CaNANDian
Published 25 Sep 2012Christopher Hitchens talked with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about George Orwell. Drawing on his book Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens talked about Orwell’s opposition to imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, his moral courage, and his devotion to language. Along the way, Hitchens made the case for why Orwell matters.
Download audio: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009…
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:
Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.
– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.
– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.
– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)
“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.
If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:
Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Jul 2017THE DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY: https://youtu.be/D9Ihs241zeg
It’s been brought to my attention that I made two mistakes: 1) Yes, I disappear at 18:26. Not sure how that happened. 2) At 12:25 I use a map of Africa that with some weird borders. That’s my bad. But if you look at a legit map of Africa, you’ll see the same straight lines in the places that I marked them.
(Remember: making mistakes is ok, so long as we learn from them)The Epic of Mwindo sure was cool, huh? This video is here to show you all about the lovely continent that it came from: Africa! And BOY are there a lot of misconceptions about it.
This video was produced with assistance from the Boston University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
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The Greek myths […] could not tell us of the conquest of Death by Love, because they could not know it yet; but they did know what it was not. They — the Greeks with their legends — were not just pessimistic. They were heroic pessimists.
Orpheus descends into Hades to retrieve his bride, Eurydice. In the account we read in Virgil’s Georgics, the point of the tale is already slightly smoothed, blunted. Orpheus has made the mistake of looking back on her countenance, when he is almost home. He has emerged in the sun, but she is still in the shadows. As he looks back, she recedes, disappears; she is now lost forever. In modern “education” we used to weep for the tragedy. He almost succeeded. It is a tragedy, strictly in the Roman pagan sense.
But it was a tragedy in the Greek sense, first. If we go instead to Plato, and listen to the aristocratic Phaedrus in the Symposium, we learn that Orpheus was thoroughly in the wrong, in his attempt to retrieve Eurydice. He was bound to be punished. His mistake was not a technicality. His living descent into Hades was a challenge not only to the gods, but to nature, and to the truth of things. His love for Eurydice, so affecting in his mournful dirges — moving everyone to tears — was not true love. A coward, he would not die for it.
Hades has presented him with a wraith, in Eurydice’s outward form. Inevitably, this illusion would dissolve in the sunlight. And the fate of Orpheus was now set — the fate of an eloquent softie, who loves an imaginary woman — a woman he had created from the start. He will die at the hands of the real ones he rejected. He will be torn apart by the Maenads, as by wild beasts. His lyre will be destroyed. This is the fate of our shallow romantic star; the pretty boy whose lyre and whose voice had once been an enchantment.
Boethius deals with that backward gaze, in the Consolations of Philosophy. We who seek to lead into the light of the upper day — we triumphalist philosophers — are bound to look back into the Tartarean cave. And when we do, the clarity of our “vision” will be obscured; then ruined, totally. To guide we must be guided; or all will be lost.
David Warren, “A backward glance”, Essays in Idleness, 2021-02-09.
World War Two
Published 15 May 2021The Soviets pre-empt a German offensive with one of their own in the south of the Eastern Front, but that’s not the only fighting. The skies over Malta and the waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence are full of action. Meanwhile, two races against time — and the Japanese — come to an end in India.
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Lindybeige
Published 26 Feb 2011A weapon can be very effective even if it never actually kills anyone.
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Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Jan 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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Today we have Part 2 of machine gun terminology — the small caliber guns. Specifically, submachine guns, personal defense weapons, and machine pistols. [Part 1 is here]
Submachine Gun: Pistol caliber, fully automatic, and fitted with a shoulder stock. For example, Thompson, MP40, MAS-38.
Machine pistol: Handgun form factor and fully automatic. For example, Glock 18, Mauser Schnellfeuer, Stechkin.
Automatic Rifle: Shoulder or hip fired, limited magazine capacity, minimal sustained fire capacity. Examples: M1918 BAR, Chauchat.
Personal Defense Weapon: (1) Armor-piercing or (2) holsterable submachine gun, not intended for front line combat. For example, FN P90, H&K MP7, Czech vz.61 Skorpion, Polish PM63 Rak.
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, 2001.
World War Two
Published 13 May 2021A large number of European and asian inhabitants of South-East Asia are locked up in Japanese prison camps, while in Burma, a big refugee crisis claims the lives of thousands. In Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor, gassing Jews on an immense scale begins.
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The Tank Museum
Published 18 Sep 2020The Tank Museum’s Archive and Library Manager Stuart Wheeler presents this Tank Chat Special on the Pak 43/41. Find out the history behind the infamous anti-tank gun and the story behind how it came to be in The Tank Museum’s collection — from its time as a gate-guard, to its restoration, and finally its display in the Museum.
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In The Line, Howard Anglin offers some observations on how Canada’s class system developed and how it can be very roughly delineated:
This comfortably flat image of our social hierarchy, however, belies a more complicated series of gradations that, while clearly marked, are rarely observed and almost never described accurately. Peter C. Newman mapped some of the terrain in his three volumes on The Canadian Establishment, but his account was already dated when he began it in 1975 and it was a work of history rather than social commentary by the time he finished in 1998. [Line editor Jen] Gerson’s own description of the Canadian class system explains why it can be hard for outsiders, and even insiders, to see it: “[W]e manage the cognitive dissonance presented by the haves and have-nots of housing,” she says, “by requiring our rich people to keep quiet. They should wear clothes that are well-cut and well-designed, but not flash. Buy the multi-millionaires car, but paint it in a sedate hue.”
Social sorting is intrinsic to human nature, perhaps even necessary — as the Bard has Ulysses remind us: “Take but degree away … and, hark, what discord follows!” — and it’s here in Canada too, if you look for it. Like the United States, Canadians early on replaced a class system based on titles with one based on the more easily-acquired currency of, well, currency. And, as in America, this immediately created a new opportunity for class to subtly reassert itself.
I used to joke that the only meaningful class division in Canada is whether you use “summer” as a noun or as a verb; lately I’ve developed the Starbucks test. In this analogy, Starbucks is Canada’s middle class, with Tim Hortons and fast food franchise coffee below, and specialty cafes and boutique chains (Matchstick, Phil & Sebastian, Bridgehead) above.
Unlike the crude measure of income, coffee choice better replicates a traditional class system because it carries an implicit sense of social solidarity, cultural assumptions and biases. During the days of the Harper government, Tim Hortons became a symbol to a certain sort of conservative as iconic as the Greek fisherman’s cap is to aging Marxists. The Maple Leaf red cup represented the honest values of rural and suburban working families, in contrast to the globalist elites with their overpriced green Starbucks. Starbucks was sipped at dog parks and served in board rooms; Tim Hortons got the job done on a cold winter morning: it was Don Cherry in a mug.
The Starbucks test is a silly heuristic, but it reveals something about the complex nature of class: an aristocrat may be penniless, and a billionaire may love his Tims. It also puts the middle class back in its traditional place as the uneasy middle-child of the social order.
In the old British system, there was pride in being working class. There was a bond of mutual support that grew out of the shared experience of hard labour and was reinforced by institutions like working men’s clubs, the British Legion, and the trade union movement. The middle-class striver with his airs and pretensions, his flash new car and his evolving accent, was a figure of general mockery, even more to the working men he left behind than to the upper classes he aspired to join. Class was about more than money; it was an identity. And there was nothing that gave you away as middle class more than worrying about being middle class — an anxiety exploited by Nancy Mitford in her tongue-in-cheek guide to “U” and “Non-U” language and behaviour. The Starbucks test reveals something similar, something more reflective of Canada’s reality than the Liberal vision of one big happy middle-class family.
Tim Worstall explained that the British middle class is still despised by the upper class and hated by the lower class. Not a model for encouraging aspirational working class folks to “move up”.
Atun-Shei Films
Published 24 Dec 2020Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the Lost Cause myth that tens of thousands of black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army during the American Civil War.
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Twitter ► https://twitter.com/atun_shei~REFERENCES~
[1] “Black Confederate Movement ‘Demented'” (2014). AmericanForum https://youtu.be/fYFIWlGJhjM
[2] Sam Smith. “Black Confederates: Myth and Legend.” American Battlefield Trust https://www.battlefields.org/learn/ar…
[3] “25th USCT: The Sable Sons of Uncle Abe.” National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/25-usct.htm
[4] Justin A. Nystrom. New Orleans After the Civil War (2010). Johns Hopkins Press, Page 20-27
[5] Kevin M. Levin. Searching for Black Confederates (2019). University of North Carolina Press, Page 45
[6] James Parton. General Butler in New Orleans (1864). Mason & Hamlin, Page 516-517
[7] Levin, Page 12-15
[8] Levin, Page 34-35
[9] Myra Chandler Sampson & Kevin M. Levin. “The Loyalty of ‘Heroic Black Confederate’ Silas Chandler” (2012). HistoryNet https://www.historynet.com/loyalty-si…
[10] Levin, Page 82-83
[11] James G. Hollandsworth, Jr. “Looking for Bob: Black Confederate Pensioners After the Civil War” (2007). The Journal of Mississippi History, Vol. LXVIX, Page 304-306
[12] Lewis H. Steiner. An Account of the Operations of the U.S. Sanitary Commission During the Campaign in Maryland, September 1862 (1862). Anson D. F. Randolph, Page 19-20
[13] Levin, Page 32-33
[14] Charles Augustus Stevens. Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters in the Army of the Potomac (1892). Price-McGill Company, Page 54-55
[15] Levin, Page 44
[16] Andy Hall. “Frederick Douglass and the ‘N*gro Regiment’ at First Manassas” (2011). Dead Confederates Blog https://deadconfederates.com/2011/07/…
[17] Jaime Amanda Martinez. “Black Confederates” (2018). Encyclopedia Virginia https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/…
[18] Levin, Page 58-61
[19] Levin, Page 39
[20] Levin, Page 46
World War Two
Published 11 May 2021She is much more than the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and once she tasted political life, she soon followed her own interests, changing what it means to be a politician’s wife.
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Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Aug 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
When someone makes a “fake” historical gun, they can do so with the intent to deceive or be up-front with the gun’s new manufacture. Those acknowledged reproductions are a great option to have — guns like Uberti reproduction revolvers give us an excellent opportunity to shoot antique designs without the cost of true originals and without the risk of damaging them. On the other hand, creating “antiques” fraudulently to deceive someone into believing they are actually originals is a reprehensible practice.
What about when you don’t know, though? In the Victorian era, it was popular to have fancy antique guns — like these wheellock pistols. Just like today, not everyone could afford to actually go buy a 300-year-old ornate gun, though. So, many people would commission new replicas made (and I’m sure plenty of fraudulent copies were created as well). Fast forward a hundred years or more to the present day, and we have a bit of a conundrum for the potential buyer. Is a gun 100 years old or 400? It takes some substantial experience and knowledge to be able to tell the difference — and yet an acknowledged Victorian copy is still a potentially fantastic piece of workmanship and collectible in its own right.
Another of the reader-contributed book reviews at Astral Codex Ten considers the personal history and astounding political career of LBJ, as told by biographer Robert Caro:
2: LBJ’s guide to amassing power
(i) Seduce older men
(Eww, not like that.) LBJ had a gift for becoming a “professional son” to any powerful man. At college, LBJ sat at professors’ feet and stared at them as if they were God’s gift to the educational system. LBJ constantly ran errands for the college president, Prexy Evans, and wrote glowing editorials about him.
LBJ’s fellow students were not amused. One said:
“Words won’t come to describe how Lyndon acted toward the faculty — how kowtowing he was, how suck-assing he was, how brown-nosing he was.”
But this flattery paid off. Evans put LBJ in charge of the financial aid program. Yes, really. And when other students wrote nasty comments about LBJ in the yearbook (e.g. the time he stole the Student Council elections), Evans ordered professors to cut out those pages with razors.
LBJ would repeat this flattery with President (Franklin) Roosevelt, Speaker Rayburn, and Senator Russell.
(ii) Treat your employees like dirt
LBJ wanted his staff to be absolutely loyal, so he could direct them like chess pieces. He found their weak points — their weight, their divorce — and mercilessly taunted them. I’m not going to describe the crude things he did.
Before his marriage, LBJ treated Lady Bird like an angel; once they were married, he treated her like one of his employees.
[…]
(v) Use money in new and exciting ways
LBJ funneled government contracts to Brown & Root, a construction company. In return, they gave his campaign gobs of money. During the 1948 election, two of his campaign staff ate at a cafe and then accidentally left behind a brown paper bag containing $50,000 in cash (more than $500,000 in today’s money). Luckily no one stole it.
Using all of this money, LBJ was able to make the media say whatever he wanted about his opponent, Coke Stevenson. He hired “missionaries” to hang out in bars and spread rumors about Stevenson. Thousands of federal workers also repeated LBJ’s talking points.
(vi) Cheat
But Stevenson was a storybook character, so money couldn’t defeat him. He simply told the people of Texas that he would continue to do the right thing, and they believed him. LBJ had lost the 1941 Senate election because Pappy O’Daniel had cheated better than he did. Now LBJ would cheat, and he would cheat big.
In 1940s Texas, basically every type of election fraud was real: Dead people voting, county bosses writing down whatever numbers they wanted, Mexicans being hired to cross the border and vote, etc. By buying tens of thousands of votes, LBJ was almost able to close the gap between him and Coke Stevenson. That wasn’t enough, so six days after the election, Luis Salas “found” 200 more votes for LBJ, giving him a margin of victory of 0.01%.
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