Published on 19 Dec 2015
Indy sits in the Chair of Wisdom again to answer your questions about WW1. This time we are talking about Baseball and Bicycle Battalions.
December 20, 2015
Baseball during WW1? What Was the Role Of Bicycle Battalions? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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When the police are afraid to investigate crimes
In the town of Rotherham, the local police have been effectively hiding a massive criminal conspiracy for fear of being accused of racism:
Fifteen years ago, when these crimes were just beginning, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry into the conduct of the British police was made by Sir William Macpherson a High Court judge. The immediate occasion had been a murder in which the victim was black, the perpetrators white, and the behaviour of the investigating police lax and possibly prejudiced. The report accused the police – not just those involved in the case, but the entire police force of the country – of ‘institutionalised racism’. This piece of sociological newspeak was, at the time, very popular with leftist sociologists. For it made an accusation which could not be refuted by anyone who had the misfortune to be accused of it.
However well you behaved, however scrupulously you treated people of different races and without regard to their ethnic identity or the colour of their skin, you would be guilty of ‘institutionalised racism’, simply on account of the institution to which you belonged and on behalf of which you were acting. Not surprisingly, sociologists and social workers, the vast majority of whom are professionally disposed to believe that middle class society is incurably racist, latched on to the expression. MacPherson too climbed onto the bandwagon since, at the time, it was the easiest and safest way to wash your hands in public, to say that I, at least, am not guilty of the only crime that is universally recognised and everywhere in evidence.
The result of this has been that police forces lean over backwards to avoid the accusation of racism, while social workers will hesitate to intervene in any case in which they could be accused of discriminating against ethnic minorities. Matters are made worse by the rise of militant Islam, which has added to the old crime of racism the new crime of ‘Islamophobia’. No social worker today will risk being accused of this crime. In Rotherham a social worker would be mad, and a police officer barely less so, to set out to investigate cases of suspected sexual abuse, when the perpetrators are Asian Muslims and the victims ethnically English. Best to sweep it under the carpet, find ways of accusing the victims or their parents or the surrounding culture of institutionalised racism, and attending to more urgent matters such as the housing needs of recent immigrants, or the traffic offences committed by those racist middle classes.
Americans too are familiar with this syndrome. Political correctness among sociologists comes from socialist convictions and the tired old theories that produce them. But among ordinary people it comes from fear. The people of Rotherham know that it is unsafe for a girl to take a taxi-ride from someone with Asian features; they know that Pakistani Muslims often do not treat white girls with the respect that they treat girls from their own community. They know, and have known over fifteen years, that there are gangs of predators on the look-out for vulnerable girls, and that the gangs are for the most part Asian young men who see English society not as the community to which they belong, but as a sexual hunting ground. But they dare not express this knowledge, in either words or deed. Still less do they dare to do so if their job is that of social worker or police officer. Let slip the mere hint that Pakistani Muslims are more likely than indigenous Englishmen to commit sexual crimes and you will be branded as a racist and an Islamophobe, to be ostracised in the workplace and put henceforth under observation.
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December 19, 2015
Despair And Mutiny On The Italian Front I THE GREAT WAR – Week 73
Published on 17 Dec 2015
The morale of the Italian Army at the Isonzo Front is on an all time low. Catastrophic defeats against the Austrians, bad and broken equipment, unsanitary conditions, no supplies, no front leave and recreation for the soldiers. This week the first troops under Luigi Cardona are mutinying. At the same time the Entente is in real trouble against Bulgaria on the Macedonian Front and the evacuation of Gallipoli is still in the planning phase.
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December 16, 2015
The First Soldier of Belgium – King Albert I I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 14 Dec 2015
King Albert I of Belgium was not by any means a regular monarch. It was already unlikely that he became King in the first place and when he did, he tried everything he could to distance himself from King Leopold II who had reigned before him. After the outbreak of World War 1 he tried everything he could to keep up the morale on the Yser Front, the last part of Belgium not occupied by the Germans.
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How Did Submarine Warfare Change During World War 1? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 12 Dec 2015
Indy sits in the Chair of Wisdom again to answer your questions of WW1. This time we are talking about submarine warfare during the First World War.
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December 15, 2015
Hannibal Barca’s tactical triumph and strategic failure
William Brooke Stallsmith explains how Hannibal’s amazing string of battlefield successes still ended up meaning little in the larger war between Rome and Carthage:
Hannibal Barca of Carthage was one of history’s most remarkable commanders. In 218 BCE, at the start of the Second Punic War, he led an army of Carthaginian regulars, barbarian allies, and mercenaries — not to mention a few elephants — over the Alps into Italy and over the next few years nearly brought Rome to its knees. Hannibal scored a series of victories, which climaxed at the Battle of Cannae in August 216 BCE, where his 50,000 soldiers enveloped and destroyed nearly twice as many Roman legionnaires, including both consuls of the Roman Republic.
After Cannae, Hannibal controlled nearly all of Italy. Roman military forces on the peninsula were in tatters, and the republic was on the verge of panic. But this great triumph — still studied today as the model for a battle of complete annihilation of the enemy — turned out to be a strategic dead-end. Its aftermath was 15 more years of war and a harsh Roman-dictated settlement that ended centuries of Carthaginian power in the Western Mediterranean.
I think the reasons for Hannibal’s ultimate defeat lay not so much in any failings on his part as in the resilience and flexibility of the Roman Republic. Resilience was built into the nature of the state and the character of its citizens. This fundamental trait made it possible for Rome’s Senate and other institutions to shake off their initial panic and adapt to the new situation created by Cannae. They mobilized the Republic’s manpower and other resources with a ruthless efficiency would have made Albert Speer blink. While new legions were being formed and trained, Roman command in Italy went to a septuagenarian ex-consul, Quintus Fabius Maximus. He refused to engage his limited forces in pitched battle against Hannibal and focused instead on pinprick harassment and the disruption of Carthaginian supply lines.
When the Romans had regained strength and confidence, new adaptations were made. Roman institutions harnessed the energy and lust for glory of an aggressive young commander, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. Scipio led an offensive into the Carthaginian heartland in North Africa and inflicted the final defeats on Hannibal’s army that ended the war on Roman terms.
December 11, 2015
Britain On The Run – The Siege of Kut Al Amara I THE GREAT WAR – Week 72
Published on 10 Dec 2015
Serbia is breaking under the pressure of the Central Power invasion and the last troops and civilians flee through the Alps. The final decision to evacuate Gallipoli is made and the British Indian Army gets under siege in the town of Kut Al Amara in Mesopotamia. The end of 1915 certainly looked grim for the Entente. The morale in Italy was also at a low point after the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo river ended like the three before.
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QotD: Hegel is not so much studied these days as viewed from afar, dimly
A book review by Roger Kimball helps round out the picture. Along with presenting the legend that Hegel said that “only one person only understood me, and even he misunderstood me”, Kimball writes:
Like many people who have soldiered through a fair number of Hegel’s books, I was both awed and depressed by their glittering opacity. With the possible exception of Heidegger, Hegel is far and away the most difficult “great philosopher” I have ever studied. There was much that I did not understand. I secretly suspected that no one — not even my teachers — really understood him, and it was nice to have that prejudice supported from the master’s own lips.
Is it worth the effort? I mean, you spend a hundred hours poring over The Phenomenology of Spirit — widely considered to be Hegel’s masterpiece — and what do you have to show for it? The book is supposed to take you from the naïve, “immediate” position of “sense certainty” to Absolute Knowledge, “or Spirit that knows itself as Spirit.” That sounds pretty good, especially when you are, say, eighteen and are busy soaking up ideas guaranteed to mystify and alarm your parents. But what do you suppose it means?
Despite trying really hard to say some nice things about Hegel, just about the best that Kimball can do is:
So why read Hegel? Just as doctors learn a lot about health by studying diseases, so we can learn a lot about philosophical health by studying Hegel.
The phrase “damning with faint praise” seems insufficient here.
Worse, Hegel has been criticized as a racist, a totalitarian, a proto-Nazi, and the kind of rationalist everyone hates – complete with stories about how he proved from first principles that there were only seven planets (not quite true, although he does seem to have made some similar inexcusable scientific errors. He was mocked (with some justice) for believing that his own work represented the final achievement of God’s plan for the Universe, and that the objective progress of history had culminated in the early 19th century Prussian state.
As a result, when I spent four years getting a bachelors in Philosophy, not only did I not receive a word of instruction in Hegel, but I was actively pushed away from him with frequent derogatory references.
I should qualify all this. Part of it is the analytic-continental divide. Hegel ended up well on the continental side of that, so even though analytics have a dim opinion of him, I’m pretty sure he remains studied and well-respected within continental circles. Indeed, the split may have necessitated analytics dismiss him in order to justify ignoring him, given that not ignoring him would mean engaging him would mean reading him would mean not having the time or energy to do anything else.
But since we’ve already brought in Google as a philosophical authority, we might as well note that it autocompletes “hegel is” into “hegel is impossible to understand”. This seems to be pretty close to a consensus position right now.
Scott Alexander, “What The Hell, Hegel?”, Slate Star Codex, 2014-09-12.
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December 10, 2015
Why Weren’t The Germans Allowed to Pass Through Belgium in 1914? I Out Of The Trenches
Published on 5 Dec 2015
Indy sits in the chair of wisdom again to answer your questions and this time we are telling the story of German New Guinea and talk about Germans passing through Belgium in 1914.
December 7, 2015
QotD: The problem of Belgium
Judging by emerging reports, it almost looks as though the big new international-relations problem highlighted by the latest massacre might end up being the failure of the Belgian state. Some of the perpetrators seem to have fled toward the terrorist-riddled Brussels suburb of Molenbeek, which has sprouted a long sequence of killers involved with everything from the 2004 Madrid attacks to the failed August Amsterdam-Paris train attack that was stopped by American passengers. The Belgian authorities are contrite about the helplessness of their police and security apparatus in a zone that is a giant magnet for Europe’s Muslim creeps and ne’er-do-wells.
This raises further existential questions, and it is not as though they are new, about an ethnically divided country fabricated by 19th-century great powers mostly for geopolitical purposes. Foreign-policy amateurs are fond of saying, with some justice, that most of the world’s problems come from borders badly drawn by Europeans in out-of-the-way places. Belgium’s worsening habit of exhaling spores of Muslim terror on to its neighbours may actually put it on that list, unless its problem is solved pretty quickly.
Colby Cosh, “After Paris, are we sure the map that needs changing is in the Middle East?”, National Post, 2015-11-17.
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December 4, 2015
The Serbian Exodus Through Albania I THE GREAT WAR – Week 71
Published on 3 Dec 2015
Serbia’s last stand is over and the remaining forces and civilians have to leave their home country across the inhabitable trails of the Albanian Alps. So, a whole nation is on the run while their enemies celebrate their successful military operation. The German Army is gladly relocating the much needed troops to other fronts while they leave the Austrians and Bulgarians to deal with the new situation on the Balkans.
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The moral wretchedness of BDS
Brendan O’Neill talks about the anti-Israeli BDS movement:
There are many weird and angry political movements in the 21st-century West. But it’s hard to think of any as ugly, vindictive and packed with prejudice as the Israel-bashing BDS movement.
BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Its backers want every institution, retail outlet and right-minded person in Christendom to refuse to have anything to do with Israel and its apparently wicked wares and people.
They want us to stop buying Israeli produce. To refuse to read books written by Israeli academics. Even to refuse to listen to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, lest its beautiful music infect our minds and make us think for a dangerous split second that Israel might just be made up of people like us.
The ugliness of BDS was thrown into sharp relief yesterday, when it was revealed that a former Cambridge academic refused to answer a 13-year-old girl’s curious questions because the girl is an Israeli.
Marsha Levine, a supporter of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, is an expert on horses. Israeli schoolgirl Shachar Rabinovitch emailed her to ask her some questions, saying “I know you are a very important person and I’ve read your articles about horses”.
Ms Levine’s response was like something out of a Grimms’ fairytale: an angry woman barking irrationally at an innocent, inquisitive girl who made the mistake of (virtually) knocking on angry woman’s door.
“I’ll answer your questions when there is peace and justice for Palestinians”, she said. “You might be a child, but if you are old enough to write to me, you are old enough to learn about Israeli history and how it has impacted on the lives of Palestinian people.”
And that was it. Ms Levine refused to respond to a schoolgirl’s questions about horses because the schoolgirl lives in a part of the world where there is conflict. Actually, scrap that. She refused to answer the girl’s questions because of the girl’s nationality. Nasty stuff.
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Britain’s “ghost trains”
BBC Future explains why there are some very odd trains that run on British railways, but aren’t advertised or even known about by railway staff:
The Leeds-Snaith line is what rail enthusiasts call a ghost train; Snaith station, a ghost station. The webpage about Snaith on ticket sales site TheTrainLine.com warns that ticket machines are not available at the station. Nor is there a ticket office, taxi rank or cab office.
It’s one of many train services around Britain that run with empty carriages – sometimes once or twice a day, sometimes as rarely as once a week. Sometimes even ticket sellers don’t know they exist, and it takes dedicated amateurs to seek them out. So why do these trains run at all?
There is no single definition of what constitutes a ghost train, although the general consensus is that it’s when a service is so infrequent, the train becomes effectively useless. Slippery or not, though, the term “ghost train” seems apt. It implies a service that is not exactly whole – something that whispers through towns and countryside, leaving barely a dent in its wake.
Perhaps most important of all, the term ghost train implies something that only a special few know exists. The press contact of the National Rail Museum of York, for example, was baffled by my request for an interview about ghost trains, thinking I wanted to discuss “haunted items” in the museum’s collection.
Nobody knows exactly how many ghost trains there are. On the website The Ghost Station Hunters, run by rail enthusiasts Tim Hall-Smith and Liz Moralee, there are 37 listed, and those are only the stations the intrepid pair has gotten to and written about so far. Hall-Smith says he’s counted more than 50 by looking through timetables.
So what is the point of running trains that almost nobody uses or even knows about?
Given the overcrowding on Britain’s trains, it may seem odd for these empty carriages to ride the rails – or for empty stations to stand sentry over them. From 1995-96 to 2011-12, the total number of miles ridden by train passengers leapt by 91%, while the entire UK train fleet grew by only 12%.
“Ghost trains are there just for a legal placeholder to prevent the line from being closed,” says Bruce Williamson, national spokesperson for the advocacy group RailFuture. Or as Colin Divall, professor of railway studies at the University of York, puts it: “It’s a useless, limited service that’s borderline, and the reason that it’s been kept is there would be a stink if anyone tried to close it.”
That is the crux of why the ghost trains still exist. A more official term is “parliamentary trains”, a name that stems from past years when an Act of Parliament was needed to shut down a line. Many train operators kept running empty trains to avoid the costs and political fallout – and while this law has since changed, the same pressures remain.
Closing down a line is cumbersome. There must first be a transport appraisal analysing the effect of a closure on passengers, the environment and the economy. The proposal is submitted to the Department of Transport and at that point its details must be published in the press, six months ahead of the closure. Then comes a 12-week consultation period, during which time anyone is welcome to protest; public hearings are sometimes held, especially if the closure is controversial. Then, finally, the plans are submitted to the Office of Rail and Road, who decide if the line closes.
In other words, it’s cheaper to run just enough service to keep the line “active” than it is to go through the bother and cost of shutting it down.
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December 2, 2015
Can the Royal Navy fund a “cheap and cheerful” frigate?
In the most recent British government SDSR plan, the Royal Navy’s hopes to get 13 new Type 26 frigates have been trimmed down to only eight. Save the Royal Navy speculates on developing a cheaper ship design that could perhaps fill the gap:
Is it really possible to produce a fully effective frigate that is significantly cheaper than a T26? Let us call it the ‘Type 31’, It still requires point defence missiles, anti-ship weaponry, a hangar and small flight deck (even if only for a UAV or Lynx size helicopter), plus a command and control system and suite of sensors. Although the hull size could be reduced, a simpler propulsion system used and the anti-submarine capability eliminated or reduced. You might cut the cost by 30%, and get a general purpose ship but there is still the cost of developing a new design. (At least £200M has already been spent on the T26 design as well as various development ‘blind alleys’ along the way.) A second frigate type will also need its own equipment support logistics and training pipelines.
The desire to create an exportable frigate is laudable but will we not be re-inventing the wheel when there are already cheaper foreign designs that could be licensed or adapted. The highly successful German MEKO design and the Danish Stanflex system are good examples.
If your warship is designed to cope in high-intensity conflict then it will need expensive weapons and sensors. Today’s generation of supersonic anti-ship missiles are truly formidable. Modern surface ships face greater and more diverse threats than ever. To counter this requires good sensors, agile missiles and an array of decoys, backed up by last-ditch close in weapon systems (CIWS). Although the general purpose frigate may not be dedicated to hunting submarines, it will still need a decent sonar to give some hope of prosecuting a submarine or detecting and avoiding torpedo attack. Submarines are also getting more and more stealthy with a growing arsenal of weapons. Without quiet propulsion and sophisticated sonars (i.e. towed arrays) that can detect threats at range and helicopters to attack, the Type 31 could ‘just be another target’.
If your escorts are really going to escort anything eg. an aircraft carrier or merchant shipping, then it needs more than just last-ditch self-defence weapons. A Phalanx CIWS may defend the ship it is mounted on, but it is little use protecting another vessel. If the escort ship can only defend itself, it has very limited use or must be permanently on the offensive. The Sea Ceptor being fitted to the Type 23 and Type 26 frigates has the major advantage over the Sea Wolf it replaces by having more than double the range (around 25Km), significantly extending the size of the protection umbrella over ships being escorted. Frigates are traditionally built to hunt submarines, if our Type 31 has no real ASW capability then it is pretty limited in a wartime role.
Sleek, fast and loved by their crews, the Type 21 was the poster child for the cheap frigate. There is a very fine line between a successful ‘less capable, cheaper frigate’ and a compromised warship design that becomes a liability. The Type 21 Frigate design of the 1970s was designed by a private company and accepted by the RN as a way to get a modern and affordable frigate to sea. Unfortunately when tested in the heat of the Falklands war their deficiencies became obvious. A top-heavy design on a lightweight hull, they suffered structural problems in the prolonged South Atlantic operations. They were also inadequately armed and suffered accordingly. God help them if they had gone up against Soviet aircraft or missiles. Ironically the surviving Type 21s still soldier on today in the Pakistani navy. Upgraded with a Phalanx system and Chinese SAMs / Harpoon missiles they are now slightly more potent.
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