DUFF & NONSENSE!

Well done, "Mr. W.H.", whoever you were!

I am grateful to Mr. Tim Lihoreau on Classic fm this morning for reminding me that today is the anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare's sonnets and as I am still in poetic mode following my transcription of Hardy's evocative tribute to "Drummer Hodge" in my Sunday Rumble yesterday, I can't resist publishing one  of his most famous efforts, and as this is 'the merrie month of May', it can only be:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date;
 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
 
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
 
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

What a fantastic poem to present to a lady so, er, it's a bit tricky to learn that he wrote it for a man - a young man - a very pretty young man with long golden hair - oh dear!

Yes, that's him, Henry Wriothesley, or the Earl of Southampton to you and me!  That somewhat gushing extravaganza of a poem written for such a pretty boy - he was 17 at the time - led some people who should have known better to assume that Shakespeare was homosexual.  Nonsense, of course, when 'our Will' was 17/18 he was so busy shagging Anne Hathaway that he put her in the family way and had to get married!  And once married he didn't stop because two years later Anne produced twins.

Shakespeare 'experts', like experts in everything, can produce theories like a magician pulling rabbits from a top-hat.  Like almost everything to with 'our Will' exact, provable knowledge is so scarce that it positively encourages everyone and his uncle to come up with theories, some of which are worth a second look but most of which are crackpot.  I like the one that suggests that he wrote the early ones (for money!) at the behest of  Southampton's mother and step-father in order to encourage the young man to find a girl, get married and - above and beyond all other things - beget an heir!  The layer upon layer of flattery was exactly the style a social inferior, like 'our Will' would adopt in writing to, or of, a social superior like Southampton in Elizabethan times.  The thing about 'our Will' was that he could do it with such wit and style and, dammit, such beauty.

When published, the dedication was as follows, and the identity of the mysterious "Mr. W.H." has kept zillions of Shakespeare 'experts' busy ever since:

TO.THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.INSUING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H.   ALL.HAPPINESSE.
AND.THAT.ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE.WELL-WISHING.
ADVENTURER.IN.
SETTING.
FORTH.
                              T.T.

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" who he was, I will simply raise a glass in gratitude to his memory.

 

The Sunday Rumble: 19.5.13

In which, during the course of the day, I will emit sundry burps and belches on anything that catches my beady eyes.

'Swivel-eyed plebs':  By their unguarded, flabby-mouthed remarks shall you know them!  And actually, I am rather pleased when it happens because suddenly in the fog and mists of PC-speak you catch a rare glimpse of the truth, or at least, the truth as perceived by the "swivel-eyed loons" who run this country of ours.  In this latest case it was some Tory toff referring to the grass-roots suckers workers who volunteer their time and efforts to get these oily rascals up the greasy pole, however, it is an attitude of mind that stretches effortlessly to encompass all of us "plebs" who actually vote.  Even as they grovel, they despise us.  But you should not think that this attitude is confined to Tory toffs; the grandees of, say, the Trade Unions who swill their champagne in the best hotels and restaurants in the land think the same way about the real-life "plebs" who are daft enough to volunteer their union dues every week in order to keep the champagne flowing.

  

 A poem:  An old and dear friend gave me a rather beautiful book of war poems for my birthday last week.  Very nicely produced in folio size, it contains war poems from all ages not just the usual and well-rehearsed WWI poems.  Here is one that struck me as I was flicking through the book.  It is reminiscent of Rupert Brooke's famous "That there's some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England" but this was written by Thomas Hardy who lived and wrote in Dorset just a few miles south of here and the particular "corner of a foreign field" to which he refers is somewhere on the veldt in South Africa.

Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined – just as found:

His landmark is a kopje-crest

That breaks the veldt around;

And foreign constellations west

Each night above his mound.

 

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –

Fresh from his Wessex home –

The meaning of the broad Karoo,

The Bush, the dusty loam,

And why uprose to nightly view

Strange stars amid the gloam.

 

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge forever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain

Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellation reign

His stars eternally.

 

Oliver Kamm misses the point:  A week ago on his Times blog Oliver Kamm (you can read it via my link or something called 'Tumblr', whatever that is!) took issue with Nigel Lawson over Lawson's urging that we leave the EU.  In his usual concise and logical manner he laid out the economic advantages of us remaining in, although he admitted that we would instantly be £8bn a year better off for no longer having to pay into the EU budget.  As an economist/banker by trade (before he fell into Grub Street) it is not too surprising that he sticks to economic arguments but 'the dismal science' is not the primary one in this particular and fractious matter.  It's politics, innit?  We, that is the royal 'we', in case you're wondering, simply do not wish to be ruled by European politicans and bureaucrats - it's as simple as that!  I don't care if our standard of living drops 0.75% or whatever, or even if it goes up by the same amount, I just want the United Kingdom to run itself, make its own laws, make its own mistakes, make its own way - c' est tout!  (See, bloody French get everywhere!)

 

 Albert Finney's Big Fail:  I have just had lunch in my kitchen and the 'Memsahib' was watching Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney playing Hercule Poirot.  I nearly murdered Albert Finney!  That has to have been his worst performance - ever.  He shouted his lines from somewhere at the back of his throat because in his effort to look plump, which he was not at the time, he kept his chin buried in his neck in an effort to show a double chin.  I have admired Finney for years, for just one example, his performance as Sir Donald Wolfit in The Dresser was superb.  I suppose from time to time even the best get it wrong - the worst do so constantly as my past performances bear witness!  Anyway, no-one does Poirot better than David Suchet.

 

The Bookaholic's Tale:  I got lucky last week.  I wrestled with my conscience, with which I had sworn never, not ever, to buy another book until I had reduced the pile of 'waiting-to-be-read' books - and lost!  So in I went to Waterstones without even a pang of regret and ended up in front of the American History section which was surprisingly small.  I am still waiting to come across a book on Lincoln which is biography and not hagiography.  There was one on the shelves but reading the reviews my suspicions were aroused.  However, when I replaced it I noticed The American Civil War written, I was re-assured to notice, by a Brit and a damned good historian at that - the late Sir John Keegan.  It was half the size of Lincoln's biography so that helped, too!  Anyway, a warning to my American e-pals, sometime in the next 10 years I will be an expert on your civil war about which, at the moment, I know next to nothing.

But my good fortune did not end there.  Going to the Pay Desk I noticed a bookcase of books at knock-down sale prices.  Amongst them was The Information by James Gleik.  I have two of his books on my shelf, one on Richard Feynman and the other on chaos theory.  Gleik is excellent at writing science for dummies without actually insulting our intelligence.  The book had a tear in the cover and slight damage to the spine but was only reduced by £2.  My second-hand car dealer persona took over and I asked the man at the desk if that was the best he could do given the damage.  Not only did he sell it to me for a fiver, he noticed a very slight tear in the cover of the American Civil War book and knocked two quid off that, too!  Well done, Waterstones!

That's my lot for today.

 

Related articles

Words in the News: Loon

Happy Birthday to Albert Finney

The Battle of Castle Itter - you couldn't make it up!

First of all an apology.  One of you lot, by which I mean, of course, you, dear readers, sent me a link to this story but, alas, life being somewhat hectic here at 'Chateaux Duff' these days, I simply cannot remember who it was so I cannot acknowledge you - but my thanks all the same.

So, here is the tale of the strangest battle ever fought in WWII.  It involved on one side, a strong force of fanatical SS men still determined to fight on; and on the other side, a rag-bag mix of black and white American soldiery, a group of famous French political prisoners and, to add to the head-shaking incredulity of it all, a small force of ordinary Werhmacht soldiers.  Yeeees, quite!

It took place in Austria in early May 1945 just after the fall of Berlin but at a time when fanatical SS troops were busy fighting to the last man! A certain Lt. John C. "Jack" Lee Jr. was despatched with a tank or two and a handful of black and white American soldiers to rescue high-ranking French political prisoners from Schloss Itter, a castle situated in the middle of a fluid area which neither side completely controlled.  On his journey towards his objective he ran into a group of Werhmacht soldiers who promptly surrendered.  He took them along but no sooner had they entered the castle when it was attacked by the SS.  Everyone, French, German and American rapidly co-operated and a stout defence was put up, but with the pressure mounting and the ammo running low the situation was becoming desperate.  Almost like a Hollywood movie, at the last minute the American cavalry, or at least, a rescue force, arrived and saved the day.

You can read the details of this remarkable battle here:

http://www.historynet.com/the-battle-for-castle-itter.htm

Well worth a read!  And thanks again to who-ever it was who told me of it.

 

"War, war, war . . . "

". . . all you gentlemen ever talk of is war!"  Thus spake, not Zarathustra, but the truly beautiful Vivien Leigh in her opening lines as Scarlett O'Hara - and I surely do not need to tell you the name of the film even if next year marks its 75th anniversary!  Anyway, all of that, in my usual rambling way, is by way of telling you about a new book just published on military philosophy.  In a review in the TLS, Michael Howard (and military historian/philosophers do not come much more distinguished than him) places it up there alongside Clauswitz, no less, which is some compliment given that the writer, Emile Simpson, was recently a junior officer serving with the Gurkhas in Afghanistan.

Even an old ex-corporal like me has gradually become aware that the nature of warfare has changed since the days of the 18th/19th century.  There are now aspects to war which were never a consideration for Frederick the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte, although the first inklings were discernible during 'Boney's' adventures when an army's ranks began to be filled by civilians, not just professional soldiers, and the sheer size spelled the end of command and control by a single commander however large his genius.  The young Prussian officers who rebelled ('viz absolute korrectness, natürlich!) against the stultifying control of their king after their defeats by Napoleon, saw the changes that would be needed in an age of 'the nation in arms' and invented what became the German General Staff.

But in the 20th century a new element entered warfare - public opinion.  The 20th century saw the culmination of 'the nations in arms' and the colossal struggles that ensued and it became glaringly apparent that the correct message be relayed to the people to keep them involved - a national narrative was required:

The narrative must not only be persuasive in rational terms. It also needs drama
to appeal to the emotions. Above all, it needs an ethical foundation. Not only
one’s own people, but the wider “strategic audience” must believe that one is
fighting a “good” war. The genius of Winston Churchill in 1940 was to devise a
strategic narrative that not only inspired his own people, but enlisted the
support of the United States: indeed, most of British military operations in the
early years of the war were planned with an eye on that strategic audience. The
great shortcoming of Hitler’s strategy was his failure to create a strategic
narrative that appealed to anyone apart from his own people – and a rapidly
decreasing number of them.

But today, even that is not enough because modern communications means that everyone from those in the the high command bunkers down to the 'Tom' in the foxhole and 'the man in the street/bazaar/jungle/desert/shanty town is bang up to date with the latest news.  What you do and what you say must be crafted with a world-wide audience in mind.

The paradigm (still largely accepted by Clausewitz) of “bipolar” wars fought
between discrete states enjoying the support of their peoples has now been
shattered by globalization. Popular support can no longer be taken for granted.
“The people” are no longer homogeneous and the enemy is no longer a single
entity. Further, “the enemy” is no longer the only actor to be taken into
account. The information revolution means that every aspect, every incident of
the conflict can be instantly broadcast throughout the world in width and in
depth, and received by anyone with access to the internet; including the men in
foxholes fighting it.

Off the top of my head I would suggest that we, meaning 'the West', have lost every war(*) since WWII with the exception of the one that evicted  Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.  In all cases the 'narrative' was confused and stood no chance against the multitude of contrary opinion available round the globe.  It seems ot me that Mr. Simpson's book is required reading - 'SoD', please take note and remember it's my birthday next month!

(*) Of course, the 'officer class' tend to trot out the post-WWII Malaya campaign as an example of how we won but they forget that what won it was our surrender!  In other words, as soon as we acknowledged that Malaya would be granted independence at the conclusion then the insurgency lost its main raison d'être. 

 

WAR FROM THE GROUND UP: Twenty-first-century combat as politics

by Emile Simpson

 

Please, Mummy, can I be cruel to Lefties?

Well, no, of course one shouldn't be cruel to anyone, even deluded old Lefties slowly creeping towards death and disillusion.  But then again, one thinks of the horrors they would have inflicted on us if they had enjoyed half a chance and the urge to hurl stones becomes irresistible.  The death of 'that woman', of course, reminds us how close they came to doing just that back in the '70s when it was increasingly clear that the burden of state-social-democracy piled on our national shoulders by Clem Attlee and added to by every government, red or blue, since, simply wasn't working.  The choice was clear, either more socialism and never mind too much about the democracy, or, a return of sorts to the liberal free-market democracy of the 19th century.  Fortunately, just in the nick of time (why is Britain so damned lucky in times of crisis?) the right person came along and, in effect, made up our minds for us.

I am provoked to these thoughts by two posts at Dave Ostler's place.  The first, posted immediately on news of the death of 'that woman', was an open thread and is barely worth trudging through given that it is mostly a mixture of mindless drivel and bile.  The second, authored by Dave Osler himself, came a little later yesterday as Mr. Osler composed his thoughts.  Alas, it was surprisingly thin stuff given the target and from a usually thoughtful man. He likened her to La Pasionaria, a particularly stupid Spanish woman who, in the style of so many '30s communists never looked further than the end of her nose and thus trod through the blood without noticing, and that struck me as a rather thin and glib comparison.  He trotted out (no pun intended!) some particularly trite remarks from that despicable and dimwitted, little shit, Karl Marx, which did not bear more than two seconds consideration before they evaporated - much as Marxism has.

Dave Osler is, I would judge, a man with whom I would enjoy a few beers - although the reverse may not be the case!  He does, in the usual Marxist sense, 'analyse' matters but in writing an epitaph to 'that woman' he seems not just bereft of words but of thoughts also.  In this, he stands as an icon for the Left who to this day remain "bewitched, bothered and bewildered" by the her victories in this country and the outstanding victory of her philosophy worldwide - is it too much of a stretch to propose that perhaps the market reformers in China were encouraged by her?  Anyway, today the Left is best illustrated by that scene in the film of 'Les Mis' when the childish revolutionaries were blasted off their pathetic barricade by a couple of volleys from the artillery.  All that remains today are the comic antics of the Socialist Workers Party, or whatever they call themselves in their current form - like bacteria they keep splitting and evolving into new forms each more useless than the first.  

So, to return to my question, should we be cruel to the Lefties?  Well, it's a 'no brainer', isn't it? - pass me a few stones!

 

Humbuggery is alive and well in the NUM

I mentioned in an earlier post that Sunderland Football Club have appointed some Italian lout as their new manager.  So far so normal but this particular lout is, apparently, a fascist lout as this photo courtesy of The Telegraph indicates:

Anyway, this item of less than earth-shaking importance has produced one result.  The old guard of the Durham Miners Association has lumbered forth and demanded the return of a banner they gave to the Club when the new stadium was built on the site of one of the oldest coal mines in England.  I heard one of these 'worthies' on the radio last night thundering on about 'ow it were an insult to the lads who fought 'n' died fighting fascism'.  True up to a point but it is worth remembering that coal mining was a reserved occupation during WWII so very few miners went to the front.  And needless to say, those who stayed behind had very little compunction in going on strike whenever they felt like it - 'and boogger the lads oop the front!'  As the LabourNet site reports:

[T]he miners won the highest minimum wage in Britain. Their average earnings ranked 81st in 1938, but rose to 14th after the strikes. [My emphasis]

Needless to say, if Paolo di Canio, the lout concerned, had boasted of his communist affiliations, the dinasours from the NUM would probably have sent him a case of champagne, that being the drink of choice for your average Left-wing union leader!

The Telegraph article by Dan Hodges, linked above, is worth a read.  He reminds us of that embarrassing moment 75 years ago next month when the England football team under the urgings of the British ambassador, Sir Neville Henderson, gave Hitler a fascist salute in Berlin prior to a match against Germany.  There was a near riot in the dressing-room when the order came down but they did it.  Thankfully they went on to beat Germany 6-3 which salvaged a little honour.

 

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The art of war: #2

I am rather busy today, part of my time being taken with driving Peg the leg-legga-leg the 'Memsahib' to the hospital where her new hip was inserted, so my posting today will be odds and sods inserted at speed.  To start with, here are some more wartime posters from the site I wrote about earlier - courtesy of 'Big Sis':

This was painted by Drake Brookshaw who was, apparently, a very prolific artist and illustrator responsible for several of the postsers that used to decorate the London Underground.  I'm surprised that he has no Wiki entry.  Anyway, I'm sure you will all agree that this is a delight with the dappled sunshine caught beautifully and contrasted with the dark figure of the man and the tree branches.  One of those magical illustrations which instantly make you smile - a useful thing during wartime.

Here's a very different style in a poster by Tom Purvis:

Can't say I care for this one very much.  In some indefinable way it's just not very British.  It smacks too much of a continental style.  I can't help thinking that Mussolini would have liked that sort of thing.  However, Purvis knew war from the sharp end having served in the Artists Rifles during WWI.  That distinguished regiment, of course, later morphed into the 21st Special Air Service (reserve).

Now this one is terrific.  A brilliant use of Churchill's famous request illustrated with wit and style:

Frank Newbould was one of the greatest of the train poster artists.  This site will give you a whole collection of his work which are well worth a browse.  A superb and witty illustrator.  Here is one of his well known peace-time posters which shows his sense of fun:

 Two weeks in 'Skeggie'!  God, I'd rather have three weeks in Siberia!

 

 

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Is God laughing or crying?

I ask, you see, because I have 'got religion'!  No, no, I'm not banging on your door asking if you believe or any of that sort of thing, but ever since I read Jonathan Sachs's superb book The Great Partnership I have become interested in the history of religion, or to be precise, mainly the Christian religion.  What nags away at the back of my mind is the incredible speed with which, in those ancient times, it spread round the Roman empire and was lapped up so quickly by the populations of so many different countries.  Of course, now I think about it, I can see the attraction for ordinary people in a religion in which prince and pauper are equal before the eyes of God.  Even so, the speed of its spread was amazing.

Talking about this with a friend before Christmas prompted her to buy me another book, The History of Christian Thought by Jonathan Hill.  I am only partway through it but already, like God in my title above, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  If indeed God did despatch his Son to earth to preach a simple but hugely powerful and persuasive message of morality to be easily understood by the great unwashed and ignorant, then surely he must have realised that it would only be a matter of time - a very, very short time - before the intellectuals got at it!  Amongst the first was Justin Martyr, about a hundred years after Christ, and after Justin it was downhill all the way.  Endless 'picking of nits' and 'dancing on the heads of pins' was undertaken by sundry bloody intellectuals so that the simplicity of the original message was buried under a slag-heap of contradictory interpretations, many of which would in time be enforced by axe, sword and fire.

And then yesterday, via the good offices of Arts & Letters Daily, I came across an excellent review of a book called Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg.  The reviewer, R. I. Moore at The Nation, begins with Nirenberg's unique (as far as I know) interpretation of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in which he proposes:

“In sooth, I know not why I am so sad,” Antonio wonders at the outset of The
Merchant of Venice. What could seem more universal, more culturally neutral
than melancholy? Yet if David Nirenberg’s argument in Anti-Judaism is correct, by Shakespeare’s time the negative associations of Judaism were so universal, and so close to the surface of Christian consciousness, that Antonio’s words immediately prompt the suspicion that he might be a Jew. Other characters soon echo the suggestion. His friend Salerio attributes Antonio’s mood to anxiety about the safety of the ships carrying his merchandise overseas, thus taxing him with excessive regard for his money; then, when Antonio repudiates the accusation, another friend, Gratiano, charges him with hypocrisy. Either way, Nirenberg writes, Antonio “appears to be, in the vocabulary of Christianity, a ‘Jew.’”

Well, I have lost count of the number of times when Shakespearean experts have offered up a new way of looking at his plays which have left me open-mouthed and my own pet theories in ruins about me.  This way of looking at Antonio is certainly new to me but . . . but . . . now you mention it  . . . !  Anyway, both the book and the review are concerned with wider matters.  They both draw attention to the way in which the early 'Church Elders' (or bloody intellectuals, if you prefer!) felt the need to differentiate themselves from Judaism despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that they both drew their inspiration from the same early chronicles.  This need to distance themselves from the Jews went hand-in-hand with the necessity of crushing any Christian sects who failed to abide by the totally man-made creed of the early church, and , of course, any pagans still surviving who preferred their old, semi-human and therefore recognisable Gods.  Over the centuries these habits, which might be described as 'getting your retaliation in first' persisted with increasingly bloody results.  But through it all ran the over-riding necessity to mark the differences between Christianity and Judaism with results that live - and die - with us today.

I think He's crying!

 

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Justin Martyr: The Dialogue with Trypho

The Art of War: #1

My gorgeous e-pal, 'Sister Wolf', sent me a link to a site at the National Archives featuring War Art from WWII.  Mostly posters but including some portraits.  I was born in 1939 and so my 'experience' of the war was that of a very young child and I suppose, in retrospect, most of my impressions were taken from the conversations of 'grown ups' and the impeccably correct pronunciation from the 'man at the BBC' reading the news.  Some, however, were real enough, like being taken to the school bomb-shelter with my gas mask for a practice drill.  Anyway, from time to time I will be offering you samples of these.  I think they, that is, the posters, need to be judged by their efficacy in getting over a message, and their quality as art forms.

This is the first poster:

 

By and unknown artist known only as 'Xenia'.  Very simplistic, one might call it naive, especially in comparison with some of the more sophisticated poster work that was produced.  Even so, I like and admire it.  It spells the message out with the repetition of 'Better' and the touches of green in all of the little sketches.  It was aimed at 'The Village Produce Associations' of the time, what we would call today, the allotment owners.  I think that little poster would have hit the intended target exactly right.

Here's another one, concerned with agriculture but with a different target group:

It doesn't quite work for me.  I suspect the unknown artist, "O'Connell", has been somewhat influenced by Soviet-style art with their endlessly smiling and handsome peasant girls and boys.  The white-on-black message at the bottom and the choice of typeface smacks of government bureaucracy!

Anyway, I am enormously grateful to 'Big Sis' for a fascinating site.

 

The cracked European edifice

In a comments thread further down, my e-pal, Ortega, provided me with a link to a YouTube film of a seminar at an American university (Harvard, I think) given by a distinguished French professor of politics on the subject of the EU.  It is, I think, a little out of date on small details, and also, whilst the Professor's English is excellent, his accent is not!  Even so, I persevered to the end and it was worth it.  You may watch it here but bear in mind it lasts well over an hour: http://youtu.be/ERRJyd5doXc

I'm not sure I learned anything new but it was good to hear my own suspicions confirmed by a man who obviously had studied the history of the EU from its inception.  He ran through the obvious - well, obvious to anyone who is not a European fanatic - that the whole set-up is riven with internal contradictions as a continent made up of proud individual nations attempts, in a ludicrously short spell of time, to become one nation.  In his (paraphrased) words, the result is an EU 'constitution' that is both too strong and too weak.  Since its very beginning, the men driving this construction upwards and onwards have been blinded by their own vision and only now is reality, already huge and growing more ominous by the day it seems, exerting pressures undreamt of by these dreamers!

An indication of their blind faith is the constant repetition of their mantra that the European Union has brought peace to Europe.  Nonsense!  It was the Russian and American armies with a little (comparitively) help from Britain that brought peace to Europe.  The nation-states that existed in 1945 were far too wrecked and ravaged to contemplate war with anyone and ever since the first moves were made to form the EU these nations have chosen material comfort over standing armies which is why today we can barely manage to drop a few bombs on Libya or Mali!  Today, under the pressure of financial (not military) events it is more clear than ever before that the fundamental fault at the centre of this construction has not be solved, that is, the balance between central European authority and the individual power of the nation states.  The emotional heart of this 'union', of course, was the engagement followed by the marriage between France and Germany.  Alas, like all marriages Time has wrought his changes.  A defeated, humiliated and shameful Germany was embraced by victorious La France and all past sins forgiven; but today, it is Germany that is all-powerful and an enfeebled France, about to be made even more anaemic by a strong dose of socialism, has no more power over Germany than good manners dictate.  As the good Professor put it, with a likely split between north and south Europe, the only decision France has to take is which side to join!

Like the Central Committee of the old Soviet Union with their mad idea of unifying countless different peoples in different countries with different histories, one must not make the mistake of thinking the pseudo-'religiosity' of the fanatics who dream a similar dream of a United States of Europe will give up easily.  In the last few days they agreed to steal money from citizens by means of edict.  How long before they back up their monstrous demands with tanks?

 

The Sunday Rumble: 17.03.13

Another Sunday rumble, or perhaps 'grumble' is a better word, as I awake to yet more global warming falling gently from an iron grey sky and settling nicely, thank you for asking!  As usual, I shall add to this litany of moans and groans as the day goes on, so if you are actually feeling rather happy today, then read no further!

'And then they came for your bank savings':  So now you know, and you must be deaf, dumb, blind and lacking a sense of smell if you didn't know it already, that to the apparatchiks who run the Berlin-Brussels axis nothing is sacred, least of all your hard-earned savings which you have entrusted to your local bank.  The Cypriots have just found that out - the hard way - with banks closed until Tuesday whilst the authorities rip off up to 10% of their savings.  Of course, they put it about that what they're really after is the untaxed il-gotten gains of various Russian crooks oligarchs who decided that Cyprus with its, er, Mediterranean banking laws was a haven of first resort.  Call me 'Mr. Cynical' but I wonder how much Russian 'moolah' was shifted electronically on Wednesday and Thursday when, in return for a nice bung, various apparatchiks quietly tipped them the wink?

Mother Russia is a murderous old bitch!  When I read Tom Rob Smith's best-selling book, Child 44, I promised myself never to read another book by him on the subject of Russia - well, I didn't have to really because Child 44 nauseated me - not, I hasten to add, that Mr. Smith isn't a first-rate writer, he's terrific!  He seems to capture exactly the fear and loathing that existed within Stalin's Soviet Union in which everyone is seeking either to denounce others, or desperately trying not to be denounced themselves.  Anyway, being a hopeless 'bookaholic' I wasn't too surprised to find that somehow, in some mysterious way - nuffin' to do wiv me, honest guv! - someone had slipped a copy of his book Agent 6 into my shopping bag.  I only reached page 25 and already I could feel the nausea returning - when will I ever learn?  Anyway, I was reminded of this by a review at The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwartz of a book called Moscow 1937 written by Prof. Karl Schlögel:

Schlögel’s book is a fragmentary yet meticulous social history of Moscow in the grip of the Great Terror—the period from the summer of 1936 to the end of 1938, when the already sanguinary Bolshevik regime let loose on itself its apparatus of suppression, purging, in waves, all Soviet institutions and at all levels of society, from the nomenklatura, the highest echelons of administrative, cultural, and scientific life, through the high command of the Red Army, to the engineers and apparatchiks, down to the factory workers and peasants. It is an almost impossibly rich masterpiece. [...]

In this chapter and throughout his book, Schlögel is the master of the chilling counterpoint. He subtly makes clear to readers that the 1936 Directory [the equivalent of our Dictionary of National Biography] is brimming with the names of people destined for the abattoir, and he notes that this edition of the Directory was, perforce, the final one: “No editorial board could have kept pace with the frantic rate at which people were driven from their posts and destroyed while their places were taken by others.” Completed on the eve of the Terror, this last Directory “encapsulates a moment in time in which the accusers and the accused, the perpetrators and the victims, the executioners and the executed of the morrow, still sit side by side.”

Once again, and not for the first time, I fall to my knees and thank the Gods of Good Fortune that I was born English!

There's no fool like an educated fool:  And here I give you - no, no, please, there's no charge and he's all yours - Prof. Geoffrey Miller, not just a fool but a dangerous one, to boot.  In a (thankfully) short article at Edge, this eye-swivelling maniac urges on us the advantages of Chinese eugenics:

There is unusually close cooperation in China between government, academia, medicine, education, media, parents, and consumerism in promoting a utopian Han ethno-state. Given what I understand of evolutionary behavior genetics, I expect—and hope—that they will succeed. The welfare and happiness of the world's most populous country depends upon it.

I cannot be bothered to take up all the hideous nonsense this man writes but I would remind him that there is nothing unusual about "close cooperation in China" because, you stupid, master-race theorist, it's a one party dictatorship in which everyone does what they're told - or else - so if you admire it that much, Prof. Miller, why don't you fuck off and live there!  (Apologies for my language but I haven't read this sort of vile vomit since the late Herr Hitler did us all a favour and topped himself!)

How are your alkenones hanging?  I ask, not that I have the remotest idea what an 'alkenode' is when it's at home, but because some less-than-scientific HAF called Marcott has just published a paper indicating 'The Hockey Stick' of all 'hockey sticks'!  He and his little helpers base their record of galloping global warming in the last century by using ocean core samples as proxies.  Very good, you might think, and quite rightly you will be alarmed at the way that temperatures have rocketed up, up and away such that the end of the world really must be nigh.  Unfortunately, that meddlesome nuisance, Steve McIntyre, decided to take a closer look and - whodathunkit? - it appears that the HAFs concerned altered the dates of some of their data.  This, shall we call it, carelessness with regard to dates had rather a significant result, as this diagram, courtesy of McIntyre's Climate Audit site shows:

 

'Les flics' finally spiral out of action:  Yes, yes, I know it's a rather heavy-handed sub-title but last night Spiral 4 came to an end on BBC4 which is a personal catastrophe for me because the other two women in my life will be no more - unless they bring it back for a fifth serial.  You have days left to watch most of the episodes on your I-Player-thingie (whatever that it is) or perhaps there are DVD sets available.  Most of the time I had only the vaguest idea of what was going on in the series - so no change there, then! -  but I didn't care just so long as my two ladies kept appearing.  First, Caroline Proust whom I hope fervently will one day handcuff me and throw away the key!

 

And then there is the sexiest 'lawyer' I have ever come across - no, I admit, not a hard test - the gorgeous Audrey Fleurot.  Whenever I am in legal trouble, and assuming that Ms. Anna Raccoon is unavailable, then this is the lady I want to defend me - and quite honestly I won't care very much if I lose!

Now I have a problem!  What on earth am I going to do with my empty Saturday nights?

 

Zis iss ein German yoke:  Which probably means you won't get it!  However, as the new Gauleiters of Greater Germany (er, that's Europe to you and me) set about stealing money from people's bank accounts in order to teach them fiscal discipline so that they can be loaned more money - vich zey vill pay back on time viz interest - sorry, that's enough cod German - an article on the DW.de site will give you a smile.  According to the story:

Highly indebted, without access to capital, viewed suspiciously by creditors - . Half the country's debts were canceled 60 years ago this week - the foundation of the "economic miracle." [...]

It was only with the London Debt Agreement of 1953 that the German economy was given room to breathe again, says historian Ursula Rombeck-Jaschinski of Stuttgart University: "One could even argue that the economic miracle would have been impossible without the debt agreement."

Ah, yes, now remind me, what exactly is the German for 'don't do as we did just do as we tell you - or you will be shot'?

 

I am now out of rumbles for today!

 

Wingless wonders!

So, in the same week in which it is announced that the armoured brigade bearing the proud name of 'The Desert Rats' is to lose its tanks, along comes another Shlock-Horror story in The Mail today.  Apparently, the Parachute Regiment is to have its parachutes withdrawn - no, no, they're not going to throw the chaps out the back of a Hercules with large beachballs to break their fall, they're just not going to train them as parachutists any more, which rather makes a nonsense of the regimental name!

Still, I suppose the Lancers lost their lances a century or so ago and they seem to have managed without them and I'm sure the non-jumping Paras will get by without their wings but it seems a pity because I remember wearing mine with some pride - in fact, I still have a set of three taken off my last uniforms which sit on the book shelf to my left to remind me of 'times past'.

 

 

To be honest, I am amazed that it hasn't happened sooner.  The last large-scale parachute operation was at Suez in 1956 so it really doesn't look as though the parachute is the entry route of choice to enemy territory, particularly in this age of the helicopter.  Perhaps now is the time to change the name and call it the Airborne Regiment, or perhaps, the Airborne Commando Regiment to keep it level with the Rock Apes Marines.

"What's in a name", asked Shakespeare.  Well, in this case a lot of regimental pride earned by some very brave men.

 

Related articles

'Only one in five Paras ready for jumps'

Army chiefs' fury as Paras lose their parachutes: New cutbacks mean recruits will no longer be trained to jump

Parachute Regiment flags flown in Derry as plans are laid to target concert

Proud history of the Desert Rats

Famed Desert Rats to lose their tanks under Army cuts

A tiger in a Tiger!

My previous post on the subject of Tiger tanks extolled the courage and cunning of a British tank crew who, out-gunned and out-armoured, simply adopted naval tactics and rammed the Tiger tank with their own puny Sherman.  Here is a photo of the end result:

 

This tale excited 'SoD' who went haring off through the internet records and produced, amongst other things, the history of one of the most effective German tank commanders of WWII.

 

He looks a bit like a very young Burt Lancaster but actually his name is Kurt Knispel (20 September 1921 – 28 April 1945).  A Sudetan German who served in their armoured forces, he was credited with the greatest number of confirmed 'tank kills', a total of 168, in the war.  A maverick personality who refused to conform, he sported a goatee beard and long hair.  According to Wiki:

Knispel's slow promotion is attributed to several conflicts with higher Nazi
authorities (for instance, he assaulted an Einsatzgruppen officer whom he saw mistreating Soviet POWs) and general lack of military bearing, sporting a goatee and hair longer than regulations. Only his impressive track-record saved him from ending up in a military prison.

Alas, this brave man died of his wounds 10 days before the war ended.

 

How to take out a King Tiger? Easy when you know how - and have guts!

In my last Sunday Rumble I made a passing reference to the difficulty - no, let's be honest, the virtual impossibility - of dealing with the German armoured behemoth of WWII - the King Tiger tank.  Without boring you all to death with the techie details, suffice to say that it had virtually impervious armour and was armed with an 88mm AA gun which was deadly against all known opposition at the time up to huge ranges.  I am obliged to 'SoD' for providing a link which describes one solution which was breathtaking in its simplicity and in the courage needed to carry it out.  I thought it was worth sharing with you all:

James Baron, who has died aged 87, was awarded an immediate Military Medal for charging and ramming a German King Tiger tank in Normandy in 1944 while serving with Armoured Irish Guards.

On July 18 the 2nd Armoured Battalion of the Irish Guards was taking part in a powerful armoured thrust near Cagny in Operation Goodwood, which aimed to isolate Caen from the east and free the Allied forces to the west for the forthcoming breakout of Normandy.

The Irish Guards were equipped with Sherman tanks, which had proved to be a reliable fighting vehicle, but were outclassed by the German Tiger and Panther tanks. On the Western Front, the Allies had no answer to Hitler's latest weapon, the King Tiger, armed with an 88 mm gun, originally designed as an anti-aircraft gun. Intelligence reports that it was about to make its appearance in Normandy were received with considerable apprehension. 

"What do we do if we meet a King Tiger?" Lance-Corporal Baron had asked his troop commander, Lieutenant John Gorman, at a briefing a few days earlier. "The only thing we can do," Gorman told his driver, "is to use naval tactics. If the 88 mm gun is pointing away from us, we shall have to use the speed of the Sherman and ram it."

On the afternoon of July 18, as Gorman came round the corner of a hedge in his Sherman, he saw four German tanks 300 yards away in the middle of a field. There was an old-fashioned Tiger, a Panther, an old Mark IV and a King Tiger - the first seen in battle on the Western Front.

The King Tiger's devastating 88 mm gun was pointing at one of Gorman's troop on the rise behind him. The Sherman's 75 mm gun was little more use than a pea-shooter against the King Tiger's armour - armour piercing shells would bounce off it. "Driver, ram!" shouted Gorman.

The Sherman crashed through a thin hedge and careered down the slope at 40 mph towards the King Tiger. With 75 yards to go before impact, the Sherman's gunner, Guardsman Scholes, fired a high-explosive shell at the King Tiger. Although it did not penetrate the armour, he felt that it would give the Germans something to worry about.

The British tank slid down beside the long barrel and struck the King Tiger hard at the rear of its right track. With the Sherman's turret only a few inches from the 88 mm weapon, Gorman's crew were like birds sitting on a sportsman's gun. On impact, both crews baled out and went in opposite directions - except one man, Guardsman Agnew, the front gunner, who, finding his exit blocked and having to scramble back to the turret, was the last out of the tank.

As Agnew dropped to the ground, he saw four men running for a ditch and promptly joined them. They were the German crew. After an exchange of cold stares, being a punctilious sort of man, he saluted smartly and disappeared into a cornfield to rejoin his comrades.

Gorman ordered Baron and the others to stay where they were; he set off on a zig-zag run through the orchards, where he found a Firefly tank. Gorman returned with the Firefly and completed the destruction of the King Tiger and the Sherman with the 17-pounder gun.

Meanwhile, the crew had been caught in an artillery barrage. When two guardsmen were wounded, Baron made a rough bed for them and stayed with his friends until they were picked up by a passing tank.

For their parts in this action, Corporal Baron received the MM and Lt Gorman the MC.

James Baron was born at Clayton-le-Moors, Lancashire, on April 15 1915 and educated at the local school. His family moved to Great Harwood when he was a boy, and at the age of 14 he was working in the textile industry.

Baron enlisted in the Coldstream Guards in 1936 and trained at the Guards Depot, Caterham, before joining the 2nd Battalion at Windsor. He purchased his discharge the following year to join the Lancashire Constabulary, but was called up in 1940 and re-enlisted in the Irish Guards.

In 1941 Baron was selected for armoured training and qualified as a tank driver on the Crusader Mark I. He joined the 2nd Armoured Battalion Irish Guards in 1942 and was promoted to lance-corporal in May. After landing with the battalion on the Arromanches beaches on July 1 1944, he fought with his unit in the drive for the Seine and across north-west Germany, ending the war near Bremen.

Having left the Army in 1946 in the rank of sergeant, Baron returned to the textile industry as a technician at the Palatine Mill, Great Harwood; he retired in 1981. He entered the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, as an In-Pensioner in 1991 but left the following year and moved to Blackburn.

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?126970-New-Allied-Tactic-How-to-Take-out-Tigers-Easy-w-Sherman

 

Old traitors never die, they linger on in history

But of course, some 70+ years on when traitors are unmasked, everyone shrugs and mutters, "Alger who?" or "So what?" before changing the subject.  Almost no-one pauses to cogitate upon the possibility that if it was like that then, why wouldn't it be like that today?  Even so, a recent book [1], reviewed in The American Spectator, undertakes the unpleasant task of raking the muck that surrounded and infected the government of FDR during WWII. The authors retread the path laid bare by the Venona Project in which the American and British intelligence services combined to decrypt tens of thousands of messages sent by the various Soviet agencies.  The result was to bury a lance of truth into the Leftist myth that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were patriots, the Rosenbergs were innocent and that Whittaker Chambers was a liar.  It is now indisputable fact that the exact reverse was true.  Even more, the deeply unpleasant Sen. McCarthy was, in essence, right and the equally unpleasant Richard Nixon was right to defend Whittaker Chambers.  All those attending the Yalta Conference were either knowingly or unknowingly dancing like Russian puppets as Stalin jerked their strings. To be fair to Roosevelt, which he barely deserves, he was by this time in failing health and was thus well and truly in the manipulative hands of the likes of Harry Hopkins.  Thus, half of Europe was handed over, bound and gagged, to a monster.  To those, like Enoch Powell and Andrew Alexander, who maintain that the Cold War was totally unnecessary I can only suggest that 'there is none so blind as them wot is determined not to see'!  If Stalin could have grabbed more of Europe he would have done - and he worked hard enough at destabilising both Italy and France to say nothing of the Berlin blockade.

Today in the USA, the Left have no need of foreign powers to assist in their planned destruction of their democracy.  They subverted the main organs of society decades ago and thus today they have the overwhelming support of the MSM, the universities, most of the professions, a gargantuan - and growing - civil service and, via the schools, the hearts and what passes for the minds of the young.  Home run, really!

1:  Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government
By M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein
(Threshold Editions, 294 pages, $26)

Christ on a bike . . . !

You know how it is, you stumble and bumble along on your life's journey, mostly smoothly but sometimes hitting the odd bump or three which can cause alarm or despondency, or both, but you keep on pedalling and then suddenly, without warning, you come across someone else's life and for a few minutes your own stops dead!  Thus it was for me when I read this last night:

"Max Ostro was a young Jew living in Poland when the Nazis came.  He and his family were rounded up.  Together with one of his brothers and his father, he was herded into a cattle truck in a train bound for Treblinka.  No one came back from Treblinka.  It was an extermination camp.  There, many of Poland's three million Jews were gassed, burned and turned to ash.

In the train, barely able to breathe, his father held his two sons.  He said to them, 'Mein kinder, if you stay on the train you will die.  It belongs to malch hamoves, the angel of death.  I want you to davven maariv - pray the evening prayer.  Then I want the two of you, when the opportunity presents itself, to jump.  The Nazis will shoot.  But one of you will survive.  This I promise you: one of you will survive.'

The sons prayed.  Both jumped from the train.  The Nazis saw the movement and started firing.  Max's brother was killed instantly.  Max, under cover of darkness, survived.

The family had hidden a sum of money which Max was able to recover, and with it he paid a farmer to hide him in his hay barn.  Max survived this way for some time.  Then came November 1944.  The Nazi effort to round up and exterminate all remaining Jews intensified.  Max later told his son that he had a dream at that time.  In it he saw the Rebbe, the holy teacher his father had admired.  The Rebbe told him, 'It is no longer safe for you in the barn.'

So Max came to an arrangement with the farmer.  He had himself buried in a grave in the ground with only a narrow space open to the sky.  Through it Max was able to breath.  Once a week the farmer would come and bring something for Max to eat and drink.  He survived like that, buried alive, for two months until the war came to an end. 

Max eventually came to Britain, built a business, married and had two children.  He went to the synagogue regularly, prayed every day, lived his life as an Orthodox Jew and gave much of his money to charity.  He never spoke bitterly about the Holocaust, and though sometimes he wept for the family he had lost - he was the only survivor - he and the other survivors in Britain became a kind of extended family to one another.

I did not know Max well - I saw him from time to time at gatherings of Holocaust survivors.  I knew his face, but not his story.  While I was writing this book, he died and I went to comfort his son Maurice, whom I knew.  That was when I heard his story.  A book has been written about it."

        Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning; ch. 10,         pp182,183

No doubt there are a thousand and one stories like that, not just from the Holocaust but from all the other man-made catastrophes we have inflicted upon each other.  As you come across them, they give you pause and once again you marvel at the human spirit and the strength that lies in the will to live.

 

 

In which you may assist me in choosing my Christmas present

That Abe Lincoln has a lot to answer for!  First of all, the trailer for the current film was on last night as I waited for Les Mis to begin.  Obviously one cannot judge the film by a few quick takes here and there in a trailer but I must say that Daniel Day-Lewis's shouting, peremptory, desk-banging attitude got up my nose!  The second thing that Abe has to answer for is finally provoking me into buying a good biography of his life.  I have one which has remained on my book shelf untouched since I first bought it from a charity shop.  It is a slim volume written by Jan Morris but I am somewhat reluctant to start it because one of the reviews describes it as "blending fact, narrative and imagination"(!) which is not what I am looking for.  As that old American TV policeman used to say in every episode, "Just gimme the facts".  And I want the facts even more now that I have read a letter in today's Telegraph (can't find a link) from the historian, Alan Sked, in which he says that:

Lincoln was a racist who deliberately started a war that killed more than 650,000 people.  He had no intention of freeing slaves, who freed themselves by fleeing to Unionist lines during a war that was going badly for the North and in which they became needed as recruits. [...]

Until the day he died, Lincoln's ideal solution to the problem of blacks was to "colonise" them back to Africa or the tropics.

Eh?  What? Is that really true?  Tell me it ain't so - but better still, recommend to me as honest a biography as you know of.  'SoD' gave me a fistful of book tokens for Christmas and, on your advice, I will invest some of them into a good biography of the man about whom I know nothing other than the 'saintly' glow which emanates to this day from his historical persona; a glow, incidentally, which, in so far as I ever think about it, I view with some suspicion!

 

Related articles

The lure of Lincoln

The Sunday Rumble 7/01/13

It's the solar rays wot dunnit!  Once again this blog was wrong - so no surprise there, then!  In fact, this blog is pissed off with having to keep owning up to errors but then again, no-one in their right mind pays any attention to what is written here, so what's the problem?!  Anyway, my frequent dire warnings and my shaking, accusatory finger-pointing at those nasty little sun spots as being the cause of all our good/bad weather was wrong.  At least, that is according to Dr. Leif Svalgaard, the well-known Scandinavian spelling mistake and the expert of all experts when it comes to solar matters.  He has written an article over at WUWT which I urge you all to read, not least because I don't see why I should be the only one with a headache this Sunday.  It is also worth reading the entire comments thread - just take a handful of paracetamol first - because sundry swots add in their expertise and slowly - very slowly as far as I am concerned - you begin to grasp, not the absolute truth of the matter, but the complexity of it all and the way in which first-class scientists, like Svalgaard, inch their way slowly and carefully towards some tentative conclusions.  One of which appears to be some sort of correlation between cosmic rays emitted from the sun and the formation, or not, of cloud cover on earth which, of course, even a scientific twit like me can see would alter our climate to some extent. 

The '50s: Heaven or Hell?  I grew up during the 1950s in the pleasant county of Surrey.  As a 'family' unit my Mum and I were exceedingly hard-up although I never sensed it at the time because whilst there were never any luxuries equally there were never any shortage of absolute essentials.  So for me, the '50s were heaven, or as near to it as you can get on earth.  Of course, it was a time when public propriety went hand-in-hand with private promiscuity as, according to the  reviews of An English Affair by Richard Davenport-Hines, was the case with the Profumo affair. So no change there, then!  From the reviews I gather that Davenport-Hines was shocked - shocked, I tell you - by the rank hypocrisy of the ruling class to which I can only respond with a yawn.  One only requires a slight knowledge of 'dear Bertie's' efforts to shag for Empire, or, going further back, to the dear old 'Duke of Boot' and his 'heroic' efforts to defeat 'feelthy' French hints that we Brits were not really up to the job whilst on the job!  Anyway, one result of the scandal was that henceforth hypocrisy, that is, the wilful practice of hiding one's sins because of shame, has disappeared and today anyone and everyone is advised to 'let it all hang out' so shame has been banished.  Well, bring back the era of hypocrisy, I say.  (By the way, Profumo once shook my hand and if I had known then where it had been I would never have washed it again!)

Chicago should follow LA:  Let not Mayor Rahm Emanuel put it about that this blog has it in for his 'Windy City'.  Absolutely not, even if the body count last year was at record heights and that in the first three days of this year, five more people were murdered.  Despite all that, this blog is eager to assist the mayor in his valiant efforts to cut the killing - er, he is making efforts, isn't he?  Anyway, eager to be of assistance might I suggest that he begins by introducing strict hammer and club control laws because according to the FBI, no less, more people are killed with those implements than with rifles!  Next, he should begin a vigorous campaign to attract Latinos to his city because according to a city cop with the Los Angeles Police Department commenting on the drop in crime stats in his city, a goodly part of it is due to the influx of Latinos pushing out Blacks.  Ooops, perhaps that was a tad blunt, so allow me to re-phrase it in 'PC-lingo for the cringo', let's just call it a "demographic shift", there, that's much nicer, isn't it?

The Plods get it right and wrong:  I noticed somewhere, I forget exactly where, someone moaning that Scotland Yard were wasting public time and money in putting 30+ officers onto the task of investigating the so-called 'Plodgate case' involving the ex-Chief Whip, Andrew Mitchell.  I care nothing either way for Mr. Mitchell whose efforts at the Ministry of Overseas Aid should have led to him being put naked in the stocks in Parliament Square so that we could all pelt him with rotten veg.  However, if - and it still remains an 'if' - there was a concerted effort by a gang (I use the word deliberately) of police officers to 'fit up' a government minister then absolutely every effort should be made to uncover it.  It strikes with deadly accuracy at the very heart of our democracy.  What they should do, is cut down on the ridiculous investigation, now verging on a witch hunt, into various elderly gentlemen (er, well, men, anyway) accused by sundry old biddies of having touched them up as young girls but none of whom, as far as I know, were exactly kidnapped and raped!  I am also slightly miffed that I have not been questioned as yet!  I consider it a slur on my manhood because I certainly spent a considerable amount of time and energy attempting to touch up inappropriately as many young girls as I could get to stand or lie still long enough for me to do it.  Alas, truth will out, and the fact is that the number was distressingly tiny.  'E' for Effort - again!

 

 

Related articles

IoS book review: An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, By Richard Davenport-Hines

Why is a historian blackening the name of this Mail reporter who went to jail rather than betray a source?

Politicians Sleeping With Spooks; Vassall; Profumo

Christine Keeler 'was not mistress of KGB spy'

Once a year we get a glimpse under the blanket

In all the New Year broo-ha-ha I forgot to share my amusement at the annual release of classified documents under the 30-year rule.  This year, of course, it covered, amongst other things, the Falklands war, or perhaps, now that we know what went on, we should rename it 'the Washington war'!  Dr. Tim Stanley, an English history prof who specialises in America, wrote a summary for the Daily Telegraph.  According to the prof (who looks about 14-years old!), Mrs Thatcher, as she was then, quickly learned that "the special relationship is only special when it's convenient".  This was made clear when the Americans told her that they felt the need to inform the Argentinians of the forthcoming British landings on South Georgia in order to maintain their stance of neutrality.  Of course, they assured her, they would only do this at the last possible moment so as to avoid British casualties but  . . .   Well, needless to say, out came the handbag with the lead weight in it and perhaps Reagan felt that, on the whole, being shot was less painful!  I frequently bemoan the useless, when not actually harmful, activities of our very own 'Ministry for Foreigners' but the American State Department reminds me, constantly, that it could be worse.  Were there really educated, knowledgeable, sophisticated people at the highest level of American foreign affairs who thought that tipping off the 'Argies' to our landing, even at the last moment, would do anything other than utterly rupture the Atlantic alliance?  Every British casualty, fairly or unfairly, would have been laid at the door of a treacherous White House and an alliance that had lasted through two world wars would have ended instantly.  Was that really worth being thought well of by a bunch of drunken, debauched, Argentinian thugs dressed in ridiculous uniforms and well past their sell-by date, General Haig and Mrs. Kirkpatrick?

Mind you, whilst it is easy - alas, all too easy - to deride the many imbeciles who inhabit American governments we should not forget our very own.  By a sheer fluke we had the most outstanding prime minister since Churchill but just pause and consider what might have happened if that doddering, old fool, Michael Foot, had been running the country - yeeeees, quite!  And also, before we lay into the (so-called) American elite with our base-ball bats, let us pause and raise a glass to the memory of (Sir) Caspar Weinberger, a man who could definitely see the British wood for the Argentinian trees!

Well, after 30 years, it's all "blood under the bridge" but as Dr. Stanley reminds us, it behoves British statesmen to keep a very clear eye open when appraising likely American responses to this or that.  What we do not need is the sort of moon-calf love exhibited by 'Dim Dave':

Alas, whenever David Cameron takes a romantic break in Washington DC, it’s truly love that we see in his eyes as he hangs on Barack’s every word. Some of us will never forgive him for describing the UK as America’s “junior partner” during the Second World War. Given how much an Eton education costs, you’d have imagined that Dave would’ve paid a little more attention in history class.

Exactly!

 

Related articles

Documents show Reagan's plea to Thatcher

Reagan's plea to Thatcher revealed

US wanted to warn Argentina about South Georgia

It was a good day until the name of Anne Frank came up!

Yes, I was enjoying a quiet day, sitting up here in my attic scrolling through 'Blogdom' and then I hit the name "Anne Frank" who is the subject of an article in Der Spiegel.  That led me on to read her Wiki entry which left me, and I really do not want to sound soppy here, in a state close to tears.  I should make clear that I have never read her diaries, partly because the intimacies of a very young, teenage girl held, and still hold, little interest for me but also because I knew and still know that I would be hugely distressed by her words.  So, yes, good, old-fashioned, moral cowardice 'rules OK'! 

There are so many examples in existence, particularly in science, where the nature of being alters depending on the focal range.  For example, proteins, elements, molecules and atoms are one thing which studied en masse give one appearance of reality but sharpen the focus to the sub-atomic world and the picture changes utterly.  Thus it is, I think, with human affairs like the Holocaust.  I can look at it from a distance and mutter the usual pieties - and they are not hypocritical, I mean what I say, and to an extent I feel what I say.  But in doing that I am emulating the boffin, or the history professor, as he draws general rules from general observations taken at a distance.  With the story of Anne Frank, suddenly, you rocket downwards to the very closest of close-ups.  She is of statistics but is not a statistic.  Absolutely the opposite, she is herself, in all her varied aspects of being a human.  To be honest, I simply cannot bring myself to, as it were, look her in the eye.  Pathetic, I know, but there it is.  I honour her memory.  I pray that she may escape the worst attentions of both the well-meaning and the malign, and that she may continue to exist in her own right, not other people's.

In expressing her fervent desire to become a writer she used these words:

I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!

Who can read that knowing the outcome and not weep?

 

An official 'go slow' here at D&N!

Yes, I'm afraid 'the trains will not be running on time' here at D&N due to a coincidence of events.  First of all, on Wednesday this blog is not so much taking a great leap forward as rather stumbling through the swing-door into the 21st century by up-dating to Microsoft 8.  In addition, as part of my effort to rejuvenate and once again lead a healthy, vigorous sex blog life I am having a new 'drive' fitted - and, no, I have no idea what a 'drive' is in 'computerese' but I am assured it will do me a power of good.  Needless to say, with all the cynicism aquired after 25 years in the second-hand car trade, I am prepared for the whole thing to splutter to a halt the first time I press a button!

However, despite that particular event there is something else causing a slow down at D&N and I blame Waka Waka Waka!  No, no, that is not some new Max Mosley-style party game for Christmas, Waka Waka Waka is the blog of my e-pal Malcolm Pollack who makes occasional appearances here in the 'Comments'.  He has written a post drawing attention to some other contemporary thinkers and writers who share my increasing misgivings concerning the direction and the ends pursued by so-called 'democracy'.  In particular, Malcolm points to a four-part series of essays written by Nick Land (no, me neither) who explores the historical and philosophical routes that have led, inexorably it seems, to where we are today, and the likely (in his view) outcome in a dim but not so distant future.

Nick Land, and the other writers he links to, raise huge questions which I, and I think several other readers of this blog, have sensed without perhaps, in my case, the intellectual or just plain, old-fashioned, educational ability to formulate them.  His essay runs to four fairly long parts and then, of course, there are the other writers he refers to who must also be read.  In the meantime, I am slowly and carefully working my way through Jonathan Sacks's book whilst simultaneously trying to snatch bits and pieces from Hans Zinserr's eccentric master-piece Rats, Lice and History.  I am uneasily aware that some of my recent posts have been, shall we say, cursory and whilst I know that you do not expect polished gems of wit and wisdom I really don't like scribbling too many 'space fillers'.  So, there will be a bit of a 'go slow' for a few days as I try to catch up with my reading and, even more tricky, attempt to assimilate its contents.  Except when I go 'off air' on Wednesday there will be the odd post but nothing too 'heavy'!

Anyway, in the meantime, get over to Malcolm's place and pick up his links to Nick Land and start reading!

 

Lest we forget - who exactly won the war!

I haven't read Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945 by Max Hastings.  Not because I think it will be anything other than interesting but I am, so to speak, WWII worn out!  Also, I am uneasily aware that in my tottering pile of waiting-to-be-read books there are at least two or three on the subject.  However, I did read a review of the book in The American Spectator by Mr. G. Tracy Mehan, III.  (I am always amused by the idiosyncratic habit of some Americans in placing a numeral after their name and I wonder why they do it.)  Anyway, Mr. Mehan the Third, draws our attention to one great truth concerning WWII which Hastings makes much of and which is seldom referred to in British or American histories; that is, the mind-boggling difference in scale between the Eastern and Western fronts.

The most significant theme emphasized throughout Max Hastings' compelling history is the overwhelming nature of the savage war on the Eastern Front, which dwarfed Allied military efforts in Italy and France. So vast was the spilling of Soviet and German blood and treasure that Hastings makes this unequivocal judgment in the concluding chapter of the book:

The Soviet Union revealed an industrial and military capability that would have enabled it to complete the destruction of Hitler's war machine even had the Western Allies never landed in Italy or France, though their interventions hastened the end. There is a powerful argument that only a warlord as bereft of scruples or compassion as Stalin, presiding over a society in which ruthlessness was even more institutionalized than in Germany, could have destroyed Nazism. Stalin proved a supremely effective tyrant, as Hitler was not

In the course of his review he also draws attention to the writings of Benjamin Swchwartz, the Literary Editor of  The Atlantic:

Citing the British historian Norman Davies, Schwarz observed that, for four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions fought over a front of 1,000 miles. "At its most intense, the war in the West was fought between 15 Allied and 15 Wehrmacht divisions, [my emphasis]" wrote Schwarz. "Eighty-five percent of the German military dead fell there; in July 1943, in the decisive battle of the war, the Soviets permanently broke the Wehrmacht's capacity for large-scale attack at Kursk, 'the one name,' Davies properly asserts, 'which all historians of the Second World War should remember.'"

Schwarz continues: "So…the most odious criminal regime in Europe's history was defeated by an even more murderous regime, if numbers are the yardstick -- which significantly tarnishes any notion of the 'Good War.'" He concludes his essay with a quote from historian Geoffrey Roberts, who ventures to say that "Stalin…saved the world for democracy." [My emphasis]

The bitter and bloody irony of that final sentence cannot be over-stated.

 

Jonathan Sacks reminds me of my ignorance!

The last time I mentioned a book by Jonathan Sacks called “The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning” I had just finished chapter  #1 and already I was jumping up and down with excitement.  Now I have finished chapter  #3, and yes, it is slow going but I am both savouring the words whilst simultaneously trying to ensure that I understand them correctly.  The result of all that effort is that I am even more enthusiastic for both the book and the author - and my brain hurts!

Sacks, who is, as it happens, the Chief Rabbi, puts forward in quiet, elegant and civilized English the notion that: “Science takes things apart to see how they work.  Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”  He then sets out to support this proposition.  He begins by returning to that esoteric specialty, the study of ancient texts.  He reminds the swots amongst you, but actually teaches me because I never knew it, that whilst the Old Testament was written in Hebrew the New Testament was almost certainly written in Greek.  In other words, the teachings of Christ were eventually written and saved for us in a language which Christ himself probably did not speak.  It was at that point that two very different influences were brought to bear on the whole fractured and fractious business of God and His nature and purpose.

Sacks suggests that these two differing ways of thinking about our existence is mirrored in the natural make up of our brains in which the left hemisphere tends to be the basis of rational, analytical thinking whilst the right is more concerned with empathy and relationships and emotion.  Thus, he concludes, the left side of the brain will concern itself with seeing how things work whilst the right will search for meaning.  In early times when written language was just evolving most languages, certainly Hebrew and Aramaic, had no symbols to denote the vowel sounds and the written language went from right to left.  Later, beginning with the Greeks, a written language evolved which included vowel symbols and the writing switched to left to right.  The coincidence, Sacks points out, that this revolutionary change occurred during the period in which Greek philosophy and science also began is more than just a coincidence.

To begin with, Sacks tells us, the two very different approaches to the mystery of existence – the Greek scientific approach and the Jewish/Christian mystical approach – went along hand in hand and with mutual respect.  The Rabbis of the time never questioned Greek analytics, in fact they frequently agreed with them, but they remained steadfastly to the view that whilst it explained the ‘hows’ it failed to explain the ‘whys’.  For ‘meaning’ to become clear it was necessary to look into men’s hearts.  This happy synthesis continued until the 16^th century when the truly amazing explosion of scientific knowledge began which drove a wedge between the two that remains more or less unbridged right up to this day.  In fact many of the scientists in their arrogance are now positively hostile to any idea of a remaining mystery.

But not all of them!  If you need your sense of wonder to be re-ignited turn to the book written by Lord Rees called “Just Six Numbers”.  These are the six ‘prime’ numbers, if you like, that simply had to be met – exactly and independently of each other – before our universe could exist in the form we know it and they are, therefore, the absolute bedrock for our existence.  Rees puts it thus:

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitiveto their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator? I take the view that it is neither. An infinity of other universes may well exist where the numbers are different. Most would be stillborn or sterile. We could only have emerged (and therefore we naturally now find ourselves) in a universe with the ‘right’ combination. This realization offers a radically new perspective on our universe, on our place in it, and on the nature of physical laws.

It is astonishing that an expanding universe, whose starting point is so ‘simple’ that it can be specified by just a few numbers, can evolve (if these numbers are suitable ‘tuned’) into our intricately structured cosmos.

“Astonishing” is an astonishing understatement, in my view.  More later as I read further but why wait – get out there and beg, borrow or steal a copy – er, but not mine!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Partnership-Jonathan-Sacks/dp/0340995246

 

'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier ... Ghost'!

So George Blake, born George Behar of a Dutch mother and an Egyptian-Jewish father, is 90 years old.  I confess that if I had ever thought about him at all I would have assumed he had died years ago but not so according to The Mail which tells us that he lives comfortably in a flat in Moscow with his Dacha in the countryside, in other words, he lives the very comfortable life of a typical, bourgeois, Marxist commissar and I wonder if the irony, not to say, the tragedy, of it ever occurs to him?  He chose Marxism as his creed whilst fairly young which was a sign of his immaturity, but then he continued in its service whilst an adult which was indicative of his infantile stupidity.  The fact that he married and fathered three sons whom he deserted demonstrated his massive egotism.  I can only hope that the incontrovertible and, for him, deeply uncomfortable fact that his beloved Soviet Union is no more and that Mother Russia has reverted to type and is now ruled by a fascist gangster mob makes him weep nightly.  I doubt he sheds many tears for the men he betrayed and who died for an ideal far greater than his.  I can only hope he eventually dies of a particularly painful, long and lingering cancer!

 

Lest we forget

It is entirely right, fitting and perhaps essential that for a few moments each year we pause, bow our heads and ponder on the memory of those who have perished in service to the political imperatives of British foreign policy.  You will not often see it described thus, people preferring to use more abstract and grandiloquent terms.  But the fact remains that in the two world wars and in the plethora of minor campaigns and skirmishes around the globe, most of which are now forgotten, our men (and a considerbale number of women, too) died at the behest of the Foreign Office, the British cabinet and Parliament.  I put it thus to remind us that we should consider carefully where and when we deploy our armed forces and for what purpose.  Not, I hasten to add, that we should allow ourselves to be paralysed by fear of action.  It is a Darwinian world and if (big word that 'if'!) we value our society, using 'society' in its fullest and widest sense, then we should be prepared to fight and die for it.  It seems to me that a general feeling has grown up, perhaps engendered by the magnificent WWI poets and encouraged by the Marxists, that somehow the first world war was a waste of blood and treasure in contrast to the second which was entirely honourable and necessary.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The difference between Prussian and Hitlerian militarism was minimal.  The French had to be helped to resist the German onslaught in August 1914 because their defeat would have made ours almost inevitable.  So the men who fell in Flanders' fields did not do so in vain and we should remember them.

 

Stalingrad: "A new version of events"? Not really!

I frequently read the English-language version of Der Spiegel even though I know the magazine is Left-wing.  I do so mainly because the translations are very good and it provides a partial view inside Europe.  Needless to say, I always take a bag of salt with me and sprinkle it about liberally!  However, this story which they feature is not concerned with contemporary affairs but deals with history, in this case, the battle of Stalingrad.  It features the work of a former Soviet historian, Isaak Izrailevich Mints.  Apparently, in 1941 he set up the “Commission on the History of the Patriotic War”.  According to the ‘comrades’ at Spiegel:

The idea was for everyone in the armed forces, from common soldiers to high-ranking officers, to express their thoughts, feelings and experiences as a model for others -- but with no embellishments.

At that point I nearly swallowed my bag of salt!  Would anyone in Soviet Russia under Stalin ever dare to speak freely to strangers in that fashion?  I don’t think so!  The writers dismiss out of hand Antony Beevor’s assessment in his book Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, that 13,000 Russian soldiers were summarily executed at Stalingrad alone.  Actually, Beevor does say that there was a fair degree of honest and open talk, including criticism, right up at ‘the sharp end’ where denunciation of one’s comrades (in the military sense of the word) was minimal.  However, he also writes (p.288):

As one veteran put it, “A soldier felt that having paid with his blood, he had a right to free speech.”  He had to be far more careful if evacuated to a Field Hospital, where informants and political officers were vigilant for any criticism of the regime.

Spiegel even shoots itself in the head, so to speak, with this admission:

There is no doubt that there were executions on the front. Lieutenant General Vasily Chuikov, supreme commander of the 62nd Army, personally told historians how he dealt with "cowards": "On Sept. 14, I shot the commander and commissar of a regiment, and shortly thereafter I shot two brigade commanders and commissars. They were all astonished."

“Astonished”?  Well, quite!  But according to Spiegel, the Political Commissars who were attached to every formation HQ down to battalion level were really just a sort of combination of Father Christmas and Mother Russia:

At critical moments, the political officers occasionally also distributed chocolate and mandarins to the demoralized comrades. One of them, Izer Ayzenberg, from the 38th rifle division, used to tour the trenches with his "agitation suitcase." Aside from brochures and books, it contained games like checkers and dominoes.

Well, that’s nice, isn’t it?  And no-one in the Russian army would doubt their good motives, would they?  However, it seems to be true, as confirmed by Alexander Werth’s book, Russia At War 1941-194 [p:420], that efforts were made at high level to cool down the murderous activities of the Political Commissars.  The magazine Red Star produced a notable article on the subject:

Thus this truly historical article in the Red Army’s paper not only sounded the alarm over the excessively ruthless and perhaps irresponsible application of the new “iron discipline” rules but also brought to the surface the chronic conflict that had been brewing for a long time between the officer [class] and the commissar [class].

 Spiegel claims to be making an effort to right the wrong of a widely-held belief:

These latest findings completely undermine the argument -- put forward by the Nazis and repeated by the West during the Cold War -- that the Red Army soldiers only fought so fiercely because they would have otherwise been shot by members of the secret police.

I have never read a book that suggested fear of their Commissars was the main imperative behind Russian heroism.  Obviously it was a factor but far from being the largest – love of country, hatred of invader, comradeship and fear for family (or quite often revenge for loss of family) was likely to be much stronger.  Spiegel’s attempt to pink wash the Commissar class in the Soviet Army, some of whom were exceedingly brave men, might be politically correct from their point of view, but it hardly fits the facts.

Timon of Beijing!

This is one of my more meandering posts on an even more than somewhat arcane subject -Shakespeare's Timon of Athens - but stick with me, there is a point to it, honestly!  First of all let me correct an inexactitude, Timon was not wholly written by Shakespeare, a new-ish 'kid on the block', Thomas Middleton, was roped in to help out, the boss being somewhat busy around the 1606/7 period writing some of his very greatest masterpieces.  I learned all this and much more, very much more, from the 2008 Arden edition prepared by two Eng. Lit. swots, Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton.  I stress the duality because normally if you were to place two Shakespearean experts in a locked room eventually only one would emerge with three different opinions - the other having been murdered!  But these two are a 'dream team'.  They meld together effortlessly (or apparently so) and, joy of joys, they write clear, plain English that is easily understood, by which I mean that I only had to reach for my OED once or twice!  It is, in my opinion, the very best Arden Introduction I have ever read.  They are helped, happily, by the fact that Timon was not only never performed in Shakespeare's time, but neither was it published!  This only occurred when Shakespeare's old mates got together long after his death, collated his works and published them as the First Folio.  Timon, being of mixed parentage, so to speak, only squeaked in at the last moment almost due to an accident.  Anyway, the lack of a publishing history means that our two swots do not, unlike their compatriots discussing other scripts, spend page after tedious page telling us of the minor work practices of 'compositor A' as compared to 'compositor B' to say nothing of 'C', 'D', 'E' and so on into a yawn-inducing coma.  Instead, they tell us about the play and its underlying themes.

I vaguely remember skim-reading a cheap edition of the script very many years ago when my AmDram club decided to give it a go.  I was underwhelmed!  My 'whelm' was not increased after seeing our production of it - not that it was a bad production - just that the play, somehow, didn't quite work.  Thanks to Dawson and Minton I now have a clear idea why but, oddly enough, I am now very much more interested in it which is just as well because I am booked into my local cinema on the 1st of November to watch a 'simulcast' of the current production at the Royal National Theatre(*) starring Simon Russell Beale.  I urge you all to give it a go at your local cinema and it's no excuse to tell me that you live 'over there' or 'down under there' because these things go world wide, so your absence will bring down on your recalcitrant heads at least a hundred lines by way of punishment!

The main theme of the play is money.  When Shakespeare/Middleton wrote the play England was, just like today, in a state of flux over money and its uses and abuses.  Usury, that is charging interest on loans, had been forbidden across Christendom and it was only that old 'rebel', Henry VIII, who finally permitted the practice.  'The times they were a-changin' but in those days they changed exceedingly slowly and the mores of the earlier age hung on.  Thus, through Elizabeth's reign the higher levels of society worked on the give and take principle of you scratch my back today and I will be obliged to scratch yours on another day. Now you see the point of my silly title because this is the practice in modern day China where 'obligations' are, so to speak, banked!  As the recent Bo Xilai scandal has illustrated, this system is coming under extreme strain in a new era of international banking.  Back in 1606/7, similar rifts were occurring and, one might ruminate, Shakespeare himself was somewhat at sixes and sevens over this tricky problem of money, interest and obligation.  He, after all, was an artist, a creator, and yet we do know, or can infer, from his scant history that he was personally very keen on aquiring and keeping money.  He even sued to recover a loan that had gone bad!

Of course, mention money and you must instantly mention its bedfellow - sex!  To lend money at interest and thereby beget yet more money has obvious metaphorical connections to sex and procreation.  Shakespeare's approach to sex was ambivalent, being apparently idealistic in his earlier plays (R&J, for example) but even there, beneath the surface of the text there is a more than somewhat realistic, verging on cynical, undercurrent.  In later plays his approach to sex its almost vitriolic (MforM, T&C).  Not, except for a minor interlude, that sex as such enters this particular play, it's just that the references to usury have strong sexual undertones.

Timon lives under what he fondly believes (because he wants to believe it) a code in which gentlemen are always but always generous in gift-giving to each other but his fault-line lies in his insistence that he must forever be the biggest giver!  With all the inevitability of a stock-market crash, he goes broke and then finds out the hard way that his beneficiaries and 'friends' have deserted him.  This sends him from one extreme of lunatic generosity to the other extreme of almost psychopathic misanthopy.  He dies, mysteriously, and there's an end on't!  The play features one of Shakespeare's favourite devices, the apparently detached observer and commentator.  One thinks of Feste and Jaques but Epemantus in this play almost rivals Thersites from T&C in his venomous, vitriolic attacks on Athenian society in general and Timon's individual stupidity in particular.  This is a play of extremes and it lacks the subtleties and depths of his other great tragedies.  It is best described, I think, as 'a work in progress' but unfortunately he and Middleton never quite got around to finishing it off and providing it with a bit of polish.  Even so, I have learned, via this excellent Arden edition, that sometimes Shakespeare's lesser works are tremendously illuminating.  This is a savage, unformed attack on the society of the early 17th century - it can be read as a warning shot aimed at James  the First's notoriously spendthrift court which was causing much alarm at the time.  Anyway, Simon Russell Beale is in it and I would pay to hear him recite his laundry list!  Even if you don't see the 'simulcast' treat yourself to this Arden, the Introduction alone is worth the money:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Timon-Athens-Arden-Shakespeare-Third/dp/1903436974

(*) I try always to give the Royal National Theatre its full title because the left-wing scumbags who run the place are almost ashamed of using their 'Royal' title. Harrrrumph!

 

I say, old chap, shoot out at six suit you?

This blog prides itself on finding the very best of truly esoteric stories to bring to your grateful attention, er, you are grateful, aren't you?  Yes, of course you are, and this one is a corker from The Daily Mail:

To the casual Victorian visitor, Runnymede could have been any English country town. Locals would gather at the Runnymede Arms to discuss the cricket or the failings of Runnymede Wanderers Football Club.  There was a tennis club, polo ground and a thriving amateur dramatics society full of people speaking in the assured tones of the British upper class.

You might have thought you were in Berkshire, if it wasn’t for the fact that the local hunt chased coyote and some of the town’s polite young men liked nothing better than to swagger down the High Street firing rounds from six-shooters strapped to their hips.  For this particular Runnymede lay amid the endless plains of Iowa and its citizens weren’t the usual grizzled bunch of settlers scrabbling out a hard existence, but the sons of Britain’s ruling classes seeking a new life in the wide open spaces of the American West.

The article written by Tom Leonard follows the publication of a book, Prairie Fever by Peter Pagnamenta which charts the history of this odd fascination by the British aristocracy for a life in the 'wild west'.  One of the leaders of these 'awfully decent chaps' was no less than Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, who set up a community in Tennessee and, naturally, called it Rugby:

Thomas Hughes, famous in Britain as the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, set up his own colony in 1879, this time down south in Tennessee, where the English could learn to farm and lead a ‘manly outdoor life’ in a community of alcohol-free Christian fellowship.  Hughes named it Rugby — after his and Tom Brown’s old school — and it soon had such British landmarks as a 50-room hotel called the Tabard after Chaucer’s inn at Southwark, and a wooden Gothic church.

Hughes attended the church’s inauguration service and they all sang Jerusalem the Golden and God Save The Queen. It was, said a prominent New York visitor, nothing less than Britain’s second colonisation of America.

So why didn't these splendid chaps, the cream of the British public school system, go on to retake America and return it to its rightful owner - Her Maj Victoria?  Well, er, mainly because they were a bunch of total plonkers, that's why - read the article or the book for the details.

Still, jolly good show, chaps, 'E' for Effort, and all that sort of thing!

 

Compare and contrast: The 'Go git 'im, boy' and the 'Decent British chap'!

I am obliged to my regular commenter, 'Back of an Envelope' (who I wish would choose a more succinct psuedonym!), who points me in the direction of the ineffable Richard North who has written a post on the incipient corruption lying at the heart of our MoD High Command to which I drew attention in the preceding post.  In the course of his post, Dr. North introduces us to Col. Harry D. Tunnel IV, an American officer of, shall we say, very decided views as to the operational policy in Afghanistan, in general; but in particular, to the utter uselessness (in his view) of Maj. Gen. 'Nick' Carter, British Army, and his superior at the time - circa 2009/10.  Here they are:

You may read Col Tunnel's views (if you are up to taking on military jargon!) courtesy of Michael Yon, surely the very best war correspondent of his era, here.  In essence, according to Col. Tunnel, Carter is an ineffectual tosser unfit to command a latrine work-party.  You see, Col. Tunnel thinks that what armies are actually for, when you strip away the BS, is to kill people - mostly the enemy but if a few civilians get in the way, well, hell, that's war!  There is considerable merit in Col. Tunnel's, er, robust views and in any normal war between conflicted armies his notion complies with Lanchester's Square Law of Attrition which states, in simplified terms, that if you can kill more of the enemy over time than he can kill of you, then the rate of difference will increase exponentially and you will win - all other things being equal!  (Ah, yes, military strategists have learned a thing or two from the second-hand car trade when it comes to weasel words!)

But of course, the campaign in Afghanistan is not one of two armies facing off against each other.  It is one, clod-hopping, stumble-bumming army (because that is the nature of all armies everywhere) facing a more or less hostile population who, whilst they might hate each other for sundry tribal and/or religious and/or political and/or business reasons (usually the latter!), are combined in their desire for all foreigners to fuck off and leave them alone.  In so far as I can understand it, Maj. Gen. Carter's operational inspiration arose from a desire to make nicely-nicely with the civilians and by holding the roads open at all times to allow trade to flourish thereby winning friends and influencing people.  To which I can only ask - where do they find these little innocents?  And why do they put them in charge of armies?  Col. Tunnel is entirely right to suggest that putting troops into static positions guarding roads is simply to offer perfect targets for the enemy.  And who in hell actually likes any government, let alone one held in power by foreign troops?

Now, in the unlikely event that Maj. Gen. Carter reads this from ex-Cpl. Duff and complains,  my answer is simple - just look at Afghanistan - NOW - TODAY - after years of all your clever, subtle strategies and tactics!  You lost, Carter, but so did you, Tunnel, you poor man's John Wayne!  The pair of you should have taken one look at the country, and another look at recent history, and then told your bosses in Washington and London that there was absolutely no chance of ever running Afghanistan.  If they failed to listen to you then you should have put the lives of your men before your rabid desire for higher rank - and resigned!

The only operational plan that might have achieved some success should have been applied years ago when you should have wrecked the country's infrastructure (not a long job!) and departed, leaving a letter on the presidential desk telling whoever it would be who would eventually run the cesspit country that they had better behave because we know where you live and we can send a missile straight through your front door if you don't!

 

Honestly, Sir, I'm doing my prep

I am, so to speak, girding my loins, or, if that is too inflammatory an image, I am doing my homework before I undertake my in-depth investigations of Messrs. Disraeli & Gladstone, former 'Managing Directors of Great Britain Inc'.  As I indicated down below, whilst I know a fair bit about the early decades of the 19th century when Bonaparte provided some excitement for those of us who enjoy vicarious thrills, and the latter decades provided Bismarckian and Prussian mischief and venom to keep keep me amused, all the inbetween seems deadly boring by comparison.  But, as the 'cousins' say, all this is my 'bad' and I am determined to rectify my ignorance.  However, before launching into biographies of these two 'giants' of British history I had a quick look at my book shelves to see if their was something that might set the scene, so to speak.  Hey-ho and hoorah, there was an old paperback entitled, rather forbiddingly, "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918" by A. J. P. Taylor.  I have a soft spot for Taylor because once, as a callow youth, I had the impertinence to joust with him at a meeting of CND when he was a guest speaker in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament.  I can't remember the details but I am fairly sure he squidged me like an irritating mosquito.  See, I was an argumentative sod even then!

I suppose I must have read this book at sometime - it was first published in 1954 and my paperback version was printed in 1971 - but for the life of me I cannot remember it.  Anyway, yesterday, in between meeting old friends, I managed to begin reading his Introduction which is superb.  Clear, straightforward English that directs the reader immediately to the crucial factors involved but which does not avoid some dry wit.  Hence, in a footnote he writes: "It becomes wearisome to add 'except the Italians' to every generalization.  Hencefort it must be assumed." 

Oh boy, am I going to enjoy this one!

The bottomless pit of my ignorance

There's no end to it!  The more I try to learn something the more I realise how miniscule my knowledge is.  Take for example, Disraeli and Gladstone.  Oh, go on, give them a try.  How much do you know about either of them?  Almost certainly more than me.  Disraeli?  Bit of a flash-Harry, Jewish chap in a frock coat.  Gladstone?  Bit of a dull, Anglo chap in a frock coat.  Gladstone, I think, out-whiskered Disraeli!  Mind you, I do know a bit about Lord Salisbury because I have actually read Andrew Roberts' biography.  Proper chap, that Salisbury, and an all-out winner in the whiskers competition, too!

Anyway, now, because I have just read Dominic Sandbrook in The Mail, I simply have to read a good biography of both of them.  I have a vague memory that the late Roy Jenkins wrote a much-praised biography of  Gladstone but I am slightly wary because Jenkins, as a liberal politician himself, might be a touch too sympathetic.  Anyway, if any of you lot 'out there' can recommend anything I would be pleased to know.

So what, I hear you ask, did Mr. Sandbrook have to say on the subject of these two mighty Victorian statesmen?  Well, enough to convince me that Disraeli was the Tony Blair of his age:

At bottom, Benjamin Disraeli was interested only in Benjamin Disraeli. His entire political career was devoted to his own advancement; it is not for nothing that he famously boasted of having climbed ‘to the top of the greasy pole’.

As a young man in the 1830s, he tried to make his name as a novelist. But when money and fame were slow to materialise, he decided on politics instead.

Like so many of today’s professional politicians, Disraeli had distinctly mercenary motives. Although his father was a rich literary critic, young Benjamin had run up large debts because of his inordinate fondness for the high life. As an MP, however, the law would protect him from imprisonment for debt.

His principles, meanwhile, were as changeable as the winds.

I'm not suggesting that Mr. Blair is a financial wastrel but he certainly pursues the big bucks with a dedication that is almost frightening.  Back to Disraeli:

Having initially pretended to be a radical, he then flirted with ultra-reactionary Toryism, opposing efforts to improve the lot of the downtrodden working classes and scorning attempts to reform the corrupt political system.

Indeed, it spoke volumes about Disraeli’s essentially destructive style that he made his name with a devastating attack on his own party leader, the dogged and serious Sir Robert Peel, who wanted to scrap the archaic Corn Laws which protected British farmers against foreign competition.

Peel and his fellow reformers believed that free trade would benefit ordinary British families, who were naturally delighted at the prospect of cheaper food. But in this crucial test of principle, Disraeli preferred to back the wealthy vested interests of the day.

It was entirely typical of his cynical style, though, that once the Corn Laws had bitten the dust, he made no effort to restore them. Throughout his career, he saw principle as subordinate to tactical self-interest.

Oh boy, do I have to learn more about this man!  But what of Gladstone?  According to Mr. Sandbrook:

 Although Gladstone and Disraeli are forever associated in the public imagination, they could hardly have been more different. Disraeli was funnier, more flamboyant and more dashing.

But on almost every count that actually matters, Gladstone was far superior. He was a more convinced reformer, a more imaginative chancellor and a dedicated public servant who genuinely cared about the plight of the poor.

He upheld the principles of free trade, banished corruption from the civil service and introduced universal education for Britain’s children. And although he campaigned passionately for oppressed peoples abroad, he shrank from foreign adven- tures and despised Disraeli’s jingoistic excesses.

Above all, Gladstone was a man of impeccable moral seriousness, a hard-working, high-minded man with the courage to address the thorny issues of the day who left Britain a richer, fairer and more virtuous society than he found it.

Oh dear!  And just when I thought I could return to my favourite pulp fiction for a bit of R&R after all that learning from Ferdinand Mount, it's 'bak to skool' time again!

Taking a quick break from God business . . .

Yes, poor old God has taken a bit of a hammering here in recent days but I'm sure he can take the heat, as it were.  However, for a quick break do pop over to Anna Raccoon's place and read the first episode of the history of Sparta by 'Gildas the Monk'.  Absolutely fascinating!

Ethiopians fought in Korea?

Indeed they did, and they fought extremely well according to this story on the BBC News site.  In particular, this man, Capt. Mamo Habtewold, showed courage and leadership of the very highest order although his sense of timing (not really his fault) was slightly off. 

He was placed in command of a patrol sent out into no-man's-land just as the Chinese launched a major offensive.  Cut off, wounded, and with many of his men killed or wounded, Capt. Mamo Habtewold realised that all of his radios by which he might call in assistance were destroyed or lost. He maintained command and control of his men who beat off several Chinese attempts to overrun them.  Eventually, he found a functioning radio and called in artillery which allowed the patrol to get back to their own lines.

And there is a happy end to this story of courage.  Capt. Mamo Habtewold is alive and well at the age now of 81 and given his record of fighting in Korea plus the dangerous upheavals inside his own country that is some achievement.  Also, the South Korean government has agreed to pay pensions to any surviving Ethiopian(*) veterans of the Korean war.

See, it's not all bad news here at D&N!

(*) Thank you, JK, for the correction but I was under pressure from the Memsahib this morning and she is more terrifying than a Chinese division!

 

What does it take?

I have been pondering over a comment to my last Sunday Rumble by 'RogerH' in which he suggested that the key requirement for a successful national leader, or a Foreign Secretary, was 'character'.  I was in a hurry this morning and could only leave a somewhat cryptic response in which I edged towards that tiresome phrase "it all depends on what you mean by ..."  which is usually a precursor to tedious semantic nit-picking.

However, in an effort to avoid that particular quagmire I have been thinking about three great statesmen and what, if any, characteristics they shared.  Talleyrand, a great hero of mine, was famous for his womanising, his corruption, his treachery - and his finely-honed shrewdness.  He might have betrayed various governments of France, including especially that of Bonaparte, but did so always in what he saw as the higher interests of the nation rather than the current Jack-in-office.  I seem to remember from the biography by Duff Cooper (no relation, alas) which I read decades ago that Talleyrande always possessed a very clear view of his objectives and resisted any attempts to confuse him with too much detail.  He instructed his clerks, who were wont to pile paperwork upon him, "pas trop de zèle!"  He understood, I think, that it was essential to keep clear objectives in a clear mind even if you had to duck and dive en route to reach them!

I have discussed that dreadful old Prussian bully, Bismarck, many a time and 'oft.  His is an epic tragedy.  His success in welding a new nation-state out of hundreds of mini-statelets all of which succumbed to Prussian leadership was outstanding.  Again, the old brute never lost track of his ultimate aim and thus, despite the multi-dimensional complexity of European politics in the 19th century, he achieved his ambition.  The tragedy was that in creating the new Germany under a Prussian system he built into it the massive flaws that eventually brought about its collapse.

Sir Edward Grey was about as different from those two as it is possible to be.  A Victorian/Edwardian gentleman of the 'old school', a man of impeccable manners and deportment, happy to avoid at almost any cost (except duty) what were for him the horrors of London society by returning as often as possible back to his beloved Northumberland for the excitement of - bird watching!  Throughout his career as Foreign Secretary he never went abroad.  Like the others, he never lost sight of his ultimate aims and objectives.

Of course, in all these three examples, one might criticise them for choosing the 'wrong' set of objectives, but alas, that brings us back to semantics and what you mean by 'wrong'?  Unsuccesful?  Immoral?  Impossible?  Because one might be tempted to suggest that up until 1941 Hitler's policy objectives had been reached with absolute mastery but do we admire him?  Somewhat cynically, one is forced into a position of suggesting that the first three were brilliant and steadfast - and what made them truly great was that they lived to die in their own beds! 

 

I have just been re-educated and I didn't feel a thing!

Actually, that is not quite true because what I did feel was intense pleasure, delight and wonderment mixed with shame at the lazy idleness I have nurtured through the years which has left me as a man filled with opinions but not much in the way of true learning.  So, thank the Gods, for (Sir William Robert, 3rd Baronet) Ferdinand Mount and his jewel of a book, Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back To Us.  It is typical of this man that he rarely if ever uses his title, and he carries his staggeringly huge learning with the lightest of ease.  And I do mean 'learning' in the very highest and best sense of the word.  He doesn't just read books on the innumerable, mind-boggling subjects on which he writes with such elegant ease, he goes out and inspects them, digs into their history, compares them with similar artifacts, takes account of the mores of their day, links them to events and artifacts of today, and then with the sort of wit that leaves you smiling and nodding in appreciation he offers some startling conclusions.

Perhaps the most startling is the main thrust of his book which is the proposition that, far from the progressive's dream of Mankind climbing ever higher and higher to new levels of civilisation, in fact we have just spent the last two thousand years going in Full Circle back to the Greeks and the Romans.  He points the finger, not of hostility but more of intellectual wonderment, at the last 2,000 years of Christianity which, whilst it, too, had its virtues, also acted as a big wet blanket on the behaviour of Man.  Now the blanket has dried out and is beginning to disintegrate under the unrelenting forces of "that old common arbitrator, Time" and, lo, we find ourselves returning in a mixture of surprise and delight to the truly ancien regime of the classical world.

Please, please, buy this delightful, witty and immensely learn-ed book.

 

It's PowerPoint that won the Battle of Waterloo!

I have been racing - er, well, expending short bursts of energy - to try and finish my new, all-singing-all-dancing PowerPoint (PP) presentation on the Battle of Waterloo.  Yesterday a commenter called Jeff left a comment on an earlier post of mine and it transpires that he works for a PowerPoint design company in Canada.  Until now, I had reckoned myself the Cecil B. de Mille of PP designers but I suspect that Jeff's outfit have forgotten more about PP than I will ever know.  Even so, I have no hesitation in declaring my total and unstinting love for PP and the team of swots who dreamt it up in the first place.  It appeals to the latent (very latent) artistic side of my nature because colour, tone, shape, balance and movement all have to be considered along with sound effects if required.  Also there is a sort of theatrical element involved because you must limit the effect of PP's flair at those points during the presentation where you need the audience to listen to what you are saying.  In other words, PP can be a bit like acting with one of those prima donna leading ladies who will up-stage you at every turn - bitch!  Anyway, I love it and I can tell you that when I gave my last PP talk on the Battle of Midway and my little aircraft flew across the screen and bombed my little ships I was like a child of five at Christmas - and my audience loved it, too, after I woke them up to make sure they watched - well, it had been a good lunch!

But returning to Waterloo, again, just like Midway, I am struck by how luck? chance? fate? seems to play such a huge part in great events.  With the latter it was a couple of Jap recce planes being delayed by half an hour, and with the former it was a terrific mid-summer rainstorm on the Saturday afternoon and evening the day before the battle.  The rain 'stair-rodded' in for hours and allowed the British to make their escape up the road from Quatre Bras and on to the field at Waterloo.  The next morning Napoleon had ordered that battle commence at 09.00 but was advised that the ground was so sodden that artillery would be rendered ineffective.  Gunners firing round shot (canon balls) liked to achieve a skip and bounce effect which would provide you with a 'bigger bang for your buck' by taking out considerably more men.  Equally, the howitzer gunners knew that their exploding shells, instead of lying on the ground fizzing away until the fuse went off, would instead bury themselves in the mud and achieve very little.  As an ex-gunner himself, Napoleon appreciated the problem and so the opening 0f the battle was delayed by over two hours in order to give the ground time to dry out somewhat.  Those two hours turned out to be gold in the bank as far as Wellington was concerned because it gave his Prussian allies that bit more time to come in on Napoleon's flank and clinch victory.  Splendid chaps, those Prussians, won't have a word said against them, er, well, the 19th century ones, anyway. 

All of that old waffle was by way of telling you that I am giving my PP talk on Waterloo tonight and I am still frantically trying to put in last minute touches and tweaks - that's another problem with PP, you can never stop fiddling with it!  So I might be a bit busy for the rest of the day.

 

By the Left, quick march Forward!

I am obliged to Mr. Victor Morton of The Washington Times for his semantical reseach into the antecedents of the Democrat party's single word slogan - FORWARD.  It has history, that word!

Photos courtesy of USA Today

Mr. Morton reminds us that 'Forward' has long and strong connections to the most virulent forms of Marxism:

The slogan "Forward!" reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism. [...]

There have been at least two radical-left publications named "Vorwaerts" (the German word for "Forward"). One was the daily newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany whose writers included Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky. It still publishes as the organ of Germany's SDP, though that party has changed considerably since World War II. Another was the 1844 biweekly reader of the Communist League. Karl Marx, Engels and Mikhail Bakunin are among the names associated with that publication.

And even Lenin is attached to the name:

Vladimir Lenin founded the publication "Vpered" (the Russian word for "forward") in 1905.

So come on, you Yankee-doodle-dandies, altogether now, keep in (goose) step and on the word of command . . . FORWARD! . . . and don't forget to wave your little bouquets of flowers to the Dear Leader as you dutifully march past!

 

A Spanish perspective on Orwell and Trilling

In a comment thread down below somewhere, my Spanish e-pal, Ortega, obviously an Orwell admirer, offered some terrific links to the Orwellian ouevre and I encouraged him to come back with his own thoughts on this idiosyncratic (I choose the word carefully) intellectual whose influence, or at least, whose repuatation, still stands tall today.  Obviously a busy man, Ortega sent instead a translation of an essay on the subject of Lionel Trilling's Introduction to Homage to Catalonia by a friend of his, Gregorio Luri.  I thought it was worth reprinting it as a guest post.  I have taken some liberties by correcting it for English usage and clarifying (I hope!) certain passages.  Ortega you must feel free to come back and correct me if I have changed anything into a different meaning. You can see Ortega's original comment here without changes.

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Well, as in answer to your request I had translated something that Gregorio Luri, a friend of mine and a much more clever thinker than I ever will be (what? what do you mean it is easy?), wrote about Trilling and Orwell, I copy it anyway. Maybe it will interest you anyway. Of corse, you may also simply delete it!

Please note that any silly point comes from my poor translation:

 "Just start reading 'The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent', a selection of essays by Lionel Trilling. Those who have read Orwell in catalan may recall that he is the author of the introduction of Homage to Catalonia, also in the first American edition of this book.

Trilling interest me so much, for different reasons. He belongs to that generation of leftist intellectuals who appeared in New York in the first decades of the twentieth century (the New York intellectuals), which has had a so important impact on the subsequent development of the intellectual history of the United States. He was one of its most representative and influential members and certainly one of the most determined to pawn our intelligence in a critique of totalitarianism, without much regard for those who considered him an enemy in his time for this. Unable to have more faith in history than in intelligence, he had no qualms about openly dissent from the Orthodox dissent. The collection of essays published in 1950 under the title of 'The Liberal Imagination' is a great example of this.

The book 'The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent' takes its title from an essay by John Erskine (1914) and it is a declaration of faith in the intelligence. An intelligence, it must be added, freed from the bonds that usually hold it to utilitarian ends, let's say, to happiness. Innocence and purity bored him as much as he hated bigotry. He knew that things are always more complex than what those in need of comfort at all costs want to imagine. In that sense, he was very much a Nietzschian and was profoundly suspicious of the dangers lurking surreptitiously after our best intentions. His ultimate goal: not to disappoint himself.

Trilling was, before anything else, a literary critic. It is no exaggeration to add that he was one of the fathers of modern American literary criticism, as clearly illustrated in 'The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent'. He was convinced that contemporary moral imagination had been shaped by the novel of the last three centuries that had managed to shroud the reader in a moral atmosphere and to further encourage his critical eye into an examination of the underlying reasons for his actions, beyond what conventional education had taught him. In this sense, the history of the modern novel would be the history of contemporary moral sense and a competent literary critic could not be anything but a historian of morality. The novel would have been the great educator of the present.

Death caught him writing an essay on Jane Austen, representative, in my view, of that fraction of literarature morally defeated by the apologists of nihilism, led by Tolstoy, who reveals to us the trivial fall of Ivan Ilyich into an unremarkable death.

About Lionel Trilling on Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I've just re-read it and I think it is still in full force, for its ability to continue to illuminate the problems of today.
Trilling, who read with great interest Ortega's 'Rebellion of the Masses', knew that Europe had relinquished command in the world. But he also knew that in politics there is no vacuum. Abstention is also a form of political activity and, therefore, it does not relieve us from responsibility in the progress of the world. This is one of the ideas that 'Homage to Catalonia' points out.

Orwell was highly critical of what he called "the English left-wing intelligentsia". He satirized them with some ruthlessness, stating that their entire ideology could fit in half a dozen newspaper articles and they showed a striking inability to offer any real alternatives to the real problems. "There is little substance in it, except for the irresponsible criticism from people who has never been and never will be in a position of government."

Finally, Orwell was particularly interested in preserving the commonsense of ordinary people from the erosion of the apostolic enlighteners of the masses. Moreover, he was convinced that the ingenuity with which ordinary people cling to their values is a real vaccine against the influence of abstract ideas and their potential nihilism. In everyday prejudices, he could sense an unconscious (and no less natural) will for healthy society. If this is so, if political life on its surface shows a profound truth, intellectuals bent on liberating the people no matter what, may be less lovers of the truth than what they proudly and enthusiastically assume."

 

"Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare": James Shapiro

I must begin by creeping to the 'Headmaster', DM, because he urged this book upon me and who am I to dare to refuse?  Once again, Sir, you demonstrate your excellent taste and discernment!  Actually, I was halfway there anyway because Shapiro's earlier book, 1599: A year in the Life of Shakespeare, I now treasure as one of my all-time favourites.  Shapiro has that rare but invaluable talent of passing on a seemingly inexhaustible breadth and depth of knowledge on Shakespeare and his times with the very lightest of touches.  At the end of it you have been well and truly educated and yet you didn't feel a thing - except warm pleasure.

The same is true of his latest book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare, although it must be admitted that, as DM warned, it gets a little hard-going in the middle.  This is not, I think, Shapiro's fault.  Given the subject matter he is absolutey required to repeat, with as much accuracy as possible, the infantile dribblings of a great many people who should have known better.  The list of fools, suckers, shysters, snobs and dimwits just seemed to get longer and longer.  Here is just a sample:

Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Tom Bethell (of The American Spectator whose journalism I used to admire), Leslie Howard (the late film actor), Sir Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance and so on and on.  None of these are 'shysters' but I leave it to readers of the book to catergorise them according to taste.

Not, I hasten to make clear, that all these people and many others actually agreed upon who had written Shakespeare's plays, oh dear me, no; like Python's The People's Front of Judea confronting The Judean People's Front, the two sides, one in favour of Francis Bacon, the other favouring the Earl of Oxford, lambast each other with cries of "Splitters!" and both reserve complete contempt for the minority groups in favour of Kit Marlowe or Edmund Spenser or Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all!

That very shrewd observer of both modern and historical life, Hilary Mantel, sums it up beautifully in her review in The Guardian:

It's a tale of snobbery and ignorance, of unhistorical assumptions, of myths about the writing life sometimes fuelled by bestselling authors who ought to know better.

In essence, this disbelief in the abilities of the country boy from Stratford rests upon the belief that no-one could write in so much detail of matters and experiences which, given Will's lower-middle-class background, he could not have experienced himself.  In other words, artistic imagination does not exist.  And this came from several world-renowned writers! 

You couldn't make it up - but they did!

 

The shortest love affair in history

Monday 27th August 2012:  Dear George, I love you.

Tuesday 28th August 2012:  Dear George, let's call the whole thing off!

I refer, of course, to George Orwell whose praises I was singing to the skys skies (sorry, Miss Andra, I'll hand in my 100 lines later), see below, but that was before I actually read something of his work.  I blame my e-pals who urged me to read The Lion and the Unicorn but who failed to provide me with the second part of his title, Socialism and the English Genius, which might have given me a warning.  Parts I and II of the First Section were somewhat romantic but by Part III onwards and into the Second Section it was not so much downhill as a freefall off the cliff!  Reading Orwell on the supposed joys of socialism is like reading one of those Mills & Boone romances in which even a hint of reality is firmly eschewed.

I would dearly love to return to his book and, step by step, take him and his nonsense apart but what's the point?  He's dead and I have learned the hard way on the Trot-lot blogs that people of his mind-set (I refuse to say 'thinking') inhabit a cartoon world of cigar-smoking capitalists and honest, horny-handed sons of soil and toil.  Anyway, his English socialist dream came true in 1945 and instead of galvanising our society to levels of prosperity for all, by the time he died in 1950, we still had rationing which was to continue until 1954 - nine years after the war had ended!  So much for socialism!

I'm sorry, George, but I'm very angry with you.  I think you have led me up the garden path and your intentions were not honourable.  Your brilliant writing smoothed the way to my heart but my reading of it has exposed you for the 'useful idiot' you are, or, were!

And as for all you match-makers - you're all banned!

 

George Orwell - Right, Left, Centre or in a space of his own?

I have been prodded into this post on the subject of George Orwell by two recent events.  Needless to say, I know virtually nothing about the man but, hey, when did that ever stop me tapping away?  The first event was reported in the MSM when, and I'm hazy on the details, some 'Pecksniff' in a local council decided that a statue to Orwell could not be erected because he was - too Tory!  Blimey, I thought, that sounds like subtle thinking from a 'Pecksniff' because Orwell is generally known as a Leftie.  The second event, however, confirmed the 'Pecksniff'; it was an article on Orwell in The Weekly Standard by John P. Rossi and the title was The Tory Anarchist.

Now I had better 'fess up and tell you that my ignorance of George Orwell is yet another of those pebbles in the shoes of my conscience (there are so many I wonder why I bother giving my conscience shoes to wear!) which niggles away at me.  The very little I do know, or think I know, of George Orwell makes me suspect that he was a very great Englishman.  He was one of those rarities, it seems to me, who was able to combine great passion, enough anyway to make him volunteer for someone else's war, with calm detachment which allowed him to see through the fakery of the great 'religions' of his time, like the British Empire, and Communism.  To tell truth and shame these devils took considerable physical and moral courage.

So, there is my mea culpa, but now I need some of you swots to recommend a good biography, or even, just a good assessment of his life and works.  I am now, and always have been, much given to hero-worship and I sense that George Orwell was one of life's real heroes.

 

In which I share a bath with Ferdinand Mount

Well, I have known him, off and on, for about 30-years.  Perhaps 'known' is too strong a word but back in the day he used to write for 'The Speccie' and, like all my favourite columnists, I feel I really do 'know' him even if I have never met him.  Anyway, my somewhat laboured joke in the title to this post refers to the opening chapter of his latest book - Full Circle: How the Classical  World Came Back to Haunt Us.  In this chapter, entitled The Bath, he provides us with a history of baths and bathing as a means of proving his central point in the book that far from following progressive notions in which Humankind has steadily advanced to ever greener pastures in an upland of civilisation (always led by Progressives, of course), in fact we have merely executed a complete circle and are now back where we started in Greco-Roman times.

Now, it really doesn't matter whether or not you agree with Mr. Mount who is, after all, a typical 'Speccie' writer in that he is highly intelligent, perceptive and able to cast a cool but good-humoured  eye over all sort of ideas and then distill his conclusions into shrewd but witty words.  However, having only read his opening chapter on the history of bathing I am convinced!  And, what is more important, in the process of being convinced I have also been effortlessly educated and delighted with a seemingly unending wealth of details and personalities ranging from Sir Daniel Gooch who was Isambard Kingdom Brunel's chief engineer and the patron behind the building in Swindon of the huge bath-house provided for the benefit of his workers on the Great Western Railway, to the eras of Diocletian, Caracalla and Hadrian and their baths each covering some 25 acres which puts them amongst the biggest buildings we know of in the ancient world.  I am tempted to quote that old catchphrase of an equally old Brit comedian whose name eludes me - "notta lotta people know that!"

I know I am always banging on about this book or that but really, truly and honestly and cross my heart and wish to die - this is a copper-bottomed, gen-u-ine, absolute CORKER!  I know that one or two of my regular readers are tremendous brain-boxes (which makes me wonder why they slum it over here) but I bet even they will find things in this book which they never knew and which might, just, alter their perception of our world.

 

Sir John Keegan: Farewell and thanks

I have been mulling over the possibility of writing a series of blog posts under the general heading of 'Books Wot I Read and Remember', in fact, I might yet do so - you have been warned!  Amongst them would certainly be John Keegan's The Face of Battle.  I have just taken my copy down from my bookshelf and am somewhat shocked to see that it was published as long ago as 1976 - where did the time go?  Anyway, alas and alack, Sir John Keegan has just died and so we have lost one of the very best writers of military history for the non-specialist.  That particular book, his first, I think, looked at war in different ages from the bottom up.  Rather than concentrate on the high and mighty manouvres of the generals, he told us what it was like for the archer at Agincourt, the infantryman at Waterloo and the 'Tommy' at the Somme.  But he was far, far, more than just a mere raconteur, he analysed closely the physics and mathematics of warfare and how they impinged on the men 'up the sharp end'.

He went on to write other books on military history in his pelucidly clear writing style so that matters of great moment and complexity were teased out into easily understood explanations.  I must read some more of him because according to his Wiki entry he took a swipe at the 'God of Warfare', Karl von Clausewitz, which angered his fellow historians.  I always enjoy a contrary view so I must look that up.  Anyway, what's not to like and admire about a man who wrote this:

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

Quite so, quite so, couldn't have put it better myself!  Anyway, I for one am very grateful for the life and works of John Keegan which have give me not just historical information but also historical insights.

ADDITIONAL:  Since writing the above I have come across this paper by Christopher Bassford suitably entitled "A Polemic" in which, I gather from a  brief glance, is a defence of Clausewitz and a fairly vigorous defence, too!  Goody-goody, nothing like a really vicious, academic punch-up, beats the Olympics every time! 

 

Once upon a time . . .

Now and then, take a look at these 'then and now' photos of old London sent to me by my e-pal, JK,  The very last photo looks like Kenneth Branagh and his chums from the Olympic opening show.  The other (semi) interesting thing is exactly when and who decided that we drive on the left?  Jest askin'!  Anyway, thanks, Jk, for a fascinating link - but that's not an encouragement for you to send me 200 more!

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/25/once_upon_a_time_in_old_london_town#0

If accidentally you bump into Anna Breslaw, hold your nose and move on!

Good manners insists that I thank the excellent John Podhoretz of the Commentary site for pointing me towards this particularly rancid pile of pavement droppings even if he did warn me to avoid stepping in it.  Alas, curiosity impelled me on and so I read the article in The Tablet sicked up by the afore-mentioned Anna Breslaw.  The opening paragraph gives you the, er, flavour: 

Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror—visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”

It's difficult to know how to respond to this except to wonder if the gas is still switched on at Dachau and if so whether or not they could squeeze in just one more!  Ms. Breslaw claims to possess "a gut instinct".  I would put it more accurately by describing it as a 'gutter instinct'.  To sneer, to insult, to spit upon anyone who survived the Nazi extermination factories (or the Communist gulags, or the Chinese mass murders of Mao, or - well you fill in your own choice) is behaviour so vile as to be beyond description.  Needless to say, or at least, needless to say amongst grown ups with even half an idea of the way of the world (so that excludes the brainless Ms. Breslaw), they were not all saints inside places like Dachau.  There were, perhaps some outright saints but the other 99.9% of the inmates were the usual very human mixture of vice and virtue.  They all wanted to survive because that is part of being human.  Most did not and those that did were, I guess, 95% lucky and 5% intelligent.  Your name either came up on the daily rosta or it did not.  The longer you were an inmate the smaller became your chances of surviving.

So, Ms. Breslaw, here's five examples of those who made it.  What would you do if you were facing them?  Shriek insults at them for surviving?  Insinuate slyly that they obviously worked for the Germans because they lived and others did not?  Harangue them for failing to push themselves to the head of the queue leading to the gas chambers?  Perhaps even suggest that they do the 'decent' thing and top themselves?

True evil comes in many forms but amongst the worst is when it appears in the form of a monumentally stupid, 'Noo Yawk' Jewish, clacker-mouth with the moral and common sense of a slug - if that is not an insult to slugs!  I truly hope and wish (and would pray if I knew who to pray to) that Ms. Breslaw gets cancer.  Then we'll see what she has to say about survival and survivors!

 

The man had balls as well as a brain!

Poor old Albert, er, Einstein that is, was a very misunderstood man.  Well, I for one never understood a word he wrote, or at least, sometimes I would catch a glimpse of the great shining truth he espoused but just as I was about to shout "Eureka!" I would blink and away it would go with the fairies - into infinity, I suppose! Anyway, his wife obviously didn't understand him, either, judging by this note he addressed to her as the conditions for him remaining with her for the sake of the children:

CONDITIONS

1. You will make sure:
   1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
   2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
   3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
2. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:
   1. my sitting at home with you;
   2. my going out or travelling with you.
3. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
   1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
   2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
   3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
4. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

 

Needless to say, she left after five months!  Still, guy's got guts whatever else you think about him.  I mean, if it was me (assuming I could summon up the courage to write such a thing), I would probably die of starvation because I would never dare eat anything the Memsahib produced!  Odd, isn't it, that perhaps a brief scribble like that tells you more about the man than a detailed biography. The quote came from the delightful and always interesting Lists of Note site.

 

The Sunday Rumble: 15 July 12

Hoorah for the Jobsworths:  You will not often see those words on this blog so savour them whilst you may.  I nearly fell out of bed with laughter this morning when I heard on the news that some Jobsworth had switched off the sound system in Hyde Park just as someone called Bruce Springsteen and that dreadful little scouser, Paul McCartney, were about to bawl and shout their final numbers.  Apparently they had over-run their finishing time 0f 10.30 and according to the by-laws no more 'music' was permitted.  You don't even have to listen to their demented wailing to know just how awful they are, instead just look at this photo and imagine, courtesy of the BBC:

The over-excited oaf on the right is Steven Van Zandt, a member of Springsteen's E Street Band, and his finer artistic feelings were deeply hurt at being cut off in his, er, prime:

"English cops may be the only individuals left on earth that wouldn't want to hear one more from Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney!"

No, no, darling, there's lots more of us who would pay good money never to hear from either of them again - or you, come to that!

How to break the world record: With the Olympic yawn-a-thon stumbling catastrophically to its imminent opening I think it behooves us all to raise our different games.  We may not be able to break the 100 metres sprint record, in fact, many of us couldn't even run 100 metres, but in our different ways we should try to improve our performance.  I made an inadvertant start this morning when I shuffled into the kitchen and glancing at the 'telly' I saw this:

In an amazing feat of pure athleticism I both found and activated the 'do-flicker-thingie' in the world record time of 0.17 seconds and, bingo, she was gone.  'Harry Harperson' has that effect me.  How about you?

Is 'Dave' going to do a 'Harold'?  Rumours in the 'hackosphere' that  Georgie's time may be up.  Apparantly the ratings agencies are moving closer to a downgrade on British credit worthiness which is hardly surprising given that both George and Dave continue to spend and borrow like the toffs they are whilst pretending to be austere minders of the privie purse.  Dave's popularity is not only sinking amongst the electorate but even amongst his own party, as last week's massive rebellion indicated.  When Harold MacMillan was faced with a similar problem he executed his infamous 'night of the long knives', sacking, I think, six cabinet ministers starting with his chancellor.  Thus, he earned his soubriquet of "Mac the Knife"!  Will Dave have the ruthlessness to do the same?  He might have to do something because I cannot see either him or this coalition lasting.

Well, would you want your ear licked by - a lawyer?  As you all know, this blog is ceaseles in its efforts to bring you all the news that's fit, or unfit, come to that, to print.  Thus, with the assistance of the greatest grubber of news items big, small and infinitesimal, Drudge, I bring you a report of dirty goings on in a Kauai court.  Where the hell is Kauai when it's at home, I hear you mutter, so let me inform you ignoramuses that it is on the Island of Oahu (correction - see comments) in Hawaii, birth place (allegedly!) of the greatest (sort of) black man ever born.  According to that great newspaper of record, the Star Advertiser:

A Kauai District judge found an attorney guilty Thursday of licking his client’s ear at his Lihue office. 

Lawrence McCreery, 64, was convicted of harassment by per-diem District Judge Frank Rothschild. 

On July 26, 2011, McCreery was discussing a 21-year-old woman’s child custody case when he touched her arm, said a news release from the Kauai prosecutor’s office, and McCreery made a strange sound, hugged her tightly and licked the back of her right ear.

Shockin', shockin', of course, but they don't tell us what we all want to know - how much did he bill her for that little lick?

Anyway, mention of Oahu reminds me that I still have work to do on the Pearl Harbour bit of my forthcoming talk.  Mind you, I'm still shaking my head in wonderment that those two crucial American carriers were absent having delivered aircraft to Wake and Midway when the Japs struck.  They were scheduled to be back but bad weather delayed them.  Perhaps, just perhaps, there is a God!

 

More creepy coincidence

This coincidence business is happening more and more often.  Only the other day I told you about the excellent but gut-wrenchingly awful Child 44 written by Tom Rob Smith.  The opening chapter describes in wincing detail the horrors of the Ukrainian famine.  I have read some of the history books on this mass murder wrought on his own people by Joseph Stalin but somehow statistics never quite convey the full and loathsome flavour.  In just one chapter Mr. Smith does what a dozen history books can never do - make you feel ill.

That was a few days ago but last night I decided to watch a programme I had recorded on my 'super-dooper-do-flicker-recording-thingie' (thanks, Rupe!) concerning the life and somewhat mysterious death of a Welsh reporter called Gareth Jones (1905-1935).  The programme, on BBC4, was called, rather intriguingly, Hitler, Stalin and Mr. Jones.  I am forced to agree with Ian Hollingshead in The Telegraph who thought that the very remarkable life and death of Gareth Jones was ill-served by this rather poor documentary. 

 

Jones was from a middle-class, Welch background and attained a first class degree in modern languages at Cambridge.  He seemed to have an effortless ability to identify the important circles in which an aspiring young man with no connections should mix and as a result, Hollingsworth writes:

He graduated from Cambridge in 1930 and spent the next five years working variously for Lloyd George, The Times, the Economist, Rockefeller and British intelligence. He also managed to meet Randolph Hearst, share a 16-seat aircraft with Hitler, whom he likened to a “middle-class grocer”, and have dinner with Goebbels.

How Somerset Maugham or John le Carré would have enjoyed knowing him!  However, back to my creepy coincidence.  He first made a name for himself by visiting the Soviet Union - he had learned Russian - as a journalist.  This was in the early '30s when Stalin's version of "hope 'n' change" had begun in the Ukraine.  Rather shrewdly, Jones skipped off the train before it reached its destination where he would have been met by Party apparatchiks.  Making his own way he saw the truth which was a deliberate policy of mass starvation.  We now know, or at least, estimate, that some 10 million men, women and children perished in the Ukraine during this period.  Jones reported this via The Times and all hell erupted over his head, led by The New York Times and its despicable Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, who ran a headline: “Russians hungry, but not starving”.  (Heavens to Betsy, the NYT lying for communism, 'who'da thunkit'?)

Jones was now a marked man but he continued his travels moving into ever higher circles of influence.  Eventually, in the mid '30s, following his nose to yet another potential trouble spot, he went into inner Mongolia and the border between China, Russia and Japanese-controlled Manchukuo.  There, in a desert wasteland, in the company of an exceedingly dodgy German of very mixed loyalties, he was taken prisoner by some bandits.  Somehow, the German was freed but Jones was killed. 

A short life but one that was lived to the full.   Come on, Mr. le Carré, there's a cracking book to be written here - and an even better film.  But in the meantime I wish these creepy coincidences would leave me alone!

 

This book makes me sick!

No, I mean really, it does.  I kep reading a bit until I feel the bile rising and then I put it down and leave it for a day until I have the stomach to try again.  Then why bother, I hear you ask, but the problem is that it is a vey good, well-written book, it's just, well, oh hell, I had better explain.

The book is Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith and everybody and their uncles have praised it up hill and down dale - but it still makes me sick.  What Mr. Smith is doing so brilliantly is exactly what Alan Furst has done so brilliantly with central Europe in the late '30s early '40s.  He, you may already know if you pay attention to my recommendations - er, you do, don't you? - evokes that period so vividly that you can almost smell the Gaulloises cigarettes and the ersatz coffee.  Smith does the same thing with Stalinist Russia but with him you can only smell the sheer, rank fear that oozes out of everyone with their sweat.  From my little knowledge of that period I suspect that he has it exactly right.  The violence is casual, unthinking and driven entirely by a mix of ideology and orders.  There are no exceptions - men, women, children, the sick, the lame and the halt, all are despatched frequently for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I jest occasionally at the body count in some of the 'pulp fiction' to which I am addicted but somehow it is never real.  Jack Reacher takes down six men singlehanded and it leaves you chuckling but the characters in Mr. Smith's book put a bullet in the head of a kneeling child without compunction - and that is all too real.  It has taken me a week to just reach halfway.  I suppose I must finish but, oh God, I'm not looking forward to it.

 

As the sun sets, the bugle sounds, we bid farewell to ...

2nd Bn, the Royal Welch, incorporating the South Wales Borderers (of Rorke's Drift fame), Royal Welch Fusiliers, The Welch Regiment whose combined service included the Boyne, Quebec, Indian mutiny, Waterloo, Crimea, Boer War, the Somme, Normandy, Iraq.

2nd Bn, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, incorporating the Northumberland, Warwickshire, Lancashire and Royal (City of London) Fusiliers.  They variously served in the American Revolution, Napoleonic wars, Boer War,both World Wars, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan.  Famously the Lancashires won 7 Victoria Crosses before breakfast at Gallipoli.

2nd Bn, the Yorkshire Regiment, incorporating the Green Howards.  In the 18th century regiments were frequently named after their colonels and at the time there were two Col. Howards. To distinguish them they were given different coloured facings to their tunics.  Thus, one became Howard's Buffs soon simplified to 'the Buffs'; and the other became the Green Howards.  They won 16 Victoria Crosses including the only one to be awared on D-day.

3rd Bn, the Mercian Regiment, incorporating the 38th Foot, 64th (2nd Staffs) Regiment, 2nd Bn the North Staffs Regiment.  They fought everywhere from Ireland to Russia to Africa, France, Iraq and Afghanistan.  They won 13 Victoria Crosses.

5th Bn, the Royal Regiment of Scotland (the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders).  They fought at Waterloo, the Crimea, Passchendaele, Crete, Palestine, Suez, Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan winning 16 Victoria Crosses.

Two armoured regiments are to be merged with sister regiments and a regiment of artillery is to disappear.  A total of six Engineer and Logistic formations are to be disbanded.

And so it ends, "not with a bang but a whimper".  And it has ended, my friends, once and for all.  By "it", I mean pretensions to grandeur, the self-delusion that we are still a world power, willing and able to project our strength about the globe.  The beginning of the end started around 1900 and reached its culmination 45 years later.  Everything since then has been a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable mixed with occasional demands of duty, the Falklands campaign, for example.  We are now a middling world power but a somewhat stronger regional power.  It is time to think hard about our new place in the world order and how we can set about stopping our decline.  Not, I hasten to add, that I have any wish to resuscitate old habits of attempting to boss the world about, but only to establish a reputation as a fiercely independent country confident of its own abilities.

Warning - I might bore more on this subject anon!  In the meantime, pause a moment and think on the histories of those proud regiments and the men who served in them, gentlemen and rogues, scallywags and heroes, to paraphrase Orwell, 'rough men who stood ready to do violence on our behalf'.