Marx thought the Proletariat would develop class consciousness — that is, solidarity based on their mutual exploitation by the “capitalists” and “bourgeoisie” — and from that all else would flow. Lenin modified that, arguing that The Proletariat would never achieve class consciousness without a “Vanguard Party”. That’s why it’s Marxism-Leninism to this day. Lenin was closer to correct, but with this crucial difference: Instead of leading the Laboring Masses to Socialism, the Vanguard Party has decided “hey fuck the Laboring Masses, we’re getting ours“.
Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses” for a reason — by dulling their pain, it prevented them from realizing their true class position, thus achieving class consciousness, thus sparking The Revolution. What religion really does, of course, is satisfy a deep yearning in the human soul. There is more to life than shit, shoes, and bread. Karl Marx didn’t want to hear that, because his religious yearning was satisfied by his substitute god, Dialectical Materialism, and the half-assed (but very real) ceremonial it produced. Again, there’s a reason every Leftwinger practically from the French Revolution looked like [this]
I don’t know how you say “fake and gay” in Russian, but every single thing in that photograph is fake and gay. A pose. An affectation. And as with their look, so with their behavior. Leftwingers are, and always have been, famously boorish. They have no idea how longshoremen actually act, but they sure think they know, and so that’s how they act — like the worst caricature of a crude, illiterate, drunken longshoreman.
(I don’t know any longshoremen either, but I do know some folks who make a living from the sweat of their brows, and they’d turn Lenin’s head around for him if he came to their neighborhood and started acting like that. The Laboring Masses might indeed be “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s sense — meaning, without too much formal education — but they’re surely not rude in the behavioral sense, because in their world, running your mouth gets you punched in it).
Dressing and acting like that is, quite literally, a religious ceremony for them … and ceremonial can only take place in a designated space, a liminal space that the community respects. A priest can indeed hold a mass on a street corner, but only if the passersby have enough residual respect for the institution of religion not to beat and rob the worshipers while their backs are turned.
The intelligentsia never understood that consciously. They sure as hell understood it unconsciously, though, which is why they immediately self-segregated — getting “sent down to the countryside, to reconnect with the laboring masses” was one of the worst punishments Mao’s boys could dish out to one of their mandarins, and again, there’s a reason for that. The upshot is, the intelligentsia, the Apparat, the Cloud People, whatever you want to call them, are the only ones who developed “class consciousness” in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary sense …
… and their class consciousness is entirely oppositional. They are not us. That’s their sole criterion for virtue. Whatever we like, they dislike. Whatever we do, they must not do; and whatever we eschew, they must embrace.
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
August 13, 2026
QotD: Marx was right about “class consciousness”
August 12, 2026
The Korean War Week 112 – The Chinese Take Siberia – August 11, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 11 Aug 2026There’s heavy fighting in the field this week for a position the US Marines call Siberia. Behind the scenes there’s worry, though, as the US Army is more and more facing a manpower crisis. They are, however, training ever more South Korean troops to one day hopefully bring all their own troops home from the Korean peninsula, and leave it defended by the locals.
“Hitler’s socialism wasn’t just an internal economic policy – it was the cause of the war”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski explains why socialism — of the left (the Soviet Union) and the right (Nazi Germany) — was the economic driver that pushed Europe into war in 1939. German socialism (in one state) could only continue to grow by annexing resources and manufacturing capabilities from neighbouring states, and by August 1939 it was Poland’s turn:
Socialism was at the origin of the war. Not as a coincidence. As a necessity. The socialist economic model generates contradictions it cannot resolve internally – the calculation problem, the misallocation, the stagnation, the mounting failure. War is the exit. It provides the external enemy that explains the internal failure. It justifies the total mobilization the system always wanted. It consumes the surplus population the economy cannot employ. It redirects the resentment outward.
Does this remind you of anything?
The evidence is not subtle. The NSDAP program of 1920 reads like a standard socialist manifesto. The economic reality confirmed it – price controls, industrial planning, state allocation of raw materials, entrepreneurs reduced to government functionaries. Private property in name only. Mises called it Zwangswirtschaft – coercive economy. Hayek dedicated a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the socialist roots of Nazism. Both writing from observation, not retrospect.
After 1945 the Soviet victors imposed their version and attached the capitalist label to every rival. Western textbooks followed. The lie became the curriculum.
The real divide has never been left versus right. It is collective control versus individual freedom. Once you place National Socialism correctly within the family of collectivisms, the political spectrum becomes legible – and the war becomes explicable.
When the system fails — and it always fails — it needs an enemy. The bigger the failure, the bigger the enemy required.
Imagine being Poland. Squeezed between two socialist systems, both searching for their enemy.
We were it.
US Army M68 Close Combat Optic aka Aimpoint CompM Series
Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Mar 2026When Aimpoint entered the competition for a US Army standard-issue combat optic in the 1990s, they really didn’t expect to win. The other finalists were Trijicon and Meprolite, and it seems like a safe bet that the American firm — Trijicon — would get the contract. However, it ended up going to Aimpoint’s CompM on both price and technical capability. This meant an order for 100,000 of the optics, requiring Aimpoint to massively scale up. It also led to a series of improvements to the design, which became the CompM2, CompM3, and CompM4.
Today, we are looking at the history of this evolution. How the Aimpoint 3000 became the Comp[etition], how the Comp was ruggedized to the CompM[ilitary], and how the Swedish Army Aimpoint CS led to the current CompM4.
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August 11, 2026
QotD: The long lead-up to the invasion of Iraq
The Americans kicked Iraq out of Kuwait quickly and easily, and then … hesitated about what to do next. Nobody wanted to keep Saddam around (remarkably, when you have outlived your usefulness, people suddenly start to notice all of your human rights abuses), but nobody wanted to march into Baghdad and topple him either. There was some wishful thinking that the Kuwait defeat would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but most US foreign policy thinkers just shrugged their shoulders and figured better Saddam than chaos and a Vietnam-style quagmire. One especially perceptive official put it this way to a PBS journalist:
I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict … and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it.
That official’s name was Dick Cheney.
So Saddam was left in place, and throughout the ’90s American policymakers seethed about it. There was no official policy that said we were going to overthrow him, but prominent politicians like Al Gore were out there writing op-eds saying that Saddam must be toppled and his government dismantled. This produced what Mazarr calls “destructive ambiguity” — everybody knew that everybody else knew that the real policy was to get rid of the guy, but since this was an unofficial position it went through none of the usual policymaking channels and was never formally debated. It also left a lot of room for freelancing.
For example, CIA clandestine operative Bob Baer (whose memoir is a terrifically fun read, by the way) began organizing a coup in 1995, not because he was directly ordered to do so but because he thought it was what his supervisors wanted. Even the strategy of the coup points towards this ambiguity — rather than straightforwardly overthrowing the government, it aimed to spark a rebellion that would gain some momentum but not enough to win, so that when Saddam moved to crush it the US would be pulled in and forced to act.1 Think for a moment about what an odd plan this is, and how it only makes sense if you believe the US secretly wants to invade while officially pretending not to.
The leader of this rebellion was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi, one of the more fascinating characters in this story. Chalabi was a dapper, cosmopolitan, and erudite bank manager who got exiled from Iraq for gross financial corruption. He promptly reinvented himself as a freedom fighter, rented beautiful houses stocked with fine art in several major cities, and set about ingratiating himself with Western elites. He also began organizing his fellow emigrés and exiles into an effective political lobbying force. Unsurprisingly given his educated and aristocratic manner, he was extremely good at the lobbying part, and soon placed a special focus on the United States, wining and dining congressmen and writing op-eds for major newspapers. Soon he managed to convince the CIA that there were thousands of resistance fighters back in Iraq ready to follow him into battle.
He was good at convincing, but they also wanted to be convinced. Chalabi and his fellow emigrés were charming, cultured, westernized intellectuals who at least pretended to be pro-democracy. It was oh-so-tempting to believe that everybody in Iraq was like that, when in fact they were completely unrepresentative. As a rule of thumb, when a country has a revolution or a civil war or other social breakdown, the ones who make it out are the ones bright enough to see it coming and rich or well-connected enough to escape. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the Lebanese Civil War, or whatever you call what’s happening in South Africa, the people who leave are not a random subset — they’re the creme-de-la-creme. Unfortunately the US government somehow couldn’t figure this out in the case of Iraq. They met the emigrés, and were impressed by them, and decided that Iraq really was a civilized and cosmopolitan place under the surface, when in fact the society that created the emigrés had been destroyed decades earlier.
The emigrés represent one pole of the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that emerged in the ’90s to advocate for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. The other is exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, a soft-spoken academic who bounced between senior government positions and jobs at think tanks. Wolfowitz was a humanitarian in the most sincere sense. Much of his extended family had been killed in the Holocaust. The plight of oppressed peoples was not an abstraction for him, and he dedicated his life and career to the proposition that the United States should use all available means to end tyranny and oppression wherever they existed.
Wolfowitz is commonly described as a fanatical neoconservative, and he is, but I think it’s important to demystify that term. Too often it gets used as a catchall for “people we don’t like”, but at least when it comes to foreign policy the neoconservatives fit squarely within the American mainstream. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, every American president of the past few decades has had essentially the same foreign policy, driven by essentially the same core ideas: (1) Americans are the good guys, (2) it’s the job of the good guys to right wrongs wherever they are happening, (3) freedom and democracy are the non-negotiable inheritance of everybody on planet earth. These ideas drive the neoconservatives, yes, but they also drive Samantha Power and Susan Rice, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
If you are an American, it may not be apparent to you how weird these ideas seem to the rest of the world. If I were to characterize how previous empires — and America’s current rivals — think about the world, it would be more like: (1) every country has core interests and peripheral interests, (2) you should not interfere in another country’s core interests if you can help it, (3) different peoples and cultures are adapted to different forms of government, and this diversity makes life spicy and interesting. Perhaps most shocking to Americans: most countries do not self-identify as “the good guys”, instead they think of themselves as a people with a history and a set of territorial claims.2
Mazarr describes this peculiar American quality as “the missionary impulse”, and notes that while it comes from a well-intentioned place, it “can produce a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility as well as a romantic conviction that America can renovate other societies at will”. Or, to put it in blunter words, it makes us do insane things like invade and occupy a culturally alien country on the other side of the world, and stand there in blinkered incomprehension when people don’t like it. Perhaps the most damning thing about this missionary impulse is the way it provides a self-excusing justification for recklessness: since America is definitionally the good guys, all the horrible consequences of America’s dumb decisions must be somebody else’s fault, and anyway we meant well so you can’t really blame us.3 It’s like a speeding driver who hits and kills pedestrians over and over again, and when confronted gets huffy and points out he’s on his way to feed people at a soup kitchen.
Why is our national character like this? It’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because we were settled by various strains of fanatical Protestants, or because our ethnos was born during the Enlightenment, or some other “genetic” factor. Alternatively, it could be something about our historical development, or perhaps the large oceans that have always insulated us from most of the negative consequences of our decisions. Or maybe it’s just inevitable that whoever the current world empire is will feel this way, a consequence of our “unipolar moment”.4 Whatever the cause, it’s been a frequent source of misunderstanding between American and foreign diplomats, and few more so than Iraq’s.
The inability of the Iraqi regime, and of Saddam Hussein in particular, to “get” America or its motivations is a recurring bit of comic relief in Mazarr’s book, and one of the first big episodes of it occurs here in the mid ‘90s. This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.
I remember when I was a kid watching Dr. Strangelove, and laughing at the part where the Soviets built a doomsday device without telling anybody, completely defeating the purpose of having a doomsday device. Then I got older, and learned that no actually, in real life the Soviets built a doomsday device, and then didn’t tell anybody, because they apparently assumed that its psychological effect would be more powerful if America found out about it from its spies (naturally, we didn’t find out until after the Cold War was over). Saddam’s mistake was a weird inverse of this, destroying all his doomsday weapons and then just assuming we’d figure it out. I guess the moral of the story is that in real life, these too-clever-by-half schemes where you double-bluff your opponent are rarely worth it.5
Anyway, Saddam destroyed all of his WMD, and then kicked out the UN inspectors so as to maintain the charade that he still had them. At the same time that all of this was happening, the sanctions regime that the US had imposed was clearly falling apart. European and Asian businessmen were swarming all over Baghdad, trying to get things in place for when foreign investment inevitably flooded back into the country. All of this contributed to an ambient sense that something had to be done; the attempt to kick the can down the road was failing. By the late ’90s, the Clintons had already convinced themselves that a rematch with Saddam was inevitable, but they didn’t have time to act on it before their term was up and a new sheriff rolled into town.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.
- Yes, this was exactly Strelkov’s strategy in the Ukrainian civil war. And for similar reasons — the Russian government as an official body was dithering and indecisive, but a large faction within it wanted to act.
- My north star here is, as always, my former coworker from Bulgaria.
- Graham Greene did an exquisite job skewering this attitude in his novel The Quiet American. One character says of the titular American: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”.
- Did the Romans feel this way? Did the Chinese? I don’t actually know, but I think there’s something distinctive about the American imperial attitude. It really does come down to our belief that we’re bombing you for your own good (or overthrowing your government for your own good, or whatever). My sense is that past hegemons have been a bit more honest.
- Then again, Gaddafi did what Saddam arguably should have done, and look what that got him. I guess the real lesson is just not to make too much trouble until your nukes really work.
August 10, 2026
Was Canada’s Victoria-class submarine deal a massive procurement failure?
Dominion Defence Review
Published 8 Aug 2026Plagued by chronic low availability while also being expensive to maintain, the purchase of used British submarines seems to be a good reminder that a low sticker price isn’t everything …
Gresham’s Law and the Thirty Years’ War
For one of the most destructive wars in European history (until the 20th century), most people know little or nothing about the Thirty Years’ War (which was a name applied later to a series of overlapping and interlocking conflicts that caused nearly 10 million deaths between 1618 and 1648). One of the many causes wasn’t so much religious or military, it was financial:
“Clipping coins in a Kipper mint”
Wikimedia Commons.
The Kipper und Wipperzeit of 1621 to 1623 [Wiki] was a direct consequence of princes and mints doing exactly what governments always do when they need money and cannot borrow it: they debased the currency.
The Thirty Years’ War started in 1618, and the Holy Roman Empire’s princes immediately faced a problem. War is expensive. Silver is finite. So the mints across the Empire began clipping, sweating, and debasing the small subsidiary coins that ordinary people used for daily transactions, flooding markets with copper-heavy pfennigs and kreutzers while hoarding the full-weight silver.
If you want to understand Gresham’s Law in its most brutal form, watch this play out. Bad money drives out good. People saved the honest silver and spent the garbage. Prices in nominal terms exploded. Contemporary accounts from Frankfurt and Augsburg document grain prices doubling and tripling between 1619 and 1623.
The real villain is the territorial mint system, which gave dozens of competing princes the legal power to set coin standards within their own borders. That fragmented monetary sovereignty created a race to the bottom. Each prince had every incentive to debase slightly more than his neighbor, because the first mover extracted real purchasing power before the market caught on.
This is currency debasement as taxation without legislation. The people who held wages and savings in subsidiary coin absorbed the loss. The princes who controlled the mints captured the seigniorage gain. No vote, no debate, no accountability.
Sound money advocates have been clear about the mechanism: when you hand governments monopoly power over coinage, they spend it. Every single time. The Kipper und Wipperzeit killed trade, wiped out savings across central Europe, and contributed to social instability that fed the war it financed. The policy destroyed the instrument it relied on.
Debasement never solves a fiscal crisis; it transfers it onto the population.
The Strangest Hammer Ever Patented (1924)
Rex Krueger
Published 1 Apr 2026This video includes a short clip that appears to be widely reposted on Instagram. I was unable to determine the original creator after reasonable searching. If you are the original creator, please contact me for attribution.
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QotD: Cleopatra’s relationship with Egypt and her Egyptian subjects
The factors usually pointed at to demonstrate Cleopatra’s attachment to Egypt are that she learned the language, engaged with Egyptian religion and represented herself in Egyptian fashion in royal artwork and commemoration meant for consumption in Egypt. And that’s true, she did those things! But the context often missing from using that as a clear indicator of Cleopatra’s cultural “Egyptianness” is that, apart from learning the language, those were common things for Ptolemaic rulers to do, despite the fact that the dynasty maintained a pronounced ethnic hierarchy in Egypt and aren’t generally regarded as being particularly attached to its people or culture. Nevertheless, there’s not nothing here in the sense that Cleopatra showed – or at least wanted to show – more than the normal Ptolemaic attachment to Egypt as a place and the Egyptians as people, which is to say almost any at all.
Let’s start with languages, because I think this fact can be presented in a somewhat distorted way. The language of the Ptolemaic court was Greek, initially Macedonian Greek (the Macedonians had a pronounced accent), though Plutarch notes that some of the later Ptolemies had lost their Macedonian accent (Plut. Ant. 27.3-4). Cleopatra, by contrast, was the first of the Ptolemies to bother to learn Egyptian (which should tell you something about the character of Ptolemaic rule; imagine if King Charles was the first English king since George I and kings from the House of Hanover to bother to learn English). The problem with this fact is that it is incomplete, presenting Cleopatra as a Greek-speaker who learned the language of her people out of sincere devotion, but that’s not what Plutarch says. Plutarch says:
She could turn [her voice] easily to whichever language she wished and she conversed with few barbarians entirely through an interpreter, and she gave her decisions herself to most of them, including Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. She is said to have learned the languages of many others also, although the kings before her did not undertake to learn the Egyptian language, even though some of them had abandoned the Macedonian dialect.1
So let’s unpack that. This isn’t a native speaker of Greek who learned just the language of her subjects, but a spectacularly skilled linguist who learned a lot of different languages, quite regardless of if she ruled the people in question. Running through the list, she evidently learned Ethiopian, the language of the people on her southern border, the speech of the Troglodytae, the people who lived on the coast of the Red Sea (a hinterland of her kingdom). The “language of the Hebrews” here is probably Aramaic rather than Hebrew (which would also cover much of Syria), while the language of the Medes and Parthians might mean both Old Persian and the Parthian language. To which we must add Egyptian, implied by that last sentence; it also seems fairly clear Cleopatra knew at least some Latin.2 This is part of why I find arguments that use Cleopatra’s knowledge of Egyptian as strong proof either for her Egyptian ancestry or deep attachment to Egypt less than fully compelling; she was surely not Parthian and did not have a deep attachment to Parthia, but she learned their language too. Again, there’s not nothing here, but it’s not a slam dunk either.
What of Cleopatra’s role in Egyptian religion? The recent Netflix miniseries makes quite a fuss about how Cleopatra’s first action as queen – that we know of, because this is simply the first moment she is visible in the sources to us at all – is to partake in a religious festival installing a new sacred bull in a shrine at Hermonthis, close to Thebes in Upper Egypt and how this was indicative of a deep love of Egyptian religion. And it may well have been, but it’s also worth noting that Ptolemaic rulers had been taking part in Egyptian religion for a long time. Most of the massive temple complex at Philae, for instance – even farther from Alexandria than Hermonthis, I might add – was built in the Ptolemaic period, with major expansions by Ptolemy II and III. Even more relevantly to our subject, this was a [devotion] to Isis; Cleopatra was not the first Ptolemy by any means to claim that goddess for the dynasty.3
Nor had this even been a new practice for the Ptolemies. Alexander was presumably crowned pharaoh in Memphis in the traditional manner, visited the oracle of Amun at Siwa and dedicated a major set of construction works in the temple of Amun at Thebes. The Ptolemies followed this model. Ptolemy II went to Mendes to personally conduct the ritual of the process of the Ram of Mendes and then extended the temple, he presided over the inauguration of a temple at Pithom, and so on.4 And on it went with Ptolemy III and on down the line (indeed, becoming a bit more pronounced as we move into the later Ptolemies, beginning with Ptolemy V Epiphanes, potentially as a result of the increasing weakness of the Ptolemaic dynasty both internally and abroad). Ptolemaic kings were regularly in and out of Memphis, the religious capital of Egypt, building new Egyptian temples, attending Egyptian religious rituals and so on. The reason is that the job of Pharaoh was as much (if not more) a religious job as it was a political one and it was a job that only the Pharaoh could conduct. And the idea that a Ptolemaic pharaoh with a legitimacy problem might consecrate some temples to help fix that wasn’t new either; Ptolemy VIII Physcon is out doing that thing in the mid-second century. Consequently, involvement in Egyptian religion was a requirement of the position, quite apart from the question of how much the holder of that position cared.
Cleopatra, like any Ptolemaic ruler, engaged in this sort of building, though it seems striking how much of her building program was composed of Hellenistic structures in Alexandria, even as Duanne Roller admits, “the queen was not a major builder”.5 She restored the gymnasium of Alexandria, made major repairs to the Lighthouse, built a new precinct in honor of Julius Caesar called the Kaisareion, and apparently built a monumental tomb for herself, also in Alexandria. Examples of her building outside of Alexandria are fairly thin: the completion of a temple at Dendera begun by Ptolemy XII, extensions to the temple at Hermonthis (where she visited early in her reign), never entirely finished and a temple to Isis in Ptolemais Hermiou in Upper Egypt. Cleopatra could hardly be accounted the great renovator of Egyptian religion or religious sites.
Likewise the assertion that Cleopatra represented herself in Egyptian artwork in Egyptian style and dress; that too was true of all of the Ptolemaic rulers from the very beginning. Indeed, Cleopatra’s self-representation as Isis was very much not new, but in fact the normal way Ptolemaic queens were represented (to match Ptolemaic kings being represented as Osiris). Here, for instance, is Ptolemy II Philadelphos (r. 284-246) with his queen Arsinoe II represented in Egyptian style on a relief now in the British Museum.
Like all Ptolemaic rulers before her, Cleopatra presented herself in an Egyptian form, conforming to Egyptian style, in Egyptian contexts. And, like all of the Ptolemaic rulers before her, she presented herself in a Hellenistic form in Alexandria and on her coinage. While you will see people point to various busts and frescos as being images of Cleopatra, it is only her coins where we can say for certain that an effort was made to capture her likeness (her Egyptian portraiture, though labeled, follows Egyptian stylistics, not her actual likeness); we have no idea if, for instance, later Roman artists had any information about what she actually looked like or if the busts we suppose to be of her actually are. Be wary also of Greek and Roman frescos showing fair-skinned women reported to be Cleopatra; almost all women in Greek and Roman fresco are shown as fair-skinned; it’s a standard artistic convention. Coins, of course, record no skin color and neither do our sources for Cleopatra; anyone who thinks they can tell you what color her skin was is unduly certain.6
Now this isn’t to say Cleopatra is doing nothing new. She does seem to have been somewhat more involved in Egyptian religion than her predecessors, though the exact degree to which this is true is hard to see because we don’t have anything like a full accounting of their actions; if it is a difference it is a different in quantity, not kind. Certainly her building program wasn’t anywhere close to the scale of the early Ptolemies, but perhaps she took more direct personal involvement. Once again, the unknowns here are formidable. Dorothy J. Thompson in the the Cambridge Ancient History7 takes this, along with Cleopatra switching her regnal name from “philopator” (“loves-father”) to “philopatris” (“loves-homeland”8) to be indicative of a clear effort by Cleopatra to be, “indeed queen of Egypt”, particularly in the context of dynastic struggles with her brothers: outflanking them by getting the favor of the people.
The problem with this narrative is the timing: Cleopatra makes that switch in titles in 36/5 BC, which is to say in year 16 of her 21 year reign, eight or nine years after her last serious competition for the throne, her youngest brother, had died. Instead, Bingen9 argues that the homeland Cleopatra is professing love for is the greater Macedonian empire – the empire of Alexander – which she may have seemed in 36 on the verge of reclaiming.10 Antonius was just about to give her (through her children) sweeping portions of Roman Syria, Cilicia, Cyrenaica and Armenia; he would also give them titles to Medea and Parthia, which he didn’t control (though perhaps in 36 he hoped to) but would represent collectively the whole of the old Seleucid Empire near its height. Bingen notes the other change to Cleopatra’s titulature at this point was rather than just being “the goddess who loves her father” she becomes “the young goddess who loves her father and her country”; the added νεωτέρα (“young”) perhaps being intended as a link to Cleopatra Thea, Seleucid queen-consort of Syria from 150 to 126 BC and Cleopatra’s own great-grand-aunt. Cleopatra, after all, was about to achieve the long Ptolemaic dream of controlling all of Syria.
Strikingly the sources do not tell us that Cleopatra was seen as any more distinctively Egyptian than her father or that she had some groundswell of popular support in Egypt. Indeed, Cassius Dio implies the opposite (Cass. Dio 42.34-6) that the Egyptians favored Ptolemy XIII in the succession dispute and it was only the force of Caesar’s arms that turned the issue to Cleopatra. Of course we have to be somewhat skeptical of this account too: Dio is marinating in a literary tradition that is very hostile to Cleopatra and also makes no effort to distinguish between the Alexandrians and the rest of Egypt, two very distinct groups. In any case it is clear that Cleopatra achieved no groundswell of support in Egypt in those early years: she had to raise her army in Syria and in the event it wasn’t the stronger force as she and Caesar spent the winter of 48/7 besieged in Alexandria by Ptolemy XIII’s then larger army (Caesar had not brought his full field army), until the arrival of an army out of Roman Syria led by a collection of Caesar’s allies tipped the balance. Julius Caesar was never a particularly cautious commander, so if he looked at whatever force Cleopatra still had and said, “we need to wait for reinforcements”, it could not, at that point, have been very substantial. Afterwards, Caesar would leave four legions in Egypt to secure Cleopatra’s rule, which seems not to indicate her great popularity or any great faith in her ability to hold the kingdom. After 44, she’s able to rule without direct support, but of course after 44, she and her children are the only dynastic options left, her brothers and sisters all being dead (some at her hand). Finally, when Octavian comes for her, there is no major effort by anyone to stop him militarily. If Cleopatra had the love of the Egyptian people at that point, we sure don’t see it.
In my view then, it seems like an argument can be made that Cleopatra had a fairly modest propaganda effort towards presenting herself as more in touch with Egyptian religion, but the extent and quality was at most only a modest improvement over the previous Ptolemies and apart from keeping her on the throne (with Roman backing), it doesn’t seem to have achieved much.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.
- Trans. from Jones (2006).
- On this, see Roller (2010), 48-9.
- On this sanctuary and its inscriptions, see J. Bingen (2007), 31-43.
- On this, see Hölbl (2001), 77-90.
- op. cit. 108.
- Though, contra Netflix, we can say something about her hair. I was rather confused when one of their talking heads posited that he liked to imagine Cleopatra with hair like his – his hair was very tightly curly and indeed that is how the Netflix documentary opted to do Cleopatra’s hair. We can see her hair on her coins and it is wavy, pulled together into a bun in Hellenistic style with short draping curls (loose, not tight) and a Hellenistic diadem. I think it is pretty fair to suppose this is how Cleopatra actually wore her hair – or at least, how she wanted people to think she wore her hair.
- The second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History; in this case CAH2 IX, 320-1.
- Literally “loves her fatherland”. To save myself some audio pain in the future, I often hear “philopator” pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable (phi-LOPE-a-tor), but the accent is on the alpha, phi-lo-PA-tor, because that o is an omega, a long-vowel, so the accent can fall no further back.
- op. cit., 58-62 and 76-79.
- Bingen argues that in an Egyptian context, it would have been clear that Cleopatra’s patris was, in fact, Makedon – the most prestigious and useful possible patris to have in Ptolemaic Egypt.
August 9, 2026
How To Launch the Apocalypse – Death of Democracy 27 – Q3 1939
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 8 Aug 2026This is Step 27 in the Death of Democracy: LAUNCH A WORLD WAR — the moment when the collapse of democracy, diplomacy, and collective security culminated in an attack that would engulf the world.
In July and August 1939, Adolf Hitler turned the destruction of German democracy into the instrument for launching a European war.
While Nazi Germany armed Danzig, mobilized reservists, prepared its U-boats, introduced civilian rationing, and manufactured stories of Polish aggression, Britain, France, Poland, the United States, and the Soviet Union made a final series of increasingly desperate attempts to prevent catastrophe.
At the center of the crisis was the failed effort to construct an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Nazi aggression. Negotiations foundered on delay, mutual suspicion, the Baltic states, and the Soviet demand for military passage through Poland. Stalin then chose an agreement with Hitler: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and prepared the way for the destruction of Poland.
Inside Germany, there was little repetition of the supposed national enthusiasm of August 1914. Nazi leaders and Wehrmacht commanders ranged from confidence and opportunism to anxiety and fatalism, while many ordinary Germans feared that Hitler had finally pushed Europe beyond the point of no return. Yet propaganda, repression, and six years of dictatorship had stripped the population of any effective means of preventing the war.
The next episode will conclude the series with an epilogue examining what the destruction of the Weimar Republic teaches us about defending democracy today.
The drift toward socialism in the west
I’m reminded of that line from Kipling: “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”, as most western countries have had plenty of opportunities to observe socialism in the wild, yet there’s always the chorus that it “wasn’t real socialism” and this time it’ll be great:
Socialism survives because it flatters the most powerful human instinct you have: the desire to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes.
The engine is pure motivated reasoning: not ignorance, not stupidity.
Venezuela collapsed from one of Latin America’s wealthiest economies into a country where citizens lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight in 2017 because food disappeared. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions in gulags and deliberately starved Ukraine in 1932-33. Cuba turned a middle-income Caribbean nation into a prison island. West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The pattern repeats, and yet the ideology never takes the blame.
Here’s why. Socialism’s defenders always move the goalposts. When the USSR fell, they said it wasn’t “real” socialism. When Venezuela imploded under Chavez and Maduro’s nationalizations, they blamed American sanctions. There is always an excuse, and that excuse always points away from the central planning mechanism itself.
Ludwig von Mises nailed this in 1920 in his essay on economic calculation. Without prices set by voluntary exchange, planners cannot allocate resources rationally. You get shortages and surpluses simultaneously, not because bureaucrats are evil, but because they are operating blind. The information simply does not exist in a form they can use.
Mises’s argument is uncomfortable in a specific way: it says the system cannot work regardless of who runs it. You cannot fix central planning by finding better central planners.
The real villain is the intellectual class, professors and politicians who build careers selling the promise of top-down coordination. They capture universities, media institutions, and government agencies, and they teach each new generation that the solution to failed socialism is more socialism.
Socialism survives because the people promoting it face zero personal cost when it fails. The Venezuelan peasant starves. The tenured professor in Boston gets a book deal.
That gap between who sells the idea and who pays for it is what keeps the whole rotten project alive.
Celina notes that a recent Cato Instutute report shows uncomfortably strong support for both socialism and communism in the youngest groups:
This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding. At the same time, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank whose entire institutional purpose is the defence of free markets, commissioned a survey with Morning Consult of 2,253 American adults. The survey included the usual questions: pride in country, knowledge of what the anniversary commemorated, and belief in the American Dream.
Besides the typical civic questions, the Cato questionnaire also asked Americans their feelings on communism, socialism and capitalism. The responses were quite explosive; the survey’s authors reported that: 21 percent of Americans said they held a favourable view of communism.1
Not socialism but communism. The word itself, which to the older Western mind is attached to the gulag and the Stasi and the Cultural Revolution, the one that American politics spent literally seven decades treating as roughly synonymous with treason.
Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the figure was 38 percent. In that cohort, favourable views of communism (38 percent) ran only seven points behind favourable views of capitalism (45 percent), and the generation was the only age group in which favourable views of communism actually edged out unfavourable ones, 38 to 36. Socialism, meanwhile, outpolled capitalism among the young outright: 53 percent favourable against capitalism’s 45. Also, the generational gradient was almost perfectly linear. Favourability toward communism fell from 38 percent among Gen Z to 29 percent among younger millennials, 19 percent among the middle-aged, 13 percent among those approaching retirement, and just 5 percent among seniors, the Americans old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills, Brezhnev, and the Berlin Wall as a piece of functioning infrastructure.
The 2026 Cato survey was not a fluke, which would be plainly obvious to people with even a slight interest in American politics. We also know this was not a fluke because the year before, in March of 2025, a Cato/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent favourable toward socialism. Cato’s senior editor Michael Chapman recorded roughly 52 million Americans aged 18 to 29, reporting a 34 percent favourability figure implying something on the order of eighteen million young people willing to say a kind word about an ideology that the Black Book of Communism credits with approximately 100 million deaths.
If you know a bit about the history of communism in America, you can understand why these numbers landed the way they did. American attitudes toward communism for most of the twentieth century were not just slightly negative; they were extremely so. Anti-communism was one of the few genuinely bipartisan commitments in American life, embraced by Cold War liberals and conservatives alike. Congress quite literally passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the Communist Party. Having any public sympathy for communism was politically and professionally fatal, as evidenced by the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Gallup asked Americans in 1949 what “socialism” meant to them, the largest share answered on the lines of “government ownership of the means of production”, and they wanted no part of it. Communism, the harder and more explicit term, was too unthinkable during that time to even be asked in the poll.2
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating
https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx
Clearing Bannerman’s Castle: A Century of Explosive Ordnance
Forgotten Weapons
Published 11 Mar 2026The Bannerman family decided to sell Bannerman’s Island to the state of New York in the 1950s, but the sale required that they first clear all the ordnance off it. That was no simple task, and the military was not interested in the job. Instead, the family found Val Forgett Jr, a demolitions expert who happened to be looking for seed money to start a business making reproduction black powder revolvers. His offer to do the cleanup work was accepted, and he spent a summer doing the job and put the proceeds into the first Navy Arms reproduction 1851 Colt Navy revolvers.
This video includes the talk given by Forgett to the Armor and Arms Club of New York in the 1990s explaining the process of clearing out the ordnance from the island …
(more…)
August 8, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 03 – Enter the Persians 7 – Marathon, The First Shock
seangabb
Published 16 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
The Persian army lands at Marathon. Athens must decide whether to wait or fight. We examine Miltiades’ strategy, the Athenian command structure, hoplite tactics, and Herodotus’ restrained account of the battle.
We also analyse the later legend of the Marathon runner and the political consequences of the victory. Marathon did not end the Persian threat — but it changed Greek confidence forever.
This is not the end of the war. It is the end of its beginning.
August 7, 2026
Blood Dawn by Hans van de Ven
On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman reviews a new book on the Second World War in Asia by Hans van de Ven:
I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.
The author aims to provide a narrative that “contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II”. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.
The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.
Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of “Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire”. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.
As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.
In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.
A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.
The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that “British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India”. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that “the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk”. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.
The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.
The History of Gumbo in New Orleans
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Feb 2026Shrimp and crab gumbo with beef and ham hock served with rice
City/Region: New Orleans
Time Period: 1885New Orleans is one of my favorite food cities. Gumbo, a rich, thick soup or stew (depending on who you’re talking to), is an embodiment of the many cultures that have lived there. Ingredients and techniques from Native Americans, Africans, French, Spanish, and Acadian roots, just to name a few, have a place in gumbo.
While this is a relatively simple dish, it is absolutely packed with flavor. I was blown away by how a handful of ingredients, cooked down over time, came together to make such a delicious dish. Go to New Orleans and try one of the many versions of gumbo, and in the meantime, make this historical version that is so, so good.
Gombo With Crabs, or Shrimp
To a pound of beef add half a pound knuckle of ham; chop up both in inch pieces and fry them brown in two tablespoons of boiling lard; add to them four large crabs cut up, or a pound of peeled shrimps, or both if desired; cut into this four dozen small okra pods, one large onion, a little red pepper, and salt to taste. Let all simmer on a slow fire for about twenty minutes; then fill up with warm water, enough to cover the contents two inches deep. Let this boil for two hours. If it becomes too thick, add as much water as required. If preferred, a chicken can be used instead of beef.
— La Cuisine Creole compiled by Lafcadio Hearn, 1885
