World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 20 Jun 2026By late 1937, Nazi Germany’s rearmament economy had trapped itself. Autarky was failing. Hjalmar Schacht was pushed aside. Göring’s Four-Year Plan dominated economic policy. And at the secret Hossbach meeting of November 5, Hitler turned economic impossibility into an argument for territorial conquest.
This episode covers Q4 1937: the Hossbach Memorandum, Schacht’s resignation, the Anti-Comintern alignment, Lord Halifax’s visit, Himmler’s police-state consolidation, the December “Preventive Crime Fighting” decree, and the antisemitic propaganda exhibition Der Ewige Jude.
The argument is not that war was metaphysically inevitable. It is that the Nazi regime built an ideological, economic, and police-state machine that made war look increasingly necessary to its own leadership. This is a historical analysis of Nazi dictatorship, antisemitic propaganda, and war planning. It condemns Nazism and uses extremist material only for educational and documentary context.
Chapters:
0:00 Q4 1937 Intro
0:53 The world at the end of 1937
1:36 Germany’s quarter of acceleration
3:30 Himmler Tightens Police Power
6:26 Der Ewige Jude and dehumanization
8:30 Hossbach: autarky fails
11:16 Halifax and diplomatic confidence
13:03 Mood inside Germany
15:09 Mein Kampf has become policy
17:16 Conclusion: the politics of beasts
June 21, 2026
How To Make War Inevitable – Death of Democracy 20 – Q4 1937
Explaining our failure to expand beyond Earth to an alien
Devon Eriksen pens an ultra-short story in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “we” need to take a lot more money from Elon Musk to benefit “everyone”:
This-individual has an outstanding query for you-individual.
Yes, Dee-six-twenty-four-prime? Ask your question.
When we-collective initialized language-idea-exchange with you-collective, you-collective had no settlements on the surface of other planets in your-collective own star system.
Yet you-collective possessed advanced chemical propulsion technology sufficient to leave your-collective native gravity well. For over a hundred cycles around your-collective star, you-collective possessed this.
Why did you not use it?
Well, all that technology was worth a lot of money.
Value-consideration-tokens, yes. Continue.
So we decided to take it away from the really talented geniuses who built, break it up for parts, sell the parts, and throw a big free stuff party.
A … free stuff party?
Yeah, for like, average dudes. The kind of guys who don’t know calculus or anything. The ones you’d want to have a beer with. We thought we’d buy them some stuff.
Instead of leaving your home planet?
Yeah.
This-individual understands, now. Conclusions have been submitted to collective-thought-matrix. Please line you-collective up in an orderly fashion for processing, classification, and reassignment and/or biomass reclamation.
How Britain Made the L1A1 SLR: archive film with intro by Jonathan Ferguson
Royal Armouries
Published 21 Jan 2026Following last week’s look at the very first L1A1 SLR ever produced (1957), we’re sharing a remarkable Royal Small Arms Factory (RSAF) Enfield archive film, shot in the 1960s, showing the key stages of L1A1 manufacture and a rare glimpse of the original Enfield pattern room.
Then we step back and let the film speak for itself, nearly an hour of pure production and engineering process.
0:00 Intro
3:05 Enfield + Pattern Room
3:57 Planning & Tooling
4:37 Rifle body: Heat treat → Machining → Inspection
18:16 Barrels: Drilling, Rifling, Plating & Production line
34:28 Housing/Trigger, Furniture & Magazines
50:16 Assembly → Proofing/Testing → Packing & Dispatch
(more…)
QotD: Wishful thinking
The wish is often father to the belief, never more so when our interests are in play. But even without material interests, we are often so attached to our ideas or theories that wishful thinking easily overcomes evidence that casts, or at any rate ought to cast, doubt on them. No one is immune from wishful thinking, and therefore from special pleading. Not surprisingly, the latter is easier to spot in others than in oneself.
There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.
June 20, 2026
“Every system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud”
Most wars are not significant drivers of technological change and military innovation. The Franco-Prussian War, the Boer Wars, World War 1, and World War 2 are some of the exceptions where the fighting accelerated innovation and adoption of new and untested technologies that were proven or discarded on the battlefield. The Russo-Ukraine war has been going on long enough and requiring new and improved weapons to such a degree that modern arms shows clearly reflect at least some of the technological changes in response to the ongoing combat:

Thales RapidStriker SHORAD, I think. Oddly, what struck me about this image was how much it reminded me of very early WW1 armoured cars, both in general outline and in its being a quick reaction development to a current combat situation.
Photo from Eyes Only with Wes O’Donnell
I was thinking recently about the good ole pandemic days; ah, what a simpler time …
At the time, I was writing for military and cybersecurity magazines about whether NASA spacesuits can be hacked and hypersonic tomfoolery.
Six years ago, a defense expo like this was mostly about better armored boxes. Things like thicker protection, a nicer turret, an upgraded engine, a fire-control system with a new acronym.
The headline acts were tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, things that go very high and very fast, and the unspoken assumption underneath all of it was that war would look roughly like it always had, just with more cowbell.
Then 2022 happened.
Then Operation Spiderweb.
Then a year of Russian glide bombs and Ukrainian refinery strikes and FPV drones turning hundred-dollar quadcopters into tank-killers.
Then the Gulf woke up to Iranian missiles in March. And the entire defense industry got the same text message at the same time, written in other people’s blood.
You can read that message on the Eurosatory floor this year.
Almost every serious system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud:
How do I shoot from farther away so I don’t die?
How do I kill cheap drones without going bankrupt?
How do I send a robot instead of a soldier?
How do I keep my tank’s roof from becoming a Thermador pizza oven set to “broil?”
Back then, I also used to write listicles, like “Top Ten Gifts for Veterans!” In that tradition, I’ve put together a hand-picked list of ten weapon systems emerging this year at Eurosatory in Paris, and every one of them is really a story about how much war has changed since 2020.
Lessons learned: “In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not”
The flare-up of anti-immigrant/anti-government violence in Belfast has drifted out of the headlines lately, as state-oriented media try to get their audiences back onto safer topics like footy and hissing at the Bad Orange Man. But the situation in Northern Ireland has not resolved itself in the preferred way — preferred, that is, by the British government. John Carter responds to some American social media users who loudly wonder why British men generally are not “doing something” now:
In response to the migroid atrocity du jour, one often hears Americans ask “why haven’t British men done anything?”, to which Americans will flatteringly reply to themselves, “It’s because those BRITCUCKS have gone SOFT, they gave up their GUNS like little BITCHES, but you won’t see anyone trying THAT in a SMALL TOWN”. Which conveniently elides the awkward detail that American men, armed to the teeth as no other people on Earth, have allowed themselves to be pushed around this way and that since the sleep of the good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior (PBUH) was disturbed by his little dream. “Just you wait”, Americans will promise when this is pointed out, “The electric boogaloo will come any day now, you’ll see!” Sure we will. In the meantime, all those guns have done precisely nothing to prevent the relentless incursions of Section 8 housing, disparate impact, affirmative action, DEI, anti-discrimination training, Title IX, human resources, and all the rest of the soft tyrannies that flew out of the Pandora’s box of America’s ersatz race communist constitution. There was no resistance to any of this. Heavily armed red state Americans abandoned the cities for the suburbs rather than standing and fighting for them, and then stolidly watched as their kids were sidelined in education and employment while being terrorized by black criminals.
American speech is protected by the first amendment and backstopped by the second, yet nevertheless you will not find many Americans daring to even so much as mutter the forbidden word of power. This is not because white Americans don’t understand the problems. They have developed an elaborate vocabulary of “bad neighbourhoods” and “good schools” and “urban crime” and “troubled youth” and so on and so forth with which to discuss, in whispers, after glancing twice over their shoulders, the realities of life in the USSA. There is no law against parrhesia [Wiki], technically an American citizen may say whatever he pleases without consequence, but of course frank speech in this Greek sense requires courage by definition, and there has been a great shortage of that. You can say whatever you please, yes, of course, fill your boots, but you will find yourself ostracized, divorced, unemployed, and homeless if you speak too directly, so you know, shut up. The unspoken strictures of the longhouse are a more effective prison than iron bars for those whose spirits have been cowed.
Meanwhile, last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. Ogilvie’s life, though not his sight (and he was already hard of hearing) was saved by three Irish men who rushed in to beat the innocent Sudanese rocket surgeon off with their hurling sticks. In the aftermath, it emerged that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move in to his new accommodations just a few days before. No good deed, etc.
[…]
The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these. A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power. A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed. In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of “bowing” to “pressure” from the “public”. The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every “public policy research group” in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do. Show me what Our Democracy looks like; this is what Our Democracy looks like.
There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans. While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.
The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.
[…]
The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem. It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out. Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing. Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next. Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive. Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.
All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.
Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own. The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.
That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.
Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks. The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them. As a result, parallel lawsuits that had been launched by councils across the country were dropped. The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to “Operation Scatter” in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.
In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not.
Update, 22 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”
Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:
Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.
The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.
If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.
The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.
As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:
– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”
– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).
– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.
– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.
– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin
– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.
– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.
– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American
Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism
While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement
It impacts you too
“Get off your high horse”
Devon Eriksen responds to a post from a Japanese man who claims not to understand American racism:

“United States, Canadian and Japanese Flags on Seventh Avenue” by Jim, the Photographer is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga
Honestly, racism is one of those things many Japanese people struggle to understand.
If we see a white person, we think, “Oh, they’re white.”
If we see a black person, we think, “Oh, they’re black.”
If there were blue people, we’d probably think, “Oh, they’re blue.”
And that’s about as far as it goes.
If someone is nice, we think they’re nice.
If someone is an asshole, we think they’re an asshole.
If we like them, we like them.
If we don’t, we don’t.
We grow up being told not to cause trouble, not to fight, and to get along with the people around us.
Maybe that’s why judging someone by their race feels so foreign to a lot of Japanese people.
We’re usually too busy judging people by whether they’re good people or not.
This is what we, in America, call a “Luxury Belief System”.
That means something you can believe, and advertise your belief in, precisely because your privileges shelter you from the negative consequences of believing it.
You, @japan_nobunaga, live in a nation that is 99% Japanese, just like you.
You have plenty of time to evaluate gaikokujin as individuals. There are only a few of them around, and they probably aren’t going to stab you while you are trying to figure out the content of their character.
So you have the luxury of telling everyone “look at me, I am not a racist, I am an enlightened being who makes no judgments about wolves” … because you do not live near any wolves, and run no risk of being bitten.
In America, we have another saying … “Get off your high horse”.
This does not mean a literal horse.
But it is meant to make you think about how the daimyo‘s son, on his expensive thoroughbred stallion, does not understand why the peasants have muddy boots.
If you get down off the horse, and walk, you will understand why the farmer’s boots are muddy.
There were some dissenting comments to the original post:
I’ve heard similar stories of Japanese racism toward other East Asian peoples, never mind what they said (and probably still do say) about American black servicemen.
Caesar Augustus – The man and his story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Jan 2026An overview of the career of the man who became Rome’s first princeps (or emperor as we would call him). Heir to Julius Caesar’s private estate, he somehow managed to make himself Caesar’s adopted son and political successor, plunging himself into Rome’s violent politics at the age of just nineteen and in turn beating all his rivals. Supreme master of the Roman empire in his early thirties, he then ruled for four decades, profoundly changing Rome, its empire — and by extension shaping the modern world.
My biography of the man — Augustus: First Emperor of Rome is being released as a new edition from Basic Books in the USA on 27th January 2026.
QotD: The word “alchemy”
My favourite thing in this chapter is an etymological nugget that I suspect is too good to be true, but which I desperately want to believe. The word “alchemy” comes from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ (الكيمياء), which in turn comes from the Greek khēmeia (χημεία), but that’s where our knowledge of this word stops. χημεία has no known Indo-European origin, and no obvious cognates that would suggest a borrowing. There are some hand-wavy theories that it might derive from khēmet, the word for Egypt in ancient Egyptian, but it’s a stretch to put it mildly. Needham proposes the Chinese 金 meaning “gold” as the ultimate source. In modern Mandarin, this word is pronounced like jin, but the Classical Chinese pronunciation is better preserved by the Southern dialects, which variously render it as gum, gim, or, in Hakka and Southern Min, as kim. The list of English words with Chinese origins is short,1 and it would be nice to add this one.
But the Chinese alchemists by and large weren’t after gold, their goal was eternal life instead. In fact aurifaction originated as an instrumental “warm-up” exercise for the main event. Everybody knew that the reason gold was the most perfect metal was because it was a harmonious and balanced combination of the elements. So if the same harmoniousness and lack of internal contradiction could be achieved within a living organism, then the consequences would obviously be physical immortality and superhuman abilities. Elemental harmony, biological harmony, social harmony — in the light of Chinese metaphysics these goals were all reflections and intimations of one another. And the first two at least could be brought about by the same methods: the application of various potions and elixirs designed to increase or reduce the influence of a particular element. The same principle forms the cornerstone of Chinese medicine today.2
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.
- My favourite of these, since it seems so unlikely, is “ketchup” deriving from 茄汁 (“tomato sauce” in Cantonese), perhaps via the Malay kicap.
- Needham’s third lecture is about the most recognizable and well-traveled example of Chinese medicine — acupuncture — and contains the intriguing assertion that naloxone administration totally cancels acupuncture’s efficacy for pain relief. This suggests that acupuncture’s mechanism of action may have to do with stimulating the body’s production of naturally-occurring opioids. There’s some evidence the placebo effect could be related (fascinatingly, naloxone also appears to eliminate the placebo effect).
June 19, 2026
US history is unique, it does not map onto the histories of other nations
I’ve noticed this pattern myself, but I hadn’t considered that a lot of Americans don’t just use the patterns of their national history when looking at other western nations:

“Political Map of the Indian Empire, 1893” from Constable’s Hand Atlas of India, London: Archibald Constable and Sons, 1893. (via Wikimedia Commons)
Not every place in the world can be examined through the historical template of the United States.
One of the reasons conversations about India are so difficult for folks in the West to untangle is that many of the frameworks Americans use to understand power, intergroup dynamics, identity, and historical injustice do not map onto India. Not at all.
For Americans who have adopted a critical lens, the template derived from American history is fixed. A dominant demographic majority group seeks to preserve power while marginalized demographic minorities fight for recognition and inclusion. Because this template is so fixed in the imagination, there is a tendency to view and interpret dynamics and events in other countries in exactly the same way. I have seen it myself. “We’ve all seen how this works”, someone will say, and proceed to apply the American template to a different place.
And the history of the Americas (both North and South) is dominated by European (white) Christian colonization. As a result, Americans are familiar with the legacies of European empire and Christian missionary expansion. By contrast, the history of Islamic conquest and rule, which shaped large parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe for centuries, occupies far less space in the American imagination. So too does the contemporary influence of petrodollar-funded religious institutions, transnational Islamist movements, and the global circulation of Islamist narratives.
This does not mean these forces explain everything. It does mean that many Americans have little historical or conceptual framework for understanding how they might shape politics, memory, education, or intergroup relations in places like India.
India’s history is not the same as that of the Americas.
For centuries, India experienced successive waves of colonization. The first came through a series of Muslim invasions and dynasties, culminating in the Mughal Empire. The second came through British colonial rule, predated by British mercantile and missionary efforts. Yet unlike many colonized societies, the civilizational majority was never fully displaced, converted, or absorbed. Hindu traditions, practices, languages, stories, temples, and collective memories survived.
This is perhaps the single hardest aspect of India for many Americans to grasp because it has no real analogue in American history: the Hindu demographic majority is also the historically colonized population.
For many Western observers, this creates immediate suspicion because it violates the assumptions embedded within our familiar frameworks. The expectation is that majorities defend power while minorities challenge it.
As a result, contemporary debates about textbooks, public memory, historical figures, temples, and national identity are often seen and interpreted by folks in the West through frameworks that retrofit Indian history into contemporary American critical analysis through the reductive binaries of majority/minority, right/left, which are memeable and digestible, but obscure much more than they reveal about power, history, equity, policy, foreign influence, etc.
When Hindus argue that violent and painful aspects of Mughal conquest have been whitewashed in public education, they are frequently accused of attempting to rewrite history to justify the alleged “Hindu right wing” suppression of a minority group today. (Please do read my analysis of religious-based violence in India. It’s not what you think it is. Link.)
Yet Americans themselves are familiar with the process of revisiting historical narratives to advance truth and reconciliation. We have debated how slavery is taught, how Indigenous history is taught, how immigration is taught, and how women and minority groups have been represented in textbooks and in classrooms. We generally accept that historical narratives evolve as new evidence emerges and as previously marginalized perspectives are taken seriously.
What makes India different is that the group seeking rigorous reconsideration of historical narratives is often the majority population. For many Western observers, this creates immediate suspicion. The assumption is that majorities seek dominance while minorities seek justice.
But history does not always work that way.
The result is that efforts by Hindus to recover historical memory are often denounced as nationalism (which is falsely equated with white or Christian nationalism in the United States) before they are examined on their own terms. Questions about historical representation become questions about political motives. Efforts to revisit narratives become “evidence of extremism” or, even more bizarre, “anti-intellectualism”. And figures who have occupied a central place in Hindu memory for centuries are presented as newly invented symbols of contemporary political power.
The result is that the Indian voices most readily amplified in Western media are often those whose analyses are already legible within familiar Western frameworks. Their arguments are immediately understandable, which lends them “credibility”. Perspectives that do not fit those frameworks are frequently dismissed as “Hindu nationalist” before they are seriously considered.
One need not agree with every argument made in these debates to recognize that they are, in fact, debates. The question is not whether history should be examined. The question is whether everyone is permitted to participate in that examination without having their motives presumed in advance.
Sparta vs Athens – 2(a): Two Greek Worlds (Citizens, Helots, Power)
seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
In this lecture segment I set out the fundamental contrast between Sparta and Athens as social and political systems. Sparta was a permanent military state built on coerced labour and internal discipline. Athens was a quarrelsome democracy that relied on participation, persuasion, and a wider civic culture of debate.
We begin with the basic structures: who counted, who did the work, and how each society organised its citizen body. This is not moral theatre. It is institutional reality. By the end, the students should see why Sparta could produce cohesion and battlefield reliability, while Athens produced instability, argument, and a public life that made intellectual achievement possible.
QotD: The Prince is a … satire?
When I was a lad, I was told that Machiavelli’s The Prince is a satire. I don’t believe it, personally — I know a few things about Renaissance Italy, and I think he meant every word — but I learned something important from the people who insist it’s a satire: They’re wishcasting.
Let me back up. The occasion where I first heard the “it’s a satire” thesis was an “advanced placement” History class back in high school. They probably don’t have those anymore as part of the regular curriculum — dat be rayciss — so in case you’ve never endured one, it’s a bunch of mega-nerds who only care about pleasing Teacher trying to do History. For our unit on “The Renaissance”, we had to read both The Prince and More’s Utopia, and do our term paper on one or the other.
Naturally I picked The Prince, and since you all know the kind of kids who were in that kind of class, naturally everyone else picked Utopia. I might’ve been the only kid who ever did his paper on Machiavelli; certainly the teacher acted like she’d never seen one before. We didn’t have the phrase “trigger warning” back then, but that’s what it amounted to — Teacher hastened to inform everyone in the class that The Prince was really a satire, and so of course I was just kidding too, ha ha, because otherwise we were in the presence of very, very, very bad thought …
“Yes, kidding, ha ha ha,” I muttered, because while I obviously wasn’t the quickest on the uptake back then — I should’ve just done the stupid paper on goddamn Utopia like the rest of the sheep — even I could figure out that I was gonna get sent to the school counselor if I didn’t get with the program …
… and that’s when I learned the aforementioned lesson. Kidding? You think Machiavelli’s kidding? Didn’t we just do this whole unit on the Renaissance? Your main man Thomas More was burning people at the stake, for fuck’s sake! And as for the Italians, they were straight whacking people out in church, with the active connivance of the fucking Pope himself. Satire, fuhgetaboudit, that’s Godfather shit, Machiavelli’s as serious as cancer. You just don’t want to believe that people are actually the way they so obviously are, so you’ll tell yourselves he’s kidding … and Teacher will back you up on it, because she doesn’t want to believe it either.
(Meanwhile, I’ll get an A for my excellent “satire”, in exchange for which I will never ever bring it up again or I’ll fail the rest of the semester).
Severian, “End States and Inverted Incentives”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-22.
June 18, 2026
Unexpected increase in legal gun ownership in Canada
The federal government has been doing everything it can to curtail Canadians’ access to firearms since 2015, most recently imposing bans on literally thousands of different gun models and almost completely restricting purchase, sale, or transfer of legal handguns. Under these circumstances, you’d expect that interest in legal gun ownership would be on a pretty steep decline. But that’s emphatically not the case:
Here is something the government does not talk about.
Canada’s handgun freeze took effect on October 21, 2022. Since that date, very few people who have exemptions have been able to buy, sell, gift, or inherit a handgun. The market for new restricted handguns is effectively closed.
So you might expect the number of Canadians holding a Restricted PAL (the licence required to own handguns and other restricted firearms) to be flat or declining. Why bother completing the restricted component of the Canadian Firearm Safety Course if you can’t use it to buy a handgun?
The data says otherwise.
According to the RCMP Commissioner of Firearms Reports, the number of RPAL holders has grown every year since the freeze:
2022: 716,348
2023: 752,002 (up 5.0%)
2024: 775,266 (up 3.1%)
2025: 794,768 (up 2.5%)That is a net gain of 78,420 restricted firearm licence holders in three years, a 10.9% increase, all during a period when the primary reason most people get the restricted designation on their PAL (to buy a handgun) was legislated away.
Canadians are still taking the safety course, submitting to the background checks, and getting licensed. The freeze did not stop the demand for restricted licences. It just stopped the legal market from serving the people who hold them.
Source: RCMP Commissioner of Firearms Reports, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
















