Trying to make sense of Gaza
Remember how Al Qaeda’s product refresh on 9/11 lured the Americans into acts of great hubris which did the world, and the Americans great harm? What will Hamas’s product refresh achieve?
In my ignorance, I quote Brad quoting Christopher Jones:
For years long-time Israeli Prime Minister pursued a strategy of funding and boosting Hamas, with the idea that a stronger Hamas meant a weaker Fatah, and thus made resisting calls for a Palestinian state more possible. Now it has blown up in his face. As I see it, he wants to keep his job and cannot do so without at least trying to destroy Hamas as a government, as a network, and as an ideology. 40,000 IDF soldiers, 2 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and an unknown number of Hamas terrorists and militants.
Was the Hamas plan to cross the border, attack some military bases, seize some hostages, and hightail it back? Or was the plan to kill as many civilians as possible in order to make it impossible for the IDF to not pursue into the urban soon-to-become-a-hellscape that is Gaza? I do not know. I suspect the second.
So what happens now as the IDF goes into Gaza?
Christopher W. Jones: ‘From Anwar Sadat up to the present… normalization has always been a triangular calculation recognizing the unlikelihood of military victory over Israel versus the economic benefits of peace with Israel and improved relations with the USA. Against the slow tide… Hamas and Hezbollah have always argued "no, armed struggle can still work, just give us a chance." But winning is the only thing that makes this argument convincing. Tension arises because projecting victimhood—the most successful Palestinian diplomatic strategy—requires notwinning.
Hamas had to choose one route or the other, and chose to go full ISIS. But how is slaughtering hundreds of civilians winning?… They've hurt Israel. That's what matters. This is the "resistance" that many are euphemistically posting about today. Will it provoke a massive Israeli response? Certainly. Will it undermine Palestinian diplomatic standing in the West. Yes. Does this matter? Not as long as Hamas' government in Gaza survives….
I see many comments calling this a suicide mission by Hamas. This is based on the assumption that Hamas will inevitably lose if the IDF embarks on a full invasion of Gaza. That is not an assumption that should be made. Hezbollah fought the IDF to a draw in 2006.. Hamas has been steadily increasing its military capabilities, gaining experience from every war. They have had over a decade and a half to prepare the ground. New tech such as drones and ATGMs heavily favor the defender. A conventional battlefield victory by Hamas inside Gaza is entirely possible. I don't think the Hamas leadership would have launched yesterday's attack if they thought otherwise…
What is going to be the ratio of Hamas leader and foot-soldier deaths to Palestinian civilian deaths? What is going to be the ratio of Hamas leader and foot-soldier deaths to IDF soldier deaths? And how long and far will Israel push the death and destruction as it executes its just war against Hamas—a just war as long as it takes due care to reduce collateral civilian casualties? And will civilian casualties mount so high that Israel’s war on Hamas will seek to be a just one. A just war, after all, has to be one that produces a better rather than a worse situation—even if your cause is just, your war is not unless it can also be justified on utilitarian grounds.
This was horrible on Saturday as Hamas’s terrorists wreaked murder. This is more horrible now. This is going to get more horrible still.
Some other voices
Your Moral Equation Must Have Human Beings on Both Sides
Johnathan Chait isn’t buying refusals to denounce. He doesn’t know many things but he knows one big thing. I agree with the sentiments in his piece more than anyone else’s here but what would I know? Even if I knew vastly more than the truly puny amount I do know, I doubt I’d be much the wiser about what to do.
Hours after Hamas terrorists carried out a horrifying pogrom against Jewish civilians, 31 progressive student groups at Harvard released a collective statement insisting they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” The statement did not condemn the murder, abuse, and kidnapping of civilians.
Around the same time, conservative publisher Ben Shapiro had a revealing exchange on X. In response to Ian Bremmer, who wrote, “palestinian civilians are not responsible for the atrocities of hamas terrorists. but they will suffer the consequences,” Shapiro made a sharp rejoinder: “No, Hamas is responsible for both the atrocities against Jews and what now happens to civilians under their control. They deliberately hide behind those civilians. They are currently telling civilians to STAY IN PLACE despite Israeli warnings to get out.” …
I would not say these ideas are equally evil. But the two statements use similar language, defining “responsibility” as entirely resting on one side and transferring guilt from a governing entity to the people living under it. And they share their most important traits: a refusal to acknowledge that the political and military goals they are pursuing must be balanced against the humanity of innocent civilians or even a recognition that innocent civilians exist on the other side at all. At their core, they reject universal humanity.
Bremer was not absolving Hamas, nor was he even opposing Israeli retaliation. He was simply expressing regret that innocent Palestinians would die as a result of Hamas terrorism. That is the sentiment Shapiro refutes. …
have no interest in joining the game of measuring which evil is greater. Do you want to believe the position of Shapiro and Baker is less evil than that of the left because Israel’s response is retaliatory and has not yet taken shape? Go ahead. Do you want to believe it is a greater evil because it represents a mainstream faction within American politics and Hamas apologism remains factionalized on the far left? That is also fine. I personally consider defenses of terrorism more barbaric than cold indifference about collateral damage, but I can accept opposing beliefs about which evil is the greater evil. I insist only that they are both evil.
Whatever calculation you make must begin with the premise that the deaths of innocent people are evil. I simply don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that any ideology that is not bounded by a recognition of universal humanity is too dangerous to be let loose upon the world.
Claudia Goldin: Nobel laureate in economics
Over to Alice Evans whom I’ve only recently discovered. If you’re interested in Claudia Goldin’s achievements, go no further than click through to her substack.
In this Substack, I discuss some of her major works:
The Power of the Pill
Marriage Bars
The Quiet Revolution
The U-Shaped Female Labour Force Function in Economic Development
Career and Family
Why Women Won (published this morning!)
It may not be clever, but I laughed out loud
Ibram X. Kendi’s fall is a cautionary tale — so was his rise
Good essay from Tyler Austin Harper.
Published in August 2019, “How to Be an Antiracist” was born half a year too early. While it earned modest accolades when it appeared, it was not until the death of George Floyd in May 2020 that the book exploded into the national consciousness. Readers turned to Kendi’s how-to guide in a bid to understand both the racial inequalities that tragedy exposed as well as the racial turmoil it unleashed. “How to Be an Antiracist” landed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list within weeks of Floyd’s death, turning Kendi into an academic superstar almost overnight. It remained on the list for nearly a year.
Whereas [his previous book] “Stamped” focused on history and policy, Kendi’s follow-up was a field guide for White redemption. … Unlike his earlier work, which framed anti-racist struggle as a matter of wonkish resistance to bad policies, “How to Be an Antiracist” started conceiving of anti-racism as a personal “journey” toward enlightenment. “Like fighting an addiction,” Kendi counsels, “being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” … Though conservatives tended to focus on the book’s famous catchphrase — “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” — in my view the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like “racism” and “white supremacy” into banal, everyday terms like any others.
Once reserved for the gravest of racial trespasses, thanks to the influence of Kendi and other charlatans like Robin DiAngelo, “racism” is now routinely employed to describe anything from workplace microaggressions to terrorist attacks. The march on Charlottesville was white supremacy, but so too is asking Black people to show up to Zoom meetings on time. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called such terms “floating signifiers”: bits of phraseology that are “void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.” The mainstreaming of Kendi’s brand of anti-racism has made “racism” into a word so plastic as to have lost all descriptive power — and with it all moral magnitude. At a moment when actual white supremacy is on the rise, the loss of “racist” as a condemnation with real ethical and political power is of grave consequence and may ironically be Kendi’s most significant contribution to American politics. …
It is relatively easy to get elite universities, corporations and rich progressives to buy into the idea that they personally can make the world better by tweaking their vocabulary and making minor adjustments to their interpersonal etiquette. That vision offers good vibes at low cost. Regardless of Kendi’s motivations, the pivot from policy to the personal would prove financially profitable and professionally opportune. Now that Kendi’s career seems to be unraveling, his critics have come to take their pound of flesh. And after the deluge of self-help hokum he has produced since Floyd’s murder — not to mention the corporate water-carrying his ideas have facilitated — I don’t begrudge them. But I also think the blame lies not just with Kendi but with the rich donors, CEOs and universities that were eager to purchase their own absolution by bulk-buying anti-racist indulgences. …
In June, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled “I am the wrong kind of Black professor,” which criticized the default assumption that Black academics should be interested in Black subjects. Afterward, I found myself inundated by a small flood of requests to write and talk about race in America. … We all make choices, and I don’t want to suggest that Kendi is a victim or that we should pity him. He basked in the accolades and accepted lavish speaking fees. But though I don’t condone Kendi’s race grift, I do understand how easy it would be to become a grifter. His rise in 2020, and his ignominious decline today, are a mirror held up to liberal America. His failure, intellectual and moral, is as much ours as it is his.
That disheartened feeling meeting a non-Etonian
Rory Sutherland on media formulae
Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs in a K, which would feature two women by a washing machine engaged in unlikely conversation about some wondrous new detergent. Since The Spectator is a family publication, I shall pretend that 2Cs in a K stood for two ‘consumers’ in a kitchen, although it did not. … The ads were cheap to make and allowed you to say more or less anything you wanted without having much of a creative idea. The same applies to television news, where the equivalent fallback formula might be called ‘Two stats and a sob-story’.
Achingly sad events happen every day. But this same tedious hand-wringing formula is applied to everything from massacres to train delays. … Paul Bloom … argues [in Against Empathy] that, although valuable in certain settings, empathy [is] not well calibrated for the mass-media age: it evolved at a time when you felt sorry for people you could materially help.
The conventional media get off the hook too easily by blaming online media for polarisation. Compared with most mainstream news coverage, many podcasts and YouTube videos are rare beacons of measured good sense.
He also points out that ‘empathy is always on the side of the censor’. If an argument is phrased in empathetic terms, ‘It seems mighty cold-blooded to tell someone who has been offended that they should just “suck it up”. By contrast, the case for free speech seems pretty unempathic.’ Logos looks nasty when pitted against pathos. A friend of mine, a leading transport expert, was invited on to a programme to defend smart motorways. His fellow interviewee – for purposes of balance, see – was someone who had lost family members in a smart motorway crash. In such a context, any counterpoint looks insensitive. …
Media bias reveals itself in different forms. One form is simple partisanship. Another, more pernicious form is the relative prominence given to different stories. But a third problem is this: even in the absence of intentional bias, empathy-hacking and confected-outrage stories are (for both right- and left-wing media) just like 2Cs in a K: quick, cheap and easy to make. Three phone calls and you have 30 minutes of TV. Meanwhile, moderate, considered opinion goes unreported.
Inspiration porn I
Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: a moral reckoning
Not much chop.
Last week I told you of Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism. I was wary of its belligerence, because I don’t really need someone to tell me all the silly things that are said in pursuit of the latest wokery from the academy. But I was grateful for the other side of Cecil Rhodes’ genocidal racism. (Hint: at least from the evidence Biggar gave, he was quite benevolent for his time on the question of race.)
Still, on reading on, it became a very reductive hatchet job on anti-colonialist history. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with a book that does that. I’ve been reading the French political theorist Betrand de Jouvenel and agree with him strongly that “The wise man knows himself for a debtor and his actions will be inspired by a deep sense of obligation”. That certainly counts for me and Western civilisation. But book length denunciations of ideological imbalance gets tedious.
I love the west and its achievements. But hey, it’s not all beer and skittles. And as for all those professional boosters of Western civilisation like John Howard and Tony Abbott? Well with great connoisseurs of culture like that (and great defenders of western traditions like the independence of the public service) all I can think of is what Ghandi said when asked what he thought of Western civilisation. He said he thought it was a good idea.
Anyway, whether the West is good or bad always reminds me of the line in Annie Hall when Woody’s mother says in her best long suffering voice “Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean”. Biggar takes up the cause of the frontier wars where he takes Geoffrey Blainey as an authority — rather than as a partisan. So it’s pretty reductive, and tendentious to boot. It’s a ‘no’ from me. I got my Audible credit back.
Henri Rousseau liked a nice tower
Inspiration porn II (Turn the sound up!)
Weasel words
I didn’t realise what a brilliant expression ‘weasel words’ is. As ChatGPT informed me:
The term "weasel words" refers to ambiguous or equivocal language that is intended to disguise or dilute the meaning of a statement, making it less straightforward or assertive. These words are often used to avoid making a clear, direct statement, allowing the speaker to deny any specific meaning if challenged.
Origin:
When: The term "weasel words" has been in use since at least the early 20th century.
Where: It is believed to have originated in the United States.
How: The expression derives from the image of a weasel sucking the contents out of an egg while leaving the shell outwardly intact. Just as the egg appears whole but is empty, a statement full of weasel words appears meaningful but is empty of direct assertions.
Notable Usage:
Theodore Roosevelt: One of the early popularizers of the term was Theodore Roosevelt. He referred to weasel words in the context of political language that was used to evade clear statements or commitments.
Of course Don Watson knew, having named a book weasel words. And looking at the opening pages of the book I came upon Toni Morrison’s Nobel Speech — which is reproduced below.
The North Korean never-never
When “Postliberalism” Means Reaction: On Patrick J. Deneen’s “Regime Change”
I enjoyed, and in many ways agreed with Deneen’s previous Why Liberalism Failed. But that’s because I failed. As following him on Twitter has confirmed for me, he seems to me to be guided by tribal affiliations. He doesn’t like liberals. Why. Well because. And when these guys come out and articulate just what they’re suggesting, then it’s usually clearer where they’re coming from. And it’s not pretty.
Decades ago, a number of “communitarian” writers—including Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, Robert Bellah, Daniel Bell, Michael Sandel, Jean Elshtain, and Deneen’s revered mentor, Wilson Carey McWilliams—critiqued liberalism for its narcissism, possessive individualism, and animus toward traditions and moral limits. Read generously, Regime Change seeks to repurpose this critique for 21st-century America. Had this book appeared a decade ago, such a reading might at least seem tenable.
But the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence and power in many liberal democracies, including the United States. Read under the shadow of this new authoritarianism, the book registers as both insidious and dangerous.
It is dangerous because Deneen speaks out of both sides of his mouth, gesturing at some very radical and even violence-provoking ideas while issuing muted caveats that might afford him plausible deniability. Insisting that liberal democracy is a tyrannical and even totalitarian regime, Deneen—holder of an endowed chair at Notre Dame and star of a CPAC lecture circuit well funded by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer—apparently considers himself a victim of liberal persecution compelled to practice the art of circumlocution in the name of his “truth.” And while the book has received a great deal of attention for its appeal to a new brand of right-wing politicians like Josh Hawley and J. D. Vance, it is particularly dangerous in the way that some of the most reactionary aspects of Deneen’s argument might appeal to people who don’t think of themselves as conservative. Antipathy to liberalism might lead some on the left to support the kind of “red-brown alliance” that Deneen seems to favor.
Put another way: Regime Change is an important and much-advertised public intervention whose ideas pose significant danger to liberal democracy in large part because they have the potential to be taken seriously by many people who should know better.
From Brink Lindsay’s “The end of the working class”.
[E]ven as pay increased steadily and workplace hazards to life and limb receded over the course of the 20th century, the essential inhumanity of industrial work never changed. Consider these recollections from End of the Line, an oral history of Ford’s Michigan Truck Plant, published in the 1980s just as the industrial era was drawing to a close:
The next day I went in after school and worked ten hours. I thought I had gone to hell. I couldn’t believe what people were doing for money.
Management’s approach is that the simpler the work, the easier it is to train workers and the easier they are to replace. You can’t keep that from sinking into a person’s self-esteem…. Even though it gives us a certain amount of financial freedom, we are prisoners of the assembly line. You’re tied to a machine, and you’re just another cog. You have to do the same thing over and over again, all day long.
The way foremen talked to people, you soon realized you were a serf and the foreman was your master…. In those days ex-athletes, especially prizefighters, were highly valued as foremen in automobile plants, especially at Ford. They were big barroom brawlers, bouncers, scrappers, and fighters, people who could bully people and command respect because of their size.
To have the human body work like a machine—consistently, continuously, hour in, hour out, to produce a product—is inhuman…. It’s like you’re incarcerated from the minute you get there until it’s time to leave…. The first few weeks I was there, I thought the world was going to end.
I was going to quit after that first week. I was so tired. My hands were aching, and my whole body was a wreck. But when I got my first check, it was over $400 and I told myself, “Maybe I don’t hurt as bad as I thought I did.”
Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture
Don Watson’s book Weasel words has an epigram from Toni Morrison’s stunning Nobel Lecture.
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise.” Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children. I have heard this story, or one exactly like it, in the lore of several cultures.
“Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind. Wise.”
In the version I know the woman is the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town. Her reputation for wisdom is without peer and without question. Among her people she is both the law and its transgression. The honor she is paid and the awe in which she is held reach beyond her neighborhood to places far away; to the city where the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.
One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her, and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.”
She does not answer, and the question is repeated. “Is the bird I am holding living or dead?”
Still she doesn’t answer. She is blind and cannot see her visitors, let alone what is in their hands. She does not know their color, gender or homeland. She only knows their motive.
The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter.
Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know”, she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
Her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.
For parading their power and her helplessness, the young visitors are reprimanded, told they are responsible not only for the act of mockery but also for the small bundle of life sacrificed to achieve its aims. The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.
Speculation on what (other than its own frail body) that bird-in-the-hand might signify has always been attractive to me, but especially so now thinking, as I have been, about the work I do that has brought me to this company. So I choose to read the bird as language and the woman as a practiced writer. She is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. Being a writer she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences. So the question the children put to her: “Is it living or dead?” is not unreal because she thinks of language as susceptible to death, erasure; certainly imperiled and salvageable only by an effort of the will. She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.
And here she shares a story of her childhood:
The Work You Do, the Person You Are
ll I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.
I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.
Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.
In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they were needed. They could earn money; they could care for children younger than themselves; they could work the farm, take care of the herd, run errands, and much more. I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet . . .
Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid She would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.
Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
That was what he said. This was what I heard:
1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.
2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.
3. Your real life is with us, your family.
4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.
I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.
Noah Smith thinks we’ll be sorry when Pax Americana is over.
I think he’s right.
The War on Terror reoriented the U.S. military toward counterinsurgency and away from defeating enemy armies. The defense-industrial base was allowed to wither — in 1995, the U.S. could produce about 30 times as many artillery shells as it can now, and China can produce about 200 times as many ships as the U.S. This is a catastrophic loss of hard power, and it means that even a modest diversion of U.S. military resources (like the Ukraine War) can largely remove the threat of U.S. intervention elsewhere.
Finally, a new great-power coalition arose that was capable of matching or exceeding U.S. power. China’s massive growth has given it a manufacturing capacity as great as the entire West combined, meaning that even if we could fix the problems with our defense-industrial base, we’d be outmatched in a protracted one-on-one fight.
Thus it’s little surprise that the threat of interstate conflict is starting to reemerge in Europe and the surrounding regions. The world is a more ungoverned, lawless place than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. I think Zheng Yongnian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong put it best last year:
“The old order is swiftly disintegrating, and strongman politics is again ascendant among the world’s great powers,” wrote Mr. Zheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order.”
… Anyway, Pax Americana always had an expiration date. If the U.S. had avoided the Iraq War and maintained its defense-industrial base, it could have prolonged its hegemony by about a decade, but ultimately the rising power of China would have ensured the return of the multipolarity that existed before World War 2. In any case, it’s over now, and until and unless a new dominant global coalition of nation-states can be forged — either a Chinese-led global order or some kind of expanded democratic hegemony that includes India and large other developing nations — we’re going to have to re-learn how to live in the jungle.
Over the past two decades it had become fashionable to lambast American hegemony, to speak derisively of “American exceptionalism”, to ridicule America’s self-arrogated function of “world police”, and to yearn for a multipolar world. Well, congratulations, now we have that world. See if you like it better.
Britain: disappointment sets in
Inspiration porn III: From Simon Schama’s History of Britain, Vol 3.
I think I’d heard of this story once before. If you don’t know of it, you should.
Nursing was the one single-woman’s profession that the queen felt perfectly fitted with the feminine qualities of tenderness, solace and healing. And the carnage of the Crimean War, of course, had everything to do with this. The genuinely epic history of Florence Nightingale, the single woman par excellence who had spurned marriage for the sake of a higher calling; who had brought her band of 38 young women to the hell of the barracks hospital at Scutari; who had taken on the mutton-chop whiskered medical corps and the army bureaucrats to wring from them the barest necessities: bandages, splints, soap; who had made the washtub her personal escutcheon – all this had stirred the nation, not least the queen herself. Many times Victoria had expressed her bitter regret that she was not the right sex to be able to join the soldiers in their heroic privations and combat. She knitted mufflers, socks and mittens; and sent letters to the front, and visited returning soldiers in hospital, so that the troops should know that no one grieved more deeply for their suffering or felt more warmly for their sacrifices. The heavy losses suffered at Balaclava and Inkerman kept her and Albert awake at night. And as the news, reported in October 1854 by one of The Times’s war correspondents, Thomas Chenery, of incompetent management and command, and of shortages of basic supplies became more and more appalling, so Victoria’s sense of maternal concern grew more acute.
The nurses at Scutari were surrogates for her own presence. When Florence Nightingale returned to Britain after the armistice in 1856, Victoria invited her to Balmoral to hear, first-hand, her account of the ordeal. But there was another heroine of the Crimea whose work was unknown to the queen (until her own step-nephew Captain Count Victor Gleichen told her) but who was the soldiers’ own favourite pseudo-mother. In the same year that Nightingale met the queen, a gala banquet and concert, with 11 military bands, was held by guards regiments at the Royal Surrey Gardens to benefit Mary Seacole, who had been declared bankrupt. There was a good reason why the returning soldiers so admired Mary. If you had been sick or wounded and managed to get taken to her ‘British Hotel’, you stood a decent chance of surviving. It was not so at Scutari.
But Mary Seacole was the wrong colour to be an officially canonized Victorian heroine. Born Mary Grant, she was the mulatto child of a Scotsman and his Jamaican wife. After marrying one of Nelson’s godsons, Edwin Horatio Seacole, she had run an establishment in Jamaica that was part hotel, part convalescent home; during both the cholera epidemic of 1831 and the even more serious yellow-fever outbreak of 1853 she had acquired a reputation for working miracles of recuperation among the critically sick. Her antidotes for dysenteric diseases and the associated dehydration, which almost always proved fatal, were all drawn from the Caribbean botanical pharmacopeia. This origin guaranteed that they would be ridiculed as ‘barbarous’ potions by the medical establishment and that Mary’s application to go to the Crimea to treat the cholera and typhoid victims (which accounted for the vast majority of fatalities) would be dismissed out of hand, not least by Florence Nightingale herself.
Unlike Nightingale, Seacole had no Baron Sidney Herbert at the War Department to argue her case. But, using her own funds, she somehow got herself to the eastern Mediterranean along with two of her most trusted Jamaican cooks. Once there she made, not for the barracks hospital in Turkey where it was clear she was unwelcome, but for the Crimea – the theatre of war itself. About two miles from Balaclava, Mary spent £800 of her own money building – presumably in imitation of her Jamaican establishment – the British Hotel: a combination of supply depot, refectory for soldiers about to go into action, and nursing and recovery station for the sick and wounded. Unlike the Scutari wards, the British Hotel was kept warm and dry. The best thing that could happen to a soldier laid low with cholera or typhoid was to be cared for on the spot, rather than endure the excruciating, sometimes three-week passage across the Black Sea to the deathtrap hospital at Scutari.
There were rats, of course, at the British Hotel too – caught in legions by ‘Aunty Seacole’s’ exterminators at first light. Once they were dealt with, she would begin the morning routine. Coffee and tea by 7 a.m.; then chickens plucked and cooked, hams and tongues (where did she get them?), broth, stewed rhubarb, pies and Welsh rarebits prepared, and the pièce de résistance – her patented milkless (and therefore safely transportable) rice pudding. Even without the milk there was something especially maternal about that pudding: comfort food spooned out to soldiers who, amidst all the terrors of war, were allowed to become small boys again, fed by their big mulatto nanny. ‘Had you been fortunate enough to have visited the British Hotel upon rice pudding days,’ wrote one returning soldier, ‘I warrant you would have ridden back to your hut with kind thoughts of Mother’s Seacole’s endeavours to give you a taste of home.’
Alexis Soyer, the celebrity chef of the Reform Club who in 1855 had come out to provide his own brand of stews for the soldiers (Mary watched him ladle it out with his fleshy, bejewelled hands), approved her fare as wholesome and her courage as heroic. Once the convalescents had been taken care of, she would saddle up two mules and load a wagon with hot and cold food and basic surgical supplies – bandages, blankets, splints, needles, thread and alcohol. She would then set off straight into the thunder of the siege and, guided by a Greek Jew who knew the lines of the trenches and the positions of the camps, would disappear into the smoke, looking for wounded men – sometimes enemy Russians as well as British and French – who needed rescuing along with a mug of tea, a word of consolation and, as she instinctively understood, the touch of a clean handkerchief. Mortars whizzed past the old lady and her mules plodding through the fire. More than once, when she heard shouts of, ‘Lie down mother! Lie down’, ‘with very undignified and unladylike haste I had to embrace the earth’. She became inured to horror. One soldier whom she found had been shot in his lower jaw. Mary put her finger in his mouth to try to open it enough to get some fluid down, but the teeth clamped down on her finger, cutting through it, and she needed help to prise them open.
Those who did manage to survive the nightmare of sickness and slaughter seldom forgot Mary Seacole. When she came back from the Crimea to London there were no invitations to Balmoral; only a press of creditors. But the fundraising events – at Covent Garden and Her Majesty’s Theatre, as well as the Royal Surrey Gardens – saved her from bankruptcy. Alexis Soyer and William Russell both made sure her work would be given public recognition. And Queen Victoria’s half-nephew, Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who had served in the war and was an amateur sculptor, made a bust of the woman he knew as ‘Mami’. It was probably through him that she eventually became known to Victoria, who in 1857 wrote to Seacole officially recognizing her work. Seacole lived on until 1881, and left an estate worth £2000 – all subscriptions from those whom she had cared for. But her memories were still haunted by the casualties: the frostbitten and the hopelessly mutilated; young men she thought should have been playing cricket, but who died in the mud, their eyes ‘half-opened with a quiet smile’ or ‘arrested in the heat of passion and frozen on their pallid faces, a glare of hatred and defiance that made your warm blood turn cold’.