Coldspur

Much of my August reading was taken up by Rebecca West’s monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her extraordinary account of travels in Yugoslavia just before WWII. The volumes had lain on my bookshelf for about twenty years, after I bought a 1942 edition in a second-hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, and I at last resolved to bring it to the top of my reading-list. It is an amazing tour de force, sparkling with erudition and insight, but also weighed down with some plodding and ingenuous generalization and numerous vague assertions. West’s main thesis is that humanity is burdened by the Black Lamb of brutal sacrifice, exerted by a powerful and superstitions priesthood, and on the other hand, is irreversibly damaged by the cult of suffering and martyrdom in pursuit of unearthly goals, as personified by the Grey Falcon. Liberal by instinct, she uncovers the tortured histories of the Balkan communities that comprised the South Slavs in the 1930s, but her argument is torn by contradictions. She identifies the mixture of race, religion, language and culture that influences and cross-pollinates the various tribes of Yugoslavia, sympathizing with them for their suffering under various incompetent Empires, yet criticizing them for their ancient feuds and ‘race memories’. At the same time she elevates the idea of nationhood, and cultural tradition, as a pointer for future peace, as if cleanly defined nations could emerge from the ashes to which a rampant Nazi Germany (and to her, less obviously, Communist totalitarianism) is about to reduce them. Thus, while showing keen insight into the fragmentation that other writers (such as Robert Kaplan in Balkan Ghosts) have written about, she grossly understates the challenges to nationhood inherent in a backdrop of such remorseless medievalism. A rich selection of quotations – mostly admirable – appears in my Commonplace entry for the month: seeCommonplace2011.  (August 31, 2011)

In July, I read Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22, the paperback release of which I had been waiting for. (Sadly, Hitchens has been struck with esophageal cancer since the original hardback version was published last year. I wish him a speedy recovery.) He has for a long time been a writer I look out for: his erudition and wit have enlivened the book pages of Atlantic Monthly, and I have enjoyed his polemic god is not Great, as well as his collections of essays. A few years ago, Atlantic Monthly published a letter of mine, challenging Hitchens as to why he had not discussed Michael Straight’s assertion that P. G. Wodehouse had expressed sympathy for Hitler and Mussolini in the early 1930s, and Hitchens wrote a shrewd response in the magazine.

Hitch-22 is generally very incisive, insightful, allusive, and entertaining. Hitchens has a wonderfully broad span of interest, and a refreshingly contrarian perspective. But the author comes over as very pleased with himself. He is a big ‘friend-collector’ (although not in the class of Denis Healey: see TheFriendsofDenisHealey). He took a long time to discard his Trotskyist rompers, all the time eager to take the capitalist’s shilling, and remains a ‘socialist’ of undisclosed persuasions. He does not clearly understand what ‘fascism’ is, and his romantic exploration of his Jewish roots lacks the rigour that he brings in his analysis of other issues, showing several categorical mistakes. Like his idol, George Orwell, he seems to have a photographic memory, but, also like Orwell, he is a bit careless in not checking his quotation authorities properly. His accounts of the word-games he plays with his equally self-satisfied literary friends are cringe-making in the extreme. He takes cheap shots at names like Ayn Rand and Stanley Baldwin, without providing any analysis. (And the title he chose for his atheist treatise is absurd, as it explicitly gives the attribute of existence to an entity whose existence he denies.)

But it is in his justification of the war in Iraq that finds Hitchens at his most awkward. Since he had witnessed the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s regime at first hand, he presents the need for intervention by ‘the international community’ (yes, that meaningless cliché – another mythological entity believed in by the ingenuous) as a call for moral action. Yet this argument is rife with contradictions and unimagined complexities. In a letter last year on this subject to the historian, Correlli Barnett (with whom I am in occasional contact, though I cannot claim him as a friend), I wrote, after reading a letter of his in the Spectator that complained about the role of ‘moral obligation’ and ‘mission’ in the execution of British foreign policy:

“i) Foreign policy has to be considered within the pragmatics of economic affordability, and furtherance of national interests. Claiming that such complex issues as nation-building, and resolution of civil wars and tribal conflicts, can be reduced to unambiguous decisions about morality simply devalues the whole debate.

1. ii) If such decisions were really ‘moral’ ones, there would be no choices, no compromises to be made. If it is moral to insert ourselves into Afghanistan, say, it would presumably be immoral not to do so in Somalia or the Congo, for example. Yet the country has to choose. What is the moral guidance for such choices?

iii) The only Law that really takes effect is the Law of Unintended Consequences. For every such apparently well-intended action, there will be outcomes that have deleterious, even fatal, results on some, such as the killing of innocent schoolchildren in drone attacks. What is the morality implicit in that, if the premier goal is one made on specious grounds of morality?

1. iv) I don’t believe that you can raise a volunteer army on the basis that a soldier might have to give his (or her) life simply because a politician (and party) believes that a mission not tightly bound to the nation’s interest and survival has to be undertaken. That itself is immoral, to me.”

(Dr. Barnett agreed with all my points.) Since then, this debate should have intensified, but in fact David Cameron’s coalition has fallen into the same trap. If Colonel Qaddafi should be brought down, why not Robert Mugabe? Or Bashar al-Hassad? Or Kim Jong Il? Or any other number of murderous dictators? For if it is a moral imperative (for whom?) to intervene when a tyrant kills his own citizens, it must be immoral not to do so in circumstances elsewhere. Yet we all know that would be impossible. The challenge has to boil down to pragmatics and priorities, not estimates of moral obligation. Hitchens never discusses this aspect of the problem, and, for all the admission of his maintenance of two sets of mental books, thus falls short in his role of public intellectual.

The normal Commonplace updates posted (Commonplace2011). (July 31, 2011)

I should record that I received a courteous reply from the ODNB editors: it had been busy putting out  a new release.  A quiet month: updates to Commonplace2011 only. (June 30, 2011)

The early part of my May reading was consumed by the 97-year-old Chapman Pincher’s epic and astonishing Treachery, which for some reason was published in the USA a couple of years before its recent appearance in the UK. Pincher makes a devastating case – though based on circumstantial evidence – that Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, was indeed the Soviet spy, Elli, controlled by the GRU, and identified vaguely by Igor Gouzenko, the Soviet defector in Canada. Hollis had been semi-cleared by internal investigations, but the biographical entry in the DNB (and later republished in the ODNB) by his mentor, Dick White (who headed MI5 and MI6) is very equivocal about Hollis’s guilt or innocence. Last year, I had contacted the editors of the ODNB, suggesting, in addition to identifying suitable candidates who merited an entry in the work, that Hollis’s name should now be cleared. This recommendation was based on my reading of Christopher Andrew’s Defending the Realm, which claimed that inspection of Soviet archives had shown that the spy Leo Long was in fact ‘Elli’. On taking a fresh look at the ODNB a couple of weeks ago, I was pleased to see that Ewen Montagu (of Operation Mincemeat, and one of my recommendations) now had an entry, but also noticed that an addendum to Hollis’s entry had been made, echoing my recommendations from last year. It used the authority of Yuri Modin and Christopher Andrew, but illogically implied that since someone other than Hollis (John Cairncross) had been shown to be the Fifth Man, Hollis therefore could not have been a spy! I thus had to write to the Editors again, retracting my previous advice, and pointing out that Elli was handled by the GRU, not the KGB, who handled the Cambridge 5. (Those two organizations did not communicate closely!)  I alerted the editors to Pincher’s new book, but have not yet had the favour of an acknowledgment or reply. Maybe they are fed up with meddling amateurs such as me, but I believe they have an obligation to correct the record, and several entries could benefit from refreshment, and more objectivity. Meanwhile, I am eagerly waiting to read reviews of Pincher’s book from the UK press.     (May 31, 2011)

I took some time out to write an article critiquing a ‘progressive’ idea for taxation, after reading a preposterous letter published in the New York Times (see Eating the Seed Corn) . I should be grateful for feedback on this: I am not a professional economist (thank goodness!), but that fact may well have been a help rather than a hindrance, given some of the articles I have read from professional economists during the past year. I may, however, have overlooked some obvious and relevant perspectives or facts that those many tax accountants and economists among my regular readers may be able to point out for me

I have added Commonplace entries for April (Commonplace 2011), a new batch of Hyberbolic Contrasts (Hyperbolic Contrasts – Examples), as well as a few choice references to Rolls-Royces (Rolls Royces) (May 1, 2011)

A New Year, and a new Commonplace Book opened (Commonplace2011). Quite a rich and varied assortment for January. Please take a look especially at the quotations from Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands – a very impressive, though gruesome, book, that deservedly gained multiple plaudits from the critics. Now I am off to the UK for a dinner, at Whitgift School, to celebrate the Centenary of my father’s birth on February 9th. (January 31, 2011)

It was Clive James, in an essay in the indifferent collection, The Revolt of the Pendulum, who prompted me to pick up in December the memoirs of the British Labour Party politician, Dennis Healey, The Time of My Life. The book is well worth reading (though not as wonderful as James asserts), if you can glide quickly through the portions that display Healey’s affectations. Healey is the first person I have read to debunk that absurd remark from Dean Acheson about Britain ‘losing an Empire and not finding a role’, and the chapter on the hopelessness of trying to manage an economy in a democratic society should be compulsory reading for any dedicated monetarist or neo-Keynesian today. But the contradictions and oversights in Healey’s account of his life are preposterous. Like Brown (and Churchill, of course) he claimed to know nothing about economics when he became Chancellor, yet he had for twenty-five years been espousing a policy of pursuing that ‘irreversible shift of power and wealth to working people’ without an understanding of how wealth is created, or what it would mean for aesthetes like him if such a goal were achieved. He was of that generation (‘Our Age’ as Noel Annan so condescendingly wrote), which was sympathetic to socialism (and occasionally communism) out of some simplistic moral inclination, and shares with us his deluded belief that the UK was fighting the Nazis so that socialism could be built in his native land. His definition of socialism is sloppy, defined primarily by ‘consensus’, and he thus lauds (in 1989) the Japanese economy as it was managed by a multipartite consensual approach to business. Yet he admires constitutions that allow rapid decision-making, and he has the tastelessness to refer to the first two years of Margaret Thatcher’s term of office as a ‘holocaust’. He was disparaging about aristocrats and culture in his firebrand youth, but shows off his cultural accomplishments and boasts of his high-placed friends throughout the book.

Healey’s vast claims of friendship with so many persons really grabbed my attention. He identifies well over 100, most of whom are ‘close’, ‘dear’ or ‘lifelong’, and I have compiled a roster of them, which can be seen on this site at TheFriendsofDenisHealey, a kind of List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen de nos jours.  Last December, after reading Kenneth Clark’s memoirs, I remember posting here the opinion that Clark’s collection of  ‘friends’ made George Weidenfeld (of Remembering My Good Friends) look like a hermit. But Denis Healey makes Kenneth Clark look like St Simeon of Stylites.

Coincidentally, on December 26^th, an Op-Ed piece by Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, titled You’ve Got To Have (150) Friends, appeared in the New York Times. Here Professor Dunbar drew attention to the illusion of the multiplicity of friendships that was enabled through social networks like Facebook, reminding us that ‘our circle of actual friends remains stubbornly small, limited not by technology but by human nature’. He has written a book titled How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks, and frequently lectures on the topic. I then exchanged brief email messages with Professor Dunbar (he is not a friend of mine), pointing out the contribution that memoirs – especially political memoirs – could make to his research, and expressing the hypothesis that that there might be an inverse correlation between the confidence with which one feels one’s fame is merited, and the number of friends that that person makes claim to in his or her memoirs. The professor replied – rather disappointingly – that ‘the short answer is that we haven’t looked at celebrities [sic] friendships at all.’ Get to it, prof!

In December I also read the woolliest and most pointless book on history that I have read for a long time – Robert Dallek’s The Lost Peace. Professor Dallek attempts to analyze the opportunities missed by national leaders between 1945 and 1953 to create a more peaceful world, engaging in his narrative some dubious counterfactual speculation, but not offering any inspection of structural influences that prevented such an idealistic outcome. In underplaying the ideological divide between totalitarianism and constitutional democracies (which he sloppily misrepresents in the Marxian terms of communism versus capitalism, as have so many other historians and commentators), he appears to regard the representatives of both systems as equally morally culpable. Typical of his conclusions is the following observation: “Mao cannot be seen as any wiser than Truman or the Koreans for having entered the conflict [the Korean War]. China’s battlefield casualties were horrendous – more than a million – and the war delayed badly needed investments in the domestic economy to raise the country’s miserably low standard of living.” Irrespective of the US’s adventurism, there appears nothing in this account to suggest awareness of Mao’s later social programs of ‘investment’ – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, in which over 60 million Chinese citizens were to die. Theirs was truly a ‘Lost Peace’ – or alternatively the peace of the graveyard. Didn’t Schiller have it (as J. Wallace Larwood inquired on Peter Sellers’s The Critics) – ‘Die Ruhe eines Kirchhofs!’?

A much better read was David Lodge’s outstanding Deaf Sentence.            All three of these works have contributed to my December Commonplace entries.

A Happy New Year to all my readers!                                                                                                                                                                (December 31^st, 2010)

Similar story to tell!  Updates to Commonplace made for November.  I also draw readers’ attention to the very last item in the November Commonplace entries, an excerpt from aNew York Times report on the celebration by certain Southerners in the USA of the sesquicentennial of their states’ secession from the Union. The New York Times, in its infallible wisdom, has severely reduced the length of the article on its website, declaring bleakly that ‘a version of this article appeared in print on November 30^th’. The quotation that I reproduce runs as follows:

“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known. [While there were many causes for the war,] our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”  It was spoken by a Michael Givens, described as commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and was part of his explanation of plans to air television commercials celebrating secession.

What a series of weasel-words and selective truth-telling appears in this statement! The claim for the spokesperson to represent accurately a large swath of the country (“we in the South”); the sense of grievance and victimization unreasonably claimed for people such as him (“we have been kicked around”); the facile dismissal of charges of racism (when lynching was commonplace less than 75 years ago); the arrogant claim that the truth has been concealed; the sloppy inclusiveness of the speaker and selective forefathers one hundred and fifty years ago (“our people”); the biased view of history and causes, overlooking the defense of slavery (“fighting to protect themselves”); the phoney and folksy communitarianism (“Sons of Confederate Veterans”); overall, a sickly misplaced sense of righteousness in the guise of ‘heritage’.

Cultural traditions such as these are divisive and pernicious. Kosovo Field, the Battle of The Boyne, the American ‘War Between the States’ – they all provide banners that grant a sense of belonging and grievance to individuals who are not strong enough to think for themselves, or to accept their own identity outside some collective grouping of pseudo-ethnicity. Such mutual admirers cannot even be contented with celebrating their aberrations in private, but need to promote their prejudices to society at large. (December 1, 2010)

Another month of Indolence and Procrastination. Just Commonplace entries added. (November 1, 2010)

The first half of September was spent, very pleasantly, staying with our son, James and his wife, Lien, in Santa Clara, California. This visit was marked by the second ace in my golfing career, on the 16^th hole at the Santa Teresa Golf Club, outside San Jose, on September 11th. The hole measures 170 yards, is slightly downhill, although a dip lies in front of the green. The pin was placed just right of a bunker on the left, between the front and centre of the green. The extraordinary aspect of the shot was that it came towards the end of an excruciatingly slow five-and-a-quarter hour round. I am not known for my patience when dealing with slow play, and we had to wait on the tee for ten minutes.  I thus had plenty of time to make adjustments for altitude (about 120 feet above sea-level), wind-speed (5-10 miles per hour), and pin placement, and accordingly put the tee down a bit further back in my stance, and took a little off my 5-wood (!). Immediately the ball was in the air, my son observed that it was going straight at the pin, and then said that the ball must be very close to the hole. I can no longer see 170 yards away, so I just hoped I didn’t have one of those dreadful three-foot knee-knockers for birdie. But when we got up to the green, there was no sign of the ball. Had it gone over the green? No, it was in the cup, and the pleasure was magnified by the fact that my wife, my son, and one of his closest friends were there to witness it. And when my son (after leaving a putt short) pointed out how spongy that particular green was, I was able to remark that I really could not comment. (October 31, 2010)

The usual updates. No progress on the web-site! (September 30, 2010)

I did get the FrontPage book out, but made no progress. Too many other interesting things going on! Just the normal updates. (August 31, 2010)

Updates to Commonplace entries made. It is my intention, in August, to get out my copy of Microsoft FrontPage, Step by Step, and learn how to redesign this website. And I know a lot of people will tell me I shouldn’t be using that product. (July 31, 2010)

I spent most of June on an enjoyable trip to the UK, where I was pleased to link up again with many friends and family members. I spent an afternoon and morning in Oxford, primarily to meet members of the Bodleian Library, but also to see the Wilfred Thesiger exhibition at the Pitt-Rivers museum (a bit thin and disappointing) and the John Aubrey and The Advancement of Learning exhibition at the Bodleian (brilliant). I also spent a day in London, first at the Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library (truly magnificent and unmissable), and last at the Rude Britannia exhibition at the Tate, which consisted of a rather bizarre and not broadly representative collection. A natural segue between these two shows was a visit to the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street near the British Museum, where an excellent exhibition of Ronald Searle’s work is running. The permanent collection there contained another example of the intriguing ‘map as an octopus’ theme highlighted at Magnificent Maps, as well as showing Gillray’s Doublures of Characters that was on show at the Tate as well. I also enjoyed a visit to Sissinghurst, eyeing the volumes in Harold Nicholson’s Library with rather more rapt attention than the assuredly beautiful flowers in the famous garden just beyond.

I have duly updated Commonplace entries, and one or two other documents. (June 30, 2010)

My biographical entry on Gordon Kaufmann was published on-line in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on May 27. It is featured on the following page of the ODNB: http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/prelims/may10/, with the entry itself viewable at  http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/98440.html. (Viewing ODNB entries normally requires a subscription, but the OUP makes some available as promotional pieces.)

This month’s Commonplace entries are a little thin, as I have spent considerable time reading books about espionage. First was Christopher Andrew’s monumental, recently published history of MI5, The Defence Of The Realm (for some absurd reason titled Defend The Realm in the USA). The revelations and anecdotes in this volume (919 pages of text) have prompted in me a number of side-tracks of research on personalities and events, on which I shall report in due time. I followed this up by reading John Costello’s superbly researched Mask of Treachery (1988, 621 pages), which had been sitting on one of my bookshelves for some years. I was amazed that Andrew does not even list this volume in the bibliography of either Defend The Realm or The Sword and the Shield (1999, co-authored with Vasili Mitrokhin, which I read a few years ago). In Chapter One of the latter, Andrew rather condescendingly reports: “The first approach to a western writer offering material from KGB archives intended to create the ‘positive’ image was to the mercurial John Costello, a freelance British historian who combined flair for research with a penchant for conspiracy theory.” In a footnote he adds: “Costello’s untimely death in 1996 has been variously attributed by conspiracy theorists to the machination  of British or Russian intelligence.  While Costello was somewhat naive in his attitude to the SVR [Russian (post-Soviet) Intelligence Service], there is no suggestion that either he or any of the other western authors (some of them distinguished scholars) of the collaborative histories authorized by the SVR have been Russian agents.” The book that Andrew is presumably alluding to is Deadly Illusions (1993), co-authored by Costello and Oleg Tsarev, which Andrew recognizes in both the works mentioned above.  Anybody who reads Mask of Treachery  (even though Costello does conclude it with the now debunked assertion that Guy Liddell was probably the KGB agent ‘Elli’, now revealed by Russian archives to be Leo Long) could not conceivably imagine that Costello was impelled by other than pure motivations, or that he could be attracted to a particular line of argument by a conspiratorial Russian secret service. And so why does Andrew ignore his earlier book? Defend The Realm has already been critiqued as something of a cover-up, and Andrew’s silence about Mask Of Treachery casts further doubt on the academic freedom he claims he was granted by MI5 in recording the ‘official history’. Lastly, a rather quicker read was Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat, a lively and more broadly researched version of Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was.

Astute readers of my article on George Orwell (‘Orwell’s Clock‘) will remember that I used scornful references by Orwell to the appearance of Rolls Royces on the streets of London as a symbol of his shallow economic thinking. Over the years, I have been collecting, from my reading, examples of famous (and infamous) individuals exploiting the opulence suggested by the Rolls Royce to advertise their newly found richness or importance, as well as a few other references that caught my eye. Many of those quoted have been writers of a leftist slant, who clearly should have known better. I thought it was time to post these citations, and they can be found here (‘Rolls Royces’).

I shall be leaving for a three-week vacation/holiday in the UK on May 31, and thus am closing this month’s updates today.  (May 29, 2010)

Another month: not much to report. The normal updates to Commonplace 2010 and Hyperbolic Contrasts. A good day to remember the shadow of Percy Hotspur hovering over the town. (May 1, 2010)

When my chiropractor gave me the all-clear on April 1st, telling me that the degenerated disk in my neck was healed, he told me: ‘Now you can go and play golf!’ ‘Wow!’, I said, not having played golf before. ‘That sounds fun!’  Joking apart, I was able to play 54 holes without (physical) pain over the weekend with my wife and son James, who was visiting us from Santa Clara on a business trip between Orlando and Austin. So  to sufferers of bulging disks I can heartily recommend the treatment – Spinal Decompression Therapy – as something to be investigated in place of invasive surgery – something I have undergone eight times on my lower back. It works by using delicate machinery to widen gently the vertebrae around the damaged disk to allow the disk to be rebuilt with fluid and tissue from the surrounding area. It appears to have worked for me.                                               I duly completed our census form on the right day, and sent it off on April 2nd. And then, in the mail on April 3rd, we received another set of forms, and a threatening letter indicating that ‘This is your last chance to respond by mail before a Census Bureau Representative contacts you.’ The letter went on to say that our answers ‘will only be used for statistical purposes’. If I do get the 2 a.m. knock on the door to be hauled off to the Lubianka for not filling in the sections on race and ethnicity (see ‘The 2010 US Census’) , I shall be sure to ask them whether they can define what ‘Chicano’ means, and what kind of statistical conclusions they think they can arrive at if they base them on such subjective and meaningless data. That there are not enough Chamorrans represented on the Brunswick County School Board, perhaps? I shall keep you informed. (April 5, 2010)

Today is the day when the US National Census takes place. To read my somewhat jaundiced take on this event, please click on ‘The 2010 US Census’. I have also added a substantial number of items to my Commonplace entries (see Commonplace 2010), and one new example of Hyperbolic Contrast (see ‘Hyperbolic Contrast Examples’) Today also marks the completion of my first set of sessions of Spinal Decompression Therapy to repair the degenerated disk in my neck. I shall be reporting on the success of this treatment shortly. And congratulations to my old school, Whitgift, which won the Daily Mail National Rugby U-18 Championship at Twickenham yesterday, easily beating RGS, Newcastle 34-10! (April 1, 2010)