Published on 19 Feb 2015
After more than six months of war, the first big mutiny breaks out in Singapore. The endless battles in which big powers sacrifice thousands of soldiers are leading to an organised resistance for the first time. Indian troops refuse to board a ship because they don’t want to fight other muslims in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the great offensives at the front in Europe continue.
February 20, 2015
The Singapore Mutiny I THE GREAT WAR Week 30
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February 19, 2015
“Faking it” versus “Keeping it real”
Neil Davenport reviews Authenticity is a Con by Peter York:
Everyone and everything today must, it seems, be ‘the real deal’ — they must be walking, talking embodiments of heart-on-your-sleeve authenticity. After all, no one wants to be accused of ‘faking it’, as Kurt Cobain put it in his suicide note. From pop stars to politicians, being real, being oneself, being transparent, is pretty much a pre-requisite for entrance into respectable society.
But social commentator Peter York believes there is something rather phoney in the need to be seen as genuine. In his short polemical book, Authenticity is a Con, York provides several deliciously scathing snapshots of the current tyranny of transparency.
For York, authenticity is the ‘absolute favourite word of shysters and chancers; of motivational speakers and life coaches dealing with “human potential”; of people who think “I’m so worth it”… people with only the vaguest idea of authentication and none at all about the philosophical back story.’ He traces the ‘me generation’ tendencies back to 1960s America. For York, the authenticity peddlers sell the idea that if you’re ‘true to yourself’ then everything else, from a satisfying career to successful relationships, will magically fall into place. York understands that the free-yourself psychobabble has always sounded preposterous. To lampoon it requires very little effort.
[…]
York’s sharp eye provides insights aplenty. There’s a hilarious dig at hippy ‘t-shirt and trainers’ companies such as Facebook or Virgin, whose informality disappears when they are challenged on something substantive (‘you get some very formal legal action’, quips York). He points out the irony of early- to mid-twentieth-century black musicians like Lead Belly, who wanted to wear smart suits and play hotel jazz, having to ham up a jailbird persona in order to sate their white audience’s demand for an ‘authentic’ blues performer. York also notes how, in the 1970s, the desire to be inauthentic, to not be ourselves or down to earth, was a mark of boldness and imagination. Think of the sci-fi-based, proto funk of Parliament or Funkadelic, or how working-class bricklayers donned tights and make up during the Glam era. Roxy Music made a career out of not keeping it real. They even prompted the NME’s Charles Shaar Murray to declare them a threat to Britain’s rock culture with, as York says, ‘their posey eclecticism, poncey retrofuturism and their wholly meretricious concern with appearances’. And then there’s David Bowie who elevated artifice, pretension and inauthenticity to the level of an art-form.
Today’s art-school poseurs, though, are as swept up with authenticity as anyone else. York begins Authenticity is a Con by visiting Shoreditch and noticing a product called ‘honest man’s beard oil’. As readers of Sunday supplements will know, east London has the highest beard count in the capital. York has great fun juxtaposing Shoreditch’s quest for reclaimed-floorboard authenticity with its entirely invented (read inauthentic) claim to be an artistic Boho enclave. ‘It’s a thing of surfaces’, writes York, ‘anti-bling surfaces that actually cost much more than the gold and glass and shiny marble of mainstream bling’. Indeed, Shoreditch and Hackney are the kind of places that have specially designed ‘old man pubs’ that don’t actually feature any old men drinking in them. York calls Shoreditch ‘applied authenticity’, which is about as accurate and as real a description of EC1 as you will find.
And yet the authenticity-marketing scam goes far beyond east London. For over a decade now, we’ve experienced what can be called ‘kooky capitalism’, wherein huge companies re-brand themselves as ethical, people-orientated cottage businesses. York supplements the idea of kooky capitalism with his concept of ‘micro-connoisseurship’, which refers to the ‘market for luxury, for superior, smart, snobby, value-added goods – “positional goods” of all kinds. We’ve got millions of micro-connoisseurs agonising about the thread count in sheets, the back-story of a recipe, the provenance of a shop.’
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February 18, 2015
Maximilian von Spee I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 16 Feb 2015
Vice Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee is one of the most famous admirals of World War One. When the war broke out, he and his East Asian Squadron are stationed in the Pacific. But instead of surrendering to his superior enemies, he manages to reach South America during an audacious cruiser war. At the Battle of Coronel, he ends the legend of the invincible Royal Navy.
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A tour of the French ballistic missile submarine Le Redoutable
Gerard Vanderleun posted a link to this set of photos of the retired French submarine Le Redoutable:
Fascinating and worthwhile for the blend of megadeath and French lifestyles: A tour of the ballistic missile submarine Redoutable (photos) the largest submarine you can tour without security clearance, and one of the only ballistic missile subs fully accessible to the general public. The French nuclear submarine Redoutable spent the ’70s and ’80s at sea and was home to 135 sailors for months at a time. The missile boat-turned-museum resides in the French seaside town of Cherbourg after extensive refurbishment.
It’s pretty much impossible to get a full shot of the sub, given where it rests. Let’s just say, it’s big.
Man, this looks like a nuclear power station control room.
Oh, wait, it is. Along with all the other moving and dangerous parts of the “drivetrain.”
The 16 missile hatches, with the lovely Cherbourg harbor in the background.
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February 16, 2015
QotD: The impotence of the League of Nations
Within a couple of months of the Invergordon mutiny, Japan intervened in Manchuria, deaf to all the entreaties of the League of Nations. While, today, we are used to the fact that a ringing denunciation from the United Nations is probably the single most ineffective tool in international relations, the revelation of its predecessor’s impotence came as a disagreeable surprise. So many statesmen had placed their faith in collective security that the naked aggression of the Japanese left them floundering for a response. In 1931 the British people had more pressing concerns than remote Asian wars, but the lesson was not lost on Germany’s rising political star Hitler, nor the posturing Mussolini in Italy whose Fascist Party dreamed of a new Roman Empire.
Max Arthur, The True Glory: The Royal Navy 1914-1939, 1996.
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February 15, 2015
They call it “Great” Britain, after all
H/T to Think Defence for the image.
Let’s make no mistake, Great Britain is great, the clue is in the name after all.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is obviously uneducated, or French.
And not only that …
Without Great Britain the world would be a poorer place in every regard.
Lets just remind ourselves why…
We gave the world democracy, common law, the Bailey Bridge, tanks, gravity, the worlds most common second language, Led Zeppelin, fair play, queuing, the backhoe loader, metal bridges, modern economics, the industrial revolution and Hollywood villains.
The Beatles, Morris Dancing, penicillin, HP sauce, Top Gear, the World Wide Web (your welcome), One Direction, Carry On and Simon Cowell.
Tea drinking, chicken tikka masala, Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, battered Mars Bars, the BBC, the mini (car, roundabout and skirt), the Spice Girls, Darwin, football, Marmite, rugby, cricket, golf, tennis, ping pong, pubs, tea, sharp suits, Spitfires and the fact there are homosexuals, lesbians and transsexuals in the armed forces and no one gives two shits.
With our friends and allies stood against the Nazis, invented the railway, sarcasm, MRI scanners, the screw propellor and a proper breakfast, been on the right side of the Napoleonic, First, Second and Cold War and gave the world steam power, the Mexeflote, Wallace and Gromit, roast beef dinners, the Dyson, Doctor Who, television, telephones, text messaging, GMT, electric motors, lawn movers, spotted dick, sewage systems, the thermos flask, the jet engine, carbon fibre, the flushing toilet and polyester (just for the RAF), pencils, radar and the Bank of France (ha ha ha).
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February 14, 2015
Europe in 1899, according to Fred W. Rose
Before the modern age of the infographic, artists like Fred W. Rose still had their own idiosyncratic ways to present as much information as they could for a wider audience:
H/T to Tam for the link.
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QotD: The “acquisition” of the British Empire
A word first, though. You’ll have heard it said that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind — one of those smart Oscarish squibs that sounds well but is thoroughly fat-headed. Presence of mind, if you like — and countless other things, such as greed and Christianity, decency and villainy, policy and lunacy, deep design and blind chance, pride and trade, blunder and curiosity, passion, ignorance, chivalry and expediency, honest pursuit of right, and determination to keep the bloody Frogs out. And often as not, such things came tumbling together, and when the dust had settled, there we were, and who else was going to set things straight and feed the folk and guard the gate and dig the drains — oh, aye, and take the profit, by all means.
George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, 1990.
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February 13, 2015
Stopping Russia – Hindenburg’s Final Offensive? I THE GREAT WAR Week 29
Published on 12 Feb 2015
This week, well over 1 million soldiers are on the advance everywhere in Europe. General Hindenburgs tries to beat the Russians once and for all at the Masurian Lakes. Austria-Hungary is fighting the Russians with German support in the Carpathian mountains and on the Western Front the Champagne offensive is still going.
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Britain’s next defence review
Think Defence looks at the 2015 iteration of the British defence review process:
There is a pre defence review ritual that everyone with an interest indulges in. It starts with a few gentle discussions on Great Britain’s ‘place in the world’, the scale of our global ambition and obligations as a G8 regional power with a seat with our name on at the UN.
After a suitable period has elapsed the discussion then veers into areas of risk and threat but even during this phase the mood is still good natured.
Phase 3 gets heated because it is the first stage at which money is usually involved and therefore consideration of how the diminishing cake is sliced up between the services.
It is during this phase that negotiations and backroom deals kick in and the inevitable ‘test the water’ leaking to sympathetic journalists.
The final phase happens when it is all over and then as the implications of actual decisions made become clearer the bitterness sets in which can last for decades (see moving Australia and CVA01 for a good example).
If you start with the money and define a fixed budget you still get into the same argument and all that happens then is people tend to shape the first phases so that, oh look, my answer was right all along.
Start with risks and threats and the answers will always have to be tempered by the time it comes back around to budgets. Each review is rapidly made redundant by ‘events dear boy’ and the cycle starts again.
There are no easy answers and to think so is rather foolish, if there was an easy method, everyone would be doing it.
[…]
The ‘punching above our weight’ theme needs to be ruthlessly struck from the vocabulary because not only does it lead to illogical equipment decisions and hollowed out forces it fundamentally results in the talk loud small stick foreign policy that we seem unable to wean ourselves off.
You can only get away with this for so long until others start to realise you are bluffing and I believe this is where we are now, even our allies are starting to realise that our big talk isn’t backed up, despite having the worlds most advanced x or y, they are of little practical value if you only have a handful. Fur coat and no knickers could be an apt description of much of the UK’s defence capabilities, as painful as it may be for us all to recognise, and so I think there is a fundamental need to reassess ‘our place’.
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Feeling nostalgic for Cold War-era Soviet propaganda? Don’t worry … it’s back!
Strategy Page on the disturbing resurrection of Soviet style “news”:
Westerners in Russia, especially those who speak and read Russian, report that state controlled Russian media has seemingly reverted to stories and attitudes right out of the Cold War. It is, in short, unreal but actually happening. Russian media is full of stories of NATO aggression against Russia and anything that is going wrong in Russia is blamed on a NATO conspiracy to destroy Russia. The Russian aggression in Ukraine is described as largely a fable created by a NATO conspiracy to take over the Ukrainian government and institute a terror campaign against the ethnic Russian minority in Ukraine, especially eastern Ukraine. There, the Russian media described ethnic Russians leading a rebellion against this NATO puppet government running Ukraine and NATO soldiers pretending to be Ukrainians doing most of the fighting. No captured NATO agents are presented which Russian media describes as proof of how clever and dangerous this NATO aggression is.
The reality is that Russian soldiers are regularly captured (dead and alive) and presented on Ukrainian TV but this is ignored and dismissed by Russian media as more insidious NATO propaganda. Those Russians familiar with their own history who point out the current government propaganda in Russia is similar to what went on in 1939 and 1941 are condemned as traitors. But it is a fact that in 1939 the communist Soviet Union signed a peace treaty with Nazi government of Germany and overnight Germany went from threat to valued ally according to Soviet media. That switched again in mid-1941 when Germany broke the treaty and invaded the Soviet Union. But during the time the treaty was in force Russian invaded Poland, the Baltic States and Finland. Russia was defeated in Finland and only got control of some territory just across the border. But eastern Poland was seized (as part of the 1939 treaty, with Germany taking most of Poland) as were the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania)
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February 12, 2015
EU governments and GM crops
Last month, Matt Ridley ran down the benefits to farmers, consumers, ecologists and the environment itself that the European Union has been resisting mightily all these years:
Scientifically, the argument over GM crops is as good as over. With nearly half a billion acres growing GM crops worldwide, the facts are in. Biotech crops are on average safer, cheaper and better for the environment than conventional crops. Their benefits accrue disproportionately to farmers in poor countries. The best evidence comes in the form of a “meta-analysis” — a study of studies — carried out by two scientists at Göttingen University, in Germany.
The strength of such an analysis is that it avoids cherry-picking and anecdotal evidence. It found that GM crops have reduced the quantity of pesticide used by farmers by an average of 37 per cent and increased crop yields by 22 per cent. The greatest gains in yield and profit were in the developing world.
If Europe had adopted these crops 15 years ago: rape farmers would be spraying far less pyrethroid or neo-nicotinoid insecticides to control flea beetles, so there would be far less risk to bees; potato farmers would not need to be spraying fungicides up to 15 times a year to control blight; and wheat farmers would not be facing stagnant yields and increasing pesticide resistance among aphids, meaning farmland bird numbers would be up.
Oh, and all that nonsense about GM crops giving control of seeds to big American companies? The patent on the first GM crops has just expired, so you can grow them from your own seed if you prefer and, anyway, conventionally bred varieties are also controlled for a period by those who produce them.
African farmers have been mostly denied genetically modified crops by the machinations of the churches and the greens, aided by the European Union’s demand that imports not be transgenically improved. Otherwise, African farmers would now be better able to combat drought, pests, vitamin deficiency and toxic contamination, while not having to buy so many sprays and risk their lives applying them.
I made this point recently to a charity that works with farmers in Africa and does not oppose GM crops but has so far not dared say so. Put your head above the parapet, I urged. We cannot do that, they replied, because we have to work with other, bigger green charities and they would punish us mercilessly if we broke ranks. Is the bullying really that bad? Yes, they replied.
Yet the Green Blob realises that it has made a mistake here. Not a financial mistake — it made a fortune out of donations during the heyday of stoking alarm about GM crops in the late 1990s — but the realisation that all it has achieved is to prolong the use of sprays and delay the retreat of hunger.
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World War II Relics: Juno Beach
Published on 5 Feb 2015
National Geographic television series The Sea Hunters Relics exploring the history of World War II Juno Beach.
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February 10, 2015
Companions In The Trenches – Animals of World War 1
Published on 9 Feb 2015
The deeds of animals in World War 1 are often forgotten next to the sufferings the soldiers had to endure in this industrial war. Millions of horses, thousands of dogs and pigeons were useful companions and dependable comrades. In this special episode Indy explains everything about the usage of animals in the great war and under which conditions they had to live.
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