World War Two
Published 15 Mar 2025Anna sits down to quiz Indy and Sparty about the Winter War! Did Simo Hayha really kill 500 men? Who’s to blame for the Soviet farce? And what was the Sausage War?
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March 16, 2025
Fireside Chat – Winter War
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QotD: The “Social Contract”
… that’s a problem for modern political science, because — put briefly but not unfairly — all modern political science rests on the idea of the Social Contract, which is false. And not just contingently false, either — it didn’t get overtaken by events or anything like that. It’s false ab initio, because it rests on false premises. It seemed true enough — true enough to serve as the basis of what was once the least-worst government in the history of the human race — but the truth is great and shall prevail a bit, as I think the old saying goes.
Hobbes didn’t actually use the phrase “social contract” in Leviathan, but that’s where his famous “state of nature” argument ends. In the state of nature, Hobbes says, the only “law” is self defense. Every man hath the right to every thing, because nothing is off limits when it comes to self preservation; thus disputes can only be adjudicated by force. And this state of nature will prevail indefinitely, Hobbes says, because even though some men are stronger than others, and some are quicker, cleverer, etc. than others, chance is what it is, and everybody has to sleep sometime — in other words, no man is so secure in so many advantages that he can impose his will on all possible rivals, all the time. We won’t be dragged out of the state of nature by a strongman.
The only way out of the state of nature, Hobbes argues, is for all of us, collectively, to lay down at least some of our rights to a corporate person, the so-called “Leviathan”, who then enforces those rights for us. So far, so familiar, I’m sure, but even if you got all this in a civics class in high school (for the real old fogeys) or a Western Civ class in college (for the rest of us), they probably didn’t go over a few important caveats, to wit:
The phrase corporate person means something very different from what even intelligent modern people think it does, to say nothing of douchebag Leftists. In the highly Latinate English of Hobbes’s day, “to incorporate” meant “to make into a body”, and they used it literally. In Hobbes’s day, you could say that God “incorporated” (or simply “corporated”) Adam from the dust, and nobody would bat an eye. I honestly have no idea what Leftists think the term “corporate person” means — and to be fair, I guess, they seem to have no idea either — but for us, we hear “corporation” and we think in terms of business concerns. Which means we tend to attribute to Hobbes the view that the Leviathan, the corporate person, is an actual flesh and blood person — specifically, the reigning monarch.
That’s wrong. Hobbes was quite clear that the Leviathan could be a senate or something. He thought that was a bad idea, of course — the historical development of English isn’t the only reason we think Hobbes means “the person of the king” when he writes about the Leviathan — but it could be. So long as it’s the ultimate authority, it’s the Leviathan. For convenience, let’s call it “the Leviathan State”, although I hope it’s obvious why Hobbes would consider that redundant.
Second caveat, and the main reason (I suppose) it never occurred to Hobbes to call it a social contract: It can’t be broken. By anyone. Ever. It can be overtaken by events (third caveat, below), but no one can opt out on his own authority. The reason for this is simple: If you don’t permanently lay down your right to self defense (except in limited, Rittenhouse-esque situations that aren’t germane here), then what’s the point? A contract that can be broken at any time, just because you feel like it, is no contract at all. And consider the logical consequences of doing that, from the standpoint of Hobbes’s initial argument: If one of us reverts to the state of nature, then we all do, and the war of all against all begins again.
Third caveat: The Leviathan can be defeated. Hobbes considers international relations a version of the state of nature, one there’s no getting out of. If pressed, he’d probably try to attribute Charles I’s defeat in the English Civil War to outside causes. Indeed at one point he comes perilously close to arguing something very like that New Donatist / “Mandate of Heaven” thing we discussed below, but however it happened, it is unquestionably the case that Charles I’s government is no more. Hobbes bowed to reality — he saw that Parliament actually held the power in England, whatever the theoretical rights and wrongs of it, so even though the physical person of Charles II was there with him in Paris, Hobbes took the Engagement and sailed home.
Severian, “True Conclusions from False Premises”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-22.
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March 15, 2025
Trump’s actual goal in Ukraine
David Friedman posted this a couple of days ago, considering what President Trump’s real goals may be in the Russo-Ukraine conflict:
There are two possible interpretations of Trump’s policy. The pessimistic one is that he plans to give Putin what he wants, force Zelensky to accept peace terms that give Russia substantial amounts of Ukrainian territory and leave Ukraine disarmed and defenseless against future Russian demands. On that theory the clash with Zelensky was a pre-planned drama intended to provide an excuse for the US withdrawing support, make it less obvious that Trump now supports Putin. As of Monday that looked like a plausible reading of the situation.
The optimistic reading was that Trump wanted to force an end to the war on compromise terms, use the withdrawal of support to force Zelensky to agree. Tuesday’s news, Zelensky agreeing to a proposed cease fire and Trump responding by resuming US support for Ukraine, is evidence for that reading. The ball is now in Putin’s court. If he rejects the proposal Trump will be under pressure to continue, perhaps even increase, US support. That is a reason for him not to reject the proposal. My guess is that Putin will agree to a temporary cease fire, at least in principle, although he may haggle over details, try to push for a version more favorable to him.
What Trump wants, on the optimistic interpretation, which I now find likely, is to end the war. To do that he needs to find terms that both sides will accept. Zelensky will not accept terms that amount to surrender — even if the US abandons him, he has the option of continuing the war with increased support from the European powers, now moving to rearm. If they are sufficiently committed to Ukraine or sufficiently annoyed at the US they should be able to replace most, although not all, of what the US has been providing, if necessary with munitions purchased from the US; it is hard to imagine even Trump forbidding US arms manufacturers from selling to allies. Ukraine would be worse off than continuing the war with US support but, if Russia is willing to agree to terms Trump approves of and Ukraine is not, that will not be an option.
Putin was, despite American support for Ukraine under the previous administration, winning, although very slowly and at considerable cost. Unless Trump is willing to respond to Russian rejection of his peace plan by greatly increasing US support, which I think unlikely — no boots on the ground nor wings in the air — Putin has the option of returning to that, so will not accept anything much less. That suggests that the most likely terms amount to an extended cease fire. Ukraine does not disarm, Russia does not withdraw from territory it is occupying. Both sides stop blowing things up on territory controlled by the other, stop shooting at each other.
Judged by territorial control that is a win for Russia, since it ends up controlling most of what it wanted, the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russian speakers plus the areas that can block the water supply into Crimea, with Ukraine even further from recovering Crimea than before. That might be enough to let Putin present it to his population has a victory sufficient to justify the decision to invade Ukraine.
Seen from the outside, it would be an expensive victory, which might be enough to deter future adventurism or a renewal of the war. To get it, Russia has consumed a large part of the store of military equipment inherited from the Soviet Union, making it less formidable in any future conflict with Ukraine or anyone else. Worse still, the war has driven two neutral powers, both militarily substantial and one of them on the Russian border, into joining NATO. And between Putin and Trump they may have pushed the European powers into finally rearming. The population of the European NATO members is several times that of Russia, their economies as well:
“It’s striking but it’s true. Right now, 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.” (Donald Tusk, prime minister of Poland)
What would be the effect of an extended pause in the war on the balance of power between Russia and Ukraine, the prospects for a renewed conflict? Both Russia and Ukraine will be able to rebuild what the war has destroyed; that will be a bigger benefit for Ukraine, since it has lost much more. One of Russia’s advantages in the war was that it not only had more munitions, it could build more, could fire far more shells at Ukrainian forces than Ukraine could fire back. An extended pause will give Ukraine and its allies time to build the factories they need. It will give states not involved in the war, such as South Korea and India, time to build up supplies of armaments and ammunition some of which can be sold to Ukraine when and if the pause ends. It will give US arms firms time to expand for a world where there is increased demand for what they produce.
If the European powers go through with their current talk of greatly increased military expenditure and continue to back Ukraine, there will be much more money bidding for arms on behalf of Ukraine than on behalf of Russia. That could shift the balance when and if the war resumes.
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March 14, 2025
“CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up”
I don’t follow German politics closely, so I depend on regular updates from euygppius, like this post from the other day which I’m sure wasn’t popular among CDU voters or personal fans of Friedrich Merz, the likely next German Chancellor:
For some time now, I’ve wanted to catalogue in one place all the ways that CDU Chancellor hopeful Friedrich Merz is screwing up. His strategic failures are really a thing to behold; I’ve never seen anybody screw up this frequently and this dramatically before. Yet I have delayed writing this post, above all because I wanted Merz to reach the end of his present streak and stop screwing up for a while. I wanted to have a complete unit – a full collection of screwups – to present to my readers for analysis. I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.
As with all deeply rooted phenomena, it is hard to tell where the present parade of screwing up began. There was the lacklustre CDU election campaign and Merz’s ill-advised flirtations with the Greens that began last autumn, which cost the Union parties precious points in the polls. None of that looked auspicious, but the screwing up did not begin in earnest until January, in the wake of Aschaffenburg – when Merz decided to violate the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland. For the first time in history, the CDU, the CSU and the FDP voted with AfD in the Bundestag, first in a successful attempt to pass a meaningless if sternly worded anti-migration resolution, and then in a failed attempt to pass an actual piece of legislation that would take real steps to stem the influx of asylees from the developing world.
This manoeuvre had the real glimmerings of strategy, and so we would do well to ascribe it to Merz’s underlings rather than to Merz himself. It was only superficially an attempt to stop the tide of voter defections to the AfD. Above all, it was an effort to gain leverage over the Greens and the Social Democrats in any future coalition negotiations. Merz and his CDU, sobered by polls showing a left so weakened that they feared having to govern in a nightmare Kenya coalition with the SPD and the Greens both, wanted to send a clear message: “We’re not afraid to achieve parliamentary majorities with the AfD if you won’t go along with our programme”. Had Merz stuck to this line, he’d be in a far better place than he is today. Alas, the man chose to screw up instead. Spooked by yet another wave of leftist protests “against the right” – a “right” which now included not only the AfD but also the CDU and the CSU – Merz lost himself in a string of disavowals. A minority government with AfD support would be unthinkable, he and his lieutenants said. The Union parties would never work with the AfD, he and his lieutenants said.
In this way, Merz’s firewall gambit succeeded only in outraging and energising his future coalition partners, while achieving nothing for himself or his own party. A lot of CDU voters would like to see some measure of cooperation between the Union parties and the AfD, and for his constant never-again-with-the-AfD rhetoric Merz paid a price. The CDU underperformed the polls, crossing the finish line with a catastrophic 28.5% of the vote on 23 February. The Greens whom Merz had spent months courting – at the cost of alienating his own base! – emerged from the vote too weak to give his party a majority, and so the man was left to deal with the Social Democrats, newly radicalised not only by their own dim showing but also by Merz’s firewall trickery.
Thus it came to be that Merz ceded the high ground in negotiations to the SPD, the biggest losers in the 2025 German elections. That is itself remarkable, the kind of thing you could not be certain of achieving even if you tried. And yet it is only the beginning!
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March 13, 2025
QotD: Processing flax to make linen
The process for this is called retting and changed relatively little during the pre-modern period. The term “retting”, related to the Dutch reten shares the same root as English “rot” and that is essentially what we are going to do: we are going to rot away every fiber that isn’t the bast fibers themselves. The first step is to dry the stalks out, at least to a certain point. Then in the most common form of retting (called “water retting”) the partially dried stalks are submerged in stagnant or slow-moving waters (because you do not want too much water-motion action on the flax washing it away). Pliny (Natural History 19.17) notes the use of weights to hold the stalks down under the water. The water penetrates into the partially dried stalks, causing the pith to expand and rupture the skin of the stalk, which permits bacteria into the stalk. That bacteria then rots away the chemicals which bind the fibers together (this is pectin, located in the cell walls of the plant cells) allowing the fibers to be separated. This process takes around two to three weeks to complete, but has to be carefully controlled and monitored; over-retting will make the bast fibers themselves too weak, while under-retting will make it more difficult to separate the fibers.
By the Roman period at least, the potential benefits of retting in warm water were already well known (Pliny, NH 19.17). There is some evidence, for instance from Staonia and Saetabis, that at least by the Roman period specially built pools fed by small channels and exposed to the sun (so they would heat up) were sometimes used to speed the process. Very fine flax was in some cases double-retted, where stalks are partially retted, removed early, then retted a second time. Alternately, in water-poor regions, retting might instead be done via “dew retting” where the stalks are instead spread evenly and carefully on either grassy fields or even on the roofs of houses (e.g. Joshua 2:6), where the action of morning dew provides the necessary moisture for bacteria to break down the pectin. Dew retting generally seems to have taken rather longer as a process.
Once retted, the flax must be dried completely. The nest step is breaking, where the pith of the stalks is broken up by being beaten, sometimes with a wooden club (Pliny mentions a particular type of mallet, a stupparius malleus, or a “tow-club”, tow being the term for short broken fibers produced in the processing of flax, for this purpose, Pliny, NH 19.17). In some places (particularly in Northern Europe) it seems that stomping on the flax by foot or having horses do so was used for this purpose. Once broken up, the pith and other fibers may be separated from the bast using a wooden knife in a process called scutching (the knife is called a scutching knife). By the 1800s, this process was assisted through the use of a swingle, essentially a board stood upright with an opening at the top where the flax could be inserted and held, while the scutcher then strikes with the scutching knife downward against the board. Scutching is a fairly rapid process; Sir George Nicholas detailing flax production in the 1800s (in The Flax-Grower (1848), 45-6) reports that a skilled worker could scutch ten to fifteen pounds of flax a day by hand, though improper retting or low-quality flax might be more difficult to process. Scutching, when completed, left a bundle of fibers (sometimes slightly twisted to hold them together), with almost all of the other plant matter removed.
All of these steps, from planting to scutching, seem to have generally been done on the farm where the flax was being cultivated. At least in the early modern period, it was only once the flax had been scutched that the bundles might be sold (Nicholas, op. cit., 47). That said, our flax is not quite ready to spin just yet. The final step is hackling (also spelled heckling), where the bast fibers are combed along a special tool (a hackling board or comb) to remove the last of the extraneous plant matter, leaving just the bast fibers themselves. The hackling board itself is generally a wooden board with several rows of nails (the “teeth”) put through it, through the earliest hackles seem to have been made of bone or else a wood board using thorns or thistle as teeth (see Barber (1992), 14 for a reconstruction). The fibers that come out of this process are generally separated into grades; the “tow” fibers are short, loose or broken fibers that come loose from the longer strands of bast during scutching or hackling; these are gathered and spun separately and typically make a lower-quality linen thread when spun. They stand in contrast to the “line” of long bast fiber strands, which after hackling form long wavy coils of fibers called stricks; the small tangles give these fibers coherence and account for part of the strength of high quality linen, once spun. Pliny comments on the roughness of the entire process, quipping that “the more roughly treated [the linen is] the better it is” (Pliny NH 19.18). Nicholas, on this point, is explicit that the two grades ought to be kept separate, so as not to lower the value of the more useful fibers (op. cit., 47).
There was a significant amount of skill in the entire process. Pliny notes that the ratio of flax input to usable fiber output was skill dependent (NH 19.18) and that a good worker could get around fifteen Roman pounds (10.875lbs, 4.93kg) of usable fiber out of fifty Roman pounds (36.25lbs, 16.44kg) of raw flax. Nicholas agrees, noting that hand scutching skill was deemed sufficiently important for experienced scutchers to be sent to train workers elsewhere in the best methods (op. cit. 47). Pliny concludes on this basis that producing flax was a sufficiently skilled job as to befit free men (Nicholas also assumes a male worker, at least with his pronouns; he is explicit that breaking was done by men, though with women or children assisting by placing and retrieving the bundles of flax as they are broken), though it seems that much of this work was also done by women, particularly scutching and hackling. In each case it seems fairly clear that this work was done mostly on the flax farm itself, by many of the same people living and working on that farm.
The final result of all of this processing are bundles of individual flax bast filaments which are now quite smooth, with a yellow, “flaxen” color (though early pulled, very fine flax may be a quite pale yellow, whereas utilitarian late-pulled flax is a deeper near-brown yellow), ready to spin. We’ll deal with color treatment in a later post, but I should note here that linen is notoriously difficult to dye, but can be bleached, for instance by exposing the fibers to the sun during the drying process.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part II: Scouring in the Shire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-12.
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March 12, 2025
QotD: A different parable of democracy’s origins
Then one day, somebody came up with a daring suggestion: what if instead of actually fighting a civil war, they instead had a pretend civil war. The two contenders for the throne would arm-wrestle, and everybody would treat the winner as if he had actually won the civil war, and thus many lives would be saved. Everybody applauded this idea, unfortunately the first time it was tried the loser of the arm-wrestling contest decided to try his luck anyways, broke the deal, started the civil war, and won. The problem with this approach is that it’s “unstable”, because one’s ability to win an arm-wrestle is only loosely correlated with one’s ability to win a hypothetical civil war. The rule-by-arm-wrestle system can work so long as nobody challenges it, but as soon as somebody does, it’s prone to collapse.
Then somebody else observed that in the last few civil wars, the side with the bigger army always won, and proposed that instead of settling the succession on the battlefield, the two sides simply count up the number of soldiers they would be able to muster, and the side with the largest hypothetical army would win without the war being fought. Note how different this situation is from the previous proposal! This time, the defeated party of the fake, simulated war has good reason not to be a sore loser, because he’s just seen that if the matter really came to blows, he’d probably lose. The solution is “stable” in this sense, all sides are incentivized to accept the outcome. And thus democracy was born.
I like this as a pragmatic argument for a loosely democratic system. It has nothing to do with the moral case for popular sovereignty, or whether it is right and just for the governed to have a say in government, it’s simply about avoiding violent instability by giving everybody a sneak peek at how the putative civil war might turn out, then all agreeing to not have it. But this theory has another selling-point, which is that it also tells us why democracy arose when it did, and why it may now be on the way out. If the principle is that governments will tend towards a form and structure and rule of succession that’s closely tied to their ability to fend off challengers, the that suggests that the most common form of government will depend heavily on what the dominant military technology and strategy of its era happens to be.
For example: in the early Middle Ages, wars were fought by a much smaller number of people, and success in warfare was more dependent on the actions of an elite group of professional soldier-aristocrats. And sure enough, political power was also concentrated in the hands of this much smaller group, because in the event that somebody decided to contest the state, it was the opinion of this group that mattered, not the opinions of everybody.
Sometime in the nineteenth century, the “meta” for total warfare changed dramatically. The combination of mass production, replaceable parts in machinery, and new weaponry that was deadly even in the hands of the untrained masses, all meant that suddenly the pure, arithmetic quantity of men under arms on each side became a much more potent factor in the military calculus. Is it any wonder that a little while later, democracy began to spread like wildfire around the globe? Mass suffrage and mass conscription are inextricably bound with one another. The people have generally ruled in our lifetimes, but only because a little while before (these things always operate on a lag) wars were decided by masses of conscripts with rifles.
There’s no rule that says this connection between military success and popular support has to hold true forever, and in fact it probably won’t. You can imagine this going a few different ways. Perhaps the conflicts of the future will be settled by vast swarms of autonomous killer robots, and the winner will be whoever can produce the best robots the fastest. This world might be conducive to rule by industrial conglomerates and robber-barons, a return to the great age of oligarchy, but with a less aristocratic, more plutocratic spin. If we look to the past, there was a class of societies whose militaries had an extreme ratio of capital intensity to labor intensity — the Mediterranean merchant republics with their fleets and their mercenary armies of condottieri. If future wars are settled by robots, we may find ourselves bowing to a new, doubtless very different, doge.
There’s another possible world, where control of information becomes supreme. You can think of this world as being an intensification of our current one, with an arms race of ever more sophisticated techniques for swaying the masses. Surface democracy spins out of control as an ecosystem of competing psychological operations vie to program or reprogram or deprogram swarms of bewildered and unsuspecting voters, alternatingly using them as betting chips and battering rams. This is a world ruled by the meme lords — brutally efficient teams of spin doctors, influencers, AIs, and the occasional legacy media organization. Like I said, pretty much just an intensified version of our current world.
My guess, however, is that neither of these worlds will come to pass, but instead a third one. The history of military technology is a history of the ancient contest between offensive technologies and defensive technologies, with both sides having held the crown at various points. We may be about to see the balance shift decisively in favor of offensive technologies, with extreme political consequences. Arguably we’ve been in that world ever since the invention of the atom bomb, but WMDs haven’t affected this strategic calculus as much as you might guess, due to all the issues surrounding their use (to be clear, this is a good thing).
Technology marches on, however, and I believe there’s a chance that it’s about to deliver us into a new golden age of assassination.1 Between miniaturized drones with onboard target recognition, bioengineered plagues designed to target exactly one person, and a host of more creative ideas that I don’t even want to write about for fear of summoning them into existence, it may soon become very dangerous to be a public figure with any enemies — that is to say, dangerous to be a public figure at all. What kind of men will rule such a world, where your reign could end the moment somebody discovers it?
Two kinds of men: men with nothing to lose, and men that you will never find. This world of ever-present threat to those with power is a world eerily well adapted to governance by grey, faceless men in grey, faceless buildings. A world of conspiracies hatched in unobtrusive exurban office parks, of directives concealed within stacks of paperwork, where the primary goal of power is to hide itself from view. In other words it’s the world that MITI already inhabits. As in so many things, the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.
1. Japan had a high-profile and socially traumatizing assassination just recently. I find it noteworthy that Abe was killed when he wasn’t Prime Minister anymore, but was perhaps more influential than ever as a deep state power player.
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March 11, 2025
The Myth and Truth behind Croissants – A Recipe from 1850
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Oct 2024Crescent-shaped bread rolls, from before the croissant was a flaky pastry
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1853Croissants weren’t always the buttery, flaky pastries that we know and love. While today, that flakiness is what defines a croissant, in the past, it was the crescent shape that was most important.
This recipe from the mid-19th century, a good 50 years before the croissant got its flakes, is a wonderfully soft bread. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to a modern croissant besides the shape, but it is much easier to make. The bread is a little plain, but would be lovely with some butter and jam.
In luxury bakeries, small loaves called croissants are prepared, usually in the semi-circular shape of a roll curved and tapered at the ends. The liquid is used to form the dough with one kilogram of flour consists of one or two eggs beaten and mixed with about five hundred grams of water. Moreover, the choice of flour, the dose of yeast, as well as the working of the dough, require the same care as when it comes to the other luxury breads mentioned.
— Des substances alimentaire et des moyens de les améliorer by Anselme Payen, 1853.
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March 10, 2025
Rome (2004): HBO’s Untold 5 Season Story
Little Wars TV
Published 6 Sept 2024HBO’s Rome is one of the greatest television shows ever made, but the premium network infamously cancelled Rome after just two seasons. It is a decision HBO executives later admitted was a mistake. In this video essay, we explore why HBO cancelled Rome and what the showrunners envisioned as the full, five-season story arc. Which characters were meant to survive? What historical storylines would have been explored? And what was the show’s final scene supposed to be at the end of five seasons?
We’ll unearth interviews with Bruno Heller and William J MacDonald, hear from actors like Kevin McKidd, and attempt to piece together a vision of Rome‘s full potential if HBO had not cancelled the show prematurely.
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March 9, 2025
Europe’s leaders start talking about rearmament
Yet another side-effect of the Trumpening has been a shift in attitude among European leaders on the issue of self-defence and military spending. eugyppius points out that the flashy new media campaign to drum up support for the new position has “borrowed” its design from an unfortunate donor:
For three years we have had war in Ukraine, masterminded on the NATO side by senile warmonger-in-chief Joe Biden. This war included bizarre moments, like direct attacks on German energy infrastructure, and also escalatory brinksmanship, as when Biden authorised long-range missile strikes within Russian territory, and the Russians responded with a not-so-subtle threat of nuclear retaliation. Throughout all of this madness, the Europeans slept, sparing hardly a single thought for their defence. Now that Donald Trump hopes to end the war in Ukraine, however, Continental political leaders are losing their minds. War: not scary at all. Peace: an existential threat.
The first way our leaders hope to dispel the disturbing spectre of peace, is via Ursula von der Leyen’s “ReArm Europe” initiative, which will permit member states to take on billions in debt to fund their rearmament. In this way, the clueless histrionic Brussels juggernaut hopes (in the words of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk) to “join and win the arms race” with Russia, even if (in the words of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung – h/t the incomparable Roger Köppel) we must “avoid for the moment a confrontation with the new Washington”. Becoming a global superpower with a view towards confronting the hated Americans is all about spending and time, you don’t need strategy or a plan or anything like that.
Those of you wondering whether it might be a better idea to rearm first and then set about alienating our powerful geopolitical partners simply lack the Eurotardian vision. These are such serious people, that in the space of a few days they spun up this remarkable logo for their spending programme …
… which obviously portrays the EU member states smearing yellow warpaint on themselves and in no way evokes the most notorious obscene internet image of all time. Nations just do stuff, but the Eurotards cannot even take a shit without bizarre hamfisted branding campaigns.
As I said, these are deeply serious people, and they also speak very seriously, in declarative sentences that don’t mean anything. In a publicity statement, von der Leyen said that these are “extraordinary times” which are a “watershed moment” for Europe and also a “watershed moment for the Ukraine”. Such extraordinary watersheds require “special measures,” such as “peace through strength” and “defence” through “investment”. Top EU diplomat and leading Estonian crazy person Kaja Kallas for her part noted that “We have initiative on the table” and that she’s “looking forward to seeing Europe show unity and resolve”. Perhaps there will also be money in the ReArm Europe programme to outfit Brussels with an arsenal of thesauruses so we do not have to hear the same words all the time.
At Roots & Wings, Frank Furedi says that “Europe Has Just Become A More Dangerous Place” thanks to the shift to “military Keynsianism” where future economic growth is mortgaged to current military spending:
Net Zero image from Jo Nova
Of course, it is still early days, and wise counsel may well prevail over Europe’s jingoistic shift towards a war economy. The justification for opting for military Keynesianism is the supposed threat posed by Russia to European security and the necessity for defending the integrity of Ukraine. However, it is evident to all that even if all the billions earmarked for the defense of Europe are invested wisely it will have little bearing on developments on the battlefields of Ukraine. Converting Germany’s ailing automobile industry to produce military hardware will take years as will the process of transforming Western Europe’s existing security resources into a credible military force.
Just remember that Germany’s railway infrastructure is currently in too poor a state to transfer tanks and other military hardware across the country. Years of obsessing with Net Zero Green ideology have taken their toll on Germany’s once formidable economy.
It is an open secret that Europe has seriously neglected its defence infrastructure. It is also the case that initiatives led by the EU and other European institutions are implemented at a painfully slow pace. The failure of the EU to offer an effective Europe wide response to the Covid pandemic crisis exposed the sorry state of this institutions capacity to deal with an emergency. The EU is good at regulating but not at getting things done. The EU’s regulatory institutions are more interested in regulating than in implementing a complex plan designed to rearm the continent.
Nor is the problem of transforming European defense into a credible force simply an matter to do with military hardware. European armies – Britain and France included – are poorly prepared for a war. The nations of the EU have become estranged from the kind of patriotic values necessary to support a real military engagement with Russia. Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” raises the question of “willing to do what?”. At a time when neither France nor Britain can secure their borders to prevent mass illegal migration their willingness to be willing will be truly tested.
Macron and his colleagues may well be good at acting the role of would-be Napoleon Bonapartes. But these windbags are not in a position seriously affect the outcome of the war in Ukraine. As matters stand only the United States has the resources and the military-technological capacity to significantly influence the outcome of this war.
While all the tough talk emanating from the Brussels Bubble has a distinct performative dimension it is important to take seriously the dangers of unleashing an explosive dynamic that has the potential of quickly escalating and getting out of control. As we head towards a world of increased protectionism and economic conflict there is a danger that European rearmament could inadvertently lead to an arms race. History shows that such a development inevitably has unpredictable consequences.
What’s really concerning about the decision taken by the European Council is not simply its “spend, spend” strategy or its wager on the economic benefits of the arms industry. What is really worrying is that Europe’s leading military hawks lack clarity about the continent’s future direction of travel. Afflicted by the disease of geopolitical illiteracy the leaders of Europe have failed to address the issue of how they can navigate a world where the three dominant powers – America, China, Russia – have a disproportionately strong influence on geopolitical matters.
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Italy’s Italian Fiasco
World War Two
Published 8 Mar 2025Today Sebastian puts Indy and Sparty in the hot seat for questions about the war in China and North Africa. Just what is the deal with the Italian Army anyway? How much fighting did the CCP do against the Japanese? And what’s the most overlooked event of the first year of war?
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Sulla: bloodthirsty psycho or saviour of the Republic?
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 23 Oct 2024Today’s question asked about Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the first man to the march his legions against the city of Rome, starting the first — but far from the last — of Rome’s civil wars. He killed a lot of people, broke a lot of laws and conventions, but as dictator also introduced a very “conservative” programme of reforms. How should we judge Sulla, as a selfish, brutal murderer, or as a reluctant rebel and well-intentioned reformer?
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QotD: HR metastasized
The Peter Principle tells us that everyone gets promoted to their own level of incompetence. So, that explains why the people actually running HR departments are incompetent. The second is Parkinson’s Law, which everyone usually takes to be about work expanding to fill the time available etc. In reality the book as a whole is about how bureaucracy will eat an organisation from the inside. Like one of those parasitic wasps where the pupae eat the spider from the inside out. The lesson of this is that proper management of any organisation is a constant battle against the growth of the bureaucracy. Proper managers should — must — spend significant amounts of their time turning a blowtorch on that internal bureaucracy. Real slash and burn, proper Carthaginian Solution on their arses.
The third has the most direct and exact relevance here. Up the Organisation. In which we are told that the personnel department (what we had before Human Resources) should be the secretary of the line manager. Someone wants to hire someone? Sure. The person who decides who to hire is the person doing the hiring. He needs an assistant only in so far as someone should phone up the local rag to put the job ad in.
Now, it is necessary to have someone making sure the details for the paycheque are right, that they enrolled in the company equity scheme, health care is sorted. But that’s some beancounter preferably hundreds of miles away from any actual influence upon anything.
All of which — from that distillation of the finest ponderings upon corporate management civilisation has so far achieved — tells us what to do with Human Resources.
Turn the blowtorches on the power skirts. Possibly even the full Carthaginian. Tho’ who we’ll find to buy as drabs and doxies the usual inhabitants of HR is another matter. Dunno, might be worth ploughing them into the fields and selling the salt instead.
Tim Worstall, “The Invasion Of The Power Skirts”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-12-06.
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March 7, 2025
Soviet Invasion of Finland: Winter War 1939-40
Real Time History
Published 18 Oct 2024November 1939. Germany and the Soviet Union have conquered Poland, and Germany is at war with France and Britain. Moscow is free to do as it pleases in Eastern Europe and sets its sights on Finland – but the Winter War will be a nasty surprise for Stalin.
Corrections:
02:19 The dot marking Leningrad is about 80km too far east, it’s of course directly at the far eastern end of the Gulf of Finland.
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QotD: Infantry combat and esprit de corps
Well, no. Not quite.
We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion. [W]e discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined “mechanical” soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.
Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. It was only really after the Second World War that systematic study began to be made of unit cohesion (e.g. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947), though subsequent literature on the topic is voluminous and Marshal’s work has its problems, but its conclusions are broadly accepted having been confirmed in subsequent studies) [NR: Some discussion on Marshall and his theories here]. What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t “the cause” or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.
And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).
And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in “toughening” boot camp and to say, “aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!” Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare. We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).
Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities). That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
By contrast, “warrior” classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion. Of course exactly what “good generalship” or “good officership” looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the “brain” of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.
One of the things I find most striking about the “warrior ethos” advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically. Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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March 6, 2025
Passionate belief in historical untruths
As mentioned in earlier posts, one of the most toxic exports from Australia to the rest of the Anglosphere has been the academic indulgence in believing that “settler colonialism” explains everything about the history of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and anywhere else the British diaspora touched:
Welby in Zanzibar
Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.
In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement”, a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter”. And this has “continuing toxic consequences”.
Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.
Consonant with his church’s policy, the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar last year, in which he criticised Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that “we [British] must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar”.
Really? What the British did in Zanzibar during the second half of the 19th century was to force the Sultan to end the slave-trade. Indeed, the cathedral in which the archbishop was preaching was built over the former slave-market. And here’s what the pioneering missionary David Livingstone wrote about black Africans in 1871: “I have no prejudice against [the Africans’] colour; indeed, anyone who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels that they are just fellow men…. If a comparison were instituted, … I should like to take my place among [them], on the principle of preferring the company of my betters”.
[…]
St. John Baptiste church was one of many local churches to go up in flames during Justin Trudeau’s performative national guilt trip over “unmarked mass graves” at former Residential Schools across Canada.
Which bring us to Canada. The May 2021 claim by a Kamloops Indian band to have discovered the remains of 215 “missing children” of an Indian Residential School was quickly sexed up by the media into a story ‘mass graves’, with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. The Toronto Globe and Mail published an article under the title, “The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg”, in which a professor of law at UBC wrote: “It is horrific … a too-common unearthing of the legacy, and enduring reality, of colonialism in Canada”. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by Roman Catholics, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalising churches, 112 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.
Yet, four years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indian child in an unmarked grave has been found anywhere in Canada. Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling 2023 book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the whole, incendiary story is a myth.
So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries against noble (not-so-very) savages — from London to Sydney to Toronto. Why?
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