/ theguardian.com
George Washington was born in the early part of the eighteenth century (1732), a son of a planter in Virginia, he was a Southerner. At 22 he was fighting for the British in both the French and Indian Wars and was present at the taking of Fort Duquesne (later to become Pittsburgh) in 1758 when he was twenty-six. Having completed his duties as a gentleman he resigned from the army and took to planting tobacco. (more…)
‘King Arthur’ at Camelot / wrl-inc.org
The Myth of King Arthur. Thirteenth century Europe knew much of the legends of a possibly Welsh King called Arthur, who supposedly drove away Britain’s enemies, laid the laws for honour and chivalry, surrounded himself with romantically named knights at a great Round Table, and married a beautiful but unfaithful wife called Guinevere. The myth was propagated in art and literature, exciting, inspiring and entertaining men and women everywhere from Sicily to Scotland. King Edward I of England was seduced by the stories and supposed relics of the imaginary hero. (more…)
Treacherous sands and a tidal bore / en-wikipedia.org
European Anti-Semitism in the 13th century. There can be no doubt that the thirteenth century was the most violently anti-Semitic in all the Middle Ages. Kings in Europe made similar repressive measures against their own kingdom’s Jewish communities. Frederick II made Sicilian Jews wear a blue T-shaped badge, and the men must keep their beards long; French Jews under Philip Augustus had to wear a wheel-shaped badge. English Jews wore a book-shaped yellow badge ordered by law under Edward I. Massacres, pogroms, locking into ghettoes, discriminatory laws, abuse and general persecution were rife. Yet despite this the Jews remained Europe’s accepted financial sector. This is not to say that several kings did not cast a speculative eye on Jewish wealth. (more…)
The Telegram published in the Washington Post March 1, 1917 / spotlights.fold3,com
The Zimmerman Telegram. On 19 January, 1917, twenty-two months before the end of the Great War (1914 – 18), the United States had still not joined with The British Commonwealth and France in the munumental struggle against Germany and her allies. On that day the German Foreign Secretary, Artur Zimmerman, sent a telegram in code to the German ambassador in Mexico. The message said that should war be declared between Germany and the United States, an alliance must be made between Germany and Mexico: this would indicate the need for Mexico to go to war with the US, in order to recover what the message called ‘lost territories’; these were Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. At the same time Mexico would have to persuade Japan to join Germany’s alliance, making war in the Pacific against American interests. (more…)
/ wikipedia.org
Samurai. This was the Japanese equivalent of the barons of England, feudal aristocrats in France and regional princes in Germany, who ruled the country while representing their king or emperor. They were the ruling caste by the 12th century. One century before these great Japanese warrior families were taking over power from the Emperor however. Towards the end of the 1180s, the victor of most of the battles, one Minamoto Yoritomo was given the special title of Shogun (emperor’s personal deputy) after his ending of the struggle between the Minamoto and Tairo families. (more…)
Nuri as Said / britasnnica.com
Nuri as Said, and what Iraq might have been. Though we think of Iraq as a Middle Eastern country, it is really West Asian, bordering on Turkey to the north, Iran on the east, Syria and Jordan to the west, and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to the south. This land used to be known as Mesopotamia, and was the site of very early civilizations. It was actually called ‘The Cradle of Civilization’, but later in the seventh century after Christ it became a Muslim state after invasion from Arabia. Then the Ottoman Empire grabbed it in the sixteenth century and Turkish it remained until 1914/15 when British forces drove the Turks out.
After the Mesopotamian Campaign the country was occupied by Britain, granted responsibility under a League of Nations mandate (1920 – 32). In 1921 Amir Ahd Allah Faisal became King Faisal of Iraq, and British influence was strong, especially under the premiership of Nuri as Said (1888 – 1958). His was the last effective and sensible rule in that sad country.
Said set up the Iraq Development Board, using ever growing oil revenues for positive and constructive purposes. There were no collections of dozens of Rolls-Royce motor cars kept in specially designed hangars. Instead good roads and bridges were built, electricity and proper sewage disposal came to the villages, fresh water pipes were laid, schools, colleges and hospitals founded and financed. The beginnings of heavy industry were created. Iraq might by now have been among the richest and perhaps even happiest nations in the world, but by 1957 the pot was being stirred, as always happens, by revolutionaries.
Nuri said in 1957 that Iraq was not a real country at all; that it was an artificial creation, put together by Britain as an emergency measure; that it could not be managed by constitutional means, kindness and British-style laws. It required a tough approach, and resolute leadership, which the British disapproved. That disaster was imminent, and could not be reversed. The British Embassy declined to take any notice.
In 1958 Uri as Said, King Faisal and most of the royal family, Said’s cabinet of ministers and advisers were machine-gunned by military revolutionaries, a group which included the young Saddam Hussein. This was the beginning of Iraq’s long and apparently interminable martyrdom, still continuing today, even after the hanging of Saddam. If Nuri as Said had been allowed to finish what he started, there would have been no Iraq/Iran War, no Bush/Saddam wars, and the ancient Mesopotamian coastline might have been a favourite Riviera. But Life, and Politics, are not like that.
Is Spain democratic?
April of the year 2014 is with us, and one cannot really face the headache of the news on television every evening, because the country seems to be splitting into a number of segments, each with a jagged edge:
Andalucía is a bottomless (and I fear neglected) well of confusion and corruption; the latest discovery by the police is the possible stealing of more than 2000 million euros destined by Europe for adult education grants for unemployed youth. The female judge Alaya is still struggling womanfully with the Case of the EREs, involving hundreds of millions of euros supposedly contributed by the EU to assist Andalucía with the unemployment problem some years ago. Over 500 million euros have vanished. This case involves two ex-presidents of the autonomic region – Chavez and Griñan, plus a host of others. This unholy couple is under the protection of the Spanish Parliament, as they are senators now. They cannot be judged in Andalucía therefore, but in the Madrid Supreme Court. If only it were supreme! It is called ‘supreme’ but its judgments can be overturned by the Constitutional Court, which is the same in grammar as calling something ‘almost unique’ or ‘nearly unique’ when if a thing is unique it is unique. The word cannot be modified.
Mr Artur Mas the president of Cataluña, burdened with a ‘Rhodesia Smith’ Complex, is determined to continue his nearly hopeless fight to declare independence unilaterally from Spain. The Government in Madrid recently won – with a massive majority – a debate about whether or not Cataluña can consult the Catalans on this subject. The Congress and the Constitution say no. Mr Mas and Mr Homs continue saying yes. Now Mr Barroso from the European Commission speaks up saying that the Catalans should know that if Cataluña breaks away from Spain she will NOT remain in the EU: that Catalans will require a passport to visit family and friends in formerly neighbouring regions such as Asturias. In reply, Mr Homs tells the Catalans not to worry, for Barroso was not speaking officially. Perhaps he was speaking, observed by a hundred TV cameras, from his bath?
The Popular Party thought it had got rid of a pile of dodgy former ministers like Acebes and Cascos etc. But the official they did not dismiss was the one who is now causing all the trouble over the financing of political parties while robbing the till – Mr Bárcenas, who even looks like a Chicago gangster. He was the Treasurer of the Popular Party until a Spanish judge started (years ago) investigating his personal finances. The PP could do without Mr Bárcenas just now, when the cleaning of the Augean Stables by Mr ‘Hercules’ Rajoy is beginning to take effect.
Is Spain democratic? The answer is no for these reasons, though if you call it ‘representaive democracy’ it scrapes by: (1) If in an election, local or national, voters use their vote to elect a Party, not a Person, it is not democratic as such. (2) If, as happened recently in Andalucía, the people vote (albeit with insufficient majority) for an Opposition Party, it is clear that they wish that opposition party to rule. They have voted democratically. But Spain has a ‘Pact’ system, by which the party that lost the election can still win it, though not democratically, by forming a pact with a third party. In Andalucía the PSOE lost the election to the PP, but then pacted with IU, giving the combined couple a majority larger than that gained by the PP. So the PSOE continued ruling, and the PP, which had won the election, was left in opposition. (3) Again in Andalucía, the previous president decided to resign. He was replaced by a fellow party member, in this case a woman. She was never elected by the people of Andalucía as their president, but she is still the President. This is undemocratic.
The book is taking up all my time and I am doing it alone. Thanks for your patience. I shall try to write a post for General-history this week. Very best wishes, Dean.
Dozens of webbers gave an answer to our last Who Said It quiz, but few got it right. The answer is Samuel Goldfish, better known as Samuel Goldwyn, the American independent film producer. Important clues were there in his sayings. ‘Who Said It’ number 3 starts here: please send your solution in the form of a Comment. Thanks from Dean.
“Protection is not a principle, but an expedient.”
“He traces the steam engine always back to the tea-kettle.” (of Sir Robert Peel)
“He has to learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and that insolence is not invective.”
“Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.”
“Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant.”
“Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilisers of man.”
“An author who speaks about his own books is like a mother talking of her children.”
“He is a great master of gibes, and flouts and jeers.” (of the Marquis of Salisbury)
“A sophistical (sic) rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.” (of W.E. Gladstone)
“The practice of politics in the Far East may be defined by one word, dissimulation.”
“I believe they went out, like all good things, with the Stuarts.”
“Critics are those who have failed in literature and art.”
Tommy Brown, 1926 – 1945
Incident at sea, 30 October, 1942
During the Second World War the British had been reading top-secret German codes messages sending orders to their Navy, Army and Airforce, thanks to the team at Bletchley using their Ultra machine to crack the difficult codes set by the Nazi Enigma machine. Millions of tons of shipping in the Battle of the Atlantic had been saved by the Ultra code-cracker, and the German High Command did not know until 1945 that their orders were being read by the Allies. But in February 1942 it had been the Germans’ turn; they had cracked British Naval Cipher No. 3 and soon could see the size, destination and leaving times of Allied convoys. At the same time, the Germans added an extra rotor wheel to their Enigma machines used by U-Boats in the Atlantic, thus greatly increasing the number of solutions to their encrypted text. They knew this had happened at Bletchley, even calling the new effort Shark. They set about finding a way to crack it, but for more than ten months Bletchley was in the dark, its de-codifier producing rubbish. German submarines in the Atlantic sank 7 million tons of Allied shipping in 1942 at a cost of eighty-six U-Boats. In November alone 860,000 tons of shipping went to the bottom. It was more than essential to get hold, somehow, of one of the new data and associated documents from a German submarine, but how? (more…)