In Jakarta, aside from flags at half-staff, we have seen no signs of mourning for the victims: while employees and dependents of the American embassy spent their holiday loading trucks and putting together medicine kits, the city’s inhabitants went ahead with New Year’s parties; nightclubs and shopping centers are full; and regular television programming continues. At least 120,000 of their fellow countrymen are dead, and Indonesians hardly talk about it, much less engage in massive charitable efforts. The exceptionally wealthy businessmen of the capital — and the country boasts several billionaires — haven’t made large donations to the cause of Sumatran relief; a few scattered NGOs have done a bit, but there are no well-organized drives to raise funds and supplies. We have seen nothing akin to what happened in the USA following the 9/11 atrocity, or the hurricanes in Florida of this past year.
The Sri Lankan’s words echo in my mind every day, “Why do we want to bother with this? We all know you Americans will do everything”. With the exception of handful of Western countries, most of the world would appear inhabited by the sort of Eloi-type creatures depicted in that old sci-fi flick based on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, passively watching as flood waters or Morlocks drag their fellows away.
Begging the pardon of the cultural relativists, but might we not be allowed to raise — ever so gently, of course — the possibility that these differing reactions to human suffering, show Western civilization as the best we have on the planet? Maybe, just maybe Western civilization is morally superior.
The Diplomad, “Death in Nasty Places: Who Cares?”, The Diplomad, January 10, 2005.
February 2, 2026
QotD: Moral relativism
November 14, 2025
This is in your house … and you’ve never noticed
Rex Krueger
Published 12 Nov 2025The Secret History of Wood – Rubber wood
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March 6, 2025
The Iron Curtain Descends – W2W 10 – News of 1946
TimeGhost History
Published 5 Mar 20251946 sees the world teetering on the brink of a new global conflict. George Kennan’s long telegram outlines Moscow’s fanatical drive against the capitalist West, while our panel covers escalating espionage, strategic disputes over Turkey, and the emerging ideological battle between the U.S. and the USSR. Tune in as we break down the news shaping the dawn of the Cold War.
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February 8, 2024
“Mwa-mwa-mwa”, they said
Chris Bray expands on the topic of yesterday’s post about the legacy media wanting you not to do your own research because it might lead to the “wrong” kind of answers:
I’m a hundred pages into a book I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I meant to spend last night reading it. But then I accidentally looked at social media.
For years, now, I’ve been watching as journalists and politicians connect a set of fact claims to a conclusion that has nothing to do with the evidence they’ve just given: This happened, and this happened, and this happened, and, trust us, all of that means this. It snaps your head back, because the statement about the meaning of the evidence is so ridiculous they can’t possibly have failed to notice. The news is frequently a series of bizarre interpretive non-sequiturs.
I wrote about a favorite example here, as an army of Barack Obama hagiographers described The Lightbringer’s glorious childhood in Indonesia. He went there with his mother and Indonesian stepfather in 1966, during a massive purge of communists by the army that included a great deal of mass killing, and Obama’s biographers describe the future American president being a young child in a place where rivers were choked with corpses and soldiers marched prisoners through the streets. Then, casually, they conclude that his time in Indonesia was idyllic and warm, and Jakarta was the place where this wonderfully decent future leader learned the gentle values of civic engagement and democratic pluralism.
See also this example, from back in the days when I didn’t have many subscribers, discussing an op-ed piece that described the Freedom Convoy as a movement of anti-government radicals who wanted to live in a society with no rules at all and marched on Ottawa behind the banner of authoritarianism to implement their fascist agenda.
Over and over again, reading the “news” that these people write, you catch yourself muttering but you JUST SAID …
Fact claims don’t add up, categories clash, paragraphs self-refute, sentences start out insistently claiming X and then wander into a firm insistence upon Not X before the period arrives at the end. The great complex of global news and politics has the internal consistency and logic of the day ward at a mental hospital.
Last night we seem to have suddenly turned the knob on that machine up to eleven, BECAUSE HITLER IS IN MOSCOW TO DO AN INTERVIEW. The people who are proud that we’re fighting authoritarianism by arresting the leading figure of the political opposition and throwing him off the ballot are also very angry that Tucker Carlson is interviewing an autocrat, and they hate autocracy, so Tucker Carlson must be arrested and bankrupted and barred from returning to the United States, to stand up to authoritarianism. I had a moment last night when I sincerely wondered about the wisdom of paying attention, because the experience of hearing from The Responsible People™ became painfully hallucinatory.
The officials at the EU get to decide who counts as a real journalist and who gets ruined, to protect democracy. Ukraine is the brave and incorruptible vanguard of ideal democracy, by the way, and so pure it floats, like an ad for soap. Nothing bad has ever happened there, you Nazi, but now Satan Putin’s vampire fangs drip with innocent blood, and there’s absolutely nothing else to say about it, send cash.
Watching people like Bill Kristol and David Frum comment on real-world events now is like watching a homeless drug addict having a psychotic break at a bus shelter. The connection between fact and interpretation has become painfully severed. A whole layer of allegedly high-status people have gone barking mad. We need to arrest everyone who disagrees with us about politics or else we’re going to lose our system of open society to authoritarianism, and you really ought to smoke some of whatever we have inside this glass pipe.
September 18, 2023
BM59: The Italian M14
Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Oct 2017After World War Two, both the Beretta and Breda companies in Italy began manufacturing M1 Garand rifles. When Italy decided that they wanted a more modern selective-fire, magazine-fed rifle, they chose to adapt the M1 Garand to that end rather than develop a brand new rifle. Two Beretta engineers, Vittorio Valle and Domenico Salza, began work in 1957 on what would become the BM-59. Prototypes were ready in 1959, trials were run in 1960, and by 1962 the new weapon was in Italian military hands.
The BM59 is basically an M1 Garand action and fire control system, but modernized. The caliber was changed to 7.62mm NATO, and the barrel shortened to 19.3 inches. A simple but effective selective fire system was added to the fire control mechanism, and the en bloc clips replaced with a 20-round box magazine (and stripper clip loading guide to match). A folding integral bipod was added to allow the rifle to be used for supporting fire on full auto, and a long muzzle device was added along with a gas cutoff and grenade launching sight to allow the use of NATO standard 22mm rifle grenades.
In this form, the BM59 was a relative quickly developed and quite successful and well-liked rifle. In addition to the Italian military, it was purchased by Argentina, Algeria, Nigeria, and Indonesia. A semiautomatic version was made for the US commercial market and designated the BM62, and a small number of fully automatic BM-59 rifles — like the one in this video — were imported into the US before the 1968 Gun Control Act cut off importation of foreign machine guns.
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August 27, 2023
6 Strange Facts About the Cold War
Decades
Published 27 Jul 2022Welcome to our history channel, run by those with a real passion for history & that’s about it. In today’s video, we will be exploring 6 odd Cold War facts.
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August 15, 2023
History must be forced to fit the narrative
Chris Bray revisits an older article from the Obama years:
President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2014.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
There is no question that authoritarianism is descending on the United States of America, quickly. There is also no question where it’s coming from, as you quickly learn from the current social media musings of the most wonderfully progressive people. Trump must be silenced NOW! Why is the authoritarian being ALLOWED TO SPEAK? Ruth Ben-Ghiat, please call your office.
How have we gotten here?
I’ve mentioned before a looooong essay I wrote, more than ten years ago, about the cottage industry in Barack Obama hagiographies. Obama’s fellatiographers noted, for example, that Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, had been ordered back to Indonesia in 1966, and that photos of him from that time show him in the uniform of the Indonesian army. They also mention, with remarkably disingenuous vagueness, that there was maybe some political trouble going on in Indonesia while Obama was there as a child and his stepdad was a soldier.
But what was happening in the mid-1960s in Indonesia is that the Indonesian Communist Party tried to restructure Sukarno’s careful balancing of competing forces in the new country with the kidnapping and killing of a group of right-wing flag officers by leftist soldiers, beheading conservative military power — after which the military responded with the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of communists, often with machetes and with a serious commitment to doing the job as grimly as possible: bodies in rivers, heads on pikes, slow killing in front of mass graves. Here’s my last paragraph from that section on the Obama biographies:
And the lesson? Indonesia was where “Ann was Barry’s teacher in high-minded matters—liberal, humanist values”, Remnick concludes. It’s where she taught him the values of “honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others”, where she lectured him about “a sense of obligation to give something back”, Scott adds. It’s where she “worked to instill ideas about public service in her son”. Because Indonesia in the late sixties was the perfect place and time to learn about liberal humanist values and public service.
Barack Obama was a Democrat who attained the presidency, which means that journalists knew he had to be a sainted figure, and he was the first black president, which means that journalists knew he had to be brilliant and extraordinary. So they assembled the threads of his story — Barack Obama went to Indonesia in 1966 with his stepfather, a soldier, during a long period of extraordinarily brutal political retribution by the Indonesian army — and then, pro forma, wove those threads into the foundation of “liberal, humanistic values”.
If Barack Obama had spent his childhood torturing kittens to death and eating their eyeballs in front of a sobbing crowd of kitten-loving toddlers, the Obama biographies would have said that Barack Obama spent his childhood torturing kittens to death and eating their eyeballs in front of a sobbing crowd of kitten-loving toddlers, a heartwarming experience that taught him the value of democratic pluralism and fundamental human decency. The story was written before anyone began working on it: Barack Obama [experience TBD] and [experience TBD], the formative experiences that made him the kind and wonderful genius he is today.
See also this recent discussion with David Garrow, a historian who
has written a new(corrected: published a post-Obama-presidency) biography — and who found, as he researched his subject, that he was often looking at evidence no one had ever pursued before. The hagiographers of the Obama presidency-era weren’t looking for evidence; they already knew the story they meant to write. They came up with some evidence-simulating objects for form’s sake, to assemble their liturgy in the apparent form of biography. Their “Barack Obama” was never Barack Obama.Their “Donald Trump” is not, now, Donald Trump. There’s a formula; they apply it. There’s a narrative to be written. Donald Trump said he would repeal two federal regulations for every new regulation he implemented — textbook authoritarianism! Donald Trump said that America has fought a bunch of “dumb wars”, and should be much more careful about foreign military involvement — JUST LIKE ADOLF HITLER!!!!!!
It’s beside the point to note that the conclusions never matched the evidence. They were never meant to.
This is crazymaking behavior. Constantly spinning narratives that have nothing to do with anything in the actual, physical world is a recipe for a psychotic break. And we have multiple layers of institutional actors who cosplay “elite” — in media, in academia, in government, and in corporations — who’ve been playing with their shadow puppets for so long that they’ve forgotten they’re shadow puppets. They believe themselves.
That’s how you get to we need a single-party ballot to prevent authoritarianism and we have to arrest the opposition leader to prevent authoritarianism. It’s socially distributed insanity, a real descent into the world of false symbols. And it’s becoming incredibly dangerous.
November 19, 2022
“But actually, vat ve haf to confront is ze deep, systemic, and structural restructuring of our world”
Because, as Chris Bray points out, there’s no point in restructuring the non-structural structures or something…
The G20 leaders flew to Bali this week to cosplay social repulsiveness and to hear from Klaus Schwab, who has no government position or formal place in the G20, making the G20 gathering a kind of executive committee meeting for something that rhymes with “Morld Meconomic Morum”.
The terrifyingly vacuous Bond villain said that ve must fundamentally restructure ze vorld, flattering the geniuses like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden who will now use their personal wisdom and strength to do the restructuring.
(That’s an excerpt — the whole thing is here, if you want to punish your mind.)
There’s so much to love in this babbling, starting with the fact that the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world can’t manage to deliver decent audio. But listen to what the man says:
1.) Looking out into an audience of the world’s major national leaders, he says that we face a global “multi-crisis”, made up of “economic, political, social, and ecological, and institutional crisis”.
Accepting the premise for the sake of argument, who caused all that crisis? Hello, leaders of the ruined world, I honor your wisdom and clarity, and turn to you to fix your broken countries that you’ve been leading.
2.) “But actually, vat ve haf to confront is ze deep, systemic, and structural restructuring of our world. Und zis vill take some time! Und ze vorld vill look differently, after ve haf gone through zis transition process.”
This is all of Klaus Schwab in three sentences: We must do structural restructuring, see, not non-structural restructuring. And after we have completely, deeply, systematically restructured literally everything in the entire world, the world will look — wait for this, because this is insight from the most renowned of all the experts, a deep mind who you may struggle to follow — different. Yes, changing things a lot makes them not be the same. Und zis is vy Klaus Schwab receives ze big bucks! You and I could not think at this level! Stand at attention!
3.) “Politically, the driving forces for this political transformation, of course, is the transition into a multipolar world, which has a tendency to make our world much more fragmented.”
Political fragmentation, then — the transition into multipolarity — causes fragmentation. The fragmentation into multipolarity makes the world fragmented, thereby, you see, fragmenting it. Careful, Klaus, you’ll accidentally write a whole Thomas Friedman column with your mouth.
The man is like a novelty gift with a pop-up clown inside it: You press the button, and it makes nonsensical streams of word-sounds. Fortunately, however, Klaus was speaking to an audience of Joe Biden, so I’m sure it sounded deep in the room.
October 10, 2022
Look at Life — Trouble Shooters (1964)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018
From the comments:
David Mills
1 year ago
We never wore berets but jungle hats. This is an honest attempt to illustrate their role but so obviously, painfully stage managed. In reality, it was a hot, sweaty, stinking environment with constant tensions. Contacts were few and far between. Going into the IBAN long houses and chatting with the headman (Kampong Ketua) was fascinating, useful and, for the short period, relaxing. Between June 1965 and Aug 1982 I had four tours in the area. Learning Malay was essential and welcomed by the indigenous population.Iolis
1 year ago
The late Paddy Ashdown at 6.36. Later in life he would becone leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrat Party. He sadly died on 22 December 2018.
September 16, 2022
Look at Life — East of Suez (1966)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018More than 50,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen police the rivers and jungles of Borneo.
April 12, 2022
Last War Patrol of HMS Terrapin
The History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
Published April 11, 2022On her seventh war patrol, in the south Java Sea, the T class British submarine HMS Terrapin and her crew had faced the terror of battle and barely survived. Badly damaged and far from home, sometimes the drama of war is not just in the battle, but in the voyage home.
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March 15, 2022
FN FNC: The Belgian 5.56mm NATO Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Nov 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
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The FNC (Fabrique Nationale Carabine) was FN’s followup to the unsuccessful CAL rifle. Chambered for the newly-adopted 5.56mm NATO cartridge, the FNC uses a long stroke gas piston system very reminiscent of the AK, combined with a stamped upper and milled aluminum lower. After about 5 years of development, the FNC was put on the market in 1980, and was quickly purchased by Indonesia, along with a license for domestic production as the Pindad SS-1. It would also be adopted by Sweden as the AK-5 (minus the 3-round burst functionality) and Belgium. About 6,000 semiautomatic sporting models were imported into the US. A number of those, including this one, were legally registered as transferrable machine guns before 1986.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
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March 6, 2022
Lugers for the Dutch East Indies Army
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Nov 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
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Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
Note: When I say the double magazine pouch is unique for this model, I was not thinking about those issued with LP-08 Artillery Lugers.
While the Dutch Army dithered over new pistol adoption, the Dutch East Indies Army (KNIL) took more decisive action and adopted the Luger as the M11 in 1911 after a few years of testing. They ordered the first batch of 4,181 from DWM in the years before World War One. After the Treaty of Versailles, German companies were barred from military production, and so the KNIL bought a batch of 6,000 Lugers from the Vickers company in the UK. These were still insufficient for the force, and in 1928 they ordered one final batch of guns.
This final batch was made by DWM. The Allied Control Commission ceased operation in 1927 and left Germany, and DWM almost immediately resumer Luger production. This final batch consisted of 3,828 more M11 pattern pistols. All three batches were in a single serial number range, starting at 1 and running to 14020. They were chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum cartridge, with 4 inch (100mm) barrels. Unit marks were engraved originally on the back of the frame, but in 1919 this was replaced with the use of a small brass plaque on the trigger guard. A plaque on the left side of the frame was introduced for unit marks in 1939, as seen on this example.
We also have an original KNIL M11 holster and double magazine pouch to take a look at — accessories that are extremely rare today.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
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February 26, 2022
QotD: Taste in decoration
It’s as if a Las Vegas wedding chapel designer had been abducted, brought to Indonesia, and forced, at gun-point, to lower his standards. One half-waits for the Elvis impersonator to come down the staircase.
Conrad, “The Long Weekend”, The Gweilo Diaries, 2004-09-28
October 27, 2021
Looting WW2 Java Sea Wrecks – “The Biggest Grave Robbery in History”
Historigraph
Published 26 Oct 2021Support on Patreon to help keep the videos coming https://www.patreon.com/historigraph
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► Second Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpIj…
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► Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historigraphSources:
[A] Mediacorp documentary on the salvaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9iRR…
[B] Footage of the wreck of Prince of Wales, by Nigel Sinclair – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD96F…
[C] Footage of the wreck of Repulse, by Clayton Neilson – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3U_e…[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia…
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/201…
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/201…
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-…
[5] https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitst…
[6] https://www.reclamet.co.uk/scrap-meta…
[7] https://www.nst.com.my/news/2015/10/n…
[8] https://www.maritime-executive.com/ar…
