Deep Roots

I am currently reading The Steel Bonnets by George MacDonald Fraser, which is a history of the border reivers- the violent and wild people who lived on the frontier of England & Scotland in the 16th century. The border culture is interesting both in itself and due to the impact it has had on the wider world. Both the Ulster Plantation and the slightly misnamed "Scotch-Irish" settlers of the USA's Appalachian backcountry derive mostly from the borderers.

I have not finished the book yet so will not attempt a review but one thing that did strike me was how many of the clans on the Scottish side of the border bear surnames which now crop up in the Scottish rugby team over the decades- Armstrongs, Beatties, Redpaths, Weirs and Irvines etc- reflecting that the region is the heartland of the Scottish game. Similarly a lot of the English surnames appear over and again among English footballers of North Eastern origins- Charltons, Milburns, Hendersons and Robsons among them.

There really is a very strong continuity of population in this country that goes back hundreds of years, with families often having lived in the same area over the course of many hundreds of years.

Muslims Discovered America

According to Turkey's Islamist president Recap Erdogan anyway.

Muslims discovered the Americas more than three centuries before Christopher Columbus, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said.

He made the claim during a conference of Latin American Muslim leaders in Istanbul, pointing to a diary entry in which Columbus mentioned a mosque on a hill in Cuba.

Mr Erdogan also said "Muslim sailors arrived in America in 1178".

He said he was willing to build a mosque at the site Columbus identified.

The Turkish president - whose AK Party is rooted in political Islam - gave no further evidence to back up his theory, instead stating: "Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th Century."

There's actually quite a long list of supposed examples of pre-Columbian contact between the Old and New World, the Vikings are the only ones who've been confirmed but the Welsh, Irish, Basques, Romans, English, Egyptians, Africans, Chinese, Polynesians and Japanese have all had claims. Some of them are vaguely plausible- though probably still wrong- but most are not.

The Muslim discovery of America is not one of the more convincing theories but like a lot of psuedo-history appeals to the pride of a culture whose actual accomplishments have been rather modest since the Mongols sacked Baghdad. The former Chinese President Hu Jintao did something similar when he informed the Australian parliament that the Chinese discovered Australia back in 1421- a claim based on the ridiculous book by Gavin Menzies. Again it appealed to the pride of a culture that while once great, has lagged the West for centuries.

My favourite example of Islamists hijacking Western accomplishments is the widely believed story in the Middle East about Neil Armstrong hearing the Islamic call to prayer when he first set foot on the moon. In comparison reaching the Americas is lacking ambition.

100 Years On

The centenary commemorations for World War One are a chilling reminder of how quickly a continent can slip from a long peace to industrial slaughter. I'm inclined to agree with the current orthodoxy on the causes of the war- that it was a result of German military expansionism.

Whether the UK should have entered the war is harder to say- if the Asquith government had stayed out, Germany would likely have won and an unrestrained aggressive nation could well have threatened Britain- with no France or the Low Countries between Germany and the UK. Yet it's hard to imagine any greater damage would have been inflicted than hundreds of thousands dead that were inflicted.

An awful even but one that offers no easy lessons.

Guess The Country

Over at The View From Cullingworth, Simon Cooke has a quote from a 17th Century English sailor:

"The men that are married are given much to jealousy, and will not permit any stranger to come where their wives are, much less to see them, but will keep them out of sight as much as they possibly can...all their women, both married and unmarried, go with a black veil over their heads and reaching down to their legs, all being covered except their eyes."

Can you guess where the sailor was visiting? If not, have a guess at the predominant religion in the country.


He wasn't at some port in the Ottoman Empire or on the Barbary Coast but was instead visiting Catholic Portugal. It might reflect the Moorish influence in Portugal although it must have been a few centuries since Islam held sway in the country.

It does show that while the burqa is now an Islamic garb in the past, other cultures have been equally repressive. It also shows that even in the 17th century the English regarded it as primitive and evidence of the failings of the menfolk that enforce it.

Also 17th century sailors are more insightful about the motives behind face covering garments than most modern politicians, academics and pundits- it is due to extreme sexual jealousy on the part of the menfolk.

What causes some cultures to foster such extreme sexual jealousy is the next obvious question- I don't know the answer but suspect it has something to do with clannishness and marriage structure.

Failing To Understand The Concept Of "History".

Lester Holloway isn't happy that Michael Gove wants school history to have more Cromwell and less Seacole*:

The 2012 Olympics were surely evidence that he cannot turn back the clock to a bygone age.

Er, that is kind of the point of history.

* Mary Seacole seems to have been a remarkable woman but the apparent role she has in school history is out of proportion to her importance as a historical figure. Also school history needs to give a rough grounding in the development of the nation rather than projecting current obsessions with race and sex backwards.

Art: Then & Then.

I am currently watching "Cave of Forgotten Dreams", Werner Herzog's documentary about the incredible cave paintings in Chauvet, France.

On thing which is notable to me is that despite being painted tens of thousands of years ago the quality of the pictures in very good. In face the depictions of some animals seem far more realistic than those of medieval artists who were thousands of years more technologically advanced.

Compare cavemen depiction of horses:

Now look at the horses in the Bayeux Tapestry:

Which are frankly a bit crap.

Kim Jong-un Will Probably Be Crazier Than His Father

The new leader of North Korea is 28 year old Kim Jong-un.

When the US constitution was written a lower age limit of 35 was put in place for the holder of the office of president. This was partly because as the founders looked through history they noticed that the most completely crazy, paranoid and murderous rulers were often those who took office at a very young age.

Roman emperors are a good case in point- most of the really terrible emperors were those who took power at a very young age. For example this list ranks the five worst emperors and I have added their age at ascension in brackets:

1. Caligula (25)
2. Elagabalus (14)
3. Commodus (19)
4. Nero (17)
5. Domitian (30)

The list is obviously subjective but broadly indicative of how things are seen. Getting absolute power while still young and full of the desires and immaturity that goes with that tends to be a very bad thing. In the case of Kim Jong-un he is part of dynasty that has held absolute power for 70 years and has grown up in an environment where questioning his authority is tantamount to treason.

This is not an environment in which openness and responsibility are likely to be nurtured.

Onwards To Defeat

Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, issued the warning as angry unions threatened to walk away from talks over plans to pay more for reduced entitlements.
He told the Guardian newspaper: "It will be the biggest since the general strike. It won't be the miners' strike. We are going to win."

Er does Dave Prentis realise that the General Strike was a monumental defeat for the unions?

Anyway I'm still hoping that they go on strike one day a week for the next year in order to cut the deficit.

Hari + Economics = Fun

Johann Hari calls for a Keynsian approach to getting the economy going. Apart from getting economic history completely wrong (for example President Hoover did not slash spending, he increased it faster than anyone in history had done up to that point), there is something else about it too.

Like all of the press advocates of Keynsianism who advocate higher public spending in a downturn. Keynes encouraged counter cyclical spending- spend more in a recession but less in a boom. Hari was not demanding that Gordon Brown rein in spending while he was running budget surpluses during the boom years. Therefore it can only be concluded that Hari 's support for Keynsianism is opportunistic and he merely supports whatever theory will encourage further public spending at any given time.

Via.

Fear Of Something Worse

Whilst I am glad the Egyptian protests have succeeded in ousting President Mubarak, the concern that the alternative may be worse is worth considering. defining "worse" as being more repressive, more destabilising, more incompetent or more anti Western. Rather than look deeply at Egypt I've decided to look up what the results of previous occasions on which regimes have been toppled by mass protests (as opposed to by war) to see if there is any pattern. I am trying to be reasonably unbiased in the choice of countries (I'll be looking at the most populous nations) and objective in the judgements made:

Indonesia: Old regime overthrown in 1998. Democracy has more or less taken root and the country has not succombed to fanatacism.  Not anti-Western.

Russia: Crowds led to the defeat of the Soviet hardliners coup d'etat in 1991. Since this led to break up of USSR it has certainly not caused more instability. The successor regime is still repressive and anti Western but it isn't noticably worse than before.


Philippines: The "People Power Revolution" overthrew Marcos regime in 1986 and again, there has been no great breakthrough by the extremist opponents whose existance was supposed to justify the britality of the regime. Not ant Western.

Germany- East German protesters caused the regime to crumble in 1989. As part of a united Germany thongs have improved in almost every category.

Iran- 1979. That didn't go so well.

Thailand- 2008 & 2010- One side over threw the government by mass protests. Lack of real support meant that other side tried the same thing in 2010.

South Korea- 1960 & 1987- 1960 saw protests lead to the fall of strongman Syngman Rhee to be replaced by a similar but less brutal government. 1987 saw that regime deposed by student protests and led to genuine  and lasting democracy. 

Argentina- 2002- A democratic government overthrown and replaced after an election by another democratic government.

Romania- 1989- Fall of Ceaucescu. Clearly the current regime is an improvement.


OK so that's ten mass movements in 9 countries over the last half century who have overthrown an old regime. By my reckoning only one mostly peaceful revolution has resulted in a regime worse than what went before and most have seen considerable improvements.

Something To Get Rid Of

Hugh Muir's remarks on the idea of teaching school children about scientists depending more upon how they tick diversity boxes than on what they achieved hasn't impressed many people.

I like this paragraph:

There is black history month, I tell him. We are lucky to still have that. No sign of a Polish history month, a Chinese history fortnight or even a Pakistani history week. But it's stuck, he says. On Mary Seacole, and Martin Luther King.

No there isn't, yet amazingly despite not being given a month dedicated to Chinese role models, British Chinese pupils do extremely well academically and I'm not aware of Polish students doing poorly either. All of which suggests that Black History Month doesn't do much for any black children in terms of improving academic performance. I doubt that "role models" matter that much either. It seems to serve the interests of professional race obsessives instead.

Like Hugh Muir.

But really the big problem with the idea of stuff like Black History Month, is that it seeks to turn history from an inquiry into the past to a tool to promote certain preconceived ideas based purely on the race of the subject.

Britain & Israel.

Israeli president Shimon Peres claims that the English are antisemitic and 'always work against Israel'. The ironic thing is that Shimon Peres was quite deeply involved in the Suez crisis where the UK went quite far in working on Israel's side. Britain and the Jewish people should be friends anyway, united as we are by the undying hostility of Mel Gibson.

History Fail

Michael Tomasky gives his readers a quiz to test their historical knowledge. Question 1 is:

1. Arguably the first great work of history in the Enlightenment era was by Edward Gibbon and in six volumes described:

a. The Greco-Roman wars
b. The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire
c. The "Mohametan" conquest of Iberia

He believes the answer is so obvious that "If you didn't get this one, you should have stopped right then and there.". However Edward Gibbon did not describe the "Rise and Fall" of the Roman Empire but the "Decline & Fall" as the name of his great work indicates. Gibbon starts at a point where Rome was near the peak of its powers.

Movies Not Historically Inaccurate Enough Say Race Baiters

Some people really are too stupid to breathe:

Essence.com recently featured a commentary titled, “Another White Actress to Play Cleopatra?” where the writer opined, “Honestly, I don't care how full Angelina Jolie's lips are, how many African children she adopts, or how bronzed her skin will become for the film, I firmly believe this role should have gone to a Black woman.”

First of all Egyptians in general are at least as close to white people as to black people in terms of their physical appearance, in fact probably closer. Secondly Cleopatra was not a typical Egyptian as she was part of the ruling Ptolemic dynasty and would therefore have been ethnically Greek. The only thing that should disqualify Angelina Jolie from playing Cleopatra is that the queen was actually a bit of a munter to be honest.

This is what happens when the branch of pseudohistory that is Afrocentrism enters the mainstream.

Seamus Milne Does History- Oh Dear

Compare and contrast- Seamus Milne discusses the history of Communism and the history of the British Empire:

Nazi Comparisons:

With the USSR are bad-

The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sobibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions.

With the British Empire are entirely reasonable-

No wonder Hitler was such an enthusiastic admirer of Britain's empire, which he described as an "inestimable factor of value". The echoes of Nazism in the colonial record are unmistakable

The Ends Justifies The Means:

With the USSR, yes-

communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment, captured even by critical films and books of the post-Stalin era such as Wajda's Man of Marble and Rybakov's Children of the Arbat. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the west, boosted the anticolonial movement and provided a powerful counterweight to western global domination.

With the Empire, no-

But the question, as Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, puts it, should be: "Which narrative?" If Britain had genuinely come to terms with its imperial history, no senior politician would have dared suggest celebrating it or mobilising apologists to sanitise its record for schoolchildren.

The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people.

By the numbers:

For the USSR, we must avoid an "ideologically-fuelled inflation game":

The real records of repression now available from the Soviet archives are horrific enough (799,455 people were recorded as executed between 1921 and 1953 and the labour camp population reached 2.5 million at its peak) without engaging in an ideologically-fuelled inflation game.

With the Empire we can cherry pick sources about death tolls from idealogically fuelled nutjobs whose estimates are more than ten times those of mainstream historians:

To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead.

Etc etc.

But Don't Question Their Patriotism

I see Australian academics* are demanding that Australians stop commemorating ANZAC day, which commemorate those fine biscuits those Australians and New Zealanders who fought in wars for their countries.

Nina Burridge of the University of Technology in Sydney - said Anzac Day glorified white males.

"It's something about male mateship in many ways to me - it doesn't celebrate the wide diversity in Australia," she said.

"The very fact we focus on Gallipoli means we symbolically exclude others, even if we don't intend to."

Right. The implications of that idea is probably not what Burridge would intend, but her argument that Australia's history can't be remembered because it "excludes" non whites etc, implies that multiculturalism and large scale immigration necessitate forgetting a country's history and customs.

* No, Australian academics is not an oxymoron.

Fame Through Anonymity

Labour MP Martin Salter writes of Michael Foot:

Prior to his being made editor of the “Evening Standard” at the age of 28, he had already achieved fame from his co-authoring of the pamphlet “Guilty Men”, which attacked Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

"Guilty Men" was anonymous so it is hard to see how Foot could have achieved fame through it. I don't know exactly when Foot outed himself as one of the authors then surely it would have been after he stopped working for Lord Beaverbrook, then owner of both the Express and the Standard, as it was his proprietor whose attention he wanted to avoid through anonymity.

Human Sacrifice.

Human sacrifice has been practiced in ancient Britain, Meso America, Africa, India and the Middle East.

These cultures were sufficiently isolated from each other as to make it highly unlikely that they copied each other.

Therefore cultures throughout history have independently come to the conclusion that ritually slaughtering someone in order to appease the gods is a good idea.

Therefore humans have an innate tendency to consider human sacrifice to be a good thing.

So human sacrifice is a natural human response to deal with challenging conditions.

With the credit crunch and all that we are enduring challenging conditions.

Therefore we should consider ceremonially killing someone in order to satiate the thirst of an angry god.

Nominate the victim offering in the comments below or speculate as to why the practice has arisen so often in so many different places.

I'm So Sorry That People In The Past Weren't As Morally Worthy As Myself.

One of the reason apologising for historic wrongs is usually a bad idea is that there is often a very strong subtext of self congratulation masquerading as regret, comparing the moral failings of others and contrasting it with one's own enlightened and modern sensibilities.

I say subtext but in Gordon Brown's clunking fist it just becomes text, as today's apology to Alan Turing who died over half a century ago:

I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.

How can you be sorry and proud at the same time? There is nothing for Gordon Brown to be sorry for, he isn't responsible for something that happened when he was a toddler. Equally he has nothing to be proud of, the treatment of Alan Turing was disgraceful and tragic but that applies to a lot of events in history why feel proud simply because we live in an era with slightly different moral codes than that which existed at other times?

Historic apologies are just an excuse for sanctimonious moral preening.

{via Plato}

Damn The War Monger/ Appeaser!

Following the kerfuffle over a column of Pat Buchanan's that some saw as being too sympathetic to poor peace loving Adolf Hitler who was forced into war, I ended up reading the transcript of his recent contribution to a debate on the subject of whether " Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world."

Several claims he makes struck me as dubious. Firstly he repeats the old myth about Churchill and the use of gas against the Kurds:

In 1920, as Secretary for War and Air, Churchill, enraged by Iraqi resistance to British colonial rule, declaimed, "I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes to spread a lively terror."

Eighty years later, Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali would be hanged in Baghdad for doing what Churchill urged Britain to do and what Britain did.

Churchill specifically referred to the use of tear gas to minimise fatalities which is not remotely the same as Saddam and Chemical Ali using deadly nerve agents to create mass casualties and induce panic. Incidentally Chemical Ali has not been hanged at the time of writing.

He also makes Churchill bear the principle responsibility for events where he was at best a bit part player- for example he excoriates Churchill for the Washington Naval Conference, where fixed ratios were established between the naval power of Great Britain, the USA and Japan. Churchill also criticises the effects of this treaty in The Gathering Storm, but at the time of the conference he as not the First Lord of the Admiralty, not the Prime Minister & not the Foreign Secretary, yet in Pitchfork Pat's eyes Churchill seems to bear the primary responsibility.

The bombing of Dresden which is depicted as an assault on an unimportant city of a defeated power, is described as causing fatalities numbering from "from 35,000 to 250,000". Yet the only historians who have concluded such preposterously high figures numbering over 100,000 are the likes of David Irving and other pro-Nazi partisans.

Buchanan's criticisms of Churchill are all over the place as he swings wildly from condemning him for seeking war (with Germany) but also condemns him where he tried to avoid war (with Japan and with the USSR for example).