This book states what the revisionists have questioned: the fall of the Roman Empire sucked and the Dark Ages really were dark and a regression for civilisation. Looks like a must-read for fans of ancient history.
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One day, I have no doubt, we ourselves shall be dispossessed – though only if we forget that a territory belongs really to those willing to possess it. – From ‘The Column of Phocas’, a novel by Sean Gabb. September 1st, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 On Tuesday August 22nd BBC Radio Four’s ‘PM’ programme had a piece on what would have happened if Otto Von Bismark had drowned (which he almost did) off Biarritz (a French resort that I have long wanted to visit) in 1862. The historian Nicolas Davies was interviewed and explained that Bismark was not a very important person in 1862 – just a representative of Prussia in France… but in fact Bismark was already the most important minister of Prussia and had convinced the King to collect extra tax money in order to expand the army without the approval of the Prussian Parliament, thus cutting the control of the purse strings by the legislature and undermining hopes of constitutional government in Prussia (and setting it off on its lawless road to expansion). We were also told that the death of Bismark might have had an effect on the ‘French Republic’. I am sure that his Imperial Majesty Napoleon III would have been interested to learn that he was living in a ‘Republic’. August 23rd, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Having recently become a struggling podcaster myself, I have been paying a lot more attention than I otherwise would to podcasters who sound like they have got past the struggling stage. And of all the podcasts I have heard, the one that has impressed me most in recent weeks has been this one, in which Russell Roberts interviews Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. At Cafe Hayek, where I first learned about it, Roberts describes this podcast thus:
And at EconTalk, Roberts writes:
King Leopold II of Belgium is a particularly revealing example. August 16th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
A while ago I briefly referred to a book by Simon Winder about Britain in the decades immediately following the Second World War. The book takes the idiosyncratic approach of looking at post-war Britain through the prism of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures. I cursorily flicked through the pages and it appeared to be an amusing and quite cleverly-done piece of work. Winder seems to have added something fresh to what is already a crowded cottage history of Bond studies. Winder’s book, at first glance, looked like a zany and rather affectionate recollection of what it was like to grow up as a young English middle class boy in the era of Meccano toys, WW2 comics and James Bond film premieres.I can identify with some of Winder’s own upbringing and views. So I bought the book and sat down to read it to pass away a few hours. What I read was in fact rather different, more serious and more annoying than what I had expected. Winder makes a lot of astute points about post-war British history but a lot of his book is spoiled by an insistent, splenetic hatred of the English upper classes and Britain’s colonial history. He is determined to lay it on a bit thick, in the manner of a rather earnest sixth-former trying to creep up to his leftwing history master. In fairness, he does grasp how Britain, victorious in the war but materially and financially shattered, rapidly lost its global position, overtaken not just by the already-mighty USA but also by France, West Germany and Japan. While Konrad Adenauer was helping to turn the devastated western half of Germany into an economic dynamo – with a little help from Hayek-influenced economics minister Ludwig Erhard – Britain built its ‘New Jerusalem’ of a welfare state, nationalised industries, crushingly-high income taxes, currency controls and a still-heavy military spending burden. Winder gives an easy pass to the Labour government after 1945 and is savage to the Tories under the elderly Churchill and his deputy, Anthony Eden. For Winder, the Tories are a bunch of old pin-stripped duffers more used to shooting grouse in the Scottish highlands than wrestling with Britain’s supposedly rightful position as a meek European power. His attacks on the Tories seem to be more about their accents and backgrounds than on what they actually did or did not, do. He misses the chance to make what I think is the really serious charge against the Tories of the time, as made for example by historian Andrew Roberts in Eminent Churchillians: these men failed to even make the slightest dent in the Attlee socialist creation. They accepted, for example, the trade union legal privileges and regulations that helped pave the way for the economic near-collapse in the 1970s and early 1980s. It is a harsh charge, but Winder does not make it as it would not, I think, occur to him to do so if my judgement of his political views is accurate. → Continue reading: An entertaining but infuriating book about British post-war history August 15th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
A number of bookshops in Britain seem to be selling reproductions of the advisory books that were given to Allied servicemen readying for D-Day in 1944 and for U.S. Army Air Force personnel arriving in Britain in 1942. I bought a copy of the latter and it is, in its way, a wonderful snapshot of how Britain was viewed by Americans more than 60 years ago and makes me wonder if many of the descriptions could still apply. The book is called Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain. Here’s a couple of paragraphs:
The book is printed from the original typescript that was used by the War Department in the States. Some of the descriptions now may strike us as a sort of cozy, simplified portrayal, but actually I was rather impressed by the strenuous efforts of the author(s) to describe the privations of a nation at war, its habits, differences and qualities (I love its descriptions of attitudes to sport). It also struck me that the US authorities clearly felt it was necessary to take steps to educate servicemen and women a bit about the people they would be meeting as allies in the war against Hitler. While those who have reprinted the book may think they are making some sort of clever-dick post-modernist point by re-issuing these things, I find them rather moving. By coincidence, on the same day that I bought the book, I drove up to see friends in Cambridgeshire. About a few miles away from the house of my friends, I passed by a rather neat row of hedges, screening a rather fine little white-washed building. The Stars and Stripes were flying from a masthead. I slowed down and realised that it was one of the cemeteries to commemorate the U.S. aircrews who flew hundreds of missions from the flatlands of East Anglia in aircraft such as B-17 Flying Fortresses or P-51 Mustangs. There were hundreds of such airbases, some of which are now either just strips of busted concrete in a wheatfield, although a few preserved airfields remain, complete with the old control towers and huts. On my father’s farm in Suffolk we used to find the odd .50 shell case that had been ejected from a passing aircraft. Chuck Yeager, the legendary U.S. Mustang fighter jock and test pilot, flew from Leiston, a few miles away from my old home. Some of the men who lie in the soil of Cambridgeshire probably had read that guidebook and wondered about the country they were operating from all those years ago. At a time when cheap anti-American bromides fill up the airwaves and newsprint, it is no bad thing to reflect on the debt we ‘Britishers’ owe to those who came over to this island in 1942. May they all rest in peace. August 7th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Amongst all the the bad things about the French Revolution – the murders, the mutilations, the rapes, the robbery, the paper fiat money (and so on) there were some good things… and these good things happened during one session of the ‘National Assembly’ – a session about the time of the 4th of August 1789 (there was some night work – but there is no great need to complicate matters). Serfdom may have covered only a tiny minority of the French population and courts may not have been in the habit of enforcing it – but it was still good to have it abolished. The old taxes may soon have been replaced by worse taxes – but it was good to have so many of the old ones abolished. It was of course wrong to later rob the Church of its lands (and later to plunder other people of their land, and to rob a lot of other people of various things), but tithes were wrong – and they went in the August 4th session. Of course such things (that some books give credit to the Revolution for) such as religious toleration and the end of torture had been granted by Louis XVI long before the Revolution (and were soon violated by the Revolutionaries anyway), but it was nice to have formal statements about the end of ‘putting the question’ and freedom of conscience. If any day in the Revolution deserves to be celebrated (most of the Revolution being a matter of robbery and mass murder – mostly of ordinary people) it is August 4th. Certainly July 14th should not be celebrated. The Bastille contained about half a dozen people (including de Sade) and it was not ‘stormed’ at all. The Governor of the Bastille gave up the defence of the place when he was offered safe conduct – he was then promptly murdered. When talking of the French Revolution it is normal to make a nod to the Declaration of the Rights of Man – but I have read it (in translation) and the drafting does not compare very well to (for example) the American Bill of Rights. At first glance the French Revolutionary document looks like a defence of individual rights, but the more one reads it and thinks about the wording the less good it is. To put it American terms – the thing smells of Thomas Paine (not the libertarian a lot people think he was). August 4th, 2006 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
My career in student politics lasted approximately 2 minutes. Recollected, hazily, over a distance of 25 years, it went like this:
So I never did join the FCS. Unlike, I suspect, many of blogistan’s more venerable residents. Now Tim Hames is doing a radio history for the BBC. I am not sure how to read this. Are people like us now history? Or has Hames persuaded someone in the commissioning department that the FCS generation is about to come to power, as a generation of 70s New Lefties did under Blair, in heavy disguise, but with their ideals intact? That would be a lovely thought, but there is a problem with that theory. Part of the reason the Tory Party was in such an appalling mess by the 90s was the foolhardy destruction of the FCS which drove out of the party a generation. Old Labour, in the 70s, on the other hand, clasped the New Lefties to its bosom: paid for fraternal trips to Cuba and Bulgaria, gave them speechwriting and policy jobs, helped them in the Long March Through The Institutions that was achieved by the turn of the century. The New Left base is strong. The New Right are even now outcasts. They (we?) are not close to power, unless I am much mistaken. Not even in alliance with the RCP… Still Hames’ piece is full of delightful quirks. I liked in particular his treatment of Marc Glendenning, whom he insisted on giving the full grandeur of Marc-Henri, “a philosopher-king among politicians”. I did not meet Marc until quite recently, and though I have thought of him up to now as a conspicuously pleasant and interesting chap, I will look at him now in a whole new light. Would bended knee be appropriate, I wonder? July 28th, 2006 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
This by Greg Burch, about the differences between Marxism and Islam, linked to by Instapundit, strikes me as shrewd. And the posting is also, unlike other blog postings I have found myself reading recently, mercifully brief, saying a great deal in a few pithy paragraphs. Marxism, Burch reminds us, promises heaven on earth, and in time, this promise will prove wrong. So, to defeat Marxism all you have to do is quarantine it, and then wait for it to defeat itself. But Islam makes no verifiable and hence self-defeating real world promises.
I do not claim that this is in any way a new insight, but it is an important meme, well stated. It also feeds in to what Johnathan said yesterday, about us “setting an example” to Islam rather than barging in and re-arranging it. Another good Islam-related meme emerged from a not-that-recent (but it deserves to be placed on the Samizdata record, I think) conversation between me and Perry de Havilland. Perry perpetrated that widespread meme-that-ain’t-so, to the effect that Islam needs a Reformation. The muddle here is that it confuses Reformation in the sense of reform in the direction of sanity and niceness with reformation in the direction of more devoted adherence to the original texts, which of course means the exact opposite of sanity and niceness. My so far rather limited reading of the Koran causes me to agree with Islamic fundamentalists about what the Koran says and what it demands of Muslims. Reformation, in the sense of what happened historically in Europe with Christianity – believers reading the stuff for themselves and not allowing the message to be bent out of shape by priests before it gets to them – is what Islam has for many decades now been busily engaged in, and that, from the point of view of Western Civilisation, is the problem, not the solution. Perry quickly rephrased what he was all along trying to say. Islam, he said, needs a New Testament. I.e. something fundamentally different for the fundamentalist true believers to read. Again, I am sure that this is not an original notion, but it is still a meme to conjure with, I think. It is a lot to ask, but that is the point. Islam has to change a lot before it can hope to rub along contentedly with the rest of us. I suspect that lots of people benignly raised within the Muslim religious tradition, but appalled by what Islam actually says, have many times attempted such a project, but that Original Islam 1.0 contains not only the contradiction of all such niceness memes, but also other memes which have the effect of preventing the niceness memes from ever catching on and becoming more than historical footnotes. However, the world is a very different place now to what it has been throughout most of Muslim history, and I remain optimistic that Islam may eventually reform itself, in the sense that Perry and I and everyone else who is civilised would all like. Such a benign transformation would be unprecedented and utterly out of character with almost everything that went before in Muslim history. But, so are mobile phones. July 16th, 2006 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that’s what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found. Reading Tom Holland’s Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience. After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a “Latin verse” exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome’s subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck. At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal’s defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal’s elephants to charge uselessly through. Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves’s I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina’s exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don’t know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey’s career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great? For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn’t going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped. → Continue reading: Tom Holland fills in my ancient Roman blanks June 11th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Not long ago I did a posting here about material progress, as illuminated by a book about the past which described a time before many of our modern comforts had been devised. A commenter commented, as at least one commenter always will during discussions of this sort: dentistry! He was right of course. And it so happens that I have been reading another work of history, by Charles Spencer, this time about the Battle of Blenheim, in which the primitive dentistry of earlier times gets a particularly memorable mention. The Battle of Blenheim was fought in 1704 between a coalition of allies under the command of the Duke of Marlborough and various French armies of Louis XIV. Louis XIV is of course the villain of the story, who gets his just comeuppance at Blenheim. However, it turns out that finding all his grand plans of European conquest thwarted by a supreme commander of genius, who, in the words of Sir Edward Creasy, “never fought a battle that he did not win, and never besieged a place that he did not take”, was not Louis XIV’s only bit of bad luck. We learn, from an early paragraph in Blenheim (pp. 20-21 of my paperback edition), that Louis had another huge misfortune to contend with towards the end of his life:
I almost feel sorry for the man. But having got this sad story out of the way, Spencer then goes on to describe what Louis XIV’s soldiers did to the people of the United Dutch Provinces – genocide, basically, to all of them that they could get their murdering hands on – and any sympathy you may feel for this abominable man immediately disappears. But the point about dentistry remains. The average citizen of an average country now enjoys vastly less painful and more knowedgeable dental care than even the grandest of kings had to endure in earlier times. Never knock progress. June 2nd, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some wonderful photos and informative writeup here about the lost, and now found, treasures of Alexandria, which at one point ranked as one of the wonders of the world, boasting the world’s tallest lighthouse. The photographs are outstanding. Enjoy. (Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. Stephen has written a fine book debunking that steaming pile of intellectual hocus known as post-modernism, incidentally.) May 20th, 2006 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
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