TimeGhost History
Published 9 Feb 2025In 1946, the old colonial empires of Britain and France struggle to maintain control as nationalist movements rise and their economies crumble. Meanwhile, two new superpowers — the U.S. and the USSR — seek to reshape the world in their image, using decolonization as both an ideal and a tool for influence. As the colonial order fractures, global power shifts, and the battle for dominance begins.
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February 11, 2025
The End of Empire? Colonialism in Crisis – W2W 003
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February 7, 2025
Justice for WW2?! – W2W News 1945
TimeGhost History
Published 6 Feb 2025Join SPARTACUS and INDY on the War2War 1945 Newscast as we explore a world tumbling from war to war. European colonies face fresh conflicts and groundbreaking polymer innovations spark industrial revolutions. All the while Nazi war criminals are brought to justice at the Nuremberg Trials.
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February 3, 2025
A New World Order – War 2 War 01 – Q4 1945
TimeGhost History
Published 1 Feb 2025World War Two is over. The anti-Axis alliance has promised that their victory shall usher in a time of peace, stability, and freedom. They have pledged to uphold new values of humanity, tolerance, solidarity, and the right to self determination. Have they spoken the truth or has it been a string of lies all along?
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February 1, 2025
A century of war: The cartridge that remains deadly on today’s battleground
BFBS Forces News
Published 19 Oct 2024Say “7.62mm” when talking about rifle and machine gun rounds, and most people will think of the Nato cartridge that was introduced in 1954, but there’s a far older one that’s still in use – the 7.62x54mmR.
While the 7.62x51mm Nato cartridge was brought into service in 1954, the 7.62x54mmR dates back to 1891 in Imperial Russia.
Although this cartridge was developed in Russia, the “R” actually stands for “Rimmed” and this is what makes these two 7.62mm cartridges so different.
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QotD: In a centrally planned economy, all that matters is meeting or exceeding the Gross Output Target
The mobbed-up oligarchs currently running Russia, for instance, were almost all members of an informal class whose name I forget, which translates as “brokers” or “wheeler-dealers” or something. They learned how best to manipulate the Soviet system of “gross output targets”. Back when he was funny, P.J. O’Rourke had a great bit about this in Eat the Rich, a book I still recommend.
When told to produce 10,000 shoes, the shoe factory manager made 10,000 baby shoes, all left feet, because that was easiest to do with the material on hand — he didn’t have to retool, or go through nearly as many procurement processes, and whatever was left over could be forwarded to the “broker”, who’d make deals with other factory managers for useful stuff. When Comrade Commissar came around and saw that the proles still didn’t have any shoes, he ordered the factory manager to make 10,000 pairs of shoes … so the factory manager cranked out 20,000 baby shoes, all left feet, tied them together, and boom. When Comrade Commissar switched it up and ordered him to make 10,000 pounds of shoes, the factory manager cranked out one enormous pair of concrete sneakers …
So long as Comrade Commissar doesn’t rat him out to the NKVD — and why would he? he’s been cut in for 10% — nobody will ever be the wiser, because on the spreadsheet, the factory manager not just hit, but wildly exceeded, the Gross Output Target. That nobody in Krasnoyarsk Prefecture actually has any shoes is irrelevant.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
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January 24, 2025
Was WW1 Pointless? – War Goals Of Every Major Nation
The Great War
Published 13 Sept 2024The First World War is often seen as futile and pointless. Millions of men fought and died for years, but no one was satisfied with the outcome, which did not bring a lasting peace. But that is not how governments and many people saw the war as it was being fought. So what did the countries fighting actually want to achieve? In other words, what was the purpose of the First World War?
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January 21, 2025
January 19, 2025
Dozens of Dead Tiger Tanks at Prokhorovka? – Prokhorovka Part 6
World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2025As the dust settles on the fields of Prokhorovka, Indy takes a look at the losses suffered by the Red Army and the Waffen-SS. But we soon see that Rotmistrov and the Soviets have launched a calculated propaganda operation to distort the numbers and paint the battle as a crushing victory.
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January 18, 2025
The Battle of the Bulge, LGBTQ+ Victims & Atomic Secrets – WW2 – OOTF 038
World War Two
Published 17 Jan 2025This episode of Out of the Foxholes dives deep into your WWII questions. From LGBTQ+ persecution during and after the war, to the potential impact of diverting Battle of the Bulge troops to the Eastern Front, and Ukrainian collaboration with the Germans, we unravel the complexities of war. Join us as we tackle the secrets, strategies, and untold stories of WWII.
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January 9, 2025
Forgotten Armies of the Vietnam War: Australia, Korea, China, USSR
NR: Sorry about this … RTH must have taken this video down at some point between me scheduling it to appear and today.
Real Time History
Published 16 Aug 2024The Vietnam War is mainly remembered as a conflict between the Vietnamese and the United States. But both sides received direct and indirect support from other countries.
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January 5, 2025
Four Waffen SS Tigers vs 50 T-34s – Prokhorovka Part 4
World War Two
Published 4 Jan 2025A mass of Soviet armour charges at the Leibstandarte Division, it looks like they might smash through the German lines. Then, Michael Wittmann’s Tiger tanks go into action. Will the Waffen SS be able to turn the tide at Prokhorovka? Indy reveals all.
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December 31, 2024
QotD: Pre-revolution Russia satirized by Dostoevsky
As the book unfolds, the satire gets more and more brutal. The real Dostoevsky knew this scene well — remember he spent his early years as a St. Petersburg hipster literary magazine guy himself — and he roasts it with exquisite savagery. As a friend who read the book with me put it: the men are fatuous, deluded about their importance, lazy, their liberal politics a mere extension of their narcissism. The woman are bitchy, incurious about the world except as far as it’s relevant to their status-chasing, viewing everyone and everything instrumentally. Nobody has any actual beliefs, and everybody is motivated solely by pretension and by the desire to sneer at their country.
But this is no conservative apologia for the system these people are rebelling against either, Dostoevsky’s poison pen is omnidirectional. Many right-wing satirists are good at showing us the debased preening and backbiting, like crabs in a bucket, that surplus elites fall into when there’s a vacuum of authority. But Dostoevsky admits what too many conservatives won’t, that the libs can only do this stuff because the society they despise is actually everything that they say it is: rotting from the inside, unjust, corrupt, and worst of all ridiculous. Thus he introduces representatives of the old order, like the conceited and slow-witted general who constantly misses the point and gets offended by imagined slights. Or like the governor of the podunk town where the action takes place, who instead of addressing the various looming disasters, sublimates his anxiety over them into constructing little cardboard models.2 If there’s a vacuum of authority, it’s because men like these are undeserving of it, failing to exercise it, allowing it to slip through their fingers.
All of this is very fun,3 and yet not exactly what I expect from a Dostoevsky novel. It’s a little … frivolous? Where are the agonizingly complex psychological portraits, the weighty metaphysical debates, the surreal stroboscopic fever-dreams culminating in murder, the 3am vodka-fueled conversations about damnation? Don’t worry, it’s coming, he’s just lulling you into a false sense of security. After a few hundred pages a thunderbolt falls, the book takes a screaming swerve into darkness, and you realize that the whole first third of this novel is like the scenes at the beginning of a horror movie where everybody is walking around in the daylight, acting like stuff is normal and ignoring the ever-growing threat around them.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.
1. In an incredible bit of translation-enabled nominative determinism, the main cuckold is a character named Virginsky. I kept waiting for a “Chadsky” to show up, but alas he never did.
2. Look, the fact that he’s sitting there painting minis while the world burns makes the guy undeniably relatable. If you transported him to the present day he would obviously be an autistic gamer, and some of my best friends, etc., etc. Nevertheless, though, he should not be the governor.
3. For some reason, there are people who are surprised that Demons is funny. I don’t know why they’re surprised, Dostoevsky is frequently funny. The Brothers Karamazov is hilarious!
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December 29, 2024
Armies of the Soviet Union, Charge! – Prokhorovka Part 3
World War Two
Published 28 Dec 2024On the morning of July 12, 1943, the Battle of Prokhorovka begins! Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army charges into a storm of anti-tank fire from Paul Hausser’s Waffen SS divisions. As vehicles clash and burn, fierce hand-to-hand combat rages all around. In this episode, Indy takes you into the heart of the action as one of history’s most ferocious battles unfolds hour by hour.
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December 22, 2024
Tanks Prepare for Battle! The Greatest Ever? Prokhorovka Part 2
World War Two
Published 21 Dec 2024In the early hours of July 12, 1943, the Waffen SS and the Red Army are ready for battle. SS General Paul Hausser has his armoured spearheads ready to strike at Prokhorovka while Soviet commander Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army readies his counterattack. Today, Indy walks you through the enormous armoured fleets deployed for the coming fight.
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December 18, 2024
QotD: Western shaming – the grass is always greener overseas
Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.
By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.
Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.
After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Cult of Western Shaming”, Townhall.com, 2020-01-29.
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