The Reformation’s great complaint against the late-medieval Church is that it, the Church, had turned Catholicism entirely into a process. Those naive folks who argue that life wasn’t so hard for the medieval peasant because he had all those days off — 180 some odd saints’ days, feast days, and so on — have a bit of a point for all that. Ritual life simply was community life; “free time” as we understand it just wasn’t a thing in the middle ages, and not just because life was such a constant struggle. Every hour of your day carried its obligation to someone; there’s a reason the very best sources for “daily life in the middle ages” are called books of hours.
Your hotter Protestants, your John Calvins and Oliver Cromwells and so on, saw all of this as mere ritual. And to be fair to them, late-medieval Catholicism was very elaborate, and very, very weird — slog through a few chapters of The Stripping of the Altars if you want the details. To the Prods, this was cheating — you can’t just go through the motions and expect to get into Heaven. They made a similar distinction between “natural magic” and the unlawful stuff — the one was undertaken only after deep study and the most rigorous self-purification, while the other “worked” entirely mechanically, because what the sorcerer was really doing was cheating; he was really making a deal with a (or The) devil, to short-circuit the natural processes.
Now, it’s important to realize that the Protestants were not saying anything close to “do your own thing, man”. They were NOT hippies, encouraging everyone to read the Bible and decide for themselves how best to commune with the Big JC. The German peasants thought that’s what Martin Luther was saying back in 1524, but Luther himself was out there urging the authorities to smash the peasants with extreme prejudice. The Protestants were, in fact, extremely concerned about ritual. It just had to be the right ritual, the Biblically sanctioned ritual, and nothing but that — that’s what “Puritanism” (originally an insult) means.
Severian, “Faith vs. Works”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-07.
November 19, 2024
QotD: The Reformation
November 18, 2024
“The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve ‘always been multicultural'”
Fortissax thinks that the rest of Canada has lessons to be learned from Quebec:
If you are a Canadian born at any point in the Post-WWII era, you have been subjected to varying degrees of liberal “Cultural Mosaic” propaganda. This narrative exploits the historic presence of three British Isles ethnic groups (which had already been intermixing for millennia) and the predominantly Norman French settlers to justify the unprecedented mass migration of people from the Third World into Canada. This process only began in earnest in the 1990s before accelerating rapidly in the 2010s.
The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve “always been multicultural”, as though the extremely small and inconsequential presence of “Black Loyalists” or the historically hostile Indigenous groups (making up only 1% of the population at Canada’s founding in 1867) played any serious role in shaping the Canadian nation, its identity, institutions, or culture. Inspired by Dr. Ricardo Duchesne’s book Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), which chronicled the emergence of two ethnic groups uniquely born of the New World, I delved into the 2021 Census data collected by the Canadian government to explore the ethnic breakdown of White Canadians in greater detail
The evidence is clear. In 2021, just four years ago, 72.7% of the entire Canadian population was not just White, but Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian, representing an overwhelming presence compared to visible minorities and other White ethnic groups, such as the small populations of Germans and Ukrainians.
In the space last night, I highlighted this historical fact and explained to the audience the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Canadian and its significance. While we all recognize that the Québécois are a homogeneous group descended predominantly from Norman French settlers — such as the Filles du Roi and Samuel de Champlain’s 1608 expedition, which established Quebec City with a single-minded purpose — the Anglo-Canadian story also deserves similar recognition for its role in shaping Canada’s identity.
But what is less known is that Anglo-Canadians are just as ethnically homogeneous as the Québécois, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Anglo-Canadian identity emerged from Loyalist Americans in the 1750s, beginning with the New England Planters in Nova Scotia — “continentals” with a culture distinct from both England and the emergent Americans. After the American Revolutionary War, they marched north with indomitable purpose, like Aeneas and the Trojans, to rebuild their Dominion. Author Carl Berger, in his influential work The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, demonstrates that the descendants of Loyalists were the one ethnic group that nurtured “an indigenous British Canadian feeling.” The following passage from Berger’s work is worth citing:
The centennial arrival of the loyalists in Ontario coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Toronto and, during a week filled with various exhibitions, July 3 was set aside as “Loyalist Day”. On the morning of that day the platform erected at the Horticultural Pavilion was crowded with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries and on one wall hung the old flag presented in 1813 to the York Militia by the ladies of the county. Between stirring orations on the significance of the loyalist legacy, injunctions to remain faithful to their principles, and tirades against the ancient foe, patriotic anthems were sung and nationalist poetry recited. “Rule Britannia” and “If England to Herself Be True” were rendered “in splendid style” and evoked “great enthusiasm”. “A Loyalist Song”, “Loyalist Days”, and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, were all beautifully sung
The 60,000 Loyalist Americans, who arrived in two significant waves, were soon bolstered by mass settlement from the British Isles. However, British settlers assimilated into the Loyalist American culture rather than imposing a British identity on the new Canadians. The first major wave of British settlers after the Loyalists primarily consisted of the Irish. Before Confederation in 1867, approximately 850,000 Irish immigrants settled in Canada. Between 1790 and 1815, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 settlers, mainly from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, also made their way to Canada.
Another large-scale migration occurred between 1815 and 1867, bringing approximately 1 million settlers from Britain to Canada, specifically to Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. New Brunswick was carved out from the larger province of Nova Scotia to make room for the influx of Loyalists. During this time, settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland intermingled and assimilated into the growing Anglo-Canadian culture. Scottish immigrants, who constituted 10–15% of this wave, primarily spoke Gaelic upon arrival but adopted English as they integrated.
All settlers from the British Isles spoke English (small numbers spoke Gaelic in case of Scots), were ethnically and culturally similar, and had much more in common with each other than with their continental European counterparts.
Settlement would slow down in the years immediately preceding Confederation in 1867 but surged again during the period between 1896 and 1914, with an estimated 1.25 million settlers yet again from Britain moving to Canada as part of internal migration within the British Empire. These settlers predominantly also [went] to Ontario and the Maritimes, further forging the Anglo-Canadian identity.
A common misconception among Canadians is that Canada “was a colony” of Britain, subordinate to, or a “vassal state”. This is wrong. Canadians were the British, in North America. There were no restrictions on what Canadians could or could not do in their own Dominion. From the first wave of Loyalists onward, Canadians were regularly involved in politics and governance, actively participating in shaping the nation.
Like the ethnogenesis of the English, which saw Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians converge into a new people and ethnicity (the Anglo-Saxons), Anglo-Canadians are a combination of 1.9 million English, 850,000 Irish (from both Northern and Southern Ireland), and 200,000 Scots, converging with 60,000 Loyalist Americans from the 13 Colonies. These distinct yet similar ethnic groups no longer exist as separate peoples in Canada. Anglo-Canadians are the fusion of the entire British Isles. The Arms of Canada, the favourite symbol of Canadian nationalists today, represents this new ethnic group with the inclusion of the French:
Arms of England, Scotland, Ireland and France in that order.
It’s no coincidence that, once rediscovered, the Arms of Canada exploded in popularity as the emblem of Canadian nationalists. Unlike more controversial symbols that appeal to pan-White racial unity, such as the Sonnenrad or Celtic cross, the Arms of Canada resonate as a distinctly Canadian icon, deeply rooted in the nation’s true heritage and history — a heritage that cannot be bought, sold, or traded away. This is an immutable bloodline stretching into the ancient past. If culture is downstream from race, and deeper still, ethnicity, then Canadian culture, values, and identity are fundamentally tied not just its race, but its ethnic composition. The ethnos defines the ethos. Canadians are not as receptive to the abstract idea of White nationalism for the same reason Europeans aren’t — because they possess a cohesive ethnic identity, unlike most White Americans.
Changing the way “our leaders” speak to us
Ted Gioia says that the old rules of communicating to the public are undergoing a major shift.
Before they executed Socrates in the year 399 BC — on charges of impiety and corrupting youth — the philosopher was given a chance to defend himself before a jury.
Socrates started his defense with an unusual plea.
Socrates defends himself at his trial (painting by Louis Joseph Lebrun, 1867)
He told his listeners that he had no skill at making speeches. He just knew the everyday language of the common people.
Socrates explained that he had never studied rhetoric or oratory. He feared that he would embarrass himself by speaking so plainly in his trial defense.
“I show myself to be not in the least a clever speaker,” Socrates told the jurors, “unless indeed they call him a clever speaker who speaks the truth.”
He knew that others in his situation would give “speeches finely tricked out with words and phrases”. But Socrates only knew how to use “the same words with which I have been accustomed to speak” in the marketplace of Athens.
Socrates wasn’t exaggerating. His entire reputation was built on conversation. He never wrote a book — or anything else, as far as we can tell.
Spontaneous talking was the basis of his famous “Socratic method” — a simple back-and-forth dialogue. You might say it was the podcasting of its day. He aimed to speak plainly — seeking the truth through open and unfiltered conversation.
That might get you elected President in the year 2024. But it didn’t work very well in Athens, circa 400 BC.
Socrates received the death penalty — and was executed by poisoning.
Is that shocking? Not really.
Western culture was built on one-way communication. Leaders and experts speak — and the rest of us listen.
This is how leaders once spoke to the people — but it’s now changing.
Socrates was the last major thinker to rely solely on conversation. After his death, his successors wrote books and gave lectures.
That’s what powerful people do. They make decisions. They give orders. They deliver speeches.
But not anymore.
In the aftermath of the election, the new wisdom is that giving speeches from a teleprompter doesn’t work in today’s culture. Citizens want their leaders to sit down and talk.
And not just in politics. You may have seen the same thing in your workplace — or in classrooms and other group settings. People now resist one-way orders from the top.
The word “scripted” is now an insult. Plainspoken dialogue is considered more trustworthy. This is part of the up-versus-down revolution I’ve written about elsewhere — a conflict that, I believe, may have even more impact on society than Left-versus-Right.
For better or worse, the hierarchies we’ve inherited from the past are toppling. To some extent, they are even reversing.
This is now impacting how leaders are expected to speak. Events of the last few days have raised awareness of this to a new level — but the “experts” should have expected it. That’s especially true because the experts will be those most impacted by this shift.
HBO’s Rome Ep. 3 “The owl in a thorn bush” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 17, 2024Episode Three: Now that Caesar has crossed the Rubicon, the Civil War has begun and the series gathers pace.
Vidcaps taken from the dvd collection and copyright belongs to the respective makers and channels.
Transcript
QotD: Napoleon and his army
Napoleon’s easy rapport with his troops also gives us some glimpses of his freakish memory. On multiple occasions he chats with a soldier for an hour, or camps with them the eve before a battle; and then ten years later he bumps into the same guy and has total recall of their entire conversation and all of the guy’s biographical details. The troops obviously went nuts for this kind of stuff. It all sort of reminds me of a much older French tradition, where in the early Middle Ages a feudal lord would (1) symbolically help his peasants bring in the harvest and (2) literally wrestle with his peasants at village festivals. Back to your point about the culture, my anti-egalitarian view is that that kind of intimacy across a huge gulf of social status is easiest when the lines of demarcation between the classes are bright, clear, and relatively immovable. What’s crazy about Napoleon, then, is that despite him being the epitome of the arriviste he has none of the snobbishness of the nouveaux-riches, but all of the easy familiarity of the natural aristocrat.
True dedication to the welfare of those under your command,1 and back-slapping jocularity with the troops, are two of the attributes of a wildly popular leader. The third2 is actually leading from the front, and this was the one that blew my mind. Even after he became emperor, Napoleon put himself on the front line so many times he was practically asking for a lucky cannonball to end his career. You’d think after the fourth or fifth time a horse was shot out from under him, or the guy standing right next to him was obliterated by canister shot, the freaking emperor would be a little more careful, but no. And it wasn’t just him — the vast majority of Napoleon’s marshals and other top lieutenants followed his example and met violent deaths.
This is one of the most lacking qualities in leaders today — it’s so bad that we don’t even realize what we’re missing. Obviously modern generals rarely put themselves in the line of fire or accept the same environmental hardships as their troops. But it isn’t just the military, how many corporate executives do you hear about staying late and suffering alongside their teams when crunch time hits? It does still happen, but it’s rare, and the most damning thing is that it’s usually because of some eccentricity in that particular individual. There’s no systemic impetus to commanders or managers sharing the suffering of their men, it just isn’t part of our model of what leadership is anymore. And yet we thirst for it.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.
1. When not flinging them into the face of Prussian siege guns.
2. Okay, there are more than three. Some others include: deploying a cult of personality, bestowing all kinds of honors and awards on your men when they perform, and delivering them victory after victory. Of course, Napoleon did all of those things too.
November 17, 2024
Nazi Uniforms banned across three States – Rise of Hitler 06, June 1930
World War Two
Published 16 Nov 2024In June 1930, the Weimar Republic faces escalating tensions as Nazi uniforms are banned in three states to curb political violence. The French withdrawal from the Rhineland marks a major milestone while Saxony’s elections leave the state in political deadlock. Meanwhile, Chancellor Brüning battles to save his government amidst growing financial turmoil and party divisions.
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Contrasting origin stories – the 13 Colonies versus the “Peaceful Dominion”
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter outlines some of the perceived (and real) differences in the origin stories of the United States and Canada and how they’ve shaped the respective nations’ self-images:
The US had plans to invade Canada that were updated as recently as the 1930s (“War Plan Crimson”, a subset of the larger “War Plan Red” for conflict with the British Empire). Canada also had a plan for conflict with the US, although it fell far short of a full-blooded invasion to conquer the US, designated as “Defence Scheme No. 1”, developed in the early 1920s.
In perennial contrast to its tumultuous southern neighbour, Canada has the reputation of being an extremely boring country.
America’s seeds were planted by grim Puritans seeking a blank slate on which to inscribe the New Jerusalem, and by aristocratic cavaliers who wanted to live the good life while their slaves worked the plantations growing cash crops for the European drug trade. The seeds of America’s hat were planted by fur traders gathering raw materials for funny hats.
America was born in the bloody historical rupture of the Revolutionary War, casting off the yoke of monarchical tyranny in an idealistic struggle for liberty. Canada gained its independence by politely asking mummy dearest if it could be its own country, now, pretty please with some maple syrup on top.
America was split apart in a Civil War that shook the continent, drowning it in an ocean of blood over the question of whether the liberties on which it was founded ought to be extended as a matter of basic principle to the negro. Canada has never had a civil war, just a perennial, passive-aggressive verbal squabble over Quebec sovereignty.1
America’s western expansion was known for its ungovernable violence – cowboys, cattle rustlers, gunslingers, and Indian wars. Canada’s was careful, systematic, and peaceful – disciplined mounties, stout Ukrainian peasants, and equitable Indian treaties.
Once its conquest of the Western frontier was wrapped up, America burst onto the world stage as a vigorous imperial power, snatching islands from the Spanish Empire, crushing Japan and Germany beneath the spurred heel of its cowboy boot, and staring down the Soviet Union in the world’s longest high-stakes game of Texas Hold’Em. Canada, ever dutiful, did some stuff because the British asked nicely, and then they went home to play hockey.
America gave the world jazz music, rock and roll, and hip-hop; Canada contributed Celine Dion and Stan Rogers. America has Hollywood; Canada, the National Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. America dressed the world in blue jeans and leather jackets; Canadians, flannel and toques. America fattened the people with McDonald’s; Canada burnt their tongues with Tim Horton’s, eh.2
The national stereotypes and mythologies of the preceding paragraphs aren’t deceptive, per se. Stereotypes are always based in reality; national mythologies, as with any successful mythology, need to be true at some level in order to resonate with the nations that they’re intended to knit together. Of course, national mythologies usually leave a few things out, emphasizing or exaggerating some elements at the expense of others in the interests of telling a good story. Revisionists, malcontents, and subversives love to pick at the little blind spots and inconsistencies that result in order to spin their own anti-narratives, intended as a rule to dissolve rather than fortify national cohesion and will. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is a good example of this kind of thing, as is Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tendentious 1619 Project.
Probably the most immediately obvious difference between Americans and Canadians is that Americans don’t suffer from a permanent identity crisis. Demographic dilution due to decades of mass immigration notwithstanding, Americans by and large know who they are, implicitly, without having to flagellate themselves with endless introspective navel-gazing about what it means to be an American. The result of this is that most American media isn’t self-consciously “American”; there are exceptions, of course, such as the occasional patriotic war movie, but for the most part the stories Americans tell are just stories about people who happen to be American doing things that happen to be set in America. Except when the characters aren’t American at all, as in a historical epic set in ancient Rome, or aren’t set in America, as in a science fiction or fantasy movie. That basic American self-assurance in their identity means that Americans effortlessly possess the confidence to tell stories that aren’t about America or Americans at all, as a result of which Hollywood quietly swallowed the entire history of the human species … making it all American.
As Rammstein lamented, We’re All Living in Amerika …
Since we’re all living in Amerika, the basic background assumptions of political and cultural reality that we all operate in are American to their very core. Democracy is good, because reasons, and therefore even de facto dictators hold sham elections in order to pretend that they are “presidents” or “prime ministers” and not czars, emperors, kings, or warlords. Insofar as other countries compete with America, it’s by trying to be more American than the Americans: respecting human rights more; having freer markets; making Hollywood movies better than Hollywood can make them; playing heavy metal louder than boys from Houston can play it. It’s America’s world, and we’re all just along for the ride.
America’s hat, by contrast, is absolutely culturally paralyzed by its own self-consciousness … as a paradoxical result of which, its consciousness of itself has been almost obliterated.
Canada’s origin – the origin of Anglo-Canada, that is – was with the United Empire Loyalists who migrated into the harsh country of Upper Canada in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. As their name implies, they defined themselves by their near-feudal loyalty to the British Crown. Where America was inspired by Enlightenment liberalism, Canada was founded on the basis of tradition and reaction – Canada explicitly rejected liberalism, offering the promise of “peace, order, and good government” in contrast to the American dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
1. Quebec very nearly left the country in a narrow 1995 referendum in which 49.5% of the province’s population voted to separate. It is widely believed in Anglo Canada that had the rest of the country been able to vote on the issue, Quebec would be its own country now.
2. Well actually a Brazilian investment firm has Timmies, but anyhow.
Three (more) Forgotten Roman Megaprojects
toldinstone
Published Jul 19, 2024This video explores another three forgotten Roman megaprojects: the colossal gold mines at Las Médulas, Spain; the Anastasian Wall, Constantinople’s outer defense; and Rome’s artificial harbor at Portus.
Chapters:
0:00 Las Médulas
3:13 The Anastasian Wall
5:24 Portus
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November 16, 2024
The 1980 Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander starts a post titled “The Early Christian Strategy” with some relevant back-story (fore-story?) involving game theory and the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma:
An example prisoner’s dilemma payoff matrix drawn by CMG Lee using emojis from Wikimedia Commons.
In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament.
He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE.
In the “tournament”, each bot “encountered” other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners’ Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won.
To everyone’s surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT:
- Always COOPERATE on the first move.
- Then do whatever your opponent did last round.
This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won — although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top.
In certain situations, this strategy is dominated by a slight variant, TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS. That is, in situations where a bot can “make mistakes” (eg “my finger slipped”), two copies of TIT-FOR-TAT can get stuck in an eternal DEFECT-DEFECT equilibrium against each other; the forgiveness-enabled version will try cooperating again after a while to see if its opponent follows. Otherwise, it’s still state-of-the-art.
The tournament became famous because – well, you can see how you can sort of round it off to morality. In a wide world of people trying every sort of con, the winning strategy is to be nice to people who help you out and punish people who hurt you. But in some situations, it’s also worth forgiving someone who harmed you once to see if they’ve become a better person. I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here. And pragmatically, this is good, common-sense advice.
For example, compare it to one of the losers in Axelrod’s tournament. COOPERATE-BOT always cooperates. A world full of COOPERATE-BOTS would be near-utopian. But add a single instance of its evil twin, DEFECT-BOT, and it folds immediately. A smart human player, too, will easily defeat COOPERATE-BOT: the human will start by testing its boundaries, find that it has none, and play DEFECT thereafter (whereas a human playing against TIT-FOR-TAT would soon learn not to mess with it). Again, all of this seems natural and common-sensical. Infinitely-trusting people, who will always be nice to everyone no matter what, are easily exploited by the first sociopath to come around. You don’t want to be a sociopath yourself, but prudence dictates being less-than-infinitely nice, and reserving your good nature for people who deserve it.
Reality is more complicated than a game theory tournament. In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount. In the real world, we have edge cases like poor people, who haven’t done anything evil but may not be able to reciprocate your generosity. Does TIT-FOR-TAT help the poor? Stand up for the downtrodden? Care for the sick? Domain error; the question never comes up.
Still, even if you can’t solve every moral problem, it’s at least suggestive that, in those domains where the question comes up, you should be TIT-FOR-TAT and not COOPERATE-BOT.
This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world.
RT20: Croatia’s Insane Kludged 20mm Anti-Materiel Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jul 31, 2024During its Homeland War, Croatia manufactured a wide variety of ad-hoc firearms including a number of anti-materiel rifles. The RT-20 was the largest of these, and its development began with the discovery of a stash of Yugoslav M55 anti-aircraft cannon barrels chambered for 20mm Hispano in a warehouse. These barrels were cut down, fitted with single-shot bolt actions, bipods, and bullpup stock assemblies and became the RT-20s. The most unusual element of the design is the use of gas vents about halfway down the barrel which open into a hollow tube which vents over the shooter’s shoulder. This creates a gas exhaust jet upon firing to help counteract recoil (and also reducing the muzzle velocity by about 25%). The recoil from firing is still pretty brutal, but the guns can be used — and were during the war for Croatia’s independence. A few remain in Croatian police inventory today …
A big thanks to the Croatian Police Museum (Muzej Policije) in Zagreb for giving me access to film this rare piece for you! Check them out at: https://muzej-policije.gov.hr
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QotD: Mao Zedong’s strategy of “protracted war” is a “strategy of the weak”
First, the party trying to win a protracted war accepts that they are unable to win a “war of quick decision” – because protracted war tends to be so destructive, if you have a decent shot at winning a war of quick decision, you take it. I do want to stress this – no power resorts to insurgency or protracted war by choice; they do it out of necessity. This is a strategy of the weak. Next, the goal of protracted war is to change the center of gravity of the conflict from a question of industrial and military might to a question of will – to make it about mobilizing people rather than industry or firepower. The longer the war can be protracted, the more opportunities will be provided to degrade enemy will and to reinforce friendly will (through propaganda, recruitment, etc.).
Those concerns produce the “phase” pattern where the war proceeds – ideally – in stages, precisely because the weaker party cannot try for a direct victory at the outset. In the first phase, it is assumes the stronger party will try to use their strength to force that war of quick decision (that they win). In response, the defender has to find ways to avoid the superior firepower of the stronger party, often by trading space for time or by using the supportive population as covering terrain or both. The goal of this phase is not to win but to stall out the attacker’s advance so that the war can be protracted; not losing counts as success early in a protracted war.
That success produces a period of strategic stalemate which enables the weaker party to continue to degrade the will of their enemy, all while building their own strength through recruitment and through equipment supplied by outside powers (which often requires a political effort directed at securing that outside support). Finally, once enemy will is sufficiently degraded and their foreign partners have been made to withdraw (through that same erosion of will), the originally weaker side can shift to conventional “positional” warfare, achieving its aims.
This is the basic pattern that ties together different sorts of protracted war: protraction, the focus on will, the consequent importance of the political effort alongside the military effort, and the succession of phases.
(For those who want more detail on this and also more of a sense of how protracted war, insurgency and terrorism interrelate as strategies of the weak, when I cover this topic in the military history survey, the textbook I use is W. Lee, Waging War: Conflict, Culture and Innovation in World History (2016). Chapter 14 covers these approaches and the responses to them and includes a more expensive bibliography of further reading. Mao’s On Protracted War can be found translated online. Many of Giáp’s writings on military theory are translated and gathered together in R. Stetler (ed.), The Military Art of People’s War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giáp (1970).)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How the Weak Can Win – A Primer on Protracted War”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-03.
November 15, 2024
The Final Solution to the German Question
World War Two
Published 14 Nov 2024Millions of Germans continue to be expelled from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. They run a gauntlet of violence, robbery, and even murder before arriving in the shattered remains of Berlin. By the end of 1945, the Allied Powers have at least agreed that further expulsions must be “orderly and humane”. But isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
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QotD: Battles are over-rated
Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal.
Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end.
Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting?
In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on.
In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories.
The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons.
Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk — the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000).
In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk — less than a month’s worth of AFV production.
If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter — if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter — what did?
Anonymous, “Your Book Review: How the War Was Won“, Astral Codex Ten, 2024-08-09.
November 14, 2024
Early Christianity – from ~1,000 to 40 million believers in the Roman Empire
The latest book review at Astral Codex Ten is Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity:
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.
Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.
This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!
Rodney Stark was a sociologist of religion. He started off studying cults, and got his big break when the first missionaries of the Unification Church (“Moonies”) in the US let him tag along and observe their activities. After a long and successful career in academia, he turned his attention to the greatest cult of all and wrote The Rise Of Christianity. He spends much of it apologizing for not being a classical historian, but it’s fine — he’s obviously done his homework, and he hopes to bring a new, modern-religion-informed perspective to the ancient question.
So: how did early Christianity win?
Following the Longest Roman Aqueduct
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published Jul 19, 2024Tunisia’s Zaghouan Aqueduct, built to serve Carthage in the second century, is among the longest and most impressive of all Roman aqueducts. This video follows the aqueduct from the monumental fountain at its source to the grandiose baths at its terminus.
Historic tours with toldinstone: https://toldinstone.com/trips/
Check out my other channels, @toldinstone and @toldinstonefootnotes
