Quotulatiousness

July 23, 2026

QotD: The development of the Main Battle Tank (MBT) and Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV)

As we get into the Cold War era, one thing becomes simpler: the distinction between different kinds of tanks (heavy, medium, light, cruiser, infantry, etc) largely drops away. Improved engines, suspension and lighter but more effective composite armor meant that the slightly different roles of the different weights of tank could increasingly be accomplished by a single platform evolving out of late-war medium tanks. You could now fit a heavy tank’s gun and armor on a chassis with a medium tank’s speed and maneuverability. The first of these “universal” tanks was the British Centurion (first deployed in 1945 [but did not see WW2 combat]) and other countries followed suit.

The result is the modern “main battle tank” (MBT), typically between 45 and 75 tons, with a single powerful direct-fire cannon as its primary armament. That’s not to say design differences between militaries drop away; there are still decisions to be made: the level of emphasis between speed, armor and firepower for instance. Another major decision is whether a tank is designed with a three-person turret (one of whom is a dedicated loader) or a two-person turret with an autoloader (that is, a machine that does the loading for you). It used to be that now I’d have to go on about why going autoloaders aren’t simply obviously the best but given the live demonstrations of some of the drawbacks of Soviet/Russian carousel autoloaders going on right now [in Ukraine] I’ll just say that both options have advantages and drawbacks and move on. So there is variety within the idea of an MBT, but by and large most countries field just one type of MBT (or one family of MBTs for countries which can’t afford to retire older systems) and that covers their tank needs.

But of course nothing could easy so just as tanks were getting easier to keep track of, APCs get much more complicated. Even before they were fully enclosed, APCs had generally carried some kind of defensive weapon (usually a heavy machine gun), but you weren’t supposed to fight with it if you could avoid it. Beginning in the 1950s, designers – first in West Germany – began experimenting with the idea that an APC could be armed to not merely deliver the infantry (“dismounts”) but to actually fight when they got there. The thing is, there are a lot of situations where an infantry formation might want more firepower but where a tank would be overkill: armored vehicles lighter than tanks, or enemies with lighter fortifications, for instance. West Germany pioneered the idea by putting a 20mm autocannon on their APC, the Schützenpanzer Lang HS.30, enabling it to put out some meaningful firepower, albeit much less than a tank.

The USSR cottoned on to the idea and liked it, resulting in the Soviet BMP-1 and the subsequent BMP family of what we call “infantry fighting vehicles” (IFV). Initially resistant to the idea (American doctrine was that APCs move troops and should not fight if they could help it), the United States, noticing the effectiveness of these sorts of platforms, got into the act with the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (these days the M2 Bradley). And IFVs, especially the Bradley, look like tanks. And indeed, they are sometimes called on to do the kind of armored reconnaissance and infantry support jobs that in a previous era would have gone to a light tank.

But they are also notably not tanks in several key ways. The primary job of an IFV is to move infantry and support them against lighter targets; some IFVs do maintain some kind of anti-tank capability, but it tends to be more limited (e.g. the Bradley’s pair of TOW AT missiles). The requirement that an IFV needs to be fairly fast but also needs to fit a bunch of dismounts means they can’t carry the firepower or the armor of a tank, often using lighter aluminum armor rather than steel or heavy composites. Finally, the tendency is for IFVs to mount lighter primarily armaments – again, space and weight concerns – like the Bradley’s 25mm M242 Bushmaster chain gun. The BMP-3 is probably the most heavily armed IFV out there with a low-velocity 100mm rifled gun and a 30mm autocannon, which is still a far cry from the firepower of the high-velocity 125mm main gun of a contemporary T-80 or the 120mm high velocity gun of a M1A1 Abrams. Instead, most IFVs would rely on anti-tank missile systems to engage tanks (although IFV autocannons can cause a tank serious problems if they can engage the rear or side armor, which is thinner).

Note that the IFV did not mean the end of the APC just as the APC didn’t bring the end of soft-skinned troop transports. In the US military, the Bradley serves alongside lighter-but-still-IFV Strykers, the venerable M113 APC along with soft-skinned HMMWV (Humvees; to be in theory replaced with the Oshkosh L-ATV) and trucks of various kinds and uses. Likewise, the Russian army has its BMPs (which are IFVs), and BTRs (which are APCs) as well as soft-skinned vehicles – or at least it did until, I am now being told, they were all towed away by Ukrainian farmers. The real Iron Harvest.

The final category worth noting here are variations on the concept of the MRAP (Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected): infantry transport vehicles designed to resist the sort of dangers one encounters in counter-insurgency operations, mostly mines, IEDs and small-arms ambushes. In essence, these vehicles are a purpose-built version of the up-armored Humvees designed to operate in a very particular combat environment (insurgencies and particularly urban insurgencies). These sort of vehicles have gotten more visibility in the United States because many of them have been shifted into the hands of law enforcement, where their utility is questionable, to say the least.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.

July 15, 2026

QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution

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

An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.

A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.

He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.

Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.

Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.

Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.

When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.

He had set forces in motion that he could not control.

He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.

His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.

The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.

In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”

Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2026-03-22.

July 2, 2026

PBS-1 Soviet AK Silencer (the Original, not the Dead Air One)

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Feb 2026

The Soviet Union had made fairly extensive use of silencers on Mosin Nagant rifles during World War Two, as tools for snipers and recon scouts among others. In the mid 1950s a new silencer was put into development for the new 7.62x39mm family of weapons, called the PBS (Прибор Бесшумной Стрельбы; Pribor Besshumnoi Strelyby; Silent Shooting Device). This was originally intended to be a multi-weapon silencer, but the abandonment of the SKS and reliability problems with the RPD led to it being limited to just the AK. Compared to the Mosin Nagant silencers, this new design was much more difficult, as it had to allow the rifle to cycle reliably using specialized subsonic ammunition, and also continue to run reliably with the silencer removed and standard ammunition used. This led to the most unusual element of its design; a thick rubber wipe just in front of the muzzle to help boost back pressure.

The remainder of the design was pretty simple, with 12 plain flat plate baffles. The first production PBS model used a clamshell main body, but this was replaced by a solid tube on the PBS-1 improved model in 1962. These suppressors were used until the late 1970s, when the 9x39mm cartridge was developed for better subsonic effectiveness, along with a number of unique new firearms designed for it.

Bramit Suppressor for Mosin Nagant: • Soviet WW2 Bramit Silencer for the M91/30
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June 9, 2026

QotD: The temptations of totalitarianism

In 1977, the French essayist, Jean-François Revel, published a tract with the title The Totalitarian Temptation. In it, he condemned the western intelligentsia’s faiblesse, which was at the same time dishonest, posturing, stupid, and evil, for Stalinist-style dictatorships.

One might have thought — I certainly thought — that with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian temptation had been exorcised once and for all. This, of course, was a very superficial view. Instead of disappearing, the temptation balkanised, so to speak, and was also repatriated. Totalitarianism had been shown almost as conclusively as anything in the sphere of human affairs to be inherently absurd, intellectually nugatory, and catastrophic in practice. This fact was not sufficient, however, to destroy its attractions — at least for those who desire a complete solution to all of life’s little problems such as how to live and what to live for. A solution in the mind is worth a thousand disasters in the world.

Naturally, it takes a certain level of education to feel the temptations of totalitarianism: they do not occur to the illiterate, for example, but only to the intelligentsia. The latter has increased in size almost exponentially with the expansion of tertiary education, or at least with attendance at institutions of tertiary instruction. In retrospect, it is not surprising that totalitarianism should continue to exert its siren-song in previously liberal societies, particularly when the young, always tempted by radical ideas, face genuine if intractable problems, seemingly worse than those of the previous generation.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Temptations of Power”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-06.

May 17, 2026

“Communism > Capitalism”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Once again, thanks to the auto-translation feature on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam responds to a fan of the most evil economic system yet devised by man:

“Communism > Capitalism”

Brother. You’re tweeting this from an iPhone. Designed in California. Made in a Chinese factory that only exists because Deng Xiaoping realized in 1978 that Maoism mostly produced corpses and decided to do capitalism in disguise.

The greatest reduction in poverty in human history (China 1980-2020) happened at the exact moment when China stopped doing communism. The greatest famine in human history (China 1958-62, 45M dead) happened at the exact moment when they started.

Same country. Same people. Same territory. Two systems. One built smartphones, the other built mass graves. Pick your side.

Communism’s trophy board:
USSR: collapsed
China: pivoted to capitalism, prospered
Vietnam: pivoted to capitalism, prospered
Cuba: still rationing soap in 2026
North Korea: eating tree bark
Venezuela: sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, imports gasoline
Cambodia: killed 25% of its own population

Communism isn’t an ideology. It’s a hiring program for people incapable of finding a real job, dressed up as economic theory. When you can’t build, you redistribute. When redistribution fails, you hunt for saboteurs. When you run out of saboteurs, you become someone else’s saboteur.

100 million dead. Zero examples that work. The most expensive LARP in human history.

But please, keep tweeting “Communism > Capitalism” from your capitalist phone, on your capitalist app, funded by capitalist ads. We need the comedy.

May 11, 2026

“We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle”

Filed under: China, History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You have to have noticed that progressives all seem to have recently decide en masse that we need to liquidate eliminate expropriate the billionaire class. It’s been done in the past, and modern progressives seem to be unable to spot the pattern, even as they work hard to bring it back to life by constantly scapegoating the wealthy (machine translated from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post):

Lydia is putting her finger on something that no one wants to name clearly: we’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle.

The script is documented, archived, and it repeats itself identically for a century. Before every mass massacre carried out in the name of Marxism, there are always 5 to 15 years of public designation of a category of people as “the enemy to be taken down”. Not a debate on public policies. Not a critique of inequalities. A methodical dehumanization of an entire class.

In the USSR in the 1920s, it was the kulaks. Lenin wrote as early as 1918 that it was necessary to “exterminate the kulaks as a class”, an expression repeated word for word by Stalin ten years later. Result: 4 million peasants deported, several million dead in the Holodomor.

In Maoist China, it was the landlords and “class enemies”. Mao orchestrates public “struggle sessions” where neighbors, children, former employees are forced to denounce, humiliate, and beat. Tally from the land reform alone: 1 to 2 million executions, not counting what follows.

In Cambodia, it was the “new people”: city dwellers, intellectuals, people wearing glasses. Khmer Rouge propaganda designated them for years as parasites before massacring them. 1.7 million dead in 4 years.

Now look at what’s happening in the United States in 2026.

Hasan Piker, who reaches millions of young men on Twitch, speaks openly of the “blood of f***ing capitalists”. Not in 1968 in a Trotskyist cell, in 2026 on the platform most watched by 18-25 year olds.

Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, films viral videos in front of billionaires’ buildings, exactly where Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated last year by Luigi Mangione. The latter was turned into a pop icon by a part of the American left in less than 48 hours. T-shirts, fan art, romanticization of the murderer.

This isn’t “political passion”. It’s phase 1 of the protocol. The public designation of a category of humans as legitimately hateable, followed by the valorization of those who take action.

The “normal” reaction of a healthy democracy should be the immediate social and professional isolation of these voices. What’s happening: they top podcast charts, they’re elected officials, and they get favorable media coverage.

History doesn’t stutter. It copy-pastes. And the first victims are always surprised to discover, too late, that the speech they found “a bit excessive but oh well” was actually the clear warning that a pit was being dug for them.

Lydia is right to say it. And she’ll be even more right in five years when we reread these tweets.

And more:

And if you’re reading this thinking, “This doesn’t concern me, I’m not a billionaire”, stop for two seconds and really think about it.

Because that’s exactly what the Russian peasants told themselves in 1918 when people started talking about the “bourgeois”. They applauded, or they looked the other way. It wasn’t their problem. They weren’t rich.

Ten years later, they were called kulaks. And “kulak“, in Stalinist practice, meant any peasant who owned one more cow than his neighbor, who had dared to hire a seasonal worker, who had a slightly better-kept barn. 4 million deported. Several million dead.

That’s exactly what the small Chinese shopkeepers told themselves in 1949, when Mao went after the “great landowners”. Not their problem. They just ran a little store. Five years later, they too were classified as “class enemies”, stripped of everything, publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten to death by their own neighbors.

That’s exactly what the Cambodian schoolteachers told themselves in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge talked about “urban exploiters”. Not their problem. They barely earned enough to live on. In 1975, knowing how to read was enough to sign your death warrant.

The communist mechanism NEVER stops at the ultra-rich. Never. It’s a historical law as solid as gravity.

Why? Because fundamentally, the communist doesn’t hate wealth. He hates individual emancipation. He hates the very idea that a man can build something that belongs to him, decide his own life, refuse the collective. Private property isn’t an economic detail to him — it’s the metaphysical enemy. Because someone who owns something is someone who can say no.

So if you have an apartment you spent 15 years paying off, you’re concerned. If you have a small business, a shop, a sole proprietorship, you’re concerned. If you have a savings plan, a bank book, stocks, you’re concerned. If you have a family home in the provinces, you’re concerned. If you work hard to pass something on to your kids, you’re at the top of the next lists.

Billionaires are just the first course. Always. Because there are few of them and they’re easy to point out. They’re the appetizers for the machine. The main course, historically, is you.

And meanwhile, a lot of people read threads like this, nod their heads, and don’t share. Don’t comment. Don’t take a stand. Out of fear of being labeled “right-wing”, “reactionary”, “too political on LinkedIn”. Out of comfort. Out of social cowardice.

Know that this silence has a precise historical cost. Every time a society has tipped into this madness, it did so because the reasonable majority stayed silent too long, thinking it would all blow over on its own.

It never blows over on its own.

May 8, 2026

The Strugatskys’ The Doomed City and the Soviet Experiment

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 12 Dec 2025

While The Doomed City isn’t the last book Boris and Arkady Strugatsky wrote, it is arguably the end of their journey from idealism to cynicism with regards to the whole Soviet project and serves as an almost spiritual history of the period. Let’s meander through it to look at some things not covered in a literary review.

00:00 Intro
03:12 New Jobs
04:45 Aside – Facts and Theory
05:42 Laws and Mentors
09:36 The Experiment
10:50 Regime Change
13:25 Aside – Maps
15:45 Status and Power
18:22 The Ground Beneath Our Feet
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May 7, 2026

Tu-144 Concordeski – Speed, Spies and Failure

HardThrasher
Published 4 May 2026

In great secrecy, in 1963 the USSR set about making aviation history with the world’s first Supersonic Transport (SST). In 1968, five months before Concorde, the Tu-144 became the first passenger jet to break the sound barrier. But it was a white elephant that crashed on multiple occasions, killed hundreds and flew for just a matter of months after over a decade of development. It was, perhaps the first of a string of failures that brought down the Soviet Union.

00:00 – 11:06 – Introduction and Background
11:07 – 23:10 – The Decision is made to build
23:10 – 35:31 – And then it got worse — how everything fell apart
35:32 – 39:10 – The En Crashening — From First Flight to Constant Crashes
39:11 – 48:49 – Enter the KGB — What role did spies play
49:22 – End – Like, Subscribe, Join the Patreon
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May 6, 2026

PSS: Russia’s Silent Captive-Piston Handgun

Filed under: History, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Dec 2025

The PSS is a semiautomatic pistol using captive piston ammunition to achieve a comparable level of sound suppression to a .22 pistol with a good normal suppressor. It was developed to replace a couple multi-barrel derringer style captive piston pistols in Soviet use, with the semiautomatic action and (6-round) detachable magazines making it suitable for a wider variety of missions than the previous guns.

It was given the GRU catalog designation 6P28 and entered service in 1983. It fires a cylindrical steel projectile weighing 155 grains at about 620 fps, with a noise of 122 dB (1m left of the muzzle) as measured by silencer legend Phil Dater. Mechanically, the design takes its fire control system from the Makarov but uses a floating chamber system to cycle reliably with the unique ammunition. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the pistols were available for commercial export by Russian state-run export companies, although that ended in 2018. In Russian service, the PSS was replaced with the much improved PSS-2 in 2011.
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May 3, 2026

QotD: Communism, nationalism and literature

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

“Literature as we know it”, Orwell wrote in “Inside the Whale”, “is an individual thing, demanding mental honesty and a minimum of censorship”. It’s the “product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual”. This is why Orwell argued that “a writer does well to keep out of politics. For any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up.”

According to Orwell, “As early as 1934 or 1935 it was considered eccentric in literary circles not to be more or less ‘left’, and in another year or two there had grown up a left-wing orthodoxy that made a certain set of opinions absolutely de rigueur on certain subjects”. In other words, many writers became communists, which meant they constantly had to decide whether to toe the line or shut up, depending on the circumstances: “Every time Stalin swaps partners”, Orwell wrote, “‘Marxism’ has to be hammered into a new shape … Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.”

Orwell also explained how communism replaced the patriotic and religious feelings that members of the English intelligentsia believed they had transcended: “All the loyalties and superstitions that the intellect had seemingly banished could come rushing back under the thinnest of disguises. Patriotism, religion, empire, military glory — all in one word, Russia. Father, king, leader, hero, savior — all in one word, Stalin”. Is it any wonder that Orwell, witnessing these endless intellectual and moral contortions, the shameless propaganda, and the constant stream of wartime lies and distortions, was drawn to a writer who didn’t regurgitate any orthodoxies or toe any lines? Miller gave his readers “no sermons, merely the subjective truth”.

Matt Johnson, “George Orwell, Henry Miller, and the ‘Dirty-Handkerchief Side of Life'”, Quillette, 2020-10-05.

April 23, 2026

QotD: The problems of a “no first use” nuclear weapons policy

Now, you might ask at this point: why not defuse some of this tension with a “no first use” policy – openly declare that you won’t be the first to use nuclear weapons even in a non-nuclear conflict?

For the United States during the Cold War, the problem with declaring a “no first use” policy was the worry that it would essentially serve as a “green light” for conventional Soviet military action in Europe. Recall, after all, that the Soviet military was stronger in conventional forces in Europe during the Cold War and that episodes like the Berlin Blockade (and resultant Berlin Airlift) seemed to confirm Soviet interest in expanding their control over central Europe. At the same time, the Soviet use of military force to crush the Hungarian Revolution (1956) and the Prague Spring (1968) continued to reaffirm that the USSR had no intention of letting Central or Eastern Europe choose their own fates – this was an empire that ruled by domination and intended to expand if it could.

The solution to blocking that expansion was NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Not because NATO collectively could defeat the USSR in a conventional war – the general assumption was that they probably couldn’t – but because NATO’s article 5 clause pledging mutual defense essentially meant that the nuclear powers of NATO (Britain, the United States, and France) pledged to defend the territory of all NATO members with nuclear weapons. But just like deterrence, mutual defense alliances are based on the perception that all members will defend each other. Declaring that the United States wouldn’t use nuclear weapons first would essentially be telling the Germans, “we’ll fight for you, but we won’t use our most powerful weapons for you” in the event of a conventional war; it would be creating a giant unacceptable asterisk next to that mutual defense clause.

So the United States had to be committed to at least the possibility that it would respond to a conventional military assault on West Germany with nuclear retaliation (often envisaged as a “tactical” use of nuclear weapons – that is, using smaller nuclear weapons against enemy military formations. That said, even in the 1950s, Bernard Brodie was already warning that restraining the escalation to general use of nuclear weapons once a tactical nuclear weapon was used would be practically impossible).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

April 3, 2026

QotD: The Great Purge

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

In July 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be interrogated for being part of Trotsky-led conspiracy. The pair had been part of the ruling triumvirate, along with Stalin, after Lenin was incapacitated with a stroke, but they had sided with Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. As a result. their status had declined in the party. In 1932, they were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.

The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.

The Z Man, “What Comes Next”, The Z Blog, 2020-08-03.

March 19, 2026

QotD: From the fall of the Soviets to the rise of the Wokerati

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

… for 50 years the Soviet nuclear threat provided […] an Armageddon to fear, and a reason to rally round the state in the free countries of the West. It provided an unexpected bonus, which protected us all though we did not realise it at the time. Since the USSR was the arsenal of repression, political liberty in the Western lands was under special protection as long as the Kremlin was our enemy. Freedom was, supposedly, what we fought and stood for. Governments claiming to be guarding us from Soviet tyranny could not go very far in limiting liberty on their own territory, however much they may have wanted to.

That protection ended when the Berlin Wall fell. In the same extraordinary moment, the collapse of Russian communism liberated revolutionary radicals across the Western world. The ghastly, failed Brezhnev state could not be hung round their necks like a putrid albatross any more. They were no longer considered as potential traitors simply because they were on the left. Eric Hobsbawm, and those like him, could at last join the establishment. Indeed, fortresses of the establishment such as the BBC now welcomed political as well as cultural leftists onto their upper decks.

Antonio Gramsci’s rethinking of the revolution — seize the university, the school, the TV station, the newspaper, the church, the theatre, rather than the barracks, the railway station and the post office — could at last get under way. At that moment, the long march of 1960s leftists through the institutions began to reach its objective, as they moved into the important jobs for the first time. And so one of the main protections of liberty and reason vanished, exactly when it was most needed.

The BBC’s simpering coverage of the Blair regime’s arrival in Downing Street, with its North-Korean-style fake crowd waving Union Jacks they despised, and new dawn atmosphere was not as ridiculous as it looked. May 1997 truly was a regime change. Illiberal utopians really were increasingly in charge, and the Cultural Revolution at last had political muscle.

Then came the new enemy, the shapeless ever-shifting menace of terrorism, against which almost any means were justified. To combat this, we willingly gave up Habeas Corpus and the real presumption of innocence, and allowed ourselves to be treated as if we were newly-convicted prisoners every time we passed through an airport.

Those who think the era of the face-mask will soon be over might like to recall that the irrational precautions of airport “security” (almost wholly futile once the simple precaution of refusing to open the door to the flight deck has been introduced) have not only remained in place since September 2001: they have been intensified. Yet, by and large, they are almost popular. Those who mutter against them, as I sometimes do, face stern lectures from our fellow-citizens implying that we are irresponsible and heedless.

Now a new fear, even more shapeless, invisible, perpetual (and hard to defeat — how can you ever eliminate a virus?) than al-Qaeda or Isis, has arrived in our midst. There is almost no bad action it cannot be used to excuse, including the strangling of an already shaky economy for which those eccentric or lucky enough to still be working will pay for decades. Millions have greeted this new peril as an excuse to abandon a liberty they did not really care much about anyway.

As a nation, we now produce more fear than we can consume locally, hiding in our homes as civil society evaporates. We queue up happily to hand in our freedom and to collect our muzzles and our digital IDs. And those of us who cry out, until we are hoarse, to say that this is a catastrophe, are met with shrugs from the chattering classes, and snarls of “just put on the frigging mask” from the mob. If I hadn’t despaired long ago, I would be despairing now.

Peter Hitchens, “Democracy muzzled”, The Critic, 2020-09-25.

March 16, 2026

Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan 1979

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 24 Oct 2025

Christmas 1979. Soviet armor pours across the Afghan border towards Kabul as helicopters secure the mountain passes through the Hindu Kush mountains. In Moscow, the Politburo has decided to save Afghanistan’s communist government from collapse. Afghan rebels have taken up arms against the unpopular regime and control most of the countryside. But the Red Army leadership doubts it can pacify the country – so why did the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan?
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March 4, 2026

The Korean War Week 89: Is There Such Thing As Soviet Neutrality? – March 3, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 3 Mar 2026

The UN is not just worried that the Communists have strong air power, they’re worried that because they can’t produce more jets quickly enough, the Communist advantage in the skies will soon become insurmountable, but they at least have plans to try and stave that off. They also have plans for rotating in fresh troops, but those plans have stumbling blocks of their own, as do the negotiations about who might be part of a post-armistice supervisory team, specifically the USSR, whom the US does not see as “neutral” with regard to this war.

00:00 Intro
00:54 Recap
02:05 Supervisory Team
03:29 45th and 40th Divisions
07:14 POW Repatriation
10:29 Communist Air Power
15:52 Notes
16:36 Summary
16:55 Conclusion
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