Quotulatiousness

July 30, 2022

Alexis de Tocqueville

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

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 29, 2022

Why Ghost Division? What did Rommel do?

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Military History Visualized
Published 5 Feb 2019

Why was Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division called Gespensterdivsion – the “Ghost Division”? From all we know it earned this name during the Battle of France.
(more…)

July 18, 2022

John von Neumann, The Man From The Future

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

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Man From The Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”.

The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived.

By age 6, he could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put “el” before English words and add -o to the end). Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that “he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes”.

A group of scientists encountered a problem that the computers of the day couldn’t handle, and asked von Neumann for advice on designing a new generation of computers that was up to the task. But:

    When the presentation was completed, he scribbled on a pad, stared so blankly that a RAND scientist later said he looked as if “his mind had slipped his face out of gear”, then said “Gentlemen, you do not need the computer. I have the answer.” While the scientists sat in stunned silence, Von Neumann reeled off the various steps which would provide the solution to the problem.

Do these sound a little too much like urban legends? The Tale Of Two Cities story comes straight from the mathematician involved — von Neumann’s friend Herman Goldstine, writing about his experience in The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann. The computer anecdote is of less certain provenance, quoted without attribution in a 1957 obituary in Life. But this is part of the fun of reading von Neumann biographies: figuring out what one can or can’t believe about a figure of such mythic proportions.

This is not really what Bhattacharya is here for. He does not entirely resist gawking. But he is at least as interested in giving us a tour of early 20th century mathematics, framed by the life of its most brilliant practitioner. The book devotes more pages to set theory than to von Neumann’s childhood, and spends more time on von Neumann’s formalization of quantum mechanics than on his first marriage (to be fair, so did von Neumann — hence the divorce).

Still, for those of us who never made their high school math tutors cry with joy at ever having met them (another von Neumann story, this one well-attested), the man himself is more of a draw than his ergodic theory. And there’s enough in The Man From The Future — and in some of the few hundred references it cites — to start to get a coherent picture.

July 15, 2022

Forget George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR – studying the presidency of Jimmy Carter is suddenly more relevant

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

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter by Kai Bird. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter.
Official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Like most people under 70, I was more aware of Carter’s post-presidency role as America’s kindly old grandfather, pottering around holding his wife’s hand and building Houses for Humanity. I mostly knew that he liked to wear sweaters, that he owned a peanut farm, and that he lost to Ronald Reagan.

But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter”. It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.

Carter was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, which, as you can tell from the name “Plains”, is very dull. His father was a successful farmer, which made his family wealthy by local standards. Almost every other Plains resident during Carter’s childhood was an impoverished African-American, many of whom worked on the Carter farm, a fact that is often cited as the answer to the central mystery of Carter’s childhood: how he grew up white in the Depression-era South without becoming a huge racist. It probably doesn’t tell the whole story, though, as his siblings came out just about as racist as you’d expect.

Carter attends the Naval Academy and eventually becomes a lieutenant on a nuclear submarine. At one point, he participates in a cleanup mission in which he is lowered directly into the core of an active nuclear reactor, thus causing him to develop superpowers that he will later use to win the presidency. Perhaps because of this experience — but, more likely, because he realizes that his deep-seated religious beliefs make him a poor fit for a career in an organization designed to wage war — he quits the Navy at 29 and returns home to Plains. “God did not intend for me to kill”, he says, which would have been an awesome catchphrase had those superpowers actually been real.

Searching for a new career, Carter runs for State Senate, loses due to voter fraud, then challenges the results and wins by 15 votes in a new election. A few years later, he runs for governor, and loses for real this time, to avowed segregationist (and man with a truly awesome name) Lester Maddox. Having never experienced failure in any way before, Carter is plunged into a profound spiritual crisis by this loss. Today, we would probably just say he was depressed. But as a religious Christian in the Deep South in 1966, you don’t “get depressed”, you have a spiritual crisis.

In 1970 Carter runs for governor again. This time, however, he decides to do whatever it takes to win. He runs a sleazy campaign that flies in the face of his modern-day reputation as kindly and honest. His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him. He even wins the endorsement of his old opponent, outgoing Governor Maddox, who’s term-limited from running again. As far as anyone can tell, Carter never expresses any second thoughts about his disingenuous behavior during the campaign. Having passed through his spiritual crisis, he’s now guided by an unshakeable faith in his own goodness — a faith that justifies a victory by any means necessary.

The “fake racist” strategy works. Carter trounces his opponent, a wealthy businessman named Carl Sanders who he caricatures as “Cuff Links Carl” — when he’s not busy falsely accusing him of corruption, or hypocritically bashing him for his support of Martin Luther King. In January 1971, Carter is sworn in as the 76th Governor of Georgia.

Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over”. The crowd gasps audibly, and outgoing Governor Maddox denounces Carter as a liar before the inauguration is even over. But Carter doesn’t care. He’s governor now, and he’s going to do what he wants.

July 12, 2022

Ed West – “Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Greece, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Outgoing (in several senses) British PM Boris Johnson was a political throwback in many ways:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold Macmillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History, this obsession with the classics guided his career.

Classics, Holland said, had once been a “how to do politics” course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to “how to behave morally and politically”. This became especially important as elites in Europe and America came to consciously imitate the ancients — five Victorian and Edwardian prime ministers read classics — but “that has not been the case for many, many years”.

Johnson in that way “is a throwback. He is someone for whom classics is central to his education, but I think the thing that is intriguing about it is that he studied it as an example of how to get ahead. He had a properly Greek/Roman understanding of Fortuna, Tyche, chance, this great goddess who has her favourites. He genuinely, in an inchoate sense but in a sense that does seem to be authentic, saw himself as fortune’s favourite, but of course it’s the essence of tragedy, the cruelty and humour of Fortuna, that she raises her favourites up only to hurl them down. The joke that fate has played on Johnson is a particularly cruel one.”

It’s hardly surprising that Boris believed in Fortuna, considering just how much she smiled on him. A little over a year ago I wrote about how incredibly fortunate Boris was to become leader in the middle of a seismic demographic shift that would make life very difficult for the Tories in just a few years.

It was all the more incredible because, just 12 months earlier, it appeared that Boris’s luck had finally run out. Having done everything to climb the greasy pole, Johnson had achieved his goal only for his dreams of power to turn sour. Apollo had fired his arrow at Britain and Boris was left with a country overrun by disease and necessitating authoritarian measures that repulsed him; soon he was sick himself, and it looked like he might follow his idol Pericles a bit too much by dying of the plague.

July 7, 2022

“Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics”

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I’m writing this, Boris Johnson seems to be losing a cabinet minister every couple of hours, and there’s a finite number of them so at some point soon he’s likely to resign — or in Tory tradition, be knifed by a former trusted colleague. Ed West gets in an early political obituary for Boris:

However bad Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far.

There is something charming and colourful about Johnson’s background, the mixture of Turkish, Russian, Jewish and even a Circassian slave just a few generations back (according to Boris himself, and if you can’t trust his version of events, who can you trust?). Just like David Cameron, he is also descended (via a mistress) from George II, the last king of England to fight in battle.

As Rod Liddle once put it, Boris is “the esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation”, and that’s part of the attraction. It explains his ease with people of different backgrounds, and his liberal persona as London Mayor, which felt like the real him, more than his later populist act. It’s why the charges of racism never stuck; he has his faults, but racial prejudice isn’t one of them.

It’s often been noted that Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics while his opponents, both Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, came from that other British political archetype, the do-gooding Puritan. Disraeli and Gladstone were the Platonic examples of these contrast, but the division dates back further to the Civil War, and there could be no doubt which side Boris would have fought for at Marston Moor.

In fact he is almost more like an oriental potentate, a benevolent and cosmopolitan sultan, hampered by court intrigue and presiding over a crumbling empire. At the time of his ascension to Downing Street, Wikipedia listed Johnson’s de jure and de facto spouses, making Boris the first polygamous ruler of England since King Canute. Since coming to power his rule has been marked by unprecedented court drama, with quite obvious parallels to the reign of Henry VIII, with Carrie Symonds as Anne Boleyn and Dominic Cummings playing Thomas Cromwell.

And on his political legacy, such as it might be:

There’s a whole new generation out there who hate progressivism, who don’t want social norms dictated by dysfunctional, miserable people, and yet the Tories have nothing to offer them. Everywhere there is a sense of overwhelming gloom about the state of the country and its lack of future. Boris Johnson, one of the funniest men to inhabit Number 10, has left his audience with a feeling of dread and sadness, a lesson perhaps in allowing newspaper columnists too much of a say.

As Johnson’s rule nears it end, it feels like everything is collapsing, from the health service to the police, even a shared faith in institutions — and as a Conservative voter I’ve got no “buts” to give in response, except perhaps that Corbyn would have been worse.

In clear expectation of the smash, Mark Steyn reposted what he wrote when Boris took possession of Number 10 Downing Street:

Boris Johnson, it seems, is determined to hang on. Tonight I chanced to see, on the one hand, his father, apparently breezy and unperturbed. On the other hand, a senior Tory backbencher told me that, were another confidence vote to be held, Boris would win the support of fewer than sixty Conservative MPs, with over three hundred voting against him.

I don’t really have anything new to say about this failed prime minister because, in the third of a century since I first met him, he has been, in the turbulence of a constantly changing world, eternally unchanging. Here is what I wrote about him upon the occasion of him taking office as PM:

Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy — a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.

What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation — a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s Question Time that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”

“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, God …” he sighed, and ordered dessert.

If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot … and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.

So much for that. That was July 2019. Six weeks later came the first of what would become an avalanche of ministerial resignations …

June 28, 2022

The Early Emperors – Part 5: Claudius, the First Normal Emperor

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 13 Dec 2021

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

June 24, 2022

QotD: “[Woodrow] Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash”

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I come now not to explain Wilson, but to hate him. A national consensus on hating Wilson is long overdue. It is the patriotic duty of every decent American. While conservatives have particular reasons to detest Wilson, and all his works, and all his empty promises, there is more than enough in his record for moderates, liberals, progressives, libertarians, and socialists to join us in this great and unifying cause.

The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.

Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”

Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.

Dan McLaughlin, “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson”, National Review, 2022-03-16.

May 9, 2022

Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

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

Chris Bray is reading a book by Tim Reiterman which goes into great detail about the life and career of cult leader and mass murderer Jim Jones:

Reverend Jim Jones in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Kearny & Jackson Streets during a rally to save the hotel.
San Francisco Chronicle photo by Nancy Wong, 1977 via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1971, Jim Jones loaded up some buses in California and took members of his Peoples Temple across the country to Pennsylvania — to Woodmont, the estate of the late spiritual leader Father Divine, who had a much bigger church (and a lot more money) than Jones did.

Reaching Woodmont, Jones tried Plan A, announcing the glorious news that he was the reincarnation of Father Divine and had come to lead his church again, and we might as well just go ahead and put my name on all the bank accounts; the dead leader’s wife suggested, in fairly clear language, that Jones get back on his bus while he could still walk. The delegation from Peoples Temple took the hint. But Jones also executed Plan B, with modest success: He poached some congregants, and drove them across the country to his own church in Ukiah.

Back home, Jones worried that people who had followed Father Divine would struggle to make the transition, feeling more loyalty to their old leader than to their new one. So he showed them that he couldn’t be crossed. One day, as the refugees from Philadelphia sat eating a meal with everyone else in the communal dining room, Jones walked in and caught several of the earlier members of his church being disloyal to him — and so, pointing a finger, he ordered them to die.

They did, immediately. Bodies littered the floor. Jones let the silence linger, standing over the lifeless bodies of the people who had betrayed his trust, the power of death shooting through his fingertips. And then he showed his merciful side: He resurrected them, a choice that allowed the dead to share the horrible feeling of being struck down by the indescribably vast and awesome power of Jim Jones. Terrified, the new members of the church fell into line.

He did this shit all the time. During recruiting trips to rented churches in other cities, visitors had mid-sermon strokes and heart attacks; nurses in the congregation frantically tried to resuscitate them, but announced that it was too late. But no, the Reverend Jones wouldn’t allow death to strike in his own holy church! Rushing forward and shoving the nurses aside, he commanded the dead to ARISE, ARIIIIISSSSEEE yadda yadda whatever. In 1972, a church bulletin proudly announced that Jones had personally resurrected forty dead people so far in just that one year. And here you are feeling proud that you remembered to make the bed this morning.

I take these stories from Raven, a doorstop-thick history of Jones and Peoples Temple written by the journalist Tim Reiterman (with research assistance from a colleague, John Jacobs). Reiterman decided to write about Jones after he was shot at Jonestown, visiting the final Peoples Temple location with the congressional delegation led by Leo Ryan. The research task was made easier by the self-regard the Reverend Jones had felt, because he left behind a giant catalogue of taped sermons and lectures, and a long paper trail of church bulletins and memoranda. The resulting book is an extraordinarily detailed look at every step Jones took along the path to mass murder, starting with the sadistic hucksterism of his strange childhood.

May 7, 2022

QotD: De Gaulle’s France

Filed under: France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

De Gaulle was as much a Victorian as Churchill, but he lasted much longer, striding into the modern era not just as an object of reverence but as an active political force. His childhood in France’s austere northern regions was soaked in patriotism and religion, administered and absorbed in strong doses which would now be regarded as dangerous. In those years of toy soldiers and strict mealtimes he learned, among other things, to dislike, mistrust, and resent the ancient English foe, so much that he would never fully shake off these feelings. His was the France wounded and dismembered by the debacle of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, appalled by the rising of the Paris Commune, shaken and divided by the wrongful humiliation, prosecution, and cruel imprisonment of Captain ­Dreyfus. The shadow of Germany was unavoidable. In Paris, the statue on the Place de la Concorde that represented the city of Strasbourg was veiled in black, in mourning at its seizure by the German Empire. Professor Jackson tries hard to acquit de Gaulle of any allegiance, then or later, to the ­anti-Dreyfus faction. There is no doubt that de Gaulle in his later life was far too intelligent to fall for the crude anti-Semitism that infects so much French conservatism and was especially strong in de Gaulle’s youth. Still, it is hard to accept that he was never touched by it, and in moments of strain he would make remarks or use derogatory words that no person should make or use.

Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.

May 5, 2022

Belisarius: The Last Battle

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Epic History TV
Published 29 Apr 2022

Thank you to our video sponsor Displate. Get exclusive discounts on metal posters, including original EHTV artwork, using this link:
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Big thanks also to our series consultant Professor David Parnell of Indiana University Northwest, who you can follow on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/byzantineprof

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April 26, 2022

QotD: “Boris Lloyd George”

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

Since Lloyd George’s admirers are usually found at the liberal end of the spectrum, I imagine many of them will be displeased by the comparison. It’s true that Lloyd George — born in 1863, brought up speaking Welsh, steeped in the Baptist faith of his native land — came from a relatively humble background, never went to Eton, was a brilliantly fluent speaker and had an extraordinary appetite for hard work. And in his early days he exhibited an admirable commitment to all kinds of unfashionable causes — that is, until he sold out.

But more than any other twentieth-century PM, the last Liberal premier embodied the ambition, promiscuity and shameless indifference to rules and conventions that have driven Boris Johnson’s critics mad. Boris might be a mountebank, but Lloyd George was the mountebank’s mountebank.

Had he been prime minister during the Covid pandemic, would he have held parties at Number 10? The answer is obvious. He wouldn’t just have invited you to a party, he’d have sold you a peerage and made a move on your wife while you were still hanging up your coat.

Lloyd George was brilliantly funny. He was patriotic. He had the common touch. He was also, to quote Max Hastings on his modern-day successor, a “cavorting charlatan”, a “bully”, a “rogue” and a “scoundrel”, who “would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade”. And like Boris, he never hid it; quite the reverse. “My supreme idea is to get on,” he wrote to his future wife, Maggie Owen, during their courtship. “I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” He meant every word.

According to one of his own aides, Lloyd George was “mental on matters of sex. In his view, a man and a woman could not possibly be friends without sexual intercourse.” That sounds familiar. Like Boris, he could never be entirely sure how many children he had. Within months of his marriage to the stolid and long-suffering Maggie, he had already strayed, impregnating a Liberal activist known only as Mrs J.

Not content with also impregnating his wife’s cousin Kitty, he also had affairs with “Mrs Tim” who was married to his friend Timothy Davies, as well as Julia Henry, another Liberal MP’s wife. He also carried on for decades with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, whom he forced to have at least two abortions. And there were many more — so many that nobody has ever produced a definitive count.

At the time, people joked that Lloyd George had a child in every town in Britain. The story goes that one day his son Dick went into a pub and fell into conversation with a stranger who looked just like him. The stranger eventually confessed that Lloyd George was indeed his father, and was secretly paying him £400 a year. To cap it all, some biographers suggest that Lloyd George also slept with Dick’s troubled wife, Roberta — and this when he was well into his sixties! By these standards, even Boris seems a paragon of fidelity.

Dominic Sandbrook, “How to bring down a Prime Minister”, UnHerd, 2022-01-14.

April 20, 2022

Khrushchev – Stalin’s Loyal Enforcer?

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2022

Nikita Khrushchev has served Joseph Stalin faithfully for the past decade. He’s a career commissar and party man. So, when war breaks out, are commissars like Khrushchev little more than Stalinist enforcers? Or is there more to the institution than that?
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April 18, 2022

Republic to Empire: The Augustan Settlement

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 23 Mar 2021

Here is the tenth lecture, which covers the Augustan Settlement and the ending of the Roman Republic. Discussion includes: the Constitutional Settlements, graphical representations of the old and new Roman Constitutions; opinions in Rome and the provinces of the new order; the legitimisation propaganda; the general success of the reign of Augustus.
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April 12, 2022

Calvin Coolidge: The Silent President

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Biographics
Published 27 Sep 2021

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Source/Further reading:

Miller Center, in-depth overview: https://millercenter.org/president/co…

History Today, overview: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/…

New Yorker, “The case for Coolidge” (cached): https://webcache.googleusercontent.co…

NY Times, “Coolidge, the great refrainer”: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/bo…

NY Times, 1933 obituary for Coolidge: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim…

Atlantic, “Coolidge and depression”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…

Politico, “How Coolidge survived the Harding-era scandals”: https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto…

History, “Boston Police Strike of 1919”: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-h…

Coolidge letter written after death of his son: https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/pr…

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