“There is always a temptation to explain great events in terms of great ambitions, but the truth about Stalingrad might be much simpler. In the orders of 23 July Stalingrad was only one among many other targets and aims. It had no obvious priority over the others. It might be that the first failure to capture the city led to reinforcements being sent to make a second attempt, which also failed. More reserves were then fed into counteract the earlier failures. In this way more and more men and resources were pushed in piece by piece until the battle took on a priority of its own, quite divorced from the actual value of the supposed target. Prestige and stubbornness became the reason for the battle to continue, not the capture of Stalingrad itself. It would not be the first time such a thing had happened. The great Battle of Gettysburg that decided the American Civil War was another example. A Confederate regiment had gone to the town to capture a shoe factory, because they were short on footwear. Before they could get the shoes they were driven out by a Unionist division. The Confederates called up reinforcements and counterattacked, causing the Unionists to summon their own support. Before long the two main armies were locked in a deadly combat that neither had foreseen and neither wanted. It seems that much the same thing happened at Stalingrad.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“a high priest of the debunked Davoisie”

Conrad Black in National Post February 14, 2026 [re Mark Carney but the term applies far more widely and as far as I know originated with Black in this column].

“I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those [Professors] whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antithesis of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.”

Samuel Butler Erewhon

“Felipe Alou, the team’s manager and club-house philosopher (and Moises’ father), maintains that no team ever won anything with their mouths.”

Maclean’s April 5, 1993

“In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aging Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as Las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple. ‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’ Every mortal – Christian or not – had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“My new philosophy of life: Lethe faire – let me sleep.”

Me awakened from sleep in the wee hours of February 5-6, 2026.

“A decolonized university is no university at all.”

Michelle Stirling  “Dr. Frances Widdowson's Arbitration Review – Phoenix from the Ashes” on her Climate of Hope Substack February 7, 2026 [https://michellestirlingg.substack.com/p/dr-frances-widdowsons-arbitration].

“Up until New Year 1943 Goebbels and his minions had portrayed Nazi Germany as the harbinger of a New Order for Europe, a new social, political and economic system that would sweep away the decadent, failed and discredited wreckage of the Old Europe that had perished in the Great War of 1914-18. Nazism had been portrayed as youthful, vibrant, dynamic and irresistible. But now all that had changed. The 6th Army [trapped and collapsing at Stalingrad] was hailed as being a legion of heroes worthy of the finest traditions of the ancient Teutonic warriors. The spirit of Arminius, who had ousted the Romans from Germany, was invoked, along with that of Frederick the great, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Blücher and many more. This was the reason behind the promotions and the awards. The 6th Army had to be built up to be the finest that Germany had ever fielded. In truth it was good, but it had never been as good as Goebbels now claimed. The message that Goebbels was slowly and carefully crafting was that the 6th Army was heroically sacrificing itself to save the ancient civilization of Europe from the onslaught of the barbaric Asiatic hordes pouring out of Siberia.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination