Tag: history

They Know They Lost, Right?

It’s no wonder that NATO has been demolished in Ukraine with military leadership of this intellectual calibre and historical knowledge:

The Ukrainian government needs to look at what Germany did in WWII to stand a chance against Russia, according to Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army forces stationed in Europe. Hodges, who retired as a lieutenant-general in 2017, has long been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine. In an interview with the Australian YouTuber Perun, published over the weekend, he repeatedly cited examples from the Second World War to argue that Kiev can defeat Moscow on the battlefield. “They are gonna have to increase production of ammunition and weapons in Ukraine,” Hodges said. “Some of these things are already happening, but it is possible when you are at war to increase production, even with Russian missiles raining down on your cities.” “I mean, think about what Germany did in 1944. Aircraft production for the Luftwaffe peaked in 1944. That’s after more than two years of steady bombing by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Corps bombing the hell out of German cities. But yet German aircraft production increased. So I think Ukraine can do that with some improving efficiency. Some Western companies are already there helping,” he concluded.

On the one hand, he’s right. Germany did increase its aircraft production in 1944. And so did Japan, which not only increased its shipping tonnage produced in 1944, but even managed to build more aircraft in 1945 than it did in 1942.

  • 1942: 8,900
  • 1943: 16,700
  • 1944: 28,200
  • 1945: 11,100

On the other hand—–and I would argue this is the more salient point—–both Germany and Japan were not only defeated militarily, but were defeated so comprehensively that they were forced to surrender unconditionally and are still under military occupation nearly 80 years after their respective surrenders.

Forget the Kiev regime. Forget Ukraine. And forget NATO. Anyone who knows anything about military history recognizes that both of them are already finished, they simply haven’t stopped quivering yet. The USA is now facing global military defeat on every single front, even as it is prostrate before the biggest invasion in all of human history.

At this point there appears to be nothing that can stop the All Nations Alliance from defeating Clown World. And for those who would cite the US and Israeli nuclear arsenals as a possible emergency measure, I repeat: there is nothing. I didn’t understand it when I first read the book as a child, but in retrospect, Jeff Sutton was telling us what the programming was back in 1968.

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Gunning for the Dollar

Russia is openly advocating for other nations to follow the lead of itself and China in abandoning the dollar standard for international trade:

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in a statement, that it is very important for all the BRICS member states that they develop sustainable financial relations and settlements within the organization. He made the statement while speaking on Monday at the Russia-China Financial Dialog in Beijing, where he was conducting meetings with Lan Foan, his Chinese counterpart.

The BRICS alliance of developing nations, made up currently of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been hashing out ways for member countries to make payments in local currencies. The bloc wants to accelerate its growth by reducing its reliance on the US dollar and the euro.

Siluanov said, “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries. Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them.”

We have the rare historical privilege to witness the decline and fall of an empire. While we tend to think of such things as being sudden and catastrophic events, they actually tend to take place over such an extended period of time that most of the empire’s inhabitants don’t even realize anything is changing until well after the changes have taken place and they have become accustomed to the consequences.

The events of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take place over century. The decline of the US empire is only measured in decades at this point, but even at this accelerated rate, it is taking place too slowly for the average individual to comprehend, even if he is sufficiently acute to notice some of the changes.

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Social Media is MPAI in Action

I posted this on Gab:

War is not a sport. Fatalities are not points. You cannot tell which side is winning a war simply on the basis of comparative KIA. Remember, the Allies took 77 percent of the total casualties in WWII. And yet, the Axis lost the war.

I’m sure it will surprise precisely no one to discover that the Smart Boys policing the Internet couldn’t restrain themselves.

@voxday Did the “Axis” really lose? I concur with General George Patton: “Gentlemen, I’ve come to the inexcusable conclusion that we defeated the wrong enemy. We should have aligned with the Fascists to defeat the communists, not aligned with the Communists to defeat the Fascists.”

Yes, the Axis really fucking lost WWII. Under no possible interpretation can it be said that the Berlin-Toyko-Rome Axis, which is the full and proper name for the WWII military alliance collectively known as “the Axis”, did not lose the war. The signatures on the various surrender documents should suffice to prove this beyond any reasonable doubt.

The particularly stupid thing about this specific Smart Boy posturing is that regardless of whether he and General Patton were correct to conclude that the wrong enemy was defeated, the point is that it was, definitively, defeated.

@voxday 77%??? WTF??? ONLY if you count the Russian casualties as Allies!

The Soviet Union absolutely were among the WWII military alliance known as “the Allies” which were opposed to “the Axis”. Not only that, but the Soviet Union was easily the most important Ally, and almost certainly could have won the war by itself. Both the USA and the UK faced only a fraction of the Axis forces that the Soviet Union did, and fielded military forces that were only a fraction of the forces fielded by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union defeated the primary Axis element, Germany, with help from the USA and the UK, but it almost certainly would have defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan without any help if the two Anglo states had stayed out of the war.

The Lesson, As Always, Is This: More than 9 times out of 10, the average individual would be best served by remembering to shut the fuck up instead of offering one’s unsolicited opinion. And that goes double for the self-styled Smart Boys.

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The War on Christmas 2023

The current phase of the War on Christmas began with the desacralization of the Christian holiday, which combined an attempt to create alternative secular carols with the creation of alternative fake holidays like Hannukah(1), Festivus, and Kwanzaa.

However, it’s very clear that as the Greatest Generation has mostly died out and the Boomers have become increasingly irrelevant, the younger generations are not falling for what has always been an anti-Christian psychological operation.

It’s interesting to see how the subversive attack on how Christians celebrate Christmas was considerably more successful than the attempt to wage open war on the holiday by pushing alternatives to it. In fact, it now appears that the attempt to push alternatives on the population has backfired, by making Christians cognizant of the importance, if not the necessity, of defending their own holy days.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

(1) While “the festival of lights” is a legitimate rabbinical holiday that has been celebrated by religious individuals for centuries, the ethnic “Hannukah”, as it is presently advertised in the USA, and, to a lesser extent, the UK, is no more historically genuine than Festivus or Kwanzaa.

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Off the Record

Seymore Hersh writes a posthumous, must-read expose of one of Clown World’s most insidious and destructive clowns, the late Henry Kissinger:

When I arrived at the Washington bureau in the spring of 1972, my desk was directly across from the paper’s main foreign policy reporter, a skilled journalist who was a master at writing coherent stories for the front page on deadline. I learned that around 5 pm on days when there were stories to be written about the war or disarmament—Kissinger’s wheelhouse—the bureau chief’s secretary would tell my colleague that “Henry” was on the phone with the bureau chief and would soon call him. Sure enough, the call would come and my colleague would frantically take notes and then produce a coherent piece reflecting what he had been told would invariably be the lead story in the next morning’s paper. After a week or two of observing this, I asked the reporter if he ever checked what Kissinger had told him—the stories he turned out never cited Kissinger by name but quoted senior Nixon administration officials—by calling and conferring on background with William Rogers, the secretary of state, or Melvin Laird, the secretary of defense.

“Of course not,” my colleague told me. “If I did that, Henry would no longer deal with us.”

Please understand—I am not making this up.

Kissinger, who had made no public remarks about my writings on the My Lai massacre and its cover-up, suddenly invited me to the White House for a private chat. I had just returned from a reporting trip to North Vietnam for the Times—I was the second mainstream American reporter in six years to be given a visa by Hanoi—and we were to discuss it. I had written about North Vietnam’s view of the secret peace talks Kissinger was conducting with the Vietnamese in Paris, but that was not the issue. He wanted, so I concluded, to stroke me. There was no question that, as a total loose cannon suddenly installed at the Times, I was of special interest.

He asked me about my impressions of the North Vietnamese, as seen in a closely watched three-week visit to Hanoi and elsewhere in the North. I had been taken to areas that were under heavy American bombing attacks and witnessed the North’s amazing ability to repair bombed-out rail lines within a few hours after an attack. Extra rails and the equipment needed to make repairs were hidden every few hundred yards along the tracks from Hanoi to the main harbor in Haiphong.

He asked about the morale of the residents in Hanoi. I told him I had seen no signs of panic, fear, or desperation in my many unguarded (so I believed) walks throughout the city. Every morning, in fact, a group of schoolboys en route to class who had seen me when I first arrived would walk by my hotel in central Hanoi at the same hour—I made a point of being outside then—and cheerfully say ‘Good morning, sir!” in English to me. But I was always aware that I was in enemy territory.

The schoolboys and other anecdotes prompted Kissinger to summon a prominent former ambassador who was his senior aide for matters related to the war and say to him, in front of me, in obvious mock anger: “This fellow is giving me more information about the morale in the North than I get from the CIA.” I remember thinking “Is this it? Is this all he’s got? Does the guy really think this kind of obvious flattery is going to win me over?”

I met Henry Kissinger on the same night, and at the same party, that I met Donald Trump. What was fascinating that it was not Trump who was the center of attention, despite his wealth, fame, and Ivana looking rather slinky despite her age. It was Kissinger upon whom all of the wealthy and powerful were fawning, and around whom they were clustered.

Apparently they knew quite well where the power was centered. And while I was not at all favorably impressed with the man himself, I was impressed by everyone else’s reaction to him.

This quote, I believe, epitomizes everything one needs to know about Henry Kissinger.

The deadline for the front page was around 7 pm and close to that time Al Haig telephoned me. “Seymour,” he said, which got my attention—those who knew me, including Al, called me Sy—and said the following words, which I will never forget: “Do you believe that Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Germany who lost thirteen members of his family to the Nazis, could engage in police state tactics such as wiretapping his own aides? If there is any doubt, you owe it to yourself and your beliefs and your nation to give us one day to prove your story is wrong.”

Needless to say, Kissinger not only did it, but was caught red-handed while doing it by the FBI.

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Thereby Raising the Question

“We are a people that has been kicked out of every place we’ve ever lived for 2000 years. Every. Single. Place.”
—State Rep. Randy Fine, (R-Israel)

I’m no historian, of course, but I don’t recall either Florida or the USA having been around for 2,000 years. Well, I suppose it’s an improvement that they’re no longer pretending to be real Americans who love football, apple pie, and Christmas.

It certainly doesn’t look like as if they’ve learned anything from the last 2,000 years or that the pattern is going to change anytime soon.

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Russia’s Volkskriege

Big Serge explains the transformation of the Russian approach to its war with NATO/Ukraine:

Russia began a Kabinettskriege in 2022 when it invaded Ukraine, and found itself mired in something closer to a Volkskriege. Russia’s mode of operation and war aims would have been instantly recognizable to a 17th Century statesman – the Russian professional army attempted to defeat the Ukrainian professional army and achieve limited territorial gains (the Donbas and recognition of Crimea’s legal status). They called this a “special military operation.”

Instead, the Ukrainian state has decided – like the French National Government – to fight to the death. To Bismarck’s demands for Alace-Lorraine, the French simply said “there can be no reply but Guerre a Outrance” – war to the utmost. Putin’s cabinet war – limited war for limited aims – exploded into a national war.

Unlike Bismarck, however, Putin has opted to see Ukraine’s raise. My suggestion – and it is only that – is that Putin’s dual decisions in the autumn of last year to announce a mobilization and to annex the disputed Ukrainian territories amounted to a tacit agreement to Ukraine’s Volkskrieg.

In the debate between Moltke and Bismarck, Putin has chosen to follow Moltke’s lead, and wage the war of extermination. Not – and again we stress this – a war of genocide, but a war which will destroy Ukraine as a strategically potent entity. Already the seeds are sown and the fruit begins to bud – a Ukrainian democide, achieved through battlefield attrition and the mass exodus of prime age civilians, an economy in shambles and a state that is cannibalizing itself as it reaches the limits of its resources.

There is a model for this – ironically, Germany itself. After the Second World War, it was decided that Germany – now held to account for two terrible conflagrations – could simply not be allowed to persist as a geopolitical entity. In 1945, after Hitler shot himself, the allies did not demand the spoils of a Cabinet War. There was no minor annexation here, no redrawn border there. Instead, Germany was annihilated. Her lands were divided, her self-governance was abolished. Her people lingered on in a stygian exhaustion, their political form and life now a plaything of the victor – precisely what Moltke wanted to do to France.

Putin is not going to leave a geostrategically intact Ukraine which will seek to retake the Donbas and exact revenge, or become a potent forward base for NATO. Instead, he will transform Ukraine into a Trashcanistan that can never wage a war of revanchism.

Clausewitz warned us.

This is why studying history, even as an amateur hobbyist, is invaluable. The ability to recognize the patterns that play repeatedly play out over time will often provide the intelligent, but informed amateur a better basis for understanding and anticipating events than the professionals and political decision makers.

It’s educational to note that while the professionals and politicians never understood the significance of the Special Military Operation designation, many of the armchair military historians did.

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Copyright is Corporate Welfare

You won’t often hear a publisher or an author speak out against the manufactured government-monopoly granted legal right that is “copyright”. And I’m not doing so because there are some books by deceased authors that we would definitely publish if their copyright was expired, or because I believe that the extended copyright of life+70 years is both immoral and absurd even though I do. In most cases, we have absolutely no problem obtaining the necessary rights from the copyright holders.

What I’m addressing here instead is the reality of the situation that surrounds the issue, because nearly everyone who opines about it is doing so in complete ignorance and on the basis of some wildly false assumptions.

First and foremost, the idea that no one will write books if they are not “protected” by copyright that “gives them the opportunity” to sell and profit from them is absolutely and utterly false. It is such a ridiculously stupid statement that anyone who argues this should never, ever, express their opinion on anything ever again, because they are not only literally retarded, they are also historical null sets. I will never regard anyone who presents this argument as a cognitive adult, because it requires a complete absence of both thought and relevant information.

Copyright was invented in The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. Previous “copyrights” were simple royal monopolies granted on an individual basis, which should make plain the true foundation of the so-called “moral right”. Regardless, the fact is that all of the pre-1710 classics were written sans copyright, thereby exploding the ahistorical notion of copyright causality.

But one doesn’t need to know anything about history to realize that economic factors do not drive the impulse for human creativity. Consider the current numbers reported by the book publishing industry.

  • 787,700,000: Total US print editions sold in 2022
  • 526,000,000: Total US ebook editions sold in 2022
  • $22,600,000,000: Total US print revenue in 2022
  • $2,040,000,000: Total US ebook revenue in 2022
  • $8,900,000,000: Big 4 publisher revenue in 2022 (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan)
  • 4,000,000: The number of new books published in 2022.
  • 2,300,000: The number of self-published books published in 2022
  • 600,000: The number of self-published books published in 2014
  • 80: The percent of total book distribution controlled by Amazon.
  • The average book sells 200 copies in its first year and 1,000 over its lifetime on Amazon

In other words, each print edition produced an average $28.69 in revenue while each ebook produced an average $3.88 in revenue. So the average book produces $27,182.80 lifetime revenue, with at most $17,668.82 going to the average self-published author and $997.30 to the average mainstream published author. Obviously, since Colleen Hoover sold more than 4,730,000 books in 2022, the median book lifetime revenue is considerably lower, but the averages are sufficiently informative to make it clear that absolutely no one is writing books in order to make less than $20,000 over the entire sales lifetime of the book.

Still less is copyright required to defend the interests of any heirs to that massive average windfall.

The fact is that copyright is nothing more than corporate welfare that primarily benefits five companies in the publishing industry and is defended by a very small number of corporate-favored authors who are the chosen beneficiaries of those five companies. Copyright is neither a moral right nor a property right, it is actually a violation of the economic rights of hundreds of millions of people for the benefit of a very, very small number of individuals connected to an insignificant number of corporations.

As for me, I would write even if absolutely no one ever read my books. I have written and published 27,435 blog posts and more than 500 opinion columns without ever getting paid for a single one of them. And not only am I very, very far from alone in that regard, I can count on one hand the number of writers I know who will not write if they don’t get paid for it.

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An Army of Gammas

The US Army’s strange recruiting tactics make a lot more sense once you realize it probably isn’t mobilizing for a war with a near-peer military like China or Russia, but rather, in preparation for the large-scale violent suppression of civilians:

Do you remember when the testosterone-driven “Top Gun” was the ultimate recruitment tool for the US Navy? It’s easy to see why—the movie was packed with adrenaline, rugged men, beautiful women, and plenty of what’s now termed “toxic masculinity.” Contrast that with today’s military, which has totally shifted focus. Instead of seeking out traditionally masculine men, their recruitment now heavily includes the LGBTQ community and men who wear pantyhose. This change might be why their recruitment numbers are in the toilet.

The United States military’s newest recruitment tactic is taking a really bizarre turn. Gone are the days of scouting for robust young men at gyms or high school football practices. Now, they’re adopting a different strategy: dressing up as anime characters and visiting “conventions” across the nation.

The Bolsheviks didn’t unleash an elite and well-disciplined military against the kulaks of the Ukraine. To the contrary, they unleashed a horde of coked-up gammas to steal, slaughter, and suppress the population, if the accounts of the Holodomor are even remotely accurate.

So, either the US Army has no idea what sort of young men it is going to attract by shifting its focus toward recruiting sexual deviants and “socially-awkward weirdos” or it is preparing for a very different sort of war than most people anticipate it fighting.

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