Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jun 12, 2024Starting a series looking at the HBO/BBC co production drama series ROME. We will look at how they chose to tell the story, at what they changed and where they stuck closer to the history.
September 22, 2024
History and story in HBO’s Rome – S1E1 “The Lost Eagle”
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QotD: The work of Le Corbusier
The sheer megalomania of the modernist architects, their evangelical zeal on behalf of what turned out to be, and could have been known in advance to be, an aesthetic and moral catastrophe, is here fully described. The story is more convoluted than I, not being an historian, had appreciated; Professor Curl conducts us deftly through the thickets of influences of which I, at least, had been ignorant. But the rapid rise and complete triumph of modernism throughout the world, so that an office block in Caracas should be no different from one in Bombay or Johannesburg, is to me still mysterious, considering that its progenitors were a collection of cranks and crackpots who wrote very badly and whose ideas would have disgraced an intelligent sixth-former. I do not see how anyone could read Corbusier, for example (and I have read a fair bit of him), without conceiving an immediate and complete contempt for him as a man, thinker and writer. He has two kinds of sentence, the declamatory falsehood and the peremptory order without reasons given. How anyone could have taken his bilge seriously is by far the most important enquiry that can be made about him.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.
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September 21, 2024
“This might be the greatest asymmetrical attack in human history”
Terrorist organizations in the Middle East always have to be aware of the risk of coming to the attention of Israel accidentally, and they’ve suffered losses whenever their operations have been prematurely exposed. The attack on Hezbollah’s communications infrastructure is, as Phil A. McBride says in The Line, “something genuinely new in warfare”:
The attack on Hezbollah’s communications through exploding pagers, radios, and other electronic devices triggered a cascade of instant memes.
Detonating the pagers and other devices would have been a relatively easy thing to do (to the extent that any of this was easy!), since it’s obvious that Israel had already penetrated the pager network, and Hezbollah’s communications generally, before the devices were even deployed. Once Israel was confident that they’d put all the devices into the right hands, they simply sent a message — remember, these devices are all intended to receive telecommunications — that somehow triggered the explosions we saw. I don’t know if the explosives did all the damage, or if the batteries were somehow overloaded as well. What is clear is that the explosions were enough to kill, injure and maim people who were directly holding the devices, but not much more. Videos posted online show people suddenly dropping to the ground in agony after their device explodes in their hands, pockets or backpacks, but people in their immediate vicinity are unharmed.
Again, none of this is easy, but if one is looking to remotely detonate a bomb, it helps when the bomb it intended to literally receive incoming communications.
[…]
That covers the pagers and two-way radios, but what about the other various items that exploded? While almost everything electronic you can buy these days has internet/wireless capability, Hezbollah went through a lot of trouble to be as disconnected from the internet as possible. I can only assume they wouldn’t have connected a device meant to read the fingerprints of terrorists trying to enter a safe house to the internet, where a Mossad hack is a constant threat. This means that any other device that exploded not only had explosive charges installed, but also a radio capable of receiving a remote detonation command. The most efficient approach would have been to tune those radios to the same frequencies used by Hezbollah’s two-way radios to minimize the infrastructure needed to pull off what was already an insanely complex operation, but we will need more information to even begin to understand that part of Israel’s plan.
And let’s talk about the plan. The level of sophistication for such an operation cannot be understated. Everything that we’ve seen over the last few days indicates a complete and total breakdown of Hezbollah’s internal security. Israel managed to intercept and infiltrate both their primary and backup communications networks before they were even deployed, as well as a swath of other electronic equipment, and turn them into bombs.
It has been said that communication is the most important component of any military system, but I don’t think anyone had ever thought of actually weaponizing the opposition’s communications infrastructure itself before now. This is something genuinely new in warfare.
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The Dramatic Birth of Two Korean States
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 20 Sep 2024The United Nations plan is to reunite the divided Korean peninsula into a single state. But soon the USA and USSR have installed their own leaders, neither of whom are willing to compromise. By the end of 1948 Kim Il-Sung and Syngman Rhee stand at the head of separate North and South Korean states.
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Statistics Canada notes significant decline in life satisfaction and hope for the future
In one sense, we should be quite used to Statistics Canada giving us unwelcome economic news, given the state of the Canadian economy over the last decade. What seems less in character is that they’re connecting the dots between our obvious national financial decline and showing how directly it has impacted ordinary Canadians’ views about life in Canada and what they expect in the future:
Life satisfaction among Canadians is on the decline. Based on data from the Canadian Social Survey, levels of life satisfaction have been tracking downward since the summer of 2021, when quarterly monitoring of key Quality of Life indicators began. Less than half (48.6%) of Canadians aged 15 years and older were feeling highly satisfied with their lives in 2024, down from 54.0% three years earlier.
Not only is life satisfaction down, but so is hopefulness about the future, which dropped from 65.0% to 59.7% from 2021 to 2024. These results are based on a new study released today, “Charting change: How time-series data provides insights on Canadian well-being”, which sheds light on changes in overall life satisfaction, hopeful feelings about the future and financial well-being. It examines differences and trends across various dimensions, such as age, gender, racialized and non-racialized populations, and 2SLGBTQ+ populations.
Decline in life satisfaction more common among young adults and racialized Canadians
Life satisfaction can be considered a pulse check on Canadians’ overall well-being. While this indicator of subjective well-being has been declining for the past few years, there is nonetheless substantive variation in life satisfaction across different demographic groups. Younger adults (aged 25 to 34) had notable declines in their life satisfaction in 2024, with their proportions declining an average of 3.9 percentage points per year since 2021. By 2024, fewer than 4 in 10 (36.9%) of these adults were highly satisfied with their lives.
Meanwhile, seniors (aged 65 and older) maintained their high level of satisfaction, with 61.5% being happy with their lives in 2024. This measure of subjective well-being has remained relatively stable among senior Canadians since 2021.
In addition, racialized Canadians, who are younger on average than non-racialized Canadians, saw greater drops in life satisfaction than their non-racialized counterparts. The proportion of racialized Canadians reporting high levels of life satisfaction fell from 52.7% in 2021 to 40.6% in 2024. This decline was more than five times higher than the decrease observed for non-racialized Canadians, who experienced a decline in life satisfaction of 0.8 percentage points per year from 2021 to 2024. In 2024, over half (51.5%) of non-racialized Canadians were happy with their lives.
It really is a bad sign when the largest province in Confederation is also becoming the most disheartened by its economic prospects:
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M1911A1: America’s Definitive World War Two Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jun 12, 2024The United States adopted the M1911 pistol just in time for the First World War, and between Colt and Springfield Arsenal some 643,000 of these pistols were made by the end of 1918. During that production and the gun’s field service in France, a number of potential improvements were recognized. They were put together in a batch of 10,000 new pistols ordered from Colt in 1924, but not officially designated until years later. A second batch of 10,000 was ordered from Colt in 1938. These were the first guns officially designated M1911A1. The changes were all about improving user handling, with a reshaped mainspring housing, larger sights, longer grip tang, and shorter reach to the trigger.
In 1939 the government put out a tender for M1911A1 education contracts. These contracts were for production of just 500 pistols, and they were intended to pay a company to build the a complete set of production line tooling and then store it in case of future need (similar contracts were also issued for rifles and machine guns). Two companies were granted such contracts – Harrington & Richardson and the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Singer produced a quite satisfactory batch of pistols, but ended up making higher-priority material like artillery sights. H&R was unable to complete its contract, which was cancelled in the spring of 1942.
When the US entered the war, pistols were needed in large number, and three companies were given contracts to produce the M1911A1: Remington-Rand, Ithaca, and Union Switch & Signal. These three new contractors, along with existing production lines at Colt and Springfield, produced 1.9 million new pistols during World War Two, enough to fully supply all branches of the US military until 1985 when the 1911 was replaced by the Beretta 92.
The example we are looking at today is a Remington-Rand, manufactured in April 1945. Remington-Rand received its first contract in May 1942, and delivered its final pistols in July 1945. In total, it made 877,751, in the following serial number blocks:
916405 – 1041404
1279699 – 1441430
1471431 – 1609528
1743847 – 1816641
1890504 – 2075103
2164404 – 2244803
2380014 – 2619013 (the last one made was 2465139)
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QotD: Progressivism
What it seeks is not, however, goodness, or security, or higher living standards, or even better health care. What it seeks is the celebration of its own brilliance. “Smug” is a small word that perfectly captures the nature of the progressive mind.
This gnostic trait is the source of all of the damage liberalism has wrought for more than 300 years. From the French Revolution to the Third Reich, from Stalinism to North Korea, liberalism has brought with it repression of liberty, death camps, and executions on a mass scale. What’s often not well understood is the fact that violence and repression are inevitable because liberalism seeks to change what does not wish to change – and it does so not for the purpose of making things better, but as an attempt to confirm the superiority of the liberal mind and its ability to manage society.
Most Americans find this conception of existence repulsive. They follow the true path of love, marriage, childbirth, hard work, and faith in God and country. Liberals actively seek to destroy this conception of existence because it rejects their mission of transforming society. It’s either the true path or liberalism. Both cannot be true.
To succeed, liberalism must acquire and retain clients in need of change. It is not in the interest of the liberal to solve problems. What the liberal needs is continually to discover new problems and hold them up as in need of solution. The fate of the “DREAMers”, held in limbo by generations of liberals, is one example. The “downtrodden”, as they were once called, are indeed the pawns of liberal politicians.
Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.
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September 20, 2024
How Popular Was Hitler?
World War Two
Published 19 Sep 2024In the summer of 1940, Hitler was at the peak of his popularity as he conquered Germany’s enemies seemingly at will. But just how quickly did this approval decline as the war turned further and further against Germany? What did the Germans think of him by the end of the war? Is there any love left for Hitler in postwar Germany? Today Spartacus answers these questions.
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I guess I’ve been reading a lot of Substack posts lately …
Substack helpfully sent me a pre-rolled draft post for “my” Substack … this is a very clever trick to get Substackers (like me) who primarily read other peoples’ posts to begin sharing their own posts. Here are the highlights:
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The Me163 Komet – Rockets Are Dangerous
HardThrasher
Published Jun 3, 2024The story of the Me163 is a complex and multifaceted one, and I have attempted here to draw together a number of different sources into a narrative covering the political, structural, scientific and operational history. Necessarily I will have missed things and probably got things wrong. Where I know a mistake has been made, you’ll find it in the pinned comment marked “snagging” – one obvious example is Winkle Brown flew a “sharp” start after the war ended on an Me163 in Germany, and a towed flight in the UK, which I missed.
The below then is an extremely limited subset of the resources I’ve pulled on:
Me163 Rocket Interceptor – Stephen Ransom and Hans-Herman Cammann – not for the faint of heart, a book with brilliant nuggets, a drunken editor and a lot of very pretty pictures. This was my primary source.
Rocket Fighter – Marno Ziggler – Now out of print, this is a Hitler Jugend‘s Own Adventure story most of which has some truth in it but a lot of which is Marno wishing to be in his early 20s and flying for the Führer again. You can find it online fairly easily.
The kids probably haven’t got a clue what a video tape is, never mind Betamax https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/vh… – Betamax vs VHS
Baxter, AD: Walter Rocket Motors for Aircraft, RAE Technote Aero 1668, September 1945 – a Technical note that’s incredibly hard to get hold of, but which I managed to find, quite by chance, in some papers I got years ago. Probably available from the UK National Archives still.
http://www.walterwerke.co.uk/walter/i… – a fantastic archive of all things Walter but it isn’t an https site as a warning.
https://hushkit.net/2019/03/29/the-li… – The coal powered bomber rammer P.13
https://donhollway.com/me-163/ – Bat out of Hell – great website for images of the Me163 as imagined in the Artists’ fever dreams
WW2 Gun Camera: 8th Air Force VS Mess… – Gun Cam Footage of the Me163 and Me262s being shot at and down by various USAAF pilots.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection… – Air and Space Museum have their usual, brilliant photos and terrible descriptions.
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QotD: The Matrix, Harry Potter and “The One Pop Culture Thing”
That certainly seems to be the appeal of The Matrix, and indeed The Matrix stopped being The One Pop Culture Thing very quickly, I hypothesize, because it made “intellectualizing” it too easy. The Matrix is pretty much just Jean Baudrillard: The Movie, and while that’s fun and even useful — Baudrillard did have a point, despite it all — it’s just too clever … by which I mean, The Matrix did too much of the heavy lifting, so that you don’t get too many Very Clever Persyn points for noting that we’re all, just, like, simulations in other people’s minds, dude. Descartes can go fuck himself; Keanu Reeves has solved the mind-body problem with kung fu.
Also, Baudrillard-lite is everywhere now. We’re all Postmodernists, in the same way we’re all Marxists, so even the kids who slept through most of their one required Humanities course has at least vaguely heard of this stuff. A show like True Detective, on the other hand, hearkens back to much older philosophy — as tiresome as the wannabe-Foucaults were back in the late 1980s, as a culture we’ve pretty much forgotten about them, so the brooding wannabe existentialist douchebag seems new now. I just googled up “best true detective quotes”. Here’s a small sampling:
This is a world where nothing is solved. You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.
Also:
… to realize that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream you had inside a locked room — a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.
That “flat circle” thing is a direct quote from Schopenhauer, I’m pretty sure, and the idea of “eternal recurrence” came from Vedic philosophy via him to Nietzsche. Here, for instance, the Manly Mustache Man summarizes the plot of True Detective, season 1:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?
Here again, I don’t blame the average HBO viewer for having their minds blown by this (or at least pretending to), but people with PhDs should damn well know better. This is existentialism for dummies, but since they spent most of their off hours in grad school reading Harry Potter …
Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.
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September 19, 2024
We’re approaching Halloween … expect the offensensitive inquisition!
Andrew Doyle with a timely reminder that Brits can — and have been — arrested, prosecuted, and (potentially) even imprisoned for wearing “offensive” Halloween costumes, and it’s likely to get worse:
The novelist Simon Raven once received a telegram from his wife which read: “Wife and baby starving send money soonest”. He replied: “Sorry no money suggest eat baby”. At the risk of sounding callous, I must admit that my first reaction on reading this was to laugh. It was involuntary, like the best of laughter. The reader should rest assured that this does not mean that I in any way approve of cannibalism and infanticide.
There is a brand of humour which relies on its sheer inappropriateness. It’s why we can find ourselves laughing during funerals or other solemn occasions. The social responsibility to take the matter seriously nags at our senses and dares us to rebel. John Cleese understood this all too well when he delivered the eulogy at Graham Chapman’s funeral and noted that his deceased friend would obviously have liked him to say: “Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard. I hope he fries.”
The same principle applies, albeit in a cruder manner, to the convention of Halloween costumes that are intended to shock. It might seem puerile, but rather than donning the costume of a ghost or a vampire, many partygoers now celebrate this season of horror by dressing up as the most appalling human beings in history, such as Adolf Hitler, Myra Hindley, or Jedward.
The “gross out” is the whole point. The more outrageous the better, and the guest who displays the worst taste sometimes wins a prize. This is precisely what happened to David Wootton, who dressed as an Islamic terrorist, complete with Arabic headdress, and a t-shirt bearing the words “I love Ariana Grande”. To top it all, he carried a rucksack with “TNT” and “boom” written on it. This was in reference of course to the horrendous terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 that killed twenty-two people, including many children, and injured a further thousand.
Bad taste? Offensive? Juvenile? I would agree with all of these assessments. But the partygoers understood the rules of the game, and Wootton later claimed to have been awarded the prize for Best Costume. Once his image was posted online, however, it became a police matter, and he was quickly arrested. He pleaded guilty and now faces up to two years in prison. He has also relocated and changed his name.
I have complete sympathy for anyone who found the images upsetting, grotesque, and not remotely funny. Nobody worth knowing would deny that the terrorist had committed an unforgivable crime. I find it particularly shocking that so many of us seemed to forget all about it with ease, as though we should accept that this kind of atrocity is simply an occasional aspect of living in modern Britain. Personally, I find this far more offensive than any tasteless Halloween costume.
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German opinions are changing on the migration question
On of our key European commentators is back from a brief internet vacation and reports on recent changes in official German views on mass immigration:
There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.
For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.
Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.
The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises they are up against the limits of their ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift, to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise their understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.
In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore tabu thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.
Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever “the extreme right” is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.
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“This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action”
Tom Knighton provides a wonderful example of “be careful what you wish for”, especially in the rich virtue-signal territory of the “green transformation”:
“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 
.
… it seems our glorious green future now comes with more child labor!
A new report from the Department of Labor raises tough questions about whether and to what extent forced labor and child labor are intertwined with climate-friendly technology.
The department released a report this month finding that several minerals that are key components of electric vehicles and solar panels may be produced through these unethical labor practices.
The findings point to major ethical quandaries surrounding the ongoing energy transition. Climate change, if not addressed, endangers many of the world’s most vulnerable people. At the same time, the report raises serious human rights concerns about the technology being used to address it.
[…]
Whoops.Here’s the thing, cobalt and nickel are kind of important for this sort of thing, so we have to get them from somewhere and the one attempt to mine cobalt here in the United States fell flat. Why? The price of cobalt dropped. It was no longer profitable to try to mine it in the United States.
But in poor countries, it was still plenty viable.
Yet while we view child labor as unethical, we have to remember that our society is rich enough that we can afford to hold that belief. Now, I share it and I’d rather kids be kids, and worry about things like school, video games, television, and that sort of thing, but the truth is that when you’re barely able to feed yourself, you need every penny you can get.
That means kids going out to work.
That means doing some grueling, back-breaking, nasty work like mining stuff like cobalt.
It means paying for dirty, nasty strip mining so you can convince yourself and your friends that you’re better than those of us who still prefer a gasoline- or diesel-powered car.
All around us, we tend to be oblivious to the reality of the rest of the world. We simply think something should be so and then just act like they are. We ignore what all might be required to make that something so.
This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action.
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D-Day Tanks: Operation Overlord’s Strangest Tanks
The Tank Museum
Published Jun 7, 2024An opposed beach landing is the most difficult and dangerous military operation it is possible to undertake. Anticipating massive casualties in the Normandy Landings, the British Army devised a series of highly specialized tanks to solve some of the problems – Hobart’s Funnies.
Named after General Sir Percy Hobart, commander of their parent unit, 79th Armoured Division, the Funnies included a mine clearing tank – the Sherman Crab, a flamethrower – the Churchill Crocodile and the AVRE – Assault Vehicle Royal Engineers which could lay bridges and trackways, blow up fortifications and much else besides.
In this video, Chris Copson looks at surviving examples of the Funnies and assesses their effectiveness on D Day and after.
00:00 | Introduction
01:24 | Operation Overlord
03:02 | Lessons from the Dieppe Raid
05:31 | The Sherman DD
07:21 | Exercise Smash
14:38 | Sherman Crab
17:38 | The AVRE
19:47 | Churchill Crocodile
23:15 | Did the Funnies Work?
28:49 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum #d-day #operationoverlord
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