Tag: history

Waterloo Need Not Have Been Fought

A fascinating coda to the tale of Wellington’s most useful intelligence officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Colquhoun Grant, during the Peninsular War suggests that but for an incompetent Prussian cavalry general, Napoleon would likely have been defeated at the Battle of Ligny, thereby rendering the historic battles of Quatre-Bras and Waterloo entirely unnecessary.

It will scarcely be believed that this resourceful man was back in the Peninsula by September and reported himself to Wellington just four months after he had been captured near Sabugal. His chief got him a brevet-colonelcy without delay, and employed him as his head Intelligence officer during the remaining eighteen months of the war.

He was again called out during the Hundred Days from the Military College at Farnham, where he had been given a berth as instructor in 1814, and was put by Wellington in charge of his Intelligence department in Belgium. He always maintained that the surprise of the British and Prussian armies by Napoleon on June 15th would never have taken place but for the stupidity of a cavalry brigadier, who stopped one of his emissaries bearing certain news of the outmarch of the French army. Grant’s messenger was detained by the Hanoverian general Dõrnberg, whose cavalry was watching the frontier about Tournai and Mons. He did not send him on till the fighting had already begun around Charleroi, and Grant could only deliver the message to Wellington a day late, when the Battle of Quatre-Bras had actually begun. The loss of the twenty-four hours was almost irreparable: if Dõrnberg had not stopped the all-important news, Wellington’s whole army would have been concentrated a day earlier than was actually the case, and he would certainly have co-operated with Blücher at Ligny, instead of being forced to hold back Ney at Quatre-Bras with detachments that kept dropping in all through the day.

History repeatedly teaches that having the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time is one of the most costly mistakes that any leader of any sort of organization can make. The consequences are often not merely limited to immediate failure, but result in complete catastrophe and an existential crisis for the organization.

In this case, more than 20,000 British and Prussian soldiers were killed or wounded unnecessarily, due to the unnecessary action of a single officer.

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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

We’re very pleased to announce that both editions are now bound and shipping to the warehouse. We printed 250 more than usual knowing that there would be additional demand. If you want to pick up one of these magnificent reproduction of the spectacular Peacock first edition, you can do so at Arkhaven.

There are more pictures of both editions at the Castalia Library substack. And speaking of which, I would be remiss if I did not mention the amazing adventures of the celebrated Major Grant, the scout whom Wellington declared was worth more than a brigade of troops, which are being serialized there and are very well worth reading.

These documents took one back at once to one of the most daring escapes of a British prisoner which can be found in the annals of the Napoleonic Wars—an escape carried out with an almost absurd nonchalance and readiness of wit. The tale was known to Napier, who thought it so curious that he spared four pages for it in a chapter of his fourth volume. And Mr. John Buchan made an excellent story out of it in one of his volumes of miscellaneous adventures, with confirmatory detail out of his fertile imagination, and an exciting account of Grant’s dealings with Spanish guerrilleros, who sought to rescue him, and were refused his permission to carry him off.

What really happened I can give from the memoirs of Colquhoun Grant’s brother-in-law, Sir James McGrigor, who devoted a chapter to the exploits of his evasive and resourceful relative.

Colquhoun Grant, of the IIth Foot, was one of four officers whom Wellington employed on special reconnoitring and Intelligence duties. They were all good horsemen, good linguists in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and noted for resourcefulness and cool heads. Whenever the French were on the move it was their duty to hang about the advancing army, on its flank sometimes, not infrequently in its rear, and to report to headquarters all important developments. These officers were Colquhoun Grant, Waters of the Portuguese Staff, Leith Hay of the 29th Foot, and Charles Somers Cocks of the 16th Light Dragoons. The pitcher that goes often to the well ends by being broken, and all these gallant Intelligence officers came to their day of ill-luck; it was impossible to foresee all possible dangers. Waters was captured on the Coa in April 1811, Leith Hay near Toledo in April 1813, Somers Cocks was killed in action (not while scouting) at Burgos in October 1812. Of Colquhoun Grant’s extraordinary capture and escape this screed must suffice to tell the tale.

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Damn the Drones, Full Speed… RETREAT!

The French navy has been defeated by the Yemenis in the Battle of the Red Sea:

France’s Aquitaine-class FREMM frigate Alsace has turned tail from the Red Sea after running out of missiles and munitions repelling attacks from the Yemeni armed forces, according to its commander, Jerome Henry.

“We didn’t necessarily expect this level of threat. There was an uninhibited violence that was quite surprising and very significant. [The Yemenis] do not hesitate to use drones that fly at water level, to explode them on commercial ships, and to fire ballistic missiles,” Henry told French news outlet Le Figaro in an exclusive interview published on 11 April.

“We had to carry out at least half a dozen assistances following [Yemeni] strikes,” he added.

The commander of the Alsace also revealed that, after a 71-day deployment, all combat equipment was depleted.

“From the Aster missile to the 7.62 machine gun of the helicopter, including the 12.7mm, 20mm, or 76mm cannon, we dealt with three ballistic missiles and half a dozen drones,” Henry adds.

According to the French commander, the Franco–Italian Aster missile – each carrying a price tag of up to $2 million – “was pushed to its limits” by the Yemeni armed forces, as the Alsace had to use it “on targets that we did not necessarily imagine at the start.”

They cheated, they surprised us by shooting at us! The surprise on the part of the former colonial powers is almost comical, considering the way in which things that were obvious to every armchair history buff doesn’t seem to have quite penetrated the skulls of the various admirals and defense ministers of Clown World.

However, it does make what always appeared to be the strange behavior of Civil War and WWI generals a little more understandable, as apparently no military adapts easily to technological changes that necessitate new and different tactics and strategies.

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The Return of National Economics

While the Chinese have lower per capita income than US citizens do, the lack of debt and their median household wealth combined with their lower degree of income inequality means that the Chinese economy is much more economically stable than its US counterpart.

I’ll post more about this next week, but one of the reasons Western macroeconomic metrics don’t work to analyze the Chinese economy is because the Chinese are observably following the principles described by Richard Werner in his excellent Princes of the Yen, which chronicles the way Japan successfully maintained its centralized wartime economy to develop its economy and literally buy a significant percentage of the global assets from 1945 through 1990.

That relentless period of economic advancement came to an end in 1998 with the final triumph of the private Bank of Japan, which served as Clown World’s proxy, over the Okurasho, Japan’s Ministry of Finance, and the subsequent shift to the same sort of financialized unproductive economy featuring private credit creation that has systematically weakened the West for the last century.

As part of its policy of unrestricted warfare, China has methodically applied the lessons of Japan’s post-WWII economy and maintained control of its own credit creation, thereby boosting its productive capacity to historically unprecedented levels and providing it with the monetary resources to buy up foreign assets everywhere from Angola to the USA. By publicly breaking with Clown World in 2015, and setting up BRICS as an alternative to the various Clown World institutions, China is offering the rest of the world an observably viable and historically superior economic model to the corrupt and deceptive one that was holding the elites of the various nations enthralled.

This is why Janet Yellen, the US Secretary of the Treasury, was in China this week begging the Chinese to “reduce their overcapacity”. And it’s not an accident that China has applied Japan’s historical policies of a) government credit creation to fund b) productive industrial exports while minimizing the use of credit to fund domestic consumption. This is a proven means of enhancing national power and prestige at the expense of global competitors.

The economic assumptions of the Smith-Keynesian era have gradually been proven over time to be entirely false. This is a difficult lesson for even economic iconoclasts like me to accept, but it is inarguable at this point. From David Ricardo to Paul Samuelson, from free trade to the rational actor, everything about neoclassical economics is intrinsically and observably incorrect, which is why those nations whose economic policies are based on traditional neoclassical economics will inevitably fall behind, both in terms of societal wealth and military power.

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A Brief History of Clown World

An Italian economic historian appears to have inadvertently exposed the way in which Clown World migrates The Empire That Never Ended from a declining power to its successor empire:

It pays to revisit the work of the Italian political economist and historian of global capitalism Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009). Arrighi, who is often simplistically pigeonholed as a Marxist historian, a label far too constricting given the breadth of his work, explored the origins and evolution of capitalist systems dating back to the Renaissance and showed how recurrent phases of financial expansion and collapse underpin broader geopolitical reconfigurations. Occupying a central place in his theory is the notion that the cycle of rise and fall of each successive hegemon terminates in a crisis of financialization. It is this phase of financialization that facilitates the shift to the next hegemon.

Arrighi dates the origin of this cyclical process to the Italian city-states of the 14th century, an era that he calls the birth of the modern world. From the marriage of Genoese capital and Spanish power that produced the great discoveries, he traces this path through Amsterdam, London and, finally, the United States.

In each case, the cycle is shorter and each new hegemon is larger, more complex and more powerful than the previous one. And, as we mentioned above, each terminates in a crisis of financialization that marks the final stage of hegemony. But this phase also fertilizes the soil in which the next hegemon will sprout, thus marking financialization as the harbinger of an impending hegemonic shift. Essentially, the ascending power emerges in part by availing itself of the financial resources of the financialized and declining power.

Arrighi detected a first wave of financialization starting around 1560, when the Genoese businessmen withdrew from commerce and specialized in finance, thereby establishing symbiotic relations with the Kingdom of Spain. The subsequent wave began around 1740 when the Dutch began to withdraw from commerce to become “the bankers of Europe.” The financialization in Great Britain, which we will examine below, emerged around the end of the 19th century; for the United States, it began in the 1970s.

Hegemony he defines as “the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states.” Central to this concept is the idea that historically such governance has been linked to the transformation of how the system of relations among states functions in itself and also that it consists of both what we would call geopolitical dominance but also a sort of intellectual and moral leadership. The hegemonic power not only rises to the top in the jockeying among states but actually forges the system itself in its own interest. Key to this capacity for the expansion of the hegemon’s own power is the ability to turn its national interests into international interests.

Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.

Returning to the question of financialization, the original insight into its epochal aspect first came from the French historian Fernand Braudel, of whom Arrighi was a disciple. Braudel observed that the rise of finance as the predominant capitalist activity of a given society was a sign of its impending decline.

Arrighi adopted this approach and, in his major work called ‘The Long Twentieth Century,’ elaborated his theory of the cyclical pattern of ascendency and collapse within the capitalist system, which he called the ‘systemic cycle of accumulation.’ According to this theory, the period of ascendency is based on an expansion of trade and production. But this phase eventually reaches maturity, at which point it becomes more difficult to profitably reinvest capital in further expansion. In other words, the economic endeavors that propelled the rising power to its perch become increasingly less profitable as competition intensifies and, in many cases, much of the real economy is lost to the periphery, where wages are lower. Rising administrative expenses and the cost of maintaining an ever-expanding military also contribute to this.

This leads to the onset of what Arrighi calls a ‘signal crisis,’ meaning an economic crisis that signals the shift from accumulation by material expansion to accumulation by financial expansion. What ensues is a phase characterized by financial intermediation and speculation. Another way to think about this is that, having lost the actual basis for its economic prosperity, a nation turns to finance as the final economic field in which hegemony can be sustained. The phase of financialization is thus characterized by an exaggerated emphasis on financial markets and the finance sector.

Financialization is the first stage of decline and fall, but because it looks like an economic boom, it confuses everyone as to the fact that the mantle of hegemonic power is already being passed on. And part of the chaos of today’s world likely stems from the apparent fact that China belatedly rejected both financialization as well as its role as the next seat of the travelling empire, while both China and Russia are systematically destroying every attempt to expand the hegemon to global proportions.

It’s a long piece, but read the whole thing. The Long Twentieth Century is definitely going on the reading list.

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The History of the Byzantine Empire

If you’re a Castalia History subscriber, you just might want to visit the Castalia Library substack today, as there is an announcement there concerning the fifth book in the Castalia History series, the April-May-June subscription book.

Also for Castalia History subscribers: there are about 20 Annual subscribers who still need to renew their subscriptions manually since we are not permitted to do so automatically in this particular situation. If your subscription has not been renewed, or if you need to make a catchup payment, you will receive an email shortly informing you of the need to do so.

And since we’re talking about Castalia History, I strongly recommend the daily excerpt from STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, as the chapters on the tales of the secret services feature stories worthy of an action-adventure movie. The recently completed chapter on Brother James, who travelled through the enemy empire searching for a missing Spanish army that found itself surrounded by allies turned enemies in the aftermath of Napoleon’s decision to replace the Bourbon King of Spain with his brother Joseph, really has to be read to be believed.

In April La Romana had begun to be perturbed at the way in which the stream of dispatches and private letters from Spain, which had hitherto arrived regularly, had suddenly dried up. An officer who got through from Madrid with details of the accession of Ferdinand VII brought a complaint that the Home Government had got no dispatch from the expeditionary force for many weeks. Napoleon had stopped the post at both ends. This caused much alarm and evil surmises. They were more than fulfilled when on June 24th there was delivered to the Marquis a dispatch from Bayonne, announcing that the Bourbons had abdicated, that Joseph Bonaparte had been proclaimed King of Spain, that he had been acknowledged by the whole realm, and that he was to transmit the news to his army, and order the regiments to swear allegiance to their new sovereign.

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Why the Empire Always Falls

Philip K. Dick called it The Empire That Never Ended. Miles Mathis called them the Phoenecian Navy. I call them the Prometheans. Most people today call them globalists, but Jesus Christ called them the Synagogue of Satan. We don’t know what they call themselves, but they a) often appear to identify publicly as Jews and b) always criminalize expressions of Christianity and antisemitism.

And the latter points toward why they always fail, and why they have never, in more than 1,500 years, been able to successfully establish or maintain their own society or civilization despite occasionally possessing all the necessary instruments of power and influence in societies as powerful as pre-Imperial Spain, Tsarist Russia, post-Imperial Britain, or the post-Cold War USA. This cartoon sums up the essential cause of the failure.

For some inexplicable reason known only to themselves, the Prometheans always insist on a completely subjective law. And while that’s very useful for acquiring power, it is absolutely fatal to preserving it, because subjective law necessarily imposes the very sort of inequality that renders a society unstable. This is why every society that has successfully developed into a civilization has an elite that not only practices some form of noblesse oblige, but holds the members of the elite fully accountable to objective laws that are not substantially different than the laws the plebs must obey.

In short, to rule, one will be held responsible. To rule successfully, one must be capable of responsibly looking after the interests of the ruled.

Any elite that does not do so is viewed, correctly, as parasitical and illegitimate, and in Chinese terms, does not hold the Mandate of Heaven. And if there is one thing that is clear about the current Clown World super-regime, it is that it is illegitimate by its own self-proclaimed standard of democracy and its laws are entirely subjective. Which is why Clown World, like Babylon, is going to fall.

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Finland Played for Fools

The Finns are giving up their national sovereignty to Clown World because, despite decades of evidence, they actually believe that the US military is going to defend them against Russia:

The DCA gives the American military access to 15 bases in Finland and allows the deployment of military equipment and supplies on Finnish territory, as well as the free movement of US aircraft, ships, and vehicles. Members of the US military and the facilities they use would also get special legal protections.

When the DCA was signed, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen said it was “a guarantee from the world’s largest military power that they will defend us.”

First, the USA is no longer the world’s largest military power except in two categories, sea power and space power, neither of which is sufficient to defend against Russia’s advantages with regards to infantry power, artillery power, air power, or nuclear power.

Second, the Finns should have probably asked the Poles what Britain’s guarantee was worth, or the Vietnamese, the Afghans, or the Iraqis what their US guarantees secured them in the end.

History strongly suggests that what best protects a small country is neutrality combined with a population willing to defend against any encroachments on its sovereignty. The single most dangerous position to assume is permitting a cowardly or corrupt elite inclined toward surrender that chooses a side in a battle between two major powers in the erroneous belief that this will either a) secure their own positions or b) protect the country.

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Archeology and the Sacred Name of God

There is a very important difference between the Greek and the Hebrew Old Testaments:

The Greek Septuagint Old Testament of 285 BC never used any sacred name for God, nor was such ever mentioned by other ancient writers such as the Israelite historians, Philo, and Josephus, or the later Eusebius, or even the Jewish Aristeas the Exegete who wrote his commentary on the Greek Septuagint. The YHWH word did not appear in any Old Testament text until the Masoretic Text of 1000AD! Nor was the existence of any Hebrew language Old Testament text ever mentioned by ancient theologians, whose work was exclusively with the Greek Septuagint text.

From the viewpoint of modern theologians, it must first be understood that they all still today accept the Masoretic Hebrew text of 1,000 AD as the true ancient language and Old Testament of our patriarchs. Anyone who dared question this assumption would end his career. Since that Masoretic Text includes the four letter tetragrammeton, YHWH, over 6,000 times, theologians are forced to speculate that Moses must have put it in his Pentateuch. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6, p. 1012, reads as follows: “In terms of the biblical narrative, some suggest that Moses derived the name of Yahweh from the Egyptians, while others think Yahweh was a Midianite deity worshipped by the Kenite clan. Moses would have been introduced to this new deity when he married the daughter of Jethro…”

Certainly, Moses would have been acquainted with the Pagan religion of the Egyptians. But, even if the Pentateuch was actually written by Moses in the 15th C. BC, he could not have written it in the Hebrew language which was not formed until the time of the Israelite captivities, from the 8th to 6th centuries BC, when the captive Israelites merged their native Phoenician language with the Aramaic of their captors. Now, I ask you, who wants to raise his hand to claim that Moses adopted the name of a foreign deity as a substitute for “God” or “Lord.”

If we set aside the closed-minded obduracy of modern scholarship, we can see that Moses did not write any text in the modern Hebrew language because it did not exist at that time, nor was there any Hebrew alphabet or script. The oldest Old Testament text known is the Greek Septuagint of 285 BC, and the word does not appear in it one single time, or in any other ancient Israelite writing, with one exception which I will mention now.

To place this information in proper context, recall that the northern kingdom of Israelites, who had turned to other gods, had been purged from the Holy Land during the 8th century BC, along with most of Judea. It would not be until 586 BC that the last three unconquered cities of Judea, namely Jerusalem, Azekah, and Lachish, were defeated. Archaeologists have found eighteen ostraca (clay sherds) in the city of Lachish from about 590 BC, most of them being letters from subordinates to a man named Yaosh, the military governor of Lachish. It is unknown if the writer was Israelite or Babylonian…

At the time of this letter in 590 BC, it would only be four more years before Lachish was conquered as a punishment from God because His Israelite children had gone chasing after Pagan gods.

Now, I’m not a theologian. This should be regarded as a starting point for investigation rather than an end. Even so, in this context, a lot of what is happening today begins to make sense, does it not? And it’s not as if we are not instructed, by the highest religious authorities, that their g-d is absolutely not God, the Father of Jesus Christ. I’ve certainly never witnessed anything positive come out of the Christian esotericism that dabbles in concepts like sacred names and languages.

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