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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Nicely done, Horatio.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.