Sarah Gainham, 'Night Falls On The City'

A long read, and a powerful and intelligent one. Of course, we know the story, and we know the ending "this man Hitler, they say he is dangerous". But the milieu (an actors' troupe in Vienna in WWII) is interesting, and the characters subtly and compellingly drawn. I found it quite mesmerising, and am not sure why Gainham is not read any more. (She lived most of her life in Austria, and died there in 1999. This book was published in 1967, to great acclaim at the time, and is a love song to Vienna as perhaps a native Viennese could never write it). She is wonderful on place and atmosphere - the claustrophobic Vienna apartment; a village church in the Tyrol as war is declared and the sound of the boots of the "young men at the back of the church ... it was for them the prayers were meant, the young who would be sacrificed". One character says, in what could be the book's slogan, "There is nothing we can do, except survive."

Stanley Karnow, 'Vietnam, A History'

Here is my review of this commanding history of Vietnam by Stanley Karnow .Read on.

This is a comprehensive history of Vietnam by Stanley Karnow, a historian (died 2013) who is viewed as somewhat to the left of others such as Michael Lind (my reviews passim). This means fairly simply that he is not very pro-US, whatever the US might do.

Although the book takes us through Vietnam’s history from prehistoric times (the heroic Trung sisters, anyone?)

the Trung sisters, heroines of the Vietnamese revolution c 940 AD. Note the elephant.

it is perhaps most interesting on the lesser-known aspects of that country’s 20^th-century history. Such as the fact that the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, was in close touch with Ho Chi Minh, as were various American generals, as early as 1946. And that between 1945 and 1954 France got more finance for its military efforts to retain its Indochina possessions than it did in Marshall Aid for its shattered postwar economy. But at the same time the OSS was supplying the Vietminh (Vietnamese Communists) with weapons for their battles to drive out the French colonialists. So, US covert forces were colluding with Vietnamese communists to drive out the French, while its overt forces were helping France battle to hold on in Indochina. Or so it would seem. None of this worked, of course, and the Americans legged it out of Vietnam, not for the last time. And then – WHAT a story this is – the BRITISH were brought in to restore order, under a certain General Douglas Gracey. Predictably, things got worse.

 Also, like many Americans of all political stances, Karnow did not view Great Britain as heroic in World War II, as I was brought up to believe we were, fighting on alone (but for the mighty USSR) after France collapsed and the smaller European nations either were overrun or changed sides. On LBJ’s formative experiences which led him to oppose withdrawal from Vietnam, Karnow cites “the Munich pact, Britain’s capitulation to the Nazis”. This is not how Munich was seen in Britain at the time, nor, mostly, since, including by its opponents. But it appears here to be an uncontroversial statement. Karnow does not say whether LBJ actually held or expressed that view. Perhaps though if he did it was utterly unremarkable.

Karnow does not take issue with the assessment by Michael Lind that the 1960s escalation of US involvement in Vietnam was about US prestige and position in the world. Not one bit. So right and left are united on this point.

The advice given to LBJ in preparation for the debate on the South-East Asia Resolution, which, only arguably, rendered US actions in Vietnam constitutional, included this answer to a FAQ: “Does South-East Asia matter all that much? Yes – because of the rights of the people there…”. This would not be said now, and certainly not on the left. Brown-skin people in far-off countries are not judged as deserving of rights as white westerners, these days. Ernest Gruening of Alaska, a “veteran liberal” said in the debate “All Vietnam is not worth the life of a single American boy”. No change on the left there, then. Although, as indicated above, Karnow does not try to say the war was about anything other than American prestige, he does use emotive language on the subject: “dutifully recited the dogma of the domino theory”.

It’s interesting how utterly chaotic and corrupt the various governments installed in Saigon were, and not all of them were installed by the US. South Vietnam at this time was rapidly becoming a failed state, and while this wasn’t the fault of the US, they weren’t helping either.

Karnow is clear that “the Vietcong” (a South Vietnamese nickname intended to be derogatory) were not, as many in the West believed they were, an indigenous insurgent population. In fact they were a trained militia funded and directed from Hanoi, and via them from the USSR and China. But, Karnow notes, North Vietnam, after the start of the Rolling Thunder operation, did not have its cities carpet-bombed as Dresden and Tokyo were in World War II. You only have to visit Hanoi, as I did in April this year, to see that Hanoi still looks very much like the French colonial city it once was.

 “And the marines, as one of their commanders put it, will henceforth ‘start killing the Vietcong instead of just sitting on their ditty box’”, quoted without comment. This remark by the marine commander is of course absolutely correct. If you are going to go there, go there and get the job properly done. Otherwise those who die there will have died senselessly and in vain.

Karnow continues with the emotive language throughout: “the hopelessness of the American cause”. Well, we know how it turned out, of course. We also know, or think we do, that the domino theory was incorrect. Indonesia and Malaya did not go communist, despite various attempts and uprisings. And this was not just because the Chinese hordes did not pour across the border (figuratively speaking) – when they did pour across the actual border, in Korea in 1950, the end result was not a communist Korean peninsula, but a stalemate and an uneasy partition.

 Karnow ends the book in a curiously sentimental fashion, with Bui Tin, former Vietnamese army colonel and the man who took the surrender of the last South Vietnamese leader, Duong Van Minh, in 1975. Tin has been a dissident since the mid-1980s, and is an old man now, latterly living in France. Karnow, who knew Tin quite well personally, has him flinging himself elatedly on to the ground and gazing into the sunlit sky as North Vietnamese forces take Saigon. But this, as the coda, is the only real moment of weakness in this magisterial work: Karnow was too rigorous a historian to allow whatever personal and emotional fealty he might have had to the North Vietnamese cause to subvert the history.

.

Michael Lind, 'Vietnam, The Necessary War': A Neocon Writes

This is a very interesting historical analysis of the Vietnam war from what might be called a neocon perspective - if you think not opposing all America's wars because they are America's makes you a neocon. To Lind the US adventures in Vietnam were not, or not especially, about anti-communism, but were especially about US credibility, not just in the region but in the wider world. He seems to say that, in terms of a military campaign, the job should have been done properly: "Kennedy and Johnson should not have allowed an unrealistic fear of Chinese intervention to prevent them from invading North Vietnam, or at least cutting it off from its Chinese and Soviet sponsors by measures such as mining North Vietnamese ports." After all, he says, the threat of Chinese invasion was real at the time. It had happened in Korea not that long before. A Chinese Party Central Committee document of 1965 declared that the top priority for the Chinese government was supporting North Vietnam against the United States." Therefore, Lind concludes, "the argument that Johnson could have brought the war to a quick end by invading North Vietnam has been completely discredited". Slightly contradictory, no?
Lind even tries to rehabilitate the reputation of LBJ by saying he was undermined by RFK and his associates, who went as far as to meet the KGB (this apparently was revealed in Soviet archives) to indicate to them that RFK was at one with JFK, unlike LBJ, and would be the USSR's friend if he became President.
Lind explains the change in the Democratic Party (away from interventionism and towards isolationism) by the core constituencies of the party ceasing to be much Southern or Catholic and becoming Greater New England Protestant, Jewish, and black. He makes comparisons, again and again, for example to the assassination of President Park of South Korea in 1979, which he says would have put a stop to then-active attempts at Korean reunification if it had happened in 1972. But it didn't, so it didn't. He especially compares, again and again, the situation facing LBJ in 1965-6 with that facing President Clinton in Yugoslavia in 1999. It's fair, but as a device gets a bit tedious after a while.
Far from stating that the US bombing of Cambodia, always intended to disrupt the passage of materiel through Cambodia from Sihanoukville, and the effective occupation of the ports of eastern Cambodia by the North Vietnamese, Lind says "the banning by the US Congress of further US air support for the Lon Nol regime ensured victory for Pol Pot and his followers." That, and Sihanouk immediately declaring for the Khmer Rouge and urging all Cambodians to join them. Also, "the Khmer Rouge owed their victory to the North Vietnamese military." He rejects the position of Cambodia scholars such as Ben Kiernan, namely that the US bombing of Cambodia somehow drove the Cambodian peasantry collectively insane and spawned the Khmer Rouge. He goes as far as to argue that Sihanouk, by allowing the passage of weapons and materiel through Cambodia to the North Vietnamese from the port of Sihanoukville "became a co-combatant" in the Vietnam War in the mid-60s.
"The only two presidents to have waged major wars in defiance of the US Constitution have been Harry S. Truman (in Korea) and Bill Clinton (Kosovo).
On the Clinton presidency's foreign policy and adventures, not a glorious episode in anyone's estimation, he goes further too. President Clinton's publicly ruling out the use of ground troops in Serbia to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was "the single greatest act of incompetence ever committed by an American commander-in-chief." He's probably right about that, though it all came right in the end (sort of). As he says: "fortunately; the capitulation of Serbia averted what might have been a disaster for the United States."
For some reason he quotes Churchill on Dunkirk "We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory." He uses this quote to introduce a section on history's verdict on Vietnam. Whatever, the old boy's quotes certainly have stood the test of time.
"The Vietnam War was neither a mistake nor a betrayal nor a crime. It was a military defeat." I now agree with him that it was not a mistake. But disastrous mistakes were made in the execution of it, and also of course in its presentation.
A non-conventional perspective on the war, and a highly commendable contribution to the history of that conflict, still very much in living memory.

War, what is it good for?

Here is my Goodreads review of 'War, What Is It Good For?' by Ian Morris.

It is an interesting and counter-intuitive piece of historical writing. Morris indicates that casual violence has reduced over history, and that this is because societies become more stable as they become more prosperous, and that they only become more prosperous once they have been subdued - by war. And that this has always happened, and probably always will. A fascinating read. He is not afraid of big ideas, or of uncomfortable ones; and that is always a good thing.

Gibraltar near Spain

as John Lennon once sang. A very long time ago. I visited Gibraltar once, also rather a long time ago, and I remember that the Gibraltar government spokesperson continually referred to members of the delegation I was with as having "flown down" to Gibraltar - i.e not having gone in through Spain. One or two members of the delegation did in fact choose to enter Gibraltar through Spain, to demonstrate that they believed Gibraltar was part of Spain. But they could only do this because both Spain and the UK were, at the time (1998) members of the EU and thus obliged to keep their borders with other member states open. Before that, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the UK was a member of the EU but Spain had not yet joined, there was harassment by Spain at the border, with consequent difficulties for the Gibraltar economy. Before that, when neither the UK nor Spain had yet joined the EU, the border was blockaded and there was regular sabre-rattling by Spain. But at no time even then did Spain actually try to occupy Gibraltar militarily by force. They didn't dare.

As soon as the UK formally leaves the EU Spain can close its land border with Gibraltar and also blockade it by sea. The UK would then have to respond in some way, in the interest of the British people of Gibraltar, who have as we know chosen to remain British whenever their opinion has been asked. However, that does not mean war. One Spanish soldier's boot across the border, or one shot fired into Gibraltar from a Spanish gun, would however oblige the UK to retaliate on behalf of its citizens. As Michael Howard said yesterday, Theresa May as prime minister would have no choice. This is simply how it is. Spain knows this very well. Why has Spain never tried to take back Gibraltar (ceded to Britain in perpetuity by the Treaty of Utrecht) by force before? And what happened when another state occupied a British territory, 35 years ago this week? Some of us remember the Falklands.

I make no remark on the merits of all this, or indeed of the Treaty of Utrecht. Bismarck I think it was who coined the term Realpolitik. 

Stephen Kotkin, 'Stalin, Paradoxes of Power'

This is a splendid book. Apparently it is the first of a trilogy, and I for one am eagerly anticipating the next one. Highly readable, and brings out the humanity of Iosip Vissarionovich Jugashvili, though it is far from an apology for Stalinism. (I shudder when I think of the apologist for Stalinism I was at times in my youth, but we learn). He has excellent contemporary sources, available of course only some time after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia's first genuine universal suffrage election took place in November 1917. Lenin had been "against the whole notion of elections ", but changed position at this time. The country voted Socialist. The Constituent Assembly thus elected met for one day. Then the Bolshevik members walked out. The next day, when delegates arrived to resume the session, armed guards refused them entry. Trotsky wrote of the Constituent Assembly just before this "We are not about to share power with anyone". Lenin then named the Petrograd Soviet "a higher form of democracy", and later all mention of the Constituent Assembly was erased from Soviet sources. I didn't know any of this, or I have not retained it from what I read in earlier years, and I should have, because I purported to study Soviet history at one time. But I actually think the Soviet history I was taught at university never told us that. Those were different times, and this is a major contribution to the history of the early 20th century.

There are splendid small reminders in this book that also help us to understand the politics of today, such as "Poland did not exist between 1795 and 1918" *ducks for cover*. And not least that Lenin's cook was Vladimir Putin's grandfather! Imagine, as I do, the infant Vladimir hearing at his grandfather's knee tales of the Lenin kitchen!

It seems that Kotkin has understood, as most other historians do not seem to have, perhaps because they are usually not politicians, why Stalin became the ultimately unchallenged leader he did, when he was not the most intelligent, nor the most erudite, nor even the most politically committed or passionate, of the candidates for that role in the burgeoning Soviet Union. When the gamble [of forced collectivisation of the countryside, about which the late Robert Conquest wrote magnificently in Harvest of Sorrow, please read it] met mass resistance and unfathomable ruin, Stalin saw it through to completion". Those are the politicans we remember. The ones who do it ALL.

Kotkin tells us that Lenin's 'Testament', which appeared not to endorse Stalin as Lenin's successor, was used against Stalin, as you might expect it to be. So Stalin picked up his enemies' strength and used it against them, word by word, line by line. And won. This is the counter-intuitive aspect of political life - use your enemies' strength against them. Drew Westen has written an impressive book about just this, called 'The Political Brain'.

Kotkin refers to Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s as "pretzel logic" - both participating in and working to overthrow the capitalist world order. Some might call this running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, and that is a recipe for downfall, though it usually takes a long time. "Pretzel logic" is an expression I first came across in the 1970s when it was the title of a splendid album by Steely Dan, the thinking rockers. But I didn't know what it meant then, and I don't think most people who bought the record did.

Still and all. In 1927, it was said by those who liked to coin such phrases "Moses took the Jews out of Egypt, and Stalin took them out of the Central Committee."

The first official (ie Soviet) biography of Stalin was published in 1927. It was 14 pages long.

memories of a heatwave

I like books which anchor themselves to a particular time or place, not to describe it but to set it as the background and then use it as a kind of metaphor for what happens in the story. One such was by Tim Lott, who is brilliant, and it was set in 1987 and called "Rumours of a Hurricane". I missed the hurricane in England because, er, I was in South Korea that autumn. Which is a story of its own, and one I will tell. I have some tales to tell about the hurricane though too. If you haven't read that book, do, it's worth it.

The book I have just finished reading is by Maggie O'Farrell (the first of hers I have read) and it is called "Instructions for a Heatwave". It is a good novel about a family in crisis, or rather a family with secrets, as all families are, and how the secrets come out when one or more members breaks the circle of silence. It is set in London, but also Ireland and New York City, in the summer of the Great Heatwave of 1976. The characters, an Irish family uprooted and transplanted and dislocated, all of them in their various ways in crisis, are unforgettable. I would not be at all surprised to find this become a TV mini-series of the kind that has people discussing the boxed set.

Maggie O'Farrell was four in 1976, and so cannot really remember that summer. I was 22, and can. It was a hot summer like no other, and there has not been one like it in England since, although 2003 came close. It was a summer before desk fans and air conditioning, when it was normal for women, especially those past their first youth, to wear polyester dresses on a daily basis. Men did not wear shorts in public then as they often do now.

I was pregnant that summer, with my first child, a Fire Dragon in the Chinese horoscope, born in October in a year of change. Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned - no one at the time knew why - Mao Zedong died, and a great earthquake in China killed many thousands. Taking water without permission became a criminal offence in England under the Drought Act 1976. It didn't rain between Easter and August Bank Holiday - or that is how I remember it. We lived in Bath then, and the river was so low that some of us walked across the river on the lip of Pulteney Weir. I was wearing an orange and yellow cotton dress. This is what it was like.

'March 1939, The British Guarantee to Poland', Simon Newman.

Neville Chamberlain

This book is the author's PhD thesis and was published in 1976. It has been out of print for many years. I met the author at a party in December, and, just for fun, bought the book on my phone while we were talking. Naturally it came from a second-hand dealer, so he didn't make anything on the deal.  I didn't get round to looking at it for a while, but when I did I was fascinated. It is a kind of apologia for Neville Chamberlain, and you don't see much of THAT these days. He says Britain could have avoided war with Germany, either by containment or by capitulation. He doesn't use the latter word, but calls it "granting her requirements wholesale". (When did countries stop being called "she", I wonder? Not in 1976, clearly. Faintly distasteful, I find it.) He refers to "Britain's continued interest in maintaining the independence of the central and south-eastern European states, an interest which most historians do not generally concede". No, it appears they do not. And what actually happened to those central and south-east European states, hein? Other historians, including a pair called Gilbert and Gott, who I do not think were artists in suits pratting around with their own turds, and from whom Newman quotes extensively, call it thus: "Chamberlain's policy was to allow Germany a free hand in eastern Europe". That went well, then.

not the historians Gilbert and Gott

Newman says it is not true that most of the Foreign Office were against Chamberlain's appeasement policy. Halifax, as Foreign Secretary, although he was loyal, was no pacifist. He had written to his father in 1918, about Germany, "It goes much against the grain not to burn some of their towns." That's my boy, though I'd like to think I wouldn't have said that in 1918. Halifax was a High Anglican, who saw the Nazis as a threat to Christian civilisation (he wasn't far wrong there), whose biographer wrote that he saw any war which might come as a "crusade". The Government became unpopular on foreign policy in the late 1930s. However, the appearance of this was deceptive, as it usually is. You can see where I'm going with this, can't you? Labour under Tony Blair won the 2005 election easily, despite the cry-baby "Not In My Name" nonsense. My own doorstep verdict at the time was about a quarter for the action in Iraq, about a quarter against, and the rest didn't care. No Guardianista would believe me, because none of them talked to anyone except other Guardianistas at their dinner parties. In December 1938 there was a by-election in Kinross andWest Perthshire, fought by the Duchess of Atholl specifically on the issue of her opposition to Chamberlain's foreign policy. She lost, rather comprehensively.

misguided or malevolent? You decide

The whole book seems to be an attempt to rebut an earlier book called 'The Appeasers' by the said Gilbert and Gott. Did you know that in 1939 the Anglo-German Payments Agreement was still funding German rearmament? Nor me. It's all very readable, to a non-historian like me who is nonetheless interested in history and world events. Chamberlain told the Commons in March 1939, after the annexation of Czechoslovakia, that appeasement had failed and that the "spirit of Munich" had been violated. Quaintness, looked at from the 21st century: when an article appeared in the Nazi paper 'Volkischer Beobachter' denying that Germany had issued an ultimatum to Romania, Halifax as Foreign Secretary "suppressed the distribution of the report inside and outside the Foreign Office". Imagine trying that one now.

The book is chiefly about the process which led to the British guarantee to Poland, which was spun very successfully to the public at the time as a noble thing. Foreign Office papers of the time say "the value of Poland lay not in the capacity of her army to launch an an offensive against Germany, which was virtually non-existent, but in her capacity to absorb German divisions." Cynical, but true. And wise. Did Chamberlain understand this stuff?

Britain feared a German-Polish deal: they had reason to, as Poland had gone into alliance with Germany in the Sudeten crisis in "demanding the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia".

Gdansk, picture tripadvisor

Danzig (present-day Gdansk, in Poland, a fine city) was at the time a free city under the Treaty of Versailles, under the protection of the League of Nations. The League had a commissioner resident in Danzig, who could do nothing to halt or oppose Nazification and enactment of anti-Jewish laws there. There was even a British representative in Danzig, by the name of Gerald Shepherd, who wrote "Halifax now wanted Polish adherence to an anti-German coalition at all costs." And then he wrote "By encouraging the Poles to reject German terms for a settlement of Danzig, the British increased the likelihood that Hitler would resort to force in order to break the deadlock." So it was decided to plant a parliamentary question and put unequivocal support for Poland in the answer. Tactics don't change.

Newman's line is that you can't say appeasement never worked, because it was never really tried. And that the British guarantee to Poland was not deterrence, but a deliberate challenge. Interesting.

Perhaps people who are cleverer at history than I am might like to give their views in the comments. They'd be really welcome. Jew-hating will not, however, get in, and there's plenty of it around, especially on the Guardianista left, as any fule kno. The cry-baby bully-boys (TM Julie Burchill) who have been active in recent months will also be welcome to leave their comments. But their tactics are more extra-blog and personal, hein?

a hearse, a hearse

Richard III
 

the apparent confirmation that the skeleton found under a car park in Leicester is that of Richard III gives me an excuse to use this picture, which is the best-known portrait of him. Perhaps now his reputation will begin to recover from the Shakespeare spin.  And perhaps now he will get the burial his memory deserves, as a great king of England. Oh, and if you haven't read 'The Daughter of Time' by Josephine Tey, then do so.

Peter Hennessy, Distilling the Frenzy

This book is interesting in that Hennessy is a historian who writes not about the past but about now.  We understand the present by understanding the past, it is said, but this is the other way round – perhaps we can understand something of Britain’s history by looking at where we are now.  That’s the idea, anyway.  And it works, kind of.  He begins with a grand meeting in the very grand Locarno Room of the Foreign Office in 2011, in which William Hague looks at the role of the Foreign Secretary, and, by extension, at Britain’s place in the world.  Almost immediately we are reminded that defence reviews have come and defence reviews have gone, and most of them have been technical documents, many of which have had to be scrapped or revised because of unforeseen world events (the Korean War, Suez, 9/11).  On very few occasions has there been a vision attached.  One of those occasions was the publication under Macmillan in 1959 of a document entitled ‘Future Policy Study’, done in great secrecy and looking forward to what Britain’s place in the world was expected to be up to 1970.  Hennessy rather wistfully hopes for something similar to be created by the present government (he is a cross-bench peer), but does not appear optimistic.  He notes that Britain is a nuclear nation, that no government has wished for it to cease to be so, and inevitably cites Nye Bevan’s “send a British Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the conference chamber” speech to Labour party conference in 1957 as an example of this.  Not that Labour were in government at the time.  Whatever else Bevan was, as a politician and as a political thinker and strategist (some might argue that he was effectively none of these things) he was committed to the notion that it is governments which do things, and which change things.  Parties in opposition can do nothing.  The first Labour leader to understand that was arguably Tony Blair.  (Which does not appear to be Hennessy’s view: it is mine.)

The Bomb, and versions of it, has exercised parliamentarians, and political thinkers, since 1945.  Every vote on such matters has been controversial, mainly but not always in the the Labour Party.  In 2007 Parliament voted, overwhelmingly, to renew Trident, and a number of Labour MPs who had pledged their anti-nuclear passion to their party General Committees voted for it.*  Let us remember too, as Hennessy helpfully reminds us, that neither the leaderships of the UK nor the UK has wanted France to be the sole nuclear power in Europe.  No.  This book relies quite heavily on Cabinet committee papers and on the briefings of senior civil servants, and as such is a valuable resource.  Hennessy intimates, for instance, that Gordon Brown as Prime Minister told a non-proilferation session of the UN Security Council that the UK would retain “only the absolute minimum” nuclear deterrent capability.  Neither full Cabinet nor the relevant Cabinet committee had been consulted.  He did it on the hoof.

Hennessy’s writing is fluent and readable, which saves the more detail-rich passages from dryness and keeps the reader with him.  There are moments of cliché “the shadow of the Russian Revolution” but there are not many of them.  He indulges himself at moments, such as when he imagines the Sermon on the Mount as it might have been reported by The Times, ending with “Pontius Pilate’s Press Secretary said,’That bit about “blessed are the persecuted” will go down particularly badly in the Centurions’ Mess’”.|  But on the whole he is forgiven for his moments of indulgence.  For me it was worth it, to have set out precisely what duties a Prime Minister has (not many, in fact).

There are some fabulous quotes too.  I loved this one, from a letter to The Times from T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie in 1970:

“Sir – my husband, T.S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi.  As he got in, the driver said: “You’re T.S. Eliot”.  When asked how he knew, he said ‘Ah, I’ve got na eye for a celebrity.  Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?”, and, do you know, he couldn’t tell me.” 

* Including, naturally, Martin Salter

an erased town

the history of Ukraine has mostly been a sad one.  I have been there twice, both times as election observer, at two of the three elections which took place in 2004.  I was in Kyiv first, observing the election in a village outside the city, and the second time in Odessa, a city I am keen to visit again.  Those elections produced, in the end, the Orange party, which resulted in much misplaced euphoria.  The country's politics has not much improved, if at all, since then.  The memories of that country's communities have been systematically erased over time, and it can seem as though the cemeteries are the most living places there.  But don't read me on this, read Alexander J. Motyl, a writer and blogger i have recently discovered who is of Ukrainian origin himself.  Excellent.

Erased memory is part of the theme of a little collection of stories have written, and which is about to appear.  And indeed it touches upon something that Motyl touches upon in the piece I have linked to, in connection with the 20th-century history of Poland and Ukraine, and the role emigration and memory play in taking that history forward.  Or something like that.  Anyway, more soon on my stories, but do read Motyl.

Hitchens on Kipling

Christopher Hitchens' writing has the gift, among others, of making me think again about writers I have read, and wanting to read some I have not.  Like many children of my generation I read, or had read to me, Kipling's "Jungle Book" and "Just So Stories", but did not really read him other than that.  And his reputation is not a good one, these days.  But Kipling was all-get-out interesting, as Hitchens shows us.  He praised Indians as equal human beings, not a fashionable view in his time and milieu, but opposed independence.  Hitchens notes that in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century British politics was almost completely remade by the forces of organised labour, Irish nationalism, and female suffrage.  This, I suspect, is right, and Kipling understood it as few others did.  He cites here George Dangerfield "The Strange Death of Liberal England", published in 1935.  Which I have not read, but surely must one day soon.  Hitchens notes too that as a boy he saw bound volumes of Kipling in his school library, with a left-handed swastika on the covers, and as I was informed in the comments on a previous post this was not uncommon before 1939 - but Kipling insisted in the mid-1930s that the symbol be removed from all editions of his work, in which too he was ahead of his time.

I have posted previously about this symbol, as I found it on a book given as a Sunday school prize to my late great-uncle Ridley, always known as Tigs, when I recently helped begin to clear my aunt's house after she died in February this year.  Another thing we found was a diary that Tigs kept of a trip he made to southern Africa, by sea, in 1959.  This is being serialised as the Tigs' Trip blog, and you can read it here.  Fascinating social history.

Bring Up The Bodies

I completely loved Wolf Hall, after a slow start, and now I have been pulled in from the start of its sequel by Hilary Mantel, as the falcons fly in the late-summer sky, named after dead women and with flesh between their claws.  The king, a redhead, is sunburned, having lost his hat.  What is not to like?  And the story of the downfall of Anne Boleyn is one we all know.  Nonetheless, she is still pictured to this day in the lobby of the House of Lords.  Why is that, when others who have suffered political or dynastic defeat are forgotten?  Henry VIII died a believing Catholic.  We know this too.  I have not got far into the book, and will write more when I have read it.  But I say now, read this book.

now here's a thing

and a symbol you do not see often these days.  Or not outside a Jewish cemetery anyway.  Regular readers will know that at the end of February I went to my aunt's funeral in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria (if you press me to be more specific, Walney Island) - my aunt was my father's sister, and I appropriated this book from her house, which had been my grandmother's house.  The book, as the label shows, was given as a Sunday school prize in 1925.  The recipient was my grandmother's younger brother Ridley, always known as Tigs.  Tigs was always thought to be "the clever one" of my great-grandmother's rather large brood, and certainly he worked in the drawing office rather than in a manual job in the shipyards in Barrow (Vickers in those days, the whole family lived in what is still known as Vickerstown).  Tigs never married.  The family story was that he was dropped down the stairs as a baby by one of his older sisters, and was "never the same" after that. In fact the most likely scenario is that he had a tubercular spine.  I remember him as small and crookbacked.  He died in the 1970s, having been cared for in his last years by a sister, not my grandmother, her younger sister Hilda, widowed by then.  In those days people like him could not marry.  We are still going through family photographs, and a photograph of Tigs will be found and shown in due course.

His story is one to be told elsewhere.  For now, the book.  I haven't read it properly, but have looked through it.  It is a cruel story.  But even in my childhood in the 1950s children's stories were cruel - Enid Blyton, anyone?  In the days of this book they didn't put the date of publication in the book, so you  couldn't be sure.  But it was published not that long before 1925 it seems.  I notice that the author is female, and that the main character is a feisty young girl, whose father often says to her that he would tan her hide, or similar, if she was a boy.  But anyway, it was given to a boy as a Sunday school prize.  Tigs lived all his life in the family house in Buller Street, Vickerstown, my great-grandparents' home, because he did not marry, and presumably when he died and the house was cleared my grandmother somehow acquired some stuff. And there this book still was, all this time later.  And now I am blogging about it.

Readers, I know you wonder, why the swastika on the cover?  The short answer is that I have no idea.  In the 1920s in England, what did a swastika mean?  We know that it is in fact a Hindu symbol from the Aryans of north India, which is why it was appropriated in the way it was in Europe in the 1930s.  Incidentally, what we now think of as the Star of David is also a symbol with that heritage.  Apparently you can, in some places in India, see a Star of David and a swastika together as a joint emblem.  This to me is culturally mysterious.  As is the cover of this book.  The details inside the book give very few clues.

If you are knowledgeable about these matters, please comment.  Googling these things really does not help very much.