Real Time History
Published 21 Feb 2025With the Japanese surrender in September 1945, the Second World War comes to an end. But for China there won’t be peace right away because the nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek and the communists under Mao Zedong still haven’t resolved their struggle and so the Chinese Civil War will flare up once again.
Chapters:
00:00 Japanese Surrender
03:44 Opposing Forces
07:33 KMT Offensives
12:18 CCP vs KMT Strategy
14.45 CCP Counterattack
19:19 Civilian Experience
23:23 CCP Huaihai Campaign
26:30 Final CCP Offensives
29:31 KMT Escape to Taiwan
31:59 Why did the Communists Win?
36:07 The United States and Taiwan
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August 5, 2025
Origin of the China-Taiwan Conflict: Chinese Civil War 1945-1949
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August 4, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 8 “Caesarion” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 19 Feb 2025Continuing series looking at the HBO/BBC co production drama series ROME. We will look at how they chose to tell the story, at what they changed and where they stuck closer to the history.
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QotD: The impeachment of Andrew Johnson
Over the past few weeks, it has surprised me how seldom the name Andrew Johnson has come up. Sure, every time it has been mentioned that Donald Trump is the third (or fourth — or third and a halfth) President to be impeached, Johnson, the first, is given a brief mention, but very few details are offered of a story almost as stupid, insane, villainous, and corrupt as what’s going on now.
Almost.
I am greatly obliged to my old friend revisionist historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, who encouraged me to look into the Johnson impeachment. Johnson was the 17th President of the United States, rising to that office when his predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Johnson had been a southern Democrat Senator, unjustly reviled by both sides, but remained in the Senate throughout the War Between the States and was chosen by Lincoln to help spread the appeal of a crypto-Republican “National Union” party dedicated to the peaceful and humane reintegration of those states that had seceded and been militarily crushed.
Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, however, held a somewhat different view. He thought he should be running the government. For various unsavory reasons — that would fill a book or two by themselves (hint: look up Grenville M. Dodge) — Stanton wanted to grind the South down even further under the Northern boot-heel, establishing, for example, extra-constitutional military zones to supervise the phony replacement “carpet-bag” state governments that the North had imposed on Southern states.
Once Johnson became President, he fired Stanton — whom more than one historian believes actually engineered Lincoln’s assassination — immediately running afoul of a little ditty called the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, which it appears was specifically cobbled together to keep Johnson from operating his own Presidency, leaving the nascent Stantonian Police State intact. Stanton and his cohorts impeached Johnson; his conviction failed by one vote in the U.S. Senate. Stanton resigned and skulked off to the garbage-heap of history.
L. Neil Smith, “Andrew and Donald”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-12-22.
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July 17, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 7 “Pharsalia” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 22 Jan 2025
Half way through the first season, we take a look at Episode 7, set during the summer of 48 BC amid the campaign between Pompey and Julius Caesar in Macedonia. For once, most of the action takes place away from Rome. Central is the Battle of Pharsalus, where in reality 80,000 or more men clashed in August and Caesar decisively defeated Pompey and his supporters. So today we talk about the reality of the campaign and battle, its political context, and then consider how this is presented for TV in a series where they did not have the option of vast numbers of extras and big set piece battle scenes.
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July 13, 2025
Q&A: Finland and Finnish Small Arms (From Berdan to New Sako AR)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Feb 2025Today’s Q&A is brought to you by the fine folks at Patreon!
I figured that Finland would be a good subject for this month’s Q&A, as I am visiting the country to shoot Finnish Brutality this month. In fact, this video was filmed during the trip (the match took place last weekend, and its video coverage will be coming soon!).
00:39 – Development of the Suomi and PPSh-41 submachine guns
03:24 – Oldest guns used in Finnish Independence War
04:40 – Biggest strength and weakness of the Suomi
06:43 – Soviet use of captured Suomis?
08:52 – Finnish Maxim guns
11:41 – Finnish alcohol
17:05 – Finnish small arms that could have been globally popular but weren’t?
20:04 – Benefits of a small invaded country using the same weapons as its invader?
23:07 – Favorite and least favorite Finnish customs?
25:57 – Finnish Mosin Nagant book by Matt DiRisio
27:26 – Sisu movie
28:28 – Are the Finns masters of improving other peoples’ guns?
30:08 – Pre-independence Finnish arms production
31:47 – Shower beer or sauna beer?
32:20 – Why so few RK95 rifles made, and RK95 vs RK62M?
35:35 – Swedish Mausers in Finland
37:54 – Commercial Sako rifles before and after Beretta bought Sako
39:19 – Finnish gun laws, specifically CCW
40:58 – Interlude: Finnish Brutality 2025 match update w/ Jari Laine
42:24 – Did Finland improve the PKM and SVD like they did the AK and Mosin?
44:57 – 7.62x54R vs 7.62x53R
47:56 – Thoughts on new Sako AR for Swedish and Finnish militaries
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June 29, 2025
June 20, 2025
QotD: The innate appeal of socialism
And the material side of Socialism is technically feasible. Obviously so, and indeed it was obvious by 1865. Consider what the Union Army had to do to keep one million men in the field, simultaneously, spread over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This was not without its problems, of course — soldiers finally receiving their back pay spurred a minor economic boom in 1865-6 — but it was not just possible, but an everyday occurrence, for hundreds of thousands of men, dispersed over a huge geographic area, to receive their entire subsistence from the government. Clothes, shoes, food — the stuff Riis’s “street Arabs” would’ve killed for — all at public expense, delivered with clockwork efficiency.
If Socialism were just that, then indeed we could’ve “built Socialism”, as the Bolsheviks would have it, by the end of the 19th century. And cheaply, too — by the late 1880s, the US Treasury’s massive surplus was a major campaign issue for both parties. The “Yankee Leviathan“, as political historian Richard Bensel put it, was as close to actual Fascism as has ever been put into practice (alas, the term hadn’t been invented yet), and it was just aces at delivering the material goods. (It’s Alanis-level ironic that the Confederacy was even more actual capital-F Fascistic than the Union, given the whole “states’ rights” thing, but that’s what happens in totaler Krieg — win first, sort the theory out later).
Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.
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June 19, 2025
The Guns of the South: Checkmate, Alt-Hist Plausibility Sticklers
Feral Historian
Published 24 Jan 2025Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South gives us a look at a victorious Confederate States as they grapple with the consequences of slavery, war, and the challenges of building a new nation. It also skewers a favorite activity of alt-history readers, the nitpicking of plausibility in the points of divergence, by dropping South African time travelers with AKs into the middle of the Civil War.
00:00 Intro
02:08 America Will Break
04:49 Right and Left
05:36 CSA at odds with AWB
08:08 Forrest
10:16 Technology
13:16 “Why then …”
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June 15, 2025
QotD: Four stages of revolutions
Professor Chirot writes extremely well and is never less than clear. He uses no jargon and he has a gift for condensing complex historical events into a short compass without resort to procrustean simplification. I would imagine that he is an excellent teacher.
He does not claim to have found a universal law of history that applies at all times and in all places, but he says that large-scale revolutions in the modern world have had a tendency to go through four discernible stages. First, an outmoded governing power refuses to accept that change is necessary and consequently refuses to make the necessary concessions to save itself. This leads to overthrow by relatively moderate leaders who would once have accepted compromise but see that change can only come about by revolution. Second, there is a counter-revolutionary reaction by those who do not accept their loss of power and who provoke a civil war or call for foreign intervention, or both. As a result, much more radical revolutionary leaders come to the fore and defend the revolution by increasing repression of enemies or supposed enemies. Third, the radical leaders, because they hold extreme views and are imbued with unrealistic notions of the complete redemption of mankind from all its earthly ills, impose experimentation on the population which is economically and socially disastrous. Fourth, in the case of its evident failure, the revolutionary regime loses its ideological ardour, and settles down to a kind of routine and less violent authoritarianism accompanied by large-scale corruption and cronyism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, Law & Liberty, 2020-05-13.
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May 27, 2025
The Revolution is Crushed – Greek Civil War Part 3 – W2W 30
TimeGhost History
Published 26 May 2025The Greek Civil War ends in 1949 — in fire, blood, and betrayal. This episode explores how the Communist Democratic Army was defeated, why Yugoslavia and Tito cut off support, and how American-backed government forces brought the conflict to a brutal conclusion.
This is the final part of our Greek Civil War trilogy in War 2 War — TimeGhost’s Cold War series following the battles that refused to end even after WW2.
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QotD: Refuting the “state of nature” argument in Leviathan
Alas, Hobbes’s method is so seductively useful, and his “state of nature” so seemingly correct (if you don’t think about it too hard, which is easy to do, as Hobbes’s prose is entrancing), that in their haste to reject his conclusions, later thinkers like Locke didn’t stop to question whether or not the premises behind the method are actually true. It helped, too, that Locke (born 1632) came of age as the civil wars were winding down (his father was briefly a Parliamentary cavalry commander); he made his philosophical bones with the Restoration (1660). […]
It’s easy to get too far into the weeds with this stuff, but I trust everyone takes my point: Because Hobbes presented such a seductive vision, and because he took such sustained criticism by such high-level guys as Locke even as they were adopting his premises and methods, we — later generations of thinkers, almost without exception — behave as if Hobbes really had done what he said he did, which was to naturalize political philosophy. Political science, he would’ve said, and unlike the pretentious dweebs who staff those departments in modern universities, he wasn’t kidding — he really thought the arguments in Leviathan were as unassailable and compelling as geometry proofs.
But they weren’t, and even he knew it. Hobbes is a fascinating personality, but he’s a hard man to like, not least because he’s so irascible. I sympathize, Tommy, I really do, I’m no mean curmudgeon myself, but dude, you were wrong. Recall the fundamental premise of the “state of nature” thought experiment: All men are functionally equal.
That’s not just wrong, it’s arrant nonsense. It’s hard to think of a statement this side of Karl Marx that’s so backasswards as that one. Far from naturalizing political philosophy, Hobbes made it totally artificial, completely mechanical. His social contract requires a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth free agents, of sound mind and body, all ready and willing to defend themselves to the hilt at all times. Women have no place in Hobbes’s world. Nor do children, or the weak, or the halt, the sick, the old …
In short, although Hobbes is a brilliant observer of human nature, full of acute insight into man and his works, the most famous passage of Leviathan, the one to which all modern political philosophy is mere footnotes, has nothing at all of Man in it. It’s baloney, and therefore, everything derived from it is also, on some deep philosophical level, horseshit.
Severian, “Range Finding III: Natural Law”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-23.
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May 13, 2025
Mao Wins the Civil War – Chinese Civil War Part 4 – W2W 28
TimeGhost History
Published 12 May 2025By early 1949, Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang is falling apart. Hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops surrender as city after city fall to Mao Zedong. Beijing falls without a fight and the Communists cross the Yangtze. Chiang’s final plan is escape and he moves tons of gold and his best troops to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Mao declares victory and the birth of the People’s Republic of China.
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May 2, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 6 “Egeria” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Oct 2024This time we come to Episode 6 of Season 1 of ROME. This one is very much based around the City of Rome itself and places Antony centre stage. In the video we look at the actual history and how well the show reflects this. For more detail on the history, have a look at the videos in the Conquered and the Proud playlist.
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May 1, 2025
QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest has never quite recovered, but oh, you should have seen it in its glory days, when the rich national cultures that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Debussy, and Grieg bandied together to bring us “La-La-La” (winner, 1968), “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (1969), “Ding-Dinge-Dong” (1975), “A Ba Ni Bi” (1978), “Diggy Loo Diggi Ley” (1984), and my personal favorite, “Lat Det Swinge,” the 1985 winner by the Norwegian group Bobbysocks. The above songs are nominally sung in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and even English, but in fact it’s the universal language of Eurogroovy: “Ja, ja, boogie, baby, mit der rock ‘n’ roll”.
Mark Steyn, “Waterloo”, Steyn Online, 2020-05-17.
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April 28, 2025
Stalin and Tito fight over the Balkans: Greek Civil War part 2 – W2W 24 – 1948 Q4
TimeGhost History
Published 27 Apr 20251948 plunges Greece deeper into civil war as foreign aid fuels brutality on both sides. The Nationalist government launches ruthless crackdowns, establishing notorious prison camps, while the Communist Democratic Army desperately seeks aid from Yugoslavia and Stalin’s Soviet Union. But when Stalin rejects the rebellion, Yugoslavia’s Tito steps in — until a stunning feud erupts, leaving Greek communists stranded. Will this power struggle decide Greece’s fate?
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