Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2024

EUquake 2024

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, Italy, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Although the European elites have managed to move as much as they can out of the reach of democratic institutions, they still have to allow the illusion that the few things ordinary people can vote for still kinda, sorta matter. Ordinary people seem to have noticed this:

“I cannot act as if nothing has happened”, said a weary, dejected Emmanuel Macron, in an unplanned address to his nation last night. The French president, bruised by an unprecedented showing for the right-wing populist National Rally (RN) on Sunday’s European Parliament elections, immediately dissolved the French parliament and announced snap legislative elections. The first round will take place in just three weeks’ time.

When Macron was elected president in 2017, he promised the French people that they will “no longer have a single reason to vote for the extremes”. Pro-EU centrists hailed his apparent defeat of nationalist, populist forces. Seven years later, RN is on course to achieve its best-ever result in an EU election. Marine Le Pen’s party is projected to win double the vote share of the president’s liberal, centrist Renaissance group. Clearly, the French feel that they have more reasons than ever to revolt against the mainstream.

The French are not alone in this. The hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), despite two of its leading MEP candidates being dogged by major scandals, came second behind the centre-right CDU. Crucially, it beat all three of the parties in Germany’s governing coalition. The Social Democrats (SPD), led by chancellor Olaf Scholz, suffered its worst result of any nationwide election since the 1940s. According to one pollster, around a million people who supported the left-leaning parties in the “traffic light” coalition have since defected to the AfD. Pressure is now mounting on Scholz to call his own snap election. In Italy, meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy topped the European polls, exceeding the vote share that swept her into power in 2022’s national elections. Populist, right-wing and hard-right parties, therefore, came in first or second place in all three of the major EU nations.

Even Belgium, at the epicentre of the EU empire, has been struck by the populist earthquake. Prime minister Alexander de Croo announced his resignation last night as his party was beaten to below 10 per cent in Sunday’s federal parliamentary elections and to around five per cent in the European elections – squeezed by Flemish separatist parties. Hard-right parties also came first in Austria and second in the Netherlands.

While Macron has been forced to react to the scale of his defeat, acknowledging euphemistically that these elections were “not a good result for the parties that defend Europe”, others in the Brussels oligarchy have tried to bury their heads in the sand. On Sunday evening, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declared – delusionally – that “the centre is holding”.

She is right in one, very narrow, sense. The centre-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) and the liberal Renew group have likely gained enough seats between them for business as usual to resume in the European Parliament. The two groupings to their right – the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) and Identity and Democracy (ID) – have not made enough gains, even when combined, to start throwing their weight around in Brussels. Von der Leyen’s own position as Commission president is likely secure, not least because her EPP is the single largest grouping in parliament. The new populist MEPs will likely be shut out of key decisions, including the vetting of new EU commissioners. The EU has never allowed the democratic wishes of the public to intrude on its affairs before, so it is unlikely to start now.

But Brussels cannot hide from reality forever. These elections clearly show that the EU and its boosters are failing to contain the public’s anger. European elites have pulled every trick in the book to try to put the brakes on the populist surge, seemingly to little avail.

How bad was the rejection of the kakistocrats in France? This bad:

Mark Steyn on Nigel Farage

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is from his Friday round-up post at SteynOnline:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Demography is relentless. Douglas Murray notes that the BBC is always warning that the “far right” is “on the march“, but in the west it is demographic transformation that is truly on the march, quietly and unreported, picking up pace every month. By comparison, the wretched Sunak/Starmer dinner-theatre of the UK election campaign is completely irrelevant to Britain’s future. So I am glad to see that Nigel Farage has had a change of heart and opted to join the battle. Back in 2016, in the days after the Brexit vote, I said he was the most consequential figure in UK politics since Mrs Thatcher. Which was true. Alas, people most Britons have never heard of then set about subverting Brexit, and very effectively.

So here we are eight years later, with half-a-million Anglo-Celts abandoning the UK each year and a million Pushtun warlords and Sudanese clitoridectomists and Albanian sex-traffickers taking their place. Demography is relentless, and the hour is late.

Over a decade ago — in fact, closer to two, as I estimate it — Nigel Farage said to me that the first thing you have to do when you found a new political party on the right is to accept the burden of being its only member — at least for a while. Because the first 10,000 people who want to join are neo-Nazis and skinheads and the like. It was a clever insight, and he spread it around. So I had it told back to me many times over the years by populist politicians from all over the Continent, Danes and Dutch, Swedes and Spaniards alike.

Nigel took his gatekeeping seriously — and not just on the domestic front, “distancing” himself from Tommy Robinson and Tommy-associated issues such as Islam and the industrial-scale sex-slavery of thousands of English girls. As Gavin Mortimer reminds us, a decade ago Farage also rejected any Euro-collaboration with Marine Le Pen because her party had “anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA“. Geert Wilders (for whose fine book I am proud to have written the introduction) was furious with Farage and attempted to broker a rapprochement. Nigel was having none of it.

So here we are a decade later:

    * in the Netherlands, Wilders is currently the most powerful politician, leading the most popular party, and has helped move the electorate significantly;

    * in France, Mme Le Pen’s party will, in just two days’ time, win the European elections. She is the de facto leader of the opposition, and her caucus in the National Assembly is the largest and most effective opponent to Macron. She has also helped move the electorate significantly;

    * in the United Kingdom, by contrast, voters are about to elect a left-wing government led by a fellow, Sir Vics Starmer, who thinks men can have a cervix.

I think Nigel over-gatekept.

He has been very good at founding personal vehicles (Ukip, the Brexit Party) that deflate like punctured soufflés when he steps down as leader. Yes, he was very watchable in the jungle on “I’m a Celebrity — Get Me Out of Here”, and, in my GB News days, he certainly handed me a bigger audience at 8pm than any of his guest-hosts. But, as that station’s currently Farageless ratings reveal, you can’t build a sustained movement on one man. Nigel’s advice was clever twenty years ago. Wilders, LePen, Meloni et al were wise to recognise its limitations.

So I’m pleased Farage changed his mind on this election. He should change his mind on the over-gatekeeping, too.

Time and demography march on.

QotD: Mandatory fun

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, Russia, Sports — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Mandatory, government-sponsored fun has been on the European Left’s agenda practically since the Estates General. All of that stuff — hiking clubs, guitar clubs, model this-and-that clubs — falls under “building Socialism”, and the idea is either to totally replace a community’s organic ties with State-mandated bonds, or to restore a community’s organic ties via State-mandated bonds, depending on whether the “Socialism” you’re building is of the Soviet or Nazi variety.

The Soviets, at least, went so far as to organize an entire massive government bureaucracy around the idea of Proletkult, which aimed at replacing “bourgeois” art wholesale with the “proletarian” version. You’re free to slog through the novels of guys like Maxim Gorky to see if it worked or not; for now I’ll simply note that the first head of Proletkult, Anatoly Lunacharsky, officially carried the title “Enlightenment Commissar”. […]

The other way the European Left built socialism was with sports, of course, and though it will never happen under the current dispensation, I’d love to read a solid academic history of the USSR’s Olympic teams. Viktor Suvorov (of the famous “Suvorov Thesis” of the Ostfront) insisted that pretty much all Soviet travel teams were comprised entirely of Spetsnaz commandos, and while I don’t doubt this is largely true, there were, on the other hand, “military” teams that were almost entirely civilian. To take one famous example, NHL legend Sergei Fedorov came up with CSKA Moscow, which — for some mysterious reason — you have to dig a bit to learn was the official Red Army hockey team. As in, Fedorov — though only sixteen — was in the Soviet Army, specifically to play hockey, and he wasn’t the only one. There was such a thing as “pro” hockey in the USSR, and it was very popular, but all the best “pros” played for Armed Forces teams, because anyone good enough at hockey to go “pro” would find himself drafted …

Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (an ongoing series)”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.

June 10, 2024

Elite contempt for democracy is fuelling anti-immigration “far right” sentiment in the west

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Even for people who are generally happy with robust immigration, the numbers being recorded (or, more likely, under-recorded) in Canada, the United States and Europe are far too high to pretend that the new arrivals will quickly integrate into their new countries, and they are generally not being encouraged to do so anyway. Complaints to the people who have enabled these massive inflows — at best — are waved off or ignored, but often are seized upon as examples of hateful far-right xenophobia to be punished and suppressed:

Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.

Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.

The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.

Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.

If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?

This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grâce, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.

Biden, of course, is now desperately scrambling to salvage something from this disaster. This week, he contradicted himself by saying he has the unilateral capacity as president to shut down the border, and attempted to blame the GOP for the problem. Yes, the GOP was unhelpful and cynically political earlier this year — but that won’t muddy the waters for most voters who have been conscious for the past three years. But I am grateful nonetheless to hear the president echo what the Dish has been saying for years now, and for which I was routinely called a racist:

    To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.

Now that didn’t hurt, did it? But why did he keep telling us there was no crisis for the last three and a half years? And why would anyone trust a re-elected Biden to enact this if he had a Congressional majority? I sure don’t.

Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory“!

Bigger Isn’t Always Better: A1E1 Independent | Tank Chats Reloaded

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published Mar 1, 2024

A bigger tank is a better tank, right? Wrong.

Meet the Interwar Vickers A1E1 Independent: a failed prototype, a prototype that proved bigger isn’t always better. Impractical and expensive, it was never accepted into service – but it is said to have inspired equally cumbersome designs including the German Neubaufahrzeug and the Soviet T-35.

Join David Willey, The Tank Museum Curator, as he examines one of the more unusual vehicles in the collection – and discover how it became a focus for political espionage in the early 1930’s.

00:00 | Introduction
02:56 | Tank Design & Vickers
03:28 | Heavy Tank Requirements
05:38 | Initial Blueprints & Prototypes
11:08 | Test-bed Vehicle
14:50 | Myths, Issues and Life after Trials
19:25 | Does it lead to anything?

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

#tankmuseum #davidwilley #Interwar #heavytanks

QotD: The British sweet tooth

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It will be seen that British cookery displays more variety and more originality than foreign visitors are usually ready to allow, and that the average restaurant or hotel, whether cheap or expensive is not a trustworthy guide to the diet of the great mass of the people. Every style of cookery has its peculiar faults, and the two great shortcomings of British cookery are a failure to treat vegetables with due seriousness, and an excessive use of sugar. At normal times the average consumption of sugar per head is very much higher than in most countries, and all British children and a large proportion of adults are over-much given to eating sweets between meals. It is, of course, true that sweet dishes and confectionery – cakes, puddings, jams, biscuits and sweet sauces – are the especial glory of British cookery but the national addiction to sugar has not done the British palate any good. Too often it leads people to concentrate their main attention on subsidiary foods and to tolerate bad and unimaginative cookery in the main dishes. Part of the trouble is that alcohol, even beer, is fantastically expensive and has therefore come to be looked on as a luxury to be drunk in moments of relaxation, not as an integral part of the meal. The majority of people drink sweetened teas with at least two of their daily meals, and it is therefore only natural that they should want the food itself to taste excessively sweet. The innumerable bottled sauces and pickles which are on sale in Britain are also enemies of good cookery. There is reason to think, however, that the standard of British cookery – that is, cookery inside the home – has gone up during the war years, owing to the drastic rationing of tea, sugar, meats and fats. The average housewife has been compelled to be more economical then she used to be, to pay more attention to the seasoning of soups and stews, and to treat vegetables as a serious foodstuff and less a neglected sideline.

George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)

June 9, 2024

Rishi Sunak “promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Gage pokes a bit of goodnatured fun at British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s awful start to his re-election campaign:

This week on the campaign trail might just enter the political history books. Rishi Sunak, the man who themed his cheese-melting campaign on national pride and security, slipped off home early from the D-Day commemorations in France.

World leaders gathered at the event on Thursday to honour the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. You know, the one attended by a dwindling platoon of demigod veterans in what might be the final year graced by their presence. To riot in understatement, this Irish goodbye was inadvisable. Sunak might as well have fed Dame Judi Dench to a ravenous gang of XL bullies.

Our prime minister is one of life’s thoroughbred winners. From one of the most exclusive schools in the country, Sunak went on to Oxford and then to Stanford university. Cultured in our meritocratic petri-dish, Sunak has never failed a thing in his 44 years. Until now.

Twenty-odd points behind Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour, Sunak is on course to finish third in a two-horse race.

It gets worse. This week, Nigel Farage announced he would stand for election as the Reform Party candidate in Clacton. That Essex seat is the living, breathing symbol of pissed-off, left-behind, white-working-class, fucking furious Great Britain.

The polls have broken Tory brains. Clamped around the Conservative Party’s noodle neck is Reform’s roid-head paws. The right-wing upstarts trail the Tories by just two points. And that was before Sunak committed the social equivalent of tarmacking over the Princess Diana memorial garden on Mothering Sunday.

Sunak is a one-colour pie chart of hubris. After losing the Tory leadership election to the ludicrous Liz Truss, Sunak got handed the top job by knowing the right string-pullers.

Breathless commentary from back then christened Sunak as a Silicon Valley start-up guru, furnishing the boy wonder with LinkedIn adjectives such as “brilliant” and “dynamic”.

Sunak parrots the pediculous babble beloved of that skulk of Babbitts. With blue-sky thinking, and by sticking to core competencies, Sunak has a plan to deliver. He promised to run Britain like a start-up. On that account, he has delivered. Over one-third of start-ups crash and burn within two years.

What went wrong? Sunak’s indulgent reboots have crashed his operating system. Not so long ago, he was an anti-woke culture warrior reeling off tiresome jibes about trans people. Then came spartan Sunak, trusted centurion of the Telegraph comment section.

Too late. For the best part of two years, Sunak has circulated in meme-form around this teetering island, his existence a boundless source of second-hand embarrassment and ridicule.

With each reboot, Sunak sunk further. Ordinary people have a radar for bullshit. They don’t see such shapeshifting as necessary brand correction to meet market demands. They see duplicity and serpentine salesmanship bordering on fraud. In the plain English of my council-estate youth: Sunak is full of shit.

With his wings smeared in beeswax, Rishi Sunak is Icarus. And Nigel Farage is the sun.

Farage is more than the sun. Farage is Wetherspoon Man.


A quick image search for “Nigel Farage beer” provides lots of evidence for “Wetherspoon Man”

During his visit to Clacton, Farage fittingly visited a Wetherspoon pub. For the unfamiliar, Wetherspoon pubs owe their undeniable success to their reliability and recognition. Wherever you may be in Britain, you know what you’ll get in one of Wetherspoons’ 800-odd cavernous boozers: A decent burger, chips, and a pint for half an hour on the minimum wage, alongside cheap, cheap booze.

Critics scoff. But they’ll never find a Wetherspoon empty at any time of day or on any day of the week.

Farage announced his plans and doubled the Reform vote in Clacton. His appeal relies on the Wetherspoon model. Farage is the same wherever he may be and to whomever he may talk. Dressed like a hobbyist gamekeeper, he sinks pints, smokes fags, and cracks jokes. “Nigel” says what a sizeable swathe of left-behind Britain thinks and wants to hear.

His many detractors don’t get it. How can a privately educated former metals trader claim to speak for the people? For the same reason that populist parties are lapping at the walls of power across Europe: their erstwhile champions are too busy peacocking their pronouns in their Twitter bios.

Operation Downfall: 2 Million Men to Invade Japan – WW2 – Week 302 – June 8, 1945

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 8 Jun 2024

The plans to invade the Japanese Home Islands in the fall grow ever more concrete, with the main issue being not just how to transport men by the millions around the world, but where to put them once they get there. On land the fight continues in Okinawa and the Philippines, and at sea the American fleet is savaged by a typhoon for the second time in six months.

Chapters
00:34 Recap
01:22 The Allied Control Commission
02:29 Okinawa
03:50 The War in the Philippines
06:22 Halsey and another typhoon
09:13 Operation Downfall
19:07 Summary
19:24 Conclusion
20:28 Dedication to Donald Wilson Round
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Men In Armour (1949) – The origins and operation of tanks

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

FWD Publishing
Published Feb 18, 2024

Lengthy documentary made in 1949 about the men and tanks of the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC).

QotD: The biological importance of salt to humans

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… regardless of whether it was used in agriculture, for preservation, or for cooking, salt was also essential. The human body is constantly losing salt through sweat, and to a certain extent urine, but it tries to keep the blood’s salt concentrations maintained at a certain level. So as the blood loses salt, the body also ejects water to adjust. Ironically, as you lose salt your body responds by drying you out. Without constantly replacing the salt in your body — which is only ever stored for a couple of days at a time — you will at first feel fatigued and a little breathless, but increasingly weak and debilitated, as though sapped of all energy. The slightest exertion would start to bring on cramps, then problems with your heart and lungs, as your body continually shed water. If these did not kill you — and they probably would — you would essentially die through desiccation. The process would be all the faster if you became ill, rendering even the slightest dehydrating fever or bout of diarrhoea utterly lethal.1

A population deprived of salt was thus one that was weaker and more prone to disease — and at a time when the vast majority of the economy’s energy supply came from the straining of muscle, both human and animal, that weakness in effect meant a severe energy shortage. Although the main fuels for muscle power were carb-heavy grains like wheat, rye, oats, and rice, the indispensable ingredient to getting the most out of these grains was salt — just as how nuclear power uses uranium as its fuel, but also requires a suitable neutron moderator. A population deprived of salt would quite literally be more lethargic and sluggish, making it less productive and poorer too.

Salt’s unique properties made it a serious tool of state. In 1633 king Charles I’s newly-appointed Lord Deputy for Ireland, Baron Wentworth, advised controlling its salt supply as a way to make the Irish utterly economically dependent on England. Given salt was “that which preserves and gives value to all their native staple commodities” — herrings, butter and beef — then “how can they depart from us without nakedness and beggary?” Salt would be a method of control, and a profitable one too, being “of so absolute necessity” that it could be sold to the Irish at inflated prices without much dampening demand: salt “must be had whether they will or no, and may at all times be raised in price”.2 Much like economists today, Wentworth saw revenue-raising potential in taxing goods with such unresponsive or “inelastic” demand.

Wentworth’s scheme to control the Irish never came to be. But a great many other countries did choose to tax it. Given a minimum amount of salt had to be consumed by absolutely everyone, monopolising its sale — and levying what was effectively a tax by inflating the price well above the costs of importing or producing it — could function as kind of indirect poll tax, levied more or less per head of both people and livestock, but without any of the administrative hassle of taking and maintaining an accurate census in order to impose such a tax directly.

When compared to other necessities like grain, salt did not need to be traded in especially large quantities either, meaning that its supply could be monopolised with relative ease. And it could not be produced everywhere. Salt tended to be lacking the further you got from the sea coast, unless there happened to be some relatively rare inland sources like salt lakes, brine springs, or rock salt mines. And it could even be lacking on the sea coast where it was either too humid or too cold to get salt cheaply by evaporating seawater using the sun, or where there was insufficient fuel for boiling the brine. These places were thus prone to being charged inflated prices, while the states that controlled places where the costs of production were low — in warmer and drier climes where the salty water of coastal marshes could cheaply be evaporated using only the heat of the summer sun — could extract especially large monopoly profits from the difference. The revenue from controlling solar salt thus became the basis of many kingdoms, some unusually powerful republics, and even empires.

Anton Howes, “The Second Soul”, Age of Invention, 2024-03-08.

    1. Roy Moxham, “Salt Starvation in British India: Consequences of High Salt Taxation in Bengal Presidency, 1765 to 1878”, Economic and Political Weekly 36, no. 25 (2001): p.2270–74.

    2. George O’Brien, The Economic History of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century (Maunsel and Company Limited, 1919), p.244, which has the transcription of Wentworth’s proposal

June 8, 2024

Battlefield Normandy – The battles for Norrey, Bretteville & Putot

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The AceDestroyer
Published Jun 27, 2019

Hello, welcome to The AceDestroyer and welcome to the third and final episode of the Battlefield Normandy Series. In this episode we follow the Canadians defending Putot-en-Bessin, Bretteville-L’Orgueilleuse and Norrey-en-Bessin. In the two days of heavy combat with the 12th SS Hitlerjugend, the 7th Canadian Infantry brigade managed to hold on to all three towns. Find out how in this episode …
(more…)

June 7, 2024

Nigel Farage’s challenge to the Conservatives

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West perhaps goes a bit far in comparing Nigel Farage and his Reform UK to Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, but he’s not wrong about what the rise of Farage’s party might mean to the already dim re-election hopes of Rishi Sunak’s bedraggled clown posse:

“Nigel Farage” by Michael Vadon is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I imagine that the last remaining serotonin emptied from the bodies of the Tory election team when they heard that Nigel Farage was to return as leader of the Reform Party and stand at Clacton.

The likelihood is that Farage will win that seat, and the reception he received was certainly electric. And Clacton is not even among Reform’s top 20 targets, according to Matt Goodwin.

It’s possible that the party could overtake the Tories in some polls, although I doubt that they will beat them on election day. That is certainly Farage’s aim, and as he said on Monday: “I genuinely believe we can get more votes in this election than the Conservative Party. They are on the verge of total collapse … I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again. I will surprise everybody.”

Contrary to the jokes about Farage failing to get elected, or the criticism that he is a “serial loser“, he is arguably the most successful politician of the past decade. He built up a minuscule party of ‘fruitcakes and gadflies’ to win two successive European elections. He made Brexit happen, and then stood his candidates down in a number of seats to ensure the Leave alliance remained united in 2019, securing Boris Johnson a victory.

For which he didn’t get the thanks he felt was due, something he alluded to at Monday’s press conference. From what I understand the Tory establishment treated him with a snooty disdain which many an outsider has experienced with the British upper class. And for those making the old point that Farage’s private school background bars him from being a true outsider, that’s not how high society works. Populist movements claiming to represent the downtrodden or disenfranchised have invariably been led by people from highly educated or privileged backgrounds, whether of the Left or Right.

Farage’s targeted constituency certainly fits that bill. Clacton is the town that Matthew Parris called “Britain on crutches” in a piece warning the Tories not to desert their traditional middle-class voters. But the problem for the party is that, through a combination of authoritarian vibes and very liberal policies, they have managed to lose both. Rather than making moderate, soothing sounds while using the British executive’s immense power to shape the country around their will, they have done the exact opposite.

The Government’s disastrous polling figures are not some great mystery. Conservatives don’t tend to have the same emotional attachment to their party as the Labour family does. They vote Tory because they want them to do three things: cut immigration, put more criminals away, and lower taxes. It’s nothing more complicated than that, and they’ve failed on all three.

It is obviously the former that has provoked the most bitterness towards the party. I’m a great believer in Stephen Davies’s analysis of alignment in politics, and the central issue in British politics is immigration, multiculturalism and diversity. Labour are unquestionably on one side of this issue; the Tories are broadly pro-multiculturalism and, while issuing soundbites critical of high immigration, have raised it to record levels. If both main parties are seen to be on one side, something else will fill that gap in the market. Political parties are amoral bodies seeking voting coalitions, and the side which is most united in aligning its core groups around primary and secondary issues will win.

Redeployment! – Millions of men from Europe to Asia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2024

Now that Japan is the only Axis power still in the fight, Allied forces — especially American ones — must redeploy to prepare for the final invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. But how do you move millions of men halfway around the globe? And which ones go — veterans, new recruits, or some combination? Who decides? Where exactly do you send them to prepare too, with some many eastern ports like Manila a shambles? Let’s take a look.
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Battlefield Normandy – The battle of Authie D-DAY + 1

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The AceDestroyer
Published Dec 20, 2018

June 7, also known as D-Day +1 marked the first battle between the Canadians and the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend during the Normandy campaign. When the Canadians attacked Authie, the German 12th SS counterattacked and a large tank on tank battle commenced. The first encounter between the two divisions was immediately a bloody one. The battle unfortunately had a barbaric end as members of the SS murdered several Canadian POW’s in cold blood. Here’s the battle of Authie.
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June 6, 2024

The reason Germany failed on D-Day (Ft. Jonathan Ferguson)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Imperial War Museums
Published Jun 5, 2024

Adolf Hitler was looking forward to D-Day. His plan was simple. Reinforce the western defences, launch a furious counterattack, and “throw the Allies back into the sea”. After that, he could turn his full strength against the Soviet Union and end the war. For Hitler, the outcome of this campaign would be decisive.

In the previous episode of our D-Day series we looked at the air battle for Normandy. This time IWM Curator Adrian Kerrison covers the fighting on land. Why were some beaches bloodier than others? Why did German counterattacks fail? And why did it take so long for the Allies to breakout?

To help us answer some of those questions we’ve brought in the Royal Armouries’ Jonathan Ferguson to look at some of the most important weapons of D-Day.
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