the_miracle_aligner
Published 29 Mar 2025What Marc Anthony sang after he gave an epic speech at Caesar’s funeral.
One of my favorite songs and one I was supposed to upload on the Ides of March this year but got late. As punishment, I will do one for dearly departed Julius every year from now. RIP Caesar.
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August 14, 2025
August 13, 2025
The Korean War Week 60: Neutral Zone Violations and the 38th Parallel Standoff – August 12, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 Aug 2025UN Commander Matt Ridgway is extremely frustrated by the Communist delegation’s unyielding stance on the 38th Parallel at the Kaesong peace talks. Chinese violations of the neutral zone highlight the fact that the war still goes on, though, as do the preparations for a UN offensive soon to be launched, to really reignite the active war in a big way.
Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:50 Recap
01:15 Ridgway’s Frustration
05:01 Neutral Zone Violations
08:57 Van Fleet’s Plans
12:28 Conclusion
13:50 Call to Action
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“[A]ll those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic: they [were] advance notice”
In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya discusses the — in my opinion, insane — court ruling in British Columbia that invalidated existing land titles in part of the Vancouver area, handing the titles to the properties over to the Cowichan First Nation:
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court
It turns out that all those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic. They may have been advance notice.
When Canada adopted its constitution in 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau slipped in a ticking time bomb: an explicit recognition of indigenous land rights without constitutional protection for property rights for other Canadians. That constitutional clause has fueled decades of lawsuits from First Nations — Canada’s indigenous people — asserting claims to huge portions of their ancestral territories.
Last Thursday, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” to about 1,846 acres of land on the south shore of Lulu Island in Richmond, and constitutionally protected rights to fish in the south arm of the Fraser River.
This 275,000-word judgment doesn’t just affect government-owned lands. It also includes private property now owned by third parties. So if you’re a Canadian who is a property owner in British Columbia and not indigenous, your claim on what you think you own has just been superseded by indigenous claims, called a “senior” claim in legalese. Down the road, your land or house could be expropriated by the federal government and turned over to an indigenous group that claims ownership.
That has already happened in Ontario, where three northern Ontario First Nations claimed in a lawsuit last month that a 14-acre public park in Kenora called Anicinabe Park is actually unceded territory and should be returned.
“In constitutional terms, aboriginal rights trump private property rights,” Bruce Pardy, a professor of constitutional law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, told me. He pointed to last November’s ruling by a New Brunswick judge that the court might be in position to order the government to seize private property and turn it over to an indigenous group making a claim on it.
As Prime Minister Mark Carney tries to fast-track major infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, pipelines, power plants, and more — all part of his plan to boost Canada’s global competitiveness and reduce reliance on the U.S., some of those ambitions might be snarled by indigenous land claims that take years to resolve. The British Columbia case began in 2019 and is considered to be the longest trial in Canadian history.
The day before the Cowichan Nation ruling in British Columbia, a Yukon First Nation announced that it would oppose all new mining claims on its traditional territory while a regional land-use plan is developed. Yukon First Nations leaders said that new claims are “unwelcome” and “unlawful”, and that they plan to challenge the mining industry to protect the land from further industrial activity.
Stefan Labbé in BIV last week:
A B.C. court has handed the Cowichan Tribes and other First Nations title over a chunk of federal and city land in Richmond that for centuries was used as a winter fishing village, before colonial administrators evicted the people who lived there.
The landmark Aug. 7 ruling was handed down after more than 500 days of litigation before the B.C. Supreme Court.
It gives the Cowichan Tribes, the Stz’uminus First Nation, Penelakut Tribe, Halalt First Nation — as well as the Lyackson First Nation in a supporting role — Aboriginal title over the Tribes’ historic Tl’uqtinus village on the southeast side of Lulu Island.
The ruling also gives the First Nations fishing rights at the mouth of the Fraser River.
In a joint statement, the First Nation plaintiffs said: “We raise our hands to the generations of leaders” who fought for the return of the Tl’uqtinus village lands and their fishing rights in the Fraser River.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Barbara Young suspended her decision for 18 months “to allow for an orderly transition of the lands” in keeping with the principle of reconciliation.
“Now that this multi-year journey has concluded, it is my sincere hope that the parties have the answers they need to return to negotiations and reconcile the outstanding issues,” she wrote.
Jamie Sarkonak in the National Post wrote on Monday:
This case of “land back” in action (Cowichan Tribes v. Canada) casts a shadow over the country’s property system. It jeopardizes the default means of owning land in Canada — the estate in fee simple, where owners have exclusive rights to sell land — wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist.
Aboriginal title is the right of an Indigenous group to use, control and reap benefits from the land. It’s granted to claimant groups that can prove they are descended from the sole occupants of an area at the time the British asserted sovereignty. Unlike regular fee simple ownership, it’s enshrined in Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution and impossible to sell to anyone but the Crown.
The Cowichan claim covered the site of their summer village near the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had established continuous, exclusive seasonal occupancy dating back to European contact in the 1790s.
In 1846, the British Crown asserted sovereignty over that land and the rest of what would become B.C. The following years would see property being surveyed and auctioned off to public and private buyers — but not the Cowichan summer village. Instead, it was set aside in 1860 and continued to be used as a settlement for the group. Colonial officials considered the possibility of making it into a reserve, and took initial steps to do so. After B.C. joined Canada in 1871, however, the summer village was carved into parcels and sold over the years until 1914. Purchasers included private parties (including “well-placed men” in the colony) and even the municipality itself; some of the land purchased privately would eventually be sold back to the Crown. Today, about half of these lots are held by public bodies, with the other half falling under private ownership.
A map shows the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. (B.C. Supreme Court) Photo by B.C. Supreme Court
The question before the B.C. Supreme Court was whether the taking of those village lands was legal to begin with. Justice Barbara Young (a Harper appointee, by the way) concluded it was not.
QotD: The New York Times and their 1619 project
In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers: “I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”
It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way? Baquet had no answer to this contradiction, except to say that the 1619 Project was a good start: “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that”. In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.
The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.
Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview. (That view that “systems” determine human history and that the individual is a mere cog in those systems is what makes it neo-Marxist and anti-liberal.) But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity.
Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.
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August 12, 2025
German-Soviet Invasion of Poland 1939
Real Time History
Published 8 Aug 2025Germany and the Soviet Union both regarded the Polish state as a creation of the post-WW1 system, and both had claims on Polish territory. In the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler decided to invade Poland in a fait acompli against the Allies. In a secret agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union they agreed on dividing up the Polish state and Eastern Europe.
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Negev 7: Israeli Scales up to a 7.62 NATO Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 Mar 2025The Israeli Negev machine gun had a rather long development cycle, beginning in 1985 but not seeing final completion and issue until 1997. Once on the market, it proved to be a pretty successful weapon, used by the Israeli military and also a number of export client around the world. In 2012, IMI released an improved newer version, the Negev 7. This was made exclusively as a 7.62mm NATO caliber gun, as opposed to the original Negev which was only made in 5.56mm NATO.
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August 11, 2025
Smug Canadian boomer autohagiography rightly antagonizes the under-35s
Fortissax had an argument with one of his readers over a smug, self-congratulating meme about how wonderful Canada was in the 1990s and early 2000s:
What we lived through long before Trudeau was the Shattering, the breakdown of Canada’s social cohesion, driven by left-liberalism with communist characteristics applied to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, and punitive almost exclusively toward visibly White men. My generation, those millennials born on the cusp of Gen Z, saw post-national Canada take shape not in the comfortable suburban rings of the GTA or the posh boroughs of Outremont and Westmount, but in self-segregated, ghettoised enclaves of immigrants whose parents never integrated and were never required to.
Memes like that are dishonest because they feed a false memory. The 2000s were not normal. Wages were stagnant, housing was already an asset bubble, and immigration was still flooding in under a policy that explicitly forbade assimilation. Brian Mulroney had enshrined multiculturalism into law in 1988. Quebec alone resisted, carving out the right to limit immigration under the 1992 Quebec–Canada Accord. After Chrétien, Stephen Harper brought in three million immigrants, primarily from China, India, and the Philippines in that order.
The Don Cherry conservatives of that era were Bush lite. They were rootless, cut off from their history, their identities manufactured from the top down since the days of Lester B. Pearson. They conserved nothing. For Canadian youth, it was the dawn of a civic religion of wokeness, totalitarian self-policing by striver peers, and the quiet coercion of every institution. My memories of that decade are of constant assault — mental, physical, spiritual — from leftists in power, from encroaching foreigners, and from the cowardice of conservatives.
Your 2000s might have been great. For us, they were communist struggle sessions. In 2009 we were pulled from class to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama, a foreign president, as a historic moment for civil rights. Our schools excluded us while granting space to every group under the sun: LGBT safe spaces and cultural clubs for Italians, Jamaicans, Jews, Indians, Indigenous, Balkaners, Greeks, Slavs, Portuguese, Quebecois, Iroquois, Pakistanis — every culture celebrated except our own. Anglo-Quebecers and Anglo-Canadians got nothing but an Irish club, closely monitored for “white supremacy” and “racism” by the HR grandmas of the gyno-gerontocracy of English Montreal. Students self-segregated, sitting at different cafeteria tables and smoking at different bus shelters. At Vanier, Dawson, and John Abbott College, these divisions were institutionalised. I remember walking into the atrium of Dawson, my first post-secondary experience, greeted by a wigger rolling a joint while a Jamaican beatboxed to Soulja Boy.
We became amateur anthropologists out of necessity, forced to navigate a nationwide cosmopolitan experiment from birth. We learned the distinctions between squabbling southeastern Europeans of the former Yugoslavia, and we did not care if Kosovo was Serbia or whether Romanians and Albanians were Slavic, they all acted the same way. We learned the divides within South Asia, the rivalries between Hindutva and Khalistani, the differences between a Punjabi, a Gujarati, a Telugu, a Pakistani, a Hong Konger, a mainlander, and a Taiwanese. We know the shades of Caribbean identity, the factions of the Middle East, and the intricacies of North African identity. We should never have needed to know these things, but we do.
For us, childhood in this cesspit was the seedbed of radicalism. We never knew an era when contact with foreigners was limited to sampling food at Loblaws. All we know is being surrounded by those who hate us, governed by a state that wants to erase us, with no healthcare, no homes, no jobs that are not contested by foreigners, and no money to start families.
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Stalin’s Death: The Day the USSR Changed Forever! – W2W 39
TimeGhost History
Published 10 Aug 2025March 1953: Stalin’s sudden death triggers a whirlwind of conspiracies, paranoia, and a deadly battle for control inside the Kremlin. As Beria, Khrushchev, and the Soviet elite scramble for power, the fate of the world’s largest superpower hangs in the balance. Was Stalin murdered by his inner circle, or did his own regime consume him? Discover the truth behind the downfall, the rise of Khrushchev, and the birth of the KGB in the Cold War’s most dramatic turning point.
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Speed vs Armour: The Unexpected History of Fast Tanks
The Tank Museum
Published 21 Mar 2025Would you rather go to war in a tank that was quick but lightly armoured – or heavily armoured but slow?
The concept of fast tanks has existed since the First World War, but making a tank fast is easier said than done. You can increase the speed, but only by compromising the other two sides of The Iron Triangle.
Whilst a good power to weigh ratio is key to making a tank go fast, there are other factors that need to be considered. J Walter Christie pioneered the innovative helicoil spring suspension system – an invention that allowed tanks to cope with travelling at high speeds across country. Although not picked up by the US Army, the brilliance of Christie’s suspension was recognised by the Soviets and soon made an appearance on the BT-Series of tanks – and most effectively on the T-34.
Back in the UK, the newly mechanised cavalry was making use of some brand-new Cruiser tanks. Whilst these were fast vehicles, this was coming at the cost of effective protection. Some military thinkers advocated for the concept of “speed as armour” but results were mixed – with the Crusader and Cromwell both proving to be capable tanks.
After the war, the British Army finally moved on from “speed as armour” and settled on sacrificing a bit of speed for the sake of better protection. This was incorporated first into the concept of Universal Tanks and remains a fixture in the modern Main Battle Tank.
So, we’ll ask again. Would you rather go to war in a tank that was quick but lightly armoured – or heavily armoured but slow?
00:00 | Introduction
00:51 | What Makes it a Fast Tank?
02:39 | What is a Fast Tank For?
04:39 | Suspension of Disbelief
06:34 | Speedy Soviets
08:29 | Cruisers Replace Cavalry
11:20 | The Second Wave
13:19 | Cruising in Europe
19:08 | One Tank to Do It All
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QotD: The job of the fuller
The cleaning agents for fulling wool varied by time and place. Roman fulleries generally used urine allowed to sit for a time (becoming “stale” – such urine is known as “wash”) because that concentrated the ammonium in the urine which acted as the cleansing agent. By the Middle Ages, we see the use of “fuller’s earth” (ammonia-rich clay), although urine continued to be used as well, presumably for its greater availability. As J.S. Lee notes (op. cit., 53), from the late twelfth century, we begin to see the use of water-power to replace the fullery worker as the treading agent, with the use of heavy wooden hammers driven by a water wheel to pummel the fabric.
Once this process was done the clothes or fabric were removed from the basin, scrubbed and wrung out fully, before being rinsed. In the Roman context – Roman fulleries (fullonicae) are fairly well archaeologically preserved and so give clues to the process at that time – the rinsing basins are set up to allow workers to walk in and out of them (some have working benches) which suggests that rinsing may have included additional scrubbing and wringing to make sure to remove both all of the impurities as well as all of the cleaning agents (Flohr, The World of the Fullo, 179-81). Fabrics would then have to be hung to be dried. In the Roman context, artwork tends to show clothes hung over high beams in the fullonica to dry; in the medieval context they were often hung to dry outdoors on long wooden frames called “tenters”.
Finally, the cloth would be “napped” (also called “raising the nap”, “rowing”, “teasing”, or polishing), which may have actually been the most labor intensive part of the process. Cloth would be brushed first, to raise the nap (the fuzzy, rough raised surface on woolen cloth), which would then be sheared to leave the cloth smooth. This stage also provided an opportunity for burling (and now you know why the coat factory is in Burlington), the inspection of the cloth and the manual removal of burrs, knots and other defects. Flohr (op. cit.) argues that this stage in the process consumed the bulk of the time and labor of fulling (a point on which J.S. Lee concurs for the Middle Ages). It is to a significant degree unfortunate that the sensational “they washed clothes in urine!” element of fulling has tended to eclipse the rest of the process in not only the popular imagination but occasionally in the scholarly discourse (the already cited Flohr, The World of the Fullo is a good antidote to this).
The position of fulling in the production chain of textiles seems to have varied a bit over time. In the medieval and early modern periods, fulling was generally done only once, as a final finishing stage in cloth production. By contrast, as Miko Flohr argues (op. cit., 57ff), the primary job of the Roman fuller was effectively as a laundry (though they may have treated freshly woven wool as well). Part of this probably has to do with differences in Roman clothing; Roman clothes were generally fairly simple in shape which must have made them easier to put through a fullery as a completed garment. Myself, I wonder if the changing role of fulling has to do with the introduction of soap during the later Roman Empire, which would have made it more possible for clothes to be laundered domestically (the Romans cleaned their bodies with oil, scraping it off with a strigil, which while perfectly good for cleaning skin would obviously not do for clothes, but soap and scubbing will work for both).
Fulling was generally a commercial (that is, not household) operation, done by professional fullers and we’ll talk about them (along with dyers and cloth merchants) in just a moment in terms of their place in society.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-02.
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August 10, 2025
Al Stewart – “Helen and Cassandra”
jonnoms
Published 19 Jun 2011Slight re-working of ‘Where Are They Now?’ video to another, Al Stewart song.
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QotD: The “generations” of warfare
First Generation Warfare, abbreviated 1GW, was war as it was waged from the dawn of civilization up through roughly the Civil War. This style of conflict involved massed line infantry, equipped with spears, pikes, swords, or line-of-sight ranged weapons such as longbows, crossbows, or muskets. The basic tactic was to draw up two large groups of armed men, bring them into close contact, and have them hack at one another until one side grew demoralized by the slaughter, at which point their line would break and the real slaughter could begin.
Industrial or Second Generation Warfare (2GW) brought rifled firearms, machine-guns, and indirect artillery. Men could now be killed at a great distance, without ever seeing the enemy. Camouflage, concealment, and cover became the keys to victory. Its heyday was roughly from the Civil War to the Great War.
Mechanized warfare or 3GW arrived with the internal combustion engine and powered flight. Tactics now depended on speed and manoeuvrability. It dawned with the Second World War and reached its apogee with the invasion of Iraq.
Mechanized warfare created an overwhelming advantage for large industrial states. Small states and non-state actors responded with 4GW, which can be thought of as televisual warfare – combat via propaganda. This is war as fought with cameras and media distribution networks. It is guerrilla warfare via weaponized morality: using the enemy’s own military actions against it by showing the consequences of war for one’s civilian population to the enemy civilian population. Bait the enemy into killing babies, then ask them how many more babies they’re willing to murder. Think Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
The response to 4GW is 5GW – warfare by psyop, utilizing misinformation and sentiment engineering. Its characteristic weapons platform is the social network. Where 4GW seeks to use the enemy’s own morality against it, 5GW seeks to change that morality, to transform the enemy’s inner nature, getting the enemy to attack themselves for you, to surrender with open arms and smiles on their faces … ideally, without the enemy even realizing that they’re under attack.
John Carter, “Political Conflict in the Age of Psychic Warfare”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2024-03-01.
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August 9, 2025
Erma EMP36: External Form Factor of the MP40
Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Mar 2025The German military began looking for a new submachine gun design in secret in the mid 1930s. There is basically no surviving documentation, but the main contenders appear to have featured: Hugo Schmeisser’s MK-36,II and Erma’s EMP-36. Today we are taking a look at one of two known examples of the Erma design at the VHU in Prague. Designed by Heinrich Vollmer, this is a plain blowback open bolt system chambered for 9x19mm. It is massively more complicated than such a simple design has any right to be, though. Elements like the tiny set screw holding together the recoil spring assembly and the detachable bolt face are, frankly, nutty to include in a prospective military design.
However, Vollmer’s design had a number of external design features that were deemed very desirably by the German military. The pistol grip and very compact underfolding stock were both admirable, and the muzzle rest system was also of interest (in a simplified form). Ultimately, the result of testing of the Erma and Schmeisser prototypes was a combination of their features into a hybrid design. The Erma provided the external form factor, and the Schmeisser contributed the internal mechanics for the MP38 and in turn MP40.
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August 8, 2025
Debunking the idea that Japan was about to surrender anyway
Dr. Robert Lyman on the common misunderstanding of Japan’s situation in July and August of 1945 — no, they weren’t “on the brink of surrender so atomic bombing was unjustified” … instead, they were intending to make the assault on the Home Islands the biggest bloodbath ever:
Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s the anniversary of Hiroshima again today. I wasn’t going to write anything to mark the event (more coming next week on VJ Day), but I’ve been triggered already by nonsense on the radio which suggests that the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary, because Japan was about to surrender.
Nonsense. There is not a shred of real evidence to support this idea. In fact, the evidence that Japan wanted to keep on fighting is irrefutable. And yet this lie persists, despite the deluge of scholarly work demonstrating Japan’s commitment to the ritual suicide of its entire nation right until the end, when Hirohito pulled the plug. If you are in any doubt about the facts of the case, as opposed to the propaganda, read Toland’s Rising Sun (1970), Frank’s Downfall (2001), Spector’s In The Ruins of Empire (2007), Pike’s Hirohito’s War and, more recently, Stewart Binn’s Japan’s War (2025). All are excellent, clear, analytical and well researched. There are lots more, too.
Why does this canard keep on popping up? Is it because people don’t read? Or is it that they just don’t want to believe in the necessity of such a dramatic event to force Japan to surrender and thus bring about an end to the greatest man-made tragedy the world has ever suffered? The origins of this wishful myth in fact derives from hard right nationalist propaganda in post-war Japan (driven by Admiral Suzuki himself), quickly lapped up by the gullible and wishful thinkers in the West. Its one of the most enduring of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki myths, in part because it seems palatable to many, and because it is inherently anti-American.
What is the real story? In short, the Allies tried hard to persuade Japan to surrender. They demonstrated unequivocally to Japan that it was going to lose the war by defeating its armies and by beginning the long, slow and painful crawl towards the Japanese home islands. All the books I’ve mentioned note the extreme chaos of Japanese decision-making before and during the war. Who really was in charge? Who could one talk to, to secure a commitment to negotiate? In any case, the chaotic government under Koiso which replaced that of General Tojo following the fall to the Americans of Saipan in 1944, made not a single effort to engage with the Allies to seek terms. This government also collapsed on 5 April 1945. The replacement prime minister was Admiral Suzuki, and it was from this man that the myth seems to have arisen, after the war, that Japan was considering surrender and that the A-bombs were unnecessary. This is not true. During his entire time as Prime Minister he resolutely refused to do anything but continue to fight, unless the ending of the war could be secured on Japan’s terms. There were some initiatives to persuade the Suzuki government to surrender, but none of them amounted to much, because they didn’t engage directly with the government in Tokyo, and they didn’t derive from the Allied powers. The evidence that peace-feelers were being put out by various sources (such as the Vatican) in 1944 and 1945 is evidence only that the Japanese government ignored them. None were taken seriously in Tokyo.
Indeed, throughout the period of the Suzuki government, the war parties were dominant. In early June the military Supreme Command submitted a paper entitled The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War, in which it demanded that the government confirmed that Japan would fight to the very last Japanese in an act of national suicide leading to the “honourable death of the hundred million”:
With a faith born of eternal loyalty as our inspiration, we shall – thanks to the advantages of our terrain and the unity of our nation, prosecute the war to the bitter end in order to uphold our national essence, protect the Imperial land and achieve our goals of conquest.
The proposition was passed, not unanimously, but overwhelmingly nonetheless.
There were some in the government – interestingly including Tojo himself – who saw that this was self-defeating, and that Japan must negotiate to secure acceptable peace terms. Naively, it was hoped that this would enable it to retain parts of its empire. Suzuki was part of this group who thought that Japan could negotiate favourable terms to end the war, in the form of a negotiated settlement such as that had brought about the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, but when he suggested this in parliament on 13 June he was shouted down by the war mongers. Hirohito then endorsed an approach to the Soviets in late June. Bizarrely – though Moscow was neutral in the Far Eastern war at this point – Tokyo’s emissaries suggested that the USSR and Japan join forces to rule the world. It was yet more evidence of how Tokyo fundamentally misunderstood the world, and its enemies, and the way the war would have to end: complete and utter surrender by Japan.
Moscow, of course, scorned these “negotiations” as meaningless.
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