Quotulatiousness

November 3, 2019

Mussolini plays Hitler like a Fiddle – The Invasion of Greece – WW2 – 062 – November 2, 1940

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Nov 2019

A new front opens up in Greece as the Italians invade, while the Battle of Britain seems to come to an end.

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Research by: Indy Neidell
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Map animations: Eastory

Colorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius Jääskeläinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Sources:
– IWM: HU 76031, E 15223, E 450, E 6661, A 22111
– killer by Arthur Shlain from the Noun Project
– National Portrait Gallery, London
– Torpedo body icon by Blaise Sewell from the Noun Project
– FDR Presidential Library & Museum

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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
3 days ago (edited)
This week covers about two major events with effects that will ripple through the remainder of the war. Actually, both have been attributed by historians for being “the one event” that caused the war to end as it did. You’ll have to stick around to find out how and when that will be though. Though I can tell you one thing now. History is rarely that simple. If you like our series and want to enable us to cover the complex web of events, locations, individuals and techniques that changed the outcome of the war, please consider supporting us on https://www.patreon.com/timeghosthistory or on our own website at https://timeghost.tv. If you would like to make a one-time contribution, you can do so via PayPal to (paypal@timeghost.tv).
Cheers, Joram

QotD: The theocratic Anabaptist State of Münster

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A crucial part of the Anabaptist reign of terror was their decision, again prefiguring that of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, to abolish all private ownership of money. With no money to purchase any good, the population became slavishly dependent on handouts or rations from the power elite. Accordingly, Matthys, Rothmann, and the rest launched a propaganda campaign that it was un-Christian to own money privately; and that all money should be held “in common,” which in practice meant that all money whatsoever must be handed over to Matthys and his ruling clique…

After two months of unremitting propaganda, combined with threats and terror against those who disobeyed, the private ownership of money was effectively abolished in Münster. The government seized all the money and used it to buy goods or hire workers from the outside world. Wages were doled out in kind by the only employer: the theocratic Anabaptist State.

Food was confiscated from private homes, and rationed according to the will of government deacons. Also, to accommodate the host of immigrants, all private homes were effectively communized, with everyone permitted to quarter themselves everywhere; it was now illegal to close, let alone lock, one’s doors. Compulsory communal dining halls were established, where people ate together to the readings from the Old Testament.

The compulsory communism and reign of terror was carried out in the name of community and Christian “love.” This communization was considered the first giant step toward egalitarian communism, where, as Rothmann put it, “all things were to be in common, there was to be no private property and nobody was to do any more work, but simply trust in God.” Somehow, the workless part never seemed to arrive.

[…]

Totalitarianism in Münster was now complete. Death was now the punishment for virtually every independent act. Capital punishment was decreed for the high crimes of murder, theft, lying, avarice, and quarrelling. Death was also decreed for every conceivable kind of insubordination: the young against the parents, wives against their husbands, and, of course, anyone at all against the chosen representative of God on earth, the government of Münster. Bernt Knipperdollinck was appointed high executioner to enforce the decrees.

The only aspect of life previously left untouched was sex, and this deficiency was now made up. The only sexual relation now permitted by the Bockelson regime was marriage between two Anabaptists. Sex in any other form, including marriage with one of the “godless,” was a capital crime.

But soon Bockelson went beyond this rather old-fashioned credo, and decided to enforce compulsory polygamy in Münster. Since many of the expellees had left their wives and daughters behind, Münster now had three times as many marriageable women as men, so that polygamy had become technically feasible. Bockelson convinced the other, rather startled preachers by citing polygamy among the patriarchs of Israel, reinforcing this method of persuasion by threatening any dissenters with death.

Compulsory polygamy was a bit much for many of the Münsterites, who launched a rebellion in protest. The rebellion, however, was quickly crushed and most of the rebels put to death […]

The rest of the male population also began to take enthusiastically to the new decree. Many of the women reacted differently, however, and so the Elders passed a law ordering compulsory marriage for every woman under (and presumably also over) a certain age, which usually meant becoming a compulsory third or fourth wife.

Since marriage among the godless was not only invalid but also illegal, the wives of the expellees became fair game, and they were forced to “marry” good Anabaptists. Refusal of the women to comply with the new law was punishable, of course, with death, and a number of women were actually executed as a result.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist”, Mises Institute, 2009-10-09.

November 1, 2019

“Unbreakable” – Guerrilla Warfare – Sabaton History 039 [Official]

Filed under: China, History, Media, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published 31 Oct 2019

The exact topic of Sabaton’s song “Unbreakable” will forever be a mystery. But we do know that it has to do with guerrilla warfare, which is what Indy will dive into in this episode.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson and Markus Linke
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Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– RIA Novosti archive
– Colorization of Mao Zedong by Olga Shirnina a.k.a. Klimbim
– IWM: NA 15129
– Water splash sound effect – littlerobotsoundfactory

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 days ago
There are many examples where guerrilla warfare was used in an attempt to force out or at least harass a foreign invader or domestic military power. Partisan movements are almost always connected to a certain ideology or party — after all, they rebel against a power they disagree with. We haven’t mentioned a lot of different movements and causes in this episode, not because we don’t value or support them or their cause, but because we have a limited amount of time to cover a general topic in. As Indy also states in the video, we have picked several examples to describe what guerrilla warfare was. Please share any additional groups or events that are relevant for this episode, but keep it civil and keep your political thoughts to yourself.
Cheers, The Sabaton History team

Why All Germans Were Nazis – How Hitler Created the Third Reich | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1934 Part 1 of 4

Filed under: Germany, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 31 Oct 2019

After Hitler seized power in Germany in January 1933, he rapidly transformed the Democratic Weimar Republic into a repressive, totalitarian and racist state. In 1934, Germany became Nazi Germany.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
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Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
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Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Image sources: Bundesarchiv, Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-15282A / Georg Pahl, Heinz Bergschicker Deutsche Chronik 1933-1945 – Ein Zeitbild der faschistischen Diktatur

Icons from the Noun Project: Police by IconTrack, soldier by Simon Child, police man by Gregor Cresnar, hello by Universal Icons.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

Spartacus Olsson
2 hours ago
Now, this episode explains the measures that the Nazis used to gain control over the German people. It is not an attempt to justify, or be apologetic of the responsibility for the horrors committed during the Nazi regime. But it is also not a blanket condemnation of Germans. What happened in Germany starting in 1933 should serve us all as a warning to what can happen when you let loose authoritarian power, normalize lies as an acceptable part of political discourse, and make mainstream the disregard of basic human values. We should all think of that although the Nazis were especially efficient in their implementation of an authoritarian system, they are by far not the only ones that have succeeded in seducing whole a nation into blind hatred and acceptance of the suffering and death of others to forward an ideology. We should remember that freedom and democracy is essential, but also that words matters. The beginning of oppression starts with an endless stream of lies that confuse public discourse to the point that facts don’t matter anymore and truth becomes fiction. This video shows us what can happen next. Our mantra as a channel is to focus on the facts, not our opinions, not our ‘truth’ — just the facts m’am — and that is what we have presented here, for better or worse.

October 31, 2019

“Big Lizzie” (HMS Queen Elizabeth) to sail into disputed waters in 2021

Filed under: Britain, China, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

UK Defence Journal reported a few days back that the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carrier will take on her first active deployment in 2021, including a possible Freedom of Navigation exercise (FONOPS) in the South China Sea:

Aerial view of HMS Queen Elizabeth with Type 23 frigates HMS Iron Duke (centre) and HMS Sutherland (right) in June 2017 off the coast of Scotland.

Photo by MOD via Wikimedia Commons.

Commodore Michael Utley, Commander United Kingdom Carrier Strike Group, is reported by Save The Royal Navy here as saying that HMS Queen Elizabeth will be escorted by two Type 45 destroyers, two Type 23 frigates, a nuclear submarine, a Tide-class tanker and RFA Fort Victoria.

The ship will also carry 24 F-35B jets, including US Marine Corps aircraft, in addition to a number of helicopters.

Prior to the deployment, it is understood that the Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group will go through a work-up trial off the west Hebrides range sometime in early 2021.

When asked about whether or not the UK has enough escorts to do this without impacting other commitment, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said:

    The size and the scale of the escort depends on the deployments and the task that the carrier is involved in. If it is a NATO tasking in the north Atlantic, for example, you would expect an international contribution to those types of taskings, in the same way as we sometimes escort the French carrier or American carriers to make up that.

    It is definitely our intention, though, that the carrier strike group will be able to be a wholly UK sovereign deployable group. Now, it is probably not necessary to do that every single time we do it, depending on the tasking, but we want to do that and test doing it. Once we have done that, depending on the deployment, of course, we will cut our cloth as required.

Gareth Corfield expands on this in The Register:

Although the initial plan was for Britain’s biggest ever warship to sail through the South China Sea, which China claims as its own territory in defiance of international laws and norms, and despite claims from at least six other countries including Vietnam and the Philippines, this detail was noticeably absent from the UKDJ report.

Over 200 islands, also subject to disputes between China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, also lie in the area, which stretches across 3.5 million square kilometres and is visited by one-third of the world’s shipping traffic.

A US presence on the South China Sea deployment will be a useful political tool for the administration as a show of strength to China as well as asserting the right to freedom of navigation in the sea. In addition, it reinforces the idea that the UK supports US foreign policy – Queen Elizabeth is effectively replacing a US carrier on her Far Eastern tour as part of the superpower’s standing naval presence.

Of the jets aboard QE, around half will be supplied by the US Marine Corps, as has been reported for years.

The Dutch Navy will definitely join the deployment, most likely with a De Zeven Provinciën-class frigate – replacing one of the British Type 23 frigates in the mooted carrier battle group. Similarly, UKDJ reckons that an American destroyer will join the 2021 deployment (named Carrier Strike Group 21), freeing up a British Type 45 destroyer.

Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) underway in the Atlantic on 17 October 2019, participating in exercise “WESTLANT 19”. The first operational deployment for HMS Queen Elizabeth with No. 617 Squadron and a squadron of USMC Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightnings is planned for 2021.
Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nathan T. Beard, US Navy, via Wikimedia Commons

The Graveyard of Empires Strikes Back – The British-Afghan War of 1919 I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, India, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 30 Oct 2019

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» SOURCES
Adamec, L.W. Afghanistan, 1900-1923: A Diplomatic History, Berkley, 1967
Barthorp, Michael (2002) [1982]. Afghan Wars and the North-West Frontier 1839–1947. London: Cassell.
Beattie, Hugh: “Afghanistan”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2016-09-02
Heathcote, TA. The Afghan Wars (Spellmount, 2003).
Jacobsen, M H. The Third Afghan War and the External Position of India, 1919-1924. Defense Technical Information Center Archive report ADA195401, 1988.
Monro, Charles. “Despatch from His Excellency the Commander-in-Chief in India regarding the operations against Afghanistan, to the Secretary to the Government of India, Army Department”. Second Supplement to the London Gazette, 15 March 1920 https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/i…
Molesworth, George (1962). Afghanistan 1919 — An Account of Operations in the Third Afghan War. New York: Asia Publishing House
Robson, Brian (2007). Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign in Waziristan 1919–1920. The History Press.
Sykes, Percy. A History of Afghanistan vol II. (London Macmillan 1940)
Wyatt, Christopher M. “Change and Discontinuity: War and Afghanistan 1904-1924,” Asian Affairs, 01 September 2016, Vol.47(3): 366-385.

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A mathematical revolution in late medieval English ship design and construction

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest installment of Anton Howes’ newsletter on the Age of Invention, he discusses how geometry and mathematics helped transform late Medieval English shipbuilding:

An English ship of a slightly later period: this is a replica of the Susan Constant at the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia. The original ship was built sometime before 1607 and rented by the Virginia Company of London to transport the original settlers to Jamestown.
Photo by Nicholas Russon, March 2004.

Since about 1500, an Italian and Portuguese method of making ships had come into ever wider use in northern Europe. This was to construct the ship’s skeleton first, and then lay the planking around it. This contrasted with the older “clinker” method, by which the planks were laid from the keel upwards, with each plank slightly overlapping the one below – the rest of the skeleton was filled in later to strengthen it. The new “carvel” method, instead of having overlapping planks, allowed for a smooth hull. But it also required more planning.

The master shipwright had to first design full-sized templates, or frames, which were placed along the keel to determine the width and height of the hull, like cross-sections up and down the length of the ship. To the edges of these frames were then fixed ribbands — long, pliable boards running down the ship’s length. Altogether, the frames and ribbands formed a temporary, basket-like structure, to guide the moulding of the ship’s permanent hull around it.

But calculating the size of the frames at each point was tricky. After the placement of the first few, which might be pre-specified in size, the next ones along were typically determined according to the curve of the ribbands. Calculation was certainly involved, but it took place in the form or marking and adjusting the wood itself. Design and construction both took place in the shipyard, and through the medium of wood.

What Matthew Baker did in the 1570s was to take the design process out of the shipyard, and onto paper. He drew his ships, to scale. And by using pen and paper, with geometry to make such drawings possible, he opened up grand new possibilities for design. His process allowed him to jot down the latest innovations from the Mediterranean, to speculate about the designs of Noah’s ark and the ships of the ancient world, and to cheaply conduct his own experiments. He drew out new designs for frames, using geometry to work out how any variation would affect the overall shape of the hull, as well as its weight and carrying capacity – all at the cost of only time, ink, and paper, and avoiding the huge potential waste of conducting experiments at full scale in wood. His process allowed him to innovate more easily, and even to design new measuring instruments.

The Legend of Vlad the Impaler

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Armouries
Published 31 Oct 2017

Hear the story of the infamous tyrant Vlad Tepes, notorious for the grisly way in which he killed his enemies.

Where to find us:

⚔Website: https://royalarmouries.org/home
⚔Blog: https://blog.royalarmouries.org/
⚔Twitter: https://twitter.com/Royal_Armouries

October 30, 2019

Defending the work of Dr. Beeching

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Railways — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Ever the contrarian, Tim Worstall responds to an article calling for the “Beeching Axe” cuts to the British passenger railway network in the 1960s to be reversed:

The British Railways Board’s publication The Reshaping of British Railways, Part 1: Report, Beeching’s first report, which famously recommended the closure of many uneconomic British railway lines. Many of the closures were implemented. This copy is displayed at the National Railway Museum in York beside a copy of the National Union of Railwaymen’s published response, The Mis-shaping of British Railways, Part 1: Retort.
Photo by RobertG via Wikimedia Commons.

For background, as the “Beeching Axe” is far less well-known today than it used to be, here’s Wikipedia’s introduction:

The Beeching cuts (also Beeching Axe) were a reduction of route network and restructuring of the railways in Great Britain, according to a plan outlined in two reports, The Reshaping of British Railways (1963) and The Development of the Major Railway Trunk Routes (1965), written by Dr Richard Beeching and published by the British Railways Board.

The first report identified 2,363 stations and 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of railway line for closure, 55% of stations and 30% of route miles, with an objective of stemming the large losses being incurred during a period of increasing competition from road transport and reducing the rail subsidies necessary to keep the network running; the second identified a small number of major routes for significant investment. The 1963 report also recommended some less well-publicised changes, including a switch to containerisation for rail freight.

Protests resulted in the saving of some stations and lines, but the majority were closed as planned, and Beeching’s name remains associated with the mass closure of railways and the loss of many local services in the period that followed. A few of these routes have since reopened; some short sections have been preserved as heritage railways, while others have been incorporated into the National Cycle Network or used for road schemes; others now are lost to construction, have reverted to farmland, or remain derelict.

Worstall says:

[Dr. Richard] Beeching is one of the most universally hated figures in British politics, yet I have no doubt that he was that rare creature, someone working for the state who actually got things about right.

What Dr Richard Beeching mostly did was a cold, analytical report into the railways and recommended cutting large chunks of it that no-one was using. This was done because the railways were losing a fortune every year. And he mostly got it right. He assumed that we would replace trains with buses, which isn’t a bad idea at all. […]

One of the reasons I think Beeching ended up more right than he thought was the arrival of the car. Yes, cars can be environmentally damaging, cause deaths and so forth. Personally, I lean towards the bus or train as a preference. But you can’t ignore the upsides of cars.

The biggest problems with trains are connection time, flexibility and that there’s no market in there. Rail is quite poor at doing their one job: getting a train from A to B. You’d think after 150 years, they’d have it going pretty good, but crew not turning up, signal failures, electrical failures, doors not closing properly. industrial action are not that rare. The problems are certainly more common than if you drive a Toyota Corolla on the motorway to work. Your driver will turn up (because it’s you), the doors will close, the car will run pretty much perfectly. You also have no connection time in that Corolla. You turn off one road straight onto another. You can also go when you please. Middle of the night, middle of the day.

Maps originally from Losing Track by Kerry Hamilton and Stephen Potter (1985), by way of Is Your Journey Really Necessary?, 2012-12-31.
https://isyourjourneyreallynecessary.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/nice-work-if-you-can-get-there/
Click map to enlarge.

Homer, the Trojan War & the Late Bronze Age Collapse

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

History Time
Published 20 Mar 2018

This is the first in a new series I will be producing on the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

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QotD: Trotskyism

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00


[The word “Trotskyist”] is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. Although in some places, for instance in the United States, Trotskyism is able to attract a fairly large number of adherents and develop into an organised movement with a petty fuehrer of its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is against Stalin just as the Communist is for him, and, like the majority of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is obviously false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.

October 29, 2019

Parallels between the current Brexit mess and the 1906 general election

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

Sean Gabb writes in the Libertarian Enterprise on the clusterfail in Parliament and an interesting historical parallel from the beginning of the 20th century:

… the Brexit debate that only began with the counting of the Referendum votes has been a valuable education. So far as it blurs the lines of accountability, membership of the European Union has been a useful entrenchment of our ruling class. It has also helped provide a mildly liberal and cosmopolitan gloss to a domestic project that has been anything but liberal. Its refusal to honour the Referendum has torn aside what remained of the democratic veil behind which power is exercised. These people are not our servants. They are a hostile elite. Their interests are not ours. They despise us. They fear us. They are determined not to give us even the shadow of what we were – perhaps unwisely – promised.

I have given a quotation from Chesterton. I am increasingly minded of parallels between his day and ours. In 1906, the Liberals won a large and unexpected majority in the House of Commons. They set about transforming the country on the lines they had been discussing since the end of their last majority government in 1885. In doing this, they faced a wall of resistance from the old ruling class. The Conservatives controlled the Law and education and most of the administration. They possessed the greatest mass of the national wealth. Above all, they dominated the House of Lords. They used their majority here to block the Liberal Government until such time as the people could be persuaded at the next election to bring back a Conservative Government.

Now, in that contest, I would have sided with the ruling class. I think England had a better future under the Conservatives than under the Liberals. I think most of the Liberal changes were bad. Moreover, the Conservative strategy showed some evidence of working. The Liberals lost a steady stream of by-elections — most notably Peckham in 1908. Then the Conservatives went too far. In 1909, the Liberals brought in a deliberately populist budget. The Conservatives broke more than two centuries of convention by voting this down in the Lords. This gave the Liberals their excuse. With the cry of “The People against the Peers,” they attacked the Conservatives in their most powerful stronghold. After two general elections in 1910, the Lords were stripped of their blocking veto. Of course, the Great War then changed everything. But it is reasonable to suppose that, had the Liberals won another election in 1915, most of the domestic changes that we blame on the War would have come about, if more slowly.

The lesson is that ruling classes often make strategic mistakes. Had the Conservatives before the Great War taken a more selective approach in their opposition, they might have won an election in 1911, and carried on with their own vision of the national future. As it is, they only lost the 1910 elections because the Liberals were able to rely on Labour and Irish support in the Commons. Because they overreached themselves, they eventually lost everything.

It may be the same now. Had our own ruling class pulled sad faces in 2016 and delivered a minimal Brexit — something like continued EEA membership and a Norwegian relationship — they might have put the issue to bed and continued riding us all to certain ruin. Instead, they went into a three-year filibuster, every so often drawing breath to suggest another referendum. The strategy appears to have failed. We may now have a more substantial Brexit than was intended. More to the point, the democratic veil has been torn aside. The continuing argument over Mr Johnson’s new Withdrawal Agreement is largely now unfinished business. The Agreement needs to be passed — but so we can go into a general election where the main issues will not be a new relationship with the European Union. These issues will be the nature and personnel of the country’s domestic government. I do not imagine that we shall become more “democratic.” But I can imagine that we shall find ourselves with a new ruling class that holds the mass of ordinary people in less vicious contempt.

Greenland to USA, Australia to war, and French Colonies to…? – WW2 – OOTF 004

Filed under: Africa, Australia, Europe, France, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 27 Oct 2019

In another edition of our Q&A format, Indy answers some questions about Greenland after the German occupation of Denmark, the state of Australia and the fate of the French Colonies.

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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
3 days ago
We get a ton of questions about the war on a daily basis. A lot of them are already answered in the YouTube comments to you all directly, but because some questions are very interesting indeed, we like to showcase some of them on the channel. Because the YouTube comments are hard to navigate, we have made a section on our forum where you can submit questions to be covered in Out of the Foxholes. You can do that here: https://community.timeghost.tv/c/Out-of-the-Foxholes-Qs

Cheers,
The TimeGhost team

1918 Mauser Tank Gewehr

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 23 Aug 2015

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Hammer price: $4,750

Germany was the first country to produce a purpose-built antitank rifle, in response to the major Entente tank attack at Cambrai. The design was pretty simple, basically a scaled-up Mauser 98 with 4 locking lugs chambered for the massive 13.2mm TuF cartridge. It would perforate about 20mm of armor plate at 100m, which was nicely effective on WWI tanks. By the end of the war more than 15,000 had been made. Interestingly, a bunch of them ended up at Springfield Armory, where they were used in the development of the .50 BMG cartridge.

QotD: The financial crisis of 33AD

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Let us next take a brief but important notice in Tacitus, for the year 33 AD:

    Meanwhile a powerful host of accusers fell with sudden fury on the class which systematically increased its wealth by usury in defiance of a law passed by Caesar the Dictator defining the terms of lending money and of holding estates in Italy, a law long obsolete because the public good is sacrificed to private interest. The curse of usury was indeed of old standing in Rome and a most frequent cause of sedition and discord, and it was therefore repressed even in the early days of a less corrupt morality. First, the Twelve Tables prohibited any one from exacting more than 10 per cent., when, previously, the rate had depended on the caprice of the wealthy. Subsequently, by a bill brought in by the tribunes, interest was reduced to half that amount, and finally compound interest was wholly forbidden. A check too was put by several enactments of the people on evasions which, though continually put down, still, through strange artifices, reappeared. On this occasion, however, Gracchus, the praetor, to whose jurisdiction the inquiry had fallen, felt himself compelled by the number of persons endangered to refer the matter to the Senate. In their dismay the senators, not one of whom was free from similar guilt, threw themselves on the emperor’s indulgence. He yielded, and a year and six months were granted, within which every one was to settle his private accounts conformably to the requirements of the law.

    Hence followed a scarcity of money, a great shock being given to all credit, the current coin too, in consequence of the conviction of so many persons and the sale of their property, being locked up in the imperial treasury or the public exchequer. To meet this, the Senate had directed that every creditor should have two-thirds of his capital secured on estates in Italy. Creditors however were suing for payment in full, and it was not respectable for persons when sued to break faith. So, at first, there were clamorous meetings and importunate entreaties; then noisy applications to the praetor’s court. And the very device intended as a remedy, the sale and purchase of estates, proved the contrary, as the usurers had hoarded up all their money for buying land. The facilities for selling were followed by a fall of prices, and the deeper a man was in debt, the more reluctantly did he part with his property, and many were utterly ruined. The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, till at last the emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces, and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to double the amount. Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found. The purchase too of estates was not carried out according to the letter of the Senate’s decree, rigour at the outset, as usual with such matters, becoming negligence in the end.

So far as we can understand what was happening, the passage largely explains itself. An old law restricting the rate of interest is suddenly revived. This invalidates a large class of loans above the official rate made on short term but renewable contracts. An indulgence is given of eighteen months, during which the now illegal loans are systematically called in. The result is a liquidity crisis in which land prices collapse. The crisis is dealt with by emergency lending by the Emperor.

There is nothing unusual about this sort of crisis. We are passing through something similar at the moment. What Tacitus is showing is a developed economy with much integration of capital and land markets. We can see how easily land can be sold, and how responsive prices are to the forces of demand and supply. Again, special pleading can be brought to bear on the story to try and minimise the extent of market behaviour. But, so far as this crisis can be analysed in terms of standard economic theory, the simplest explanation is to conclude that the economy of the early Roman Empire was, in its essentials, like that of the modern world.

Sean Gabb, “Market Behaviour in the Ancient World: An Overview of the Debate”, 2008-05.

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