Quotulatiousness

October 12, 2026

A minor action for the Kriegsmarine in the Soviet Arctic

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This is a minor enough action that I had never heard of it before, but as I’ve said in the past I haven’t studied the titanic struggle of the Soviet Union and the Third Reich in detail. Mapping History charts (see what I did there?) the Admiral Scheer‘s attempt to take the Soviet Union’s most northerly airstrip on Dickson/Dikson/Диксон island during Operation Wunderland [Wiki}:

“Chief Air Lines of the U.S.S.R.” created in 1939 by Alexander S. Grigorovich, Ivan V. Sautin, Ivan P. Ivanitsky, Valentina M. Podgornova, and Lazar M. Lissitzky.

There’s a tiny error on this map. Made around the time of the New York World’s Fair in 1939, it shows the airports and air routes of the Soviet Union at a time when the USSR was keen to show visitors a country stitched together by aeroplanes. Follow the lines north until they run out and you arrive at a dot near the mouth of the Yenisei, labelled Dickson. But in 1939, it should — of course — be marked “Dikson”.

Should be “Dikson”, of course.

Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld named the harbour in 1875 after Oscar Dickson, a merchant from Gothenburg who’d paid for his foray north. Russian usage dropped the “c” almost at once, and Dikson has been the official name since 1884 — which means on the day it was printed, this map was fifty-five years behind the curve.

You’ll have spotted this is an air map: Dikson is still the northernmost airstrip on any continental mainland, and from 8 December to 5 January it gets no daylight at all, not even twilight — but that’s almost a moot point.

I’m about to describe a fight between a cruiser, an icebreaker and two guns parked on a pier. The only aeroplane in what follows is a German floatplane, and even that gets wrecked before the shooting starts — but I liked the map, and I’ve been posting notes and tweets and whatever-it-is-bluesky does about Soviet mapping today, so this is the map you’re getting. It’s that little red dot, that deserves our attention.

In August 1942, Dikson was the scene of what is usually described as the only battle fought against German forces beyond the Urals. The Germans arrived by sea, certain they could take the land base without too much trouble, and they left, having been put firmly in their place – and without putting a man ashore.

Recognition diagram for the Admiral Scheer

BREAKING THE ICE

The German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer left Narvik on 16 August 1942 for the Kara Sea. As one part of Unternehmen WUNDERLAND, her task was to find and sink the convoys using the Northern Sea Route along the Siberian coast.

Operation WONDERLAND was considered a first, key stage in establishing control over the western Arctic. As is often the way, Mother Nature didn’t attend the same briefings. Pack ice turned the Admiral Scheer back from the Vilkitsky Strait, fog hid the convoys her floatplane had found, and then the floatplane itself was lost in what might be called a “landing accident”. Her captain, Wilhelm Meendsen-Bohlken, also discovered his charts could not be trusted. Rocks stood where open water was marked, and shoals where the chart promised depth.

Maps, huh.

But then on 25 August, her lookouts sighted a single ship, the Alexander Sibiryakov, a Glasgow-built steamer of 1909 that had started life hunting seals off Newfoundland.

Soviet postage stamp of 4 kopecks from 1977, showing the Aleksandr Sibiriakov

In 1932 the Alexander Sibiryakov had made the first single-season passage of the Northern Sea Route, finishing it under improvised sails after losing her propeller. The Soviet Navy had requisitioned her in September 1941 and given her a handful of light guns – which is something of a coincidence.

Alexander Sibiryakov, the Siberian gold merchant she was named for, had been Oscar Dickson’s partner in funding Nordenskiöld. Sixty-odd years later, one patron’s ship was about to die warning the other patron’s island. She carried six 11-inch guns and a crew of 1,150 — it wasn’t enough.

Meendsen-Bohlken wanted the Alexander Sibiryakov intact. Her codebooks and ice reports would tell him where the convoys were. He ordered her – presumably in signals of one syllable — to strike her flag, and Captain Anatoli Kacharava gave his answer with a plain-speaking message from his deck guns. Not the best idea, when face to face with the Admiral Scheer, which promptly responded with the few salvoes needed to set the Alexander Sibiryakov on fire. Her crew opened the seacocks so that nothing useful could be salvaged, and most of the 104 people aboard died – but not before they had radioed the nearest military base, with a report on what was happening, and where. Within hours every Soviet ship and station in the Kara Sea knew that a German raider was loose, and the busiest transmitter of all was at Dikson.

The V2 Story: 1934-1940, A Pact with the Devil

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 11 Oct 2026

Like many Nazi ideas, what looked good on paper was, in reality, somewhat different. The Rocket craze of the late 1920s led directly to the development of one of Nazi Germany’s most expensive weapon systems, which was technologically astounding, but militarily rubbish.

Today we’re going to look at how that all began, the race to develop the A-4 rocket, the building of a massive test site to create the weapons and talk about what the A-4/V-2 was, how it was supposed to work, how the technical challenges were over come, and ask the question no one did at the time — why bother?

00:00 Big Rockets, Bad Ideas: The V2 Story
00:55 The “So What” Question
03:04 Rocket Fever — the late 1920s
06:51 The Lads in Grey Step in
08:50 von Braun’s Faustian Pact
11:21 Peenemünde: Onwards and Sometimes Upwards
13:42 Size Matters: The A4 Concept
19:26 Getting the Gang Together: The V-2 Engineers Come Together
22:36 A Quick Tea Break and some Blatant Self Promotion
23:51 The A4 and Other Rockets: A Timeline
27:28 Anatomy of the A4
29:26 Guidance and Gyroscopes: Making It Go the Right Way
35:09 The Rocket Engine: Controlled Fire and Clever Plumbing
38:36 The V-2 Turbopump: The Wolverine
46:54 Survivor’s Club

Notes

[1] Guy Walters, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, Head of Zeus, 2026 p.27 (Kindle ed)

[2] Tooze, Wages of Destruction p. 750 gives German GDP in 1937 as RM73.757bn, approximate cost of the V2 programme whilst Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p.273 gives the total cost of the A4/V2 project, excluding vehicles, warhead and guidance systems as RM900m

[3] Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995), Kindle Edition pp. 122–124

[4] Stephen Ransom & Hans-Hermann Cammann, Me163 Rocket Interceptor, Crecy Publishing, 2021, pp.30–32

[5] Micheal Nuefled, Von Braun, 2007, Smithsonian (Kindel Ed), p.50

[6] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, pp. 19–21.

[7] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 23.

[8] Neufeld, Von Braun, p.55

[9] Neufeld, Von Braun, p.61

[10] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 32.

[11] Neufeld, Von Braun, pp.64–65

[12] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 50

[13] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 51

[14] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 52.

[15] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 179

[16] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 59.

[17] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 98 & 121 – A-9 development stopped in 1942, A-10 was never more than a paper study

[18] As above, worth picking out the A-10 proposals as theoretical

[19] A4/V2 Rocket in detail: Turbopump “V2 Turbo Pump Part 1”

[20] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p.65 and on

[21] For those who’re so minded there’s a complete explanation of the V2 engine systems here: John A. Halchak, James L. Cannon and Corey Brown, “Materials for Liquid Propulsion Systems,” in Aerospace Materials and Applications (AIAA, 2018), p.15 and onward

[22] “Analysis and Evaluation of German Attainments and Research in The Liquid Rocket Engine Field. Volume 4. Propellant Injectors”, which you can get in pdf form online has a really good description of how this works.

[23] Walters, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, p.27

[24] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 80.

[25] A4 / V2 Rocket in detail: Turbopump – I make no apologies for referencing the same YT video here, it is art, go and watch it

[26] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 88

[27] Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, p. 85

[28] The riddle of the V2 rocket shape

Australia’s first military action in WW1

Filed under: Australia, Germany, Pacific, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Australian troops got into action much earlier in 1914 than most people might remember, acting to shut down German wireless stations and coaling facilities in the south Pacific islands and invading the German colony of Neu Guinea in September:

German reservists at Neu Guinea
Photo from Chris’s Naval History Substack

On the 11th September 1914 the Australian army launched its first campaign of the Great War and it was pretty much as far away from the Dardanelles that you could possibly get which is where many people think their War began. The first Australian Expeditionary force were walking up the beaches of German Neu Guinea towards an undefended shoreline.

But why are the Australians fighting there?

Officially these were moves to neutralise the Wireless stations and possible bases for von Spee’s Cruiser squadron which would then mean Allied shipping was secure. However Australia had long coveted the German colony of Neu Guinea since before it was a German colony. When Germany finally made a move to establish itself on the island, they really wanted it and the British Crown was not too bothered about the malarial jungle that was too thick to really carve a niche out. If Germany wanted to pour money and resources into such a backward colony for little return then they were welcome to it. The rest of the island was owned by the Dutch East Indies and the British, soon to be Australian Papua Guinea in the south looking over their border jealously. The First World War offered the Australians a chance to absorb the territory without any repercussions.

Defensive measures

As War commenced, German colonies around the world had to try and figure out what the best course of action was. Togoland made a bid for neutrality, Sud West Afrika got ready for invasion and Tsingtau began fortifying itself.

But for the German island colonies there was not much in the way of defences and out on the “Australian Station” the majority of defence was supposed to be carried out by the Ostasiengeschwader‘s ships, sailors or marines. For local issues each colony had local armed police officers led by a German officer which could hold down local problems until the cruisers arrived as they had during Sokeh’s rebellion in 1910. In Neu Guinea there were 125 Melanesian policemen backed up by a small group of German reservists amongst the colonists under a regular Army officer who had been sent out by the Colonial Office. By the 6 August the Colony had put out the call for assistance and managed to swell the force to two regular Army officers, seven reservist officers, fifty-two reservist soldiers and 240 native soldiers.

Defending the beaches against an armed invasion would be a really poor decision as the Australian navy’s guns would decimate their trenches and positions as well as the nearby town drawing death to the civilian population. The Germans knew that the main target of the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force would be the wireless station. Ultimately, they could not stop the colony;s eventual fall but they could make the Australians pay for the advance and try and buy as much time as they could for transmission time and setting demolition charges. The pathway through the jungle would be defended by snipers, trenches and hit and fade attacks against an enemy who wouldn’t know the terrain.

The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026

The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.

00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
(more…)

QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers

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

I’ve written many times that the real culprits here aren’t the Boomers, but the Silents. Pick any obnoxious “Boomer” who did whatever in The Sixties™, and it’s Build Back Brandon to one that the “Boomer” in question was born in the 1930s. Which makes sense for a lot of historical reasons, but simple chronology will do: If we take as read that The Sixties™ started with the Port Huron Statement, then The Sixties™ started in 1962. The Baby Boom started in 1945, meaning that the very oldest Boomers were still in high school in 1962. They might’ve enthusiastically embraced every word — then again, they might not — but they surely didn’t write one letter of it.

Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.

… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?

As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.

October 11, 2026

Britain – “… one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reflects on the sage words of Adam Smith during that eighteenth century unpleasantness with some of the North American colonies:

In 1777, Britain lost the battle of Saratoga — a decisive defeat that would spell the end of its rule over the 13 Colonies. A young John Sinclair declared that the nation would soon be ruined. An older and wiser Adam Smith replied that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.

Smith would be vindicated. Despite losing 60 per cent of its North American territories, Great Britain would go on to become the leading economic and military power of the 19th century. But history does not necessarily repeat itself. Today, as the mistakes and catastrophes pile up one on another, one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin.

Consider the news of the past week. The most dramatic scene played out late Sunday night in Gosport, as illegal immigrants were ferried onto shore by the coast guard. Overlooked by the remaining might of the Royal Navy, in sight of HMNB Portsmouth which two thirds of the surface fleet call home, illegal migrants were delivered to tax-payer funded accommodation by the British state. The full coercive power of that state was on display, but it was not directed towards the young men seeking to invade English waters, but against the people of Gosport. The entire town was locked down, and the right of assembly suspended, using a law usually deployed against vagrants and vandals. Legions of high-vis jacked police were deployed across the town, clashing with protestors in the streets of a once-sleepy seaside community.

This is bad enough, but consider what else is going on across the country. Prisoners were being released early, not because of their exemplary behaviour or reformed characters, but simply because we had run out of room to safely house them. The parole services openly admit they cannot cope, and parolees could wait weeks before they are fitted with electronic tags.

The economic situation is no happier. There is a global surge in bond yields, meaning higher costs of borrowing and straitened circumstances for our government as it prepares for the autumn budget later this month. War in the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula looks set to cause a surge in fuel prices over the coming winter, hitting consumers and business alike. Far from being prepared to weather this storm, Britain has some of the lowest diesel reserves in the developed world. Our domestic supplies of oil and gas, already squeezed by reckless environmental policies, could now face strike action that could see a third of production shut down.

If you have faith in British civil society and public life to respond with stoicism and solidarity, one can think again. The country recently had a hysterical and ugly debate over whether Rishi Sunak was a real Englishman, in which a number of right wing ethnic minority figures claimed not to be, and a number of progressives suggested that there is no ethnic English identity at all. In the latest horrific chapter of our coming apart as a culture, the Green Party passed a motion at its conference declaring that Zionism is “racist” and that Israel should be entirely annexed by a Palestinian state. During the same vote, they rejected a proposal promising not to engage in disciplinary proceedings against Jewish party members for affiliation with synagogues or Jewish organisations that support Israel. Given that the majority of British synagogues could be described as Zionist by some definition, this was effectively a declaration that observant Jews were no longer welcome in the party. Nothing like this has been seen in British society for a century.

As a country, we are running up against hard limits to how far we can manage decline and stifle unrest. The patience of the public, the confidence of markets and the state’s own capacity to enforce order are all reaching breaking point. Britain is indeed on the brink of ruin.

But what does ruin look like? Writing three years ago, and looking ahead to a likely Labour government, I warned that temporary disasters can become long term realities: “Argentina, a country economically competitive with the USA in 1900, proceeded to politically wreck itself for over a hundred years, with cyclical economic crises destroying hard-won prosperity. In Argentina, the situation of the ‘precariat’ is all that most of today’s middle-class families have ever known.”

The end of colonial Africa

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Celina reviews a 1960s film I’d never heard of, and having read her review I can understand why it has been forgotten because it tells a brutal tale as the colonial European powers withdrew from their former colonies in Africa far too often leaving the newly independent peoples to settle old scores in bloody civil conflicts:

The 1966 Italian documentary Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa), directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see for absolutely anyone who wants to understand the realities of African governance. Filmed in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa between 1963 and 1965, Africa Addio captures the bloody upheavals accompanying the end of White colonial rule across much of the continent. It chronicles the withdrawal of the British and Belgian colonial powers, alongside Portugal’s efforts to retain its African colonies and White South Africans’ determination to preserve their rule.

The film itself is bewildering at moments, for much of the film a camera is mounted in a light aircraft, capturing the serenity of the azure waters and brilliant white sands of the Zanzibar archipelago. The visual splendour of the landscape is overwhelming in its beauty, it evokes the pristine imagery of a mid-century travelogue designed for European consumption.

Nevertheless, as the aircraft gradually descends, the white sands are revealed to be peppered by dark, irregular shapes. As the telephoto lens finds its focus, the visual abstraction resolves into a horrifying, incontrovertible reality. The idyllic beaches are entirely strewn with the corpses of hundreds of Arab and Indian civilians, the victims of the January 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.

Screenshot from the film Africa Addio. 19 January 1964. Arab civilians attempting to flee revolutionaries.

Screenshot from the film Africa Addio. 20 January 1964. Bodies of Arab civilians at low tide, caught while trying to flee Zanzibar.

Accompanying this almost god-like, detached aerial survey of mass slaughter is the melancholic, and achingly beautiful orchestral score of the celebrated Italian composer Riz Ortolani.

This startling juxtaposition, which is only one of many in the film, feels immensely unsettling with the sheer, unfathomable scale of human atrocity paired with the romantic elegance of European orchestration. It encapsulates the disturbing essence of Africa Addio.

The opening sections focus primarily on Kenya. We see a series of trials of Mau Mau terrorists and their accomplices, who massacred White families and mutilated their cattle, and for some inexplicable reason also tortured and hung wild baboons. Most were sentenced to life in prison for these egregious crimes. A few years later, Jomo Kenyatta, the anti-colonial activist who served as Kenya’s Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964, pardoned the Mau Mau criminals.

[…]

If you decide to watch Africa Addio today, you will subject yourself to a gruelling, psychologically taxing endurance test of historical horror. The film explicitly positions itself as a visual archive of decolonisation in motion, capturing the violent and often utterly merciless transition from European empire to African independence.

After watching this film, you realise that it is a genuine civilisational artefact, yet somehow it still feels wrong to watch. It forces the viewer to confront the terrifying speed with which order can evaporate when a European hegemon suddenly withdraws. Through its seemingly endless catalogue of massacres, mercenary warfare, political assassinations, and ecological devastation, Africa Addio becomes an uncompromising mirror of the anxieties surrounding the collapse of the European imperial order.

[…]

The film highlights the horrific brutality of the new African order emerging across the continent. In conflicts such as the Congo rebellion, insurgents receiving Soviet-bloc or Communist Chinese support terrorised White civilians. Nevertheless, the violence depicted in Africa Addio does not end with Whites fleeing for safety from the militant communist backed African hordes: it extends to the massacre of other ethnic and political enemies.

In Zanzibar, the targets were Arabs who were associated collectively with the island’s history of slavery and Arab domination. In January 1964, the newly independent government was overthrown in a revolution involving pro-communist forces, followed by the massacre of thousands of Arab civilians. Some estimates place the death toll as high as 20,000, although the precise number remains disputed. Historian Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim explicitly argues that these killings constituted genocide, and that their recognition has been obstructed by the political narratives surrounding African liberation.

One Artillery Piece for the Road! – StuG III – Nazi Rearmament 09

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 10 Oct 2026

The StuG III was built to support infantry. It became one of Germany’s most important tank killers. How did the Sturmgeschütz III go from mobile artillery to a mainstay of German armored warfare?

Built on the Panzer III chassis, the StuG traded a revolving turret for a low silhouette, strong frontal protection, and a fixed gun. Originally designed to destroy machine-gun nests and fortifications, it gained a long-barreled 75 mm gun as Germany confronted the T-34 and other Soviet tanks.

In “One Artillery Piece for the Road”, Spartacus Olsson follows the StuG III from Manstein’s assault-artillery concept through its development, production, and combat service. We examine its strengths, mechanical limitations, and the struggle between the artillery and Panzer branches over its expanding role.

Germany’s most numerous fully tracked armored fighting vehicle also exposes a larger contradiction: Nazi Germany could build practical, economical weapons, yet repeatedly burdened its war effort with costly complexity. What made the StuG different, and why could its battlefield successes never solve Germany’s strategic problems?

“Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

L. Wayne Mathison on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

I watched this video about Indigenous education and reconciliation in BC schools. It raises some questions we should be asking across Canada.

Schools should teach history, including residential schools, treaties, colonization and the treatment of Indigenous people. But history should be taught honestly, with evidence, context and room for disagreement.

When students hear slogans like “Indigenous brilliance” and “land back”, are they being encouraged to examine what those terms mean, or simply expected to agree?

Orwell warned us about political language that substitutes slogans for clear thinking. Sowell taught us to judge policies by their results rather than their intentions. Hayek warned against assuming anyone possesses all the necessary knowledge. Bastiat reminded us to consider the costs nobody bothers to mention.

Those principles belong in every classroom.

Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking. Historical injustices deserve examination, but so do competing historical accounts, modern treaty obligations, property rights, individual responsibility and the consequences of government policy.

Students should be free to question every claim, including those made by teachers, politicians and Indigenous leaders.

If a historical claim is true, it should withstand scrutiny. If a political proposal is sound, it should withstand debate.

Education should produce independent thinkers, not obedient political activists.

We owe young Canadians an honest education, not a preferred political narrative dressed up as unquestionable truth.

In The Country of the Blind: A Tale of Applied Cliology and Incompetence

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

Feral Historian
Published 5 Jun 2026

Michael Flynn’s In The Country of the Blind gives us a mystery wrapped around an examination of the idea of predictive history. Sort of Foundation with more laughs and cynicism.

I’ve been sitting on this one for some time now, hoping to think of some good b-roll to cut in. But I got nothing, so here it is. For those that listen to these while driving, this one’s for you.

I haven’t found the study I mentioned that isn’t paywalled, but here’s a link so you know which one I’m talking about. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/92…

00:00 Intro
04:50 Results, Not Intentions
10:43 Technopeasants
13:21 Scientific Management
16:33 Back to Now
18:43 Power Structures

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian
🔹 and Merch! | feral-shop.fourthwall.com

QotD: The history of New Harmony, Indiana

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.

Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.

In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.

It collapsed almost immediately.

The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?

Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.

American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country’s earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: “The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity”. The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.

When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.

Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality”.

Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different.

Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse.

His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall”. He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.

Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons.

Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-09.

October 10, 2026

Denouncing great art of the past as “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Not content with reading history backwards to find fault with historic figures based on the most progressive views of the modern world, the same approach is now taken with fine art:

For a discipline devoted to art, contemporary art history can seem remarkably contemptuous about the object of its study. In the 1970s “new art history” began to revolutionise a discipline that was hitherto focused on the connoisseurship of the Western canon.

It became instead a subject that used artworks as artefacts for social and political critique. John Berger, the pioneer of the new approach, questioned the very permissibility of having a “love of art”, dismissing it as “a useful concept to the European ruling classes”.

New art historians have since continued this crusade, with different “lenses”, each now well known, encompassing such topics as the “feminist turn”, the “de-colonialist turn”, the “LGBTQ+ turn”, and so on.

As critics such as Lola Salem and Pierre d’Alancaisez have argued in this magazine, this tendency now extends beyond academic fashion: the assumptions through which art is studied have migrated into museums, funding bodies and cultural institutions, where they shape what is exhibited, how it should be interpreted, and what socioeconomic purposes art is expected to serve.

The old question, “Is this good art, and what does it tell us about the civilisation that made it?” has acquired a formidable set of competitors: “What makes this work and its creator suspect, what depravity does is its supposed beauty trying to hide?”

In Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, Daisy Dixon’s sense of contempt is made plain in the very first line: “When I was a teenager, I hated the painter Paul Gauguin.” As assistant professor of Philosophy at Cardiff, Dr Dixon has built a social media platform as an outspoken critic of historical and contemporary visual media. Not even Miriam Margolyes is spared her rancour.

In a world now dominated by AI, Dixon tackled the very real issue of deepfake pornography, where this new technology was abused by perverts to create pornographic images of victims (mostly women) without their consent. Whilst Dixon’s criticism of this sinister practice was laudable and justified, the extension of her criticism to art is misguided and regrettable.

The indignant chapter titles of her book — Obscenity, Criminality, Oppression, Malevolence, Cruelty, Iconoclasm, Reparation — read more like the call-to-arms of the culture wars than a work of fair and rigorous academic analysis. At the heart of her book lies the accusation that art with an erotic element by the likes of Titian, Velázquez or Giulio Romano should be considered “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”.

To support her argument, Dixon begins outside the confines of art with a work of literature: Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Using the indisputable “depravity” of De Sade, she aims to justify her accusation that those paintings were motivated by the same male and depraved roots in Western culture.

Her greatest ire however is reserved for Titian’s Rape of Europa, which she considers “just a portrayal of an immoral act”. The failure to consider any alternative meaning to the picture is indicative of the reductive and misleading nature of her approach.

Titian’s The Rape of Europa, c. 1560-62.

Wikimedia Commons.

Without delving further into the many other readings of the Rape of Europa, suffice it to say that the reductive conclusions drawn by Dixon impede us from a deeper understanding that might call her assumptions into question.

Although I read Art History at one of the most renowned institutes in Britain, I can confirm that students are taught this superficial understanding and contempt. I remember a senior lecturer singling out the experience of finding a group of Oxford postgrads discussing Titian’s Diana and Actaeon as a scene worthy of ridicule. “I was shocked,” the lecturer opined, “how they were so busily discussing which translation of Ovid that Titian consulted, when they completely ignored that there was a black slave girl in the picture.”

The girl depicted was one of the handmaidens of Diana, something the lecturer would have known had she even the most elementary knowledge of the story. More distressing was the sight of a senior academic masquerading assumptions as fact.

“The Catholic Church has always struggled with its relationship to nation-states”

Filed under: Europe, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Gilley wonders when — or even whether — Pope Leo XIV will realize his pastoral duties extend to defending western civilization:

Pope Leo XIV in the library of the Vatican, 13 October, 2025.
Photo by Ricardo Stuckert via Wikimedia Commons.

    In the Middle Ages, they would have kicked a few cardinals in the ass, elected a new pope, and declared this one an anti-pope.

So says the French president in Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, in which a fleet of 100 ships carrying 1 million illegal migrants from Calcutta disgorges its wretched cargo onto the beaches of the Côte d’Azur.

The outburst is occasioned by the insistence of the pope in the novel that Europe should open its borders to all Third-World migrants in the name of charity and solidarity, beginning with this Calcutta fleet. In the novel, His Holiness has sold off all the Vatican art and treasures to raise funds for the migrants, and he is badgering the French president to similarly raise funds to pay for needs of this influx.

“What else can you expect from a Brazilian pope?” the president asks an aide. “The cardinals wanted an innovator as pope, in the name of the universal church, and they certainly got one.”

This fictional scene has obvious parallels to real-life events we’re all experiencing under the current and previous pope, both drawn from service in Latin America, in weakening rather than strengthening the defenses of Europe against a migrant invasion and other anti-Western ills.

During a day trip to the Italian island of Lampedusa in July, Pope Leo took a page out of The Camp of the Saints in requesting European governments create a “a long-term strategic plan capable of receiving, protecting, supporting and integrating migrants”. He also praised the locals “for the solidarity that so many of you have shown”. The United States, he said, should likewise be “welcoming, protecting, and assisting immigrants” as “an act of charity”.

In 2025, before he was chosen as pope, then-Cardinal Prevost had taken up a similar cudgel by openly rejecting U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s invocation of St. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris (the ordering of love) which allows that human limits mean we must prioritize those closest to us first and those afar second. To be frank, the hillbilly has a better grasp of Augustine than the man who became pope.

Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis was even more radical, calling for “open humanitarian corridors” for all and sundry who felt they had a right to waltz into the West. People should be “free to choose whether to migrate or stay” and national borders should be transformed into “privileged places of encounter”. Anyone who resisted, according to that logic, was a racist.

In 2023, the former editor of a Vatican newsletter insert, Lucetta Scaraffia, said that Francis “hates the values of the West” and was more interested in climate change than he was in condemning anti-Semitism or defending Christians from persecution around the globe. “He forgets that the West is the lone part of the world that’s tried, even in limited and insufficient ways, to realize the values of the Church”, she said.

The uncanny similarities between this outlook of Francis, an Argentinian, and that of Leo, whose career was spent in Peru, to the fictional Latin American pope in The Camp of the Saints is tragedy more than farce. Because if the Catholic Church cannot understand the problem that mass Third-World migration poses for Christendom, then the game — for Europe, at least — is surely up.

Tim Worstall argues that the BC drug decision was correct

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t always agree with Tim Worstall‘s takes, but he’s quite convinced that the recent decision in British Columbia to create a new human right to buy and sell drugs is correct and will lead to better outcomes than the existing law:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

Drug dealing — branded drug dealing — is now legal. Or it will be once the 6 month stay expires or the Canadian Parliament changes the law.

The change in the law that should — won’t, but should — is that branded drug dealing should be legal.

That humans like to get blitzed is true. That humans like to get blitzed so much that every time anywhere tries to stop it — short of immediate execution for users and dealers — means that whatever the law says there’s always that market in ways to get blitzed. There are two arguments for making it legal to get blitzed. One is the simple liberal point that it’s our own life to waste and we each get to chart our own path — whether sooner or later — to the inevitable grave. The other is that for most drugs the consumption of the pure stuff doesn’t do much harm.

Sure, sure, cocaine turns people into obnoxious wankers but decent heroin has few physical problems and users tend to spend their time contemplating the joys of an enhanced reality. Not my thing but, you know, Meh.

The illegal stuff kills at least tens of thousands to get to us and then tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more through being stepped upon, cut, polluted and then the basic public health problems of AIDS ridden whores — of both, or any, sex — tricking to pay for the next dirty needle full.

We have a solution to this. A known solution. Capitalism. Capitalism in the full light of day and under the rule of law. We don’t just want we positively lust after corporations to make pure junk. Branded, pure, junk. Their brand dependent upon how good the highs are at the price of how few deaths. Their profit depends upon maintaining the value of that brand.

That is, turn that always present human greed into our purity guarantee. Same thing that keeps the rats out of our bread supply — WonderLoaf finding that rat bits in the sandwich reduce their sales.

So, Marlboro branded heroin, that’s the thing. And, yes, Marlboro, they’ve already got that association with horse, haven’t they?

FN’s New ARKA: Revamping the SCAR for Military Tenders

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Jun 2026

The ARKA is essentially FN’s SCAR rifle on the inside but with more AR-style controls and handling. It was developed in response to a number of military and security service tenders which required specifically an AR-style top charging handle and AR-compatible buttstock. It is made in 11.25″ and 14.5″ barrel lengths, with long and short handguards. It will be interesting to see how this iteration of the rifle fares in international competitions.
(more…)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress