February 27, 2005

Crabwalk

Posted by Chris

I’ve just finished Günther Grass’s Crabwalk , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s Natural History of Destruction ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been much blogospheric concern recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, David Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

February 19, 2005

America's worst race riot

Posted by Chris

Today’s Financial Times has a remarkable article about the Tulsa riot of 1921 — essentially a bout of ethnic cleansing — its disappearance from official memory for over fifty years and the long struggle of the survivors and their descendants for recognition and compensation:

Historians call the firestorm that convulsed Tulsa from the evening of May 31 into the afternoon of June 1 the single worst event in the history of American race relations. To most Tulsans it is simply “the riot”. But the carnage had nothing in common with the mass protests of Chicago, Detroit and Newark in the 1960s or the urban violence that laid siege to Los Angeles in 1992 after the white police officers who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted. The 1921 Tulsa race riot owes its name to an older American tradition, to the days when white mobs, with the consent of local authorities, dared to rid themselves of their black neighbours. The endeavour was an opportunity “to run the Negro out of Tulsa”.

The whole thing is worth reading.

February 12, 2005

Dresden, 60 years on

Posted by Chris

Tomorrow is the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden. The other week I mentioned W.G. Sebald’s The Natural History of Destruction , a work that addresses the horror of the Allied bombing raids and the inadequacy of the German postwar response to that horror. Today, of course, the bombing is being cynically used by German neo-Nazi groups who want to relativise or diminish Nazi crimes. The methodical slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others shouldn’t lead us to close our eyes to what happened in Dresden and in other German cities. What was done there was wrong, even though I, for one, would hesitate in blaming those who did it. Der Spiegel’s English site has an interview with historian Frederick Taylor , a piece on Victor Klemperer , and an extract from Klemperer’s diary .

February 05, 2005

Airbrushing the past

Posted by Chris

Every so often the Guardian brings me up short. Today, for example, when I read the following :

Thirty years ago a book by a Grenadian writer about the number of black British children being sent to schools for the educationally subnormal caused outrage in the community. Here author Bernard Coard describes how the ‘ESN book’ came to be written and its relevance to today’s black children.

Now, whilst it is strictly irrelevant to the merits and demerits of his book, it seems to me to be remarkable that the Guardian fails to mention that this is the same Bernard Coard who led a Stalinist coup-d’etat against the Maurice Bishop, charismatic leader of the New Jewel Movement. Bishop and several other people were arrested on Coard’s orders and shot. This gave Ronald Reagan an excuse to invade the island. Coard was subsequently sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment, and Coard is still in gaol. A “Grenadian writer” ….

January 30, 2005

Faith in progress

Posted by Henry

Brad DeLong spares me the effort of completing a half-written post about how badly Gregg Easterbrook misses the point of Jared Diamond’s wonderful Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond isn’t arguing that material circumstances trump human inventiveness but that they structure it. Still, there’s another aspect to Easterbrook’s review of Diamond’s new book which is worth discussing. In Easterbrook’s closing paragraph, he says:

Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity — we’re living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society’s evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only a decade or two. What might human society be like 13,000 years from now? Above us in the Milky Way are essentially infinite resources and living space. If the phase of fossil-driven technology leads to discoveries that allow Homo sapiens to move into the galaxy, then resources, population pressure and other issues that worry Diamond will be forgotten. Most of the earth may even be returned to primordial stillness, and the whole thing would have happened in the blink of an eye by nature’s standards.

This crystallizes something that I’ve been struggling to articulate for a while. It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse).1 This comes out very clearly over the course of Easterbrook’s review, where it becomes clear that Easterbrook’s objection isn’t to the specifics of Diamond’s arguments - it’s to the very notion that material limits might determine our collective fate, a contention which Easterbrook bizarrely describes as ‘postmodern’. This faith in boundless possibilities is at best a-scientific, and at worst pseudo-religious feel-good claptrap along the lines of Easterbrook’s previous muddled attempts to reconcile cosmology and religious belief. Of course, it may be true that future discoveries will enable us to leave the Earth, conquer the galaxy, exploit the “infinite resources” of the universe etc. But half-assed appeals to the limitless opportunities of the future aren’t an argument; they’re a statement of faith. It’s a wonder that Easterbrook should have been asked by the NYT to review a serious book; it certainly shouldn’t happen again.

Update: A commenter over at Brad’s points out that Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s wicked corporate satire, The Space Merchants, anticipated Easterbrook’s basic argument over fifty years ago.

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way ‘plundering’ our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

1 While Easterbrook isn’t a global warming skeptic as such, he is skeptical about many of its adverse consequences.

November 10, 2004

Edelweiss Pirates

Posted by Chris

Deutsche Welle has an interesting article about the Edelweiss Pirates, an anti-Nazi German youth movement whose members carried out numerous low-level acts of resistance and defiance during the war. A feature film about their exploits played at the Montreal film festival in September.

November 09, 2004

Fifteen years since the end of the Wall

Posted by Chris

Today it is fifteen years since the breaching of the Berlin Wall. The BBC has its reports and some video footage . Reuters have a good item on the continued polarisation of the city. The Independent analyses the mismanagement of the transition. The New York Times writes of ambivalence on the part of former East Germans. Further comment from FAZ , Deutsche Welle , Le Monde . A great day for human freedom, but 9 November is also a day of “shame and reflection” as Gerhard Schroeder puts it, since the anniversary of the end of the wall is also that of Kristallnacht in 1938.

November 05, 2004

Remember, remember...

Posted by Chris

Ah the whiff of cordite and a hint of ancient religious bigotry …. Nice to see some fireworks tonight.

September 19, 2004

Internment

Posted by Chris

A & L Daily is giving prominence to an article by one Thomas F. Powers “an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota Duluth” arguing that a policy of “preventive detention an idea whose time has come”. There’s much that’s worthy of comment in Powers’s piece, not least the fact that he writes that ” we should look to other countries, especially England and Israel, which have crafted preventive detention policies with meaningful safeguards for due process.” England? !! Is this assistant professor of political science’s political geography really that bad? Anyway, he has this to say about the British Government’s internment policy introduced in Northern Ireland in 1971:

Great Britain’s indefinite internment policy, formalized in 1973 following the recommendations of a famous report authored by Lord Diplock on the situation in Northern Ireland, was allowed to lapse in 1980. Lord Diplock was reacting to a legally murky use of police power, one he termed “imprisonment at the arbitrary Diktat of the Executive Government.” Though his reform proposal, incorporated in the 1973 Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, made preventive detention a matter of administrative, not judicial, oversight, the new policy reasserted civilian control and included due process safeguards. No less a figure than the secretary of state for Northern Ireland made initial detention determinations. Within a period of 28 days, an administrative official would then review each case with the option to extend the detention. Those detained also had a right to be informed of their status hearing in advance, and they were granted the right to an attorney paid for by the government.

Mick Fealty or Marc Mulholland (or maybe other Timberites) could comment more authoritatively than I can on the strict accuracy of Powers’s account (1980 seems an odd date to choose for internment to lapse… and those of us who actually remember the period will wince at the rhetorical phrase “no less a figure than”). But it does seem strange to cite the Northern Ireland experience in support of a policy of preventive detention. Here’s the CAIN summary of the introduction of internment and the political and security effects of the policy:

In a series of raids across Northern Ireland, 342 people were arrested and taken to makeshift camps. There was an immediate upsurge of violence and 17 people were killed during the next 48 hours. Of these 10 were Catholic civilians who were shot dead by the British Army. Hugh Mullan (38) was the first Catholic priest to be killed in the conflict when he was shot dead by the British Army as he was giving the last rites to a wounded man. Winston Donnell (22) became the first Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) solider to die in ‘the Troubles’ when he was shot by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) near Clady, County Tyrone. [There were more arrests in the following days and months. Internment was to continue until 5 December 1975. During that time 1,981 people were detained; 1,874 were Catholic / Republican, while 107 were Protestant / Loyalist. Internment had been proposed by Unionist politicians as the solution to the security situation in Northern Ireland but was to lead to a very high level of violence over the next few years and to increased support for the IRA. Even members of the security forces remarked on the drawbacks of internment.]

On that day

Posted by Chris

I just posted and (then deleted) a link to the BBC’s On this Day page, which I think is generally well worth a look. The reason for deletion was just that today is 19th September and the BBC were still linking to the 17th from their front page. Still, on that day (the one I first linked to) the major item was the 60th anniversary of the Arnhem drop , complete with links to audio footage and an animated map. But what also caught my eye was a page about the Sabra and Chatila massacres (22 years ago) by Lebanese Phalangists, a reminder that the murder of children is not the monopoly of any one faith or political current. Yesterday’s anniversaries were also noteworthy: they include the arrival of the first Ugandan Asian refugees in Britain (a great blow to the viability of Uganda and, as it has turned out, a major bonus for the UK). Today’s page has the refusal of the US to allow Charlie Chaplin to re-enter the country (1952) and the Southall Rail Crash (1997), the consequences of which are still very much with us.

August 13, 2004

Mommsen's death

Posted by Henry

Prominent German historian, Wolfgang Mommsen has died while swimming in the Ostsee. He was the scion of an astonishingly prolific family of German historians and thinkers (his great-grandfather, Theodor Mommsen, won the Nobel Prize; Max Weber was a relation by marriage). He is likely to be remembered for his prominent and honorable role in the Historikerstreit (historians’ controversy), in which he along with several others (Jurgen Habermas, Kaiserreich historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, social historian Jurgen Kocka) battled with conservatives who seemed to be trying to normalize the Nazi period of German history. See Rhine River blog for more. Thanks to Nathanael Robinson for letting us know.

July 22, 2004

Scandal

Posted by John Quiggin

As far as I can see, the Right seems to be winning the scandal wars just at the moment. I didn’t follow the Plame-Wilson scandal the first time around, so I can’t really tell how damaging or otherwise the latest claims from US and British intelligence may be to Wilson’s credibility. Similarly, although it seems clear that Sandy Berger has made a fool of himself , I have no idea what this means for anything that might possibly matter. Finally, it appears that last Thanksgiving in Iraq, Bush posed not with a fake turkey, but with a display turkey, never intended for carving but to adorn the buffet line. I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

All this confirms me in the view that the kind of “smoking gun” or “what did X know and when did s/he know it” scandal that has dominated politics since Watergate is a waste of everybody’s time. The real scandals are those that are, for the most part, on the public record.

Looking specifically at Iraq, I’m amazed at the continuing focus on intelligence reports about WMDs. It seems to me as if people on both sides of the debate have excised from their memories everything that happened between December 2002 and the outbreak of the war, with the exception of some speeches given by Bush, Blair and Powell. In particular, it seems as if judgements about the threat posed by Saddam’s regime depended primarily on intelligence reports from places like Niger.

To remind anyone who might have forgotten, from December 2002 onwards, anyone who watched the news could acquire all the evidence they needed to conclude that Saddam did not have nuclear weapons and was not close to getting them, and that he probably didn’t have a germ warfare program either. This is because UN inspectors had (with trivial exceptions) unhindered access to any site that US or British intelligence reports indicated might be suspicious. In particular, they were able to visit old nuclear sites like Tuweitha where both Blair and Bush claimed that suspicious rebuilding activity had gone on. They found nothing, for the very good reason that nothing was happening. A more thorough search would have been needed to rule out the possibility of a stockpile of poison gas, but we now know it would have come to the same conclusion.

Of course, this was not enough to convince those who were bent on war in any case. But even for these people, the intelligence reports should have been irrelevant once the inspections commenced. At this point it became clear that whatever was in the intelligence reports, it was not information that could be given to the inspectors to say go and look at place X, take up the floor and you’ll find the evidence you need. I saw various more or less desperate explanations of why this might be the case during the leadup to the war, but I find it hard to believe that anyone actually relied on intelligence reports, as opposed to longheld beliefs, in concluding that Saddam must have WMDs.

Either way, it doesn’t matter much whether and how the intelligence reports were cooked, over-egged, sexed up or whatever. The main question is how, with the world having agreed on a UN resolution that required either inspections or war, we ended up with both1.

1 I can’t stop people posting absurd legal quibbles about the meaning of “active compliance” and so on, but I won’t respond to them.

July 20, 2004

The virus of error

Posted by John Quiggin
In the most recent London Review of Books, Hugh Pennington has a generally excellent article on measles and erroneous (to put it charitably) research linking the combined MMR vaccine to autism. It's a pity therefore that, on a peripheral issue, he perpetuates an equally glaring error, saying
'Most people have an intuitive appreciation that the best vaccine programme, from an individual's point of view, is one where almost everyone else is vaccinated while they are not, so that they are indirectly protected without incurring any of the risks or inconvenience associated with direct protection.' If too many people act in this way, the infection becomes commoner in the population as a whole, and returns as a real and significant threat to the unimmunised. This is a modern version of the 'Tragedy of the Commons' described by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 essay: 16th-century English peasants had free grazing on commons; their need to supplement food supplies and income was very great; the resulting overgrazing wrecked the commons for everyone.
As I've pointed out previously Hardin's story was, in historical terms, a load of tripe. It's interesting to note that, in repeating Hardin's story, Pennington adds the spurious specificity of "16th century England", whereas Hardin's account was not specific regarding dates and places, and therefore harder to refute. This is characteristic of the way in which factoids are propagated.

June 11, 2004

Operation Bagration

Posted by Chris

Mike Davis, writing in the Guardian , puts D-Day in perspective.

But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.

By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened.

Thank Ivan. It does not disparage the brave men who died in the North African desert or the cold forests around Bastogne to recall that 70% of the Wehrmacht is buried not in French fields but on the Russian steppes. In the struggle against Nazism, approximately 40 “Ivans” died for every “Private Ryan”. Scholars now believe that as many as 27 million Soviet soldiers and citizens perished in the second world war.

June 08, 2004

Dolchstoßlegende

Posted by Henry

Pejman Yousefzadeh has a Flack Central Station piece that is quite remarkably at odds with the facts, even by Yousefzadeh’s usual standards. He criticizes Matt Yglesias’ comparison of warbloggers with German purveyors of the “Stab in the Back” legend, arguing that if Matt is not “actually accusing those who are critiquing the media of being Nazis, he is accusing them of stealing a page out of the Nazi playbook.”

Update: German spelling correction following comments

Matt quite reasonably responds that he’s not making any comparisons whatsoever with the Nazis, and is instead

charging people with charging defeatest elements on the home front with being the main cause of American difficulties in Iraq. Since the people in question do, indeed, believe that defeatest elements on the home front are the main cause of difficulties in America’s Iraq policy, I don’t know what wrong with that.

Matt’s right on the facts. According to Detlev Peukert’s classic The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, the “Stab in the Back” legend didn’t originate with the Nazis. Quoting from p.68

Even before the end of 1918, and especially during the first months of 1919, as the Räte movement was being bloodily put down, the forces of counter-revolution began to regroup, taking up arms as Freikorps and neighbourhood militias. In the course of 1919 the Dolchstoßlegende and the revanchist campaign against the ‘shame of Versailles’ crystallized as the key articles of faith – along with hatred of the revolution – of the movement’s ideology, embraced not only by counter-revolutionary activists but by a very large body of sympathizers. The Dolchstoßlegende, the myth that the Social Democratic, liberal and Catholic Centre politicians and the Räte movement had betrayed the ‘unvanquished’ front-line army, was given additional ideological respectability by inflammatory statements from Hindenburg and Ludendorff, despite the fact that it was the two generals themselves who had told the democratic politicians, virtually overnight, to sue for peace in 1918.

Yousefzadeh doesn’t know his history. The Dolchstoßlegende didn’t originate with the Nazis – it originated with the conservatives who wanted to repeal the Weimar constitutional revolution, and recreate the militaristic, Prussia-dominated political system that Weimar had replaced. The NSDAP later took the idea up – but so too did other elements on the right. As Matt says, this may put Glenn Reynolds and his cronies in some rather disreputable company, but that’s not Matt’s fault. The comparison that Matt draws between the warbloggers’ rhetoric and the myths being touted about in Germany just after WWI is both striking and historically appropriate.

April 22, 2004

Powers of prognostication

Posted by Henry

I’ve been reading Anthony Grafton’s Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astronomer which is a lot of fun. Grafton has a lively writing style, well exemplifed by the following (unfair but funny) dig at the dismal science.

At the most abstract level, astrologers ancient and early modern carried out the tasks that twentieth-century society assigns to the economist. Like the economist, the astrologer tried to bring the chaotic phenomena of everyday life into order by fitting them to sharply defined quantitative models. Like the economist, the astrologer insisted, when teaching and writing for professional peers, that astrology had only a limited ability to predict the future. … Like the economist, the astrologer proved willing in practice, when powerful clients demanded it, to predict individual outcomes anyhow. Like the economist, the astrologer generally found that the events did not match the prediction; and like the economist, the astrologer normally received as a reward for this confirmation of the powers of his art a better job and a higher salary.

April 15, 2004

Unusual Hobbies

Posted by Belle Waring

Because my sister participates, I have been thinking a little lately about the peculiar practice of military reenactments. That people in America reenact the U.S. Civil War is, I think, pretty widely known, but readers from other countries may be interested to learn that WWII is also very popular. The climate and topography of the East Coast is such that passable locations can be found for many European theater battles, so long as they took place outside of cities or towns. People who live in Michigan could probably reenact evil Soviets vs. Finnish commandoes on cross-country skis, and for all I know, they do. I had thought that WWI was too depressing to attract much interest, but I see now that I was very wrong:

The accurate recreation of such an era of warfare has been no simple task, but on small battlefields around the United States (around the world, in fact) reenactors have created the closest thing possible. These battlefields have trenches, bunkers and yes, real barbed wire. There are grenades and working mortars, as well as machine guns and full-scale over-the-top assaults. Nighttime is punctuated by trench raids carried out under the eerie light of flares and star shells. In the adjacent trench bay, there is the sound of a hand-to-hand struggle, as each side battles for possession of the trench…If this kind of madness appeals to you, if it makes you curious, then you might want to consider reenacting the Great War.

But then again, perhaps not. Now, I am fairly sure that WWII reenactment would be illegal in Germany (and France?) where you are not allowed to trade Nazi memorabilia or make new, accurate SS uniforms and so on. Germans make up for this with their ridiculous Wild West fascination, based on the works of Karl May. But what about other countries? Do Belgian people like to do WWI reenactments? That would seem…morbid, but no more so than Americans doing the Civil War, I suppose. I am dead certain that Italian people are not off replaying the battle of Lake Trasimene in their free time. Italian people have better things to do, like see friends, ride Vespas around, and eat gelato. I could imagine British people going for this in a big way, however. Let’s see…oh, hell yes. English Civil War reenactments; I had forgotten. I’m sure that Japanese people are discouraged from doing WWII reenactments, just to spare feelings. Australian people, you will be happy to know, reenact the U.S. Civil War, so you can be sure they like to pretend they’re dying like flies in Turkey during WWI as well.

Why do people do this? I can see the appeal, to an extent. You get to play with guns and artillery, which is fun, and there is a hide-and-seek element to it, plus the obvious costume party aspect. According to my sister, people who dress as ordinary German soldiers in WWII reenactments are not necessarily crazy (just as there is no shame in choosing to be the Axis in a game of Axis and Allies, especially since you get more tanks). However, as you’d expect, among people who dress up as SS officers, there is a high proportion of unsavory characters. I am unable to parse the modern-day cultural significance of choosing to be a Roundhead vs. a Cavalier. Do you see yourself as more of a Guelph, or a Ghibelline? Punic invader, or Roman defender? Finally, Irish Timberites may be amused to know that this weekend my sister is reenacting the Easter Uprising of 1916. (I can only assume they have some town for this.) She gets to wear clothes of the period (the main appeal) and smuggle guns and bombs to partisans under loaves of bread and what not. People have their little ways.

April 10, 2004

Iraq in 1920

Posted by Chris

Niall Ferguson in the Daily Telegraph gives a history lesson :

… in 1917 a British general … occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” … What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship. … Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi’ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa - where British forces were besieged - and reached as far as Kirkuk. Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi’ites and even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in December - with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions - British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament.

March 13, 2004

Ditto

Posted by Ted

I’ve written, revised and rejected a number of thoughts about the terrorist massacre in Madrid. I would have liked to have written something like this.

March 11, 2004

A Distant Mirror

Posted by Maria

I’ve just bought a double-bill of Umberto Eco’s ‘The Name of the Rose’ and Barbara Tuchman’s ‘A Distant Mirror’ for Henry’s and my younger sister. Nelly’s a huge fan of historical mysteries who can tell you more about Richard III and the murdered princes, the Holy Grail and Pompei than is probably healthy for a 16 year old.

I thought Tuchman would be a good all-round introduction to medieval European history - I bet I’m not the only one who read it as a teenager and took a degree in medieval history as a result. I was amazed to see the book is now over 20 years old and I wondered - has it aged well? How is the book regarded by medievalists? Any other recommendations?

Here’s another question while I’m tapping CT’s collective brain power; Nelly’s thinking of applying to Oxford to study history, maybe with politics. (I think she should do PPE, but she says I’ll have to live vicariously through my own children if I have them, and not through my younger siblings.) Any ideas/prejudices/anecdotes about which colleges to apply to? The little I know about Oxford colleges I learnt from University Challenge.

Where’s a good place to be challenged but not hot-housed? What are the women’s colleges like? (bearing in mind that one blue-stocking in the family is probably enough) How to avoid the rugger-buggers? (fine people, but you don’t necessarily want to be sharing accommodation with them for 3 years.) And, how important is the choice of college for both academic and social life? Answers on the back of a postcard…

February 24, 2004

Writing History

Posted by Kieran

Simon Schama protests too much. He claims that academic history is obsessed with scientific data and obsessive footnotes rather than good storytelling and calls for a return to a “golden age” of historical writing — Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. This mostly seems like promotional fluff for his new TV series. Yet Timothy Burke and Invisible Adjunct broadly concur with Schama, though as cogs in the “juggernaut of academic history” that he condemns they add the caveat that “a broadly communicative, publically engaged rhetoric of history is dependent upon the existence of a body of much more meticulous scholarship.” That’s true — but it’s more than a caveat!

Schama’s Great Historians fused authoritative judgment, great range and vivid prose and brought the result to large audiences, helping to define the practice of history as they went. What fun it must have been. He wants those things, too. Yet although he speaks to an audience bigger than any of his heroes, Schama must know he can’t occupy that niche, because it no longer exists. The vast differentiation of the academic division of labor over the past century and a half destroyed it. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of excellent, accessible narrative history written for a mass audience by respected historians. Schama’s complaints notwithstanding, you’ll find your local bookshop stocked full of the stuff — far more, alas, than you’ll find excellent and accessible sociology, political science or economics. But, unavoidably, these histories are written on the back of all those footnoted monographs, and they cannot command the field in the way that Carlyle or Macaulay might have.

Once asked what he specialized in, the sociologist Daniel Bell replied, “Generalizations.” It’s a line worth stealing for job interviews, but it tells an important truth. Being a generalist these days is itself a kind of specialization. Like any other role in an advanced division of labor, it depends on thousands of others, most notably all those monographic specialists dug into the archives. Timothy Burke would like to see historians be trained “to write well, to seek audiences outside the academy, to stretch their powers of persuasion.” Those are worthwhile goals, but whereas the mills of academic specialization can grind exceeding small, we can’t all have our own BBC miniseries. Besides, I don’t think Schama simply wants historians to write better prose. Rather, he himself yearns to play the same role today that Macaulay or Gibbon did in their time. He covets the way they could grasp their subject whole and bring it to almost the entire reading public. Which of us scribblers wouldn’t want to do the same? But his off-lead qualifications and dilutions suggest that, deep down, he knows that’s the sort of anachronistic wishfulness that historians teach us to avoid.

February 20, 2004

Wie es eigentlich gewesen

Posted by Henry

Timothy Burke has a fascinating short post on Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver as a Foucauldian genealogy. As Burke says, Stephenson succeeds in looking at history from a skew angle, making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Read the piece - it’s an example of the very best kind of academic blogging. All that I can add is to point out one of the ways in which Stephenson (and Thomas Pynchon in Mason and Dixon) tries to defamiliarize the past; the use of anachronism. At various points in the narrative, Stephenson introduces modern ideas or inventions into the margins of his historical narrative (he can get away with this more easily, because Quicksilver is an alternative history of the world, a history that never happened). He does this so as to make a tiger’s leap into the past.

Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In Quicksilver, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility. Even if Quicksilver isn’t really a historical novel, it’s a novel of history, which to my mind is a much rarer and more interesting thing.

February 18, 2004

"Twenty or thirty years ago..."

Posted by Chris

I was at a meeting the other day where the question of “normal” boy and girl behaviour came up. I mean by this what girls and boys, especially teenagers, take to be normal behaviour for those of their own and the opposite gender. I don’t mean what they ought to do. The opinion was voiced by others present that these norms had shifted appreciably in the last twenty or thirty years. Wearing makeup, for instance, they thought, was far more acceptable for boys today that for boys “twenty or thirty years ago”.

Since I was myself a teenager thirty years ago, I think I can say with some authority that this is mistaken, at least for the UK. Sexual intercourse was, as we know, invented in 1963 , and by the early-to-mid-1970s glam-rock in the shape of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had made all kinds of flirting with cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity acceptable for teenage boys. Punk followed almost immediately afterwards. (I’m told that things were different and more backward in the US, which, for James Miller, in his magisterial Flowers in the Dustbin , explains Bowie’s initial lack of success over there — until he toned things down.) But my guess is that, in the UK at least, teenagers were more ready to play with mixed sexual signals in the 1970s than they are today (and have been since the advent of “new laddism” in the 1990s).

My reading of the evolution of teenage mores may, of course, be wide of the mark. But my point in making it is just to observe how common is the notion of a “dreamtime” about “twenty or thirty years ago” when 1950s moral and cultural norms are supposed to have applied. Probably such standards didn’t obtain in the 1950s either, but people look on the past with a permanently moving horizon before which things were different, everybody was straight, lived in conventional families and playing with sexuality (and indeed being serious about it) was the preserve of intellectuals, poets and German cabaret artistes. It wasn’t like that.

February 10, 2004

The black Spartacus

Posted by Chris

Two hundred years after the foundation of the world’s first black republic, Ian Thomson, writing in the Guardian, hails Toussaint L’Ouverture . For those who don’t know his story, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins is the place to look. And here is Wordsworth’s poem in full:

Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den; —
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

February 07, 2004

How will history judge?

Posted by Micah

Unlearned Hand wonders what we’ll think about America in a hundred years:

Here’s the game I’d like to play, if you’d all be so obliged: name the one thing about America as it is now that the America (if it exists as such) of 2104 will look back on with the most admiration/envy/nostalgia, and the one thing the America of 2104 will look back on with the most disgust/pity.

I’d like to say that we’ll be disgusted by the amount of poverty in the 21st century—and how little Americans did to alleviate it. But that’s probably too optimistic. We’ll pity our inability to cure diseases that will have been eradicated over the next century. Much harder, I think, to decide what we’ll admire. Maybe we’ll be nostalgic for the days before our permanent attachment to computers.

December 20, 2003

Jefferson and Thurmond

Posted by John Quiggin

One of the most striking historical facts I’ve learned this year is that George Washington freed all his slaves in his will despite opposition from his family, including his wife Martha. It’s surprising and revealing that this fact has never been part of the standard account of Washington’s life.

It is also one of the facts leading me to an increasingly negative view of Thomas Jefferson. The parallel between Jefferson’s unacknowledged slave children by Sally Hemings and the more recent case of Strom Thurmond, on which Kieran has recently posted, is striking. (Jefferson was, quite literally, the first Southern Democrat). Until now, I’ve tended to vaguely excuse Jefferson’s actions here as a case of personal inability to resist the thinking of the times, but Washington’s example undermines this.

I think you can go from the personal to the political here as well. The course leading to the Civil War was set when the Northern States adopted emancipation around the time of the Revolution and the Southern states did not. Jefferson advocated gradual emancipation in Virginia at this time (1783), but he didn’t fight hard on the issue after this. Given Washington’s personal evolution on the issue, it seems plausible that a determined effort by Jefferson in the years after Washington’s death, during which he was president for eight years, could have achieved a peaceful end to slavery.

December 17, 2003

Famine in Ireland

Posted by Chris

I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in Development as Freedom . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:

ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)

Sen argues that cultural alienation (or even hostility) meant that

very little help was provided by the government of the United Kingdom to alleviate to destitution and starvation of the Irish through the period of the famine. (p. 173)

Interesting, because Natalie Solent , who has been writing about famines recently links to an essay in the National Review Online by the awful John Derbyshire on the subject. Derbyshire asks why the

British government did not organize adequate relief, or prevent the export of foodstuffs from Ireland while Irish people were starving.

and answers

it was not within the nature, philosophy or resources of Anglo-Saxon governments to do such things in the 1840s.

Contrast Sen, who knows the facts:

… by the 1840s, when the Irish famine occurred, an extensive system of poverty relief was fairly well established in Britain, as far as Britain itself was concerned. England too had its share of the poor, and even the life of the employed English worker was far from prosperous …. But there was still some political commitment to prevent open starvation withing England. A similar commitment did not apply to the Empire — not even to Ireland. Even the Poor Laws gave the English destitute substantially more rights than the Irish destitute got from the more anemic Poor Laws that were instituted for Ireland.

So contra Derbyshire, who is probably just making it up as he goes along (but then gets quoted and circulated around the network of misinformation that is the blogosphere) it was “in the nature” of Anglo-Saxon governments, even in the 1840s to do “such things”. Just not for the Irish or the Indians.

Sen also provides us with this striking portrait of Edward Trevelyan

the head of the Treasury during the Irish famines, who saw not much wrong with British economic policy in Ireland (of which he was in charge), point[ing] to Irish habits as part of the explanation of the famines. Chief among the habitual failures was the tendency of the Irish poor to eat only potatoes, which made them dependent on one crop. Indeed, Trevelyan’s view of the causation of the Irish famines permitted him to link them with his analysis of Irish cooking: “There is scarcely a woman of the peasant class in the West of Ireland whose culinary art exceeds the boiling of a potato.” The remark is of interest not just because it is rather rare for an Englishman to find a suitable occasion for making international criticism of culinary art. Rather, the pointing of an accusing finger at the meagreness of the diet of the Irish poor well illustrates the tendency to blame the victim. The victims, in his view, had helped themselves to a disaster, despite the best efforts of the administration in London to prevent it. (p. 175)

Blaming the victim, bad choices, poor diet — I’ve heard those explanations before somewhere. And cultural alienation from those suffering from acute poverty? Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose .

November 28, 2003

Risus sardonicus

Posted by Henry

By sheer coincidence, I read Kieran’s post a couple of hours after I picked Quicksilver up again (I’ve been too busy this semester to read big fat books, however tempting), and came across this passage (p.200-201, US edition).

There, mounted up high on a weatherbeaten stick, was a sort of irregular knot of stuff, barely visible as a gray speck in the moonlight: the head of Oliver Cromwell. When the King had come back, ten years ago, he’d ordered the corpse to be dug up from where Drake and the others had buried it, and the head cut off and mounted on a pike and never taken down. Ever since then Cromwell had been looking down helplessly on a (sic) scene of unbridled lewdness that was Whitehall palace.

Pepys figures prominently in the narrative a couple of pages before; I suspect that his diaries are Stephenson’s source. So far, I’m enjoying Quicksilver a lot more than I expected, given some of the rude reviews (Kevin Drum describes it as a core dump). But then, my tolerance for long, semi-relevant digressions on this or that subject is probably a lot higher than that of the average reader. Will blog more on this when I’ve finished the damn book …

November 11, 2003

Veterans Day

Posted by Ted

When I lived in South London a few years ago, there were a handful of small cemetaries within walking distance of my house. It was an interesting contrast. American gravestones tend to be fairly minimalist; it’s unusual to see much more than “Beloved Father” or a Bible verse. In British cemetaries, we saw a number of memorials with very personal, heart-rending epitaphs. Widows and widowers inscribed “I’m lost without you” on the graves of their spouses; parents wondered why God couldn’t wait a little longer to take their beautiful children.

The gravestone that sticks with me is a memorial for a soldier from New Zealand who didn’t come home. His parents bought a plot for him in a graveyard in South London that they probably never saw. I wish now that I had thought to write down the epitaph. It was not an appeal to patriotism, or to the good cause. It was a controlled cry of anguish from parents who had lost their beloved son to a small piece of land on the other side of the world.

People like me, who have never really been cold or hungry or frightened in their whole lives, have the duty to be grateful for his sacrifice. But to his parents, it was surely more than they could stand.

I owe more than I can say to our soldiers and our veterans, to people like Kos and Tacitus and Wesley Clark and George H. W. Bush and my brother Scott. Thank you.

Remembrance

Posted by Daniel

On the 85th Armistice day, I remember with honour the memory of:

  • Military casualties of the First World War
  • Military casualties of the Second World War
  • Casualties of conscripted labour in the Second World War (such as the “Bevin Boys” conscripted to work in coal mines in the UK, who had a casualty rate higher than most active service units)
  • Casualties of the Second World War among the fire service, ARP, ambulance service and similar, many of whom were conscientious objectors to the war itself
  • Military casualties of the Falklands War

In their own ways, all of these people gave their lives in protecting the lives and liberty of Britons, for which we owe them the most profound thanks.

I also remember with the deepest sympathy and pity the men and women of our armed forces who gave their lives in the other military operations which the United Kingdom has carried out in the last century. They died for the most part in the service of dishonourable missions which were forced on them by governments which we elected, so we bear them an equally heavy debt, though much less glorious and more shameful.

This is the nearest I can come to a pacifist’s response to this day; I long since gave up wearing a white poppy in remembrance of the conscientious objectors in my own family, simply becaused it caused so much offence. I wholeheartedly apologise for any offence caused by this statement, without withdrawing any of it.

October 29, 2003

Weapon of Choice

Posted by Henry

From James Buchan’s Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money (as nice an example of limpid prose as you could ask for, by the way) comes the following.

Sir William Petty, when challenged to a duel in Ireland by Sir Aleyn Brodrick, readily accepted, though he was so short-sighted as to be purblind. He merely asked for choice of weapons and selected, according to Evelyn and Aubrey, ‘an hatchet or Axe in a darke cellar.’

October 24, 2003

Concorde

Posted by Chris

Today brings the last commercial flight of Concorde . Concorde was built jointly by engineers in Toulouse and in Bristol (the city where I live and work). It is a tremendous source of local pride for the people of the city. Just last weekend I happened to be in the British Aerospace Welfare Association in Filton and overheard a number of elderly people who had worked on the project chatting about their experience of the aircraft. Anyone who grew up in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s will also know what the plane represented then in terms of confidence in a new technology-driven future, how the test flights were reported, the celebrity status of test-pilot Brian Trubshaw , the worries about Concordski (later crashed at the Paris air show) and Boeing’s rival SST (abandoned). Now it will take longer to get from London to New York than it did twenty-seven years ago.

September 11, 2003

Two Septembers

Posted by Chris

I was not surprised that the newspaper which carried a column including the lines “A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully” in the aftermath of September 11th 2001, should head its comment page two years on with a reference to September 11th 1973. The message the Guardian thereby seeks to convey is that what happened in New York two years ago is nothing special, and has to be seen in the context of US responsibility for other crimes against humanity.

After September 11th 2001, I was, like many other people, disgusted by the various statements made in the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books and elsewhere, to the effect that the victims somehow got what they deserved, shouldn’t really be considered innocent and so on. I said so at the time, and then later on my blog, Junius, and then in a paper I wrote on the war in Afghanistan. When, as liberal or a leftist, you make such points, you get a good deal of approbation from the conservative and libertarian parts of the blogosphere. The sentiment being “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.” It is nice to be praised, to be considered part of the “decent left” and a “non-idiotarian”. While I may flatter myself that I’m not especially susceptible to flattery, I know that I’m not exactly immune to it either.

I don’t want to take back one word of what I’ve written about September 11th 2001. I feel just as repelled by the Pilgers, Pinters and Alis today as I did then. Their world view is not mine. But I also, remembering September 11th 1973, feel somewhat dirtied by some of the praise I received from the right-hand-side of the blogosphere. I’ve read recently a certain amount of blogospheric comment on Chile, often highly critical of the Allende regime. I don’t have the knowledge or the expertise to evaluate Allende’s economic policies, and I’m sure that many of his political choices were wrong or unwise. But no explanation of the context, and not examination of the “root causes” of the Pinochet coup can justify or excuse the

3,197 cases of victims of ‘disappearances’, extrajudicial execution and death resulting from torture under military rule. [A] figure that does not include the thousands of victims of torture who survived their ordeal. (Amnesty)

There can be a “decent left”, that sees September 11th 2001 as the crime against humanity that it was, a crime that no amount of context or explanation can excuse or mitigate. But I’d rather not be told how decent I am by anyone disposed to excuse September 11th 1973 and its aftermath.

September 10, 2003

History of the EU

Posted by Chris

In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:

Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.

September 02, 2003

Trotsky, Jewish universalist

Posted by Chris

When I, somewhat unwisely, ventured into the “greatest figures of the 20th century” debate and mentioned Trotsky, there was a good deal of flak in the comments to the post. One blogger who agreed with that judgement, and who had voted for Trotsky in the original poll, was Norman Geras. Now Norman has published (for the first time in English) an essay he wrote a few years ago on Trotsky’s Jewish identity and the tension between that identity and the revolutionary leader’s universalist goals. It is well worth reading for many reasons, but I’ll mention two: first, it reveals Trotsky’s remarkable prediction, as early as 1938, that the extermination of the Jews was in prospect, and second, Geras reminds us via Trotsky’s account of a pogrom from 1905 what a powerful writer he was.

August 25, 2003

Decline and fall

Posted by Henry

Via David Langford, a comprehensive and rather wonderful accounting of the various reasons advanced for the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Langford’s summation is worth reprinting in full.

It seems to me that practically everything — from the Iraqi war to the downfall of Big Engine to delayed BSFA mailings — can be explained by some subset of this list of 210 reasons for the fall of the Roman empire, as enumerated in Professor Alexander Demandt’s Der Falls Rom (1984) — which needless to say I have not read in either German or English, but which some kindly journalist has summarized. Read and marvel:

Abolition of gods, abolition of rights, absence of character, absolutism, agrarian question, agrarian slavery, anarchy, anti-Germanism, apathy, aristocracy, asceticism, attacks by Germans, attacks by Huns, attacks by nomads on horseback.

Backwardness in science, bankruptcy, barbarization, bastardization, blockage of land by large landholders, blood poisoning, bolshevization, bread and circuses, bureaucracy, Byzantinism.

Capitalism, change of capitals, caste system, celibacy, centralization, childlessness, Christianity, citizenship (granting of), civil war, climatic deterioration, communism, complacency, concatenation of misfortunes, conservatism, corruption, cosmopolitanism, crisis of legitimacy, culinary excess, cultural neurosis.

Decentralization, decline of Nordic character, decline of the cities, decline of the Italic population, deforestation, degeneration, degeneration of intellect, demoralization, depletion of mineral resources, despotism, destruction of environment, destruction of peasantry, destruction of political process, destruction of Roman influence, devastation, differences in wealth, disarmament, disillusion with state, division of empire, division of labour.

Earthquakes, egoism, egoism of the state, emancipation of slaves, enervation, epidemics, equal rights (granting of), eradication of the best, escapism, ethnic dissolution, excessive aging of population, excessive civilization, excessive culture, excessive foreign infiltration, excessive freedom, excessive urbanization, expansion, exploitation.

Fear of life, female emancipation, feudalization, fiscalism, gladiatorial system, gluttony, gout, hedonism, Hellenization, heresy, homosexuality, hothouse culture, hubris, hyperthermia.

Immoderate greatness, imperialism, impotence, impoverishment, imprudent policy toward buffer states, inadequate educational system, indifference, individualism, indoctrination, inertia, inflation, intellectualism, integration (weakness of), irrationality, Jewish influence.

Lack of leadership, lack of male dignity, lack of military recruits, lack of orderly imperial succession, lack of qualified workers, lack of rainfall, lack of religiousness, lack of seriousness, large landed properties, lead-poisoning, lethargy, levelling (cultural), levelling (social), loss of army discipline, loss of authority, loss of energy, loss of instincts, loss of population, luxury.

Malaria, marriages of convenience, mercenary system, mercury damage, militarism, monetary economy, monetary greed, money (shortage of), moral decline, moral idealism, moral materialism, mystery religions, nationalism of Rome’s subjects, negative selection.

Orientalization, outflow of gold, over-refinement, pacifism, paralysis of will, paralysation, parasitism, particularism, pauperism, plagues, pleasure-seeking, plutocracy, polytheism, population pressure, precociousness, professional army, proletarization, prosperity, prostitution, psychoses, public baths.

Racial degeneration, racial discrimination, racial suicide, rationalism, refusal of military service, religious struggles and schisms, rentier mentality, resignation, restriction to profession, restriction to the land, rhetoric, rise of uneducated masses, romantic attitudes to peace, ruin of middle class, rule of the world.

Semi-education, sensuality, servility, sexuality, shamelessness, shifting of trade routes, slavery, Slavic attacks, socialism (of the state), social tensions, soil erosion, soil exhaustion, spiritual barbarism, stagnation, stoicism, stress, structural weakness, superstition.

Taxation, pressure of terrorism, tiredness of life, totalitarianism, treason, tristesse, two-front war, underdevelopment, useless diet, usurpation of all powers by the state, vaingloriousness, villa economy, vulgarization.

This proves it. I am strangely comforted to think that Rome was undermined by Bolsheviks, feminists, socialists, public baths, and, above all, the decline of the Nordic character.

August 21, 2003

Greatest figures of the 20th century

Posted by Chris

Matthew Yglesias has some reaction to Right-Wing News’s lists of greatest figures of the twentieth century as voted for by right- and left-wing bloggers. My considered view that such lists are inherently silly hasn’t sufficiently stifled my irritation at the omissions. There’s obviously an argument to be had (on Aristotelian lines) about whether a person can both be great and do really bad things, though the further back in time one goes the easier it seems to be to reconcile judgements of greatness with the fact of a historical figure having committed atrocities or other acts of cruelty (e.g. Alexander the Great, Cromwell).

But I was also appalled by the fact that the so-called left-wing bloggers were, for want of a better word, chicken. Their list contained no leading figures from the international communist and socialist movements at all, and yet quite a few of them warrant serious consideration. Jean Jaures, French socialist opponent of war, murdered on the eve of the first world war, for one. And how about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, again, socialist opponents of the war, murdered by the neo-fascist Freikorps in 1919? I’d even make the case for Lenin and Trotsky. The leftists have voted, safely and reasonably enough, for Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King jr. Fair enough, but I’d have thought Ho Chi Minh and Ben Bella were in with a shout. Yglesias bemoans the absence of theorists other than Orwell (who wasn’t). I concur: why were there no votes for Bertrand Russell (also a campaigner against WW1), Max Weber and Emile Durkeim (20th century figures both) or John Rawls? No doubt the prevalent francophobia meant that the right-wing crowd denied Charles de Gaulle his place. (And don’t get me started on the artists, writers and composers.)

UPDATE: (Thanks CY) There’s a long thread on this at Electrolite.

UPDATE UPDATE: Norman Geras posts the list he voted for and some reflections.

August 20, 2003

Trotsky's great-grand-daughter

Posted by Chris

Via both CalPundit and Mark Kleiman comes the news that Trotsky’s great-grand-daughter has a high-profile position in US administations as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She seems to have an odd line on the incompatibility of science and politics. An interesting nugget of historical gossip, anyway.

August 05, 2003

Geras on Polanski

Posted by Chris

A bit more online content from Imprints: Norman Geras’s reaction to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. He concludes:

The Holocaust and other calamitous experiences not only can be represented, they must be, whatever the difficulties. There will be those who err or fail in the way they do it. Others, though, will not, as The Pianist itself exemplifies. And if part of what is revealed in these efforts to represent the universe of pain and death is some surviving human value, so be it. Would the world be better without this, or for not being shown it? No, it would be then truly without hope, the hope that Polanski professes to have found in Szpilman’s story in spite of the enormity of the surrounding horror.

August 04, 2003

Michael Walzer interview in Imprints

Posted by Chris

A puff for one of my other collaborative projects: Imprints. The latest issue is now out and contains much of interest. The online content this time is an interview with Michael Walzer which ranges over many issues: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the morality of humanitarian intervention, Israel and Palestine, anti-Semitism, memories of Rawls and Nozick, the permissibility of torture, blocked exchanges and commodification, the narcissism of Ralph Nader, and much more. Read the whole thing - it is both enlightening and provocative.

August 03, 2003

Back in the GDR

Posted by Chris

I’m very much looking forward to seeing Goodbye Lenin!, especially because I’ll be interested to find out how far the film tallies with my own (admittedly brief) experience of the GDR. I spent a week there in 1984, staying with some medical students in Leipzig whom my girlfriend had made friends with in Hungary on an earlier holiday. They’d been very interested that we thought of ourselves as Trotskyists and we, in turn, were keen to discover what a “deformed workers’ state” (to use the official Trot jargon) was like. At the time (early Thatcherism) Britain was in a real mess, and the claim was frequently made that the GDR had a higher per capita GDP than the UK. So we went there expecting both a somewhat repressive society and one where living standards were similar to our own. So what did we find?

The population, so far as we could tell, was neither fanatically pro-regime nor pro-Western. I remember an elderly woman hearing us talking in English in a cafe and striking up a conversation. She told us that she had spent the Nazi years in Leeds, only returning to Germany with the end of “fascism” as Nazism was universally referred to. I’ve blogged before about our experience of playing a game of Monopoly with our hosts. They certainly didn’t have the capitalist ethos (near bankrupt players could depend on their comrades to bail them out!) and we Western socialists thrashed them easily! At the time, the people I talked to said that they wanted more democracy and political freedom, but not Western-style capitalism. They all seemed moderately hostile to the regime and I remember that there were jokes about people from Dresden being orthodox communists because the Western tv transmitters didn’t reach that far. East Germans were both proud and ignorant of their own history. Leipzigers in particular were proud that their town had witnessed the defiance of Dimitrov, later secretary to the Comintern, who was put on trial by Goering in 1933 (and won). But though they new about the high points of Communist history, they didn’t know much about the lows. My friends knew nothing of the history of the KPD (the pre-war Communist Party) before the Stalinist Thaelmann faction took control in 1927. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were known, of course, but as icons rather than as thinkers (their ideas would have been too radical for the GDR).

The public face of the regime was, of course, everywhere, with many banners and posters vaunting the achievements of the regime and the benefits of “Peace”. We didn’t get to see East German tv until I was in West Berlin (as our friends didn’t have a tv set, and when we did, we saw two programmes: a long (a really long) speech by Chernyenko and a drama about sabotage in a factory making agricultural machinery. As for political repression, I really have very little to say. We know now, of course, that the Stasi kept tabs on pretty much everyone (so I’m sure there was a little file on me somewhere). We misread the conditions of our visa and failed to report to the local police until three days after our arrival. But when we did go, full of trepidation, the policeman was very friendly and relaxed and stamped our passports without making a fuss. One of my student friends, who had been required to read “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (not one of Lenin’s best IMHO) told me that he had asked at the library for a copy of the work to which Lenin’s was a reply (Kautsky’s “The Class Struggle, I think). Although the work was in the catalogue, he was told that he was not permitted to inspect it, let alone borrow it. The same friend also displayed a certain wariness when out in public with us, and on one occasion, when we visited a bar, asked that we remain silent and not speak in English.

It was evident, almost immediately, that East German living standards were way below those of capitalist Britain.There was a terrible selection of consumer goods. There really was not much worth eating in the shops (and endless bottled vegetables), though many East Germans grew their own produce on allotments. Having heard our hosts moan about the difficulty of getting decent food, we were amazed to find a wide range of cheeses for sale. Or so we thought. In the shop, there were packets advertising Rocquefort, Camembert, Brie, Gouda and many other varieties. We bought many packets and took them home to general hilarity: all the packets contained identical processed cheese. Oranges from Cuba did seem to be plentiful (though they were a horrible brown/green colour) and on a trip to the zoo we discovered animals chewing through enormous quantities of turnips. Back at our friends’ place we looked up “turnip” in the German-English dictionary to find it rendered, literally as “animal food”. Clearly there was room for Anglo-German cultural disagreement on what counted as “food”.

The impression of generally poor living standards seemed to extend to housing. Our friends lived in the only inhabited apartment (on their staircase) in a condemned tenement block. One thing that took some getting used to was the toilet facilities. To go, one had to step out into the corridor and into what looked like a cupboard where there was a bench and what seemed to be a saucepan lid. On lifting the lid one was presented with a shute running straight down to the cesspit several floors below from which rose a most appalling stench. I was constipated for days! Apparently, a modern, flushing wc had been scheduled for installation, the parts had been delivered on day 1, but had been stolen by the time the workmen arrived on day 2. Nevertheless, the official records stated that the apartment had been modernised (in this respect, anyway!) and since the records must be right, nothing could now be done.

One day we visited Wittenberg (the town where Luther did all that nailing-to-the-door stuff) and spent a whole morning thinking there was something strange about the place. There was - the silence! Since East Germans had to wait many years to acquire a Trabant (the little state-manufactured car powered by a 2-stroke engine) most did not have one. There was no traffic, and so no traffic noise. On the same day we met an East German teacher of English and her teenage daughter, who were amazed to see Western tourists. I have to say that the teacher’s English was not especially good - but since she had never visited and never could visit an anglophone country, that was not surprising.

There was a definite edginess in the streets in the neighbourhood where our friends lived. We dressed oddly by East German standards and were shouted at by strangers on one occasion. We also witnessed a violent confrontation in front of the main railway station between football fans and police. When we saw gangs of fans in other areas later, we felt pretty nervous.

There are many other things I could mention (the pollution and how bad it was, for one). The main thing to say, though, is that though the GDR was a shoddy and poor place, it was not, at least for most of its history, a place that matches the dystopian fantasy imaged of the communist bloc that one sometimes finds in the blogsphere. There were not, as far as I could tell, widespread disappearances, torture or any of that stuff. Rather, people adjusted, adapted, whispered and grumbled and hoped for better times (though all thought that the wall was there for the rest of their lives). Grim and depressing, sometimes, but this was not Leningrad 1937. It was also a place where people could, on the whole, be pretty certain about the shape their lives would take. Sometimes this meant compromise. My doctor friends wanted to be together and get married, but they knew that there was a danger that once they had passed their exams they would be assigned to different cities. There was some flexibility in the system: you could say where you would prefer to practise. If thet put down a popular city like Berlin, then the likelihood was that they would each be sent to random towns, perhaps at opposite ends of the country. So they chose to go to Chemnitz (or Karl-Marx Stadt), guessing, correctly, that there would be few volunteers for that grim industrial Saxon city. They were right, and they got to stay together.

ADDENDUM: The Financial Times has a review of recent books on the GDR.