Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Jul 2025The ZK-381 was designed by Josef Koucký, his first design of 1938 (hence 381). This is one of the last of the Czech pre-war self-loading rifle projects, of which there were quite a lot. It uses a tilting bolt and a short-stroke gas piston, with ZB26 machine gun magazines and chambered for 7.92mm Mauser (although they would have been happy to offer a model in any other modern rifle cartridge). It was tested in the spring of 1938 by the Soviet Union, which liked it enough that they requested a model in 7.62x54R — and those were tested in November 1938. Ultimately domestic Russian designs were chosen instead, and tests in German, France, Spain, and Italy also led to naught.
Thanks to the Czech Military History Institute (VHU) for graciously giving me access to this one-of-a-kind prototype to film for you! If you have the opportunity, don’t miss seeing their museums in Prague:
https://www.vhu.cz/en/english-summary/
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December 13, 2025
ZK 381: Czech Pre-War Prototype Battle Rifle
QotD: Victorian mores, homosexuality, and the Empire
The public school phenomenon, which probably isn’t a euphemism but we’ll use it as one. You know, the whole “beatings and buggery” thing, and I’m going to stop now, because of course you know what I mean. Lots of Old Boys from all tiers of the public school system really did go out to run the Empire because they wanted to escape Victorian women, who were indeed as bad as that in a lot of cases (again, think “Karen on steroids”). But how much of that “to escape women” thing was because the women were awful, and how much of it was because the Old Boys were not-very-repressed homos?
This is where modern identity politics really messes up historical analysis. We probably all know that the vast majority of Victorian homosexuals were married, because the vast majority of Victorians were married. This isn’t my professional field, but because I went to grad school I’m pretty well up on it – the ivory tower finds Victorian poofters endlessly fascinating, because they are huge homo cheerleaders (obviously), but also because of the costumes.
Women and gay men love playing dress up — have you noticed? — and Victorian dress up is the best, because it’s a) expensive, and b) time consuming, but also c) flattering to just about any body type. It was socially acceptable among the upper classes to be porky (and nobody dresses up like a chimney sweep or factory hand), so both men’s and women’s fashion in the Late Victorian era can accommodate modern bodies. (Unlike the early Victorian era, which continued Regency fashion. They’d love to dress up Regency style — there’s a reason “Regency romance” is the most popular genre of light porno books for cat ladies — but it takes a specific physical type to pull off, and they don’t have it). […]
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah — lots of people in grad school really, really into Victorian queers, so if I seem extremely well informed on this topic, don’t read too much into it.
“Repressed homosexual” was redundant back then. Oscar Wilde, for instance, was sort of the ur-homo — he was so gay, just gazing too long at a picture of him at his dandiest could give you an uncomfortably strong urge to touch a penis. […] Oscar Wilde was also married, and had two children, because that’s how even the queerest of the queer rolled in Victorian London.
Given that, you’d expect one of two things to happen to public schoolboys once they got out into the bush. Either they’d totally let their freak flag fly — you know, given that everyone else in their social world was an equally repressed public schoolboy — or they’d bottle it up even further, because it was important to show nothing but the best image of Her Majesty’s servants to the wogs at all times.
As far as I know, the latter was almost universally the case. Before the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), you could have a nonstop bacchanalia over there … if you were straight. Those guys could, and did, rock the casbah with extreme prejudice. It started tapering off early in Victoria’s reign, but in the late 1700s you had British army officers converting to Islam (no, really) for the express purpose of getting even more tail, by marrying the Koranically sanctioned four wives (sometimes with all the age of consent queasiness that implies).
The repressed homos, on the other hand, got really into scholarship. It’s not generally known (because even then the vast majority of their works were of interest only to micro-specialists) but Anglo-Indians were insanely productive scholars, on every conceivable topic. You could fill a decent sized library with their five-, seven-, nine-volume works on Sanskrit philology, and the botany of the lower Himalayas, or the migratory habits of tigers, or pretty much anything. And if they weren’t the scholarly sort, the repressed homos simply threw themselves into their work, of which there was always an endless supply — take a look at a map of India, recall that there were at most 200,000 Britons in the whole place, and you’ll see what I mean.
So: Were they going out there to get away from Victorian women? Absolutely. Were they therefore going to turn the place into Studio 54? Absolutely not.
Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.
December 12, 2025
British Columbia’s embrace of UNDRIP entails vast unintended consequences
The government of British Columbia may have downplayed or even deliberately lied about the impact of incorporating the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) into BC’s legal system, but I suspect even they are suddenly realizing just what a legal disaster they have unleashed on their province (and indirectly, on the rest of Canada):
A map showing the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. These lands were declared subject to Aboriginal title by the BC Supreme Court earlier this year, in accordance with the UNDRIP provisions added to BC law in 2019.
When the B.C. NDP introduced a 2019 act committing the province to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP), they very specifically assured critics that it would not be a “veto” over existing laws.
“The UN declaration does not contain the word veto, nor does the legislation contemplate or create a veto”, Scott Fraser, the province’s then Indigenous relations minister, told the B.C. Legislative Assembly.
Fraser explained that it was not “bestowing any new laws”, it would not “create any new rights” and it certainly wouldn’t make B.C. subservient to a UN declaration.
Fraser would even explicitly assure British Columbians that there was no conceivable future in which, say, a private landowner could suddenly see their property declared Aboriginal land.
“We are not creating a bill here that is designed to have our laws struck down,” he said.
That it only took six years for all of these scenarios to take place may explain why there is so much panic in B.C. right now.
The newly appointed head of the B.C. Conservative Party is calling for an emergency Christmas session of the legislature to excise UNDRIP from provincial law, saying it has become an anti-democratic tool.
Even B.C. Premier David Eby — a onetime champion of the legislation — has said that “clearly, amendments are needed”.
And British Columbians, whose support for the UN law was already not great, are growing restless. According to an Angus Reid Institute poll released on Wednesday, Eby ranks as one of the least popular provincial leaders in the country.
What changed was a Dec. 5 B.C. Appeals Court ruling that not only struck down a B.C. law (the Mineral Tenure Act) on the grounds that it violated UNDRIP, but effectively ruled that any law or government action could similarly be overturned if it wasn’t in line with the 32-page UN declaration.
By writing UNDRIP into B.C. law, the province had adopted the Declaration as “the interpretive lens through which B.C. laws must be viewed and the minimum standards against which they should be measured”, read the majority decision.
Although UNDRIP is mostly filled with uncontroversial declarations about languages and traditional medicine, its clauses are pretty uncompromising when it comes to issues of land use or resource development.
“Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired”, reads a subsection of Article 26. It also states that Indigenous peoples “own, use, develop and control” any land that they’ve held traditionally.
Eby is saying that the courts took it too far, and that writing UNDRIP into B.C. law was only ever meant as a holistic decision-making guide, rather than a law superceding all others.
As Eby told reporters this week, by signing onto UNDRIP, B.C. wasn’t intending to put courts “in the driver’s seat”.
Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world
CDR Salamander provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y:
I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts.
I remain convinced that a lot of the problem with trying to get everyone to fully understand the challenge in the Western Pacific is that to a large part, we think in a “north-up” orientation.
I don’t think that is all that helpful.
Just a few days ago, we had another Pearl Harbor Day anniversary and we’ve all seen the maps, usually centered on Hawaii, where the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Kidō Butai comes at the Pacific Fleet from stage left off the map. Then we fought battles in the Coral Sea, Midway, and so on.
To the lay eye — or to those who don’t have time to dig into the reasons — a traditional north-up map looks disjointed; things seem all over the place.
No, not really. Let’s bring back that first map.
[Click to embiggenate]
For both Imperial Japan in the early-mid 20th century and Communist China today, the most important part of this map is the access to the resources in or going through the bottom-right hand corner.
Today’s greatest bone of contention — not unrelated to the most important part of the map mentioned above — is Taiwan, right at the mouth of the funnel.
If we need to bring a fight there, that is one hell of a fight to get there if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to prepare a proper welcome for us.
For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii — Midway, Wake, Guam — and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.
They’re planning a layered defensive fight. Their actions make that clear.
Make no mistake, we may say we are going to “defend Taiwan”, but to do that we will have to fight an aggressive war across the Pacific, into the enemy’s prepared funnel.
Update, 13 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Starships and Walls : Which Shall We Build?
Feral Historian
Published 25 Jul 2025While faster than light travel may be impossible, proclaiming absolutes based on the understanding of a particular time has a spotty record. But even if we are limited to sublight travel by the fundamental nature of the universe, we as a civilization have several macro-level choices to make, one of the most significant being which foundational concept do we want to build a future on: Ships? Or walls?
00:00 Intro
01:50 The Athenian Sailor
05:25 Frontiers
06:00 Assuming it’s Impossible
07:26 Picard Without Starfleet?
09:40 Culture over Economics
15:28 Founders of Worlds🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
QotD: Crime and the army
But in the Army, “crime” is capable of infinite shades of intensity. It simply means “misdemeanor”, and may range from being unshaven on parade, or making a frivolous complaint about the potatoes at dinner, to irrevocably perforating your rival in love with a bayonet. So let party politicians, when they discourse vaguely to their constituents about “the prevalence of crime in the Army under the present effete and undemocratic system”, walk warily.
Ian Hay (Major John Hay Beith), The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of “K(1)”, 1916.
December 11, 2025
Lines of Fire: Operation Market Garden Part 2 of 2 – WW2 in Animated Maps
TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 10 Dec 2025September 17, 1944. A slight morning fog over Britain gives way to clear skies, as the first of hundreds of Allied aircraft leave the ground to execute the largest airborne operation ever attempted. Will Montgomery’s gamble pay off? Or are the Germans in the Netherlands far less beaten than he believes? Last time out we covered the planning, rationale, and logistics of the idea. Now, watch it unfold from beginning to end, map by map.
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Britain’s Top 10 UGLIEST Aircraft
Rex’s Hangar
Published 13 Aug 2022Today we take a look at the top 10 ugliest aircraft every to grace the skies of the United Kingdom. Some were failures, some were hugely successful, but all were lacking in the good looks department, lets check out these ugly planes!
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December 10, 2025
The Korean War Week 77: The Korean Winter Bites Hard – December 9, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 9 Dec 2025Now that they’ve agreed on a Demarcation Line, the talk this week at the Panmunjom peace talks has turned to whether there will be restrictions or not after the signing of an armistice. Also, how would inspections work to make sure the other side is complying with the armistice terms? Perhaps a group of representatives from neutral nations? Meanwhile the troops are digging in to their winter defenses, as the frozen Korean winter descends upon them.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:16 Two New Points
08:42 Korean Winter
11:47 Communist Defenses
13:20 Summary
13:33 Conclusion
14:28 Call to Action
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QotD: The “rules” of Gonzo journalism
- The story behind the story is the real story.
- The writer is now the hero of each episode.
- All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.
Why couldn’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson.
But it grows tired and predictable in the hands of today’s imitators — and the Gonzo King never invited either of those modifiers. Yes, blogs and Substacks are part of his legacy, formats that blur the line between diary, confession, and journalism. But he did it before all the rest, not as a desktop publisher — instead putting his life at risk on the road with total fear and loathing.
So if Substack is the grandchild of Hunter Thompson and New Journalism, it is a tame, well-behaved descendant — and nothing like its brave forebear, who kept going full speed without a helmet until the end.
Even the reader has to run to keep up.
Ted Gioia, “The Rise and Fall of Hunter Thompson (Part 2 of 3)”, The Honest Broker, 2025-09-08.
December 9, 2025
Krieghoff’s Bizarre Prototype FG42 Proposal
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Jul 2025When the Luftwaffe was looking for its new universal paratrooper rifle, six different German arms companies were asked to submit proposals. Only two actually did; Krieghoff and Rheinmetall. Krieghoff designed this very interesting system, clearly optimized to reduce weight and length as required by the design brief. It uses a tiny vertically traveling locking block and an unusual gas trap system combined with an under-barrel piston. The total number made is unknown, but both fixed- and folding-stock models were produced (the German museum at Koblenz has a fixed-stock example on display). This particular example appears to have been tested after the war by engineers at Springfield Armory by drilling a hole in the gas tube to measure pressure while it cycled.
Thanks to the Springfield Armory National Historic Site for giving me access to this rare prototype from their reference collection to film for you! Don’t miss the chance to visit the museum there if you have a day free in Springfield, Massachusetts:
QotD: The development of army discipline and drill in pre-modern armies
The reason we cannot just call this “drill” is because while drill is the most common way agrarian societies produce this result, it is not the only way to this end. For instance as we’ve discussed before, steppe nomads could achieve a very high degree of coordination and synchronization without the same formal systems of drill because the training that produced that coordination was embedded in their culture (particularly in hunting methods) and so young steppe nomad males were acculturated into the synchronicity that way. That said for the rest of this we’re going to place those systems aside and mostly focus on synchronized discipline as a result of drill because for most armies that developed a great deal of synchronized discipline, that’s how they did it.
Fundamentally the principle behind using drill to build synchronized discipline is that the way to get a whole lot of humans to act effectively in concert together is to force them to practice doing exactly the things they’ll be asked to do on the battlefield a lot until the motions are practically second nature. Indeed, the ideal in developing this kind of drill was often to ingrain the actions the soldiers were to perform so deeply that in the midst of the terror of battle when they couldn’t even really think straight those soldiers would fall back on simply mechanically performing the actions they were trained to perform. That in turn creates an important element of predictability: an individual soldier does not need to be checking their action or position against the others around them as much because they’ve done this very maneuver with these very fellows and so already know where everyone is going to be.
The context that drill tends to emerge in (this is an idea invented more than once) tends to give it a highly regimented, fairly brutal character. For instance in early modern Europe, the structure of drill for gunpowder armies was conditioned by elite snobbery: European officer-aristocrats (in many cases the direct continuation of the medieval aristocracy) had an extremely poor view of their common soldiers (drawn from the peasantry). Assuming they lacked any natural valor, harsh drill was settled upon as a solution to make the actions of battle merely mechanical, to reduce the man to a machine. Roman commanders seemed to have thought somewhat better of their soldiers’ bravery, but assumed that harsh discipline was necessary to control, restrain and direct the native fiery virtus (“strength/bravery/valor”) of the common soldier who, unlike the aristocrat, could not be expected to control himself (again, in the snobbish view of the aristocrats).
In short, drill tends to appear in highly stratified agrarian societies, the very nature of which tends to mean that drill is instituted by a class of aristocrats who have at best a dim view of their common soldiers. Consequently, while the core of drill is to simply practice the actions of battle over and over again until they become natural, drill tends to also be encrusted with lots of corporal punishments and intense regulation as a product of those elite attitudes. And though it falls outside of our topic today it seems worth noting that our systems of drill to produce synchronized discipline have the same roots (deriving from early modern musket drill).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.
December 8, 2025
Hungary 1956: The Day Hope Met Soviet Steel – W2W 056
TimeGhost History
Published 7 Dec 2025Here we trace how, only eleven years into Soviet rule, Hungary’s brief hope after Stalin’s death ignites into demands for reform, free speech, and withdrawal of Soviet troops. Students mass in Budapest, the secret police fire on demonstrators, and the uprising spreads as workers’ councils seize factories and crowds pull down Stalin’s statue. Imre Nagy promises neutrality and multi-party politics, but Moscow wavers, then sends in overwhelming force. As tanks return to Budapest, street fighting erupts, radios broadcast desperate pleas, and the revolution is crushed, leaving thousands dead and a generation convinced that the thaw was an illusion.
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Eating aboard a US Submarine during World War 2
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Jul 2025Slow-cooked steaks with tomatoes and onions with mashed potatoes and gravy
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1945Being a crew member aboard a submarine during World War II was one of the most dangerous jobs in the US military with a fatality rate of over 20%. This, and the extremely cramped and uncomfortable quarters, were why the food aboard a US sub was really good. If nothing else, at least you had delicious food to keep you going.
These steaks cook up to be fall-apart tender and delicious, and the mashed potatoes have wonderful flavor, even if the texture is a little different from regular mashed potatoes. They kind of remind me of the mashed potatoes I’d get as a kid in school, which were also probably made from dehydrated potatoes.
SWISS BEEF STEAKS
Portion: 1 (6-ounce) steak.
100 PORTIONS
Beef, bone-in……60 pounds
OR
Beef, boneless……42 pounds
Flour……2 pounds……1/2 gallon
Salt……6 ounces……3/4 cup
Pepper……1/2 ounce……1 3/4 tablespoons
Fat……2 pounds……1 quart
Tomatoes……12 pounds, 12 ounces……2 No. 10 cans (6 1/2 quarts).
Onions, sliced……6 pounds……4 1/2 quarts
Salt……1 ounce……2 tablespoons
Flour (for gravy)……1 pound……1 quart
Water, cold……
Cut meat into 6-ounce steaks 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick.
Sift together flour, salt and pepper. Pound into steaks.
Cook steaks in fat until browned on both sides. Place in roasting pans.
Add tomatoes. Cover with onion slices. Sprinkle with 1 ounce salt.
Cover pans. Cook in slow oven (300°F.) 3 hours or until steaks are tender.
Drain liquid from Swiss steaks. Make a paste of flour and water. Stir into steak liquid. Cook until thickened. Pour over steaks. Reheat.MASHED POTATOES (Using dehydrated, shredded potatoes)
Portion: Approx. 4 1/2 ounces (approx. 2/3 cup).
100 PORTIONS
Water……5 pounds, 8 ounces……2 gallons
Potato shreds, dehydrated, precooked……5 pounds……2 gallons
Salt……3 ounces……6 tablespoons
Milk, liquid, hot……3/4 gallon
Butter, melted……1 pound……1 pint
Heat water to vigorous boil. Pour over potatoes. Cover.
Let stand in warm place 15 minutes or over low heat 10 minutes.
Add salt. Stir vigorously 15 to 20 minutes or until smooth.
Add milk and butter. Whip until light. Serve immediately.
— The Cook Book of the United States Navy by the United States Department of the Navy Bureau of Supplies and Accounts, Washington, D.C., 1945
December 7, 2025
“Anglofuturism” – slogan or beacon of hope?
At Without Diminishment, Robert King argues for Anglofuturism as the most hopeful path forward from the morass all of the Anglosphere seems to be bogged down in:
(From the Ministry of Space, created by Warren Ellis, 2004.)
Born in the digital backwaters of podcasts and Substacks, Anglofuturism has climbed into public view like a rocket nearing the King Charles III Space Station, gathering both attention and indignation as it ascends.
The New Statesman mutters about it being rooted in “nostalgia“, while the far-left activist group Hope Not Hate insists it is something deeply sinister. Yet their agitation merely confirms a familiar sequence. First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.
At its essence, Anglofuturism is a project of civilisational renewal.
It begins with the conviction that Britain’s decline is not destiny but a decision, and the consequence of decades of political miscalculations that consider the national story to be over, Britain’s very own “end of history”.
Just turn on the news and you will see evidence for this everywhere. Strategic islands like the Chagos Islands surrendered to the vassals of hostile powers. A once-thriving energy sector crippled by the ritual self-flagellation of net zero policies, despite abundant North Sea oil resources.
The capital city of London, once envied for its composure, now deafened by the shrill chants of imported grievances, “From the river to the sea”. Britain was once a country whose streets were said to be paved with gold, according to the legend of Dick Whittington.
Today, they are paved with boarded banks, betting slips, and vape shops. The country’s future is already playing out in London, a place where the nation of Britain has faded into the idea of “the Yookay”. Britain is told that because it once colonised, it must now invite colonisation, that because it once conquered, it must now submit.
The result is a people bending ever lower in the hope of forgiveness from a self-appointed virtuous minority at home, and from the ever-growing numbers of strangers who now claim the country as their own.
Anglofuturism is the vanguard against this ideology. It insists that love of one’s civilisation is a duty, not a sin. It binds identity to optimism, and pride to ambition. It seeks to remind Britons that its best days may yet lie ahead, but only if it learns once more to have confidence in itself.
[…]
The policy of splendid isolation simply will not work for the twenty-first century.
Enter CANZUK, the proposed alliance of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Four constitutional monarchies, four democracies, and four maritime powers linked by law, language, and lineage. Together they would represent over 140 million people and a combined GDP exceeding $6 trillion. It would be a realm on which, once again, the sun would never set.
Our shared day of remembrance on November 11 is a reminder that we partake in traditions born of shared sacrifice.
Such a bloc would not be a re-creation of empire, but a confederation of equals who share the responsibilities of defence and trade, coordinating space and science, and projecting stability from north to south and east to west.
It could stand apart from American turbulence, Chinese authoritarianism, and European stagnation, and be a new civilisational pole rooted in innovation and freedom under common law. It could even be a new contender to lead the free world.
Britain is still a nation successful at exporting ideas like capitalism, liberalism, and, regrettably, Blairism. Anglofuturism could be its most powerful export to the Anglosphere yet.
For those of us at the edge of that world, in Cape Town, Perth, or Vancouver, the message of Anglofuturism is that our story is not over. Our civilisation may be weak, even fading, but it can be revived. Doing this will demand the same courage that built it, in the spirit of the pioneers and soldiers, the engineers and thinkers who shaped continents and defended freedom when it was under siege.
Like this, but better.
