Tag: history

Tween Shakespeare and Shakspere

Ron Unz is finally convinced that “William Shakespeare” was not William Shakspere of Stratford-on-Avon. Which, to be honest, was always pretty obvious considering how unlikely it was that a near-illiterate tradesman who owned no books and never traveled outside of England could have possibly been the great Bard of English literature.

Chapter 1 devoted more than a dozen pages to a very thorough review of the actual name of the Stratford native, demonstrating that in nearly all cases it had been spelled “Shakspere” by everyone in his family across several generations, with the relatively few exceptions generally being those variants produced by clerks who misspelled it phonetically. Meanwhile, that name had never been associated with any of the plays or poems of the great literary figure.

But apparently, the growing early twentieth century challenge to Shakespearean orthodoxy by Mark Twain and others led the academic community to “kill off” Shakspere’s actual name around the time of the 1916 tercentenary of his death. As a consequence, almost all the many appearances of “Shakspere” in published articles relating to the Stratford native were henceforth replaced by “Shakespeare,” thereby partially concealing the identity problem from future generations.

The second chapter focused upon Mr. Shakspere’s six known signatures, showing these to be illegible and seemingly illiterate compared to the many signatures of other prominent literary figures of that same era. This contrast was very apparent from the numerous images displayed.

The next chapter compared the actual paper-trail of Shakespeare with that of some two dozen other contemporaneous literary figures. Ten different categories of evidence were considered, including education, correspondence, manuscripts, book ownership, and death notices. For each of these items, many or most of the other writers yielded such material, but in the case of Shakespeare—the subject of the most exhaustive research efforts—everything always came up totally blank.

Another chapter focused on examples of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark.” With the publication of his plays and poems, Shakespeare had become an enormously prominent literary figure throughout Britain, yet oddly enough nobody seemed to have ever connected him with Mr. Shakspere or the other Shakspere family members living quietly in Stratford. The essay focused upon ten individuals considered “eyewitnesses” whose extensive writings survive and who should have mentioned the great playwright who lived and died in Stratford but who said nothing at all. For example, Queen Henrietta, wife of Charles I, was enormously fond of Shakespeare’s plays and during a visit to Stratford she apparently spent a couple of nights at Shakspere’s grand former home, then owned and occupied by his daughter and her family; but although hundreds of the Queen’s letters have been collected and printed, she never referred to that visit in any special way.

Shakspere’s shrewd business dealing had established him as one of the wealthiest men in Stratford at the time of his death, but not only did his lengthy will lack any literary flourishes, there was no mention of books, nor any plans for the education of his children or grandchildren. He seemed not to have owned any pieces of furniture that might hold or contain books, nor any maps or musical instruments. All this was in very sharp contrast with the many surviving wills of other writers or playwrights.

A short chapter of a couple of pages noted that although the deaths of so many lesser literary figures were marked by an outpouring of tributes and elegies, with some of the individuals even honored with burial in Westminister Abbey, no one seemed to have taken any notice whatsoever of Shakespeare’s passing in 1616. For example, Ben Jonson was then considered close in stature, and upon his death in 1637, at least thirty-three separate elegies were published, but none at all for Shakespeare.

However, as is his wont, Unz goes even deeper. I’ve never quite understood all the arguments for the Earl of Oxford, as I’ve never felt that the author of the sonnets attributed to “William Shakespeare” was necessarily the author of the plays; they have never read as if they were to me. But Unz’s article goes even deeper than that, as the modern ability to analyze texts appears to have nailed down the actual author of the plays, as well as explained the difference between the style of the sonnets and the style of the plays.

It’s very much worth reading if you consider yourself to be an even modestly well-read individual.

UPDATE: the author of the work cited by Unz has a new post, and a new paper coming out, demonstrating that Ben Jonson and others knew the real author of Shakespeare’s plays:

In fall of this year (2025), June Schlueter and I will have an academic paper published that we do expect to make some mainstream news. The paper confirms that no fewer than three satirists identified Thomas North as the original author of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, and Timon of Athens. An abstract to the paper reads as follows:

In this article, we discuss numerous independent proofs that Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, and Ben Jonson all satirized Sir Thomas North as the well-traveled, continental, translating playwright who wrote the “Ur-Hamlet” and other source plays used by William Shakespeare. The satirists identify North as their target in ways typical of the era, including punning on North’s name, quoting his translations, and referencing personal details like his unusual travel experiences and his family manor at Harrow on the Hill. Importantly, we also report here the results of an AI program analysis that also confirms Lodge was, indeed, spoofing North.

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JFK Records Released

March 18, 2025 Release

In accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive of March 17, 2025, all records previously withheld for classification that are part of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection are released.

The National Archives has partnered with agencies across the federal government to comply with the President’s directive in support of Executive Order 14176.

As of March 18, 2025, the records are available to access either online at this page or in person, via hard copy or on analog media formats, at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. As the records continue to be digitized, they will be posted to this page.

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The Return to Sanity

Forty years of Clown World failure – more like sixty, actually – are in the process of collapsing.

The return of sanity to politics is a significant break with the consensus of the last four decades, which produced a liberal system with ambitions to dominate the globe.

As the Soviet Union fell, a paper was published by the RAND Corporation. In 1989 Samuel Hirschfeld wrote on “U.S. Grand Strategy for the 1990s and Beyond” for the Pentagon think tank, and presented four options for the role of the United States at the end of the Cold War.

Three of them would have seen the US draw down, with one offering a “disengagement strategy” – pulling back its military and financial commitments to a minimum. These options would reduce its enormous military budget and allow it, in varying degrees, to spend the resulting “peace dividend” at home.

Only one of the four options demanded an increase in spending and commitments. This was the strategy the US decided to pursue – option one, to become the “Only Global Power”.

The strategy of world hegemony – becoming and remaining the dominant global force – became the grand strategy of the United States. This means everything it did was mobilised to support this goal. Its economic, military and political culture was shaped, along with the production of belief through the sponsorship of mass culture, towards securing world dominance.

This goal is no longer in the national interest of the United States is what the Trump administration’s new direction means. Why is it no longer interested in global supremacy? Why has it pivoted to national renewal in place of building an international empire?

There are two main reasons for this shift. One, the world has changed. Two, these enormous commitments will bankrupt the United States if they are not cancelled. The dream of global hegemony has met with the hard limits of reality. We were made to believe that the end of the Soviet Union meant that the “liberal democratic” system had won, and for all time.

THE UNIPOLAR MOMENT

Defined by Francis Fukuyama as elections plus cheap consumer goods, the fall of Soviet communism was heralded as the “End of History”, with “liberal” consumerism emerging as the perfect system.

This was the ideological basis for the argument that it should be spread around the world, by any and every means necessary – including propaganda, the subversion of sovereignty, and through the more direct means of regime change which is war.

This was the “unipolar moment” – when the world had only one power.

How was that power used?

The idea of a peace dividend was quickly forgotten. Instead of reducing the military and cultural propaganda budget, it was massively increased as a series of wars and dubious attacks furnished a globalist project with a case for a permanent “war on terror”. The US National Security State expanded enormously, with billions spent on domestic and foreign surveillance. Projects such as the National Endowment for Democracy – begun under Reagan to subvert Soviet satellite states and counter Russian influence, were expanded through cutouts like USAID to sponsor a global social revolution.

These activities resulted in the subversion of news, entertainment, and the entire political culture of the Western world, producing a system which was either perfectly suited to produce a global empire – or was totally corrupt and fake, depending on whether you agree with liberal globalism.

This is why the formerly Free World is now managed by corrupt officials in every walk of life.

From Church to State, through the military and judiciary, everyone is managed by zealous political commissars who ruthlessly punish anyone who disagrees with the liberal-global agenda. This agenda, also known as the “rules based order”, seldom defines its obvious principles.

The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has given a simple explanation of what these rules are. “LBGT, open borders and war.” To this description can be added the Net Zero or Green agenda.

Whether you agree with this agenda or not it is enormously expensive to maintain.

DISSOLVING POPULATIONS
The effects on national cohesion are disastrous, as nations are replaced with global supermarkets browsed by borderless bargain hunters. Wages are driven down, and housing costs go up with increased demand, making the raising of a family nigh impossible. Birth rates have collapsed, as the financialisation of the consumer economy has seen real wages stagnant since the early 1970s.

Importing millions more people to fix this problem simply makes it worse, and will lead to the extinction of the nations of the West in short order.

This is not a problem but a solution if you seek to standardise all former nations in a global system.

Yet the costs of this ambitious utopia are endless.

The consumer lifestyle is one of convenience, in which unwanted babies can be destroyed with a pill, and the elderly taught they should dutifully dispose of themselves when they become a burden. In this system there is no higher spiritual purpose to life than shopping, with fornication a close second.

To persuade people that the politics of national and even personal suicide are progressive and desirable is also enormously expensive. The USAID scandal has shown how vast amounts of money were spent to manufacture belief in this diabolical system. Much of our news, popular entertainment, our “thought leaders”, and indeed most of our mass popular culture in music and film and video games are all simply messages from the sponsors of a war on our entire civilisation.

The reason Clown World’s potemkin global village is failing is because it is literally at war with Nature and Nature’s God. It is correctly described as the Empire of Lies because everything about it is quite literally fake and gay. It is sterile, it is uncreative, and it is unproductive. Rather like its cartoon villains, it can be defeated by simply refusing to believe its many lies and deceptions.

This is why “conspiracy theory” looks more like prophecy; because the only thing you can be absolutely certain is not true is what you are being told.

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The First Color Revolution

A fascinating and very detailed article on how the first battle of the American Revolution appears to have been a somewhat of a failed green flag:

Early in this article, we listed reasons why British accounts of Lexington are more credible than American ones. So let’s reconstruct the event based on their reports. Bear in mind that the British were already under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon.

Lieutenant William Sutherland and Lieutenant Jesse Adair were riding ahead of the marching column. As they approached Lexington village, they heard shots to their left and right, but hearing no balls whistling, assumed it was a local alarm signal. Then they then saw a colonist aim his musket at them and pull the trigger – but it “flashed in the pan”; that is, the primer powder failed to ignite the charge in the musket.

Sutherland and Adair rode back and reported this incident to Major John Pitcairn, commander of the lead column. Pitcairn, who had already heard warnings along the road that a hostile force was waiting at Lexington, now told his troops to load their guns and fix bayonets. He then ordered them to advance, but not to fire under any circumstances without orders.

When the British troops spotted the militia on the green, they split left and right to flank them. At this point, the first shots at the green itself were fired. Quoting Lieutenant Sutherland:

We still went on further when 3 shot more were fired at us, which we did not return, & this is sacred truth as I hope for mercy These 3 shots were fired from the corner of a large house to the right of the Church.

The house Sutherland referred to is Buckman’s Tavern. (The “church” and the “meeting house” on the map are one and the same.) Since there were, of course, no repeating rifles then, this means three shooters. The first of these shots might technically be the “shot heard round the world.” But though the militias were noted for their marksmanship, all three shooters missed their targets.

Ignoring the shots, the British kept focused on the militia on the green. Major Pitcairn rode up toward them, and ordered them to throw down their guns and disperse. At this point, both British and American accounts concur that the militia began dispersing. However, according to the British, four or five of the militia suddenly dove behind a wall and fired:

Major Pictairn: “some of the rebels who had jumped over the wall, fired four or five shots at the soldiers.” Lieutenant Sutherland: “instantly some of the villains who got over a hedge [wall] fired at us which our men for the first time returned.” Ensign Jeremy Lister, writing an account several years later, reversed the sequence and said: “they gave a fire then run off to get behind a wall.” Since Pitcairn’s and Sutherland’s accounts were written shortly after the event, they can be assumed more chronologically accurate. Pitcairn’s report also noted that his horse was hit by shots fired from “some quarter or other” and “at the same time several shots were fired from a Meeting House on our left.”

(I would like to interject here that Major Pitcairn, who later died at Bunker Hill, was not a man to whitewash a report; he was widely known for his integrity and courage, such that even the Sons of Liberty paid him respect, a high compliment indeed.)

So, not counting the “flash in the pan,” we have three shots from Buckman’s Tavern, four or five shots by the men who jumped behind the wall, perhaps more from “some quarter or other,” and “several” from the meeting house. Based on the British reports, it appears that possibly upwards of ten shots were fired on the redcoats before they returned fire. According to all British accounts, their return fire was not based on orders given, but was a spontaneous, disorderly reaction to the multiple shots the Americans fired. The green now billowed with musket smoke, and the British officers had to restrain their men with considerable difficulty.

The three men who fired from the corner of Buckman’s Tavern surely knew they were jeopardizing the militia on the green. So must have the men who jumped the wall. It is noteworthy that Paul Revere – whose alarm brought the militia out in the first place – had been at Buckman’s Tavern only moments before the “shot heard round the world” was fired from that very place. The map details Revere’s path, which took him from Buckman’s right through the militia. Was he really there just to haul a trunk, or was he choreographing the incident, passing instructions as he moved along?

Of course, I don’t believe for a moment that the Lexington militiamen were planning to sacrifice themselves as cannon fodder, any more than the mob at the “Boston Massacre.” I suggest that only a few were “in the know” – the individuals who fired the opening rounds from protected places, leaving the men on the green to absorb the fury of British retaliation.

The astonishing thing is that it’s entirely possible that Paul Revere himself fired “the shot heard ’round the world”. The more closely one reviews history, the more obvious it is that only the conspiracy theory of history can possibly be the correct one.

It’s also apparent that the same instruction book is being used over and over again. At this point, one has to look askance at any hysterical assertions about enemy atrocities, particularly those supposedly having targeted women and children.

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Free Trade and Strategic Crisis

Big Serge has an excellent post on the history of naval warfare that happens to touch lightly on the strategic crisis facing the USA today with regards to the production of steel and the post-WWII lack of industrial capacity that has weakened the US military.

At the core of the great naval developments occurring around the turn of the 20th Century was a systematic erosion of Great Britain’s strategic position. This strategic decay was of course a multivariate process which included the emergence of new great powers like Germany, Japan, and the United States, and the evolving industrial dynamics of the world. At its heart, however, the problem was very simple: in the latter half of the 19th Century, industrial technologies began to diffuse from Great Britain to the rest of the great powers, to the effect that British supremacy in industry and critical military technologies became an open question.

A brief perusal of the relevant economic statistics betrays a clear and sustained erosion of British supremacy. In 1880, Britain still accounted for nearly a quarter of global manufacturing output and was by far the leading industrial nation of the world. By 1913, it had fallen in absolute terms well behind Germany and especially the United States, which now boasted nearly 2.5 times Britain’s output. Already by 1910, Britain (formerly the world’s premiere steelmaking nation) produced only half as much steel as Germany and barely a quarter of American steel output.

The immense economic advantages enjoyed by the United States need little enumeration. America occupies a uniquely providential economic geography, being blessed with a pair of accommodating seaboards saturated with natural harbors, an internal Mississippi waterway that is both dense and far reaching to accommodate internal trade, superb growing regions, peaceful borders, and ample deposits of virtually every mineral resource thinkable. In short, it is a country with bountiful mineral and agricultural resources, internal waterways for moving them about, harbors for exporting them abroad, and no meaningful security threats.

The German case, however, bears closer scrutiny. Whereas the United States was characterized by boundless space, free of meaningful external security threats, Germany was intensely bounded in the middle of Europe, birthed into a firestorm of potential enemies all around it. German economic might was little like the American story, characterized by the uninterrupted exploitation of a vast geographic bounty, and more the product of powerful and aggressive German institutions – both of corporations and the state.

The German population grew rapidly into the 20th Century (German birthrates were forever a point of hand wringing for the French). The German population grew from some 49 million in 1890 to 65 million by 1910 – an increase of 32%, compared to an increase of just 3% in France (from 38.3 to 39.5 million) and 20% in Britain (37.3 to 44.9 million). Simultaneously, the consolidation of an impressive educational apparatus ensured that this growing population was highly literate and productive. Around the turn of the century, many European armies still reported high levels of illiteracy among recruits. In Italy, some 33% of recruits were deemed illiterate: the corresponding figure was 22% in Austria-Hungary and 6.8% in France, but a mere 0.1% in Germany. The rapid growth of such a young and educated population benefited not just the German army, but also the burgeoning roster of German industrial enterprises like Krupp, Siemens, AEG, Bayer, and Hoechst. Such firms dominated the emerging 20th Century industries like chemicals, optics, and electrics, and the intensive adoption of agricultural modernization and chemical fertilizers made German agriculture the most productive in Europe on a per-hectare basis.

The explosion of two industrial powers who could not only compete but even outstrip Britain (and one of them right in the heart of Europe) could have no effect other than directly undermining Britain’s strategic position. Matters were made worse, however, but the proliferation of advanced naval technology around the world – in many cases directly abetted by British firms.

In 1864, British military leadership had made the fateful decision to keep artillery production in the hands of the state-owned Woolwich arsenal, despite the emergence of private industrial firms, like the Armstrong company, who were capable of making state of the art naval artillery. Cut out of British government contracts, this let manufacturers like Armstrong with no choice but to seek foreign buyers. When Armstrong built an armored cruiser – the O’Higgins – for the Chilean government, it set off serious alarm bells about the basis of British naval supremacy. The O’Higgins was fast enough to easily outrun any capital ship of the day, but her powerful 8 inch guns made her more than capable of sinking targets in the lower weight class. This suggested a distinctive use case as a commercial raider, able to evade enemy battleships while preying on merchants. Chile, of course, was hardly a rival to Great Britain, but Armstrong’s exploits did not end there. All told, Armstrong would build 84 warships for twelve different foreign governments between 1884 and 1914, and frequently supplied technical systems more advanced than those in use by the Royal Navy at the time – for example, the powerful main battery of the Russian cruiser Rurik, launched in 1890.

The prospect of fast cruisers – optimized for speed and striking power at the expense of armor – was particularly alarming to Britain owing to emerging patterns of agricultural production. The advent of efficient steamships had drastically lowered seaborne transportation costs – a fact that was of the first importance for Britain, as it allowed for the mass import of cheap grain from places like North America, Australia, and Argentina, at costs far below the levels at which British farms could compete. As a result, between 1872 and the end of the century wheat acreage in Great Britain dropped by about 50 percent, and already by the 1880’s some 65 percent of Britain’s grain was imported from overseas. The prospect of swift enemy cruisers capable of intercepting grain shipments while evading the British battle fleets now assumed a potentially existential importance, as for the first time in history London contemplated the possibility that the interdiction of its trade could bring the island to the brink of starvation.

This raised the possibility of a dangerous asymmetry: might it be possible to nullify Britain’s centuries-old naval supremacy without building competing battleships at all? French naval theorists certainly thought so, and it was proposed that France could out-lever Britain on the seas with a fleet comprised entirely of fast cruisers and torpedo boats. Such a program had the additional advantage of being very cheap, with dozens of torpedo boats available at the cost of a single armored battleship. This financial calculus was particularly important to France: after the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prusso-Germans in 1870-71, it was natural that building out the army should be Paris’s primary concern. Therefore, a naval program that promised to outmaneuver the British without eating into funds for the army had irresistible allure. In 1881, the French allocated funds for 70 torpedo boats (halting the construction of armored battleships), and in 1886 the new Minister of Marine, Admiral Aube, launched a new building program for 100 additional torpedo boats and 14 swift cruisers designed to raid enemy shipping.

Taken together, the decay of Britain’s naval supremacy is easy to sketch out. Great Britain had become uniquely vulnerable to asymmetrical warfare at sea, owing to its growing dependence on imported grain, at the same time that technical changes in the form of the torpedo and the fast cruiser gave her enemies the potential to exploit this vulnerability. To make matters worse, the diffusion of the industrial revolution to continental Europe and the United States raised the prospect that Great Britain might no longer be able to simply out-build her enemies. In a sense, the comforting and familiar dynamic of the blockade was now reversed: instead of a powerful British battlefleet insulating the home islands from invasion and blockading enemy ports, the home islands now faced starvation at the hands of fast and cheap enemy raiding vessels armed with torpedoes and modern naval artillery.

The parallels of British decline and the subsequent US decline should be fairly obvious. As Admiral Mahan wrote in The Influence of Sea Power Upon the French Revolution, “we may profitably note that like conditions lead to like results.”

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Projecting on Putin

Clown World propaganda outlet The Atlantic absurdly tried to pin the observable loss of faith in “democracy” across the West on Vladimir Putin:

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration…

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization’s very survival.

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

This is revisionist and characteristically-inversive nonsense. The idealism of “American democracy” has vanished, not due to Putin and Xi cunningly exploiting the advantages of autocracy, but because so-called “representative democracy” has repeatedly and reliably proven itself to be aggressively opposed to the will of the people.

In fact, “Western democracy” is explicitly anti-democratic; genuine democracy that accurately expresses the will of the people is castigated as “populism” or worse. Every time the will of the people is democratically expressed, it is overturned and overruled by the elite’s captive courts; one little-realized consequence of the failure of this faux democracy as a governing system is the way that it has underlined the intrinsic corruption of the court systems which have even less respect for genuine justice than the “representative” institutions have for genuinely expressing the collective will of the people they supposedly represent.

The Founding Fathers were always rightly dubious of democracy. But their intricate tripartite system designed to achieve some of its benefits while avoiding some of its costs has turned out to be even more corruptible, and even worse, than they could possibly have imagined.

The astonishing and observably reality is that both the Russian and the Chinese systems are now superior to the wicked corruption of Western democracies, in both the moral and material senses. And this is not the result of anything the Russian or Chinese leaders have done, it is the direct result of the complete abandonment of the historical principles of Christendom that made the West great.

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We are the Ghost Dancers

The realization that Americans are the Indians now is gradually dawning on more and more people now that the influence of the Boomers and their memories of the 1950s and 1960s are fading away:

At best, at best, we might hope to plant seeds, that our children, and more likely our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, may once again live in a thriving and functional society that does not hate them. We ourselves, we who are live now, are the lost children of history, abandoned and betrayed by our feckless elders, stripped of our patrimony, cursed to have lived to see the last dying embers of the golden age that has now passed, fated from now to know only a darkness that will just become deeper and colder as we live out the rest of our lives. We are Spengler’s Roman soldier, guarding his outpost in Pompeii’s threatening shadow.

I do not say that is what the future holds, only that this is the prevailing sense: things suck, and the suck will only suck harder from here on out. We train and read and pray, not because we think we can roll back the suck, but only to have the strength to endure it, and maybe to carry some small fragments through that will be worth passing on to whoever comes next. We gather to the old symbols because they remind us of who we are, provide some anchor to our identities as the whirling maelstrom seeks to dissolve us into posthuman madness. We practice clean living – insofar as we do practice it, which I think is not very far, let’s be honest – because we know we are under attack, and the drugs and the poisoned food are one of the enemy’s primary weapons.

Irrational hope is a dangerous thing, but to abandon all hope is more dangerous still. The zombie junkies dying in our streets are where the abandonment of all hope leads. Things are unlikely to improve for we Westmen in the near future, or even perhaps in our own lifetimes. Too much is arrayed against us, most especially including our worst enemy: ourselves. Yet the examples of the Ghost Dancers, the Boxers, and the Zealots need not lead to despair. The Amerindian has not regained his lands, but he is far from extinct, and in Canada at least is growing rapidly in numbers, wealth, and political influence. The Han most certainly did regain their country, and while they endured a century and a half of massacre and madness, they have once again taken their place as one of the world’s great peoples. And as for the Jews, say what you will of them, but the destruction of the Temple was certainly not the end of their story, either.

So be it. If we dance, then at least we’ve got some killer beats and grooves to fuel us. But there is no reason to give up hope, however irrational it might seem. The Chinese persisted and got their country back after centuries of foreign rule. The Spanish endured five centuries of foreign rule before expelling all the Muslims and Jews from their country.

We have nothing to complain about except the foolishness of our recent forebears and the innocent stupidity of our youth. Others have faced far more difficult challenges. So start laying the foundation for the next round of Reconquistas. Greatness awaits!

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The Mysterious Omission

Ron Unz delves into the French Revolution and discovers a very interesting omission from Simon Schama’s popular history of that revolution:

Given its great length, Schama’s account provided an enormous amount of detail on the French society of that era and the course of the revolution that suddenly upended it. But his narrative very conspicuously lacked any direct explanation of why that colossal upheaval occurred, instead suggesting the French Revolution resulted from a combination of unforeseen, contingent factors and events. Two years of bad harvests had driven up the price of bread and the blunders of the king and some of his ministers provoked the spontaneous political combustion that brought down their thousand-year monarchy, while further mistakes gradually moved the revolution in an increasingly radical and bloody direction.

This constituted the major contrast with Webster’s account, which instead presented a very different interpretation of roughly the same historical facts. She portrayed the French Revolution in strictly conspiratorial terms as the deliberately planned outcome of particular political plots.

Some of her theories seemed quite unlikely. Her book was written during the height of the anti-German propaganda of the First World War. Therefore, on the basis of extremely thin evidence, she suggested that prior to his death in 1786, Frederick the Great of Prussia had sought to weaken the French monarchy and its Austrian alliance by promoting Masonic propaganda against Queen Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Austrian Empress Marie Theresa, who for decades had been his foremost geopolitical adversary.

But the main conspiracy that Webster described was hardly an implausible one, with neither the motive nor the means being outlandish, and she drew heavily upon contemporaneous sources for her analysis. The individual whom she fingered as the primary orchestrator of the French Revolution had also been discussed by Schama but only given glancing coverage.

As I had mentioned earlier, Philippe, the enormously wealthy Duc d’Orléans, was the king’s cousin and a close heir to the throne, ranked just behind the youngest brother of Louis XVI. Yet rather remarkably, he became one of the major early patrons of the revolutionary movement, even officially renaming himself “Égalité” as a sign of his support.

Among his large personal holdings was the Palais-Royal estate in Paris. Both Schama and Webster emphasized that he allowed it to be used as a hotbed and staging area for revolutionary activism, its private grounds being off limits to the French police authorities. Schama treated this as merely due to his liberal, open-minded tendencies, but according to Webster it was only one of the many actions he took deliberately aimed at destabilizing the ruling monarchy and then replacing his cousin on its throne. Whether or not her analysis was correct, the important role of the Palais-Royal in the early stages of the revolution appeared on dozens of pages of Schama’s text, and indeed many members of the National Assembly later described it as the “birthplace of the Revolution.”

One of the earliest cases of mass urban violence in Paris was a major riot at a wallpaper factory, leading to more than two dozen deaths, and this important story was covered at length by both Schama and Webster. Philippe visited the scene during that incident and threw small bags of money to the cheering rioters. Their attack on the factory was initially blocked by government troops, but after the latter were forced to open their lines to allow the carriage of Philippe’s wife to pass, the rioters poured through that gap and destroyed both the factory and the home of its influential owner. Both authors reported all these same facts, but only Webster treated them highly suspicious.

According to Webster, this was only one of many such examples. She argued that Philippe deployed his vast wealth to recruit thousands of violent brigands, who launched attacks against government facilities and civilian infrastructure, all aimed at fostering the spread of lawlessness, violent unrest, and the resulting wild rumors that would weaken the hold of the king and provoke an uprising. In fact, at one point Schama freely admitted that “later generations of royalist historians” had claimed that many of these incidents were orchestrated by Philippe and his fellow plotters in order to undermine government authority and allow him to seize the throne. But the author then made no effort to either explore or refute those accusations.

A couple of months after that first large riot, Philippe played a crucial role in leading the political revolt of most of the traditional French parliament against monarchical authority, and these members soon formed the new National Assembly in its place.

Later that same year, a mob of Parisian protesters led by women marched on Versailles and violently stormed the residence of the king and queen, who narrowly escaped with their lives. Philippe was later accused of having planned their murder by funding those rioters, who allegedly chanted his name as their new king. Once again, Webster heavily emphasized these facts, while Schama minimized them.

Webster also noted that the colors adopted early on by the revolutionary forces—white, blue, and red—happened to exactly match the colors of Philippe’s Orléans family. Perhaps this was mere coincidence, but perhaps not.

Given her future areas of historical interest, Webster also naturally emphasized that Philippe served as the Grand Master of French Freemasonry, presumably giving him a great web of hidden influence over the elite elements of his society, something obviously very helpful in overthrowing a regime. Schama entirely omitted that potentially important fact, and instead explicitly dismissed all such conspiratorial notions in just a few sentences:

To counter-revolutionary writers, looking back on the disaster of 1789, the proliferation of seditious and libelous material seemed even more sinister, evidence of a conspiracy hatched between godless followers of Voltaire and Rousseau, Freemasons, and the Duc d’Orléans. Was not the Palais-Royal after all one of the most notorious dens of iniquity, where even the police were forbidden from pouncing on peddlers of literary trash? Understandably, modern historians have steered clear of anything that could be construed as subscribing to the literary conspiracy theory of the French Revolution.

Wikipedia is notorious for representing the establishmentarian perspective on historical events and shying away from any questionable conspiratorial claims. But although the page on Phillipe makes no mention of Webster, the factual account it provided seemed closer to her analysis than that of Schama.

We should also not entirely ignore an interesting historical echo that came decades later. After the final defeat of Napoleon, the Bourbon monarchy was restored in France, and two of Louis XVI’s younger brothers then successively held the throne. But in the Second French Revolution of 1830, Charles X was overthrown and replaced by his cousin Louis Philippe d’Orléans, Philippe’s surviving son, who thus finally achieved the goal that his late father had allegedly sought.

Judging Webster’s work and weighing her conclusions against those of Schama is obviously difficult for a non-specialist such as myself, but I can certainly understand why her book was so highly regarded by at least some scholars when it appeared in 1919. Her main historical analysis seemed solidly based upon reliable sources of that era, many of which were only available in French, and she made an effort to weigh these against each other and evaluate their credibility. Her text included well over 1,000 footnotes to such crucial source material, while Schama’s provided none at all, instead merely listing the main works he drew upon for each individual chapter. So to some extent, Webster’s book represented new academic research, while Schama had produced what amounted to a very hefty synthesis and presentation of preexisting material.

All of this raises the interesting question of why Schama’s massive volume so casually dismissed and ignored the conspiratorial analysis that had been advanced by Webster more than three generations earlier.

The answer, of course, is that in order to get published and become the primary English language reference on the French Revolution, it was vital for Schama to conceal the involvement of The Empire That Never Ended.

I’ve read Schama’s work twice. I’ve never read anything by Webster. But I have absolutely no doubt that Webster’s work is more historically accurate and reliable, simply because Schama had to omit what has been, over the course of recorded human history, one of the most important actors and drivers of events, which is the intersection of supernatural and material evil that Philip K. Dick identified as The Empire That Never Ended, that AC calls Cabal, that Vladimir Putin calls The Empire of Lies, and which we label Clown World.

The Romans called it Carthage, demanded its defeat, and sowed its grounds with salt. The Conquistadors called it the Aztec Empire and did their best to eradicate it forever. The Crusaders were corrupted by it. The Inquisitors did their best to root it out of Christendom and have been slandered for their efforts ever since. But regardless of what it is called, it will never die because it is not of human origins and the fallen rulers of this world will always find corrupt human spirits who are willing to serve them in return for the false immortality they are offered.

It’s not hard to understand why the wicked are so slavishly committed to the will of their evil masters. They fear death, as they well should, and they will do literally anything in their futile attempts to avoid their inevitable Divine judgment.

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Batting 1.000

Big Bear was right again. This time about John F. Kennedy. The F… well, let’s just say it didn’t stand for “Fitzgerald”.

In September 1953, she and Jack wed in a lavish ceremony in Rhode Island. By 1960, they were in the White House — and so was Lem, with his own bedroom in the private residence. Jackie confessed to Senator George Smathers, one of JFK’s closest allies, that she could barely stand it.

‘Just one weekend in my life,’ she said, ‘I’d like to have my husband to myself. But Lem is always there, bathing and massaging him, even putting on his shoes and socks.’

Whispers about JFK and Lem’s ‘special relationship’ flew through DC, the press corps, the FBI and CIA — the latter agency worrying that Russia and other enemy states could blackmail the president with such information.

Jackie understood. Her own father, ‘Black Jack’ Bouvier, was a womanizing bisexual. Very little shocked her, and she came to appreciate Lem’s loyalty and discretion, the ‘stress relief’, as Lem often put it, that he provided for Jack.

However, I don’t think this was the big release of the files related to JFK for which everyone was waiting.

UPDATE: I would be remiss if I did not provide a link to Big Bear presenting evidence to a Boomer concerning what the “F” in John F. Kennedy stood for.

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The Glorious History of GG

Grummz praises the OGGers and the consequences of #GamerGate.

It’s time to take credit.

Gamergate really did change the world.

It was the first time normies (like I and others used to be), woke up to how corrupt our journalism was.

We fought back so hard that social media spent millions developing censorship tools to stop us, which were then weaponized against the mass populace.

There IS a gamergate playbook and it is this: TRUTH. We used TRUTH and social media to spread the word, through epic meme battles and more.

We gave rise to the Right media. So many pundits on the Right came from GG and got HUGE.

We helped get Trump elected the first term, because Trump called the media “fake” and that was the GG banner. We wanted it fixed.

We crushed AAA gaming last year and forced Ubisoft to their knees.

We may not be called Gamergate anymore, we may have been smeared and pushed into a corner for years as social media banned us all, but we are the keyboard warriors of truth and we have won the long game.

Now let’s keep going!

Indeed. As it happens, the final track on the SOULSIGMA album is THE RIDE NEVER ENDS, a tribute to GamerGate and all of its leaders, of whom, of course, I am one.

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