Giving way takes courage

‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it’. That’s a Shakespeare line that always amazes me by how many situations it applies to. Today, I’d say of Joe Biden that nothing in his career became him like his withdrawal from it. I’m not saying he wasn’t a good president – he had some notable achievements – but he was no longer a good candidate, at a time when his defeat would return to the White House a man determined to undermine the most fundamental values of the US constitution.

It’s obvious that standing down was immensely painful to him. That makes his action particularly courageous and admirable. It puts him into the tradition of a man like George Washington. He received a commission from the Continental Congress, the body that headed the thirteen colonies that rose against Britain, to head its armies. When he emerged victorious from the war, many feared that he would use his popularity to make himself dictator or king of the newly independent nation. Instead, he went to Congress and handed back his Commission.

Biden has shown himself a worthy heir of Washington

As I’ve said before, what he didn’t do (he didn’t seize power) is right up there in importance with what he did (he won the war). What Biden hasn't done (he’s not clinging on to the nomination) is a fine way of crowning a career including some pretty great things he did do (like post-Covid measures and initiatives to aid economic recovery).

But what happens next? 

A friend commented to me recently that Biden clinging on to the nomination would leave the Democrats with no chance of beating Trump. Replacing Biden would certainly not guarantee them victory. But it would at least give them a chance.

It was quite clear, and I got that message powerfully even from individual Americans that I know here in Spain, that many of those who dreaded the return to power of Trump couldn't bring themselves to vote for Biden, once his state of health showed him to be unfit to hold the office of President for another term. 

The frontrunner to replace him is the present Vice President, Kamala Harris. If she wins the White House, it’ll be historic: the first woman to hold the post and the second person of colour, after Barrack Obama.

However, front runner or not, she’s not even sure of the Democratic nomination yet. There are other possible candidates. They all have one advantage over Biden, which is their age. Had Biden stayed in the race, he would have been the oldest candidate ever for the presidency. Now that mantle falls on Trump’s shoulders. I hope the Democrats will be as ruthless against him as he was in using age as a weapon against Biden. That would be especially appropriate as Trump too is suffering from the effects of his advancing age, shown in speeches that are frequently incoherent and confused.

If it is Kamala Harris that faces off to him, it’s likely that he’ll attack her for being allegedly soft on drug offenders during her time as Attorney General of California. I hope he does. But I only hope that because it’ll give her the opportunity to respond by asking just how tough a sentence the law should impose on a felon convicted of fraudulently using company funds to cover up, for his own electoral purposes, an affair with a porn star.

Harris has also built herself a good reputation as a defender of abortion rights. Trump has surrounded himself with anti-abortion characters, like his running mate JD Vance. I’d love to see her suggesting that it’s not at all surprising that he refuses women rights over their own bodies, seeing how little respect he’s shown for those bodies in his behaviour and, indeed, his boasts about what he likes to do to them.

I’d love to watch Trump squirming under that kind of pressure.

Treason in the White House

The price of not being prepared for war can be an end to peace
Syrian Kurds flee the fighting as Turkey invades

Oh, say can you see,
By the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed,
At the twilight's last gleaming?

The words of Francis Scott Key’s poem, which became the lyrics for the US national anthem, refer the American flag flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, after a night’s bombardment from ships of the British Royal Navy in September 1814. The image of the flag still flying proudly in the dawn, despite such a battering from what was then the world’s leading naval power, is a tribute to the pluck of a still small nation standing up to the oppression of a far more powerful one.

I don’t believe that war is glorious, even less that it should be fought for glory. It should be fought as a last resort, and only because the principle at stake is so vital that even deliberately killing others is a price worth paying to protect it. That was the case in Fort McHenry, for instance.

Even better, however, is to be able to use the threat of military force to protect the principle, without actually activating it. The Principal of my first college was a former General, Sir John Hackett. He once told me that a military commander who has to give the order to open fire has already failed. The perfect military engagement, in his view, was one where the winning side deploys such overwhelming force that the other backs down without firing a shot.

Sometimes, indeed, the mere presence of a powerful nation’s soldiers in a potential war zone can deter other nations even contemplating military action.

These are principles known well in the United States. Let’s see what a few presidents have said on the subject.

George Washington declared that “being prepared for war is one of the most effective ways of preserving peace”. It wasn’t an original thought. The Romans had a similar saying, “si vis pacem, para bellum”, “if you wish for peace, prepare for war”, and the Greeks and Chinese voiced the same idea earlier still.

To be a great nation requires certain qualities. “We must dare to be great; and we must realise that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage”. That’s true even without war, but it’s certainly true of war in particular. Being prepared for war requires being ready to engage in toil, to make sacrifices and to display high courage.

That was Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s another quality that great nations, like great individuals, enjoy and display. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” as another President put it. And he’s right: without loyalty, high courage, toil and sacrifice will produce little worth having.

Who was that President? Why, Donald Trump. Interesting, isn’t it, that he talked about “I need loyalty”? He needs it from others. He doesn’t need to show any himself.

Which is why he’s suddenly pulled out of Syria, leaving his allies, the Kurds, at the mercy of Turkey. Which has prompted invaded.

The American presence was the classic case of simply being present. They weren’t there to fight the Turks. But their mere presence meant that an invasion couldn’t be launched – it might have led to American losses and a massive American retaliation. Trump could have preserved peace by being ready for war. Instead he claimed:

WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out…

Figuring the situation out for the Kurds sounds like getting themselves massacred by the Turks. Which, incidentally, means they won’t be able to guard prisoners from the ISIS terrorist movement, now poised to escape and start their campaign again. After three years of US effort against them. That doesn’t sound like “FIGHT TO WIN” but much more like “FIGHT TO LOSE”.

The loss will be down to a failure to show precisely the loyalty Trump himself demands.

Let’s end with some other words from a US President, on the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

We can add another date to the roster of infamy: 8 October 2019.

The day Donald Trump decided to pull out of Syria, without notice, betraying his Kurdish allies to the invading Turks.

The fine British tradition of wishing Americans well on Independence Day

Best wishes to all my American friends, this fourth of July.

I say that with complete sincerity, even though I’m British, and the celebration is of American independence from Britain. In fact, by wishing them well on this day, I’m merely perpetuating a tradition fully rooted in Britain. It stretches back to the time of that breach, nearly two and a half centuries ago.

The names of many of the leaders of the American side in that struggle still resonate today. Men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin, though we draw a delicate veil over the inconvenient truth that the first two of those champions of liberty were slave owners, and the other two endorsed a constitution which allowed them to continue.

Their opposite numbers in Britain are far less well remembered. Maybe some retain a vague sense that there were two William Pitts, the elder and his son the younger, and even maybe that they both became Prime Minister. Some still recall the name of Edmund Burke, if only as the father of modern Conservatism. And there may even be those who remember the great wit and maverick, rival of the younger Pitt, Charles James Fox.

Pitt the Elder, Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox, Edmund Burke

If I had to pick four figures who stand out as extraordinary from that period of British history, it would certainly be those. And they stand head and shoulders above those who prosecuted the war against the Americans, most notably King George III and his Prime Minister, Lord North.

What did those four have to say about British action against the colonists?

In 1775, even before the Declaration of Independence was issued, the elder Pitt, by then Earl of Chatham, by then already suffering from his final illness, came into the House of Lords to call for conciliation of the colonists:

We shall be forced ultimately to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must.

On 12 June 1781, his 22-year old son, by then a Member of Parliament himself, made his own heartfelt declaration about the conflict in America to the House of Commons:

It is a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust and diabolical war… Where is the Englishman who on reading the narrative of those bloody and well-fought contests can refrain lamenting the loss of so much British blood shed in such a cause, or from weeping on whatever side victory might be declared?

The British blood whose loss he lamented was being shed on both sides – like most of his contemporaries, he saw this fight as pitting British subjects against British subjects.

Charles James Fox said something similar, speaking presciently to denounce Lord North’s behaviour towards the colonists in October 1775. He was:

the blundering pilot who had brought the nation into its present difficulties ... Lord Chatham, the King of Prussia, nay, Alexander the Great, never gained more in one campaign than the noble lord has lost—he has lost a whole continent.

In a pamphlet of April 1777, Edmund Burke was even blunter in his denunciation of British government policy:

When any community is subordinately connected with another, the great danger of the connection is the extreme pride and self-complacency of the superior, which in all matters of controversy will probably decide in its own favour…

They have been told that their dissent from violent measures is an encouragement to rebellion. Men of great presumption will hold a language which is contradicted by a whole course of history. General rebellion and revolts of an whole people were never encouraged, now or at any time. They were always provoked.

The government had provoked the uprising against its rule. But it wasn’t an uprising against Britain, only against certain British leaders. Burke, Irish born and therefore aware of what oppression from London could feel like, knew what he was talking about and backed an opposition that would have hoped to do things differently had it been in office.

It was indeed the short government in which he held ministerial office that ultimately forced the King to recognise American independence.

It’s not the outlook of the men who waged a brutal and futile war in North America, but that of these outstanding figures, that I’d like to emulate.

And it’s in the spirit that I wish all my American friends a happy July the fourth.

After Charlottesville: Trump and taking down statues

Donald Trump has come up with some interesting remarks on the clashes that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. These were the background that led to the murder of a protester  leading to the murder of a protester, Heather Heyer, and the injury of several others, by a white supremacist who took a leaf out of the terrorists’ book, and drove a car into the crowd. 

Trump said:

Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E Lee. This week, it is Robert E Lee and this week, Stonewall Jackson. Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop? George Washington was a slave owner. Are we gonna take down statues of George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? ... Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now are we going to take down his statue? … You're changing history, you're changing culture...

Robert E. Lee: should his statue go?

In a sense, he has a point, though not the one he thinks he’s making. It’s true that iconic figures from the US past have terribly tarnished images: George Washington was a slaveowner who never freed any of his slaves, even on his deathbed.

Thomas Jefferson too, who penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” clearly felt the right to liberty was alienable for anyone with African blood. Why, he even took it from his own family. Visitors to his house at Monticello commented on the strange sensation of being served at table by slaves whose looks made it absolutely clear they were Jefferson’s own sons. He had fathered them on another of his slaves, Sally Hemings. 

He enslaved his own children? What an indictment.

So one can see an argument for taking down their statues.

However, that would mean simply ignoring their real achievements elsewhere. One of Washington’s finest was to have led the American army to victory over the British colonial power, and then to have resisted the temptation to take on the military dictatorship that was clearly open to him. And Jefferson was the voice of the revolution. He may have behaved shockingly in his home, but at least he set certain principles for democratic behaviour – though limited only to white males at the time – which have become a benchmark for the rest of us to aim at (but for everyone).

So maybe their statues should remain after all.

What about Lee?

I’ve never understood why he had monuments anyway. He swore allegiance to the United States, served in its armed forces, and when his state rose against his country, chose to side with his state. He couldn’t, he claimed, draw his sword against his “country”, but by that he meant Virginia, not the USA.

That made him an oathbreaker and turncoat. In absolutely strict terms, he committed treason. And that betrayal was directed at the very country, the United States, most Southerners would loudly uphold today.

Why on earth celebrate such treason? Why tolerate monuments to it? Why aren’t they in the forefront of the movement to tear down his statue?

Don’t think it was the only option open to him. His fellow-Virginian, George H. Thomas, made the opposite decision. He remained loyal to the country to which he had sworn allegiance and to the army in which he served. He became, in my view, the most effective general on either side – significantly better in that respect than was Lee himself.

That view runs counter to the claims of many who maintain that Lee deserves our respect as a great soldier. Really? He sent men to march a mile under devastating fire from enemies in well-protected positions, in what became known as Pickett’s Charge on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg. George Pickett himself, the man who gave his name to the charge though he didn’t order it, when asked to put his division in order for a defensive fight after the charge, replied that he no longer had a division.

Men like Douglas Haig, who threw away hundreds of thousands of lives of British soldiers under his command in the First World War, and his equivalents in the French and German armies, simply took Lee’s Gettysburg lunacy to a new level of carnage.

As for Stonewall Jackson, well there’s little to say. He was a religious maniac and a man of appalling brutality. An effective soldier maybe but a thoroughly unpleasant man. Take down his statue by all means.

And why not, indeed, Lee’s too.

So, you see, Trump has a point. Though I doubt he’d agree with it if he thought it through. On the other hand, who’s ever accused Trump of thinking things through?

Shocking internet searches, hagiographic biographies and inspiring teachers. All linked

Beware the internet search: it can sometimes shock and sadden.

And another fundamental truth: out and out partisanship for the subject can make for the most exciting teaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed “there is properly no history, only biography.” I’ve always been interested in history, so I’ve very properly turned my attention to biographies in recent years – reading them or listening to them, a great way to enhance such experiences as walking a dog, or even more fulfilling, washing floors.

My interest in American history (it’s good, because there isn’t too much of it) inevitably led me to consume biographies of such extraordinary figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. My sympathies have tended to be with the Jeffersonians, with their passionate commitment to democracy and human rights. My son Michael, on the other hand, has a soft spot for the man who became and remained their nemesis during his lifetime: Alexander Hamilton.

Eventually I felt that I really had to turn my attention a biography of Hamilton too, and chose one by Ron Chernow, who wrote so masterfully about Hamilton’s mentor, George Washington. I’m enjoying the imaginatively titled Alexander Hamilton.

How massively have I had to change my viewpoint. I knew, of course, that Jefferson and Madison (Washington too, as it happens) were slaveowners, but I was unaware that Hamilton, on the other hand, was a passionate abolitionist throughout his life. Who then, as Chernow asks, was truly committed to human rights?

It’s always good to have your presumptions challenged. On the other hand, there were times when I began to despair of Chernow’s tone. Jefferson and Madison, as well as being denounced as hypocrites, also come across as conniving, cowardly and backstabbing. This began to feel over the top, so I dug out my copy of Lynne Cheney’s James Madison, a life reconsidered, if only so I could contrast accounts of the same events from the two points of view. Cheney, of course, is as hagiographic towards her subject as Chernow is to his. In fact, I had to smile when I came across her description of Jefferson and Madison as “the two greatest minds of the eighteenth century.”

So we’re setting aside men such as Hamilton, are we? To say nothing of Newton, Locke, Leibniz or Voltaire among so many others?

It’s interesting how biographers tend to become partisans of their subjects. You don’t have to. My PhD thesis turned into Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis: an intellectual biography and I have to say, the more I found out about Maupertuis, the less I liked the man – prickly, self-aggrandising, paranoid and not above being a bully – so I felt no need to canonise him. Equally, I recently enjoyed A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert Merry, who doesn’t pull his punches concerning the faults of the eleventh US President (he was prickly, paranoid and not above being a bully, though perhaps less inclined to self-aggrandisement.)

Still, one has to admire teachers who become so enthusiastic about their subject that they identify personally with it. A man I greatly admired did just that in lectures about the French Renaissance writers, at what was then called Bedford College, University of London, which he allowed me to attend although I was a student at another college.

He gave a series of classes about Michel de Montaigne during which he gave marks of extreme humility. Most striking was his comment that he only felt qualified to teach the course by his profound sense of inadequacy to the task. Now, Montaigne wrote a series of pieces he called “Essays”, the first time the word was used for such writing – so he’s responsible for that bane of schoolchildren’s lives from his days to ours. But at his time, an “essay” was a trial, in the sense of a trying out – “these are the trials of my natural faculties” he says of his book. So everything he wrote was tentative. Indeed, I know of no author who used expressions equivalent to “on the other hand” more than he did.

Montaigne: the inventor of the essay
Ushering in centuries of pain for schoolkids everywhere

When the lecturer finished the classes on Montaigne, he switched his attention to the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard and introduced the subject by informing us that we should immediately forget everything we had ever read or heard about Ronsard, because everyone else had got him entirely wrong. Ronsard, as it happens, believed that no one had written anything that could be properly called French poetry before him. He saw himself as the greatest poet since Classical Antiquity, and probably superior to the Greeks and Romans too.

It was a privilege to be taught by a man who was so entirely adopted the personalities of his subjects.

It occurred to me that I ought to look him up to see what had become of him. I could only remember his first name, Malcolm. But google is unbeatable. “Malcolm Bedford Ronsard” immediately gave me a series of hits. Sadly, the first of these was a 1994 article from the Independent headlined Obituary: Professor Malcolm Smith.

Another giant of Renaissance studies, Professor Screech, had written the tribute. It ended:

His Oeuvres Complètes de La Boétie for the Editions de la Pléïade was submitted last December when he already knew that his cancer was terminal.

His edition of Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome with Edmund Spenser's Ruines of Rome was printed and bound in America days before he died.

He’d died at only 53. But right to the end he’d maintained his fiery enthusiasm for his subject. The enthusiasm that I’d found so inspirational when he taught me.

In all likelihood, you wouldn’t remember me, Professor Smith, if you were still around. But I remember you, with admiration undimmed. Thanks for all you did. And thanks for the passion you communicated in doing it.

Being principled is great. In the right cause

It’s not enough to have a conscience.

We all tend to respect honesty and principle in politicians. Well, we don’t get that much opportunity to do so, since in the age of spin and soundbites, it’s hard to find a politician that displays much of either. Which perhaps makes us all the more admiring of those who do.

But honesty and principle, like courage, have much in common with a gun: what matters isn’t so much the thing in itself, as where it’s pointing. It would be hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher showed great courage, resolution, pure grit, but she used it to destroy communities up and down the country. Back in 1970, I taught in a mining village in South Yorkshire; today the population has fallen by over a third, and rates of unemployment or invalidity are frighteningly high. The price of the crushed miners’ strike…

Maggie: grit and courage misapplied

I can think of no better example of misapplied honesty and principle, analogous to Thatcher’s misapplication of courage and resolution, than the case of Robert E. Lee. He occupies a place of honour today, for many, as one of the great generals of history, although he fought, indeed became the leading military figure, on the Confederate side in the American Civil War. That’s the defeated side, and generally now felt to be the wrong side (except by a few diehards in the southern US).

That meant he fought on the side of states defined by slavery – it was their one common point – although he called it “a moral and political evil” and personally freed his slaves. He fought against the Union, although he considered the so-called right of states to secede as “idle talk.”

So why did he fight on the slave-holding Secessionists’ side?

His father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee died a disgraced bankrupt, but in his youth he’d been a dashing cavalry commander in the army George Washington led to fight for independence from Britain. The father had claimed “Virginia is my country; her will I obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject me.” Virginia came first.

Likewise, Robert Lee, the son, claimed “if the government is disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.”

So Lee turned down the opportunity to take overall command of the forces of the Union to which he was ostensibly committed, even though it was offered to him not just by a Northerner, the President, Abraham Lincoln, but by the Commanding General of the Army, Winfield Scott – who was a Virginian like Lee. Indeed, another Virginian, George H. Thomas, had a distinguished career as a general on the Union side, and a distant cousin of Lee, Samuel Phillips Lee became an Admiral in the Union navy.

Many admire Lee’s commitment to the principle that he could not fight against his own country, which he saw as being Virginia rather than the United States.

I however have real trouble with that notion. He was undoubtedly a man of conscience, and it’s apparently honourable to live by one’s conscience. But surely the admiration ends when doing so leads to your fighting for two bad causes, secession and slavery, especially if you believe in neither?

Robert E. Lee: principled and honest,
but for the wrong cause – which he didn't even believe in

It’s like Thatcher’s courage. It would have been wonderful, employed in furthering a good cause. it was lamentable when used for a bad one.

It isn’t abstract principle that counts. It’s the concrete application made of it.

WOMAD and bucket lists

There are bucket lists and then there are reverse bucket lists.

Bucket lists contain the things one feels one really ought to do at least once before kicking the bucket. I’ve never been on a helicopter ride, or visited the Taj Mahal, or seen the Northern Lights. They’re all things I’d like to do before I get my visit from the grim reaper (even if he turns out to be rather a sympathetic character, as in the Terry Pratchett view).

On the other hand, I’ve also never visited a firing range or the state of Israel. The first of these I feel no desire whatever to do, the second is one of those things I don’t contemplate with any enthusiasm for the present or the future, but would quite like to have done in the past: I’d like to have already been to Israel, to know a little more about what it’s really like, but as far as any future plans are concerned, it’s probably pretty much at the bottom of my list of places to visit, outside war zones.

Really. Below Minsk, say, or even Pittsburgh. 

I’d actually quite like to go to those places, if only because my grandfather’s family came from Minsk, and Pittsburgh includes the place that was once known as the ‘Forks of the Ohio’ – George Washington was there, as a Militia officer supporting British military operations, and it still feels ironic to me that Washington once served under, rather than against, British colours.

The Forks of the Ohio.
Less built up in the time of loyal British subject, George Washington

Another thing I’ve never done is ever visit a theme park. I say that without pride, though with relief. I gave up going to amusement parks when I realised, aged 22, that rides I’d loved as a child simply made me sick as an adult – anything, in particular, that spun round and round. As for a ride that takes you to the edge of a death-defying fall and then plunges down, my vertigo leaves me regarding the experience as to be avoided at any cost. A source of pleasure? I’m not that masochistic.

That does leave me feeling guilty towards my poor, long-suffering wife. She was once deeply familiar with more or less every theme park from South West Germany (Europa Park) and North West England (Alton Towers), enduring in particular several visits to Disneyland Paris and the nearby Parc Asterix. Somehow I was always unavoidably elsewhere when any of these trips occurred.

My only grandchild to date has now reached an age where she doesn’t need her grandfather to accompany her to one of those ghastly places. Since my other two sons are proving slow at producing any further grandchildren for us, I expect to be able to plead age and infirmity by the time it comes to taking any of them if, indeed, any of them ever show up.

So visiting theme parks remains firmly on my reverse bucket list: things not to do this side of the grave. I’m making no dispositions for what may happen on the other side. I suspect, given the life I’ve led, that I might find myself condemned to an eternal theme park anyway.

But tomorrow an important box gets ticked off one or other of the lists. I’m still not sure which. Certainly, it wasn’t something I felt inclined to do – otherwise I might already have done it – but nor am I averse to doing it. Either way, it happens tomorrow.

I shall be off to my first ever music festival.

Gets ticked off a list tomorrow

WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance, I’m told), near Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Danielle and I are going and meeting a bunch of friends there. I expect it’ll be fine, though probably not in the meteorological sense of fine: heavy rain’s forecast. But I understand that mud is part of the experience, so that’s probably appropriate.

Anyway, at least I’ll be able to tick it off the list. And by the time I get home, I’ll no doubt have decided which list it belonged to.

Greek debt: parallels and contrasts with the US

Greeks who remember the German occupation, according to the BBC, are now talking about another invasion by Germany without a shot being fired.

Greece will, it seems, stay in the Euro. At least for the moment. It will do so at the cost of measures that apparently represent more severe austerity than the terms rejected by Greeks in a referendum just over a week ago. It feels like Greek voters have lost, but German politicians – apparently the fiercest critics of Greece and the harshest in their demands of them – have won.

Merkel may have avoided this destiny so far
But certainly not be being gentle with Greece

This reminds me of how the United States dealt with a similar crisis, when it faced debt problems not unlike those of Greece within the Eurozone.

The original constitution of the United States was deeply unsatisfactory, giving almost no power – certainly no power to raise funds – to the national government, and leaving most authority in the hands of the States. It became increasingly clear over just a few years that the situation was untenable and something with a more serious Federal government at its centre would have to be set up.

A Convention met and drew up the Constitution of the United States that we know today (though at that stage without any amendments, of course). George Washington became the first President and, among an all-star cast of Ministers, he appointed Alexander Hamilton as his Secretary of the Treasury (Minister of Finance).

Now there’s little on which I agree with Hamilton, particularly his views of popular sovereignty, but that’s for another debate. On finance, he was something of a wizard. And one of his first major measures concerned what came to be known as Assumption – not a religious moment, except for those whose God in Mammon, but the initiative by which the Federal government would take over the debts incurred by the individual States in fighting the War of Independence.

That was great news for Massachusetts and South Carolina, which were saddled with heavy debts (viz Greece) but not so good for Virginia and North Carolina which had cleared most of theirs, and didn’t appreciate having to pick up the tabs for the others (viz Germany). There was a battle royal. James Madison, destined to become the Republic’s fourth president, was a Congressman at the time and led the campaign against Assumption. He defeated the proposal.

The story has it that Alexander Hamilton met Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State but destined to be the third President, in the street outside Jefferson’s house. He was distraught and Jefferson invited him in. Hamilton explained that without Assumption, certain States would be driven towards bankruptcy, and also the Federal government would be shown to be powerless to face up to dealing with a financial crisis (viz the Eurozone).

What’s more, Hamilton maintained the apparently paradoxical view that the Federal government would be accepting a “national blessing” by taking on the debt: it would oblige it to collect taxes and establish it as creditworthy (viz the Eurozone again).

Jefferson was a close ally of Madison’s and increasingly an opponent of Hamilton’s. But he allowed his then-colleague to convince him, and took it on himself to win Madison round.

The two allies came up with a compromise solution: Madison would not block the question of Assumption coming up again in Congress; he would vote no, but would not speak against the proposal. That’s what happened, and Assumption was adopted, over the silent opposition of Madison.

At the time, the US had a population of under 4 million. Even the UK had 8 million, and France 20 million. GDP was around $200 million, corresponding to about $4.5 billion today – when US GDP is about $17.7 trillion. The US was, in other words, a minor sideshow in geopolitics back then; today it is the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

There is no need for Europe to aspire to that status. European nations have been massive global players in the past, and places like Amritsar or Algiers testify to how badly that went. But it strikes me that Europe needs to get its act together if it is only to defend its status in a world increasingly dominated by huge nations, such as the US, China and Russia.

The success of the US wasn’t naturally entirely down to acceptance of Hamilton’s proposals on handling debt. But they certainly contributed: they set up the notion of the Union has owing a duty to all its components, and therefore being more powerful than any of them, capable of playing a full role on the world stage.

So the US passed its test over Assumption.

I’m not sure the Eurozone has done anything like so well over Greek debt.

Separated by a common language? Over-united more like. With some odd quirks

On both sides of the Atlantic, we love to quote the Shaw view that England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

A completely different view was expressed by the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. He’d been a leading aide to George Washington during the Revolutionary War, but emerged in the 1790s as an outspoken Anglophile. Which made him the nemesis of Thomas Jefferson, Anglophobe and friend of the French.

Hamilton told a leading British agent “I have always preferred a connection with you, to that of any other country. We think in English and have a similarity of prejudices and predilections.”

Indeed. There is something out there which the French call the “Anglo-Saxon” mentality, and not as a compliment (they move quickly on to talk about globalisation and neo-liberalism). It tends to come out in a joint obsession between the two countries to put profit before pretty much anything – if Britain, as Napoleon claimed, is a nation of shopkeepers, the US is a country of mall operators – and to use military force against anyone who is even suspected of possibly jeopardising such a sacred way of life.

As a result, even an ostensibly Centre-Left government could end up trotting obediently into Iraq at the beck of possibly the most inept of US presidents, Dubya Bush. We’re still paying the price twelve years on. And it’s likely to get worse. Just because ISIS are a lot grimmer even than Al Qaida doesn’t mean we won’t face something still more dire down the line.

Yep. That’s the one we chose to follow into Iraq
Might have been useful to have spoken a different language:
he made no sense in ours

The community of thought which makes possible this kind of consensus, with all its beneficial consequences, surely owes much to the fact that on both sides, “we think in English.”

So – it’s more a matter of two nations (along with New Zealand, Australia and Canada – predominant whiteness plays a role) bound together, for better or for worse, by a common language.

What differences exist, are pretty insignificant. Does it really matter that Americans wear their pants outside, covering their underpants, while we keep our pants inside, with trousers over them? I think not.

Even so, from time to time I find some of the differences a little quaint. Quaint to the point of bizarre. Here’s a curious contrast between the two sides of the pond in the use of prepositions (little words that really matter in this common language of ours).

If I were to call in on my friend Tom, I would reckon I was visiting him. In the language the French persist in calling “Américain” I would, however, be visiting with him. That always strikes me as slightly odd. I feel that if I’m visiting with Tom, then we’re popping in on someone else, George perhaps. Together.

On the other hand, an American desiring to enter into correspondence with him, would write Tom. Without a preposition. Again, that puzzles me. Surely if you write Tom, you have to be penning a piece of fiction? Shakespeare wrote Touchstone, and pretty clever it was too. If he’d wanted to send him a letter, he’d have written to Touchstone. Which, if he’d expected a reply at least, would have been pretty silly. 

Branagh playing Touchstone in As You Like It.
He did well to write him, but never wrote to him.
And wouldn't have had a reply anyway

Occasionally I listen to books instead of reading them. Recently, I was listening to a book being read by someone called Edward Herrmann. What struck me about him was that, despite being American, he pronounced the word “era” in a way that distinguishes it from “error”. As I do. Generally, on the other side of the pond, the words are indistinguishable when spoken.

This is awkward if we wanted to describe, say, the time of Dubya, if I can return to that sad period. In British English, even in the spoken language, we can distinguish the two words in “error era.” In Américain, they’re the same. You’ve got to admit that would sound a bit silly.

On the other hand, you might argue that to sound silly when talking about the Dubya presidency is entirely appropriate.

And you may well be right.

Things you might watch – if in one case, not for long...

Turn’s worth watching, partly for the acting – it’s great to see Billy Elliott (well, Jamie Bell, who played him in the film) turn adult, give up dancing, take up spying and move 250 years back in time. But the pleasure of Turn is mostly in the story: it’s fascinating to learn how George Washington ran a spy network called the Culper Ring in New York City, then under British occupation, on lines that ought to gain at least the grudging approval of modern spy operations. He was concerned for his agents’ wellbeing, keen on keeping their communications secure, and only pressurised them to keep the information flowing.

Intelligent military intelligence, in fact.

The series has the merit of sticking quite closely to the known historical facts. It’s not as good as the book on which it’s based, Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies, which draws on close research and talks about more aspects of espionage in the American War of Independence than Turn. Even so, the TV series takes its structure from the record, so in broad lines and occasionally in detail, sticks to it with some degree of faith.

Jamie Bell as Abraham Woodhull,
lead agent of the Culper Ring, in Turn

Indeed, it’s at its least good when it diverges from history: in an attempt to give the series more of a soap feel, it takes some liberty, for instance adding a love triangle where there was none, between Jamie Bell’s character, his wife and his lead female agent: in reality, the female agent existed but was ten years his senior and in a perfectly good marriage, while he married only later. What it does well is to avoid a simple black and white distinction between supporters of the American or British causes – in fact, one of the most attractive characters is John André, the British spymaster, a historical figure involved in one of the iconic moments of American infamy, who was regarded by most who met him as charming and witty.

It’s that degree of fidelity to the record that also makes Vikings watchable. Here the issue is less historical fact, since it’s not even known whether the central character, Ragnar Lothbrok, ever existed outside legend. Myth or history, the tales of Lothbrok at least provide a framework for the series, as the history of the Culper ring provides one for Turn. That somehow makes the stories told more plausible, and therefore makes it easier to suspend disbelief.

Ragnar with his first wife, the shieldmaiden Lagertha
Travis Fimmel and Katheryn Winnick

Nor does the series whitewash the brutality that was the hallmark of Viking raiding. Even if it cuts it back considerably, there is more than enough violence for anyone likely to be put off by its depiction. For example, there was a particularly vicious form of Viking execution by torture called the Blood Eagle; while it doesn’t happen as often in the series as it did in reality, it does happen once – be warned.

That being said, the series also puts into play a series of extraordinary characters who are a delight to follow: Ragnar himself has boldness and ingenuity that are not completely proof to failure (he has his share); Floki is almost as cunning as the god Loki his name conjures up, as well as wild to the point, occasionally, of lunacy; Ragnar’s first wife Lagertha is strong, courageous and straight; Athelstan is a monk captured by the Vikings in a raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne who finds himself sucked into their way of life (an early case of Stockholm syndrome, one might say, but these Vikings are from Norway not Sweden); even Ecbert King of Wessex is a well-painted study in deviousness, intellectualism and fascination with a past greatness (that of the Romans).

Gustaf Skarsgård as Floki in Vikings
Fascinatingly wild, to the point of craziness

In order to keep the series going, it again resorts to some soap-like devices – inexplicable failures of communication sustain misunderstandings or unjustified suspicions to fill a sub-plot or two – but overall it relies on the original story for some remarkable plot twists and a generally compelling narrative.

As for Revenge, it was highly entertaining for the first few episodes. The backstory is that a man has been betrayed by his friends at the top end of business and framed for collusion with a terrorist outrage. Particularly bitter is that one of those who sold him was the woman he loved, and who apparently loved him as strongly.

The best part of two decades later his daughter Amanda is back in the Long Island Hamptons, haunt of these gilded individuals, under the assumed name Emily, ready to wreak her revenge. She has the means because an internet billionaire (Nolan, much the most entertaining character), owes his fortune to her father, and has given her half of it. In the first few episodes she uses her resources and her intelligence to start destroying her enemies in ways that are brilliantly ingenious and devilishly effective, but then alas the series starts to decline and, to a far worse degree than the other two, descends into pure soap.

Emily Van Camp as Emily and Gabriel Mann as Nolan in Revenge
His is the only consistently entertaining, if not wholly believable, character

So we get characters who change character or, even more often, allegiance: he was intent on killing her before she killed him, there was nothing but intense hatred between them until, lo and behold, in this week’s episode they’re working together (usually against the ones we’re sympathising with). Love simulated for the purposes of revenge becomes real, without much plausibility and only in order to create tension that might otherwise be lacking. And ruthless, effective killers, fail to finish off adversaries when it would rather shorten the series if they did.

Reasonable entertainment if you’ve nothing better to do but, believe me, by the end of season 1, you have to be able to find better things to do.

Military force: limited, however great it may be

It’s hard to understand what prevents the United States understanding that, faced with a popularly supported insurrection of a majority of a population, even the most powerful military force on earth can only ever gain a temporary advantage.

What happens is that an occupying military force tends to alienate even those who are initially sympathetic to its aims. Foreign soldiers aren’t good at distinguishing between their enemies from their friends within a civilian population. They tend, therefore, to treat them all as hostile. And treating people as hostile generally means treating them badly, imposing martial law, for instance, denying their rights, even confiscating their property, and generally being arrogant, high-handed and brutal.

The result is that disaffection grows. What might have been a relatively small, localised antipathy quickly spreads, so that ultimately large swaths of the population are at least passive opponents, so that even if they don’t join the active insurgents, they don’t resist them and may even succour them. This affects every part of the occupied nation. Even those who are drafted in to support the occupiers, in some kind of locally recruited military force, lose their stomach for the fight or even worse, turn against their erstwhile allies.

They’re often quick to spot what’s happening themselves. Here’s a comment from one officer in a locally raised militia, on the behaviour of his supposed allies, and its effect on alienating the support they were initially offered.

… the people in general are becoming indifferent, if not averse, to a government which in place of the liberty, prosperity, safety and plenty, under promise of which it involved them in this war, has established a thorough despotism.

What’s got me thinking about these things?

It could have been the fall of Ramadi in Iraq. Units of the national army, exhausted and their enthusiasm worn thin, eventually collapsed in the face of the advance of ISIS, which occupied the large and strategically vital city earlier this month. There are reports of a counter-attack making some progress, but there’s clearly a hard battle ahead. Meanwhile, the civilian population is suffering the brutality that comes with ISIS rule. The Dubya-Blair assumption that all they had to do was overthrow Saddam Hussein by military force, to usher in a friendlier and democratically-inclined regime in Iraq, has been exposed as massively misguided.

The ruins of Palmyra: memento of an Empire
Now occupied by ISIS

Alternatively, the fall of Palmyra in Syria could have prompted my thoughts on this theme. Palmyra is one of the great cultural centres of the world. At one point, it stood at the heart of an Empire which for a time resisted the power of the Romans. The remains of that culture are a precious world heritage. ISIS have occupied that city too and, though they’re promising to respect the ruins, there’s no guarantee that they will. And meanwhile the civilian population is suffering the brutality that comes with ISIS rule.

But in fact it was neither of these events that got reflecting on the hopelessness of using military force to crush an insurrection.

Amazon’s streaming video service is currently offering viewers a series called Turn: Washington’s spies. Well acted and constructed, it also opened my eyes to an aspect of history that I knew little about: George Washington’s highly professional use of a spy ring against the British in the American War of Independence. It focuses on the so-called Culper ring that spied on the British in occupied New York.

Jamie Bell in the role of Abraham Woodull
a key figure in the Culper ring of spies

As it happens, the series, though entertaining, also suffers from some of the flaws of any soap. A narrative that would have been far more believable had it stuck to the historical record moves increasingly away from it as the series advances, until it becomes frankly implausible. So I’ve turned to the book on which it’s based, Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies. And I’ve found it fascinating.

You may have noticed that the remark I quoted earlier was a little archaic in its style. it comes from the book, and the person quoted was a loyalist – i.e. pro-British – officer in a Militia unit. He voiced his complaint in 1779, and what he was lamenting was the way the British, then probably the most powerful military nation on Earth, were driving loyal supporters like himself into the arms of those they regarded as rebels.

Benjamin Tallmadge
As a younger man, he ran the Culper ring, reporting to Washington

Which is why the Americans really ought to know better. They’ve been on the receiving end of the alienating behaviour of military occupiers. And they were able to turn it to their favour, to gain the ultimate victory.

The British, too, who lost their colonies through their own blundering actions, ought to have learned their lesson. Over two centuries ago.

And that brings me back to the intervention of both nations in Iraq.

What on earth were we thinking of?

US government shutdown: a long but hardly honourable tradition

So the Republican Party in Congress, and in particular its Tea Party faction, have pushed the US federal government into shutdown. Such is their hatred of Obama’s limited reforms of the healthcare system, which manages to incur the highest costs in the world while failing provide proper access to care for most of the population.

Obama: suffering exasperations
that were already familiar to Washington

In fact, such is their commitment to preventing comprehensive access to healthcare, that the Tea Party is indifferent to the fate of nearly half a million federal employees, now on forced unpaid leave. What is their right to expect an income compared to the congressional duty to denying care to 15% of their fellow citizens?

Curiously, there’s nothing new in this attempt at starving the government of funds.

The Tea Party’s name is a conscious allusion to the revolutionaries of the 1770s, when the Boston Tea Party was one of the iconic moments in the intensifying resistance to British rule. Among the revolutionaries of that time were many to whom

And the activists back then included many to whom today’s rebels can draw a direct line of descent. Indeed, if the present US constitution was adopted, one of the reasons was to overcome the paralysis that flowed from the inability of the Continental Congress to get States to pay for federal expenditure.

Sound familiar?

Ask any of today’s Tea Party people about the sufferings of the soldiers in the Continental Army of the revolutionary war, and they’d no doubt be unstinting praise of their fortitude and heroism. They might mention the resolve of the army that got it through the terrible conditions of its first winter in Valley Forge, and the debt it owed its general, George Washington, who put up with terrible privations in order to stay with his troops and share their suffering.

What they won’t point out is that the horror of Valley Forge was inflicted by States who refused funding for the Army. Men died, in large numbers, of malnutrition and disease because the very patriots who were quick to back them with words, weren’t prepared to back them with cash.

Sound familiar?

Worse still, many of the farmers in the area where the solders were starving, kept selling produce to the British authorities, because they could offer better rates and pay in a reliable currency.

See? Just like today’s Tea Party. Business first, politics second. And if ordinary people have to pay with their lives or the parsimony of those who claim to back them, well, that’s just the natural order. Like slavery.

In particular, who needs healthcare? The patriots at Valley Forge took their medicine and died – or rather didn’t get any medicine and died – so why should today’s poor expect more?

The classic TV series, Yes, Prime Minister refers at one point to a nation struggling with a military threat to its existence, to which Britain offers , in which a struggling nation is offers ‘every support, short of help.’ Or, to go even further and plunge into paradox, the Tea Party, however rabidly right wing, reminds me of Lenin, who offered to support the British Labour, ‘in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man.’

Yes, that’s the kind of support the American people can expect from the Tea Party.

The only odd thing is that so many of those awaiting on the gallows for their turn to be hanged, keep on offering their genuine support right back. By voting for them.

Slavery: seems the Blacks were just fine with it. Like victims of any abuse

A Polish émigré, Julian Niemcewicz, who visited George Washington in 1798, commented ‘Either from habit, or from natural humour disposed to gaiety, I have never seen the blacks sad.’ 

So that was OK, then. The slaves were happy. What was wrong with slavery?

Niemcewicz’s words are a striking example of the capacity we all share to convince ourselves of any belief we find convenient. At the time he expressed that view, the Northern US states were busily abolishing slavery, and yet the South would cling on to the ‘peculiar institution’ for nearly seven more decades, and only give it up after a crushing defeat in a bitter civil war.

Not many miles from Washington’s home lived another major figure of the early United States, Thomas Jefferson. He wrote those stirring words that inspired the revolutionary war: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ Yet he too was an owner of slaves, and even fathered several children on one of them, Sally Hemings.

In fact, those very words were used against African Americans by Chief Justice Roger Taney, when he wrote what must be one of the most shameful documents in US history, the final judgement of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case:

‘The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family [...] But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration [...] The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.’

So a proclamation of the equality of all men was turned on its head, into an argument in favour of the inferiority of the ‘black race’ and a justification for its enslavement.

What makes this kind of self-delusion particularly extraordinary is that, not only was slavery repugnant, it was also known to be economically inefficient, even in Washington’s day, as Dr David Stuart, from his extended family, made clear: ‘[Slaves’] support costs a great deal; their work is worth little if they are not whipped; the [overseer] costs a great deal and steals into the bargain. We would all agree to free these people, but how to do it with such a great number?’

I say nothing for Taney, but Washington and Jefferson were outstanding men who understood the issues. Yet even they felt powerless to act. It’s that ‘how to do it’ in David Stuart’s words that is most striking: he knew what was right and he knew it was expedient but he saw no means to do it.

Curiously the same impotence to overcome entrenched wrong has marked many of the other great abuses in history, whether discrimination against religious minorities, the denial of rights to women, the use of child labour, the refusal of minimal protections to workers. They have been preserved either by a self-delusion worthy of a Taney, or by a failure to act by those who knew that change was needed. ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,’ wrote Edmund Burke. Slavery is a classic case of an evil that was not extirpated because good men did nothing (and a few bad ones did a great deal too much).

Edmund Burke: understood how evil could triumph

Once the abuse has been ended, a new consensus appears which finds it extraordinary that it had ever been tolerated. Slavery? Appalling. The wonder is that it lasted.

But when we look at the Washingtons and the Jeffersons and wonder how they could have lived with that abomination, we should pause a moment and ask ourselves a few questions too. Because right now, in our own advanced, democratic countries we’re tolerating abuses which may in turn come to be regarded as just as incomprehensible as slavery.

In Britain, thirty people a week are dying after having been deemed fit for work by an agency acting for government. This means that terribly ill individuals, often disabled, are being denied benefits, their suffering hugely increased as they go to their deaths. This is presented as tough but intelligent economics.

On both sides of the Atlantic, huge numbers of people are being denied access to healthcare either because it is being sacrificed to shareholder interest in the US, or subject to increasingly draconian restrictions in Europe. People are dying needlessly, and in greater pain, than they would if we were prepared to invest more in their care.

The kind of racist thinking that inflamed Roger Taney continues to poison the debate about immigration or about Islam, and the greatest ‘minority’ of all, women, are still far from attaining equality with men or the full protection of the law, as casual attitudes towards domestic violence or rape constantly attest.

We can look back on those grand old men of the eighteenth century and puzzle at their blindness and wilful self-delusion. If we don’t want future generations to look back at us with the same condescending contempt, we need to take a look at what we’re doing wrong in our time.

And fix it. Fast.