Bonar Law

Your interpretation is that he’s advocating resisting the British Government’s decree for home rule, but my instinct (based on my knowledge of the historical circumstances and Bonar Law, without any specific knowledge of this particular speech) would be that he was expressing support for the Ulster Unionists as strongly as possible, including in their violent suppression of SUPPORTERS of it . You (or perhaps the author) inserted “[British]” in brackets into that quote – are you sure that he meant British, and not the Government in Ulster or something more like that? That would materially change the significance of the quoted line (if not the whole speech, which I admittedly haven’t read). There was a power struggle going on between different organizations with different sources of moral and institutional legitimacy so the shading matters, I think.

I had a similar reaction; the GOP has been playing this game for a while. When they don’t have the Presidency, they rail against an oppressive federal government. Whey they do have the Presidency, they do their d*mnedest to make the federal government more oppressive and more corrupt, while trashing anybody who might even criticize it.

there are interesting parallels here with the french oas and its armed resistance to degaulle’s de-colonization of algeria. l’algérie est française et le restera!

if bonar law had pushed it further, it could have made a great film called “the day of the bulldog”.

To be honest, more or less anything to do with Ireland basically disappeared from historical memory in Britain[1]. I don’t know why but it just isn’t taught. I think I’ve commented here before a few times that it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.

[1] presumably less so in Northern Ireland, though I dunno.

Bonar Law seemed to follow in the seditious footsteps of Randolph Churchill, minus the u-turns.

Right. I’m midway through Andrew Roberts’ voluminous biography of Salisbury, right at the Home Rule debacle, and it’s quite clear that such “allusions” were present and understood at that time.

… What struck me more, oddly, was what Roberts acknowledges as Salisbury’s quite unconstitutional abuse of the Queen’s favoritism — she would forward him private letters from Gladstone, and from other Liberal cabinet members, while Salisbury was in opposition. Roberts simply observes that for Salisbury the end of defeating Home Rule justified the means.

it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.

Who, even if there might be a bit of hyperbole involved here, that’s shocking – so the English education system falsifies history? On the other hand, since I’ve known Irish people from a very young age, I always had the mental image of Cromwell eating small children for breakfast.

oops, wow, not who

‘To be honest, more or less anything to do with Ireland basically disappeared from historical memory in Britain. I don’t know why but it just isn’t taught. I think I’ve commented here before a few times that it wasn’t until as an adult when I met a few Irish people that I discovered that Oliver Cromwell wasn’t universally regarded as a pioneer of democracy, social egalitarian, political reformer, who if he had any flaws at all, was perhaps a little bit of a killjoy when it came to Morris dancing.’

Well I’m Scottish (admittedly Scottish Catholic) and I can tell you know that there is no great love for Cromwell up here either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War#Scotland

I doubt he’s particularly worshipped in Wales either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_St_Fagans

The strong (and to outsider’s eyes, incomprehensible) regard for the ‘British Stalin’ is very much an English thing.

Cromwell:England :: Napoleon:France

Oddly, the only google hit I get for “British Stalin” re: Cromwell is from someone quoting that appellation to deride it.

Perhaps the rest of us have an unduly favorable view of Cromwell because of this low internet presence for his critics. Someone needs to register http://www.cromwellwasthebritishstalin.com.

…Conservatives, who usually conceive of themselves as the law and order party, actively advocated rebellion….

But wasn’t Home Rule something akin to “state death” in the jargon of the “Realists” – what’s a conservative supposed to do when the old order cannot be preserved? In those circumstances you have to choose your side. You have to decide what it is you want to conserve: democratic legitimacy or the empire in this case.

If there is any particular reason why this episode has been deleted from “historical memory in the UK” it may be because the army didn’t seem to be entirely under civilian control. That’s the sort of thing people prefer to forget. But historical memory is pretty selective at the best of times: see 1066 and All That. It’s much the same in Ireland, we just edit out different episodes.

what’s a conservative supposed to do when the old order cannot be preserved?

Dsquared, anyone – anything to say about the Wilson business? I’m not doing it, I’ve already got people going on about Masons at me.

Alax:
When I studied history not that long ago, Home rule wasn’t covered, nor was the Potato famine.

I’m staggered. The Potato Famine was covered in *American* history.

Admitedly, I am of (partly) Irish ancestry — one grandmother was born in Ireland and participated in the Troubles — so, like novakant, I had a vaguely cannibalistic mental image of Cromwell, and William of Orange, too.

I hope I’m not the only one who’s been double-taking at the title of this post, because it sounds so much like the messages in my spam filter …

@TimWilkerson:

I always think of it as the one with the P, too. Plataea. Salamis was the naval battle.

Why are any of you surprised that most of history isn’t taught in schools? Most of everything isn’t taught in schools, and what is taught amounts to an extended multiple-choice test in which the wrong answers are already half shaded-out. Students get to Uni and are amazed – amazed, I tell you! – that lecturers decline to tell them exactly what to write in an essay…

#26: “And BTW from what I could tell most of those who supported the Iraq war in the UK didn’t really have much interest in ‘WMD’, Kurds, or what have you, nor in “kickin’ ass”. It was just a war; the US wanted it and these things have to be done. The leader is best placed to pick wars in the National Interest, and to decide on a halfhearted cover story.”

And it’s the same spirit of practicality that has made me particularly fond of the English civilization. I have always thought that in the larger scheme of things, the Iraq misadventure is not as important as some more hyperbolic people tend to think; it’s more like a Boer replay than anything else. Some things aren’t right, or even smart, but they are a means to an end, whether you agree with that end or not. You don’t get much choice in the matter. It’s always useful to observe that what really made the decade immediately following the Suez debacle really dangerous for the world wasn’t so much the notion that Britain and France have become impotent and powerless, and the world doomed to a dystopian two-power condominium; it’s that Eisenhower, in his infinite ignorance, has by his anti-Anglo-French actions completely invalided Europe’s centuries-old notions of how statecraft works. Wars aren’t meant to be just or moral; they are there, they happen, and they are means to sometimes ignoble ends.

One of the really weird things with Blair is that he is probably the only Labour prime minister since Attlee to be credible in foreign affairs; Wilson, as we all know, was a neurotic and paranoiac.

In the long-term, perhaps people will view the Iraq War more kindly, not as any kind of success, but as a useful mechanism that deflected a great deal of tension among the great powers. The pretense of fighting terrorism has enabled China, for example, to transition from a favourite strawman of the American right, to a decently respectable power with predictably convention foreign-policy positions. One imagine that more American planes would have been shot down over some patch of ocean near China, or some bizarre, hideous Congressional inquisition begun about Chinese spying, had not the exigency of war overtaken the pettiness. That the war has allowed China and India as having decently responsible and realistic foreign-policy positions have been a good litmus test of how the world could continue in general peace (i.e. absence of war between, rather than by, major powers).

The litmus test has showed that China and India can be accommodated within the existing order, while Brazil cannot, and Russia yet unknown. It has at one stroke dissolved the inane stupidity that was the BRIC construct, which if had been taken any more seriously could have forced China or India into seriously untenable anti-Western positions if only by default. The most dangerous development in the last decade, I thought, was not terrorism but the general incredible silliness that attributed to Chinese and Indian development some sort of totemic, and wholly involuntary, representation for the Third World in general, which was bound to spark a general conflict of sorts between the West and everybody else if it had been taken seriously, making them into wholly unwilling but forced anti-Western crusaders on behalf of the rest of the world. When, however, China and India were forced to express their fundamental position, that their positions were positions of accommodation, contrasted in sharp relief against the hyperbole coming out from much else of the world, were signals that serious great-power conflict has been averred.

The first time I learned about the Potato Famine in (UK) school was in biology class, when we were doing pathology – a kind of “interesting plagues of history” bit that covered the Black Death, the potato blight, the 1918 influenza pandemic and a few others. As far as I recall, we learned that the potato harvest in Scotland and Ireland had failed due to an outbreak of Phytophthora infestans (I think that’s right); the Scots had managed to pull through, just about, due to a slightly more varied diet (oats, fish, root vegetables as well as potatoes), but the Irish hadn’t, being poorer and more potato-dependent, and had mostly either died or left. It certainly wasn’t treated as a Great Massacre Of History.

We covered Cromwell and he was treated as a Good Thing if a bit oppressive. His actions in Ireland weren’t really mentioned – I think there was a vague sense that he, like pretty much every other British ruler before and since, hadn’t been very nice to the Irish. I was as startled as dsquared to find that the Irish regard him as some sort of particularly horrible person. But the Civil War was the Bishops’ War up where I was, and more to do with Covenanters than Roundheads…

Follow up to #24: looking back at this post I see that I didn’t make my point clear. The original Orwell article, which I can’t find anymore, was a response to Victor Gollancz (I think) who was arguing that Henry the VIII was the ‘British Stalin’. Orwell acknowledged the force of the comparison but went on to argue that Cromwell would be an even better analogy.

One of the really weird things with Blair is that he is probably the only Labour prime minister since Attlee to be credible in foreign affairs; Wilson, as we all know, was a neurotic and paranoiac. (Myles SG)

Blair told us ‘without doubt’ about WMD in 45 minutes.
Wilson’s file in MI5 was extensive (and secret), and so he had a lot to be paranoid about. And he successfully resisted ‘special relationship’ pressures to embroil Britain in the Vietnam War.

Very different PMs, yes, but only one had credibility.

25, 32,
The Potato famine is covered in US history because it was an important cause of Irish immigration, of course, and Irish immigration is an important part of US history. Even in the US, though, it’s usually taught as being mostly a natural disaster, with the role played by British policy largely being ignored. (Students have a strong tendency to think that potatoes originate from Ireland, if they don’t think they originated from Idaho, because most of what they know about the famine is that the major food of Ireland failed and then people went to the US. Even the maltreatment of the Irish in the US is mostly ignored. )

The founder of my hometown is famous for invading Canada. (The Fenians didn’t have a navy and went with what was British and nearby.) Nobody forgot the invasions, but nobody in any position of power thought to put him on trial for this. Eventually the U.S. started physically preventing him from invading, but that’s about it. People who considered the IRA a terrorist organization during the 70s still admired him. And technically, it wouldn’t be fair to call him a terrorist by most standards as he didn’t attack the unarmed.

[O Grada, sorry]

Holocaust envy? Good grief.

You’d have to understand the mentality of the old-fashioned IRA-funding Irish-American troglodytes. (Not that you’d want to understand it…)

Seems they had a pretty tough time in the US as well, lol.

S.B. Matt@39.

Holocaust envy? Good grief.

See also the late-80s upgrading of the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine into the Holodomor (a neologism which translates roughly as ‘plague of hunger’), and the claims that it killed six million people. I’m not inclined to deny or belittle the famine (my mother-in-law lived through it, apart from anything else), but there’s something a bit distasteful about an approach which involves rounding up the death-count and coining a word that begins with ‘Holo’.

bert, why avoid the history of the leftward movement of European politics up through abolition of the monarchy, disestablishment of religion, universal suffrage, and so forth (not to mention, granting of civil rights to Presbyterians and Methodists)? Are we supposed, now, to regard Wilsonian self-determination of nations as applicable to the US itself–and as bad only when it results in “Balkan situations”? If so, I must have missed the memo.

Thanks, Bianca- I was thinking more in terms of how it was discussed in US history classes (and normal ones, not AP). I don’t remember how we talked about it when I took AP European History (we read some Swift, I know) but that was long enough ago that it might have been just how you described and I’ve merely forgotten. Most students in US high-schools, of course, don’t take any specifically European history at all, and I’d be shocked if more than 1 in 10 had any idea of what the corn laws or Chartism were.

Bianca, I’m mildly surprised that American high school students are being taught about “the leftward movement of European politics”. I’m far from critical of that fact. Indeed, I’m not offering considered criticism of any curriculum, let alone the specific one you have in mind. The references to Shlaes and Ayers were lighthearted, not snarky.

That said, you did explain that the Irish Potato Famine was being addressed in the context of Chartism. That’s not an obvious context. Certainly not at a high school level. I’m intrigued as to how that might work, but I’m afraid your comment at #53 doesn’t help. As for #54, there is some kind of tentative, tangential link between the debate about the Corn Laws and demands for tariff reform. Look it up and see what you think.

Chartism was a popular movement. It advocated electoral reform. It was mainland British, had British aims and a British focus.
The Irish potato famine is none of these things.
So to hear that the famine is being taught in the context of Chartism is interesting. I’d like to hear more. I have no ugly motives for wanting to hear more, but feel free to speculate. Perhaps best to do so privately, though.
In the meantime, can I offer some possible common ground? When you wrote “in the context of” you meant “alongside”, within the wider context you describe in #53.
Makes sense.
You still have a big problem with #54, though.

“A true gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude”
And noone who knows me would ever confuse me with a gentleman.
Now I’m off to have dinner. Cheers, Bianca.

What Sunder said, plus also the UK does seem to have an uncommonly large amount of history, and no more schoolroom time than anyone else.

Or as M. Bison put it:

Chun Li: My father saved his village at the cost of his own life. You had him shot as you ran away. A hero at a thousand paces!
Bison: I’m sorry… I don’t remember any of it.
Chun Li: You don’t remember?
Bison: For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me… it was Tuesday.

“What’s a few thousand dead Boers or Iraqis, against deflecting tension?”

And you prefer a repeat of the Great War and and the Second World War, which shook the pinnacle of human civilization achieved in the Edwardian era, instead?

Let’s keep a sense of proportion.

I find it interesting how concern over hundreds of thousands of deaths can be described as “hyperbolic”.

Alex 12.12.09 at 2:39 am

“I find it interesting how concern over hundreds of thousands of deaths can be described as “hyperbolic”.”

Well, balanced against millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions which might hypothetically be lost in WWIII 1/2 (post-Cold War), what’s hundreds of thousands? And if WWIII 1/2 involved antimatter ‘planet crackers’, that might hypothetically have killed all life on Earth – 6 billion people.

And if WWIII 1/2 involved antimatter-driven timeline disrupters, then the lives all people (and para-people, pseudopeople and intelligent dinosaurs) of uncountable alternate Earths would have been lost. This could have been trillions of lives!!!!!!

There is an extremely good pub in Newcastle on Tyne called the Free Trade Inn with wonderful beer and views over the river. Urban myth is that Chas Chandler took Jimi Hendrix drinking there when he was in England.

Could well be the only pub named after an economic theory?

Didn’t Dylan get called Judas at the Free Trade Hall?
Not sure if Hendrix ever played there.
There’s lots of Free Trade this and thats across the North.
Manchester liberalism, they used to call it.

In terms of atrocities, Cromwell’s record in Ireland was pretty much par for the course in that period – see the Thirty Years’ War, passim. I’m not really convinced how useful it is to demonise individuals for living down to the standards of a fairly barbaric age. I’m quite convinced it’s not useful to get moralistic about them using 21st century standards.

‘I’m not really convinced how useful it is to demonise individuals for living down to the standards of a fairly barbaric age. I’m quite convinced it’s not useful to get moralistic about them using 21st century standards.’

I’m sorry but this kind of argument really pisses me off. Yeah yeah yeah, to a certain, highly limited sense, ‘we’ are more ‘moral’ than ‘them’, in that, for example, when Republicans exhibit their essential racism they have to use coded language (‘dog whistle racism’), rank, aggressive misogyny is now frowned upon (and, indeed, the language of ‘feminism’ is frequently used to bash Muslims) and so on.

But the fact that murder, slaughter, rape, torture and war are a bad thing is not, in actual fact, something that was suddenly discovered on January 1st 2000 (or 2001, depending on your predilictions). Just as nowadays, these things were widely known, but, equally, there was a huge amount of propaganda by the powerful to demonstrate that it’s not really evil when ‘we’ do it: it’s only evil when ‘they’ do it. If one looks at the world as it is today, or at least over the last 20 years, (and by the world I mean the real world, not just ‘Western Europe, Australasia and North America’), some of the more striking things that have happened include:

The Rwanda Genocide
The Congolese Wars
Mass slaughter, genocide, and rape camps in the former Yugoslavia
Mass slaughter, terrorism, and concentration camps in Sri Lanka (in the ‘war’ against the Tamils)
The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan (with casualties now spiralling off into the 2 million plus region)
Terrorism torture and mayhem in Chechnya
Chinese colonialism in Tibet
Insurgency, and ‘counter-insurgency’ (i.e. torture, murder) throughout India
The situation in Palestine, Western Sahara, East Timor, West Papua

Not to mention continued environmental collapse, the increasing gap between rich and poor and so on and etc.

We must remember that for the vast majority of our existence as a species, we lived in ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies where mass industrial slaughter, the rape of the environment, and vast gaps between rich and poor were unknown. It is equally clear that by these standards, we now live in an extremely barbaric age.

Also: this comparison implies that if Cromwell (and those that fought him) were suddenly transported into the 21st century they would all go: ‘Goodness me! What a paradise! Nuts, Zoo and Loaded magazines on every shelf! And the X Factor on TV! What talent! And Gordon Brown! What a superb politician!’ And so on. In other words, as usual ‘we’ are allowed to judge ‘them’ (or in the suggestion above, not allowed to judge them as, apparently, ‘they’ are too barbaric to be judged by ‘our’ superior moral standards) but ‘they’ can’t judge ‘us’.

And if we continue to hold these ideas, please don’t get all upset when, in the 24th century, historians suggest that of course Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Obama, and Chirac were savage war criminals by ‘our’ standards, but, as we all know, the early 21st century was an extremely barbaric age, and they were all just behaving in the way their savage, backward, smug little culture encouraged.

“What’s a few thousand dead Boers or Iraqis, against deflecting tension?”

Myles SG @65: And you prefer a repeat of the Great War and and the Second World War, which shook the pinnacle of human civilization achieved in the Edwardian era, instead?

OK, may as well add to the above criticism by adding that your original thesis appeared and still appears to be a confused and hopelessly speculative exercise in retrospective ignoring of now-sunk costs in human life, and in the assignment to one’s favoured cloud of whatever silver lining may be found lying about, or indeed fabricated. (At least on this occasion not a pair of mushroom clouds lined with the white silk of imminent surrender. There’s perspective for you.)

Still, I can at least now discount the appearance that you were espousing a particularly unattractive thesis: that the Boer war prevented the two world wars. This remark tips the balance decisively in favour of your acceptance that those wars did after all happen, at the relatively minor cost of conceding the irrelevance of the Boer war.

I like “shook the pinnacle”, though. It has a certain blancmangy resonance that brings to mind the vaguely topical defiant luncheon in Carry On up the Khyber.

And @31 – One of the really weird things with Blair is that he is probably the only Labour prime minister since Attlee to be credible in foreign affairs; Wilson, as we all know, was a neurotic and paranoiac.

Given the overall thrust of your remarks, there is some room for questioning the credibility of your questioning of credibility. I’ll eschew such meta-debate, and further otiose criticism of your arguments for (are they arguments for?) the invasion/colonisation of Iraq. Blair’s foreign policy speaks for itself.

But I wonder whether you actually have substantive criticism of the foreign policy performance of Wilson (leaving Callaghan and Brown aside). I can take a pretty good guess given your view of Suez and Iraq, but hearing the criticism itself might have been interesting.

Actually not only interesting but indispensable, since even if we did know that Wilson can reliably be diagnosed as having been mentally ill (which is what you seem to be alleging), that wouldn’t establish that his foreign policy was defective. That’s a polite charge of vulgar argumentum ad hominem*, by the way.

The biographical side-issue of Wilson’s state of mind toward the end of his career must take account of the terrible psychic consequences of perceived (in his case justifiedly perceived) persecution, which forms such a large part of the problems of those – very clearly not including Wilson – who suffer from auditory hallucinations, paranoid tendencies etc. But more importantly, and sadly, there is some likelihood that by the end of his last term in office he was suffering from ‘early confusional’ stage Alzheimer’s. His subsequent history shows it to be a salient possibility, whose actuality some highly speculative evidence tends to confirm. I don’t suggest that any decent person would make use of this horrible debility to insinuate that he suffered some prior personality defect or disorder, of course.

And of course we don’t have any good reason to give a significant degree of credence to any such scurrilous smear nor, per jake townhead @32, to think that Wilson was even given to unreasonable (an objective assessment of subjective data) suspicions. In fact he had far more reason to be highly suspicious than jake makes explicit.

———————–

*Regarding ad hominem argument: classically it consists in showing that a person holds an inconsistent set of opinions, without showing any particular member to be unsound. More vulgarly, it’s attacking character or motive rather than the substantive points. That’s you, that is. (And BTW the inadvisability of believing a proven liar is beside the point, in this case because inapplicable, but also in general since that’s a question of credible testimony, and has nothing to say about sound argument.)