Tag: history

The True Author of Shakespeare’s Plays

Yes, we should have known. Ben Jonson was openly telling everyone who wrote all along, right at the front of the First Folio, that it was Lord Thomas North, the translator, among many other works, of Plutarch’s Lives.

In 1623, Ben Johnson wrote one of the most famous odes one poet ever crafted for another—To the Memory of My Beloved the author Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us. The poem was prominently placed at the beginning of the first official collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio. Yet some eight years later, the poet Leonard Digges wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jonson’s ode, denouncing it as an attack against Shakespeare. He was so furious that he wanted Jonson’s supposedly abusive poem removed for the publication of the Second Folio (1632)—and replaced with Digges’s own defense of the Stratford playwright, answering Jonson’s insults “point by point.” In 1693, the renowned Shakespeare enthusiast John Dryden responded similarly to Digges, labeling Jonson’s poem as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.” And Brian Vickers has noted that Dryden’s “judgment has been echoed many times.”

But no one has been able to explain what was so insolent and invidious about the poem—until now. As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle. And, at the end of this article, you are almost certainly going to be asking yourself the same question I think about daily: HOW ON EARTH DID EVERYONE MISS THIS?

Jonson.. is saying when we turn from tragedy to Shakespeare’s comedies, the great tragedians (and the reader) would be better served to ignore the Stratford dramatist altogether and focus instead on:

the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

And the subject of these lines—the English author who rose from the ashes of a “comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth” is not hard to determine.

Jonson chose his words carefully—carefully enough that his reference to North’s Plutarch’s Lives is unmistakable—or as its actual title reads: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED …” Not surprisingly, the signature feature of North’s translation is that it is not just a collection of biographies; rather its extremely peculiarizing feature is that Plutarch is writing “COMPARISONS” of Greek leaders with Roman ones. Each section of the book contains three chapters—a biography of a Greek, a biography of a Roman, and a chapter examining correspondences between the two.

All of the titles of these third-chapters in the section followed the same format: “The COMPARISON of [Greek] with [Roman]” – with “COMPARISON” in all-caps. For example, “THE COMPARISON OF Alcibiades with Martius Coriolanus.”

Moreover, Jonson, with his specific description of “insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” even appears to be hinting at the parallels between Alcibiades and Coriolanus as they are the lead characters of two parallel tragedies—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—in the very Folio he is introducing. As shown in the following passages, according to North’s translation, the Greek Alcibiades, one of the main characters of Timon of Athens, was known for his “insolence,” while the Roman Coriolanus was known as “haughty.”

Howbeit in Alcibiades there was nothing, but his insolency and vainglory that men misliked.20

This Timon was a citizen of ATHENS, that lived about the war of PELOPONNESUS, as appeareth by Plato, and Aristophanes comedies: in the which they mocked him, calling him a viper, & malicious man unto mankind, to shun all other men’s companies, but the company of young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly feast.

This latter passage, referring to Timon’s great feasts and his relationship with Alcibiades, describes the main focus of Timon of Athens and again describes Alcibiades as an insolent Greek. And this is how he is portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, while the Greek warrior was known for his insolence, his Roman counterpart was a paragon of haughtiness. North’s translation of the story of Coriolanus emphasizes “the austerity of his nature, and his haughty obstinate mind.” More, all editions of the Roman tragedy mention his pride, condescension, and aloofness, with many editors describing Coriolanus as “haughty.” In fact, examples are so numerous that specific citations are pointless. A Google Book search for the phrase, “haughty Coriolanus,” yields more than 150 results. And it’s likely that the vast majority of all editions of the Roman tragedy describe him thusly.

Jonson’s remark in the front of a Folio that contains four tragedies based on Thomas North’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED” including two parallel plays that invite comparisons between the “insolent” Greek Alcibiades and the “haughty” Roman Coriolanus is not a coincidence. Rather, Jonson is not only exposing the author behind the Folio but emphasizing the intricate entanglement among North’s plays and his translations.

I found the evidence for North’s authorship to be entirely convincing even before this. The textual similarities indicated by the plagiarism analysis is simply too strong to deny. Nor do I find it remotely troubling to accept that this means that the sonnets were written by someone else; they never struck me as having been authored by the same individual and I wondered about that even back in high school.

But this evidence from the First Folio would, in itself, be sufficient. And it’s truly amazing that no one else ever clocked it.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Lethal Cancer of Globalization

Clown World is literally killing its host civilization. Again.

If an American, German, French, Canadian, or Dutch citizen examined the state of their nation in the 80s/early 90s, when globalization went into overdrive, and compared it to today, what would they see? The greatest wealth transfer from the middle class to the oligarchy in history, permanent war, a ramped-up police state, weaponized immigration overload, wild inflation, and Rothschild Zionist control of every facet of society. The neocon/neoliberal ravaged Global South fared worse.

“Western” parasite globalization takes locally grown carrots, transports them around the world, and either sells the marked-up carrots back to their place of origin or forces the local carrot-growing region to sell their good carrots globally and buy inferior and more expensive carrots from abroad. This wastes energy and produces unnecessary pollution. It also creates superfluous middlemen, toll collectors, and debt. Flooding a domestic market with foreign products that the domestic market can produce crushes local labor.

Digital platform globalization takes it to the next level, whereby everything sold digitally (which is practically “everything.”) pays a cut to the digital toll collector, extracting wealth from artists, musicians, content creators, entrepreneurs, and other value producers, and transferring the profits to the oligarchy through Amazon, Apple Music, PayPal, etc. Worse, by moving humanity’s data to the digital platform, Big Tech finance not only controls, but in reality owns, all intellectual property from antiquity to the present.

The remarkable thing is how Clown World’s advocates have absolutely nothing to defend it with. Nothing works anymore. Despite being drenched in an absolute torrent of pornography in every form, young women would rather work as virtual prostitutes and young men would rather play games than get together; sexual oversaturation has proven to be a far more effective libido-killer than censorship and chaperons. Despite the supposed benefits of free trade and massive immigration, the economies are collapsing and the once-mighty industrial power Great Britain now has the manufacturing capacity of a small Caribbean island circa 1700. Despite 72 childhood vaccines, young adults are unhealthier than they have ever been.

And yet, all the clowns can do is to bleat “democracy” and “racism” and “good for the economy”. All they have to offer is more of the lies that have already been comprehensively disproven by current events and observable reality.

Any society that wishes to survive into the future, let alone thrive, needs to reject the poison fruits of the so-called Enlightenment and actively disavow Clown World and all its fake pomps.

DISCUSS ON SG

There Are Not “Two Wests”

The New York Times unconvincingly attempts to pass off Clown World as the genuine Christendom it subverted:

After the fall of Communism, fledgling democracies chose to again believe that an association with the West — its image freshly burnished and shining — would bring freedom, wealth and stability.
Now that idea of the West has been broken in two. One half belongs to Mr. Trump and other predatory populists. The other is composed of those who still believe in liberal democracy, respect for international agreements and the right of nations to self-determination.

For now, small countries that have thrown their lot in with America find themselves in a geopolitical trap. For Ukraine in particular, Mr. Trump’s words and actions have triggered something close to an existential panic. But the rest of the direct neighbors of Russia need a new plan, too: alliances of democratic values.
The European Union seems to be fundamental to this effort. For those countries that are already members, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Estonia, the question of how to move forward is simpler. The E.U. is also an aspiration for those countries which aren’t yet members, but have candidate status. As in the ’90s, integration will require adaptation and change — first and foremost, perhaps, in military spending, as the bloc embarks on a plan to spend hundreds of billions to rearm the continent. (Here, Poland is already a model.)

But Europe is only part of the answer to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy of betrayal. Countries like Canada and South Korea cannot join the E.U., but will still seek security alliances with those countries that still share their democratic values — Canada is already moving closer, and is in talks to join the bloc’s military expansion.

It is the end of a chapter. But in alliances of security and values, there will be another: Strange as it may sound, for maybe the first time in history there are two Wests.

There are not “two Wests”. The West, aka Christendom, is a) Christian, b) European, and c) based upon the Graeco-Roman legal and philosophical tradition. It is now represented by the Nationalist Right, which is still suppressed and repressed by all of the Clown World institutions.

Clown World is a satanic inversion of the West that it pretends to be. It is a) Satanic, b) multi-ethnic, and c) based upon talmudic legality, nihilistic philosophy, and a consent-based morality. Every single one of its proclaimed virtues and principles are inversions of the historical values of the genuine West, and every single one of its definitions are false and intentionally misleading.

  • Democracy = rules by an unelected controlled elite
  • Money = debt
  • Nation = ideological idea
  • Person = unaccountable state-created paper entity
  • Sin = rejection of the narrative
  • Misinformation = truth
  • Truth = official narrative
  • Math = official narrative
  • Logic = official narrative
  • Science = official narrative
  • Christianity = judeo-christianity
  • America = idea

The reason Clown World will fail and fall, as it has repeatedly over the course of previous human civilizations and recorded human history, is that it is fundamentally at war with both Nature and Nature’s God. So, counter-intuitively, the stronger it becomes and the more its inversions and perversions take root throughout a society, the closer that society is to complete collapse.

Clown World can only survive through parasitism and subversion. Once a society actually tries to live upon the basis of its principles, it soon discovers that it cannot, and that its weakness will not permit it to survive its encounter with any society that rejects Clown World. Which, of course, is why post-Western Europe’s attempts to defeat Russia will comprehensively and conclusively fail, and why a failure of the God-Emperor 2.0 root out Clown World in the USA would inevitably result in ceding global dominance to China.

There are not “Two Wests”, and this is far from the first time in history that The Empire That Never Ended subverted a society or a civilization. As always, Clown World’s narrative is a factually-incorrect inversion of objective reality.

DISCUSS ON SG

Infertility is the End of Democracy

A highly astute observation on how the ascent of the so-called nationalist autocracies and the demise of the so-called democracies appears to be inevitable due to the way these democracies heavily bias their policies toward the least-productive members of their societies:

As far as I can tell, the most notable political science results of the 21st century is democracy cannot work well with low fertility rates. All converge on prioritizing retirees over workers and immigrants over citizens escalating social transfers beyond sustainability. I think this means we should try to understand non-democratic regimes better since they will represent the majority of global political power in the future.

It seems to me that the great graying and mass immigration simply are the end of democracies as we understood them. Just as failure to manage an economy and international trade were the end of Soviet Communism as we understood it. Low-fertility autocracies seems to have little trouble with reindustrializing or waging war when needed. These used to be 20th century strengths of high-fertility democracy!

This is simply another way that enfranchising and educating women, and encouraging the 30 percent of young women who historically married and had children to enter the work force, is both logically and observably incompatible with societal survival. It’s a viable path for a limited time, and it may even be considered a highly desirable path by many, but the now-observable fact is that viability comes with a built-in time limit which is remarkably consistent with the recorded lifespans of many historical societies.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the fundamental flaws in the underlying assumptions of failed past ideologies.

  • Communism: the idea that production will take place without a profit incentive.
  • Libertarianism: the idea that consent is a valid or viable basis for morality and legality.
  • Democracy: the idea that the collective will of the people exists in any meaningful sense or is relevant to the ordering and sustainability of society in any way.
  • Representative Democracy: the idea that an elected elite will meaningfully represent the wishes of the people
  • Constitutionalism: the idea that words on a piece of paper, interpreted by a political elite, will preserve the intentions of the society’s founders.
  • Elefthemporism: the idea that you can replace your native people with foreigners and buy the weapons required by your armed forces from your enemies.
  • Neoliberalism: the idea that the various idiosyncracies of the post-WWII order are of immutable significance for future orders.
  • Conservatism: the idea that yesterday’s status quo is the high point of human existence and any departure from it in any direction is dangerous and wrong.

Personally, I think the reason the “democracies” are failing is because they are fake, evil, and literally gay, but it is without question true that a societal lack of fertility and the inevitable evils that result from it will eventually render even the ideal Platonic form of liberal, constitutional representative democracy non-functional.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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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