We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend
Leo McKinstry
John Murray, 2007 (first published in paperback 2008), 435pp., £8.99 in paperback
On the strength of Leo McKinstry’s excellent book about Geoff Boycott, I bought this book about the Supermarine Spitfire. I didn’t find it quite so entertaining as that first one, but I kept reading, and I kept learning things that I didn’t know about this famous airplane.
The basic problem with the Spitfire story, as a story, is that almost all of the excitement comes at the beginning. How was it designed and by whom? Once designed, will it be ready in time for the world-shaping, civilisation-saving contest which all readers know will soon erupt? Well, we know that it will be ready, but how? In what numbers? Who were the insufficiently sung heroes of this story, and who the insufficiently damned villains? And, in the great battle, how exactly did it do? That’s the heart of the story, and McKinstry tells it well, or at least (to an airplane ignoramus like me) convincingly. But the Spitfire carried on being manufactured right through the war, all the while being speeded up, enlarged, having its shape made uglier, its armaments made fiercer, its range improved, its weight greatly increased, and its task list expanded. Had McKinstry ignored all this later stuff it might have made a more entertaining book, but that would not have been the story of the Spitfire. As it is, the Battle of Britain only ends more than half way through the book, after which McKinstry takes us on a tour of all the other dramas and developments as efficaciously as he can. → Continue reading: What the Spitfire did and what the Spitfire did next
It is funny how films that you put down on the “must get around to seeing it sometime” list never get seen. Well, I have wanted to watch that 1970 epic, Waterloo, for a while and watched it during a quiet Saturday afternoon. Several things struck me about it, not least the fact that the cast was drawn from the Soviet Union (the Red Army?). I think I remember reading somewhere that the Soviet forces were used as cast extras in quite a lot of films, including a Russian film version of War and Peace. Rod Steiger’s portrayal of Bonaparte has not, in my view, ever been bettered. What a great actor Steiger was. Mad eyes.
I wonder if anyone who drives past the rolling wheatfields of Belgium in which the battle was fought ever wonder about the sheer carnage that was caused on that damp June day in 1815, or reflect that, nearly 200 years later, Bonaparte’s dream of a pan-European empire has in some ways come to pass, albeit without the nifty French cavalry uniforms.
Andrew Roberts’ fine account of both Napoleon and his nemesis, Wellington, is certainly worth a read.
“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he brought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service….The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent of the national income.”
– A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, page 1. Quoted by Alvin Rabushka in “From Adam Smith to The Wealth of America, page 80. The latter is a particularly good book, written very much from the “supply-side” school of economics with a strong account of developments in UK 19th century politics, Hong Kong, and the Reagan presidency.
I have been reading this book, by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV. King Henry ascended the throne of England after successfully deposing Richard II, and his own reign seems to have consisted of one attempt after another to depose him. Yet Henry IV died in his bed of natural albeit very painful causes.
One of these failed rebellions against King Henry, at the beginning of the year 1400, involved a certain Sir Thomas Blount.
Only six men, including Sir Thomas Blount, received the full traitor’s death of being drawn, hanged, disembowelled, and forced to watch their own entrails burned before being beheaded and quartered. Blount’s execution resulted in one of the greatest displays of wit in the face of adversity ever recorded. As he was sitting down watching his extracted entrails being burned in front of him, he was asked if he would like a drink. ‘No, for I do not know where I should put it’, he replied.
I had no idea that the people who suffered these frightful deaths were able to say anything at this late stage in their ordeal. I guess the executioners were trying to be as nice as they could to Sir Thomas, against whom they presumably had no personal animus, rather like Michael Palin in this. But, talk about too little, too late.
Although of course it is a joke, see the posting immediately below. As Jonathan has already noted, Guido Fawkes has had a lot of fun over the last few months noting that every time Gordon Brown comes out in support of anything, it immediately tanks. Andy Murray was Mr Brown’s latest victim, apparently. So when I read on the Coffee House blog this morning that Gordon Brown now supports Barack Obama, I knew that Guido would be crowing with laughter, if not now then very soon, and sure enough, he is. Obama, says a delighted Guido, is now officially doomed. Luckily, before posting this, I also checked out Samizdata to see if anyone else here was having a laugh about this, and of course, they are.
Apologies if you think I am duplicating here, but behind the hilarity of all this is to be observed an interesting re-arrangement of the political conventions, which is why I still put this thought up as a separate posting. More and more mere people, especially political people, like the ones who read Samizdata for example, have their particular preferences not just in their own countries and constituencies and districts and states and towns, but in ‘foreign’ parts also. The logic of the internet – even of instant electronic communication itself, which got started getting on for two hundred years ago – has always, to me, suggested global political affiliations, and in due course, global political parties. Certainly the Communist movement thought so. Maybe language remains a big barrier, but geography now matters less and less.
Remember that counter-productive attempt by the Guardian to swing the last (was it?) Presidential election against Bush? Many concluded that this proved the wisdom of political people staying out of foreign elections. To me it merely proved that if you want to help this or that side in foreign parts, make sure that you really are helping. Because attempts to help like this are absolutely not going to stop. As the very existence of Samizdata now nicely illustrates, this is all now one big Anglospherical conversation.
Obama’s idiotic campaign trip to Germany was, you might say, a self-inflicted version of that same Guardian blunder. But nor does that folly prove, to me, that campaigners should never go abroad and seek foreign support when campaigning, merely that they should choose their foreign supporters with more care than Obama did. Having the right sort of foreigners waving and cheering next to him can do a politician all kinds of good, now that the pictures can be flashed around the world in seconds.
Under pressure from the McCain camp, the Brown regime is conducting another of its hasty and shambolic retreats. All sorts of stuff gets read out by Mr Brown, or appears under his name in printed articles. But you don’t suppose that he actually reads it all beforehand, do you? Mr Brown’s people are now assuring us that it was one of them who inadvertently revealed this sentiment, rather than Mr Brown himself who actually said it. All Mr Brown did was allow his name to be attached to the bottom of a newspaper article. So once again, there is this pattern, of the political leader trying, but failing, to observe the old and obsolete conventions, against his natural instincts, but his mere people not being so inhibited about saying what they think. Sooner or later the world’s leaders will all follow their mere supporters, and stop pretending to be neutral in foreign elections. Their line should be, because this will be the truth: of course I’ll work with whoever wins, I’m a politician. But meanwhile, yes, I do most definitely have my preferences.
The particular awfulness and embarrassingness of Mr Brown’s particular expression of a preference in the US Presidential election should not detract from the more general interestingness of this little event. Inevitably, most of the commentary will be about how the Obama campaign may now have peaked (the comments on Jonathan’s previous posting are already saying yes it has), and about how the Brown regime is unravelling, definitely, again, some more. But I find the more general global political party angle at least as interesting.
After all, this is not now only Brown preferring Obama, which we all know he does despite any denials (does anybody at all in what is left of the Labour Party not prefer Obama to McCain?). This is also now the McCain team opposing Brown, and not caring who knows it. And by extension, and whatever Mr McCain may personally feel or even know about the man, helping David Cameron. After all, the heading at Coffee House says: “The McCain campaign mocks Gordon Brown”. So now Mr McCain is doing it too, whatever denials he may subsequently issue.
The other night I dined with Michael Jennings, and the question arose between us about how the political atmosphere of Britain now compared with the atmosphere of Britain in slightly earlier times, the most obvious comparison being between now and the time just before – and at the start of – the Thatcher era. Whether Michael himself asked about how 1979 and thenabouts compared to now I cannot recall. Probably not, because in 1979 he was a young boy living in Australia. But I found myself trying to answer this question, because I believe that the comparison is rather intriguing.
Economically, Britain then and Britain now are in a rather similar mess, created by similar policies. The government was then, and is now, spending more than it can comfortably raise from us in taxes. Then as now, international conditions had reduced what the government could comfortably spend, but the government found it hard to react rationally. So much, briefly, for the similarities. But the differences are huge. These differences are in the party politics of it all. → Continue reading: 1979 and now – similar economics but different politics
The BBC is running a television series called The Tudors, I believe that the show is in its second series. They seem to think that the Tudor dynasty started with Henry VIII as there were no episodes on his father Henry VII, and the show still seems to be stuck on Henry VIII. Indeed his second wife, Ann Boleyn, has not even been executed yet – sorry if this is a ‘spoiler’ to people who think the fate of Ann is a cliff hanger.
“Sneer as much as you like about how slow paced this series is,” I hear you say, “the BBC is concentrating on telling the story correctly”.
Really?
Today I channel hopped and came upon the point in the show where the actor playing Thomas Cromwell was introducing a new invention – a secret weapon that would win the propaganda war with the Roman Catholics. The printing press (spoken with special stress) – introduced to the show with cries of “by God, what is that?”, and other such, from the actors.
Sadly the printing press was introduced to England during the reign of Edward IV – some sixty years before the time the scene was set, so everyone would have known exactly what a printing press was.
The excuse for the special tax that funds the BBC is that the organization ‘educates’ the population. This excuse just does not stand up.
So what might shift contemporary impressions of President Bush? I can only speak for myself here, but something I did not expect was the discovery that he reads more history and talks with more historians than any of his predecessors since at least John F. Kennedy. The President has surprised me more than once with comments on my own books soon after they’ve appeared, and I’m hardly the only historian who has had this experience. I’ve found myself improvising excuses to him, in Oval Office seminars, as to why I hadn’t read the latest book on Lincoln, or on – as Bush refers to him – the “first George W.” I’ve even assigned books to Yale students on his recommendation, with excellent results.
“Well, so Bush reads history”, one might reasonably observe at this point. “Isn’t it more important to find out how he uses it?” It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested – as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time – in how the past can provide guidance for the future.
– John Lewis Gaddis
We have of course already alluded here to the passing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Here is another tribute to this great man, from Theodore Dalrymple twelve days ago, which I think is spot on:
Contrary to popular belief, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died last week at 89, told the world nothing that it did not already know, or could not already have known, about the Soviet Union and the Communist system. Information about their true nature was available from the very first, including photographic evidence of massacre and famine. Bertrand Russell, no apologist of conservatism, spotted Lenin’s appalling inhumanity and its consequences for Russia and humanity as early as 1920. The problem was that this information was not believed; or if believed, it was explained away and rendered innocuous by various mental subterfuges, such as false comparison with others’ misdeeds, historical rationalizations, reference to the supposed grandeur of the social ideals behind the apparent horrors, and so forth. Anything other than admission of the obvious.
Solzhenitsyn’s achievement was to render such illusion about the Soviet Union impossible, even for its most die-hard defenders: he made illusion not merely stupid but wicked. With a mixture of literary talent, iron integrity, bravery, and determination of a kind very rarely encountered, he made it impossible to deny the world-historical scale of the Soviet evil. After Solzhenitsyn, not to recognize Soviet Communism for what it was and what it had always been was to join those who denied that the earth was round or who believed in abduction by aliens. Because of his clear-sightedness about Lenin’s true nature, it was no longer permissible for intellectuals who had been pro-Soviet to hide behind the myth that Stalin perverted the noble ideal that Lenin had started to put into practice. Lenin was, if such a thing be possible, more of a monster than Stalin, not so much inhumane as anti-human. Solzhenitsyn was always uncompromising – and, of course, quite right – on this point: no Lenin, no Stalin. Insofar as Solzhenitsyn finally destroyed the possibility in the West of intellectual sympathy for the Soviet Union (which inhibited the prosecution of the Cold War), he helped bring about the demise of the revolutionary, ideological state, and for that he will be remembered as long as history is written.
But I suspect that this may also be right:
The problem for Solzhenitsyn’s literary reputation is that the subjects his books address no longer seem so compelling to younger readers. Astonishing as it may seem to people who lived through the time when Solzhenitsyn appeared as a colossus, many people younger than 30 – not only in America and Western Europe but in Russia itself – have never heard of him or do not know what he did. Of course, literary reputations wax and wane; but his disappearance from the consciousness of young people at least raises the question of whether his achievement was more political and moral than literary.
Ever since I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (out loud on the University of Essex radio station as it transpired), I always had Solzhenitsyn clocked as: Great Writer? – not sure; propagandist – all time great. In this respect, I particular recommend his memoir called The Oak and the Calf, which is about how he did his propagandising, which was all mixed up with how he managed to keep himself alive to go on propagandising, which was a mighty achievement in itself under the murderous circumstances that he described and publicised so well.
Quite aside from the fact that I don’t read Russian, this judgement of mine surely has much to do with the fact that I have no very definite idea what a great writer is in any language (although I know very approximately what I like) and am myself scarcely a published writer at all. I’m not saying he was a great writer of literary fiction, and I’m not saying he wasn’t. On the other hand, I know quite a lot about propaganda and have myself done it with some glimmerings of success. In rather the same way that if you actually play football in some very lowly division you are an order of magnitude better than I am at knowing just how good Pele was or Ronaldo is, I can tell you that Solzhenitsyn was, when it came to spreading ideas, awesomely good, and that this was no accident. He brought skills like those of a chess grandmaster to the ideological struggle between him (and all his Samizdat allies) and the USSR. and his industry and attention to detail (to say nothing of his sheer courage) was extraordinary. The notion that he won his ideological battle without any hard graft besides the hard graft of just writing it down in some isolated dacha is quite wrong. He was the spokesman for an entire generation of other writers and record keepers. He was the leader of an entire underground movement. He created a fact-shifting machine as surely as any Western press magnate. He quite consciously set himself the task of destroying the USSR using only the power of the written and published word, and more than any other man – with the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, who also had the awesome military clout of the USA at his disposal – he succeeded.
Not that Solzhenitsyn was himself indifferent to or ignorant of military affairs. Towards the end of his life he wrote several novels about the First World War. He was in the artillery before being swallowed up by the monster that he named the Gulag, and he thought of all the truths that he gathered about the Gulag as ammunition, and the publishing of them as the launching of artillery barrages. If Dalrymple is right, it will be for the war of words that Solzhenitsyn conducted against the USSR, and for the fact that it succeeded so brilliantly, that he will be most admiringly remembered. But now that he is gone, fresh looks will surely be taken from the purely literary point of view at Solzhenitsyn’s achievement, and posterity may arrive, as Dalrymple says, at a somewhat different conclusion.
Thinking about the recent not-so-smart observations on men’s magazines by Tory politician Michael Gove, it is useful to recall that our so-called moral guardians have for a long time got themselves all hot and bothered about the prospect of biddable young chaps getting an eyeful of the fairer sex:
“The French rulers [the Bishop informed the House], while they despair of making any impression on us by force of arms, attempt a more subtle and alarming warfare, by endeavouring to enforce the influence of their example, in order to taint and undermine the morals of our ingenious youth. They have sent amongst us a number of female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes, and most wanton theatrical exhibitions, succeed but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people.”
Quoted in Decency & Disorder, by Ben Wilson, page 16. The comments were made by a Bishop sitting in the House of Lords in 1798. The late 1790s were a frightening period for the British ruling classes – as well they should have been. But it seems strangely comical that a Bishop should imagine that pretty French girls showing a bit of leg were more dangerous than the armies of Napoleon. Even at the time, I suspect that the likes of your average British sailor who was in the front line of defending Britain from attack would have thought this prelate to be a bit of an ass.
But however silly the Bishop’s comments were, they do point to something that is actually quite important: soft power, as foreign policy strategists like to call it. Yes, force of arms can subdue a weak nation. But any part of a “conquest” of a culture must take heed of the power, not just of tanks, guns or aircraft, but of ideas and preferences. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we tend to forget that the sight of Western advertisements for goods and services, occasionally glimpsed by people living in the Soviet empire, must have been a shock to anyone told that state central planning was the inevitable course of economic history. And when young people the world over – of whatever religion or of none – get to enjoy greater freedoms, most of them, from what I can tell, rather like them. Of course, religious extremists recoil in horror at such freedoms, just as the bishop I quoted did more than 200 years ago. Such folk may even use moral panics about such things to inflame opinion in reaction. But most people welcome a more liberal culture, which is why religious and other ideological puritans get so angry about it.
Maybe the Bishop was actually being quite wise after all. He need not have worried though, since those ladies’ men, Nelson and Wellington, dealt with the Corsican tyrant in the end, with a bit of help from a lot of Russians and Germans.
“It is many years since British historians felt comfortable in celebrating their country’s triumphs. Once upon a time, Britain’s incontestable naval and commercial supremacy in 1815 would have been explained as the predestined fruit of national virtue, religious truth and political freedom. Among professional historians all three explanations would nowadays arouse varying degrees of amusement, distaste and embarrassment, but no modern consensus of opinion has emerged to replace them. For many years the tendency has been to ignore or belittle the fact as well as the consequences of British naval supremacy. Not many would go so far as to dismiss it outright as a convenient myth, or imply that Napoleon won the Napoleonic War, but a number of intellectual strategies have been devised to ignore it.”
From N.A.M. Roger, The Command of The Ocean, page 575.
This is a quite outstanding book, published a few years ago. I particularly liked its explanation of how the Royal Navy knitted in with the commercial and political world of the time, such as how the need to provide food and supplies for ships going over vast distances encouraged development in things like food preservation, the development of the UK agricultural market, mass production techniques (for things like bits of ship rigging). The famous 17th Century diarist, Samuel Pepys, famously played a key role in developing the administrative machinery that was essential in making the operation work.
And what is also interesting is that the image that we traditionally have of the navy in the 18th century – “rum, sodomy and the lash” – to quote Churchill’s famous phrase about the navy – is not quite the full picture. There were brutal captains, terrible conditions and bad treatment of sailors via the press gang, yes. But Roger balances all this by pointing out how many of the ships we led by relatively humane and considerate men who treated sailors as well as could be reasonably expected (food and conditions were frequently better than on dry land).
It is hard to conceive, as Roger says, that Nelson and the rest would have won their famous victories had the sailors of the fleets been purely driven by the menace of the cat o’ nine tails. Roger explains a great deal of how the Navy was able to play such a massive role in UK history.
For history at its best, this book takes a lot of beating.
Well the 4th of August came and went again, without comment from anyone else – so I will belatedly comment upon it myself.
This day is more than the 47th birthday of the Windy City Marxist (sorry “liberal”) – spiritual grandchild of Saul Alinsky, it is also the date of the only good day in the French Revolution.
I refer not so much to the “Declaration of the Rights of Man”, a document whose wording makes it rather less useful in defending people (as opposed to ‘the people’) against the power of the state than the American Bill of Rights. I refer to the practical things that were done on the Fourth of August 1789… The abolition of so many taxes, monopolies and restrictions…and the ending of serfdom.
Certainly ‘only’ half a million French people (out of a population of some 30 million) were serfs and the courts had not been in the habit of enforcing serfdom, but the legal status still existed – till the 4th of August 1789.
And certainly the ending of the so many taxes on the 4th of August was followed, only a few months later, by new taxes and by the theft of vast amounts of land from the Roman Catholic Church and others, supposedly to “back” the newly issued fiat money “Assignats” that collapsed into hyperinflation anyway – in spite of all the stealing and all the murders that the Revolutionaries committed.
However, the 4th of August was still a good day, the one good day of the French Revolution, and it should not be forgotten.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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