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Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan (1971)

Milligan’s war memoirs

The same year that Eric Newby published his memoir of being an escaped prisoner of war in ‘Love and Death in the Apennines‘, Spike Milligan published his own contribution to the roster of Second World War memoirs, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’.

In the preface Milligan says it was intended to be the first part of a trilogy about his war experiences, covering the period from his conscription in 1939 till the time his regiment landed at Algiers. Volume 2 would cover from going into action till VJ day. Volume 3 would cover from his demobilisation in 1945 to his eventual return to England. In the event, according to Wikipedia, Milligan ended up writing no fewer than seven (!) volumes of war memoirs:

Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall
‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’
Monty: His Part in My Victory
Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall
Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

The Goons

A few year after the end of the war, Milligan would be central to setting up the fantastically popular radio programme, The Goon Show, which ran from 1951 to 1960 and created characters and catchphrases which entertained a mass audience during the decade of Austerity. (He has a brief passage explaining the origin of the word ‘Goon’ which he took from a US TV series about Popeye, on page 77 and further references to proto-Goon writing on pages.) In theory I ought to like The Goons, and I sort of enjoy the silly voices, but between my youth and the Goons lies, like an Iron Curtain, the vast presence of Monty Python, like an impassable barrier.

Monty Python

The thing about the Pythons, for me, was their intelligence and cultural capital; it was the logic and thoroughness of the thinking, where an idea is worked through with a thoroughness which takes it beyond the everyday and far into the surreal, such as the dead parrot sketch or ‘is this the right room for an argument’ sketch, combined with their easy familiarity with advanced cultural knowledge, for example the confidence with which they handle the material in the Philosophers’ Song. It’s written by someone who really has done a degree in philosophy and really knows what they’re talking about and it shows. They also had tremendous variety due to all the members being capable of writing material.

By contrast, The Goons always seemed very thin to me. It relied entirely on Milligan as the main writer and, although he has a fertile way in creating characters many of whom became popular figures, and it has silly voices and absurdist scenarios, for me it lacks the conceptual depth, the twisted logical thoroughness and the cultural confidence of the Pythons.

I’ve never met anyone who quote Goon Show sketches but all through my life I’ve met lots of bores who can reel off entire Monty Python sketches, and this is why. The Goons relied on silly voices and quickfire gags, whereas Python was all about very clever concepts worked out very cleverly, so that anyone repeating them not is not only funny but experiences the deep logic many of them follow.

So that’s why I feel the way I do about this book – that the comedy aspects of it depend entirely on the textual equivalent of him doing funny voices and pulling funny faces, and these are, frankly, pretty limited tricks and quickly become over-familiar.

Types of Milligan joke

What I mean is he has a limited number of types of gag and you quickly come to recognise and expect them. Most of them are types of wordplay. For example, over and again he quotes a common or garden English locution then takes it to extremes, exploiting its latent absurdity:

I heaved at the weights, Kerrrrrrissttt!! an agonised pain shot round my back into my groin, down my leg, and across the road to a bus stop. (p.19)

Father and son were then shown the door, the windows, and finally the street. (p.16)

The walls once white were now thrice grey. (p.27)

Very closely related is taking a common or garden phrase and taking it literally and/or giving it an unexpected (and therefore comic) spin.

I was put in Lewisham General Hospital under observation. I think a nurse did it through a hole in the ceiling.

The fog was very dense, as were Signallers Devine and White.

Sergeant Harris was a regular. He went every morning without fail. (p.50)

He said I couldn’t climb a tree for toffee. I said, ‘Who climbs trees for toffee? I get mine in a shop.’ (p.94)

We had arrived at a hundred-year old deserted chalk quarry. How can people be so heartless as to desert a hundred-year-old chalk quarry?

The dance was held in a large and comfortable countrystyle lounge: chairs and sofas clad in loose floral covers, plenty of polished wood, a few Hercules Brabizon-Brabizon water colours on walls, standard lamps with silk shades, a few oriental curios, traces of visits to foreign climes. (What are foreign climes? Waiter! A pound of foreign climes, please!) (p.98)

A deliberate misunderstanding can be worked up into a bit of repartee:

A worried officer rushed up. ‘Can you play “The Maple Leaf Forever”?’ ‘No sir, after an hour I get tired.’ ‘You’re under arrest,’ he said. (p.48)

[The cook] doled out something into my mess tin. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Irish Stew,’ he said, ‘Then,’ I replied. ‘Irish Stew in the name of the Law.’ (p.141)

There’s the verbal trick of offering a clichéd phrase then doing a comic reversal of it:

Occasionally he sang ‘Mighty Like a Rose’ in a quavering light baritone (or mighty like a baritone, in a quivering rose).

Taking words intended metaphorically literally:

The Catholic priest warned, ‘Avoid loose women.’ I never told him the women I knew were so loose they were falling to bits. (p.49)

These all strike me as variations on the same idea, the deliberate misinterpretation of an everyday phrase for comic effect, or the revealing of the comic implications laying dormant in a phrase which he makes explicit, or the taking of a common phrase to absurd extremes. Puns, in other words.

Another strand is what you could call English suburban surrealism like the jokey stuff at the beginning about his mum making an air raid shelter in the garden or his dad putting a road block across their street, silliness of a very ‘Diary of a Nobody’ kind. It’s surrealism but of a very mundane flavour. Of the statutory cross country run in the army he knocks off a quick one-line gag:

Many tried to husband their energy by running on one leg.

Or:

‘Silence when you speak to an officer,’ said Battalion Sergeant Major. (p.29)

All of his humour depends on a kind of rapid, quickfire delivery which, once it gets going, keeps you permanently off balance, vulnerable to the next gag, then the next one then the next one.

It can become quite painful. 1) Milligan’s humour is very hit and miss. On the radio it didn’t matter too much because the script was made up entirely of absurdist scenarios which carry you with them, and in whose chaotic context a barrage of one-liners worked. Plus, crucially, 2) the performance was shared between Milligan and two performers of genius, Harry Secombe and especially Peter Sellers.

But in static prose Milligan doesn’t have any of those resources. It’s just him and the written word, no silly scripts, silly voices or silly collaborators egging each other on.

Read cold on the page this reveals a number of things. One is that, after an opening flurry of silliness – taking the mickey out of Neville Chamberlain, the silly stories about his father and older brother trying to get the Ministry of Defence interested in patently absurd inventions, getting into trouble with the police for erecting a barrier across their road on the day war is declared and so on – the book settles down and becomes more factual and this is generally to the good.

Behind the tiresome gags is an interesting account of being conscripted and sent to join a gunnery regiment on the south coast. There’s all kinds of stuff about men in the army but what really comes over is how he set up a jazz band with three like-minded blokes and managed to play gigs and parties around the region, sometimes picking up hefty fees. The story of him being invited to the BBC studios in Maida Vale to play with a scratch band and actually record some tracks is memorable because it is sincere; his love of music and of performing shines through.

A second thing which emerges is that his style is wildly uneven, veering from semi-illiterate, passing through competent enough, and on to the extremely idiosyncratic. Here he is, struggling to write a sentence.

From motor vehicles we went on to Bren Carriers, they were marvellous, they’d go anywhere, and didn’t we just do that. (p.111)

At the other end of the spectrum his attempts at normal prose are liable to be interrupted by his fondness for staccato and/or telegraphese: he is very partial to one-word sentences, verbless sentences and abrupt transitions.

At six o’clock we arrived at the night rendezvous, a field of bracken resting on a lake. We got tea from a swearing cookhouse crew, who took it in turns to say ‘piss off’ to us. We were given to understand we could have a complete night’s sleep. Good. We tossed for who was to sleep in the truck. I lost. Sod. Rain. Idea! Under the truck! Laid out ground sheet, rolled myself like a casserole in three blankets. I dropped into a deep sleep. I awoke to rain falling on me. The truck had gone. Everybody had gone. (p.85)

There’s one particular passage where he attempts to describe the simple beauty of lazing around in the sunshine on the South Downs and his attempt to write descriptive prose is so weird it’s worth quoting in full:

No matter what season, the Sussex countryside was always a pleasure. But the summer of 1941 was a delight. The late lambs on springheel legs danced their happiness. Hot, immobile cows chewed sweet cud under the leafchoked limbs of June oaks that were young 500 years past. The musk of bramble and blackberry hedges, with purpleblack fruit offering themselves to passing hands, poppies red, red, red, tracking the sun with open-throated petals, birds bickering aloft, bibulous to the sun. White fleecy clouds passing high, changing shapes as if uncertain of what they were. To break for a smoke, to lie in that beckoning grass and watch cabbage white butterflies dancing on the wind. Everywhere was saying bethankit.

All that said, I liked the descriptions, right at the end, of going aboard ship. The vividness of the experience has obviously stayed with him and brings out some of his best description.

Nobody wanted to sleep. I worked out we were waiting for the tide. About one o’clock the ship took on an air of departure. Gangways were removed. Hatches covered. Chains rattled. The ship started to vibrate as the engines came to life. Waters swirled. Tugs moved in. Donkey-engines rattled, hawsers were dropped from the bollards, and trailed like dead eels into the oil-tinted Mersey. We were away. Slowly we glided downstream. To the east we could hear the distant cough of Ack-Ack. The time was 1.10 a.m., January 8th, 1943. We were a mile downstream when the first bombs started to fall on the city. Ironically, a rosy glow tinged the sky, Liverpool was on fire. The lads came up on deck to see it. Away we went, further and further into the night, finally drizzle and darkness sent us below. (p.130)

Q TV

In the 1970s when I started watching TV as a boy, Milligan wrote and presented the Q series of absurdist, surreal comedy sketches. He seemed to have a lot more fun making them than it was to watch them. Even as a boy I felt there was something wrong about them. I wasn’t surprised, later on, to learn that Milligan had had a mental breakdown towards the end of the war and that it was the start of a lifelong battle against depression. He didn’t seem to be master of his material but letting it gush out and master him. Well, the same feels true of the passage I’ve just quoted – he’s letting the first things that come to mind, the gags, verbal fizzes and bangs, have their way. Possibly the text took ages to compose and revise and hone but I’m talking about the final effect, which is of a man carried away by the exuberance of his own deranged antics.

Class and education

What also comes over is a class thing, that Milligan was lower-middle class with little or no higher education. His humour, and this text, entirely lacks any cultural or intellectual depth. Most male British writers of the twentieth century went to a) public school and b) Oxford or Cambridge, where they were pumped full of the Latin classics and English literature’s greatest hits. Those kinds of authors (and their fictional protagonists) feel perfectly at home dropping quotes and references from the standard Western canon of poets, playwrights, philosophers and so on. These kinds of knowing references are the natural accompaniment of the smooth narratives, rounded sentences and well-shaped paragraphs which they were taught to write at school and which are so enjoyable to read in their novels, poems, autobiographies and so on.

Milligan has absolutely none of this. There are no literary or intellectual or cultural references of any kind anywhere in the book (actually I spotted two things: one where he paraphrases ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ by Lewis Carroll, and another occasion where he spoofs the style of the King James Bible. That’s it as far as cultural references go.) Lacking any literary or cultural depth, there’s just the basic narrative of events during his period of service in a gunnery battery based on the south coast of England, which is continually interrupted by the incessant fizzing and banging of his literalism, puns and wordplay.

This inability to create larger structures or develop a flowing narrative is connected to the way the text isn’t structured in chapters (which you strongly suspect he wouldn’t have been able to plan and flow over a long stretch) but into short sections given blunt headings such as RELIGION, FOOD, SPORT, BARRACK ROOM HUMOUR and so on. Rather as the Q TV series was almost like notes for a comedy show, with the half-finished chaotic nature of the notes left in full view, so ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’ feels like notes for an autobiography, a ramshackle rummage of sections devoted to specific themes, pasted together in roughly chronological order, with no attempt to join them together into a coherent narrative.

And all of this is connected with what I mentioned earlier about class. Although Milligan was in the army there’s surprisingly little about the army as a career – nothing like the earnest engagement in the RAF of Geoffrey Wellum, for example. Instead, army life is depicted from the classic perspective of the non-officer class, as a predicament to be mocked with work and duties to be dodged whenever possible.

Spike is determined to make you see life and the Army from the squaddie’s point of view, as an organisation characterised by mismanagement and shambles, as an opportunity for pranks and practical jokes, and a set of rules and enforcers (for example, scary sergeant-majors) to be broken, dodged and avoided – all with the aim of furthering the three classic interests of uncultured working class life – grub, booze and shagging.

Anti-romance

He warns us in the preface that it’s going to be ‘bawdy’ and it is, indeed, crude bunk-up-behind-the-bike-sheds stuff.

If we take John Buchan in his Sir Edward Leithen books, as a type of the very upper-class, tight-lipped, chivalrous view of women and romance, then Spike is at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum. He, like, one suspects, many of his fellow 20-something conscript soldiers, is permanently on the lookout for sex. Whichever bars, pubs or clubs they visit or his band plays in, he’s always got an eye open for the birds, makes a point of chatting them up, is constantly aware of then. The main reason he applied to join the RAF in 1940 was that men in RAF uniform were always surrounded by the best birds in pubs (‘All the beautiful birds went out with pilots’) and he wanted some of that. Nothing to do with wanting to fly let alone serve his country. Birds. Women. Chicks.

Whereas Eric Newby’s war memoir contains a chaste and sensitive and romantic portrait of the woman who helped him on the run and went on to become his wife, a typical Milligan anecdote describes the way the high-minded Jehovah’s Witness in his unit, Bombardier MacDonald, was slowly degraded by military life until one night the guard on duty, Gunner Devine, was puzzled to hear a funny rhythmic thumping noise coming from the back of the coal sheds. Upon investigation he found Bombardier MacDonald, his trousers round his ankles, ‘having a late-night knee-trembler with a local fat girl.’ But that’s not the end of it.

Gunner Devine watched until the climax was nigh, then shouted, ‘Halt! Who comes there?’ The effect was electric. MacDonald ran into the night shouting ‘Armageddon’. The girl, still in a sexual coma, was given Gunner Devine’s rifle to hold, while he terminated her contract.

The picture of the local fat girl holding the gunner’s rifle while he took his turn screwing her is about as far from the upper-class nobility of Buchan or the romantic love affair of Newby as it’s possible to get.

But ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’ is packed with incidents like this – blunt descriptions of crude practical jokes, awful food, the odd characters you’re forced into proximity with in the army (the soldier who turned up on parade naked, the hypochondriac, the madman), silly escapades and shagging stories – only Milligan’s love of jazz and the regular playing of his band offer any sort of escape, the one place, you feel, where he can be himself and stop having to be the relentless gagster.

Happiness was a mug of tea, a cigarette, and a record of Bunny Berrigan playing ‘Let’s do it’.

It’s a great feeling playing jazz. Most certainly it never started a war. (p.135)

Birds

We had three [observation posts]: Galley Hill, Bexhill; a Martello Tower, Pevernsey and Constables Farm on the BexhillEastbourne Road. Most of us tried for the Martello on Pevensey Beach as the local birds were easier to lay, but you had to be quick because of the tides.

After a quick drink in The Devonshire we ended up at the Forces Corner to finish off the evening. I started chatting up the birds, one especially, Betty Aspnel, a plain girl who made up for it with a sensational figure, man has to be satisfied with his lot, and man! this girl had the lot.

In the evenings after dark, one or two of our favourite birds would visit us and bring fish and chips; once in we bolted the door.

That night there was an Officers’ and All-Ranks’ dance in the Drill Hall. We all worked hard to extricate all the bestlooking A.T.S. girls from the magnetic pull of the officers and sergeants. Alas, we failed, so we reverted to the time-honoured sanctuary of the working man – Drink.

Sex

At this new billet we received morning visits from a W.V.S. Canteen Van. A very dolly married woman took a fancy to me and one night, after a dance, she took me home.

Sometimes he tells what you could call a straightforward anecdote, without the odd prose style and quickfire gags. Probably the best example is, again, about sex.

It was all sex in those days it was that or the ‘flicks’ and flicks cost money. There was a lovely busty bird called Beryl, who had hot pants for me. During the interval of our first dance at Turkey Road I took her to the lorry park, into the back of a fifteen hundredweight truck. We were going through our third encore when the truck drove off. Apart from the jolting it must have been the best ride we’ve ever had. It stopped at Hastings. Through the flap I saw our chauffeur was Sergeant ‘Boner’ Hughes who hated my guts (I don’t know why, he’d never seen them). He backed the truck up an alley and left it while he went into The White Lion for a drink with his bird who was barmaid. Slipping into the driving seat I drove it back, and arrived in time to play the second half of the dance. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ asked Edgington, sweating at the piano. ‘I, Harry, have been having it off in the back of a lorry, and I got carried away.’

Pranks

These include:

the variety of farting skills in the unit, including the man who had an assistant light his farts
the gunner who always reeled back to barracks blind drunk and had a piss in a corner of the dorm, till a new recruit asked where to sleep and they all told him to put a bunk in the corner with the result that that night he got covered in a stream of pee
the bombardier they all hated so when he passed out drunk one night they removed his trousers, then loaded him, in his bed, into a lorry and deposited him in Bexhill cemetery
the soldier who did impersonations with his cock and balls, arranging them to produce tableaux with titles such as ‘Sausage on a Plate’, ‘The Last Turkey in the Shop’, ‘Sack of Flour’, ‘The Roaring of the Lions’ and, by using spectacles, ‘Groucho Marx’

Spike worked in the signals part of the regiment.

One of the pleasures of Duty Signaller was listening to officers talking to their females. When we got a ‘hot’ conversation we plugged it straight through to all those poor lonely soldiers at their OR’s and gun positions. It was good to have friends.

Army foolishness

Allegedly when he arrived his unit had some Great War-period 9.2 inch artillery pieces with only one drawback. There were no shells. This didn’t stop their commanding officer insisting on training the correct drills over and over except, when it came to the crucial moment, the entire gun crew was trained to shout BANG in unison.

The actual war

The narrative does follow a simple chronology describing him and his family hearing Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war, the repeated official letters announcing his call-up and then, once he’s in the army, the months leading up to Dunkirk (26 May to 4 June 1940), the rest of 1940 and into 1941. During this entire period he and his battalion are shunted from one south coast posting to another.

In the passages about Dunkirk an unusual degree of seriousness breaks through:

Next day the news of the ‘small armada’ came through on the afternoon news. As the immensity of the defeat became apparent, somehow the evacuation turned it into a strange victory. I don’t think the nation ever reached such a feeling of solidarity as in that week at another time during the war. Three weeks afterwards, a Bombardier Kean, who had survived the evacuation, was posted to us. ‘What was it like,’ I asked him. ‘Like son? It was a fuck up, a highly successful fuck up.’

The same is even more true of the Blitz, which historians date from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. Milligan and his mates lie in their dormitories on the south coast and hear the German bombers fly over night after night. Sometimes they go outside and can see the sky to the north lit up orange as London burns. Lots of them are Londoners, so they lie awake at nights trying to cheer each other up with stories of how solid Anderson shelters are and how the bombs will never penetrate to the Tube shelters. Worried men.

Damage

This brings me to how the war quite obviously damaged him quite severely. In the preface he warns:

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind…

He describes how in 1941 they made friends with a jazz drummer named Dixie Dean whose Dad owned a radio shop in Hailsham. On Sunday evening he invited the band over to listen to jazz records all evening. It was his greatest joy. When he was posted overseas he left his jazz record collection in Dixie’s dad’s care and, of course, his shop suffered a direct hit, destroying all his records bar one.

Among the losses was my record collection, all save one, which I still have, Jimmy Lunceford’s Bugs Parade. I daren’t play it much; it creates such vivid memories. I have to go out for a walk; even then it’s about three hours before I can settle down again. (p.102)

When he worked as a signaller, a wartime telephone exchange was set up:

It was installed in a concrete air-raid shelter at the back of Worthingholm. In 1962 I took a sentimental journey back to Bexhill. The shelter was overgrown with brambles; I pushed down the stairs and by the light of a match I saw the original telephone cables still in place on the wall where the exchange used to be. There was still a label on one. In faded lettering it said, ‘Galley Hill O.P.’ in my handwriting. The place was full of ghosts – I had to get out. (p.73)

‘I had to get out’ – just those five words, if you give them their proper weight, reveal the truth behind the entire book; almost buried in the welter of gags, one-liners, excruciating puns and absurdist flights of fantasy, lurks the deep, abiding mental anguish.

Credit

Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1971. References are to the 1973 Penguin paperback edition.

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Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace @ the Photographers’ Gallery

‘Everywhere I look, and most of the time I look, I see photographs.’
(Bert Hardy)

This is a lovely overview of the entire career of acclaimed English photographer Bert Hardy (1913 to 1995), responsible for some of the most iconic shots of British life in the mid-twentieth century.

The Gorbals Boys 1948. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The exhibition includes:

87 black-and-white prints
two photos enlarged and pasted on the walls
two display cases showing Hardy memorabilia such as front covers of Picture Post, letters and negatives, press passes and diaries, even his passport (!)
and, off to one side, a darkened room showing a slideshow of his colour photos

There’s even a case displaying one of his cameras. All this stuff is loaned from the Bert Hardy archive, now held by Cardiff University, making what is probably as major a retrospective as we can expect for some time.

Blackpool Railings, 1951. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

All the photos are brilliant. Hardy was a photographer of genius. Born into a working-class family in the shabby area around Elephant and Castle, Hardy was self-taught and, once he’d gotten his big break during the war – getting a gig to photograph conditions in London’s bomb shelters – he went on to have a very varied career indeed.

He was lucky enough to break into the profession as it was experiencing the peak of photojournalism. During the 1930s there’d been a revolution in photojournalism and press reporting. This was precipitated by the advent of new, high quality lightweight cameras such as the 35mm Leica, but also the popularity of new, often left-wing editorial perspectives, themselves driven by wide cultural awareness of the miserable poverty caused by the Great Depression at the start of the 30s. Thus the late 30s saw the heyday of ground-breaking photo-journals such as Life in the USA (founded 1936) and Picture Post in Britain (founded 1938).

Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Magazines like this pioneered the use of photography-led journalism, extended pictorial essays about society during the politically fraught and feverish 30s. Lead editor at Picture Post was Tom Hopkinson and it was Tom who gave Bert his big break.

Bert had left school at 14 (1927) and got a job as a lab assistant at the Central Photo Service where he slowly familiarised himself with all the technical aspects of the trade. He practiced by taking photos of friends and his extended family (he was the eldest of seven sibling). His first commercial work was when he took a photo of the ancient King George V riding in an open top carriage along Blackfriars Road in 1935, turned it into a postcard and sold 200 copies around his neighbourhood.

In 1936 he was given a job as photographer at the General Photographic Agency and began to get work published in the Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch and the photo magazine, Weekly Illustrated. In 1941 he applied for a job with the Picture Post and the editor, Tom Hopkinson, set him a challenge – to take photos of Londoners in the air raid shelters where, notoriously, no lights were allowed, obviously creating difficult conditions for someone using a 1930s camera.

In the event, Hardy’s photos were vivid, well-composed and atmospheric and Hopkinson gave him a staff job on Picture Post where he was to remain for the next sixteen years (until the magazine closed in 1957). So this story explains why one of the first sections of the exhibition is devoted to images from the war.

Life of an East End Parson, 1940. Photo by Bert Hardy//Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1942 he was recruited into the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) with the rank of sergeant. Three days after D-Day he joined the troops in Normandy and went on to document the Liberation of Paris (August 1944), the invasion of Germany (November 1944), the crossing of the Rhine (March 1945) and arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a few days after it was liberated by British troops (April 1945). (I wonder if he met the SAS soldiers who were the first to discover Belsen, as detailed in Ben Macintyre’s book ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’). He was then sent with the AFPU to Singapore in the Far East, where he became Lord Mountbatten’s personal photographer – there are some striking photos of the devilishly handsome Earl – and where he remained until September 1946.

He went on to cover Cold War conflicts in Greece and Korea (where his shots of the amphibious landings at Inchon in 1950 won awards) and then post-colonial conflicts in Malaya, Kenya, Yemen and Cyprus. The Inchon photos on display here are thrilling, conveying a real sense of the danger and contingency.

Assault Craft, 1950. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

As to the other conflicts, I was particularly struck by images of supposed Mau Mau rebels cooped up behind barbed wire, and a particularly poignant photo of a British soldier searching a tubby, scruffy old peasant leading a donkey in Cyprus. So stupid, wars; complete failures of intelligence, failures to negotiate sensible rational solutions to human quarrels. (For the Mau Mau rebellion from the African point of view, see my reviews of the novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.)

But it wasn’t all war: Bert went on photo assignments to an impressive roster of countries, photographing ordinary life in Thailand, Bali, Burma, and across Europe to Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia. He also went to Botswana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Sudan and Tibet. Wow. What a life for a poor boy from the Elephant and Castle.

Farmer in the Douro Valley, Portugal (September 1951) Photo by Bert Hardy

Between these foreign forays he travelled widely in the UK, recording the grim living conditions of working class people in London, Glasgow, Belfast, Tyneside and Liverpool and, along the way, documenting social and cultural changes after the war. By the early 1950s his work had become so well known and acclaimed that he was offered a job on the bigger, richer Life magazine (which he turned down).

Display case showing front covers of photojournalism stories by Hardy along with other memorabilia. Photo by the author

In the 1950s Bert branched out to cover the glamour and glitz of London’s theatre land and visits by Hollywood stars. Just before Picture Post closed, Hardy took 15 photos of the Queen’s entrance into the Paris Opera on 8 April 1957, which were assembled into a photo-montage – there’s a case devoted to this elaborate magazine spread.

In parallel to the war, travel and glamour work, he also covered sporting events – the exhibition features shots of cycling (early on he had freelanced for Cycling magazine), wrestling and boxing stars.

Robinson And Fans, 1951. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Videos

Exhibition overview:

Interview with the curators:

Thoughts

Life just seemed so much more interesting and varied in those days. Britain’s cities look mired in crushing poverty, hardly anyone had a television (plenty didn’t have an inside toilet or hot water), but one aspect of this was a much greater diversity of people and dress and accent. Nowadays everyone dresses (more or less) the same and sounds the same and carries the same phones, and the shopping malls of London, Liverpool, Belfast or Glasgow all look depressingly the same with the same chain stores selling the same products. The world had much more genuine diversity and character back then.

But above and beyond learning a lot of detail about Bert Hardy’s career and individual commissions, the simple thought this exhibition prompts is that his photos need almost no explanation. They come from an era when photography and photojournalism was intended to be immediately comprehensible to a wide and popular audience, and by God, they are – incredibly direct and impactful.

The contrast with our own image-cluttered and intellectually verbose age is emphasised when you walk up a floor at the Photographers’ Gallery to see the four finalists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024. Each one of these requires a lengthy wall caption to introduce them and their aims and project plans and so on; and then each photograph requires a lot of explanation, some of them covering an entire A4 page.

Obviously all the Hardy shots do have wall labels giving their title and one in every three or four also has a caption giving a bit more detail and context – but none of them really need it. The whole point is that the images speak for themselves in a way that, interestingly, a lot of modern photography just doesn’t. Which means they are wonderfully democratic and accessible and inclusive, in a way that so much modern art and photography simply isn’t.

Cockney Life in the Elephant and Castle: ‘My goodness, my Guinness’ (1949) Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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by Simon on March 20, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Photography, Second World War, War

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Posted by Simon on March 20, 2024

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The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary (1942)

They would say, ‘I hope someone got the swine who got you: how you must hate those devils!’ and I would say weakly, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and leave it at that. I could not explain that I had not been injured in their war, that no thoughts of ‘our island fortress’ or of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ had bolstered me up when going into combat. I could not explain that what I had suffered I in no way regretted; that I had welcomed it; and that now that it was over I was in a sense grateful for it and certain that in time it would help me along the road of my own private development.
(The Last Enemy, page 166)

Potted biography (from Wikipedia)

Born in April 1919, Richard Hillary was 20 when the Second World War broke out. He was the son of an Australian government official and his wife, and attended one of the UK’s top public schools, Shrewsbury School, before going on to Trinity College, Oxford (‘a typical incubator of the English ruling classes before the war’).

At Oxford he was a fit, handsome man who devoted all his energy to rowing, hoping to achieve a ‘Blue’ (‘Unfortunately, rowing was the only accomplishment in which I could get credit for being slightly better than average.’) His memoir contains some very funny rowing stories, particularly the tour of German and Hungarian regattas he went on with seven fellow rowers who wangled free tickets and hotel rooms on false promise that they were the ‘official’ Oxford Eight, which they very much weren’t.

But at the same time as rowing, he joined the Oxford University Air Squadron and the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. The undergraduates all knew war was coming.

Hillary was called up to the Royal Air Force in October 1939. He was sent for training in Scotland then, in July 1940, was posted to B Flight, No. 603 Squadron RAF, located at RAF Montrose, still in Scotland but, for the first time, flying Spitfires.

On 27 August the Squadron was moved south to RAF Hornchurch, in Essex, and immediately saw combat in the Battle of Britain (10 July 1940 to 31 October 1940). In one week of combat Hillary personally claimed five Bf 109s shot down, claimed two more probably destroyed and one damaged.

On 3 September 1940 i.e. seven days into his new posting, Hillary had just made his fifth ‘kill’ when he was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109. He describes vividly the key mistake he made. After getting an enemy plane in his sights he let off a 2 second burst of machinegun fire which he saw hit the machine. But instead of breaking off and wheeling away, he let off another 3 second burst to make sure and that was long enough for another Messerschmitt to get on his tail and hit him.

Trapped in his cockpit while the Spitfire burst into flames Hillary was badly burned, then passed out, then literally fell out of the plane as it tumbled down towards the sea. The cold air revived him, he deployed his parachute and landed in the North Sea, where he was rescued by a lifeboat from the Margate Station.

If school and university were part 1 and combat flying was part 2, now began the third part of Hillary’s short life, an extended period of medical treatment for his appalling burns.

Hillary was first treated at the Royal Masonic Hospital, Hammersmith and then at the Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex. Here he came under the direction of the plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and endured three months of repeated surgery in an attempt to repair the damage to his hands and face. Pioneer patients were known as McIndoe’s ‘Guinea Pig Club’. It was a painful and psychologically devastating period.

The Last Enemy

The Last Enemy is a carefully crafted text. I’ve copied the outline of Hillary’s life from Wikipedia in order to show how he treats it in The Last Enemy. The Last Enemy is in three parts:

The proem (‘a preface or preamble to a book or speech’)
Book One – his life up to the shooting down, focusing on Oxford then his RAF training
Book Two – medical treatment, plastic surgery, return to a semblance of civilian life

1. Proem

A short 6-page Proem, an intense description of the day he took off with the rest of his squadron, engaged in a dogfight, was hit and his cockpit immediately burst into flames, how he struggled to open the hatch, tumbled through the air, and then the long, long time (four hours) he spent in the cold North Sea, entangled in the straps and ropes of his parachute, the tortured thoughts that went through his head, his feeble attempts to deflate his life jacket and drown himself, which turns out to be harder than he expected. It is told with the winning, upper-class sang-froid of his class.

There can be few more futile pastimes than yelling for help alone in the North Sea, with a solitary seagull for company, yet it gave me a certain melancholy satisfaction, for I had once written a short story in which the hero (falling from a liner) had done just this. It was rejected.

Then willing arms are pulling him up, his parachute is cut free, brandy, a blanket and the long chug back to Margate, ambulance, hospital, anaesthetic. Blimey. It’s harrowing stuff. But what led up to this fatal moment? How did we get here?

2. Book One

Book one contains five chapters. He skips past his parents and childhood and boyhood and school, and the text opens with young Richard a bright young undergraduate at Oxford University, and this is where we get introduced to the book’s style and purpose.

There’s a lot of facts about Oxford and undergraduate life, as there will later be a lot of facts about the different planes he trained and flew in. It is all told in the bright and breezy style of the confident English upper class, with lashings of self-deprecation and irony.

The press referred to us as the Lost Generation and we were not displeased. Superficially we were selfish and egocentric without any Holy Grail in which we could lose ourselves. The war provided it, and in a delightfully palatable form. (p.24)

But what sets it apart from other memoirs of bright young things is Hillary’s earnest, if rather immature, young mannish attempts to make sense of it all, to make sense of his life, how it fit into his generation’s attitudes and experiences.

On the face of it this gives rise to a number of descriptions of how he and his generation felt about, say, international politics, English society, the British Empire or the writers of the 1930s, the poets of the generation just before them, all of which give rise to quotable soundbites (which are often included in social histories of the period).

On politicians

We were convinced that we had been needlessly led into the present world crisis, not by unscrupulous rogues, but worse, by the bungling of a crowd of incompetent old fools.

Class consciousness and the 1930s poets

Despising the middle-class society to which they owed their education and position, they attacked it, not with vigour but with an adolescent petulance. They were encouraged in this by their literary idols, by their unquestioning allegiance to Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and Day Lewis. With them they affected a dilettante political leaning to the left. Thus, while refusing to be confined by the limited outlook of their own class, they were regarded with suspicion by the practical exponents of labour as bourgeois, idealistic, pink in their politics and pale-grey in their effectiveness. They balanced precariously and with irritability between a despised world they had come out of and a despising world they couldn’t get into… (p.13)

The post-war future

Was there perhaps a new race of Englishmen arising out of this war, a race of men bred by the war, a harmonious synthesis of the governing class and the great rest of England; that synthesis of disparate backgrounds and upbringings to be seen at its most obvious best in R.A.F. Squadrons? While they were now possessed of no other thought than to win the war, yet having won it, would they this time refuse to step aside and remain indifferent to the peace-time fate of the country, once again leave government to the old governing class?…Would they see to it that there arose from their fusion representatives, not of the old gang, deciding at Lady Cufuffle’s that Henry should have the Foreign Office and George the Ministry of Food, nor figureheads for an angry but ineffectual Labour Party, but true representatives of the new England that should emerge from this struggle?

(Partly this passage stood out for me because of his use of the phrase ‘the old gang’ referring to the corrupt old aristocrats and public school johnnies who run everything, because it copies the phrase from an Auden poem:

We know it, we know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death.
Death of the old gang…

From The Destruction of Error by W.H. Auden, 1929)

There’s a lot of stuff pitched at this level, undergraduate generalisations about society and it’s very readable and interesting, as far as it goes. It took me a while to realise that Hillary has a deeper, sometimes quite buried, purpose to all this. And this is to describe how the narrator matures and grows up, so that the book could have been titled The Socialisation of an Egotist. Or maybe, How The Egotist Grew Up.

I read a commenter on Amazon saying they disliked Hillary because of his sense of entitlement and arrogance, but I take that as being precisely the point of the book, to show the reader that that’s how he started off and to take you on his journey of maturing. It is a Bildingsroman. It is a coming-of-age story. The whole point is to start with the hero being immature, rootless, drifting and fantastically self-absorbed. He lives for the moment. He lives to express himself and fulfil himself. Rowing’s what he’s good at and partying and being handsome and witty with other gilded, witty, athletic posh types, and so this is how he spends his time.

And so this is the attitude he brings to fighting the war: he laughs at all the ‘rot’ about the Empire and patriotism and the great this, that or the other. He doesn’t give a stuff for any of that grand talk. Keith Douglas, in Alamein to Zem Zem, sees the advent of war as a personal challenge, and that’s just how Hillary sees it:

For myself, I was glad for purely selfish reasons. The war solved all problems of a career, and promised a chance of self-realisation that would normally take years to achieve. As a fighter pilot I hoped for a concentration of amusement, fear, and exaltation which it would be impossible to experience in any other form of existence. (p.24)

It’s a point he rams home with repetition, convinced most of his peers feel the same:

We continued to refuse to consider the war in the light of a crusade for humanity, or a life-and-death struggle for civilization, and concerned ourselves merely with what there was in it for us… (p.46)

He gives us good pen portraits of his undergraduate friends and then he enlists and is whisked off to Scotland for training. Here we are introduced, once again, to quite a large number of chaps, some of whom are really very well off: a son of Lord Beaverbrook, several landed gentry who invite them to go grouse shooting on their vast estates. (It’s notable that Hillary positions himself as very much not part of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set; he describes at least two separate shooting invitations at length and each time makes it clear he hates stomping through wet heather and mud in order to stand around on a windswept hillside shooting at a few wretched pheasants. He dips into that world, but he is not of it.)

But the point I’m making about the fairly large cast of other characters (for example, all the pilots he trains with and then in his squadron – I counted 32 named individuals in all) is that although we get their height and hair colour and university background and everything, there’s a persistent thread of Hillary considering them as psychological types, and measuring them against his own, very well expressed egocentricity. Take what he says about his fellow pilot Peter Howes:

The change in Peter Howes was perhaps the most interesting, for he was not unaware of what was happening. From an almost morbid introspection, an unhappy preoccupation with the psychological labyrinths of his own mind, his personality blossomed, like some plant long untouched by the sun, into an at first unwilling but soon open acceptance of the ideas and habits of the others. (p.45)

He sees in others the maturation process which the book ends up being about. This comes into focus in the character of one of the young flyers he meets, a chap named Peter Pease, who is a devout Christian.

Peter was, I think, the best-looking man I have ever seen. He stood six-foot-three and was of a deceptive slightness for he weighed close on 13 stone. He had an outward reserve which protected him from any surface friendships, but for those who troubled to get to know him it was
apparent that this reserve masked a deep shyness and a profound integrity of character. Soft-spoken, and with an innate habit of understatement, I never knew him to lose his temper. He never spoke of himself and it was only through Colin that I learned how well he had done at Eton before his two reflective years at Cambridge, where he had watched events in Europe and made up his mind what part he must play when the exponents of everything he most abhorred began to sweep all before them.

Many, many things happen. They train, they fly, they fight, they go dancing and drinking. There is an interlude where we discover some of the pilots have been using their spare time to entertain small children who have been evacuated from urban centres to the small hamlet of Tarfside (pages 78 to 79). There is a lot of detail and incident and character, all described in a winningly confident pukka style.

But at the core of Book One is the longest chapter in the book (26 pages in the Penguin edition) titled ‘The World of Peter Pease’ for it contains a prolonged debate between Richard the selfish atheist and Peter the quietly spoken, selfless Christian. Richard volunteered for the RAF because he selfishly wants the experience of flying a Spitfire and shooting down enemy fighters. Peter is serving because has observed events across Europe and come to the conclusion that the Nazis represent real Evil, Biblical Evil, created by the Devil. What they are doing is Devilish and must be combated by all good Christians.

Hillary isn’t Dostoyevsky or Sartre. Their debate isn’t pitched in sophisticated theological or philosophical terminology. And it doesn’t last that long, pages 82 to 91. But you have the sense, the dramatic literary sense, that although he’s writing the account, Hillary himself knows he’s on quicksand. There’s an old saying that you know you’re losing the argument when you resort to insults, as Hillary finds himself doing:

‘You are going to concern yourself with politics and mankind when the war is over: I am going to
concern myself with the individual and Richard Hillary. I may or may not be exactly a man of my time: I don’t know. But I know that you are an anachronism. In an age when to love one’s country is vulgar, to love God archaic, and to love mankind sentimental, you do all three.’

But the more fiercely Hillary argues that nothing matters except the self, that he’s only fighting for the experience, that life is about self expression and getting as much out of it as you can, the more you can feel him beginning to doubt himself:

I’m not concerned with genius. I’m concerned with my own potentialities. I say that I am fighting this war because I believe that, in war, one can swiftly develop all one’s faculties to a degree it would normally take half a lifetime to achieve. And to do this, you must be as free from outside interference as possible. That’s why I’m in the Air Force. For in a Spitfire we’re back to war as it ought to be–if you can talk about war as it ought to be. Back to individual combat, to self–reliance, total responsibility for one’s own fate. One either kills or is killed; and it’s damned exciting. (p.85)

‘Exciting’, the same word Keith Douglas uses in Alamein to Zem Zem:

It is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and to be killed… (Alamein to Zem Zem)

Interesting coincidence as this may be, it doesn’t strengthen Hillary’s case. A close reading suggests the quietly spoken Christian, Peter Pease, is on the solider ground. I couldn’t say whether Hillary intends the reader to take his side, but I think he intends it to be a close-run thing.

(It might be worth mentioning in passing that Auden felt the same. After he had emigrated to America in 1939 her came to realise that all the so-called ‘political’ poetry he wrote in the 1930s was, deep down, motivated by personal needs and urgencies and that, if it came right down to it, why were we fighting the Germans? If everything is personal and psychological, then maybe it’s possible to change your personality, or in a different mood, support the Nazis. Where was the solid, objective basis on which to found your belief that the Nazis were wrong, not a matter of taste or scruple, but the conviction that what they were doing was simply wrong and anti-human? Arguments like this were part of Auden’s process towards readopting the lapsed Anglican Christianity of his boyhood. You cannot allow the fight against the Nazis to depend on your vacillating mood, on personal preference. There must be an objective truth outside yourself. There must be a God who underpins a universal moral order, who underpins Human Morality. This is the conviction expressed in different styles by Auden, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and many other writers of the age, and explains why the Second World War saw an upsurge in Christian faith, from a wide range of people asking themselves this question: ‘Why am I so sure the Nazis are wrong? Because there are universal moral standards external to me, there is a Moral Law, there is a timeless Creator who underpins them.’)

In the moral or philosophical terrain (i.e. not the fighter pilot or medical parts) of the narrative, Peter Pease is triangulated with another character, David Rutter, a convinced pacifist. It is worth quoting Hillary’s description of Rutter at length for what it tells about the ideas floating around in 1939:

‘Modern patriotism,’ he would say, ‘is a false emotion. In the Middle Ages they had the right idea. All that a man cared about was his family and his own home on the village green. It was immaterial to him who was ruling the country and what political opinions held sway. Wars were no concern of his.’ His favourite quotation was the remark of Joan’s father in Schiller’s drama on the Maid of Orleans, ‘Lasst uns still gehorchend harren wem uns Gott zum Köng gibt,’ which he would translate for me as, ‘Let us trust obediently in the king God sends us.’

‘Then,’ he would go on, ‘came the industrial revolution. People had to move to the cities. They ceased to live on the land. Meanwhile our country, by being slightly more unscrupulous than anyone else, was obtaining colonies all over the world. Later came the popular press, and we have been exhorted ever since to love not only our own country, but vast tracts of land and people in the Empire whom we have never seen and never wish to see.’

So he’s not just a pacifist but has clearly thought-out views about the meretricious role of the popular press and the bogusness of the British Empire (something Hillary isn’t very impressed by, either). Rutter is only one among many named characters in the book, but Hillary explicitly links him to Pease by virtue of his thought-through, principled stance.

3. Book Three

As mentioned above, book three starts with Hillary recovering in hospital and follows the long, gruelling process of the treatment for his burns and then the plastic surgery designed to give him a semblance of a face and of hands (at one point the surgeon taps the shiny white part of his knuckle – which Hillary can’t feel – and points out it’s raw bone; he was burned to the bone).

This is very gruelling for the reader because in each of his hospitals Hillary, of course, meets and finds out about patients in much worse plight than himself. Worst of all is the burns hospital in Sussex which includes a 15-year-old girl who was totally burned by molten sugar on her first day in a factor, and who screams in agony all the time. God.

He has umpteen hallucinations under the influence of heavy painkillers for months. In one he is in the cockpit with his friend Peter Pease when he is shot down and killed. (This chimes eerily with the Roald Dahl short stories of close relatives, mothers or wives or friends, witnessing at first hand the deaths of their loved ones miles away in bombers or fighters. Was it a very common hallucination or intuition, one wonders.) The nurses are almost universally excellent and there are many little examples of their kindness and tact when dealing with the devastatingly injured, and the towering example of Sister Hall, who is a firm but compassionate ruler of the burns ward at the Queen Victoria Hospital, Sussex.

Peter’s wife, Denise, comes to visit and, when he is well enough to leave hospital, Richard often goes to stay at her house in Eaton Place. In fact it’s one of the mild surprises of the book that he is allowed to leave hospital and travel to London, to meet old friends for drinks etc, even while his treatment continues. It’s because each of the skin grafts to give him new eyelids or new lips, takes months to ‘take’.

The climax of the book comes quickly and I found overwhelmingly moving, if for reasons I don’t fully understand. It is in two parts. One day Hillary accepts an invitation from his old friend David Rutter, the pacifist, and takes the train out to his cottage in Norfolk. The door is opened by David’s wife, Mary, who is visibly shocked at Hillary’s appearance. They shake hands, make a pot of tea, sit down to chat but Hillary finds Mary quite aggressive. After a while Rutter intervenes to explain that she is over-compensating, because so many of their friends in the Forces end up berating Rutter for being a pacifist. OK, Hillary processes this fact, but senses there is a deeper reason for Mary’s unhappiness.

Then it comes out. David has lost his pacifism. As the war has continued he has come to doubt his stance. The Nazis have emerged as not just another enemy in another war, but the most evil force history has ever thrown up and this is a war to preserve not just democracy but all human decency. And so David has come to doubt his contented pacifism.

As country after country had fallen to Hitler his carefully reasoned arguments had been split wide open: it was as much the war of the unemployed labourer as of the Duke of Westminster. Never in the course of history had there been a struggle in which the issues were so clearly defined. Although our peculiar form of education would never allow him to admit it, he knew well enough that it had become a crusade. All this he could have borne. It was the painful death of his passionate fundamental belief that he should raise his hand against no man which finally brought his world crumbling about his ears. (p.168)

And so his wife Mary is distraught. She thought she knew where they stood. She thought they shared common values and now she doesn’t know any more. I thought this was all beautifully sense, imagined and described.

In the climax of their conversation, David asks Richard what he should do and Richard suddenly feels like a fraud, a fake. He has no principles of his own beyond seeking self-fulfilment and adventure. He has no moral ground on which to stand, from which to give David the certainty he has lost and wants to find again. They shake hands and Richard catches the train back to London feeling like a fraud.

This is what I mean by Bildungsroman. Remember the Amazon commenter who said they disliked Hillary’s arrogance and elitism. Well, this scene exemplifies my point that the initial arrogance is calculated; it is part of a calculated literary strategy, to follow the journey of cocky, handsome, privileged young public schoolboy on his journey to shame and humility. And the interesting thing is that it is not the shooting down, the burning or the terrible pain which does it; it is the example of the other people around him, it is Peter Pease and Denise and David and Mary.

Psychological climax

All this prepares us for the climactic last few pages of the book. His train from Norfolk pulls in to Liverpool Street Station during a German air raid. A taxi picks him up but then the driver says they’d better take cover, so Richard tells him to pull over at the nearest pub and they both duck inside. Here the atmosphere is febrile as the bombs fall all around. Then they hear a series of bombs coming closer and closer and everyone throws themselves to the ground. Is this it? the reader wonders.

No. There’s an almighty explosion, the floor jumps up, the windows shatter and so on, but they stagger to their feet alive. The bomb fell next door. An air raid warden opens the door and asks for help digging through the rubble, Richard volunteers. After a while of removing rubble they come to a bed, and slowly disinter a little girl who is stone dead. She was being held and protected by her mother, pinned by rubble to the bed, her leg broken under her. Richard has a flask of brandy and pours a little into the woman’s mouth and she opens her eyes to weakly thank him and then, seeing his melted face, says ‘I see they got you too’, and then she died.

I’m crying all over again as I write this. Richard struggles to screw the lid of the flask back on, gets to his feet and pushes past the other rescuers on the rubble, into the street and struggles with all his strength not to start screaming, to start running as fast as he can and screaming at the top of his voice. Something inside him has finally, totally, utterly snapped. Forgive me for quoting it at length, but its power lies in the thoroughness and cumulativeness of the horror;

Someone caught me by the arm, I think it was the soldier with the girl, and said: ‘You’d better take some of that brandy yourself. You don’t look too good’; but I shook him off. With difficulty I kept my pace to a walk, forcing myself not to run. For I wanted to run, to run anywhere away from that scene, from myself, from the terror that was inside me, the terror of something that was about to happen and which I had not the power to stop.

It started small, small but insistent deep inside of me, sharp as a needle, then welling up uncontrollable, spurting, flowing over, choking me. I was drowning, helpless in a rage that caught and twisted and hurled me on, mouthing in a blind unthinking frenzy. I heard myself cursing, the words pouring out, shrill, meaningless, and as my mind cleared a little I knew that it was the woman I cursed. Yes, the woman that I reviled, hating her that she should die like that for me to see, loathing that silly bloody twisted face that had said those words: ‘I see they got you too.’ That she should have spoken to me, why, oh Christ, to me? Could she not have died the next night, ten minutes later, or in the next street? Could she not have died without speaking, without raising those cow eyes to mine?

‘I see they got you too.’ All humanity had been in those few words, and I had cursed her. Slowly the frenzy died in me, the rage oozed out of me, leaving me cold, shivering, and bitterly ashamed. I had cursed her, cursed her, I realised as I grew calmer, for she had been the one thing that my rage surging uncontrollably had had to fasten on, the one thing to which my mind, overwhelmed by the sense of something so huge and beyond the range of thought, could cling. Her death was unjust, a crime, an outrage, a sin against mankind — weak inadequate words which even as they passed through my mind mocked me with their futility.

That that woman should so die was an enormity so great that it was terrifying in its implications, in its lifting of the veil on possibilities of thought so far beyond the grasp of the human mind. It was not just the German bombs, or the German Air Force, or even the German mentality, but a feeling of the very essence of anti-life that no words could convey. This was what I had been cursing — in part, for I had recognised in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognised as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself — something of which until then I had not even sensed the existence.

And it was in the end, at bottom, myself against which I had raged, myself I had cursed. With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!

In the final pages Hillary reviews the entire narrative in a new light, his cocksure self-centredness destroyed for good. Why did he enjoy bating Peter Pease, so obviously right about the moral aspect of the war? Why had he quietly mocked the selfless determination of Peter’s widow, Denise? Why had he failed to acknowledge the deaths, the sacrifices of all his flying colleagues, ‘the Berrys, the Stapletons, the Carburys’ who instinctively honoured the dead? And all the people with terrible burns and amputations who he met in hospital, in his self-centredness, he had seen them only as objects of interest and then irritation.

Even David who he had gone to see earlier the same day, when he needed help, advice, some kind of guidance, Hillary had recoiled into his smart and aloof self-centredness, because his philosophy of life – that life is entirely and only about Self Fulfilment – could provide no guidance, no basis for helping anyone else.

Again memory dragged me back. It had been this very day who had sat back smoking cigarettes while David had poured out his heart, while his wife had watched me, taut, hoping. But I had failed. I had been disturbed a little, yes, but when he was finished I had said nothing, given no sign, offered no assurance that he was now right. I saw it so clearly… ‘Do you think I should join up?’ On my answer had depended many things, his self-respect, his confidence for the future, his final good-bye to the past. And I had said nothing, shying away from the question, even then not seeing. In the train I had crossed my legs and sat back, amused, God help me, by the irony of it all.

Now the enormity of the pointless, cruel death of the woman in the bombed house finally breaks his reserve, smashes the smooth, protective arrogance which has been his carapace all his life. He has lived in a trivial world of ‘nice comfortable little theories’ (p.176), protected by his ironies and his detachment. All his life he has refused to embrace the reality of the world.

Stricken with guilt, Hillary spends a sleepless night agonising over his hundred and one failures and only in the last two paragraphs does some kind of way forward appear to him, a way to atone for his shallowness, his heartlessness, his failure to help. He will write. He will write it all out.

I would write of these men, of Peter and of the others. I would write for them and would write with them. They would be at my side. And to whom would I address this book, to whom would I be speaking when I spoke of these men? And that, too, I knew. To Humanity, for Humanity must be the public of any book. Yes, that despised Humanity which I had so scorned and ridiculed to Peter.

If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilization.

Those are the last sentences. Reader, you hold in your hands the fruit of Hillary’s decision to help in the wider struggle, to honour his comrades, dead and still living, and to redeem himself. It is, I think, an incredibly powerful ending.

Epilogue

What follows isn’t in the book; it’s the rest of Hillary’s biography as copied from Wikipedia:

In 1941 Hillary persuaded the British authorities to send him to America to rally support for Britain’s war effort. While in the United States, he spoke on the radio, had a love affair with the actress Merle Oberon (!), and drafted much of this book, which was to make him famous.

Hillary managed to bluff his way back into a flying role even though, as was noted in the officers’ mess, he could barely handle a knife and fork. He returned to service with No 54 Operational Training Unit at RAF Charterhall, for a conversion course to pilot light bomber aircraft.

Hillary was killed on 8 January 1943, along with Navigator/Radio Operator Sergeant Wilfred Fison, when he crashed a Bristol Blenheim during a night training flight in adverse weather conditions, the aircraft coming down on farmland in Berwickshire, Scotland.

Credit

The Last Enemy was published by Macmillan and Co in 1942. All references are to the 2018 ‘Centenary Collection’ Penguin paperback edition.

Other flying memoirs

Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)
First Light by Geoffrey Wellum (2002)

Second World War reviews

Second World War reviews

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by Simon on March 11, 2024 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on March 11, 2024

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Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) part 1

(I believe you pronounce his surname Si-, to rhyme with sky, and -eed; Edward Si-eed.)

Orientalism created a big splash when it was published way back in 1978, nearly 50 years ago. It opened doorways into radical new ways of thinking about imperialist history and culture. It has gone on to be translated into more than 40 languages and had an immense influence right across the humanities. It’s a classic of cultural criticism.

An example of its ongoing impact is the way the very first wall label which introduced the 2019 exhibition at the British Museum about the interplay between the Muslim world and Europe – Inspired by the East – quotes page one of Orientalism and then liberally applies Said’s perspectives throughout the rest of the show. It may nowadays be impossible to discuss the cultural and ideological aspects of Western imperialism, specifically as it affected the Middle East and India, without taking into account his perspective and sooner or later mentioning his name.

There are probably four ways of considering the book:

The thesis.
What the text actually says, its discussion of individual Orientalists (I try to give a summary in part 2 of this review).
Its implications and influence.
The practical political conclusions Said draws from his thesis.

Said’s thesis

Said’s thesis is relatively simple in outline and consists of a set of interlocking contentions:

The ‘West’ has always defined itself against the ‘East’. In earlier centuries, Europeans defined Christianity and Christendom partly by contrasting it with Islam and the Muslim world. In the imperial nineteenth century Europeans thought and conceived of themselves as energetic, dynamic, inventive and ‘advanced’ partly by comparing themselves with an ‘Orient’ which was slothful, decadent and ‘backward’.

But this entire notion of ‘the Orient’ is a creation, a fiction, a fantasy, created over centuries by Western scholars and writers and artists. It is a self-contained, self-referential image which is the product of Western fantasies and needs and bears little or no relationship to the confusing and complex reality of peoples and races and religions which actually inhabit the very varied territories which Europeans all-too-easily dismissed as ‘the Orient’.

These fantasies and fictions and fabrications about ‘the Orient’ were created by a sequence of Orientalist scholars, starting in the later 18th and continuing throughout the 19th centuries. Orientalism as a discipline began back in the 18th century with the first studies of Arabic, the Semitic languages and Sanskrit.

The bulk of Said’s text comprises portraits of, and analyses of the work of, the leading Orientalist scholars who, from the late eighteenth century onwards, founded and then developed what turned into an eventually enormous body of work, given the disciplinary name of Orientalism. This far-flung discipline, whose attitudes leeched into arts, sciences, anthropology, economics and so on, set out to categorise, inventorise, define, label, analyse and intellectually control every aspect of life and culture in ‘the Orient’.

This body of ‘knowledge’ ramified out through Western societies: it was packaged and distributed via newspapers, magazine articles, the new technology of photography, and informing, and in turned informed by, creative writing – novels and stories and poems about the ‘exotic East’ – and the arts – painting, sculpture and so on – to produce an immense, self-reinforcing, self-justifying network of verbal, textual, intellectual, ideological and artistic, popular, journalistic and political stereotypes and clichés about ‘the mysterious East’, and its supposedly sullen, childlike, passive, sensual and barbarous peoples.

Eventually this huge network of images and texts became received opinion, idées recues, hardened into ‘common sense’ about the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Islamic world. And all of it – Said’s main and central point – was completely and utterly misleading.

Why did it thrive? How was it used? Said contends that this eventually huge set of preconceptions, this extensive set of prejudices, supported by leading scholars in the field, backed up by the narratives of various explorers and adventurers, given visual power in thousands of lush, late-Victorian paintings of the sensual, slothful, backward ‘Orient’, all this provided the discourse – the network of texts and images and ideas and phrases – which European rulers (of France and Britain in particular) invoked to justify invading, conquering, oppressing and exploiting those countries and peoples.

Orientalism justified empire. Orientalism provided the ideological, cultural, scientific and academic discourse which justified western colonialism.

When imperialist politicians, adventurers, soldiers or businessmen wrote or spoke to justify the imperial conquest and exploitation of the Middle East they quoted extensively from this storehouse of supposedly ‘objective’ academic studies, from supposedly ‘eye-witness’ accounts, from the widely diffused visual and verbal stereotypes and clichés of European artists, from what had become the received wisdom about ‘the Orient’ which ‘every schoolboy knows’ – in order to justify their imperial conquests and ongoing domination. But which were, in fact, the profoundly misleading creations of Orientalist scholars, ethnographers, writers, artists and so on.

The logical consequence of this sequence of arguments or worldview is that all Western narratives and images of the so-called ‘Orient’ produced during the 18th, 19th and indeed the first half of the twentieth centuries, are deeply compromised – because they all, wittingly or unwittingly, to a greater or lesser degree, helped to justify and rationalise the grotesque racism and unfair domination and economic exploitation of an entire region and all its peoples.

Orientalism is not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the West; it is also an influential academic tradition…as well as an area of concern defined by travellers, commercial interests, governments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians, and pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specific kind of knowledge about specific places, peoples and civilisations. (p.203)

Compromised learning

Said’s basic premise is that all knowledge, including academic knowledge, is not pure, objective truth, but highly constrained and shaped by the society, and people, which produced it.

My principle operating assumptions were – and continue to be –that fields of learning, as much as the works of even the most eccentric artist, are constrained and acted upon by society, by cultural traditions, by worldly circumstance, and by stabilising influences like schools, libraries, and governments; moreover, the both learned and imaginative writing are never free, but are limited in their imagery, assumptions, and intentions; and finally, that the advances made by a science like ‘Orientalism’ in its academic form are less objectively true than we like to think. (p.202)

Foucault

Said is a chronic name-dropper. He namechecks what has become the standard sophomore checklist of French and Continental literary and political theorists so very fashionable when the book was written. Thus he refers to Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser. It’s notable that these are all Marxist theoreticians and critics, because, at bottom, his project is not only to inject contemporary politics back into academic discourse, but specifically left-wing, anti-imperialist politics. But the figure Said refers to most often (fourteen times by my count) is the French historian and critical theorist, Michel Foucault.

This is because Said’s thesis piggybacks on Foucault’s notion of discourse. Foucault was a French historian who studied the institutions of prisons and madhouses (among other subjects) with a view to showing how the entire discourse around such institutions was designed to encapsulate and promote state power and control over citizens, and in that very Parisian perspective, over citizens’ bodies. So you could argue that Said is copying Foucault’s approach, lock, stock and two smoking barrels, and applying it to his own area of interest (hobby horse) the colonial Middle East.

Rather than give my own impressionistic view of a book, I generally find it more useful for readers to see the actual contents page. Then we can all see what we’re talking about. Here’s the table of contents. (I give a detailed summary of the actual contents of the book in part 2 of this review; and a summary of the long Preface and Afterword in a third review):

Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism

‘Draws a large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes.’

1. Knowing the Oriental

2. Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalising the Oriental

3. Projects

4. Crisis

Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures

‘Attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism by a broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the work of important poets, artists and scholars.’

1. Redrawn frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularised Religion

2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory

3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination

4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French

Chapter 3. Orientalism Now

‘Begins where its predecessor left off at around 1870. This is the period of greatest colonial expansion into the Orient…the very last section characterises the shift from British and French to American hegemony. I attempt to sketch the present intellectual and social realities of Orientalism in the United States.’

1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism

2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Wordliness

3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower

4. The Latest Phase

Said’s personal position

Limiting his scope to the Middle East

On page 17 of the introduction Said says that, in order to avoid writing a book about ‘the Orient’ in its widest definition, he’s going to limit himself to writing about Islam and the Middle East. Sounds like a reasonable plan, the kind of defining of the boundaries of an intellectual project which you’d expect in any objective academic study. But the last pages of the Introduction give a whole new spin to this decision. On page 11 he writes that:

No production of knowledge in the human sciences can ever ignore or disclaim its author’s own circumstances.

He says this in order to broach his own relationship with the entire subject, then goes on to indulge in more pages of autobiography than you’d expect in a scholarly work. He tells us that the subject is in fact very, very close to his heart.

My own experience of these matters are in part what made me write this book. The life of an Arab Palestinian in the West [he’s obviously referring to himself], particularly in America, is disheartening. There exists here an almost unanimous consensus that politically he [Said] does not exist, and when it is allowed that he does, it is either as a nuisance or as an Oriental. The web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanising ideology holding in the Arab or the Muslim is very strong indeed, and it is this web which every Palestinian has come to feel is his uniquely punishing destiny. It has made matters worse for him [i.e. Said] to remark that no person academically involved with the Near East – no Orientalist, that is – has ever in the United States culturally and politically identified himself wholeheartedly with the Arabs… (p.27)

So the book really is by way of being a very personal (and I use the word with knowing irony) crusade, coming out of his own personal experiences of discrimination and erasure, or, as he puts it in the 1994 Afterword to the book, from:

an extremely concrete history of personal loss and national disintegration. (p.338)

And written in the passionate hope that, by revealing the power structures behind the academic discipline of Orientalism in all its manifold forms, he can overthrow the false dichotomy between Orient and Occident, between East and West.

It’s a judgement call whether you find this frankness about his personal investment in the project admirably honest and an example of fessing up to the kind of personal position behind the text which his project sets out to expose in so many Orientalist scholars – or whether you think it reveals a highly partisan, parti pris perspective which invalidates his approach.

Said’s involvement in the Palestine-Israel problem overshadows the work

Said goes on to tie his detailed cultural analysis to a highly controversial contemporary political issue, namely the ever-fraught Israel-Palestine situation, as screwed up back in 1978 as it remains today. Crucially, his Introduction describes how this plays out in America culture, in academia and the media in the present day:

the struggle between the Arabs and Israeli Zionism, and its effects upon American Jews as well as upon liberal culture and the population at large (p.26)

In other words, Said explicitly ties his analysis of historical Orientalism to the bang up-to-date (albeit nearly 50 years old) political and cultural view of the Arab-Israeli conflict held inside American academia and the media and political establishments. This is obviously a perilous approach because the liveness of the current political debate around Israel-Palestine continually threatens to overshadow his academic, scholarly findings or ideas.

And Said was in fact far from being a distant academic viewer of the conflict. Said’s Wikipedia page tells us that from 1977 until 1991 he was a member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) and deeply involved in negotiations to try and find a two-state solution to the Palestinian Problem.

1) It’s ironic that his book accuses all Orientalist scholars of being parti pris and biased, even if they don’t know it, while he himself is phenomenally biased and parti pris. But that’s a small point, and one he was perfectly aware of. He is perfectly clear about not really believing in the possibility of disinterested academic research:

I find the idea of strict scholarly work as disinterested and abstract hard to understand. (p.96)

2) More importantly, his political involvement threatens to a) distract from and b) overshadow Said’s entire project. In practice it meant he was forever getting dragged into stupid media squabbles, like the one featured on his Wikipedia page about him throwing a stone in Lebanon which managed to get blown up into press headlines about ‘The Professor of Terror’.

This is an American problem and links into the issues of the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington which is itself (as I understand it) linked to the even larger power of the fundamentalist Christian lobby in Washington, which (as I understand it) strongly supports the state of Israel for theological and eschatological reasons.

All I’m saying is that Said positions himself as someone who is bravely and pluckily bringing ‘politics’ into academia, revealing the power structures and political motivations behind an entire academic discipline, ‘Orientalism’, and good for him. But it’s a double-edged and very sharp sword. He who lives by politics dies by politics. Discussing radical political theory is relatively ‘safe’, as so many Marxist academics prove; but if you bring clarion calls about one of the most contentious issues in international affairs right into the heart of your academic work, and you shouldn’t be surprised if your political opponents will throw any mud to blacken your name.

Ironies

It’s a central irony of Said’s work that although he went to great lengths to expose the Islamophobia at the heart of the Orientalist project, he himself, despite being of Palestinian heritage, was not a Muslim, but had been raised a Christian.

In other words, all his writings about how Orientalists write about Islam without being inside it, without understanding it, without giving voices to Islam itself – the very same accusations could be brought against him.

From start to finish his book lambasts Westerners for speaking over the Orient, for never giving it a voice so it is a delicious irony that:

There are no Muslim voices in his book – as far as I can tell he doesn’t quote one Arab or Muslim scholar anywhere, so he’s largely replicating a practice he is fiercely critical of.
Said himself is not a Muslim – he lambasts various Western simplifications and demonisations of Islam with a strong sense of ownership and partisanship – but he himself comes from a completely different tradition.

I’m not saying either of these aspects negate his argument: but the whole thrust of the book is to teach us to pay more attention to the political aims and ideologies underlying apparently ‘objective’ academic texts, to question every author’s motives, to question the power structures they are part of and which permit their teaching, their research, their publishing. So these thoughts arise naturally from Said’s own promptings.

Problems and counter-arguments

Despite its astonishing success and the widespread adoption of its perspective throughout the humanities, Orientalism has many problems and issues.

Defining the ‘Orient’ and ‘Orientalism’

For a start, Said’s use of the word ‘Orient’ is extremely slippery. Sometimes he is referring just to the Middle East, sometimes he includes all of Muslim North Africa, sometimes he is referring to the entire Islamic world (which stretches to Indonesia in the Far East), sometimes he throws in India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, whichever suits him at the time.

In an ironic way Said’s definition(s) of Orientalism are as slippery and detached from reality as he says Orientalists’ discourse about ‘the Orient’ were.

One upshot of this is that you get right to the end of the book without ever reading a simple, definitive, usable definition of the central word. Here’s what the Etymological Dictionary has to say about ‘Orient’:

Late 14th century: ‘the direction east; the part of the horizon where the sun first appears,’ also (now with capital O-) ‘the eastern regions of the world, eastern countries’ (originally vaguely meaning the region east and south of Europe, what is now called the Middle East but also sometimes Egypt and India), from Old French orient ‘east’ (11th century), from Latin orientem (nominative oriens) ‘the rising sun, the east, part of the sky where the sun rises,’ originally ‘rising’ (adj.), present participle of oriri ‘to rise’.

Same applies to his slipperiness in defining what ‘Orientalism’ means. He gives at least ten distinct definitions (on pages 41, 73, 95, 120, 177, 202, 206, 300 and more) but it’s possible to arrive at the end of the book without have a really crystal clear definition of his ostensibly central concept.

Said is not a historian

This really matters because he is dealing with history, the history of European empires and of the texts which, he claims, though written by supposed ‘scholars’, in practice served to underpin and justify imperial rule. But thousands of historians of empire have passed this way before him and his text , whenever it strays into pure history, feels like history being done by an amateur.

It feels particularly true when he again and again suggests that what underpinned the British and French Empire’s control of their colonial subjects was the academic knowledge grouped under the heading Orientalism – and takes no account of some pretty obvious other factors such as economic, technological or military superiority.

In a sense he can’t afford to for at least two reasons: 1) because if he did get into, say, the economic basis of empire, his account would end up sounding like conventional history, and second-rate economic history at that; 2) literature and scholarly texts are his stomping ground a) because he’s just more familiar with them b) because his central premise is that knowledge is power; conceding that there are other types of power immediately undermine the narrow if intense scope of his book.

Histories of empires

In the introduction Said says that the chief imperial powers in the Middle East and India were a) Britain and France through to the mid-twentieth century, and b) America since.

This feels a bit gappy. John Darwin’s brilliant comparative study of the Eurasian empires, After Tamerlane, teaches us that ’empire’ has been the form of most governments of most civilisations for most of history. Imperialism is the ‘natural’ form of rule. It’s ‘democracy’ which is historically new, problematic and deeply unstable.

Were the British and French empires somehow unique?

No, in two ways. Taking a deep historical view, Darwin shows just how many empires have ruled over the Middle East over the past two and a half thousand years, namely: the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Parthian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Moghul Empire, the Athenian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Seljuk Empire, various Muslim caliphates who concentrated on conquering territory the Umayyad Caliphate, the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Ottoman Empire (or Caliphate). So the British Empire’s relatively brief period of control was neither the sole nor the most important influence.

The role of the Ottoman Empire in falling to pieces during the nineteenth century, leading to mismanagement, repression and the rise of nationalist movements across its territories is never given enough credit in these kinds of books. It’s always the French and British’s faults, never the Turks’.

Second, focusing on Britain and France may be justified by the eventual size of their territorial holdings, but downplays the rivalry with and interference of other European imperial powers. For example, Sean McMeekin’s brilliant book ‘The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918‘ shows how the newly united German Reich (or empire) elbowed its way into the Middle East, with its own Orientalising scholars and preconceptions.

And Said completely ignores the Russian Empire. For me this is the most interesting empire of the 19th century because I know nothing about it except that it expanded its control relentlessly across central Asia, as far as the Pacific where it eventually got into a war with Japan (1905). But long before that Russia had ambitions to expand down through the Balkans and retake Constantinople from the Turks, re-establishing it as a new Christian city, the Second Rome. This is one of the most mind-boggling aspects of Orlando Figes’s outstanding book about The Crimean War (1853 to 1856).

Blaming Britain and France just feels like blaming ‘the usual suspects’. Very limited.

Putting politics back into scholarship

He says on numerous occasions that 19th century Orientalist scholars claimed that their work was objective and scholarly and completely unconnected with the way their countries exercised imperial dominion over the countries whose cultures they studied – and that this was of course bullshit. The Orientalist scholars were only able to carry out their studies because they could travel freely across those countries as if they were the members of the imperial ruling caste. Therefore his project is very simple: it is to put the politics back into supposedly neutral, ‘detached’ scholarly analysis.

This struck me as being very Marxist. It was Marx who suggested that cultures reflect the interests of the ruling class, aristocratic art in the 17th and 18th centuries, bourgeois art and literature with the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie in the 19th century – and made the point which underpins Said’s whole position, that supposedly ‘neutral’ bourgeois scholarship always always always justifies and underpins the rule of the bourgeoisie, there’s nothing ‘neutral’ about it.

Christendom versus Islam

Said claims that Western civilisation, that Christendom, largely defined itself by contrast with the Muslim world for 1,000 years from the rise of Islam to the decline of the Ottoman Empire, as if this is a subversive insight. But to anyone who knows European history it’s obvious. Expansionist militarist Islam had already seized half the territory of the former Roman Empire and threatened to invade up through the Balkans and, potentially, exterminate Christendom. You would notice something like that. I’d have thought it was schoolboy-level obvious.

General thoughts

The Other

At regular intervals Said invokes the notion of ‘the Other’ which is always presented in critical books like this as if it was a big bad bogeyman, but I always find the idea a) childish b) too simplistic. If you read Chaucer you’ll see that his notion of ‘the Good’ is defined in hundreds of ways, most of which have nothing to do with Islam. OK when he refers to the Crusades (the Knight’s Tale) he does mention Islam. But there’s lots of other things going on in European texts, lots of ways of creating value and identity, which Said just ignores in order to ram home his point.

It’s an irony that Said says the use of the simple binary of East and West is too simplistic but then uses an even more simplistic term, ‘the Other’, replacing one simplistic binary with another which just sounds more cool.

What if the East really is a threat to the West?

Fear of the Other is always treated in modern humanities, in countless books, plays, documentaries, in artworks and exhibition texts, as if it is always a bad thing, irrational, can only possibly be prompted by racism or sexism or xenophobia or some undefined ‘anxiety’.

But what if things really do get worse the further East you go? What if the governments of Eastern Europe, such as Poland or Hungary, really are worryingly authoritarian and repressive? What if the largest country in the world, which dominates ‘the East’, Russia, has clearly stated that Western liberal democracy is finished, carries out cyber-warfare against infrastructure targets in the West, and has invaded and committed atrocities in a West-friendly neighbour? What if ‘the East’ is a source of real active threat?

As to the Middle East, what if it is subject to one or other type of civil war, insurgency, and horrifying acts of Islamic terrorism, widespread atrocities committed in the name of Allah, and the region’s chronic political instability?

And further East, what if the most populous nation on earth, China, is also known to be carrying out cyber attacks against Western targets, operates spy networks in the West, and is raising tensions in the Pacific with talk of an armed invasion of Taiwan which could escalate into a wider war?

Isn’t it a simple recognition of the facts on the ground to be pretty alarmed if not actually scared of many of these developments? I don’t think being worried about Russian aggression makes me racist. I don’t think being appalled by barbaric acts in the Middle East (ISIS beheading hostages, Assad barrel-bombing his own populations) means I’m falling prey to Orientalist stereotypes.

I don’t think I’m ‘Othering’ anybody, not least because there are lots of players in these situations, lots of nations, lots of governments, lots of militias and ethnic and religious groups, so many that simply summarising them as ‘the Other’ is worse than useless. Each conflict needs to be examined carefully and forensically, doing which generally shows you the extreme complexity of their social, political, economic, religious and ethnic origins.

Just repeating the mantras ‘Oriental stereotyping’ and ‘fear of the Other’ strikes me as worse than useless.

Britain and the East

Said goes on at very great length indeed about the British Empire and its patronising stereotyped attitudes to ‘the East’, ‘the Orient’ and so on.

But, because he’s not a historian, he fails to set this entire worldview within the larger perspectives of European and British history. Attacks and threats have always come from the East.

The ancient Greeks and Romans feared the East because that’s where the large conquering empires came from: the Persian Empire which repeatedly tried to crush the Greek city states and the Parthian Empire’s threat to the Romans went on for centuries. When Rome was overthrown it was by nomadic warrior bands from ‘the East’.

As to Islam, all of Europe was threatened by its dynamic expansion from the 7th century onwards, which conquered Christian Byzantium and pushed steadily north-west as far as modern Austria, while in the south Muslim armies swept away Christian Roman rule across the whole of North Africa, stormed up through Spain and conquered the southern half of France. They were only prevented from conquering all of France – which might have signalled the decisive overthrow of Christian culture in Europe – had they not been halted and defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732.

As to Britain, we were, of course, invaded again and again for over a thousand years. Britain was invaded and conquered by the Romans, invaded and conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, invaded and conquered by the Vikings, then invaded and conquered by the Normans.

Attacks on Europe always come from the East and attacks on Britain always come from the East. Napoleon threatened to invade in the early 1800s and in the later part of the nineteenth century many Britons lived in paranoid fear of another French invasion. Hitler threatened to invade and obliterate British culture in the name of a horrifying fascism.

So the fundamental basis of these views isn’t some kind of persistent racism, isn’t fancy ideas about ‘the Other’ or ‘imperial anxiety’, it’s a basic fact of geography. Look at a map. Where else are attacks on Europe, and especially Britain, going to come from? The Atlantic? No, from the East.

Throughout European history the East has been synonymous with ‘threat’ because that’s where the threat has actually come from, again and again and again. For me, these are the kinds of fundamental geographical and historical facts which Said simply ignores, in order to sustain his thesis.

And what if the Orient actually was alien, weak, corrupt and lazy?

Said repeats over and over again that Western, Orientalising views of the Middle East or Islam loaded it with negative qualities – laziness, inefficiency, corruption, violence, sensuality – in order to help us define and promote our own wonderful values, of hard work, efficiency, honesty in public life, good citizenship, Protestant self restraint and so on.

You can see what he’s on about and I accept a lot of what he says about Western stereotyping, but still… what if the West was, well, right. This is where a bit of history would come in handy because even modern, woke, post-Said accounts of, say, the declining Ottoman Empire do, in fact, depict it as corrupt, racked with palace intrigue, home to astonishing brutality from the highest level (where rival brothers to the ruling Sultan were liable to be garrotted or beheaded) to public policy.

I’ve just been reading, in Andrew Roberts’s biography of Lord Salisbury, about the Bulgarian Atrocities of 1876 when an uprising of Bulgarian nationalists prompted the Ottoman Sultan to send in irregular militias who proceeded to rape, torture and murder every Bulgarian they came across, with complete impunity. Up to 30,000 civilians were slaughtered, prompting the British government to abandon its former stalwart support for the Ottomans. My point is this wasn’t invented by Orientalists to justify their racist stereotypes about the violent barbaric East; nobody denies that it happened, it was widely publicised at the time, and it moulded a lot of people’s opinions about Ottoman rule based on facts.

Anybody who tried to do business or diplomacy with the Ottoman Empire quickly came to learn how corrupt and venal it was. So what happens to Said’s thesis that all these views were foundationless stereotypes, artificial creations of the racist Western imagination – if historical accounts show that inhabitants of the Orient, which he defines at the Middle East, really were lazy, inefficient, corrupt, violent.

For example, in his book about the railway line which the Kaiser wanted to build to Baghdad, Sean McMeekin describes the comic meeting between German engineers and Turkish labourers. No ‘Orientalism’ was required for the contrast between Teutonic discipline and efficiency and the corrupt, lazy ineffectiveness of the Turks to be clear to all involved.

Said’s style

Said is long-winded and baggy. He never uses one word or concept where fifteen can be crammed in. Moreover, he is clearly aspiring to write in the high-falutin’ style of the Parisian intellectuals of the day, Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, who used recherché terms and tried to crystallise new ideas by emphasising particular terms, words used in new, lateral ways, teasing out new insights. At least he hopes so. Here’s a slice of Said, made up of just two sentences.

Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is passively reflected by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is, rather, a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). (p.12)

That second sentence is quite exhaustingly long, isn’t it? In my experience, you often get to the end of Said’s huge unravelling sentences with the impression that you’ve just read something very clever and very important, but you can’t quite remember what it was.

A key element of his style, or his way of thinking, is the deployment of lists. He loves long, long lists of all the specialisms and areas which he claims his ideas are impacting or pulling in or subjecting to fierce analysis (power political, power intellectual, power cultural, power moral and so on).

On the one hand, he is trying to convey through monster lists like this, a sense of the hegemony of Orientalist tropes i.e. the way they – in his opinion – infuse the entire world of intellectual discourse, at every level, and across every specialism. This aim requires roping in every academic discipline he can think of.

On the other hand, his continual complexifying of the subject through list-heavy, extended sentences, through the name-dropping of portentous critical theorists, threatens to drown his relatively straightforward ideas in concrete.

Said describes the process of close textual analysis very persuasively but, ironically, doesn’t actually practice it very much – he is much happier to proceed by means of lists of Great Writers and Orientalist Scholars, than he is to stop and analyse any one of their works.

He explains that it would be ‘foolish to attempt an encyclopedic narrative history of Orientalism’ but this is deeply disappointing. That might have been really solid and enduring project. Instead we are given a surprisingly random, digressive and rambling account.

His actual selection of example, of texts which he studies in a bit of detail, is disappointingly thin. This explains why you can grind your way through to the end of this densely written 350-page book and not actually have a much clearer sense of the history and development of the academic field of Orientalism.

And lastly, he just often sounds unbearably pompous:

And yet, one must repeatedly ask oneself whether what matters in Orientalism is the general group of ideas overriding the mass of material? (p.8)

One uses the phrase ‘self conscious’ with some emphasis here because… (p.159)

And his frequent straining for Parisian-style intellectual rarefication sometimes makes him sound grand and empty.

I mean to say that in discussions of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientalist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist’s presence is enabled by the Orient’s effective absence. (p.208)

No, no we must never forget that. Forgetting that would be dreadful.

Lastly, he cites quotations, sometimes quite long quotations, in French without bothering to translate them. This is impolite to readers. On a smaller scale he drops into his prose Latin or French tags with the lofty air of an acolyte of Erich Auerbach’s grand traditions of humanist criticism who expects everyone else to be fluent in French and German, Latin and Greek.

Nevertheless, [in French Orientalist Louis Massigon’s view] the Oriental, en soi, was incapable of appreciating or understanding himself. (p.271)

It would be more polite, and effective, to take the trouble to find adequate English equivalents.

Immigration

When the book was published, in 1978, there weren’t many immigrants of any colour in Britain and Said could confidently talk about scholars and an academic world, as well as the nation at large, which was largely white. In other words ‘Orientals’ were still rare and relatively unknown.

In the 45 years since the book was published, mass immigration has changed the nature of all Western countries which now include not only large communities of black and Asian people, but eminent black and Asian cultural, political and economic figures. As I write we have a Prime Minister, Home Secretary and mayor of London who are all of Asian heritage.

I dare say fans of Said and students of post-colonial studies would point out the endurance of ‘latent’ Orientalism i.e. the continuation of prejudice and bigotry against the Arab and Muslim and Indian worlds, especially since the efflorescence of vulgar imperialist nostalgia around the Brexit debate.

Nevertheless, I imagine the unprecedented numbers of what used to be called ‘Orientals’ who now routinely take part in Western political and cultural discourse, who write novels and plays, direct films, comment in newspapers and magazines, host TV shows and, of course, teach courses of postcolonial and subaltern studies, would require Orientalism to be comprehensively rethought and brought up to date.

The modern Middle East

At the end of the day, Orientalism is a largely ‘academic’ book in two senses:

1. On reading lists for students

Said primarily set out to change attitudes within universities and the humanities. In this he was dramatically successful, and it is impossible to read about the European empires and, especially, to read about 19th century imperial art, without his name being invoked to indicate the modern woke worldview, the view that almost all European arts and crafts which referenced ‘the Orient’ are morally, politically and culturally compromised or, as he bluntly puts it on page 204, racist, imperialist and ethnocentric.

Said provides some of the concepts and keywords which allow modern students of the humanities to work up a real loathing of Western civilisation. Good. The Russians want to abolish it, too.

Irrelevant for everyone else

But it’s also ‘academic’ in the negative sense of ‘not of practical relevance; of only theoretical interest’. What percentage of the public know or care about the opinions of nineteenth century Orientalist scholars? For all practical purposes, nobody. Who gets their ideas about the modern Middle East from the poetry of Gérard de Nerval, the letters of French novelist Gustave Flaubert or umpteen Orientalising Victorian paintings? Nobody.

I suggest that most people’s opinions about the Middle East derive not from poetry or paintings but from the news, and if they’ve been watching or reading the news for the last 20 years, this will have involved an enormous number of stories about 9/11, Islamic terrorism, Islamic terror attacks in London and Manchester and other European cities, about the 2001 US overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, the long troubled military struggles in both countries, the 2011 Arab Spring followed swiftly by civil war in Libya, the terrible civil war in Syria, the military coup in Egypt, the ongoing civil war in Yemen, and just recently the humiliating and disastrous US withdrawal from Kabul (2021).

Remember the heyday of Islamic State, the videos they shot of them beheading Western hostages with blunt knives? Footage of them pushing suspected gays off rooftops? Blowing up priceless ancient monuments?

Alongside, of course, the perma-crisis in Israel with its never-ending Palestinian intifadas and ‘rockets from the Gaza Strip’ and retaliatory raids by the Israeli Defence Force and the murder of Israeli settlers and the massacres of Palestinians, and so on and so on.

And you shouldn’t underestimate the number of Westerners who personally know people who fought in one or other of those wars; for example, 150,610 UK personnel served in Afghanistan and some 141,000 in Iraq. All those soldiers had family, who heard about their experiences and shared their (sometimes appalling) injuries and traumas. First hand testimony trumping Victorian paintings.

And quite a few Westerners have been affected by one or other of the many Islamic terrorist attacks on Western cities, starting with the 2,996 killed in the 9/11 attacks and all their extended families, the 130 people killed in the 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris, the families of the 22 people killed and 1,017 injured in the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing; or attacks on tourists in Muslim countries such as the 202 killed and 209 injured in the 2002 Bali bombings, numerous Islamist attacks in Egypt, Tunisia and other tourist favourites.

Compared to the images and news footage and reports and first hand experience of these kinds of events, I’m just suggesting that Said’s warning about the frightful stereotyping of the Orient carried out by nineteenth century and early twentieth century writers, artists and scholars is a nice piece of academic analysis but of questionable relevance to the views about Arabs, Muslims and the Middle East currently held by more or less everyone living in the contemporary world.

Said addresses this point by saying that there is a direct link between older imperial views and current views, that his entire project was not only to show the origins and development of Orientalist views but how they continue up to the present day to inform contemporary news and TV and magazine and political discourse about Islam and the Middle East.

But proving that would require a completely different kind of book, something from the field of media studies which examined how the tropes and stereotypes Said complains are utterly without foundation in the real world, have gained renewed life from actual events which people not only consume via TV and newspapers, but via social media, massacres filmed live, as they happen.

In the 1995 Afterword and 2003 Preface which he added to the book (and I review separately) he does indeed try to do this, but he died (in 2003) well before the advent of social media and cheap phones transformed the entire concepts of media, news and information out of recognition.

In almost all ways, this book feels as if it comes from a bookish, scholarly, library-based world which has been swept away by the digital age.

An interview with Edward Said (1998)

This interview was produced in 1998, so before 9/11, the Afghan War, the Iraq War, al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Arab Spring etc. If Said thought Western attitudes to Middle Eastern countries were bad then, what must he have made of the hugely negative shift in impressions caused by 9/11 and the subsequent wars (he passed away in September 2003, living just long enough to see the American invasion of Iraq, commenced in March 2003, start to unravel)? You could almost say that the interview hails from a more innocent age.

Practical criticism

See if you can identify the kind of essentialising Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs and Islam which Said describes in the coverage of the recent Hamas attack on Israel (I’m just giving the BBC as a starting point):

Israel Gaza news live

Credit

Orientalism by Edward Said was first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978. References are to the 2003 Penguin paperback edition (with new Afterword and Preface).

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by Simon on September 20, 2023 • Permalink

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Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd (1977)

‘The great problem of our civilisation is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence for abundant wealth and teeming prosperity.’
(Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, quoted on page 122)

Joe Chamberlain was to become the only politician in British history to split two parties and destroy two governments of which he was a member.
(The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley, page 105)

Joseph Chamberlain (1836 to 1914) shot like a charismatic meteor across the late-Victorian and Edwardian political scene.

Chamberlain made his name as a Liberal reforming mayor of Birmingham, where he cleared the slums and introduced municipal control of gas, water and electricity supplies, rousing loyal support and bating entrenched interests with his fire-breathing, radical oratory. He entered the House of Commons in 1876 at the relatively advanced age of 39, as a Liberal Party MP for his home turf, Birmingham. He rose quickly and after just 4 years the Liberal leader, Gladstone, gave him a cabinet position as President of the Board of Trade in 1880.

What is enjoyable and interesting about Judd’s biography is he takes you right into the nitty-gritty of the local administration of a dirty, polluted but relentlessly growing late-Victorian city like Birmingham, and then into the knotty detail of Chamberlain’s Parliamentary career. He gives you a powerful sense of how difficult it is to get into any position of power, how challenging it is to formulate meaningful policies, and then of the struggle to co-opt support and create coalitions ready to take on often very entrenched interests, if you want to change and improve things.

Reforming acts

Take, for example, the acts Chamberlain supervised as President of the Board of Trade, 1880 to 1885:

a Grain Cargoes Bill for the safer stowing of cargoes
a Seaman’s Wages Bill for fairer wages
an Electric Lighting Bill which enabled municipalities to set up electricity supplies either themselves or through private companies
a Bankruptcy Bill which created a body of official receivers in order to investigate and speed up bankruptcies, where necessary
a Merchant Shipping Bill designed to stop owners sending to sea unworthy ships, known as ‘coffin ships’, in the expectancy that they would sink and the owners claim the insurance money; due to the resistance of big business, the Bill failed (pages 106 to 108)

Radical Joe

Although Chamberlain rose to prominence as a crusading, reforming mayor of Birmingham, the opening chapter of the book details the surprising fact that he was born and bred in London, first in semi-rural Camberwell, then in smart Canonbury. His father was a successful merchant with a shop in Cheapside and Chamberlain didn’t go to university but left his private school at 18 and went to work for his father’s firm. It was only when a business opportunity arose in Birmingham, to invest in a new firm being set up to exploit a new technique to mass manufacture pointed screws, that his father dispatched him to England’s second city to look into the opportunity.

Chamberlain was by all accounts an extremely effective businessman or, as his enemies put it, relentless and ruthless. But he was from the start interested in local politics, active as a counsellor and then elected mayor in 1873 where he set new standards for slum clearance, clean water and sewage facilities etc. With the same ruthless efficiency he had brought to business, Chamberlain now embarked on a systematic programme of municipal improvement; this included the building of branch and central libraries, raising money for the art gallery and other public collections to be augmented, founding public swimming pools, new parks and gardens.

Judd liberally quotes from Chamberlain’s speeches and letters which are very enjoyable, pithy, clear and forceful. (Many contemporaries testified to what Beatrice Potter called his ‘energy and personal magnetism… [that he possessed] masculine force in a superlative degree.’ p.76.)

These letters, articles and speeches show how, right from the start of his career, Chamberlain really understood the misery and poverty of many in Victorian cities. Take this excerpt from an article in The Fortnightly Review, the Liberal periodical edited by his friend and political ally, John Morley:

We are compelled occasionally to turn aside from the contemplation of our virtues and intelligence and wealth, to recognise the fact that we have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries to whom we attempt from time to time to carry succour and relief. (p.72)

And he had, right from the start, a firm belief in the ability of local and national government to physically improve the environment of the poor and, by so doing, significantly improve their lives, as expressed in a speech he gave when opening Highgate Park in Birmingham:

‘It is simply nonsense to wonder at the want of refinement of our people when no opportunity is given to innocent enjoyment. We are too apt to forget that the ugliness of our ordinary English existence has a bad influence on us.’ (quoted page 67)

It was this kind of straight-talking support of the poor, and his acts and bills which aggressively took on entrenched interests, which quickly earned him the reputation as a radical, a socialist or even a communist, although Judd makes clear he was neither. Chamberlain is quoted in numerous contexts clarifying that he thought the improvement of the lot of the poor was not only a moral good in itself but was a form of social insurance which would ensure the ongoing survival of the wealthy, propertied classes, classes which he never seriously threatened (p.117).

Nonetheless the accusation that he was a fire-breathing republican led to much popular entertainment, for example the rash of humorous cartoons when he was obliged to kiss the Queen-Empress Victoria’s hand upon taking his Cabinet post (p.102).

In July 1885 Chamberlain wrote the preface to a pamphlet titled the ‘Radical Programme’, the first campaign handbook in British political history. The Programme proposed: free elementary education; land reform including measures to help people buy land, taxes on unoccupied or unused land, provision of allotments and smallholdings by local authorities; higher rates for big landed estates; progressive income tax on land owned; an increase in direct as opposed to indirect tax; encouragement of local government and housing schemes; as well as free public education, the disestablishment of the Church of England, universal male suffrage, and more protection for trade unions.

He also proposed to separate the goal of free education for every child from the religious question. His policy was rejected by groups on all sides, who continued to use education as a political weapon, including the National Liberal Federation, Nonconformists, Catholics, and the Church of England-supporting establishment.

The Radical Programme earned the scorn of Whigs and Conservatives alike. Chamberlain had written to his friend, John Morley, that with Radical solidarity ‘we will utterly destroy the Whigs, and have a Radical government before many years are out.’ But in the event nothing came of it. Gladstone’s Liberal government was defeated on an amendment to its budget and Gladstone resigned, to be replaced by a minority administration led by Lord Salisbury (who had replaced Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the Conservative Party when Disraeli died in 1881; Salisbury led the party from the House of Lords, with a deputy in the Commons, still a possibility in those days).

Insults and abuse

Chamberlain established from the start of his career a reputation for plain speaking which sometimes overstepped the boundaries of decorum. Before he’d even been elected as an MP, soon after being nominated to stand, he rashly denounced the then-Prime Minister Disraeli, as ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.’ (p.75). He was quickly forced to apologise.

During the intense period of manoeuvring between the various factions of both the Liberal and Conservative Parties which led up to the 1884 Reform Act, Chamberlain notoriously declared in a speech that Salisbury was ‘himself the spokesman of a class – a class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin’ (p.118). In response, Salisbury branded Chamberlain a ‘Sicilian bandit’ and his deputy in the Commons, Stafford Northcote, called him ‘Jack Cade’.

1. Home Rule

Chamberlain’s first big contribution to history was to split the Liberal Party in 1886 over Home Rule for Ireland. In early 1886 a new Liberal administration was elected and Gladstone made widely known his determination to push through a bill permitting home rule for the Irish. Chamberlain vehemently objected, on the basis that it would weaken the power of the British House of Commons and introduce fractures into the foundations of the wider British Empire. Chamberlain’s alternative was a plan for a federal system for not only Ireland but Scotland too, which would create an Irish devolved administration with powers over internal affairs. It was a masterpiece of compromise which satisfied none of the parties involved.

After a lot of manoeuvring, Chamberlain led a group which came to be called the Liberal Unionists out of the Liberal Party proper and into independent existence, thus severely weakening Gladstone’s Liberal government. There then followed years of complex machinations, but the Unionists, by their very nature, came into closer tactical alliances with the Conservative Party and eventually merged with them.

2. Liberal Imperialism

Chamberlain’s second massive contribution was to become the cheerleader for British Imperialism during the peak of jingoistic enthusiasm from the mid 1890s to the middle Edwardian years. (The British Empire didn’t reach its geographic peak until after the Great War when Britain awarded itself various colonies belonging to the defeated Germans and also adopted ‘mandates’ in the Middle East.)

Secretary of State for the Colonies

When a Conservative government was returned after the 1895 general election with the help of Chamberlain’s bloc of 50 or so Liberal Unionists, the new leader, Lord Salisbury, offered Chamberlain a cabinet position. To many people’s surprise, Chamberlain turned down more senior departments and chose the Colonial Office, becoming Secretary of State for the Colonies, an office he held for the next eight years.

It is fascinating to read about how the British Empire was actually administered. In modern cultural discourse it is dismissed as one big evil monolith but, of course, it was a lot more complicated than that, run, like most British affairs, in a ramshackle, amateurish way. The Indian Empire was run by a separate office, the Secretary of State for India and, anyway, Chamberlain never showed much interest in it. His responsibility was for 11 self-governing colonies of white settlement with a European population of 11 million, and a jumble of crown colonies, protectorates and chartered territories, with a population of around 40 million (p.187).

Chamberlain’s Liberal Imperialism was an extension of the Radical reforming approach he’d brought to Birmingham. He thought that by wise investment, the disparate territories clumped together as ‘the Empire’ could be made more economically efficient and productive, its people educated and provided better jobs, housing, amenities, infrastructure and so on. He was a hard-working and diligent colonial secretary (notably unlike many of his predecessors) but his tenure is remembered for two policies which were out and out failures.

1. The Boer War

Chamberlain encouraged the ill-fated and derided Jameson Raid of December to January 1895, a force of 500 British soldiers led into the Boer-held Transvaal in expectation that the large number of British labourers working in its gold mines would rise up, join them, and together the Brits would seize government from the properly constituted Boer government. Not only was this a shameful attempt at a coup, but a shambles and dismal failure. How much exactly Chamberlain a) knew about it b) encouraged the conspirators, is unclear to this day, but the fact that establishing his role was one of the aims of the subsequent British government enquiry shows there was widespread belief that he was involved.

His continued support of the parties who wanted to take on and conquer the Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) so as to absorb them into an unambiguously British country of South Africa, meant that when the Boer War commenced in October 1899, many critics saw it as ‘Joe’s War’. Thus his name became associated with the military disasters of the first six months of the war, with the humiliating failure to end it, with its long drawn-out two years of guerrilla fighting, with the shameful policy of rounding up Boar farmers’ wives and families into concentration camps which were so appallingly run (by the shambolic British army) hat some 28,000 died of hunger and disease. Not a good look for someone who had once been a radical, reforming politician, always on the side of the poor.

What makes the Boer War all the more of a pitiful shambles was that, within a few years, the Boers were restored to full power over their own republics. It need never have been fought at all.

2. Tariff reform

As to tariff reform, Judd details the complexities of Chamberlain’s decisions, first to commit himself wholeheartedly to trying to create a tariff or customs union between the nations of the empire, and secondly, once he’d made this decision, the very complicated negotiations with Arthur Balfour, who had taken over leadership of the Conservative Party in 1902 and which led Chamberlain, ultimately, to resign from the Conservative cabinet and to set up a well-funded and well-organised national campaign for tariff reform.

And then shows in sad detail how it was doomed, for at least two reasons. Chamberlain, like plenty of other British politicians, businessmen and commentators, had realised that British business was being out-performed by its international rivals, America and Germany. His solution was to unite the white imperial nations – Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – into a customs union to encourage mutual trade and create a powerful economic and agricultural bloc which could hold its own against competitors. The only problems were:

a) Economic reality

Experts showed him that trade between the colonies and Britain had been steadily declining i.e. we did more trade with the rest of the world and that percentage was increasing.
There was no getting round the fact that, if we imposed extra tariffs on goods entering the union from outside, that would increase the cost of food, seeing as most of the UK’s foodstuffs were imported. Hence the slogan developed by the Liberal opposition, ‘Big loaf, little loaf’, meaning big loaf under the Liberals, little loaf under the tariff reforming Tories.

So Chamberlain was forced to abandon hard facts in preference for rhetoric about the Empire as a civilising force and the power of the Anglo-Saxon peoples when united, and so on. Although he started from Radical roots, he ended up sounding as pompous as the windiest Conservative. And this kind of rhetoric about the great British Empire and the great Anglo-Saxon peoples was extremely popular, his movement distributed posters and banners and badges and placards, and held countless meetings, and was widely supported by leading newspapers of the time. It was wildly popular and it was a complete failure.

b) Political reality

Unfortunately, the other ‘white’ colonies, or the dominions to give them their technical name, weren’t all that interested in Chamberlain’s rhetoric. A meeting was held of all the leaders in London at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee (1887), another one was held (in Ottowa) in 1894, then Chamberlain organised another one in 1897 and arranged for them to be held at regular intervals thereafter. And so they were: 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, 1918, 1921 and so on, being replaced, after the Second World War, by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting.

But at those early meetings Chamberlain was disappointed to discover that the colonial governments were very hard bargainers indeed, cared nothing for his imperialist rhetoric, and were only prepared to negotiate tough deals in their own advantage.

The 1906 Liberal landslide

Balfour’s Conservative government was plainly running out of steam during 1905, and Chamberlain’s aggressive tariff reform campaign did it a lot of damage by attacking Balfour’s refusal to commit to it wholeheartedly. The election held in January 1906 was a devastating defeat for the Conservative and Unionist Party, leaving them with the fewest seats in the party’s history (156), and the Liberal Party with a record landslide victory which kept them in government till the middle of the Great War.

Summary

So it’s a fascinating story, fascinating in the detail of Chamberlain’s youth and young business success, and how he parlayed that into a dazzlingly successful career in local politics leading to him becoming the superstar mayor of Britain’s second city. Fascinating to learn how, when he entered Parliament then government, he continued his radical approach with bills and acts designed to help the poor and exploited. And then fascinating to watch the distortion of these early principles when he came to apply them as Colonial Secretary, the man who had once been feared as a communist revolutionary ending up encouraging the Boer War and trying to create an entirely impractical policy of imperial union which ended up dividing the nation.

When I picked up this book second hand I didn’t realise it was quite so old (1977). Partly because it comes from the era before critical theory became widespread in the humanities, it is a wonderfully readable account, short on politically correct carping and long on a sympathetic understanding of the Unitarian, non-conformist origins of the Chamberlain family. The older reader such as myself is perfectly capable of recognising the racism and the sexism prevalent throughout the age and often found in Chamberlain’s attitudes, without having it made the centre of the account to the neglect of the other important aspects of his political theory and practice. The sympathetic way Judd handles Chamberlain’s non-conformist origins makes it all the more poignant when we read the letters in which he confessed to close friends how the death of his wife in childbirth had made him question and then completely reject his native religion.

The art of the possible

More interestingly, like the Richard Shannon book I read recently only more so, Judd’s account takes you deep into the nitty-gritty of real, actual politics, which is the art of the possible and how this, in practice, comes down to endless number-crunching – how policy-makers are mainly concerned with: a) how many people will vote for them at a general election; b) what number of MPs they will gain; and then c) how to mobilise these numbers in order to get actual bills passed into law.

(It was, apparently, Bismarck who said that: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best’.)

It is eye-opening to read so many accounts of the back-room horse-trading and negotiations, of the creation of coalitions, of the offers and counter-offers and endless behind-the-scenes negotiations which were required to get even the simplest piece of legislation passed through Parliament.

It makes you realise the immense distance between, on the one hand, the grand and rousing rhetoric of politicians’ speeches and articles and party manifestos and the broad hopes of commentators and critics on the Left or Right for sweeping social change, for Noble Principles and Grand Visions – and, on the other hand, the extremely cramped and narrow room for manoeuvre most actual governments and politicians in power have to operate within.

Immersing yourself in the clotted realities of the politics of this faraway era, and studying Chamberlain’s brilliant but ultimately frustrated career, really helps you understand why politics so consistently results in disappointment. It suggests that the high hopes of all commentators, of both left and right, are always going to be disappointed.

Remember the high hopes which greeted the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997? How is he regarded now? Remember the high hopes of Gordon Brown’s supporters that, when he assumed the leadership, we would finally have a proper democratic socialist government. How did that pan out? Remember the Liberals going into coalition with the Conservatives telling their supporters how it would allow them to implement lovely Liberal policies? How did that end up for them?

And then the past five years of Brexit mayhem, 2016 to 2021, including the hilarious decision of Theresa May’s advisers to go for a snap general election in April 2017, promising it would lead to ‘strong and stable’ leadership? But which in fact led to a hung parliament in which she was entirely dependent on the support of the tiny Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power? And then faced a series of no confidence votes until she was replaced by Boris Johnson, the same Boris Johnson who sacked all his moderate MPs and bulldozed through the worst possible Brexit deal, which we will all now have to live with for a generation?

Politics = disappointment.

In fact it was in an essay precisely about Joseph Chamberlain that Enoch Powell MP wrote his often-quoted judgement:

‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

So Chamberlain is not just a disappointing politician but, in Powell’s view, the epitome of the politician who had all the gifts, who worked hard, who had deeply held principles and yet…whose political career fizzled out in failure and disappointment.

Two divorces

The book features two high-profile divorces from the period.

Dilke and the Crawford divorce

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Second Baronet (1843 to 1911) was an English Liberal, Radical politician and good friend of Chamberlain’s. He helped the passage of the Third Reform Act and supported laws giving the municipal franchise to women, legalising labour unions, improving working conditions and limiting working hours, as well as being one of the earliest campaigners for universal schooling. In July 1886 the MP Donald Crawford sued his wife, Virginia, for divorce, citing Dilke. At the trial in February 1886, the judge found in Crawford’s favour.

Two months later, determined to clear his name, Dilke reopened the case but was subject to a withering cross-examination from which he emerged much worse off. Virginia alleged that Dilke had introduced her to every type of French vice and even that he had introduced a serving girl into their bed. The result was that Dilke’s name became a byword for lurid sexual scandal and he became the butt of music-hall songs. Dilke lost his seat in the 1886 general election, the Queen demanded he be stripped of his membership of the Privy Council and his career as a high-flying politician was over.

What is, in a way, most striking about the whole story is that modern historians now think Dilke was actually having a long-term affair with Virginia’s mother, and it was this fact which made so many of his answers during the cross-examination evasive or contradictory – and that he knew the family in the first place because his younger brother, Ashton, was married to one of the other Crawford daughters. In other words, Dilke was accused of having an affair with his brother’s wife’s married sister, but made a hash of denying it because he was in fact having an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother! (p.142)

Parnell and the O’Shea divorce

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who was Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, then leader of its successor, the Irish Parliamentary Party, from 1882 to 1891.

It is vital to an understanding of the politics of the period to realise just how much the issue of Irish Home Rule dominated British politics from, say, 1880 right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and the fact that the bloc of 80 or so Irish MPs who sat in the House of Commons often held the balance of power. Parnell rose to become leader of this bloc and the decisive figure in Irish nationalism, the man who Gladstone and all English politicians had to negotiate with.

Parnell was at the peak of his power when, in December 1889, one of his most loyal lieutenants, Captain William O’Shea, sued his wife, Katharine O’Shea, for divorce and named Parnell as co-respondent. In fact, political society had known that O’Shea and his wife had been separated for years and that Parnell was her lover. In 1886 he moved into her home in Eltham and had three children with her (!). Political leaders knew all about the situation and accepted it; Mrs O’Shea even acted as liaison in 1885 with Gladstone during proposals for the First Home Rule Bill. However, the wider public, and the devoted members of Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party knew nothing.

Parnell assured his followers that he had nothing to hide and would be exonerated in the divorce proceedings, and loyal supporters, not only in Ireland but in faraway America, held meetings, passed resolutions, created posters and leaflets and bullishly supported their Chief. So it came as a devastating shock to all these people, many if not most of them devout Catholics, when the full details of Parnell’s living in sin with a married woman came out in the divorce case in November 1890. Supporters were dumbfounded and heart-broken. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland condemned him. Gladstone, as always having to cater to the very strong non-conformist faction of the Liberal Party, was also forced to abandon Parnell as his negotiating partner.

The crunch came at a committee meeting in Whitehall where senior figures in his party tried to expel him, he refused to go, and so the majority of anti-Parnellites left to form the Irish National Federation. The bitterness of the split tore Ireland apart, set back the cause of Irish independence by decades, and resonated well into the next century. (p.145)

The record from Parnell to Matt Hancock shows that: a) politicians are just normal people like you and me, with messy complicated private lives, and b) how rubbish British society, or political and media society, has always been at dealing with fairly straightforward relations between the sexes i.e. how scandalous the Press still find the crushingly banal idea of a politician having an affair. Who cares.

Credit

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. All references are to the 1993 University of Wales Press paperback edition.

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Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

‘Matters are gloomy – I never saw them gloomier.’
(Lord Salisbury in March 1885, but could have been at any time in his long life, quoted on page 318 of ‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’)

‘The first of duties is to be pachydermatous’ (p.286)

The great thing about Tory writers is they are completely untroubled by theories, ideas or doubts. Living in a dream world of privilege and entitlement, they radiate confidence and suavity. This explains why the writings of so many Conservatives are often so clear and attractive. It explains one of the reasons why Andrew Roberts is so attracted to the hero of this huge biography – for his adamantine certainty:

Unlike so many conservative leaders before and since, Salisbury was a true, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, entirely lacking in either middle-class guilt or ideological doubt. (p.365)

Andrew Roberts is an accomplished biographer and journalist with a very strong Tory bent. He comes from the same kind of privileged, public school background as his subject (though not, admittedly, from the same kind of grand and venerable old family Salisbury came from).

Roberts attended Cranleigh public school then went on to Cambridge, where he chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He has had a distinguished career as a freelance i.e. non-academic, historian, writing 19 books, including four about Winston Churchill, along with countless papers and articles. He writes regularly for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He lives in Knightsbridge. In 2022 he was created Baron Roberts of Belgravia by that reputable politician Boris Johnson (who has also, coincidentally, authored a book about Winston Churchill; I think everyone should write a biography of Winston Churchill, at least once in their lives) and so took his seat in the House of Lords draped in much the same ermine cloak as Lord Salisbury wore. You get the picture.

This is a blockbuster of a political biography, enormously researched and enormous sized, weighing in at 852 pages. It covers all the political issues its subject was involved in, in extraordinary detail, giving daily, sometimes hour-by-hour descriptions of changing events and opinions. And yet it is written with such tremendous clarity and verve, with such an authoritative presentation of the facts in such a logical order, presented in such beautifully lucid prose and with such amiable good humour, that the pages fly by.

Lord Salisbury

This is a blockbuster biography of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury KG GCVO PC FRS DL (1830 to 1903), British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times, for a total of over thirteen years. He was also Foreign Secretary before and during most of his tenure, holding these posts at arguably the high peak of the British Empire, 1886 to 1892 and then 1895 to 1902.

Salisbury’s forebears were the Cecils, advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, who built the imposing Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. The 7th Earl of Salisbury, politician and courtier, was raised to the marquessate, becoming the Marquis of Salisbury, by George III in 1789. (There are currently 34 marquises in Great Britain and Ireland.)

The first Marquis of Salisbury was a solid Tory, as was his son, the 2nd marquis, born in 1791, and so was his son, our hero, when he himself became the 3rd marquis on the death of his father in 1868. Cecil’s own father, the second marquis, had been a successful politician in his own right, Lord Privy Seal in 1852 and Lord President of the Council between 1858 and 1859.

Anyway, this is why Roberts refers to our hero by the family name of ‘Cecil’ in the first past of the book, up till the moment when his elder brother died, in 1865, at which point he inherited the title of Viscount Cranborne, from which point Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. When his father died in 1868 and he inherited the marquisate to become the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, from that point onwards Roberts refers to him as ‘Salisbury’.

1830 to 1865 – Cecil
1865 to 1868 – Cranborne
1868 to 1902 – Salisbury

In 1821 Cecil’s father had made a strategic marriage into the wealthy Gascoyne family, marrying Frances Mary Gascoyne, daughter of Bamber Gascoyne of Childwall Hall, Lancashire, which explains why the family name became Gascoyne-Cecil.

Lonely, sensitive and sad

Cecil’s siblings were either a lot older or younger than him, his father was away in London a lot, so he had a lonely childhood, wandering the echoing corridors of Hatfield House, his only company the house’s 40 or so servants and its vast library. He became a book addict.

Cecil was sent to Eton where he was so mercilessly bullied that he wrote his father a letter begging to be allowed home, and Roberts includes excerpts from his letters with quite harrowing accounts of being punched, kicked in the shins and spat on by older boys.

Cecil was lonely, hyper-sensitive, often depressed and his boyhood experiences made him an extreme pessimist about human nature, always ready to believe the worst, convinced that just beneath the civilised veneer lurked the savage, a belief he saw confirmed by, for example, the savage fighting of the American Civil War. ‘The optimistic view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill,’ he wrote in 1872. But what if there isn’t?

High Tory conservatism

This extreme pessimism formed the basis of Cecil’s arch conservatism: we must hang on to what we’ve got because all change and innovation risks opening the door to democracy, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to barbarism.

Cecil didn’t just go up to Oxford but to Oxford’s poshest college, Christ’s Church. It was the time of the Oxford Movement to restore quasi-Catholic decorations to Anglican belief and services. This attracted him because it gave the C of E a more solid foundation in the central tradition of Christianity. At Oxford he crystallised into an arch conservative in religion, domestic politics and foreign affairs. High Anglican, High Tory. He was vehemently against all forms of change or innovation, in any sphere of life; after all, he was doing just fine, so why change anything?

That said, Cecil was too sensitive to complete his degree at Oxford and so was awarded an honourable 4th. But then academic qualifications didn’t matter. Oxford had done its job of putting the finishing touches to another deep-dyed reactionary member of the English aristocracy.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that he was a lifelong bibliophile, Cecil was solidly, thumpingly philistine, in that dim conservative aristocratic way. He didn’t like contemporary fiction, he disliked theatre and ballet and had no time for art. He didn’t even like music very much. He was also notoriously scruffy and badly dressed all through his life, even on state occasions, even when meeting royalty.

All this is what makes Cecil so funny, a very amusing caricature of a huffing, disapproving old buffer. Given his family name of Gascoyne-Cecil, I wondered whether the extended family of doddery old aristocrats of the Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family in the Ealing comedy ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ were based on him.

In line with tradition, Cecil was packed off on the Grand Tour of the Mediterranean sights. But then, a little unusually, he continued on to the southern hemisphere and visited Britain’s main colonies there, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.

Like upper-class Englishmen before and since, Cecil got on well with the ‘natives’, conceiving an admiration for the ‘Kaffirs’ in SA and the Maoris in New Zealand, liking to think that he detected in them a certain aristocratic independence and natural superiority, much like his own. Just as predictably, he complained about the ghastly, awful, vulgar middle class people he was forced to mix with on the long sea voyages between these places. He hated the Boers of South Africa who he thought crude slave-drivers, an antipathy which mattered 40 years later when he was to be Prime Minister during the Boer War.

In Australia and New Zealand he saw how white men behave when far removed from the steadying hand of England with its hierarchy of Queen, Lord lieutenants, justices of the peace etc, which was appallingly. In colonial towns like Melbourne and Sydney he saw drunkenness, prostitution, violence, and unfettered lust for gold and money. It confirmed him in his High Toryism: human nature is essentially barbarous and needs to be restrained, by order, disciple, hierarchy, an established church, monarchy etc.

Married and elected MP

Within ten weeks of returning he was ‘elected’ unopposed i.e. nominated, to the ‘pocket borough’ of Stamford (p.20).

Surprisingly, he married not for money or to make an aristocratic alliance, but for love of a middle-class woman, Georgina Alderson, much against his father’s wishes, in 1857. Cut out of the family inheritance, he turned to journalism to support his wife and growing family (he quickly had seven children) and wrote a prolific amount, mainly reviewing and articles in a wide range of publications, notably The Saturday Review. The period 1857 to 1866 (i.e. from age 27 to 36) were his Journalism Years.

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Roberts does a great job of showing the themes and attitudes which informed Cecil’s huge output, demonstrating his fierce satire and sarcastic opinions on everything from women’s fashion to foreign affairs (his policy was to ‘encourage supporters and anger opponents,’ p.261). He was a fierce opponent of nationalisms on the continent and prophetically warned against the rise of German nationalism; scratch the sophisticated veneer of a German professor, he wrote, and you find the same barbarism which transacted the Thirty Years War. The twentieth century was to prove him right.

Cecil was anti-slavery but supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War because of a deep dislike of Americans as a whole, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular. He thought Lincoln’s actions during the war, such as closing the free press, suspending habeas corpus and interning up to 14,000 political opponents, was exactly what you got if you let democracy run rampant i.e. tyranny.

He also thought that letting the Confederacy win would have the benefit of splitting the US into two countries, both a lot weaker and less of a rival for Britain. He also worried that if the Union won the war, it would attack Canada next.

Roberts’ descriptions of Cecil’s vehement and bigoted views makes for hilarious reading. Cecil had strong views about everything, which he expressed in often very funny satire and sarcasm. For example, he hated the Irish. While happily admitting that England had behaved terribly to the Irish for centuries and possibly even owed the Irish reparations, he still wrote waspish satire such as that Ireland ‘had given us foreign invasions, domestic rebellions, and in quieter times the manly sport of landlord shooting’ (p.53).

Having just read Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion, which highlights the need for capital investment in the poorest African countries, it’s interesting to see that Cecil thought this was precisely the trouble with 19th century Ireland too, that investors didn’t want to invest because of the poor returns and, above all, the lack of security i.e. threat of violence. Interesting to think of 19th century Ireland as experiencing the same problems as 21st century Africa.

So regarding Ireland, in Salisbury’s view, if inward investment was the solution, then it was vital to establish security and the rule of law in order to attract investors; in which case, the continual agrarian unrest in Ireland had to be ruthlessly crushed.

Cecil approved of Ireland’s high migration rate and, indeed, looked forward to a time when every single Irish person had emigrated and the island could be populated with law-abiding Scots and Saxons: ‘the sooner they are gone the better’ (p.53). Mind you, he was just as scathing about the Orangemen and ‘the special fanaticism of Ulster’ which is, of course, still causing trouble one hundred and sixty years later.

Another major issue was electoral reform on which Cecil had a very blunt utilitarian view: if the working classes were given the vote they would elect radicals who would redistribute wealth via fierce taxation on the rich. So in defence of his class, and out of naked self interest, Cecil was against extending the franchise. It wasn’t that the ruling class was morally better than the plebs – he wrote plenty of satirical articles criticising the lifestyle of the Victorian rich – but that the leisure and education they enjoyed made them likely to be better, more disinterested legislators, who would act for the national good, compared to radicals who, if elected, would owe their position to pleasing i.e. bribing, the electorate, probably by levying unjust taxes on the wealthy i.e. Cecil and his class.

(Cf Richard Shannon’s excellent book, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915, which also drums home how both conservatives and opponents believed that the 1832 settlement had produced a nice balance between the interests of the landed aristocracy, the new business-based bourgeoisie, and the skilled working class. It wasn’t extending the franchise to the lower middle classes and rest of the working class they objected to, as such (although some did), it was upsetting this delicate balance by giving too much prominence to one particular part of the population, which they thought risked toppling the country into either anarchy or demagoguery.)

Cecil also pointed to the baleful example of America where, once every four years, the entire administration ground to a halt while the political parties competed in offering bribes (tax cuts, favourable government policies) to the electorate.

Timeless issues

The appeal of reading about old politics like this is that as well as the obvious appeal of explaining how political leaders behaved as they did and so helping to explain how and why we got from there to here – it also takes you way out of your comfort zone and presents you with completely different ways of thinking about all sorts of political problems. In my opinion this is useful because closely observing how people in the past were prisoners of their age’s assumptions, their level of technological, economic and social development, sheds light on how we, in our own time, are just as much prisoners of our technological, economic and social conventions. It prompts the thought that our descendants will view us with the same curiosity, puzzlement and disgust as we view the Victorians.

And it’s always disconcerting to learn how few of those issues have really changed: electoral reform; trade reform; worrying about economic rivals; worrying about our poor standard of education; squabbles about the rights of trade unions and strikers; managing clean water and sewerage; difficulties with Ireland; small wars in Africa; instability in the Middle East; how to fend off the growing threat from Russia. Ring any bells? Plus ça change… (a phrase which was coined in 1849 and itself hasn’t changed).

Using the Saturday Review

By the time I got to the end of the book I realised a simple central fact about it which is that Roberts uses Salisbury’s early journalism as a central structuring device. The main structure of the book is straightforwardly chronological, he covers all the events in Salisbury’s career as they occur. But almost every single one of these topics or themes is introduced with a quote from a Saturday Review article which Salisbury wrote about it. Sometimes, 10, 20 or 30 years later, and now in power, his early opinion as evinced in a Review article shows the continuity of his thinking; sometimes, on the contrary, the quote from an article shows how either his thinking or the situation has changed.

But either way, Roberts uses the fact that he has clearly read and carefully annotated all of Salisbury’s early journalism as a kind of running commentary on his later career. Thus almost every incident of Cecil’s long political career is seen from two perspectives: that of the cocksure young journalist writing in humorous, general, cynical terms; and that of the older, experienced statesman, acting on experience. Two voices, two perspectives. Or a running commentary on the mature politician by the cocky young tyro.

Viscount Cranborne

In June 1865 (two months after the end of the American civil war) Cecil’s older brother died, aged just 42, and so Cecil inherited the courtesy title Viscount Cranborne, he and his wife becoming Lord and Lady Cranborne. From now on Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. From now on Cranborne enjoyed the income associated with the title and so his journalistic activities wound down, as Roberts demonstrates with a graphic statistic: before his brother’s death he wrote 589 articles for the Saturday Review; afterwards, he wrote just 19, mostly to whip up support for policies he was trying to promote.

Four months later Lord Palmerston died and the numerous competing forces in British politics which he had been holding in check were let loose. Lord Derby and Disraeli formed a joint leadership of the Conservative Party, Derby in the Lords, Dizzy in the Commons. Cranborne grew to dislike and distrust ‘Dizzy’. He was the lead figure in the attempt to water down if not cancel Disraeli’s reform bill of 1867.

In 1868 Cranborne’s father died, aged 77, and he inherited Hatfield House and all its incomes, becoming the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury and, of course, being forced out of the House of Commons and into the House of Lords.

Cecil was a surprisingly ramshackle father who let his kids run wild. They all remember a boisterous sociable happy childhood, the exact opposite of his. Lady Salisbury grew into a formidable hostess and manager of the Hatfield Estate, which employed well over 100 staff. Parliamentary colleagues nicknamed him ‘Buffalo’ because he was big (well over 6 foot), solemn and obstinate. In 1870 he built a big ugly red-brick holiday home near Dieppe on the Channel coast of France, naming it Chalet Cecil.

Victorian Prime Ministers

Lord Derby – February 1858 to June 1859 (Tory)
Lord Palmerston – June 1859 to October 1865 (Whig)
Lord John Russell – October 1865 to June 1866 (Whig)
Lord Derby – June 1866 to February 1868 (Tory)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1868 to December 1868 (Tory)
William Gladstone – December 1868 to February 1874 (Liberal)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1874 to April 1880 (Tory)
William Gladstone – April 1880 to June 1885 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1885 to January 1886 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – February 1886 to July 1886 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – July 1886 to August 1892 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – August 1892 to March 1894 (Liberal)
Lord Rosebery – March 1894 to June 1895 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1895 to July 1902 (Conservative)

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

He never canvased to be an MP but was simply appointed one by the Earl of Exeter to a pocket borough.

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

In 1865, his older brother died, he inherited the title of Cranborne, and in 1866 Disraeli appointed him Secretary of State for India.

Salisbury was blamed for mishandling the Orissa famine of 1866, a disaster which affected the east coast of India from Madras northwards. At least a million Indians died, roughly one third of the population of the area. New to his brief, Salisbury believed his officials and experts who said it wasn’t serious, until it was too late, leaving him with a lifelong suspicion of experts. It made him quick off the mark and insistent on spending whatever it took to save lives in later Indian famines. The scale of the disaster made educated Indians realise maybe Britain wasn’t the all-powerful protector she pretended to be. The famine was one among many triggers for Indian nationalism.

Fear, awe and respect

Salisbury thought Britain’s rule over India was achieved by psychological means. There was no way 250,000 (mostly native) troops could hold down 250 million people if they chose to rebel against them. Earlier India officials such as Macauley had recommended that a select number of upper class Indians be educated, in English, up to western standards, in order to become intermediaries between western and Indian culture. Salisbury was sceptical about even this colonial, patronising idea, in fact he thought it was catastrophic since it just produced a class of ‘seditious article writers’. He thought India was vital to Britain’s prestige in the world i.e. vis-a-vis the other powers, and must be kept down by ‘fear, awe and respect for the law’ (p.139).

As Secretary of State for India, where British resources depended to a large degree on prestige rather than actual resources employed, Salisbury…was one of the first people to appreciate quite the extent to which militarily the British Empire was a gigantic bluff. (p.178)

And, criticising the more enlightened policies of Gladstone’s Liberals, Cecil declared in a speech that:

‘They will not learn that these tribes, these vast uncivilised multitudes, are not governed merely by the sword. They are governed by the imagination. They are governed by their fears.’ (p.293)

As Roberts summarises:

He stood out against the Whig ethos propagated by Macauley and others that Britain’s duty was simply to prepare Indians for eventual self-government. In Salisbury’s view, India was a prize that should remain Britain’s until it was forcible wrested from her. (p.216)

The 1867 Reform Act

The big issue was electoral reform in which Disraeli dished i.e. scuppered the Whigs. Salisbury made himself a master of electoral statistics and predicted reform would eliminate support for Tories. Salisbury made a big speech attacking Disraeli for rubbishing the Whig bill in 1866 then introducing one which was even more radical in 1867. Disraeli calculated that the newly enfranchised middle classes would be grateful to the Tories. Salisbury had done the math and said they wouldn’t and they weren’t. In fact he was fanatical about research, and always read everything he could get his hands on about whatever issue was at hand, electoral reform in 1867, and then again in 1885, being classic examples.

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Gladstone’s Liberals won the 1868 election and were in government for 6 long years which they devoted to reforming all aspects of British law and society

Cranborne’s father died and he inherited the title of Lord Salisbury, the big house at Hatfield and a seat in the House of Lords. Roberts describes the ecclesiastical and political issues around his election as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the core of high Anglican high Toryism.

Roberts also has a passage describing Salisbury’s unexpected interest in new technology. He was an early adopter of electricity and built a laboratory at Hatfield House where he carried out quite serious experiments about light. Cecil had a surprisingly scientific openness, for example he refused to be drawn into attacking Darwin after the ‘Origin of Species’ was published.

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Queen Victorian wished to be awarded the title Empress of India was sharpened when a newly united Germany, after its victory over France, declared itself an empire in 1871, so there as a danger that her daughter, Vicky, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia, would take precedence over her, a mere queen. Also the Tsar made a state visit to Britain in 1874 after the marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Edinburgh. In other words, everyone else was, or was becoming, an emperor – why not her?

The delicate handling of the issue, for British public opinion, abroad, and, of course, in India itself, are covered by Robert with typical thoroughness. He describes the great hou-ha that was held across India on the declaration on New Year’s Day 1877 (p.215).

The extremely complicated manoeuvring during the crisis triggered by uprisings against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria and Serbia in the summer of 1876. The Turks crushed the Bulgarians with great brutality, sending in mercenaries (the notorious bashi-bazouks) who were allowed to rape, pillage and murder at will. Gladstone publicised all this with his famous pamphlet of September 1876, ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’.

You have to understand that this was all caught up in the long-term consequences of the Crimean War. The Crimean War had been fought to prevent Russia’s extension of its influence into the Balkans i.e. further into Europe, at the expense of the Ottomans. The Treaty of Paris which concluded it pledged the allies i.e. France and Britain, to come to the support of the Ottomans.

The point of a detailed account like Roberts’ is to take you right into the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, and describe in very great detail the different positions of the 12 men who comprised it. And this issue split them up into half a dozen factions as the crisis dragged on and a host of different responses, political, diplomatic and military all emerged.

Basically, some of the Cabinet thought the Ottoman Empire was irrevocably doomed to collapse and so we should never have pledged to prop it up. This led to the view that the Crimean War should have never been fought and was a colossal mistake. But this didn’t mean we supported Russia and its restless aims for expansion. Some supported Russia but opposed any expansion of its territory or power. Some thought we should continue to prop up ‘the sick man of Europe’. Some trod a middle way, trying to find a formula to support the Christians in the Balkans – the Bulgarians and Serbs – without insulting the Turks and without allowing undue Russian influence. Some went to an extreme and thought the European powers should partition the Ottoman Empire and civil servants in European capitals began drawing up suggestions for who would get where.3

Queen Victoria was a confirmed Russophobe. I was startled to learn that she threatened to abdicate no fewer than five times through the course of the crisis, leading Salisbury to speculate privately about her sanity (p.174). Disraeli had made it his policy to suck up to Her Majesty, maybe because it was good politics to have the monarch behind you, maybe because he saw it as his duty as ‘a minister of the Crown’, maybe because he liked sucking up.

Foremost in everyone’s minds was how to keep the route to India, the jewel in the British Crown, open and secure, but there were multiple answers to this problem: the most extreme was letting Russia invade and conquer through Bulgaria and down into Ottoman territory until she, possibly, took Constantinople and restored it as an Eastern orthodox Christian capital, as Russian extremists wanted to. In that case, some Cabinet members were for a) pre-emptively seizing Constantinople ourselves or b) sending an Expeditionary force to seize the Dardanelles i.e. the gateway from the Black Sea. The point of this would be to prevent the Russian fleet from freely passing through it and staking a claim in the Eastern Mediterranean. A simpler route would be to annex Egypt, thus securing the south east Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The rearguard position was continuing to prop up the sick man – and our power and influence in the region – hoping something would come along.

The enormous pleasure of a book like Roberts’s is that he takes you right into the detail of this complex chess game, in which everyone – not just Russians, Ottomans, and neighbours like Austria – had multiple points of views and proposals, but even within the British cabinet there were multiple beliefs and strategies and that these kept changing and evolving as the situation changed.

Thus Salisbury was chosen to attend the Constantinople Conference (December 1876 to January 1877) to try and sort out the crisis, very usefully meeting the heads of all the important states en route (including huge, coarse, very clever Count von Bismarck), but Roberts shows in great detail how his ostensible aim of securing peace between Turkey and Russia was secretly sabotaged by Disraeli and his ally Lord Derby who, along with the Queen, loathed Russia, but couldn’t be seen to be supporting the perpetrators of the atrocities. Roberts’ suggests that Disraeli’s reputation for two-faced slipperiness was well deserved.

Anyway, the peace conference failed and so Salisbury’s mission failed, but many commentators in the press realised that he had been set up to fail by his boss. It was a hugely useful experience of the realities of power and diplomacy for a man who was to become Foreign Secretary then Prime Minister.

And so war between Russia and Turkey broke out, lasting from April 1877 to Match 1878, with Russia recruiting Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro to her side. Russia won. Her army fought all the way to the gates of Constantinople at which point the western powers intervened again.

In victory Russia reclaimed provinces in the Caucasus but more importantly, the principalities of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro formally proclaimed their independence from the Ottoman Empire and, after almost five centuries of Ottoman domination, the Principality of Bulgaria emerged as a free nation.

So there’s one layer of pleasure to this narrative, which is watching the drama of high politics play out like an episode of House of Cards. But there’s a huge additional pleasure deriving from Salisbury’s Eeyorish character, always pessimistically convinced of the worse – ‘Things that have been secure for centuries are secure no longer,’ (p.274) – a doom-laden attitude which very often converts into hilariously satirical attitudes and observations. Roberts cites from Salisbury’s letters and dispatches countless examples of ironic reversals and witty sarcasms, a permanent attitude of ‘amused cynicism’ (p.215).

His unexpected juxtapositions aren’t on the level of Oscar Wilde’s deliberate paradoxes, but indicate the taste for aristocratic humour which characterised the age:

‘General Ignatiev is an amusing man without much regard for truth and an inordinate vanity which our Embassy takes every opportunity of wounding.’ (p.159)

Salisbury was an inveterate phrase-maker’ (p.247). Epigrams came naturally to him:

‘No one is fit to be trusted with a secret who is not prepared, if necessary, to tell an untruth to defend it.’ (p.194

Good government avoids one of the causes of hate; but it does not inspire love.’ (p.214)

And ran in the family. Salisbury’s daughter, Maud, accompanied him on his journey across Europe to Turkey, and kept a diary. Roberts cites her being told by beaming Ottoman officials that they were travelling on had been built by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, to which she politely enquired whether anyone had mended it since.

Beaconsfieldism

In 1876 Queen Victorian rewarded Disraeli for his ~~toadying~~ services to the nation, by making him Earl of Beaconsfield. From this point onwards contemporaries, and Roberts, refer to him as ‘Beaconsfield’.

From 1878 to 1880 the leading opponent of the Tories, William Gladstone, gave a series of speeches as he campaigned to win the parliamentary seat of Midlothian in Scotland. There were 6 very long speeches and over twenty shorter ones, addressed to halls full of thousands of voters, which harped on four main themes. He charged Disraeli’s administration with: financial incompetence, neglect of domestic legislation, and mismanagement of foreign affairs. In particular he charged Disraeli with a strategy of distracting public opinion from the economic and financial problems of Britain by means of foreign adventures. Gladstone gave the name Beaconsfieldism to ‘the immoral, bullying acquisition of territory almost for its own sake’ (p.212). One Tory critic defined it as: ‘occupy, fortify, grab and brag’ (p.227).

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

As mentioned above the recurring concerns of Britain in foreign affairs were: continual wars, unrest and Russian threat in the Balkans; management of Egypt and her southern extension, Sudan; management of South Africa and fractious relations with the Boers and the irritating little states like the Transvaal which kept being claimed or created with resulting tribal wars where we had to decide where we stood. And above all else, the running sore of Ireland.

Russo-Turkish War (April 1877 to March 1878)
Second Afghan War (November 1878 to September 1880)
First Zulu War (January to July 1879)
Egypt

Congress of Berlin

Roberts gives an intricate account of the multi-layered diplomacy which brought an end to the at the Congress of Berlin, June to July 1878, for which he was rewarded by the Queen with the Order of the Garter (as was with Disraeli).

Afghanistan

Many in the Foreign Office panicked about Russian intentions in Afghanistan i.e. it was placing diplomats there with a view to infiltrating/overthrowing the Amir, with a view to eventually invading India. Salisbury was sceptical about this talk of Russia attacking. He believed that the expansion of the Russian empire, or ‘the Russian avalanche’ as he called it, was unstoppable but was moving east across central Asia.

‘If it keeps north of the Hindu Kush it may submerge one caste of Muslim robbers after another without disturbing our repose.’ (p.145)

The Afghan war was the fault of Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India. Lytton’s despatches had become steadily more hysterical and Salisbury predicted to a cabinet colleague that he expected him [Lytton] would no conduct operations ‘so as to achieve the most brilliant results – lose the greatest number of men – and spend the largest amount of money’ (p.221).

Sure enough Lytton disobeyed instructions to disengage and sent a British force to force the Amir to accept a British representative at his court, which was defeated at the Khyber Pass. This forced Salisbury’s hand because he believed Britain must be seen to be strong.

The Battle of Maiwand

The war included the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 when Afghan forces under Ayub Khan defeated an admittedly smaller British force consisting of two brigades of British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows, some 969 of whom were killed.

The point of mentioning this is that when British forces were dispatched to south Afghanistan in 2006 their bases in Helmand Province turned out not to be very far from the site of the battle and they discovered that local Afghan leaders and fighters still remembered it as a great patriotic victory over the infidel invader. The moral being that we, the British, have forgotten or never even knew most of our imperial history whereas, for scores of nations which we fought and conquered, our violent interventions are very much part of their national story.

The Anglo-Zulu War

From Wikipedia:

Following the passing of the British North America Act of 1867 forming a federation in Canada [Salisbury’s friend and ally in Disraeli’s cabinet] Lord Carnarvon thought that a similar political effort, coupled with military campaigns, might succeed with the African Kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa. In 1874, Sir Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as British High Commissioner to effect such plans. Among the obstacles were the armed independent states of the South African Republic and the Kingdom of Zululand. Frere, on his own initiative, sent a provocative ultimatum on 11 December 1878 to the Zulu king Cetshwayo and upon its rejection sent Lord Chelmsford to invade Zululand. The war is notable for several particularly bloody battles, including an opening victory of the Zulu at the Battle of Isandlwana, followed by the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a small British force from attack by a large Zulu force. The British eventually won the war, ending Zulu dominance of the region.

Salisbury in several places rages against the way the men on the spot, politicians or viceroys or diplomats or sometimes buccaneering businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, were forever stirring up trouble and starting conflicts which the government back in London then had no option to follow through. It was true of both the Afghan and Zulu wars where the same ends might have been achieved through diplomacy, trade and deals.

Roberts tells how Salisbury couldn’t understand why the Queen was so keen to allow the son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III (who had sought refuge in Chislehurst in Kent) Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, to accompany British forces, but she insisted. He was promptly killed on 1 June 1879 by Zulus who stripped his corpse, all except for one blue sock bearing the initial N from which he was identified.

Egypt

Salisbury wanted to exercise ‘informal empire’ over Egypt not officially annex it. In theory Egypt was run by a Khedive appointed by the Ottoman Sultan. In practice, in return for propping up the Sultan and broadly supporting him against the Russians, Britain was allowed to interfere in Egypt. Apart from anything else Britain had huge sums invested in the Suez Canal and associated businesses. When the stroppy Khedive Ismail Pasha threw out British representatives, Salisbury had the British ambassador to Istanbul ask the Sultan to oust him in favour of his son, Tewfik Pasha, who would be more pliable. A few weeks later Salisbury wrote with typical dour cynicism to a colleague:

‘The only form of control we have is that which is called moral influence, which in practice is a combination of nonsense, objuration and worry.’ (p.229)

I had to look up ‘objuration’. It means ‘a firm binding by oath’. Salisbury’s cynicism is deliberately witty but it’s also bullshit, isn’t it? We also had a massive army (in India a truly huge army), the Royal Navy (which bombarded Alexandria and docked at Istanbul to threaten the Sultan with their guns), and various instruments of financial control through the City of London. A lot more tangible than ‘nonsense, objuration and worry.’

British troops used Egypt as a base to head south to defeat the forces of the Mahdi in what is now the Sudan. Despite all Salisbury and other British politicians’ insistence that the occupation of Egypt was purely temporary, it was, of course, strategic and long term, designed to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India (p.343). British troops didn’t leave Egypt until 1956, leaving a deep legacy of suspicion and resentment.

Tory defeat in 1880

The Tories were surprised at the scale of the landslide which turned them out in the 1880 election: Liberals 352, Tories 237, Irish Home Rule MPs 60 (p.238). Beaconsfield was ill, he had looked tired at the Conference of Berlin, had fluffed his lines and missed sessions due to chronic asthma (p.203).

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Salisbury took up some of his old hobbies including experimenting with electricity and collecting seaweed. Beaconsfield continued as Tory leader until his death in April 1881.

The Liberal Party had only been founded in 1859 as a coalition of anti-Tory forces. As the number of Radical Liberal MPs increased, it alienated the other wing of the party, the landed aristocratic Whig faction (p.244). In opposition, one of Salisbury’s cunning plans was to subtly egg on Gladstone’s radicalism, specially regarding Irish Home Rule and electoral reform, in order to inflame the Radicals’ expectations and rhetoric and so scare the landowning Whigs that they would come over to the Tories. There’s huge amounts of that kind of Machiavellian scheming in this book.

Electoral reform

The big issue at the end of Gladstone’s ministry was electoral reform. Eventually he passed two acts, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. Both were passed by the Liberal House of Commons but strongly resisted in the House of Lords led by Salisbury. This was for the simple reason that both acts tended to favour the Liberal, Whig and Radical interest at the expense of the aristocracy.

For the first time Britain was divided into 670 constituencies of roughly equal size, each returning just one Member of Parliament (previously many constituencies had returned two MPs, who tended to be one Liberal and one Tory, who didn’t even bother campaigning against each other. In other two-member constituencies the fractured Liberal Party had handed one to a Whig and one to a Radical. Salisbury cannily calculated that forcing them to choose one or the other would drive wedges between the two factions.

A lot more constituencies were created in cities, but Roberts shows that Salisbury, with characteristic thoroughness, had done intensive research into British psephology and correctly guessed that although some of these cities might turn Liberal or Radical, a lot of Britain’s big cities now had extensive suburbs and the inhabitants of these were just as scared of working class radicalism as the aristocracy (p.306). This was referred to ‘villa Toryism’ and came to be seen as a legacy of Disraeli.

A small symbol of this was the establishment in October 1882 of the periodical the National Review, designed to produce intelligent journalism for these middle-class Tories.

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

Roberts chronicles the extraordinary manoeuvrings which surrounded Salisbury’s first spell as Prime Minister. In February the Liberals were defeated in an amendment to a bill and Gladstone immediately resigned. But the organisation required by the new Reform Act had not yet been put in place and wouldn’t be until the end of the year so, if he accepted power, Salisbury was faced with the unappetising prospect of being Prime Minister of a minority government for 6 months which was just long enough to make numerous mistakes and, at the next election, be unceremoniously chucked out. It’s fascinating to read the long maze of negotiations this led to, centrally getting Gladstone to agree to pass various nuts and bolts laws and acts which needed to go through. Gladstone had done the same thing to Disraeli in 1874; Salisbury had watched and learned.

There were two other problems. Salisbury wasn’t a shoe-in for Prime Minister. He sat in the House of Lords whereas the leader in the Commons throughout the period in opposition had been Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Baronet [Eton]. Northcote expected the job but was widely seen to be too weak and lacking drive whereas Salisbury (as we’ve seen) enjoyed nothing more than making swingeing attacks on his enemies.

The second problem was Winston Churchill’s father, the radical and unreliable Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (Eton). Randolph had set himself up with a cohort of followers on the Radical wing of the Conservative Party the leaders of which came to be referred to as ‘the Fourth Party’ (Churchill, Henry Drummond Wolff, John Gorst and Arthur Balfour). He promoted something called ‘Tory democracy’, that the Tories should accept the 1885 Reform Act, and the rise of the working class which lay behind it, but ensure the boundaries and details were drawn up to their advantage. A flashy update of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation Conservatism’. He created the National Union of the Conservative Party, created to ‘organise propaganda to attract working men’s votes, registration, choose candidates and conduct elections’, had many followers but refused to serve in Salisbury’s cabinet unless various demands were met.

Salisbury’s juggling of all these issues, trying to square various circles, makes for fascinating reading, insight into the real, smoke-filled rooms nature of actual party politics, more like a soap opera or school playground, with gangs and threats and changing alliances, than anything to do with principles, let alone serving the country.

Salisbury only finally accepted the job when Queen Victoria shed tears and pleaded with him. It was called a ‘caretaker’ government. He was 55. Lord Northcote was gutted but rewarded by being made Earl of Iddlesleigh and packed off to the Lords. Apparently, this is the origin of the expression, being ‘kicked upstairs’.

It is impossible to take the honours system seriously when you see titles like this being used with the utmost cynicism as rewards for mediocrity or being a big donor to party funds or simply to shut people up and get them out of the way. The people these made-up ‘titles’ get handed out to are generally lapdogs, the superannuated or inconvenient mediocrities who need to be shut up. That the givers or takers of these ‘honours’ then get on their hind legs and spout about ‘honour’ and ‘tradition’ and all the rest of it is risible, pathetic: see the way Boris Johnson simply rewarded key allies with peerages, damehoods and knighthoods. Dame Priti Patel. Or Liz Truss’s ‘honours’ list which even the Daily Telegraph described as ‘shameless’.

IRELAND

Salisbury was as solid as a rock against any form of home rule or national assembly for Ireland, because:

the 1800 Act of Union was a bulwark of property rights, law and order
it would be a slippery slope, the first step on an irresistible drive towards independence
as the first and nearest colony of Great Britain, giving Ireland any measure of home rule would immediately trigger calls for the same from every other colony in the empire, especially India (cf pages 574, 587)
it would mean abandoning the minority of the population of Ireland who were active supporters of the Union i.e. mostly in Ulster
on a moral level, it would be an ignoble surrender to the forces of violence (what was later called terrorism) i.e. the continual low-level agrarian protests and occasional murders all across Ireland
losing our prime colony would undermine Britain’s prestige in the world, make us look less powerful, and also
an independent Ireland led by people who hate us would become a serious security threat, even a starting point for invasion by enemy powers (as it had been for the French during the Revolutionary Wars)
a neutral or hostile Ireland would threaten Britain’s ability to import food in time of war (p.587)

Ireland quotes:

‘Are we to cut our country in two and, in the smaller portion, are we to abandon a minority of our own blood and religion to the power of their ancient enemies, in spite of their bitter protests against the debasing and ruinous servitude to which we propose to leave them?’ (p.586)

There was also rabid anti-Catholicism. Salisbury wasn’t just an Anglican, he was a fierce insister on the rights and perquisites of the Church of England in all its aspects. There was, therefore, a strong element of religious bigotry in his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. It’s not just in the last few years that politicians have come up with superficial trivialising jingles: it was about this time that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’ began to be repeated by the lighter minded Conservatives and chanted at meetings and conferences (p.380).

But Roberts gives the game away, on the same page, about Ireland and the whole imperial ethos, by telling us that the very First Earl of Salisbury had been instrumental in the wholesale CONFISCATION of land in Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone between 1607 and 1609 and selling it in lots roughly the size of parishes to Scottish and City businessmen for settlement. He makes it crystal clear that the Protestant English stole the land from its rightful owners, then distributed it according to English law and from that point onwards, for the next 400 years, insisted it was a bulwark of English law when it was plain for any bystander to see that English law was, in that case, just a form of organised thieving, looting, imperial confiscation.

To then turn around and claim that this act of grand larceny, the organised theft of an entire nation’s patrimony, represented the epitome of ‘law and order’ and defending the theft amounted to ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276):

Hartington looked upon the Irish Question primarily as one of defending property and landowning rights. (p.367)

is either to lie to yourself or be guilty of ridiculous hypocrisy. Ask any Irish historian what they think of English ‘honour’ and ‘legality’.

Roberts’ long account of the lengthy manoeuvrings about Home Rule is interrupted for a brief mention of how the British ‘formally annexed’ Upper Burma. The king of Burma, King Theebaw, was negotiating a convention with France but Salisbury was having none of that – Burma had little or no value in itself but might be a useful conduit to western China, and the French certainly weren’t going to have it! — so he sent a force of 9,000 troops who smashed the Burmese army, overthrew the king and put him in prison, installing a friendly Buddhist in power.

Invading foreign countries, overthrowing their traditional rulers, making them subservient to British rule. Only a special kind of mental perversion could talk about this in the same breath as ‘preserving law and order’ and ‘the inviolable rights of property’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’, let alone think that ‘Britain’s greatest contribution to civilisation and mankind [was her] empire’ (p.370).

The violent overthrows, the coups, the imposition of rule by military force, the suppression of opposition voices, were all carried out to defend British strategic and business interests. The fact that they were dressed up in fancy rhetoric was what prompted continental observers like the French or Germans to routinely accuse the British of stunning hypocrisy.

Anti-democracy

It’s worth exploring the thinking behind Salisbury’s opposition to expanding the franchise. Basically he thought liberty was based on a) property and b) tradition and c) the law which upheld them. Only people with property have an interested in the existing system. Give the vote to people who have no property and their opinions will be wild and unpredictable, harmful to tradition, security, property etc. It would be mob rule, unjust, arbitrary and destructive. This is why he often referred to ‘the tyranny of numbers’. Just because a majority of the voters vote for something doesn’t make it right.

If you start from the position that property is the bedrock of liberty, then it follows that all attacks on property are, to the same extent, attacks on liberty. Thus Salisbury put a wide variety of reforms, such as extending the franchise or a graduated death duties, under the heading Attacks on Property which, in Salisbury’s mind, was synonymous with Attacks on Liberty.

It’s a coherent and logical position, but one which doesn’t take account of poverty. Its twinning of liberty with property, the more the better, gives no representation, voice or opinion to the large number of people who have little or no property: should they have no say in the running of the country? No, according to Tories of Salisbury’s stripe.

This was because he had nightmares that enfranchising the working classes and the poor would encourage in them, or demagogues, a wish to overthrow the aristocracy and take the money and property of everyone better off than themselves. He had a lifelong fascination with, and horror of, the French Revolution, not only read books on the subject but amassed a collection of pamphlets and ephemera, often some up from Paris bookshops and second-hand stalls (p.541). The conclusion he drew from it was that it was the fault of weak-willed liberals who set off with the best of intentions but broke down the constitutional checks and restraints and so opened the door to Terror and tyranny. That’s how he viewed the Liberals of his day: as well-intentioned but weak-willed types who, by attacking ‘privilege’ and ‘property’, threatened to sweep away restraint and open the door to anarchy.

Ironically, however, the actual result of electoral reform was virtually the opposite: as a result of the 1884 Reform Act, during the 1890s Salisbury began to worry that the effect of widening the franchise would not be revolution but the opposite, the triumph of super-patriotic Jingoism which, with his incurable pessimism, he regarded as almost as bad.

Salisbury sayings

‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.’ (p.173)

When a member of his own party objected to the way bits of other countries were traded like counters at the Berlin Conference, Salisbury robustly replied:

that if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’ (p.185)

Comedy

At the Conference of Berlin in the summer of 1878 it was very hot. At the Kaiser’s residence in Potsdam there were mosquitoes, but at Berlin there were ‘minor powers. I don’t know which is worse.’ (p.201).

Of the army hero and adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, who had undertaken a 1,000 mile midwinter expedition across Central Asia, he wrote: ‘I cannot see any reason for interfering with the natural right of a Briton to get his throat cut when and where he likes,’ (p.218). (Burnaby was subsequently killed in hand-to-hand fighting against followers of the Mahdi at the Battle of Abu Klea, 16 January 1885.)

When, at the time of the Congress of Berlin, an Admiral Hornby demanded that preparations for war with Russia be stepped up, Salisbury wrote to a cabinet colleague that:

‘If Hornby is a cool-headed, fearless, sagacious man, he ought to bring an action for libel against his epistolary style.’ (p.192)

At a tricky point of negotiations with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Salisbury wrote to the British Ambassador at the Sublime Porte, Sir Austen Henry Layard, that they might get their way in small matters with the Sultan but at the risk of inflaming his Muslim people and risking revolution, which was ‘rather like burning down a house to procure roast pork.’ (p.237).

‘To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.’ (p.250)

In 1889 the Shah of Persia, Nasr-el-Din, visited England for a month. When he was taken to see a model modern prison, he asked to see a gallows in action. On being told that no-one was due to be hanged that day he offered one of his own entourage (p.543).

Of the Daily Mail Salisbury quipped that Alfred Harmsworth had:

‘invented a paper for those who could read but not think’ (p.668)

He liked to say that bishops came in two mutually exclusive categories: those who were fit to be made bishops but unwilling, and those who were willing but unfit. A lot of bishops died and needed to be replaced during his premiership, he appointed 38 new bishops, more than any other Prime Minister before or since. He joked: ‘They die to spite me’ (p.676).

Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1895 to 1902 was so appalled by the rapidly escalating cost of the (second) Boer War that he repeatedly threatened to resign from the cabinet. So many times in fact, that Salisbury joked that he had a special drawer in his desk just for Hicks Beach’s resignation letters (p.744).

Balfour said of his uncle that he certainly believed that all men are equal, ‘by which he means, equally incompetent’ (p.746).

When the Liberal politician John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, attacked the dire management of the Boer War, Salisbury replied that:

‘A more gloomy collection of lugubrious vaticinations I never heard.’ (p.755)

In 1896 Victoria asked Salisbury to promote Lord Waldegrave from being a Lord in Waiting to the Yeoman of the Guard, because as a Lord he was constantly in her presence and she found him simply too ugly to look at (p.794).

Roberts says that Salisbury’s wit was the equal of Disraeli’s but different in kind, relying on ‘high irony rather than mere paradox’ (p.849). Discuss.

Roberts the fanboy

Roberts loves his hero:

Protecting the Royal Family from embarrassment, whether it be political in Berlin, financial over the Royal Grants, sexual over disappointed mistresses, or even highly tangential, as over the Cleveland Street Scandal, Salisbury simply saw as part of the duties of the premiership, and he carried them out impeccably. (p.561)

This is not the tone of an objective historian but of an impassioned fan. Robert devotes pages 336 to 338 to citing witnesses to Salisbury’s sense of fun, his dry humour and cynical wit:

Just as he could not write a boring sentence, so Salisbury was also incapable of uttering a commonplace or canting remark. Lord Rosebery [Eton] once wrote that reading old political speeches was as dull as drinking decanted champagne. Salisbury’s extra brut speeches are the exception, and of a vintage that is still effervescent. (p.208)

Roberts himself often mimics or echoes Salisbury’s drollness:

Sultans of Turkey lived on the grand scale, some compensation for their occasional short life expectancy. (p.161) [E.g. Midhat Pasha was dismissed as Grand Vizier during the Russo-Turkish War, banished to Baghdad and eventually strangled.]

They both have that lofty Tory irony, that droll detachment and amused good humour, which makes the book so readable.

Conclusion to part one

This is a magnificent biography, huge, compendious but written with a tremendous lightness of touch and good humour throughout, echoing the ethos of its subject who portrayed himself as a gruff old Tory but, as his letters and speeches reveal, was a lifelong humorist. It is an absolute goldmine of insights into every aspect of British domestic and foreign policy for the 35 years when Britain reached the peak of its economic and imperial might, 1867 to 1902. It is massively enjoyable on every level.

But none of this should blind us to the fact that Salisbury was the enemy. He was the rooted opposition to everything progressive that was attempted through the period. He stood for a level of privilege and entitlement that almost no one nowadays can conceive, an almost incomprehensibly dedication to the life-or-death importance of hierarchy, the aristocracy, the Church of England. Like all conservatives and authoritarians he thought that if any of this was tampered with it would open the floodgates to anarchy. Thus he resisted every move to give Ireland more home rule because he saw it as threatening a wider collapse:

He saw the [Home Rule] campaign in Ireland as merely the precursor for a general class struggle over the rights of property. (p.258)

Of course it didn’t. Trying to hang onto this world of privilege in the face of changing technologies, social norms and culture, in the increasingly embittered clinging onto India, in the embittered clinging on to Ulster, in the embittered fight against electoral reform (all leading to the climactic struggle between Tories and Liberals in 1911), it was these rearguard positions which nearly led to anarchy.

Above all, he held positions of power during the height of empire and openly admitted it was based on threat and intimidation. In Roberts’s view: ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and revenge’ (p.247).

The single biggest conundrum is how he managed to reconcile the windy rhetoric of his speeches about ‘the highest interests of Empire’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276) (cf Ireland p.351) with the acid cynicism of his private papers and correspondence, which bluntly state that we had to hang onto India and Ireland by whatever means possible because they’re what made Britain ‘great’.

You know the cliché ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’? Well, every time you read a Victorian politician talking about ‘honour’ you can be sure it’s high-sounding cover for either he and his class clinging onto their wealth and privileges or, in an international context, for the British clinging on to countries they acquired by force, with no right or law or ‘honour’ involved in either.

Roberts’ central argument is that Salisbury kept the peace between jostling European Powers for a generation by his foresight and intelligence and diplomacy. This is all true and yet we know that the sweeping changes across all aspects of society which he held back for so long were inevitably going to come about, and it could be argued that, by delaying them for so long, Salisbury made the process of managing them when they became unavoidable (votes for women, rights for workers, Irish independence) much more violent and painful than they need have been if they had been addressed more sympathetically and much earlier.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

Civilisation and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud (1930)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

Civilisation and Its Discontents might more accurately be titled Why Civilisation Makes Us Unhappy. Freud suggests that civilisation is built on the renunciation of sexual and aggressive drives but that, although this benefits wider society, it often comes at the expense of anxiety and guilt i.e. mental illness, for us as individuals.

Many of the articles and books I’ve read about Freud claim that this was his single most influential book.

Civilisation and Its Discontents is a good example of Freud’s lifelong interest in the Big Questions of society – religion, morality, art and so on. His attempts at explaining the origins of society in Totem and Taboo (1914) and Moses and Monotheism (1939) were heavily criticised at the time and have been generally discredited since. His attack on Christianity in The Future of an Illusion (1927) doesn’t address (or invent) historical events in the same way as Totem and Moses does and so hasn’t dated so badly. It’s more an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of organised religion and so retains some force – although it has been superseded by thousands of later writers, commentators, utopians and revolutionaries, also seeking to abolish religious belief, so it’s just one polemic in a very crowded field.

By comparison with those other books, Civilisation and Its Discontents (although it kicks off with yet another dig at religious belief) is built on stronger foundations. Its central thesis that repression of our baser instincts is simultaneously the basis of a ‘civilised’ society and the source of many problems and mental illnesses suffered by its civilised citizens. This is an intuitively plausible argument which the passage of time has done nothing to discredit, which is why many critics reckon it might have been Freud’s single most influential book: its message that modern society makes us ill probably reached a far wider audience than any of his more theoretical or therapeutic works.

1.

Freud opens with a reference to his essay The Future of an Illusion, his most sustained, full-frontal attack on the psychological bases of religious belief. Freud replies to a critic who had written to say that Future failed to take into account genuinely spiritual feelings, in particular the ‘oceanic feeling’ of which the religious speak (as did Freud’s renegade follower, C.G. Jung).

Freud explains that this feeling is a relic, left after the realistic ego grew up, of a person’s infantile narcissism and sense of oneness with the world. For Freud religious belief begins in the infant’s sense of helplessness and need for parental protection, a feeling which is reborn and accentuated in the adult by their nervous awareness of the countless risks and dangers of human existence.

2.

Life is cruel. Human beings, endowed with memory to remember the past and reason enough to foresee the disasters of the future, need protection from both. There are three ways of escaping reality:

Defence mechanisms, such as religion.
Substitute satisfactions and sublimations of hopes and fears – Art.
Intoxicants to extinguish consciousness.

What is the purpose of life? Well, who knows. But when you examine the way people actually behave – and not what they say – it is clear that most people live life in the pursuit of happiness. This happiness is threatened by three things:

The decay and dissolution of the body.
The destructiveness of the outside world.
Our difficult relations with other people.

So how can we escape this dreadful predicament?

hedonism? (full of risks and danger)
art? (limited to the percipient few)
intoxicants? (ultimately self-destructive)
Eastern quietism? (brings only mild contentment, not happiness)
hermetic isolation? (you go mad)
delusions and mental illness? (as in psychotics and paranoiacs)
mass delusions? (for example, religion)
love, which may be the source of our greatest gratifications? (but oh how exposed and vulnerable we are to its sudden withdrawal)
the enjoyment of beauty? (fickle and easily destroyed)

There are maybe three psychological types, who will each tackle these problems differently:

The Erotic Man who wants love and sexual satisfaction.
The Narcissist who tries to take control of the world in his own mental pleasures.
The Man of Action who seeks to change the world.

But there is one complete worldview which seeks to tackle all of these threats to our wellbeing – Religion. Religion tackles the vulnerability of human beings by:

depressing the value of life in this world
drawing its followers into an unreal view of the world, similar to mass delusion
fixing them in psychical infantilism

3.

So, it’s 1930. We are all discontented with civilisation. Why? Because in rising to a civilised level we have been forced to renounce many instinctual pleasures. A glance at many primitive peoples, for example, Australian aborigines, seems to show a people at one with life. By contrast, psychoanalysis has shown the terrible price in neurosis and nervous disease paid by ‘civilised’ people for the benefits of civilisation. A general disappointment with the early promises to improve life made by science and technology hasn’t improved things. So what are the salient features of this civilisation we are so unhappy with?

technology and the exploitation of nature
the creation of order and beauty
higher mental achievements, for example, religion, art and science
the ordering of human affairs via Justice and the Law

On the level of the individual citizen, civilisation is a process which results in:

character-formation
the sublimation of the instincts into ‘higher’ cultural achievements
the renunciation of instinct

4.

The development of civilisation is like the growth of an individual. Savage men are driven to compete for a wife/sex object. One strong man comes to rule the horde. Then the sons rise up and kill the Father. Genital love is the motor in the formation of the Family. Aim-inhibited love leads to friendship and camaraderies, useful for uniting the group and forming bonds between them. Once set on this path, Man is moved to sublimate his basic sex-drive into more complicated psychic and social structures. As society is built up it exerts tighter control on the individual’s potentially anarchic sexuality, corralling it and narrowing it down to focus on heterosexual pairing. Even that restricted arena of expression mustn’t come about before a rigorous series of rituals have been carried out.

So much for libido and sex drive. Are there other reasons for the unhappiness created by civilisation?

5.

Yes. Human beings are violent. The Biblical injunction to love your neighbour is only necessary because there is such a violent urge in all of us to rape, torture, exploit and mutilate our neighbour. Society uses every means at its disposal to rearrange libido so as to secure social acquiescence. One obvious way is via aim-inhibited libido, libido which is rerouted into either generalised affection (for your dog or children or old people) or into friendship, rerouted libido which vastly expand the ties of family into society.

Civilisation has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction formations. Hence, therefore, the use of methods designed to incite people into identifications and aim-inhibited relationships of ‘love’, hence the restriction upon sexual life, and hence, too, the ego-ideal’s commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself – a commandment which is justified by the fact that nothing runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man.
(Pelican Freud Library, volume 12, page 303)

The communists say that men were originally peaceable and equal but that the institution of private property has corrupted them. Do away with private property and everything will be alright. Freud laughs. On the contrary, all societies are bound together by what they exclude, by their ability to project the natural aggression of their members outwards onto outsiders.

In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilisations who were their hosts. (volume 12, page 305)

A newly insurgent dream of Germanic world domination has inevitably raised the oldest scapegoat upon which to focus its anger – the Jew. And the communist utopia in Russia turns out to call for an entire class to anathematise, the bourgeoisie (although, at this period, the direst fate was being meted out to the wealthier peasants, known as kulaks.)

In order to become civilised, man has to give up these two elements: unbridled sexual satisfaction and the expression of aggression. Primitive man expressed these easily and was happy. He also died young. Civilised man has exchanged happiness for security. We live long lives with a lot of frustration and misery in them.

6.

Section 6 is a complicated defence of Freud’s theory of the death instinct or Thanatos. Originally Freud posited just two psychic classes, ego-instincts and object-instincts. The idea of narcissism, first developed in an essay of 1914, complicated matters and by 1920 Freud had developed a new fundamental opposition, that between Eros and the death drive, between instincts which seek to unify, to bind (in a primitive way with the breast, with food; later with a sex-object; in a sublimated form with friends or comrades, via aim-inhibited libido) and instincts which seek to break psychic energy down into smaller units, ultimately to death.

In practice our instincts always appear in some combination. On the personal level libido accompanied with aggression is sadism; the death drive comes to the aid of group psychology and aim-inhibited libido by being deflected outwards onto strangers and enemies. Aggression thwarted is turned inwards as masochism or self-punishment or suicide. Despite opposition and scepticism to these ideas, even within analytic circles:

I adopt the standpoint, therefore, that the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man, and that it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilisation. (12: 313)

Civilisation is a process in the services of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. These collections of men are libidinally bound to each other. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this programme of civilisation. This aggressive instinct is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct which we have found alongside Eros and which shares world dominion with it. Thus the evolution of civilisation represents a struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of and it is this battle of giants that our nursemaids try to distract us from with their lullaby about Heaven. (12: 314)

7.

So how is this aggression controlled in the individual? Through the superego. By returning it in upon itself, by setting a part of itself aside, the ego is able to satisfy upon itself the aggressive wishes it would like to impose on others – Freud calls this mental agency the conscience and the emotional affect it produces in us is guilt. The superego is the watch-dog of civilisation planted inside the head of each of us.

Guilt is the fear of the loss of love, its primal source the withdrawal of parental love. In its simplest form, if you do something bad you are anxious that you will be found out and that love will be withdrawn from you, the love of your parents or of the community at large. So you can still do wrong but will strive not to be found out.

In the more sophisticated form, you develop a full superego based on childish experiences and anxieties. Now you feel guilty even if no-one finds out or can find out what you’ve done – because someone does know; your conscience knows. What’s more, it knows about things you haven’t even done but have fantasised about doing; and it knows about things you’ve fantasised about doing and repressed so deeply you don’t even remember them. Since everyone has the same Oedipal fantasies, everyone suffers a greater or lesser sense of guilt.

More: the superego is fiercest in those who set out to please it most; the more you try to please it in every way, the more demanding the superego becomes. Hence the pathological saint. And if bad luck from the external world does actually befall you, this only provides the punishing superego with more opportunities to punish you for being such a loser. Hence, Freud declares, with the confidence of an unbelieving Jew, the characteristics of the Jewish race, in that the more calamities overtook it, the more they blamed themselves.

More: there is an original substratum of guilt laid down in all of us due to archaic vestiges of the primal Parricide, which is bequeathed to each of us at birth. Its traces are reawakened by naughty things we do, which introduces us to fear of punishment (withdrawal of love); and further reinforced by the introjection of that fear/aggression in a superego. The more we renounce our instincts, the more the superego is given energy to punish us, to demand more. Therefore, insofar as civilisation is defined as the renunciation of instinct, it must inevitably lead to an increase in guilt. Civilisation, by its very nature, reinforces the superego in all of us, and the superego is the punishing principle. Civilisation must make everyone feel guilty.

8.

So, to recap: The price we pay for civilisation and security is the loss of happiness through instinctual renunciation and an accompanying increase in personal guilt.

Freud goes on to speculate that maybe guilt is the product not of libidinal wishes but only of repressed aggressive wishes. So neurotic symptoms are the result of the libido being repressed; when aggression is repressed it reactivates ancient feelings of remorse (for murders, real or imaginary) and guilt i.e. the aggression is rechannelled, via the superego, against the repressing ego, in the form of demands for more obeisance and penitence.

Freud draws the analogy between the development of an individual and the development of civilisation. In the latter, also, a superego, an ego-ideal, is created in the form of a strong leader – Moses, Jesus et al. Just as the oedipal boy unconsciously wishes his authoritative father dead but then suffers remorse and guilt at these buried feelings, so the Jews and Christians wanted their insufferably strict leaders dead and then, in fact, killed them. And just as the individual superego – in the latency period – sets up an idealised version of the dead leader’s injunctions and punishes followers for not attaining them, so entire peoples feel guilt and remorse at the primal murder they’ve committed, set up idealised versions of the murdered Father (of Moses who talked to God, of Jesus who IS God) and punish themselves for not living up to these impossibly high ethical standards.

Over and above the vague sense of guilt or malaise whose origin Freud has explained, there are the specific injunctions of the superego. In individual patients, modern therapy often consists in softening the impossibly strict demands made on them by their own superegos, demands which result in unhappiness and illness.

In society as a whole, the same is true. Our society makes impossible demands on people. Freud singles out the injunction to love your neighbour as yourself as a prime example. It is a fine specimen of the highest ethical ideal a society can rise to, but its very impossibility leads to unhappiness among the many people who try to live up to it, fail, and then punish themselves.

Freud dryly remarks that he thinks maybe a real change in the relations of people and their possessions, a genuine redistribution of wealth – in other words communism – would be more likely to produce ethical improvement than religion’s insistence on demanding the impossible.

Credit

The history of the translation of Freud’s many works into English forms a complicated subject in its own right. Civilisation and Its Discontents was translated into English in 1961 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Quotes in this blog post are from the version which was included in Volume 12 of the Pelican Freud Library, ‘Civilisation, Society and Religion’, published in 1985.

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by Simon on June 30, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Psychoanalysis

Tagged 1930, aborigines, aggression, aggressive drive, aim-inhibited libido, anxiety, character-formation, Christianity, civilisation, Civilisation and Its Discontents, Communism, ego-instincts, Eros, Freud, Friendship, frustration, Genital love, Germany, group psychology, guilt, instinctual renunciation, introjection, Jesus, Jews, Judaism, Jung, kulaks, libido, love, love your neighbour as yourself, masochism, morality, Moses, Moses and Monotheism, narcissism, object-instincts, oceanic feeling, Oedipal fantasies, parental love, Pelican Freud Library, psychiatry, Psychology, religion, remorse, Russia, sadism, sex drive, sexual drive, Sigmund Freud, society, sublimation, suicide, Superego, Thanatos, the death instinct, The Erotic Man, the Family, The Future of An Illusion, the Jewish people, The Man of Action, The Narcissist, the Oedipus Complex, Totem and Taboo

Posted by Simon on June 30, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/06/30/civilisation-and-its-discontents-sigmund-freud/

Virtual War: Kosovo and beyond by Michael Ignatieff (2000)

Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4.

Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was followed by The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience in 1998.

In the introduction to this volume, written in December 1999, Ignatieff says Virtual War is, in effect, the third in a trilogy about the nature of modern war – but this statement has been rendered redundant by the fact that he’s gone on to publish several more. As far as I can make out the sequence now runs:

1993: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
1998: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
2000: Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
2003: Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
2004: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
2017: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World

His books contain extensive descriptions of contemporary conflict zones, fighting, wars and aftermaths. The first book in the series (‘Blood and Belonging’) contains riveting eye-witness reporting from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the second one has a chapter where he accompanies the head of the United Nations to Rwanda, Zaire and Angola; and the fourth one adds scenes from the conflict in Afghanistan. This one contains reportage from a Kosovar refugee camp and a description of a Kosovar village, Celine, where a disgusting massacre was carried out by Serb paramilitaries.

But Ignatieff is not a war reporter; there are plenty of those, filing daily reports from the front line of conflicts around the world. And similarly, he is not a military analyst; there are thousands of those, publishing papers in specialist journals analysing this or that aspect of the hardware or strategy involved in the world’s many conflicts.

Ignatieff stands aside from both those genres because his stance can perhaps best be summarised as ‘a moral philosopher considers modern conflict’. He goes into military and technical detail where necessary – for example, in this book he gives a detailed description of the command and control centres running the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an extended explanation of how targets were established, confirmed and then the complex bureaucracy planners had to go through in order to get permission to bomb them. Very detailed, very informative.

But that isn’t where Ignatieff’s interest lies. He is interested in what this kind of conflict tells us about the nature of modern warfare and, above all, about the moral and political attitudes of the West – what it tells us about ourselves and the modern societies we live in. He is interested in trying to unpick the complex moral issues which the conflicts he covers raise or have created or are evolving or distorting. His aim is:

exploring the new technology of war and the emerging morality governing its use. (p.7)

Maybe it’ll help if I summarise the short introduction in which Ignatieff unpacks the different senses of the word ‘virtual’ which underpin this book and give it its title.

(If you want to know the historic and geopolitical background to the war in Kosovo read the relevant section of my review of Anthony Loyd’s book, Another Bloody Love Letter. Ignatieff devotes a fascinating chapter, ‘Balkan Physics’, to a detailed account of the recent history and complex power politics which led up to the conflict, paying special attention to the failure of American diplomacy in the region and then to the change of tone brought by new Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright, pages 39 to 67.)

Virtual warfare

Ignatieff thinks the Big New Thing about the war in Kosovo was that it was a virtual war. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word ‘virtual’ in quite a few senses or contexts.

1. The public

It was a war which most people in the West watched on their screens, in which they had little or no investment or commitment. For Ignatieff this is a worrying new development. For example, will ‘war’ slowly morph into a particularly gruesome spectator sport? Does this mean that the populations of the West no longer believe in their causes enough to slug it out face to face? Will this, over the long run, weaken our resolve to mount wars when we need to?

2. Air force screens

It was a ‘virtual war’ in at least two further senses. The ‘war’ consisted mostly of NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign carried out against Serbian forces inside Kosovo and against crucial infrastructure in Serbia itself, especially in the capital Belgrade. No ground forces were sent into Kosovo and this, apparently, confused NATO’s air force, whose doctrine and training leads all of them, from air commodores down to pilots, to be expect to co-ordinate air attacks with ground forces, to be called in by radio to support ground attacks. They were unused to an army-less war.

Instead, the pilots, and their controllers back in control and command centres in locations in the West (Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK) worked via computer readouts of target information and then by sharing the view of the in-plane cameras which the pilots were using.

Thus the people choosing the targets and guiding the pilots towards them had pretty much the same view as the viewers at home (who got to see selected plane or missile-based footage which NATO released to the press). Obviously they were deeply involved in actually making it happen, identifying, assessing, instructing and so on. But nonetheless, it was, for these technicians, also a ‘virtual’ war, fought or, more accurately, experienced, via screens.

3. No army

Let’s go back to that point about no army. There was no NATO presence at all in Kosovo during the 78-day bombing campaign. There had been Western observers and peacekeepers in Kosovo but overnight they became enemies of Serbia, liable to be arrested and used as hostages, and so they were all withdrawn. So there were no NATO soldiers on the ground at all. Which is why Ignatieff very reasonably asks, What kind of war is it which involves no army at all on our side?

And furthermore, no casualties. None of the pilots of the thousand or so NATO planes which flew nearly 100,000 sorties were lost. A couple were downed by ejected. So Ignatieff further asks, What does it mean that the West can now go to war without fielding an army and without risking the life of a single combatant? Surely this is the kind of war fought by people who don’t want any casualties, a kind of war without the physical risk.

Previously, wars have involved loss of life on both sides. Western leaders have been slow to commit to war (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain being maybe the most famous example) because they knew the bloody horror it entailed. But now there is no bloody horror. There is no risk. What, Ignatieff asks, does that do to the very definition and concept of war?

How does that change everyone’s perception of what a war is? How does it effect:

1. Policy makers Does it make them more liable to intervene if they think they’re risking less – financially, but above all in terms of casualties, with consequent minimal damage to their domestic reputation and ratings?

2. The public in Western nations Will it teach the public to become so risk-averse that as and when a serious commitment of soldiers on the ground is required, it will be unacceptably unpopular? Will old-style fighting become less and less acceptable to a public acculturated to watching everything happen on a video screen? Will we refuse to countenance any conflict in which we lose soldiers?

3. The enemy On the face of it, the use of laser-guided precision weapons ought to scare adversaries so much that they are put off ever triggering the intervention of the West and its high-tech weapons. In fact, as he reports in detail, the reality in Kosovo turned out to be the exact opposite: President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, cannily triggered the West and then, in defiance of all our best efforts, carried out his nation-scale ethnic cleansing.

Because Milošević knew that as soon as the bombing started NATO would withdraw its ground forces and so he would be free to do what he wanted to the Kosovar population. He intended to drive them right out of their own country using exemplary terror i.e. using his army and paramilitaries to massacre entire villages and burn them to the ground, thus terrorising populations nearby to flee across the border into Macedonia or Albania – and that is exactly what happened. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees were harried out of their own country, even as the NATO bombing campaign proceeded. According to Human Rights Watch, by early June 1999, more than 80 percent of the entire population of Kosovo and 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians had been displaced from their homes. Amnesty International estimated that nearly one million people were forced to flee Kosovo by the Serb terror campaign.

On the face of it, then, this new kind of hi-tech gee-whiz ‘virtual’ war let the bad guys get away with it, with genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the first ‘virtual’ war undermined its own rationale: it seemed very much as if what was needed to force the Serbs to end their ethnic cleansing was precisely what had been so carefully avoided i.e. face-to-face clashes between NATO forces and Serb forces. In other words, traditional warfare.

4. No mandate

Lastly, Ignatieff claims it was also a virtual war in the sense that the forces involved weren’t technically at war. The NATO forces who bombed the Serbs for 78 days never actually declared war on Serbia, no UN resolution was passed to justify this attack on a sovereign state, and none of the legislatures of the European countries who went to war were called on to vote for it.

NATO lawyers cobbled together a justification in law but, like everything to do with the law, it is subject to endless interpretation and debate. Even the outcome was unorthodox, a so-called ‘military technical agreement’ which didn’t settle any of the issues but merely allowed the entrance of NATO ground forces into Kosovo to protect the population while the diplomats went back to the negotiating table. But the fundamental issue is simple: Was NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia legal or illegal under international law?

I’m no lawyer but what I took from Ignatieff’s account was that the campaign was technically illegal but was morally and politically justified. NATO used force as a last resort, after all attempts at mediation and conflict resolution – mainly at the talks held between NATO, the Kosovo Liberation Army and Milošević at Rambouillet in France – failed to find a solution.

NATO’s aim was to save lives, to put an end to Serbia’s low-level policy of massacre and ethnic cleansing. But does a worthy aim – saving the lives of a defenceless population – justify breaking one of the fundamental principles of the UN and the post-war international consensus, namely that the integrity of the nation state is sacrosanct; that nobody has a right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another state. This is one of the central moral-political-legal questions which Ignatieff returns to again and again.

To intervene or not intervene?

Like its two predecessors and its successor, Virtual War is a) short and b) not so much one consistent through-written book, but a collection of articles, published at different times in different magazines, but with enough thematic unity to work as a book. And each article or chapter focuses on particular aspects of the Kosovo war which I’ve itemised above.

Thus the issue I just described – whether the West was justified in attacking Serbia – is dealt with in chapter three, which consists entirely of an exchange of letters between Ignatieff and the British lawyer and politician, Robert Skidelsky, three from each of them.

The chapter may be short (16 pages) but it gets straight to the point and is packed with argumentation on both sides. Skidelsky argues that respecting the integrity of states has (more or less) kept the peace since the Second World War. If we alter that fundamental premise, if – like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – we argue that we are so convinced of our moral rectitude and our case that we are justified in intervening in other countries wherever minorities are threatened by oppressive governments – then the world will descend into chaos.

Ignatieff politely but firmly disagrees. He describes himself as an ‘internationalist’, meaning that he agrees that the basis of the international system is the integrity of the nation state, but he also believes in the human rights of individuals and of communities, and that this second principle can clash with the first and, in Kosovo, trumps it.

He’s our author, so the weight of evidence from the other chapters tends to bolster Ignatieff’s argument. But Ignatieff tries to present a fair fight, giving Skidelsky’s objections as much air time as his own views. I very much took Skidelsky’s point that the notion Tony Blair was promoting in various public speeches (particularly, apparently, one given in Chicago on 22 April 1999, pages 72 and 74), that the West not only has the power to intervene in rogue regimes, but is obligated to intervene, is a terrible precedent. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (p.73).

And indeed, we know what happened next, which is that, after the 9/11 attacks, the US, under President George W. Bush, bolstered by Tony Blair and his interventionist stance, decided to intervene in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Overthrowing the absolutely awful dictator, Saddam Hussein, sounded like a great idea. Liberating Iraq and rebuilding it as a modern democracy sounded like a great idea. And how did those interventions turn out? Catastrophic wastes of time, money and lives, which left the region more unstable than before.

In this respect, Virtual War is a snapshot in time, capturing a moment when the interventionist mindset was new and still being explored and worked through. This is a fancy way of saying that quite a lot of it feels out of date. Ignatieff’s subtle premonitions about a new type of warfare have been completely superseded by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Content

As mentioned, the book consists of chapters which bear a strong resemblance to standalone magazine articles. In his previous books these had each been based around particular issues or countries. Here each chapter revolves around a central figure. These are:

Richard Holbrooke, impresario of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, architect of US policy in the Balkans, who Ignatieff follows and interviews as he mounts frantic shuttle diplomacy in the runup to the outbreak of hostilities (December 1998).
Robert Skidelsky, British economic historian, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and vocal opponent of the bombing campaign against Serbia who Ignatieff debates the legality of the NATO bombing offensive with (May 1999).
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1997 to 2000, who commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War, and is profiled as part of an extended description of how the bombing campaign was managed, not only technically in terms of selecting targets etc but at a diplomatic level (June 1999).
Louise Arbour, a Canadian, who was Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In this role she indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes on 27 May 1999, the first time a serving head of state was called to account before an international court. Ignatieff interviews her at length on the tribulations of setting up the Tribunal and especially of getting enough evidence to prosecute Milošević (July 1999).
Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav writer and dissident, friend of Ignatieff’s, opponent of the bombing campaign not only on general humane grounds but because he is a Serb and so imprisoned by the propaganda of the regime. He flatly denies that the massacres of civilians, whose bodies Ignatieff saw with his own eyes, were carried out by Serbs. claiming they must have been caught in the crossfire of battles with the KLA. He couldn’t accept the fact that his nation was carrying out a genocide using Nazi tactics. Refusal. Denial.

As in The Warrior’s Code, Ignatieff has fantastic access to the top dogs: he accompanies leading figures such as Holbrook and his cohort of other US negotiators (ambassador Richard Miles; liaison officer with the KLA fighters, Shaun Byrnes) in the fraught weeks leading up to the bombing campaign; he has lunch with US ambassador to Macedonia, Chris Hill; he is part of the press pack covering a visit of Arbour’s to the Kosovar village of Celine, scene of a typical Serb massacre of unarmed civilians (lined up and machine gunned in cold blood). He interviews Arbour at her headquarters in the Hague, a conversation he reports at length.

Ignatieff vividly conveys what life is like for these jet-setting international politicians and lawyers: 1) the hectic lives, the endless mobile phone calls, dashing for planes or helicopters, setting up meetings, taking more calls. He 2) acutely dissects the issues they have to grapple with. But where Ignatieff comes into his own is with his 3) insightful analysis of the themes or issues or moral problems arising from the challenges they face; the general issues which arise from trying to resolve ethnic conflict, from intervening in a sovereign state, from trying to achieve some kind of justice for the victims.

Critique

1. The idea of a screen war not so novel

For me the weakest part of the book was Ignatieff’s claim that watching a war via a TV screen was somehow a) new, b) morally degrading, c) fraught with perilous consequences. It shares the same tone of moral panic as the chapter in The Warrior’s Code about the ever-increasing power of television. Looking back from 2023 both concerns seem out of date and overblown. Since Ignatieff was writing (in 1999) screens have come to dominate our lives to an unimaginable extent, and this has had many social consequences which impact Ignatieff’s ideas and interpretations.

But I disagree that watching a war on the telly was something radically new in 1999. People in the UK had been watching war footage on telly at teatime ever since the TV news was established in the 1960s. I remember listening to punk songs taking the mickey out of it in the 1970s (5.45 by Gang of Four, 1979).

And, of course, in the UK we had a war of our own, in Northern Ireland, which was on the TV news almost every night for decades before Ignatieff started worrying about it. So I question Ignatieff’s claim that watching the Kosovo conflict on the telly was a radically new departure with worrying social implications.

2. Kosovo’s ‘virtual’ war in no way replaced conventional conflict

At a more serious level, the ‘virtuality’ Ignatieff wants to make such an innovation of Kosovo hasn’t changed the face of war as much as he claims. In his long final chapter Ignatieff claims the West is living through a revolution in warfare, and that the new technology of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, and remote control will change warfare for good, and he sets off worrying about the implications for all of us.

But it wasn’t true. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t carried out entirely by remote control, it required a conventional army with tanks and armoured cars and all the rest of it, and then degenerated into a counterinsurgency which was even less remote, very much requiring boots on the ground (as described in excruciating detail in Thomas E. Ricks’s two books about the Iraq War, Fiasco and The Gamble).

OK, so was Iraq just a blip, have other wars continued the radical new ‘virtual’ path worries about? No. Take the war in the Ukraine. A conventional army (accompanied by its disgusting mercenaries) has invaded a neighbouring country and is being repelled by an entirely conventional army and air force. No doubt lots of screens are being used by everyone involved, maybe drones are being deployed and maybe some of the missiles are cleverly targeted, but most are not, and the whole thing feels like a traditional boots-on-the-ground conflict.

So not only have a lot of his concerns about war and society been superseded by the events of the last 23 years, but his central concern about the perilous consequences of ‘virtual war’ can now be seen to be exaggerated and unwarranted. He worries that war via screens will end up being no more than a spectator sport, emptied of meaning, and lacking engagement or understanding by the wider population. That is not at all what happened with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anticipations of ‘Empire Lite’

In scattered remarks through the book, and then more pithily in the introduction, Ignatieff draws the central conclusion which will go on to underpin the next book in the sequence, 2003’s ‘Empire Lite’.

It is based on the run of events during the 1990s in which the UN and the so-called ‘international community’ performed so abysmally. They let down the Marsh Arabs who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were very slow to support the Kurds who Saddam drove up into the mountains to die of exposure. They abandoned the mission to Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1994; in the same year the member states of the UN failed to cough up enough troops to enable the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to prevent the fastest genocide in history. Then in July 1995 UN peacekeepers once again stood by helplessly while Serb militia rounded up some 7,000 boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and murdered them all.

In his earlier books Ignatieff visited the sites of mass murder in Rwanda and of massacres in Bosnia. This book gives a stomach-turning description of the massacre of unarmed Kosovar women and children carried out by Serb paramilitaries at a village called Celine. Did those Serb soldiers think it was serving their country to shoot unarmed women and children point blank in the head? Did they think this is what soldiers do? That this is what makes you a man – murdering little children?

These experiences drive Ignatieff to his Big Conclusion, which is that the West needs to intervene more, more deeply, more extensively, with more troops and resources, and for longer, than it has hitherto done.

Sitting above the Stankovec 2 refugee camp, packed with Albanian Kosovars who have been hounded from their homes by the Serbian army, and reviewing the West’s dismal record of failing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ignatieff’s conclusion is surprisingly blunt:

This must be stopped. Now. By persistent and precise military force. (p.45)

His humanitarian principles, his concern to protect the vulnerable, lead him to believe that the intervention of the West is vitally required, as here in Kosovo, to prevent yet another crime against humanity, and this is the nexus of his argument with Robert Skidelsky.

But he goes further. Ignatieff thinks that the only way to prevent these crimes happening in the first place is to help developing countries build stronger states. And the only way this can be done is by major intervention, supervisions and investment in failing states by the West. And that means, in practice, America. He shares the view he attributes to the roving American diplomat Richard Holbrook, that:

the Americans are the only people capable of replacing the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians – the only people with the character required for an imperial vocation. (p.35)

America needs to be more imperial, more prepared to intervene to stop states failing, to prevent genocides, to create more stable polities. And it’s this idea which was to be the central theme of the book which followed this one, Empire Lite, arguing for greater American commitment to places like Afghanistan and written on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In other words, Ignatieff’s fine and subtle humanitarian principles led him to support George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, support he later came to bitterly regret. Seen from this perspective, Ignatieff’s books on foreign affairs are almost like a tragic novel, about a highly intelligent and deeply philosophical man who argues himself into supporting Bush and Blair’s idiotic invasion of Iraq.

The scale of the waste

Alongside Ignatieff’s brilliant descriptions and fascinating insights, one aspect which comes over really strongly is how extremely expensive it is to wage this, or any kind, of conflict in the modern world. The cost of one jet. The cost of maintaining it. The cost of training one pilot. The cost of training the small army of technicians and engineers required to maintenance the jets. The cost of housing and feeding them all somewhere far from home. And then the cost of the munitions, up to a million dollars per missile.

One of the problems which the bombing campaign encountered was that the Serbs turned out to be very good indeed at hiding from the planes. They were expert at camouflage, deception and the use of decoys. They learned to turn off the radar on their anti-aircraft guns so as not to be detected. They hid all their real armour and created fake tanks and trucks made of wood and canvas. Hence the accusation that NATO was dropping million-dollar missiles to blow up ten-thousand-dollar decoys (p.105).

But stepping back, for a moment, from the geopolitical, historical, military and diplomatic contexts which Ignatieff explains so well…My God, what a colossal, colossal waste of money! If a fragment of what the war cost had been invested in the economy of Kosovo and its million-strong population it could have been rich as Luxemberg by now. I know the waste of war is a cliché but given the extortionate cost of modern equipment, arms and infrastructure, modern war amounts to the expense of hyperwaste in a sea of need.

Pleasure

Hopefully, by now you can see where Ignatieff is coming from. As I said above, he is not a war reporter or a military analyst or a commentator on international affairs. He is fascinated by the moral issues thrown up by conflict in the modern age and by the way our understanding of those issues and their implications were changing and evolving during the 1990s and into the Noughties.

He is also a really beautiful writer. Ignatieff writes a clear, deceptively simple prose which fluently embodies his continual stream of sharp observations and acute analysis. The combination of lucid prose with measured analysis and thoughtful reflection makes him a tremendous pleasure to read.

Credit

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 2000. References are to the 2001 paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 15, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Philosophy, War

Tagged 9/11, Afghanistan, air force, air warfare, Albania, Albanian Kosovars, Aleksa Djilas, America, American diplomacy, Amnesty International, Angola, Another Bloody Love Letter, Anthony Loyd, Arusha, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Balkan Physics, Belgium, Belgrade, Black Hawk Down, book, Bosnia, Bosnian war, Canada, Celine, Chamberlain, Chris Hill, contemporary history, contemporary warfare, counterinsurgency, cruise missiles, Dayton Agreement, Empire Lite, ethnic cleansing, France, General Wesley Clark, genocide, genocides, George W. Bush, Germany, high-tech weapons, history, Human Rights Watch, ICTY, international community, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Iraq War, Italy, Kosovo conflict, Kosovo Liberation Army, laser-guided missiles, Louise Arbour, Macedonia, Madeline Allbright, Marsh Arabs, Michael Ignatieff, modern war, moral philosophy, Nato, new world disorder, Northern Ireland, Operation Allied Force, Ottoman Empire, President Bush, public intellectual, Rambouillet, Richard Holbrooke, Richard Miles, Robert Skidelsky, Rwanda, SACEUR, Saddam Hussein, Second World War, Serb militia, Serb paramilitaries, Serbia, Shaun Byrnes, shuttle diplomacy, Slobodan Milošević, Somalia, Srebrenica, Stankovec 2 refugee camp, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the Balkans, The Hague, the UK, the US, the West, Tony Blair, TV, TV news, Ukraine, Ukraine War, UN, UN peacekeepers, United Nations, USA, Virtual War, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, Virtual warfare, Wesley Clark, Yugoslavia, Zaire

Posted by Simon on May 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/15/virtual-war-kosovo-and-beyond-michael-ignatieff/

Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945 @ the National Army Museum

The main exhibition space at the National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently hosting an exhibition titled ‘Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945’. It is premised on one core fact: Germany has been at the heart of the British Army’s story since 1945.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum

Overview

The exhibition does what it says on the tin, giving a straightforward chronological account of the British Army’s time in Germany, from the closing battles of the Second World War (Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May 1945( through to the present day. It covers:

the British Army’s role in helping to rebuild a completely shattered and broken Germany
how this quickly evolved into providing protection and defence against possible attack by Russia during the long period of the Cold War (1945 to 1990)
how the well-trained battle-ready forces in Germany then became a base from which to deploy troops across the world, specifically during the first Gulf War (1990), the civil wars in Yugoslavia (1991 to 2001), then the wars in Iraq (2003 to 2011) and Afghanistan (2001 to 2021)
finally, the drawdown in British forces in Germany, whose presence officially ended in 2019

Movement Forwarding Office boxes

Dotted through the exhibition are replica Movement Forwarding Office boxes. These were the wooden boxes personnel’s belongings were sent to Germany in. Here they are stamped with information panels but are also the site of recordings of ordinary people’s voices from each of the five sections of the exhibition (see below). In other words, the exhibition isn’t silent but, as you move through it, you hear a whole range of voices describing their experiences, from the occupying soldiers of 1945 onwards.

Two aspects

The British Army had a significant presence in Germany from the country’s defeat in 1945 to its final departure in 2019, near enough 75 years. During that time more than two million British service personnel and their families called Germany home. Many were posted for significant periods of time, got married and lived with spouses and children

The exhibition has two aspects: one is to give a detailed account of the changing military situation, describing all aspects of what was at first a military operation and then changed into a defence function as part of NATO. The second aspect looks at the social history of these people and this period, at what it was like to serve and live in Germany, at the impact it had on those two million service personnel and their families, and at the many traditions and institutions which rose between Brits and locals.

The exhibition is divided into five themes:

1. Winning the Peace

On 8 May German forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. These nations – Britain, France, the USA, the USSR – divided the defeated nation into Zones of Occupation which they administered. The British forces were christened the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR).

German map of the occupation zones (1945)

The BAOR was confronted with enormous problems. They had to feed the impoverished population. They had to deal with the revelations of the Holocaust. They had to manage the millions of refugees and homeless people. They literally had to set about rebuilding roads, houses, factories, the entire infrastructure of a modern nation. The display includes:

maps of the zones of influence
a hand-written statistical record compiled by a British soldier detailing the state of inmates, numbers of deaths, burials and evacuations at the Belsen concentration camp
the BAOR supervised the rebuilding of the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg

In 1946 families were allowed to join the soldiers of the BOAR. Barracks were created. The British remained entirely segregated from the local population, using their own schools, their own currency, forbidden to fraternise with the enemy. The scale of the devastation and the task ahead were detailed in this 1946 documentary film.

Field Marshall Montgomery and Churchill took a victory parade of 10,000 British troops through the ruins of berlin on 21 July 1945. A series of letters from Montgomery give instructions on the strict non-fraternisation policy between Brits and Germans.

The athletics medals of Bevis Shergold, a veteran of the war in Europe who lived in Germany with her husband in the 1950s, indicate the thriving sporting and cultural scene that was established to cater to service personnel and their families. Many service personnel lived better in Germany, enjoyed better facilities, than back in Britain, much of which was also in ruins and subject to strict rationing.

‘Who was a Nazi?’ A major goal of the occupying forces was the denazification of Germany. Leaflets and pamphlets were written to help ordinary soldiers question German citizens and identify Nazis. Two million cases were investigated in the British Zone alone.

The Berlin airlift 1948 to 1949

Tensions with the Russians climaxed on 24 June 1948 when the Soviet authorities blockaded Berlin, in theory a city occupied by all four Allies but which was embedded deep in the Soviet Zone. The three Western Allies promptly set up airlifts to fly in food and other necessities. At its height a British or American plane was landing in one of Berlin’s three airports every 60 seconds. Eventually, after nearly a year, the Soviets abandoned their blockade on 12 May 1949.

Now it was clear for all to see who the enemy was, and the prolonged commitment of the Allies to Berlin changed the relationship between Germans and their occupiers. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was now, that the Germans were allies against the mightier threat, Russia.

2. Walls and Wire

Churchill had warned of an iron curtain dividing Europe as soon after the war as March 1946. The Berlin Airlift crystallised tension between the former Allies. But it wasn’t until 1961 that things took a further turn for the worse, when, on the night of 12 August, Soviet soldiers erected 100 miles of barbed wire around West Berlin, cutting it off from the outside world. In the weeks that followed the wire was followed by a concrete wall.

But the Berlin Wall was just a small forerunner of the bigger divided between east and West Germany. Eventually a wall, accompanied by barbed wire and guard towers, ran 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. It eventually became, along with the border between North and South Korea, one of the most heavily militarised zones in the world.

The Berlin Airlift clarified the British commitment to Germany. The manpower of the British Army on the Rhine was set at 53 to 55,000. The sense of embattled threat from the East set the tone of British soldiers’ lives for the next 40 years. In Berlin itself, service life was dictated by a host of rituals, rules and regulations surrounding the Wall and the exhibition highlights many little known aspects.

For example, I didn’t know that the Queen visited British forces in Berlin on three separate occasions, in 1965, 1978 and 1987.

Westerners were only allowed to travel from the West to Berlin via one heavily monitored road and one heavily monitored railway line. The exhibition includes movement orders and information leaflets relating to both.

We learn about BRIXMIS, which was the British Commanders in Chief Mission to the Soviets in Germany. Officers from BRIXMIS held parties and receptions, but were also allowed to go on three-man fact-finding missions anywhere inside the Soviet sector. It was a small organisation, numbering just 31 people, yet had wide-ranging freedoms to travel in the Soviet sector. Despite their official status, members of the little BRIXMIS parties could still be subject to harassment and even violence from Soviet or East German troops.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing uniform and equipment used by the BRIXMIS unit.

The British Army presence in Berlin numbered 3,100, deployed in three infantry battalions, with a number of supporting units. They were rotated every two years.

In 1947 the BAOR instituted the Berlin Tattoo, two days of displays and pageantry. This was open to German citizens and became part of the city’s social calendar. It continued until 1990.

3. Active Edge

‘Active Edge’ was the term used by the Army for exercises that brought about fast mobilisation under the Soviet threat. This section documents the changing face of the BOAR during the Cold War years of the later 60s, 70s and 80s. During this period there was a growing threat from biological and nuclear weapons, with far-reaching consequences for training and equipment. It saw the inauguration of so-called ‘Survive to Fight’ training. Suits designed to protect against nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are on display.

The army’s readiness peaked with 1984’s Exercise Lionheart, the biggest British military exercise held since the Second World War, which involved 131,000 UK troops.

National Service ended in 1960 although the last national servicemen were only discharged in 1963. By the 1970s the BAOR had long ceased to be an army of occupation and was a smaller, more professional army which focused entirely on the possibility of having to fight a war of defence on the North German plain. Money was invested in better uniform, weapons and equipment, some of which are on display here.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing weapons used by the British Army on the Rhine during the 1970s and 80s

A magazine was set up for service personnel and titled ‘Threat’ which kept its readers up to date with intelligence about Soviet weapons, and their weaknesses, and likely battlefield tactics.

A video shows the Queen’s visit to the BAOR in 1977 to mark the jubilee of her reign, alongside photos and a commemorative mug. There’s an old-style push-button display which contains a dinky diorama of rolling landscape with half a dozen toy tanks scattered among it. When you press a button spotlights illuminate the different tanks and you have to press another button to identify the vehicle as friendly or enemy, using the list of profiles next to the buttons.

A surprisingly dominant display is of a mocked-up catering van, testament to an enterprising German, Wolfgang Meier, who spotted a commercial opening for someone to offer grub to hungry thirsty troops on the well-known Soltau-Lüneberg training range. For 25 years his bright blue catering vans offered hungry squaddies a menu including bratwurst, currywurst, fish and chips, chicken and chips, and Coke, Fanta or Sprite.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing a mock-up of one of Wolfgang Meier’s distinctive refreshment vans

4. Deployments

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was quickly followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw pact, which had glowered at NATO forces for 45 years. What now for the British Army? What was it for? What should it do?

In brief, the Army in Germany was cut in size by half. But as the 1990s progressed new types of threat or emergency emerged, notably:

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait which triggered the Gulf War (2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991)
the wars in former Yugoslavia, consisting of:
- the Slovenian War of Independence (1991)
- the Croatian War of Independence (1991 to 1995)
- the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995)
- the Insurgency in Kosovo (1995 to 1998)
- the Kosovo War (1998 to 1999)

In Operation Granby an entire division of BAOR was deployed out of Germany as part of a multinational coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. British forces based in Germany also made major contributions to operations in Bosnia and the wider Balkans. They were then involved in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The BAOR came to be seen as a highly trained, highly motivated force which could be drawn on for operations in these other theatres.

This section examines the complete rethink about what the British Army in Europe was for, and contains mementos of the army’s involvement in some of these conflicts.

There’s a Seventh Armoured Brigade pennant from Kosovo. A copy of ‘Threat’ magazine, now focusing on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army rather than the Warsaw Pact. A road sign from Basra. A mannekin sporting a uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing the uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait with the flag of 1(BR) Corps in the background

At the same time, this final section dwells more than previously on the social aspects of British military life in Germany. A case displays the wedding outfits of local girl Sigrid Krueger and British soldier Anthony Young whose marriage in 1990 symbolises the ever-closer ties between service personnel and locals. They met singing in an Anglo-German Choir in Rinteln and still live in Germany today. The harsh non-fraternisation policies outlined in Montgomery’s letters right at the start of the exhibition seem to come from another age.

There’s mention of the British Forces Broadcasting Service which began broadcasting in 1945 and kept going till the end. Generations of young Germans grew up listening to it, not least because it had lots of fashionable pop hits in the 60s and 70s.

There’s more about army schools, including a school uniform for a British forces-only school. Notes on the British Army Summer Show which developed in the town of Bad Lippspringe and became a regular part of the British Forces Germany calendar, with its live music, equestrian events, trade stands, car show and beer tents. A description of the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) which ran pubs, clubs and supermarkets for the British. The biggest NAAFI in the world opened in Rheindahlen in 1972 and wives in particular would travel a hundred miles to stock up on British food and drink.

Grateful German municipalities sometimes awarded their local British forces a Fahnenband, the highest award that can be bestowed on a British unit by the German military, and several examples are on display here.

But the 1990s brought change on the social front, too. The first British Military Tattoo was held in Berlin in 1947. The last one was held in October 1992.

5. Legacy

In 2010 the Liberal-Conservative British government decided to reduce the size of the army from 112,000 to 82,000 with a reserve of 35,000. And plans were announced to withdraw the entire remaining 20,000 forces from Germany by 2020.

At the culmination of this 10-year drawdown, the British Army’s permanent deployment to Germany came to an end in September 2019. No British combat units now remain in Germany. It was the end of an era.

However, in November 2021 the Ministry of Defence announced that Germany would become one of three ‘Land Hubs’, along with Kenya and Oman, where the British Army can train abroad with NATO allies and partner nations. Significant numbers of British tanks, armoured cars and other vehicles remain in storage at a training area in Sennelager. A garrison support unit remains in Germany to to provide health service support, welfare and the British Forces Broadcasting Service. From the peak of 780,000 British troops in Germany in 1945, there are now just 135 Army personnel remaining in Germany, none of them combat forces.

In-depth walk through the exhibition (40 minutes)

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by Simon on March 29, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in European History, Exhibition, History, Second World War, War

Tagged Active Edge, Afghanistan war, Anthony Young, Army and Air Force Institutes, Bad Lippspringe, BAOR, Basra, Belsen concentration camp, Berlin Airlift, Berlin Tattoo, Bevis Shergold, Bosnia, Bosnian war, British Army, British Army of the Rhine, British Army Summer Show, British Forces Broadcasting Service, BRIXMIS, Cold War, Croatian War of Independence, East Germany, Exercise Lionheart, exhibition, Fahnenband, Field Marshall Montgomery, First Gulf War, Foe to Friend, Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945, Germany, Insurgency in Kosovo, Iraq War, Iron Curtain, Kosovo War, Kuwait, Land Hubs, NAAFI, National Army Museum, National Service, Nato, Navy, Nazis, North German plain, Operation Granby, Rheindahlen, Russia, Saddam Hussein, Second World War, Sennelager, Sigrid Krueger, Slovenian War of Independence, Soltau-Lüneberg training range, Soviet Union, the Balkans, the Berlin Airlift, the Cold War, The Holocaust, Threat magazine, USA, USSR, Warsaw Pact, West Germany, Winston Churchill, Wolfgang Meier, Yugoslav civil wars

Posted by Simon on March 29, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/29/foe-to-friend-the-british-army-in-germany-since-1945-the-national-army-museum/

The Life of Vespasian by Suetonius

This is a sub-edited version of the 1914 Loeb Classical Library translation of Suetonius’s Life of Vespasian by J.C. Rolfe, with a few comments of my own.

Summary (from Wikipedia)

Vespasian (9 to 79 AD) reigned as Roman emperor from 69 to 79 AD. The fourth and last emperor who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors, he founded the Flavian dynasty (consisting of himself and his sons Titus and Domitian) which ruled the Empire for 27 years (69 to 96). His fiscal reforms and consolidation of the empire created political stability, and he undertook a vast Roman building program.

Vespasian was the first emperor from an equestrian family and only rose late in his lifetime into the senatorial rank as the first member of his family to do so. Vespasian’s renown was based on his military success; he was legate of Legio II Augusta during the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 and pacified Judaea during the Jewish rebellion of 66 to 70.

In June 68, while Vespasian was besieging Jerusalem during the Jewish rebellion, Nero committed suicide and plunged Rome into a year of civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors. After Galba and Otho perished in quick succession, Vitellius became emperor in April 69. The Roman legions of Roman Egypt and Judaea reacted by declaring Vespasian, their commander, emperor on 1 July 69.

In his bid for imperial power, Vespasian joined forces with Gaius Licinius Mucianus, the governor of Syria, and Marcus Antonius Primus, a general in Pannonia, leaving his son Titus to command the besieging forces at Jerusalem. Primus and Mucianus led the Flavian forces against Vitellius in Italy, while Vespasian took control of Egypt. On 24 October 69 Vitellius’ army was defeated at the second Battle of Bedriaticum. It took another 2 months for the Flavian army to march to Rome and take it by storm. During the sack Vitellius was murdered by Vespasian’s soldiers, on 20 December 69, and the following day Vespasian was declared emperor by the Senate.

Little information survives about the government during Vespasian’s ten-year rule. He:

brought the campaign in Judaea to a successful conclusion
reformed the financial system of Rome
initiated several ambitious construction projects, including the building of the Flavian Amphitheatre, better known today as the Roman Colosseum

Through his general, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Vespasian increased imperial territory in Britain. Vespasian is often credited with restoring political stability to Rome following the chaotic reigns of his predecessors. After he died in 79, he was succeeded by his eldest son Titus, thus becoming the first Roman emperor to be succeeded by his natural son (all the emperors of the preceding Julio-Claudian dynasty had appointed their successors by adoption).

The Life of Vespasian by Suetonius

(1) The empire, which had been unsettled by the usurpation and violent death of four emperors (Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius) was at last taken in hand and given stability by the Flavian family. This house was obscure and without family portraits, yet it was one of which Rome had no reason to be ashamed (even though it is the general opinion that the penalty which Domitian paid for his avarice and cruelty was fully merited [he was to be assassinated in 96]).

Vespasian’s ancestor ,Titus Flavius Petro, a burgher of Reate and during the civil war a centurion or a volunteer veteran on Pompey’s side, fled from the field of Pharsalus and went home, where after at last obtaining pardon and an honourable discharge, he carried on the business of a collector of moneys. His son, surnamed Sabinus (although some say that he was an ex-centurion of the first grade; others that while still in command of a cohort he was retired because of ill-health) took no part in military life, but farmed the public tax of a fortieth in Asia. [A fortieth was a duty (portorium) of two and a half per cent on imports and exports.] And there existed for some time statues erected in his honour by the cities of Asia, inscribed ‘To an honest tax-gatherer’.

Later Petro carried on a banking business in the Helvetian country and there he died, survived by his wife, Vespasia Polla, and by two of her children, of whom the elder, Sabinus, rose to the rank of prefect of Rome, and the younger, Vespasian, was to become emperor.

Polla, who was born of an honourable family at Nursia, had for father Vespasius Pollio, thrice tribune of the soldiers and prefect of the camp [a position held by tried and skilful officers, especially centurions of the first grade] while her brother became a senator with the rank of praetor.

There is, on the top of a mountain near the sixth milestone on the road from Nursia to Spoletium, a place called Vespasiae, where many monuments of the Vespasii are to be seen, giving strong proof of the renown and antiquity of the house.

I ought to add the rumour that Petro’s father came from the region beyond the Po and was a contractor for the day-labourers who come regularly every year from Umbria to the Sabine district, to till the fields, but that he settled in the town of Reate and there married. Personally I have found no evidence for this, in spite of careful investigation.

(2) Vespasian was born in the Sabine country, in a small village beyond Reate, called Falacrina, on the evening of the fifteenth day before the Kalends of December [17 November] in the consulate of Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus and Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, five years before the death of Augustus [9 AD].

He was brought up under the care of his paternal grandmother Tertulla on her estates at Cosa. Even after he became emperor he used to visit the home of his infancy, where the manor house was kept in its original condition and he was so devoted to his grandmother’s memory that on religious and festival days he always drank from a little silver cup that had belonged to her.

After assuming the toga of manhood Vespasian for a long time made no attempt to win the broad stripe of senator, though his brother had gained it, and only his mother could eventually persuade him to bid for it. She at length drove him to it, but by sarcasm rather than entreaties or parental authority, since she constantly taunted him with being his brother’s ‘footman’. [This refers to the anteambulo who was a client who walked before his patron on the street and compelled people to make way for him.]

Vespasian served in Thrace as tribune of the soldiers. As quaestor he was assigned by lot to the province of Crete and Cyrene. He stood as a candidate for the aedileship, attaining it only after one defeat and then barely winning sixth place. He then stood for the praetorship, and was among the foremost candidates.

In his praetorship, Vespasian lost no opportunity of winning the favour of Gaius [Caligula] who was at odds with the senate, by asking for special games to celebrate the emperor’s victory in Germany and recommended as an additional punishment of the conspirators against the emperor, that they be cast out unburied. He also thanked the emperor, before the senate, because he had deigned to honour him with an invitation to dinner.

(3) Vespasian took to wife Flavia Domitilla, formerly the mistress of Statilius Capella, a Roman knight of Sabrata in Africa, a woman originally only of Latin rank. [This was a limited citizenship, taking its name from the old Latin cities and varying in different cases and at different times.] Later Flavia was declared a freeborn citizen of Rome in a suit before judges, brought by her father Flavius Liberalis, a native of Ferentum and merely a quaestor’s clerk.

By Flavia Vespasian had three children – two sons who were destined to become emperor after him, Titus and Domitian – and a daughter, Domitilla. Vespasian outlived his wife and daughter; in fact lost them both before he became emperor. After the death of his wife he resumed his relations with Caenis, a freedwoman and amanuensis of Antonia, and formerly his mistress. After he became emperor he treated her almost as a lawful wife.

(4) In the reign of Claudius, Vespasian was sent in command of a legion to Germany, through the influence of Claudius’s freedman and secretary, Narcissus. From there he was transferred to Britain, where he fought thirty battles with the enemy.

In Britain he reduced to subjection two powerful nations, more than twenty towns, and the island of Vectis [the Isle of Wight], partly under the leadership of Aulus Plautius, the consular governor, and partly under that of Claudius himself.

For this he received the triumphal regalia and, shortly afterwards, two priesthoods, besides the consulship, which he held for the last two months of the year. The rest of the time up to his proconsulate he spent in rest and retirement, through fear of Agrippina [Claudius’s fourth wife and mother of the emperor Nero], who still had a strong influence over her son and hated any friend of Narcissus, even after the latter’s death.

The administrative lottery then gave him Africa, which he governed with great justice and high honour, save that in a riot at Hadrumetum he was pelted with turnips. Unusually for a Roman governor he returned from the post none the richer, for his credit was so nearly gone that he mortgaged all his estates to his brother, and had to resort to trading in mules to keep up his position. [Suetonius’s text refers to him by the slang term mango, which was applied to a dealer in slaves, cattle, or wares which he tried to give an appearance of greater value than they actually possessed. The nickname implies that Vespasian’s trade was in mules.] As a result he became known as ‘the Muleteer.’

He is also said to have been found guilty of squeezing 200,000 sesterces out of a young man for whom he obtained the broad stripe against his father’s wish, and to have been severely rebuked in consequence.

When he accompanied Nero on his tour through Greece, Vespasian bitterly offended the emperor by either leaving the room while Nero was singing, or falling asleep if he remained. He was, as a result, banished, not only from intimacy with the emperor but even from his public receptions, so he withdrew to a little out‑of-the‑way town, until a province and an army were offered him while he was in hiding and in fear of his life.

There had spread over all the Orient an old belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. The people of Judaea wrongly applied this prophecy to themselves (although, as later became clear, it referred to the future emperor of Rome) and so they revolted and, after killing their governor, routed the consular ruler of Syria as well, when he came to the rescue, and took one of his eagles.

Since putting down this rebellion required a considerable army with a leader of no little enterprise, yet one to whom such great power could be entrusted without risk, Nero chose Vespasian for the task, both as a man of tried energy and one not to be suspected of ambition due to the obscurity of his family and name.

Vespasian added to the forces in Judaea two legions, with eight divisions of cavalry and ten cohorts. He took his elder son, Titus, as one of his lieutenants, and as soon as he reached his province he attracted the attention of the neighbouring provinces by the way he at once reformed the discipline of the army. He fought one or two battles with such daring that in the storming of a fortress he was wounded in the knee with a stone and received several arrows in his shield.

(5) While Otho and Vitellius were fighting for the throne in Italy, Vespasian began to cherish the hope of imperial power which he had long nurtured because of the following portents:

On the suburban estate of the Flavii an old oak tree, which was sacred to Mars, on each of the three occasions when Vespasia was delivered of a child, suddenly put forth a branch from its trunk – obvious indications of the destiny of each child. The first was slender and quickly withered, and so the girl that was born died within the year; the second branch was strong and long and portended great success; but the third was the image of a tree.
Their father Sabinus, so they say, being further encouraged by an inspection of sacrificial victims, announced to his mother that a grandson had been born to her that would one day be a Caesar. But she only laughed, marvelling that her son should already be in his dotage, while she was still of strong mind.
Later, when Vespasian was aedile, Gaius Caesar, incensed at his neglect of his duty of cleaning the streets, ordered that he be covered with mud, which the soldiers accordingly heaped into the bosom of his purple-bordered toga. This some interpreted as an omen that one day, in some civil commotion, his country, trampled under foot and forsaken, would come under his protection and, as it were, into his embrace.
Once when Vespasian was taking breakfast, a stray dog brought in a human hand from the cross-roads and dropped it under the table. [The human hand was a symbol of power, and the word manus is often used in the sense of potestas or power.]
Again, when he was dining, an ox that was ploughing shook off its yoke, burst into the dining-room and, after scattering the servants, fell at the feet of Vespasian as he reclined at table and bowed its neck as if suddenly tired out.
Also, a cypress tree on his grandfather’s farm was torn up by the roots without the agency of any violent storm, then thrown down and, on the following day, rose again greener and stronger than before.
Vespasian dreamed in Greece that the beginning of good fortune for himself and his family would come as soon as Nero had a tooth extracted and on the next day it came to pass that a physician walked into the hall and showed him a tooth which he had just then taken out.
When Vespasian consulted the oracle of the god of Carmel in Judaea, the lots were highly encouraging, promising that whatever he planned or wished, however great it might be, would come to pass. One of his high-born prisoners, Josephus by name, as he was being put in chains, confidently declared that he would soon be released by the same man, who would then become emperor.

Omens were also reported from Rome:

Nero in his latter days was admonished in a dream to take the sacred chariot of Jupiter Optimus Maximus from its shrine to the house of Vespasian and from there to the Circus.
Not long after this, when Galba was on his way to the elections which gave him his second consulship, a statue of the Deified Julius of its own accord turned towards the East.
On the field of Bedriacum, before the battle began, two eagles fought in the sight of all and, when one was vanquished, a third came from the direction of the rising sun and drove off the victor.

(6) Yet Vespasian made no move (although his followers were quite ready and even urgent) until he was roused to it by the accidental support of men unknown to him and at a distance. Two thousand soldiers of the three legions that made up the army in Moesia had been sent to help Otho. When word came to them after they had begun their march that he had been defeated and had taken his own life, they none the less kept on as far as Aquileia, because they did not believe the report. There, taking advantage of the lawless state of the times, they indulged in every kind of pillage. Then, fearing that if they went back, they would have to give an account and suffer punishment, they took it into their heads to select and appoint an emperor, saying that they were just as good as the Spanish army which had appointed Galba, or the praetorian guard which had elected Otho, or the German army which had chosen Vitellius.

Accordingly the names of all the consular governors who were serving anywhere were taken up, and since objection was made to the rest for one reason or another, while some members of the third legion, which had been transferred from Syria to Moesia just before the death of Nero, highly commended Vespasian, they unanimously agreed on him and inscribed his name on all their banners.

When their action became known, Tiberius Alexander, prefect of Egypt, was the first to compel his legions to take the oath for Vespasian on the Kalends of July (1 July), the day which was afterwards celebrated as that of his accession. Then the army in Judaea swore allegiance to him personally on the fifth day before the Ides of July (11 July).

The enterprise was greatly forwarded by the circulation of a copy of a letter from the late emperor Otho to Vespasian (whether genuine or forged) urging him with the utmost earnestness to vengeance and expressing the hope that he would come to the aid of his country. It was further helped:

by a rumour which spread abroad that Vitellius had planned, after his victory, to change the winter quarters of the legions and to transfer those in Germany to a safer and milder service in the Orient
among the governors of provinces, by the support of Licinius Mucianus (governor of the neighbouring province of Syria) and, among the kings, by that of Vologaesus, the Parthian. The former (Mucianus), laying aside the jealousy which had created rivalry between them, promised Vespasian the support of the Syrian army; and the latter 40,000 bowmen

(7) Therefore Vespasian began another civil war by sending generals with troops to Italy while he crossed to Alexandria to take possession of the key to Egypt. Here he dismissed all his attendants and entered the temple of Serapis alone, to consult the auspices as to the duration of his power. And when after many propitiatory offerings to the god he at length turned about, it seemed to him that his freedman, Basilides, offered him sacred boughs, garlands, and loaves as is the custom there and yet he knew very well a) that no one had let him in, b) that for some time he had been hardly able to walk by reason of rheumatism, and c) was far away. And immediately letters came with the news that Vitellius’s army had been defeated at Cremona and the Vitellius himself slain at Rome.

Vespasian as yet lacked prestige and a certain divinity, so to speak, since he was an unexpected and still new-made emperor; but these also were given him. A man of the people who was blind, and another who was lame, came to him together as he sat on the tribunal, begging for the help for their disorders which Serapis had promised in a dream; for the god declared that Vespasian would restore the eyes, if he would spit upon them, and give strength to the leg, if he would deign to touch it with his heel. Though Vespasian had hardly any faith that this could succeed and therefore shrank from even making the attempt, he was at last prevailed upon by his friends and tried both things in public before a large crowd – and they worked!

And, at this same time, by the direction of certain soothsayers, some vases of antique workmanship were dug up in a consecrated spot at Tegea in Arcadia and on them was an image very like Vespasian.

(8) Returning to Rome under such auspices and attended by so great renown, after celebrating a triumph over the Jews, Vespasian added eight consulships to his former one. He also assumed the censorship and during the whole period of his rule he considered nothing more essential than first to strengthen the state, which was tottering and almost overthrown, and then to embellish it as well.

The soldiery, some emboldened by their victory and some resenting their humiliating defeat, had abandoned themselves to every form of licence and recklessness. The provinces, too, and the free cities, as well as some of the kingdoms, were in a state of internal dissension. Therefore Vespasian discharged many of the soldiers of Vitellius and punished many. But so far from showing any special indulgence to those who had shared in his victory, he was slow in paying them their lawful rewards.

To let slip no opportunity of improving military discipline, when a young man reeking with perfumes came to thank him for a commission which had been given him, Vespasian drew back his head in disgust, adding the stern reprimand: “I would rather you had smelt of garlic” and then revoked the appointment.

When the marines who march on foot by turns from Ostia and Puteoli to Rome asked that an allowance be made them for shoe money, not content with sending them away without a reply, he ordered that in future they should make the run barefooted, and they have done so ever since.

Vespasian made Roman provinces of Achaia, Lycia, Rhodes, Byzantium and Samos, taking away their freedom, and likewise of Trachian Cilicia and Commagene, which up to that time had been ruled by kings. He sent additional legions to Cappadocia because of the constant inroads of the barbarians, and gave it a consular governor in place of a Roman knight.

As Rome was unsightly from former fires and fallen buildings, Vespasian allowed anyone to take possession of vacant sites and build upon them, in case the owners failed to do so. He began the restoration of the Capitol in person [after the fire which broke out during the siege of his brother Sabinus – see Tacitus’s Histories for a detailed description of this event], was the first to lend a hand in clearing away the debris, and himself carried some of it off in a basket.

Vespasian undertook to restore the 3,000 bronze tablets which were destroyed with the temple, making a thorough search for copies. These included priceless and most ancient records of the empire, containing the decrees of the senate and the acts of the commons almost from the foundation of the city, regarding alliances, treaties and special privileges granted to individuals.

(9) Vespasian also undertook new works, the temple of Peace hard by the Forum and one to the Deified Claudius on the Caelian mount, which was begun by Agrippina but almost utterly destroyed by Nero. Also an amphitheatre in the heart of the city, a plan which he learned that Augustus had cherished. [This is the building we call the Colosseum, which was known as the Flavian amphitheatre until the Middle Ages.]

Vespasian reformed the two great orders [senators and knights], reduced by a series of murders and sullied by longstanding neglect, and added to their numbers, holding a review of the senate and the knights, expelling those who least deserved the honour and enrolling the most distinguished of the Italians and provincials.

Furthermore, to let it be known that the two orders differed from each other not so much in their privileges as in their rank, in the case of an altercation between a senator and a Roman knight, he rendered his decision: ‘Unseemly language should not be used towards senators, but to return their insults in kind is proper and lawful’ [i.e. a citizen could return the abuse of another citizen, regardless of their respective ranks].

(10) Lawsuit upon lawsuit had accumulated in all the courts to an excessive degree, since those of long standing were left unsettled through the interruption of court business during the civil wars and new ones had arisen through the disorder of the times. Vespasian therefore chose commissioners by lot to restore what had been seized in time of war, and to make special decisions in the court of the Hundred, reducing the cases to the smallest number, since it was clear that the lifetime of the litigants would not suffice for the regular proceedings.

(11) Licentiousness and extravagance had flourished without restraint so Vespasian induced the senate to vote that any woman who formed a connection with the slave of another person should herself be made a slave. Also that anyone who lent money to minors (meaning sons who were still under the control of their fathers, regardless of their age) should never have a legal right to enforce payment, that is to say, not even after the death of the fathers.

(12) In other matters Vespasian was unassuming and lenient from the very beginning of his reign until its end. He never tried to conceal his former lowly condition and often paraded it. Indeed, when certain men tried to trace the origin of the Flavian family to the founders of Reate and a companion of Hercules whose tomb still stands on the Via Salaria, he laughed at them for their pains.

So far was he from a desire for pomp and show that on the day of his triumph he did not hesitate to say: ‘It serves me right for being such a fool as to want a triumph in my old age, as if it were due to my ancestors or had ever been among my own ambitions.’

He did not even assume the tribunician power at once nor the title of Father of his Country until late. As for the custom of searching people who came to pay their morning calls to him, he gave that up before the civil war was over.

(13) Vespasian bore the frank language of his friends, the quips of pleaders, and the impudence of the philosophers with the greatest patience. Though Licinius Mucianus, a man of notorious unchastity, presumed upon his services to treat Vespasian with scant respect [claiming that, as leader of Vespasian’s army, he won Italy and Rome and, in effect, gave it to him], he never had the heart to criticize him except privately and then only to the extent of adding to a complaint made to a mutual friend, the words: ‘I at least am a man’ [implying that Mucianus was effeminate and unchaste].

When Salvius Liberalis ventured to say, while defending a rich client, ‘What is it to Caesar if Hipparchus had a hundred millions?’ he personally commended him. When the Cynic Demetrius met him abroad after being condemned to banishment, and without deigning to rise in his presence or to salute him, even snarled out some insult, Vespasian merely called him a dog.

(14) Vespasian was not inclined to remember or to avenge affronts or enmities, but made a brilliant match for the daughter of his enemy Vitellius, and even provided her with a dowry and a house-keeping outfit.

When he was in terror at being forbidden Nero’s court and asked what on earth he was to do or where he was to go, one of the ushers threw him out and told him to ‘go to Morbovia’ [a made-up name meaning ‘go to the devil’]. When the man later begged for forgiveness, Vespasian confined his resentment to words, and those of about the same number and purport.

Indeed, so far was he from being led by any suspicion or fear to cause anyone’s death that when his friends warned him that he must keep an eye on Mettius Pompusianus, since it was commonly believed that he had an imperial horoscope, he ignored them and made Mettius consul, guaranteeing that he would one day be mindful of the favour.

(15) It cannot be shown that any innocent person was punished save in Vespasian’s absence and without his knowledge, or at any rate against his will and by misleading him.

Although Helvidius Priscus was the only one who greeted him on his return from Syria by his private name of ‘Vespasian’ and, in his praetorship, left the emperor unhonoured and unmentioned in all his edicts, still Vespasian did not show anger until by the extravagance of his railing Helvidius had all but degraded him [meaning reduced him to the status of a common citizen].

But even in Helvidius’s case, though Vespasian did banish him and later order his death, he was most anxious for any means of saving him, and sent messengers to recall those who were to slay him; and he would have saved him, but for a false report that Helvidius had already been done to death. Certainly he never took pleasure in the death of anyone, but even wept and sighed over those who suffered merited punishment.

(16) The only thing for which Vespasian can be fairly censured was his love of money. For not content with reviving the taxes which had been repealed under Galba, he added new and heavy burdens, increasing the amount of tribute paid by the provinces, in some cases actually doubling it, and quite openly carrying on traffic which would be shameful even for a man in private life. He bought up certain commodities in order to distribute them at a profit.

Vespasian made no bones of selling offices to candidates and acquittals to men under prosecution, whether innocent or guilty. He is even believed to have deliberately advanced the most rapacious of his procurators to higher posts so that they might be the richer when he later condemned them. In fact, it was common talk that he used these men as ‘sponges’ because he ‘soaked’ them when they were dry and ‘squeezed’ them when they were wet.

Some say that Vespasian was naturally covetous and was taunted with it by an old herdsman of his who, on being forced to pay for the freedom for which he earnestly begged Vespasian when he became emperor, cried: ‘The fox changes his fur but not his nature.’

Others on the contrary believe that he was driven by necessity to raise money by spoliation and robbery because of the desperate state of the treasury and the privy purse. He testified to this at the very beginning of his reign by declaring that 40,000 millions were needed to set the state upright. This latter view seems the more probable, since he made the best use of his gains, ill-gotten though they were.

(17) He was most generous to all classes, making up the requisite estate for senators [this had been increased to 1,200,000 sesterces by Augustus] giving needy ex-consuls an annual stipend of 500,000 sesterces, restoring to a better condition many cities throughout the empire which had suffered from earthquakes or fires and, in particular, encouraging men of talent and the arts.

(18) Vespasian was the first to establish a regular salary of 100,000 sesterces for Latin and Greek teachers of rhetoric, paid from the privy purse. He presented eminent poets with princely largess and great rewards, and artists, too, such as the restorer of the Venus of Cos and of the Colossus.

(19) At the plays with which he dedicated the new stage of the theatre of Marcellus, Vespasian revived the old musical entertainments. To Apelles, the tragic actor, he gave 400,000 sesterces; to Terpnus and Diodorus, the lyre-players, 200,000 each; to several, a hundred thousand; while those who received least were paid 40,000, and numerous golden crowns were awarded besides.

Vespasian gave constant dinner parties, too, usually formally and sumptuously, to help the marketmen. He gave gifts to women on the Kalends (first) of March [the Matronalia or feast of married women] as he did to the men on the Saturnalia.

Yet even so he could not be rid of his former bed reputation for covetousness. The Alexandrians persisted in calling him Cybiosactes, the surname of one of their kings who was scandalously stingy.

Even at his funeral, Favor, a leading actor of mimes, who wore his mask and, according to the usual custom, imitated the actions and words of the deceased during his lifetime, having asked procurators in a loud voice how much his funeral procession would cost, and hearing the reply ‘Ten million sesterces,’ cried out, ‘Give me a hundred thousand and fling me even into the Tiber.’

(20) Vespasian was well built, with strong, sturdy limbs, and the expression of one who was straining. Apropos of which a witty fellow, when Vespasian asked him to make a joke about him, replied, ‘I will, when you have finished relieving yourself.’

Vespasian enjoyed excellent health, though he did nothing to keep it up except to rub his throat and the other parts of his body a certain number of times in the tennis court, and to fast one day in every month.

(21) This was Vespasian’s manner of life. While emperor, he always rose very early, in fact before daylight. Then, after reading his letters and the reports of all the officials, he admitted his friends, and while he was receiving their greetings, he put on his own shoes and dressed himself. After despatching any business that came up, he took time for a drive and then for a nap, lying with one of his concubines, of whom he took several after the death of Caenis. After his siesta he went to the bath and the dining-room. It is said that this was the part of the day when he was most good-natured or indulgent, so that the members of his household eagerly watched for these opportunities of making requests.

(22) Not only at dinner but on all other occasions he was most affable, and turned off many matters with a jest. He was very ready with sharp sayings, albeit of a low and buffoonish kind, so that he didn’t refrain even from obscene expressions.

Yet many of his remarks are still remembered which are full of wit, among them the following. When an ex-consul called Mestrius Florus called his attention to the fact that the proper pronunciation was plaustra (‘wagons’) rather than plostra, he greeted him next day as ‘Flaurus.’

When he was importuned by a woman, who said that she was dying for love for him, he took her to his bed and gave her 400,000 sesterces for her favours. Being asked by his steward how he wanted the sum entered in his accounts, he replied: ‘To a passion for Vespasian.’

(23) Vespasian also quoted Greek verses with great timeliness, saying of a man of tall stature and monstrous parts:

‘Striding along and waving a lance that casts a long shadow’ [Iliad 7.213.]

And of the freedman Cerylus, who was very rich, and to cheat the privy purse of its dues at his death had begun to give himself out as freeborn, changing his name to Laches:

‘O Laches, Laches,
When you are dead, you’ll change your name at once
To Cerylus again.’

But he particularly resorted to witticisms about his unseemly means of gain, seeking to diminish their odium by some jocose saying and to turn them into a jest.

Having put off one of his favourite attendants, who asked for a stewardship for a pretended brother, he summoned the candidate himself, and after compelling him to pay him as much money as he had agreed to give his advocate, appointed him to the position without delay. On his attendant’s taking up the matter again, he said: ‘Find yourself another brother; the man that you thought was yours is mine.’

On a journey, suspecting that his muleteer had got down to shoe the mules merely to make delay and give time for a man with a lawsuit to approach the emperor, he asked how much he was paid for shoeing the mules and insisted on a share of the money.

When Titus found fault with him for levying a tax on public conveniences, Vespasian held a piece of money from the first payment to his son’s nose, asking whether its odour was offensive to him. When Titus said, ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Yet it comes from urine.’

On the report of a deputation that a colossal statue of great cost had been voted him at public expense, he demanded to have it set up at once, and holding out his open hand, said that the base was ready.

He did not cease his jokes even when in apprehension of death and in extreme danger for when among other portents the Mausoleum opened on a sudden and a comet appeared in the heavens, he declared that the former applied to Junia Calvina of the family of Augustus, and the latter to the king of the Parthians, who wore his hair long. And as death drew near, he said: ‘Woe is me. I think I am turning into a god.’

(24) In his ninth consulship he had a slight illness in Campania and, returning at once to the city, he left for Cutiliae and the country about Reate, where he spent the summer every year. There, in addition to an increase in his illness, having contracted a bowel complaint by too free use of the cold waters, he nevertheless continued to perform his duties as emperor, even receiving embassies as he lay in bed.

Suddenly taken with such an attack of diarrhoea that he all but fainted, he said: ‘An emperor ought to die standing’, and, while he was struggling to get on his feet, he died in the arms of those who tried to help him. Vespasian died on the ninth day before the Kalends of July [23 June] at the age of sixty-nine years, seven months and seven days.

(25) All agree that he had so much faith in his own horoscope and those of his family, that even after constant conspiracies were made against him he had the assurance to say to the senate that either his sons would succeed him or he would have no successor.

It is also said that he once dreamed that he saw a balance with its beam on a level placed in the middle of the vestibule of the palace, in one pan of which stood Claudius and Nero and in the other himself and his sons. And the dream came true, since both houses reigned for the same space of time and the same term of years.

[Suetonius’s Life of Vespasian should be read alongside Tacitus’s Histories, which give a detailed account of Mucianus’ and Primus’s military campaigns in north Italy which led to the overthrow of Vitellius as well as the siege of Sabinus on the Capitol.]

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by Simon on January 13, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Biography, Translation, War

Tagged Achaia, aedile, Africa, Agrippina, Alexandria, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, ancient world, anteambulo, Apelles, astrology, Augustus, Aulus Plautius, Basilides, Battle of Bedriacum, battle of Pharsalus, Byzantium, Caenis, Caligula, Campania, Cappadocia, Carmel, Cerylus, civil war, Claudius, Commagene, Cosa, Cremona, Cutiliae, Cybiosactes, Demetrius, Diodorus, Domitian, Domitilla, Falacrina, Favor, Flavia Domitilla, Flavian Amphitheatre, Flavius Liberalis, Gaius, Gaius Caesar, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, Galba, Germany, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, Hadrumetum, Helvidius Priscus, Hipparchus, horoscope, Isle of Wight, J. C. Rolfe, Josephus, Judaea, Junia Calvina, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Laches, Legio II Augusta, Licinius Mucianus, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Loeb Classical Library, Lycia, mango, manus, Marcus Antonius Primus, Mestrius Florus, Mettius Pompusianus, Moesia, Mucianus, Narcissus, Nero, Nursia, Ostia, Otho, Pannonia, Parthian Empire, Polla, Pompey, portorium, potestas, praetor, Primus, Puteoli, Quintus Sulpicius Camerinus, Reate, Rhodes, river Po, Roman army, Roman Britain, Roman Egypt, Roman emperor, Roman Empire, Rome, Sabinus, Sabrata, Salvius Liberalis, Samos, second Battle of Bedriaticum, siege of Jerusalem, Spoletium, Statilius Capella, Suetonius Life of Vespasian, Syria, Tacitus, Tacitus Histories, Terpnus, Tertulla, the Capitol, the Colosseum, the Colossus, the Flavian amphitheatre, the Flavian dynasty, the Flavii, the Jewish rebellion, the Jews, the Matronalia, the Mausoleum, the Parthians, the Saturnalia, the Venus of Cos, the Vespasii, the Year of the Four Emperors, Thrace, Tiberius Alexander, Titus, Titus Flavius Petro, Trachian Cilicia, Translation, Umbria, Vectis, Vespasia, Vespasia Polla, Vespasiae, Vespasian, Vespasius Pollio, Via Salaria, Vologaesus, war

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2023

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