Tag: history

The Campbell Letters

Fandom Pulse presents a fascinating look into the history of science fiction with an intriguing article on The John W. Campbell Letters:

Campbell is generally credited with building the Golden Age of Science Fiction almost single-handedly. Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography, credited Campbell as the dominant force in the field for the first decade of his editorship. Before he became an editor, Campbell wrote his own fiction, first under his own name and later under the pen name Don A. Stuart, including “Who Goes There?”, the 1938 novella that became the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Once he took over Astounding, he largely stopped writing and turned his attention to the writers who would define the field for the next thirty years. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and Hal Clement all passed through his door, and in many cases through his editorial red pen, on their way to becoming the names science fiction still measures itself against.

One letter shows exactly what that editorial pressure looked like at full force. In March 1959, Campbell wrote to Robert Heinlein’s agent, Lurton Blassingame, rejecting an early draft called “Starship Soldier,” the manuscript that would later become Starship Troopers. Campbell’s objection was not political squeamishness about the book’s militarism. It was a craft argument, rooted in a rule he considered a founding principle of the kind of science fiction he had spent two decades building: “Don’t tell the reader about the background; let him gather it from what happens.” Heinlein’s draft violated that rule directly, laying out its politics in what Campbell called direct, multi-page “preachments” rather than letting the reader arrive at the ideas through the story itself. Campbell went further, arguing that fiction persuades precisely because it never announces its conclusions, comparing the technique to parables, and noting that a skilled author could make a reader feel genuine sympathy for a committed Nazi if the story stayed inside that character’s head without editorializing. He then spent several more paragraphs disputing Heinlein’s actual thesis, that any two living organisms sharing a universe are doomed to physical combat, arguing instead that higher forms of competition had already replaced war as the most efficient way species out-compete one another. It is a strange letter to read today, an editor best remembered by his critics for a right-leaning editorial stance arguing at length that humanity was outgrowing warfare, on craft grounds, while rejecting the novel that became one of science fiction’s most famous defenses of the military.

Campbell, of course, has been posthumously cancelled by the deranged freaks of post-science fiction, as what was once the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer in science fiction was renamed because a foreign woman who doesn’t even write anything that can reasonably be recognized as science fiction objected to his politics of 60 years prior.

In 2019, the Campbell Award was renamed the Astounding Award after Jeannette Ng, that year’s winner, called Campbell a “fascist” during the Hugo Awards ceremony; soon afterward, Analog Editor Trevor Quachri announced that award sponsor Dell Magazines would change the prize’s name. Ng’s condemnatory acceptance speech went on to win the 2020 Best Related Work Hugo.

This is why you always sink the damn ships, both metaphorically and literally. And it’s why you always keep the creeps, freaks, and women out, because they don’t join organizations in order to participate in them or because they share the organizational vision, they join organizations in order to fundamentally change them according to their preferences. It’s not as if they hide it either; the imperative need for change is literally the first thing they say every single time they’re allowed in the door, and they repeat it mindlessly like a mantra regardless of how much change has already taken place.

Romantasy, diversity, and social justice didn’t kill science fiction. The Boomer generation of science fiction writers did by refusing to maintain the professional standards established by Campbell’s generation. Remember that when the freaks, creeps, and women come at your organization and demand that you relax your standards in the name of fairness, or kindness, or equality, or equity, or whatever other absurdity they think might serve as leverage.

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The Multinodal World

Larry Johnson correctly points out that the post-New World Order world is not actually multipolar, and is better described as multinodal.

Polarity counts poles by aggregate weight — GDP, military spending, population — the heavier the body, the stronger its pull. And underneath all of it sits the realist picture of world order as a vertical structure with a hegemon, or contending hegemons, at the apex, where power means the capacity to coerce and security means avoiding defeat. That is a serviceable vocabulary for describing armies and alliances. It is a poor one for describing the plumbing of the world economy.

A node is a different kind of object. It is a point in a network, and it is defined not by its mass but by its connections — by how many links run through it and how much flows across them. A 2024 essay in the China International Strategy Review put it well: a multinodal world is an asymmetric matrix of actors, each embedded in a web of relationships, in which the horizontal business of continuous interaction matters more than the vertical business of one power imposing on another. Scholars at Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute, tracing the same shift in security affairs, describe a system of nodes, modes, and flows in which, crucially, flows simply bypass reluctant or hesitant nodes to keep moving.

Hold those two pictures side by side and the difference becomes concrete. Nodes are many, and they vary wildly in size. They are joined by multiple, redundant links rather than arranged around a single center. They are non-hierarchical — a mesh, not a pyramid. They are measured by throughput, not tonnage. And they are non-exclusive: a node can be wired into a dozen other nodes at once, which is something no body orbiting a pole can do. That last property is not a footnote. It is the defining behavior of the present moment, and the pole metaphor renders it invisible.

Power as throughput, not mass. Consider how power actually operates in the world this series has been documenting. The dollar’s dominance was never a matter of American economic mass alone; it was a matter of position in a network. Nearly everyone had to clear payments through nodes the United States controlled, and that mandatory-passage property — not the size of the U.S. economy — is what made sanctions bite. Political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman gave this its proper name: weaponized interdependence, the power that accrues to whoever sits astride the chokepoints others must traverse. The Strait of Hormuz, the dollar-clearing system, the CIPS network, a handful of Chinese refineries, a fleet of shadow tankers — these are the coordinates of contemporary power, and every one of them is a node, valued for what passes through it.

This is why “multipolar” keeps producing bad predictions. It tells the analyst to tally great powers by mass, and so he counts the United States, China, perhaps Russia and India and the EU, and stops. He misses that a small state can be an enormous node — that the UAE, Singapore, Qatar, or a port like Gwadar can command flows out of all proportion to their weight. Polarity has no way to see them. Nodality is built to.

Networks reroute; poles do not. The single most important property of a network is that it routes around damage. Block one path and the flow finds another; the more redundant the links, the more resilient the whole. This is the entire de-dollarization story rendered in one sentence — and it is a sentence “multipolar” cannot form.

When Washington weaponizes the dollar node, the response is not for the world to huddle around a rival pole. It is to build alternative nodes — CIPS clearing yuan outside the dollar system, mBridge settling in digital currency beyond correspondent banking, gold and barter and swap lines — until no single node is mandatory and the chokepoint loses its grip. The Elcano formulation is exact: flows bypass the reluctant node to sustain their fluidity. Every sanction is thus an instruction to the network to grow a bypass, and every bypass makes the next sanction weaker. That dynamic — the core geoeconomic story of the decade — is perfectly legible in nodal terms and literally unsayable in polar ones, because poles do not reroute.

This is an insightful and important observation. The multipolar concept creates another Cold War setup that really isn’t the situation at all. Iran’s defeat of the USA and Israel has demonstrated that even second- and third-tier players now play roles that at times will be more significant than those of the first-tier players. In order to understand the post-WWII world and the events taking place within it, it’s going to be necessary for us to abandon our binary thinking about Soviets, Chi-Coms, and Uncle Sam being the good guy by spreading democracy.

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The Failure was Predicted

And not merely by armchair military historians like me, but by the intelligence analysts who were reporting directly to the White House:

Days before going to war with Iran in February, President Trump summoned his intelligence chief to the Oval Office to ask whether a full-on assault was a good idea. Iran was at its weakest point in decades, senior aides and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him, providing Trump the rare opportunity to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program and bolster his legacy as a peacemaker. The question was whether a large-scale attack would work and possibly topple the regime.

Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard outlined assessments from America’s intelligence apparatus. According to people familiar with the meeting, she told Trump that killing Iran’s supreme leader would likely usher in a more hard-line regime open to acquiring nuclear weapons. Tehran would rush to close the Strait of Hormuz, destabilizing the global energy market. And it would strike U.S. forces and partners in the Middle East, prompting questions about American resolve and reliability with allies.

Trump ordered an attack that began on Feb. 28 and urged Iranians to overthrow their government. Nearly six months later, a conflict the president promised would be over within six weeks is continuing without a clear end in sight. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps controls the country and fires on commercial ships in the strait. The regime led by Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader who succeeded his slain father, shows no signs of capitulating.

That being said, I don’t think the historical consequences of the failure were adequately foreseen by the intelligence analysts. The situation is considerably worse than The Wall Street Journal is painting it. China now knows, without even having to risk testing it for themselves, that the US Navy is a paper tiger and that the USA cannot even hope to rival its industrial power anymore. The fundamental weakness of the USA has now been exposed, and not only do its two main rivals know it, but everyone else does too.

This is why Russia is now openly threatening the UK. Russia is no longer concerned about what the US will do if it attacks a NATO ally. It’s why the Gulf states are developing alternative security arrangements, because they know that Iran is now a more important regional power than the USA. And it’s the reason for the Mecca agreement between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey.

The Pax Americana is over. And rightly or wrongly, mostly wrongly since he wasn’t responsible for all of the historical factors, Trump will get the historical blame for it since it happened both on his watch and as a direct result of his actions.

Even the neocons are now openly admitting the complete catastrophe of their 30-year “bomb Iran” campaign, as Robert Kagan’s new article in The Atlantic demonstrates:

For years, Iran confronted a balance of power in the Middle East that tilted against it. The region was dominated by a hostile American superpower, a nuclear-armed and militarily superior Israel, and significant local actors—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates—that were strategically and economically aligned with the United States. Today finds Iran in entirely new circumstances. It has gone head-to-head with the superpower and Israel, withstood a pounding from their most advanced weapons, and more than survived. As a result, Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like.

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When the Ships Aren’t Sunk

Think the Palestinians now regret not defending their land when they had the ability to do so? You know back in the early 20th century, there were Arab leaders and intellectuals saying: “They’re refugees from Europe. What harm could come of allowing them to live here among us?”

Israel will continue building illegal settlements in the West Bank in preparation for a “major” wave of Jewish immigration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said. Israel’s most recent settlement expansion triggered rebukes from its Arab neighbors and Western partners.

“Today, many of our brothers and sisters around the world understand: This is our land and it will remain ours,” Netanyahu said in Jerusalem on Tuesday. “And when I say our land, every Jewish man and every Jewish woman, the door is open. We are waiting for you. We are preparing the door for major Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel).”

It is unclear whether the “major Aliyah” predicted by Netanyahu is actually coming. Israelis have emigrated in growing numbers since Hamas’ 2023 attack and the subsequent war on Gaza. More than 150,000 Israelis left the country from 2024 to 2025, according to a report by 972 magazine.

The Israeli prime minister spoke at an event organized by the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs 47 Jewish settlements in the West Bank. All of these settlements, which are located outside Israel’s 1967 borders, are considered illegal by the UN, and Israel’s transfer of population to them has been deemed a breach of the Geneva Convention by the International Criminal Court.

Although the Israeli state sometimes pre-authorizes the construction of settlements, they typically begin as outposts on Palestinian land, until they are retroactively legalized by the Israeli government. During his speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu boasted that his government has established and regularized “104 settlements and 160 farms and we continue to do more.”

The Israeli historian Martin van Creveld pointed out that immigration is war in his landmark essay of that name. It always has been. The Visigoths who sacked Rome were refugees seeking refuge from the Huns. The time known as The Movement of Peoples is also known as a period of relentless wars.

Pity on the perceived unfortunate often comes at a terrible price that is paid later in blood by the innocent and the undeserving.

I don’t think we’re going to see peace in the Middle East anytime soon. Especially now that the US security structure has failed and Syria no longer serves as a buffer state in between Israel and Turkey. Remember, the Turks have a long-standing claim on the West Bank too.

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Foreign Affairs Throws in the Towel

Clown World is beginning to grasp that the US military can’t even defeat a second-rate power anymore.

For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has bedeviled U.S. presidents. The 1979 Iran hostage crisis helped doom Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid. The Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s badly tarnished Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy record. And Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), led to an unprecedented situation in which the U.S. Congress invited a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington to argue against it.

In February, when he launched his war against Iran, President Donald Trump declared that he intended to break this embarrassing pattern once and for all. By crushing Iran militarily and effecting regime change, he boasted that whereas other presidents had only talked about the Iranian threat, he was taking decisive action to end it. But six months later, Trump has become yet another U.S. president facing a dangerous humiliation related to Iran; the fallout from his excursion threatens his party’s prospects in the midterm elections. Now, perhaps in desperation, Trump is attempting to squeeze an economic noose around Tehran. But as it is constructed, this economic-pressure operation poses a greater threat to U.S. credibility than it does to Iran’s economy.

The irony of Trump’s failed war on Iran—and his stop-start negotiations to try to end it—is that it has so severely weakened Washington’s ability to exert pressure on Tehran that no future administration will ever be able to revert to the traditional U.S. playbook. But that could also be the only upside of a war that has already exacted a heavy toll on U.S. munitions and the global economy. The war could—and should—force a broader reckoning with 47 years of failed strategy and change Washington’s approach for good.

The combination of strategic 5GW and the ability of Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz has nullified both the USA’s military and financial power. This, combined with the fact that China now surpassed US economic and industrial might, and Russia now exceeds the USA’s ability to project power into Europe, means that the post-WWII era is officially over. What comes next remains to be seen, but Americans should look to post-WWII Britain to better understand what their domestic future likely holds.

And the sooner Trump, or whoever is pulling the short, fake Trump’s strings, understands that continued conflict will only make things worse, the better. The financial system already looks as if it is on the verge of breaking this fall; October could be very ugly beyond just the financial markets. Getting the oil flowing and getting gasoline and diesel prices down will at least help somewhat cushion the economic blow.

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Air Power Idiocy

What do air power advocates, American tax protestors, religious conservatives, and NATO strategists all have in common? The foolish idea that with just a little external assistance, the people will rise up and overthrow their government:

Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan, which has not been previously reported.

In short, they wanted to plan a mass terror attack on Russian airports to completely shut down all civilian flights in and out of Moscow as a way to ramp up pressure and make Russian civilians in the capital city feel the consequences of the war.

It’s remarkable that military planners even entertain these ridiculous notions that never, ever, work. The idea has been around since the 1920s when it was first conceived by an Italian general named Giulio Douhet. It will probably not escape your attention that despite having first access to this strategery, Italy has not won any wars since the publication of The Command of the Air in 1921. Nor has ever it worked anywhere from Germany to Vietnam to Gaza.

Contra the air power theory, bombing tends to cause the people to support the regime in charge and turn to it for protection. It doesn’t ever make them want to surrender to the people bombing them or accede to their wishes.

And in preemptive answer to the obvious rebuttal, Russia isn’t bombing civilian targets in Kiev to turn the Ukrainian people against Zelensky and the Kiev regime. It’s a) payback for Ukraine’s attacks on civilians and b) a warning to the Kiev regime’s NATO supporters.

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The Retreat From Asia

Even those pulling the strings of the Short Fat Trump now understand that Asia is a bridge too far for the US military to even pretend it can contest, and it appears they’re now conceding the region to China.

Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I hâve instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!” Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

It’s only a matter of time before US troops are withdrawn from South Korea and Japan. Which is a good thing, since the fate of South Korea and its dying population has demonstrated that as bad as communism and Jutism may be, and they are very, very bad, Western liberal values and feminism are even worse for a nation.

The USA now has a single-issue foreign policy.

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The Civilizational Metric

Civilization literally lives when you give men more money and dies when you give women more money. Literally. That’s the Natural Law. And it is screaming at us.

A recent study found that giving men a pay raise led them to have more children, while giving women a pay raise led them to have fewer children.

I’ve long said that feminism is the only political philosophy that is materially worse than communism, socialism, and national socialism. It’s essentially the political philosophy that pairs with satanic theology, and it’s not an accident that feminism has led to mass child murder, the construction of transgenderism, and if Clown World survives long enough, even worse.

The good news is that history very clearly teaches that once Clown World reaches a certain point, it gets wiped out so comprehensively that it takes centuries to recover.

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The Daily Machiavelli

Having finished with their collective read of THE GUNS OF MARS, the subscribers of Castalia Library voted on the next Library work to be excerpted daily. The vote went as follows:

  • 16% Pensées
  • 23% History of Florence
  • 23% History of Freedom of Thought
  • 12% De Bello Gallico
  • 27% Discourses on Livy

And so we have begun the daily excerpting of Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius by Niccolò Machiavelli. Today features the introduction, so it’s not too late to join in and read along:

Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome, but may also bring me some reward in the approbation of those who will kindly appreciate my efforts.

And if my poor talents, my little experience of the present and insufficient study of the past, should make the result of my labors defective and of little utility, I shall at least have shown the way to others, who will carry out my views with greater ability, eloquence, and judgment, so that if I do not merit praise, I ought at least not to incur censure.

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TRANSLATION: Cádiz

The eighth volume of the Episodios Nacionales, the great historical novel cycle of Spain, Cádiz carries Gabriel Araceli into the besieged island city where Spain’s first constitution is being born, and where a drawing-room intrigue will end in blood on the sand.

It is 1810, and Cádiz is the last free city in Spain. While French cannon fire arcs across the bay and the newly convened Cortes debates sovereignty, freedom of the press, and the abolition of feudal lordships, Gabriel finds himself entangled in a world of tertulias and domestic politics more dangerous than any battlefield. The condesa Amaranta needs his help to recover her secret daughter, Inés, from the household of the formidable doña María de Rumblar, a Catholic absolutist matriarch who has imprisoned the girl behind the walls of a household so rigidly governed it resembles a convent. To reach Inés, Gabriel must navigate a social minefield: the effusive doña Flora, whose speeches are torrents of self-interruption and genuine warmth; the feckless young Count Don Diego, who is supposed to marry Inés for family advantage; and the absurd Don Pedro del Congosto, commander of a militia so magnificently incompetent that its members are named after parrots and peacocks.

At the centre of everything is Lord Gray, a brilliant, melancholic Englishman who delivers dazzling speeches against his own country, joins the beggars at the Carmen convent for the philosophical experience, and quotes Byron while systematically destroying the people around him. Gabriel believes Lord Gray is pursuing Inés. He is wrong. The truth, when it comes, is worse than anything Gabriel has imagined.

The Episodios Nacionales is a cycle of forty-six historical novels tracing the history of Spain from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 through the Restoration of the 1870s. Written between 1872 and 1912, the cycle is one of the supreme achievements of European fiction — a work that stands with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and Trollope’s Palliser and Barchester novels as a panoramic portrait of an entire nation across a century of upheaval. This is the first complete English translation of the eighth volume.

CÁDIZ by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the eighth of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.