World War Two
Published 3 Oct 2026The MG 34 pioneered the modern general-purpose machine gun. The MG 42 preserved that battlefield versatility while cutting manufacturing labor roughly in half and producing the terrifying sound remembered as “Hitler’s Buzzsaw”.
In this Nazi Rearmament episode, Spartacus traces the development of the MG 34 and MG 42 from clandestine German weapons programs during the 1930s through mass production and combat in World War II.
We examine how one basic weapon could accompany an infantry squad, deliver sustained long-range fire, engage low-flying aircraft, and serve inside tanks and fortifications. We also explore why the beautifully machined MG 34 became an industrial problem, and how stamped steel, roller locking, rapid barrel changes, and a cyclic rate reaching 1,500 rounds per minute transformed its successor.
But this is more than the story of two famous German machine guns. It is also a study of Nazi Germany’s war economy: technically ambitious and capable of remarkable innovation, yet ultimately unable to overcome the manpower and industrial resources of the coalition it chose to fight.
Finally, we follow the weapons beyond 1945, from the continued foreign service of the MG 34 to the MG 42’s postwar descendants, the MG 1, MG 2, and MG 3.
Which small arm should we cover next: the MP 40, FG 42, or StG 44?
October 4, 2026
From MG 34 to MG 42: Building Hitler’s Buzzsaw – Nazi Rearmament 08
September 30, 2026
What’s the Point of Armoured Cars?
The Tank Museum
Published 29 May 2026Even though we call ourselves The Tank Museum, at heart we are the museum of the Royal Armoured Corps. That means we don’t just have tanks — we have a wide range of armoured fighting vehicles that tell the story of the Corps. Within that collection sits the armoured car.
On the surface it can seem redundant: tanks are better armoured, have superior cross-country mobility and usually carry bigger guns. So why do armoured cars — a concept that predates the tank — remain in service today? After all, a Ferret doesn’t sound nearly as intimidating when up against the likes of the Chieftain.
00:00 | Introduction
01:25 | Starting Small
02:49 | Speed Demons
09:40 | Going Global
13:13 | Only the Enemy in Front
19:28 | Go Big or Go Home
(more…)
September 24, 2026
More than you ever wanted to know about the Teapot Dome scandal
At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia has a long, long post about the scandal that (probably) killed President Harding: the Teapot Dome scandal.
“The Teapot Dome scandal” by Clifford Berryman, 1924
Granger Collection
Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.
Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.
Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry”. (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)
[…]
Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.
Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.
Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.
Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.
The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang?—?old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.
Harding’s cabinet, 1921. A few members of the Ohio Gang are hiding among the respectable people. They look very serious here. After hours was another story.
[…]
For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.
The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.
Wild concept.
So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels?—?about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.
There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.
Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.
Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.
Teapot Rock on an old postcard from around 1922
Public DomainYes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.
So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.
Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?
Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.
He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.
[…]
Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.
For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.
So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: “I have no trouble with my enemies … But my goddamn friends … they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!”
Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.
Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.
September 20, 2026
September 14, 2026
Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday
I’d heard a bit about Stefan Zweig but I’d never read any of his work. Ted Gioia’s review of The World of Yesterday certainly makes me a bit more likely to pick up a copy:
Photo from The Honest Broker
My most recent find is Stefan Zweig’s account of how Vienna went from nineteenth century elegance, prosperity and cultural flourishing to warmongering and hyperinflation. His book The World of Yesterday may be the single best memoir from a survivor of societal collapse from the 20th century — and deserves to be far better known.
I call Zweig a survivor, but that’s not entirely true. He somehow managed to stay alive during World War I (not an easy task for a young man in Central Europe), and the subsequent economic crisis. But World War II forced him into exile, and he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.
He was a broken man by then — and he feared Hitler was too powerful to stop. So Zweig, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of his generation, ended it all with an overdose of pills.
Just a few years earlier, Zweig had gained renown as the most widely translated contemporary author in Europe. In Germany, his books sold 20,000 copies on the first day — even before a single advertisement had appeared. But that now changed.
“Not a single one [of my books] is available in Germany today,” he lamented at the end of his life. “Those who still possess a copy keep it carefully hidden.” And the same was true in France, Italy and other countries under fascist control.
Zweig is best known today as the inspiration behind Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel. “It’s basically plagiarism”, the director has admitted. But Zweig ought to be remembered more for his writings, especially this final work from his pen.
Stefan Zweig is now remembered as the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
His fiction is also sadly under-appreciated. And it’s very readable — Zweig was a specialist in short novels with fast-paced plots. I highly recommend 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, and Chess as starting points. Zweig also had a knack for mini-biographies (see, for example, his stellar book on Montaigne).
The day before he died, he mailed his manuscript of The World of Yesterday to a publisher. It was released posthumously, and is now recognized as a defining document in how things go bad. Over the course of 500 pages, Zweig starts with the peace, prosperity, and cultural flourishing of the final years of the Habsburg Empire, and then shows, step by step, how a healthy, vital society self-destructed.
The entire book is well worth reading. I will only discuss a small part of it here — covering the hyperinflation following World War I. But this book is so rich in observations and telling details, I could easily devote several articles to it without coming close to exhausting its riches.
Zweig lived through the currency collapse twice — first in Austria (where he lived across the road from an odd young man named Adolf Hitler), when the crown devalued rapidly. Then he moved to Germany, where hyperinflation was even worse.
The stories he tells are so fanciful, you might think he was writing a fable in the style of Jorge Luis Borges. Consider his story of beer-swilling tourists.
The story starts when the Austrian currency collapses in value. Germans quickly learn how to take advantage of this, by crossing the border to buy up cheap merchandise — but with unforeseen consequences:
Finally, at the instigation of the German government, a border guard was appointed to prevent all consumer goods from being bought in the cheaper Salzburg instead of in the home stores … But one article remained free, which could not be confiscated: the beer that one had in the body.
And the beer-drinking Bavarians calculated from day to day on the exchange rate slip whether, as a result of the devaluation of the crown, they could drink five or six or ten liters of beer in Salzburg for the same price they had to pay at home for a single liter.
A more splendid lure could not be imagined, and so crowds of women and children moved over from neighboring Freilassing and Reichenhall to afford the luxury of swilling as much beer as their stomachs could hold. Every evening the station was a veritable pandemonium of drunken, bawling, spitting hordes of people; some who overloaded themselves had to be carried to the carriages on the trolleys usually used to transport suitcases …
Of course the happy Bavarians had no idea that they were in for a terrible revenge. For when the crown stabilized and the mark, on the other hand, plummeted in astronomical proportions, the Austrians crossed over from the same station to get cheaply drunk in their turn, and the same spectacle began a second time, but in the opposite direction.
This imbalance between currencies created other surreal scenes.
Incredible as the fact may seem, I can corroborate it as a witness that the famous luxury Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was for a long time rented out entirely to English unemployed people who, thanks to the abundant English unemployment benefits, lived here more cheaply than in their slums at home.
September 13, 2026
The scandalous The Whispering Gallery published by “The Badly Had” in 1926
In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte recounts the publishing scandal of the 1920s, as The Bodley Head fought off other publishers to obtain the British rights to The Whispering Gallery, written by an anonymous career diplomat with lots of juicy scandal about the great and the good of British public life:
Hesketh Pearson
In 1926, Allen Lane was a young publisher at The Bodley Head, a firm founded by his uncle. He was approached about a manuscript entitled The Whispering Gallery — the diaries of an anonymous retired diplomat or, rather, “envoy extraordinary”. Its pages, writes Lane’s biographer, Jeremy Lewis, were “crammed with scandalous and revealing revelations about assorted politicians, tycoons and literary men, including Lenin, Mussolini, Kitchener, Churchill, the late Tsar, Henry James, and Cecil Rhodes”.
Who wouldn’t want to publish that?
Lane learned that the manuscript had been whipped into shape by Hesketh Pearson (below), an actor, writer, and military hero, who was also the representative of the anonymous diplomat. The US rights had been sold to the prestigious firm of Boni & Liveright. Lane rode his Triumph motorcycle to Sussex where he met the vacationing Hesketh Pearson and learned that his anonymous diplomat had been keeping a diary since his university years and throughout his impressive career. With the backing of colleagues at The Bodley Head, Lane offered £250 for the rights to the manuscript, with the provision that the diarist’s identity be revealed to him and one of the firm’s directors. His offer was accepted. Lane was told that the diplomatic diarist was Sir Rennell Rodd.
An aggressive print run of 5,000 copies was ordered. Lane sold the serial rights to the Sunday Chronicle and assured literary editors at other major newspapers that The Whispering Gallery would be “one of the most talked about books of the autumn season”. He was not wrong.
By publication day, all but about 500 copies had been sold into stores. Another print run was ordered. Lane was not especially concerned when the Daily Mail denounced the book on release as a “scandalous fake”. A conservative paper was never going to respond well to a diplomat who described Lenin as a sympathetic character.
Then the Observer piled on: “a reeking compost of garbage”, it wrote. The Times joined the chorus. Important figures disputed facts in the book. Winston Churchill, for instance, said he was actually on the Western Front when the diarist had him dining with Asquith in Downing Street.
Lane came under pressure from the higher-ups at The Bodley Head. They asked him to coax the anonymous diplomat into responding to his critics, or sue those describing his book as a fraud.
“I do not mind if I am believed or not”, responded the diplomat via Pearson.
Attacks on the reputation of The Bodley Head continued. Lane and a director of the firm decided to confront Pearson. They arranged a meeting. Pearson arrived late and flustered. He said he’d had a difficult time with the diarist who claimed, “among other things, that it is [Pearson’s] fault that the book has got all this publicity, and that he did not want it”. Lane and the director were mollified.
But the Daily Mail kept up its attacks on the publisher: “They have lent themselves to a fraud on the public and have debased the name of their firm. It remains to be seen whether reputable authors will be willing to have their works published by a firm which is capable of such disgraceful conduct.”
Increasingly impatient with young Lane, The Bodley Head’s board increased its pressure on him to find a resolution. He met again with Pearson and demanded to meet the diarist. Pearson said that was not possible. Among other reasons, the timing was inconvenient because Sir Rennell Rodd’s daughter was about to be married. Pearson was indignant at suggestions that the diarist might not exist and that he had written the manuscript himself. Lawsuits were threatened both ways.
The Bodley Head’s board insisted Lane reveal the name of the diarist. Lane at first refused, but then took it upon himself to visit Sir Rennell Rodd at his home in Cavendish Square. A well-regarded former ambassador to Rome and delegate to the League of Nations, Sir Rennell said he had nothing at all to do with The Whispering Gallery. “Had Lane taken the trouble to consult the reference books”, writes Lewis, “he would have discovered that [Rodd] had recently written his memoirs in three volumes; the last of these had appeared only the previous year, which made it all the more unlikely that he would have written The Whispering Gallery“.
Lane confessed all this to his board. Word leaked to the Daily Mail, which celebrated its exposure of “the greatest literary scandal of recent times”. The Bodley Head tried to salvage its reputation by claiming to have been the victims of a fraud by a “miscreant”, i.e. Pearson, and by blaming “our junior director”, i.e., Lane, for guaranteeing the authenticity of the book.
Then the fun started.
September 12, 2026
Berlin after 1918 … the decadence the Nazis fought
The period after the First World War in Weimar Germany was a huge break with the Wilhelmine past, especially in Berlin and some other large cities. Hitler wasn’t wrong about the moral decadence of the 1920s and the reaction helped build his movement. At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia illustrates what life was like in Berlin for those who fully indulged in the excesses of the new liberalized society that so outraged Hitler and his supporters:
Metropolis by Otto Dix, 1927–1928,
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
It’s 1929, and Berlin is having the kind of night respectable people will later insist never happened.
Neon bleeds across wet pavement. A taxi hisses past, throwing gutter water onto a woman whose dress has misplaced most of its back. Somewhere below street level, a trumpet murders a respectable German melody while a girl in a tuxedo leans in to kiss another girl.
Berlin, 1929: Haus Vaterland, where Berliners could drink, dance, dine around the world, and enjoy an hourly fake thunderstorm over the Rhine because subtlety had apparently taken the night off. The pleasure palace could accommodate as many as 8,000 people.
CC BY 4.0She goes in. Another comes out laughing. The door swings.
They call these women the Neue Frau — “new woman”. Hair bobbed to the jawline as though she took a knife to the nineteenth century. Hemline at the knee, one stocking laddered at the ankle.
The new woman works behind a counter at a department store. When the doorman holds out his hand, she pays him with her own wages from her own bank account. Today, we would call these progressive women “girlbosses” while silently hating ourselves for not having a less cringy word.
Berlin, 1929: Two women dance at the Eldorado, where lipstick, tuxedos, and heterosexual expectations were all optional. Four years later, the Nazis shut it down.
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust EncyclopediaOther young women belonged to a more slippery category Berliners called the Halbseidenen — the “half-silks”. Half-silk was fabric woven partly from real silk and partly from cheaper thread. The fabric was glossy enough to pass at a distance, suspect once you got close.
The nickname landed on women who were equally difficult to classify — shopgirls, dancers, sexually independent working women, occasional prostitutes, girls dressed just a little better than their wages should have allowed.
These women do not dance politely. Anita Berber, Berlin’s cocaine-addicted queen of nude dance, had made Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy infamous. Grosz and Otto Dix paint Lustmord — sex murder — as a genre, and sell it.
Otto Dix – Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925
Public DomainInside the club, smoke curls from red-stained lips like a genie escaping its lamp. Champagne sweats in silver buckets and sloshes in chipped glasses. A folded banknote, a razor’s quick flash, two white lines cut across a mirror while dancers stamp and spin inches away.
Women arrive as men, men arrive as women, and bankers disappear into back rooms with people their bankers’ wives would not have invited to luncheon.
This particular den of iniquity has competition. Weimar Berlin supports somewhere between 65 and 80 gay bars and another fifty lesbian ones.
And the sexual revolution does not stop at closing time. It is sitting on the newsstands. By the end of the decade, more than twenty publications cater to gay, lesbian and gender-nonconforming readers — romance serials, political essays, personal ads, and club listings. A lonely girl in Leipzig can get Die Freundin without ever setting foot in a dancehall.
Berlin, 1929: Die Freundin, Germany’s lesbian weekly, advertises two women’s clubs at the Amerikanischer Tanzpalast. The fine print reads: “Men are not admitted.” I added the flowers. Weimar Berlin did not. | Forum Queeres Archiv München.
Across town, Magnus Hirschfeld has spent years trying to drag sex out of whispers and into science. The physicians in his Institute for Sexual Science would soon help pioneer some of the first gender-affirming surgeries. The institute also offers birth control and counseling, and works with Berlin police on “transvestite passes” — documents that let trans people walk the city without being arrested for their clothes.
Berlin has somehow managed to give gender nonconformity paperwork.
Not everybody finds this charming. Berlin has been hearing the opposite sermon since the republic was born. Ten years earlier, in the political convulsions after World War I, a poster showed a crowned Berlin locked in a waltz with a skeleton, “Berlin, halt ein! Besinne dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod” — Berlin, stop. Come to your senses. Your dance partner is Death.
The poster was not about lesbians in tuxedos. It came from the political chaos of 1919. But the accusation is already there.
Berlin is losing itself. It must return to the past and what once made it great.
Of course, by the late 1920s, the people making that nostalgic argument have begun pointing at sex. In 1927, Wilhelm Frick warns that homosexuality will lead to the “disintegration of the German people”. Large numbers of Germans describe Weimar’s new sexual visibility as decadent, immoral, and evidence of national degeneration. Right-leaning religious organizations and parties preach family, restraint, and traditional German culture.
Looking back on the inflation era, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig remembered the city transforming into “the Babel of the world”, with gay bars multiplying like mushrooms and transvestite balls so extravagant he thought ancient Rome had been outdone.
Berlin read the room. Berlin went on dancing, spending, and fucking.
Berlin, 1919: Ten years before Fritz stands outside our nightclub, Berlin is already being warned about its dance partner. “Stop! Come to your senses! Your dancer is Death.” | Van Santen, Berlin, Stop! 1919.
Lithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public DomainBerlin’s own tourist bureau was advertising Jeder einmal in Berlin! — everyone should visit Berlin at least once. In 1929, nearly 1.7 million guests did.
But not everyone enjoyed watching Berlin turn its private vice into a tourist attraction.
Because while people inside experienced liberation, and the moral right experienced decadence and national decline, young men experienced something else.
Exclusion.
September 7, 2026
The Backbone of the Nazi Panzer War – Panzer III
World War Two
Published 5 Sep 2026The Panzer III was intended to become the backbone of Nazi Germany’s panzer divisions. Emerging from clandestine Weimar-era experimentation and formally developed from 1934, it combined mobility, a five-man crew, a three-man turret, and comprehensive radio communication in one highly effective prewar design.
In this episode, Spartacus follows the Panzerkampfwagen III from secret German-Soviet tank trials at Kama through its production and deployment in Poland, France, North Africa, and Operation Barbarossa. We examine its evolution from the 3.7 cm gun to increasingly powerful 5 cm weapons, the advantages provided by crew specialization and radio-coordinated warfare, and why the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 exposed its diminishing margins in armor and firepower.
By 1943, the Panzer III had been displaced as Germany’s principal gun tank by the more adaptable Panzer IV. Its chassis, however, found an extraordinarily productive second life beneath the Sturmgeschütz III. The Panzer III was not a failed tank. It was an effective prewar design overtaken by an armored arms race it lacked the capacity to survive. Its fate also reflected Nazi Germany’s wider strategic failure: it had built weapons for short campaigns, then unleashed a coalition war whose demands exceeded Germany’s resources.
Watch our episode on the Sd.Kfz. 251: • The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possibl…
Watch Ten Days in Sedan: • Ten Days in Sedan
August 25, 2026
The Halftrack That Made Blitzkrieg Possible
World War Two
Published 23 Aug, 2026The tanks get the glory. But Blitzkrieg could not work on tanks alone.
The Sd.Kfz. 251 was designed to solve one of the fundamental problems of armored warfare: how do you keep infantry moving fast enough to fight alongside the Panzers? Germany’s answer was an armored half-track that helped turn infantry from a slow-moving follow-up force into an integral part of the Panzer division’s combined-arms assault.
In this German Rearmament special, we trace the Sd.Kfz. 251 from clandestine development under the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles to its first production runs on the eve of World War Two. We examine its design, its role in the emerging doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, its deployment in Poland and France, and the extraordinary range of variants that turned it into one of the Wehrmacht’s most versatile vehicles.
But the 251 also exposes the limits behind the image of a fully mechanized German war machine. It was complicated and expensive to manufacture, there were never enough of them, and most German infantry continued to march or rely on horses and trucks. Even as production soared later in the war, Germany’s shortages of fuel, materials, manpower, and industrial capacity increasingly overwhelmed the advantages its engineers and tacticians had created.
The Sd.Kfz. 251 helped make the early German style of armored warfare possible. It also became another example of a sophisticated weapon system serving a war of aggression that Nazi Germany ultimately lacked the resources to sustain.
This is the story of the half-track that made Blitzkrieg possible.
Never Forget.
August 20, 2026
QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s role as Stalin’s useful idiot
George Bernard Shaw stood in Stalin’s USSR in 1931, watching millions starve to death, and declared there was no famine at all. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright didn’t just stay silent about the horror unfolding around him. He actively promoted the lie that would help Stalin cover up one of history’s greatest atrocities.
Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin’s “remarkable progress” and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda.
Why would an intelligent man become Stalin’s useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning’s inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts.
Shaw deliberately used his celebrity status to give Stalin cover while Ukrainian children died of starvation. He returned to Britain and spent years defending Soviet policies, even as refugee testimonies and photographic evidence exposed the genocide. The man who wrote about moral awakening in Pygmalion had abandoned his own moral compass entirely.
Free market economists warned that socialist calculation was impossible, that without prices and property rights, economies would collapse into chaos and death. Shaw dismissed these warnings as bourgeois nonsense while standing ankle-deep in their vindication.
Handre, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-13.
Update, 21 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.
August 19, 2026
QotD: The Kwantung Army was the tail wagging the Japanese Imperial dog
The Lytton Commission was commissioned by the League of Nations to investigate the Mukden Incident, which was one of those false flags the Kwantung Army was fond of. They used it to seize Manchuria — technically a province of China — and set up a puppet government they called “Manchukuo” (under the Qing Emperor who was deposed in 1911 — who was 5 at the time — thus giving it a veneer of historical legitimacy). The Lytton Commission concluded that the Mukden Incident was indeed a false flag; that Japan was the aggressor; and that Manchukuo was a puppet state that should be dissolved, with Manchuria returning to Chinese sovereignty.
That’s bad, because if you’re Japan and you do any of that, you’ve now knuckled under to not just the West, but the worst hypocrites of them all (“Lytton” was Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, formerly governor of Bengal and Viceroy of India, and oh, by the way, how exactly did Britain come to rule in India? The shit they pulled makes the Mukden Incident look like very small beer indeed). And it’s bad from the Chinese side, too, because now you’ve basically tied their hands in any peace negotiations — they can’t conclude any kind of honorable peace without getting Manchuria back, and as should be obvious from the above, you must pry Mantetsu from Japan’s cold, dead hands.
Still, Japan might’ve disciplined guys like Ishiwara … but how? You can’t cashier him; the Army would go insane. You can’t really transfer him — as much trouble as he’s causing in Manchuria, if you bring him home you might well have another February 26 Incident, and it might work this time. You certainly can’t execute him, because a) you’d have to take his entire faction with him, which would decimate your officer corps, and b) perhaps more importantly, the seizure of Manchuria was pretty popular. Mantetsu’s Media boys hadn’t been sitting on their hands during all of this, of course, and the Army’s Media people had been going nuts too.
In the end, the Japanese pretty much had no choice: They gave the League of Nations the finger. Which of course emboldened the KA even more, such that they cooked up an even faker and gayer false flag, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and WWII was on.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
August 10, 2026
The Strangest Hammer Ever Patented (1924)
Rex Krueger
Published 1 Apr 2026This video includes a short clip that appears to be widely reposted on Instagram. I was unable to determine the original creator after reasonable searching. If you are the original creator, please contact me for attribution.
(more…)
August 9, 2026
How To Launch the Apocalypse – Death of Democracy 27 – Q3 1939
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 8 Aug 2026This is Step 27 in the Death of Democracy: LAUNCH A WORLD WAR — the moment when the collapse of democracy, diplomacy, and collective security culminated in an attack that would engulf the world.
In July and August 1939, Adolf Hitler turned the destruction of German democracy into the instrument for launching a European war.
While Nazi Germany armed Danzig, mobilized reservists, prepared its U-boats, introduced civilian rationing, and manufactured stories of Polish aggression, Britain, France, Poland, the United States, and the Soviet Union made a final series of increasingly desperate attempts to prevent catastrophe.
At the center of the crisis was the failed effort to construct an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Nazi aggression. Negotiations foundered on delay, mutual suspicion, the Baltic states, and the Soviet demand for military passage through Poland. Stalin then chose an agreement with Hitler: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and prepared the way for the destruction of Poland.
Inside Germany, there was little repetition of the supposed national enthusiasm of August 1914. Nazi leaders and Wehrmacht commanders ranged from confidence and opportunism to anxiety and fatalism, while many ordinary Germans feared that Hitler had finally pushed Europe beyond the point of no return. Yet propaganda, repression, and six years of dictatorship had stripped the population of any effective means of preventing the war.
The next episode will conclude the series with an epilogue examining what the destruction of the Weimar Republic teaches us about defending democracy today.
August 2, 2026
How to Make Aggression Sound Like Defense – Death of Democracy 26 – Q2 1939
World War Two
Published 1 Aug 2026By the spring of 1939, Hitler’s Germany is no longer merely threatening war, it is preparing to launch one while insisting that every act of aggression is really self-defense.
In this episode of “Death of Democracy”, we look at Germany in the second quarter of 1939: the launch of the battleship Tirpitz, the secret planning for Fall Weiss — the invasion of Poland — Hitler’s 50th-birthday military spectacle, the renunciation of the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, the Pact of Steel with Mussolini’s Italy, and the diplomatic moves designed to isolate Poland before the coming attack.
But behind the military display, Nazi Germany’s economy is still on a knife’s edge. Rearmament, shortages, debt, plunder, and autarky have pushed the regime toward a brutal logic: conquest is no longer just ideology; it has become the regime’s chosen answer to the crisis it created.
Meanwhile, persecution inside the Reich continues to escalate. Jewish tenants are stripped of protection, the refugee ship St. Louis leaves Hamburg in a desperate search for sanctuary, and Ravensbrück opens as a concentration camp for women. As Germany exports terror into annexed Austria and Bohemia-Moravia, Britain and France finally begin to wake from appeasement — but dangerously late.
This is how aggression is made to sound like defense.
Never Forget.
July 26, 2026
How to Provoke a War – Death of Democracy 25 – Q1 1939
World War Two
Published 25 Jul 2026By March 1939, appeasement has failed.
Hitler’s Germany has moved from threats and persecution inside the Reich to the destruction of Czechoslovakia, the seizure of Memel, and renewed pressure on Poland. No shots have yet been fired between the great powers — but Europe is now locked on a course toward war.
In this episode of Death of Democracy, Spartacus Olsson reports from Berlin at the end of Q1 1939: the “Israel” and “Sara” decree, Schacht’s dismissal, Göring’s Central Office for Jewish Emigration, Hitler’s genocidal Reichstag threat, the launch of Bismarck, the coerced occupation of Prague, the Memel ultimatum, and Britain’s guarantee to Poland.
This is the moment when the Munich illusion collapses. Hitler is no longer pretending to unite Germans. He is dismantling states.
