Published on 3 Oct 2012
Dr Richard Holmes’ TV Documentary series from 1996 entitled War Walks. This episode concerns the legendary Battle of Agincourt. Unfortunately, Richard Holmes — my favourite military historian — died of Pneumonia only last year (2011).
October 30, 2013
Dr. Richard Holmes – Agincourt 1415
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Human Progress
At Reason, Marian Tupy introduces a new website celebrating Human Progress:
In a world where we are constantly bombarded with bad news, it can sometimes be difficult to think of “progress” and “humanity” in the same sentence. Are there not wars taking place, people going hungry, children at work, women being abused, and mass poverty around the world?
In fact, for most of human history, life was very difficult for most people. People lacked basic medicines and died relatively young. They had no painkillers and people with ailments spent much of their lives in agonizing pain. Entire families lived in bug-infested dwellings that offered neither comfort nor privacy. They worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset, yet hunger and famines were commonplace. Transportation was primitive and most people never traveled beyond their native villages or nearest towns. Ignorance and illiteracy were rife. The “good old days” were, by and large, very bad for the great majority of humankind.
Average global life expectancy at birth hovered around 30 years from the Upper Paleolithic to 1900. Even in the richest countries, like those of Western Europe, life expectancy at the start of the 20th century rarely exceeded 50 years. Incomes were quite stagnant, too. At the beginning of the Christian era, annual incomes per person around the world ranged from $1,073 to $1,431. As late as 1820, average global income was only $1,274 per person. (Angus Maddison, whose income estimates I use here, gives his data in 1990 dollars. I have adjusted Maddison’s figures for inflation.)
Humanity has made enormous progress — especially over the course of the last two centuries. For example, average life expectancy in the world today is 67.9 years. In 2010, global per capita income stood at $13,037 — over 10 times what it was two centuries ago.
The new website is called Human Progress:
It is perhaps best to start by explaining what the Human Progress website is not trying to accomplish. It will not try to convince you that the world is a perfect place. As long as there are people who go hungry or die from preventable diseases, there will always be room for improvement. To that end, we all have a role to play in helping the destitute in our communities and beyond.
Our goal, then, is not to paint a rosy picture of the state of humanity, but a realistic one. A realistic account of the world should focus on long-term trends, comparing living standards between two or more generations. Crucially, it should compare the imperfect present with a much more imperfect past, rather than with an imagined utopia in the future.
As such, this website has two main aims. First is to inform you about the many ways in which the world has become a better place. Second is to allow you to search for reasons that brought that improvement about. While we think that policies and institutions compatible with freedom and openness are important factors in promoting human progress, we let the evidence speak for itself and hope the website stimulates an intelligent debate on the drivers of human progress.
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QotD: The career of Karl Marx
[Karl Marx] was also an unemployed professor, a scholar in the German tradition with a first-rate brain, a vast depth of learning and considerable obscurity of thought. Of his intellect and scholarship there can be no doubt at all. He knew many languages and had read widely in many subjects. A very learned man indeed, he was admirably fitted for the life of a German university. Marx’s complete absorption in his philosophy, history and economics was quite typical of the sort of professor he should by right have become. That mixture of scholarship, vagueness, poverty and practical inexperience would have graced a chair at Heidelberg or Bonn. But for the death in 1840 of Frederick William IV, a man of strictly orthodox views on religion, Marx might have had an academic career. Barred from this, however, as an atheist, he had no class to teach, no pupils from whom he might have learned. There is a sense, of course, in which a professor lives apart from the world. But his duties, even in the mid-nineteenth century, involved some contact with other people. The most professorial of German professors would have examinations to set and appointments to keep. Sessions of Senate and Faculty might give him scope for eloquence or intrigue, and he would find for himself the need to compromise, concede and persuade. Howbeit painfully and slowly, the professor comes to know something of administration and finance. But this was the practical knowledge which Marx was denied. All the experience he had was in his own home, where his failure was catastrophic for his wife and family. Of his children some died of slow starvation and two committed suicide. Retaining and increasing all his professional learning, he became more purely theoretical than even professors are allowed to be. Of the difficulties of organizing human society he knew practically nothing. There was in fact no human society — no province or city, no school or club — of which he could be said to have been a member. His whole life was bounded by the printed page.
C. Northcote Parkinson, “Internal Contradiction”, Left Luggage, 1967.
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October 26, 2013
The origins of the British army
A primer called “Boots on the Ground” at Think Defence provides a quick historical sketch of how the British army came to be:
It is worth reminding ourselves that up until Cromwell in effect there was no ‘Army’ as such.
Individual nobles raised troops top fight for the king in haphazard amounts and units, equipped according to their finances; and often with little relation to their feudal dues. A rich Knight often turned up to fight for or against the King with more and better equipped troops than a poor Earl.
The New model Army (more properly contemporaneously called the ‘Newly Modelled’ Army,(if I recall) changed that. Fed up with troops that would only fight under ‘Their’ commander and on ‘Their’ turf Parliament said (and I paraphrase):-
‘Sod this literally for a game of soldiers we need to get an Army we can command, if we are going to get any of this shit sorted’…
So the UK’s first professional full time paid and resourced Army was born.
The revolutionary Ideas of:
- Paying the troops well and on time,
- Concentrating on Moral, (through religious conformity it its case),
- An organization of units according to modern requirements,
- Proper logistics.
- And a proper code of Military justice.
Worked so well that it pretty much kicked arse from the moment it hit the ground.
However with the restoration of the monarchy a lot of old attitudes re-emerged.
It was very much the case for hundreds of years that you joined ‘The Regiment’. Often named after the Colonel who was in command. The British Army seems at some points to have been almost an accidental conglomeration of like minded units a bit like a trade organisation of organisations who happened to wear uniforms and fight for the King.
OK, this was slowly chipped away at by events in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars, to the stage by the late 19th century it was an ‘Army’, but some traditions and mindsets seem to take an age to die.
For all the ‘esprit de corps’ it undoubtedly delivered, incidents of internecine ‘warfare’ between units hampering actions in the field are well recorded up to WWII and beyond.
It is worth reminding ourselves that we are only now returning to an army the same size as the one we entered the run up to World war 1 with. That’s the one that was so small by European power standards that when asked what he would do if the British Army invaded Germany in the 1890′s [Otto von Bismarck] replied ‘I would call the police and have it arrested’!
On the topic of internecine warfare between army units, regimental memories are long and opportunities to “pay off” old scores arise when dissimilar/unfriendly units are brigaded together. George MacDonald Fraser (author of the fantastic Flashman novels) mentioned in one of his MacAuslan stories that it was dangerous to let certain Highland regiments get too close to one another for fear they’d fight one another instead of the enemy (or overthrow the government).
I strongly disagree with the author’s belief that the regimental system should be scrapped, but he makes a reasonable case for that step (“reasonable” if you’ve never actually served in the army, that is…)
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October 24, 2013
The Somme, then and now – “most of these men would be dead 40 minutes after this film”
Published on 6 Oct 2013
After painstaking research I found a lot of the exact positions that Malins filmed the Battle footage from. I hope to re-edit it soon and make it a bit smoother; also will be going back soon to film where the artillery bombarded Gommecourt.
H/T to Think Defence for the link.
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October 23, 2013
The most dangerous shipwreck in the Thames Estuary
Uploaded on 16 Aug 2010
A documentary about the SS Richard Montgomery. The remains of this second world war Liberty ship lie semi-submerged in the Thames estuary. There are currently over 1500 tons of explosives left on board. This documentary looks into the danger the wreck still presents.
I’m mildly amused that they frequently mis-name the vessel as the “USS” Richard Montgomery (she was never a commissioned ship of the US Navy, so it should be just “SS” not “USS”). If you watch to the end of the documentary, they’ve included a “blooper reel” of voice-overs for the last minute or so…
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October 20, 2013
QotD: The “Paleo” diet
Look, I can see that there is a lot of common sense behind some of these modern dietary ideas and yes, I have personally adjusted my lifestyle a bit, such as cutting down on grains and bread and so on. But there is something about the almost religious fervor behind this “paleo” stuff that bothers me. The fact is that without what we call modern agriculture, the vast majority of the today’s population would not be alive. And that is a rather big plus for agriculture. Sure, there is obesity and associated issues to deal with, many of which have complex causes. But I am damn glad we did have agriculture. It is precisely the wealth that such developments made possible that enable people today to worry about this stuff, and even make whole careers and businesses out of it.
(Full disclosure, I am a Suffolk farmer’s son, and probably the only person on this blog who has driven a combine harvester for its intended purpose.)
Johnathan Pearce, “Let’s talk about paleo”, Samizdata, 2013-08-30
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October 18, 2013
Newly discovered Homo erectus skulls may upset current evolutionary timeline
I can’t improve on Joey DeVilla‘s introduction to this story: “I don’t think that the skull of homo erectus throws the story of evolution into disarray. However, I do know for a fact that SAYING ‘homo erectus’ in a high school classroom will most certainly put it in disarray.” Here’s the Guardian article by Ian Sample:
The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago in central Asia has forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution.
Anthropologists unearthed the skull at a site in Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, where other remains of human ancestors, simple stone tools and long-extinct animals have been dated to 1.8m years old.
Experts believe the skull is one of the most important fossil finds to date, but it has proved as controversial as it is stunning. Analysis of the skull and other remains at Dmanisi suggests that scientists have been too ready to name separate species of human ancestors in Africa. Many of those species may now have to be wiped from the textbooks.
The latest fossil is the only intact skull ever found of a human ancestor that lived in the early Pleistocene, when our predecessors first walked out of Africa. The skull adds to a haul of bones recovered from Dmanisi that belong to five individuals, most likely an elderly male, two other adult males, a young female and a juvenile of unknown sex.
[…]
David Lordkipanidze at the Georgian National Museum, who leads the Dmanisi excavations, said: “If you found the Dmanisi skulls at isolated sites in Africa, some people would give them different species names. But one population can have all this variation. We are using five or six names, but they could all be from one lineage.”
If the scientists are right, it would trim the base of the human evolutionary tree and spell the end for names such as H rudolfensis, H gautengensis, H ergaster and possibly H habilis.
The fossil is described in the latest issue of Science.
“Some palaeontologists see minor differences in fossils and give them labels, and that has resulted in the family tree accumulating a lot of branches,” said White. “The Dmanisi fossils give us a new yardstick, and when you apply that yardstick to the African fossils, a lot of that extra wood in the tree is dead wood. It’s arm-waving.”
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Peak America
In the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reviews the last few times we thought we’d reached “peak America” moments:
Those old enough to remember the 1929 crash on Wall Street and the US exit from the Gold Standard under Franklin Roosevelt — thin in numbers these days — will recall the pervading sense that America had already peaked, its capitalist model overtaken by history.
The Russian trade agency Amtorg in New York famously advertised for 6,000 skilled plumbers, chemists, electricians, and dentists, and suchlike, to work in the Soviet Union, then deemed the El Dorado of mankind, or the “moral top of the world where the light never really goes out”, in the words of Edmund Wilson. It is said that 100,000 showed up.
The commentariat went into overdrive, more or less writing off the United States. The Yale Review, Harpers, and The Atlantic all ran pieces debating the risk of imminent revolution.
Just 12 years later the US accounted for half of all global economic output and was military master of the West, literally running Japan and Germany as administrative regions.
Those a little younger — like me — who remember the impeachment of President Richard Nixon and the last American citizens being lifted by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975, will recall the ubiquitous claims that the US could never fully recover from what looked like a crushing defeat.
The Carter Malaise, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Iran hostage humiliation all followed in quick succession, and seemed to seal the argument.
Oh, but this time it’s different because reasons. The sky really is falling! It’s the end! THE END!
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October 17, 2013
Who were the Vikings, Episode one
Neil Oliver heads for Scandinavia to reveal the truth behind the legend of the Vikings. In the first programme, Neil begins by discovering the mysterious world of the Vikings’ prehistoric ancestors. The remains of weapon-filled war boats, long-haired Bronze Age farmers, and a Swedish site of a royal palace and gruesome pagan ritual conjure up an ancient past from which the Viking Age was to suddenly erupt.
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QotD: Small town architecture
Damariscotta, Maine, is a village about forty percent of the way to Canada along the Atlantic coast, with about 2500 people living in it, and at least that many gawping at it at any given time. It’s cuter than a baby trying to eat an apple.
Damariscotta is an Indian name that means something in Indian, I suppose. I don’t speak Abenaki, and neither do Abenakis, so there’s no use askin’, but I think it means: “Place we’ll burn down during King Philip’s War, and again a few times whenever we’re bored and the sheriff’s drunk during the French And Indian Wars.” The colonists got jealous of the Indians getting to burn the place down fortnightly, and burned the place down themselves so the British couldn’t occupy it during the Revolutionary War, or maybe so the bank couldn’t repossess it, I can’t remember, I was very young back then.
[…]
The restaurant was identified to me as haunted, anyway. I was likewise informed that there’s a tour that points out all the local haunted houses, which includes most every building in town but the Rexall. No one ever wants to die and haunt a Rexall. It ain’t dignified. I believe to a certainty that I was supposed to be interested in the fact that the building I was in was haunted by someone besides a man with a liquor license, but I have a defective nature and I wasn’t; but I was fascinated to learn that out-of-plumb doorframes, squirrels in the attic, and a hint of cupidity is enough to get you a paying job lying to people “from away.” And to think I’ve been lying to strangers for free all these years, and on more diverse topics.
There’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in small cities in the East. The really nice looking cities are made of brick, and all the buildings look like one another, because everything that was there before burned down eleven or four or nine times, until the residents all decided brick buildings were cheaper than a fire department, and built everything at the same time under a regime of architectural and intellectual coherence that is not abroad in the land just now. Damariscotta’s like that; Providence, Rhode Island, parts of Boston, and Portland, Maine are too.
One likewise cannot help but notice that in Damariscotta, the rhythm of the lovely brick buildings, with the occasional gawjus neoclassical residence smattered in, is broken only by the public library, which is fairly new, and built in the Prairie/International/Cow Barn/Reform School style, because reasons. There’s a plaque on the sidewalk that declares the entire downtown a member of the National Register of Historic Places, so you have to check with someone official about the color of the mortar you’re using to fix a brick on your haunted ice cream parlor or haunted Kinko’s or whatever you’ve got, but the town can hire Frank Lloyd Wrong to design the library and place it there like a dead cat at a picnic.
“Innocents Abroad: The Damariscotta Pumpkinfest”, Sippican Cottage, 2013-10-16
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October 11, 2013
The “truth” about the “Illuminati”
Jesse Walker is invited to free-associate on a series of words or phrases by the staff of TNB. One of the terms they just happened to mention was “Illuminati”:
The Bavarian Illuminati — the actual historical organization, not the all-powerful cabal of legend — were founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed about a decade later. They weren’t the first group to call themselves Illuminati, and they weren’t the first Illuminati to appear in a New World conspiracy theory. In Chiapas in the 1580s, a bishop became convinced that some of the local Indians were “giving cult to the Devil and plotting against our Christian religion.” The secret sect’s beliefs, he added, resembled those of the Spanish heretics known as the Alumbrados, or Illuminati.
But the Bavarians were the biggies. Their alleged machinations set off a panic in Federalist circles at the end of the 1790s. The New England minister Jedidiah Morse sermonized that he had “an official, authenticated list of the names, ages, places of nativity, professions, &c. of the officers and members of a Society of *Illuminati* … consisting of *one hundred* members”; among other things, the plotters allegedly had a plan “to invade the southern states from [Haiti] with an army of blacks … to excite an insurrection among the negroes.” Another Federalist writer warned that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the cabal. The order entered pop culture, too. In Sally Wood’s novel *Julia and the Illuminated Baron*, published in 1800 and set in prerevolutionary France, a lady Illuminatus describes their initiation ceremony: “disrobed of all coverings except a vest of silver gauze, I am to be exposed to the homage of all the society present upon a marble pedestal placed behind which sacrifices are to be offered.” She adds, “This sect increases daily. They will in a few years overturn Europe and lay France in ruins.”
In the 20th century the Illuminati became stock villains on the far right, appearing alternately as a revolutionary force and as the secret rulers of the world. In the 1960s they started cropping up in countercultural and leftist tales too, thanks partly to some pranksters who thought it would be fun to seed the underground press with stories about Illuminati activities. A couple of those pranksters wrote the cult novel Illuminatus! in the 1970s, and that helped re-inject the idea into mass culture. These days, of course, the Illuminati are everywhere. Er, I mean *stories about* the Illuminati are everywhere.
All of these theories are quite clearly mistaken or deliberately fraudulent … unlike the shadowy Council of 300!
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October 8, 2013
In defence of savings
Keynes notoriously thought savings were bad … that a penny saved was a penny “prevented” from working its “magic” in the economy. Gregory Bresiger explains why Keynes’ notion has become the unspoken understanding of most Americans:
Our grandparents believed in the value of thrift, but many of their grandchildren don’t.
That’s because cultural and economic values have changed dramatically over the last generations as political and media elites have convinced many Americans that saving is passé. So today, under the influence of Keynesian economists who champion government spending and high levels of consumption, thrift has been devalued.
“The growth in wealth, so far from being dependent on the abstinence [savings] of the rich, as is commonly supposed, is more likely to be impeded by it,” according to John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
“The more virtuous we are, the more determinedly thrifty, the more obstinately orthodox in our national and personal finance, the more incomes will have to fall,” he writes. “Saving,” Keynes wrote in his Treatise on Money, “is the act of the individual consumer and consists in the negative act of refraining from spending the whole of his current income on consumption.”
But saving, pace Keynes, isn’t “negative.” It is deferred consumption. “The great producing countries are the great consuming countries,” writes Benjamin Anderson in Economics and the Public Welfare. More importantly, high rates of savings will lead to higher productivity, which would benefit our children and grandchildren, classical and Austrian economists have explained.
“We are the lucky heirs of our fathers and forefathers whose saving has accumulated the capital goods with the aid of which we are working today,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in Human Action. Saving, ultimately, is consumption, writes Detley S. Schlichter in Paper Money Collapse. “By setting aside some resources for meeting financial consumption needs, we invest them.”
Nevertheless, Keynesian ideas dominate the Obama administration and mass media. Most politicians, including Republicans who often pretend to be friends of thrift and self-improvement, are tacit or overt Keynesians. That’s because politicians, whether they have studied Keynes or not, generally love the idea of cheap money. Most delight in spending taxpayer dollars. They believe this is the way elections are won.
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October 4, 2013
QotD: Depression-era thinking
Everybody wants everything now. I caution persons slightly younger than me that life was not always as rosy as it has been for the last 20 or 25 years, at least for the most part. There was a time when it was very difficult for a hardworking family to get by, and you jumped on any work situation that promised even a modicum of stability. With both feet. You’d accept work situations that would look like indentured servitude now, more or less. You never ever ever quit your job before you had another one. Never. And it took real nerve to buy a rundown building like this and turn it into something.
My elders warned me about the Depression. It led them to certain habits which seem like madness now — overreaction and paranoia. When you hear about honest people hoarding cash outside of banks, saving newspaper and cardboard and scraps of this and that, never throwing anything away, always afraid that all prosperity is ephemeral — that’s the Depression talking.
Twice in my working life, unemployment in the construction business has exceeded 25% for a substantial stretch. That might be news to you civilians, but the reason you can’t find anyone to do anything for you that involves heavy lifting, hammers, and speaking English, is that everyone but the hardiest souls and people with nothing but a strong back were driven out of the sector for sunnier economic climes. Everybody bailed out if they could manage it.
Sippican Cottage, “I Know That Smell”, Sippican Cottage, 2013-10-03 (originally posted in 2006)
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October 3, 2013
Postwar horror – the misery didn’t stop with VE day or VJ day
In the last couple of years, I’ve read several books about the aftermath of World War Two, including Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ronald Spector’s In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia, and David Stafford’s Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II. When you concentrate on the combat side of war, you can easily miss the destructive side-effects of that combat and it’s hard to imagine how long it can take for a city or a region to recover from being a battlefield. What is even more interesting is the complex interplay of humanitarian, political and social pressures on the winning side, too often leading to actions that we would have called war crimes if they’d happened just days or weeks earlier. In the New York Times, Adam Hochschild looks at an interesting new book covering the immediate postwar period:
Ian Buruma’s lively new history, Year Zero, is about the various ways in which the aftermath of the Good War turned out badly for many people, and splendidly for some who didn’t deserve it. It is enriched by his knowledge of six languages, a sense of personal connection to the era (his Dutch father was a forced laborer in Berlin) and his understanding of this period from a book he wrote two decades ago that is still worth reading, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. His survey rambles over a wide expanse of ground, from sexual behavior (imagine millions of Allied occupation troops in a Germany where women outnumbered men by eight to five), to British and American soldiers unintentionally killing thousands of liberated concentration camp inmates by feeding them more than their shriveled intestinal tracts could handle, to the Allies’ blindness to how much of their cornucopia of food and supplies found its way into the hands of Italian, French and Japanese gangsters, restoring some of their prewar power.
Despite the lofty democratic aura of World War II, Buruma points out that the Allies spent much of the latter half of 1945 reviving colonialism. After Algerian Arabs began an uprising on V-E Day, demanding equal rights, some of the troops the French governor general called in to suppress them included an elite infantry regiment that had just taken part in the final assault on Germany. Rebellious towns and villages were bombed, or shelled by naval vessels; in two months of fighting as many as 30,000 Algerians may have been killed. Thousands were made to kneel before the French flag and beg forgiveness.
On the other side of the world, inhabitants of the Dutch East Indies demanded freedom just after the Japanese surrender. But the Dutch government answered with troops, aided by soldiers from Britain’s large Indian Army, British battleships and abundant American military supplies. Fighting continued for four years. And in Vietnam, where a crowd of more than 300,000 gathered to hear Ho Chi Minh declare independence from France, the story would of course eventually become even bloodier. In 1945 British troops were crucial to restoring the colonial order in Vietnam, with help from French Foreign Legion detachments. These included many German volunteers, recruited from P.O.W. camps, who had recently been fighting the Allies in Europe or North Africa.
Meanwhile, the victorious Allies were uprooting some 10 million ethnic Germans from parts of Eastern Europe, where they had lived for generations, and forcing them to move to a shrunken Germany, with perhaps a half-million or more dying in the process from hunger, exposure or attacks by vengeful neighbors. Buruma, like others before him, notes the paradox of the Allied armies carrying out something that echoed “Hitler’s project . . . of ethnic purity.”
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