World War Two
Published 7 Feb 2026In spring 1933, Nazi Germany shows how dictatorship becomes normal. This episode of Death of Democracy follows the regime’s second quarter in power, from the first state-organized antisemitic boycott to the destruction of free trade unions and the takeover of the courts. Step by step, democratic institutions are hollowed out through fear, legality, and propaganda. Death of Democracy reveals how tyranny doesn’t arrive overnight — it is made to feel ordinary.
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February 8, 2026
How Legal Immunity Becomes Absolute Power – Death of Democracy Q2 1933
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February 7, 2026
S.R.E.M.: Britain’s Experimental WW2 Bullpup Sniper
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Sept 2025The Sniper Rifle Experimental Model (S.R.E.M.) was designed by the “Czech Section” of small arms designers who had taken refuge in the UK to escape German occupation of Czechoslovakia. The intention was to develop a scoped sniper rifle that could be fired and cycled without disturbing the shooter’s sight picture. The idea that the designers came up with was to use the pistol grip as a moving charging handle, similar to the Czech BESA machine gun already in British service.
In 1944, the Essex Engineering Works in the UK got a contract to make 22 sample S.R.E.M.s, although only 2 were actually made. Really, the whole concept was a bit of a red herring, as the recoil from 8mm Mauser (this was made in 8mm, expected the post-war the UK would be adopting it or another modern rimless round to replace the .303) would disturb the sight picture regardless of the mechanism used to cycle the action. The project was cancelled in 1945, and this example is the only known survivor today.
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February 6, 2026
Dresden Part 2 – Firestorm Dresden: Three Days In Hell!
HardThrasher
Published 5 Feb 2026In “Firestorm Dresden: 3 Days in Hell”*, we’ll unpack the bombing and subsequent firestorm in February 1945. We’ll look at how first the RAF night raids and then the US 8th Air Force daylight attacks unfolded, the damage they did and the horrific impact on the ground. We’ll look at how the aftermath shaped the myths and understanding surrounding the raid, and the fate of Arthur Harris and those who’d planned the raid.
* Proof once more, as if it were needed, how shit AI is — I have, apparently, to put the title of the video into the first words in the description to attract Google’s attention … I am so sorry to brutalise the English language like this.
[NR: Part one was posted here on January 22nd, should you want to watch it first.]
00:00 – 02:22 – Opening
02:26 – 06:20 – The weather
06:20 – 16:12 – The attack
16:18 – 25:17 – Horror on the ground
25:22 – 29:26 – USAAF Attacks
29:30 – 34:30 – Dealing with the bodies
34:34 – 44:59 – Reaction in the west
45:03 – 48:06 – The Soviet view
48:10 – 54:27 – Summing up and close
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February 4, 2026
The Korean War Week 85: Futilely Pounding North Korea? – February 3, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Feb 2026The UN forces are by now having trouble just keeping their planes in the skies, thanks to shortages of spare parts, so for long can they maintain aerial supremacy over Korea? And though the aerial campaign to destroy North Korean infrastructure has been stepped up, so too has the enemy’s ability to quickly rebuild. And at the armistice talks, the big issue this week is which countries will form inspection teams after an armistice, and who might be out of the question. The Soviets?
00:00 Intro
01:06 Recap
01:30 The POW Lists
07:12 The Soviets
10:25 Communist Manpower
12:01 Air Force Supply Issues
13:21 Summary
13:34 Conclusion
14:17 Call to Action
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French Trials FN CAL: Adding Rifle Grenade Capability
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Sept 2025In the 1970s when the French Army was looking for a new rifle 5.56mm, they tested a number of foreign rifles alongside development the FAMAS at St Etienne. These included the HK33, the M16, and the FN CAL — and today we are looking at the FN CAL. It already had a four-position selector switch (safe/semi/full/burst), fulfilling one of the French Army requirements. But it did not have sufficient grenade launching capability, and so several examples were modified for trials with unique rifle grenade launching hardware.
Ultimately the HK33 was the best performing rifle, but it was not seen as a politically acceptable option and the FAMAS was chosen instead. I have not seen the trials reports to understand specifically why the FN CAL was unsuccessful, but we know that it was unsuccessful in many other trials, and FN dropped it for the distinct FNC design instead before long.
Full FN CAL teardown: • FN CAL: Short-Lived Predecessor to the FNC
HK33F Video: • Roller Delay in France: The H&K 33F (Trial…Many thanks to the IRCGN (Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale) for allowing me access to film these trials prototypes for you!
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QotD: The impact of quasi-official monotheism on the Roman Empire
This trend towards calcification [into the relatively rigid categorizations of honestiores and humiliores (“respectable” and “humble” people, but in practice, “wealthy” and “commoners”)] had been matched by the loss of Rome’s (admittedly opportunistic and unevenly applied) religious tolerance. This is often attributed to Christianity itself, but is perhaps better understood in light of the increasing demands of emperors during and after the Crisis of the Third Century to insist on unity through uniformity. The first empire-wide systemic persecution of Christians, the Decian Persecution (250 AD) was exactly this – an effort to have all Romans everywhere sacrifice for the safety of the emperor as an act of unity to strengthen his reign which rather backfired because it seems not to have occurred to Decius that Christians (of whom, by 250, there were many) would be unable to participate. Diocletian likewise launched the Great Persecution in 303 as part of a program to stress unity in worship and try to bind the fractured Roman Empire together, particularly by emphasizing the cults of Jupiter and Hercules. From that perspective, Christians were a threat to the enforced, homogeneous unity Diocletian wanted to foster and thus had to be brought back or removed, though of course in the event Christianity’s roots were by 303 far too deep for it to be uprooted.
That is part of the context where we should understand Constantine (r. 306-337). Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity again – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism had arose as a consequence of Diocletian’s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).
It is in that context that later Christian emperors’ efforts to unify the empire behind Christianity (leading to the Edict of Thessalonica in 380) ought to be understood – as the culmination of, by that point, more than a century of on-again, off-again efforts by emperors to try to strengthen the empire by enforcing religious unity. By the end of the fourth century, the Christian empire was persecuting pagans and Jews, not even a full century after it had been persecuting Christians.
These efforts to violently enforce unity through homogeneity had the exact opposite effect. Efforts to persecute Arian Christians (who rejected the Nicene Creed) created further divisions in the empire; they also made it even more difficult to incorporate the newly arriving Germanic peoples, who had mostly converted to the “wrong” (Arian) Christianity. Meanwhile, in the fifth century, the church in the East splintered further, leading to the “Nestorian” (the term is contested) churches of Syria and the Coptic Church in Egypt on the “outs” with the official (Eastern) Roman Church and thus also facing persecution after the Council of Ephesus in 431. The resentment created by the policy of persecution in the East seems to have played a fairly significant role in limiting the amount of local popular resistance faced by the Muslim armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the conquests of Syria, the Levant and Egypt in the 630s, since in many cases Christian communities viewed as “heretical” by Constantinople could actually expect potentially better treatment under Muslim rule. Needless to say, this both made the Muslim conquests of those regions easier but also go some distance to explaining why Roman/Byzantine reconquest was such a non-starter. Efforts to enforce unity in the empire had, perhaps paradoxically, made it more fragile rather than more resilient.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
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February 3, 2026
The Killer Pigs of the Middle Ages
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Aug 2025Sliced roasted pork loin with jus
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1390Pigs were an important source of food in the Middle Ages. They didn’t take up a lot of space, had lots of babies, and ate pretty much anything, so despite their smell and bouts of violence (sometimes ending in murder), they were commonly found throughout Europe.
This English recipe, which uses black pepper, coriander seed, caraway seed, and wine, all expensive ingredients that had to come from far away, wouldn’t have been for the common folk. Today, these ingredients are readily found at the grocery store, and this is a delicious roast that is perfect for those just getting into medieval cooking. As with a lot of historical recipes, there are no quantities given, so feel free to adjust the amounts of any of the spices to suit your taste.
Cormarye.
Take Coriander, Caraway small ground, Powder of Pepper and garlic ground in red wine, muddle all this together and salt it, take loins of Pork raw and flay off the skin, and prick it well with a knife and lay it in the sauce, roast thereof what thou wilt, & keep that that falleth therefrom in the roasting and seeth it in a little pot with fair broth, & serve it forth with the roast anon.
— The Forme of Cury, 1390
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February 2, 2026
Amelia continues to annoy and scare the UK establishment
Leo Kearse mocks the establishment media folks who are just wetting themselves over Amelia’s malign influence on English youth, pushing such hateful themes as loving England, having a pint at the pub, loving dogs, eating bacon, etc.
Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism is a computer game created in collaboration with Prevent, the agency tasked with stopping radicalisation that could lead to terrorism.
It’s your usual state funded dopey social engineering, You play a non-binary college student called Charlie. You have to make it through college without being radicalised. Parents in the United Arab Emirates will no longer send their kids to London because they’re worried about them being radicalised by Islamists. So do you think that’s what this game looks at?
No, this is dealing with white Brits. The radicalised actions are things like “looking up immigration statistics” or “talking about English identity”.
Amelia is a character in the game. A purple-haired girl who tries to radicalise you into eating bacon because, like all young purple-haired girls, she’s a fascist.
This being Britain, people have taken the piss out of the game, because that’s what Brits do. The establishment is not taking the pisstakes well.
There are many people on the social media site formerly known as Twitter sharing Amelia memes and stories, including @Amelia, sharing bits of English and British history in bite-sized morsels:
GM Britain ☕
In 1696, England’s currency was in crisis. Coin clippers were shaving silver off the edges of coins, melting it down, and spending the debased coins at full face value. Around 10% of the nation’s currency was counterfeit. Riots broke out 🔥
Britain’s solution? Put Sir Isaac Newton in charge of the Royal Mint 🪙
Not just gravity, you see.
Newton recalled every coin in the country. Melted them all down. Reminted them with a reeded edge – ridges along the rim that made clipping instantly visible.
Before Newton arrived, the Mint produced 15,000 coins a week.
He had them turning out 50,000.
Then he went undercover. Disguised himself. Visited taverns and dens. Built networks of informants. Prosecuted over 100 counterfeiters.
At least two dozen were hanged at Tyburn.
The man who gave us gravity also saved the British economy.
That’s British ingenuity. 🇬🇧
One of the many variations of this image (original by John Carter, I think) amused me:
And another snippet of history via @Amelia:
GM Britain ☕️
In India, the practice of Sati was a custom that saw widows burned alive on their husbands funeral pyres. This awful tradition continued for centuries until Britain banned it in 1829. 🔥
Hindu priests protested: “It’s our religion!”
The British commander in India, General Charles Napier, replied;
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
The practice stopped.
🇬🇧
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The Biggest Naval Battle in History: Leyte Gulf 1944
Real Time History
Published 5 Sept 2025In Fall 1944, Japan is set on stopping the US from re-capturing the Philippines, a vital trade route between the Japanese home islands and the resource-rich occupied territories to the south. With a complex plan they want to strike the US Navy as it’s landing on Leyte island. The resulting series of battles is today known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the biggest naval battle in history.
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February 1, 2026
How to End Democracy in 60 Days – Death of Democracy Q1 1933
World War Two
Published 31 Jan 2025This episode of the history documentary series “Death of Democracy” covers Q1 1933 with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichstag Fire, Reichstag Fire Decree, Enabling Act, rise of Nazi terror, Gleichschaltung, and media control, explaining how Weimar Germany’s democracy collapsed in just sixty days.
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Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:
The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.
Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.
Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.
He then elaborates:
It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.
America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.
Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.
Australia, same narrative as Canada.
New Zealand, same as Australia.
Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.
France, same as England.
Spain, same as France.
Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.
Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.
The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.
The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.
The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.
The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.
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The Agora of Athens | A Historical Tour
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 3 Oct 2025The Agora was the political and economic heart of ancient Athens. This tour explores its long history and evocative ruins.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Bouleuterion
1:44 Tholos
2:22 Monument of the Eponymous Heroes
2:56 Temple of Hephaestus
5:28 The Hellenistic Agora
6:16 Stoa of Attalos
6:57 Augustus and the Agora
8:06 Odeon of Agrippa
9:26 Herulian Wall
10:56 Overview
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January 31, 2026
“… nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a ‘granfalloon'”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to an older tweet about the replacement of “original” Romans during the Republic with other ethnicities over the course of the Empire:
Any time a nation allows slavery, de jure or de facto, the business owning class immediately tries to replace the working class with slaves.
If they succeed, the nation collapses and everyone dies. A nation cannot survive if it’s populated by slaves.
Why?
Because nations are what Kurt Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon” … his word for an association that only exists because people believe in it.
Now Vonnegut, who was a liberal and therefore wrong about everything important, meant to mock the concept of nations and tribes by coining this term. He believed them to be unnecessary throwbacks to humanity’s primitive past … a delusion he was able to sustain because he never had to try existing without one.
Granfalloons are indeed arbitrary — you could base them on anything — but humans cannot survive without them. Because humans are a pack animal.
If you drop your cat off somewhere in the woods at night, assuming he is a healthy and physically fit cat, he will likely survive, regardless of his unhappiness at the sudden deficiency of chin scratches and clean laundry to sleep on.
Try that experiment with your dog, and he’ll die.
Why? It’s not because cats are smarter than dogs. They’re about the same.
It’s because cats are not a pack animal. A cat doesn’t need other cats to survive. The basic unit required to execute all cat survival strategies is one cat.
Dog survival strategies work just fine, too, but they require multiple dogs. A lone dog will die because he cannot execute his survival strategies by himself.
And so it is with humans.
The great error of the classical liberal worldview is that, because history is full of tribes fighting wars over scarce resources, that it was the tribes, not the scarcity, that caused conflict.
So they decided they were going to get rids of tribes, and nations, and religions, all the granfalloons, and just glue everything together with economics. And there would somehow be world peace.
Kurt Vonnegut was a dreamer.
Unfortunately for all of us, he was not the only one.
So the experiment was carried out, and in every single place it was carried out, things got observably, obviously worse. Sometimes “gosh the boomers had it way easier than us” worse, and sometimes “what shall we do these corpses, Comrade Commissar” worse, but always worse.
Because economic incentives alone cannot hold a society together.
Economic incentives, without ethnic or cultural solidarity, get you nothing but massive robbery and fraud.
It’s why the Biden Administration let millions of third world savages into America. It’s why Proctor and Gamble sells you poison food, and why the American Heart Association takes their money to lie to you and say it’s healthy. It’s why every product you buy, from your Tesla to your laptop to your security camera system, tries to spy on you and control how you use the thing you paid for and theoretically own. It’s why you’ve never held the same job for more than three years, because they either laid you off or gave you two percent raises every year until you had to find a new company to pay you what you’re actually worth.
When there is no granfalloon, there is no incentive not to cheat. And no, fear of punishment doesn’t work. The police cannot arrest, try and convict everyone. And when there is no granfalloon, the enforcers themselves have no incentive to actually perform, instead of looking just busy enough to get paid, or taking bribes to look the other way.
An atomized group of individuals, unconnected by a granfalloon, have no morality, because morality isn’t something an individual has. It’s something a tribe has, because what the word “morality” actually means is the system of behavior that tribe members display towards each other.
A slave has no morality. He has no sense of responsibility, not only for the nation, not only for his masters, but even for his fellow slave. He is homo economicus, the man who responds purely to incentives of reward and punishment.
A slave has no granfalloon.
Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote “If you wish to examine a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon.” By which he meant that such associations are nothing but a puff of air, and therefore unimportant.
But having been surrounded by air all his life, in abundant supply, Kurt had forgotten that air is important.
You need it for breathing.
Try removing the skin of a SCUBA tank.
WW1: Hell in the Trenches | EP 4
The Rest Is History
Published 4 Sept 2025What happened at the crucial, bloody, Battle of Ypres in October 1914? How did the battle come about? Why did the Germans and the British fight each other so brutally and for so long to take Ypres? What made the fighting so particularly violent? How were the British able to repel the relentless German onslaught time after time? What was the famous “Kindermord” — “the Massacre of the Innocents” — in the German army, and how true was it? And, what would be the outcome of this almighty clash?
Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the terrible Battle of Ypres; its significance to the First World War overall, and its consequences for the rise of Hitler in Germany later on….
0:00 – Adobe Express AD
0:49 – Intro: To the Front
3:26 – The Kindermord Myth
5:02 – Race to Ypres
11:04 – The Ypres Salient
17:07 – Crisis at Gheluvelt
23:29 – Uber & Folio Society ADs
25:43 – November Slaughter
32:05 – The Langemark Legend
44:02 – Why the War Didn’t Stop
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January 30, 2026
“… now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts”
On Substack, The Scuttlebutt looks at an iconic photo, a sculpture based on the photo, and shows that the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is still quite true: “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”
In an old black and white John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper man tells the hero of the piece “When Legend becomes Fact, print the Legend”. Meaning; tell the people what you want them to know, even if it’s not true. We’re going to talk about that today; but first, Get in out of the cold damn it! Seven degrees is cold even by my standards. Grab a cup of coffee, or cocoa, tea if you must, pollute it as you will, and have a seat, Dinner is Chili, please remember the tip jar where we collect for the mess. Let’s begin!
I referred to the picture above last week, though I didn’t include it. I’m going to include it now, because of something that a reader and good friend of some four decades sent me, in regard to it. See, she lives in Birmingham, where there is a statue commemorating this event, titled Foot Soldier. This is it:
Notice any differences from the photo of the event? Yeah, the cop is the one grabbing the kid, and the dog is threatening, the kid is defiant, and the cop looks like they pulled him out of a Soviet or Nazi recruiting poster. (The article I will reference also calls out the fact that the kid in the sculpture has emphasized black racial features. The kid it happened to, is so Anglo in feature he could be a white guy in “blackface”. Oh and the kid in real life is every bit as big as the cop.) Those are just the initial things, there’s more, but I’ve made my point.
Yeah, you in the back, with the purple hair and the septum ring? What’s that? “But that’s art” you say? “Putting artistic license on the sculpture is reasonable” you say?
Well, Ma’am? I think you’re a Ma’am? Yes, it is. It’s propaganda, but “Art” is allowed to be propaganda, and in fact most art is just that. From the formal paintings of Kings and Heads of State, to Andy Warhol’s stuff, images are altered to make a point. Maybe to emphasize a chin that’s pretty weak in the real guy, making him look “tougher” or putting more jewelry on the woman than the family owns to make them look richer … Most art that isn’t just “an exercise for the student” has some sort of statement. (Note, I consider “still life with fruit”, and such things to be an exercise, teaching proportion and play with light.) Political caricatures are the ultimate expression of this point, and that cop is a political caricature.
Ah, but here’s the thing. While the “art” is reasonably a political statement, the news story, and the photograph are supposed to be news, and we have been told that “News is facts, not Op-ed”.
Well, we all know that lately, that’s just not so, but here’s the thing: It never was!
It’s not that the Media is lying to you today, it’s that the media has NEVER told the truth. It’s just that by the time the truth comes out, usually, it’s decades later, and no one cares.
But you SHOULD care. Take this event enshrined in legend (Remember that quote “print the legend”?) There’s a gentleman named Malcom Gladwell. He does a podcast called Revisionist History. The transcript of the relevant show is HERE as done by Emily Maina. The whole piece is really well done, and worth your time, but it’s about twenty minutes worth of reading, so I’m pulling out a couple of points to help make my point.
Mr. Gladwell was invited by the widow of the cop, to learn, as the late Great Paul Harvey used to put it, “The Rest of the Story”. This drove him to track down the artist that did the sculpture, the actual kid that was involved, friends of the cop in question, caused him to listen to the interviews done when the statue was commemorated, and so on. It seems the legend is far different from the truth. The kid in the picture wasn’t even part of the damn protest. He was a lookie-loo who had skipped school to come see “the great man” Martin Luther King.
The protests had at this point been going on for months. Constantly getting bigger, constantly drawing more spectators. The cops, specifically “the Birmingham Chief of Police, a troglodyte named Bull Connor”, in the words of Gladwell, have been tasked with keeping the spectators separated from the protesters. There was, after all, a legitimate fear that someone in the spectators might just be a Klansman, and might be aiming to take out some of MLK’s folks.
Well, that gets harder and harder to do, and the protester numbers keep growing, the spectators keep growing, until finally, Conner decides to use the K9 units to keep the peace. This is all a part of “the plan”. The protestors are trying to get the cops to do something that can be blown up and make international headlines. Finally, they succeeded.
The third of May, 1963. A photographer, Bill Hudson, gets a picture of a kid with a cop dog on him. White officer, black victim, mean dog. That’s what the narrative is. The New York Times runs it, three columns above the fold, and makes up a story to go along with it. The trouble is, no one talked to the cop, or to the kid.
The cop was Richard Middleton, his last gig had been escorting black kids to school, to keep them from being killed by whites. He’s been assigned now, to keep the separation line between the protesters and the populace. The kid’s name is Walter Gadsden, according to the person that interviewed him at the dedication of the statue, he’s now “a grumpy old man still wedded to some of the oldest and most awkward of Black prejudices”. She sees him as Stockholmed basically.
Walter, he sees himself as a dumb kid who skipped school, went where he wasn’t supposed to, and damn near got bit by a K9 because of it. Middleton was trying to pull the dog off, you can see it in the photo, if you actually look. But that’s not the legend, and the media prints “the legend”. The artist admits:
Well, I saw that the boy was being about 6’4, the officer was maybe 5’10, 5’9. And I said, “This is a movement about power”. So I made the little boy younger and smaller, and the officer taller and stronger. The arm of the law is so strong, that’s why his arm is almost, like, straight. And the dog is more like a wolf than a real dog. Because if I’m a little boy, that’s what I would see. I would see like this superman hovering over me, putting this big old giant monster of a dog in my groin area, in my private area. And so, that’s what I envisioned when I first saw the photograph.
Of course, the artist is a black man. He continues: “So he’s almost like a blind officer. He doesn’t even see the kid, because he’s so far beyond that. ‘Killed this nigger. Attack this nigger.’ He saw past the reality of this is a hu-, innocent chi-, human child, a human being, that’s why he was wearing blind people glasses like that.”
Well, it’s art, the artist wasn’t there, never talked to anyone involved, and he told the story he wanted to tell. OK, that’s what art does. The trouble is, that’s also what the news media did.
And they got away with it, until July 6 2017, which is when the article in question came out. Actually, they are still getting away with it, because now that the legend is fully established, good luck trying to convince people of the facts.
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