Forces News
Published Jul 20, 2024Nicosia International Airport was once a busy hub full of holidaymakers but since the Cyprus conflict of 1974, it has been frozen in time.
Today, the disused airport resembles a ghost town as it sits abandoned in the 180km buffer zone dividing the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish-occupied north.
On the 50th anniversary of the conflict, Forces News goes inside the eerie airport and learns how it became the site of a major battle.
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November 26, 2024
The ghost airport of Nicosia: Rare glimpse inside the abandoned 1974 battleground
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QotD: Hesiod’s five ages of man
The only text I vividly remember from my university semester in Classics is a poem by Hesiod entitled Works and Days. I read Homer, of course, and Virgil, and Ovid, and the three tragedians, but their texts have long become a blur of strange names, strange desires, inventive use of parataxis and the word “destiny”. But I remember Hesiod. Memory is a peculiar thing.
Hesiod is the seventh century BC management book writer. He didn’t write about digital strategy, but his poems drone on in the earnest monotone of an old-school sociology lecturer who — after years of correcting student papers — decides to try his hand at fine letters. Hesiod is ace at conveying fact, but not at re-inventing it. This makes him a fine chronicler, but not a poet. I cannot imagine anyone reading Works and Days today for anything other than anthropological curiosity.
I don’t remember all eight hundred lines of Works and Days — just five stanzas: one for each of the Five Ages of Men. First came the Golden Age, in which the land was bounteous, the forests were rich with game, and men were decent, happy, and favoured by the gods. But this state of bliss didn’t last. Cracks began to appear during the next generation with the emergence of the Silver Race — small crooks and delinquents who “could not keep from sinning and from wrongdoing one another”. Zeus didn’t like them and eventually killed them off. The third generation, the Bronze Race, managed to be an even greater disgrace, a bunch of hoodlums of great physical strength with “unconquerable arms which grew from their shoulders on their strong limbs.” (I find this image rather powerful. It reminds me of my gym on a Friday night.) Things looked up momentarily during the subsequent Heroic Age, as Zeus created a “god-like race of hero-men called demi-gods”. But everything went definitively, irrevocably tits-up in the fifth and final age: the Iron Age. Land became barren, crops wilted, stock died of disease; men were poor, men were bitter, son betrayed father, neighbour killed neighbour, chaos and treachery ruled.
As a story of decline and fall, it’s a nice one (although I’ve seen better). In terms of literary merit, it’s nowhere near Homer. So why am I harping on Hesiod? (Now do pay attention, as here comes the point of this essay.) The key variable between the time when men were happy and the time when they were not, according to Hesiod, is work. “In the Golden Age,” he writes, men “lived like gods … remote and free from … hard toil …” But in the Iron Age, “men never rest from labour …” Writing about the Iron Age — the age of hard work and misery — Hesiod wrote about his own time, but he also wrote about our time. We live in the Iron Age. It is a sad age. It is the age when people have to work. And work kills the spirit.
Elena Shalneva “Work — the Tragedy of Our Age”, Quillette, 2020-01-29.
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November 25, 2024
Andrew Sullivan as an (unconscious?) exemplar of the mentalités school
I sent the URL to Andrew Sullivan’s article I linked to yesterday to Severian to see what he’d make of it. He certainly didn’t disappoint me:
Founding Questions coat of arms by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.
Because someone like Andrew Sullivan is the kind of guy he is, we might have a good example to hand of a mentalités approach to History [Wiki]. We can all play along, because the key to a mentalités approach is a version of our favorite game, “For That to Be True”. Let’s see if we can’t ferret out some of Sullivan’s cultural assumptions here, and what that might tell us about our world.
There was something truly surreal about President Biden suddenly changing course and agreeing to give Ukraine advanced long-range missiles to attack deep inside Russian territory in the last two months of his administration. There was no speech to the nation; no debate in the Senate; just a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power. You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.
A couple things stand out immediately. The great thing about fags and chicks as pundits is that they’re hyper-emotional, so they always go for the big splashy adjectives. “Surreal”, for instance (and not just surreal, “truly surreal”). Let us instead return to the cool, rational prose of 18th century diplomacy, and term this a volte-face.
They happen all the time, of course. Indeed it’s one of the standard criticisms of representative government — they’re impossible to deal with, long term, because the volte-face is baked into the system. No agreement is so airtight that it’s not at immediate risk of repudiation if one of the other guys wins the next election. This is Diplomacy 101.
So, there’s the first assumption we need to examine: Since this kind of thing does, in fact, happen all the time — as any professional political analyst surely knows — why does this particular volte-face seem so “truly surreal?”
Moreover, it’s not as if the Biden Administration has been the model of consistency up to now. Not only is the diplomatic volte-face pretty common, so is the domestic — again, it’s a standard criticism of parliamentary-style government. And not just during election season. Domestic policy changes with the winds, because that’s kinda what it’s supposed to do. Vox populi, vox dei, at least as far back as the early 18th century, and the populi are notoriously fickle.
So why is this one “truly surreal”? If I were one of those Peter Turchin or Steve Sailer types, I’d plug all the Biden Administration’s policy decisions, foreign and domestic, into an Excel sheet and graph the changes. You know, plotting “variance ratios” against “consistency coefficients” and whatnot. It’d be all over the damn place, for reasons we here in this clubhouse call “The Do Long Bridge” — Brandon is the titular head of government, but there ain’t no fuckin’ CO, and if you look at the spastic incoherence of “Biden’s” policy decisions you’d see it plain as day.
It seems extremely unlikely, to put it no stronger, that a paid political analyst like Andrew Sullivan doesn’t see that. So either he does see it, but is pretending not to, for fun and profit — possible cultural assumption #1 — or he truly doesn’t see it, which would be revealing of cultural assumption #2.
I can’t decide which is which yet, but I can see a common denominator for both. It’s the last sentence I quoted in that paragraph:
You know: the kind we’ve long worried about with Donald Trump.
There’s a whole world full of embedded assumptions there. Does Trump actually do that — “a quiet demonstration of unilateral presidential fuck-you power”? […] To me, it sure looks like Trump was actually remarkably restrained when it came to unilateral demonstrations of presidential fuck-you power, alas, compared to Biden and especially Obama (he of the infamous pen and phone). And the few times he tried, he got Hawaiian Judged to hell and back. But since I don’t have my Steve Sailer graph to hand, I’m not going to assert that (maybe it’s one of my assumptions — I really want to see Trump exercise some fuck-you power).
And the verb is extremely interesting. They’re worried about Trump doing it; they’ve heretofore not been bothered by Biden doing it.
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The Experimental SOE Welrod MkI Prototype
Forgotten Weapons
Published Aug 12, 2024The Welrod was a program to develop a silent assassination pistol for British SOE (Special Operations Executive) late in 1942. It needed to be chambered in the .32 ACP cartridge, be effective to a range of 15m, and have its firing not recognizable as a firearm at 50m distance. The project was led by Major Hugh Quentin Reeves, who developed much of SOE’s inventory of gadgets.
The Welrod concept was ready in January 1943, and it was not quite the Welrod that we recognize today. This initial MkI design used a fixed internal 5-round magazine and a thumb trigger, along with a rifle style bolt action mechanism. Samples were produced in April 1943, and testing showed that it was rather awkward to use. A MkII version was quickly developed in June 1943 with a more traditional style of grip and magazine, and formal trials led to the adoption of that MkII design. Incidentally, this is why the first Welrod produced was the MkII, and the later production version in 9mm was designated the MkI (it was the first mark of 9mm Welrod).
Eventually many thousands of Welrod pistols were manufactured, and they almost certainly remain in limited use to this day. This example we have today is the only surviving MkI example, however.
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QotD: Le Corbusier
But most bureaucrats aren’t evil, just ignorant … and as Scott shows, this ignorance isn’t really their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know, because they can’t know. Very few bureaucratic cock-ups are as blatant as Chandigarh, where all anyone has to do is look at pictures for five minutes to conclude “you couldn’t pay me enough to move there”.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
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November 24, 2024
How Allied and Nazi Generals Created the Clean Wehrmacht Myth
World War Two
Published 23 Nov 2024After the fall of the Third Reich, many of Hitler’s generals are convicted as war criminals by the Allies and condemned to prison and disgrace. Yet, within a few years, the Western Powers embrace them Cold War partners against the Soviet Union. In this new alliance, they rewrite history and create the enduring myth of the “clean Wehrmacht“.
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Trump breaks the electoral pattern that had persisted for decades
In Quillette, Jason Garshfield outlines the “traditional” pattern of presidential elections and identifies the relatively few breaks in that pattern and how Donald Trump represents a major disruption compared to what outside observers might have expected to see:
How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.
… Yet the symbolic power of the presidency is paramount. We speak of the 1980s as the Reagan Era and the 1990s as the Clinton Era, not the “Tip O’Neill Era” or the “Newt Gingrich Era”. The presidency represents control over the federal government, and ultimately over the spirit and the direction of the nation. It is the highest political prize, and a party consistently denied the presidency will not remain a satisfied player in the system, even if they achieve political success on other meaningful fronts. This is dangerous in a nation where mutual assent is a prerequisite for the smooth functioning of a free and fair electoral system.
Trump’s 2024 victory does not feel as shocking as his 2016 victory did. After all, we’ve seen this show before. But 2024 is a more remarkable coup than 2016. Back then, Trump’s victory did not buck the prevailing trend. This time, he won against that trend and shattered the pattern.
Some have argued that Trump’s indomitable force of personality, demonstrated in the way in which he has refashioned American politics in his image over the past decade, vindicates the Great Man Theory of History. For instance, Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic in 2022, commented that Trump’s “personal idiosyncrasies — and, I would argue, malignancies — altered the course of American history in directions it otherwise would not have gone”. To Rosenberg, this represented a turn for the worse, but many of Trump’s supporters would say the same, while casting it in a more positive light. As with Napoleon Bonaparte, one cannot confidently state that if Trump had never been born, someone like him would have done what he did.
Elsewhere in this magazine, I compare Donald Trump to the Mule, a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories who, with his unique superpower of mind control, manages to undo the entire Seldon Plan which had been designed to direct the future of the galaxy. In Asimov’s fictional social science of psychohistory, humans are compared to molecules within a gas: the path of each individual molecule is unpredictable, but the movement of the gas as a whole can be predicted. But the psychohistorians assume that no one molecule can ever have a significant effect on the whole — and they are mistaken.
Trump is a particle that defies measurement. It is as though Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies to him: you can know where he is, or how fast he is going, but never both at the same time. Once you think you have him pinned down to a fixed point in the cosmos, he throws your calculations into chaos. This drives his opponents crazy and imbues his most fervent supporters with a near-messianic belief that he will triumph against any odds.
Social scientists tend to hate the Great Man Theory of History because it renders their work entirely meaningless. No matter how strong certain social forces may be, they can ultimately be dispensed with at any time by unpredictable mighty figures. As a result, the future is frighteningly unknowable. But both Great Man Theory and historical determinism have dire implications. Either individuals are irrelevant, or else we live in an unknowable and irrational universe, which unfolds according to no fixed laws. Neither theory allows rationalism and individualism to coexist.
The durability of the eight-year pattern in American politics seems to provide strong evidence against the Great Man Theory. Many of the leaders and almost-leaders of the United States since 1952 have been outsized personalities, yet the sociological paradigm suggests that their personal charisma had little impact on their success or failure. In this view, neither Barack Obama’s charm nor John McCain and Mitt Romney’s lack of charm radically influenced the outcomes of the 2008 and 2012 elections. It was simply time for a Democrat to win, and McCain and Romney might as well not have run. For that matter, both parties might as well have saved their energy and agreed to simply exchange places every eight years — that is, if we accept historical determinism as the driving factor.
Before Trump, only two other figures in postwar America came close to being Great Men. They were the finalists of the 1980 election: Ronald Reagan, who managed to win against the pattern and usher in twelve straight years of Republican control, and Jimmy Carter, who lost the election he should have won. It is debatable as to whether the 1980 election was more a story of Carter’s weakness or Reagan’s strength, but both undoubtedly played a role. Now Trump has become both Carter and Reagan, the unexpected loser of one election and the unexpected winner of another.
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How Newfoundland and Labrador lost their independence
Geography By Geoff
Published Jul 16, 2024Did you know that Newfoundland and Labrador were once an independent country in the same manner as Canada was? It’s true! It was called the Dominion of Newfoundland and due to a series of unfortunate events, it had to relinquish its independence. In today’s video, we cover the vast geography of the province, it’s very old history (including Vikings!) and how the country managed to lose its independence when it managed to survive on its own for decades. Oh … and we’ll also talk about why Labrador got included in the name upon confederating with Canada.
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November 23, 2024
How the US Paranoia of Leftism was Born
World War Two
Published 21 Nov 2024Elizabeth Bentley’s defection in 1945 didn’t just expose a Soviet spy network — it fueled America’s second Red Scare and a wave of anti-communist paranoia. Her revelations about Soviet infiltration within the U.S. government became a catalyst for McCarthyism, reshaping American politics and society in an era defined by fear and suspicion.
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QotD: Nietzsche’s message
H.L. Mencken, “Transvaluation of Morals”, The Smart Set, 1915-03.
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November 22, 2024
Kalthoff 30-Shot Flintlock: The First Repeating Firearm Used in War (1659)
Forgotten Weapons
Published Aug 7, 2024The first repeating rifle used in combat by a military force was a flintlock system developed by the Kalthoff brothers. It was adopted in the 1640s by the Danish Royal Guard, who purchased a bit more than 100 of the guns, and used them successfully in the Siege of Copenhagen in 1659. The Kalthoff is a .54 caliber flintlock rifle with a magazine of 30 balls under the barrel and a powder storage compartment in the buttstock. A lever under the action is rotated forward 180 degrees and then back to completely reload the rifle — this action loads a ball into the chamber, seats it fully in place, loads powder behind it, primes the pan, cocks the hammer, and closes the frizzen. This was an amazing amount of firepower in the mid-1600s, and the mechanism in the gun is brilliant.
The Kalthoff brothers (Peter, Mathias, Caspar, Henrik, and William) spread out across Europe working for many royal courts although it was in Denmark where their gun saw the most substantial military use. The system would lead to other repeating flintlock designs like the Lorenzoni, but these did not really meet the quality of the original Kalthoffs (in my opinion). However, the system was very expensive to make and rather fragile to use. By 1696 the Danes had taken them out of service in favor of simpler and more durable designs. Kalthoffs today are very, very rare, and it was an incredible privilege to be able to take this one apart to show to you. Many thanks to Jan, its owner, for letting me do that!
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QotD: Pre-modern armies on the move
(As an aside: one my enduring frustrations is the tendency of pre-modern strategy games to represent most flat areas as “plains” of grassland often with a separate “farmland” terrain type used only in areas of very dense settlement. But around most of the Mediterranean, most of the flat, cleared land at lower elevations would have been farmland, with all of the obstructions and complications that implies; rolling grasslands tend to be just that – uplands too hilly for farming.)
The other problem is pathfinding and geolocation. Figuring out where you off-road overland with just a (highly detailed) map and a compass is sufficiently difficult that it is a sport (Orienteering). Prior to 1300, armies in the broader Mediterranean world were likely to lack both; the compass (invented in China) arrives in the Mediterranean in the 1300s and detailed topographical maps of the sort that hikers today might rely on remained rare deep into the modern period, especially maps of large areas. Consequently it could be tricky to determine an army’s exact heading (sun position could give something approximate, of course) or position. Getting lost in unfamiliar territory was thus a very real hazard. Indeed, getting lost in familiar territory was a real hazard: Suetonius records that Julius Caesar, having encamped not far from the Rubicon got lost trying to find it, spent a whole night wandering trying to locate it (his goal being to make the politically decisive crossing with just a few close supporters in secrecy first before his army crossed). In the end he had to find a local guide to work his way back to it in the morning (Suet. Caes. 31.2). So to be clear: famed military genius Julius Caesar got lost trying to find a 50 mile long river only about 150 miles away from Rome when he tried to cut cross-country instead of over the roads.
Instead, armies relied on locals guides (be they friendly, bought or coerced) to help them find their way or figure out where they were on whatever maps they could get together. Locals in turn tend to navigate by landmarks and so are likely to guide the army along the paths and roads they themselves use to travel around the region. Which is all as well because the army needs to use the roads anyway and no one wants to get lost. The road and path network thus becomes a vital navigational aid: roads and paths both lead to settlements full of potential guides (to the next settlement) and because roads tend to connect large settlements and large settlements tend to be the objectives of military campaigns, the road system “points the way”. Consequently, armies rarely strayed off of the road network and were in most cases effectively confined to it. Small parties might be sent out off of the road network from the main body, but the main body was “stuck” on the roads.
That means the general does not have to cope with an infinitely wide range of maneuver possibilities but a spiderweb of possible pathways. Small, “flying columns” without heavy baggage could use minor roads and pathways, but the main body of the army was likely to be confined to well-traveled routes connecting large settlements.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the move”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-08-12.
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November 21, 2024
1966: Chieftain Tank Simulator | Tomorrow’s World | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
BBC Archive
Published Jul 15, 2024“All the tension, the excitement, and indeed the technical demands of driving a modern tank into battle … but, in fact, I haven’t moved a yard.”
Raymond Baxter test drives the British Army’s Chieftain tank simulator, used for training tank drivers. The illusion is created using a large 1:300 scale model of the battlefield, a computer, and a roving mirror connected to a television camera. The battlefield can be altered simply by swapping out the model trees and buildings.
Mr Baxter can attest to how realistic the experience is, and it costs just one tenth of the price of training in a real Chieftain tank.
Clip taken from Tomorrow’s World, originally broadcast on BBC One, 28 September, 1966.
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QotD: The 1965 Immigration Act
Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.
But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.
So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.
I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.
Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?
Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.
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November 20, 2024
The Korean War Week 22 – Winter is Coming! – November 19, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 19 Nov 2024Eighth Army commander Walton Walker makes his final preparations for the big push north to the Yalu River. The Communist Chinese prepare their own forces and wait for the Americans to make their move. At the same time, the freezing Korean winter arrives in force, plunging temperatures well below freezing. The Americans must get this done, and soon.
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