Quotulatiousness

November 26, 2020

Deport All Anarchists! – The Palmer Raids | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.05 – Harvest 1919

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

TimeGhost History
Published 25 Nov 2020

The First World War has been over for a year, and the modern era plows ahead. But so does fear and paranoia. In America, the Red Scare goes into overdrive.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Daniel Weiss and Spartacus Olsson
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/TheYankeeCol…

Sources:
Some images from the Library of Congress

Some Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound, ODJB, Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss and Pietro Mascagni:
– “One More for the Road” – Golden Age Radio
– “Dawn Of Civilization” – Jo Wandrini
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Easy Target” – Rannar Sillard
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “Steps in Time” – Golden Age Radio
– “Tiger Rag” – ODJB
– “Cello Concerto” – Edward Elgar
– “Pomp and Circumstance” – Edward Elgar
– “Die Frau ohne Schatten: Act III” – Richard Strauss
– “Cavalleria Rusticana” – Pietro Mascagni
– “What Now” – Golden Age Radio

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

November 19, 2020

White Lives Matter More – A Summer of Blood | BETWEEN 2 WARS: ZEITGEIST! | E.04 – Summer 1919

TimeGhost History
Published 18 Nov 2020

Technology promises a better and more connected world in the summer of 1919. But battles still rage everywhere over who will inherit it.

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Subscribe to our World War Two series: https://www.youtube.com/c/worldwartwo…
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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell and Francis van Berkel
Image Research by: Miki Cackowski and Michał Zbojna
Edited by: Michał Zbojna
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations:
Mikołaj Uchman
Spartacus Olsson

Sources:
From the Noun Project: bridge by Adrien Coquet, Delete by Kevin Eichhorn, Fire by Sweet Farm, Model T by Alex Valdivia, people by Anastasia Latysheva, peoples by Musmellow, revolt by Symbolon, Smoke by Krish, people by Nithinan Tatah, explosion by Aldric Rodríguez

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
21 hours ago
Four episodes into this new series and we think it’s going pretty well. Behind-the-scenes we have been getting ahead with our planning to make make things as laser-focused as possible and we have some pretty fascinating pieces of history we want to talk about.

But we know that there is always a learning curve with a new series and we care what our community thinks. It’s the TimeGhost Army who make our content possible so we’d like to hear from you what you think about Season Two of Between 2 Wars. What are you enjoying about it? Is there anything you think we should work on? How do you feel about Indy’s outrageous suits and ties?

November 1, 2020

QotD: Trumbo

Over the past weekend I watched Trumbo, the story of the Marxist screenwriter blacklisted by Hollywood during the Red Scare back in the 1950s. To say that I watched it with a jaundiced eye would be a very big understatement, because I suspected (just from the trailer) that the movie would just be one big blowjob for both Dalton Trumbo and his merry little band of Commiesymps who infested Hollywood back then.

And it was. Needless to say, the movie made villains of the conservatives who opposed the Marxist infiltration: people like John Wayne and Hedda Hopper in particular, Wayne because Wayne, and Hopper because she had a son serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Of course Wayne was made out to be a bully and Hopper a vindictive bitch — and the Senators and Congressmen who haled the Commies in front of the Senate and House Un-American Committee (HUAC) were depicted as ideological purists who saw Communists behind every bush — even though, in the case of Hollywood, there were Commies behind every bush at the time.

Of course, much was made of the fact that being a Communist wasn’t actually illegal (then, and now), and Trumbo made a great show of this being a First Amendment issue — which it was — and how these Commies all wanted to improve America, but of course there were evil right-wingers like Wayne, Joe McCarthy and HUAC harassing them at every turn.

The execution of the traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg got a little puff piece in the movie, which didn’t — couldn’t — actually say they weren’t guilty of treason espionage, so it was brushed over with the throwaway that it was the first execution for espionage in peacetime, as though peacetime should give espionage a pass. And if that wasn’t enough, the Rosenberg children were paraded around as sympathy magnets — as they still are — because Communists have no problem using children to serve their own purposes.

Kim du Toit, “Blacklists Matter”, Splendid Isolation, 2020-07-28.

October 21, 2020

The First Liberation From Nazism – The Republic of Užice – WW2 Special

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

World War Two
Published 20 Oct 2020

When the Yugoslav Partisans and Chetniks liberate a large part of modern-day Serbia, the Partisans found the Republic of Užice, complete with its own governmental structure, education and cultural policy and weapons factory.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Mikolaj Uchman
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Sources:
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
FOTO-FORTEPAN – MZSL-Ofner Károly
Yad Vashem 3731/1
Bundesarchiv
IWM H 11368
Museum of Yugoslavia
ETH-Bibliothek
map of Belgium, courtesy of Marcuscalabresus https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
from the Noun Project: Injury by Adriano Emerick, Dead Soldier by Gan Khoon Lay, Helmet by Daniel Turnel, person by Adrien Coquet, Skull by Muhamad Ulum

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Hakan Eriksson – “Epic Adventure Theme”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

October 18, 2020

Russian Civil War in Central Asia I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Asia, Europe, History, Military, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 17 Oct 2020

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By the fall of 1920, the Russian Civil War had unleashed three years of ethnic and internal conflict in Central Asia, and there was no end in sight. In this episode we’ll catch up on the dramatic events of the former Russian imperial lands in Central Asia from the revolution right up to the end of 1920, 100 years ago.

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» SOURCES
Baumann, Robert F. Russian-Soviet Unconventional Wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, Combat Studies Institute, 2010.

Becker, Seymour. Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

Brower, Daniel R. Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire, Routledge, 2010.

Buttino, M. “Study of the Economic Crisis and Depopulation in Turkestan, 1917–1920”, Central Asian Survey, no. 4, 1990, pp. 59-74, doi:10.1080/02634939008400725.

Campbell, Ian W. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917, Cornell University Press, 2017.

Everett-Heath, Tom. Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, Routledge, 2003.

Hiro, D. Inside Central Asia, Abrams, 2011.

Keller, Shoshana. Russia and Central Asia: Coexistence, Conquest, Convergence, University of Toronto Press, 2020.

Khalid, A. “Central Asia Between the Ottoman and the Soviet Worlds”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 2, 2011, pp. 451-76, doi:10.1353/kri.2011.0028.

Khalid, Adeeb. “The Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim Sources”, Die Welt Des Islams, no. 3, 2010, pp. 335-61, doi:10.1163/157006010×544287.

Khalid, Adeeb. Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR, Cornell University Press, 2019.

Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Loring, B. “‘Colonizers With Party Cards’: Soviet Internal Colonialism in Central Asia, 1917–39”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, no. 1, 2014, pp. 77-102, doi:10.1353/kri.2014.0012.

Olcott, M. B. “The Basmachi or Freemen’s Revolt in Turkestan 1918–24”, Soviet Studies, no. 3, 1981, pp. 352-69, doi:10.1080/09668138108411365.

Poujol, Catherine. “Jews and Muslims in Central Asia”, A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day, edited by Abdelwahab Meddeb, Benjamin Stora, Jane Marie Todd and Michael B. Smith, Princeton University Press, Princeton; Oxford, 2013, pp. 258–268.

Sahadeo, Jeff. Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865-1923, Indiana University Press, 2010.

Sokol, Edward D. The Revolt of 1916 in Russian Central Asia, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

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»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Motion Design: Philipp Appelt
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig

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Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020

October 9, 2020

Yugoslav Resistance and Serb Collaboration in 1941 – WW2 Special

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 8 Oct 2020

Resistance has been brewing since the Axis invasion in April 1941. Multiple resistance groups fight for very different reasons and with different methods. When they launch a big offensive against the occupier, lines between friend and foe become blurry.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Mikolaj Uchman
Carlos Ortega Pereira – BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/

Sources:
Bundesarchiv
Museum of Yugoslavia
FORTEPAN / Konok Tamás ID 27502
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
from the Noun Project: Skull by Muhamad Ulum, Dead Soldier by Gan Khoon Lay, Helmet by Daniel Turner, Injury by Adriano Emerick, person by Adrien Coquet

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 26, 2020

QotD: A visit to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1

Filed under: Asia, Business, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

He [Anthony Daniels] sees throughout these Marxist backwaters a physical infrastructure comprising perhaps the most ugly and dehumanizing architecture known to man. The cavernous emptiness of all public spaces and the gigantism of the buildings are designed to intimidate, to belittle and to discourage insurrection by making every crowd seem small. Any pre-Communist architecture not destroyed to make way for these monstrosities is charming only because it is preserved by a lack of economic development, which also, however, ensures its eventual degradation.

What few consumer products he finds are of the very worst quality, with packaging that provides as little information as possible and that destroys all confidence in its contents. Even the material shortage of these products has its uses to the state, however, as they remind the comrade that it is only by the good grace of their leaders that they eat, and when one spends all afternoon queuing for an item that turns out to be unavailable, there is little time or energy left for revolution. Besides, isn’t the desire for consumer goods artificially created by capitalists to enslave the proletariat?

Nowhere is the dishonesty of this last belief (as well as the sheer insanity of modern North Korea) better illustrated than in Daniels’ description of his visit to the creatively-named Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. He wanders into the store without a minder and is dumbstruck by his eventual realization: the entire store is a fake. Although it is a frenzy of activity and is filled with beautifully packaged and artfully arranged consumer goods, no one is actually buying anything. Daniels watches individual “shoppers” go up and down the escalators or exit and re-enter the store in a continuous loop of simulated shopping. At the line for a cash register, cashiers and customers stare aimlessly past each other, unmoving. Under Daniels’ gaze some of them realize they are found out and cast about nervously, wondering what to do next. “I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep,” he says. “But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.”

Arnold Beichman, “The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World”, National Review, 1991-10-21.

September 22, 2020

An idea for the blighted 21st century — Radio Free Earth and an updated “Liberator” pistol

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the most recent edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith considers a couple of ways to help oppressed peoples all around the world:

An example of the original Liberator pistol from WW2.
Screen capture from a Forgotten Weapons video.

The first is an idea that I originally read about in the 1950s in a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There’s a satisfying irony about using it against the Chinese communists,since Clarke himself was an ardent collectivist (among other nasty things) and wrote about it as a way that communists might bring Western Civilization to its knees. Building on Clarke’s original concept, imagine a tiny radio receiver, tuned only to a single frequency, with no moving parts, small enough to fit almost entirely into the human ear, and with the right coloration to be virtually invisible.

Now imagine a geostationary satellite standing 22,300 miles in space over China. The basic idea is like Radio Free Europe, but with significant differences. Instead of dull propaganda (I listened to some of those RFE and Voice of America broadcasts), there would be readings by celebrities like James Earl Jones and Dennis Haysbert from the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and other Founding Fathers. Nineteenth century thinkers like Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker would be featured, as well, along with H.L Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayeck, and Milton Friedman from the twentieth century.

Very importantly, these lessons in liberty would be interspersed by good, old-fashioned action-adventure radio drama, featuring the works of individualist scribblers like Robert A. Heinlein, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, and little old me, Underdog. Jammed in there just to keep the comrades listening avidly, there would be what I like to think of as “weaponized pornography”, high-quality dramatic readings of Pauline Reage’s Story of O, among others. If it works in Chinese, it will work in Arabic or Farsi, as well.

The geostationary satellite would beam all these offerings down twenty-four hours a day to the millions of little radios that we have air-dropped or otherwise smuggled to the citizenry. Sailors on their brand-new ships would probably listen in, as well. The Chicoms would try their damnedest to outlaw them and maybe even shoot the satellite down, but 22,300 miles is a long way away, and battle-lasers can defeat missiles laboring at the peak of their climb. Such satellites are relatively cheap and replaceable, especially if they can prevent World War III, and we’d keep sending the Chinese those little radios.

That’s Idea #1. Idea #2 involves a World War II project most gun enthusiasts know about called the “FP-45 Liberator Pistol”. A million of the crude, stamped, single-shot firearms, unrifled and chambered for the .45 automatic pistol cartridge, were manufactured by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors at a total cost of $2.10 apiece (that’s $31.55 today). The whole package contained a few spare cartridges, a wooden ejection rod, and a comic book illustration showing how to use it: sneak up on a Nazi soldier, blow his brains out, and steal his rifle.

You were supposed to throw the pistol away, but me, I would have kept it. You never know when you might need it. The Liberators are so scarce today that the bidding starts at $600, meaning that there are hundreds of thousands of the ugly little roscoes still tucked away in barns and attics in eastern Europe. Wikipedia, no bastion of liberty, claims that they were all rounded up and destroyed by Allied troops (which probably cost more than the guns did). If true, it means that I was right when I wrote in my first novel, The Probability Broach, that WWII was basically a conflict between competing brands of fascism.

September 12, 2020

Andrew Sullivan on a “genetic case for communism”

Filed under: Books, Education, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Actually, this isn’t the case Sullivan himself is making, but he’s summarizing a recent book by Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How our broken education system perpetuates social injustice:

There aren’t many books out there these days by revolutionary communists who are into the genetics of intelligence. But then there aren’t many writers like Freddie DeBoer. He’s an insistently quirky thinker who has managed to resist the snark, cynicism and moral preening of so many others in his generation — and write from his often-broken heart. And the core of his new book, The Cult of Smart, is a moral case for those with less natural intelligence than others — the ultimate losers in our democratic meritocracy, a system both the mainstream right and left have defended for decades now, and that, DeBoer argues, gives short shrift to far too many.

This isn’t a merely abstract question for him. He has grappled with it directly. As a school teacher he encountered the simple, unavoidable fact that some humans are more academically gifted than others, and there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. He recalls his effort to teach long division to a boy who had managed to come a long way socially (he’d gone from being a hell-raiser to a good student) but who still struggled with something as elemental as long division: “At one point he broke into tears, as he had several times before … I exhaled slowly and felt myself give up, though of course I would never tell him so. I tried to console him, once again, and he said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ And it struck me, with unusual force, that he was right.”

What DeBoer tries to do is explain how our current culture and political system is geared to torment, distress and punish this kid for no fault of his own. “This is the cult of smart,” DeBoer proclaims. “It is the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth. It is pernicious, it is cruel, and it must change.” It has become un-American — or perhaps it always was? — to say that an individual has natural limits, that, even with extremely hard work, he won’t always be able to realize his dreams. And this is not because of anything he has done or failed to do — but simply because of his draw in the genetic lottery of life. The very American cult of education is supposed to end this injustice — except that it doesn’t, because it can’t, and its brutal logic actually exposes and entrenches the least defensible inequality of all, the inequality of nature.

This genetic reality — in fact, the very idea of nature existing at all — is currently a taboo topic on the left. In the most ludicrously untrue and yet suffocatingly omnipresent orthodoxy of our time, critical theory leftists insist that everything on earth is entirely socially constructed, that all inequality is a function of “oppressive systems”, and that human nature itself is what John Locke called a “white paper, void of all characters” — the famous blank slate. Freddie begs to differ: “Human behavioral traits, such as IQ, are profoundly shaped by genetic parentage, and this genetic influence plays a larger role in determining human outcomes than the family and home environment.”

People are not just born unequally and unfairly into class, and culture, and place, they are inherently unequal in various ways in their very nature: “not everyone has the same ability to do calculus; not everyone has the same grasp of grammar and mechanics … we can continue to beat our heads against the wall, trying to force an equality that just won’t come. Or we can face facts and start to grapple with a world where everyone simply can’t be made equal.” And this is not a counsel of despair. What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.

[…]

This genetic case for communism can leave a reader a little disoriented, I have to say, if only for its novelty. But it is more coherent, it seems to me, than a leftism that assumes that genes are irrelevant to humans and society, that the ultimate goal is to be as smart and thereby wealthy as possible, and that we can set up an educational system where everyone, regardless of their genetic inheritance, can succeed or fail by their own efforts. What sounds like a meritocratic dream is, in practice, a brutal and unforgiving formula for most who can’t achieve it — and has obviously failed if its task is to foster equality. In fact, mass education appears to have increased the gulf between rich and poor. As Freddie notes, “education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality.”

August 28, 2020

QotD: Communism and socialism

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

Communism was the most aggressive and (up to a point) successful offshoot of an 18th century idea called socialism. A great deal has been written since the middle of the 19th century — especially academically — about socialism (I once attended a seemingly endless lecture on the orthodox Marxist interpretation of Jean Paul Sartre’s excruciatingly boring 1944 existentialist play No Exit), but in the end, what it all boils down to is nothing more than a fairly shabby and pretentious attempt to make simple theft seem respectable.

If you have something — some money, a car, a house, a plot of land, a factory, a body of literary accomplishments, even things like television sets and devices to play music — you can bet that somebody, somewhere is trying to figure out how to appropriate, expropriate, steal, or simply take it away from you. And most of those schemers will be college professors and politicians.

Under a set of natural laws that can be seen as ethical addenda to the laws of thermodynamics, it is always less effort to destroy than to build, which is what makes war an attractive threat for barbarians and looters to wield, and it is always less effort to steal things than to create or earn them, which is why we have always had thieves of various stripes among us, including college professors and politicians.

Within a democracy, socialism is a cynical con-game that, like all con-games everywhere, can’t operate without larceny in the heart of the “victim” or mark. Convince young voters that they can have a free higher education (regardless of how it’s going to get paid for or who’s going to pay for it), and, having been taught nothing useful by the socialist primary and secondary education systems they were compelled by force to attend, they will ignorantly vote you into office. Convince them that you deserve the power to order private businesses to pay them fifteen dollars an hour (whether their labor is actually worth it and it damages the business or not), and they will stupidly make you king.

That, in a nut-shell, and spread out over the entire culture, is what happened to Venezuela and why they’ve had to eat their pets. It’s what’s happened for three generations in North Korea, and why, it’s rumored, that cannibalism is being practiced there. The history of a hundred other countries that have tried socialism and suffered hideously for it informs us that these kinds of developments are inevitable.

L. Neil Smith, “Bernie Sanders Wants You Dead”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-05-12.

August 25, 2020

The Russian Revolution 1917

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Epic History TV
Published 4 Aug 2016

Everything you need to know about the Russian Revolution in a 13 min video. Produced in partnership with Bridgeman Images http://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-GB/

We explain all the major events of Russia’s TWO revolutions of 1917 – the February Revolution that ended Tsarist rule in Russia, and the October Revolution, that brought the Bolsheviks to power. We explain the causes of Tsar Nicholas II’s growing unpopularity – the role of the mysterious Siberian mystic Rasputin, Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War One, and the events on the streets of Petrograd that led to the Tsar’s abdication. That summer Russia lurched from crisis to crisis, with a Provisional Government that faced riots (the July Days), military revolt (the Kornilov Affair), economic chaos, and constantly dwindling support. Socialist Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky, once hailed as Russia’s great hope, was unable to restore order, or, in October, prevent the Bolsheviks from launching a coup, organised by Leon Trotsky and led by Vladimir Lenin, that overthrow the Provisional Government and brought the Bolsheviks to power. A brutal civil war followed, leading to the death of more than 10 million Russians – amongst them Tsar Nicholas II and his family, executed by Bolsheviks at Yekaterinburg in July 1918. From the wreckage emerged the Soviet Union, formed in 1922, and destined to be one of the 20th century’s two superpowers.

Please help me make more history videos by supporting me at Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/epichistorytv

#EpicHistoryTV #HistoryofRussia #RussianRevolution

Recommended books on the Russian Revolution (as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases):
S. A. Smith, The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction http://geni.us/RzOAk2U
Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution http://geni.us/UIxyirj
Robert Service, The Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution http://geni.us/A89T
Neil Faulkner, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution http://geni.us/bME0unl

August 21, 2020

“Uprising” Pt. 2 – The Liberation of Paris 1944 – Sabaton History 081 [Official]

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

Sabaton History
Posted 20 Aug 2020

Mid-August 1944. The battle for France enters its decisive phase. With the Allied spearheads just 100 km away from Paris, the Résistance prepares for its long-awaited uprising. While collaborators and fascist officials flee the city in panic, many insurgents are eager to immediately rise up against the occupation and fight the Germans in the streets. But there is need for caution. The Germans are still there in force, and they have tanks and machine guns. The fear that this might turn into “another Warsaw” if the Allies don’t show up in time is very real.

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Listen to “Uprising” on the album Coat Of Arms:
https://music.sabaton.net/CoatOfArms

Watch the Official Music Video of “Uprising”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01IaK…

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
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Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
All music by Sabaton

Sources:
– Imperial War Museum: B 9298
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild_101I-027-1477-16, Bild_183-2008-0710-500, Bild_183-2003-1112-500
– lubini from freesound.org

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August 14, 2020

Warsaw, 1920 – “Smash a Bolshevik!”

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

Arthur Chrenkoff on the important but little-known Russo-Polish conflict a century ago:

Polish propaganda poster “Smash a Bolshevik”
Image via Daily Chrenk.

The Polish-Russian war of 1919-20 was the last major conflict where massed cavalry played an important role. Unlike the static Western Front a few years earlier (but similarly to the much more mobile Eastern Front) it was a war of maneuver and speed, conducted over vast swathes of territory. While still fought in a pre-armour era, its conduct directly and indirectly inspired the major proponents of the future tank warfare and the doctrine of blitzkrieg, from the young De Gaulle (who was one of the official French Army observers in Poland at the time) through Tukhachevsky in the Soviet Union to Guderian in Germany. Two million troops from both sides took part in the conflict, making it the most significant foreign intervention against the newly installed Bolshevik regime over the course of the Russian Civil War. It might have even succeeded in strangling communism in its cradle; what prevented the cooperation with the counter-revolutionary White forces was their old imperial hostility to independent Poland (coincidentally, the anti-Hitler German opposition of 1944 was likewise unfriendly to the idea).

The basic story of the war is easily enough told. After 123 years of partition between Russia, Prussia and Austria-Hungary, Poland was recreated (or, really, recreated herself) among the chaos of the late 1918, with the collapse of all three of her occupying empires. The new “Versailles” Poland was smaller than in the past, which led the new government to try to restore by force what has been denied to her at the negotiating table (where Poles had no seat in any case). The Russian Revolution (or rather the Bolshevik coup d’etat) and the following civil war provided a perfect opportunity. Throughout 1919, the reconstituted Polish Army under the command of Marshall Jozef Pilsudski fought against and took over the briefly independent Western Ukraine republic and then marched on Kiev, this time in alliance with the forces of also briefly independent Eastern Ukraine republic (it was Pilsudski’s intention to recreate some form of an independent Ukrainian state – minus the predominantly Polish areas – as part of his larger project to create the Miedzymorze (Intermarum) Confederation of both anti-Russian and anti-German states stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea).

But the Polish Army became overstretched and the Soviet government, now having defeated its major White opponents, found itself willing and able to stand up to and roll back what they saw as the Polish aggression against historically Russian territories. The Red Army, which sporadically skirmished with the Poles over the previous year, now counter-attacked across the whole wide front across what is now Belarus and Ukraine, driving the Polish Army back at an unprecedented pace of 30 kilometres a day. Soviet Marshall Tukhachevsky ordered his troops “To the West! Over the corpse of White Poland lies the road to worldwide conflagration. March on Vilno, Minsk, Warsaw!” and “onward to Berlin over the corpse of Poland!” Pravda newspaper echoed “Through the corpse of the White Poland lies the way to World Inferno. On bayonets we will carry happiness and peace to working humanity”. British Labour Party and French Socialists vowed not to support “reactionary” Poland; German and Czech unions sabotaged the delivery of crucial military supplies to the beleaguered Poland.

On 10 August, Cossack units of Tukhachevsky’s northern Army crossed the Vistula River north of Warsaw in at attempt to envelop the capital. This was a mistake, as the southern Army, under Budyonny, was still stuck around Lwow, three hundred kilometres to the south-east. For weeks preparing in secret, the last Polish reserves punched through the centre, first cutting off the two Soviet fronts from each other and then in a series of counter-enveloping maneuvers routing three Soviet armies. Now it was the Poles’ turn to advance 30 kilometres per day, as the Red Army collapsed and retreated in chaotic circumstances. The Polish counter-strike subsequently became known as “Cud nad Wisla” (Miracle of the Vistula), but it was less of a supernatural intervention and more a combination of several favourable factors: Soviet missteps, good Polish organisation, the growing hostility between Stalin and Trotsky as well as various military commanders, which hampered the cooperation between the Soviet fronts. Last but not least, and this was only revealed in 2004, Polish cryptographers had managed to break the Red Army codes – just as they would later be instrumental in breaking the German Enigma.

August 11, 2020

Orwell’s “Notes on Nationalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Adam Wakeling discusses George Orwell’s essay in the postwar magazine Polemic:

In the bleak post-war Britain of October 1945, an essay by George Orwell appeared in the first edition of Polemic. Edited by abstract artist and ex-Communist Hugh Slater, the new journal was marketed as a “magazine of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.” Orwell was not yet famous — Animal Farm had only just started appearing on shelves — but he had a high enough profile for his name to be a boon to a new publication. His contribution to the October 1945 Polemic was “Notes on Nationalism,” one of his best and most important pieces of writing. Amidst the de-Nazification of Germany, the alarmingly rapid slide into the Cold War, and the trials of German and Japanese war criminals, Orwell set out to answer a question which had occupied his mind for most of the past seven years — why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or even contradictory beliefs about politics?

As a junior colonial official in Burma, the young Eric Blair (he had not yet adopted the name by which he would be known to posterity) had been disgusted by his peers and superiors talking up the British liberty of Magna Carta and Rule Britannia while excusing acts of repression like the massacre of Indian protestors at Amritsar in 1919. As a committed socialist in the late 1930s, he openly ridiculed those who claimed to be champions of the working class while holding actual working-class people in open contempt. And he had watched the British Communist Party insist that the Second World War was nothing more than an imperialist adventure right up until the moment when the first German soldier crossed the Soviet frontier, at which point it instantly became a noble struggle for human freedom.

Orwell’s most personally searing experience, though, had come in Barcelona in 1937. The previous year, he had travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the Republican side. His poor relationship with the British Communist Party led him to enlist in the militia of an anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Even while it was fighting a bitter winter campaign in the Aragon mountains, the POUM was subject to a relentless propaganda campaign by pro-Soviet Republicans who insisted it was a secret front for fascism.

Over May and June 1937, the POUM and the other independent left-wing organisations in Barcelona were brutally suppressed by the Republican Government and Soviet-backed Communists. Orwell saw his friends and comrades smeared, arrested, and in some cases shot. He only made a narrow escape back into France himself. Upon his return to Britain, he found the British Communist Party resolute in its line that the POUM was a fascist party. Admitting that there could be a difference of opinion among left-wing groups with respect to the Soviet Union, or that the Spanish Communists could have acted unjustly, was unacceptable. And when Orwell published his own account of the events in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, few were interested in reading it. The betrayal of the POUM weighed on Orwell’s mind through the Second World War, and Animal Farm provided an outlet for his anger. But those bloody spring days in Barcelona also informed “Notes on Nationalism.”

“Notes on Nationalism” is not an ideal title, as Orwell was not talking only about loyalty to country. Rather, he used nationalism as a short-hand for any type of group loyalty — to a country, but also to a religion, a political party, or an ideology itself. A nationalist may be defined by his membership of a group, or by his opposition to one, which Orwell called “negative” nationalism. Orwell used anti-Semites as an example of the latter, as well as the “minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism.” He then set out to explain how everyone — no matter how reasoned and level-headed — is capable of irrational and biased thinking when our sense of group identity is challenged.

He identified three characteristics of “‘nationalistic’ thinking.” First, obsession — the ideologue’s need to filter everything through an ideological lens. Entertainment is not entertaining unless it is orthodox. Second, instability — the ability of the ideologue to go from believing one thing to quickly believing another to follow the party line. And thirdly, indifference to reality. One of the most interesting aspects of “Notes on Nationalism” is the “inadmissible fact” — something which can be proven to be true and is generally accepted but cannot be admitted by the adherents of a particular ideology. Or, if the fact is admitted, it is explained away or dismissed as unimportant.

The ideas explored in “Notes on Nationalism” run through much of Orwell’s writing, most obviously his anti-totalitarianism and hatred of hypocritical pieties. But central to his argument is how nationalistic thinking exposes our inescapable biases. “The Liberal News Chronicle,” he wrote, “published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians.” This anticipated the doublethink of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which atrocities “are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one’s own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.” The first step down the deceptively short road to totalitarianism is believing that our political enemies pose such a grave threat that defeating them takes precedence over truth, consistency, or common sense.

August 10, 2020

Donald MacLean: The First of the Cambridge Five

The Cold War
Published 22 Jun 2020

Our historical documentary series on the history of the Cold War continues with a video on the famous Cambridge Five and Donald Maclean in particular — a real Cold War-era spy story

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