Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
In the early morning of 12 January 2024, an Anglo-American aerial strike force rained fire onto 16 locations across the rebel-controlled Yemen almost simultaneously. Thirty minutes later a second wave of 12 locations were hit, again simultaneously. In total around 200 missiles hit key rebel assets across the beleaguered country in a highly precise attack. These strikes were delivered through several assets: American jets launched from the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower; American land-attack missiles launched from a cruiser, 2 destroyers and a nuclear submarine; and finally British fighter jets launching from our overseas bases in Cyprus. A massive, coordinated attack from the preeminent military force on a weak and very much local militia force far from allied homelands. Why was the Yemen worthy of such retaliation, when the West has been unwilling to intervene with the much more deadly and "important" conflict occurring in the Gaza Strip? The answer, as many know, is supply routes.
^The World Trade Axis, overlaid with the 50 largest ports.
The "World Trade Axis" is a line that can be drawn encircling the globe, following the major maritime trade routes that connect the hubs of our modern world: Western Europe, the US and East Asia. The map above demonstrates how this works, showing the top 50 container ports by volume of goods moved in 2022: they map near perfectly with the so called "axis". In the era of the aeroplane it is easy to forget the importance of seaborne trade: but international trade always has been and still absolutely is maritime, with over 90% of international trade being by sea by volume. If maritime trade were to be cut-off, advanced economies would suffer massively, economies collapsing overnight. But second and third world economies would suffer just as much: with the world now relying on this trade, many agricultural countries invest heavily in crop specialisation, meaning that they do not have the diversity of food production required to be self-sustaining and would starve without access to imported bulk cereals. The result of this state of affairs is that events that affect the world trade axis ARE internal matters to most nations, and need to be dealt with.
I will outline the route circumnavigating the globe starting and finishing in London, heading predominantly Eastwards. Our journey starts as the River Thames empties herself out into the North Sea, the basin from which "global trade" first emanated during the age of empire-building. As well as the nexus of the British Empire, the mighty River Rhine also empties out into the North Sea, a river that feeds the industrial heartlands of continental Europe; not to mention controlling access to the Baltic Sea and the ports of Poland, Sweden and St Petersburg. Here we meet the first of the world's primary maritime "chokepoints": the Strait of Dover. "Chokepoints", as the name suggests, are geographical bottlenecks that force shipping into narrow channels, causing heavy traffic and points vital to be kept open for trade to continue. Many exist across the world-sea's myriad straits and channels, but six have been identified as the cornerstones for international trade.
The route travels West through the strait into the English Channel, flanked by the iconic white cliffs of Southern England and the green fields of Normandy and Brittany. Unsurprisingly the only people on Earth who do not refer to this stretch of water as the "English Channel" are the French, calling it "Le Manche", "the Sleeve". France and Britain, I would argue, have acted as the two primary movers of the world for much of world history. The military, economic, social, cultural and demographic struggle between the two have driven the global dialectic for centuries. Here you will find the Royal Navy's two principal bases: Portsmouth "Pompey" and Plymouth "Guzz"; you will also find the mouth of the River Seine, that leads up to the French Capital. The channel is traditionally bounded on its Western limits with a line from the Scilly Isles off Cornwall to the Isle of Ushant off Brittany, past which we enter the open Atlantic.
Travelling South down the coasts of France and Iberia we reach the second of our primary chokepoints: the Strait of Gibraltar. A stretch of water regarded by the ancients as the limits of the world. The strait is guarded by two large rock formations: on Europe this is the rock of Gibraltar itself, and on Africa the similar formation of Ceuta. It is said that these two great rocks were placed by Hercules himself, inscribed with the words "NON PLUS ULTRA", "Nothing further beyond". Why he was writing in Latin I can't tell you. These rocks have clearly always had a magical presence, being a gateway where old and new meet, bringing around change and the unnatural mixing of cultures. It was where Britain wrested the complete dominion of the sea from the French at the Battle of Trafalgar, where the Moors brought Islamic culture over into Europe, and where they were cast back across during the Reconguista, it's also the only place in Europe to have wild monkeys, very unnatural. Even the political reality is inverted: Spain controls not the rock on its own side of the strait, but the Southern Ceuta instead; and Gibraltar is of course a British territory!
And so we head East into the Mediterranean Sea, once the centre of civilisation but now more often a passage connecting two separate locations. The legacies of the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Romans and the early Christians ring out as ships steam toward Egypt and the Holy Land. Here, nestled between Alexandria on the Nile Delta, and the Biblical Cities of Israel and Palestine sits the entrance to the Suez Canal, built by an Anglo-French coenterprise in 1869, it connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, quickly becoming the busiest shipping lane in the world: a title it retains to this day. It actually echoes ancient equivalents built by (possibly) Pharaoh Ramesses the Great three millennia earlier, and another by the Persian Shahanshah Darius the Great in the 5th century BC. The modern canal cuts across the low-lying deserts of the Sinai Peninsula, the land of the Exodus: the canal shadowed by the looming peak of Mt Sinai. The waterway parts the land just as Moses parted the sea, letting through pilgrims and merchants alike. And just as Moses let the crashing sea fall back onto the Egyptian army, the canal is easily blocked: as seen with the Chinese cargo ship "Ever Given" in 2021. I also see an echo of this moment when the Americans prevented the British, French and Jews from keeping the canal open during the Suez Crisis of 1956, the moment that the Western Powers symbolically lost their positions as superpowers.
Through the canal lies the Red Sea, so called because it runs red with the blood of Islamic Extremism. Actually I have no idea, but it is a strip of water marred with the post-WWII struggle and pains felt by the Arab world and the horrors of the wars for oil and against terror. It is here, as the sea empties out into the Indian Ocean we find the "Gate of Tears" ("Bab El-Mandab" in Arabic), with Arabia to the North and the Horn of Africa to the South. The name is apt, as this part of the world is full of strife. Of the countries in the area: the Sudan, Ethiopia and the Yemen are in civil war, and Eritrea and Somalia are violent failed states, leaving only tiny Djibouti as a bastion of peace (propped up by global militaries). And it is here that the news of Anglo-American missile strikes comes to us from. Yemeni extremists (backed by the Persian Caliphate), by obstructing merchant shipping through the Gate of Tears, are forcing ships to take the long route around the Cape of Good Hope and adding 5100 miles to the journey, damaging the already hurting global economy. And it is for this reason that Britain and America were forced to intervene: attacks on global chokepoints are attacks on the world after all.
And here is where I'll end part one, as we sail East through the Gate avoiding Yemeni missiles and Somali pirates into the serene waters of the Indes. Next time I'll cover the journey to the Orient and beyond, through the remaining three of our chokepoints.
