Mark Holland is on a blogging roll just now, and one of the more interesting things to be found on his blog earlier in the week was a link to and a big chunk of a speech made by Winston Churchill, on June 4th 1945, which I assume Mark to have found here. (Mark himself offers no link.)

Quote:

But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.

Now I am not trying to say or even to suggest that what governs Britain now is what was meant in 1945 by "Socialism". That hard-line root-and-branch government control of everyone and everything is a horror story has by now been well understood by all but a tiny few lunatics, if only because the promised economic benefits of such a system have all turned to dust and rust, in Britain and everywhere else where such Socialism has been attempted. Churchill's team won that argument, even if this took rather longer than Churchill had hoped in 1945. But the book which prompted Churchill to say these things, Hayek's The Road To Serfdom, paints a more complicated picture than just simple tyranny. Hayek also foresaw chaos, and an ever more desperate governmental effort to correct chaos, with even more chaos. And at the moment, governmentally induced chaos probably looms larger in our lives than governmental tyranny. But the means of inflicting a more self-conscious and deliberate tyranny at some future date are now pretty much all in place.

And, once again, the traitor in our midst is war. In 1945, it was the recently concluded war against Nazi Germany, and the warm glow of team spiritedness which that war gave off, for those who had good wars like formerly poor soldiers who had lived through victories (rather than those who had died during defeats), and like behind the lines enthusiasts for central planning. Now, it is the so-called War on Terror, which creates an atmosphere in which the Government does not demand or expect to know everything, but does insist upon its absolute right to know anything in particular that strikes it as important. And, now as in 1945, the British people, on the whole, do not object. Rather do they expect this, and complain only when the Government fails to keep an eye on things enthusiastically enough.

Today is the anniversary of the execution of French monarch Louis XVI. If my reading of history is correct, the matter did not end terribly well for France. Not that most Frenchmen would want the Bourbons back, however.

Of course there is a huge body of historical literature on the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution, which in many ways created the model for totalitarianism in Soviet Russia, China and elsewhere. That the Bourbon monarchy was a corrupt institution and that the ordinary folk of France suffered under an oppressive system is not in much doubt, mind. I cannot help but think, however, that the violent overthrow of the monarchy and what followed was, in net terms, a disaster for Europe and sowed the seeds of much eventual trouble.

I recommend this book by Simon Schama and this item, which pinpoints the violent events in France as an example of "totalitarian democracy" and the dangers of folk who claim to have an unique insight into some fictitious entity called the General Will.

One of my favourite actors, Michael Caine, achieved one of his early breakthroughs in the film, The Ipcress File, based on the Len Deighton Cold War thriller of the same name. (I love the fact that Deighton, a fine historian of the air campaigns in the Second World War, used to write a cookery column for the Observer. Very hip). Anyhow, without spoiling the plot of either the book or the film, it hinges around the use of “brainwashing” techniques to make people do one’s bidding or erase the memory of certain information.

How much of this could ever be based on fact or indeed, did either side in the Cold War use such techniques? There is a long entry in the now-indispensable Wikipedia site on this topic, pointing to the origin of the word “brainwash” in the early stages of the Cold War during the Korean campaign. The entries raise some doubts about how widely used such techniques were, or whether the term simply refers to a particularly fierce form of propoganda. I have come across the term in various films of the period, such as the first version of the Manchurian Candidate (forget the remake, which is a pale imitation of the original). But to what extent were such techniques really all that effective in moulding minds? Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”, which I have just finished reading and enjoyed immensely, queries the idea of an infinitely malleable mind, arguing that there are limits to how the brain can be influenced by certain techniques.

If this is true then it is encouraging that there are limits to how far the mind can be moulded in any way that those in authority, whether benign or malign, wish.

Anyway, I can strongly recommend readers rent out the Caine movies based on the Deighton books. Highly entertaining.

To say that the ancient Greeks have had a profound influence on Western civilisation is a truism so obvious to many who regularly read this site that it might seem silly to spell it out. The state of education in Britain, however, means that it is important and necessary to spell that achievement out and draw out the key elements of what the ancient Greeks 'did for us' as well as point to some of the shortcomings.

Charles Freeman’s The Greek Achievement is a splendid tour of ancient Greece, starting in the Bronze Age and finishing with the advent of the Middle Ages. It covers military campaigns, notably the long-running Peloponnese war; the changing fortunes of the dozens of city states; the development of democracy and city government and the eventual rise of Rome. Interwoven with this is a masterful survey of developments in philosophy, maths, science, astronomy, law and language. Freeman also is excellent at explaining the role of myth and ceremony in Greek culture, and does not fight shy of showing the lousy treatment of women and the huge use of slavery.

Among the highlights of the book is a lucid exposition of the philosophical innovations and arguments of Plato and Aristotle. Freeman writes without obvious bias but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that much though he admires Plato’s clarity of thought, he is highly conscious of how Plato's vision of a Republic run by 'philosopher kings' is an early model for many tyrannies such as Revolutionary France, Communist Russia and China. Freeman even cites Sir Karl Popper's book, the Open Society and its Enemies, as a foremost demolition of Plato's ideas. He is, meanwhile, full of admiration for Aristotle and his development of key building blocks of logic.

Another highlight is Freeman’s description of the military campaigns of Alexander the Great. The myth of this great military leader is that of a man who had conquered a huge chunk of the then-known world by the age of 32 before succumbing to illness. He was certainly a brilliant and brave military commander and his feats were openly envied by later greats such as Tiberius of Rome and Napoleon Bonaparte. Alexander, though, was also a brute – sacking towns that failed to show instant loyalty and looting captured cities of their treasures. He also failed to set up the kind of stable regime able to survive after his death. Freeman certainly tries to cut this man down to size.

When I studied history at school and in my undergraduate days the Greek story was hardly touched upon in my studies. It seems to me, as I get older and think about the enormous contribution to civilisation made by the Greeks, that a study of this period is intensely absorbing. I intend to go on filling a major gap in my education in this area.

I can also recommend this book by Freeman and this one.

Perhaps this category should be referred to as prehistorical views. Usually, when we hear that palaeontologists and archaeologists have extended the prehistory of the human species, we think of the Leakeys, Africa, Lucy and the Olduvai Gorge.

For once, such an announcement comes from closer to home. The Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project has discovered a site near Lowestoft dating human habitation in Britain to seven hundred thousand years ago. This date is based upon the vole teeth discovered on the site, compared with later discoveries at Boxgrove and Westbury sub Mendip in Somerset.

The dates involved are much too early for carbon dating - effective only to about 40,OOOBC - but scientists have been able to calculate good approximate ages from the known ages of animal fossils found at the sites.

In particular, the research centres on teeth belonging to a genus of prehistoric watervole, known as mimomys. About 700,000 years ago these voles had rooted molars, similar to those of human beings, which grow once then get worn down through adult life. But by 500,000 years ago, the animals had evolved rootless molars that continue to grow - an advantage to creatures that eat tough vegetation.

The voles found at Boxgrove are from the later era, but the East Anglian ones have primitive molars, dating the site definitively to at least 700,000 years ago. Those at Westbury are of an intermediate form. "The dating still involves some guesswork, but the best estimate is about 600,000 years ago," Professor Stringer said. Simon Parfitt, a fossil mammal specialist at the museum and at University College, London, who analysed the vole fossils, said; "We can put everything in a relative order, and Westbury could be 100,000 years earlier than Boxgrove. The Best Anglian finds go as far back as 700,000 years."

Early Man's reach extended further and earlier than we have anticipated. Who knows what else prehistory will throw at us.

Finally someone has explained to me why such as fuss is made, and not just by idiot Frenchmen, about the military genius of Napoleon.

All I have seen for the last forty years or so is a very self-important general who liked presiding over slaughters, sometimes of the other fellow's army, sometimes of his own, and frequently both. I have seen a land-locked leader who was comprehensively defeated by Nelson several times. And I have seen a hubristic fool who invaded Russia, with catastrophic consequences. Okay he also won several battles, and wrote out lots of laws. But why the adulation?

Recently, however, I have been reading General Sir Rupert Smith's new book, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World.

Reading the Introduction was sometimes a little like wading in lead boots through treacle. It contains sentences like: "Force is the basis of any military activity, whether in a theatre of operations or in a skirmish between two soldiers." "Military force when employed has only two immediate effects: it kills people and destroys things." And: "Military force is applied by armed forces of men, materiel and their logistic support." Even a civilian like me knows these things, although to be fair to Smith these thudding revelations of the obvious immediately become the basis of distinctions and qualifications that were more subtle.

However, as soon as Chapter One got started, things livened up considerably. And Smith began his story proper with: Napoleon.

What made Napoleon different was that the French Revolution had created something quite new, in the form of a vast and almost infinitely replenishable army of conscripted citizen enthusiasts, rather than the human farm animals who were herded into battle by his contemporaries. Eighteenth century infantry tactics were as much about preventing desertion by one's own soldiers as they were about defeating the other lot, which does much to explain why actual battles were generally avoided and manoeuvre and negotiation were often all that happened in pre-Napoleonic military confrontations.

Besides which, in the eighteenth century, armies were hard to replace. They did not flock to any banners. They had to be chased after and caught.

Napoleon did not invent the solution to this problem, but the Revolution presented him with it, and he seized upon it.

This is the bit of the story I never did properly understand, and I guess I still do not. What was the big difference between being a subject and being a citizen? Some non-aristocratic thug standing on a balcony bellowing at you that you were now a "citizen"? Big deal. But apparently, in those days, it was a big deal. In exchange for this title Napoleon's citizen army became something quite new.

Napoleon realised that, provided that he looked after his men – fed them properly, clothed them properly, and so on – he could demand of them things that his rivals could only dream about. In exchange for such solicitousness, Napoleon was able to split his vast citizen army into independent corps, each able to fight on their own, and trust them to do as they were told and not to run away. While his opponents could manoeuvre only as one docile mass, his armies would split up and march this way and that (which also made them a lot easier to supply because this made foraging so much easier), like a Kung Fu master waving his hands hypnotically, and only converging on what Napoleon decided would make a good battlefield on the day of the battle itself.

Once there, Napoleon was not afraid to get stuck into a pitched battle, because unlike the opposition, he could whistle up another army in the event of defeat, or for that matter of costly victory. Apparently his fellow "citizens" did not mind this. Risking death, in exchange for "gloire" was, they reckoned, a good deal. Fighting for Napoleon was like playing football for Brazil, in an age of mud-bound cloggers. Dying was worth it, because until then, you lived! Was that it? I do not really know.

Even after the amazing Russian fiasco, Napoleon was still able to magic another army together out of nowhere, and have another crack at the coalition that confronted him from 1813-1815. As Smith himself points out, this was truly remarkable.

So I guess I still do not fully understand Napoleon's achievement. But thanks to General Smith, I have, as it were, isolated the bit of the story that is still a mystery to me. And once I take that bit on trust, the rest of the story falls into place.

Maybe me not fully understanding the "citizen" bit is because, as Smith has already made very clear, the "paradigm" of industrial warfare that got started with Napoleon is now, in his opinion, in a state of advanced crisis, and is in fact pretty much history. It was this paradigm shift argument that got me interested in this book in the first place, and why I intend to press on until I have finished it, despite any further treacle I may encounter. General Smith is, I think, a man worth following, through a book anyway, and the price of following him is worth paying.

Smith apparently played a big part in the Balkans in the nineties. I wonder what he did there, and what he will say about it. And I wonder whether Perry de Havilland approves of this man or has in the Spawn of Satan box, in the company of people like Harold Pinter.

Yesterday I chanced upon a short interview on some children's TV type show called T4, with the actor James Purefoy. "Purefoy" is, I now finally know, pronounced "pure-foy", rather than "pure-i-foy", which I have often wondered about.

Anyway, James Pure-foy is playing Mark Anthony in the hit TV series, Rome, and one of the things he said struck me as really rather illuminating. He said that the difference between us and the Romans was that they regarded weakness as a vice and what we would call cruelty as a virtue.

To many readers here this will seem a banal and obvious observation, but I have never heard it put quite like that, or if I ever have I was not paying attention. Perhaps the clarity of this observation can be attributed to the fact that although the actors in this series are British, the producers are Americans. Americans do love to nail down in a few words what a show is all about. (Until Purefoy went on to say this, I did not even know that Rome was an American production rather than British.)

This cruelty-is-a-virtue meme pulls together lots of different things about the Romans that have never previously made proper sense to me. Basically, why were they such total and utter bastards, and at the very same time so amazingly smug about how virtuous they were? Did they like torturing each other, and even being tortured? Answer: no. But they did believe in it. They were not indifferent to pain. They believed in pain. They believed in inflicting it, and believed that being able to endure it was one of the highest virtues. A lot falls into place once you (by which I mean I) get that.

Given the kind of world that the Romans inhabited, you can see how such beliefs would answer the Darwinian necessities of that time. But perhaps because the Roman political system had such a modern feel to it, the ancientness of their ethical beliefs seems somehow jarring. But yes, the Romans spent a lot of their time – in particular a lot of their education – actively trying to be more cruel than their natural inclinations inclined them to be. (See also: Sparta.)

I think this distinction goes a long way to explaining how Christianity fitted in to Roman civilisation, and in particular the kind of difference it made. You can agree about that, even if, like me, you regard Christian theological claims as crackpottery.

I think that this cruelty-as-virtue idea throws into particular relief the particular kinds of blunders that we now make. The basic Roman blunder, it seems to me, and judged by our standards rather than theirs, was that they were just too damn destructive. They killed too many people, shut down too many worthwhile rival civilisations, slaughtered too many of the extras in their version of Hollywood entertainment. Whether you explain the collapse of Rome by its destructiveness, or by the weakness of Christianity, like Gibbon, I do not see how all that destruction could possibly have helped.

The virtue we aspire to is kindness, and in everyday life this usually works pretty well. But the vices of our civilisation are mostly also related to that aspiration, it seems to me, and now more than ever before. Even as Christian theology is now laughed to scorn, by me among many thousands, Christian ethics are triumphant in our civilisation as never before. But the underside of kindness is weakness, meekness, sentimentality, thoughtlessness – niceness as a substitute for competence and for thinking it through. Instead of thoughtful and because of that all the more hideously destructive brutality – the Roman vice – we indulge in impulsive and frivolous orgies of unthinking niceness.

This, if you think about it, is the running argument we have here at Samizdata with the zeitgeist of our time.

Some of our more vocal commenters think that our world is ruled by sinister power grabbers, who know exactly what they are doing. I think, in contrast, that we are ruled by sentimentalities which vaguely indicate what would be nice, but a not nearly sufficient idea of how actually to contrive such niceness. The power grabbers are merely the insects that thrive in the resulting chaos, rather than the instigators of the chaos itself.

To put the point in terms of a prominent British political personality, Tony Blair is and has for some time been our Prime Minister because, and unlike his Conservative predecessors, he is thought to be, in a word, nice. If he is now losing his grip, this is because the ideas he has tried to follow do not by their nature provide him with grip, rather than because he is some kind of secret Mark Anthony in our midst.

I actually suspect that, just as there is lots of surreptitious nastiness in our world, there was in ancient Rome, on the quiet, lots of surreptitious niceness going on. To oil the wheels, so to speak. The equivalent in Roman times of Peter Mandelson, screaming down a telephone threatening to chop your balls off and eat them at the latest posh restaurant du jour, was a Roman politician looking both ways down the street to make sure no one saw him at it, and then smiling at you and doing you a nice little favour. Niceness was, I suspect, a Roman fact but also a Roman secret. (How else could Christianity have ever caught on?) And then our nice Roman fixer would be back to the Senate to make blood-curdling speeches about the need to suppress with the utmost brutality whatever little challenge Rome faced that week.

I said above that "we" aspire to the virtue of kindness. Maybe that is a rather European view. Americans may be wondering quite where they fit into this dichotomy. In particular, they may be noting that it is precisely in the Christian bits of the USA that the semi-Roman virtue of cruel-to-be-kind foreign policy precision is still aspired to, and in the non- or anti-Christian bits of the USA where the kind of incompetent niceness I have been complaining about is most popular. Maybe Christianity has its own built-in safeguards against Christian and especially post-Christian feeblemindedness and sentimentality.

One of the shrewder things that the actor and (sometimes) wit Peter Ustinov used to say (he said everything he had to say many times over) was that the Americans were like Romans, and that he, the Brit, felt very Greek in their company. (I suspect he meant, in particular, Athenian.) Ustinov also used to say how impressed he was at the crispness with which Americans would sum up the central themes of the movies which they produced and directed, and which he acted in.

I see that John Milius was involved in the creation of Rome. I have always felt that there was something particularly Roman about that man. Milius is also the living embodiment of the notion that, faced with the choice between a politically correct miss and a politically incorrect hit, Hollywood always goes with the money, but that is another story.

All over the UK tonight, the sky will be lit up with fireworks and the evening will reverberate with a lot of loud bangs as folk mark Guy Fawke's Night. Here is a nifty website explaining all about the event, what is commemorated and why. I'll be off to Battersea Park later this evening to enjoy the fun. I hope people use their common sense and don't get hurt.

Here is an informative book about the early 17th Century plot to blow up Parliament and the subsequent anti-Catholic crackdown. There is also even something called the Gunpowder Plot Society.

When I was a student living in Brighton, I once went to nearby Lewes, a town that stages a massive series of processions and bonfires every year. It is pretty non-PC in that a lot of people have muttered that such an event, especially one that involves burning effigies of a 17th Century Pope, stirs up ugly prejudices. I can sympathise up to a point with the grumblers. When I went along to the event there was the smell not just of gunpowder in the air but quite a lot of aggressive body language on display (although that may have been due to the potent local ales). I am glad to say that, all this time on, anti-Popery hysteria is mostly a thing of the past in Britain (apart from the odd bit of nuttiness at Glaswegian local football matches between Celtic and Rangers). Alas, it lingers on in Northern Ireland.

How do they do it? To be more exact and honest, how do we do it? Some of us, that is to say. I am referring to the mysterious tenacity of poshly educated people in British politics. Tony Blair went to a posh school. Now it looks odds on that the Conservatives will pick another posh, after a generation of not-so-poshes, starting with Edward Heath. Why? What is the magic that the canniest and most ruthless of us public school educated people which keeps the most prominent of our kind so prominent?

Part of it is that the education of the non-posh majority has, in Britain, been severely damaged, in the name of advancing the non-poshes. That is certainly part of the story.

But I think that another quality that people like David Cameron manage to exude – honestly or dishonestly, it really does not matter which – is: humility. Personally I tend to find this type insufferable, which may be because I got to know these people close up when they were still perfecting their personas, and in some cases before they were even trying and were just being pure bastards. The nastier the bastard, the thicker the veneer of humility that they later glue on, in my experience. But if you are not intimately acquainted with these nice, nice chaps, that humble act can fool you. Plus, in a few cases, the humility is genuine and was there from the start. Anyway, Cameron's type radiates the notion that he only got where he is by being very lucky. The cards he was dealt made Cameron what he is, Cameron seems to say. Without these cards, the undoubted skill with which he played the cards he did get would have availed him nothing. One, you know, does one's best, but one has been fortunate, extremely fortunate.

The trouble with the meritocrats whom the likes of Blair and Cameron come up against is that they seem to believe that they merit their cratness. They deserve it. Gordon Brown, for example, suggests to me a man who not only thinks that himself to be an excellent Chancellor of the Exchequer, but also a man who thinks that he deserves to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for that matter deserves to be Prime Minister, instead of recognising with his every public word and gesture that he also needed a hell of a lot of luck to get anywhere near either job.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that these people do not work twenty hour days, day after day after day, year after year, and study the grease on their greasy pole with obsessive attention. But you can work fifty brilliantly accomplished hours every day of your life and still not be Prime Minister or now, anything near it, if you are, to note just one of many uncontrollable political disabilities, bald. Or if the hair you do have is ginger. Maybe those rules will change, but for now, there they are. My point is that maybe, yes, there is a sense in which Gordon Brown deserves everything he has had, and may still have coming. But the same applies to thousands of others just as deserving, who came nowhere near to his eminence.

Democratic politics is an extraordinarily flooky business. Timing, for instance, is everything. One basic reason why Cameron looks like winning the Conservative leadership is that he is younger than his rivals. All of them, but not he, are members of a fatally tainted generation of Conservatives who did well, or who thought they would do well, or who are thought to have thought that they would do well – who enjoyed – Thatcherism. Smug bastards, screw the whole damn lot of them, is the view of the electorate. All the expensively educated charm in the world would have been of no use to Cameron if he had been ten years older than he is, and had spent his early political years feeling – or merely looking – smug about being a member of Thatcher's Conservative Party.

I deliberately did not read this article by Matthew Parris before writing the above about Cameron. I but now have. Parris notes that the toffs are back, but does not really say why.

I have already explained some of why toffs can be more likeable, but why is mere likeability now considered important? As Parris points out, for a generation before Blair, it was not. Ghastly nouveau riche meritocratic peasants dominated the Conservatives for several decades. And Labour has not been in the habit of picking obviously posh leaders, not since Ramsay MacDonald. Only now are the toffs "back in the saddle". What gives?

I think it is that the British now believe that they can afford the luxury of only paying attention to likeable leaders. David Cameron, you might say, is a bet on Britain continuing to have a quiet life of genteel decline, with no events.

But if there is a job to be done, such as trade unions to be crushed and national bankruptcy to be dodged, a war to be won, a welfare state to be built, then disliked or socially inept leaders elbow their annoying and embarrassing way to the top and do whatever needs to be done. Thatcher had her silly voice lessons and her all round overbearingness, quite aside from the amazing handicap of being female. Churchill and Attlee, so different in so many ways, also had unlikeability in common. Churchill, although educated as a toff, was ludicrously over-the-top in manner until an over-the-top job (thwarting Adolf Hitler) hove into view and rescued him from ludicrousness, while Attlee was so far under the top as to be invisible, as Churchill in particular loved to piont out. But they each got their various jobs done, and were then dumped as soon as they had done them, the Churchill and Attlee jobs having been laid end to end.

But when there is nothing important to be done, toffdom is reinstalled, in the person first of the sanctified post-war Churchill, of Eden, and then when that went wrong too, Harold Macmillan. And now, we have nice Tony Blair, the Hugh Grant of British politics, and Labour's answer to Macmillan.

The Wilson/Heath/Callaghan period can now be understood as a series of attempts to do what Thatcher finally did do, namely "get Britain moving", as Wilson put it, with Callaghan foolishly imagining that a kind of Old Labour toffdom ("What crisis?") was relevant and sufficient, when it was neither.

But now, it is believed, we are back to an age of post-ideological calm, or settlement, during which a nice guy who did not do the ideology can surrender to that ideological settlement, gracefully. Hence Tony Blair. And Cameron is the Conservative Party's way of acknowledging that niceness now counts for more than getting anything done, or anything changed.

Interestingly, the prominent Conservative who now disagrees with this most strongly is Ken Clarke. On Europe I find Clarke repulsive, to which he has now added the vice of lying about being repulsive, which he at least used not to do. But of all the Conservative candidates in this leadership election, he has been the one most given to denouncing Gordon Brown and all his works. If the British people ever decide that they again need someone to get Britain moving, again, well, we know how Blair and Brown will fare. They will not. They are the ones now presiding, Macmillan style, over the slow-down. But would Cameron do any better? He is not the type.

Maybe these guys will barge through on the rails. Of the two pictured at the other end of that link, the first looks to be rather ginger, and the other – who seems happy to be known as Vince - is bald.

Just to remind everyone that today is a rather special Trafalgar Day.

Nicely done, Horatio.

I went from Instapundit to this this presumably not-so-instant pundidtry by Glenn Reynolds called The old industrial state, and from there, via an eBay reference, to another Glenn Reynolds piece called Is small the new big?.

The idea here is that that new big businesses - eBay, Amazon – are getting big by helping the small guy to do his thing, unlike the old big business, which was an economically deluded tyrant.

But did not the big, bad old industrial system - which only became a "state" in the years of its dotage - also empower people? For as long as it was properly run, it did.

The Model T and the Sears Roebuck Catalogue empowered the little guy, just like eBay and Amazon now. The Model T was the basis of many a small business. Sears Roebuck made it possible for smaller operators outside the big cities to function on level terms with the city folks by letting them buy the same stuff and get their money back if not satisfied, just as if they were buying it from a big city store. Most of the USA still lives in small towns, I am constantly told. The old industrial "state" is what enabled them to do so, comfortably.

More recently, the personal computer industry - now dominated by big, bad, old Intel and Microsoft - has empowered millions of individuals, and made possible the growth of enterprises like eBay and Amazon. Empowering the little guy is not a new idea. I can still remember the thrill of empowerment that I felt from my first computer, an Osborne 1.

There are two quite distinct ideas rubbing together here. One is bigness, and its alleged badness. The other is the genuinely bad idea that it is both smart to try to - and actually possible to - insulate huge numbers of people from market pressures, indefinitely. J. K. Galbraith, quoted by Reynolds, thought that this could happen, and his big idea, if you can call it that, was that business bigness meant being above and beyond market realities. The truth is that a big business that ignores market realities is heading for a big fall.

But the little guy is just as prone to economic delusion as the big guy. That is often why he is so little. Like the guy making a small fortune in sport, he started out with a large fortune.

The ultimate embodiment of the Galbraith delusion was of course the USSR, which copied the bigness of US business without copying any of the market responsiveness that brought the USA's business bigness into being in the first place. The USSR just stole bigness from others, and eventually the loot ran out.

What is true is that formerly successful and still established ways of doing things can get into serious trouble, and because they once were so successful, they can last way beyond their days of success. There is a lot of ruin in them. Big and successful businesses become Galbraithian. They become, on a tiny scale, economically speaking, the USSR. But they cannot last, any longer than the USSR could. Not being able to murder all their rivals and critics, they last a lot less long.

Business bigness is the consequence of a new business idea becoming thoroughly understood by a few exceptional people, who proceed to organise it, and then to triumph over almost all of their rivals. Then, times change, and that kind of bigness needs to change too, but by then millions have got used to it and cling to it. That is the problem of the old "industrial state". What we are living through is neither the end of bigness nor the beginning of individual empowerment by bigness. It is a transitional period, between one lot of bignesses and other sorts of bigness. And these new bignesses will be just as like to give rise to new Galbraithian delusions as the earlier ones were.

And let us also give credit where credit is still due. Those big old businesses got big in the first place by doing lots of empowering of the little guy. To put it in Reynolds-ese: the old big also did small.

Instapundit today links to Ralph Kinney Bennett's charming article about the history of shaving equipment. Anyone who still – even after being subjected to the cry of "dentistry!" – doubts that modern comforts are really as comfortable as all that, really should read this hymn of praise to just what capitalism and its attendant attention to detail can do for human happiness. I mean, imagine having to shave with an uneven, hand-made cutting edge. Bleedin' hell, as we English would say.

The heart of Bennett's article is a short account of the life and works of – and this really was his name – King Camp Gillette. Gillette was a salesman, and his achievement was essentially to ask a question. What if, he asked, you could separate the bit of a razor that gets quickly blunted, and needs to be either sharpened or replaced, from the rest of it? Thus the disposable razor blade.

Like so many creative endeavours, the Gillette empire had another guy heavily involved, an engineer who actually made everything. But here there was a problem.

A grateful Gillette wanted to incorporate both his and Nickerson's names into the company that was established. Nickerson felt his name sounded too much like what the new product was designed to avoid.

We are now deep into the age of three-bladed, four-bladed, and even, now, the five-bladed razor. But the first blade was the one that really made the difference.

Gillette himself, at any rate according to this, was himself some kind of socialist:

Gillette was part of a broad socialist movement in the USA in the 1890s, who wanted to use the profits from his safety razor to finance his beliefs in a new socialist system.

Which only goes to show that people who are clever at one thing are not necessarily so clever at other things.

I love this story:

Historians have found that Britain's first Indian restaurant was opened in 1809, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars and during the period in which Austen set Pride and Prejudice.

The Hindoostane Coffee House was established by Sake Dean Mahomed, an Indian-born entrepreneur, as a purveyor of Oriental food of the "highest perfection" in Marylebone, London, which at the time was a residential district for the well-off.

In my area of Pimlico, central London, there is an Indian restaurant right near my flat (aaahhh!) - said to be one of the oldest in London, dating back to the 1950s. But it appears that this now-established feature of culinary life has been going on since the age of Nelson, Wellington and William Wordsworth. An early example, in fact, of culinary globalization. It is not, in fact, all that surprising, since the desire for eastern spices and foodstuffs was an important economic incentive behind much of global trade at that time.

I can imagine how this story is going to change all those costume dramas set in the early 19th Century: "Pray excuse me sir X, but I am in urgent need of a chicken korma."

It seems many important building in Moscow may still be mined from WWII.

Indeed, the recollections of another NKVD officer only corroborate Krotov’s story. “On October 20, 1941, there was an order to place explosives beneath the most prominent objects in the capital,” Pavel Sudoplatov, once the head of the Central Staff of the Fighter Battalion of the NKVD, wrote in a memoir. According to Sudoplatov, the Bolshoi Theater and other buildings were on the list. They could be blown up only on very special orders, however, and only if occupied by Germany’s top leadership.

The German's would have found Moscow nights to be rather more high energy affairs than expected... as they watched the last waltz at the Bolshoi.

If you have any interest at all in the history of classical music, then I warmly recommend this fascinating article by Jane Glover in last Friday's Guardian (linked to yesterday by Arts & Letters Daily). I already know Jane Glover as an excellent conductor, and before writing this I played a CD of her conducting some of my very favourite Mozart symphonies. Wonderful. But, I had no idea until yesterday how much of a Mozart expert she is.

Her article, which doubles as a plug for her forthcoming book called Mozart's Women, concentrates on Mozart's wife Constanze.

Glover states the Constanze problem succinctly:

Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus brilliantly explores the confrontation between genius (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and mediocrity (Antonio Salieri). But there is one person to whom his take on Mozart's life does no favours at all: his wife Constanze. Portrayed as a vulgar, bubble-headed sex kitten, lacking any appreciation of her husband's phenomenal gifts, Constanze shares and encourages only the immature aspects of Mozart's personality.

What is more, in portraying Constanze like this, Shaffer only echoed contemporary gossip about her, now believed to be utterly without foundation, to the effect that she had no idea to whom and to what she was married.

But it turns out that Constanze was a hugely more formidable figure than that. She thoroughly appreciated her husband's genius, and it was during their very happy marriage that Mozart wrote the vast majority of his finest works. Coming herself from a famous musical family, the Webers, she was in fact the ideal composer's wife, assisting and inspiring in equal measure.

Even more important from the point of view of posterity is that after Mozart's tragically early death – which most scholars now agree to have been accidental, despite how Peter Shaffer tells the story – Constanze did everything she could to ensure that Mozart's music was made available to posterity. All who love Mozart's music are in her debt.

The history of art is shot through with horror stories of lost masterpieces, of destroyed manuscripts, of mislaid musical scores, and nowadays, of things like destroyed tapes from the early days of television. That nothing like this happened to the wondrous creative output of Mozart is due to the industry of many people, not least to that of Constanze's second husband, whom she got to know because they worked together to preserve and publish husband number one's compositions. But pride of place in ensuring that Mozart remained for ever Mozart, so to speak, goes to his beloved Constanze.

As for the "sex kitten" stuff, I cannot believe that, musically speaking, this did any harm either. On the contrary, even the smallest acquaintance with Mozart's music – especially his operas - suggests quite the opposite.

The EU Referendum blog links to this fascinating article about the engineering history, so to speak, of New Orleans, referring in particular to this paragraph:

The lower Mississippi is in no way a natural river anymore. A law instituted in 1724 by a French colonial governor, whose name was Perrier, of all things, demanded that early homeowners in New Orleans raise the low natural levees upon which they all built. Three year later, Perrier declared the little city floodproof.

So there you have it. Do not blame Bush. Blame France.

Not really. The situation is a deal more complex than that. But it does seem to be true that once they decided on living lower than the Mississippi River, they found that the methods they chose to protect themselves from it only served to make it rise ever higher into the air, and themselves to sink lower and lower.

Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of comment out there in dead-tree media and the electronic versions about religion and its relation vis a vis the state at the moment. (Full disclosure: I am a lapsed Anglican Christian who read a lot of David Hume, much to the annoyance of my old vicar, no doubt). There is a bracing essay in the Spectator this week about the nonsense spouted in the usual places about "moderate" Islam.

The blog Positive Liberty, which has become a group blog like this one - has an excellent piece looking at the religious, or in some cases, decidely lukewarm religious, views of the U.S. Founding Fathers. These men, to varying degrees, were acutely conscious of the dangers of religious fundamentalism, having seen within their lifetimes the human price of it. As we think about the dangers posed by Islam in our own time, the insights of Madison, Adams, Jefferson et al are needed more than ever. The linked-to article is fairly long but worth sitting back and sipping on a coffee for a good read, I think.

It is in my view essential for the west's future that the benefits of separating what is God's from what is Cesear's is made as loudly and as often as possible. Muslims must be made abundantly aware of this point for if they do not, the consequences could be dire. Maybe because of the role played by the Church of England in our post-Reformation history, we don't have the tradition, as in the States, of keeping a beady eye on the blurring of the edges of temporal and spiritual. Cynics have of course argued that nationalising Christianity via the CoE has helped the cause of fuzzy agnosticism and atheism more than the complete works of the Englightenment. Well, maybe. It may have as much to do with the relative openness of British society, our ironical sense of humour (religious enthusiasm has often struck the Brits as slightly silly or unhinged, ripe for Monty Python treatment) and desire not to give offence.

I fear that sense of humour is going to be tested for the remainder of my lifetime.

I know this post is not 'on topic' in these days of Islam casting its shadow over the Western society but it is tonight I am watching Doctor Zhivago.

I remember reading the book by Boris Pasternak in 1980s, as a teenager. I got only about 70% of it because I was too young. Despite the fact that I was living in deep communism. I guess that was the reason I understood even that much of the story, at the tender age of 14... Never mind the love story - it is the backdrop that interests me. The Russian Revolution of 1918.

The film shows the destraction of an individual, educated and sensitive, a doctor and a poet. Not a perfect human being by far, who loved his country and saw it and his life rent apart by a brutal change, his loved ones in danger and all he treasured destroyed.

Let me relay some snippets that I found memorable.

Zhivago's house in Moscow has been taken over by the local Soviet run by two sour-faced comrades. They tell him, reproachfully, that there is room for 13 families there. He says: In that case, this is a better arrangement. More just...

Doctor Yuri Zhivago was a member of the Russian intelligentsia and believed that there was a need for reform of the country. At the start, he saw the Communist Party as performing a deep operation cutting out a cancerous tumour. Today he probably would be reading the Guardian or the New York Times calling himself a progressive. A bleeding heart liberal, perhaps. But Pasternak puts the Zhivago character through the reality of a dystopia coming true.

There is a conversation between Doctor Zhivago and Strelnikov, a commander of the Red Guard of legendary reputation, the scourge of the country.

Strelnikov: Are you the poet? I used to admire poetry, it's so personal, the flight of affections and humanity. Personal life is dead in Russia. I can see how you could hate me.

Zhivago: The fact I hate you, does not mean I want to kill you.

And later in the same conversation:

Zhivago: You burnt the wrong village.

Strelnikov [agitated]: A village is burnt, the point is made.

Yes, I remember the stern self-righteousness (or more accurately a psychotic moral high-ground), the fragile power that many experienced until they were the next batch to be devoured by the monstrous system. The glorious Party, the Workers, the Justice, Equality and the Better Tomorrow... airbrush the Gulags and you have the Guardianistas...

And then there is the nihilism of the 'revolutionaries'.

Tonya's (Zhivago's wife) father: They shot the czar and all his family... [exclaims] What's it for?

Zhivago: To show that there is no going back...

A young boy is found dying in the field after the attack of the partisans who kidnapped Zhivago for his medical expertise. The boy dies while Zhivago looks sadly on unable to save him. A partisan says:

It does not matter.

Zhivago: Did you ever have any children?

Partisan: I once had a wife and four children. None of this matters.

Zhivago: What matters, commander?

Partisan: Tell me, I have forgotten.

Towards the end of the film, Zhivago's brother says of Lara, his lover:

She vanished and died somewhere in one of the labour camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid...

Watching the film reminds me of what an unqualified and unchecked evil the Soviet Revolution and communism was. Horrific in its suppression of the individual, ruthless in its ritual extinguishing of the human spirit and freedom, terrifying in its imposition of the most toxic variety of dystopia, arrogant in its denial of reality and brutal in the execution of those who dared even breathe against it. Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.

Yeah, I should have gone out on Saturday night...

Last week, on Tuesday evening, Britain's Channel 5 TV showed a fascinating documentary called "Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet". Some readers may only know "Khubilai" Khan as the Kubla Khan of Coleridge's poem of that name, but this man did more that decree stately pleasure-domes. The Times summarised the programme thus:

The greatest naval disaster in history took place in August 1281, when 4,000 ships carrying Khubilai Khan’s Mongol army sank with the loss of 70,000 men off the coast of Japan. This rather protracted documentary (below), describes how a marine archaeologist discovered the remains of the fleet, and explains why the vast fleet sank in such mysterious circumstances.

Khubilai used many ships which were shoddily and hurriedly constructed, by recently conquered Chinese labourers who, the archaeologist featured in the show speculated, had no particular desire for his project to succeed. Worse, Khubilai commandeered many Chinese river boats wholly unsuited to ocean travel. When a typhoon struck all these boats sank, and the invasion was a total failure.

This is not a story we often hear in Britain. Understandably, we prefer to reminisce about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and about Trafalgar. Yet the sinking of Khubilai's fleet was an event of worldwide significance. Quite aside from allowing Japan to remain independent, this misfortune punctured the myth of Mongol invincibility and speeded the collapse of the Mongol Empire.

The Mongols had a huge effect on world history but might have had even more. They might, for instance, have resumed the attempt to conquer Europe which they had to break off in 1241, in order to go home and elect a new leader. Even this near catastrophe for Europe is not much discussed nowadays, in Europe.

Events in one part of the world have always had big effects elsewhere. The difference is that there used to be less mileage in presenting global history in a global manner. Like the news, global history has tended to be seen through national eyes. But, now, if only so that history documentaries on TV can find more viewers, global history is going global.

Yours truly, my fiancee plus regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor, have returned from a fine and patriotic day out in Portsmouth for the "International Festival of the Sea", an event which at its core commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Trafalgar in fact was fought in October, but the organisers are no doubt exploiting what passes for the English summer to put on all manner of events for sailing nuts like myself.

There has already been a fair amount of media coverage of the events linked to the Trafalgar bicentennial, although arguably the BBC has underclubbed its coverage, giving more attention it seems to Wimbledon tennis and the Live8 music event. For anyone who wants to know the human cost of defending this nation's liberties, however, understanding what Lord Nelson and his forces achieved is important. As an island nation, our livelihood is crucially dependent on our peaceable enjoyment of the high seas.

For more than 100 years after Nelson crushed the Franco-Spanish forces off Cadiz, the Royal Navy dominated the world's oceans, enjoying a naval mastery to an extent not seen until the modern U.S. navy and its vast carrier fleets. Nelson instilled in the Senior Service an esprit de corps, a sense of confidence that was to carry on until the First World War, at which point Germany and Japan began to challenge Britain's mastery.

There are many excellent studies of Nelson's life and achievements, and I would recommend in particular Alan Schom's study of the countdown to Trafalgar, which gives credit not just to Norfolk's most famous son but also many of the other actors of the time, who ensured that the Royal Navy was raised to a high pitch of excellence. Tom Pocock's biography of Nelson is also a rattling good read of this brilliant, occasionally vain and charismatic man.

From the New York Times op-ed pages, of all places, confirmation of a number of libertarian ideas, including the axiom that an armed society is a polite society.

These revisionists' history, unlike the one now fashionable in academia, is not a grim saga of settlers exploiting one another, annihilating natives and despoiling nature. Nor is it like the previously fashionable history depicting the settlers as heroic individualists who tamed the frontier by developing the great American virtue of self-reliance.

The Westerners in this history survived by learning to get along, as Terry Anderson and Peter Hill document in their new book, "The Not So Wild, Wild West." These economists, both at the PERC think tank in Montana, argue that their Western ancestors were usually neither heroic enough to make it on their own nor strong enough to take it away from others.

Always gratifying to see the NYT take a slap at the PC bilge being ladled out in institutions of higher learning, of course, but what is perhaps more interesting is the nod given to the voluntary ordering of civil society on the frontier.

Roger McGrath, a historian who studied dozens of Western mining camps and towns, found a high rate of homicide in them mainly because it was socially acceptable for young, drunk single men to resolve points of honor by fighting to the death. But other violence wasn't tolerated, he said.

"It was a rather polite and civil society enforced by armed men," Dr. McGrath said. "The rate of burglary and robbery was lower than in American cities today. Claim-jumping was rare. Rape was extraordinarily rare - you can argue it wasn't being reported, but I've never seen evidence hinting at that."

One suspects that the presence of substantial numbers of prominently displayed large caliber handguns would have a certain pacifying effect. I submit that this would appear paradoxical only to animists or people infected with an irrational fear of inanimate objects.

One of the most popular subjects of counterfactual fiction or alternate histories is the outcome of the Second World War, with authors analysing the possibilities of a Nazi victory. This particular type of fiction formed the subject of an article by Gavriel Rosenfeld, an associate professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Such alternate histories engage with the national identities of the United States and Great Britain where the Second World War is represented as the most recent representation of national virtue, a good war, if conflicts can be described as such. Rosenfeld argues that these fictions downplay the impact of the Holocaust and tell of National Socialist regimes that modernise, liberalise or decay, putting their nightmares behind them.

Various factors explain these rosy representations of history as it might have been under Nazi rule.

In some cases, American conservatives' intensifying fears of Soviet communism and anxieties about American national decline in the post-Vietnam years of the late 1970s and early 1980s helped to challenge the view that an American victory in World War II had actually worked out for the best.

In other cases, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship after 1989 provided an optimistic model for how the Nazi dictatorship might eventually have fared had it triumphed in World War II.

The motives and plausibility of these narratives aside, however, the tendency to view a Nazi wartime victory as a fantasy rather than a nightmare suggests the slow emergence in the United States of a less demonized picture of the Third Reich in American memory.

The downplaying of the Holocaust in many of these accounts, in particular, provides the most telling evidence of this trend and suggests a growing willingness to view Nazism as something less than absolute evil.

The equivalent school within British fiction dwells upon the possibilities of collaboration within an occupied nation, or the lower costs of an isolationist foreign policy.

Rosenfeld criticises these stories for being tendentious and relativist. However, one role of fiction is to explore uncomfortable alternatives and anticipate the movement of National Socialism from memory into history. Perhaps the Holocaust is ignored because these authors do not have the tools or the imagination to grapple with the enormity of the genocide and duck the challenge in their work. Most act as alternate visions of the Cold War, not as a darker age of barbarism.

One novella that conveys the evil is David Brin's "Thor Meets Captain America", a useful antidote to the swastika equivalents of glasnost and perestroika.

I have recently been re-reading (well, more like re-dipping into) Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History (first published 1931), mainly because I prefer light (as in not weighing very much) reading when I am out and about in London, as I often am now.

The gist of this slim but profound and highly influential volume is that the past did not consist of people arguing about the same things as we argue about, and trying to do or to stop the same things as we are now trying to do and to stop. History is not a smooth ascending line during which perfection as we understand it slowly manifested itself, despite opposition of the same sort as we enlightened ones still face now. Monarchy, aristocracy, democracy. Religion, toleration, secularism. Tyranny, freedom. That kind of thing. The past had its own contending pre-occupations, its own contending definitions of progress. And just because something did lead to something else, that does not mean that they intended it to at the time.

Recently I came across this illustration of these point. It fitted snugly onto page 60 of my 1971 paperback edition. You can find it about half way down this webpage:

The Reformation which is so often regarded as result and continuation of the Renaissance – a parallel movement of man's expanding mind – might also be looked upon as a reassertion of religious authority in the world, a revolt against the secularization, the laxness and the sins of the time. Luther, who appeals to us so strongly as an innovator and a rebel against constituted authority, was behind everything else the religious leader, in a sense the revivalist – whose rebellion was only an incident in his great attempt to establish right religion in the world. Luther and Calvin were both alike in that they attacked the papal and medieval conception of the religious society; but it is doubtful whether the Biblical Commonwealth for which they laboured would have been any less severe in its control of the individual, or would have commended itself to these men if it had been less severe. And although the Bible has proved to be the most flexible of authorities and the most capable of progressive interpretation, it has yet to be demonstrated that the Reformers who used it to confound the Popes did not regard it as a more firm and rigid authority than the Roman tradition or the canon law, of which they seem to have condemned precisely the innovations and the development. Luther, when he was making his development of religious doctrine, was not hindered but was generously encouraged by his superiors in the Catholic Church, and he was not molested when, like so many other preachers of his day, he fulminated in his sermons against the common attitude to indulgences. One might say that the very action which precipitated the break with Rome was prompted by Luther's own intolerance of what be deemed wrong religion in other people. It might be argued that what Luther rebelled against was not the severity but the laxity of the Popes.

I do not think that I am the only person reading this now who would say: Islamic Fundamentalism! And the comparison is made all the more telling by the fact that when Butterfield wrote this, about an earlier age of fundamentatlism, Islam was at about its all time low as a force in the affairs of the world. (Did Butterfield even entertain the thought of this comparison?)

It is often said, especially in blogs in our part of the political landscape, that what Islam needs is a Reformation. What this passage drives home is that Islam has already been having and is even now still having its Reformation, in the form of what we in the West call Islamic Fundamentalism. And this "Islamic Reformation" has indeed been a lot like the Reformation that we had. It is not that the currently raging Islamic Reformation has actually been, because similiar to ours, good. It is that our Reformation was not nearly so good (by our current Whiggish standards) as some of us imagine it to have been.

What, by our current liberally Whig standards, the Islamic world really needs is what followed our Reformation and all the religious and political turbulence it gave rise to: toleration. And, just as many of the voices speaking out for toleration during our Reformation were traditional and Catholic rather than modern and Protestant, as Butterfield makes clear, so now, many of the most eloquent arguers for toleration within Islam are those very exponents of traditional Islamic ideas whom the Islamic Fundamentalists now denounce for their laxity and lack of zeal.

And to all those who say: but Islam contains very few such persons, I reply: and Europe contained very few such persons at the time of Europe's Reformation. Yet they eventually won.

Things can change. Europe's history proves it.

I am well aware of the fact that this post demonstrates me to be in many ways an unreconstructed Whig. Indeed.

However, I do not believe that History is the story of the inexorable triumph of, approximately speaking, Whiggism. I merely say that it should have been, and that it should continue so to be.

Hopefully my title has alerted readers to what "George IV" I am thinking of.

George IV has got a bad press. He is thought of as a fat, drunken fool. Who was so deluded that he thought he fought at the battle of Waterloo.

His father (George III) has had his reputation defended by it being pointed out that his metal problems had a physical cause (a blood disorder made worse by arsenic poisoning from the power in his wigs and the very medical treatments he was given). Whilst in control of his body and mind, it is now accepted, that George III was a hard working and learned man who was deeply concerned by cases of individual injustice - for example a poor clock maker might be cheated of the longitude prize by all the politicians and administrators, but when George III got to hear of the case he would not rest till justice had been done.

On the other hand George IV is seen as a man whose problems were self inflected. A man unwilling to resist temptation - whether it was for women, food or booze. A man disloyal to his father (for example keen to be Regent years before his father had his final breakdown and even willing to have his father locked up for life), of hopelessly unsound political judgement (for example his connection with Charles James Fox, a politician who supported the French Revolution and never showed the understanding of either security or finance needed to be fit for high office).

And whereas George III was learned (with a great library of well used books, knowledgeable on all the main subjects of his day), George IV is presented as shallow minded and lazy - whose knowledge of even those subjects that interested him (such as architecture) was superficial.

The last point first:

George IV may indeed have had less knowledge of art and architecture than George III had. And George IV's favoured architect (John Nash) may indeed have big gaps in his education.

However, have a look at Windsor Castle, or the Brighton Pavilion, or the area of Regents Park in London. Neither George VI nor John Nash may have had the book learning of George III - but they did not do so bad a job.

On women, food and booze: George IV had the faults that many European aristocrats (and other rich people) had in this period. That George III did not have these faults is to his credit - but it should not be used as a stick to bash his son over the head with.

Also on booze, water was unsafe to drink in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (although not as unsafe as it would be when cholera stuck Britian in the 1830's) so becoming what we see as a drunk was quite common - even the great Pitt the Younger (the supposedly straight laced rival of the degenerate Charles James Fox) died of booze.

A man may say some very stupid things when he is drunk - even waxing on about the fighting at Waterloo - but then again people interested in military history (or military affairs in general) often see themselves at certain battles and talk in this way.

I would not like to be thought mad because I have talked of battles (as if I had been there) that occurred hundreds of miles from me, or indeed centuries ago - we armchair generals may be bores, but we are not mad.

On women: George IV could not officially marry the women he loved (she was a Roman Catholic), and was pushed into marrying a women he despised. And for all the supposed ill treatment of Queen Caroline, nothing was actually done to her. She was not murdered, she was not tossed into some prison (which would have been normal in many parts of Europe) - in the end she was not even denied the title of Queen. George IV certainly neglected her and was unfaithful to her - but that was about it. Surely at least some of the fault lies with the clever men who demanded he marry Caroline in the first place?

On Politics:

George IV became King on the death of his father in 1820 and remained King till his own death in 1830.

The 1820's are one of my favourate periods in British history. It is true that taxes (as a percentage of the economy) were not at the lowest in this period (that came in 1874), but taxes were greatly reduced over this period - and national government spending was kept under strict control.

This was the time after the post war chaos (made worse by some of the coldest winters on record). It was the time of "Prosperity Robinson" (Earl of Ripon and later Viscount Goderick) - who as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister rolled back taxes and held back spending (which meant that economic growth reduced the size of government).

It was the time of William Huskisson, a follower of Pitt the Younger, who as M.P. for Liverpool and President of the Board of Trade moved Britian in the direction of free trade and (along with Robinson) helped teach John Peel (the later repealer of the Corn Laws and teacher of finance to Gladstone) his business.

Peel himself may have created government police in London in 1829, but there had always been state watchmen here. There certainly was no great move to state police in Britain as a whole in the 1820's.

Also Peel removed the vast majority of death penalty statutes that had meant (in theory at least) that a man could be killed for theft in the years before him. To Peel death was only fit for murderers and traitors - a hard view by modern standards, but an incredibly liberal (in the best sense of "liberal") view by the standards of a few years before.

In policy concerning other lands, Canning (one of George IV Prime Ministers) supported the freeing of Greece from the Turks and of Latin American from Spain.

Things may not have turned out well in Latin America - but at the the time greater free trade and an end to slavery in such nations as Chile seemed to show a bright future to the benefit of Britain and other nations.

Slavery still existed in the British colonies (although not in Britain itself, and the Royal Navy has already begun its one hundred year war against the slave trade round the world), but pressure as rising against slavery in the colonies - and in 1833 the bill to outlaw it finally passed.

Britain also refused to be involved with the "Holy Alliance" ideas of censorship and oppression in Europe. With the benefit of hindsight it might be argued that the forces the Holy Alliance Monarchs and Ministers were fighting against were a lot more oppressive than they were - but the reasoning was sound, it is not Britain's business to be involved in such things.

It is true that there was a heavy burden of poor rates in England (such a heavy burden partly because of the Poor Law Act of 1782 - which allowed for the subsidies to be paid to people in work, in order to build up their wages, an idea that has come back) and this led to the Act of 1834 (which may have dealt with the wage subsidy problem, but whose expansion of the workhouse system has hardly got a good press).

But this was an English problem - Scotland did not have a great poor law problem (indeed the Rev. Chalmers boasted of how even the people of the great city of Glasgow managed to look after the poor as well as any city in Europe in the 1820's - without having a Poor Rate). And indeed many of the northern English cities managed to keep the Poor Rate under control - in cities like Leeds the Poor Rate actually went UP under the newly expanded Workhouse system of the 1834 Act. It was the Justices of the Peace in the rural areas of southern England who proved unable (or unwilling) to control the Poor Rate.

In the 1820's even when there was a "reactionary" Prime Minister he did liberal things (Lord Liverpool had such men as Robinson and Huskinson as his ministers, the Duke of Wellington got rid of the restriction on Roman Catholic Irishmen being elected to the House of Commons). And there was a general (although not total) move towards greater liberty and prosperity.

And none of the great principles were breached. Government police were not made compulsory in every town (that did not happen till the 1850's) local councils with the right to spend lots of money were not set up (that was 1835), nor was there the command that local authorities a spend lots of money and take over much of civil society (there were about 40 Acts of Parliament allowing local councils to do various things from the 1830's onwards - but the command that they must do them mostly came in the great Act of 1875).

Such areas as the education of children were almost totally free of the government (the Scottish system was far more limited than is supposed and in England even a tiny government subsidy had to wait till 1833).

Nor was there a large professional bureaucracy (sadly the work of misguided Liberals later in the 19th century) or even the collection of many government stats (without statistics government finds it hard to control things - the first great move in this direction, after the census of 1801 and every ten years after, is the Birth, Marriages and Death's Registration Act of 1836).

But how was George IV involved in any of the above? Surely the move towards greater liberty and greater prosperity in the 1820's was nothing to do with him?

I am not sure. A King in the 1820s (indeed up to the Reform Act of 1832) controlled a large number of M.P.s in the House of Commons (he owned the seats which they represented). In the 1820's a King directly picked ministers in a way that even Queen Victoria gradually lost the power to do.

He find it hard to believe that George IV was a total subhuman who just happened to pick lots of good ministers by chance. I suspect that some more research is needed in this area.

One can indeed say that the climate of opinion was good in the 1820's. The works of Edward Gibbon Wakefield (which made popular the view, later taken up by Karl Marx, that markets could be saturated - leading to the need for businessmen to find virgin markets or face a falling rate of profit) were yet to be written.

In such Universities as Oxford the works of economists like Richard Whately were still dominant - Whately regarded the labour theory of value as absurd and he regarded most state intervention as harmful. The inferior works of the middle part of the century (and such works as John Stuart Mill's "Principles of Political Economy" [1848] are inferior) were yet to be written.

But in Europe there were also many good economists (Gossen was yet to write in Germany but Rau was popular, Italy had Ferrara, France the Say family and others). and that did not stop governments being on a knife edge facing revolution form normally more statist forces.

The government of Charles X in France helped liberate Greece from Turkey and destroyed the centuries old threat of North African raiders, but this did not stop Charles X falling in 1830. The new monarchy meant more state education spending, plus government money for railways and still more trade protectionism - hardily a move to what a libertarian would call freedom

There were many revolutionary threats in the 1820's - and George IV did not fall.

Again pure luck in the choice of his minister - or those who choose the ministers in his name?

Again I doubt it. I repeat that I think more research is needed.

I will start this posting, having written the rest of it already and therefore possessing foreknowledge of what it contains, with a warning to easily offended Christians. This posting contains ideas that may offend easily offended Christians. So, if you are an easily offended Christian and sincerely do not wish to be offended yet again, best to stop reading now.

Christians are perfectly free to be offended by my anti-Christianity, just so long as they realise that I am likewise disgusted by many of the things they keep on proclaiming, mostly with no objections from me, both for its barbarity and for its contempt for normal standards of truth-seeking or logical argument. The offence is mutual.

Okay. Today being Good Friday, I have taken it upon myself to give the talk at my last Friday of the month meeting. Getting another speaker at such a time, and then perhaps having to soothe him or her because only three other people showed up, is more bother than the looks-bad factor of me doing the talk myself. (I did the same on the last Friday of December 2004, which happened also to be New Year's Eve. That went okay.)

And since it is Good Friday, I will be talking about Pain: its history; how that history might explain why Christianity, and in particular the crucifixion story, has done so well down the centuries; the fact that recently pain has abated for lots of lucky people in lucky countries like mine, and the fact that this might do something to explain the recent decline of Christianity in lucky countries. Christianity thrives in adversity, but wilts in comfort, not least physical comfort, which is why completely wiping out Christianity has proved so hard. Communism tried, but the more you torment Christians the more like Christ they feel. Meanwhile Communism, lacking a story that makes any sense for those unfortunates caught up in its numerous failures, is itself rapidly crumbling, not least at the hands of Christians.

Most histories of pain seem to be histories of pain relief, which is understandable. But what effect on life generally did the prevalence of pain have, in all the centuries when pain was prevalent? And what has been the effect of the recent and remarkable abatement of the pain, for millions upon millions of fortunate people, like me, and very probably, you too, for decade after decade?

I did not mention it in my email to my congregation, but pain also has a bearing on the libertarian political ideas that are the ongoing agenda of these Friday meetings. Libertarianism, you might say, is the idea that in our dealings with one another, we will forego the infliction of physical suffering upon each other, and confine ourselves only to doing things that all concerned consent to voluntarily, without any physical threats being exchanged. Libertarianism in this broader, non-ideological sense, of not getting what we want by hitting people, has been relentlessly growing in recent decades. We are now lucky (favourite phrase in that piece: "controlled oblivion") enough not tohave to endure nearly as much pain as in former centuries.

I have lived for over half a century and have experienced hardly any physical pain at all, and I am surely now quite typical, in my country. It took a recent and very minor accident to make me think seriously about the subject at all. But in former times, people suffered terrible pain quite routinely, from such things as frightful, unanaesthetised medical procedures, from childbirth, or from the fact that medicine could offer no cure and little solace for our pains (think only of dentistry), breakages and other accidents (often caused by arduous and prolonged physical toil such as most of us are now spared). This means, I surmise, that for us now to create pain for each other, just to get what we want, now seems far worse to us than it must have done in the past. This has all manner of intriguing effects.

Consider education. The command-and-control education system which our teachers still try to operate depends on, among many other things, the judicious application, every now and again - especially to boys - of torture. Certainly the people who began these educational arrangements had no compunction about inflicting the occasional beating. Our teachers now try to – or are told that they must – abjure torture as a means of classroom control. Yet they still try to exert the same old command-and-control, either out of sheer habit or because they have no faith in other, more libertarian, arrangements. Accordingly, we should not be surprised that the lives of our teachers have recently become more stressful.

At the other end of the age range, what effect will the increasing number of old people, kept alive by modern medicine and the modern food industry, hobbling about or driving about in annoying little electric trolleys, grumbling about their aches and pains, have on our beliefs about pain?

To me, the Christian obsession with their founder's crucifixion, however inspiring it may be in bad times, is absurd, not to say barbaric. I mean, a blood sacrifice to God, of God's only son? Is that supposed to cheer God up? Is that really something for civilised people seriously to believe in? But, as I (along with the rest of the Baby Boom) get older, as my body starts seriously to malfunction, and as hurts take longer and longer to go away, will the story of the crucifixion start to seem less daft to me? I cannot see myself overcoming my scientific type objections to Christianity as a body of supposedly truthful doctrine about the nature of the world, but I can see myself becoming slightly less scornful of all this crucifixion mumbo-jumbo that an atheist such as me who loves classical music has to put up with. I do not, however, think that I will ever modify my scorn for the notions embodied in the Holy Communion. Every week, we eat God. Charming.

So, in other words, if my attitude is anything at all to go by, I do not think that the medical travails of the Baby Boom in its dotage will be enough successfully to relaunch Christianity in the pain-free modern world. More likely responses will be redoubled enthusiasm for such things as yet more pain-killing drugs, and ever more intense argument about euthanasia, not least among the Baby Boom's descendants who will be keener and keener to be rid of this ever-ghastlier generation.

I love Grand Theories of history, and also their close cousins, Interesting Aspect theories of history: history as the history of the means of communication, history as the history of warfare, history as the history of the potato, or of art, or cultery, or sport, or travel. I loved Guns, Germs and Steel.

Pain seems to get less of a mention in such theorisings, which is especially offputting when you consider how prominently military matters figure in such ideas. (Sometimes, you can read an entire book about battles with hardly a mention of anyone actually finding the experience of battle painful.) No doubt there are histories of pain out there which are more than just the history of anaesthetics. If so, and you know of such, links please.

Just as a final, further for-instance, even my cursory pain-googling reminded me that the prevalence in our culture of alcohol owes much to the fact that, for many centuries, the only widely available palliative for pain was getting stupefyingly drunk.

Happy Easter everyone.

I was delighted by the first What If? book. So I eagerly purchased its successor volume, More What If?, when I also came across that in a remainder shop.

I buy lots of books in remainder shops - my intellectual efforts beiong heavily influenced by chance purchases - and often only read them months or years later. So it has been with More What If? I am now, finally, reading it. Not in any particular order. Just dipping at random, in among reading and writing other stuff. (This posting is not a review, merely some speculative reactions to this follow-up book, but here is a review, which includes a contents list.)

And the more I dip, the more convinced I am of the extreme efficacy and vividness of this particular way of writing about the past. Reviewers like the one linked to above can get rather blasé, because they know all this stuff anyway. (As he says in his first paragraph, the professional historians all have what-if conversations when doing their degrees.) But for the rest of us, this is a truly terrific way to learn history, because it brings it so alive. Suddenly, the uncertainty and unpredictability of what it was actually like living in what is now the past but was then the present is brought fascinatingly to life. Regular history tells you what happened, one damn happening after another, but it often neglects to tell you which happenings mattered most, and why. The What If? formula cuts down on the number of happenings, but explains in great detail how important each selected happening was, by telling you not only what else happened because of it, but also what would have happened had the happening itself not happened, or happened differently.

Examples: Maybe you did know that someone tried to kill FDR in 1933, although I did not. But did you know that way before that, FDR proposed marriage unsuccessfully to a conventionally good-looking, conventionally Republican young lady, before he switched his amorous attentions to lefty cousin Eleanor? Yes. Had he married Alice Sohier instead of Eleanor, he would surely, in the event of still becoming President at all, have become a very different sort of President.

Did you know that before Martin Luther got seriously started at making history, he might have been burnt at the stake at the very beginning of his career as a religious troublemaker? Apparently so, in 1521. Luther burns, and there is no Luther Bible, and no Authorised Version of the Bible as we (I anyway) know and love it, because (and I did not know this) our Authorised ("King James") Bible drew heavily from Luther's work. Oh, and the German Reformation would also have played out very differently, and perhaps – who knows? – far less destructively.

Did you know that if France had been a bit less belligerent in 1870, Germany might never, following Prussia's stunning success in the war that did then occurred, have been united in the particular, toxic way that it was?

Did you know that China might very well have discovered America in the late fifteenth century, and subsequently (again – who knows?) conquered it?

You probably do know that, in the opinion of many, Caleb Carr in particular, General Eisenhower might have handled the assault by the Western Allies on Germany in the late summer 1944 a whole lot better than he did. There might, that is to say, have been an assault by the Western Allies on Germany in the late summer of 1944, instead of only several months later. That way, Eastern Europe might have escaped Soviet tyranny, and the very Cold War itself might have been permanently cooled down.

Meanwhile, what if there had been no atom bombs to drop on Japan? (That chapter makes a gruesomely good case for dropping them, given that they did have them.)

What if, a few years earlier, Enigma had not been cracked? Or what if war had started in 1938 instead of 1939? (Much better, apparently. Appeasement did great harm, says Williamson Murray.)

What if Socrates had died at the Battle of Delium, if Napoleon had invaded North America, if William had not been The Conqueror, of if Jesus of Nazareth had lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes?

What if Pizarro had not found any potatoes in Peru?

Questions like these turn the past into something more like the present, the sort of present in which our heads spin with still fresh what-ifs concerning our recent past and our immediate future.

What if the 9/11 conspirators had been caught before they did their evil business?

What if someone cleverer than John Kerry had been chosen by the Democrats last year, and what if that other person had become President instead of GWB getting a second term? How does that change the future of the Axis of Evil? (It has been said that all it might have taken for Kerry himself to win would have for those Rathergate forgeries to have been forged by someone half competent.)

And, although I do not know any of the details to back the claim, I bet you anything that the earlier life of George W. Bush, just like that of FDR, is fraught with a succession of what-ifs, any one of which might have turned GWB into a dead drunk by now. What if God, to consider just one for-instance, had not found him?

What if the advice of those who advised that the recent Iraq election should have been postponed until things in Iraq had quietened down had been taken instead of ignored?

Speaking of God, and bringing all this home to Samizdata-land, what if Tony Blair were to have a heart attack tomorrow afternoon? (Yesterday I was conversing with some lefties who said that great swathes of the Labour Party devoutly hopes that he will, soon. They yearn for the God of medical chance to do for them that which they dare not do themselves for fear of offending the voters.) What if someone lets off a mega-bomb in the middle of Paris next week? What if Turkey does (or does not) join the EU? What if, as I speculated in my earlier piece, China falters in its ascent to superpowerdom? What if Asian Bird Flu turns seriously nasty? What if, as is apparently feared, a lump of the Canary Islands (I think it is the Canary Islands) falls into the sea and unleashes a North Atlantic Tsunami, similar to but even worse than the Tsunami that did recently wreck the coasts of South East Asia, and what if the Tsunami that did happen had not happened?

In my opinion, one of the more subtle effects of the Tsunami (that did happen) has been to push 9/11 rather more quickly into "history" than would happened otherwise. I surmise that a great many people, even quite a few Americans, are just that tiny bit less bothered by 9/11, which killed just over three thousand people, now that a giant wave in another part of the world has killed nearer to three hundred thousand people, a great many of them Muslims. The History Date that was 9/11 now has another huge and in terms of mere dead bodies far huger History Date between it and now, so to speak. Maybe, logically, this ought not to change anything, because murder is one thing and accident quite another, but I sense that maybe it does. That effect would be hard to prove and even harder to quantify, but it might be true, maybe, possibly. And that is not even to begin to enumerate all the personal futures – all those potential Great Lives who will now never be lived – which were snuffed out by the Big Wave. No doubt we are well rid of some of them, although of course we cannot now know which.

My favourite what-ifs are the ones that start with someone very obscure doing something very obscure slightly differently, which causes X, which causes Y – Y being a happening of universally agreed importance – not to happen. The human version of the Butterfly Effect, in other words. Going back to FDR again, apparently the bloke who did the backstage politics for FDR's rise to the Presidency had previously been working for another politician, and this other politician got fed up with politics and threw in the towel, and is now completely forgotten in consequence, apart from the indirect effect he had on FDR. What if he had carried on, and the bloke who was helping him had carried on helping him, and as a result had never helped FDR? Fascinating. I never had a clue about any of that until now.

So, all of your rush now to Amazon and purchase What If?, if you have not done so already, and More What If?, and any sequels that by your buying frenzy you persuade Robert Cowley to produce in the future. I want more.

To strengthen defence, cut taxes and balance the budget is very difficult.

Ronald Reagan managed the first two tasks, but failed in the third. President Bush made no effort to control nondefence spending in his first term and is only now trying to do so - we shall see how how well he does (he does not have President Reagan's defence of the Democrats being in control of the House of Representatives)

However, it is not impossible to achieve all three tasks. Perhaps the most important example in history is that of the Emperor Anastasius.

When Anastasius became Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire in 491 AD (the Senate allowed the choice of Emperor to rest with the Empress Ariadne) the Western Roman Empire had already collapsed. Here and there (such as in the Province of Britian) there were local leaders who continued to fight against the Germanic peoples, but the vast majority of the old empire in the west was under various Germanic kings.

The Eastern Roman Empire (which evolved into what we call the Byzantine Empire) was not in a good state. As with the Western Empire taxes were crushing, and yet the treasury was empty and the defences of the Empire were falling apart.

Anastasius fought many wars, both against invaders and against domestic rebels (mostly Chalcedonian Christians who objected to his austere Monophysite variety of Christianity - although I am not claiming that all Monophysites were austere, and it should also be remembered that Anastasius did not tend to persecute other sorts of Christians - not even Arians, the religion of the most of the barbarian rulers in the West and a religion whose doctrines were further from the "one divine nature of Christ-God" of the Monophysites, than were the "two natures of Jesus" view of the Chalcedonians from which the vast majority of modern Christians get their doctrines), and yet he greatly reduced taxes. Anastasius abolished the "chrysargyon" (a major tax on the urban population) and reduced the "capitatio" - one of the great taxes on the peasantry.

It must never be forgotten that most citizens of the Empire were and had always been country people (the concentration of the written records with city matters misleads us). And it was the demands for ever greater taxation that had led the Emperor Diocletian to tie peasants to the soil - i.e. to turn the bulk of the population into what would in later times be called serfs.

Anastasius was working to a plan to abolish the capitatio (although the land tax would remain - and it had to be paid in gold), but sadly the Emperor elected by the Senate after him (Justin) and the real man of power (Justinian) had other plans. Also if provinces were devasted by war Anastasius would grant remission of their taxes. An obvious policy perhaps - but not every Emperor did this, too often a province might be almost destoyed by war, only for the tax collectors to come along afterwards and finish the job.

At the same time Anastasius rebuilt the army, so whilst it did not become as good as the great Roman army of old, it avoided becomming the sick joke that the Western army had turned into. The army with which the Generals of Justinian won so many victories in their efforts to retake the West was at least in part the work of Anastasius.

Such defences as the great fortress city of Dara (built to guard against the Persians) were also the creation of Anastasius. As was the Long Wall of Thrace - part of the complex of defences that protected Constaninople. A city that withstood siege after siege - not falling till the Forth Crusade of the early 13th century, hundreds of years after Anastasius died (of course, after the Frankish occupation the Byzantines made a recovery of sorts - which was not to end till the capture of Constaniople by the Turks in 1453).

Anastasius also reformed the coinage (the actual minister in charge was named John the Paphlagonian - why should such folk be forgotten), so the East remained a money economy (not collapsing into barter) with coins in the denominations useful to the citizens, and Byzantine coins remained a normally undebased system of exchange for many centuries.

And as for "balancing the budget" - Anastasius left a reserve of 320,000 pounds (weight) of gold in the treasury when he died in 518.

Well "how did he do it"?

There was no magic, just the hard slog of careful cuts in wasteful spending (such as shows to amuse the urban mob - although even Anastasius dare not touch the chariot racing, whatever the of truth or otherwise of the claim that he had the support of the Green faction from the chariot races). And the endless work against corruption (the ways that officials found to get money in their pockets rather than in supplying the army).

The efforts of Anastasius and his ministers (such as Polycarp and Marinus) to reform administrative structures, cut spending and root out corruption have a history among Roman financial managers of the better sort all the way back to Sulla in the days of the Republic (Sulla abolished the Corn Dole, and he smashed the tax farmers [folk who demanded X for the state and X plus for themselves] who had looted the provinces - this made Sulla very popular with folk away from Rome regardless of how many Popularies he killed in the city).

Indeed only half a century before the time of Anastasius the Senate elected Marcian as Emperor - and he abolished a few taxes and charges upon Senators, which he was able to do partly by the bold move of refusing the pay any more protection money to Attila the Hun, and partly by just hard control of spending.

However, in recent centuries only Anastasius had cut taxes for the great mass of people, whilst rebuilding defence, and balancing the budget (indeed building up a directly held reserve that would have made Martin Van Buren proud).

The Republic was centuries dead. Under the Empire "liberty" sometimes seemed to mean a picture of free bread on the coins (part of the destruction of liberty being hailed as liberty itself - a very modern touch), And the ideology of the late Roman Empire was collectivist to the core, yet Anastasius was able to good - indeed vast amounts of good. Individuals do matter in history.

But what is the relevance of me ranting on about ancient history? What an Emperor can do can not be matched by the democatic politics of modern nations. Why even the old Republican Sulla did not get his reforms into practice by constitutional means - he cut down his Popular party ("party" in a loose sense of course) enemies like pork (although the round of political killings in Sulla's time was actually started by the Popularies - a point that many history text books seem to oddly forget) and his reforms did not last long after his retirement.

This is where the example of Philadephia comes in. In the 1930's the United States was fully democratic (yes there were some Poll taxes and blacks in the South could not vote - but by ancient standards northern cities like Philadephia had an almost unthinkable proportion of their population with the right to vote - no slaves, few resident aliens, and even voting rights for women).

In the days of the early Republic democrats (whether the political party was Jefferson's Republicans or later Jackson's Democrats - and whether the various democrats happened to like each other or not) had been small government men (Jefferson with his abolition of all internal federal taxes, Jackson and Van Buren with the paying off of the national debt.....). But by the 1930's the people who viewed themselves as "progressive" or "democatic" (whether they were in the Democratic party or not) were deeply collectivist. Also the popular culture was collectivist - in books or films the bad guy was normally a rich man of business (just like today - with a few brave exceptions), and (of course) the 1930s was the period of the Great Depression with up to a quarter of the workforce unemployed and the economy in chaos.

In this period the budget of the city of Philadelphia went from a revenue of 133 million dollars and spending of 163.4 million Dollars in 1930, to a revenue of 127 million Dollars and spending of 127.6 million Dollars in 1940. Indeed in many years of the 1930's Philadelphia balanced the budget - and all without the special "help" of the new hand outs from President Roosevelt's federal government.

In short Philadelphia did not expand government - in the teeth of the supposedly inevitable spendthrift nature of democracy, and in spite of the intense collectivism of the 1930's, the temptation of money from Washington and the longest depression of American history.

For those who may think that there may be special factors involved in the stats I gave above (and prices did fall in the first couple of years of the 1930's) compare Philadelphia's stats with those of New York City:

In 1930 New York City government had revenue of 725.6 million Dollars and spending of 681.8 billion Dollars. In 1940 New York had revenue of 896.7 million Dollars and spending of 1327.5 million Dollars.

In short, spending about doubled in New York city in the 1930's (whereas it fell in Philadelphia) and by 1940 New York city government was spending more than ten times what Philadelphia city government was spending (and no, Philadelphia's population was not only a tenth of the population of New York).

Yes the Philadelphia that had Conservative black newspapers as late as the 1960s is long gone (indeed perhaps it was really killed by the new City Charter just after World War II), and yes Philadelphia did not provide for its own defence (it was not a classical city - for all its Greek name). But it is one example that shows that even in the most difficult of circumstances polticians do not have to be collectivists - they choose to be. Political leaders can fight the growth of statism if they really wish to do this.

It is not "inevitable social trends", the "historical period" or any other factor. Polticians are government growers because they choose to be so, they do not have to be so.

For some of the facts above I made use of the work of the late AHM Jones (on Anastasius his short work "The Decline of the Ancient World", Longman 1966, is still all one needs) and of Bruce Allen Hardy (on Philadelphia). I came upon Dr Hardy's thesis (Wayne State University 1977) recently and it gave me the stats to support something that I had long known (that Philadelphia resisted the growth of statism in the 1930s).

Of course I am certainly not claiming that either the late AHM Jones or Dr Hardy would support any of my political opinions.

For the last several weeks I have been watching with growing pleasure, every Monday night from 8 pm to 9 pm, two episodes at a time, one of those Channel 5 TV series that tend to pass without much comment or many claims of significance, called Massive Engines.

Last night saw the airing of the final two episodes, number 9 about massive pumps, and number 10 and finally, about the massive jet engines that enable modern airliners to ply their trade. The presenter was Chris Barrie, who is probably best know for comedy-of-embarrassment characterisations like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, or Brittas in The Brittas Empire, and in Massive Engines there are occasional Rimmer/Brittas style, self-send-up moments of leaden humour. The impression you get is that Barrie is not as sure as he would like to be that he is keeping his audience's attention.

For myself, I absolutely do not think Barrie need have worried. Whenever, which was most of the time, he forgot about being comical and concentrated on explaining the whys and wherefores of his various massive engines, often while himself operating them and with every sign of knowing pretty much what he was doing, I was held, and fascinated.

I learned all kinds of things I never knew. For instance, in the last show, about aircraft engines, I learned that on an early aircraft engine, not only did the propeller rotate, but the cylinders also, firmly attached to the same bit of the engine as the propeller, and rotating along with the propeller. To keep them cool. Amazing. Well, you probably knew that, but I had no idea. You probably also know that whereas petrol engines work with regular explosions, diesel engines (names after a German bloke called Diesel) do not feature externally induced explosions. The pressure caused by the cylinder coming back up again is enough to set fire to the next lot of fuel. Well, I sort of vaguely did know that. But now I know it a little better.

In general, throughout the run of the show, Barrie's quick and clear explanations of the principles behind all the mechanisms he was describing were, well, amazingly quick, and amazingly clear.

The only episode which I found a bit weak was the one about motorbikes, which featured rather too much footage of Barrie trundling about rather pointlessly on a motorbike, in between the serious explanatory stuff. The trouble with motorbikes is that frankly, they are not massive. They got as big as they will ever be many decades ago, and anyway, the point of them is speed, plain and simple, rather than speed (or anything else for that matter) achieved through massiveness.

That episode aside, all the engines on show got steadily bigger and more effective throughout their history. They are not necessarily massive any more. The pumps, for instances, that shift water hither and thither used to be a lot bigger, when they were steam engines, than they are now, now that they are diesel or electrical engines or whatever. But a good few of the engines Barrie talked about with such enthusiasm are huge right now, and getting ever huger.

The earth moving kit they now use is unbelievably huge, as was proved with a trip to a massive open cast coal mine in Germany, where there were also earth-shifting lorries with wheels the size of terrace houses. The machines used to dig tunnels are now as massive as they have ever been. As are those aircraft engines of course.

I expected the airplane episode with which the show ended to be a commercial for the Airbus A380, but actually it was a commercial for the Rolls Royce Trent Alphabetsoup engine. No Airbuses were mentioned, but a Boeing was, the two engine 777, which is apparently almost as huge as the four engine 747.

I recall no mention whatsoever of the wickedness of massive engines from the environmental point of view, which was most refreshing. On the contrary, massive engines got massive because they were used, again and again, to solve massive environmental problems, such as the environmental mess that the London sewage system had become towards the end of the nineteenth century, or the massive problem of travelling vast distances across the damn environment, most especially the sea. (There was an episode devoted to massive ships.) The entire show was a continuous hymn of praise to the God of the Technical Fix. You have a problem? Building a massive engine to solve it.

I cannot claim to remember all the technical details that were laid out before me on Massive Engines, but when they were being laid out I recall very, very clearly that they did make perfect sense, at the time. Had I written the stuff down, I am confident that only my own handwriting would have then stopped it making perfect sense now.

What I am really saying is, if I come across DVDs of this show at a suitably miserly price, I would definitely consider buying them, and watching the whole show again, repeating the quick and clear explanations and fast forwarding through the motorbike trundling.

As a potential interester of intelligent and intellectual curious children, boys especially of course, these shows would, I feel sure, prove excellent.

And Chris Barrie's Rimmerisms might even help from that point of view. By the end, even I was enjoying the rest of it so much that I found myself smiling instead of wincing when Barrie started up yet another massive engine not with a "right let's start this thing up", but instead by shouting rather self-consciously: "let's rock". Very embarrassing dad. But when you really like the serious work that someone is doing, you can put up with mannerisms and foolishnesses that would drive you insane if it was just another pointless idiot doing them. And when they are gone, you even find you miss them.

So, an outstanding show, and particular proof of the value of having lots of different TV channels, allowing lots of different points of view besides the official one, which as far as massive engines is concerned is now that massive engines are, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, just plain evil.

The Duel
John Lukacs
Ticknor & Fields, New York 1994

Five Days in London: May 1940
John Lukacs
Yale Univ. Press 1999

We buried Winston Churchill forty years ago. Sixty five years ago, come May, he faced, for us, the greatest crisis of our history. BBC's Radio 4 commemorated his death with a fine, hour-long recall of his funeral and the crisis of 1940 with a gripping drama, Playing for Time - Three Days in May 1940. I do not know whether the author of the play, Robin Glendinning, owed anything to the books noticed here, but to me they seem to autheticate it. Another Radio 4 programme, Churchill's Roar, very perceptively analysed the voice that spoke the words that still move us.

The World's Debt to Britain

To put it no higher, the world is fortunate that, for a whole year, from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain had a government that did not capitulate to or compromise with Hitler. The situation during that year looked barely a stalemate. The Axis Powers now completely dominated Europe. Italy was an ally, Spain was friendly and the USSR no threat (the only person Stalin ever trusted was Hitler). Germany had absorbed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938, then in less than a year's war had overrun and partitioned Poland, occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and completed her conquest of Western Europe by knocking out France. The Balkans represented no problem.

Although it may have been the result of miscalculation and misfortune that for a year Britain "stood alone", it turned out to be the right thing to do. And more than calculation stood behind the decision: it felt the right thing to do. But what could Britain hope for? The Dominions (except for Southern Ireland, still officially one of them, whose government played its ignoble role, excused by its history, until the very end) were loyal and contributed men and arms. The United States was sympathetic but strongly isolationist: to win the Presidential Election in 1940, Roosevelt felt he had to promise to keep out of the war. There was little Britain could do but protect herself and trounce Hitler's jackal-ally Italy in Ethiopia, Somaliland and North Africa - and hope that Hitler would make some mistake.

The Inevitable Parallel: Napoleon and Hitler

The parallel between Britain's struggle against Napoleon and that against Hitler hardly needs to be drawn, but if there is any lesson in history, surely it is here. Napoleon retains his high reputation, gained from victory in a dozen battles; Hitler never commanded in the field, yet subjugated Europe more thoroughly. Both underestimated Britain in both her power and persistence, Hitler the more excusably. Napoleon abandoned the attempt to invade, and did not in person try to eject Britain from Spain and Portugal; in combination, a fatal error. Hitler postponed his invasion attempt, half-hoping the fruit would drop into his hand, also a fatal error.

Hitler's Priority - and his Four Mistakes

We can see now that the priority for Hitler was the elimination of Britain. Any move that Hitler made that did not have this purpose was bound to be a mistake. From June 1940 until April 1941 he had no other enemy; a better opportunity to attack her was never to recur. That he failed to concentrate on this was his first mistake. Then he made his next; he attacked Jugoslavia and Greece, wasting energy merely to enter the irrelevant theatre of the Mediterranean by a more difficult route than one he already had, through Italy - Rommel was already causing us trouble in North Africa. The third error, the colossal blunder of invading the USSR, followed in June; from then on Germans were to be killed on a large scale, though at terrible cost to the Russians because of the stupidity of Stalin and the wastefulness of his generals. Even so, the first German offensive would almost certainly have captured Moscow, Leningrad and European Russia, including the Ukraine, had Hitler's resources not been depleted by his Balkan adventure and the need to keep watch on Britain. We on our part, began to send arms to Russia. Hitler's fourth mistake was the inexplicable stupidity of declaring war on the USA. This sealed his fate by rendering Britain impregnable and providing inexhaustible armaments to anyone willing to fight him.

That the US military alliance was vital, no one can deny. Churchill, in May 1940, our darkest hour, confessed to his son that his only hope was somehow to get the United States into the war. The rapport that Churchill and Roosevelt developed was an extraordinary bonus, not something that could have been taken for granted. Although it can be confidently asserted that Churchill took the initiative and that necessity drove him, yet the bond formed was firm and lasting. When Roosevelt died in January 1945 Churchill wept copiously at his Memorial Service; reciprocally, Roosevelt had confided to a colleague that Churchill was "the greatest man alive".

Why Britain's Survival in 1940 was Essential to Win the War

The survival of Britain as a fighting power after June 1940 was thus essential to victory. Without it, the US would would almost certainly never have come to Europe, where the political scene, whether dominated by a Nazi Germany or, much less likely, a Communist USSR would be at best depressing, at worst horrific. While both ideologies might mellow or collapse over time, that time would undoubtedly have had its fill of horrors and humiliation. It would certainly have been most of the last 65 years and of the lifetimes of those born since 1940, the year we are now so reluctant to see as our Annus Mirabilis.

...and Why We Should Have Fought On

There have been suggestions that Britain, in 1940-41, might have reached a modus vivendi with Hitler, similar to the Peace of Amiens in 1802 with Napoleon. Logically, Hitler should have offered to withdraw to 1939 boundaries (which still included Austria and Czechoslovakia), but this would have been for Hitler, a political and psychological impossibility. He made no offer anything like it. For Britain to have accepted anything less, on the other hand, would have been unwise, leaving her vulnerable, both materially and psychologically, to a second round. And Britain in 1940 was not Britain in 1802. In 1802 her foreign policy was run by a handful of aristocrats with a managed Parliament, who took their country in and out of wars and alliances with little need to consult public, or even informed opinion. In 1940, by contrast, a government that stopped the country fighting would have had difficulty in starting it again.

Churchill as Inspirer (or Mouthpiece?)

The resolution of the government, in 1940 as in 1802, remained all-important, and accounts of Cabinet meetings and less formal discussions leave one in no doubt that this resolution would have wavered, had it not been for Churchill. Well might he have said, in the words uttered (without bombast, one feels sure) by Wellington after Waterloo: "By God! I don't think it would have done if I had not been there!" In fact, Churchill's assessment of his own part was humble: "Had I faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office." Yet when Churchill inspired, first his cabinet, then the nation, while France crumbled and the BEF was being evacuated from Dunkirk, he had been Prime Minister for less than a month.

Since any terms offered by Hitler would have been equivalent to surrender, Churchill refused to condone any negotiating, which would merely admit weakness. Both RAF and Royal Navy chiefs thought they could prevent an invasion, but emphasised the importance of national morale. Churchill probably overestimated the nation's courage and determination, but in thinking he was only its mouthpiece, he inspired it into believing itself what he thought it was. "It fell to me," he wrote later, "to express their sentiments on suitable occasions. This I was able to do because they were mine also. There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end." With the Battle of Britain won and the Blitz endured, Britain was saved. and, ultimately, the war was won. If any one man was responsible for this achievement, it was Churchill.

If Britain Had Been Beaten...

Allow me to reiterate the logic of this claim. If Hitler could have subjugated Britain, he could then, by concentrating all his resources, and in his own time, have occupied or neutralized all of Europe west of the Black Sea, dominated the Mediterranean, and still have surprised the USSR and annihilated her armies. The USA could only have acquiesced in this state of affairs. It might ultimately have collided with Japan, but yet have taken no action while that power absorbed the Far Eastern possessions of the Dutch, French and British and turned China into a helpless puppet. India could have experienced a spurious liberation, either by the Germans or the Japanese - how can anyone know what might have happened to her?

The laws of Physics determine that however long and strong a lever may be, without a fulcrum it cannot be used. It is almost impossible to believe that Germany could have been beaten without either Soviet or US participation, but in the event, neither could it have happened without Britain's survival through the year 1940-1 when she stood alone. We do not know whether or for how long we could have survived a determined German attack, but we do know that Churchill's role in Britain's defiance was paramount. The VE Day crowds in 1945 did not doubt it. When he told them "This is your victory" they roared back "No - it is yours".

...or negotiated

By the end of October 1940 the British Government knew that German invasion plans had been cancelled. It is presumably during the next five months, until the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, which was started at the beginning and completed by the end of April, that some modern historians see a "window of opportunity" for a negotiated peace. Whether or not this seems reasonable in retrospect, it is difficult to see how it could possibly ever have happened. Churchill was now at the zenith of his power and prestige and had no intention of discussing peace. There was no politician of any standing whom a peace party could form around; Chamberlain was dead, Halifax (as a lord, anyway more or less disqualified) had been sent as Ambassador to Washington and Cripps to Moscow; Butler had been sidetracked into the unwarlike Ministry of Education.

Which Would Hitler Invade First - Britain or the USSR?

Be that as it may and granted that Churchill had the bit between his teeth (we can surely dismiss personal ambition) we still have to decide whether peace was a reasonable option and on what terms. The question boils down to this: if Hitler had spent the better part of a year preparing to invade Britain, would he have succeeded? For this his best strategy would be a massive aircraft and U-Boat building programme. The Army was certainly adequate as it was. But here a large factor looms - the USSR. With hindsight, we know that Hitler always intended to subjugate it. From captured documents the British government knew that in July 1940 Hitler had initiated the planning to do so. So for Britain, the question must have been not "If?" but "When?" As we have seen, Hitler's best strategy would have been to neutralize Britain first; as soon as Britain knew the attack on Russia was fixed for June 1941, there would be no reason to seek peace. The British Government would not be justified in making, or in considering, peace overtures if the evidence showed that Germany was either not making a serious attempt to dominate the Channel, or that such an attempt would fail. After the Battle of Britain, which we won, evidence for both became overwhelming.

So confident was Churchill and the government of this that the the British felt able to send troops to Egypt and campaign, in a morale-raising way, to throw the Italians out of North Africa. Hitler refused Rommel reinforcements which may, at the time, have revealed that he needed the men elsewhere - Russia.

The Academic Debate: The Price We Paid - Unnecessary or Inevitable?

Despite the facts in the analysis above, it has been claimed that this interlude, irrespective of Hitler's choice between the two alternatives, would have been a good time to negotiate. Large numbers of Britons (200,000+?) would have stayed alive, large numbers of houses and factories would not have been destroyed, our empire, including its oil-rich territories, would have remained intact, and its resources diverted to counter any threat from the Japanese. The morality of such a policy could be brushed aside and with some reason; Nazi atrocities were largely in the future, were dwarfed to date by Communist ones and, it has to be said, did not affect military strategy when they were known.

Lives Lost...

None of these reasons is really valid. What of the 200,000+ putative lives to be saved? Spread over the whole country, this would be a one chance in 275 of being killed, about twice the likelihood of anyone today being killed in a road accident during their entire lives. In human history, warfare has ranged from being regarded as a somewhat dangerous sport, through all the various stages of high-risk activity to kamikaze and suicide bomber. In short, it is difficult not to believe that most people in this country would have accepted a 100 to 200 to 1 chance of being killed in preference to the risk of trusting Hitler. Admittedly, in the armed forces, the risk would be higher!

Material Resources...

The other reasons can be dealt with more straightforwardly. The actual aftermath of the war has shown how rapidly material resources can be regenerated. The undeniable fact that the two defeated nations subsequently outstripped the victors economically even suggests that a thorough demolition of obsolescent structures, physical and psychological, can be even beneficial.

...and The Empire

As for the survival of Britain's empire; this had been held together by moral force; selfconfidence in the rulers, acquiescence by the ruled. It would have been amazing if it could have survived a perceived British defeat any better than it did the ultimate British victory, especially in the case of India. The Japanese, had they taken care not to become embroiled with the US, could have over-run Malaya and Burma just as effectively as they did in 1942. To them, the difference between a compromise peace and an outright British defeat might not have seemed sufficient for them not to take the risk.

The Surprising "Moral Dimension"

Coming, lastly, to the moral dimension, it may surprise cynics, blase to British claims to hold the higher moral ground, to find how crucial this was. If the Germans had treated the inhabitants of White Russia (Belorus) and the Ukraine humanely or as allies against Bolshevism, as most of them wished to be, the Soviet Union might well have fallen to pieces nearly 50 years before it did. Hitler was even advised to do so but opted for their enslavement, largely because he regarded them as inferior human beings. With a parallel idiocy, both sides ill-treated their prisoners, instead of wooing them.

But Back to 1940 - 41: The Actual Situation...

During the months October 1940 to March 1941 Churchill waited to see whether Germany was going to move against Britain or the Soviet Union first. Given his complete dominance over the Cabinet, Parliament and the nation, there was, because of his refusal to consider them, no chance of peace negotiations coming about and the discussion of their desirability is literally an academic exercise. The academic exercise conducted in the paragraphs above suggests that he was right. At Nuremburg, the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop (if one can believe him) claimed that Hitler himself, baffled as to what to do about Britain, even turned in desperation to Japan - to initiate an alliance that was to make his ruin ultimately complete.

Britain's "Compromise Option" - To Be Eaten Last

There was, of course, an enormous risk that Hitler would succeed in completely defeating the Soviet Union, disintegrating its armies, killing or capturing Stalin or after occupying Moscow and Leningrad, turning him into a completely discredited, hunted man. But this risk would be much increased if Britain was neutral and our position would become desperate when the last power independent of Germany in the whole of Eurasia disappeared. Consequently it was not in our interest to agree with Hitler to give him a free hand to deal with the Soviet Union; that would be merely to accept the privilege accorded by the Cyclops to Odysseus - to be eaten last.

Because the United States, due to Hitler's folly, became involved in the European war, Britain never had to confront either single power, Germany or the Soviet Union, dominant on the continent. However, whichever it had turned out to be, we should have been best to do so fully armed, with our resources mobilised in a fashion that only actual belligerance can ensure.

In The Duel, practically a day by day account of 80 days, May 10th to 31st July 1940 Lukacs explains how Churchill put the backbone into the British policy of defiance, a policy justifiable at the time only because the alternatives would be worse, but ultimately vindicated. Its most obvious feature is Churchill's determination and will power, compared with the pessimism, if not actual defeatism, of, in particular, Halifax and Butler. Against their wish to explore Hitler's terms was Churchill's awareness of the "slippery slope" down which any interest in them might lead. It was another matter to carefully place "false feelers" to confuse and delay German reactions.

But there are other points well worth taking into account. The magnanimity of both Chamberlain and Churchill emerge; Churchill in his loyalty until his time comes and his kindness thereafter; Chamberlain's acceptance of his replacement (he surely realised how much more adequate Churchill was to the task) and his pressure on his own supporters to rally behind Churchill. The number of Conservative MPs who began the period hostile to Churchill was large (large enough in the Commons Chamber to cheer Chamberlain rather than Churchill after the changeover). I rather wish that Lloyd George (Petain in waiting?) had been followed up.

The famous "calling off" by Hitler of Rundstedt's advance on Dunkirk remains (to me) unexplained. The book finishes just as the Battle of Britain begins. Not perhaps argued strongly enough by the author is his suggestion that airborne or paratroop landings by the Germans might have led to the defeat of Britain immediately after, perhaps during, the Dunkirk evacuation. But were such airborne facilities yet developed sufficiently?

As an American, Lukacs is aware of the dependence of Churchill upon hopes of US help and knows the personalities in US politics; the various ways and means may have been simplified here. The weakness of a democratic system, especially of the US constitutional type, shows up in the difficulties Roosevelt had in aiding Britain, e.g., for his political support he had to keep the defeatist Joseph Kennedy as Ambassador to Britain. He also characterises John Foster Dulles as an isolationist in 1940 - and John F. Kennedy following his father in his defeatist attitude. It seems amazingly fortunate that the Republican candidate in 1940 was Wendell Wilkie, who also favoured intervention short of war.

In his Five Days in London: May 1940, Lukacs, in 1999, followed The Duel with a more detailed examination of the most critical period of 1940. I am not sure if I can say that he has added much to the subject, though doubtless the detail is greater. Perhaps there is more about the precariousness of Churchill's position, but even so, this seems to have ended before the Dunkirk evacuation when far more men had been rescued that had been thought possible by anyone at its start. He may have thought the book was necessary after the publications of such revisionist historians as Charmley or Lawler, while he cites fairly often Roberts' biography of Halifax, The Holy Fox (1991) and Eminent Churchillians (1994), often to correct and contradict. The book has the merit of greater brevity, concentration and force than The Duel.

The aftermath

Britain emerged from the War exhausted and bankrupt, unable and unwilling to be any longer a Great Power. The Americans had come to liberate us all from the Germans; they remained to protect us from the Russians. Increasingly content, like the rest of Western Europe, to shelter under the American umbrella, and increasingly powerless, we could all cavort beneath it in a parody of independence, indulged by our benign protector, whom we treat in the normal, expected way - with ingratitude.

Even if we take only two nations, the United States and the United Kingdom, this question is complex.

If we take the old John Dewey definition of liberty (at least the definition of liberty that John Dewey tended to use in his youth - as he got older he became a more interesting man), the answer is 'right now'. Never before have average incomes been higher, most people can buy more things (and so on) than people could in the past.

However, for those of us who reject the Pragmatist soft-left FDR 'freedom from want' definition of liberty or freedom (no, I am not going to go into possible differences between 'liberty' and 'freedom') more thinking is required.

First the United States.

Slavery may be against natural law (if there is such a thing) as even the Romans accepted (although slavery was not against 'the law of all nations' or Roman law itself), and it may be (as authorities for centuries have claimed - for an American example see Salmon P. Chase) against the principles of the English Common Law, but it certainly was not against the statute law of many States.

So if we define (as libertarians do) liberty as the non-violation of a person or their goods by another person or group of persons ('the nonaggression principle') then the United States was more of a free country after the slaves were freed than before. So the United States after 1865 (not in the first years of the Republic) is at its most free.

Government taxes and regulations actually decline after the Civil War (or War between the States, or War of Northern Aggression - or whatever you want to call it), and statism does not seem to rise again till after the Interstate Commerce Commission of 1887 (it is pity that a good free market man like Grover Cleveland was responsible for that - but he thought of himself as using federal regulation to ward off worse regulation by individual States, a rather Madison style move that did not work out well in the end).

Oddly enough the Jim Crow laws in the South were not fully underway by the mid 1880's either (although they were on the cards - it depends which State one is talking about). So the early 1880's would seem (for all their faults) were about the peak of liberty for the nation as a whole. The trade tax (or 'tariff' if you prefer) was increased in 1890 and 'antitrust' came in the same year, and Jim Crow got worse and worse.

However, even by just before the First World War Federal Government spending was only between 2 and 3 per cent of the economy. Indeed even as late as 1928 Federal Government spending was only about 3&percent; of the economy and total government spending only about 12&percent;. Of course there was the vile Federal Reserve System of 1913 (which took over from the less vile, but still vile, National Banking Act system put on the books during the Civil War) and there was Prohibition and... Well, it is too depressing to think about modern history.

Of course the Federal (or 'federal' as some people like to write it) government was bigger after the Civil War than before it and it never quite fell back (for example the fed taxes on booze remained - America was never again the land that Jefferson had boasted of after he got rid of the excise, the land were the fed tax-collector 'was never seen') and there were State debts and State taxes to think about - so if one is considering an individual State (rather than the whole United States), the peak of liberty (if it was a free State and in existence) is likely to have been before 1861.

If we take the example of New Hampshire (the first State that springs to mind) its peak must be after 1819 (because there was a town church tax before then), and there was a Fed trade tax increase in 1824 and the crazy one of 1828 (I mean crazy, various low tariff people voted for deliberately mad amendments to the bill in Congress hoping to turn votes against the measure, but instead of falling the bill got into law - this is not the first time that a clever free market person plan has gone very wrong, try and avoid cleverness in politics).

So liberty in New Hampshire was at its peak in the early 1820's.

This is true of most non-slave States. The regulations and state education schemes of colonial times had decayed and the new ones (established by such men as H. Mann in the 1830's and later) had not got off the ground (although Rhode Island established a State school system, of sorts, in 1828).

However, in some semi-free States (i.e. States where there were very few slaves) there is little sign of an increase in government power till the Civil War (I am told that New Jersey is a good example of this).

Now for the United Kingdom.

Well if we leave aside the stories of 'Celtic liberty' ('P Celt' or 'Q Celt') and the stories of Arthur, and we leave aside the stories of Pagan Anglo Saxon hero Kings like Penda - well we come (after a couple of centuries) to the stories of Alfred, his daughter Ethelfleda (warrior ruler of Mercia) and his son Edward the Elder.

These are interesting people. Most 'feminst' historians seem to have missed Ethelfleda (of course they spend so much time 'doing theory' that they do not have much time left to learn about what happened in the past), but she was an interesting person - who led her army in battle after battle, crushing the Vikings in war and gaining their submission at the conference table (she was rather better at this than Edward the Elder). The Irish and Welsh annuals remembered her - but we do not.

Then there is Alfred himself, seeing all English Kingdoms (including Wessex) fall to the armies of the Norse (who were certainly not the 'competing protection agencies' of libertarian theory - at least they competed in 'non-market ways' and were not above collecting goods and people without consent [in the same way that the sea is not above the sky]), and yet he fought back and defeated his enemies in the end - and without murdering or enslaving the Vikings who gave in (a rare humanity by the standards of the time). Yes they did have to covert to Christianity - but it is difficult to practice full religious toleration with folk who believe in human sacrifice (the Blood Eagle was probably no myth, neither are the other practices)

But we know so little about the basic society of the time. We know there were no formal Church taxes (they come in with King Edgar - most likely at the suggestion of Archbishop Dunstan).

But we do not know how much was taken by Kings from their subjects (as a percentage of their subjects income in money or kind) in peacetime (although King Athelstan is known to have been interested in pomp and luxury than Edward the Elder or Alfred had been).

Nor do we know (with any certainty) what percentage of the population were free and what percentage were either slaves or bound to the soil (a practice that went back at least to Roman times). In later time Kent was known for its free men as was (to be fair to the Norse) the Danelaw north - but numbers, numbers we do not know the numbers.

The ancient Saxons and Fresians seem to have not practices serfdom (or whatever you wish to call it) amongst their own people, or gone in for mighty lords (the Saxons were known for the 12 man councils that ran their villages - a different root for the jury to the Norman root?). And Saxon law (like the Welsh law) recognised the property rights of women.

But this may tell us little about 'Saxons' in England, and the Angles had a different culture (not just concerning lords, the Angles less also less concerned with the rights of women). Still forget Angle, Saxon or Jute (or whoever) everyone was English, Welsh, or Norse (either Norman or Dane) by Alfred's time.

For the non-aggression principle all we can say is that Alfred's family (his brothers and forefathers as well as his children) was virtually the only Royal House in Europe that were not in the habit of killing each other. That, by the standards of the time at least, made them the good guys - people that folk would follow (even when things seemed hopeless).

Well what about the times when we do have 'the numbers'?

Well the calculation is simple enough. Central government spending reaches its low point (and what regulations that were to be repealed in the 19th century were repealed, and women's property rights to some extent accepted) by 1874 - so for the areas of the country that had not set up School Boards (for example my own town of Kettering) the high point of freedom comes in 1874. For those towns that had set up school boards, under the Act of 1871, the peak is the year before they do. It is mostly down hill for freedom from there (although even as late as the 1960's some nasty laws are repealed, such as the ones that threatened homosexuals with prison - but, of course, many new regulations were added). Total government (national and local) was about 10% of output at most in the early 1870's.

But "the numbers" only take us so far. Where did the orgy of statism of 1875 (Trade Union Act, Slum Act, 40 different local government Acts codified and made compulsory on towns and cities) come from? A clear blue sky?

No, the principles of statism (that government should give money to education [1833], that government should have police [London 1829, other towns and rural areas - compulsory by 1856], that public health should be a local government concern [almost as soon as local government was reformed in 1835] and so on) had already been accepted. Government only continued to shrink (from its high point in the ways with France - when it reached perhaps 25% of output), because economic growth was higher than government growth - after 1874 that was no longer true.

If you want a time when people like John Stuart Mill (saying 'liberty' with every other breath, whilst stating in such works as Principles of Political Economy that "everyone agrees" with such and such bit of statism) did not influence British life you really have to go back to the 1820's.

Taxes were higher overall (including Poor Law taxes) but the principles that the state must be at least involved in just about everything were not accepted (taxes were for the war debt, the military, and the local rates for the old Poor law - in Scotland there was no large scale Poor Law, but there was some government education). Taxes were cut most years (and had been since 1815) and regulations were reduced, statute after statute being tossed on the fire.

1820's for both Britain (in principle, if not in the raw numbers) and for the non slave States, and early 1870's and early 1880's. for overall.

Perhaps the United States and the United Kingdom are not so different.

Today, while wandering along beside the Thames, I came across a plaque, which said the following:

LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN BY, ROYAL ENGINEERS

FOUNDER OF OTTAWA, CAPITAL OF CANADA

John By was born near this place and baptised in the church of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, August 10, 1779. After a distinguished career in Canada and in the Peninsular War, he was called out of retirement in 1826 and sent to Canada to build the Rideau Canal waterway. A defence project, the waterway would extend 200 kilometres from the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario. It penetrated uncharted lakes and rivers, virgin forest, rock, and swamp attended by the horrors of introduced malaria. This outstanding engineering feat, which required the construction of 47 stone masonry locks and 23 dams, was opened May 30, 1832. Now a heritage treasure, it remains in use as a recreational waterway.

John By retired to Frant, East Sussex, where he died February 1, 1836.

Erected 1997 by The Historical Society of Ottawa.

You learn something new every day, if you keep your eyes open and your brain open.

A camera helps too. Photographs of where I was in London, and of the plaque itself, and further linkage, here.

December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbour attack.

The image says it all.

I have just begun reading Niall Ferguson's Empire: How Britain Made The Modern Word, and I know that it will be a finisher, so to speak. Here is his description of how the British Empire got started:

In December 1663 a Welshman called Henry Morgan sailed five hundred miles across the Caribbean to mount a spectacular raid on a Spanish outpost called Gran Grenada, to the north of Lago de Nicaragua. The aim of the expedition was simple: to find and steal Spanish gold – or any other movable property. When Morgan and his men got to Gran Grenada, as the Governor of Jamaica reported in a despatch to London, '[They] fired a volley, overturned eighteen great guns . . . took the serjeant-major's house wherein were all their arms and ammunition, secured in the great Church 300 of the best men prisoners . . . plundered for 16 hours, discharged the prisoners, sunk all the boats and so came away.' It was the beginning of one of the seventeenth century's most extraordinary smash-and-grab sprees.

It should never be forgotten that this was how the British Empire began: in a maelstrom of seaborne violence and theft. It was not conceived by self-conscious imperialists, aiming to establish English rule over foreign lands, or colonists hoping to build a new life overseas. Morgan and his fellow 'buccaneers' were thieves, trying to steal the proceeds of someone else's Empire.

The buccaneers called themselves the 'Brethren of the Coast' and had a complex system of profit-sharing, including insurance policies for injury. Essentially, however, they were engaged in organized crime. When Morgan led another raid against the Spanish town of Portobelo in Panama, in 1668, he came back with so much plunder – in all, a quarter of a million pieces of eight – that the coins became legal tender in Jamaica. That amounted to £60,000 from just one raid. The English government not only winked at Morgan's activity; it positively encouraged him. Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way of waging war against England's principal European foe, Spain. In effect, the Crown licensed the pirates as 'privateers', legalizing their operations in return for a share of the proceeds. Morgan's career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces.

For a more respectful, and proudly Welsh, view of Morgan's place in history, try this. And see also this posting here, early last year, about the TV show Ferguson did after writing his book.

Last Friday, on another blog, I did a link-to/short-comment-on piece, linking to and commenting on this report. It was about Chinese students lying about their qualifications in order to get into British Universities.

Harry Hutton (esteemed writer of this hugely entertaining and clearly much frequented blog) added the following very interesting comment to my posting:

It's a big problem with the IELTS exam in mainland China – people turn up to do tests for other people. They also come in with live mobile phones, to record the script. But there is zero cheating in Hong Kong. I don't know why this big difference, but it is so.

Cards on the table, I do not know why there is this big different either. And never having been to – or for that matter anywhere near – Hong Kong, or mainland China, I am a lot less qualified even to guess than Harry Hutton is.

However, I choose to offer a guess nevertheless.

Hong Kong has been a rampantly capitalistic economy for the last half century, and rampantly capitalistic economies make people more honest.

Oh not in the short run, but they do in the long run. People learn, at first the hard way, and then by being eloquently taught by the people who did learn it the hard way, or who already knew it and whose experience confirmed it, that honestly pays off, in the long run. In the short run, you may get some small or even big advantage by cheating. But in the long run, the damage you risk doing to your reputation for honesty by cheating, whether at a game, in the market or in an exam, is a risk not worth taking.

The biggest single reason why someone is unemployable, if he is unemployable, is that he is dishonest. Incompetence can often be corrected, with luck and application. Ignorance, ditto. And if a basically well motivated and honest person simply cannot master the first job you give him despite days or weeks, or even months of honest effort, why then, you can find him another job, if you have one for him. If not, you can enthusiastically recommend him to someone else who can, for his honesty if not his competence. (Remember: your recommendations have to be honest too!) But dishonesty is a deal breaker. Well, it would be. Dishonesty means that you break deals, so why would anyone want to make a deal with you, if that is what you do?

To put all this in modern econmicspeak, in a society in which people are entitled to shun you and have no obligations towards you that they do not freely accept, what is now called 'human capital' grows rather than shrinks.

I vividly recall participating in a radio panel discussion in which our chairman, a prmoinent newspaper editor, said that free market capitalism was all very well at accumulating capital of the physical, steel and wheels, bricks and mortar variety, but that when it came to 'moral capital', it consumed the stuff, and eventually exhausted it. This is the direct opposite of the truth, which is: that free market capitalism is not only good at encouraging the accumulation of physical capital, but that it is especially good at encouraging the accumulation of moral capital. It is the collectivist, politically dominated societies (such as mainland China), the societies in which how you are paid is quite separate from what sort of character you are or worse, are paid according to how nasty you are willing be, that consume moral capital.

Moral capital is no triviality. It does far more than merely decorate the cake of society with an icing of decency. No moral capital means no cake to put icing on in the first place. A society where people who say that they will ring you back do ring you, in which people turn up for things when and where they say they will turn up, who declare that (for instance) a structure is safe only if they really think that it is safe, is a society that is going to function a whole lot better than one where people are not to be trusted, to keep an appointment, or to express an honest opinion regardless of how much money is being waved under their noses to say something dishonest.

Banks, to take a particularly portentous example, simply cannot work at all unless the people who run them are regarded as trustworthy, and the only way that can happen for any length of time is if they actually are trustworthy.

I know, from reading about eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, that everyone who was involved in any sort of trade or business – not just those who could 'afford to be honest' but everyone – took their reputations for honesty and square deal very seriously. They could not, that is to say, afford not to be honest. So, why should it be different in Hong Kong now? Hong Kong, I am guessing, has recently been a very Victorian sort of place. Long may it last.

This tradition of honest dealing survives only very incompletely in Britain, and this is quite rightly regarded as a major threat to Britain's economic future. This is because, although wise enough to impose wise economic policies upon Hong Kong, we were not wise enough to impose similarly wise policies upon ourselves.

I recommend this posting at the highly recommendable Social Affairs Unit blog, by Anthony Glees, about Christopher Hill, John Roper and Robin Pearson. (SAU Director Michael Mosbacher, who is presumably the one who recruits the writers for this blog, is doing a remarkable job with this blog, I think.)

The stuff about Christopher Hill interested me particularly. What a vile man. I knew that he was a bolshevik, but I had not realised how vile a bolshevik and how much damage he did to the cause of civilisation.

The vile Hill wrote many highly regarded works of academic scholarship. This little bit from Glees' posting throws a different light on the sort of academic that he was:

One of Hill's unsavoury measures (showing his interest in Britain's academic culture) was his proposal to dismiss for "political reasons" (Hill's own words) all White Russian university teachers in the UK and replace them by Soviet citizens to be nominated by the Russians themselves (that little phrase, "for political reasons" is chilling). Hill wanted Churchill and Stalin to agree to this at the Potsdam Conference in 1945.

While googling for more about Anthony Glees, I came across this 1999 BBC report, which included this quote, from another of the vile academics whom Glees writes about, Robin Pearson of Hull University:

"This was all 20 years ago and I'd rather it all went away."

I just bet you would, matey.

It is a pity that Glees had to promise the vile Hill to keep quiet about what the vile Hill told him about his (the vile Hill's) bolshevistic activities until he, the vile Hill, died. But then again, the vile Hill had to die knowing that his full vileness would in due course fully emerge. That is justice of a sort, although not nearly enough of course.

Treating these people as badly as they really deserve seems difficult these days, but it is important to make them squirm a little, and to die in the knowledge that their support for barbarism has been thoroughly revealed and stands a fair chance of being the only thing about them that will be lastingly remembered. Well done Professor Glees.

(And again, well done Michael Mosbacher for getting him to write for the SAU blog.)

Today is the 150th anniversary of that glorious cock-up known as The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The charge, which was part of the Battle of Balaklava, was one of those iconic moments in British military history due more to the works of Alfred Tennyson than the actual importance of the incident itself, which was really little more than a footnote in the overall conduct of the Crimean War. Yet at the time many newspapers accorded the charge of the Light Brigade far more significance than it was really due (and they also tended to gloss over the rather more successful actions of both the Heavy Brigade under Lord Lucan and the magnificent Chasseurs D'Afrique under General D'Allonville).

The charge was regarded as a great military blunder, and certainly it was not what Lord Raglan actually intended to happen when he issued the orders, nor what Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade's commander, wanted to execute (he is alleged to have quipped "Here goes the last of the Brudenells", his family name, upon receiving the order), but in point of fact, the charge largely disrupted the astonished Russian forces at the end of the valley. As military blunders go, it was a fairly effective one and the overall battle was more or less a draw (though Russian attempts to take Balaklava failed, so it could be argued that it was a net allied victory).

Also in the news is the redeployment of the Black Watch mechanised battlegroup into the American zone of operations in Iraq. The fact this unremarkable operational movement of forces within Iraq has caused apoplexy in media and political circles shows that 150 years on, the pundits back home are just as clueless about military affairs as they ever were.

Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns that Shaped the Modern World 1588-1782
Peter Padfield
John Murray, 1999 (Pimlico paperback 2000)

I enjoyed this book a lot. It briskly and entertainingly filled in some huge gaps in my historical education, combining the reasonably familiar with the utterly unfamiliar.

I learned of crucial sea battles of which I had never previously even heard the name, some of them fought only a few dozen miles from the coast of my own country, in parts of the sea I had never heard of. For example, do you know what and where 'The Downs' is? Maybe you do. I did not, until now.

Peter Padfield starts his story with the launching of and failure of the Spanish Armada and ends with the success of the American Revolution two centuries later. These are the battles he highlights: Spanish Armada, The Downs, Sole Bay, Beachy Head, Barfleur/La Hougue, Malaga, Finisterre, Quiberon Bay, Chesapeake Bay, and The Saints.

Of all of those, I only really knew about the Armada. In 1588, Spain launches a huge fleet of huge ships, full of soldiers as well as sailors, whose job is to achieve sea supremacy in the English Channel and escort an army from the Continent to England, to subdue English Protestantism. But the soldiers never get to fight, because the English ships, more manoeuvrable and with better guns and gunners, refuse to close and fire at the Spaniards from a distance. The Armada is not destroyed by the English, but it fails to make an English invasion possible, so by the time it is scattered into the North Sea and beyond, it has already been defeated, in the sense of prevented from achieving its purpose.

The result of the defeat of the Armada is not the triumph of England (as had been implied by omission by my school teachers), but on the contrary, the emergence into their century of maritime dominance of the Dutch United Provinces, the first great Europe-based global maritime trading power of the modern era (unless you prefer to start with Venice).

The Downs (1639). The Spanish launch another Armada (a complete surprise to me, this one) to crush the United Provinces. The Dutch navy defeats it, off the stretch of sheltered water between the Goodwin Sands and the coast of Kent, known as 'The Downs'. The British, behaving like some UN peace-keeping force, try to chase everyone out of their 'territorial waters', but are ignored.

Sole Bay (1672). England, the Catholic-inclined version of it ruled by Charles II, is in alliance with France against the Dutch. There is a naval battle off the coast of East Anglia. The Dutch do not lose, which means that they win, because England then backs out of the war.

William of Orange masterminds a coup d'état known here as the 'Glorious Revolution' (1688), and installs himself as King of England. My teachers made it sound as if the English elite suddenly decided one day that they wanted a different king, found William of Orange in a mail order catalogue, liked the look of him and had him delivered the next day, in a state of great amazement and gratitude. IN fact, William bossed the entire operation, albeit with plenty of English support. It is worth noting that William achieved a successful cross-Channel invasion of England, so all that stuff about England not having been invaded since 1066 is quite wrong.

Although Protestantism is supreme in England, in Scotland and Ireland there is everything to play for. At Beachy Head (1690), the French defeat an Anglo-Dutch force, but then fail to exploit their victory by making the difficulties that they might have made for William while he is busy subjugating the Irish. At Barfleur/La Hougue (1692), the Anglo-Dutch alliance reverses Beachy Head, and for the time being the French abandon any plans to topple William and reinstate his predecessor James II. But for the next century Britain and France confront each other.

Malaga (1704) is a draw, but strategically it means that Britain keeps Gibraltar, and remains at large around the coasts of France, blockading and preying upon French trade, protecting British trade. At Finisterre (1747) the French try to break the British blockade and to launch an invasion of England, but fail. At Quiberon Bay (1759) a similar plan fails again. The British remain the masters of the sea.

At Chesapeake Bay (1781) and The Saints (1782), the British again clash with the French. They lose at Chesapeake Bay, which for some reason means they do not get to keep America, but win at The Saints, which means that they remain top dogs in a general global maritime sort of way. If Padfield explains the causes and effects of these two battles properly, I missed it. He merely says what happened on the day, and announces that those were the consequences.

What makes this book so special and so entertaining is that it is not only about naval warfare. It is also about the way it is paid for and the reasons it was fought. Sea and land are bound together into one story.

Maritime supremacy starts with trade, loosely defined in a way that most emphatically and enthusiastically includes piracy, that is, stealing the gains of other people's trade.

A bunch of traders, like those in the United Provinces, start doing global business, with merchant ships, and by stealing other people's merchants ships, and get rich. Others naturally want to steal their ships and their markets, so they build a navy to protect their ships and their markets. The resulting Dutch maritime supremacy results in further massive trading success. The point is: merchant ships first, then war ships.

Only countries whose economies are built on maritime trade ever get to achieve maritime supremacy. This is because the other kind of potentially dominant countries, the great land based continental autocracies, cannot, when push comes to shove, be bothered with the huge expense and huge complexities of both building and then maintaining and making use of huge fleets of war ships. They are too busy creating and maintaining huge continental armies. Also, although their ships are often very fine from the design point of view, the autocrats tend not to be able to come up with such good guns to put on the ships. They do not have the industry.

But above all, they do not have the will. Their merchant adventuring enemies do have this will. When a war goes badly for the autocrats, they cut back on naval expenditure. When war goes badly for the sea traders, they spend more on their navy, because without naval success, all is lost.

Naval success breeds more naval success. When the British are blockading France throughout the eighteenth century, they get to master all the many problems of warfare at sea. These are not just fighting skills on the day, important though those are, but such things as supply and cleanliness, and above all, the basic ability to sail a ship on that most unpredictable and treacherous of surfaces, the sea. When the French fleet does break out, its sailors have been in port for the last year, and lack to skills to win. The British, on the day of battle, have been in effect preparing for nothing else for the previous few months, years and decades.

Continental navies have other problems. They get orders from sea-ignorant land-lubbers who think that fleets can be ordered about on the sea like soldiers on a parade ground. Go up to the left hand end of the Channel, turn right, sail to Calais, halt, escort an army across the Channel, yes sir, one two one two. But of course fleets typically cannot bring off such parade ground manoeuvres. Successful admirals must be well-trained, given strategic objectives, and then, during the actual campaign, trusted to do their best in whatever turn out to be the circumstances.

Interwoven with Padfield's descriptions of sea battles, each with its diagrams with lines of tiny little shapes waddling towards one another, and descriptions of cannon balls wreaking havoc and decapitating people and causing anyone left alive to be ankle deep in blood, is another narrative. The sea-dependent powers are actually run by merchants and their cronies, and these merchants demand the necessary legal and political framework within which they will be allowed to make their deals and their killings. Hence the emergence of modern constitutional government. Parliaments curb royal despotism, because royal despotism is bad for business.

It would be pleasing to think that these merchant adventurers, first in Amsterdam, and then in London, and later in the USA, favoured low taxes, Samizdata style. Alas, no. The merchants are prepared to pay quite high taxes to win their wars (half of a killing is still a killing), and are politically able to demand that others, much to their disgust, join in with paying these taxes too. And given that this system, for all its widespread unpopularity, does at least work, this means that merchant governments can also borrow more, and at more favourabe interest rates. than can their enemies.

For meanwhile, in France, the government is crippled by its inability to extract taxes from the church or from the nobility, and instead taxes only the politically impotent traders and impoverished workers, industrial and rural. This not only eventually results in the French Revolution; it also in the meantime makes major wars against Britain impossible to finance for long enough to win them.

Padfield waxes lyrical at the modernity and prosperity first of the Dutch and then of the British – the Dutch Golden Age, Rule Britannia, etc.. He notes the rise of the liberal spirit, and of liberal philosophers who codified and rationalised it, like Locke and Hobbes.

But – and it is a big and admirable but – he notes how very imperfectly these self-styled free peoples managed to embody these principles in their own conduct.

The matter of taxation I have already referred to. The biggest blot on the historical record is of course slavery and the slave trade. You can point out all you like that liberal consitutionalism was not the only political system of, say, the seventeenth century, that practised and profited from slavery; they were all at it. True, they all were. And equally true, it was the liberal constitutionalists of Britain and America who eventually decided to get rid of slavery, and they duly did, pretty much. But before they did that, they profited from it mightily. Their first reaction to slavery was not to recoil from it in moral horror; it was to get it organised and internationalised, and more profitable, and hence inevitably to make it a much bigger trade than it had been before. Only later, when they felt they could afford to, did they get rid of it.

The other great exception that Padfield points to is the treatment of the men upon whom all this liberty and prosperity ultimately depended, the sailors themselves. The British were eventually able to make the life of a sailor in the Royal Navy actually better than the life of a contemporaneous land-based labourer (dead sailors, after all, do not fight so effectively), but that took a long time. As with the moral glories of the anti-slavery campaigns, the age of relative comfort at sea, now enjoyed by crews all of whose members have volunteered, was preceded by a far longer age of extreme naval discomfort, and what was for all practical purposes slavery as complete as that endured in the plantations of the West Indies or of the southern states of America. Many a sailor in the Royal Navy embarked upon his service to the crown by being press-ganged – forcibly captured, in plain English – and from then on life was horrible until he died, which he did quite soon, usually horribly, either from some ghastly death in action, or from some equally ghastly disease brought about by the prolonged deficiencies of the naval diet.

Nevertheless, although these liberal constitutionalists may have been decidedly imperfect in the application of their liberal principles, they did at least they proclaim them. The standards these people set, even if they only imperfectly lived up to those standards themselves, eventually became the standards against which the affairs of all of mankind are now judged. Are the people free? Are they passably comfortable? Can they get rich? Are they happy? It was the maritime supremacists who put these principles on the map, so to speak. They created a momentum not only of material progress but also of moral progress which shows no sign of being halted.

Padfield's book has a happy ending, not just in the form of the success of the American Revolution, with all its portents of freedoms and prosperities to come, but with the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Throughout the period of mercantile national rivalry, the merchants of both sides tended, despite all their blockading and market capturing, tended still to trade with one another. Simply, it made no sense not to. Both parties gained. What Adam Smith did was nail this principle down in a big, fat and important book. Trade is not a fixed-sum battle which you won or lost with war ships. It is in everyone's interest. For people to get rich, it is absolutely not necessary for them to steal either each other's ships or each others markets. All can gain.

He also did much to free the slaves, by arguing that free men are more productive, and hence more profitable to live with than slaves.

At its best, Padfield's book is wonderful. At its worst it is somewhat confusing, with rather too abrupt switches from the details of a sea battle to the alleged (but sometime insufficiently explained) consequences of that battle on land, in the form of another set-piece description of something like the Glorious Revolution or of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His ambition is splendid, but his execution imperfect. In this respect his book resembles the story it tells. Above all, why no detailed discussion of the Athenians, the Venicians? Or of the Americans, once they had got into the stride of being a major naval power? But better a book you want to be longer than a book you do not see the point of because it is not saying anything, or is saying something pointless, or wrong, or saying it badly. I loved this book, and enthusiastically recommend it to, well, anyone who thinks they might like it.

I learned all kinds of little titbits, especially about the technology of naval warfare. I did not know, until reading this, that the English had better guns and gunners than the Spaniards at the time of the Armada, while nevertheless both then and for many decades after that having much to learn from the continentals about ship design and construction. I knew nothing, until now, of 'carronades', which are – for all you ignoramuses who still do not know – miniature canons which the English were very good at mass producing (unlike the French), and which had the great advantage that they were light enough to put lots of them on the top decks of ships without capsizing them. And I knew nothing of the naval significance of copper (another English industrial ace). Copper bottomed ships are better because they are barnacle-free, hence smoother, and hence faster.

And, in general, I knew very little indeed about the exploits of the British eighteenth century navy against the French. All that blockading of the French coast in those times came as a huge surprise to me. For me, the British Navy of that time was, you know, 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, preceded by a great fog of Hornblower-modified ignorance. Admirals Hood, Hawke, Anson – even the wonderfully named Sir Clowdisley Shovel – were for me mere names, if that, until now.

The title I have chosen for this posting comes right at the end of the book, when Padfield describes the kind of Americans who agitated for a complete American break from Britain, and the kind who argued against that. Plenty of colonists were, of course, opposed to this break, and regarded the merchants who financed the effort to achieve it and the firebrands who argued for it as motivated by mere greed.

Here is Padfield writing about how the US Constitution got ratified:

In the subsequent public discussion and pamphlet war over whether the constitution should be ratified by the states, there were striking similarities with the fierce debates in the English parliament at the time of the foundation of the Bank of England soon after William's 'Glorious Revolution'. Then the landed classes feared the merchant/financial interest would take over government and preside over a rising spiral of deficit financing for its own advantage, raising taxes to service the ever-mounting debt and spreading government into ever greater areas of English life. Their fears had not proved exaggerated. It is doubtful if Americans, who had just thrown off the shackles of the resulting mighty fiscal-military machine, recognized the precedents, but it was again the great landowners, joined by small farmers and small businessmen, a great many in debt to their wealthier fellows, who provided the opposition to the proposed federal constitution, discerning behind it the designs of the commercial and moneyed interest and fearing tyranny by an aristocracy of merchant wealth.

No doubt the motives of those in favour of the constitution were not so self-interested as they were painted by the opposition: there was boundless idealism and optimism for a republic created on a clean slate with all history and the latest Enlightenment ideas as guides, granting power not to hereditary nobles, but to the people. For all that, the 'Federalists' were concentrated in the seaport cities and were led by wealthy men of business and finance who attracted to their cause the professional, skilled and unskilled classes dependent on commerce and even those farmers outside whose livelihoods were bound up with city and international markets. Indeed, the dispute over the constitution was characterized by a member of the New York ratifying convention as 'between navigating and non-navigating individuals'. It was the 'navigating individuals' – whose concerns, it will be recalled, had sparked the original rebellion against British rule, and who had influence over the press and in the legislatures — who eventually won the vote in a surprisingly low turnout, and the new constitution was ratified by the majority of states in 1788. The next year ten amendments were passed to give American citizens statutory rights which the British had acquired in common law or by Act of Parliament: freedoms of religion, speech and the press; rights of peaceable assembly; security against unreasonable searches of the person, home or effects; trial by jury; the right not to be a witness against oneself, nor to be oppressed by excessive fines, excessive bail or 'cruel and unusual punishments'.

So the liberalizing inspirations of the great trading cities of the United Provinces, transferred to England under William of Orange and spread under the shelter of British trading and naval supremacy to the North American colonies, were inscribed in the constitution of the infant United States of America.

So too, but without formal adoption, were the commercial and colonizing compulsions. The establishment of land-speculating companies, often subscribed on both sides of the Atlantic, and the westward migration of settlers had preceded the American Revolution; in those colonies where the Crown set limits to westward expansion, it had contributed to the desire for independence. Native tribes such as the Cherokee and the Creek in the south had already ceded vast tracts of territory as payment for trading debts they could never otherwise have met, and with the coming of war these had allied with the British to prevent further encroachment. It might be said that they were the true losers at the Peace of Versailles, yet in the long run, whatever the outcome in 1783, it is impossible to imagine any native tribes long resisting the expansionary forces and materially powerful system – not to mention the smallpox and syphilis – of the white men and women who had arrived on the commercial tide from Europe. Ruthless exploitation of less materially endowed peoples and their land and every living creature within their power was as much the mark of trading strength and merchant power as were liberal values.

Of these values, freedom was sovereign. …

That quote captures pretty well what this book is all about. In it you get both Padfield's excitement about the political principles upon which naval supremacy conferred victory, together with a lively sense of the disappointments and miseries this caused to those on the receiving end of the raw power that both caused and was then further unleashed by these principles. You see the same principles springing to life in one location, and then being as it were passed on, like an Olympic torch, to the next bearers of the flame. Who will be next, I wonder? And what will their 'ships' be, exactly? What will be their 'sea'?

For me, then, the perfect book. And all the more so because you can sum it up as the history of the ideas that Samizdata exists to spread to all corners of the earth and beyond, and of a large chunk of the physical circumstances that gave birth to them. Strongly recommended. And I got it in a remainder shop for a mere £5.99. Trade. I love it.

The Guardian, biased but, so far as I can tell after one skim-through, accurate:

For supporters of John Kerry, who have seen allegations about the Democratic candidate's military record sap his campaign, it must have seemed like a case of just deserts.

The president, George Bush, was last week looking vulnerable on the same grounds after CBS's flagship current affairs show, 60 Minutes, broadcast a report claiming he had been suspended from pilot duties for failing to meet the required standards. It was also claimed that a commanding officer had been put under pressure to 'sugar coat' Mr Bush's performance reviews.

But while CBS stands by its story, allegations have now surfaced that 60 Minutes based a large part of the report on forged documents.

Now as in last Friday. Surfaced as in we have now heard about it other than just via the blogosphere, who have been all over this for some time. But, better late than never. Much better.

Later on in the same report:

60 Minutes does not have a reputation for irresponsible journalism - it was the show that first broadcast the now notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq - and it takes the reliability of its stories seriously.

The CBS news president, Andrew Heyward, told the Baltimore Sun he had confidence in the story and it was appropriately vetted, but conceded it was a "political hot potato".

Indeed. CBS throws more chips on the table with every passing hour.

My one objection to this Guardian report (apart from the fact that I knew it all already) is that it refers to things like "a report on the Free Republic weblog", while linking only to the Free Republic weblog in general, rather than actually linking to the particular post it refers to. But such links – there are others to the top of other weblogs (Little Green Footballs, Power Line) – are, again, far better than no links at all.

If you do want links, you can of course track all of this on Instapundit. Scroll down and, you know, find the postings for yourself. Unless you think that everything of importance has all been said here. Oh all right then, here is a good Insta-posting to start, with lots of links, to other actual postings.

Changing the subject completely, I have just been reading a very fine description in this book (Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the West Mind by Peter Padfield) about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Light, better armed, much more agile little English ships sporting cruelly with the stately galleons of Philip II of Spain, occasionally capturing one, and changing the course of history. An excerpt (about the country that gained most from the Armada's defeat, Holland) from the book can be found here. Sorry. Flying off at a total red herring tangent. Must stop doing that.

Say "9/11", and we all know what you mean. "Bali": ditto. Now add "Beslan" to that mass murder list.

I remember thinking, when I saw those children on my TV a week ago, running hither and thither in nothing but their underwear, that this was another of those strategic shooting-in-foot blunders that Islamists seem to have such a genius for perpetrating. 9/11 finally concentrated the minds of the white West on Islamist terrorism. Now Beslan has got even Muslims thinking – and, miracle of miracles, even Muslims of the sort who make public pronouncements saying - that maybe something is seriously amiss with their (for the time being) accursed religion, with no 'but'.

This from a recent New York Times piece:

The brutal school siege in Russia, with hundreds of children dead and wounded, has touched off an unusual round of self-criticism and introspection in the Muslim and Arab world.

About time too.

And today, Arts & Letters Daily links to this New Statesman piece by Ziauddin Sardar, which is just about the most encouraging thing I have read about Islam since 9/11:

The Muslim world is changing. Three years after the atrocity of 9/11, it may be in the early stages of a reformation, albeit with a small 'r'. From Morocco to Indonesia, people are trying to develop a more contemporary and humane interpretation of Islam, and some countries are undergoing major transformations.

Much of the attention is focused on reformulating the sharia, the centuries-old body of Islamic law deeply embedded in a medieval psychology. The sharia is state law in many Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and the Sudan. For many conservative and radical Muslims, the sharia is Islam: it cannot be changed, and must be imposed in exactly the shape it was first formulated in the ninth century. Since 9/11, there has been a seismic shift in this perception. More and more Muslims now perceive Islamic law to be dangerously obsolete. And these include the ulema, the religious scholars and clerics, who have a tremendous hold on the minds of the Muslim masses.

I know exactly what a lot of you are now thinking. You are thinking: bollocks. Or, more politely: window dressing.

To that I would reply with these three further observations.

First: what do you think the most bigoted and suicidal Islamists think about claims like this? Would such reports not make their hearts sink and their brains hurt? The idea that their own actions may be having the opposite result to the one they want must cause at least the less completely idiotic among them to pause in their idiot tracks. Their plan is to make Islam purely and uncompromisingly idiotic, and to turn the West into an Islamicist bigot-hole. Instead, their actions, while having no very profound effects on the West other than a wave of belligerence and anti-bigot measures, may instead be provoking the exact sort of softening of Islamic bigotry within Islam that the idiots spend half their lives cursing. Remember, 9/11 etc. is at least as much about yanking Islam back to true-faith-total-idiocy as it is about imposing such idiocy on the West. Yet instead, what happens? Bloody Islam turns sensible. The idiot-bigots do not give a damn about the damned infidels! But these turncoats are Muslim's, for God's sake! – or at least pretending to be, the swine. That some of Islam even claims to be turning sensible must be, for your Islamicist bigot, a scary thing.

Maybe Allah has plans for the world that are other than they had at first seemed.

Second: do not knock window dressing. How else can this process get started? One of the standard techniques of propaganda of any kind is to announce that the thought processes and legal changes which you merely hope for are in fact under way, in a more substantial way than a dispassionate look at the facts really reveals. That way, the people you are trying to influence (basically the next couple of generations) feel in their own minds that they are being asked to join a movement which already counts for something and which will give them psychological support ("Wow I thought I was the only one who thought like that!") friends, drinks parties, boyfriends, girlfriends, careers, etc.

Third: if you want to observe a particular historical case of window dressing taking over the shop, look no further than the disintegration of the old USSR and the end of the Cold War, no less. Clearly, and just like these reformist tendencies within Islam, the collapse of Soviet Communism had a lot of causes and quite a few key triggering events. But one of the big contributory factors was that the Soviet bosses, thinking that they were being oh-so-clever, tried to install a reformist-communist style system in the Eastern European bit of their empire, with the idea that the underlying system wouldn't then be so hated and despised, and would thus be able to stagger on for a few more decades, and even maybe make further advances. Perhaps you think that this is the motive behind much of this Muslim 'reform', to soften up the West, lull it into a false sense of security, tell it that it has already won, blah blah blah, and maybe for many 'reformers' that is the plan, just as it was for those clever Soviet bosses, and just as many of the gloomier pro-Westerners pointed out at the time. But the Eastern Europe example shows that, to put it mildly, such schemes can go badly, badly wrong.

Personally, I do not now see the West dropping its guard, either physically or intellectually. On the contrary, and especially intellectually, the West is only just beginning to get into tits stride when it comes to dealing with Islam. That Arabs (especially) are prone to duplicity and that Islam as a whole is a slab of primitiveness and foolishness are memes far too completely embedded in the West now to be forgotten overnight. Similarly, by the nineteen eighties, Soviets-equals-shits was a far too well established notion in the West for the West to walk off the Cold War pitch, snatching a draw from the jaws of Cold War victory, and it was the USSR which crumbled.

Unlike many of its more pessimistic and belligerent defenders, I actually have profound faith in the power of the West to win this thing, just as the West always does win these things. There are huge differences between The West v. Soviet Communism and The West v. Islam, most importantly that 'winning against' Islam cannot mean destroying Islam, but instead must mean provoking its intellectual and moral redemption. (Soviet Communism stank through and through, and more to the point, everyone important knew it. Therefore the damned thing could be binned. Islam is not, er, quite like that. Many people actually believe in it.) But when it comes to how well the West will do, I believe the result will be similarly pleasing.

And the events described in this New Statesman article, together with the obvious desire among lots of Muslims to believe that such descriptions are approximately accurate, is, I believe, all part of that process.

We, the West, plus the millions of good Muslims who just want to get along with us in peace and prosperity, are starting to win.

Beslan was not a victory. But I believe that history may reckon that it was the end of the beginning.

As the French celebrate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation , it seems to me entirely appropriate to draw attention to a rather more sanguine view of French history.

French-bashing has always been something of an indulgent British cultural habit that appears to have caught on in the USA where I get the impression that it is fast becoming a national pastime. Speaking for myself, I find most of its manifestations to be crass and juvenile but that should not deter any serious and critical examination of the key role played by the French state in much of the darkness and turmoil that has so overshadowed the 20th Century.

Professor Christie Davies has done just that in a forthright and trenchant essay for the Bruges Group:

The French defeat in 1870 decisively confirmed France's decline from being the most powerful nation in Continental Europe to that of a feeble and unimportant country rapidly falling behind Germany in population, economic importance and military strength. A decent and sensible country would have accepted that its relegation to the second division was inevitable but the French now tried to drag every country they could find into fighting the Germans. The French threw enormous sums of money into the economic development and thus military strengthening of Russia, then lost it all and nearly ruined themselves. The French shamelessly manipulated the guileless British into thinking they ought to be at the heart of Europe even though they never got further than the Somme. This delusion of an enfeebled France that it somehow had a historic right to dominate Europe, if not by force then by chicanery, is still the source of many of our more recent problems.

As I am not a historian I cannot vouch for the accuracy (or otherwise) of the various factual claims and I suppose it behoves me to point out that the Bruges Group is a think-tank staffed mainly by Conservatives who take a famously hostile view of the European Union.

That caveat aside, Professor Davies essay makes for a compelling, tragic and utterly damning read.

It will be found from the Foreign Prints, which from time to time, as Occaſion offers, will be mention'd in this Paper, that the Author has taken Care to be duly furnith'd with all that comes from Abroad in any Language. And for an Aſſurance that he will not, under Pretence of having Private Intelligence, impoſe any Additions of feign'd Circumſtances to an Action, but give his Extracts fairly and Impartially ; at the beginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence 'tis taken, that the Publick, ſeeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairneſs of the Relation

- from the The Daily Courant of March 11, 1702. The Courant was probably the world's first daily newspaper.

Bloggers might not like the next bit:

Nor will he take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact ; suppoſing other People to have Senſe enough to make Reflections for themſelves.

A few days past but who is counting? In all the talk of the anniversaries noted by the media on August the 4th (90th anniversary of the British declaration of war on Germany and the 300 hundredth anniversary of the capture of Gibraltar) I hoped (although I did not expect) that there would be a brief mention of August the 4th 1789.

The French Revolution was mostly just a story of murder and plundering (at least ten times more government officials, paper money, vast numbers of killings all over France, endless new regulations...) but there were a few good things (things that people like me often overlook) and most of them happened on August the 4th 1789.

It was on this date that the National Assembly abolished many of the old taxes and regulations of the Ancient Regime.

Taxes to the Church - abolished. Feudal dues - abolished. Many of the Royal taxes (including, I believe, the salt tax) - abolished.

True the good things were being overwhelmed by bad things even by August the 4th 1789 - but, to be fair, we should still remember the good things.

It was also the date when (again if my memory serves me correctly) serfdom was abolished. True French courts had hardly been in the habit of enforcing serfdom - but the fact remains that about half a million people were formally serfs in the France of 1789.

Sadly my memory fails me when I try to remember when the guilds were abolished - was it also August the 4th? True the guilds should not have been abolished, it was their legal monopoly on the production of various products (granted by Henry IV - before his time towns in France had varied in terms of guild rights) that should have been abolished - but the revolutionaries were sort of right in this area. They (or at least some of them) sort of understood that the effects of the guild monopoly (in-so-far as the courts enforced it) were bad.

It is not difficult to sneer at the new King Arthur movie. One can sneer at its historical errors - for example where is the mention of Ambrosius Aurelianus, who even writers who believe in the existence of Arthur admit was the original leader of British (or Briton or Romano-British or whatever you prefer) resistance to the Germanic invaders (dividing people into neat tribes 'Angles', 'Saxons' and so on is harder than might be thought). And Ambrosius Aurelianus was certainly a leader of south west Britian (his centre of power would have been in areas like the Cotswalds - places like Cirencestor). Nothing 'northern' about him.

And one can sneer in simple film-story terms. For example if going north of Hadrian's wall is so dangerous, why is there such a lightly defended villa (containing such important people) doing up there?

But to sneer is to miss the point. This is a very brave film.

For example to make the point that there were different sorts of Christian in Britain and that the ideas of Pelagius on free will and moral responsibility might have political importance is to touch on matters that most films seem to assume are well above the heads of the audience.

The avoiding of "all Christians good, all Pagans bad" or (more likely in a modern production) "all Christians bad, all Pagans good" is brave.

Also brave was the direct treatment of de facto serfdom in the late Roman Empire. Whilst formally free men, peasants had been tied to the soil (originally for reasons of tax collection) since the time of the Emperor Diocletian. The Emperor Diocletian (with his price controls and semi serfdom) did not rule Britain at first (there was great resistance to him in this province), but his writ eventually ran here.

By the 5th century it was not considered illegal for a local notable to chain up peasants he thought might run away (formally upheld by Constantine as early as 332) or to use physical pain against those peasants that defied him. And such folk as landlords had to watch out for themselves - as Imperial officials used such things as torture against them (if the officials thought tax collection was poor, or if other orders did not seem to be obeyed correctly).

The film showed that the condition of the 'coloni' (tenants) who were tied to the soil was little different from that serfs or slaves (and, of course, taxes and other dues forced peasant free holders into becoming coloni - they had to borrow to survive a sudden collection and became trapped in debt, and even peasant freeholders were tied to the soil anyway).

But the film did not make the mistake of showing the Germanic invaders as 'liberators' - they were anything but that.

On Britain itself the film may have been mistaken in showing the various groups of Britons near Hadrian's wall as being anti Roman - most scholars would argue that the local 'tribes' (if I may use this word) of the area were pro Roman (unlike the 'Picts' further north).

Such British kingdoms as Strathclyde continued for centuries after the Romans (the great stronghold of Dumbarton 'Fortress of the Britons' fell to the Vikings in the late 9th century and the Kingdom limped on till absorbed into Scotland in the 11th century).

However, again the film was making an interesting point. The various groups of Celts in Britain (at least in the north and west) were far less pacified than local people elsewhere in the Empire.

Of all the Western Empire only in Britain is there long term resistance to the Germanic invaders - indeed what is now Wales never fell to the 'Anglo-Saxons'. And this is because only in Britain was there still a tradition of using weapons (at least among certain groups of people).

Since the time of Augustus it had been illegal for civilians to train in arms in the Roman Empire - only the army was to keep and use weapons. But in the far north of the province of Britannia (on both sides of Hadrian's wall) this was not the policy - both in the north and to some extent in the west of Britannia the Romans allied with certain groups and these groups continued to practice in arms. Of course Britain had not been part of the Empire in the time of Augustus - but the law was still valid here.

Heavy cavalry may have been important. The old notion was that "Roman cavalry could not charge, as without stirrups they would fall off their horses" never seemed to fit in with the existence of lances and horse armour - and consideration of the Roman saddle shows that (even if "Romans did not have stirrups" is true - rather than "Romans did not use metal stirrups") certain types of Roman cavarly could charge.

There was heavy cavalry stationed in Britain right from the time of Marcus Aurelius (and, yes, they were originally drawn from Eastern peoples) and evidence for heavy war horses ("first created in the middle ages") has been found in the Roman period in such places as what is now Austria.

So, contrary to the mockers, one can even have 'Arthur and his knights'.

However, a bit of heavy cavalry is not going to achieve much on it's own. There is a lot of evidence for light cavalry in Britain - an ancient Celtic tradition. And some people must fight on foot.

The relationship of the Celts of Britain (the P. Celts to give the name for the Celts who spoke the local dialects, as opposed to the Q. Celts of Ireland who gave rise to the Scots) is complicated. Some were indeed crushed by the Romans, but many were neither crushed not eternally hostile and they varied greatly.

Roman civilization seems to have (for example) to have been thin in what is now north Wales but very strong in what is now south east Wales - especially in what is now the county of Monmouth - where the 'Citizens' (as the Welsh called themselves) were still maintaining some Roman buildings (and not just military ones) in the 11th century - 600 years after the Romans left Britain.

The language of what is now Monmouth may have been Welsh (which comes from P. Celtic), but the people did not hold Latin civilization to be an enemy - far from it.

So even the King Arthur film's mixture of Celtic language with surviving classical influences may not be so far from the truth.

Lastly the "absurd P.C. notion of women fighters". Well perhaps, although there were female gladiators in the Roman world and some strange examples of females fighting in the Celtic world - and if a women is to fight she should avoid armour, only by avoiding a blow rather than going 'toe to toe' with a man is she going to survive - yes there is even a justification for the half naked look.

However, this raises another point. Forget female fighters and there is still the difference between the legal status of women between the Celtic Britons and the Germanic peoples. For example adultery could result in divorce under Welsh law - it could be punished by the death of the women under various Germanic codes.

Also a women could inherit land under Welsh law - but not Angle law (or that of most Germanic peoples). Although interestingly enough under Saxon law a women could inherit land.

Of all the Germanic peoples who invaded Britain (and mixed with each other and with the locals) 'Saxons' is the word that seems to carry the most hatred down the centuries (including in this film) which is a bit unfair on the Saxons (who were a complex and interesting people. But that will have to wait for another time.

Today is the 60th Anniversary of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg's attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power in Germany. In the 12 long years of the Third Reich, it was the only serious attempt that was made to remove Hitler and his vile regime.

Graf von Stauffenberg was a mid-ranking Colonel who had been severely injured during service in North Africa but he was a talented officer so he was sent to Berlin. to fulfill a staff role in the 'Home Army'. As part of his duties, he was to give briefings to Hitler at his Rastenburg headquaters.

On the day itself, Colonel von Staufffenburg hid a bomb in his briefcase and made sure he left in in Hitler's main working room. It was placed so that the blast would be lethal to the dictator. But another officer found it was in his way and moved it, critically, so that a leg of the heavy table that the papers and maps for the briefing was between the bomb and Hitler. So when the bomb went off, although many were killed, Hitler himself survived.

Colonel von Stauffenburg had planned his escape well, and flew back to Berlin, blissfully unaware that Hitler had survived. There, he tried to organise his co-conspirators into taking power, but their attempt was feeble, and once word reached Berlin that Hitler was still alive, the attempt failed miserably. Colonel von Stauffenburg was shot that night; a merciful end compared to the barbaric fate that awaited some of his collegues, and many more who had done nothing.

The ramifications of the affair sent shockwaves through Germany until the total destruction of the Nazi regime. Although it is not well remembered, Germans now honour Colonel von Stauffenberg and his collegues who tried to actually do something about the hideous regime.

Our own Natalie Solent posted a really good piece at her personal blog last night, about the fact that many, many bad things continue to be done to the world, but that the difference is that they are soon liable to be done with equal relentlessness everywhere, spread around the world evenly, in a way that will make it much harder to notice and complain. Time was when evil was done with maximum ferocity in country A, but hardly done at all in countries B and C, and the evil done by the evil was eventually obvious to all, even to those at first most inclined to support it. Sometimes it was even easier than that:

… To help you along to this conclusion the goddess History primly laid out several countries split into communist and non-communist sections so that you could watch one half sink and one half rise and draw appropriate morals. …

But not any more. Will the day come when that same goddess ordains that we are all to be governed by the same benign, suffocating, righteous, repressive elite, and no comparisons between them ruling and them not ruling will possible, because everywhere will be theirs?

What I fear is that a time will come when there will be no significant examples of difference left in the world. That possibility is still far off but for the first time in history the technology is in place for it to happen. Think about that. …

She mentions that extraordinary moment in history, notable for the fact that hugely important and portentous things were made to not happen:

I am haunted by the tale of the fleets of Zheng He, recounted in Guns, Germs and Steel. China's vast program of exploration, greater than anything Europe ever had, was turned off click! because of some otherwise obscure quarrel between two factions at court. The reason that there was only one switch was that China was unified.

And the worry is that, unlike the blood-sodden grindings and thrashings of evil in the twentieth century, the clicks we are about to be subjected to will be inaudible.

It is a beautiful and melancholy piece. David Carr rewritten by Jane Austen. It contains at least another half dozen sentences I wanted to copy and paste here, but since it is all there, go there, and read it all.

You wait for articles on Dickens and suddenly, three turn up at once. Fortuitously, I have just concluded "Sketches by Boz", a book that recommends itself to the commuter. It is not a novel to take up, put down or plough through. Published in periodical form, it lends itself to the daily article or chapter, preferably read after Motspur Park and before Earlsfield, and, one likes to think, approximating the reading experience of the early Victorian.

One of the joys of reading Dickens is his written observations of life and lowlife in London, including the accents of the denizens of Seven Dials. Three women in a gin palace ("Scenes: Chapter V: Seven Dials"):

"Vy don't you pitch into her, Sarah?" exclaims one half-dressed matron, by way of encouragement. "vy don't you? if my husband had treated her with a drain last night, unbeknown to me, I'd tear her precious eyes out - a wixen!" "What's the matter, ma'am?" inquires another old woman, who has just bustled up to the spot. "Matter!" replies the first speaker, talking at the obnoxious combatant, "matter! Here's poor dear Mrs Sulliwin, as has five blessed children of her own, can't go out charing for one arternoon, but what hussies must be a comin', and 'ticing avay her oun' 'usband, as she's been married to twelve year come next Easter Monday, for I see the certificate ven I vas a drinkin' a cup o' tea vith her, only the werry last blessed Ven'sday as ever was sent. I 'appen'd to promiscuously, 'Mrs. Sulliwin,' says I-----"

The last time that I heard someone swap v's for w's and w's for v's was on 'Allo 'Allo - a pantomime BBC sitcom. This speech pattern was used to mock German officers during WWII.

However, the joke is on us. If Dickens accurately portrays the table talk of Londoners, then some of us used to sound a lot more German than we do now.

I am in my kitchen, reporting on one of my last-Friday-of-the-month meetings. It is still in full swing. Most of the London events you read about on Samizdata are booze-ups at Perry's, and at my meetings, there is also booze. From 9.30 pm until around midnight the drink flows and the conversation bubbles merrily, and I can hear it bubbling now. But there is also, always, an agenda. Starting at 8 pm, and proceeding until 9.30 pm, there is a speaker lead discussion.

I have been hosting these things since the late 1980s, and there a moment, a few years back, when I was finding them something of a drag to organise. Only the enormous inconvenience that would necessarily have continued, every last Friday of the month, even if I had stopped holding these meetings, in the form of regulars knocking on my door and demanding entry to a non-existent event and then having to be diverted (which might not be much fun) or told to go away (which might not be wise or kind), persuaded me to persist with these events. But then along came email, to the point where even I had it, and now they pretty much run themselves. I fix a speaker, email everyone on the list on about the Tuesday telling them of exactly who will say approximately what on the Friday, and of any other future meetings that have already been fixed. (Speakers for July and November are now settled, but nothing else is certain as yet, other than that someone will speak.)

Tonight, Sean Gabb spoke about "Demography and History". He is the second from the right in the picture, with our own David Carr lending an ear in the foreground. The guy in the corner is Bruce, a real photographer, who would have done a far better picture, but with him as with me, you get what you pay for, photographically speaking.

When Sean speaks about current affairs, he is always interesting, but so are most of us. We all have worthwhile opinions about what is happening now. But when it comes to speaking about the whys and wherefores of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in the Sixth Century or for that matter about the history of Eastern Europe in the years before the outbreak of the First World War, Sean is, in the London libertarian scene, in a class of his own. Not being burdened with false modesty, Sean was recording his talk, on his laptop computer, and I understand that it will be available on the Internet. He had to leave promptly at 9.30 pm to catch his train down to the South Coast where he now lives, so I can not be sure of the details of this, but I will supply a link to his talk as soon as I can, and maybe some more comment on it.

The most interesting thing I learned this evening was the existence of an entire class of historical event such as I had never previous known existed. I refer to the plague induced toppling of a culturally distinct poltical elite. The Eastern Roman empire was presided over by a Greek speaking elite. Every city and town of the Empire was run by this tiny handful of Greek speakers. But the plagues of the 540s and onwards destroyed the influence of these elites. Whereas they had previously sustained themselves by recruiting a constant flow of new recruits from among the ranks of the upwardly mobile barbarians, the plague put a stop to that. Suddenly, there were no Greek teachers to train up these new recruits. The elites were both halved in size, and unable to replenish their ranks. Thus the Greek Empire disintegrated. I think I have that about right. (By the way, many moons ago I posted here a rather fanciful speculation about what caused these plagues.)

I feel no great shame at not knowing this stuff about the Eastern Roman Empire, but just before Sean had to leave to catch his train, I had the extreme good fortune to ask about another famous plague, namely the Black Death, the great mid-fourteenth-century plague that killed about a third of the population of Europe, including about a third of the population of England. And it turned out that something rather similar happened here. The "Empire" didn't collapse, exactly, but the English elite, as a result of the Black Death, abruptly ceased to speak French, and switched to English. The same cultural conveyor belt that had suddenly stopped working throughout the Eastern Roman Empire, did the same in England. Again, I think I have that about right, and what I want to say here is: (a) I never knew that, and (b) how extremely interesting. I have read quite a lot about the economic, and hence political, impact of the Black Death on England, in terms of the relative power of the elites and the masses. But I never knew that about the elite talking French, and then suddenly stopping.

As he said himself, Sean did not say much that was distinctively libertarian, distinctively pro-liberty. He concentrated on how an understanding of population trends illuminates our understanding of history. But on the other hand, nor did he say anything un-libertarian. I was a little nervous that the title, including as it did the word "Demography", might entice here all manner of political creepy-crawlies, but I only spotted one, and he was not actually that bad, although that may have been because he was so heavily outnumbered.

Useful Idiots
Mona Charen
Regnery, 2003

It must have struck many people besides myself that anti-Americanism, so much a world-wide sentiment and problem, is, to an extent it is hard to quantify, an American export. No nation, surely, has produced such a large volume of self-criticism, proceeding through self-denigration to self-hatred. Is it surprising that the rest of the world has listened to, copied, and amplified the message? Yet it was not always so; indeed Americans fought both World Wars and the Korean War with little dissent. Television may have been the ultimate morale-breaker in the Vietnam War, but why did those responsible use it for this purpose, even turning good news into bad, as with the crushing of the Vietcong "Tet offensive"? This book doesn't give the motivations, just the facts.

"Lenin is credited with the prediction that liberals and other weak-minded souls in the West could be relied upon to be 'useful idiots' as far as the Soviet Union was concerned," states the author and I have been unable (like her, I suppose) to find any source for Lenin's insight in the handful of books of quotations I have consulted; it would be interesting to know to whom it was first contemptuously applied. If the function of a useful idiot is to support a cause detrimental to his best interests, then the definition is perhaps a little imprecise, for few, if any, of the useful idiots described in this book have received their come-uppance. But then, their cause didn't triumph. Or didn't where they lived; elsewhere, it was a different matter.

For most of the book Communism was the cause to which the useful idiots gave aid and comfort and here the author might be accused of making the category rather too inclusive, from fainthearted opponents to blatant advocates. The study also is confined almost entirely to America, so that many, perhaps most, names will be unfamiliar to readers elsewhere. They must also get used to the nomenclature; it may jar that "liberal" does service for an inclusive left, perhaps because the name has no historical political ancestry in the US, and socialism has never been successfully sold to the working class, or otherwise become an OK word.

Even to those most eager for its fall, the collapse of Communism came as a surprise. Rather as one who, pushing hard at a door, falls flat on his face when it is suddenly opened, western leaders seemed more disconcerted than overjoyed, worried at the sudden fragmentation of their giant opponent. As for the leftist intellectuals, some tended to claim that this proved the USSR had never been a menace (Strobe Tallbott) and that it certainly wasn't the US that was responsible for ending the Cold War (Frances Fitzgerald) - though former top Soviet officials have said they thought it, and Reagan's policy in particular, was (p. 116). Others said that everyone had really been united against Communism all the time: "One of the greatest sources of our strength throughout the Cold War," declared President Clinton in 1997, "was a bipartisan foreign policy . . . politics stopped at the water's edge (p. 10)." From someone who had crossed the water's edge to avoid the draft, this was pretty cool. As well as being, of course, completely untrue.

In fact the national consensus against Communism lasted into the sixties, perhaps being a little dented by distaste for Senator McCarthy's investigative methods and then by Fidel Castro's gradual revelation of himself as a Communist, which could, of course, be ascribed by his defenders to American "hostility". Nixon and Kennedy competed with each other to take a hard line against Communism, Kennedy giving the famous pledge at his Inauguration in 1961 that the US would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to ensure the survival and success of liberty (p. 24)." It was Kennedy, making good his word, that took America into Vietnam, Johnson his successor who mismanaged both war and diplomacy into a hopeless stalemate and Nixon who finally resolved matters as best he could. He got no thanks for this and the Watergate scandal empowered the mischief-making propensities of the media. It was not impossible now for a journalist to imagine that with a little luck, a lot of hard work, and a cooperative judiciary, he could destroy a president. This was quite a subversive baton to pack into his knapsack. There was no baton for the preservation of the status quo.

It was during the Vietnam War that the useful idiots increasingly had their impact and "that the consensus against Communist expansion was permanently shattered . . . American liberals - as distinguished from the hard Left - became not just neutral about Communist expansion, but contemptuous of cold warriors (p. 28)." Unfortunately liberals included most academics and much of the media. Because conscription (the draft in US parlance) was in operation and students were subject to it, it was not difficult to persuade them that the war was immoral as well as dangerous (when the draft was abolished, student protest ceased).

After 1968, when the Republicans took over the Government, the Democratic Party as a whole could, and did, turn against the War, with its leaders becoming defeatists, followed, if not led, by a defeatist media, willing to put the worst construction on every military episode and certainly not doing anything to keep up the morale of the fighting soldiers, most of whom, like most of the country (as polls howed) were willing to fight until victory was gained. Although Chasen names several writers, journalists and others - Susan Sontag, Ramsay Clark, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Mary McCarthy, Frances Fitzgerald, Jonathan Schell - it was probably the mass of run of the mill journalists that did the damage.

There had now developed a vociferous and influential left-wing constituency that, far from being worried about an American and South Vietnamese defeat, strongly desired the Communists to win. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, one of the most distinguished Democrat senators lamented: "I do not want to see the Democratic Party become a party which gives any aid and comfort to people who applaud Vietcong victories or wave Vietcong flags", now standard behaviour at anti-war rallies. "But Jackson's was a lonely voice in the Democratic Party (p. 42)". After American forces had been withdrawn, the Democrat dominated Congress refused all aid to South Vietnam; "Edward Kennedy [brother of the dead President] mobilized a 43-38 Senate vote to forbid the expenditure . . . it needed to survive (p. 49)".

The antiwar consensus in the Democratic party was sufficiently strong for "John Kerry, tall, handsome and highly ambitious" to reassess his attitude and jump on its bandwagon, though perhaps without looking very carefully at the "veterans" he was associated with, whose lurid stories of atrocities, which he then retailed, have never been confirmed while some have been falsified; the account here of his political debut (pp. 44-46) and his anti-SDI activities (p. 164) long predates, of course, his presidential bid.

In the aftermath of the North's victory and occupation of South Vietnam (remnants of the local Vietcong guerillas, crushed during the Tet Offensive, were marginalised) a few of the antiwar activists had misgivings as "Boat People" fled the unified country, and large numbers (between 200,000 and 1,000,000) of the defeated or liberated, including discontented Vietcong, were sent to "re-education camps", while some 65,000 were executed (p. 49). Joan Baez, the Quaker pacifist singer, a rally fixture, appealed to 350 activists for signatures to a very moderate appeal to the North Vietnamese - she got 83, and a large volume of abuse. Jane Fonda, her "particular hope", refused: "I worry about the effects of what you are doing," she replied; it might encourage people "who continue to believe that Communism is worse than death (p. 53)."

Thus the liberal left saw no reason to change its mind and, in a sense, have kept it unrepentedly in Vietnam War mode ever since. It remained so even after the horrendous genocide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, something that Democrat Congressmen (Carr, Dodd and Downey) and Sydney Schanberg, a journalist on the spot who later actually witnessed it, denied could ever happen. And when it did, their explanation was simple: the US bombing had driven the Khmer Rouge crazy, which accounted for their behaviour more than one and a half years after it had stopped! In fact, the Khmer Rouge were attempting to imitate Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward - but this time it was going to work. William Shawcross is one of the few to retract the "America started it" excuse for their atrocities, which he made in his book, Sideshow.

The election of Democrat Jimmy Carter as President in 1976 set the seal on near-defeatism as a United States policy. In the four years of his presidency Communist regimes were established in Cambodia, Laos, South Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua and Afghanistan (not the Soviet occupation), all, needless to say, undemocratically. All these he seems to have accepted with resignation until he was shocked by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. This was just after he had seen his attempt to show his disapproval of the Shah result in the installation of a rabidly anti-American Islamic regime in Iran.

This Communist advance was not exactly the "domino effect" the US had feared, which was probably something like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, in that order of risk. But the catalogue is bad enough, and though the misery entailed in the imposition and maintenance of Communist rule cannot be held as directly the responsibility of the United States, even in the case of the first two, its acceptance of defeat in Vietnam, and its subsequent withdrawal and passivity, encouraged Communist insurgency worldwide. "The fact is," said President Carter's Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, as he contemplated the mess, "we can no more stop change than Canute could still the waters (p. 82)." Interfering to prevent Communist takeovers would only make things worse. With these signals to go by, the USSR could assume it was being given carte blanche, and it took it with both hands (pp. 84-85). Besides, what political and economic alternatives did America offer? Left-liberal intellectuals were not exactly champions of laissez-faire capitalism; their sophisticated view was that the US and USSR were in a state of "convergence". The eminent economists Paul Samuelson, Lester Thurow and John Kenneth Galbraith, for that matter, were all confident that the Soviet system was delivering as well and as much as that of the United States (pp. 104-105).

Chapter Four gives an account of the long love-affair between American left-wing writers, artists, journalists and intellectuals and the USSR, from its beginning right up to the end and from Lenin to Gorbachev. Much of this is the usual chilling stuff, though that does not mean it is necessarily familiar. Just one grim story: the hope of Paul Robeson, the famous black singer, that Communism would abolish racism led him, as he confessed, to do nothing to save his friend Feffer the poet from Stalin's anti-Jewish persecution (p. 95). On the other hand it is almost amusing to discover how Andropov was built up into a sympathetic figure and, when he died, hopes were raised about his successor, Chernenko. Of course, such positive assessments paled in comparison with the ecstasy that greeted the arrival of Gorbachev and made Time, in 1990, name him Man of the Decade, though he had been around for less than four years. The notion of giving the title to Reagan, who in fact deserved it, would have been inconceivable.

Chapter Five is of "Fear and Trembling": the United States seems to have started seriously worrying about the bomb ten to fifteen years after we did. In fact, however, this was the left-liberal consensus worrying about Ronald Reagan, whose term as President started in 1981 and who was taking up a completely different attitude from the last three Presidents - he "not only gave every indication of wanting to fight the Cold War; he also seemed to think the West would win it (p. 120)." To do so, Reagan had to fight the antinuclear activists and most of the Democratic Party, as well as the Russians, from the installation in Europe of Pershing missiles in response to the SS-20s deployed by the Soviets, to his floating of the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) as a feasible project. Dubbed "Star Wars", this was opposed as something which wouldn't work but would upset the Russians, presumably because they would think it could - reasonably so, in fact, because they had something rather like it, built in contravention of treaty agreements, defending Moscow. That Reagan won through we know from other sources was due to his own persistence, despite the opposition of his opponents, but also the misgivings of some of his own advisers.

Leaving the main arena, Chasen proceeds in Chapter 6, "Each New Communist is Different" to investigate the reactions of "political pilgrims" (the phrase is taken from Paul Hollander's book of that title) to various Communist utopias. Perhaps the most unbelievable is Robert Scheer's endorsement of North Korea, though admittedly as long ago as 1970 (p. 172). However, the section on Cuba and Castro (pp. 173-187) must run it a close second. The reports on the regime, for and against, are so incompatible that either one or other must be incredible; Chasen naturally has a long list of enthusiastic visitors whom she would classify as useful idiots and opposes them by others who report what a run-down, oppressive place Cuba is. Che Guevara, icon on a million sweatshirts, caused I.F. Stone, after meeting him to gush that "he looked like a cross between a faun and a Sunday school print of Jesus [and in him] one felt a desire to heal and pity for suffering". Would he and Guevara's many other admirers have changed their minds if they knew that in his will he praised the "extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless and cold killing machines (p. 176)"? Or if they knew of the deeds that matched these words? How Janet Reno, with President Clinton's acquiescence, returned the five year old Elian Gonzalez to Cuba and how questionable the process was, is recounted at length (pp. 236 - 245). That was in 2000 - has anyone followed up how the little boy is getting on?

When a Communist coup ejected the democratically elected government of the small Caribbean island of Grenada in 1979 and a thousand Cuban troops came to stay, there was, of course, no US reaction. However, four years later, when the economy had been ruined (as usual), one Communist faction had murdered and replaced the other as the government, there was general chaos and shooting in the streets and there were 750 American medical students on the island (why?), President Reagan ordered in the marines who tided up the place in short order. Does one need to say that critics at home (the usual suspects) and abroad sounded off? Comparisons were made with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Ted Weiss) and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (New York Times) and Poland (Carl Levin). The Grenadians and the medical students were, of course, relieved and delighted. However, it all died down and perhaps not one person in a million in America knows the state of affairs in Grenada today.

Nicaragua and, by extension, Central America, was much less a flash in the pan. As in Iran, President Carter hoped that the destabilization of an autocrat, in the case of Nicaragua, Somoza (our sonofabitch, as a previous President had defined him) would result in the dawn of a new age of human rights. The Sandinistas, Communists who replaced him as a result, were just as bad in a different way. Despite generous funding by the Carter administration to start them off, the Sandinistas resolutely turned away from the US and with Cuban and East European help, built up an army of 75,000, larger than that of Mexico. All this met with the approval of the American liberal left (too many to list again here), some, such as Warren Christopher, even members of the Carter administration itself, others like Tom Harkin, Matthew Martinez, Patrick Leahy, Claiborne Pell and Edward Kennedy, Democrats in Congress. A blind eye was turned to the persecution of opponents and minorities such as the Moravian and Meskito Christians and, because of an alliance with the PLO, the Jewish community. Radio stations were closed, and strict censorship imposed on the main newspaper La Prensa, which had opposed Somoza. A guerilla opposition, the Contras, emerged, some of whose members had been Sandinistas; despite President Reagan's pleas, the Democrat-dominated Congress refused them even non-military aid, resulting in the President's attempting a clandestine method of helping them which came badly unstuck. The happy ending came unexpectedly in 1990: the Sandinistas deceived themselves into believing that a submissive meant a supportive population, called an election and lost it, hampered from rigging it because large numbers of observers flooded into the country to monitor it. Some were American left-liberals, who had come to celebrate a Sandinista victory and found that things had gone seriously wrong - "meaning the opposite", as the right-wing gadfly journalist P.J. O'Rourke, who witnessed their discomfiture, mordantly put it. Charen tells us that, as of writing, Nicaragua remains free and democratic.

And after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union - what? Our useful idiots can still be depended upon to find something to praise in Cuba, and to applaud the decision to deport a five year old there (the picture of his siezure at gun-point "warmed my heart" said New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman). But China? But does anyone there truly believe in Communism? Vietnam? North Korea?

But why bother with these when there is 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq? From the same crowd came the same response to the destruction of the Twin Towers: America was much worse: "The US has taken the lives of literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocents, most of them children . . . " (Joel Rogers), "The US is is a leading terrorist state" (Noam Chomsky). It seemed that every violent death anywhere was America's responsibility, plus "the policies that are a leading factor in the death of maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe half a million children" (Chomsky again, before Iraq War II, of course). However, at least one thing seems to be clear: we are not being asked to adopt, or even approve of, Muslim fundamentalist beliefs. There was no question of Susan Sontag donning a burqua. But then, it would be doubtful if she would have been happy writing to order in Ho Chi Minh City, or have settled down in an artists' and writers' colony in Moscow. It was not that there was anything to approve about Islam, with its bigotry about women, abortion and homosexuality, to mention just three of the sacred cows of the liberal left. America, however, was to blame for having provoked the resentment of these people. It had let the genie out of the bottle. There was nothing one could - or should - do about the genie, but it was in order to bash the bottle opener.

Open societies - and pace our useful idiots, the United States is probably the most open in the world - permit almost unrestrained abuse of anyone by anyone. In fact in the US anyone can tell lies about a public figure, who is unprotected by the libel laws unless he can prove malice was the motivation for them. Under these circumstances, and understandably, it is easier to attack the near at home than the far away, the known than the obscure, the rectifiable local abuse rather than the distant atrocity. Add to this that the comfortable get bored, the young rebel, minorities are informed of their grievances and women ask "Why can't I be more like a man?" Most people are content or look for opportunities to improve their lot; a very few look to a political solution. Unlike many other countries and societies, the United States has no one else to blame but itself if there is anything wrong with it. Is this, in the end, why so many of its elite have turned against it?

Naming Names

On my way through the book I have noted the names, no doubt missing some, of the "useful idiots" - more than 250 in all - so why not set them down, in alphabetical order, for easy reference? Some, of course, are more idiotic than others, for the net has been widely cast and is rather narrow-meshed. The index of the book (in which their names might have been starred to help) will allow the reader to find to what extent the author's classification is justified. She must certainly have allowed many to remain in obscurity. Many Church organizations, both Catholic and Protestant, could be added to the list, though it is doubtful if their benign views of their country's enemies would be representative of a majority of their memberships.

It is amusing to reflect that if this list were widely publicised, it would be as widely stigmatised as a "blacklist" and "McCarthyist".

Bob Abernethy, Madeleine Albright, Bill Alexander, Muhammad Ali, John Ward Anderson, Susan Anspach, Bishop James Armstrong, Ed Asner, Joan Baez (though she had misgivings after the Boat People started leaving Vietnam), Michael Barnes, Richard Barnes, Harry Belafonte, the Berrigan brothers, Seweryn Bialer, Jim Bitterman, Robert Blake, Abraham Blumberg, Sydney Blumenthal, Edward Boland, Heirich Boll, David Bonior, Cathy Booth, Barbara Boxer, Jackson Browne, George Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, McGeorge Bundy, Helen Caldicott, Joan Brown Campbell, Stokeley Carmichael, Bob Carr, John Chancellor, Noam Chomsky, Warren Christopher, Connie Chung, Frank Church, Ramsay Clark, Paul Cleary, Clark Clifford, Eleanor Clift, Hillary Clinton, William Sloane Coffin, Richard Cohen, Stephen Cohen, Robert Coles, Joseph Contreras, John Conyers, David Corn, Julio Cortazar, Katie Courie, Alan Cranston, George Crockett, Walter Cronkite, David Crosby, Joseph Davies, Angela Davis, Karen De Young, David Dellinger, Ron Dellums, Colleen Dewhurst, Russell Dilley, Julian Dixon, Christopher Dodd, Dusko Doder, Phil Donahue, Byron Dorgan, Michael Douglas, Tom Downey, Michael Dukakis, Walter Duranty, Mervyn Dymally, Paul Ehrlich, Linda Ellerbee, Henry Fairlie, Richard Falk, Mike Farrell, Vic Fazio, Jules Feiffer, Geraldine Ferraro, Frances Fitzgerald, Jane Fonda, Barney Frank, Betty Friedan, Thomas Friedman, Carlos Fuentes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Garcia, Todd Gitlin, Richard Gizbert, Henry Gonzalez, Bill Goodfellow, Ellen Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Richard Gott, Gunther Grass, Graham Greene, Dick Gregory, Bryant Gumbel, Lee Hamilton, Armand Hammer, Dashiell Hammett, Tom Harkin, James C. Harrington, Michael Harrington, Ruth Harris, Gary Hart, Mark Hatfield, Tom Hayden, Lilian Hellman, Hendrik Herzberg, Abbie Hoffman, Stanley Hoffman, Al Hubbard, Steve Hurst, Julian Huxley, Jesse Jackson, Bianca Jagger, Peter Jennings, Tamara Jones, Robert Kaiser, Gary Kayima, George Kennan, Edward Kennedy, John Kerry (yes, him), Barbara Kingsolver, Jerry King, Ted Koppel, Jonathan Kozol, Kris Kristofferson, Cardinal John Krol, Admiral Gene La Rocque, Diane Ladd, Corliss Lamont, Saul Landau, Brook Larmer, Owen Lattimore, Vint Lawrence, Pat Leahy, Barbara Lee, Mike Lee, John Leland, Mickey Leland, Max Lerner, Julius Lester, Carl Levin, Anthony Lewis, R.W.B. Lewis, Stuart Loory, Norman Mailer, Ed Markey, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Matthew Martinez, Mary McCarthy, Cynthia McFadden, George McGovern, Mary McGrory, Matthew McHugh, Robert McNamara, Barbara Mikulski, George Miller, Mark Crispin Miller, C. Wright Mills, Parren Mitchell, Jessica Mitford, Walter Mondale, Robert Morris, Lance Morrow, Bruce Morton, Edmund Muskie, Graham Nash, Mary Rose Oaker, David Obey, Phil Ochs, Thomas (Tip) O'Neill, Tim Padgett, Wolfgang Panofsky, Claiborne Pell, Byron Pitts, Don Podesta, Katha Pollitt, John Quinones, Bert Quint, Ed Rabel, Charles Rangel, Marcus Raskin, Dan Rather, Barry Reckord, Robert B. Reich, Elliott Richardson, Alan Riding, Paul Robeson, Walter Rodgers, Joel Rogers, Suzanne Ross, Carl Sagan, Edward Said, Harrison Salisbury, Paul Samuelson, Sydney Schanberg, Robert Scheer, Jonathan Schell, Sergei Schemamm, Carlotta Scott, Pete Seeger, George Bernard Shaw, Gail Shehy, Bob Simon, Upton Sinclair, Michelle Singletary, Samantha Smith (aged 10!), Wayne Smith, Steven Solarz, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Pete Stark, Ronald Steel, I.F. Stone, Oliver Stone, Meryl Streep, Richard Strout, William Styrom, Kathleen Sullivan, Donald Sutherland, Strobe Talbott, Evan Thomas, Richard Threlkeld, Lester Thurow, Robert Toricelli, Mary Travers, Paul Tsongas, Ted Turner, Anne Tyler, Peter Van Sant, Cyrus Vance, Mike Wallace, Barbara Walters, Michael Walzer, Harry Ward, Maxine Waters, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ted Weiss, Victor Weisskopf, Dessima Williams, Edmund Wilson, C. Vann Woodward, Jim Wright, Andrew Young.

Today I bought a great book in a remainder shop. It is a year by year history of London, strong on strange and intriguing events, not heavy with the theorising. Lovely.

It is a blogger's delight. I have already culled three postings from it - two for here and a 'how very odd' posting here.

Here is another fascinatingly odd factoid, entry number six for the year 1729:

WIFE-SELLING IN THE CITY

It was reported that 'Last Wednesday one Everet, of Fleet Lane sold his wife to one Griffin of Long Lane for 3 shilling bowl of punch; who, we hear, have since complained of having a bad bargain.'

A salutary reminder that 'Christian' men could be fairly primitive to Christian women, not so long ago. Many Muslims still are, of course. But if we Christians can mend our ways, they surely can too.

The Confederate crew of world's first submarine (or more correctly 'submersible') use effectively used in combat, were buried with military honours yesterday in Charleston, South Carolina. Their boat, the CSS Hunley, was discovered in 1995 and raised in 2000 from where it sank in Charleston harbour in 1864. The Hunley went down shortly after having sunk a blockading US Navy armed sloop, the USS Housatonic.

This is an interesting end to a fascinating chapter in military history

Sometimes a widely-practised custom falls out of use in a way that, looked at with hindsight it seems amazing to us that humans could behave in the ways they did. Consider the Romans' love of gladiatorial combat, for example. Perhaps in future our descendants will read with amazement about the habit of inhaling tobacco smoke or drinking intoxicating and health-affecting beverages known as wine and beer.

Well, one activity to have disappeared from Western life is the practice of duelling. I thought about this after watching a remarkable film, recently released on DVD, called The Duellists, a film set in Napoleonic France and starring Harvey Keitel and David Carradine. One of the earliest directional efforts of Ridley Scott (who later did stuff like Gladiator and Bladerunner), it is an excellent work. Keitel's character obsessively pursues his vendetta against his opponent, although the affair ends not in the death of either, but the humiliation of one.

Duelling reached its peak, as far as I can tell, in the first decade or so of the 19th Century. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of aristocratic young men and officers of the army and navy lost their lives or were badly injured from the practice. Even the most senior politicians duelled. The former American president, Andrew Jackson, was said to have killed a handful of people in duels, and did not suffer in terms of popularity as a result. Can you imagine Dubya or John Kerry fighting with swords outside the White House? The Tory politicians George Canning and Lord Castlereagh fought a duel. Sir Robert Peel, arguably the greatest Tory statesman of the 19th Century in my view, nearly fought a duel against the Irish political figure, Daniel O'Connell.

But duelling died out. The art of sword fighting lives on in England among the fencing clubs one finds in our universities, and interestingly, it is very popular with women. But the notion that defending one's honour involves throwing a challenge for "pistols or swords at dawn" no longer exists. Instead, those who imagine themselves traduced by another take their stories to the Sun newspaper.

The lost practice of duelling also reminds us of how, although we may have become more "genteel" in some ways, our society takes "affairs of honour" perhaps less seriously than it once did. Has our sense of shame diminished? Does one's standing in society any more depend upon notions of honour?

In any event, I probably am glad at the turn of events. With my co-ordination skills, I would probably have to say to a challenge -- "AK 47s at dawn!"

I've been dipping into a book called Churchill's Generals, which was published in 1991, having been edited by the redoubtable John Keegan. I'm now reading the piece by Duncan Anderson about Field Marshall Slim. During the retreat from Burma in 1942, Slim did very well, no thanks to his superior, the nice but dim, and rattled and incoherent, Alexander.

Alexander's responsibility as army commander now lay in maintaining the efficient functioning of the rear areas for as long as possible, supervising an orderly withdrawal, and ensuring the successful demolition of access routes. It was Slim's task to keep the frontline forces intact and conduct rearguard operations. The conduct of these two aspects of the retreat is instructive. The rear areas rapidly fell apart, the administrative troops degenerating into bands of pillaging brigands. Confusion reigned supreme. Major Michael Calvert waited for days for Alexander's order to demolish a vital railway bridge – an order which never came. Conversely, Major Tony Mains, acting under Alexander's explicit orders, destroyed a stockpile of fuel outside Mandalay which was almost essential for the successful withdrawal of Slim's 7 Armoured Brigade. Years later Slim had still not forgiven the unfortunate Mains.

The retreat of the frontline forces, however, proceeded with almost clockwork precision. A brilliant rearguard action at Kyaukse delayed the Japanese, and at Monywa and Shwegyin, Slim extricated his forces from near disaster with considerable skill. Once contact was broken with the Japanese at Shwegyin, the retreat became as much a race against the monsoon as against the advancing Japanese. Slim marched back with his exhausted and now disease-ridden columns up the Kebaw Valley to the relative safety of Tamu on the India – Burma border. Thin and ragged as they were, they still carried their weapons like soldiers.

By rights, Slim's conduct of the two-month retreat should have earned him recognition in the highest quarters as a general of first-rate ability. Yet in the event it was Alexander as army commander whom the waiting press men interviewed, Alexander who was the hero of A Million Died [the first book written about the Burma campaign, published in 1943], Alexander whom the BBC extolled as 'a bold and resourceful commander, [who] has fought one of the great defensive battles of the war'. Stilwell knew better. He had seen both generals under stress and knew that 'good old Slim' rather than 'Alex [who] has the wind up' was the real hero of the piece. 'Vinegar Joe' lived up to his name in his acerbic dismissal of Alexander's BBC publicity as 'crap'.

What? Biased BBC, in 1942? Yes. In those days the BBC was biased in favour of a previous, more aristocratic sort of establishment, the sort personified by Alexander, and then only being challenged by likes of the strictly meritocratic Slim, whose father was a Birmingham ironmonger.

Slim eventually got the recognition he deserved. His 'forgotten army' is not forgotten now, by anyone who knows much of the British military effort in World War Two.

A statue of Slim stands, eccentrically but proudly, outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, alongside Montgomery and Alanbrooke, no less.

Alexander is nowhere to be seen. Is there a statue of him in London, anywhere? There must be, but where?

Mohammed and Charlemagne
Henri Pirenne
Barnes & Noble, 1992

In view of the debates, controversies, outraged cries and tactful statements regarding the relationship between Islamic and (for want of a better word) Western civilizations, it is of interest to read this classic work (his last) by the great Belgian historian, Henri Pirenne. And when the reader comes to its end and wonders how to sum it up, prior to making a judgement, what could be more convenient than to find that the author, in his Conclusion, has done it for him in masterly fashion? So here it is, almost seventy years after the author's death.

From the foregoing data [some 260 pages, broadly dealing with the Mediterranean economy from 300 to 800 AD], we may draw two essential conclusions:

The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West.

Despite the resulting turmoil and destruction, no new principles made their appearance; neither in the economic or social order, nor in the linguistic situation, nor in the existing institutions. What civilization survived was Mediterranean. It was in the regions by the sea that culture was preserved, and it was from them that the innovations of the age proceeded: monasticism, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, the ars Barbarica &c.

The Orient was the fertilizing factor: Constantinople the centre of the world. In 600 the physiognomy of the world was not different in quality from that which it had revealed in 400.

The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity. Countries like Africa and Spain, which had always been parts of the Western community, gravitated henceforth in the orbit of Baghdad. In these countries another religion made its appearance, and an entirely different culture. The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer the thoroughfare of commerce and of thought which it had always been.

The West was blockaded and forced to live on its own resources. For the first time in history the axis of life was shifted northwards from the Mediterranean. The decadence into which the Merovingian monarchy lapsed as a result of this change gave birth to a new dynasty, the Carolingian, whose original home was in the Germanic North.

With this new dynasty the Pope allied himself, breaking with the [Eastern, Byzantine] Emperor, who, engrossed in his struggle against the Musulmans, could no longer protect him. And so the Church allied itself with the new order of things. In Rome, and in the Empire which it founded, it had no rival. And its power was all the greater, inasmuch as the State, being incapable of maintaining its administation, allowed itself to be absorbed by the feudality, the inevitable sequence of the economic regression. All the consequences of this change became glaringly apparent after Charlemagne. Europe, dominated by the Church and by the feudality, assumed a new physiognomy, differing slightly in different regions. The Middle Ages – to retain the traditional term – were beginning. The transitional phase was protracted. One may say it lasted a whole century – from 650 to 750. It was during this period of anarchy that the tradition of antiquity disappeared, while the new elements came to the surface.

This development was completed in 800 by the constitution of the new Empire, which consecrated the break between the West and the East, inasmuch as it gave to the West a new Roman Empire – the manifest proof that it had broken with the old Empire, which continued to exist in Constantinople.

An academic medieval historian tells me that Pirenne has been "superseded" and it may seem to some readers that his emphasis on the continuity of a Mediterranean-based economy after the barbarian invasions is overdone, but there is no doubt that he makes his point that the discontinuity and disruption after the Muslim incursions was far greater; the Arabs, in contrast to the barbarians who adopted the language and religion of the conquered population, successfully imposed both their language and religion. Trade across the Mediterranean largely came to a stop; merchants and gold (and papyrus) disappeared and so did the ports and cities through which merchandise was imported and consumed. The sea was no longer a route of commerce, but a region of chaos, to remain so for more than a thousand years. Western Christian civilization moved north and contact with eastern, Byzantine Christendom was lost, so that when it was resumed during the Crusades, the two had evolved into incompatibility, as geographically separated races evolve into non-hybridizable species. Though Pirenne does not claim it, there could be not be a more damning collection of evidence that the replacement of the Christian culture of the southern and western Mediterranean seaboard by an Islamic one was one of the greatest catastrophes to befall Europe.

I was watching the early evening news, and there was an interview with and report about the man who is about to provide the legal defence for Saddam Hussein, a person called Jacques Vergès. It so happened that, by pure coincidence, I had been reading about this man earlier today. He makes an appearance in this book about the remarkable life of the remarkable language teacher Michel Thomas, Thomas having been involved as a prosecution witness in the trial of Klaus Barbie, whom Vergès (characteristically) also defended.

It was already clear from the news report this evening that Vergès will be using the same tactics, namely using the trial of his supposed client as a platform to launch attacks against everyone else, in a way that won't help his client but which will further his own political agenda.

Here is how that Vergès got signed up to defend Barbie, and here is what sort of man Vergès is.

A wealthy Swiss banker, Francois Genoud, who was a declared Nazi both during and after the Second World War, had stepped forward to bankroll Barbie's defence. Genoud had appealed to the extreme-left lawyer Jacques Vergès for help, and the attorney flew to Geneva to confer with the Nazi paymaster. This unlikely couple had more in common than at first appeared in that they shared a deep and fundamental antipathy towards Israel. Genoud funded Arab liberation movements of the extreme left, while Vergès had defended Arab terrorism. The lawyer had flown to Lyon to meet his new Nazi client and was appointed as the mastermind for the defence. From now on Barbie would merely be a pawn in an elaborate political agenda.

On the surface, Jacques Vergès appeared quintessentially, almost affectedly, like a member of the French establishment. He dressed in the immaculate, formal style of a lawyer, worked at a Louis XV desk in his office, and boasted old Flemish tapestries on the wall. But his entire life and political philosophy had been shaped by the conviction that the culture in which he was immersed secretly dismissed him as a colonial half-caste. Vergès was half Vietnamese, and therein lay the root of his intellectual and political rage against France. He was born a twin in Thailand in 1925 – then known as the Kingdom of Siam - where his father, a doctor and diplomat, had married a Vietnamese woman. She died when the twins were only three years old. The children seem to, have been brought up by their father in a poisonous atmosphere of resentment and hate. As a young man Vergès saw the world through a distorting prism of racism, while his twin brother received a life sentence when he murdered the man competing with his father for a minor political position.

As a student in Paris, Vergès became a Communist and president of the Association of Colonial Students at the Sorbonne. One of the more active members was the young Cambodian Pol Pot, who became a lifelong friend. (Pol Pot went on to become leader of the Khmer Rouge and the architect of the mass murder of more than a million of his fellow countrymen.) The French Communist Party sent Vergès to Prague for four years in 1950, where he met Josef Stalin. He left the party when it failed to take a radical position against France over Algeria, insisting that French crimes in Algeria were as bad as Nazi crimes in the Second World War. Vergès became well-known for defending Arab terrorists, and his court tactics were so aggressive that he was jailed for two months and temporarily lost his licence to practise law. In 1962 he moved to Algeria, convened to Islam and married an Algerian woman whom he had defended against charges of placing bombs in cafes. (The conversion had a practical side as the lawyer was already married with children in France.) He spent his honeymoon in China, where he met Chairman Mao and became an avid Maoist, and when he returned to Paris he edited the Maoist review Revolution. (It was Verges who sent Regis Debray to Bolivia to hunt for Che Guevara.)

He now adopted a new enemy: Israel. Fundamentally opposed to the existence of the Jewish state, he defended Palestinian terrorists charged with hijacking an El Al plane. He argued that the act was political, not criminal, and that Israel was to blame for the passengers' deaths. This outrageous claim attracted international notoriety, but did nothing to help his clients, who were found guilty. Most of Vergès's clients were found guilty, despite all the rhetoric and political posturing. The press began to call him Maitre Guillotine.

In 1970, Verges disappeared. Left-wing conspiracy buffs believed him to have been murdered by Mossad, while his enemies secretly hoped it might be so. He did not reappear until 1978, when rumours from the right suggested he had spent the time with his friend Pol Pot in Cambodia and with Palestinian guerrillas in the Lebanon. 'I am a discreet man,' Vergès said when questioned about the eight-year gap in his life. 'I stepped through the looking-glass where I served an apprenticeship. I have come back battle-hardened – note that word, it's the right one – and optimistic.'

Once again he picked up radical cases, defending neo-Nazi bombers and Armenian terrorists, and used the courts as a platform from which to attack his political enemies. He continued to lose many cases, and some clients went to jail for long periods. The high-profile Barbie trial provided a magnificent stage, complete with an international audience, for him to vent his rage both against the French establishment and Israel.

Essentially, Vergès argued that if France could try a man for crimes committed forty years earlier, while operating under orders from a foreign government, then France herself was equally guilty of crimes against humanity in Indochina, Algeria and Africa. The lawyers he assembled for the defence team were all from Third World countries: 'In this trial made in the name of humanity it is important that the defence is made of the colours of the human rainbow: black, white, brown and yellow.' There was not an Aryan among them, but the Nazi Barbie raised no objections.

The irony of this fanatical representative of racial purity being thus defended was not allowed to go unremarked. The French-Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut – who would later describe Barbie in print as 'this paltry underling, this monstrous subaltern, this poor man's Eichmann – stood on the steps of the court and declared, 'We should be indignant over the situation in which a black man, an Arab, a Bolivian and Vergès – a man who claims his Asian ancestry – rise to the defence of a Nazi, and furthermore defend him in the name of their race, in the name of their non-European identity. Imagine you're in 1945, at the end of the war, and someone says, "You'll see, in twenty or thirty years when they accuse and condemn a Nazi torturer, it'll be the subhumans (that's what the Nazis called them) who
will defend him." Everyone would have laughed.'

Vergès continued to argue throughout the trial that Barbie's crimes were no different to those committed by the French state sitting in judgement, and that the defendant was a small criminal in comparison to French colonialism. The French were no better than the Nazis, and neither were the Jews, as Israel's actions clearly demonstrated. When Barbie claimed in a brief statement in German that he was only a cog in the machine following orders and should not be punished for doing his job, he was silenced by his lawyer. It was not the defence that Vergès had planned and could only serve to remind jurors exactly what Barbie's job had been and the monstrous nature of the Nazi machine for which he had worked. And when the defendant declared that he remained an honest Nazi, and had been doing a soldier's job in time of occupation. Vergès handed him a note. Barbie read it and took the advice to claim the right not to be present at his own trial. Vergès then had the stage to himself.

As the fifty-eight witnesses were interviewed over three weeks - each one numerically representing fifty victims - the intellectual and political arguments faded in the face of grim facts. One woman, who had been thirteen years old when Barbie tortured her, said she had never recovered from the experience. Another, who had been tortured nineteen times, described how her back was torn apart by a spiked ball on a rod, and was unable to say any more: 'I excuse myself from recalling the rest.' The evidence against Barbie piled up, the most damning of which was5 proof of his involvement in the murder of the forty-four orphans of Izieu.

Vergès dismissed the order for the deportation of the children presented as evidence by Klarsfeld as part of a Zionist plot to justify Israel's existence and its oppression of the Palestinians by morally blackmailing the world with the sufferings of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. He described Klarsfeld as a 'Zionist hitman' and said the order was a forgery. Experts proved beyond doubt that it was not. Vergès switched arguments. The Nazis were not to blame for the deportation and gassing of the children, but the Jews themselves. He held the UGIF in Lyon responsible for keeping files on the orphans and placing them in an unsafe region, and for collaborating with Vichy and the Nazis.

The plea made on Barbie's behalf by his Arab lawyer consisted of a long rant against Zionists and Israel for crimes committed against Arabs. He again claimed that Israel was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinian refugees, and that 'the Israelis were just as guilty as the Nazis'. The attorney did not actually mention Barbie once, merely attacked Israel, until the judge finally silenced him for digression.

After six hours of deliberation the jurors found Klaus Barbie guilty of crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Verges predictably proclaimed the trial a farce. Barbie made a final statement, speaking in French for the first time: 'I did not commit the raid on Izieu. I fought the Resistance and that was the war, and today the war is over. Thank you.'

But perhaps the most eloquent argument against Barbie was made by Sabin Slatin, the woman who had founded the orphanage at Izieu, and the sole surviving adult. 'Barbie said that he made war on résistants and maquisards, but the forty-four children of Izieu were neither resistants nor maquisards. They were innocents. Neither pardon nor forget.'

I am not really in the market for big, long books about the Cold War, but I do like a good short one from time to time, and Communism by Richard Pipes, is looking good so far. I started by reading the conclusion, and now I am reading the penultimate chapter, "The Third World".

Here is what Pipes says about the relationship between poverty and Communism:

Conventional wisdom holds that poverty breeds Communism. Reality is different: poor countries do not opt for Communism. Nowhere in the world has a poor majority, or any majority for that matter, voted the Communists into power. Rather, poor countries are less able to resist Communist takeovers because they lack the institutions that in richer, more advanced societies thwart aspiring radical dictators. It is the absence of institutions making for affluence, especially the rights of property and the rule of law, that keeps countries poor and, at the same time, makes them vulnerable to dictatorships, whether of the left or right variety. In the words of a student of the Cambodian Communist regime, the most extreme on record, 'the absence of effective intermediary structures between the people and their successive leaders predisposed the society to the unrestrained exercise of power.' Thus, the same factors that keep countries poor – above all, lawlessness – facilitate Communist takeovers.

That rings true. In general, it has always seemed to me that the favourite metaphor of 'rabid anti-communists' (i.e. the people who underestimated the true depths of Communist disgustingness only somewhat), to the effect that Communism was like a disease, is dead right. And Pipes is asking: how strong was your country's immune system?

Far be it from me to find anything hopeful about the PSOE election victory in Spain last weekend. After two election terms of relative fiscal sanity and an end to the grotesque corruption of the Felipe Gonzalez era, a return to PSOE government is bad news for Spain. It is also extremely bad news for the rest of the European Union, as this represents a shift away from pragmatism towards an (even more) collectivist EU agenda.

It is not however, necessarily good news for terrorism. Among the multitude of scandals faced down by the previous Spanish Socialist government the 'GAL affair' looms large.

GAL was the name assumed by a anti-ETA terror group in the 1980s that entered France and murdered ETA members and supporters. I no longer have the details but there was a spate of terrorist attacks on Basques living in the Bordeaux area, as well as closer to the Spanish border.

Following the arrest of several GAL members it transpired that they were all either members of law-enforcement agencies and the armed forces, or recently had been. It later emerged that the money to finance GAL came from the Ministry of the Interior and was signed off ultimately by the Minister. Whilst the Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez himself was never proven by documentary evidence to have sanctioned the GAL death squad, let me just say that if he ever wins a libel action on the issue, I will be amazed.

Two things are worth noting, firstly that both the French and Spanish governments were under Socialist control at the time, second that Spanish public opinion was firmly on the side of the death squads: the only non-Basque critics of the policy tended to shut up because it was their own party that was doing the dirty deeds.

In France the President from 1981 to 1995 was François Mitterrand, the former far-right youth organisation member turned founder of the modern French Socialist Party. It is worth noting his record as an Interior Minister in the 1950s.

In 2001, one of the big political scandals was the publication of Services Spéciaux: Algérie 1955-1957, by the retired General Paul Aussaresses. The French Left went beserk and managed to get the retired former leader of the Action Service to have his Légion d'honneur withdrawn. They also tried to get his pension removed. The ostensible reason was that General Aussaresses had exposed and admitted the use of torture against Algerian terrorists during the Battle of Algiers.

In my copy of this extremely interesting book I find on page 12:

De son côté, François Mitterrand, le ministre de l'Intérieur chargé des départements français de l'Algérie, considérant que la police était impuissante à maintenir l'ordre républicain, envoya son directeur de cabinet au ministère de la Défense nationale pour y requérir la troupe et déclara sans ambiguité ce même 12 novembre, devant les députés: "Je n'admets pas de négotiations avec les enemis de la Patrie. La seule négotiation, c'est la guerre!"

My translation: For his part, François Mitterrand, the Minister of the Interior responsible for the French administrative districts of Algeria, believing that the police was powerless to maintain the Republic's peace, sent his chief advisor to the Ministry of National Defense to resquest the use of troops [including the 11th Shock Paras, better known as the Action Service]. He also declared without ambiguity on the 12th November, before the Chamber of Deputies [French House of Representatives]: "I will not tolerate negotiations with the enemies of the Fatherland. The only negotiation, is war!"

It took the removal of the French Socialists and the introduction of the General de Gaulle to bring about appeasement of the Algerian terrorists. There is a strand of Western Socialist thought that takes the secular State seriously. I seriously doubt if there will be any safe-haven for Islamist terrorists in Spain for the forseeable future. Jacobins ain't soft on Terror.

Yesterday evening I was channel hopping by way of relaxation and chanced upon a UKTV History programme about the Cold War, and in particular about the doings and sayings of the rocket scientists. (Here is the UKTV History home page, but I can find no internet reference to this particular programme.)

The programme seemed fairly good, on the whole, but towards the end of it there was one glaring – not to say outrageous – non sequitur.

We had reached the Star Wars phase of the story. US and Soviet rocketeers had been shadow boxing for a couple of decades, and the Americans, in the person of President Ronald Reagan, decided that the time was now right to put and end to this thing. Rockets are particularly vulnerable just when they are taking off and just after they have taken off. They are then highly visible, because this is when they make their greatest commotion (until they strike!), getting themselves up to speed and up into the sky. So, said the Americans, let us zap them at this point, with laser beams and such like.

The bewilderment of the Soviet strategists and scientists was described vividly, with quotes and interviews with their rocket men, military and scientific. We simply did not know what to do, they said. They needed a national effort, in which the entire resources of the Soviet economy were brought to bear on the problem, the way they had mobilised their entire economy to get them seriously into the rocket race back in the fifties and sixties, first scaring the Americans into building the Minuteman rocket (much quicker to launch and much more accurate than their previous efforts) and then matching the Minuteman with their own version (the Minuteman's plans presumably having been stolen by them, although that was not discussed at all). Well, now they needed to counter Star Wars with their own version.

Trouble was, they simply could not. This was an arms race they just did not have the resources to win.

And at this point in the story, the programme announced that 'politics' then took over. We will never know, they said, if Star Wars would have worked, or if it would have done any good, because, thanks to 'politics', the USSR retired gracefully from the field and the Cold War ended, seemingly of its own accord.

I could scarcely believe what I was hearing, or rather, what I was not hearing.

At no point was it even discussed whether the fact that they were going to lose the next phase of the Cold War, had it continued, and that they knew that they were going to lose it, had it continued, had any bearing whatsoever on the decision of the USSR's leaders to quit the entire contest. No, there was no connection. A connection was not even denied. It was simply ignored. Rockets is rockets and politics is politics, and they have no connection with each other. Rockets (bad) kept the Cold War going. Politics (good – and in the form of an 'internal' Soviet collapse/decision-to-quit that had nothing to do with the external pressures the Soviet system was being subjected to by its adversary) ended the Cold War.

Yet the evidence that there was a very close connection between Star Wars and the Soviet collapse had all been assembled by this same programme. The evidence that what the programme then said about Star Wars was a fatuous lie had all been presented to us, just before the lie itself was presented.

If the Soviet rocket scientists had been queueing up to say; "We were winning! We were stabbed in the back by our damned politicians!", well, that might have counted for something. But they did not say that. They said: "We were losing! We had lost! It was all over!"

This was bias of a very particular sort. It was not cunning, seriously duplicitous, well crafted bias, with any evidence that might undermine the lie being told being quietly suppressed. No, this was extremely public wrong-headedness bias, barefaced, public stupidity bias. Had they hung a big sign on the show saying: "this is totally biased", it could not have been more obvious or more risible.

What, if anything, were they thinking?

My guess is that the people who made this programme were so completely eaten up with the notion that Ronald Reagan was a buffoon of no significance to anything whatever, who was by his very nature – Republican, B movie actor, rabid anti-communist, etc. – incapable of doing anything even vaguely smart or well-timed or well-executed, let alone anything as portentous as, you know, Winning the Cold War – that they just were unable to consider the possibility that he did just this, and on purpose and that Star Wars was all part of it.

And I further believe that the UK History people believed similar things of the American rocket scientists, the men whom Reagan unleashed – along with many other highly competent Cold Warriors in all kinds of other places and with all kinds of other skills. Oh sure, these guys knew how to lob bits of metal and explosive hither and thither, and to fake up pretty laser beam videos. But when it came to actually thinking through what the larger consequences of their gizmos might be for anything or for anyone, well, that was obviously beyond their one-dimensional brains to grasp and is a job for people such as those who work at the UK History channel. We get the wider picture. They do not.

But rocket science? Is that not supposed to be rather difficult? Do you not have to be rather clever to do this?

They did an interview with Jerry Pournelle, for heaven's sakes. Is he just some dumb fuck rocket guy with no grasp of the wider picture? The pronouncements of Edward Teller, both as an old many being interviewed, and as a younger man arguing his corner when in the thick of the action, were prominently featured. Did he give no thought to the wider picture? Well yes, but the thoughts of a man like that are so obviously wrong that they were obviously wrong. I guess.

Idiots.

As I believe Ronald Reagan himself said: It is astonishing what you can accomplish if you do not mind who gets the credit.

I was and am a devout anti-Communist. I rejoice that civilisation won the Cold War, detest the evil folly that was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism-decrepitudism, and regret that the Russian Revolution was not strangled at birth. But (and you could hear that coming couldn't you?) as far as I am concerned, Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 ("A Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism") to Symphony Number 4.

Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin's denunciation of him, I don't think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way.

Thanks to Stalin, if that is an excusable phrase, Shostakovich was forced to write what is now called 'crossover' music, that is, music which is just about entitled to remain in the classical racks in the shops, but which also gives the bourgeoisie, such as me, something to sing along to and get excited about. Shostakovich had always written film music as well as the serious stuff. What Stalin and his attack dogs did was force him to combine the two styles. He might well have ended up doing this anyway, but who can be sure?

What Stalin also did for Shostakovich was to make his music matter more. Thanks to Stalin (that phrase again!) every note composed by Shostakovich became a matter of life and death – while it was being composed, and whenever you listen to it. Stalin turned Shostakovich into a kind of musical gladiator, a man who knew that every day might be his last. Not many composers get that kind of intense attention.

One of my little hobbies is giving career counselling advice, and like many career counsellors, I often ask people: what would you do today if you knew that today was to be your last day on earth? The point being that the guy would live well. He would do the things that mattered to him most, that he most believed in, that he was meant to do, so to speak. In religious language (in which as an atheist I am not fluent), he would do what God had put him on this earth to do. Stalin created those circumstances for Shostakovich for real.

How does an artist function if he lives permanently on Death Row? Most would have buckled, but Shostakovich functioned very well. He was a naturally nervous man. Indeed, someone should write a narrative song about the life of Shostakovich with the chorus "and Dimitri Shostakovich was a very nervous man" at the end of the each verse, the point being (a) that this was his nature, but that (b) the course of his life gave him a hell of a lot more to be even more nervous about. What Stalin did was to make sense of Shostakovich's life, to pull it all together. Stalin gave external validation to Shostakovich's own natural disposition. He made his life much less enjoyable, but he made it count for far more.

None of which could possibly have happened if Shostakovich had actually been killed by Stalin, as Stalin killed so many others. Death Row is not Death Row if nobody actually does die.

Enjoying the music of Shostakovich is the moral equivalent of making use of the research discoveries made by Nazi experimenters in concentration camps who studied how people died by killing them.

All that intensity and consequent intense meaningfulness, if that's what it was, was paid for with an ocean of the blood of other artists, of other human beings. Still, it is worth pointing out that some good did come of all the horror. The price was absolutely not worth paying, but given that it was paid, I am glad there is something to show for it.

Devoid of inspiration, I looked in my library and found Soviet Communism – A New Civilisation by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. There is no question mark in the title of my 1937 Left Book Club edition, and it was "NOT FOR SALE TO THE PUBLIC" (as it says on the front). And a good thing too, I muttered, as I scanned through it, looking for something particularly vile and wrong-headed for you people to have a good chuckle and a good sneer at.

Imagine my surprise, then, to encounter a paragraph of complete truth. Admittedly I had to go to page 1122 to find it, but even so, don't you think that this is really rather good?

We place first in far-reaching importance the complete discarding, as the incentive to production, of the very mainspring of the western social order, the motive of profit-making. Instead of admiring those who successfully purchase commodities in order to sell them again at a higher price (whether as merchant or trader, wholesale dealer or retailer). Soviet Communism punishes such persons as criminals, guilty of the crime of "speculation". Instead of rewarding or honouring those (the capitalist employers or entrepreneurs) who engage others at wages in order to make a profit out of the product of their labour, Soviet Communism punishes them as criminals, guilty, irrespective of the amount of the wages that they pay, of the crime of "exploitation". It would be difficult to exaggerate the difference that this one change in ideology (in current views of morality as well as in criminal law) has made in the manner of life within the USSR. No one can adequately realise, without a wide study of the facts of soviet life, what this fundamental transformation of economic relationships has meant, alike to the vast majority of the poor and to the relatively small minority who formerly "lived by owning", or by employing others for profit.

The paragraphs that follow revert to the evil drivel of which this book mostly consists, as the elderly dupes try to explain how none of this did any harm. But even so, something of a surprise.

Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora
Ronald Segal
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001

Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry
Bernard Lewis
OUP; 1994

To treat this subject it is really necessary, as Segal has done, to run through the history of Islam from Western India to Western Africa, for during the whole of the period of more than 1300 years black slaves have been acquired and traded increasingly with the spread of Islam - indeed, it might be said that one reason for the spread of Islam was trade, of which slaves were a considerable part.

In Islam's Black Slaves Segal makes very clear the difference between the Islamic trade, and the use to which it was put, and the transatlantic trade that brought blacks to the Americas. He has already written a book about the latter subject, The Black Diaspora, and it is probable that he regards it as the greater crime. Slaves in the Islamic world were much more for domestic use and while in the Americas the imports were predominantly male, within Islam females outnumbered males by two to one, probably (though this is not mentioned explicitly) because slave-raiding involved killing the men to secure the women and children (as opposed to slave-trading with the black kingdoms on the African West Coast). Segal claims, however, that though the journeys of the slave-caravans were terrible, once the slaves had, so to speak, arrived at their final destination, their treatment was relatively humane.

The whole system reflected the fact that slavery had been part of the Old World from time immemorial, with white slaves antedating black. Islam had rules about slavery; indeed, only non-Muslims were supposed to be enslaved at all, though this law was often broken, especially with regard to North African "white" Moors slave-raiding the Islamicised African kingdoms to the south. Freeing slaves was also common and while girls were sold for concubinage, their children by their masters were born free and marriage, though into a polygamous household, was frequent. Large scale use of slaves agriculturally or industrially hardly took place and seems to have been abandoned after rebellions of black (Zanj) slaves employed on the land around Basra in the ninth century. One feature not found in the Americas was castration to provide eunuchs; particularly for blacks this was a radical operation, removing penis, scrotum and testicles. One estimate is that in Ottoman times every eunuch "represented at the very least 200 Soudanese done to death". (p. 156)

There is absolutely no evidence that any opposition to slavery as an institution ever arose within Islam. The reduction and final abolition first of the slave trade and then of slavery itself came about as the world-wide dominance of the European powers, with Britain in the forefront, impinged on the Ottoman Empire, which in theory held sway politically and theocratically over the whole area involved. Segal gives the impression that during the nineteenth century, despite pressure from Britain and others, the traffic in slaves actually increased because of the general expansion of exploration and trade and the greater availability of firearms. He does not withold credit where credit is due: Lord Lugard's settling of the problem of slavery in Nigeria illustrates what could be done when the British were in untrammelled occupation of the territory. However, he cannot help adding that "freedom from slavery was not freedom as the British applied it to themselves (p. 180)." The French seemed to have had greater difficulty but the impression left is that their commitment was less wholehearted.

The penultimate chapter deals with the remnants of slavery today, or more precisely, since the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It is probably not an oversimplification to say that these occur where Arabs confront blacks. Although Segal often emphasises the non- and even anti-racist tenets of Islam, he cannot avoid stating the fact that now, at any rate, racism is rife in the Arab world, particularly in the Sudan and Mauretania, where slavery is also more or less openly in being.

The last chapter, "America's Black Muslim Backlash", should belong, it might seem, more properly to Segal's book on transatlantic slavery, where presumably it is missing. It is a sorry tale, where fantasy leads to nightmare, but at least so far the violence is more rhetorical than actual.

The forerunner of Bernard Lewis's Race and Slavery in the Middle East goes back to 1969 and its conception and gestation even earlier. First delivered as a lecture that year, an expanded version was then published in Encounter of August 1970, then, further expanded, published as a book in New York in 1971 under the title Race and Color in Islam; a French translation was issued in 1982 with more additions. What we now have is a much revised, expanded and recast work issued in 1990. This paperback was published in 1992. Notes and appendices, of impressive erudition (which I have rather skipped), are equal to about three-quarters of the text. It should certainly be give equal attention with Segal's book and there are some very fine coloured illustrations, well reproduced from manuscripts extending from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. If this review must be regarded as an appendage to Segal's Islam's Black Slaves, it is because it was written several years ago, when my notes on books I had read were briefer.

The author, a venerable authority on the Near and Middle East, using many Arab and Persian sources in the original languages, traces the connexion between slavery and status, both in theory and practice, in the Islamic world from the 7th century to the present. Until quite late in the 19th Century, when the Russians closed the Caucasus route, white slaves were imported; after this, black slaves became preponderant. On the whole Lewis demolishes the somewhat idealised (and guilt-generated) Western perception of Islamic slavery as being more benign that its Western counterpart and its culture non-racist. He demonstrates that freed blacks rarely rose to high positions and quotes anti-black opinions about it when they did. In exemplary anecdotes, even the good black is usually only a simple, pious person and sometimes his spiritual reward is to be turned white. Mention by Muslim apologists of the benefit to the black of the acquisition of eternal salvation makes me wonder how much this is, or has been, a defence of Western slavery and, indeed, what the attitude of devout blacks is, and was, to the harsh means that introduced them to Christianity, or Islam, for that matter.

Indian: A History
John Keay
HarperCollins, 2001

Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier
Charles Allen
Abacus (paperback), 2001 (first published in hardback 2000)

I have to begin with a confession: John Keay's big and excellent book (576 pages, including notes, bibliography and index) is the first history of India I have read right through, though I have consulted and skimmed through others on my shelves. So it is impossible to keep in my head even the mainstream facts. From its final chapter, Crossing the Tracks, 1948 -, a metaphor of the historian's journey "who ... must get down from the air-conditioned express ... cross the tracks and elbow his way aboard a slower, noisier train", I gather that in it "India" no longer includes Pakistan, or even Bangladesh, a narrowing from the previous inclusive vista of the whole sub-continent. This may be a concession (together with others) to the fact that the title page gives "HarperCollins Publishers India" below "HarperCollins Publishers London" [their italics].

Indian nationalists may make grandiose claims for the age of their civilization, but the fact remains that its documentation does not really exist before the first Moslem incursion in the 8th century. The first civilizations so far discovered, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which are of course in territory now in Pakistan, cannot be linked with any other, even negatively by being shown convincingly to have been destroyed by the incoming Aryans, whose religion, the treatment of which is understandably sketchy, though not language, penetrated to the end of the peninsula; the history of Ceylon is left out.

Within this anonymous era, sparsely illuminated by oral myths and some inscriptions, there are a few peaks, such as Alexander's invasion, which left written history behind it, in Greek. "Ashoka ... India's first defined historical personality" (p. 95 - never mind Porus), died in 231 BC, left some jargon-free, high-minded edicts carved on stone monuments - "extending from Orissa to Mysore, Bombay, Junagadh, Kandahar, Peshawar and Dehra Dun" - and, after uniting much of northern and central India, left an empire that quickly fell to pieces - like many other subsequent ones..

It is interesting to note that Sanskrit emerged as a "prestige language" in the first century AD (p. 132) and (if this can be believed) was artificially constructed from the Prakrit languages - Hindi, Marathi, Gujerati, Panjabi, etc. - derived from the original Indo-European tongue, rather as if Latin had been formed from Italian, Spanish and French. The Hindu states typically continued to war with each other; if one became dominant, it did not absorb the other or others, but, after relieving it of as much treasure as was there, installed a subservient king, who asserted his independence as soon as possible. Wars were, in effect, looting expeditions, and kings seemed to accumulate enormous quantities of gold, silver and jewels without, as far as I can see, otherwise putting them back usefully into the economy. This is not much, if at all discussed - from general knowledge I understand that India was the world's gold sump.

Harsha (d. 647AD) united northern India for a while, the last Hindu to do so before the incursion of the (Arab) Muslims through Persia into what became Sind (Persian: = Hind, Ind). About 1000AD Turkish Moslems, the Ghaznavids, as they would become, started to move in from the north, whence all further incursions would come until the British. The 1192 rout of the Rajputs [by the Ghorids] at Tarain is "arguably the most decisive battle in the history of India (p.237)" when Rajput unity and resistance dissolved. Various Muslim sultans extended their dominance through northern India, but failed to unify it: "Far from uniting India, early Islam's historic role would be to develop and entrench the sub-continent's so-called 'regional' identities (p. 261)". I get the mpression that with both the Muslim and Hindu states the succession was always solved with bloodshed.

Genghis Khan's Mongols are barely mentioned, let alone why they never came to India until, as the Mughals, three centuries later, they ultimately provided India with some dynastic continuity and, at the death of Aurungzeb (d. 1710) had conquered nearly the whole peninsula: the succession Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurungzeb was of able, in some cases, great men. But just when these were needed to confront the West, the dynasty failed, as can be seen even from the dynastic table (p. 385).

The four chapters 16 - 19 (pp. 383 - 508) are of the British dominance; not a bad balance, in my opinion, granted its impact, documentation and closeness in time as against a period of less than 200 years (1750 - 1947). If the author is walking the tightrope to keep in balance between British and Indian opinion, he does so skilfully, though here the climate of British self-denigration helps. He omits, perhaps taking for granted, our differences from previous conquerors, which might be worth listing - we did not come by land, we came to trade, in small numbers, from a literate, organised society, militarily technically advanced rather than innately warlike and predatory, constrained ultimately by a government far away, our religion not directly impinging on the inhabitants.

Much has to be compressed; one feature that is missing is the feeling of British self-confidence that enabled us to rule so many people over such a large area with so few men. At the time of the Mutiny, for example, it is impossible, when reading other sources, not to be impressed by the sheer energy and initiative displayed by those who confronted it. If the obverse of this was racial superiority, it merely gives the value that can be elicited from this universal trait, which is certainly not confined to the British or even the white races.

Perhaps it is unfair to carp at the omission of what must be the benefits of British rule. Here are some I can think of: the bringing of peace to large areas previously scoured by constant warfare (e.g., by the Marathas), the improvement of communications (culminating in the railways), the importation of Western education and technology (despite the author's sneer at Macaulay's "notorious tirade", perhaps inserted for Indian readers, the Minute still makes sense today; would it be churlish to suggest the author has not actually read it?), the gift, inadvertent though it may have been, of both a common and a world language, but perhaps most of all, the open teaching, and, I like to think, the practice of those liberal values which the Indians were able to learn and use against us. The author does admit this last, though somewhat ungraciously ( "the British would thus be hoist on their own petard - p. 431"). Demography is hard to take account of, but I feel that the rise in population during and after British rule does signify one of its benefits, ecologically unfashionable though such a view may be.

Charles Allen's Soldier Sahibs was published in 2000 in hardback at £22.50 and bought remaindered less than three years later for £9.50. Unless this indicates the publication of a paperback edition, this dumping
onto the remainder market suggests a lack of demand, rather a pity, since this is a well told account of the men who were effectively responsible for setting the boundary of British India and hence subsequently Pakistan, as far north as was practical, enabling Kashmir and the Punjab to live in peace. The central character is John Nicholson, the charismatic Nikal Seyn, mortally wounded when his luck ran out as he led the mopping-up operations that followed the breaching of the walls of Delhi, an event he had master-minded and which broke the resistance of the Indian Mutiny.

Allen found it was, however, impossible to write of Nicholson without including the many others as able, daring and energetic, and as convinced of the rightness of their cause, which was, roughly speaking, the establishment of law and order by the expansion and imposition of British power. Fervent, unquestioning religious beliefs were in strong support. "There was nothing but God above, and duty below," as Neville Chamberlain wrote years later. And Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was a tag quoted with sincerity, not, as now, with cynicism or derision (p. 11). These were mostly men born in the early 1820s, but promoted and set in place by men of a like sort almost a generation older - the brothers George, Henry and John Lawrence, especially Henry, who died early in the Siege of Lucknow. Their names should be set down: added to the Lawrence generation, Abbott and Mackeson; and the others: Macgregor, Edwardes, Lumsden, Taylor, Cocks, Hodson, Pollock, Bowring, Coxe, Melville, Chamberlain, Daly, Coke and, of course, Nicholson himself - he had two other brothers of promise, Alexander, killed soon after he arrived in India and Charles, who lost an arm at Delhi and died young. All of these knew each other and mostly got on together, some with deep friendship; not surprisingly, there were also differences and insubordination. In the critical days of the Delhi siege, the "young Paladins" - Nicholson, Chamberlain, Baird-Smith and Alex Taylor - simply outfaced and overawed their nominal superiors, Generals Reed, who invalided himself out and departed for Simla, and Wilson, his successor, who authorised the assault while announcing he disagreed with it.

The period chronicled runs from the disastrous First Afghan War of 1840, which notoriously left one survivor of an army of 16,000, to the Mutiny in 1857. The major military events between include the reprisal expedition to Kabul (1841-2), the First Sikh War (1845-6) and the Second Sikh War (1848-9). Concurrent and following these came the pacification of the North West, outside the Punjab, which the first Sikh war had won and the second secured. Although it is evident that no Afghan could be trusted to keep his word, it seems likely that the personalities of such men as Edwardes, Nicholson and Chamberlain were sufficient to convince the tribal leaders that they should remain at least neutral during the Mutiny. In the seven or so years previous to it, in the tribal areas, where the blood-feud perpetuated a murderous chaos, it was the duty of men such as Edwardes to impose order; one of the first tasks was to prevent the native troops, such as Sikhs, just defeated, now recruited, from plundering during the process. It was Edwardes who not only had the nerve to have a fort built in the most strategic point in Bannu but, when it was completed, the temerity to order all the small towers in the district to be demolished - which they were. The book is so packed with such episodes that it is difficult, and would be invidious, to pick examples. In this dangerous region British mastery was gained over some of the fiercest, most unscrupulous and independent-minded men in the world, not by "the Maxim gun, which they have not" but by the individual ascendancy of British officers, of which those given in this book are the most outstanding.

The climax, taking about a quarter of the book, is the Mutiny. Allen can focus "only on the parts played by Henry Lawrence's Young Men ... This is not to give them unjustified prominence," he claims, for it is no exaggeration to say that the actions of six of the Young Men ... combined to turn almost certain defeat into victory" (p. 264). In doing so, they had to leapfrog over the old and irresolute generals officially in command, for they realised that everything they did had to be done at speed, following John Lawrence's advice: "Act at once, march with any body of European troops to the spot, and the danger will disappear. Give it time, and it will flame through the land (p. 270)." Such was the case of those sent to reinforce the Delhi siege from Peshawar under Chamberlain, Back in Peshawar, Edwardes, Nicholson and Cotton took the drastic step of disarming, to the outrage of their British officers, the native regiments, while Nicholson pursued a mutinous regiment, dispersed and massacred most of it and blew forty of the 120 prisoners from the guns (a Mughal form of execution, fearsome but swift). This seems to have convinced the local population; volunteers came in to join the winning side and for the expected loot that went with it. With a band of these, who dispersed after his death, Nicholson was free to join the Delhi siege, where the besiegers, outnumbered three to one, took the city, perpetrated a murderous sack and stamped out the core of the Mutiny. Here Nicholson was mortally wounded, hours after the city was entered but while its clearing and complete capture still hung in the balance. Found by Fred (later Lord and Field Marshall) Roberts in an abandoned dooli (a closed litter), he lingered long enough to know victory was complete, though not without threatening to rise and shoot the general nominally in command if he ordered a withdrawal. The narrative is simply too powerful to summarize.

The least likely outcome a "successful" mutiny would have brought about would have been a united, organized regime confronting the British, reduced to bridgeheads in Bengal and southern India. The Mughal power, to which the mutineers had attempted to rally, had long ebbed away, the Sikhs would not be capable of expanding from the Punjab, and would have trouble enough holding their own against Afghan marauders, let loose when the British disappeared from the North West Frontier. Chaos would have come again, which only Britain, if it had the will, and all its work to do again, could have ended. Only Britain, still to attain its apogee as world power, could have done it, and it probably would have, given men of the same calibre as those which prevented the need, of which there was still the necessary supply. India, as well as Britain, can be grateful to the men whose tale is told here

One of the most potent anti-liberty memes has been that simple phrase, the "Wild West". Wild as in lawless, violent, murderous. And one of the most potent pro-liberty memes is therefore, if only because it negates the first meme, the fact that the Wild West was, in the words of a famous Journal of Libertarian Studies article by Terry Anderson, the Not So Wild Wild West.

Here is another article, The American West: A Heritage of Peace by Ryan McMaken, dealing with the history of the West, and with the history of its history, in the form of Western novels and of course "westerns", that is to say movies set in that Wild Wild West. This makes similar points to those made by Terry Anderson, and the one link in McMaken's article is to Anderson's.

McMaken ends his article thus:

Unfortunately for novelists and filmmakers, the American West was far less exciting than we have long been led to believe. The frontiersmen knew this themselves. In his old age, Buffalo Bill Cody, one of the most flamboyant architects of our perceptions of the West, openly admitted to lying about his violent exploits to sell more dime novels. He was, after all, wounded in battle with Indians exactly once, not 137 times as he claimed. And such tales are no doubt popular with many Americans today who seem increasingly open to believing almost anything about the West as long as it is simultaneously exciting and violent and bleak.

As with so many success stories, however, the story of the West is primarily a story of hard work, trade, tedium, and peace. The original mythmakers would have us believe that the settlement of the West was some kind of crusade. A war of righteous American legions against everybody else. In reality, there were no legions, and there was certainly very little righteousness.

There were men and women trying to make a better life for themselves, acting under their own will, and pursuing their own ends. On the other end of the spectrum, the purveyors of the new Western victimology would have us believe that these individuals brought with them messiah complexes and violent tendencies which would never be brought under control until "civilization" caught up with them. Yet, the messiah complexes, the "Manifest Destiny," and the raging violence have always mostly resided in the minds of politicians, pundits, novelists, and movie directors; none of whom ever tamed any land harsher then their own back yards.

As I say, this is a familiar theme among libertarians. I thank my fellow London libertarian Patrick Crozier for alerting me to this piece, and I also checked through the archives here just to make sure that no Samizdatistas had already commented on it. This is familiar stuff – but familiar because so persuasive and important, and for that reason, worth any amount of supportive comment.

Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance (Ohlin Lectures)
Deepak Lal
MIT Press, 1998

I felt I had to read this book twice to fully appreciate its message, yet it is not difficult to read, indeed to do so is easy and a pleasure. It must have been equally a pleasure to attend the lectures on which it is based. But a large accumulation of facts, each one of which can be seen to be relevant to the thrust of the book, are difficult for the reader (or anyway, by me) to hold ready to slot into a logical structure to be reproduced in a satisfying synthesis in the memory when the book is finished.

As for the "unintended consequences" of the title, these are the results of social structures, political motives and individual actions which often have quite different aims: "We have known since Adam Smith that an unplanned but coherent and seemingly planned social system can emerge from the independent actions of many individuals and in which the final outcomes can be very different from those intended. All this, I hope, is uncontroversial," writes the author (p. 7). Well, I hope so too - but "we" needed Hayek and the collapse of Communism to convince a lot of other people.

Lal seeks to find an answer to the question why the explosive development that characterised the Industrial Revolution took place in Western Europe, though he merely mentions Great Britain as its origin, without further analysis (p. 20). Why not in the other great areas of civilization - India, China or Islam? He proceeds to examine the civilizations that arose after the development of agriculture from about 10,000 BC; pastoralism as a parallel development is mentioned but left undiscussed, presumably because it is basically predatory on and if successful, assimilated into neighbouring agricultural civilizations.

Such civilizations typically reach an optimum through what Lal labels Smithian growth, where greater efficiency is generated by division of labour and by trade, capitalism being the result (according to the precepts of Adam Smith). They are, however, limited by having only human and animal power and organic, rather than mineral sources of fuel. The breakthrough to Industrial Civilization, technologically based with mechanical power and virtually unlimited energy from mineral resources, Lal calls Promethean growth and this was evolved only in Western Europe. The question is: why?

Lal surveys other civilizations, both in time and geographically, to clarify this. The answer seems to be that societies evolve to where the governing class, indeed, in a sense the whole non-producing class, including the military, the priesthood, servants and hangers-on, has achieved a state from which it cannot envisage a change for the better. Lal calls this the "high equilibrium trap" (p. 34). The ideology supporting such a society (in fact, any society) he terms its Cosmological Belief, something rather broader than its religion, though that is often its basis. This, in the case of India, is the caste system; in China, Confucianism, embodied in the mandarinate, with its contempt for trade and technology, while in Islam, the rational, secular, intellectual process has lost out against religious dogmatism. Though this summary is an over-simplification, it can be seen that in each of these societies, merchants and financiers held low status and their property (like everyone else's) had low security from the "predatory state" (another of Lal's useful concepts) which renders any capital accumulation difficult if not impossible.

There are some points that come to mind. The success of any Smithian growth may be masked as population growth, so that a larger number of people have the same (albeit low) standard of living. This was the case with both India and China. Although Lal treats India as a "cosmologically" Hindu, caste-ridden society in its failure to achieve Promethean growth, Islam, which conquered much of it, added its responsibility for stultification. He also dismisses "the nationalist hagiography that there were any prospects for indigenous Promethean growth emerging in medieval India ... blocked by British colonialism" (p. 35). China seems to have suffered from being too united, too self-sufficient (and so with scant interest in the outside world) and too successfully centralised. Thus when coastal traffic was obviated by the building of the Grand Canal, the navy was simply abolished, though it had explored and dominated the seas as far as Africa in the fourteenth century. Unlike Europe, whenever China did fragment, it either descended into anarchy until reunited, or the successor states kept the old ethos. Technologically, it could have achieved "take-off"; it had, for example, discovered coke-smelting in the eleventh century, and it produced more, and cheaper iron then than Europe managed to do until the end of the eighteenth century. This situation, "one of the great historical problems" is known as the "Needham problem", forced upon, and named after, the biochemist turned historian, whose massive, multivolume work costs more in price and time than the general reader would be willing to spend on it (p. 42). It can only have been the mindset of the Chinese governing class, a high-prestige, meritocratic, self-recruiting bureaucracy, that prevented the population it ruled, with its inventiveness, political security and size, from exploding into Promethean growth. In a later chapter (Ch. 8) Lal explains the Smithian growth of an even more isolated Japan and how its decentralised social structure prepared it for imitative Promethean growth when it encountered the West.

When he comes to consider Europe, Lal prefers to identify this ultimately successful civilization with Christendom, and Western Christendom at that, as distinct from the Eastern Orthodox branch. His search for the origins of its success goes further back than "that moment of self-generating expansion ... in the late eleventh century" (p. 81), to an imposition of papal dominance which, in safeguarding church property, altered the structure of the family from the extended type to the nuclear. "The temporary or permanent delay in marriage ... allowed the West uniquely to have some economic surplus available for investment growth, however small, which was not eaten up by population growth" (p. 87). One of the many myths that Marx and Engels helped put into circulation (p. 86) was that the Industrial Revolution brought the nuclear family into existence; in fact, it seems more likely that the reverse was the case. The evolution of the nuclear family led to Individualism, a social concept Lal considers sufficiently important to merit a whole chapter (Ch. 6), though it might be seen to be a portmanteau for all philosophical changes brought about by the Renaissance and Reformation. In a fairly long discussion (pp. 89-94) Lal also involves the Western guilt" culture as another (and related) factor in our progress to Promethean growth, for "without the fear of purgatory and the hope of the Last Judgment, the Western legal tradition could not have come into existence" (p. 94).

While such sociological factors are valuable insights, the practical, commercial reasons for the safeguarding of property rights are not emphasised, and such discussion as there is on the emergence of states solidly based on their financial and mercantile classes is relegated to a very technically-worded Appendix. Florence and Venice do not appear in the Index, or any of their rivals, and while the Spanish and the Portuguese never developed commercial empires, since their bureaucracies successfully suppressed their mercantile classes, the Dutch and the English certainly did. It may be that Lal considers these empires to be merely products of Smithian growth, with their own high equilibrium traps and the "predatory state" apparatuses for diverting profits away from further useful investment; if so, he has failed to describe and explain the Promethean growth that followed. I cannot help feeling that this is a serious omission, for it implies that Lal believes that the Western European civilization he has designated as successful moved smoothly, uninterruptedly and uniformly from Smithian to Promethean growth. This was definitely not the case, and the origin of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, precursor of Promethean growth worldwide, requires some explanation which is not given here. This is surely important even though, as Lal points out, the growth mechanism can be adapted to other societies with different Cosmological Beliefs (p. 175). And, it must be said, without undergoing the painful journey of discovery.

Leaving this aside, or taking it for granted, Lal examines the prospects for proper, capitalist advance in the economies of India and China, following the demonstrated failure of Fabian socialism in the one and Communism in the other. For this Lal borrows a catchphrase from The Economist: "commitment [by the people at the top], competence [enough educated people] and consensus [the general population willing to try or put up with change]" (p. 131). "Competence" is the only component undoubtedly present in both. Lal notes that: "It might appear that a dictatorship committed to reform would find it easier to do so that a democracy" a situation that favours China. For the political and intellectual elite of India there is a sort of nostalgic "Nehruvianism", less likely to be paralleled by nostalgic Mao-ism in China. Again, the general population in China may be open to change, while in India the horde of small bureaucrats, linked to caste and status, will be more recalcitrant in accepting redundancy. The remaining East Asian economies are dealt with only in passing.

It must be said that there are considerable, presumably deliberate, omissions. Islam does not come in for a second look after its original historical analysis, beyond Lal's pointing out that where progress has occurred - Malaysia, Egypt and Turkey - the state has been separated from religion, and everywhere there are signs of an Islamic backlash. Africa, with four references in the index to mere mentions, is not discussed at all. Latin America has produced many examples of efforts repeatedly aborted for reasons crying out to be explained or even discovered. It may be that in a book and lecture series dealing with reasons for economic progress and success, a digression into stagnation and failure would merely distract the reader from its basically constructive, even optimistic message.

Perhaps too optimistic? No misgivings are expressed about the results of Promethean growth, and by these I do not mean the jeremiads of those Lal dismisses as Ecofundamentalists. Yet success brings its problems, just as does failure. Some are hinted at, such as the claim for "rights" (p. 157) and the weakening of the concept of individualism. The modern "predatory state" can be just as predatory in the guise of the welfare state, abetted by a democratic process which tends to hoodwink the voter into believing he can get someone else to pay the expenses for his health, education and old age. It may even be that the abolition of the extended family so long ago may be exacting a penalty at last in enforcing the perception on parents that the rearing of children brings no direct benefits, resulting in the withering away of the very society, the welfare state, to which they look instead for support. An "Unintended Consequence" indeed! Remember: the Greeks had a word for it - Irony.

Not long ago, our beloved David Carr did a characteristic posting here entitled The joys of pessimism.

Here is how David ended that posting:

I heartily recommend pessimism. It enables you to amaze your friends with your powers of prediction and bask in the satisfaction of being borne out by events.

As he constantly is, I am sure you would all agree.

I remembered this while I was dipping today into Hitler and Churchill – Secrets of Leadership by Andrew Roberts.

Here is what Roberts says, on p. 93 of my 2003 hardback edition, about Winston Churchill's wartime leadership:

'Long dark nights of trials and tribulations lie before us,' he warned in an especially bleak radio address. 'Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be companions of our journey, constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted. We must be inflexible.' One man who immediately recognised the strategy behind Churchill's dismal honesty was Joseph Goebbels. 'His slogan of blood, sweat and tears has entrenched him in a position that makes him totally immune from attack,' wrote the Nazi propaganda chief in a magazine article entitled 'Churchill's Tricks'. 'He is like the doctor who prophesies that his patient will die and who, every time his patient's condition worsens, smugly explains that he prophesied it.' By preparing the public for bad news, Churchill denied the Nazis the full propaganda value of their victories. They could not wreck national morale if Britons had already heard the worst from the Prime Minister himself.

So now we know. David is really trying to cheer us all up.

Here on Samizdata we seem to make a point of remembering things that happened on today's date but in an earlier year.

So does the New York Times. Their "ON THIS DAY" section today contains this poignant and thought provoking item:

On Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage of New York's World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others.

It's a cruel thought, but suppose that if, instead of killing six people, this explosion had killed, say, three hundred and fifty. Given that it injured a thousand, it presumably might have killed many more. Had it done so, that actually might have saved quite a lot more lives, come a certain later date, in September 2001. Not that anyone would ever have known.

Which of course also gives rise to the even crueller thought that, when it comes to the actual body count on that later date, America might even then have got off quite lightly. Once again, we will never know.

Whilst undertaking a major reorganization of my house and all the junk accumulated over many years, I have been constantly rediscovering little treasures at the bottom of boxes or at the back of seldom visited closets which have not seen the light of day for many years.

One of the most interesting items to emerge today was a pristine £1 note issued by the Bank of Biafra: a poignant reminder of a truly savage war which raged between the Nigerian Federal Government and Ibo Separatists from 1967 until 1970. I acquired the banknote during a trip I took to Nigeria in the late 1970's with my grandfather. A business associate of my grandfather was a former Biafran soldier and gave it to me after we had a very interesting chat when we visited his home in Port Harcourt.

The daily images of starving children with beri-beri during the dying days of the Biafran Republic was one of the first things I saw on television as a child which I recall having made a real impact on me. That was also what started both my fascination with Africa and my abiding cynicism towards it. I find objects like this bank note a fascinating bit of not-so-far-off history that one can hold in one's hand and finding such things is one of the reasons I have always so enjoyed travelling.

Sticking with the religious theme, I am puzzled by the furore regarding Mel Gibson's acclaimed flick, The Passion of The Christ

An American Jewish leader met with Vatican officials to ask them to publicly restate church teachings on Jesus' crucifixion. Anti-Defamation League Chair Abraham Foxman says that Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ" contradicts the Vatican's repudiation of the charge that the Jews killed Jesus. A top Vatican official who met with Foxman said no such statement is planned. Archbishop John Foley, who heads the Vatican's social-communications office, instead praised the film and said he found nothing anti-Semitic in it.

The way I see it, a couple thousand years ago a Jewish man called Jesus, most of whose followers were Jews, was executed on the basis of trumped up charges. This was done with the grudging sufferance of the Imperial Roman authorities at the behest of certain powerful Jewish political and community leaders. Thus it would be fair to say he was killed by Jews.

This is of course not at all the same thing as saying he was killed by the Jews: that makes about as much sense as saying "John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Caucasians".

This is just history, guys! What is the big deal?

I do not know who David Butcher is, but I like him already on the strength of this, that he wrote in the latest Radio Times – which is published, be it noted, by the BBC. It is part of a plug for a programme to be broadcast tonight on BBC2 at 8 pm:

Having enjoyably milked all the clichés about olden times in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Jones makes up for it here. The idea is to put the record straight by presenting portraits of how real life would have been for eight medieval archetypes, starting tonight with the dirty and downtrodden figure of the peasant.

The gist is that things weren't nearly as bad for feudal serfs as received history and Monty Python films would have you believe. For a start, they had 80 days' holiday a year, thanks to all those church feast days. And although they were forced to work 50 or so days in a year for their feudal lord, that's rather less than most of us today work to pay our income tax. By the end of the programme, you may be feeling almost envious.

Well that may be going too far, but I do like that bit there about income tax, measured in days per year. And I bet these guys will be pleased about this kind of talk too.

In the early 1860's the majority of the Prussian parliament refused to accept new taxes (to finance higher military spending) without parliamentary control of the government.

If the liberals in the parliament had been libertarian they would have opposed the new taxes whether or not the government was subject to the control of parliament (the extra military spending was certainly not needed - Prussia was not being threatened with invasion by anyone), but at least they opposed the tax increase.

The Prussian chief minister Otto Von Bismark collected the new taxes in defiance of the Prussian parliament. The liberals made speeches, they conducted votes, they signed petitions - and Bismark ignored them. The Prussian minister understood that government rests on force ('blood and iron') not opinion. If the liberals could not defeat the government in battle their opinions were not relevant.

Why does this bit of old history put me in mind of modern Iran? Well in Iran there is a parliament whose votes are often ignored by the unelected 'Supreme Leader' and 'Council of Guardians'. And now the Leader and Council are trying to stop many people (including sitting members of the institution) even standing for election to the parliament.

What do the parliamentarians do? Well they make speeches, conduct votes, sign petitions - and indeed 'resign' (your enemies are trying to kick you out of something, so you resign your membership of it and this is supposed to hurt your enemies?).

David Hume may not have invented the idea that all government rests on opinion rather than force, but he certainly spread the notion (whether he really believed in it or not is another matter) and like many of the other ideas he spread (whether or not he believed in them) the idea is false.

It is false for kings as well as parliamentarians. Louis XVI studied Hume's History of England and absorbed the notion that Charles I did not die because he lost the Civil War (as 'ignorant people' believed), but because he used force - and thus left himself open to force. So Louis XVI did not fight (and ordered others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to fight) - the revolutionaries killed him anyway.

Just as the 'I' does exist and is not just a stream of sensations (who is having the sensations?), and just as the physical universe is not just ideas in the mind (yes the very mind whose existence Hume, at times, tried to cast doubt upon), and just as 'simple' people are correct in thinking that determinism and moral responsibility are radically incompatible (whatever 'compatible-ism' may say), so some governments rest on force not opinion.

If the liberals in Prussia in the early 1860's wanted to have parliamentary rule they would have had to have been able to use force well enough to defeat their enemies. And if the parliamentarians (and their supporters) wish to have parliamentary rule in Iran they must be able to the same.

Perhaps I am wrong and, in this case, it is a matter of 'opinion' - perhaps the parliamentarians simply do not wish to use violence against the Supreme Leader and the Council of Guardians (in which case they should shut up and go home - as violence is the only language their foes understand), but I suspect that the real 'opinion' that matters here is the judgement of relative military force. In which case the parliamentarians (and their supporters) better get themselves stronger forces.

Small Earthquake in Chile: Allende's South America
Alistair Horne
1990 edition

This paperback edition, published 1990, seems now to have been remaindered. It is very necessary to run through the history of this book. It was first published "towards the close of 1972" (p. 344), as "Allende stumbled from crisis to crisis, walking close to illegality". What happened after that is given in a final chapter "The Deluge ... and After", pages 345 to 384, added in 1989.

It is a little difficult to assemble all the events of the book into a context so hazy in my memory, to say nothing of remembering the situation in a number of South American countries as it was 31 years ago, with a last chapter added 14 years ago. Although the book is mainly about Chile, as the title implies, there are substantial chapters on Colombia and Bolivia, Peru is more than mentioned in passing and there is something about Ecuador. This leaves Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Venezuela unvisited and undiscussed. A feature of the 1970s, much less one of today's, is the emphasis throughout the book on the population explosion. It is interesting to find that Horne's only mildly exasperating companion and one of the book's dedicatees, was Bill Buckley then-editor (I think) and certainly founder of National Review; his right-wing conservative views don't greatly intrude. The other dedicatee is the charming, ever-helpful Nena, clever enough to become Director of Chile's National Art Gallery just before the coup, and still be there at the end of the book (p. 346).

What is important about Chile (and here everyone seems to agree) is that it was politically the most stable and perhaps the most prosperous South American state, not without its poverty-stricken peasants (like everywhere else) and marginalised Indians (like everywhere else bar Argentina, where they'd largely been exterminated), but with a functioning democracy, regular free elections (though only those literate could vote - not a bad idea), an enlarging middle class and a free, diversified press with a relatively large circulation. Perhaps its most unusual feature, for a Latin American country, was the fact that the armed forces (of which the army had the least chic) did not interfere in politics.

Under these circumstances, what could seem more reasonable than a spot of land reform? Unfortunately, the person who took this on was Allende. Like most revolutionaries (though a fairly conventional politician originally and minister of health in 1940) he came from the middle class, a fact which still seemed to surprise his egregious friend and confidant, the nut-case intellectual Regis Debray, ex-friend of the defunct martyr Che Guevara, to whom he'd given just as bad advice. Allende's rhetoric and nationalisation plans scared the middle classes, who left the country in droves. He intended to carry out most of his program within the country's legal framework, which seems to have been sufficiently elastic to enable him to do so. However he, and apparently everyone else, expected this to provoke a clumsy attempted right wing coup, which he could then crush with "revolutionary violence" (p. 149). As for his democratic credentials, it is worth pointing out that he won the presidential election in a three-cornered contest with only a slender majority over the second of two other candidates to the right (36% to 35%), a situation reflected in the composition of the Legislature. Yet the impression given is that he was an improvisatory bourgeois amateur; such was David Holden's estimate, which I must have read in Encounter in January 1974, an actor in love with a revolutionary part, rather than a serious leader who knew where he was going" (p. 357).

In the 1970s, communism, let alone socialism, were far from discredited creeds, China's Cultural Revolution was not perceived to be what it was, Soviet dissidents were isolated and samizdat-dependent and, worst of all, thanks to the subversion of the US intellectual left, the Communists could look forward to winning in Vietnam. Allende made no secret of his fondness for Communist regimes, his words and actions being more extreme than the official Chilean, Moscow-oriented Communist Party. Even more extreme were the bands of black-bereted guerrilla-activist MIR (Movimento de Izquierda Revolucionardia), one of which, led by Commandante Pepe, inevitably of middle-class origins, Horne and Nena visited (Ch. 9, pp. 192-228). They were busy ejecting well to do farmers to instal landless peasants, something I distinctly recall from an article in Encounter, possibly the one cited above. Allende had instructed the police (carabinieros) not to interfere in these activities - but nor did they if the farmers managed to get enough help to counter-eject the peasants. He was also following a policy of intervention in businesses, oddly enough using a law instituted by a previous regime, resulting in effect in creeping nationalisation. Of course, as might be expected, the economy was ruined, inflation reaching 10,000% (p. 241) and the original edition of the book ends with Horne predicting disaster.

The last, additional chapter briefly describes what happened. In July 1973 there was a half-cancelled, half-cock rightist coup, but it produced no spontaneous workers' response, which emboldened Pinochet, quite late in deciding to participate, to carry out a proper one in September (p. 348), when Allende seemed to be no better prepared than in July, despite a large consignment of Czech arms from Cuba, disguised as a present of mango-flavoured ice-cream. Deserted by the presidential palace police and rocketed by the air force, the most trustworthy evidence is that Allende committed suicide with the automatic rifle that Castro had given him.

Horne is not one to canonise him, as leftists in the West have and he points out that the media castigation of Pinochet's Chile has been completely disproportionate compared with the treatment of oppression in Cambodia, Cuba, Poland or Czechoslovakia (p. 361). It is certainly dispiriting to read of the amount of bloodshed there has been elsewhere on the South American continent; "It was a long time before I was forgiven by the Chileans," Horne remarks, "for making the unacceptable comparison with Bolivia" (p. 355). The number of deaths the Pinochet regime was responsible for he puts "somewhere substantially less than 5,000" (p. 360). Nor does he think that any intervention by the CIA made much difference and perhaps was even counterproductive. Even its foreknowledge of the coup seems to have been sketchy and its expenditure on certain items seems almost laughable (p. 354). Moscow seems to have spent a good deal more. It is true that this evidence comes from an American official investigation (which "washed its dirty linen in public, in 1975, with great thoroughness") and I suppose anyone is free to disbelieve it. Considering that Army coups have happened constantly over the whole of Latin America without the CIA being always held to blame, it seems a little odd to suggest that Chile was the only place its help was needed. I personally would not regard it as matter for condemnation if the CIA had been responsible for Allende's troubles from start to finish, but the evidence from everywhere else seems to suggest that it is nowhere near that efficient.

Horne revisited Chile (having stayed away during the Pinochet regime because of his revulsion from the well-publicised instances of its use of torture) during a lecture tour he was giving in South America in 1987. Entering the country from Peru, he was favourably impressed by the contrast in cleanliness, order and signs of increasing prosperity. He gives credit in a guarded way to the adoption of laissez-faire economics pioneered by the "Chicago Boys", the intellectual offspring of Milton Friedman, some years before Mrs Thatcher took them up here. He was granted a long interview by Pinochet who gives the impression of having stayed in power, not to enrich himself, or for fear of his own future, but to ensure that Chile would not be in danger of another left-wing takeover if he left too soon.

Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night's episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the "Colossus" computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his "difference engine". Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage's machine, and it worked.

But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.

I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.

For many years now, I've been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage's restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … "it worked", which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.

So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.

There's a terrific Steyn piece to be read here. I'm not sure if I could have read it sooner, without purchasing the Atlantic Monthly in paper form but I am delighted to have read it now.

Final two paragraphs:

Amid the herd-like moral poseurs, Kazan was always temperamentally an outsider, and his work benefited after he became one in a more formal sense. But, both before and after, his best productions concern themselves with a common question: the point at which you’re obliged to break with your own – your union, your class, your group, or, in Kazan’s case, your Group. The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan's movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

Well I surely hope that that last rhetorical non-question is correct, and anyway, even if it isn't, merely agreeing with posterity is not the point. The point is being morally right now, and if posterity is wrong, so much the worse for posterity. That aside, this is the kind of piece that makes me want Mark Steyn to carry on carrying on for just as long as he can manage it. Morally he says all the right things here, and he is obviously so well informed about the artistic issues that no semi-philistine from Hollywood would dare to play the philistine card. Of such pieces are ideological victories fashioned. For as long as there are anti-anti-communists in business, then for so long should they be lambasted until anyone they might influence gets the point.

I am very proud of my little contribution to the anti-anti-anti-communist genre, a piece called Why I Support The Contras. My one regret about this is that it is available in pdf form only, as yet. (I will correct this Real Soon Now.) And now, like Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting, I say, never forget what Communism did and what its disgustingly self-righteous stooges in the West are still retrospectively fronting for.

This (it seems I can read at least quite a lot of Atlantic Monthly on line) makes the same point.

I have been slightly ill for the last couple of days, and I still am. And one of the consequences of feeling ill is that if you are quite old, you also feel old. And one of the symptoms of advancing age is that you start to fret about how almost all the news seems to be bad. (Well, course it is bad. That is its nature.)

But today, not all. From today's Independent:

The vast majority of people from ethnic minorities feel British even if they were not born in this country, according to a report from the National Statistics department.

Racial attacks and recent political gains by the British National Party are leading to long-established immigrants becoming increasingly determined to assert their right to be in this country, it is claimed.

The research by the department, formerly the Office of National Statistics, is the first time that ethnic minorities have been asked how they feel about their national identity, rather than about their actual origin. It revealed that both first generation immigrants and those who were British-born had a strong sense of identity with their adopted country.

It would seem that we here all have one thing to thank the BNP for, which is that by claiming loudly that all these newcomers are not British, they have provoked them into insisting that they are.

I recall attending a meeting about five years ago, it must have been, at which we all talked about ethnic issues – issues meaning when people with different coloured skins fight with and shout at each other – and I was struck by the vehemence with which some of the least white people (both visually and sociologically, so to speak) present were most vehement about being British. Struck, and rather pleased. And it seems that my merely anecdotal research has been duplicated nationally, and has come up with the same answer. And I'm very glad.

After all, one of the nightmare futures for this country was that it would stop being one country at all, to the point where different fragments of it became identified not just with different bits of the ex-country, but with different bits of the world. Like the Balkans, in other words, where three different world religions (Eastern Christianity, Western Christianity, and Islam) contend at one explosive meeting point. Was that the future my generation (the last "British" generation) had bequeathed to its descendants? Apparently not.

Of course this new Britain will be – already is – very different from the old one I grew up in, and in which my mother still lives, in the leafy suburbs of the extreme west of Surrey (the bit where Surrey, Middlesex and Berkshire meet, mostly peacefully). But since when was the deal ever that your country remained the same from one century to the next?

In many ways what this means is that Britain has become rather more like the USA, more a country of immigrants and less a country of people who can trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest (the Norman Conquest being the event that turned this country into an Anglo-French melting pot).

Many further questions remain unanswered by surveys like this. I wonder, how would the young son or grandson of a family recently arrived in Britain from India, say, have felt watching the brilliant production of Shakespeare's Richard II that I watched last Monday evening on the television. And I wonder exactly what he would have made of the fact that the actor playing the Duke of Aumerle, one of the doomed Richard's favourites, was played by a black (Afro-Caribbean) actor? (Maybe nothing at all.) Did that young man feel that this is his history he was watching, as well as mine? I don't know, but I hope he did.

Most of our readers probably know Tony Robinson best as the much put-upon Baldrick at the bottom of the Blackadder pecking order. He has cunning plans, but they don't work.

However, last night I watched a Tony Robinson effort that was slightly more substantial than one of Baldrick's plans, and an interesting sign of the times in this United Kingdom of ours, namely a couple of Channel 4 TV shows about the history of the British monarchy.

I missed the early part of the first of the two hour-long shows that airedlast night, but my understanding is that in the first, Mr Robinson started out investigating Richard III and ended up by satisfying himself that the current official Royal Family is descended from a deception, in the form of Edward IV.

Edward IV was born in 1442, having been conceived the regulation number of months before that in Rouen, France. Both the circumstances surrounding that birth, and the gossip which it immediately gave rise to say that Edward IV's biological father wasn't the King of England that he should have been, but was instead a French soldier whom the Queen had a brief fling with. Edward IV looked nothing like his official dad. More fuss was made when his younger brother was born than when he was. There's a line in Shakespeare's Richard III alluding to the gossip to the effect that Richard III's rival was a bastard. And so on. Robinson even had himself a bona fide historian on hand to back this up with some new documentary evidence which further proved that the king was nowhere near Rouen when he should have been to be Edward's biological dad.

It is possible – not likely but possible – that there will be an explosion of comments on this posting from people we don't usually hear from, because believe it or not, the rights and wrongs of whether or not Richard III was or was not the Bad Thing that Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, and now Ian McKellen, have portrayed him as remains a live issue among a certain sort of rather eccentric English person. The argument goes that Richard had the Princes in the Tower killed, not because he was a swine and wanted the Real Monarchy out of the way, but because he considered it his painful but patriotic duty to put and end to a couple of nationally disruptive fakes.

So, having satisfied himself that our actual monarchy isn't our real monarchy, in the second of his two programmes, Robinson proceeded to chase down who our Real Monarch now is. To cut a long story short, this real King of England is a bloke called Mike Hastings, who left England to live in Australia in his teens, has had a great life there, and who actually voted for a Republic in the latest Aussie referendum on that subject. (I'm only making this up if Tony Robinson was too.) Mike and his disbelieving and frankly rather suspicious not to say rather contemptuous daughters were shown chuckling over it all, when Robinson arrived to visit him with a film crew. Although, it's fair to add that Mike did take his ancestry seriously enough to possess his own chart, which luckily confirmed all of Robinson's conclusions about his ancestry.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable programme, and on the whole Robinson didn't try to make too much of things. By their own rules, the monarchs of England aren't as kosher as they would like. If those rules had worked out differently, things would have been different. That was what he was really saying. His main conclusion wasn't that Queen Elizabeth II should now be knocked off her throne. It was that we live in a rum old world.

After these shows ended, I went a-googling, and discovered the usual killjoy response to all such startling revelations, to the effect that This Is Nothing New:

I don't see anything there that hasn't already been thoroughly discussed here. Am I missing something?

Short answer: the Queen is Queen because of the Act of Settlement, not because of her descent from any Plantagenets, Tudors, or Stuarts.

If it could be proved that she wasn't legitimately descended from the Electress Sophia, then there would be something to talk about. But the chances of that are approximately nil. (DNA evidence wouldn't do it: legitimacy is a matter of law, not of biology. Not that I have any reason whatever to think the Queen is not descended from Sophia.)

And the Act of Settlement happened way after 1442 (in 1701), and on its own would appear to end this as a serious live issue, so to speak.

However, with my googling I also discovered something else, which is that Tony Robinson is a bigger cheese on the left hand side of current British politics than I had previously realised.

This makes sense. The real political punch that this programme packs is that it is yet another little tiny chip off the edifice that is the British monarchy in particular, another squirt of urine into the swimming pool of the Old Story of British history. It was a very small but definite dig in the ribs for all the sort of people who, until very recently, used to rule this country, by one of their successors – by one of the New Establishment, you might say. The Old Establishment got to be that by inheritance. The New Establishment who rule us now is a meritocracy, in its own eyes anyway, rather than a strictly hereditary class in the old sense. Others who don't love our New Establishment might prefer to call it something more like a Mediacracy or a Mediocracy or some such insult, but the point is, there has been a social discontinuity in recent British history, which is reflected in what often looks like a conscious effort by the New Establishment to piss all over the past. Robinson is no part of that, but he is clearly not averse to revising it.

It is only recently that the Royal Family have been declared fit subjects for serious regardless-of-where-it-leads investigation. I can remember when saying they were ridiculous was like saying that homosexuality is an abomination now. Forty years ago, I don't believe that TV shows like these would have been allowed to make it to our screens. Which is precisely one of the reasons why these programmes was made and shown now. (Another reason is that they were very entertaining.)

Personally I don't base my sense of Britishness, or Englishness, in any way whatsoever on whether Queen Elizabeth II is the rightful air to her throne. And if it weren't for the argument now raging about the sovereignty of my country as whole, in the form of the argument about whether Britain should be reduced to a clutch of little Euro-provinces, I would be an unambiguous anti-monarchist and pro-republican myself. However, given that debate, I have become more of a royalist than I've ever been before.

Because those who do take our Sovereign seriously tend also to take the sovereignty of our country seriously, these programmes will ever so slightly demoralise some of the people who now care about British sovereignty. And for that reason, ever so slightly, they demoralised me, despite being very entertaining, and indeed because they were so entertaining. In other words, although the idea of toppling the current Queen is not serious, these were still serious programmes, in the sense of still having a sort of current political agenda. (Metacontext?)

At the end of the second show, for example, Robinson tossed in the notion that had there been no bastard Edward, Britain might have remained catholic country, by which I assume he meant Roman Catholic. And Roman Catholicism is deeply embedded in the EUropean project, to the point where it almost makes sense to put that the other way around.

Robinson. Is that a Roman Catholic name I wonder?

The Sunday Telegraph has an article about Winston Churchill's lifelong battle with the taxman that continued even at the height of the Second World War. Documents covering a 20-year period were published for the first time last week and refer to Churchill's "latest attempt to minimise liability". They indicate that he used every lawful opportunity to avoid tax. At one stage he considered setting up an overseas company to ensure that his lucrative extra-parliamentary earnings would be exempt from income tax.

Andrew Roberts, a historian who has written extensively about Churchill, said:

I do not think these disclosures will make people think any less of Churchill.

Au contraire! They further point to Churchill's excellent judgment as to who the enemies are...

My day has been deranged by the discovery, which I made at about 4 pm, that Simon Schama's televised History of Britain has been shown and is still being shown continuously on UK History (one of the free digital channels) throughout the day, from 7 am until 1 am tomorrow morning. I've been dipping into it ever since I found out about this, having only caught bits of it when it was on one of the bigger channels first time around.

Most of the historical personalities mentioned by Schama were reasonably familiar to me. I know who Elizabeth I was, and when. I know who Thomas Cromwell, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth were, approximately speaking. But one name, in the the episode about the Victorian age, was entirely new to me: Mary Seacole:

Mary Seacole, the "black Florence Nightingale" was once one of the best-known women in England. She was a Caribbean doctress who had travelled widely, and was able to put her skills to good use in the Crimean War. Denied the opportunity to work with Nightingale, she travelled there on her own to minister to wounded British soldiers. Thousands of them remembered her with gratitude and affection.

That's her. That's definitely who Schama was talking about. Denied an official nursing position, she simply went out to the Crimea on her own initiative, and got to work, feeding the soldiers before they went into action in the 'hotel' she somehow contrived to have built (I think that's what Schama said), and then prowling the battlefield searching out the wounded and feeding them and caring for them, and even curing them with her West Indian remedies, which, said Schama, saved many a life, as the word "doctress" certainly suggests.

I'm guessing that knowing about Mary Seacole is probably a generation thing. I am of the generation that learned dates and maps and chaps, but which made no great effort to search out worthy people other than White Male worthies for deserved – and I dare say sometimes undeserved – celebration. So I'm guessing that Mary Seacole is now an increasingly well known figure among younger people with any curiosity about Britain's past. But I'd never heard of her. Thanks to Simon Schama and the UK History channel, now I have.

And thank you also to the Internet, and in particular to Google (apparently some are complaining about Google – for its sinfulness in wanting to make money). All I had to go on was how the name sounded, but soon, up came the magic words: "did you mean Mary Seacole?" and the means were in front of my to satisfy any curiosity I might feel about this remarkable woman.

On the face of it, this posting by Alan Little is about music:

A performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, the "Eroica", by Wilhelm Fürtwangler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra from 1944. There are hundreds of recordings of the Eroica, dozens of which are probably excellent; but this is supposed to be one of the handful of truly great ones according to well-informed opinion on rec.music.classical.recordings. …

Later in this posting, Little was kind enough to link back to a piece I did on my Culture Blog about how Hitler's love of classical music did dreadful harm to classical music, and when Little emailed me about his Fürtwangler piece, he probably had in mind that it would get a mere reciprocal mention on my blog. But actually, Little's posting is more in the direction of the Samizdata agenda.

...I’m feeling distinctly queasy, though, about listening to and possibly enjoying a work of art produced under the Third Reich.

See what I mean? Little continues:

Why? I have no qualms about listening to Soviet music, Shostakovich for example. Yet Stalin was just as much of a monster as Hitler and the Soviet Union in the 1930s was at least as much as a horror as the Third Reich. So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does? Do I think the Soviet Union was in some ways a lesser evil than Nazi Germany? There’s not much to choose in terms of crude bodycount. But I still think it’s a good thing that the most important war memorial I’ve ever seen is two Soviet tanks in front of the Brandenburg Gate and not two panzers in Red Square; the people of Russia and Eastern Europe would have had an even worse time in the last fifty years if it had been the other way round. I think there also is a sense in which Hitler was something the German people did – they elected him and were enthusiastic about him for quite a while – whereas Stalin was something that happened to the Russians – the Bolsheviks came to power in a wartime military coup that their brilliant propaganda machine subsequently dressed up as a popular revolution.

This question of which was worse, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, is one that fascinates me. My gut feeling is that there was indeed something an order of magnitude worse about Nazi Germany, in terms of the moral inexcusability of the people who did it rather than in terms of the destructive results – which were much of a muchness when you add it up, as Little says. Russia, you feel, or at any rate I do, was engulfed in a great wave of ideologically induced stupidity and destructive passion. They knew no better, poor fools. (I feel rather the same way about the Islamo-fascists now.) Germany, on the other hand, did know better, but went bad on purpose. Germany chose evil.

Granted, that is an extreme collectivist oversimplification of what was still a vast and vastly messy assemblage of individual decisions, nothing like all of which were as evil as the worst of them. Nevertheless, to a far greater degree than the Russians, the Germans chose, collectively, all in one conversation – so to speak, to go bad.

That also seems to be roughly how Alan Little sees it.

By the way, Little liked that Fürtwangler Eroica. A lot. "The best performance I've ever heard, I think."

I made a very brief trip to Belgium at the end of a trip to Amsterdam last year. On that occasion I spent a day in Brussels and a day in Bruges. My great discovery on that trip was the extraordinary quality of Belgian beer. I spent a tremendous evening in 't Brugs Beertje in Bruges, sometimes referred to as "the best bar in Belgium", which on that occasion was filled with English beer buffs. (The best kind, quite possibly). On that trip, I passed Antwerp in a train, and from my guide book and what people told me, I got the impression I had missed somewhere good.

And, as it happens, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to Ashford opened recently, giving me the chance to travel through Kent at over 200 km/h. I was able to both try this out and see Antwerp last weekend. I had an evening in Bruges and then a day and a half in Antwerp. The drinking in Bruges section of the trip I have documented already.

But the next day I did get to Antwerp.

The first thing I discovered is that the city has one of the more beautiful railway stations I have encountered. It is a single arch train shed, not quite London St Pancras but beautiful just the same, and for similar reasons. Brussels is essentially a French city, Bruges is a medieval Hanseatic League anachronism that was sort of stranded in time when the estuary of the river Zwin silted up in the 16th century, and Antwerp is the Dutch (Flemish) city where all the traders went when this happened.

One problem though is that Antwerp Central is a terminal station, rather than an intermediate stop on a line. Trains from Brussels to Amsterdam do not come into the centre of Antwerp but stop at a station on the edge of the city. (It was apparently not properly appreciated in the 19th century that however important the city was, it was essentially an intermediate stop, or at least would become one). This is being fixed, as a rail tunnel is being built under Antwerp to take TGV trains. Through trains will stop at new platforms underneath the existing ones. Heaven knows what this is costing to build, but it will certainly improve transport to and from Antwerp. (Brussels once had the same problem, but a tunnel under the city was completed around 50 years ago).

Anyway, Antwerp itself. For historical regions I do not fully understand, the Dutch speaking world is full of Argentinian steak houses.

This is true in Amsterdam, and also true in Antwerp, even though Antwerp is in Belgium. The cultural differences are dramatic when you cross from Flanders into Wallonia, much less so than from the Netherlands to Belgium. Architecturally it looks Dutch and not French. Shopping streets are not quite fully Dutch, but things are heading that way, although you still do see more French high street shops than in Amsterdam. Quite a lot of it feels Dutch or German though. Still, though, Antwerp (unlike Brussels) feels like an economically alive city. Which is accurate. Antwerp is perhaps most famous due to the fact that the world diamond business is centred in an area just near the railway station and is run by a community of Hasidic Jews. However, this actually pales in importance compared to the city's immense port and huge petrochemicals business.

Antwerp Cathedral is one of the most beautiful I have seen, especially on the inside. (There are four original Rubens paintings - Antwerp was his home city). This photo doesn't come close to doing the building justice.

It feels more planned than many great cathedrals, some of which tend to be a hodge podge of styles, with the key thing being to make the building as large as possible. Not so much this one. It is pretty large, however.

Like any major port, the city has lots of ethnic colour. I wasn't careful and thus had lunch in an Egyptian restaurant rather than the Turkish restaurant I had intended. The food was good though.

The Belgian Congo (initially the personal property of King Leopold II of Belgium, who had ironically managed to get control of it in the first place by presenting himself as a great humanitarian) was perhaps the most brutal colonial enterprise of them all. Essentially, at the end of the 19th century the colony was turned into a slave labour rubber plantation by King Leopold and his men. Over a thirty year period the population of the colony was reduced from 20 million to 10 million. The level of brutality is hard to imagine. People who are interested in the story should read this or (for the same story told in the broader context of African colonialism) this. The ships bringing back rubber and other extraordinary bounty from the Congo sailed into the port of Antwerp, up the river Scheldt. There are raised promendes on the sides of the river which were erected at the time, so that people could watch ships arriving with African bounty.

The brutality was exposed by a passionate English advocate of free trade named Henry Morel, who founded the Congo Reform Movement after observing that the ships sailing into Antwerp were full of rubber and other things of great value. The ships going out contained nothing of value, except for some firearms and ammunition. From this Morel (correctly) deduced that the only explanation was slave labour. (The practice in the Congo was truly mindblowingly barbaric. One of its more notable practices was to demand that the men enforcing the collection of rubber from Africans bring back a severed human hand for every bullet they were issued with, to demonstrate that the bullet had not been "wasted").

You can see remnants of the Congo trade today.

There are no bridges across the river at Antwerp, perhaps because of all the shipping. As I said, Antwerp is one of the busiest ports in Europe. Most of the port is downstream from the city, but a little is upstream. No doubt a larger proportion of it was once upstream. If anything, the city is a touch like Hamburg in layout.

And of course at least some of the Congo bounty (at least that portion that did not end up in the hands of Leopold's mistress' pimp) was used to build ornate public works throughout Belgium - museums, opera houses, and other monuments to King Leopold.

Like at most major ports, containerisation has moved the ships downstream from the city. Unfortunately I did not see most of it. But, if anything, the city is a touch like Hamburg in layout, because the river is navigable upstream further than is often the case. There is even a little container port just upstream from the main city.

I do love a container port in the evening.

I'm hoping to enter the Hastings Weekend Chess Congress at the first weekend after the New Year. I have never previously been to the entry point to the UK of Perry de Havilland's marauding ancestors. They were among the (so far) most successful gang of 11th century "asylum seekers".

In order of Anglosphere fame I suppose Hastings ranks as:

1. The place where the Norman Conquest happened. And since I spent much of yesterday enduring endless processions of fairweather English rugby fans parading around central London, pretending they know what a three-quarter line is, and I lost money on France to win the rugby world cup, I remind Anglo-Saxons that the battle was the most decisive result between the two countries.
   [I feel better already!]
   
2. Captain Hastings, the nice but dim sidekick of Agatha Christie's fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The main problem being that most Belgians I have met are either extremely racist (so would not live in London), or have not got as many grey cells as Hastings between them. Or both.
   
3. The site of the most famous chess tournament ever - the 1895 Hastings Christmas Tournament, and the scene of one of the all-time classic matches: former world champion Wolfgang Wilhelm Steinitz versus Curt von Bardeleben. On Black's 25th move, von Bardeleben, in Prussian fashion, realising that the situation was lost, is said to have got up without a word, put on his hat and walked back to his hotel, leaving his clock to run down and lose on time default. I enclose this link from a Brazilian web site still raving about the game over 100 years later. I googled 295 references to this one game.
   My immediate concern is to get my entry in before the late entry penalty and to find a bed and breakfast to stay in Hastings on the two nights of January 2nd and 3rd. Any advice gratefully accepted.

After that it will be time to prepare some tactical plays for the tournament itself: and exhausting schedule of one match ending on Friday night at 11pm, then three matches on Saturday running from 9.30am to 11pm pm, and another two matches on Sunday that I haven't even begun to worry about.

No kidding: I shall be doing some weight training over the next few weeks just to help with my stamina. (I can hear Adriana sniggering already) I shall also be re-freshing my familiarity with a few opening sequences. My nightmare would be a repeat of a 1995 match in Mill Hill against the then London under 8 year old champion, a certain David Ho. My favourite win posted online to date is this one, a tough positional game against a Minnesota amateur.

Patrick Crozier has some interesting thoughts on 'the war to end all wars'. A blogopotamus of a post in fact!

Who am I to start writing about the origins of the First World War? Many others, far more qualified than me have speculated at great length on the subject. Entire British Library bookcases groan under the weight of tomes dedicated to the minute analysis of the Austrian Ultimatum and the Naval Arms Race. And here am I either adding to or (more likely) replicating that effort.

The First World War was, to me at least, the great disaster of the 20th Century. Millions died. Millions more experienced the horror of the trenches: the cold, the mud, the shelling, the stench, the lice, the exhaustion, the ever present fear, the death. It gave birth to Total War, to conscription and to rationing. It laid the foundations for a massive expansion of the state, the Second World War, brought forth the horrors of communism and, in turn, the Cold War. The chain of events ends in the European Union - that instrument of European economic and political suicide. If only it had not happened. If only it could have been prevented.

Of course, the mere fact that the war was a dreadful thing need not mean that its cause was similarly great. One thinks of President Kennedy and his assassin. But, if lessons are to be learnt then one needs to know what started it.

The reason I am writing this is because I have long been unhappy with traditional, textbook explanations for the outbreak of World War I; the sort of thing you get taught at school (see here for an example). Such explanations tend to harp on about Great Power rivalries or the Alliance system. Some add in the growth of industry, nationalism, socialism and democracy.

But I am afraid blaming it all on Great Powers and Alliances simply will not do. There were plenty of Great Power rivalries and alliances in the century before 1914 and yet these never managed to plunge Europe into a general war. From the late 1940s to 1989 in the Cold War two super powers and their allies stared at each others daggers drawn without either side ever pushing the button. No. Something funny was going on in the years immediately prior to 1914 and I think I know what it was.

I think what happened was that between 1888 and 1914 the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II managed to throw away every diplomatic, strategic and military advantage he had. He antagonised Britain and Russia so much that they were practically forced to fight him. The Versailles Treaty was right: the Germans were to blame.

Consider Germany's position in, say, 1887. It is newly united. It is rapidly industrialising. Its army is the best in Europe. It has no navy to speak of but why should it? It has no overseas empire to protect and the British navy is perfectly capable of protecting its trade routes. It has one real enemy: France, which is desperate to recover Alsace and Lorraine, lost in the war of 1870.

France may want Alsace and Lorraine back but there is precious little she can do about it. She is not powerful enough on her own and she has no allies. She has no allies because the Germans have got there first. Bismarck has been assiduous in courting both the Russians and the Austrians. Although German relationships with these two powers have not always been entirely smooth it has served to prevent a war between them. If Austria goes to war with Russia, Germany sides with Russia. If Russia attacks Austria then vice versa. Thus, peace is maintained and everyone's happy. Except France.

There is only one other power in Europe: Britain. But Britain is enjoying a period of "splendid isolation". She has her empire, her trade and her navy to defend them. She has no territorial ambitions or interests (Gibraltar excepted) on continental Europe. She has no alliances and does not wish them.

So, in 1887, Germany can look forward to an age of peace and prosperity. And then, in 1888, Kaiser Friedrich III dies to be succeeded by his son, Willhelm II. More or less his first act is sack Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, the man who almost single-handedly, unified Germany and granted her this Golden Vista.

His second act? To scrap the military alliance with Russia. The story is that in 1891 the Russians show up in Berlin expecting the extension of the alliance to be a mere formality only to be told by the Germans that, actually, you know, we have just done a deal with the Austrians and because we have done a deal with them we cannot now do a deal with you. Cue alarm bells going off in St Petersburg and the rubbing of hands in the Quai d'Orsay.

The French are quick to capitalize on this blunder. By 1894 they have concluded an alliance with the Russians. The Russians order from them huge quantities of firearms.

This in turn sets alarm bells ringing in the German High Command. There is a real possibilty of a war on two fronts - the ultimate nightmare. Alfred von Schlieffen is tasked with coming up with a strategy to deal with it. He decides that Germany's best bet is to concentrate on knocking out France before the Russians have time to mobilise. That way he can deploy light forces in the East while the main weight of his army is used to destroy the French. The Western strategy envisages the bulk of the German army making a lightening strike through Belgium, across Northern France, to the West of Paris before attacking the French Army in the rear. The Western Front should all be over in six weeks.

Only one problem: the Schlieffen Plan is stupid. It is utterly reliant on wishful thinking. It assumes that attacking neutral Belgium will not bring the British into the war and if it does her intervention will be inconsequential. It assumes that Belgian resistance will be light. It assumes that the Russians really will be that slow to mobilise. It assumes that the men on the right most flank can actually march that far that fast for six weeks continuously. It assumes that the French will not work out what is going on and counter it or, alternatively, that the French thrust into Alsace and Lorraine will not work. It assumes that the capture of Paris marks the end of French resistance. Frankly, it is nuts. Worse still, it boxes Germany into a military and strategic corner. The Schlieffen Plan is the only plan. It assumes that war against Russia means war against France. There is no Plan B and there is no follow up if things go wrong. It is highly dependent on railway timetables which further reduces flexibilty. Surely Schlieffen must have known this? The more I think about it the more I think it was a cry for help. It is a stark admission of German weakness - weakness brought about by the arrogant buffoonery of the Kaiser.

The loss of Russia as an ally might have made sense had Germany's other allies been any good. But Austria was a dying empire, riven by nationalistic divisions. Some Germans likened the alliance with Austria to being "shackled to a corpse". The later deal with Turkey, the sick man of Europe, was, if anything, even worse.

While the German army was seeking to sort out the mess caused by making an enemy out of Russia, the Kaiser was busy making new enemies. He had already taken a few pot shots at Britain. He had expressed support for the Boers in South Africa. He had talked of Britain's "contemptible little army". He had talked of Germany's ambitions for "a place in the Sun" and he was not talking about timeshares in Marbella.

All this Britain could take. It was only words. Then came the deeds. Germany started building a navy.

Bismarck had had no time for the creation of an overseas empire. He saw Germany as a continental and industrial power. So when the Kaiser put that policy into reverse, Germany found there was not much left to conquer. She ended up with Tanganyika, South West Africa and a few others. It did not look good on a map. It was not befitting of a Great Power like Germany.

It would have looked better had Germany had no empire at all. She could have made the same sort of excuses the British make about being useless at winter sports: "It's all about geography Old Boy, not our scene, we'll stick to what we know."

It is difficult to know precisely what the Kaiser's plans were but he started to build a navy. The British reponded. They started building the Dreadnought class of battleship. It was faster, better armed and better armoured than anything else on the seas. It rendered all other battleships obsolete. It was like calling someone's bluff in a game of poker. But the Germans were not bluffing and started building dreadnoughts of their own. The British started to get distinctly worried. They started having conversations with the French and later the Russians. Although the original Entente Cordiale of 1904 was a fairly loose thing by the 1910s it was starting to bear the hallmarks of an alliance.

I have heard it said, though I have no source on this, that Germany's military situation was also starting to deteriorate. Despite all its internal problems and its military incompetence, aided by its growing industrialisation, year after year, Russia's military potential was growing. Germany's advantage was being wiped out. If she had not made war in 1914 in a few years she would not have been able to make war at all.

So, the scene was set for the outbreak of war. For 26 years the Kaiser had been assembling his and Germany's own funeral pyre. All it needed was a spark.

As an addendum, there are a couple of other observations I would make. The first, is that it is not the preservation of the balance of power that prevents wars - it is the preservation of the imbalance of power. States go to war when they think they have a chance of success, not when defeat is certain.

The second, is the Germans seem to have been incapable of removing bad leaders. The English, on the other hand, are quite good at this - even the supposedly absolute ones. Think of Charles I, James II, Henry VI, George III respectively beheaded, removed, sidelined and suspended. I do not know if the Germans have got any better at it over the years.

For as long as Marxists continue to evade responsibility for the atrocities that their own atrocious opinions unleashed upon this planet during the twentieth century, then for so long will be necessary and desirable for anti-Marxists to go on attacking Marxism. For as long as it is seriously being argued that Marxism was innocent, or worse, that it should even be encouraged to rise again from its grave, then the rest of us should continue to stamp on that grave.

One of the best such stampings I've recently read – although it is more of an elegant and civilised application of the light roller, as if at a cricket match – is a piece by Anthony Daniels in the October 2003 edition of New Criterion, entitled History by other means.

His reflections are provoked by a trip to Cambodia, and by the uneasy feeling that all that charm and grace might merely be a mask for the horrors that erupted during the ghastly reign of Pol Pot. He reflects upon a writer called Vickery, who plays down the Marxist aspect of what happened in Cambodia, and plays up the Cambodian aspect of it all he can.

Observes Daniels:

Perhaps not surprisingly, Vickery’s estimate of the numbers of excess deaths in Pol Pot’s four years of power is lower by a million than that of other writers. But what he is really trying to do (for when numbers are so large, the exact figure hardly matters from the moral point of view) is to exculpate an entire ideology: the Pol Pot episode was merely the continuation of Khmer history by other means, and thus had nothing, or nothing much, to do with ideology. "The Cambodian revolution. was in contrast to any variety of Marxism, classical or revisionist." …

Ha! Daniels continues:

… As also were the Russian, Chinese, Albanian, North Korean, etc., revolutions. So Marxists can sleep easy in their beds – Marxism is responsible for nothing, certainly not mass killing and starvation.

An atrocious lie of course.

Most writers, though, take the view that without ideology, without the ideas that Saloth Sar (later Pol Pot) and his small group of associates picked up in Paris in the early 1950s, the history of Cambodia would have been very different and much less brutal. True, Cambodians have a record of brutality, perhaps even brutality of a particular kind – but is there any people that has not? Ideology raises brutality to a new level, and surely it isn’t very difficult to see threads that connect Pol Pot’s regime to other Marxist regimes, as well as to Marx himself.

It shouldn't be, should it?

And that's good news if you want to enjoy the company of Cambodians now. Daniels ends his piece thus:

This being the case, the visitor to Cambodia can begin to relax again. Maybe the Cambodian tradition has its flaws, maybe the country is not a full democracy and never will be; no doubt it is a very unpleasant thing to fall into the hands of the Cambodian police, who do not behave as they should. Maybe corruption is rife and the rule of law as we know it hardly exists. But the Pol Pot years really were different in point of brutality from all that preceded them, and were not the logical or inevitable outcome of purely Cambodian phenomena or developments. The charms of the Cambodian people are real charms after all, they are not a front for something else, they are not a screen for an unquenchable fire of hatred or a mask for national sadism. You can enjoy these charms for what they are, without having to agonize over their incompatibility with what happened twenty-eight years ago.

Or agonize about whether it really is charming, or just a front behind which yet more horrors hide. One of the nasty little things about Marxist regimes, along with all the nasty big things about them, is how even the charmingness of their people become insidious little weapons in their disgusting power struggles. For how could people as charming as this possibly wish us ill, still less be doing horrible things to themselves? How often did we here that asked of some tremendously charming Soviet Russian of the Cold War era?

I recently stumbled upon an extraordinary contemporary example of this phenomenon, from North Korea, commenting briefly on it here. It took me a while to spot the "North" bit, my unconscious reasoning being that clearly nothing this nice could possibly be happening in a place as horrible as North Korea is now. Because it is truly nice, I think.

Let us hope that the Twenty First Century will be a time when, on the whole, humans being charming doesn't have a hidden agenda to it, but just means that humans are being charming.

I have recently read Andrew Roberts biography of Lord Halifax the pre-World War II British Foreign Secretary.

Mr Roberts' book Halifax: The Holy Fox is considered the classic defence of Halifax from charges that he was simply the 'yes man' of the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and a pathetic 'appeaser' of Adolf Hitler (or in secret sympathy with the National Socialists).

However, as I read the book I was gripped with a violent dislike of Halifax.

Partly this was because Halifax was an example of a type of politician I dislike - politicians who claim to be Conservatives but who demand ever more statism ( yes I know there are a great many Conservatives like this). Indeed Halifax was so misguided that he even advocated more welfare schemes and subsidies even in the aftermath of World War I - when Britain was virtually bankrupt.

But there was more than this involved.

Halifax represented muddle in foreign policy - and my own my mind has a tendency to muddle in this area (hence the violence of dislike of him, it is a dislike for an element in my own mental make up).

There were two main polices to choose from in relation to Nazi Germany in the 1930's. Either one could say that Britain would be best off staying out of European conflicts and just build up Britain's own defences against the possibility that Germany might, at some future time, attack. Or Britain could decide that Nazi Germany was such a threat that war was inevitable - in which case a policy of preparing for offensive war should have been followed (building up offensive forces, developing aggressive alliances, looking for an excuse for war at a favourable time - such as when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in 1936, when the German military was so unready for war that the troops were sent in without bullets and with orders to retreat if any British or French military forces attacked them, - and so on).

Instead British policy was utterly muddled - neither staying out of European affairs nor following a policy of preparing to destroy Nazi Germany.

Chamberlain seems to have wanted to stay out of European conflicts (although he could not resist getting involved in the Continental disputes - for example first seeming to back Czechoslovakia and then making Britain look absurd when he backed down), but Halifax was an interventionist - he would not hear of walking away from European disputes and just preparing Britain's own defences (in case they should ever be needed).

However, Halifax had no plan whatsoever for the military defeat of Germany. He demanded that Britain stand by Poland in the hope that this would deter Hitler - but even when this bluff was called Halifax still felt no need for any military plan to achieve victory.

Hitler would be removed by internal moves in the Nazi Regime (which shows no understanding of how a this sort of dictatorship works), or by a popular uprising (shades of Ike over Hungary in 1956 or George Bush over Iraq in 1991, first encourage a revolt and then stand shocked when it is crushed - real tyrants are not removed by popular revolts [that is Hollywood] only weaklings like Louis XVI or Nickolas II are removed in this way, a ruler who is prepared to slaughter the population of his nation has no reason to fear 'the people').

All Britain had to do was to declare war, make aggressive noises and move troops and material about - and all would be well.

Britain committed army and air force units to France - and when the Germans finally attacked (May 1940) lost large numbers of aircraft, tanks and other equipment (not to mention large numbers of men - in spite of the Dunkirk evacuation).

It is a classic example of a compromise being worse than either alternative. To go into war with no real military plan is surely, even to the most ardent supporter of war, worse than not going to war at all.

Nor was the folly of Halifax confined to policy towards Germany. Leaving aside India (where Halifax's idea that gradual concessions would keep India within the Empire was absurd - but then any policy might have failed in India) there is the example of Halifax's policy towards Japan.

Halifax followed a policy of normally (although not quite always) provoking Japan. No alliance with Japan was to be sought (it is often forgotten that it was Britain who turned its back on its ally Japan, not the other way round, way back in the early 1920's) nor was there to be any acceptance of Japan's desire to dominate Asia, however no real preparations to defend the British Empire against Japan were to be made.

This was because Halifax believed that Japan would do "everything short of war" in relation to Britain. Japan would not fight - and even if it did fight would not fight very well.

To believe this before Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 would have been understandable (although even then such a belief would have been based on dubious racial doctrines), but to believe it when Halifax believed it...

However, why do I say that something about Halifax reminds me of myself (and some other libertarians I know).

The reason is this. I am in two minds about foreign policy. On the one hand I have deep doubts about the ability of government to achieve anything positive, and I understand war to be the mother of government (it is both the reason that governments came into existence and one of the major reasons in history as to why statism grows) - such thoughts push me in the direction of non-interventionism.

However, there are also factors leading me in the direction of interventionism. I do not like socialist dictators (such as the ex-dictator of Iraq) - I dislike their torturing and killing of the local population and (if I am to be honest) I, at gut level, dislike their insulting Britain and the United States at least as much as I dislike their 'human rights abuses'. People I do not know torturing and killing other people I do not know is something I condemn (even if I suspect that the people who are being tortured and killed would also be torturers and killers, if they had the chance) - but people insulting Britain or the United States or the West generally is what really makes me angry.

There is also the cultural factor. All my life the enemies of the wars of the United States that I have seen have been the leftists I have hated for as long as I can remember.

Some of my first memories are of watching the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations on television. The people I watched were not interested in peace - they waved red flags and chanted communist slogans. I hated them with an almost insane passion, my young mind longed to see helicopters come and drop napalm on them. An evil desire certainly - but remember how young I was (I was born in 1965) the young tend to be cruel and lacking in judgement.

The demonstrators reminded me of my enemies among the children and teachers at school who I thought of as doing everything they could to abuse and torment me (although as I am still alive and have both arms and legs and so on, this is clearly not true), I somehow associated such folk with the tax collectors and regulators who tormented my father (although this was not true either - as British government people did not tend to be Guardian readers in the late 1960's and early 1970's) and even with the businessmen who had cheated him (which was grand conspiracy theory indeed).

I suppose I could think up rationalizations for my emotions. After all government administrators are (even if they are card carrying members of the Conservative party) sort of 'serving statism' and therefore sort of on the some side as communist demonstrators (even if they are fighting each other). And corrupt businessmen that violate contracts are serving "the other side" almost as much as the sinister financial interests that have long owned pro-statist 'capitalist' newspapers such as the Financial Times.

But these are rationalizations for emotions. The fact remains that when (for example) I see anti war demonstrators the old anger and desire to see them dead comes back (it did not help that many of the antiwar demonstrators in Britain chant much the same thing and wave much the same flags and so on, as the 1960s - early 1970's ones did) - as does the instinct to do the opposite of whatever they are demanding.

So I am very torn on overseas policy.

I hate emails like this. But now, instead of suffering alone, I can spread the load to all of Samizdata's readers. That way, even if the problem remains unsolved, it can at least rot out there in the Commons where it belongs.

Dear Mr Micklethwait

I am writing a concise statement of ancient rights as part of a longer publication.

I want to include all the most important Common Law rights: life, liberty, property, family life, fair trial in open court, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury etc.

I cannot find a comprehensive list anywhere. Do you know of one please?

Regards,

Richard Marsden

My irascible Libertarian Alliance colleague Chris Tame is fond of translating such communications until they read more like this:

Dear Mr Tame

Please do all my work for me.

Regards,

Lazy Bastard

But maybe I now have friends and acquaintances who can be a little more constructive and polite than that. I don't know the answer to Mr Marsden's question, but maybe one of you clever geezers does.

Any suggestions?

From our friends at the Libertarian Alliance, a very interesting article on the close historical links between fascism and socialism (or at least Marxism). It has never ceased to amaze me how many people think that fascism/nazism and socialism are somehow divided by a wide gulf.

Sure, states professing fascism and nazism went to war with a state professing to be communist/socialist, but the most bitter struggles are always internecine, and anyway how can you miss the fact that the name of the Nazi party was National Socialist?

The article should provide you with ample ammunition to make uncomfortable the many, many socialists out there who view "fascist" as the ultimate in derogation.

From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.

Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists.

Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures.

Given what most people today think they know about Fascism, this bare recital of facts is a mystery story. How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?

What indeed? The remainder of the article, on first read, seems to be well-researched and well-thought out story of intellectual and political ferment.

James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism, and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism. Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We may compare this with the relationship between, say, Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.

Yes, the authoritarian acorn never falls far from the collectivist tree.

Last week I linked from White Rose to this piece by Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph, because it contained some stuff of White Rose relevance about using technology to enable parents to keep track of their kids.

But, as commenter Mark Ellott pointed out there, this Telegraph piece also contained some interesting reflections on the teaching of history, provoked by the increasing annoyance being expressed by Germans about Britain's continuing obsession with the history of Nazism to the exclusion of any other sort of history.

Our Education Minister, the big-eared Mr Clarke, has been using his big ears to listen to his German opposite number Edelgard Buhlman, tell him that:

… our fixation with Hitler is leaving British teenagers with a distorted view of German history, and a violent prejudice against the Teutonic race.

A lot of the problem, says Lewis, is that children don't learn history dates any more. I think she's probably right. When I was about eight or nine I had a vast set of history dates dinned into me – with my enthusiastic cooperation I should add – and I've been fascinated by history, all history, any I could lay my hands on that was fun and made any sense, ever since. My only regret is that the list I imbibed wasn't bigger and more global in its scope. I should guess that much the same applies to many of the regular readers of this blog. How can you understand history without getting a handle on the basic stuff that it happens in, namely time?

Yet this boringly chronological approach to history teaching was, Ms. Lewis tells us, abandoned in the 1970s for a more pick-and-mix, bring-it-alive and never-mind-when-exactly-it-happened approach to history, and the only bit that kids now want to pick is The Nazis.

This is not a matter of opinion, but of fact. An Ofsted report earlier this year confirmed that British pupils spend more time learning about the Nazis than any other period of history. Meanwhile, one survey after another suggests that our broader historical knowledge is dying out. The statistics are hair-raising. More than half of Britons are unaware that America used to be a British colony; 55 per cent believe that Elizabeth I introduced curry to this country; 17 per cent of teenagers cannot even guess in which century the First World War took place.

Never mind the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Industrial Revolution and the Suffragettes, what we want is Hitler!

Now that they can – and do – choose to spend almost every lesson poring over the evil deeds of history's most infamous homicidal maniac, the evidence suggests that they love it. As one teacher bemoaned last week: "If you try to avoid him, the pupils say: 'I was only doing history to study the Nazis.' " But a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone. We need to see the broader sweep of things.

But for me there is a huge irony here. For ask yourself this: why is Mr Clarke so anxious to de-Nazify the teaching of history in Britain? And why are German politicians making such a fuss about this issue? I'm sure that part of the answer is that they just are, and that as time goes by, the thing just gets more and more embarrassing and uncouth.

But I think that the EU is involved here. If a generation of Brits has now grown up thinking that "Europe equals Hitler", that could be the popular opinion half of a British pincer movement against British EU provincehood, the other half being British elite hesitations. For as long as the "bloody Huns" view of history was confined to the old geezers who had actually fought against the Huns, then that sentiment could simply be left to die out with the old warriors. But now, it turns out, this sentiment is not dying out. The kids hate the Huns too! Indeed, that's the only thing about the past that they're sure of.

We are told again and again that British public opinion is now unchangeably against British becoming a province of the new EUropean nation that they are busily forging on the continent, to the point where this public opinion might not merely vote against the EU constitution if granted the opportunity, but actually vote for such an opportunity in the meantime. Where did this opinion come from? Might the "Hitlerisation" of British history teaching not be one of the big the culprits?

Ms. Lewis says that "a diet of unleavened Hitler is no good for anyone". But if you are the type, as I am, who believes that Britain should shake itself free from EUro-provincehood, might you not reckon that the collapse of that more nuanced and informed and less melodramatic presentation of History – of History with lots of history dates and with that "broad sweep", as Ms. Lewis terms it – turn out to have been … rather a good thing?

How huge an irony would that be? The very people who have worked hardest to beat British national pride out of Britain, namely the teaching profession and the theorisers of teaching who have been guiding them, have ended up with a kind of History that says only one thing: Germany bollocks!! Don't want nothing to do with them bastards!!! As a result these anti-historical history persons, mostly rabidly pro-EU on anti-British grounds, could be achieving what looked impossible as recently as only a decade ago, namely the saving of Britain from permanent EUro-subjugation.

Lefty bastard enemies of British History, we hail you, the savours of British national independence.

Or, as Instapundit would say: Heh.

The Reconquest of Spain
D. W. Lomax
Longman, first published 1978

It is surprising to read (p. 179), "There seems to be no serious book in any language devoted to the history of the whole Reconquest," (at least when the book was published in 1978) despite the fact that it would seem to be the underlying theme of the history of the Middle Ages in the Peninsula, with the nice firm dates of 711-1492. The author commends O'Callaghan's A History of Medieval Spain.

Like everywhere else, from Persia to the Atlantic, Islam rolled unstoppably over the whole of Spain, except its tiny northern edge, probably leaving that out in favour of richer pickings in southern France. Even here, in Asturias, only active resistance to the Arabs ensured the survival of the tiny state and an early civil war amongst the Moslems led to the withdrawal of disaffected Berbers from northern territory which was then occupied by Christians.

The author claims, with some evidence, that quite early the ideal of Reconquest was the ambition of the Christian kings and people. However, the initial Ummayad emirate, subsequently caliphate, flourished until the end of, and particularly during, the tenth century, though the last caliphs were puppets. It is probably this period of the Muslim occupation that has been idealised as a time of toleration by Muslims of Christians and Jews, though these were definitely second-class citizens and persecution of them not unknown.

The break-up of the caliphate enabled the Christians to advance again, with some assistance from France; also the crusading ideal, though mainly focussed on Jerusalem, was some help, sometimes by crusaders en passant. The capitulation of Toledo, even though it remained something of an outpost, signalled this. However, about 1085, some of the Muslims, in desperation invited in from North Africa the Almoravids, a puritanical sect (often hated by the more liberal decadent Spanish Muslims) who, in the great battle of Sagrajas (1086) halted the reconquest. The Cid (1043-99) is of this period. Much of the time he as often served Muslim kings as Christian, but after capturing Valencia, "was the only Christian leader to defeat the Almoravids in battle in the eleventh century". (p. 74)

By this time the Christian states were Portugal, Leon-Castille (gradually united), Aragon and Navarre, sometimes allied, but more often not and generally with no scruples about fighting each other with Muslim allies. However, Aragon was pushing down the Ebro valley, taking Saragossa in 1118, though the Almoravids fought back successfully to prevent it reaching Valencia, which had been evacuated after the death of the Cid.

Like the Caliphate before them, the Almoravids disintegrated and were largely replaced, from 1157, by another sect from Africa, the Almohads, who soundly defeated the Castilians at Alarcos in 1195. This defeat seems to have first cowed then roused the Christians (particularly the Pope); finally Christians from all the Spanish kingdoms, and some from France, united in a campaign which won the decisive victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). In the forty years after the battle the Almohad empire broke into pieces which were annexed by" Castile and Aragon. Vital cities - such as Cordova (1236) and Seville (1248) - passed permanently into Christian hands so that "by 1252 the whole of the Peninsula was nominally under Christian suzerainty" (p. 129), though this, of course, did not mean the end of Muslim kingdoms.

The pace of reconquest slowed down, initially as a result of another transfusion from Africa, the Marinids, who, however, could only defend the Muslim rump. In 1340, at Tarifa, their sultan was decisively defeated and no successor state in Africa invaded Spain again. Muslim Spain survived as Granada for another 150 years, the Christians occupying much of the time fighting and rebelling against each other. One is forced to add: when they should have been completing the Conquest. The process, when it happened, certainly united Spain. In the end, "Fernando and Isabel could cure one crisis in 1481 simply by setting the war-machine to work once more to conquer Granada." (p. 178)

The author, at his Conclusion makes the persuasive claim that "Only Spain [and also, I suppose to a lesser extent Portugal, which he does not mention] was able to conquer, administer, Christianize and europeanize the populous areas of the New World precisely because during the previous seven centuries her society had been constructed for the purpose of conquering, administering, Christianizing and europeanizing the inhabitants of al-Andalus." (p. 178) As so often in books published from the 1970s on, the maps leave much to be desired; certainly places are mentioned in the text which are not to be found on them.

Two days after I had finished this book I listened to a discussion on "Cordovan Spain" under Melvyn Bragg's chairmanship on Radio 4. The three other participants were Tim Winter, a Muslim convert, of the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University, Mary Nickman, a Jewess (carefully correcting herself from AD to Common Era) and an executive director of the Maimonides Foundation, and Martin Palmer, whose voice was not to me sufficiently distinguishable from the first, an Anglican lay preacher and theologian, and author of A Sacred History of Britain. Although the consensus was largely positive about the Ummayad regime, and their tone "multicultural" in the modern sense, the first two did seem to agree that the three religions, while coexisting, did not indulge in dialogue, let alone interpenetrate. This confirms an episode mentioned in the book, that even when promised immunity in a bilateral debate, a Christian was executed "when he expressed his real opinion of Mohammed". (p. 23) Nor was the Koran translated into Latin "until the twelfth or thirteenth century", someone said in the discussion. Needless to say, the rosy view of Muslim Spain did not take into account that the Muslim conquest fatally disrupted Mediterranean civilization, the burden of Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne. To pick up the shards and pass a few of them on does not strike me as a very large recompense.

The Age of Reagan: I 1964 –1980
Steven F. Hayward
Prima Lifestyles, 2001

This is a very long book (718 pages + another 100 pages of notes etc.) and it is somewhat daunting to realise that in due course a second volume will come to complete the story. It might be as well to say that this is emphatically not a biography, not even a political biography; the title and the sub-title The Fall of the Old Liberal Order make this clear. It is more a history of the times, from the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 to the Reagan landslide of 1980. The cumulative impression of the book itself is its richness and how its detail ministers to its analysis.

And it is a sorry, not to say a frightening tale, telling as it does of the collapse of American self-confidence and the rise of the counter-culture of self-hatred amongst its elite. The narrative is admittedly partisan, but at the very least a case that needs to be put. As for the Presidents of the period, Hayward's judgements are that Johnson was irresolute, reacting to events minimally, Nixon misguided, obsessive and unfortunate, Ford a mere stopgap and Carter simply disastrous. All of them seemed to have underestimated Soviet malevolence and overestimated Soviet stability; for the latter the intelligence services seem to have been especially at fault.

For anyone who has been misled into thinking that Reagan was an intellectual nullity, here is ample evidence that he was an independent and original thinker, often insisting on keeping to his own line or script in face of criticism from his advisers and speechwriters. Many of his statements, which at the time seemed naive, questionable, wrongheaded or too extreme now seem merely farsighted. He was also optimistic about America and had no time for any rationale for its decline, such as Kissinger, student of the rise and fall of European states, believed in, or at least feared. Nor was he put off by the "complexity" arguments of those who despised him for his simple attitude to problems and their solutions. Some of his difficulties with his own advisers and supporters lay in persuading them that this attitude could be made plausible to the public as electorate.

As much as the first two thirds of the book, however, has little mention of Reagan, for it is a history of how the US got into the messes that Reagan, it is fair to say, rescued it from. By far the biggest mess, which he was too late to do anything about, was, of course, the Vietnam War and it is quite plain that the left-leaning media and intellectuals, combined with political ineffectiveness and downright ignorance, contributed overwhelmingly to its being lost. To illustrate US political masochism: the two "war pictures" that had the greatest negative impact on home support - execution of the Vietcong prisoner and the napalmed little girl - won Pulitzer Prizes for the photographers.

It is not exactly necessary to be reminded, but it is necessary to bear in mind that it was under two Democrat Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, that the US entered and enmeshed itself in the Vietnam "quagmire" (though this is not a term I recall being used by the author). The muddled, incremental escalation of the conflict by Johnson is described in Ch 4. It was also a Democrat Congress, not the President, the hapless Ford, that abandoned the South Vietnamese, even refusing to supply them arms.

Even more so was Cambodia betrayed, and the dignified reproaches of their leaders, as they refused the offer of evacuation by the American ambassador, to face certain death, make sad reading (p. 408). It is a terrible comment on what the consensus was that Reagan's characterisation of the US effort in Vietnam as a "noble cause" was regarded as eccentric and chauvinist, just as later was "evil empire" (but for the latter's vindication see The Week, 15/2/02, p. 13).

All through the account is woven the political manoeverings of various, almost forgotten presidential hopefuls and their minions. The ups and downs of Reagan's two bids for the Republican nomination and the campaign that won him the Presidency, are given in great detail. On the other hand, his two terms as Governor of California are more lightly sketched in (or are perhaps less memorable). A fine book, which should be better known.

On BBC 2 last night there was a programme in the series 'Seven Wonders of the Industrial World'.

This particular episode was on the building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States.

As one would expect the show did not present the companies involved (the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific) in a very positive light. And the BBC have a point - the companies were subsidy grubbing, brutal and corrupt.

However, it was also clear from the programme that the the Central Pacific was less brutal, less corrupt and more effective than the Union Pacific.

Some things the programme did not mention (for example the Central Pacific's policy of 'buying off' Indians - rather than just getting the army to kill them). But it did show that although the Central Pacific Railroad were ruthless they were not the killers (of Indians and Whites) that the Union Pacific were. The programme also showed that the owners of the Central Pacific actually cared about their company (rather than just considering an object to be looted as Durant of the Union Pacific did).

Furthermore it was clear that the Central Pacific overcame vast physical obstructions to the building of a railroad and that its people (White and Chinese) showed creative thought and vast physical effort in overcoming these obstructions.

In the end the Central Pacific won the race to get to the rendezvous point decreed by Congress - and had to wait for two days for the Union Pacific to turn up.

Fantasy presents conflicts as being between good guys and bad guys. However, in real life conflicts are more often between bad guys and worse guys (although later in American railroad history J.J. Hill does appear to have been a genuine good guy).

It was good for the soul of America that the bad guys (rather than the worse guys) won the race.

There's an article in today's New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won't find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler's "Bavarian retreat".

The predominant color scheme of Hitler's "bright, airy chalet" was "a light jade green." Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, "a droll raconteur," decorated his entrance hall with "cactus plants in majolica pots."

Such are the precious and chilling observations in an irony-free 1938 article in Homes & Gardens, a British magazine, on Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. A bit of arcana, to be sure, but one that has dropped squarely into the current debate over the Internet and intellectual property. This file, too, is being shared.

The resurrection of the article can be traced to Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers in Britain, who says he was given a vintage issue of the magazine by his father-in-law. Noticing the Hitler spread, which doted on the compound's high-mountain beauty ("the fairest view in all Europe") at a time when the Nazis had already gobbled up Austria, Mr. Waldman scanned the three pages and posted them on his personal Web site last May. They sat largely unnoticed until about three weeks ago, when Mr. Waldman made them more prominent on his site and sent an e-mail message to the current editor of Homes & Gardens, Isobel McKenzie-Price, pointing up the article as a historical curiosity.

Ms. McKenzie-Price, citing copyright rules, politely requested that he remove the pages. Mr. Waldman did so, but not before other Web users had turned the pages into communal property, like so many songs and photographs and movies and words that have been illegally traded for more than a decade in the Internet's back alleys.

Still, there was a question of whether the magazine's position was a stance against property theft or a bit of red-faced persnicketiness.

Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that's what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they've written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought.

This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place.

Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it.

But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed.

This posting of mine may now seem like a typical example of the media, in this case a blog, telling some wretched victim of a media frenzy (such as this story now surely is) that they "now have the opportunity to tell their side of the story", to yet another bit of the same damned media, who will then slant that new bit of the story as cruelly as they have slanted every other bit of it. But that isn't how this part of the media works. If you take the minimum bit of trouble you need to take (e.g. by setting up your own blog), you really can, these days, "tell your side of the story" in a manner over which you can have editorial control. Be interesting. Be honest. Don't be boring. Follow rules like that, and you can influence all stories about you in a very big way, because any decent journalist will want to refer to anything you have to say, simply to prove that he is on top of the story.

The same new media world which makes it impossible for you to snuff out the original article (still less the media frenzy about the original article), no matter how much the law may be on your side, also makes it impossible for you to be silenced, unless you silence yourself.

As the New York Times piece concludes:

For all of that, though, IPC Media's unwillingness to discuss even the content of the Hitler article is puzzling to Mr. Waldman. This skeleton was abruptly yanked from the Homes & Gardens closet, yes, but the article reflects more about the mind of aristocratic Britain in 1938 – well known to have given Hitler the benefit of the doubt – than it does about the magazine itself. Even the American press noted the beauty of Hitler's compound, including The New York Times, which on Sept. 18, 1938, wrote that the chalet was "simple in its appointments" and that it commanded "a magnificent highland panorama."

Posting these pages online "doesn't damage Homes & Garden's reputation," Mr. Waldman said. "In fact, putting them up, along with a letter from the editor explaining a bit about them, could be a very positive thing for them to do."

I do admit that, done wrongly, such a letter might only fan the flames of the story, but what are the alternatives? Either you feed your genuine opinion of what is being said about you into the frenzy, or you don't. The frenzy still happens. The situation is either: definitely bad – or: it could vary anywhere from bad through okay considering and we held up our end, and onwards and upwards to downright excellent and we made a stack more money this year than we ever expected to, and all because of something rather stupid we said about Hitler in 1938.

Maybe in the next few days Homes & Gardens will, under the pressure of events, change their tune, and end up singing the one I here recommend for them. But my guess is they'll say to themselves, better play it safe.

But my point is: safe isn't safe these days. There's only truthful and positive and risky, and evasive and negative and risky. The biggest risk being that you turn your back on all the gains you might have won if you'd played your hand right.

I have been reading a remarkable book about a remarkable period in British history - the mid- to late 18th century - when a group of entrepreneurs, gifted amateur scientists and political radicals helped create the foundations of much of our modern industrial world.

The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, looks at the lives of a small but amazingly influential group of men, particularly the ceramics genius Josiah Wedgewood, pamphleteer and scientist Joseph Priestley, engineer Matthew Boulton, steam engine king James Watt, and medical doctor Erasmus Darwin. What jumps off the page is these men's tremendous sense of drive and enthusiasm for acquiring and sharing knowledge. They were great polymaths, seeing no division between the pursuit of abstract knowledge and practical concerns of money making.

Most of these men were consciously outsiders, eccentrics and radicals ill at ease with the Anglican establishment. That sense of being 'on the outside' I think partly explains their drive to succeed. Most of them notably were unable for religious reasons to attend the main English universities of Cambridge and Oxford, often attending Scottish academies instead or bypassing such places altogether. And I was also struck by the sense of limitless possibility afforded by a country which at the time imposed very few restrictions and taxes on the public. 18th Century Britain was a bit like the Silicon Valley of the 1990s, with powdered wigs. Of course there were restrictive practises such as merchant gilds and duties on some imports, but that period surely came about as close to a genuine model of laissez faire capitalism as we have ever seen in our history.

There was much that was very bad and ugly about that period in our history, but also a great deal worth preserving and emulating today. The entrepreneurial gusto of these men is something we could surely use today. Glorious geeks indeed.

It would be quite wrong to suggest that the issue of self-defence (and the law relating thereto) is a libertarian issue. But it is probably true that, for many years, there was next to no debate about it as an issue outside of libertarian circles.

For free market advocates, self-defence (and the natural right thereto) is not just an important issue, it is a cornerstone of individualist philosophy. Yet, while libertarian scholars and writers debated passionately about the issue, it barely registered a blip on the radar of wider public interest.

That is, until a certain Tony Martin shot two intruders who had broken into his remote Norfolk farmhouse, killing one of them. The news that he had been arrested and charged with murder, led to a broken-dam deluge of furious and passionate debate about the right of self-defence and which flooded every medium.

Overnight, it seemed, self-defence had become a ‘hot’ topic, not least because, as with so many debates, it has tended to generate more heat than light.

I do not intend to simply re-hash the Martin case and the various reasons why his actions either were or were not justified. That has already been done in some length here and elsewhere. What I want is to examine the reasons why practical self-defence has, to all intents and purposes, become illegal in the UK.

The obvious starting point is the law itself. While I believe that broader phenomena have played their part in creating the current situation, it is critical to examine how they worked to shape both law and custom as it stands.

There is not, as such, any statutory right of self-defence but self-defence is permissible under the terms of S3 (1) of the Criminal Law Act 1967:

A person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large.

Thus a person may use force to prevent the commission of a crime which includes a crime being committed against that person (such as assault, rape etc). However the crucial caveat is that the use of force must be limited to ‘such force as is reasonable in the circumstances’. This means that a person who is subjected to an attack must have regard to proportionality in their response to that attack. Their actions can, and will, be judged objectively after the event.

It is often said, indeed it is widely assumed, that the 1967 Act merely codified the previous common law position. But, on closer scrutiny, I think that claim holds no merit. The English common law (which, in theory at least, still exists) managed to establish some important and meritorious distinctions reference to which can be found in The Law of the Constitution by A.V. Dicey (MacMillan, London 1885).

That is not to say that the lines were straight or the issue black-and-white. In fact, Judges struggled to maintain a balance between the individual right and wider public interest.

Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians. Over-stimulate self-assertion, and for the arbitrament of the Courts you substitute the decision of the sword or the revolver.

Despite grey areas (which are unavoidable), the Courts dealt with self-defence cases by eschewing dogma in favour of applying common-sense principles. The result of this was the emergence of two separate doctrines. The first, according to Dicey:

In defence of a man's liberty, person, or property, he may lawfully use any amount of force which is both "necessary" - i.e. not more than enough to attain its object - and "reasonable" or "proportionate" - i.e. which does not inflict upon the wrongdoer mischief out of proportion to the injury or mischief which the force used is intended to prevent; and no man may use in defending his rights an amount of force which is either unnecessary or unreasonable.

Clearly the 1967 Act is a codification of this doctrine ("legitimacy of necessary and reasonable force").

However, Dicey goes on to describe a second doctrine ("the legitimacy
of force necessary for self-defence."), thus:

A man, in repelling an unlawful attack upon his person or liberty, is justified in using against his assailant so much force, even amounting to the infliction of death, as is necessary for repelling the attack - i.e. as is needed for self-defence; but the infliction upon a wrongdoer of grievous bodily harm, or death, is justified, speaking generally, only by the necessities of self-defence - i.e. the defence of life, limb, or permanent liberty.

A far more robust doctrine and one which does not require of the citizen the employment of either proportionality or reasonableness provided the use of force is strictly in defence of life or limb.

Dicey concludes from these two doctrines:

If, however, it be necessary to choose between the two theories, the safest course for an English lawyer is to assume that the use of force which inflicts or may inflict grievous bodily harm or death - of what, in short, may be called extreme force - is justifiable only for the purpose of strict self-defence.

But extreme force is expressly stated to be ‘justifiable’ in those circumstances and, indeed, this doctrine was reaffirmed by the ruling of Lord Chief Justice Parker in the case of Chisham (1963 - 47 Cr App Rep 130):

".... where a forcible and violent felony is attempted upon the person of another, the party assaulted, or his servant, or any other person present, is entitled to repel force by force, and, if necessary, to kill the aggressor ....".

Note that there is no mention of either ‘reasonableness’ or ‘proportionality’.

Put simply, the two doctrines combined represented a judicial recognition of the difference between crimes of a life threatening nature and crimes of a non-life threatening nature. In the case of the latter the force used had to be proportionate and reasonable. In the case of the former, no such qualifications applied. So, for example, a shopkeeper cannot take out a gun and shoot someone who has been merely pilfering from his shop because the act of pilfering does not represent a threat to the shopkeeper’s life and limb. However, if the criminal enters the shop wielding a knife to use on the shopkeeper then, under the common law doctrines, the shopkeeper would be permitted to shoot the miscreant dead.

In my view the fault of the 1967 Act was in ignoring the important ‘second doctrine’ of the legitimacy of force necessary for self-defence and instead using the ‘first doctrine’ as a blanket provision. By doing so the Act also extinguishes the previous recognition of the practical difference between life threatening and non-life threatening crimes. This means that the citizen is in a weaker position post-1967 because he or she required to respond ‘reasonably’ and ‘proportionately’ regardless of the nature of the threat he or she may be facing.

However, my opinion is that the British citizen today has been put in an even more helpless position than they should have been by the 1967 Act and this is due to the pre-eminence of various political and cultural phenomena.

All the common law described by Dicey is predicated on the firm assumption that the ordinary citizen had not just a right to prevent crime but even a duty to prevent crime. Truly the law was in the hands of the people although they were still required to abide by it. Today, this assumption has been turned completely on its head and although it is difficult to identify the precise provenance of this change or any specific turning point, what does seem clear is that, sometime during, or possibly just after World War II, the business of crime prevention and self-defence was wholly nationalised.

The change in attitude can be illustrated by the extract from a speech given in 1953 by the then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe:

The government do not wish to lend themselves to the support of the proposition that it is right or necessary for the ordinary citizen to arm himself in self-defence. The preservation of the Queen's peace is the function of the police, and... …it would be a great pity if anything were done explicitly by statute to condone actions which imply the inability of the forces of law and order to maintain the Queen's peace."

[This extract is taken from the book ‘Guns & Violence: the English Experience’ by Joyce Malcolm]

Fyfe was most likely referring to the issue of gun-control but the attitude he exhibits is, I suggest, typical of the political attitude to the subject of self-defence in general. The prevention of and resistance to crime was no longer the duty of the citizen nor even the right of the citizen; it was now seen as being wholly the function of the state to be exercised as a monopoly by its various agencies.

Thus, the citizen who ‘takes matters into his own hands’ is so deeply offensive. Aside from the question of any mischief he may or may not have inflicted upon his tormentor or assailant, his worse ‘crime’ lies in the usurpation of a power that the state regards as being within its sole competence.

The law is now in hands of the government. The citizen is merely required to obey.

Every British government since at least the 1940’s has held as a core belief that safety of the citizen and the prevention of crime is a matter for the government and the government alone. Indeed, so deeply ingrained has this assumption become in every branch of the state that, in practice, any action taken by the citizen that is more than mere token resistance is regarded by the police and the judiciary as unreasonable. The same culture has fuelled the missionary zeal with which the British state has pursued (with great success I might add) the complete disarmament of its citizens.

But even that is, perhaps, not entirely the picture for I find it hard to believe that the post-1960’s ascendancy of post-modernism has not also left its mark. I say this because of the number of times that, whenever the issue has been the subject of public discourse, I have heard self-defence described as ‘vigilantism’ or ‘retribution’. This is a squalid and reprehensible distortion of the truth but it is one which is entirely consistent with a philosophy by which acts of resistance to barbarism are ascribed a far worse degree of moral turpitude than the manifestations of barbarism itself.

My opinion is that the law should be changed to take into account the greater breadth and depth provided by the common law tradition. But the law itself is only a part of the picture because the real problem has been caused by an unfortunate agglomeration of Conservative Paternalism, Labour Statism and moral relativism that has abolished self-help, stripped the citizen bare, and delivered each one of them up as the ‘slaves of ruffians’.

Though a change of law may be required, of itself it will not be enough. What is required to reverse this situation is also a change of culture and, above all, a reclamation of the kind of common sense and pragmatism that once informed all those English judges.

[Thanks are due to Dr.Sean Gabb for his invaluable research materials and to Steven Chapman for the quote from Joyce Malcolm.]

A couple of weeks ago, while taking a little tour of Provence, I found myself in Arles, once a great Mediterranean port but today a small town with some spectacular Roman ruins, famous for being the location where Vincent Van Gogh painted many of his most famous works, as well as being the place where he cut off his left ear.

In one of the town squares, I found a fairly ordinary and old looking memorial to the events of the second world war.

However, there was a very new plaque on it. Let's get a closer look.

This is quite intriguing. Unless the servicemen in question did something extremely famous, it is unusual to find a memorial to one or two specific men. (At least, it is outside graveyards). While the sacrifice of every soldier or airman who died is worthy of commemoration and remembrance, the numbers who died were so great that it is not possible. So why these two? Were Lieutenants Tippett and McConnell the only Americans to die in Arles in the war? If not, what did they do to merit this memorial? And why was this plaque not erected until almost 60 years after the action in question? Were more details as to what happened in the war only found out recently? Had some historian who knew what they did long campaigned for such commemoration. One senses that there is an interesting story there, either about the actions of the men themselves, or at least about how the plaque came to be erected. I googled for their names on the internet but found nothing. I am sure that if I wrote to the mayor of Arles to ask, I would receive a letter back telling me the answer. However right now I don't know anything. Still, if any readers of this site know anything, I would be interested to hear it.

And it is worth noting that the citizens of at least one French town felt the need to erect another memorial to the American sacrifices made in 1944 in liberating France as recently as last year. Not everyone forgets.

How exactly did the Cold War end, and who exactly won it, and lost it?

I like this summary, provided by someone or something called "The Friendly Ghost", which he (it) wrote in response to the accusation that the current President of the US has also been telling the occasional untruth.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he was briefed on the military capabilities of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At the end of the briefing, Reagan asked, "Is that all the forces we can afford?" The answer was yes. The president then asked, "Then how can the Soviet Union afford such a huge military?" He was told they couldn't. At that point, Reagan decided to see the Soviet Union's 20-year military build-up, and raised them Star Wars.

Now, President Reagan couldn't just say he was building a shield to shoot down ICBMs. He had to demonstrate that the technology actually worked. But it didn't really work. So the decision was made to rig the tests, so that it looked like the system worked. In other words, HE LIED. But the Soviets believed the lie, and bankrupted themselves trying to catch up to the Americans. Gorbachev eventually came to power, and shouted "glasnost!" A few years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.

The moral of the story? By telling a lie, Ronald Reagan helped bring down the United States' biggest, most powerful enemy, without firing a shot. Sun Tsu would be proud.

I'm not exactly sure what the provenance of the above is. It seems to be a summary of things that the Friendly Ghost guy got from this guy.

The Friendly Ghost then continues, in his own voice, so to speak.

Yes, the story is a simplification of events. But a couple of months ago, I watched a documentary on the History Channel about Star Wars. The Soviets really were that paranoid about SDI, at least for a few years. Although by the time of the Reykjavik Summit, there was some suspicion about the effectiveness of SDI, Reagan's actions in not giving it up helped sustain the illusion in many minds in the Soviet leadership. But the most telling statistic? When the Soviet Union fell, it was discovered that the CIA had woefully underestimated Soviet military spending. The Soviets were spending 25% of their GNP on their military. Yes Virginia, there was a reason the Soviet Union fell. The military spending killed the economy. And why were the Soviets spending so much on their military? Two words: Ronald Reagan.

I was always of and remain of the opinion that the proper percentage figure for Soviet "defence" spending was one hundred.

A lot of my libertarian friends, acquaintances and competitors believe that the USSR would have collapsed anyway, a victim of its own "internal contradictions" – i.e. its useless economy, inability to make PCs or washing machines or jeans or decent cars, or make sensible use of fax machines and photocopiers.

My feeling about that is, maybe it would, but how might it have collapsed? Had the old USSR not been faced by a weapon-wielding USA breathing fire, brimstone and Tom Cruise movies all over it, and flashing cool photos of stealth bombers all over the place, might the USSR not have collapsed outwards, so to speak? Might it perhaps have attacked lazy, fat, pre-occupied Western Europe, in order to get more plunder, and to divert its domestic population from its domestic griefs with foreign glories, Henry V style – and because it preferred going out with a bang to going out with the whimper that it actually did go out with?

My favourite end-of-Cold-War moment came in the late eighties when, on a British TV show, a Dimbleby asked Caspar Weinberger what defence spending was being "prioritised". Said Weinberger, after a thoughtful pause: "Well, pretty much everything." I knew then that it was over.

I know, I'm a libertarian and I'm not supposed to enjoy stuff like that, but I did and I do. Given what Reagan could do with the buttons he had on his desk, and did not have, I think he did very well.

I have been enjoying the television documentary of the American war of Independence shown over on the BBC (yes, that pinko channel!), presented by military historian Richard Holmes.

Bestriding around the countryside, Holmes is excellent. He even looks the part with his bearing and military moustache - you could imagine him in an army officer's uniform circa 1940.

During his trip Holmes asked some locals on a bus travelling near Charleston about what the war meant to them. One elderly lady gave an articulate take, arguing about the issues of taxation, representation and liberty. And then he spoke to a young guy, probably in his early 20s, who came out with this gem. I paraphrase slightly:

Well, it was all about rich folks, who just did not want to pay their taxes. If it hadn't been for them, we'd be British, and enjoy (!) socialised medicine.

So there you have it. Some of the younger American generation wish that George Washington had lost so that all Americans could use the National Health Service.

Don't know whether to laugh or cry, really.

The dominant 'story' of economic development is that science gives birth to technology, and technology makes money. But who pays for science? That has to be the government, the community, all of us. Because, who else will? So, economic development depends on a strong state, because only a strong state will pay for all that science.

Terence Kealey, in his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, tells a different story. Strong states destroy freedom. Weak states allow it, and thus allow capitalism, which pays for technology, which stimulates, pays for and is in its turn stimulated by science (the causal link between technology and science is that technology causes science at least as much as science causes technology), and technology also (Kealey accepts the usual causal link about this bit) causes increased prosperity.

The early chapters of this book supply an excellent potted history of pre-industrial Western Civilisation and its development. Here are the paragraphs that describe the fall of the Roman Empire:

So unconcerned with research did the Roman State become, that the Emperors actually suppressed technology. Petronius described how: 'a flexible glass was invented, but the workshop of the inventor was completely destroyed by the Emperor Tiberius for fear that copper, silver and gold would lose value'. Suetonius described how: 'An engineer devised a new machine which could haul large pillars at little expense. However the Emperor Vespasian rejected the invention and asked "who will take care of my poor?".' So uncommercial had the Romans become, their rulers rejected increases in productivity. In such a world, advances in science were never going to be translated into technology. Thus we can see that the government funding of ancient science was, in both economic and technological terms, a complete waste of money because the economy lacked the mechanism to exploit it.

The fall of the Roman Empire was frightful. The growth of the Empire had always been based on conquest, and the Empire's economy had been fuelled by the exploitation of new colonies. When the Empire ran out of putative victims, its economy ceased to make sense, particularly as the mere maintenance of the Empire, with its garrisons and its bureaucrats, was so expensive. From the beginning of the second century AD, the State had to raise higher and higher taxes to maintain itself and its armies. It was under the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan, when the Empire was at its largest, that residual freedoms started to get knocked away to ensure that revenue was collected. Special commissioners, curatores, were appointed to run the cities. An army of secret police were recruited from the frumentarii. To pay for the extra bureaucrats, yet more taxes were raised, and the state increasingly took over the running of the economy - almost on ancient Egyptian lines. In AD 301, the Emperor Diocletian imposed fixed wages and prices, by decree, with infractions punishable by death. He declared that 'uncontrolled economic activity is a religion of the godless'. Lanctantius wrote that the edict was a complete failure, that 'there was a great bloodshed arising from its small and unimportant details' and that more people were engaged in raising and spending taxes than in paying them.

The origins of medieval feudalism emerged from the Roman Empire as it decayed. To ensure that the peasants continued to work under an economy which had lost its free-market incentives, Constantine promulgated a law in AD 332 which bound all coloni to the state as serfs. Their children were glebe adscripti, tied to the soil. To reinforce state control on all aspects of the economy, the city trade guilds or collegia imposed compulsory, hereditary trades on all. An edict Of AD 390 forbade children of the workers in the mint to marry outside their caste or trade. The towns shrank, and the population condensed on the patriarchal, self-sufficient, isolated estates that adumbrate the medieval European villages. Indeed, the word 'village' derives from the Latin villa, indicating that the feudal villages originated as the private estates of Roman magnates. And the Roman Catholic Church, once adopted by Constantine as the official religion, started to burn heretics. Religious and intellectual freedom, the great gifts of the Graeco-Roman period, were extinguished. No new technology emerged.

Contrary to myth, the empire did not collapse in the face of unstoppable barbarian hordes. The numbers of barbarians were always small (a mere 80,000 vandals took the whole of Roman Africa in less than a decade). The empire fell because many of its citizens had emigrated to the freer, more pleasant barbarian lands (under the late empire, the population fell from 70 to 50 million) and, crucially, the invading barbarians found themselves welcomed as armies of liberation by vast numbers of oppressed people. The empire had been warned. In De Rebus Bellicus, published anonymously around AD 370, the author called for tax cuts, new technology, and political freedoms: 'In the technical arts, progress is due not to those of the highest birth or immense wealth or public office or eloquence derived from literary studies but solely to men of intellectual power . . . [the barbarians] are by no means considered strangers to mechanical inventiveness.' The author blamed the greed of the rulers for the desperation of the poor: 'This store of gold meant that the houses of the powerful were crammed full and their splendour enhanced to the destruction of the poor, the poorer classes of course being held down by force. But the poor were driven by their afflictions into various criminal enterprises, and losing sight of all respect for the law, all feeling of loyalty, they entrusted their revenge to crime. For they often inflicted the most severe injuries on the Empire, laying waste the fields, breaking the peace with outbursts of brigandage, stirring up animosities, and passing from one crime to another, supported usurpers.' Unfortunately, this very sensible tract was never shown to the Emperor, Valentinian I, even though Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that he was one of the emperors who actually was interested in inventions.

The empire collapsed, not for a lack of Hellenistic science - there was plenty of that - but because it abandoned capitalism. It was a plunder empire, not a market empire. For plunder, it forsook free trade, and it therefore forsook the developments in technology that the free market would have fostered, and it also forsook the development of technologically inspired science. Since new technology is effectively synonymous with economic growth (see the discussion in Chapter 7), we can say that, in modern terms, the empire failed to raise its GDP per capita.

The fall of the Graeco-Roman hegemony teaches that the government funding of academic science will not generate useful technology in the absence of an appropriate, capitalist economy. This is so different from the conventional history that we must underline it. A standard textbook like Buchanan's Technology and Social Progress emphasises, in the author's own italics, on the very second page, that 'A strong state, in short, is a necessary precondition of industrialization' but we have shown that, historically, the reverse is true. In antiquity, it was the strong states that suppressed technology, and the weak ones that fostered it, because the weak ones were too weak to rob individuals of their freedom. As we shall see, it took the Dark Ages and their attendant chaos to liberate the human spirit and so fructify commerce, technology and a healthy science.

When reading about the many and disparate anti-globalisation activists who protest against international trade, one often gets the impression that the writers discussing their antics think that what motivates these folks is a relatively new phenomenon.

Not so. The desire to replace free trade with politically controlled and above all, domestic trade has long been a central aspect of collectivism of all flavours.

Adolf did not much care for global trade either

At its root, all forms of collectivism have more in common than its supporters might be comfortable admitting.

From the Radio Times (paper only) of 14-20 June 2003, on the subject of the BBC4 TV programme "High Rise Dreams", shown on Thursday June 19th:

Time Shift looks back at how a group of idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, inspired by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier and new materials, only to be thwarted by financial restraints, poor craftsmanship and Margaret Thatcher's private ownership creed.

In the Radio Times of 21-28 June 2003, on the subject of the repeat showing on BBC4 TV of the same programme on Sunday June 22nd:

In the first of three programmes on architecture, Time Shift looks at how idealistic architects changed the face of council housing in Britain, only then to be thwarted.

Well that removes the obvious political bias, but I'm afraid that if the idea was to make this puff less wrong-headed, it scarcely begins to deal with the deeper problems of it.

The implication, still being assiduously pushed on the quiet by the more blinkered sort of dinosaur partisan for the Modern Movement in architecture, is that the failures of the Modern Movement were all externally imposed, by penny pinching bureaucrats and by horrid, politically motivated politicians like the hated Margaret Thatcher, and that if only more money had been made available and they'd been allowed to get on with what they were doing unimpeded by their mindless enemies, all would have been well.

A logical (if not moral) equivalent would be if the Radio Times were to talk about how a group of idealistic Nazis tried to improve the world, inspired by the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, but about how they were thwarted (a) because not enough resources were devoted to doing Nazism, and (b) because Nazism's opponents decided, for who-knows-what wrongheaded and arbitrary reasons, to barge in there and put a stop to it. With more money and less silly opposition from ideologically motivated enemies, all could – and would – have been well. (I dare say there are still a few old Nazis around who think this.)

The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating.

The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I'll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens.

The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an "experimentally designed" block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited.

The idea of a "vertical street", also made much of by certain Britain's Modern Movement architects, is also rubbish. Streets have to be at least a bit horizontal or they don't work. Think square wheel.

I've chosen those two notions in particular because they were emphasised in the programme itself, the general tone of which was decidedly different from the puffs in the Radio Times.

I think I've found the culprit.

6 June 1944... the start of the Anglosphere's armed liberation of western Europe from National Socialism.

It never hurts to keep reminding some people of that.

Instapundit links to this UPI report:

WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine.

"In response to an international campaign, the Pulitzer Prize board has begun an 'appropriate and serious review' of the 1932 award given to Walter Duranty of The New York Times," Andrew Nynka reported in the May 25 edition of the New Jersey-published Ukrainian Weekly. The campaign included a powerful article in the May 7 edition of the conservative National Review magazine.

Sig Gissler, administrator for the Pulitzer Prize board, told the Ukrainian Weekly that the "confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty's award," Nynka wrote.

The utter falsehood of Duranty's claims that there was no famine at all in the Ukraine -- a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others -- has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented -- and potentially immensely embarrassing -- procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize.

The Ukrainian famine of 1929-33, named the "Harvest of Sorrow" by historian Robert Conquest in his classic book on the subject, was the largest single act of genocide in European history. The death toll even exceeded the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people a few years later.

One of the lesser lies now circulating about the Cold War, Communism and all that is that because it is now history, we should all forget about it.

So, in an attempt to spread interest in this important issue by trivialising it, I have a question. Walter Duranty – Jimmy Duranty. What if any is the connection between these two persons?

Jimmy Duranty was the bloke who sang that song that they used at the end of Sleepless in Seattle, right? And in one of my all time favourite movies ever, What's Up, Doc?, Ryan O'Neal and Barbra Streisand sing a song called "You're The Top" or some such thing, and during their version of this, reference is made to "The Great Duranty". Walter, yes? Or is that Jimmy? If it's Walter, it shows how the lie has reverberated down the decades, but is it?

It's not that I'm opposed to writing serious prose about murderous famines and about the scumbags in the West who concoct and print lies about how these murderous famines aren't murderous famines at all and then spend another seventy years lying about all their earlier lies - merely that joking around is one of the ways you draw attention to such things.

This appeared as a comment from Nick Forte in the largely humorous article about the brouhaha relating to the State Flag of Georgia. As Nick makes some very interesting points about an endlessly debated subject, we thought it was worthy of appearing as a Samizdata.net article in its own right

I fear the debate over the cause of the Civil War will never be resolved. This is because there was no single cause. There was not even a predominant cause. The various participants in the war fought for a myriad of different reasons. On the Southern side, it is true that many advocates of secession argued that slavery was threatened if the South remained in the Union. This view was strongest in the Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), were most of the slaves were located.

But is must be remembered that there were two waves of secessions. The states of the Deep South seceded in the early months of 1861 and many of their articles of secession did claim slavery as a major issue.

The Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas) did not secede until after Lincoln called for a levy of state militias to put down the "rebellion". It was their view that the Federal government was abusing the sovereign rights of the seceding states that drove the Upper South out of the Union. In fact, prior to Ft. Sumter, Virginia voted against secession. Also, both Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson, two Virginians who were unarguably the Confederacy's two best generals, viewed slavery as an abomination and wouldn't have taken up arms simply to fight for slavery. They were fighting to defend their home and hearth from what they viewed as a foreign invasion.

Even this dichotomy between the motivations of the Deep South and Upper South over simplifies the issue. The South also had other grievances against the North, particularly over the tariff. The Republican Party, representing the manufacturing interests of the North-Eastern States, was highly protectionist at that time. Lincoln had written quite extensively on the benefits of high tariffs. The South, with few manufacturers, generally supported free trade.

Two days before Lincoln's inauguration, the new Republican dominated Congress passed the notorious Morrill Tariff, which raised the average tariff rate from 20% to 47%. Nine days later the Confederate Congress adopted a 10% tariff.

Although a low tariff was good economic policy for the Confederacy, it was terrible politics for the South's goal of independence. Overnight it changed the reaction of the North to secession. Prior to the passage of the 10% tariff, most Northern newspapers editorialized in favour of letting the South go. Even abolitionist papers took this position, believing that Southern independence would allow the North to eliminate all vestiges of the fugitive slave acts, making slavery unsustainable in the Confederacy. The passage of the 10% tariff was viewed a direct economic challenge by the North and eliminated Northern tolerance to Southern independence. After its passage, most Northern papers changed their editorial positions and called for the military subjugation of the South. With a little more discretion by the Confederacy on the timing of the passage of the tariff and Lincoln may not have been able to sustain Northern support for the war.

As for abolition, this didn't become a part of the North's war aims until the war was already half over. Lincoln not only denied that he was fighting the war to free the slaves, he even supported the passage of an irrevocable amendment to the Constitution that would preserve slavery were it already existed in perpetuity. Very few people realized that this proposed amendment was actually approved by the House of Representatives after the Southern delegations had already departed.

Add to the above a strong cultural mistrust between dour Puritan Yankees and Southern "cavaliers" and you have a complex cocktail of "causes" for the Civil War. Trying to divine a single cause of the war, although understandable, is simply a misguided act of foolishness.

Nick Forte

Once upon a time, there was a group of states within a larger nation who did something terrible...they allowed slavery. Eventually there was a dreadful civil war between those states and some other states who did not approve of slavery. Although the war was only incidentally about slavery and rather more about centralised versus decentralised power, it did at least have the happy effects of ending slavery.

The National Flag of The Bad Guys: The Stars and Bars!

The flag which The Bad Guys flew in battles

How do we know they were 'The Bad Guys'? Because of slavery, of course, but mostly we know this because they lost and the winners get to write the history books.

So much later, after the war was over, one state used a flag which harked back to the old battle flag. They argued that most of the people who fought in that war from their state were just fighting for hearth and home and very few of them actually owned slaves anyway. Regardless, those days were part of their history and they rather liked their old flags.

Oh no...Echos of The Bad Guys!

This upset some people mightily and they threatened economic boycotts and all manner of other nastiness if the state did not change their flag to remove the symbolism of The Bad Guys of Old.

So the governor said people could vote on this, but then decided that no, actually, they couldn't, or maybe they could... but in the mean time, here is a splendid new flag and will you leave me alone now?

The Flag Spangled Banner?

So folks stopped for a moment, looked at this new flag and agreed that it was just about the dumbest, ugliest dish-rag to flap over the state capitol ever. "Screw that!" they all cried, and so the arguments continued to rage.

Eventually however, they agreed to another splendid brand new flag and everyone was happy because this new flag does not look anything like the flag used by The Bad Guys of Old, right?

The State Flag of the Good Guys: The...er, um, ah...Stars and Bars

Those Americans... who says they have no concept of ironic humour? You just gotta love 'em.

On May 4, 1626 American Indians agreed to sell Manhattan island to European settlers for $24 in cloth & buttons. As with most free market transactions, all parties involved were satisfied with the deal: the settlers got land to homestead, the Indians received exotic manufactured goods that were beyond their ability to produce.

This is the first posting in what may or may not turn into a series on the general theme of the historic impact of the ever changing and evolving technology of communication, thoughts provoked by the talk that Michael Jennings gave at my home on the evening of Friday April 25th.

One of my fondest memories is of an earlier talk given by Sean Gabb in this same ongoing last-friday-of-the-month series, about the impact of the printing press. He described this not in the usual way, by telling the story of the printing press itself, and how it spread, and what it caused, but by describing how things were done before printing existed. He described how documents were copied before there were any printing presses to copy them, the central point being that such documents only lasted so long and it was all that the copyists could do to keep existing texts in continued existence. In such a world it was very hard for knowledge to grow. On the contrary, the only thing it could really do was shrink, which does a lot to explain why the Golden Age in those days tended to be placed in the past, rather than in the future as we now tend to prefer.

But another way to look at the arrival of printing is to look at it not just as a means of data storage, but also as a means of data transmission.

Consider. With any means of communication there are basically two problems to solve. First, you have to concoct the message in the first place. Second, you have to transmit it. Now, look at printing from these two points of view. Clearly, it does wondrous things to the first process, but equally clearly, a little compression aside, it contributes almost nothing to the second. Getting a book from Antwerp to Rome still depends on the speed of a donkey, just as it always did.

This simple fact had huge consequences for the way that printing impacted upon the wider culture.

Suppose you are a hand-copier of texts. Basically, your product is loaded onto donkeys just as soon as you and your assistants can finish the things. Therefore, your product is spread thinly, as it were, all over the known world, in rather the way that fish food sprinkled only very slowly onto the water of your fish tank is spread all over. Reading is the shared experience of an international elite which is small, but widely dispersed.

Did I say "international"? Make that pre-national. Civilisation consists of one elite, who all tend to speak and read in the one international (make that "universal") language (Latin), who together preside over and quarrel about a mass of relatively tiny geographical possessions, whose various peasantries speak God knows what barbarous dialectical variants of whatever language thrives in their vicinity. Learning literacy and learning Latin are the same thing. The peasants – by which I mean nearly everyone – aren't involved. That's the world without printing.

Enter printing. Suddenly – suddenly at any rate in terms of the long span of history - each printing press is thrashing out more products than the wretched transalpine donkeys can keep up with, or it is wanting to if only it can sell the damn things.

A printer starts out by thinking that he is merely speeding up an existing business, but soon he starts to look at the local market in a new way. To cut a long story short, what he does is: produce books in the local language. That way, he cuts out all those donkey journeys and opens up a huge market right on his own doorstep.

The unbreakable, impossible to un-imagine link between learning and learning Latin is broken. And before you know it, the printers produce their first Killer App. The Bible in the local language, or the vernacular as the scholars call it. The world is no longer one community, with a civilisation-spanning elite that communicates more with itself than with any mere locals; it is shattered into several dozen separate communities, in which the locals start seriously to communicate with each other, but not so much with foreigners. And each of these new nations interprets the Bible in its own distinct way. Words like "national", and in due course our own hybrid word "inter-national", start to make sense.

It's a new world.

But – and it's a big but – the details of the story of how printing changed history, as with the story of how any big new method of data storage and data transmission change history, is massively more complicated than the little story I've just told about hand-copied texts and donkeys. (This lady, for example, goes as far as saying that printing did not cause nationalism, which is taking the "it's complicated" line way too far.) The stuff about texts and donkeys is true, but there was much more to it than that, and that simple principle took several centuries to work its way through our culture. But the fact that these effects can often be very complicated is itself too complicated to elaborate on in this posting.

I pretty much worked out all of the above for myself, that is to say I got it from no one writer or mentor. Therefore, not many links. But I did a google search with "Printing" and "Nationalism". I got lots of stuff, as you can imagine, and the detestable Eric Hobsbawm loomed larger than I would like. This (produced by these people) looks more promising, and more directly relevant to what I've written.

On this day in 1945, Benito Mussolini paid 'the price of tyrants' and became an interesting public ornament for a while.

Last night the British television channel, Channel 4, gave us another superb documentary history programme with a great twist - the story of the Dambuster raid on the German dams in WW2. It relayed the story of how Wing Cmdr Guy Gibson (a mere 24 years old) led a squadron of Avro Lancasters to smash two dams using the famous "bouncing bomb".

The programme makers got a group of present-day serving RAF aircrew, including two women, who work in the very different airforce of today, to try to repeat the feat of Guy Gibson's men, using a flight simulator and a real-live Lancaster. These modern flyers are used to state-of-the-art navigation technology rather than the old pencil, map and compass techniques that had to be used back in the 1940s, when radar-based techniques were in their relative infancy.

It made for compulsive viewing. And one thought stuck in my head. Most of the flyers are about on average 10 years younger than me (I am 36). Gibson, as noted above, was just 24. I don't think - as the Iraq campaign demonstrates - that the best of our young folk today are any less capable of performing heroic and dangerous feats than our forbears. And while I would prefer to see such talents used for peaceful purposes like entrepreneurship rather than flying a bomber, I think recent events bode rather well for our future.

That's something to remember when London gets infested with the usual rag-bag of anti-globalistas and Saddam mourners on May 1.

Nigel Meek has been doing some digging around in the archives.

Having flicked through a digest of British politician's speeches about the war, and looking at just the contributions from some members of the Labour Party, four themes seem to stand out.

1. Devotion to the United Nations as the only real legitimising agency before, during, and after the war.

2. That because of the various dealings that we may indeed have had with the regime in the past, it is therefore unacceptably hypocritical of us to tackle them now.

3. Pessimism about the eventual outcome.

4. Irrespective of the outcome, a belief that it will be extremely costly not least to our own side.

Iraq in 2003? No, the Falkland Islands in 1982.

For reasons that I won't bore anyone with, earlier today I was puttering around the Latin American section of the University of London's library at Senate House. My eyes fell on a dusty tome entitled "The Falkland's Campaign: A Digest of Debates in the House of Commons, 2 April to 15 June 1982" published by HMSO, London.

By a remarkable coincidence, the book fell open at a speech by none other than that master of decisiveness, Robin Cook. Randomly dipping further into the book, it was eerie to read the 'usual suspects' such as Cook and Tony Benn making the same speeches then as they've been doing two decades later. It's as if they've had their secretaries scan in their old speeches from Hansard, convert them into Microsoft Word documents, and then use Word's find and replace facility to swap 'Argentina' and 'Iraq'.

There was even dear old Tam Dalyell using the words 'South Atlantic', 'mire', and 'Vietnam' in one speech!

Britain's Channel 4, whilst known to have more than its fair share of nit-wit journalists, does nonetheless turn out some splendid documentary programmes. The best of the current crop being a series called 'Secrets of the Dead' which attempts to explore the science behind great disasters of the past.

This past week (and I cannot help wondering if the scheduling was more than coincidental) they devoted themselves to the great Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918/19 that swept right around the globe and claimed some 20 millions lives. Or at least, that is the death toll that I believed was generally accepted but, according to this documentary, the real toll was between 50 million and 100 million! If that is so then surely it must rate as the single most lethal pandemic in history? Not to mention that fact that, coming hot on the heels of World War I, it has to be the biggest ever kick in the head.

But here is the rub, because according to the senior virologist advising the documentary makers, there is some convincing evidence that the troop concentrations of World War I is what led to the outbreak:

John Oxford and his team found pathology reports from an army camp in Etaples, northern France, that have given him vital clues about the origin of the 1918 pandemic. Etaples was a huge army camp, almost the size of a city. 100,000 soldiers, well and wounded, moved through the camp daily. To supply food to this number, the army installed piggeries at the camp. There is evidence that soldiers bought live geese, chickens and ducks from the local French markets. Crucially, there were lots of opportunities for a flu virus to move from bird to pig, to soldier. Indeed, in the winter of 1916/1917, Etaples pathologists describe a disease-like flu that ended in heliotrope cyanosis and death. John Oxford believes the weight of evidence points toward Etaples as the viral mixing bowl that produced the 1918 strain of flu.

Mr. Oxford also adds,

'If we had another influenza pandemic, and we will have another influenza pandemic, I think it will make the HIV outbreak almost look like a picnic.'

Blimey! The only thing missing from that is the spooky background music. Still, TV producers do like to spice up their dry-as-dust science programmes with a bit of melodrama and, let's face it, general doom-mongering has probably overtaken fly-fishing as a favourite recreational activity. But I would more prepared to let this slide into great public melee of cried havoc were it not for the persistant, and increasingly troubling reports, of SARS:

Dr Carlo Urbani, a 46-year-old Italian and an expert on communicable diseases, had identified Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in an American businessman admitted to hospital in Vietnam in February.

Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore are all confining people to their homes if they have been exposed to the disease.

Isolated cases have been identified in Europe and North America.

Of course, SARS (the technical name for which is 'shitscarey-itis') appears to be a virulent form of influenza or pneumonia and we've got very large troop concentrations indeed in Iraq and the surrounding vicinity. Who was it that said that history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme?

Now I am not about to get all wild-eyed and apocalyptic on you. In fact, as soon as I have finished posting this I am going to go to bed and sleep like a baby. Also, and let me be quite emphatic about this for the benefit of the 'quagmire' lovers out there, there is no comparison whatsoever between the current hostilities in Iraq and World War I and I do believe that SARS has, in fact, been knocking around South-East Asia for quite a few months but we've only recently got to hear about it.

But, crystal-clear distinctions aside, nobody is going to tell me that there isn't just a hint of eerie resonance here.

The Western Roman Emperor Valentinian I (364-375 AD) refused to intervene in theological controversies "It is not right for me, a layman, to meddle in such things. Let the bishops whose business it is meet by themselves wherever they like".

Valentinian tolerated all sects of Christian (bar the Manichees) and even allowed the traditional pagan rituals to take place in the Senate House in Rome - the alter of Victory remained in place, and the Vestal Virgins and the other ancient Roman priesthoods continued.

Valentinian was not a half hearted Christian - he had been an open Christian during the time of the pagan Emperor Julian (when being a Christian was not exactly a good strategy for promotion).

Nor was Valentinian a kindly man - for example he had men who tried to dodge conscription burned alive.

It was simply that religious toleration was a perfectly respectable point of view for a Christian in Valentinian's time.

The other point of view (that at least non Christians should be persecuted) was widely held also - for example by the powerful Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Valentinian's own brother (the Emperor of the East - Valens) persecuted Christians that held to a different point of view to himself (as Valens was an Arian this meant persecuting people who held what later became the mainstream point of view). But the matter was not clear cut - one could be a Christian in good standing and not support persecution.

Only a few years later the idea that the ruler should not lay down what people believed and that pagans and heretics should not be persecuted would have been held to be absurd by most theologians and rulers. This continued to be the mainstream view till at least the 17th century and it was only in the 18th century that most Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians came towards the view that they should tolerate each other.

What had happened?

I hold that it was the vast prestige that the writings of St. Augustine were held in that explains the matter. Augustine had justified persecution (in his case of the Donatist Christians) Augustine was the greatest theologian of all time - so (for most people) that settled the matter. When the Protestant Reformation came it did not mean religious toleration because the Protestant theologians (such as Luther and Calvin) were at least as devoted to Augustine as the Roman Catholics were.

Nor was this Augustine's only negative influence. Augustine practically invented (certainly did more than anyone else to make mainstream) the revolting doctrine of 'predestination'. Under this doctrine how a man acts in his life does not affect his chances of going to heaven. Human beings were, by definition, so vile that nothing they could do would improve their chances - they all deserved to be damned for all eternity.

God (according to Augustine - with, I admit, some support form the Book of Revelation, whilst ignoring most of the rest of the Bible) has selected certain people from the begining of time to save and their being saved is nothing to do with any merit - as human beings can have no merit.

True Augustine pushed this doctrine to counter the British theologian Pelagius, who Augustine (perhaps falsely) held stressed free will so much as to deny divine grace (i.e. that people could make themselves perfect, or could work their way into heaven without any need of God), but the effects of this doctrine of predestination were terrible.

People understood from the doctrine that reason and moral effort were meaningless, that the ways of God were arbitrary and nothing to do with reason - and that human beings were vile and would always not just be not perfect, but would always be utterly vile and those of the slave owing, child raping crew (that is humanity) that went to heaven rather than to hell were selected at random, or at least by some process outside human understanding. Not so much "justification by faith" (for it is not the choosing to be a Christian that saves someone according to predestination), but "justification by who knows what".

This may not have been Augustine's intention, but this was the logical conclusion of the doctrine he spread. And as the early Protestant theologians (especially Calivn, but Luther also) were devoted to Augustine the Protestant reformation of a thousand years later did not mean the breaking down of the doctrine (although the later Lutherians did break with it).

St. Augustine was consistent. Just as he used his vast reasoning powers to deny reason in the area of religion ("that bastard reason" as Luther put it), thus committing treason against the mind, so he also denounced scientific thought.

For example ideas that the world was very ancient (according to Augustine) should be crushed - because they went against the Bible.

Only a tiny fraction of the literature of the classical world has come down to us. And whilst it is true that the Church was the great preserver of classical writings, it is also true that there were periods when the Church destoyed writings thought of as anti-Christian - and when they burnt the books they had the prestige of Augustine to justify their actions.

It is not true that either the 'dark ages' or the 'middle ages' were free from intellectual enquiry (far from it), but the forces of ignorance and persecution had the prestige of Augustine to support them at every turn.

Objections.

"But Augustine is a saint, so he must have been a good man".

Cyril of Alexandria was also made a saint (indeed he was honoured  by Pope Leo XIII as recently as the late 19th century) and he was a revolting man. He 'won' a debate against a rival (Nestorius) by having the rival's tongue removed and then saying that 'divine worms' had come down from heaven and ate it whilst it was still in his rival's mouth. Cyril also indulged in all forms of bribery and corruption, organised a pogrom against the Jews and caused the pagan philosopher and mathematician Hypatia to be dragged from her chariot, stripped naked and skinned alive on the high altar - this seems rather more like a sexually perverted 'black mass' straight from a horror film then anything a Christian should be proud to be involved in.

"Augustine was a great thinker and inspired many other great thinkers".

Karl Marx is also widely held to have been a great thinker and to have inspired many other great thinkers - that does not mean that Marxism is true.

"Michael Oakeshott held that Augustine was a defender of civil association".

Michael Oakeshott also held that Thomas Hobbes, Jean Bodin, Sir William Petty and many other supporters of tyranny were defenders of civil association. Michael Oakeshott was indeed a great man who had many great and true ideas - but he is a dangerious guide to the history of political thought.

Oakeshott correctly states that (for example) Thomas Hobbes held that the alternative to the state was chaos were no man's goods or life would be safe. But this does not make Hobbes a defender of civil association. There is no attempt anywhere in Hobbes' writings to limit the power of the state - no constitutional ideas and no theory of resistance.

Indeed the whole point of Hobbes' writings is to get people to submit to the state (to avoid civil strife yes, but the state is in no way limited to just preventing civil strife). To Hobbes the rulers can do what they like and there is nothing we should try and do about it, he is an a defender of the all mighty state state - and was understood as such.

Oakeshott loved to get writers such as Hobbes (supporters of tyranny) and present them as defenders of freedom (what would be the point of presenting Hobbes as a defender of tyranny - anyone could do that, only a powerful thinker could present the opposite case, just as only a truly powerful thinker can present the case that Alexander Haig was a great general during the first World War - John Terraine has done exactly this).

To present Augustine as a defender of civil association is false. Certainly he did not express much interest in government economic planning (unlike, say, Sir William Petty he had other concerns). But there is little in Augustine about constitutional government (he may, as Oakeshott points out, use some of the language of Cicero - but he is no follower of Cicero). Indeed Augustine even has 'positive' ideas for government himself - such as his support for government welfare provision.

"Augustine was guided by the holy sprit and therefore can not have been a force for evil".

For libertarians who are atheists the above will not seem a strong argument. However, for those people who are not atheists I would say the following.

By their fruits shall you know them - you know this. I am not saying that everything Augustine wrote was wrong (let alone evil), or even that all the consequences of his writings were evil.

Nor am I saying that Augustine was an evil man. Indeed even when he justified the persecution of the Donatists it should be remembered that they were in favour of persecuting the mainstream church people.

Nor am I defender of the idea that reason can do everything, or that people can transform the objective facts of their lives by the "power of positive thinking" (or other such emotional uplift). Anyone who knows me would testify that I am a grim minded man with, if anything, far too strong an idea of the darkness of human life in this world and the limits of what many (indeed perhaps most) people can do to improve their lives.

What I am saying is that Augustine was sometimes mistaken and that the consequences of some of the doctrines he defended were bad.

If you can refute what I say by using the reason that God has given you please do so - if not, do not hide behind the evasion that people who win theological disputes and have a lot of influence must have been guided by the holy spirit in everything they wrote. To do this does not just insult human reason, it insults God as well.

The second instalment, from the same source, of historical events relevant to current affairs, as it often seems with history. This is due to the comments on the previous posting about slave trade by Muslim corsairs, correctly identifying who took them on.

More effective were the exploits of the Americans, who put the British government on its mettle. The activities of the corsairs, who did not scruple to kidnap Yankee sailors, led to the new republic's first experiment in geopolitics. It was principally on their account that Congress decided to establish a navy in 1794, and America consistently refused to ransom captives in the European way by handing over money, powder, shot and arms to the Muslims. As President Jefferson put it: "Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute." From 1803 Washington, in effect, made war against the beys. In one episode in 1805 American marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing Tripoli to make peace and surrender all American slaves, and giving rise to the famous line in the U.S. Marine Corps anthem "From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shore of Tripoli". Immediately after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, when the cruising season of 1815 opened, Washington sent out a squadron under Stephen Decatur to punish the Barbary towns for violations of previous agreements. He forced the Bey of Tunis to pay $46,000 in compensation, and in Tripoli he also exacted a fine and secured the release of some Danish and Neapolitan slaves. His squadron was relived by five of the new 'big' frigates under Commodore William Bainbridge who, in June 1815, achieved a remarkable moral victory over the Bey of Algiers, who was given exactly three hours to comply with an American ultimatum to hand over all U.S. captives plus a cash compensation; the Bey capitulated on time. There is some doubt about the permanent effectiveness of this American intervention, since all the pirate rulers repudiated their treaties once American ships were below the horizon. But news of it created a sensation in Britain and led to irresistible pressure on the government to order a similar display of British naval power.

Could we, please, have the history repeat itself again now?!

The stories of how outrageously the anti-war protesters in London dealt with those who will bear the consequences of the West's actions, whatever they are, reminded us again of the double-standards of the peaceniks and other useful idiots. Blinded by their ideology they let the pleas of those who experienced Saddam's tyranny fall onto deaf ears.

There is also the now institutionalised double standard for racial relations and the double standard on which the entire debate about 'white imperialism' is based. Pondering such inconsistencies in people's positions, I often attributed them to the lack of intelligent and rational public discourse. The short attention span of mass audiences maintained by the mass media enables them to substitute the rational with the emotional.

Or so I thought. And then I came across this early example of double standard by Western politicians that would score a high political correctness count, even in these affirmative action times:

In the early 19th century slavery was almost ubiquitous in the world but the Barbary Coast, stretching 1,500 miles from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Sirte in Lybia, was unique in being the only area where white men and women were subjected to it in large numbers. The Barbary pirates, using what would now be called a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam as their pretext, regularly kidnapped Christian livestock from Italy, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and from the ships of all nations sailing the Mediterranean.

Wealth capitves could usually obtain ransom without difficulty. The rest were treated with varying degrees of barbarity. Torture was used to obtain convestions to Islam, "turning Turk", as Western sailors called it.

The West's supine attidute towards the horrors of Barbary piracy had long aroused fury in some quarters. Officers of the British navy were particularly incensed since seamen were frequently victims of the trade. They could not understand why the huge resources of the world's most powerful fleet were not deployed to root out this evil affront to the international law of the sea, once and for all. They could not understand why liberal parliamentarians, who campaigned ceaselessly to outlaw the slave trade by parliamentary statue, took no interest in Christian slavery.

Admiral Nelson wrote in 1799:"My blood boils that I cannot chastise there pirates. They could not show themselves in the Mediterranean did not our country permit. Never let us talk about the cruelty of the African slave-trade while we permit such a horrid war."

But William Wilberforce, MP, and the other Evangelical liberals, who finally got the slave trade made unlawful in 1807, flatly refused to help. They were concerned with the enslavement of blacks by whites and did not give the predicament of white slaves a high priority on their agenda, an early example of double standards.

So, nothing new under the sun...? History repeats itself...? People don't change...?

OK, that'll do.

The naval might of Switzerland has prevailed. A country with all the maritime traditions of Outer Mongolia, Iowa and Chad has prevailed where 152 years of British endeavour have failed. The America's Cup, a trophy given by Queen Victoria to promote yachting in the English Channel, and which has never been won by a British team has now changed hands from the USA (1851-1983 [No, that isn't a typo!], and 1988-1995), Australia (1983-1988), and New Zealand (1995-2003). And now Switzerland.

The main priviledge for the winner, apart from collecting a silver trophy named after its first winner, the schooner America is to get the right to host the next challenge, which is now expected to be in 2007. As this has to be on seawater, there is a little problem. Switzerland is about 450 miles from the nearest coastline. So the defence will probably take place in the Mediterranean or on the Altantic coastline of France.

It's all very jolly for Ernesto Bertarelli the Swiss owner of the Alinghi team, for Russell Coutts the New Zealander skipper hired to beat his former team mates. So why no British success. Until the 1970s, no one else but the British even challenged the New York Yacht Club. The explanation I offer explains why Italian and now Swiss challengers have emerged, despite no obvious historical tradition for this sort of contest.

In the first place, British ship design has been poor since the day that King Henry VIII watched his newly launched flagship the Mary Rose, capsize in Solent. Admiral Nelson is well known to have preferred a captured French frigate to the Admiralty's own designs. At the battle of Jutland in 1916, inferior ship design was responsible for the destruction from one hit each of two British battle cruisers and only the desperate (and dying) actions of a crew member saved the flagship from suffering the same fate moments later. At the same battle the only German loss was a cruiser which had taken over one hundred hits and was scuttled. During the pursuit of the Bismark in 1942, the largest British ship ever built (later overtaken by the Vanguard) HMS Hood took one hit from the German battleship. Three out of 1,300 crew survived as the Hood simply blew up. During the Falkands war (1982) it was discovered that the British frigate hulls were so thin that one Exocet missile would melt a whole section of it, and the anti-aircraft missiles didn't work.

Whenever a foreign government (Japan, Tsarist Russia etc.) has decided to build a navy, it has nearly always considered buying British. Yet having taken a look at what British shipyards had to offer, they almost invariably bought German, French or (before steam) Dutch. If the State Department will let them, they'll buy American.

Second, status. If one country could combine public money and individual talent to produce a succesful America's Cup challenge, it is France. Many of the yachting and long-distance windsufing records are held by French, especially Breton sailors. This is nothing new. Jean Cabot who landed in Newfoundland to secure the first English presence in the New World was French. Many of the place names hundreds of miles upstream in the US have curious names: Pierre, Des Moines, Boise to name but state capitals. The supreme British yachtswoman Ellen Macarthur is far better known in France than in the UK, indeed she seems to sail in French ships most of the time. When Macarthur completed a solo round the world trip a couple of years ago, the French president travelled 500 miles to welcome her ashore. I think the local British consul might have been on duty.

Third, taxes. Yachting is a rich man's toy. To compete in an America's Cup challenge, you need a cool $50 million to even think about taking part. You need a crew that's incredibly strong and intelligent, neither feature being the sort of thing a comprehensive education is designed to produce. You also need to be able to hire the best at top rates, again more money and dynamic management. The result is that only big corporations, very big family businesses and governments have the money for this sort of enterprise.

Britain has plenty of corporations and government, but not a lot of family businesses in the billionaire bracket. The main blame for this is taxation. 'Inheritance Tax' or 'Death Tax' as I prefer to call it, whacks 40 per cent of capital from one generation to the next. One of Britain's cutest institutions the National Trust was actually created to manage the property confiscated through taxation from Britain's wealthy families, hence all the stately homes one can visit. Luxembourg has no Death Tax, I imagine that Switzerland's can't be very high and the Italian situation can't be too harsh (one way or another).

Taxation also forces savings into distorted investment patterns, what the Austrian economists call "malinvestment". In Britain we have wonderful private and corporate pension funds able to provide a far higher proportion of our old age needs than any other European country. Of course this means that there are virtually no family businesses of large scale in the UK, unlike France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland. everything is owned by the funds and administered by fund managers.

It is obvious that board-room politics and being the skipper of a racing yacht don't mix, the best model on a ship is top-down autocracy. Politicians acting via bureaucrats also don't make very good skippers either, except perhaps in wartime. But a family business that can throw a hundred million away from time to time has exactly the right focus to make a success of a racing team. Witness the Grand Prix Formula One racing dominated by the late Gianni Agnelli's Ferrari team. Yachting is the same. So too was aeronautics before the 1950s.

So for land-lubbers like myself - and most Swiss people - the America's Cup has a curious function. It is a barometer of enterprise around the world. One of these years I expect to see a private challenge from Russia or China, now what an indicator of social change that would be.

On February 25, 1836 Samuel Colt patented his revolver. "God made man, Colt made them equal"

I don't suppose that anybody outside Britain or Greece has even heard of the Elgin Marbles and in neither country are there a great many people who are likely to be get exercised over them.

That said, these ancient Greek artifacts are something upon which a small number of people have quite robust opinions and I happen to be one of them.

The 'Elgin Marbles' are currently housed in the British Museum in London and are made up of 56 sections of the frieze sculpted by Phidias around the Parthenon. They were acquired and brought to London by the British diplomat Lord Elgin early in the 19th Century from their original home in Greece and where, despite their grandeur and beauty, they had been abandoned to the twins corrosions of the elements and indifference.

For many years, the Greek government has been campaigning for the return of the Marbles to their original home in Greece. In this, they are supported by a large section the British arty/literatti/celebrity set who approach the issue with the same kind of fuzzy-headedness and sophistic feel-goodery that they approach everything else.

Much of the left in Britain has also taken the side of the Greeks in this issue, not out of any particular fondness for Greece but because, for them, the Marbles are a rude reminder of British imperial acquisitiveness and arrogance and their continued presence in the British Museum a standing affrontery to the culture of self-abasement and guilt that they have so assiduously fostered on these shores.

However, the entire matter has been off the radar-screen for some time and it may be because the 'usual suspects' are otherwise noisily engaged in the matter of preserving Saddam Hussein's regime, that we have been treated to a rather bold announcement from the British Museum's director:

"The director of the British Museum has said that the Elgin Marbles should never be returned from Britain to Greece.

In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Neil MacGregor said the sculptures, which once adorned the Parthenon temple in Athens, should remain in London.

He has also ended discussions with a British campaign group seeking their return to Greece."

Good for you, Mr.McGregor. I was not only delighted by this announcement but also (pleasantly) surprised, given the recent low-profile of the issue. It has set my mind to wondering whether Mr.McGregor has at all chanced upon a very recent essay on the matter by Sean Gabb:

"Needless to say, I am strongly opposed to returning the Marbles. If I had my way, they would stay in London forever - preferably joined by anything else we might in future be able to bribe out of the Greeks or the other successor states of antiquity. Indeed, if Lord Elgin did anything wrong, it was to leave too much behind when he finished his work in Athens. He should at least have taken all the pediment sculptures and another caryatid. He might also have dug up some of the statues buried after the Persians destroyed the old Acropolis in 480BC. The world of culture would be all the better had he done so. Just compare the Caryatid he took away with those he left behind, and ask if he really did wrong. However, rather than continue with its mere statement, let me try to justify my opinion. I will review the case for returning the Marbles."

I usually make a point of arguing a given matter from my own bat, but I am not averse to using someone else's bat in circumstances where their bat is both bigger and wielded with such admirable adroitness. Sean's tightly argued and highly learned essay is quite the most the comprehensive and definitive case for retaining the Elgin Marbles in Britain and I do not hesitate to strongly recommend it to everyone regardless of whether they are British or not.

Of course, I can only speculate as to whether or not Mr.McGregor has read the essay and was inspired by it in the same way I was. Probably not. More likely it is just coincidence in which case it is a welcome synchronicity and an indication that level-heads are starting to fight back on this issue.

One of the best things about the British Channel 4 television slot is its history programmes. I recall watching a number of programmes about the Napoleonic wars, and they ended with a remarkably Euro-sceptic take on the different visions of social order as evinced by British Prime Minister Pitt the Younger and politician Edmund Burke on the one hand, and those of Robespierre and his fellow totalitarian psychos, on the other. So maybe Channel 4 is not quite the haven of idiotarian marxoid nonsense I used to think after all.

Further proof of that view came last night in the end of the series Empire, a series on the British Empire by historian Niall Ferguson, who also has a good book out.

Anyway, last night's programme ended with a comment much to the effect that for all its faults, the British Empire spread the English language (good thing), the rule of law (same), capitalism (yep, good thing again), and team sports (ditto). And although it eventually broke up, our influence is still large, albeit indirectly, via the US, although the US dare not call its reach of influence an empire.

In other words, Ferguson has gotten the Anglosphere bug. This meme is spreading fast. Where will it go next, I wonder?

About once every blue moon, Blogosophical Explanations springs to life, and there was another posting there as recently as December 14th of last year. It included this, from Herb Gintis, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts:

… Economists are fond of using the Folk Theorem of repeated games and the Tit-for-Tat simulations to argue that human cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run, enlightened self-interest, but we will argue in chapter 11 that this view is profoundly incorrect. There are two major problems with the idea that cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run self-interest (charitably interpreted to include regard for kin). The first is that self-interest results in cooperation only when agents are sufficiently future-oriented (i.e., the discount rate is very low); but in situations where a social system is threatened and likely to be destroyed, cooperation is most central to survival and agents are likely to be very present-oriented, since the probability of future interactions is low. Therefore, societies in which cooperation is based on long-run self-interest will invariably collapse when seriously threatened. The second problem is that there is sizable evidence that we are considerably more prosocial than is predicted by the long-run self-interest models.

Except in the context of anonymous market interactions, the idea that human beings are self-interested is particularly implausible. Indeed, some of the major predictive failures of game theory stem from not recognizing the positive and negative aspects of preference and welfare interdependence. Homo economicus might be reasonably described as a sociopath if he were to be set loose in society.

There are many more tangents there to fly off at than one little Samizdata posting could possibly have space for, but allow me to indulge in just one.

As a description of the full panoply of human society, Tit-for-Tat is surely every bit as inadequate as Gintis says it is. All humans, provided only that they are allowed to, train each other to be more axiomatically cooperative than that, in societies which expect to survive past their next big collective crisis.

But how about Tit-for-Tat as a description both of the nature of actually existing "Soviet man" and of the collapse of the Soviet system?

… but in situations where a social system is threatened and likely to be destroyed, cooperation is most central to survival and agents are likely to be very present-oriented, since the probability of future interactions is low. Therefore, societies in which cooperation is based on long-run self-interest will invariably collapse when seriously threatened. …

… Homo economicus might be reasonably described as a sociopath if he were to be set loose in society.

As descriptions of a successful society, these two statements are woefully insufficient, but as descriptions of what did happen in the old USSR, both to the system as a whole and to the character of the individuals who ended up running it, are they not uncannily accurate? Was Homo Sovieticus not also Homo Economicus? Yes he was.

But although Soviet individuals were all Economicus (apart from some of the dissidents), the system as a whole was Sovieticus, thus giving them the worst of all possible worlds.

In free societies, the system is much more Economicus, but the individuals – for that very reason - become much more Sovieticus, in the original aspirational sense hoped for by the first generation of actually existing Homo Sovieticus (the generation which, in an insane fit of misplaced team spirit, allowed itself to be wiped out by the final version).

One of the deeper ironies of actually existing socialism (or "socialism" as we samizdatistas like to call it) is that socialism recreates in the purest form the precise vices that it wrongly attributes to "capitalism". Actually existing Homo Sovieticus became precisely the selfish calculator of short-term and long-term self-interest, with absolutely no sense whatsoever of citizenship, collective cultural enterprise, social teamwork, shared civilisation – with absolutely no altruism, other than towards his own family and in particular towards his own descendants. Thus, when the Soviet system as a whole was threatened with collapse, actually existing Homo Sovieticus did nothing – absolutely nothing – to save that system. It simply wasn't in his personal interest.

So although game theory may not be very good at explaining the social harmonies and social complexities to be found in a successful and interesting place like Massachusetts, it is great at making sense of the old USSR.

I have just watched part of a left wing John Wayne film (I did not see it all - I got so irritated I turned it off)... In Harm's Way (1965) blames American problems in the Pacific war against the Japanese, on stuffed shirt Conservative officers - people who call the war 'Mr Roosevelt's war' as people from their evil wealthy families called WWI 'Mr Wilson's war'.

Of course there is no mention of the film that President Roosevelt deprived the Pacific front of resources so that he could prop up Soviet Russia. Nor was this policy confined to the United States. Why did Singapore have no Spitfire fighters for air defence? Because the Spitfires earmarked for Singapore were diverted to Soviet Russia. 100, 000 troops of the British Empire were captured at Singapore - and they were left to rot and die. About 80, 000 Americans were captured in the Philippines - and they were left rot for years as well (many thousands died).

This was not because American commanders (Navy or Army) were poor in the Pacific (although some of the British ones were poor indeed). It was because the New Dealers in Washington D.C. did not care - all they cared about was their sacred Soviet Union.

Before anyone says that the Soviet Union saved Britain from German invasion think about the following: Thousands of allied sailors died taking supplies to the Soviet Union (not Soviet sailors dying taking supplies to Britain). Whether operation 'Sea Lion' (the German invasion of Britain) was practical or not (and the Germans certainly lacked the resources vital to operation 'Overlord' the allied invasion of France in 1944), the choice by Hitler to switch German air attacks from British airfields to British cities made operation Sea Lion a dead letter.

This choice was made before the Germany invasion of the Soviet Union. The 'Battle of Britain' was won before the invasion of the Soviet Union (not after it).

Of course there would have been no WWII anyway if Hitler and Stalin had not allied in 1939 - but the New Dealers (and their friends in Britain) blanked that out.

Prodded by a recent conversation with my eldest brother who is a UKIP (UK Independence Party) member, on the subject of British nationalism, I recently put the pieces of a puzzle together concerning the dramatic events of 1940 that I want to try out on the readers of samizdata. (Apologies in advance to all those who see the only puzzle as being how long it took me to puzzle out the obvious.)

At the risk of publicising my own slow-wittedness, it has always puzzled me that British nationalists these days almost to a man now worship the ground that Winston Churchill walked on, because he saved Britain in 1940, despite the fact that Churchill himself wasn't a British nationalist.

Preliminary digression. Did Churchill actually save Britain in 1940? I tend to accept the orthodox view that Churchill did indeed save my country, and that it really was one of our finer hours.

The case against how Churchill behaved in 1940 is that an accommodation with Hitler was there for the taking, which would have been less harmful to British interests than even the events that subsequently unfolded, and certainly than any events that looked at all likely in 1940 if we did fight on.

As to that, I've always been fond of the words spoken by Ralph Richardson in the early stages of the film The Battle of Britain. Richardson plays a British diplomat who is squaring up to his German equivalent, played by Curt Jurgens. The Jurgens character speaks of how the Fuhrer is willing to offer "guarantees" to Britain. Replies Richardson: "Experience shows that Herr Hitler's guarantees guarantee nothing." Exactly so. The case for not trying to accommodate Hitler in 1940 in one pithy sentence.

(I've heard it said that this is also the basic case against Saddam Hussein. The man simply can't be relied upon to refrain from what he has promised to refrain from. He is therefore not, and never can be, a member of the club of Heads of State who, no matter what they may do to their subjects, can at least be relied upon to tell the truth to fellow club members.)

Well I'm not entirely sure about that. Maybe there was a good deal going which Churchill spurned. But this I do know. Churchill was, as I say, not a British nationalist. He was an Anglospherist.

Chruchill's mother was an American. In his youth Churchill roamed the earth in the service of the British Empire and of his own fame and glory. When the time came for him to write his historical magnum opus, he called it The History of the English Speaking Peoples.

It was Churchill's political adversaries, like Chamberlain and like Halifax (his rival in 1940 for the British Prime Ministership), who were the real British nationalists. It was they who spoke to each other in 1940 of the beauties of the English countryside and of how it was now threatened with being turned into scorched earth. Churchill was willing to fight, and they were not. And as soon as Churchill got into power, he orated about blood on the beaches and set about organising an anti-German resistance-to-the-death scorched-British-earth policy, for the "defence" of Britain. Some defence.

Churchill was able to do this because Britain, for him, was not the ultimate point. Britain was, in the end, merely a slab of territory near the front line in the fight. And it was, ultimately, expendable.

I'm not saying that Churchill wanted to expend it, that he would have been happy if it had been expended. Far from it. But in the final analysis he did not regard Britain as the ultimate object being defended. The object being defended was the Anglosphere, and the Anglosphere would continue (and Churchill with it) to confront Hitler even if Britain had been conquered in 1940. The Anglosphere could still eventually be persuaded to take a military stand against Hitler, which sooner or later, Churchill believed, it would have had to, despite whatever guarantees it might have received in the meantime (see Ralph Richardson above).

This is why Churchill was willing to bet Britain in 1940. For this was a bet which, ultimately, he was willing to contemplate losing. The Halifax tendency could not bear the thought of losing such a bet, and even to take the risk of losing it was, for them, an unendurable folly. I think that as ironies go, this is a pretty big one. To repeat it: the nationalists couldn’t defend their nation. The non-nationalist could. And I think it says something about the sentiments of the British people that they followed Churchill so contentedly in 1940. Maybe they even got all this at the time, and realised that if they squared up to Hitler on behalf of "civilisation", they could get the best possible outcome for their nation, whereas if they merely fought for their nation, the fight would make no sense and they would lose everything.

And maybe Halifax himself also got this. He didn't press his case in 1940. He stepped aside and allowed Churchill to fight his war.

It's a game theory point, I think. It's like the oft repeated observation that the soldiers who are willing to die in battle are, paradoxically, more likely to survive than the soldiers who will, when things get desperate, try to run away.

Britain stood firm in 1940, and thus made it possible for Anglosphere allies to carry on fighting also (in the USA's case it allowed other non-nationalists to inveigle their nation into the conflict), and eventually to use Britain as the launching pad for the final attack on Germany.

As a general observation it seems to me that the twentieth century has been an era of pseudo-nationalism, that is to say of people like Churchill (and like FDR). The twentieth century's nationalists, time and again, under cross examination so to speak (i.e. in a crisis), turned out to be people who were ultimately willing to risk any rational definition of the national interest of the nation they claimed to be serving, in the service instead of multinational or even global ends. The communists weren't the only ones doing this. Almost everyone was. Partly they did it out of ideological conviction. But partly they did it because, paradoxically, it made them more effective "nationalists".

Hitler, apparently such a rabid German nationalist, proved himself willing, Churchill-like, to sacrifice Germany itself on the altar of his peculiar vision of how the world ought to be, the difference being that in this case the sacrifice actually happened. He died believing that his country had betrayed him, and his countrymen spent the last few months of his life realising that he was betraying them.

Now I'm sure that, for many samizdata readers, all this is very obvious. But I have grown up in a world in which British nationalists who were willing retrospectively to support Halifax rather than Churchill (or even to sympathise with Halifax!) could be counted on the fingers of one hand, but in which regular British nationalists simply took it for granted that Winston Churchill was one of them. It was the slowly dawning realisation that Churchill was not one of them, combined with the fact that Churchill had nevertheless served British national interests so very well (assuming you go along with Ralph Richardson, as most Brits do nowadays), that I found myself having to explain. What was going on? It seemed like a contradiction. Now I see that the contradiction is actually the explanation.

I hope I have not bored everyone by rediscovering the obvious, but to me all this came as something of a revelation. But that's samizdata for you. You don't have to be interested by everything here, just interested every so often.

Every so often I rearrange my books to make them take up less space in my home than they actually do take up, and during my latest rearrangement I came across a book called Catastrophe by David Keys. The central claim of this book is that in the year 535 AD there was a truly enormous volcanic eruption in South East Asia, filling the sky with dirt so dense that the sun was hardly visible for several years, unleashing plague, famine and the fall (and rise) of empires all over the world.

I remember being quite severely convinced. Now that I am a blogger I am able to ask the big wide world: Was I right to be impressed by this book? Did this really happen? And whether it did or not, what do the official, academic historians think about all this? David Keys' book is not academic; it is midddlebrow at best. He's a journalist, and I first heard about his notions by watching a TV show on Channel 4 a few years ago, and we all know that TV and truth don't always go together. Did TV get it right this time?

To put my question another way, which of these two reviews of Catastophe is correct? This one?:

That the Earth suffered catastrophic weather conditions starting around 535AD and lasting for many years thereafter, is becoming a scientifically accepted "fact." As explained in "Catastrophe: a Quest for the Origins of the Modern World," these conditions weakened the Eastern Roman Empire; created horrendous living conditions in the western part of Great Britain that were remembered and later incorporated into the Arthurian legend; contributed through drought in the America's to the fall of the Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico; and through flooding to the collapse of a major center of civilization in Yemen.

Almost wherever in the world that there was significant use of writing in the 6th century AD, from Constantinople to China, references to this catastrophe have shown up in contemporary documents. Many such documents are cited in this book. In the 20th century, the occurrence of the catastrophe and its worldwide impact has been confirmed by the analysis of ice-cores from Greenland and Antarctica and by the study of annual growth rings in wood from across the world that can be safely dated to the 6th century.

Or this one?:

I enjoyed reading Catastrophe, but I took it with a large grain of salt. …

First, Keys covers a great deal of ground for someone who is described on the book jacket as an "archaeology correspondent" for The Independent, a London daily paper. He makes a number of important judgments about ancient Chinese, Indonesian, American, British, European and Middle Eastern sources, as well as about geology, meteorology and even physics. His book suggests that he consulted specialists before drawing his conclusions, but I can't avoid the impression that some of his claims might be hotly disputed by experts in the relevant field. In short, it's a little hard for the lay person to judge whether Keys has the qualifications needed to make the judgments upon which his arguments ultimately depend.

Second, Keys has a disturbing tendency to use words like "undoubtedly" and "certainly" when describing the ancient world. I've read a great deal of history, and I have learned that nothing is ever really "certain" or "undoubted," especially if we're talking about events that happened 1500 years ago. Rather, such words often reflect an author's uncouncious effort to shore up a weak argument.

Finally, Keys gets a little swept away by his thesis, constantly re-asserting that whatever happened in 535 caused (however indirectly) the birth of the modern world. …

You'll probably enjoy Catastrophe, but don't be surprised if the experts (for whatever they're worth) roll their eyes when they read and write about this book.

The relationship between amateurs and professionals interests me a lot, and of course amateurs have been trading blows with pros long before the Internet came along and made this an order of magnitude easier. There have been a string of amateur best sellers challenging official scientific explanations. But, they have been extremely variable in quality.

The thing that populariser and journalists (such as David Keys) are well placed to do, unlike the typical scientist who is an extreme specialist, is to gather evidence from a wide range of fields and pull it all together into a single hypothesis, often of a kind which does indeed challenge many scientific orthodoxies. I'm tempted at once to launch into a rhapsody concerning the particular contribution of amateurs to the advance of knowledge.

But first things first. Is this particular piece of amateurism (a) right or wrong, and (b) how is it regarded by serious, professional historians?

Is 535 now an official history date, of the sort I might have memorised at school (but did not) alongside 1066 (Battle of Hastings), 1215 (Magna Carta), 1688 (Glorious Revolution) and 1815 (Battle of Waterloo)? Or is it still just a date like any other?

I await any comments anyone can supply with interest.

Paul Marks takes an interesting look at the relevance of Britain's bloody history

How can a civil war, in the 12th century, between rivals for the throne of England be relevant to libertarians today? Surely the war was simply as it was presented by the contemporary (pro Stephen) writers - a lot of needless bloodshed brought about by the lust for power of wicked women?

However, I think the war is of interest.

First some background. Henry I was the youngest son of William the Conqueror, he based his claim to the throne of England (after the 'hunting accident' death of his brother William II) on the grounds that he was the only son of William I to be born after the conquest (i.e. after William I had been accepted as King of England) and in England itself.

To some people (such as Robert of Normandy - Henry's older brother) such a claim appeared weak. However, by a combination of diplomacy and war Henry I made good his claim.

Henry had issued a charter of liberties limiting the lawless power of the Crown (in such matters as taxation and the security of property), he appealed not just to the Norman but to the Anglo Saxon (English) population and married Matilda (formally Edith) - daughter of the King of Scotland, but also direct decedent of the Anglo Saxon Kings of England going back to Alfred the Great.

Henry I ruled for 35 years, but faced with the death of his son William (in the "White Ship" shipwreck) he had made his daughter Matilda his heir.

Worried that the Barons might not accept a female ruler Henry had made sure that they had all (twice) sworn a sacred oath to be loyal to Matilda.

However, as soon as Henry died Stephen of Blois took control.

Stephen is not supposed to have been a bad man (as Barons of the period go) and he was of the line of William the Conqueror (he was the third son of the fifth daughter of William I actually), but there are a few points to be thought about.

Weakest first, Stephen (unlike Henry or his daughter) was not born in England - so what (perhaps), after all Henry and and Matilda spoke Norman French as their main language and Matilda was first married to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V (hence the name "Empress Maud") and then (after the death of Henry V) to Geoffrey Count of Anjou.

But there are two other points. Stephen was not the rightful claimant by ancestry to the throne of England (even if one only considers the Norman line of William I and ignores the Old English Kings and the English in general), and the supporters of Stephen (and Stephen himself) were oath breakers.

In short if Stephen could take and keep power without opposition then inheritance and contract meant nothing in England and the English people were just the slaves of lawless warlords.

One does not have to be a supporter of 'women's rights' (although women should have the same basic rights as men) to see that Matilda's supporters were right to fight under the standard of the person they proclaimed "the Lady of the English".

Certainly Matilda made mistakes in the war (such as her failure to have Stephen executed when her army captured him), and indeed the conflict finally ended in compromise (Stephen to rule till he died and Matilda's son Henry Plantagenet "FitzEmpress" to rule after him) - but the war had to be fought.

Paul Marks