Tag: history

The End of the Conservative Party

The Tories may be going the way of the Whig Party soon, and they absolutely deserve suffering the worst electoral defeat in British history by having thrown away 14 years of political power and accomplishing nothing more than to slavishly serve their masters in Clown World:

The UK Labour party is predicted to win a landslide victory in the British general election, according to a preliminary exit poll released as voting closed on Thursday evening.

According to the poll, Labour will win 410 out of the 650 seats, up from 205, in the House of Commons, while the previously governing Tories will secure 131 seats, down from 344.

The Liberal Democrats are predicted to win 61 seats, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK 13, and the Scottish National Party (SNP) ten. The Greens are slated to win two seats and the Welsh party Plaid Cymru four.

Sky News has described the Tories’ result as “the biggest electoral collapse in British electoral history.”

All the Tories had to do to stay in power was three things: Brexit, Deportation, and Neutrality in Ukraine. Well, four things, as a genuinely English Prime Minister would have also gone a long way.

Instead, they went one-for-four and quite rightly paid the price. The pendulum is moving toward sovereign nationalism, and the sovereign nations are going to win their war against Clown World. And there is no need for a Conservative Party that couldn’t even conserve the nation.

Labour, of course, won’t be any better. But at least they are open enemies rather than false friends.

UPDATE: It’s interesting to note that the Scottish National Party has been totally destroyed in Scotland. They had their chance, but they blew the independence referendum and thereby demonstrated that there was no need for the party to even exist. And all they had to do to win it was limit the vote to Scottish citizens actually resident in Scotland.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Russian Historiography of WII

This looks like a book worth reading once I’m finished with Jack Vance’s Treasury.

The Postil (TP): You have written a trilogy on the Great Patriotic War, that is the Second World War as experienced by Soviet Union. The first part of this magisterial study will be published soon. What is your overall aim?

Michael Jabara Carley (MJC): My trilogy, as I call it, deals with the origins and early conduct of the Second World War and the Great Patriotic War (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina). The VOV is the name given to the war in Soviet and Russian history arising from the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. My work runs from January 1930 to December 1941. My project was first entitled “A Near-run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II,” supported by an “Insight” research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My initial objective was to write a narrative history of how the USSR, Britain, and the United States, powers hostile to each other during the interwar years, became allies against Nazi Germany and the Axis. The work evolved from an envisioned single volume into three dealing with Soviet relations with the great and lesser European powers and the United States.

TP: Is there a difference between a Western historiography of WWII and a Russian one?

MJC: Oh yes, the difference is enormous. During the war, it was clear to all who had eyes to see that the Red Army played the key role in smashing the Nazi Wehrmacht and winning the war in Europe. The United States and Britain played supporting roles. After 1945 the war became an important object of propaganda in the Cold War. The new narrative was that the United States or Churchill single-handedly won the war in which the USSR was practically invisible. In the western media, histories, iconography, Hollywood films, comic books, more recently video games, the Red Army is invisible. The key moment in the war was operation Overlord, the Normandy landings, when in fact, they were an anticlimax, grand to be sure, in a war whose outcome had already been determined by the Red Army. In the context of the Cold War, it was normal that the United States would seek in various ways to rub out the memories of the Soviet role in the war, for otherwise how could you portray the USSR as a menacing communist enemy.

I’ll report back on it once I’ve finished it. It should be interesting to see if he supports or contradicts the Icebreaker theory of Operation Barbarossa.

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It’s Not Just Books

The destruction of knowledge at the behest of the Zero Historians isn’t limited to printed matter.

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.

In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.

This is why Castalia Library is expanding its efforts from just publishing leatherbound classics to leveraging its subscriber base to preserve knowledge in general. Among our efforts, which will include opening up Infogalactic editing to all Library and UATV subscribers and making it easier for them, is releasing free Library ebooks for all Library, Libraria, and History subscribers. We’ll also provide an inexpensive bundle of those titles for which we have permission available for sale as ebooks.

We’ll go with a standard cover for all of them, although we’ll update the logo once we’ve got the Castalia Library-specific one instead of the modified History variant. An example can be seen below. An announcement with a link will be made on the Castalia Library substack within the next week; if you haven’t subscribed there yet, we very much encourage you to do so.

We’re also going to start doing books that are transcriptions of worthwhile video works from various UATV and other video creators. If this is something of serious interest to you – and by serious, I mean cleaning up least five 1,500-word transcriptions per week – please email me with TRANSCRIBE in the subject line. We can provide an AI-transcribed text as a starting point, but it takes about twice as long to go over the whole video and edit it for print as the length of the video. So figure 20 minutes of work for a 10-minute video.

This is going to be particularly important in light of the meltdown we hear is coming in the book industry. The financial takeover of Simon & Schuster by KKR, a private equity firm, combined with the incipient failure of Barnes & Noble, means that the distribution system is going to be further converged and cease to function normally, which will have a tremendous negative effect on all of the mainstream publishing houses going forward.

UPDATE: MTV News isn’t the only site destroying its own archives in the last year:

Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned. Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks

UPDATE: Wikileaks is also being wiped.

Julian Assange has been instructed to direct WikiLeaks to destroy any remaining classified documents and information in their possession and provide an affidavit once completed, as part of his plea agreement.

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Mailvox: The War on Knowledge

An email from a reader illustrates how even the profession of the Librarian has been inverted in order to destroy the knowledge they are charged with preserving.

My wife and I are volunteers for the Friends of the Library at the branch library in the college town where we first met, where every year we help out at the book sales. A month ago we received a peculiar donation. It turns out the new director of the library at our alma mater made the decision to liquidate the library’s special collections. Among those liquidations was a special collection library that had been initiated in the nineteenth century by a member of college founder’s immediate family.

In my years at college, I treasured this special library – it was housed in an elegant top-level room in the college’s oldest building, and required special access to visit. Nearly all the books were old, and all of them were on special subjects of great interest to me – literature, poetry, theology, the sciences. Many titles had bookplates with the names of the alumni who donated them over the years.

After some investigation I discovered that this new head of the college library pulled all of the books out of that special library, and put them in an enormous rented bin in the main lobby, with a sign suggesting that students could use them for art projects and scrapbooking, you know, to cut and paste their contents to express themselves and be “creative.” The majority of books sat there for weeks, and then she called our group to donate them to our book sale.

The last day of the book sale is bag day, where a brown grocery bag of books is only a dollar. What the library doesn’t sell at the end of sale is brought to a pulper. I pulled all of these books and placed them in private storage—if I hadn’t, they would have literally been shredded a week ago.

The process is ongoing. I’m told that the librarian is closing all of the special collections in all departments of the college, so I don’t want to share any names just yet, but before this is over, I hope I’ll have saved at least a thousand out-of-print books.

This is not new. Well over a decade ago, another university library in my state was destroyed. This library, in a literal ivory tower built exclusively for holding and preserving hundreds of thousands of books, was at one time among the top ten libraries in the nation. A new library director had not only decided to gut the
interior of the building and destroy all of the original architectural detail and period decor, but he also pulled out and destroyed a great majority of the books to make room for “computer stations.” They did not sell the books, they did not offer to donate them, and the director specifically instructed staff to discard the books in locked university dumpsters so that they couldn’t be taken by anyone.

The bad, the ugly, and the false. That is the makeup of the world these people are actively contriving and constructing. It really is time to build a consortium of knowledge, physical and digital, containing archives of the world’s books and works that are under attack and being taken away.

The Serpent promises knowledge and provides nothing but ignorance. What we have collectively taken on as a responsibility with Castalia Library and Infogalactic may eventually prove to be one of the most important things any of us have ever done. We are the only true Librarians and we stand between Man and the state of Zero History that Clown World seeks to impose on him.

The Zero Historians need to destroy all human knowledge because only in its absence can they present their lies as truth. And indeed, the better we understand their motives and methods, the more it appears this is not the first time they have attempted such a grand endeavor.

Inversion is always the key. Now it should be perfectly clear what a fundamental lie the asserted conflict between Christianity and Science, and between Faith and Knowledge, has always been.

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How the Hapsburgs Took Over England

Or, was Henry VIIIth actually the good guy and was the dissolution of the monasteries motivated by something more than simple royal greed?

The story of Henry VIII is the story of a conflict. The conflict that is occurring is the conflict between Habsburg and Tudor houses. The house of Habsburg is, as they had previously done in many other European countries, attempting to gain political control of England through marriage and through its influence over the Catholic Church.

Which is to say: The Habsburgs are trying to take over England during the reign of Henry VIII.
Henry’s actions – exiting a marriage to a Habsburg connected figure, and exiting the Catholic Church – are direct responses to Habsburg attacks on England’s sovereignty through those same two avenues. The Habsburg attack comes through marriage and the Catholic Church.

However I have never seen that story recounted. Instead, I have only seen bizarre retellings where half the plot is left out, the Habsburg part. Obviously, if you omit the geopolitical motivation for Henry VIII’s actions from the story then his actions seem insane. The situation reminds me a little bit of the experience of accidentally walking into a spiderweb. Have you ever done this? It is totally jarring. You flail your hands and look like an idiot trying to get the bits of spiderweb off of your face. To an outside observer who can’t see the spiderweb you just walked into, you look spastic, manic. But there is a reason you’re acting that way. The conflict with the Habsburgs is that spiderweb for Henry VIII. You need to know it is there to understand his actions.

Is there any evidence of a Habsburg coup attempt? The evidence I have that the Habsburgs are trying to take over England during this period is that the Habsburgs do take over England in this period.

What? Yes. ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor weds Phillip II Habsburg – the son of the Habsburg Emperor – just 5 years after the death of Henry VIII.

Phillip Habsburg becomes King of England Jure Uxoris – joint sovereign with Queen Mary. England comes under Habsburg control, along with Spain, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Flanders, Bohemia, Germany, Italy, Hungary and… Did I forget any? At this point the Habsburgs are basically kings of the Universe, totally drunk with power. In England they are literally burning their enemies at the stake.

The Habsburg method for expanding their territory was fairly simple:

  1. Find a failing kingdom in need of aid or protection.
  2. Offer to use your influence in the Catholic Church to aid the Kingdom in exchange for an advantageous marriage, protection money, or both.
  3. Betray the Kingdom and use your influence instead to install your newly wed Habsburg as the sole sovereign.

Are you starting to understand why the story of a medieval Republican who miraculously defeats something that looks suspiciously like today’s democratic institutional oligarchy has never been properly told?

The Habsburg Coup in Henry VIII’s England

I’ve literally never, ever, heard this theory before, but at first glance, it sounds extremely persuasive. It also tends to raise an obvious question about the ethnicity of the Hapsburgs, who were both highly consanguineous and physically deformed. They certainly appear to have worked out their own method of “color revolutions” centuries before the neocons, although it may simply be that they were inspirations for the Rothschilds rather than predecessors of some kind.

And, of course, it would be yet another example of a “religious war” actually being about something other than the purported religious conflict, which tends to track with what we’ve learned about everything from the Crusades to the 30 Years War.

To think some people actually believe that history is boring… Definitely read the whole thing!

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Subscribe, Scan, and Stockpile

Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies predicts a Clown World campaign against books:

Soon, you will see a silent undertaking to destroy the last decentralized form of offline knowledge:

Books.

If the elites don’t do this, then these books will be turned into training AI about the true history of the last 2000 years.

I highly recommend a) subscribing to one of Castalia’s series, b) scanning any unique book to which you have access, and c) stockpiling both books and electronic texts. The latter should be in the simplest possible forms, either PDF or TXT format.

We are the monestaries for the 21st Century and beyond. The Zero Historians are coming to destroy all human knowledge and neither the atheists nor the agnostics are going to stop them. So it again falls to us.

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Judgment, Not Blessing

The Christian Zionists who are on AIPAC’s payroll are even worse theologians than Calvinists and comedians. This is what a complete rhetorical blowout looks like.

The fact that the Jewish organizations in the USA are actually suing to remove the Ten Commandments from public schools should be sufficient to convince even the most rabid Christian Zionist that modern Jewry has an inverted connection to the historical Hebrew people, religion, and culture. It won’t be, but it should be.

God’s promises of blessings to Man have always been contingent on Man’s subsequent behavior. And one need only look at the current state of Israel, or, for that matter, the current state of the USA, to know that it is not God they serve, and that it is God’s judgment, not God’s blessings, that should be anticipated.

It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.

–Romans 9:6-8

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The Harsh Lessons of History

One of the great benefits of reading history is that it provides the reader with an informed perspective to interpret current events. As I was scheduling future posts for the daily Castalia Library serialization of the 1911 edition of The Cambridge Medieval History, I came across this very timely section on the economic challenge faced by the Roman emperors in the early Third Century.

Serious economic difficulties have moral causes, and there was no radical cure short of a complete change in the temper of society. Yet much might have been done by a permanent reduction of taxation and a reform of its incidence and of the methods of collection. Instead of this, the machinery of government (and its expense) was greatly increased. The army had to be held in check by courts of Oriental splendour and a vast establishment of corrupt officials. We can see the growth of officialism even in the language, if we compare the Latin words in Athanasius with those in the New Testament. So heavier taxes had to be levied from a smaller and poorer population. Taxation under the Empire had never been light ; in the third century it grew heavy, under Diocletian it was crushing, and in the later years of Constantine the burden was further increased by the enormous expenditure which built up the new capital like the city in a fairy tale. We are within sight of the time when the whole policy of the government was dictated by dire financial need. We have already reached a state of things like that we see in Russia.

That passage anticipated the October Revolution by six years. Given that there are absolutely no indications that the American people are in any moral condition to force “a complete change in the temper of society” or even to stop the massive invasion of the last 59 years, it’s possible that we will see the political collapse I predicted would take place in 2033 as soon as 2030.

Simplicius notes that the Clown World elite that rules the USA appears to finally be aware that their predatory, self-serving governance has weakened the empire to the point they are in danger of being swept away completely.

I’ve written previously on the panic currently effervescing through the global elites, made viscerally apparent at conclaves like the Davos forum earlier this year. But in America particularly, a deep worry is now consciously gnawing the ruling class—they can see it, feel it: that the American Empire is on its last legs, close to collapse.

This month has seen a bevy of new thinkpieces from top American deepstate figures or old-guard publications urging the changing of course, lest the country be swept away by the remorseless tide of history… This is the theme which recurs again and again throughout the new zeitgeist taking over political discourse in the stricken Beltway—panicking neocons are exhorting each other: we’re in a fight for our lives, if we don’t accept the new realities, we’ll drown!

Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America’s Decline, 22 June 2024

The clowns won’t be able to do anything to reverse the decline, or even slow it, of course. Subversion, rhetoric, corruption, and doubling-down are all they know how to do, but none of those tactics work when you’re the one in charge and you’re responsible for maintaining the social order. The more they subvert, the more they corrupt, and the more they double down, the weaker their position becomes.

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Do Not Fear the Good

For the last 24 hours, we have polled the subscribers of the Castalia Library substack to determine which work we would serialize in the aftermath of the very successful serialization of Oman’s STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. The results were as follows, with Medieval History eking out a narrow victory over Meditations, which was a surprise to me, as I expected Discourses would be the favorite after having narrowly finished second last time, although I voted for the Marcus Aurelius work myself.

  • 35% THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY
  • 32% MEDITATIONS
  • 19% DISCOURSES ON LIVY
  • 13% POLITICS

Now, although we have not yet presented the logo for Castalia Library proper, as opposed to the logo for Castalia History, we already have the Latin motto for it: NOLITE TIMERE BONI. This admonition to not be afraid of the Good can be interpreted in several ways, one of which is “don’t be afraid to do it right”. This mindset applies to everything we do at the Library, from taking risks on ancient machines that may or may not work to abandoning a perfectly good space for a better one that provides us with room to grow in the future.

In this context, however, it applies to which version of the Cambridge Medieval History we serialize. Although I was originally thinking of the serialization in the context of the abbreviated edition by Charles Previté-Orton that we published in two volumes, both of which are already sold out, it occurred to us that the lack of material limitations that applied to the leather books does not apply to the digital domain of the substack. So, we’ve decided that instead of the 1952 Previté-Orton edition, we will serialize the first volume of the original 1911 edition edited by J.B. Bury, entitled The Christian Roman Empire and the Foundation of the Teutonic Kingdoms.

At 614 pages, not including the bibliography which we will not serialize, it’s of a similar length to the edition we published, but it goes much deeper into the details of historical events such as the original Nicene Council and Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians than the shorter Previté-Orton edition. Given the chance to provide our readers with the deeper and more substantive material, our philosophy dictates that we do so.

The serialization has already begun. Therefore, please enjoy the preface to volume I as presented by the editors.

The present volume covers a space of about two hundred years beginning with Constantine and stopping a little short of Justinian. At its opening the Roman Empire is standing in its ancient majesty, drawing new strength from the reforms of Diocletian and the statesmanship of Constantine: at its close the Empire has vanished from the West, while the East is slowly recovering from the pressure of the barbarians in the fifth century, and gathering strength for Justinian’s wars of conquest. At its opening heathenism is still a mighty power, society is built up on heathen pride of class, and Rome still seems the centre of the world: at its ending we see Christianity supreme, Constantinople the seat of power, and the old heathen order of society in the West dissolving in the confusion of barbarian devastations. At its opening Caesar’s will is law from the Atlantic to Armenia: at its ending a great system of Teutonic and Arian kingdoms in the West has just been grievously shaken by the conversion of the Franks from heathenism direct to orthodoxy.

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