Blood & Treasure

Accountant pleads for more financial information

(Richard J here)

Ban This Filth! Letters from the Mary Whitehouse archive. On one hand, given the extraordinarily patronising way she was treated by the BBC, I can't help but feel a bit more sympathy towards her. On the other, given that you hint towards her links with Moral Rearmament, and their links with the right-wing shadow structures,  to refer to the whole topic of financing with the sentence below is something of a cop out:

 "[Clean Up TV] and [the National Viewers and Listeners Association]'s accounts are one realm of the archive to which access is forbidden, but 'the Lord will provide' does seem to have been the mantra of those organisations in terms of funding."

There's the glimmer of a very interesting topic here, but this book isn't it - shallow, and never quite sure of the tone it wants to take; cheap laughs, grudging respect, or something more interesting. (The involvement of Trunk Records in its inception suggests the former, as do the captions in the photos, but the text is surprisingly more ambivalent.)

Mary Whitehouse awaits a proper examination - oh for a British Rick Perlstein, that's what I say.

 

Yorkshire, Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau!

(Richard J here - I promised Jamie this in his holidays, but work, and no home broadband got in the way.)

 "The voice of theorists of nationalism can be distant and ironic; they see that the apparently obvious is obviously mistaken, that the emperor has no clothes. The question is why naked emperors get to rule. Part of the answer is the deceptively soporific nature of irony. [...] It might also seem ironic that [...] the one line of poetry that every Pole can recite is "Lithuania, my fatherland!". If we experience irony as an invitation to investigate, we find that variants of the early modern nationality of the Commonwealth survived its demise by more than a century. In this study, irony is a way to ask questions, not a substitute for answers."

From the preface to Timothy Snyder's Reconstruction of Nations, and I think a handy summary of the book as a whole. When one looks at the awkward separation of the utterly intertwined senses of national identity in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an ironic tone is hard to avoid - that Wilno was less than 2% Lithuanian as late as World War II, or the nested chauvinisms inherent in modifying Lithuanian orthography by using Czech orthography as a basis, rather than Polish, even though Polish itself had originally based its spelling on Czech (the Czechs having in the meantime changed their orthography to purge it of German influence.)

And for a lot of the book, the able and clear way in which Snyder disentangles the squabbling and competing claims as Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian identities consciously created themselves (or failed to do so) is lighthearted knockabout fun. Until, of course, it all changed, when, for example many Lithuanians welcomed the takeover by the USSR as finally allowing them to take Vilnius back into the homeland it had never been part of, or the petty squabbling over whether a village was full of Ukranians with a misguided belief that they were Polish, or just misplaced Poles, became, literally, a life or death question.

In the West, I think we tended to view the Banderistas through a cold war prism - doomed romantics fighting against both the Germans and the USSR for an independent Ukraine (with a vague nagging doubt about what they got up to in the Holocaust) - what this book really brings out is their parallels with the Ustashe - their main targets were neither the German, nor the USSR, nor even the Jews (albeit mainly because they were already, in the main, dead, before they got fully active), but Poles - the descriptions in the book of the UPA wiping out Polish villages in Ukraine to purge Ukraine of 'alien' elements are chilling (as are, with Snyder's trademark scrupulous fairness to all sides, the retribution carried out by the Poles and the ensuing cycle of violence).

Which leads onto the book's last section, the dog that didn't bark - why did a newly free Poland not seek to recover the lost territories, and manage to avoid entirely a Yugoslavian type situation so effectively that (myself included) most Westerners aren't even aware there were such lost territories - here, the book becomes perhaps less convincing, but its core argument is that a small group of emigré Poles single-handedly steered the discourse away from lost hurts and focussing onto establishing a bulwark of friendly and stable neighbours as being in Poland's own self-interest, no matter whether Vilnius, as a city, was in living memory about as Lithuanian a city as Warsaw.

Highly recommended.

Soldaten, however, oh Soldaten. What can I say? The virtue of the book and its biggest flaw are precisely the same, and stem from the primary sources behind it all - the secret recordings of mostly unacquainted German soldiers, pilots, etc. stuck in a room together, and left to their own devices. The virtue lies in the unguarded nature of the conversations, and the further demolition of the idea of the Good Wehrmacht. This is also, paradoxically, its biggest flaw, in that people stuck together with nothing to do will bullshit and tacitly avoid calling people out on it, particularly in recordings from earlier on in the war, where, after all, admitting to being anything other than ardently pro-Hitler might cause problems once the 4th Panzer's dramatic sweep through from Camber Sands liberates you. Ultimately, despite the seductive appearance of the honest truth in these transcripts, disappointly we have to admit we're no further in understanding wie Sie eigentliches gedenken.

(The book itself is apparently translated from the German, rather than being written by the (German) authors in English. You could have fooled me. Other than that, it's fine - my vague sense of anti-climax is due to the sources themselves, not the book.)

there once was a world

Following Jamie's spate of disrecommendations, Misha Glenny's Dark Market is crap.  I liked McMafia a lot, and his book on the Balkans, but it's abundantly clear from the start that Glenny doesn't know anything about computers or geek culture, and will swallow pretty much anything he's told. It reads like an Internet panic story from 2000 or so, and it's strangely clumsily written to boot.  The only thing I got from it was finding out, in passing, about the 1996 Turkish car crash involving a Parliamentary deputy, the chief of the Istanbul chief, and a heroin smuggler and contract killer.  Rather disappointed by The Anatomy of a Moment, about the failed Spanish coup, as well.  

On the positive side, Martin Gidron's The Severed Wing is one of the few Holocaust novels worth reading.  (Terrible, terrible cover, though.)  It's an alternate history with a swift Great War and no Holocaust, about a world with sixteen million Jews, abundant Yiddishkeit, Polish pogroms, and all that was lost, both in reality and in potential. It's frequently a little too smart with the alternate references - Bill Gates as a windows salesman, for instance - but it's clever and sad and sometimes beautiful.  

conventionalonomics

On the list of great unfinished works - Edwin Drood, Dead Souls, The New Shadow, Big Numbers - I'm sure we would all include "dsquared's review of Freakonomics."  (Personally, I'd like James C. Scott to write his book on "people who move around," though I think much of it ended up The Art of Not Being Governed.)

In the meantime, there's a pleasing list of that book's failings here.

Further entries on the B&T reading list

(Richard J here). Sundry capsule reviews of recent reading...

David Edgerton - Britain's War Machine - Chris W has alluded to his work here and there recently, and this book appears to form a handy precis of his arguments, which truly change how I thought about WW2 - epitomising perhaps a tad too much, it's not that Britain underestimated technology and the quality of its war machines, but that it made (perhaps forgiveable in context) errors in what areas it chose to focus on before the proving began. Also, Corelli Barnett can go fuck himself. Perhaps slightly too much of an otherwise puzzling axe to grind against leftist historians (given the leanings of his implicit targets) but definitely worth reading.

Jill Lepore - The Whites of their Eyes - The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History - disappointingly unreflective. Short, and expanded from a New Yorker article, which summarises the errors and fallacies in the Tea Partier-view of the American Revolution, but is disappointingly light on any real analysis as to why such errors find resonance with such a wide section of the American population. (Top fact: 'Founding Fathers' wasn't coined until 1916.)

Nigel Hamilton - American Caesars- light, gossipy, noticeably inaccurate in several obvious places, fun. Pretty much like the Suetonius model, in actual fact.

Timothy Snyder - Bloodlands - If you only want to read one book this year about the agonising deaths of millions through callous and deliberate starvation, make it this one.

Anna Reid -Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege. Alternatively, make it this one. I wish I could be anything other than remorselessly trivial and bad-taste jokey about these books, because both of them are superb, if grim, reading, with an obvious passion and empathy for the human beings unfortunate enough to be living in that particular place at that particular time.

China Mieville - Kraken -  I always want to like Mieville more than I actually do, and this, sadly, is no exception.

Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London - similar theme to the above (the intersection between the police and the supernatural in London), and, TBH, much less well executed than Mieville's take on the theme, but if I had to read one again, well...

misery poker

I've heard some tragic stories in my time.  Entire families wiped out in earthquakes, Stalinist persecutions, village thuggery, organized crime murders ...

But one of my friends just told me he had to edit Tony Parsons' My Favourite Wife.  Jesus.

a fistful of books

The Last Days of the Incas, Kim McQuarie – A little way into this, I realized that the conquistadors were, in fact, a D&D party. They travel into a land of unknown empires and strange creatures in search of as much silver and gold as they can accumulate. Their main tool is gratuitious violence. They wear plate armor and massacre hordes of not-quite-human (from their perspective) enemies. Their group is made up of fighters, clerics, and thieves. And “We kidnap the Emperor and hold him to ransom!” is something many a party has tried over the years.

Anyway, excellent book, which covers Incan imperialism fairly while also emphasizing how much more more tolerable it was, for ordinary people, than the Spanish replacement. The record of squabbles and murders among the Spanish is also good. That’s what happens when you pick evil characters, you know; heap up the loot and the player-on-player violence starts straight off.

The Captured, Scott Zesch – Great book about “white Indians” taken as children and raised among the tribes, concentrating on Texas in the 1870s. One interesting thing is how quickly these German-American kids (for the most part) learnt “Indian” skills; it reminds me of the cultural flexibility you always get on borders, such as the exiles and displaced people who ended up becoming “Cossacks,” who mastered horsemanship within a generation and, when they hit the Black Sea, became expert pirates. It comes, I suspect, in part because of the lack of clear hierarchies and the culturally marginal status; contrast, for instance, the Viking colonies in Greenland, who, at least by Jared Diamond’s account, basically tried to replicate the old country ways as closely as possible.

Also, I hadn’t realized quite how many Germans there were in the 19th century US. (Though I did know that a bunch of towns used German as their main language right up to WWI.) There’s probably a good PhD to be written on the influence of Wild West stories back in Germany itself, especially on the conceptions of the Eastern frontier; Karl May sold a zillion copies and was often recommended by the Nazis.

 “Look at what the Americans did to the Indians” was one of the standard Nazi talking points – it comes up at the Nuremberg trials almost as often as “What about the Soviets?”, “We couldn’t break our oaths,” and “It was all Hitler’s fault,” but it was used in internal Nazi dialogue too. The Wild West thing also had some influence on SS training, which drew heavily on German romantic outdoor traditions – like Woodcraft Folk* but with submachine guns – that in part stemmed from notions about “Indians.” “Indian” camps are still popular in Germany and Denmark.

*Founded in part by neo-pagans in the 1920s, according to Ronald Hutton, which would explain why, in my experience, it was so fucking tedious.

Lost in Shangri-La, Mitchell Zuckoff – My grandfather spent his childhood and adolescence in small-town Transylvania, a third-rate British public school, and an Australian internment camp, before ending up a clerk in the Australian army in Papua in 1944. (He got jaundice and failed to get laid; he once assured me “There is no chance you have any Papuan cousins.”)

So I have a certain family interest in stories of that time, and this is a very well-done, often funny popular history of an American plane crash in a remote valley, culminating in one of those ridiculous, amazing, and ludicrously expensive technical feats that the military sometimes pulls off. Does a fine job of bringing wider issues (the Philippines’ relationship with the US, Papuan culture and war, cultural arrogance) into the story without overwhelming the reader with information, though I sometimes wished for it to go just a bit deeper.

The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber – Very good, and only about 100 pages too long, which is a remarkably achievement for a novel of its size. Even managed to overcome my initial skepticism about having a gamine, super-intelligent teenage prostitute for a protagonist, which seemed a little bit like the “Dragon Tattoo” thing of “I totally respect women, and here is my uber-hot genius heroine who loves bonking middle-aged journalists to prove it.” I did think of Alan Moore’s FROM HELL, though, which is the best depiction of the Victorian underclass I know, and in which the prostitution is about as unerotic as you can get.

War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence H. Keeley – Surely the perfect Blood and Treasure book, dedicated as it is to “primitive” people doing horrible things to each other, and how it compares to “civilized” people doing the same. I especially like the bit where he calculates how much worse 20th century casualties would have been, given the same number of people, in a state of primitive warfare. Good hard statistics and archaeological/anthropological evidence to back up his claims, too – one of the entertaining parts about archaeology is how it can suddenly turn into CSI: Ice Age. One of the things he finds is that increased trade contact leads to a higher rate of conflicts and therefore wars, which I’m going to trot out the next time I hear a “globalization means no-one can go to war anymore!” argument.

(Also, The Psychopath Test, very entertaining but I always find with Ronson that I want more detail than he gives, Transitions, which is the weakest Iain Banks for a long time – it’s depressing when a story of dimension-skipping assassins is both didactic and lifeless - Rivers of London, surprisingly good London urban fantasy, emphasis on the urban, genuinely funny, The Perfect Nazi, which Jamie’s already written on – I particularly like the stormtrooper song blaming bad weather on the Jews. How do you even sing that? Seriously, or as self-parody that’s also threat? -, The Last Wish, not bad gritty Polish fantasy (I’m told the author, now the doyen of the Polish fandom scene, has to be kept away from drink and girls at conventions), Write More Good, mildly amusing, The Simpsons: An Uncensored History, crap, not least because while an oral history format might be good for punk, where people were doing vast amounts of drugs and killing each other and other interesting things, the petty squabbles among producers and comedy geeks aren't anywhere near an entertaining, Land of Marvels, entertaining but not Unsworth’s best by a long stretch, The Battle of Britain, short and interesting but nothing new, and Tales from Earthsea and The Other Wind, wonderful, though the ending of The Other Wind is abrupt and weak.)

declining value

So, Waterstone's.  Worth £300 million in 1998, when HMV brought it, just sold for ... £53 million.  That feels about right, sadly.  I can remember when I'd walk into the Deansgate branch and buy £150 of books without even thinking about it; last time I was back I was stretched to spend £20. 

philososnore

 I brought Michael Sandel's Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? some time back, because his Harvard lecture series is super-popular on the Chinese internet.  And it was ... dull.  Not bad, or objectionable, just dull, like listening to a Unitarian sermon.  Anyway, I quit about a third of the way in, and had no great plans to go back.

And we've got an interview with him today which is, again, almost mind-numbingly dull. (Apparently people in material societies discover that material things aren't enough for happiness, and then begin to ask the reason why, shockingly.)   So what is it about this guy?  Is he a really good lecturer, or something?  Or do the lectures appeal to the Chinese audience exactly because they deal with very basic issues, of a type that Chinese schools don't touch.

boooooks

To End All Wars, Adam Hothschild - About pacifists, conscientious objectors, and suffragettes in World War I. The broad outlines of the history, I imagine, will be familiar to your average B&T reader, but it's extremely well-written, gripping in its focus on the personal without forgetting the big picture, and has some cracking details. I also had no idea that in 1915, the British and Germans struck a deal [whoops, totally wrong link in first version of post] through Switzerland, to exchange German optics for British rubber; very sporting, really, and made sure everyone could keep the war going.  (Checking, there seems to be some doubt as to whether the deal actually went through; Hothschild says that the UK received 32,000 binoculars in August 1915, but that the records on what they gave the Germans in return have disappeared.)

Why Marx Was Right, Terry Eagleton- Interesting, combative and well-written, as you'd expect, but glosses over the fact that a lot of the supposed "distortions" of Marx he complains about arise from Marxists themselves. It's a little like those defences of Christianity based purely upon the Gospels; the actual movement didn't work that way.  And just plain bad when it comes to trying to find excuses for the Bolsheviks, and in the treatment of Marxism-in-power in general.  Also, as usual with Eagleton, much too given to the arch professorial joke, ideally with a celebrity reference.

The World As It is, Chris Hedges - Chris Hedges has written one all-time classic, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and three decent other books (American Fascists, I Don't Believe in Atheists, Empire of Illusion.)  Unfortunately, this collection of essays brings out all his worst qualities - for instance, the brand of American exceptionalism that sees the US as uniquely sinful, degenerate, etc - and ridiculous comparisonsab.  ("Any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police.") Andif I cared what Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader thought about anything, I'd buy their books.  Apparently the idea that Nader was in any way to blame for the election of George Bush is "an absurdity that found fertile ground among those who had abandoned rational inquiry for the thought-terminating cliches of television."

Plus there's one of those passages about how he was on a boxing team in college, and "my closest friends were construction workers and pot washers," who were so much more reliable than the effete liberals at his university. Just once I'd like to see "I spent time with ordinary, honest working men when I was young, and they were a bunch of lazy racists."

Suicide in Nazi Germany, Christian Goeschel - Useful statistical and anecdotal material, but I wish they'd been comparative work with Japan, and it suffers badly from PhD-itis, right down to the lit. review at the beginning. 

(Also The Retreat, by Michael Jones, a superior class of war-porn which makes, very oddly, no mention of the fact that the mass deaths of Russian prisoners, which he discusses, was planned pre-war by the Wehrmacht, and Jo Nesbo's The Redbreast, which was pretty good, but why is Scandinavian crime literature so obsessed with World War II?)

 

scandinavian