… a word of warning, Gentleman’s Relish is an acquired taste. One look at the sludgy paste is enough to deter many. And then there is its pungent smell. Brave men have been known to blanch at it. Yet, once these initial reservations are overcome, you will discover a delicate paste that rivals Marmite in its deliciousness.
Opinions differ as to how and when you should eat Gentleman’s Relish. According to the Ritz, breakfast is the time to enjoy its piquant flavour, preferably on thinly sliced, brown toast. I prefer to eat it for tea, on white toast with a little mustard and cress. Mrs Beeton suggests that anchovy paste is usually spread on toast as “an excellent bonne bouche which enables gentlemen at wine-parties to enjoy their port with redoubled gusto”.
It was originally created in 1828 by John Osborn, an English provision merchant in Paris. Like any good marketing man, he created a grandiose name from a fictitious fudge of Latin and Greek implying pepper paste, to tempt his fashion-conscious customers into buying it. It only became known as Gentleman’s Relish once his son brought the business to London. According to Elsenham, its current manufacturer, it is still made according to the original recipe. It imports the finest Spanish anchovy fillets, which have been packed in barrels of salt and left to mature for 18 months. Once suitably fruity, they are rinsed in brine and gently cooked before being cooled and blended with butter and rusk. A secret blend of spices and herbs is then added.
Sybil Kapoor, “Spreading the word”, The Guardian, 2001-02-18.
October 23, 2021
QotD: Patum Peperium, the Gentleman’s Relish
October 22, 2021
QotD: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the ancient (or medieval) world
That is often not the impression that you would get from a quick google search (though it does seem to be the general consensus of the range of ancient military historians I know) and that goes back to arguments ex silentio. A quick google search will turn up any number of articles written by folks who are generally not professional historians declaring that PTSD was an observed phenomenon in the deep past, citing the same small handful of debatable examples. But one thing you learn very rapidly as a historian is that if you go into a large evidence-base looking for something, you will find it.
That’s not a species of research positivity – it’s a warning about confirmation bias, especially if you do not establish a standard of proof before your investigation. It is all too easy to define down your definition of “proof” until the general noise of the source-base looks like proof. In this case, we have to ask – before we go looking – what would evidence of PTSD in ancient societies (I’m going to start there because it is where I am best informed) look like?
Well, ancient societies engaged in a lot of warfare. Among the citizenry – the sort of fellows who write to us and are written about in our sources – combat experience was almost ubiquitous. That only really changes as we get into the Roman Empire, as violence levels both decline generally and are pushed to the frontier via a professional army. The percentage of veterans in the citizen population (again, citizen here is an important caveat, but then those fellows basically are our primary source base) probably equaled that of the WWI generation in Britain or France, except all the time (there’s a point in the Second Punic War where the Roman censors went through the entire rolls, checking to see how many had managed to avoid military service and found only a few thousand in a citizen body of c. 150,000 adult males). So what ought we expect from our sources? We should expect to see signs of PTSD everywhere. It should be absolutely pervasive in a source-base produced almost entirely by, for and about combat veterans, in societies where military mortality exceeded modern rates by a robust margin.
And it simply isn’t there. There is one very frequently cited account in Herodotus (Hdt. 6.117) of a man named Epizelos experiencing what is generally understood as “conversion disorder” (which used to be badly labeled “hysterical blindness”) in combat. Without being wounded he went blind at a sudden terror in battle and never recovered his sight. Herodotus terms it a θῶμα – a “wonder” or “marvel”, a word that explicitly implies the strange uncommonness of the tale. Herodotus is concerned enough about how exceptional this sounds that he is quick not to vouch for its veracity – he brackets the story (beginning and end) noting that it was what he was told (by someone else) that Epizelos used to say happened to him. In short, this was uncommon enough that Herodotus distances himself from it, so as not to be thought as a teller of tall-tales (though Herodotus is, in fact, a teller of tall tales).
This one example – cited endlessly and breathlessly in internet articles – is remarkable not because it is typical, but because it is apparently very unusual (also, it is my understanding – with the necessary caveat that I am not an expert – that while conversion disorder is a consequence of emotional trauma, it is not clear that it is associated with PTSD more generally). Meanwhile, in the war literature of the Romans, in their poetry (including that by folks like Horace, who fought in quite terrible battles), in the military literature of the Greeks, in the reflections of Xenophon (both on his campaigns and his commands), in the body of Greek lyric poetry … all of it – nothing. It is simply not there – not as a concern that such a condition might befall someone, nor a report that it had done so. Nothing. The lacuna baffled me for years.
My impression is that the medieval literature looks much the same: a few scattered passages that, if you squint hard enough, might be PTSD set against a vast backdrop of nothing in a society where literature was dominated by the war-fighting class. More examples than in the classical corpus (but then the medieval corpus is much larger; oddly, the examples I’ve seen all seem to concern crusading particularly), but nothing close to what we would expect given a literary tradition absolutely dominated by military aristocrats and their (often clerical) families. I call this my impression, because the medieval corpus is both much larger and I have read much less of it; but if there is a hidden reservoir of accounts showing clear symptoms of PTSD, I have not found it yet. I was always struck that – despite the fact that monastic life was often a destination for medieval military aristocrats troubled by their life of violence – none of the monastic rules I have read (admittedly, not all of them), which often have guidelines for abbots to deal with difficult monks, have had anything about how to deal with the symptoms of PTSD.
Now that’s not to say there isn’t grief at loss, mind you! The lamentations of defeat, the sorrow of losing a loved one (even in victory), the misery of war – that you find in the ancient texts in abundance. It occupies literary topoi, it is depicted in artwork, it gets entire tragedies to stretch out in, it is addressed by great big political speeches, it sits at the cornerstone of the Iliad‘s narrative (one reason, no doubt, that the Iliad remains a useful text for soldiers working through their experiences). But the persistent symptoms of PTSD, no. I haven’t been able to find one “flashback” or combat-memory related dissociative episode in ancient literature. You might argue that they simply weren’t recorded, but that strikes me as unlikely in societies where other forms of war-damage were so fiercely valorized and which would have often seen – as with Epizalos – such symptoms as divine omens. There should be dozens and dozens of them. These are societies with active medical literature, after all!
I think the evidence strongly suggests that ancient combatants did not experience PTSD as we do now. The problem is that the evidence of silence leads us with few tools with which to answer why. One answer might be that it existed and they do not tell us – because it was considered shameful or cowardly, perhaps. Except that they do tell us about other cowardly or shameful things. And the loss and damage of war – death, captivity, refugees, wounds, the lot of it – are prominent motifs in Greek, Roman and European Medieval literature. War is not uniformly white-washed in these texts – not every medieval writer is Bertran. We can’t rule out some lacuna in the tradition, but given just how many wails and moans of grief and loss there are in the corpus it seems profoundly unlikely. I think we have to assume that it isn’t in the sources because they did not experience it or at least did not recognize the experience of it.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-04-24.
October 20, 2021
QotD: The English
Here are a couple of generalizations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic “world-view”. Nor is this because they are “practical”, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town-planning and water-supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, “a sleep-walking people”, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
October 19, 2021
QotD: Slaves and indentured servants in early Virginia
One could justly say these early-arriving blacks were not treated exactly like poor English whites who – unless convicted of a crime – had always chosen to sign their ten-year indenture, to pay for transport across the Atlantic and survival while they found their feet. The closer analogy is to some Scottish whites. More than one clan chief sold some clansmen on indentures across the Atlantic when funds were low, and in 1707 a leading Scottish parliamentarian informed his peers that there was no need for them to fix the disastrous financial situation by accepting the English payment and voting their own abolition – Scotland’s elite could keep their separate parliament and avoid national bankruptcy by selling enough poor Scots to the Americas instead.
When the Portuguese offered to sell black slaves, those 1619 Virginians could only buy them as ten-year-indentured servants. They were still wholly under English common law and Lord Mansfield’s 1770s ruling merely echoed a two-centuries earlier ruling of Elizabethan judges that English common law knew no such state as slavery. It took the Virginians decades to start even questioning this and almost a century to unlearn it fully. As late as the 1690s, a black man who petitioned the Virginia council that his white master had made him serve not for ten years but for twelve “contrarie to all right and justice“, was freed by their order. If Nikole had called it the 1705 project, I’d have thought she at least knew something about the actual faults of the country whose history she was travestying. Only positive statute law can override English common law’s aversion to slavery, said Lord Mansfield – and 1705 was the year the Virginia legislature completed providing it. I knew from the start that Nikole was not just lying about all that, not just indifferent to the truth of all that – she was also pretty clueless about it.
Niall Kilmartin, “Critical Race Theorist literally knows nothing”, Samizdata, 2021-07-16.
October 18, 2021
QotD: Harold Macmillan’s “Gold Pass” on British Railways
Too old? Just a few years later that same wily showman drove a memorable stiletto into Margaret Thatcher’s ribs, using the same falsely quavering voice to attack her policy of selling off national assets. But I remember the humiliating occasion of my failed interview for another reason. Macmillan was able to drive me away partly because he was occupying an entire first-class compartment, reserved for him personally, on the London express. Compartments — oh, how I miss them — had sliding doors, which cut them off from the rest of the train. You could even pull the blinds down between you and the corridor. They could be marvelous private spaces for all kinds of purposes on long journeys. But you had to be lucky to get one to yourself. Once the ex-premier had driven me out, he was safe.
But Macmillan (who in those days had not given into vanity and accepted a peerage) did not have to be lucky. He had once been a director of the Great Western Railway, which had been taken into state ownership in the 1940s. So to the end of his life (in compensation for his lost power) he possessed a magical shiny token called a Gold Pass. This entitled him to free first-class travel, without limit, on any train in Great Britain. It was even rumored that it gave him the power to have trains stopped for him at stations where they did not normally halt. I often thought I would rather have such a pass than be prime minister.
Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.
October 17, 2021
QotD: Like Justin Trudeau, too many western politicians admire China’s “basic dictatorship”
Then there is the Chinese government’s ability to surveil and control their people – for their own good, of course. How many over here would love a Social Credit System, where they can reward and punish people according to government’s priorities, from environmentally-conscious behaviour to public health considerations. In democracies, the people rate their leaders; in China the leaders rate their people. Just imagine how much more effectively our governments and health authorities would be able to to deal with all of us during the current pandemic if they could “see” and “nudge” every individual at every moment and in every situation. The most dangerous virus to come from China recently is not COVID, it’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” with its siren call of unrestrained power for large sections of our political and economic elites.
Arthur Chrenkoff, “World hearts commies”, The Daily Chrenk, 2021-07-01.
October 16, 2021
QotD: Social security
Julian Sanchez, “Social Security’s Progressive Paradox: Retirement ‘insurance’ as a Rube Goldberg machine”, Reason, 2005-05-02.
October 15, 2021
QotD: England and the English
But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.
Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
October 14, 2021
QotD: Americans’ perception of foreign economic threats
And when it does Americans will learn nothing from their most recent mistake. If people really understood sound economics, they would not continue to make this same mistake again and again.
Robert Higgs, “China — Americans’ Economic Bugaboo du Jour”, The Beacon, 2018-12-19.
October 13, 2021
QotD: The POW/MIA theories from the post-Vietnam War era
It routinely showed up on the “news magazine” shows, and of course there were whole series of movies about it: The Missing in Action flicks with Chuck Norris, Rambo II, I’m sure I’m forgetting a few. And though the “firsthand testimony” for this thesis was always of the “somebody knew somebody who heard from somebody that Lt. Smith suddenly disappeared from a POW camp back in 1968,” there was one seemingly strong piece of archival evidence: The seemingly disproportionate number of soldiers and airmen officially listed as “missing in action”.
And yet … c’mon, man, as a guy who dodged that war probably said back when he could still remember what century he’s living in. Why would the Vietnamese do that? All the mooted explanations — slave labor, selling captured pilots to the Russians for training purposes — didn’t pass the smell test. So a historian started digging into it, and while I read MIA: Mythmaking in America 30 years ago in college, I remember the crux of his argument:
In the war’s early days, the military used a statistic called KIA/BNR — killed in action / body not recovered. Everyone knows Lt. Smith is dead, but since his aircraft was vaporized by a SAM over Haiphong, his remains can’t be returned to his people. As Al notes, though, when a pilot was killed in action, his wife and kids got a puny condolence check from the government and kicked out of base housing. Thus the surviving pilots, acting from noble motives, started fudging. “Well … maybe Lt. Smith’s plane wasn’t vaporized. I might’ve seen a chute. It’s all very confusing; remember I was going Mach 1 at the time, dodging flak …” Mrs. Smith and the little Smiths get to keep drawing a paycheck, keep living on base housing, etc. So the official MIA list grew.
Enter Richard Nixon and that sneaky rat fuck Kissinger. Needing a way to prolong the war while concluding “peace with honor” — that is, to weasel out without seeming too weaselly — they needed a sticking point at the treaty table. The MIA issue was perfect for that. What about Lt. Smith? Of course the Vietnamese government can’t account for him; he was blown to atoms over Haiphong; but there’s his name on the missing list. Perhaps he’s in double secret prison!
And thus “the narrative” — the perfectly understandable-in-context lie that changed KIA/BNR to MIA — became “The Narrative”, that the Vietnamese were, for some unfathomable reason, still hanging on to captured American servicemen. Who knows why those inscrutable Orientals do anything, and what kind of America-hating hippie scum are you to ask questions? Don’t you want to bring our boys back home?
Severian, “Kayfabe”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
October 12, 2021
QotD: Titus Livius, better known as Livy
What little we know of the man himself suggests he was somehow financially well-off, independent, and reclusive. He was schooled in rhetoric, philosophy, and history. He never served in any public position, though apparently, he personally knew Augustus. Writing his massive history of Rome absorbed his adult life.
Though Romans at the time of his writing held his work in high regard, we know that some parts of Livy’s historical accounts were surely based on minimal records, old and dubious oral stories, and even legend. After all, he wrote 2,000 years ago about people and events of as much as eight centuries before his time. “I hope my passion for Rome’s past has not impaired my judgment,” he opined in his introduction to Ab Urbe Condita, “for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer in good citizens and noble deeds.”
“The old Romans,” wrote Livy of his countrymen before the beginning of the Republic, “all wished to have a king over them because they had not yet tasted the sweetness of freedom.” But then in 508 BC, Romans mounted a truly historic revolution of both ideas and governance. They overthrew the monarchy and established a new order that ultimately included a Senate of nobles, popularly elected Assemblies, the dispersion of centralized power, term limits, a constitution, due process, habeas corpus, and the widest practice of individual liberty the world had yet seen. Before they lost it all less than five centuries later, they experienced a remarkable rise and fall. […]
From Livy, we learn about Rome’s pivotal wars against the Carthaginians, the Samnites, and other peoples of the Italian Peninsula. He also informs us of the rivalry between Sulla and Marius, the tumultuous last days of the Republic as strong men fought each other for power, the murder of Julius Caesar, and the self-serving machinations of Augustus. Livy celebrated the courage of his ancestors; in fact, he originated the phrase, “Fortune favors the brave,” which is still used commonly today as a maxim and a motto.
Lawrence W. Reed, “Lessons from Livy on How Great Civilizations Rise and Fall”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-06-28.
October 11, 2021
QotD: Columbus Day
But when Columbus landed on the Caribbean Island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, he set off a wave of exploration and colonization which the previous discoveries had not. The Viking and Chinese settlements did not last, but the post-Columbian ones did. And that is an incredibly significant historical event, no matter how you view history.
In the 1970s it became popular on the left to consider Columbus a monster, a villain who gave the innocent and peaceful natives diseases, enslaved them, wiped out their culture, and destroyed all that was good. This theory teaches that the American natives were all good and peaceful and wonderful and just and true and righteous. They all ate free trade non-GMO gluten free food and were perfectly multicultural and non-judgmental, free of war and with perfect gender equality. Columbus, an evil white European showed up and ruined it all. In short, Columbus he infected the Eden-like paradise of the Americas with his Euro-masculinity.
And the origin of this theory is that of the Noble Savage. There were people living outside the evil corrupting influence of White European Males, and Columbus found them and ruined everything. That’s why when you hear someone talking about this, they never mention the nearly-constant wars, cannibalism, human sacrifice, rape, pillaging, genocide, disease, poverty, and incredible lack of technical and scientific, artistic, and literary knowledge of the native peoples of America.
Columbus was a man of his time, and a particularly greedy one at that. He ripped off his own people, acting as the King’s supreme representative and authority in the Americas (which at the time was not known to be as vast as it is). He took credit for what others did, he took over what they developed, he took the riches they found, and so on. And yes, he and his men enslaved the local natives, and because of their culture of “free love” spread European venereal diseases among the natives they were not exposed to before. Entire tribes were wiped out by the infections they had no resistances to.
Of course, the natives spread disease among the Europeans they hadn’t been exposed to, either, such as Typhus and Syphilis, and the natives were murderous and killed Europeans but those are details that modern revisionist historians either ignore, gloss over, or present as a rough sort of justice: they had it coming for daring to set foot in the Eden of the Americas.
Objectively, neither side was particularly admirable, as one would expect if you understand innate and original sin. If what’s bad comes from within us rather than outside influences, then its spread evenly throughout all humanity without regard to creed, culture, race, or location. The natives were bad because people are bad. The Spaniards and Columbus (who was Italian) was bad, because people are bad.
Christopher Taylor, “Eden Ruined By Italian”, Word Around the Net, 2018-10-09.
October 10, 2021
QotD: The taste for ugliness
The word ugly does not quite capture the connotations of the word “moche“, which include those of bad taste. If I were to try to make a table, it would probably be ugly due to my incapacity as a woodworker, but not moche.
I must say that the publishers of the book (Fayard) have done the author proud. The shiny cover of the book is vivid purple at the top, descending by various shades of unpleasant colours to a bilious yellow at the bottom. The typeface is also in purple, and the pages the same shade of yellow where they are bound into the spine. It is, as an artifact, aesthetically appalling, as obviously it was meant to be.
If we lived in a normal world, the deliberate creation of something ugly would be regarded as reprehensible: but we do not live in such a world.
The author is an apologist for the ugly, seeing the search for beauty as a kind of totalitarian dictatorship against which the ugly is a justified or necessary revolt or uprising, a cry for individual freedom.
She is a Parisian bourgeoise who has been taught to decry and therefore to reject her own previous privilege. In her own estimate, she was unfortunate to have been so fortunate as to have been surrounded by beauty.
This highly ideological, dog-in-the-manger attitude to beauty is commonplace and has almost been made the basis of official policy — or if it has not, it might just as well have been.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Kitsch and Our Taste for the Ugly”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-18.
October 9, 2021
QotD: China’s “social credit” policy
The China lobby excuses the policy by comparing it to Western customer loyalty programs and asserting that it’s not in place around the whole country yet. In truth, it’s a typical aspect of Chinese communism, which loosens the reins for a period before tightening them again. Mao instituted the “Thousand Flowers” campaign in the ’50s that encouraged criticism of the party, following up a few years later with the Great Cultural Revolution, in which those critics were shot or sent to the Gobi.
Like it or not, progress of any sort – social, scientific, artistic – is propelled by the mavericks. Beethoven, Tesla, Einstein, Patton, Kubrick, Trump … all individualists – cantankerous, arrogant, belligerent – who pushed against social inertia, no matter what the consequences. Their story, from Socrates on, is the story of the West. With the “Social Credit” program, China is returning to its immemorial preference for stasis, which has led to disaster time and again. The end result will be a society that is stratified, ossified, and petrified. There is evidence that this is occurring right now.
J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.
October 8, 2021
QotD: Coping with the Karens
So then I changed tactics. Even the most draconian jurisdictions had mask exemptions for certain kinds of disability, so I became “disabled”. When Karen started shouting at me, I simply replied, calmly and quietly: “I have a disability; I’m exempt.” That worked 95% of the time. But for the hardcore Karens, I had to break out the big guns. Some of them were bitchy enough to actually ask me “what disability?”, and that’s when it was time to take sweet, sweet revenge.
See, as Martinian notes, the coin of the realm with Karen is attention. She wants fawning adulation, of course, but she’ll happily take negative attention, because as I’ve written many times re: The BCG, having “h8rz” on social media just confirms how awesome and fascinating you are. The only kind of attention Karen can’t stand is the kind that cuts her off from the group. “Disability” is the perfect way to flip that on her. For your information, I have PTSD. I watched my buddies die in my arms at Chung King and Chow Mein and Al-Kahaliq and Fuckaduckabad. How dare you dishonor my sacrifice, Karen? How dare you?!?
It’s grossly undignified on both sides, but all’s fair in civil war.
Severian, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-23.
