The death has just occurred of Kim Dae-Jung (1924-2009), brave Korean dissident and opposition leader, who later became President. The Guardian’s obituary is here. He survived imprisonment, a death sentence, a kidnap and beatings by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, speaking out bravely and persistently against the ruthless Park and Chun dictatorships to become the Republic of Korea’s first non-Conservative President. However, the military-jaebol complex which has run the country since WW II proved too strong for him, and he was not able to enact the reforms he desired. His strong desire for peace and possibly unification of the two Korean states may also have led him to a certain naivety in dealings with the criminal gang who enslave the North.
The Guardian has a photo gallery of the life of Kim Dae-jung here.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Page 13 of 16
Oz-NZ Cabinet Meeting
The Australian and New Zealand Governments are to hold their first-ever joint Cabinet meeting, in Sydney on this Friday 24 August. The political parties in charge of the two countries are currently of opposite hue: Labor in Australia, and National in NZ.
In some respects, the only surprise here is why this took so long. For a period before it was self-governing, New Zealand was a dependency of the British colony of New South Wales, and indeed NZ achieved self-government four years before NSW did (1852 vs. 1856). The preamble to Australia’s Federal constitution mentions NZ as one of the founding states, which would still provide NZ fast-track entry to the Federation should it ever wish. Immediately following Federation in 1901, both countries had cabinet ministers born in the other country, and New Zealand cabinet ministers (along with those from Papua New Guinea and from Norfolk Island) are now regular participants in the various Ministerial Council meetings of COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, the Australian Federal-State body tasked with co-ordinating policy. (As a consequence, COAG meetings, which rotate locations, sometimes take place in NZ or PNG.) The two countries have agreed freedom of trade in almost all products and services and freedom of movement (at least for each others’ citizens), and have even talked about a common currency. They have shared defence activities since at least the joint ANZAC force landed at Gallipoli, Turkey, in 1915.
Apart from actual political unions, such as the USA and the EU, I wonder what other two political entities have this degree of co-ordination. Even the British-Irish Council of the Isles, which links the various national assemblies of Eire, Great Britain, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Northen Ireland, Scotland and Wales, does not involve much substantive collaboration. No doubt different languages make joint cabinet meetings difficult across many borders: The only example I can recall in recent years were the joint Franco-German cabinet meetings held under Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl.
Recent reading 3: Santayana
I’ve just read the memoirs of philosopher George Santayana, as mentioned in this earlier post. They were published in three volumes, being written during and just after WW II.
The personal aspects of these memoirs are fascinating, and very enjoyable. Santayana seems to have known everybody, or if not, he was related to them. He had two families – one via his mother and father, Spanish colons in the Philippines, and one via his mother’s first husband and their children, American from Boston, not quite Brahmins but society people. The two families, at least from this account, were Faulkneresque in their eccentricities, entanglements and bedevilments. Santayana’s writing is as smooth as a gimlet and the reader is carried along as if reading a Doris Lessing novel. No wonder the one novel he wrote – about his family and friends (The Last Puritan) – was such a financial success.
At least the first volume of his memoirs was smuggled out of Italy (where Santayana was living), allegedly with assistance from the Vatican’s international network, and published during the war. It is therefore not surprising that it makes no mention, even allusively, to current political events. Ditto the second volume. I was surprised that even the third volume makes no real mention of the war, although it does contain a section near the end which seems to present Santayana’s political positions, although in an indirect and abstract way. I wonder if the reticence was due to the extremity of his political beliefs. Having been able to retire anywhere, he chose Rome and stayed there through the Mussolini years. He also barely mentions the Spanish civil war in his memoirs, but perhaps this was still too close, with the possibility of his family being affected by his writing. From the few comments he makes on matters political it is apparent he was a conservative, although he gives no good reasons for this. (Nor could he.)
I can make no sense of Santayana’s writing in philosophy. His writing typically consists of a sequence of abstract assertions and generalizations, none of which is supported by evidence or even argument. Against each one I cavil and wish to argue the case, or at least to have the pleasure of being the recipient of a case in support; since he provides no justification for these assertions, argument-against them is difficult, and there are so many, it is tiring. Perhaps this style was typical of the philosophy of his day. I find that every academic discipline takes some significant statements or assumptions for granted, and that people in the discipline expend most their intellectual heft arguing over the trivial remainder. People outside the discipline wonder how anyone could argue about the trivialities while ignoring the big issues assumed or implied at the start.
For the record, I’ll include here some quotations which struck me:
With parents evidently Catalans of the Catalonians how did my mother come to be born in Glasgow, and how did she ever meet a Bostonian named Sturgis? These facts, taken separately, were accidents of travel, or rather of exile and of Colonial life; but accidents are accidents only to ignorance; in reality all physical events flow out of one another by a continuous intertwined derivation;” (page 8, Santayana 1944)
Catholicism is the most human of religions, if taken humanly: it is paganism spiritually transformed and made metaphysical. It corresponds most adequately to the various exigencies of moral life, with just the needed dose of wisdom, sublimity, and illusion.” (1944, p. 98)
Even what we still think we remember may almost become the act of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to the interests of the present. This, when it is not intentional or dishonest, involves no deception. Things truly wear those aspects to one another. A point of view and a special lighting are not distortions. They are conditions of vision, and spirit can see nothing not focused in some living eye.” (1944, p. 155)
It is or it was usual, especially in America, to regard the polity of which you happen to approve as sure to be presently established everywhere and to prevail for ever after.” (1947, p. 138)
Unattached academic obscurity is rather a blessed condition, when it doesn’t breed pedantry, envy or ill-nature.” (1953, p. 103)
References:
George Santayana [1935]: The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel. (London, UK: Constable.)
George Santayana [1944]: Persons and Places. (London, UK: Constable.)
George Santayana [1947]: The Middle Span. (London, UK: Constable.)
George Santayana [1953]: My Host the World. (London, UK: The Cresset Press.)
Recent reading 2: Spooks
For the record, herewith brief reports of recent reading of books on espionage:
- Michael Holzman [2008]: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence. (Amherst, MA, USA: University of Massachusetts Press). A fascinating topic, not given justice in this poorly-written account. Sentence without verbs. Not fond of. I. The author claims to have undertaken interviews with key players (although I only noticed one reference to such an interview), but the book is almost entirely written from secondary sources. This means it has no new insights. On some issues, the book is not up to date – eg, on the Nosenko affair, the author seems not to have seen Bagley’s book (see below), published a year before. The writing is very vague about dates (a rather important failing for a writer of a history book), and lots of information is only provided en passant; for example, we only learn about Angleton’s first child well after its birth. Perhaps that is an editor’s failing, as much as an author’s. There are worse problems: the author appears to have a very unsophisticated understanding of marxism (p. 103), and his description of the Bay of Pigs invasion puts all the blame on Bissell and colleagues (p. 187), when some of it rightly belongs in the White House, including with JFK himself. Relying on secondary sources and without new insights, Holzman could have shown us how Angleton’s literary training helped him in the world of intelligence. Despite repeated claims that his literary education did help, we are not ever shown it doing so, nor given a detailed explanation of how it helped. To show us this, Holzman would have needed to provide a detailed presentation of at least one theory of intelligence and counter-intelligence; this is something that would have been very interesting and very useful in itself, yet is also lacking from the book.
- Tennent H. Bagley [2007]: Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games. (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press). An insider’s account of the Nosenko affair, which I have blogged about here and here. Bagley argues compellingly that Yuri Nosenko was a KGB plant, not a genuine defector. From this he concludes that CIA should not have accepted him as a genuine defector. As I argue, it is not certain that CIA did in fact accept him as such, despite what it looks like, and the benefits of accepting him (or appearing to accept him) may have outweighed the costs. An intelligence agency needs to think through the wider consequences of its beliefs and of what are believed by others to be its beliefs, in addition to considerations of simple truth and falsity.
- S. J. Hamrick [2004]: Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press). Hamrick argues that British intelligence knew that Philby, Burgess and Maclean were Soviet agents several years before their public exposures, and during this period used them to securely transmit messages — both information and disinformation — to the Soviet leadership, knowing it would more likely be believed if it came from the Soviets’ own agents. If Holzman’s book about Jim Angleton (above) had included some discussion of theories of intelligence and counter-intelligence, this is just the type of case that such a theory would seek to account for. The (alleged) facts of Hamrick’s book are fascinating, but the book itself is poorly-written, repetitious, acronym-rich and comes with added right-wing tirades. There are even anti-Catholic tirades against the novelist Graham Greene and —for goodness sake! — the poet-priest Robert Southwell SJ (p. 32), who was executed in 1595. These tirades are not only out-of-place here, but replete with errors. One has to wonder at the immense power of a Catholic missionary that he can still provoke such an irrational rant four centuries after his murder by Elizabeth’s police-state. I am certainly one of Southwell’s admirers (see, for example, here), but there cannot be more than a score or two of people alive who even know of him.
- Valerie Plame Wilson [2008]: Fair Game: How a top CIA Agent was betrayed by her own Government. (New York, USA: Simon and Schuster). Published with CIA redactions shown. Very well-written and her life story is fascinating. Shame about her Government.
- Tim Weiner [2007]: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. (London, UK: Allen Lane). The best single-volume history of CIA, at least as far as an outsider can judge. Well-written and thorough, although I would have liked more on Africa. On page 80, Weiner claims the only two successful CIA-sponsored coups were both executed under Eisenhower, but what of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire in 1965 (see Devlin’s book below), and Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973 (and perhaps Malcom Fraser in Australia in 1975)?
- Larry Devlin [2007]: Chief of Station, Congo: A Memoir of 1960-67. (New York, USA: Public Affairs). An insider’s account of the role of CIA in putting Mobutu into power in Zaire. Having once met Mobutu, I found this account fascinating, although, of course, I have no idea how honest or comprehensive it is.
- Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy [1997]: Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster. (New York, USA: Public Affairs). A riveting read, which I read in a single day. Markus Wolf presents himself, I am not sure how sincerely, as a reform Communist, an admirer of Andropov and Gorbarchev.
- David C. Martin [1980]: Wilderness of Mirrors. (Guildford, CT, USA: The Lyons Press). A detailed account of the relationship between Jim Angleton and Bill Harvey. Well-written and an easy read. However, the chronology of the events in the George Blake affair (pp. 100-102) is inconsistent.
- Milt Beardon and James Risen [2003]: The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB. (New York, USA: Ballantine Books). Although mostly riveting, I skipped over the history of 1980s Afghanistan. Reading of KGB watching CNN during the attempted coup of August 1991 to learn what has happening was very amusing. The book would have been better if more had been included on the post-1990 period: just when events get interesting, the book ends.
An insignificant literary mystery
The Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, was a close friend of Frank Russell, the second Earl, elder brother of the now-more-famous Bertrand, and, it seems, a man with much more than his allocated lifetime quarter-hour of drama and fame. In the second volume of his memoirs (The Middle Span, pp. 50-52), Santayana mentions their first encounter, at Harvard in October 1886, where they seem to have connected instantly and deeply, meeting just once but talking for hours. Reading this account, I was reminded of Bertie’s account in his autobiography of his first meeting with Joseph Conrad, which also (at least, according to BR) went deeper, and deeper faster, than any previous or subsequent encounter he had with another person.
Santayana says that following their initial meeting, upon his return to England Frank Russell sent Santayana a gift:
I received through the post a thin little book bound in white vellum, The Bookbills of Narcissus, by Richard Le Gallienne, inscribed “from R.” ” (page 52).
Santayana next saw Russell on his trip to England in March 1887, when they spent significant time together, and they continued to meet and travel together periodically.
Something is amiss in this report, since that book by Richard Le Gallienne was not published until September 1891, by Frank Murray in Derby. I thought perhaps that Russell had sent Santayana a pre-publication copy, but checking a biography of Le Gallienne (Whittington-Egan & Smerdon 1960), I find, first, that Le Gallienne seems only to have written this book during winter 1890-91 (p. 125), and, second, that Le Gallienne wrote to his parents around February 1892 that he had heard that Lord Russell “raves” about Narcissus (p. 185). So clearly, Frank Russell knew and liked the book, and told others this following its publication; he also quite possibly gave an inscribed copy to his friend Santayana. But he could not have done so in the winter of 1886-7. Le Gallienne’s first volume, My Ladies’ Sonnets, was only published in August 1887, and circulated only in Merseyside, so it is unlikely that Russell would have had a pre-publication copy of that to give to Santayana.
Did Russell send some other book to Santayana in 1886, which Santayana’s memory has forgotten and confused with Narcissus? Or was perhaps the book Russell sent Santayana something he would prefer not to mention, a book that might reveal more of their relationship than Santayana desired to be revealed? Certainly, reading the urbane, enthralling and smoothly-written three volumes of Santayana’s memoirs, one would not be led to think he had a poor memory; he seems to have recalled every person he ever met or Harvard student he ever taught, and every soap-operatic life-incident in his two Faulkneresque extended families, one Spanish, one American.
I doubt this mystery will ever be resolved; on the other hand, nothing momentous rests on its resolution.
POSTSCRIPT (2013-10-22): I wonder if the book of verse sent by Russell to Santayana in late 1886 was one of the works by poet Marc-Andre Raffalovich (1864-1934).
References:
M-A. Raffalovich [1884]: Cyril and Lionel, and other poems. A volume of sentimental studies. London, UK: Kegan Paul & Co.
M-A. Raffalovich [1885]: Tuberose and Meadow-Sweet. London, UK: D. Boque.
M-A. Raffalovich [1886]: In Fancy Dress. London, UK: Walter Scott.
George Santayana [1947]: The Middle Span. London, UK: Constable.
Richard Whittington-Egan & Geoffrey Smerdon [1960]: The Quest of the Golden Boy: The Life and Letters of Richard Le Gallienne. London, UK: The Unicorn Press.
Newton and scientific publication
While on the subject of Isaac Newton, here are several statements by historian Scott Mandelbrote on Newton’s attitude to the public dissemination of his work. The more we know of Newton, the less we should consider him a scientist in the modern meaning of the word.
His [theological investigation] was a voyage of personal discovery; even the Principia required Halley’s exertions as a midwife to bring them to light. Newton might share his religious opinions with other members of the remnant, as he did in his letters to Locke, but he worried about the consequences of their wider dissemination: ‘I was of opinion my papers had lain still & am sorry to heare there is news about them. Let me entreat you to stop their translation & impression so soon as you can for I designe to suppress them.’ Newton’s concern may have reflected fear of being discovered to hold unorthodox opinions, but it was also the product of religious motives. Not everyone could be expected to comprehend ‘strong meat’, which was intended for personal consumption, and which might be wasted on others.” (p.299)
His [Newton’s] theology pervaded his alchemy, in his analysis of the Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus, and in turn his alchemy suggested to him how matter might be understood physically. A true understanding of the uses of language enabled Newton to introduce astronomical calculation into his chronological writings, and to complete his mathematical arguments with theological references:
[pagebreak]
. . . .
Mathematics was God’s language; the language of the prophets communicated God’s purposes and ‘times’ to men. Newton felt it was his duty to understand and to reconcile the two, to decipher the hieroglyphs which corrupted religion and learning had obscured. The problems of mathematics ended in the solutions of divine majesty, and mathematical language solved the theological problem of describing Newton’s Arian interpretation of the relations within the Trinity:
. . .
Newton’s natural philosophical and theological discoveries removed the obscurities from divine language, in the books of nature and of scripture. In the life of the true believer, the two could not be separated. But most had to be content with the milk for babes, because Newton’s own language was beyond them.” (pp. 300-301).
Reference:
Scott Mandelbrote [1993]: ‘A dute of the greatest moment’: Isaac Newton and the writing of biblical criticism. British Journal of the History of Science, 26: 281-302.
Chasing the sources: a Newtonian mystery
As is well-known to historians (although less so among scientists), Isaac Newton was a devout religious believer, an alchemist, and a seeker after ancient wisdom about God and the cosmos. He was a Unitarian, a belief not permitted at the time, and so he kept his religious views very, very close to himself and to a small circle of intimates. When his friend and fellow FRS, Nicolas Fatio de Duiller, publicly supported the millenarian French Protestant sect, the Camisards (aka The French Prophets), in London in the first decade of the 18th century, Newton kept in touch with him to learn of their prophecies, and came close to publicly supporting them also.
So when an historian writes the following it is very plausible, at least to people aware of Newton’s religious beliefs and interests:
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was also enamored of Egyptian wisdom, as we shall see in the next chapter, even if it is not clear that he accepted the Hermetic tradition. It was essential for his theory of gravitation to have an accurate measure of the world’s circumference, and for that he needed to calculate exactly a single degree of latitude. Newton was convinced that there was no need to send a team of surveyors to plot distances on the ground, as the French were doing. It was rather easier to determine the exact length of an Egyptian cubit, which ancient authors insisted was directly related to a degree of latitude. This information could be obtained from the dimensions of the Great Pyramid, which was always believed (perhaps rightly) to enshrine perfect units of length, area and volume, as well as pi. Sadly, the results of the Pyramid experiment did not fit Newton’s calculations, but, instead of scrapping the theory, the great scientist blamed the surveyors instead. As luck would have it, the French astronomer Jean Picard (1620-82) succeeded in 1671 in measuring perfectly a degree of latitude in Sweden, so Newton could prove his theory of gravitation without the Egyptians.” (Katz 2005, page 31)
The reference the author David Katz cites for this story is Shalev 2002. But consulting that reference, we do not see mentioned the story Katz relates here. Instead, we find this sentence (on page 574):
As Robert Palter has argued in his critique on Bernal’s Black Athena, there is no evidence to show that Newton related his interest in the Egyptian cubit to his physics and geodesy.”
with the reference being to Palter 1993, pages 245 and following.
What is going on here? Has Katz mistakenly cited the wrong source for the story above, something easy enough to do in academic writing? Perhaps Katz could tell us. I hope it is a simple mistake in citation, and not something more sinister.
References:
David S. Katz [2005]: The Occult Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Present Day. (London, UK: Jonathan Cape).
Robert Palter [1993]: Black Athena, Afro-Centrism, and the history of science. History of Science, 31: 227-287.
Zur Shalev [2002]: Measurer of all things: John Greaves (1602-1652), the Great Pyramid and early modern metrology. Journal of the History of Ideas, 63: 555-575.
Lecture styles
In response to Timothy Burke’s guidance notes for academic lecturers, I recalled Henry Adams writing in 1905 of his time as a student at the University of Berlin in 1858:
. . . but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture-system in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The Professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a Degree. To an American the result was worthless.
Reference:
Henry Adams [1905]: The Education of Henry Adams. (The Library of America, 1983, p. 789)
A salute to Thomas Harriott
Thomas Harriott (c. 1560-1621) was an English mathematician, navigator, explorer, linguist, writer, and astronomer. As was the case at that time, he worked in various branches of physics and chemistry, and he was probably the first modern European to learn a native American language. (As far as I have been able to discover, this language was Pamlico (Carolinian Algonquian), a member of the Eastern Algonquian sub-family, now sadly extinct.) He was among those brave sailors and scientists who traversed the Atlantic, in at least one journey in 1585-1586, during the early days of the modern European settlement of North America. Because of his mathematical and navigational skills, he was employed variously by Sir Walter Raleigh and by Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, both of whom were rumoured to have interests in the occult and in the hermetic sciences. Harriott was the first person to use a symbol to represent the less-than relationship (“<“), a feat which may seem trivial, until you realize this was not something that Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, Indian, or Chinese mathematicians ever did; none of these cultures were slouches, mathematically.
Yesterday, 26 July 2009, was the 400th anniversary of Harriott’s drawing of the moon using a telescope, the first such drawing known. In doing this, he beat Galileo Galilei by a year. The Observer newspaper yesterday honoured him with a brief editorial.
Interestingly, Harriott was born about the same year as the poet Robert Southwell, although I don’t know if they ever met. Southwell spent most of his teenage years and early adulthood abroad, and upon his return to England was either living in hiding or in prison. So a meeting between the two was probably unlikely. But they would have each known of each other.
Previous posts in this series are here. An index to posts about the Matherati is here.
Tony Benn in Rhodesia
Normblog today quotes an interview with former British Cabinet Minister and MP Tony Benn, talking about visiting Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during WW II:
When I was there, there was no democracy at all: all the good land had been stolen and given to white farmers, no African had votes, it was a criminal offence for an African to have a skilled job; and now we lecture Zimbabwe on democracy – total hypocrisy.”
First, as so often with Benn, rhetorical effect takes priority over truth. The franchise in Southern Rhodesia was not based on race, but on age, property ownership, income, and a test of English literacy. Despite the inherent bias of these conditions (made worse by the use of a definition of “property” which excluded cattle, the main traditional form of black wealth), some black Rhodesians qualified to vote from the granting of self-government in 1923. Of course, the number of black voters enrolled was tiny (in 1948, 248 non-whites to 48,000 whites enrolled), but even 248 is not zero. Such a system allowed many white Rhodesians to convince themselves their electoral system was not racist. The electoral situation in Rhodesia was undemocratic enough without Benn having to exaggerate it.
Second, the fact that any non-whites had the vote at all was due to British government insistence against the wishes of most of the Rhodesian white population, from 1898 onwards (see West 2002). Benn’s statement jumps from a description of Southern Rhodesia in WW II straight to Zimbabwe in 2009, ignoring the campaigns for majority rule in the 1950s and 1960s, the international struggle and sanctions against the illegal UDI regime of Ian Smith, the British-sponsored negotiations leading to British-led peace-keeping forces, majority rule, and independence in Zimbabwe in 1980, and the political, technical, moral and financial support given by Britain for the newly-elected democratic Government of Robert Mugabe. It is Mugabe and his ZANU-PF henchmen, not Britain, who have failed to honour the standards of democracy. Like Norman Lamont in his deplorable support for the Chilean murderer Augusto Pinochet, Tony Benn seems to apply one standard to elections in Britain and another standard elsewhere. As with Lamont, let me ask Benn: Would it have been OK for John Major to have terrorized and murdered his opponents and refused to leave office when he lost the British election of 1997? If not, then why is it OK for Robert Mugabe to do so? Such a double standard strikes me as treating black people differently to white people.
POSTSCRIPT (2009-07-07):
The advisory Legislative Council established by the ruling British South Africa Company in Southern Rhodesia in 1898 had 6 appointed and 5 elected members, who were, from its creation, chosen under a non-racial franchise (see Walker 1953, p. 104). This franchise was that in force in the Cape Colony, which itself dated from a Municipal Ordinance of 1836, which created a conditional, but colour-blind, franchise for some local governments based solely on ownership or rental of fixed residential property above stated monetary values. Other tests, such as literacy in English, were added later to the conditions. Indeed, the history of white rule in southern Africa in the 19th century can be seen as a fight between liberal, often colour-blind policies imposed from the Colonial Office in London but opposed by far-less-often liberal settlers, particularly those of Afrikaaner origin, who repeatedly left the area under British colonial jurisdiction to establish their own settlements further inland.
Reference:
Michael O. West [2002]: The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe 1898 – 1965. Indiana University Press.
Eric A. Walker [1953]: The franchise in Southern Africa. Cambridge Historical Journal, 11 (1): 93-113.