World War Two
Published 21 Dec 2021Amin al-Husseini is one of the leading figures in global Islam. He’s an Arab nationalist, an anti-Semite, and anti-Zionist. But he’s also willing to work with imperialist powers if it suits him. He’s been loyal to the Ottomans and the British. In 1941, he throws his lot in with Hitler and the Nazis.
(more…)
December 22, 2021
The Nazi-Islam Alliance? – Amin al-Husseini – WW2 Biography Special
Comments Off on The Nazi-Islam Alliance? – Amin al-Husseini – WW2 Biography Special
December 15, 2021
Christopher Hitchens, ten years gone
In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith laments our loss of the “last cool columnist”:
Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.
The ten year anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens (15 December) brings to mind two questions. Firstly, has it really been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? Secondly, has it only been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? The vivid nature of his prose and rhetoric makes him feel like our contemporary. His obsessions, though, — like atheistic evangelism and Middle Eastern nation building — feel as dated as a Roman artifact.
Columnists have a short cultural lifespan. Once, millions of Britons read Bernard Levin every week. Now? I doubt that most young writers have even heard of him. Classic books are reprinted. Newspapers gather dust. Hitchens’s name does not have all the weight it had ten years ago but it has stayed alive, because the Internet archives essays and appearances and because of the esteem that he is held in by his peers.
Janan Ganesh, writing for the Financial Times, believes that Hitchens would have thrived if he had lived to comment on 2021. “He was made for our time, not his own,” Ganesh writes, “The great vacancy in today’s public life is for an equal scourge of the censorious left and the feral right … Hitchens would have been in his element.”
This is bunkum. Hitchens would have been hopelessly out of sorts in the 2020s. How, for example, would he have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? It is as implausible to imagine that a man with such a lust for life would have endorsed long-term restrictions as it is to imagine that a man with such cheerful faith in the scientific establishment would have had time for COVID sceptics and vaccine hesitancy. Anybody hoping that Hitchens would have carved out some kind of nuanced middle ground, meanwhile, must have forgotten who we are dealing with. No, the plain truth is that the high moralism and rhetorical fury of “the Hitch” were perfectly suited to the heydays of the War on Terror and cable TV.
Liberal commentators like Ganesh miss Hitchens not so much because of his opinions as because he was cool. Ross Douthat mentions Mark Lilla, Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan as other liberals who criticise the left and the right. But while I respect Lilla and Applebaum’s accomplishments and enjoy Sullivan’s writing, how many people do you think have fantasised about having a few drinks with them — or, indeed, with any other political commentator not named “Hitchens”?
Comments Off on Christopher Hitchens, ten years gone
December 12, 2021
“Say what you will about Rand, nobody ever described her as a light read”
In Quillette, David Cohen notes that we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s death, which will almost certainly help expose her work to a renewed audience of disaffected teens and freshman university students:
More than a half-century ago the great — and, alas, irreplaceable — American scholar Allan Bloom became aware of the spell she could cast. He first started noticing it around the time he became aware of a decline in serious reading among his students. As the University of Chicago professor later recounted in The Closing of the American Mind, it became particularly evident whenever he asked his large introductory classes which authors and books really mattered to them. Most of the undergrads fell silent, he wrote, or else were puzzled by the question. There was generally no text to which they looked “for counsel, inspiration or joy,” he remarked. But one exception kept popping up.
There always seemed to be, he marvelled, a student who mentioned Atlas Shrugged, a work “although hardly literature, which, with its sub-Nietzschean assertiveness, excites somewhat eccentric youngsters to a new way of life.” And rather more of them than did Allan Bloom or, indeed, pretty much anyone else in the United States who has ever tried to hawk philosophy to the masses. Rand’s book sales overall stand at around 30 million, with hundreds of thousands more each year, and probably rather more this coming year.
Not only is she sought-after for her two best-known novels — the other being The Fountainhead — but also for her nonfiction. Her slim volumes of collected essays and old newspaper columns and other outtakes comprise an apparently fathomless vault from which the Ayn Rand Institute routinely cobbles together regular offerings for the lucky kids. One survey by the Library of Congress listed Atlas Shrugged as second only to the Bible in terms of campus popularity; an incredible accomplishment. All the more so in an era of Twitter, Facebook, and all the other intimations of the shortened attention-span. Say what you will about Rand, nobody ever described her as a light read.
A random internet search throws up an impressive litany of fans from the entertainment world, including Oliver Stone, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, and Sandra Bullock. Even the late professional wrestler James Hellwig, better known as The Ultimate Warrior, bellowed her praises, which might add some context to those rollickingly individualistic pre-fight interviews he used to do back in the WWE glory days. Oh, and let’s not forget Brad Pitt and Vince Vaughn. Which is particularly interesting, I think, since Jennifer Aniston (also a Rand fan) replaced the first with the second after Pitt ran off with Angelina Jolie, who’s also on record enthusing about Rand’s “very interesting” take on the good life.
In politics and economics, Rand had her youthful followers, too, and here again one sees the youth-appeal angle. Probably her best-known disciple is the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who is rather ancient now. But back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, Greenspan declared that the high empress of the libertarian Right “taught me that capitalism is not only practical and efficient but also moral.” Like the young and philosophically restless undergrads in Allan Bloom’s classes, the British health secretary Sajid Javid also discovered her early on, and apparently still reads the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead every year. Or rather, as the cool libertarian kids in the black jeans might prefer to put it, it still reads him.
Comments Off on “Say what you will about Rand, nobody ever described her as a light read”
November 16, 2021
Bettie Page: The Queen of Pinup
Biographics
Published 4 Mar 2019Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org
Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Shannon Quinn
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell HarrisBusiness inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com
Source/Further reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJhop…
https://www.pbs.org/video/history-det…
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7…
https://www.biography.com/news/bettie…
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/ric…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomal…Secondary Sources/Photos/Videos:
(Hey guys- You technically can’t see any of her private parts in these videos, so it’s not really porn, but I still would not call this safe for work. Your wives, co-workers, or people on public transportation may give you really dirty looks if they see these over your shoulder. You have been warned.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettie_…Dancing video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pndr…
The “Striporama” scenes with Bettie Page
https://youtu.be/ZDypKx8c1TM
Comments Off on Bettie Page: The Queen of Pinup
November 13, 2021
The patron saint of “Gonzo” journalism was a pretty cruddy human being
As I mentioned in an earlier post on one of Hunter S. Thompson’s famous early books, I discovered the writer at a particularly susceptible age … teenagers of my generation were generally suckers for counter-culture heroes (being too young to be actual hippies because we were in primary school when the Summer of Love flew past, and therefore feeling we’d missed out on something Big and Important and Meaningful). As a gullible teen, I believed Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was mostly factual with some obvious-even-to-me embroideries for dramatic or comedic effect. I could easily forgive the guessed-at 10% fiction, but Thompson eventually admitted that the majority of the story was bullshit. Entertaining bullshit, but bullshit.
Which, as it happens, turns out to have been Thompson’s life-long modus operandi, as Kevin Mims repeatedly highlights in his Quillette review of David S. Wills’ biography called High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism:
In High White Notes, his riveting new biography of Hunter S. Thompson, journalist David S. Wills describes Thompson as America’s first rock star reporter and compares him to Mick Jagger. But by the time I finished the book, I’d decided that Thompson bore a closer resemblance to Donald Trump. The two men were born nine years apart, during white American masculinity’s golden age. Both were obsessed with politics without possessing anything that could be described as a coherent political philosophy. Both men longed for some mythical American paradise of the past. Both men screwed over multiple friends and business partners. Both men would have gone broke if not for the frequent intervention of helpful patrons. Both men were egomaniacs fond of self-mythologizing and loath to share a spotlight with anyone. Both men enjoyed making disparaging remarks about women, minorities, the disabled, and other disadvantaged people. Both men were frequently disloyal to their most loyal aiders and abetters. Thompson’s endless letter writing and self-pitying 3am telephone calls to friends and colleagues were the 20th century equivalent of Trump’s late-night Twitter tantrums. Both men generally exaggerated their successes and blamed their failures on others. Both men mistreated their wives. Both men nursed a constant (and not entirely irrational) sense of grievance against perceived enemies in the government and the media. Both men had a colossal sense of entitlement …
The list could go on and on. Trump actually fares better than Thompson by various measures. For instance, Trump has never had a drug or alcohol problem, as far as I know. Thompson was a drug and alcohol problem. The first US president in living memory without a White House pet seems to have no interest in animals. Thompson enjoyed tormenting them. Rumors have circulated since 2015 that a recording exists of Trump using a racial slur but since the evidence has never surfaced, it might be fairer to conclude (at least provisionally) that this is not one of his many character failings. Thompson’s published and (especially) unpublished writings are full of such language.
All of which may lead you to conclude that High White Notes is not a favorable account of Hunter S. Thompson’s life and work. To the contrary, David S. Wills is a Thompson devotee who considers his subject to have been a great writer and, at times, a great journalist. But Wills is an honest guide, so his endlessly entertaining biography manages to be both a fan’s celebration and unsparing in its criticism of Thompson and his work.
Though impressive, the book is not without faults. Wills relies too heavily on cliché (“This book will pull no punches”; “breathing down his neck for the final manuscript”; “women threw themselves at him” etc.), and has a tendency to find profundity in unnaturally strained readings of Thompson’s prose. For instance, Wills describes a scene from a 1970 profile Thompson wrote of French skier Jean-Claude Killy, in which three young boys approach Thompson and ask if he is Killy. Thompson tells them that he is, then holds up his pipe and says, “I’m just sitting here smoking marijuana. This is what makes me ski so fast.” This sounds to me like standard Thompson misbehavior, but Wills infers something more complex: “On the surface, it appears to be comedy for the sake of comedy but in fact it is a comment on the nature of celebrity and in particular Killy’s empty figurehead status.” And when Thompson describes Killy as resembling “a teenage bank clerk with a foolproof embezzlement scheme,” Wills remarks, “Thompson has succeeded mightily not just in conveying [Killy’s] appearance but in hinting at his personality. He has placed an image in the head of his reader that will stick there permanently. It was something F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved, albeit in more words, when he had Nick Carraway describe Jay Gatsby’s smile.” (The book, by the way, takes its title from Fitzgerald, who used the phrase to describe short passages of writing so beautiful that they stand out from the larger work of which they are a part.)
[…]
Thompson’s big break as a writer came in 1965 when he was hired to write an article about the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang for the Nation. The piece was so popular that Thompson found himself besieged by publishers who wanted him to expand it into a full-length nonfiction book. The Thompsons moved into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco and Thompson set about writing Hell’s Angels, the 1967 book that would make him famous. Even in that first book, written before he had fully formulated the concept of Gonzo journalism, Thompson was already tinkering with the truth and engaging in the kind of self-mythologizing that would become a hallmark of his work. And that didn’t sit well with the Hell’s Angels themselves. According to Sonny Barger, a founding member of the Angels, Thompson “would talk himself up that he was a tough guy, when he wasn’t. When anything happened, he would run and hide.” Barger’s assessment of the book was terse: “It was junk.”
Wills notes that Thompson “tended to write about himself in ways that built his legend … to prove his machismo on paper. The back cover [of Hell’s Angels] describes him as ‘America’s most brazen and ballsy journalist’ and in the book he tells the story of first meeting the Angels and trying to impress them by shooting out the windows of his own San Francisco home. Such moments of bravado tend to enter the story very briefly and seem to serve little purpose beyond this self-mythologizing.”
But it was exactly this kind of self-mythologizing — the bragging about his drug use and general misbehavior — that editors of American magazines found so exciting about Thompson’s work, so it’s no wonder that he engaged in so much of it. It was his wild man persona that made Warren Hinckle of Scanlan’s Monthly want to unleash him among the socialites of Louisville. Still, Thompson didn’t fully emerge as a countercultural hero until he began to write for a small start-up publication in San Francisco called Rolling Stone.
Comments Off on The patron saint of “Gonzo” journalism was a pretty cruddy human being
November 6, 2021
Choose your college roommates well
Scott Alexander on the unlikely rise of Victor Orbán:
Viktor Orbán at the European People’s Party Summit in Brussels, December 2018.
Wikimedia Commons.
Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. And some are Victor Orbán’s college roommates.
Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman and Orbánland, my two sources for this installment of our Dictator Book Club, tell the story of a man who spent the last eleven years taking over Hungary and distributing it to guys he knew in college. Janos Ader, President of Hungary. Laszlo Kover, Speaker of the National Assembly. Joszef Szajer, drafter of the Hungarian constitution. All of them have something in common: they were Viktor Orbán’s college chums. Gabor Fodor, former Minister of Education, and Lajos Simicska, former media baron, were both literally his roommates. The rank order of how rich and powerful you are in today’s Hungary, and the rank order of how close you sat to Viktor Orbán in the cafeteria of Istvan Bibo College, are more similar than anyone has a right to expect.
Our story begins on March 30 1988, when young Viktor Orbán founded an extra-curricular society at his college called The Alliance Of Young Democrats (Hungarian abbreviation: FiDeSz). Thirty-seven students met in a college common room and agreed to start a youth organization. Orbán’s two roommates were there, along with a couple of other guys they knew. Orbán gave the pitch: the Soviet Union was crumbling. A potential post-Soviet Hungary would need fresh blood, new politicians who could navigate the democratic environment. They could get in on the ground floor.
It must have seemed kind of far-fetched. Orbán was a hick from the very furthest reaches of Hicksville, the “tiny, wretched village of Alcsutdoboz”. He grew up so poor that he would later describe “what an unforgettable experience it had been for him as a fifteen-year-old to use a bathroom for the first time, and to have warm water simply by turning on a tap”. He was neither exceptionally bright nor exceptionally charismatic.
Still, there was something about him. To call it “a competitive streak” would be an understatement. He loved fighting. The dirtier, the better. He had been kicked out of school after school for violent behavior as a child. As a teen, he’d gone into football, and despite having little natural talent he’d worked his way up to the semi-professional leagues through sheer practice and determination. During his mandatory military service, he’d beaten up one of his commanding officers. Throughout his life, people would keep underestimating how long, how dirty, and how intensely he was willing to fight for something he wanted. In the proverb “never mud-wrestle a pig, you’ll both get dirty but the pig will like it”, the pig is Viktor Orbán.
Those thirty-six college friends must have seen something in him. They gave him his loyalty, and he gave them their marching orders. The predicted Soviet collapse arrived faster than anybody expected, and after some really fast networking (“did you know I represent the youth, who are the future of this country?”) Orban got invited to give a speech at a big ceremony marking the successful revolution, and he knocked it out of the park.
He spoke about freedom, and democracy, and the popular will. He spoke against the older generation, and the need for a rupture with the crumbling traditions of the past. And also, he spoke against the Russian troops remaining in the country — the only speaker brave enough to say what everyone else was thinking. The voters liked what they heard: in Hungary’s first free election, he and several of his college friends were elected to Parliament on the Fidesz ticket.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t a very good liberal MP.
Separated from his pomp and platform, he was just a 27 year old kid without a lot of political experience. There was a glut of liberal democrats in Hungary — the country had just had a successful liberal democratic revolution — and Orbán and Fidesz couldn’t differentiate themselves from the rest of the market. Most liberal democrats wanted cosmopolitan intellectual types; Orbán — despite his herculean efforts to lose the accent and develop some class — was still just a hick from Hicksville. During the next election, Fidesz did embarrassingly badly.
So Viktor Orbán got everyone from his liberal democratic party together and asked — what if, instead of being liberal democrats, we were all far-right nationalists?
Wait, what?
Comments Off on Choose your college roommates well
October 13, 2021
Josip Broz Tito — The “Maharaja of the Balkans”
In The Critic, Thomas Gallagher looks at the man and the myth of Yugoslavia’s communist leader, known to the world as “Tito”:
Decades after his death in 1980, Josip Broz Tito still casts a spell as a larger-than-life figure.
The legend portrays him as a famous military leader and anti-fascist guerrilla fighter who fought off the Nazis and defied Stalin. He then went on to be a champion of peace who stood up for various small nations snapping the coils of European overlordship. He was at home on imperial estates or, more often, on his secluded luxury home on the island of Brioni, with Old Masters adorning his walls and kings, emperors and fellow communist strongmen paying homage.
Despite clumsy language and hyperbole in places, as well as some avoidable errors, Tito’s Secret Empire seeks to debunk Tito’s legend and in several key respects it succeeds. The authors William Klinger and Dennis Kuljiš accord some honours to their subject.
He was a unique character well-equipped to surmount various obstacles during his 88-year life. For the British diplomat, Sir Fitzroy Maclean, he was “a fail-proof survivor”. In 1974 he was hailed by Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, as “the greatest of the winners of the Second World War”.
A benign image persisted, despite Tito being responsible for more acts of mass cruelty than any other European communist leader with the exception of the Soviets. He was admired as a wheeler-dealer in international affairs, from murky transactions to the most delicate undertakings in statecraft. This well-researched book deserves attention for those who wish to peer beyond the carefully cultivated image.
[…]
His 1954 state visit to then-royalist Greece, a regime which he had spent years trying to topple, was an unmistakable indication that he was placing himself at the head of a hybrid regime. Britain’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had already visited him and urged the United States to prop up Tito financially. The favour was not returned. Evidence is provided that Tito played a major role in encouraging Egypt to nationalise the Suez Canal. He saw President Nasser as a kindred spirit, a populist unencumbered by ideology. Tito even more keenly sought to end French rule in Algeria, arming the rebels and offering diplomatic support.
In September 1961, he welcomed dozens of leaders from the promising new “non-aligned” bloc to a conference in Belgrade. Next year China invaded India and his soul-mate, Nehru, turned to the West for help. Thereafter, the non-aligned movement’s influence waned, as did Tito’s with it.
He increasingly became a pensioner of the Soviet Union. American ardour cooled as it became clear how reliant he was on Soviet arms and industrial licences which enabled this supposed ambassador of peace to export weapons to the Third World.
Comments Off on Josip Broz Tito — The “Maharaja of the Balkans”
A War Without Hate? – The Officers and Gentlemen of North Africa – WW2 – Gallery 05
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2021In the history of European-style warfare, there has always been the ideal of “rules of warfare”. The horrors of the Eastern Front and the Pacific prove how hollow this ideal can be, but there is one theatre where some officers are trying to maintain it: North Africa.
(more…)
Comments Off on A War Without Hate? – The Officers and Gentlemen of North Africa – WW2 – Gallery 05
October 12, 2021
QotD: Titus Livius, better known as Livy
Livy’s life (roughly 59 BC to about 17 AD) spanned the most consequential period in the thousand-year history of ancient Rome. He witnessed the last decades of the crumbling old Republic and the rise in its place of the imperial autocracy we know as the Roman Empire. He was in his early twenties when the last great defender of the republican heritage, Cicero, was assassinated by a henchman of the tyrant Marc Antony. Livy observed the entirety of the reign of the first Emperor, Augustus. He is best known for his history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, described both in his day and in ours with such terms as “monumental” and “magisterial”.
What little we know of the man himself suggests he was somehow financially well-off, independent, and reclusive. He was schooled in rhetoric, philosophy, and history. He never served in any public position, though apparently, he personally knew Augustus. Writing his massive history of Rome absorbed his adult life.
Though Romans at the time of his writing held his work in high regard, we know that some parts of Livy’s historical accounts were surely based on minimal records, old and dubious oral stories, and even legend. After all, he wrote 2,000 years ago about people and events of as much as eight centuries before his time. “I hope my passion for Rome’s past has not impaired my judgment,” he opined in his introduction to Ab Urbe Condita, “for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds.”
“The old Romans,” wrote Livy of his countrymen before the beginning of the Republic, “all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom.” But then in 508 BC, Romans mounted a truly historic revolution of both ideas and governance. They overthrew the monarchy and established a new order that ultimately included a Senate of nobles, popularly elected Assemblies, the dispersion of centralized power, term limits, a constitution, due process, habeas corpus, and the widest practice of individual liberty the world had yet seen. Before they lost it all less than five centuries later, they experienced a remarkable rise and fall. […]
From Livy, we learn about Rome’s pivotal wars against the Carthaginians, the Samnites, and other peoples of the Italian Peninsula. He also informs us of the rivalry between Sulla and Marius, the tumultuous last days of the Republic as strong men fought each other for power, the murder of Julius Caesar, and the self-serving machinations of Augustus. Livy celebrated the courage of his ancestors; in fact, he originated the phrase, “Fortune favors the brave,” which is still used commonly today as a maxim and a motto.
Lawrence W. Reed, “Lessons from Livy on How Great Civilizations Rise and Fall”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-06-28.
Comments Off on QotD: Titus Livius, better known as Livy
October 10, 2021
Three Years in Vinland: The Norse Attempt to Colonize America
Atun-Shei Films
Published 9 Oct 2021Happy Leif Erikson Day! Some time after Thorvald Erikson’s disastrous voyage to the mysterious lands west of Greenland, a wealthy Icelander named Thorfinn Karlsefni financed and led an expedition of his own, with the goal of establishing a permanent Norse settlement in Vinland. Karlsefni and his crew would spend three summers in the New World, where they would have to deal with internal division, hostile Native Americans, and (according to some) the wrath of demonic mythological creatures.
Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms
Leave a Tip via Paypal ► https://www.paypal.me/atunsheifilms
Buy Merch ► https://teespring.com/stores/atun-she…
#LeifErikson #Vinland #History
Original Music by Dillon DeRosa ► http://dillonderosa.com/
Reddit ► https://www.reddit.com/r/atunsheifilms
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/atun_shei~REFERENCES~
[1] Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson. The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America (1965). Penguin Books, Page 7-43
[2] Birgitta Wallace. “Karlsefni” (2006). The Canadian Encyclopedia [https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.c..].
[3] Lorraine Boissonault. “L’Anse Aux Meadows and the Viking Discovery of North America” (2005). JSTOR Daily https://daily.jstor.org/anse-aux-mead…
Comments Off on Three Years in Vinland: The Norse Attempt to Colonize America
Book Review: The Guns of John Moses Browning, by Nathan Gorenstein
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Jun 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
John Moses Browning is, without argument, the greatest firearms designer in history. While we have had many brilliant designers who had their names forever connected to guns (Maxim, Luger, Kalashnikov, …), Browning invented whole *categories* of firearms. Gorenstein’s new book The Guns of John Moses Browning is a welcome biography of the man, giving great insight into Browning’s life and work. The book is well researched, well written, and thoroughly engaging. It is also worth noting that Gorenstein is himself a competitive shooter, and understands the world that Browning operated in.
I think my back-cover blurb for the book (for which I received no compensation; full disclosure) sums it up well:
Following Browning from his birth in rural Utah to his death in urban Belgium, we see how a changing world shaped his inventions and how, in turn, his inventions shaped a changing world.
Browning began in the last years of the Wild West inventing lever action rifles, then became a major part of the blossoming of the automatic pistol, then invented the semiauto shotgun before designing the modern machine guns that become iconic to the United States’ involvement in two world wars. It is a tremendous story, and Gorenstein’s book lays it all out for the reader.
Available from Amazon here:
https://amzn.to/355eMxeContact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Comments Off on Book Review: The Guns of John Moses Browning, by Nathan Gorenstein
September 20, 2021
History-Makers: Maimonides
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Sep 2021“From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.” Jump into 1100s Cordoba & Cairo as we take a look at the life of one of the Medieval world’s most boundary-breaking History-Makers: Moses Maimonides!
SOURCES & Further Reading: Great Courses lectures “Jewish Scholar in Cairo: Moses Maimonides” from The History and Achievements of the Islamic Golden Age by Eamonn Gearon and “Maimonides and Jewish Law” from Great Minds of the Medieval World by Dorsey Armstrong. Britannica “Maimonides” https://www.britannica.com/biography/…, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Maimonides” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ma…, The Guide For The Perplexed, Mishne Torah and Commentary on the Mishnah by Maimonides
Special thanks to Yellow/LudoHistory for his assistance in checking over my script. You can check out his livestreams playing historically-inspired videogames over at https://www.twitch.tv/ludohistory
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP
PODCAST: https://overlysarcasticpodcast.transi…
DISCORD: https://discord.gg/osp
MERCH LINKS: http://rdbl.co/osp
OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProductions.com
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/
Comments Off on History-Makers: Maimonides
September 15, 2021
Narendra Modi apparently doesn’t inspire mere biographies … he gets hagiographies
Scott Alexander reviews Andy Marino’s gushingly admiring Modi: A Political Biography:
The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have “open-ended conversations” about “every aspect of his life”. The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that “Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense — and probably the most vituperative — campaign of vilification.” Marino promises to replace this campaign with “a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair — but also unsparingly critical of [Modi’s] foibles” — which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness — and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing “foibles”. I’m not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.
I am still going to summarize and review this book, but I recommend thinking of it as Modi’s autobiography, ghost-written by Andy Marino. I hope to eventually find another book which presents a different perspective, and an update for the past six years (M:APB ends in 2014, right when Modi was elected PM). Until then, think of M:ABP as a look into how Modi sees himself, and how he wants you to see him.
[…]
In 1975 the Emergency happened.
For thirty years, since its independence, India had been a socialist state. Not the cool kind of socialist where you hold May Day parades and build ten zillion steel mills. The boring kind of socialist where the government makes you get lots of permits, then taxes you really heavily, and nothing really ever gets done. “Even today the Representation of the People Act requires all Indian political parties to pledge allegiance not only to the Constitution but also to socialism.” The RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and its collection of associated right-wing nationalist parties supported Hindu nationalism plus socialism. Their arch-enemy, the center-left-to-confused-mishmash Congress Party, supported secularism plus socialism. Non-socialism was off the table.
In unrelated news, there was a food shortage. Indians took to the streets protesting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi was heavy-handed in crushing the protests, which caused more protests, one thing led to another, and finally Gandhi declared martial law, a period which has gone down in history as the Emergency.
Gandhi immediately moved to arrest all her political enemies and shut down all newspapers that criticized her. The RSS was one of Gandhi’s main enemies and had to go underground quickly. Gujarat became a center for the resistance. So Modi, as an official in Gujarat’s RSS, ended up right in the middle of this. He remained a paper-pusher, but now he was a paper-pusher for freedom, scheduling meetings of resistance leaders, maintaining a master list of safe houses and trusted operatives, and keeping lines of communication open.
During a capital-e Emergency even paper-pushers can have greatness thrust upon them, and Modi ended up with responsibilities way outside his formal job description:
Chhayanak Mehta tells of how, after Deshmukh’s arrest, it was discovered that the papers he was carrying were still with him. These contained plans for the future actions of the [resistance], and it was essential to somehow retrieve them. To this end, Modi planned a distraction with the help of a female swayamsevak from Maningar. They went to the police station where Deshmukh was being held. While she posed as a relative and contrived a meeting with the prisoner, Modi somehow took the documents from under the noses of the police.
Or:
Modi was also responsible for transportation and travel to Gujarat of those opponents of Indra still at liberty … Modi too, in the course of his duties, was compelled to travel, often with pamphlets that could have got him arrested. To minimize the risk he became a master of disguise, something that came naturally to one who always paid attention to his appearance. On one outing, he would appear as a saffron-robed sanyasi; on another, as a turbaned Sikh. One time he was sitting in a railway carriage, hiding behind a thick black beard, when his old schoolteacher sat down next to the grown-up “urchin”. The disguise worked perfectly, but some years afterwards the teacher attested that as Narendra disembarked, he introduced himself and offered a hearty saluation.
Still, the Emergency ground on. One aspect the book doesn’t stress, but which I was surprised to read about when Googling the period, was the forced sterilizations. Under pressure from the US and UN to control exponentially rising populations, Indira had started various population control efforts in the 60s, all ambiguously voluntary. Over time, the level of pressure ratcheted up, and during the Emergency the previously-ambiguous coercion became naked and violent. “In 1976-1977, the programme led to 8.3 million sterilisations, most of them forced”.
How did this end? Gandhi called an election — during which she was predictably voted out completely and her party lost more thoroughly than any party has ever lost anything before. Her opponents’ campaign was based on things like “she just forceably sterilized 8 million people and you could be next”, which is honestly a pretty compelling platform. The real question is why she gave up her emergency dictatorship and called an election at all. According to the book:
It is more likely that in ending the Emergency Indira was thinking of herself, not India. She was aware of her growing international reputation as a tyrant, the daughter of a great democratic leader whose legacy she had damaged. As the journalist Tavleen Singh points out, the pressure to end the Emergency came simply from Indira Gandhi finding it unbearable that “the Western media had taken to calling her a dictator.”
(but before you interpret this as too inspiring a story of the victory of good over evil, Indira Gandhi was voted back in as prime minister three years later. We’ll get to that.)
Modi came out of the Emergency a rising star, appreciated by all for his logistical role in the Resistance. In the newly open political climate, the RSS was devoting more attention to their political wing and asked Modi to come on as a sort of campaign-manager-at-large, who would travel all around India and help friendly politicians get elected. He turned out to be really good at this, and rose through the ranks until he was one of the leading lights of the new BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, “Indian People’s Party”). He spent the next two decades running campaigns, traveling the country, and getting involved in internal backstabbing (which he had a habit of losing in ways that got him kicked out of the party just before something terrible happened, leaving him as the only person untarnished by the terrible thing when they inevitably invited him back). Finally some of Modi’s political enemies failed badly in the leadership of Gujarat — one was expelled for corruption, another suffered several natural disasters which he responded to poorly. Modi had been accepted back into the party. He was beloved by Gujaratis, who still remembered his heroic work during the Resistance. He was the only person untarnished by various terrible things. By the rules of Indian politics, it was the party’s choice who would replace the resigning incumbent as Chief Minister of Gujarat, and as Modi tells it, everyone else just kind of agreed he was the natural choice (his enemies say he did various scheming and backstabbing at this point). So on October 7 2001, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat, India’s fifth-largest state.
Comments Off on Narendra Modi apparently doesn’t inspire mere biographies … he gets hagiographies
September 12, 2021
Terry Pratchett: Discworld And Beyond
Biographics
Published 19 Mar 2021Dive into Discworld.
Comments Off on Terry Pratchett: Discworld And Beyond
September 7, 2021
How William Fairbairn Created the Modern SWAT Team in Warlord Era Shanghai
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Jun 2021William E. Fairbairn is best known for his work with Eric Sykes and their “Commando” knife design during World War Two. However, Fairbairn spent some 33 years in the Shanghai Municipal Police, working his way up from a beat constable to Assistant Commissioner. There he was responsible for the SMPD adopting truly forward-thinking fighting methods, and he essentially invented the modern SWAT team (the “Reserve Unit”, which Fairbairn led for 10 years). He combined expertise in formal marksmanship, instinctive practical shooting, and hand-to-hand combat schools (including jiu-jitsu and judo) into a comprehensive training program like no other on earth at the time.
Book references:
The World’s First SWAT Team, by Leroy Thompson:
https://amzn.to/2TrYiNvGentleman & Warrior, by Peter Robins:
https://amzn.to/3vuODn9http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Comments Off on How William Fairbairn Created the Modern SWAT Team in Warlord Era Shanghai
