Drachinifel
Published 25 May 2024HMS Canada / Almirante Latorre, a single dreadnought battleship of the British Royal Navy and Chilean Navy, is today’s subject.
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July 18, 2025
HMS Canada / Almirante Latorre – Guide 389
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QotD: Christianity destroyed the ancient Graeco-Roman culture
Reading this book really makes it clear how nearly every aspect of Christianity was like a laser-guided bomb aimed at one or more of the pillars holding up the social order of ancient Mediterranean civilization.
Consider celibacy: Fustel de Coulanges examines several ancient legal codes and finds that in all of them the deliberate refusal to procreate was a crime that carried severe punishments. This makes total sense in light of all you’ve said — a man does not belong to himself, he belongs to his family, a diachronic (or transtemporal?) entity that lives in and through and above individuals. Deliberate celibacy would be like your hand or your kidney refusing to perform its assigned function and trying to murder you instead. Cancer, in other words. And the solution to cancer is to cut it out and destroy it.
Now imagine a religion praising cancer and vaunting the tumor as the highest form of biological life, and maybe we can feel a sliver of the horror that the ancients must have felt towards Christianity. And it wasn’t just celibacy either — in area after area Christianity emancipated individuals from the dense, ancient web of obligations, loyalties, and client-patron relationships. Loyalty to the city and loyalty to the family were both such incomparably important qualities for the ancients that Sophocles got several tragedies out of the collisions when they came into conflict, but Christianity in its most radical form says that both are ephemeral and contingent, and must be subordinated to a higher loyalty — fidelity to the Truth. To the ancients I bet this didn’t just seem like antisocial behavior, I bet it seemed like the apocalypse. No wonder there were so many martyrs. No wonder so many of them were martyred by their closest relations.
I’m almost tempted to say that that old snake Gibbon was right, it was Christianity that destroyed the Roman Empire, destroyed the entire ancient Mediterranean civilization that had lasted for a millennium or more, first bit-by-bit then all at once. But of course that isn’t quite right either. By the time Pentecost occurred, the dissolution was already well underway. Christianity massively accelerated a process that was inexorable by then, and changed the shape of what was to come after it, but the collapse was baked in.
Read any of the Roman authors from either shortly before or shortly after the Lord’s birth — Virgil, Cicero, Pliny, Suetonius — all of them, in one way or another, are obsessed with the unraveling of the matrix of tribal and familial relationships that Fustel de Coulanges describes. There were a lot of reasons for it, including but not limited to: mass migration to the cities, economic rationalization that replaced freehold farming with massive latifundia (plantations), and just the accumulated stresses from centuries of continuous warfare and expansion. The cumulative effect of all this was that a society formerly governed by ritual, familial and civic piety, tribe, and clan was transformed into an ocean of atomized and deracinated individuals engaging in mass politics.1
One of my favorite passages in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall2 is in the intro to the chapter on Alaric’s invasion of Italy. Gibbon contrasts this with Hannibal’s invasion 700 years earlier, and goes on this beautiful riff about how on paper, the Rome of the 5th century AD looks incomparably stronger than that of the 3rd century BC — it had a massively larger population, greater wealth, a greater technological edge over its opponents, etc. And yet when it came to a responsibility as basic as that of defense against a foreign invasion, all the GDP and technology in the world wasn’t able to make up for a lack of asabiyyah. When Hannibal annihilated the legions at the Battle of Cannae, something like 20% of the entire adult male population of Rome was killed, including most of her military and political leadership, to which the Romans simply gritted their teeth and raised a few more armies. The descendants of those heroes, despite having a vastly larger population to draw from, weren’t able to muster a single legion or a single capable commander, and surrendered their city to the Visigoths almost without a fight.
Rome was a rocket that soared into the sky and then came crashing back down, and it’s easiest to see it right at the apogee, the point midway between the first and the last great invasions of Italy. The first century glory days of Rome, the time that we moderns consider the height of her power, were actually a moment of deep institutional and social decay. Like an exothermic reaction — a bonfire or an explosion or a fireworks display — what we notice immediately is the ebullient, magnificent blaze. But it’s easier to miss all the fuel that’s being consumed: solidarity, economic resilience, social technology, all of it woven through with the tight bands of ancient law and custom that Fustel de Coulanges documents. Just as the Greek philosophy we love was an uncharacteristic flash in the pan, an evanescent moment that subverted and destroyed the culture that had given rise to it; so too the Roman imperial achievement was an engine fueled by a society and a citizen-soldiery that it quickly burned to cinders.
I wonder if every civilizational golden age would turn out to have this unsustainable character if you inspected it closely. If so it would explain a historical mystery, which is why these epochs are rare, and why they never last long. From this angle history looks a bit like a 2-stage cyclic phenomenon wherein the long “dark ages” are actually epochs of patient stewardship of economic, cultural, and demographic resources, whilst the short “golden ages” are a kind of manic civilizational fire sale of the accumulated inheritance. Maybe we need a new historiography founded on the idea that what we have heretofore considered dark ages are the true golden ages, and vice versa. This transvaluation of values would be like a temporal version of James Scott’s attempted reversal of civilization and barbarism.
Alas, while peasants could vote with their feet and migrate across the imperial frontier, our options for time travel are a bit more limited. Would we prefer to live in the cozy but constricting deep prehistory of a civilization, or in the wild glory of its last days? No doubt it would depend a lot on who we imagine being in each of these phases, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because we don’t have a choice. May as well sit back and enjoy watching the blaze. It will be beautiful and exhilarating while it lasts.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
1. If this sounds familiar, it should. Whenever I read about first century Rome I always come away with a weirdly twentieth century vibe.
2. Yes, I’ve read the whole thing cover-to-cover. What? Why are you looking at me like that? There was a pandemic happening, okay?
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July 17, 2025
Afghan refugees and the British government
On Substack, Fergus Mason explains why the British government got deep into a secretive program to bring thousands of former Afghan soldiers and their families to Britain:
So here’s what we know so far. In February 2022 a Royal Marine officer, working for the Director of Special Forces, sent an email to several Afghans in Britain. These people were involved in the effort to rescue former interpreters and Afghan National Army special forces soldiers who were at risk of reprisals from the Taliban regime, and the Marine wanted to know whether some Afghans who claimed to be ex-special forces really were. The officer intended to attach a filtered list of around a hundred names from an Excel spreadsheet, but inadvertently attached the whole file — which contained around 25,000 names. One of the Afghans he sent the list to immediately passed it on to someone else – this time in Afghanistan. MoD sources are stressing that these were all trusted Afghans, but … well, we’ll get to that shortly.
And then nothing much happened for 18 months. The Taliban didn’t round up and shoot everyone on the list, even though they now claim to have had it since early 2022. But then, in August 2023, an Afghan man — a former soldier who had applied for asylum in Britain, but been rejected — popped up on Facebook. He promptly released part of the spreadsheet, then threatened to post all of it. At this point the government swung into action. First, it pressured Meta, which owns Facebook, to shut down the group the data was posted in and remove the user. Then the Ministry of Defence, under former defence secretary Ben Wallace, applied for a super-injunction to prevent the media from reporting anything about the leak, what the government planned to do about it, or what it was going to cost. It even banned anyone from revealing the existence of the injunction itself. That injunction was granted to Wallace’s successor, Grant Shapps, and the entire story was killed before it became public. The government was already drawing up a plan to bring tens of thousands more Afghans to Britain; the media and Parliament weren’t allowed to mention it; the British people, of course, were not to be allowed to know a thing. The degree of secrecy imposed was truly extraordinary.
And, over the last 18 months or so, the government has quietly been running a huge and very expensive operation to bring those identified as being at risk to Britain. From those listed on the spreadsheet, 23,900 former Afghan soldiers, policemen and intelligence officers were deemed to be in danger because of the leak. So, of course, were their families. How many people does the government plan to bring in under this scheme, in total? Nobody knows. Early estimates, according to court documents, were that 43,000 Afghans would be given asylum in Britain. Yesterday, officials insisted the real total was 6,900; even that dramatically lower number is a big addition to the 24,000 Afghans the government has admitted to bringing in under other, declared schemes. However, horrifyingly, last June three judges — Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lord Justice Singh and Lord Justice Warby — issued a written (but, of course, secret) ruling that up to a hundred thousand people could be at risk if the Taliban got their hands on the list.
Embarrassment for the British government, certainly, both for the initial cock-up and the ridiculous follow-up. It’s going to be expensive to resettle all those refugees and their often quite large families (guesstimates range from £850 million up to £6 billion), but not really a big deal, right? Well, about that …
I’ve already mentioned Afghan culture’s horrific misogyny. This leads to some truly dire attitudes towards women who don’t comply with Afghan society’s draconian rules of female behaviour (which boil down to having no rights and not being allowed to leave the house without a burqa and a male relative). One of the consequences of this is that Afghan men have unleashed a tidal wave of sexual assaults across Europe. At least one migration expert has noted that as well as their frequency, assaults by Afghans are remarkable for their brutality, audacity and often downright stupidity. Austrian political scientist Cheryl Benard wrote:
Can these men possibly expect that their attempts will be successful? Do they actually think they will be able to rape a woman on the main street of a town in the middle of the day? On a train filled with other passengers? In a frequented public park in the early afternoon? Are they incapable of logical thought — or is that not even their aim? Do they merely want to cause momentary female hysteria and touch some forbidden places of a stranger’s body? Is that so gratifying that it’s worth jeopardizing their future and being hauled off to jail by scornful and disgusted Europeans? What is going on here? And why, why, why the Afghans? According to Austrian police statistics, Syrian refugees cause fewer than 10 percent of sexual assault cases. Afghans, whose numbers are comparable, are responsible for a stunning half of all cases.
Type two words into Google — Afghane and Vergewaltigung — and a cornucopia of appalling incidents unfolds before you.
Incidentally, to all you lefties who’re undoubtedly sputtering with fury as you read this, don’t even think of writing Benard off as an anti-Afghan racist. Her husband is former US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is Afghan.
But surely, the “trusted” former Afghani soldiers, police and intelligence officers being brought in are bound to be much better able to adapt to British culture, right? Uh, well …
The government has been very reluctant to release — or even admit it possesses — statistics on the link between nationality and crime, but under pressure from independent MP Rupert Lowe it finally did so in March. This showed that among Afghans in Britain, 59 per 10,000 have been convicted of a sexual offence — 22.18 times higher than British men, at 2.66 per 10,000:
By the way, yes, I know the graph is from the Centre for Migration Control — but the data is from the Ministry of Justice and was obtained by a Freedom of Information request. I’ve checked the graph against the data, and it’s accurate.
[…]
Does this photo of Afghan men watching a young boy dance give you the creeps? It should.
It’s not only women at risk, by the way. Afghan men aren’t averse to raping young boys, either. One of the most revolting aspects of Afghan culture — and that’s saying something — is the tradition of bacha bazi (Dari for “boy play”). Prepubescent boys are forced to dress up as girls then dance for, and “entertain”, men. This strain of paedophilia was common among anti-Taliban warlords and the Afghan security forces, particularly the police. The Taliban claim to be against the practice; their founder, the late Mullah Omar, actually was violently opposed to it. However, many prominent Taliban commanders also enjoy a spot of recreational pederasty.
Of course the obvious answer to this is “But most Afghan men aren’t rapists!” I agree; most of them aren’t. But an alarmingly high percentage of them are, and our governments clearly can’t keep the rapey ones out. The graph and its underlying statistics prove that beyond any possible doubt. And while it’s easy to downplay the statistics by saying it’s still “only” 77 sexual offences committed by Afghans over a two-year period, bear in mind that a) that’s 77 offences that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t let any Afghans in and b) this number is only convictions. In Britain just 3.1% of sexual offences reported to the police (around a third of which are rapes) lead to a conviction, which brings the potential number of Afghan suspects up to 2,484. The police estimate that only 10-15% of sexual offences are even reported; that could mean Afghans committed between 16,500 and 25,000 sexual offences across that same two-year period. Afghans would have to be bringing stupendous benefits to this country to make 25,000 sexual offences a worthwhile price to pay; indeed, many (emphatically including me) would argue that it wouldn’t be an acceptable price under any circumstances.
In Spiked, Tim Black on the government’s decision to hide everything for as long as they possibly could … for reasons:
Yet as catastrophic an error as this data leak was, the state has somehow managed to compound it with a series of decisions that made a terrible situation even worse. Successive Conservative and Labour governments effectively mounted a cover-up of both the data breach itself and the response. They slowly undertook a secret evacuation and relocation programme for the Afghans without telling even the Afghans affected about the data breach and the fact their lives were at risk. At the same time, they sought to hide all this from the British public, too, even while thousands of Afghan refugees were quietly being deposited in hotels and in military accommodation across the country. All with no explanation.
It is this de facto cover-up, this attempt on the part of ministers and senior officials to hide state errors and actions from public view, which is the most disturbing aspect of this whole sorry affair. They set about shielding a data breach followed by a costly, large-scale asylum scheme from any form of accountability, criticism or debate. And they did so by exploiting a legal tool that has never been used before by a British government – namely, the superinjunction.
This effective cover-up did not happen immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until early August 2023, a whole 18 months after the data breach took place, that the leak was finally brought to the attention of officials. A support worker responsible for settling Afghans in the UK emailed Luke Pollard, Labour MP for Plymouth, and James Heappey, the then Conservative defence minister, warning them that he’d seen the database circulating online. Days later, journalists also became aware of the leak. It was this that finally prompted the Ministry of Defence and the government to launch a covert mission, codenamed Operation Rubific, to shut down the leak and help Afghans put at risk get to the UK (after being vetted in Pakistan).
It was at this point that the authorities took the unprecedented step of applying for a superinjunction. This legal tool doesn’t only prevent journalists from reporting on the subject of the injunction. It also prevents anyone from acknowledging that the injunction even exists. Ministers argued that this extreme free-speech-defying measure was necessary to prevent the Taliban from becoming aware of the datasheet’s existence. Granted in September 2023, the superinjunction acted like a form of legal dark magic, rendering the data breach and the government response to it invisible. It insulated both from even the possibility of scrutiny.
Members of parliament could have still used their parliamentary privilege to speak up. But since all reporting had been prohibited, MPs found themselves in the same place as the wider public – in the dark. For nearly two years, then, we have all borne blind witness to the state’s conspiracy of silence. Until this week, that is, when defence secretary John Healey decided the superinjunction was no longer necessary.
It wasn’t just the British having issues with Afghan forces, as @InfantryDort recounts on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Among the Wildflowers @deaflibertarian
Did the high ranks really tell American soldiers to stand down and not interfere when children were being sexually assaulted in the Middle East region?TLDR, but you need to read it to get what I’m saying. I know it may be hard to understand how American Soldiers could witness horrors in Afghanistan and feel powerless to stop them. But let me try to explain. Fellow veterans, feel free to add on or correct me, because this rot ran deep.
1. We were forged to kill, then reprogrammed to hesitate. The warrior was replaced with a social worker in a helmet. Instead of rehearsing “react to contact,” we sat through PowerPoints on cultural sensitivity. Our edge dulled by doctrine that taught us empathy for the enemy and suspicion of ourselves.
2. We were ordered to practice “courageous restraint”. Sounds noble. It wasn’t. It meant ignoring your instincts. It meant second-guessing every shot, every step. The Army trained us to fight, then punished us for following that training. We were told killing the enemy might make things worse, as if leaving them alive made anything better.
3. Every success was credited to the Afghan army. Every failure pinned on us. We propped up a Potemkin military, full of cowards and thieves, and were ordered to salute the illusion. We whispered truths in smoke pits while speaking lies in briefings.
4. Under certain generals, aggressiveness was punished harshly. They’d clip the wings of the hawks and reward the peacocks. It’s like blaming a wolf for baring its teeth when surrounded by jackals.
5. “Green on Blue” attacks poisoned every partnership. The Taliban infiltrated Afghan ranks so deeply we stopped sleeping. Trust vanished. No one dared provoke them. Not over child rape, not over beatings, not over anything. Every Blue 1 report was a career landmine, so the truth stayed buried.This was the cocktail we drank every day:
• Restraint over reaction
• Illusion over integrity
• Shame over strengthWe were taught to see women as property, not to intervene. To accept children as sexual currency for Afghans, not to interfere. That the blame for every failure lay with us, not the corrupt warlords we empowered.
And was it non-consensual sexual currency? Because the culture was so backwards, we were told villagers would give their kids to powerful Afghans as tribute. And that the kids themselves understood the assignment. How f****d is that? How evil? How diametrically opposed to everything we believe?
And once you’re complicit in enough sin, it gets easier to stay silent. When you’ve spent years maintaining a lie, the truth becomes radioactive. Ripping off the bandage would mean admitting the whole war was infected.
We stood “shonna ba shonna” or shoulder to shoulder with some of the worst people humanity ever produced. And we called it partnership.
That’s how this happened.
A culture of confusion.
A doctrine of deceit.
A war that killed our ability to fight the very evil we were sent to destroy.There is a silver lining here. History has proven that our suspicions were right. And luckily, many of us are still in uniform or in charge of the DoD apparatus. We will NEVER let this happen again. And I will shout this from the rooftops to make sure that’s the case.
Infantry Dort, X.com, 2025-07-16.
A renewed push to ban AfD from contesting elections in Germany
eugyppius updates us on the state of play as the various smaller parties in Germany try to ban Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) which had risen from fringe status to being the most popular political party after the last federal election:
I’m far from a sensationalist, and I’ve repeatedly discounted the likelihood of an AfD ban – not least because the German establishment and the left in particular have good reasons to keep the AfD around. Lately, however, I’ve begun to appreciate that there are deeper, systemic forces working against the AfD in this case. These forces are beyond anybody’s control and if nobody does anything, they may well end in political catastrophe that is much bigger than any single party.
Since the end of the Merkel era, the German left has become thematically scattered, and so they have retreated to the only coordinating issue the German left has ever had, which is hating the right. As climatism started to fade, the social welfare state exceeded its limits and mass migration went sour, AfD bashing became the sole unifying principle for much of the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens. Hating the right is particularly important because it keeps leftist politicians and their activist class on the same page. Without a crusade against the right, a great chasm opens between the antifa thugs who want to smash the state and destroy capitalism on the one hand and the schoolmarm leftoid establishment functionaries in the Bundestag who want to mandate gender-neutral language for the civil service on the other hand. What is more, the firewall against the AfD splits the right and keeps the shrinking left in government. It is a win-win for leftoids everywhere.
Recent events, however, show why things cannot continue as they are now indefinitely. Over time, our Constitutional Court will begin to fill with leftist justices supported by the left parties, who like the rest of the left will also want to ban the AfD. Brosius-Gersdorf and Kaufhold are omens here. Right now the system is held in perfect balance; the left talks a big game about wanting to stamp out the AfD, but they can always justify their hesitation by saying the outcome of ban proceedings is too uncertain. When the necessary judicial majority for an AfD ban is finally secured in Karlsruhe, everything changes. At that point, there will be no excuse for not proceeding with a ban. The activists and the NGOs will take to the streets if their political masters in Berlin don’t begin the process. The CDU will be brought around by media smear campaigns and antifa intimidation.
Keep in mind that this is not about the AfD, but about imperatives within the left itself. No amount of moderation, polite messaging or triangulation on the part of the AfD can get the left to stop or pursue other goals. Unless some exogenous force introduces a new unifying obsession for the left parties and their activists, they will never stop gnawing on this particular chew toy.
Practically, this probably means that the AfD has an expiration date. If they can’t get into government at the federal level and if nothing else changes, they will find themselves facing ban proceedings before a court stacked with leftists who hate them in the next 10 or 15 years. The federal elections in 2029 seem like the last opportunity to normalise the AfD before this final escalation.
People in the CDU need to realise how serious this is, because their fate hangs in the balance as much as the fate of the populist opposition to the right of them. It is absolutely necessary that they break the firewall and enter some kind of arrangement with the AfD before it is too late. It doesn’t matter how much the press freaks out. It doesn’t matter how many violent antifa thugs take to the streets. It doesn’t matter how many party headquarters the leftists invade and vandalise. The firewall will fail in one direction or the other, and if it fails with an AfD ban, we are all in very deep shit.
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HBO’s Rome – Ep 7 “Pharsalia” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 22 Jan 2025
Half way through the first season, we take a look at Episode 7, set during the summer of 48 BC amid the campaign between Pompey and Julius Caesar in Macedonia. For once, most of the action takes place away from Rome. Central is the Battle of Pharsalus, where in reality 80,000 or more men clashed in August and Caesar decisively defeated Pompey and his supporters. So today we talk about the reality of the campaign and battle, its political context, and then consider how this is presented for TV in a series where they did not have the option of vast numbers of extras and big set piece battle scenes.
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QotD: War elephants in India
This may seem a strange approach to use to end a discussion of war elephants – after all, these are war elephants – but as will soon become apparent, war elephants are almost impossible to fully understand outside of the social and political context in which they are most useful.
First, we are going to look at how elephants fit into the ancient and medieval political systems which used them as weapons of war. I want to stress very strongly here that what I am presenting is essentially the main argument of Trautmann’s Elephants and Kings (2015), not something I dreamed up. For the sake of brevity, I am leaving out a lot of detail here – but you know where to go to find the argument in full.
Last time, we introduced a problem: while awesome, war elephants were very expensive and relatively easy to counter on the battlefield. This answered the question of why the Romans and Chinese mostly ignored the elephant as a weapon-system despite having access to it, but it raised a second question: if the elephant was at best a limited weapon, why did its use persist in India? After all, if the Romans could figure out how to beat these things, surely the Indians could too!
Part of the answer, of course, is that some of the logistical problems that existed for states located at the edges of elephant’s natural range simply don’t apply to states closer to the source. Indian kings could (and did!) deploy elephants in far greater numbers than Seleucid or Roman armies could. In particular, North Indian rulers, rather than relying on long distance trade, could acquire elephants through trade relations with “forest peoples” in their own hinterland. We have reports of armies with not hundreds but thousands of elephants from, for instance, the Nanda or Maurya empires. Nevertheless, while these factors simplified elephant logistics, they hardly made the use of the animals cheap.
What Trautmann instead observes is that the rise of war elephants occurred specifically in the context of kingship in India. Indeed, elephants were associated with kingship through royal elephant hunts and domesticated elephants kept for show even before war elephants were developed. Around 1400 B.C. the chariot arrives in India, bringing with it a military aristocracy where the nobles – and the noblest of all nobles is, of course, the king – rode into battle.
(I keep finding myself recommending it, but I’ll again note – for a good rundown of the value of chariots as royal symbols more than battlefield weapons, check out chapter 2 of Lee, Waging War (2016).)
That was the context the war elephant emerged into. By the fifth century or so, the war elephant seems to be displacing the chariot as the quintessential vehicle of the warrior-aristocrat (and thus the ultimate warrior-aristocrat, the king). Interestingly, the Mahabharata (fourth century B.C., but with components that may date as early as the ninth) preserves some of this shift, with a mix of aristocrats on chariot and aristocrats on elephant. As chariots faded (they were tactically inferior to true cavalry which was arising at this time), elephants progressively became the vehicle for the important warriors.
It’s not hard to see the appeal. For the warrior-aristocrat, battle isn’t just about winning, but is also about social status and position. Put another way: why does anyone put up with warrior-aristocrats, who get to live in luxury and boss everyone around? The implicit reason (sometimes explicit) across cultures is that it is the martial prowess – typically the personal, physical combat skill – that justifies the existence of the military aristocrat. You need Sir-Better-Than-You (to use a European framing) because you need someone who has mastered a difficult combat art (mounted combat) and is very, very good at it.
The warrior-aristocrat needs to be seen being a warrior aristocrat. For this purpose the elephant (much like its chariot forerunner) is perfect. Fighting from the back of an animal is a difficult skill which requires a lot of training the common folk do not have time to do. It also requires being able to afford and maintain a very expensive military asset commoners cannot afford. And not only does it allow the warrior-aristocrat to have an out-sized impact on the battle, but it literally elevates him over his fellow men so he can be seen (and it could not have escaped anyone that this was a physical realization of his actual high status). So long as the elephant remained even moderately militarily valuable, it was a perfect vehicle for a warrior-aristocrat to display his power and prowess.
And even more so for the king. Not only can the king ride his own elephant, but with his vast resources, he can procure elephants for his retainers. What is more impressive than a warrior aristocrat who has his own elephant? A warrior-king who has hundreds or thousands of elephants and his own warrior aristocrats to mount them. The thing is, a king’s actual power derives from the perception of his power – showing off the king’s military might makes him more likely to be obeyed (in ways – like tax collection – which allow him to further enhance his military might). This isn’t just a vanity project for the king (though it is that too) – extravagant displays of royal power are a key component of remaining king (the key big-word idea here is legitimacy).
This pattern in turn becomes self-reinforcing: as kings use elephants to show off (and thus reinforce) their power, elephants become symbols of royal power all on their own. Trautmann (2015) tracks this spread, particularly in South-East Asia – as the Indian model of kingship spreads into that region, war elephants spread with it. Whereas in places where there is plenty of contact, but the institution of Indian-style kingship doesn’t spread, war elephants are used rarely, if at all.
This in turn answers another quandary: why war elephants appealed to Hellenistic (that is, the heirs of Alexander) monarchs. Macedonian monarchy was not a form of Indian kingship – it had grown up in Macedon and been influenced by exposure to the Great Kings of Persia all on its own – but it was very similar in many ways. Compatible, we might say. Macedonian monarchs did not ride elephants (they rode horses), but they did need to be seen demonstrating martial excellence before their armies, just like Indian kings. In that context, the display of wealth and royal power implied by fielding a large elephant corps could be powerful, even if the king himself didn’t ride on an elephant. This is, perhaps most vividly demonstrated with Seleucus I Nicator, who earned himself the nickname “The Elephant King” and even produced coins advertising that fact […] This tie between elephants and kings seems to have been quite strong. Trautmann (2015) notes that even within India, states without kings (oligarchies, independent tribes and cities, etc) only rarely acquired elephants and never in the same sort of numbers as kings. So even when elephants are cheaper – because they are close by – unless you need elephants as physical symbols of the power and legitimacy of the king and his warrior-aristocrats, they are largely not worth the effort to procure.
The one great exception is Carthage – by the time it was using war elephants, Carthage was a mixed republic (much like Rome), and yet employed elephants extensively. Unfortunately, we have no sense of if Carthage – like Rome – would have abandoned elephants given time. The earliest attestation we have of Carthaginian war elephants is 262 B.C. (although they would have encountered them earlier from Pyrrhus of Epirus) and Carthage is completely gone in 146 B.C. It is possible Rome simply caught Carthage in the same “trying them out” phase of elephant use Rome would undergo in the second century B.C. and that Carthage may too have largely abandoned war elephants had it not been destroyed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part III: Elephant Memories”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-09.
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July 16, 2025
Matt Gurney’s “Hollywood Thesis”
I almost skipped reading this one, as Matt and Jen usually keep their own columns behind the paywall, but this one is free to non-paying cheapskates like me:
… I actually think there is one way that Hollywood — and probably mass entertainment writ large — has kind of warped our society. It’s not that it has promoted degeneracy or loose morals or shameless enjoyment of vice. It’s more insidious. And probably more dangerous.
I think Hollywood has tricked us into thinking that, in an emergency, our governments will prove to be a lot more competent than they will be. And usually are.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve mentioned it to my Line colleagues before, and I call it my Hollywood Thesis. As I see it, the broader public has fairly accurate expectations about the level of service they can expect from their government. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s mostly realistic. We basically know what we’re getting into when we, for example, drag the trash bin to the curb, or turn on a tap in the morning, or go to an emergency room because you need to get stitched up after a minor mishap.
But I’ve observed over the years an interesting exception. When the public is confronted with any kind of new or unexpected threat, people, for some reason, believe their government will have some secret ability or unexpected expertise in dealing with it. Maybe it’s a quirky scientist working in the bowels of some ministry or department. Maybe it’s an elite team of experts. Or some hidden base loaded with commandos and advanced weaponry.
Wrong. And I’ve been thinking about this. Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.
So why? What explains this?
It’s Hollywood. It has to be.
Lots of smart, competent people have government jobs. One of the great joys of my career has been the opportunity to speak with many. There are shining lights of unusual competency in every department, and at every order of government, really — my colleague Jen Gerson recently told our podcast listeners about how one of these hidden gems helped her cut through a confusing and dysfunctional process so she could get a permit. And I will never get tired of saying good things about the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — true miracle workers we do not support enough.
But there aren’t hidden capabilities. There aren’t secret teams. The same people trying to prevent Canada Post from going on strike will be the same people handling the next pandemic — or who would be responsible for opening a dialogue if aliens decided to land their mothership in the middle of a Saskatchewan farm.
It’s within the range of possibilities that, presented with a unique challenge, government leaders could rise to meet it … as long as it’s a completely unexpected situation with no pre-existing rules or regulations or bureaucratic processes in place. I admit it’s not the way the smart money would bet, but it’s technically a possibility.
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The Korean War Week 56: Ceasefire Talks Start – With Threats, Tricks, and Delays
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 15 Jul 2025This week might be a big turning point in the war, for this week, ceasefire negotiations begin in Kaesong. Both sides have sent delegations, and both sides have different goals they wish to achieve. The big question is, though: what is each side willing to concede in order to create a lasting peace?
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:53 Recap
01:27 The Communist Delegates
04:34 The First Session
08:40 The Next Few Days
11:38 Future Planning
13:21 Conclusion
(more…)
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Offensensitivity over a 12 year-old wearing a Union Jack dress to school
I’m not in the least bit surprised to hear that a 12 year-old girl has triggered the sensitive souls at her school for choosing to wear a Spice Girls style Union Jack dress to her school’s Cultural Diversity Day:
Photo from The Daily Sceptic
Another month, another glaring example of toxic activism sweeping through the British workplace, and this time, it’s no less than shocking.
On July 11th, 12 year-old Courtney Wright was sent home from Bilton School in Rugby, Warwickshire, simply for wearing a Union Flag dress and hat for the school’s Cultural Diversity Day. She had put effort into her costume, even writing a speech celebrating British culture: Shakespeare, fish and chips, tea, the Royal Family. Yet for what was a harmless celebration of her national culture, she was excluded.
The school’s response? A sanctimonious head of year, presumably with the support of management and colleagues, told her: “You get to celebrate your culture every day. This is for everyone else.” Then ordered her to remove her outfit and wear a second-hand uniform or go home. So she, rightly, called her father, who came to collect her.
Stuart Field, her father, a 47 year-old Marine Engineer, alleges she was not alone. A boy was reportedly sent home for wearing a farmer’s costume, illustrating a broader, troubling trend: the suppression of British symbols and pride in the name of “diversity”.
[…]
The aftermath saw the usual potted response from the school’s governing trust, the Stowe Valley Trust about how it values “diversity”, “respect” and so forth, yet its words ring hollow. It claims to regret “upset caused”, note, not the exclusion itself – only the distress that followed. It says it will “reflect on how this could have been handled better”. It then goes on to assure parents that it will be looking at the policies and training.
But what does that really mean? The trust refuses to admit that sending a girl home for celebrating her country was an appalling and divisive breach of common sense and, arguably, of law. Their language suggests an attempt to dodge accountability, to spin it as a mere mishandling rather than a fundamental failure.
At Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that this is merely a slightly more visible version of what British children learn in school … that there’s nothing at all to be proud about if you’re British:
British schoolkids have long been encouraged to be ashamed of their nationality and history. They’re taught “anti-racism” lessons and to constantly check their privilege as Brits. They study “decolonised” curricula, shorn of “triggering” British authors. Now, it seems, even dressing up as a Spice Girl and praising Shakespeare are being treated as beyond the pale.
[…]
You might say Courtney’s outfit was not exactly “traditional”, inspired by Geri Halliwel’s famous Union Jack dress from the 1997 Brit Awards. But that was clearly not the issue. What the school’s instructions really meant was that she should dress as any nationality or heritage, so long as it’s not British. According to Courtney’s father, Stuart Field, the school also turned several other pupils away at the gates on Culture Day, including a boy with a St George’s flag, a boy with a Welsh flag and a boy dressed as a farmer with a checked shirt and a traditional flat cap.
Courtney’s school also stopped her from giving a speech about what being British meant to her. “In Britain”, she would have said, “we have lots of traditions including drinking tea, our love for talking about the weather and we have the Royal Family”. “We have amazing history, like kings and queens, castles, and writers like Shakespeare.” It also praised British humour, “our values of fairness and politeness”, and fish and chips. Not exactly Enoch’s “Rivers of Blood“, is it?
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German Sten Copy: MP-3008, aka Gerät Neumünster
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Feb 2016The MP 3008, aka Gerät Neumünster, was one of two German efforts to copy the British Sten gun. The first was the Gerät Potsdam (“gerät” meaning device or project; basically project code name), which was a direct copy of the Sten distinguishable only by a marking details and a few differences in manufacturing processes. While 10,000 of those were being manufactured by Mauser, R&D engineer Ludwig Vorgrimmler was simplifying the Sten design even farther, resulting in the MP-3008.
This simplified design did away with the Sten’s barrel shroud, and used a vertical magazine well instead of the Sten’s distinctive horizontal mounting. These were the significant changes, although there was also a sling loop placed on the front of the magazine well and a few minor simplifications to the fire control parts. Unlike the Potsdam, significant variation can be found in the MP-3008 in the details of stock and grip design.
In a masterpiece of insane optimism, German official placed an order for literally a million MP-3008 submachine guns, which of course was completely insane. Manufacture was undertaken at a wide scattering of small shops, with guns being assembled by larger manufacturers from supplied parts. The total made is not known, but is probably in the range of 3000-5000. Some are marked with manufacturing codes from recognized factories, some with codes unknown, and some have no marking at all. This particular example is dewat made by “TJK” — an unknown factory.
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QotD: Slavery in history
It is pathetic but unsurprising how ignorant all these brave “anti-fascists” are. Yet there is a lesson here not just for Britain but for America, too: when a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia.
Mark Steyn, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, 2011.
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July 15, 2025
American (religious) exceptionalism
Christianity has been in retreat across the western world for decades, with the United States being the laggard in abandoning the faith. Canada is closer to the western European rate of secularization. On Substack, Fortissax explains why it has become uncommon to find a believing Christian outside the US in response to a query on X about people turning to various neopagan faiths:
First, I believe there are two factors at play. One is the divide between the United States and the rest of the Western world. The United States still has the highest percentage of weekly churchgoers in the West, at around 24 percent. In the U.S., Christianity remains a living tradition. Millions still attend church, or at least try to. Many people share a common faith, believe in God, and are familiar with Christian references in public life, politics, and law. In contrast, in countries like Canada and much of Europe, regular church attendance is closer to 5 percent. That number often includes recent immigrants who tend to be more socially conservative. Among native-born Canadians and Europeans, especially in urban areas, church attendance is even lower. Religion in these places is often kept alive only by older or rural populations. Among the youth, it has largely faded. Second, many Western countries have experienced secularization for much longer.
I believe this first one is not obvious to a majority of people. There are significant cultural differences and experiences within in the United States and outside of it. I believe it would be appropriate to say that the U.S. is still a Christian country, and not just nominally, regardless of whether or not it was established on Lockean principles and Greco-Romain inspiration (some would say revision), of the liberal enlightenment. Sure, the faith is not what it used to be, but probably the majority of Americans at least understand Christian references in common parlance.
I can share a personal anecdote that I believe is fairly typical.
I was born and raised in a region where Christianity had long disappeared from everyday life, following a slow process of state secularization. My great-grandfather was Catholic, but he changed denominations to marry my great-grandmother in the 1930s. It was a utilitarian choice. He believed in God but didn’t care for the petty tyrannies of ethnic and cultural association by denomination. His son, my grandfather, saw hypocrisy in both Catholic and Protestant institutions. As a boy, he was told he could not be friends with a Protestant by a the Catholic priest of his best friend, and he was kicked out of the house by his mother for attending Catholic mass with his girlfriend, even though his father had once been Catholic. My parents were irreligious agnostics. They were not hostile to Christianity, just indifferent, because they were not raised in it. As for me, I grew up in a post-liberal, post-Christian society. I believe in the divine and understand the importance of religion to civilization, but I have no living connection to what came before. In my country of Canada and among my people, Christianity is no longer part of the cultural fabric. I believe this to be the case in Western Europe as well.
There is a common joke that if someone likes paganism so much, they should try the most pagan tradition of all: converting to Christianity. But the unfortunate reality is that secular liberalism has exercised a longer and deeper influence in the modern West than many realize. In response, one could just as easily say that the most Christian tradition of all is converting to secular liberalism, which has formally shaped the cultural and institutional framework of the West for more than 275 years.
For people raised in multi-generational secularized liberal contexts, there is nothing to return to. Christianity is not a living tradition. They cannot come home to Jesus the way many Americans still can, and they cannot undo the liberal Enlightenment. They can only move forward through it. At best, something new might be reinterpreted or reformed from its remnants. But Christianity was never part of their lived experience. It was not seen, heard, or practiced. Churches were never attended. Christmas and Easter functioned as civic holidays focused on family rather than faith. Christianity resembled a historical artifact, something like a beautiful mantelpiece in an old house. It had aesthetic and historical value, but no emotional, cultural, or spiritual presence. This situation is common in much of the non-American West.
This is why many contemporary efforts at Christian revival often feel disconnected. They are built on the assumption that secular individuals are lapsed believers who simply need to be reminded of what they once knew. But these individuals are not returning exiles. They are cultural natives of a secular world. They did not lose the faith, it was never given to them. There were no prayers at the dinner table, no hymns embedded in childhood memory, no sacred calendar shaping the flow of life. Organized religion belonged to the past, replaced with secular civic cults they’re largely unaware of. It was something other people had, something no longer meant for them. This group is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. In many cases, they admire it. They recognize its role in shaping art, architecture, law, and moral tradition. When foreigners attack these, they defend them. They understand its civilizational significance. But the faith speaks a language they do not understand. Its metaphors do not resonate. Its moral claims appear without context. Its stories feel distant.
A useful comparison can be found in the Heliand, a ninth-century Old Saxon gospel poem that re-imagined the life of Christ using the language and imagination of Germanic warrior culture. In that version, Christ is not a wandering teacher from a distant land, but a noble chieftain surrounded by loyal retainers. His mission is framed in terms of honor, loyalty, kinship, fealty, and sacred duty. The gospel message is not altered in its substance, but it is reshaped so that it resonates with the values, social structures, and poetic traditions of a people for whom neither Scripture nor Roman religious order had any living relevance.
This work was part of a broader process of the Germanization of Christianity, a phenomenon that has been studied in detail by scholars like James C. Russell and Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. Russell, in The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, argues that the conversion of the Germanic peoples did not consist merely in the passive reception of Christian doctrine, but in a complex synthesis between Germanic folk-religious consciousness and Christian metaphysics. The resulting Christianities of the early medieval West were distinct, rooted in local mythic frameworks, and expressed through tribal loyalty, sacrificial kingship, and heroic virtue. Murphy, in works such as The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, explores how the Heliand uses alliteration, formulaic verse, and martial imagery to make Christ intelligible to a newly converted warrior society. He shows how the gospel was not just translated into the Saxon tongue, but into the Saxon soul.
This is the historical precedent that today’s Church must study carefully. The peoples of early medieval Europe were not apostates. They were unbaptized, uncatechized, and culturally alien to Christianity. They were brought into the faith through through cultural immersion. Christianity did not ask them to surrender their world entirely. It entered their world, dignified their heroic values, and redirected them toward the divine. Only then did conversion become possible.
Even those outside the Church understand that this work is urgent. The crisis of meaning in secular liberal societies is visible. The desire for transcendence, rootedness, and spiritual structure has not disappeared. It has been redirected into political identity, consumer behavior, and digital escapism.
If Christianity is to succeed, the same kind of work is needed today. Christianity must once again become a missionary faith. This time, the mission field is not a remote foreign land, but the secularized cities and postmodern suburbs of the Western world. The people being addressed are cultural outsiders. Many were born into environments where the gospel was never lived, never spoken, never embodied. Christianity was not abandoned. It was never truly encountered.
A future for Christianity in the West will not be built on appeals to lost memory or civilizational guilt. It will not be recovered through progressive accommodation or through aesthetic traditionalism that treats churches, vestments, and relics as ornaments of cultural decline. It will only re-emerge through an act of deep cultural translation. That act must begin with an honest assessment of what has been lost, and a willingness to reframe the sacred in terms that can again be understood.
The alternative is a continued descent into spiritual confusion and civilizational forgetfulness. Christianity may continue to grow in the Global South. It may endure as a global religion. But in the West, it will only live again if it learns how to speak, once more, to those who were never taught how to listen.
Looking in from the outside, it seems to me that the majority of Christian priests and ministers have already made their peace with the inevitable extinction of their faith and far too many of them are actively working toward that end. Feminist and progressive currents move far more local Christian leaders than the message of the faith itself, hence any hopes of western Christianity reforging itself depend on a tiny minority of the clergy.
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Why France Couldn’t Crush the Viet Minh – W2W 36
TimeGhost History
Published 13 Jul 2025Why couldn’t France crush the Viet Minh after war broke out in Vietnam? In this episode we dive into the brutal opening years of the First Indochina War, from the outbreak of violence in Hanoi in December 1946 to France’s failed military campaigns and the rise of Vietnamese resistance.
Despite having superior weapons, colonial experience, and Foreign Legion reinforcements, France failed to defeat Ho Chi Minh’s forces. We explore why early offensives like Operation Léa and Ceinture fell short, how the Viet Minh’s rural strategy kept them alive, and why French hopes of ending the war quickly vanished.
As Mao Zedong’s Communist China consolidates power just across the border, the Viet Minh gain strength, support, and a long-term advantage that France simply cannot match.
This video is part of War 2 War, our Cold War history series covering the decade after WW2, a time of seismic global transformation.
(more…)
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What the CBC calls a “360-degree view of a story”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Harrison Lowman provides a detailed example of how the CBC prefers to present stories to Canadians — which signally fail to present a “360-degree view” because the CBC actively avoids including actual disagreement on any given topic:
THREAD: When you make complaints about patterns of bias or skewed reporting on the CBC, you are often met by CBC supporters who proceed to demand a list of examples.
When they don’t receive it immediately from you, they proceed to tell you you’re the biased one …. that “it’s in your head”. It feels like a bit of gaslighting to be honest.
So let me, as someone who has worked at the CBC, provide you a prime example of CBC coverage I think is glaringly biased and you can tell me what you think:
/1Earlier this summer, the CBC published this radio/TV story. The webpage version is headlined “Supervised drug site at Kingston prison has only had one visitor despite being open since 2023”
The story details a trial project where prisoners at a Kingston-area prison have been given the ability to inject, snort, or swallow the drugs they’ve smuggled into their cells under the supervision of a nurse.
The news hook is that only ONE inmate has visited the site since its inception more than a YEAR ago.
https://cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6802851
/2The CBC journalist then proceeds to interview three people: 1. someone running the program, 2. a retired academic expert sympathetic to the program wanting it expanded, and 3. a former inmate who was not in jail when the program started. All sources appear generally in approval of the pilot program.
In the story:
– At no time does the journalist speak to someone who sees this pilot program as the wrong approach. Keep in mind a recent Abacus poll shows a mere 19% of Canadians support expanding safe injection sites. (You’re literally ignoring the vast majority of the population here.)– At no time does the journalist reveal the cost of said program: a whopping $517,000 taxpayer dollars so that a SINGLE inmate could get high.
– Nor do they speak to someone who says (as many in the public would rightly ask) if given the cost and almost non-existent use, whether it’s worth continuing the program, or whether there’s a better way to spend this money within the corrections system- rehabilitation etc.
/3
Instead the CBC journalist exclusively focusses on the “barriers” to using the jail drug program, implying this all that can change- ie. look at making it easier for the inmates to use drugs.
The coverage, highlighting barriers:
– implies that they should operate at night, because it’s current hours “don’t line up with when inmates want to get high.”;
-In the written version of the article: source: “They’d prefer to take drugs during their free time after supper.”– That prisoners need to be allowed to smoke crystal meth as part of the program.
– That prisons need to make it so using the program won’t mean users getting unwanted attention from fellow inmates, officers…etc.
/4Last week, CBC News’ general manager and editor in chief Brodie Fenlon said:
“The job of a CBC News journalist is to report facts, to proportionately surface the variety of viewpoints that exist about those facts, to provide context and counter narratives where they exist, and to ensure credible analysis is in the mix. The goal is to give you a 360-degree view of a story so you can draw your own conclusions.”
“… We don’t shy away from contrarian views or perspectives that challenge orthodoxy.” “The best journalism often involves facts and viewpoints that challenge our own worldview.”
In what world is this a 360 degree view of this story? In what world is this a story that challenges orthodoxy?
Instead, this coverage appears to tell viewers the CBC approves of safe injection sites … for criminals, and doesn’t prioritize taxpayer $ waste in its coverage.
With this story, CBC is just clearly not meeting their own journalistic standards, and are failing to adequately inform the public.
There’s your example. Tell me I’m wrong.
The CBC must do better.
I plan to launch a complaint with the CBC ombudsman. It won’t be my first.
https://cbc.ca/news/editorsblog/cbc-news-platforming-1.7580219
Among the responses was this one from Andrew Kirsch:
I wrote the 1st ever memoir about being a Canadian spy. It was a National bestseller but largely positive about the org. I desperately tried to get on CBC (and TVO) to promote it. They weren’t interested. A while later my ex-colleague wrote a memoir about her career with a focus on institutional racism at CSIS. She was interviewed and her book was featured all over the website. I don’t want to take anything away from the other book. I just felt like mine was also a Canadian story worth telling.
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“A Cloak of Anarchy”: Gradations of Statelessness
Feral Historian
Published 21 Feb 2025“A Cloak of Anarchy”, written by Larry Niven and published in 1972, is a simple story. But it offers us an entry to examine the basic ideas of Anarchism without diving head-first into the political theorizing of the big anarchist philosophers. This one is a 3-minute look at a simple short story wrapped in a 20-minute attempt to cast aside the most basic misunderstandings of what anarchism is.
I don’t consider myself to be an anarchist, but by most standards I’m damn close. Take what I say here in that light.
00:00 Intro
01:00 Cops-Eyes
03:09 Absence of Rulers
06:37 AnComs and AnCaps
10:07 Is Anarchism Leftist?
11:30 Practical Considerations
16:17 Anarchism and Environmentalism
19:00 Closing Ramble
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