TimeGhost History
Published 7 Sept 2025Breadlines, quotas, and Stasi fear collide with propaganda promises as East Germany erupts. In June 1953, strikes on Stalinallee ignite a nationwide uprising — Soviet tanks roll into Berlin, thousands are arrested, and the GDR tightens control. How did the regime survive this shock?
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September 8, 2025
“Down with this sort of thing!”
In the free-to-cheapskates part of Ed West’s post on the Graham Linehan case in Britain, he identifies one of the reasons that Linehan’s Father Ted became so popular in the country it was situated in:
I don’t think I’d seen a “down with this sort of thing” placard in the flesh since I watched the Protest the Pope march back in September 2010. Those were the heady days of New Atheism, before the movement evolved into something more explicitly progressive.
The sign references an episode of the 1990s comedy Father Ted, in which the protagonist and his dim-witted sidekick Fr Dougal are forced to protest the screening of a blasphemous new film called The Passion of Saint Tibulus. Among the many catchphrases popularised by the comedy, back in 2010 this one suggested an ironic and gently mocking attitude to religion; that it was ridiculous, rather than evil.
This week, outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court in Marylebone Road, the sign appeared in a rather different context, carried by supporters of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan as he faced charges of harassment and criminal damage in an ongoing trial, following an incident at last year’s Battle of Ideas involving a young transgender activist.
Linehan had been bailed before trial, allowing him to travel to the United States to work on a new comedy project. When he arrived back at Heathrow on Monday, however, he was arrested by five armed police officers over three tweets he had posted back in April. The situation was as absurd and surreal as anything that had emerged from the writer’s fertile imagination.
As Linehan described it on his substack: “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists’. The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.”
The incident is embarrassing to Britain as it faces increasing scrutiny in the US for its poor record on free speech, especially over the Lucy Connolly case. It was unfortunate timing that this arrest happened just as Nigel Farage was heading in the other direction to talk about this very issue in Washington. But Linehan’s ordeal is also part of a much longer and sadder story about the perils of the political meeting the personal.
Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan had worked on The Fast Show before renowned comedy producer Geoffrey Perkins had taken to one of their ideas, about a group of priests stuck on a remote Irish island, proposing that it be written as a six-part sitcom. It was brilliant, and hugely loved, and in its timing was significant.
Conor Fitzgerald wrote of Father Ted that, while well-loved in Britain, in Ireland it is more like “the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us”. It also appeared at a crucial time in history.
Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.
When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.
Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally.
Those establishment hierarchies collapsed across the West in the late 20th century, first in more secularised nations such as Britain and France and later, and more quickly, in places like Ireland and Spain where the Catholic Church still held on.
The Church lost its power to patrol its taboos, without which it became a sitting duck for satirists; the Passion of St Tibulus was influenced by the protest against Life of Brian, successfully banned in Ireland until 1987. As a teenager, Linehan had to join a film club to watch it, but such censorship was disappearing everywhere.
Father Ted was a work of genius, employing a surreal style of humour that has often been characteristic of Linehan and Mathews, and later seen in their under-appreciated sketch show Big Train – including the brilliantly bizarre sketch in which Beatles producer George Martin is kidnapped by Hezbollah.
The clerical comedy bequeathed numerous catchphrases. “I hear you’re a racist now, Father”, which features in an episode where Fr Ted is wrongly accused of anti-Chinese prejudice, is still a popular meme. Likewise, “These are small, but the ones out there are far away“, Ted’s explanation of perspective to his idiotic housemate, is still used to mock the gormless.
The show was also charming, and its treatment of religion was far from vicious. Rather than being a vitriolic attack on Church authority, Father Ted poked gentle fun at the absurdity of the old order, a kind of mockery which is perhaps a more dangerous threat to a belief system that relies on awe and fear. It was innocent, and many years later Linehan said he would find writing Father Ted much harder in light of the abuse scandal.
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Ancient Historian Reviews Monty Python’s Life of Brian | Deep Dives
History Hit
Published 1 May 2025In this new video, classicist Honor Cargill-Martin delves into the iconic Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Is it historically accurate or is it a very naughty film?
00:00 Intro
00:53 Judea A.D. 33
01:55 Colosseum?
06:56 People’s Front of Judea
10:28 “What have the Romans done for us?”
16:05 Roman Grafitti
19:44 Hypocaust
23:30 Biggus Dickus
28:42 “Crucifixion?”
30:37 “… release a wrong doer from our prison”
32:09 “I’m Brian!”
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QotD: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
In 1911, the two English women recounted their experience in a book, An Adventure, using the pseudonyms Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. The book immediately caused a sensation. Among those who were gripped by their time-travelling tale was a young J.R.R. Tolkien. So was Tolkien’s friend, fantasy writer C.S. Lewis, whose later book about time travel, The Dark Tower, referred to “the ladies of the Trianon”. At the turn of the century in England, there was great interest in the paranormal. Leading proponents included the eccentric occultist Aleister Crowley, author of The Book of Lies. It was an era when fascination with spiritualism created a culture of credulity in the face of fantastic fictions and clever hoaxes.
One of the most famous hoaxes of that era was the so-called Cottingley Fairies. Two girls in Yorkshire, cousins Elise Wright and Frances Griffith, took a series of five photos in 1917 showing themselves near a stream in the presence of tiny fairy-like creatures. Elsie’s father Arthur Wright, an amateur photographer, never doubted that the photos were fabricated. But the girl’s mother Polly was more credulous. The pictures became public when Polly Wright attended a lecture on “fairy life” at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford. They were quickly circulated among the group’s adherents, who found the photographed fairies consistent with their theosophical beliefs. The extraordinary images soon came to the attention of the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist who was writing an article on fairies for the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was convinced the fairies were real. His article was published under the headline Fairies Photographed, describing the Cottingley Fairies as an “epoch-making event”.
“The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life,” wrote Conan Doyle. “Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been put before it.” In 1922, Conan Doyle followed up with a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in which he announced that proof of fairy existence was a blow to cold Victorian science, which “would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon”. He added: “There is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing things that are invisible to others.”
Conan Doyle was wrong of course. Like many other spiritualists at the time, he’d been taken in. The photos were fake. The two girls Elsie and Frances both lived into their 80s. Toward the end of their lives in the 1980s, they admitted that they’d fabricated the fairy photos using paper cutouts.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
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September 7, 2025
The BEF and the German Sichelschnitt of May, 1940
Dr. Robert Lyman rebuts the common-since-the-1950s adulation of the Wehrmacht‘s attacks of May-June, 1940 through the Low Countries that drove the British Expeditionary Force off the continent and destroyed the flower of the French army prior to the surrender of France in June:
Detail from the West Point Military Atlas map of the “Campaign in the West, Disposition and Opposing Forces, 1940”
Full map.
The world has largely remembered Sichelschnitt as a brilliant German operation of war, but it was one that was fundamentally enabled by Allied ineptitude. Indeed, Blitzkrieg wasn’t particularly new, innovative or even a warfighting doctrine. It is best described, in the context of France 1940, as an event. It was simply the way that the Wehrmacht exerted its tactical and operational superiority over its more pedestrian enemies in 1940. In fact, it was the 1940 extension of what the German Army had first demonstrated in Flanders in March 1918, this time with tanks and Stukas. It was the Panzerwaffe (“tank force”) – combined with a tactical air force – which in 1940 would create the breakthrough that Ludendorff had been unable to achieve in 1918. Where it was applied, by Army Group A, it concentrated fast-moving armoured vanguards co-ordinated with tactical air power, such as 400 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, to so overwhelm the enemy in both time and space that they were unable to respond quickly enough to the changing and challenging battlefield. In 1940 the panzer came into its own, the sound of clattering tracks on French cobblestones a new feature in the sound of battle and a key element in how France remembers its defeat in 1940.
It wasn’t the type of tank in the German inventory which mattered, but the way in which these tanks were employed. Only about 10 per cent of the army comprised tanks, the remainder relying on horse and wagons and the raw, painful feet of the marching infantry. Of the 2,539 tanks the Wehrmacht deployed in 1940, only 916, or 36 per cent were battleworthy, the remainder being clattering tin cans with machine guns (the obsolete Panzer Mark Is and Mark IIs). The only modern tanks were 683 Panzer Mark IIIs and Czech T38 tanks armed with a 37mm gun, and 278 of the larger Mark IVs with a short 75mm gun. But it was enough. The German operational strategy was to use this mass of armour not to fight a large confrontational tank battle, but to achieve breakthrough and breakout, bursting through the enemy’s linear defences. It was surprise and shock action that so discomforted the Allies, who had lazily and, given what we know of British failure to understand 1918, ignorantly assumed that the war would progress against a 1914 rather than a 1918 pattern. The armoured vanguard would surge through the outer skin of the enemy defences, concentrating heavy effort in one place, before driving hard into the heart of enemy territory. With an enemy intent on fighting a linear battle, the rear areas, behind this outer crust, would be weakly defended and full of rear-echelon, administrative and supply troops managing the lines of communication up to the front, not expecting to have to fight. It was by driving hard and fast behind the enemy front line, breaking the cycle of Allied battlefield decision-making, that Blitzkrieg was to achieve its psychological effect.
In contrast the Allies remained concerned about retaining the integrity of their defensive lines. The diaries of Major General Henry Pownall, for instance, are replete with concerns as the days spun past about the widening frontages on one defensive line or another. British concern was misplaced. It was to spread the ever-decreasing butter of the British infantry across ever-widening stretches of French and Belgian bread, without realising that the Germans were concerned not with rolling up a front line, but with driving hard to the rear. By so doing they would take risks with their flanks, but the discombobulatory effect on the enemy was considered to far outweigh any worry about the risk of counter- attack from an increasingly battered and disorganised enemy. Of course this operational concept was risky, but the risks taken were carefully calculated given what the German General Staff knew about British and French tactical doctrine, or the lack of it.
These German tactics were psychologically disconcerting for those not trained to expect them. As was demonstrated on the Meuse, artillery would batter a position in co-ordination with armoured columns bypassing fixed defences and attacking those it needed to clear from the flanks and the rear. The infantry accompanying the advancing armour – Panzergrenadiers (mechanised infantry) – arrived in tandem with the Stukas, which could drop their bombs from a screaming dive. Each Stuka seemed to those at the receiving end to be diving directly at them, personally. For untrained troops it was a terrifying experience. The panzers would sweep on while the truck-borne infantry would turn up to deal with survivors of this storm of fire and movement. By this time, of course, the disorientated French and British would now consider themselves cut off, behind their front line, with no prospect of being relieved. Surrender or a disorganised escape to the rear would seem to be a more sensible option than the forlorn hope of continued resistance when the surrounding fields were dotted with the grey-green uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets of their enemy. The psychological effect of Blitzkrieg was considerable. This wasn’t how their fathers had told them war was fought. How did the Germans manage to discomfort them on the battlefield so comprehensively? Were they inadequate soldiers, unable to meet the standards of campaigning set by the previous generation? Or was it that their tactics were simply not able to cope with the shock of a comprehensive assault by German infantry, armour and air power all descending on them at once? This was the battlefield that the British had entirely dominated, by virtue of their tactical innovations, in 1918. It was now Germany’s turn, a direct result of the failure of the British Army to develop its doctrine and approaches to warfighting at the end of the Great War. Brave men in 1940 did their duty, but against a battle-winning concept of their enemy, they were out-thought rather than out-fought. And critically, when an army thinks it is beaten, it is indeed beaten.
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How Did Göring Get the Cyanide? OOTF Community Questions
World War Two
Published 6 Sept 2025In this episode of Out of the Foxholes, we dive into your community questions about World War II. How did Hermann Göring manage to get the cyanide capsule that ended his life at Nuremberg? What role did Slovakia really play in 1939? Why didn’t the Allies invade the Balkans instead of France, and why didn’t Japan use its submarines like Germany did?
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Long before the “Bad Orange Man”, there was “T.R.”
In the Coolidge Review, Amity Shlaes points out some strong similarities between Donald Trump’s career and that of the Bull Moose himself, Theodore Roosevelt:
Though a century apart—TR served from 1901 to 1909 — these two chief executives have favored the same modus operandi: using unpredictability to amass power. And the record of Theodore Rex, as Edmund Morris titled his TR biography, bodes ill for both the economy and the Republican Party.
The Trump-TR Parallels
But to the similarities. They start, for both men, pre–White House. As Trump did, TR staged his pre-presidential efforts as much with an eye to public recognition as to sustained reform or strengthening institutions.
Whenever TR stumbled, he pivoted to a new venture and publicized it like mad, though the medium in those days was the printed word, not season after season on The Apprentice. Before the cognoscenti had even absorbed the meaning of the young Roosevelt’s humiliating fourth-place score in a key 1886 New York City mayoral contest, for example, TR was off to the Badlands, memorializing his ranching experiences in dispatches and books such as Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
As Trump does, TR routinely alienated GOP grandees, circumventing them to get ahead. As Trump has, TR skillfully cultivated the media — so skillfully that members of Congress were left trying catch up with whatever shifts in public opinion resulted from the politician’s press alliances. TR’s Rupert Murdoch was the widely syndicated William Allen White of Kansas’s influential Emporia Gazette. TR’s equivalent of Fox News was the New York Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, drummed a steady beat of support when Roosevelt called for war against Spain.
Today, Murdoch must be scratching his head over what his showcasing Trump has wrought, especially now that Trump decided to sue both Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal. White, too, found that he had second thoughts about his decision to back TR: “Roosevelt bit me and I went mad,” White reportedly told a colleague.
[…]
BULLY
The occupant of what he labeled the Bully Pulpit — “bully” as in “excellent” — proved a literal bully as well.
As president, TR perpetually unnerved fellow Republicans, pivoting back to domestic politics. As Trump has, TR cast his campaigns in moral terms rather than economic ones. Where Trump launched his tariff war, TR made war against trusts, large combinations of companies. Relying more on whim than statute, Roosevelt segregated trusts into “good trusts” and “bad trusts”.
TR targeted an invincible-looking industry that, in those days, mattered as much as the interstate highways, or the internet, do today: railroads. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway took over a struggling competitor, Northern Pacific. Roosevelt asked Hanna what he made of the combined entity, Great Northern Securities. Hanna replied that it was “the very best thing possible for the future of the whole Northwest territory”. Roosevelt nonetheless sicced the Justice Department on the Great Northern.
J. Pierpont Morgan, a participant in the beleaguered deal, called on the president to inquire, as desperate steel importers these days do from time to time, whether their attorneys might work out the matter behind the scenes.
No.
Next, the disconcerted Morgan asked whether other investments of the House of Morgan might be assailed. Roosevelt’s reply captures the chill of arbitrary leadership. The administration would not go after the other Morgan companies, he said — unless “they have done something we regard as wrong”.
As Edmund Morris reports in Theodore Rex, to observers such as French ambassador Jules Jusserand, Roosevelt seemed “more powerful than a king”. That power suited many voters fine, which is why Roosevelt won so headily when he ran for office on his own in 1904.
Of course TR, like Trump, occasionally supported laws that aligned with his impulses. One example is the Elkins Act of 1903, which made it illegal for railroads to charge different freight rates for different customers. This shallow effort to achieve market “fairness” deprived the railroads of a standard business tool: the ability to provides discounts to those who buy the product in larger quantities. Shares in railroads promptly dropped more than 20 percent, a shift that undermined TR’s premise of railroad invincibility.
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Up on the Mountain: a History of the Ski Cap
HatHistorian
Published 1 May 2025The ski cap, sometimes also called by its german name of Bergmütze, is a visored cap with ear flaps secured to the front by buttons or a buckle. Allegedly descended from eastern bashlyks worn by Russian soldiers, it was popular in the alpine regions of Germanic countries. First adopted by the AUstro-Hungarian Empire as a field cap, it was infamously worn by the Wehrmacht during WWII. It continues to be used as a field or dress cap by German, Austrian, and Hungarian armed forces, and civilian versions can be found around Central and Eastern Europe.
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QotD: Generation X
The concept of “selling out” — and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything — is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties. The complexity, nuance, and application of the term sellout was both ubiquitous and impossible to grasp. Nothing was more inadvertently detrimental to the Gen X psyche.
Or, as I like to put it, we were so obsessed with “authenticity” that we took as our guru an exquisitely sensitive longhaired goof who fronted a band named after spooge. […] But Klosterman does have genuine insights sometimes:
The detail always noted in remembrances of the Bronco chase is the throngs of bystanders cheering for Simpson as the car rolled down the freeway, congregating on overpasses and holding makeshift cardboard signs proclaiming, “The Juice Is Loose”. It seemed perverse then and still seems perverse now. Yet this can also be understood as the primordial impulse of what would eventually drive the mechanism of social media: the desire of uninformed people to be involved with the news, broadcasting their support for a homicidal maniac not because they liked him, but because it was exhilarating to participate in an experience all of society was experiencing at once.
Sailer thinks that’s clever and perceptive, and I agree. Too bad you have to read some masturbatory bullshit about Zima to get to it.
Sadly, he doesn’t take that out a step (or, at least, he doesn’t get quoted doing so in Sailer’s review). Here’s Klosterman’s verdict on why Gen X, for all its faults, wasn’t so bad:
The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy.
True enough, but look: Of all the things that made the Boomers so fucking insufferable, right near the top was their utter inability to let go of their youth. Instead of seeing Forrest Gump as a metaphor so unsubtle, an anvil to the head seems sneakier, they thought it was a lighthearted celebration of a simpler, more innocent time. We knew better. Since they couldn’t let go of their youth, we made “being old and jaded long before our time” into our signature thing.
But where, my fellow alterna-dudes, is that attitude now, when it matters? We’re in the same position in 2022 as our parents were in 1992: Staring down the barrel of middle age, teeing off on life’s back nine, pick your metaphor. It’s time to put away childish things. Grow the fuck up already, the way we wish our parents would’ve done for us back in 1992. Instead, we’re letting our lunatic children smear their pathologies all over what’s left of America, because … ?
I know why Klosterman does it: That’s what they pay him for. What’s our excuse?
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
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September 6, 2025
New Evidence on the loss of HMS Hood!
Drachinifel
Published 5 Sept 2025Today we take a look at a heretofore unpublished account from a sailor who saw the destruction of HMS Hood, and take a look at what this might tell us about the incident.
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The federal government’s foreign worker program is set up for abuse
Dan Knight discusses Canada’s deliberately two-track job system, which severely disadvantages unemployed Canadians and favours temporary foreign workers instead:
Canada now has a two-track employment system. On one track, you’ve got over 1.6 million Canadians unemployed the official rate just jumped to 7.1%, the worst since 2016 outside the COVID crash. Youth joblessness? 14.5%. Alberta, supposedly an economic engine, bleeding at 8.4% unemployment. And those folks are drawing EI, funded by your tax dollars.
On the other track? The Temporary Foreign Worker pipeline. In 2024 alone, Ottawa issued over 162,000 TFW permits by October. And they’ve already budgeted another 82,000 entries in 2025. Think about that: while Canadians are struggling to find work, Ottawa is busy handing out golden tickets to foreign workers.
And let’s be honest about how this program actually works. It’s sold as a way to “fill labor shortages”. In practice, it often looks like a backdoor family reunification scheme. Business owner Abdul suddenly needs a “specialized” worker conveniently, his cousin in India just happens to fit the bill. So instead of waiting in line under the normal visa system, he comes in the side door through the TFW program. Legal? Sure. Exploitative? Absolutely. It undercuts the immigration rules that everyone else has to follow, and it keeps wages low for Canadians who should be first in line.
Here’s the part that makes you wonder if Ottawa is even trying: we’ve got two federal departments, Employment and Social Development Canada (who runs EI) and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (who runs TFW permits). Wouldn’t a functioning government have these two agencies talk to each other? One department says, “Hey, we’ve got 1.6 million people sitting on EI“. The other says, “We’ve got 162,000 employers asking for TFWs“. The obvious solution? Connect the dots. Fill Canadian jobs with Canadian workers first.
But that would require coordination and “coordination” is a foreign concept in Ottawa. These are the same geniuses who can’t keep escalators running in Parliament Hill without a three-year feasibility study. You expect them to line up two departments, EI and Immigration … and have a five-minute conversation? Forget it. Imagine the radical idea: one arm of government saying, “Hey, we’ve got 1.6 million Canadians unemployed and drawing EI …” and the other saying, “Oh great, we’ve got 162,000 employers begging for workers. Maybe, just maybe, we could match those two groups up“. That’s not rocket science. That’s not even science. That’s called basic competence. And Ottawa can’t even spell it.
Using the fakejobs.ca website, I found three LMIA postings in my small town on the edge of the GTA … all paying well over median for pretty ordinary retail management jobs.
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Unique British Crankfire .58 Morse Manual Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Apr 2025This is a really interesting piece with a mostly unknown origin. It was manufactured in the UK (the barrel was deemed Enfield-made by former Royal Armouries curator Herb Woodend) and is chambered for the .58 Morse centerfire cartridge. The date of production is unknown. It uses a gravity-feed magazine and fires via hand crank. Turning the crank cycles the bolt forward and back, not completely unlike a Maxim gun but without the automatic operation. It came out of a small Canadian museum in the 1950s, but its provenance before that is unknown.
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QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3
The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”
There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.
But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5
Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:
“Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”
2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.
3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”
4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.
5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.
6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:
“I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”
7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.
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September 5, 2025
End the “temporary” foreign worker scam!
In the National Post, Chris Selley explains why Pierre Poilievre and the federal Conservatives should be hammering their demand to eliminate the much-abused temporary foreign worker program:
Youth unemployment stands at 14.6 per cent, according to Statistics Canada’s latest release. That’s the highest non-pandemic July figure since 2009 (15.9 per cent), at the nadir of the Great Recession. It makes nothing but good sense that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would position himself, as he did on Wednesday, foursquare athwart bringing in any more temporary foreign workers to fill positions that certain employers swear blind they cannot fill with younger Canadians at any conceivable price.
“Why is (the government) shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited?” Poilievre asked, rhetorically, on Wednesday. By rights it ought to be a solid populist pitch to Canadians, and no-brainer policy besides.
Companies who use TFWs will insist it’s not about finding “cheaper” help, but about finding any help. Tim Hortons defended itself Wednesday noting that less than five per cent of its national workforce were TFWs — which seems like a very high number, right? It’s not just me? — and those hires tended to be clustered “in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available”.
But an odd sort of small town or community, surely, that can’t live without a Timmy’s, but that doesn’t have enough people to work at it. And it’s an odd sort of remedial program, surely, to bring in employees not from other parts of Canada but rather from halfway around the world. Especially since groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) swear blind they’re not after an hourly wage discount, just anyone who’s willing and able to fill the position. It was certainly a very odd kind of fishing resort, it struck me, that claimed this summer it couldn’t find any Canadian employees and needed the TFW program instead.
Didn’t kids used to flock en masse cross-country to take outdoorsy jobs every summer? Have I not read 150 tiresome baby-boomer op-eds on the topic?
The special pleading sometimes beggars belief. And unemployed young Canadians aren’t free to you and me, after all — whoever’s fault it is, if anyone’s, they’re an anchor on the economy. A Deloitte study commissioned by the King’s Trust Canada, published in November, estimated “that under the right conditions, overall real GDP could increase by $18.5 billion by 2034 — more than Canada’s entire arts, entertainment and recreation sector — and (Canada could) add an additional 228,000 jobs in the process” if “youth engagement in the workforce” significantly increased.
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