All posts filed under: history and politics

Privatizing war

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I recently interviewed Stephen Armstrong for Faber about his new book, War plc. The book takes the reader into the world of the private security companies, which have mushroomed in the last few years to the extent that the military effort in Afghanistan and Iraq would be impossible without them. The development is not accidental. To get a sense of the ideological drive that lies behind the emergence of these private companies on the battlefield, here is an extract from an extraordinary speech (quoted in Stephen’s book) which US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave the day before 9/11: “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating 5 year plans. From a single capital it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defence of the United States and …

What’s the big idea?

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In May I made a number of recordings for this year’s Bristol Festival of Ideas, a series of very popular events which brought some high-powered thinkers to the city to stimulate discussion on subjects as diverse as the legacy of ’68 to why the human brain is not quite ‘fit for purpose’. I’m editing my interviews now for a series of podcasts sponsored by The Philosophers’ Magazine, which will be appearing over the next few months. The first one is downloadable now from iTunes here.

15. The Big Parade with Mary Beard

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“I’m interested in saying, look, how can you challenge the Asterix-and-the-Romans kind of image that we tend to have of Rome? We are determined to turn a blind eye to Roman subtlety, humour and sophistication because the Romans do a very good job for us of being bridge-builders and thugs. The Greeks are sophisticated guys who go round thinking about the meaning of life, and the Romans conquer people. And those kinds of symbols of difference are terribly convenient for modern culture to use, as you can see if you look at how Rome appears in movies.” I’ve recently been in Cambridge to talk to Professor Mary Beard about her radical re-evaluation of one of ancient Rome’s quintessential rituals – the triumph. There are few images more evocative of ancient Rome than the triumph. It’s one of the favourite set-pieces of countless “sword-and-sandal” epics. To be awarded a triumph was the greatest accolade for a victorious Roman general. He would be drawn through the city’s streets, dressed as a god and surrounded by his raucous …

The bomb-hunters of Laos

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“It’s a very surreal place… children have grown up with bomb scrap around them. So when they see bomb scrap, they don’t perceive any danger. It’s all around you.The houses are made of bombs. It’s piled up by the side of the roads. It’s part of the fabric of life.” I’ve just completed a first podcast for the English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, the monthly French paper which now exists in many foreign-language editions and publishes in-depth reports on the political, social and cultural situation around the world. My guest in this first LMD podcast is Angela Robson, who used to work with Amnesty International, and is now a writer and journalist who broadcasts frequently on the BBC. Angela recently visited Laos, the small land-locked country in S.E. Asia, ahead of the Dublin conference to discuss an international cluster-bomb ban. Though few people in the west know much about Laos, it is the country which has suffered the heaviest bombing of any nation on Earth. More than Japan and Germany in the Second World …

‘Places can’t stand open’

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“In politics there’s a constant endeavour to expose hypocrisy. Because people don’t like hypocrisy, it’s a very useful weapon to attack an opponent. But the exposure of hypocrisy – the anti-hypocritical movement – doesn’t drive hypocrisy out of politics. It doesn’t even diminish the amount of hypocrisy that there is. If anything it just increases it.” I was in Cambridge last week to interview David Runciman about his new book, Political Hypocrisy, for Princeton University Press. You can listen to the PUP podcast by clicking here (for iTunes) or here (for PUP site). The title of this post is a quote from one of the people David discusses in his book, the eighteenth-century writer, Bernard Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, which was thought by his contemporaries to be one of the wickedest books of his day on account of the cool eye with which its author regards the hypocrisy of his time. According to Mandeville, the difficulty of waiting for politicians to come along who bear not the slightest taint of hypocrisy, …

14. The Mighty Handful and more

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“In Russian music you have a very different portrayal of Russia [from the one you find in literature], which has very strong rhythms, very festive images. It’s very bright, very colourful, very, very different from the melancholy Russian soul.” Writing of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar after its premiere in 1836, one Russian critic boldly predicted that ‘Europe will be amazed’. Surely Europeans would now want to ‘take advantage of the new ideas developed by our maestro’? Yet this opera, which is regarded as the very foundation of Russian music in its home country, is little known abroad, its composer (the ‘great father of Russian music’) merely another name in the long list of half-neglected nineteenth-century Russian composers. Marina Frolova-Walker, a Russian-born musicologist now based in Cambridge, set out to do something much more ambitious than explain the neglect of certain Russian composers. She wanted to examine the whole notion of ‘Russianness’ in Russian music, a story which starts with Glinka. What did Russianness consist of? How did it come about? What changing …

12. A Chinese character

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“I think the burning question is: we think of printing as having revolutionized intellectual life in Europe, how come it doesn’t appear to have revolutionized intellectual life in China? There’s no great fanfare when it arrives. It seems to creep in and people don’t talk about it much for quite a long time. That was the problem I was trying to address overall.” This week I’ve been at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to see Professor of East Asian History, Tim Barrett. It was the title of Tim’s recent book – The Woman Who Discovered Printing – which made me keen to meet him. After all, most of us have grown up with the idea that printing was invented in medieval Germany by Gutenberg. In fact, Tim’s book shows that printing was already well-established in China many centuries before Gutenberg, and that Europeans had probably seen eastern wood-block type at a period when they were too far behind China technologically speaking to make use of it. Perhaps our difficulty in the …

10. Fleeing Hitler – the story of the Paris exodus

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On 14 June 1940 German tanks swept into Paris. That the city would fall to the Nazis was by then a foregone conclusion; it had been declared an ‘open city’ the day before. In other words, it would put up no resistance against the invaders. The government had already packed up and left. By 14 June, four-fifths of Parisians had also fled the city, leaving it looking as though it had been stricken by some medieval disaster such as a great plague. Little more than a week later Hitler would make a propaganda visit to Paris and have his picture taken beneath the Eiffel Tower. Yet, despite the magnitude of the exodus in which literally millions of people took to the roads in any form of transport they could find, including push-carts and bicycles, it has been little written about by professional historians, as though it has been crowded out by the attention given to the Vichy regime, the resistance, and the occupation. Hanna Diamond‘s new book, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (OUP) sets out to …

9. Talking about animals

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‘As soon as humans make images, they make them about humans and they make them about animals and the relationship between them.’ My guest on this week’s programme is Martin Kemp, Professor of the History of Art at Oxford, whose latest book, The Human Animal is a rich and thought-provoking study of the relationship between the human and the animal worlds as reflected in art and science. It is one of those books which make you look at the world in a different way after you close it. It is full of examples of how throughout history we have drawn (often unflattering) comparisons between humans and animals, and it makes you realize that anthropomorphized animals are still all around us – in adverts, political cartoons, children’s literature – and the language of animal comparisons still infuses our everyday speech (from politicians crying ‘crocodile tears’, to a child’s taunt of ‘scaredy cat’ to the media branding a thug an ‘animal’ or a ‘beast’). When we reach for animal comparisons, we seem to be asking what it …

8. A Philosopher in Everytown

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Philosophy can seem the most cerebral and abstract of disciplines. So what would happen if a philosopher stepped out of his study and ’embedded’ himself in an ordinary (but unfamiliar) community in his own country and tried to work out whether the English people have anything which could reasonably be called a philosophy? That’s exactly the challenge that Julian Baggini set himself in 2005, when he left his comfort zone in Bristol and moved to Rotherham, which, it turns out, is as typical as you can hope to find of how the English live now. We met this month to coincide with the paperback publication of his account of his sojourn, Everytown, and I asked him how his assumptions about what he would find had matched up to reality. Here’s the list he made as he travelled north: ‘On the train, I jotted down a list of values and characteristics I expected to find, making no attempt to mask my prejudices. I thought there would be toleration for difference, but no real love for it, …