Dr John Bahadur Lamb

This is the most important article of the year. Highlights below, but you should really read it in full.

⚡🇫🇷 France turns Leclerc tank into giant anti drone shotgun in live test France has adapted its Leclerc main battle tank into a powerful anti drone system, using a modified 120mm shell that disperses over 1,100 tungsten pellets to take down aerial targets. In a live test in Abu Dhabi, the system successfully destroyed a drone, proving a simple but deadly concept: instead of building a new weapon, upgrade an existing one. The idea reflects how modern battlefields are rapidly evolving, where even heavy tanks must now counter cheap, fast moving drone threats. 🇫🇷 From tank killer to drone hunter, the battlefield is changing fast.

Restore Britain 🇬🇧

Je veux présenter mes excuses, au nom des Français, pour avoir enfanté la French Theory (qui a enfanté la pire des merdes idéologiques : le wokisme). Nous avons donné au monde Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. Et puis, dans les ruines intellectuelles de l'après-68, nous avons donné Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Trois hommes brillants qui ont fabriqué, dans l'élégance de notre langue, l'arme idéologique qui paralyse aujourd'hui l'Occident. Il faut comprendre ce qu'ils ont fait. Foucault a enseigné que la vérité n'existe pas, qu'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir. Que la science, la raison, la justice, l'institution médicale, l'école, la prison, la sexualité, tout n'est qu'une mise en scène de la domination. Derrida a enseigné que les textes n'ont pas de sens stable, que tout signifiant glisse, que toute lecture est une trahison, que l'auteur est mort et que le lecteur règne. Deleuze a enseigné qu'il fallait préférer le rhizome à l'arbre, le nomade au sédentaire, le désir à la loi, le devenir à l'être, la différence à l'identité. Pris isolément, ce sont des thèses discutables. Combinées, exportées, vulgarisées, elles forment un système. Et ce système est un poison. Car voici ce qui s'est passé. Ces textes, illisibles en France, ont traversé l'Atlantique. Les départements de Yale, de Berkeley, de Columbia les ont absorbés dans les années 80. Ils y ont trouvé un terreau qui n'existait pas chez nous : le puritanisme américain, sa culpabilité raciale, son obsession identitaire. La French Theory s'est mariée à ce substrat, et l'enfant de ce mariage s'appelle le wokisme. Judith Butler lit Foucault et invente le genre performatif. Edward Said lit Foucault et invente le post-colonialisme académique. Kimberlé Crenshaw hérite du cadre et invente l'intersectionnalité. À chaque étape, la matrice est française : il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que du pouvoir, donc toute hiérarchie est suspecte, toute institution est oppressive, toute norme est violence, toute identité est construite donc négociable, toute majorité est coupable. Voilà comment trois philosophes parisiens, qui n'ont probablement jamais imaginé leurs conséquences pratiques, ont fourni le logiciel d'exploitation à une génération entière d'activistes, de bureaucrates universitaires, de DRH, de journalistes, de législateurs. Voilà comment on a obtenu une civilisation qui ne sait plus dire si une femme est une femme, si sa propre histoire mérite d'être défendue, si le mérite existe, si la vérité se distingue de l'opinion. C'est de la merde pour une raison simple, et il faut la dire calmement. Une civilisation se tient debout sur trois piliers : la croyance qu'il existe une vérité accessible à la raison, la croyance qu'il existe un bien distinct du mal, la croyance qu'il existe un héritage à transmettre. La French Theory a entrepris de dynamiter les trois. Pas par méchanceté. Par jeu intellectuel, par fascination du soupçon, par haine de la bourgeoisie qui les avait nourris. Mais le résultat est là. Une génération entière a appris à déconstruire et n'a jamais appris à construire. Une génération entière sait soupçonner et ne sait plus admirer. Une génération entière voit le pouvoir partout et la beauté nulle part. Je m'excuse parce que nous, Français, avons une responsabilité particulière. C'est notre langue, nos universités, nos éditeurs, notre prestige qui ont donné à ce nihilisme son emballage chic. Sans la légitimité de la Sorbonne et de Vincennes, ces idées n'auraient jamais traversé l'océan. Nous avons exporté le doute comme d'autres exportent des armes. Ce qui se construit maintenant, en silicon valley, dans les labos d'IA, dans les startups, dans les ateliers, dans tous les lieux où des gens fabriquent encore des choses au lieu de les déconstruire, c'est la réponse. Une civilisation se reconstruit par les bâtisseurs, pas par les commentateurs. Par ceux qui croient que la vérité existe et qu'elle vaut qu'on s'y consacre. Par ceux qui assument une hiérarchie du beau, du vrai, du bon, et qui n'ont pas honte de la transmettre. Alors pardon. Et au travail.

That is Lieutenant Colonel Or Ben Yehuda, commander of the CARACAL unit near Gaza. On the morning of October 7th, she opened her eyes and saw Hamas in front of her. “I look up at the sky, then lower my head again, glance to the side, and there are maybe five pickup trucks coming toward me, full of motorcycle riders. There are terrorists leaping between the sand dunes and the trees, all of them wearing vests and uniforms, moving in our direction, and I can’t even count them properly with my eyes. It’s hundreds. Hundreds. And farther back, on the distant road, I see columns of Gazan civilians simply walking toward us, some armed, some not. And I say to myself: ‘That’s it. This is where I die. Right here, exactly where I’m standing now. This is where I die.’ Then I said to myself: Fine. If this is the end, then I’ll end it well. I’ll die with honor. I’ll do the best I can. And I’ll fight until my very last drop of blood. So I turn to my soldiers, a group of twelve heroic fighters waiting for me to tell them what to do. I turn to them with half a smile. Later, they told me I smiled; I didn’t remember it. And I tell them: ‘Come on, let’s tear them apart!’ And they all shout back: ‘Yalla!!!’ They come to the embankment with machine guns, with everything they can carry, and we position ourselves there and start firing at everyone approaching the outpost. We’re shooting like mad. At some point, we had a LAU missile with us, so we fired it at one of the Hamas pickup trucks. The truck exploded in a massive blast, something unbelievable. There must have been huge amounts of explosives inside, and the explosion took several of the motorcycle riders with it. And little by little, I suddenly realize many of them are beginning to retreat, turn around, and flee back the way they came. And suddenly I understood: yes, we’re doing something significant here. We were there for about half an hour, and then, in the middle of all the chaos, I suddenly hear the tracks of a tank behind me. It was an unbelievable sigh of relief. I told my deputy company commander: ‘Stay here! I don’t know whose tank this is — I’m going to get it!’ It was already around eleven o’clock. I start moving backward, advancing toward the tank through the concrete barriers, and suddenly I realize a terrorist is jumping at me from point-blank range, and in another second, he would’ve been hugging me. And my luck was that I already had a round in the chamber and my finger on the trigger. It was literally a question of who shoots first, and I shot first. The terrorist collapsed in front of me. And I froze for a moment, like, what was that? What just happened? Then I hear my deputy commander yelling from behind me: ‘Commander! Commander! Are you okay?’ I look at myself, I’m okay. I turn back toward him and signal with my hand: everything’s under control. He runs up after me, looks at me, and says, ‘What… what just happened between you two?’ And I tell him: ‘Exactly what’s going through your head right now.’ But the tank! I remember — I can’t let it leave. We need it. I ran quickly toward it, and because I’m used to working with my tank crews, I started signaling to them in tank hand signals: ‘Terrorists there, behind me, do this, shell over there!’ And he’s with us, he understands immediately. And for the first time, I suddenly have additional force joining me. We make some kind of flanking maneuver, take up a strong position, and simply fire toward wherever the terrorists are coming from. We keep firing and firing, and they start pulling back. And I understand — all of us understand — that if we don’t continue fighting right now, those terrorists will get past us and reach all the communities behind us. At a certain point, my deputy commander and his radio operator are hit by an RPG and collapse to the ground. So we pull them out of there. Then I call friends of mine who are pilots flying Yasur and Yanshuf helicopters, and I ask them to come land at the helipad near the outpost, because I’ve evacuated wounded soldiers there and I need them to clear our casualties out. And it actually happens. They arrive, they land, and they evacuate the wounded for me. Meanwhile, my medical unit is there the entire time treating casualties, loading them up, evacuating them to the helipad. We managed to bring there the wounded from the APC we had seen, the wounded from our battalion, and several civilians we picked up along the way — people who escaped from Kibbutz Sufa, from Pri Gan, and from other places. They all received treatment from my incredible medical team — those angels — and the helicopters I called in evacuated them to Soroka Hospital, where they finally received proper care. There were also many dead in that battle. There were dead. And I remember one moment at the end, when everything was over, just minutes before they came to evacuate the bodies. There was a moment when they were lying there side by side, and I walked between them, gently touching their faces, stroking them softly, telling them I was sorry, and closing their eyes. And I remember telling myself in that moment that those people, who were now making their final journey, were unbelievable heroes. They fought there like lions to save Kibbutz Sufa. They fought until their last drop of blood." From Or's book 'book One Day in October'.