Nebulous Media
Published 27 Dec 2022Allen Guelzo joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss George Washington. From his early childhood to his years as president, the two analyze the founding father’s legacy. Should the first president stay cancelled?
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July 17, 2023
Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 06 George Washington
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July 4, 2023
From the American Revolution: Short Land Pattern Brown Bess
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Mar 2023The standard weapon of the British Army in the American War of Independence was the “Brown Bess”, and today we are looking at a 1769 Short Land Pattern example of the Brown Bess. This was a smoothbore .75 caliber, 10.2 pound flintlock with a whopping 42 inch barrel (the Long Land Pattern it superseded had a 46” barrel). Adopted in 1769, it would serve as the British standard infantry arm until 1797.
This particular example was issued to the 53rd Infantry Regiment, otherwise known as the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. This regiment arrived in Quebec City in May 1776 and participated in the fighting at Ticonderoga and Saratoga, where several of its companies were captured and interned until the end of the war.
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QotD: The (arguments over the) founding of America
You could of course say that the ideals of universal equality and individual liberty in the Declaration of Independence were belied and contradicted in 1776 by the unconscionable fact of widespread slavery, but that’s very different than saying that the ideals themselves were false. (They were, in fact, the most revolutionary leap forward for human freedom in history.) You could say the ideals, though admirable and true, were not realized fully in fact at the time, and that it took centuries and an insanely bloody civil war to bring about their fruition. But that would be conventional wisdom — or simply the central theme of President Barack Obama’s vision of the arc of justice in the unfolding of the United States.
No, in its ambitious and often excellent 1619 Project, the New York Times wants to do more than that. So it insists that the very ideals were false from the get-go — and tells us this before anything else. Even though those ideals eventually led to the emancipation of slaves and the slow, uneven and incomplete attempt to realize racial equality over the succeeding centuries, they were still “false when they were written”. America was not founded in defense of liberty and equality against monarchy, while hypocritically ignoring the massive question of slavery. It was founded in defense of slavery and white supremacy, which was masked by highfalutin’ rhetoric about universal freedom. That’s the subtext of the entire project, and often, also, the actual text.
Hence the replacing of 1776 (or even 1620 when the pilgrims first showed up) with 1619 as the “true” founding. “True” is a strong word. 1776, the authors imply, is a smoke-screen to distract you from the overwhelming reality of white supremacy as America’s “true” identity. “We may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy,” Hannah-Jones writes. That’s a nice little displacement there: “some might argue”. In fact, Nikole Hannah-Jones is arguing it, almost every essay in the project assumes it — and the New York Times is emphatically and institutionally endorsing it.
Hence the insistence that everything about America today is related to that same slavocracy — biased medicine, brutal economics, confounding traffic, destructive financial crises, the 2016 election, and even our expanding waistlines! Am I exaggerating? The NYT editorializes: “No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed … it is finally time to tell our story truthfully”. Finally! All previous accounts of American history have essentially been white lies, the NYT tells us, literally and figuratively. All that rhetoric about liberty, progress, prosperity, toleration was a distraction in order to perpetrate those lies, and make white people feel better about themselves.
Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.
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June 21, 2023
“Luttwak tweets with unparalleled Boomer energy, primarily in a write-only mode, at times seemingly oblivious to the waves he causes”
John Psmith reviews the second edition of Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook. I read the first edition in the mid-70s, when it seemed like coup attempts were an almost weekly news item from any number of exotic tropical locations:
First things first: you need to get the revised, second edition of this book. Why? Because the introduction to the second edition is an excuse for the author to brag about all the bloodstained and bullet-riddled copies of the first edition that have been found among the personal effects of palace security chiefs, spymasters, and air force officers. Perhaps, he gloats, they should have read it more carefully, or perhaps they should have waited for the second edition.
None of this should come as a surprise if you follow Edward Luttwak on Twitter, where his account is characterized by a judicious degree of irascibility and gloating. Yes, I regret to inform you that he’s on Twitter. But unlike some of my other favorite authors who succumbed to the analgesic call of the Great Blue Bird, the medium has not totally destroyed him yet. Luttwak tweets with unparalleled Boomer energy, primarily in a write-only mode, at times seemingly oblivious to the waves he causes. This is good, because it means we get to read his internal monologue, but without the reward loop of social media hacking his amygdala and progressively turning him into a self-parody.
Or perhaps his descent into self-parody was arrested by the fact that he was already a bit of a self-parody. Luttwak came from a Jewish family in communist Romania, spent some time in Palermo where he totally wasn’t involved in the war between the authorities and the mob,1 and provided “consulting services to multinational corporations and government agencies, including various branches of the U.S. government and the U.S. military”, before retiring to the life of gentleman scholar and cattle rancher (and prolific Twitter poaster) in rural Argentina. Along the way he picked up a PhD and wrote a massive pile of books about history, war, diplomacy, and political theory, all while pissing off the authorities in those fields with his epistemic trespassing.
But all of that was still far in the future when he wrote this book about coups. When the non-recommended first edition came out, Luttwak was a tender twenty-six years old, and working tenderly as a consultant for the energy industry in Africa and the Middle East. This raises some questions, questions that Luttwak absolutely refuses to answer, sometimes coyly and sometimes vehemently. Were I concerned about my reputation as a third-world fixer for oil companies, I would simply not write a practical guide to launching coups, but to each his own.
What is a coup? Also known as a putsch, a palace rebellion, or my personal favorite, a pronunciamiento; there are a lot of words for it, many of them in Spanish (you know what they say about Eskimos and their words for snow). The basic definition is a bloodless or almost bloodless extrajudicial transfer of power whereby a group of conspirators is able to turn the machinery of the state against itself, seizing control quickly and cleanly and without triggering a civil war. Note how different this is from other sorts of exceptional transfers of power. In a revolution, all of the institutions in a society are burned down and replaced. A coup is the opposite — only the very top level of the system is swapped out, and the new boss quickly and seamlessly resumes ruling through the machinery of the old regime. Ideally, citizens who aren’t especially politically engaged wouldn’t even notice.
This leads us to a guess as to the most coup-friendly sorts of polities: ideally they should be highly centralized and efficient bureaucratic states, but with very low democratic engagement or popular investment in politics. The first half is important, because without an efficient government machine, there’s nothing for the coup plotters to grab onto. A coup is an action by a tiny group of people who would lose instantly in any fair fight — the only chance they have is to magnify their power by hijacking a system that was already pretty good at controlling the country. It also helps that soldiers, policemen, and citizens in a bureaucratized society are already conditioned to obey impersonal authority, and therefore are more likely to do what the new guy says if he’s careful to use the old, familiar forms. Anarchists love to talk about how anarchy is like a vaccination against foreign occupation, because occupiers generally lack the state capacity to administer newly acquired territories without existing state machinery to co-opt, and that argument is even more true for coups.
1. Also unclear: which side he was not-involved on.
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June 13, 2023
QotD: The purge of the Socialist Revolutionaries
As Solzhenitsyn explained it, in the early days of the Bolshevik revolution, these SRs were part of a coalition government with the Bolsheviks. As such, they had to be given a certain amount of jobs in the ministries, including the justice ministry. They actually believed that stuff about The Workers, so they weren’t ready to send people to Siberia for twenty, thirty, forty years like Lenin demanded. They broke with Lenin (over other issues as well, obviously), the Bolsheviks crushed them, and once the Bolsheviks had power over all the ministries, there’s your gulag archipelago. Same as it ever was.
The Nazis had their “Left SR’s”, too. These were the Strasserites, led by brothers Otto and Gregor, the guys who put the “Socialist” in “National Socialism”. The Night of the Long Knives was a purge against both “left” and “right” — though Röhm and his butt boys get all the press, one of the Strasser brothers got his, too. That’s German efficiency for you!
And then there was the original Terror, in France, and even before that we had ours, too — the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays’ Rebellion aren’t usually taught as ideological (they’re usually not taught at all, of course), but they were. We’ve had two revolutions (before this week), in fact, and in both cases you had those pesky “we really believe this shit!” types causing all kinds of problems for the revolutionary government — see, for example, those state governors who made Jeff’s life hell in Richmond, objecting to the nationalization of their state militias on the grounds that the Confederacy is actually, you know, a confederacy, and that drafts and war production boards and taxes in kind and all the rest are exactly the kind of tyranny you’d expect from Abe’s gang in Washington …
Severian, “Speaking of Purges…”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-08.
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May 13, 2023
What was the First Modern War?
Real Time History
Published 12 May 2023The question about the first modern war has caused lively debates among historians and YouTube comment sections alike. In this video we take a look at a few candidates and some arguments why they are or aren’t modern wars.
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May 9, 2023
Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 03 Thomas Jefferson
Nebulous Media
Published 6 Dec 2022Jean Yarbrough joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy. They talk about the Declaration of Independence, his presidency, and the various controversies that have surrounded him. Should Thomas Jefferson stay cancelled?
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January 14, 2023
Colonial History on the Mississippi River
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 13 Jan 2023This video explores the surprising traces of French and American colonial history along the 150 miles of Mississippi River between St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois.
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December 7, 2022
The Marie Antoinette Diet
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 6 Dec 2022
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December 5, 2022
Edmund Burke
At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin republishes part of a much older post out as background on Edmund Burke (who I haven’t yet read):
Portrait of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), circa 1770-1780 after a painting of 1774 by James Northcote.
Original in the Royal Albert Museum & Art Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.
When I first started reading Edmund Burke, it was for the political wisdom his writings contained. Only many years later did I start to benefit from noticing that the Burke we know – the man proved a prophet by events and with an impressive legacy – differed from the Burke that the man himself knew: the man who was a lifelong target of slander; the one who, on each major issue of his life, gained only rare and partial victories after years or decades of seeing events tragically unfold as he had vainly foretold. Looking back, we see the man revered by both parties as the model of a statesman and thinker in the following century, the hero of Sir Winston Churchill in the century after. But Burke lived his life looking forwards:
- On America, an initial victory (repeal of the Stamp Act) was followed by over 15 years in the political wilderness and then by the second-best of US independence. (Burke was the very first member of parliament to say that Britain must recognise US independence, but his preferred solution when the crisis first arose in the mid-1760s was to preserve – by rarely using – a prerogative power of the British parliament that could one day be useful for such things as opposing slavery.)
- He vastly improved the lot of the inhabitants of India, but in Britain the first result of trying was massive electoral defeat, and his chosen means after that – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – took him 14 years of exhausting effort and ended in acquittal. Indians were much better off, but back in England the acquittal felt like failure.
- Three decades of seeking to improve the lot of Irish Catholics, latterly with successes, ended in the sudden disaster of Earl Fitzwilliam’s recall and the approach of the 1798 rebellion which he foresaw would fail (and had to hope would fail).
- The French revolutionaries’ conquest of England never looked so likely as at the time of his death in 1797. It was the equivalent of dying in September 1940 or November 1941.
It’s not surprising that late in his life he commented that the ill success of his efforts might seem to justify changing his opinions. But he added that, “Until I gain other lights than those I have“, he would have to go on being true to his understanding.
Burke was several times defeated politically – sometimes as a direct result of being honest – and later (usually much later) resurged simply because his opponents, through refusing to believe his warnings, walked into water over their heads and drowned, doing a lot of irreversible damage in the process. Even when this happened, he was not quickly respected. By the time it became really hard to avoid noticing that the French revolution was as unpleasant as Burke had predicted, all the enlightened people knew he was a longstanding prejudiced enemy of it, so “he loses credit for his foresight because he acted on it”, as Harvey Mansfield put it. (Similarly, whenever ugly effects of modern politics become impossible to ignore, people like us get no credit from those to whom their occurrence is unexpected because we were against them “anyway”.)
Lastly, I offer this Burke quote to guide you when people treat their success in stealing something from you (an election, for example) as evidence of their right to do so:
“The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgments – success.”
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November 15, 2022
How Was The Soviet Union Founded?
The Great War
Published 11 Nov 2022Vladimir Lenin had led the Bolshevik movement through the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War but by 1922 his health was failing and infighting among Bolshevik leadership caused friction. In the end Josef Stalin was able to prevail over Leon Trotsky and lead the newly founded Soviet Union until his death in 1953.
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November 14, 2022
QotD: The first modern revolution
One of the dark little secrets of my past is my teenage membership of the English Civil War Society. I spent weekends dressed in 17th-century costumes and oversized helmets, lined up in fields or on medieval streets, re-enacting battles from the 1640s. I still have my old breeches in the loft, and the pewter tankard I would drink beer from afterwards with a load of large, bearded men who, just for a day or two, had allowed themselves to be transported back in time.
I was a pikeman in John Bright’s Regiment of Foote, a genuine regiment in the parliamentary army. We were a Leveller regiment, which is to say that this part of the army was politically radical. For the Levellers, the end of the monarchy was to be just the beginning. They aimed to “sett all things straight, and rayse a parity and community in the kingdom”. Among their varied demands were universal suffrage, religious freedom and something approaching modern parliamentary democracy.
The Levellers were far from alone in their ambitions to remake the former Kingdom. Ranters, Seekers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Muggletonians: suddenly the country was blooming with radical sects offering idealistic visions of utopian Christian brotherhood. In his classic study of the English Revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, historian Christopher Hill quotes Lawrence Clarkson, leader of the Ranters, who offered a radical interpretation of the Christian Gospel. There was no afterlife, said Clarkson; only the present mattered, and in the present all people should be equal, as they were in the eyes of God:
“Swearing i’th light, gloriously”, and “wanton kisses”, may help to liberate us from the repressive ethic which our masters are trying to impose on us — a regime in which property is more important than life, marriage than love, faith in a wicked God than the charity which the Christ in us teaches.
Modernise Clarkson’s language and he could have been speaking in the Sixties rather than the 1640s. Needless to say, his vision of free love and free religion, like the Leveller vision of universal equality, was neither shared nor enacted by those at the apex of the social pyramid. But though Cromwell’s Protectorate, and later the restored monarchy, attempted to maintain the social order, forces had been unleashed which would change England and the wider world entirely. Some celebrated this fact, others feared it, but in their hearts everyone could sense the truth that Gerard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, was prepared to openly declare: “The old world … is running up like parchment in the fire”.
Paul Kingsnorth, “The West needs to grow up”, UnHerd, 2022-07-29.
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October 14, 2022
When Potatoes were Illegal
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 7 Jun 2022
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September 2, 2022
QotD: Historical parallels between the British and American empires
England was colonised by the Norman Empire (a tribe that spread across France, Britain, Italy, and the Middle East can be referred to as an empire I believe), in 1066. After some initial fierce resistance, they settled well, integrated with the local economy, and started developing a more advanced economic society.
North America was colonised by the British Empire (and Spanish and French of course), in the sixteenth century. After some initial fierce resistance, they settled well, integrated with the local economy, and started developing a more advanced economic society.
Norman England spent the next few centuries gradually taking out its neighbours. Wales, Ireland, and eventually Scotland (though the fact that the Scottish King James I & VI actually inherited England confuses this concept a bit). The process was fairly violent.
The North American “English” colonies spent the next few centuries taking out their neighbours. Indian tribes, Dutch, Spanish and French colonists, etc. The process was fairly violent.
England fought a number of wars over peripheral areas, particularly the Hundred Years war over claims to lands in France.
The North American colonies enthusiastically joined (if not blatantly incited) the early world wars, with the desire of taking over nearby French and Spanish colonies
The English fought a civil war in the 1640s to 50s over the issue of how to share power between the executive government, the oligarchs, and the commons. It appears that the oligarchs incited the commons (which was not very common in those days anyway). It was extremely bloody, and those on the periphery — particularly the Scots and Irish — came out badly (and with a long term bad taste for their over-mighty neighbour).
The Colonies fought their first civil war over the issue of how to share power between the executive, the oligarchs and the commons in the 1770s to 80s. It is clear that the oligarchs incited the commons (who in the US were still not very common — every male except those Yellow, Red or Black. An improvement? Certainly not considering the theoretical philosophical base of the so-called Revolution!). It was not really so bloody, but those on the periphery — particularly the Indians and slaves (both of which were pro-British), and the Loyalists and Canadians — came out badly. (60-100,000 “citizens” were expelled or forced to flee for being “loyalists”, let alone Indians and ex-slaves). Naturally the Canadians and their new refugee citizens developed a long term bad taste for their over-mighty neighbour — who attempted to attack them at the drop of a hat thereafter.
The British spent the next century and a half accumulating bits of empire — the Dominions, the Crown Colonies, and the Protectorates — in a haphazard fashion. Usually, but not always, troops followed traders and settlers.
The United States spent the next century and a half accumulating bits of empire — conquests from the Indians, purchases from France and Russia, conquests from Mexico and Spain, annexations of places like Hawaii, etc. — in a haphazard fashion. Usually, but not always, troops followed traders and settlers.
Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.
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August 27, 2022
Prussia’s Rise & Denmark’s Decline: The Schleswig Wars 1848-1864
Real Time History
Publisheed 26 Aug 2022The two Schleswig Wars of 1848-51 and 1864 mark an important period in European History. Intertwined with the 1848 revolutions, the First Schleswig War’s settlement tries to uphold the European status quo. But the unhappy belligerents soon find themselves at war again in 1864 when Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck uses the Second Schleswig War as a first step towards German unification.
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