Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2023

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was initially quite interested in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, but given the criticism from historians, I doubt I’ll make the effort to see the film in the theatre. I’ve quite enjoyed some of Scott’s earlier “historic” movies, but it appears that he’s taken the historical figure of Napoleon and “interpreted” it to better fit his preferences for a film. Bret Devereaux‘s initial response is rather telling:

For this week’s musing, I want to comment at least briefly on dust-up surrounding Ridley Scott’s latest film, Napoleon and historians. As was evidently heavily reported, Ridley Scott responded to historians doing critiques of the film’s historical accuracy by telling them to “get a life” and suggesting that the earliest works on Napoleon were the most accurate and that subsequent historians have just progressively gotten more wrong.

I think there are two questions to untangle here: is the film accurate and does it matter? Now I haven’t yet seen the film, I’ve only seen the trailer. But my response to the trailer seems to have been basically every historian’s response to the trailer: Napoleon shows up at all sorts of places, doing all sorts of things he didn’t do. In particular, the battle scenes I’ve seen in the trailer and other snippets bear functionally no relationship to either Napoleonic warfare in general or the Battle of Austerlitz in particular (the bit with large numbers of soldiers drowning in a frozen lake was disconfirmed at the time; the lake was drained and few remains were found).

All of this is not a huge shock. All of Ridley Scott’s historical movies take huge liberties with their source material. Sometimes that’s in the service of a still interesting meditation on the past (Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Duel), sometimes in service of just a fun movie (Gladiator). Ridley Scott, in particular, has never mastered how basically any historical battle was fought and all of the battle scenes in his movies that I’ve seen are effectively nonsense (including Gladiator, which bears functionally no relationship to how Roman armies actually fought open field battles). Cool looking nonsense, but nonsense. Heck, Gladiator‘s entire plot is basically nonsense with some characters sharing historical names and very little else with their actual historical counterparts (the idea of Marcus Aurelius aiming to restore the republic in 180 is pretty silly).

So it isn’t a surprise that Ridley Scott’s grasp on Napoleonic warfare is about at the level of a not particularly motivated undergraduate student or that he has finessed or altered major historical details to make a better story. Its Ridley Scott, that’s what he does. Sometimes it works great (Kingdom of Heaven), sometimes it works poorly (Exodus: Gods and Kings).

Does it matter?

Unsurprisingly, I think that Ridley Scott is being more than a bit silly with his retorts to historians who are using his film as an opportunity to teach about the past. That’s what we do. Frankly, I find the defensiveness of “get a life” more than a bit surprising, as I assumed Ridley Scott knew he didn’t have much of a grasp on the history and was OK with that (or better yet, did have a grasp on it, but chose to alter it; I do not get this sense from his commentary), but it rather seems like he thinks he does know and is now very upset with the D+ he got on his exam and has decided to blame his “nitpicky” professor instead of his not having done the reading.

That said, when it comes to criticism (in the sense of “saying things are wrong“, rather than in the sense of “critical analysis”), I think there is a distinction to make. In the past I’ve framed this as the degree to which works “make the claim” to some kind of historical validity. It might be a fun exercise to talk about the armor in, say, Dungeons and Dragons or The Elder Scrolls and we might even learn something doing that, but neither of those works is making any claim to historical accuracy or rootedness. And so the tenor of the discussion is quite different.

But here I think Ridley Scott is to a significant degree making the claim. Of the battles, Ridley Scott says, “It’s amazing because you’re actually reconstructing the real thing” and that he “started to think like Napoleon”, which is once again both clearly making that claim (“the real thing”) and also just a remarkable thing to say given how much of a mess his battle scenes generally are. He also comments that “the scale of everything is so massive … I’d have 300 men and a hundred horses and 11 cameras in the field” and while that’s far more cameras than were on any Napoleonic battlefield, that’s just not a statement which suggests that Ridley Scott is even very aware of other achievements in recreating historical battles. Gettysburg (1993) had something on the order of five thousand reenactors on the field for filming and it is by no means the largest such effort! Spartacus (1967) had a cast of eight thousand Spanish soldiers to play the Roman legions.

So while I do not know if Napoleon is a good movie or not – I haven’t seen it yet – it seems pretty clear to me that Ridley Scott did make the claim for some of its fundamental historicity and the response of historians has been to reject that claim. And I think it’s actually quite fair to also skewer the apparent whiny arrogance of Scott making that claim baselessly and then responding petulantly when historians handed him that “D+, please come see me after class”. If you want to make historical fiction, by all means do – Scott is very good at it! – but do not be upset if historians call it what it is.

November 24, 2023

The Man Who Started the Cold War

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Nov 2023

What if I told you that a new conflict will sweep the globe in less than a year? It will open not with gunshots but with silent, shadowy espionage. The man who will kick off the Cold War is a quiet Canadian pilot, millionaire, and spymaster. A trusted aide to Churchill and FDR. I bet you haven’t heard this name before: William Stephenson.
(more…)

November 22, 2023

“[T]he Tudors were indeed pretty awful, and that the writers who lived under this dynasty did serve as propagandists”

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

I quite like a lot of what Ed West covers at Wrong Side of History, but I’m not convinced by his summary of the character of King Richard III nor do I believe him guilty of murdering his nephews, the famed “Princes in the Tower”:

As Robert Tombs put it in The English and their History, no other country but England turned its national history into a popular drama before the age of cinema. This was largely thanks to William Shakespeare’s series of plays, eight histories charting the country’s dynastic conflict from 1399 to 1485, starting with the overthrow of the paranoid Richard II and climaxing with the War of the Roses.

This second part of the Henriad covered a 30-year period with an absurdly high body count – three kings died violently, seven royal princes were killed in battle, and five more executed or murdered; 31 peers or their heirs also fell in the field, and 20 others were put to death.

And in this epic national story, the role of the greatest villain is reserved for the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III, the hunchbacked child-killer whose defeat at Bosworth in 1485 ended the conflict (sort of).

Yet despite this, no monarch in English history retains such a fan base, a devoted band of followers who continue to proclaim his innocence, despite all the evidence to the contrary — the Ricardians.

One of the most furious responses I ever provoked as a writer was a piece I wrote for the Catholic Herald calling Richard III fans “medieval 9/11 truthers”. This led to a couple of blogposts and several emails, and even an angry phone call from a historian who said I had maligned the monarch.

This was in the lead up to Richard III’s reburial in Leicester Cathedral, two and a half years after the former king’s skeleton was found in a car park in the city, in part thanks to the work of historian Philippa Langley. It was a huge event for Ricardians, many of whom managed to get seats in the service, broadcast on Channel 4.

Apparently Philippa Langly’s latest project — which is what I assume raised Ed’s ire again — is a new book and Channel 4 documentary in which she makes the case for the Princes’ survival after Richard’s reign although (not having read the book) I’d be wary of accepting that they each attempted to re-take the throne in the guises of Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

The Ricardian movement dates back to Sir George Buck’s revisionist The History of King Richard the Third, written in the early 17th century. Buck had been an envoy for Elizabeth I but did not publish his work in his lifetime, the book only seeing the light of day a few decades later.

Certainly, Richard had his fans. Jane Austen wrote in her The History of England that “The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians, but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man”.

But the movement really began in the early 20th century with the Fellowship of the White Boar, named after the king’s emblem, now the Richard III Society.

It received a huge boost with Josephine Tey’s bestselling 1951 novel The Daughter of Time in which a modern detective manages to prove Richard innocence. Paul Murray Kendall’s Richard the Third, published four years later, was probably the most influential non-fiction account to take a sympathetic view, although there are numerous others.

One reason for Richard’s bizarre popularity is that the Tudors were indeed pretty awful, and that the writers who lived under this dynasty did serve as propagandists.

Writers tend to serve the interests of the ruling class. In the years following Richard III’s death John Rous said of the previous king that “Richard spent two whole years in his mother’s womb and came out with a full set of teeth and hair streaming to his shoulders”. Rous called him “monster and tyrant, born under a hostile star and perishing like Antichrist”.

However, when Richard was alive the same John Rous was writing glowing stuff about him, reporting that “at Woodstock … Richard graciously eased the sore hearts of the inhabitants” by giving back common lands that had been taken by his brother and the king, when offered money, said he would rather have their hearts.

Certainly, there was propaganda. As well as the death of Clarence, William Shakespeare — under the patronage of Henry Tudor’s granddaughter — also implicated Richard in the killing the Duke of Somerset at St. Albans, when he was a two-year-old. The playwright has him telling his father: “Heart, be wrathful still: Priests pray for enemies, but princes kill”. So it’s understandable why historians might not believe everything the Bard wrote about him.

I must admit to a bias here, as I wrote back in 2011:

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that I portrayed the Earl of Northumberland in the 1983 re-enactment of the coronation of Richard III (at the Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto) on local TV, and I portrayed the Earl of Lincoln in the (non-televised) version on the actual anniversary date. You could say I’m biased in favour of the revisionist view of the character of good King Richard.

November 12, 2023

The most dangerous man in the world?

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on Daniel Jupp’s new biography of Bill Gates, Gates of Hell: Why Bill Gates is the Most Dangerous Man in the World:

A new book, Gates of Hell: Why Bill Gates Is the Most Dangerous Man in the World by Daniel Jupp, manages to dissect all of Gates’s activities since September 2011 and has he ever been a busy psychopath. Jupp is one of the several gifted polemicists called forth by the gnarly times we live in. He soared to recognition with witty, but somehow soothing Facebook blasts that combined PJ O’Rourke with Jonathan Swift with Steve Bannon. Everyone passed around his posts exulting. Jupp, if that is his real name, hails from working class England, Essex to be precise-ish, and edits or writes for Country Squire Magazine. Whatever, he is of the time and do we ever need him.

Jupp in Gates of Hell is careful. He does not risk libel, not even a whiff of it. And in contrast to his usual oxygen-rich posts, he is measured, calm, working with a surgeon’s focus, as he peels back the PR, the methodology, the results, the hiding of the malign results, the cantering on to the next heady task as the ultimate white Saviour. Unfortunately, as Jupp describes, Gates is not quite as simple as that. He also changes law, dictates policy in far too many countries where he does not belong, buys all the media, and every politician he can. When he calls, the Great and the Good come to sit in his Presence and be lectured to in that stickily sentimental tone about his noble purpose. When he makes a mistake, and almost everything he does is a mistake, he spends several hundred million dollars buying desperate legacy media and every functional PR firm to cover it up.

Gates’s life changed when his practice of turning competitors to scorched earth, thereby crippling innovation in the digital world, resulted in an embarrassing court case. The sullen, nit-picking slug on trial, radiating contempt is, I suspect, the real Gates, or his shadow self, very much like Gollum in LOTR defending his Precious. Jupp skates by the many charges of sexual abuse, but points out that he formally left Microsoft after one of them became too big to ignore.

Gates then constructed his new self. He married, not a babe, but a substantive character, and had three children in quick succession. He hired the most expensive fixers and PR, and built himself an avuncular sweater-clad persona. He was going to give away his massive fortune, give back to the people from his incredible privilege.

In the ensuing years, that fortune doubled and then doubled again.

That’s because he met Jeffrey Epstein. While Epstein’s sexual activities have received 90% of the attention, his activities during the last years of the Clinton administration are the more significant. First of all, Epstein was running an entrapment scheme for various covert agencies, which made his insinuation into government easy. At the same time, he taught high-level government officials, cabinet ministers, heads of agencies, and the great larcenous dame herself, Hillary Clinton, how to steal. It was a pincer movement. Having second thoughts? Here’s a video of your encounter with a fourteen year old.

I’ll make it super simple: he taught these people, and they weren’t all Democrats, how to stand up a policy meant to benefit the least advantaged, like for instance access to the housing ladder, and then profit off it. Since then every government initiative has carved out for its progenitor, a fortune. His first, of course, was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and James Johnson who ran these agencies into deep bankruptcy, collapsed the ’08 economy, nevertheless walked away with $100 million from a government job. Wall Street Journal reporter, Gretchen Morgenson’s Reckless Endangerment covers the waterfront here.

November 5, 2023

Hugo Chávez

Filed under: Americas, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The most recent entry in the Dictator Book Club at Astral Codex Ten looks at former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez:

Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
Photo by Roberto stuckert Filho/PR via Wikimedia Commons.

All dictators get their start by discovering some loophole in the democratic process. Xi realized that control of corruption investigations let him imprison anyone he wanted. Erdogan realized that EU accession talks provided the perfect cover to retool Turkish institutions in his own image.

Hugo Chavez realized that there’s no technical limit on how often you can invoke the emergency broadcast system. You can do it every day! The “emergency” can be that you had a cool new thought about the true meaning of socialism. Or that you’re opening a new hospital and it makes a good photo op. Or that opposition media is saying something mean about you, and you’d like to prevent anyone from watching that particular channel (which is conveniently bound by law to air emergency broadcasts whenever they occur).

This might not be the only reason or even the main reason Hugo Chavez ended up as dictator. But it’s a very representative reason. If Putin is basically a spook and Modi is basically an ascetic, Hugo Chavez was basically a showman. He could keep everyone’s attention on him all the time (the emergency broadcast system didn’t hurt). And once their attention was on him, he could delight them, enrage them, or at least keep them engaged. And he never stopped. Hugo Chavez was the marathon runner of dictators.

    He was on television almost every day for hours at a time, invariably live, with no script or teleprompter, mulling, musing, deciding, ordering. His word was de facto law, and he specialised in unpredictable announcements: nationalisations, referenda, troop mobilizations, cabinet shuffles. You watched not just for news value. The man was a consummate performer. He would sing, dance, rap; ride a horse, a tank, a bicycle; aim a rifle, cradle a child, scowl, blow kisses; act the fool, the statesman, the patriarch. There was a freewheeling, improvised air to it all. Suspense came from not knowing what would happen.

    There would be no warning. Soap operas, films, and baseball games would dissolve and be replaced by the familiar face seated behind a desk or maybe the wheel of a tractor … it could [last] minutes or hours. Sometimes Chavez wouldn’t be talking, merely attending a ceremony … One time Chavez decided to personally operate a machine on the Caracas-to-Charallave rail tunnel. A television and radio announcer improvised commentary for the first few minutes, but gradually ran out of things to say as the president continued drilling, drilling, drilling. Radio listeners, blind to Chavez pounding away, were baffled and then alarmed by the mechanical roar monopolizing the airwaves. Some thought it signaled a coup.

In 2012, while he was dying of cancer, Chavez gave “a state of the nation address lasting nine and a half hours. A record. No break, no pause.” Put a TV camera in front of him, and the man was a machine.

If he had been an ordinary celebrity, he would be remembered as a legend. But he went too far. He became his TV show. He optimized national policy for ratings. The book goes into detail on one broadcast in particular, where he was filmed walking down Venezuela’s central square, talking to friends. He remarked on how the square needed more monuments to glorious heroes. But where could he put them? The camera shifted to a mall selling luxury goods. A lightbulb went on over the dictator’s head: they could expropriate the property of the rich capitalist elites who owned the mall, and build the monument there. Make it so! Had this been planned, or was it really a momentary whim? Nobody knew.

Then he would move on to some other topic. An ordinary citizen would call in and describe a problem. Chavez would be outraged, and immediately declare a law which solved that problem in the most extreme possible way. Was this staged? Was it a law he had been considering anyway? Again, hard to tell.

Sometimes everyone in government would ignore his decisions to see if he forgot about them. Sometimes he did. Other times he didn’t, and would demand they be implemented immediately. Nobody ever had a followup plan. They expropriated the mall, but Chavez’s train of thought had already moved on, and nobody had budgeted for the glorious monuments he had promised. The mall sat empty; it became a dilapidated eyesore. Laws declared on the spur of the moment to sound maximally sympathetic to one person’s specific problem do not, when combined into a legal system, form a great basis for governing a country.

But Chavez TV was also a game show. The contestants were government ministers. The prize was not getting fired. Offenses included speaking out against Chavez:

    Chavez clashed with and fired all his ministers at one time or another but forgave and reinstated his favorites. Nine finance ministers fell in succession … it was palace custom not to give reasons for axing. Chavez, or his private secretary, would phone the marked one to say thank you but your services are no longer required. Good-bye. The victim was left guessing. Did someone whisper to the comandante? Who? Richard Canan, a young, rising commerce minister, was fired after telling an internal party meeting that the government was not building enough houses. Ramon Carrizales was fired as vice president after privately complaining about Cuban influence. Whatever the cause, once the axe fell, expulsion was immediate. The shock was disorienting. Ministers who used to bark commands and barge through doors seemed to physically shrink after being ousted … they haunted former colleagues at their homes, seeking advice and solace, petitioning for a way back to the palace. “Amigo, can you have a word with the chief?” One minister, one of Chavez’s favorites, laughed when he recounted this pitiful lobbying. “They know it as well as I do. In [this government] there are no amigos.”

… or taking any independent action:

    [A minister] was not supposed to suggest an initiative, solve a problem, announce good news, theorise about the revolution, or express an original opinion. These were tasks for the comandante. His fickleness encouraged ministers to defer implementation until they were certain of his wishes. In any case they spent so much time on stages applauding — it was unwise to skip protocol events — that there was little opportunity for initiative. Thus the oil minister Rafael Ramirez would lurk, barely visible, while the comandante signed a lucrative deal with Chevron […]

    But upon command, the stone would transform into a whirling dervish … the comandante‘s impulsiveness demanded instant, urgent responses. He would become consumed by a theme. Rice! Increase rice production! The order would ricochet through [the government]. The agriculture, planning, transport, commerce, finance, and infrastructure ministers would work around the clock devising a scheme or credits, loans, cooperatives, mills and trucks to have it ready, at least on paper, for the comandante to unveil on his Sunday show. Thus was born the Mixed Company for Socialist Rice. Then, the next week, chicken! Cheaper chicken! The same ministers would forget about rice while they rushed to squeeze farmers, truckers, and supermarkets so that the comandante could say, on his next show, that chicken was cheaper.

… or, worst of all, not enjoying Chavez’s TV shows enough:

    [Ministers had to] arrange their features into appropriate expressions when on camera or in the comandante‘s sight line. This was tricky when the comandante did something foolish or bizarre because the required response could contradict instinct … Missing a cue could be fatal. During a show the comandante‘s laser-beam gaze swung from face to face, spotlighting expressions, seeking telltale tics. Immediately after a broadcast, Chavez reviewed the footage, casting a professional eye over the staging, lighting, camera angles — and audience reaction.

    The comandante‘s occasional lapses into ridiculous were inevitable. He spoke up to nine hours at a time live on television, without a script … Being capricious and clownish also sustained interest in the show and underlined his authority. No other government figure, after all, dared show humour in public. But on occasion this dissolved into absurdity. Who tells a king he is being a fool?

    Ministers faced another test of the mask in September 2007, when the comandante announced clocks would go back half an hour. The aim was to let children and workers wake up in daylight, he said. “I don’t care if they call me crazy, the new time will go ahead, let them call me whatever they want. I’m not to blame. I received a recommendation and said I liked the idea.” Chavez wanted it implemented within a week — causing needless chaos — and bungled the explanation, saying clocks should go forward rather than back. If ministers realized the mistake, they said nothing, only smiled and clapped […]

    On rare occasions the correct response was not obvious, sowing panic. In a speech to mark World Water Day in 2011, the comandante said capitalism may have killed life on Mars. “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.” Some in the audience tittered, assuming it was a joke, then froze when they saw neighbors turned to stone. To these audience veterans it was unclear if it was a joke, so they adopted poker faces, pending clarification. It never came; the comandante moved on to other topics.

How did a once-great nation reach this point? I read Rory Carroll’s Comandante to find out.

October 31, 2023

In the 1920 presidential election, Americans voted overwhelmingly for a return to “normalcy”

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Warren G. Harding’s term in office has been treated like a punchline by progressive writers and commentators for a century, but Lawrence W. Reed refutes this easy mockery and points out that the winner of the 1920 election deserves much better:

Warren G. Harding, 14 June 1920.
Library of Congress control number 2016828156

Routinely dismissed as a bad chief executive, Harding’s reputation is undergoing a long overdue renovation. The latest contribution in that regard is a new, must-read biography by Ryan S. Walters titled, The Jazz Age President. Read it, and you’ll forever be skeptical of the lazy, biased, conventional historians who worship power and those who wield it.

Warren Harding didn’t just tell audiences what they wanted to hear. He sometimes told them what they did not want to hear. He went to Birmingham, Alabama to condemn racism and Jim Crow laws, for example — a fact I’ve previously pointed out.

Conventional historians praise Presidents for the bills they signed into law but often it requires more courage and conviction to veto them. On that score too, Harding can be judged favorably. He vetoed six bills in the 2-1/2 years he served in the White House. None of the six was overridden. That may not sound like a lot but remember, his party controlled both houses by big majorities; Congress didn’t send him much it thought he wouldn’t sign.

Four bills Harding vetoed concerned minor issues and generated little attention, but one concerned a bonus for veterans of World War I. It stirred up quite a fuss. As the bill worked its way through the House and Senate, Harding gave ample warning that he wouldn’t even consider a bonus that wasn’t paid for. Congress ignored him and sent the bill to his desk. He rejected it, noting as follows:

    In legislating for what is called adjusted compensation, Congress fails to provide the revenue from which the bestowal is to be paid. We have been driving in every direction to curtail our expenditures and establish economies without impairing the essentials of governmental activities. It has been a difficult and unpopular task. It is vastly more applauded to expend than to deny.

After the Civil War, Congress paid pensions to veterans of the conflict and their dependents. Sixty years later, in 1923, it sent a bill to Harding to grant pensions to women who married aging Civil War veterans long after the war. It even authorized higher payments to them than what recent widows of veterans in the war with Germany were getting. His veto message included this unassailable objection:

    The compensation paid to the widows of World War veterans, those who shared the shock and sorrows of the conflict, amounts to $24 per month. It would be indefensible to insist on that limitation upon actual war widows if we are to pay $50 per month to widows who marry veterans 60 years after the Civil War.

Congress should have known better than to expect Harding to sign such bills. This was the same man who declared at his modest, unembellished inauguration that “Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government”. He had expressed a desire to put “our public household in order”. He said he wanted “sanity” in economic policy, combined with “individual prudence and thrift, which are so essential to this trying hour and reassuring for the future”.

If somebody told me all that, I wouldn’t even think of asking him to approve a check for an able-bodied 30-year-old simply because she married an 80-year-old veteran.

This was the same Warren Harding, remember, who gave the country perhaps the best Treasury Secretary in its history, Andrew Mellon. According to historian Burton Folsom, Mellon slashed government expenses and eliminated an average of one Treasury staffer per day for every single day he held the office. Harding, Mellon and Calvin Coolidge (Harding’s successor), together with a friendly Congress, reduced the federal budget and cut the national debt by more than one-third.

October 29, 2023

QotD: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will

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

Eighty-five years ago today, the National Socialist Party was midway through its hugely successful rally at Nuremberg — the Reichsparteitag des Willens, or Rally of the Will. Unlike previous get-togethers, the 1934 rally would produce a hit movie, one that cinéastes still watch with appalled fascination to this day. Its creator was a brilliant cinematographer and editor who could compose and edit anything — except, in the end, her own life. If only she’d been able to snip one problematic decade out of her 101 years, we’d know Leni Riefenstahl as a game old gal who in her sixties went off to live with an African tribe, in her seventies learned to scuba dive, and at the age of 98 survived a plane crash in the Sudan. There was a documentary made about her a few years back in which she’s seen getting off the boat at the end of a day’s diving. The captain and her friend Horst walk up the pier ahead of her, lost in conversation. She follows behind, carrying her scuba gear and oxygen tank. She’s 92, and it never occurs to either man to give her a hand. They don’t think of her as a woman or as a nonagenarian.

Ah, if only it weren’t for that awkward patch …

In the 1930s, Fräulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and, after attending the Reichsparteitag des Willens in 1934, produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will.

Go back to that scuba-diving disembarkation scene in Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl. In theory, it could all be a setup, and the participants chewed over how best to do it beforehand and did fifteen takes: anyone who’s worked in documentaries knows how phony the whole business is. But the point is it seems careless — as if it happened, and the camera happened to be there to record it.

There’s no sense of that in any frame of Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934, and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, it’s still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fräulein Riefenstahl’s official explanation to the end — that this was just a “documentary record” of the 1934 annual party convention. Early on, we see the Führer‘s motorcade driving through Nuremberg, with what seems like the entire citizenry jammed on to the streets to greet him. Riefenstahl’s camera shoots Hitler (if you’ll forgive the expression) from directly behind him, a sequence which for some reason always reminds me of Gore Vidal’s boast that only very famous people such as himself know what the back of their heads look like. There’s a fabulous moment when the great man — Adolf, not Gore — is responding to the Hitler salutes offered up by the crowds with his campy little elbow-bend and wrist-flip and, as his Mercedes moves forward, the sun catches his fingers and fills the palm, first bathing it in glory and then making it appear as if the Führer‘s hand is the very source of the sunlight itself. Did the director just get lucky? Did the sun just happen to hit? Seconds later, we cut to a long shot of Hitler in the Mercedes continuing down the street. There’s no camera in the car, although the scene we’ve just witnessed could only have been filmed by someone in the back seat. Another minute goes by, and we’re back to the close-up of the Führer‘s neck.

Did she stop the car, get out and film the long shot, and then get back in? Did Leni get Adolf to do re-takes? Or maybe she made the entire population of Nuremberg re-take the scene; maybe they staged the procession twice. If Hitler was unusually agreeable about taking direction, it was because this was never a filmed record of an event so much as an event created for the film. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, it’s not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films — not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organized — and, if that isn’t the essence of totalitarianism, what is? Riefenstahl has the same superb command of the crowd as Busby Berkeley, the same flair for human geometry (though Berkeley would have drawn the line at giving the gentlemen of the chorus as swishy a parade step as Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard do).

Mark Steyn, “Triumph of the Will”, SteynOnline, 2019-09-07.

October 8, 2023

Richard Blair’s memories of his father, George Orwell

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

Jonathon Van Maren contacted Richard Horatio Blair, the adopted son of George Orwell to discuss his memories of his famous father:

“My story starts on the 14th of May, 1944, when I was adopted by Eric Arthur Blair and his wife Eileen,” he told me. “This was during the Second World War. He’d been wanting a child for several years because he felt, rightly or wrongly, that he was unable to have children himself. I think this was compounded slightly by the fact that Eileen — my mother — was not very well herself, and in fact when I was ten months old, in March of 1945, she went to the hospital in Newcastle, which was the area where she was born and had gone to school. She went into a nursing home and died very soon after being anesthetized to have a hysterectomy. She probably had cancer, was very anemic, and simply had a heart attack on the operating table and died.”

The adoption had come about when Eileen was told by her sister-in-law, Dr. Gwen Shaughnessy, that she knew of a pregnant woman whose husband was off fighting. Orwell and Eileen adopted Richard when he was only three weeks old, and Orwell ensured that he alone would be known as Richard’s father by burning the names of the birth parents from the birth certificate with a cigarette. Richard would never know Eileen, as she died a mere nine months after the adoption took place, leaving the little boy and Orwell to fend for themselves. Some of Orwell’s friends suggested that perhaps he turn Richard over to someone else, but Orwell was having none of it. “I’ve got my son now, I’m not going to give him over,” Blair recalled. Blair even remembers Orwell “changing my nappy and feeding me after my mother died.”

“Meanwhile, my father had been asked to go to Germany at the end of the war by his friend, a gentleman by the name of David Astor of the Astor family,” Blair told me.

    He was the proprietor of a newspaper called The Observer, and he asked my father — they had met during the war and become friends — to go to Germany after the war to observe what was happening, and it was while he was in Paris that he got a telegram telling him that Eileen, my mother, had died. He had to rush back and attend to the funeral and funeral arrangements. He decided the best thing he could do would be to go back to Germany and continue his war report, so that’s what he did. I was placed in the hands of relatives and friends to be looked after. I was cared for from that period onward by a nanny.

    In 1946, he had decided to give up his reviews and extra work, because by now he had published his first major book, Animal Farm, which gave him enough resources to think about what to do next. And he had in his mind by then that he wanted to write what turned out to be 1984, and he decided to take the invitation of his friend David Astor to go to a remote island off the west coast of Scotland called Jura. He went up for a holiday and spent a couple of weeks there in the early part of 1946, came back, and announced that he would like to move out of London to this island of Jura and rent a farmhouse called Barnhill. A few weeks later I joined him with my nanny at the farmhouse, a place he had indicated to a friend was a very ‘un-get-at-able’ place.

Indeed it was. To reach the remote Hebridean island from London, “you had to take a train and several ferries, and then a taxi from the top part of the island, and then for the last five miles you had to walk,” Blair recalled. At first, it was Richard, Orwell, and his nanny, Susie Watson. This didn’t last long: Watson clashed with Orwell’s younger sister Avril and returned to London. “From that point on,” Blair told me, “I was cared for by my father’s sister Avril, and that continued well past when he died in 1950.” In the meantime, Blair still had a few precious years with his ailing father, who was trying to balance his fear of passing on his tuberculosis to his son with wanting to be an involved father. “He was really hands-on in a way that was really unusual for that era,” Blair told one interviewer.

In fact, he was so hands-on that he even worried about Richard’s television consumption, which is perhaps not surprising from someone who was so concerned about how people absorbed information — but Richard was, at this point, a very small child. “As a father he was completely devoted to me,” Blair told me. “He was terribly worried about my emotional development simply because he had TV, and he was very concerned that the views [on TV] might be passed on to me.” Blair still bears a scar on his temple from balancing on a chair while “watching him make a wooden toy for me”. He fell off the chair, cracked his head, and was bustled down to the village for a few stitches in the enormous gash on his forehead. “There’s a groove in the bone,” he ruefully told one interviewer. But there were no tests in those days, and so his head was sewn shut and he was sent back home again.

September 14, 2023

Scott Alexander reviews the (old) Elon Musk biography

Filed under: Books, Business, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s okay, he makes it clear from the start that he’s talking about Ashlee Vance’s earlier work, not the one that just hit the shelves this year:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now.1

I read the book to try to figure out who that was. Musk is a paradox. He spearheaded the creation of the world’s most advanced rockets, which suggests that he is smart. He’s the richest man on Earth, which suggests that he makes good business decisions. But we constantly see this smart, good-business-decision-making person make seemingly stupid business decisions. He picks unnecessary fights with regulators. Files junk lawsuits he can’t possibly win. Abuses indispensable employees. Renames one of the most recognizable brands ever.

Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart – a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future delights in its refusal to resolve the dissonance. Musk has always been exactly the same person he is now, and exactly what he looks like. He is without deception, without subtlety, without unexpected depths.

The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world. When he decides to do something, he comes up with an absurdly optimistic timeline for how quickly it can happen if everything goes as well as the laws of physics allow. He – I think the book provides ample evidence for this – genuinely believes this timeline,2 or at least half-believingly wills for it to be true. Then, when things go less quickly than that, it’s like red-hot knives stabbing his brain. He gets obsessed, screams at everyone involved, puts in twenty hour days for months on end trying to try to get the project “back on track”. He comes up with absurd shortcuts nobody else would ever consider, trying to win back a few days or weeks. If a specific person stands in his way, he fires that person (if they are an employee), unleashes nonstop verbal abuse on them3 (if they will listen) or sues them (if they’re anyone else). The end result never quite reaches the original goal, but still happens faster than anyone except Elon thought possible. A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.

This is the Musk Strategy For Business Success; the rest is just commentary.

    1. Vance starts with the story of the biography itself. When Musk learned he was being profiled, he called Vance, threatened that he could “make [his] life very difficult”, and demanded the right to include footnotes wherever he wanted telling his side of the story. When Vance said that wasn’t how things worked, Elon invited him to dinner to talk about it. Elon arrived late, and spent the first few courses talking about the risk of artificial superintelligence. When Vance tried to redirect the conversation to the biography, Elon abruptly agreed, gave him unprecedented access to everyone, and won him over so thoroughly that the book ends with a prediction that Musk will succeed at everything and become the richest man in the world (a bold claim back in 2015).

    I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request — why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice! If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).

    2. The book gives several examples of times Musk almost went bankrupt by underestimating how long a project would take, then got saved by an amazing stroke of luck at the last second. When Vance asked him about his original plan to get the Falcon 1 done in a year, he said:

    “Reminded about the initial 2003 target date to fly the Falcon 1, Musk acted shocked. ‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘We said that? Okay, that’s ridiculous. I think I just didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The only thing I had prior experience in was software, and, yeah, you can write a bunch of software and launch a website in a year. No problem. This isn’t like software. It doesn’t work that way with rockets.”

    But also, the employees who Vance interviewed admit that whenever Musk asks how long something will take, they give him a super-optimistic timeline, because otherwise he will yell at them.

    3. I wondered whether Elon was self-aware. The answer seems to be yes. Here’s an email he wrote a friend:

    “I am by nature obsessive compulsive. In terms of being an asshole or screwing up, I’m personally as guilty of that as anyone, and am somewhat thick-skinned in this regard due to large amounts of scar tissue. What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why … it’s probably [rooted] in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”

September 11, 2023

Golda Meir

Filed under: History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Oren reviews Golda a new biopic on the life of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir:

Ever since the 1970s, the entrances to many American Jewish institutions have boasted a single bust. It is not of Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, or of Israel’s preeminent leader, David Ben-Gurion, nor even of any prominent American Jew — Justice Louis Brandeis or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The likeness is not flattering. Beneath tightly bunned hair, the face is unsmiling, its features decidedly bland. Their owner never graduated college, wrote a transformative book, or commanded an army. Still, that statue embodies an ideal to which most American Jews aspire: at once patriotic yet open-minded, liberal but muscular, courageous and caring. The bust, moreover, is of a woman and not just any woman. With an accent as flat as the Midwestern plains, four packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and the omnipresent purse that held them, the clunky shoes and grandmotherly attire, she was Everywoman. Yet, in a rags-to-preeminence story so appealing to Americans, that woman rose to become the prime minister of Israel. She was Golda Meir — or, as she’s still colloquially known, simply, Golda.

Until my grandmother’s death at the age of 100, she claimed that the proudest day of her life was hosting Golda for a fundraising event in her Boston home. In 1973, and again in 1974, a Gallup poll named Golda “Woman of the Year”, the only non-American ever to achieve that title, garnering twice as many votes as the runner-up, Betty Ford. Though no feminist — Ben-Gurion once called her “the only man in the government” — she became a poster-child of women’s liberation, appearing under the banner, “But Can She Type?” She served as the subject of two Broadway plays, several documentaries, and a made-for-television movie. Golda characters appear in a variety of productions, from Steven Spielberg’s Munich to season 26, episode 1 of The Simpsons. No fewer than nine English-language biographies have been written about her, in addition to her own memoir, and the recollections of her son. She was — and to a large extent, has remained — an American icon.

Not so for Israelis. For 50 years, the name Golda has been associated with reckless hubris, with humiliation and trauma and the loss of an innocent Israel that can never be retrieved. Most bitterly, the name Golda evokes the memory of the 2,656 Israeli soldiers — 83 times the number, proportionally, of Americans lost on 9/11 — killed on her watch. Israel has no end of streets and facilities named for Ben-Gurion, for Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin, but there are few Golda Meir boulevards or university halls. New York has Golda Meir Square, complete with that unprepossessing bust, but not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Only among Israeli children, born long after her death, does Golda elicit any excitement as the name of a popular ice-cream chain.

Now, half-a-century after her purportedly disastrous performance during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, there are attempts to revisit Golda’s legacy, to examine it in the light of recently released documents, and to reflect on the complex human being behind the bust. Spotlighting these revisions is a bold and riveting new film by Academy Award-winning director Guy Nattiv, starring the incomparable Helen Mirren. After portraying Queens Elizabeth I and II and Catherine the Great, Mirren praised her latest character “one of the most extraordinary I’ve ever played.” That estimation is more than illustrated by the movie simply titled Golda.

[…]

Yom Kippur War — Sinai front 6-15 October, 1973. (via Wikipedia)

Golda Meir remained in her post for another eight months while the people of Israel seethed. Though the Agranat Commission accepted her claim that she acted solely on the defense establishment’s advice and cleared her of any personal responsibility for the war, the population resented the blame placed almost solely on the army. The country, devastated emotionally and economically, was further traumatized by terrorist attacks that killed 52 civilians and wounded 150. Later that year, terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, a holster on his hip, received a standing ovation from the UN General Assembly, which went on to equate Zionism with racism. Succumbing to Arab pressure, 24 of the African countries with which Golda helped establish relations cut ties with Israel. In 1977, the degraded Mapai Party for the first time lost an election to Menachem Begin’s Likud, ending what many Israelis still regard as the state’s golden age.

Such painful events are barely touched upon in either of the Golda films, which prefer to conclude her story with Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in November 1977. The subsequent peace process resulted in the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979, a year after Golda’s death.

Yet her legacy endures — especially now, on the 50th anniversary of the war. Though her standing remains highest in the United States — the Israel National Library reports more searches for her name in English than in Hebrew—in Israel, too, her record is being reconsidered. Here was a woman without military experience who had to rely on men whose expertise on military matters was above reproach. Here was a woman who, when many of those men buckled to pressure, remained clear-headed and strong. And here was a woman who, contrary to long-held wisdoms, repeatedly held out her hand for peace.

Some critics have been unkind to Golda. They take issue with the film’s concentration on her career’s least illustrious period and with the allegedly one-dimensional depiction of a personality known to be compassionate one minute but backbiting the next, alternately maternal and coarse. Most expressed discomfort with the director’s obsession with Golda’s cigarettes — they are practically actors — which earned the film a PG-13 rating for “pervasive smoking”. I, for one, would have liked to see more of Golda’s insecurities about her lack of higher education, military experience, and Hebrew eloquence. I would have welcomed more of the swift-witted Golda who once quipped to Kissinger, arriving in Tel Aviv after exchanging kisses with Egyptian and Syrian leaders, “Why, Mr. Secretary, I didn’t know that you kissed girls, too!”

Nevertheless, Golda must take its place alongside other outstanding portraits of leaders in crisis. Like Gary Oldman’s Churchill in Darkest Hour and Bruce Greenwood’s Kennedy in Thirteen Days, Helen Mirren’s Golda Meir offers a profile of greatness in the face of overwhelming adversity. These are films that, rather than merely report and redramatize facts, show us character. And Golda — the woman, not the myth — should continue to generate our interest as well as our respect. The Everywoman behind the bust should still be revered.

September 7, 2023

J.R.R. Tolkien was completely at odds with the literati of his day

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

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank marks the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien

A romantic Edwardian, steeped in Northern European folklore and Victorian literature, Tolkien was and is despised by large parts of the fashionable literary establishment. I have known very few neutral reactions to his work. People either love or loathe Lord of the Rings, which seems doomed to eternally inspire adoration or ire, and nothing much in between.

The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism”, which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favour of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of dwarves, elves and hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine.

Edmund Wilson called the books “balderdash”, a battle between “Good people and Goblins”. The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. As his work travelled into the 60s, political problems cropped up, with one feminist critic writing a book-length attack on the series to denounce it as “irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine”.

The mystery of how a book can so sharply divide opinion is answered perhaps by how profoundly original and unusual The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s wider legendarium are. They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony. Yet they are as much a radical departure from prior literary forms as modernist literature itself is, making the book doubly at odds with prevailing style and doubly original.

The moralism of Tolkien’s work is not, as some critics seem to suppose, the product of schoolboy simplicity. It is far too rigorous for that. So morally charged and orchestrated is the novel, that it would be numbered amongst the small number of works that might have passed Plato’s test for literature. Not only is this in respect of its exacting honouring of good characters and depreciation of wicked ones within its narrative framework, but equally in Tolkien’s utter refusal of allegory, thus meeting Plato’s challenge that poets are dangerous imitators of the world.

August 15, 2023

History must be forced to fit the narrative

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

Chris Bray revisits an older article from the Obama years:

President Barack Obama and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2014.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

There is no question that authoritarianism is descending on the United States of America, quickly. There is also no question where it’s coming from, as you quickly learn from the current social media musings of the most wonderfully progressive people. Trump must be silenced NOW! Why is the authoritarian being ALLOWED TO SPEAK? Ruth Ben-Ghiat, please call your office.

How have we gotten here?

I’ve mentioned before a looooong essay I wrote, more than ten years ago, about the cottage industry in Barack Obama hagiographies. Obama’s fellatiographers noted, for example, that Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, had been ordered back to Indonesia in 1966, and that photos of him from that time show him in the uniform of the Indonesian army. They also mention, with remarkably disingenuous vagueness, that there was maybe some political trouble going on in Indonesia while Obama was there as a child and his stepdad was a soldier.

But what was happening in the mid-1960s in Indonesia is that the Indonesian Communist Party tried to restructure Sukarno’s careful balancing of competing forces in the new country with the kidnapping and killing of a group of right-wing flag officers by leftist soldiers, beheading conservative military power — after which the military responded with the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of communists, often with machetes and with a serious commitment to doing the job as grimly as possible: bodies in rivers, heads on pikes, slow killing in front of mass graves. Here’s my last paragraph from that section on the Obama biographies:

    And the lesson? Indonesia was where “Ann was Barry’s teacher in high-minded matters—liberal, humanist values”, Remnick concludes. It’s where she taught him the values of “honesty, hard work, and fulfilling one’s duty to others”, where she lectured him about “a sense of obligation to give something back”, Scott adds. It’s where she “worked to instill ideas about public service in her son”. Because Indonesia in the late sixties was the perfect place and time to learn about liberal humanist values and public service.

Barack Obama was a Democrat who attained the presidency, which means that journalists knew he had to be a sainted figure, and he was the first black president, which means that journalists knew he had to be brilliant and extraordinary. So they assembled the threads of his story — Barack Obama went to Indonesia in 1966 with his stepfather, a soldier, during a long period of extraordinarily brutal political retribution by the Indonesian army — and then, pro forma, wove those threads into the foundation of “liberal, humanistic values”.

If Barack Obama had spent his childhood torturing kittens to death and eating their eyeballs in front of a sobbing crowd of kitten-loving toddlers, the Obama biographies would have said that Barack Obama spent his childhood torturing kittens to death and eating their eyeballs in front of a sobbing crowd of kitten-loving toddlers, a heartwarming experience that taught him the value of democratic pluralism and fundamental human decency. The story was written before anyone began working on it: Barack Obama [experience TBD] and [experience TBD], the formative experiences that made him the kind and wonderful genius he is today.

See also this recent discussion with David Garrow, a historian who has written a new (corrected: published a post-Obama-presidency) biography — and who found, as he researched his subject, that he was often looking at evidence no one had ever pursued before. The hagiographers of the Obama presidency-era weren’t looking for evidence; they already knew the story they meant to write. They came up with some evidence-simulating objects for form’s sake, to assemble their liturgy in the apparent form of biography. Their “Barack Obama” was never Barack Obama.

Their “Donald Trump” is not, now, Donald Trump. There’s a formula; they apply it. There’s a narrative to be written. Donald Trump said he would repeal two federal regulations for every new regulation he implemented — textbook authoritarianism! Donald Trump said that America has fought a bunch of “dumb wars”, and should be much more careful about foreign military involvement — JUST LIKE ADOLF HITLER!!!!!!

It’s beside the point to note that the conclusions never matched the evidence. They were never meant to.

This is crazymaking behavior. Constantly spinning narratives that have nothing to do with anything in the actual, physical world is a recipe for a psychotic break. And we have multiple layers of institutional actors who cosplay “elite” — in media, in academia, in government, and in corporations — who’ve been playing with their shadow puppets for so long that they’ve forgotten they’re shadow puppets. They believe themselves.

That’s how you get to we need a single-party ballot to prevent authoritarianism and we have to arrest the opposition leader to prevent authoritarianism. It’s socially distributed insanity, a real descent into the world of false symbols. And it’s becoming incredibly dangerous.

August 12, 2023

Churchill and India

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Food, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andreas Koureas posted an extremely long thread on Twitter, outlining the complex situation he and his government faced during the Bengal Famine of 1943, along with more biographical details of Churchill’s views of India as a whole (edits and reformats as needed):

The most misunderstood part of Sir Winston Churchill’s life is his relationship with India. He neither hated Indians nor did he cause/contribute to the Bengal Famine. After reading through thousands of pages of primary sources, here’s what really happened.

A thread 🧵

I’ve covered this topic before, but in a recent poll my followers wanted a more in-depth thread. Sources are cited at the end. I’m also currently co-authoring a paper for a peer reviewed journal on the subject of the Bengal Famine, which should hopefully be out later this year.

I’ll first address the Bengal Famine (as that is the most serious accusation) and then Churchill’s general views on India. It goes without saying that there will be political activists who will completely ignore what I have to say, as well as the primary sources I’ll cite. I have no doubt, that just like in the past, there will be those who accuse me of only using “British sources”.

This is not true. I have primary sources written by Indians as well as papers by Indian academics.

Moreover, I have no doubt that such activists will, choose to “cite” the ahistorical journalistic articles from The Guardian or conspiratorial books like Churchill’s Secret War by Mukerjee — a debunked book that ignores most of what I’m about to write about, and is really what sparked the conspiracy of Churchill and the Bengal Famine. For everyone else, I hope you find this thread useful.
(more…)

August 4, 2023

Tsar Vlad’s biography

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

Scott Alexander reviews The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen:

Vladimir Putin appeared on Earth fully-formed at the age of nine.

At least this is the opinion of Natalia Gevorkyan, his first authorized biographer. There were plenty of witnesses and records to every post-nine-year-old stage of Putin’s life. Before that, nothing. Gevorkyan thinks he might have been adopted. Putin’s official mother, Maria Putina, was 42 and sickly when he was born. In 1999, a Georgian peasant woman, Vera Putina, claimed to be his real mother, who had given him up for adoption when he was ten. Journalists dutifully investigated and found that a “Vladimir Putin” had been registered at her village’s school, and that a local teacher remembered him as a bright pupil who loved Russian folk tales. What happened to him? Unclear; Artyom Borovik, the investigative journalist pursuing the story, died in a plane crash just before he could publish. Another investigative journalist, Antonio Russo, took up the story, but “his body was found on the edge of a country road … bruised and showed signs of torture, with techniques related to special military services”.

Still, I’m inclined to doubt the adoption theory. Vladimir Putin’s official father, a WWII veteran and factory worker, was also named Vladimir Putin. The adoption story requires that a child named Vladimir Putin was coincidentally adopted by a man also named Vladimir Putin. Far easier to believe that an old Georgian woman had a son who died or was adopted out. Then, when a man with the same name became President of Russia, she assuaged her broken heart by pretending it was the same guy. Records of Putin’s early life are surprisingly sparse. But there are a few photos (admittedly fakeable), and people who aren’t face-blind tell me that Putin looks very much like his official mother.

As for the investigative journalist deaths, it would be more surprising for a Russian investigative journalist of the early 2000s not to die horribly. Both were researching other things about Putin besides his childhood. and had made themselves plenty of enemies. Russo was in Chechnya at the time, another known risk factor for horrible death. I wouldn’t over-update on this.

Still, I found the adoption controversy interesting as a metaphor for everything about Putin. Vladimir Putin really did seem to appear on Earth – or at least in the corridors of power in Russia – fully formed. At each step in his career, he was promoted for no particular reason, or because he seemed so devoid of personality that nobody could imagine him causing trouble. This culminated in his 2000 appointment as Yeltsin’s successor when “The world’s largest landmass, a land of oil, gas, and nuclear arms, had a new leader, and its business and political elites had no idea who he was.”

My source for this quote is The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen, a rare surviving Russian investigative journalist. As always in Dictator Book Club, we’ll go through the story first, then discuss if there are any implications for other countries trying to avoid dictatorship.

July 24, 2023

QotD: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor after the abdication

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

The author laces his chapters with some memorable phraseology. Of the wedding of David and Wallis in France on 3 June 1937, we are reminded, “Only the most cynical could have begrudged the pair their happy ending, although it remained ambiguous as to who was the dashing prince and who the swooning maiden.” With another coronation in the offing this year, [The Windsors at War author Alexander] Larman dwells on that of George VI (known hitherto at Bertie) at Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937. All the time, we are reminded that the new king loathed the debonair confidence of “the king across the water”, fearing that if he made a hash of the kingship he never wanted, his scheming elder brother might return. This is one theme that runs throughout Larman’s fine scholarship.

We are reminded that the king’s much-rehearsed coronation speech was a success. “Millions of his subjects sat at home listening to the broadcast, willing him to succeed whilst knowing of his stammer and the difficulties that even speaking a few short sentences publicly had caused him … Yet fortunately for the coronation ceremony, the king’s nerves seemed to vanish on the day, aided by his sincere religious faith: another characteristic absent from his brother’s life.”

[…]

One trait that runs through this important book is the personal weakness of the Duke and the compelling strength of his bride. Larman makes it plain that both Baldwin and Chamberlain were aware that it was Wallis who was passing state secrets to German intelligence, although her husband also expressed sympathies for Hitler’s regime. Cecil Beaton, photographer of the David-Wallis wedding in France, noted in his diary that the Duchess “not only has individuality and personality, but [she] is a strong force”. Even as he praised her intelligence and admiration for the Duke, Beaton offered the judgement that she “is determined to love him, though I feel she is not in love with him” — an interesting reflection on the woman for whom her husband had abandoned his throne. In 2015, Andrew Morton dwelt in great detail on Wallis’s treachery in 17 Carnations: The Windsors, The Nazis and The Cover-Up.

Throughout Larman’s compelling read, we are offered evidence of how tone-deaf the Duke was to international protocol, the interests of Britain and the sufferings of others. Anthony Eden, as Foreign Secretary, observed how the pair felt they should be “treated abroad by ambassadors and dignitaries, rather as they would a member of the royal family on a holiday”. This came to a head when friends of the Duke organised a visit to Germany over 11–23 October 1937. They met several leading Nazis, including Hess, Goebbels (who called the Duke “a tender seedling of reason”) and Göring, as well as renewing their acquaintance with Ribbentrop, still then ambassador to Britain. It was Ribbentrop, according to Morton’s book, who had sent Wallis 17 carnations daily “each one representing a night they had spent together”.

On the penultimate day, the Windsors met Hitler at Berchtesgaden. Larman reasons that the visit was as much to show that the Duke and his bride were still relevant in the wider world, as to form a bond with the Führer to avoid future war. As with many public figures of the era, David feared communism far more than fascism, for which he saw the best antidote in an alliance with Germany. We are left wondering whether the Duke observed in Hitler’s authoritarian state all that he admired and wished for Britain, but was now denied.

A subtext to The Windsors at War is just how much anxiety David caused the King, his younger brother, during the run up to war and during it. For most of the period, the Duke badgered for money, confirmation of his status and a royal title for Wallis. Whilst the first was forthcoming, amounting to a financial settlement of £25,000 a year (generous by any standards, considering the Windsors spent their days sofa-surfing and sponging off their rich friends), neither of the latter were. Chamberlain was forced to write that “in addition to letters of protest he had as Prime Minister … all classes stood against him. In addition to the British not wanting him to return, residents of Canada, New Zealand and America wished him to remain in exile”.

Yet, writes Larman, the Duke would not simply “languish in exile and be denied the opportunity to contribute his thoughts on the international situation. This arrogance made him both unpredictable and, with the outbreak of war drawing closer, dangerous. At a time when it was crucial that the loyalties of prominent public figures were transparent, his inclinations remained opaque”.

Peter Caddick-Adams, “The other one”, The Critic, 2023-04-18.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress