James and Lynn discuss historical examples of the hero in single combat through history.
The Crackpot Podcast features unsanctioned historian James LaFond and sleep deprived motherslave Lynn Lockhart.
0:00:40 James' process for writing about Evola and other complex writings
0:08:49 The Civil War as the first industrial war
See Wyman Park Dell video project
0:13:27 The scale of available weaponry vs. the scale of actual warfare
0:16:40 Single combat, James gives some kind of sex metaphor
0:19:30 The selection of the champions, Hector and Achilles, Spartacus
0:25:40 Milo of Croton, gunpowder, Gustavus Adolphus
0:28:40 Horatio Nelson
0:31:12 Roger's Rangers
0:32:15 Nathan Bedford Forrest, the last Аrуаn hero
0:33:36 The Machine, Rommel, Patton
0:34:33 Liver Eating Johnson, Big Ron
0:40:35 Richard Marcinko, Carlos Hathcock
0:45:40 House to House, David Bellavia
0:48:08 Shooter with Mark Wahlberg
0:48:49 Back to Nathan Bedford Forrest
0:58:35 Two books to read to help you understand current conflicts
1:05:28 Sickness of the Heart (Q&A part 1 and part 2) and Our Captain, Sunset Saga, Organa
1:12:10 Unpredictability as a personality trait
Preshow notes
James, reading your Evola piece just now caused a brain wave. You have discussed the Civil War as a turning point in warfare, the first industrial war, where man power and materiel defeated superior fighters and strategists.
There have been a lot of wars since then, and not all have followed that model (I am thinking about Vietnam). Today, war seems to be a perpetual ebb and flow of overt hostility between groups, military industrial complex interests, and, most infuriatingly and importantly, opaque and covert conflicts serving as proxy wars between international "deep state" agents, here I am thinking about Syria and ISIS.
All this takes place while world powers have enough nukes to glass the planet several times over and all sorts of other technologies, and no great shortage of recruits either.
What I really want to talk about is single combat. All I know of this is what I have read in stories, not histories. Have battles or wars really been decided by single combat? Can you explain to listeners what it means? Is it a degeneration of the concept of the hero king?
Examples off the top of my head:
David and Goliath
C.S. Lewis wrote one into the Chronicles of Narnia
Ouroboros Gorice XI and Goldry
Do you think we can do an hour on this?
Production & Grand Strategy Rome & WWII [nation]
Strategy: [army] civil war
Operational: [corp]
Tactics: [division down to team]
Morale; is the substrata and depends on individual energy, cite the Marshall Study
The Line:
Promocus of Pellene
Milo of Croton
Spartacus
The Machine:
Horatio Nelson & Black Bart
Nathan Bedford Forest
The Old Way:
Liver-Eating Johnson
Homeric
Carlos Hathcock on the rice patty and the sniper
To listen, go to:
link › jameslafond.blogspot.com
"...Destroy their army in the field..."
No chance. Not enough arms, Men, etc.
Maybe if they would have thrown everything they had right at the beginning before the North got ramped up they maybe could have shocked the North into suing for peace and going their own way.
I'm Southern and a lot of bad things have happened because of the Northern win but I'm glad the South lost. I believe that we would have continued to fight each other, over and over. Settling the issue meant we could grow into what we are now, good or bad.
War will be different in the future. The dehumanization, mechanization, of war reached it's max in the 19th and 20th century and the pendulum is swinging back to the individual. Drones, GPS guided weapons, computers allow the individual to defeat much larger forces. The former trend was centralization the trend now is decentralization. The best book I've read on this is.
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (1999) by James Dale Davidson
Holy shit I just looked it up on Amazon and they're asking,
1 Used from $5,441.99 1 New from $3,682.27
I can't believe it. I think I have two copies. I bet they'll never sell a copy at that price. I may have to sell mine, if I can find them in the maze of books I have. Here's a link to a downloadable copy.
gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=James+Dale+Davidson&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&res=25&phrase=0&column=def
Rommel considered the battles in the desert to be like sea battles and planned accordingly.
Hathcock invented the idea of putting a scope on a fifty cal. rifle, getting on mountain tops and sniping from miles away.
On the Seals in combat. I heard this guy on Joe Rogan who was thrown out of the Seals after finishing the initiation...twice, someone in the training REALLY hated him. Anyways he left the military and became a multimillionaire gambler. He said that 30% of the people he trained with, I think, were dead. So that guy that refused to let him graduate as a Seal did him a huge favor and may be dead himself.
Blackwaters Erich Prince says that bankers muscled him out out the business. The bankers own the private armies now.
James you really should read the book I linked below. The WHOLE book is about how violence shapes society. It specifically points out that the society is forced by the violence and not the other way around.
Very entertaining episode. You know a ton stuff about things that interest me.
Evola should be read in italian to understand him, translated texts are always harder to understand.
I have been told the same thing about Musashi, Junger, the Church fathers, all of the ancients—and I find myself a half dozen languages short.
I did find, through a crude parsing of Attic Greek, that the Loeb verse translations and even some epigrams, were way off the mark, was expected to believe that "the high-hander" meant "mister fingertips." This was informed by my firsthand experience fighting with wrapped fists and empty bar hands. However, in the realm of high-thinking, such efforts on my part would generate more mistakes than defending on a translator.
Does it therefore follow that I should only read British, Canadian and American authors?
That would sink me much further into the abyss of ignorance I was born into.
Who do we trust more, the translator with an axe to grind or the commentator with an axe to grind working from the translation of a first language commentator with an axe to grind translated into English by a translator with an axe to grind?
We have only our choice between shades of ignorance unless we be towering intellectuals like Richard Francis Burton.
It took me 20 years of English until I felt comfortable commenting on English literature.
How many decades for me to be qualified to understand Evola in Italian. Based on my experience with English, it would take me roughly 80 years.
Thanks for listening to my hopelessly ignorant opinion—for that is what everything based on second language translations I extract must be. because, you are right, I am in no position to judge the translation.
So, in terms of the Koran, which I reading English in two translations three times should I only trust the English words of an Arabic reader—utterly ignorant of his true perspective?
What brand of translation should I settle for?
The passive or the active?
Should I have a man writing in his second language speak to me or a man translating from his second to first language speak to me?
The only rational answer is that I should not read anything translated from another language and should remain ignorant and unseeking rather than ignorant and seeking.
And who, would ever read anything written by one who refused to seek for fear of being wrong?