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| 3.87
| 356
| 2021
| Dec 30, 2021
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really liked it
| 'Devil-land' is a narrative history of England (and to a much lesser extent Scotland and Ireland) from 1588 to 1688 told largely through the dispatche 'Devil-land' is a narrative history of England (and to a much lesser extent Scotland and Ireland) from 1588 to 1688 told largely through the dispatches of diplomats to or sent overseas by the English Court (or the Protectorate) and through the propaganda pumped out as pamphlets and other works. Jackson's diligence is not in question. As solid research, its status as winner of the Wolfson History Prize (2022) has been reasonably earned but we should not see it as the whole story by any means. It is certainly low on analysis and interpretation. We are speaking here of a hundred years between the Armada when the Spanish Empire was a material threat and the invasion of the Dutch Prince of Orange, invited by much of the British Establishment to 'defend their liberties'. One virtue of the book is the way it pinpoints something easily lost - the centrality of the execution (effectively judicial murder) of Mary, Queen of Scots, in defining foreign outrage at English political pragmatism and in setting a precedent for the execution of Charles I. Ideology is important. Elizabeth had introduced an ideology of ruthless power that flummoxed a European political culture that placed a greater premium on the sanctity of the royal and the identification of that sanctity with such nations as existed. This difference might be said to have been inherent in English political culture in light of the struggles between Yorkists and Lancastrians and Henry VIII's abandonment of a dynastic marriage and of the universal Catholic Church. The mystique was more in power than blood. The Stuarts, from a stronger line of blood in their own estimation as Kings of Scotland, possessed a more European notion of the divinity of Kingship. It is the clash and management of the clash between these pragmatic and ideological visions of rule that destabilise England. If we add in religion where High Anglicanism and then Catholicism offer more security of tenure for the divine monarch than the more demotic Low Anglican and Non-Conformist world-views then the struggle becomes national and cultural. It would have taken highly skilled and sensitive monarchs to have preserved their prerogatives and the total allegiance of their populations (which means a popular blind eye to brutal repression of dissent). The Stuarts were self-evidently not up to that mark after James I died. Cromwell was given a hospital pass in that respect. He could not claim 'divine' prerogative except through the providence (a sort of fatalism) of having acquired power - pragmatism justified after the fact - and his allegiances were 'Trumpian' (that half of the nation that had triumphed). Jackson's tale of diplomatic manipulations and frustrations shows us how the political failures of the regime brought into play the foreign powers who presented themselves as threats to or allies of the differing world views in the England of the day. We have to start with the stake of the ruling order in Protestantism which created two kinds of threat. The first was from Catholicism backing the claims of Spain and then of monarchs who might re-catholicise the country through edict over the heads of the Protestant majority. The fear was visceral and very much overdone except that the burnings of martyrs under Mary, massacres in the French Wars of Religion and the massacres of Protestants in Ireland all created a popular fear that Catholics and invading troops would take lives and property. The other threat was of embroilment in foreign wars at huge expense where picking one side or the other - the Dutch and the Protestant Princes or the Catholic Powers - had huge internal implications whether of high taxation, standing armies, commercial costs or alien threat. There is no point in going through the constant shifting of influence and alliances in which five dynasties - [Spanish] Hapsburgs (initially), Stuarts, the Elector Palatines, Bourbons and the House of Orange (latterly) - played for high stakes since that is what you should read the book to understand. Suffice it to say that part of the 'English problem' was that the interests of a dynasty - a sort of family firm - and of a self-perceived nation became almost impossible to bring into line in the eyes of both parties. Dynasticism and nationalism are often hard to reconcile under early modern conditions. This tale of international relations and continual attempts at regime change from within and without is played out between just a few dynastic States (plus the Republican Netherlands) who saw England as of great strategic importance in their own games of continental hegemony or survival. Although there are walk on parts for the Baltic, Russia, the Austrian Hapbsburgs, the Ottomans, the Poles and the Italians, this is a game largely played in North Western Europe between the Spanish Empire, France, the United Provinces, the German Princes, Denmark and the United Provinces. Half way through the period, signs of future imperial struggle appear with conflicts in far away Indonesia, acquisitions through marriage and the Cromwellian raid on the Caribbean (as Elizabethans had raided the Spanish Empire before) but this is a European story and only part of it at that. Where I would depart from Jackson (and one wonders if she was driven to this by publicists and publishers) is the attempt to make England into more of a basket case than it probably was since, barring a few years of civil war, some central authority was always present. If we think of the state of France during the Wars of Religion and right up to the 1590s (and the Fronde and continuing tensions until Louis XIV finally stamped his authority on France), then England seems less unique. France appears a nation but is, in fact, a dynastic possession. We can then add the disgusting warfare of the Thirty Years War before the Peace of Westphalia, the crumbling of Spanish Habsburg authority with revolts in Iberia and the constant struggle between the House of Orange and the Republic in the Netherlands. Given that English disorder and disorders between England and Scotland and in Ireland (rather than just free and open political disagreement) were intermittent to say the least, to paint England as an extreme exception in being an example of disorder simply does not stand up. And if it was unstable, it was unstable because it was relatively free and rarely distracted by the sort of continental adventurism that the Monarchy could ill afford and that the modern British State, though it seems not to know it, can ill afford today. There is a confusion here of lively debate with political instability. If anything, once breakdown had been experienced in the 1640s and 1650s as a series of accidents under what must count as one of the stupidest of British monarchs matched only by his son James, elites tended to work to stability. The problem here is not with the rambunctious English whose only fault seems to be that they were partial to the Anglican Church settlement, reducing competition for office, low taxation and their property rights and 'liberties' but with ideological monarchs trying to preserve magical beliefs. Still, the book is excellent at giving something like real time accounts of the puzzlement of foreign aristocratic observers at this propensity of the English for individualism and excitable politics which seems to have lasted well into this century despite every elite effort to contain it. Monarchs look weaker and a tad more stupid in this account although James I strikes us as wise in avoiding foreign entanglements and a skilled politician in keeping his ship of state on an even keel. Cromwell, of course, is one of the great men of history but still a failure in the end. Kings were still being judged on their ability to maintain national security but national security was often interpreted in emotional and ideological ways. Parliaments were always wary of handing over resources not merely for the wrong war but to be used against themselves. The story could be twisted into an argument against 'democracy' but this would be absurd. Regime instability was what it says on the tin. It only becomes national instability for a very short period of extreme violence from which lessons are learned. Trade generally continued regardless. For much of this period, instability was there but superficial much like it is in the US today. The core of the regime (monarchical with attempted parliamentary restraint centred on getting cash) remained the same as different monarchs came and went. Cromwell ended up monarchical in effect. Bursts of extreme violence did not recur very often outside the 1640s. Rebellions were generally crushed swiftly. Monarchical change in 1660 and 1689 avoided bloodshed. This is nothing like what had happened in the Thirty Years War or French Wars of Religion (Ireland excepted). Monarchical repressions may have involved the quasi-extrajudicial murders of Stafford, most infamously of Charles I and of republicans involved in the Rye House Plot or the Monmouth rebels but killing was highly localised. There were no mass purges or slaughters in England outside the 1640s. In other words, excepting the 1640s and the brutalities in Ireland, in general, regimes and elites were simply playing a high stakes game to stabilise the country around two competing narratives that eventually would become sanitised in a civilised way around Whigs and Tories. We might better see the process as one of maturation in which an Anglican establishment tamed its own extremist high church, presbyterians and non conformists and the Catholic tendencies of the dynasty itself and built the capacity for peaceful regime change. The fruits of this were the facts that the 1688 Revolution was England's last revolution (unlike in Europe), that English identity was cultural and not political so that it did not matter if Germans were monarchs and that ideological struggle could be turned into an elite game for advantage. We see this today in the twenty first century with England 'revolting' only to get back on track with its identity in 2016, existing around a mythic monarchy with marginal power and seeing a centre-left government control the state on a ridiculously undemocratic vote without fighting in the streets. The value of this book is not in telling the truth of England between the Armada and the Glorious Revolution but in allowing us to see just how confusing England had become to the rest of Europe, simultaneously unmanageable and expensive in attempts to influence it. What struck this reader was that the French in particular had poured the equivalent of billions into trying to sustain a sympathetic Stuart Dynasty after 1660 (much like we pour billions into Ukraine) only to see it becoming a money pit that merely held the line against the inevitable. In short, the England that Elizabeth created and the England that happily took on a Dutch chancer with no interest in the country shows a strong cultural and political continuity - that of a lively nation of individuals that could often get out of hand but which always veered back to the centre. In this interpretation, the brutal Civil War of the 1640s and the republican experiment of the 1650s are still the focus of attention as necessary 'mistakes' that lance the boil of divine right dynasticism and permit the 'nation' to emerge in partnership with a more pragmatic monarchy. In this interpretation, rather than the one implied in the book, England was only superficially unstable and the struggle to become a nation a slow process with a very bad decade or so rather than an example of a 'failed State'. England was rather a 'new-state-in-the-making'. Still, 'Devil-land' remains an important source text for understanding this period better. Only one side of the story but a previously neglected one. The diplomats and scribblers offer insights unavailable elsewhere even if we cannot take their analytical skills for granted. ...more |
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| 4.05
| 26,158
| Sep 10, 2015
| Nov 22, 2016
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really liked it
| Norman Ohler was not trained as a professional historian but this German novelist and scriptwriter has done a superb job in giving new insight into th Norman Ohler was not trained as a professional historian but this German novelist and scriptwriter has done a superb job in giving new insight into the Second World War and into Hitler's regime through original research. He looks at both through the prism of drug abuse. Perhaps some of his claims may be a trifle exaggerated because of lack of context but the three main themes are well argued: that German early military success, wartime errors of judgement by Hitler and the complicity of the German navy in concentration camp abuses were all related to drugs. In the case of drug use by the German military he makes a good case that the Blitzkrieg method of warfare owed a great deal to a deliberate use of drugs that had been normalised in Germany by commercial interests under Weimar and which continued to be used under the Nazis. He implies further that the weaknesses of the Germany military later (on the Eastern Front) may be partly put down to the 'lows' created by a drug dependency that decreased capacity over time. This latter must remain 'unproven' but the evidence for very high drug use to avoid sleep in 1940 is clear. The heart of the book, however, is the story of the malpractice of Hitler's personal physician, Morell, in solving short term problems of attention and drive with injections of substances that effectively turned Hitler into a 'junkie' in successive stages during the Second World War. Most of this claim is fully evidenced. Even the circumstantial evidence is more than plausible. Hitler's mental state was deteriorating month by month and year by year because his doctor was giving him cocktails of drugs that merely created the conditions for more drugs. If this is so (we are 99% convinced), then what becomes really interesting is not that Hitler was incapable of sound judgment but the total ineffectiveness of the officials around him to do anything about it. Some did see that something was wrong but none could act to reverse the process. There is something tragically eternal about this situation, well known to students of the worst Roman Emperors. Power is demanding. The means to make it less demanding have costs on frail flesh (leaders are not Gods) but no one dare bring power to account. The situation worsens. The point here is that Ohler rewrites the whole history of the war and the regime because, although it is probable that Germany could never have won in the long run, the cataclysmic manner of the defeat and the lack of ways out for negotiation might be partly put down to the work of a cowardly quack. The final account of how the German Navy in the last days of the war, desperate for answers to the impending defeat of Germany, became collusive in monstrous drug trials to help send teenagers on near-kamikaze missions is a coda, a foot note, to the main story. Like so many drug stories, the underlying themes are cynical greed and desperation. The cynical greed is that of the interwar German equivalent of today's Big Pharma and of a third rate Berlin doctor who 'struck lucky' when he solved a problem for the Fuhrer and made what he could of that. But we also have the desperation required for survival under Weimar, the desperate gamble of Guderian's Bilitzkrieg, the desperate attempt of Hitler to stay psychologically and physically on top and the desperation of Doenitz's navy to play a role in defeating the coming Allied onslaught. This heady cocktail of demand and supply is that of all criminal and legitimate pharamecutical call-and-response relationships between pushers and users. Once the user becomes a junkie, the pusher is in control. The pusher is not one to see the big picture or be moral and do the right thing. If Ohler is right, then we need to factor in part of the German population, a significant part of its military and its wartime Leader as 'de facto' junkies with all the inability to see straight of the junkie. You have to ask which other war leaders today and in the past have also been victims of their dealers. I, for one, am not convinced that this thesis of Ohler's alone is sufficient or sole explanation for German irrational exuberant behaviour and eventual collapse in the 1930s and early 1940s but the book makes a good argument for it being a very important contributing factor. ...more |
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| 4.11
| 1,168
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| May 17, 2022
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really liked it
| Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian who has already written on Chernobyl, takes us through six nuclear disasters, the decisions that led to each disa Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian who has already written on Chernobyl, takes us through six nuclear disasters, the decisions that led to each disaster and its consequences in a useful contribution to the nuclear debate. He does not take a stand, he merely gives us the data to enable us to do so. The first three arise from the primarily military interest in nuclear power (Bikini Atoll [US], Kishtym [Soviet] and Windscale [UK]) and the second three from the 'atoms for peace' era (Three Mile Island [US], Chernobyl [Soviet] and Fukushima [Japan]). In all cases, there is no malice here. These are warriors, scientists, engineers and business people 'learning through doing' and getting it horribly wrong (quite rarely in fact) from ignorance, inexperience and/or basic human error often derived from local organisational realities. The problem with 'learning through doing' is that the consequences of mistakes are far more potentially serious with nuclear power than getting the building of a bridge wrong or a railway signaling system or even the electronics in an aircraft. The common denominator in all these accidents is simple human error compounding technological flaws in design and/or events that could have been predicted but were not because someone simply did not think of them (most notably the possibility of a major tsunami overtopping a sea wall). The question that springs to mind - since each accident improves procedures and technology and a consequent withdrawal from peaceful nuclear power allows time to learn for the next building cycle - is whether the next wave of enthusiasm for nuclear power will result in another major accident or not. The book does not give us a great deal of confidence in this respect. At the moment, thanks to the twin panics over energy security and climate change, both Green and national security apparats are going hell for leather for a massive revival of the use of nuclear power. This will ostensibly be based on an increase in new and 'improved' nuclear power stations but also on smaller, local SMRs (small modular reactors) assuming the proponents of these latter can get past the resistance of local communities - which is why safety is going to be a political issue. It is probably true that the next wave of nuclear reactors will be much safer than anything that has appeared before. It is equally true that nuclear accidents are uncommon - after all, there have (to date) been no further major accidents even with old Soviet stock in Ukraine since Fukushima. So, putting aside equally problematic issues related to waste disposal and the vast cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations (another major 'tax' dumped on a non-voting future), why should we retain a degree of concern? The statistics say that a multiplication of reactors is more likely than not to result in another major case of human error merging with technological weaknesses and strategic errors to provide us with the high probability of another tragic nuclear event some time in the next thirty years somewhere. And this likelihood is the more likely because the scale of production of SMRs and their spread creates serious issues with the availability of fully trained and (initially) experienced nuclear engineers. Junior staff with insufficient traning are a definite factor in some of these accidents. The UK Government has already recognised a shortage of nuclear engineers and proposes to do something about it but we are living in a global market place with nuclear power assets soon to be developed on a global scale - that is the accident waiting to happen: skilled labour shortages. But does it matter? Given the energy security and environmental arguments, surely a few thousand kids dying in one locality of thyroid cancer and so forth is a 'price worth paying' to the utilitarian types operating at the highest level of decision-making - not that any dare say so openly. What struck me was that, unlike the use of nuclear weaponry, the consequences of a nuclear accident were a lot less than I had expected. It seems that chance exposure and genetic resilience mean that some people are immune to radio-active effects and other devastated by it. It is a lottery. Nevertheless for those affected, the consequences can be truly devastating and long-lasting. The fear must be that nuclear power expansion, with the eventual inevitability of some accident or other, is going to result in 'hot spots' of misery and individual tragedy that need to be faced. The public policy debate is, as usual, one of misdirection, smoke and mirrors because the nuclear lobby dare not face us with the gaming aspect of the decision-making - a few of us will die or get sick so that the vast majority will have the energy they need to live. Who dies will be a chance event. The lobby is also wholly evasive about the problem of accumulating radioactive cost which will not be able to be dumped on the 'third world' in time-honoured waste dumping tradition and about the costs to future generations of replacement and decommissioning of assets. In a world where the US has just got a minor debt downgrade because of the scale of its debt, no one is calculating the fact that the private-public balance is actually thoroughly skewed. The taxpayer is going to pay through the nose for subsidising building, decommissioning and accident clean-up. On the other hand, there is the utilitarian argument that 'something must be done' to ensure energy security (despite energy insecurity being the result of suicidal foreign policy decision-making) and stop climate change (despite the burden on future generations of the solution). Personally I cannot come down on one side or the other of the debate but only want an honest debate that includes future generations and that cuts out the exclusive voices of those with an interest in taxing us or profiting from us. Plokhy's book will not answer the question 'what is to be done?' but it is well worth reading for a well researched blow-by-blow account of what actually happens in a nuclear accident and what the consequences are in each of his six cases. At the end of the day, nuclear power expansion is a gamble in which a disinterested position is hard to find and where it is hard to have confidence in those making the decisions. What we need are the facts in the case. Plokhy does us a great service in that respect. ...more |
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really liked it
| When a regime collapses, it leaves a lot of political detritus, men unwilling or unable to knuckle down, accept defeat and build again under new condi When a regime collapses, it leaves a lot of political detritus, men unwilling or unable to knuckle down, accept defeat and build again under new conditions. The collapse of the Nazi regime allowed no opportunities to wait (as old Soviet warriors might have) for more propitious times for its ideology. First, the victors over the regime were absolute in their victory, occupiers, quite capable of setting the terms for recovery. Second, the old regime had committed awesomely brutal crimes that should have brooked no forgiveness. Third, the regime was not decadent like Sovietism but fanatic in its last days. Orbach's 'Fugitives' is about those war criminals, fanatics, psychopaths, cynics and opportunists who had to deal with collapse and build new lives in confused circumstances, what they did, why they did it and what happened to them in the end. He is not interested in the escape routes ('rat lines'), those who ended up in South America or those who buried themselves and hoped for nonentity within the German Democratic Republic. He has very little to say about those who chose to join the Soviet cause (simply for lack of sources). He has had exceptional access to the archives of the German and Israeli intelligence services. Although these will have their own biases, this is sufficient to tell some remarkable stories that shine a new light on post-war espionage and the 'politics of the dark side'. If a Nazi of some notoreity or prominence did not decide to go quiet and try to become a businessman or minor bureaucrat in the new German democracy, he would have four broad choices. He could hold on to the Nazi faith in the belief that he could play the allies off against each other. He could choose the Soviet path (if he got past the initial risk of the firing squad) on the basis that the Soviets were the enemy of Jewish capitalism. Or he could join the Western cause (if his crimes were not too obvious and he was not too high-ranking) because it was the enemy of Jewish Bolshevism. The fourth option was not to give a damn about ideology or politics (and perhaps never to have given a damn in the first place) and look to old contacts to earn some money through political means - as military or police adviser, as arms dealer or perhaps in what might amount to organised crime. Orbach looks at all these options and how they played out amongst a surprisingly small group of people, mostly chancers and sociopaths, over the few decades following the Second World War in a story that is highly complicated but is well presented here. The author is a professional historian. He does not allow himself to get over-excited by his subject matter. He is diligent. He has excellent and (I believe) reliable sources. He writes well and clearly. It may not be the whole story but the story is interesting enough. The first section concentrates on the oft-told story of Reinhard Gehlen and the compromises entered into in order to create the Gehlen Org, the precursor of the BND (the German State Intelligence Service). It is a revisionist tale, shattering Gehlen's own carefully cultivated legend. The truth is that Gehlen was a lucky opportunist, that American weakness when it comes to interagency co-operation rather than anything more malicious allowed his rather bungling organisation to continue as long as it did and that it became riddled with Soviet infiltration. The Soviets come out of this as rather clever, exploiting the Nazi old boy network with Nazis of their own to create a scandal that was highly disruptive of German politics as the German Establishment tried to avoid exposure of the rum ex-Nazi, Hans Globke, Adenauer's Chief of Staff, to world gaze. To be charitable, German democracy could not have secured itself without accepting the services of some who served under the previous regime and who had 'mains sales'. The chaos of collapse appears to have allowed the new system to avoid the worst of the Nazis only by taking the most weaselly. The first part of the book leads into the second with its strong Middle East focus by telling the story of the Gehlen Org's attempt to build a Middle Eastern intelligence network using old regime sympathisers while West Germany simultaneously tried to build a positive relationship with Israel. The second part of the book then deals largely with those ex-Nazis who embedded themselves in the world of Arab nationalism and took a more political view of things - that the war against the Jews was a war against Israel and the West. Ex-Nazis turned up in Nasser's Egypt and in Syria as it went through regime change after regime change, touting themselves as military, police and interrogation advisers and introducing the techniques of the Gestapo to Nasserite and proto-Baathist officers. The two main stories here are those of the vicious and murderous war criminal Alois Brunner who embedded himself in the Syrian security state and the Nazi arms trading operations such as OTRACO which ran guns, not always competently, to the Algerian rebels against French rule. Brunner is another well known story except that, here, because of his access to Mossad files, Orbach can give us a fuller picture of his adventures. One is gratified (spoiler alert) that he ends up a victim of the Baathists who clearly despised him, eventually languishing in a cell no better than a Gestapo one. What is more interesting are the insights into Israeli policy towards Nazi holocaust perpetrators. It is not quite what one may think. Although it was vital for Israel to trigger global awareness of the Holocaust, this was also a State with limited resources and other priorities. The capture and trial (1961) of Eichmann, which, of course, led to a classic text, Arendt's 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' which spoke of the banality of evil, satisfied that primary aim. Judgements then had to be made on use of resources once that core end had been achieved. Mengele (never captured) was never not going to be on the 'forever' list of Israel (with full justification) but other existential concerns of the nation pushed punishing war criminals to the back of the queue once the Eichmann Trial had had its effect. The Eichmann kidnapping unnerved old Nazis. The myth of Israeli 'justice' by any means was sufficient to drive some into hiding but, after an attempt to assassinate Brunner (rather than attempt his kidnap for trial), he was ignored for two decades. The FLN arms trading operation naturally brought into play the thoroughly murderous and ruthless French security services who conducted a campaign of car bombs against Neo-Nazi arms dealers, on German soil if necessary which was not good for Franco-German relations. The arms dealers were not particularly adept at either field craft or business. Some of the 'deals' appear almost comically inept in retrospect. The French scored a nice own goal by harassing the second rate Nazis out of existence only to create space for far more efficient Soviet suppliers. The strategic incompetence of security services seems to be a theme of this book. Gehlen and French intelligence are soon matched in the third and final part by the story of Israeli intelligence's poor analysis and diversion of resources into yet another murderous campaign. In this case, it was triggered by panic over Nasser's hiring at enormous expense of West German rocket scientists (not necessarily Nazis) who were presumed to be building a missile capable of dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel. The fear is understandable. Concern about nuclear weaponry led Israel into its own nuclear weapons programme and it has guided its foreign policy ever since. However, on this occasion, the evidence was there that these rocket scientists were second rate and there was no threat. The 'justice' agenda was dropped but the scientists were assumed to be Nazis seeking a second holocaust (they were not Nazis, just hired hands). Israeli intelligence went down the rabbit hole and undertook a violent programme of assassination that destabilised Israeli-German relations. In the end, Nasser's missile programme got nowhere for reasons that had little to do with Israel's efforts but simply because his team was not up to the job. The project was too expensive to be maintained. Again, to be fair, Cairo in the late 1940s and 1950s, was a hotbed of pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish sentiment but we are now well into the early 1960s. Nazis were getting old and tired in any case, past any serious usefulness to local Arab regimes if ever they were very useful in the first place. In the end, the West Germans and Israelis settled the matter far more intelligently by simply buying off the rocket scientists in 1964. The irony of it all is that the deal was partly enabled with intelligence acquired by Israel with the help of one of the most prominent Nazis of all - Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny, as a foot note, in this context is interesting because, untainted by war crimes yet the hero of European Neo-Nazis, he comes across here as a pragmatic opportunist hinting at the first emergence of Far Right admiration of Israel as a plucky national socialist State in its own right. This might be puzzling but if there were Nazis committed to 'extermination', other Nazis were more inclined to forced emigration (like the forcing out of the Moriscoes of Spain) so the existence of Israel might not present such a problem. This has been a division within the Far Far Right ever since. There was another brief burst of 'justice' attempts at creating an assassination programme directed at elderly Nazis under Begin in the late 1970s but it did not get very far. Brunner lost some fingers because of a letter bomb attempt on his life in 1980. This book is a fairly detailed account of the history of post-war Nazi mercenaries yet it is readable. The overwhelming effect is one of despair at our species, not because of its crimes but because of its blundering ineptitude whether Nazi, the sponsors of Nazis or their enemies. We are watching a criminal circus of surprisingly few people either 'busking' their way through life or engaging in extreme measures that would have been less necessary with a little forethought and closer attention to intelligence analysis. The Nazis come across as losers in a struggle for survival that simply results in them doubling down on their earlier criminal or sociopathic behaviour. Their enemies come across as tending to panicked paranoia which perhaps marks out active service units today then as now. History never repeats itself precisely but we are left with a suspicion that the shenanigans of excitable security apparats from Moscow to London, from Warsaw to Kiev, are likely to exhibit much the same tendencies nowadays as French, German and Israeli intelligence in the two post-war decades. On the other hand, and more positively, it is equally probable that amateur banditti arising from regime collapse may be disruptive but have no serious means of changing history while, on the few occasions that the big boys of politics intrude into the game, problems can be resolved rationally. An excellent historical work on a neglected part of post-war espionage, Orbach's use of his limited but important resources is exemplary. We can only hope that, one day, the Russian, Syrian and Egyptian Governments will give him access to their archives to fill out the story. ...more |
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really liked it
| Whitney Chadwick is a well regarded scholar of women in art with a strong interest in Surrealism. 'The Militant Muse' might be regarded as a sequel to Whitney Chadwick is a well regarded scholar of women in art with a strong interest in Surrealism. 'The Militant Muse' might be regarded as a sequel to her 'Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement'. It is not a straight narrative history but rather a series of essays on a theme. That theme is less some feminist attempt to recover women's role in Surrealism (although there is that aspect) and more an assertion of uniquely feminine responses to friendship set in a period of artistic change and war. It is a humane book but very much one for women about women. One has to step back a little from the currently fashionable determination to promote female, black or LGBTQ contributions to history. These are enlightening at best but often severely distorting at worst. The Academy as a whole has tended to distort rather than enlighten in recent years. Finding black relatively minor composers in the eighteenth century or concentrating attention on Artemesia Gentileschi and her castrating art or creating some idea of gayness long before it existed is all very well but has ended up with Jane Austen performed by black actors in a travesty of history. Chadwick is better than that. She does not make outrageous claims but presents the facts based on the documents and letters that she can get access to. Although we see a tendency to will an interpretation that suits an agenda on occasions, this is a work of history and not ideology. Nevertheless, we must not be seduced. The gender approach to art history (like the racial and the sexual) is a fashion. It derives in part from the market fact that, as with crime fiction and romance, women are disproportionately interested in art history. There is a drive to validation here. Looked at more dispassionately, Surrealism did produce some very significant women artists (less so literary figures), notably Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo although only Meret Oppenheim can claim to be part of the initiating group. This is more than women being a simple muse although it is equally true that men had the driving thoughts and energy that created the space for these women. Is that simply a matter of a 'patriarchal society' or is it perhaps true that women often do not initiate revolutions but can exploit them? The master literary and intellectual initiator of Surrealism, Andre Breton, was not accidentally someone who radicalised thought from experience of the front line in World War I. The preceding movements of Futurism and Dada were also related to war (for and against). Chadwick has something to say here about how war might drive a feminine sensibility under the conditions of the Second World War (and the Spanish Civil War) where violence and disruption affected both genders with far more equality than in the previous war. Unfortunately her story ends to all intents and purposes in 1945. There is no evidence of some upsurge in new ideas from women outside the contribution to Abstract Expressionism. Similarly Frida Kahlo is not really a Surrealist and neither was Lee Miller, both subjects of Chadwick. So, the task of capturing Surrealism for feminism does not quite work here but what does work is profound insight into female-to-female relationships (not necessarily but sometimes Lesbian) and the shattering effect of war on mostly very young but not exclusively so, women. Chadwick does this by taking five sets of interwar friendship broadly chronologically with the 'muse' aspect of women almost inevitably emerging as several of the women are as much known as the wives or lovers of 'great men' (Breton, Ernst, De Rivera and Penrose) as achievers in their own right. Indeed, one of the emergent themes is that interwar artistic women still tended to domesticity (and nothing wrong that) while trying to carve out an individual artistic expression and some sense of personal autonomy. Cooking and food emerge more than once as solace to no surprise. The first set is the quasi-Lesbian (or possibly fully Lesbian) romantic friendship of Valentine Penrose (first wife of Roland) and Alice Palen. There is not too much to say about this. It is sweet but reads like a romantic Lesbian novel and seems based on slender material. The second is the relationship between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini which actually says little about the latter but a great deal that is valuable about the former and how her art was formed - and how she coped or did not with the brutal incarceration of her lover Max Ernst during the phony war. Carrington was almost broken by the experience. The suggestion is that she was supportive and loyal during the temporary incarceration by the French authorities but the relationship did not survive long after. What is interesting is how Surrealism acted for her as psychotherapy through art. The third set explores the relationships of the surrealist and left-wing circles in which Frida Kahlo lived in Mexico as European political exiles arrived in the 1930s to create a vibrant artistic and cultural centre in Mexico City equal to those of (say) Bloomsbury or Paris. The central friendship is that of Kahlo (who easily surmounts her role as Diego de Rivera's wife) and Jacqueline Lamba ('Mrs Breton') but the tale is broader than that involving not only artists and surrealists but the circle around Trotsky in exile. The fourth set is for me the most interesting and powerful - less gossip perhaps and more solid history. It is the story of two long-loving Lesbians, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe, on the island of Jersey during the war with a rather weak link to 'Mrs Breton' coming for a holiday. One of the great posturings of the intelligentsia is that 'resistance' is writing a tract or poem against an oppressor or talking about resistance in a cafe and then having it added to one's own CV after others have fought with blood and gold to liberate you. Cahun and Malherbe's story (Cahun was an interesting surrealist and political actor in her own right duriing the interwar period) looks as if it might head in the same direction and then rapidly shifts into a story of radical action against the German occupiers at enormous personal risk. The two women, no longer young, become the epitome of a courage, their actions perhaps not changing the course of the war by one jot but demonstrating that even the littlest person can do what they can to destabilise rule by monsters and thugs. These are both true heroines. They got caught and underwent a terrifying trial and imprisonment escaping death by a hair's breadth and demonstrating that cliche 'the indomitability of the human spirit' to the nth degree. This story should be abstracted from this book and, at the least, made into an inspiring Netflix docudrama. The final set explores the kindly 'menage a trois' of Roland Penrose, his first divorced wife Valentine in exile from France (returning only once a year to Paris for a Lesbian romance) and Roland's generous and interesting (and war-traumatised) second wife, the renowned photographer Lee Miller. It is an oddly heart-warming story of dysfunctionality and polyamorous survival that could be happily mangled into some BBC drama. Of course, you do not get Roland's view on his ex-wife and current wife in situ with him on a Sussex farm but one suspects that he was tolerantly happy. We can add that the book is well illustrated with images that alone make it worth holding in the library. It should comfort female readers. Male readers should not ignore it. These are profound friendships and there are insights here for any man who wants to plumb the mysteries of woman. ...more |
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| With only one significant fault, this is a model of in-depth local history treating of one small village (Margate) of perhaps a couple of thousands of With only one significant fault, this is a model of in-depth local history treating of one small village (Margate) of perhaps a couple of thousands of farmers and fisher-folk (often the same thing) on the far edge of North East Kent (Thanet) from the Middle Ages to 1763. 1763 is significant because it is the date of the first commercial sea-bathing establishment in a village which rapidly expanded into a fashionable resort for the London gentry. Eventually Margate was to become the town of Dreamland, Tracey Emin and the Turner Centre. The fault lies only in the author insisting on embedding every detailed entry of his documentary evidence in the main text which reduces readability. Much of this could have been placed in foot-notes both for specialists and for proof while the general reader could be left the narrative. The solution is to speed-read over these sections and then slow down when required because the core history is very interesting. It gives an honest flavour of what it must have been like to live in such a place in (at least) the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this context the highlights lie in the author's handling of pre-Victorian poverty which tends to show a kindlier and more enlightened paternalist approach than might have been expected as well as more detailed evidence of Kent as constant front-line in national wars. We get a picture of a dynastic State only interfering locally to ensure the Defence of the Realm and otherwise leaving a rather insignificant Church and the local gentry to maintain order while ordinary people largely got on with their lives in, administratively, a rather haphazard way. The economic base of the village and its environs was better than many with a steady London market for local corn but it clearly went into decline as time passed. Poverty and economic insecurity seem to have been the normal state of affairs although we are not talking about starvation. A fairly poor harbour was neverthless maintained because of its strategic position as a point of arrival and departure for the Continent, its fishing (especially for herring like much of the North Sea zone) and the hoy trade in agricultural products for the capital. I must declare an interest - I was born in Margate at the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital (now converted into luxury flats) and my mother taught at the Drapers Mill Primary School although we did not live there long. I feel much closer to neighbouring Ramsgate. Still, it has a small place in my heart. ...more |
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liked it
| Innes' sixth thriller is, as are so many adventure thrillers, predicated on an absurdity - in this case, the existence of a multi-million pound secret Innes' sixth thriller is, as are so many adventure thrillers, predicated on an absurdity - in this case, the existence of a multi-million pound secret U-Boat base located on the Cornish coast making use of old mine workings. Once you get past this block to rational thought, what you get is a reasonably well crafted early wartime thriller (published at the very beginning of 1940) which has the virtue of having an authentic feel as far as the psychology of the time is concerned. Late 1939 was a time of deep anxiety about both Nazi espionage networks and fifth columnists and the threat to British naval power of German submarine warfare. Britain was also a nation still reeling from the Depression, psychologically insecure even if still determined to take on the Nazis. Even at this early stage, we see the division (later to be expressed in the Rommel legend) of the honourable military enemy contrasted with the thuggish and cowardly boot-boys of the Nazi Party - another absurdity only to be uncovered when the history could finally be written. There is nothing truly remarkable about this book but Innes writes with verve. His action sequences would be easy to translate into a 'war film'. He has a good eye for character and scenery so it ends up an easy and likeable read once you have drifted backwards in time to late 1939. One interesting note though. The young narrator who becomes the hero of the hour is not afraid to express his fears about war or his doubts about the consequences of heroism. This vision of young male anxiety, with only WWI as a measure of what war may be like, feels thoroughly authentic. The book feels like an act of psychological catharsis, of the writer forcing himself into the line of duty through his hero. The latter's undoubted selfless heroism and that of his working class comrades is the transformation of a weedy intellectual (a drama critic) into a potential officer and leader of men. All thrillers are male power fantasies but this is one where you can taste the fear of and anxiety about death in a greater cause at a particular moment in history. The educated middle class prep school boy does what he did in 1914 - take his natural social place as leader of men by overcoming his fears. ...more |
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| Sep 02, 1996
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liked it
| Although now thirty years out of date, Gerald Segal's one volume guide to global issues as they stood in the early 1990s is still useful as a summary Although now thirty years out of date, Gerald Segal's one volume guide to global issues as they stood in the early 1990s is still useful as a summary of international relations at that time. From there, you just have to fill in the subsequent three decades aware that many of the apparently intractable problems and disputes of what will soon be the mid-twenty-first century have very long histories and are unlikely to be resolved quickly. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Milan Rai's 'Chomsky's Politics' is an excellent introduction to Noam Chomsky, the political thinker and activist. Above all, it is readable (which Ch Milan Rai's 'Chomsky's Politics' is an excellent introduction to Noam Chomsky, the political thinker and activist. Above all, it is readable (which Chomsky is often not) and it has the benefit of being written by someone who had worked closely with the Chomsky in the peace movement. Rai is good both at placing Chomsky in his personal and American historical contexts and in elucidating Chomsky as consciously both an intellectual and a critic of intellectuals. Part of his skill lies in giving us a sense of the human being behind the activism and the theory. The book is well structured. It seems to fall into two halves naturally - Chomsky's analysis of what I usually call late liberal capitalism and how he came to it and, then, his conclusions about activism and what to do about the situation we find ourselves. In the first half (analysis), I found myself in analytical agreement with Chomsky on almost every point, especially in regard to the 'propaganda model' of society. This remains for me the central insight of the man, all the more so as I have been within the belly of that particular beast. The second half I have problems with - not as a book (it remains lucid and unacademic) but as a form of elitist anarchism over-depending on pure reason and on the transformation of the intellect in a species built on a self-serving yet co-operative dialectic between emotion and calculation. The final chapter compounds this sense of a detached rational ego of undoubted 'rightness' with its privileging of the intellectual as both cause of the current problem of amoral or immoral state public policy and somehow (if pessimistically) its solution. That hoary old Gramscian quotation about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will (an aphorism I have always despised) comes up at this late stage. In my eyes, the transformation of society is not a matter of intellect or will but of values and adaptation to human complexity. Chomskian radicalism (the book was written in the mid-1990s) has played its role in transforming society but largely (this was not Chomsky's intention) as support for a blind and arrogant moralising activist class that has ended up simply wanting its place in the elite sun. A world where Green politians act as boosters for NATO and defence spending, 'liberals' support a Democrat American Presidence challenging China for world hegemony and activists do not hide their contempt for the values of the conservative masses is perhaps not what he had in mind. Pessimism of the intellect led to an abandonment of any model for radical redistributive wealth or withdrawal from imperial values expansion. Optimism of the will has simply led to activist narcissism provoking a populist backlash and seething resentment in the masses. This is tragic because Chomsky's analysis stands. His moral force remains undoubted (he is ethically greater than many of his anarcho-Left followers) but his analysis of the system does not change it. It only creates the opportunity for a new branch of humanity to manipulate it. Chomsky himself was a tireless worker attempting to change public attitudes against the tide of rubbish delivered to that mass by the media. He should be honoured for that but he was always up against what he recognised himself as a self-serving 'intellectual class'. What has happened since, of course, is the rise of social media (giving a voice to the masses), of the billionaire disrupter (the Crassus' or Pompeys of our time) and of populist political organisation - all three throw up in the air the idea of rational revolution by town meeting. What we are seeing now is a different type of struggle as the 'ruling order' splits into competing components, all struggling for power and a piece of the cake while the villainous state-intellectual structures he identified make increasingly brutal attempts to control the means of information. The current stage is a mad world of proto-war fever with its implication for eventual state-driven emergency powers. We see two nuclear powers playing silly games shooting down each other' UFOs and driving mass hysteria in the street. 'Bourgeois panic' threatens to immolate the rest of us. Pure reason along classic cosmopolitan Jewish intellectual lines is no longer sufficient. There is no slow path to utopia through rational fact production. The genie is out of the bottle. The rational is and will be over-whelmed because the intellectual class has captured reason for its own purposes. The probable solution lies in a tougher form of political organisation and dissent based on a single-minded resistance to all forms of anti-imperialism and in favour of a sensible and patient socio-economic redistribution that leaves culture to develop organically in favour of toleration. Such forms once existed in labour and communist parties but got shattered either by the takeover of the first by middle class 'intellectuals' or the discrediting of the second by its bureaucratic criminality. But similar organisations are still needed as permanent challenges to the given system. America is in a particularly dire state because its initial Socialist Party was crushed by the ruthless war mounted on it by American middle class progressives sensing a threat to the property that allowed their beneficence. Now socialism is a barely tolerated out-rider to an Imperial Presidency. Unfortunately for Leftists, a combination of ideological purity and descent into cultural politics has now conceded ground almost wholly to populism as the voice of justifiable resentments. The Left-liberal activist class has now become the conservative and reactionary class in Western society. There are two signs that things may be changing. First, the risk of impending global war has brought left-wing radicals who are still within the 'real Left' and libertarians and centre-right war critics increasingly into alignment at the expense of the ideological purist. Second, there are signs of revolt in the Academy, especially amongst the rising generation of historians who are still embedded in fact as Chomsky was, against critical theory and the politics of culture. These are both small signs but they are signs. Nevertheless, for all the criticisms to be made of Chomsky as 'activist', Chomsky the thinker should continue to be an important source of ideas and influence for the Left resistance to the 'Left' and to the 'System'. The roots of effective change against the odds still lie in small towns and working class communities. These are generally tolerant and liberal in the best sense if respected. A Chomskian engagement to transform populism into anti-imperialism and redistribution is not impossible. Similarly a fair and sensible strategy of redistribution and equitable and sustainable economic growth is precisely what the 'masses' want. The idea of the mass is, in any case, inclusive with the actuality of ethnicity, gender, orientation, belief and lifestyle buried within it as personal freedom. So, optimism of the intellect, qualified optimism of the will ... ...more |
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liked it
| Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under Written almost immediately after 9/11, this 'very short introduction' cannot do much more than give us a basic history of what we like to place under the term 'terrorism' and to express a barely hidden frustration with the war on an abstract noun (Terry Jones of Monty Python fame). There are two major points being made here. The first is that there is no satisfactory definition of what terrorism actually is except in terms of its political purposes. And the second is that media-driven hysteria around the subject threatens the very fabric of liberal society. The book also debates whether terrorism as tactic (by whatever definition) is efficacious or not. The author suggests not and yet his examples sometimes tend to tell us the opposite especially if we take the long view. We can agree that most socialist or anarchist terror within liberal democracies was a waste of energy but then the later manifestations of it in the Red Army Faction and similar organisations were somewhat narcissistic and even patronising expressions of middle class outrage on behalf of others. However, the cases of the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Venezuela and others tend to show that terror as a tool designed to eliminate opposition in the sea in which revolutionaries must swim did work and that national/socialist regimes did emerge and survive for decades - right up until the present day. This, of course, is very different from the attempt at an 'ethical' terrorism by the Narodniki although anarchism descended into very unethical behaviours before too long. Whether ethical or unethical, these types of political excitability without a greater strategy certainly failed. It could be argued, of course, that the failure of the Social Revolutionaries constructed the conditions for Communist ruthlessness as, if we want a symbol of this, Lenin's ideology emerged out of the State murder of his brother. This would certainly be taking the long view. Townshend does himself great credit by not shying away from the existence of state terror and not only of the communist type. The Western empires have not been averse to it, again as part of a wider strategy of warfare, even if they like to cover it up as 'counter insurgency'. Townshend could have gone further and deeper down this route but the danger would have been that the purchasing punter might have got confused if this commissioned attempt to explain what was then a new phenomenon to some had moved into Chomskian territory. He is certainly right that terror within a revolutionary struggle that does not have a national resistance aspect is likely simply to mobilise the resources of the enemy into counter-strategies of great brutality (as in Chile and Argentina) and alienate populations uncommitted to the struggle. Each case is different but Townshend is particularly good and honest on the cat-and-mouse terror tactics of Israel and the Palestinians where he unravels the self-serving Netanyahu narrative that drives American congressional opinion, a legislature of surpassing lack of sophistication. In fact, Israel is an example of terrorism working because it was primarily ethnic and capable of being integrated into the survival strategies of an emerging ethnic State. That Jews never truly repudiated the massacres committed on Arab villagers as ethnic cleansing is a blot on their moral reputation. He also looks at the IRA and ETA as national liberation movements making use of terror as a tactic and he judges, prematurely in the case of the IRA, that they were failures. This is probably true in the case of the Basques with the Basque territory still well locked into the Spanish State mechanism. However, the Whitehall sell-out by stealth of the Unionists in a trajectory that was perfectly happy to abandon aspects of UK sovereignty in collaboration with the Irish in return for Washington's little scheme to get Ireland into NATO was also partly driven by Irish terrorism. As each decade goes by the inveigling of Northern Ireland into an eventual referendum to get the Province off the back of the British budget and secure Ireland so that it was no longer a neutralist strategic risk factor in a European War could rely on Irish terror to make that job easier. If the purpose of Irish terror was to unite Ireland then, although Irish terror did not in itself bring the unification about, the conditions it created have enabled the possibility of their aspirations to be met just as Unionist terror has slowed the process down. In that respect, terror works. Terror, in other words, is a tool within a much wider political or military game. This is something the Israelis never forgot. When the Nazis called the French Resistance 'terrorists' they were strictly correct if we look at the term neutrally as a description of a 'practice'. The FLN in Algeria will have watched French terrorism 'working' in this way - as a process linked to politics and conventional or guerrilla war - just as the OAS blunderingly tried to do the same and the Islamist insurgents of the 1990s even more brutally did the same again. The claim that the 'terrorist' is someone else's 'freedom fighter' is trite because it separates the two as moral categories whereas the actual moral categories are a) the killing of 'innocents' on the one side set against b) the greater aims of, say, national self-determination on the other. We live with this every day. Ukrainian car bombs are called partisan activity and their terrorist nature is glossed over in the Western media and yet these same Editors froth at the mouth when the same tactic is used by Afghans or Hezbollah on their own soil. Townshend was also writing at that point where nearly all commentators found themselves thoroughly confused by the emergence of what appeared to be a nihilistic (from a liberal humane perspective) form of radical religious terrorism that looked to a supernatural end. As always throughout the book he is sensible here, if possibly overly non-committal. Research into Islamic terror was in its early days. Western observers were no more successful in getting into the mind-set of the Islamist than they are today in getting inside the mind-set of a Russian or Chinese. The overwhelming characteristic of the average Western policy wonk is a staggering lack of imagination which leads to simplistic and disproportionate, indeed hysterical, responses to what is generally far less of a threat to a population than exhausted doctors and truck drivers. However, Townshend's wise insights into the tactics of Hezbollah suggest that even Islamist fanatics (if we can only get to understand how they think instrumentally) are instrumental in their approach with attitudes no different in this respect from the Narodniki or the Tupamaros. One of the lessons of the book is that terrorism continues to have its instrumental logic and that we can soon begin to divine when it might be used ineffectively or effectively to achieve very long range ends in association with other strategies - military, political and economic. The liberal moral outrage at the tactic is justifiable in the abstract but the liberal rarely sits where the 'damned of the earth' (Fanon) sits and easily turns a blind eye to state terror when it acts in his interest. Morality is a tool like any other in the brutal game of power. Terror strategies tend to emerge when power is disproportionate so it was always likely that America as hegemon would face it because American power was and is disproportionately greater than anything else on the planet. We should really be surprised that there is so little of it. We might go further and say that, while national liberation strategies (for all the nonsense talked about a Terrorist International in Washington during the Cold War) were located in specific territories, globalisation has created a new West/Rest dichotomy that increases the risks of terror. Russian analyses of the nature of American power are far from incorrect. Russia has not been entirely isolated because non-Western elites connect with that analysis. The blocs that emerge in fact reduce the chances of terrorism because a countervailing non-Western bloc can imply sufficient resistance. However, if the resistance bloc is eliminated as a traditional network of powers striving not to be subsumed within the Western imperium, Western dominion creates the opportunities for asymmetric 'terrorist' resistance amongst the powerless and not only overseas. The same threat exists in the heart of the West from those who feel excluded from the imperium at home. So long as populist ideas and feelings have leg room, terrorism as a tactic is counter-productive but it becomes productive if the national populist or the deprived feel their back is to the wall. Similarly, the potential unravelling of the cosy consensus between the corporate sector, states and eco-politicians over green issues because of crude energy security and more urgent socio-economic requirements might also threaten the system with what might be called a Green Army Faction, The point here is that terrorism as a tactic is always a potential threat and increases to the degree that Western society behaves more like the old Russian Empire than the liberal democracy it purports to be - surveillance, social control, hunting down whistleblowers and so forth. Townshend notes something important - the grim dialectic between terrorism and the media and the way that the media's excitability and hysteria drives public panic far beyond what reason would dictate and so creates inappropriate political decision-making and manipulation. It could be argued (I would) that the most socially destructive force in Western society is not the potential terrorist but the Editor with his propensity for 'stories', fast news cycles, high emotion, moral posturing and attempts to manipulate power by the back door. There is nothing we can do about this because liberal democracy defines itself in part by the freedom given to the Press. The benefits of good journalism (where it exists) should theoretically always outweigh the disbenefits although increasingly they do not as serious journalism decays. Although now out of date by about two decades (especially in regard to Islamic terror), this very short book (139 pages) packs in a lot of information. If it does not do a great deal to help us define what the phenomenon is then that is because the phenomenon is not easily definable at all. ...more |
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| Mar 22, 1989
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really liked it
| Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the Alongside Trevor-Roper's 'Last Days of Hitler' and Crankshaw's 'Gestapo', this book was one of the earliest attempts (1956) to come to terms with the then very recent experience of the horrendously chaotic and destructive national socialist experiment in Germany. We have to remember that the period from the Nazi seizure of power to the collapse of the regime in 1945 was just twelve years ... which is no more than three Presidential terms and only two years more than Tony Blair's 'reign'. Reitlinger was writing only a decade after the regime collapsed. In other words, a historian's objectivity was likely to be difficult in such circumstances. Reitlinger was, in fact, an historian and specialist in Asian ceramics who just wanted to tell this particular history and, in another book, that of the holocaust. He also had to rely on a limited range of sources - unreliable media and Nuremburg process documentation and self-serving memoirs from former German officials and soldiers with a great deal of important evidence locked up in the closed Soviet system. From this perspective, his achievement - even if only preliminary and overtaken by other researchers - was significant. Although his emotional responses to what were recent events come through, the work is nevertheless a work of history albeit a provisional one. There is a bias towards the story of the chaotic concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies rather than the extermination process uncovered by the Soviets. This would be corrected by later writers. His horrified emotional responses are, of course, understandable regardless. His holocaust study had underestimated deaths in the extermination camps by a significant number. It took two decades more for academics to expose the scale of what happened in the East. From that perspective, giving slight primacy to Belsen over Auschwitz is of its time. He expresses a righteous disgust at the ease with which so many SS mass murderers got off lightly and you sense anger that the German State at the root of the crimes was too ready to try and forget what was done. However, he does not mention the Cold War context enabling this leniency. As an interim assessment of the role of the SS in the Hitlerite imperium Reitlinger's account remains useful today even if those emotional qualities to the book now look unnecessary and more polemical than academic. Yet the horrible facts still stand. Reitlinger has a polemical point and it is a fair point. In contemporary terms he wants to knock on the head the dangerous myths surrounding the SS as competent or idealistic or the sole monsters of the Nazi regime. He wins his point on the evidence then available. The story is also the story of Heinrich Himmler (where perhaps the account is sometimes less satisfactory as psychology) and of the SS as just one important element in the fragmented one person rule of that brilliant monomaniac Adolf Hitler. The SS starts off as a personally loyal death squad to deal with Hitler's problem with his own Party embodied in the SA as a potentially revolutionary armed force. To understand Hitler, one must understand that he was not a revolutionary but concerned only with the seizure of the State. The Nazi State was not like the Communist State - the arm of a Party - but the German State owned and guided by the Fuhrer who exercised control through not only the Party but the traditional organs of state power (the civil service) and, after its personal oath, the Army. Hitler did not give a damn which bit of the system he used so long it was directed at his personal ideological ends - effectively, a throwback to Wilhelmine imperialism combined with an existential loathing of the Jews and Bolsheviks. Each of his gangster barons was granted personal leave to exploit a segment of the machinery for these ends and their own. Each was allowed to compete ruthlessly for territory knowing that the Fuhrer could dispossess any one of them at any time to the advantage of another. Goebbels incorporated the revolution into Hitler's mainstream and came to control the nation qua nation. Goering was responsible for the economy and air power until his failings saw his influence crumble, largely in favour of Speer. Bormann rose to rule Germany as administrative machine through the Party Gauleiters. Others ruled segments - whether foreign affairs (Ribbentrop), the navy (Doenitz), occupied territories. 'justice' (meaning state control of society) or whatever. Himmler was both immensely powerful and an outsider with an emerging two-fold brief to police the Nazi State and act as brutal agent of Germanisation and social control (and obviously anti-semitism) in the grey area between Germany itself and the front lines of war. Hitler was a creature of his own history. He feared a 'stab in the back' while he pursued his warrior ambitions. Himmler's job was in part (alongside those of Goebbels and Bormann) to make sure that German dissent could not rise from below and snatch victory away. This helps to explain the viciousness of Hitler's reaction to the July Bomb Plot. One of the three great arms of Hitlerite power (the Army) had gone over a line and stabbed Germany, represented by him, in the back. The SS' importance rose accordingly but still not above that of the Army. When Himmler in the last days tried to negotiate futilely with the West to create an anti-Bolshevik front (we see a pale version of this today in the East European nationalist-NATO alliance against Russia), Hitler saw another betrayal under conditions where the personal was the political. The SS may have started life as a death squad-cum-personal protection operation for the Party Leader and it may have poddled along for some years accumulating power and numbers as a slightly potty ideological avant-garde with influence but war made it. It was charged with implementation of the Commissar Order (the slaughter of captured Soviets) and then of Jews (brought to a fine industrial art in the camps) and expanded as an economy in its own right as well as an auxiliary generally brave but variably competent military force. It 'grew like topsy' to the point where it was to become clear that Himmler himself could no longer cope. The last months of the war in 1945 show a man constantly on the edge of personal mental breakdown. The overwhelming impression is not of some dark lord of inherent evil but of someone without a traditional moral bottom who was led by circumstances ever deeper into the mire so that one wonders whether his eventual suicide may not have been a relief. Reitlinger's contempt for him may be deserved but two decades in corporate life taught me that there but for the grace of god would go not a few people I have worked with given perks, status, pathways to the top and a carefully cultivated ignorance of the consequences of their actions. From this perspective, Reitlinger wins his implicit polemic point that the attempt by modern (1950s) Germans to put all the blame for the evil done on the SS was criminally self-serving. The SS was the implementation agent for evil acts in which the German State as a whole was complicit. I do not agree, however, with Reitlinger's attempt to blame the German nation as a whole - like many people even today, he cannot draw the correct distinction between a nation and that filthy but necessary thing we call the State. I tend to believe Doenitz when he said that he did not know of the miserable horrors of the last days of the concentration camps which were largely the product of regime chaos and neglect let alone the extermination programme. Many if not most Germans would have been insulated from all this. He is right that the SS, evil though its actions were, cannot be allowed to be an alibi for Germany but we should be specific that we are talking about Germany as an elite State operation made up of a forced alliance of Party, civil service and military. A lot of that State survived 1945. It took all these forces working together to murder Jews, engage in imperialistic wars and create widespread mayhem and carnage - the SS was simply given the dirty jobs to do and it is clear that many of them did not enjoy it. It was just a job in a system. Because of sourcing problems the period before the war is less well served than the war. The account then starts to come alive but this reflects the relative unimportance of Himmler in the grand scheme of things until he is commissioned to deal with the occupied territories. What is very useful is the picture that the book develops of the bureaucratic rivalries under Hitler and within Himmler's own network. These demonstrate just how circumscribed Himmler could be by the machinations of others. His fear of Hitler lasts to the very end. The figures of Heydrich, Canaris, Schellenburg, Ohlendorf, Kaltenbrunner, Wolff and many others weave in and out of the story as what amount to Divisional Directors of National Socialism, Inc. of Bertlin and its offices across Europe - competing, conniving, sometimes dying. Sometimes the machinations become so abstruse and complex that the general reader may have difficulty in following what is happening but, at its best, incidents such as the Night of the Long Knives (1934) or the July 20th Bomb Plot (1944) can be positively exciting. Reitlinger is also good on weakening substantially myths about the SS's competence and even idealism which still hold the attention of popular culture three quarters of a century later. There were competent bureaucrats and idealists but the total system was a shambles. Although they tried hard, the SS were not professional soldiers in general. By the last eighteen months of the war, Himmler was commanding a motley group of 'racial Germans' (from outside Germany proper) and anti-communist occupied forces with weak military skills. This is not to say that they did not often fight bravely but it is to say that they were no substitute for the fully trained regular Wehrmacht once their numbers exceeded the original German core of dedicated Nazis and some of those were more enthusiastic than capable. As to the idealism, this could certainly be found in fanatic Nazis and in the dreamy 'Europeanists' in the Divisions raised in the West (the starting point for the European ideal now represented by Ursula Von Der Leyen) towards the end of the war but this was a minority if a dangerous one. Perhaps sometimes Reitlnger overstates his case but the case is there on the evidence he has to hand. Further analysis would in due course refine the picture, remove some of the emotion without losing the values and balance the picture out a bit but this still remains a useful history. Himmler and the SS should definitely not be let off the hook. They engaged in horrendous crimes in a horrendous age. However, the buck does not stop with them. They were part of a total system and this book makes it hard to accept claims that Hitler knew nothing of these crimes. There may be no incriminating piece of paper fingering Hitler but we can be sure that the SS was an agent more than it was a principal and that it was only one part of a much more complex criminal enterprise that encompassed almost every significant part of the German State System. ...more |
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it was amazing
| It is hard to tell when and where Moorcocks's Eternal Champion archetype emerges and that is wholly fitting given the nature of his multiverse. There It is hard to tell when and where Moorcocks's Eternal Champion archetype emerges and that is wholly fitting given the nature of his multiverse. There is an argument that this book represents the quintessence of the concept or at least a clue to its personal and 'philosophical' origins. Erekose never achieved the fan allegiance that other manifestations of the archetype achieved, most notably Elric of Melnibone, Jerry Cornelius, Duke Hawkmoon, Corum Jhaelen Irsei, Pyat or Graf von Bek but then we might expect that from an early experimental run. The novel was published in 1970 but it owes its origin to a Novella of 1962 written when Moorcock was only 23 years old and already drawing the lineaments of what many genre writers offer us - a private obsession with a universe (here a multiverse) and a particular narrative approach. Elric and Hawkmoon, even Cornelius, would precede Erekose in the canon but Erekose feels as if it contains the authentic origin of all subsequent iterations and it has been unjustly neglected perhaps because of its relative simplicity. There are traces evidently of work from as far back as 1956. The work starts with a fantasy cliche of the man drawn from his mundane world into the fantastic. Erekose's alter ego is a shadowy ordinary man of the twentieth century, John Daker, and he emerges as the Eternal Champion much as John Carter emerges in Barsoom. Similarly, the archetype involves derivative complications of chivalry and advanced weaponry as the book draws to its close with the Jungian love triangle that most men will understand between Erekose and two women who represent different appreciations of noble love. The core of the book, however, owes a great deal to what we might call the 'Nietzsche Mythos' - the eternal return, man caught between animal and divine, the price of looking into the abyss, man as blonde beast (though the hero is black), the aristocratic ethics of choice and honour. The writing is clear and, for once in fantasy, Moorcock takes us away from the William Morris of thees and thous and archaisms and presents us with a brutal aristocratic society and relations between persons that are surprisingly realistic within the constraints of an alternative world. The subject of the novel, is, frankly genocide and duty and it might be seen as a reflection on the 'morality' of national socialist ideology without mentioning it once. It is about the struggle for survival and perception of threat from the 'other'. In this case, the human race shares Earth with the Eldren, a stoical alien human-like species that is positioned by humanity as loathsome and dangerous and which humanity must extirpate if it is tself to survive. The Eldren appear to lack the will to power of humanity. The Eternal Champion emerges by sorcery to lead Humanity's genocidal destiny and the dynamic between the faint remaining traces of John Daker and the aristocratic-warrior ruthlessness of Erekose drive the plot to a possibly expected but tragic conclusion. The reasoning here is that war is intrinsic to Humanity which is not the case for the Eldren who are perhaps only a few stages removed from Tolkien's Elves and who are, in fact, more advanced in many ways than their enemy, defensive by nature and preferring death to dishonour and crime. Humanity talks of honour but is brutal and Machiavellian while claiming it is the Eldren that are the very things that they are - vicious, proud, self-deluding, paranoiac, filled with blood-lust and murderous. Aristocratic forms are just intruments of power rather than expressions of value. The realisation dawns that the human condition is one of eternal strife and that Humanity needs an enemy to hate in order to be united. If it does not have such an enemy, then it will war on itself. It is a grim and pessimistic view of our species that may be disturbingly accurate. Erekose sloughs off his John Daker personality but can only do so by adopting the role of Erekose as Humanity's champion, a role which requires him to become a cold genocidal figure almost to the end. Millions die to allow him to discover what is right and what is wrong. The process could be seen as an existentialist tension between the man who is destined to become a role by the pressure of his species (or society in our world) and the man who learns that he can eventually have a choice and cease to be nothing more than his role. The love triangle is also intriguing in this context. His first love is a creature of the social - a magnificent queen but one whose love is given or not given according to whether he delivers what society needs or not. If he retains his genocidal role, he gets the queen as wife. His second love is a Eldren princess who may be a manipulator (the claims of Humans may prove to be right in the end) but also represents an unconditional love apparently resigned to loss and destruction rather than betray its moral condition. Jung's argument that alpha men need two women which may be unpalatable to many has its truth. In this case, we have woman as social order but conditional in her love or unconditional romance although Moorcock allows one to win and one to lose which is not in the spirit of Jung's insight. The psychological core of the Eternal Champion, written in accessible language yet demonstrated in an alien world, the classic genre thought experiment, is an appreciation of male yearning to be hero, to have meaning, to make choices from strength and to have unconditional love. The grim and probably justifiable pessimism about our species is balanced by a coded analogical suggestion that all these things that are yearned for may not be impossible for the individual (even though, in the real world, they probably are or at least only partially achievable). A fine book that helps set the parameters for the huge corpus of Moorcock's eternal champion stories under other names and not a bad place to start even before Elric, Cornelius and Hawkmoon. It should settle on the mind in dreams and perhaps quietly weave its magic on the ordinary. ...more |
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liked it
| A short but decently illustrated overview of the history of European swords by an experienced specialist curator. Part of the Shire stable of pamphlet A short but decently illustrated overview of the history of European swords by an experienced specialist curator. Part of the Shire stable of pamphlets. ...more |
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it was amazing
| Philip Short demonstrates his integrity by starting with the demolition of a conspiracy theory about Putin. He then gives us a sensitive and intellige Philip Short demonstrates his integrity by starting with the demolition of a conspiracy theory about Putin. He then gives us a sensitive and intelligent account of the personality of Russia's leader based on in-depth research of his early years and his time in St. Petersburg. A good chunk of the rest of the book is a little less impressive because, once Putin enters the Presidency, it becomes quite clear that the author does not have, perhaps cannot have, the access to close sources that he needs. Still, with caveats about his later sources (which often are, as he notes, witnesses for the prosecution), the account of Putin's Presidency, if somewhat too close to the standard Western narrative, is still valuable and (as far as the sources allow) factual. It may not be the last word on Putin but it largely displaces all previous words on the man and his times. It should be the first point of call for someone coming to the subject for the first time. The notes are also excellent and revealing. So where does the book take us? Short has already upset a lot of people by bothering to understand where Putin is coming from and the role of the West in driving him to decisions that may be good or bad but are logical and almost inevitable. In fact, what comes out of the book are the unsurprising conclusions that the current crisis is very much the creation of confused, narcissistic and often inept policy-making in the West and that Putin has an analytical mind often much superior to that of his opponents. What may surprise people more is the evidence that Putin was very much a pro-Western politician for much of his career although always placing Russia first (he saw no necessary incompatibility between those two positions until quite recently). Russians I know have told me that he was often regarded as both excessively pragmatic and rather weak in defending Russia's interests for many years. In some respects we might see Putin as a man who feels badly let down by the West and who is now hitting back hard in frustration. The warts of Putin are demonstrated (as one would expect in a largely Western narrative by an honest journalist) although perhaps there is a lack of full explanation and understanding of the political economy that he is trying to manage. Russia is dysfunctional but it is dysfunctional because Western management of the fall of the Soviet Union was destructive and negative. It was always going to be a slow process getting a busted nation back to a creditable status as a workable economy and society. Almost every action taken by the regime (albeit frequently crossing Western 'red lines') is only a reflection of behaviours undertaken by the West itself. What the West cannot forgive is the inability to revolutionise the State into a non-corrupt, legalistic liberal democracy. Russia is more interested in recovery and survival where economic recovery and survival competes with concerns about national security. Russian fears about the latter are often justifiable even if we find it tragic that smaller Ukraine has become the pawn in a greater game. To Western politicians, severe provocation is no justification but there is an air of the small boy picking on a smaller boy under the protection of the playground bully. Severe provocation is what it was and the Western bully, merely throwing a cosh to the smaller lad, must take some of the blame. Putin himself is a very interesting man. If he has had an analytical fault, it has probably been one of ignorance of Western arrogance and of American ignorance of Russia and so a rather naive belief in the possibility of Russia being treated as an equal by the hegemon. The analytical skills are those of an intelligent boy from the wrong side of the tracks, an outsider, who is trained under the old regime and learns life by doing, avoiding mistakes and learning from the mistakes when he cannot avoid them. Do we like Putin? Well, oddly, one finds oneself in some sympathy for him despite his faults. He learns fast and seems to have an inner ethical core often overwhelmed by the balance of interest involved in surviving what he rules. What we do see is consummate political skill in holding together the potential for chaos that was post-Soviet Russia and building sufficient prosperity and national security to feel able to claim once again something like great power status. This delusion may be a delusion shared by two other nations on the winning side of the Second World War - France and Britain - to the effect that the hegemon would ever truly treat them as equals. They would all be favoured 'free' satrapies with pre-set 'values' or nothing. Russian pride and exceptionalism, the sacrifices of industrialisation and war, the realisation that the old regime they once believed in was an inept, corrupt lie have conspired to create the noble but existentially dangerous view that it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. It is all a matter of timing. Russia has got trapped. Whereas China can afford to wait and let the hegemon slowly decline, Russia has had either to live on its knees like Britain or find that its nemesis would drive it to die on its feet. That is why the current war is existential. Although Washington back-tracked from regime change as a proxy war aim, there is little doubt that it wants a Russia run from the centre by liberal Muscovites prepared to impose Western values on the smaller towns and rural areas in a modernisation that would unravel a culture. Putin evidently believed both in the efficacy of the market and in the cultural importance of Russia. At a certain point a Russian leader was going to have to choose between the two. Putin's gamble is a low key version of the German gamble in the 1930s - can a targeted culture, good or evil, survive? At the time of writing, it is hard to see who will win in Ukraine. The West has the money and is sending substantial military support to Ukraine but it is also finding it difficult to cope with the consequences of its economic war on Russia. Ukraine is technically bust already. Russia has achieved a temporary victory for the ideology of national self-determination in taking the bulk of the Donbas and Kherson (as well as holding Crimea) but at considerable cost. If it dies on its feet, it will also have opened up space for a resentful global anti-colonialist ideology. The US is not going to lose entirely because it is too rich to lose and, for China and for the US, techniques and ideas are being tested for a very different end-game - will the Chinese elite bend the knee to the world order or structure itself to be resilient for a new existential struggle? The posturing and sabre-rattling over Taiwan are really about trying to work out which path China will choose - the early Putin strategy of accommodation and de facto submission or the late Putin strategy of defiance and potential isolation from the core of the global economy. Europe, meanwhile, has been turned into even more of an unstable satrapy, its energy dependence on Russia merely exchanged for one on the US and its Gulf allies and dodgy African states. Europe is being forced into global imperialism despite itself and to spend billions on guns to boot. The next few months (August 2022) are going to be very interesting. Although the cards are stacked against Russia, its recent resilience is part of that story as well as the fact that it still sits on vast natural resources and last resort nuclear weaponry. Vladimir Putin, a frustrated and angry if pragmatic man in his late sixties, backed largely by his own people, is key to what happens next and what happens next could be a global disaster if the West continues to push and prod as it has done since the 1990s. But there is another factor in all this. The US President has an approval rating around 38%, the hawkish British Prime Minister has been ousted, the Italian Government is in disarray and the German Government is talking about energy rationing. The economic war unleashed by the West may present serious medium to long term issues for Russia requiring it to be more authoritarian to survive as a culture but that same economic war has delivered high inflation, disruption and possible recession in sensitive democracies. Personally, I think both Russia and the West will survive this but both will be much weakened in the long run to the benefit of the growing network of non-Western nations prepared neither to be re-colonised not dragged into a new Cold War. That is a worse result for the West than Russia since the latter can turn in on itself but the raison d'etre of the West is expansion and hegemony. There is a real possibility of a period of implosive politics within the West starting with the US Mid-Terms in November. The key question left by this book is that of succession. Russian liberals have been knocked sideways. They are as secondary to the big picture as more rational populists like Orban are to the big picture in the West. Lone voices with an alternative vision have been shunted aside by history. There is almost certainly no leading candidate for the Presidency after Putin who is not going to be approved by Putin and share the view that existential survival of Russian political culture is prior even to participation in the global system. Medvedev speaks like a Russian hawk nowadays. Wise counsel in the West would have long since negotiated with Putin on sphere of influence lines but there is no wise counsel left. Raw emotion on both sides has taken over. Men, money and material are going to be poured into Ukraine until one side or the other breaks. Whatever the outcome, this book is a highly recommended account of at least part of how we got into the mess we are in and why no one deep in the hole is going to stop digging - in Washington, London, Berlin, Ky'iv/Kiev, Donetsk, Warsaw or Moscow. Whatever the slight faults of taking some sources at face value, relying too much on Western sources after 2000 and perhaps failing to explain some of the less contentious aspects of Kremlin administration, Short provides a sad but fair account which should be more widely circulated. It should certainly make Westerners stop and think about their own moral compass, about their geo-political narcissism and their arrogance before throwing so many (often rightly thrown) stones at Putin's glass house. His regime is partly dysfunctional, still too inefficient, undoubtedly corrupt and increasingly authoritarian but it is also hard done by, bullied and trying to save some things worth saving. Neither side comes out of this book smelling of roses. As to poor battered Ukraine, it has become both target of an attack by an older brother on a younger and the battle ground of a far more serious (potentially) proxy war between competing system. It is hitting back hard but it is just a pawn in a bigger game. Much resides on the outcome of this war and, having been defeated in Afghanistan, having left the Middle East in a two decade mess and desperate to deter its real enemy China, the US is playing this to win over the bones of Ukrainians and bank accounts of Europeans alike. Putin too is not going to give way - based on this book, he will do what it takes to hold 'Novorossiya' at the least and has got used to long brutal wars of attrition which he mostly wins simply by pragmatically accepting least worst outcomes. So, read this book, despair at humanity, watch the horror unfold and ask why we should place our trust in the people who got us to this point. As to Russians, they must make up their own mind about Putin and it seems the bulk of them have. ...more |
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it was amazing
| 'Resistance' is an encyclopedic account of the varied resistance movements across occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is not about political res 'Resistance' is an encyclopedic account of the varied resistance movements across occupied Europe between 1939 and 1945. It is not about political resistance to the Axis powers (of Italy only after Mussolini was ousted) nor of resistance to Axis empires overseas (Abyssinia and Libya are ignored). It is more conventionally Eurocentric than, say, Overy's recent account of the Second World War but still covers some 14 countries (Luxembourg is forgotten and the last days of the Axis-allied regimes in Eastern Europe are included) in 180 pages is no mean feat. If I have a gripe, it is not about the patronising abandonment of resistance to the expansion of the Italian Empire, but the equally and currently fashionable Westocentric weaker coverage of the Soviet partisan resistance. It is covered but as if it was a sideshow to the work of SOE. But these limitations do not make the book any the less invaluable as a single volume compendium of resistance experiences under very different national circumstances. It is for someone else to write the more awkward story of the other side of the coin - collaboration. Perhaps what does not come across in current historiography is that the Second World War was not only a war of empires (Overy) and a war of liberation (the preferred narrative) but a European Civil War eventually settled by a non-European and two barely European outsiders. If we look at Europe as a whole (no country was precisely like any other in its experience) we can break the story down into regional zones of similar experience, assuming we exclude both the neutrals and the Axis core of Germany and Fascist Italy. There were the highly politicised resistance activities in France and Italy where the forces of order and socialism contested the right to determine the nation's destiny along lines that perhaps were only diverted from civil war on the Spanish model by the skill of the occupying powers. To the north a line of North Atlantic states sullenly disliked occupation, were broadly obedient to the dictates of allied strategy and faced (as did the French resistance) various forms of ideological collaboration negotiating its way to political power not always with the assistance of the Nazis. In Europe's south east, resistance was sometimes tantamount to local warlordism with ethnic cleansing and social violence just below the surface when it was not manifest - Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Again, international war enabled civil war which the allies could not control or avert. Above them was a bloc of often reluctant Axis allies from Bulgaria through Romania and Hungary to Slovakia where pragmatism and some very real material benefits dictated compliance until the Soviets started to arrive on their borders and priorities shifted. Then, to their north, are the very different cases of Bohemia-Moravia and Poland where nationalist feeling often pushed resistors into traps where they misjudged their own capability. Further to their north, of course, the Baltic States and Finland had their nationalisms recognised by Germany. Finally, there are the 'bloodlands' (still bloodlands today) where the Soviets had moved to take over Western Poland, been pushed back and then returned in force over the heads of the non-Russian identities, notably Ukrainian, to find themselves eventually masters of all Eastern Europe. The European Union is still dealing with these very different experiences - France as balance to Germany, an unstable Italy and Balkans, the liberal democratic Atlantic, nationalism in Poland and the Baltic States, the 'bloodlands' now in a state of localised war in Ukraine. It is thus very difficult to find something common to say about 'resistance' under all these different scenarios (just as it would be if we tried to pigeon-hole all forms of collaboration) but Kochanski gives us all the facts we need to theorise and suggests thoughts of her own. The first general point to make is that, in general, resistance was, in military terms, fairly futile except as an affiliate operation providing intelligence and targeted sabotage for the Allies. The destruction of the heavy water facilities in Norway might have been decisive but little else was. One exception might have been the partisan operations in Russia and Belarussia but, even here, the Germans under Bach-Zelewski and others soon learned techniques of anti-partisan activity that made behind-the-lines operations mostly an irritant rather than decisive. More useful, as sabotage operations, were the destruction of rail supply lines in West and East as the Allied armies advanced although the Germans seem to have been adept at work-arounds. The Russians use missiles to do what resistors did and the Ukrainians no doubt work around these. The intelligence role was vital. The Allies were wise to ensure that intelligence-gathering circuits were generally separated from active service units although the Germans seem to have been skilled at breaking these circuits. As to the 'home armies' these were likely to be valuable only as irregulars or affiliates when Allied armies were nearby. Indeed, the tendency of over-enthusiastic resistors to demand weapons from the air to undertake premature operations seems to have been a thorn in the Allied side. Often we find local resistance forces, keen to act out of emotional national pride, misjudging the situation and shooting off their war bolts far too soon, eliciting vicious reprisals that may have encouraged a stronger attitude of resistance but deterred much further direct action. As the story unfolds we see a narrative in which the majority of Europeans were 'attentistes' rather than collaborators or resistors. A temporary soft form of collaboration was often encouraged by governments-in-exile in order to maintain the structures of government and avoid reprisals. This enables us to see the Nazi regime as 'interesting' because its brutality was of two entirely different types that might be called Nazi and military, both of which centred on the permission granted to it by Adolf Hitler himself. The first was racial-ideological and the second pragmatic. The resistance (other than the Jewish resistance) appears to have been quite detached (relatively) from the racial-ideological process of deportation and extermination although the treatment of the Jews undoubtedly contributed to decent distaste for the occupiers as time went on. Resistance was primarily about restoring the nation and/or restoring a very particular form of the nation (monarchical, democratic-bourgeois or socialist). It was a minority sport (as was formal collaboration) while the majority simply tried to survive. Often times, the particular form of the nation dominated the agenda to the point that the Germans could pass through a war zone while 'resisters' were more interested in killing each other. Old regime military types were also in constant tension with civilian irregulars. Several times we come across popular resentment at over-enthusiastic irregulars bringing down on the heads of the population horrendously brutal German reprisals - massacres of whole villages, executions of hostages, mass deportations. This was simply 'technique' to the Germans. The situation is fluid everywhere with the resistant authorities (generally in exile but still with infrastructure at home) advising restraint and as often disturbed as the Allies at premature operations of no strategic benefit. Over time, the dynamic of growing resistance and increasing reprisals destroyed the German ability to hold the middle ground in the West (there was no middle ground in the East). Populations grew more eager for Allied victory rather than (as might have been the case) a German peace. It could be argued that the various resistances were not so much important in deciding the Second World War as in deciding the destinies of the nations that emerged after the war (at least in the West since the Soviets were to decide the destiny of the East regardless of resistors). Kochanski closes by suggesting that the importance of resistance should be seen as something that I might perhaps call 'spiritual' - an expression of the desire of a small and then a growing minority of a nation to 'act' and to 'be' and not simply accept conditions from outside. It may be no accident that the philosophical school that emerged in France during and after the war was 'existentialism', a philosophy, if ever there was one, of choice and action, ironically drawn largely from two German philosophers more closely associated with the 'enemy'. The Western allies showed much skill such as permitting France to become an accredited Ally despite it not honestly earning the right. It used what it could of the resistors, was often exhausted and frustrated by them but it engineered them into a new national democratic mythology. This new mythology of direct participation by the people (even if a minority in practice) in their own liberation (despite the fact that the actual liberation was down to the hard power of the three Allied empires) allowed democracy to settle in again and fascist alternatives to be marginalised. A European Civil War takes two sides. Fascist ideologies were either dominant or growing across much of Europe in the interwar period. The war of resistors against collaborators (which sadly often turned into civil war between resistors) was central to eliminating this European 'norm'. Indeed, to the sensitive modern mind, the conduct of some resistors in victory (at least in Italy, France and the Balkans) might leave a lot to be desired ethically with extrajudicial killing a norm. The treatment of women who had sexual relations with the occupiers was deeply perverse. But generalisms are not helpful in history, not with so many diferent national histories to deal with. There are exceptions to every possible general statement but the primacy of hard power over civil resistance in war does not diminish the role of civil uprising in setting the terms of peace. Kochanski is a historian of Poland. This helps to explain the depth of coverage of Polish conditions where her narrative is often eye-opening about the Polish determination to resist against all the odds. The final uprising in Warsaw was an attempt to pre-empt Soviet hard power that failed. The Paris Rising in 1944 on the other hand only succeeded because Allied hard power, much to its own strategic frustration, felt it had to intervene where Stalin clearly did not think he had to. There was, in fact, a certain brutal logic to the behaviours of all the Allies. Warsaw and Paris were about national re-assertion in the face of the Allies. The difference was that Stalin, as an internationalist communist, did not want a strong national Poland on his Western flank whereas the Allies wanted to restore a self-confident democratic France. Both sides (Soviet and democratic) were perfectly aware that the United Nations rested on fragile ground and that imperial spheres of influence would replace the crushing of the Axis empires. Churchill explicitly recognised this by abandoning much of Eastern Europe for Greece. One aspect of the book is worth emphasising - the importance of SOE and the British effort to mobilise and manage European resistance. The OSS played its role but far less even if it was to become the seed from which the CIA grew. In this narrative, the SOE and other similar British organisations (SIS, SAS and others) were ubiquitous, playing roles (albeit smaller for logistical reasons) as far as Bohemia and Poland. Being British, there are, of course, blunders alongside the triumphs. Kochanski can barely repress her revisionist disgust at British support for Tito at the expense of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia. The Cairo Office seems at times to have been particularly stupid on occasions. British spycraft could be naive in the early days. But the general story is one of remarkable engagement by an organisation learning the arts of subversion and the management of secret armies from the ground up. An exhausted Britain was to pass on this experience to the Americans later. Although they recognised they could not charge Germans with war crimes related to the execution of spies, the sheer persistence of the British at Nuremburg in hunting down perpetrators of orders to kill captured commandos in uniform indicates that 'secret war' was regarded as legitimate. Kochanski's book has merit in not hiding the blunders and the self-defeating actions of the resistance movement but only as part of a very complex and confused picture where there would never have been a perfect solution to any problem. From the point of view of liberal democracy in Europe (whether you believe in it or not), the British commitment to building national resistance movements was almost selfless, expensive in resources and operatives and prejudiced in favour of the effective resistor regardless of their ideology. Although it can get bogged down in detail and it is not easy to keep track of so many narratives in so many different location amidst impossible tactical and strategic complexity, the book is well worth working through. You are much wiser by the end of it. Resistance can, and this is wisdom, be futile and not futile, destructive and constructive. It cannot win against entrenched hard power prepared to take off its gloves and do what it takes to retain power. It can, however, win the peace if it can bring external forces into play. But deeper than that, in a world where most people are political puddings, sitting there waiting to see which way the wind blows and accepting the opinion of the last person who spoke to them (often the media), resistance demonstrates that imposed systems will find their rule costly. Over time, the wind changes direction, the costs of maintaining rule on the puddings becomes too great and the men, women and ideas that represent the resistance may come to dominate discussion of what the nation is to be when the old order collapses. I suppose the lesson, therefore, is that resistance is not futile after all. If our order is collapsing under second-rate leaders who cannot manage the economy and are detached increasingly even from their own puddings, then those with a language of resistance, though few, may yet triumph. ...more |
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| Apr 27, 2021
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really liked it
| Gladwell, the populariser of social psychology and East Coast intellectual, has come up with an interesting book about the psychology of American air Gladwell, the populariser of social psychology and East Coast intellectual, has come up with an interesting book about the psychology of American air war and of the bombing campaigns of the Second World War that is well worth reading, assuming one's critical faculties remain intact. He rightly characterises the Brit 'Bomber' Harris as a card-carrying psychopath (a characterisation probably as applicable to Lindemann and possibly Churchill) in passing but spends the last chunk of his 220-page (roughly) book trying to persuade us that Curtis LeMay was not. It is a morality tale of sorts taking us from the interwar air intellectuals (the 'Bomber Mafia' of the title) through the precision bombing failures of the Second World War to the final resort of massively damaging incendiary warfare against Japan. If I had to characterise this book ideologically (which I am wont to do) I would say that it represents, wittingly or not, a very recent turn of East Coast progressives in the direction of liberal militarism, perhaps a new tough-minded shift of mindset as their world comes under more threat. For example, the author seems inordinately proud of his hob-nobbing with Air Force big wigs yet he has undoubtedly done his research and he presents a thoughtful analysis which stands up to scrutiny as a valid and evidenced opinion (even if I have my own doubts). With regret, Gladwell comes to the conclusion that the original interwar intent (present in the UK as much as US) that air power could be a means of avoiding mass slaughter was proven to be flawed or at least flawed given the technological situation in the early 1940s. The road is precisely mapped from that failure to the truly psychopathic invention of incendiaries and on to the grim reality of the fire-bombing of Japan, still an embarrassment to Japanese and Americans alike. All attention is now on the Atom Bomb because it became the basis of an 'Age' and was clearly more immediately instrumental in Japan's surrender but the murderous nature of aerial incendiary warfare should not be forgotten even if the Japanese no longer want to talk about it US officials pointed out that more people died by fire in six hours of bombing over Tokyo than at any other time in history - perhaps 100,000 people, men, women and children, mostly civilians. The numbers of dead during this and subsequent raids remain unclear but were high. From March to August 1945, Curtis LeMay's bombers did enormous damage to 67 Japanese cities, killing around 330,000 people (though other calculations have suggested 'only' 240,000), maybe more, with many more injured. Gladwell does not hide the horror but he cites figures rather loosely. At the end of the day, once the assumption is made that the only way forward was to win the war as quickly as possible to save more lives, Gladwell may express his own moral torment (the East Coast liberal in him) but comes down firmly on the side of LeMay. It had, he suggests, to be done. As a realist in human affairs, I get where he is coming from. It is certainly not helpful to come up with moral sloganeering. That sort of attitude tends to lead us to major mistakes like the war in Afghanistan and now the asinine and self-destructive economic war against Russia. However, I am not entirely convinced. There are bigger questions here about political motivation (the obsession of politicians with pre-empting the Soviets) and the ideology of unconditional surrender, necessary in the West but not so necessary in the East perhaps. Stylistically the book may also irritate a little because it has an initial chatty, repetitive and emotive style that detracts from its role as history and implies journalism (which is never to be fully trusted). This is explained by it originally having been designed as a podcast. Gladwell says that the subject started in one medium (audio) and ended up in another (print). The stylistic traits and journalism of the first endeavour got carried into the final result but, as history, it is to be trusted more than its style may suggest. It is, regardless, an easy read of a complex story. Overy's 'The Bombing War' is, naturally, a vastly superior book and it should be read first for a balanced view of the morality and utility of aerial bombing of civilians but Overy only deals with the European theatre whereas Gladwell makes his main moral judgements about Japan. Both books (I have reviewed Overy's elsewhere) are about evil but Gladwell's book wants to suggest that what was evil (killing civilians) in principle was not evil in the Japanese case because the killing was, in fact, useful in ending the war. Incendiary and saturation bombing had little effect on Germany compared to the effort involved - part of the evil was the loss of young Allied lives. Gladwell's argument rather depends on decisive evidence that the firebombing strategy had a major effect on the end of the war in the East. Unfortunately, he asserts that this was so rather than demonstrating that this was so. However, it clearly was an influential driver for surrender even if the surrender might have taken more months to effect without the arrival of an Atom Bomb that would simply compound the evil. The moral truth is that this campaign was a 'war crime' objectively speaking and that it only ceased to be a war crime once the Allies had won the war. Gladwell's morality is essentially that based on the righteousness of the American cause and not much else. You can agree or disagree accordingly. This is a slight book compared to much that has been written on the war by professional historians but it is more than just opinionated journalism. The author has made an effort to become a historian and he has served the muse well for an 'amateur'. It is not perfect but it is useful. ...more |
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it was amazing
| It is super-nerdy of me to give this book a five star rating but I have a thing for subterranea and certainly the tunnels and underworlds of big citie It is super-nerdy of me to give this book a five star rating but I have a thing for subterranea and certainly the tunnels and underworlds of big cities, especially London. Anyone who thinks like me or likes railways and transport (which is less my thing) will love this book. They will love it for its photographs which are to a very high standard, the book's design and the well written short histories of lost parts of the London underground transport empire. Published by Yale University Press, my quibbles over a typo and some minor editorial lapses may be passed over. The book is really a popular summation of the recent work of the London Transport Museum which may be classed as archaeological, historical and sometimes selectively conservationist although the budgetary implications of full conservation would be too great for the creaking system to bear. The method is to take an Underground location as the type of a theme, tell its tale and add details and material from other similar locations. It is definitely not a narrative history of the London Underground but rather a series of localised narratives that give us a rounded picture of the whole. If you read the book through, you will be able to put the bits of a puzzle into a jigsaw and have a better of idea of London's development than you might from other more plodding and academic chronological surveys. There are ten primary locations and themes covered. The first disused underground station is that at King William Street where ambition exceeded experience in engineering and which opened in 1890, only to close in 1900. As in all cases, the authors then tell the story of the subsequent use the tunnels were put to and their state today. The book moves on to the Picadilly Circus complex, Down Street and its role as the wartime railway executive's headquarters and the first of two overground stories with an account of the modernist 55 Broadway headquarters of the underground system built in 1929. We then have the deep level shelter at Clapham South (whose post-war history is as fascinating as its wartime origins and use), the secret Cold War control bunker at the unopened North End station and the second overground story of inherited mainstream railway stations in Buckinghamshire. Finally, there is an account of the speculative capitalism around Highgate High Level which allows the telling of the story of the NIMBY-led creation of Hampstead Garden Suburb and a return to the centre of London for the stories of the Strand complex and that under Euston. There are larger themes that run through all these stories. In the early years we have rampant entrepreneurial capitalism speculatively putting risk capital into lines to move workers and incidentally or deliberately creating opportunities for even more profitable property speculation. There is the worthy public service corporatism of the interwar period, the first inklings of the military-industrial complex, the introduction of rational planning, paternalism and modernisation but always with an eye to the welfare of workers and people - and budgetary responsibility. Then we have the hinge of British recent history - the war - where the underground had a double function of protecting the people from air warfare and ensuring that the state administration and war effort could run unhindered by turning tunnels into administrative and control assets. After these three periods, exciting in their different ways, the story is more fragmented, bits of Cold War history, cut-backs in some areas, new lines in others, a working system constantly adapting to a city that took quite a long time to recover before its boom times later in the century. It is sobering to note that the Government gave up on deep shelter strategies for the population almost immediately after the first nuclear bombs were demonstrated because no place inside London would be safe from their effects. Worth noting in the age of sabre-rattling over Ukraine. The history of the London underground is only a part of the history of London - a history that started only with the world's first underground railway in 1863 (the Metropolitan line) - but it is an important part. The very existence of the London Transport Museum is testament to that. Throughout, the illustrations are a pleasure in themselves, whether pictures of decay that evoke the world of the horror film 'Death Line', photographs, charts, posters or plans. Abandoned tunnels litter the London beneath its inhabitants, some I have walked in abandoned within my memory. Nearly all are still in some sort of use, even if temporary in many cases - for ventilation, storage, as film sets or as service corridors. Others really are ghosts to which access is difficult - in the case of Highgate banned in part not because of the military-industrial complex but to protect rare bats. All in all, well produced (despite the very small if disappointing editorial lack of attention once or twice), informative, pleasurable and perfect for both subterranea, transport and London history nerds. ...more |
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it was amazing
| I cannot praise this book enough. Eighty years since the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Overy's 878-page masterpiece manages to co I cannot praise this book enough. Eighty years since the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad, Overy's 878-page masterpiece manages to cover much more than the canonical Second World War in one perfectly arranged volume. It is the new starting point for its study. Overy solves the problem of the competition between narrative and thematic history by doing both in an orderly way. Four chapters take the story from 1931 to 1945, seven chapters look at the great themes of the conflict and a final chapter looks at the legacy of the war in decolonisation. He takes one broad interpretative position (that the conflict must be seen as an essentially imperial struggle between older and aspirant empires finally decided by new ideological structures that were against empire) and asks one question that he never actually answers perhaps because he cannot. That most interesting question is why vast populations within the contesting powers suddenly switched into behaviours that involved the acceptance of conscripted enslavement and complicity in mass murder under the command of relatively small elites with the levers on power. It is a question of fundamental importance to our objective assessment of the capability and worth of our own species and is probably beyond the ability of any working historian to answer without moving into speculative territory that would work against his or her credibility. What Overy does, though, is provide the facts as efficiently and as completely as may be possible in a single volume so that we can make our own anthropological and perhaps moral judgements of what happened not only in the fourteen years of imperial war but afterwards. I might criticise him a little for one lapse in one section in failing to question the standard moral narrative provided to us in the West by our victorious history but I think not lapsing would have taken him into such dangerous territory that his book would have been devalued immediately. I cannot blame him for not answering the question he poses because the answer may be very frightening to all of us, to our own self-image of being individuals and not a herd, of being good rather than evil, of being superior to animals rather than fundamentally animal ourselves. The precise mechanisms of power are not merely institutional, they are fundamentally psychological and anthropological. They lie in issues as basic as the pecking order that you find in nature and the way co-operative behaviours create dependency on others. The consequential horrors of nation-empires at war are provided as facts on the ground and not as evidence in some moralistic polemic. One picture he has of what would be primary school children being guided by trusted authority into gas vans is the tip of a terrifying abyss of murder. The Holocaust is the known worst or is it? Do we sometimes conveniently present the Holocaust as a 'unique' horror so that we can load all the evil onto one apparently unnatural event run by demons from hell in order not to face the sheer breadth and depth of violence in war? This is the problem. The Holocaust was actually a natural event, the latest in a long line of genocides in history and prehistory but one merely with access to inventive technologies. The perpetrators were not demons but humans such as you might see walking down your street. Let us step back to the primary focus of the book. Three aggressive 'hungry' powers challenge two fat self-satisfied empires in an expectation of empire as their right. But why do they consider it their right? Because they think themselves 'civilised' and civilisation means empire. What does empire mean? It means the control of vast areas of the world as natural territory where 'lesser' human beings exist to serve the civilised and where any brutality is acceptable to control those peoples and clear space for the civilised and their needs. Does that sound familiar? It should. Because the Axis imperial mission is precisely what the British, French and the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgians had done in the not-so-recent past and what American Manifest Destiny did to indigenous peoples in their turn. In other words the mentality behind brutality was created and shaped by what we think as the 'good guys' in the Second World War who could moderate their position only because their command and control (and brutality) had worked - it had created a resource base. The Japanese looked at China and thought that it was their right to own it before the Westerners could seize it. The Germans looked East, seeing Slavs as if they were African natives with the problem of the Jews a gross racial inconvenience. Italy wanted a slice of an Africa already carved up. It is undoubtedly true that Axis racism and brutality was of another order to that of the older empires (or at least the Axis brought their brutality closer to home and 'civilisation') but the mental map and attitudes would not be alien to British officials in India or French in Indo-China. The other victors too were lesser demons rather than angels. The hypocrisy of a deeply racist US in trumpeting the rights of man is well known as is that of the Soviet Union with its Gulag and its strategy of slaughtering national elites as it did in Katyn Wood. Of course, when war broke out, we see the conduct of Japanese troops (the rape of Nanking and the slaughter in Manila), of German troops (with the Wehrmacht willing war criminals ready to slaughter families) and of Italian troops murderous in their inept and blundering way. But, before too long, Churchill was complicit in the deliberate terror bombing tactics of Harris over Germany and Roosevelt in the equally vicious and deliberately terror-directed fire-bombing of Tokyo while Soviet troops raped their way across Prussia with complete tolerance back in Moscow. One officer who protested rape ended up in the Gulag for 'bourgeois humanism'. American intelligence officers had a tough time trying to get front line troops in the Pacific to take prisoners for questioning. This gets us back to the problem of our species. This is that we are not truly free individuals (or rather only some of us are). However, we are not a potential hive either as might be suggested in the nightmare post war fashionable liberal critiques of totalitarianism. What we are is something closer to a complex herd species, perhaps with a lemming quality. At a certain point, we all willingly coalesce into a social narrative not of our making and quite possibly personally harmful to us and our families and have done so certainly since the Greek city-state. As the international socialists crumbled within days of imperial-national war being declared in 1914 so did the churches in 1939 and 1941, despite all the cant of believing in the gospel of peace of Jesus Christ. Only the Jehovah's Witnesses showed courage and many died for that reason. Pacifists too represented very considerable movements of people in the 'free world' in the late 1930s but they too crumbled under social pressure quickly. Here we get to the heart of the matter - reality is socially constructed and war allows elites to construct that reality. The mechanism by which our herd species, allowed freedom in peace in the West at least, enslaves itself to imperial elites is what is not and cannot be covered in this book but the book is absolutely invaluable to the person who wants to start that process of understanding. It is an understanding that is vital because you can see the same mechanisms re-emerging even as I write this in the struggle for mastery between the latest iteration of imperial conflict, a process that goes back at least to the facing off of the Egyptians and Hittites at Megiddo (Armageddon). This time the now-cyclical nonsense is between the 'West' (actually the political class of the Western alliance) and the 'SCO' (the political elites in Moscow and Beijing). Once again, reality is being falsely constructed by both sides to get their herds moving in the right direction. For this reason, Overy's book is not just a history book, it is a book that gives us the raw data in a new form, without bias or loss of moral compass, that we need to understand our own situation - impotent as individuals before the mass and the State as manipulator of the mass. The social construction of reality under the command of elites is not a false reality or 'fake news', it is reality and that reality can quickly get out of control and unleash animal forces that are quite capable of mass rape, the murder of ordinary people and widespread destruction. And if you do not believe me - take a look at the atrocities on all sides in the current Tigrayan War in Ethiopia or the deaths, barely reported in the mainstream media, that took place in the Congolese Wars or the evidence of our own and French behaviour during decolonisation. The final chapter of Overy's book is the most cursory but in some ways the most revealing because it shows how the savagery of 1931 to 1945 did not end there but continued out of sight of the 'civilised', perpetrated by precisely those victors who had claimed the moral high ground. Nuremburg refused to deal with mass terror bombing or US unrestricted submarine warfare in the Pacific. Germany was never obliged to deal with the murderers of women and children in the East. Soviet crimes are self-evident. Dutch behaviour in Indonesia was unconscionable. The list goes on. Although the story of the Second World War is one we all think we know and there is much that is familiar, there is also much here that will be new to most of us and possibly awkward, supported by references that indicate a man who is in total command of his sources. Churchill may be regarded as a great war leader from the point of view of the homelander but he was a ruthless imperialist too. Stalin was a brutal leader but his troops were exhausted when they reached the Vistula and it would have been unreasonable to test them further to relieve Warsaw. The German military was highly effective in its early expansion but lost its edge not simply because of greater material resources on the opposing side but because the Allies learned by doing in the face of challenge in both theatres. This brings out another, perhaps more positive side of the socially constructed herd, its adaptability under pressure, its ability to learn rapidly and exploit its advantages and an understanding of the behaviours of the other side. No one has a workable system to win in the casino in the long run and no power can beat the house in the struggle between empires. The house is a matter of resources and control over populations, economics and that ability to construct narratives that enable power to be exercised. The Axis powers were doomed from the point that the United States decided to fight back and hard and the Nazis failed to push Stalin out of the industrial zones to the East and create the conditions for regime change amongst a discontented population. It was only a matter of time. But it was also only a matter of time before the triumph of the two new ideological powers unravelled the older empires as well and came into direct conflict. The blindness to this aspect of strategy is perhaps what is most unnerving about Axis and old imperial decision-making. Perhaps, despite the racism in the East (which had some reasonable origin in foul Japanese behaviour), the terror bombing of Japan and the hypocrisies, the nation that comes out of this best is the US which, for all its flaws, showed an anti-imperialist commitment to be commended. It can also be honestly said that it was least inclined to oppress its own people to undertake war and least inclined to atrocity. Its later history may have tainted its status as moral arbiter (as did the cowardice of elites towards popular racism) but it was easily the best of a bad bunch. Given just how evil war is, the act of perpetrating war for whatever reason should be a mark against a nation. Both the US (attacked at Pearl Harbour and with war on it declared by Germany) and the Soviet Union (attacked by Germany, noting its earlier occupations of others) come out best here. If the Axis empires are the prime aggressors, it has to be said that the British and French Empires escalated things by initiating declarations of war against Germany in 1939. We should fear today that alliances designed for defence may end up with our being dragged into things we may regret. Complex alliances to maintain the balance of power, neglect of homeland defence and failure to distinguish between wrongful imperial acquisition and legitimate unification of peoples are permitted because elites know that, ultimately, they can guide the herd. Our entire international system is based on some fundamental conceptual flaws - above all, that borders must be fixed eternally and externally rather than through democratic non-violent self-determination - and those flaws are going to see many small wars and some big ones to come. And the herd will follow as it always has done and always will, elites will countenance horrible crimes claiming existential necessity and ordinary people will once again become thieves, rapists and killers when they are unleashed on the world. And so it goes ... ...more |
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really liked it
| Aeschylus has only seven surviving plays to his name. One of those (Prometheus Unbound) is now heavily disputed to be his. Vellacott's translation is Aeschylus has only seven surviving plays to his name. One of those (Prometheus Unbound) is now heavily disputed to be his. Vellacott's translation is of the four that are not the only full surviving trilogy - the Oresteia - which has entered deep into Western culture in its own right. Self-evidently the survival of these plays, preceding the work of Sophocles and Euripides, testifies to the regard in which he was held but the lack of his other plays (which may have amounted to 90) and the non-survival of those of his rivals suggests that we are seeing only the tip of an iceberg. Aeschylus was not the only playwright of his time, his audience would have been demanding under conditions that were semi-sacred as well as popular and the dispute over 'Prometheus Unbound' indicates that others could probably reach high levels of attainment. Still, Aeschylus was clearly regarded as an innovator who reached heights of rhetoric and drama not achieved before, above all (it is said) introducing characters who related to each other and not just singly with the Chorus. These four non-Oresteian plays still stand up to scrutiny even if we need guidance in order to think our way into what it must have been like to be presented with performances that were as much a type of free form religious and political experience as theatre, at least as we understand it. Contemporary fashion tends to favour 'The Persians' both because of its unique references to contemporary events and because the modern mind favours what appears to be a transfer of empathy towards the defeated (the Persians) although I think this has been exaggerated. My favourite - the one that still moves me - is the heroic war poem-drama 'Seven Against Thebes' which seems to capture the barbarism of city-state conflict prior to the Athenian discovery of 'reason' in all its raw energy just as it introduces us to the civic morality of tragedy. Its masculinity is overt - there is a remarkable scene where King Eteocles upbraids the Theban women for destabilising the war effort through their inability to restrain their sentiments and their excess of religiosity. it is patriarchal but Eteocles has a strong point here. This heroic rawness is perhaps what Nietzsche had in mind in condemning what Socratic reasoning was to do to the ability of Greeks to maintain their ability to prosper as 'peak humans'. It is less comfortable for our culture to read than faux-empathy in the propaganda against the Persians. The other two plays read well in Vellacott's translation but they suffer more from being detached from the other plays in their trilogies. The Oresteia works for us today because it 'unfolds' with a form of thesis and antithesis resulting in a synthesis of more civic moral worth based on reason. The meaning of Greek tragic drama is too complex an issue to deal with in a brief GoodReads review but the religio-political aspects lie in 'squaring' our nature with social obligation especially when various obligations start to clash. Which is to win out? In 'Seven Against Thebes' King Eteocles is primarily honour bound to defend his City against raiders brought against it by his estranged brother Polyneices (whose lack of proper burial later will be the cause of another great tragedy by Sophocles in 'Antigone'). However, he is also bound not to spill the blood of his brother. Yet fate has decreed that he must fight him to the death at the seventh gate. The fate is written as part of a set of individual crimes with origins in breaching past taboo afflicting blood lines - the Oresteia is another such example. In this case, the taboos breached are all those surrounding Oedipus, father of both Eteocles and Polyneices by his own mother Jocasta and compounded by Oedipus' curse on his sons because of their rejection of him. Antigone is going to be just the next stage in a succession of horrors. Eteocles is actually given a choice by his own advisers, to send another hero against his brother or perhaps switch gates which a King could choose to do but Eteocles will not do this. The heroic lies in not avoiding an impossible moral choice with no good end if it is 'fated'. Once it has happened that the allocation of the seventh gate is to him and that the raider on that gate is his brother, the tragedy unfolds as inevitable ... not as a choice or a matter of rational calculation but as an 'ill-fated' moral necessity to do an evil thing less evil than another evil thing. Of course, the audience is seeing him put his City first but the avoidance of choice cannot have gone unnoticed nor its association with the legendary world's heroic barbarism. Tragedy is here truly cathartic, filled with a vicarious death instinct in which life is truly lived. The fourteen heroes, raiders and Thebans, are all totally disregarding of death, placing honour and glory ahead of a quiet life, much as we have come to expect from Homer. Perhaps the dramatists want all Athenians to be heroes when necessary ... but only when rationally necessary. In our own day, this brings us back to the legacy of Nietzsche but also to an awareness that just because God is dead does not mean civilisation is dead. Our general cultural incomprehension of Eteocles' decision-making possibly defines the full victory of 'reason' over 'life'. This play, set alongside the defiance of 'God' in 'Prometheus Unbound' and the brilliant exposition of girlish terror of quasi-incestuous rape and of social obligation in 'The Suppliants', shows a society living in a state of reason performatively exploring questions of sentiment and honour. We cannot honestly know what a Greek citizen thought of all this but the fact that such plays were far from unusual and highly regarded suggests that an entire society needed 'drama' in some way to 'square' the conflicts within itself and get debate going about right action. The gods too are 'real' although it is hard to get a fix on how an ancient actually felt about these capricious and often cruel creations. The overwhelming sense is of the gods, under all-father Zeus, maintaining right order in the world where right order was not always that of reason. If the city was based on reason among men, nature and society or rather natural social relations in family and tribe and in war were not. The gods, who spoke for right order outside men's rules, ruled this world of natural social relations, right behaviour and right ritual. 'Squaring' civil order with the natural order (including the justified sentiments of society and culture prior to the laws) must have been a constant process of civil and personal negotiation. Greek tragedy helped worked out the limits of the game and educate a populace about them. In 'The Suppliants'. Pelasgus King of Argos explores every 'reasonable' argument why he should not plunge his people into war to save the 'virtue' of 50 distant relatives threatened with rape by their Egyptian cousins. In the end, he accepts, having realised that a higher law answerable to the Gods requires that he protect the girls, that he must challenge the Egyptians despite the inevitable grim result. His people agree with him. This is community heroism and truly absurd in the existential sense. The sense we get is of the very real belief in a 'higher law' provided by the Gods (although this means within a framework laid out with strict justice and order by Zeus) whose breach must lead to tragedy often generations later and that reasoning is there to endorse this law not thwart it. None of this higher law is systematised as in the religions of the book. It is customary and oral - things everybody knows are right but which have to be policed with frequent reminders directed as much at the forgetful as at the young. Community survival is at stake. Doing the right thing (which is very different from the Judaeo-Christian faith-based 'being good') is not easy. The lesson of the tragedies is that not doing the right thing creates imbalances in the natural order that will be corrected in time - at the expense of your own blood line. Drama appears later to move more strongly not so much towards expressing the crisis of heroic sentiments and the tragic results of breaching taboo but more heavily towards civic society as the resolution of the crises created by the old way of doing things - but our evidence remains sparse. Greek Tragedy is complex and multi-layered, not easily analysed or summarised in secular terms, highly suggestive even while laying out its grim facts with crystal clarity. This is a shame and not a guilt culture. One should be shamed for soiling one's own blood line and 'fating' one's children. Vellacott is an old translation (1961) but highly readable and directed at credible performance. With minimal academic infrastructure, he points out corrupt texts where they matter and provides indications of the sort of metaphor and references relevant to understanding the plays. ...more |
Notes are private!
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| 031232572X
| 9780312325725
| 031232572X
| 3.90
| 436
| Jun 29, 2006
| Mar 06, 2007
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liked it
| Ostensibly about mind control in the round, this is, mostly, a rather confused if well written set of chapter-by-chapter case studies on various aspec Ostensibly about mind control in the round, this is, mostly, a rather confused if well written set of chapter-by-chapter case studies on various aspects of 'brainwashing' as well as an extended essay on interrogation with a fairly set 'rationalist' and sceptical view of most claims of mind control. Certainly Streatfield has worked hard. He has done valuable independent research to add to his reasonably broad reading in the subject but what starts well as a history of Cold War fears about brainwashing starts to fall apart so that early promise remains unfulfilled. It is hard to be too critical (because the work seems mostly sound) about this book yet it lacks a coherent narrative even if it has a coherent message that all the work undertaken by 'spooks' aimed at controlling our minds does not amount to hill of beans. To a great extent, Streatfield proves his point by showing us that, time and time again, claims about the mind in society (truth serums, subliminal advertising, alleged messages in heavy metal music, cult behaviours, satanic abuse) do not stand up to much scrutiny. But in this worthy work, where the case studies are often truly horrific and often show humanity at its most stupid as much it shows it at its most cruel, the interspersing of these tales with the 'spook' stories and history of interrogation (I prefer the term torture) adds little. Most of the spook and drugs material is better told elsewhere although there are important new insights especially about Anglo-American 'bad psychiatry' and its links to the Western security apparat. Dr. Ewen Cameron is up there with Mengele on the 'evil doctor' lists. But, while there is new insight into the story of Cold War evil, the book soon veers into case studies that might cause outrage and shock but are somehow not connected to make a whole. What do they tell us that is coherent - not much more than that we can be a pretty dumb and cruel species. This has all the marks of journalistic writing . It is no surprise to find that Streatfield's main profession is as a documentary maker which lends itself precisely to his short form case study method. Having been critical (based on expectations), we have to say that he writes well and humanely. The case studies are well reported. His judgements seem sensible. We should be horrified by these stories. And his showing how stupidity combined with lack of moral compass does harm is vital. However, in his eagerness to demonstrate the natural scepticism of the evidence-based investigative journalist, one clearly determined to expose horrors rationally rather than emotionally, he sometimes seems not to see the wood for the trees. He fills gaps in the data with rational extrapolation of rational expectation when an even more sceptical mind might point out that a documentary investigative journalist is scarcely going to be told everything that needs to be told. We know how much documentation gets destroyed and we also know that sources that brief a journalist secretly will generally have an angle of some kind. If they are in office (even if not), they would have a quiet word with someone in their system on what any co-operation should achieve. The case that mind manipulation is less than the sum of its popular cultural parts sounds at times like that determined attempt of the urban liberal intellectual to deny the existence of all conspiracies because they have been unnerved by the Protocols of the Elders of Sion fraud. The same caution one should have in denying the possibility of conspiratorial behaviour when we know that these are sometimes, if accidentally, evidenced to rational people should apply to claims that mind control is ineffective and has been abandoned by those who rule us. He may be looking in the wrong place since it is as convenient for those who rule us to deny socialised control of consciousness nowadays as it to deny the existence of conspiracies (of a sort). Yet he is right that interrogation has no magic bullets and is much as it was under the Inquisition. But 'mind control' (meaning the deliberate manipulation of consciousness in the context of power relations) should not be so easily dismissed or at least should be investigated more thoroughly. After all, the vast sums being spent on psychological warfare operations require more scrutiny. Of course, we know that ridiculous sums were spent on futile and cruel research in the Cold War and it is possible that the ridiculous sums being spent on psychological operations may be equally amoral and stupid but that is the investigation we need - not of what was but of what is. We are in the middle of a massive global information war in which journalists are witting or unwitting combatants as much as priests or pastors in a religious war - believing themselves to be sacred, they are, in fact, players in the game and so targets. Interrogation only happens when the manipulation of minds has failed and real war of some sort has broken out. Interrogation is the easy and material part of this game, a matter of pain and cruelty as well as fear and manipulation. The case studies about 'spooks' and psychologists out of control - sociopaths sanctioned by a claim of existential struggle - show us 'intent', the intent to control consciousness. It is the history of this intent and its methodologies that needs its coherent history, now more than ever. In this book, we see case after case of 'methodology' by 'bad' psychiatrists and secret warriors alongside social paranoia that sees badness where there is no badness to be seen yet we do not see much of the deep 'why' of all this except as sets of responses to specific incidents. The deep 'why' is not the functional approach that says that such-and-such sought to get such-and-such to admit this-or-that but the question of how entire structures can exist that believe either that they can manipulate minds or are in the midst of a programme of manipulation. It probably comes down to deep instinctive paranoia based on a fact on the ground - we cannot know other minds. Power requires that it knows the minds over which it has power. The impotent are easily led to believe that minds can be manipulated in ways that must be simple to understand. A correct scepticism is sceptical about scepticism insofar as the urgency of power's desire to understand in order to control minds must be accepted and analysed and the fears and paranoia that lead to belief in non-existent mind control need to be understood and corrected. Streatfield does some of what is required in exposing the absurdity and cruelty of passionate or stupid people refusing to believe that mind control is not going on or believing in too much that they have themselves unwittingly created (as in the truly shocking satanic abuse chapter). He should get credit for exposing much. We should be horrified by the treatment of innocent Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the almost-plan for total sensory deprivation as an 'experiment' and the simple policeman destroyed by his own disturbed religious community. But I was not persuaded that elite or state mind control has not gone beyond failed experiments to improve interrogation methods or create better agents. I may sound excessively conspiratorial to Streatfield but I suspect there is lot more to this story and that it is even darker than we think. ...more |
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Nov 13, 2021
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