Flashman!

I suppose he might be saying that, in the novel, everything would have gone right if only they’d listened to Flashman about how to do it?

This is actually true – Flashman is highly sceptical about the invasion from the start, because a) he thinks it’ll be dangerous to him personally b) he doesn’t think it’s got much chance of succeeding and c) he can’t see the point.

Putting Flashman in charge of the current ISAF effort would probably go rather well too, because his first staff meeting would consist of him saying “So, general, you’re saying here that the country’s been a bullet-riddled hellhole for the last four decades, there’s not a damn thing left worth looting in the entire place, the natives mostly hate our guts for being foreign infidel invaders, and even the Chinese have given up on making any money out of it – in short, the only people doing well out of it are greasy-haired Punjabi army officers playing both sides, and well-connected Bible-thumping boxwallahs making money hand over fist as contractors back in Washington? Well, old Flash is off to Bagram and taking the first C-17 back to Gandamack Lodge, Leics. (changing at Landstuhl and Brize Norton) and I strongly advise the rest of you to follow my lead. Toodle-oo.”

3: He’s fairly scornful and pessimistic: “thanks to that conceited Scotch buffoon Burnes the British Government had invaded the country, if you please, and put our puppet king, Shah Sujah, on the throne in Kabul, in place of old Dost Mohammed, who was suspected of Russian sympathies. I believe, from all I saw and heard ,that if he had Russian sympathies it was because we drove him to them by our stupid policy… the wise ones said there was an explosion coming, and, as we started out on our journey from Calcutta, my foremost thought was that whoever got blown up it should not be me.”

And his own plan on how to withdraw was to make sure he had a good horse and a good escort, and leave the rest of the army – its native troops and its civilian camp followers – to founder.

Never happen, Flashman’s too tolerant and speaks too many languages (an obvious sign of liberalness. Why, he even has fluent French).

In the end you can be politically correctwrite for NRO or you can be a great power eschew idiocy — but not both.

Flashman’s Afghan adventure ends in disaster.

(SPOILERS)

The British are forced from Kabul, harried on their retreat and lose hundreds of soldiers and civilians, then Flashman holes up in a siege point where he behaves like a coward and has to be forced to fight by his underlings, before escaping and returning to England where he has no choice but to remain with his adulterous wife because she has money and he has none.

Maybe Steyn has more foresight than he’s credited for.

It’s weird how Flashman can be read positively by people with different views – right-wing cranks love the fact that the local rulers being deposed by European imperialists are often shown and cruel and savage, and some of the imperialists are well-meaning (and such readers sometimes seem to enjoy the unalloyed racism of the protagonist, as Steyn does here). More liberal minded readers note how most of the plots have at their heart British, American or European meddling and stupidity, and that the main avatar of imperialism throughout the books is Flashman himself, who despite his endearing honesty, clearsightedness and occasional cunning, is quite clearly a racist, raping, abusive, cowardly, lying scumbag who shouldn’t have been inflicted by Britain on any country. Personally I like the books, but if Steyn thinks they form a ‘how to’ guide he needs to re-read them.

Extreme HTML fail. Probably as well.

Now GMF’s The Pyrates, that’s a good book.

I suppose he might be saying that, in the novel, everything would have gone right if only they’d listened to Flashman about how to do it?

Yeah: therefore we should listen to Flashman now and in the future. That’s how it came across to me. Presumably, where we think Flashman was wrong, that’s where we have a lot to learn.

From the comments of that NR piece: ‘[Flashman] is a fictionalized account–with a comically horrid main character–of a British colonial misadventure that took place more than two and a half centuries ago.’ I believe that comment was posted in the year 2112 and beamed back through time.

And I wonder how many Internet commenters remember the not very PC Games magazine article from about 1980 about “Games Afghans Play” and how the Russians were going to have their work cut out for them.

I agree with bianca steele…..maybe we should listen to Flashman. However, those in power normally don’t listen to the commoners. Along these lines I would also recommend this novel cause it shows what could happen when the citizens are ignored.
booksbyoliver.com It’s a thriller so I recommend it.

Afghanistan/Iraq/Libya & possibly Syria & Iran. When do these continual wars every end & we can stop sending our children to die in foreign wars? Great article…THanks

“That is, employ the old, infirm, women and children as human shields between you and the enemy, in effect. (Wasn’t that the nub of it?)”

Good Grief! If we hadn’t killed off the weakest among us with a maximum modicum of moral impunity we might never have evolved into the paragons of intelligent integrity that we are.

Our town followed its “One Book” project of Three Cups of Tea with The Killer Angels, which I would guess Steyn would prefer. If Longstreet’s advice had been followed, could Lee have won the war? Probably not (though according to Shaara the third-day bloodbath would have been avoided). Lee, or more likely J.E.B. Stuart, sounds more like Flashman, from what I gather. Longstreet just didn’t understand the romance of the “Lost Cause,” it seems.

28: W was a lot better at avoiding hazardous military service than Flashman was, though. You have to give him credit for that.

Also W lacks the whiskers which made Flashman so irresistible to the opposite sex.

Steyn and Ferguson mislead w/ such impunity..what is it about British public pseudo intellectuals here in the states?

Could someone from Timber do a thread on Ferguson..of spiking US interest rates and hyper inflation fame?

“See the defining moment of Flash, in which he hurls his naked pregnant mistress out the back of a droshky into the snow in order to distract the pursuing Cossacks.”

Well, if she had been an elderly naked male mistress, I’m sure the Cossacks would have been distracted to the point of cancelling the pursuit.

I haven’t read the Flashman novels, but look at the quote Steyn is using:

“This I will say for the Afghan – he is a treacherous, evil brute when he wants to be, but while he is your friend he is a first-rate fellow. The point is, you must judge to a second when he is going to cease to be friendly. There is seldom any warning.”

This is (surely deliberately on the original author’s part?) the most useless advice imaginable. The Afghan is treacherous, except when he’s not being treacherous, which is when he is very loyal. So the trick is to trust him when he is trustworthy, and cease trusting him when he becomes untrustworthy, though you can only know the difference in retrospect.

It reads to me (again, without the context) like a mockery of the sort of vague, unfalsifiable generalities people are always using about all sorts of ethnic groups. (There’s something similar in “M. Butterfly,” where Rene offers his superiors advice based on his knowledge of the Chinese character, all of which is wrong and eventually gets him fired.)

Hmm, it was just as defining when he sold his lover into slavery for the sake of convenience. Oh, and money.

Yes, but it was her idea!

Had W been Flashman he would have gone to Vietnam with the firm intention of running a highly profitable officers’ club and brothel somewhere in Saigon, but would have scheduled the big opening-night party for Tet, 1968.

Subsequently meeting Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh, and Jimi Hendrix. Not to mention that memorable evening spent in the company of Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.

No, I guess we’re not.

I haven’t gotten around to reading that one yet.

I can’t say how much the jacket drawings at Wikipedia make me want to read the Flashman books now.

Or what if the characters in The Magicians were teenage fans of quasi Flashman instead of quasi C.S. Lewis?

Aulus Gellius: Yes, I think Steyn doesn’t realize that the Flashman books are comedies whose hero is a lazy, conceited, cowardly lecher who just happens to be the recipient of a long series of amazingly lucky coincidences.

ajay: Major Blodnok seems very similar to Flashman at the time he was writing his memoirs. I’m waiting to read Flashman and the Affair of the Lone Banana.

Imagine Pat Buchanan rewriting Howard Zinn.

Where’s the Zinn?

It’s a people’s history, written by someone with contempt for the people

You mean in the novels, right? not in the linked piece?

My favorite Flashy-ism is when he overhears the Liberals of his day (whom he despises almost as much as the Conservatives of the same day) complaining how the Great Powers have conquered and overwhelmed so much of the world’s indigenous culture with their white man’s burden conquest. As I recall, he makes a comment that people have to go somewhere, and violence sometimes then results, but that otherwise: “Ur of the Chaldees would be a damned crowded place by now.” I think it’s at the beginning of Flashman and the Redskins, but the book is in the other room and I don’t feel like walkin”.

Subsequently meeting Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh, and Jimi Hendrix. Not to mention that memorable evening spent in the company of Janis Joplin and Grace Slick.

I really want to read this now. Or indeed write it. “Flashman and the Heart of Darkness”. Opening scene of Flashy lying on a bed in a Saigon hotel watching the ceiling fan go round, surrounded by the debris of the night before (whisky bottles, cyclo girls, smuggled heroin etc.)

“Saigon. Wonderful. Two weeks, and I had still managed to stay in Saigon. The last thing I wanted was a mission, but, for my sins, they gave me one.”

I think Steyn doesn’t realize that the Flashman books are comedies whose hero is a lazy, conceited, cowardly lecher who just happens to be the recipient of a long series of amazingly lucky coincidences.

I suspect he may not realise that they’re fiction.

the Segway is possibly the most moronic invention since the marzipan dildo

Counterargument: this production alone makes the Segway a very splendid and worthwhile invention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYykpRRuHQM

Though one must admit that, like the television camera, it can potentially be used by the forces of Brutal Repression:
http://www.autoblog.com/2008/07/03/photo-of-the-day-chinese-anti-terror-segway-commandos/

Well, yes, but notioce that the performers are moving with palpable gingerness, while the moves are limited to the slowest and simplest, and still you can see them wobbling and drifting out of position. A large part of the entertainment is the silliness of what they are doing, combined with the extreme concentration that is evidently required. A sequence with similar appeal could be choreographed for marzipan dildos – possibly also incorporating a flotilla of Sinclair C5s.

Those commandos though are great – I wonder if they have actually checked the effects of recoil. Perhaps that explains the comic tiny guns.

My understanding is that the Segway was a spin-off of the development of the iBot wheelchair, and was released primarily as a means to raise money for developing said iBot. A wheelchair that can walk up stairs, climb curbs and run over gravel and rough ground sounds like a pretty good invention to me.

Flashman’s debates with the Queen of Jhansi on British and ‘native’ justice in Flashman and the Great Game are well worth a read. Also Fraser’s episode of Desert Island Discs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009498m

Wonderful post & thread! I’ve been with Flashman since the beginning, and cling to the belief that there are worse ways to learn about the “Great Games” of the 19th century. My 2 cents worth, Flashman at the Charge and Flashman and the Redskins show Fraser at the top of his game.

Steyn seems not to concern himself with making sense, and in this case he seems to be saying that in order to be a Great Power one must take policy advice from comic accounts of Britain’s 19th century wars, written with the benefit of hindsight from the point of view of a poltroon who somehow finds himself repeatedly in the thick of the fighting.

In the case of Afghanistan, that advice would be not to get involved in the first place, and if you find yourself there to leave, but not under the command of the old and sick William Elphinstone.

gman, I thought Steyn was a Canadian rather than a Brit.

fr: “What is it with Americans buying their nonsense for so long? I mean I could have told Larry Summers in the early 2000s that the man was a joke, and I was barely out of britches and not that bright.”

And why would Larry Summers have cared? The man’s life story is the trail of wreckage he’s left whenever he’s had power or influence. He’d have happily put Ferguson in charge of the Harvard History Dept if he knew just how bad Ferguson was.

“Wonks: yes indeed. He wrote nonsense for the Ottawa-based Macleans magazine before taking his act to more lucrative pastures.”

Yuck. Don’t remind me.

He wrote nonsense for the Ottawa-based Macleans…
And still does, the last I looked, although this has been a while – the ascension of Steyn to the position of regular columnist for Mclean’s was part of the program initiated by the current editor to turn a formerly reasonably-good national news magazine (the only one we have) into a right-wing rag, too toxic to take seriously. Although I believe that it’s based in Toronto, home of Mayor Harkonen, rather than in Ottawa.
Steyn, like many Canadian neo-cons of his vintage, is happy to allow you to believe that he does not come from a second-rate northern socialist state such as Canada but is rather British (top-drawer, of course) or American. British, in his case, I think. We are happy to collude in this. Very happy.

chris y: “Clicky-ba” is a trace memory from my childhood that I thought I’d never track down. Thanks for the reference. I was only semi-literate when I last saw the comic, and I seem to recall that Chung, while a worthy-enough chap in his way, of course, wore no shoes.

It’s happening to me too. Apparently clicking on the Home link at the top also brings in the new stuff.

Fncking browsers, how do they work?

Toronto, home of Mayor Harkonen

Cruel and misspelled, but fair.

> The Home button did not work before, but works now. And once clicked, all now
> seems normal.
The problem is that the URL https://crookedtimber.org/ is okay, but the URL https://www.crookedtimber.org/ is not.

> In the case of Afghanistan, that advice would be not to get involved in the first
> place, and if you find yourself there to leave, but not under the command of the
> old and sick William Elphinstone.
Either that or the advice would have been for the British to have come up with a more carefully thought through campaign strategy. There might be a lesson or two from the Anglo-Afghan wars (lessons only in very broad terms because these were land wars using colonial armies that were drafted and trained very differently than they are today, and using very different military tactics), but they are not the ones Mark Steyn seems to have in mind.

Mark Steyn’s post is so bizarre that it deserves a Bloggie Razzie award.

I must say that GMF strikes me as not totally dissimilar to Gogol, in that he is clearly at heart an old-fashioned conservative, but his satire strikes enough of the right targets that liberals believe he is secretly one of them. It’s noteworthy that in the Daily Mail article he reveals that he has very few ideas, most of them are cliched and not particularly justifiable in terms of fact, and they amount to very little more than a nostalgia for a largely imaginary Britain. I think it’s also worth remarking that GMF really doesn’t seem to care much about or for women.

I will say that I’ve enjoyed some of the Flashman series, but after a while it gets rather boring and predictable and there’s a sense, for me at least, of sourness and old scores being settled against whoever GMF had decided to dislike at the time.