Tag: history

So That Went Well

It didn’t take long for Ukraine to lose its first F-16. And by “not long”, I mean the very first mission. So much for the so-called game-changer.

Well, the quintessential ‘game-changer’ of all game-changers was unceremoniously shot out of the sky on its maiden mission. As I had stated from the get-go, F-16s were being utilized only in “safe” defensive roles in the far rear of the country to help shoot down Russian drones. Apparently even this task was too great for the poor F-16. But the more shocking detail was revealed when Ukrainian Rada rep Mariana Bezuglaya claimed on her official account that the F-16 was kiboshed by none other than a friendly American-made Patriot missile system. Face palm. Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh confirmed the loss but refused to comment on whether it was indeed a Patriot that brought the plane down.

All in all, it’s a testament to the fact that modern near-peer, high-intensity conflict is not about wunderwaffe and ‘game changer’ toys. There is no such thing as a golden bullet or unicorn weapon that can really move the needle in near-peer conflict. It’s all about the totality of what your nation as a whole can bring to the table, economically, militarily, productively, and in terms of willpower, political influence, morale, etc. Any single weapon system is meaningless in the grand scheme of things and can be destroyed easily by the plethora of available modern counter-systems.

Simplicius is right. As is Martyanov. Victor Davis Hanson’s division of the way of war into Eastern and Western variants needs an updating, because there is a more important and fundamental difference between the way a sea power wages war on an expeditionary basis, a land power wages war on an existential and attritional basis, and an air power wages war on an regime change basis. This is why Clown World is obsessed with gestures, gimmicks, and short-term game-changing moves that look pointless and insane from a land power perspective; not even when their threats prove utterly toothless do they understand that their defeat is as inevitable as was Japan’s in 1941.

UPDATE: Ukraine’s General Staff has confirmed that a Western-supplied F-16 fighter jet has been lost along with its pilot.

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Across the Centuries

A commenter at Castalia Library observes the relevance of Athanius to the pagans who call themselves seculars today.

“But though the builder had many of the qualities which go to make a religious reformer — pure in heart and life, full of sincere piety, manly and with a strong sense of duty — the edifice he reared was quite artificial, lacked the living principle of growth, and could not last. Athanasius gave its history in four words when he said ‘It will soon pass.’ The world had outgrown paganism.”

Athanasius speaks across the centuries to the makers of man-crafted religions. Will any one of them listen?

Of course they won’t. They are fools and ignorati, for all that they consider themselves intelligent and educated. They’re not the equals of the noble pagans of the 4th Century, they’re not even the equals of their Enlightenment-misled predecessors who created the Cambridge Medieval History in the early 20th Century.

Whatever faults the Christianity of the time exhibited, whatever ills had come to it from Imperial patronage and conformity with the world, it still retained within it the original simplicity and profundity of its message. Nothing in its environment could take that from it. It proclaimed a living God, Who had made man and all things and for Whom man was made. That God had manifested Himself in Jesus Christ and the centre of the manifestation was the Passion of our Lord — the Cross. Whatever special meanings attach themselves to the intellectual apprehension of this manifestation, it contains two plain thoughts which can be grasped as easily by the simplest as by the most cultured intelligence, and was therefore universal as no previous religion had ever been.

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The Battle of Kursk, Round 1

As the second Battle of Kursk winds down, it seems appropriate to note the anniversary of the end of the first, much larger one.

The Battle of Kursk, which involved the largest tank battle of the Second World War, was fought on the steppe of Kursk oblast between July 5 and August 23, 1943. It was initiated by the Germans who, in retreat after their spectacular defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad, concentrated 50 divisions, two tank brigades, three tank battalions, and eight artillery assault divisions comprising 2,700 Tiger and Panther tanks, some two thousand aircraft, and 900,000 men in all. The Soviet forces, consisting of General K. K. Rokossovskii’s Army of the Center, General N. F. Vatutin’s Voronezh Army, and the reserve army of the Steppe Front under General I. S. Konev, numbered 1.3 million troops, 3,600 tanks, and 2,800 aircraft.

The German offensive, code named “Citadel,” involved two simultaneous thrusts against the Soviet-held northern and southern salients. Both were successfully repulsed, and by July 12, the Soviet forces had gone over to the offensive. On August 4, the city of Orel was liberated and by the 18th the German army took up defensive positions east of Bryansk. It had lost 30 of its 50 divisions and up to 500,000 men killed, wounded or missing in action. From its victory in the Battle of Kursk, the Soviet Red Army went on to liberate most of Ukraine in the autumn of 1943, marching into Kiev on November 6. Although Western historiography traditionally marks the beginning of the German downfall to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the crushing defeat of Kursk makes a more likely turning point for the war.

For anyone who knows anything all about military history, or just WWII, the idea that a single, solitary Ukrainian division was going to accomplish anything of note on Russian territory was always absurd on its face. And remember, the Russian population today is 34 percent larger than it was in 1943.

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History Notes

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

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

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Immigration and the USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Narrative Shifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Susie’s World

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

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

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

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

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

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She Knows Some Bad People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Educating the Englishman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And machines don’t vote.

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

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

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

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

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Ukraine’s Battle of the Bulge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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