Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 May 2026Despite the French Army adopting a 65mm mountain gun in 1906, several French companies — including St Chamond and Schneider — developed their own mountain gun designs in the years before World War One. These were popular guns for foreign export, being relatively small, light, and inexpensive. St Chamond’s 70mm gun was built on the same breech design as their previous 75mm field gun, at the request of the Mexican military and famous small arms designer Manuel Mondragon. Quantities were sold to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belgium (for use in the Belgian Congo). This example is a Guatemalan one, now in the United States as a live, registered, transferrable Destructive Device.
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September 18, 2026
Guatemalan Contract St Chamond 70mm Mountain Gun
September 17, 2026
British government seeks to retroactively change the Rules of Engagement during “The Troubles”
I’m old enough to have had lengthy conversations with British soldiers and officers who were serving or had recently served in Northern Ireland at the tail end of “The Troubles”. It was a dangerous situation the troops found themselves in and the Rules of Engagement they worked under at least recognized that it wasn’t a normal day at the office back home. On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman explains why the current government’s plan to retroactively change the rules that governed the actions of the British military forces is one of the worst possible things they could do:
Lieutenant Robert Lyman in the Ballymurphy, 1983, in a photograph snapped by Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Elliott, CO of 1LI at the time. He was driving past in his Landrover and spotted a photo opportunity.
Photo via The War Room
For those who know me well, the idea that I might now be encouraging young men and women not to join the Armed Forces might sound that I had lost my marbles. I can assure you that is not the case. I am deadly serious. This government’s determination, building on the surrender of the previous Conservative government to the varying dictats of the ECHR, will drive an impossible moral and legal wedge between the people who the country ask to do its dirty work, and the government that sends them in harms way. It is an intolerable set of affairs that all sensible people in his country should oppose. What sort of perversity might think that this behaviour is acceptable from any government? I despair, yet it seems that this is precisely what our current morally impoverished government seems to desire.
[…]
The central concern is that the proposed changes will expose servicemen and women, many of whom have already undergone judicial scrutiny for actions undertaken during the Troubles, to further litigation and investigation. In practice, this is likely to encourage a new wave of cases brought by individuals seeking to revisit or reinterpret events from a campaign in which terrorist organisations such as the IRA and INLA were ultimately defeated.
The immediate implications are troubling enough. The longer-term precedent, however, is far more serious. If this legislation proceeds, it will send a clear message to today’s servicemen and women, that even after they have acted lawfully, completed investigations, and fulfilled their duty to the State, they may still face renewed legal jeopardy in later decades. It undermines the fundamental bond of trust between those who serve and the government that sends them into harm’s way.
Every member of the British Armed Forces operates within a strict and clearly defined legal framework. These rules, embodied in the Laws of Armed Conflict and implemented through Rules of Engagement (RoE), govern the use of force in military operations. During my own service, I spent countless hours learning these rules, teaching them to my soldiers, and ensuring they were followed in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and elsewhere.
This debate is not about whether soldiers should be above the law. Of course they are not, nor should they be. Rather, it is about whether the rules that governed military operations at the time can be retrospectively reinterpreted after a conflict has ended. The concern is that former adversaries will be able to pursue legal action against veterans for actions that were considered lawful under the Rules of Engagement in force at the time.
Today, Policy Exchange published an excellent report examining this issue in relation to former members of the SAS who served in Northern Ireland. The report sets out the problem clearly and persuasively, concluding that the proposed changes should be abandoned. I agree.
Predictably, some MPs have defended the legislation. Diane Abbott, for example, has argued on X that opposition to the changes amounts to “a call for armed forces personnel to be placed above the law.” That characterisation is deeply misleading. The debate has never been about exempting soldiers from the law. It is about subjecting veterans to repeated investigations and additional layers of judicial scrutiny many years after the events in question, often in ways that were never demanded of those they fought against on behalf of the nation.
At its core, this issue is one of fairness. It raises questions about double standards, retrospective judgment, and the constant shifting of the goalposts. Veterans who served under one set of rules are now being told that those rules may no longer be sufficient protection against further legal action.
You don’t hate the relic media nearly as much as they deserve
The relic media in Canada has — thanks to generous government subsidies — become a maple-flavoured version of the North Korean news media, but even in the United States where there’s still a somewhat competitive market, most media outlets are delighted to act as unpaid propagandists … and have been that way for generations:
Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for lying about Stalin’s Ukraine famine while millions starved. His employer, the New York Times, never returned that prize. The institutional rot ran deeper than one reporter.
In 1936, Times Moscow correspondent Harold Denny watched the first of Stalin’s Great Purge trials and reported the proceedings as credible. The defendants, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev among them, confessed to plotting murder and sabotage. Denny saw no obvious coercion and wrote accordingly. The NKVD had spent weeks breaking these men through sleep deprivation, threats against their families, and relentless psychological torture until they would say anything in open court.
Every confession was fabricated. Every defendant was executed anyway. Stalin murdered roughly 750,000 people during the Great Purge between 1936 and 1938, and the Times gave the operation a veneer of legitimacy at its most critical moment.
Central planners require a monopoly on information to survive. When the newspaper of record in the most powerful capitalist country on earth launders your show trials as fair proceedings, you buy yourself years of Western political goodwill. Stalin purchased that goodwill with useful idiots who confused proximity to power with insight.
You pay for this dynamic today every time an institution that failed catastrophically keeps its credentials, its prizes, and its authority to declare what counts as credible journalism.
Duranty would have been proud of Time magazine had he been alive today.
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The Brutal Life of a Medieval Butcher
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Mar 2026Tender stewed spiced meat and onions with bright yellow saffron sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1430It’s a well-circulated myth that medieval cooks spiced meat heavily in order to hide the fact that the meat had gone bad. And it is, indeed, a myth. Amongst the many reasons why this doesn’t hold up is the fact that in medieval Europe, spices were expensive, and if you could afford to use a lot of them on your meat, you could afford not-spoiled meat. Dishes like this one, which uses five different spices and saffron, which has always been expensive, would be only for the wealthy.
This dish has the classic medieval flavors of warm spices and vinegar, and I really enjoyed it. The meat and onions are tender, the sauce is a beautiful bright yellow, and it’s quite unlike anything we typically eat today.
Brawn en peuerade
Take might broth of Beef or Capon, and then take clean fresh meat, and seeth it, but not too much; And if it be fresh meat, roast it, but not too much, and then cut it in pieces, and cast it into the broth; And then take whole onions, and peel them, and then take vinegar thereto, and cinnamon, … then take cloves, mace, and powdered pepper, and cast thereto, and a little saunders, and set it on the fire, and let boil till the onions and the meat be cooked enough, and not too much; then take liquor made with bread and vinegar and wine … and cast thereto saffron to make the color bright, and salt, and serve it forth.
— Harleian Ms. 279, c. 1430
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QotD: Boris Johnson
Some generous souls are claiming it’s not Boris’s fault — which may be true, up to a point, of which more in a moment — but whoever is to blame one thing is abundantly clear: Britain is a failed state, the Sick Man of Europe, and those of us who grew up believing that to have been born British was to have won the lottery in life have now been sorely disabused of the notion.
How can this possibly have happened to the land of Magna Carta and English Common Law, the heroic seafaring nation which coloured the atlas pink and stamped its character on half the world’s nations from Australia and the U.S. to India and South Africa, that invented most of the world’s best sports, produced most of its greatest literature, beat Philip II of Spain, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler and discovered almost everything worth discovering?
Just when did Britain become so incredibly, embarrassingly shit?
Well, it’s easy to blame Boris, as I have done on occasion, for being a priapic lard-butted lightweight chancer who should never have been given the keys to Number 10. As we’ve learned to our cost, he’s all mouth and no trousers, great for an impromptu bon mot or jolly photo op but perfectly useless in times of crisis, being too easily led, having no opinions of his own, the backbone of sponge and the moral character of a Plecostomus catfish.
James Delingpole, “Britain is now the sick man of Europe”, Breitbart, 2020-08-14.
September 16, 2026
The new front in the British “flag war” – Welsh castles
You may have heard that at least one municipal government in England is trying to ban private citizens flying both the Union flag and the St. George’s Cross, yet actively encouraging the use of other national or political flags. On Substack, Paul Embery shows just how far the anti-British/anti-English activists are willing to go … in this case all the way to Wales (where, yes, there’s already some local anti-English sentiment to start with):
Pakistani flags fly over medieval walls in Cardiff.
Photo from X via Paul Embery
SOMETIMES it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Britain’s political elites are engaged in some sort of private game to see just how far they can test the patience of the native population before it snaps.
A people who were, and still are, remarkably tolerant in all sorts of ways, including towards those from minority backgrounds and cultures, seem daily to have their good faith exploited.
Only someone who had been living under a rock for the past couple of decades could have failed to notice the gulf that has emerged between our political institutions and everyday folk living outside of our fashionable cities and university towns.
That gulf – which is widening still – explains why a palpable sense of polarisation exists across many parts of the country today.
The latest attempt to stir the pot comes courtesy of Cardiff council, which recently decided to fly the flag of Pakistan from the city’s castle – one of the Welsh nation’s most historic and iconic sites. The flag was apparently hoisted in celebration of Pakistan’s independence day and stayed there over two days (a similar thing happened in 2024 — see image).
Needless to say, a row swiftly broke out, with Reform voices locally and nationally attacking the decision and in return facing accusations from their political opponents – who seemed to close ranks around the issue very tightly – that they were seeking to incite hatred and division.
Recent history tells us that anyone who expresses even mild disapproval about this type of virtuous ingratiation of foreign nationalities and cultures by our public bodies is likely to face taunts of being some kind of embittered xenophobe or reactionary. And, usually, the condemnation will be accompanied by a lecture trumpeting the merits of living in a diverse and multicultural society.
But those who harbour misgivings surely have a point. Because such acts do rank as a kind of provocation. It’s one thing seeking to foster good relations with other nations and cultures – such an approach is eminently sensible – but it’s another thing entirely indulging those nations and cultures to such a degree that many indigenous citizens begin to feel their own country is losing its historical identity and turning into something resembling a supersized version of the Olympic village. And that is where many Britons feel their country is now.
That Pakistan is a member of the Commonwealth did not appear to be the prompt for Cardiff Council’s decision, for no councillor seems to have cited that justification in defence of it. Moreover, the colours of non-Commonwealth nations, such as Poland, have also been displayed over the castle in recent times.
“Oh, it’s only a flag, and it’s just for two days”, the citizens-of-nowhere will argue. Except that it isn’t only a flag, and it isn’t just two days. What we have seen over the past couple of decades is a subtle but concerted effort on the part of Britain’s elite class to embed the ideology of cosmopolitan universalism across all areas of our public life.
These people are globalists in every sense. They see our country as a shop, not a home.
They believe in permissive migration policies, free trade libertarianism and technocratic supranationalism – all things to which large chunks of the population are hostile.
Update: I’ve heard that it helps to actually include the URL …
Update the second, 17 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
WWII British Tank Tech Tree
The Tank Museum
Published 8 May 2026In 1939, the Vickers Light Mark VI formed the backbone of the British tank force. It’s hard to believe that in six years technology evolved from this to the mighty Centurion.
But this journey was no walk in the park. It took blood, sweat, lots of tea and various wrong turns. So, in this video we’re going to walk you through the entire British tank family tree to reveal this process.
This is a family tree organised by type not by chronology. That means Light Tanks, Cruiser tanks, Infantry tanks and Assault tanks.
So, without further ado, this is every British tank of World War II.
00:00 | Intro
01:14 | Light Tanks
03:21 | Cruiser Tanks
12:37 | Infantry Tanks
16:08 | Assault TanksThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this film, join Paul Famojuro for the ultimate deep dive into British tanks of WWII. Over six years Britain’s tanks evolved in a number of curious directions. From the light tanks of the early war to the troubled development of the cruiser tanks concept, the slow-moving infantry tank to the hard-hitting assault tanks, each branch of this tech tree was designed to solve specific problems on the battlefield. There were some successes, just as many failures, and a whole lot of weird and wonderful tanks along the way.
Want to learn more about the British tanks of WWII? Here are some of the sources we used to make this film:
British Tanks and Fighting Vehicles 1914-1945, B.T. White. 1970
British Cruiser Tank A13 Mk I & Mk II, Peter Brown. 2015
British Infantry Tank Mk III Valentine, Parts 1 & 2 Dick Taylor. 2010
The Great Tank Scandal, David Fletcher. 2021
The Universal Tank, David Fletcher. 2021
Centurion Owner’s Workshop Manual, Simon Dunstan. 2017
The Tank Museum Guide to Matilda, Dick Taylor. 2024
The Tank Museum Guide to Comet, Dick Taylor. 2025
A13 Cruiser Mk. V Covenanter Tank. A Technical History, P.M. Knight. 2018
A38, Infantry Tank, Valiant, https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/gb…#tankmuseum #veday
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QotD: Squeaky bum time
I blinked at them. “We’ve entered … what?”
“Squeaky bum time”, they repeated, as if this was a perfectly normal phrase that everyone uses. “You know, when it’s so tense you’re clenching.”
The first time I heard this phrase, I nearly fell off the couch laughing.
But now?
Now I find myself using it during American sports, muttering it to myself during tense moments, while my American family would have no idea what I’m on about.
This is what happens when you live in a British-American household. Your vocabulary becomes a delightful jumble that sounds slightly off to everyone.
Marianne Jennings, “Squeaky Bum Time and Other British Phrases I Never Knew I Needed”, An American’s Guide to British Life, 2025-10-05.
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September 15, 2026
“Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education”
InfantryDort responds to a complaint that military leaders are taught Clausewitz without the career of Napoleon for context:
THE THING WE STILL CAN’T TEACH
I’ll bite on this one. Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education. Why? Let me take a stab at it …
Jomini watched him and tried to turn the phenomenon into rules. Anyone in the U.S. Army has seen this before. If you do something exceptional on the field (especially in training), then you’re often coached that you went outside the lines and need to get back in. You may have succeeded, but it COULD have been a disaster. So we try “putting baby in a corner” because the science of war is safe. The art scares people.
Clausewitz watched the same fire in Napoleon and concluded that rules would never be enough. Two centuries later we are still dissecting the campaigns, naming principles, drawing arrows on maps, and trying to explain what exactly lived inside that man.
Again, why?
There is a part of command that refuses to become curriculum. T.E. Lawrence called it the “kingfisher flash”. Clausewitz reached for the genius. It’s the instant when one mind sees through fog what a hundred educated men cannot see at all, then possesses enough violence of will to act before the moment disappears.
Read that last part again 👆
You can feed that gift with history, sharpen it through hardship. But you CANNOT manufacture it with another degree. It MUST be revealed.
Yet modern institutions are built around the opposite assumption. We stack schools, evaluations, gates, boards, and credentials high enough and convince ourselves that eventually genius will emerge from the assembly line. It won’t. It can’t. Ever.
Worse, the machine often recognizes the dangerous talent and rejects it precisely because it cannot reproduce it. The unusual man is “reckless”. The instinctive one is “unserious.” The officer who refuses the approved path becomes “unqualified”.
READ. IT. AGAIN. 👆 👆 👆
Then war arrives and burns the paperwork. That is the lesson Napoleon keeps trying to teach us from two hundred years away. You can study the flame forever. You still have to recognize it when it walks into the room.
The closest we can come to discovering this genius is testing our officers on it. No more reliance on pure paperwork. I say to these officers: Show us the gift you’re supposed to possess for the highest commands.
Or step aside for someone who will.
The First Military Luger: Swiss Model 1900 s/n 01
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Apr 2026The first nation to adopt the Luger was Switzerland, which began testing in late 1898 and formally accepted the Luger in May 1900. Their guns were the first Lugers to be mass produced, as they were the first order received by DWM. The first batch of 600 arrived in Switzerland in May 1901, and today we are taking a look at the very first of that batch — serial number 01. It is the first production military Luger, and that’s a pretty cool landmark.
C&Rsenal Swiss Model 1900 video: • History of WWI Primer 145: Swiss Luger 19…
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QotD: Auftragstaktik or “mission-type tactics”
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
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September 14, 2026
The demands for reparations should be rejected, firmly
Large-scale slavery has been a dead letter in most parts of the world since the Slave Trade Act of 1807 made the transportation of slaves illegal within the British empire and on the high seas where the Royal Navy patrolled. Legal abolition of slavery followed in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act. Chattel slavery in the United States was ended by the American Civil War. The last major power to allow slavery was the Ottoman Empire, which was dissolved after the First World War. Slavery still exists … mostly in the Islamic world and in the criminal underworld elsewhere, but is no longer an almost universal condition. (Despite ridiculous recent claims, slavery was not “invented” in 1619: pretty much every civilization we know of had forms of slavery from before the earliest cities were built.)
Despite nearly 200 years since the suppression of the slave trade and the abolishment of the institution, many countries are now presenting claims for reparations to Britain for the history of slavery. And feeble-minded politicians are treating these claims as though they are somehow morally correct despite all the evidence of history. On his Substack, Spaceman Spiff demands that we treat these grifters firmly and refuse any such future claims:
I came across a video that explains how absurd modern views on European colonization are. Accusations of racism aimed at our ancestors are meaningless since everyone was racist. Only one group attempted to be non-racist. Transcript below.
The Maori were racist towards other Pacific Asian tribes. I mean, everyone is a racist if by that term we mean the assumptions by GROUP A that members of GROUP B are inferior and deserve to be conquered if they can be.
That is a universal human phenomenon and it arises from evolutionary needs for basically in-group solidarity. So racism is the standard default position for all peoples.
To say that the Europeans were racist is just to state the obvious because all peoples were racist.
If it is not a statement of the obvious then it’s patently false. And by that I mean that if I were to judge the racism of the Europeans vis-a-vis the places they conquered, compared to the racism of other groups at the time, we find the Europeans much less racist. And if we were going to put it on a spectrum the only anti-racists in the whole world at the time of European colonialism were the Europeans. Because they were the ones who went abroad and said, these peoples have the capacity to be just like us. These people deserve freedoms. These people deserve to be freed from slavery. They deserve to be developed. They deserve to be civilized, which of course is seen as a sort of great racist act but it is quite the opposite.
It is the act of saying all peoples have the potential to be self-governing, to be flourishing, to have a written language, history, arts and culture. This was the great anti-racist campaign that European colonialism represented. So that’s why I say it is simply a statement of the obvious or it is patently false.
The video calmly debunks the notion European colonization was driven by racism. Quite the opposite. It was an early form of anti-racism on a global scale based on a belief everyone deserved a high standard of living like Europeans.
This quirk of Western man has encouraged calls to pay reparations for the slave trade thanks to our continuing concern with the welfare of out-groups, a preoccupation unique to Europeans and shunned by the rest of the world even today.
Pay us in cash, guilty Westerner
It has become fashionable to suggest Britain and America pay reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. This is partly because of Britain’s involvement in European colonization of Africa, and partly the presence of slaves in the USA and some British colonies in the Caribbean.
The facts surrounding the abolition of slavery are well documented. They represent one of the most astonishing acts of decency in history, all the more amazing as one of those countries was the unchallenged global superpower of its day. There was no one else strong enough to make them do it; it was entirely voluntary.
Manacles being removed by Able Seaman Joseph Chidwick in 1907 from an enslaved man who had worn the leg irons for three years. HMS Sphinx operated off the coast of Oman in the Arabian sea and attracted a number of slaves from a nearby slave-trading village whom the British immediately freed.
Britain’s actions were quickly followed by France and then the USA which led to the abolition of slavery throughout most of the world.
And yet reparations have become a rallying call among some. Everyone from the United Nations to individual countries like Jamaica and Ghana are baying for blood.
Underlying the drive is the additional charge of racism, a very modern idea.
Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday
I’d heard a bit about Stefan Zweig but I’d never read any of his work. Ted Gioia’s review of The World of Yesterday certainly makes me a bit more likely to pick up a copy:
Photo from The Honest Broker
My most recent find is Stefan Zweig’s account of how Vienna went from nineteenth century elegance, prosperity and cultural flourishing to warmongering and hyperinflation. His book The World of Yesterday may be the single best memoir from a survivor of societal collapse from the 20th century — and deserves to be far better known.
I call Zweig a survivor, but that’s not entirely true. He somehow managed to stay alive during World War I (not an easy task for a young man in Central Europe), and the subsequent economic crisis. But World War II forced him into exile, and he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.
He was a broken man by then — and he feared Hitler was too powerful to stop. So Zweig, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of his generation, ended it all with an overdose of pills.
Just a few years earlier, Zweig had gained renown as the most widely translated contemporary author in Europe. In Germany, his books sold 20,000 copies on the first day — even before a single advertisement had appeared. But that now changed.
“Not a single one [of my books] is available in Germany today,” he lamented at the end of his life. “Those who still possess a copy keep it carefully hidden.” And the same was true in France, Italy and other countries under fascist control.
Zweig is best known today as the inspiration behind Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel. “It’s basically plagiarism”, the director has admitted. But Zweig ought to be remembered more for his writings, especially this final work from his pen.
Stefan Zweig is now remembered as the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
His fiction is also sadly under-appreciated. And it’s very readable — Zweig was a specialist in short novels with fast-paced plots. I highly recommend 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, and Chess as starting points. Zweig also had a knack for mini-biographies (see, for example, his stellar book on Montaigne).
The day before he died, he mailed his manuscript of The World of Yesterday to a publisher. It was released posthumously, and is now recognized as a defining document in how things go bad. Over the course of 500 pages, Zweig starts with the peace, prosperity, and cultural flourishing of the final years of the Habsburg Empire, and then shows, step by step, how a healthy, vital society self-destructed.
The entire book is well worth reading. I will only discuss a small part of it here — covering the hyperinflation following World War I. But this book is so rich in observations and telling details, I could easily devote several articles to it without coming close to exhausting its riches.
Zweig lived through the currency collapse twice — first in Austria (where he lived across the road from an odd young man named Adolf Hitler), when the crown devalued rapidly. Then he moved to Germany, where hyperinflation was even worse.
The stories he tells are so fanciful, you might think he was writing a fable in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider his story of beer-swilling tourists.
The story starts when the Austrian currency collapses in value. Germans quickly learn how to take advantage of this, by crossing the border to buy up cheap merchandise — but with unforeseen consequences:
Finally, at the instigation of the German government, a border guard was appointed to prevent all consumer goods from being bought in the cheaper Salzburg instead of in the home stores … But one article remained free, which could not be confiscated: the beer that one had in the body.
And the beer-drinking Bavarians calculated from day to day on the exchange rate slip whether, as a result of the devaluation of the crown, they could drink five or six or ten liters of beer in Salzburg for the same price they had to pay at home for a single liter.
A more splendid lure could not be imagined, and so crowds of women and children moved over from neighboring Freilassing and Reichenhall to afford the luxury of swilling as much beer as their stomachs could hold. Every evening the station was a veritable pandemonium of drunken, bawling, spitting hordes of people; some who overloaded themselves had to be carried to the carriages on the trolleys usually used to transport suitcases …
Of course the happy Bavarians had no idea that they were in for a terrible revenge. For when the crown stabilized and the mark, on the other hand, plummeted in astronomical proportions, the Austrians crossed over from the same station to get cheaply drunk in their turn, and the same spectacle began a second time, but in the opposite direction.
This imbalance between currencies created other surreal scenes.
Incredible as the fact may seem, I can corroborate it as a witness that the famous luxury Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was for a long time rented out entirely to English unemployed people who, thanks to the abundant English unemployment benefits, lived here more cheaply than in their slums at home.
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Performative Canadian politics again
Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power promising that he was the best-qualified to deal with the US government on trade issues. Canadians assumed that this meant he’d be able to get as fair a trade deal with President Trump’s administration as possible. What he really meant was that he could do the most damage to cross-border trade relations in order to “pivot” to the EU and to China. He never intended to settle US-Canadian trade conditions, and his actions clearly show he was always putting the negotiations dead last in his priority list. And, thanks to the government’s generous subsidies to the relic media, instead of grilling him and his ministers for their blatant failures, they instead try to hold the opposition to account for things they have no control over.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out that it makes no economic sense for Canada to become part of the European Union as Carney now says he’s working toward:
This strikes me as remarkably stupid economic strategy.
Diversifying Canadian trade makes sense. Pretending Europe can somehow replace the economic relationship we have with the United States does not.
The United States is next door. Our railways, pipelines, electricity grids, manufacturing supply chains and energy markets have been integrated for generations. Even after the trade fight intensified, 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports still went to the United States in 2025.
And Canada already has CETA with the European Union. Roughly 98% of EU tariff lines on Canadian goods became duty-free when CETA took effect, eventually rising to about 99%. If Canadian companies see profitable opportunities in Europe, they already have extraordinarily good market access.
So what exactly do we gain from some invented “associate membership” beyond CETA?
Potentially European regulatory obligations, political entanglements, financial contributions and pressure to harmonize Canadian rules with decisions made in Brussels, all to sell more goods across an ocean to markets that cannot duplicate the geographic advantage of the United States.
Norway rejected EU membership twice. Iceland opened accession negotiations and eventually walked away without joining. Both understood that you can have close economic relations with Europe without surrendering unnecessary national autonomy.
Canada should trade aggressively with Europe, Asia and everyone else who wants our products. But our first priority should be fixing the relationship with our largest customer, removing our own interprovincial trade barriers, building pipelines and ports, and making Canada competitive again.
Picking a fight with the neighbour who buys most of your exports and then announcing that Brussels might become your new best friend isn’t economic sophistication.
It looks like desperation dressed up as grand strategy.
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George Orwell according to family and friends – Writers & Wordsmiths
BBC Archive
Published 21 Mar 2026This programme contains attitudes of its time.
Recollections of George Orwell by his wife Sonia Orwell, sister Avril Dunn, and friends Malcolm Muggeridge and Cyril Connolly. [Original billing]
“From early in his writing career, Eric Blair adopted the nom de plume, which he is now universally known. He became George Orwell. In his will, he emphatically directed that no biography of him should be written. And to insure his wishes were respected, effectively covered up his traces. Blair hid behind Orwell.”
The man behind Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and The Road to Wigan Pier was elusive, but in this programme family and friends share memories of the influential author.
Clip taken from George Orwell: 1903-1950, originally broadcast on 20 November, 1965.
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