Tag: history

History Notes

A few notes for History subscribers as we’re rolling a more books into the final stages of the production process.

  1. The new Spanish cowhide leather will make its Castalia debut with the CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM volumes 1 & 2. There will be no additional charge. We’re not sold out quite yet, but there won’t be very many extras, so keep that in mind if you’re contemplating a History subscription.
  2. We have improved the quality of our paper. Previously we were using the same paper that Folio Society does, but starting with DRACULA for Library and BYZANTIUM for History, we’re moving up to the highest quality offered by the same manufacturer. Neither Easton nor Folio will be competitive with the quality of the materials Castalia is offering by this winter.
  3. The first high-quality bonded leather has arrived at the bindery. We’re still sorting out how our lower-cost line of Signature Society books will be presented, but if you’ve got a book you’d like to see offered in that line, let us know at SG.
  4. Many Annual History subscribers need to renew their subscriptions. Since we changed payment processors, we cannot automatically renew your subscription. If you’re not sure if your subscription has lapsed or not, please email library AT castaliahouse DOT com. Since the History subscription has grown to the point that it is approaching Library print runs, we seldom have any extra books.
  5. NAPOLEONIC WARS is scheduled to be bound on October 1st.
  6. BYZANTIUM Vols 1 & 2 are expected to be bound in November. As is Dracula.
  7. We MAY offer a few goatskin BYZANTIUMs if we have any extras from the sets we are binding for Cambridge.
  8. SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON may – MAY – be out in time for Christmas.
The front endpapers for NAPOLEONIC WARS

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Immigration and the USA

A few of the smarter observers appear to finally be recognizing that not only is diversity not a strength, but that the immigration which was wrongly believed to have been responsible for the century of American greatness is actually assuring the inevitable fracturing of the US polity and the ongoing demise of the American empire.

From my days in high school, perhaps in history class, I saw an invisible common thread that ran through history. Every empire, nation, and city-state had risen with such hope, believing they would last forever, only to fall to dust and be swept aside into a common grave. In recent years, I have grown steadily more concerned about the prospect of a complete democratic breakdown in America. I have studied how such grand empires, always founded for eternity, crumble, split, and then turn into revolutions spawned by civil unrest. I have immersed myself in the centuries of literature describing the polarization of societies and the rise of political violence. It appears that the common source has always begun with this idea of a federal government that then seeks to impose its will upon the people in a one-size-fits-all approach…

Except they still don’t get it. They still subscribe to the ridiculous Melting Pot myth, and erroneously insist that the problem is a) Democrats and b) illegal immigration.

We face the very same crisis in this mass migration of illegal aliens, and the purpose is the very same as I encountered in 1997 in Australia – yet the opposite. Biden opened the border with an Executive Order on the first day he entered office. The Democrats know that their Marxist Agenda, like Communist China and Russia, is losing. The simple stats reveal their peril. This chart takes the total number of seats in the Senate and House and plots the combination held by each party. The Democrats were the slave party and lost during the Civil War. They flipped their fate by adopting Marxism, which was successful during the Great Depression. They have never been able to exceed the highs achieved by FDR at that time and have been making lower highs and lower lows, which, in market terms, is a bear market.

Biden isn’t the problem. Illegal aliens aren’t the problem. The cancer that will kill the USA dates back to 1965 and the Naturalization Act that ensured the demographic demolition of the USA. (Don’t be pedantic, one could also make credible cases for 1913 and 1865.) Unless a nationalist leader the quality of Xi or Putin comes to power and immediately begins a repatriation program of a scale that rivals the Chinese Great Leap Forward, the USA will likely collapse within ten years.

And there is no such leader on the horizon. We know it isn’t Trump. We know it isn’t Vance. And so it will be collapse, which is why major powers like China and Russia, and lesser powers like Iran and Indonesia, no longer consider the USA to be a major limitation on their freedom of action. The US military still has to be respected, but it is no longer feared, as it is only a matter of time before its capabilities are degraded to the point that it can no longer even threaten foreign interventions.

The collapse of the USA isn’t the end of America. In fact, it may very well be good for Americans, since the US government observably isn’t. The patterns of History always play out in the end.

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The Narrative Shifts

It’s fascinating to see that while historians have completely disproven the old Black Legend about the Spanish Inquisition and corrected the number of people prosecuted and executed by several orders of magnitude, Clown World is still trying to present what was a very minor and non-noteworthy exercise in successfully maintaining the social order into one of the worst historical iniquities in human history.

Beyond its endless sunshine and sandy beaches, Spain has a dark history that has stained the nation to this day. For hundreds of years, people were burned at the stake, stretched to death, or otherwise tortured for the sole reason that they were not Catholic.

The Spanish Inquisition is considered to be one of the most shameful and grotesque periods in Roman Catholic history. According to some modern estimates, around 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offences during the three-century duration of the reign of terror, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed after enduring some of the most spine chilling acts of torture imaginable.

Extensive archival material contains accounts of torture victims’ cries and descriptions of funeral pyres, atrocities which continue to horrify historians to this day. The horrors of the Inquisition are among some of the most sadistic acts of terror in history, which extended into every area of Spanish society and almost every corner of its global empire.

This is total historical nonsense. Even if we assume the very worst of it, the Spanish Inquisition was less lethal than children’s bicycles are today. The Inquisition prosecuted 421 people per year for the crime of pretending to be something they were not in order to feign loyalty to the Spanish crown; just last year, the British crown prosecuted 419,000 people in England and Wales alone, many of them for simply expressing their opinion about the migrant invasion of their country.

Modern Britain is more than three orders of magnitude worse than the Spanish Inquisition, and that was prior to the establishment of the Keir Starmer regime. This is an indisputable historical fact.

And as for those 3,000 to 5,000 executions over a period of 356 years, during the 38-year reign of the King of England, Henry VIII, as many as 72,000 people are estimated to have been executed.

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Susie’s World

CALVIN AND HOBBES has turned out to be a warning about the bureaucratic madness of Clown World.

While the comic seems like a light and cheery look into childhood, there are very dark undertones. Like the main character in “Adventure Time” doesn’t realize he lives in a nuclear wasteland, “Calvin and Hobbes” is set in a world that has no place for a rambunctious boy. There’s an inherent loneliness permeating the comic from the title on, that Calvin only has an imaginary friend who understands what makes him tick. Calvin never comes across a figure that can channel his energies toward finding his way in the world…

Susie Derkins, on the other hand, has the world catered to her sensibilities. She loves school because she loves the accolades she receives from authority figures. Her aspirations, whether they are having kids or being a girl-boss, are catered to and considered mature. Whenever she gets harassed by Calvin, authority figures immediately swoop in to defend her. It’s not her fault the world she was born into gave her more advantages and comfort, and there’s nothing wrong with her taking advantage of it. She’s just in a protective bubble, and has no understanding of what is required to keep her small world turning.

In a way, the comic showed the stark realities of being a young boy trying to find his way. He is surrounded by types like Susie Derkins, who can’t help but be Susie Derkins. The real failure happens in the men who should have been there for him, channeling his energies toward finding a place in the world, and pushing back against the busybodies and scolds who want him to act more like a pliable, conformist little girl.

It’s a good piece, well worth reading for any fan of the comic.

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She Knows Some Bad People

This is a short piece about Neil Gaiman by a woman with whom I was briefly acquainted; I also knew the “Mike” to whom she refers, and even spent quite a bit of time talking to him about Traveller at the one science convention I ever went to, which I believe was called Minicon. He had contributed a few adventures to Marc Miller’s excellent SF game, and I was interested in obtaining the video game rights to it. Elise was a bit of a character, as she attended the Minnesota writers workshop that consisted of Lois McMaster Bujold, Pat Wrede, Joel Rosenberg, Bruce Bethke, and Peg Kerr, among others, at which I was a guest for a few months in the mid-90s. However, I was always a bit confused as to what Elise was doing there, as she never wrote anything and didn’t appear to ever read anyone else’s work either. I don’t believe Mike aka John M. Ford belonged to the writer’s group, or if he did, he never showed up while I was there.

The one thing I remember about Elise was that she was what I consider to be a full-time professional feminist. So, if she says she didn’t know Gaiman was up to the various shenanigans of which he has been repeatedly accused, I have absolutely no doubt that she didn’t, because she struck me as the sort of woman that is obsessively interested in complaining about every form of male oppression. Which tells us that Gaiman was more than a bit circumspect in his predations, and that he was very much a self-controlled and intentional stalker of insecure and starstruck young women.

I’ve known Neil Gaiman since the very early nineties, when Mike said a friend was coming to a local book-centric fantasy convention and that we should look after him. Apparently he sounded trepidatious or something; Mike said something about how of course there were the comics but the friend said he’s only written one book and he only wrote half of that. Sure, Mike, we can make your friend welcome. So we did. I wrote elsewhere about how this left me for some years with a habit of checking in on Neil at events or when he had a recording session where I worked. I’d go by to see how he was doing, ask whether he’d eaten lately, see if he needed anything. I didn’t quite march over and tell him to put on a sweater, but it was like that. (He always had a leather jacket; a sweater wasn’t necessary.)

Over the decades there were shared meals in various cities, late night convention conversations, visits to the house, gatherings and parties, some with musicals written by Mike because Neil had made a typo on the invitation too good for Mike to resist. For many years I’ve navigated to Neil’s house by singing the American Pie filk Mike wrote about Neil’s invitation to his annual Guy Fawkes Day party which contained the driving directions. One verse ended “The tower lights will be alive; you’ll see the house as you arrive. But do not park upon the drive!” because that last bit was emphasized on the invitation.

Mike and Neil meant a lot to each other. Back in the day, watching the two of them talk writing at a restaurant or sushi bar or a room at a convention late at night was a true delight. When Mike died, Neil helped me through the aftermath. He gave one of the eulogies. He did kind things. He wrote a foreword for Mike’s posthumously published book Aspects which was pretty much another eulogy. He told me it was the hardest thing he ever had to write, and that we were very lucky to have had Mike in our lives.

One time at the house Neil gave me beeswax from his beehives. I used it to make pendants where meteorite dust was sealed into tiny corked glass bottles with the beeswax and sterling silver wire. Stardust in a bottle.

For decades, my metric for buying a new pair of glasses was that whichever one made me wonder what Neil would think of it was the one I’d probably buy.

He took me to my first Tori Amos concert many years ago.

So yeah, I’ve been friends with Neil for somewhere upwards of three decades.

After the news broke, I walked through my house, and every room had something Neil had written, or some art or music that he had introduced me to, or something he had given me. He’s woven through so many memories, with Mike and without. I looked through various correspondence, all the notes with “So much love to you,” all the snippets of news and shared silliness. Years. Decades.

And you know what? Not one bit of that cancels out any of what the survivors say. He’s been my friend for a long time. And I believe them. Which is a tangled set of feelings from one angle, but from another perspective what rings true to me is clear. I believe them.

When I see people saying “Oh, everybody knew,” I shake my head. Everybody did not know. I didn’t know. Nobody in any of the whisper networks told me, or warned me, or asked me to help anyone who had been hurt. And I never figured it out for myself. When the news broke, I was shocked.

Thinking back, I wondered whether anyone had thought he must be OK to be around because of people like me who were his friends. It’s happened before. I don’t like being used as cover… What I say to my friend when we next talk will be between me and him. What I most want to say is “You know fairy tales. You WRITE fairy tales. What did you think was going to happen??”

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Educating the Englishman

Richard Dawkins, who is considerably less intelligent than the average individual who has never read one of his books tends to imagine, attempts to criticize the USA’s Constitutional limits on democracy. This is a rather transparent attempt by the hapless evolutionist to avoid criticizing his own kingdom’s even more stringent assaults on democracy, probably because if he did, he would be arrested, imprisoned, and convicted within 48 hours. Devon Eriksen wasted no time in setting Dawkins straight:

Richard Dawkins: Electoral College could deliver presidency to party with 73,000 votes against “losing” party’s 260,000. US Senate election: Single voter in Wyoming wields more influence than 65 Californians. Convicted felon can be President but not superbly qualified US citizen born abroad.

Devon Eriksen: You see, the people who wrote the Constitution understood that a nation is more than just a collection of people. It also consists of all the organizations, processes, institutions, and industries required to actually keep those people alive and have a functional society.

All of these things need political power to defend and advance their interests, allowing them to function.

So, the Constitution itself was designed as a balancing act. Some things are up for a vote, and others are not. And when representation is apportioned, it is not doled out equally by head count.

This is not a bug. It’s a feature. And it’s incredibly wise.

The more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the fewer actual thinking human people are employed by life-sustaining industries.

That’s a good thing. It is the whole fucking point of technology… free up most of your population from whacking at the dirt with a stick to survive, and they can be engineers, businessmen, tradesmen, entertainers, and artists. People are freed from drudgery, invent cool stuff with all their newfound spare time, and life is better.

But what about those life-sustaining industries? They still have to run. They still need political power in order to make sure the laws protect them, and society sees to their needs. But their work involves very few people, and a lot of machines.

And machines don’t vote.

So it’s not only very important, but gradually more and more important, to the health of your nation that the political will of a cattle rancher in Wyoming carries more weight than that of a fashion magazine editor in San Francisco.

Because fewer and fewer people in your society even understand what is necessary to keep everyone fed.

With the partial exception of Switzerland, the West never had any democracy. In the USA, it is not only limited by the Constitution, but even more strictly by the courts, which make a habit of overturning every referendum that doesn’t please the elite and mostly foreign oligarchy that actually runs the empire masquerading as a “republic”. But both “democracy” and “freedom” are useful rhetorical terms for the imperial propagandists, as they don’t have any substantive meaning that tends to contradict the inverted definitions that are used today.

Dawkins, like most secularists, is orders of magnitude away from understanding anything about the modern world. In rejecting every aspect of the supernatural, he is completely unequipped to make any sense at all between the ancient war between the fallen god of Carthage and the fallen god of Rome, much less the Divine Invasion that is in, but not of that war.

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Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge

That’s what this desperate counteroffensive looks like to me, albeit in miniature:

Zelensky decided to launch what some Russian commentators are calling the single largest land assault into Russian territory of the entire SMO thus far. What stood it apart from the previous mid-level raids on Belgorod region and such, is that this time it wasn’t the ‘Russian Legion’ paramilitary group—made up of disgruntled traitor Russians—but rather the full force of the AFU itself, by way of the 22nd Mechanized Bridge, from what I’ve seen so far. Details are still coming in, but it’s said to have been around 3 battalions or 1 brigade in size, though some report several hundred troops for now.

The attack was decently well-coordinated and utilized the full breadth of combined arms warfare, with Ukrainian forces leading with a mass FPV drone attack, and pulling up mobile air defenses to cover the advancement.

This isn’t going to change anything on a strategic level. The historical Ardennes Offensive utilized nearly 400,000 German troops divided into 16 infantry divisions, 8 armored divisions, and 2 armored brigades and it accomplished virtually nothing except to delay the Allies a month or two.

One single mechanized brigade will not even do that. This is a PR attack conceived to give Clown World an excuse to keep laundering money in Ukraine. See, Ukraine isn’t defeated yet! Why, they’re taking the war to Russia! If we just send them another few hundred billion, they’ll take Moscow and capture Vladimir Putin!

What a stupid waste. The problem is that Russia can’t defeat Clown World by killing Ukrainian soldiers, because Clown World doesn’t actually care about Ukrainians.

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Evil Redefines

Americans and Afrikaners are “colonizers” on “stolen land” despite 400+ years of presence in America and South Africa. But the Rwandan immigrant who murdered British children is “Native Welsh”.

But evil not only redefines, it uses whatever definition happens to suit its purpose at the time. At no point in time does it simply utilize the historical truth:

  1. Most, though not all, of the land in the USA was stolen from the American Indians. This isn’t debatable, as there are over 386 treaties, many of them broken, on record to this effect, with the US government alone.
  2. Most, though not all, of the land in South Africa was stolen from the Khoisan and Bantu peoples by the British and the Dutch.
  3. The current wave of immigrants to Great Britain, Europe, and the United States are still in the early stages of the process of colonizing and stealing the land, their populations simply haven’t reached the point of the numbers required yet. But they already outnumber the initial European colonizations of South Africa and the USA.

A society that won’t use its military forces to prevent large numbers of incompatible outsiders from settling in their lands will not survive unless it changes course and expels them all. That being said, things can still be restored, as the example of the Spanish Reconquista proves. But that will require a degree of ambition, determination, and intolerance that neither Generation X nor the Millennials possess; the Boomers obviously don’t count because they welcomed the invasion in the first place and they won’t be around for any future restorations.

But for now, the conquest continues apace.

Furious locals are facing new-build hell amid plans to turn their sleepy village into a megacity to give Labour a boost in its bid to create millions of new homes. The proposal, put forward by a thinktank, looks to dramatically increase the population of Tempsford, Bedfordshire, from 600 to as many as 350,000 people.

UKDayOne described it as ‘probably the best-connected greenfield site in Britain’ for the Labour Government to build on to help fulfil its housing targets. The New Towns for New Britain report highlights the opportunity as it would sit at the intersection of the East Coast Main Line and the planned East-West Rail line.

Villagers say the plans are a ‘joke’ and have threatened to move away if it comes to fruition as it could turn the ‘beautiful little village’ – where locals rejoice to see deer and rabbits roaming around – into a town bigger than Cambridge.

The English still don’t get it at all. Threats to move away are no threat at all. Getting rid of them is the objective! This is an invasion far more destructive than the one that was threatened by the Germans, a conquest that is considerably more advanced than the failed one that never crossed the channel, and yet the English still don’t even recognize it as a war on them.

It’s really remarkable how many whites and Europeans still have no idea what has happened, and what continues to happen. Perhaps it takes an American Indian to recognize the pattern. After all, how can Americans recognize that their land is being stolen when they refuse to recognize that they stole it in the first place?

So let me spell it out for you. Again. You’re the Indians now.

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A Carthaginian Counterattack

Simplicius posits that the devastation of the West is the revenge of the Carthaginian remnant on the heirs of Rome:

Why do current Western leaders seem to be intent on destroying their own countries? One strong possibility is that the fanatical messianic leaders of Israel view all of the West as the descendants of Rome. Recall that Rome was the last great enemy of the Jews, having destroyed their Second Temple and exiled them, not to mention creating the off-shoot Christian religion.

If you study the history of Rome’s collapse, you’ll note it can be argued that it never truly collapsed but rather lives on in today’s Western society. Roman elite and royal families merely transitioned to a large extent into the new Vatican church which began to rule the world for the next millennium. Most of Europe held allegiance to the Church, and was in some offshoot or another just an extension of the Roman Empire and civilization—for instance, the Holy Roman Empire which existed through most of the Middle Ages.

Israeli cult leaders secretly view the Western world—that is, Europe and the U.S.—as basically New Rome, and thus believe they are exacting their ‘revenge’ on the old Romans for what they did to the Jews. It’s perfectly understandable to an extent, wouldn’t you hold the same view, and want some form of retribution?

Thus, this ‘cult’ has no qualms about installing leaders to subvert and destroy all of Rome, err…Europe—just look at Macron, ex-banker at Rothschild Group:

It has, however, always puzzled me why Rothschild would be fine with his native England being destroyed. After all, I have seen an interview with Jacob himself where he said despite his love for Israel, and his family’s role in its creation, his ultimate love and allegiance remained to the UK—and I don’t think he’s lying, after all, he doesn’t choose to live in Israel, does he?

The answer is that I don’t believe all the elements of this global hydra are one monolithic mechanism. They work in conjunction on overlapping interests, and watch out for one another when they can, but do not necessarily subscribe to all of each other’s pursuits. There are many ‘emergent’ properties to the whole mechanism, though it’s not all one or the other. Jacob himself likely truly believed bringing migrants to his ‘beloved’ UK would somehow benefit it, because other more cleverly devious men convinced him of that. But the true apex of the pyramid—the fanatical cultists who may, as David Icke claims, be Sabbatean Frankists—are probably steering this play with a much more direct intent, as described earlier. One thing is certain, while the moneyed powers get all the shine for being global ‘rulers’, the true ‘hand’ behind them must necessarily be the fanatical religious faction. Whether it’s the Jesuits, the Vatican, the Sabbateans—whatever you choose to believe—it can only logically be a spiritual fanaticism capable of such rigorous devotion to total dominion of the earth.

That’s part of the deeper historical truth, to be sure. Clown World bears remarkable similarity to Carthage and other past irruptions of evil. But the rest of it boils down to Satanists seeking to destroy Christendom. And those at the top aren’t merely fanatic, they’re not even human. It is, in the end the same spiritual war that is waged for every human soul.

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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.

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