The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 31 Mar 2026A surprise announcement this week leaves the US wondering just who is going to run for President — the election is this fall. Whoever does run and win, it can’t help but have an impact on this war. As for what’s going on in the war, Operation Mixmaster winds up, having moved the US 1st Marine Division far to the west along the front lines. The operation was a success, but there are a host of new dangers to deal with in the new defenses. Operation Saturate goes into action- this is another aerial interdiction campaign against Communist logistics, but early results are disappointing, and the future composition of the South Korean armed forces because more and more an issue of contention.
00:00 Intro
00:46 Recap
01:14 Truman Won’t Run
07:04 Operation Mixmaster
11:04 Operation Saturate
13:17 Increase the ROK
16:32 Summary
16:46 Conclusion
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April 1, 2026
The Korean War Week 93: Who Wants To Be President? – March 31, 1952
The fall of Rome and the rise of Islam
Gustavo Jalife points out that a work from nearly a century ago identified the rise of Islam as being far more disruptive to western civilization than the fall of the western Roman Empire (and the surge of Islamic power destroyed the Persian Empire and nearly toppled Constantinople as well):
Expansion of the Caliphate: Mohammed, 622-632 (red), Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661 (orange), and the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 (yellow).
Wikimedia Commons.
In Mohammed and Charlemagne – posthumously published in 1937 – renowned historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) advanced a thesis at once simple and much contested: that the true rupture between Late Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages was not the fall of Rome in the fifth century, as traditionally held, but the expansion of Islam in the seventh. The Germanic kingdoms, he argued, had preserved much of the Roman economic and cultural architecture. Trade across the Mediterranean continued; cities, though diminished, remained nodes in a wider network sustained by the circulation of goods and by administration. For the Romans, the mare nostrum was a highway rather than a barrier.
If a good article starts after it ends, one might say that a civilisation reveals itself most clearly not in its proclamations, but in the modification of its habits – when what was once assumed becomes contested. In such subtle alterations, Pirenne discerned the end of the ancient world.
With the Islamic expansion the greater part of the Mediterranean’s southern and eastern shores fell under Muslim control, from the Levant and Egypt to North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The sea was no longer a unified Roman basin, but a divided one. Authority and function shifted: the Mediterranean ceased to operate as a shared commercial zone. Long-distance trade dwindled, the flow of goods between East and West was disrupted and with it the urban and monetary life that depended upon it. Only then did Western Europe withdraw inward, shrinking into the medieval world as it is recognised today.
The argument has been debated, qualified, and revised. Yet its inner core endures: civilisations are sustained not merely by armies or laws, but by the invisible fibres of exchange – commercial, intellectual and cultural – that bind their parts together. Sever those threads and, without even the cut of a sword, a whole order may vanish into a rumour.
To draw a parallel with present-day Europe is to tread on disputed ground. The language of “invasion” is often employed with more heat than light; yet to deny that significant demographic and cultural changes are under way would be equally unhelpful. The question, then, is whether Pirenne’s model can illuminate what many believe is a tragedy without reducing it to a farce.
The spread of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries was a series of military conquests. The Arab fleets that took North Africa and Spain, the armies that crossed into Gaul, and the long struggle for control of the Mediterranean were enterprises of war and empire. Contemporary migration into Europe, by contrast, occurs largely through civilian movement, legal and illegal. However, both historical processes demonstrate that massive migratory movements, whatever their specific nature, do not merely add numbers to a population; they introduce new networks, new loyalties, new values and new norms that eventually fracture the existing state of affairs.
Before the eighth century, the Mediterranean economy continues to function, vibrant and connected. After the eighth century, that system is shattered. The sea is closed. Trade disappears. Europe faces an empire whose only wealth is the land, where the movement of goods is reduced to a bare minimum. Far from advancing, society regresses.
Pirenne’s thesis gains thrust and edge in presenting the Islamic expansion as embodying a fundamental alteration in coexistence.
Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers)
Wee Nips
Published 19 Sept 2025Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers) explores the fascinating differences — and surprising overlaps — between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the often-overlooked Generation Jones.
Were you too young for Woodstock but too old for grunge? Stuck between disco and Nirvana? You might just be a Joneser.
In this video, we’ll compare:
🎵 The cultural touchstones of Boomers, Gen X, and Jonesers
📉 The low points in history that shaped each generation’s outlook
💰 The economic conditions that defined their opportunities
🧠 The attitudes and stereotypes that still stick today
Generation Jones isn’t just a footnote — they’re the missing link between the optimism of the Boomers and the skepticism of Gen X.
0:00 Introduction
1:38 Definitions
2:42 Cultural Touchstones
3:38 Low Points in History
4:53 Economic Conditions
5:42 Social and Attitude Differences
6:38 Humorous Stereotypes
7:09 Overlaps and Connections
8:02 Closing
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QotD: “Colour-blind” casting
Is noticing somebody’s skin colour an important factor in addressing your privilege, or is noticing race itself racist? And should white actors ever play a character whose historical and/or geographical context suggests that they should be played by people of colour? I ask, because people who have been watching the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall have noticed that there are lots of global majority actors playing roles that — back in the distant past of Series 1 — would have been played by white actors. Should people have noticed that? And should historical accuracy have a part to play? It certainly used to be the case that only racists noticed race, but then racists started trying to disguise themselves by not noticing race, which made not noticing race racist again.
As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.
First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist.
The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?
I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.
Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both — without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.
David Scullion, “People of Colour television”, The Critic, 2024-11-12.
March 31, 2026
This Recipe Took 3 Years … Ninja Kikatsugan
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Sept 2025Very bitter, very sake-flavored balls that include ginseng, coix seeds, and licorice
City/Region: Japan
Time Period: 1676Much like cowboys, pirates, and knights, ninja have been fictionalized to be a far cry from the intelligence gathering and sabotage experts of history. The term “ninja” didn’t even become popular until the mid-20th century.
Even the historical text I’m using here, the Bansenshukai, has been called into question. Because it was written over the period of several centuries, often by people who weren’t even alive during the period when ninja, or shinobi, were active, who knows if it’s an accurate portrayal of their tools and methods.
If this recipe is accurate, I feel bad for the people who had to eat them. They’re really bitter with an overwhelming sake flavor that isn’t pleasant. Really, I wouldn’t recommend making these; they’re not worth the 3 year time investment, and hyōrōgan are a much tastier ninja survival food.
Kikatsugan
10 ryō Asiatic ginseng
20 ryō Buckweat flour
20 ryō Millet Flour
20 ryō Yam
1 ryō Liquorice
10 ryō Coix seed
20 ryō Rice flour
Grind this into a powder, soak it in three shō of sake for three years until it has dried. Afterward, roll it into balls the size of peach pits.
Eating three of these daily will keep you healthy even when you have nothing else to eat.
Eating three will prevent both mental and physical fatigue.— Bansenshukai, 1676
QotD: Slavery
It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)
What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.
This is not to say slaves have no legal personality — all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.
Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.
Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.
Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.
All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)
None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.
While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.
The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.
In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.
To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:
without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)
Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:
All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)
In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.
In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master — hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.
The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions — rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.
Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance — officials could not be assigned to their home counties — and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)
Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.
So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.
For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.
The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)
Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.
The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.
Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.
The Greeks also had citizenship and — particularly in the case of Athens — mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.
Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.
Aristotle — as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism — came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.
The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)
Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.
Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour — labour bondage — on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China — infamously of the Uyghurs — and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.
Lorenzo Warby, “Owning people, owning animals, controlling attributes”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-12-25.
March 30, 2026
UOTCAF – EP 001 – The Royal Canadian Regiment – SWG
Stormwalker Group
Published 24 Oct 2025Dive into the rich legacy of the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR) in the premiere episode of “Units of the CAF”, hosted by ex-reservist Mario Gaudet.
This 15-minute narration explores the RCR’s origins in 1883 as Canada’s first permanent infantry unit, the symbolism of their iconic “VRI” cap badge, unique uniform features, and their heroic battles from the North-West Rebellion to Afghanistan. We also spotlight some of the regiment’s most decorated soldiers.
Whether you’re a history buff, military enthusiast, or proud Canadian, this series honors the sacrifices and traditions of the Canadian Armed Forces.
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QotD: The Revenge of the Archaeologists
It is thus relevant that over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it. Other fields of history are still processing their much larger quantity of texts; why dig so deep a well when you live next to a running river?
The result, in ancient history, has been what I tend to refer to as “the revenge of the archaeologists”. Not, mind you, revenge on medievalists, but in fact revenge on a very specific ancient historian and classicist, Moses Finley. Moses Finley was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, one of the most prominent classicists and his work touched on many fields, including the study of the ancient economy. Finley, writing in the 1960s was generally skeptical of the ability of archaeology to provide useful answers about the ancient economy (he preferred to understand the question by probing the mentalities of the Greek and Roman elite). Archaeology, Finley thought, was frequently over-interpreted and could never give a representative sample anyway; as he quipped in his 1965 article “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World”, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots”, a line for which, as far as I can tell, he is still quite unforgiven by some archaeologists.
As if in response, the archaeologists have spent the subsequent almost-six-decades proving again and again the tremendous value of their discipline by, among other things, utterly burying Finley’s The Ancient Economy (1973) under a mountain of archaeological data. It turns out the mentalités of aristocrats who largely hated merchants were not a good barometer of the activities of those merchants.
But you may now guess how this is going to play out in the discussion of Late Antiquity. The ancient historians come to the question ready to think in archaeological terms and ask what archaeological data can do to clear up these questions. Scholars of Late Antiquity trained as medievalists on the other hand, may or may not be well versed in archaeological methods or data (to be clear, some medievalists very much are versed, including prominent voices on the “change and continuity” side of this debate! But it is also very possible to be a “pure text” medievalist in a way that I don’t think I know a “pure text” ancient historian younger than sixty) because their field has not been forced, by dint of the paucity of sources, to revolve so heavily around archaeological data and because the archaeological data on the Middle Ages is not yet as voluminous as that on Classical Antiquity.
As I noted in the first post, beginning in the 1970s, what James O’Donnell calls the “reformation in Late Antique studies” launched a long overdue reassessment of Late Antiquity and the impact of the Fall of Rome – what we’ve called the “change and continuity” argument. I bring up all of this to note that the “counter-reformation” – what we’re calling the “decline and fall” argument – that really emerges beginning in the 90s is in many ways an extension of the “revenge of the archaeologists” in Classical studies (and especially the ancient economy) into the field of Late Antiquity. Indeed some of the scholars are the same (e.g. Willem Jongman) and many of them enter the debate on Late Antiquity as an extension of the debate about the Roman economy (in part demanding that “change and continuity” Late Antique scholars acknowledge things now generally considered “proved” by ancient historians about the earlier Roman economy).
In my own experience, particularly in more informal conversations, the methodological difference that interaction creates between ancient historians – for whom it has long been almost entirely settled that in a “fight” between archaeological evidence and effectively any other kind, the archaeological evidence “wins” – and medievalists for whom archaeology is a much less central part of their method (in part because their textual sources are more extensive) can lead to situations where the two sides of the debate talk past each other.
But when it comes to questions of demographics, economics and the conditions of life for the sort of people who rarely figure in our sources, archaeological evidence – although it is often incomplete and hard to interpret – offers the possibility of decisive answers to questions that otherwise would have to live entirely within the realm of speculation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-11.
March 29, 2026
The collapse of the Afghan National Army in 2021 was inevitable
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort explains why the way that soldiers were required to cover up ANA shortcomings or even blatantly lie about the ANA’s military capabilities show that collapse was inevitable once western forces began to pull out:
A Boeing CH-47 Chinook transport helicopter appears over the U.S. embassy compound in Kabul, 15 Aug 2021. Image from Twitter via libertyunyielding.com
I always get confused when I hear people say they never saw the collapse of the Afghan military coming.
Anyone who’s been on the ground with them knew this.
I saw an entire ANA battalion with modern American equipment get pinned down by 3 Taliban with AKs. Begging me for air support.
How was this a surprise?
And further:
When it came to partnering with Afghans, I was actually convinced for awhile that their failure was my fault. Why? Because that’s what our superiors told us.
I remember giving honest assessments in formal reports about the capabilities of Afghans. It led to many confrontations with superiors across different tours.
“You can’t write that they don’t do X, Y, or Z in this SITREP. Don’t you know every failure is yours and every success is theirs?”
That was the mantra. Every failure was ours and every success theirs. And I believed it.
The military intellectual crowd was in charge at the time. The ones who hate us now for noticing their inadequacies.
The ones who made us think that we could succeed if we made just one more measure of performance and measure of effectiveness to implement.
Maybe we could make that barbarian culture better by just doing one more intellectual thing.
No. And it’s those same people who punished us for telling the truth. And they should be shamed for it in perpetuity.
Senior leaders in 2021 acted stunned at how the Afghans fell so fast. Nobody could believe it.
Maybe they were stunned because the truth had been filtered for decades. Laundered. And for what?
Lies. All lies. And they were peddled by the most “intelligent” military leaders among us.
So if you’re part of that crowd and are now uncomfortable with the current backlash from “idiots” like me. I simply ask, why?
You earned it.
Forcing subordinates to lie doesn’t change the reality they’re trying to inform you about, it just makes the point where reality asserts itself that much more surprising and painful. True in business, especially true in the military.
Update, 31 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.
How Radio Killed Democracy – Death of Democracy 09 – Q1 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 28 Mar 2026Radio did not just spread Nazi propaganda — it helped make dictatorship feel normal.
In How Radio Killed Democracy, we examine how Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used mass broadcasting to manipulate public opinion in Germany in early 1935. As the Saar plebiscite returned the Saarland to the Reich, the regime turned radio into a political weapon: shaping emotion, manufacturing consent, and helping millions of Germans embrace rearmament, conscription, and the destruction of democracy.
This episode of Death of Democracy follows the decisive first quarter of 1935: the Saar vote, Göring’s admission of [the existence of] the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s open defiance of Versailles, and the growing power of the Gestapo. While Nazi propaganda promised pride, unity, and national revival, civil liberties were collapsing, Jews were being isolated, and Germany was being prepared for war.
How did propaganda become so effective? How did radio help turn fear, resentment, and nationalism into obedience? And how did so many people support a regime that was already dismantling the rule of law?
This is the story of how radio helped kill democracy in Nazi Germany.Never Forget
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Adventures in Surplus! Finnish M28 “Ski Trooper”
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Nov 2025Today we are going to take a look at just how much historical [information can] be read from the features and markings of an individual rifle. This is an early production Finnish M28 “ski trooper” Mosin Nagant that can be traced from Russian manufacture to WW1 Russian use, Austro-Hungarian capture, rechambering to 8x50mm Mannlicher, concession to Italy as war reparations, sale to Finland, rebuilding as a Civil Guard M28, use in the Winter War and Continuation War, transfer to the Finnish Army, and finally importation into the United States.
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March 28, 2026
QotD: The moment the American empire began to decline
The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy”. What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?
I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.2 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation”, and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.
As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,3 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity”. I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.
Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.
Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.
Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.
The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil”. I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails
Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive4 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?”
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.
- Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.
- Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.
- Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it. >
- “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”
March 27, 2026
Protecting modern warships from new threats
CDR Salamander considers how the US Navy up-gunned their fleet after the shock of the Pearl Harbour attacks with an eye to the current day, where it appears that modern warships suddenly need far more defensive firepower than they have:
USS Tennessee (BB 43) underway in Puget Sound, Washington, on 12 May 1943, after modernization.
Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives via Wikimedia Commons.One of the many lessons of the modern air threat against surface ships in the last few years is simple: we need more of everything.
It isn’t really a new lesson. It is an old lesson that our peacetime accountants convinced us to pretend we didn’t know.
Since the first war in which the threat from the air targeted the surface fleet, what was a common thread after D+0 from WWII to the Falklands War?
After cursing those responsible for preparing the fleet for the next war, those tasked to fight the war in front of them would, at the first chance, put every possible weapon possible on their warships.
My favorite example is what the U.S. Navy did with its old battleships the first chance after Pearl Harbor.
The picture at the top of the post is the battleship USS Tennessee (BB 43) after the completion of her rebuild, May 12th, 1943.
- The older single 5-inch/25 cal guns were replaced by eight twin 5-inch/38 caliber dual-purpose gun mounts (totaling 16 guns).
- Ten quadruple 40 mm Bofors mounts and 43 single 20 mm Oerlikon guns replaced 1.1-inch and .50 cal machine guns.
Here she was with her “cleaner” deck from the 1930s.
USS Tennessee in the mid-1930s.
The Royal Navy reached the point in the Falklands War that they resorted to lining the decks with Seamen firing whatever weapons they could find from rifles to crew-served weapons … as they simply did not have the time to up-arm their ships properly.
Like the sudden realization that they did not quite understand the true nature of the threat from the air in the 1930s, here in the mid-2020s we are suddenly realizing that we don’t fully understand — or more likely were comfortable ignoring those warning of the problem — the high/low threat to warships from the air.
The tan, rested, ready, if the not quite battle-tested People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is comfortably unbothered, moisturized, happy, and staying in their lane as we have been emptying out magazines and wearing out sailors and ships, They continue to be focused on how to defeat the U.S. Navy should it venture west of the International Date Line in response to a future contingency — the very mission the PLAN was built to execute as the world’s largest navy.
I am quite confident, because, especially in the ballistic missile area, they were ahead of everyone, that the PLAN has a whole mix of threats they are ready to throw at our fleet should it be required.
The Houthi who have been providing us unscheduled range time in the Red Sea for over two years, and Iran from Turkey to UAE over the last year. The Houthi are a fourth-rate threat, and the Iranians are on a good day, a second-rate threat. They are throwing everything from slow drones to anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM) at ships.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a first-rate threat … and then some. She will do the same, but better and in higher volume. We need to be ready to face that, and we are not.
The Greatest Scoundrel Story Ever Written
Lotuseaters Dot Com
Published 29 Nov 2025Luca is joined by Dan to discuss Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser. They explore Fraser’s skill in writing historical fiction, the genius of the Harry Flashman character, and the sheer hilarity of the novel’s dark humour.
March 26, 2026
From conservative, traditionalist Wilhelmine Germany to the unbridled excess of the Weimar Republic
Celina discusses the wrenching social changes Germany went through as the First World War ended, the Kaiser abdicated, and the Versailles terms were imposed on a still-young nation that didn’t think it had been defeated on the battlefield (it had been, decisively, but the truth was not revealed or understood on the home front):
To understand the death of a civilisation, one must first walk through its ruins. The scene is Berlin, sometime in the mid-1920s, beneath the blinding, electric glare of neon and the suffocating, narcotic haze of the Berliner Luft, an atmosphere that locals gleefully described as an amphetamine-like air that made hearts race, pupils dilate, and morals evaporate until dawn.1 In the shadowed, labyrinthine alleys of a shattered empire, the streets of the capital have been entirely surrendered to a bacchanalia of unprecedented depravity. Prostitutes in various stages of undress crowd the cobblestones. They are openly aggressive, their ranks swollen by pregnant mothers, desperate war widows, and adolescents, all selling their flesh for the price of a meal.2 On every street corner, hawkers peddle cocaine, morphine, and opium to passersby, while newsstands prominently display nudist magazines dedicated exclusively to the exhibition of children.3
Push past the heavy, smoke-stained velvet curtains of the subterranean cabarets, and the full, suffocating scope of the abyss reveals itself. Here, glittering shows parade acres of sweaty, perfumed flesh to the applause of an audience intoxicated by a potent mixture of ecstasy, terror, and moral decay. Cross-dressing men perform grotesque pantomimes of traditional womanhood, while tuxedo-clad women mock the remnants of patriarchal authority, puffing cigars and sneering at the ghosts of their fathers.
Cabaret
For the modern, liberal apologists of the era, this explosion of libertinism is often retroactively celebrated as a vibrant, avant-garde renaissance, a brief, shining moment of progressive emancipation before the darkness of fascism fell. It is romanticised in our modern cinema and theatre as a glorious rebellion against the stuffy confines of tradition. But to the ordinary, rooted citizens of the German nation, the truth was far darker and far more evident.
The normalisation of perversion was not an expression of human flourishing, it was an aggressive, deliberate assault on the family, faith, nation, and the natural order itself. It was the deliberate dismantling of the moral architecture that had sustained European civilisation for a millennium. This was not liberation. This was civilisational suicide and the German people knew it.
Left: Valeska Gert, Dance in Orange, Munich (1918). Right: Olga Desmond performing the ‘Sword Dance’ (1908). Photo by Otto Skowranek.
The Shattered Fatherland: Versailles and the Death of Order
The tragedy of the Weimar Republic cannot be understood without first grasping the significant psychological and spiritual trauma that birthed it. Before 1914, Wilhelmine Germany was a society defined by structure, piety, and an organic connection to history. It was a nation grounded in Christian sexual ethics, where the family was revered as the inviolable bedrock of the state, and where duty, honour, and natural law governed public life.4 Men were expected to be providers and protectors; women were the venerated guardians of the hearth and the moral educators of the next generation.5
The cataclysm of the First World War shattered this world completely. The defeat of the German Empire brought not only physical devastation, millions of young men fed to the meat grinder of the trenches, but an unprecedented spiritual crisis. The humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, specifically the “War Guilt Clause” and the crippling imposition of 130 billion marks in war reparations, stripped the nation of its dignity and its sovereignty.6 The collapse of the monarchy left a gaping void where the Fatherland had once stood, and the pervasive Dolchstoßlegende, the widely held belief that the military was stabbed in the back by domestic traitors, socialists, and cultural subversives festered in the national consciousness.7
- https://www.salon.com/2000/11/22/weimar/
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://verso.uidaho.edu/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=01ALLIANCE_UID&filePid=13308274540001851&download=true
- Ibid
- https://theoldshelter.com/weimar-republic-and-the-rise-of-anti-semitism/
- https://verso.uidaho.edu/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=01ALLIANCE_UID&filePid=13308274540001851&download=true
