Quotulatiousness

October 20, 2021

Alberta and Quebec, the dark twins of Confederation

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson explains why the Alberta government is consciously taking some of its strategies for dealing with the feds and other provinces from the generations-long success that has been Quebec’s planbook:

Quebec — as the single largest recipient of equalization cash — is often a target of anger in these parts, but I’d encourage any readers from thereabouts not to read too much into this fact. Both Alberta and Quebec suffer from a culture of political grievance that feed off one another. Alberta resents the fiscal balances, often casting Quebec as an ungrateful recipient of the very oil wealth that the latter regards with contempt. And I can only imagine how Quebec must read this; as a signal of its own isolation from Anglo culture more broadly. On both sides, I see politicians who have made a generational art of milking these respective grievances.

So sometimes it’s worthwhile to point this out.

Alberta doesn’t hate Quebec.

The provinces exist on flip sides of the very same coin; they are each others’ dark twins, and Alberta seeks mostly to emulate its French sibling.

Kenney made this point entirely explicitly in the days leading up to the referendum.

“We’re using this to get leverage to basically take a page out of Quebec’s playbook in having successfully dominated the political attention of the federation for the last 40 or 50 years.”

What playbook was he referencing, here?

The answer is obvious; the separation referenda of 1980 and 1995. In fact, the whole logic of Alberta’s referenda last night was predicated on a novel reading of the Quebec Secession Reference, in which a clear majority on a clear question must force the federal government to the negotiating table in good faith. The fact that this reference spoke to a secession question — and not a longstanding quibble over an item within the constitution — is a material difference from a legal point of view, but not a psychological one.

The hope is that this referenda will give us somethin akin to the “leverage” Quebec has enjoyed vs. Ottawa since its failed separation referenda; and the disproportionate financial and cultural incentives that followed in the following decades. Essentially, Alberta is asking for the leverage of a true separatist movement without suffering the risk of actually separating. We are play-acting a little Potemkin secession referendum, here. If it falls to me to point out the show is a little childish and even a touch pathetic, well, so be it.

September 30, 2021

Petrol shortages in the UK

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve seen several reports on the somewhat sudden rash of petrol (gasoline to US/Canadian readers) shortages in Britain, and most of those reports airily pin the blame for the situation on Brexit. To the media, Brexit seems to be an all-purpose explanation for anything that goes wrong (in the same way that previous administrations get the blame for current problems even many years after they left power). Sean Gabb says that despite the frequent glib blaming of Brexit, in this case it is part of the reason:

There is in the United Kingdom a shortage of lorry drivers. This means a dislocation of much economic activity. Because it cannot be delivered, there is no petrol in the filling stations. Because there are not enough drivers, and a shortage of fuel, we may soon have shortages of food in the shops. Christmas this year may not involve its usual material abundance.

These difficulties are wholly an effect of the new political economy that has emerged in England and in many other Western countries since about 1980. An army of managers, of agents, of administrators, of consultants and advisers and trainers, and of other middle class parasites has appropriated a growing share of the national income. This has happened with at least the active connivance of the rich and the powerful. Since, in the short term, the distribution of the national income is a zero-sum game, the necessary result is low and falling real wages for those who actually produce. So long as the productive classes can be kept up by immigration from countries where even lower wages are on offer, the system will remain stable. Because leaving the European Union has reduced the supply of cheap labour, the system is no longer stable in England.

There are two obvious solutions. The first is to rearrange the distribution of income, to make the productive classes more able and more willing to produce. Since this would mean reducing the numbers or incomes or both of the parasite classes, the second is the solution we mostly read about in the newspapers. This is to restore the flow of cheap foreign labour.

In summary, that is my explanation of what is happening. For those who are interested, I will now explain at greater length. According to the mainstream theory of wages, labour is a commodity. Though workers are human beings, the labour they supply to employers is of the same general nature as machine tools and copper wire and cash registers and whatever else is bought and sold in the markets for producer goods. A wage therefore is a price, and we can illustrate the formation of wage rates with the same supply and demand diagrams as we use for illustrating the formation of prices:

The supply curve slopes upwards because most work is a nuisance. Every hour of labour supplied is an hour that cannot be spent doing something more enjoyable. Beyond a certain level, workers can only be persuaded to supply more labour if more money is offered for each additional hour of labour. As with other producer goods, the shape of the demand curve is determined both by the price of what labour can be used to produce and by the law of diminishing returns.

[…]

Our problem in England is that large areas of economic activity have been rigged. There is an immensely large state sector, paid for by taxes on the productive. Most formally private activity is engrossed by large organisations that are able to be so large either because of limited liability laws or by regulations that only large organisations can obey. The result is that wages are often determined less by market forces than by administrative choice. In this kind of rigged market, we cannot explain the distribution of income as a matter of continual choice between marginal increments of competing inputs until the whole has been distributed. It may be better to look at a modified wages fund theory. A large organisation has a pot of money left over from the sale of whatever its product may be, minus payments to outside suppliers, and minus whatever the directors choose to classify as profit. This is then distributed according to the free choice of the directors, or how hard they can be pushed. Or we can keep the mainstream cross-diagrams, but accept that the demand curve is determined less by marginal productivity than by the overall prejudices of those in charge.

Therefore the growth of a large and unproductive middle class, and the screwing down of all other wages to pay for this. This is not inevitable in rigged markets, but is possible. It has come about since the 1980s for three reasons:

First, the otherwise unemployable products of an expanded higher education sector have used all possible means to get nice jobs for themselves and their friends;

Second, the rich and the powerful have accommodated this because higher wages and greater security for the productive might encourage them to become as assertive as they were before the 1980s;

Third, that these rich and powerful see the parasite classes as a useful transmitter of their own political and moral prejudices.

August 17, 2021

QotD: The “Crisis of the Third Century”

You can find huge shelves of books analyzing this, attributing it to every conceivable thing, from the ol’ “lead in the water pipes” to massive structural defects stretching into remote antiquity. There’s probably something to all of them, but the biggest proximate cause is probably one the Romans themselves had identified, as early as Sallust, way back in the last century BC: lack of purpose. Having defeated Carthage and salted the earth where once she stood, the Roman “security state” — the largest and most comprehensive ever assembled to that point — simply ran out of reasons to exist.

If you’ve read much about (or especially by) them, you know that the Romans were, for lack of a better term, paranoid. It was simply incompatible with the Roman psyche to have any large, organized group of non-Romans anywhere near the Empire’s borders … so the Empire kept expanding, first reducing, then Romanizing, every conceivable threat. They kept doing this long past the point of negative returns, such that the Empire collapsed under the strain of trying to hold itself together.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: A “government” whose only claim to legitimacy is naked force. A large, increasingly rapacious, increasingly class-conscious military with no obvious enemies to fight, and no ability to subdue the ones it settles for. A large, increasingly rapacious, increasingly caste-conscious bureaucracy that views the whole “Imperial” project as one big tax farming operation. Massive, ever-increasing wealth disparities that can only be very temporarily alleviated by debasing the currency, because structural reform is culturally impossible from above, and physically impossible from below. And to top it all off, a weird, apocalyptic religious cult totally destroying the few pan-imperial cultural institutions, including the military.

The history of the Third Century is insanely complex, not well understood in many respects even by field specialists, but the gist of it is clear enough: Some general somewhere decides he’d like to have a crack at emperorizing, so he gets his troops to throw a purple toga on him and proceeds to take on the incumbent. Some other general thinks that’s a pretty nifty idea, so he does the same thing, taking on both the incumbent and the pretender. Not wanting to be left out of the fun, the incumbent’s main general murders the incumbent and takes the crown for himself, fighting whoever’s left, plus whichever of his subordinate commanders decide they want a shot at the big chair. The Senate rubber-stamps one of these clowns, or some other general who decides he’d like to throw his toga into the ring, and civil war follows civil war until one of them temporarily triumphs … only for the same thing to happen again once the shine is off the new guy (usually in less than a year or two).

They called ’em the “Barracks Emperors” for a reason, y’all. And it’s actually worse than that, since lots of times the rebel generals didn’t bother going for the big prize back in Italy. Lots of them decided they’d do just fine ruling, say, Britain, or parts of Gaul, or Asia Minor or Egypt or what have you, while the other guys slugged it out for the increasingly marginalized, if not totally meaningless, “official” title. Declare yourself the Emperor of ___, issue some slapped-together coins with your picture on them, and go nuts. The “Gallic Emperors” had a run of nearly half a century like that — not bad at all for Late Antiquity.

Severian, “The Crisis of the Third Decade”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-03-18.

July 24, 2021

History Hijinks: Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Jul 2021

Local Empire Too Stubborn To Die — Field Historian Blue is here at the scene of Ancient Rome with more on the Crisis of the Third Century.

SOURCES & Further Reading
https://www.britannica.com/place/anci… + Aurelian, Postumus, Zenobia
The Great Courses The Roman Empire: From Augustus to The Fall of Rome lectures 13 14 and 15, “From Commodus to Caracalla”, “The Crisis of the Third Century” and “Diocletian and Late Third-Century Reforms”, by Gregory Aldrete
The Enemies of Rome Chapter 20 “Parthia, Persia, Palmyra” by Stephen Kershaw

Partial Tracklist: “Scheming Weasel”, Sneaky Snitch”, “Marty Gots A Plan” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

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From the comments:

Facundo Cadaa
2 hours ago
Thumbnail: “Rome’s big crisis”

Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?

June 19, 2021

The context for Confederate general Patrick Cleburne’s proposal to arm slaves to fight the Union

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

On YouTube, Andy of Atun-Shei Films responds to a social media post that presented Cleburne’s proposal without context, which appears to show Cleburne as an anti-slavery advocate:

Confederate army Major General Patrick Cleburne.
Painting by M.D. Guillaume (1816-1892) via Wikimedia Commons.

I recently came across a pro-Confederate Facebook post featuring this quote from Confederate major general Patrick Cleburne, written on January 2, 1864:

    It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

Now, I’m not going to share the post itself, as that would inevitably lead to doxxing and bullying. However, this is a teachable moment, a classic example of the beloved Lost Causer past-time of divorcing quotes from their important contexts.

You need to keep a couple things in mind when considering a historical quote. Who is the speaker? Who are they talking to? Do they have an objective in mind? What events surrounding this person, if any, have inspired them to say this particular thing at this particular time?

Quotes by themselves are useless in historical education and can often be misleading. I see y’all making this mistake with the Cornerstone Speech [Wiki] all the time – it’s not the mic drop you think it is. You can’t just shove it in someone’s face and call it a day. If you really want to change minds, you need to present it in its proper context and alongside other evidence. Only then can you craft a complete and compelling argument.

Now as it happens, Alexander Stephens was totally sincere when he called late 18th century notions of racial equality “wrong,” and he spoke for the overwhelming majority of Confederate true believers in the Spring of 1861 when he said that “our new government is founded on exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the [black man] is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” But without context, how would I know that? When making an argument, the onus of proof is on you.

This particular pro-Confederate post presented the Cleburne quote by itself in meme format without any context whatsoever, so allow me to provide one. At first glance, it seems like Cleburne is espousing anti-authoritarian values. It seems like he is declaring, clearly and definitively, that the Southern states did not secede to preserve slavery, but rather to uphold their regional self-determination.

This quote is from a letter Cleburne wrote to Joseph E. Johnston, his commanding officer in the Army of Tennessee, proposing that the Confederate government emancipate and arm the South’s enslaved men to bolster the thinning ranks of the army. As you may remember from Checkmate Lincolnites, this proposal was met with shock and horror from the Confederate leadership, who quickly rejected it.

But Cleburne saw further than them. He believed – correctly – that unless something drastic was done, the Confederacy was doomed to destruction. As he writes in the proposal, “Instead of standing defiantly on the borders of our territory or harassing those of the enemy, we are hemmed in to-day into less than two-thirds of it, and still the enemy menacingly confronts us at every point with superior forces.”

“If this state continues much longer we must be subjugated,” he continues, arguing that achieving victory would require immense sacrifice, including “the loss of all we now hold most sacred — slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood.”

May 8, 2021

QotD: That time the global elites were against diversity

There was simply no debate back then [in the aftermath of the Great War] that a mass influx of European refugees to Africa would have been a conquest, not a “humanitarian crisis” that Africans, with their ample space and nutrient-rich soil, had some kind of responsibility to sit back and accept. And to be clear, many of the European refugees who would have trekked across Sörgel’s newly reclaimed land were genuinely in need. They were impoverished, homeless, destitute. And a lot of them were fleeing political violence. Those folks were as poor, wretched, and persecuted as any Honduran is today. But in fully rejecting Atlantropa as a goal to be pursued, the international community took the position that “it sucks that you’re impoverished and mistreated in your home country, but it ain’t Africa’s problem. Stay where you are.”

See, in those days, the elites believed in keeping people in their own damn land. Hard as that might be to fathom now, that used to be a mantra of the progressive internationalists. There was a die-hard belief that the key to world peace was the separation of people, the segregation of populations by race, religion, and ethnicity. That was the entire point of the Greek/Turkish population exchange of 1923, overseen by the League in the name of keeping Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims separated for the sake of peace. As UNC Chapel Hill history professor Sarah Shields wrote in her 2016 essay in the Journal of the History of International Law, the prevailing belief at that time was that “Muslims and non-Muslims could not live together peacefully, and modernity required rejecting a diverse past in favor of a nation-state along European (unmixed) lines.”

Separation was the future, diversity was the past. Damn near 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were sent from the land of their birth to the land where they could live with those of a similar faith. Many of the other population transfers and redrawn boundaries that followed World War I were based on that same concept of giving people their “own” homeland based on characteristics like religion or ethnicity. It was simply taken as fact back then that nations function better with some level of homogeneity. That was canon back then. By the time the U.N. came around, that notion was still very much a guiding principle, as the internationalists realized that a vision of a multireligious, multiethnic Palestine was unrealistic and unattainable. And the Jews and the Arabs realized that too, which is why they started slaughtering each other, because they couldn’t bear to live in a partitioned state. Being separate but equal was not enough. They wanted to be separate and separated.

David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.

April 26, 2021

Was GENERAL SHERMAN a WAR CRIMINAL?!?!?!?!

Atun-Shei Films
Published 11 Aug 2020

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the Lost Cause myths surrounding William Tecumseh Sherman during the American Civil War, including the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and the burning of Columbia — and tackling the “slavery would have gone away on its own” thing while we’re at it. Surprisingly, Johnny Reb gets in one or two really solid points.

[Updated 8 Feb 2023: Vlogging Through History’s reaction video to Atun-Shei’s interpretation is here – https://youtu.be/CTVr4YgB5VI]
(more…)

January 17, 2021

Hector Drummond on Boris “Cane-Toad” Johnson

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

As a teaser to attract new subscribers to his Patron and SubscribeStar pages, Hector Drummond shared this piece on the ecological disaster of Australia’s 1930s cane-toad importation and the similar political disaster of Boris Johnson in Britain:

In the 1930s Queensland farmers were facing trouble with large numbers of cane beetles eating the sugar crops that were an important part of the state’s economy. So the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations came up with a cunning plan. They would import some cane toads (a native of middle and south America), because cane toads ate cane beetles. This was sure to solve the problem in a trice. One-hundred and two cane toads were duly imported into the state, from Hawaii as it happened, to do the job.

Unfortunately this soon became a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. In fact it wasn’t any cure at all because the cane toads didn’t bother much with the cane beetles, and instead ate everything else they could wrap their tongues around. The other thing they did was multiply at an explosive rate. These days there are estimated to be 200 million cane toads in Australia, mainly in Queensland, and they cause havoc with the native fauna, not least because they have nasty poison-producing glands on the back of their head which the native animals have no naturally-evolved defence against. Curious pet dogs who mess about with a toad can die.

In 2019 Britain was facing its own crisis. It had become obvious to half the country that Theresa May’s Conservative government was deliberately trying to prevent Brexit from happening. As the other parties were even worse, the only hope for a real Brexit to take place was if a new pro-Brexit leadership in the Conservative party could be installed. After a titanic struggle, this finally happened, and Alexander “Boris” Johnson became the new leader, with Michael Gove and advisor Dominic Cummings at his side.

Unfortunately Johnson has proven to be Britain’s own version of the cane toad, a cure that is vastly worse than the disease. Johnson, at least, proved to be more able than his Australian counterpart at doing the job that was required of him. Whereas the Australian toad was about as interested in cane beetles as Olly Robbins was in getting the UK out of the EU, Johnson at least gave us a middling type of Brexit which, as fudged as it was, was at least far better than anything any of his fellow MPs could have got.

But in terms of being worse than the disease, Cane-Toad Johnson has proven to be far, far more destructive than the cane toad ever was. The cane toad, after all, is merely an ecological pest, whereas Johnson has proved to be a dangerous menace to the country’s liberty, prosperity and health. The poison from his glands has leached into our very life. We have become like domestic dogs who have been forced to lick them every day.

November 15, 2020

Mark Steyn is looking for an argument

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

I somehow missed this when it went up on Mark’s website:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

One of Mrs Thatcher’s great insights was: First you win the argument; then you win the election.

To win the argument, you have to make it. In the Westminster system, you make the argument for three or four years, then you have a six-week election campaign. That’s when the system’s functioning, which it certainly wasn’t under, say, Andrew Scheer’s Tory leadership in Ottawa.

But, even when it’s not functioning, somebody’s making an argument. Thus the fatal miscalculation of David Cameron when he decided that the Brexit referendum would be the best way to put the EU issue to bed once and for all. By then every electorally viable political party — from the Tories to Sinn Féin — was “pro-Europe”. Nigel Farage had been making the argument for twenty years, but, because he had no real political party to advance it, it didn’t get him anywhere at UK general elections. So, the minute Cameron called a referendum on Nigel’s issue in splendid isolation, it gave Farage a shot at the second half of Maggie’s great formulation: He’d won the argument; and Cameron delivered up a mechanism that allowed him to win the vote.

In the American system, it is, as the Brits say, arse over tit: As Monty Python once asked, where’s the room for an argument? There are no parliamentary debates, so you never see a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator. Even more strikingly, there are a bazillion political talk shows, none of which ever features a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator — the way that even the most despised BBC, CBC, ABC yakfests routinely feature opposing legislators debating health care or the Irish backstop or Covid response.

Instead, there is a multi-billion-dollar two-year campaign, which is all polls, fundraising, horse race piffle, telly ads for the halfwitted, plot twists of no interest to anybody normal (ooh, look, Cory Booker is up from point-three to point-four in Iowa!), all culminating in a stilted pseudo-debate tediously moderated by a pompous mediocrity asking questions all framed from the left’s point of view. You’d almost get the idea that the entire racket was designed to eliminate the very possibility that someone might make an argument.

October 30, 2020

“We Burn” – The Road to Srebrenica – Sabaton History 091 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published 29 Oct 2020

Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. The road to the bloodiest massacre since the end of the Second World War was paved by the violence that followed the breakdown of Yugoslavia. A series of wars and brutal atrocities accompanied the individual struggles for independence as old ethnic and nationalist hatred resurged. The Bosnian Serbs who followed the leadership of politician Radovan Karadžić and General Ratko Mladić sought to separate themselves within Bosnia. However their views soon radicalized and Kradazic began to advocate for a Serbian ethno-state utopia, free of the Muslim Bosniaks. And he was willing to use extreme violence to achieve it.

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Visual Sources:
– Library of Congress
– Portrait of Slobodan Milosevic courtesy of Stevan Kragujevic with the approval of daughter Tanja Kragujevic
– Icons from The Noun Project: Arrow by Dolly Holmes
– Pictures from Siege of Sarajevo, Portrait of Mladić & Karadžić and more courtesy of Mikhail Evstafiev
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October 23, 2020

The EU’s sudden but inevitable betrayal on Brexit deal

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After a long absence, Nigel Davies posts on the breakdown of the British talks with the EU:

… I suggested that the EU would finally have to face the fact that the failure of their system was nothing to do with xenophobic little countries in the Balkans, or corrupt east European dictatorships, or incompetent Mediterranean democracies in permanent crisis.

No this disaster — the disaster that finally reveals just how impossible the European “project” is — will be at the hands of the morally superior, self righteous goody two shoes of Europe … principally France and the Netherlands.

And it will be for the obviously domestic partisan, (and completely ethically unfathomable), reason, of protecting the unnatural rights of a few fisherman who have had the unlikely and unreasonable benefit of unfettered access to British fishing waters for the decades that Britain has been in the EU.

(An unwarranted privilege for which they probably should pay compensation … Certainly if Britain was an “unjustly persecuted” Asian or African country instead of an “obviously evil” European one, compensation for this unnatural practice would be a demand of every new age propagandist of any colour.)

Nonetheless I have been amazed at the number of column inches wasted in the last week as some journalists try and pretend that it must be the British who are being unreasonable. Or indeed that there is even a remote possibility that the EU could ever come to an agreement, no matter what the British do. (Short of the British admitting that it was all a ghastly mistake, and submitting to total and permanent subservience to the benign dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucrats of course.)

The truth is that the EU is completely incapable of accepting any agreement, because that presumes that 27 individual nations can agree to overcome the drag of their own domestic policies to agree on a common good. (Or on a common decency that would require even the slightest domestic discomfort in one or more of their members.)

August 19, 2020

QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The CBC was conceived 90 years ago to give the country a national broadcaster and to help Canadian regions understand each other better. It has often lived up to that mandate and in places still does.

But it is an infestation of leftist biases, and is often grossly unprofessional. For decades, despite being almost entirely funded by Canadian taxpayers, it was the principal house organ of the Quebec separatist movement, to the point that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, shortly before the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, threatened to shut the French network down; when asked what he would replace it with, he responded with his customary vivacity of wit: “Still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases, at least they have some cultural value.” It is compulsively misanthropic and nasty, and almost always takes a snide leftist view of everything, including foreign affairs. Brexiters were cavemen, U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, sexist crook and moron, and it is racism and xenophobia to assert that the coronavirus originated in China. Can’t we have better and more original insights than this?

Conrad Black, “Canada needs a much better CBC”, New English Review, 2020-05-02.

August 10, 2020

Russia in Asia (for now)

Filed under: Asia, China, Government, History, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell looks at some long-frozen geopolitical forces that may become more active in coming years:

The Jamestown Foundation, which some experts describe as mainly non-partisan and relatively unbiased, has published an interesting article by Paul Goble in which he reminds us that “Russia east of the Urals comprises more than two-thirds of the Russian Federation but has only about one-fifth of that country’s population. It is where most of Russia’s natural resources are to be found, though the earnings from their extraction largely go to Moscow and not to local people. The region is located three to ten time zones east of Moscow and is linked to the center by few roads or rail lines. Its people are far closer to China and other Pacific rim countries — including the United States — than to the core of the Russian Federation. Because of their roots in explorers, those fleeing oppression, and those sent there by the state for punishment, eastern Russians have always been more independent minded and entrepreneurial than Russians in central and western Russia. Perhaps the most important measure of this cultural divide is that Protestant faiths dominate the religious scene there, not the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.”

It is related to something I have been saying for a long time: Siberia (essentially everything East of the Yenisei River (some say everything East of the Urals) is Asia …

… while Russia, per se, is an Eastern European country.

[…]

A few years ago a couple of middle-ranked Chinese officials suggested to me that one of China’s long-term strategic plans was (and I’m guessing still is) to encourage separatist movements in Siberia which, they hoped, will succeed in creating three or four (maybe even five or six) “autonomous” states in Siberia which will, like Mongolia, look, primarily to China for trade and support.

China covets needs the resources, including water, that Siberia has. I have, in the past, forecast a Sino-Russian “Water War” in Siberia. But, speaking broadly and generally, the Chinese don’t like wars: they are expensive and unpredictable. They would much rather play a modest, behind the scenes role in creating a handful of weak, independent Siberian states with which they can trade to their advantage. They do not, I was told, wish to annex Siberia ~ some Chinese feel that the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) went too far when it annexed what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (新疆维吾尔自治区) in 18th century.

(Tibet is a different matter and most of the Chinese people I know who might wish that Xinjiang was a more autonomous place, more like Kyrgyzstan, for example, believe that Tibetans are Chinese (and Uighurs are not) and Tibet is a “natural” part of China.)

I said a couple of days ago, that “Russia is a pariah state that is flailing about as it withers and dies.” But Putin is flailing about in the wrong directions. The Chinese are, I believe, cultivating and fertilizing Siberian separatist movements with a view to dismembering Russia and “liberating” Siberia. When that happens, and I’m confident that it is NOT an IF, the world will be a much different place.

July 1, 2020

QotD: The Quebec play (that never works) (for long)

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

Certain things recur eternally, in time with the rhythm of the seasons. Flowers bloom in spring. The swallows return to Capistrano. And the federal Conservatives prostitute themselves for the Quebec-nationalist vote.

Well, that’s a bit strong. Prostitutes, after all, expect to be paid. Whereas the Conservatives’ periodic efforts to sell themselves, their principles and their country to people with a proven lack of interest in all three are as notable for their unremunerativeness as they are for their self-abasement.

The Conservatives have been trying this same act now for several decades, most notably — and destructively, to both country and party — under Brian Mulroney, but in their different ways under Robert Stanfield (“deux nations“), Joe Clark (“community of communities”) and even Stephen Harper (“the Québécois nation” resolution).

Occasionally, they manage to attract some attention in the province that has remained largely indifferent to them since 1891. If they are particularly extravagant in their offerings, as under Mulroney, they may even win their votes — but only for as long as it takes to sink in that there is no support in the rest of Canada for what they are proposing, and no possibility of their being implemented.

At which point the whole exercise sinks in a heap of dashed expectations and accusations of bad faith, leaving the country divided and the Tories in ashes. Until, inevitably, some genius gets it into his head to launch the whole routine again.

Andrew Coyne, “It’s that time again, when Conservatives say anything to woo Quebecers”, National Post, 2018-05-16.

March 15, 2020

Irish War of Independence – Black and Tans vs. IRA Guerrillas I THE GREAT WAR 1920

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

The Great War
Published 14 Mar 2020

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The movement for more Irish self determination had turned into a full out revolutionary movement by 1919. The British Empire was losing control over Ireland and by early 1920 was in a full out guerrilla war against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). To regain control more police forces were recruited with wide ranging authorities – and a lack of actual police training. With their mismatched equipment made from war supplies, they soon got the nickname “Black and Tans”.

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Bowen, Tom, “The Irish Underground and the War of Independence 1919-21” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 8, No. 2 (Apr., 1973), pp. 3-23

Hopkinson, Michael, The Irish War of Independence, (Montreal & Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002)

Leeson, David, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920-1921, (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011)

Lowe, W.J., “Who Were the Black-and-Tans”, History Ireland (Autumn 2004)

Townshend, Charles, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence 1918-1923, (London : Penguin Books, 2013)

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