Tag: History

Changing History, Just A Little

History, The Gun Thing

This little flight of fantasy was inspired by Chris Muir’s cartoon from yesterday and the day before.

In the spirit of our Crossing America series, imagine that you and a dozen of so of your best buddies were able to go back to any time during the Civil War and enlist in the army of your choice, at an appropriate age and level of fitness.  In your travel back through time you could take the battle rifle and sidearm of your choice and 500/50 rounds of ammo for each piece respectively, subject to the following conditions:

  • no full-auto rifles or machine guns of any type;
  • no explosive ordnance e.g. hand- or rifle grenades
  • no fanciful crap like lasers or photon pulse guns — you know what I’m aiming for, here.  You’d be a foot-soldier but by the standards of the time, a Starship Trooper.

To make life even easier, let’s assume that you could pick the campaign or battle you’d fight in, under your choice of battlefield commander, but you and your platoon would have a certain degree of autonomy.

Your choices and supporting arguments in Comments.

My weapons of choice:

Swedish Mauser M96 (6.5x55mm) as equipped below:

…with a bagful of loaded stripper clips, to save on weight.

Next (to nobody’s surprise):

Springfield 1911 in .45 ACP:

…ammo pre-loaded in five 10-round Chip McCormick magazines.

As to the battles and such, I’ll have to think about that for a while longer, but I’m leaning towards Stones River, on the Confederate side.

I Stand Corrected

History, Wokism

I love my Readers.

In response to this little comment of mine in the last News Roundup:

From the Dept. Of “Defense”:


...if I were a donor, I’d also hold off till they rename it the “Robert E. Lee Military Institute”.

…Reader Mike S. suggests via email:

I am second to none in my respect for General Lee (I’ve a framed print of him in my library), but VMI should be renamed “Thomas J. Jackson Military Institute.”

Gen. Jackson was a professor at the Institute before the Late Unpleasantness.

Gen. Lee was a graduate and later the commandant of West Point. THAT facility should be renamed for Lee.

All good points.  However, most people (especially the Racial Grievance Industry) probably have no idea of who Thomas J. Jackson was (maybe unless “Stonewall” is included in the nomenclature), but every damn one of them knows about Marse Robert.

So historically I’m in full agreement with Reader Mike;  but in terms of social impact on the Wokists…?

It’s a tough call.

Apocalyptic Addendum

Resistance

It’s a little late now, but Walter William Jacobson’s excellent anniversary essay is if anything even more timely than it was a month ago, and it simply adds a little support to yesterday’s Eucalyptus summary:

There is a rising tide of absolutism in ideas and enforcement of ideological uniformity that is palpable. I feel it in the air, even at Cornell which is far from the worst…
Even language as a means of communication is corrupted, with terminology manipulated and coerced to achieve political ends. It started on campuses, and it’s moved into the AP stylebook and the mainstream.
The press could stand as a bulwark against this slide, but it too is corrupted.

Please note that Walter wrote that in 2009.  Bringing it more up to date:

We’re in the collapse phase. You can feel it. There are no credible national institutions left. The medical field, the sciences, public health experts, on down the line are being gutted and losing legitimacy.
The military is run at the top by woke clowns.
Higher Ed is gone, K-12 is the last cultural battlefield. That’s why the teachers unions, the education bureaucracy, and leftist billionaire funders are fighting so hard and so dirty. What better wake up call do you need than the fact that you have to worry about your kindergartner being ideologically manipulated at school by teachers and administrators?
Collapse is not irreversible, but it’s happening in real time. You can feel it.

And then:

The backlash is building. You can feel that too. It’s not a natural state of affairs for people to want to live under such tyranny. It can’t continue at this rapid pace. Something has to give.

Still more:

But the backlash to the backlash will be to criminalize dissent and to intensify the cultural purge. We already see that the power of the state and corporations will be brought to bear.

Jacobson goes on to say:

I have so little faith in the people running this country at various levels that stocking up on long shelf-life food and other prepper-lite protections seems to me, for the first time in my adult life, to be one of the least crazy ideas.

I’ve done all that, and a little more besides.  So what’s left?

I’m going to sharpen my bayonet now.  A bayonet on the end of an old WWI-era rifle may be a stupid, old-fashioned and ultimately hopeless thing, but then again:  so am I.