Quotulatiousness

July 7, 2020

Taking stock after the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:

I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)

Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.

This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.

Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.

There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.

June 27, 2020

Maximilien Robespierre: The Reign of Terror

Filed under: France, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Biographics
Published 5 Jul 2018

Maximilien Robespierre promised to usher a fairer, more representative form of government to the French people. What they got was a reign of terror that saw thousands facing the horror of the guillotine.

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Andrew Sullivan on revolution in the current year

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

The people involved in the protests — some of them would-be revolutionaries — may not know about prior revolutionary movements, and if they succeed then they’ll ensure that nobody will be able to remember what life was like before their longed-for Year Zero moment:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.” “The ‘saints’ were very strong on the work of neighborhood committees. In Calvin’s Geneva, law and order were maintained through ‘mutual surveillance.’ Church members (ideally all Genevans were church members) ‘watched, investigated, and chastised’ each other.” Imagine what these Puritans could have done with cell phones and Twitter histories.

Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today. The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute. The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.” The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school. The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.

And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible. You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is Translations From the Wokish.) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.

So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment. It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment. Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality. But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.

The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.

But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.

June 13, 2020

The CHAZ is a little bit 1968, a little bit 1789, but perhaps more 1871

Filed under: France, Germany — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed finds the developments in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone of Seattle remind him of the Paris Commune:

Otto von Bismarck talks with the captive Napoleon III after the Battle of Sedan in 1870.

“‘Autonomous zone’ has armed guards, local businesses being threatened with extortion.”

That was quite a striking headline to behold. My immediate reaction was, “Oh my gosh, the Paris Commune is back!”

Except that it wasn’t Paris, and it wasn’t 1871. It was Seattle, Washington, USA — today. According to multiple reports, radical protesters seized a six-block area of the city. They declared it a police-free fiefdom, posted armed guards at its perimeter, began extorting money from local businesses (normally called “taxation”) and were even requiring residents to provide ID to enter their own homes.

The Paris Commune that lasted just 70 days in the spring of 1871 was born amid the ruins of France’s wartime loss at the hands of Prussia in the fall of the previous year. When the Prussians captured France’s Emperor Napoleon III, the monarchy collapsed, and the French Third Republic was born. In Versailles, just a few miles from Paris, its leaders sat on their hands as Parisians stewed in the toxic juices of defeat, resentment, and a rising tide of Marxist-inspired class warfare. The voices of the big mouths increasingly drowned out those of the more moderate citizens who preferred to get the city back to normal and work for a living.

On March 18, 1871, the socialist radicals seized the upper hand in the City of Lights. They occupied government buildings and ousted or jailed their opposition. It was a “People’s Revolution” (unless you were one of the people who didn’t support it). Karl Marx’s communist scribblings provided the radicals — called “Communards” — with their primary inspiration, but Marx himself later criticized their failure to immediately seize the Bank of France and march on the government in Versailles. In the early days of the Paris Commune, however, he hoped he was witnessing a fulfillment of his own delusions:

    The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in Paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained.

Barricades of the Paris Commune, April 1871. Corner of the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville and the Rue de Rivoli.
Photo by Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg (1818-1875) from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

May 29, 2020

QotD: Historical ways to deal with your “rage heads”

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

The main lesson I hope our distant descendants draw from the Orange Man Era is: The rage heads ye have always with you, so ye must find a way to channel them into something as non-destructive as possible. The story of modern politics can be written in a sentence: The weaponization of rage heads, combined with the inability of any society to properly dispose of said WMDs.

Set the Wayback Machine to the turn of the 20th century. Lenin’s great insight is that “the masses” will never achieve the proper revolutionary consciousness without a dedicated cadre of hardcore, professional revolutionaries to lead the way. Lenin recognized the prevalence of incipient rage heads in his society — how could he not? — but realized that, absent some guiding hand, they’d flounder around incoherently. At best (from the “furthering the Revolution” point of view), they’d do what his, Lenin’s, idiot brother did: Try to knock off the tsar, and get himself hung for it. Thus, the Bolsheviks.

The problem, though, is that rage heads by definition suffer from poor impulse control. The tiny subset of them that are pure sociopaths (like Lenin), and thus have the icy-veined self-control to hold their fire, have to maintain the very tightest discipline over the Party, or all hell breaks loose. See, for example, the massive street battles in Weimar Germany between the KPD (German Commies) and the SD. Hitler, like Lenin, had to get his rage heads on a tight leash, so he channeled the disciplined sociopaths from the SD into the SS, cooled out the coolable in the SD by buying them off, and shanked the incorrigible remainder. See also the almost-exactly-contemporary Moscow Show Trials.

Note please that this is your best-case scenario for a purely ideological revolution. From Robespierre to Kim Il Sung, the first step in consolidating the Revolution is killing off a large fraction of the original revolutionaries.

The worst-case scenario (again, from the “furthering the Revolution” standpoint) is what the American wannabe-bolshies did / are currently doing. Knowing that you can’t shank or show-trial the dreadlocked poetry majors that make up your goon squad, you try to channel them into academia, the Media, the “arts.” Which fails egregiously, because whatever tenuous contact with reality they once had gets completely severed by those institutions’ social bubbles. They never were very good at holding fire, and now they can’t, literally can’t, see any reason to — life is great here on campus, so why can’t it be that way everywhere?

Severian, “Living in End Times”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-28.

March 1, 2020

The Freikorps Marches On Berlin – The Kapp Putsch I THE GREAT WAR 1920

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

The Great War
Published 28 Feb 2020

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Dissatisfied with the new German Republic and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, parts of the new Reichswehr and the paramilitary Freikorps decide to take matters into their own hands. The Marinebrigade Ehrhardt marches on Berlin to topple the government: It’s the Kapp Putsch.

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» SOURCES
Grevelhörster, Ludwig: Kleine Geschichte der Weimarer Republik. 1918-1933. Ein
problemgeschichtlicher Überblick, 2000.
Haffner, Sebastian: Die Deutsche Revolution 1918/1919. 2010.
Heiden, Konrad: Adolf Hitler: Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit. Ein Mann gegen
Europa, 2016.
Kotowski, Georg (Hrsg.): Historisches Lesebuch. 1914-1933, 1968.
Möller, Horst: Die Weimarer Republik. Demokratie in der Krise, 2018.
Pöppinghege, Rainer: Republik im Bürgerkrieg. Kapp-Putsch und Gegenbewegung an Ruhr
und Lippe 1919/1920, 2019.
Stackelberg, Roderick & Winkle, Sally (Ed.), The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts, (Florence : Taylor and Francis, 2003)
Ulrich, Volker: Adolf Hitler. Band 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs 1889-1939. 2013.
Sturm, Reinhard (2011). “Weimarer Republik, Informationen zur politischen Bildung”. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.

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February 28, 2020

The Robin Hood complex – Social banditry theory and myth making

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 15 Dec 2016

There’s one historical theory that people keep deluding themselves with, and it’s about time I pointed it out. Social banditry, or the “Robin Hood theory” is problematic at best and cultural misanthropy at worst.

Social bandit or social crime is a term invented by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels, a study of popular forms of resistance that also incorporate behavior characterized by law as illegal. He further expanded the field in the 1969 study Bandits. Social banditry is a widespread phenomenon that has occurred in many societies throughout recorded history, and forms of social banditry still exist, as evidenced by piracy and organized crime syndicates. Later social scientists have also discussed the term’s applicability to more modern forms of crime, like street gangs and the economy associated with the trade in illegal drugs.
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References:
Boessenecker, John. “California Bandidos.” Southern California Quarterly 80, i4 (Dec. 1, 1998), 419-434.

Hall-Patton, Joseph. Pacifying Paradise: Violence and Vigilantism in San Luis Obispo. San Luis Obispo: California Polytechnic – San Luis Obispo thesis, 2016. http://www.digitalcommons.calpoly.edu…

Hobsbawm, Eric. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: WW Norton & Company, 1965. https://amzn.to/2L6TDY0

Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. Rev. ed. New York: The New Press, 2000. https://amzn.to/2L4RagK

Rediker, Marcus. Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailor, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2014. https://amzn.to/2OasYf4

Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000. https://amzn.to/2JKq8tN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_…
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November 29, 2019

Revolts, civil wars, and revolutions

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian offers his taxonomy of protest with examples from English history:

King Charles I and Prince Rupert before the Battle of Naseby 14th June 1645 during the English Civil War.
19th century artist unknown, from Wikimedia Commons.

  • A revolt is a large-scale, semi-organized riot. It aims, at best (e.g. Wat Tyler’s Rebellion), at the redress of specific grievances. At worst, it’s violent nihilism (e.g. the Jacquerie).
  • A civil war aims to replace one leader with another, leaving the underlying civil structure intact — e.g. any of the Roman civil wars post-Augustus.
  • A revolution‘s goal is total social transformation. We’re stipulating that it’s violent, because while stuff like the Industrial Revolution is fascinating, we’re not looking at peaceful change here in the Current Year. Revolutions are necessarily, fundamentally ideological.

I realize this can cause some confusion, as events I’d classify as “revolutions” are called civil wars in the history books, and vice versa. But the difference is important, because it sheds light on the development, course, and outcome of events.

The paradigm case is the English Civil War, 1642-51. This was clearly a revolution, as it aimed at — and achieved — the near-total overthrow of existing society. When Charles I took the throne in 1625, his kingdom was very much closer to a Continental-style divine-right monarchy than most Britons would like to admit. While the English had succeeded in clawing some of their liberties back from the crown after Henry VIII’s death, the fact remains that the Stuart state, like the Tudor state, was despotic. But by 1625, the despot was completely out of step with his people, and his times.

By 1642, the first revolutionary prerequisite was in place: No clear alternative. There were lots of revolts against Henry VIII, and one of them, the Pilgrimage of Grace, had the potential to turn into a civil war, or even a revolution. The revolts against Elizabeth I didn’t quite rise to that level, but the Northern Rebellion, and Essex’s Rebellion certainly imperiled her government. See also Wyatt’s Rebellion against Queen Mary, the Prayer Book Rebellion and Kett’s Rebellion against Edward VI, etc. In all of these, the alternative was clear — return to Rome, replacement of one court faction with another, or return to the old ways.

November 27, 2019

The Father of Modern China – Sun Yat-sen l HISTORY OF CHINA

Filed under: China, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

IT’S HISTORY
Published 2 Sep 2015

Sun Yat-sen is known as the “father of modern China”. He spent his adult life fighting against imperial China and the ruling Qing dynasty. First as revolutionary leader and later as politician. He founded the Tongmenghui League in 1905 and supported rebellions in China. After the Wuchang Uprising, Sun handed over the presidential office for the Republic of China to Yuan Shikai who soon after would ban Sun’s political party, the Kuomintang. So he reformed it as China’s National People’s party. His military and political work laid the groundwork from which his successors would later call out the People’s Republic of China.

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» SOURCES
Videos: British Pathé (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishp…)
Pictures: mainly Picture Alliance
Content:
Chang, Johannes (1960): “Sun Yat-sen – Seine Lehre und seine Bedeutung” in: JCSW 1 [1960] S.179-194
Gernet, Jacques (1988): Die chinesische Welt. Die Geschichte Chinas von den Anfängen bis zur Jetztzeit, Suhrkamp, Berlin.
Klein, Thoralf (2008): “Politische Geschichte Chinas 1900-1949”, auf bpb.de
https://www.bpb.de/internationales/as…
Vogelsang, Kai (2013): Geschichte Chinas, Reclam, Ditzingen.
Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (2012): “Der geteilte Himmel”, in ZEIT Geschichte Nr. 01/2012
http://www.zeit.de/zeit-geschichte/20…

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November 26, 2019

QotD: The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688

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

William of Orange masterminds a coup d’état known here as the “Glorious Revolution” (1688), and installs himself as King of England. My teachers made it sound as if the English elite suddenly decided one day that they wanted a different king, found William of Orange in a mail order catalogue, liked the look of him and had him delivered the next day, in a state of great amazement and gratitude. In fact, William bossed the entire operation, albeit with plenty of English support. It is worth noting that William achieved a successful cross-Channel invasion of England, so all that stuff about England not having been invaded since 1066 is quite wrong.

Brian Micklethwait, “Navigating individuals”, Samizdata, 2004-10-04.

November 9, 2019

History of Space Travel – Revolutions – Extra History – #2

Filed under: History, Science, Space — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published 7 Nov 2019

Start your Warframe journey now and prepare to face your personal nemesis, the Kuva Lich — an enemy that only grows stronger with every defeat. Take down this deadly foe, then get ready to take flight in Empyrean! Coming soon! http://bit.ly/EHWarframe

As the Renaissance breathes new life into Europe, Copernicus develops mathematical proofs for the sun resting in the center of the universe. And from his works, a new world is born. The scientific world gets faster and faster. Revolutions of all kinds begin to set off chains of events that reshape human history. And as science improves, so do the tools of war. Both will be necessary to propel humanity to the stars. Join us on this race through the scientific works between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.

Copernicus’ publishing really came down to the wire! Legend has it that he was given the final printed pages on his death bed. When they presented him with the book, he awoke from a coma, saw his life’s work and finally passed away in peace. Or so the story goes.

September 30, 2019

Ten Minute History – The Early British Empire

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, India, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Matters
Published on 26 Sep 2016

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tenminhistory
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This episode of Ten Minute History (like a documentary, only shorter) covers the birth and rise of the British Empire from the reign of Henry VII all the way to the American Revolution. The first part deals with the Tudors and their response to empire in Spain (as well as the Spanish Armada). The second part deals with England’s (and later Britain’s) establishment of its own empire in North America and India. It then concludes with the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution.

Ten Minute History is a series of short, ten minute animated narrative documentaries that are designed as revision refreshers or simple introductions to a topic. Please note that these are not meant to be comprehensive and there’s a lot of stuff I couldn’t fit into the episodes that I would have liked to. Thank you for watching, though, it’s always appreciated.

September 29, 2019

History Summarized: Mexico

Filed under: Americas, Europe, France, History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 27 Sep 2019

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This video is quite serendipitous in timing — by complete coincidence, this is going live on September 27, the day of Mexico’s true political independence under the First Mexican Empire. This is the 11 year sequel to the more traditional Mexican Independence celebrations of September 16th, which marks Miguel Hidalgo’s proclamation of the “Cry of Dolores” and the start of the Mexican War of Independence. No joke, I only realized this when I was partway through researching the video. I do so much ancient history I’m not used to events having dates we can track to the day.

ANYWAY enjoy this look at Mexican History, here broken into three main acts, the Aztec Empire, the Colony of New Spain, and the Independent nation of Mexico.

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September 3, 2019

The Forgotten Soldiers of the Revolutionary War

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

Townsends
Published on 25 Jan 2018

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August 31, 2019

History Summarized: French Empire (Ft. Armchair Historian!)

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, France, History, Humour, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 30 Aug 2019

Check out the Armchair Historian channel for more on French Vietnam and the battle of Dien Bien Phu: https://youtu.be/IJ051WyUsW8

Dubious morality, drawn out timescales, intricate royal politics, worldwide stages — Colonialism be like that sometimes. And by “Like That” I mean impenetrably complicated. I did my best, I’ll say that, but oh man is history a mess in the 15-1900s. This stuff is the reason I had so much trouble with history for so long. It’s just so DENSE.

ANYWAY, join Blue and Griffin the Armchair Historian for a look into the history of the multiple successive French Empires. Listen carefully as Blue makes imperceptibly subtle commentary about his extremely non-biased opinions on this chapter in history, and laugh together as we analyze the historical significance of Napoleon Bonaparte’s anime hair.

NOTE on 6:14 — I say Napoleon became Emperor in 1802. That’s a mistake. In 1802, the constitution of France was amended to make the position of Consul permanent, but Napoleon did not become the Emperor until 1804, when he declared the French Empire. That’s my bad.

NOTE on 11:25 — French Guiana, on the northeast coast of South America, remained part of France following the decolonization of Africa. That’s a mapping mix-up.

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