Quotulatiousness

March 1, 2026

The American Revolutionaries – when you don’t want a king, but you do want someone king-ish

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack Notes, John Carter shared this post by Theophilus Chilton, saying:

Fascinating. The American founders were explicitly trying to revive a stronger form of monarchical executive authority with the presidency, as a deliberate corrective to the relatively powerless Crown of the British Constitution, which had been effectively neutered by the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.

Along similar lines, the American Bill of Rights was in most ways simply a restatement of the ancient rights of Englishmen.

So, of course, I had to go read the post:

Too “kingly” but also not “kingly” enough for America’s Founding Fathers.
King George III in his Coronation robes.
Oil painting by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) circa 1761-1762. From the Royal Collection (RCIN 405307) via Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, I’ve been reading an interesting book about 18th century political philosophy entitled The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. In this work the author, Eric Nelson, guides the reader through the various aspects of the great inter-whiggish debates that roiled the American colonies prior to independence, and which then continued afterwards. One of the main premises is that a major faction within this debate — and indeed the one which ended up prevailing in the end — understood the relationship between colonies and mother country to be founded upon the king of Britain’s personal proprietorship over the colonies. This Patriot position was opposed by the Loyalist position which saw the colonies as existing under the laws and rule of Parliament.

Now this might seem strange to generations of Americans who grew up learning in school that the American revolutionaries fought against the great tyrant King George III who was set upon grinding the American colonies under his bootheel of oppression. That view would be quite surprising to many of the participants on the Patriot side, many of whom actually appealed to King George, both publicly and in private correspondence, to exercise kingly prerogative and overturn the various duties, laws, and taxes which Parliament had laid upon the colonies. This, indeed, was the crux of the Patriot argument, which is that because the colonies were originally founded under the personal demesne of the British King, they remained so even despite the temporary abolishment of the monarchy after the execution of Charles I in 1649. In the interregnum between that and the Glorious Revolution and restoration of a stable monarchy that was accepted by all classes as legitimate in 1688, Parliament had illegitimately usurped authority over the colonies. Because it was Parliament which was laying the Intolerable Acts and all the other complaints which the Americans had, it was Parliament against whom they wished to be protected.

But these Patriots were pining after a situation which no longer existed. In point of fact, the British kings since the Glorious Revolution had left whatever prerogative powers they might still have had unused. So it was with George III, who rejected the American colonists’ calls for him to intervene, knowing that doing so would have provoked a constitutional crisis in Britain which he would not have won. As a result, the American colonists chose to make their final break with the British monarchy and throw in their lot for independence, buttressed by Thomas Paine’s fleetingly persuasive but ultimately ineffectual pamphlet Common Sense.

However, after independence, the colonists were faced with providing their own governance. Initially, this was attempted under the Articles of Confederation, as well as their state constitutions, all of which were very whiggish in principle. They were also inadequate to the task. As every student who took high school civics knows, the solution to this was the Constitution of 1789.

Typically, students are taught that the new Constitution was designed to strengthen the ability of the federal government to handle the various issues that applied to the confederation of states as a whole. What we don’t generally hear, however, is that much of this included strengthening the roles and powers of the president to include several areas of prerogative powers which exceeded even the powers then available to the kings of Britain. The stock view of the Constitution is that it “was created to prevent anyone from getting too much power!” The actuality is that the Constitution was crafted, in part, to expand presidential power and create what was viewed at the time as a literally monarchical chief executive. Opponents of this described the proposed executive as “the foetus of monarchy”. Supporters often defended it on the basis that parliaments and congresses, if left unchecked by a strong executive whose interest was drawn from the body of the whole people, would themselves become the greatest threats to the liberties of the people.

The Founders who proposed this enhancement of the executive didn’t do this in a vacuum. Indeed, they had a century and a half of history about this very subject to draw from first-hand. Fresh in the collective mind of every Englishmen, both in the home country and in the colonies, were the English Civil Wars of the previous century. Beginning with the revolt of the parliamentarian army in 1642 through the regicide of Charles I in 1649, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the attempted restoration of the House of Stuart under James II, until the final deposition of James and his replacement with William, Prince of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Englishmen had a long series of examples from which to draw various conclusions.

So yes, they could see the parliamentarian excesses that took place during the Protectorate. Current in the collective national mind were the overreaches (whether real or imagined) of Parliament both during the interregnum and in the century since the acquisition of the throne by the House of Hanover. As noted above, among these overreaches, at least as viewed by many in the American colonies, was parliamentary interference in the affairs of the colonies, viewed as transgressions into the rightful domain of the king’s purview. Hence, by a strange twist, the Loyalists who opposed American independence before and during the Revolution were generally the more whiggish of the two sides, throwing in their lot with the parliamentary oligarchies. The Patriots, on the other hand, were desperately trying to get the king to reassert his royal prerogatives and intervene by reasserting his perceived rights to directly rule the colonies, something of a modified “high/low vs. the middle” type of scenario.

January 25, 2026

QotD: Dostoevsky’s views on revolutionaries in Demons

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In a novel about political radicalism you might expect the ideas to take center stage, but here they’re treated as pure comic relief (if you’ve read The Man Who Was Thursday, the vibe is very similar). The guy who wants to kill all of humanity and the guy who wants to enslave all of humanity have some seriously conflicting objectives (and don’t forget the guy who just wants to kill himself and the guy who refuses to say what his goal is), yet they all belong to the same revolutionary society. The leader of their society takes it to an extreme, he has no specific ideas at all. His political objectives and philosophical premises are literally never mentioned, by him or by others. What he has is boundless energy, an annoying wheedling voice,1 and an infinite capacity for psychological cruelty. But all these impressive capacities are directed at nothing in particular, just at crushing others for the sheer joy of it,2 at destruction without purpose and without meaning.

Does that seem unrealistic? That ringleader was actually based on a real life student revolutionary named Sergey Nechayev, whose trial Dostoevsky eagerly followed. Nechayev wrote a manifesto called The Catechism of a Revolutionary, here’s an excerpt from that charming document:

    The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution … The revolutionary despises all doctrines and refuses to accept the mundane sciences, leaving them for future generations. He knows only one science: the science of destruction … The object is perpetually the same: the surest and quickest way of destroying the whole filthy order … For him, there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction.

The ideas don’t matter, because at the end of the day they’re pretexts for desires — the desire to dominate, the desire to obliterate the world, the desire to obliterate the self, the desire to negate.3 Just as in their parents’ generation the desire for status came first and wrapped itself in liberal politics in order to reproduce and advance itself, so in their children the desire for blood and death reigns supreme, and the radical politics serve only as a mechanism of self-justification and a lever to pull. This is not a novel about people, and it’s also not a novel about ideas. It’s a novel about desires, motives, urges, and the ways in which we construct stories to make sense of them.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-07-17.

  1. To Dostoevsky’s own surprise, when he wrote the main bad guy of the story, he turned out a very funny, almost buffoonish figure. He may be the most evil person in literature who’s also almost totally comic.
  2. Dostoevsky is notorious for dropping hints via the names of his characters — applied nominative determinism — and this one’s name means something like “supremacy”.
  3. Or as another famous book about demons once put it:

    4. I am the spirit that negates
    And rightly so, for all that comes to be
    Deserves to perish wretchedly;
    ‘Twere better nothing would begin.
    Thus everything that your terms, sin,
    Destruction, evil represent —
    That is my proper element.

January 22, 2026

QotD: Higher education

Filed under: Americas, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the 1980s, I took an interest in Latin American guerrilla movements, especially in Central America. The general consensus among those who took an interest in such matters was that they were caused by the intolerable conditions of the poor, oppressed peasantry who rose up spontaneously against them. This was complete nonsense, of course. This is not to say that the peasantry was not poor and oppressed, but poor and oppressed peasants are rarely capable of more than a jacquerie, a kind of rural riot that exhausts itself and results in the oppressors coming back stronger than ever.

No; I came to the conclusion that the cause of the revolutionary guerrilla movements was the expansion of tertiary education in countries where it had not long before been the province only of the elite, largely, though never entirely, hereditary. (For the poor, gifted, and ambitious, the army was the route to social ascension.)

Tertiary education, however, was expanded with comparative suddenness. Before it was expanded, those who had it, being few, were more or less guaranteed important roles in the economy and government. They had already drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life. Not surprisingly, a false syllogism insinuated itself into the minds of the newly educated: If the rich were educated and important, then being educated would make you rich and important. Again not surprisingly, this turned out not to be the case. If you turn out thousands of lawyers, for example, the remuneration of their work, if they find any, will be reduced and they will be disappointed in their hopes and expectations. They become angry, bitter, and disaffected, believing themselves not to be valued at their inestimable worth. They and their ilk became the middle ranks of the guerrillas (the very uppermost reaches being filled mainly by the narcissistic, spoiled sprigs of the upper classes). Only revolution would acquire for them the positions of influence and importance to which they felt that their education entitled them, and which such education had always entitled people to in the past.

Is it possible that Latin America was not so much in the rear as in the forefront of this modern social development (the case of Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path of Peru, was a pure culture of this phenomenon)? Is it not possible that we in our societies have duped tens of millions of young people into believing that the prolongation of their formal education would lead them inexorably into the sunny uplands of power, importance, wealth, and influence, when in fact many a PhD finds himself obliged to do work that he could have done when he was 16? No one likes to think that he has been duped, however (it takes two for fraud to be committed, after all), so he looks around for some other cause of his bitter disappointment. It isn’t ignoramuses who are pulling down the statues, but ignoramuses who think that they have been educated.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Bees With Degrees”, Taki’s Magazine, 2020-07-02.

Update, 24 January: 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.

December 28, 2025

QotD: The Middle Ages saw rebellions but no revolutions

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

At some point in this space, we discussed the difference between a rebellion and a revolution. Drawing on Michael Walzer’s key work The Revolution of the Saints, I argued that a true revolution requires ideology, as it’s an attempt to fundamentally change society’s structure.

Therefore there were no revolutions in the Middle Ages or the Ancient World, only rebellions — even a nasty series of civil wars like The Wars of the Roses were merely bloody attempts to replace one set of rulers with another, without comment on the underlying structure. A medieval usurpation couldn’t help but raise questions about “political theory” in the broadest sense — how can God’s anointed monarch be overthrown? — but medieval usurpers understood this: They always presented the new boss as the true, legitimate king by blood. I forget how e.g. Henry IV did it — Wiki’s not clear — but he did, shoehorning himself into the royal succession somehow.

Combine that with Henry’s obvious competence, Richard II’s manifest in-competence, and Henry’s brilliant manipulation of the rituals of kingship, and that was good enough; his strong pimp hand took care of the rest. Henry IV was a legitimate king because he acted like a legitimate king.

A revolution, by contrast, aims to change fundamental social relations. That’s why medieval peasant rebellions always failed. Wat Tyler had as many, and as legitimate, gripes against Richard II as Henry Bolingbroke did, but unlike Henry’s, Tyler’s gripes couldn’t really be addressed by a change of leadership — they were structural. 200 years later, and the rebels were now revolutionaries, willing to give structural change a go.

Severian, “¡Viva la Revolución!”, Founding Questions, 2025-02-27.

December 8, 2025

Hungary 1956: The Day Hope Met Soviet Steel – W2W 056

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

TimeGhost History
Published 7 Dec 2025

Here we trace how, only eleven years into Soviet rule, Hungary’s brief hope after Stalin’s death ignites into demands for reform, free speech, and withdrawal of Soviet troops. Students mass in Budapest, the secret police fire on demonstrators, and the uprising spreads as workers’ councils seize factories and crowds pull down Stalin’s statue. Imre Nagy promises neutrality and multi-party politics, but Moscow wavers, then sends in overwhelming force. As tanks return to Budapest, street fighting erupts, radios broadcast desperate pleas, and the revolution is crushed, leaving thousands dead and a generation convinced that the thaw was an illusion.
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December 7, 2025

History Summarized: Quebec’s Architectural Memory

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Cancon, France, History, Humour, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Aug 2025

Congratulations, you just got Chateau’d.

Ten years ago I visited Quebec City with my dad, this summer the two of us went back, and today I bring you the analytical fruits of a visit well spent. (Let it be known I did my best attempt at Quebecois, recalling pronunciation differences like Frontenac condensing to “Frotnak”, but otherwise defaulting to Metropolitan French when I wasn’t sure of local pronunciations. Alas, any attempt to “split the difference” between Quebecois and Metropolitan French will invariably result in utter disaster. For this, je suis désolé.)
(more…)

November 19, 2025

Ken Burns’ The American Revolution gets the Howard Zinn seal of approval

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander is persuaded, against his better judgement, to watch the latest Ken Burns documentary … and discovers that it’s somehow still 2018-2022 in Burns’ world:

So, I’ve watched the two episodes of Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, in spite of my stated zero desire to do so. Why? If you are not up to speed with the MSNBCification of Ken Burns over the last decade, catch up.

Anyway, as Mrs. Salamander knows more about the American Revolution than 99.7% of people out there, she insisted we watch it. I’ve been married for over three decades for a reason, so I sat down with her to watch.

FFS.

… and … it started with a land acknowledgement. ISYN.

It doesn’t get better.

By the end of episode two we’ve gotten through the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet there has been no mention of John Locke, Montesquieu, or any of the other philosophical drivers of the revolution. They have plenty of time to quote the memories of an old man about what he thought of George Washington when he ran into him when he was 8 (it wasn’t good).

Let’s pause there a bit. It is clear that they made a decision that for every good thing they say about GW in the first two episodes, they insist on finding a way to smear him with presentism. It is also clear that he really wants to do a documentary on African Americans in the Revolutionary War, but couldn’t get the funding for that. Instead there is a constant referring back to slavery and racial issues. Just overdone to the point of being obvious, given that they were, at best, tertiary issues during the war. It deserves mention, but not in this ham-fisted, patronizing manner it is being done … and done mostly to smear GW up.

The presentism and biased scholarship is not shocking if you’ve read my reports at my Substack over the years about the absolute woke-soaked state of American historical organizations such as the American Historical Association. (see my FEB 2021 Substack, “The War on (Military) History: Half a Century In” for reference.)

The smearing of GW like this is more than “balance” — it is emblematic of the presentism that makes so many modern virtue signaling tiresome — and exactly meets the low expectations I had for this documentary.

There is also the pettiness of their choices of what to comment on, and how — the smug New England perspective of the Acela Corridor that is Ken Burns’ intellectual terrarium. Just one example from the second episode: the arrival of the Virginians to support the patriot forces around Boston. Might as well have called them rednecks.

Even Mrs. Salamander, halfway through Ep. 2, had about enough of the shoehorned in identity politics of “inclusion” … as if everyone ever got over the fever of 2018-2022.

October 16, 2025

“The ‘big secret’ of the Soviet archives was that the communists really were communist”

Filed under: Books, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Big Serge talks to historian Sean McMeekin, the author of Stalin’s War and other works that some call “revisionist” for their different views of “settled” historical events:

Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”

Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?

Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.

For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents”, joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage”. So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?

Readers may have missed the obvious Fischer inspiration for Russian Origins owing to the editors at Harvard/Belknap, who thought my original title – the obviously Fischer-inspired Russia’s Aims in the First World War – was boring and unsexy. Probably this helped sell books, but it did lend my critics an easy line that I was “blaming Russia for the First World War” rather than simply applying a Fischer-esque lens to Russia’s war aims. Some also called me Russophobic, which is understandable, though I think it misses the point. To my mind, subjecting Russian strategic thinking, wartime diplomacy and maneuvering to the same scrutiny as those routinely applied to Germany and the other Powers is taking the country seriously on its own terms, rather than ignoring Russia, as nearly every historian of, say, Gallipoli has done.

A book on Russian war aims was also long overdue. Other than an underwhelming Chai Lieven study from 1983 and a few articles, no one had really done this for Russia since Soviet scholars and archivists had (with very different motivations) published annotated volumes of secret Russian diplomatic correspondence back in the 1920s. For me, this was a door wide open, and I walked right in. Stalin’s War is in many ways a sequel to Russia’s Aims in the First World War (my own title!), written in a similar spirit, albeit much longer and in some ways more ambitious.

With the Russian Revolution, it was probably still harder to say anything really new, particularly after the popular histories of Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes (and a huge new literature written partly in response to them) came out in the 1990s. And I do not think my “take” was quite as revisionist or controversial as those on WWI or WW2. What I did try to do, in order to add something new to the story, was to combine my own research in a number of areas (Russian army morale reports before and after Order No. 1, depositions taken after the July Days, police reports from 1917, Bolshevik finances and expropriation policies, etc.) with new work done by others since 1991 on, especially, Russia’s military performance in WWI (a topic almost completely ignored in Cold War era literature on the Revolution, both Soviet and western), to reinterpret both the February and October Revolutions. In full disclosure, I would have preferred to write an ambitious history on just 1917, where I had the most original material and new points to make, but my publisher wanted a one-volume “comprehensive” history of the Revolution, so that is what I wrote. Like most historians and writers, I like to think that I write entirely from inspiration with a free hand, but of course there are all kinds of factors that play into our work.

Getting back to your question – while I have certainly done original research for all of these books, I am hardly the only historian to take advantage of Russian archives opened after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – including, I should add, all the incredible archival material compiled by Russian researchers in the 1990s and 2000s into huge published volumes of Soviet-era documents. I think it is my mindset that differentiates me from other scholars who have taken similar advantage of this opportunity. Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, uncovered incredibly rich veins of new material for Stalin. Court of the Red Tsar, as Antony Beevor did for Stalingrad, both of which books made an enormous splash. They’re not exactly “revisionists”, though. Rather, these historians retell stories already partly familiar, but with reams of fascinating new details that greatly enrich the story. I think this is a wonderful way to write history, and thousands of readers evidently agree. It is just not what I do.”

Big Serge: “I’m glad you brought up The Russian Origins of the First World War. This was the first of your books that I read, and I found it interesting for a counterintuitive reason, in that its arguments seem like they should be obvious and not particularly controversial. The essence of the book is that the Tsarist state had agency and tried to use the First World War to achieve important strategic objectives. That should be obvious, after all this was an immensely powerful state with a long pedigree of muscular foreign policy, but people are very accustomed to the Guns of August sort of narrative where all the agency and initiative is with Germany, and everyone else is reduced to the role of objects in a story where Germany is the sole subject.

It makes me think somewhat of a quip that Dr. Stephen Kotkin has used in interviews about his Stalin biographies, when he says that the “big secret” of the Soviet archives was that the communists really were communist. His point is that, even in a very convoluted and secretive regime, sometimes what you see really is what you get. I think you made a similar sort of point with Russian Origins. If I could paraphrase you, the big reveal is that the big, powerful Tsarist Empire was behaving like a big powerful empire, in that it had cogent war aims and it consistently sought to work towards those – so consistently in fact that the war aims were initially largely unchanged after the fall of the monarchy in 1917. You’re saying something very similar with Stalin’s War: the shocking secret here is that a powerful, expansionist, heavily militarized Soviet regime acted like it and worked aggressively to pursue its own peculiar interests.

How do you conceptualize this? It strikes me as a little bit odd, because, as you say, there is sometimes a bit of a stigma round the label “revisionist”, but your books generally present schemas that are fairly intuitive: Tsarist Russia was a big, powerful empire that pursued big imperial aims; Stalin was the protagonist of his own story and exercised a muscular, self-interested foreign policy; the Bolsheviks used extraordinary violence to conquer an anarchic environment. Are you surprised that people are surprised at these things?”

Dr. McMeekin: “I wish I was surprised, and perhaps at first I was, but I suppose that, over the years, I have become inured to the shocked! Shocked! reactions I receive when I point out fairly obvious things. Historians, like most groups, tend to be pack animals, who like to run in safe herds. When it comes to a familiar subject such as the outbreak of World War I, the literature tends to groove around well-trodden themes and questions. Certainly it has done since Fischerites took over the field: it’s Germany all the time, with perhaps a nod to Austria-Hungary in the Serbian backstory, or Britain with the naval race. France and Russia had almost disappeared from the story, as if one of the two major continental alliance blocs was irrelevant. I was heartened that my own treatment of Russia’s role in the outbreak of the war and Russia’s war aims garnered attention and shaped the conversation, both in itself and through Christopher Clark’s bestseller Sleepwalkers (which draws on Russian Origins). By contrast, Stefan Schmidt’s pathbreaking 2009 study of the French role in the outbreak of the war (Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914), which Clark and I draw on heavily, has still not been translated into English, making barely a ripple in the profession. Clark and I have poked around with English-language publishers, trying to gin up interest in a translation, but so far without luck.

With the Second World War, I suppose the “shock” value is still greater, and perhaps therefore even less surprising. In Germany, after all, there are laws on the books making it illegal to “trivialize” the Holocaust, for example by foregrounding Soviet war crimes on the eastern front, and of course whole areas of the war such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet war plans in 1941, and even Lend-Lease are highly sensitive in Russia, though I’ll note that there has been a curious exception for the “full-on” revisionism of Rezun-Suvorov (Icebreaker, etc.) – perhaps because his thesis is so extreme as to be easily caricatured, or maybe just because his books sell so well, it has never been difficult to find them in Russian bookstores. In a way, I also think the popularity of Suvorov’s books in Russia relates to the way they do take the Soviet Union seriously as a great power, as I do, of course – whether or not one agrees with his thesis, and I’m sure many of his Russian readers do not, it is less condescending than western histories that treat the Soviets as passive victims of fate in the Barbarossa story before Stalin woke them up.

I was perhaps more surprised at the visceral reaction to Stalin’s War in Britain, particularly my discussion of Operation Pike (eg British plans to bomb Soviet oil installations in Baku in 1940), which sent certain reviewers into paroxysms of rage I found absolutely bewildering. If anything, I should have thought my sharply critical treatment of Hopkins and Roosevelt would have offended Americans far more gravely than my slightly more sympathetic portrayal of Britain’s wartime statesmen, but it was quite the opposite. Certainly some American Roosevelt admirers were annoyed, but this was nothing like British reviewers’ hysteria over Operation Pike. Curiously enough I had dinner not long ago with one of these reviewers, and he brought up Stalin’s War. He was very civil, full of British charm, but he still wanted desperately to know why I had argued that Britain “should have gone to war against the Soviet Union instead of Nazi Germany”. As always when I am accused of this – another reviewer stated this point blank in the TLS – I simply asked him if he could locate a passage in the book where I had stated any such thing? The entire subject of World War II has become so encrusted with emotion and taboos that I think it clouds people’s vision. They see ghosts.”

October 9, 2025

QotD: Ontario and the Loyalists

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

The Province of Ontario is the most populous province in Canada, home to 38.5% of Canada’s national population as of the 2021 census. Located in Central Canada, it is the political, economic, and cultural heart of the country. Its capital, Toronto, is the nation’s largest city and financial centre, while Ottawa, the national capital, lies along Ontario’s eastern edge. Ontario is bordered by Quebec to the east and northeast, Manitoba to the west, Hudson Bay and James Bay to the north, and five U.S. states to the south — Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York — mostly along a 2,700 km (1,700 mi) boundary formed by rivers and lakes in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence drainage system. Though Ontario is the second-largest province by total area after Quebec, the vast majority of its people and arable land are concentrated in the warmer, more developed south, where agriculture and manufacturing dominate. Northern Ontario, in contrast, is colder, heavily forested, and sparsely populated, with mining and forestry serving as the region’s primary industries. But Ontario is more than just a province; it is the crucible of English-speaking Canada.

In 1784, after the American Revolution, Loyalist settlers arrived with intention, bringing with them the legal traditions, religious institutions, and steadfast allegiance to the Crown that had shaped their former world. They sought to uphold a civilisational order rooted in monarchy, Church, and Law, and to establish a society founded on duty, hierarchy, and restraint. From these early Loyalist settlements, beginning at Kingston, a distinct political and cultural tradition emerged. It was neither British nor American. It became the foundation of a new people.

Today, the descendants of these settlers form the core of an ethnocultural identity known as Anglo-Canadian. Numbering over ten million across the country, and more than six million in Ontario, Anglo-Canadians are known for their enduring institutions: constitutional monarchy, common law, Protestant-rooted civic morality, and a national ethos shaped by loyalty and order. This cultural framework shaped Ontario’s development across every sphere of life.

Loyalists built the province’s schools, banks, and legal systems. They established its early industries, including agriculture, forestry, mining, and railroads, and later came to dominate the professional sectors of law, education, public administration, and finance. Their shining city, Toronto the Good, became the centre of Canadian banking and corporate life, while small towns across the province were anchored by courthouses, parish churches, and grain elevators.

Language and schooling played a central role in shaping the Anglo-Canadian character. Ontario’s education system, from common schools to universities, was built to transmit British values, civic order, and the English language. Protestant denominational schools and later public grammar schools taught the children of settlers to read scripture, study British history, and speak in the elite formal register of English Canada. Institutions such as Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and the University of Toronto became pillars of elite formation, producing the clergy, lawyers, teachers, and administrators who carried the culture forward.

Culturally, Anglo-Canadians preserved a rhythm of domestic and seasonal life rooted in British tradition but adapted to the northern landscape. Autumn fairs, apple bobbing, and harvest suppers marked the calendar in rural communities. Roast beef, butter tarts, mincemeat pies, and tea with milk became the everyday fare of farmhouses and urban kitchens alike. Sunday observance, cenotaph ceremonies, school uniforms, and service clubs reflected a moral seriousness and civic sense inherited from the Loyalist project. It is this tradition that formed the structural spine of its political and cultural development.

Fortissax, “Loyal she Began, Loyal she Remains”, Fortissax is Typing, 2025-07-07.

October 3, 2025

QotD: The role of the True Believer

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Anon @Greynxgga69

    Abolish The Family.
    Abolish Religion.
    Abolish Wage Labour.
    Abolish Money.
    Abolish Work.
    Abolish Commodity Production.
    Abolish the State.
    Abolish Class.
    Abolish Private Property.
    Abolish the Nation.
    Abolish Patriarchy.
    Abolish Gender.
    Abolish Town and Country.

The True Believers imagine they will live in Utopia after the Revolution.

They will instead be sent to the gulag, or lined up against the wall and shot.

Why?

Because the function of the True Believer is to make the Revolution. And the purpose of the Revolution is to replace The Regime.

Once the Revolution is made, and The Regime has been replaced, no further Revolutions are wanted. Therefore the True Believer serves no purpose.

He is a liability, because he has been promised Utopia, and Utopia is hard, even perhaps impossible, to deliver. If he does not receive the promised Utopia, he is apt to make Revolution again.

The Regime does not want this. It does not wish to be replaced in the same fashion that it replaced The Regime. So the True Believer must be disposed of. He must be replaced with the Opportunist.

The Opportunist can be relied upon, because he does not want Utopia. He wants to have more than his comrades. So long as he receives more than his comrades, he will serve The Regime.

As above, so below.

As before, so after.

Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter , 2025-07-01.

September 27, 2025

QotD: Utopian revolution

Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the virtues of You Say You Want a Revolution is that it admits and illuminates, though it does not altogether explain, the failure of post-colonial regimes in Africa — even those that were established without much in the way of violent struggle. The first generation of post-colonial leaders were so taken by the prestige and perhaps by the glamour of revolution that they employed revolutionary rhetoric themselves, and sometimes went in for utopian schemes of their own. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, for example (he is not mentioned in the book), was bitten by the bug of utopianism, caught in part from socialists at the University of Edinburgh, calling the sole permitted political party in Tanzania the Party of the Revolution. In the name of creating a just and equal society, he forcibly removed at least 70 per cent of the population from where it was living and herded it into collectivised villages. This was, all too predictably, an economic disaster, famine having been prevented only by large infusions of foreign aid, but it served the interests of members of the Party. Tanzania was saved from being much worse than it was by the fact that Nyerere, though perfectly capable of ruthlessness, was not personally a monster, and also by the peaceful nature of the Tanzania people themselves. Another saving grace was that there was no ethnic group that could have become dominant, so ethnic antagonism could not be added to the witches’ brew.

This illustrates a point that Professor Chirot makes clear in his discussion as to why the Vietnamese communist regime, though often brutal, never descended to anything like the level of horror of neighbouring Cambodia. Among the factors must surely have been the character and personality of the leaders as well as of the countries themselves. In other words, the fate of countries cannot be reduced, either in prospect or in retrospect, to an invariable formula. Human affairs will, to an extent, always be incalculable.

Still, some degree of regularity is possible. I was rather surprised that Professor Chirot overlooked one such. He writes the following of the corruption endemic under communist regimes: “a function of a deliberately exploitative, thieving elite that staved the general economy by its dishonesty than it was the essence of the system itself. Avoiding corruption was impossible because without it the society could not function.”

What is surprising here is that he does not mention why it could not function, but the answer seems to me perfectly obvious: it was because the communist system abolished the price system and substituted political decision-making in its place. This explanation is sufficient, for where there are no prices, and the economy is thereby largely demonetarised, goods and services can be distributed only by corruption. This is not to say that where there is a price system there will automatically be no corruption, obviously this is not the case; but such corruption will be limited by the very need for money to retain its value where such a price system exists. To that extent, it imposes at least a degree of honesty. The mystery of the Soviet Union or any other communist country is not why it produced so little, but why it produced anything at all: and here Professor Chirot is quite right. The answer is because of corruption: an “honest” communist state would produce nothing. It could not survive.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Longing for Revolution”, New English Review, 2020-05-13.

August 5, 2025

Inside the CIA Coup That Changed Iran Forever! – W2W 38

Filed under: Britain, History, Middle East, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 3 Aug 2025

In 1953, a battle for Iran’s soul erupts on the streets of Tehran. Prime Minister Mosaddegh defies British oil interests, outwits Soviet intrigue, and faces down the Shah — but a secret Anglo-American plot changes history forever. As coups, street mobs, and betrayal plunge Iran into chaos, the nation’s fragile democracy is crushed and a brutal new order rises. This is the untold story of oil, espionage, and the coup that reshaped the Middle East.
(more…)

July 18, 2025

The Napoleonic-era Royal Navy

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman on some of the aspects of Britain’s Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century which may be incomprehensible to modern readers who encounter it in works of historical fiction (like the books of C.S. Forester or Patrick O’Brian):

“HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour”
Painting by Charles Edward Dixon (1872-1934) via Wikimedia Commons.

I have read and enjoyed several series of novels set in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, most recently one by Naomi Novik that departs a little further from history than its predecessors by providing the British and their enemies with dragons. The internal structure and the associated rules and customs of the navy seem very strange to a modern eye, yet it was a strikingly successful institution.

One feature likely to catch an economist’s eye was prize money. If a naval vessel captured a legitimate prize, an enemy warship or merchantman, and brought it back to port, the vessel and its contents were sold and the money distributed among those responsible. One large chunk went to the captain, another was distributed among his officers, a third among the crew, a fourth to the admiral under whose orders he was operating.

Another feature of the system was the role of patronage, political influence both within the navy and outside it in the career of an officer, especially a young officer. The critical step of promotion from lieutenant to captain depended in part on performance, in particular on the opinion of the captain under whom a lieutenant was serving. But it depended also on things that seem, to us, irrelevant.

One of Patrick O’Brien’s novels contains a conversation between Maturin, one of his protagonists, and a friend, a young officer of aristocratic birth. The officer has been having an affair with the separated wife of a high naval official and wants to know whether he should live openly with her. Maturin’s response is that, moral issues aside, it might be imprudent for him to offend a powerful official and so risk his future career. His friend replies that he has considered that matter but his family controls a significant number of seats in both houses of parliament and he thinks their influence will be sufficient to balance that of the man he will be offending.

Neither party sees anything strange in either the assumption that giving personal offense to someone within the bureaucracy will make it harder for a competent officer to be promoted or that having a politically influential family will make it easier; that is just part of how the system works. It was a system that produced extraordinarily successful results, a navy that, from the late 18th century to the early 20th won almost every ship to ship or fleet to fleet battle it fought at anything close to even odds.1

A third feature was the seniority system. Once a lieutenant was promoted to captain, his future rank depended only on how long he survived. His name was on the list of captains, the list was ordered by strict seniority, and the next captain to be promoted to admiral would be the one at the top of the list. When two or more captains were working together it was the senior who commanded. That provided an unambiguous rule for allocating command, since every captain knew where he was on the list and knew, or could readily find out, where any other captain was. But it was a rule that had nothing to do with the relative competence of two officers of the same nominal rank.

Promotion beyond captain was entirely determined by seniority; what the officer got to do with his rank was not. An insufficiently competent captain who made it to admiral would end up as an admiral of the yellow, an admiral without a fleet, effectively retired on half pay. A sufficiently competent captain could be assigned particularly important duties, including the command of a group of ships with the temporary position of commodore — provided none of the other captains in the squadron was senior to him. A sufficiently incompetent captain could end up without a ship, on half pay with no chance of prize money. In peacetime, when there was no shortage of competent captains, a minor failing might do it.

[…]

Consider the case of the pre-modern British navy. Prize money was a property solution. The admiralty wanted captains to have an incentive to capture enemy merchant ships, defeat and capture enemy warships, even at risk to their lives. Most of the relevant decisions were made by the captain, so he got the largest part of the reward, but other people, including the admiral whose orders determined what opportunities the captain had to earn prize money, got some of it. A pattern that shows up in the novels, and presumably in the real history, is an admiral who puts an unusually competent and aggressive captain in places where he is likely to encounter enemy warships not because he likes the captain but because he hopes to profit from successful encounters.

Allen argues that prize money was an imperfect property solution because capturing a warship was much riskier, more likely to get the captain killed, than capturing a merchant ship, but prize money was awarded for both. One puzzle he does not consider is why the navy did not solve the problem of misaligned incentives by lowering the prize money awarded for merchant ships or raising it for warships, which should have been easy enough to do.

Allen offers the imperfect alignment of incentives, such as the temptation for a captain in a fleet action to hang back and let other ships and their captains take the risk, as a reason why the property solution had to be supplemented with elements of the other two systems. The admiralty had detailed information on what a captain did through a system of three different logs, one by the captain, one by his first lieutenant, one by the sailing master, the ship’s senior warrant officer. A captain whose career showed him to be incompetent or too inclined to go after merchant ships and avoid warships might end up spending the rest of his career on shore with no ship, hence no opportunity for prize money. A captain who declined a clear opportunity for combat with a ship of the same class was subject to trial by court martial; one admiral ended up convicted and executed for failing to pursue the enemy fleet after an engagement.

    1. With the possible exception of the War of 1812.

July 13, 2025

QotD: The ever-elusive perfect future (maybe we can get there with more blood spilled…)

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

What the modern hard left wants is the same they’ve wanted since the French Revolution: claim the present in the name of the future, repudiate the past, then own the past, redefine it to their terms, then make it off limits for discussion unless you keep within the lines they’ve defined. Discussion of the past outside of the boundaries is counter-revolutionary, and proper consciousness has to be displayed at all times.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2020-06-15.

July 4, 2025

July 4, 1826

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

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 4 Jul 2022

On the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence, the US lost two of the men most responsible for its creation. Independence Day 1826 might be the most important since July 4, 1776.
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