Wrong Side of History newsletter #66

It's holiday time

Thanks to everyone who came to the Canon Club event last month. It was great fun to talk to so many subscribers, and speaker Alexander Lee was very appreciative of the audience, how interested and welcoming you all were. Lee’s excellent talk on Palladio is now up on YouTube. Our next talk is in September - I will share details later in the summer.

I spoke about the Canon Club at the recent Now & England conference. Since the last round-up, I have also written a two-part piece about changing taboos, here and here, about hating on Glastonbury. I also wrote about the 7/7 attack on London (unpaywalled) and the surreal experience of watching the aftermath of a bombing in Israel.

Yesterday was also Unification Day for England, as no one calls it, and reminded me that we have only two years to organise the 1100th anniversary party.

I’m away from next Sunday for two and a half weeks, on a family holiday in Sri Lanka: I’ve heard many good things about the country and the people, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m also keen to see elephants again, and if anyone has any recommended articles or books about these wonderful creatures, please leave them in the comments. We met some on our holiday in Thailand last year, and I was tempted to post a picture of me with the animals, but I look too much like a sweaty middle-aged sex tourist.

Service will continue in the meantime, and I’ve scheduled posts to run while I’m away, but as I don’t want to be monitoring all the comments on holiday, I’ve made them deliberately uncontroversial; the first one will be a long read on who really owns the Holy Land, using genetic studies, followed up by a piece on autogynephilia.

The dates of my US trip are now confirmed, so get in touch if you’re in any of these cities and haven’t already:

October 7: Washington
October 10: Charleston
October 17: Austin
October 21: San Francisco
October 25: New York

I will be driving back and forth between Washington and Charleston, doing some Founding Fathers tourism, but I’m keen to see some of the Appalachian region if I have time: any subscribers out there, send me a message.

Elsewhere…

Couples who vote together, stay together. Interesting post by Stephanie H. Murray:

Running through their findings: the odds of union dissolution is about 39% higher for couples who prefer different political parties than for those who prefer the same political party. That’s roughly on par with, or even larger than, the association between separation and other types of “heterogamy” (i.e. marriage between people not sharing some trait, such as education level or religion). So, for example, couples in which partners hold different religious beliefs are 34% more likely to separate than those who hold the same religious views. But even more than opposing party membership, the real death sentence for a couple was holding opposing views on Brexit: the odds of breaking up are 2.3 times higher among couples who disagree about Brexit than for those who don’t.

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How did television documentaries get so bad, Alex Webster wonders, in response to a question I asked on Twitter:

A related problem is that the people who make television genuinely think introducing viewers to concepts, people or events they are not already familiar with will cause them to turn off. This is especially bad in children’s television. It even comes down to music choices. A CBBC executive told me that “children don’t like to hear things they haven’t heard before” when I tried to slip You make my dreams come true by Hall and Oates into a training montage (one of the all time great montage songs). It’s a bizarre statement when you consider that children haven’t heard most things at their young age, and presents a tautological problem of how did they come to like anything without, at some point, hearing it for the first time…

All the usual criticisms about TV producers wanting to educate their viewers in left wing values, oft repeated to the point of tedium, are nevertheless true. Diversity quotas are real. On screen, I’ve had perfectly able contributors dismissed out of hand because they are white men, forcing me to go back, waste more time, and find female and minority contributors who just weren’t as good. I’m not saying they can’t be, of course — just that for those projects, they weren’t. Creativity and artistry are now subordinate to political messaging and hiring policies, overt and covert, that privilege ethnicity and ideology over ability.

This is why so many history documentaries are unwatchable. They all come with the assumption that the viewer is a drooling moron who has to be spoon fed information because they can’t, you know, look things up.

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Another Fred Sculthorp classic, this time on Brum.

Yet for all its quiet unravelling, the city resists the evidence of failure. Since 2008, the growth of its services industry has helped to add nearly £10 billion in value to the economy. In the last decade, Birmingham has attracted more inward investment than any UK city outside London. It has the youngest population in Europe, poised, as the city’s boosterists hope, to help it rise from the ruins of the old dream of a modernist, car-driven Detroit to build a new experiment: a lower Manhattan crossed with Lyon.

If you were to build a “living museum” to the Britain of the early 21st century for the amusement, intrigue and horror of visitors, you would probably settle on Birmingham in 2025. All the nation’s drama and upheaval can be found in a ten-mile radius around a Blair-era shopping centre. This sprawl takes in some of the world-leading research and development establishments and the highest rates of absolute poverty lurking in prefab slums and forgotten estates.

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William Herkewitz of U.S.A.I.D laments how bad they were at communicating the good they did.

For the most expensive fiscal year, 2022, the American government spent over $2 billion for the entirety of the drought response. That means it cost the average American household roughly $6 a year in taxes to prevent about half as many deaths as occurred in the Holocaust.

It sounds absurd to justify something so self-evidently humane. And in the end, I don’t believe individual Americans would believe it even needs justification. For any of our faults, we are not so small a people as to refuse such a financial and moral bargain.

I think there is a strong case for maintaining aid spending, but I wonder if there is a way to keep this programme without all the bad stuff thrown in, like video games highlighting gender issues or interference in European politics. (Admittedly, I imagine that these are a small proportion of spending).

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Charges have been dropped against Kneecap, just as I predicted. The Lucy Connolly case will continue to erode the public’s trust in the system.

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On the topic of taboos, the subject of two recent posts, there is a big free speech gap between people who work for themselves and those subject to HR department, as Chris Bayliss explained here.

Samuel Rubinstein on Blue Labour, the last remnants of the socially conservative wing of the people’s party.

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David Goodhart responds to Sam Freedman who responds (sort of) to me and others on the issue of the Right going full ‘blood and soil’. I like Freedman, and he’s always polite and respectful towards me, despite our strong difference of opinions. All I can add is that for me the key issue is David’s point that it is not the 1990s: there has been drastic and dramatic demographic change since then, way beyond what any group of people would find tolerable. The liberal/pro-immigration side seems to have no response to this except talk of narrative framing or reinforcing taboos; you need to make some arguments about why this dramatic change is actually good.

Imagine living in a society in which inequality and absolute poverty were rising each year, and there were a growing number of dangerous far-left agitators using increasingly extreme language. A regime which cared about its own survival would want to do something with those radicals, to isolate them in some way, but it would also be wise to look at the social issues that made them popular.

I’m in favour of taboos against racism, but they have to go in tandem with taboos against pursuing extreme and radical policies that transform the country in a way which most people don’t like, and a recognition that every people on earth have a right to resist such change. Taboos are only going to go so far, and can eventually become counter-productive if they end up breeding shame-resistant political actors (Trump the showcase example).

Pessimism and despair are unhelpful and even boring, but, even if the borders were shut tomorrow, demographic trends alone are going to lead to political instability and the Right of my generation will give way to a much more embittered and extreme cohort. This could so easily have been avoided.

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Speaking of future instability, James Kanagasooriam with a cheery piece on how we’re all losing our jobs.

“Executive Britain” though looks like it is in for an incredibly tough decade. Based on the modelling outlined above the top 5 constituencies for job exposure to AI are Richmond Park, Highgate & Hampstead, Cities of London and Westminster, Battersea and Wimbledon. Britain’s leafy, Remain heavy, high income London boroughs might face more trouble than they realise.

“Management consultants and business analysts” are listed as the job occupation most vulnerable to automation, and “chartered and certified accountants” the third highest - perhaps suggesting the government’s 2023 analysis of exposure by job type was directionally correct.

The white-collar promise of stability and higher incomes may be imploding completely. The graduate earnings premium has eroded in Britain.

Unemployment among the most educated young people is perhaps the most dangerous condition a country can face.

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Alex Stein compares the fates of Hebrew and Irish.

My assumption has always been that the Gaelic revival failed because the Gaelic Irish were Catholic, and so didn’t use their ancestral religion in their religious services. Welsh, despite being far closer to the English onslaught and seeing huge amount of migration from England in the 19^th century, did better because the mostly Methodist Welsh conducted their religious service in their native language. But I don’t know if this is true.

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Someone called Conundrum Cluster on lessons from the Russian Revolution, and comparing it to the mistakes of today’s Right-wing leaders.

White leadership primarily consisted of military leaders who brought with them the assumptions of a military hierarchy and Russian society that no longer existed. They were ruthless when a light touch was required, passive before events that demanded a response, tolerant of obvious liabilities and needlessly hostile to potential allies, stubborn about all the wrong things, demanding of the impossible, and just fundamentally unable to make something work.

I also wonder if, had the Whites won the Russian Civil War, they would have committed genocide against the Jews. I started reading Antony Beevor’s book on the Russian Civil War while on holiday a couple of years ago, and I had to put it down as the relentless inhumanity was getting too depressing. Even his books about Stalingrad and Berlin contained occasional moments of mercy and kindness.

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Andrew Cusack on the Druze.

Druze beliefs are as secretive as they are distinct. Most file them as (for lack of a less judgemental word) a schismatic branch of Islam that emerged out of Isma’ilism; others argue that they are gnostics who took up the Islamic mantle to avoid oppression. Naturally they do not call themselves Druze, but muwaḥidūn, which more or less means ‘monotheists’ or ‘singularists’ — believers in the singularity of God. Ethnically, they are Arab, and migrated to the Lebanese mountains and Jabal al-Druze from south Arabia before the advent of Islam….

Under the French League of Nations mandate, the Druze had their own state, but today the majority seem keen to stay part of Syria, while keeping their weapons at hand. The areas of Druze majority or plurality are neither geographically contiguous nor cohesive, meaning any potential Druze state would have to include a significant and potentially destabilising number of non-Druze.

The Middle East seems unsolvable to me, but as an armchair observer, turning Syria and Lebanon into a series of tiny Swiss-style cantons would seem like a wise idea; they could be tiny enough that no one had to move but there would still be comfortable majorities within. The idea of breaking up the West Bank authority into seven emirates also seems better than the current situation. Small states have huge advantages, especially when larger areas have little unifying idea.

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Daniel Kalder on central Asia’s finest Adolf Hitler impersonator.

Shishkin’s father was indeed a Red Army pilot. But he was shot down in 1941 and spent the war in a POW camp. Once it was over he was condemned to 25 years in the Gulag as an “enemy of the people” and his son was prevented from entering educational institutions. Eventually he trained in aeronautics, and then again in theater criticism, graduating in 1979. But Shishkin never worked in his specialty: instead he joined Uzbekfilm as a “simple worker,” scraping by on five rubles a day (extras made six).

Shishkin eked out this dismal living, and he was only occasionally bothered by people telling him that if he grew a moustache he would look just like Hitler. He married; had a daughter; got divorced. Then he played Hitler in a movie in which the Fuhrer had survived the war and was running a restaurant in Kazakhstan, playing the accordion for customers while Eva Braun danced. In 1990 he flew to Leningrad to participate in a lookalikes contest. There were many Alla Pugachevas, Lenins and Saddam Husseins. Shishkin was the undisputed champion among the Hitlers.

By the year 2000, the weight of history was starting to crush him. Lenin, also from Tashkent, was locked up in an insane asylum for a while. But on his release he went to the Arbat, where on Victory Day he and Nikolai II made $1,000 each from posing for photographs. Hitler on the other hand was attacked by cops, chased and beaten, or simply abused: “You started the war! You, Hitler, get out of here!”

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Alex Byrne, one of the authors of the recent review of gender dysphoria, on American exceptionalism on the trans issue:

Why is the United States, as Cass has observed, “out of date” on treatment for gender distress in young people? One reason is our fragmented health care system: more centralized systems in Europe and Britain prioritize cost-effectiveness, which requires careful evaluation of the evidence of medical benefit. Centralization also makes it easier to establish national treatment guidelines. Another reason is the stark division in the U.S. along political party lines. Adding to the mix is a problem not confined to this country: many adults in the room were driven to prudent silence by aggressive activists. “There are few other areas of healthcare,” Cass wrote in her foreword, “where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour.”

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The American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life

Few Americans report feeling satisfied with the way things are going in the United States. Only 39 percent of the public say they feel at least somewhat satisfied with what is happening in the country. Meanwhile, more than six in 10 (61 percent) say they are not too or not at all satisfied.

Despite Americans’ negative views about how things are going in the country, they have a somewhat more positive outlook than they did a few years ago. In 2022, fewer than one in four (24 percent) Americans said they felt satisfied with how things were going in the United States.

Although young men swung strongly toward Trump in the latest election, they are uniquely hostile toward the Democrats and Republicans. More than one in three (34 percent) young men say they view both the Democratic and Republican Parties unfavorably. Meanwhile, 26 percent of young women view both parties unfavorably.

Young liberals are especially disillusioned with the Democratic Party. Among young adults who identify as liberal, 37 percent say they have an unfavorable opinion of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Fifty percent view the Democrats favorably. This negative view starkly contrasts with that of older liberals, who generally view the Democrats positively. Nearly eight in 10 liberals age 65 or older have a favorable view of the Democratic Party; only 14 percent have a negative view of both parties.

Left-wing populism is coming. Another notable finding, also found in Britain, is that younger people are more anti-pornography than their elders.

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On a similar topic, Claire Lehmann on female extremism.

Women moving to the left is a global phenomenon. A 2020 study on the Extinction Rebellion environmental movement in the U.K. (a group which regularly engages in civil disobedience such as blocking traffic and vandalism) described it as a “highly feminised” protest culture. Surveys have found that attendance at climate demonstrations in cities around the world tends to be about 60 percent female, and recent American progressive movements—such as Black Lives Matter and the Gaza encampments, many of which were supported or led by the female-founded Jewish Voice for Peace—have likewise been launched and sustained by women.

There is growing awareness of how young men can be drawn into far-right extremism or misogynistic subcultures, but we in the media—and society more broadly—pay less attention to how young women become drawn into political subcultures. Indeed, the terms “radicalization” and “women” are rarely—if ever—seen together. This oversight has consequences, because radicalization—defined as rigid commitment to an ideological cause to the point where it distorts one’s worldview, harms mental health, undermines relationships, or disrupts functioning—is not a male-only phenomenon.

Young female extremism is probably the most under-discussed social problem of our age, despite being far more of an issue than ‘radicalisation’ among young men.

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Inquisitive Bird on Africa’s poor numbers. ‘The Bird’ also did a post on life expectancy. It includes this startling nugget: ‘a 30-year-old Swedish woman born in 1750-1759 was 33 times more likely to die before their next birthday than a 30-year-old woman born in 1990-1994.’

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A beginner’s guide to Old English poetry

I’m especially fond of The Wanderer, which inspired Tolkien so much.

Indeed I cannot think
why my spirit does not darken
when I ponder on the whole life of men throughout the world,
How they suddenly left the hall,
the proud thanes.
So this middle-earth, a bit each day, droops and decays

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The Pimlico Journal on Japan’s decline.

National debt has exploded, stabilising for now at around 250% of GDP — significantly higher than any other developed economy. Elsewhere, numbers like these would cause crisis. However, Japanese government debt is overwhelmingly held domestically on behalf of an elderly penny-pinching population facing long lives. This makes government debt service very affordable, subsidised by the poor performance of Japanese pensions. Japanese savers are, in effect, sacrificing investment returns in exchange for stability and the continuance of a low inflation, low growth, and low consumption status quo. The story of Japanese government debt is ultimately, like many things Japan, the story of a risk-averse population trading the potential of a vibrant future for the safety of a peaceful decline.

I loved Japan – maybe I’m one of the people he refers to – but it’s obviously sinking, and it’s not just demographic death, either. I wonder if the Japanese mindset is less suited to the post-industrial age, which depended on diligence and meticulousness (see also Germany). The tech era rewards innovation, and a willingness to break convention, which gives Americans a huge advantage.

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What if France had won in 1940?

It’s hard to overstate how extremely risky this maneuver was for the Germans. It would have only taken a few different decisions, before or during the battle, for it to have become a catastrophe for the Wehrmacht.

Allied reconnaissance aircraft actually spotted the huge traffic jam created by German forces lining up behind the Ardennes, but Allied high command disbelieved it. Had they believed the reports, they could have counterattacked early and halted the German thrust in its tracks.

If the French counterattack at Sedan had succeeded, it could have disrupted the German advance midstream. If the Allies had kept some more reserves instead of committing so heavily to Belgium, they’d have had a range of options to counter the German assault. Germany effectively rolled double sixes in 1940.

I’ve thought about this a lot since, and how our entire civilisation was changed and overturned by the decisions of just a few men. How much better the world be if run as an Anglo-French carve up, how much better if our entire civilisation had not become framed by a Teutonic death cult and its legacy.

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Matthew Syed on the link between grooming gangs and cousin marriage. I’ve always thought the problem is less to do with Islam than with clannishness.

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What Was It Like to Live in 1776? asks Derek Thompson.

Bloody awful

Given the need for heat and light in the 1770s, the business of turning trees into fuel was one of the largest sectors of the country. In 1774, firewood output accounted for 28 percent of US GDP, according to a new paper on the historical price of wood fuel. Chopping down and burning trees was as significant to the 1770s economy as health care plus manufacturing are to today’s economy. As the graph below indicates, between the 1770s and 1840s, the firewood business never fell below one-sixth of GDP. It was only when coal and oil came on the energy scene that the firewood industry collapsed.

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Graham Linehan on the Surrey Pride scandal. I have the feeling that this is going to be a slow-burning - but eventually enormous - scandal.

It’s interesting that upper normies, for want of a better word, have an ironic and cynical default, so that someone who is homophobic or obsessed with masculinity is obviously a closet case; a man who wants to mentor children, like a Baden Powell or General Gordon figure, must be a nonce of some sort. But when presented with a grown man who turns up in schools advertising paraphilias that scream ‘I am a wrong ‘un’... nothing. Taboos about prejudice completely switch off that cynicism when it is most appropriate.

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In brief

Video comparing the lives of someone born in 1964 and someone born in 2000.

‘A new mural in France depicting Lady Liberty covering her face in shame was unveiled the day before America's Independence Day.’ So lame, especially as the area, Roubaix, is one of the quintessential Paris banlieue from which the natives have fled, and was the scene of rioting two years ago.

The Norwegian royals are running a demonstration on behavioral genetics, by intermarrying with a family of criminals.

A man who murdered a woman in 1967 has been found with DNA. The killer had form, ‘and in 1977 he admitted raping two women aged 79 and 84 in their homes in Ipswich, Suffolk. He was originally jailed for life but at an appeal doctors told the court the rapes arose of sexual frustration arising out of his marriage to an “ambitious and demanding” wife. The sentence was reduced and he spent only about two years in jail.’ Remarkable, really.

General Richard Taylor - son of President Zachary Taylor - describes being lectured to by a German immigrant Union soldier about the ‘correct ideas’ and ‘duties of American citizenship’.

‘What about you people, Mr. Wilson, what do you have?’
’The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.’

US support for bombing Iran, by party, followed predictable partisan cues. People really do follow what the leader says.

On that topic, an interesting YouTube vid about the B2 bomber involved in the recent Iran business.

A new paper showing how the Autobahn’s construction helped entrench Hitler in power. Another reason why cars are bad.

Is there a theory why immigration surged everywhere in the West straight after Covid? Lots of ideas on Twitter, and subscriber Aidan Barrett suggests that remote working made it much easier for people in the Global South to move. It seems like the authorities everywhere panicked at the ‘labour shortage’.

The Italian Renaissance and the Dutch Golden Age are clearly observable in this database of notable paintings.

Nearly half of one percent of young women in the US are choosing to sterilise themselves.

People are more productive when they work from home, apparently.

‘Intrinsic respect for rules and social expectations are the most important motives for rule-following… Extrinsic incentives and social preferences play only a minor role.’

Why do the Nordics and Dutch speak English so much better than the Germans, Italians and French? Subtitles, according to this paper, although they surely spoke better even before television.

Much to ponder.