World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 11 Jul 2026On September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich promising “peace for our time”. Adolf Hitler returned to Berlin with the Sudetenland.
In this episode of “Death of Democracy”, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin as Nazi Germany escalates on two fronts: terror against Jewish citizens at home, and diplomatic blackmail against Czechoslovakia abroad.
While the Evian Conference fails to open the world’s doors to Jewish refugees, the Nazi regime tightens the trap with identity cards, forced names, professional bans, the opening of Mauthausen, and Eichmann’s machinery of forced emigration in Vienna.
At the same time, Hitler manufactures the Sudeten Crisis, threatens war, breaks Czechoslovakia’s defenses through the Munich Agreement, and convinces much of Europe that surrendering another country’s territory is the price of peace.
This is Germany in Q3 1938: the lie that Hitler would not start another war — and the world’s decision to believe him.
July 12, 2026
How WW2 Really Started: Appeasement! – Death of Democracy 23 – Q3 1938
This used to be active sabotage … now it’s standard EU practice
Ten years back, I posted an excerpt from a WW2 American espionage manual showing workers in occupied Europe how to bureaucratically sabotage their organizations to harm Nazi Germany’s war efforts. At the time I joked that it also sounded like a lot of company meetings in the modern world. Brivael Le Pogam uses the same set of guidelines to illustrate just how much the EU has embraced these sabotage methods as their standard operating practices:
Link goes to full text at Wikisource
🚨 The OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) describes how to paralyze an organization without explosives.
The European Union seems to have taken it as its official instruction manual. Here are the disturbing similarities:
1. “Insist on everything going through official channels.”
✅ 27 states, 24 official languages, 3 seats, thousands of committees and agencies. Even a directive on lightbulbs goes through 7 levels of validation.2. “Hold meetings. Speak at length with anecdotes.”
✅ 45-minute speeches in the European Parliament on minor topics. Strasbourg and Brussels locals applaud politely.3. “Refer everything to committees. Make them as large as possible (never fewer than 5 people).”
✅ The trilogue, COREPER, working groups, expert committees … A simple decision turns into a 3-to-7-year obstacle course.4. “Bring up unrelated matters repeatedly.”
✅ Talking agriculture? Let’s add the Green Deal, LGBT rights, Palestine, and the carbon border tax. Nothing is ever straightforward.5. “Haggle over the precise wording of communications.”
✅ Months of negotiation over a semicolon in a 400-page regulation. The word “should” vs. “must” can stall everything.6. “Reopen decisions that have already been made.”
✅ Directive adopted? We reopen it 2 years later for “revision”, “strengthening”, or “adaptation to the geopolitical context”.7. “Advocate caution and deliberation. Avoid all haste.”
✅ “We need more time to study the impact”, “let’s consult stakeholders more”, “better safe than sorry”. Result: nothing moves quickly.8. “Question the legitimacy of every decision.”
✅ “Is this really within the EU’s competence?” (even when it’s already in the treaties). Subsidiarity invoked when convenient, forgotten when not.The EU doesn’t need Russian or Chinese saboteurs. It has turned itself into a machine for slowing down Europe, exactly as the manual recommended to weaken the enemy.
The funniest part? All of this is done legally, democratically, and with the best intentions.
Automatically translated from the original French by X.
How Rome’s Survival Came Down To One 25-Year-Old General – The Second Punic War | EP 2
The Rest Is History
Published 5 Feb 2026What happened at the Battle of Ibera, a totemic though overlooked battle of the Punic Wars? With the forces of Carthage closing in on a depleted Rome, would a young Roman, Publius Cornelius Scipio resurrect the fortunes of the Republic? And, could he destroy Carthage’s most crucial power base in Europe?
Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss this next phase of the Carthaginian Wars.
00:00 Intro: Rome’s “darkest hour” + Scipio teased as the Republic’s saviour
02:26 206 BC, Atlantic coast of Iberia
04:26 What’s “up” with Scipio?
12:05 Spain as hostile “sci-fi planet”
15:30 New Carthage (Cartagena)
18:09 215 BC crisis: Hasdrubal tries to march north
19:14 Battle of the Ebro
21:25 “Two rival pairs of brothers”
24:48 Rome’s commander problem
30:36 Scipio’s bold plan
31:37 New Carthage targeted
34:57 Sack of New Carthage
39:01 Hasdrubal crosses the Alps with elephants
39:59 Italy’s crisis for Rome
44:05 Battle by the Metaurus
47:23 Ilipa (206): Scipio crushes Mago and breaks Carthage’s Spanish power
49:52 Mago’s last throws
52:14 Scipio returns to Rome as a superstar
53:05 Senate authorises Africa invasion
(more…)
July 11, 2026
Governments should not have easy access to emergency powers
As we found out in Canada in 2022, when the government gives itself emergency powers unrestricted by normal legal procedure and due process, they abuse those powers. The UK government is eager to grant itself similar powers due to a “climate emergency” that will, among other things suspend habeus corpus and the 1689 Bill of Rights:
Emergency, d’ye see? National security emergency.
But here’s the problem if the government declares a national security emergency:
Part 1 of the act establishes a new and broad definition of “emergency”. The definition includes war or attack by a foreign power, which were defined as emergencies under previous legislation, as well as terrorism which poses a threat of serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom and events which threaten serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom or to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom.
Damage to the environment in the UK. So, that matches. And if they then declare such an emergency, under the act, then the following laws — among others — no longer apply:
The only primary legislation which may not be amended by emergency regulations is the Human Rights Act 1998 and part 2 of the Civil Contingencies Act itself
That is, all other laws no longer apply. It’s an Enabling Act, allowing rule by decree for the length of the emergency. Absolutely everything is up for grabs. These laws are not, repeat not, protected:
The peers tried to protect the following laws from emergency regulation:
Habeas Corpus Act 1679
Bill of Rights 1689
Section 7 of the Parliament Act 1911 which limited the duration of a parliament to five years[e]
Act of Settlement 1701
House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975
Life Peerages Act 1958
House of Lords Act 1999
Seriously, it wipes out the entire legal and constitutional structure.
So, you know, no. Not because there is, or isn’t, a climate change emergency. But because of the powers they’ll take if one is declared.
No.
It’s not November yet, but this sign seems rather appropriate:
British censorship laws do not apply outside the UK’s jurisdiction
On Substack Notes, Lorenzo Warby links to a fascinating discussion about the ongoing struggle between the UK government’s Ofcom and the US-based 4chan and their legal representatives, saying “The totalitarian wannabes currently running the UK do not apparently grasp that the American Revolution and War of Independence was a thing. Also, being totalitarian wannabes, they have no sense of humour.”
A UK cabinet minister, Rt. Hon. Liz Kendall MP, Secretary of State for the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (“DSIT”), discussed the infamous “hamster e-mail” I sent on behalf of my client 4chan to the UK’s Internet censor, on national radio today in the UK. […] My father always told me, when I was growing up, “when a cabinet minister holding the technology policy brief for a G7 Member State is talking about your e-mailed jokes to an audience of millions on national broadcast media, that is the right time to explain the joke, especially if the cabinet minister didn’t get the joke”.
That explanation follows.
The backstory – Hamster #1
The hamster joke has a bit of a history to it. Ofcom, the UK’s Internet censor, first made contact with my American client 4chan in June of 2025 in its attempt to impose British censorship law on that website. I was subsequently retained as defense counsel, pro bono.
Ofcom then “provisionally fined” 4chan on August 16th, 2025 for refusing to obey the UK’s censorship regime. We were invited to make representations to the regulator following that provisional fine decision.
We did two things in response to that. The most newsworthy response was to file a lawsuit against the regulator in the DDC. Before that, however, we explained our position to Ofcom in writing and gave them an opportunity to walk away:
To wit, Ofcom’s fine notices were not properly served and were not enforceable in the United States. Note that we also gave Ofcom fair notice that while this might have been their first attempt to enforce their censorship orders in America, this was not our first rodeo when it came to successfully refusing such orders.
No quantity of officious and haughty foreign demand letters will change our stance. The UK could even pass a bill of attainder – historically Parliament’s most extreme and powerful legislative weapon – against my client, for all I care. My client’s right to operate its service lawfully in the United States is protected by the First Amendment. There is no law Parliament could enact that would change that fact.
I am very familiar with how this movie ends, and it does not end with 4chan paying Ofcom’s fine.
It may end with the UK’s censors getting a blocking order that it serves on its own ISPs; that would be the UK visibly censoring its own people, rather than censoring my client, and doing so ineffectively, at that, as ISP blocks can be circumvented with a VPN. That is a consequence my client is prepared to accept.
England might have the Online Safety Act, but the United States has the U.S. Constitution. These rulesets do not override each other; they are, rather, mutually exclusive. In America’s domain, the Online Safety Act essentially doesn’t exist. It has about as much legal force as a pile of shredded paper one might use to line a hamster’s cage.
Peace was always an option here, but that would have required the UK to abandon the fiction that its rules override the U.S. Constitution on U.S. soil, which we are not prepared to accept.
My clients did not start this fight, but by golly we do intend to finish it.
My client sued Ofcom two weeks later.
There’s much more, so do read the whole thing.
Road to Rangoon, Ep. 2 – Jungle Commandos Operation Romulus & Hill 170
HardThrasher
Published 10 Jun 2026In the Arakan, it turned out the third time was the charm, at least for those lucky enough to survive the jungle, malaria and a coastline without maps.
In this episode we return to Burma and the Arakan, where Operation Romulus turned a miserable sideshow into a strategically vital victory. We look at XV Corps’ third attempt to take Akyab, the extraordinary march of the 81st and 82nd West African Divisions, the improvised amphibious landings at Myebon, and the brutal fight for Hill 170, where the Royal Marine Commandos as we know them today, cut their teeth
Featuring Operation Romulus, Pungent, Lightning, Akyab, Myebon, Kangaw, Hill 170, the Black Tarantulas, 3 Commando Brigade, 25th and 26th Indian Divisions, and Japanese 28th Army.
00:00:00 – Intro
00:02:28 – Recap
00:08:15 – Operation Romulus – the Plan to take the Arakan
00:20:57 – The Attacks Begins
00:30:34 – Meanwhile in land
00:43:10 – Op Pungent and the Fight for Meybon
00:50:43 – The Final Assault
00:56:06 – Aftermath
00:57:41 – Epilogue
00:59:13 – Survivor’s Club
(more…)
Winston Churchill’s Personal Patchett/Sterling Submachine Gun
Royal Armouries
Published 4 Feb 2026This episode of “What Is This Weapon?” Jonathan examines a seemingly ordinary Sterling/Patchett submachine gun that turns out to be anything but.
This is a rare opportunity to examine a historically significant firearm that was owned and more than likely, used by Britain’s wartime Prime Minister.
0:00 Intro
1:55 The Hidden Plaque & Churchill Connection
3:36 Provenance: Churchill’s Firearm Certificate
5:58 Not a Wall Hanger: Ammunition & Use
6:05 Patchett vs Sterling: Design Differences
10:43 Churchill, Firearms & Wartime Image
14:49 Legacy & Back Next Week for Another Archive Film
(more…)
July 10, 2026
EU “Chat Control” passes through parliamentary chicanery
As mentioned yesterday, the EU introduced “Chat Control” which allows the authorities to examine any and all private communications by EU residents “to protect the children”. As eugyppius reports, it got through and was passed into EU-wide law on Thursday:
If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.
It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.
Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.
Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.
The EU’s stratégie “antiracisme”
The media has been pushing the narrative of a huge rising tide of racism and white supremacy, even as those ideas had been steadily losing influence and popularity. European and western governments generally have been doing their part to keep racism alive by importing as many unassimilable young men of military age and setting them loose upon the native population. Something’s got to give:
It has been proven. The narrative of systemic racism and “white supremacy” was completely fabricated by the media and activists since 2010. It’s undeniable.
Ask yourself this: have you ever come across, among your friends, your family, or your colleagues, someone who calls themselves a white supremacist and wants to “restore the purity of the white race”?
No. It doesn’t exist. It might have been a marginal fantasy in the past. Today, it’s a media construct to justify division and ideology.
The post I made that Elon Musk reposted yesterday proves it perfectly.
This European strategy isn’t going to “fight racism”. It’s going to create the perfect breeding ground for grooming gangs to spread everywhere in Europe, including France.
Reminder: in the UK, thousands of underage girls were raped, drugged, and sexually exploited by networks (often Pakistani) in Rotherham, Rochdale, and elsewhere. The cops, social services, and elected officials let the most horrific abuses slide for years … because they were afraid of being labeled racists. They chose to sacrifice young girls rather than “stigmatize” a community.
This is exactly the mechanism that Brussels is now rolling out across the board:
– Denial of anti-white racism
– Definition of “structural racism” without perpetrators or intent (so everyone is suspect by default)
– 3.6 billion euros in public money to anti-racist NGOs
– Training for civil servants to detect “racial bias” everywhereResult: police officers and agents paralyzed by the fear of being called racists. They’ll hesitate even more to act in certain neighborhoods or against certain groups.
In France, this ideology has already been carried by associations like Touche pas à mon pote and others of the same ilk. Instead of promoting integration and unity, they’ve created division by exploiting minorities for political ends.
Antiracism as it’s practiced today is racism. It divides people by skin color, protects real problems, and criminalizes those who dare to name the facts.
What needs to be done: stop dividing. Stop multiplying associations that exploit minorities to sow discord. Go back to true equality: judge actions, not origins. Protect victims without ideological taboos.
If this strategy passes, we won’t have “small” problems.
We’ll have grooming gangs on steroids across all of Europe.
That’s the price of this madness.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
The Pastry War – When France invaded Mexico over pastry
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Jan 2026Puff pastry rings filled with raspberry and apricot preserves and topped with a cherry
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1840The Pastry War between Mexico and France was kicked off when, during a time of political upheaval, Mexican soldiers ransacked Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in the 1830s. Seeking reparations for M. Remontel as well as the repayment of other debts, the French invaded.
While we don’t know what was sold in Monsieur Remontel’s pastry shop in Mexico, these puits d’amour could certainly have been on the menu. By all means, you can make your own puff pastry, but I gave myself permission to use store bought, and you should, too. You can even use store-bought preserves to simplify things even further, but this preserves recipe is very delicious and very sweet. I used both store-bought apricot preserves and homemade raspberry preserves, and both were delicious. You can also fill them with half jam and half chantilly cream or pastry cream if the fancy strikes you.
PUITS D’AMOUR.
When the puff pastry has received all its turns, roll it out to a thickness of two lines; cut it with a fluted cutter, that is to say with a pastry cutter, and place the first piece on a baking sheet; then, with a cutter of the same type but smaller, cut another piece and place it on top; moisten the round with a little water, press it in slightly, brush these puits with egg, and put them into a hot oven. When they are three-quarters baked, sprinkle them with sugar in order to glaze them — that is, until the sugar melts; then remove them, hollow them out, and fill them with whatever preserves you judge appropriate.
— Le Cuisinier Royal by André Viart, 1840
July 9, 2026
They call it “Chat Control”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam talks about what the EU is calling “Chat Control”:
We need to talk about Chat Control, because it’s all happening this week and almost no one understands what it’s about.
In plain terms: the EU wants to authorize the scanning of your private messages. Your WhatsApp conversations, your emails, your DMs. Not those of a suspect. Those of everyone, all the time, by default.
The pretext is airtight, and that’s the trap: “protecting children”. No one can be against that. That’s exactly why it’s the perfect tool. They’ll never get you to swallow mass surveillance in the name of mass surveillance. They’ll get you to swallow it in the name of children, terrorism, disinformation. Always some cause you won’t dare challenge.
Understand the two-step mechanism well.
Today it’s the “soft” version: platforms have the right to scan, on a voluntary basis, unencrypted messages. Harmless on the surface. It’s the foot in the door.
Then comes the real version, the one under negotiation: mandatory scanning, including of your encrypted messages, analyzed directly on your phone before they’re even sent. Over 500 cryptographers have signed a letter saying it’s technically unfeasible without creating security vulnerabilities that any hacker or hostile state could exploit. You’re breaking encryption for everyone, including the criminals you claim to be targeting.
And the worst part isn’t even that.
The real danger isn’t that Brussels technocrats will be watching you tomorrow. They’re probably too spineless for that. The danger is that they’re building the infrastructure. Once scanning everyone’s messages becomes normal, legal, operational — the track is laid. And on that track will roll everything that comes next. The day a crisis brings ruthless people to power, they won’t have to invent anything. The machine will already be there, ready to go.
No surveillance infrastructure has ever stayed limited to its original purpose. None. It’s a law of administrative nature: a tool built for X always ends up serving Y.
What makes this text dangerous isn’t what it does today. It’s what it makes possible forever.
The decisive vote is Thursday. The last lock.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
The good folks at Windscribe weigh in:
The EU is not a democracy.
They’re closer to a guy who keeps pressuring a girl to sleep with him despite her saying no.
5 times now.
But he won’t stop.
We’re at the stage where he’s giving her alcohol and making her drunk so she struggles to say no.
Over the last 3 years, Chat Control and similar scanning measures have been defeated or blocked 5 times.
The citizens of the EU and members of EU Parliament have made it abundantly clear — they don’t want Chat Control.
This latest attempt by the EU is the slimiest one yet. Revive dead legislation that was already defeated, flip the passing criteria so that majority don’t need to SUPPORT it, majority need to DEFEAT it, and as the cherry on top, hold that vote on the very last day before Parliament members go on summer break so that many don’t show up. Oh and if they don’t show up, it counts as a vote to pass Chat Control.
You can dress it up in as many legal technicalities and loopholes as you want, what the EU is doing here is fundamentally undemocratic.
No means no.
And if you ever saw a guy pressuring a girl into sleeping with him with disgusting tactics after she said no THIS many times, you would consider him to be a rapist.
So congrats to the EU on adopting rapist strategies to your governance.
Here’s why “free range children” went away
As a child in England and then in Canada, I had a pretty wide range for unsupervised activities and I generally took advantage of that. On foot or riding my bicycle, it was completely normal for me to be several miles from home on any given day. I’ve posted this image a few times, showing the “free range” diminishing generation by generation for an English family, and it’s mostly true here in Canada and in the United States as well:
Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.
At Classical Ideals, Megha Lillywhite discusses the “political extremism” involved today in trying to raise your children:
One of the most fundamental things that children require in order to grow up healthy, strong, wise and good, is a lot of time outdoors and in public spaces. Yet what we see from more traditional families in the west, as well as from extremely wealthy families, is that they are holding their children closer than ever, and enclosing them in increasingly smaller and more carefully selected bubbles of protection.
This is because “the outdoors” and “public life” is territory that has increasingly been ceded by western society to violent criminals, the mentally ill, and drug addicts. Parenting, for those who are vigilant to the threats, can no longer be “laissez-faire” and it has become less about choosing the ideal, and more about choosing the least damaging option.
But what has been lost? And what must be reclaimed for those of us with power and spirit to have any kind of meaningful victory in this world?
Most leftists see politics through the framework of wanting to be “a good person” as it is defined by their peer group and ideology. The ordinary person, on the other hand, views politics through the set of decisions that would best protect their children and give them the best chance at a good life.
Why is this? Leftists either don’t have children, or they have children but live in gilded cages and are therefore untouched (yet) by the consequences of their ideological beliefs.
Children must exist as part of a broader community in order to develop healthily. They must be able to go to a public library, the local shop, ride their bikes to the park, take the city bus or walk to their grandmother’s house on their own. They must be able to play outside unsupervised for hours on end in their neighbourhoods.
[…]
But some measure of freedom is also necessary for children to develop a healthy psyche. A child who can go to the shop and pay for milk on his own and bring it home will develop not only a sense of responsibility, but will feel confident in his ability to do useful things. A child who can visit his friends and relatives on his own will develop social skills and a sense of belonging. A child who can go to the library on his own can begin the lifelong journey of guiding his own learning.
[…]
In a 2007 study done in Sheffield, UK by Dr. William Bird, he found that children in 1926 were allowed to roam up to six miles away from home unsupervised and by 2000, that number dropped to 300 metres. The major drop off happened around 1979 which is coincidentally the time when mass migration began in the United Kingdom and demographics of towns like Sheffield began to seriously shift. In the recent “Rape Gang Inquiry” released by the Restore Party of Britain, the report which details three decades of kidnap, rape and murder of a quarter of a million British girls which would have began around this time. So English parents restricting their children’s freedoms around this time period was not something hysterical or unfounded.
We must be politically courageous in order to admit what is required to maintain that kind of a world. Stated simply, a safe, healthy and good childhood requires a fundamental rejection of leftist “empathy” politics. There is one incident in particular that can help to describe how this system functions today.
Link from John Carter on Substack Notes, who commented:
The same shift towards a confined, highly monitored childhood took place in the US, corresponding to the great suburbanization. The suburbs grew due to white flight from the cities, following their colonization by blacks and the de facto ban on community defence enforced by the civil rights act.
Suburban municipal architecture is largely comprised of informal defensive barriers that prevent undesirable elements from penetrating the neighborhoods undetected.
This enables middle class parents to deniably insulate their children from the worst consequences of diversity, but at the cost of raising their children in open air prisons, in a stifling social atmosphere characterized primarily by a brittle insistence upon euphemistic avoidance of direct acknowledgement of the real issues. “Racism is simply terrible! We just wanted to live somewhere with good schools.”
Children brought up amidst the tedious fakery of the suburbs naturally become attuned to the pervasive hypocrisy of suburban white culture. They have to: simply navigating this culture requires the ability to understand the unsaid, while pretending that one has not understood it. Combined with the open air prison environment inhibiting emotional development, this is a powerful recipe for induced neurosis.
There are only a few possible outcomes: 1) they become cowardly hypocrites themselves; 2) they reject the hypocrisy and become fanatical anti-white race communists; 3) they reject the hypocrisy and become fascists.
The Ancient Greeks 03 – Enter the Persians 2 – Cyrus, Destiny, and the Making of an Empire
seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
Who was Cyrus the Great? How did a minor Persian ruler come to dominate the Near East? In this lecture we examine Herodotus’ account of Cyrus’ miraculous survival, his overthrow of the Medes, and the conquest of Lydia and Babylon. We analyse Persian imperial strategy: flexible governance, religious tolerance, and pragmatic rule. We also explore how the Ionian Greek cities of Asia Minor first came under Persian control — setting the stage for future rebellion.
Empire did not emerge through chaos alone. It was built through method.
QotD: The labels “capitalism” and “socialism”
Before identifying why they were wrong, we need to acknowledge what Marx and his disciples were right about. Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer in the United Kingdom grew over 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent. The proportion of national income going to the top percentile of the population rose from 25 percent in 1801 to 35 percent in 1848. In Paris in 1820, around 9 percent of the population was classified as “proprietors and rentiers” (living from their investments) and owned 41 percent of recorded wealth. By 1911 their share had risen to 52 percent. In Prussia, the share of income going to the top 5 percent rose from 21 percent in 1854 to 27 percent in 1896 and to 43 percent in 1913. Industrial societies, it seems clear, grew more unequal over the course of the nineteenth century. This had predictable consequences. In the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, for example, the mortality rate for individuals with an income of less than 800 marks a year was thirteen times higher than that for individuals earning over 50,000 marks.
It was not necessary to be an intellectual to be dismayed by the inequality of industrial society. The Welsh-born factory owner Robert Owen envisaged an alternative economic model based on cooperative production and utopian villages like the ones he founded at Orbiston in Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana. It was in a letter to Owen, written by Edward Cowper in 1822, that the word “socialism” in its modern sense first appears. An unidentified woman was, Cowper thought, “well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist”. Five years later, Owen himself argued that “the chief question … between the modern … Political Economists, and the Communionists or Socialists, is whether it is more beneficial that this capital should be individual or in common”. The term “capitalism” made its debut in an English periodical in April 1833 — in the London newspaper the Standard — in the phrase “tyranny of capitalism”, part of an article on “the ill consequences of that greatest curse that can exist amongst men, too much money-power in too few hands”. Fifteen years later, the Caledonian Mercury referred with similar aversion to “that sweeping tide of capitalism and money-loving which threatens our country with the horrors of a plutocracy”.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
July 8, 2026
Don’t call them “U-boats”!
In his latest post for The Line, Matt Gurney violates the cardinal rule of discussing German naval equipment … don’t call ’em “U-boats”!
In Halifax on Monday, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Canada had chosen a preferred vendor for our new fleet of patrol submarines. Canada will (probably) be going with a German-Norwegian consortium that was offering the Type 212CD submarine, and not the South Korean boats offered by Hanwha. The prime minister said it was a close finish between the two competitors and noted that either design would have met Canada’s needs. The decision announced Monday is not a final purchase order but rather a determination of who our preferred partner would be. The prime minister said that if the negotiations with TKMS, the German company offering the 212CD, did not go well, Hanwha remained an acceptable option.
Personally, I was rooting for the Koreans. I liked their submarine’s ability to launch missiles vertically, which would’ve given the Canadian fleet some powerful strike options. I also tripped a little over the thought of Canadians in U-boats — I suspect many historically minded Canadians will also blink hard at that little twist of fate. But I fundamentally agree with the prime minister — either boat is fine for our purposes. The 212CD will be an excellent asset once it enters Canadian service (presumably with a snappier name).
Sooner would be better. The prime minister noted repeatedly during his remarks on Monday that the government was moving quickly to make this announcement, having settled on a preferred partner five years ahead of the original schedule. This is true, and I give the prime minister full credit for that. I would also note that the schedule was already ridiculously long. We actually should have begun replacing the submarines a decade ago. The PM’s comments reminded me that I had written a column about the urgent need to just get on with replacing the submarines when we had last announced another cycle of refurbishments to keep the current fleet in service because we had yet again delayed a decision on a replacement.
I found my old article. I wrote it seven years ago.
That was bad. Carney accelerating it is good. It’s also good that we are looking at a much larger fleet of submarines, going from four to as many as 12. Submarines are very complicated machines. For every boat you want available for service, you need three or four in your fleet. This gives you a large enough fleet to have an operational submarine available while others undergo maintenance or refits or participate in training exercises with their crews. The four Victoria-class submarines Canada possesses today mean that we typically might have one available for service at any given time, so a fleet of 12 will give us a much more robust presence. Given that we claim three oceans, and that the world is pretty much a dumpster fire these days, having a submarine available on each coast at all times seems like a good idea.
Time is of the essence. Germany and Norway, the prime minister said, have offered to allow Canada to cut ahead of them in line for deliveries of the submarines, which are already under construction but haven’t yet entered service. Given the decrepit state of our elderly existing fleet, that was obviously a meaningful sweetener, and the PM said the first boats could be in Canadian service in seven or eight years, which is pushing the Victorias to their limits, but should work. We hope?
HMCS Victoria, one of four ex-Royal Navy submarines in Canadian service, will have to carry on in service — as much as the class can carry on — until the early 2030s.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
