Point(s) of view

Boris Johnson talks about the single viewpoint created across the Roman Empire by Augustus. The man sure had high rolling PR: Virgil, Horace, Propertius, but, though Boris doesn't mention it, there must have been similar stuff at all levels, right down to the most tawdry souvenirs, pamphlets, charms, etc. As an example, he gives the Battle of Actium, when Antony and Cleopatra turned and fled leaving the field (waters) and the empire to Augustus.

For a decade and a half before that, Antony had been the supremo in the East, and it is conceivable that the empire could have been split in two. There must have been an Antonian propaganda machine, another way of looking at things, but it was disassembled and junked way back then when Augustus was sewing up the future. So now we have the Great Roman brought low by lust; the scheming but oh-so-alluring Eastern whore befuddling his senses and fatally undermining his manhood. The Augustan Team did their job well; now there really is basically just one way of seeing the Battle of Actium and much else of that time. ('History will judge us kindly', Churchill told Roosevelt and Stalin at the Tehran Conference in 1943. How could he be so sure? 'Because I shall write the history'.)

Boris asks, Will the French and the British ever have the same view of Waterloo? It seems doubtful. As a demonstration of goodwill ("Call me an idealist"), he suggests that, to start building that Common European Point of View, every schoolchild by the age of 16 should have read Book IV of the Aeniad. That's the one when Aeneas walks out on Dido. (I wonder what the subsidies to maintain a Common European Point of View would amount to over the decades, and what its effect would be on Third World literature. Would it come under the jurisdiction of the WTO?)

But there's work to do at a much lower level than the European Union. One of the most striking aspects of Italian political life is the number of 'mysteries' still unresolved after 10, 20, 40 years. Put 'misteri d'Italia' into Google and you get 200,000 sites. Open the first, and the front page lists 27, though one of those includes "8 massacres; 150 dead; 39 trials". Britain is such a tame place. I'm sure that those who are keen on such things could find a few, but they would never compare in scale or depth to the Italian collection.

I wonder if this, too, isn't a question of points of view. The UK has been politically stable for many centuries, and its institutions are relatively well-established and trusted. There is one goverment, and generally, there is a broad consensus on most things. The death of David Kelly, for instance, was potentially a fertile ground for conspiracy cultivation, but once the official inquiry was completed, talk died down very quickly. This doesn't seem to be the case in Italy.

My hypothesis is that, at least in part, Italy is rich in mysteries because it does not have a single source of authority. There are too many 'active agents' and too many well-established powers away from the centre. The big split, of course, is that between the Church and the State, about which you could refill the sea with speculation. Then there are the para-military powers of the Mafia in Sicily, 'Ndrangeta around Naples, La Sacra Corona in Apulia so 'interpenetrated' (forgive me) with the State that it is unlikely that any of us will live to see their end. Not too speak of the entirely legitimate regionalism of the country, or provincialism, or parochialism - for the visitor, one of the glories of Italy, but an impenetrable block on the road to unity. Mussolini said once, "It isn't difficult to rule Italy. It's useless." Could it be that one of the gifts of stability is this single authority that imposes on reality a 'single point of view'. I'm not saying it is necessarily the truth. However, it functions as such, and in so doing saves a lot of time.

Stop!

One of the many problems with Life, but not with stories, is that you can't stop it. But, how would it be if, face-to-indifferent-face with catastrophe, you just stopped, and said, 'Right. Just hold it there!'? Everything stops. Birds become blots in the air, and the wind at your back is stilled. The river is a frozen slick and the ocean is just paint on the sky. The sun no longer burns, though light hangs flabby in the air.

You step back in this shabbylight. One step, two, three. How far back will you have to go before you can discern the turn-off to catastrophe? And when you start forward again, how forceful will the propulsion towards it be? Will you be able to summon the will sufficient to deviate from that onrush once it begins again? If not, will you stop and try again? And again? Would this absolute liberty, power over all, become just a variant on the castigation of Sisyphus?

Motivation

I've just started Boris Johnson's The Dream of Rome, and I thought you might like a taster.

He tells the story of one of greatest military disasters in Roman history, the battle known as the Teutoburg Forest, in which Publius Quinctilius Varus lost three entire legions to the German tribes under Arminius. Evidently, the German women would hang around just behind the lines ready to move in and strip the bodies of the fallen enemy of anything that could be used or swapped. However, they had another function.

If a barbarian retreated or was beaten back, it was standard for the wives to bare their breasts in a kind of Sun Page Three exhortation to the troops. 'This is what you are fighting for!' they would cry, and the barbarian would pick up his sword or axe, wipe the blood from his nose, thank the girl for reminding him and run back to battle.

Typical Boris Johnson, as is his explanation for not addressing himself before now to the great question of how Rome unified Europe (and, presumably, why it can't be done now).

Much of my university career was spent, alas, in dissolution of one kind or another.

There are sure to be more treats in store.

The 10 Commandments (revised and forwarded)

by Big Pharoah
A sample? Commandment number 8.

Thou shall not boycott an entire nation because a single newspaper, TV channel, radio station, politician, actor, actress, etc, etc, in that nation said or wrote or drew something that offended you. Why? Because its stupid and childish to do so and it further hurts your image.

(via Instapundit)

The wondrous weapon: Islamic violence

What a weapon! What an army! You can't outgun it - it's bigger than any weapon ever made. You can't sabotage it - it has no vital parts. You can't protect its targets - there are as many targets as it decides. It needs no special ammunition. Its strikepower is infinitely adaptable. When it strikes it never misses because even if its target remains standing, in striking it has replicated itself by inspiring others. It has no structure to be crippled nor supply lines to be disrupted. It needs only air to breathe, words to focus it and a brotherhood to recognise it.

The creation of the modern terrorist must be one of the most curious cases of social pathology in history. To have turned the self-disgust of the flagellati outwards and to have propagated like a computer virus so that there are no fences facin' surely marks a unique phenomenon. The rage of the political revolutionary turned back to its religious sources and magnified like AIDS returning to Africa. And it is a rage that is forever fuelled - by the feelings of cultural inadequacy before a world so shaped by the great adversary that even its victims depend completely on the very structure that humiliates them.

What a weapon! It can be put to so many uses. If Amir Tahiri is right, and what he says makes sense, this latest worldwide tantrum was egged on by Iran and Syria for very immediate and strictly political purposes. Iran because it is about to be reported to the UN Security Council; Syria because the UN is wants to question Bashar al-Assad, his relatives and aides about the Hariri assassination and the Security Council will soon decide how to bring this about. And ... the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council is about to pass to Denmark.

These two only saw their chance after the first well-scripted shouts were hurled in the streets. For several months, Sunni-Salafi groups from Denmark and other European countries had been trying to spark 'mass Muslim anger' into a conflagration, but had had only limited success. Damascus and Tehran were able to offer offended Muslims on demand.

The resentments and anger conjured for various reasons into street violence is different only in degree and application to that which puts bombs in market places. This wondrous weapon can create instant icons of victory and it can also bully and intimidate, strike repeatedly locally and internationally to crack and crumble its enemy's self-confidence. Which brings us to ... us.

Thankfully, there has not been unanimous pusillanimity this time round. But reaction among the usual appeasers is instructive and illustrates beautifully the immense power of the wondrous weapon. They use phrases such as 'common sense', 'a sense of restraint', 'respect' and 'compromise'; all laudably adult and reasonable. Is it not reasonable to give a little in order to get a little? We agree not to do or say certain things and they agree not to burn down buildings or chop our heads off. That's fair, isn't it?

No. Because it is giving in to intimidation.
No. Because it means one rule for a them, another for us.
No. Because it would not be a compromise but a surrender; it would be submission.
No. Because it would be the first of many such demands.

Tony Blair said today at the opening of the Labour Party Conference,

Freedom of speech is an ancient British liberty, but it should be exercised with responsibility because if it isn't, another ancient liberty, the right to life, is put at risk, and that cannot be right.

Now I would hope that he is referring here to what certain mullahs say in their mosques. But maybe not. Maybe he's got 12 cartoons and a handful of newspaper editors in his mind. In any case, this is the sort of thing that many other commentators have muttered with regard to the cartoon fuss. And what does it actually mean? That we must only say that will not cause us to be threatened. Who decides what that is? The ones doing the threatening. The lot who believe in the subjugation of civil society to religious authority, in the inferiority of the female, and the further inferiority of non-believers.

Freedom of speech is a political right exercised in order to control political power, both constrained by the law. The limits placed on freedom of speech cannot be decided on the streets according to who is most willing to dole out violence. They cannot be decided by a minority whose fundamental political position is a negation of that freedom.

No debate. No question.

A bit late with this one. I haven't been keeping up with Dorothy King. My loss.

She writes about places where you can only think one way; you can only say certain things; your support and opposition must be entirely predictable. Do not question. Our universities.

A documentary by Evan Maloney, Brainwashing 101, has demonstrated how unwelcome anyone with non-leftwing views is made to feel in US universities these days - one professor was told she would not have been hired had they known she was a Republican. Leftwing anthropologists outnumber rightwing ones 30-to-one in US universities; with politics professors the ratio is almost seven to one. We are rapidly moving towards the one-party campus, and universities where you can only belong to the left are as dangerous as those where you could only belong to the Nazi party.

Ecology is a prime example of a field in which extremism rules. Anyone who questions the doomsday scenarios is labelled ignorant. Bjorn Lomborg, a leftwing Danish professor, set his students a project - to check the facts of a writer who had argued against the likelihood of ecological apocalypse. Mr Lomborg was shocked to discover that many ecological theories were based on estimates rather than statistics, and went on to write his book The Sceptical Environmentalist. Still an environmentalist by any assessment, he is now reviled for having pointed out that the Earth is not about to self-destruct next week. Worse, he gathered a group (including three Nobel laureates) to form the Copenhagen Consensus, which argues that fighting disease is more important than implementing the Kyoto protocol. When his research and statistics stood up to every onslaught, he became the subject of personal attacks.

She also speaks about the DDT ban, the promotion of generic drugs in the Third World, and the link between cancer and the pill. On the last.

I mentioned the theory of a possible link between hormones, oral contraception and cervical cancer at the dinner and was screamed at by an American academic: apparently I risked setting back women's rights 100 years. Her idea of debate was to throw bread in my direction and to refuse to listen to contrary arguments. An ardent feminist, she thought she could help women with cervical cancer by yelling.

The people present that evening were all very intelligent, but they questioned surprisingly little. Just expressing the "right" opinions gave them a sense of moral superiority. If such people are shaping our future, we're in trouble. If we stifle debate - from the left or the right - we are no better than totalitarian regimes such as the Nazis.

Does this remind you of another topic in the smoke-filled air at the moment to do with Danes and cartoons, though the representatives of Right Thinking in this case are not throwing bread?

Arab performance

Ninme has dug out a report published in 2002 by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). There's a lot in it, but one thing that stood out for me was what it had to say about knowledge (the report identifies 3 great 'deficits': freedom, knowledge and womanpower). It is the figure it gives for the number of translations made into Arabic.

...in the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, say the authors, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in one year.

One of the most telling signs of a culture's growth is the quantity of knowledge it seeks, its hunger for new sources of information. The number of translations is not an infallible one. For instance, compared to many cultures, English translates little, but that is because it is the main scientific and academic language. This is not the case for the major European languages; the figure for Italian, for example, is something like 30%. It must have been similar in this country in the 16th century when we had to catch up with Italy and France, when the trickle of Latin and Greek loanwords became a flood.

The following quote is given in the same paragraph of the report summary.

“If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.”

What sort of education is it that young Arabs receive?

From their schooldays onwards, Arabs are instructed that they should not defy tradition, that they should respect authority, that truth should be sought in the text and not in experience. Fear of fawda (chaos) and fitna (schism) are deeply engrained in much Arab-Islamic teaching. “The role of thought”, wrote a Syrian intellectual “is to explain and transmit...and not to search and question.”

via Ninme

The British Empire ... not long enough

Mark Steyn with some familiar sentiments on the British Empire and constitution

...Simone Weil, the Parisian author and sometime Jew/Marxist/anarchist who came to Britain during the war to work for the Free French ... pondered why, alone among the European powers, it was England that had maintained "a centuries-old tradition of liberty guaranteed by the authorities." She was struck ... "by the fact that in the British Constitution the chief power is vested in one who is all but powerless, the monarch."

...and some less familiar ones.

Indeed, if you step back, one way to look at the "war on terror" is as a belated civil war within the British Empire -- at any rate between the Anglosphere core (America, Britain, Australia, India) and a dysfunctional periphery (Gaza, the Pakistani tribal lands, the Sunni triangle), or between those territories that enjoyed the full attentions of the mother country and those it acquired in the Versailles settlement -- the last flickering fag-end of imperial expansion...Alas, for them, for their subjects and for the world today, when they finally got their hands on the Middle East, British imperialism had dwindled down to its bare bones: import some Hashemite prince, create a phony-baloney kingdom for him, and retreat to your bases.

"Liberty guaranteed by the authorities". Hmm.

Commemorate by not remembering

If ever you feel that it's all just too complex to untangle and it's nothing but congestion of the country and the soul from now on and you daydream of becoming Winnie-the-Pooh, read something like this, and thank whatever deity you prefer or have created that you were not born in Hungary. A taster.

The enthusiasm of the Hungarians is always short-lived. Foreigners see this as perhaps their most characteristic trait. Together with the way they cry at parties. And curse fate, bent over the table.

But instead of entering the murky waters of the national character and the soul of the people, let us rather concentrate on Hungary's peculiar brand of communal national remembrance – this memory without remembering, the fact that in Hungarian history, strangely, the way memory works is by blocking out precisely that which is to be commemorated.

Remembering meant suppressing memory. In other words: the more deformed the memory, the more truthful it appeared.

This was occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the 1956 uprising. (Highlighting in original)

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and George Szirtes

It the ones who have had to fight for it that really appreciate it. Those not to the manna born. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for one.

SPIEGEL: But Muslims, like any religious community, should also be able to protect themselves against slander and insult.

Hirsi Ali: That's exactly the reflex I was just talking about: offering the other cheek. Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren't preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don't allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they'll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless.

And for another, George Szirtes.

In fact this is not about Muslims or Islam. It is about us and our assumptions, principles, integrity, and our long struggles to achieve such rights as we have achieved, rights we generally think worth having struggled for. And here I mean 'rights' as enshrined in laws, not manners, or habits of address or respect. ...
I would of course prefer an ethos of respect and politeness. But when it comes to the very principles of European liberty I want firmness and the determination to yield not an inch of vital life-giving ground.

Enough about this. It has brought to the fore a great question. Are we Europeans prepared to fight, not for our holidays, or electronic fun machines, or the article of faith that it's got to be right for me, but for the achievements of so many before us, and the greatest of which is, not love, but freedom? Will we give over apologising for having achieved so much, or will we shrink from the spitting rage that we're faced with? It doesn't require violence or chauvinism or the old Bolschevic demonisation of some group or other (no matter how much they might do it); it just requires self-knowledge, honesty and confidence.

(via Harry's Place)