Quotulatiousness

February 18, 2020

Royal Resistance in Benelux and Scandinavia 1940 – WW2 – War Against Humanity 008

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 17 Feb 2020

When the Racism of Naziism hits the Nationalism of Monarchism, it doesn’t quite go like Hitler would have imagined.

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Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
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Research by: Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Sources:
National Museum of Denmark https://natmus.dk/museer-og-slotte/fr…
Archive of I.M. Bondarenko
Regionaal Archief Nijmegen
CegeSoma, n°34706
NationalSocialistMovementintheNetherlands (1).png by Ec1801011 from wikimedia commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Resistance_15_December_1940 by SiefkinDR from wikimedia commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Re…
IWM (FL 24877, HU 66187)
The Dubbo Liberal and Macquarie Advocate (NSW : 1894 – 1954), p. 3 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article132…
Yousuf Karsh, National Archives of the Netherlands / Fotocollectie Anefo
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Delphin, Rigmor Dahl, Oslo Museum

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation in Time”
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Wendel Scherer – “Reunion”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
Hakan Eriksson – “The End of The World 2”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

Spartacus Olsson
3 days ago
You’d think that the Nazis would know how nationalism works … well, it turns out that when Hitler’s fantasies of race meet the very real nationalism of the old European monarchies, race doesn’t have the trump. Now, in 1940 nationalism isn’t that old, but it’s anchored in old traditions that the monarchies now occupied by the Nazis have managed to reconcile with modernity rather successfully. And here’s an important point: nationalism is often decried as the root of all of these conflicts, and perhaps it is, but in some places it’s also proved to be fertile ground for modern democracy. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learnt somewhere in there, and maybe that’s that in the end it’s not what, but how that makes a difference. What’s particularly interesting, in for instance the Netherlands with the February Strike or in the Germany resistance rings, is that when faced with a common enemy to the nation, patriotism unites people across the political spectrum, well except those obsessed with the idea of race.

FN Grand Browning: The European 1911 that Never Happened

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Feb 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

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When John Browning licensed his handgun patents, the North American rights were granted to Colt, and the Western European rights to FN in Belgium. Browning provided the patents and patent model guns to the companies, and they were then free to interpret the design however they thought best. In the case of the shrouded-hammer blowback system, the Colt interpretation (the Pocket Hammerless) was a civilian concealed pistol in .32ACP, while the FN interpretation (Model 1903) was a substantially larger gun in 9×20 Browning Long intended for military service.

The locked-breech patent was the same. Colt developed it into the Model 1911 adopted by the US military, and FN built a slightly smaller version in 9.65x23mm intended for European military service. However, while the Colt pistol became tremendously popular, FN’s development was disrupted by World War One, and never completed in its aftermath. Only a couple dozen examples of the Grand Browning, as it was called, were made before the war, and just a few survive today. We will never know how European militaries would have responded to a Browning locked-breech pistol at the time…

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“The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese”

Filed under: Europe, Food, France — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Lichfield on the plight of the cheesemakers (get your MPATHG jokes out of the way now):

French cheese seller, offering Villefranche de Rouergue and other artisanal cheeses.
Photo by Sybren via Wikimedia Commons.

In his small fromagerie at Saint Point Lac in the Jura, Fabrice Michelin produces authentic, hand-made, raw-milk Mont d’Or cheeses. He is the last person in France to do so — the last in a line of local cheese-makers which goes back for centuries.

“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk myself from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it carefully into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mold the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”

Individual, artisanal cheeses? Wonderful.

Not any more, it seems.

“That’s what gets me into trouble these days,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”

Forget the yellow vests. Forget the strikes against pension reform. The real battle for the immortal soul of France is about something far more important — cheese.

The infinite variety of French cheeses — one of the finest achievements of French culture — is gradually being eroded and dumbed down. Only one in ten of the cheeses now consumed in France is made with raw milk or “lait cru” in the authentic manner.

Search where you like in the finest cheese shops in France, you will no longer find a Bleu de Termignon or a Galette des Monts-d’Or. They are among 50 species of French cheese that have vanished, like rare flowers or butterflies, in the last 40 years. Other varieties, like Vacherin d’Abondance and M. Michelin’s hand-made Mont d’Or have been reduced to a single producer.

Many of the best-known French cheeses — Brie or Pont L’Evêque or Camembert — thrive at home and abroad, but they are overwhelmingly made in large factories with pasteurised or sterilised milk. To purists, that is a betrayal of the French tradition of “living cheese”.

Major French AOC cheese designations: the size of the symbol indicates the relative production of that variety. Many smaller cheese varieties not shown.
Graphic by FrancoisFC – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3640022

Viking Invasion of England | 3 Minute History

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jabzy
Published 18 Oct 2016

https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy

Thanks to Xios, Alan Haskayne, Lachlan Lindenmayer, Victor Yau, William Crabb, Derpvic, Seth Reeves and all my other Patrons.

QotD: Boring old Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Quotations — Nicholas @ 01:00

Canada may be the nicest country on earth. Bad things don’t happen in Canada, or at least not very often, because Canadians are far too nice to let them.

Unfortunately, here in America, bad things are what we call “news”. Canada’s undoubtedly a land of rich blessings for its residents (weather aside), but it makes it a little hard to write about.

Jane Galt, “Blame Canada …”, Asymmetrical Information, 2005-01-18.

February 17, 2020

Sieges and Siege-craft

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Lindybeige
Published 2 Jun 2016

Sieges in the ancient and medieval worlds were on quite different scales. 10,000 men can do things differently from 500.

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This video’s subject was chosen by Jack Sargeant, the winner of the DeepArt art competition a couple of weeks ago. The topic is a large one, but I hope I gave it a decent enough shot.

Castle illustration by Mathew Nielsen.

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Justin Trudeau and the UN Security Council

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although I’m much less a fan of the United Nations than Ted Campbell is, I agree that Prime Minister Trudeau’s grip-and-grin-and-bribe world tour in support of Canada’s bid for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council is probably doomed to failure:

The United Nations Security Council Chamber in New York, also known as the Norwegian Room.
Photo by Patrick Gruban via Wikimedia Commons.

He has seemed oblivious to the fact that he’s bragging about Canada’s “human rights” and “equality” to politicians who are happy to have laws that criminalize homosexual behaviour and that he’s willing to enter a “partnership” in Africa’s oils and gas sectors even as his cabinet tries to shut down Western Canada’s energy industries and as his own country is in a political and economic crisis over pipelines. And then he bowed and scraped to the foreign minister of the mass-murdering Iranian regime, only a month after it shot down a civilian airliner, killing 57 Canadians.

This is all in pursuit of the ambitions of a few Laurential Elite insiders who are still campaigning against Stephen Harper. They remember that Prime Minister Harper’s government’s bid for a UNSC seat was rejected (2010) largely because Canada was perceived to be too close to Israel and because Prime Minister Harper was perceived to be too different from superstar US President Barack Obama, and not serious enough about climate change. Team Trudeau is hell-bent on proving that it is “better” than Team Harper by winning that seat (the other contestants are Ireland and Norway).

My guess is that Canada will fail again because the few hundred million dollars in bribes aid it has promised to spread around Africa is not going to make much of a dent in the anti-Canada campaign that I suspect China is waging to continue to punish us for the Meng affair, amongst other things. China is, I believe, using Canada as a bit of a whipping boy to send a message to the rest of the world about the benefits and costs of dealing with China … on its terms.

In fact, I rather hope Canada loses. Not because I enjoy seeing my country rejected. Not even because I would enjoy seeing Justin Trudeau humiliated, but I admit that would be nice. I think that losing the bid for the worthless, second class Security Councils seat might persuade our diplomats that we need to rethink our role in the UN.

The United Nations is a marvellous idea and it’s an important institution. But it is also a deeply troubled organization. It is corrupt. It is badly managed. It is poorly led. It is badly organized. It is in dire need of reform.

The bad leadership and poor organization begin at the Security Council.

The Roman Senate during the Republic

Filed under: Government, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 28 Aug 2014

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There’s an earlier video on the functions of the Senate during the monarchy here, but the audio track is rather wonky.

“The rails to hell are laid with good intentions”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Law, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Jonathan Kay explains how Canadian governments find themselves in the situation where the basic laws of the land can be flouted at will by a small extremist faction and the police are unwilling to do more than bare peacekeeping duties:

“Vancouver Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en” by jencastrotakespictures is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

If you find yourself astounded by the current situation in Canada, whereby protesters have been allowed to shut down a rail network that remains a backbone of passenger travel and industrial transport (and whose coast-to-coast completion in 1885 became a symbol of national unity), it’s useful to revisit the accumulation of symbolic gestures that have steadily destroyed the moral authority of our governments to push back at any assertion of Indigenous rights and grievances. For years, our leaders offered reflexive acquiescence to increasingly expansive claims that Canada remains a white supremacist dystopia, culminating in last year’s campaign to convince us not only that modern Canada is a “genocide” state, but that even the act of expressing disagreement with this description makes you a sort of metaphorical train conductor on the rails to Canadian Dachau. Having publicly tattooed their guilty settler souls with every imaginable hashtag, our leaders now apparently find themselves stopped from restoring the rule of law.

The rails to hell are laid with good intentions. And there is nothing that now signals goodness in Canadian public life more than the land acknowledgment. Certainly, no one can argue with the historical truth that Indigenous peoples populated Canada for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. But words have meaning. And the well-understood meaning of these acknowledgments is that Indigenous peoples exercise a sort of broad, vaguely defined moral sovereignty over lands “owned” by Canadian governments, corporations and private citizens — including the lands on which we have constructed roads, rails, ports and legislatures. And since this sovereignty apparently now may be asserted at any time, for pretty much any reason, we have effectively lost the ability to enforce the systematic organization of property rights on which every functional society, Indigenous or non-Indigenous, depends.

The push to recognize Indigenous sovereignty over ancestral lands stretches back generations, an effort rooted in very real constitutional and treaty rights. But what I am describing here is not this formally bounded legal campaign, but rather the more general insistence that the entire country remains stained by original sin, and so must be purified by an open-ended, quasi-spiritual process of “decolonization.” This project began in earnest in 2017 as a counter-reaction to the perceived jingoism of the Canada 150 celebrations. Within the rarified corners of the literary and arts milieus (in which I found myself embedded at the time), decolonization quickly became a sort of state religion, complete with decolonization-themed sensitivity training and confession rituals.

[…]

The people doing the protesting are led by dissidents within one of the affected Indigenous communities, amplified by a critical mass of white environmentalists who are perfectly happy to cherry-pick Indigenous causes based on how well they line up with their own Anti-Racism/Critical Studies term-project requirements. Indeed, there is a certain type of very self-satisfied white Canadian leftist who sees himself as a real-life Lorax. Drawing on antiquated noble-savage stereotypes from the past, these decolonization super-allies cast Indigenous people as their little bar-ba-loot bears. And it just ruins their day when Indigenous leaders refuse to grab their tummies, moan for the CBC cameras, or read their bar-ba-loot scripts.

There is a larger hypocrisy at play here, too. Justin Trudeau and his entourage — currently on world tour, hoping to convince African and Caribbean leaders to hand him the shiny trophy of a UN Security Council seat — don’t take the train much. They fly. So, too, do the provincial politicians passing the buck in equal measure, not to mention the national broadcast journalists offering maudlin profiles of the demonstrators. Forcing ordinary travellers to bear the burden of upholding officially sanctioned upper-middle-class social-justice pieties isn’t “progressive.” It’s reactionary, snobbish elitism with a progressive façade.

Development of the Model 1911 Pistol

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Nov 2014

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When I was looking through the catalog for this upcoming Rock Island auction, I noticed that there were a lot of early-type Colt automatic pistols listed. I looked a bit closer, and noticed that there was, in fact, one of almost every major developmental variety. Well, that sounded like a recipe for a big overview video! So here I present the developmental history of the 1911.

These pistols sold for:

$10,350 (1900 Sight Safety)
$2,875 (1900/1902 Sporting)
$1,840 (1902 Sporting)
$2,875 (1902 Military)
$2,588 (1903 Pocket Hammer)
$6,900 (1905)
$16,100 (Savage 1907)
$2,300 (1911)
$3,738 (1924 Transitional)
$8,625 (1911A1)

http://www.forgottenweapons.com

Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

QotD: Hitchens’ rule of morality

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

Whenever I heard some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.

Christopher Hitchens, quoted by Douglas Murray in “Beware the creepy male feminist: ‘White knights’ like Robert De Niro often turn out to be less than chivalrous”, Unherd, 2019-11-15.

February 16, 2020

Diamonds vs. Self Determination – South West Africa and the League of Nations I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 15 Feb 2020

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Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points and their idea of self-determination didn’t go unnoticed in the former German colonies like German Southwest Africa. But especially South Africa had other ideas at the Paris Peace Conference and lobbied to take control over future Namibia and its lucrative diamond mines.

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» SOURCES

Emmett, Tony. 1999. Popular Resistance and the Roots of Nationalism in Namibia, 1915-1966. Basel, Switzerland: P. Schlettwein Publishing.
Olusoga, David, and Casper W. Erichsen. 2011. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London, UK: Faber and Faber.
Onselen, Charles van. 1980. Chibaro: African mine labour in Southern Rhodesia 1900-1933. London, UK: Pluto Pr.
Pirio, Gregory. 1988. “The Role of Garveyism in the Making of Namibian Nationalism.” In Namibia 1884-1984: Readings on Namibia’s History and Society: Selected Papers and Proceedings of the International Conference on “Namibia 1884-1984: 100 Years of Foreign Occupation; 100 Years of Struggle”, London 10-13 September, 1984, Organised by the Namibia Support Committee in Co-Operation with the SWAPO Department of Information and Publicity, edited by International Conference on “Namibia 1884-1984: 100 Years of Foreign Occupation; 100 Years of Struggle,” Brian Wood, Namibia Support Committee, United Nations Institute for Namibia, SWAPO, and Department of Information and Publicity. London: The Committee in cooperation with United Nations Institute for Namibia.
“Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany.” 1918. 1918. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00072665/00001/1j.
Silvester, Jeremy, and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds. 2003. Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia: An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book. Sources for African History, v. 1. Leiden, NL ; Boston, USA: Brill.
Smith, Iain R. 1999. “Jan Smuts and the South African War.” South African Historical Journal 41 (1): 172–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/0258247990867….
Vinson, Robert Trent. 2012. Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/public….
Wallace, Marion, and John Kinahan. 2013. A History of Namibia from the Beginning to 1990. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
William Blakemore Lyon. 2015. “The South West Africa Company and Anglo-German Relations, 1892-1914.” Master’s thesis, Cambridge University.
Zimmerer, Jürgen, and Joachim Zeller. 2008. Genocide in German South-West Africa. Monmouth, UK: Merlin Press.
Michell, Lewis (1910). The Life and Times of the Right Honourable Cecil John Rhodes 1853-1902, Volume 2. New York and London: Mitchell Kennerly
Rhodes, Cecil, (1902) “The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes: With Elucidatory Notes to Which Are Added Some Chapters Describing the Political and Religious Ideas of the Testator”, London: “Review of Reviews” Office
Cecil Rhodes, “Confession of Faith”, 1877 https://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Rho…

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Enter Erwin Rommel – The British Advance in Africa – WW2 – 077 – February 15 1941

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

World War Two
Published 15 Feb 2020

While the Germans send one of their best generals to North Africa to bail out the Italians, Great Britain switches focus from Libya to Greece, but make symbolically important gains in East Africa.

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Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv
– A German soldier poses atop a tank, photo credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Perquimans County Library
– US National Archive
– IWM: A 4035, HU 39482

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago
When you know the story going forward it’s fascinating to see how the decisions unfold this week — the reshuffling of command both on the Axis and Allied side might seem like innocuous administrative decisions when you don’t know the future. But if you have a crystal ball, you’ll know that not just Rommel arriving in North Africa, but also the decisions on the British side this week will have momentous impact on the war in total. That’s one of the things we discovered early-on with a chronological narrative, it suddenly puts things in a new perspective. The relationship between events changes, and things that might seem too boring, or undramatic to include in a “great story” take on a whole new meaning, increasing our understanding of cause and effect of the “greater” events that will come. On a different note, we just finished shooting a new batch of videos today and we’ll be announcing some fascinating developments on our program in the coming weeks. Stay tuned, and stay awesome, you all are by far the best community on YouTube!

The Canadian economy taken hostage while the PM swans around the world schmoozing for a temporary Security Council seat

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the state of play in the stand-off between (some) First Nations protesters and their temporary fellow travellers of the various permanent protest class:

“DSC02285” by Bengt 1955 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

The majority of Wet’suwet’en First Nation members support the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline project, and they are in an objectively peculiar situation. On the one hand, the RCMP is doing its best to clear away the protesters and let construction proceed. On the other hand, anti-pipeline protesters claiming solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en have created chaos in their name — most notably the total shutdown of CN Rail’s eastern Canadian network, the cancellation of nearly every Canadian passenger train, and the layoffs and untold economic costs that go with that.

If protesters acknowledge the diversity of opinion among the Wet’suwet’en at all, they will defer to the authority of five hereditary chiefs who oppose the project, or observe that the five elected Wet’suwet’en band councils — all of which have signed community benefits agreements — represent a form of settler democracy imposed by the Indian Act.

[…]

Clearly the Wet’suwet’en are a divided community, including on the most basic questions of how they should be governed. It’s a mess. Mind you, look at the state of Canada as a whole.

Just as the RCMP have court authorization to clear protesters and encampments along the pipeline route, the Ontario Provincial Police have court authorization to clear the Mohawk rail blockade near Belleville, Ont. Unlike the RCMP, the OPP refuses to exercise its authority. And we just have to live with that. Conservative politicians are barking at Justin Trudeau to “enforce the law,” but he doesn’t give orders to the OPP, and neither does Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and nor should we want them to.

Still, you might expect senior ministers to have moderately stern words for folks illegally causing economic harm. You might expect the prime minister, at minimum, to be in the country. Instead, Trudeau spent the week swanning around Africa drumming up support for the UN Security Council seat with which he remains unaccountably obsessed, then decamped for the Munich Security Conference, where he was photographed warmly embracing Iranian foreign affairs minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, five weeks after Iran blew an airliner full of Canadians out of the sky over Tehran.

The Little Potato is probably doubly happy to have a valid (in his own mind) excuse for not being in the country at this particular time. He loves being the centre of attention … as long as that attention is friendly. He doesn’t handle situations well if the tempers are higher and the hostility is rising … like much of Canada right now.

The pipeline is a provincial project, not a federal one, but if the OPP won’t end the blockade and the feds aren’t willing to take truly extraordinary measures, then at some point in the foreseeable future it may well make short-term economic sense to give in to their demands. Maybe the feds can buy the pipeline from Coastal GasLink and shut it down.

And what if the Mohawks do lose interest, or are somehow induced to stand down? That now counts as the best-case scenario, and it will have involved shutting down the CN railway for at least a week — maybe two, maybe three — with enormous consequences for people’s livelihoods and the economy as a whole, all in the name of killing a project supported by the vast majority of Indigenous people affected by it. And it will happen again, as many times as any group wants it to, on whatever issue they want it to, for as long as they want it to. Unless someone in power does something unusually bold and concrete in the very near future – and it’s not even clear what that thing would be — we are well on the road as a country to being terminally screwed. In the meantime, we certainly have no lessons on accountable government to give the Wet’suwet’en.

Tank Chats #62 KV-1 | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 15 Dec 2018

It was decided to put the KV heavy tank into production in December 1939, alongside the T34-76 medium tank.

The invading Germans received a major shock when they encountered the KV1 heavy tank in June 1941.

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