About That Royal Navy….

Sometimes, to know where you are, you have to know where you have been.

First, “A Tale of Two Royal Navy’s – Ambitious Expansion Vs Strategic Decline” — which states that in the not-so-distant future, Australia will have a larger navy than the British.

Second, an excellent X-thread on the importance of Diego Garcia to the West’s defense of the Indo-Pacific theater.

Third, the 43rd-anniversary of the re-capture of Goose Green.

Great Britain is no longer a serious country. It is within living memory that the British not only relied on a large and potent navy to keep the Empire intact, but also to prevent their own home islands from being starved-out in the face of enemy blockade.

Nobody expects the return of Jacky Fisher and the Grand Review, but a fleet that only has a total of 14 destroyers and frigates, with only a few of those operational at any one time? The last commissioned more than 11 years ago?

Go ahead, Tommy Friedman and the rest of the DC crowd, and tell me about our special relationship.

It’s not just about hulls.

Take the issue of Diego Garcia, the key US-UK base in the Indian Ocean and the linchpin to Western defense in the region. It’s not just a modern-day Uhliti as an expeditionary base, with its bomber-capable runways and port facilities. It’s that it sits directly across major sea lanes.

Unfortunately, Diego Garcia is part of the Chagos Island Archipelago, a British Indian Ocean Territory that the British are hell-bent on ceding to Mauritius, an island 1,300 miles away. Mauritius’s shaky claim to the Chagos is based on a history of administrative convenience, that they were once part of the same local British colonial apparatus.

Last week, British PM Starmer signed a deal that formally ceded the Chagos to Mauritius, but that provides the fig leaf of the US leasing back the Diego Garcia base. I say fig leaf because the Chagossians who were expelled from Diego Garcia to build the base want the island for themselves.

This will not end well, and the question is how much, not if, Chinese money is involved. After all, buying a bunch of Mauritian politicians to expel the base a few years from now in the name of “Chagossian rights” is a lot cheaper for the Chinese than the missiles it would need to use to destroy it.

Thanks, Britain. If you cannot do your part to keep up your military could you at least do your part not to undermine ours?

Forty-three years ago and on a week’s notice, the British deployed a task force nearly 8,000 miles, to the bottom of the planet, in the face of an approaching Antarctic winter, to fight a war in a hostile power’s backyard. The mission was to retake the Falklands Islands, a fairly desolate and sparsely populated bit of real estate, from the Argentines; a goal that the US Navy assessed to be impossible.

Well, the war lasted all of 10 weeks and the Union Jack still flies there.

That’s just not within living memory, but my living memory.

The British are faced with the fact that, through their own efforts, their not-so-distant past has become as alien to them as the proverbial Stone Age tribe in the Amazon stumbling onto a lost city built by their ancestors.

The Vanished World

I read the various news stories about the latest Islamic-inspired mass murder in India with a mixture of odd emotions. One of them being ‘Oh dear, radical Muslims again, behaving in that manner which we have come to expect,’ the second being a degree of sadness for a place and a time that I have never been a part of, but am sort-of-acquainted with, and the third being straight-out nostalgia for a vanished world. Or several vanishing worlds. I was moved to take down and re-read a murder mystery from the collection in the hallway segment of the home library – M.M. Kaye’s Death in Kashmir.*

The mystery is set in the mountains in the first chapters, and then in a garrison town on the plains, and finally on Kashmir’s Lake Dal, all described most lovingly by a writer who knew them well, eight or nine decades ago. It takes place in 1947, as the British were packing up to leave India for good and all. M. M. “Mollie” Kaye’s family had served the so-called ‘Raj’ for generations; father to son, to son, to mother, to daughter, serving and doing their bit, spending their lives there, in various capacities. Military, missionary, civil service, the railway network, overseas banking, industry, trade – generations and decades spent in the Far East in various capacities.

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The Great Unraveling

For the last few weeks we have been watching one of the greatest collections of weaponized autistics in the world going happily about their task of unraveling exactly how much of our money was directed through previously undetected means for previously undetected and wholly curious ends. The Doge crew are going at it with the zeal and joy of unleashed rat terriers turned loose on a field of suitable prey, in tracking millions of dollars’ worth of our money into various progressive slush funds.

And interesting things are suddenly happening. Although coincidence is not causality, by any means … still, there are things that people on the conservativish side of things have wondered about for the last decade. Things like … strangely well-choreographed protests, with tens and hundreds of participants (who mostly have no obvious means of support) appearing almost like magic, carrying professionally-printed signs. Hmmm … we all wondered in times past: who is footing the bill for all this?

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Elections and Atom Blasters

“It’s a poor blaster that won’t point both ways”
Issac Asimov, Foundation

U.K. Orders Apple to Let It Spy on Users’ Encrypted Accounts:

“Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

“The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies. Its application would mark a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users, the people said, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss legally and politically sensitive issues.”

The 2024 US election marked a choice between two alternatives, between a chance at restoring the constitutional republic and a continued, perhaps even accelerated, slide into progressive materialism.

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Fair Play

“The Saxon is not like us Normans, His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealings,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.
Rudyard Kipling

If there is one concept thought to be more quintessentially English over any other, I think it must be the concept of fair play. Fair dealings, as Kipling put it. That one party should be treated as any other, held to the same standard of conduct, and afforded the same penalties or rewards for the same acts, regardless of economic standing, religious beliefs or racial background. A lot of this concept of “fair dealings” carried over into the American cultural mainstream as well; honored as a concept and an ideal to be striven for. I’d guess that a lot of that general support among Americans generally for the civil rights movement was based on the dawning realization among most of us that Jim Crow laws restricting black Americans were not fair at all.

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