Archive for the ‘History’ Category

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The silence of the wolves

Published by peter on 2013-03-02 in Decision theory and History. 0 Comments

The tenth anniversary of the second Iraq War being upon us, there is naturally lots of commentary and coal-raking. Some of this involves re-writing of history.  For example, many of those who participated in the February 2003 demonstrations against the war seem to have forgotten that, in Britain, they were not able to convince a majority of MPs to vote against the House of Commons resolution supporting invasion, as Norm rightly notes.  However,  many then on the other side too seem to have forgotten something:  that the leaders of the West – President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Prime Ministers Blair and Howard – had to be dragged by the public, kicking and screaming and much against their will, to explain their decision to invade Iraq to their own citizens.
World-wide demonstrations against the war took place on Saturday 15 February 2003.    Only on that day itself did Tony Blair, in a speech in Glasgow, first present in public his arguments in favour of military action.   Only on 25 February 2003 – ten days after those massive street protests – did Tony Blair finally agree to a House of Commons debate on the issue.  Donald Rumsfeld was not able or not willing to provide a convincing justification to even the Foreign Minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer (“You have to make the case!”, Fischer said to Rumsfeld, in English, in the midst of  a speech in German, in public, at a security conference in Munich, 9 February 2003, video here.)  And most notoriously of all, the Australian Senate, for the first and only time in its (then) 102-year history passed on 5 February 2003 a censure motion against the Government and a vote  of no confidence in the Prime Minister John Howard, for their failure to provide any case at all for the Government’s support of the invasion.
Yet we now know that the decision by the Bush administration to invade Iraq had most probably been made by August 2002, and the question of invasion had been the focus of intense and loud public argument in every house and pub and office in the western world for at least three months.  The silence of our leaders was so noticeable that, at the time, I speculated whether there were other good reasons for that silence, beside cowardice or malfeasance (blog post of 2003-02-14).  We still don’t know for certain why no decision-maker would make their case public, but I suspect now it was because the case was built on decision-making about potential events with small probabilities but with catastrophic consequences:  IF Saddam Hussein acquired  weapons of mass destruction AND IF he used them against the West, the results would be far worse than even 9/11.    Although the probabilities of these conditions being true were judged to be very small, the consequences of them being true would be so serious that the conditions had to be precluded from happening, at all costs.  This, to me, would have been a compelling argument, had it ever been made in public.
Now our press carry stories of Tony Blair saying he had “long since given up trying to persuade people it was the right decision.”   For goodness sake, he hardly even tried!   Here is Andrew Rawnsley writing in The Observer on 14 September 2003:

Mr Blair is being punished not because he did the wrong thing, but because he went about it the wrong way. The Prime Minister didn’t trust the British people to follow the moral argument for dealing with Saddam. This mistrust in them they now reciprocate back to him.  For that, Tony Blair has only himself to blame.”

Scotland under cyber attack?

Published by peter on 2013-02-03 in Cyber security, History and Politics. 0 Comments

In the past, global empires such as those of Rome or Britain or France could face attacks from anywhere across the empire.   Britain, for instance, fought Imperial wars in Southern Africa and Afghanistan.   The Internet takes us back to that situation – any country, no matter how small or obscure, potentially faces cyber espionage or incursions or attacks from people anywhere in the world.   Ask Estonia or Denmark, both small countries that came under attack from cyber attackers.
The Roman Empire never did manage to subdue the belligerent peoples in what is now Scotland.   How ironic, then, that Scots nationalists seem not to have realized that an independent nation will need to defend itself from global attack.   MP Rory Stewart has reminded them, asking some hard, clear-light-of-day, questions about the romantic, candle-lit, vision of Scottish independence.   Questioning Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s Deputy First Minister, who was appearing before the UK House of Commons Committee on Foreign Affairs, Stewart asked about independent Scotland’s plans for intelligence and security:

Sturgeon came under repeated pressure from the Tory MP for Penrith and the Border, Rory Stewart, a former army officer and Foreign Office diplomat, to explain how an independent Scotland would build, equip, train and fund its own spying and security services.
Stewart said the UK’s current annual spying and security budget did not include the total historic costs of building and equipping its intelligence services, from setting up secure intelligence units in overseas embassies, training its agents, to building and equipping GCHQ.
It would cost billions, he said, to set up the secure communications Scotland needed for its intelligence agencies. For instance, if an independent Scotland wanted to have the same number of embassies overseas as Ireland, which has 97, or Finland, which has 93, it would cost hundreds of millions to equip them.”

Eric the Red

Published by peter on 2012-12-23 in History and Politics. Closed

Journalist Neal Ascherson recounts his first encounter with historian Eric Hobsbawm, who publicly insulted him as a new undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge in the early 1950s before Hobsbawm apparently even knew his name:

I lurched up a dark wooden stairway into a room full of chattering, laughing young men (no women, I noticed) and was handed more wine. Presently a lean, bespectacled man with fairish hair came over to me, with a few students drifting up behind him. One of them I vaguely recognised, an American, but I didn’t know his name.
Eric inspected me. A specimen, indeed.
“What’s that medal affair you’re wearing?”
“It’s my national service campaign medal. For active service in the Malayan emergency.”
Eric pulled back and took another look at me. Then he said, very sharply but without violence: “Malaya? You should be ashamed to be wearing that.”
I don’t think I said anything at all. I remember noticing the students around us, round-eyed with shock. Then I left the room, stumbling back down the dusky stairs, and out into the huge court where it was beginning to rain.

And the American?  Daniel Ellsberg!  Of course it was.  Of course.
I am reminded of that old joke about time being God’s way of preventing everything happening at once, while space is His way of preventing everything happening at Cambridge.

Memory

Published by peter on 2012-12-10 in Heroes, History and Politics. 0 Comments

We keep books because they are personal souvenirs of the past – physical reminders of the feelings we had while reading them.  The same goes for concert programs and tickets for sporting events, which many people keep.     As more of our life goes online, we risk losing such souvenirs.  Only the online record itself may provide a long-term reminder of something, or someone.
On the other hand, the web makes it vastly easier to bring to wide attention something or someone who should be remembered.  In the early days of photography, photographers recorded memorable events, such as weddings and Presidential inaugurations.  Susan Sontag noticed that something changed as photography ceased to be only done by professionals and became a democratic pastime: the relationship between events and photographs switched.  Now events were memorable (and remembered) precisely because they had been photographed.   The web is effecting the same reversal, I believe.
I can record a person of great influence on my life, who would otherwise be entirely forgotten to history, or people whom I never met, but whose words and actions have affected mine, for example, the activist-poets Vadim Delone, or Robert Southwell.  I can record people who think differently to the verbal paradigm which so dominates contemporary western culture – the  matherati, say, or musical thinkers.   I can even use the Web to find and trace the genealogy of some of my own musical thinking, say, and then record for posterity these cross-generational networks of connections.  Since so much of written history is by definition written by people au fait with language-based thought, it is particularly important that minority, non-language thinkers are not forgotten. (Many more people know, for instance, of the writers of Japanese haiku poetry in the Edo period than do of the ordinary people who solved temple geometry problems, the Sangaku.)
The souvenirs I mention above are mostly personal, perhaps of little interest to anyone else.  The same became true of photographs, early in their adoption.  The Web also lets us record for posterity events and people of much wider significance.   Perhaps the best recent example I know is Normblog’s admirable and riveting series of Holocaust stories, Figures from a Dark Time.  Apparently not everyone agrees that this series is worth doing.  Let me add my strong opinion that this recording is both necessary and important, and we should all be very grateful for Norm’s efforts.  After 9/11, the New York Times published short obituaries of every person killed in the attack.    Although it may be too late, we should be aiming for the same in remembering the Holocaust.

Music and Physics on the Strand

Published by peter on 2012-10-19 in History, Music and Science. 0 Comments

The Music Shop at no. 436 Strand

Monday 22 October 2012, 6.00pm-7.30pm
Venue: King’s College London
Strand Building 2:39 (English Seminar Room)
Introduced by Clare Pettitt
“From the age of fourteen until his late teens, Charles Wheatstone worked in his uncle’s musical instrument shop on the Strand, modifying instruments and conducting experiments in acoustics at the back of the shop until he left to take up a scientific career, later moving down the road to become Professor of Experimental Philosophy at King’s College London and inventing the stereoscope, improving the concertina (Wheatstone’s musical instrument makers is still a going concern and makes concertinas) and inventing, with Cooke, the telegraph. When he was only 19 years old in September 1821, Wheatstone caused quite a sensation by inventing and exhibiting the ‘Enchanted Lyre or Aconcryptophone’ at his father’s music school/shop on Pall Mall and subsequently at the Adelaide Gallery of Practical Science on the Strand.
This session will concentrate on the crossover between musical, commercial and scientific culture and will ask whether it is possible to map the multiple utility of spaces on the Strand (shops which are schools which are galleries which are scientific workshops etc.) onto the radical rearrangement of the senses in this period which made new technologies of seeing, hearing and communication possible.”
[Text from here, where references and suggestions for further reading may also be found.]

The fungus of Wagner

Published by peter on 2012-09-29 in History and Music. 0 Comments

Composer Thomas Ades in an interview with Tom Service:

Ades:  It’s too psychological.  I’m thinking of The Ring more than Tristan, there’s an awful lot of psychology in it which I find tedious. And naive, in a sort of superficial way. I mean, so much of Parsifal is dramatically absurd, which would be fine if the music was aware of the absurdity, but it is as if the whole piece is drugged and we all have to pretend that it’s not entirely ridiculous. And it seems to me that a country that can take a character as funny as Kundry seriously, this woman who sleeps for aeons and is only woken up by this horrible chord, a country that can seriously believe in anything like Parsifal without laughing, was bound to get into serious trouble.
Service:  You’re obviously not convinced by the music?
Ades: I don’t find Wagner’s an organic, necessary art. Wagner’s music is fungal. I think Wagner is a fungus. It’s a sort of unnatural growth. It’s parasitic in a sense – on its models, on its material. His material doesn’t grow symphonically – it doesn’t grow through a musical logic – it grows parasitically. It has a laboratory atmosphere.
 

You have to make the case!

Published by peter on 2012-08-16 in Decision theory, History and Politics. 0 Comments

Former conservative Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (who, by the by, has long been an admirer of Ayn Rand), together with former Secretary of the Australian Commonwealth Department for Defence, Paul Barratt, and former Australian Defence Forces Chief, General Peter Gration, has called for a public inquiry regarding the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.   As I noted at the time, what was truly remarkable was the complete unwillingness of any of the principal decision-makers  – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair or Howard – to publicly justify their decision, a decision taken before August 2002, until very late in the day.    So severe was this reticence on John Howard’s part that the Australian Senate – for the first and so far only time in its history – passed a censure  motion against the Prime Minister for his refusal to explain or justify his decision.  It seems that Fraser, Barratt, Gration, et al., are still waiting for those particular dogs to bark.
As I said at the time, there could be good and compelling reasons for a Government to not publicly justify a military decision.  If so, one would have expected the principals at least to explain the reasons for their reticence to other friendly Governments, even if only in private.  It is noteworthy then to recall Joschka Fischer’s public beration of Donald Rumsfeld:  “You have to make the case!” (video here).   Even the German Foreign Minister, it seems, could not be trusted by the decision-makers with either an explanation of the invasion decision or an explanation as to why no explanation could be given.  After all this time of dogs still quiet, one is led increasingly to the conclusion that the real reason for the decision was something that ill-behooved or shamed the decision-makers.

Recent reading 5

Published by peter on 2012-08-01 in Books, Computer Science, Concats, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Music, Politics and Recent Reading. 0 Comments

A list, sometimes annotated, of books recently read:

  • Richard Bassett [2012]: Hitler’s Spy Chief. New York: Pegasus. A biography of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. This book appears to be a reissue (also revised?) of a book first published in 2005. The subject and argument of the book are fascinating, but sadly this is not matched by the writing, which is just appalling.

    The first problem is with the status of the book. The inside cover pages say “copyright 2011”, and “First Pegasus Books hardcover edition 2012”, yet the Acknowledgements section is dated 2004. Various references to contemporary events throughout the book also indicate a date of writing of around 2003 or so. The front section contains a “Preface to the American Edition” which is undated, but cites letters written in 2008 and 2009. The author’s sloppiness with dates is manifest throughout the book, and it is often very hard for a reader to determine exactly which year events being described actually happened.

    A further great sloppiness concerns the use of names – many people, like citizens of Indonesia, appear only to have surnames. Later references will often find a first name attached to the surname – is this the same person, one wonders? It is as if the author assumes we know as much as he seems to know about minor Nazi officials, and temporary clerks in MI6.

    The book actually reads like the author’s narrative notes for a book rather than the book itself, with much background information missing or assumed to be known by the reader. Is this his first draft perhaps, ready for editing? How could one write on the topic of German foreign intelligence in WW II without discussion of the XX Committee, for example? Admittedly, the author does make one single reference to this operation (on page 280, out of 296 pages of text), but with no explanation of what the committee was doing or an evaluation of its work, and not even a listing in the index. And given the author’s argument that Canaris was an internal opponent of Hitler from before the start of WW II, then an analysis of the alleged success of the XX operations in outwitting Nazi intelligence is surely needed here. Was Canaris complicit in these operations, for example? Especially if, as the author believes, Canaris met with his British opposite number, Sir Stewart Menzies, during WW II.

    And like a person too eager to please, the author’s sentences run on and on and on, with clause after subordinate clause, each introducing a new topic or change or direction, or dropping yet another name, in some drunken word association game. Where were the editors when this book was submitted? On vacation? On strike? Reading the book requires a reader to fight past the author’s appalling prose style to reach the interesting content. Sadly, Admiral Canaris still awaits a good English-language biography.

    The book makes a very strong claim, which is not supported by the citation given by Bassett. On page 167, we read:

    “in Finland where the British forces sent to help the Finns against the Soviets in 1940 were actually assisted in their passage by the Germans. German air and land forces were instructed not to interfere with the progress of these British forces.”

    For this very bold claim, Bassett cites Frederick Winterbotham, The Nazi Connection, p. 164 (London 1978). But Winterbotham’s book seems to have nothing about the Winter War. Finland is not even in the index.

    Basset also cites Winterbotham for a claim that Luftwaffe General Milch visited the Royal Air Force in Britain before the war. However, none of the pages of Winterbotham’s book which mention Milch say this.

  • Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman [2012]:  Spies Against Armageddon:  Inside Israel’s Secret Wars. Levant Books.
  • Milton Bearden and James Risen [2004]: The Main Enemy:  The Insider Story of the CIA’s Final Showdown with the KGB.  Presidio Press.
  • Natalie Dykstra [2012]:  Clover Adams:  A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.   An intelligent and sympathetic life of Marian (“Clover”) Hooper Adams (1843-1885), pioneer of art photography, wife of Henry Adams, and a daughter of transcendentalist poet, Ellen Sturgis Hooper.   She was a friend and muse to Henry James, and a distant relative of the step-family of George Santayana.
  • Archie Brown [2010]:  The Rise and Fall of Communism.  Vintage.
  • James Douglass [2008]:   JFK and the Unspeakable:  Why he Died and Why it Matters. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.
  • Sidney Ploss [2009]:  The Roots of Perestroika:  The Soviet Breakdown in Historical Context. McFarland and Company.
  • David Maraniss [2012]:  Barack Obama:  The Story.  Simon and Schuster.
  • Ben MacIntyre [2012]: Double Cross:  The True Story of the D-Day Spies.  London: Bloomsbury. Reviewed here.
  • Colin Eatock [2009]: Mendelssohn and Victorian England.  London: Ashgate.  A detailed and comprehensive account of Mendelssohn’s visits to England (and his one visit to Scotland), and his activities, musical and other, while there.
  • George Dyson [2012]:  Turing’s Cathedral:  The Origins of the Digital Universe.  Allen Lane.   A fascinating account of the involvement of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, NJ, in the early development of scientific computing, led by that larger-than-life character, Johnnie von Neumann.
  • Gordon Brook-Shepherd [1988]: The Storm Birds:  Soviet Post-War Defectors.  Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
  • Neil Sheehan [2010]:  A Fiery Peace in a Cold War:  Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon. Vintage Books.  A fascinating history of the US inter-continental ballistic missile program in the 1950s, told through a biography of one of its parents, USAF General Bennie Schriever.    It is easy to forget how much practical expertise was needed for successful missile and satellite launches, as with any new and complex technology.   As a consequence, we forget how few of the early test launch attempts were successful.  The Vanguard 3 rocket, for example, launched just 3 satellites out of 11 attempts between December 1957 and September 1959. (Vanguard was a USN project.)

Computing in Cottonopolis

Published by peter on 2012-07-07 in Computer technology and History. 0 Comments

A 1951 article about the Manchester computer, reprinted in The Guardian today.

To think of two twelve-figure numbers and write them down and then to multiply them together would involve considerable mental effort for many people, and could scarcely be done in much under a quarter of an hour. A machine will be officially “opened” at Manchester University on Monday which does this sort of calculation 320 times a second. Provisionally named “Madam” – from the initials of Manchester Automatic Digital Machine and because of certain unpredictable tendencies – it is a high-speed electronic computer built for the University Mathematics Department, and paid for by a Government grant. It is an improved version of a prototype developed by Professor F. C. Newman and Dr. T. Kilburn of the Electrical Engineering Department, and Professor M. A. Newman and Mr. A. Turing, of the Mathematics Department.
The practical applications of the machine are great and varied, and it is, of course, of greatest use where long, repetitive calculations are involved, some of which would probably be impossible without its aid.  There are also commercial possibilities as yet unexplored relating to accountancy and wage departments. It is significant that one of the largest catering firms in the country has recently installed a similar machine, which may replace the work of hundreds of clerks. Will it perhaps solve the problems of redundancy it may create? Large-scale private or national statistics can be prepared in a far more up-to-date form, in some cases in a matter of weeks rather than years. Finally, of course, there are such sidelines as teaching the machine to play chess or bridge.
There are two features that might be mentioned: the magnetic drum for storing permanent information and the cathode-ray tubes for storing information produced in the course of a calculation. These have added immensely to the “memory” of such machines. The magnetic drum will hold 650,000 binary digits and each of the eight cathode-tubes sixty-four twenty-digit numbers. It will add up 500 numbers before you could say “addition”, and it could work out in half a day the logarithmic tables which took Napier and Briggs almost a lifetime.
It is an alarming machine, in fact. A tool like a plough is friendly and intelligible, but this reduction to absurdity of mental arithmetic is another matter. Those associated with the machine stress that what it can do depends on the “programme” fed to it. Nobody knows what Manchester’s machine will be able to do, and Mr. Turing said to-day that, although it will be used on problems of pure mathematics, the main idea is to investigate the possibilities and theory of such machines.  In an article in “Mind” six months ago, Mr. Turing seemed to come to the conclusion that eventually digital computers would be able to do something akin to “thinking” and also discussed the possibilities of educating a “child-machine.”  One feels that whatever “Madam” can do she will do it for Mr. Turing.

The government grant mentioned in paragraph 1 was awarded to the pure mathematician Max Newman because of his secret cryptographic work at Bletchley Park during WW II.   Because of that work, he knew Turing and his capabilities very well, and recruited him to Manchester to work on the project.   It is interesting that even in a newspaper article published in 1951 mention was made of machines playing chess.
An earlier post on long-lived memories of Alan Turing is here.  Some information about Turing’s death is here, including his mother’s theory that his death by poison was accidental, occurring while he attempted to silver-plate a spoon.
 

Teachers

Published by peter on 2012-06-16 in History. 0 Comments

I previously listed some of my teachers and lecturers whose influence on me I was aware of, here. I thought it good to have a more complete list (as complete as memory allows), which I include here:

Robert Bartels, Marcus Bazley, Leo Birsen (1902-1992), Trevor Boyle (ca. 1940-ca. 1973), Sr. Claver Butler RSM (ca. 1930-2009), Burgess Cameron (1922-2020), Sr. Clare Castle RSM (ca. 1920-ca. 2000), David Chant, Brenton Clarke, John Coates (1945-2022), John Collins, Barry Cooke (1923-1990), William Coppel, Jules Culot, Rebecca Cuthbertson, Bro. Clive Davis FMS, Jeremy Davis (1942-2023), Tom Donaldson (1945-2006), Gary Dunbier, Sol Encel (1925-2010), Felix Fabryczny de Leiris, Claudio Forcada, Richard Gill (1941-2018), Peter Hall AO (1951-2016), Rachel Harland, Sr. Jennifer Hartley RSM, Chip Heathcote (1931-2016), Sr. Columbanus Hennigan RSM (ca. 1920-ca. 1990), Ken Holloway, Algy Howe, John Hutchinson, Sleeba John, Brian Kearney (ca. 1935- ca.1975), Margaret Keetles, Genevieve Lloyd, John Logan (1940-1998), Rick Loy, Joseph Lynch, Robert Marks, Edward Martineau, Grant McCall (1943-2023), Nancy McDougall (ca. 1920-ca. 1990), Colin Meale (1926-1992), David Midgley, Roger Miles, John Morgan, Lindsay Morley, Leopoldo Mugnai, Des Nicholls, Terry O’Neill, Jean-Paul Orr, Jim Penberthy (1917-1999), Bryan Pickard, J. Priestley, Malcolm Rennie (1940-1980), John Ritchie (1941-2006), John Roberts, Geoffrey Rossiter (1916-2004), Eugene Seneta, Gisela Soares, Neville Smythe, Brian Stacey (1946-1996), Peter Swan, James Taylor, Deane Terrell, Paul Thom, Frank Torpie (1934-1989), Pravin Trivedi, Neil Trudinger, David Urquhart-Jones, Martin Ward, Frederick Wedd (1890-1972), Gary Whale (1943-2019), Ted Wheelwright (1921-2007), Ian Wilkinson, Bro. Hubert Williams FMS, Paul Winer, Robert Wood, and Alkiviadis Zalavras.