Quotulatiousness

March 10, 2022

“Putin’s War”

Filed under: Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest post on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Stephen Green suggests we will end up calling it “Putin’s War”:

Putin apparently believed his top general — “who has never been a professional soldier” — that the Russian Army was up to the task of quickly defeating Ukraine.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was supposed to flee or be killed/captured — not lead a heroic resistance. Ukraine’s kleptocratic government was supposed to collapse. Putin seems not to have had a Plan B, aside from the old Russian habit of firing artillery and rockets at stuff until even the rubble stops bouncing.

Putin failed to heed the lesson of Grozny: That even a besieged city, cut off from all reinforcement, can hold out for weeks. Kyiv is neither completely under siege nor cut off from reinforcement.

Putin also seems to have badly underestimated the West’s willingness to put the screws to the Russian economy, even though we’re putting the screws to ourselves, too.

If the war continues going badly for Russia, it ought to be remembered not as the Ukraine War or even the Russo-Ukraine War.

It ought to be called Putin’s War.

But at the rate Joe Biden is going, the Ukraine War might end up being known as the Putin-Biden War, and we all get to pay for it.

I posted a couple of comments on MeWe about his article:

I was commenting on another thread a bit earlier about how the fall of the Soviet Union revealed just how much of their military power was smoke and mirrors … a whole country of military Potemkin Villages. From what we can tell is happening in Ukraine, things haven’t improved much for the successor Russian military. On the other hand, thanks to progressive control of pretty much everything in the west, we’re starting to realize a lot of western military strength is a bit Potemkin-y. And the progressive warhawks now want to start WWIII? Let’s all hope they don’t get their wish!

Near the end of the column, you suggest calling it “Putin’s War”, which I think is a good idea. I’m starting to see Putin and the apparent state of the Russian military as being quite analogous to Mussolini and the Italian military. Il Duce had carefully excluded from his advisors and military leadership anyone who might tell him the truth about the state of Italy’s war-making capabilities and was clearly drinking his own ink on the propaganda side. Italy was forced into a war they were not equipped to fight because Il Duce believed the newsreel and parade-ground might he saw was real. Sound like something Putin may have done as well?

In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams catches us up on the war news to date:

It was during the Winter War of 1939-40, when plucky little Finland stood up to the might of Soviet Russia, that the Finns prepared a nasty surprise for their attackers. They made millions of petrol bombs and named them after the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Molotov. Today, it is Ukraine that has borrowed the Finnish recipe book to greet a new generation of Russian invaders with petrol and fire.

How has the current war against another Russian neighbour, Ukraine, progressed? After months of tensions and intense diplomacy, including assurances to the UK’s Defence Minister by his Russian counterpart that there were “no plans to invade”, Mr Putin’s forces crossed the threshold early on 24 February. This had been preceded by long-announced military “manoeuvres” in neighbouring Belarus, which saw the assembly of over 100,000 combat-ready troops with all their vehicles and equipment. We now know this was a long-planned distraction to cover the concentration and preparation of their forces for war.

They came from 4 directions: Belarus in the north, from out of the rebel-held Donbas in the east, from Crimea in the south, and via amphibious assaults around the port of Mariupol. This tactic was designed to distract and divide the defenders and cause them to dilute their numbers. However, defying a basic military principle of war, the plan also inflicted the same disadvantage on the Russians. None of the four attacking thrusts possessed sufficient force to defeat their opponents and knife their way through to their objectives.

The first strikes in the early hours were a surprise only in their time and location, for Ukraine’s President Zelensky had long feared the worst, and other nations had quietly assessed an invasion was likely, rather than probable. Accompanied by the air raid sirens of Ukraine’s civil protection service, explosions from Russian cruise missile strikes were heard across the country. Some 600 have been fired since. Their airborne forces landed at civilian airports and military airbases. These elite paratroops were deployed to enable endless planeloads of follow-on forces to drive on the principal cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv before Ukraine woke up to what was happening.

The Russian tactical goal remains to control Ukraine by separating its pro-Western government from the population, hence the importance of the cities. President Zelensky declared martial law, ordered mobilization of all men between 18 and 60 and appealed to the wider world for help. Thousands started making Molotov cocktails, so deadly to attacking tanks more than 80 years ago. In some ways this war is anachronistic, with a Russian armoured train being filmed moving supplies forward. Expect railway sabotage with shades of Lawrence of Arabia. On 1 March, Belarus predictably entered the war on Russia’s side with such timing, that it is assumed President Lukashenko was merely following a script Vladimir Putin had written months earlier.

In The Line, Matt Gurney wonders what will happen if Russia actually loses the war:

Military historians and security experts are going to be studying the first two weeks of this invasion for years. Entire careers will be made of this, whole PhD theses written. Armies have always marched on their stomachs, but a modern army also needs massive quantities of fuel and lubricants, ammunition for hungry weapons systems, spare parts for weapons and vehicles, medical supplies and, yes, food for the troops, and also the ability to move wounded troops and prisoners backward down the supply line. This all takes an enormous amount of planning and specialized equipment and knowledge. Sustaining an army on the move means having the necessary supplies and items in abundant supply, but also having a sophisticated enough logistics system to get them to where they’re needed in a timely way. This involves everything from having good warehouse inventory control systems to the vehicles required to ferry the supplies to where they’re needed, plus a trained pool of manpower to run the whole operation. And the logistics system itself needs to be sustained — what good is a fleet of trucks to deliver supplies to the front if you can’t fuel those trucks?

We knew Russian logistics were well below Western standards. Logistics units never get the attention they deserve compared to the more exciting frontline units, and in a cash-strapped, corruption-riddled military like Russia’s, that means major problems in times of war — in an already poorly off military, the units that get even less TLC than most are going to be in rough shape indeed. Still, the Russians are underperforming what many Western analysts expected. We knew they’d be bad at this, but this is really bad.

There are reports of Russian troops running out of fuel and food, and abandoning their vehicles in place. There are other reports of long-expired Russian combat rations. In what was perhaps the nerdiest but most fascinating Twitter analysis thread of the war thus far, a retired American Department of Defence employee looked closely at photos from the battlefields in Ukraine and concluded that the tires on Russian vehicles were failing prodigiously, suggesting that the vehicles were not properly cared for when in storage. Again, given the known funding and corruption problems in the Russian military, that’s extremely plausible.

I mentioned this in an earlier Ukraine post, that the Soviet doctrine was much more oriented to the attack, and units and formations that hit heavier resistance than they could overcome were to be left behind to struggle, rather than be reinforced as most western military doctrine would prefer. Units were expected to fight until they were no longer combat-effective (or longer) and “expended” more like ammunition, in ways no western army could possibly support. As a result, Soviet and Soviet-aligned armies tended to be proportionally much more heavily armed, but very modestly supplied and logistics was very much a backwater where unpopular or inefficient officers could be sent to rot, professionally. I think most western analysts had assumed the successor Russian forces had moved away from those ideas, but the fighting to date in Ukraine seems to show that to be mistaken.

March 9, 2022

By all means, decry the Russian invasion, but also scrutinize Ukraine’s government

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Mark Almond says we need to keep a clear perspective about the war in Ukraine, to condemn Russian aggression certainly, but also to see as clearly as we can what kind of government is in charge of defending Ukraine:

“Know Your Enemy” is a standard invocation in wartime. But, if clear-eyed appreciation of an opponent and his intentions is obviously necessary, shouldn’t “Know Your Ally” be equally imperative?

Even when war has become a spectator sport for Westerners, rejoicing in killing Putin with their mouths in cyberspace and joyously kicking Russian cripples out of the paralympics, there is a real conflict going on which is horrendous for Ukrainians, which also has serious implications even for us off-shore islanders, as well as Europe as a whole.

Romanticising our chosen side and vilifying their foes are natural reactions, but fairy-tale versions of conflict often disguise the flaws of the allies even if they pale by comparison with the vices of the invader.

Think how in 1914 “Plucky Little Belgium” was portrayed as a damsel in distress about to be raped by a literally monstrous Hun. But until August, 1914, Belgium’s place on the scale of victimhood was decidedly at the perpetrator end. The horrific exploitation of the Belgian Congo’s population as slaves to King Leopold’s greed — fictionalised by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — had been exposed by Sir Roger Casement and E.D. Morel, who both rejected the defence of Belgium.

Casement went over the top to side openly — and suicidally with Imperial Germany — while Morel went to prison for urging men not to join up. They were deeply mistaken about Germany, but they did know something about our Belgian ally’s moral record.

Wartime Polish resistance to the Nazis and service in the RAF is fondly remembered in this country and rightly so, but the Polish junta in 1939 was as militarily incompetent as their Argentinian counterparts in 1982. The courage of ordinary Polish soldiers should not make people forget the regime which had colluded with Hitler against the Czechs in 1938. Our other ally, Stalin, subsequently “liberated” the Poles in his inimitable way. The trade-offs and alliances that defeated the Nazis were extremely ugly.

Turning to Ukraine today, it is easy — and heart-warming — to get swept away by the pictures of Ukrainian soldiers fight back against the vast Russian army or civilians blocking the path of the “Russian steamroller” (so admired in 1914 by the British public). President Zelensky is by far the best president Ukrainians have had since independence in 1991. That might seem a back-handed compliment when we consider how low his predecessors set the bar. But the focus in Western media on this real life Charlie Chaplin defying the Kremlin’s “Great Dictator” makes good “reality tv” but overlooks the actual power-structures in Ukraine.

March 5, 2022

Duelling narratives on the fighting in Ukraine

Filed under: Europe, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Mary Dejevsky thinks that Vladimir Putin is very worried about losing control of the narrative:

Two quite contradictory messages are emerging about the success, or otherwise, of the Kremlin’s efforts to control what Russians learn about the war in Ukraine. On the one hand, there is still, it appears, widespread ignorance about Russia’s actions, and disbelief about reports coming out of Ukraine. In other words, the official narrative prevails. But on the other hand, the imposition of an increasing number of media curbs, including on two independent domestic broadcasters and a slew of international news websites, suggests the authorities are running scared.

One of the most dispiriting but salutary accounts of Russian awareness came from the anonymous writer of a St Petersburg diary. He or she observed that most people, in what is Russia’s cosmopolitan second city, were simply not aware that a war was going on, let alone of its extent or that Russia had, in fact, invaded Ukraine.

Their ignorance, the writer said, was dictated by the largely monotone state media, which referred only to a “special military operation” that had been launched with the limited aims of “de-militarising” and “de-Nazifying” parts of Ukraine. Something similar emerged from a BBC report about Oleksandra, who lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, trying to explain to her disbelieving mother in Moscow that Kharkiv was under attack; and also from Mikhaylo in Kyiv who discovered that his father in Nizhny Novgorod was convinced that Russia was saving Ukrainians from Nazis.

The swingeing nature of media curbs being introduced in Russia over recent days, however, suggests at very least apprehension in the Kremlin that another version of the war is seeping through. Today a special session of the Russian Duma – Russia’s parliament – passed a new law designed to “prevent the discrediting of the armed forces of the Russian Federation during their operations to protect the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens”. Offenders can be punished by up to 10 years in prison, and up to 15 years for distributing “false news” about the Russian army that leads to “severe consequences”.

Russia also started to block or severely restrict access to most international news sources, including the websites of the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle.

Many, many pundits have ended up with egg on their faces for staunchly proclaiming that Vladimir Putin is too cautious and calculating to actually launch a full-on invasion of Ukraine, despite the drip-drip-drip of evidence beforehand that a military build-up was happening. Some have taken the hit and admitted the error while others ignore what they’d been saying only a couple of weeks ago. In The Critic, Phillips O’Brien points out that Putin’s long-standing admiration for leaders like Stalin has clearly become more than an inspiration for him and has become a model to emulate:

The “Big Three” meet at Tehran, 28 November-1 December, 1943.
Photo attributed to US Army photographer, via Wikimedia Commons.

Vladimir Putin fancies himself a great student of Russian history. He couched his justification for the invasion of Ukraine in a vision of Russia and the Soviet Union’s history that was paranoid, grandiose and incoherent, all at the same time. Ukraine needed to be subjugated by Russia because it was acting as a stalking horse for NATO and the West. At the same time, the West was declining and Russia had the strength to, in Putin’s mind, reincorporate Ukraine into its natural place within a Russian empire. Clearly, Putin has decided that this was the right moment to establish himself as one of the greatest Russian leaders of all time — an equal to Peter the Great, or Joseph Stalin.

As an obsessive student of Russian history, Putin has had an evolving view of Joseph Stalin over the years. Early in his authoritarian rule Putin kept Stalin somewhat at arm’s length, both praising and criticising Stalin’s record. More recently, as Putin has transitioned from autocrat to dictator, he has moved further and faster to identify himself with the greatest despot in Russian history. Stalin statues are now appearing in different places around the country, and respect for Stalin as a historical figure has risen strongly across Russia.

In the last few weeks, Putin has put this trend into overdrive and started behaving in a manner that apes Stalin almost perfectly. As Stalin in 1939 decided to invade the Soviet Union’s neighbour Finland, so has Putin today invaded his neighbour Ukraine. In both cases the decision for war was made by the dictator talking to a very small group of cronies, and in both cases the mass of the Russian people seemed indifferent or even hostile. Also, both invasions were disasters that revealed massive shortcomings in the Russian armed forces. In Stalin’s case, however, he was allowed time to rectify the problems, and his regime survived. It’s not clear that this will be the case for Putin.

The public meeting where Putin both embarrassed the other leaders in the Russian state security hierarchy, and forced them to publicly associate themselves with his decision to invade, was pure Stalin — if Stalin were alive today and could do it on television. As his rule became more bloody and despotic, Stalin increasingly forced his inner circle to endorse in writing his worst depredations, from signing the execution warrants of those slated for destruction, to publicly speaking in favour of policies that would force millions to starve. It both served his interest to humiliate his inner circle by reinforcing that they had to do his bidding no matter how onerous, and at the same time gave the impression to the outside world that his policies were strongly supported by the ruling circle. Putin is evidently doing the same, which is why he was so withering to the head of Russian intelligence, Sergey Naryshkin, when the latter seemed to waffle on the policy of recognizing the Russia puppet regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk.

A few days back, Theodore Dalrymple showed that there isn’t a Goldwater Rule when talking about Russian leaders:

When I watched Vladimir Putin, with what the Russians so graphically call his “tin eyes”, justify his invasion of Ukraine, I thought, as did many others, that he looked a little deranged. Denazification, indeed! Had he failed to appreciate that Ukraine, not noted throughout its history for its philo-Semitism, had elected a Jewish president, and that by a large majority, thereby suggesting a major cultural shift in the country?

It then occurred to me that Putin looked rather puffy in the face, and I wondered whether he could be taking steroids. These drugs are noted for their numerous side effects, not the least being psychological changes such as paranoia and elevation and depression of mood. Then there was the question, of course, as to why Putin would be taking them. Cancer, perhaps — a lymphoma? This brought to mind Evelyn Waugh’s somewhat uncharitable remark when Randolph Churchill underwent surgery for cancer: that it was characteristic of modern medicine to have removed the only part of him that was not malignant.

If Putin were taking steroids, his extreme and seemingly bizarre anxiety about contracting Covid-19 would be explained. Both the underlying condition of cancer itself and the drugs would have made him vulnerable to such anxiety, and the man who once liked to present himself as the Russian Crocodile Dundee, bare-chestedly wrestling bears and the like, has undergone a gestalt switch: invulnerability has been replaced by its opposite, unseen danger with every breath.

It is hazardous, however, to ascribe actions that we do not like to madness. This is for two reasons: first, the diagnosis may be wrong — the apparently mad may in fact be sane — and second, madness can have its own rationality. Indeed, the mad of strong character can often take others along with them: they can persuade others that their paranoid view of the world is correct. This is especially so when they possess levers of power over people of lesser character than themselves.

And finally, Ralph Berry offers a tiny bit of perspective on the almost universal condemnation heaped on the Russians for their use of artillery to attack Ukrainian targets with civilians nearby:

Of the real news, I select the serial bombing of Ukrainian targets by the Russians. Many civilians have been killed. This is presented as a war crime which must be pursued to the Hague. But the British have done it before. At the Normandy landings on D-Day, the plan was to take Caen on the first day. The landings on Juno beach were successful, but the following advance stalled and German resistance as so often made good the defences. As Anthony Beevor drily remarked, after noting that artillery was the arm on which the Allied commanders relied, “the French civilians, not surprisingly, felt that they did so to excess.” Caen did not fall, and Montomery changed the attack to bombing. This was merciless, and the French population suffered greatly. Not for six weeks were Caen and its environs controlled by the British and Canadians, by which time Caen was reduced to rubble. Some 3000 French civilians died during the bombing campaign. This fact should give pause to the widespread condemnation of what for the Russians is a regular practice of their system of warfare.

March 3, 2022

If wars could be won by propaganda alone, Ukraine would already be staging a virtual victory parade

Filed under: Media, Military, Russia, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve gotten a bit tired of reminding people on social media that almost everything we think we know about the fighting in Ukraine is — to a greater or lesser extent — propaganda by one side or the other. That said, Ukraine’s propaganda efforts have been far more effective than the Russian equivalents. In The Line, Jen Gerson rounds up some of the best-known stories that have flashed across Twitter and other social media platforms since the combat began:

Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable consequence of protracted news overload, but the war in Ukraine feels surreal. Pulling up the news, following Twitter, none of it feels like reality, but rather like we’re all collectively remembering an event that was always destined to happen. Perhaps I’m the only one suffering from this dissociative state? Or perhaps not; is anyone else feeling as if our daily life has taken on this faded quality of a simulacrum?

Maybe this is the inevitable sensation of watching a war play out on Twitter and TikTok. It has a participatory quality that offers the sensation of being a part of the conflict without the dose of necessary, reality-evoking risk.

Did you see the viral video of the Ukrainian babushka demanding the Russian soldier keep sunflower seeds in his pocket so that he leaves behind flowers when he dies? Or the one of the soldiers on Snake Island telling the Russian warship to “go fuck yourself” when asked to surrender? Reportedly, 13 died after that ship blew the station apart — though it appears that this was false and they in fact were taken alive.

Did you watch the Twitter video of Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky filming himself on the streets of Kyiv to thwart rumours that he had fled? Or the guy who moved an anti-tank mine from the road with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth?

Did you hear about the Ghost of Kyiv, a mysterious fighter pilot who has allegedly scored more kills than any other in recent memory?

Or the TikTok video of the young woman teaching her contemporaries how to operate an abandoned Russian tank; the stranded artillery towed by Ukrainian farmers; the men stuffing polystyrene into Molotov cocktails to make peasants’ napalm?

Oh, and in case you missed it: an official music video lionizing the Ukrainian drone, Bayraktar.

I can’t assess the reality of any of this — and I presume some or all of it is staged. That’s what propaganda is, after all. All I can do is examine the transparent unreality of it all, to take note of the ephemeral, the narrative. And from here, the Ukrainians are absolutely crushing the propaganda war.

On Monday, David Patrikarakos also came to the same conclusion in UnHerd after viewing the online echoes of the war:

The internet is a chaotic place, but it is nonetheless ruled by a series of iron laws, especially when it comes to what we put on it. Perhaps the most important one is that whatever you post, try to make it visual. Once that’s established it’s about what sort of image will best hoover up those likes and shares and retweets. Well, that’s down to where you are and who your audience is. But as a rule of thumb there are two things that generally never fail: blondes and guns.

Over the past few days, the very brave and very blonde Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has been tweeting various pictures of herself posing with an AK47. She began last Friday:

What is striking about the photos is not that Rudik posted them: she is a people’s representative in a time of war — it’s exactly the sort of thing she should be posting. What’s so interesting, and smart, is how she did it. Rudik does not pose in a uniform, or even in camouflage fatigues. She does not salute or lift the AK triumphantly; in fact, the way she holds it makes it clear that she’s not used to holding a weapon of any sort. The photo is taken not in a base or even in an office, but clearly in the living room of her home, just by a window that looks out onto a small patio.

The final touch though — and it’s a genius one — is that she doesn’t have shoes on; instead she stands barefoot, her toes painted a delicate pink.

In one sense, this all seems irretrievably amateurish — but that’s the point. Of the many things the internet craves, authenticity is sacrosanct. And this is a model of the genre. The tweet is designed to do two things: first, to show that Ukrainians will stand and fight for their homeland; and second, to humanise those whom we are told will be doing the fighting. And it does this by showing them to be the most ordinary of people; people standing in their bare feet, vulnerable and ordinary — just like civilians across the world. As such, they stand in total contrast to the stormtroopers invading their lands. It’s pink toenails versus mud-encrusted jackboots; smiling mothers versus bearded Chechens — all shorthand for the battle playing out between Ukraine and Russia.

As Kurt Schlichter said, “The first report is always wrong and nobody knows nothing”:

The battle in Ukraine seems to be one of the most covered and worst covered events in history. You cannot spend more than two minutes on social media without crossing paths with a snippet of shaky cell phone footage of a Russian tank burning or some heroic story of sturdy Ukrainian resistance. You have experts on TV trying to tell you what’s happening but no one is actually giving you any real information. Maybe you think the Ukrainians are winning, that their counterattacks are driving out the Russian invaders. There are plenty of sources saying 2800 or 5300 or some other oddly large and specific number of Russian soldiers are dead. All hail the coming victory!

Well, we’ll see.

Don’t believe a damn thing you see or hear right now. I’d like to. I want the Ukrainians to win. But I understand that I, like you, am a target of information operations by Ukrainians, Russians, and even Americans. Get woke to it.

All that exciting footage? What do you know about where it was shot, or when? Nada. Zip. Zero. We’ve seen people trying to pass off simulator footage as real battle footage. We’ve seen explosions and fires without context. What caused them? Who knows when all you have is the label on the video? All those Russian tanks on fire? Well, guess what kind of equipment the Ukrainians use.

I don’t know if the Ukrainians are winning or losing, but I know that a lot of people in the media want them to win. So do I, but simply because I would prefer they send the Russkies packing does not mean that I am blind to what is an obvious and effective propaganda campaign designed to keep the West in Ukraine’s corner. And it has worked, with a few sketchy, wacky exceptions. I am impressed by the information operation designed to get resonant stories out there, like the defiant guardians of Snake Island, the “Ghost of Kyiv”, or that Ukrainian marine who was forced to blow himself up to take out the bridge. It’s like they were designed to appeal to us.

In short, we don’t know what’s happening — for excellent military reasons on both sides — and much of what we’re being told is almost certainly pure fiction. Keep your bullshit filters up and re-calibrate ’em if and when you get genuine information, but good luck on finding any of that in the immediate future.

March 2, 2022

“Somehow, the Ukrainians proceeded to launch the greatest PR operation of our times”

Filed under: Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith on the plight of Ukraine under Russian attack and the rather surprising success they have been having on western social media and in legacy media coverage:

Soon after the Russians invaded Ukraine, President Zelensky released a video to the world. Filmed on his mobile phone, it looked as if he could have been anyone else in the 21st century. He was tired and sad, and the skin was red around his eyes. Whatever a strong leader looks like, President Zelensky looked like the opposite.

That feels like a long time ago now. Somehow, the Ukrainians proceeded to launch the greatest PR operation of our times. How many people had heard of Zelensky, a veteran comic actor whose most significant action on the world stage since his electoral triumph in 2019 had been listening to Donald Trump’s ramblings, until a few days ago? How many people even knew there had been fighting in Donbass?

You have to wonder if the Russians, having seen the capitulation of the Afghan government, thought a Western ally would hightail it at the first opportunity. Zelensky, on the other hand, announced that he was staying in Kiev. His speech, addressed to the Russian people, was measured, dignified and eloquent. His little updates from the Kiev streets were mischievous and bold.

A weak country invaded by a powerful aggressor is naturally sympathetic. But the Ukrainian cause projected a uniquely irresistible combination of victimhood and strength. Theirs is not a tale of mere persecution but of underdog resolve.

What happened on Snake Island, for example, remains mysterious. The Ukrainians reported that their soldiers were killed after delivering a “go fuck yourself” to a Russian warship. The Russians claim they are alive. Still, the emerging image of unbreakable defiance, spreading across the vortex of social media, has won hearts and minds across the world.

What has been crucial is that people are not just pitying. They are inspired. We have heard relatively few tales of atrocities, because the Russians were attempting to minimise casualties, but also because the Ukrainians have attempted to maximise their triumphs. Did the “Ghost of Kiev” exist? Almost certainly not. But when such urban legends were combined with undeniably tough Ukrainian resistance in cities like Kharkiv, foreign sympathisers were encouraged to think that the Ukrainians, while embattled, had a fighting chance. This has been translated into sanctions on Russia and massive donations of arms and equipment.

David Warren reports that the Chinese government has accused the Ukrainians of trouble-making in Hong Kong:

This did not happen yesterday, I should explain, but some months ago. How did those clever Ukrainians do this, my reader may ask, naïvely. They did it by secular inspiration, when they uttered the phrase, “Slava Ukraini!” — which they had been doing in their own nationalist cause since the nineteenth century — and more aggressively since they fought for independence from the Leninist regime of the Soviet Union, during 1917–21.

Since 2014, the phrase has been in the air again, just as truck horns are in the air here in the Canadas. The Hong Kongois, who tend to be well-informed to a fault, picked up on it in 2019. They began to declare, “Glory to Hong Kong!” in multiple languages, from Cantonese to English; or rather, to sing it, for this phrase and its variants are often set to music, in both countries. (The Canadian trucker’s “Honk Honk” makes its own music.)

Wi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and little Justin Trudeau, all get quite offended by the use of such phrases; and all have gone to the trouble of manufacturing bare-faced lies to resist the respective sovereignty movements. Readers will gather that I am unsympathetic with any of these dictators, or Mr Would-Be.

Because I (or more exactly, my father) was also unfavourably inclined to the dictatorship of Mr Adolf Hitler, it may be incumbent upon me to specify of what my disapproval consists. For granted, Hitler was a nationalist of a sort. I have long been an enemy of nationalism, when it is rudely proclaimed, though with mysterious moments of enthusiasm for nationalisms of other sorts.

March 1, 2022

Words of the day — “tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism”

Filed under: Europe, Media, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Glenn Greenwald on the war propaganda being pushed by both sides in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and how after two full years of “war on Wuhan Coronavirus propaganda”, we’re seeing a smooth transition to more traditional war propaganda from our governments and media:

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media’s most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet’s largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.

Kinzinger’s fantasy that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically — and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia”. The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”

Having the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when “Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert, reminding the world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.

In the reporting and opining on the conflict in Ukraine, Mark Steyn says the frequent rhetorical invocation of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 are unfair:

Which brings us to this last day of February 2022. Which is beginning to feel like late February 2020, don’t you think? That is, in the stampede to impose the suffocating blanket of “the narrative” to the exclusion of all else. There is certainly a real country called Ukraine, where real people are being killed by real missiles hitting their apartment houses. Just as there was a real virus called Covid-19, which emerged from a real lab in a real city in China and began killing real people all over the world. Yet “the narrative”, then as now, seems designed to obscure any serious consideration of the underlying causes.

Nevertheless, certain things should be capable of being grasped even by viewers of CNN and readers of The New York Times. Just as Covid revealed that China is now the planet’s dominant economic power, so Ukraine confirms that America’s post-Cold War unipolar moment is dead: over the weekend, the talk shifted (again very Corona-like) from fifteen days to flatten the Tsar to an acceptance that this is a long-term thing — that, for a while at least, “a gas station masquerading as a country” (in John McCain’s characteristically stupid sneer) has succeeded in rolling back the great European liberations of three decades ago.

These days Neville Chamberlain is too invoked and the comparison is unfair. In 1938, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the Prime Minister went on the radio and described it as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. For America, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the precise opposite: a quarrel in a far-away country of which their leaders know everything. Because they’ve been up to their neck in it for years.

Ukraine is a beautiful place, its people are intelligent and agreeable, and its women are stunners. But it is a very poor country and, notwithstanding its many fine qualities, the most corrupt nation in Europe, and, per Ernst & Young, the ninth most corrupt in the world. As I pointed out regularly three years ago on Tucker and Rush, at a time when Hunter Biden was getting fifty grand a month plus seven-figure bonuses from Burisma, the average wage in Ukraine was $200 a month: The Biden family’s heist was “not a victimless crime”.

A far-away country of which we know nothing? Has there been any Washington scandal that has not involved Ukraine in recent years?
The Trump impeachments? Ooh, he telephoned … Ukraine!

The “Russia investigation”? Putin wanted Trump to win why exactly? Oh, no problem: because he’ll roll back sanctions imposed for Moscow’s actions against … Ukraine!

Do we have any witnesses to any of this? Yeah, sure, the really good guy’s some Colonel Vindman. He’s an immigrant from … Ukraine!

On the other hand, Obama made Biden his point-man in … Ukraine!

Biden told the Ukrainians they had to clean up all the corruption. They took the hint and put Hunter on the board, and Joe, Jim and the rest of the mob family suddenly acquired extensive “business interests” in Ukraine.

Oh, and the biggest source of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation is … Ukraine.

February 25, 2022

Total War NOW – WAH 053 – February 1943, Pt. 2

Filed under: China, Europe, France, Germany, Greece, History, Italy, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Feb 2022

Germany declares total (unconditional war) putting its economy on a full war footing over three years into the war. Given the unconditional war they are already waging, and the resistance and opposition they now face, it’s unclear what it shall mean.
(more…)

February 22, 2022

Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Folding Ideas
Published 10 Feb 2017

Clickbait title: Nazis hate him! Secrets of propaganda exposed!

This took far longer to put together than I’d anticipated. It wasn’t even the work itself, it’s the emotional load. I eventually had to start chopping out huge planned segments, like looking at modern propaganda like that awful “Surfing in the DPRK” white guy rap video. I’m sorry about the downer ending, but there’s no way to spruce it up. To a certain degree we lost.

You should seriously read, and then re-read, Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism”. It’s available online for free. It’s not that long. Here, I’ll even link it for you. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/…

Books mentioned:
Urania’s Children
The Occult Roots of Nazism
The Origins of Totalitarianism

Written and performed by Dan Olson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman

February 19, 2022

When Goebbels Signed Germany’s Suicide Pact – WW2 Special

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

World War Two
Published 17 Feb 2022

Outnumbered, outgunned, and outproduced by the Allies, the noose seems to be tightening slowly but surely around the Third Reich. For Joseph Goebbels, salvation lies in a radical transformation of the economy and society – Total War. But first, he must sell it to the German people.
(more…)

January 28, 2022

The Warsaw Ghetto: The Jews Strike Back – WAH 51 – January 1943, Pt. 2

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

World War Two
Published 27 Jan 2022

In early 1943 Nazi German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels is preparing to rally the German people behind an unrestrained war — or “total war” as he puts it. It’s unclear what that means, Nazi Germany has long been waging an unrestrained war, and it seems that the United Nations alliance is now ready to do the same on Germany.
(more…)

January 27, 2022

What is this “Mass Formation Psychosis” thing that so many are suddenly fascinated with?

Filed under: China, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I started seeing the phrase “Mass Formation Psychosis” popping up a lot recently, but I hadn’t bothered looking into it until quite recently. In an effort to figure out what it’s supposed to be and why people are talking about it, I did the lazy thing I usually do and had a quick wander through some of the blogs I follow to gather up their respective takes on it. Here’s one from earlier in the week from Severian at Founding Questions:

In the depths of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong decided that China must overtake at least Great Britain, if not the US, in steel production (this was back when the US actually made shit, you understand, so … you know, like a hundred years ago). But since that was impossible with China’s existing steel mills, Mao hit on a solution: He’d just have the peasants do it! Right in the backyards of their collective farms.

No, I’m not kidding. They really did that. The “steel” produced was worthless, of course, and indeed the whole zany scheme probably contributed to the Great Famine, as peasants ended up throwing farm implements, cooking pots, anything and everything that could be melted down into their backyard furnaces. Yeah, they’d need them for the harvest, but the harvest was a month or two away, and the commissar and his pistol demanding more more more! steel was right now.

And that’s the great thing about a totalitarian dictatorship (if you’re the dictator) — if your madcap caper runs aground on reality’s rocks, you can simply declare victory and move on. What backyard blast furnaces? Never heard of them … and neither have you, comrade, if you know what’s good for you. Problem solved.

But … what if, for some bizarre reason, Mao’s slaves had just kept throwing things into their backyard furnace? If Mao had come down personally from the Forbidden City and said “Yeah, we’re good here, save your hoes and scythes and woks and whatnot,” but they still they persisted?

That’s the situation in which Tapioca Joe and the Juggalos find themselves vis a vis Covid.

Severian linked to Robert Stacy McCain’s call for making today “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day”, which in turn linked to this Substack post from Robert Malone.

As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.

What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.

These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.

January 22, 2022

“China’s statistics remain in the hands of officials who carefully do everything possible to make sure China’s image remains unblemished”

Filed under: China, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve been a disbeliever in official Chinese statistics for many years — one of the first repeat topics on the blog in 2004 was the unreliable nature of Chinese government statistics on economic growth. As a result, I find it very easy to believe that the Chinese statistics on deaths due to the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic are unreliable, as John Horvat explains:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

As the latest wave of COVID cases surges in the West, all is quiet in the East. It has always been quiet. Millions have died from the coronavirus epidemic as it sweeps the world. However, few consider it strange that the nation where the virus first appeared amid an entirely unprotected public of 1.3 billion people should record a mere 4,636 fatalities over the past three years.

China’s statistics remain in the hands of officials who carefully do everything possible to make sure China’s image remains unblemished. They claim that low numbers are due to the communist nation’s brutal “zero tolerance” policies. China is presented as a model for the West.

Some voices are appearing that dispute this claim. One expert says the fatality figures are likely closer to 1.7 million. This figure would put China in the same camp as the rest of the world. It would also point to the failure of the world’s strictest lockdown and explain the recent shutdowns of whole cities and regions due to the virus, which supposedly kills no one in China.

[…]

Communist parties have always used statistics as a tool and weapon to advance their agenda. Officials feel free to change the numbers to reflect well upon the state, which controls everything. Truth is whatever furthers the fortunes of the party. If statistics must be changed as a result, there is no problem. Hence the notorious unreliability of communist statistics.

The problem is complicated by anxious officials who must report good news to party leaders or face the consequences of their failures, including death. Zero tolerance numbers may be statistically impossible and even absurd, but most officials prefer their survival over inconvenient truths.

Also disturbing is the complicity of Western media that repeat the cooked numbers of communist regimes. Few dare to question impossible figures or “follow the science” when leftist prestige is involved. During the long Cold War, the West presented the Soviet Union as the second-largest economy. When the Berlin Wall fell, the actual size of the economy was found to be significantly less.

Even in a centrally planned socialist state, incentives matter. In the west, failing to meet expected standards may get you fired (unless you work for the government), but in authoritarian states like China it can get you shot or exiled to a remote labour camp for years or decades. The top statisticians know that the numbers they work on are … massaged … at every stage even before they are aggregated for regional or national reporting, but there is literally no point in telling the truth and there is much to be gained by “scenario-ing them rosily” because your bosses will only accept good news regardless of reality.

January 18, 2022

Decadence

Filed under: Economics, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the old Soviet put-down of all of western culture (especially the American one) … that it was decadent:

“The Consummation of Empire” from the painting series “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).
New York HIstorical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, sure. I hear any number of you gnashing your teeth on that side of the screen: the soft living, the snowflakery in — mostly — our universities, the demands that everyone cater to them, people being completely terrified of a bad cold. Oh, yeah, rampant crime and bad sexual morals. We’re OBVIOUSLY decadent. How can I make fun of it?

Very easily.

For one your gnashing of teeth rhymes eerily with Romans gnashing of teeth for millennia, long before Rome was anywhere near ripe to fall, and in fact while Rome was the bad ass of the world. Second, it echoes even more eerily all of the Christian explanations of why Rome fell, which curiously also echoed the Christian beliefs in the loss of paradise.

“Decadence is sinfulness, and then comes the end and only G-d can save you” is the narrative there. Which is fine, in a spiritual sense, and completely bonkers insane when it applies to cultures and history. But it served the nascent theocracy that replaced Rome quite well. One of the things it served was to explain why life was now much, much harder. Because you know, abundance is what leads to decadence. Life is too soft, you don’t work hard enough and … bam! suddenly you’re in the middle of an orgy or worshiping a goat or something. Never you mind that the Romans pretty much did that all along, even when they were the badasses of the world. It’s really easy to shape the history of a fallen civilization so it suits the purposes of its successor.

Which brings us to the fact that Communism is a Christian heresy, complete with paradise — the supposed egalitarian and property-free pre-history (it’s also really easy to shape a period that left no account of itself that we can find) — until greed — and in one version PATRIARCHY and in another “whiteness” WTF that means — kicked us out of it. Now we must force the perfect human (Homo Sovieticus!) to emerge, so we can go back to living in caves in (sing it) perfect harmony. (Yeah.)

The complaints of decadence I heard as a young woman were mostly Soviet Agit Prop. Yes, yours were too. They ranged from incoherent to frigging insane. Some of it was a very old rhyming chorus: Americans were decadent because they were too rich. They had too many choices. They were too immoral. They never had enough, and would commit crimes to be richer. They ate too much, drove too much, slept in too comfortable a bed, and in general were DECADENT. Just like Rome before it fell. (If you realize the actual structure of Imperial Rome was closer to the Soviet Union’s, a plunder culture that could only survive by stealing, the whole thing will take your breath away with its chutzpah.

The fact that our (even though at the time it was your, as I was a foreigner at least in some ways) entertainment and art echoed these crazy accusations only made the whole thing stick, so even the right, American loving side (which anyway always has a vast side of puritanism in America. And speaking of puritans, let’s talk about what some of them did to … turkeys? If weird sexual kinks are a sign of decadence, we’ve never been non-decadent) bought into it. I mean Spartacus (the novel) portrait of the decadence of Rome was meant to echo how bad America was. What’s that I hear? The author was a communist? You. Don’t. Say. I think I sent my shocked face out to be mended, but I won’t be a sec while I retrieve it.

In a more personal sense, my own family told me Portugal too was decadent. Why, unlike mom, I didn’t have to walk beside the train line to pick up enough coal for the family to cook. We had butane bottles delivered, even if they were super expensive, so we often cooked on a petrol lamp in the patio, if the weather was fine.

Decadent and soft living, I tell you. Sure, the bathroom was outside, but it was a bathroom, with running water included. JUST like Rome before the fall. How much longer till we started screwing Nightingales’ Tongues, eating Bear Sausages and electing horses to congress (I think in America we’ve been doing that all along, too. Though I’d prefer if every now and then we elected the front half of the horse.)

January 14, 2022

People who tell “noble lies” are still liars who should not be trusted

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Matt Ridley considers why so many scientists went along with the disinformation campaign to obscure or discredit the lab-leak theory on the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.
In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.

Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.

January 2, 2022

Eat the bugs, peasants! Leave the meat for your betters!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Europe, Food, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Orlowski on the self-imagined elite attitudes to the environment and — as a direct result — the growing chorus of journalists pushing the idea of substituting plant-based synthetics and/or insects in place of meat for us proles:

In recent years, media messaging has been emphatically bossy about what we should eat. State micromanagement of taste has increased, too. After government intervention, British staples ranging from sticky-toffee pudding to Sugar Puffs have been reformulated beyond recognition. But the anti-meat crusade demands that something far more radical should happen – it seeks to stigmatise something central to many of our lives, and demands a shift in how we regard nature. As part of this, our media now seek to normalise lab-grown Frankenmeats, and strangest of all, adopt entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.

So what’s behind the war on meat? The apparent justification is the political elite’s great preoccupation of our time – climate change. We’re told that rearing livestock for meat is bad for the environment, and that cows are the worst offenders of all. That’s the assumption behind hit YouTube videos like Mark Rober’s “Feeding Bill Gates a fake burger (to save the world)”, a promotional video for Gates’ synthetic-meat investments, which has racked up nearly 46million views.

But the environmental argument doesn’t look so robust on closer examination. Agricultural CO2 emissions are small – so small that if the United States turned entirely vegan this decade, it would lower US emissions by just 2.6 per cent. In reality, a cow is a highly efficient protein-conversion system, turning protein that we can’t eat into protein that we love to eat. Three quarters of livestock, on balance, improve the environment, enhancing the yield of the land through fertiliser, which would otherwise need to be made synthetically. For example, one of the crimes regularly levelled against beef is water consumption. But the cow loses most of this water the same day – it’s returned to nature. So with environmental claims so weak, there must be some other rationale for the war on meat.

Much of today’s war on meat appears to be driven by venture capitalists, and their client journalists in the media. Ever eager for the next dot-com boom, Silicon Valley has made a bet on lab-grown, synthetic meat. This requires an industrial bioreactor – an expensive chemical process. But lab-grown meat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Business Insider recently reported that scepticism about the sector is growing, as costs remain higher than those for real meat – and this is before one single laboratory-meat formula has received regulatory approval, let alone passed the consumer test.

Another factor driving the war on meat is the academic blob. For example, Professor Peter Smith, an environmental scientist at Aberdeen University and a leading contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likes to insist that “we’re not telling people to stop eating meat”, before adding that “it’s obvious that in the West we’re eating far too much”. Have a guess who defines what is “too much”. It’s Smith and his colleagues, not you or me making informed consumer choices.

But the oddest spectacle of all is the relentless promotion of entomophagy at the posh end of the media. The posher the paper, the keener they are on normalising bug-eating.

This is a campaign that has a high hurdle to overcome in most markets, where insects are associated with disease. “Deeply embedded in the Western psyche is a view of insects as dirty, disgusting and dangerous”, a group of academics found in 2014. Many bugs, such as cockroaches, carry disease. Flies like shit, as the saying goes. “Individuals vary in their sensitivity to disgust”, another academic paper acknowledges. “This sensitivity extends to three dimensions of disgust: core, animal reminder and contamination.” Only seven per cent of the US population would countenance the idea of eating insects, even in powdered form, according to one academic study in 2018. Processing insects also raises practical problems, with e-coli and salmonella. “Spore-forming bacteria and enterobacteriaceae have been reported in mealworms and crickets, with higher levels found in insects that had been crushed – likely due to the release of bacteria from the gut”, another study found. It’s easier to clean a cow’s stomach than a cockroach’s.

It should be no surprise, then, that the edible-insect movement has hit a few snags. Blythman recalls the startup, Eat Grub (geddit?), providing the snacks for an insect pop-up in London’s hipster East End. On the menu were “Thai-inspired” creations such as spicy cricket rice cakes and buffalo worms wrapped in betel leaf. “It tasted disgusting, and so I swallowed it whole. Then the legs stuck in my throat”, she recalls. The pop-up hasn’t returned. The following year, Sainsbury’s tapped Eat Grub for its first range of insect products – barbeque-flavoured crickets. Today, the only crickets you can buy at Sainsbury’s are cigarette lighters.

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