Quotulatiousness

January 27, 2024

Flashpoint: Texas

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton wonders if you’re ready for a full-blown Constitutional crisis:

I’m sure that by now, we’re all aware of what is continuing to take place down in Texas. Far from backing down in his standoff with FedGov over the seizure of Shelby Park in Eagle Pass and subsequent expulsion of federal agents, Gov. Abbott has directed the state’s National Guard to continue interdicting illegal immigrants. Indeed, in response to the recent SCOTUS decision allowing the Feds to dismantle the razor wire Texas installed, they’ve simply installed more, in direct defiance of the wishes of the Regime. The Regime has now responded by giving Abbott and Texas an ultimatum — restore control of the park to the Federal government by the afternoon of January 26, or … well … something. Whether the governor ultimately continues to tell the Feds to get bent remains to be seen, but so far the trend is looking pretty good.

Of course, it helps that — for once — Republicans across the country have actually found a little courage to support doing what’s right. As of writing this, the Republican governors of 25 other states have all issued statements of support for Texas’ position. Hence, there are now an outright majority of states whose executives (who control their various National and State Guards) are publicly backing Texan efforts to secure our border. Many of these governors have explicitly cited the Biden administration’s continued abandonment of the federal government’s constitutional duty to protect the several states from invasion and the constitutional right of the states to act in their own defence as sovereign entities in their own right.

Needless to say, this is a constitutional crisis that would not have been conceivable even twenty years ago (well, except for this one movie that seems to have been amazingly prescient). Since 1865, the doctrine of absolute federal supremacy has been in force and the balance of power between the state and national governments has inexorably trended in Washington, DC’s favour. Occasional spurts of opposition to the contrary, most of the previous incipient talk by states about “reining in the federal government” generally proved to be all words and no action. On a few things (e.g. marijuana legalisation), the Regime allowed states to “oppose” federal policy if these were policies that the Regime wanted to change anywise but couldn’t “officially” at the federal level. But on anything that was a true Regime priority, FedGov brooked no dissent. So it is now, but the calculus has changed. What would have been impossible in 2003 is now on the verge of happening in 2023.

This all highlights the fundamental illegitimacy of our current federal government. There is no moral or legal case to be made to justify the actions of the Biden administration. The federal Constitution both enjoins the federal government to protect the states from foreign invasion (which being overrun with millions of foreigners breaking our laws most certainly counts as) and also grants the states the right to protect their own borders and sovereignty. Instead of doing this, the Biden administration has been purposefully inviting hordes of migrants to enter this country. Indeed, this is being encouraged in contravention to statutory federal law as well. Further, if Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is correct (and he almost assuredly is), the administration has even been partnering with criminal cartels to smuggle illegals into this country. All in all, there is absolutely no justification to be credibly made for the Regime’s actions and anyone who supports them are in opposition to the Constitution, the laws, and the people of this land.

Despite the fevered ravings of various progressive “Christians” on social media, the moral argument for allowing the Regime to throw the gates open is nonsense. Indeed, the whole attempt to craft a “biblical” argument for open borders is simple-minded and ignorant of the relevant scriptural and historical context. Simply put, the Bible’s approach to “the stranger” falls into line with common ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean modes of hospitality that were meant to “tame” the foreigner and integrate him into a society, thus preventing him from causing disruption to that society. If that couldn’t be accomplished, then the “inhospitable foreigner” was either to be expelled or eliminated. Needless to say, this applied only to individuals or small family groups — large masses of foreigners attempting to enter an ancient country would have been rightly recognised as an invasion and dealt with accordingly.

However, the illegitimacy of the current Regime and its actions alone can’t explain why the Republicans have closed ranks so precipitously. After all, Republican politicians are not exactly known for their intestinal fortitude when faced with opposition of any kind. Yet, even Northeastern moderate squishes like New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu have signed onto supporting Texas in this. Something changed that has caused the GOP, almost as a whole, to support this, either openly or tacitly.

December 18, 2023

QotD: A short history of the (long) Fifth Century

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The chaotic nature of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire makes a short recounting of its history difficult but a sense of chronology and how this all played out is going to be necessary so I will try to just hit the highlights.

First, its important to understand that the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was not the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries (all AD, to be clear). From 235 to 284, Rome had suffered a seemingly endless series of civil wars, waged against the backdrop of worsening security situations on the Rhine/Danube frontier and a peer conflict in the east against the Sassanid Empire. These wars clearly caused trade and economic disruptions as well as security problems and so the Roman Empire that emerges from the crisis under the rule of Diocletian (r. 284-305), while still powerful and rich by ancient standards, was not as powerful or as rich as in the first two centuries and also had substantially more difficult security problems. And the Romans subsequently are never quite able to shake the habit of regular civil wars.

One of Diocletian’s solutions to this problem was to attempt to split the job of running the empire between multiple emperors; Diocletian wanted a four emperor system (the “tetrarchy” or “rule of four”) but what stuck among his successors, particular Constantine (r. 306-337) and his family (who ruled till 363), was an east-west administrative divide, with one emperor in the east and one in the west, both in theory cooperating with each other ruling a single coherent empire. While this was supposed to be a purely administrative divide, in practice, as time went on, the two halves increasing had to make do with their own revenues, armies and administration; this proved catastrophic for the western half, which had less of all of these things (if you are wondering why the East didn’t ride to the rescue, the answer is that great power conflict with the Sassanids). In any event, with the death of Theodosius I in 395, the division of the empire became permanent; never again would one man rule both halves.

We’re going to focus here almost entirely on the western half of the empire […]

The situation on the Rhine/Danube frontier was complex. The peoples on the other side of the frontier were not strangers to Roman power; indeed they had been trading, interacting and occasionally raiding and fighting over the borders for some time. That was actually part of the Roman security problem: familiarity had begun to erode the Roman qualitative advantage which had allowed smaller professional Roman armies to consistently win fights on the frontier. The Germanic peoples on the other side had begun to adopt large political organizations (kingdoms, not tribes) and gained familiarity with Roman tactics and weapons. At the same time, population movements (particularly by the Huns) further east in Europe and on the Eurasian Steppe began creating pressure to push these “barbarians” into the empire. This was not necessarily a bad thing: the Romans, after conflict and plague in the late second and third centuries, needed troops and they needed farmers and these “barbarians” could supply both. But […] the Romans make a catastrophic mistake here: instead of reviving the Roman tradition of incorporation, they insisted on effectively permanent apartness for the new arrivals, even when they came – as most would – with initial Roman approval.

This problem blows up in 378 in an event – the Battle of Adrianople – which marks the beginning of the “decline and fall” and thus the start of our “long fifth century”. The Goths, a Germanic-language speaking people, pressured by the Huns had sought entry into Roman territory; the emperor in the East, Valens, agreed because he needed soldiers and farmers and the Goths might well be both. Local officials, however, mistreated the arriving Goth refugees leading to clashes and then a revolt; precisely because the Goths hadn’t been incorporated into the Roman military or civil system (they were settled with their own kings as “allies” – foederati – within Roman territory), when they revolted, they revolted as a united people under arms. The army sent to fight them, under Valens, engaged foolishly before reinforcements could arrive from the West and was defeated.

In the aftermath of the defeat, the Goths moved to settle in the Balkans and it would subsequently prove impossible for the Romans to move them out. Part of the reason for that was that the Romans themselves were hardly unified. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here except to note that usurpers and assassinations among the Roman elite are common in this period, which generally prevented any kind of unified Roman response. In particular, it leads Roman leaders (both generals and emperors) desperate for troops, often to fight civil wars against each other, to rely heavily on Gothic (and later other “barbarian”) war leaders. Those leaders, often the kings of their own peoples, were not generally looking to burn the empire down, but were looking to create a place for themselves in it and so understandably tended to militate for their own independence and recognition.

Indeed, it was in the context of these sorts of internal squabbles that Rome is first sacked, in 410 by the Visigothic leader Alaric. Alaric was not some wild-eyed barbarian freshly piled over the frontier, but a Roman commander who had joined the Roman army in 392 and probably rose to become king of the Visigoths as well in 395. Alaric had spent much of the decade before 410 alternately feuding with and working under Stilicho, a Romanized Vandal, who had been a key officer under the emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) and a major power-player after his death because he controlled Honorius, the young emperor in the West. Honorius’ decision to arrest and execute Stilicho in 408 seems to have precipitated Alaric’s move against Rome. Alaric’s aim was not to destroy Rome, but to get control of Honorius, in particular to get supplies and recognition from him.

That pattern: Roman emperors, generals and foederati kings – all notionally members of the Roman Empire – feuding, was the pattern that would steadily disassemble the Roman Empire in the west. Successful efforts to reassert the direct control of the emperors on foederati territory naturally created resentment among the foederati leaders but also dangerous rivalries in the imperial court; thus Flavius Aetius, a Roman general, after stopping Attila and assembling a coalition of Visigoths, Franks, Saxons and Burgundians, was assassinated by his own emperor, Valentinian III in 454, who was in turn promptly assassinated by Aetius’ supporters, leading to another crippling succession dispute in which the foederati leaders emerged as crucial power-brokers. Majorian (r. 457-461) looked during his reign like he might be able to reverse this fragmentation, but his efforts at reform offended the senatorial aristocracy in Rome, who then supported the foederati leader Ricimer (half-Seubic, half-Visigoth but also quite Romanized) in killing Majorian and putting the weak Libius Severus (r. 461-465) on the throne. The final act of all of this comes in 476 when another of these “barbarian” leaders, Odoacer, deposed the latest and weakest Roman emperor, the boy Romulus Augustus (generally called Romulus Augustulus – the “little” Augustus) and what was left of the Roman Empire in the west ceased to exist in practice (Odoacer offered to submit to the authority of the Roman Emperor in the East, though one doubts his real sincerity). Augustulus seems to have taken it fairly well – he retired to an estate in Campania originally built by the late Republican Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus and lived out his life there in leisure.

The point I want to draw out in all of this is that it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroyed from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed (as we’ll see next time) there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.

It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.

December 9, 2023

Venezuela’s renewed imperialism

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Like many of us, Colby Cosh is trying to figure out what’s going on in Venezuela these days, as the government “won” a plebiscite to push its long-standing claim for a huge chunk of next-door neighbour Guyana’s territory:

Map showing the two disputed land areas of Guyana. The red region is disputed with Venezuela (Guayana Esequiba) and the yellow region is disputed with Suriname (Tigri or New River Triangle)
Map by SurinameCentral via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been plunging into the weeds — as some of my readers perhaps are — trying to figure out why Venezuela is trying to take over three-quarters of the land area of neighbouring Guyana. I mean, yes, duh, the simple answer is “oil”. The relevant part of Guyana — the sparsely populated, heavily Indigenous Essequibo region west of the river of the same name — has been claimed by Venezuela with varying degrees of vigour and indignation since it became independent from Spain. In the last decade or so, it has come to light there is abundant oil beneath the continental shelf belonging to the Essequibo area.

It might, in fact, be enough oil to make Guyana the world’s largest crude producer in a manner of months. Such an event would almost certainly create an unbearable crisis for the radical-left Venezuelan government, which has fouled up its own oil industry, obliterated its currency and created the single largest refugee crisis in the recorded history of the Americas. And so, the North Korea of the Western Hemisphere is suddenly behaving in an awfully warlike — one might say imperialistic — manner towards a tiny neighbour. Which is, in turn, why the United States is rattling the sabre in Guyana’s defence.

The basic situation in the Essequibo region in the centuries after Columbus was that the territory de jure belonged to Spain but was often really in the hands of Dutch mariners and colonists. There was a long cycle of Dutch incursion and Spanish retaliation. Venezuela inherited and pursued the Spanish claims upon independence — originally as part of the Republic of Gran Colombia (1811) and then as a sovereign state unto itself (1830). Britain gained the Dutch territory in the Napoleonic Wars and incorporated Essequibo into the unified colony of British Guiana in 1831.

The two countries recognized that they had a big disagreement over where the Venezuela-British Guiana border might actually lie. But Venezuela wasn’t in a position to pick a fight with the British Empire, and British public opinion couldn’t be convinced to care very much about the problem. The two countries kicked the can down the road and mutually agreed not to colonize the area.

Fast-forward a bit: in the 1870s, gold was discovered in the disputed zone, waaay over toward the Venezuelan side, and in the 19th century, gold meant a gold rush. British and American privateers started turning up with shovels and pickaxes in the interior, sovereignty be damned. Venezuela eventually began to lobby the U.S. executive branch for redress, reminding American politicians of their precious Monroe Doctrine (which was technically incompatible with the existence of a “British Guiana”). Britain, coming under uncomfortable diplomatic pressure, agreed to submit the border question to neutral arbitration.

And here we come to the heart of the quarrel. The U.S. and Britain set up an arbitration panel of the classic 19th-century kind — the same kind of panel, in fact, that fixed up much of the U.S.-Canada border during the same period. This panel had two American Supreme Court justices representing Venezuelan interests; two equally high-ranking British judges; and a neutral fifth man borrowed from the Russian Empire — the Estonian international-law scholar Friedrich Martens (1845-1909). Throughout the 19th century, Russia had often been used in this way by western powers as an honest broker, and arbitration was seen as a universal means of peaceful dispute resolution — the great hope of the world’s future.

And yet, like what seems to be every border dispute in South America since the Spanish skedaddled, an agreement doesn’t seem to last more than the lifetime of one of the governments that negotiated it and some of them aren’t even that durable. Ed Nash has a video summarizing the economic and military state of affairs that helps explain why this dispute is potentially of global concern.

November 30, 2023

Why Wilders’ PPV appealed to Dutch voters and why the establishment is utterly horrified

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

In The Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus explain why Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom took so many seats in the Dutch elections:

Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.

It was in 2004, the same year that Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered, that Geert Wilders saw his opening.

Though Wilders had been in Dutch politics for a long time, that year Wilders left the VVD — the center-right party where he served alongside Ayaan — and branched out on his own with a new party, the Party for Freedom. The key issue that led to his break was that Wilders refused to countenance the possibility of EU membership for Turkey (which the VVD was willing to accept as long as certain conditions were met).

Almost immediately, Wilders became the most controversial man in Dutch politics. He urged the banning of the Quran and a halt to the construction of new mosques. He railed against what he described as the “Islamization of the Netherlands”. When he asked a crowd in 2014 whether they wanted “more or fewer” Moroccans, the crowd chanted “fewer”, and Wilders replied that this was something that would be arranged. Prosecutors argued this constituted an illegal collective insult, and the Dutch High Court ultimately ruled that Wilders was guilty, but without sentencing him to a penalty.

It was easy to be scandalized by Wilders. The press and the political class certainly were. Some publicly supported Wilders’ prosecution in the “fewer Moroccans” case.

We disagreed — and still do — with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism.

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration.

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they — the public — had not been adequately consulted. In the 1960s, 60,000 Muslims lived in the Netherlands; today there are around 1.2 million, thanks to massive chain migration, asylum, and a high birth rate. (Fewer than 50,000 Jews remain in the country.)

While political elites told the public to be tolerant of Islam, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of religious tolerance, ordinary people saw that Islamists were increasingly well-entrenched in the country, a point even made by Dutch intelligence officials. Although Wilders’ rhetoric can be uninhibited and extreme, he articulates a general and perfectly legitimate feeling among voters who know that Islamism is a threat to their way of life and want to oppose it. (Wilders has been the subject of sustained Islamist threats and has had to live his life within a tight security bubble because of them.)

While elites told the public that giving more power to the EU was an unqualified good, ordinary people took a more nuanced view. When we left the Netherlands in the early 2000s, the Dutch were solidly pro-EU. Today, although most Dutch voters do not wish to leave the EU, there are growing concerns that, especially when it comes to migration and borders, too much authority has been ceded to supranational institutions.

Over the years, we have heard more and more friends express private sympathy with Geert Wilders. And it should be noted that during the most recent campaign, he toned down some of his more extreme rhetoric. Previously, his party called for a “Ministry of Re-migration and De-Islamization”. That is no longer the case. Similarly, the phrase “Islam is not a religion, but a totalitarian ideology”, which was previously part of the election manifesto, was scrapped. This time around, Wilders emphasized his commitment to working within the Dutch coalition system, which he conceded would require him to make compromises in order to be able to govern.

The recent aggressive and occasionally violent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Dutch streets — as elsewhere — may have been the final blow that led to last week’s landslide. It’s worth noting that Wilders’ voters do not fit a crude stereotype — he won the most votes of any party among voters between the ages of 18 and 35.

October 12, 2023

Considering Israel’s potential courses of action in Gaza

Filed under: Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander puts on his Operational Planning hat and sifts through what Israel may decide to do in light of open source information from Israeli and other sources:

This isn’t going to make anyone happy. It doesn’t matter if you are on the “cease fire and de-escalate” left or the “Linebacker III” right — none of my COAs will be quite what you are looking for … though the Linebacker III crowd might be OK with COA-B and COA-C … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Cut this ‘ole Operational Planner some slack, and a few caveats:

  1. I’ve had to rewrite 85% of this from its first draft over the weekend as we now have Commander’s Intent (CI) and higher Direction and Guidance (D&G). That had me discard two of my three Courses of Action (COA).
  2. I am quite sure the Israeli Defense Forces had appropriate draft Operational Plans (OPLANS) on the shelf with all sorts of Branch Plans and Sequels waiting to be updated and providing enough once dusted off to get things in to Phase I.
  3. I don’t have a Planning Staff or even a Core Planning Group, intel support, or even some Italian colleagues to remind me to take my 10:00 and 15:00 coffee breaks, but I’ll do my best anyway. As anyone in crisis response planning can tell you — as opposed to advanced plans types — you have to be comfortable enough to accept that you don’t have enough time, staff, or information to produce a great OPLAN, but you’ll come up with a good enough plan anyway. You’re happy to be wrong about a detail or two, and are open-minded enough, secure in your ego, and content to change what you thought was perfect — some or all of your plan — the moment you get better information, changes in CI or D&G, or the situation develops in unexpected ways … as they do.
  4. If you are looking for a detailed Tactical OPLAN or a sweeping Strategic OPLAN, you’re at the wrong substack. I’m an Operational Planner and what I am about to do is an “elevator speech” level Preliminary COA Decision Brief with the principals (J2, J3, J4, J5, and the Chief of Staff) where they get to weigh in and refine what the Planning Group I am the Chair of has produced (OK, I’m a Planning Group of one and I made myself Chair … I don’t care, it’s going on my FITREP anyway). Following the Principals’ input — especially from the Chief of Staff who has had better one on one time with the Commander and as such has the nuance no one else does — I’ll beg for a day and will be told I have two hours to make changes and then well brief the Commander.

Working from open-source information, we have CI and D&G from the Prime Minister and the Minister for Defense.

If you go to YouTube you can get the script, but we’ll use this statement from the weekend as a close approximation of POLMIL-level guidance from Prime Minister Netanyahu;

As a Planning Staff, what do I need to take away from this?

  • Israel is at war.
  • Israel will finish it.
  • We will exact a price that will be remembered by them (Hamas) and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.

From Defense Minister Yoav Gallant we have:

  • Gaza won’t return to what it was before.
  • We started the offensive from the air, later will also from the ground, and that’s how it will end.
  • Gaza will never return to what it was.

Like I said … that had me ditch two of the my three COA from this weekend. If you wanted to know how it shifted, my most dovish COA is gone, and my most harsh COA is now the center of my Overton Window. A planner must try to align with CI and D&G as it is understood — not how he wishes it to be.

October 7, 2023

Rearming West Germany: The G1 FAL

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Jun 2023

Today we are taking a look at a German G1 pattern FAL. The initial purchased of the G1 were actual made by the German Border Guard (the Bundesgrenschutz). In the aftermath of World War Two, the western Allies decided to perpetually disarm Germany, and German security was provided by French, British, and American forces. As the Iron Curtain fell across Europe, that attitude softened — West Germany was on the front lines of the Cold War, and could be a valuable ally against Communism in the East. Thus in 1951, the West German Bundesgrenzschutz (Border Guards) were formed and armed — basically with all WW2 Wehrmacht equipment. Looking to improve its small arms in 1955/56, the BGS tested a number of modern rifles and decided to adopt the FAL.

The BGS initially ordered 2,000 FAL rifles from FN, with wooden hand guards and a fixed flash hider (essentially a standard Belgian FAL) — these are known as the “A” pattern. A second BGS order for 4,800 more rifles followed, this time of the “B” pattern with a metal handguard and folding bipod. This was the first use of an integral bipod on the FAL, and would go on to be a popular option for other buyers.

In 1955, the German Army was reinstated as the Bundeswehr. Looking over the BGS rifle testing, the Bundeswehr also decided to adopt the FAL, and placed and order for 100,000 rifles — the “C” pattern. These include sights lowered 3mm by specific German request, as well as a set of swappable muzzle devices (flash hider and blank-firing adapter).

Ultimately, FN was unwilling to license FAL production to West Germany, and this drove the Germans to adopt the Spanish CETME as the G3 rifle, which it was able to license. The Bundeswehr G1 rifles were eventually transferred to the BGS and later sold to other allies as surplus.

Special thanks to Bear Arms in Scottsdale, AZ for providing access to this rifle for video!
(more…)

October 5, 2023

The Great War: Its End and Effects, Lecture by Prof Margaret MacMillan

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

McDonald Centre
Published 25 Jan 2019

22 January 2019, “How far did the Versailles Treaty make Peace?”, Professor Margaret MacMillan, Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford. The lecture was sponsored by Christ Church Cathedral and the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, Oxford.

September 19, 2023

The end of the Western Roman Empire

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

Theophilus Chilton updates a review from several years ago with a few minor changes:

British archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkin’s excellent 2005 work The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is a text that is designed to be a corrective for the type of bad academic trends that seem to entrench themselves in even the most innocuous of subjects. In this case, Ward-Perkins, along with fellow Oxfordian Peter Heather in his book The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, sets out to fix a glaring error which has come to dominate much of the scholarly study of the 4th and 5th centuries in the western Empire for the past few decades.

This error is the view that the western Empire did not actually “fall”. Instead, so say many latter-day historical revisionists, what happened between the Gothic victory at Adrianople in 378 AD and the abdication of Romulus Augustulus, the last western Emperor, in 476 was more of an accident, an unintended consequence of a few boisterous but well-meaning neighbors getting a bit out of hand. Challenged is the very notion that the Germanic tribes (who cannot be termed “barbarians” any longer) actually “invaded”. Certainly, these immigrants did not cause harm to the western Empire — for the western empire wasn’t actually “destroyed”, but merely “transitioned” seamlessly into the era we term the Middle Ages. Ward-Perkins cites one American scholar who goes so far as to term the resettlement of Germans onto land that formerly belonged to Italians, Hispanians, Britons, and Gallo-Romans as taking place “in a natural, organic, and generally eirenic manner”. Certainly, it is gauche among many modern academics in this field to maintain that violent barbarian invasions forcibly ended high civilization and reduced the living standards in these regions to those found a thousand years before during the Iron Age.

Ward-Perkins points out the “whys” of this historical revision. Much of it simply has to do with political correctness (which he names as such) — the notion that we cannot really say that one culture is “higher” or “better” than others. Hence, when the one replaces the other, we cannot speculate as to how this replacement made things worse for all involved. In a similar vein, many continental scholars appear to be uncomfortable with the implications that the story of mass barbarian migrations and subsequent destruction and decivilization has in the ongoing discussion about the European Union’s own immigration policy — a discussion in which many of these same academics fall on the left side of the aisle.

Yet, all of this revisionism is bosh and bunkum, as Ward-Perkins so thoroughly points out. He does this by bringing to the table a perspective that many other academics in this field of study don’t have — that of a field archaeologist who is used to digging in the dirt, finding artifacts, drawing logical conclusions from the empirical evidence, and then using that evidence to decide “what really happened”, rather than just literary sources and speculative theories. Indeed, as the author shows, across the period of the Germanic invasions, the standard of living all across Roman western Europe declined, in many cases quite precipitously, from what it had been in the 3rd century. The quality and number of manufactured goods declined. Evidence for the large-scale integrative trade network that bound the western Empire together and with the rest of the Roman world disappears. In its place we find that trade goods travelled much smaller distances to their buyers — evidence for the breakdown of the commercial world of the West. Indeed, the economic activity of the West disappeared to the point that the volume of trade in western Europe would not be matched again until the 17th century. Evidence for the decline of food production suggests that populations fell all across the region. Ward-Perkins’ discussion of the decline in the size of cattle is enlightening evidence that the degeneration of the region was not merely economic. Economic prosperity, the access of the common citizen to a high standard of living with a wide range of creature comforts, disappeared during this period.

The author, however, is not negligent in pointing out the literary and documentary evidence for the horrors of the barbarian invasions that so many contemporary scholars seem to ignore. Indeed, the picture painted by the sum total of these evidences is one of harrowing destruction caused by aggressive, ruthless invaders seeking to help themselves to more than just a piece of the Roman pie. Despite the recent scholarly reconsiderations, the Germans, instead of settling on the land given to them by various Emperors and becoming good Romans, ended up taking more and more until there was nothing left to take. As Ward-Perkins puts it,

    Some of the recent literature on the Germanic settlements reads like an account of a tea party at the Roman vicarage. A shy newcomer to the village, who is a useful prospect for the cricket team, is invited in. There is a brief moment of awkwardness, while the host finds an empty chair and pours a fresh cup of tea; but the conversation, and village life, soon flow on. The accommodation that was reached between invaders and invaded in the fifth- and sixth- century West was very much more difficult, and more interesting, than this. The new arrival had not been invited, and he brought with him a large family; they ignored the bread and butter, and headed straight for the cake stand. Invader and invaded did eventually settle down together, and did adjust to each other’s ways — but the process of mutual accommodation was painful for the natives, was to take a very long time, and, as we shall see …left the vicarage in very poor shape. (pp. 82-83)

Professor Bret Devereaux discussed the long fifth century on his blog last year:

… it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroy[ed] from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed […] there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.

It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.

September 3, 2023

The Saalburg: A Roman Fort on the German Frontier

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

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 23 May 2023

A brief tour of the principal buildings in the Saalburg, Germany’s most completely reconstructed Roman fort.
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August 5, 2023

The Anglo-Scottish “Debatable Lands”

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

In the visible portion of this post on the history of the Debatable Lands, Ed West considers the differences between national heartlands and the borders:

Border regions tend to be different, something I thought about during the summer before Brexit when we underwent a mammoth trip across five of those six countries (we never got around to Luxembourg, for which apologies). The journey from Alsace to Baden-Württemberg, or Liguria to Provence, brings home how nationality is often a matter of gradations and unnatural boundaries imposed on the whims of bureaucrats in distant capitals – often more alien than supposed foreigners across the border.

But once you leave that tunnel, things are different; there is no ambiguity between Calais and Dover, only ocean. You’re either in England or France. The same is not true of England’s northern frontier, Britain’s great zone of ambiguity, and in particular the area between Carlisle and Langholm which has historically been known as the “Debatable Land” – the subject of Graham Robb’s book.

Robb, an Anglo-Scot who mostly writes about France, moved back to this part of Britain in the 2010s, and describes it with his characteristic style of history, personal narrative and social commentary.

The border people are a unique subset of the English nation, being the last to undergo the pacification of government. Until the Union of Crowns in 1603, the region’s unusual position outside the orbit of either London and Edinburgh helped create a culture that was clannish and marked by violent feuds and cattle rustling.

Among the notorious Borderer clans were the Scotts, Burns and Irvines north of the border, and Fenwicks, Millburns, Charltons and Musgraves on the English side, while some could be found on both, among them the Halls, Nixons and Grahams. Many of these clans were outlaws and some were lawmen; others were both or either, depending on circumstances.

This proto-Wild West produced many characters, and among the famous border reivers of legend were men such as Archie Fire-the-Braes, Buggerback, Davy the Lady, Jok Pott the Bastard, Wynkyng Will, Nebless [noseless] Clem, Fingerless Well and Dog Dyntle [penis] Elliot.

“Debatable Land” most likely comes from batten, common land where livestock could be pastured, and it was this pastoral economy which shaped their psychology: the importance of honour, and a reputation for violence and revenge, as a deterrent against predators.

Violence was so common on the border that there sprung a tradition whereby truces were arranged in return for “blackmail”, a tribute to border chiefs, from the Middle English male, tribute; only in the nineteenth century did this come to mean any sort of extortion.

Another of the Borderers’ contributions to our language is “bereaved”, which is how you felt after the reivers had raided your land (it usually meant to have lost property rather than a loved one). Other local terms were less successful in spreading, such as “scumfishing”, which meant “surrounding a pele tower with a smouldering heap of damp straw and smoking out its inhabitants”, as Robb put it.

Border folk relied heavily on the protection of their clan, and so “for a reiver, the greatest disgrace was not excommunication but ostracism: if a man failed to keep his word, one of his gloves or a picture of his face was stuck on the end of a spear or a sword and paraded around at public meetings. This ‘bauchling’ was considered a punishment worse than death.”

Both the kings of England and Scotland regarded them as a nuisance. In 1525, the Archbishop of Glasgow excommunicated the reivers en masse; Parliamentary decrees issued by authorities in England and Scotland between 1537 and 1551 stated that “all Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock … without any redress to be made for same”.

In the 1580s the border area remained “verie ticklie and dangerous”. One adviser even urged Elizabeth I to build another Roman wall because he believed the “Romaynes” had built theirs to defend themselves “from the dayly and daungereous incurtyons of the valyaunte barbarous Scottyshe nation”.

July 13, 2023

“… if Ukraine were to join NATO in the middle of a war, then congrats – most of Europe and North America are at war”

Filed under: Government, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I’ve said several times, I have great sympathy for ordinary Ukrainians caught up in a war not of their making, but I’m not a fan of the awesomely corrupt Ukrainian government. NATO nations providing weapons, ammunition, and training is fine, but in no way is Ukraine ready to become a member of the alliance and will not be until after this war is over and they conduct a very significant set of anti-corruption reforms in their national government. CDR Salamander points out the insanity of western pundits demanding that NATO add Ukraine to the alliance in the middle of a major war:

I understand the desire for Ukraine — and others for that matter — to be part of NATO. I also understand why the frontline states in Central Europe such as the Baltics republics and Visegrad Group would like Ukraine in as well. Defense in depth and long fronts are a thing.

As much as I can sympathize with the above, I also understand the reasons that Ukraine and other nations may never be right for NATO membership, or at best be a decade or two out. Single points of failure triggers to another world war — where every new member state increases the aggregate risk to all members — is not a minor thing to consider.

There is also the very real fact that Ukraine is in a war right now, for her an existential war with Russia. This CNN article is a perfect example of some of the absolutely foolish questions people are even considering right now. I’m not even going to quote from it as there are dozens like it out as the NATO summit is going on. It is a waste of your time.

You don’t need to be an international lawyer to understand that if Ukraine were to join NATO in the middle of a war, then congrats — most of Europe and North America are at war. As history tells us, when Europe and North America goes to war, eventually the world joins in.

For today’s post, I’d like to pull some quotes from a superb Financial Times article, NATO’s dilemma: what to do about Ukraine’s bid to join?

    Membership represents the long-term security that Kyiv wants and was promised 15 years ago. But Russia’s war has complicated things

    When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strides into Nato’s annual summit in Vilnius on Wednesday, his country will have been fighting a full-scale war of survival against Russia for 503 days.

2008, in the last year of the Bush-43 administration. The year it looked like we had Iraq stabilized yet were already planning to take the keys in Afghanistan back from NATO after the alliance culminated in the summer of 2007.

The year of imperial overreach in denial;

    It was over breakfast in Bucharest in 2008 that the seeds of Nato’s current dilemma were sown.

    At an early morning meeting on the second day of the alliance’s summit that year, then secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer met with US president George W Bush and his French and German counterparts Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.

    The outcome of that breakfast, and a result of Merkel softening her opposition to Bush’s proposal to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia, was a statement by the entire Nato alliance.

    Both countries “will become members of Nato”, it said, without providing a timeline. That declaration, at the same time both unequivocal and non-committal, was hailed as a major achievement. It has since sunk into infamy.

Amazing how people forget that other nations get a vote. Your actions will cause reactions by those who either think they will benefit from or be endangered by them. Roll that simple context in to the 1,000 year record of people west of the Vistula misreading Russia and you have this;

    Four months later Putin’s tanks rolled into northern Georgia. In 2014 his special forces annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Nato, as Putin knew well, refuses to accept new members with “frozen conflict” on their territory. Aside from condemnatory rhetoric, Nato did little to punish Moscow. Putin, who had been present at the Bucharest summit as a guest, had called Nato’s bluff.

Putin was right. No one will join NATO who has border disputes or are best known for their globe-spanning corruption.

NATO and the USA’s natsec “blob” was, again, wrong. Being wrong isn’t the problem. It is an imperfect business where mistakes are going to be made. The important thing is to learn from them and if the same people and institutions are perpetually wrong, you get new people and institutions to help you make decisions. That is the danger. It isn’t that we “remember everything but learn nothing” it is more that we “remember only what confirms our priors and only learn to try harder next time.”

June 28, 2023

The Treaty of Versailles: 100 Years Later

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Gresham College
Published 4 Jun 2019

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in June 1919. Did the treaty lead to the outbreak of World War II? Was the attempt to creat a new world order a failure?

A lecture by Margaret MacMillan, University of Toronto
04 June 2019 6pm (UK time)
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an…

A century has passed since the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. After WWI the treaty imposed peace terms which have remained the subject of controversy ever since. It also attempted to set up a new international order to ensure that there would never again be such a destructive war as that of 1914-18. Professor MacMillan, a specialist in British imperial history and the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries, will consider if the treaty led to the outbreak of the Second World War and whether the attempt to create a new world order was a failure.
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April 10, 2023

US Army and Marine Corps deployments other than with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF)

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Another excerpt from John Sayen’s Battalion: An Organizational Study of United States Infantry currently being serialized on Bruce Gudmundsson’s Tactical Notebook shows where US infantry units (US Army and USMC) were deployed aside from those assigned to Pershing’s AEF on the Western Front in France:

Apart from the war in Europe, the principal military concern of the Wilson administration during 1917-18 was the protection of resources and installations considered vital to the war effort. The threat of German sabotage in the United States was taken very seriously. In addition, Mexico was still unstable politically and sporadic border clashes continued to occur into 1919. Mexican oil was also regarded as an essential resource and the troops stationed on the Mexican border were prepared to invade in order to keep it flowing. However, all the National Guard, National Army, and even the Regular Army regiments raised for wartime only were reserved for duty with the AEF. (The National Army 332nd and 339th Regiments did deploy to Italy and North Russia, respectively, but both remained under AEF command.) This left non-AEF assignments in the hands of the pre-war Regular Army regiments.

Out of 38 Regular infantry regiments available in 1917, 25 were on guard duty within the Continental United States or on the Mexican border and 13 garrisoned U.S. possessions overseas. Local defense forces raised in Hawaii and the Philippines eventually freed the pre-war regiments stationed in those places for duty elsewhere. By the end of the war the 15th Infantry in China, the 33rd and 65th (Puerto Rican) Infantry in the Canal Zone, and the 27th and 31st Infantry (both under the AEF tables) in Siberia were the only non-AEF regiments still overseas. Inside the United States state militia (non-National Guard) units and 48 newly raised battalions of “United States Guards” (recruited from men physically disqualified for overseas service) had freed 20 regiments from stateside guard duties, but not in time for any of them to fight in France.

Only twelve pre-war regiments actually saw combat in the AEF. Nine of them served with the early-arriving 1st, 2nd, and 3rd AEF Divisions. The other three were with the late arriving 5th and 7th Divisions. One more reached France with the 8th Division, but only days ahead of the Armistice. By this time, the Regular Army regiments had long ago been stripped of most of their pre-war men to provide cadre for new units. They were refilled with so many draftees that their makeup scarcely differed from those of the National Army.*

The situation with the Marines was similar to that of the Regular Army. Most Marine regiments had to perform security and colonial policing duties that kept them away from the “real” war in France. Also like the Army, the Marines made Herculean efforts to accommodate a flood of recruits, acquiring training bases at Quantico Virginia and Parris Island South Carolina, as their existing facilities became too crowded. The Second Regiment (First Provisional Brigade) continued to police Haiti while the Third and Fourth Regiments (Second Provisional Brigade) did the same for the Dominican Republic. The First Regiment remained at Philadelphia as the core of the Advance Base Force (ABF) but its role soon became little more than that of a caretaker of ABF equipment.

Although there was little danger from the German High Seas Fleet ABF units might still be needed in the Caribbean to help secure the Panama Canal and a few other critical points against potential attacks by German surface raiders or heavily armed “U-cruisers.” Political unrest was endangering both the Cuban sugar crop and Mexican oil. To address such concerns, the Marines raised the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Regiments as infantry units in August, October, and November 1917, respectively. The Seventh, with eight companies went to Guantanamo, Cuba, to protect American sugar interests. The Ninth Regiment (nine companies) and the headquarters of the Third Provisional Brigade followed. The Eighth Regiment with 10 companies, meanwhile, went to Fort Crockett near Galveston, Texas to be available to seize the Mexican oil fields with an amphibious landing, should the situation in Mexico get out of hand.

Three other rifle companies (possibly the ones missing from the Seventh and Ninth Regiments) occupied the Virgin Islands against possible raids by German submarines. In August 1918, the Seventh and Ninth Regiments expanded to 10 companies each. The situation in Cuba having subsided, the Marine garrison there was reduced to just the Seventh Regiment. The Ninth Regiment and the Third Brigade headquarters joined the Eighth at Fort Crockett.**

    * Order of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War op cit pp. 310-314 and 1372-1379. A battalion of United States Guards was allowed 31 officers and 600 men. These units were recruited mainly from draftees physically disqualified for overseas service. The 27th and 31st Infantry when sent to Siberia were configured as AEF regiments, though they were never part of the AEF. Large numbers of men had to be drafted out of the 8th Division to build these two regiments up to AEF strength. This seriously disrupted the 8th Division’s organization.

    ** Order of Battle of the United States Land Forces in the World War op cit pp. 1372-78; Truman R. Strobridge, A Brief History of the Ninth Marines (Washington DC, Historical Division HQ US Marine Corps; revised version 1967) pp. 1-2; James S. Santelli, A Brief History of the Eighth Marines (Washington DC, Historical Division HQ US Marine Corps; 1976) pp. 1-3; and James S. Santelli, A Brief History of the Seventh Marines (Washington DC, Historical Division HQ US Marine Corps; 1980) pp. 1-5.

March 24, 2023

Only a paper dragon?

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

In UnHerd, Edward Luttwak suggests that China’s military may be much more apparent than real:

The day after Li Keqiang, China’s departing Prime Minister and the last of Beijing’s moderates, called for more market liberalisation to reach this year’s 5% growth target, Xi Jinping responded by announcing a muscle-flexing 7.2% increase in China’s defence spending. That is certainly consistent with Xi’s truculent stance (he replied to Nancy Pelosi’s recent Taiwan visit with a series of ballistic missile launches), and with his official promise to the Communist Party that China will become the world’s dominant power by 2049. But what do those percentages actually mean?

The declared total of China’s newly increased defence budget at 1.56 trillion yuan amounts to $230 billion, according to the current exchange rate. If that were the case, it would mean that China is falling further behind the United States, whose own fiscal 2023 defence spending is increasing to $797 billion (and actually more, since that figure does not include its funding for military construction or the added help to Ukraine).

China’s own figure is also generally assumed by experts to be greatly understated — not by fiddling the numbers one by one, but rather by wholesale exclusions, such as the attribution of research-and-development spending to civilian budgets. Even if a commando team of elite forensic accountants were sent into action to uncover China’s actual defence spending, with another team dispatched to determine what’s missing from the US budget, we would still only have a very loose indication of how much actual military strength China and the United States hope to add.

But one thing can be said with absolute certainty: each side is adding less than the rising numbers imply.
In China’s case, a manpower shortage undercuts military spending in the PLA’s ground forces and naval forces, and soon it will affect manned air units as well. The PLA ground forces now stand at some 975,000, a very small number for a country that has 13,743 miles of borders with 14 countries — including extreme high-mountain borders where internal combustion engines lose power, jungle-covered borders where remote observation is spoiled by foliage, Russian-river borders with endemic smuggling, and the border with India’s Ladakh where an accumulation of unresolved Chinese intrusions have forced each side to deploy substantial ground forces, with at least 80,000 on the Chinese side.

Except for Ladakh, which now resembles a war-front, borders are not supposed to be guarded by army troops but by border police. And China did in fact have a substantial dedicated border force, but it was abolished for the same reason that the PLA ground army is so small: a crippling shortage of physically fit Chinese men willing to serve in these regions. Cities and towns, by contrast, do not seem afflicted by such severe manpower shortages, leading to the weird phenomenon on Nepal’s main border crossing to Tibet where, according to an acquaintance, a group of freezing Cantonese city policemen were checking travellers and “guarding the border”. (They said they had been “volunteered” for two months.)

February 14, 2023

China’s awkward actions on the world stage do not charm the neighbours

Filed under: Asia, China, India, Military, Pacific — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander explains why the BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) “coalition” is as unlikely to occur in the real world as any other opium pipe-dream:

Yes, the USA and Canada had our Balloons of February, but in the last year or so, what has China been doing to seem like a pleasant alternative to the United States to the rest of the world?

Her largest neighbor? They get sticks:

    The root cause is an ill-defined, 3,440km (2,100-mile)-long disputed border.

    Rivers, lakes and snowcaps along the frontier mean the line can shift, bringing soldiers face to face at many points, sparking a confrontation.

    The two nations are also competing to build infrastructure along the border, which is also known as the Line of Actual Control. India’s construction of a new road to a high-altitude air base is seen as one of the main triggers for a deadly 2020 clash with Chinese troops.

    How bad is the situation?

    Despite military-level talks, tensions continue. In December 2022 troops clashed for the first time in more than a year.

    It happened near the Tawang sector of Arunachal Pradesh state, the eastern tip of India. Some soldiers suffered minor injuries.

    De-escalation work has taken place since a major clash in June 2020. The Galwan Valley battle — fought with sticks and clubs, not guns — was the first fatal confrontation between the two sides since 1975.

    At least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died.

    Another face-off in January 2021 left troops on both sides injured. It took place near India’s Sikkim state, between Bhutan and Nepal.

The “I” and “C” in the B.R.I.C. are not going to be close friends, ever — one of the reasons I roll my eyes at those who propose the BRIC nations as some kind of power block — something only slightly sillier than the Cold War “Non Aligned Movement.”

With the “B” being the basket case Brazil (always the nation of the future, and always will be), and the “R” being Russia, I mean, child please.

Another nation that if the PRC was just slightly more subtle and less arrogant they might have a chance to make things more difficult for the USA-Japan-Australia defense concerns is The Philippines. They had a window in the last couple of decades, but … if they’re doing this;

The PRC Wolf Warrior Lack of Charm Campaign perhaps may play well internally — and that may be all they care about — but there was a window not long ago that the PRC was playing smart on the world stage — making significant impact in Australia and having the USA happy to let them set up Confucius Institutes at our major universities, etc … but the last decade or so they somehow decided to play a different game.

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