The Great War
Published on 20 Aug 2018Check Out Desert Operations: https://desertoperations.gamigo.com/
John Pershing already had a long career in in the US forces when World War 1 broke out. When 1917 came around he was tasked with the monumental challenge of creating and expanding the American Expeditionary Forces and send them over to Europe.
August 21, 2018
Creating An American Army – John J. Pershing I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
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Celebrity chef accused of cultural appropriation
Tim Worstall explains why, despite jerk chicken being something like the national dish of Jamaica, accusing Jamie Oliver of culturally appropriating it makes no sense whatsoever:
Well, here’s a recipe for that jerk chicken which does seem to be close to being the Jamaican national dish.
Ingredients
8 -10 pieces of legs and thighs
1 lemon/lime
Salt and pepper to season
½ tablespoon cinnamon powder
1 sprig of fresh thyme
3 medium scallions (green onions) chopped
1 medium onion coarsely chopped
2-4 habanero pepper chopped
1 1/2 tablespoon Maggi or soy sauce
1 tablespoon bouillon powder optional
3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
6 garlic cloves chopped
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 tablespoon allspice coarsely ground
1 1/2 tablespoon fresh ginger chopped
1 tablespoon coarsely ground pepperAs far as I can tell those ingredients coming from, in order – the chicken, SE Asia via land cultural exchange to Europe and then the Americas by the Portuguese and Spanish. Sure, some evidence of Polynesian delivery but on West Coast only. The lemon, SE Asia, salt everywhere, pepper India or perhaps Indonesia. Cinnamon, SE Asia but introduction to European thus Caribbean cuisines through Ancient Egypt and thus into Greece. Thyme, the Levant and Ancient Egypt, scallions at least as far back as Ashkelon and further east than that. Onions, definitely Eurasian, habaneros definitively Latin American. Soy sauce, think we’ll allow Nippon to claim that, maybe China. Bouillon powder, industrial civilisation somewhere. Sugar, Indian subcontinent, garlic central Asia we think. Nutmeg and allspice the Spice Islands, now Indonesia. Ginger, South and SE Asia.
So, someone who makes this is accusing us of cultural appropriation if we make it?
Oh Aye?
All of which is, of course, to misunderstand the basic point about human beings. We’re apes, ones with a special and remarkable talent. We’ve this readin’ an’ writin’ stuff meaning that when we spot something that works we’re able to tell other people about it. In a manner rather more efficient than just teaching junior to do what we’ve learned to do. This is the secret of our success. That things once learned can be passed onto millions, billions, of other people. If we had to go reinvent the wheel each generation then we’d not all be rolling around in cars now, would we?
The very essence of our being the successful tool using species we are is that we copy. Appropriate that is. So insistences that we don’t “culturally” appropriate are demands that we stop being us, stop being human. Well, you know, good luck with that, however delightful the concept of cultural appropriation is as a method of having something else to shout about.
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The StuG III – Germany’s deadliest AFV
Lindybeige
Published on 31 Jul 2018At Bovington Tankfest, there were three Stug III assault guns for me to have a look at. Naturally, I looked at all three.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeThanks to The Tank Museum at Bovington for the invitation.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
▼ Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lindybeige (it’s a ‘page’ and now seems to be working).
Google+: “google.com/+lindybeige”
website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
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August 20, 2018
The Opium War
In Quillette, Jeffrey Chen reviews Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War:
The war had a name even before its first shot. The first recorded use of the moniker, the ‘Opium War,’ was in an 1839 piece in the London Morning Herald; within months it would be echoed across the benches of Parliament and across the carronades of the fleet sent to punish the Chinese crackdown on British trade.
The war’s nomenclature revealed from the beginning the multivalent views the British public held towards the war: it was at once the “unjust and iniquitous” Opium War — to use Gladstone’s well-known phrase — as well as the patriotic ‘China War,’ as its proponents wanted it to be called. The historiography of the war is similarly divided among varied lines. Some see the war as reflective of China’s failure to catch up to Western technologies; others emphasize the British desire to avenge their slighted national honour as the prime motive for the conflict. A wide array of scholars have placed a central focus on the role of opium, while some prefer to see the war in the context of imperial and economic expansion. Song-Chuan Chen’s Merchants of War and Peace: British Knowledge of China in the Making of the Opium War is a worthy addition to these voices.
Chen’s portrait of the Opium War places the role of British traders and their lobbying efforts in the foreground by arguing that it was British knowledge of China, as transmitted via the merchant class, that contributed to the ‘making’ (in the sense of both manufacture and execution) of the war. Chen asserts that it was the decade-long campaign of bellicose editorials and pamphlets on the part of the Canton merchant intelligentsia, as well as an accumulation of knowledge on the details of China’s coastal defences and overall military strength, that made it possible for Britain to both conceive of and win the war. The book casts, as its main actors, the ‘Warlike Party,’ a group of British merchants in Canton who lobbied for military intervention to expand the Canton System of trade, and the ‘Pacific Party,’ who opposed the war and criticised the diffusion of opium as an illicit and immoral drug. By narrowing his focus towards the production of knowledge, Chen also elevates the importance of language. A chapter of the book is devoted to a summary of the ‘Barbarian’ controversy – the disagreements and narratives spun around the British choice in translating the Chinese character 夷 (Yí) as ‘Barbarian,’ rather than ‘Foreigner.’
Chen’s account is thus of a battle as much between China and Britain as an internal conflict within the British public sphere. Though Chen is careful to nuance his depiction of the war by overlaying the many causal factors detailed by existing scholarship, his book makes two main arguments, which, in the words of the author, are new to the field: firstly, that the decisive factor in the war’s escalation was due to the machinations of the Warlike Party; and secondly, that the Canton System represented a ‘soft border’ through which the British were able to secure intelligence on the Qing state, without a reciprocal exchange of knowledge.
Written in engaging, lucid prose that presents its ideas clearly, if repetitively, Chen’s monograph is studded with riveting selections of his primary source research, drawn from the National Archives, UK, the First Historical Archives of China, the National Palace Museum, the British Library, SOAS Library, and Cambridge’s Jardine & Matheson archive. These quotations are often reproduced at generous length from the Warlike Party’s Canton Register and the Pacific Party’s Canton Press, and they provide a revealing account of the vigorous rhetorical strategies employed by the two camps.
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August 19, 2018
Recruits from Alsace – Angel of Siberia I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 18 Aug 2018Next to the Chair of Wisdom, Indy Neidell talks about how the German Army dealt with recruits from Alsace-Lorraine and how Elsa Brändström became the Angel of Siberia to many prisoners of war.
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The Dieppe Raid, from Canada at War, 1962
piddflicks
Published on 19 Aug 2012An excerpt from the brilliant 1962 series Canada At War by the National Film Board of Canada focusing on the disastrous raid on Dieppe, 19 August 1942, where more than two-thirds of the 6,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
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August 18, 2018
The collapse of Genoa’s Ponte Morandi
Austin Williams reviews what information is currently available on the collapse of one of the towers of the Morandi Bridge (Ponte Morandi) on Tuesday:
The Morandi Bridge in Genoa shortly after the collapse of one of the towers, viewed from Coronata.
Photo by Salvatore Fabbrizio via Wikimedia Commons
The appalling tragedy of the Morandi Bridge, which collapsed on Tuesday, 14 August 2018, is a disaster that is still under investigation. At the moment, there are reports of 40 lives lost, but not much is known about the causes or the wider consequences. I am loath to speculate about either, but there needs to be a wider conversation and not simply kneejerk demands for corporate manslaughter charges against the private bridge-operating company, Autostrade per l’Italia. Heads will roll – deservedly so – but we must look at wider concerns about infrastructure, per se. (I caveat all of this by saying that pre-empting the ongoing investigation may reveal me to be wide of the mark.)
Firstly, the collapse was extraordinary. The bridge – built in the mid-1960s and named after the civil engineer Riccardo Morandi – is architecturally unique, and with this comes unique stresses that may have given rise to the catastrophic failure. A similar collapse of a similar nature and magnitude has not occurred before with a cable-stayed bridge. This bridge had 90m-high concrete towers that held tensioned cables fixed at an angle to the deck (the roadway), meaning that as the cables were being stretched by the loads, the towers were being squashed by the same loads. In engineering terms, the weight of the deck (and the traffic on it) was carried by the combined structure, meaning that the towers were under tremendous compression while the cables were under tension.
Bridge design always makes allowances – contingencies – for localised failure, and therefore even the most efficient, slender structures tend to be over-designed so that the engineers can sleep at night. The bridge has to imagine, for example, wind loads, snow loads, or 250 lorries being on the bridge rather than just 250 cars. But have the owners and managers of this bridge kept up with the reality, that in the 60 years or so since this bridge was constructed, loading conditions have significantly increased owing to increased freight volumes and vehicle sizes? Has this unseen attritional damage finally come home to roost?
In this bridge design, there is only one angled ‘stay’ (made up of four steel cables) encased in a concrete covering. The idea was that the concrete would protect the steel from weathering, corrosion and failure. Maintenance work as recently as 15 or so years ago replaced some of the cable stays and recoated them in concrete. Suggestions that cracks in the concrete exacerbated the ingress of water, which speeded the corrosion of the cables, are possible, but not totally convincing.
Were the cables to snap – possibly requiring more than one to snap due to the engineering contingency discussed above – then the deck would fall and possibly overbalance the entire structure. However, the fact that the towers collapsed in such a horrific fashion – seeming to crumble – may hint that the problem may lie in the foundations, where regular maintenance work was being carried out. We just don’t yet know. As Professor Gordon Masterton, from the University of Edinburgh’s school of engineering, told the Guardian, there needs to be a ‘forensic and thorough’ investigation to get to the root cause.
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Mythbusting with the .30-06 American Chauchat: Reliability Test
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 28 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Everyone knows, of course, that the Chauchat is the worst gun ever, and can’t normally get through an entire magazine without malfunctioning. Well, let’s try that out … and with an even worse culprit; an M1918 Chauchat made for the AEF in .30-06.
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
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August 17, 2018
Assassination attempt on Lenin – German morale plummets I THE GREAT WAR Week 212
The Great War
Published on 16 Aug 2018As the Battle of Amiens is coming to an end, the Germans are desperately trying to stem the Allied advance and fortify new positions. But morale is crumbling and German High Command is running out of time to find a new strategy. Meanwhile in Russia, the struggle between Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries reaches a violent climax, as assassins prey on Lenin’s life. The Dunsterforce finally arrives in Baku to help defend the city from the Ottoman advance. But this is not the mighty British force the inhabitants had hoped for. Will Lenin survive? Does Ludendorff choose to abandon all the gains the German army made over the spring? And what about the attack on the Wookies? Find out this and more in the new episode of The Great War.
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Thomas Clarkson: The First Abolitionist
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 26 Jul 2018The brutal and cruel transatlantic slave trade lasted for more than 300 hundred years. In 1785, Thomas Clarkson, a man you’ve probably never heard of, firmly held to his belief that no man can rightly claim ownership over another. That year he vowed to end the transatlantic slave trade. This is his story.
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August 16, 2018
Three Great British Wartime Deceptions
Lindybeige
Published on 15 Aug 2018http://www.audible.com/Lindybeige or text ‘Lindybeige’ to 500 500 for a free thirty-day trial and one free audio book.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeTales of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in World War One, El Alamein in WW2, and of the extraordinarily successful failure that was Operation Camilla in East Africa. One man with terrific hair rambles for over half an hour about ruses of deceit against the enemies of the Empire.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
▼ Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Lindybeige (it’s a ‘page’ and now seems to be working).
website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
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August 14, 2018
German Submarine Warfare in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 13 Aug 2018Find out more about War2Glory: https://war2glory.com/
Submarines played a vital part in Germany’s WW1 strategy. They would disrupt allied shipping despite the British Naval Blockade and ensue fear across the Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.
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Sean Gabb’s view of Anglo-American relations from 1945 to today
He seems such a nice, mild-mannered chap but who else but a virtual bomb-chucking anarchist could title an article “Death to America?”
My view of America is tinged with a paranoia born from jealousy and resentment. I believe that American self-respect has, for at least the past hundred years, required the destruction of England as a great and independent nation. The Americans speak a language that did not emerge among themselves. They live within a system of law and within a set of constitutional assumptions that are also not co-existent with their nation. If their country were a minor power, they could, like Haiti, or Australia, or America before the 1870s, accept the fact of inferiority. If it were to vanish from the earth, they could look on the originator of their language and institutions with sentimental affection, as the Byzantines did on Athens and Rome.
Their problem is that, before 1940, England was a strong competitor. Since then, it has been generally subordinate, but never with full willingness. Therefore, the Americans have mixed occasional humiliation, as at Suez, with continual meddling in our politics. Our foreign policy has, since 1945, been largely set by Washington. Our leaders are mostly American Quislings, and these have systematically promoted American culture at the expense of our own. It may be that the accumulation of blocking powers by our new Supreme Court is an imitation to be welcomed. But the importation of American political correctness is not to be welcomed. Nor, I suggest, should we welcome the official replacement of English with American words and expressions — see, for example, the use of “train station” for “railway station”. This may appear, in itself, a trivial complaint. Repeated across the whole administrative and educational machinery, it has the effect of making our own recent past into a foreign country.
What the Americans want is for England to be discussed mainly in the past tense. They will study our literature, and sometimes our history. Some of their higher classes will put on Anglicised airs and graces, much as the Romans turned hellenophile after they had plundered and enslaved Greece. But to see their preferred model for living Englishmen, look at the characters played by Wilfred Hyde-Whyte, or the character of Alfred in Batman — polite, reliable, elderly, and, above all, ineffectual.
Though I dislike the European Union, I believe that the long term interests of my country lie in a close relationship with France and Germany, and in an amicable working arrangement with Russia. We have an obvious commonality with France and Germany of economic and strategic interests. We are of approximately equal weight. None is able to dominate the others. Each must work in compromise with the others. Any talk of “hands across the Atlantic” is either self-deception or a lie. Except perhaps between 1922 and 1940, there has never been an equality between England and America. Any close relationship between these countries has otherwise rested on the domination of one by the other — a domination with at best a limited overlap of interests. Though roles have changed, so it was at times before 1914, and so it has been since 1940.
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August 13, 2018
Blasphemy in modern Britain
Once upon a time, blasphemy was prosecuted by the Crown as an attack on the very basis of English law: “[blasphemy] law is needed to uphold the national law, which is based on Christianity. Thus, targeting Christianity is targeting the very foundation of England.” The last successful prosecution was in 1977. Modern prosecutions for blasphemy do not get filed under the old law, but the mechanism of the police, the courts, and the media are directed against those who dare to insult one particular faith:
Religious freedom is one of the core principles of any modern liberal society. As a secularist, I defend the right of religious people to send their children to faith schools, have their children circumcised, or wear the burqa. This does not mean I approve of any of these practices; they should be permissible but not protected from criticism. We should be free to ridicule, lampoon, chastise, critique, etc. every aspect of religious belief that we tolerate.
This is, more or less, what the U.K.’s former Conservative Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson wrote in his now infamous newspaper column in the Telegraph last week. Yet all hell has broken loose. It was greeted by near-hysterical outrage and shrill denunciations of Johnson’s alleged dog whistle racism; reports of civil war in the Tory Party over the matter; the now ubiquitous demands for an apology for causing offence (or else), which was backed in this instance by the Prime Minister. Boris’s is now the subject of an internal Party inquiry. It’s worth untangling this sorry tale as a snap-shot of today’s offence culture and how chilling it can be to a free society.
Johnson has been ‘called out’ as Islamophobic for arguing against – yes against – a ban on the burqa and for defending – yes defending – the right of any “free-born adult woman” to wear what she wants “in a public place, when she is simply minding her own business”. His column is predominantly an excoriating critique of Denmark’s betrayal of its own “spirit of liberty” and “the spirit of Viking individualism” by its decision to impose a state ban on the burqa or niqab (although he is not being indicted for caricaturing Danish culture). He rightly notes that being opposed to a ban should not be interpreted as approval and goes on to say – albeit in a somewhat crass manner – that “Muslim head-gear that obscures the female face… looking like letterboxes… like a bank robber…is absolutely ridiculous”.
As similes go, no doubt Boris could have been more tactful. I am no fan of BoJo-style private school wit. Indeed, I can understand that veil-wearing Muslim women – whom myriad journalists throughout the country have stopped on streets to ask if they like being compared to criminals or inanimate objects – would find the analogy offensive. But should all political comment on religion have to pass an offense test to be allowed? I am pretty sure that my two aunts – who are Catholic nuns – would be pretty offended if they heard my atheist mates’ denouncing as backward mumbo-jumbo a religion that believes the host and wine is literally the body and blood of Christ. But that’s the deal – a free society affords religious tolerance for nuns, imams, rabbis; and conversely liberty for others to stick the metaphorical boot into their beliefs.
Are Boris’s critics demanding respect for all religious practices regardless of whether they consider them backward, wrong-headed, or oppressive? Should we bite our lip in case we offend? We seem to have forgotten that we once all declared #JeSuisCharlie – a brief but inspiringly unapologetic defense of free speech after cartoonists for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were brutally butchered in Paris for daring to publish cartoons deemed offensive to Islam. Should they have shut up until they learned to become more tactful?
Naturally, cheap sectarian Tory-bashing has driven some of the outrage. Supporters of the Labour Party, recently afflicted by an anti-Semitism scandal that is still rumbling on, were quick to denounce the “gross Islamophobia” in the article, even though criticism of the burqa has been commonplace in Labour and feminist ranks over the years. Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (and Boris’s shadow until his recent resignation), declared on BBC’s Question Time in 2013 that “I wouldn’t want my four-year-old looked after by somebody wearing a burka. I wouldn’t want my elderly mum looked after by somebody wearing a burka. They need to be able to show their face. I wouldn’t mind if they worked in records in the hospital.”
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Tank Chats #34 Chieftain | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 31 Mar 2017The thirty-fourth Tank Chat, this time presented by Curator David Willey after some help from Eli. https://youtu.be/T33hp0J-LAw
Britain’s Main Battle Tank for twenty years, Chieftain was one of the first true Main Battle Tanks, designed to replace both medium and heavy tanks in front line service.
To find out more, buy the new Haynes Chieftain tank manual. https://www.myonlinebooking.co.uk/tan…
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