(13)

History is an interesting thing, often said to be "written by the winners"... but is it? Certainly in much of Eastern Europe, the end of Communism did not necessarily means the political end of the communists behind the system.

James Mark is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Exeter and he has written a very insightful article on the subject that I commend to all Samizdata.net readers.

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There is a very revealing article in the Guardian (natch) called 'East Germans lost much in 1989'. The 'money quote' (in GDR Marks of course) is:

On 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down I realised German unification would soon follow, which it did a year later. This meant the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the country in which I was born, grew up, gave birth to my two children, gained my doctorate and enjoyed a fulfilling job as a lecturer in English literature at Potsdam University. Of course, unification brought with it the freedom to travel the world and, for some, more material wealth, but it also brought social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an "elbow society" as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.

Yes it is hard to not shed a tear for all those unemployed Stasi and blacklisted apparatchik that made the whole system possible. I have long suspected the real reason the wall was built was to keep out the waves of oppressed Western workers who were flooding into the socialist worker's paradise and threatening to overwhelm the system.

More seriously, the blacklisting process did not go nearly far enough in my view. A large number of people who were the enablers of the communist state should have spent a great many years in gaol. In 1955 the USSR created East Germany... and it ended in 1990... so it would seem to me that putting the most egregious enablers of that system in gaol for thirty five years would be a measure of poetic justice for the people who lost a generation of personal liberty by living in that open air prison called East Germany. Blacklisted? Apologists for tyranny deserve far worse than just being 'blacklisted'.

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Bishop Hill:

Devil's Kitchen has a must-read post up, detailing the increasing use of enabling legislation by the government. And he doesn't swear at all - must be serious.

Indeed.

I daydream that one day, a British Cabinet Minister will grab hold of one of the laws that DK writes about, where it says that, if there is a crisis (and it is up to him to decide), then he, the British Cabinet Minister, may do whatever he considers to be appropriate (i.e. whatever he damn well pleases). I daydream that he, the British Cabinet Minister, will bring into the House of Commons a huge list itemising all the laws that he is now going to repeal, just like that, no ifs no buts no discussion, because he, the British Cabinet Minister referred to in one of the laws, says so, on account of there being a crisis caused by all the damn laws.

Impossible, you say? Very probably. But it is surprising how much of history consists of impossible dreams that were dreamed during earlier bits of history.

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So asks John McWhorter:

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.

But let's remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota.  So our case for preserving the world's languages cannot be based on how fascinating their variegation appears to a few people in the world. The question is whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.

See also this article about Indians who write their novels in English rather than in one of the local Indian languages, partly because they just do, and partly in order to increase their potential readership around the world. The piece is by Chandrahas Choudhury, himself the author of a novel in English. He also blogs.

Both pieces were recently linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, to whom thanks.

I suppose a danger of everyone on earth speaking the same language, as was explained in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is that we would all of us then understand each other's insults.

... the ... Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

But this is to assume that hostility causes wars. I think it is at least as true to say that wars cause hostility.

Quite aside from the rights and wrongs of English conquering everyone and everything, there is the intriguing question of whether it in fact will so triumph, or whether any other potential universal language, like Spanish or Chinese, will triumph, in the nearish future. Perhaps English will triumph, but in the process it may itself fragment. If one language does triumph, it may well be English, but not necessarily English as I know it.

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Some thoughts on Anglo-American history contrasted with Bavarian history - with possible political and/or cultural consequences. The main expanders of the state in 19th century Britain are remembered (at least by most of the minority of people who remember them at all) as good people.

Edwin Chadwick was a good man who urged for state police forces to be made compulsory in every town (done in 1835 as part of Municipal Corporation Act, the Act that swept away, apart from in the City of London, the nasty Tory closed corporations and created the new councils that would mean more economical local government - of course we are still waiting for those lower local taxes). And in the rural areas , achieved by the Act of 1856 (which also provided central government funding and controls) - before this time the people of the villages of England and Wales were savages who hunted each other for food.

Chadwick was also the nice man who saved us all from being killed by filth (government being the only thing that can provide water or remove waste you see) or falling over in the dark (government being the only thing that can provide street lighting) and so on on and so on. A noble reformer in the tradition of his mentor Jeremy Bentham (although Bentham's dream of 13 departments of state controlling every aspect of human life, had to wait till the 20th century to come to pass - even the national Public Health Board was repealed in 1858 in the time of the wicked Palmerston).

All of Chadwick's doctrines are described as things that "everyone agrees with" in J.S. Mill's "Political Economy" of 1848, of course there were large numbers of things that looked human that did not agree, but J.S. Mill did not count them as people (a full person being someone whose mind is fully developed - and whether someone had a fully developed mind could be determined by whether or not they agreed with J.S. Mill, this is also true of the Labour Theory of Value which was "settled" with everyone in agreement the people who did not agree, such as Richard Whately and Samuel Bailey, being nonpersons). Academics and media people carry on with J.S. Mill's tactic to this day, and like him, they talk endlessly of "freedom" and "liberty" as they do so.

There were some large cities in Britain were "public services" were mostly provided by private companies funded by voluntary payment (Newcastle for example) right up to the First World War, but conventional history draws a veil over such places.

Later on even the evil Tory folk (at least at the leadership level - which is often different to the drink sodden local Tory folk) accepted the need for reform and produced such noble people as Disraeli who as well as expanding the franchise (partly to people who would have lost it when the next generation of "pot wallopers" lost the vote under the noble Reform Act of 1832 - but we must not make history too complicated for the children) also did such things as try and put the unions above the Common Law on such things as obstruction ("picketing") and contract breaking (the effort behind the Act of 1875 - sadly held up by pesky court judgements till the Act of 1906) and further with such things as council housing (sadly only taken up by a few places before the First World War) and local government Acts (such as the one of 1875 which took about 40 different powers that before local councils might do and said they must do them - whether local rate payers liked the idea or not) and, of course, compulsory education (the Act of 1876 - for those places who had been enlightened enough to set up a School Board under the Liberal Government Act of 1870).

Even Gladstone can be thrown in (if one is selective) - with his support for government regulation (or outright control) of the railways, and his support for a government savings bank via the Post Office. And, of course, after Gladstone's "retirement" (which came as news to him at the time - but a veil can be drawn over that as well) the Liberal party was free of the reactionary parts of his thinking (one can tell the rare curious person that the reactionary parts of Gladstone's thinking came from him starting out as a Tory). There had once been a "voluntarist" stream within liberalism - but by the 1900's it was reduced to a rump (for the tradition of liberty in the various political parties see W.H. Greenleaf's "The British Political Tradition", two volumes, specifically the section titled "The Libertarian Strand").

In the United States things are much the same.

The man behind the revival of government education (it had declined in the 18th century and in the early 1800's) was the noble reformer H. Mann - with his religion of humanity style of thinking, the true "Father of American Public Schools" (and government madhouses, where some of the people who were shoved in were not mad when they first arrived - but let us not dwell on that...). A true citizen of Massachusetts. Followed decades later by the noble Bellamy brothers - Francis and Edward, with their Pledge of Allegiance (so beloved by conservatives who do not notice that it contains no mention of the United States Constitution - and this was no accident), and their religion without God, sadly reactionaries removed Francis Bellamy from his position as a minister over his desire to introduce a religion in which government, rather than God, is worshipped - he was ahead of his time, and there other ideas as advocated in their magazine "National Socialism" funded, in part, by the flag making companies (the Bellamy's ideas would mean that schools would buy flags - and their socialism would never be dangerous...).

Of course the biggest spending politician in 19th century America and the man who established that no State may leave the Union (regardless of anything the Constitution might or might not say) was the Henry Clay Whig ("a national bank, a protective tariff and internal improvements - these are my principles" first speech on slavery in 1854) Abraham Lincoln - another hero lauded by history.

Here I will get into trouble with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute people - as I hold that the Civil War was (in main part) about slavery. I do not believe that State governments like Virginia and North Carolina, which were (for the time) big government States - spending taxpayers money just about everything,, tried to leave the Union because they were concerned about the rise of big government. And the actual economic policies of the Confederacy during the war were actually more collectivist (on inflation, on "progressive" income taxes, on imprisonment without trial - although Governor Vance of North Carolina dissented from that), even than Lincoln's.

Abraham Lincoln was indeed a nasty piece of work, he was a corrupt politician (as his record in Illinois shows - although just about every politician was corrupt there, and they still are) a big government man - and incompetent to boot (with the overwhelming advantages Lincoln had the Civil War should not have lasted four years and cost 600,000 lives - it did, in part, because Lincoln was useless). Lincoln was far from the hero presented in the school text books and shown in the statues - but the other side was even worse, as southerners who faught for the Union like General George Thomas understood. As did other people from States such as Virginia, especially those people from what became West Virginia (as well as eastern Tennessee - which is Republican to this day) - oh yes many of the hill-billy Rednecks were for the Union although it has slipped down the memory hole now.

Even in the West pro Union (or "anti slavery" "free State" people - which is what they called themselves) groups were every bit as good fighters, and often every bit as brutal, as their foes - in a war that actually started in "bleeding Kansas" (although it spread to other areas - in the Civil War there was large scale fighting as far West as what would one day be the States of Colorado and Utah) before Lincoln - and lasted till the last remaining of those foes in arms, the James "gang" and the Youngers, were defeated in their raid on a town in Minnesota - decades after Lincoln was dead (defeated by local residents who out-shot them - although they did not hang the people they captured, Minnesota not having the death penalty for attempted armed robbery).

Although some have even claimed that the last gasp of the Civil War was on a street in Tombstone Arizona - where the Earp brothers (with the assistance of Doc Holliday - who rather complicates the picture, being both a TB sufferer and a "moral defective" - i.e. the sort of person who H. Mann and co would have had locked up back in Boston) defeated the Clantons and their friends. But I do not know enough about the situation there to make a judgement.

"Well what has this got to do with Bavaria Paul".

Simple enough, in both Britain and the United States statists of the 19th century have gone down as heros. The "reformers" in Britain were noble people (and by "reform" the history books and the culture that history informs do not mean the free trade movement or the movement to reduce taxes and government spending - liberals of the type of Joseph Hume are not what is meant).

And in the United States Lincoln is the liberator of the slaves (forget everyone else - and forget Lincoln's own incompetence), thus proving that big government (especially big centralized government) is noble. Again forget that Jefferson Davis (the President of the Confederacy) was an even bigger big government centralizer than Lincoln was (although the burning of the Confederate records in Richmond allowed Davis to pretend that he had not wanted to be) and...

In 19th century Bavaria things are not quite the same...

They start off the same - with noble reformers, in the early 1800's, imposing taxes on the nobles and Church and setting up compulsory education, and "ending serfdom" (which meant a rather different thing in Bavaria compared to other places - but such details can be kept from people).

But then things change.

Government is no longer about noble reformers - it is a matter of mad Kings building fairytale castles and subsidizing Richard Wagner (actually I prefer that, especailly the bit about building fairytale castles - but "progressives" do not). And then in the late 19th century government is not about noble Bavarians at all - it is about the dictates of an outsider.

Otto Von Bismark (not my favourate person - as some of you may know) could not claim to be the liberator of the slaves when he defeated Bavaria (and the other traditional Germanic states) in war. Nor was he romantically killed in the year of victory - in fact he clung on to power (by every corrupt means) till 1890 and lived on till 1898.

Nor was he even totally victorious - he had to make deals that gave Bavaria (and some other Startes) a wide measure of autonomy (even their own army).

Nor was Bismark even a democrat (and the constitutional form of democracy is the religion of Progressives - as long they totally control the "democracy" in practice) in fact he came to power by the whim of a King (the King of Prussia) and kept power by using the Prussian Army to trump the Prussian Parliament (collecting un-voted for taxes by force) and by a policy (and it was a policy - whoever formally declares war first, Bismark had written the script and manipulated everyone) of successful wars against Denmark, Hapsburg Austria (and the rest of the Germanic states that would not follow him) and France. Wars that made the name of Bismark a legend. Unlike Lincoln, Bismark choose the correct Generals and had clear military plans (rather than working from fantasy assumptions).

However, this did not make Bismark popular in Bavaria (unlike, oddly enough, a previous Prussian enemy of Bavaria - Frederick the Great in the 18th century, who at least had abolished torture and declared freedom of religion before he started his wars of conquest).

Nor did Bismark achieve popularity by his policy of persecuting the Roman Catholic Church in his "war of cultures" (which was going on at the same time as the start of the "War of Method" in economics - between the logical, partly Aristotelian, Austrian School of Carl Menger and the Historical, partly Hegalian, School of Bismark's Germany, although the actual economic policies of Austria were actually more statist than the traditional economic policies of Prussia).

The Welfare State (the dream of so many German thinkers for centuries) was achieved by Bismark - at first on a tiny scale (the seeds would grow), but all the essential features (bar unemployment "insurance" which Germany did not have till after the First World War) were introduced by Bismark - but he can not be praised as the creator of the Welfare State by Progressives in Germany, especially in areas (such as Bavaria) which he defeated and persecuted the people of. Especially as Bismark eventually lost his "war of cultures" - and had to go begging to the Roman Catholics for aid against the socialists (Bismark had subsidized socialists early in government, as a stick to beat liberals with, - the socialists were Bismark's monster, but he lost control of them).

In Britain the creator of the first Welfare State schemes (again on a tiny scale at first) was the Progressive hero Lloyd George.

And in the United States the first Presidents to talk of such things (although they did not achieve them - due to the resistance of evil reactionaries in Congress) were the Republican "Teddy Roosevelt" (held as a hero by John McCain and cited on health care by Barack Obama) and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson (the first American President to have spoken admiringly of socialism - although he was careful not to do so publicly, the little people were not ready they had not been "educated" enough yet). Both of these men are presented as hero types, good guys - and most people have some vague idea of them (or know someone who does - the names have been heard of and are "good names").

But after the fall of Bismark the man who led the charge for statism in Germany was the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) - who had actually kicked out Bismark for not being statist enough (the Kaiser wanted more welfare schemes, more colonies, a bigger navy - and so on and so on).

Opinions of the Kaiser vary wildly - to some he was a racist madman bent on world conquest, to others he was a well meaning kindly man, who was scared of all the big powers around Germany and has been repeatedly misquoted. However, there are few people who hold Wilhelm II to be a hero - he made repeated misjudgements (the first being to break the alliance with Russia - a misjudgement that Bismark desperately tried to prevent) and then managing to alienate Britain (the traditional ally of Prussia), by a series of misjudgements.

The Kaiser has all the faith that Bismark had in "blood and iron", but none of Bismark's skill in politics/warfare. The Kaiser was more on the skill level of Lincoln - but Lincoln's Union free population outnumbered the free population of their enemies by about four or five to one (that comes as a shock to modern Americans - who live in an environment where southerners have been out breeding northerners for decades, and where people who live in the mountain and hill country of the South also count themselves as "southern" which was not always so in the past), the Kaiser was outnumbered (greatly outnumbered) by the people he made the enemies of Germany.

The Kaiser led Germany to defeat - and how can a Prussian King come German Emperor be a hero for modern Progressives anyway? Remember their love of the forms of constitutional rule (the German Parliament was democratically elected - but the Kaiser choose the ministers).

Things go on:

In the 1920's and 1930's the main leader in developing welfare state schemes in Britain was Neville Chamberlain (working in the tradition of his father "radical Joe"), but memory of Neville Chamberlain is so dominated by his policy of talking to the National Socialist government in Germany that things like his housing policy or his general policy of taking the schemes of Lloyd George and working them up into univeral policies is overshadowed). Besides Chamberlain can be presented as a "reactionary" because of his insistence that welfare state schemes be paid for by taxation - rather than by borrowing and printing. And borrowing and printing (and modern variations of printing money) are the road to prosperity, especially in a slump, - as every progressive academic and media person knows.

In the United States there was little Progressive going on in most of the 1920's (apart from government racism and prohibition - but it is forgotten that these were parts of the Progressive movement). However, then came FDR - President Roosevelt (Roosevelt the Second) who "saved America from the Depression" and "won World War II".

Of course FDR did not save America from the Depression (caused by the credit money bubble of Ben Strong's Federal Reserve and President Hoover's panic response to the bursting of the bubble) - like Herbert "The Forgotten Progressive" Hoover, everything that President Roosevelt delayed recovery ("he had to do something" - well he could have cut taxes and government spending as Warren Harding did during the slump of 1921, after the collapse of the World War One credit bubble, and the economy was in recovery within six months "we do not mean that").

However, President Roosevelt was around during World War II and the Nazis and Imperial Japan were defeated. And, contrary to some of the Ludwig Von Mises institute people, it was right for the United States to defeat the Nazis and Imperial Japan (it was just wrong not to defeat the Communists as well - when America had the chance). So FDR goes down as a hero - as does his statism.

In Germany in the 1920's there was first the Weimar Republic (a total mess that even the Progressive can not claim was a great success) and then the leader of Progressive politics in Germany in the 1930's - whose policy of government spending, printing and borrowing, and direct controls of prices and wages (and so on) was so praised by J. M. Keynes in the introduction to the German edition of the "General Theory..." in 1936 - Adolf Hitler. Of course Lloyd-George was a big fan to - rightly seeing in the economic policies of the Nazis the logical destination of his own thinking, and dreaming that (even at his advanced age) a deal could be made with Germany to bring him back to power (however let us not confuse the kiddies with that stuff).

It is not respectable in Germany to be a fan of Adolf Hitler (although a politician in Austria did try and praise Hitler's employment policies - but he is dead now), so the Progressive can not use Hitler as a hero.

After World War II the United States has the "Fair Deal" effort of President Truman - defeated by "reactionary" elements in Congress (as with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson), but Progressives can still point to Truman as a hero and say "he was in favour of these things - if only they had come to pass".

In Britain they all did come to pass of course - the final transformation of the schemes of Lloyd-George and Neville Chamberlain into a fully formed Welfare State (with no limits on its further development). And nationalization and "planning" and other controls and...

And the Atlee government is widely held (by the education system and the media) to be the foundation of post war prosperity in Britain - so his policies must have been correct. The fact that Britain fell behind virtually every other Western European country (and many outside Western Europe) in economic growth after World War II can be ignored - so much if they got richer faster, we were still better off and that must be because of Atlee and his Progressive politics (although if only they had been more Progressive as Harold Laski wanted - then Britain would be as prosperous as North Korea).

However, Germany after World War II was the land of Ludwig Ernhard (who first started as an adviser to the Bavarian government before he moved to the national scale) and Konrad Adenauer. The land of radical deregulation and free markets.

So it is hard to see how the Progressives can claim that the "German economic miracle" after World War II was the result of Progressive policies (it was the result of "reaction" of the most literal kind - reaction against both the policies of World War II and the pre war policies of Hitler and the National Socialists).

However, Germany began to move away from the free market path in the late 1960s and in the 1970's.

Just as the United States had President Johnson (whose Welfare State policies are also attributed to President Kennedy - although I have never seen much evidence that Jack Kennedy believed in building a Welfare State) and President Nixon (who expanded Johnson's "Great Society" and added massive regulation of the economy on top) and Britain had Harold Wilson and Edward Heath (see Johnson and Nixon), so Germany had Willy Brandt and Helmet Schmidt.

And as with Britain and the United States the 1960s and 1970's are remembered in Germany (especially by people who look back with the rosy glasses of the memory of their youth) as a time of consumer pleasure (yes even in Britain - people remember the bright colours and forget the unburied dead) and sexual revolution - and whatever the long term consequences of the "sex, drugs and rock and roll" (que Samuel Adams 1772 quote about those who seek to undermine the liberty of the people first conspire to corrupt their morals, and then add in musings about the lies of Kinsey Report of the late 1940's and the intentions of the left to...) it was fun for the people involved - at least if they did not get to closely involved and got made deaf by the pop music, or got a nasty sexual illness, or died of an overdose of drugs.

For the record I have my doubts about the Samuel Adams position - after all Americans may have been (were) a very socially conservative people in 1936 (for example the most religious people in the Western World, the old Nazi jibe about "German soldiers carry copies of Nietzsche's writings on the Superman - Americans carry copies of Superman comics" was false - American soldiers were more likely to carry a copy of the Bible than a comic, and to call on God in battle rather than a political leader), but that did not stop 60% of them voting for Franklin Roosevelt (thus showing a somewhat less than strong commitment to liberty - although the nature of the population did limit just how far FDR could go, he could never be worshipped as more important than God). However, it is true that there was one long Progressive orgy in the late 1960's and 1970's (eating the seed corn of the future in terms of industrial investment).

However, Bavarian just continued to be ruled by conservatives and not "conservatives" like Nixon, Heath, or George Walker Bush either. And this has continued right to our own times.

Even the government school system never had a great "Progressive" reform (as happened in Britain and the United States decades ago). Although there are signs of "legal" (i.e. activist court) attacks on religion in schools and there are signs that changes in German Federal tax law on inheritance may hit the family owned companies that have been the life blood of German manufacturing for centuries (already that vampire Warren Buffett has been seen in Germany).

However, over the last one and half centuries both Britain and the United States have had a strong Progressive tradition, but after the Progressive reforms of the early 1800's it is harder to maintain that Bavaria has such a strong Progressive tradition over the last one and half centuries. All this I think I have established above.

What are the political and/cultural consequences of this (if any)? I have written quite enough - so I leave this question for others.

(2)

... thirty nine years ago, the Dawson's Field hijackings were in progress.

I have long thought - longer than eight years - that the seeds of a poison tree were sown by an event that happened soon afterwards. To quote the Wikipedia entry linked to above:

About two weeks after the start of the crisis, the remaining hostages were recovered from locations around Amman and exchanged for Leila Khaled and several other PFLP prisoners.

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The Libertarian Alliance made a bit of a splash during the week, after a Daily Mail journalist conflated the LA's regular blogger, David Davis, with a man of the same name who happens to be a senior Tory MP. Sean Gabb, one of the head honchos of the LA, has had a bit of fun with this, and very enjoyable it is to watch the discomfiture of a journalist who, plainly, did not do the necessary checks.

But during my reading of this silly saga, I came across Sean Gabb's thoughts about the start of the Second World War - 70 years ago - which the Daily Mail journalist came across, and which no doubt prompted some sharp intakes of breath. Here is his opening paragraph:

"Today is the 70th anniversary of our declaration of war on Germany. My own view is that this was the greatest single disaster in British and perhaps world history. It beats the decision to go to war with Germany in 1914. That was a disaster in its own right, but did not necessarily mean the destruction of western civilisation. By 1945, around fifty million Europeans had been killed in battle or murdered or starved or bombed, and Bolshevik Russia was supreme across half the continent. British liberalism and world power had collapsed. Their best replacement was American corporatism with its increasingly ludicrous fig leaf of “human rights” and “democracy”. None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war."

Repeat that final sentence: "None of this would have happened had we stayed out of another European war".

It seems to me that Sean Gabb is seriously overplaying the argument and as a result, has rendered it seriously defective, in my opinion. For a start, it is far from clear to what extent Britain, and its then-empire, could have "stayed out" of a conflict involving various European nations only a few hundred miles away. For instance, one question I would put to Sean and others is this: how neutral could Britain have been, and to what extent would it have been endurable, either morally or practically, for Britain to stand aside while millions of refugees, such as Jews, sought a place of escape? For example, suppose that Hitler had demanded, as a condition of UK neutrality, that the UK ban any of its citizens from joining anti-Nazi resistance movements, or even promoting causes designed to weaken Hitler's regime?

It is also, in my view, verging on outright nuttiness to suggest that had Britain stood aside, that Western civilisation would have been saved in some way. Western civilisation necessarily includes the West, ie, Western Europe - you know, places such as France, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Scandanvian nations, and so forth. It is not just about the UK, North America and the Anglosphere diaspora. And consider this point: had Hitler defeated Soviet Russia, and the whole Eurasian continent, from Bordeaux to Vladivostok, fallen under his iron hand, it is naive to suppose that this would be a great result for "Western civilisation". At best, the remnants of that civilisation would have lived under the shadow of a huge and menacing empire, based on racial and socialist dogmas that are too obviously horrifying to need spelling out.

So while I can heartily endorse Mr Gabb's disgust at some of the outcomes of the war and its cost, his argument does not convince me. That is not to say that there are not revisionist interpretations of WW2 that do not deserve taking seriously, nor do we have to denigrate those men, such as former UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who worked so hard to avert a conflict. But unlike Sean Gabb, I am glad that the young Winston Churchill escaped a violent death during his soldiering days, and ignored the advice of those who imagined that Britain could cut some sort of deal with a revolutionary racialist-socialist with a proven record of deceit.

Victor Davis Hanson has a good take on WW2 revisionists like Pat Buchanan. I also recommend this post by Patrick Crozier, taking on, and taking apart, the arguments of Ralph Raico, another revisionist, but unlike Buchanan, is a libertarian.

(8)

Here is a story about a woman, who recently died at the great age of 98. She helped send thousands of young Jewish people to safety in WW2. This is an amazing story. Her tale needs to be more widely known. RIP.

(2)

There are lots of bridges in Normandy - like this elegant beauty of civil engineering - but in this very pleasant region of northern France, few such constructions carry more historical significance and reminders of the costs of war than this one. I visited the Pegasus Bridge museum during a very enjoyable trip to the region last week on holiday. I also went to Arromanches, which has an excellent exhibition about the Normandy landings. You can see the remaining bits of the old Mulberry harbours that were used by the Allies to land their equipmment before the main ports along the French coast were eventually captured.

Most of the folk in France last week were enjoying the usual August holidays without a care in the world. I like to think that is what the men who fought so brilliantly to liberate the Continent would have wanted us to do: have a good time.

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I must admit that in many respects, I find the former Labour cabinet minister, Roy Hattersley, to be a bit of a buffoon in his clinging to socialist dogmas of a planned, highly taxed economy. But he can write: and this essay on the funeral of Harry Patch, who had been the last surviving British soldier of the First World War, is first class.

(6)

August 4th was one of the good anniversary dates of the French Revolution, argues our own Paul Marks. Here is his comment from a year ago, explaining why.

(14)

One of the most evil books I ever read was a quite short Penguin paperback that I inherited from my father. It was written not long after World War 2, when the pre-war trickle of honest reporting about the horrors of Stalin's USSR was becomimg a post-war, Cold War, gush. But the author of that Penguin paperback argued that, since very few of these reports were first-hand and in writing, they could be dismissed as merely malicious gossip. Beautiful. The Soviet Government shifts heaven and earth to obliterate all first-hand, written reports of its crimes. It then, echoed by persons like the evil writer of that evil paperback, declares that, in the absence of the very written reportage which it has laboured so hard to suppress, these crimes are imaginary, invented by malevolent enemies of the inevitable and noble tide of history. After I had read that evil paperback, I understood far better Alexander Solzhenitsyn's obsession about getting the Gulag story, with its wealth of first hand accounts, into print in such voluminous detail.

I cannot now locate that evil paperback, although I believe I still own it. Such is the disorder that is my library that if I do still own it, the book is hidden from view. Contrary to the argument made in it, this does not mean that it does not exist or that its author never said what he said, or that him having said it is of no significance. On the other hand, neither does him having said what he said automatically make what he said true, for in fact what this particular writer said was evil lies.

It may seem odd to be starting a piece about medieval history with this uncertain recollection of a book which I have not recently set eyes on, concerning the recent and recently collapsed USSR. But not long ago I stumbled upon a debate about how to write medieval history which reminded me of the claim made inby that evil book.

My recent interest in medieval history was provoked by the purchase of a book about a man called Mortimer, by a man called Mortimer. The overlap is potentially confusing, but surely not surprising. Had a man called Micklethwait been the ruler of England between, say, 1327 and 1330, I would have been more than casually interested. Well, Roger Mortimer did rule England between those two dates. No wonder historian Ian Mortimer got interested, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this interest was what turned him into a historian in the first place.

I hugely enjoyed that book about Roger Mortimer. All previous attempts by me to put flesh on the bare bones of my schoolboy knowledge of those times, mostly consisting of a few history dates, had been engulfed in tedium. Yet now, I was suddenly engrossed in the fourteenth century. Partly, it must have been because I was at last ready to be fascinated by it. My historical knowledge had finally, tediously, arrived at the state where a bit of medieval detail finally had a bulky enough structure to get attached to. But there was something else going on in Ian Mortimer's book about his namesake besides my mere readiness to take it it. I found the book to be, as they say, a page turner, something I had never experienced before with a book about medieval history. When I learned that Ian Mortimer had written a follow-up volume to his Roger Mortimer book, about the king who toppled Roger Mortimer, Edward III, about whom (not least because neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had written any plays about him) I knew pretty much nothing apart from his presumed involvement in a couple of those schoolboy history dates (Battle of Crecy 1346 and Black Death 1349), I bought that, and immediately became engrossed in that book also. A further book by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV wasn't quite the thrill that its two predecessors had been, if only because Henry IV did marginally less exciting and surprising things than Roger Mortimer and Edward III, but that too was pretty good, and contained many fascinating titbits. (For instance, did you know that when Henry IV ascended the throne of England, he was the first English monarch to proclaim his newly monarchical status in a document written in English? Well perhaps you did know this, but I didn't.) And now, I am looking forward to reading this, which will flesh out another big history date. And after that one, there will be yet more. To get a sense of what Ian Mortimer is all about without buying any books, try reading one of these. (Some of these pieces I like, others not so much.)

But what was it about Ian Mortimer's writing that so fascinated me, when so many other writings about the same historical era had failed to strike any sort of spark?

I found a clue in the introduction to the third book, the one about Henry IV. Apparently debate has long raged among professional historians about the very possibility of writing satisfactory biographies of medieval personalities, a debate which Ian Mortimer describes thus (pp. 9-10 of my paperback):

There was for many years a general perception that biography was too populist a medium for serious consideration. 'It is despised by the hard and practised by the soft in one discipline after another', wrote a correspondent in the Times Higher Educational Supplement in 1987. Sixty years earlier K. B. McFarlane had declared that 'the historian cannot honestly write biographical history; his province is rather the growth of social organisations, of civilisation, of ideas'. One could talk about a king's reign, or the interaction between a king and his people, but biography itself was seen in a negative light on account of its sympathetic (as opposed to objective) approach, or, as other critics have said, because biographical authors 'opt for narrative rather than analysis'. Thus, for most of the twentieth century, academic historians tended to write history books about individuals, not biographies, and justified this on the grounds of the intellectual superiority of the objective, analytical approach. At the same time, there was a widespread belief in literary circles that a 'proper' biography could not be written for a character living before 1500, as personal letters do not normally survive to attest to what the subject thought or felt. This view was seized on by the anti-biographical academics and used as a justification for why it was essential to avoid the biographical medium when writing about medieval political figures: the whole exercise was impossible, they said, 'for the sources to permit such a study have not survived'. For decades no one exposed the weaknesses of this view.

That struck a chord, both in terms of what it said about how medieval history should be written, and how it shouldn't. What it should be, these anti-biographical academics had been saying, was tedious analysis of the development of "social organisations, of civilisation, of ideas". And what it should not be was like the stuff Ian Mortimer writes, and which I had been so greatly enjoying.

I also possess other Penguin paperbacks, this time ones which I can lay my hands on, with titles like English Society in the Early Middle Ages, these being the books about medieval history that I had, over the decades since my school history lessons, tried and failed to read. I do not say that the growth of the manorial system, say, or the rise of trade and the weakening of feudal ties, were social processes and civilisational developments which did not happen or were of no significance. But such things do not explain why particular events occurred. The Battle of Crecy, for instance, did not happen merely because of certain social processes - even though plenty of interesting and important social processes are illustrated by that battle, notably the rise to prominence of the unmounted, unwealthy footsoldier as a military force to be reckoned with (see also Peasants Revolt 1381). Crecy happened because two kings - two individual persons - decided that it should happen. One king, Edward III of England, was in France with an army, spoiling for a fight. The other, the King of France, felt he had no choice but to oblige, what with all the spoiling that would otherwise have continued, on his land, had he decided not to fight. So, to understand what happened and why, you need, in particular, to understand the individual attitude of Edward III, the man who set all this in motion. Why did Edward III think it a proper, even noble, use of his time and resources to invade France? Ian Mortimer's writing, to put it bluntly, makes sense of the times and events he is describing. Certain powerful individuals made decisions with big consequences for the lives of others, and with the available facts Ian Mortimer gets as far as he can inside the heads of such persons, to explain why they thought of themselves as they did, and why they decided to do what they decided to do. The most pertinent historical analysis of events, medieval or otherwise, is, again and again, biographical analysis. X did Y because of the kind of person X was and because of how X thought of himself. As Ian Mortimer says of his namesake (p. 10):

For example, in order to understand Roger Mortimer's actions against Edward II in 1322-6, it is necessary to understand his earlier loyalties, disappointments, military experiences and political awareness from his own point of view.

All those, for me, relatively unexciting ruminations about the manorial system and suchlike embody a moral judgement of medieval times, to the effect that the experiences of ordinary people should not be written out of history, however insignificant these experiences may have been thought to be at the time. Quite so. But it is one thing to regret that ordinary people counted for so little in those times and to believe that they should have counted for more; it is quite another to suggest that no individual counted for as much then as individuals have in more recent times. On the contrary, one of the features of life in settled times and places such as my own is that I and my lucky contemporaries in countries governed as mine now is are not now at the mercy of cruel or incompetent individuals to anything like the same degree that most other people have been in the past, and that many people still are, and in the way that almost everyone was in medieval times. Oh, my finances get regularly mucked about because of the mistakes of powerful people. But these are mere pinpricks when compared with what it must have been like for a French peasant, perhaps already on the edge of starvation, who found himself and his dependents on the receiving end of some of that spoiling that Edward III did in order to provoke the battle of Crecy, or to be an Englishman of any kind during the latter stages of the disastrously cruel and incompetent reign of Edward III's father, Edward II (the king deposed by Roger Mortimer). If you were a lowly farm worker, it mattered desperately whether the king who reigned over you was capable (like Edward III) or not (Edward II). The former, and war and its associated havoc and misery was a distant rumour in France. The latter, and the havoc was all too likely to happen all over you. So, to simply block out the individual decision making processes of individual people like Edward II or Edward III, to block out the fact that all those ideas and social processes had their greatest impact in shaping what such individual men decided to do, and how to do it, and where to do it, and who to do it to, is like trying to understand a car while ignoring the nature and impact of the petrol that powers its engine. And you also, let it be added, block out one of the most characteristic and distressing experiences endured by all those ordinary people in those times, which was what happened to an ordinary person when bad luck or bad judgment caused an ordinary person to get in the way of an extraordinary person, like a powerful or vengeful or angry king. Such history is The Godfather without Brando or Pacino, just a great crowd of extras labouring away in the fruit business. Which is interesting, if you are interested only in that kind of thing, but I want more. And it's not only me. Ian Mortimer paperbacks are now to be found in all the history sections of the mainstream bookshops. He is now a successfully self-employed historian.

The written evidence of the lives of these extraordinary and powerful medieval individuals is indeed harder to come by than about powerful people of later times. But historians must do their best, and if Ian Mortimer's work is an example, their best can be very good indeed. What is more, as Ian Mortimer says (p. 11):

This ... leads us to ask why a biography based on a man's actions should not be every bit as 'biographical' as a life based on his letters? Indeed, we delude ourselves if we think that letters prove a man's feelings, or necessarily convey an accurate impression of his inner life. Men and women may misrepresent themselves and their feelings in their letters for any number of reasons, consciously and subconsciously, perhaps due to momentary depression or elation, or even due to their inability to express themselves. In a long summer of happiness, one may take a moment just to write down a single line of regret or bitterness, and what is left of that summer a hundred years later? But although men and women often deceive in what they write, it is rare that they deceive in what they do.

It would seem that Ian Mortimer's attitude to medieval biography is now becoming more fashionable, for he introduces all these ruminations thus (p. 9):

In the summer of 2003 a whole string of leading medievalists attended a conference at the University of Exeter on 'The Limits of Medieval Biography'. Almost all echoed the conclusion of the keynote speaker: that biography was not only one of the most important approaches to the past, it might actually be the most important, for 'only through biography could one argue why this had happened, or that had not happened'.

Exactly so. And more public and less personal writings than letters and diaries must, as my opening paragraph in this posting illustrates, be treated with even more suspicion, as all honest historians have long known. In the matter of the USSR, the truth of the deeds presided over by that extraordinary individual, Stalin, speaks far louder than the torrent of lying words that Stalin's governmental apparatus also unleashed.

And the extreme excitement and enjoyment that I got from reading Mortimer's medieval trilogy (so far) of biographies was derived from the fact that I was finally not just reading about but understanding what was going on.

When I read what Ian Mortimer said about how "anti-biographical academics" had "seized upon" the difficulties of medieval biography to say that medieval biography simply could not be properly done, I believe that I also heard an echo of that vile writer who claimed that since the evidence of Stalin's alleged atrocities was, allegedly, not available in writing, that too was a kind of knowledge which it did not make sense to pursue.

I do not want to suggest that all those medieval historians whom I found to be boring were also evil, although I am sure that some of them were. But I do at least speculate that, intellectually, some of their anti-individualist emphasis may have shared the same evil intellectual ancestry. Communists were definitely responsible, if not for creating, then at least for reinforcing the notion of history as the working out, in a succession of stages, of impersonal, abstract social and economic forces, in a way that made the mere decisions of individuals relentlessly less significant than they, or Ian Mortimer, or I, think that they actually were or are. In writing like this about the past, Communists were seeking to create a kind of historical momentum behind the idea that individualism of the sort that Ian Mortimer and I both regard as a permanent fact of history - the fact that what powerful individuals think about and decide to do matters - is really only a passing phase. Such individualism, they tried to suggest, counted for less in medieval times. Social forces and social systems and social institutions counted for more. Which makes it that much more credible that individual decision-making might, for equal and opposite reasons to the ones that caused it to rise, fall again. Were individuals making big decisions in medieval times? No. If they thought they were, they were deluding themselves. If we think they were, we are deluding ourselves. Do we now make a silly sentimental fuss about how other individuals fell foul of another very significant and powerful individual, Stalin? A silly and sentimental fuss is also all that that is. You can't stand in the path of history, and you shouldn't try to.

The above is, I think, a fair summary of the intellectual atmosphere that has surrounded the Soviet-inclined brand of Communism during the twentieth century. And now that Stalin's successors and what remain of their apologists elsewhere have found themselves on the receiving end of some more history of a sort that their Communist prejudices did not prepare them for, it makes sense to me that this communist attitude should now be in retreat, and that a more realistic approach to the importance of medieval individuals should now be catching on amongst historians.

Such speculations about a possible link between anti-biographical medieval historians and the more recent sort of anti-individualists are reinforced by an Ian Mortimer endnote (note 18, p. 389), which reveals that the piece he quotes from the Times Higher Educational Supplement, published on October 9th 1987, was by a certain Eric Homberger. That is where Ian Mortimer got his K. B. McFarlane quote from. Both McFarlane and Homberger are new names to me, so I did some googling. I found very little about McFarlane, more about Homberger. Homberger is not remotely a slavish Stalinist, but he has written, I'm guessing not unsympathetically, about American Communists of yesteryear who were closer to that kind of foolishness, and his political inclinations are definitely towards the left. Might Homberger perhaps be the kind of leftist who regards Stalinism as an individualist deviation from the true faith, rather than the kind of thing that should have been expected in any time or place that took communism seriously? Might he be someone who, noticing that that inevitable and noble tide of history, in which earlier leftists had invested such hopes, has not obliged, still believes that it should have, and that one day it still might? If Ian Mortimer himself has any such suspicions he keeps them to himself, perhaps wisely.

But now, I am entering "But what do I know?" territory, a land I often stray into when blogging, if only because commenters often know far more about whatever it is than I do. And since this posting of mine, although rather long, is still only a loose-ended blog posting rather than a properly topped and tailed essay, I would be particularly interested to read comments on the degree to which the anti-biographical arguments I have referred to really do overlap with concurrent Communist notions about more recent events. Was Homberger any sort of overt Communist sympathiser in his youth, and did other Communists and Communist sympathisers ever echo these anti-biographical sentiments? I'm guessing yes, but would dearly love to know chapter and verse.

Paul Marks, to name but one potential commenter on this, knows American Communism pretty well, and history, and well, everything. So, Paul?

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Via such blogs as this one (see the list of recent postings on other blogs), and this one (the previous list being how I got to that blog), I today encountered a video of someone called Ian Plimer plugging his latest book, which is called Heaven and Earth. Watch it here.

And here (via this posting) is a piece about an Aussie politician who seems to be following Plimer's lead.

I am no scientist, and politically I am heavily in favour of the free market capitalism that the Green Movement wants to shut down or at least castrate. So I would say all this. But I can honestly say that I find Plimer more convincing than those persons who talk about climate change as if the urgent need now is to stop all climate change (impossible) of as if those who doubt their prophecies of apocalypse (such as me) believe that climate is not now changing. The climate always changes.

Plimer is eloquent, and relatively brief. Even pro-AGW greenies would find this, I think, a quite useful short compendium of all the arguments against their views, in fact they already are using it this way. That's if they are interested in answering arguments, as some are.

The clearest insight that I personally got from this video performance was Plimer's claim that the AGW (as in anthropogenic global warming) people are all atmospheric scientists (insofar as they are scientists at all), who are plugging their apocalypse without looking at any other kinds of scientific evidence, or much in the way of historical evidence either. He also says that this particular evidence is itself very threadbare, but that is a distinct argument that I have long known about.

I was also interested that Professor Donald Blainey [Correction: Geoffrey Blainey], an Australian historian whom I have long admired, is in his turn an admirer of Plimer's book. Big plus, for me.

Plimer is optimistic that the current economic woes, woes that really are now being experienced by our entire species if not our entire planet, together with the little bit of cooling that has recently been happening, will concentrate people's minds on what a load of humbug the AGW scare is. No doubt pessimists commenting here will say that the damage has already been done, and will take decades to undo. I'll pass on that argument.

I now guess that the next argument for AGW here in Britain is going to be that since the BNP also says AGW is humbug, it must be true.

(45)

How has the current Western political class come into being?

What economic, social, historical, cultural, technological or other factors have contributed to its growth and ascendancy?

(25)

Calling a Roman Emperor a possible father of the West is problematic enough, but one from the late Empire is especially problematic.

Since the time of Diocletian peasants, the great majority of Roman citizens, had not been allowed to leave their farms - as it was feared they might be trying to dodge taxes by doing so. And since the time of Constantine it was "legal" to put peasants in chains if they were suspected of planing to leave.

And, of course, anyone below the rank of Senator was open to flogging and torture if Imperial officials felt such treatment was needed to get a confession for a crime or just to inspire greater tax revenue. Technically a town councillor could not be treated in this way, but such old fashioned legal technicalities were largely a dead letter in the late Empire. And even Senators could be flogged, tortured and murdered if the Emperor felt like it - because his will was law. In a way that baffled some barbarian tribesmen - who were used to a tribal chief not being able to change the basic laws of the tribe whenever he felt like it.

Roman legal practice (both due to the arbitary will of Emperors and the degenerate thinking of scholars) had long become infested with notions like the "just price" (of which there are traces even under the Republic) - defined not as a price freely arrived at by buyer and seller (an interpretation of the "just price" that one can see in one tradition of Roman law going from Classical times up through such things as Bavarian law in the 8th century, right to our own times) but as some "correct price" for bread (and other products), laid down by the arbitrary will of the ruler - in a way such tyrants as Charles the Great of the Franks (Charlemagne) and his pet scholars would have approved of centuries later.

Nor was Valentinian himself a gentle man - for example the punishment he brought in for trying to avoid conscription was to be burnt alive. Nor did Valentinian think of removing the ban on the private ownership, and training with, weapons - which under the Republic was just as much the mark of a free man, as it was among the Saxons or other such tribes.

Valentinian is also attacked for his "old fashioned" concentration on the frontier - building forts and other such, and stationing his best troops in the frontier areas (and leading them himself till he dropped dead of the strain of command). Rather than the enlightened "defence in depth" conception favoured by Emperors like Constantine.

The attack on Valentinian military policy is, however, wrong headed. At the time when men either marched or rode on horseback to war modern "defence in depth" ideas were not really an option. The main armies had to be on the frontiers or invasions would destroy whole provinces before "strategic reserves" could come up. After all just sending message for help could take weeks.

Nor was Constantine really thinking about "defence in depth". He created an elite army (with the best troops and equipment) and positioned them round himself in his new capital (Constantinople) to guard against frontier commanders doing what he himself had done - leading a military revolt against the Emperor. His plan was a political, not a military, one.

But just being correct on the military question would not make Valentinian a father of the West - after all the Roman Empire fell and (given the degenerate nature of the late Empire) probably had to fall for the West to be born. So Valentinian was, in the end, a failure and we should not be sad that only a few years after his death the Visigoths sacked Rome. Although this "in the long term it was for the best" thinking does leave aside the horror of the barbarian invasions themselves - and the fact that much of civilization was lost. For example Roman notions of sanitation (not a small point) only really returned to Europe in the mid 19th century.

And lastly I can not even claim that Valentinian did not add some statist ideas of his own. For example he set up a free medical service - and although it was only 12 doctors servicing the poor of the city of Rome (itself only a small percentage of the population of the Empire) this was yet another expense the Empire could have done without. And yet another betrayal of the old, pre "bread and games", Republic of independent families and voluntary association - at least the voluntary association of citizens.

So why the claim that Valentinian may have been one of the fathers of the West?

There are two reasons...

The first is land ownership.

Valentinian forbad slaves on the land being sold apart from the land they cultivated - a small point perhaps to a person in chains being flogged to work harder. "Rejoice, the Emperor has prevented you becoming just a thing that can be carried off at will" - but it did reinforce the idea that a person on the land (whether a coloni adscipticii or a formal slave) could not just be traded like a commodity, and it laid down a tradition that later people would work on far into the future. For example Hadrian IV (the only English Pope) ruleing, in the far off 12th century, that an estate owner could neither prevent his serfs marrying or break up their unions.

However, it is more than this.

For many years, indeed centuries, the Emperors had been confiscating land from "traitors" and other such. Land under state management did not produce the same level of produce over the long term as land under private ownership (for reasons which the Marxists and neo-Marxists, who have come to have such influence over classical studies in recent decades, seem unable to understand). So various Emperors tried to sell land - both to gain current income, and to increase the long term revenue of the land tax.

However, the Emperors tended to sell the land on leases - supposedly perpetual or emphyteuic leases (much like those granted in China since 1978), but leases still. So that the land could be confiscated again without the need to formally frame someone for "treason" or other serious crime. The confiscated land could then either be managed by the state, or sold on to someone else.

This system did not work very well, but Valentinian seems to have been the first Emperor to understand that. Hence the policy of granting land holding on the basis of ius privatum salvo canone - this was private ownership. Even failure to pay taxes (or what the Imperial officials claimed was failure to pay taxes - a standard dodge to confiscate land) did not, under the new system, give any right to confiscate the land itself.

Thus the idea was planted that whilst the government might claim ownership of the land in some sense it could not normally confiscate it or prevent familes passing it on to their children.

The various barbarian rulers (Ostrogothic, Visigothic or Frankish) indeed committed terrible crimes at times - but the idea that land was not just the plaything of the ruler did not die.

One can see this in such things as the Edict of Quierzy of 877 forbidding a King from confiscating a fief or preventing it being passed on to the next generation. This was not presented as a new restriction on Royal power (much though such tryants as Charles the Great might not have followed it their day), but as the defence of an ancient right.

The other claim to favour that Valentinian has is over religion:

Valentinian was a sincere Christian. This does not mean he was a nice man (see his burnings and so on), but it proved to be important for history.

Valentinian had not only been an open Christian under the pagan Emperor Julian (when being a Christian placed his prospects under a clowd), but he also seems to have the same "Catholic" opinions as the majority of Christians of his time. Unlike his brother Valens, who the Church later condemed as an "Arian" heretic who persecuted the true Christians.

I say "seems to have had" - for this brings me to the central point.

Valentinian refused to bring the power of the state into religious disputes.

Pagan Emperors had traditionally favoured Pagans - and Christian Emperors had not only favoured Christians but had favoured Christians of one or other of the many sects of Christian, persecuting all the others.

And when Valentinian died such persecution started up again - with the Emperor Theodosius (who came to power a few years later - first in the East and the in the West) persecuting not only pagans, but Jews and also any Christian who did not agree with him (and his faction of the Church) on every point.

But the memory of Valentinian's position did not die.

For centuries monks continued to write out Valentinian's reply to demands that he use the power of the state to decide religious matters and persecute dissent.

Rather than Constantine's position "What higher duty have I in virtue of my imperial office and policy than to dissipate errors and and redress rash indiscretions, as so to cause all to offer to Almighty God true religion, honest concord and due worship".

We have Valentinians' position "It is not right for me as a layman to meddle in such things. Let the Bishops whose business it is meet by themselves wherever they like".

Certainly the old Roman laws against eastern magic remained and there was even some action against the Manichees. But the general position was that religion was nothing to do with the magistrates - the civil power would not lend its arm for persecution.

This is a devstating position for persecutors - as right from the time of Augustine onwards they have tended to rely on the civil power to do their dirty work. Even if they, like the Spanish Inquisition of centuries later, dishonestly plea for mercy for the heretics when they hand them over to be executed (dishonestly as any magistrate who took the Spanish Inquisition at their word and showed mercy, would soon have a visit from the "Holy Office" themselves).

Whether the Church set up the persecuting organization itself (as with the centuries later Roman Inquisition) or the state creates the organization (as with the Spanish Inquisition) without armed men an Inquisition is of no importance.

And it was armed force that Valentinian was denying the persecutors.

In the centuries that followed Valentinian's interpretation of the position of the state tended to lose out.

As stated above Theodosius persecuted widely. Although, hypocritically, he did not try and impose his opinions (or perhaps those of his spiritual guide Ambrose of Milan) on the Visigoths - instead he made an alliance with them for the conquest of the Western Empire. An alliance that made itself felt at the terrible battle of the Frigid River in 394 when the Western army was broken by the alliance of the East and the barbarians.

Theodosius allowed the Visigoth barbarians to live inside the Empire on wide lands - untaxed. Which is libertarian in a way (if one ignores the fact that the lands in question were already settled) - but was a policy born of fear. Persecuting helpless Roman citizens was fine but armed Visigoths were quite another matter.

So it was in the Western Empire - more and more land was given or taken by the barbarian "federates" (normally heretics or pagans) and the Empire went down to collapse.

Meanwhile in the East persecution continued - till (in the 7th century) heretic Christian Arabs allied with new invaders who they hoped might treat them better than the Imperial government.

Thus the Empire of Islam was born.

However, the position of Valentinian was not forgotten.

Ever afterwards (thanks to the efforts of the monks of the Church itself) whenever someone wished to oppose persecution there was the example of respected ruler to be pointed to - and in centuries past every educated person knew of Valentinian and his position. And this Classical example eventually became one of the basic principles of the West.

(6)

The complaint now being widely voiced, referred to in passing in his recent posting about the nuclear ambitions of Iran by our own Johnathan Pearce, is that bloggers like me droning on and on about this Smeargate saga are perhaps falling into the trap of taking the contents of the "Westminster Village" (see also: "Westminster Bubble") somewhat too seriously. There is, said JP, a world out there, as indeed there is. And blow me down if JP, just as I was finalising the links in what follows, put up yet another Smeargate-related posting here with one of those very same phrases, "Westminster Village", right there in the title.

So, why this fascination? Why do I and so many other bloggers just now seem able to blog about little else?

Where to start? One place to start is by saying that, while this Westminster Bubble-stroke-Village indeed shouldn't be that important, it actually is very important. The people inside it dispose of at least half our money. Arguably, given recent financial events, they are now disposing of just about all of it. They are the people who must give their attention - if they have any to spare from their smearing of each other and of anyone else whom they take against - to such things as the nuclear ambitions of Iran.

A classic tactic of our current gaggle of rulers, when they are caught out doing something wicked, is to let the complaints about whatever piece of nastiness they just did rumble on for a day or two, but then to say: okay, okay, enough. Now we must "move on". We mustn't be obsessed with the Westminster Village, the Westminster Bubble. For yes indeed, these very phrases make up one of the key memes that is used by our present government to protect itself from sustained scrutiny. If like me you drone on about their latest petty atrocity, this means that you are indifferent to all the other ills of the world and want those to continue and get even worse, is their line.

And indeed, if I thought that this current government was doing anything good, I might see the force of this argument. As it is, even the few vaguely good, maybe, perhaps, things that the Government is now attempting, concerning various "reforms" of the sort favoured by the likes of James Purnell, will only serve to discredit such reforms in the future, and in the meantime they will be bungled. The only thing I want this government now to do is drop dead, not just because of Smeargate, but because of, well, everything.

With far greater force, as was appropriate to a far greater evil, I felt this about the old USSR. The USSR, I believed, was smashable, and I believed this before it was actually smashed. I further believed, during the 1980s, that smashing the USSR was one of the very few big yet almost unambiguously good things that the world then was capable of administering to itself. Magic buttons in politics are rare, but here was one. The USSR, then and ever since it had begun, blighted everything. Nothing else could be effectively dealt with until it was dealt with. All the other problems (notably Islamic terrorism) were being inflamed by that one big problem, namely the apparently relentless arm-wrestling that then dominated world politics, between the USSR and the civilised world. And, to repeat, that one big problem, the continuing existence of the USSR, had one huge advantage over most other problems then or since. It was fairly easily solvable. The USSR was worth breaking because, in the word of Gordon Gecko, it was breakable. A few more well-aimed shoves and over it would crash. Accordingly, I and all other anti-Soviet elements at that time brandished whatever weapons we could find at that evil empire, threw whatever mud at it that came to hand. In my case that meant writing and publishing little pamphlets about such things as how the USSR was both worthy of being broken and breakable. (I probably contributed even more by have an unusual surname and a father, "Sir Robert" if you please, who was once upon a time in MI6. What else was I doing? Nothing as it happened. But they didn't know that.)

In my recollection, nobody accused all us anti-Soviets at that time of being obsessed with the "Moscow Bubble", but we were certainly accused of being obsessed with the USSR, and told that there was a world out there, full of "real problems", and that we should stop being so monomaniacal about just the one mere government, disagreeable though it was. I agreed entirely about all those other problems, but believed that a huge step in the right direction, a huge step towards making all those other problems that little bit easier to get to grips with, would be to sweep the USSR from the board. Just smash it to rubble. I rejoiced then when that was done. I rejoice still that it was done. The post-Soviet news agenda hasn't been a hundred per cent good, but it would take a month of blog postings to even begin to count all the ways in which the USSR's collapse has made the world a better place.

On a far smaller scale and in a history-repeating-itself-as-farce kind of way, I now feel the same thing about the Gordon Brown government. Yes, there are a thousand problems out there that the British government and the wider British political debate ought to be addressing. Of course there are. And I will continue to try to find time and brain-space to blog about them too, just as I often wrote about other things besides the desirability of smashing the USSR during the 1980s. I would be very sorry if all other Samizdatistas were as monomaniacally fascinated by Smeargate as I now find that I am, and note with satisfaction that they are not. Nevertheless, here is a battle that both should be won and can be won. Quite soon now, it will be won. And the sooner it is won, and the more completely and dramatically and unforgettably it is won, the better. Once it is, we can all get back to arguing about all the other important stuff, without the chaos that is this present government screwing everything up, by the simple, sordid fact of its continuing existence.

So now, about that Derek Draper fellow ...

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Having neither the time nor the energy left to do a properly thoughtful posting, but still wanting to do a posting, what with everyone else here seeming to be out having a life, I went looking. And eventually I found this intriguingly quasi-optimistic thought, in a comment from someone called David Tomlin on this David Friedman piece.

The long run (very long run) trend of human history has been toward greater liberty.

In five or ten thousand years, if the human race still exists, I expect most people will be living in anarchist or minarchist societies, and other societies will be considered backward, as dictatorships are today.

Perhaps that is more like a thought for Easter Sunday rather than for Good Friday, but the times are depressing enough already.

Personally, I don't see why such improvement need take as long as those kinds of numbers. I reckon a thousand years ought to be plenty.

Further thoughts from me, about the cogitations of another member of the Friedman dynasty, here.

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Why was that slump, over and done with by 1922, so much shorter than the following decade’s? Well, for starters, he said, President Woodrow Wilson suffered an incapacitating stroke at the end of 1919, while his successor, Warren G. Harding, universally considered one of the worst presidents in American history, preferred drinking, playing poker and golf, and womanizing, to governing. “So nothing happened,” Mr. Vedder said. Of course Mr. Vedder does not wish ill health — or obliviousness — on any chief executive. Still, in his view, when you’re talking about government intervention in the economy, doing nothing is about the best you can hope for from any president.

From a nice article on revisionist accounts of the New Deal and Roosevelt.

Via Marginal Revolution, which has a quite good comment thread on this issue.

Talk of Warren Harding, a much maligned president, reminds me of Paul Johnson's book, Modern Times, in which that president gets a much-overdue rehabilitation, along with Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge.

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The current Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day features Andrew Neil saying, in yesterday's Observer, how very hated the ridiculous Derek Draper (a particular Guido aversion) seems to have become, amongst the sort of people who think it worth sharing their hatreds of public figures with the likes of Andrew Neil.

But I found more interesting what Neil says about The Boat That Rocked, the new Richard Curtis movie about the pirate radio stations of old:

The pirate stations were not killed off by a Tory public-school prime minister (as in the film), but by a grammar school boy and Labour PM, Harold Wilson, and the destruction was not carried out by a Tory toff minister (as in the Curtis version), but by a left-wing toff, Tony Benn (then Labour minister in charge of the airwaves).

Yes, that's certainly how I remember the story.

. . . the pirate stations were shut not by a stuffy Tory establishment, but by a supposedly modernising Labour government. Fact really is stranger than fiction.

I don't think that strange, any more than I think that the lies built into Curtis's plot are strange. "Modernising Labour governments" think that they know best how to do modernity, and are a standing menace to the real thing. Having ruined whichever bit of modernity they were obsessing about, they and their supporters then lie about that, blaming – for as long as they plausibly can - capitalism.

See also: the USSR. That was run by people who were absolutely obsessed with modernity, which they thought they could improve upon by dictatorial means. With the result that they stopped pretty much all of it dead in its tracks, apart from the stuff like concentration camps. And for decades, people like Richard Curtis told lies about that too.

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My post below on the experience of Scottish banking before 1845 - when the rules were changed by the-then UK government of Robert Peel - elicited a lot of great comments. It turns out that the Lawrence White paper that I mentioned had been savaged fairly thoroughly by Murray Rothbard. Rothbard's paper is immensely detailed and shows what a thorough economic historian Rothbard was. Briefly put, he says that White has misinterpreted the Scottish banking experience by not distinguishing between free banks that operated 100 per cent reserve requirements linked to gold, and those that were simply free banks without such specie requirements. (Rothbard was an advocate of such metal-backed money). This inevitably raises that old friend of ours, fractional reserve banking, which Rothbard described as essentially a fraud. Now in trying to make up my mind on FRB, it seems to me that so long as the holder of bank notes is made aware that the note has been issued by an FRB, rather than a 100-percent reserves one, then what is the problem? It is a bit like the argument about limited liability corporations that vex some libertarians such as Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. Surely, if I transact with a LL company and knowingly do so, then such consent is what counts. LL companies could, conceivably, exist even without special government legislation, although they might not last as long as LL firms do now. (Here is a rejoinder to Gabb on LL). Same with FRB: if there is commercial deposit insurance and customers know the score, I fail to see why the existence of fractional banking should necessarily lead to disaster. Or is there something I am missing in this debate?

At first blush, some might consider all this to be a bit arcane. It is anything but. Explaining how banks work now, and how they can be made to work much better as a result of competition and basic rules, will go some way, I hope, to destroying misconceptions. Such misunderstandings that exist at the moment only play into the hands of those who want to bring the free market order down. Such as those folk protesting at the G20 summit in London today. I will be in the area on business. I might take some photos and post them up later if they are any good.

Update: I was in the Docklands area. Nothing much going on while I was there.

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Those good people at the Institute of Economic Affairs have put this fine study of free banking, as it existed in Scotland until the middle of the 19th Century, back into print. It is examined in great detail, with lots of figures and examples of how these banks operated, how many bank failures there were, and so forth. There are a few equations but nothing that should faze all but the most mathematically challenged. Historical scholarship of this detail and depth is vital. It is as vital, in fact, as those studies that showed that in Victorian Britain, before the Welfare State came along, Britain already had an extensive network of mutual aid societies. Without this historical memory, it becomes easier for politicians to sell the lie that the solution to X or Y lies in ever bigger government.

Readers can either read the pdf for free or, if it is tough on the eyesight, as it is for me, readers can get a publication-on-demand sorted out for just £10.

I do not suggest that free banking is necessarily the panacea for the current troubles. But it seems to me that a point lost on the anti-globalistas as well as many of the other critics of the current financial system is that they fail to grasp how banking, as it is practised in most instances today, has deviated from a genuine example of laissez faire capitalism. What we need is sound money, administered by banks operating under the constant blast of competition in proving the soundness of that money. When you think about it, it is not very hard to grasp the idea, is it?

(23)

Our mother having made her final exit from it twelve days ago, the Visigothic sacking of her house by her children process has now gone into overdrive, and all sorts of odd objects have come to light.

My favourite discovery so far is this:

We wondered just how old that might be. Late forties? Maybe earlier? We quickly found a big clue on the lid:

Nothing says World War quite like a rusty tin of powdered milk, with a note on it from the government about metal conservation, not for reasons of environmental holiness but to make weapons! Truly, a vivid reminder of the ordeals that Mum's generation endured. At that time, she was raising two young children. By 1947 she had four.

Are we now being plunged by our current idiot government into a similar state of austerity, and will more powdered milk from across the Atlantic soon be needed? If so, will America be either willing or able to provide it?

(1)

Virginia Postrel has a nice item about WW2 aviator style and the Tuskegee airmen who broke racial barriers of their time in WW2. I must say that there is something deliciously satisfying at the thought that these guys helped shoot down the airforce of a racist German empire. And that they flew such glorious birds like the P-51 Mustang as they did so.

(38)

Talking to fellow contributor Brian Micklethwait last night, we somehow got on the subject of the recent property and debt market bubble, and what a total mess things were. And Brian pointed out that some market bubbles, like the infamous Dutch tulip bubble of the 17th Century, were based on almost a totally ridiculous notion, delivering nothing of value, whereas at least the tech bubble of the 1990s, for all of the associated craziness and subsequent pain of the crash, did at least propel a lot of useful innovation in the internet and associated world, just as the railway boom of the 1840s in the UK helped drive forward development of the railways, even though the industry had its fair share of crooks and incompetents. And for that matter, even the tulip bubble, as the Wikipedia entry I linked to suggests, did perhaps help to drive development of what is still a huge horticultural industry in the Low Countries.

The trouble with bubbles is that they pop. But it is too easy to forget, in our current fit of puritan disgust for speculative frenzy, that much, if not all of the energy that can drive prices for things higher is reflective of often dynamic and highly beneficial changes in the long run. I still believe that in a few years' time, unless we have reverted to statism completely, that the long boom of the 1990s and most of the 'Noughties will be seen as a generally good thing, even though part of it was driven by unwisely cheap money set by central banks - state institutions - rather than genuine economic rationale.

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A half-remembered phrase from a short story by C S Forester is lodged in my mind. The story is set in World War II. Some sort of British warship has to approach very near an enemy-occupied coast, do something or other heroic, and then get away before the German artillery can do its work. The ship, under the guidance of its iron-nerved captain, does so, and then - futzed if I can remember the details - stops or delays to do something else, to serve some side order of military misery to go with the main dish, the captain having calculated that it will take a certain amount of time for the defenders to wake up, realise this is for real, get orders and crank up the guns or whatever. Everyone else on the bridge makes their estimate of how long all this will take erring on the side that one does generally err on when the penalty for error on the other side is to be shot at by artillery, but the captain makes his estimate the way he would from his armchair at home. His bold guess is right, and the ship gets away. And then comes the phrase that shows clear among the fog of my other memories of this story: those watching on the bridge were awed by his sheer will to do the enemy harm.

I dare say in WWII there were many people, ordinary people, who really did spend a substantial fraction of their time thinking up ways to hurt the Axis. No doubt most of them ended up bombarding the War Office with absurd plans and inventions that came to nothing, but some of them found ways that worked. It must be rather interesting to live in a time and a place where it is good to let the will to harm the enemy run free.

We in Greater Europe do live in such a time and place. Don't get excited. I am not advocating violence. In fact I get a little disturbed when Tim Worstall, the blogger whom I am about to quote, makes his customary appeal for a hempen rope and a strong beam. But when I read on his blog about this latest measure from the EU, all I could think was harm them. Bring them down. Please, I would be grateful.

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I generally like the columns of William Rees-Mogg on economics; while he is no hardline free marketeer like the scribes here, he has a sharper nose for the errors of interventionism than many MSM writers. He also has a knack - which comes from a man who is of great age - for putting current events into a proper historical context. But he makes this statement in his generally admiring writeup on Roosevelt that is surely downright wrong. Not just a teeny-weenie bit wrong, but disastrously so for this whole argument:

In March 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated as president, he had to face the Slump. Unemployment was by then running at about 30 per cent. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal, based on an extensive programme of raising employment through public works. Unemployment did actually fall to about 5 per cent by the time of Roosevelt's second election victory in 1936. There continued to be stumbles along the way, particularly in 1937.

Well according to official US statistics referred to here, unemployment certainly did not fall anything like as low as that during FDR's 1930s period in the White House, and then only dropped significantly once the Second World War started.

I do not know where Rees-Mogg got his figures from or what sort of statistical resource he is using, but this is not a minor discrepancy. To suggest that unemployment fell as low as 5 per cent in the mid-1930s seems to fly totally in the face of the official data.

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This book reviewer says the 1930s were, on the whole, a pretty good time to be British. It is a point of view one does not come across very much, that is for sure. The stock image of the 1930s is the era that saw the rise of the Nazis, the Great Famine in the USSR, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, the Royal Abdication Crisis, etc. But was there more to it than that, at least at home? The book says that British society was in some ways in pretty good shape.

In military terms, at least by the end of the 1930s Britain had evolved what ultimately proved to be a very well organised air defence system, with radar and nifty fighters like the Spitfire. The 1930s was stylistically elegant: the cars of that era looked absolutely glorious.

On the other hand, I would argue that the 1930s was a period in which limited government continued to be under siege and apostles of planning and greater government regulation were gathering momentum, to reach fruition - if that is quite the right word - in 1945 with the election of the Attlee Labour government.

Discuss.

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Is this what it must have felt like in the 1930's?

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A few months back – I don't recall exactly when – I voiced my irritation here at the notion, regularly voiced by members of our commentariat until I said to put a sock in it, of leaving Britain to go and live somewhere else, usually the USA. I now officially withdraw this irritation. The sooner large numbers of Brits start voting with their feet, the sooner some kind of sanity may be restored to our public finances. Voice isn't working very well just now, but there still remains exit, and the sound of people exiting is actually one of the loudest political voices there is.

Remember which way the Berlin Wall pointed? Idiot Western apologists for Bolshevism talked their way around everything else about the Evil Empire, but that they couldn't explain. Remember when the success of Hong Kong as an alleviator of dirt-poor poverty and as a facilitator of the wildest of wild dreams was likewise denounced by the same idiots as a cruel and exploitative fantasy? Again, the statistics of who was then swimming, through what and in which direction, were the most telling of the lot, long before the economic numbers coming out of Hong Kong began to prove all those daredevil swimmers so magnificently right.

And here, now, nothing would concentrate the minds of our political class on doing the right things rather than stupid things like a mass stampede for the exit. If you are thinking now of leaving, do it. This would not only be selfishly sensible; it would be downright patriotic, just like regular voting for something sensible, only more so. In the event that any of our masters actually want to rescue our country from its present mess, nothing would be more useful to such persons than the pitter patter of adult feet, leaving for less insanely governed places. I still have hopes that Mr Cameron is now taking deep breaths and preparing himself to lunge for just this sort of glory. Call it the audacity of hope.

So, as the Americans say: way to go! But: where to go? Which countries are now the best bet for that alternative lifestyle, where you get to work, pay only moderate levels of tax, and are able rationally to hope that your grandchildren might do better than you instead of worse? The USA? Not now the obvious choice it might once have been, and in any case, how – legally – do you get in?

My suggestion is: Ireland. As the great Guido explained yesterday:

Ireland, which is taking the austerity route out of the crisis, slashing government spending, is attracting an entirely private sector solution to recapitalising banks. Property prices are becoming reasonable, tax rates are lower and big British run businesses are relocating to Ireland.

Ireland will probably be out of recession long before an economy crippled by Brown starts to recover - whomever wins the next election.

Apart from that peculiar "whomever", that strikes me as likely to be very right, and a very good bet for a good place to go to. And as Guido makes clear, the pitter-pattering has already begun. And, look, Guido now has an update to that posting:

UPDATE: Ireland's new finance bill is changing the law to entice non-doms to move from London to Ireland,

And I bet it's not just non-doms. I bet that us doms are already joining in.

Pitter patter.

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Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend
Leo McKinstry
John Murray, 2007 (first published in paperback 2008), 435pp., £8.99 in paperback

On the strength of Leo McKinstry's excellent book about Geoff Boycott, I bought this book about the Supermarine Spitfire. I didn't find it quite so entertaining as that first one, but I kept reading, and I kept learning things that I didn't know about this famous airplane.

The basic problem with the Spitfire story, as a story, is that almost all of the excitement comes at the beginning. How was it designed and by whom? Once designed, will it be ready in time for the world-shaping, civilisation-saving contest which all readers know will soon erupt? Well, we know that it will be ready, but how? In what numbers? Who were the insufficiently sung heroes of this story, and who the insufficiently damned villains? And, in the great battle, how exactly did it do? That's the heart of the story, and McKinstry tells it well, or at least (to an airplane ignoramus like me) convincingly. But the Spitfire carried on being manufactured right through the war, all the while being speeded up, enlarged, having its shape made uglier, its armaments made fiercer, its range improved, its weight greatly increased, and its task list expanded. Had McKinstry ignored all this later stuff it might have made a more entertaining book, but that would not have been the story of the Spitfire. As it is, the Battle of Britain only ends more than half way through the book, after which McKinstry takes us on a tour of all the other dramas and developments as efficaciously as he can.

I can't hope to tell you whether McKinstry has all the technical details of the Spitfire story right. Go elsewhere for that kind of review. What I can tell you is a few of the things that stuck in my mind after reading this book, which counts for something because it was actually a while ago that I finished reading it.

A big point that McKinstry makes is that the Spitfire was not in any straightforward sense a triumph of the private sector or a simple case of the public sector being rescued by the private sector. Free marketeers of my acquaintance have often made much of the fact that the ancestry of the Spitfire is to be found in the privately sponsored Schneider Trophy races of the 1920s and 1930s, and of a donation that was made in 1931 by a certain Dame Fanny Houston which kept Supermarine's participation in this contest on track at a time when the government reckoned the Schneider Trophy to be too frivolous to bother with in such economically straightened times. But the idea was always to build airplanes that would eventually be paid for by the government, to fight battles between states and in the meantime to threaten to fight battles between states, rather than merely to win privately organised sports contests.

Besides which, there is a huge difference between building a airplane that is merely fast, and one that is fast and can fight effectively against other fast airplanes. The Spitfire was a huge advance on anything Supermarine or anyone else had built only a few years earlier, and the reason it was built was that warriors and bureaucrats in the RAF and in Whitehall decided that they wanted such a airplane. It was in the context of these governmentally expressed demands that the legendary chief designer of Supermarine, R. J. Mitchell, went to work making his masterpiece.

Mitchell's first effort at a fighter airplane, the Type 244 – as it never got beyond being called, looked a lot like the Stuka, especially from front on, with its down and up wings and its clumsy fixed undercarriage. It was not a success, but Mitchell learned fast.

R. J. Mitchell was a type who is perhaps more familiar in our culture, dominated as it is now by computers and computer graphics, than he was in his own, namely the quasi-artistically motivated techy driven by the desire for design elegance rather than just money, immersed in the relevant technology but anything but your boring boffin in a white coat saying dourly why this dull thing can be done but that interesting thing cannot. A friend enthusing about his iPhone reminded me recently that Steve Jobs is a similarly visionary and driven type of person to Mitchell. Mitchell's working world was more like a genius artist's studio than most people's idea of a technological powerhouse. Paperwork was in a state of permanent derangement. The management of subordinates was haphazard and instinctive, involving long periods during which Mitchell was not to be disturbed. The one oasis of calm and beauty and efficacy was the design itself that he was working on.

Between R. J. Mitchell's body and the mind at the top of it there was a similarly extreme contrast, by the time he got around to working on the Spitfire. He did live to see his greatest creation take its earliest flights, but did not live long enough to witness its great triumph in 1940. This was because he had a particularly unpleasant form of cancer which killed him in the summer of 1937, at the age of only 42. I don't recall hearing the words "colostomy bag" in The First of the Few, the movie they made after the war about Mitchell and the Spitfire, but in this book you get a medically clearer and even more depressing idea of what his last few years and months were like, which only makes you admire him all the more.

The making of the Spitfire in large numbers was the story of Mitchell's studio, scrawled large. Throughout the early chapters of this book, we oscillate between the chaos of the various efforts to have the Spitfire ready for the war in time and in numbers, and the raptures experienced by the few pilots lucky enough to fly one of them at this early stage in the story.

If at any point in this book McKinstry actually explained the technological ins and outs of why the Spitfire's beautiful shape made it such a beautiful plane to fly, I missed this, but beautiful it was, both to fly and to look at. In particular, the Spitfire's controls were incredibly responsive, which made it an excellent platform from which to fire guns accurately, despite the Spitfire not being able (for some complicated reason which I couldn't follow) to have cannons instead of more feeble machine guns. But its guns could not have been fired at all if a decent number of Spitfires had not been ready by the time the battle began, and that story, at any rate to begin with, was a nightmare of confusion and incompetence. That the Spitfire was so small didn't make manufacturing it quickly any easier. Too many workers at once merely got in each others' way.

A succession of men, many of them with hyphenated names and with what we would now call anger management issues, grappled desperately throughout the late 1930s with Spitfire production problems. Seriously, the aircraft industry at that time seemed to consist to an amazing degree of double barrelled chaps yelling at each other, either face to face, or on the telephone, sometimes even driving themselves or each other to suicide.

There were various villains in this story, villains because of their failure to realise the potential value of the Spitfire, and because of the then widespread idea that the wars of the future would be won by bombers rather than fighters. The Trenchard doctrine loomed over the 1920s and 1930s much as the updated nuclear version of the same notion loomed over the world from the late forties onwards. The bombers would always get through, and once through would wreak frightful havoc and end the war in a few hours. Many reacted to the promise of the Spitfire much as a later generation of war theorists were to react to the idea of using laser guns to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. It won't work so why bother? The point is to have your own bombers, so that you can frighten the other fellow's bombers into inactivity. But enough people who mattered were convinced for the Spitfire to be designed, and flown by instantly enraptured test pilots of it, like Jeffrey Quill (David Niven in The First of the Few), and for a large order to be placed with Supermarine.

Which was when the trouble really started. The prototype Spitfire was a wonder, but making lots of Spitfires was something else again. It had an elegantly shaped all metal body, which may have been beautiful to behold and wonder to fly, but was the very devil to manufacture until you were thoroughly used to it.

Especially if you were Supermarine, as managed by people like R. J. Mitchell. A succession of duller but more organised organisers wrestled with the paperwork situation, and with factories filled with random piles of Spitfire parts in random places, and with trying to make sure that, just as a for instance, wings made in this small factory in the south of England would fit onto fuselages made in other small factories, regularly, as I say, losing their tempers with one another. In Whitehall, Air Ministry officials and RAF high-ups fretted, as money disappeared month after month, with very little in the way of finished Spitfires to show for it, and of course, as Hitler's airforce grew ever more menacing.

One of the many Spitfire heroes was Neville Chamberlain. It is now clear that Chamberlain was doing a lot more than merely play for time in his negotiations with Hitler, but to his great credit, Chamberlain did at least understand the value of fighter defence. Way back in 1934 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had pushed scarce resources at Fighter Command and at the design effort that would bring forth the Spitfire.

Another Spitfire hero was the suitably double barrelled Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Swinton, Air Minister from 1935 to 1938 and the main political driving force behind the Spitfire programme. All of which was no thanks to Spitfire villain, Trenchard doctrine enthusiast, and Chief of the Air Staff Sir Edward Ellington, of whom Spitfire hero Sir Wilfred Freeman said: “he never made the least attempt to do his job or to get to know politicians. He pretended to despise them, but was in fact frightened of them.”

Another Spitfire villain, but of a very different sort, was motor car tycoon Lord Nuffield. Nuffield grandly promised to build an entirely new Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham, and he did. How different, he argued, could mass producing Spitfires be to mass producing motor cars? Very different, it turned out, and for a vital year or two, Castle Bromwich produced nothing but bills and obfuscation. Even if he had been suited to mass producing Spitfires, Nuffield was by this time too old for such a task, but too rich and grand to be sacked.

Until, that is, Lord Beaverbrook sacked him. The story I have always been told was that Lord Beaverbrook made a vital difference to Spitfire production, and McKinstry endorses this orthodoxy. Beaverbrook was definitely another big Spitfire hero. Appointed by Churchill as his Minister for Aircraft Production, Beaverbrook at once started shouting down the telephone at everybody in the proper aviation industry style. McKinstry tells how Beaverbrook once rang up the boss of Supermarine, a man called Craven, at a time when Craven was answering the call of nature. I don't care what he's doing, get him, yelled Beaverbrook. Craven replied, when disturbed in the toilet by the wretched secretary in the middle of this shouting match, that he could only deal with one shit at a time.

Beaverbrook also shouted at Nuffield, and Nuffield decided to put this silly little Canadian newspaperman in his place. Perhaps he, Beaverbrook, would prefer it if he, Lord Nuffield, were to stand aside from the Spitfire programme? Yes, good idea, said Beaverbrook. Exit Nuffield.

No Spitfires were allowed to fight in France in 1940, but come the summer, there were just enough, just a Few, you might say. And the ultimate Spitfire heroes, the pilots, duly won their battle, and their place in history.

I found McKinstry's description of the Battle of Britain particularly interesting, because I've always been interested in that big Big Wing row, as publicised in the movie The Battle of Britain, and which has rumbled on ever since the battle. The most persuasive things I had so far read about this argument have come down pretty firmly against the so-called Big Wing tactic, espoused by 12 Group commander Leigh-Mallory, but vehemently opposed by Park, commander of 11 Group, which was the Group that fought most of the battle, between London (rather expansively defined) and the south coast. Len Deighton, in his book Fighter, for instance, says that the sacking of Dowding and sidelining of Park just after they had won their battle was outrageous. Park's objection to Big Wings, eloquently expounded by Trevor Howard, playing Park in The Battle of Britain, was that large numbers of attacking fighters were all very fine, but that such numbers took far too long to assemble, and by the time they had assembled the German bombers had already bombed. Which was all too liable to mean that they had bombed Park's airfields.

McKinstry doesn't seriously dissent from that judgement, but he does say that Dowding, in overall command, could have been a whole lot more decisive in his handling of this dispute, and a whole lot more flexible in his use of the available pilots and squadrons, than he actually was. The picture McKinstry paints of Dowding is of a backroom bureaucrat of genius, but of a somewhat ineffectual battle commander. Dowding supervised the creation of that famous system of command and control that won the Battle of Britain, and he was one of the first senior RAF officers to spot the importance of the Spitfire, and for that alone he deserves all the garlands he has since had bestowed upon him. But as a day to day battle commander, says McKinstry, he was not the real deal. My take on Dowding, having read McKinstry's take on Dowding, is that Dowding wanted his beloved system to do the job all by itself. For him to tinker with the system as it was doing its thing would be, to him, an admission of the system's imperfection. Which was not really the point, was it? Anyway, fair or unfair, I was glad to read McKinstry's reservations about Dowding, because until now, none of the antagonism that surrounded Dowding at the time has has made much sense to me. McKinstry also expresses reservations about Park, calling him vain and territorial. Basically, McKinstry says that the quarrelling between Dowding and Park and Leigh-Mallory reflected little credit on any of them. The methods they each insisted on might have complemented each other, instead of just being the basis of an ongoing quarrell. Clearly Dowding's system was a wonder, but Big Wings, says McKinstry, had their place. On those occasions, the climactic September 15th battles being one such, when Douglas Bader's huge Duxford Wing was able to get seriously stuck into the Germans, it played havoc with their morale, for the German airmen had been assured that the RAF had been all but wiped out. It was around then that a German famously said: "Here come those last fifty Spitfires", and McKinstry makes that one of his chapter headings. Clearly the feuding British commanders had been doing something very right, to say nothing of the people making the Spitfires.

You can't talk Spitfire without also talking Hurricane. McKinstry reasserts the orthodox view, which states that the Spitfire was better. The German pilots certainly feared it more, much preferring to have been shot down by a Spitfire than by a Hurricane. A few Hurricane pilots who had got used to their Hurricanes but then switched to Spitfires and found it hard to adapt to carried on saying that the Hurricane was the equal of the Spitfire, or even superior. But few others now believe this.

However, the Hurricane did have one huge short-term advantage over the Spitfire. Being made in a more primitive way than the Spitfire, with wood and canvas (rather as I remember assembling model airplanes in my childhood with balsa wood and paint-tightened tissue paper), it was cheaper and above all easier to make. While early Spitfire making stuttered frighteningly, Hurricane building proceeded far more smoothly and rapidly. There were thus Hurricanes to waste in France in early 1940, and plenty more in time for the Battle of Britain. The Hurricane could not have won the Battle of Britain on its own, but without it, the battle might well have been lost. Further proof of the Hurricane's inferiority to the Spitfire is that the Hurricanes were mostly given the job of shooting down the incoming bombers, while the Spitfires tackled the far more formidable fighter escorts. This boosted the kill numbers achieved by the Hurricanes, which was then used by some to argue that the Hurricane was as good as the Spitfire, but of course it proves no such thing.

The biggest difference between the Hurricane and the Spitfire was that the Hurricane was a technological dead end, while the early Spitfires were but the first of many versions. By the end of the war, many thousands of Spitfires had been made, and the manufacturing process, although never easy, always rather unwieldy, soon became as smooth and efficient as it had at first been chaotic. A story I knew nothing about until now concerned the original Supermarine Spitfire factory in Southampton. This was bombed towards the end of the Battle of Britain, but rather than rebuild it, perhaps to see it bombed into rubble again, they decided to disperse Spitfire production into the surrounding area, Vietcong style. It worked. What had begun as a nightmare of disorganisation eventually got smoothed out into a miracle of coordinated effort, much as the war effort as a whole went from absurdity to triumph, albeit at huge cost. And of course, the post-Nuffield version of the Castle Bromwich factory likewise got into its productive stride.

The most glorious and important battle fought by the Spitfire after 1940 was the defence of Malta. There were many crucial moments (I recommend googling the word “Ohio” together with “Malta” if you want to learn about another such) which enabled Malta to hold out and continue to serve as a staging post for supplying the allied armies in North Africa and for disrupting the supplies of the Germans fighting against them. But undoubtedly one of the crucial moments in Malta's wartime story was when the first Spitfires arrived.

Not that the high-ups in Fighter Command (the ones who had replaced Dowding and Park) were much help. It took a scandalously long time for any Spitfires to switch from pointless Big Wing forays across France, to meaningful action in Malta. I recall reading in my long ago youth, in Paul Brickhill's Bader biography, about huge Bader-lead expeditions over France. But why did the Germans bother to attack such formations, and thereby allow themselves to be shot down? I mean, what was being attacked, and what defended? According to McKinstry, the Germans mostly didn't attack and these forays were a nonsense.

Meanwhile, it definitely says something about the Spitfire that its most glorious battle after its first and greatest one was also defensive. The basic task of the Spitfire in 1940 was to take to the air, and immediately to start shooting at incoming attackers, helpfully tracked by radar. That the Spitfires couldn't carry very much fuel was not an insuperable problem. Running out of fuel? Okay. Land, refuel, and then take off again and rejoin the battle. Very hard on the pilots, who would find find themselves flying half a dozen sorties in one day, but basically: doable. The same formula was repeated in Malta.

The Spitfire fought just one other particular battle of significance, towards the end of the war, against the V1 rockets. By the time the V1 appeared, Spitfires had become fast enough to chase after them. But rather than shoot a V1 down and perish in the resulting explosion, the Spitfire would put a wing under the V1's wing and shove it upwards, thus sending the V1 off course. I did not know that.

But the biggest and most important thing, from the war winning point of view, that the later versions of the Spitfire did was to support the allied armies as they slowly advanced towards Germany. They helped to supply that extra dimension of misery to the Germans, by shooting up armoured convoys, wrecking trains, and generally making a nuisance of themselves to every manifestation of Germanity they were able to spot.

Not that spotting from a Spitfire was that easy. Did I mention the Spitfire's engine? This was the great Rolls Royce Merlin, and really, getting on for half the credit for the Spitfire design should go to Rolls Royce, for making the Spitfire possible. But this mighty engine did come with a rather odd price attached to it. It was very big, as fighter engines go, and right bang in the middle of what should have been the pilots field of vision. So, spotting from a Spitfire, if the ground is what you are trying to spot, was not that easy. It also made landing a problem. What they did was come in at a curve, thus enabling the pilot to see where he was going to land past the side of the engine.

This huge engine also made the Spitfire no use as a night-fighter, as the inhabitants of London discovered to their cost soon after the Battle of Britain, when the Germans switched from daylight attacks on airfields and radar stations to night-time attacks on London. The problem was that the Spitfire's engine emitted such dramatic flames and sparks that at night the pilot could see nothing else. That Dowding had nothing to offer by way of defending London was all part of why he got the sack, but it was hardly his fault. He simply didn't have the planes for the job.

Despite such limitations, the Spitfire did perform aerial reconnaissance with great distinction. It is fun, although confusing at first, to read a book where the the acronym PR stand not for the superficialities these letters stand for now, but for photo reconnaissance. What the Spitfire could not do with any distinction at all was protect bombers over Germany. It didn't have the range. McKinstry tells of how a Spitfire was forced to make a landing at a US airbase, and then to beg for fuel to get home, and of how the Americans there laughed out loud at the Spitfire's paltry fuel appetite. Drop tanks were attached, but never very satisfactorily, and besides, more petrol meant less in the way of guns and ammunition. Only for PR did the tanks really work properly, because in that case guns were positively discouraged, the point being to get the pictures back rather than to get involved in any shooting.

So, why did the Spitfire continue to be developed? Why did they not develop other planes more suited to the tasks of war winning rather than merely not war losing? Well, they did develop more planes, such as the Typhoon, the Mosquito, and so on. But entirely new airplanes are hard, and very expensive, to get into production, as the story of the Spitfire itself well illustrates. Every time they were about to forget about building more Spitfires, Supermarine would introduce some apparently rather unpromising Spitfire modifications or apparently minor improvements, and, much to the delight of all the pilots concerned, an extra dose of life would be found in her. Meanwhile, some new airplane which on the face of it had seemed a better bet, for whatever it was they wanted it for, would run into difficulties. So it was that the Spitfire carried on, and on, and on. By the end of the war, both the Russians and the Americans each had over a thousand of them, and the RAF had nearly six thousand. Measured by numbers produced, the Spitfire was the most successful British airplane ever. It carried on in active service into the late 1950s, shooting up Communist insurgents or photo-ing similar efforts by others. The Spitfire continues to delight nostalgic crowds at air displays and ceremonial flypasts.

Talking of finding more life in “her”, the pilots did indeed talk of the Spitfire as a she, and in general as a very sexy machine. And the Spitfire was sexy in another way. There is a bit in this book which reminded me of the passage in The Right Stuff where Tom Wolfe explains how some of America's most beautiful girls found their way to top secret airbases for trysts with the early jet pilots. Much the same went on at Spitfire bases. And when away on leave, any young man with the magic of a set of wings on his uniform, and, better still, who was able to say: yes I am as a matter of fact, when asked if he was a fighter pilot, and: yes I do as it happens, when asked if by any chance he flew Spitfires, was usually well taken care of, so to speak. The young men who flew Spitfires were the alpha males of their generation, much as Grand Prix drivers and Rock Stars are now, the technical back-up for a Spitfire being not unlike what goes on now in the pits at Formula 1 races.

Nor were the Spitfire pilots held back from such pleasures by much in the way of poshly educated reticence, because most of them were not from posh schools. The army had and has posh officers, especially in its posh regiments. But the wartime RAF was much more meritocratic. Could you fly, and when flying, could you kill? That was what mattered. It turned out that most couldn't fly and kill well enough, but that those who could were, socially, a very mixed bunch. Many were definite mavericks, to echo Tom Cruise's call sign in Top Gun, and there was a distinct tendency for the RAF's top guns during the war to be from the colonies, such as the New Zealander Al Deere and the South African Sailor Malan, perhaps so-called because "Sailor" presumably worked so much better than his original first name: Adolphe. Poles and Czechs were also heavily involved in the Battle of Britain, and in the Spitfire story in general, fuelled by a ferocious desire for national revenge.

This book abounds with descriptions by the pilots of their many adventures and near things, my favourite being one when a WAAF who had been doing some maintenance on a Spitfire found herself still sitting on it when it took off. They told the pilot to land, and indeed something did seem to him a bit wrong with how the plane was handling, but they didn't want to worry him by telling him exactly why. She lived to tell her tale, as did many, many more, quite a few of them to McKinstry. In general this book is stronger on human interest anecdotage than in technical explication. There is a definite air in this book of "let's get these stories written down before the people who can tell them to us have all died", and quite right too.

Us Brits now feel a whole lot better about how we contrived not to lose World War 2 at its beginning than we do about the fact that we ended up coming a rather distant third, with our last throw as a military superpower being to participate enthusiastically in the mass incineration of German civilians. Few of us minded this much at the time, but most of us are unhappy about all that now and prefer to hark back to 1940. Yet, oddly, Dowding, who commanded the British side in the Battle of Britain, is not now that well remembered. He was no Nelson with his band of brothers, brotherliness being the exact quality that Dowding so crucially failed to instill into his key subordinates, and nor was he much good at schmoozing with superiors, or with politicians. Dowding, whose nickname was "Stuffy", lacked the knack of eliciting a warm and spontaneous human response. Simply, he was not loved.

But there was nothing stuffy or unlovable about the Spitfire. As McKinstry says, it is indeed odd that the principle weapon of the victorious side in the Battle of Britain is now better remembered than the man who actually commanded the victorious side. Yet so it is, and so it probably always will be. The perfection and simplicity, and sublime individuality, of the Spitfire's shape, and the decisive contribution it made to the victory, will always ensure this.

Oh dear, I too am harking back to 1940. But it is that kind of book, I'm afraid. I found the 1940 stuff very intriguing, and the stuff before it, when they were building Spitfires for the first time, downrght fascinating. After 1940, I continued reading more as a duty, to find out if anything more of overwhelming interest was said so that I could pass it on here. The later chapters of this book certainly have their moments, in Malta, and when those V1s were being shoved off course, by hand as it were. But as I said at the beginning of this review, the beginning of this story is where the best bits are.

(14)

It is funny how films that you put down on the "must get around to seeing it sometime" list never get seen. Well, I have wanted to watch that 1970 epic, Waterloo, for a while and watched it during a quiet Saturday afternoon. Several things struck me about it, not least the fact that the cast was drawn from the Soviet Union (the Red Army?). I think I remember reading somewhere that the Soviet forces were used as cast extras in quite a lot of films, including a Russian film version of War and Peace. Rod Steiger's portrayal of Bonaparte has not, in my view, ever been bettered. What a great actor Steiger was. Mad eyes.

I wonder if anyone who drives past the rolling wheatfields of Belgium in which the battle was fought ever wonder about the sheer carnage that was caused on that damp June day in 1815, or reflect that, nearly 200 years later, Bonaparte's dream of a pan-European empire has in some ways come to pass, albeit without the nifty French cavalry uniforms.

Andrew Roberts' fine account of both Napoleon and his nemesis, Wellington, is certainly worth a read.

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“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he brought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service….The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income.”

- A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, page 1. Quoted by Alvin Rabushka in “From Adam Smith to The Wealth of America, page 80. The latter is a particularly good book, written very much from the "supply-side" school of economics with a strong account of developments in UK 19th century politics, Hong Kong, and the Reagan presidency.

(12)

I have been reading this book, by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV. King Henry ascended the throne of England after successfully deposing Richard II, and his own reign seems to have consisted of one attempt after another to depose him. Yet Henry IV died in his bed of natural albeit very painful causes.

One of these failed rebellions against King Henry, at the beginning of the year 1400, involved a certain Sir Thomas Blount.

Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor's death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount's execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. 'No, for I do not know where I should put it', he replied.

I had no idea that the people who suffered these frightful deaths were able to say anything at this late stage in their ordeal. I guess the executioners were trying to be as nice as they could to Sir Thomas, against whom they presumably had no personal animus, rather like Michael Palin in this. But, talk about too little, too late.

(12)

Although of course it is a joke, see the posting immediately below. As Jonathan has already noted, Guido Fawkes has had a lot of fun over the last few months noting that every time Gordon Brown comes out in support of anything, it immediately tanks. Andy Murray was Mr Brown's latest victim, apparently. So when I read on the Coffee House blog this morning that Gordon Brown now supports Barack Obama, I knew that Guido would be crowing with laughter, if not now then very soon, and sure enough, he is. Obama, says a delighted Guido, is now officially doomed. Luckily, before posting this, I also checked out Samizdata to see if anyone else here was having a laugh about this, and of course, they are.

Apologies if you think I am duplicating here, but behind the hilarity of all this is to be observed an interesting re-arrangement of the political conventions, which is why I still put this thought up as a separate posting. More and more mere people, especially political people, like the ones who read Samizdata for example, have their particular preferences not just in their own countries and constituencies and districts and states and towns, but in 'foreign' parts also. The logic of the internet – even of instant electronic communication itself, which got started getting on for two hundred years ago - has always, to me, suggested global political affiliations, and in due course, global political parties. Certainly the Communist movement thought so. Maybe language remains a big barrier, but geography now matters less and less.

Remember that counter-productive attempt by the Guardian to swing the last (was it?) Presidential election against Bush? Many concluded that this proved the wisdom of political people staying out of foreign elections. To me it merely proved that if you want to help this or that side in foreign parts, make sure that you really are helping. Because attempts to help like this are absolutely not going to stop. As the very existence of Samizdata now nicely illustrates, this is all now one big Anglospherical conversation.

Obama's idiotic campaign trip to Germany was, you might say, a self-inflicted version of that same Guardian blunder. But nor does that folly prove, to me, that campaigners should never go abroad and seek foreign support when campaigning, merely that they should choose their foreign supporters with more care than Obama did. Having the right sort of foreigners waving and cheering next to him can do a politician all kinds of good, now that the pictures can be flashed around the world in seconds.

Under pressure from the McCain camp, the Brown regime is conducting another of its hasty and shambolic retreats. All sorts of stuff gets read out by Mr Brown, or appears under his name in printed articles. But you don't suppose that he actually reads it all beforehand, do you? Mr Brown's people are now assuring us that it was one of them who inadvertently revealed this sentiment, rather than Mr Brown himself who actually said it. All Mr Brown did was allow his name to be attached to the bottom of a newspaper article. So once again, there is this pattern, of the political leader trying, but failing, to observe the old and obsolete conventions, against his natural instincts, but his mere people not being so inhibited about saying what they think. Sooner or later the world's leaders will all follow their mere supporters, and stop pretending to be neutral in foreign elections. Their line should be, because this will be the truth: of course I'll work with whoever wins, I'm a politician. But meanwhile, yes, I do most definitely have my preferences.

The particular awfulness and embarrassingness of Mr Brown's particular expression of a preference in the US Presidential election should not detract from the more general interestingness of this little event. Inevitably, most of the commentary will be about how the Obama campaign may now have peaked (the comments on Jonathan's previous posting are already saying yes it has), and about how the Brown regime is unravelling, definitely, again, some more. But I find the more general global political party angle at least as interesting.

After all, this is not now only Brown preferring Obama, which we all know he does despite any denials (does anybody at all in what is left of the Labour Party not prefer Obama to McCain?). This is also now the McCain team opposing Brown, and not caring who knows it. And by extension, and whatever Mr McCain may personally feel or even know about the man, helping David Cameron. After all, the heading at Coffee House says: "The McCain campaign mocks Gordon Brown". So now Mr McCain is doing it too, whatever denials he may subsequently issue.

(22)

The other night I dined with Michael Jennings, and the question arose between us about how the political atmosphere of Britain now compared with the atmosphere of Britain in slightly earlier times, the most obvious comparison being between now and the time just before – and at the start of - the Thatcher era. Whether Michael himself asked about how 1979 and thenabouts compared to now I cannot recall. Probably not, because in 1979 he was a young boy living in Australia. But I found myself trying to answer this question, because I believe that the comparison is rather intriguing.

Economically, Britain then and Britain now are in a rather similar mess, created by similar policies. The government was then, and is now, spending more than it can comfortably raise from us in taxes. Then as now, international conditions had reduced what the government could comfortably spend, but the government found it hard to react rationally. So much, briefly, for the similarities. But the differences are huge. These differences are in the party politics of it all.

In the late seventies and right through the nineteen eighties, huge numbers of Labour supporters (I met and spoke with many like this) refused to accept that there had even been a problem. As I seem to recall Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan saying at the time: "Crisis? What crisis?" Before the 1979 general election, many Labourites couldn't see what the fuss was all about, and after it they were amazed. Labour's only problem, as they saw it, was convincing the electorate that there was no drastic problem and thus that there was no need to vote for the only drastic answer then being offered to the voters: Thatcher. What was the problem with just expanding the state to solve all problems, real and imagined, in the same old style? The basic atmosphere in the Labour Party was, compared to now, relaxed and complacent, both before and after the 1979 election. Before it, they said: the voters won't go crazy. After the election they said: the voters will soon realise what a horror Thatcher is and they will recover their wits. Soon, it will be back to political business as usual.

Conservatives, on the other hand, were, towards the end of the seventies and throughout the early eighties plunged into pessimism. They were pessimistic about the direction the country was heading, and even when elected, they were then pessimistic about their ability to do much about it. They too were amazed at the result of the 1979 election, but as far as they were concerned, that was when their big problems really began. Only those Conservatives who loved having won an election and bugger the country (admittedly quite a lot of them and admitted the loudest ones) were truly happy.

Conservatives then mostly believed that the voters, although angry at the consequences of Britain's economic decline, would be similarly angry about any steps that might actually reverse that decline and would refuse to go on voting for any such corrections just as soon as they started to experience them. Unemployment of a million or more was politically unthinkable (on that point there was agreement right across the political spectrum), because it was assumed that the voters simply would not stand for it. For all on the left, such large scale unemployment was horrific and unnecessary. For many on the right, it was also horrific, maybe in some sense necessary, but whether necessary or not, politically impossible because the voters would not stomach it. Instead, Conservatives feared that the voters would just continue voting angrily, first this way and then that way but always against the government, against the deepening misery of living in a permanently declining country but not in any way that would permit such decline to be reversed. Britain had, in short, become ungovernable, and would thus decline all the more precipitately. Many Conservatives then lived in a mental universe in which the voters would simply vote the country to perdition and never stop. I am not exaggerating. Optimism, among Conservatives, was in very short supply in the late seventies and early eighties. Thatcherites thought that Thatcherism was worth a try, however risky, and given the alternative. Anti-Thatcherite Conservatives thought Thatcherism futile and doomed and that its doom should be accepted with dignity.

But the economy recovered. It at least ceased nosediving. And as far as the Conservatives were concerned (egged on by the voters with two more amazing Thatcher landslides) this economic recovery was a genuinely accomplished fact, accomplished by them.

The atmosphere amongst Labourites also changed. They realised that the damn voters would never be persuaded that there had been no problem to which Thatcher was any sort of solution. They just wouldn't be told. So, they would have to be told something different. Labour had, said new leader Tony Blair, turned over a new leaf. It was now the party of prudent economic management, and – yes – tax cuts. Under Labour, taxes would never be increased beyond what the country could afford. So when the Conservatives pissed on the recovery they had themselves allowed, Labour stood ready to harvest the votes. But Labour has now broken that promise and here we are again, in much the same kind of mess we were in in 1979.

But there are also huge differences. The optimism and the pessimism now are distributed about the landscape very differently. The travails of Mr Brown have been much discussed, here and elsewhere. That Mr Brown is now stubbornly trying to concoct an argument to the effect that he is the answer to the very problem which he has spent the previous decade saying that he had personally abolished for ever, and that his attempt is doomed, and that the Labour Party even now, still, allows this slow motion train wreck of a government to continue its ruination of the country, is now the dominant political narrative. All of which has put the Labour Party in a state of far deeper gloom than any it was experiencing in the seventies and eighties. By the eighties Labour's Plan A had failed, in everyone else's eyes but not in their own, and then they were able to contrive a Plan B, in the form of Tony Blair. Now, there is no imaginable Labour Plan C. So, back to Plan A again? A reheated version of Plan B? The political wilderness awaits. And I haven't even mentioned the Scottish Nationalists. I have had a running debate with Michael Jennings about how long the voters will remember what a shambles the current Labour government is. He says, based on Australian experience, that the voters will soon forget. I say not. Obviously it could be wishful thinking on my part, but I say that the Labour Party is now quite right to be deeply pessimistic about its future.

Far less discussed is how very much more optimistic the Conservatives now are about their ability to correct things, as soon as they become the next government. After all, they have cleaned this kind of mess up before, well within living memory, and they can do it again. In fact, when you consider that their last act before the wilderness swallowed them up in 1997 was to allow a recovery from the mess that they themselves had re-made under Chancellor Nigel Lawson, you realise that they have recently presided over two economic recoveries. It's not rocket science. You cut spending, and borrowing, and tax rates, and wait for things to pick up, which they will. You don't cut any of these things nearly as much as loony libbos like me – and you? - would like, but you cut them enough to do some good, and this will do some good. New jobs will materialise, provided only that people are clobbered less savagely with high interest rates and high taxes and negative equity than they are being clobbered now.

Oh, there are differences of – shall we say? - emphasis between this Conservative front bencher and that one, between what David Cameron says to one audience, and what he says a fortnight later to a different audience. But these divisions and uncertainties are as nothing beside the gloom in which the Conservatives were sunk at the corresponding political moment last time this particular story played itself out. When Thatcher did her thing, she was talking about rolling back the state and reversing the decline of the country, in peacetime, for the first time anyone could remember, and then, very approximately, she did it. Extraordinary! All Cameron needs to do is repeat the dose. And this time around, there is widespread Conservative confidence that the voters will vote and keep on voting for whatever needs doing. Indeed, the average Conservative has believed for some time that the voters are, if anything, rather more committed to financial prudence than Mr Cameron seems to be. As the economic state of the country worsens, fears that Mr Cameron will just carry on taxing-and-spending recede. He simply won't be able to do this, whatever he may personally have in mind to do. Meanwhile, commentators who have got used to saying such things over the last few years are saying that the Conservatives now need new ideas. No they don't. The fewer new ideas they adopt, and hence new government bureaucracies they unleash, the better. The only remotely new ideas the Conservatives need now concern just who to fire from the excessively bloated public sector, when, and in what order.

By the way, Labourites need to be careful about painting Cameron as Thatcher The Second. By the time the election comes around, that will probably be what pretty much the entire country other than them and their dwindling rabble of supporters will have decided they want. Labour risks doing the Conservatives' campaigning for them.

Because, guess what. When you are firing people, the last thing you need to do in the years and months before you fire them is to conduct an elaborate public discussion in a loud voice about exactly who you are going to fire and exactly why. No, what you do when firing people is arrange matters in such a way that the first time it seriously dawns on the unlucky ones who are to be fired that they are to be fired is when they are being fired. One moment things are fine, and whoever they are are a group of much valued public servants doing an important job in difficult circumstances. And the next moment ... chop. Pack your personal belongings in these boxes here and be out on the pavement within the hour. That's how you fire people. No wonder Cameron is not anxious to discuss his plans in any sort of public detail. But this is what his plans will have to consist of, and we all know it.

The pessimism of the Conservatives in 1979 proved excessive. Their optimism now could prove just as wrong-headed. Events favoured the Conservatives in the early eighties, presenting them, for example, with a small war that they were able to win. Events may not be so kind to Mr Cameron. But those will be other stories.

(29)

The BBC is running a television series called The Tudors, I believe that the show is in its second series. They seem to think that the Tudor dynasty started with Henry VIII as there were no episodes on his father Henry VII, and the show still seems to be stuck on Henry VIII. Indeed his second wife, Ann Boleyn, has not even been executed yet - sorry if this is a 'spoiler' to people who think the fate of Ann is a cliff hanger.

"Sneer as much as you like about how slow paced this series is," I hear you say, "the BBC is concentrating on telling the story correctly".

Really?

Today I channel hopped and came upon the point in the show where the actor playing Thomas Cromwell was introducing a new invention - a secret weapon that would win the propaganda war with the Roman Catholics. The printing press (spoken with special stress) - introduced to the show with cries of "by God, what is that?", and other such, from the actors.

Sadly the printing press was introduced to England during the reign of Edward IV - some sixty years before the time the scene was set, so everyone would have known exactly what a printing press was.

The excuse for the special tax that funds the BBC is that the organization 'educates' the population. This excuse just does not stand up.

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So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they've appeared, and I'm hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I've found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn't read the latest book on Lincoln, or on - as Bush refers to him - the "first George W." I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.

"Well, so Bush reads history", one might reasonably observe at this point. "Isn't it more important to find out how he uses it?" It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested - as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time - in how the past can provide guidance for the future.

- John Lewis Gaddis

(18)

We have of course already alluded here to the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Here is another tribute to this great man, from Theodore Dalrymple twelve days ago, which I think is spot on:

Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin's appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others' misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.

Solzhenitsyn's achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin's true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising - and, of course, quite right - on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.

But I suspect that this may also be right:

The problem for Solzhenitsyn's literary reputation is that the subjects his books address no longer seem so compelling to younger readers. Astonishing as it may seem to people who lived through the time when Solzhenitsyn appeared as a colossus, many people younger than 30 - not only in America and Western Europe but in Russia itself - have never heard of him or do not know what he did. Of course, literary reputations wax and wane; but his disappearance from the consciousness of young people at least raises the question of whether his achievement was more political and moral than literary.

Ever since I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (out loud on the University of Essex radio station as it transpired), I always had Solzhenitsyn clocked as: Great Writer? - not sure; propagandist – all time great. In this respect, I particular recommend his memoir called The Oak and the Calf, which is about how he did his propagandising, which was all mixed up with how he managed to keep himself alive to go on propagandising, which was a mighty achievement in itself under the murderous circumstances that he described and publicised so well.

Quite aside from the fact that I don't read Russian, this judgement of mine surely has much to do with the fact that I have no very definite idea what a great writer is in any language (although I know very approximately what I like) and am myself scarcely a published writer at all. I'm not saying he was a great writer of literary fiction, and I'm not saying he wasn't. On the other hand, I know quite a lot about propaganda and have myself done it with some glimmerings of success. In rather the same way that if you actually play football in some very lowly division you are an order of magnitude better than I am at knowing just how good Pele was or Ronaldo is, I can tell you that Solzhenitsyn was, when it came to spreading ideas, awesomely good, and that this was no accident. He brought skills like those of a chess grandmaster to the ideological struggle between him (and all his Samizdat allies) and the USSR. and his industry and attention to detail (to say nothing of his sheer courage) was extraordinary. The notion that he won his ideological battle without any hard graft besides the hard graft of just writing it down in some isolated dacha is quite wrong. He was the spokesman for an entire generation of other writers and record keepers. He was the leader of an entire underground movement. He created a fact-shifting machine as surely as any Western press magnate. He quite consciously set himself the task of destroying the USSR using only the power of the written and published word, and more than any other man - with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who also had the awesome military clout of the USA at his disposal - he succeeded.

Not that Solzhenitsyn was himself indifferent to or ignorant of military affairs. Towards the end of his life he wrote several novels about the First World War. He was in the artillery before being swallowed up by the monster that he named the Gulag, and he thought of all the truths that he gathered about the Gulag as ammunition, and the publishing of them as the launching of artillery barrages. If Dalrymple is right, it will be for the war of words that Solzhenitsyn conducted against the USSR, and for the fact that it succeeded so brilliantly, that he will be most admiringly remembered. But now that he is gone, fresh looks will surely be taken from the purely literary point of view at Solzhenitsyn's achievement, and posterity may arrive, as Dalrymple says, at a somewhat different conclusion.

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Thinking about the recent not-so-smart observations on men's magazines by Tory politician Michael Gove, it is useful to recall that our so-called moral guardians have for a long time got themselves all hot and bothered about the prospect of biddable young chaps getting an eyeful of the fairer sex:

"The French rulers [the Bishop informed the House], while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example, in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenious youth. They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people."

Quoted in Decency & Disorder, by Ben Wilson, page 16. The comments were made by a Bishop sitting in the House of Lords in 1798. The late 1790s were a frightening period for the British ruling classes - as well they should have been. But it seems strangely comical that a Bishop should imagine that pretty French girls showing a bit of leg were more dangerous than the armies of Napoleon. Even at the time, I suspect that the likes of your average British sailor who was in the front line of defending Britain from attack would have thought this prelate to be a bit of an ass.

But however silly the Bishop's comments were, they do point to something that is actually quite important: soft power, as foreign policy strategists like to call it. Yes, force of arms can subdue a weak nation. But any part of a "conquest" of a culture must take heed of the power, not just of tanks, guns or aircraft, but of ideas and preferences. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we tend to forget that the sight of Western advertisements for goods and services, occasionally glimpsed by people living in the Soviet empire, must have been a shock to anyone told that state central planning was the inevitable course of economic history. And when young people the world over - of whatever religion or of none - get to enjoy greater freedoms, most of them, from what I can tell, rather like them. Of course, religious extremists recoil in horror at such freedoms, just as the bishop I quoted did more than 200 years ago. Such folk may even use moral panics about such things to inflame opinion in reaction. But most people welcome a more liberal culture, which is why religious and other ideological puritans get so angry about it.

Maybe the Bishop was actually being quite wise after all. He need not have worried though, since those ladies' men, Nelson and Wellington, dealt with the Corsican tyrant in the end, with a bit of help from a lot of Russians and Germans.

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"It is many years since British historians felt comfortable in celebrating their country's triumphs. Once upon a time, Britain's incontestable naval and commercial supremacy in 1815 would have been explained as the predestined fruit of national virtue, religious truth and political freedom. Among professional historians all three explanations would nowadays arouse varying degrees of amusement, distaste and embarrassment, but no modern consensus of opinion has emerged to replace them. For many years the tendency has been to ignore or belittle the fact as well as the consequences of British naval supremacy. Not many would go so far as to dismiss it outright as a convenient myth, or imply that Napoleon won the Napoleonic War, but a number of intellectual strategies have been devised to ignore it."

From N.A.M. Roger, The Command of The Ocean, page 575.

This is a quite outstanding book, published a few years ago. I particularly liked its explanation of how the Royal Navy knitted in with the commercial and political world of the time, such as how the need to provide food and supplies for ships going over vast distances encouraged development in things like food preservation, the development of the UK agricultural market, mass production techniques (for things like bits of ship rigging). The famous 17th Century diarist, Samuel Pepys, famously played a key role in developing the administrative machinery that was essential in making the operation work.

And what is also interesting is that the image that we traditionally have of the navy in the 18th century - "rum, sodomy and the lash" - to quote Churchill's famous phrase about the navy - is not quite the full picture. There were brutal captains, terrible conditions and bad treatment of sailors via the press gang, yes. But Roger balances all this by pointing out how many of the ships we led by relatively humane and considerate men who treated sailors as well as could be reasonably expected (food and conditions were frequently better than on dry land).

It is hard to conceive, as Roger says, that Nelson and the rest would have won their famous victories had the sailors of the fleets been purely driven by the menace of the cat o' nine tails. Roger explains a great deal of how the Navy was able to play such a massive role in UK history.

For history at its best, this book takes a lot of beating.

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Well the 4th of August came and went again, without comment from anyone else - so I will belatedly comment upon it myself.

This day is more than the 47th birthday of the Windy City Marxist (sorry "liberal") - spiritual grandchild of Saul Alinsky, it is also the date of the only good day in the French Revolution.

I refer not so much to the "Declaration of the Rights of Man", a document whose wording makes it rather less useful in defending people (as opposed to 'the people') against the power of the state than the American Bill of Rights. I refer to the practical things that were done on the Fourth of August 1789... The abolition of so many taxes, monopolies and restrictions...and the ending of serfdom.

Certainly 'only' half a million French people (out of a population of some 30 million) were serfs and the courts had not been in the habit of enforcing serfdom, but the legal status still existed - till the 4th of August 1789.

And certainly the ending of the so many taxes on the 4th of August was followed, only a few months later, by new taxes and by the theft of vast amounts of land from the Roman Catholic Church and others, supposedly to "back" the newly issued fiat money "Assignats" that collapsed into hyperinflation anyway - in spite of all the stealing and all the murders that the Revolutionaries committed.

However, the 4th of August was still a good day, the one good day of the French Revolution, and it should not be forgotten.

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Last night, I watched a repeat of a programme that took me back about 30 years to when I was a young kid being taught history by a very leftwing history teacher. The period of study was the Industrial Revolution, and I remember getting what I call the default-setting "Black Satanic Mills" version of the 18th and 19th centuries, full of horrible factories, brutish owners, vicious and incompetent governments, heroic but downtrodden workers, starving farm labourers, not to mention a cast list of all those splendid French revolutionaries. I think it was at about this time - 1976-77 - that I formed in my still-young head the vague sense that I was being sold a line, that something about this was not quite accurate. Anyway, I was only 10, I was more interested in sports and messing about with my mates, and had yet to take a more serious interest in the world of current events. But even at that age I developed a love of history that has stayed with me, and for all that he is a died-in-the-wool leftie, my old history teacher, who is now retired, is someone of whom I have fond memories. He is actually one of the nicest of men and I keep in touch with him. The programme in question was fronted by Tony Robinson whom many non-Britons will know as the guy who played Baldrick in the glorious Blackadder TV series. In more recent years, Robinson, who is a campaigner for things like trade unions, long-term care for the elderly and other causes, has made a name for himself as an enthusiast for ancient history. His programme last night was a classic example of the sort of history that I was taught at school: wittily presented, but at its base incredibly biased, often factually inaccurate, and playing into a narrative of UK history that has coloured our views of industry, law, industrial relations and trade ever since.

One of the main parts of the programme was about the use of the death penalty and how the harsh penal code of the time was used to protect the property of the landed classes and the emerging class of entrepreneurs. That the code was harsh is undeniable. By the early 1820s, there were scores of offences, even ones like stealing potatoes or game, that were punishable by death. What Robinson ignored, however, is that juries frequently refused to convict such crimes because they could see that the punishment was outrageous. And in the 1820s, Robert Peel, Home Secretary at the time, swept almost all capital crimes off the statute books, save only for murder. Robinson does not mention this. And Robinson scorned how landowners were allowed, under the English Common Law, to defend their property by deadly force. He then juxtaposed pictures of poachers being executed with the recent case of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot, and killed, an intruder at his home after having been burgled repeatedly. As far as Robinson was concerned, Martin was a throwback to the disgusting concept of using deadly force to guard property, and did not stop to consider that it is often very poor, vulnerable people who are the victims of robbery and attack. The arguments presented by the likes of Joyce-Lee Malcolm, who, for example, has defended the right of use of deadly force in self-defence, do not even enter Robinson's frame of reference. Indeed, the whole show gives us an insight as to how the UK political left - Robinson is an avid Labour Party supporter of the old, hard-left variety - view the whole concept of self defence and the role of the state generally.

The economics of the Industrial Revolution makes up the background of his programme, which is mainly about crime and punishment. Not surprisingly given his political views, Robinson also gives the standard line that the Industrial Revolution was produced on the backs of "the workers", but then what is crucial to any fair appraisal of the massive changes that happened at the time is whether most, if not all, labourers were better off than they were in the days of serfdom and the peasant-based, agrarian life that pre-dated it. The Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm may like to present the pre-Industrial age as one full of peasants happily gamboling around in the woods choosing to work when and where they wanted, in order to contrast it with the horrors of industrialism, but this is dishonest nonsense. Without enclosure of land and the more productive agricultural system that sprang from it, and without the industrial wealth that enabled Britain to grow rapidly, it would have been hard to see how the rising population of the time could have adequately fed itself, let alone produce a sustained improvement in living standards. As a result of the agricultural changes and of free trade, Britain was less vulnerable to a catastrophically bad harvest, unlike Ireland, which because of its dependence on the potato and the Corn Laws, was terribly hit by the potato blight of the 1840s. Starvation was a regular feature of European life, even in relatively rich countries, for centuries. But in England, whatever other problems existed, widespread famine was no longer an issue by the end of the 18th Century.

There is no doubt that there was much misery and ugliness in the time. When tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors were paid off at the end of the Napoleonic wars, for example, there was an influx of labour into the workforce and wages in sectors like farming came under brutal pressure. But what Robinson ignores is to cure such poverty meant that the Industrial Revolution's primary focus on producing goods for the mass market such as textiles and ironware was right, both economically and for that matter, morally. Within a matter of decades, the idea of even a poor person moving from say, Manchester to Newcastle in a day was not the stuff of fantasy. It was reality.

The Industrial Revolution has been, at least in my view, strangely under-covered in much of the mainstream histories that you see in bookshops today. Walk into a Borders or a Waterstones and much of the history sections are full of books about WW2, warfare generally, some social histories of quite recent times, some stuff about the Romans (popular again thanks to movies like Gladiator) and the Greeks. But this crucial phase of British, and world, history, does not really get much of an airing. A few years ago, I praised a wonderful book about some of the men who fashioned the Industrial Revolution, The Lunar Men, by Jenny Uglow. But such books are remarkably rare. Still one of the finest and most succinct accounts of the early phases of our industrial life was written more than half a century ago by T.S. Ashton. About the only other time one sees anything about the Industrial Revolution on the television, meanwhile, are things like the programmes about old machines by the late Fred Dibner or Jeremy Clarkson's excellent programme about Brunel.

It seems to me there is a gap in the market for an account of the Industrial Revolution written by someone who is not reflexively hostile to it, as was demonstrated last night by an ageing comedy actor. It is about time the record was set straight.

Here's a good essay on the standard-of-living debate and the Industrial Revolution.

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I began fully-listening when Ellis Cashmore appeared as a 'witness'. Cashmore is 'professor' of Culture, Media and Sport, surely the Andrex of academic disciplines. You can listen to him on the website - it's the programme about celebrity - he appears at about twenty minutes. You may need a new laptop as these machines don't take kindly to being flung across the room. The gist of what Cashmore said was contained in his line 'Cultures are no better or worse than each other'. Right then, Prof, here's my time machine and, woosh, here we are in Tiananmen Square during Mao's Cultural - geddit? - Revolution. You, being an intellectual, are about to be stamped to death for the entertainment of the peasants. Luckily, I am on hand to, first, console you with the thought that all cultures are equal and, secondly, to operate the time machine and whisk you off to Germany in the thirties. I, having a Jewish mother, am being dragged off by Brown Shirts, but, luckily, you are on hand to console me with the thought that all cultures are equal. Sadly, you cannot operate the time machine. ... Who are these people? What are they for?

- Bryan Appleyard listens to the BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze

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As if an answer to my suggestion to document the communist history in Eastern Europe through the lives and eyes of individuals, the PLOTKI, an on-line and print magazine about culture and society in Central and Eastern Europe, invites contributions to a project Changes from Below:

The project “Changes From Below“ aims to collect pieces of research which highlight personal stories behind movements against ‘‘communist’’ dictatorship in Central and Eastern Europe.

... Whilst historical investigation on resistance to ‘communist’ rule often focuses on historical ‘grand events’ such uprisings as Prague Spring 1968, Hungarian Autumn 1956, 17 June 1953 in GDR or Poland in the 80's, Plotki wants to research the smaller stories, personal experiences and the rumours which slipped through the historical sieve and serve them up via various artistic means such as writing, photography, graphics, film or audio. We are thinking about the Orange Alternative in Poland who attended illegal meetings of dwarfs, and were arresting for handing out tampons to women; the spontaneous 'community supported agriculture' networks that evolved during Ceausescu's dictatorship in Romania, and that kept urban people alive by illegally supplying them with food; or Czechoslovakia’s Society for Happier Contemporary Times; or the diversity of ecological movements as the Umweltbibliothek (an environment documentation centre) in East Berlin, Ekoglasnost in Bulgaria or groups of people concerned with ecological damage in Bohemia; or factory self-management in Yugoslavia; or the protestant churches resistance in GDR; or the countless other inspirational, exciting and quirky forms of resistance which once inhabited the region.

Great stuff and worthwhile effort, no doubt. Just one minor gripe - what's with the quotation marks/inverted commas around the word communist?!

(5)

A new movie about the doings of special agents and local French Resistance folk in the days leading up to, and beyond, D-Day is out. I might go and see it - the reviews look quite good and the cast looks impressive. Lots of delicious French actresses - hardly difficult to turn down, really.

At the Imperial War Museum - always worth a visit if you have not been there - there is a section about the special forces that have operated before, during, and after WW2, such as the Long Range Desert Group, M16, the SAS, The Chindits (Burma), other forces in Malaysia, Northern Ireland, Aden, France, former Yugoslavia, Greece, etc. The displays are well done and there is loads of fascinating information about the ordeals of those involved, their lives, methods, equipment and roles in various campaigns. For all that I quite enjoyed the Ian Fleming exhibition in the same place, the real-life displays of derring-do by people who are often totally unknown to the broader public was in some ways far more impressive and actually rather moving. It was also, just to make a "point", clear that many of these operatives did not need the full benefits of a surveillance state to do their jobs. What was clear that the prime qualities of getting good intelligence are commonsense and a lot of guts.

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In one of the most beautiful avenues of Budapest, Andrássy Road, is a museum dedicated to the two 20th century horrors, Nazism and Communism. House of Terror (Terror Háza) does not differentiate between the two toxic ideologies. After all, they are the same thing with different packaging – one in black, the other in red. That they hate and fought each other is not evidence to the contrary, merely evidence of territorial in-fighting.

In winter of 1944, when the Hungarian Nazis came to power, hundreds of people were tortured in the basement of the house in 60 Andrássy street. In 1945 Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Army. One of the first tasks of the Hungarian communists arriving with the Soviet tanks was to take possession of the location. The building was occupied by their secret police, the PRO, which was later renamed ÁVO, subsequently ÁVH (names for political police). The entire country came to dread the terrorist organisation. The ÁVH officers serving at 60 Andrássy Road were the masters of life and death. Detainees were horribly tortured or killed. The walls of the cellars beneath the buildings were broken down and transformed into a prison.

After the end of communism in Hungary, 60 Andrássy Road has become a shrine, the effigy of terror and the victims' memorial. At least in Hungary they recognised that the 'past must be acknowledged'. The exhibition is a visual feast, both in the artefacts displayed and in the symbolism of their arrangement. The rooms have themes and objects in them are meant to create an atmosphere as well as communicate facts. Alas, the visual beauty conjures an image of a retro nightmare - distant and unreal it masks the brutality and dull reality of communist terror.

There is an exquisitely designed hall dedicated to Soviet forced-labour and slave camps. There are reminiscences, photographs and the display cases contain relics, the original paraphernalia used by the people detained by the Soviets and taken to gulags. And yet, it does not squeeze your heart and make you sick to your stomach. The muted light and the droning voice of the audio guide fail to convey the tragedy. By trying to describe the suffering of many thousands, they miss the opportunity to make us feel the suffering of one, to put ourselves in their place, imagine our lives being arbitrarily and brutally torn apart. And to remember that this did not happen in some kind of parallel universe, that this is history next door.

I wanted to know the people whose meagre possessions I was looking at in the display cases. Their names, stories, family, circumstances, fates. I believe that the best and only way to understand Communism and Nazism is through the lives of individuals who were affected by it not through a historical methodology or chronological exposition.

And so we need to be told about their neighbours reporting and spying on them, children betraying parents, we need to hear the tales of endurance, mercy and resistance that no historical narrative can capture. We document history in such impersonal terms and yet there is nothing more powerful then actions of a man. We look for overarching explanations but historical causality without human beings and their behaviour leaves the patterns of history indistinct, lacking in colour and texture.

Everyday life is as important to understanding of what happens as are historical milestones. It might help people realise how little it takes for the society to find itself in a grasp of a toxic ideology and how gradual the decline can be, how unnoticed the erosion of freedom, dignity and moral strength.

If I had the time and resources, I would gather the human details about communism, not just the historical facts, and create a place where others can 're-live' the individual tales. I would try to explain what it took to survive and resist. I would address the connection between totalitarianism and bureaucracy - why is it that an already unhinged and all powerful regime is so obsessed with record-taking, papers and stamps, correct documentation...? I would point at the need inherent in any totalitarian ideology for an external enemy, and by extension its internal allies. I would expose the mundane and ridiculous reasons for which people were sent to prison, torture and death. I would throw light on the 'little helpers' without whom no authoritarian regime can succeed – the nosy neighbour, ambitious boss, jealous colleague, petty family member... and at the 'silent majority' who by 'minding their business' and 'just getting on with their lives' lend credence to the ravings of the power-mad ruling class. I would examine propaganda, not through the posters, broadcasts and mass demonstrations but through the eyes of children growing up under the barrage of idiotic but effective brainwashing.

And finally, I would bring up the horrors of arrest, detention, interrogations, beatings and torture, imprisonment and executions, hiding in history's basement and cellars. Both the victims and the interrogators. Who were the people who carried out the daily atrocities? What and how did they believe? Where are they now? Did they go back home to their families at the end of the day, having broken a few more bodies and spirits? Did they do this out of fear? Or were they merely sadists gravitating to the communism sanctioned violence towards their fellow human beings? I would name them and publicly decry their deeds, spell out their participation. The Nazis got that treatment but when will such judgement be upon the Communists? Why is the hammer and sickle not abhorred the same way the swastika is? After all, it has brought evil to many more people...

Failing that, here are the pictures from the House of Terror in Budapest. The museum is an excellent reminder of what happened in just one dreaded house. And to think that there were many more.

The photos were taken despite the ban on photography in the museum. I did play along and kept my camera away until I came across a quote that sums up the deranged mindset of a communist ideologue. I wanted to make a note of it to look it up later and the fastest way was taking a photo. After the first furtive but successful attempt, it was impossible to resist taking more pictures.

Here is the quote* that goes to the heart of implementation of communism - and any other totalitarian ideology. It eradicated any notion of individual responsibility and therefore freedom, autonomy, rights and justice. And that is the essence of terror.

We do not look for evidence, we do not attempt to uncover acts or agitation against the Soviets. The first question we ask is: where are you from, how were you raised, what was your profession? These questions determine the fate of the defendant. This is the essence of the red terror. - M.J. Lacisz, Chief of ÁVO, the Hungarian political police.

*Credit for the translation goes to Zoltán Módly. The Hungarian version: "Nem keresünk bizonyítékokat, tanúkat, nem akarunk szovjetellenes tetteket vagy agitációt leleplezni. Az első kérdés, ami minket érdekel: honnan származol, milyen volt a neveltetésed, mi volt a foglalkozásod? Ezek a kérdések döntenek a vádlott sorsáról. Ez a vörös terror lényege."

(9)

How remiss of me to forget - today is the anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, France. In a few weeks' time me and the missus are heading to Honfleur, the French port town in northern France, for a long weekend. It is one of my favourite bits of France.

We should never forget the sacrifices made on that day and in the weeks thereafter. A relation of mine was in the British beach landings, and he lasted the entire campaign right through the Battle of the Bulge, the Rhine crossings and later, as part of the post-war occupation of north Germany. He went back to Normandy a few years ago and said the same family were working in a cafe near Caen as when he was a young lieutenant in the artillery. Oh, and he married a German girl from Hamburg, who was a lovely woman without a trace of bitterness.

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"Happily, we were indestructible. We didn't need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water or the Heimlich manoeuvre. We didn't require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn't need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without being reminding that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn't have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively."

- Bill Bryson, The Live and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, page 106.

I adore this book.

(7)

My title of this posting is taken from that fine film, "The Right Stuff", based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe. The character who uttered those lines in the movie was Werner von Braun. The reference is to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, a group of German scientists working on the V2 and other rocket systems were captured by the Allies and ended up working on the US space programme, while another lot of Germans ended up working for the Soviet Union.

Via the Andy Ross blog, here's a review of a new book on von Braun.

Of course, no reference to von Braun would be complete without the following song from Tom Lehrer.

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Samizdata has now been going for more than half a decade, and since what I am about to say has been becoming ever more true throughout that time, I may have said what follows before. So if you have already read, marked, learned and inwardly digested all of this, apologies, and on to the next posting.

I want to make a point about the nature of voting in British general elections. It now looks as if there is going to be a Labour melt-down, in the next one of these. A whole generation of Labour MPs seem about to lose their jobs, and whole new swarm of now diligently obscure Tories seem about to step forward to take their places. Setting aside what one feels about these two groups of people, why the completeness of the switch? Why these huge lurches, from massive Thatcher majorities, to massive Blair majorities, and soon – it now appears – to massive Cameron majorities? Even if the next general election does not yield the anti-Labour landslide that everyone is starting now to anticipate, we all know that it could. In the years when I first noticed party politics in Britain, parliamentary majorities were never this big, or they never seemed so. Parties lost elections, but they weren't crushed, the way they get crushed now. Now, we live in an age of electoral landslides. Why? What has changed?

It may simply be that I have changed. Maybe landslides always happened from time to time, but I only started noticing rather recently. That could be it. Also, in a similar comment debate about this sort of stuff, here or somewhere, I seem to recall being accused of describing London rather than England or Britain when I talked this way. But I do think that there is something else going on here other than me just being me, living where I do. I think that the electorate has also changed. This posting makes an essentially rather simple point, but be warned now, it does it at somewhat tedious length. If you push that "Read more" button, you may rather quickly want to read less.

Still here? Okay then here goes.

When I was a child, there were two recognisably distinct working classes. There was the official "working class", who wore cloth caps, who left school at fourteen, did manual labour, drank beer, went to football matches (where they stood on concrete terraces), and who didn't just vote Labour. They were Labour. The Labour Party was a vast social institution, with vibrant branches throughout the land, and you would no more switch to the Conservatives because of a bit of nasty economic weather than you would have switched over to the Germans during the war merely because your sergeant-major was a heartless swine. Remember all those black and white movies starring people like Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay?

Likewise the Conservatives. When I was young they were a similarly huge organisation. Biggest marriage bureau in the land, they were called. There was a definitely middle - as distinct from an upper – class, of "deferential" office clerks and senior manual labourers. But the aristocracy and bosses to whom the slightly more affluent and trusted workers deferred still ruled their roosts, and the massed ranks of the Conservative Party looked up to them, and aped their manners and mannerisms. I can never think of the Conservative Party of those days without thinking of another movie, Genevieve, in which office workers, thanks to their newly acquired but extremely second-hand cars, were able to play at being aristocrats.

But those movies also told a different story, of what was to come. Freedom was in the air. Not all the cars were aristocratically ancient. Suddenly the movies became openly anti-conformist, colourfully cynical about everything. Two huge transformations got under way. A culture war which started in the fifties, exploded in the sixties and which has been raging ever since, cut the deference from under the old Conservative grandees and caused them to be mocked instead of imitated, and as for the old manual labour Working Class ... well, it just melted away, went to Asia. Locally, it either smartened itself up and got itself a job pushing paper and talking over the phone, or it gave up and went on the dole.

The results were the Thatcher and Blair eras, which historians will probably come to regard as the same thing. What happened was that British voters were becoming much more alike. Not identical. Not all equally poor or equally rich, but definitely more like one another. Their ambitions, tastes and problems were converging. They tended to like the same (now televised) entertainments, to dress similarly, to do similar jobs, to live in similar houses, to have similar ambitions - not to the point where a rich manager of a big corporation is indistinguishable from a toiler in an office half a dozen rungs below him, or to the point where a good Oxbridge degree no longer counts for anything, but more so than had been the case before. Politically, there are now fewer people who define themselves as being Labour or being Conservative. They are more willing to switch, from one party to another, none of whom seem precisely to represent how they feel and what they believe in any more, not least because party politicians are now far more rarely sighted by regular people, other than on the television. And many more of those Oxbridge (and similar places) winners in the meritocratic race to the top will be liable to vote Labour, because of their ancestry or their newly acquired opinions, and because much of the modern media have now become a huge "left wing" stronghold ruled by "left wing" grandees (the quotes being because such titans are unrecognisably different from the old leaders of the old working class). Many toiling wage slaves, who wear suits but who still toil, with no ancestral Labour loyalties or leftish opinions, will willingly vote Conservative, if they offer a better deal.

As I say, you can exaggerate all this. I still buy timber from people who have permanent dirt under their finger nails, having walked to the shop past other grubby toilers putting pipes into holes. Grandees are still very grand. But so were my grandfathers, and I'm not. And who knows what the kids of the guy who cut up my timber for me last month may already be doing? Besides which, such is the nature of first-past-the-post democracy that if only, say, ten or twenty per cent of the electorate switch from being solid Labour or solid Conservative to people who will go either way or some other way, depending, that's a potential landslide, to somebody. That's humiliation, for somebody. The phrase tipping point is hard to avoid here, and why bother?

All the parties now try to be all things to all men, far more than was the case fifty years ago. In those days, the thoughtless cliché was that politicians were "all alike", when in truth they were alike only in being comparable but distinct sorts of disappointment to their own distinct armies of supporters. They all told lies, but different lies depending on which party they were. Now, they really are much more alike, a trend recently described in detail by Peter Oborne in his book The Triumph of the Political Class. Oborne describes a switch from a world in which Labour MPs had much in common with Labour voters generally, but far less with their Conservative opponents, Conservative MPs ditto, to a world in which all the MPs are, pretty much, on the same side as one another. Politicians used to get their money from their supporters. Now, they get it from, well, politics. It used to be that one lot said of government spending: more! The other lot said: less! They actually disagreed, at least in what they said. Now they all say: no more than we can afford, but no less. They agree. The circles of the Venn diagram have moved together, and all party politics - "grown-up" party politics - is now done in the area of overlap.

It's a point I almost certainly owe to Oborne's book (which I read some months ago but have now forgotten most of the fine detail of) that Winston Churchill, regarded by most as a very old-fashioned figure, what with his aristocratic ancestry and his antique mannerisms, was actually, from this point of view, a rather modern figure. He made his entire living from politics, and from political commentary and political writing. When young he did soldiering, sort of, but always with a newspaper contract and with an eye to a seat in the Commons. Once there, he had millionaire businessman friends who bank-rolled him. He switched parties when younger. But, that distinct Churchillian public persona still reflected a political world in which the classes were sharply divided, even if Churchill himself was an early member of that political class that Oborne has written about. Harold MacMillan, the Tony Blair of his day, was a similarly modern type. Now, they are all like that, or try to be.

What this means is that modern British party politics is a furious race to get just that bit ahead of the other fellows, and thereby win the whole farm. If that ten or twenty or whatever it is percent of merely rational voters, the fabled swing voters whom all the parties now court so desperately, decide that, for all your obvious faults, you are just that tiny bit less frightful than those other snouts-in-the-trough swine, then you stand to win hugely, in one of those seismic upheavals.

But, do not confuse such a landslide with being deeply respected or, heaven help you, loved. The cause of the landslide is not depth of feeling, and certainly not in your favour. It is merely a widespread judgement that you and your pals are, for the time being, likely to be a bit less incompetent, a bit less predatory, a bit more canny and a bit less panic-stricken by the unexpectedness of the unexpected than those other bastard losers.

A final point, which is that I am not describing a Final Point, some kind of local and party political end to history. A pattern in politics - in anything, come to that - is no sooner widely understood than it is ready to be smashed. I can remember when people talked, in the late 1950s, about the "end of ideology", of how the Welfare State had been set up by Labour and accepted by the Conservatives, and that, pretty much, was that. Only months after that, all kinds of ideological hell was breaking loose which is only now subsiding half a century later as the Baby Boom that unleashed it finally sinks into its dotage. No sooner has the Thatcher-Blair-Cameron age been identified as its own distinct age, than some wholly new confluence of forces will erupt to knock the smug looks off the faces of the entire Political Class as we now know them, and replace the whole damn lot of them with wholly other sorts of politicians, perhaps with dirt under their finger nails. Perhaps politics will suddenly reassemble itself along generational lines, with the Baby Boom demanding more terminal care than workers feel inclined to bestow upon it. Some new rough beast will slouch towards Bethlehem, as it always does. Maybe Cameron will win a huge majority, but then, ... something quite different will happen, and that Cameron decade that he must already be anticipating and hoping only to prolong will elude him.

Perhaps the EU will actually inform Britain, publicly, clearly, that it now rules it, and that merely British elections really do indeed now count for absolutely nothing, and maybe the British people will accept that, which will change things rather, will it not? Or maybe they won't accept it, ditto. Perhaps Labour will now pull themselves together and replace Gordon Brown with someone less off-putting, and we will enter a time not of Thatcher Mark 3, but of permanent, Italianate, John Majorism stroke Gordon Brownism, in which all politicians without exception are permanently hated and permanently despised. Perhaps there will be a new Peasants Revolt (Peasants Revolts always happen just when, and just because, nobody expects them, not even the Peasants). Perhaps the Chinese and the Americans will have a war, and we will have to go back to our fellow countrymen sewing our clothes and assembling our MP3s and mobile phones, and there will be real workers again, saying Eee Bah Goom to each other and voting Labour no matter what. Perhaps Dagenham will be the epicentre of a thermo-nuclear explosion, with who knows what party political ramifications. Perhaps a new Ice Age will suddenly start, or a new plague will sweep the world. Perhaps Scottish independence will (a) soon happen, with (b) all kinds of dramatic and unpredictable knock-on effects, such as England leaving the EU but not Scotland. Or Wales.

But in the meantime, party politically speaking, things are, I think, as I have described them.

(15)

The new-look Harry's Place carries this zinger of an article debunking a piece of revisionist tripe from the former editor of the New Statesman. The idea, essentially, is that Britain should have stayed out of WW2 so that the poor, put-upon Mr Hitler could then have shipped those pesky Jews off to some island in the Indian Ocean.

Unbelievable.

(24)

Tyler Cowen, the US economics writer, ponders - in the course of responding to a column by the US leftist economist Paul Krugman - whether modern industrial development would have reached its current pitch had it been forced to deal with today's levels of regulation. On the face of it, had the Industrial Revolution, starting in the 18th Century, had to deal with 21st century levels of state bureaucracy, health and safety rules, and the rest, we'd still be using horses and carts and there'd be no blogging. Or would there? The trouble with these kinds of assertions is that there is no counterfactual universe against which to check it. The best we can reasonably do is to look at those societies that have imposed heavy restrictions on entrepreneurship and technology, and those that have not done so, and see if there are any consistent patterns to give us an idea. I suppose one good example is what happened in China about 600 years ago, when the rulers of that nation decided they'd had enough of all that exploration business and turned inwards. Another might be the extraordinary rise of Hong Kong in the 1940s under the benign laissez faire policy of UK colonial administrator, Sir John Cowperthwaite.

The other point that Cowen and Krugman deals with is the idea that the pace of development in the field of energy and industry has slowed down. Well, up to a point. When the late Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 was made in to a film by Stanley Kubrick, people who watched in the 1960s were led to think that travel from Earth would soon be a relatively normal event. We have not got there yet. Maybe the problem is that there are sometimes periods of history of enormous change compressed into short periods, followed by longer stretches of time when not a lot appears to happen, but actually the incremental changes are quite big. We just need to get used to this rather than become unduly depressed that we are in a holding pattern rather than moving forward.

Note: I appreciate that not everyone accepts that the Industrial Revolution "started" in the 18th Century, but from my own readings, that century is when the critical mass of scientific, technological and economic forces came together, starting in the UK. For a marvellous account of the men who helped shape that revolution, I recommend this by Jenny Uglow.

On the pace of scientific advance in the West, and how it has arguably slowed since about 1950, this Charles Murray book of a few years back is a good read and is absolutely packed with statistics. I am not a professional statistics man so I am not sure I can comment all that intelligently on the rigour of his methods, but they look pretty robust.

(20)

The more I think about it, the more I realise that the establishment of a formal, state-run empire was a mistake, both from the point of view of the conquered peoples and from that of Britain. The first phase of British expansion – our informal mercantile dominion – was much the more successful. It is at least arguable that the nationalisation of the East India Company marked the moment when things started to go badly wrong.

- Daniel Hannan

(23)

I seldom recommend TV to anyone. But I caught this last night - or it caught me - and I think many readers, able through the wonders of the internet to see the whole thing lawfully, will be interested to do so.

It is the sort of serious programming that the BBC used to be famous for: a depiction and explanation using clips of films and still photographs taken by diplomats and other visitors, of the strange anachronistic religious-feudal state that existed in Tibet in the late 30s and the 40s, and how it came to be annexed by the People's Republic of China.

No-one seeing this will find it easy to make sense of the Chinese official claim that Tibet has 'been part of China for 800 years'. Welsh readers will note that Wales has been administratively part of England for 800 years, in a much clearer sense, but that does not mean they have to like it or feel English. Bordelais readers (who are old enough) will recall that they certainly were under the English crown 800 years ago, but that does not mean they still are. History is not monotonic. And neither Aberystwyth nor Aquitaine, language apart, has for centuries had institutions wholly alien to an Englishman; whereas Tibet was clearly fascinatingly weird to everyone else only 60 years ago.

(45)

I brought prejudices acquired during the Cold War to the struggle between civilisation and Islam, but tried – and try still - to be careful to see the differences as well as the similarities between the two struggles.

In this spirit, I at first thought that whereas Soviet communism was ideologically breakable, Islam is not breakable. More than a billion souls believe in it, and however true it might be that it is evil and repulsive nonsense, saying this would accomplish very little. It would merely poke the hornet's nest with a stick. But slowly, I have been coming round to thinking almost the complete opposite. Not only does denouncing Islam as evil nonsense establish the mere right, of us civilisationers, to denounce Islam - along with our right to say anything else we might want to say - true or false, nice or nasty, sensible or daft. Such talk also, I am starting to believe, strikes a dagger into the heart of the enemy camp, by spreading doubt in it about basic beliefs and hence sewing discord and confusion. I used to think that Islamists were indifferent to such ideological attacks. Now, I am starting to believe that they fear them very much. Hence all the murder threats. They sense that this is one of their weakest and potentially biggest fronts in the struggle. The biggest front of all, in fact.

And even if only a few "apostates" materialise, they are of huge significance, for they bring with them deep knowledge of the enemy we face and how we can see the enemy off.

Another advantage of ideological attacks on Islam is that arguments about - and in favour of - "apostasy" unite civilisation, and divide its enemies. We civilisationers argue fiercely with one another about how to oppose Islam, but almost all of us believe that if you want to criticise a religion non-violently you should be allowed to, and that if you want to abandon a religion you should be able to do that without getting extremely violent grief, or even the threat of it, from those who still do believe in it. Talking like this or doing this may be rather daft, and very unwise, and get you shunned by polite society (i.e. scared society), but ... yes, it should be allowed. I am content to regard all who say that they disagree with the claims in this paragraph as the enemies of civilisation that they are, not just from the point of view of the mere truth, but on tactical grounds. Put such cretinous pro-Islamist fellow-travellers on the defensive also, I say.

And now I read this article (linked to about a week ago by Instapundit) in which it is claimed that the trickle of converts from Islam that was all I had so far noticed is actually whole lot more than that. It tells of a spectacular growth in the number of converts from Islam. Conversions have been happening in a steady flow for decades, but recently they have become a torrent, world-wide. Mostly these people are converting to Christianity, but sometimes just to not-Islam. Bossiness and terrorism and constant fighting is, it seems, not just repulsive. It actually repels. People are leaving the religion of war and joining the religion of, approximately speaking, peace - or joining no religion at all. Islam is only still growing numerically because it is growing so quickly by purely biological means. As far as the flow of converts is concerned it is now in headlong retreat.

So, is this true? Is this allegedly huge exflux really happening? I have heard nothing about it before, but that could merely mean that I am ignorant. Or is the exflux just wishful thinking on the part of Christians, talking nonsense to keep their spirits up?

(6)

What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman's Average, Zidane's Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
Ed Smith
Penguin books, 2008, 190 pp., £14.99

I rarely buy new books in hardback at full price, because I rarely want any particular book. Usually I am just looking for something that is interesting, and prefer to soften the financial blows by taking my chances in the remainder and charity shops. But something about Ed Smith's little book appealed to me, despite its combination of brevity and a high price-tag. Partly it was that the first three people quoted on the cover saying how good it was were Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Michael Brearley, all of them big names if you are an England cricket fan like me, and all people whose opinions I greatly respect. Ed Smith himself is also a name, if you follow England cricket, because he is one of those many unfortunates who played a handful of test matches (his were in 2006 against South Africa), but who was then, somewhat unluckily, discarded. He now captains Middlesex. On the other hand, maybe he won't prove to be so unfortunate in the longer run, because England batting places are now up for grabs again, following several batting debacles in recent months, and Ed Smith, who read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just the kind of thoughtful, intelligent type – like the aforementioned Michaels, Atherton and Brearley - whom selectors like to have trained-up and ready to take over as England captain, should they be caught short for one. There are a few broad hints in his book to suggest that Ed Smith has not given up on such hopes himself. He certainly still hopes to play for England again. Meanwhile, I was not disappointed by this book, nor did I feel that the fifteen pounds I spent on it was wasted or bestowed upon an unworthy cause. There are basically two big reasons why I liked it.

The first reason is simply that Ed Smith writes not just about sport, but, as his title suggests, about the psychology, sociology and history of sport, and about psychology, sociology and history in general, merely illustrated by sport, in the sort of relaxedly middlebrow way that I particularly enjoy. Recently I have been doing some teaching, having always wanted to, and there is a lot of the teacher in Smith and in his family. You can entirely see why he is now a county captain.

Smith is, for instance, very illuminating on the subject of what makes a champion sportsman, and what does not. What does not, it seems, is an easy ride in the sport when you were young, fueled by pure talent, but unaided by the strength of character that you didn't need when young, because you were so talented. I recall Geoff Boycott making the same point during a cricket commentary. Boycott said that boys who outclassed their school mates often came a cropper when they moved up to professional cricket, because suddenly they were up against people as naturally gifted as themselves, but they hadn't acquired the mental toughness they also needed. Never having had to fight before, they were unable to fight now. Other less gifted boys, on the other hand, having toughened themselves up with defeats and harder-won victories in their youth, often did better later on. Smith confirms all this so eloquently that I rather suspect Boycott of having read this book himself. But maybe Boycott was just thinking of himself, and of how he personally made the maximum possible use of less that supreme talent, and maybe Smith owes the insight partly to Boycott.

Smith also mentions in particular the younger brother syndrome. Many a sporting younger brother, he says, learned to give of his best, and to prevail against formidable and grown-up as opposed to feeble and youthful opposition, by practicing on his stronger elder brother, in a way that required the maximum possible effort and strength of will. Basketball legend Michael Jordan had an elder brother, for instance, of whom Jordan said: "When you see me play, you're watching Larry." In learning to defeat Larry, Jordan learned to beat the world.

I particularly recommend the bit where Smith tells the story of a certain Billy Beane, who oozed sporting talent when young and who sailed into professional baseball like the superstar that all assumed he would inevitably become, but who, six years later, became "the first player ever to say" that he now wanted to be a scout instead. At which he proceeded to excel! Prepared by the bitter disappointments of his own failed playing career, Beane then became supremely good at bossing the very game that he could not himself play successfully. Struggle as a player, then triumph as a manager, is a pattern repeated in sport again and again. Says Smith: "We never think more deeply than about our profoundest failings. They often form the foundations of our clearest analytical insights." You can see how a bumbler like me, who nevertheless now aspires to teaching excellence, would like that, the exact opposite of the those-who-can-do-those-who-can't-teach cliché. I have reproduced this Beane story at my education blog, here. Recommended, if you do not know this story already, and, actually, even if you do.

Smith also summarises the story of how baseball triumphed over cricket in the USA, which I have copied and pasted here, the point being that there was once upon a time actually quite a lot of cricket in the USA to be triumphed over. It was the Civil War that made the difference, Smith says, because baseball was less complicated for relaxing soldiers to set up and play than cricket. Otherwise the USA might just as well have used cricket to get back at the accursed Brits by beating them at it, in the manner of the West Indians and the Indians and Pakistanis - in fact, come to think of it, in pretty much all the countries outside Britain that now play cricket - rather than by shunning it and playing something else.

I like what Smith says about amateurism. Of course all that nonsense with initials behind your name if you were a professional but in front if you were an amateur was indeed fairly ridiculous (Smith recycles the "F. J. Titmus should read Titmus F. J." announcement that greeted the great spin-bowler Fred Titmus when he walked out to the wicket in his first match, as a professional cricketer). But, perhaps a baby has been lost, along with much snobbish and unjust bathwater. Mark Ramprakash, for instance, is another type of sporting failure, the supremely effective county or provincial sportsman who could not "scale up" to the international game, despite appearing to have all it took and much more. Perhaps if Ramprakash had learned not to take it all quite so seriously, says Smith, he might have made the step-up to test cricket work better. Ramprakash apparently really enjoyed all the practicing he did for his Come Dancing triumph, and was struck by how much everyone else involved enjoyed it too. Maybe if he had made a point of enjoying his cricket more, and his test cricket playing in particular, he might have done it even better.

I really enjoy reading such ruminations, and in general, I consider this book to be a fine addition to the clever-stuff-for-the-intelligent-layman-who-can't-spare-too-much-time-for-reading-but-who-wants-to-be-diverted-and-entertained-in-the-train genre, and its appearance soon in paperback is inevitable, especially given that Penguin is already its publisher. It will be a nice little earner for Penguin as a stocking filler next Christmas, is my bet.

There is another reason why I was happy to have parted with my fifteen pounds for this book. It turns out that, ideologically speaking, Ed Smith is one of us.

Chapter 7 is entitled "Is the free market ruining sport?", and Smith's answer is that far from ruining sport, the seriously (i.e. lashings of money with lots of noughts on the end) free market that has recently emerged in many sports in the age of television has actually brought some interesting and formerly neglected facts about sport to light. The oft-observed way that, in cricket, it is the batsmen who get the knighthoods and the plaudits, but that, on the other hand, it is bowlers who more often than not win the actual games, is supported by what the English counties are now prepared to pay. Effective batsman are relatively easy to come by, and thus relatively cheap, but good bowlers are, if not priceless, then the next best thing, very highly priced, more so than almost all the merely good batters. In American football, the now much freer market in players has revealed interesting facts about who the M(ost) V(aluable) P(layer)s really are. Yes, the quarterbacks of course get paid fortunes. But so too do the hitherto undervalued offensive linemen who protect those same quarterbacks. Very good "left tackles" also now earn comparable fortunes, despite many fans still having to struggle to remember what their names are.

Most revealing of all, ideologically, is Smith's final chapter, which is entitled "Cricket, C. L. R. James, and Marxism". James's famous book about West Indian cricket, Beyond a Boundary, tells of the emergence of West Indian cricket into international prominence, thanks to such legends as the great Learie Constantine (the first West Indian cricket superstar), and then that golden generation of the Three Ws (Weekes, Worrell and Walcott), the spin duo of Ramadhin and Valentine, the uniquely brilliant Gary Sobers, and, just a bit later, the founders of that great dynasty of West Indian fast bowlers, Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. And James does it not just by writing about the cricket, but about the world that the cricketers emerged from.

Smith notes the current malaise of West Indian cricket, but, making use of the story that James tells so memorably, doubts that it can be easily cured, because the circumstances that made that earlier success are no longer present. Post-colonial resentment and lack of other outlets for intense personal ambition caused West Indian cricket to explode. Neither explosive is now present in nearly such an intense or pressurised form. Merely coaching West Indian cricket better won't be any substitute, Smith reckons, noting that most truly great sportsmen are pretty much self-taught, under only the most relaxed and laissez faire of tutelage (that teaching vibe again), if any. Sporting greatness, in other words, is about individual self-expression, as well as about the social circumstances that stir such ambitions.

Smith nails James as a characteristic twentieth century type, namely the believer in and chronicler of human freedom who nevertheless refuses to see that in calling himself a Marxist he is supporting not a means of liberation but one of the great modern sources of tyranny:

James's book is about achieving excellence in cricket despite being outside the ruling establishment and all its privileges. In fact, that is an understatement. It is about achieving excellence because of exclusion from the ruling establishment. It is about being the underdog, and how that can be more inspiring than being governed by the prescriptive rules of conventional wisdom.

So far so "Marxist", in the class-warfare sense. But then Smith offers another quote about what C. L. R. James's leftist assumptions necessarily lead to when they get into power, from George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism:

Socialism necessarily means government by a privileged class, as Lenin saw, since only those of privileged education are capable of planning and governing. Shaw and Wells, too, often derided the notion that ordinary people can be trusted with political choice. Hence the aristocratic superiority of the Bolsheviks, who reminded Bertrand Russell, when he visited Lenin soon after the October Revolution, of the British public-school elite that then governed India. Socialism had to be based on privilege, and knew it, since only privilege educates for the due exercise of centralized power in a planned economy.

Writers about cricket with pretensions towards literariness tend these days to divide either into old school traditionalists in the manner of Christopher Martin-Jenkins, whose fogeyishly antiquated solemnity is often mocked even by other Test Match Special commentators, or else left-inclined 'intellectual' types. Ed Smith dodges past these two stereotypes. He certainly is an intellectual, who likes to mention Thackeray and Wagner and Philip Larkin and Milovan Djilas as well as Bradman and Bannister and Mohammed Ali and Billy Beane. Yet he is neither any sort of blindly traditionalist fogey, not any sort of nitwit about the twentieth century's most mercilessly destructive tides of nitwit opinion. He's read Beyond a Boundary and entirely gets the point of it and entirely rejoices at the wonderful story it tells. But he also sees what is wrong with it.

In the acknowledgements at the beginning, we learn that among the people who read and commented on early drafts of the manuscript of Ed Smith's book was a certain John Blundell. I'm not sure, but I rather think that this is the same John Blundell who is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. On the other hand, this particular John Blundell may be a sports psychology professor of the same name. But if it was John Blundell of the IEA, well done him. Put it this way: if it was him, it makes perfect sense.

(11)

I like this:

For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.

"Us" being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.

To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people's religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.

Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!

Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you're there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.

I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao's argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).

That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.

(50)

History is the oppression of the weak by the strong.

(12)

"It is one of the oddities of the consumer-electronics industry that the snazziest products often have their origins in the world's oldest profession., The porn industry's embrace of the videocassette helped guarantee the technology's commercial success. Today, it is doing the same for the DVD and the Internet."

- John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A Future Perfect.

(John is related to Samizdata contributor Brian Micklethwait, for those who are curious).

(39)

The perception of Islamic science, perhaps properly called natural philosophy, has been shaped by Bernard Lewis and his strong programme of senescence instead of renaissance. The development of scientific knowledge follows a pre-ordained path to scientific revolution and those cultures that failed to ignite need to be explained. Is not exceptionalism the oddity? A review in the Times Literary Supplement adds to our understanding:

After all, the scientific and industrial revolutions did not occur anywhere in the world except in Europe, and therefore one needs to explain the peculiarity of European history, rather than adduce some kind of Islamic brake or blinker.

We know that Islamic philosophers acted as a conduit for preserving part of antiquity's heritage and transmitting mathematics and other ideas from India and the Orient to Europe. Some of this work was achieved by non-Islamic philosophers working within the Caliphate or Moorish kingdoms. There is evidence of scientific innovation up to the late Middle Ages and one can see equivalents to natural theology; one of the drivers of the Scientific Revolution in Europe:

He [Muzaffar Iqbal] points out that the Arab scientific movement in the eighth century pre-existed the translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. He draws attention to a curious genre of literature that developed later, called shukuk, which was devoted to casting doubt on the findings of the Greeks, and he has no difficulty in adducing instances of Muslim scientists improving on, empirically testing or refuting Greek ideas.

But Iqbal is successful in arguing that the "Quran itself lays out a well-defined and comprehensive concept of the natural world, and this played a foundational role in the making of the scientific tradition in Islamic civilization". Faith impelled rather than impeded the Islamic scientist. The Koran commands man to study Allah's creation. The eleventh-century cosmologist al-Biruni wrote: "Sight was made the medium so that [man] traces among the living things the signs and wisdom, and turns from the created things to the Creator". At a more practical level, astronomy and mathematics were studied and further developed to assist in such matters as the orientation of mosques, the determination of prayer times and the division of inheritances according to Islamic law.

Islamic science appears to have a developed a heliocentric system before Copernicus and continued its mathematical traditions up till the fifteenth century. We should debate the causes of the decline in these traditions during the Middle Ages and their replacement by religious debates. Robert Irwin, the author of the review and Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement provides his own big picture around complacent empires, religious education and a lack of resources that could kickstart an industrial revolution.

Only part of this big picture rings true.

I [Irwin] would suggest that the spread of the madrasa, or religious teaching college, throughout the Middle East in the central and late Middle Ages led to a certain narrowing of intellectual horizons. While scientists continued to do research and publish, they do not seem to have founded scientific societies of the sort that proliferated in Western Europe in the seventeenth century.

The Ottoman Empire, as a strong state, did not allow the flourishing of a civil society as we see in Europe during the Reformation and the Wars of Religion. Printing presses were effectively banned. In Europe, scientific societies could publish journals off printing presses and contribute to an increasingly literate population, supplemented by the Republic of Letters. There are no equivalents in the Middle East, as permanent institutions of polymaths would be viewed as dangerous innovators; perhaps similar to the attitude that Oxford took to Locke.

Through comparison, we can understand some of the general causes of Islam's path, but greater detail is required to comprehend whether we see a continuation of a long-term preference for religious debate to natural theology in current Middle Eastern attitudes to science. Perhaps we over-emphasise religious factors at the expense of poor education, parasitical elites and populations raised on Nasserite nightmares rather than capitalist dreams.

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It is not widely known even in Australia that in 1808 the NSW Corps of the British Army deposed the Governor of New South Wales, William Bligh, in a coup. This is known as the 'Rum Rebellion', but it was not really about rum. Reading about it on Wikipedia, it is clear that Governor Bligh, a Captain in the Royal Navy, who had already endured the Mutiny on the Bounty, was not fit to govern a colony like New South Wales was at the start of the 19th Century.

For there were already free settlers in New South Wales at that time, and they wanted their rights and liberties as British subjects respected. Chief among them was John Macarthur. Michael Duffy writes about the rebellion and Macarthur's role in it here.

As for myself, since it is also Australia Day today, I am going to do the patriotic thing and toast my nation onwards- with good old Australian Rum.

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Former governor Mitt Romney won the Michigan Primary, and it seems he did it the old fashioned political way, not by showing any leadership or vision, but rather by showering other people's money at the voters. This earned him the scorn of David Brooks in, of all places, the New York Times. The money quote was pure snark.

His campaign was a reminder of how far corporate Republicans are from free market Republicans. He proposed $20 billion in new federal spending on research. He insisted that Washington had to get fully engaged in restoring the United States automotive industry. “Detroit can only thrive if Washington is an engaged partner,” he said, “not a disinterested observer.” He vowed, “If I’m president of this country, I will roll up my sleeves in the first 100 days I’m in office, and I will personally bring together industry, labor, Congressional and state leaders and together we will develop a plan to rebuild America’s automotive leadership.”

This is how the British Tory party used to speak in the 1970s.

Who should be more ashamed of themselves- Mitt Romney for pandering or Michigan primary voters for swallowing this claptrap?

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I was talking to a friend this evening who noted that a bank had sent him a letter promoting a loan; confounding the pessimists who think that the days of easy credit are completely dead. He observed that the letter contained the phrase "The mill that produced this paper supports sustainable forestation".

It is hard to believe that the bank really cared that much about the source of their paper, but banks, being creatures of the market, are sensitive to their customers, and make efforts to please them. The small but noisy minority of 'environmentally friendly' customers that would have approved of the bank's effort to be eco-friendly would be appeased, and the rest of the client base would care not a jot.

But we are seeing more and more of these nods to the environment being enforced with the power of national governments. It is rather like what happened to ancient Rome in the Fourth Century. The first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, lifted restrictions on Christianity in 312, and Christianity backed by the power of the state made slow but steady gains at the expense of the old pagan faiths before the Vestal Virgins were disbanded by Imperial order in 394.

I am not sure what will really qualify as comparable milestones in the rise of environmentalism as the official faith of the West, but for those of us of a skeptical nature, I think it does rather have a feel of being like a Pagan in 4th Century Rome.

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Christian Michel holds talk-and-discussion evenings at his London home on the sixth and twentieth of each month. If you want know more about these events email him at cmichel@ cmichel.com. I am doing the talk at the next one, the first of 2008, on January 6th. My chosen subject will be: the history of music making in the twentieth century. I have just sent an email to Christian about my talk, from which he will concoct his email invite to all his regulars. I am still thinking about what I will finally say and would greatly appreciate input from the Samizdata commentariat on the subject. So here is my email to Christian:

An extraordinary interlude - an aberration, you might say - in the history of music is now drawing to a close.

The musical opportunities created by modern electronics, in the form of electronic recording, radio, and then later of actual electronically powered musical instruments, were responded to by the music profession in two profoundly contrasted ways.

The "classical" fraternity concentrated first on popularising - and then on recording in opulently perfect sound – their resplendent back catalogue.

"Pop" music has been just as profoundly shaped by electronics. Indeed, it is the creation of electronics.

The most fundamental effect of electronics on "pop" music has been that popular music (by which I mean the old folk traditions) has no longer been obliged to rely either on musical literacy skills, or, for those in whom such skills were lacking, memory. "Folk" music always teetered on the edge of oblivion, relying as much of it did on the human brain as its hard disc, so to speak. And folk musicians were forced to concentrate on remembering the old songs, having little brain space to create new ones (folk music before recording was rather like literature before printing. Written manuscripts were about as perishable as the people who created them, for they lasted about as long).

Recording, for folk/pop musicians changed everything. No longer did the lowest class of musician depend upon their own memories to keep their previous creations and inherited repertoire alive. They could compose at their instruments, and record it, confident that it would then survive, and they were thus liberated to get on with creating the next would-be hit. And pop musicians were as uninhibited in their use of new, electronic instruments as the classical fraternity were mostly stand-off-ish about them (I know: Boulez, Stockhausen etc. They're worth a mention).

This is a complicated story. Technology takes time to develop and get cheap, and it's still hurtling along of course. Electronic recording (and CDs) took nearly a century to get good enough to do justice to Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. At it took a similar time to get cheap enough for working class teenagers to play with it in bedrooms and garages.

The classical recording enterprise is now basically concluded. Oh, there are still occasional gems to be found in among the dross at the battle of the barrel. But, the great works are now recorded, and re-recording them again and again cannot count for as much now as making similar recordings did fifty years ago when classical fans were still hungry to hear their core repertoire. "Classical" musicians must now look to create new repertoire of a sort that can earn them a living, the inverted commas there being because a lot of them won't really be "classical" musicians anymore and are becoming a lot more like pop musicians, from whom they have much to learn. The music profession will once more be a single (if huge and sprawling) entity, full of varieties of taste and of technique, but without that cavernous gulf that divided it during the twentieth century (in this respect it resembled and resembles politics. Discuss).

I could go on, and on the night I will, but I'll end by briefly discussing my qualifications to do this talk. Well, first of all, I am a music fan, possessing an small-to-average sized pop CD collection and a gargantuan classical CD collection, having been a classical collector and listener all my now long life. I was a teenager during the sixties musical revolution. I have also been studying the history of the means of communication and information storage for as long as I can remember. I am no great shakes as a musician, although I did play the flute in my school orchestra, and I had a fabulous treble voice as a boy, which I used to sing in choirs of various kinds, at home around the piano and at school. But in the end, I'll just have to hope that my audience finds my talk illuminating and enjoyable. For the truth is that they know most of the facts pretty much as well as I do. The question is, will I make more sense of those facts for my listeners? I'll try.

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I found this article by Edward L. Glaeser, about the city of Buffalo, very interesting. Both Buffalo's rise and its current eclipse were caused by transport, first in the form of the Erie Canal, and then in the form of trains and lorries which made the canal less significant. Also important, at first, was proximity to Niagara Falls and its abundant energy supply. Later, when more efficient means of transmitting energy were developed, that proximity also counted for less.

More recently, of course, the Federal Government has only made things worse by throwing billions into the bottomless pit of successive 'urban renewal' projects, like superfluous housing schemes to add to the already abundant housing stock, or a superfluous train system to add to the already abundant road system. Instead of trying to help the place, says Glaeser, the Feds should be helping the people, to have good lives. In Buffalo or wherever else they end up living. Buffalo, he says, should "shrink to greatness". I think it would be even better if the Feds didn't try to help at all, and just knocked it off the income tax, but then I would, wouldn't I?

All of which is very interesting, but I found this bit of Glaesar's article especially intriguing:

And Buffalo's dismal weather didn't help. January temperatures are one of the best predictors of urban success over the last half-century, with colder climes losing out - and Buffalo isn't just cold during the winter: blizzards regularly shut the city down completely. The invention of air conditioners and certain public health advances made warmer states even more alluring.

I should guess that this consideration may have something to do with the relative stagnation of the north of England compared to the south of England in recent decades. But because the difference is less marked, this would presumably be harder to prove. Whether that particular effect is real or not, a lot now would seem to hinge on whether the weather is going to get warmer, as the current orthodoxy among the politicians and their preferred scientists says it will, or colder, as some heretics now prophecy.

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The Times yesterday reported on how well the Bible is now doing in China, both for Chinese readers and as yet another manufactured-in-China export:

One book a second glides off the production line at this joint venture between a Chinese Christian charity and the United Bible Societies, a Protestant organisation. Amity has been printing Bibles since 1986. The new factory will have a capacity of one million Bibles a month, increasing the current output by one third.

... Authorities at the officially approved Protestant and Catholic churches put the size of China’s Christian population at about 30 million. But that does not include the tens of millions more who worship in private at underground churches loyal to the Vatican or to various Protestant churches.

Of the 50 million Bibles Amity has printed, 41 million were for the faithful in Chinese and eight minority languages. The rest have been for export to Russia and Africa. Sales surged from 505,000 in 1988 to a high of 6.5 million in 2005. Output last year was 3.5 million and is expected to rise in 2007.

Does this mean that China will behave more nicely in the future than it is behaving now? An American commenter on the above piece reminds us that Christianity and niceness do not always go hand in hand:

After several visits to China I became concinced that if China ever turned ti the God of the Bible, God would bles that nation. It apears that China is turning and God is blessing. Will China become God's instrument in brnging destruction to a Western Civilization that is becoming increasigly athiest, immoral and blastphemus toward the God of the Bible?

And its spelling has not been improving lately, either.

God will not long toledrate a society that has denigrated His word and His Christ in ways that are so filthy that it is beyond imagining. God is going to judge America and China just might be that instrument. ...

Charming.

Speaking as one of the "athiest" and "blastphemus" ones, I do nevertheless concede that Christian congregations scattered around the landscape can do dramatically good things economically. Small groups of mostly decent people, constantly urged to refrain from frivolous consumer spending and to treat each other with kindly and thoughtful reciprocity, can become hugely productive. This in its turn causes others to join in, perhaps for rather less spiritual reasons than those which animated the prime movers, but in ways which also end up improving the newcomers morally, to the general betterment of economic life, among much else. So this process will surely strengthen the Chinese economy, provided only that it is allowed to take root.

But what will then be done with China's economic strength? Unlike Islam (which positively encourages it), Christianity offers little justification for war making. But by contributing mightily, in the indirect and rather surprising ways described above, to the making of the means to fight wars, it nevertheless does encourage warfare, indirectly. Christian powers have fought wars because they did become, almost in spite of themselves, Christian powers. They fought, in other words, and fight still, because they can.

If a somewhat Christianised China veers away from the warlike pattern set by the West, it will be because the weaponry of all-out war has recently become so much more destructive than was the case when the Christians were fighting most of their wars, rather than because Christianity has become any more persuasive at making people nicer to foreigners of whom they know little.

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For most of my life I have been fascinated by two-man teams. Much is written in the management books about the decision making and leadership skills of individuals. Much is made of teams, of about six to a dozen or so people (a dozen being reckoned by most to be about the upper limit before factionalism sets in), and about the skill of building effective teams. But less, it seems to me, is made of the partnership of two, despite the fact that everywhere you look in the world of human accomplishment, you see two-man teams, often famously named: Rolls Royce, Gilbert and Sullivan, Laurel and Hardy, Powell and Pressberger, Pratt and Whitney, Rogers and Hammerstein, Flanders and Swan... trust me, the game of naming two man teams goes on for as long as you have time to devote to it. I could have machine-gunned this posting with links, but Google is Google - another now famously accomplished two-man team runs that, I believe - and I could not be bothered. Partly this is because this is, be warned now, a rather long posting, and doing proper links would have taken me the whole day.

Even when a single creative genius seems to stand in isolated splendour, more often than not it turns out that there was or is a backroom toiler seeing to the money, minding the shop, cleaning up the mess, lining up the required resources, publishing and/or editing what the Great Man has merely written, quietly eliminating the blunders of, or, not infrequently, actually doing the work only fantasised and announced by, the Great Man. Time and again, the famous period of apparently individual creativity coincides precisely with the time when that anonymous partner was also but less obtrusively beavering away, contributing crucially to the outcome, and often crucially saying boo to the goose when the goose laid a duff egg. If deprived, for some reason, of his back-up man, the Lone Genius falls silent, or mysteriously fails at everything else he attempts. Think Elizabeth the First and ... damn, I can not remember his name, but he was crucial, and Elizabeth was never the same after he had died. Cecil, that was him.

That literature and showbiz are so full of two-man teams is evidence of the enormous emotional importance that we all attach to these partnerships. Every TV detective, for instance, seems to have his Dr Watson figure, less inspired, but perhaps emotionally more adult, who buys the pint afterwards, soothes the frazzled nerves of the great detective, and who generally carries the can and tidies up after. For every Holmes there is a Watson, for every Morse, a Lewis. And for every Regan, a Carter. Major kudos to the late John Thaw for having participated in – having lead, actually - two very different but equally famous two-man teams of British TV coppers.

Sport is full of two man teams, often because there actually are two men in the team, as with tennis doubles or two man rowing teams. But equally fascinating are the famous two-man teams that flourish within bigger teams, like striking partnerships in soccer, half-back or centre three-quarter pairings in rugby (Sella and Charvet), or opening batting (Hobbes and Sutcliffe) or bowling partnerships (Trueman and Statham, Lillee and Thompson, Ambrose and Walsh) in cricket. England's cricket team has never quite been the same since Trescothick and Strauss were numbers one and two in the batting order, as they were in 2005 when the Ashes were last won. Trescothick left the side, and Strauss went from being a huge force to a huge disappointment. In cricket see also the Middlesex "twins", Compton and Edrich.

Comedians often come in pairs: Martin and Lewis, French and Saunders, Morecambe and Wise, Laurel and Hardy I have already mentioned, and many more that you are no doubt astonished that I have neglected to mention. Comic duos are able to explore the endless conundra involved in being part of a more or less functional or dysfunctional partnership. Because, as most of us know, partners often do not especially like each other. Simply, they both need each other for either of them to accomplish anything. Gilbert and Sullivan could hardly stand the sight of each other by the end, and had a long period when they each tried to make a go of it separately. Only the need for money, and the less well remembered crutch to their two legs, Richard d'Oyly Carte, brought them together again.

In my own line of business two-man teams abound. In the free market activism, think-tank trade, it is noticeable that success and successful partnership have a habit of going hand in hand, if you will pardon that mostly very inappropriate way of putting it. IEA: Harris and Seldon. Rumour had it that they never really liked each other that much, but the IEA has never been the same since age put an end to their partnership. ASI: Pirie and Butler...still going quite strong, but are their glory days over? And, though I say it myself, Libertarian Alliance: Tame and Micklethwait. This latter two-man team got under way in the early 1980s and lasted for somewhat more than a decade. Much of what I know about two-man teams – what they are, how to become part of one, how to operate within one, how they end – I learned from being half of that dynamic (at any rate as I tell it) duo.

I have been calling these teams two-man teams, but of course by man I really only mean person. Many a showbiz team has consisted of a man and a woman, often portraying a romantic magic that was singularly lacking in their real relationship, or which faded far faster than they pretended in public. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were never romantically involved for real. And I often read, although I have never dug into the details, that the real-life relationship between Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn was a whole lot more, er, convenient than it looked on the screen.

Okay, two man teams are very important, but so what? Well, that is it really, they are very important. If you can have a good one in the centre of your life, lucky you, because your life will work a whole lot better and, with further luck, will be a whole lot more fun. But a little more than that can be said, and in this posting, I will end by saying how you can analyse the future prospects of an enterprise by asking a few two-man-team-related questions. Questions like: Is there a two man team at the top at all, or is the boss up there on his own? And, if there is a two man team bossing the enterprise, what sort of two man team is it?

Actually, those two questions merge into one. I recall reading something by the late great management thinker and writer Peter Drucker, to the effect that the only current measurement of the working of a big business enterprise that had any predictive power was the ratio of the top two salaries. The closer that ratio is to one, Drucker said, the better. The absolute level is unimportant. What matters is whether the top two guys are paid roughly the same, or amounts that are seriously different. If the top salary is way above the number two salary, watch out. The top guy probably thinks he is God, and there is no one around to tell him different. Expect hubristic catastrophe. If, on the other hand, the number two man gets three quarters of what the number one man gets, that probably means that number two man can look number one man in the eye and tell him, as and when, that he thinks whatever it is is daft. There is a degree of mutual respect in place. The load is being shared, and each tells the other the truth as he sees it.

Many books have been written that emphasise the similarities between Hitler and Stalin, but during the war, there was, I recall reading recently, one huge difference. Hitler never had a single respected number two figure, but Stalin did. Once again, I do not recall the name. Something-ishitskty or -ishinsky or whatever, but maybe quite different. He was the military chief of staff or some such thing, and Stalin talked everything through with him behind the scenes, and never at any point in the relationship had him shot. Churchill had his Alan Brooke, who, when push came to shove, he allowed to keep him on the rails. Roosevelt? I do not know, but I bet there was someone. Harry Hopkins was it? But the point is: Hitler had only insignificant flunkeys – Keitel, known as "Lackeitel", lackey, was one of these creatures, I believe - who dared not tell him any truths at all.

To switch to our own time and our own excitements, and on the clear understanding that I am not calling either of them Adolf Hitler, is it too fanciful to speculate that the fortunes of the New Labour regime have moved from the Blair-Brown era, which, for all its faults and oddities, basically worked, to the Brown era, when the whole box of tricks caves in on top of everyone?

The first half of that equation will be very controversial here at Samizdata. If that Blair-Brown relationship "worked", it did so in the sense that it achieved things that most of us here loathe. It presided over a relentless degradation of the quality of the public sector and an equally relentless increase in its cost. Between them, these two put in place, as Sean Gabb has been saying for a decade, the machinery of a police state. But, for as long as the two of them were in office, they got away with it, more or less. Politically, that means that their relationship worked. Meanwhile, an equally unlovely two-man team of another kind, involving Blair and Campbell, also worked successfully.

Now, politically, the Brown era is a disaster. And I think it entirely reasonable (a) to speculate that Brown's basic problem is that he has no one beside him whose judgment he respects and who is doing anything resembling half the job, and (b) to predict that if Brown does manage to pull it together again and survive his current travails, it will be because he acquires someone to stand next to him who is able to look him in the eye and tell it like it is, and to share the load and the big decisions, not just about the country, but about how Brown conducts himself in his day-to-day politicking.

Maybe Brown's understanding of his current place in the world will make such a relationship impossible, in which case, politically, he is now doomed.

Much more could be said about two-man teams, indeed I have a whole new gob of two-man-teamery already written, but I will leave that to another posting.

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I went to watch Elizabeth - the Golden Age - as I had mentioned a few weeks back and I was pretty impressed, despite a few jarring notes (Francis Drake barely gets a mention in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rather like overlooking Nelson at Trafalgar). But the film was overall good entertainment, if not dead-accurate scholarship. One thing stuck in my mind on the way home: the man who played Philip II of Spain was very convincing in the role of a religious maniac, a man swinging between rhapsodies of hatred for Elizabeth and tearful despair. I thought to myself: "This guy looks like a stunt double for the current leader of Iran". I mean, he really does. Creepy.

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Patrick Crozier and I have taken to meeting up on Monday evenings to have recorded conversations. How long we'll do this is anyone's bet, and how many people listen to these conversations apart from us I have no idea... though perhaps Patrick knows? But a good time is had by us, and the mere possibility that others may be listening tightens up our conversation and makes it a lot more satisfying than if we merely chatted in complete privacy.

This coming Monday, we will be talking about World War I: how it was fought, and why it was fought. This has long been an interest of Patrick's, particularly the how bit. He thinks, or so I expect him to be saying, that Britain's military commanders have been criticised too much.

As for me, it is my (unclear) understanding that for all its exaggerations, the Blackadder version of WW1 is basically correct. The end did not justify the means. The prize was not worth the price. Germany was temporarily subdued, but at a cost in blood and subsequent political mayhem that was out of all proportion to any good that was achieved. But is that true?

In particular (Patrick and me both being Brits) what might been the outcome of this war if it had still proceeded, but if Britain had sat it out, either by not forming a special relationship between Britain and France, or by not sticking to that deal in August 1914? What if Britain had left Germany to do its worst? Presumably the argument of Britain's WW1 warriors was that sooner or later there would have been some kind of military reckoning between Germany and Britain, involving interests that all Brits (including me) would have regarded as vital, and that the longer such a confrontation was delayed the worse it would be for Britain. But is that right?

Comments about all these and related questions would be greatly appreciated.

Last week, Patrick and I talked about Northern Ireland, and the comments on this Samizdata posting proved very useful in suggesting various reasons why peace has broken out there, if peace it proves to be. Maybe something similar may happen again.

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I love this mighty beast, linked to by David Thompson in his latest batch of ephemera links (which he does every Friday and which I highly recommend):

This rusting hulk is (was) one of the world's biggest digging machines. It now resides in an open air museum, where the captions and propaganda messages are all about the ecological folly of big digging machines. But for me, this is a glorious monument to man's continuing and growing ability to impress his imprint upon nature.

And thereby, incidentally, to create all manner of interesting new habitats for other forms of nature beside man, once man has finished with using them for his original purpose. Last night I happened to watch a TV show about some defunct clay-excavation-for-brick-making site, somewhere in the Midlands I think, which has now become one of Britain's most satisfactory habitats for various particularly interesting sorts of newt. In general, I think the way that the First Industrial Revolution churned up the landscape and thereby made it more varied and interesting, is an under-talked-about topic.

The Norfolk Broads, no less, which I have fond memories of sailing on as a boy, began as peat mining:

It was only in the 1960s that Dr Joyce Lambert proved that they were artificial features, the effect of flooding on early peat excavations. The Romans first exploited the rich peat beds of the area for fuel, and in the Middle Ages the local monasteries began to excavate the "turbaries" (peat diggings) as a business, selling fuel to Norwich and Great Yarmouth. The Cathedral took 320,000 tonnes of peat a year. Then the sea levels began to rise, and the pits began to flood.

So, good for Dr Joyce Lambert, good for the Romans, good for exploitation, and good for rising sea levels. The Romans would have loved that giant digger, even as they would have been amazed and discomforted that it was made by their arch-enemies, the Germans.

In further interesting environment-related speculations Bishop Hill reckons we may be due for a cold winter, on account of the sun taking a bit of a rest just now. Interesting. We shall see.

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Insofar as the Americans are now winning in Iraq, as they do now seem to be, this is, first, because Al Qaeda have shot themselves in their stupid murderous feet by being stupid and murderous, and pissing off the Iraqi people; and second, because the Americans switched strategies, from (the way I hear it): sitting in nice big armed camps doing nothing except maybe training a few Iraqis to do the nasty stuff, to: getting out there themselves and doing it, thereby giving the Iraqi people something to get behind and to switch to, once they had worked out what ghastly shits AQ really are.

The first bit is very interesting, but this posting is about the second bit. Instapundit linked yesterday to this, and I particular like the first comment. Here, with its grammar and spelling cleaned up a little, it is:

The Democrats missed a great opportunity. Bush would not have changed strategy if the Dems did not win as big as they did. They could have said it was them that made Bush change to a successful strategy.

Over the summer I reread one of my favourite books of the century so far, How The West Has Won: Carnage and Culture From Salamis to Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson (which was published in October 2001). In this, Hanson makes much of the Western habit of what he calls "civilian audit" of military affairs. Armchair complaining and grilling of often quite successful generals for often rather minor failures in the course of what often eventually turn into major victories. Sidelining Patton for winning some battles but then slapping a soldier. Denouncing Douglas Haig forever for winning too nastily on the Western Front. Votes of Confidence in the Commons during the dark days of World War 2. Most recently, General Petraeus being grilled on TV. That kind of thing.

Above all, there are the journalists, wandering around the battlefield being horrified and sending photos back of people who died during disasters, or during victories, thereby making those look like disasters also (which they were for the people who died.)

Unlike many with similar loyalties to his, who describe all this as a Western weakness, Hanson sees it as a major Western strength. Yes it is messy, and yes it is often monstrously unjust. Yes, it often results in serious mistakes and failures, especially in the short run. Yes the questions put to returning generals and presiding politicians are often crass, stupid and trivial. But the effect of all this post-mortemising and second-guessing and media grandstanding and general bitching and grumbling is to keep the West's military leaders on their metal in a way that simply does not happen in non-Western cultures.

It must really concentrate the mind of a general to know that there are literally millions of people back home who are just waiting for him to screw up, so they can crow: we told you so.

It also results in Western armies filled with people who know quite well what the plan is and what the score is, having just spent the last few hours, days, weeks or even years arguing about it all. Western armies invariably contain barrack room lawyers and grumblers, to say nothing of people who sincerely believe that they could do better than their own commanders and who say so, courtesy of those interfering journalists.

Central to the whole idea of the West is that you get better decisions, and better (because so much better informed) implementation of those decisions by the lower ranks, if lots of people argue like hell about these decisions first, during, and then again afterwards. In fact if you argue about them all the time.

Take Iraq now. The narrative that is now gaining strength goes as follows: Iraq invaded for dubious reasons, but successfully. Peace lost because no plan to win it. Two or three years of chaos and mayhem. Change of strategy. Now war may be being won. Maybe this story has not quite reached the MSM, but I believe that it soon will, if only because of bloggers like this guy and this guy.

Strangely, Hanson has, during this particular war, been one of the most vocal complainers about the complainers, so to speak. He has gone on and on about how suspect are the motives of the complainers and how ignorant they seem to be of what war is necessarily like and how bad it would be if the West lost this particular war. Yet is not the way this story may now be playing out yet further evidence of the important contribution made by anti-Western kneejerk anti-warriors to the good conduct of Western wars by the West's warriors? What these people want to do is stop the war by making the warriors give up and lose it. But what they often achieve instead is to bully the warriors into doing better, and winning. They are, so to speak, an important part of the learning experience. Hanson returns again and again to how the West often loses the early battles, but ends up winning the war.

Under heavy political pressure, President Bush switched in Iraq from a failing Plan A to what now looks as if it could be a successful Plan B. Would this switch have happened without all the pressure? Maybe, but it is surely reasonable to doubt it. The next commenter after the one quoted above says that it is still not too late for the Dems to do a switch of their own, and to start claiming that had it not been for them and all their grumbling, the switch by Bush from failure to success would never have happened. If and when they do start talking like that, they will surely have a point.

(Patrick Crozier and I recently discussed VDH in this podcast, more about which here.)

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Burma is a good example of 'gun control', i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 - or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration.

However, me being a cold hearted man whose mind starts to wander even when shown scenes of murder and other horror, the situation reminds me of the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force - but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the 'constitutional' government of Britain and the 'tyranny' of France - under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point.

This was part of David Hume's love of attacking what his opponents (such as Thomas Reid) were to call "Common Sense". David Hume was involved in what are now called 'counter intuitive' positions. Hume claimed (at times) that there was no objective reality - that the physical universe was just sense impressions in the mind. This did not stop him also claiming (at times) that the mind did not exist, in the sense of a thinking being, that a thought did not mean a thinker - that there was no agent and thus no free willed being.

Whether David Hume actually believed any of this - or whether he was just saying to people "you do not have any strong arguments for your most basic beliefs - see how weak reason is"... is not the point here. The point is that many people. including many people who have never heard his name, have been influenced by the ideas of David Hume.

For example, Louis XVI of France did not actively resist his enemies, going so far as ordering others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to resist, because he had read David Hume's History of England - it was his favourite book. In his history Hume claimed that Charles the First did not get killed because he lost the Civil War (as a simple minded ordinary man might think) - but because he had fought back against his enemies at all. If he had not resisted his enemies, they would have seen no need to kill him (a clever counter intuitive position).

So Louis XVI did not resist. It is possible that he was given cause to doubt Hume's wisdom right before his enemies murdered him, and so many others, but we will never know the answer to that I suppose.

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower - they appear to be mistaken.

"You are showing lack of respect for the dead" - perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty - you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason.

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This is both an historical and an historiographical puzzle.

It might well be true. It would be interesting if it were.

I do not think it is of any consequence for current affairs or community relations whether it is true or not (and I could not give a damn what anyone thinks on that point either way). But I thought my naval history was pretty good, and I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

The BBC reports Trevor Philips speaking at an event today:

"When we talk about the Armada it's only now that we are beginning to realise that part of it is Muslims," Mr Phillips told the meeting. "It was the Turks who saved us, because they held up Armada at the request of Elizabeth I."

Now what is he going on about? How would one arrange that with 16th century communications? Elizabeth certainly chartered a Levant Company, and had diplomatic relations with the Ottomans. But where is the evidence? Did the Turks hold up the Armada at all? And if so did they do it by arrangement? If so, what's the new research that "only now" gives us this information? If not, where does Mr Phillips get the idea from?

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On this day, 231 years ago, thirteen colonies declared themselves to be thirteen states.

Less known is that Thomas Jefferson wrote the "original Rough draught" of that declaration. Today is a good occasion to read in that rough draft what the full scope of grievances were before the representatives "in General Congress assembled" took the pen and scissors to it to assure unanimous support.

The last paragraph is the final treason of a treasonous document and had we lost the war that ensued, the greatest thinkers, doers and leaders of this continent would certainly have been executed for the crime of attempting the liberty of self determination.

We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled do, in the name & by authority of the good people of these states, reject and renounce all allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Britain & all others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly dissolve & break off all political connection which may have heretofore subsisted between us & the people or parliament of Great Britain; and finally we do assert and declare these colonies to be free and independant states, and that as free & independant states they shall hereafter have power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, & to do all other acts and things which independant states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, & our sacred honour.

Like they say, read the whole thing. It wasn't just about tax. It wasn't even primarily about tax. Some of the grievances have returned to us in force today and are worse perpetrated today by the government in Washington than they were by the government in Britain when this document was written. But some of the grievances may come as a surprise, particularly to some of you feeling the colonization by the EU. That is EU 'colony' as in definition 2.

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This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:

This is by intention a humorous book, a work of social satire. But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil. (Did I mention that they are evil? Also stupid?) I found this pretty clever and amusing for about the first twenty pages. But by that time I still had about 450 pages more to go, and the rest of it wasn’t any fun at all.

Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell.

But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no?

Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk - Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind - might have had enough of reading about the feats of "The Greatest Generation" and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller's book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well.

But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view.

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Libby Purves, the Times columnist, has a nice appreciation of the Cutty Sark, which was partly destroyed by fire yesterday. The burning of the Cutty Sark clipper ship appears, judging by some reports, to have been started deliberately. I have long since given up trying to fathom what goes through the minds - for want of a better word - of the pondlife who get a buzz out of torching old monuments like this 19th century vessel. An active hatred or pranksterish contempt for the past soon spills over into a defilement of the present and eventually, lack of interest in the future (very Burkean, ed).

Some time ago, I reflected on how the clipper ships like the Cutty Sark were a demonstration of how globalised the 19th Century was in terms of trade. Anyway, let's hope the vessel can be restored. It is certainly one of the finest sights in Greenwhich, in the eastern part of London and a major tourist attraction.

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I enjoy the seafaring fiction of writers like CS Forester, creator of Horatio Hornblower, the Jack Aubrey stories of Patrick O'Brien and similar fare. Over the years of reading such books, I realised of course that much of this fiction was based on the real characters who fought in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic war. There are number of them worth mentioning, such as Edward Pellew, the brilliant west countryman; William Sydney Smith, Philip Broke, and many more. And of course there is Lord Nelson himself, a man who has been much written about, with a fresh flurry of books written in 2005 to mark the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and his destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet off Cadiz.

If there is one character, however, who comes close to being the main inspiration for the fiction writers, it has to be Thomas Cochrane. Neglected as a biographical subject for many years, he has become a talking-point again, and Robert Harvey's biography of the man, written a few years ago, is a cracking read. I have finally found the time to read it and have rarely been so enthralled by the brilliance, bravery and sheer daring of a real-life character. The son of a hard-up Scottish aristocrat, Cochrane went to sea at what was then the relatively late age of 17 (it was common for young boys to join much earlier). Within a few years, his promise became apparent and he was promoted. By his early 20s, Cochrane was a commander of flair, commanding his little ship, Speedy, in a series of engagements, frequently taking on much larger vessels and using his skill and trickery to beat them.

A few years after Trafalgar - in which he did not take part - Cochrane, who was not a popular man with his jealous and pompous Admiralty governors, led a fireship raid on the west coast of France. Although the raid was a general success, several ships that could and should have been destroyed were left intact because the admiral in overall charge of the operation, Lord Gambier, was over-cautious to the point, arguably, of cowardice. Cochrane later made harsh comments about Gambier and the whole affair ended up in a very unpleasant courts martial. Cochrane's public career went into freefall; he was framed in a fraud case and sent to jail. He had a political career as a radical MP; and later, in an astonishing revival of his naval career, Cochrane went south to help form the Chilean navy, and played a full part in the overthrow of the old Spanish empire. He lived to a ripe and contented old age.

If Cochrane had his weaknesses to balance his many good points - he was a humane leader and loathed the barbaric naval practice of flogging - they were a large measure of vanity, a hot temper and inability to suffer fools gladly. Harvey's biography of Cochrane very fairly draws out these points, but at no point does Harvey succumb to the tedious modern mania for showing that any extraordinary person has feet of clay. Cochrane was treated appallingly by many people, who were frequently ungrateful and uncomprehending of the skills needed to guide sailing ships in conditions of war. (One of his trademarks was sailing raids at night, often in treacherous condtions without modern navigation aids like radar).

When, back in 2005, I walked about HMS Victory at Portsmouth, and imagined what it must have been like to sail such wooden ships into battle, with all the discomforts, brutal discipline and harshness of such life, it made me feel very humble indeed. The naval men of Nelson and Cochrane's age were a remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again.

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I thought this is one of the cases where technology is nothing but good news...

German researchers said Wednesday that they were launching an attempt to reassemble millions of shredded East German secret police files using complicated computerized algorithms. The files were shredded as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it became clear that the East German regime was finished. Panicking officials of the Stasi secret police attempted to destroy the vast volumes of material they had kept on everyone from their own citizens to foreign leaders.

Some 16,250 sacks containing pieces of 45 million shredded documents were found and confiscated after the reunification of Germany in 1990. Reconstruction work began 12 years ago but 24 people have been able to reassemble the contents of only 323 sacks.

Using algorithms developed 15 years ago to help decipher barely legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims, each individual strip of the shredded Stasi files will be scanned on both sides. The data then will be fed into the computer for interpretation using color recognition; texture analysis; shape and pattern recognition; machine and handwriting analysis and the recognition of forged official stamps

Until I read the final paragraph.

Putting the machine-shredded documents together requires analysis of the script on the surface of the fragments. The institute has already had success putting together similarly destroyed documents for Germany's tax authorities.

But then, it is never the technology that is at fault, but people and the uses they put it to...

No matter, I am very pleased to hear that there is some work somewhere being done on the past of former communist countries.

via Dropsafe

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"The British admitted defeat in North America and the catastrophes that were predicted at the time never happened. The catastrophes that were predicted after Vietnam never happened."

- former General Michael Rose, urging a retreat from Iraq.

Ok, so the defeat in North America in 1782 did not result in catastrophe (unless you happened to be an American Tory of course) and that somehow tells us something about Iraq circa 2007 according to the former General. But Vietnam? Thirty years of communist totalitarianism are not a catastrophe? Presumably the Boat People were just Vietnamese tourists looking for Disneyland and everything was really just peachy after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

What would constitute a catastrophe, I wonder?. A couple Croatian chums of mine had the dubious pleasure of meeting Michael Rose in Bosnia (which is a story I would love to tell but do not feel I can) and they told me some rather uncomplimentary things about him and they certainly felt they got the better of him 'professionally'. If that is his 'take' on Vietnam, he does not sound like someone whose judgement I would much care to rely on, that is for sure.

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I think I must share a similar taste in humour to blogger Clive Davis. Like Clive, I cannot see what is so funny about Ricky Gervais, the man who gave us the spoof TV show, The Office, and does standup. He leaves me completely cold. On the other side, Clive is a Peter Sellers fan and so am I. Sellers' reputation has been a bit trashed of late, by this scathing biography in particular and in a recent rather cruel film starring Geoffrey Rush but despite his real or alleged personal shortcomings, he towers above most of the so-called comic actors of today, with a few exceptions.

Clive has a picture taken from I'm All Right Jack, which ranks alongside Dr Strangelove - the Cold War movie of Stanley Kubrick - as probably one of the sharpest pieces of movie satire since the war. The film was made in the mid to late 50s, around the time of the Suez crisis, when the government was led by men of such standing as Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan. Manchester United's Busby Babes had entered the European Cup only to be cruelly cut down by the Munich air crash. The Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite. Ike was in the White House. Ayn Rand had completed Atlas Shrugged. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 had been mercilessly suppressed. These were, in retrospect, times that shaped much of our lives today.

In some ways the 1950s were quite a good time in Britain, as this recent book demonstrates. Crime was much lower than today. Grammar schools enabled bright working class children a chance to get up the educational ladder. The Tories ended rationing - "Set the People Free" - while Elvis, Chuck Berry and the rest of them began to come on the airwaves and push aside the stuffier fare. Certain aspects of life were still far less liberal than today, such as laws on divorce, homosexuality and censorship, although arguably free speech was actually more widely respected than today (I suspect some commenters will agree with that).

And there was the Goon Show, the brainchild of comic genius and all-round nutter, Spike Milligan. Sellers was one of that show's brightest stars and later built a career in films, some of them of mixed quality. But Sellers' brilliant portrayal of an ultra-leftist trade unionist in I'm All Right Jack is the pinnacle, in my view. He played opposite Terry Thomas ("what a fwightful shower!"), cast as the cynical factory manager, and Ian Carmichael, as the upper-class twit sent to work in the company. And in a strangely modern twist, young Richard Attenborough plays a shady businessman cutting arms deals with Arab states (nothing much changes, does it?). As a final twist of genius, that old news hand, Malcolm Muggeridge, is cast as a tv current affairs host.

The film beautifully captures the prevailing view of the 'enlightened classes' at the time, which was that Britain was not 'modern' or 'efficient' enough, and that what was needed to solve this state of affairs was a more meritocratic, technology-driven business ethic. This proved in fact to be the wrong diagnosis, an essentially corporatist one. The problem with the sort of world lampooned in this film was not that Britons were inherently lazy, stupid or venal; no, it was that much of Britain's industrial vigour had been sapped by decades of rising taxes, regulations, and the not-exactly-trivial business of two major world wars. It was not until the failed experiments of Harold Wilson in the 1960s that people realised there were no technological, managerialist fixes to Britain's economic stagnation. The 'fix' was in drastic cuts to marginal tax rates, deregulation and removal of trade unions' privileges, starting with the closed shop.

I have heard it said that Sellers' portrayal of a trade unionist was so good that it greatly annoyed much of the left. If that is so, he deserves a vote of thanks for sending up a destructive attitude so cleverly. If only we had someone of Sellers' genius to send up the intrusive state of today.

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My inestimable thanks to the commenter who linked to this exquisitely germane wiki in the comments section of my post below:

Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptuariae leges) were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures. They were an easy way to identify social rank and privilege, and were usually used for social discrimination. This frequently meant preventing commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats, and sometimes also to stigmatize disfavored groups. In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities.

I was wrong about Cameron. He is not trying to drag us back into the 19th Century, he is making a bid for the 14th Century!! I suppose it may be to some advantage that we know exactly what is driving him and his ilk. Of even more advantage is to accept that the struggle for freedom, prosperity and progress is necessarily going to encompass some degree of class war.

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225 years ago today Parliament voted a resolution to end the war and grant the colonies independence. A month later Lord North faced a vote of no confidence and stepped down.

It seems to me any old place can declare independence, it is when your would-be rulers accept it that matters.

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Everything I have heard and read tells me that this kind of thing used to be true in Britain.

I live in a very small street with only eight houses, but delivery vans come down here at least twice a day. Fed Ex and that other company. People have a lot of parcels delivered by not the Post Office these days. The internet brings us gifts every day.

They bash on the door a few times, then put the parcel down and walk off. One time, a delivery man hid the parcel under our doormat. I guess he thought it was more valuable-looking than usual (true- it was Lego/s). Nobody expects parcels to be stolen from doorsteps. Everywhere I’ve lived in England, that would be insane. I never minded about crime when I lived in the UK, but that was before experiencing life in a place that feels this safe. It's wonderful.

I heard a story from my brother-in-law about Nottingham in the thirties. Apparently, in a very poor part of town and at a very poor time, as was the practice in such places in those times, a man used to come round with a big leather bag, collecting rent, in cash. This man was not liked. People went hungry to ensure that he got his cash. But it never occurred to him or to anyone that this was a stupid thing for him to do, because it was not stupid. Anyway, one day, he left his bag in the middle of the street for some reason, full of cash, unattended. A while later he came back and collected it, untouched, all the money still there. Those were the rules.

But stories like that about long-ago Nottingham are far easier to dismiss than the contrast that Alice Bachini-Smith describes from her own direct and hugely contrasting experiences. To tell me that I am wrong about 1930s Nottingham only involves saying that the story has become exaggerated over the years, as maybe it has. To tell Alice that she is wrong means telling her that she is wrong about her own experiences. It means calling her a liar, pretty much.

As to why things worked like this in most or even all of Britain in the past and still do work like this in the more law abiding parts of America, well, that is another argument. The reasons are quite complicated, I would say. (For instance, I have long believed architectural design to be part of the story.)

I recall publishing an interesting piece for the Libertarian Alliance by the historian Stephen Davies entitled Towards the Remoralisation of Society about these kinds of arguments. This was published in 1991 but since then the story in Britain has surely changed rather little and if anything has got somewhat worse. (Here and here are some more recent writings by the same author, the former being a book that you have to buy, but the latter being a blog posting that you can actually read.)

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There is a pull-out supplement in the latest Spectator, entitled "The Connoisseur's Guide to the Cricket World Cup 2007". Peter Oborne is very gung-ho about cricket just now (no link because the bit I am about to quote is stuck behind a registration wall – I read it on paper):

Never have there been so many outstanding international teams. Go back to the previous 'golden age' before the first world war and there were just three Test-playing nations: England, Australia and South Africa.

So far so routine, this being from a piece by Oborne entitled "A new golden age", which he does explain. Basically, not only are there more good national teams now, and more excellent players, but they also play cricket that is entertaining to watch, unlike what was played a generation ago. But then comes this kicker, and in brackets if you please:

(Actually there should have been four: until 1914 the United States was well capable of competing at the highest level, and a cricket tour of the United States formed the background to Psmith Journalist, one of P. G. Wodehouse's best novels. Unfortunately, the Imperial Cricket Conference, which governed international cricket, excluded America because it was not part of the British empire, so it went off and played baseball instead. This snub to the US at such a promising stage of its cricketing development, is one of the tragedies of history.)

I did not know that (more about this sad story here). I am not used to feeling spasms of hatred toward those who presided over the British Empire, although I often learn about things that make others understandably angry about these people. But I did when I read that. We have talked here before about cricket in the USA, but I do not recall this particular circumstance being mentioned by anyone. Apologies if someone did and I missed it. For while I would not put this particular tragedy of history down there with the Slave Trade and the Holocaust and the depredations of King Leopold, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the rest of them, this certainly does seem like a definite pity to me.

Talking of cricket, and what with cricket's World Cup fast approaching, Samizdata's travel correspondent Michael Jennings has been, well, talking of cricket. He has done a podcast with Patrick Crozier, about Australian sport in general, and Australian cricket in particular, what with cricket being the biggest sport in Australia. Did you know that Aussie pace ace Brett Lee (who will sadly be missing the World Cup because of injury) does commercials on Indian telly, and has had a pop hit in India? You do now.

And for more about how sport and politics intersect, do not miss this sports report by Guido Fawkes.

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Here is a website for the film Amazing Grace, due for release soon. It centres on the life of William Wilberforce, friend of great British Prime Minister William Pitt, and the man most people will associate with the abolitionist movement. The campaign to end slavery lasted for years before eventually succeeding in the first decade of the 19th Century, although it lingered as an institution in the colonies for many years before ending in the conflagration of the US civil war. I have no idea whether this new film will be any good and what sort of "point" it will make, but if there is a point worth making on a libertarian blog like this, it is that slavery in all its forms is an abomination, a stain on humanity and should be resisted. Furthermore, man since ancient times has known that slavery is an evil but for many centuries was either resigned to the institution, or was cowed into thinking that it was part of the natural order of things. I have read comments on this blog - by an individual who thankfully no longer bothers us - that slavery was a product of its economic times and it would be quite wrong for us to "lord it over" our ancestors by condemning the practice. This is moral relativism, pure and simple.

Some people have tried to argue that the British slave trade proves the wickedness possible through capitalism, although I think it demonstrates a quite different point. Kidnapping people from their homes and then forcing them to work in conditions as appalling as a plantation has not, as far as I know, got anything to do with consensual acts of commerce as classical liberals might understand it. Quite the reverse. What slavery shows is that trade without respect for the rights of individuals is in fact a form of thuggery.

Here is an article I wrote over a year ago about a less well known opponent of slavery, Thomas Clarkson. On the 200th anniversary of Britain's outlawing the slave trade, let's celebrate what these men achieved.

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I have just made the mistake of reading the Sunday Telegraph. As is too often the case the only really good thing in the newspaper was Mr Booker's half page - and it is not worth getting a whole newspaper for half a page.

Looking through the rest of the Sunday Telegraph I came upon an article by Mr David Cameron (the leader of the British 'Conservative' party) the main business of the article was not important. It was just another absurd claim that we can "reform" the European Union in order to make it a 'force for good' - an excuse for Mr Cameron had his friends to not even promise to get the United Kingdom out of 'the Union' which is now the source of about 75% of all new regulations.

However, it was the rewriting of history that caught my eye. Mr Cameron correctly points out that we are coming up to the 50th anniversary of what was in 1957 called the European Economic Community. But Mr Cameron also states that this time (1957) was a time when the European Economic Community (EEC, now the EU) had to deal with a Europe that had been devastated by war, that was under the threat of Soviet attack, and was on the point of economic collapse.

In reality...

War damage had (in most of Western Europe) been to a great extent repaired by 1957, partly by the efforts of Europeans and partly by American aid. The EEC was not the thing that rebuilt the towns and cities of Europe. The Soviet threat was not kept at bay by the EEC - it was kept at bay by NATO (i.e. in reality the American military) and it is NATO, not the EEC/EU, that was responsible for the peace of post war Western Europe, which may well be why so many Europeans hate the United States - people often hate those they have long depended on.

As for on the point of economic collapse. In fact in 1957 Western Europe was in the middle of great period of advance.

Here American aid was not really the driving force. What was the driving force of economic progress was deregulation and the reduction of taxation. This movement is best remembered, if it is remembered at all, by the weekend bonfire of price controls (weekend because the allied occupiers would not be in their offices to block it) and other economic regulations by Ludwig Erhard in the soon to be West Germany in 1948 (the Federal Republic coming into being in 1949).

However, there were similar movements in other Western European nations. Even Britain had its 'Set the People Free' and its 'Bonfire of Controls' under Churchill and Eden.

Also (again even in Britain) there was a policy in the 1950's of the reduction of taxation.

Neither the deregulation or the tax reductions had anything to do with the EEC which (as Mr Cameron correctly states) was created in 1957. And I hope that no one will claim that such things as the Iron and Steel Community or 'Euro Atom' were behind the deregulation or the tax reductions (in various nations) either.

In short, Mr Cameron's view of history (which might be best described as "at first there was darkness and then the European Economic Community moved in the darkness...") has no connection to the truth.

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In light of the recent damage and imminent destruction of the right of habeas corpus in the United States of America, it is with mixed feelings I point out the following observations by James Madison (or possibly Alexander Hamilton) in Federalist Paper 53.

The important distinction so well understood in America, between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed in any other country. Wherever the supreme power of legislation has resided, has been supposed to reside also a full power to change the form of the government. Even in Great Britain, where the principles of political and civil liberty have been most discussed, and where we hear most of the rights of the Constitution, it is maintained that the authority of the Parliament is transcendent and uncontrollable, as well with regard to the Constitution, as the ordinary objects of legislative provision. They have accordingly, in several instances, actually changed, by legislative acts, some of the most fundamental articles of the government.

and...

Where no Constitution, paramount to the government, either existed or could be obtained, no constitutional security, similar to that established in the United States, was to be attempted.

and...

... and hence the doctrine [of annual elections] has been inculcated by a laudable zeal, to erect some barrier against the gradual innovations of an unlimited government, that the advance towards tyranny was to be calculated by the distance of departure from the fixed point of annual elections. But what necessity can there be of applying this expedient to a government limited, as the federal government will be, by the authority of a paramount Constitution? Or who will pretend that the liberties of the people of America will not be more secure under biennial elections, unalterably fixed by such a Constitution, than those of any other nation would be, where elections were annual, or even more frequent, but subject to alterations by the ordinary power of the government?

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'It' being the idea that it is a legitimate function of government to dress its servants in uniforms with shiny buttons and have them bully and interrogate people to make sure they are behaving themselves.

The word, Prussianism, was still used between the wars, but was much more common in the Indian summer of the British Empire, a century ago. It encapsulated the contempt of the liberal British (either little Liberals or little Conservatives) for the Bismarckian state and its imperative to dominate and regulate the lives of the people through petty officialdom. And that state was epitomised by shiny uniforms, the image of Prussianism.

Before the launch was buried under a torrent of further Home Office cock-up stories, the new, excitingly repressive, UK Borders Bill was launched with that image. There is nothing in the Bill about uniforms. Those are matters of prerogative. Likewise renaming the immigration service.

So the fact that John Reid chose to show off his latest 'get tough' policy* by unveiling the new uniforms for a renamed immigration service, is an epiphany of cultural change. Yesterday's chaos (of which more in another post) may have covered it up, but I did not detect a whisper of the same public derision of Prussianism that the early 20th century Brits reserved for government by shiny uniforms.

[* Of course, Dr Reid, making Kylie carry an ID-card will stop people-smuggling dead. Now go with the nice man and have a quiet lie down...]

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Recently, Samizdata's own Paul Marks had a post about F.D. Roosevelt and considered his reputation, his actions and the New Deal. The blogger under the name Hedge Fund Guy has this scathing assessment of the man regarded by many Britons to this day as a good guy:

I think FDR was a horrible president. My son takes better care of his ant farm than this guy took care of the economy. If ever there was someone in power who looked only at partial derivatives, it was FDR. If there was ever someone who focused on producers and ignored consumers, it was FDR. If there was anyone who thought self-interest was only present among businessmen, not government or union workers, it was FDR. His economic views are indistinguishable from a typical campus left-winger after 10 bong hits.

Ouch. He then goes on to attack much of FDR's record, and I don't have a quarrel with a single word of it. Even so, it interests me that a man who, objectively speaking, was a total failure in cutting the massive unemployment of 1930s America managed to hold the reputation as a saviour of capitalism for so long. I recall my O-Level history classes and how Roosevelt was presented as essentially one of the Good Men of History, while Herbert Hoover, FDR's immediate predecessor in the White House, was presented as a Republican who did what he could but not nearly enough (in fact, Hoover was a persistent meddler and regulator, and carries considerable responsibility for the scale of the Great Depression, as do the protectionists in Congress at the time).

Roosevelt was a great showman. His "fireside chats", his folksy manner, his ability to surround himself with a loyal and capable grouping of what we would call today "spin-doctors" ensured that the FDR myth lasted a long time. His friendship with Winston Churchill - albeit subject to strains and disagreements such as how to deal with Stalin - also ensured that the man is viewed by some Britons in a positive light. Being entirely selfish, I am glad that the United States entered the Second World War on Britain's side, and one of the reasons why I am a visceral pro-American is that I believe that Europe today would be in a far worse shape than it is now were it not for the courage shown by America's airmen, soldiers and sailors (some U.S. folk joined up on the British side even before America joined). I have absolutely no truck with the absurd isolationist view that the United States should have sat back, let Stalin/Hitler do their worst and if need be, come to some sort of accomodation with an entire European/Asian landmass under totalitarian, race-based thugs. So it is easy to see why Roosevelt's image burned bright for many people.

I think the lesson of how FDR managed to hold a high reputation for so long is that a political leader, particularly if he or she is adept in the arts of propoganda and can come across as "doing something" to fix a problem, however counter-productive, can get a fair pass. I do wonder, however, whether FDR would have been as successful in narrow political terms now.

This book, written very much from the "Austrian" perspective, has a particularly devastating chapter on the New Deal, the record on unemployment.

(17)

Last night I and several other assorted bloggers and Samizdatistas dined at Chateau Perry, at a gathering hosted by Jackie D. The guest of honour was Mr Squander 2. Of course we all asked after Mrs and Baby Squander 2, and the good news is that mother and child are doing much better.

For me the most memorable thing that got said last night was when Mr Squander 2 told of how, during the Brezhnev era, poor old Mr Brezhnev apparently consumed an annoyingly large amount of Soviet and in particular KGB man hours trying to get various of his minions to answer for him the question: "Who runs capitalism?"

Presumably so that they could take him/her/it out, in some way or another, and score a cheap and quick victory in the Cold War, although sadly that wasn't part of the story as told last night.

Or, maybe the idea was for Brezhnev then to able to sit down with this controlling mastermind, and to ask him/her/it: "How can we do it?"

Knowing the damn Bolsheviks, it could well have been both. First find out how they do it, then kill or enslave them all, starting where it makes most sense, with whoever is in charge.

Anyway, (1): Heh. And (2) does anyone know anything more about this? I tried googling: Brezhnev "Who runs capitalism?", but that yielded nothing. It is such a great story that it is the kind of thing people believe because they want to believe it. I know I want to. But, is there any truth in it?

(23)

This afternoon I went to meet a business contact and walked past Chesterfield Street, in the area of London to the north of Piccadilly. The houses in the quiet street date back to the 18th Century and many of them, with their elegant Georgian front doors and understated proportions, have circular blue signs on the front, describing certain famous people who used to live there. One house states that Beau Brummell, "leader of fashion", lived in one of the houses. Many foreign visitors who walk past the building and who wonder who this character was may have little idea of the man who rose rapidly to become at one stage the "most famous man in England", setting new standards of dress and elegance for men. He lived the sort of life that puts modern gaudy celebrities in the shade. His life was a wild mixture of dazzling social success, fame and renown. But his later life was tragic, although the pain was partly self-inflicted: he eloped to France to escape from mounting debts and eventually died from disease.

A biography by Ian Kelly, now available in paperback, is an excellent story of how Brummell, descended from an upwardly-mobile civil servant and businessman, managed in a relatively short space of time to set the tone for Regency England. What I found so striking about the book was that although it showed that early 19th Century England was a very class-ridden place full of snobberies and harsh social conventions, it was also fluid and open to upward mobility to a degree that almost makes one wonder whether the age of George IV is in some ways more open than our own. Brummell's grandfather was a servant; his father worked in the civil service and yet, by a mix of business acumen and a bit of sharp dealing in government contracts, amassed enough wealth to put his children through Eton and set his offspring up in the height of luxury. In some ways Brummell was the first person to be famous for being famous, for creating his own identity so well that he inspired people like Disraeli or, for that matter, Oscar Wilde (there is some debate on whether Brummell was bi-sexual). The Cary Grants, Errol Flynns or David Nivens are part of this suave tradition and so for that matter are such fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond in his dark blue suits and evening dinner jackets.

Kelly is wonderful in how he describes how Brummell set about the task of creating a new style of dress that continues to affect tailoring to this day. Inspired in part by the sort of uniforms worn by Napoleon's and Wellington's armies, particularly the dashing cavalry regiments, and by the new-found enthusiasm for all things Greek and Roman, Brummell set about driving forward the elegant styles associated with the Regency period. The classic English male attire which he created has its echoes down the ages. Even those City financiers who now ply their trade in the Square Mile of London or the capital's Canary Wharf financial district continue to wear suits and neckties that owe something to Brummell's influence.

Of course, many people, including finance professionals, lawyers and the like, have adopted a more casual dress sense since the days when no man in London would be allowed to live if he was seen wearing brown shoes in the city during the week or to be seen without a hat and cane. Dress-down Fridays are now the norm, although I have noticed how people often look exactly the same on a Friday, as if Thomas Pink shirts, Dockers' trousers and loafers are as much a uniform as the old products of Saville Row.

Anyway, in these times when scruffiness is in vogue, perhaps we need a new Brummell to ensure that the movers and shakers of global capitalism dress to do justice to the noble calling of making enormous amounts of money. London is a great town, whatever its faults, so perhaps we should do it the honour of dressing accordingly.

On the subject of the Regency period and the characters of that time, Paul Johnson's book is definitely worth checking out.

(15)

Finally, thirty or so years too late, the Communists have come up with a slogan with makes Communism sound attractive:

Well, not quite. Actually this poster is a send-up of the attitude of the music industry, which is now engaged in suing the Russian-based online music website AllofMP3.com for $165 trillion.

This meme – downloading mp3 files for free is Communism! - is but the latest in a long line of similarly wrong-headed memes collusively created by stupid anti-Communists and not-so-stupid Communists, or not so stupid anti-anti-Communists (also scum in my opinion), which make Communism look and sound far better and far sexier than it ever really was or will be. Workers demanding the right to free association is Communism! Workers going on strike is Communism! Adolescents having sex is Communism! Rock and roll is Communism! Having fun is Communism!

Please note that I am not saying that downloading mp3 files for free (or for that matter going on strike or having sex) is necessarily right or wise, merely that it is very attractive, and in a way that Communism never was. I mean, for starters, how many people, under actually existing Communism, had the kit to download, legally or illegally, and then listen to mp3 files?

I tried copying the above poster from this website, but I couldn't make that work. So, I googled it and found it from somewhere else. Does someone perhaps have something against people downloading picture files for free? (LATER: the downloading of that poster is not a problem, see comments, but just a problem for me and my photo-processing software. Apologies.)

(24)

On Saturday January 6th of what is still next year - Happy New Year when it comes everyone! - I will be giving the first of Christian Michel's talks in his 6/20 Series of the year 2007. My talk will be entitled "Getting to grips with the Total Surveillance State and the Total Surveillance Society". And for reasons which will become all too clear if you read the rest of this posting, I would appreciate some help. Last week I sent Christian the rather long and discursive ramble below concerning my thinking on this subject, which he had to shorten to turn it into a useful email announcement. What follows is a very slightly amended and extended version of that original ramble. As I say, all pertinent answers to and comments on the many questions I am now asking myself would be greatly appreciated... by the way, I already know that I need to be paying a lot of attention to this guy.

Some talks are given because the speaker has something important to say, and is very confident about what that something is, and that it is important. The first talk I gave to the 6/20 Club (on January 6th 2006) was of this sort. Oh, it had blurry edges, as all talks will, but the central thesis was something I was really pretty sure about and still am, namely that A-bombs and H-bombs had turned major war from something that Great Powers had to prepare for at all cost, into something they had to avoid at all cost. Hence globalisation. A nice and clear, nice and understandable thesis. Not necessarily right, but if wrong, then wrong in a nice clear way.

But then there are the talks such as the one I will be giving on January 6th 2007, which I am giving not because I know what to say about the Total Surveillance State and the Total Surveillance Society, but because I do not, but want to find out. About the only thing I am sure of concerning this topic is that it is an important topic, and worthy of all our best efforts to make sense of it. And if I agree to talk about this topic, I will have to think about it, no matter how much of an effort that may be.

Here are some of the questions, points, thoughts now rattling through my head on this topic:

• Total Surveillance is definitely on its way. Saying that the technology won't work is delusional. Sure, governments waste millions on technology, but it eventually works, if only because eventually you can buy the necessary kit in the High Street. On the other hand, so long as progress persists, new kit will means new blunders, neand w surprises (often nasty) about what it can be used for.
• The USSR tried totally to control economic outcomes. Can its abject failure illuminate what I now sense will be a similar failure to control safety outcomes and crime outcomes? Crime statistics certainly have a USSR steel production feel to them.
• Is total surveillance such a bad thing? Maybe not, if the only laws and behaviour enforcements are modest in scope, and very reasonable. But total surveillance enforcing crazily voluminous and tyrannically intrusive laws is very bad news.
• In general, what happens to the world when everyone else can easily learn anything in particular about us that they want to learn? What social institutions falter? (Marriage? Insurance?) Is privacy a human right or a mere historical phase? A phase which now may be passing?
• Is celebrity obsession a pre-echo of a world in which all are potential celebrities, due to the ubiquity of completely invisible and unblockable cameras and microphones?

My main conclusion so far is that Total Surveillance will mean very different things depending on what else happens along with it. You cannot analyse the phenomenon in isolation.

For instance, just who will be allowed to browse through all those sound and vision files. Will it be everyone? Or only a self-appointed elite? Both arrangements have major hazards attached to them.

Since writing the above stuff to Christian, I have begun to fixate on another question, which is this: What does an individual have to gain by being totally surveilled? Fewer aggressive attacks against him is an obvious answer. Insurance premiums might be another. (If you live a totally safe and careful life, you might gain greatly if your insurance company can see this for themselves.) But I suspect that there are many other answers. (Simple showing off springs to mind.) Which is why I think that a great deal of, if perhaps not total, surveillance is probably here to stay.

As already stated above, I wish all of Samizdata's readers a Happy New Year, but fear that for many of them, the above thoughts will have done little to contribute to such happiness.

(14)

Among the useful tasks accomplished on the Christmas visit to my mother's house was dealing with (i.e. disposing of) most of my old correspondence. They say that the difference between a radical and a conservative is 20 years. So what should I make of this?

Saxmundham, Suffolk. 14th March 1987

The Editor
The Independent

Sir,

If, as your profile today suggests, the tabloid papers have rehabilitated Boy George as a symbolic "victim of the pushers" then they do drug-users, and the rest of us, who have to support the costs of drug abuse, a great wrong. For they hold out to the user the most powerful and deceptive of excuses: "It isn't my fault; he made me do it."

Pushers only supply someone's demand, and taking a new drug is still a positive decision, even if the first one is free. Continuing a habit requires a long series of decisions to take one's poison rather than to do other things with one's time and money. It may feel like a forced choice, but the first step to freedom is to recognise that there is a choice involved. [We might elevate that to a general principle - GH, 2006]

The child's excuse can still apply: "But I didn't know... He lied to me. He made me do it." No pusher is under an obligation to be honest, no in-crowd to evaluate and announce the risks of an essentially exciting-because-surreptitious activity - why believe the authorities about this when it is palpably part of their desire to control you, and they lie about everything?

The greater the repression of drug-use, the more ruthless and dishonest will be the surviving suppliers. (Far from being the Mafia's enemy, the Drug Squad is its greatest friend, cutting down the competition and making control easier.)

No, the Great and the Good (and the tabloids) have it wrong. The cycle, of horror stories leading to unjustified fears, leading to repression, to ignorance, to gangsterism, more horrors, fears... obscures the relatively simple danger for the user, and vastly inflates the problem for everyone.

There is a step - and a difficult, but the only one - which can reduce in the long run the ignorant bravado, addiction, mess, disease, expense, accidental poisoning, purposeful deception, and organised crime stemming from heroin; the one which throws back all responsibility to the user, who must be able to say, "my decision," and "I made a mistake." Legalise it.

Yours truly,

Guy Herbert

Though there are some ways my opinions have evolved (I no longer accept, even for rhetorical purposes the mirror-magic conception of "organised crime", for example), I am still making the same point to a deaf establishment 20 years later. So, very nearly, is George.

Is there no mellowing path for a libertarian? Am I a singualar case of arrested development? Or is the generational reversal thesis sense when applied to musical and fashion-sense, nonsense on social and political questions?

The OR may not be exclusive, folks.

(66)

I was recently asked why people believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 'New Deal' saved the United States from the Great Depression.

The answer is that people are told so - by television and radio shows, films, and (of course) at school. A more difficult question would be why do some people not believe this, indeed why are some people anti-statist generally, in spite of the 'education system' and the mainstream media.

Perhaps the leftists (using the modern definition of 'left' - I know that Bastiat sat on the left hand side of the French Assembly and so on) have some variation of their 'authoritarian personality' fraud (the theory that purported to explain away conservative opinions as a personality disorder). to explain away libertarian opinions. Or perhaps there is some genetic characteristic (although leftists prefer environmental explanations) that could be claimed to 'explain' why libertarians believe the things we do.

Of course the above 'explanations' (as with older Marxist doctrines of 'class interest' and 'ruling class ideology') are efforts to avoid having to deal with the facts and arguments presented by non-leftists.

As for the 'New Deal' itself, some background is in order...

Among free market folk there are two conflicting explanations as to why a bust occurs. The view supported by (for example) Milton Friedman is that the government allows the money supply to decline and this causes the great economic decline. Milton Friedman never claimed that preventing the decline of the money supply would prevent recessions - but he did claim that preventing such a decline would prevent a great economic reverse such as the Great Depression, hence his oft repeated claim that as long as the government (or rather the Federal Reserve system) did not allow such a decline of the money supply the United States was "depression proof".

The competing view goes back to such men as David Hume and many others (see the first volume of Murry Rothbard's history of economic thought) and is expressed in such works as Ludwig Von Mises' Theory of Money and Credit and Human Action and Murry Rothbard's The Panic of 1819 and America's Great Depression.

This view holds that it is the risein the money supply that creates the conditions for the bust - i.e. that is the credit money 'boom' that causes the bust.

The temptation here is to become too technical, to go into a long discussion as to why one is not dealing with "over-investment" but rather with "mal-investment" and what exactly this is. And then to examine whether a credit money bubble needs to be directly related to "investment" (i.e. spending on capital goods) at all - or whether borrowing for consumer consumption can be the cause of some boom-busts.

However, such treatment is not needed here. All that needs to be said is that the 'Austrian' view of of the economic cycle holds that it is caused by efforts to finance loans over and above the amount available from real savings.

Real savings are the amount of people's incomes they do not spend (or hoard) - but loan out (normally via third parties such as banks) instead.

Efforts to lend out more money than has actually been saved (either by printing money, of by the various complicated methods of credit-money expansion) lead (in this view to a boom-bust. Governments may be involved via a central bank (or something like the 'private' Federal Reserve System), but there need be no central government institutions. If banks and other financial institutions are led to expand loans over and above real savings (either by such things as the National Banking Act of Lincoln's time, which dominated banking till 1913, or by the informal understandings of the pre Civil War period) there will be a boom-bust cycle. And government efforts to delay the bust by keeping the credit bubble inflated (as Milton Friedman suggested) will just (in the Austrian view) just make the bust all the worse when it comes.

Whichever of these two sides is correct (leftists, of course, would hold that both sides are wrong), there is no dispute between them over what non-monetary government policy should be in an economic slump.

Government should do what the government of the United States did in every economic slump from 1819 to 1929 - basically nothing at all.

The classic example is the crash of 1921.

During the First World War a great credit money bubble built up and this credit money boom liquidated itself in 1921. There was a major fall in both prices and output and a large rise in unemployment. The United States Administration of President Harding did nothing much, apart from cut government spending,(in spite of all the ideas of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to try and keep up prices and wages and to introduce various statist projects) and the economy was in recovery within six months.

In the late 1920's another credit money bubble built up - largely because of the efforts of New York Federal Reserve Bank Governor Ben Strong (a hero of Milton Friedman's) to help the Governor of the Bank of England (M. Norman) maintain the artificially high 1925 exchange rate of the Pound to the Dollar (this was expressed in the language of 'maintaining the Gold Standard' although if gold had really been the currency the exchange rate between the Pound and Dollar would have been a matter of how much gold the Pound represented and how much gold the Dollar represented).

When the bubble eventually burst the Federal Reserve system (not Mr Strong himself - he was dead) made efforts to prop up the bubble - not great enough efforts according to Milton Friedman, pointless or damaging efforts according the Austrian school.

More importantly President Herbert "The Forgotten Progressive" Hoover and Congress (contrary to the myth of the inactivity) went into hyper active mode.

Not for them the Taoist idea that to do nothing is often the correct thing for a ruler to do (however hard it may be to resist the endless demands to do various things). Prices and especially wages must be kept up - because if real wages were allowed to fall 'demand' would fall and recovery be prevented.

Economic theory that disputed the importance of keeping up demand was (long before Keynes had an impact on the United States) denounced as 'orthodox' or 'reactionary' (Herbert Hoover denounced it in these terms). As for the fact that in every previous bust (from 1819 to 1921) real wages has fallen and recovery (in output, employment and wages) had taken place after this had occurred, well the self styled 'empirical' people of the time (and of our time) choose to ignore this.

President Hoover and Congress also worked out the basic forms of the later 'New Deal' public works programs (although on a smaller scale), and in this they were supported by most of the economists of their time (the "what is seen and what is unseen", showing that every government project must be paid for at the expense of more productive non-government activity, as Bastiat was considered out of date, although he had not actually been effectively refuted). However, most economists of the time did not support the massive increase in import taxes that went into effect in 1931 - President Hoover himself had doubts about this move of Congress but he still signed the bill.

All in all the government price and wage rigging efforts (voluntary' agreements with various concerns), tax and spend policy (and the trade 'war' of beggar-my-neighbour tariffs) managed to turn a credit-money bust into the Great Depression.

"But then F.D.R. saved us from it".

Errr. no he did not.

Real output (once one has taken account of inflation) was about as low in 1938 as if had been in 1932, and unemployment was almost as high. This simply was no the case in other major countries. For example, in National Socialist Germany unemployment had been eliminated - not by the "build up to war" so much as by the control of real wages as prices rose (as supported, after the fact, by Lord Keynes in the introduction to the German edition of his General Theory of 1936).

For those people (such as myself) who do not support government control of wages, British economic performance is worthy of note. Contrary to the myth, British output and real incomes rose more than German in the 1930's (and vastly more than American output or real incomes did - indeed American output and real incomes were worse at the end of the 1930's than they had been and the start) and unemployment fell greatly between 1932 and 1937 (before conscription even started).

There was still large scale unemployment in certain areas of Britain in 1937 as the trade union Acts of 1875 and 1906 were not repealed (restoring the rule of contract was not needed in Germany as they had a more direct approach to dealing with union power - they physically smashed the unions rather than bringing them back under the law of contract), but the British performance in reducing unemployment compares very well with the America - a great contrast to the 1920's when American unemployment had been greatly lower than British unemployment.

Those interested in the details of President Roosevelt's polices - for example the subsidy to produce X commodity, together with the government program to destroy the same commodity (various farm products), or the complex efforts to promote cartels (such as the National Industrial Recovery Act) at one point, and the "anti trust" efforts to break cartels at another point, the various public works projects (both corrupt and non corrupt - nothing is simple, indeed their were often different government agencies operating in the same field and operating quite differently)........ and so on and so on (even as a child studying all the contradictions and absurdities of President Roosevelt's polices made me feel sick, but other people have different tastes).

Well John T. Flynn may not have been a great economist but his account of the 'New Deal' in such works as The Roosevelt Myth" and the earlier When We Go Marching are worth reading.

The articles of Henry Hazlitt and H.L.M. are also worth reading (and Albert J. Nock and all the rest).

However, Bruce Ramsey came out with an edition of Garet Garrent's articles in 2002 ("Salvos Against the New Deal from the Saturday Evening Post: 1932-1940") and that is as good a place to start as any.

I will not make many comments of my own.

Firstly the stealing of privately owned gold in 1933 and the voiding of the gold clauses in private contracts is often dismissed as a concern only of 'gold bugs', but if government can do this (in defiance of the Constitution's demand that government uphold contracts and that only gold or silver coin be legal tender in any State) and not even the four 'reactionaries' on the Supreme Court really object - well then things are rather bad. Nor was there even the poor excuse of war.

There is also the story (which I will not go into the details of) of how the power to "regulate interstate commerce" got mutated into a power to regulate non interstate commerce. Here the Supreme Court did put up some resistance - and not just on the grounds that someone selling to someone else in the same State is not "interstate commerce" (however much it may affect it), but also on the grounds that the power belongs to Congress not any arbitrary executive agency that may be set up under an enabling act (the 1935 case that struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act was all nine judges, not just the 'reactionaries', they were all against the National Recovery Agency being set up as a bunch of God Kings). However, court judgements during World War II basically broke the limits on Federal government regulatory power - and these judgements have not yet been reversed.

Oddly enough it was the war time inflation (at a time of wage controls) that actually broke the real wage rigidity
that had prevented the market clearing and unemployment really coming down in the 1930's - and the "Do nothing" Congress elected in 1946 refused to go back to the endless regulations and union power of the 1930's (so mass unemployment and depression did not return after World War II). The New Dealers had a horror of balanced budgets and free markets - and that is (more or less) what the "Do nothing" Republican Congress (Senator Bricker of Ohio and the rest) gave the nation - with the opposite results to what the New Dealers would have predicted.

As for the 'positive' aspects of the New Deal.

Yes the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco looks good - and this project (like others controlled by the same agency - very unlike other New Deal agencies) was fairly honest, but this is covered by Bastiat's what is seen and what is unseen. Any government project, no matter how nice looking and however honestly managed can only be finance at the opportunity cost of a more productive private activity.

Also (Senator James Webb please note) for all the stress on such things as the TVA the South tended to get less money per head of population than other areas of the country - in spite of its greater poverty (the area voted Democrat anyway, so why bother to spend money on the locals).

True Virginia was not hit as hard by the Great Depression as many States (although that alone may come as a bit of a shock to Senator of Virginia J. Webb), but New Deal money was not exactly think on the ground in States like Texas either, and these States were (in those days) very poor indeed.

Also perhaps the most important long term project of the FDR Administration was, at the time, of small importance.

Things like the fairly honest PWA and the corrupt WPA are long gone, the farm subsidies are still with us (indeed bigger than ever - and just like in the 1930's they are justified by talk of poor family farms and in fact tend to go to the biggest farmers), but they are small compared to another New Deal project - Social Security.

This program was passed in 1935 (although the tax did not hit till 1937). The government 'pension' Ponzi scheme was small at first but is vast now -it (along with Medicare and Medicaid) dwarfs the rest of the Federal government.

Such programs are justified as being for the 'general welfare' of the United States. That the 'common defence and general welfare' was the purpose of the powers granted to Congress by the Constitution, not a power in its self is ignored - the ever increasing burden of this final gift of the New Deal will be harder and harder to ignore over the coming years.

(11)

It is often said that Guy Fawkes was the only man to ever enter Parliament with honest intentions...

(11)

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
Tom Holland
First published in the UK by Little Brown 2005 – Abacus paperback 2006

I first encountered Tom Holland by reading his previous non-fiction work, Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which I wrote about here enthusiastically in June of this year. About Persian Fire - which is about the titanic struggle between the Greeks and the Persian Empire of Darius and then of his son Xerxes (Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis etc.) - I am, if possible, even more enthusiastic. The same virtues are present in this book as in Rubicon: narrative grip, convincing analysis, and a story of overwhelming importance to anyone who wants to understand the world he lives in and how it got to be that way. This is a story I desperately wanted to learn about much more thoroughly than my patchy reading in ancient history had previously told me, and Persian Fire made it extremely easy for me to do just that.

A standard rave review meme is that this superb book screwed up the reviewer's everyday life, sleep patterns, holiday plans, etc., and if my experience is anything to go by Persian Fire triumphantly passes this test. I had all kinds of plans for this autumn, and they were severely deranged, given what a slow reader I am. The reading of other very good books was set aside. Big writing plans were postponed yet again. My living room remains the mess it was four months ago. And then even when I had finished reading Persian Fire I found that I did not then want to do, read or even think about anything much else, because I wanted to make sure that I had done my Samizdata review of it before it began to fade from the memory. So, if you read no further of this, read that this is one splendid book.

What people like Paul Marks or Sean Gabb would make of it, people who know this story inside out already, I do not know. I suspect that they would be impressed if slightly bored, and that they would nitpick details of interpretation but have no big complaints. But I am, I surmise, a more typical sort of educated person than those two luminaries, the sort who knows lots of bits and pieces about stories like this but nothing like as much as I'd like to. And I absolutely loved it.

One of the many things I like about this book is that you get both the story from the Persian end, and the same story as experienced by the Greeks. Holland starts in Persia, with the formation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus, followed by confusion involving his sons Cambyses and Bardiya, confusion ended by the upwardly mobile Darius in 522BC.

During the very early pages of this book I did wonder how much of what I was reading was true and how much mere speculation, but in defence of Holland, he writes in a way that makes clear how sketchy the historical record is of those places and times. Great Kings like Cyrus and Darius lived in a place and at a time when (a) history was the history of the Great King, not of any distinct thoughts or actions of the riff raff they ruled, and (b) in which a routine method of celebrating a military victory was not just completely to massacre your defeated opponents but also to expunge everything they had ever said or done from the record of history, to make them as if they had never been. Which makes things hard for later historians.

Nevertheless, a convincing picture does emerge. I particularly liked the regular references to "Ahura Mazda" - the Persian version of God Almighty - and of the intimate relationship between Ahura Mazda and the Great King, their wishes and plans for the world being pretty much the same thing.

The "King of Kings" title is interesting. The point was that the Great Kings, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and the rest of them, although they would sometimes expunge entire cultures and peoples, would more typically install themselves at the top of traditional local hierarchies, rather as if a future conqueror of Europe were to announce that he was the President of France, Germany, Italy etc., the King of England, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and so on. The jobs and their associated hierarchies remained in place. It was just that the top jobs were now held by the new man, the President of Presidents, as it were.

Philosophically, if it makes any sense to use such a word about such crushingly simple arrangements, groveling obedience to the King of Kings was not just a matter of political correctness, for without such obedience the very fabric of the universe was in jeopardy. Nature, the world, the very stars in their tracks, all depended upon the smooth running of the Empire, and on everyone doing as they were told, by Ahura Mazda as interpreted by the King of Kings. So, if thousand