Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 15, 2019
QotD: Masochistic anglophobia
January 14, 2019
Sun Yat-sen – An Army in Exile – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 12 Jan 2019Sun Yat-sen spends the next ten years following his London adventures trying to organize the rebellion in Tokyo — and ends up not recruiting just Chinese reformers, but radical fighters from Japan and the Philippines too.
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Lysander Spooner and the US postal system
Naomi Mathew recounts the battle between anarchist Lysander Spooner and the United States Post Office:
This is a story about a philosopher, entrepreneur, lawyer, economist, abolitionist, anarchist — the list goes on. As his obituary summarizes, “To destroy tyranny, root and branch, was the great object of his life.” Although he is rarely included in mainstream history, Lysander Spooner was an anarchist who didn’t merely preach about his ideas: He lived them. No example illustrates this better than Spooner’s legal battle against the US postal monopoly.
Born in 1808 in Athol, Massachusetts, Lysander Spooner was raised on his parent’s farm and later moved to Worcester to practice law. Eventually, he found himself in New York City, where business was booming — but not for the Post Office.
The Postal System of the 1840s
In Spooner’s day, government subsidized the cost of building infrastructure used for mail routes. Postage rates paid for these subsidies, which in turn made the rates expensive. For example, in 1840 it cost 18.75 cents, over a quarter of a day’s wages, to send a letter from Baltimore to New York.
Corruption was another issue facing the post office. Positions appeared to change after each election cycle, indicating political cronyism. Congress was also under pressure from the coach contractor lobby, and favorable postage routes were often given to contractors with political connections. Thanks to a legal monopoly it had enjoyed since the Confederation, the Post Office remained the sole legal mail business despite its skyrocketing costs and corruption.
In his book Uncle Sam, The Monopoly Man, William Wooldridge describes how high postal costs led some to defy postal laws: Traveling individuals doubled as temporary, private postmen. By the 1840s, these illicit services were chipping into government revenues. Eventually, a court ruled it legal for individuals (but not companies) to carry mail. As a result, underground mail enterprises sprung up. Agents covertly used the existing rails, coaches, and steamboats to transport letters. It is estimated that in 1845, a third of all letters were transported by private mail firms.
QotD: Eisenhower’s Middle East policy about-face
Unlike some American presidents, however, Eisenhower learned from his mistakes. In 1958, five years after being sworn into office, he reversed course. Rather than suck up to Egypt, Ike deployed American Marines to Lebanon to shore up President Camille Chamoun, who was under siege by Nasser’s local allies.
“In Lebanon,” Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs, “the question was whether it would be better to incur the deep resentment of nearly all of the Arab world (and some of the rest of the Free World) and in doing so risk general war with the Soviet Union or to do something worse — which was to do nothing.” That is almost verbatim what the British said to justify their own war against Nasser when Eisenhower slapped them with crippling sanctions.
Reality forced the United States into a total about-face. Ike’s entire Middle Eastern worldview collapsed. Even before sending the Marines to Lebanon he announced that America was taking Britain’s place as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East. He had to start over even if he didn’t want to. “Nasser,” Doran writes, “the giant who rose from the Suez Crisis, crushed Eisenhower’s doctrine like a cigarette under his shoe.”
What happened between the Suez Crisis and Eisenhower’s intervention in Lebanon? A couple of things.
Ike’s hope to bring Syria into the American orbit alongside Turkey and Pakistan collapsed in spectacular fashion. So many Syrians swooned over Nasser after Egypt’s victory in the Suez Canal that Syria, astonishingly, allowed itself to be annexed by Cairo. Egypt and Syria became one country—the United Arab Republic—with Nasser as the dictator of both.
Washington’s attempt to groom Saudi Arabia as a regional counterbalance to Egypt also hit the skids when Nasser accused the Saudis of trying to assassinate him and foment a military coup in Damascus. The Saudis responded by shoving King Saud aside and replacing him with his Nasserist younger brother, Crown Prince Faisal.
The final blow came with the brutal overthrow of the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in Iraq and the mutilation of the royal family’s corpses in public, thus toppling the last pillar of America’s anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East. Eisenhower had no choice but to stop being clever and return to the first rule of foreign policy: reward your friends and punish your enemies.
Michael J. Totten, “We Are Still Living With Eisenhower’s Biggest Mistake”, The Tower Magazine, 2017-02.
January 13, 2019
The Red Army Regroups to Crush Finland – WW2 – 020 – January 12 1940
World War Two
Published on 12 Jan 2019After the chaotic invasion and catastrophic losses of the first weeks of the Winter War, the Soviet Army has learnt their lesson. Further west the Wehrmacht is ready to move, as long as the skies stay clear.
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Canada’s role in India’s nuclear weapons development program
Canadian nuclear technology was critical to India for helping them develop their first nuclear weapons (although the Canadian reactor was supposed to be used only for civilian purposes):
Maybe you have heard the story of how India got the Bomb with Canada’s inadvertent help. We sold India a nuclear reactor called CIRUS in 1954 on an explicit promise that the facility would only be used for peaceful purposes. When India astonished the world with its first nuke test in May 1974, having upgraded the fuel output from CIRUS, it duly announced that it had successfully created a Peaceful Nuclear Explosive. The permanent consequence was, for better or worse, a nuclear-armed Subcontinent.
This is old news to enthusiasts of Cold War history. Here’s the new news: it almost happened twice. Canadian technology was almost used by another country to break into the nuclear club.
In November, historians David Albright and Andrea Stricker published a new book called Taiwan’s Former Nuclear Weapons Program: Nuclear Weapons On-Demand. The book pulls together the previously sketchy story of Nationalist China’s covert nuclear research, which had its roots in the postwar exodus of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang party (KMT). Albright and Stricker describe decades of effort by the offshore Republic of China on Taiwan to play a double game with nuclear weapons.
At first Taiwan engaged in sneaky nuclear research — it turns out that if you research nuclear safety you learn a lot about nuclear explosions — and it tried to create a plutonium stockpile on the sly. But their scientists left too many clues: a plutonium-based nuke requires processed plutonium metal, and that is hard to make without raising suspicions. The Indian test of 1974 was an important wake-up call to the world, and the nonproliferation establishment and the U.S. Department of State started to get nervous about Taiwan.
After a 1977 confrontation with American officials, who could hardly be ignored by the vulnerable Republic of China, the KMT deep state tried subtler methods to create the “on-demand” weapon described in the title. Taiwan committed formally to nonproliferation and full U.S. inspections of their facilities, but sought to be able to make low-yield nukes within three to six months in the event of a Communist invasion from the mainland.
January 12, 2019
The role of tyche in the fall of the Roman empire
Williamson Murray posted this review at The Strategy Bridge back in August, but I don’t recall seeing it linked anywhere. He emphasizes the role of tyche both in the small events and the greater flow of history (tyche is a Greek word meaning luck, chance, or random events that change the course of human activity). In his review, he makes it clear that he feels earlier historians have failed to emphasize just how much tyche impacted the Roman world:
The approximate extent of the Roman empire circa 395AD, when the empire was formally divided into eastern and western zones with joint emperors in Rome and Constantinople.
In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease & the End of an Empire, Kyle Harper has presented us with a case study, namely the collapse of the Roman world in the period between the third and sixth centuries CE. Here tyche, in the largest sense, created a perfect storm of disastrous natural events and happenings that brought about the complete collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, and eventually the ability of the Eastern Roman Empire to control much of the Mediterranean world after the seventh century. These natural events created conditions the Roman world was incapable of understanding, but which nevertheless brought about the collapse of one of the greatest, longest lasting empires in history. What Professor Harper’s book underlines is that the military difficulties that Rome’s generals and soldiers experienced in the period from the third century on were only the surface manifestations of far deeper systemic changes that could not be predicted, but which in combination created a perfect storm. Thus, fate, or more accurately tyche, undermined the best efforts to prevent what turned out to be a disastrous collapse.
The slide to catastrophe began after a period of unparalleled prosperity that had seen the population of Rome grow from approximately 60 million under Emperor Augustus in 33 BC to 75 million in 165 AD. The historian Edward Gibbon would describe the period in the following terms: “If a man were called to fix a period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation, name” that period. Significantly, archeological and scientific evidence indicates the period from 200 BCE through the mid-point of the second century CE was extraordinarily favorable in terms of its climate for agriculture and the development of an extensive and expansive civilization in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. Combined with the favorable weather was a period of general peace under the empire that, for the most part, removed the generally disastrous role played by war throughout history. Except for one short period of civil wars between the claimants to Nero’s throne (70-71 CE, the year of the three emperors) and the two Jewish rebellions (66-71 CE and 135 CE), Rome fought its wars on the frontiers: the Rhine, the Danube, and Syria.
All that changed in the midst of the rule of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The traditional narrative suggests that in 165 CE Roman soldiers returning from the campaign against the Parthians in Mesopotamia brought a plague. In fact, the pathogen most probably came through the Red Sea, brought by traders. In the great urban centers of the empire, all closely linked, it found an ideal environment. Given the extent of trade among these urban centers, the smallpox pathogens spread rapidly from urban center to urban center. As Professor Harper points out, “[i]n one sense, the Antonine Plague was a creature of chance, the final unpredictable outcome of countless millennia of evolutionary experimentation. At the same time, the empire — its global connections and fast-moving networks of communications — had created the ecological conditions for the outbreak of history’s first pandemic.” We have no way of knowing how many died, but it was substantial, on the order most probably of what was to occur in the Black Death of the fourteenth century.
Had the Antonine Plague been the only major problem besetting the Romans, the empire would likely have weathered the initial storm without catastrophic results. It was, however, not the only major factor that would affect the long-term health of the empire, based as it was on the slight surpluses that subsistence agriculture produced. Almost concurrently with the Antonine Plague, the weather patterns across the Mediterranean and Europe, reaching into central Asia, began a slow, steady shift that resulted in an average drop in temperature and rainfall. That decline would continue through to the mid-fifth century, which was to see the beginning of an even colder period, what climatologists are now calling the “Late Antique Little Ice Age” — one that was even less favorable to agriculture.
January 11, 2019
Poland Rises in the East I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1921 Part 2 of 2
TimeGhost History
Published on 10 Jan 2019In 1921 the Second Polish Republic expands to the borders it will have until it is overrun by the Germans and Soviets in September of 1939. Through conquest, popular uprisings, plebiscite, and the Treaty of Versailles Poland incorporates land from her neighboring nations.
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Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Edited by Wieke Kapteijns
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Battle of Stalingrad (German perspective)
FootageArchive – Videos From The Past
Published on 16 Jan 2014Welcome to FootageArchive! On this channel you’ll find historic and educational videos from the 1900s. Watch, learn, and take a trip back in time as we gain insight into a previous time. Subscribe for more.
Note: this video contains archived public domain / licensed footage. This footage serves documentary purposes on world history and is to be viewed as educational.
January 10, 2019
What Happened to America’s Passenger Trains?! The Truth – from Class to Crap!
American Rail Club
Published on 1 Jul 2017Did America’s once industrious and world-famous passenger rail system fall because of “fair and equal” competition – or did the federal government tax it to death? Did America’s shift from rails to roads come out naturally – or from lobbying from General Motors? We visit two of America’s passenger rail cars from a bygone era to reminisce and then dive into the history and truth behind the decline of America’s passenger railroad system.
QotD: Pacifism
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
January 9, 2019
The past is a foreign – and very smelly – place
We moderns tend to take ordinary public health issues for granted, yet the development of adequate sanitation and improvements in personal hygiene have probably contributed more to eliminate disease and expand human lifespan than any number of medicinal innovations. Marian L. Tupy reminds us just how … aromatic … the past was, and why:
Most of us take modern restrooms for granted, but proper sanitation is a relatively modern phenomenon and is still far too rare in the poorest regions of the world.
The need to keep human and animal waste away from human contact may seem obvious today, but for millennia that was not the case. Before the emergence of the germ theory of disease, and the subsequent public health campaigns and construction of adequate sanitation infrastructure in most of the world, people and waste commingled – with catastrophic results.
Countless millions of people got sick or died from diseases such as diarrhoea, ascariasis (a type of intestinal worm infection), cholera, hepatitis, trachoma, polio, schistosomiasis and so on.
In due deference to our ancestors, it has to be noted that some cultures, such as ancient Rome, paid due attention to cleanliness. The Romans built numerous public baths, which were accessible even to the very poor for a nominal fee, and a sophisticated system of sewers that enabled Rome to grow and reach a population of over 1 million people around the start of the first millennium. That feat would not be replicated in Europe until London and Paris in the 19th century.
In general, however, standards of hygiene tended to be very poor. A typical urban dwelling had a cesspit underneath the house or next to it. That’s where human and kitchen waste accumulated and fermented. Inadequate drainage, irregular emptying and heavy rains could make the cesspit overflow and seep into the house. While discouraged by the city authorities, people often emptied their chamber pots into the streets below.
As Johan Norbeg of the Cato Institute wrote in his 2016 book Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, “When pedestrians heard the shout of ‘Gardyloo!’ they ran for cover. This phrase, taken from the French for ‘Look out for the water,’ was your only warning that someone was about to throw their waste out of the window.”
In rural areas, people lived with their animals, including chickens and cows, and used both animal and human waste to fertilise their crops – an extremely dangerous practice compounded by the fact that people could go throughout much of their lives without ever washing their hands. That led to epidemics of disease as well as other unsavoury consequences.
January 8, 2019
Tank Chats #40 Crusader | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 30 Jun 2017In the 40th Tank Chat, David Fletcher looks at the Second World War Crusader tank.
The first Crusader III was delivered in May 1942. Crusader IIIs were landed first in Algeria on 13 November 1942, but removed from service upon conclusion of the campaign in Tunisia in May 1943. This vehicle probably never left England, as it was held by the School of Tank Technology, before transfer to the Tank Museum in 1949. This vehicle is painted to represent a tank serving in Tunisia.
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QotD: RINOs and other soft conservatives
The RINOs you complain about are RINOs now but they weren’t always. I don’t know how many of you remember the seventies. The right here was kind of like the right in Europe. It assumed that in the end communism would not only win, but DESERVED to win, and what the right disagreed with was the way to get there. It is useful to remember this was a time when William Buckley’s dictum that conservatism was “Standing astride History yelling stop” found deep resonance. Unpack that phrase. It assumes history comes with an arrow, that it’s not going our way, and that at best we can get it to pause.
Those RINOs who, by the way, took immense flack back then were as conservative as anyone dared to be. Because everyone knew in the end the reds won.
Then the wall fell down and we knew what true horrors lurked on the other side.
Individuals process these things fast enough. Well, my generation, at any rate, awakened by Reagan and shown that the win of the dark side was not inevitable, was more pro-freedom than people ten years older than us.
But when we saw the wall fall down, it pushed many of us further into the liberty side of the isle. Not only wasn’t a communist win inevitable, but their vaunted “strengths” like superior planning and better minority integration didn’t exist unless you really wanted to plan for three million size thirty boots for the left foot only, and integration meant grinding the minorities very fine and spreading them in the soil.
However cultures aren’t individuals. Cultures re-orient and process startling events very slowly.
Yeah, those older Republicans are still with us, and they were over 45 when the wall fell, which means they couldn’t reorient anymore. (Studies have been done.)
Sarah Hoyt, “The Long March”, According to Hoyt, 2015-12-20.
