A few years back during my doctoral research, I was invited to a colloquium on imperialism at Oxford, which, because of our modern standards of free and open intellectual discourse, was effectively a secretive little conclave. This was during the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, around the time when, due to mob pressure, Portland professor Bruce Gilley’s “The Case for Colonialism” paper was redacted by an academic journal. The seminar’s organisers did not want hysterical teenagers egged on by activist dons to disturb what turned out to be the nuanced discussion you’d hope scholars would, and could, engage in.
There I met a man of very advanced age, whose name I cannot remember (to my shame) who had been a civil servant in India during the final days of the Raj. He told me something I have pondered ever since. “We were just a handful of people providing guidance and administration”, he said, “with overwhelming consent in a gigantic country. We even slept in the streets during summer on khatias and had no fear of being killed.”
Whatever politics was happening was between the British and Indian political elites, and plainly did not affect most normal Britishers or Indians.
Consider, that in 1901 Indians numbered nearly 300 million while the British-born population of India was around 150,000. Colonialism was indeed by the consent of the governed, and the independence fight was primarily an intra-elite affair, where the mostly western-educated native would-be boss class fought with the foreign overlords who taught them, for political control.
In the sub-continent, the civil service, lower (and some higher) judiciary, magistrates, police officers, intelligentsia, landed gentry and local businesses were primarily Indian, a lot of them pro-imperial to the end of their time. What happened to those voices? In current post-colonial discourse, one cannot read any pro-imperial literature, which is either lost or considered too reactionary to be taught at universities, an injustice to a clear understanding of history.
Sumantra Maitra, “Pro-imperial truths of the old world”, The Critic, 2021-11-09.
April 18, 2022
QotD: Colonialism in the British Raj
April 17, 2022
Operation Mincemeat, 1943
Once an obscure bit of espionage and military disinformation, the events of Operation Mincemeat are being brought to the big screen (boy, does that term seem dated) in a feature film starring Colin Firth. Michael Curtis provides a look at the actual deception mission that inspired the film:
The corpse of Glyndwr Michael, dressed in a Royal Marine uniform with false documents and a fake ID, used in Operation Mincemeat, 1943.
Public domain image from The National Archives.
The story of the British deception, a fascinating story of Allied subterfuge, is now told in the film Operation Mincemeat. It is a remarkable and seemingly highly improbable story of a plan of Allied intelligence to deceive Hitler and misdirect German intelligence. Indeed, it is one of the best examples in history of military deception.
The concept of a plan starts with the Trout Memo, officially written in 1939 by Admiral John Godfrey, director of Naval Intelligence, but almost certainly written by his subordinate Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, not yet dreaming of 007, about the deception of an army in war time by fly fishing. Many ideas were suggested, including sending out tins of explosives disguised as food so that hungry sailors would pick them up. One idea, number 28 on the list, almost certainly the thought of Fleming who thought of elaborate deception options, was to use a dead body dressed as an airman dropped from a parachute that had failed and carrying false papers, and drop it where the Germans would find it and be deceived by it.
The deception was planned by a group, the Twenty Committee, XX, headed by Lieutenant Commander RNVR, Ewen Montagu, Cambridge, Harvard, a naval intelligence officer and prominent Jewish lawyer, who later became a judge, together with an RAF officer Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley. Montagu later wrote an account of the affair in a book, The Man who Never Was, 1953. The memory of the event is also simply commemorated in a mortuary in Hackney in East London where the body that was used in the plot is buried. In a rather unkind but truthful remark Montagu said of the man who was used, “The only worthwhile thing he ever did, he did after his death.”
The main deception in the plot was a personal letter purported to be from General Sir Archibald Nye to General Sir Harold Alexander, starting, “My dear Alex.” Nye’s letter contained details of sensitive topics, and of a new commander of the Guards brigade, and U.S. service medal awards. He also referred to Operation Husky, an imminent Allied invasion of Greece, that the Germans had been reinforcing and strengthening their defenses in Greece and Crete, and therefore the chief of the Imperial General Staff felt that the Allied troops planned for the assault were insufficient. Thus, it was agreed by the chiefs of staff that the 5th division should be reinforced by one brigade group for the assault on the beach south of Cape Araxos and that similar reinforcement should be made for the 56th division at Kalamata. The letter was a clever double bluff. Nye wrote that “we stand a very good chance of making the Germans think we will go for Sicily, it is an obvious objective and one about which they must be nervous.” To confuse Hitler, he therefore suggested the Allies would invade Sicily.
It is interesting but not surprising that a key figure in the deception appears to have been Ian Fleming, Mr. James Bond, who had written of methods to confuse the enemy, and was crucial to the Trout Memo.
The plot developed. After some difficulty a suitable body was found by a London coroner and kept on ice for few months. It was Glyndwr Michael, 34, homeless Welsh laborer, penniless, with mental health problems, who had died after ingesting rat poison in a London warehouse. He was transformed into Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines whose body contained love letters from a non-existent fiancé named Pam, a jewelry bill for an engagement ring, ticket stubs, religious medal, a copy of a letter marked “personal and most secret”, and above all the false Nye letter. The body had to look as if it had died in an air crash, but floated ashore and he had died at sea. Major Martin, his body wrapped in a life jacket, and with a black attaché case chained to his wrist, was found on April 30, 1943, by a Spanish fisherman off the coast of Huelva.
Even more unlikely than the plan itself was the impact the “secret” document had on Axis planning, summarized in the Wikipedia article:
On 14 May 1943 Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz met Hitler to discuss Dönitz’s recent visit to Italy, his meeting with the Italian leader Benito Mussolini and the progress of the war. The Admiral, referring to the Mincemeat documents as the “Anglo-Saxon order”, recorded
The Führer does not agree with … [Mussolini] that the most likely invasion point is Sicily. Furthermore, he believes that the discovered Anglo-Saxon order confirms the assumption that the planned attacks will be directed mainly against Sardinia and the Peloponnesus.
Hitler informed Mussolini that Greece, Sardinia and Corsica must be defended “at all costs”, and that German troops would be best placed to do the job. He ordered that the experienced 1st Panzer Division be transferred from France to Salonika, Greece. The order was intercepted by GC&CS on 21 May. By the end of June, German troop strength on Sardinia had been doubled to 10,000, with fighter aircraft also based there as support. German torpedo boats were moved from Sicily to the Greek islands in preparation. Seven German divisions transferred to Greece, raising the number present to eight, and ten were posted to the Balkans, raising the number present to 18.
On 9 July the Allies invaded Sicily in Operation Husky. German signals intercepted by GC&CS showed that even four hours after the invasion of Sicily began, twenty-one aircraft left Sicily to reinforce Sardinia. For a considerable time after the initial invasion, Hitler was still convinced that an attack on the Balkans was imminent, and in late July he sent General Erwin Rommel to Salonika to prepare the defence of the region. By the time the German high command realised the mistake, it was too late to make a difference.
Kursk – The Next Great Battle? – WW2 – 190 – April 16, 1943
World War Two
Published 16 Apr 2022The Allies have one chance left to catch the Axis forces in Tunisia before they can reach the Tunis defences; in the USSR both the Axis and Soviets are making plans for a fight near Kursk; and in the skies, in the South Pacific a Japanese aerial offensive ends and Yamamoto himself flies off to congratulate his pilots.
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The end of the (pandemic-induced) book boom
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte metaphorically collects his winnings from predicting nearly a year back that the boom in book sales during 2020/2021 would not last once the pandemic lockdowns began to ease off:
I noted last June in SHuSH 103, “Big Guys Lose Their Minds”, that book sales, especially for the leading firms — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster — were ramping up during the pandemic, reaching 10% to 20% above 2019 levels. I also noted that the numbers were making some of these publishers giddy.
HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, for instance, gave an interview in which he proclaimed that humanity had entered a new era of permanently higher book sales and added that he was ratcheting up his spending to meet the increased demand.
“We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent,” says Murray, “and so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie … we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books in the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels.” Yikes.
In that June newsletter, I anticipated the world returning to normal and book sales falling back to earth as vaccinations took hold and the coronavirus waned (we also promised to check back in a year — so here we are, a few months early).
It did not feel dangerous, that prediction. While it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a temporary spike (or drop) in sales due to extraordinary circumstances and the beginning of a long-term trend, it’s always safest to pick extraordinary-and-temporary amid an unprecedented pandemic with people locked up and not behaving normally. Also, my buddy Jack David at ECW Press agreed with me and he’s been doing this forever. And it wasn’t like Brian Murray had any evidence to back his claim that an era of permanently higher book sales had dawned.
[…]
The share prices of big publishing companies don’t tell the same sort of story because they tend not to be pure-play book publishers: Simon & Schuster, for instance, is owned by multimedia giant Viacom; HarperCollins by the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch; Penguin Random House is less than a quarter of Bertelsmann’s business. But first-quarter 2022 revenue figures for those firms are available and they show that the great give-back is underway in the book world, too.
The headline in Publisher’s Weekly reads “The Book Sales Boom is over”. Here’s the US data:
And that’s just the beginning. Sales will continue to slide throughout 2022 and into 2023 as the world normalizes, people concentrate on doing all the things they’ve not been able to do the past two years, run through the extra cash they accumulated in the pandemic, and resume their former library borrowing habits.
What happens at the big publishing companies? If, as Murray’s comments would lead you to suspect, they’ve budgeted and spent for the good times to continue, unhappy times await.
Queen Victoria’s Easter Cake
Tasting History with Max Miller
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QotD: How jobs differ from school
When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it’s a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college. But the similarities feel greater than the differences. John Smith is now John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.
In fact John Smith’s life has changed more than he realizes. Socially, a company looks much like college, but the deeper you go into the underlying reality, the more different it gets.
What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth. Companies can be so specialized that this similarity is concealed, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. A big component of wealth is location. […] If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don’t make anything physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.
And that’s what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company. But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s. You may not even be aware you’re doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won’t make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.*
For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.
* Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don’t be fooled by the surface similarities. You’ve gone from guest to servant. It’s possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say “authorized personnel only.” But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you’re not consciously aware of it.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
April 16, 2022
Remember all the angst about untold numbers of unmarked graves at former residential schools?
Oh, c’mon man! You must remember the performative grief and anger as even the Prime Minister got into the act by declaring Canada a nation that had committed genocide against as-yet-uncounted First Nations children (oh, and upping the ante, he also implied that this genocide was still ongoing). Do you remember the number of times these graves — often described as “mass graves” rather than merely “unmarked graves” — were investigated in the wake of all this media attention and the fate of at least some of the victims confirmed? No? Well, there’s a good reason for that:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
Rosanne Casimir, the chief of the local Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, said that “knowledge keepers” within the community had guided investigators to the area to be searched — which had once been an apple orchard on the residential school’s premises. The chief also said that knowledge keepers had already told her that what lay below the surface were graves of children whose deaths had previously been undocumented.
Following that announcement, several other First Nations announced their own discoveries. And in December, the Canadian Press called the discovery of unmarked graves, the “news story of the year”.
If you aren’t from Canada, it’s hard to understand the scale of the national reaction to this story. It’s been known for decades that thousands of Indigenous children died during their time in the residential-school system, many of them from tuberculosis. But this new discovery set the country off emotionally. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, lowered the Canadian flag on public buildings, and didn’t raise it for another five months. And journalists became unrestrained in the language they used. In one Canadian newspaper, a headline ran, “Is this Canada’s Holocaust moment?”
Canadians were assured that these weren’t just graves, they were the graves of children; and furthermore, it was suggested, these children hadn’t just died from malnutrition or untreated disease — which is obviously bad enough. Some suggested these children were flat out murdered and dumped in shallow graves in the middle of the night. These claims were even aired by the national broadcaster, CBC, on an investigative show called Fifth Estate.
In the Kamloops press, meanwhile, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, the ground-penetrating-radar expert who’d helped with the discovery, described — as a newspaper put it — “recollections of children as young as six years old being woken up in the middle of the night to dig holes for burials in the apple orchard.”
But there was one odd aspect to the story — and it got odder as the weeks and months marched on: No one seemed to be in any kind of hurry to see what was actually beneath the surface. All we had were ground-penetrating-radar images. And those images don’t show bodies, or caskets, or anything like that. What this technology shows are soil dislocations, which, depending on their depth and spacing, can sometimes indicate the possible presence of grave sites. Why weren’t police, or indigenous authorities, or forensic teams searching for the remains of these poor children?
It’s important to remember that Canadians were being told that this was a crime scene — indeed, not just any crime, but mass murder. If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried in a field in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police all over the place — to see if they could find remains that could be tested and identified. Maybe evidence could be collected showing the manner of death.
And remember that many of the abuses identified at the Kamloops residential school and others like it date to the middle of the 20th century. This means that some of the perpetrators of these claimed child homicides — that is, the teachers, administrators, priests, and ministers who worked at these schools — some of them could still be alive. Shouldn’t we be getting evidence and building a case against them?
How to Make a Royal Marines Officer: Part 2 (1989)
Royal Marines
Published 13 Sep 2012First transmitted in 1989, this is the second part of a programme that follows the progress of 29 men who want to be Royal Marine officers. The remainder of those hoping to be Royal Marine officers face their toughest test.
From the comments:
Nick B
5 years ago (edited)
Richard Van der Horst (honour sword winner) rose to become a Lt Col and commanding officer of the SBS. He was widely expected to be fast tracked to General and command of all UK special forces. Tragically he died in a diving training accident in Norway in 2005.
How much of teenagers identifying as transgender is “social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture”?
The sheer number of children and teens who are deciding that they are “trans” is far in excess of previous generations. How much of this phenomena may be accounted for by social contagion?
My teenage daughter has decided that she is “trans”. So have all her friends. Not some of them. Not most of them. Every. Single. One.
She had never heard of trans, and had no signs of gender dysphoria, until she was moved to a new, cool trans-friendly school by her unsuspecting, politically liberal parents. There she met a group of geeky (or dare I say nerdy?), smart, slightly (but not very) gender nonconforming, artsy kids. As I understand it, they all discovered “trans” together. The old “cis” friends were swiftly discarded in favour of this exciting new peer group.
Exploring “trans stuff” online with friends is a source of great interest and excitement — a real social event. What’s not to love about 245 gender identities, complete with their own unique flags? Then there are those cool neo-pronouns. Forcing your out-of-touch old parents to refer to you as “ze” or “ey” (how do you pronounce that again??) in the name of “inclusivity” is just too delicious to resist. The manga, the cute avatars in computer games, the blue or pink hair — all part of the fun as well. Mocking the outgroup (in this case so-called “cis” people in general and the dreaded TERFs in particular) is also good for a laugh — especially if they happen to be your parents as well.
There is even a special vocabulary with lots of new terms — deadnaming, misgendering, sex assigned at birth, and much more. If these concepts need to be explained to your uncool parents (accompanied by eye rolls of course), so much the better.
Bonding with friends, searching for their identity and place in life, working out their sexuality, separating from family — these are all normal developmental tasks for teens. For many, youth subcultures can be a natural part of that. Some are harmless. Some, like drug use and extreme dieting, not so much. But in the case of the latter, sensible adults usually intervene to help steer the young people in the right direction. Not in the case of trans. Here we have adults steering kids down a dangerous path, which involves permanent, life altering drugs and surgeries for which there is no good evidence base.
For many of these kids, LGBTQ+ is a youth subculture. It really is as simple as that. Recent surveys have been identifying skyrocketing rates of “trans” or “queer” identification in young people. One found that an astonishing 39% of young adults in the US aged between 18-24 identified with the label LGBT — the figure for teens <18 may well be even higher. Of course this figure includes gay and lesbian people as well as those identifying as trans. Another poll, which looked only at gender, found that nearly 10% of US high schoolers identified as “gender diverse”. Yet another survey gives a lower figure of 1.8%. Whichever figure is correct, this is a huge explosion in numbers over a very short period of time. As endocrinologist Dr Will Malone asks; “How do we reconcile these numbers with 2013 data reporting the prevalence of adult gender dysphoria to be a rare 2-14 in 100,000?”
Social contagion and the development of a new youth subculture, that’s how.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
Tank Chats #143 | Hetzer | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 31 Dec 2021Our Patreons have already enjoyed Early Access and AD free viewing of our weekly YouTube video! Consider becoming a Patreon Supporter today: https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
The Munich Agreement averted the outbreak of war but for Czechoslovakia, it meant giving way to German occupation. Join David Willey to discover how Germany was able to use the country’s existing military outputs to build the tank destroyer, Hetzer.
00:00 – Intro
00:28 – The history of the tank destroyers name
14:55 – Wartime production
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QotD: The Edict of Diocletian
Who is … so devoid of human feeling as not to see that immoderate prices are widespread in the markets of our cities, and that the passion for gain is lessened neither by plentiful supplies nor by fruitful years? — so that … evil men reckon it their loss if abundance comes. There are men whose aim it is to restrain general prosperity … to seek usurious and ruinous returns. … Avarice rages throughout the world. … Wherever our armies are compelled to go for the common safety, profiteers extort prices not merely four or eight times the normal, but beyond any words to describe. Sometimes the soldier must exhaust his salary and his bonus in one purchase, so that the contributions of the whole world to support the armies fall to the abominable profits of thieves.
The Edict was, until our time, the most famous example of an attempt to replace economic laws by governmental decrees. Its failure was rapid and complete. Tradesmen concealed their commodities, scarcities became more acute than before, Diocletian himself was accused of conniving at a rise in prices, riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore production and distribution. It was finally revoked by Constantine.
The weakness of this managed economy lay in its administrative cost. The required bureaucracy was so extensive that Lactantius, doubtless with political license, estimated it at half the population. The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity.
As the state had not yet discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning, the cost of each year’s operations had to be met from each year’s revenue. To avoid returns in depreciating currencies, Diocletian directed that, where possible, taxes should be collected in kind: taxpayers were required to transport their tax quotas to governmental warehouses, and a laborious organization was built up to get the goods thence to their final destination. In each municipality, the decuriones, or municipal officials, were held financially responsible for any shortage in the payment of the taxes assessed upon their communities.
Since every taxpayer sought to evade taxes, the state organized a special force of revenue police to examine every man’s property and income; torture was used upon wives, children, and slaves to make them reveal the hidden wealth or earnings of the household; and severe penalties were enacted for evasion. Towards the end of the 3rd century, and still more in the 4th, flight from taxes became almost epidemic in the Empire. The well-to-do concealed their riches, local aristocrats had themselves reclassified as humiliores to escape election to municipal office, artisans deserted their trades, peasant proprietors left their overtaxed holdings to become hired men, many villages and some towns (e.g., Tiberias in Palestine) were abandoned because of high assessments; at last, in the 4th century, thousands of citizens fled over the border to seek refuge among the barbarians.
It was probably to check this costly mobility, to ensure a proper flow of food to armies and cities, and of taxes to the state, that Diocletian resorted to measures that, in effect, established serfdom in fields, factories, and guilds. Having made the landowner responsible through tax quotas in kind for the productivity of his tenants, the government ruled that a tenant must remain on his land till his arrears of debt or tithes should be paid.
We do not know the date of this historic decree; but in 332, a law of Constantine assumed and confirmed it, and made the tenant adscriptitius, “bound in writing”, to the soil he tilled; he could not leave it without the consent of the owner; and when it was sold, he and his household were sold with it. He made no protest that has come down to us; perhaps the law was presented to him as a guarantee of security, as in Germany today. In this and other ways, agriculture passed in the 3rd century from slavery through freedom to serfdom and entered the Middle Ages.
Similar means of compelling stability were used in industry. Labor was “frozen” to its job, forbidden to pass from one shop to another without governmental consent. Each collegium or guild was bound to its trade and its assigned task, and no man might leave the guild in which he had been enrolled. Membership in one guild or another was made compulsory on all persons engaged in commerce and industry, and the son was required to follow the trade of his father. When any man wished to leave his place or occupation for another, the state reminded him that Italy was in a state of siege by the barbarians and that every man must stay at his post.
Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ, 1944.
April 15, 2022
Russian Army Saved by French Blunder – The Battle of Lubino 1812
Real Time History
Published 14 Apr 2022Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/realtimehistory
French general Junot and Emperor Napoleon I had a bit of a history by the time of the 1812 campaign. Even though Junot has been in Napoleon’s service for years, he hadn’t been promoted to Marshal. At the Battle of Lubino (Battle of Valutino-Gora) Junot stands idly by as the Grande Armée is missing their best chance yet to win a decisive victory over the Russians. To the north, at Polotsk the French and Russians are also clashing.
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Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812. 2021.
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon. 2010.
Maag, Albert. De Schicksale der Schweizerregimente in Napoleons I. Feldzug nach Russland 1812. 1900.
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. 2012.
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. 2005.» OUR STORE
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Volodymyr Zelensky has become a “pop cultural admixture of Churchill and an ’80s action hero”
In The Line, Andrew Potter explains how Ukrainian President Zelensky has shamed all the western leaders — like Trudeau — who have been long on rhetoric and short on action to support their claimed values:
“Volodymyr Zelensky Official portrait” by http://www.president.gov.ua/ is licensed under CC BY 4.0
When asked by journalists to explain his refusal to head for safety, Zelensky has made it clear that he has no wish to die, and that he fears for the lives of his loved ones (his wife and kids have since been moved to relative safety.) But, he added: “As for my life: I am the president of the country, and I simply do not have the right to it.” Sure, he could flee to preserve his own life. But, he has said, how would he explain his actions to his kids? As Zelensky sees it, he has no choice in the matter. His duty requires that he remain and lead his country in the fight; to do anything less would be dishonourable.
But while his Last Action Hero schtick has proven enormously popular with European and North American audiences, Zelensky’s refusal to leave Kyiv, and Ukraine’s insistence on fighting off the Russians instead of capitulation, has put our so-called leaders in a bit of a bind.
To begin with, Ukraine’s refusal to capitulate to Russian aggression has forced many governments into taking steps they almost certainly would have preferred to avoid — economic and political sanctions against Russia, costly shipments of arms and other aid, diplomatic side-choosing, rethinking of trade agreements, and so on. Ukraine’s defence is coming at a pretty high cost, and the final bill is far from being tallied.
But beyond the economic and political price that is being paid to support Ukraine, there is the extraordinary amount of cognitive dissonance Zelensky’s behaviour has generated amongst the leadership of the West. Honour? Duty? Sacrifice? What century does he think he’s living in?
For centuries, honour reflected the sorts of qualities that gentlemen were expected to possess: dignity, integrity, courage. But it is hard to even talk about honour now with a straight face. It brings to mind 19th-century aristocrats in wigs and hose, demanding satisfaction and challenging one another to a meeting over some best-forgotten offence. The old honour codes couldn’t survive the triumph of the values of liberal democracy and the arrival of what Francis Fukuyama famously called the End of History, where the willingness to risk one’s life for abstract ideas or principles has been replaced by voting and economic calculation in the public sphere and “the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” in the private.
Today, the old notion of honour survives only in small and isolated precincts of (mostly) male society, places like the military and some sports, places where how you behave in front of your peers matters more than comfort, more than money, more than health, maybe even more than life itself. The rest of us have become versions of what Nietszche derided as “the last man” — creatures of liberalism who have no pride, take no risks, and desire only comfort and security.
The West Sacrifices Poland to the Soviets – WAH 056 – April 1943, Pt.1
World War Two
Published 14 Apr 2022There are cracks in the alliances on both sides. Hitler’s allies are refusing to do his every bidding, and the revelations about the Soviet massacre of Poles in Katyn has set a wedge between Poland and the USSR.
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Vladimir Putin as real-life Bond villain
In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams makes a case for Vladimir Putin being all of Ian Fleming’s fictional 007 adversaries brought to life in a single person:
I am certain Vladimir Putin has a giant coloured globe, or maybe a huge map set in a wall, which at the tap of a button, silently slides in and out of view. In his mind, he will no doubt have experimented with his artist’s palette, of coating many of his geographical neighbours with his favourite shade of bright, bloody crimson.
Talking of sliding panels operated by secret switches, I would be surprised if the Russian leader has not watched all the James Bond movies, if only out of professional interest. He would see, if so, that he is every one of Ian Fleming’s villainous creations — Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Le Chiffre, Sir Hugo Drax, Auric Goldfinger, Emilio Largo, Dr Julius No and Francisco Scaramanga — all rolled into one person.
Presiding over the robber state that is the Russian Federation, Putin is at once militarily and politically all-powerful, but also the master international criminal. At a 2017 US Senate Judiciary Hearing, the Putin arch-critic and American financier, Bill Browder, estimated the Russian had “accumulated $200 billion of ill-gotten gains”, describing him as “one of the richest men in the world, if not the richest”.
It was the Second World War espionage boss, Commander Ian Fleming, who brought not only his world famous spy to life, but also the lairs of James Bond’s opponents. Fleming had inspected many of the Nazi underground factories and subterranean rocket bases immediately after the defeat of the Fatherland in 1945. In print, they appeared as his villains’ secret headquarters.
Fleming’s novels were in turn translated into celluloid by the talent of set designer Ken Adam. He worked on seven Bond movies, beginning with Dr No in 1962, via You Only Live Twice, and Diamonds Are Forever, and devised the circular War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove of 1964. If you don’t remember the scene, you’ll recall its most poignant line: “Please, gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room.”
Adam was also working with inside knowledge, for he was born in Berlin, to Jewish parents, who fled to Britain in 1934. On the outbreak of war, Adam enlisted into a British army engineering unit composed of Axis nationals, designing bomb shelters. He later joined the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot, where he was known as “Heiney the Tank Buster”. After VE-Day, Adam toured the concrete structures and German bases he had attacked. “I flew fighters in the war, made some great movies and was Knighted by the Queen [in 2003]. Not bad for a Jewish lad from Berlin,” he told me in an interview.
A screen capture from Alexei Navalny’s YouTube video on Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea palace.In a bizarre case of real life imitating fiction, it was Alexei Navalny, now rotting in Russia’s harshest penal colony for his exposé, who discovered Putin’s covert lair. Sprawling on the Black Sea coast, it might have been designed by Ken Adam. The Russian leader’s $1.9 billion palace comes with a below-ground grand salon, hollowed-out of the cliff-face, lit by a gigantic panoramic window, that, at the touch of another button, can be retracted to let in the sea breezes. Access to the beach or the rest of the complex is by tunnels carved into the rock.
Its existence is naturally denied by the Kremlin, but the site, at Cape Idokopas, near the village of Praskoveevka, is equipped with two helipads, and reputedly 39 times the size of Monaco. I make the basic assumption that scores of designer-stubbled security muscle, dressed in black, toting sub-machine-guns, with a shoot-on-sight brief, will be prowling about.
