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The Western Roman Emperor Valentinian I (364-375 AD) refused to intervene in theological controversies “It is not right for me, a layman, to meddle in such things. Let the bishops whose business it is meet by themselves wherever they like”.
Valentinian tolerated all sects of Christian (bar the Manichees) and even allowed the traditional pagan rituals to take place in the Senate House in Rome – the alter of Victory remained in place, and the Vestal Virgins and the other ancient Roman priesthoods continued.
Valentinian was not a half hearted Christian – he had been an open Christian during the time of the pagan Emperor Julian (when being a Christian was not exactly a good strategy for promotion).
Nor was Valentinian a kindly man – for example he had men who tried to dodge conscription burned alive.
It was simply that religious toleration was a perfectly respectable point of view for a Christian in Valentinian’s time.
The other point of view (that at least non Christians should be persecuted) was widely held also – for example by the powerful Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Valentinian’s own brother (the Emperor of the East – Valens) persecuted Christians that held to a different point of view to himself (as Valens was an Arian this meant persecuting people who held what later became the mainstream point of view). But the matter was not clear cut – one could be a Christian in good standing and not support persecution. → Continue reading: Augustine
The second instalment, from the same source, of historical events relevant to current affairs, as it often seems with history. This is due to the comments on the previous posting about slave trade by Muslim corsairs, correctly identifying who took them on.
More effective were the exploits of the Americans, who put the British government on its mettle. The activities of the corsairs, who did not scruple to kidnap Yankee sailors, led to the new republic’s first experiment in geopolitics. It was principally on their account that Congress decided to establish a navy in 1794, and America consistently refused to ransom captives in the European way by handing over money, powder, shot and arms to the Muslims. As President Jefferson put it: “Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute.” From 1803 Washington, in effect, made war against the beys. In one episode in 1805 American marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing Tripoli to make peace and surrender all American slaves, and giving rise to the famous line in the U.S. Marine Corps anthem “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shore of Tripoli”. Immediately after the Treaty of Ghent was signed, when the cruising season of 1815 opened, Washington sent out a squadron under Stephen Decatur to punish the Barbary towns for violations of previous agreements. He forced the Bey of Tunis to pay $46,000 in compensation, and in Tripoli he also exacted a fine and secured the release of some Danish and Neapolitan slaves. His squadron was relived by five of the new ‘big’ frigates under Commodore William Bainbridge who, in June 1815, achieved a remarkable moral victory over the Bey of Algiers, who was given exactly three hours to comply with an American ultimatum to hand over all U.S. captives plus a cash compensation; the Bey capitulated on time. There is some doubt about the permanent effectiveness of this American intervention, since all the pirate rulers repudiated their treaties once American ships were below the horizon. But news of it created a sensation in Britain and led to irresistible pressure on the government to order a similar display of British naval power.
Could we, please, have the history repeat itself again now?!
The stories of how outrageously the anti-war protesters in London dealt with those who will bear the consequences of the West’s actions, whatever they are, reminded us again of the double-standards of the peaceniks and other useful idiots. Blinded by their ideology they let the pleas of those who experienced Saddam’s tyranny fall onto deaf ears.
There is also the now institutionalised double standard for racial relations and the double standard on which the entire debate about ‘white imperialism’ is based. Pondering such inconsistencies in people’s positions, I often attributed them to the lack of intelligent and rational public discourse. The short attention span of mass audiences maintained by the mass media enables them to substitute the rational with the emotional.
Or so I thought. And then I came across this early example of double standard by Western politicians that would score a high political correctness count, even in these affirmative action times:
In the early 19th century slavery was almost ubiquitous in the world but the Barbary Coast, stretching 1,500 miles from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Sirte in Lybia, was unique in being the only area where white men and women were subjected to it in large numbers. The Barbary pirates, using what would now be called a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam as their pretext, regularly kidnapped Christian livestock from Italy, Malta, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica and from the ships of all nations sailing the Mediterranean.
Wealth capitves could usually obtain ransom without difficulty. The rest were treated with varying degrees of barbarity. Torture was used to obtain convestions to Islam, “turning Turk”, as Western sailors called it.
The West’s supine attidute towards the horrors of Barbary piracy had long aroused fury in some quarters. Officers of the British navy were particularly incensed since seamen were frequently victims of the trade. They could not understand why the huge resources of the world’s most powerful fleet were not deployed to root out this evil affront to the international law of the sea, once and for all. They could not understand why liberal parliamentarians, who campaigned ceaselessly to outlaw the slave trade by parliamentary statue, took no interest in Christian slavery.
Admiral Nelson wrote in 1799:”My blood boils that I cannot chastise there pirates. They could not show themselves in the Mediterranean did not our country permit. Never let us talk about the cruelty of the African slave-trade while we permit such a horrid war.”
But William Wilberforce, MP, and the other Evangelical liberals, who finally got the slave trade made unlawful in 1807, flatly refused to help. They were concerned with the enslavement of blacks by whites and did not give the predicament of white slaves a high priority on their agenda, an early example of double standards.
So, nothing new under the sun…? History repeats itself…? People don’t change…?
OK, that’ll do.
The naval might of Switzerland has prevailed. A country with all the maritime traditions of Outer Mongolia, Iowa and Chad has prevailed where 152 years of British endeavour have failed. The America’s Cup, a trophy given by Queen Victoria to promote yachting in the English Channel, and which has never been won by a British team has now changed hands from the USA (1851-1983 [No, that isn’t a typo!], and 1988-1995), Australia (1983-1988), and New Zealand (1995-2003). And now Switzerland.
The main priviledge for the winner, apart from collecting a silver trophy named after its first winner, the schooner America is to get the right to host the next challenge, which is now expected to be in 2007. As this has to be on seawater, there is a little problem. Switzerland is about 450 miles from the nearest coastline. So the defence will probably take place in the Mediterranean or on the Altantic coastline of France.
It’s all very jolly for Ernesto Bertarelli the Swiss owner of the Alinghi team, for Russell Coutts the New Zealander skipper hired to beat his former team mates. So why no British success. Until the 1970s, no one else but the British even challenged the New York Yacht Club. The explanation I offer explains why Italian and now Swiss challengers have emerged, despite no obvious historical tradition for this sort of contest. → Continue reading: “England, a seafaring nation…”
On February 25, 1836 Samuel Colt patented his revolver. “God made man, Colt made them equal”
I don’t suppose that anybody outside Britain or Greece has even heard of the Elgin Marbles and in neither country are there a great many people who are likely to be get exercised over them.
That said, these ancient Greek artifacts are something upon which a small number of people have quite robust opinions and I happen to be one of them.
The ‘Elgin Marbles’ are currently housed in the British Museum in London and are made up of 56 sections of the frieze sculpted by Phidias around the Parthenon. They were acquired and brought to London by the British diplomat Lord Elgin early in the 19th Century from their original home in Greece and where, despite their grandeur and beauty, they had been abandoned to the twins corrosions of the elements and indifference.
For many years, the Greek government has been campaigning for the return of the Marbles to their original home in Greece. In this, they are supported by a large section the British arty/literatti/celebrity set who approach the issue with the same kind of fuzzy-headedness and sophistic feel-goodery that they approach everything else.
Much of the left in Britain has also taken the side of the Greeks in this issue, not out of any particular fondness for Greece but because, for them, the Marbles are a rude reminder of British imperial acquisitiveness and arrogance and their continued presence in the British Museum a standing affrontery to the culture of self-abasement and guilt that they have so assiduously fostered on these shores.
However, the entire matter has been off the radar-screen for some time and it may be because the ‘usual suspects’ are otherwise noisily engaged in the matter of preserving Saddam Hussein’s regime, that we have been treated to a rather bold announcement from the British Museum’s director:
“The director of the British Museum has said that the Elgin Marbles should never be returned from Britain to Greece.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, Neil MacGregor said the sculptures, which once adorned the Parthenon temple in Athens, should remain in London.
He has also ended discussions with a British campaign group seeking their return to Greece.”
Good for you, Mr.McGregor. I was not only delighted by this announcement but also (pleasantly) surprised, given the recent low-profile of the issue. It has set my mind to wondering whether Mr.McGregor has at all chanced upon a very recent essay on the matter by Sean Gabb:
“Needless to say, I am strongly opposed to returning the Marbles. If I had my way, they would stay in London forever – preferably joined by anything else we might in future be able to bribe out of the Greeks or the other successor states of antiquity. Indeed, if Lord Elgin did anything wrong, it was to leave too much behind when he finished his work in Athens. He should at least have taken all the pediment sculptures and another caryatid. He might also have dug up some of the statues buried after the Persians destroyed the old Acropolis in 480BC. The world of culture would be all the better had he done so. Just compare the Caryatid he took away with those he left behind, and ask if he really did wrong. However, rather than continue with its mere statement, let me try to justify my opinion. I will review the case for returning the Marbles.”
I usually make a point of arguing a given matter from my own bat, but I am not averse to using someone else’s bat in circumstances where their bat is both bigger and wielded with such admirable adroitness. Sean’s tightly argued and highly learned essay is quite the most the comprehensive and definitive case for retaining the Elgin Marbles in Britain and I do not hesitate to strongly recommend it to everyone regardless of whether they are British or not.
Of course, I can only speculate as to whether or not Mr.McGregor has read the essay and was inspired by it in the same way I was. Probably not. More likely it is just coincidence in which case it is a welcome synchronicity and an indication that level-heads are starting to fight back on this issue.
One of the best things about the British Channel 4 television slot is its history programmes. I recall watching a number of programmes about the Napoleonic wars, and they ended with a remarkably Euro-sceptic take on the different visions of social order as evinced by British Prime Minister Pitt the Younger and politician Edmund Burke on the one hand, and those of Robespierre and his fellow totalitarian psychos, on the other. So maybe Channel 4 is not quite the haven of idiotarian marxoid nonsense I used to think after all.
Further proof of that view came last night in the end of the series Empire, a series on the British Empire by historian Niall Ferguson, who also has a good book out.
Anyway, last night’s programme ended with a comment much to the effect that for all its faults, the British Empire spread the English language (good thing), the rule of law (same), capitalism (yep, good thing again), and team sports (ditto). And although it eventually broke up, our influence is still large, albeit indirectly, via the US, although the US dare not call its reach of influence an empire.
In other words, Ferguson has gotten the Anglosphere bug. This meme is spreading fast. Where will it go next, I wonder?
About once every blue moon, Blogosophical Explanations springs to life, and there was another posting there as recently as December 14th of last year. It included this, from Herb Gintis, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts:
… Economists are fond of using the Folk Theorem of repeated games and the Tit-for-Tat simulations to argue that human cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run, enlightened self-interest, but we will argue in chapter 11 that this view is profoundly incorrect. There are two major problems with the idea that cooperation can be understood in terms of long-run self-interest (charitably interpreted to include regard for kin). The first is that self-interest results in cooperation only when agents are sufficiently future-oriented (i.e., the discount rate is very low); but in situations where a social system is threatened and likely to be destroyed, cooperation is most central to survival and agents are likely to be very present-oriented, since the probability of future interactions is low. Therefore, societies in which cooperation is based on long-run self-interest will invariably collapse when seriously threatened. The second problem is that there is sizable evidence that we are considerably more prosocial than is predicted by the long-run self-interest models.
Except in the context of anonymous market interactions, the idea that human beings are self-interested is particularly implausible. Indeed, some of the major predictive failures of game theory stem from not recognizing the positive and negative aspects of preference and welfare interdependence. Homo economicus might be reasonably described as a sociopath if he were to be set loose in society.
There are many more tangents there to fly off at than one little Samizdata posting could possibly have space for, but allow me to indulge in just one.
As a description of the full panoply of human society, Tit-for-Tat is surely every bit as inadequate as Gintis says it is. All humans, provided only that they are allowed to, train each other to be more axiomatically cooperative than that, in societies which expect to survive past their next big collective crisis.
But how about Tit-for-Tat as a description both of the nature of actually existing “Soviet man” and of the collapse of the Soviet system? → Continue reading: Tit-for-Tat doesn’t explain us but it does explain Homo Sovieticus
I have just watched part of a left wing John Wayne film (I did not see it all – I got so irritated I turned it off)… In Harm’s Way (1965) blames American problems in the Pacific war against the Japanese, on stuffed shirt Conservative officers – people who call the war ‘Mr Roosevelt’s war’ as people from their evil wealthy families called WWI ‘Mr Wilson’s war’.
Of course there is no mention of the film that President Roosevelt deprived the Pacific front of resources so that he could prop up Soviet Russia. Nor was this policy confined to the United States. Why did Singapore have no Spitfire fighters for air defence? Because the Spitfires earmarked for Singapore were diverted to Soviet Russia. 100, 000 troops of the British Empire were captured at Singapore – and they were left to rot and die. About 80, 000 Americans were captured in the Philippines – and they were left rot for years as well (many thousands died).
This was not because American commanders (Navy or Army) were poor in the Pacific (although some of the British ones were poor indeed). It was because the New Dealers in Washington D.C. did not care – all they cared about was their sacred Soviet Union.
Before anyone says that the Soviet Union saved Britain from German invasion think about the following: Thousands of allied sailors died taking supplies to the Soviet Union (not Soviet sailors dying taking supplies to Britain). Whether operation ‘Sea Lion’ (the German invasion of Britain) was practical or not (and the Germans certainly lacked the resources vital to operation ‘Overlord’ the allied invasion of France in 1944), the choice by Hitler to switch German air attacks from British airfields to British cities made operation Sea Lion a dead letter.
This choice was made before the Germany invasion of the Soviet Union. The ‘Battle of Britain’ was won before the invasion of the Soviet Union (not after it).
Of course there would have been no WWII anyway if Hitler and Stalin had not allied in 1939 – but the New Dealers (and their friends in Britain) blanked that out.
Prodded by a recent conversation with my eldest brother who is a UKIP (UK Independence Party) member, on the subject of British nationalism, I recently put the pieces of a puzzle together concerning the dramatic events of 1940 that I want to try out on the readers of samizdata. (Apologies in advance to all those who see the only puzzle as being how long it took me to puzzle out the obvious.)
At the risk of publicising my own slow-wittedness, it has always puzzled me that British nationalists these days almost to a man now worship the ground that Winston Churchill walked on, because he saved Britain in 1940, despite the fact that Churchill himself wasn’t a British nationalist.
Preliminary digression. Did Churchill actually save Britain in 1940? I tend to accept the orthodox view that Churchill did indeed save my country, and that it really was one of our finer hours.
The case against how Churchill behaved in 1940 is that an accommodation with Hitler was there for the taking, which would have been less harmful to British interests than even the events that subsequently unfolded, and certainly than any events that looked at all likely in 1940 if we did fight on.
As to that, I’ve always been fond of the words spoken by Ralph Richardson in the early stages of the film The Battle of Britain. Richardson plays a British diplomat who is squaring up to his German equivalent, played by Curt Jurgens. The Jurgens character speaks of how the Fuhrer is willing to offer “guarantees” to Britain. Replies Richardson: “Experience shows that Herr Hitler’s guarantees guarantee nothing.” Exactly so. The case for not trying to accommodate Hitler in 1940 in one pithy sentence.
(I’ve heard it said that this is also the basic case against Saddam Hussein. The man simply can’t be relied upon to refrain from what he has promised to refrain from. He is therefore not, and never can be, a member of the club of Heads of State who, no matter what they may do to their subjects, can at least be relied upon to tell the truth to fellow club members.)
Well I’m not entirely sure about that. Maybe there was a good deal going which Churchill spurned. But this I do know. Churchill was, as I say, not a British nationalist. He was an Anglospherist.
Chruchill’s mother was an American. In his youth Churchill roamed the earth in the service of the British Empire and of his own fame and glory. When the time came for him to write his historical magnum opus, he called it The History of the English Speaking Peoples.
It was Churchill’s political adversaries, like Chamberlain and like Halifax (his rival in 1940 for the British Prime Ministership), who were the real British nationalists. It was they who spoke to each other in 1940 of the beauties of the English countryside and of how it was now threatened with being turned into scorched earth. Churchill was willing to fight, and they were not. And as soon as Churchill got into power, he orated about blood on the beaches and set about organising an anti-German resistance-to-the-death scorched-British-earth policy, for the “defence” of Britain. Some defence.
Churchill was able to do this because Britain, for him, was not the ultimate point. Britain was, in the end, merely a slab of territory near the front line in the fight. And it was, ultimately, expendable. → Continue reading: 1940 – How the non-nationalist saved his nation when the nationalists could not
Every so often I rearrange my books to make them take up less space in my home than they actually do take up, and during my latest rearrangement I came across a book called Catastrophe by David Keys. The central claim of this book is that in the year 535 AD there was a truly enormous volcanic eruption in South East Asia, filling the sky with dirt so dense that the sun was hardly visible for several years, unleashing plague, famine and the fall (and rise) of empires all over the world.
I remember being quite severely convinced. Now that I am a blogger I am able to ask the big wide world: Was I right to be impressed by this book? Did this really happen? And whether it did or not, what do the official, academic historians think about all this? David Keys’ book is not academic; it is midddlebrow at best. He’s a journalist, and I first heard about his notions by watching a TV show on Channel 4 a few years ago, and we all know that TV and truth don’t always go together. Did TV get it right this time?
→ Continue reading: 535 AD
Paul Marks takes an interesting look at the relevance of Britain’s bloody history
How can a civil war, in the 12th century, between rivals for the throne of England be relevant to libertarians today? Surely the war was simply as it was presented by the contemporary (pro Stephen) writers – a lot of needless bloodshed brought about by the lust for power of wicked women?
However, I think the war is of interest.
First some background. Henry I was the youngest son of William the Conqueror, he based his claim to the throne of England (after the ‘hunting accident’ death of his brother William II) on the grounds that he was the only son of William I to be born after the conquest (i.e. after William I had been accepted as King of England) and in England itself.
To some people (such as Robert of Normandy – Henry’s older brother) such a claim appeared weak. However, by a combination of diplomacy and war Henry I made good his claim.
Henry had issued a charter of liberties limiting the lawless power of the Crown (in such matters as taxation and the security of property), he appealed not just to the Norman but to the Anglo Saxon (English) population and married Matilda (formally Edith) – daughter of the King of Scotland, but also direct decedent of the Anglo Saxon Kings of England going back to Alfred the Great. → Continue reading: Stephen and Matilda
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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