History

The five surviving British veterans of the first world war.

A (slightly ponderous) documentary on a set of rare sound recordings of British and Irish POWs from World War I. First recordings are just after 10 minutes in. I liked the way the speed of the shellac recording is calibrated by matching an A note on the last groove to the A from a tuning fork. At 23″ or so there’s a recording of a man telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the difference between the ‘a’ in _father_ and the ‘a’ in _man_ is quite striking. At about 35″ there’s an nice example of the problems associated with interpreting material like this: another recording of the Prodigal Son story (a set text for the German academics who were interested in English accents) is played to a woman who knew the solider speaking, with interesting results.

There have been quite a few blogospheric discussions about staged war photographs (Iraq, Lebanon) and whether it matters whether they were staged if they reveal the truth. Here’s something to check out when you have a bit of time …. Errol Morris has a blog, “Zoom”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/ at the New York Times devoted to photography. He has now published two parts of a three- (or four-) part essay concerning whether Roger Fenton, one of the earliest war photographers, staged a famous picture of cannonballs on a road in the Crimea, as alleged by Susan Sontag. In “part one”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/ , Morris gets the opinion of the curators and art historians on which of two Fenton pictures was taken first; in “part two”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/which-came-first-part-two/ he gets his compass out and his feet dirty by going to the Crimea and finding the exact stretch of road. In comments to part one, his own readers offer their solutions to the photographic puzzle. (via “FineBooks”:http://blog.myfinebooks.com/ thanks to PdB.)

From Michael Medved’s latest column, “Six Inconvenient Truths About the U.S. And Slavery”:

Historians agree that hundreds of thousands, and probably millions of slaves perished over the course of 300 years during the rigors of the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic Ocean. Estimates remain inevitably imprecise, but range as high as one third of the slave “cargo” who perished from disease or overcrowding during transport from Africa. Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.

So the ‘inconvenient truth’ is that the slave traders were the real moral sufferers, in this situation. (OK, you’re so smart. What do you think he meant to say?) Let’s read on.

By definition, the crime of genocide requires the deliberate slaughter of a specific group of people; slavers invariably preferred oppressing and exploiting live Africans rather than murdering them en masse. Here, the popular, facile comparisons between slavery and the Holocaust quickly break down: the Nazis occasionally benefited from the slave labor of their victims, but the ultimate purpose of facilities like Auschwitz involved mass death, not profit or productivity.

But since the most morally ‘horrifying aspect’ of the Middle Passage was, by hypothesis, the element that is missing in the Nazi case – the element that breaks the analogy: the heartrending spectacle afforded by frustrated profit motive – I take it Medved has just proved the slave trade was worse than the Holocaust?

So we don’t need to feel guilty about slavery, after all?

Oh, never mind. (Honestly, don’t these people have a Moveon ad to complain about?)

Via Sadly, no! (whose discerning discussion of the whole column is worthy of your attention.)

UPDATE: In comments it has been pointed out that my reading is not plausible. Yes, I noticed. In all seriousness, what do you think he meant to say?

I recently visited the British museum for the first time. The very little I saw really was astonishing. I found it surprisingly moving, in fact – especially the Rosetta Stone, for whatever reason. But despite the sense of amazement, I also had the gnawing and depressing feeling that the last 3500 years of human history really just boils down to one damn war after another. Another (related) feeling was the more inchoate discomfort with how all that stuff managed to arrive in London.

In chapter 8 of Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” He points to an ambiguity in the term “culture.” Sometimes it refers to artifacts – “whatever people make and invest with significance through the exercise of their human creativity.” Other times it refers to “the group from whose conventions the object derives its significance.” He struggles with the relationship between these two senses of the term – specifically with the question of the return of ancient cultural artifacts to people who claim them as their “cultural patrimony”.

Appiah has lots of sensible and interesting things to say on the issue. He holds that it is “a perfectly reasonable property rule that where something is dug up and nobody can establish an existing claim on it, the government gets to decide what to do with it.” But the government should think of itself as a trustee “for humanity”. This cosmopolitan perspective breaks any kind of special tie to geographic location. “However self-serving it may seem, the British Museum’s claim to be a repository of the heritage not of Britain but of the world seems to me exactly right.”

But he also quotes Major Baden-Powell (founder of the Boy Scouts), who after looting the palace of the Asante King Kofi Karikari in 1874 1895 [thanks, rea – see comment 14.] wrote: “There could be no more interesting, no more tempting work than this. To poke about in a barbarian king’s palace, whose wealth has been reported very great, was enough to make it so. Perhaps one of the most striking features about it was that the work of collecting the treasures was entrusted to a company of British soldiers, and that it was done most honestly and well, without a single case of looting.” Appiah obviously recognizes this as theft, and wants a negotiated restitution, but this is because “the property rights that were trampled upon in these cases flow from laws that I think are reasonable. I am not for sending every object ‘home.’ … I actually want museums in Europe to be able to show the riches of the society they plundered in the years when my grandfather was a young man … Because perhaps the greatest of the many ironies of the sacking of Kumasi in 1874 is that it deprived my hometown of a collection that was, in fact, splendidly cosmopolitan.”

There certainly is something very attractive about the ideal of a grand cosmopolitan museum, whether in London or Kumasi. But I just couldn’t shake the thought that most of the artifacts were taken with an attitude that Britain – as opposed to the world – was entitled to them.

For the past week I’ve been crouching behind a bush, metaphorically speaking, waiting to ambush Oliver Kamm who was unwise enough to announce his intention to defend the use of the A-bomb at Hiroshima against its moral critics. Of course, I spent some of that time anticipating what Kamm might say and, it turns out, I anticipated wrongly. I had expected Kamm to concede, against people like Elizabeth Anscombe, that Hiroshima involved the murder of innocents, but then to argue that such murder was necessary. I’d then intended to invoke Orwell’s critique of Auden from _Inside the Whale_, a passage that contains _inter alia_, some acute comments on the Kamm mentality.

But I was wrong. It turns out that “Kamm denies the claim that it was murder”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2007/08/hiroshima-and-e.html . The trouble is, he can’t bring himself to face the issue directly, and, despite quoting Anscombe _in extenso_, gives a seriously inaccurate account of her view.

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Quiet around here over the weekend. Anyway, following up on my Euthyphro post, another legal thought.

Euthyphro describes the case (4c): [click to continue…]

So it’s the time of year when I teach Plato’s Euthyphro and I’m getting ready to run through my usual very short history of Athenian homicide law: how before Draco there was no legal distinction between intentional and non-intentional killing; after Draco, the state began to take greater interest in what had previously been strictly family business; how after Solon it was possible, for the first time, for a citizen who was not a blood relation of the victim to bring suit. (I hope I got that right.)

And then I asked myself: pre-Solon (and even after) what did happen, in practice, if a stranger – some traveler – was killed, and there was no family to bring suit on his behalf? In the dialogue, Euthyphro explains to Socrates that it shouldn’t matter whether the victim is family or a stranger – the pollution is the same either way. And, theologically, that is a perfectly orthodox thing for him to say. More specifically (although Euthyphro doesn’t mention it) Zeus is well-known for having a soft spot for travelers. So if someone kills a traveler or stranger then, theologically, the public has a very legitimate interest in getting all that miasma cleaned up quick before lightning strikes.

So what did the ancient Athenians do in cases in which there was a killing – in which it may have been known who did the killing – and no family with standing to bring suit?

Specific follow-up question: suppose the victim was a guest-friend of an Athenian citizen. Would the citizen then have had legal standing to bring suit on the victim’s behalf?

Not so long ago, in a discussion on Iraq the question came up of what various people would have predicted at the outset of the US Civil War. It seemed to me that all with the possible exception of Sherman, would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory for their side. Of course, rather than speculate, I should have checked Wikipedia. Fortunately, William Tecumseh Sherman was the featured article yesterday, and includes Sherman’s judgement.

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!

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I saw “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com last night, for the third time in the last two years, and he was simply marvellous. Funny, crotchety, gritty, and (this hadn’t struck me so much before) with a wonderfully strong and clear voice. He played some new material, together with stuff from recent albums and some of his songs that others have covered on an album he’s reluctant to call a “tribute”: Wounded Heart of America. Like the old stuff, the new featured the usual cast of characters: cowboys, Mexicans, Welsh sailors etc, all superbly observed and changed to suit audience and place. And there were the usual anecdotes about Bukowski, Rambling Jack Elliot, etc., together with some reminiscences I hadn’t heard before (on his experiences in Nigeria during the Biafran war).

(Sometimes when going along to hear an act with others, I feel slightly unsure of their reaction: I like this but maybe they won’t, and I can see why and I might feel the urge to explain or say that X was better last time. No such worries with Russell: if someone doesn’t like him then there’s something wrong with _them_ .)

Russell is on tour in the UK at the moment, and you can catch him in Newcastle tonight, in Edinburgh on Saturday and in London next Monday (along with a bunch of other places in between and afterwards).

This is a pretty weird post from “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/what_is_eugenics.php.

Ezra writes that it’s “very unfair” to apply the word “eugenics” to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down’s Syndrome by selective abortion, because “traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch.” First of all, Down’s Syndrome is not a “medically disastrous” genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term “disastrous.” Second, while the means of “traditional eugenics” were obviously very different from what’s emerging now – involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion – the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process.

Does Ross _seriously_ believe that people who have abortions because their foetus appears likely to have Tay-Sachs syndrome or Downs syndrome are doing so because their “end” is “the genetic improvement of the human species?” Can he even realistically contend that the genetic improvement of the human species crosses most people’s minds when they are making this kind of decision?? This claim seems to me to be ridiculous on its face, regardless of your underlying position on whether abortion is a good or bad thing.

What’s going on here, as best as I understand it, is something like the following. There’s a long-standing label in US politics called “progressive,” which used to mean something like “social democrat or non-revolutionary socialist.” As vaguely-left Democrats have increasingly become disenchanted with the term ‘liberal’ and its milksop connotations, they too have begun to embrace the term “progressive.” However, for them, it doesn’t mean ‘social democratic, but instead something like ‘vaguely pro-union liberal with balls’ (or ovaries depending … you get my drift). This in turn has led critics on the right to start harking back to some of the old-style socialist progressives’ sins, and to try to hang them around the necks of Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and company.

Here, Ross has been trying to assert in a series of posts that there is some sort of continuity between ‘old’ progressives’ views on eugenics, and ‘new’ progressives’ views on abortion. Which is kinda nonsensical. The modern liberal position on abortion isn’t rooted in the imperative towards genetic improvement of the species, or anything like it. It’s rooted in a particular notion of individual rights. That’s why they call it ‘choice’ rather than ’embrace your genetic duty by destroying imperfect foetuses for the benefit of mankind.’ The old-style eugenics of H.G. Wells, Swedish social democrats, Anglo-American family planners etc has _nothing to do_ with modern liberalism, or with liberals who have started to call themselves progressives. Instead, if it’s an embarrassment for anyone, it’s an embarrassment for social democrats like myself, who have some real continuities with that older tradition (although hopefully not with that particular part of it).

Pejman Yousefzadeh isn’t taking the internet mockery of his anti-FDR agitation well.

Apparently–and this is the latest pronouncement from the Reality-Based Community–we are not supposed to study things that happened 74 years ago, or perhaps longer.

That seems like a reasonable way to characterize the point that one wouldn’t usually get worked up reading a squib entitled “70 years ago this week in monetary policy.” Anyhoo, [click to continue…]

The other day David Brooks “wrote a column”:http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=login which appeared to be a stock piece of standard conservative anxiety about what he called “hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving” young women. “Matt Yglesias picks up on”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/why_i_read_david_brooks.php on the piece today, salvaging the key insight of Brooks’ piece from the muddled pop-culture framing. As Brooks says,

bq. Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

Matt comments:

bq. The reality is that technological and economic change has raised the age at which people — particularly more upscale people — do things like get married and have children. But biology stays the same. Consequently, people in their teens and early twenties engage in a lot of courtship-related program activities that don’t really entail a good-faith search for a spouse.

This point is basically correct. And for the past two months, a book exploring just this issue has been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read properly, instead of skimmed. It’s Michael Rosenfeld’s The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family.
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I experience all kinds of odd reactions on reading Kate Brown’s “review of three books about the Gulag”:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2645702,00.html in the TLS. She writes about some horrific events (starving prisoners abandoned on a island) but the general impression is not of the Gulag as I’d come to imagine it. True, this is the early system, circa 1933, but what the books Brown is writing about depict is something that calls to mind the British transportation of their undesirables to Australia, or, perhaps, ethnic deportations like the Trail of Tears. Deportees sent to the frontier to build a new life, and issued with guns to protect themselves from polar bears! Escapees running riot and terrifying the locals. And deluded managers in Moscow issuing orders to well-meaning subordinates in the distant east and giving them problems to solve but not the resources to cope. Read the whole thing, as they say.