Quotulatiousness

December 29, 2023

The Christianization of England

Filed under: Britain, History, Italy, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West‘s Christmas Day post recounted the beginnings of organized Christianity in England, thanks to the efforts of Roman missionaries sent by Pope Gregory I:

“Saint Augustine and the Saxons”
Illustration by Joseph Martin Kronheim from Pictures of English History, 1868 via Wikimedia Commons.

The story begins in sixth century Rome, once a city of a million people but now shrunk to a desolate town of a few thousand, no longer the capital of a great empire of even enjoying basic plumbing — a few decades earlier its aqueducts had been destroyed in the recent wars between the Goths and Byzantines, a final blow to the great city of antiquity. Under Pope Gregory I, the Church had effectively taken over what was left of the town, establishing it as the western headquarters of Christianity.

Rome was just one of five major Christian centres. Constantinople, the capital of the surviving eastern Roman Empire, was by this point far larger, and also claimed leadership of the Christian world — eventually the two would split in the Great Schism, but this was many centuries away. The other three great Christian centres — Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch — would soon fall to Islam, a turn of events that would strengthen Rome’s spiritual position. And it was this Roman version of Christianity which came to shape the Anglo-Saxon world.

Gregory was a great reformer who is viewed by some historians as a sort of bridge between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the founder of a new and reborn Rome, now a spiritual rather than a military empire. He is also the subject of the one great stories of early English history.

One day during the 570s, several years before he became pontiff, Gregory was walking around the marketplace when he spotted a pair of blond-haired pagan slave boys for sale. Thinking it tragic that such innocent-looking children should be ignorant of the Lord, he asked a trader where they came from, and was told they were “Anglii”, Angles. Gregory, who was fond of a pun, replied “Non Angli, sed Angeli” (not Angles, but angels), a bit of wordplay that still works fourteen centuries later. Not content with this, he asked what region they came from and was told “Deira” (today’s Yorkshire). “No,” he said, warming to the theme and presumably laughing to himself, “de ira” — they are blessed.

Impressed with his own punning, Gregory decided that the Angles and Saxons should be shown the true way. A further embellishment has the Pope punning on the name of the king of Deira, Elle, by saying he’d sing “hallelujah” if they were converted, but it seems dubious; in fact, the Anglo-Saxons were very fond of wordplay, which features a great deal in their surviving literature and without spoiling the story, we probably need to be slightly sceptical about whether Gregory actually said any of this.

The Pope ordered an abbot called Augustine to go to Kent to convert the heathens. We can only imagine how Augustine, having enjoyed a relatively nice life at a Benedictine monastery in Rome, must have felt about his new posting to some cold, faraway island, and he initially gave up halfway through his trip, leaving his entourage in southern Gaul while he went back to Rome to beg Gregory to call the thing off.

Yet he continued, and the island must have seemed like an unimaginably grim posting for the priest. Still, in the misery-ridden squalor that was sixth-century Britain, Kent was perhaps as good as it gets, in large part due to its links to the continent.

Gaul had been overrun by the Franks in the fifth century, but had essentially maintained Roman institutions and culture; the Frankish king Clovis had converted to Catholicism a century before, following relentless pressure from his wife, and then as now people in Britain tended to ape the fashions of those across the water.

The barbarians of Britain were grouped into tribes led by chieftains, the word for their warlords, cyning, eventually evolving into its modern usage of “king”. There were initially at least twelve small kingdoms, and various smaller tribal groupings, although by Augustine’s time a series of hostile takeovers had reduced this to eight — Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Wessex (the West Country and Thames Valley), East Anglia, Mercia (the Midlands), Bernicia (the far North), and Deira (Yorkshire).

In 597, when the Italian delegation finally finished their long trip, Kent was ruled by King Ethelbert, supposedly a great-grandson of the semi-mythical Hengest. The king of Kent was married to a strong-willed Frankish princess called Bertha, and luckily for Augustine, Bertha was a Christian. She had only agreed to marry Ethelbert on condition that she was allowed to practise her religion, and to keep her own personal bishop.

Bertha persuaded her husband to talk to the missionary, but the king was perhaps paranoid that the Italian would try to bamboozle him with witchcraft, only agreeing to meet him under an oak tree, which to the early English had magical properties that could overpower the foreigner’s sorcery. (Oak trees had a strong association with religion and mysticism throughout Europe, being seen as the king of the trees and associated with Woden, Zeus, Jupiter, and all the other alpha male gods.)

Eventually, and persuaded by his wife, Ethelbert allowed Augustine to baptise 10,000 Kentish men on Christmas Day, 597, according to the chronicles. This is probably a wild exaggeration; 10,000 is often used as a figure in medieval history, and usually just means “quite a lot of people”.

The Soviet follow-on operation after Bagration

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Big Serge discusses the state of the Germans on the Eastern Front at the end of the massive Soviet attacks that collapsed Army Group Centre in 1944:

But now, as Bagration began to run out of momentum, the Soviets really did put Model’s army group in the crosshairs with an enormous follow up offensive — the second phase of their summer blockbuster. Model’s army group consisted of two Panzer Armies (the 4th and 1st), and an allied Hungarian force guarding the southern flank. On paper, a pair of Panzer Armies was a formidable force, but like all German units at this stage in the war they were understrength, and by this point they were already bleeding strength as panzer divisions were scrambled north to try and slow down Operation Bagration.

Arrayed against Model’s force were two Soviet Fronts (the equivalent of an Army Group) under a pair of the Red Army’s best operators. The lead off assault came on July 13, with Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front forcing positions in the interstitial zone between Model’s two Panzer Armies. Konev’s intention was to split the two armies apart, force a penetration between them, and then curl into the rear to encircle one, or if possible both of them. Therefore, Konev’s initial assault was highly concentrated, with as much as 70 percent of his artillery and 90 percent of his armor assembled in a few narrow sectors selected for breaching.

With this level of force concentration by the attackers, there was really little that the Germans could do. Nevertheless, a somewhat lethargic and stiff German response helped make the disaster even worse. 4th Panzer Army headquarters initially believed Konev’s opening assault to be only a local attack – later defensively arguing that “there were as yet no signs of the attack being extended to other sections of the front” — and so attempted to respond with local counterattacks by its own reserves. As a result, by the second day of the Soviet offensive the Panzer Army had already committed all of its organic reserves while failing to withdraw from defensive positions that were already compromised. By the time they realized that Konev was launching a serious offensive operation, it was too late. Konev had already bashed into critical seams in the German front, turning his forces into a giant splitting wedge, in place to pry the whole front open.

[…]

What the Soviets had achieved with their enormous assaults on Army Group North Ukraine was remarkable. By precisely targeting the seams in the German formations, the initial attacks had pried open the German position like a clam, forcing the two panzer armies to retreat in opposite directions — the 1st pulling back to the south towards Hungary, and the 4th withdrawing westward towards Krakow. These diverging withdrawals opened enormous voids in the German line — the official German history of the war simply refers to this sequence of events as “the loss of a continuous front”. In a war where the enemy wielded vast mechanized forces, such gaps were fatal.

Rokossovsky and Konev had essentially overrun an entire German army group — and the best equipped group in the east, at that — in the space of about ten days, wedging the German line open and creating vast voids to drive into. Most importantly, Rokossovsky now faced one of the more tantalizing opportunities of the entire war. A great space now beckoned him to drive north towards Warsaw, and in his path was only the tired remnant of German second army — a force with no armor whatsoever, caught completely out of position.

Any wargamer could look at the map as Rokossovsky saw it and see that the opportunity to win a seminal, world-historical victory was now within reach. A sharp drive on Warsaw would put him in position to not only capture the city (a major transportation, administrative, and supply base), but also smash through the threadbare German 2nd Army and drive to the Baltic Coast. If he could achieve this, fully half of the German eastern forces would be encircled — the entirety of Army Group North (still fighting on the Baltic Coast) and everything that remained of Army Group Center. Rokossovksy now saw little standing between his powerful Front and one of the greatest encirclements — perhaps the greatest — of all time. No less than six German armies were sitting, naked and vulnerable, on the proverbial silver platter.

The Eastern Front was on the verge of total collapse. If Rokossovsky could bash through Warsaw (a seemingly simple proposition, given the enormous overmatch that he enjoyed over German 2nd Army), he would wipe out half the German eastern army and face no meaningful German forces between him and Berlin.

Rubaboo – Pemmican Stew of Canadian Mounties

Filed under: Cancon, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 12 Sept 2023
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QotD: The Hanoverian “reverse takeover of the British monarchy by the Germans”

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Why, though, did Germans feel such a special affinity with “die Königin“? The most obvious reason is that the Royal Family is, to a great extent, of German extraction. The connections go back more than a thousand years to the Anglo-Saxons, but in modern times they begin with George I and the House of Hanover. This reverse takeover of the British monarchy by the Germans transformed the institution in countless ways. They may be summarised in four words: music, the military, the constitution and Christmas.

Music was a language that united the English and the Germans. The key figure was, of course, Handel — the first and pre-eminent but by no means the last Anglo-German composer. Born in Halle, Georg Friedrich Händel had briefly been George I’s Kapellmeister in Hanover yet had already established himself in England before the Prince Elector of Hanover inherited the British throne in 1714.

In London — then in the process of overtaking Paris and Amsterdam to become the commercial capital of Europe — he discovered hitherto undreamt-of possibilities. There he founded three opera companies, for which he supplied more than 40 operas, and adapted a baroque Italian art form, the oratorio, to suit English Protestant tastes.

His coronation music, such as the anthem, “Zadok the Priest”, imbued the Hanoverian dynasty with a new and splendid kind of sacral majesty. But he also added to its lustre by providing the musical accompaniment for new kinds of public entertainment, such as his Music for the Royal Fireworks: 12,000 people came to the first performance.

Along with music, the Germans brought a focus on military life. Whereas for the British Isles, the Civil War and the subsequent conflicts in Scotland and Ireland had been something of an aberration, war was second nature to German princes. Among them, George II was not unusual in leading his men into battle, although he was the last British monarch to do so.

Still, the legacy of such Teutonic martial prowess was visible in the late Queen’s obsequies: uniforms and decorations, pomp and circumstance, accompanied by funeral marches composed by a German, Ludwig van Beethoven. Ironically, the German state now avoids any public spectacle that could be construed as militaristic, yet most Germans harbour boundless admiration for the way that the British monarchy enlists the ceremonial genius of the armed services.

Even more important was the German contribution to the uniquely British creation of constitutional monarchy.

Each successive dynasty has left its mark on the monarchy’s evolution: from the Anglo-Saxons and Normans (the common law) to the Plantagenets (Magna Carta and Parliament) and Tudors (the Reformation). Only the Stuarts failed this test, at least until 1688. Even after the Glorious Revolution, the Bill of Rights and other laws that conferred statutory control over the royal prerogative, the constitutional settlement still hung in the balance when Queen Anne, the last Stuart ruler, died in 1714.

Coming from a region dominated by the theory and practice of absolute monarchy, the Hanoverians had no choice but to adapt immediately and seamlessly to the realities of politics in Britain, where their role was strictly limited. Robert Walpole and the long Whig ascendancy, during which the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty embedded itself irrevocably, could not have taken place without the acquiescence and active support of the new dynasty.

George III has been accused of attempting to reverse this process. The charge is unjust. Rather, as Andrew Roberts demonstrates in his new biography, he was “a monarch who understood his extensive rights and duties under the constitution”. He still had the right to refuse royal assent to parliamentary bills, but in half a century he never once exercised his veto (the last monarch to do so was the Stuart, Queen Anne in 1708).

At a time when enlightened despotism was de rigueur on the Continent, the Hanoverians were content to participate in an unprecedented constitutional experiment in their newly acquired United Kingdom. It was neither the first Brexit, nor the last, but it happened courtesy of a Royal Family that was still very German.

Daniel Johnson, “Why Germany mourned our Queen”, The Critic, 2022-10-30.

December 28, 2023

War-winning expertise of 1918, completely forgotten by 1939

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dr. Robert Lyman writes about the shocking contrasts between the British Army (including the Canadian and Australian Corps) during the Hundred Days campaign of 1918 and the British Expeditionary Force that was driven from the continent at Dunkirk:

There was a fleeting moment during the One Hundred Days battles that ended the First World War in France in which successful all-arms manoeuvre by the British and Commonwealth armies, able to overturn the deadlock of previous years of trench stalemate, was glimpsed. But the moment, for the British Army at least, was not understood for what it was. With hindsight we can see that it was the birth of modern warfare, in which armour, infantry, artillery and air power are welded together able successfully to fight and win a campaign against a similarly-equipped enemy. Unfortunately in the intervening two decades the British Army simply forgot how to fight a peer adversary in intensive combat. It did not recognise 1918 for what it was; a defining moment in the development of warfare that needed capturing and translating into a doctrine on which the future of the British Army could be built. The tragedy of the inter-war years therefore was that much of what had been learned at such high cost in blood and treasure between 1914 and 1918 was simply forgotten. It provides a warning for our modern Army that once it goes, the ability to fight intensively at campaign level is incredibly hard to recover. The book that General Lord Dannatt and I have written traces the catastrophic loss of fighting knowledge after the end of the war, and explains the reasons for it. Knowledge so expensively learned vanished very quickly as the Army quickly adjusted back to its pre-war raison d’etre: imperial policing. Unsurprisingly, it was what many military men wanted: a return to the certainties of 1914. It was certainly what the government wanted: no more wartime extravagance of taxpayer’s scarce resources. The Great War was seen by nearly everyone to be a never-to-be-repeated aberration.

The British and Commonwealth armies were dramatically successful in 1918 and defeated the German Armies on the battlefield. Far from the “stab in the back” myth assiduously by the Nazis and others, the Allies fatally stabbed the German Army in the chest in 1918. The memoirs of those who experienced action are helpful in demonstrating just how far the British and Commonwealth armies had moved since the black days of 1 July 1916. The 27-year old Second Lieutenant Duff Cooper, of the 3rd Battalion The Grenadier Guards, waited with the men of 10 platoon at Saulty on the Somme for the opening phase of the advance to the much-vaunted Hindenburg Line. His diaries show that his experience was as far distant from those of the Somme in 1916 as night is from day. There is no sense in Cooper’s diaries that either he or his men felt anything but equal to the task. They were expecting a hard fight, but not a slaughter. Why? Because they had confidence in the training, their tactics of forward infiltration, their platoon weapons and a palpable sense that the army was operating as one. They were confident that their enemy could be beaten.

[…]

It would take the next war for dynamic warfare to be fully developed. It would be mastered in the first place by the losers in 1918 – the German Army. The moment the war ended the ideas and approaches that had been developed at great expense were discarded as irrelevant to the peace. They weren’t written down to be used as the basis for training the post-war army. Flanders was seen as a horrific aberration in the history of warfare, which no-right thinking individual would ever attempt to repeat. Combined with a sudden raft of new operational commitments – in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Ireland – the British Army quickly reverted to its pre-1914 role as imperial policemen. No attempt was made to capture the lessons of the First World War until 1932 and where warfighting was considered it tended to be about the role of the tank on the future battlefield. This debate took place in the public arena by advocates writing newspaper articles to advance their arguments. These ideas were half-heartedly taken up by the Army in the later half of the 1920s but quietly dropped in the early 1930s. The debates about the tank and the nature of future war were bizarrely not regarded as existential to the Army and they were left to die away on the periphery of military life.

The 1920s and 1903s were a low point in national considerations about the purpose of the British Army. The British Army quickly forgot what it had so painfully learnt and it was this, more than anything else, that led to a failure to appreciate what the Wehrmacht was doing in France in 1940 and North Africa in 1941-42.

“Lich and Barber … now hold the record for the longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

“Autonomous Truck(er)s” describes the “Lawfare Archipelago” as Justin Trudeau’s government persecutes Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their part in organizing the Freedom Convoy movement in 2022:

It has been almost two years since Canada’s Freedom Convoy took the country, and the world, by storm. In what has been hailed around the globe as the most popular protest anywhere against the international Covid Regime, represented in Canada by the venal and vindictive Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Truckers of the Freedom Convoy still occupy a place as heroes to millions.

Everyone remembers how the Freedom Convoy was crushed by Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Measures Act, and how bank accounts were frozen, credit cards, insurance, the entire financial lives of hundreds of people that were completely shut down. The police crackdown on peaceful protesters, smashing of windows and other vandalism committed against the protesters vehicles, trampling people with horses, the beatings, the arrests; an overwhelmingly disproportionate and wholly unnecessary asymmetric response.

In December of 2023, however, a number of those truckers and their supporters are still facing adversity and punishment, including potential jail time, with ongoing court cases, and in the situation with The Coutts 4, a trial which hasn’t even started yet.

These cases are illustrative of the corruption of the Canadian political system, the media, the courts and ‘justice system’, and the subversion of some of the founding pillars of western civilization.

Canada is no longer a free country by any stretch of the imagination.

Part 1 : Tamara Lich and Chris Barber

On Thursday, November 30, just a few weeks ago, I traveled to Ottawa to take part in an interview for a documentary film being made by former CBC journalist and now freelance podcaster Trish Wood, whose working title is The Trials of Tamara Lich. Trish had stumbled upon my writings and podcasts here at Substack, and invited me on her show to discuss the situation with the Coutts men being held as political prisoners. Impressed with my work on that, as well as my history in trucking and perspectives on the deeper meaning behind the Freedom Convoy, she wanted me to appear in this documentary; I was honored to be asked and happy to oblige.

As of this writing, the trial is on Christmas break, and may, possibly resume in March 2024. It should be noted that for the primary charges that Lich and Barber are facing, in their roles as organizers of the Ottawa portion of The Convoy, a 100% peaceful protest whose only acts of violence or property damage came at the hands of the police, they now hold the record for the longest ‘mischief’ trial in Canadian history.

Given the actions of our government, perhaps it is they who should be the accused.

Chris “Big Red” Barber, a trucker from Saskatchewan who specializes in hauling oversize agricultural equipment, became one of the faces of the Freedom Convoy through his frequent TikTok videos, sharing news about the protest to his many followers online.

It is these TikTok videos that appear to be the bulk of the evidence the Crown has against Mr Barber, though sharing information on a publicly available platform seems the kind of “crime” one would expect to be prosecuted in the country where TikTok is headquartered, The People’s “Republic” of China. The basic dictatorship, we should recall, that is “admired” by Prime Minister Trudeau.

Quelle surprise, coming from Cuba’s most infamous son.

The deeply unsurprising lack of evidence on the part of the Crown is one reason why this case continues nearly two years later; Trudeau, and the Laurentian Elite by whom he was groomed for glory, cannot accept that they went way out over their skis in the gross mismanagement of Covid, and their utterly disgusting treatment of the Freedom Convoy.

An example must be made of Barber and Lich, who are both facing ten years in prison should the Crown get the convictions they desire. “Copping a Tenner”, as they used to call a trip to one of Stalin’s Gulag Camps, is quite a cost to satiate Trudeau’s latent authoritarian proclivities and his narcissistic vanity. One wonders if this is not also an effort to prove to his real constituency, the forces of global corporatism and control exemplified by WEF leader Klaus Schwab, that Trudeau will preserve the image of the brand.

The Liberals may be bad at “deliverology”, but they’re world-beaters at pouring money into black holes

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

Tristin Hopper explains the apparent paradox that the federal government is spending money faster than it can be printed, yet the things the government is responsible for are perennially underfunded:

From back when The Onion was allowed to be funny – https://youtu.be/JnX-D4kkPOQ

This may surprise the average Canadian given that so much of the government is noticeably threadbare and underfunded. Canadians are dying in hospital waiting rooms due to unprecedented shortages in health care. The navy’s so strapped for cash that it can only deploy one offshore patrol vessel at a time. The RCMP’s federal policing is so under-resourced that Parliamentarians are now calling it a threat to national security. And even $600 billion in cumulative debt hasn’t been enough for the Liberals to honour their 2015 campaign promise to ensure universal clean water on First Nations reserves.

It’s popular to blame all this on some easy-to-identify example of government profligacy, such as Ukraine aid, free hotel rooms for refugee claimants or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s noted penchant to rack up outsized travel bills. But Canada’s fiscal problems are well beyond anything like that. At the current rate of spending, the cumulative $2.4 billion in military aid that Canada has sent to Ukraine represents less than a month’s worth of new debt.

So where’s all the money going? Below, a cursory guide to how Canada is able to spend so much while seemingly obtaining so little.

Debt servicing just got way more expensive

First, an easy one: The Trudeau government borrowed an obscene amount during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with rising interest rates the treasury is getting hammered with debt-servicing costs.

As recently as 2021, interest charges on federal debt cost $20.3 billion per year. In the current fiscal year, it’s probably going to blow past $46.5 billion. Ottawa now spends about as much on debt management as it does on health care transfers to the provinces.

The phenomenon of pricier debt is not limited to Canada: Virtually every government in the world ran up record-breaking debts during COVID and are now facing the consequences. But if Canada is different, it’s that our rate of pandemic debt accumulation was at least $200 billion higher than it needed to be. And in justifying all this extra spending at the time, Trudeau argued that it was a good time to take out extra debt since “interest rates are at historic lows”.

The corporate welfare is just unbelievable

Canada has a long history of government signing over grants and bailouts to politically connected corporations. As far back as 1972, then NDP Leader David Lewis famously championed the cause of stopping Canada’s “corporate welfare bums”.

But the Trudeau government has taken corporate welfare to new heights. It was only a few years ago that Bombardier was the undisputed champion in collecting federal grants, bailouts and interest-free loans. Over 50 years, according to an analysis by the Montreal Economic Institute, Bombardier received a cumulative “$4 billion in public funds”.

In just the last calendar year, the Trudeau government has signed two subsidy agreements that would dwarf that $4-billion figure several times over. In the spring, both Stellantis and Volkswagen agreed to build EV plants in Ontario in exchange for federal subsidy packages that could cost as much as $18.8 billion (plus another $9 billion from the Ontario government).

And that new $18.8 billion liability on the books doesn’t even account for the massive ramp-up in the corporate welfare everywhere else. To name just a couple: In 2021, Air Canada got a $5.4 billion loan package. And the Trudeau-founded Strategic Innovation Fund gets about $1.5 billion per year in handouts to green energy companies.

Making a Dovetail Guide | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 22 Sept 2023

Often, we woodworkers make boxes the same size over and over again, especially if or when we sell them. I designed this dovetail guide to replicate the same-sized dovetails to the four corners of the box we make and make dozens of boxes if we have a batch production run of them.

You need to lay out only once, no matter how many dovetails you make and the dovetails will even be interchangeable. Additionally, you can vary the dovetail sizes proportionally by sliding the workpiece up and down the guide for larger or smaller dovetails too.

I hope you enjoy this little nugget!
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QotD: Christmas movies

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

Critic, schmitic. How can you pretend to be engaged in objective aesthetic appraisal when you’re talking about movies that you first watched decades ago in your childhood living room, while your late mother was trimming the tree and your long-dead dad was setting up the Nativity scene? The feeling that washes over you the moment the opening credits begin has relatively little to do with these movies’ actual merits, if any. Of course they get to you: They’re part of what shaped you; they’re artifacts of the long-vanished era in which you grew up; like Proust’s bite of madeleine, they trigger tsunamis of precious memory; like attending a midnight Mass on Christmas Eve or a Yuletide performance of the Messiah, watching them is a cherished ritual, carrying meaning through time and underscoring the irretrievable nature of the past even as they make the past feel, briefly, just a bit less irretrievable.

Bruce Bawer, “The Best Christmas Movies Ever”, New English Review, 2022-12-20.

December 27, 2023

The never-settled “Pétain question”

Filed under: Books, France, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple reviews a new book on the trial of Marshal Pétain after the liberation of France in WW2:

François Mauriac, the left-leaning, Nobel Prize–winning, Catholic novelist, said of the trial of Marshal Pétain that it would never be over: a sentiment more or less echoed by General de Gaulle. And certainly, the figure of Pétain continues to divide opinion in France, at least among those with opinions on such matters. Was he a traitor to France, or its savior, or perhaps something in between the two?

Professor Julian Jackson has written a superb book about Pétain’s trial, its circumstances, and its aftermath. I would like to say that I read it in one sitting, but it was too long for that; but I looked forward impatiently to picking it up again, all else being but a regrettable interruption.

The continued salience of what might be called the “Pétain question” is illustrated by the fact that one of the candidates in the last French presidential election, Éric Zemmour, claimed that Pétain was the savior of the French Jews. This was all the more startling because Zemmour himself is Jewish (his parents emigrated from Algeria to France not long before independence), and because, if Pétain is exonerated in the matter of the deportation of seventy-five thousand Jews during the war to Germany, there to be murdered, his reputation is all but saved: for it is in this matter that his record is most excoriated.

As Jackson reminds us, this was not always so. In the immediate post-war period, and during his trial for treason, the fate of the Jews of France was not much emphasized. According to Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, in their book Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Vichy, a past that does not pass), the Jews of France themselves were not anxious that their treatment by Vichy should be emphasized, for they had had more than enough of being treated as a population apart. They wanted their suffering to be subsumed under that of the nation as a whole, and it was only later, by the subsequent generation, that the deportation assumed its great historiographical importance. It is not that nothing about the deportation was known before, it was merely that less emphasis was placed on it. There is an analogy with the historiography of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn revealed nothing that was not, or could not have been, known before, with all its human and moral significance; the difference was that the world was now ready or willing to believe it.

But what of Zemmour’s claim, which is precisely that which Pétain’s defenders, when they are not outright anti-Semites, make on the Marshal’s behalf? It is certainly true that a far higher percentage of French Jews survived than, say, of Belgian or Dutch Jews (the figures are seventy-five, fifty, and twenty-five percent, respectively). But how much of the difference was attributable to the alleged relative decency, and cunning, of Vichy and its marshal?

Allow me a personal anecdote. Above my mother-in-law’s flat in Paris lived an old Jewish lady whose brother had been deported on the last convoy of Jews from Paris before the end of the occupation. She, however, had been saved by having been sent out of Paris to the care of nuns, who disguised her identity. Hence, she survived.

One day my mother-in-law was traveling on a bus and started to talk to an old lady next to her, who asked her where she lived. She gave the street, then the number, then the number of the flat, whereupon the lady next to her, who was Jewish, burst into tears. This was the very flat in which she had been hidden by family friends during the four years of the occupation, being careful never to appear at the window because opposite was the German Kommandantur, formerly and afterwards a police station. Four years of claustrophobic terror during adolescence: it was like something from a novel by Patrick Modiano.

The survival of these two old ladies owed nothing to Vichy or Marshal Pétain, but this does not settle the historical question. What percentage of the survivors owed their survival to the bravery of individuals, and what to policy decisions? We shall probably never know with any certainty. If one compares the survival rates of France and the Netherlands, what part did the relative geographies of the two countries play? France is much larger and less densely populated, and has many landscapes more conducive to concealment than the Netherlands.

Again, what of the pétainiste claim, repeated by Zemmour, that Vichy sacrificed Jews of non-French origin in order to save those of French origin? The former, however, were more conspicuous, with much smaller networks of potential defenders, than the latter. This might explain the large difference in the survival rates between the French-born and foreign-born Jews, an explanation which would hardly redound to the regime’s credit.

Eating like a Lighthouse Keeper from the 1800s

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 19 Sep 2023
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QotD: “Healthy eating” after the holidays

Filed under: Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Day 1 of healthy eating
So good to be eating healthily again. I feel fitter and better in myself already

Day 2 of healthy eating
I miss cheese so much I want to cry. I’ve forgotten the taste of chocolate. Vegetables taste of sadness and resentment. I’ve never known such misery

Amanda (Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2022-01-04.

December 26, 2023

Canada is the unchallenged international champion of “the gesture” and “the pose”, yet always manages to be out of the room when the bill needs to be paid

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

Sorry for being several days behind on this, but Matt Gurney‘s message — while necessary and timely — does not have a “best-before” or an expiration date … it’s going to be valid for a long time to come:

On the military front, Canada has actually made some meaningful investments since that speech was given. We have announced deals for new transport and refuelling jets — desperately needed and long overdue. We more recently announced a plan to sole-source new surveillance planes, also desperately needed and long overdue. We also, just this week, announced that we are procuring a fleet of large, long-ranged, armed surveillance drones, to patrol our remote air and sea frontiers, after a mere two decades of mulling it over.

There ends the good news, sadly. Most of these procurements are many years away from actually being in service. And even once we have them, as good as the new equipment will be, the biggest problem for the military today is a crippling personnel shortage. The military is, to be blunt, a disaster. Far worse than is generally known. I’ve been covering military and defence issues for longer than I care to recount, and I can tell you plainly, dear readers, that the level of panicked leaking and lamenting coming out of the Canadian Armed Forces is like nothing I’ve ever seen. We don’t have the troops, sailors and aircrew to meet even basic obligations. Training is falling behind. The in-service availability of equipment and vehicles is appallingly low for lack of trained maintenance personnel and money for spare parts and equipment.

This is showing up in operations. The army doesn’t have enough soldiers to meet every commitment. The air force has cut back on operations. The navy’s top admiral is openly speaking, in public, about the crisis in his service.

We at The Line often talk about the Canadian love of talking about inputs instead of outputs. It’s easier to say “Our government has committed X dollars over Y years to address Societal Problem Z” than it is to actually ever have to answer to the public about why Z is somehow still getting worse. New procurements are an input; the desired output is a functional Canadian Armed Forces, capable of meeting its domestic obligations, honouring our treaty commitments and also being prepared for any unexpected contingencies. We do not have that military today. We cannot have that military for years. It would take massive investments and sustained effort to begin fixing this problem.

That is not happening. Hell, we took Anita Anand, one of Justin Trudeau’s better ministers and replaced her with Blair, a man for whom that has never been said. I can tell you with certainty that our allies, and our senior military commanders, had no trouble reading between those lines. Trudeau thought the military mattered, briefly, but then he stopped thinking that, and here we are.

So, 14 months out from Freeland’s speech and on the military front, well … Merry Christmas, or something?

But wait! There’s more!

Freeland’s speech also talked about other ways Canada could support its allies, and democracies in general. Some of it was vague and aspirational — hard to measure or follow-up on. But she was specific about two things: providing our threatened allies and the democracies broadly with a stable, democratic and reliable source of critical strategic resources. Energy, for example. And minerals.

Fourteen months later, how are we doing on those fronts?

I’m not an expert in either area, but I know experts in both. Andrew Leach is an energy and environmental economist at the University of Alberta (I literally copied that bio right off his webpage there). He is also, simply put, one of the smartest guys on the energy file in this country. I called him this week and found him grading papers, which is probably why he was so willing to talk with me. I explained to him what I was doing with the Brookings speech, and asked him if there was anything he could point to over the last 14 months as signs that we’d gotten serious and were doing as Freeland had said we would and must.

Nope!

“By any metric, it’s worse today,” Leach said. Two months ago, he noted, the Supreme Court ruled against the Trudeau government’s energy policies. “Now, there are no clear processes to get approvals for anything,” he added, except, somewhat ironically, pipelines, whose approvals process wasn’t included in the court ruling. I asked him if this was something the Trudeau government had done to itself, or if it was a victim of happenstance, and he said that some of the legislation they were dealing with dated back to the Harper era — before their time — but that in general, the Trudeau government hadn’t handled this well. “They messed up. They assumed they had powers they didn’t have, and didn’t make the arguments for those powers. They didn’t think about the framing. They had to earn that. They didn’t.”

The awe-inducing power of volcanoes

Filed under: China, Environment, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers just how much human history has been shaped by vulcanology, including one near-extinction event for the human race:

A huge volcano has erupted in Iceland and it looks fairly awesome, both in the traditional and American teenager senses of the word.

Many will remember their holidays being ruined 13 years ago by the explosion of another Icelandic volcano with the epic Norse name Eyjafjallajökull. While this one will apparently not be so disruptive, volcano eruptions are an under-appreciated factor in human history and their indirect consequences are often huge.

Around 75,000 years ago an eruption on Toba was so catastrophic as to reduce the global human population to just 4,000, with 500 women of childbearing age, according to Niall Ferguson. Kyle Harper put the number at 10,000, following an event that brought a “millennium of winter” and a bottleneck in the human population.

In his brilliant but rather depressing The Fate of Rome, Harper looked at the role of volcanoes in hastening the end of antiquity, reflecting that “With good reason, the ancients revered the fearsome goddess Fortuna, out of a sense that the sovereign powers of this world were ultimately capricious”.

Rome’s peak coincided with a period of especially clement climatic conditions in the Mediterranean, in part because of the lack of volcanic activity. Of the 20 largest volcanic eruptions of the last 2,500 years, “none fall between the death of Julius Caesar and the year AD 169”, although the most famous, the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, did. (Even today it continues to reveal knowledge about the ancient world, including a potential treasure of information.)

However, the later years of Antiquity were marked by “a spasm” of eruptions and as Harper wrote, “The AD 530s and 540s stand out against the entire late Holocene as a moment of unparalleled volcanic violence”.

In the Chinese chronicle Nan Shi (“The History of the Southern Dynasties”) it was reported in February 535 that “there twice was the sound of thunder” heard. Most likely this was a gigantic volcanic explosion in the faraway South Pacific, an event which had an immense impact around the world.

Vast numbers died following the volcanic winter that followed, with the year 536 the coldest of the last two millennia. Average summer temperature in Europe fell by 2.5 degrees, and the decade that followed was intensely cold, with the period of frigid weather lasting until the 680s.

The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote how “during the whole year the sun gave forth its light without brightness … It seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear”. Statesman Flavius Cassiodorus wrote how: “We marvel to see now shadow on our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun’s heat wasted into feebleness”.

A second great volcanic eruption followed in 540 and (perhaps) a third in 547. This led to famine in Europe and China, the possible destruction of a city in Central America, and the migration of Mongolian tribes west. Then, just to top off what was already turning out to be a bad decade, the bubonic plague arrived, hitting Constantinople in 542, spreading west and reaching Britain by 544.

Combined with the Justinian Plague, the long winter hugely weakened the eastern Roman Empire, the combination of climatic disaster and plague leading to a spiritual and demographic crisis that paved the way for the rise of Islam. In the west the results were catastrophic, and urban centres vanished across the once heavily settled region of southern Gaul. Like in the Near East, the fall of civilisation opened the way for former barbarians to build anew, and “in the Frankish north, the seeds of a medieval order germinated. It was here that a new civilization started to grow, one not haunted by the incubus of plague”.

Arson as a Christmas Tradition: The Gävle Goat

Filed under: Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tom Scott
Published 28 Nov 2016

In Gävle, Sweden, every year they build Gävlebocken, an enormous traditional Swedish Christmas straw goat. And every year, someone tries to burn it down. Here’s to holiday traditions.
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