World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 4 Apr 2026June 1935: Adolf Hitler reassures the world with promises of peace — while secretly accelerating Germany’s path to war. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine how Hitler manipulated international diplomacy and domestic opinion in the second quarter of 1935. From the collapse of the Stresa Front to the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, foreign leaders were drawn into a dangerous illusion. Meanwhile, inside Germany, antisemitic violence escalated, press censorship intensified under Joseph Goebbels, and economic realities worsened under Hjalmar Schacht’s policies.
Drawing on firsthand accounts from William L. Shirer and Victor Klemperer, this episode reveals a society caught between fear, propaganda, and growing dictatorship.
How did Hitler convince both his people and world leaders that he wanted peace – while preparing for war?
Watch to understand how democracies can be misled – and what happens when we fail to act.
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April 5, 2026
How To Let the People Pay For War – Death of Democracy 10 – Q2 1935
March 29, 2026
How Radio Killed Democracy – Death of Democracy 09 – Q1 1935
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 28 Mar 2026Radio did not just spread Nazi propaganda — it helped make dictatorship feel normal.
In How Radio Killed Democracy, we examine how Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used mass broadcasting to manipulate public opinion in Germany in early 1935. As the Saar plebiscite returned the Saarland to the Reich, the regime turned radio into a political weapon: shaping emotion, manufacturing consent, and helping millions of Germans embrace rearmament, conscription, and the destruction of democracy.
This episode of Death of Democracy follows the decisive first quarter of 1935: the Saar vote, Göring’s admission of [the existence of] the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s open defiance of Versailles, and the growing power of the Gestapo. While Nazi propaganda promised pride, unity, and national revival, civil liberties were collapsing, Jews were being isolated, and Germany was being prepared for war.
How did propaganda become so effective? How did radio help turn fear, resentment, and nationalism into obedience? And how did so many people support a regime that was already dismantling the rule of law?
This is the story of how radio helped kill democracy in Nazi Germany.Never Forget
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March 26, 2026
An alternative reading of the American Revolution
As the majority of my current readers are Americans (or Chinese folks using VPNs to pretend to be Americans), the following could be interpreted as clickbait. Just sayin’.
Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests that the events leading up to the Anglo-Colonial unpleasantness of 1776 onwards have been subject to a preferred reading that tidies up all the inconvenient details and sweeps them under the rug of a revolution against “royal tyranny” (even though HRM King George III was much more liberal than he’s ever given credit for, and a revolution against “an elected Parliament” doesn’t have the right ring to it):
Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.
The American founding narrative is a document produced by a litigation class to justify actions already taken. Its authors were not philosophers who became rebels. They were rebels who hired philosophers.
This is not a fringe position. It is not the invention of bitter foreigners or tenured radicals looking to dismantle something they never understood. It is the conclusion you reach when you put down the mythology and pick up the actual historical record, the ledgers, the court documents, the correspondence that was never meant to be read by posterity, the testimony of people who were there and whose version of events was systematically buried because they were on the losing side. The American Revolution is the most comprehensively mythologized event in the history of the English-speaking world, and the mythologizing began before the gunpowder had cleared.
Start with the money, because it almost always starts with the money. The Navigation Acts, which colonial propagandists framed as instruments of imperial oppression, were a trade regulatory system that had been in place for over a century and under which the colonies had grown from scattered coastal settlements into some of the most prosperous communities in the Atlantic world. The specific enforcement measures that triggered the revolutionary crisis came after the Seven Years War, a conflict in which Britain spent the modern equivalent of billions of pounds defending the American colonies against French and indigenous pressure across an entire continent. When the war ended in 1763, the British national debt had nearly doubled. Parliament looked at the colonies, looked at the bill, and suggested with what strikes any disinterested observer as elementary reasonableness that the people who had benefited most from the war might contribute something toward its cost.
The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed legal documents, newspapers, and pamphlets at rates that were substantially lower than what ordinary subjects in Britain were already paying. The Townshend Acts taxed glass, paint, paper, and tea, luxury goods, not necessities. At their peak, the total tax burden on the American colonies amounted to roughly one shilling per person per year. The average British subject at home was paying twenty-six shillings. The colonial merchant class, which had grown fat on a century of salutary neglect and profitable smuggling, responded to this modest request for contribution with riots, the formation of extralegal enforcement committees, the physical destruction of property, and the systematic intimidation of anyone who disagreed. They called this liberty.
John Hancock, whose signature on the Declaration of Independence is so oversized that his name became a synonym for a signature, was the wealthiest smuggler in colonial America. His fortune was built on molasses, wine, and dry goods moved outside the official imperial trade system at substantial profit. In 1768, British customs officials seized his sloop Liberty on evidence of wine smuggling. The seizure triggered a riot. The customs commissioners were driven from Boston under threat of violence and had to take refuge on a Royal Navy vessel in the harbor. Hancock was prosecuted and represented by John Adams, who got the charges dropped on procedural grounds. The same John Adams who would later write the Massachusetts Constitution. The same John Adams who, when asked to describe his greatest service to his country, cited his defense of the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre trial. These relationships are not incidental. They are the operating structure of the revolutionary movement.
The Boston Massacre has been taught to American schoolchildren for two hundred and fifty years as evidence of British brutality. Here is what actually happened. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a small detachment of British soldiers posted outside the Custom House was surrounded by a crowd estimated at several hundred people, who pelted them with ice, rocks, oyster shells, and pieces of coal, struck them with clubs and sticks, and screamed at them to fire, daring them repeatedly to shoot. Private Hugh Montgomery was knocked to the ground by a club blow. When he recovered he fired. The other soldiers, believing an order had been given, fired as well. Five people died. It was a tragedy. What happened next is the part that gets edited out of the curriculum. John Adams, cousin of the great agitator Samuel Adams, agreed to defend the soldiers and did so brilliantly. Six of the eight soldiers were acquitted outright. The remaining two were convicted of manslaughter rather than murder and were released after being branded on the thumb, the standard punishment. The jury found that the crowd had been the aggressor. Adams later wrote that the case was one of the best pieces of service he ever rendered his country, by which he meant he had established a legal record that contradicted the propaganda his cousin was already distributing. The propaganda survived. The verdict did not make it into the textbooks.
Samuel Adams, the moral conscience of the Revolution, the man who could manufacture outrage from raw air, had a financial history that his hagiographers handle with extraordinary delicacy. He had inherited his father’s malting business and run it into insolvency. He had then served as a tax collector for the town of Boston and accumulated a personal shortfall of several thousand pounds, money he had collected and failed to remit, that the town had been attempting to recover from him through legal action for years. He was an active defendant in debt proceedings during the very period when he was organizing the Sons of Liberty and writing pamphlets about the tyranny of arbitrary taxation. The Revolution did not merely advance Samuel Adams’s political philosophy. It made his financial problems disappear. When you understand this, his extraordinary energy in the cause of independence begins to look less like principle and more like survival.
Canada’s “national broadcaster” has become an expensive irrelevance
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was set up to provide Canadians across the vast heartland of the country with quality news and entertainment options. Some would say it was able to achieve those goals well enough for decades, but with the rise of the internet, fewer and fewer people are watching, listening to, or reading CBC content. In some major cities, the CBC’s share of attention is a rounding error, despite the federal government subsidizing their effort on top of the annual budget they already receive from the taxpayers.
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison makes the case for letting the CBC shut down:
CBC Isn’t Being Attacked. It’s Being Ignored. And That’s Worse.
There’s an old business rule most people learn the hard way: if your customers quietly leave, you’re already finished. No protest. No boycott. Just silence.
That’s where the CBC is right now.
You can spin it. You can defend it. You can fund it.
But you can’t fake attention.We’re looking at a public broadcaster that calls itself the “voice of Canada” while pulling audiences so small they’d embarrass a local radio host. In some cases, tens of thousands of viewers in major cities. That’s not a dip. That’s a collapse.
And here’s the uncomfortable part:
Canadians didn’t lose interest in news. They lost interest in that version of news.
Because when reporting turns into messaging, people notice. When coverage feels selective, people adjust. When tone replaces trust, people leave.
Quietly.
Now layer in Mark Carney.
Carney’s entire pitch rests on a simple belief: that complex societies should be guided by centralized expertise. Managed from the top. Coordinated. Directed. Calibrated.
Sounds efficient. Sounds smart. Sounds like it belongs in a white paper.
But we already have a working example of that model in action.
It’s called CBC.Centralized control
Institutional messaging
Weak accountability to audience demand
Heavy public funding
And the result?
A broadcaster Canadians are walking away from in real time.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s a signal.
Here’s the reframe nobody wants to touch:
CBC isn’t failing because it lacks resources.
It’s failing because it lost the discipline of needing to be chosen.When your funding doesn’t depend on your audience, your audience eventually stops depending on you.
That’s not ideological. That’s behavioural economics.
Carney’s model doubles down on that exact structure. More planning. More coordination. More reliance on expert systems that assume compliance instead of earning trust.
But trust doesn’t scale through authority.
It scales through responsiveness.And that’s the part that’s missing.
This is where the conversation usually derails into tribal nonsense. “Defund”. “Protect”. “Save public media”.
Misses the point.
The real question is simpler and harsher:
What happens when institutions stop adapting because they don’t have to?
You don’t get stability.
You get drift.You don’t get unity.
You get quiet disengagement.And you don’t get better outcomes by expanding that model across the country.
You get more of the same, just bigger.
I’ve run businesses. You learn this fast or you go broke:
If people stop showing up, it’s not because they suddenly became irrational. It’s because you stopped giving them a reason.
CBC stopped giving people a reason.
Carney’s approach assumes the reason doesn’t matter.That’s the disconnect.
Hard line:
If an institution can’t earn attention, it shouldn’t demand trust.
March 22, 2026
How To Indoctrinate the Children – Death of Democracy 08 – Q4 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 21 Mar 2026In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine Germany in the final quarter of 1934, as Adolf Hitler tightens his grip on power after Hindenburg’s death and prepares the Reich for the next stage of Nazi rule. Behind a façade of order, the regime accelerates secret rearmament, deepens propaganda and youth indoctrination, pushes Jews further out of public life, and turns universities, schools, and culture into instruments of ideological control.
This documentary explores Nazi Germany in late 1934 through the looming Saar plebiscite, the growth of the Hitler myth, rising public frustration with local Nazi officials, and the regime’s deeper preparation for dictatorship, expansion, and war. If you are interested in Hitler, Nazi propaganda, rearmament, antisemitism, the Saar vote, and the collapse of democracy in Germany, this episode provides the critical context.
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March 20, 2026
The BBC is cheerleading Britain’s “baby bust”
In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Tony Rucinski reports on a recent BBC programme that clearly takes a dim view of parenting:
ON March 13 – the Friday before Mother’s Day – the Centre for Social Justice published Baby Bust, a report projecting that 600,000 British women alive today may miss out on motherhood they actually wanted. Nine in ten young women still hope to become mothers. The ONS confirms the total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.41 in 2024. The CSJ calculates a “birth gap” of 30 per cent, with 831,000 people turning 50 in 2024 but only 595,000 babies born.
You probably did not hear about it. No identifiable standalone BBC News website article or feature covering the report has appeared. Our national broadcaster had other priorities. Namely a 1,500-word feature headlined “Like a trap you can’t escape: The women who regret being mothers“. It promoted the piece on social media, where it drew hundreds of critical replies. Instead of covering a demographic crisis, the BBC gave prominent space to a piece whose own evidence undermines its thesis – and thus revealed something important about the role it plays in the very crisis it should be reporting.
Its maternal regret article relies on a 2023 study conducted in Poland which estimates some 5 to 14 per cent of parents regret their decision to have children, a review article which synthesises several methodologically incomparable surveys – different countries, different age groups, different question wordings.
The more important point is its arithmetic. If 5 to 14 per cent of parents experience some regret, then 86 to 95 per cent do not. But the BBC devoted a feature-length article to the minority experience and ignored the majority one entirely. The lead case study featured is of a pseudonymous woman, Carmen, who came from a background of violence and dysfunction. But further data unsurprisingly finds the regret rates to be higher among single parents than married ones: 27.3 per cent versus 9.8 per cent. And that adverse childhood experiences, depression, and anxiety were also strongly associated with parental regret.
The BBC’s article however did not mention marriage once. Even the therapists quoted made the case against the BBC’s framing without apparently realising it. They repeatedly stated that regret often reflects “isolation, exhaustion, or lost identity” – failures of support, not failures of motherhood as a vocation.
The far larger and more painful form of regret that the BBC also ignored is the regret of women who wanted children and never had them, the highest figures among those who experienced fertility treatment failure. Or the similar regret found among couples whose fertility treatment did not result in a child. Or that involuntarily childless women’s regret intensifies with age.
The CSJ’s huge figure of 600,000 “missing mothers” just did not fit the narrative the BBC wants to tell.
Nor is this an isolated editorial misjudgment. Between 2023 and 2026, the BBC published a series of prominent features sympathetic to negative experiences of motherhood or to child-free lifestyles, among them: “I felt like a freak because I didn’t want children” (April 2024). “The adults celebrating child-free lives” (February 2023). “True cost of becoming a mum highlighted in new data on pay” (October 2025).
In the same period, not a single piece of the BBC’s coverage of Miriam Cates – the most prominent parliamentary advocate for pro-natalist policy – featured conversion therapy, smartphones and the trans debate, or substantially addressed her work on demographics or declining birth rates.
March 17, 2026
How Germans were propagandized into supporting the National Socialists
I’ve read a fair bit about the rise of Hitler after the First World War, beginning when I was in middle school and did a history project on the topic. Yet one aspect of the political success of Hitler’s fascist movement always puzzled me: how such blatant crude propaganda persuaded so many Germans to see things the Nazi way. Over the last five years in Canada, as our legacy media have fallen directly into the clutches of a single political party, I now understand all too well how millions of people getting their world view informed by a single point of view can create and maintain a movement. When all the mainstream media tell effectively the same story in 2026 and go out of their way to praise the government — especially the leader — and belittle and denigrate the opposition parties, it’s easy just to believe what you’re being told and not make waves.
Anyway, back to interwar Germany and their more absolute control of the newspapers and radio stations was used to mould and shape popular opinion:
In the run-up to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, most people in Germany believed what was being put about both on radio and in the state-controlled press, namely that the Poles were committing all kinds of atrocities to former Prussians living in Poland, that they were war-mongering and using threatening language, and that not only was the Danzig corridor rightfully part of Germany, it was the duty of the Reich to defend those subjects living there.
Eighteen year-old Heinz Knocke was from Hameln in central Germany and typical of many of his age. He had absolute faith in the Führer and the rightness of the German cause. Planning to join the Luftwaffe as a pilot, he had had his preliminary examinations and was hoping that with war imminent, his call-up would be accelerated. “The Polish atrocities against the German minority make horrible reading today”, he scribbled in his diary on 31st August. “Thousands are being massacred daily in territory which had once been part of Germany.”
Oberleutnant Hajo Herrmann, a twenty-four year-old pilot with the bomber group III/KG4, also thought the Poles had brought war upon themselves. As far as he was concerned, the Danzig issue was one of principle. It had been German before 1919, was still inhabited mostly by Germans, and since the Poles had rejected any peaceful solution, what did they expect? “The anger that I felt inside at their unreasonableness”, he noted, “matched my sacred conviction: that of German rightness”. For Oberleutnant Hans von Luck, on the other hand, an officer in the 7th Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment, the escalating situation had brought a sudden recall from leave just a few days’ earlier. He had found everyone at the garrison in Bad Kissingen near Schweinfurt in high spirits. Neither he nor his friends believed a word of Goebbels’ propaganda about the Poles, but they did believe Danzig and the corridor should be part of Germany once more. “We were not hungry for war”, von Luck noted, “but we did not believe the British and French would come to Poland’s defence”. How wrong he was; for while von Luck may have understood that going to war was not a matter to be taken lightly, even he had blindly accepted Hitler’s assurances that Britain and France were bluffing. It was a feature of Hitler’s rule that he frequently said one thing with immense conviction and authority but quite another once events had been proved him wrong. Such was his grip on the German people, however, almost no-one ever questioned this, and certainly not his inner circle or anyone in the German media. At any rate, all three of these young men had believed parts of the nonsense that had been spouted by Nazi propaganda, whether it be false claims about the Poles, the justness of the Nazi cause for invasion, or Hitler’s assurances the British and French were bluffing. Such was he power of Nazi disinformation.
[…]
Both the Imperial Japanese and the Nazis dominated the new forms of media communication emerging in the 1930s. Propaganda had been a key component of Nazi politics from the outset, and while there were some who had not been persuaded, it had been unquestionably hugely effective, not just within the Reich but around the world too. To a large degree, this was due to Dr Josef Goebbels, the Reich Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Gauleiter — administrative leader — of Berlin, an old Frankish term that had been resurrected by the Nazis. A former failed journalist and one of the first Nazis, he was utterly devoted to Hitler, so much so he had even given up an affair with a Czech film star with whom he was deeply in love because the Führer asked him to. Although the son of a shop assistant, Goebbels was highly intelligent and despite those humble beginnings had attended several universities and gained a doctorate. Marriage to Magda Quant, a society divorcee, gave him the kind of money and status he needed to help him climb up the Nazi ladder. He had become Propaganda Minister in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, and had immediately announced his prime goal was to achieve the “mobilisation of mind and spirit” of the German people. “We did not lose the war because our artillery gave out”, he said of defeat in 1918, “but because the weapons of our minds did not fire”.
In many ways, Goebbels was as responsible for Hitler’s position as Hitler was himself and he was the man who had largely shaped the Nazi’s public image. It was he [who] had insisted on draping swastikas – the bigger the better – from as many places as possible; it was he who taught Hitler how to whip a crowd into a frenzy; it was also Goebbels who had elevated Hitler into a demigod in the eyes of many. He knew all about manipulation theories, orchestrated heavy-handed mob violence, and in the 1933 election created the “Hitler over Germany” campaign; it was the first time, for example, that aircraft had been used to take a candidate around a country in an effort to reach more people. It worked spectacularly well.
With the Nazis in power, Goebbels had also done much to stoke up the virulent anti-Semitism that lay at the heart of Nazi ideology and had done much to turn Nazism into a form of surrogate religion, in which, again, drawing on nostalgia, they had harked back to a “purer” Aryan past to help bind the people both together and behind the Party and, more importantly, the Leader. Goebbels’ influence – his genius – should never be underestimated.
Update, 18 March: 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.
March 15, 2026
How to Go From President to King – Death of Democracy 07 – Q3 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 14 Mar 2026In Q3 1934, Adolf Hitler completed the transformation of Nazi Germany from a dictatorship into an absolute Führer state. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we examine the aftermath of the Night of the Long Knives, the destruction of the SA leadership, and the consolidation of Hitler’s personal rule after the death of President Paul von Hindenburg.
From the creation of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) to the rise of the SS under Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi regime tightened its grip on the state, the press, and everyday life. Meanwhile, propaganda, economic control under Hjalmar Schacht’s New Plan, and growing antisemitic persecution reshaped German society.
Using contemporary voices from Victor Klemperer, Luise Solmitz, and other witnesses, this episode explores how Hitler’s popularity soared even as terror and repression intensified. Watch the full Death of Democracy series to understand how the Nazi regime consolidated power step by step — and how ordinary societies can slide into dictatorship.
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March 8, 2026
How to Destroy Your Own Revolution: Night of the Long Knives – Death of Democracy 06 – Q2 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 7 Mar 2026In the spring of 1934, Nazi Germany stands on the edge of internal collapse. In this episode of Death of Democracy, we follow the escalating conflict between Adolf Hitler, the SA stormtroopers, and the German Army that culminates in the Night of the Long Knives. As economic cracks appear behind the Nazi “recovery”, Joseph Goebbels launches propaganda campaigns against critics while Heinrich Himmler expands SS power over the Gestapo.
When Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen publicly challenges the regime, Hitler moves decisively. On June 30, 1934, the Nazi leader unleashes a purge that eliminates Ernst Röhm, the SA leadership, and political rivals — consolidating absolute power.
Using contemporary voices from Martha Dodd, Victor Klemperer, and underground SPD reports, this episode explores how terror, propaganda, and political maneuvering reshaped Germany in just a few months — and paved the way for dictatorship.
Watch the full Death of Democracy series to understand how democracies collapse from within.
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March 1, 2026
How to Serve the Oligarchs for Power – Death of Democracy 05 – Q1 1934
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 28 Feb 2026In Q1 1934, Nazi Germany reaches a breaking point. In this episode of Death of Democracy, Hitler codifies central control with the Law for the Reconstruction of the Reich, crushing what remains of federalism. Abroad, the German–Polish Non‑Aggression Pact (January 26, 1934) shocks Europe while rearmament continues behind a diplomatic mask.
Inside the Reich, the real story is the power struggle: SA chief Ernst Röhm demands a “people’s militia”, forcing Hitler to choose the Reichswehr over the stormtroopers — setting the stage for the Night of the Long Knives. As Himmler expands SS power and Goebbels tightens the propaganda screws, even historic liberal papers like the Vossische Zeitung disappear. Meanwhile, unemployment falls toward three million amid manipulated statistics, wage freezes, shortages, and a looming foreign‑currency crisis.
Watch, then comment: what warning signs do you see when “order” is used to justify permanent power?
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February 24, 2026
The political spectrum in Canadian media runs from the far left all the way to the left-of-centre
The federal government isn’t noted for being good with money. Yes, I know, understatement of the century … But they did make one investment that has been fantastically beneficial. For the Liberal Party, if not for Canadians in general. That investment was buying the support of almost all of the surviving mainstream media outlets by directly subsidizing their payrolls. Most media folks lean left anyway, but once their paycheque literally depended on keeping the Liberals happy, they joyfully co-operated in ways that 1930s German newspapers would blush at. On her Substack, Melanie In Saskatchewan explains just how far away from representative the media political spectrum has drifted (leftwards, of course, always leftwards):
If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the real Canadian political landscape and the pundit ecosystem on legacy networks, you’d find they barely overlap.
Rosemary Barton is the undisputed matriarch of the CBC’s political brand. As host of At Issue and Rosemary Barton Live, she shapes the entire panel tone for CBC political discourse and anchors the network’s election coverage. She has been at the helm of federal election panels since 2016, interviewing party leaders and moderating debates from coast to coast.
Canada’s mainstream media as Liberal Party propagandists.
Image from Melanie In SaskatchewanNow ask yourself this: if half the population consistently feels unheard by these panels, is that a coincidence, or the predictable result of decades of the same ideological herd wandering through the same studios?
Here is the rub. The At Issue panel rarely rotates through voices that actually represent today’s conservative electorate. Instead, it routinely features professional journalists and political insiders who debate among themselves, talking about conservatives far more often than they engage with conservatives whose voters make up a massive share of the country. That is not centrism. It is an echo chamber assembled by committee.
Then there is Andrew Coyne. He is often presented as the token ideological counterweight on At Issue, the panel’s supposed nod to conservatism. After all, he has spent decades as a columnist and editorial thinker, comfortably critiquing governments from a well upholstered perch.
But let us be clear. Coyne is not remotely representative of today’s conservative electorate. He is not a reflection of the current Conservative Party base. He is not channeling the instincts of voters outside the Ottawa and Toronto corridor.
Positioning him as the conservative voice on a national panel is not balance. It is branding. It allows producers to claim ideological diversity without ever inviting someone who actually carries the convictions, tone, or priorities of the modern conservative movement. Coyne is not a grassroots conservative. He is a professional pundit whose worldview fits tidily within the Ottawa insider class. That is not ideological contrast. It is controlled opposition dressed up as pluralism.
Meanwhile, audiences have been increasingly vocal online about the sense that these panels sound like academic seminars, not reflections of the lived experience of Canadians who didn’t spend their twenties in Ottawa press galleries.
February 16, 2026
The destruction of Dresden, February 1945
If you’ve watched the two-part video on the bombing of Dresden by LordHardThrasher (Part 1, Part 2), much of this will already be familiar to you, as Ed West discusses the history of the city up to the point the RAF bombs began to fall on Shrove Tuesday in 1945:
… Just over six years later the city of Dresden would be reduced to ashes by hundreds of bombers from the RAF and US Air Force, a horror that began on the evening of Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, lasting until Thursday morning. Griebel would survive, but all his art went up in the blaze.
Dresden is perhaps, after Hiroshima, the name most synonymous with slaughter from the air, and in Britain at least the most controversial. Last year, while visiting this incredibly beautiful city — much of it now rebuilt — I reread Frederick Taylor’s account of the bombing, published back in 2005 on the 60th anniversary of the event.
Dresden’s destruction was extensive. Almost no buildings in the centre or its inner suburbs survived the bombs, and the death toll was immense, although difficult to assess in a city packed with refugees from the east. Anything between 20,000 and 80,000 fatalities is possible, although the consensus seems to be around 25,000.
That night was to be the worst of many wartime firestorms, a meteorological event in which the heat of the blaze becomes so intense, up to a thousand degrees centigrade, that the oxygen is sucked out of the surrounding air. More died in Dresden from asphyxiation than fire, and even those who thought they had found shelter in fountains were boiled alive. Many more drowned in the city’s reservoir, where they had gone to seek protection, their energy sapped by the soaring temperatures, unable to climb out. The bombers, thousands of feet above, could feel the warmth of the thousand fires below.
[…]
As everyone in the 1930s was well aware, the new war would bring aerial destruction on a hideously greater scale, and when it came again, it was the Luftwaffe who first put these ideas into practise, first in Poland and then Rotterdam.
After failing to destroy the Royal Air Force over the summer of 1940, the Nazis switched to aerial bombing of British cities. Between September 7, 1940 and New Year’s Day 1941, London was attacked on 57 consecutive nights, killing 14,000 inhabitants, a rate of 250 fatalities for each day of bombing. The German air force went on to kill an estimated 43,000 British civilians over the course of the war, with V-1 attacks continuing until the last weeks of the war.
On November 14, 1940, over 500 German bombers took off for a mission that would gift their language a new verb: Coventrated. Five hundred tons of high explosives, 30,000 incendiary bombs, fifty landmines and twenty petroleum mines were dropped on the target, and the medieval city went up in flames.
Like the blitz on other British cities, morale was not crushed in Coventry, but something dawned on the British high command. The destruction of Coventry’s infrastructure, utilities and transport had proved far more damaging than the destruction of any purely “military” target. Furthermore, bombers were notoriously inaccurate, and one survey showed that only 2 per cent of bombs fell within even one thousand feet of their intended point. Aerial bombardment of cities would prove far more effective than any hopeless targeting of particular coordinates.
They also learned that a large enough bombing raid would result in a firestorm, in which air currents are drawn in from the surrounding area, causing the fire to burn far more intensely. Indeed, a major attack on the City of London on December 29, 1940 might have become another firestorm but for the bad weather.
The British had been initially reluctant to take the war to Germany. While Poland was left to endure hell, leaflets were dropped over Berlin in October 1939 claiming that Nazi leaders were secretly profiting from the war, leading Noel Coward to suggest that it looked like we were trying to bore the Germans to death. There is even the apocryphal story about British official Sir Kingsley Wood refusing to bomb industrial targets in the Black Forest because it was private property. Indeed, our attempts to bomb Germany in 1940 were so feeble that Goebbels had to fake British “atrocities” to rouse the German public
With the entry of the United States and Soviet Union into the war in 1941, and with the German defeat at Stalingrad, the shoe was now on the other foot. The British invested more resources in Bomber Command and its head, Air Marshall Arthur Harris. “Bomber” Harris would become representative of the entire policy of destroying Germany’s cities, and a figure of controversy; the unveiling of his statue in 1992 attracted protests and has been repeatedly vandalised, but like many architects of wartime destruction, he was motivated by a desire to prevent a repeat of what he saw in 1914-18. The son of a colonial official who might have spent the rest of his life as a farm manager in Rhodesia were it not for war, he had joined the Royal Flying Corp in the first conflict and from his plane saw the horror of trench warfare and became determined that this sort of stalemate should never be repeated.
Having stuck to targeted industrial centres, in February, 1942 Allied command issued the Area Bombing Directive authorising the wide scale destruction of enemy cities. On 28 March the Hanseatic town of Lübeck was destroyed in a firestorm, and its most famous son, the anti-Nazi novelist Thomas Mann, appeared on BBC radio saying that while he regretted the destruction of his native city, “I think of Coventry, and have no objection to the lesson that everything must be paid for. Did Germany believe that she would never have to pay for the atrocities that her leap into barbarism seemed to allow?”
After the Lübeck bombing, Goebbels approached a state of panic for the first time, describing the damage as “really enormous”. He responded, in April 1942, by saying that he would “bomb every building in England marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide” – Exeter was now hit in retaliation.
On May 30 the Allies launched what Harris called “the Thousand Plan”, the first thousand-bomber raid. Cologne and Hamburg were singled out for destruction, but on last-minute meteorological advice only the Rhineland city was chosen. Hamburg’s citizens would never know how fate had saved them – if only for another year.
So shocked were the Germans by the attack that the authorities forced the city’s fleeing citizens to sign a pledge of secrecy about what they saw, which ended with the sinister line “I know what the consequences of breaking this undertaking will be”.
Things would only get worse, and the Allies were getting both more destructive and more skilled. In faraway Utah, the Americans were now busy testing the destruction of German-style buildings, even hiring German refugee architect Erich Mendelssohn to recreate a German apartment block.
February 4, 2026
Amelia, created by woke propagandists, is now the figurehead for the anti-woke
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Michael Greer provides a quick thumbnail sketch of the Amelia story for folks who need to get caught up:
I’ve been watching the saga of Amelia from the far side of the Atlantic in a state of utter bemusement.
For those who don’t know the first act of the saga, the British government had some collection of flacks create a video game for British kids, which was designed to elicit “racist” (that is, patriotic and un-woke) statements from them — at which point the kids who fell for it would be reported to the police for, erm, reeducation. (I wish I was making this up.)
Amelia was a cartoon figure who was supposed to mouth allegedly racist slogans, and they gave her violet hair because they thought that would annoy right-wingers, who make jokes about women with dyed hair.
Ponder the immeasurable stupidity of the flacks who put nationalist and patriotic slogans in the mouth of the kind of cute female figure who would have most teenage boys reaching into their trousers on the spot. Of course these same teenage boys instantly hijacked her and turned her into a mascot, just as they did with Kek back in the day. Of course these same teenage boys, being far more computer-skilled than government flacks, started doing LLM-generated videos of Amelia speaking out in favor of nationalist and patriotic ideas.
Of course everybody in Britain who’s sick and tired of the Starmer government and its woke doctrines embraced Amelia as their latest heroine, not least because the Guardian‘s foam-flecked fury when she’s mentioned is so entertaining to watch …
And then, as with Kek, things got weird. We’re still in the early stages of the weirdening but it would not surprise me a bit to find that just as a cartoon frog ten years ago became the vessel through which an archaic Native American deity manifested and sent the US spinning down an uncharted path, a purple-haired waifu may just become another such vehicle.
Britain used to have quite a collection of war goddesses, back in Celtic times. I’m curious, not to mention apprehensive, to see just who’s taking this opportunity to stream back into manifestation.
February 1, 2026
How to End Democracy in 60 Days – Death of Democracy Q1 1933
World War Two
Published 31 Jan 2025This episode of the history documentary series “Death of Democracy” covers Q1 1933 with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Reichstag Fire, Reichstag Fire Decree, Enabling Act, rise of Nazi terror, Gleichschaltung, and media control, explaining how Weimar Germany’s democracy collapsed in just sixty days.
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Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter reacts to an Australian race-grievance grifter “Race Discrimination Commissioner” bloviating talking about Australia as “stolen land”:
The implicit meaning of this framing is that Anglos stole the land so it’s only fair for them to give hundreds of millions of Hindoids the opportunity to steal the land.
Revealed preference demonstrates this. If he believes the land is stolen, and he believes theft is morally wrong, then he would not accept a salary of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Australian government (this is blood money), and he wouldn’t live in Australia.
Since he doesn’t do either of those things, he either doesn’t believe what he’s saying, or he does but he doesn’t think theft is bad, in which case he’s simply trying to emotionally manipulate white Australians by using their own morality against them in order to guilt them into continuing to allow him and people like him to parasitize the Australian people.
He then elaborates:
It really cannot be emphasized enough how dishonest all of this is.
America stole land from the natives, purchased some African farm equipment, and has always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “open the borders and give us your country”.
Canada is built on stolen land, sent some kids to boarding school, and has also always been a “nation of immigrants”, therefore “Let my people in, saar”.
Australia, same narrative as Canada.
New Zealand, same as Australia.
Britain did an imperialism, therefore “your country belongs to us now, saar”.
France, same as England.
Spain, same as France.
Ireland never had an empire and hasn’t had slaves since the Viking Age, and indeed was itself colonized by England … therefore Ireland must accept unlimited migration in solidarity with other post-colonial countries.
Germany was too mean to Jews for a few years, therefore Germans must abolish themselves and give their country to North Africans.
The only peoples the Swedes ever conquered or enslaved were neighbouring Europeans, but Sweden might have sold some iron that might have gotten used on some slave ships a few centuries ago, therefore must open its borders to Bomalians and give them all the rape toys they can penetrate.
The justification differs, but the conclusion is always the same: open borders and ethnic replacement.
The uniformity of the repugnant conclusion indicates that these narratives are formed by reasoning back from that tendentious repugnance, with the arguments tailored to national conditions using whatever specific historical circumstances are handy, with the intent of emotionally manipulating native populations into laying down their arms, foregoing resistance, and placidly accepting the loss of their countries to the hundreds of millions of third-worlders intent on flooding every developed white country on the planet.
The people making these arguments don’t believe a word that they say. Their seething resentment for Europeans is entirely real, but this is almost entirely an inferiority complex, humiliation at having been so easily conquered and then taught to eat and wipe with something other than their hands. They don’t believe that slavery or conquest are wrong: if they did, they wouldn’t still practice slavery, and they wouldn’t be trying to conquer the West in the guise of beggars, by shamelessly playing to our pity and misplaced guilt. They say these things in order to trick you by playing on a conscience they don’t have themselves. It’s a sales tactic, and they’re selling you annihilation.
