Tag: history

Speaking of Cancellations

The Japanese are not at all happy with a gaijin who appears to be attempting to reinvent Japanese history by taking a page from the Mary Beard “everyone was Black” school of history. After all, if both England and Sweden can be “nations of immigrants”, why shouldn’t Japan be too? To top it all off, he’s not even a historian at Nihon University, he’s just an English teacher.

On Thursday, Variety revealed that JoAnn M. Hunter, the choreographer of “School of Rock” and “Bad Cinderella,” has been hired to direct the upcoming musical “Yasuke: The Black Samurai,” which is expected to open in 2026. With few historical documents on Yasuke, the story is likely to be chiefly based on the words of Thomas Lockley. An associate professor at Nihon University, he co-authored the first book in the world about Yasuke in 2019. But how much of what he wrote about the man dubbed the first non-Japanese samurai is true? Not a lot, according to netizens.

The English author has received widespread criticism, particularly in the past few days, and has reportedly deleted his Facebook page. The biggest backlash has been against his claim that several feudal lords in Japan were happy to make use of Black slaves. There have been close to 200,000 posts on the subject. “The rumor that black slaves were popular among Japanese daimyo needs to be properly refuted and stamped out, otherwise it could cause big problems later,” tweeted one user. There have also been allegations that Lockley edited Yasuke’s Wikipedia page under the name Tottoritom.

There are also reports that Lockley has been fired from Nihon University, which are unconfirmed, but a petition to fire him has already been signed by 20,000 Japanese people.

Interestingly enough, the only article about Lockley on Japan Today was marked “expired, no longer available”. He would be well-advised to leave Japan; Meiji-era radicals would literally behead him for this sort of insult to Japanese history and culture.

DISCUSS ON SG

Napoleonic Wars

We’ve finished the interior of the fourth book in the History series, STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. For a look at the endpapers and the title page, visit the Castalia Library substack. There are 50 copies remaining, so if you’d like to acquire one, you can do so at the Arkhaven store. A significant discount from the retail price is available to all History, Library, and Libraria subscribers, but it is not the usual discount code, so please visit the substack for details.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Doability of Mass Deportation

The Dominican Republic’s mass deportations of Haitians prove that it is very easy, very humane, and very practical to deport even large numbers of immigrants if the Clown World government doesn’t stand in the way:

Following the success of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines decreed in 1804 that all white people on the island were to be killed on sight. Following the success of this gruesome act of genocide, Haitian forces sought to export their revolution by invading the Spanish side of the island, which had a much smaller, sparse population, though they encountered resistance in this crusade due to the high percentage of mixed race and white people living there. Dominicans racially classified as white, which included some light-skinned African-mixed people, were stripped of their citizenship and land by the Haitian constitution and forced out of their cattle ranching trade to work for blacks in slavery conditions in the cash crop industry.

A group of multiracial and white Dominican nationalists called the Trinitarios, led by Spanish descendant Juan Pablo Duarte, led a rebellion against Haitian dictator Charles Rivière-Hérard and expelled his forces from the eastern portion of the island in 1844, establishing the divide that exists today. Though the occupying army was numerically superior to the Dominicans, Rivière-Hérard was himself undermined from within by an uprising of Haitian blacks enraged by the fact that their leader himself had some European ancestry.

Today, the trauma of Haitian rule continues to inform Dominican identity. This national sentiment helped Abinader, of Spanish and Lebanese ancestry, successfully win the 2020 election on a platform of ending Haitian migration and cutting through red tape to deport those already in the country. It was estimated at the time of Abinader’s victory that Haitians, most of them in the country illegally, numbered somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million out of the Dominican Republic’s 11 million population.

Soon after taking office, Abinader began preparations to keep his promise. His Modern Revolutionary Party, with consensus support including from opposition groups, passed a law in 2022 to form a new immigration enforcement police unit that would specialize in targeting job sites known to hire Haitian illegals for unannounced mass round ups. In 2013, a constitutional reassessment removed birthright citizenship from all those born to foreign parents since 1929, which granted the Dominican government the powers needed to detain and remove 170,000 Haitians from the country by the end of 2022.

The next year, what the US State Department has condemned as “mass deportations” reached unprecedented levels. That year, 250,000 Haitians living within Dominican territory were identified by immigration authorities and expelled, while an additional 200,000 voluntarily repatriated. A substantial portion of these Haitians had their citizenship retroactively revoked under the 2013 constitutional amendment, which means they are not recognized as either Dominican or Haitian citizens, but this did not stop Abinader from sending them back at a rate of 50,000 immigrants per month. In one instance during this crackdown, 20,000 Haitians were deported in a time span of nine days. The small and relatively poor Dominican Republic now has one of the most active and prolific immigration enforcement systems on the planet.

From January to April in 2024, the rate of deportations fell to a total of 30,000 in four months, but this reduced level of enforcement is more of a testament to the government’s effectiveness in removing Haitian migrants in previous years rather than any dampening of their burning enthusiasm. Last May, the Abinader government completed a 250-mile concrete wall, modeled after Israel’s barrier to Syria in the Golan Heights (which, in the Israeli case, the United States supports), permanently preventing Haitians from illegally crossing into the country. The Dominican government has adamantly refused to host any Haitian refugees in its territory and has rejected demands from the UN that it grant citizenship or residency permits to multi-generational migrants regardless of how long they have resided in the country.

Within the Dominican landscape, Abinader’s policies are uncontroversial. He was recently re-elected in a landslide and all of the major parties support his anti-migrant efforts. The opposition to these policies is restricted largely to outsiders: Washington, the United Nations, and various foreign funded non-governmental organizations who have sought to undermine the effort.

The Haitian migration amounted to about ten percent of the Dominican population. That’s equivalent to about 35 million people in US terms. In the UK, the entire post-Windrush invasion could be sent back to their homelands, while in Europe the post-2015 migrant crisis could be entirely undone before 2030. And it’s no more “racist” for the European nations to ensure their futures than it is for the Dominican nation or the Jewish state to do so.

The only thing standing between the continuation of Western Civilization and its demise is Clown World. And Clown World is not only intellectual bankrupt and debunked by reality, it is actively being defeated by the sovereign nations every day now.

If you’re a one-issue voter, this would be the one vital issue upon which everything else rests.

DISCUSS ON SG

Naked Clown World

The system hasn’t so much snapped as it has been exposed. What I understood in the late 1990s, and what Wang Hunin understood some 20 years before that, is now being admitted by the mainstream media and recognized by the public. Zerohedge contemplates a significant admission by Gerry Baker, Editor at Large for the Wall Street Journal, who, says: ‘We’ve been “gaslit’ and deceived” – for years – “all in the name of ‘democracy’”.

Something significant has snapped within ‘the system’. It is always tempting to situate such events in ‘immediate time’, but even Baker seems to allude to a longer cycle of gaslighting and deception – one that only now has suddenly burst into open view.

Such events – though seemingly ephemeral and of the moment – can be portents to deeper structural contradictions moving.

When Baker writes of Biden being the latest ‘flag of convenience’ under which the ruling strata could sail the progressive vessel into the deepest reaches of American life – “on a mission to advance statism, climate extremism and self-lacerating wokery” – it seems probable that he is referring to the 1970s era of the Trilateral Commission and the Club of Rome.

The 1970s and 1980s were the point at which the long arc of traditional liberalism gave place to an avowedly illiberal, mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) that today fraudulently poses as liberal democracy.

Emmanuel Todd, the French anthropological historian, examines the longer dynamics to events unfolding in the present: The prime agent of change leading to the Decline of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident), he argues, was the implosion of ‘Anglo’ Protestantism in the U.S. (and England), with its entailed habits of work, individualism and industry – a creed whose qualities were held then to reflect God’s grace through material success, and, above all, to confirm membership of the divine ‘Elect’.

Whereas traditional liberalism had its mores, the decline of traditional values triggered the slide towards managerial technocracy, and to nihilism. Religion lingers on in the West, though in a ‘zombie’ state, Todd avers. Such societies, he argues, flounder – absent some guiding metaphysical sphere that provides people with non-material sustenance.

However, the incoming doctrine that only a wealthy financial élite, tech experts, leaders of multinational corporations and banks possess the required foresight and technological understanding to manipulate a complex and increasingly controlled system changed politics completely.

Mores were gone – and so was empathy. Many experienced the disconnect and the disregard of cold technocracy.

So when a senior WSJ editor tells us that the ‘deception and ‘gaslighting’ collapsed with the CNN Biden-Trump debate, we should surely pay attention; He is saying the scales finally fell from peoples’ eyes.

What was being gaslighted was the fiction of democracy and also that of America declaring itself – in its own scripture – to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity: America as the exceptional nation: the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden; the “last, best hope of earth”.

The reality was very different. Of course, states can ‘live a lie’ for a long period. The underlying problem – the point Todd makes so compellingly – is that you can be successful in deceiving and manipulating public perceptions, but only up to a point.

The reality was, it simply was not working.

The same is true of ‘Europe’.

The EU’s aspiration to become a global geo-political actor too, was contingent on gaslighting the public that France, Italy and Germany et al could continue to be real national entities – even as the EU scooped up all national decision-making prerogatives, by deceit. The mutiny at the recent European elections reflected this discontent.

Being subversive and inversive, the Clown World system relies upon secrecy in order to operate successfully. Now that it has been exposed, and now that its enemies see it clearly for the Empire of Lies that it is, its defeat is assured.

But what will come next will not be what was before.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of the Conservative Party

The Tories may be going the way of the Whig Party soon, and they absolutely deserve suffering the worst electoral defeat in British history by having thrown away 14 years of political power and accomplishing nothing more than to slavishly serve their masters in Clown World:

The UK Labour party is predicted to win a landslide victory in the British general election, according to a preliminary exit poll released as voting closed on Thursday evening.

According to the poll, Labour will win 410 out of the 650 seats, up from 205, in the House of Commons, while the previously governing Tories will secure 131 seats, down from 344.

The Liberal Democrats are predicted to win 61 seats, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK 13, and the Scottish National Party (SNP) ten. The Greens are slated to win two seats and the Welsh party Plaid Cymru four.

Sky News has described the Tories’ result as “the biggest electoral collapse in British electoral history.”

All the Tories had to do to stay in power was three things: Brexit, Deportation, and Neutrality in Ukraine. Well, four things, as a genuinely English Prime Minister would have also gone a long way.

Instead, they went one-for-four and quite rightly paid the price. The pendulum is moving toward sovereign nationalism, and the sovereign nations are going to win their war against Clown World. And there is no need for a Conservative Party that couldn’t even conserve the nation.

Labour, of course, won’t be any better. But at least they are open enemies rather than false friends.

UPDATE: It’s interesting to note that the Scottish National Party has been totally destroyed in Scotland. They had their chance, but they blew the independence referendum and thereby demonstrated that there was no need for the party to even exist. And all they had to do to win it was limit the vote to Scottish citizens actually resident in Scotland.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Russian Historiography of WII

This looks like a book worth reading once I’m finished with Jack Vance’s Treasury.

The Postil (TP): You have written a trilogy on the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War as experienced by Soviet Union. The first part of this magisterial study will be published soon. What is your overall aim?

Michael Jabara Carley (MJC): My trilogy, as I call it, deals with the origins and early conduct of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina). The VOV is the name given to the war in Soviet and Russian history arising from the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. My work runs from January 1930 to December 1941. My project was first entitled “A Near-run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II,” supported by an “Insight” research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My initial objective was to write a narrative history of how the USSR, Britain, and the United States, powers hostile to each other during the interwar years, became allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis. The work evolved from an envisioned single volume into three dealing with Soviet relations with the great and lesser European powers and the United States.

TP: Is there a difference between a Western historiography of WWII and a Russian one?

MJC: Oh yes, the difference is enormous. During the war, it was clear to all who had eyes to see that the Red Army played the key role in smashing the Nazi Wehrmacht and winning the war in Europe. The United States and Britain played supporting roles. After 1945 the war became an important object of propaganda in the Cold War. The new narrative was that the United States or Churchill single-handedly won the war in which the USSR was practically invisible. In the western media, histories, iconography, Hollywood films, comic books, more recently video games, the Red Army is invisible. The key moment in the war was operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, when in fact, they were an anticlimax, grand to be sure, in a war whose outcome had already been determined by the Red Army. In the context of the Cold War, it was normal that the United States would seek in various ways to rub out the memories of the Soviet role in the war, for otherwise how could you portray the USSR as a menacing communist enemy.

I’ll report back on it once I’ve finished it. It should be interesting to see if he supports or contradicts the Icebreaker theory of Operation Barbarossa.

DISCUSS ON SG

It’s Not Just Books

The destruction of knowledge at the behest of the Zero Historians isn’t limited to printed matter.

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.

In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.

This is why Castalia Library is expanding its efforts from just publishing leatherbound classics to leveraging its subscriber base to preserve knowledge in general. Among our efforts, which will include opening up Infogalactic editing to all Library and UATV subscribers and making it easier for them, is releasing free Library ebooks for all Library, Libraria, and History subscribers. We’ll also provide an inexpensive bundle of those titles for which we have permission available for sale as ebooks.

We’ll go with a standard cover for all of them, although we’ll update the logo once we’ve got the Castalia Library-specific one instead of the modified History variant. An example can be seen below. An announcement with a link will be made on the Castalia Library substack within the next week; if you haven’t subscribed there yet, we very much encourage you to do so.

We’re also going to start doing books that are transcriptions of worthwhile video works from various UATV and other video creators. If this is something of serious interest to you – and by serious, I mean cleaning up least five 1,500-word transcriptions per week – please email me with TRANSCRIBE in the subject line. We can provide an AI-transcribed text as a starting point, but it takes about twice as long to go over the whole video and edit it for print as the length of the video. So figure 20 minutes of work for a 10-minute video.

This is going to be particularly important in light of the meltdown we hear is coming in the book industry. The financial takeover of Simon & Schuster by KKR, a private equity firm, combined with the incipient failure of Barnes & Noble, means that the distribution system is going to be further converged and cease to function normally, which will have a tremendous negative effect on all of the mainstream publishing houses going forward.

UPDATE: MTV News isn’t the only site destroying its own archives in the last year:

Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned. Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks

UPDATE: Wikileaks is also being wiped.

Julian Assange has been instructed to direct WikiLeaks to destroy any remaining classified documents and information in their possession and provide an affidavit once completed, as part of his plea agreement.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: The War on Knowledge

An email from a reader illustrates how even the profession of the Librarian has been inverted in order to destroy the knowledge they are charged with preserving.

My wife and I are volunteers for the Friends of the Library at the branch library in the college town where we first met, where every year we help out at the book sales. A month ago we received a peculiar donation. It turns out the new director of the library at our alma mater made the decision to liquidate the library’s special collections. Among those liquidations was a special collection library that had been initiated in the nineteenth century by a member of college founder’s immediate family.

In my years at college, I treasured this special library – it was housed in an elegant top-level room in the college’s oldest building, and required special access to visit. Nearly all the books were old, and all of them were on special subjects of great interest to me – literature, poetry, theology, the sciences. Many titles had bookplates with the names of the alumni who donated them over the years.

After some investigation I discovered that this new head of the college library pulled all of the books out of that special library, and put them in an enormous rented bin in the main lobby, with a sign suggesting that students could use them for art projects and scrapbooking, you know, to cut and paste their contents to express themselves and be “creative.” The majority of books sat there for weeks, and then she called our group to donate them to our book sale.

The last day of the book sale is bag day, where a brown grocery bag of books is only a dollar. What the library doesn’t sell at the end of sale is brought to a pulper. I pulled all of these books and placed them in private storage—if I hadn’t, they would have literally been shredded a week ago.

The process is ongoing. I’m told that the librarian is closing all of the special collections in all departments of the college, so I don’t want to share any names just yet, but before this is over, I hope I’ll have saved at least a thousand out-of-print books.

This is not new. Well over a decade ago, another university library in my state was destroyed. This library, in a literal ivory tower built exclusively for holding and preserving hundreds of thousands of books, was at one time among the top ten libraries in the nation. A new library director had not only decided to gut the
interior of the building and destroy all of the original architectural detail and period decor, but he also pulled out and destroyed a great majority of the books to make room for “computer stations.” They did not sell the books, they did not offer to donate them, and the director specifically instructed staff to discard the books in locked university dumpsters so that they couldn’t be taken by anyone.

The bad, the ugly, and the false. That is the makeup of the world these people are actively contriving and constructing. It really is time to build a consortium of knowledge, physical and digital, containing archives of the world’s books and works that are under attack and being taken away.

The Serpent promises knowledge and provides nothing but ignorance. What we have collectively taken on as a responsibility with Castalia Library and Infogalactic may eventually prove to be one of the most important things any of us have ever done. We are the only true Librarians and we stand between Man and the state of Zero History that Clown World seeks to impose on him.

The Zero Historians need to destroy all human knowledge because only in its absence can they present their lies as truth. And indeed, the better we understand their motives and methods, the more it appears this is not the first time they have attempted such a grand endeavor.

Inversion is always the key. Now it should be perfectly clear what a fundamental lie the asserted conflict between Christianity and Science, and between Faith and Knowledge, has always been.

DISCUSS ON SG

How the Hapsburgs Took Over England

Or, was Henry VIIIth actually the good guy and was the dissolution of the monasteries motivated by something more than simple royal greed?

The story of Henry VIII is the story of a conflict. The conflict that is occurring is the conflict between Habsburg and Tudor houses. The house of Habsburg is, as they had previously done in many other European countries, attempting to gain political control of England through marriage and through its influence over the Catholic Church.

Which is to say: The Habsburgs are trying to take over England during the reign of Henry VIII.
Henry’s actions – exiting a marriage to a Habsburg connected figure, and exiting the Catholic Church – are direct responses to Habsburg attacks on England’s sovereignty through those same two avenues. The Habsburg attack comes through marriage and the Catholic Church.

However I have never seen that story recounted. Instead, I have only seen bizarre retellings where half the plot is left out, the Habsburg part. Obviously, if you omit the geopolitical motivation for Henry VIII’s actions from the story then his actions seem insane. The situation reminds me a little bit of the experience of accidentally walking into a spiderweb. Have you ever done this? It is totally jarring. You flail your hands and look like an idiot trying to get the bits of spiderweb off of your face. To an outside observer who can’t see the spiderweb you just walked into, you look spastic, manic. But there is a reason you’re acting that way. The conflict with the Habsburgs is that spiderweb for Henry VIII. You need to know it is there to understand his actions.

Is there any evidence of a Habsburg coup attempt? The evidence I have that the Habsburgs are trying to take over England during this period is that the Habsburgs do take over England in this period.

What? Yes. ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor weds Phillip II Habsburg – the son of the Habsburg Emperor – just 5 years after the death of Henry VIII.

Phillip Habsburg becomes King of England Jure Uxoris – joint sovereign with Queen Mary. England comes under Habsburg control, along with Spain, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Flanders, Bohemia, Germany, Italy, Hungary and… Did I forget any? At this point the Habsburgs are basically kings of the Universe, totally drunk with power. In England they are literally burning their enemies at the stake.

The Habsburg method for expanding their territory was fairly simple:

  1. Find a failing kingdom in need of aid or protection.
  2. Offer to use your influence in the Catholic Church to aid the Kingdom in exchange for an advantageous marriage, protection money, or both.
  3. Betray the Kingdom and use your influence instead to install your newly wed Habsburg as the sole sovereign.

Are you starting to understand why the story of a medieval Republican who miraculously defeats something that looks suspiciously like today’s democratic institutional oligarchy has never been properly told?

The Habsburg Coup in Henry VIII’s England

I’ve literally never, ever, heard this theory before, but at first glance, it sounds extremely persuasive. It also tends to raise an obvious question about the ethnicity of the Hapsburgs, who were both highly consanguineous and physically deformed. They certainly appear to have worked out their own method of “color revolutions” centuries before the neocons, although it may simply be that they were inspirations for the Rothschilds rather than predecessors of some kind.

And, of course, it would be yet another example of a “religious war” actually being about something other than the purported religious conflict, which tends to track with what we’ve learned about everything from the Crusades to the 30 Years War.

To think some people actually believe that history is boring… Definitely read the whole thing!

DISCUSS ON SG