Another version of the "end of history"

... What was going on in Peking in Caesar's time, or in Zambesi in Napoleon's, was going on on another planet. But melodic history is no longer possible. All political themes are entangled and every event that takes place immediately assumes a multitude of simultaneous and inseparable meanings.

The politics of a Richelieu or a Bismarck are lost and lose their meaning in this new environment. The ideas that they made use of in their schemes, the aims that they could advance to satisfy the ambitions of their people, the forces which figured in their calculations, all become of no import....

With effects so rapidly becoming independent of their causes, and even antagonistic to their causes, perhaps it will now be considered puerile, dangerous and insane to seek out events -- a habit essentially due to history and sustained by it. It is not that, in the meanwhile, there will no longer be events and monumental moments; there will be prodigious ones! But those whose function it is to await them, or prepare them, or to ward them off, will of necessity learn more and more to beware of their results. It will no longer suffice to combine the will with the ability in order to undertake some enterprise. Nothing has been more destroyed by the last war than the pretension to foresight.

-- Valéry, "Extraneous Remarks" (1927).

... Israel's assault on Gaza is only the most recent example that the world's politicians have been very slow learners.

Anyway underfed Bengalis

Altogether malnutrition and diseases stemming from it killed some three million people [in the Bengal famine of 1943].... Despite pleas from [Leo] Amery, the Prime Minister refused to divert scarce shipping to Calcutta and little was done to bring relief when it was most needed, though American aid came later. Churchill regarded the dispatch of food to India as an appeasement of Congress and he believed that "the starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious [than that of] sturdy Greeks." He added that despite the famine Indians would go on breeding "like rabbits."

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

... Churchill and Stalin could've gotten a decent conversation out of comparing notes; Stalin didn't beat Churchill by much ... if at all.

A sound banker

A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

-- Hyman Minsky

I wouldn't know, sir

Among the international dignitaries present [at Ghana's independence ceremonies] were two Americans of very different persuasions, Martin Luther King Jr. and Vice-President Richard M. Nixon.... Echoing the euphoria of his Ghanian hosts, Nixon slapped one man on the shoulder and asked him how it felt to be free. "I wouldn't know, Sir," came the memorable reply. "I'm from Alabama."

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1987.

A series of defeats

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

-- Orwell, "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali."

Today verse would not be invented

Poetry is a survival.

Poetry, in a period of language simplification, of changing forms and insensibility in regard to them, of specialization -- is a thing preserved. I mean that today verse would not be invented. Nor, indeed, rites of any kind.

-- Valéry, "Literature" (tr. Louise Varèse).

Reason in its more amiable aspects

For me, Stendhal is the embodiment of the principle of prose. I don't mean literary reality, but reason in its more amiable aspects. No doubt Stendhal will survive Flaubert, because Stendhal is a point of reference for the mature, while Flaubert is a point of reference for the artist, and perhaps for the immature. Flaubert takes possession of the immature and almost develops a sense of maturity and of competence and strength.

-- Stevens, in a letter (June 20, 1945).

... Possibly this rhymes with a phrase in a letter three years later, discussing artists not authors: "fantasy on the one hand and realism on the other: evasion and evasion."

Flies buzz about.

Another interrogation method was the stoika. It consisted of standing a prisoner against a wall on tiptoe and making him hold that position for several hours. A day or two of this was said to be enough to break almost anyone.
....

When there was time, the basic NKVD method for obtaining confessions and breaking the accused man was the "conveyor" -- continual interrogation by relays of police for hours and days on end. As with many phenomena of the Stalin period, it has the advantage that it could not easily be condemned by any simple principle. Clearly, it amounted to unfair pressure after a certain time and to actual physical torture later still, but when? No absolutely precise answer could ever be given.

But at any rate, after even twelve hours, it is extremely uncomfortable. After a day, it becomes very hard. And after two or three days, the victim is actually physically poisoned by fatigue. It was "as painful as any torture." In fact, we are told, though some prisoners had been known to resist torture, it was almost unheard of for the conveyor not to succeed if kept up long enough. One week is reported as enough to break almost anybody....

There is nothing new about the conveyor method. It was used on witches in Scotland. The philosopher Campanella, who withstood all other tortures in the sixteenth century, succumbed to lack of sleep. Hallucinations occur. Flies buzz about. Smoke seems to rise before the prisoner's eyes, and so on.

-- Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment.

... Compare:

Sgt. Ben Allbright knows something about sleep deprivation. During the first six months of the Iraq war, his job was to guard prisoners in Al Qaim, a makeshift base near the Syrian border where U.S. troops conducted aggressive hunts for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Every day, soldiers hauled in about 20 new detainees for questioning by military interrogators or CIA operatives. To "get them out of their comfort zone" before the interrogation, Allbright told Newsweek recently, the drill was to keep the Iraqis awake for 24 hours or longer. The guards would stand the prisoners up in old shipping containers, their hands tied behind their backs and their faces blindfolded and facing the wall. "After a while you'd see their knees buckling, or you'd see one of them lean forward and put his forehead against the wall to try to sleep." When that happened, Allbright would holler into the container or bang on the metal side with a stone or a club.

... Human Rights Watch, which interviewed the lawyers of 20 detainees held in a secret [CIA] prison in Afghanistan as late as 2004, says some of them were sleep-deprived for up to two weeks, though sometimes allowed short naps. The facility, known among detainees as "the dark prison," was among the harshest run by the United States since the start of the war on terror.

-- Dan Ephron, "Singing for Your Sleep: President Bush Aimed to Clarify Interrogation Rules: So Is It Legal -- or Effective -- to Deny Prisoners Rest?", Newsweek, Oct. 30, 2006.

Divulging state secrets

There are many accounts of the NKVD insisting that anyone released (usually after 1938) should sign a guarantee not to reveal what had happened to him in jail. A Soviet newspaper recently quoted one such:

I, Sternin, N.V., pledge never and nowhere to speak of what became known to me between 11 June 1938 and 11 July 1939 about the work of the organs of the NKVD. It is known to me that on any breach of this I will be accountable under the strictest revolutionary laws, for divulging state secrets.

-- Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment.

... Compare:

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

-- Carol D. Leonnig & Eric Rich, "U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons: Court Is Asked to Bar Detainees from Talking About Interrogations," Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2006.

The Party can do anything

The exact methods by which Stalin silenced her [Krupskaya] are unknown. He is said to have once remarked that if she did not stop criticizing him, the Party would proclaim that not she, but the Old Bolshevik Elena Stasova, was Lenin's widow: "Yes," he added sternly, "the Party can do anything!"

-- Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment.

Vast views

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws. Our passions, ambitions, avarice, love and resentment, etc., possess so much metaphysical subtlety and so much overpowering eloquence that they insinuate themselves into the understanding and the conscience and convert both to their party.

-- John Adams, in a letter to Jefferson, quoted in Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

Unreasonable expectations

All are not naturally conditioned so as to act according to the laws and rules of reason; nay, on the contrary, all men are born ignorant, and before they can learn the right way of life and acquire the habit of virtue, the greater part of their life, even if they have been well brought up, has passed away. Nevertheless, they are in the meanwhile bound to live and preserve themselves as far as they can by the unaided impulses of desire. Nature has given them no other guide, and has denied them the present power of living according to sound reason; so that they are no more bound to live by the dictates of an enlightened mind, than a cat is bound to live by the laws of the nature of a lion.

-- Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

... As he writes in the Tractatus Politicus, "men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so." A liberal polity that treats education as a secondary priority has doomed itself.

An understandable mistake

In 1919, during a session of Sovnarkom, Lenin wrote a note and passed it to Dzerzhinsky: "How many dangerous counter-revolutionaries do we have in prison?" Dzerzhinsky scribbled, "About 1,500" and returned the note. Lenin looked at it, placed the sign of a cross by the figure, and gave it back to the Cheka boss. That night, 1,500 Moscow prisoners were shot on Dzerzhinsky's orders. This turned out to be a dreadful mistake. Lenin had not ordered the execution at all: he always placed a cross by anything he had read to signify that he had done so and taken it into account.

-- Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.

But we can't say that.

Steinberg, the Left SR Commissar for Justice, was another early critic of the Terror, although all his efforts to subordinate the Chekas to the courts proved to be in vain. When, in February [1918], Steinberg first saw the Decree on "The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!", with its order to shoot "on the spot" all "profiteers, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries," he immediately went to Lenin and protested: "Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice at all? Let's call it frankly the 'Commissariat for Social Extermination' and be done with it!" Lenin's face lit up and he replied: "Well put, that's exactly what it should be; but we can't say that."

-- Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.


... Which reminds me of Edward Crankshaw's aside in his The Shadow of the Winter Palace: "Those who think Lenin was a splendid man will know just where to read all about him."

But what about seditious misunderstanding?

In March 1872 a heavy tome of political economy, written in German, landed on the desk of the tsarist censor. Its author was well known for his socialist theories and all his previous books had been banned. The publishers had no right to expect a different fate for this new work. It was an uncompromising critique of the modern factory system and, although the censorship laws had been liberalized in 1865, there was still a clear ban on any work expounding "the harmful doctrines of socialism or communism," or rousing "enmity between one class and another."

The new laws were strict enough to ban such dangerous books as Spinoza's Ethics, Hobbes's Leviathan, Voltaire's Philosophy of History and Lecky's History of European Morals. And yet this German magnum opus -- 674 pages of dense statistical analysis -- was deemed much too difficult and abstruse to be seditious.

"It is possible to state with certainty," concluded the first of the two censors, "that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it." Moreover, added the second, since the author attacked the British factory system, his critique was not applicable to Russia, where the "capitalist exploitation" of which he spoke had never been experienced. Neither censor thought it necessary to prevent the publication of this "strictly scientific work."

Thus Marx's Capital was launched in Russia.

-- Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924. (Reparagraphed for internet standards, though somewhat spoiling the punch line.)

... Sadly, the second censor was a better reader of Marx than were Lenin and Trotsky.

Divine beings

You are mistaken, my dear grandmama; Russia is not England. Here we do not need to earn the love of the people. The Russian people revere their Tsars as divine beings, from whom all charity and fortune derive. As far as St. Petersburg society is concerned, that is something which one may wholly disregard. The opinions of those who make up this society and their mocking have no significance whatsoever.

--The Empress Alexandra, in a letter to Queen Victoria, quoted in Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924.

... Grandmama had written to sympathize with Alexandra's difficulties regarding her "first duty to win [the Russians'] love and respect." Figes also notes that Alexandra kept a portrait of Marie-Antoinette above her writing desk; God only knows what she thought of when she looked at it.

God's bad days

Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?

--Henry Clarendon IV, in Raymond Chandler, Playback.

1s 6d per board

[Kitchener] drove 160,000 of [the Boers'] wives and children into the fifty concentration camps established along lines pioneered by Roberts but not, apparently, in imitation of those created in Cuba by General "Butcher" Weyler. Here 28,000 inmates, mostly children, succumbed to disease and malnutrition caused by conditions almost as bad as in the separate camps set up for Africans, where the mortality rate was probably even higher.... [W]hen British officers wore out the dance floor at the Bloemfontain Residency they sold the old floorboards for 1s 6d each to incarcerated Boer women to make coffins for their children.

--Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

It would never happen in the Commons

[T]he Whig magnate Lord Hartington, whose vigour was all the more impressive since he had raised somnolence to a political art, yawning during his maiden speech and later dreaming that he was addressing his peers, only to wake up and find that it was true.

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

... This would seem to be Spencer Cavendish, who became the eighth Duke of Devonshire in 1891.

Decline and outsourcing

Britain had invested heavily in traditional industries while rivals inevitably made the most of new techniques and inventions. Germany's chemical industry pulled so far ahead, for example, that in 1914 the British Army discovered that all the khaki dye for its uniforms came from Stuttgart.

-- Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997.

... Alas, mauve was not substituted.