Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote for different parties — they are different kinds of people. They differ psychologically in ways that are consistent across geography and culture. For example, liberals measure higher on traits like “openness to new experience” and seek out novelty. Conservatives prefer order and predictability. Their attachment to the status quo is an impediment to the re-ordering of society around new technology. Meanwhile, the technologists of Silicon Valley, while suspicious of government regulation, are still some of the most liberal people in the country. Not all liberals are techno-optimists, but virtually all techno-optimists are liberals.
A debate on the merits of change between these two psychological profiles helps guarantee that change benefits society instead of ruining it. Conservatives act as gatekeepers enforcing quality control on the ideas of progressives, ultimately letting in the good ones (like democracy) and keeping out the bad ones (like Marxism). Conservatives have often been wrong in their opposition to good ideas, but the need to win over a critical mass of them ensures that only the best-supported changes are implemented. Curiously, when the change in question is technological rather than social, this debate process is neutered. Instead, we get “inevitablism” — the insistence that opposition to technological change is illegitimate because it will happen regardless of what we want, as if we were captives of history instead of its shapers.
This attitude is all the more bizarre because it hasn’t always been true. When nuclear technology threatened Armageddon, we did what was necessary to limit it to the best of our ability. It may be that AI or automation causes social Armageddon. No one really knows — but if the pessimists are right, will we still have it in us to respond accordingly? It seems like the command of the optimists to lay back and “trust our history” has the upper hand.
Conservative critics of change have often been comically wrong — just like optimists. That’s ultimately not so interesting, because humans can’t predict the future. More interesting have been the times when the predictions of the critics actually came true. The Luddites were skilled artisans who feared that industrial technology would destroy their way of life and replace their high-status craft with factory drudgery. They were right. Twentieth century moralists feared that the automobile would facilitate dating and casual sex. They were right. They erred not in their predictions, but in their belief that the predicted effects were incompatible with a good society. That requires us to have a debate on the merits — about the meaning of the good life.
Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.
July 10, 2023
QotD: Liberal and conservative views on innovation
July 9, 2023
Imperial Rome
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.
The Destruction of Army Group Center – Week 254 – July 8, 1944
World War Two
Published 8 Jul 2023Operation Bagration continues, smashing the armies of German Army Group Center and taking ever more territory including the prize of Minsk; on Saipan the Americans have taken most of the island when the Japanese resort to a huge suicidal banzai charge to try and turn the tide; and in Normandy new attacks begin try to finally take Caen and St. Lo.
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Grain Elevator
NFB
Published 30 Sept 2015This documentary short is a visual portrait of “Prairie Sentinels”, the vertical grain elevators that once dotted the Canadian Prairies. Surveying an old diesel elevator’s day-to-day operations, this film is a simple, honest vignette on the distinctive wooden structures that would eventually become a symbol of the Prairie provinces.
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QotD: Military history informs modern concepts of conflict
At the same time, something has not changed, which is the human propensity for conflict. And so the most obvious reason to study the history of human conflict remains: to prepare for the conflicts of our day which, despite our best efforts, are sure to occur. And since political decision-making is no longer confined to a small elite, it makes sense that both the target and scope of military history has changed. This is part of why the focus on the broader “war and society” lens is important: if average citizens need to (through elections) make choices on the security posture of their country, they are going to want to know “what is conflict going to be like for me and my family?” Thus the greater focus on the experience of the common soldier (what is sometimes called the “Face of Battle” school of military history, after J. Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976)) and on the experience of the “homefront” as well as on the victims of conflict. I know that last focus sometimes frustrates the “cult of the badass” adherents, but frankly, no matter how many reps you can do, you were always more likely to be one of Alexander the Great’s victims than one of Alexander’s soldiers (much less Alexander himself).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.
July 8, 2023
The Perfect D-Day That History Forgot
Real Time History
Published 7 Jul 2023The summer of 1944 saw the Allies land in France not once but twice. Two months after Operation Overlord, the Allies also landed in Southern France during Operation Dragoon. It was “the perfect landing” and opened up the important ports of Marseille and Toulon for Allied logistics.
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Canada’s Nuclear-Armed Cold War Interceptor: the story of the McDonnell CF-101 Voodoo
Polyus
Published 14 Aug 2020When Soviet or unidentified aircraft approached Canadian airspace in the 1960s and 70s, they were met by an iconic cold war interceptor. Armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons, they were a formidable foe in their day. It served to support NORAD and protect the Northern approaches into the North American heartland during the height of the Cold War. Although it was neither designed nor built in Canada, the reliable Voodoo remains a Canadian Cold War icon and was well loved by its ground crews and pilots.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 McDonnell F-101A development
1:06 F-101B Interceptor
3:11 Canada becomes involved with the Voodoo
4:15 The Nuclear question
5:08 Comparison with contemporaries
5:36 Operational History
8:04 Legacy and Retirement
8:48 Conclusion
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July 7, 2023
Nazis destroy last Jewish sanctuary – War Against Humanity 102
World War Two
Published 6 Jul 2023Until now Miklos Horthy’s Kingdom of Hungary has been a rare sanctuary where most Jews have lived in relative safety. That changes with the German occupation. Now Adolf Eichmann. the Nazis, and their Hungarian allies bring the Holocaust to Hungary.
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Prototype Silenced Sten for Paratroops: the Mk4(S)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Mar 2023The Sten Mk4 was developed experimentally in 1943 for use by British paratroops. It used a remarkably awful folding stock along with a shortened receiver and barrel to make a very compact package — albeit one that must have been very uncomfortable to shoot. Several different models were made, with this one being a Mk4a(S) — the suppressed version. The suppressor is essentially the same system as used on the MkII(S), but with the rear endcap and barrel being permanently fixed to the receiver of the gun.
Only a small number (allegedly 2000) Mk4 guns were originally made, and they were used for testing only — never for field service. Virtually all were destroyed after the war, with a few remaining examples in British museums. This one was amnesty registered in 1968, and is almost certainly the only one in private hands in the US (and possible the only privately owned one in the world).
The Mk4 was dropped in favor of the Mk5, which was a much more effective gun and was used by the British paratroopers in the late days of World War Two.
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QotD: Nazi Germany’s plans for Eastern Europe versus their actual implementation of those plans
… at least in some places, and at least initially. There’s a second inference here: “the exigencies of war led Germany to behave tactfully”. Here’s where our initial ground rules of evidence become extremely important. Those anecdotal reports of civilian / military interaction, above: What weight do we assign those? And why?
If I’m arguing for the “greeted as liberators” theory, I can use all those recollections of cordial civilian / military interaction. But I need to be consistent: If I say “You can trust those, even though they’re personal memories written down long after the fact, because XYZ”; then I can’t turn around and dismiss contrary evidence of the same type: “All those reports of brutality are just personal memories written down long after the fact.” That’s one of the ways you catch a propagandist: they constantly conflate the two.
Fortunately, in this case we’re dealing with two totally ideologized societies. Even better, one of those totally ideologized societies was German, with their well-documented love of paperwork. All armies generate scads of paperwork, and an ideologized army’s paperwork is full of ideology. So: How does the Army of Occupation’s paperwork tell the tale? That should give us some clues as to their future plans — obviously the occupiers would need to be part of it — and some insight as to the day-to-day.
As it turns out, the second part of your inference — “the exigencies of war led Germany to behave tactfully” — is false. We’ve got the paperwork on it, starting with the infamous “Commissar Order” and working down. Ideology trumps exigency. It seems clear from Wehrmacht paperwork that so long as military efficiency was maintained, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted out there.
[Interestingly, in a bit of meta-irony, the Wikipedia “thumbnail” — the little box you get on the side of the search results page — says of the Commissar Order: “Nazi conspiracy-enforcing unit of the Nazi military.” [Sic], of course — they really want you to know these guys were Nazis. Also, what’s a “conspiracy-enforcing unit”? One imagines a Q-tard goon squad, beating up people whose faith in the God-Emperor is wavering. Finally, it wasn’t a “conspiracy” — they were right out in the open with it. We’ve got lots of copies of the Commissar Order, because it was read out to the troops before the invasion. ALL the troops].1
That segues into the “Organizational Darwinism” thing. The paperwork shows us that “the Nazis” really did have grandiose plans for settling a whole bunch of Germans in the depopulated East. They even got a pilot program underway, as I recall — a whole bunch of ethnic Germans from Bohemia or someplace getting stuck in a transit camp in eastern Poland, or even Ukraine. But notice I put “the Nazis” in quotation marks. The guys with the grandiose plans were RuSHA, the Main Race and Settlement Office. And not even all of them: It was the fourth department, “Settlement”, inside RuSHA. And RuSHA was inside the SS, which was inside — but also outside, over, under, around, and through — the rest of the Nazis’ plate-of-spaghetti org chart.
And it’s actually way more complicated than that, because of course it is — these are the Nazis we’re talking about. I’m not going to dive into the details (not least because it all makes my head hurt), but if you were an ethnic German who wanted to get resettled in Ukraine for some reason — and this is all mostly theoretical, I hasten to add, very few actually moved so far as I know — you’d have to deal with a bewildering array of bizarrely-acronymed organizations. RuSHA, VOMI, the Generalgovernment (Occupied Poland), the SS (in general; over and above RuSHA), the army, the whole bewildering array of groups represented in Generalplan Ost, which was a “plan” in much the same way the “Holy Roman Empire” was holy, Roman, and an empire. Various Party goons would want to get their beaks wet, as would the Gestapo (hell yes they want to know if people are moving around the Reich, especially towards the front on military railroads), and so on.
As weird as this sounds, all this elaborate mishmash of ass-pulled “organization” was by largely by design. For one thing, it diffuses responsibility for really nasty shit — when it comes to certain events on the Eastern Front, even scrupulously neutral historians are often reduced to Ilhan Omar’s level: some people did some things. Who gave what order? Who was he reporting to? And in what capacity? Insufficient data.
Severian, “Organizational Darwinism”, Founding Questions, 2023-01-30.
1. Side note: Ideology really increases military efficiency, up to a point. Recalling that I’m not even an armchair general, it seems like the American military is really missing a trick there. Imagine what the Americans could’ve done in Vietnam if their regular forces had been better indoctrinated, instead of punting military-civilian relations off to CORDS. Properly indoctrinated, I mean, with an ideology that kinda sorta makes sense and is internally consistent and at least somewhat intersects with the real world. “Spreading democracy” would work ok, if they actually ideologized the ranks (instead of having the PR guys just parrot it to the cameras). The AINO military is of course fully indoctrinated, but see above: we’re talking combat efficiency here, not butt stuff.
July 6, 2023
The Devilish History of Deviled Eggs
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 4 Apr 2023
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QotD: Liberalizing the US Army after WW2
And here it ruined them.
They had lived their lives in semibitter alienation from their own culture (What’s the matter, Colonel; can’t you make it on the outside?) but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.
Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn’t liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.
It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn’t like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles.
In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.
The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did — but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized. America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn’t do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.
And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient — and popular — to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too. Other professional people, such as doctors and clergymen, had special privileges — but officers, after all, had no place in the liberal society, and had better be cut down to size.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
July 5, 2023
QotD: The role of merchants in pre-modern societies
It thus tends to come as something of a surprise that with stunning consistency, the merchant class tended to be at best cordially disliked and at worst despised by the broader community (although not typically to the point of suffering legal disability, as did some other jobs; see S. Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (2016) for this in Rome). This often strikes students as strange, both because we tend to think rather better of our own modern merchants but also because the image they have of the merchant class certainly looks elite.
For the farmers who need to sell their crops (for reasons we will get to in a moment) and purchase the things they need that they cannot produce, the merchant feels like an adversary: always pushing his prices to his best advantage. We expect this, but remember that our pre-modern farmers are just not that exposed to market interactions; most of their relationships are reciprocal, not transactional – the horizontal relationships we discussed before. The merchant’s “money-grubbing” feels like a betrayal of trust in a society where you banquet your neighbors in the good years so they’ll help you in the bad years. The necessary function of a merchant is to transgress the “rules” of village interactions which – and this resounds from the sources – the farmers tend to understand as being “cheated”.
At the same time, while most merchant types are humble, the high-risk and potentially high-reward involved in trade meant that some merchants (again, a small number) could become very rich. That, as you might imagine, did not go over well for the traditionally wealthy in these societies, the large landholders. Again, the values here often strike modern readers as topsy-turvy compared to our own, but to the elite large landholders (who dominate the literary and political culture of their societies), the morally correct way to earn great wealth is to inherit it (or capture it in war). The morally correct way to hold that wealth is with large landed estates. Anything else is morally suspect, and so the idea that a successful merchant could – by a process that again, strikes the large landholder, just like the small farmer, as “cheating” – leap-frog the social pyramid and skip to the top, without putting in the work at either having distinguished wealthy ancestors or tremendous military success was an open insult to elite values. Often laws were put in place to limit the ability of wealthy non-aristocrats (likely merchants or successful artisans) from displaying their wealth (sumptuary laws) so as to keep them from competing with the aristocrats; at Rome, senators were forbidden from owning ships with much the same logic (Roman senators being clever, they still invested in trade through proxies while at the same time disapproving of the activity in public politics).
[…] As far as elites were concerned, merchants didn’t seem to produce anything (the theory of comparative advantage which explains how merchants produce value without producing things by moving things to where they are most valued would have to wait until 1776 to be mentioned and the early 1800s to be properly explained) and so the only explanation for their wealth was that they made it by deception and trickery, distorting the “real” value of things (this faulty assumption that the “real value” of things is inherent in them, or a product of their production, rather than their use value to an end user or consumer, does not go away in the modern period).
Merchants also – almost by definition being foreigners in their communities – often suffered as members of “middleman minorities“, where certain tasks, particularly banking, commerce and tax collection are – for the reasons just discussed above – outsourced to foreigners or ethnic minorities who then tend to face violence and discrimination because of the power and prominence those tasks give them in society. Disdain for merchants was thus often packaged with ethnic hatred or racism – anyone exposed to the tropes of European or Near Eastern antisemitism (or more precisely, anti-Jewish sentiment) is familiar with this toxic brew, but the same tropes were applied to other middlemen minorities engaged in trade – Chinese people in much of South East Asia, Armenians in Turkey, Parsis in India and on and on. Violence against these groups was always self-destructive (in addition to being abhorrent on its face) – the economic services they provided were valuable to the broader society in ways that the broader society did not understand.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-21.
July 4, 2023
Shock! Horror! Apparently you can’t trust that Abraham Lincoln quote about not believing what you read on the internet!
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!
Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965)
NFB
Published 15 Jun 2015In this film Keaton rides across Canada on a railway scooter and, between times, rests in a specially appointed passenger coach where he and Mrs. Keaton lived during their Canadian film assignment. This film is about how Buster Keaton made a Canadian travel film, The Railrodder. In this informal study the comedian regales the film crew with anecdotes of a lifetime in show business. Excerpts from his silent slapstick films are shown
Directed by John Spotton – 1965.
