October 04, 2003
You don't say. We'll be expecting the repudiation, arrest and extradition to America of the Iranians responsible for the kidnap and false imprisonment of 52 US diplomats any day now, then.
Yoseph Malkin
writes:At the risk of sounding like people I wish not to sound like, I must say that the British did fight on the reactionary side, and that it is hard to see on what basis, other than that of the divine right of kings', wasI'm no expert either, but my impression is that Boney was much worse than the Bourbons, corrupt as they were. He waged what we would now call "agressive war" all over Europe for one thing, murdered 2000 Turkish prisoners at Jaffa, conscripted a generation of French youth and got an awful lot of them killed, shot hostages in Russia and helped put down the peasant uprising in the Vendée* with proto-Stalinist efficiency. The ideals of the French Revolution had been drowned in the Terror long before. There was precious little left of Egalité or the Rights of Man by the time that Napoleon gave the throne of Spain to his brother and provoked the prototypical guerilla war in response.
Napoleon's rule illegitimate. Britain, Russian and and Prussia were certainly concerned about the prospects of Napoleon conquering Europe, but also about the popularity of the ideals of the French Revolution he carried with him.The British did not set out, as in Iraq, to save the French from a ruling tyrant, or else they would not have reinstated the Bourbons, but were fighting for the preservation of the status quo. I am no expert, but I don't think Napoleon was more of a tyrant that the average Louis, certainly not more than a pre-revolution one.
It is true that that the British government had no intention of bringing universal democracy to France (or, indeed, Britain), but they did stand for the rule of law and relative liberty. To my mind all their many transgressions then and later do not change that conclusion.
Despite my earlier post comparing Napoleon and his British fan-club to their equivalents in 2003 I think the real parallel is with all the apologists for Stalin. (Of course some of the statesmen of the anti-war movement are old in sin, and were themselves defenders of Stalin in their youth.) By 1815 you had to be wilfully blind not to see that the hopes for the Revolution that had caused Wordsworth to write "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!" had not, to put it mildly, been met.
*The link I found about the Vendée actually says that Napoleon wasn't nearly as bad as some others. I had thought he'd done something ruthless in the artillery line there, but I may have been mixing it up with the siege of Toulouse. Nonetheless it remains a crime of the Revolution even if not one of Napoleon Bonaparte.
UPDATE: Another day, another shooting.
October 03, 2003
...My own ability to suspend disbelief ended even before I started to read the book. See, we don't use "stone" as a measurement of weight. In fact, if you said that someone weighed "15 stone" while you were here in the US the natives would probably think you're some sort of marijuana smuggler, and you were using bundles of weed as a system of measurement.I remember that I once had to use a dictionary to prove to a buddy that people actually used stone to measure weight, and that it was equal to 14 pounds. Heck, the only reason that I know about it is because I'm fond of those novels by Patrick O'Brian, and he won't shut up about stone. It's "He weighed 14 stone" this and "The staysail alone was 10 stone" that.
But I expect it's understandable considering that the story was set in a foreign country. After all, the publisher is based in Scotland.
Ah, for the freewheeling days when hungry authors never had to bother their heads with research... Now, that is a cultural change. I've often noticed that old childrens' stories, particularly, scarcely even pretended to be accurate. Early on in life I started to wonder why Rupert the Bear's Chinese friend Tigerlily never mentioned the communists who had taken over her country. Later on in life I wondered why she never mentioned she was surrounded by talking animals.
Oh, stop it, Natalie. You know perfectly well that is not an example of what you are trying to talk about.
Yeah, but now I've found that picture of Tigerlily I'm not taking it out. Remember the blunderpuss, eh?
Where was I? Oh, yes. Research, childrens' books in, lack of. In the good old days if you wanted to send Jack to the Arctic and the plot required him to make friends with penguins - poof - there they were, instantaneously transported from the other end of the world, complete with a passing missionary in case Jack wanted to marry the professor's daughter.
September 30, 2003
I've dot a gold so not much bloggig.
But here's an odd thing. I was reading The Hotspur Book for Boys published in 1937 and came across a story called "2+2=5 in Hickey" by one Arthur Radcliffe that is either quite mind-bogglingly implausible or very revealing about bygone educational methods. In the story an upright young schoolmaster, Bill, goes to teach at the school of an extremely isolated rural village in Arkansas. He soon discovers that in Hickey there are four feet in a yard, twenty inches in a foot, twenty pounds to a stone and twenty articles to a dozen. This isn't meant to be comedy. It turns out that the local evil trading company has controlled all schooling ever since the coming of free education to Hickey (see where relying on the state gets you), and has been systematically deceiving the people so as to diddle them out of the rightful price for their produce.So far, we have a very interesting premise for a kids' story. I doubt anything like it could really have happened in 1937, when radio was at its height, but since it is only a kids' story, never mind. There was however one thing that made my willingly suspended disbelief come crashing down on top of me: the benighted inhabitants have also been misinformed about the multiplication table and firmly believe that three times four makes fifteen. When Bill says, no it doesn't, his charges proudly show him printed tables (produced by the Company, natch) that say in black and white: 3 x 4 = 15.
My point is, not that this deception wouldn't work - of course it wouldn't ; someone would have fiddled around with piles of pebbles in the two generations the scam is meant to have been running and figured out that three piles of four pebbles is twelve pebbles - but that it so obviously wouldn't work that even the schoolboys reading the story ought to know it wouldn't work.
Oughtn't they? Or was rote learning really so big in those days that the story does in fact meet the modest standard of semi-plausibility required?
(Hat tip: J M Heinrichs.)
UPDATE: The link doesn't work. I can't figure out why. Which is a pity, because it was about the rediscovery of one of the oldest European colonies in the New World, old enough that some Royalist chap had his estates there confiscated after the English Civil War. It was also the the first European settlement to proclaim religious toleration.
And now this link does work. Let's see if I remembered the story right...
September 29, 2003
Tennis champion
Althea Gibson died yesterday. She won the women's singles and doubles at Wimbledon in 1957. Only six years earlier, in 1951, she had been the first ever black player to take part in the tournament. I can just remember the tennis commentators of my teens (when I knew much more about tennis than I do these days) mentioning her occasionally, but she seems far less known now than Arthur Ashe - yet she really was the first, the trailblazer.
"By supporting
renewed war against Napoleon, Lord Grenville split the Whig party between his faction and the Foxite Whigs under Earl Grey. Pro-Napoleonic publications such as the Statesman - whose editor was relieved from debt in May 1815 by a roll-call of anti-war grandees such as Samuel Whitbread MP, the Duke of Bedford, Sir Francis Burdett MP, Lord Holland, the Marquess of Tavistock and Earl Grey - argued that Napoleon was 'legitimate' and had been called to the throne of France by the 'universal voice, or consent, at least, of the people'. So incorrigible were they in support of Britain's enemy that, if anything, Napoleons's fall sent him yet higher in the Radicals' esteem and a (post-Waterloo) letter of August 1815 published in Cobbett's Register claimed that his regime had been 'one of the grandest instances of legitimate government that ever was proposed and adopted for the welfare of a country.'"- Andrew Roberts, Napoleon and Wellington.
Had I more time, historical knowledge or guts about facing a libel action what fun I could have scattering hyperlinks over that passage. Some would refer to the way Tony Blair opting for renewed war with Saddam Hussein has split the Labour party, some to the way Geoffrey Robinson keeps the New Statesman going out of his own pocket, and some (ideally taken from the letters page of the Guardian or Independent) to claims that Saddam Hussein was 'for all his faults' popular, pro-feminist, ran a nice welfare state etc.
Trouble is, I couldn't find a really juicy post April-9 Saddam-was-progressive letter. I do remember seeing one or two, but it's a vague thing to search for. (George Galloway did famously say to Saddam Hussein "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability," but that was while SH was still in power so it doesn't quite fit the parallel. ) Now, as then, we have a roll-call of rich grandees who play at radicalism. Now, as then, they are incorrigible in support of the most blatant tyranny so long as the tyrant once made the right progressive noises. But in these decadent days the grandees tend to preface their support for tyranny with an "of course it's not that we support tyranny". Who now has the consistency of Samuel Whitbread MP, who topped himself after getting upset by the result of the battle of Waterloo?
P.S. About that libel action: I have no reason to suppose that New Statesman editor Peter Wilby is in debt personally, OK.
P.S.S. One part of my analogy doesn't fit: Grenville's Whigs were not in power in 1815. One of the oddities of our time is that Tony Blair went to war backed by a united party that stood four-square behind him... only trouble was, it wasn't his party.
September 28, 2003
"...A nation marching single-file like geese through the darkness.
The land of limitless opportunity was shut off by a couple of exploded fuses. A world power between perception and reality."A few weeks ago, I noticed that even my new disimproved and downgraded hit-counter (what's the betting Bravenet are getting out of the free counter business?) was registering regular hits from a dual language German/English blog, Davids Medienkritik. I've been meaning to link to it for a while. Now the author has sent this plum about the Italian power blackout. Der Spiegel reported the US blackout in the marvellous purple prose at the top of this post. But the Italian blackout? Oh, that was just the unfortunate result of a storm.
I hope. It is a little strange that this keeps happening to countries that supported, whether with troops or words, the recent war in Iraq. And they've got Glenn Reynolds.