One parallel between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conduct of the Second World War that has hitherto escaped notice concerns the relationship between the dictator and his generals. Just as the German General Staff obeyed Hitler’s orders, even when they knew him to be leading them not only to defeat but to depravity, so the Russian high command has capitulated to Putin despite realising that his war was not only a mistake but a crime.
In the Britain of the Sixties, a certain mystique still attached to the generals of the Third Reich. In their stylish uniforms and their gleaming jackboots, they had swaggered. Only two, Keitel and Jodl, were executed at Nuremberg; the rest got away with murder.
Even some of those who were convicted of war crimes had friends in high places. One of the most prominent was Erich von Manstein, the architect of many German victories both in the Battle of France and on the Eastern front. He was also complicit in the genocide of more than a million Jews and others by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Ukraine.
Yet Churchill was among those who successfully campaigned to have Manstein’s 18-year sentence reduced to 12, of which he served only four.
Manstein’s memoir Verlorene Siege (translated as Lost Victories) appeared in 1958, a key text in the mythology that depicted the Wehrmacht as “clean” and laid the blame for war crimes on Hitler. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the postwar Federal Republic, also played his part in the rehabilitation of Manstein, on the grounds that West German rearmament required a sharp distinction between the Nazis and an untainted military tradition as the basis for the new Bundeswehr.
Daniel Johnson, “The moral blindness of Putin’s generals”, The Critic, 2022-05-10.
August 13, 2022
QotD: Erich von Manstein
August 12, 2022
Apple, afterwards
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay looks at Apple after the death of Steve Jobs:
In 2004, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs asked famed author Walter Isaacson to write his biography. It’s a mark of Jobs’s hallowed place in the pantheon of American corporate titans that Isaacson, whose other subjects included Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, would eventually say yes. While best-selling books about successful business leaders represent a popular niche, most specimens are fawning airport reads that combine hagiography with self-help advice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (2011), by contrast, was a serious work of literary non-fiction that exalted its subject as a once-in-a-generation technological savant, while also showing him to be a callous parent and scathing boss, not to mention a proponent of loopy “fruitarian” medical theories. (Much has been made of Jobs’s use of fringe therapies to treat the pancreatic cancer that killed him in 2011, but he also entertained the bizarre belief that his vegan diet allowed him to avoid bathing for days on end without developing body odour, a proposition vigorously disputed by co-workers.)
Tripp Mickle, a Wall Street Journal technology journalist who covered the Apple beat for five years, isn’t Walter Isaacson (few of us are); and, to his credit, doesn’t try to be. Nor does he seek to present his primary subjects — former lead Apple designer Jony Ive and incumbent chief executive Tim Cook — as world-changing visionaries on par with their departed boss. Indeed, the very title of his book — After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul — presents Apple as existing in a state of creative denouement since Jobs’s death — a bloated (if massively profitable) corporate bureaucracy that increasingly feeds shareholders’ demands for quarterly earnings by milking subscription services such as Apple Music and iCloud instead of developing new products.
The first five chapters of After Steve are structured as a twinned biography, following the lives of Ive and Cook from their precocious childhoods (in England and Alabama, respectively), and on through the 2010s, when the pair jointly ran Apple (in function, if not in title) following Jobs’s death.
Timothy Donald Cook grew up in Robertsdale, a farming community located roughly halfway between Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Florida, the middle child of a Korean War veteran and a pharmacist’s assistant. In high school, Cook was named “most studious”, and served as the business manager for the school yearbook. “In three years of math, he had never missed a homework assignment”, reports Mickle, also noting that one teacher remembers him as “efficient and dependable”. Cook also happens to be gay, a subject that caused some awkwardness for his Methodist parents, even though Cook wouldn’t come out publicly till later in life. As a means to deflect questions, Mickle reports, Cook’s mother told drug-store coworkers that her son was dating a girl in Foley, a nearby town.
Following high-school graduation, Cook went on to study industrial engineering at Auburn University and business administration at Duke. He then gravitated to the then-burgeoning field of personal computing, quickly carving out a niche within its production and supply-management back office. At IBM and Compaq, Cook turned himself into a sort of human abacus, ruthlessly bringing reduced costs, increased efficiencies, and smaller inventories to every assembly line he set eyes on. By the time he’d arrived at Apple in 1998, Mickle reports, Cook was completely neurotic about keeping any stocked materials off the books, calling inventory, “fundamentally evil”. In time, he pioneered a process by which yellow lines were painted down the floor of Apple’s production plants, with materials on the storage side of the line remaining on suppliers’ books until the very moment they were brought to the other side for assembly.
Like Ive, Cook declined to be interviewed for After Steve. And so it is entirely possible that the man has a rich inner life that remains opaque to Mickle and the outside world more generally. But the portrait that emerges in this book is one of a fanatically dedicated workaholic who rises before 4am to begin examining spreadsheets, and thinks about little else except the fortunes of Apple Inc. during the waking hours that follow. Mickle reports a sad scene in which Cook is spotted by sympathetic strangers at a fancy Utah resort, dining alone during what appears to be a solitary vacation. We also learn that Cook’s Friday-night meetings with Apple’s operations and finance staff were sometimes called “date night with Tim” by attendees, “because it would stretch for hours into the evening, when Cook seemed to have nowhere else to be.”
August 11, 2022
Nostalgia seen as harmful
In The Critic, Michael Ledger-Lomas reviews a new book that is critical of Britain’s chronic case of nostalgia for “the good old days”:
Indulging in pained regret for lost times might seem a harmless pleasure, but Hannah Rose Woods is here to warn it has become a pathological “fixation”. The Right, she argues, has “weaponised” nostalgia, tapping “inchoate yearnings about fading pride and glory” to fuel hatred against historians who are simply “putting the facts back in” to the national “storybook”.
Apparently, the first cure for this “peculiarly English affliction” involves refuting errors and egregious simplifications in Tory talk about the national past. Woods is an inveterate Tweeter and her Rule, Nostalgia often works like a book-length version of the “Hi, historian here” threads that infest that medium.
The Government exhorted people to get through Covid by showing the Blitz spirit, but historians know German bombing caused as much fear and resentment as pride and resolve. Britons were supposed to Keep Calm and Carry On, “but this was a fantasy”, Woods writes, because the 1940s poster with that motto never entered circulation. The tea towels lied to us.
Woods is more productive when she probes nostalgia as a cluster of emotions, rather than condemning it as a set of errors. For like all emotions, it can be usefully historicised. This insight shapes the basic structure and approach of the book, which is more ironic than irate. Our times seem to be gripped by nostalgia for the days before yesterday, but the sixties, seventies and eighties abounded with yearning for the simplicities of the Second World War.
The thirties and forties were, in turn, full of voices lamenting what one of Orwell’s heroes called the “newness of everything”, pining for the sun-dappled afternoons of Edwardian England. The Edwardians themselves lamented the lost certainties of the high Victorian age and fretted that rural tranquillity was on the wane. And so on. Woods turns the periods of our history into Russian dolls of nostalgia, each nested within the other.
It is an engaging literary device which palls as succeeding chapters ask readers to re-enact their surprise that apparently stable times were consumed with anxiety about losing touch with tradition. Woods says the “calmly elegant Georgian heyday” fretted about whether Britain should go global or remain a tight little island, while it would be a “hard sell” to claim that the age of the Reformation and the Civil War was an “age of contentment and stability”. Well, quite.
The further Woods progresses away from the “rancid Englishness” of the present, the more forgiving she becomes of nostalgia — or at least of wistful absorption in the past, which is not quite the same thing. She rightly sees that nostalgia has generally not been an obstacle to rapid social change — what bolder Victorians would have called “progress” — but has offered psychological compensation for them.
August 9, 2022
When asking a simple, factual question is treated as a direct personal attack
Chris Bray explains why just asking for [certain] facts is enough to trigger people who think you’re somehow saying that they’re not “good people”:
Come back to the cultural sewer with me, just for a moment, because here’s the last time I’ll lay a quote on you from Klaus Schwab’s COVID-19: The Great Reset, from a discussion about public health measures to contain the pandemic:
This is ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic societies are not very good at expressing solidarity.
Now: Pharmaceutical products sometimes fail, and sometimes cause serious harm, and it frequently takes a while for reality to get out of the dugout and take the field, so keep taking your FDA-approved Vioxx. It’s safe and effective! I rarely give up on books, but I gave up on Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book Bad Pharma about halfway through — for the same reason you’d stop eating a skillfully prepared shit sandwich. I felt like, yes, I get the point: Sometimes a drug is ineffective, sometimes a drug is outright harmful, and the manipulation of science and of regulatory agencies is more common than you would ever have wanted to know.
But it’s different this time, even while “this time” fits a very long pattern. As much as Big Pharma course corrections are always hard, this one will be infinitely harder. We’re not currently debating the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product, or of a class of pharmaceutical products; instead, we’re debating self-conception, social status, and cultural position. The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?
Bad Cattitude has been on fire lately on the topic of elite self-hypnosis and the descent into an “entirely hallucinatory landscape”. Consistent with this shrewd feline analysis, look again at what Klaus Schwab said about lockdowns and the suppression of economic activity in the name of public health: He said that shutting down our open societies was a “moral choice” about “expressing solidarity”. (My mask is for you, your mask is for me!) The discussion isn’t about what works, and has never been about what works. It has never been a discussion about the efficacy of anything; it’s a posture about social character, and always has been. Are you a bad, selfish person, or are you a good person who believes in kindness? The subtext about social class strikes me as too obvious to explicate, because mean people belong in their trailer parks in flyover country, and kind people are high-status. Review the lawn signs if you doubt this.
So when you question the little vial of fluid that goes into a syringe to be injected into your body, you’re not asking questions about the way a medical product works — or at least, you’re not asking questions that are perceived, by advocates of the injections (or the lockdowns, or the masks), as a discussion about safety and efficacy. You say, “Does it work? Is it safe?” — but they process it as an attack on their moral choice to express solidarity:
Are you saying we should have stood up for selfishness? Which means, if we bring the subtext to the surface, Are you saying we should have engaged in low-status behavior?
QotD: Fusty old literary archaism
In fairy tales, this “once upon a time” has always delighted children. Novelists, and especially historical novelists, need archaic means to apprise readers of location, in their passage-making through time. Archaisms may paradoxically subvert anachronism, by constantly yet subtly reminding the reader that he is a long way from home.
Get over this adolescent prejudice against archaism, and an ocean of literary experience opens to you. Among other things, you will learn to distinguish one kind of archaism from another, as one kind of sea from another should be recognized by a yachtsman.
But more: a particular style of language is among the means by which an accomplished novelist breaks the reader in. There are many other ways: for instance by showering us with proper nouns through the opening pages, to slow us down, and make us work on the family trees, or mentally squint over local geography. I would almost say that the first thirty pages of any good novel will be devoted to shaking off unwanted readers; or if they continue, beating them into shape. We are on a voyage, and the sooner the passengers get their sea legs, the better life will be all round.
David Warren, “Kristin Lavransdatter”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-03-21.
August 8, 2022
Boring British politicians
Katherine Bayford compares the last set of cabinet ministers appointed by lame duck PM Boris Johnson with some of the Parliamentarians of the 20th century … and it’s difficult not to feel nostalgic for a past Golden Age at Westminster:
Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
One of Boris Johnson’s final, whimpering acts of power in his premiership was to appoint a new cabinet. Fatally wounded by a team of ministers made up of those with little charm, intelligence or experience, who was actually left for Boris to replace them with?
A veritable who’s-that of the worst unknowns that can be found down the side of parliamentary benches was swiftly conscripted in. I tell a lie — Johnny Mercer MP achieved mild public recognition for defending elderly soldiers accused of war crimes and getting very angry at certain risqué insinuations made in the comments section of the Plymouth Herald.
[…]
There is nothing unusual about this class of minister, however. They are representative figures: dim, without verbal sparkle, frequently light on narrow policy insights and wider understandings of social and economic history. The median British politician has been like this for decades now. Tony Blair would bemoan the shoddy material he had to work with at every reshuffle, and David Cameron likewise found himself struggling for a front bench neither too hateful nor too stupid. The difference in political acumen and sophistication from the most forgotten of ministerial interviews from fifty years ago reveal a steep decline in both the eloquence and elegance of our politicians.
Perhaps the 20th century spoiled the voting public. Pick any decade and you will discover frontline politicians with vast hinterlands. Harold Macmillan recited Aeschylus — in the original Greek — whilst lying shot in the trenches. Enoch Powell rose from private to brigadier during the Second World War, after becoming the youngest professor in the empire. When Winston Churchill was attempting to stay solvent in the face of decades worth of excess, he maintained financial buoyancy by being the highest-paid journalist in the world. Publishers adored him. He could be trusted to write a million-word definitive biography of his relative, the first Duke of Marlborough. Roy Jenkins would in turn distinguish himself as a biographer of Churchill — as well as Gladstone, and the Chancellors of the Exchequer at large. Second-hand embarrassment is the only proper response when comparing such authorial endeavours to Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill.
It’s not a matter of our politicians not being able to write anymore. Compared to the recent past they can barely speak. Political debates have succumbed to an entropic, deadening mediocrity. Recent discourse between a patronising, bland Sunak and a po-faced, blank Truss was not a nadir: it was standard fare.
Look upon this 1970 debate between Jenkins and Powell. Both men hold articulate and intelligent positions, arguing intricately and considerately, with a commitment to truth rather than point-scoring. They agree where relevant and have an ability to articulate clearly and fluently. Half a century on, political debate of such quality seems unrealisable. When watching vintage ministerial debates, the viewer is struck by the level of knowledge and attention that the speakers assumed their audience would possess, whether on the finer points of tackling inflation or whether IRA bombers deserved to the death penalty.
The slightest glance at cabinets fifty years ago demonstrates a far higher set of standards and abilities than those found today. Harold Wilson — always keen to consolidate as much power as possible — nevertheless packed his cabinet with the best and brightest, even if he kept them in positions in which they wouldn’t be able to outshine him. Wilson himself was a subtle and clever debater, not above using cheap PR tricks (such as his much-perfected pipe smoking) but always as a tool to realise his political vision.
Mediocrity requires mediocrity in order to survive. When judged against excellence — or even simple competence — the insufficiencies of today’s politician become intolerable. It is this which leads the public to distrust politicians more than their policy choices.
August 5, 2022
Don Camillo blesses the river Po
Perhaps the first foreign author I encountered as a child was Giovanni Guareschi — in English translation, of course, I’m not a natural linguist — and I’d read most of his stories by the time I was twelve. They didn’t always make a lot of sense to me as far as the political aspects were concerned, but the human stories always hit home. Clearly, Sarah Hoyt (who is a natural linguist … she read them in the original Italian, although I’d expect they would work very well for Portuguese readers) feels much the same way about the Don Camillo stories:
A still from one of the 1952-1965 film adaptations of the Don Camillo stories, with Fernandel as Don Camillo and Gino Cervi as Mayor Peppone.
There is a poignant scene in one of the Giovanni Guareschi Don Camillo books, (set in mid-century Italy, where communism and Catholicism are fighting it back and forth. They’re humorous, profoundly human, and easy reads. The stories are like 200 words each.) in which, during a period of high strife, the priest goes out to bless the river. Btw, if you need examples of how to be a flea on the side of the commies, that character is terribly subversive in little ways (as well as liking to hit them on the head. I might have taken him for a model when I was a pre-teen. Sigh. And Comrade Don Camillo is the best book for how to turn things on their heads if you’re in deep hiding in a lefty stronghold, either professional or geographic.)
Anyway, in the little village on the Po river where the priest and the communist mayor fight it out, the river is an ever present danger, and people cope with it the way they have coped with such things throughout history: every year the priest goes to the river and blesses it, in the hopes that it will become (I am remembering in Italian, the English translation is probably different) “A well behaved citizen and stay within its bounds”.
Now, this is not magic, of course, and the priest explains that. Blessing the river does not guarantee that the river won’t burst out of its bed and flood the village (later on in the book there are accounts of a flood, and if you think that a book can’t paint a picture, be sure it can. For the rest of my life, I’ll carry the image of the priest saying mass in the deserted and flooded village, while across the river, on the safe bank, his flock who fled the flood kneel on the muddy soil at the tolling of the consecration bell. BTW Guareschi is the writer I’d like to be when I grow up. Trained as a journalist, he uses minimal words, but the images stay with you.) It’s just that blessing it gives people hope it won’t, and allows them to live in a precarious place, at a precarious time without losing their minds. (It is important to remember that whatever else humans are, they’re creatures of ritual and habit, and sometimes those are the only panaceas for difficult situations.)
Well, the communists have their dander up, so they tell the priest they want to march in the procession to bless the river with their flags and paraphernalia and the priest says no, they say anyone in the procession will get beaten. They demand the priest cancel it, and people lose their minds. So, the priest says he’ll go alone, if needed. Needless to say, the communists follow, in what is an intimidation maneuver (they have no new moves, really.)
So, Don Camillo, without looking back, gets to the river and prays that the Lord will keep the river within its bounds. And of course, because he knows the audience at his back, he says “If the houses of decent people could float, I’d ask you for a flood like Noah’s. But since the houses of decent people are made of the same stone and brick and sink like the houses of scoundrels, I beg you to make the river behave.”
In case you’re wondering what went wrong in America, and why we are where we are: we forgot our houses can’t flood.
August 4, 2022
“Klaus Schwab, it turns out, is Supervillain Thomas Friedman”
Chris Bray somehow manages to girds his loins to take on a task that most of us would run screaming from: actuall reading a book by Klaus Schwab:
Seeing roughly 4,000 references a day to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, it occurred to me late last week that I’d never gone to the source — I’ve never read a book by Klaus Schwab. So I set out to read the one the Dutch parliamentarian asked his prime minister about, the one about the Great Reset, which Schwab co-wrote with Thierry Malleret. It’s a little like saying, “Man, you know, I’ve never gone swimming in the sewer,” and then pulling on your swimsuit.
So.
First, if you weigh about ten pounds, I can report that the book is the perfect size and shape for lounging.
This is the only value the book provides to the world, and I recommend the immediate deployment of all remaining copies to the one population that can actually use them. Personal to Klaus Schwab: Give the next book a scratchy cardboard cover. Just trust me on this.
As for the book’s relationship to humans: Klaus Schwab, it turns out, is Supervillain Thomas Friedman. Being shrewd, he notices things: Did you know that a lot more people are online now than twenty years ago? Did you know that many objects are now connected to the Internet, from “electric grids and water pumps, to kitchen ovens and agricultural irrigation systems”, and that objects didn’t used to be connected to the Internet? Did you realize that this shift is causing change? When we talk about the pace of change, reader, we are talking about a term called velocity, and a lot of change happening quickly has a high velocity.
If you’ve ever worked for a corporate middle manager who held meetings to encourage the team to think outside the box, you’ve already read Klaus Schwab. We get an endless stream of tautological management-speak, encouraging leaders to embrace transformation by adopting a transformational approach, leading to transformational action and transformational policy caused by a transformational something or other. Page 63: “Innovation in production, distribution, and business models can generate efficiency gains and new or better products that create higher value added, leading to new jobs and economic prosperity.” Innovation can create things that are new, he explained, showing why he’s one of our best-known and most powerful economic experts. A warning to the world: If Kamala Harris and Klaus Schwab ever end up alone in a room together for a sustained and direct conversation, the banality will attain critical mass, and we will all die in a world-consuming implosion.
And here’s the key to the man’s power and status: He sounds like them. He talks to the governing class in language they recognize, telling them the things they already think. He went to a place where people already were, and he told them he led them there.
August 1, 2022
Hannah Arendt on Adolf Eichmann’s exemplification of the “banality of evil”
Lawrence W. Reed on what Hannah Arendt observed during Eichmann’s trial:
Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963.
Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil”, entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that Eichmann, despite his soft-spoken and avuncular demeanor, must be a monster of epic proportions to play such an important role in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century.
“I was only following orders,” he claimed in the colorless, matter-of-fact fashion of a typical bureaucrat. The world thought his performance a fiendishly deceptive show, but Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was indeed a rather “ordinary” and “unthinking” functionary.
[…]
As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
Eichmann was a “shallow” and “clueless” joiner, someone whose thoughts never ventured any deeper than how to become a cog in the great, historic Nazi machine. In a sense, he was a tool of Evil more than evil himself.
Commenting on Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, philosopher Thomas White writes, “Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened’.”
Perhaps Hannah Arendt underestimated Eichmann. He did, after all, attempt to conceal evidence and cover his tracks long before the Israelis nabbed him in Argentina in 1960 — facts which suggest he did indeed comprehend the gravity of his offenses. It is undeniable, however, that “ordinary” people are capable of horrific crimes when possessed with power or a desire to obtain it, especially if it helps them “fit in” with the gang that already wields it.
The big lesson of her thesis, I think, is this: If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality”, “social justice”, and the “common good”. It could even be a prominent member of Parliament or Congress.
July 31, 2022
Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free
Joshua Styles on a book written after the Second World War that appears to have renewed relevance today:
“I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion. I felt — and feel — that it was not German man that I had met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.” — Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, ix.
It’s been more than seventy-five years since the Nazis were defeated and Auschwitz was liberated. Seventy-five years is a long time — so long, in fact, that while many still learn of the horrors of the Holocaust, far fewer understand how the murder of the Jews happened. How were millions of people systematically exterminated in an advanced Western nation — a constitutional republic? How did such respectable and intelligent citizens become complicit in the murder of their countrymen? These are the questions Milton Mayer sought to answer in his book They Thought They Were Free.
In 1952, Mayer moved his family to a small German town to live among ten ordinary men, hoping to understand not only how the Nazis came to power but how ordinary Germans — ordinary people — became unwitting participants in one of history’s greatest genocides. The men Mayer lived among came from all walks of life: a tailor, a cabinetmaker, a bill-collector, a salesman, a student, a teacher, a bank clerk, a baker, a soldier, and a police officer.
Significantly, Mayer did not simply conduct formal interviews in order to “study” these men; rather, Mayer had dinner in these men’s homes, befriended their families, and lived as one of them for nearly a year. His own children went to the same school as their children. And by the end of his time in Germany, Mayer could genuinely call them friends. They Thought They Were Free is Mayer’s account of their stories, and the title of the book is his thesis. Mayer explains:
“Only one of my ten Nazi friends saw Nazism as we — you and I — saw it in any respect. This was Hildebrandt, the teacher. And even he then believed, and still believes, in part of its program and practice, ‘the democratic part’. The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it” (47).
Until reading this book, I thought of what happened in Germany with a bit of arrogance. How could they not know Nazism was evil? And how could they see what was happening and not speak out? Cowards. All of them. But as I read Mayer’s book, I felt a knot in my stomach, a growing fear that what happened in Germany was not a result of some defect in the German people of this era.
The men and women of Germany in the 1930s and 40s were not unlike Americans in the 2010s and 20s — or the people of any nation at any time throughout history. They are human, just as we are human. And as humans, we have a great tendency to harshly judge the evils of other societies but fail to recognize our own moral failures — failures that have been on full display the past two years during the covid panic.
Mayer’s book is frighteningly prescient; reading his words is like staring into our own souls. The following paragraphs will show just how similar the world’s response to covid has been to the German response to the “threat” of the Jews. If we can truly understand the parallels between our response to covid and the situation in Hitler’s Germany, if we can see what lies at the end of “two weeks to flatten the curve”, perhaps we can prevent the greatest atrocities from being fully realized in our own day. But to stop our bent toward tyranny, we must first be willing to grapple with the darkest parts of our nature, including our tendency to dehumanize others and to treat our neighbors as enemies.
American publishing has a race problem, but it has an even bigger gender problem
In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte considers a recent online brouhaha featuring novelist Joyce Carol Oates and notes that while she was being dragged by the usual online mob for her perceived defence of “white” authors, an even bigger problem for the ever-diminishing number of “big” publishing houses is their gender balance:
Publishing also has a gender problem. Only 34 per cent of the Penguin Random House workforce is male.
When you eliminate the warehouse staff, that figure drops to 26 per cent.
A Lee & Low survey from 2019 put the male component of the US publishing workforce at 24 per cent and a Canadian survey (referenced in SHuSH 90) found our publishing sector is 74 per cent women and 18 per cent men. Oates’ critics, many of them women, skated over this part of the equation.
That’s not unusual. Most people in publishing skate over this part of the equation. A few years back, when it was revealed that men are just 20 per cent of the fiction reading public, the question arose, might that have something to do with the lack of men acquiring and marketing books. Hardly anyone in publishing thought so. As I noted at the time, a Random House spokesperson said the gender composition of the firm was “not an issue of concern or even much contemplation for us”. And the head of Columbia U’s publishing program asserted that “great literature transcends gender in terms of editors”. A UK literary agent attributed the gender disparity in fiction to merit: some men, she said, “just aren’t very good”.
I spoke to several agents this week to see if the agent mentioned by Oates was an anomaly. What I heard suggests not. My agents were not surprised by the assessment of the anonymous agent. One just shrugged, as in, “what’s new?”
Whether the comments following the Oates’ tweet are valid — “it’s about time”, or “welcome to the oppressed, now you know what it feels like” — I’m probably not qualified to say. The real issue, which seems to be missed in this conversation, is that work is very often not judged by its quality but by who the author is and what the author represents. (Not a wholly new phenomenon in the world.) It is heartbreaking to see work of real talent, maybe even genius, being rejected by publishers (and I do see this in action) in favour of an author who has the right name and biometrics.
Not all of my agents agreed with Oates’ anonymous agent. One said, “It’s equally hard to sell everybody in this market. I’ve got white authors, black authors, brown authors. It’s hard to get a good deal anywhere. The consolidation in the industry is real: there are fewer editors to pitch books to than there used to be.”
This agent admits that the trend is now toward loading up on BIPOC authors but believes that will blow itself out, as all trends do, and the publishing houses will all chase after the next shiney thing. As for the situation inside publishing houses, “it’s been tough for guys as long as I’ve been in the business. Talk to the white male editors who sit on editorial boards at publishing house and they’ll tell you, it’s tough, there’s a lot of pushback from the other voices around the table.”
This agent also noted that the agency world is starting to break down along gender lines. Not surprisingly, literary agents are overwhelmingly white women. Increasingly, they are representing only women.
July 30, 2022
Alexis de Tocqueville
In The Critic, Paul Sagar reviews a new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz:
Alexis de Tocqueville came perilously close to never existing at all. His parents, married in 1793, spent 10 of their first 18 months of matrimony in jail — arrested for the crime of being aristocrats during the height of the French revolutionary Terror. Tocqueville’s great-grandfather was guillotined in April 1794, after being forced to watch the beheadings of his daughter and grandchildren. His newlywed parents were in the queue, awaiting the same fate, but the fall of Robespierre in July meant they were spared.
Alexis, the third son of the family, would be born in 1805, and go on to write not one, but two, of the most influential works in the history of ideas. His two-volume Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) has been hailed as, variously, the first work of political science, a founding text of sociological analysis, and a landmark in the history of political philosophy.
It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand both democracy and the United States, as well as post-Revolutionary France (Tocqueville’s animating point of comparison). His later The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) attempted to locate the long-term causes of the events of 1789, and inaugurated a school of French Revolution historiography that remains alive and influential to this day.
He also enjoyed a moderately successful career as a practising politician, directly involved in France’s tumultuous political upheavals from the 1830s to the early 1850s. Constitutionally frail, and wracked by tuberculosis for the final nine years of his life before dying at just 54, he nonetheless packed a lot in.
As a narrative biography, Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy succeeds tremendously. The details of Tocqueville’s life — and the events he lived through — are rendered with engaging clarity. The detailed reconstruction of Tocqueville’s nine-month trip to America in 1831–32 is especially valuable, shedding a great deal of light on what Tocqueville saw and, crucially, who he spoke to and took his lead from. Zunz does not shy away from dissolving the myth to reveal the man. Sometimes treated as though he were a gimlet-eyed sage who saw through to the very soul of the fledgling United States, Zunz shows instead the extent to which Tocqueville tended to take too much at face value, especially regarding what he was told by less than impartial interlocutors, frequently failing to scratch below the surface on his whirlwind tour.
Thus, for example, he went on to write in Democracy in America that the liberty of the United States meant that secret societies were unknown there, entirely failing to recognise not only the extent of Masonic influence in local politics, but also how objections to Masonic influence were a core feature of contestation. A young man, dazzled by the hustle and bustle of the New World, he tended to see what he wanted to see — or what others hoped he would.
July 27, 2022
When the founder of the SAS was captured by Italian troops in 1943
In The Critic, Saul David describes what happened when Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling was captured during his “most hare-brained scheme” to link up the troops of Britain’s First and Eighth armies in Tunisia:
In January 1943 Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, founder of the SAS, was flown to Rome for interrogation. He had been captured by the Italians on his “most hare-brained scheme yet” — leading a small raiding party deep into enemy territory in Tunisia to attack lines of communication, reconnoitre the terrain and become the first Eighth Army unit to link up with the First Army advancing from the west.
Cautious when speaking to the Italians, he was “vain and voluble” in conversation with a fellow “captive”, Captain John Richards. Unbeknown to Stirling, Richards was an Anglo-Swiss stool pigeon, Theodore Schurch, who had deserted from the British army and was working for fascist intelligence.
Prior to Schurch’s court-martial for treachery in late 1945, Stirling denied he had revealed any sensitive information. If he had, it was inaccurate and “designed to deceive”. This was a lie, told to protect Stirling’s reputation. In fact, as the British authorities knew all too well from intercepted signals, Stirling had told Richards vital details about current SAS operations, including the location of patrols and their orders. He had even given them the name of his probable replacement as SAS commander: Paddy Mayne.
The story of Stirling’s unfortunate encounter with Schurch has been told before, notably by Ben Macintyre in his bestselling SAS: Rogue Heroes. But Macintyre underplays Stirling’s indiscretion and fails to link it to the many other examples of the SAS commander’s recklessness and poor judgement of character. For Gavin Mortimer, on the other hand, both the capture and loose talk were typical of a man who was “imaginative, immature, immoderate and ill-disciplined”. Small wonder that even his own brother Bill thought he would be better off in a prisoner-of-war camp.
The subtitle of Mortimer’s book — a carefully researched and impeccably sourced take-down of the legendary special forces pioneer — is a corrective to the flattering but inaccurate nickname that was first coined for Stirling by British tabloids during the Second World War. “When word reached Cairo of the Phantom Major moniker,” writes Mortimer, “it must have sparked a mix of hilarity and indignation. All the falsehoods and fabrications would have been harmless enough had Stirling not stolen the valour of his comrades.”
Thread by thread, Mortimer unpicks the myth of Stirling’s life and war service that the subject and his fawning admirers had so carefully constructed, both during and after the war. Stirling was not training in North America for an attempt on Mount Everest’s summit when war broke out in 1939, as he later claimed, but rather working as a ranch hand because his exasperated family hoped it might give the feckless youth some focus and direction.
July 25, 2022
“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous“
Rob Henderson considers the character of Julius Caesar (as filtered through Plutach and Shakespeare), and the “Dominance-Oriented Status Seekers” identified in a recent paper:
La morte di Cesare (The death of Caesar)
Oil painting by Vincenzo Camuccini between 1804 and 1805. via Wikimedia Commons.
In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (which is drawn from Plutarch’s Lives), the commoners of Rome are seen celebrating Caesar’s recent triumph over Pompey.
Two tribunes (elected officials), Flavius and Marullus, accost two of the commoners, asking them to name their trades and explain why they are out in their best attire rather than working.
The commoners respond to the tribunes’ condescension with indirect answers and puns that annoy the tribunes even more.
Eventually, Flavius and Marullus learn that the plebeians are cheering Caesar. The tribunes scorn them for doing this.
They tell the commoners that Pompey was a Roman too. So Caesar’s success was not truly a triumph for Rome.
Flavius later tells Marullus that they should remove the decorations from Caesar’s statues during Caesar’s parade.
Marullus questions this plan, stating that it also happens to be the Feast of Lupercal, a celebration of fertility.
But Flavius is adamant that they remove the ornaments, because the removal will help prevent Caesar from seeing himself as too great.
This first scene of Julius Caesar shows that the tribunes want to prevent the rise of a potential tyrant. But they themselves are more than willing to push the commoners around.
Later, two other prominent Romans — Brutus and Cassius — are likewise shown expressing their concerns about Caesar’s growing popularity.
Cassius asks Brutus how Caesar has any more right to greatness than Brutus or himself.
Cassius tells Brutus a story: When they were young, Cassius saved young Julius Caesar from drowning. Cassius always viewed himself as superior for rescuing Caesar. He is now aggravated that Caesar has risen above him.
Cassius decides to orchestrate Caesar’s assassination. Cassius gradually convinces other members of the Roman elite to help him carry out the conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Caesar himself, speaking privately with Mark Antony, expresses suspicions about Cassius:
CAESAR
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
ANTONY
Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous.
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
CAESAR
Would he were fatter! But I fear him not.
Yet if my name were liable to fear,
I do not know the man I should avoid
So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much,
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.
I rather tell thee what is to be feared
Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
And tell me truly what thou think’st of him.Caesar is saying all men are hungry, either for food, entertainment (“he loves no plays … he hears no music”), or power. If prosperous men aren’t tempted by food and entertainment, then they crave power. Thus, prosperous men who are lean are dangerous.
Mark Antony dismisses Caesar’s concerns about Cassius, because Cassius is a “noble Roman”. But as events unfold, we see that Antony was misguided.
Caesar was correct in his judgment of Cassius.
The eminent literary critic (and my former professor) Harold Bloom has stated that Caesar’s “estimate of Cassius shows him to be the best analyst of another human being in all of Shakespeare”.
Bloom goes on to characterize Cassius as embodying a “spirit of resentment, unhappy as he is at contemplating greatness beyond him”.
Cassius secretly arranges to have fake notes sent to Brutus, who is fooled into thinking the notes have been written by ordinary Roman citizens who want the Roman elites to stand up against Caesar.
When persuading the other conspirators to help him carry out the assassination plot, Cassius’s stresses his concern for the future of Rome.
But Cassius’s story to Brutus indicates that the assassination was in part fueled by his resentment that Caesar grew into someone more powerful than himself, thus upending their former status disparity.
July 20, 2022
Book Review: The Wipers Times
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 May 2018Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/2jzWnkI
Or here: https://amzn.to/2JOpMm3The Wipers Times was a satirical trench newspaper printed from February 1916 until December 1918 by British Captain F.J. Roberts and a crew of assistants. Such papers were not particularly uncommon, but the Wipers Times was particularly successful, well written, and long-lived, and it has survived in reprints today to a greater extent than any other similar work. A total of 23 issues were printed, and they consist of poetry, commentary, mock advertisements, advice columns, and short stories. While much of the humor is still quite accessible to us today, much of it also includes references, abbreviations, and inside jokes that are inscrutable to those who are not quite knowledgeable about life in the trenches.
Roberts and his cohorts were legitimate front-line soldiers, not writing as visiting journalists or from the safety of the rear echelons. Beyond its basic entertainment value, their writings also provide a rare and interesting view into the minds of men who were truly living the Great War.
Note that a book about the newspaper has also been printed, titled The Wipers Times, and with a very similar cover. If you want to buy a copy of the reprinted original issues, make sure you are not buying that book.
The BBC made a 90 minute program based on the Times, which is available in its entirely on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKPXu…[The original channel has been deleted, but I believe this is the same video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juZBxhUYRpg]
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