Category: History

Colonial War

Africa, History

Over the years, many people have written to me asking about early South Africa, and more specifically about the Boer War (or, as the Boers called it, the Vryheidsoorlog, or [Second] War of Freedom) from 1899-1902.

A few days ago, I found an old 1992 documentary on BoobTube, and it’s not bad — only just a tad over an hour — and it covers the period quite well, and impartially.  So that’s your weekend viewing assignment.  (There will be a test.)  If any questions of history remain, write to me and I’ll put the answers up in a follow-up post next weekend, when I’ll talk about my family’s relationship to the war.

There are three books I’ve always recommended on the topic:  Rags of Glory by Stuart Cloete, and the book it’s partially based on, a campaign journal called Kommando  written by Deneys Reitz, a wartime Bitter-Ender (you’ll get that explained in the video above) who went on to become the Deputy Prime Minister of the unified South Africa.  Both are absolutely brilliant — Cloete’s book also incorporates a view of the Boer War from the British perspective, and it’s both accurate and illuminating.

The third — an actual history book — is The Boer War  by Thomas Pakenham, generally regarded as the sine qua non  of historical sources for the conflict.  Written during the late 1980s, it’s devoid of any hint of the political correctness which infests later works on the topic.

Enjoy.

The Consequences Of Bad Education And Ignorance

Beauty, History, Lies and Untruths

I actually laughed out loud when I read that some idiots are going all outraged-wokey at the fact that Israeli beauty Gal Gadot has been cast to play Cleopatra in yet another remake of the Egyptian queen’s saga.  (Here are the details.)

Actually, it would have been more justified for blondes to get upset about the role going to a brunette, because as a Ptolemy (and therefore of ethnic Greco-Macedonian heritage), Cleopatra was most likely fair-skinned and blonde.

It is, as they say, to LOL.

Here’s the serious part of this.  In their struggle to claim some fragment of cultural worth, Black Africans have always tried to appropriate Egyptian civilization as “African” — specifically, with regard to sub-Saharan Africa, which had no civilization at all to speak of.  In this, of course, they have been abetted by Western “African Studies” academics, who have performed all sorts of intellectual gymnastics to conclude that yes, ancient Egyptians were really just like the Masai, promise.

The plain fact of the matter is that Nilotic people are as different from sub-Saharan Blacks as Scandinavians are from Aztecs.  The fact that Egyptians too have dark skin is a matter of geography, not racial kinship.  And the northern Greek tribes of Macedonia have closer genetic, linguistic and cultural ties with Serbs than with Arabs, let alone Black Africans.

Anyway, I don’t care.  These wokesters have shown their asses yet again and given us yet more reason withal to make fun of their ignorant little wokish philosophy (such as it is).

I’m just curious to see how Gal Gadot measures up to Elizabeth Taylor.  It’ll be a tough job.

The Forgotten Communist Traitor

History, Marxists

…forgotten, that is, except by people like this guy.  And me.  But along the way, in reading about this bastard, we see the following:

Leftism in America isn’t really a political commitment, though of course the left takes and supports a recognizable range of political positions. Leftism is, first and foremost, a fashion accessory that indicates a certain type of social status, similar to a Gucci handbag or a Rolex watch. It is a way to define oneself, and proclaim one’s solidarity with a self-conscious elite, and one’s social superiority to a hated group of outsiders. In America, the higher one rises in position, wealth, power, and status, the more leftward one’s political commitments move. This is counterintuitive at first glance, but it is nevertheless true. All their rhetorical arm-pumping about equality, revolution, income-redistribution, and hatred of Wall Street notwithstanding, left- liberals are primarily the representatives of the ruling class in America. They are not an absolutely dominant ruling class, but that is not for want of trying. They very strongly believe that they have the right and duty to govern all the rest of us.

More importantly:

The defense [of Hiss by the Left] is perfectly understandable if we read it as a claim to aristocratic privilege: Hiss is a member of the governing elite; by definition he can do no wrong! This is the same claim made by any mandarin class, whether the Prussian Junkers in Wilhelmine Germany, the landed gentry in Victorian England, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the upper-level managerial class in American corporate life today. People in such aristocracies sincerely feel that they have an inherent right to rule, and cannot be brought to book; they are a protected class immune from prosecution.

What happened in the Alger Hiss case was really important per se.  But what it reveals about the Left — then and now — is more important still.  Read the whole thing.  (It’s quite long, but if you read nothing else today…)