Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2023

Bill Slim’s plan for the Battle of Meiktila in March 1945

Filed under: Asia, Books, Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dr. Robert Lyman on the subject of his most recent book, The Reconquest of Burma 1944-45: From Operation Capital to the Sittang Bend:

When I was writing my latest book with General Lord Dannatt he said to me, “Rob, if I’ve got one criticism of A War of Empires it’s that you don’t emphasise enough the role of Bill Slim in coming up with the plan for victory in 1945, and executing it perfectly.” Fair. As Slim’s military biographer, I told Richard that I didn’t want to be accused of rewriting that book again. I was conscious of this problem as I was writing A War of Empires.

But it is fair criticism. It may be that I underplayed Slim’s role when I was considering all the other critical features in this great campaign. The idea behind the dramatic victory by 14th Army in Burma in 1945 was Slim’s and Slim’s alone. He pursued his own plan through to its remarkable conclusion.

[…]

Slim’s original plan was to fight the main strength of the Japanese army on the Shwebo Plain, a dry, flat plain between the loops of the Chindwin and Irrawaddy. Not only would the terrain be well suited to the deployment of armour, for which the Japanese had little effective reply, but the Japanese would be trapped with the river-line at their back. Slim had assumed that the Japanese would be unprepared to make a voluntary withdrawal. The scene was set for Slim to be able to deploy his superior mobility and firepower to destroy the main Japanese army in Burma.

By the end of the year, however, it became apparent that the Japanese were not going to conform to Slim’s plan for the battle, and General Kimura had seen the trap which his forces would be caught in if they attempted to stand and fight in the Shwebo Plain. Showing unusual flexibility and moral courage Kimura promptly withdrew his reconstituted 15th Army behind the Irrawaddy. Kimura hoped, not without reason, to be able to smash Slim’s army as it attempted to cross the river, which in itself presented an immense obstacle to the British. He would then counter-attack and destroy Slim as the British withdrew during the monsoon to the Chindwin.

Kimura’s move behind the Irrawaddy destroyed at a stroke Slim’s plan. Undaunted, and recognising the supreme importance of destroying Kimura’s army rather than taking ground for its own sake, Slim came up with another plan. In basic outline, his new plan (Operation Extended Capital) entailed crossing the Irrawaddy and fighting the decisive battle in February in the plain around Mandalay and the low hills around Meiktila, the key enemy air and supply base in Central Burma. Both the road and rail links between Mandalay and Rangoon ran through Meiktila. If Meiktila fell, the whole structure of the Japanese defence of Central Burma would collapse.

July 11, 2023

“Howard hit upon an ingenious solution: take the coolest parts of history, file off the serial numbers, and do with them as you will”

Filed under: Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jane Psmith reviews Robert E. Howard’s The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian:

    Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars — Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.

Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories are everything I have ever wanted in fantasy literature — decadent cities bowed under the weight of the ages, wicked sorcerers, gushing arterial blood, lurking antediluvian horrors, red-handed buccaneers, strange magics that have slumbered beneath the sands for untold centuries, glorious cavalry charges into the teeth of death, arcane jewels the size of ostrich eggs, monstrous ape-like demons with slavering jaws, captive princesses, steely thews — and this is the way to read them. For years they were only available in heavily-edited versions, interspersed with “posthumous collaborations”,1 and, worst of all, presented in chronological order (has Narnia taught us nothing?). These editions, though — there are two more volumes — give us Howard’s texts, in the order Howard wrote them, and beautifully illustrated.2 They’re a great pleasure to read, and you should, so I promise not to spoil any major plot points.

Howard got his professional start with boxing stories, but his great authorial love was historical fiction. “There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” he wrote in 1933. “I wish was I able to devote the rest of my life to that kind of work.” He published stories set during the Crusades (see, for example, Hawks of Outremer, which has some notable similarities to his later work on Conan) and the eras of Mongol and Islamic conquest, and failed to sell tales of ancient Irish warriors. Unfortunately, the markets were slim (more or less only Oriental Stories, which only ran for four years) and the demands of research high: “I could never make a living writing such things, though,” he went on. “[I]t takes me so long to complete one. I try to write as true to the actual facts as possible, at least, I try to commit as few errors as possible. I like to have my background and setting as accurate and realistic as I can …” In his Hyborian Age, the setting for his Conan stories, Howard hit upon an ingenious solution: take the coolest parts of history, file off the serial numbers, and do with them as you will. As a bonus, it means you can combine eras and civilizations that could never have coexisted (or, indeed, existed at all) in real history: the Hyborian Age has 13th century France (or its imagined version of Charlemagne and his Paladins) in the streaming banners of Aquilonia, the Old Kingdom of Egypt in the necromantic rituals of Stygia, warring Assyrian city-states in the lands of Koth, the hill tribesmen of Afghulistan and the tent-dwelling Shemite nomads and the wild pillaging Picts, all immediately recognizable. Howard paints in broadest of strokes, with none of the specifics that would obsess, say, me — there’s no fussing about why classical Greece is next door to the Timurids or why you have the Bronze Age one place and the Middle Ages elsewhere — but it works. Here’s a sweeping picture of rumor spreading across his world in Black Colossus:

    Rumors drifted up through the meadowlands, into the cities of the Hyborians. The word ran along the caravans, the long camel-trains plodding through the sands, herded by lean hawk-eyed men in white kaftans. It was passed on by the hook-nosed herdsmen of the grasslands, from the dwellers in tents to the dwellers in the squat stone cities where kings with curled blue-black beards worshipped round-bellied gods with curious rites. The word passed up through the fringe of hills where gaunt tribesmen took toll of the caravans. The rumors came into the fertile uplands where stately cities rose above blue lakes and rivers: the rumors marched along the broad white roads thronged with ox-wains, with lowing herds, with rich merchants, knights in steel, archers and priests.

You know immediately what he’s gesturing at with all these peoples and places. H.P. Lovecraft, Howard’s friend and frequent correspondent, complained about his “incurable tendancy to devise names too closely resembling actual names,” but that was precisely the point. Why waste pages establishing the culture and character of an imaginary people with no emotional valence to anyone but the author when you can simply call a real people to mind in a few choice words? We already have a wealth of associations and baggage with the real world; it just makes sense to use them when you can. This is true on the small scale — as game designer and writer Kenneth Hite points out, your reader will have a much more powerful reaction to the shocking revelation that the queen is a vampire if it’s Elizabeth I rather than Lots’apostrae’fiis VII, to whom they were introduced three pages ago3 — but it’s even more useful when your fictional world has a wide scope. And indeed, Howard’s strategy works so well that it’s been copied by a great deal of subsequent fantasy literature: A Song of Ice and Fire is full of it, as is the world of Warhammer Fantasy. Even Tolkien, widely considered the master of secondary world fiction, works best for me when he draws most directly on the real world: on a recent re-read of Lord of the Rings, I cheered for the Rohirrim but had trouble caring about the Dúnedain and the line of Elendil until I started mentally substituting “Atlantis” for Númenor.

    1. This is what they call it when you’re dead and someone else writes a story based on your notes, because they think “raping a corpse” isn’t very catchy.

    2. They make wonderful audiobooks, too, if that’s your jam, but do take a peek at the illustrations if you can.

    3. Actually, Elizabeth II would be even more fun.

July 9, 2023

Imperial Rome

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Freddie Sayers talks to historian and podcaster Tom Holland about his latest book, Pax:

To his army of ardent followers, Tom Holland has a unique ability to bring antiquity alive. An award-winning British historian, biographer and broadcaster, his thrilling accounts offer more than a mere snapshot of life in Ancient Greece and Rome. In Pax — the third in his encyclopaedic trilogy of best-sellers narrating the rise of the Roman Empire — Holland establishes how peace was finally achieved during the Golden Age, with a forensic recreation of key lives within the civilisation, from emperors to slaves.

This week, Holland came to the UnHerd club to talk about Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Freddie Sayers: Let’s kick off with the very first year in your book.

Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere?

FS: It seemed to me, when I was reading Pax, that there was a recurring theme: a movement between what’s considered decadence, and then a reassertion of either a more manly, martial atmosphere, or a return to how things used to be — to the good old days. With each new emperor in this amazing narrative, it often feels like there’s that same kind of mood, which is: things have gotten a bit soft. We’re going to return to proper Rome.

TH: It’s absolutely a dynamic that runs throughout this period. And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. There’s this anxiety that this wealth is feminising them, that it’s making them weak, it’s making them soft — even as it is felt that the spectacular array of seafood, the gold, the splendid marble with which Rome can be beautified, is what Romans should have, because they are the rulers of the world.

That incredible tension is heightened by class anxieties. There’s no snob like a senatorial snob. They want to distinguish themselves from the masses. But at the same time, there’s the anxiety that if they do this in too Greek a way, in too effeminate a way, then are they really Romans? And so the whole way through this period, the issue of how you can enjoy your wealth, if you are a wealthy Roman, without seeming “unRoman”, is an endearing tension. And of course, there is no figure in the empire who has to wrestle with that tension more significantly than Caesar himself.

FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be.

TH: And, you see, this is the significance of AD 69, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, because the question is, are the cycles of civil war expressive of faults? Of a kind of dry rot in the fabric of the Empire that is terminal? Of the anger of the gods? And whether, therefore, the Romans need to find a way to appease the gods so that the whole Empire doesn’t collapse. This is an anxiety that lingers for several decades. It looks to us like this is the heyday of the Empire. They’re building the Colosseum, they’re building great temples everywhere. But they’re worrying: “Have the gods turned against us?”

And of course, there is a very famous incident, 10 years after the Year of the Four Emperors, which is the explosion of Vesuvius. And this is definitely seen as another warning from the gods, because it coincides with a terrible plague in Rome, and it coincides with the incineration (for the second time in a decade) of the most significant temple in Rome — the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, the most sacred of the seven hills of Rome.

Romans offer sacrifice to the gods or you pay dues to the gods rather in the way that we take out an insurance policy. And if the gods are busy burying famous towns on the Bay of Naples beneath pyroclastic flows, or sending plagues, or burning down temples, then this, to most, is evidence that the Roman people have not been paying their dues. So a lot of what is going on — certainly in the imperial centre — in this period, is an attempt to try and get the Roman Empire back on a stable moral footing.

July 8, 2023

QotD: The amputation of the soul

Filed under: Books, Britain, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Reading Mr Malcolm Muggeridge’s brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.

It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew Gardens and a jeweller’s shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.

Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.

It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanization and a collective economy seemingly aren’t enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind. So it appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.

The gist of Mr Muggeridge’s book is contained in two texts from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity” and “Fear God, and keep His comandments: for this is the whole duty of man”. It is a viewpoint that has gained a lot of ground lately, among people who would have laughed at it only a few years ago. We are living in a nightmare precisely because we have tried to set up an earthly paradise. We have believed in “progress”. Trusted to human leadership, rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s — that approximately is the line of thought.

Unfortunately Mr Muggeridge shows no sign of believing in God himself. Or at least he seems to take it for granted that this belief is vanishing from the human mind. There is not much doubt that he is right there, and if one assumes that no sanction can ever be effective except the supernatural one, it is clear what follows. There is no wisdom except in the fear of God; but nobody fears God; there fore there is no wisdom. Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilizations, one Tower of Babal after another. In that case we can be pretty certain what is ahead of us. Wars and yet more wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, Hitlers and super-Hitlers — and so downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate, though I rather suspect Mr Muggeridge of enjoying the prospect.

George Orwell, “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, 1940-03-30.

July 4, 2023

Shock! Horror! Apparently you can’t trust that Abraham Lincoln quote about not believing what you read on the internet!

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a long-time collector of quotations, I almost had to take to my fainting couch when it became clear that President Lincoln never said anything about the internet being a tissue of lies. My original quotations collection (webbed here, but no longer actively maintained) was not particularly well-policed in the sense of ensuring that the quotations were both accurate and properly attributed. This is because I began collecting them before the internet was a thing for most people. When I began the blog, I tried to ensure that anything I quoted could at least be traced back to the site I found it on (which isn’t a particularly rigorous chain of evidence, but at the least it ensured I couldn’t be accused of making shit up).

In James Delingpole’s article on this topic, I was sorry to find that the very first fake quote he listed is indeed one that I had included in my original collection:

Only the dead have seen the end of war – Plato

I became aware of this marvellous quotation – so wise, pithy and dark – on one of my frequent trips to the Imperial War Museum. It’s one of a series inscribed on the wall beside the ramp leading down to the World War I/trench section. Another of my favourites is attributed to Thucydides: “There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.”

The Plato quote is so good it has been used many times since, inter alia by General Douglas MacArthur in a speech at West Point in 1962, as an aphorism apparently oft-cited by grunts in the ‘Nam, and by Ridley Scott in Black Hawk Down. But the quote is fake. Or at least its attribution is.

In fact it derives not from the Classical Age but from the early 20th century. It was invented by the Madrid-born philosopher, poet and later Harvard professor George Santayana. He clearly had a gift for this sort of thing for he also coined another of those phrases which you’ve always thought was devised by someone much more famous: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Usually this is attributed, in various forms, to Edmund Burke or Winston Churchill. But the former didn’t say it and the latter – as I suspect he quite often did – plagiarised it.

Fake quotes, whether genuine sayings that have been misattributed or fabrications which have been lent authenticity by putting them in the mouths of someone famous, have been a bugbear of mine for a while. I can probably date this to the time someone called me out on my favourite George Orwell quote: “In times of universal deceit, truth-telling becomes a revolutionary act”.

Annoyingly, I had used it a good half dozen times in articles and in internet chats before I learned that Orwell had never said it. I felt cheated and also foolish: surely as an English literature graduate I ought to have known such a thing, in the way that film buffs know that Ingrid Bergman never said “Play it again, Sam”.

But these are easy mistakes to make now that fake quotes are everywhere. Probably, this has always been the case but they have definitely proliferated with the advent of the internet, the shortening of attention spans (which make us more susceptible to gnomic verities that appear to sum everything up and obviate the need for further thought) and the corresponding appetite for meme-friendly aphorisms.

Many of these fake quotes, I’ve noticed, are printed over photographs or images of the alleged author. It’s a cheap trick but an effective one. No one ever is going to be fooled by a joke quote like: “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Abraham Lincoln, 1865.” But shove it on top of a picture of the 16th president with those familiar features – the wart, the chin beard, the lined skin and sunken eyes – and for a fraction of a second, the subconscious is taken in.

He finishes off the article thusly:

I’m reminded here, somewhat, of the introductory talk that Mark Crispin Miller used to give his students when he was still allowed by New York University to conduct his course on Propaganda. I paraphrase – you really should listen to this podcast interview for the full account – but essentially Miller warned his audience: “Be prepared to be very upset. You may be shocked to discover how many of the ideas you imagined to be your own are in fact the result of propaganda.”

It would definitely have come as a shock to the younger me. When you’ve had what you consider to be a superb education, steeped in classical literature, you tend to kid yourself that you are just too damn clever, too well-read, to fall for the kind of cheap confidence tricks that fool the unwashed masses.

Which, when you think about it, is what makes the faking of those classical quotes so cunning. They deviously exploit one of one of the cultural assumptions most deeply embedded in both the “educated” and “uneducated” classes alike: this idea that if one of the Ancient Greeks or Romans said it, it must be true because there’s almost nothing about the world that they didn’t know. Another thing they exploit is that the “educated” are rarely as clever as we pretend to be. For example, presented with a vaguely plausible quote with a fancy classical name attached, passing few of us are going to go: “Hang on a second. Did he really say that? Let me check …” Instead, we’ll go “Ah. The great Thucydides. He was the Greek general who wrote Anabasis. The sea! The sea!” and congratulate ourselves on what marvellously well-informed people we are.

Did you catch that palmed card there? Thucydides didn’t write Anabasis because he was far too busy writing the Commentarii de Bello Gallico!

July 3, 2023

Nuclear power

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk, by Thomas Wellock. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Let me put Wellock and Rasmussen aside for a moment, and try out a metaphor. The process of Probabilistic Risk Assessment is akin to asking a retailer to answer the question “What would happen if we let a flaming cat loose into your furniture store?”

If the retailer took the notion seriously, she might systematically examine each piece of furniture and engineer placement to minimize possible damage. She might search everyone entering the building for cats, and train the staff in emergency cat herding protocols. Perhaps every once in a while she would hold a drill, where a non-flaming cat was covered with ink and let loose in the store, so the furniture store staff could see what path it took, and how many minutes were required to fish it out from under the beds.

“This seems silly — I mean, what are the odds that someone would ignite a cat?”, you ask. Well, here is the story of the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Plant fire, in March 1975, which occurred slightly more than a year after the Rasmussen Report was released, as later conveyed by the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth.

    Just below the plant’s control room, two electricians were trying to seal air leaks in the cable spreading room, where the electrical cables that control the two reactors are separated and routed through different tunnels to the reactor buildings. They were using strips of spongy foam rubber to seal the leaks. They were also using candles to determine whether or not the leaks had been successfully plugged — by observing how the flame was affected by escaping air.

    The electrical engineer put the candle too close to the foam rubber, and it burst into flame.

The fire, of course, began to spread out of control. Among the problems encountered during the thirty minutes between ignition and plant shutdown:

  1. The engineers spent 15 minutes trying to put the fire out themselves, rather than sound the alarm per protocol;
  2. When the engineers decided to call in the alarm, no one could remember the correct telephone number;
  3. Electricians had covered the CO2 fire suppression triggers with metal plates, blocking access; and
  4. Despite the fact that “control board indicating lights were randomly glowing brightly, dimming, and going out; numerous alarms occurring; and smoke coming from beneath panel 9-3, which is the control panel for the emergency core cooling system (ECCS)”, operators tried the equivalent of unplugging the control panel and rebooting it to see if that fixed things. For ten minutes.

This was exactly the sort of Rube Goldberg cascade predicted by Rasmussen’s team. Applied to nuclear power plants, the mathematics of Probabilistic Risk Assessment ultimately showed that “nuclear events” were much more likely to occur than previously believed. But accidents also started small, and with proper planning there were ample opportunities to interrupt the cascade. The computer model of the MIT engineers seemed, in principle, to be an excellent fit to reality.

As a reminder, there are over 20,000 parts in a utility-scale plant. The path to nuclear safety was, to the early nuclear bureaucracy, quite simple: Analyze, inspect, and model the relationship of every single one of them.

QotD: The key weakness of the royal cause in the English Civil War

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Behemoth is Hobbes’s account of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, and it’s a perfect illustration of why people listened to Thomas Hobbes in the first place. Hobbes is a penetrating observer of human nature. He has a rare ability to boil things down to their essence, and to express that essence memorably:

    [T]he power of the mighty hath no foundation, but in the opinion and belief of the people.

A king whose knights won’t ride out to battle on his behalf is just a weirdo in funny clothes. Charles I lost for a lot of reasons, but far from the least of them was that his “foundation” was badly cracked. However attached one might be to the notion of monarchy in the abstract, it – monarchy – is always intimately connected to the personality of the monarch … and Charles I was a real piece of work, even by the world-class standards of Renaissance princes. Parliament was outgunned, often outmanned, and suffered from what should’ve been a critical shortage of experienced leadership. But all those massive advantages were offset by the fact that the Royalist forces were fighting for Charles I, personally.

(This is not the place for a long discussion of the course of the English Civil Wars – and I’m not qualified to give you one in any case – but a quick look at the top commanders of the opposing sides will illustrate the point. Prince Rupert was arguably the equal, mano-a-mano, of any Parliamentary general, up to and including Cromwell. But he was still a Prince, and carried on like one (like a young one, to boot) … and even if he weren’t, he was still running the show on behalf of his uncle. Cromwell, on the other hand, inspired fanatic loyalty, not least because he embodied a cause that was much higher than himself).

Severian, “Hobbes (III)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-12.

July 1, 2023

Grover Cleveland “still holds the record for the most vetoes of any American president in two terms (584 in all)”

Filed under: Books, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mister, we could use a man like Grover Cleveland again:

Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), President of the United States, 1885-89 and 1893-97.
Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration (NAID 518139) via Wikimedia Commons.

When the city council of Buffalo, New York, sent the mayor a measure to fund Fourth of July celebrations in 1882, conventional wisdom suggested that approving it was the politically wise and patriotic thing to do. After all, the money would pay for festivities planned by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a very influential organization of Civil War veterans.

The conventional wisdom underestimated the mayor. He vetoed the appropriation, and proudly took the heat for it. After a year in the job in which he earned the title, “the veto mayor”, he moved on to become “the veto governor” of the State of New York and finally, “the veto president” of the United States. His name was Grover Cleveland. On the matter of minding the till and pinching pennies on behalf of the taxpayer, he puts to shame the great majority of public officials here and everywhere.

In his recent biography titled A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, Troy Senik recounts Grover’s message explaining the veto:

    [T]he money contributed should be a free gift of the citizens and taxpayers and should not be extorted from them by taxation. This is so because the purpose for which this money is asked does not involve their protection or interest as members of the community, and it may or may not be approved by them.

This was a man unafraid to draw the line on public spending for two principal reasons: 1) Government should not be a grab bag of goodies for whatever cause somebody thinks is “good” and 2) Failure to keep government spending in check encourages politicians to buy votes and corrupt the political process.

That all sounds quaint and frumpy in these enlightened times of trillion-dollar deficits. Even more out-of-step with current fashion is what Cleveland did as soon as he issued his veto. Senik reveals,

    Cleveland made a personal donation equal to 10 percent of the GAR’s budget request, then deputized the president of the city council to help raise the rest through private funds. In the end, the organization raised 40 percent more than it had requested from the city treasury.

Personally, Grover loved pork in his sausage, but he hated it in bills. He once expressed the wish that he would be remembered more for the laws he killed than the ones he signed. He still holds the record for the most vetoes of any American president in two terms (584 in all).

June 28, 2023

“I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ For Dummies“

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:25

Jane Psmith reviews The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell, despite it not being quite what she was hoping it would be:

This is not the book I wanted to read.

The book I wanted to read was a detailed guide to bootstrapping your way to industrial civilization (or at least antibiotics) if you should happen to be dumped back in, say, the late Bronze Age.1 After all, there are plenty of technologies that didn’t make it big for centuries or millennia after their material preconditions were met, and with our 20/20 hindsight we could skip a lot of the dead ends that accompanied real-world technological progress.

Off the top of my head, for example, there’s no reason you couldn’t do double-entry bookkeeping with Arabic numerals as soon as you have something to write on, and it would probably have been useful at any point in history — just not useful enough that anyone got really motivated to invent it. Or, here, another one: the wheelbarrow is just two simple machines stuck together, is substantially more efficient than carrying things yourself, and yet somehow didn’t make it to Europe until the twelfth or thirteenth century AD. Or switching to women’s work, I’ve always taken comfort in the fact that with my arcane knowledge of purling I could revolutionize any medieval market.2 And while the full Green Revolution package depends on tremendous quantities of fertilizer to fuel the grains’ high yields, you could get some way along that path with just knowledge of plant genetics, painstaking record-keeping, and a lot of hand pollination. In fact, with a couple latifundia at your disposal in 100 BC, you could probably do it faster than Norman Borlaug did. But speaking of fertilizer, the Italian peninsula is full of niter deposits, and while your revolutio viridis is running through those you could be figuring out whether it’s faster to spin up a chemical industry to the point you could do the Haber-Bosch process at scale or to get to the Peruvian guano islands. (After about thirty seconds of consideration my money’s on Peru, though it’s a shame we’re trying to do this with the Romans since they were never a notably nautical bunch and 100 BC was a low point even for them; you’ll have to wipe out the Mediterranean pirates early and find Greek or Egyptian shipwrights.) And another question: can you go straight from the Antikythera mechanism to the Jacquard machine, and if not what do you need in between? Inquiring minds want to know.3

But I’ll forgive Dartnell for not writing “Lest Darkness Fall” For Dummies, which I’ll admit is a pretty niche pitch, because The Knowledge is doing something almost as cool.4 Like my imaginary book, it employs a familiar fictional conceit to explain how practical things work. Instead of time travel, though, Dartnell takes as his premise the sudden disappearance (probably plague, definitely not zombies) of almost all of humanity, leaving behind a few survivors but all the incredible complexity of our technological civilization. How would you survive? And more importantly, how would you rebuild?

    1. I read the Nantucket Trilogy at an impressionable age.

    2. Knitting came to Europe in the thirteenth century, but the complementary purl stitch, which is necessary to create stretchy ribbing, didn’t. If you’ve ever wondered why medieval hosen were made of woven fabric and fit the leg relatively poorly, that’s why. When purling came to England, Elizabeth I paid an exorbitant amount of money for her first pair of silk stockings and refused to go back to cloth.

    3. Obviously you would also need to motivate people to actually do any of these things, which is its own set of complications — Jason Crawford at Roots of Progress has a great review of Robert Allen’s classic The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective that gets much deeper into why no one actually cared about automation and mechanization — but please allow me to imagine here.

    4. Please do not recommend How To Invent Everything, which purports to do something like this. It doesn’t go nearly deep enough to be interesting, let alone useful. You know, in the hypothetical that I’m sent back in time.

June 27, 2023

Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 05 Winston Churchill

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, India, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Nebulous Media
Published 20 Dec 2022

Andrew Roberts joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Winston Churchill. The two discuss the soldier, writer and prime minister in detail, leaving nothing off limits. Should the British Bulldog stay cancelled?
(more…)

June 26, 2023

America can’t build anything these days and “it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.

Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget — or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.

Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.

But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”

There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain — he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.

That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.

How’d he do it? By creating what’s now called the public interest movement: a new form of activism through which citizens force change — or, more often, block change — by suing the government. Though it was begun with the best of intentions and achieved some real good along the way, this political innovation led to the constipated governance we all complain about today.

How did a movement launched by an unassuming 30-year-old lawyer become the dominant form of activism in the country, and completely change the way our government operates?

To find out, we have to go back to a time before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty — the era of the New Deal.

[…]

It is the inherent nature of politics that no reform works forever, because the next generation of political entrepreneurs will inevitably discover new ways to bend the process to their will. Eventually, there will always be another Dick Fosbury revealing a way to work the system that no one saw coming.

Still, I do think some of the blame for the way this all panned out can be laid on Nader’s particular personal idiosyncrasies. His ironclad black-and-white view of the world, combined with his near-pathological aversion to dealmaking and compromise, made him uniquely suited to a form of activism that focused on regulatory and legal action rather than coalition-building and electoral politics. Nader was infamously rigid and inflexible, so it’s no surprise that his movement was too. But a less rules-oriented movement might have created fewer of the bureaucratic barriers that have now become a hindrance to progressive action.

Much like the movement whose story it tells, Public Citizens the book is a worthwhile project that nonetheless suffers from significant flaws. The main problem is that it can’t decide if it’s a historical narrative or a work of political theory. As a work of political theory, it doesn’t take nearly a strong enough stand — I’ve made explicit a lot of claims that are only lightly implied in the book. I think we’re making the same argument, but the book makes its argument with such a delicate touch that it’s hard to be 100% sure.

As a historical narrative, Public Citizens has a much simpler problem: it’s boring. The author writes like an academic (which, to be fair, he is), and the book is quite light on colorful details. The uncreative chapter titles (chapter three is called “Creating Public Interest Firms”) give you a taste of what the writing is like. One particularly egregious issue is how little biographical information is provided about Nader, even though the majority of the book is about him. For someone who apparently subscribes to the Great Man theory of history, the author includes surprisingly little information about the Great Men themselves. Any interesting biographical fact you read in this review — even something as basic as the fact that Nader never married—is almost certainly something I found through other sources.

Paradoxically, this book manages to be simultaneously boring and too concise. It’s over in less than 200 generously-spaced pages, and I frequently had to look stuff up on the internet to get a full understanding of what was going on. I get the sense that the author is trying to give this book mass appeal, but come on: anyone who’s willing to read a nerdy book like this is willing to read an additional hundred pages or so. Besides, Robert Caro and Ron Chernow have proven that people will read thousand-page tomes if the story is compelling and the details are juicy.

Basically, my critique of Public Citizens is like that old Catskills joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible — and the portions are too small.

June 25, 2023

Fifty years after The Princess Bride was published

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride was not a blockbuster, nor did the movie adaptation get a huge box office when it released in 1987. Yet despite apparent early mediocrity, it became a cult classic. It’s now fifty years after the book came out, and Kevin Mims has a look back at both the novel and the movie:

Even by the eccentric standards of fantasy literature, William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is extremely odd. The book purports to be an abridged edition of a classic adventure story written by someone named Simon Morgenstern. In a bizarre introduction (more about which in a moment), Goldman claims merely to have acted as editor. Unlike Rob Reiner’s much-loved 1987 film adaptation, the book’s full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version. Yes, all that text actually appeared on the cover of the book’s first hardcover edition (all but the first three words have been scrubbed from the covers of most subsequent editions).

In the 1990s, I worked at a Tower Books store in Sacramento. Every few months, someone would come into the store and ask if we had an unabridged edition of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride. The first time this happened, a younger colleague who had worked there longer than I had told my customer, “The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman. There is no S. Morgenstern. Goldman made him up.” The customer wasn’t convinced. “It’s metafiction,” my colleague explained. “A novel that comments on its own status as a text.” When the customer had left, my colleague told me that a lot of people still believe there is an original version of the novel available somewhere, written by Morgenstern. Having fallen in love with the story via the Hollywood film, they were now looking for the ur-text.

Although I was a big fan of William Goldman, I had never read The Princess Bride. My wife and I saw the film when it first appeared in American theaters, and we have rewatched it several times since on VHS and DVD. Only about 10 years ago did I actually get around to reading the novel. And when I did, I found myself sympathizing with all those people who still believe that, somewhere in the world, there exists an unedited edition.

In his introduction, Goldman tells us that S. Morgenstern was from the tiny European nation of Florin, located somewhere between Germany and Sweden, which is where the story’s action takes place. Such a place never existed, but it’s not surprising that many 21st-century American readers don’t know the names of every current and former European kingdom. European history is littered with microstates that rose briefly and then vanished without leaving much of a trace. Back in the 1990s, before Internet access became commonplace, confirming the existence of a small defunct European statelet would have involved a trip to the library.

But readers in the 1970s might have been more alive to Goldman’s ruse. Back then, metafiction was all the rage. John Barth became a literary superstar (among the academic set, anyway) with books like The Sot-Weed Factor (which, like The Princess Bride, is a fantastical comic adventure supposedly written by a fictional author) and Giles Goat-Boy (the text of which, Barth writes in the foreword, was said to have been written by a computer). In 1983, Goldman would publish a second novel behind the Morgenstern pseudonym, titled The Silent Gondoliers, but this time he removed all mention of himself, even from the copyright page.

June 22, 2023

QotD: Nuclear non-proliferation and the Russo-Ukraine war

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The failure of the earlier League of Nations was crucial to preparing the way for the Second World War. Today, we see none of this, with most participants — excepting North Korea and Iran — still playing by the rules. This is where we return to Nevil Shute. Twice, using his technical expertise, Shute attempted to predict future war in a novel, and twice he got it wrong. With On the Beach, the author wrote of a 37-day war that “had flared all around the northern hemisphere”. Albania had dropped a “cobalt bomb” on Naples, which escalated into wider conflicts and eventually a Russo-Chinese exchange.

As one of Shute’s characters, a scientist, explained, “The trouble is, the damn things got too cheap. The original uranium bomb cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak country like Albania had a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that, thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack”. Significantly, Shute’s future war, set in 1963, wasn’t triggered by the usual NATO-Warsaw Pact arsenals of nuclear weapons, but the proliferation of them elsewhere. Then, as now, it is not Russian or Chinese aggression that should worry those with nightmares of nuclear cataclysm, but that of other countries. Thanks to the NPT, IAEA and the UN, these possibilities are contained. Today, the world’s weapons of mass destruction stand at one tenth of their number during the Cold War.

Indeed, the very origins of the current Ukraine crisis illustrate how the international order has managed to contain potential proliferation. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, greater than those of Britain, France and China combined. Kyiv soon realised it couldn’t afford to maintain the warheads and remain a credible nuclear military power. A solution was found, whereby the weapons would be destroyed, but only in exchange for security assurances that the United States and Russia would respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

What Ukraine signed on 5 December 1994 was the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances, in which Bill Clinton for the United States, Boris Yeltsin for Russia and John Major for Great Britain promised to protect Ukraine and its territorial integrity in recognition of Kyiv surrendering the protection of its nuclear arsenal. There was no mention of military guarantees, which Ukraine assumed were implied. Additionally, Kyiv promised to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the G7 nations complained that Russia had breached the Budapest Memorandum. Vladimir Putin replied evasively that since, in his view, a new regime had seized power from Ukraine’s previously pro-Moscow premier Viktor Yanukovych, “Russia has not signed any obligatory documents with this new state”. Since then, Russia has lied and prevaricated over its betrayal of Budapest. In 2016, Sergey Lavrov went so far as to claim, “Russia never violated Budapest memorandum. It contained only one obligation, not to attack Ukraine with nukes” — a gross distortion of the Memorandum’s many obligations.

However, the West responded in 2014 only with mild economic sanctions. Arguably, the apathy of the anti-interventionist Barack Obama and David Cameron, influenced by a London awash with Russian money, emboldened Vladimir Putin. Few experts disagree that had the West responded in 2014 as they did in 2022, Russia’s expansionist ambitions into Ukraine would have ended long ago. Yet, there is plenty of room for optimism. The Russo-Ukraine conflict has not spread because of the international order and its treaties. Apart from North Korea and Iran, neither of whom have quite perfected their devilish devices, nuclear proliferation of third parties has been held in check.

The Kremlin shows no sign of taking steps to escalate to a nuclear level. It is not in its interests, or those of its allies, to do so. None of the 32 nations who recently abstained from condemning Russia in the 24 February UN vote would welcome Vladimir Putin and his cronies flinging nukes around. The qualified support of major powers like China, India and Pakistan is attached to the cheap oil and arms procurements they have negotiated with Moscow. Any hint of Tsar Vladimir “going nuclear” would see their abstentions morph into support for the West. Putin, for all his rhetoric, cannot afford to go it alone with just the six who voted with him at the UN. In military terms, they offer nothing.

The world’s various international arms treaties provide plenty of optimism that this will remain a regional war. So far, Putin’s threats have melted away as the morning mist. The scenario he implies, akin that in On the Beach and other nuclear-war-scare novels and films, is so unlikely as to be discounted. They and all the rest of the post-apocalyptic genre are written as nail-biting entertainment, not history or current affairs.

Peter Caddick-Adams, “Putin, Shute and nukes”, The Critic, 2023-03-09.

June 21, 2023

“Luttwak tweets with unparalleled Boomer energy, primarily in a write-only mode, at times seemingly oblivious to the waves he causes”

Filed under: Books, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Psmith reviews the second edition of Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook. I read the first edition in the mid-70s, when it seemed like coup attempts were an almost weekly news item from any number of exotic tropical locations:

First things first: you need to get the revised, second edition of this book. Why? Because the introduction to the second edition is an excuse for the author to brag about all the bloodstained and bullet-riddled copies of the first edition that have been found among the personal effects of palace security chiefs, spymasters, and air force officers. Perhaps, he gloats, they should have read it more carefully, or perhaps they should have waited for the second edition.

None of this should come as a surprise if you follow Edward Luttwak on Twitter, where his account is characterized by a judicious degree of irascibility and gloating. Yes, I regret to inform you that he’s on Twitter. But unlike some of my other favorite authors who succumbed to the analgesic call of the Great Blue Bird, the medium has not totally destroyed him yet. Luttwak tweets with unparalleled Boomer energy, primarily in a write-only mode, at times seemingly oblivious to the waves he causes. This is good, because it means we get to read his internal monologue, but without the reward loop of social media hacking his amygdala and progressively turning him into a self-parody.

Or perhaps his descent into self-parody was arrested by the fact that he was already a bit of a self-parody. Luttwak came from a Jewish family in communist Romania, spent some time in Palermo where he totally wasn’t involved in the war between the authorities and the mob,1 and provided “consulting services to multinational corporations and government agencies, including various branches of the U.S. government and the U.S. military”, before retiring to the life of gentleman scholar and cattle rancher (and prolific Twitter poaster) in rural Argentina. Along the way he picked up a PhD and wrote a massive pile of books about history, war, diplomacy, and political theory, all while pissing off the authorities in those fields with his epistemic trespassing.

But all of that was still far in the future when he wrote this book about coups. When the non-recommended first edition came out, Luttwak was a tender twenty-six years old, and working tenderly as a consultant for the energy industry in Africa and the Middle East. This raises some questions, questions that Luttwak absolutely refuses to answer, sometimes coyly and sometimes vehemently. Were I concerned about my reputation as a third-world fixer for oil companies, I would simply not write a practical guide to launching coups, but to each his own.

What is a coup? Also known as a putsch, a palace rebellion, or my personal favorite, a pronunciamiento; there are a lot of words for it, many of them in Spanish (you know what they say about Eskimos and their words for snow). The basic definition is a bloodless or almost bloodless extrajudicial transfer of power whereby a group of conspirators is able to turn the machinery of the state against itself, seizing control quickly and cleanly and without triggering a civil war. Note how different this is from other sorts of exceptional transfers of power. In a revolution, all of the institutions in a society are burned down and replaced. A coup is the opposite — only the very top level of the system is swapped out, and the new boss quickly and seamlessly resumes ruling through the machinery of the old regime. Ideally, citizens who aren’t especially politically engaged wouldn’t even notice.

This leads us to a guess as to the most coup-friendly sorts of polities: ideally they should be highly centralized and efficient bureaucratic states, but with very low democratic engagement or popular investment in politics. The first half is important, because without an efficient government machine, there’s nothing for the coup plotters to grab onto. A coup is an action by a tiny group of people who would lose instantly in any fair fight — the only chance they have is to magnify their power by hijacking a system that was already pretty good at controlling the country. It also helps that soldiers, policemen, and citizens in a bureaucratized society are already conditioned to obey impersonal authority, and therefore are more likely to do what the new guy says if he’s careful to use the old, familiar forms. Anarchists love to talk about how anarchy is like a vaccination against foreign occupation, because occupiers generally lack the state capacity to administer newly acquired territories without existing state machinery to co-opt, and that argument is even more true for coups.

    1. Also unclear: which side he was not-involved on.

June 18, 2023

Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This is an extract from A Heretic’s Manifesto thanks to Spiked:

Words hurt, they say. This is the ideological underpinning to so much censorship today – the idea that words wound, as a punch might wound. The imagery of violence is deployed in almost every call for censure in the 21st-century West. Speech has been reimagined as aggression, hence “microaggressions”. People speak of feeling “assaulted” by speech. “Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude” – that’s the thesis of Words That Wound, an influential tome published in 1993. Activists claim to feel “erased” by controversial or disagreeable utterances. Trans campaigners speak darkly of “trans erasure”, as if words from the other side of the divide, the speech of gender-critical feminists, might contain that most awesome and nullifying power of genocide.

Words make us feel “unsafe”, people say. Witness the rise and rise of Safe Spaces on university campuses, designed to ensure students’ psychic security against the terrible threat of their hearing an idea they disagree with. Safe Spaces recreate the state of childhood, complete with colouring books and ice cream, speaking to how determinedly some long to retreat from the adult world of hurtful chatter and brickbats.

The United Nations wrings its hands over “hate speech and real harm” (my emphasis). The “weaponisation of public discourse for political gain” can lead to “stigmatisation, discrimination and large-scale violence”, it says. Better keep a check on those hurtful words. One US university even maintains a list of “words that hurt“. It includes the phrase “You guys”. That scandalous utterance “erases the identities of people who are in the room” and “generalise[s] a group of people to be masculine”. Shut it down. Silence that act of violence.

Both the formal and informal punishment of words rests on the belief that they can wound. Laws in Europe claim to guard people from speech that is alarming, distressing, hurtful. The overlords of social media censor speech for “the wellbeing of our community“. Everywhere the cry goes up: words injure, they can cut like a knife, they can be used as “weapons to ambush, terrorise, wound, humiliate and degrade“. And just as the law protects us from such dreadful things when they are done to our bodies with fists and kicks, surely it should also protect us from them when they are done to our minds with words and ideas. Surely our psychic wellbeing should be accorded as much respect by the powers-that-be as our physical integrity is.

The temptation of many of us who believe in freedom of speech, in the liberty of all to utter their beliefs and ideas, is to damn this claim that “words hurt” as a libel against public discourse. As a slippery untruth that is cynically designed to depict words as all-powerful, as containing so much energy, so much heat, that they can lay waste to self-esteem and even make us fret over erasure, over being wiped out entirely by that sore comment or that disturbing idea. Actually, we often say, words are just words. They’re not sticks, they’re not stones, they’re words. They won’t kill you, they won’t hurt you, you’ll be fine. They say words are a force of nature like no other, we say: “Relax. It’s just speech.”

We need to stop doing this. We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We need to stop responding to their painting of speech as a dangerous, disorientating force by defensively pleading that words don’t wound because they’re just words. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: “It’s only speech.” As if speech were a small thing, almost an insignificant thing, more likely to contain calming qualities than upsetting ones, more likely to help us overcome conflict rather than stir it up, more likely to offer a balm to your soul than to stab at it as a knife might stab at your body.

For when we do this, we play down the power of words. And that includes the power of words to wound. Words do wound. It’s true. Words hurt people, they hurt institutions, they hurt belief systems. Words make churches tremble and ideologies quake. Words inflict pain on priests and princes and ideologues. Words upend the social order. Words rip away the comforting ideas people and communities might have wrapped themselves in for decades, centuries perhaps. Words ambush the complacent and degrade the powerful. Words cause discord, angst, even conflict. Isn’t every revolution in history the offspring of words? Of ideas? Words do destabilise, they do disorientate. People are right to sometimes feel afraid of words. Words are dangerous. When they say words wound, we should say: “I agree.”

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress