by on

It’s not often that I agree with conservative writer Peter Hitchens. But I really do love the story and sentiment that he expresses in this column:

“Long ago, a retired Serviceman said to me that the least anyone could do, when he saw a war memorial, was to pause and read some of the names on it. It was a tiny thing compared to what the dead had done, but it would in some way help to make their deaths worthwhile.

I have tried to follow this advice. I read the names, often seeing several members of one family listed on a small village cross and forcing myself to imagine what this must have meant.”

I agree, it’s a very important thing to do. I try to read all the historical markers I come across, both for the sake of those whom they commemorate and for my own.

by on

Yesterday was Guy Fawkes Night. ABC News has an interesting article about how his image has come to be associated with present-day protests.

And once again, I must reiterate my opinion that Guy Fawkes is really not the kind of guy you want your protest movement associated with. Not just because the morality of his plan was highly questionable, nor even because his plan failed, but because of how incompetent he and all his fellow plotters seem to have been.

I guess my problem is that, wearing the Guy Fawkes mask at a protest seems to me to be saying “I don’t know much about  history, but I have watched action movies!” But that’s just my opinion.

by on

I see there’s a new movie out promoting the theory that someone other than William Shakespeare wrote the plays commonly attributed to him.

From a historical point of view this is interesting, I guess, but my immediate reaction to this is to side with the “it doesn’t matter that much” school of thought. After all, the important thing is that the plays were written by somebody. Exactly who wrote them is not really relevant to their merits as works of literature.

At this point, we can never be really certain about it, so why bother asking? Better to consider the plays themselves, in my opinion.

by on
Thirteen vessels met out in the ocean;
One Russian; the rest flew Stars and Stripes unfurled.
Aboard the sub, three Russians brought a motion
To decide if they were now to end the world.
Two of the men had decided to
Send forth with haste their lethal cargo.
Perhaps they thought “we’ll bury you”,
Or else, instead, of the U.S. embargo.
The other man, called Arkhipov,
Faced Apocalypse with equanimity.
He dared to hold the others off,
And kept the three from unanimity.
People may cite the leadership of
Kruschev and Dobrynin; of R and JFK.
But there are those who say ‘twas Arkhipov
Whose levelheaded thinking saved the day.

Well, that’s one version of the history, at any rate. Perhaps I have romanticized the story of Vasili Arkhipov too much. Few know the truth of the matter, but I follow a proud tradition and claim poetic license as a cover for my inaccuracies. But it’s a very interesting event and I encourage you to read about it and make of it what you will. 

by on

On BBC World News America, I saw an interesting piece about “BerkShares”, a local currency being used in Massachusetts. You can read the Wikipedia article about it here.

It is an interesting concept, but I think it’s also somewhat disturbing, because in the early years of the United States, a great deal of pain resulted from such “local currencies”, which meant inflation and difficulties engaging in trade among the States. And even before the Revolution, it was usual for each colony to issue its own currency.

The Constitution forbids the States from issuing their own currency, but since this is not a State but rather private persons in one region, I think it’s probably allowed under the Constitution. It may even prove to be a good idea for them. However, it does suggest a certain drifting apart of the one region from the whole; an issue which the Founders, in their day, worked very hard to remedy. Not that there’s any danger of such currencies posing a major alternative to the U.S. Dollar anytime soon, of course.

by on

Via The Escapist, a very amusing article by Lt. Col. Dan Ward of the U.S. Air Force that criticizes the wastefulness and mismanagement the Evil Galactic Empire demonstrated in the creation of the Death Star.

It’s a delightful piece, but in addition, Lt. Col. Ward makes some very important points about organizations and management.

Also, as I think about it, I realize that there is, tragically, a parallel in military history to the Death Star:  the Japanese battleship Yamato. It was a giant and fearsome ship, yet it was utterly squandered in the war, needlessly wasting the ship and the lives of the men aboard.

by on

I enjoy reading about history for many reasons, but one is that you come across little things like this story from the Wikipedia article about Jim Bridger:

“Supposedly one of Bridger’s favorite yarns to tell to greenhorns was about being pursued by one hundred Cheyenne warriors. After being chased for several miles, Bridger found himself at the end of a box canyon, with the Indians bearing down on him. At this point, Bridger would go silent, prompting his listener to ask, ‘What happened then, Mr. Bridger?’ Bridger would reply, ‘They killed me.'”

I’ve known guys who told stories like that.

by on
Caravaggio: There was a result to what you did… thousands of people could have died!
Almásy: Thousands of people did die. Just different people.
-Exchange from the film The English Patient.
There has been an interesting discussion among Ta-Nehisi Coates, Matthew Yglesias and Freddie deBoer this week over the question “was the Civil War tragic”. If I may summarize briefly: Coates says no, for it freed the slaves. Yglesias says kind of, for it could have been done more cheaply.And deBoer says yes; indeed, it is the very picture of a tragedy.
Well, certainly if for the people who was killed in it, it was very tragic. But, then again, for those freed from slavery because of it, it was not the least bit tragic.
We can go further. The Confederates lost, and hence many southerners lost much of their wealth as a result of the war—I’m sure they thought it tragic. If you were one of men sent to march across a field and get shot you probably thought it was tragic.
But so what? Those people either owned slaves or fought to defend the slave system. They got exactly what they deserved. Then again, to make a point sort of related to deBoer’s, Macbeth got exactly what he deserved for murdering the King, and everybody thinks his story is a tragedy.
We must dig deeper. What if you were a Union soldier who died because Ambrose Burnside blew a hole in the ground and ordered you to run into it and get shot? Was that tragic?  
On the other hand, General Grant went from being a nobody to being a hero and President because of the war. It wasn’t tragic for him. And what if you were one of the people who died enslaved at the year of 1859 or 1862? It was tragic there hadn’t been a war sooner, if war was the only solution.
I remember watching a program on PBS about the bombing of Dresden in World War II. I can’t remember the title, but it ended with some historian—I can’t recall who either, unfortunately—saying something to the effect that  “the most immoral thing would have been for the allies to lose World War II.” He justified the bombing on these grounds.  So maybe it’s not tragic if innocent lives are lost for a good cause. Then again, lots of evil people said the same thing.
(Incidentally, Coates says “no one mourns the first American Revolution”. I bet Britain mourned it. It seems reasonable to mourn losing a chance at hugely increasing the power of your empire in order to maintain the principle that you can tax people’s tea.)
And again, perhaps it was all fated. There was no choice, things had to be so. And in the event, logic dictated things had to be as they were. An un-falsifiable theory, I think.  If it is all Destined, can there even be tragedy of any kind? And anyway, if there’d been no Civil War, we wouldn’t be here. Different people would be here—possibly better people, but not us, at any rate.
   
What’s my point, you ask? Well, I don’t know that I have one. Should we be happy or sad there was a Civil War? Damned if I know. I’m happy the slaves were freed, but that’s all I know for sure. Who knows what could have happened had things played out otherwise? Alternate futures—or should I say alternate presents—are difficult for a human mind to predict. In the end, who can say the truth? In my view, deBoer is closest to being right: the Civil War is as tragic as you want it to be. 

by on
Sparked by this Michael Lind article,  there has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the extent to which rebellious Southerners are, perhaps with more than a little nostalgia for the Confederacy, influencing the Republican party.  

After a century and a half, I would have expected people to forget about the Civil War to some extent. The American colonists fought with the British against the French in 1760, and with the French against the British in 1780. We were allied with the Soviet Union in World War II, yet immediately commenced the Cold War at that war’s end.

I am not saying this is a good idea, but it seems to me that people could easily have forgotten about the Civil War by now. It would be simple enough for Party propagandists to pull a “we have always been at war with Eastasia” trick, and make all the old Confederate states embrace the Union. And since the Republicans are always worried about “creeping anti-Americanism” anyway, you would think the last thing that they would want people doing is glorifying secessionists.

Why do the battle lines of the old war still hold such significance?  And why is the South, which voted Democratic for 90 years after the Civil War, now solidly Republican? To figure out this relationship, we have to study some history. Permit a brief summary of what I understand from my cursory research on the topic, and bear in mind that I have no sources to cite in particular, but can only say it’s based on “my reading of the general body of historical research on this period.” In other words, my interpretation of things I’ve picked up over the years.

Now then:

The Republican party, in the late 1800s, was essentially the party of the industrialized North. Businessmen formed its core, and its attitude was fundamentally that of urban capitalism. The defeated rural South was furious about the process of reconstruction, which was being done by the Republicans. The Southerners utilized the familiar tactics of guerrilla warfare against the occupiers, including terrorizing the civilian population the occupiers were protecting.

At roughly the same time as this was going on, opposition to the inequitable conditions of capitalist industrialism began to arise in the U.S. This movement called itself by a variety of names, but their goal was much the same. They campaigned to regulate, restrain, and in some cases even end capitalism and its attendant rampant inequalities of wealth and opportunity.

Beginning in the 1870s, an alliance began to grow between rural farmers and the intellectuals who championed either reforming or abolishing capitalism. The South, perhaps adopting an “enemy of my enemy” approach, supported these movements to oppose the capitalist “robber barons” of the North and West.

This state of affairs pretty much persisted–with the Democrats enjoying a tremendous change in their electoral fortunes in 1932–until the 1960s when, as we all know, the South became Republican, presumably in response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Republicans, of course, don’t like the implication of this, and most of their affection for the Confederacy they try to explain away by saying the Southern government was based on “states’ rights”, which is sort of true, but very misleading as well. (Incidentally, my analysis of the Republican theory of what happened in the 1960s you may find here.)

What is really interesting about all this to me is that the South has gone from being the number one enemy of the “Party of Big Business” to being its best friend. Why? The obvious and most likely answer is racism, of course. My question is: could there be any other explanation that accounts for these facts as well?

 Sources:
  • More history books than I could name here, many of which I no longer have.
  • Wikipedia
  • Miscellaneous other things I’ve read over the years. 

Basically, what I am describing here I can’t attribute to any one source; it’s a more of a general impression from the reading I’ve done on the subject. 

by on

Via Andrew Sullivan (seems like I find a lot of interesting stuff reading his blog) comes a great article by Michael Lind that points out that Southerners dominate the Tea Party. His idea is that, for one reason or another, southerners have been consistently willing to jeopardize the country’s stability to get their way from the late 1700s to the present. Lind writes:

 “Contradicting the mainstream media narrative that the Tea Party is a new populist movement that formed spontaneously… the facts show that the Tea Party in Congress is merely the familiar old neo-Confederate Southern right under a new label.”

Quite true, although I should point out that the populist movements of yore were not entirely separate from confederate movements. The South, at any rate, was certainly a part of the original populist movement.

One thing to know about the South is that it is more rural in comparison to the rest of the country, and has been almost since the beginning. As I’ve discussed before, nationalism seems to be stronger in rural areas, whereas city living lends itself, naturally, more to a cosmopolitan attitude. I suspect that the fact that the South has always had a strong military tradition is also highly significant.

Of course, there is also the issue of racism. Better writers than myself have tackled that major aspect of the question. But I sometimes suspect that even if there were no issues of racial prejudice involved, the Nationalistic part of the party would still be behaving in a manner similar to this.