Quotulatiousness

October 14, 2023

A Jacobite spy for Bonnie Prince Charlie

Filed under: Britain, Business, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about the career of John Holker of Manchester, cloth manufacturer, who joined the army of Prince Charles Edward Stewart in 1745, and eventually became an expert in industrial espionage:

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, 1720 – 1788. Eldest Son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart.
Portrait by Allan Ramsay, National Galleries Scotland via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve lately been reading about one of history’s greatest spies — not a James Bond-like agent with licence to kill, but a master of industrial espionage, John Holker.1

Holker was originally from Manchester, in Lancashire, where he was a skilled cloth manufacturer in the early eighteenth century, his specialty being calendering — a finishing process to give cloth a kind of sheen or glazed effect. But Holker was also a Catholic and a Jacobite — a believer in the claim of the Catholic descendants of the deposed king James II to be the rightful rulers of Great Britain, instead of the Hanoverian George I and George II who had only succeeded to the throne because they were Protestants. In 1745 James II’s grandson Charles, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie — likely the “Bonnie” who lies over the ocean in the famous song — landed in the Scottish Highlands and raised the royal standard. Charles’s uprising defeated the British troops stationed in Scotland, captured Edinburgh, and then marched down the west coast of England, capturing Carlisle and entering Lancashire.

To Holker, who had been born in the same year as the last Jacobite rebellion in 1719, the arrival of Charles in Manchester must have seemed like a once-in-a-generation opportunity. He and his business partner instantly joined Charles’s troops and he was appointed a lieutenant. But Manchester was the last place to provide many eager volunteers for the uprising, and when Charles reached Derby he lost heart and turned around. Holker and his business partner ended up being left to garrison Carlisle as Charles and his force retreated into Scotland to hunker down, and they were soon captured by the British troops sent to quash the uprising. They were then, as officers, sent to Newgate prison in London to sit with their legs bound in irons and await trial and certain execution.

But they never made it to trial. In the first demonstration of Holker’s extraordinary talent for espionage, they escaped. Holker had been allowed visitors in prison, so had drawn on London’s crypto-Jacobite circle to smuggle in files, ropes, and information about the prison and its surroundings. They managed to file through the leg-irons and window bars, climbed up the gutters onto the prison roof, and then used planks from the cell’s tabletop to cross onto the roof of a nearby house. In the event, they disturbed a dog guarding the house, and so Holker hid in a water-butt and became separated from the others. He eventually found refuge at a crypto-Jacobite’s house, then escaped into the countryside before managing to make his way to France.

In France, Holker joined his fellow veterans of the failed uprising of ‘45, becoming a lieutenant in a Jacobite regiment of the French army. He fought for the French in the Austrian Netherlands — present-day Belgium — against the Hapsburgs, the Hanoverians, the Dutch, and the British. Even more extraordinary, however, was that when Bonnie Prince Charlie wanted to go in secret to England in 1750, it was Holker who went with him as his sole companion and guide. Although Charles failed to persuade his supporters in England to rise up in rebellion on their own, Holker managed to get the prince secretly and safely to London and back.

By the time Holker reached his early thirties he had been an industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, and even spy-catcher: he successfully identified a spy for the British in Charles’s circle, even if Charles failed to heed his warning. But in 1751 Holker’s career took yet another turn when he was recruited by the French government as an industrial spymaster.

Holker’s chief task was to steal British textile technologies.

    1. Unless otherwise stated, I’ve drawn much of my information on Holker and the industries that the French attempted to copy from John R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the 18th Century (Taylor & Francis, 2017), particularly chapter 3.

Ray Manzarek – “Riders On The Storm”

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

EliasIak2011
Published 30 Nov 2012

“The Doors: Mr. Mojo Risin’ — The Story of LA Woman“

QotD: Horses and sheep on the Eurasian Steppe

Filed under: Asia, Europe, Food, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now just because this subsistence system is built around the horse doesn’t mean it is entirely made up by horses. Even once domesticated, horses aren’t very efficient animals to raise for food. They take too long to gestate (almost a year) and too long to come to maturity (technically a horse can breed at 18 months, but savvy breeders generally avoid breeding horses under three years – and the Mongols were savvy horse breeders). The next most important animal, by far is the sheep. Sheep are one of the oldest domesticated animals (c. 10,000 BC!) and sheep-herding was practiced on the steppe even before the domestication of the horse. Steppe nomads will herd other animals – goats, yaks, cattle – but the core of the subsistence system is focused on these two animals: horses and sheep. Sheep provide all sorts of useful advantages. Like horses, they survive entirely off of the only resource the steppe has in abundance: grass. Sheep gestate for just five months and reach sexual maturity in just six months, which means a small herd of sheep can turn into a large herd of sheep fairly fast (important if you are intending to eat some of them!). Sheep produce meat, wool and (in the case of females) milk, the latter of which can be preserved by being made into cheese or yogurt (but not qumis, as it will curdle, unlike mare’s milk). They also provide lots of dung, which is useful as a heating fuel in the treeless steppe. Essentially, sheep provide a complete survival package for the herder and conveniently, made be herded on foot with low manpower demands.

Now it is worth noting right now that Steppe Nomads have, in essence, two conjoined subsistence systems: there is one system for when they are with their herds and another for purely military movements. Not only the sheep, but also the carts (which are used to move the yurt – the Mongols would call it a ger – the portable structure they live in) can’t move nearly as fast as a Steppe warrior on horseback can. So for swift operational movements – raids, campaigns and so on – the warriors would range out from their camps (and I mean range – often we’re talking about hundreds of miles) to strike a target, leaving the non-warriors (which is to say, women, children and the elderly) back at the camp handling the sheep. For strategic movements, as I understand it, the camps and sheep herds might function as a sort of mobile logistics base that the warriors could operate from. We’ll talk about that in just a moment.

So what is the nomadic diet like? Surely it’s all raw horse-meat straight off of the bone, right? Obviously, no. The biggest part of the diet is dairy products. Mare’s and sheep’s milk could be drunk as milk; mare’s milk (but not sheep’s milk) could also be fermented into what the Mongolians call airag but is more commonly known as qumis after its Turkish name (note that while I am mostly using the Mongols as my source model for this, Turkic Steppe nomads are functioning in pretty much all of the same ways, often merely with different words for what are substantially the same things). But it could also be made into cheese and yogurt [update: Wayne Lee (@MilHist_Lee) notes that mare’s milk cannot be made into yogurt, so the yogurt here would be made from sheep’s milk – further stressing the importance of sheep!] which kept better, or even dried into a powdered form called qurut which could then be remixed with water and boiled to be drunk when it was needed […] The availability of fresh dairy products was seasonal in much of the steppe; winter snows would make the grass scarce and reduce the food intake of the animals, which in turn reduced their milk production. Thus the value of creating preserved, longer-lasting products.

Of course they did also eat meat, particularly in winter when the dairy products became scarce. Mutton (sheep meat) is by far largest contributor here, but if a horse or oxen or any other animal died or was too old or weak for use, it would be butchered (my understanding is that these days, there is a lot more cattle in Mongolia, but the sources strongly indicate that mutton was the standard Mongolian meat of the pre-modern period). Fresh meat was generally made into soup called shulen (often with millet that might be obtained by trade or raiding with sedentary peoples or even grown on some parts of the steppe) not eaten raw off of the bone. One of our sources, William of Rubruck, observed how a single sheep might feed 50-100 men in the form of mutton soup. Excess meat was dried or made into sausages. On the move, meat could be placed between the rider’s saddle and the horse’s back – the frequent compression of riding, combined with the salinity of the horse’s sweat would produce a dried, salted jerky that would keep for a very long time.

(This “saddle jerky” seems to gross out my students every time we discuss the Steppe logistics system, which amuses me greatly.)

Now, to be clear, Steppe peoples absolutely would eat horse meat, make certain things out of horsehair, and tan horse hides. But horses were also valuable, militarily useful and slow to breed. For reasons we’ll get into a moment, each adult male, if he wanted to be of any use, needed several (at least five). Steppe nomads who found themselves without horses (and other herds, but the horses are crucial for defending the non-horse herds) was likely to get pushed into the marginal forest land to the north of the steppe. While the way of life for the “forest people” had its benefits, it is hard not to notice that forest dwellers who, through military success, gained horses and herds struck out as steppe nomads, while steppe nomads who lost their horses became forest dwellers by last resort (Ratchnevsky, op. cit., 5-7). Evidently, being stuck as one of the “forest people” was less than ideal. In short, horses were valuable, they were the necessary gateway into steppe life and also a scarce resource not to be squandered. All of which is to say, while the Mongols and other Steppe peoples ate horse, they weren’t raising horses for the slaughter, but mostly eating horses that were too old, or were superfluous stallions, or had become injured or lame. It is fairly clear that there were never quite enough good horses to go around.

Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-12-11.

October 13, 2023

Elvira, the Party Girl Double Agent

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 11 Oct 2023

She’s the gambler with a hotline to the Abwehr. The party girl tearing up the London social scene. Now she’s doing her bit to hold back the Panzer divisions and pave the way for D-Day. This is the story of Elvira Concepcion Josefina de la Fuente Chaudoir, Double Cross’s most flamboyant double agent.
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One of the reasons Israel was surprised by the Hamas attacks

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak explains why Israeli intelligence was deceived leading up to the Hamas terror attacks last week:

The last major news item about Gaza before the first news of Hamas’s surprise attack was the September 22 announcement that 17,000 Gazans would immediately receive permits to work in Israel, with that number set to rise to 20,000. All understood the likelihood of a permit-holder smuggling in a bomb, or perhaps stabbing an Israeli fellow worker, but that seemed a risk worth taking.

Hamas, after all, had stopped launching rockets against Israel, and appeared to be focused on containing the influence of Islamic Jihad — Hamas’s only remaining competitor after its suppression of the PLO, and one which is financed by Iran to propagate Shi’ism in Gaza. This obvious rivalry was skilfully exploited by Hamas to deceive the Israelis into thinking that it was no longer launching rockets because, as an emphatically Sunni organisation, it wanted to join the Sunni reconciliation with Israel that was already a fait accompli from Morocco to Bahrain.

Once again, as so many times before, Israel’s leaders were deluded into thinking that a Palestinian leadership had some concern for the welfare of its own people, as opposed to its ideological aim: “Palestine” for the nationalist PLO (which always included Christians), and Islamic supremacy for Hamas. The latter’s leaders have frequently explained that Islamic rule must be imposed not just on Israel but on the entire world, and that Palestinian nationalism is un-Islamic twice over — because it includes Christians, and because any nationalism intrinsically subverts Islamic unity.

With Hamas seemingly on a path to reconciliation, only the much smaller Islamic Jihad was still assembling and launching rockets. But most of those attempts were pre-empted by Israeli strikes, guided by precise intelligence supplied by a seemingly reliable agent network. Almost certainly, Hamas itself supplied the “actionable” information passed on by those agents. This efficiently blinded Israeli intelligence, which has plenty of expertise in detecting double agents peddling false information, but could hardly suspect agents who were supplying highly accurate information.

This was the first Israeli failure: its intelligence analysts did not realise that the silence of Hamas was not due to inactivity, but to planning that they could not detect. Such silence was far from normal, and it should have inspired efforts to find out what was going on. But it did not.

On top of that, there was a separate failure which was purely military. Even if intelligence reported that all was well and that Gaza was on the path to peace, military planners should not have yielded to such optimism — for a very specific Israeli reason. Since the Israeli armed forces rely on reservists, who must be recalled to duty and kitted out before they can fight, as opposed to an enemy that can switch from peace to war instantaneously, military planners must be professional pessimists no matter what. They must always be mindful of the minutes needed to broadcast an alert, of the hours that even soldiers in situ need to prepare for action, and the full 24 hours required to mobilise the reservists.

At Spiked, Frank Furedi is angered by the widespread victim-blaming being shared on social media to pretend that the Hamas terror attacks were somehow “legitimate” and the atrocities committed against civilians somehow “okay”:

The assault on southern Israel last weekend was more than an atrocity. This callous and systematic murder of civilians was nothing less than a 21st-century version of a barbaric pogrom. The videos recorded by Hamas operatives as they slaughtered people serve as a frightening testimony to human depravity. They more than match the numerous beheading videos that glorified the barbarism of Islamic State and other terrorist organisations in recent decades.

Seeing the Hamas-orchestrated pogrom was gut-wrenching. But what I have found almost as disturbing are the smug voices of those in the West who say that Israel is responsible for Hamas’s barbarism. That it brought this horror on itself.

Ever since Hamas operatives embarked on their depraved killing spree, self-styled “progressives” have been queuing up to tell anyone who will listen that the evil Zionists had it coming. Not even this week’s reports of Hamas’s massacre of babies have given them pause for reflection. Their victim-blaming is echoed by numerous Western Muslim organisations and even by some mainstream politicians. They too say that Israel had it coming. With his usual smug complacency, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis declared in an interview that he would never denounce Hamas for these atrocities. Pointing the finger at Israel, he stated that “the path to ending the tragic loss of innocent lives – both Palestinian and Israeli – begins with one crucial first step: the end of the Israeli occupation and apartheid”.

Varoufakis’s apologism for atrocities against Jewish men, women and children appears civilised compared with the response of the West’s Palestine-solidarity campaigns. Many of them have actively celebrated this pogrom. One speaker at an “All Out for Palestine” protest outside the Israeli consulate in New York seemed to think that the systematic murder of 260 young people at the Supernova music festival provided excellent “comedy” material. “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time”, he said, “until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took out at least several dozen hipsters”. The rabble assembled outside the Israeli consulate responded to this “joke” about the mass murder and kidnapping of “several dozen hipsters” with gales of laughter.

Time and again, these atrocities are excused and their victims are dehumanised. Dr Mennah Elwan, an NHS medic, tried to excuse Hamas’s assault on innocent Israeli civilians by claiming that these youngsters fleeing for their lives were not civilians at all, because “there are no civilians in Israel”. She then said of the revellers that “if it was your home, you would stay and fight”.

On Saturday, while the pogrom against Jewish people was still unfolding in Israel, Somali-American journalist Najma Sharif felt the need to remind her followers on X: “What did y’all think decolonisation meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” That she associates a blood-soaked pogrom with the objectives of the “decolonisation” movement in Western universities is revealing.

Indeed, Sharif was far from alone in framing this pogrom as an instance of decolonisation. This view has been systematically promoted by Hamas apologists. Maggie Chapman, a Green member of the Scottish parliament, responded to public disquiet over the Hamas attack by posting: “The oppressed are fighting back for their rights … Don’t let the Western media fool you into thinking it’s terrorism, this is decolonisation.” It is worth noting that Chapman is deputy convenor of the Scottish parliament’s human-rights committee. How long before she argues that perpetrating a pogrom is the human right of the oppressed?

The “decolonisers”, whether they realise it or not, are sending an unambiguous message to the world: “This is no time to be squeamish; after all, they are only Jews.”

Gewehr 43

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2013

German ordnance began looking for a military self-loading rifle to augment the K98k as early as the 1930s, although the pressures of war initially made that development a second priority. By 1941, though, two competing designs from the Walther and Mauser companies had been developed to the point of mass production, as the Gewehr 41(W) and Gewehr 41(M) rifles. These both shared a gas-trap operating system to comply with an HWa requirement that no gas ports be drilled into the barrels. When it came to locking systems, the two designs differed greatly, with the Walther being the more successful of the two. Thousands of examples of both designs were put into field testing, mostly in the East, and it became clear that the gas-trap system was not suitable for combat. The Walther company responded with a new version of their design which used a much more modern short-stroke gas piston, basically copied from the Soviet SVT-40 rifle.

The G43 was very quickly recognized as a significant improvement over the G41(W), and was very quickly put into production, with approximately 400,000 being manufactured by the end of the war. Well, I found an example of the G43 that I could shoot (thank you, Mike) and took it out for some video …
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QotD: Sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nineteen Eighty-Four remains widely read today — and ubiquitously quoted and cited. In fact, during the spring of 2017, in the wake of the inauguration of President Donald Trump — and controversies about the “alternative facts” that his aides marshaled as evidence of record attendance figures at the event — the book achieved the remarkable, unprecedented feat of skyrocketing to number one on fiction bestseller lists. This occurred an astonishing 67 years after its original date of release. Nothing of this kind had ever happened to another book in publishing history. And, in the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was the fourth time that it had topped the bestseller lists: first in 1954, in the U.K., after a BBC-TV adaptation sent sales soaring; second, throughout the English-speaking world during the so-called countdown to 1984 between October 1983 and April 1984; and third, in 2003, as the centennial commemorations of Orwell’s birth dominated the headlines and airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic.

In fact, it is fair to say that Nineteen Eighty-Four has never not been a bestseller and a publishing phenomenon. According to the website Ranker.com, the work has sold more than 25 million copies since 1949. More than a half century later, Manchester Guardian readers voted Nineteen Eighty-Four the most influential book of the 20th century. Waterstone’s, a British bookstore chain, has ranked Orwell’s dystopia as the second most popular book of the 20th century (behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings). That is an amazing feat in its own right, given that most people understandably do not particularly enjoy reading (let alone rereading) nightmarish stories of torture, betrayal, and brainwashing. The book’s ascent to the top of fiction bestseller lists in 2016 and 2017, along with the ceaseless invocation of Orwell’s catchwords to characterize the Trump administration, induced Signet, Orwell’s American publisher, to rush out a new print run of 500,000 copies. Expectations are that total sales will pass 30 million by the time of the 2020 election in the United States.

John Rodden and John Rossi, “George Orwell Warned Us, But Was Anyone Listening?”, The American Conservative, 2019-10-02.

October 12, 2023

Considering Israel’s potential courses of action in Gaza

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander puts on his Operational Planning hat and sifts through what Israel may decide to do in light of open source information from Israeli and other sources:

This isn’t going to make anyone happy. It doesn’t matter if you are on the “cease fire and de-escalate” left or the “Linebacker III” right — none of my COAs will be quite what you are looking for … though the Linebacker III crowd might be OK with COA-B and COA-C … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cut this ‘ole Operational Planner some slack, and a few caveats:

  1. I’ve had to rewrite 85% of this from its first draft over the weekend as we now have Commander’s Intent (CI) and higher Direction and Guidance (D&G). That had me discard two of my three Courses of Action (COA).
  2. I am quite sure the Israeli Defense Forces had appropriate draft Operational Plans (OPLANS) on the shelf with all sorts of Branch Plans and Sequels waiting to be updated and providing enough once dusted off to get things in to Phase I.
  3. I don’t have a Planning Staff or even a Core Planning Group, intel support, or even some Italian colleagues to remind me to take my 10:00 and 15:00 coffee breaks, but I’ll do my best anyway. As anyone in crisis response planning can tell you — as opposed to advanced plans types — you have to be comfortable enough to accept that you don’t have enough time, staff, or information to produce a great OPLAN, but you’ll come up with a good enough plan anyway. You’re happy to be wrong about a detail or two, and are open-minded enough, secure in your ego, and content to change what you thought was perfect — some or all of your plan — the moment you get better information, changes in CI or D&G, or the situation develops in unexpected ways … as they do.
  4. If you are looking for a detailed Tactical OPLAN or a sweeping Strategic OPLAN, you’re at the wrong substack. I’m an Operational Planner and what I am about to do is an “elevator speech” level Preliminary COA Decision Brief with the principals (J2, J3, J4, J5, and the Chief of Staff) where they get to weigh in and refine what the Planning Group I am the Chair of has produced (OK, I’m a Planning Group of one and I made myself Chair … I don’t care, it’s going on my FITREP anyway). Following the Principals’ input — especially from the Chief of Staff who has had better one on one time with the Commander and as such has the nuance no one else does — I’ll beg for a day and will be told I have two hours to make changes and then well brief the Commander.

Working from open-source information, we have CI and D&G from the Prime Minister and the Minister for Defense.

If you go to YouTube you can get the script, but we’ll use this statement from the weekend as a close approximation of POLMIL-level guidance from Prime Minister Netanyahu;

As a Planning Staff, what do I need to take away from this?

  • Israel is at war.
  • Israel will finish it.
  • We will exact a price that will be remembered by them (Hamas) and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.

From Defense Minister Yoav Gallant we have:

  • Gaza won’t return to what it was before.
  • We started the offensive from the air, later will also from the ground, and that’s how it will end.
  • Gaza will never return to what it was.

Like I said … that had me ditch two of the my three COA from this weekend. If you wanted to know how it shifted, my most dovish COA is gone, and my most harsh COA is now the center of my Overton Window. A planner must try to align with CI and D&G as it is understood — not how he wishes it to be.

Canada, “a country with short arms and long pockets”

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the National Post, John Ivison recounts Canada’s continuing inability to live up to expectations internationally, especially militarily:

US President Joe Biden talks to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, March 2023.

On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mark Norman, the former vice-chief of defence, made a prediction that sounded overblown at the time.

“I really think the Americans are going to start ignoring us because they don’t think we are credible or reliable. They are not even putting pressure on us anymore,” he said in a January 2022 National Post interview, based on his conversations with contacts in Washington.

It turns out he was absolutely right.

Since then, leaked Pentagon documents have confirmed that sense, indicating that the U.S. believes “widespread defence shortfalls have hindered Canada’s capabilities, while straining partner relationships and alliance contributions”.

Canada left little room for doubt about its diminished capabilities when it took a pass on NATO’s largest-ever air exercise last summer, because its jets and pilots were involved in “modernization activities”. That absence left the impression that this country might not be able to show up in certain circumstances.

Even before the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East, America was letting it be known that it felt overstretched and needed regional allies to share the burden.

When President Joe Biden visited Ottawa in March, he asked Justin Trudeau to lead a mission to Haiti, which had descended into mob rule. Since the Liberals were elected on a peacekeeping ticket in 2015, it was a logical request. However, Trudeau demurred, presumably on the grounds that Canada’s security forces were stretched too thin by operations in Latvia and fighting wildfires at home. The upshot is that Kenya is set to send 1,000 security officers to the beleaguered island nation.

The recent news that Canada now plans to trim its defence budget by nearly $1 billion — a total of $17 billion over 20 years, if savings are recurring — has reinforced the image of a country with short arms and long pockets.

Against that background, it was no surprise that on Monday Biden hosted a call with the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. to discuss the crisis in the Middle East — and didn’t include Canada.

A statement by the G7 minus Canada and Japan (which has a negligible Jewish population) was issued saying that the five countries would ensure Israel is able to defend itself.

Over at The Line, Matt Gurney discovered that the federal government was actively trying to hide the fact that Canadians in Israel were not able to access Canadian embassy services by pretending that the word “operational” meant “open and functional”:

On Sunday evening (hours after we published our dispatch), I received a reply from GAC. This was the reply:

    Since the beginning of this crisis, Canadian officials have been working around the clock to support Canadians. The missions in Tel Aviv and Ramallah remained operational through the weekend and will continue to be. Our missions will open on Monday October 9th, unless security conditions do not allow for it. We will be assessing the security situation daily, in coordination with our allies.

Okay! That seemed fair. But not having been born yesterday, and being in a profession where people try to spin me all the time, I noticed something immediately. The distinction GAC was drawing between “operational” and “open” stood out to me. I replied at once seeking clarification, and heard nothing back. Not even an acknowledgement.

This word choice mattered. The government publicly used the “operational” messaging. Members of the government repeated it. This was what they were telling the Canadian people: all is well, ignore those nasty media people and members of the opposition. Of course the embassies were “operational”!

See that tweet? The one pasted above? I checked out who was retweeting it. Lots of people did! And that included a bunch of Liberal MPs, a bunch of Canadian diplomats, members of the media, and what I’ll politely refer to as a group of “usual suspects” I recognize from online as being proxies for the Liberal government’s messaging (or at least really devoted True Believer Liberal partisans).

On Monday morning, having heard nothing back about what “operational” meant as opposed to “open”, I asked for a specific clarification in the terminology. What was “operational” vs. “open”? I also asked for specifics on what services were available locally from Canadian diplomatic missions in Israel over the weekend in real time, and how that would change when the embassy “opened” on Monday. I asked about the staffing level at the embassy on the weekend, and how that would compare to a normal workday, and also to a normal weekend.

Rather than answer a simple question, our government would much rather obfuscate and prevaricate as a matter of policy. That, by itself, tells you everything you need to know about both our political leaders and the civil service organizations they control.

It’s not mere “activism”, it’s “AAAAAH-ctivism”!

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Charlotte Gill outlines the changes in activist tactics down to today’s utter hysterics on Every. Single. Issue.

“Just Stop Oil Activists Walking Up Whitehall” by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

“How many kids have to die?” were the apocalyptic words of a Just Stop Oil activist on Sky News last week. She grimaced and flung her hands out as she asked presenter Anna Jones, and others in the studio, what it would take for them to get involved in the fight against climate change. Would it be “until the water’s lapping at your ankles? Until your own kids haven’t got food?” Forget the British mantra to “keep calm and carry on”. Anyone watching would get the impression that the advice is now firmly to “PANIC!!”

Far from jumping on the nearest piece of furniture to protect myself from rising tides and who knows what else — sharks with Leave-Means-Leave-branded laser beams shooting from their heads, for example — I felt strangely immune to someone telling me the world’s going to end. Like the “boy who cried wolf”, there’s no shortage of middle-aged people ready to cry apocalypse. It’s no surprise one’s sensory reactions have resultantly dialled down a notch or two.

I only really noticed the rise of AAAAAH-ctivism this year, after covering the war on cars. Whenever I have defended the petrol proletariat — those punished every time they drive a car — I am struck by the increasing number of people telling me I don’t care about “CHILDREN’S LUNGS!!” or “PEOPLE DYING!!” Last month Wales introduced 20mph speed limits, which vast amounts of voters have objected to. The counterargument to any perfectly pragmatic concerns is always “SO YOU THINK SPEED IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIVES?!” It is quite an effective way to close down debate, portraying it as a matter of being for or against death.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when AAAAAH-ctivism began. After all, fear mongering is nothing new in politics — one of the most disastrous examples being Tony Blair and George W. Bush’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” claims that led the West into the Iraq War.

Following some quiet(ish) years in Blighty, the hyperbole ramped up around Brexit, when Labour MP David Lammy compared the pro-Leave European Research Group to the Nazis, as well as advocates of South African apartheid. Elsewhere, militant Remainers repeatedly warned of the Hard and Far Right being on the march. Writing for The Guardian in 2018, Michael Chessum set the tone when he warned, “We are living through a moment of encroaching darkness and nationalist resurgence.” Nowadays, you could say that the “darkness” looks more like a £6 salmon sandwich at Pret.

KAMIKAZE: HMS Formidable, May 4, 1945

Filed under: Britain, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Armoured Carriers
Published 18 Apr 2020

It was the height of the invasion of Okinawa. Japan was throwing a last-ditch effort at unseating US Marines from their beachheads. Kamikazes swarmed the skies. HMS Formidable, part of the British Pacific Fleet interdicting attacks from Formosa (Taiwan), was to suffer a direct hit on her armoured flight deck. Here’s what happened — in the words of those who were there.
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QotD: America before identity politics

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lest we’re tempted to make excuses for Leftists by putting all this down to their goldfish-like attention spans, note how fast they can change. I remember the Gay Nineties, when the one true way to be queer was to have as much anonymous sex as possible. […] And yet, by 2015, “gay marriage” was a sacred constitutional right because, we were told, all gay men really want to do is settle down in a strictly monogamous relationship. I found myself asking “Have you ever actually met any gays?” to actual gays, so bizarre was this sudden flip – surely you, of all people, know …1

Pick even minor items of their catechism (if so all-encompassing a creed as Leftism can be said to have “minor” items). It’s an article of the One True Faith, for instance, that seven out of every five college girls are raped the minute they set foot on campus. And yet … free college! Yeah, Bernie, let’s march a whole bunch of new rape victims straight into the frat house, on the taxpayer’s dime. Makes sense. And speaking of free college, y’all know how you love to wave your degrees around, because that’s how you win at Internet? How’s that going to work, now that everyone has a Gender Studies degree?

Yeah, ok, I know, if they could see the obvious consequences of their actions, they wouldn’t be Liberals in the first place. But still — all of this is so obvious, so determinedly cattywampus to reality, that it has to be by design. T.S. Eliot was right — it’s “gesture without motion”, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how they pull that off. Which is why I suspect it’s actual, neurological changes in their brains, brought about by too much soy.

Severian, “The Hollow Men”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-19.

    1. Gosh, wasn’t The America That Was a hoot? If you’re under 35 you’ll just have to trust me on this, but there was a point in American history when homosexuals didn’t have to be 1000% gay all the time, to the exclusion of everything else. I know, I know, and it gets weirder – back then, you could even be friends with a homosexual and not have homosexuality come up for days, weeks, even months at a time! You and Steve went to different bars on Saturday night, but other than that, you pretty much just carried on treating each other like, you know, people. And I know this sounds crazy, but even when talking about relationships it wasn’t a big deal. “Hey, Sev, how are things with Becky?” “Pretty good, man, how’s it going with Todd?” And … that was pretty much it. Sounds like life on Mars now, but I swear to you, it happened.

October 11, 2023

“It’s our first-ever live-streamed pogrom”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts (some of) the opening atrocities of the terror attacks on Israel by Hamas terror squads:

As I write this, Israel seems close to clearing out its invaded southern areas. In the coming hours, we will be presented with more scenes of horror and atrocity as new killing sites are found. Israel’s counterattack into Gaza will almost certainly be massive, far beyond any of the campaigns we’ve seen in recent years, and we’ll see all the awful carnage that causes from close up, too. Hamas has already said they will respond to these retaliatory actions by killing their hostages one by one and sharing the video and audio of the killings for the world to see. I believe that they will indeed do exactly that. You should all prepare yourselves for that.

For me, though, as we wait for the future to arrive, I’ve been thinking about the books on my shelf and what they tell us about the past. Books about the Holocaust and Sept. 11, and how the world grappled with truly evil regimes in eras past. There are lessons there, in simple black and white. What I saw on my phone wasn’t that. It was visceral, and awful, but in its own way, usefully clarifying.

But how many people saw what I did?

[…]

During that time, and I’m limiting my summary here to reasonably verified videos, I’ve seen an Israeli family forced to watch the apparent execution of one of their children/siblings; a man having his head either smashed in or chopped off with what looked like a garden tool of some kind (the video was a bit grainy); I’ve seen what looks like some kind of shelter that was breached, with all the occupants inside gunned down. A terrorist steps inside into ankle-deep blood and corpses and puts a few rifle rounds into bodies that are still moving.

I’ve seen a shocked looking woman being dragged out of a vehicle, her pants soaked with blood flowing from between her legs, and I know what that is. (See first photo, above.) I’ve also seen a video that I’m not sure, but that I think, happened to catch a glimpse of a rape in progress. I didn’t have the stomach to go back and watch that one again, though, so I can’t be totally sure. Whatever it was, the woman was terrified and the men around her were delighted. They enjoyed her fear and torment.

How many others have seen these things? I would bet a bunch, but not a majority, or even close to a majority. Most news savvy people are probably aware that there is a conflict, and may even know the outlines of it, but if they aren’t well-plugged into the online ecosystem for news and don’t know where to look and have hepful media contacts in the region to help filter out the garbage sources, what they’ve seen of it is sanitized and curated by well-meaning news editors whose default assumption is that graphic detail is to be avoided lest the reader or viewer be traumatized and send in a complaint.

I glanced throughout the weekend and again this morning at the major Canadian news websites, and the photos are mostly what you’d expect. Evocative, but not graphic. The most graphic ones shown aren’t a fraction of what’s available. The presentation of this story looks familiar because of all the other times we’ve seen some version of it: rockets flying up atop their exhaust trails, tanks manoeuvring over desert sand, troops looking grim as they put on their equipment, clouds of smoke and dust over Gaza. This is all bulked out by the odd tasteful photo of a grieving family member, from either side. Or perhaps even both sides, for balance.

This situation completely inverts the truism that many of us overly online people have had to cling to in recent years: this time, Twitter is real life. It’s the rest of the presentation of reality that is distorting your understanding of what’s happening. Twitter is a tire fire these days, full of bots and deliberate disinformation accounts, but for those with local sources and who’ve taken the time to curate their trusted sources — and again, Ukraine has been what forced me to do that — it can still be an invaluable tool.

But you’ve got to work at that. How many do? There is a very good chance that many of the people forming and expressing opinions about this right now are doing so with only a pretty basic understanding of what’s actually happened. The coverage they’re seeing of it looks familiar, so they’ll assume it’s basically the same as ever, if maybe slightly worse. They won’t bother assessing it or wondering if they should tweak their usual prior default response to The Latest Middle East Violent Flare Up. They see a headline on the CBC and Reuters and simply man their usual culture war battlestation. It’s a reflex by now.

That’s a mistake this time. This is one is different. Not exactly unprecedented; Lord knows Israel has suffered defeats and intelligence failures before. But none like this in 50 years, and never in an age when the simple act of seizing a victim’s phone allowed the raping and butchering to be uploaded onto the Facebook pages of the victims for their families and friends to watch. It’s our first-ever live-streamed pogrom, and I can’t be the only one who spent part of the long weekend warily glancing at some of the history books on my shelf, remembering scenes described therein that many of us have now seen happen live from our homes.

How Britain Broke Hitler’s Brain

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2023

In a re-upload of one of our D-Day 24 Hour videos, Astrid introduces you to the war’s most effective counter-espionage and deception programme, The Double Cross system. Today she’ll talk about their operations before and during D-Day and introduce you to some of the most important double agents. Their mission: fool the Führer.
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In their attacks on southern Israel, Hamas is “making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray explains the otherwise insane tactics employed by Hamas terrorists:

The border area between the Gaza Strip and the State of Israel, 9 October 2023.
Map by Ecrusized via Wikimedia Commons.

Hamas broke through a fortified border, had unchallenged freedom of movement inside Israel for a shockingly long time, and attacked … a dance music festival and some kibbutzim. Not airfields, not fuel depots, not power stations, not army motor pools to deny mobility to the enemy. They went after soft targets first, and focused especially on women and children. Eyewitness reports and footage of female hostages are telling us that Hamas engaged in sustained sexual violence, and took care to make it known. A subhed in Tablet: “Scenes of young women raped next to the dead bodies of their friends.”

And I think we know what this means.

But first, look at the proposed explanations offered in the news:

    It seems that Hamas, also, is trying to force Israel into negotiations. In 2018, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a note in Hebrew to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, suggesting he take a “calculated risk” by agreeing a long-term truce. While Netanyahu agreed to some easing of pressure on Gaza, he was unwilling to accept Hamas’s long-term demands, including a large-scale prisoner swap, lifting the siege by opening the international border crossing, and establishing a port and airport in Gaza. After 16 years of siege and several catastrophic rounds of war, in which thousands of Gaza residents have been killed, Hamas may be hoping to break the deadlock.

That’s not it. Here’s another try:

    Hamas could well be trying to torpedo the Saudi deal and even try undo the existing Abraham Accords. Indeed, a Hamas spokesperson said that the attack was “a message” to Arab countries, calling on them to cut on ties with Israel …

    To be clear: Saying it makes strategic sense for Hamas to engage in atrocities is not to justify their killing civilians. There is a difference between explanation and justification: The reasoning behind Hamas’s attack may be explicable even as it is morally indefensible.

So the much-repeated claim is that Hamas in engaging in diplomatic maneuvering, sending messages to nation-states. They used mass rape at a dance festival to gain leverage in negotiations over a possible new port.

That’s absolutely not it, and I strongly suspect that the presence of widespread and carefully displayed attacks on 1.) families with children and 2.) the sexually traumatized bodies of women represent an extremely deliberate and calculated adoption, explicitly planned for months or years, of the familiar tools of ethnic cleansing.

Hamas is dirtying the memory of the Jewish spaces bordering on the Gaza Strip. They’re marking southern Israel in the memory of future families, and especially women of childbearing age, with the deliberately cultivated images of murdered children and the mass rape of young women, so that young women regard the place with dread and don’t return to have children there. They’re making a dead zone, and they intend to make a dead zone.

Mass rape by armies is not a mystery; it has been studied carefully.

Group X, as a group and deliberately, rapes women from Group Y in Neighborhood Z so women from Group Y never feel that they can safely return to Neighborhood Z, in a tribal memory passed down to later generations. Now the space belongs to Group X.

Hamas is making sites of trauma. To empty them, and to keep them empty.

Their military objective is to use the witnessed mass rape of women, the documented hunting and torture of families, and the videotaped murder of children in front of their parents to keep Jews out of southern Israel in the future. Their military target is site-specific Jewish fertility.

In the comments, Chris also points out the military insanity of how Hamas is implementing the propaganda aspects of their plan:

It’s insane for infantry to carry cellphones into combat, because cellphone locations can be tracked. But Hamas seems to be recording everything they do, and they’re stopping to upload new footage as they capture it. They’re taking the risk of carrying trackable devices in combat for the intended benefit of the display. I’d be very curious to hear if they’re all carrying standardized, organization-issued cellphones, and I’d be very curious to see a detailed analysis of where all of the footage is appearing first. This is a deliberate information operation.

Hamas has clearly calculated that the risk is worth the propaganda bonanza they are reaping from the atrocities being beamed almost in real time to the outside world.

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