Quotulatiousness

November 24, 2025

Fairy tales for Canadian boomers – “we have the best healthcare system in the world”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Older Canadians, especially the Baby Boom generation, have a huge blind spot when it comes to any discussion about healthcare … because they believe what they were told as children about Canada’s healthcare system being the “envy of the world” and other such comforting notions. (It’s not just Canada, as British belief in the quality of their National Health Service is very much at odds with the evidence.) This rose-coloured nostalgic faith makes it very difficult to address some of the very real problems that beset Canada’s hospitals and doctors. The media are understandably reluctant to publish anything that goes against this, as Peter Menzies explains:

Grok image from The Rewrite

About the same time as William Watson’s outstanding book Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life was being published in the late 1990s, the newspaper I worked for was sending a journalist to Europe to research a series of articles on how health care systems work in some of those countries.

I mention Bill’s book, which was runner-up for a public policy Donner Prize, because it exquisitely details many of the things Canadians believe about themselves that simply aren’t true. Which was the same reason why the Calgary Herald sent its health reporter (yes, there used to be such a thing), Robert Walker, to Europe — to expose its readers to the fact that there are more than two health care systems: our “defining” one and America’s, both of which are extremes. To the best of my knowledge, that remains the only time a Canadian news organization has taken on that task.

In every country examined in Walker’s reports, as is the case with almost every country in the world, public and private health care and insurance systems maintained a peaceful coexistence and the public’s needs were being met. Almost 30 years later, that remains the case. Also almost 30 years later, neither Bill’s book nor the Herald‘s reporting has had the slightest impact on the prevailing media narrative in Canada. It remains determined to perpetuate the fear that any move to increase the role of private health providers or even allow doctors to work in both systems (as was proposed this week by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith) is the first step on the slippery slope to “American-style” health care. This line has been successfully used for decades — often hyperbolically and occasionally hysterically — by public monopoly advocates for Canada’s increasingly expensive and difficult to access systems. We have known for 40 years that once Baby Boomers like your faithful servant turned bald and grey that the system would be unsustainable. But that single, terrifying “American-style” slur has halted reform at every turn.

The Tyee responded with a “Danielle Smith’s secret plan to Destroy Public Health Care” column while the Globe and Mail‘s Gary Mason, a Boomer, challenged my thesis here by suggesting it was time for open minds because “the reality is, the health care system in Canada is a mess”.

It is. And at least some of the blame — a lot, in my view — belongs at the door of Canadian news organizations that for decades have failed to fully inform readers by making them aware that there are a great many alternatives to just “ours” and “US-style”.

I was reminded of this in a recent Postmedia story concerning the perils of private health care provision. Referencing a study on MRIs, the story, right on cue, quotes the part of a study that states “It’s a quiet but rapid march toward U.S.-style health care”.

One would not want to suggest that those clinging to that parochial view should be denied a platform. But at the same time, readers have every right to demand that journalists push back and ask advocates for state monopolies simple questions such as “Why do you say that? Could it not be the first step towards UK-, German-, Dutch-, French-, Portugese- or Swedish-style health care?” and open the debate.

November 17, 2025

QotD: Turns out Judaism isn’t the peaceful exception among Abrahamic montheisms

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

    Yevardia @haravayin_hogh

    Thread w/excerpts of Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
    Shahak was an award-winning organic chemist & Classical Liberal. Born in Poland, his family moved to Israel as displaced persons in 1945.
    For this book, he received death-threats for the rest of his life.

Quoted thread is absolutely fascinating.

Like many American gentiles who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I have a fondness for Jewish culture as it manifested in this country. The food, the humor, the intellectual tradition. I read Mad Magazine as a kid and “The Joys of Yiddish” as a young man and cheerfully adopted some Yiddishisms into my idiolect.

It’s always been slightly difficult for me, though, to reconcile my fondness for the Jewish influence on American life with what I believe about monotheisms in general and Abrahamic monotheisms is in particular. Which is, basically, that they are pits of evil. Infectious insanities that bring mob violence, horror and death whenever they have actual power.

Judaism looked like an at least partial exception, a monotheism with a curious lack of horrific violence in its backstory. I thought this might be explained by its absence of coercive power ever since the destruction of the Second Temple — 2000 years of oppression by others teaching Judaism the virtue of tolerance the hard way.

Now comes Israel Shahak to tell me it wasn’t like that at all. That until historically recent times – basically, post-1800 — Judaism wasn’t tolerant and rational. Not even close. These are virtues of the secularized Jew, in reaction to traditional Jewish shtetl and ghetto communities that could best have been described as violently evil religious despotisms.

Shahak says gentiles — and many Jews — don’t know how terrible life was under pre-modern rabbis because Judaism has done a bang-up job of expurgating and sanitizing its own history.

Nobody talks about the fact that until the 19th century, rabbis routinely used the self-governance afforded them by a lack of state interest in universal secularized justice to abuse, torture, and often murder Jews they found to be in violation of religious law. I certainly had no idea of this, despite being quite well read in history and comparative religion.

Thought control, too. We think of Jews as readers and scholars, but it turns out the pre-modern rabbinate deliberately kept communal Jews ignorant of history, geography, science, and indeed all secular literature.

Shahak brings the receipts, with extensive quotation from primary sources. Even his critics — and there are many — can’t accuse him of making up these reports. They claim he misinterprets the evidence. But they can’t make the evidence go away.

In a way this comes as a relief to me. I no longer have to wonder why Judaism looks like an exception to the general evil of monotheisms. Because it isn’t one — like Christianity, it looks benign only to the extent that it’s been denatured by modernity and secularism.

On the other hand … I miss the Judaism I thought I knew. I’m disturbed that the evidence was so effectively suppressed, and that it took reading excerpts from Shahak to clue me in.

Damn shame copies of Shahak’s book are so rare that you can only find them for over a grand each. I’d like to read the whole thing, but everybody should read the excerpts in this thread.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-15.

October 3, 2025

Women and credit card access … another “just so” story

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

Janice Fiamengo debunks a common “just so” story about women only gaining the right to hold a credit card in the 1970s:

A few years ago, I started hearing that women, before feminism, couldn’t have their own credit cards. Or they couldn’t get one without a man’s signature. Or married women couldn’t have one in their own name. Divorced women, apparently, couldn’t get credit at all. Men conspired to keep women powerless and dependent.

THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!

Just last June, on the podcast Diary of a CEO (in an episode viewed by nearly two million people), three feminists debating feminism agreed that, in the words of one of the panelists, “None of us could get a credit card a few decades ago … We couldn’t have anything …” (see 1:50:37).

Before correcting herself, in fact, the panelist had started to say, “None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago …”

The statement struck me with the full force of the ludicrous. I started school in 1970. My teachers were nearly all women, at least half of them unmarried. They certainly seemed to live full, normal lives in obeisance to no man. They were paid a salary; they had bank accounts; they owned cars; they bought things and went on vacations.

My mother had worked in an insurance office for years both before and after she married my father in 1956. She had purchased appliances and paid her own rent, helped my father buy his first commercial fishing boat, and handled all the household expenses when my dad was away fishing for months every summer.

My friends’ mothers were similarly active and self-determining. Were all these women actually hobbled by the patriarchy, cut off from the economy?

Received knowledge would have us believe so. Last year, The Globe and Mail published a paid advertisement for Women’s History Month titled “50 Years Ago: Women Got the Right to Have Credit Cards”. Written by a financial services company seeking to drum up business, the article repeated the popular story that women in North America could not get their own credit cards until 1974.

Credit cards were one of the growth areas for banks and other financial service companies in the 1960s and 70s … from something only relatively wealthy travellers and business executives used, they expanded to become widely used by ordinary consumers for all kinds of purchases. Consumers benefitted from access to useful financial tools, while banks enjoyed the profits from the widespread use of credit cards. So where did the idea that they were male-only come from?

The reality is that from the 1950s on, credit cards were a new invention being aggressively marketed to both men and women. Advertising from the era shows how keen credit card companies were to target female customers, how eager to tap into women’s spending power.

Originally introduced as a convenience for travelers on business, credit cards began to expand their purview in the late 1950s. Bank Americard (later Visa) became the first consumer credit card in 1958. A network of banks formed the Interbank Card Association, originally named Master Charge (later Mastercard), in 1966.

Yet we are somehow to believe that half the population was deliberately excluded from this new consumer venture for no other reason than that they were female?

“It wasn’t until 1974 that women were allowed to open a credit card under their own name,” the Globe article states emphatically. “Before 1974, if women wanted to open a credit card, they would be asked a bunch of intrusive questions, like if they were married or whether they planned to have children. If a woman was married, she could (hopefully) get a credit card with her husband. But single, divorced, or widowed women weren’t allowed to get a credit card of their own — they had to have a man cosign for the credit application.”

The explanation is dramatic and incoherent, undoing its own logic from the beginning. It backtracks to allege that women were in fact “allowed” to have a credit card so long as they answered “a bunch of intrusive questions” or found a co-signer. Even this lesser claim is false, but it is rather different from the prior assertion about women “not having the right” to a card.

At a time when many married women either did not work outside the home or worked only part-time and on a temporary basis, there would have been nothing unreasonable about a woman’s husband co-signing her credit card application. Many married women were happy to purchase what they wanted on the assurance that their husbands would pay the bill when it came in, and credit card issuers saw joint accounts as a way of ensuring payment.

Update, 4 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 2, 2025

The ritual humiliation of ordinary Canadians through “land acknowledgements”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo explains his objections to the ever-expanding use of “land acknowledgements”:

Let me break this down clearly so you can better understand why these mandated Land Acknowledgements are offensive to me.

They imply inherited guilt
A Land Acknowledgement usually frames the land I live and work on as “stolen”. Even if it does not say the words directly, the message is that I am benefiting from a theft. I served my country for 25 years, I have paid my taxes, raised my family responsibly, and built a life honestly. It cuts against my sense of fairness and justice to be told I must carry guilt for actions taken by people hundreds of years ago. I will not accept accountability for the past when I had no part in it.

They ignore my contribution
I have invested decades of service in the military, in my education, in my community, and in my family. These acknowledgements do not recognize those sacrifices, nor those of my ancestors who also built and defended this country. Instead, they imply my very presence is illegitimate. That denies the legitimacy of my life’s work and my family’s role in helping build this nation.

They make reconciliation into a ritual of shame
A healthy society should face the past with honesty. But what I see is not dialogue or shared responsibility. It is a scripted performance that demands I accept a label like “colonizer”, whether or not it reflects who I am. Rather than bringing people together, it divides by assigning one group permanent guilt and another permanent victimhood. That is not reconciliation. It is coerced shame.

They erase complexity
History in Canada is complicated. Many settlers and Indigenous peoples lived, worked, and fought together. There were injustices, but also cooperation, intermarriage, and shared struggles. Long before Europeans arrived, Indigenous groups also fought among themselves, sometimes brutally, with violence and cruelty toward rival tribes. No group in history is free from wrongdoing. Yet the Land Acknowledgement format reduces this reality to a one-sided story of “oppressors vs. oppressed”, which is neither fair nor accurate.

They are being mandated
Perhaps the strongest reason I find them offensive is that these acknowledgements are not voluntary. They are imposed in workplaces, schools, and public events as if they were civic duties or loyalty oaths. Refusing to participate often brings social or professional penalties. That strips away personal agency and turns what could have been a gesture of respect into a forced confession.

So my reaction is not irrational. These acknowledgements conflict with my principles of fairness, personal responsibility, and earned legitimacy. They demand I accept guilt I do not bear, while ignoring the contributions my family and I have made. They also erase the truth that no people, Indigenous or otherwise, lived without conflict or wrongdoing in the past.

The first time I encountered a “land acknowledgement” in person was at my son’s university graduation ceremony. I assumed, as the university had a major First Nations study program, that this was something only done there … but now it’s hard to find any public gathering in Canada that doesn’t have the opening cultural cringe and ritual humiliation ceremony to start the event.

September 7, 2025

The BEF and the German Sichelschnitt of May, 1940

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

Dr. Robert Lyman rebuts the common-since-the-1950s adulation of the Wehrmacht‘s attacks of May-June, 1940 through the Low Countries that drove the British Expeditionary Force off the continent and destroyed the flower of the French army prior to the surrender of France in June:

Detail from the West Point Military Atlas map of the “Campaign in the West, Disposition and Opposing Forces, 1940”
Full map.

The world has largely remembered Sichelschnitt as a brilliant German operation of war, but it was one that was fundamentally enabled by Allied ineptitude. Indeed, Blitzkrieg wasn’t particularly new, innovative or even a warfighting doctrine. It is best described, in the context of France 1940, as an event. It was simply the way that the Wehrmacht exerted its tactical and operational superiority over its more pedestrian enemies in 1940. In fact, it was the 1940 extension of what the German Army had first demonstrated in Flanders in March 1918, this time with tanks and Stukas. It was the Panzerwaffe (“tank force”) – combined with a tactical air force – which in 1940 would create the breakthrough that Ludendorff had been unable to achieve in 1918. Where it was applied, by Army Group A, it concentrated fast-moving armoured vanguards co-ordinated with tactical air power, such as 400 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, to so overwhelm the enemy in both time and space that they were unable to respond quickly enough to the changing and challenging battlefield. In 1940 the panzer came into its own, the sound of clattering tracks on French cobblestones a new feature in the sound of battle and a key element in how France remembers its defeat in 1940.

It wasn’t the type of tank in the German inventory which mattered, but the way in which these tanks were employed. Only about 10 per cent of the army comprised tanks, the remainder relying on horse and wagons and the raw, painful feet of the marching infantry. Of the 2,539 tanks the Wehrmacht deployed in 1940, only 916, or 36 per cent were battleworthy, the remainder being clattering tin cans with machine guns (the obsolete Panzer Mark Is and Mark IIs). The only modern tanks were 683 Panzer Mark IIIs and Czech T38 tanks armed with a 37mm gun, and 278 of the larger Mark IVs with a short 75mm gun. But it was enough. The German operational strategy was to use this mass of armour not to fight a large confrontational tank battle, but to achieve breakthrough and breakout, bursting through the enemy’s linear defences. It was surprise and shock action that so discomforted the Allies, who had lazily and, given what we know of British failure to understand 1918, ignorantly assumed that the war would progress against a 1914 rather than a 1918 pattern. The armoured vanguard would surge through the outer skin of the enemy defences, concentrating heavy effort in one place, before driving hard into the heart of enemy territory. With an enemy intent on fighting a linear battle, the rear areas, behind this outer crust, would be weakly defended and full of rear-echelon, administrative and supply troops managing the lines of communication up to the front, not expecting to have to fight. It was by driving hard and fast behind the enemy front line, breaking the cycle of Allied battlefield decision-making, that Blitzkrieg was to achieve its psychological effect.

In contrast the Allies remained concerned about retaining the integrity of their defensive lines. The diaries of Major General Henry Pownall, for instance, are replete with concerns as the days spun past about the widening frontages on one defensive line or another. British concern was misplaced. It was to spread the ever-decreasing butter of the British infantry across ever-widening stretches of French and Belgian bread, without realising that the Germans were concerned not with rolling up a front line, but with driving hard to the rear. By so doing they would take risks with their flanks, but the discombobulatory effect on the enemy was considered to far outweigh any worry about the risk of counter- attack from an increasingly battered and disorganised enemy. Of course this operational concept was risky, but the risks taken were carefully calculated given what the German General Staff knew about British and French tactical doctrine, or the lack of it.

These German tactics were psychologically disconcerting for those not trained to expect them. As was demonstrated on the Meuse, artillery would batter a position in co-ordination with armoured columns bypassing fixed defences and attacking those it needed to clear from the flanks and the rear. The infantry accompanying the advancing armour – Panzergrenadiers (mechanised infantry) – arrived in tandem with the Stukas, which could drop their bombs from a screaming dive. Each Stuka seemed to those at the receiving end to be diving directly at them, personally. For untrained troops it was a terrifying experience. The panzers would sweep on while the truck-borne infantry would turn up to deal with survivors of this storm of fire and movement. By this time, of course, the disorientated French and British would now consider themselves cut off, behind their front line, with no prospect of being relieved. Surrender or a disorganised escape to the rear would seem to be a more sensible option than the forlorn hope of continued resistance when the surrounding fields were dotted with the grey-green uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets of their enemy. The psychological effect of Blitzkrieg was considerable. This wasn’t how their fathers had told them war was fought. How did the Germans manage to discomfort them on the battlefield so comprehensively? Were they inadequate soldiers, unable to meet the standards of campaigning set by the previous generation? Or was it that their tactics were simply not able to cope with the shock of a comprehensive assault by German infantry, armour and air power all descending on them at once? This was the battlefield that the British had entirely dominated, by virtue of their tactical innovations, in 1918. It was now Germany’s turn, a direct result of the failure of the British Army to develop its doctrine and approaches to warfighting at the end of the Great War. Brave men in 1940 did their duty, but against a battle-winning concept of their enemy, they were out-thought rather than out-fought. And critically, when an army thinks it is beaten, it is indeed beaten.

September 3, 2025

QotD: The distance between NHS PR and NHS reality

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

The uncritical national admiration, approaching worship, of the NHS has required the subliminal acceptance of a certain historiography: before the NHS, nothing; after it, everything. Before 1948, the poor received no treatment but were left to fend for themselves when they were sick, and more or less, to die. After 1948, the ever-solicitous state system looked tenderly after the health of the population from cradle to grave.

It wasn’t difficult to promote such historiography by using horror stories from the past, stories which were perfectly plausible because almost any conceivable system will give rise to such stories. If, per impossibile, a new system were to replace the NHS, it would not be difficult to justify it by reference to horror stories, whether or not the new system was better. A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care. Only anecdotes that also illustrate statistical trends or truths are valuable in such a context.

The statistics are not favourable to the NHS, at least if one chooses reasonable standards of comparison, namely other European countries. The results are not disastrous, but they are not good either. The NHS has failed even in its egalitarian goal: the gap between the health of the richest and poorest in society has only grown under its dispensation. And yet the belief in its levelling effect persists.

The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been so successful that it now accords with the sentiments of the population, a triumph that no communist regime achieved despite herculean efforts at indoctrination. The triumph has been achieved without compulsion or violence and ought to be an interesting case for political scientists who study the successful inculcation of political mythology. Of course, the danger of such a study would be that it might induce doubt or cynicism about other political mythologies, and we all need such mythologies to live by.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.

August 26, 2025

Plunder does not explain western prosperity

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

Lorenzo Warby digs deep into the “mountain range of bullshit” over the issue of plunder, as in the claims that the First World got that way by stealing everything they could from what became identified as the Third World:

I am using mainly European examples because it is the genetically (and archaeologically) best mapped continent. But these grim patterns are normal in the history of Homo sapiens. Consider, for example, the Bantu expansion across Africa that mirrors the march of Anatolian farmers across Europe.

The development of farming and animal herding led to the y-chromosome Neolithic bottleneck: a massive harrowing of male lineages that only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived. The development of farming and pastoralism created much higher populations plus plunderable assets. Folk developed much more coherent kin-groups. Teams of male warriors wiped each other out, taking the land, animals and women of the defeated as their spoils.

Plunder was thus endemic in farming and herding societies. The harrowing of male lineages came to an end via the development of chiefdoms and states. That is, the technology of exploitation — keep defeated males alive so they could breed more payers of tribute and taxes — overtook the technology of aggression (kin-groups).

States were both ordering and predatory. This process worked less well among pastoralists, as the need to defend the mobile assets of animal herds generated highly effective warriors who were harder to control or extract surplus from. Pastoralist states tended to be super-chiefdoms rather than full states and the harrowing of pastoralist male lineages continued, just at a lower level.

Africa was the continent of slavery because, being where Homo sapiens evolved, it was full of pathogens, parasites, predators and mega-herbivores that co-evolved with Homo sapiens, so could cope with them.1 This kept population density down. This meant that labour was more valuable than land. There was more potential wealth in grabbing able-bodied people than in grabbing land.

This made slavery endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa long before the Islamic, then the Atlantic, slave trades developed. Sub-Saharan African states were overwhelmingly slave states. Even those that were trade states traded in slaves.

The Atlantic slave trade looks like the most extreme pattern of Europeans plundering others — in this case, Sub-Saharan Africans. It was certainly true that the Atlantic slave trade was horrific and had multiple adverse effects on African society. But those adverse effects were to intensify patterns that already existed. Moreover, the original plundering of people by turning them into slaves was done by … Africans.

The life expectancy of a European who left the African coast was about a year: it was not practical for Europeans to do the original enslaving. They bought the slaves from Africans. This enabled the slave trade carried on by Catholics to conform to the Papal Bull Sublimis Dei (1537) which banned Catholics from enslaving the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (and, by implication, elsewhere), but did not ban trading in, or owning, slaves.

Wikimedia Commons

Plunder was endemic across human societies: including turning fellow humans into plunder — aka slavery. It was sadly ordinary. It was not a European pattern, it was a Homo sapien pattern. The Islamic slave trade was on the same scale—given it operated for centuries longer — as the Atlantic slave trade, the Saharan passage was every bit as horrific as the Atlantic passage, and the Islamic slave trade had the extra horror of the castration of male slaves. Hence, there is not an ex-slave diaspora in Islam as there is in the Americas.

Just as plunder was endemic, so was poverty. Mass poverty was the norm across farming societies. While there were economic efflorescences across human history, and evidence of periods of sustained growth, the dramatic shifts to mass prosperity since the 1820s — since the application of steam power to railways and steamships — is utterly without precedent. Moreover, it started in precisely one society — Great Britain. None of the other Atlantic littoral societies of Europe showed any sign of such a take-off.

  1. The megafauna outside Africa — which did not co-evolve with Homo sapiens — almost all died out when Homo sapiens turned up.

August 8, 2025

Debunking the idea that Japan was about to surrender anyway

Filed under: Books, History, Japan, Military, Russia, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dr. Robert Lyman on the common misunderstanding of Japan’s situation in July and August of 1945 — no, they weren’t “on the brink of surrender so atomic bombing was unjustified” … instead, they were intending to make the assault on the Home Islands the biggest bloodbath ever:

Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, taken from “Enola Gay” flying over Matsuyama, Shikoku, 6 August, 1945.
US Army Air Force photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s the anniversary of Hiroshima again today. I wasn’t going to write anything to mark the event (more coming next week on VJ Day), but I’ve been triggered already by nonsense on the radio which suggests that the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary, because Japan was about to surrender.

Nonsense. There is not a shred of real evidence to support this idea. In fact, the evidence that Japan wanted to keep on fighting is irrefutable. And yet this lie persists, despite the deluge of scholarly work demonstrating Japan’s commitment to the ritual suicide of its entire nation right until the end, when Hirohito pulled the plug. If you are in any doubt about the facts of the case, as opposed to the propaganda, read Toland’s Rising Sun (1970), Frank’s Downfall (2001), Spector’s In The Ruins of Empire (2007), Pike’s Hirohito’s War and, more recently, Stewart Binn’s Japan’s War (2025). All are excellent, clear, analytical and well researched. There are lots more, too.

Why does this canard keep on popping up? Is it because people don’t read? Or is it that they just don’t want to believe in the necessity of such a dramatic event to force Japan to surrender and thus bring about an end to the greatest man-made tragedy the world has ever suffered? The origins of this wishful myth in fact derives from hard right nationalist propaganda in post-war Japan (driven by Admiral Suzuki himself), quickly lapped up by the gullible and wishful thinkers in the West. Its one of the most enduring of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki myths, in part because it seems palatable to many, and because it is inherently anti-American.

What is the real story? In short, the Allies tried hard to persuade Japan to surrender. They demonstrated unequivocally to Japan that it was going to lose the war by defeating its armies and by beginning the long, slow and painful crawl towards the Japanese home islands. All the books I’ve mentioned note the extreme chaos of Japanese decision-making before and during the war. Who really was in charge? Who could one talk to, to secure a commitment to negotiate? In any case, the chaotic government under Koiso which replaced that of General Tojo following the fall to the Americans of Saipan in 1944, made not a single effort to engage with the Allies to seek terms. This government also collapsed on 5 April 1945. The replacement prime minister was Admiral Suzuki, and it was from this man that the myth seems to have arisen, after the war, that Japan was considering surrender and that the A-bombs were unnecessary. This is not true. During his entire time as Prime Minister he resolutely refused to do anything but continue to fight, unless the ending of the war could be secured on Japan’s terms. There were some initiatives to persuade the Suzuki government to surrender, but none of them amounted to much, because they didn’t engage directly with the government in Tokyo, and they didn’t derive from the Allied powers. The evidence that peace-feelers were being put out by various sources (such as the Vatican) in 1944 and 1945 is evidence only that the Japanese government ignored them. None were taken seriously in Tokyo.

Indeed, throughout the period of the Suzuki government, the war parties were dominant. In early June the military Supreme Command submitted a paper entitled The Fundamental Policy to be Followed Henceforth in the Conduct of the War, in which it demanded that the government confirmed that Japan would fight to the very last Japanese in an act of national suicide leading to the “honourable death of the hundred million”:

    With a faith born of eternal loyalty as our inspiration, we shall – thanks to the advantages of our terrain and the unity of our nation, prosecute the war to the bitter end in order to uphold our national essence, protect the Imperial land and achieve our goals of conquest.

The proposition was passed, not unanimously, but overwhelmingly nonetheless.

There were some in the government – interestingly including Tojo himself – who saw that this was self-defeating, and that Japan must negotiate to secure acceptable peace terms. Naively, it was hoped that this would enable it to retain parts of its empire. Suzuki was part of this group who thought that Japan could negotiate favourable terms to end the war, in the form of a negotiated settlement such as that had brought about the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1905, but when he suggested this in parliament on 13 June he was shouted down by the war mongers. Hirohito then endorsed an approach to the Soviets in late June. Bizarrely – though Moscow was neutral in the Far Eastern war at this point – Tokyo’s emissaries suggested that the USSR and Japan join forces to rule the world. It was yet more evidence of how Tokyo fundamentally misunderstood the world, and its enemies, and the way the war would have to end: complete and utter surrender by Japan.

Moscow, of course, scorned these “negotiations” as meaningless.

August 1, 2025

QotD: The self-serving mythology of Britain’s NHS

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is a matter of common experience that members of the middle classes are far better able to derive benefits from the system than the lower classes. They complain where the lower orders swear, and bureaucrats are aware that articulacy is a more dangerous enemy than assaults on staff can ever be.

The interesting question of why the NHS should continue to hold the affection of the British people, when it is at best mediocre in its performance and frequently unpleasant to deal with, is one that should be of interest to all political scientists. The answer is not pleasing to those who believe in human rationality.

The affection represents the triumph of rhetoric over reality. This rhetoric contains an implicit historiography, in which the pre-NHS era is akin to that of jahiliyya, the era of ignorance before the advent of Muhammad, in Islamic historiography: in short, that there was no healthcare for most of the population before the NHS. This historiography has for decades been continuously and successfully insinuated into the minds of the population. It has been Britain’s pale imitation of totalitarian propaganda. Intentionally or not, Boris Johnson recently reinforced the mythological status of the NHS. And when, in the present crisis, retired doctors such as I were asked to return to work if they were able, it was to help the NHS. This was like asking a soldier to lay down his life for the sake of the Ministry of Defence. It says something about the credulity of the public that the response to slogans like “protect the NHS” was dull compliance, rather than outraged demands as to why it wasn’t protecting us.

I suspect also that the sheer unpleasantness of the NHS is reassuring to the British population. It evokes the Dunkirk spirit: we are all stranded on the beach of illness together. And if we cannot all live in luxury, we can at least all die in squalor. Justice is served.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.

May 12, 2025

QotD: The Gracchi

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

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ tribunates – both of which ended with them being killed (I think it is perfectly fair to say “murdered”) – typically occupy a position in survey coverage of the Roman Republic as the inciting incident that begins (if not quite causes) the collapse of the Republic itself, the first outbreak of violence in Roman politics, the first escalation in a spiral that would lead to the repeated outbreak of civil war in the first century. And that is certainly how they were understood in antiquity; both Plutarch and Appian make this claim (App. BCiv. 1.17; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.1). And in part because the sources (again, Plutarch and Appian) frame the Gracchi quite positively and in part, to be frank, because their reforms are generally “left-coded” in a university environment that is inherently sympathetic to left-coded things, the Gracchi tend to come across to students as righteous reformers killed by foolish, hidebound and greedy reactionary Roman senators. And that is, to be fair, a potentially valid reading (if employed with some caveats).

But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.

But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a “soft coup” in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.

In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this “take” is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.

So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.

May 4, 2025

The Clean German Myth, Doomed B-17 Pilots, and Japan’s Rapid Victories – Out of the Foxholes Live

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 May, 20205

Indy and Sparty tackle some more of your interesting questions in another live Out of the Foxholes. Today they look at loss rates of B-17 crews, the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, and ask why the West was apparently so unprepared for Japan’s attack.
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April 18, 2025

QotD: Literature in (and after) the late Western Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Law, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… But surely the barbarians burned all of the libraries, right? Or the church, bent on creating a “Christian dark age” tore up all of the books?

Well, no.

Here I think the problem is the baseline we assess this period against. Most people are generally aware that the Greeks and Romans wrote a lot of things and that we have relatively few of them. Even if we confine ourselves only to very successful, famous Greek and Roman literature, we still only have perhaps a low single-digit percentage of it, possibly only a fraction of a percent of it. In our post-printing-press and now post-internet world, famous works of literature do not simply vanish, generally and it is intuitive to assume that all of these lost works must have been the result of some catastrophe or intentional sabotage.

I am regularly, for instance, asked how I feel about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. The answer is … not very much. The library burned more than once and by the time it did it was no longer the epicenter of learning in the Mediterranean world. Instead, the library slowly declined as it became less unique because other libraries amassed considerable collections. There was no great, tragic moment where countless works were all lost in an instant. That’s not how the chain of transmission breaks. Because a break in the chain of transmission requires no catastrophe – it merely requires neglect.

The literature of the Greeks and Romans (and the rest of the ancient iron age Mediterranean) were largely written on papyrus paper, arranged into scrolls. The problem here is that papyrus is quite vulnerable to moisture and decay; in the prevailing conditions in much of Europe papyrus might only last a few decades. Ancient papyri really only survive to the present in areas of hard desert (like Egypt, conveniently), but even in antiquity, books written on papyrus would have been constantly wearing out and needing to be replaced.

Consequently, it didn’t require anyone going out and destroying books to cause a break in the chain of transmission: all that needed to happen was for the copying to stop, even fairly briefly. Fortunately for everyone, Late Antiquity was bringing with it a new writing material, parchment, and a new way of putting it together, the codex or book. The transition from papyrus to parchment begins in the fourth century, but some books are still being produced in papyrus in the 7th century, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. Whereas papyrus is a paper made of papyrus stalks pressed together, parchment is essentially a form of leather, cleaned, soaked in calcium lye and scraped very thin. The good news is that as a result, parchment lasts – I have read without difficulty from 1200 year old books written on parchment (via microfilm) and paged through 600 year old books with my own hands. Because making it requires animal hide, parchment was extremely expensive (and still is) but its durability is a huge boon to us because it means that works that got copied onto parchment during the early middle ages often survive on that parchment down to the present.

But of course that means that the moment of technological transition from short-lived papyrus to long-lasting parchment was always going to be the moment of loss in transition: works that made it to parchment would largely survive to the present, while works that were not copied in that fairly narrow window (occupying Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages) would be permanently lost. And that copying was no simple thing: it was expensive and slow. The materials were expensive, but producing a book also required highly trained scribes (often these were monks) who would hand copy, letter by letter, the text for hundreds of pages. And, for reasons we’ll talk about later in this series, the resources available for this kind of copying would hit an all-time-low during the period from the fifth to the seventh centuries – this was expensive work for poor societies to engage in.

And here it is worth thus stopping to note how exceptional a moment of preservation this period is. The literary tradition of Mediterranean antiquity represents the oldest literary tradition to survive in an unbroken line of transmission to the present (alongside Chinese literature). The literary traditions of the Bronze Age (c. 3000-1200 BC and the period directly before antiquity broadly construed) were all lost and had to be rediscovered, with stone and clay tablets recovered archaeologically and written languages reconstructed. The Greeks and Romans certainly made little effort to preserve the literature of those who went before them!

In that context, what is actually historically remarkable here is not that the people of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages lost some books – books had always been being lost, since writing began – but that they saved some books. Never before had a literary tradition been saved in this way. Of course these early copyists didn’t always copy what we might like. Unsurprisingly, Christian monks copying books tended to copy a lot more religious texts (both scriptures but also patristic texts). Moreover, works that were seen as important for teaching good Latin (Cicero, Vergil, etc.) tended to get copied more as well, though this is nothing new; the role of the Iliad and the Odyssey in teaching Greek is probably why their manuscript traditions are so incredibly robust. In any event, far from destroying the literature of classical antiquity, it was the medieval Church itself that was the single institution most engaged in the preservation of it.

At the same time, writers in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries did not stop writing (or stop reading). Much of the literature of this period was religious in nature, but that is no reason to dismiss it (far more of the literature of the Classical world was religious in nature than you likely think, by the by). St. Augustine of Hippo was writing during the fifth century; indeed his The City of God, one of the foundational works of Christian literature, was written in response to the news of the sack of Rome in 410. Isidore of Seville (560-636) was famous for his Etymologies, an encyclopedia of sorts which would form the foundation for much of medieval learning and which in its summaries preserves for us quite a lot of classical bits and bobs which would have otherwise been lost; he also invented the period, comma and colon. Pope Gregory I (540-604) was also a prolific writer, writing hundreds of letters, a collection of four books of dialogues, a life of St. Benedict, a book on the role of bishops, a commentary on the Book of Job and so on. The Rule of St. Benedict, since we’ve brought the fellow up, written in 516 established the foundation for western monasticism.

And while we’ve mostly left the East off for this post, we should also note that writing hardly stopped there. Near to my heart, the emperor Maurice (r. 582-602) wrote the Strategikon, an important and quite informative manual of war which presents, among other things, a fairly sophisticated vision of combined arms warfare. Roman law also survived in tremendous quantities; the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) commissioned the creation of a streamlined law code compiling all of the disparate Roman laws into the Codex Theodosianus, issued in 439. Interestingly, Alaric II (r. 457-507), king of the Visigoths in much of post-Roman Spain would reissue the code as past of the law for his own kingdom in 506 as part of the Breviary of Alaric. Meanwhile, back at Constantinople, Justinian I (r. 527-565) commissioned an even more massive collection of laws, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, issued from 529 to 534 in four parts; a colossal achievement in legal scholarship, it is almost impossible to overstate how important the Corpus Iuris Civilis is for our knowledge of Roman law.

And it is not hard again to see how these sorts of literary projects represented a continuing legacy of Roman culture too (particularly the Roman culture of the third and fourth century), concerned with Roman law, Roman learning and the Roman religion, Christianity. And so when it comes to culture and literature, it seems that the change-and-continuity knight holds the field – there is quite a lot of evidence for the survival of elements of Roman culture in post-Roman western Europe, from language, to religion, to artwork and literature. Now we haven’t talked about social and economic structures (that’s part III), so one might argue we haven’t quite covered all of “culture” just yet, and it is necessary to note that this continuity was sometimes uneven. Nevertheless, the fall of Rome can hardly be said to have been the end of Roman culture.

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

April 17, 2025

Why TOG II was BETTER Than You Think

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 20 Dec 2024

It was rejected and ridiculed for years — but TOG II is actually much better than you think.

In 1939, the UK Ministry of War issued the spec for a heavy assault tank. This hefty brief included the requirements to cross a 16ft gap, climb over anti-tank obstacles and enough firepower to penetrate 7 inches of concrete. Enter “The Old Gang”, a group of expert engineers, responsible for most of the tanks created during the First World War.

Two vehicles were created during this process — TOG I and TOG II. While the TOG projects have often been rejected as tanks out of time — relics of thinking from trench warfare — Content and Research Officer, Chris Copson, argues that these vehicles were highly innovative in terms of their mobility, armour and firepower.

Despite fulfilling their brief, TOG was sidelined in favour of other projects, and the lone survivor — TOG II — arrived at The Tank Museum in the 1950s. This lumbering beast that never saw active service, sat sidelined whilst surrounded by WW2 legends like the Churchill, Sherman, and the infamous Tiger 131.

But in 2012, a miracle happened. World of Tanks included the super heavy tank in their online video game — launching TOG II into viral popularity. Since then, interest in this unique vehicle has skyrocketed, and now more than ever people want to see TOG II in real life and find out more about its interesting history.

Shop TOG II merch at our online shop: https://tankmuseumshop.org/

00:00 | Introduction
01:24 | An Innovative Spec
05:00 | Innovations in Mobility
10:11 | Innovations in Armour
11:49 | Innovations in Firepower
16:21 | Would TOG II Have Worked?
18:46 | The Legend Lives On

In this film, Chris Copson unpicks the misconceptions surrounding TOG II — that it was a ridiculous super-heavy tank built for a war from 30 years ago. Instead, this is a vehicle that was highly innovative and represented a significant engineering achievement. Thanks to videos games such as World of Tanks, TOG II is now celebrated as the goofiest super heavy tank in history, and lives on as an internet legend for a whole new generation of tank nuts.
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March 17, 2025

QotD: Myths from Norman Rockwell’s America

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve seen complaints on X that a factory worker’s single income used to be enough to raise a family on but isn’t anymore. It’s true; I grew up in those days.

The complaint generally continues that we were robbed of this by bad policy choices. But that is at best only half true.

World War II smashed almost the entire industrial capacity of the world outside the U.S., which exited with its manufacturing plant not only intact, but greatly improved by wartime capitalization. The result was that for about 30 years, the US was a price-taker in international markets. Nobody could effectively compete with us at heavy or even light manufacturing.

The profits from that advantage built Norman Rockwell’s America — lots of prosperous small towns built around factories and mills. Labor unions could bid up salaries for semi-skilled workers to historically ridiculous levels on that tide.

But it couldn’t last. Germany and Japan and England recapitalized and rebuilt themselves. The Asian tigers began to be a thing. U.S. producers facing increasing competitive pressure discovered that they had become bloated and inefficient in the years when the penalty for that mistake was minimal.

Were there bad policy choices? Absolutely. Taxes and entitlement spending exploded because all that surplus was sloshing around ready to be captured; the latter has proven politically almost impossible to undo.

When our windfall finally ended in the early 1970s, Americans were left with habits and expectations formed by the long boom. We’ve since spent 50 years trying, with occasional but only transient successes, to recreate those conditions. The technology boom of 1980 to 2001 came closest.

But the harsh reality is that we are never likely to have that kind of advantage again. Technology and capital are now too mobile for that.

Political choices have to be made within this reality. It’s one that neither popular nor elite perception has really caught up with.

Eric S. Raymond, X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, 2024-07-08.

March 11, 2025

The Myth and Truth behind Croissants – A Recipe from 1850

Filed under: Food, France, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 29 Oct 2024

Crescent-shaped bread rolls, from before the croissant was a flaky pastry

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1853

Croissants weren’t always the buttery, flaky pastries that we know and love. While today, that flakiness is what defines a croissant, in the past, it was the crescent shape that was most important.

This recipe from the mid-19th century, a good 50 years before the croissant got its flakes, is a wonderfully soft bread. It doesn’t bear much resemblance to a modern croissant besides the shape, but it is much easier to make. The bread is a little plain, but would be lovely with some butter and jam.

    In luxury bakeries, small loaves called croissants are prepared, usually in the semi-circular shape of a roll curved and tapered at the ends. The liquid is used to form the dough with one kilogram of flour consists of one or two eggs beaten and mixed with about five hundred grams of water. Moreover, the choice of flour, the dose of yeast, as well as the working of the dough, require the same care as when it comes to the other luxury breads mentioned.
    — Des substances alimentaire et des moyens de les améliorer by Anselme Payen, 1853.

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