Here and there – Two Nationalists Compared

01/09/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

But of course there are vast differences between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. Hitler came to power with brownshirts and only the semblance of legality. He trashed the constitution and put his secret police in black shirts. He set out to rule the world and to murder a race. He betrayed his nation and left it a smoking rubble. Trump will do no such things. But the two men still have a lot in common.

Both call themselves ‘nationalists’. This celebration of the home team leads to a perverted kind of ‘patriotism’ and to nativism – a preference for home grown people over imports. This is a curious result in a migrant nation. It leads to conflict and division at home and a loss of respect abroad.

Few educated people in the West call themselves ‘nationalists’. Those who have failed in life grab their nationalism with both hands. If they have nothing else, they have their birth certificate. They must resist their prize asset being soiled by others – like Muslims, or migrants, or refugees. The losers among us also need to have someone to look down upon.

They want war with those they call the ‘elite’. That weasel term here means those who have won life’s glittering prizes of wealth and power. Since it’s the losers against the winners, we should not be surprised if the results aren’t pretty. There is not much point in talking about ‘populism’. That’s just a loose label for what follows.

Both leaders came to power on the back of the failure of the international economic order. For Hitler, it was the Crash of 1929 and the Depression. For Trump it was the Great Financial Crisis. Both events undermined confidence in the status quo and created a giant reservoir of hurt below and vulnerability above.

Both leaders appealed to their people who had been most hurt by these world events. Creating a sense of massive injustice was simple. The world system hadn’t just failed – it was rotten and evil.

And with this sense of injustice came self-righteousness. The mob looked like the sans–culottes in Paris in 1793. They had lost out because of the crimes of others, and they were in no mood to leave vengeance to God.

Both leaders promised their followers that they would utterly cast out the old order. They would cleanse the stables and restore the nation to the glory of a largely imaginary past.

Their thinking on how they might do this is equally obscure. Mein Kampf says that Hitler stood for nationalism, hate, and the destruction of the Jews. There is little else left in these ravings. Trump doesn’t stand for anything at all. His self-love is so consuming that there’s no room for any logical policy.

Trump will do or say anything to get power. That’s all that matters. A ‘policy’ could only stand in his way. He and his followers are destroyers not builders. It’s not what they’re for that matters, it’s what they’re against.

Both leaders don’t just disregard truth – they look with contempt on those who respect it. Their followers happily join them in their own world. The assembly looks like a religious cult with its own language, rites and values, all taken on faith alone.

Trump is not out to trash the Constitution, but he shamelessly shows his ignorance of the rule of law – and his disdain of it. He routinely scorns the judiciary and Congress. He has now pardoned a government officer found guilty of contempt for abusing the constitutional rights of others. This crook routinely sneered at racially different people. He looks like a true fascist. Trump likes him, and rewards him. The world looks on at the old spectre of that frontier love of violence and lawlessness.

Trump stands for all that others fear in America, but he puts more value on throwing a scrap of meat to his crowd than on his sworn task of maintaining the constitution. In this he resembles Nero and the circus, or Pontius Pilate and Barabbas. Of one thing we may be sure – neither God nor the oath means anything to Trump. His ego leaves no room for either.

Trump, too, seeks to rule in part by force and fear. He showed his powers of intimidation in a shameful episode – the self-abasement of his ministers at that first North Korean styled cabinet meeting. People outside the U S again looked on in horror. This happened in a nation that had given the world Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.

Both leaders can turn viciously on people they think have let them down, including bunnies who have been loyal to them. But Hitler maintained his key supporters for twelve years. Trump has discarded most of his in eight months. The one thing you mustn’t do with Trump is to hug the spotlight.

Both leaders brought their own scapegoats. Hitler had the Jews and the banks. Trump has Muslims, migrants, international trade, and that hold-all of the politically inane – ‘political correctness’. Neither leader ever said ‘sorry’ in his life, and because neither can do any wrong, each finds scapegoats to cover for his mistakes.

They both know about propaganda. The American Constitution and press make the Goebbels model unavailable in the U S. Trump simply brands any statement he doesn’t like as ‘fake news’. That’s enough for the faithful. Why interrupt the dream? And Trump has something Goebbels didn’t – the fantastic reach of Twitter.

Both leaders had trouble with ratbags at the bottom of their base. Hitler murdered a lot of his in the Night of the Long Knives. Trump does not have that option. Hitler was in a murderous class of his own on race, but America has entered a new dark age on the world stage when Trump reneged on his denial of his dregs.

Americans now have to live with the nightmare that they have elected a president who cannot unequivocally repudiate his Nazi and KKK supporters. Trump sees ‘very fine people’ among them. They in turn are jubilant and very grateful to their president. Has America ever stood so low in the world – even during the agony of Nixon and Watergate?

Both leaders seek a kind of religious aura. They demand that their followers give them faith. This notion of faith is vital. The followers must have faith to withstand all opposition. It also helps them reject any evidence against the leader. Visceral politics lives on faith. It’s something that you pledge in your guts. It is by definition irrational. People like Hitler or Trump can’t bear rational analysis.

Both leaders also put great value on personal loyalty. That is what cost the Wehrmacht so dearly with Hitler. The generals had sold their soul, and given up their selves.

Both leaders are at their happiest when they are ranting to their adoring ‘base’. Whether either believes any part of their rant is a matter for conjecture or God. Some independent observers saw glimpses of Germany in 1933 in Trump at Phoenix. Trump there looked like he may have studied the Führer. You get someone to work the crowd and then come on – and stand silent. Hitler would let the tension build, like a guileful lover. But he was much better at modulating his pace than Trump.

Hitler was a lot more astute than Trump. Trump just can’t help himself when the spots go on him. He soaks up the applause while clapping himself, like a spoiled child being commended over nothing. If only it could last forever, and if only he didn’t have to face Congress, judges, and journalists – or the facts. At least Hitler knew what the word ‘leader’ entails; Trump has no idea.

Both Hitler and Trump did all they could to warn the whole world of their unfitness for office, but their bond with the faithful is unbreakable. It derives from an unsettling communion between people who are desperate in different ways. The leaders are desperate for power, and they will say and do anything to get it. The faithful are desperate for vengeance, and they will give up almost anything to get a leader who can deliver it. What you then get is a kind of Faustian pact, where people on both sides burn their bridges.

The upshot is that the followers cannot believe that their chosen champion could betray them. Their leader can do no wrong. They have surrendered the right to say otherwise. The Germans believed this to the end, even when it should have been obvious that Hitler was betraying them.

With his health care and tax policies, Trump has signalled that he will betray his followers. He will strip them of benefits to give tax cuts to his promoters. But the mob doesn’t see this. They don’t want to see it. They have to believe that their ‘redeemer liveth’.

What, then, do we have? President Obama is a man of intellect and integrity. Trump has neither. Obama gave the nation health care and sought to extricate it from Afghanistan. Trump promised to repeal health care and to get out of Afghanistan. He has broken both promises. He has now committed his country to an indefinite participation in a war it cannot win – in a world that no longer respects America. Was ever a nation’s fall from grace so swift and so complete?

There is one more difference between Hitler and Trump. Hitler fought for Germany through the worst war the world has seen. He was rejected for command, but there was no doubting his courage under fire. He was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class.

There was never any risk of Trump taking up arms for his country. That was as likely as his paying his fair share of taxes. The suggestion that Donald George Trump may be a true American patriot is just another hideous untruth in a life made up of moonshine. The permanently spoiled brat called Donald Trump is a disaster for America and the world.

Why history? 6

25/08/201725/08/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

INTERLUDE: CIVILISATION?

The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are fundamental to what we call ‘western civilisation’. The Greeks knew none of it. Nor did Rome until it was too late. Ancient religion was not about love. As a result, the ancients look to us to be hard-hearted, to be missing something. Aristotle said that ‘it would be strange if one were to say that he loved Zeus’. It would truly have been madness – for a Greek or a Roman.

The Greeks did not see mankind as sinners requiring redemption; nor did they see people trying to behave according to their conscience. Divine favour was won through ritual, by paying formal cult. The most important form of cult was the sacrifice, and the most important of those was the blood sacrifice. (Our word ‘sacrifice’ comes from two Latin words meaning ‘make holy’.)

In imperial Rome, the poet Juvenal said that ‘the public has long since cast off its cares; the people that once bestowed … all else, now… longs eagerly for just two things: bread and circuses.’ In one show put on by Claudius, 19,000 condemned prisoners manned ships for a staged naval battle. They saluted Claudius: ‘Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you.’ The audience got a say in whether the loser lived or died. The defeated would then kneel with his hands behind his back or clasping the legs of the victor and ‘take the iron’ when the crowd would yell ‘he has it!’ It sounds rather like a bull-fight. Christians were thrown to the lions out of fear – that the local gods may have been offended and might retaliate. In the less vicious republic, a rebellion of slaves was answered by crucifying 6000 of them on the Appian Way.

Ancient Greece and Rome were by our standards barbaric. Barbarism is the reverse of civilisation. Their constitutional structures were also hopelessly uncivilised. The inability of Greek city-states to live with each other led to their demise. The Romans never developed a decent policy for succession for their rulers. As a result, very few died in their bed. The Empire was run in the way that the SS would have run the Reich after Hitler.

Why then do people say that the ancients or, for that matter, the medieval world, were civilised?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘civilize’ as ‘to make civil; to bring out of a state of barbarism, to instruct in the arts of life; to enlighten and refine’. People who extol ancient Greece and Rome as ‘civilised’ presumably use the word in this final sense. They see ‘enlightenment’ and ‘refinement’ as being enough to outweigh the barbarity of slavery, empire and their unholy religions. They see civilisation even though neither Greece nor Rome had then been blessed with the respect for the dignity of each human life which is elemental to our concept of ‘civilisation’. Unlike Hamlet, the ancients had not heard the beautiful notion ‘that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’ They could not have understood Hamlet’s agony about ordained revenge.

In his book, Civilisation, Kenneth Clark said that he didn’t know what ‘civilisation’ was. He then compared a tribal African mask to a sculpture of the Apollo of the Belvedere of the 4^th century BC. He said ‘I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation from the mask’. He acknowledged that ‘there was plenty of superstition and cruelty in the Graeco-Roman world’ but said that mankind had at times sought to ‘approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection – reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium’. There are at least three issues here.

First, most people could not give a hoot about and do not appreciate the kinds of ‘enlightenment’ or ‘refinement’ referred to; indeed, most people in a pub would have as much trouble in following what Clark was saying as I do.

Next the relative terms are in any event very variable. If I were choosing art for my home or place of work, I would much prefer the African mask to the Apollo; but, then, I like aboriginal art, which would have been foreign to Clark, and pop art, which would have appalled him. The fact that the Apollo is a ludicrously idealised and stylised portrait of a vain pagan god that Napoleon looted from the Vatican does not add to its charms.

And, finally, it is not much good having a refined ear for Mozart’s Requiem if you can be murdered in your bed, or your having a Ph D for analysing the downward smile of the Mona Lisa if you can be raped or cast into prison forever on the mere say so of a prince or a bishop – or if you just cannot get enough food or water to live.

So, it’s time for the Oxbridge myth of the civilisation of Greece and Rome to be put to sleep forever. Nor do I think this picture changed much during what we call the Middle Ages – but in my view we then reach a stage in our journey where we can see the beginning of what we call civilisation.

Here and there – Entertaining migrants

22/08/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Some of us are old enough to remember just how cold and drab this dump was until we were blessed with waves of European and then Asian and African migrants that helped to break the choker hold of Saxons and Celts. Arthur Boyd, A Life, by Darleen Bungey deals with some of the first wave. The names are familiar to the art community, but their vibrant contributions to our national life deserve wider notice.

Yosl Bergner was a Jewish refugee from Warsaw. His father had implored Polish Jews to quit Europe. He had come to Australia looking for land for a Jewish settlement. For that purpose, he explored the Kimberley with a young blackfella and a white truck driver. It wasn’t the heat, or the wet, or the remoteness that put him off – the author tells us that he couldn’t imagine the new Zion with so many flies. When Yosl got here, just in time, he did so with firsthand knowledge of the great art of Europe. He quickly befriended Arthur Boyd and declared that most of Arthur’s work was rubbish. This was new for Arthur. He thought that Yosl, who scavenged the discarded vegetables at Victoria Market, was ‘a very forward bloke.’ Yosl described himself as ‘a Jew with a complex’ who saw anti-Semitism all around him. He traded in his bike for three tubes of paint, but unlike the native artists, he didn’t like the bush. Arthur looked at Yosl – who would surely have been at home in Catch 22 – as his first contact with Bohemia. (He was I think yet to meet the Reeds and their set.) It may have gone both ways. I didn’t know this, but some hookers in Melbourne then used cigarette shops as fronts. Yosl stepped into one – but he didn’t like what he saw. So he asked for a packet of cigarettes! That’s when Yosl learned the local terms of trade. ‘First pay, then fuck, then buy cigarettes.’ To his enduring credit, Yosl complied. He believed that ‘prostitutes have their professional pride and self-respect and you don’t have to hurt their feelings.’ What a noble expression of tolerance! Could this perhaps be a true Australian value?

Stanislav Halpern was known as Stacha. The author says this:

Halpern’s pottery describes Halpern: earthy, solid, with an alluring overlay of vivid decoration, applied with great eagerness and speed. He was a Jewish-Polish refugee who spoke broken English through the side of a twisted mouth that usually sprouted a cigarette. He was a blower of kisses, an embracer of life. Stacha Halpern and Arthur became great friends. They shared characteristics, such as shortness of body and strength of arms, and both worked with robust physicality. Neither cared a jot about convention. Both wore their hair long and both were amused at the abuse thrown one night from a passing car: ‘Get off the road, you poofters!’

There’s something inalienably homely about that story.

Danila Vassilieff hit town like a typhoon. He was a Cossack peasant who had fought on the Eastern Front in the Great War and had become a Colonel in the October Revolution. He was captured by the Bolsheviks, but he escaped to live with nomadic Tartars in Azerbaijan and Persia. He travelled through India, Burma, Manchuria, and Shanghai. This man of the world had an overpowering personality. He was a ‘history-laden’ figure. He helped build a railway line at Katherine, and he took up banana and sugar-cane growing before painting. The Medici at Heidi (the Reeds) took him in for his ‘curious splendour’ and his expression of the ‘pathos and loneliness, the violence and tragedy’ of the human condition. Nolan thought it was the man rather than his art that carried the whack.

Karel Zoubek was a gifted Czech musician. He had been a soloist at both German and Italian embassies. He was detained in Tehran and transported to Iraq. From there he was deported to Australia. There he was interned. He got out in 1945. His wife left him ‘after he beat her with hands he had declared too sensitive for manual labour.’ He was fined two pounds, but served seven days instead. He entertained the inmates with violin solos. He was a small man who had one other flaw. He was a pathological pants man. He just couldn’t help himself. He propositioned every woman in the Boyd family. He said ‘I am eunuch.’ This puzzled the ladies – until they realised he was saying ‘I am unique.’ Boyd’s wife answered the proposition with a flying tomato, but Boyd’s mum, Doris, fell for him. This was too much even for the peace-loving Arthur. He convinced the family that they should get Zoubek committed. They got him before a shrink. The meeting, the author tells us, went well – too well. Zoubek sounded OK. But just as the interview was ending, Zoubek lent across the table and gave the shrink the benefit of his mind: ‘The trouble with you is you fuck too much.’ Well, that bloody did it! As he was bundled into a cab, Zoubek realised what the game was. ‘Some party. I’m surprised at you.’ The men in white coats were in the car behind. Zoubek was sandwiched between Arthur and another in the back seat. John Perceval was in the front in the death seat. This was Arthur showing his cold side – but, in the name of heaven, this dude looked like he was having it off with Mum! Later, Arthur painted Zoubek with mad fierce eyes – ‘he’d hypnotise you with his absolute madness.’ Some may have felt something like that while looking at the paintings Boyd and Nolan were painting around then.

Well, that’s how the land of the long week-end and six o’clock closing under an English monarch got some exposure to Europe. This was about a generation before Victoria banned Playboy and some idiot proposed an entertainment tax on contraceptives. God only knows what the matrons of Balwyn or Brighton may have made of these four migrants. But the more important question is: would our government let any of them in now? As best as I can see, they all arrived by boat, and their English may have been as doubtful as their manners – or their religion.

Why history? 5 MEDIEVAL

17/08/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

MEDIEVAL

If you go from about the time of the sack of Rome in 410 to about the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453, you span a phase that we call the Middle Ages, the period that comes between what we call the ancient world and the modern world.

Rome had ruled what we call Europe and when it lost Rome’s governance, the world was a mess. England would be settled by Danes and Germans. The now peaceful Scandinavian peoples sent out wild raiders called Vikings. The murderous insecurity of these dark times – that we call the Dark Ages – is pictured in epics like Beowulf and The Poetic Edda. People looked for protection. One person would pledge loyalty to another in return for protection. You can see this in the Mafia in the film The Godfather. We now call this the feudal system. Although the relations may have begun voluntarily, the burdens and benefits were passed on from one generation to the next. They became issues of caste – whereas our law is seen to move from status to contract, here that process was reversed. The feudal system did lead to the institution of knighthood, and romantic ideas and ideals about chivalry, courtesy, and honour. Le Morte d’Arthur is very different to Beowulf.

Europe came to be dominated by the teaching of a Jewish holy man called Jesus. The Jews believed that they had a covenant with God and that they were his chosen people. Jesus taught that God was open to all – his teaching was therefore Catholic. He took up with prostitutes and lepers and got right up the noses of the local religious Establishment. He effectively signed his own death warrant when he took to the money people in the Temple. Jesus may well have breached the local religious law, but the imperial man on the spot had him crucified on a false charge of treason in an act of judicial murder. The followers of the man called Christ – ‘Christians’ – believed that he had risen from the dead and that following him could lead to eternal life. The creed spread very fast, in some part because of the way the Romans persecuted his followers.

As we saw, Constantine converted, and moved the empire to the east – although the church would remain firmly seated in Rome. The priests drenched the simple teaching of Jesus in Greek philosophy. They loved casuistry. They claimed a monopoly of knowledge. Only they knew the mystery. They even forbade people reading the words of Jesus in their own tongue. It has always been hard for an establishment body to cope with the teaching of a man born to blow up the establishment. The church became hopelessly corrupt and inbred.

In 570, an Arab called Mohammed was born at Mecca. He too believed in only one God and that he had found the only way to Him. Mohammed thought that he crowned the teaching of Moses and Jesus. (Muslims don’t believe in the crucifixion, much less the resurrection.) He was a fighting prophet, and he taught that his followers would go to paradise if they died fighting for their faith. That faith was quickly carried by the sword across the north of Africa and Europe into Spain. The surge of Islam was first stopped there and later outside Vienna. The Arabs developed arithmetic and made paper, and served to store the bases of Western learning.

The religions of Greece and Rome look silly to us, but since they did not claim to have the answer, they were a lot more tolerant than the three that came out of the desert in the Middle East. Three does not go into one. The German or French ruler Charlemagne was instrumental in stopping Islam’s advance into Europe. In 800, he revived the notion of Caesar when the pope crowned him head of the Holy Roman Empire. This curious body would endure for a thousand years, and muddy the development of the German nation. But the church intervened more darkly to inspire crusades against Islam.

The popes also offered paradise to those who fell for Christ. At the start of one crusade, the Christians got into practice by slaughtering Jews. Wars between these three faiths are still going on. They all have blood on their hands. None of those religions was good for that half of humanity called women. The Catholic Church made a woman the Mother of God, but did little for her daughters on earth. The doctrine of Original Sin suggested that women were the source of evil, and infected the attitude of humanity to sex for millennia. On the plus side, the Church was instrumental in setting up universities.

Genghis Khan led the Mongol hordes out of Asia in the thirteenth century. There was then an empire from Beijing to Russia. This opened Europe to Asia. Marco Polo travelled in Asia and opened Asia to Europe. One result of the Mongol risings was a drifting bunch of refuges called gypsies. China went through a form of rebirth, but then kept to themselves behind their wall. At least until the time when Constantinople fell to the Turks, China looked much more advanced than the West. Some in Islam may have felt the same, but all that was about to change.

Here and there – Playing way from home

16/08/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

During the Vietnam War, the Americans forgot all the lessons that they had taught the British during the War of Independence about fighting wars on someone else’s land either for or against regime change. Both America and Britain forgot the lot when they invaded Iraq to effect a change of regime. The price we are all paying now is horrific.

A number of people have written books about the nature and grossness of the errors of the invaders (the most unrepentant of whom is Mr John Howard). One of them is Occupational Hazards (2006) by Rory Stewart. Stewart spent some time in the army before walking across Afghanistan and joining the Foreign Office. He was one of the Englishman charged with bringing Western democracy to Iraq. He is now a Tory MP.

As you read this book, you are torn between laughing and crying. This note is a very anecdotal reflection upon that book.

Shortly after Stewart got to Iraq, a local told him that:

Uneducated people, tribal people, without reading and writing are now in the city…..They do not understand what is government. Because they do not understand what is religion….Religion is about the respect for the other human being. Each of us is created by one God. Each of us is respected. This is religion. Even the Jewish religion. But these men do not respect one another. Things are very bad now…..We are not stupid. We know what games your government is playing with oil and with Israel…

How could you overcome those misgivings? They were, after all, justified. Stewart soon lost his faith in our human quest for order. The Iraqis insisted that only a police state could restore security. But people back home thought Iraq could be both secure and democratic. They thought they could get good order without secret police, brutality and torture. They disbanded the army, sacked all senior Baathists and discussed the possibility of psychometric tests for senior officers and ‘gender-awareness workshops’. ‘We had arrived promising democracy not a warlord.’ It defies belief.

There was an ugly tribal murder. (Well, not many murders are pretty.) One British officer spoke of the rule of law. The answer was that:

Ninety-five policemen in my force are related [to the deceased] and they are in shock…We all know the best way to do this is through the tribal channel, and if people play fast – putting on police uniforms and taking them off, giving a few people a rough time – well that’s just how it goes. I don’t know where you think you are living…..

There were always problems with interpreters – conscious and unconscious. A bad example was ‘Coalition’ being translated as the ‘occupation’, ‘a word of great resonance for Arabs, conjuring the French occupation of Algeria and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.’ How did the Coalition expect the Arabs to forgive them for supporting ‘the Israeli occupation of Palestine’? An opinion poll showed two thirds of Iraqis thought they were occupied. How could they not?

This is how a local thanked the Coalition.

The occupying forces have proved that greed, cruelty and ambition are their guiding ideals; that insensitivity and stupidity are the only qualifications for your administrators; cowardice and pusillanimity for your soldiers; stinginess and prejudice for your development workers. Large and small puppets on the hands of grasping fists of the elders of Zion….

Other than that, everything in the garden was rosy.

There were problems with clerics as well as with the tribes. One cleric responded to the notion of the rule of law this way:

What matters is God, children, possessions, lives. These things are more important than the law. Forget the law. God is above the law and I represent God.

Given that the rule of law in England was the product of more than a millennium, how could the English answer this invocation of God? Well, the ‘democracy experts’ in the US were on the case. They said Iraq was not ready. Bosnia had taught them that elections that were too early led to extreme sectarian parties. That left the occupiers as king-makers and any model they chose was going to be controversial. They were like blind men in a darkroom looking for a black cat that wasn’t there.

The power brokers were the sheikhs. Stewart thought they were more ‘an irrelevant feudal remnant…[but]….little more than small-time rural gangsters, setting up extortion rackets under the pretence of security or skimming from contracts.’ But Stewart, who is now a member of Cabinet in Britain, managed to pay ‘them the respect they thought they deserved.’

Security – maintaining the peace – was the constant issue. A new governor told Stewart that he intended to ‘take full control of the police, establish a secret intelligence service, ban demonstrations, arrest a journalist who had criticised him, and expel his Sadrist opponents from the council.’ What could be more natural? One Iraqi policeman gave a response that was pure MFB. ‘It’s not my fault that things are a mess – it’s your fault that we police are poorly trained and poorly equipped.’

An American ‘democracy expert’ came to Baghdad for ‘capacity-building’. He put up a drawing that looked like a dog. One sheikh said: ‘We are an ancient civilisation and they treat us like Congo cannibals.’ The democracy expert said: ‘Welcome to your new democracy. I have met you before in Cambodia, in Russia, in Nigeria.’ At which point, two sheikhs walked out. The expert had no runs on the board.

It was only after Abu Ghraib that Stewart saw ‘for the first time that they had always assumed that we were doing these things and had never believed my statements about human rights and the rule of law.’ The game was up.

Stewart wrote a speech.

We stand at the Ziggurat of Ur at the centre of the world’s first civilisation. Within one hundred meters of us lie cuneiform tablets written in an alphabet invented here 5000 years ago, 85 generations before anyone in Italy, Britain, or America began to write…A little further and we come to the oldest law court in the world and the house where Abraham was born. Here is the birthplace of civilised man, the foundation of our urban life and of our philosophy.

Shortly before Stewart left, the Sadr militia executed a female student at Basra University Engineering Faculty for wearing jeans at a picnic. The Governor of Basra justified the militia. The picnic had been ‘decadent.’ Women had sat with men.

The people who invaded Iraq forgot all their history. What about the civil war we call the American War of Independence? The older Pitt, by this time the Earl of Chatham, one of the most experienced war time leaders England has ever had, knew what the home ground advantage meant: ‘My Lords, if I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.’

What about the French Revolution? When it was first suggested that France go to war to export the revolution, Robespierre, the latter-day terrorist, said that no one ever liked ‘armed missionaries’. Doesn’t that sum up the main problem for the absurdly named Coalition of the Willing in Iraq?

Why history? 4 ROME

11/08/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The Greeks developed a myth about Rome being founded by a refugee from Troy called Aeneas. The apotheosis of that myth is reached in the epic poem The Aeneid by the great Roman poet Virgil. The other myth of the foundation of Rome was home-made. The traditional date was 753 BC. Romulus was said to have been born a bastard and to have been cast into the Tiber, but providence directed the river to swirl him ashore and a wolf to suckle him and a shepherd to rear him. Later he would murder his twin brother, Remus, and provide wives for his settlers by raping the Sabine maidens. So far we have a militant warlike refugee who drives to suicide someone who trusted him and a bastard who is weaned by a wolf, who commits the primal crime of Cain, before completing his holy mission by raping the neighbours. Those auspices were not so good – they are indeed very ominous. But some at least at Rome thought that this myth was worth recording as saying something about the eternal city.

Rome was divided into patricians and plebeians, words which have much the same meaning today, except that the division then was one of caste. The nature of the split is gorgeously framed by Shakespeare in Coriolanus. The Romans got rid of their kings, and they always put great weight and faith in the word ‘republic’. But then they fell into class wars. They saw themselves as free, but power tended to stay with their senate, as they did not develop a form of representative government like a parliament.

Rome extended its power over Italy and near areas. The process is described in Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus, which tells of human sacrifice and other barbarities. The Romans were much better at dealing with allies and conquered people than the Greeks. They were real empire builders. They were also more business-like – they extended Roman citizenship to others. In the third century BC, Rome fought long hard wars with its African trading rival, Carthage, which was led by the great Hannibal. They defeated Hannibal and destroyed Carthage. Their impact on Africa is described by Shelley in the poem Ozymandias.

The wars Rome undertook called for a paid army and the Romans themselves became weakened. They looked to gladiators and turned killing into a game. Their religion was not civilising. Their soldiers had to be paid out of booty of conquest and that led to vicious faction fighting among the generals who returned to Rome to hand out the benefits of their conquests. Cicero would later attack these mercenary generals, but Rome never found a way to stop the conflict between them. The nature of this faction fighting, like territorial disputes between mafia capos, is described in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. When you go from Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus to Marius and Sulla, you go from the butchered to the butchers – and to a march on Rome.

Internal division promotes the strong man. Julius Caesar extended the Empire over much of Europe and North Africa. It was bad luck to be in Gaul (France) when Caesar needed to curry favour to win an election. He did so with butchery. Caesar was made dictator, but when he showed signs of becoming a king, the Roman republicans murdered him (in 44 BC). There was yet another civil war. Antony (like Caesar, a lover of Cleopatra) was defeated by Octavian (Augustus) who made himself Emperor. The Roman republic was finished.

The emperors called themselves gods. Many were degenerate, and most were put there by the army. They succeeded where the Greeks had failed in imposing law and order. Most of Europe would adopt their laws. The language of Latin would also be used throughout Europe. Their roads covered most of the known world. They developed a literature from that of the Greeks, but deep down they were concerned with power and money. They gave up enquiry and they despised science. For the most part they had a well-organised army, but their religion was primitive and based on sacrifice. It was ripe for a takeover.

The emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and moved to Byzantium (Constantinople) in about 323 A D. The Empire had stretched the resources of Rome far too far. It was sacked by nomads from the area of Germany – the Huns, Vandals and Goths. The Eastern Empire, based in Constantinople (Istanbul), lasted for another thousand years. This was the Byzantine Empire. It gave rise to the Orthodox Church, maintained the learning of the Greeks, and offered a buffer between divided Europe and Asia. It fell to the forces of Islam in 1453.

Gibbon said: ‘Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.’ That, sadly, was equally true of the Republic. As an exercise in government, Rome was a disaster – as is Italy today.

Why history? 3

04/08/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

GREECE

The Iliad of Homer tells of the Trojan War. The myth was handed down by word of mouth until it was put in writing in about 700 BC. Together with Ulysses, it became a kind of bible for the Greeks. These myths looked back to times well before Moses of prehistoric cities at Mycenae, the seat of Agamemnon, and in Crete. I said elsewhere of the hero of the Iliad: ‘Achilles is the worst kind of aggressor – he is super-sensitive to insult or affront. T.S. Eliot called Achilles a ‘spoiled teenager’. The capacity of Achilles to sulk is limitless. This is a characteristic of a high-born, spoiled brat.’ At bottom, things don’t change. We now see Achilles in the White House. That is apt for a book that links us to animal acts in prehistory.

Especially in the fifth century BC, the Greeks went through a phase of explosive growth that looks unique in the history of the world. They lived in and about towns. They never formed a nation, and their internal jealousy would be their undoing. They went through phases of monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy. They wound up with a gentlemen’s club version of democracy – only male citizens need apply.

Athens at its height rested on slavery and a protection racket, a kind of empire. Athens had achieved this pre-eminence by leading the defence against Persian invasions in battles like that of Marathon. It was they who stopped an Asian takeover of Europe. It was about the time Athens had its empire that Greece produced dramatists like Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

But the Athenian confederacy became an empire, and an empire of free states is a contradiction in terms. Then Athens made Sparta jealous. If you reflect on the English in Ireland, or the Dutch and other whites in Africa, and apartheid, or, perhaps, the Nazi occupation of France, you will begin to follow Sparta. The people Sparta conquered were called ‘helots’, state controlled but privately managed. This Spartan form of slavery was cruel, greedy, and unique.

The State ruled this version of Animal Farm with an iron discipline that the Prussians admired. The first object was to create invincible warriors, and their soldiers frequently adopted the Japanese model of atoning for defeat by suicide. To pursue their ideals, each Spartan had to be relieved of having to maintain himself or his family. Education and marriage were all conditioned to maintain a perfect army. There was of course a Krypteia or secret police. The young Spartans had to get practice at killing. They were sent out with the power to kill any helot who looked suspicious. And as with any fascist state, corruption was everywhere. Nor should we leave Athens out here. The Republic of Plato is a blueprint for fascism.

The war between Athens and Sparta – the Peloponnesian War – dragged on for decades. The Greek city states were exhausted. A cunning ruler called Philip of Macedon had little trouble subduing the shattered Greeks. His son found himself in trouble at home, so he went out and conquered the world. This was Alexander the Great. He got as far as India before dying in 323 BC. The following period is called the Hellenistic period. One city Alexander created, Alexandria, became a store house of knowledge in dark times that followed. Otherwise, European intervention in that part of the world was about as useful then as it has been recently.

The blazing meteor of ancient Greece had just burnt out. It subsided into the Mediterranean, never to be revived. Even now, it looks like a failed state.

Why history? Part Two – Towns

28/07/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

TOWNS

The breakthrough came with taming animals and the raising of crops. People were not tied up just staying alive. They could do more by dividing their labour. They could live together in towns. Petra was one of them starting about 300 BC, but there are traces of settlements at Jericho nine thousand years before that time and many thousands of years before the time when the events described in the book of Genesis could have taken place. Disputes about native title in that part of the world are therefore likely to be resolved by arms.

Settling in towns and farming with the seasons gave people a sense of order. The development of bronze then iron led to better tools and more killing. Writing started. People could record their myths. (Our aborigines relied mainly on Songlines.) Trade started. People had to count things. Coins were made to replace barter – and to allow the ruler to take his cut. People learned pottery and cloth-making. They invented the wheel and the plough, and their animals served the people.

Settled life, if not civilisation, started in what we call the Middle East and North Africa while savages still roamed over what we call Europe. From about 4000 BC, the Egyptians developed papyrus for writing, a calendar and arithmetic. People in Syria built a library and an army. In Babylon, they looked at the stars and made clocks. The Phoenicians were a trading people who created an alphabet that the Greeks then Romans developed.

A form of civilised life started in India in about 2500 BC and the first of the great dynasties of China started in about 1500 BC. Slavery somehow sprung up with the arrival of order and security. Class in India gave way to caste. The Brahmins, or priests, were at the top and the Pariahs, or outcasts were at the bottom. Religion became a source of power over people, and across the world its exponents would seek a monopoly of knowledge. Priests of all kinds commonly felt fear and jealousy when confronted with knowledge outside their realm. In China, the leading position of Mandarin was obtained by merit and learning. The Chinese script was hard to learn and this affected the spread of reading and writing. The Chinese locked themselves in behind the Great Wall.

Tribes of the people of Israel overran what came to be called Palestine. They occupied land between the great powers of Egypt and Babylon. Moses said that God gave him his ten commandments. These tribes claimed to be chosen by God, and that God had promised them the land of Palestine. They proceeded to act on that promise with their swords. Their God was fearfully personal and jealous, and by our standards brutal, but this people had and still have an amazing capacity to stick together. They were people of the word, and they developed books that contained their entire history and moral code.

There was only one God, but his laws were universal. The Ten Commandments are close to the root of what we call western civilisation. They underlie our view of the sanctity of life and what we now see as equality before the law. Two prophets, that we will come to, would give rise to the most populous faiths in the world. Sadly, conflict within and between these three faiths would cause indescribable cruelty and misery across the history of mankind.

In the sixth century BC in India, Gautama gave up the life of the rich and powerful. People called him the Buddha. He told people the Way, and this religion then spread through India and the rest of Asia. Buddha preached against caste, but it prevailed in India. Confucius was teaching in China at about the same time. He spoke of respect for the past and for the aged – very Chinese virtues.

We have been looking at what we might call the alphabet of civilisation, the bread and butter of settled life. This is a very large statement, but people in those times do not look to us to have been big on big ideas or high art. They were bent on forms and appearances, and lurks or magic – just like so many in government or business today.

Too many accounts of civilisation look too much on art and architecture. It’s not much good having beaut pictures if you can be murdered in your bed. Let us look then at the phases of law-giving described by Sir Henry Maine in his book Ancient Law.

First, the law consists of little more than judgments given by a king with divine inspiration. What the king gave, at least in the first instance, was a judgment (or ‘doom’), not a law; he was a judge, not a law-maker. Next, we have an aristocracy that becomes the keeper of the law. The aristocrats’ monopoly is not of divine instruction or inspiration, but of knowledge of the laws. In the third phase, habit becomes custom and custom becomes law, a kind of unwritten law. The Pharaoh would make a decree in a given case. Repeated enough, this decree would become a decree in the broader sense.

The next phase is the codes. The best known are The Code of Hammurabi, The Laws of Moses, The Laws of Solon of Athens, The Twelve Tablets of Rome, and later the Corpus Iuris of Justinian. The Code is some form of protection against fraud and abuse by the aristocracy (or the priesthood). But the codes get widened in their application by the process of analogy. As a result, a prohibition of a specific act for the purposes of promoting cleanliness can descend into ceremonial abstinence or ritual ablution, and a division of people by status can degenerate into ‘the most disastrous and blighting of all human institutions, Caste.’

These problems are worse where the ruling body, the aristocracy, draws its power from religion rather than politics, or the military. These generalisations are dangerous, but this may be one of the great differences between East and West, that the ruling parties were able to divorce themselves from the power of religion earlier in the West than in the East.

Why history? Part 1 – Stone

21/07/201721/07/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

[This is the first part of the revised version of a short history of the world that I wrote for my daughters in 1990. I began with a warning. ‘This sketch is intended for my children, who are currently undergoing varying degrees of adolescence. If nothing else, it exemplifies two maxims of history: it depends on what story you believe, and it is written by the winners. This sketch is hopelessly selective, incurably biased toward the West (and in particular the traditional Anglo-Saxon view) and loaded toward the present. For anyone other than a WASP MCP, it is probably at best irrelevant, and at worst offensive. There is little fact – it is almost all comment. If I were you, I would not accept any of it.’ This version of the history of the world is less than 9400 words. It is therefore shorter than so many judgments of our superior courts. There’s a lesson there.]

WHY HISTORY?

A very brief history of the world

Geoffrey Gibson

2017

CONTENTS

Stone
Towns
Greece
Rome
Medieval
Interlude: Civilisation?
Rebirth
Kings
Revolutions
Explosions
Civilisation – Are we there yet?

STONE

Did it all start with a bang or a whimper? I wouldn’t know, but the hot-shots favour the big bang. That’s fine, but where did it come from? It’s all very well to say, as some ancients did, that the elephant stands on the tortoise – what does the tortoise stand on?

Until recently, most people on earth took their history of humanity from religious texts. Most now believe that human beings evolved from animals. The theory of evolution was pioneered by the English scientist Charles Darwin. He revolutionised the way we think about a lot of things, and we will come back to him. Science has also developed ways of dating artefacts from the past so as to prove, to the satisfaction of most people, that the account of creation in the Bible is physically impossible. (Although a frightening number of people in the U S Congress still believe it. It may be not be long before people ask if they are mad.)

It looks like this process of evolution was completed round about 200,000 years ago in Africa, in that part of Africa that is now one of the most backward parts on earth. (Being first isn’t everything.) We think that humans started moving out of Africa about 70,000 years ago. They got to Australia after that. Artefacts of our blackfellas can be dated to about 65,000 years ago. Their occupation of this continent is so long compared to the tiny fragment in time of the white settlement that white people cannot get their heads around it. It looks like America was uninhabited when the first humans arrived here – when Tasmania was attached to the mainland – and the Maoris did not reach New Zealand until centuries after the birth of Christ.

We apply the label Neanderthal to the earliest man. Applied to someone now – say a backward politician – that term is one of abuse (like knuckle-grazing). They were savages. Their first job was to stay alive. They didn’t need Darwin to tell them about the importance of survival. The symptoms of what we now call panic attacks show how we learned to heighten our responses to heightened danger. People had to eat, find shelter, and stay warm – or cool. They learned to speak. People spoke to each other. The apes hadn’t done this. They learned to light fires. They developed tools – and from tools came weapons. We take the term Stone Age from our use of stone tools. These men we call Neolithic – about say 10,000 BC, although stone tools have now been found in Australia that are 65,000 years old.

Like our blackfellas, these people were nomadic. They wandered in the forests and the savannah and sought out caves. They didn’t cultivate the land or crops, or stay long enough in one place to develop towns. This phase in our story is by far the longest. We refer to the period before writing was developed as prehistory. We now see writing and the division of labour that town life permits as essential to what we call civilisation.

We cannot now know what part fear played in human life then. We now live with the risk of extinction by nuclear war. But they must surely have lived with the threat of death or injury from nature, starvation, or predators, animal or human. Having only a rudimentary knowledge of nature, what we call the supernatural may have had some charm. So, some men came to claim power over others, either because they were stronger, or because they knew more, or because they were persuasive. The fear of the unknown has always been a potent force for us. They painted. They developed totems and taboos. We see all this in the Dreamtime and in big swinging dicks on Wall Street.

The Songlines of our aborigines go back a very long way. In 1857 a blackfella told a white settler north of Melbourne that his grandfather could recall tracing the Yarra River down to the Heads where it entered the sea. As Geoffrey Blainey remarked, it was a grandfather one hundred times removed whose memory was invoked.

And people began to notice not just that they were different to the apes, but that they were different among themselves. There were differences in language, skin colour, and customs. When the white people landed uninvited at Sydney Cove, the blackfellas required ocular proof that the white men were in fact men. When people think they are somehow different to others, it is rare for one model to think that the other model is superior. What you get is a kind of sibling rivalry. And there is conflict not just about survival, but about beliefs. They might kill not just to guard their territory, but to honour a leader or to appease a god. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was a man of towering intellect who stopped three bullets during the American Civil War – he spoke of ‘that unspeakable somewhat’ that allows us ‘to face annihilation for a blind belief.’

So, before the end of what we call prehistory, mankind was infected by two searing divisions from which we have never recovered – caste and race.

Here and there – The facts of political life

18/07/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In order to encourage young lawyers to meet the facts of life head on, and to be able to recount them without bullshit, I used to give three books to my articled clerks on their admission into the legal profession: Gowers, The Complete plain Words; Clausewitz, On War; and Machiavelli, The Prince. I don’t suppose any of them read all three, or anything like it, but I wanted to convey a hard-headed message – if they didn’t like it, they may have needed to rethink their future.

This came back to me when I read Be Like the Fox, Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom, by Erica Benner. It seemed to me to have a lot in common with another book I had recently acquired, Ike and McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower’s Campaign against Joseph McCarthy, by David Nicholls. They both have respectable publishers – in order, Allen Lane and Simon & Schuster. The academic credentials of the authors are elliptically expressed. The title is catchy. The style is a kind journalese that may leave some feeling like they’ve been talked down to. In the first there is direct speech. In each, the author feels the need to tell us about their own journey of discovery, which can be a very troubling symptom. There are floods of notes. Above all, extravagant claims are made for the book by the usual tame suspects in the blurbs, and by the author. And in each case, I was left wondering what all the fuss was about – worse, I wondered how I got to be suckered once again, when I’m old enough to know better.

Erica Benner’s book is readable enough, if you go for that chatty style in the historical present, and you suppress your fear of another populist outbreak, but you would have to be a bloody idiot to believe the blurb that says she has succeeded ‘brilliantly in overturning centuries-old received views.’ We can leave that puffery to the commercial conscience licence of Allen Lane. But in the Preface, the author says this:

His [Machiavelli’s] design was to write for a tyrant those things that are pleasing to tyrants, bringing about in this way, if he could, the tyrant’s self-willed and swift downfall.’ In other words, the book’s most shocking advice was ironic. Its author wore the mask of a helpful adviser, all the while knowing the folly of his advice, hoping to ensnare rulers and drag them to their ruin…..Machiavelli’s self-proclaimed realism, his book’s main selling point, was a fraud. And Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and England were among its first victims. Cromwell had taken the Prince at face value…..and in doing so, had walked straight into Machiavelli’s trap.

These statements are not small. They are large. Is Ms Benner intent on eulogising a fraud? (‘Fraud’ is her word.) Where can you buy the crystal balls that allow you to divine Machiavelli’s real intent or purpose? Was poor King Henry VIII really a flop? Was the English Reformation a mistake? How fared the nation of England in suffering through its victimhood? And why didn’t Machiavelli’s fraud work earlier on seriously bad princes like Napoleon, Stalin or Hitler? Why did five, twenty, and fifty million people have to die before they walked into Machiavelli’s trap? Just how Machiavellian was Ms Benner’s version of Machiavelli? Are we all just sad victims of a dilettante prankster?

And that’s before you get to the subtitle. What did ‘freedom’ mean in Renaissance Italy? As Bertrand Russell remarked of Machiavelli (in his History of Western Philosophy), ‘The word ‘liberty’ is used throughout as denoting something precious, though what it denotes is not very clear.’ My suspicion is that ‘freedom’ in Machiavelli means the kind of pompous hypocrisy denoted in that word by the conspirators in Julius Caesar – as they pulled their hats down over their ears and hid half their faces, and then set out about murdering the man who was in their way.

Well, all this stuff is irrelevant to us in the Anglo-American scheme of things. We don’t go big on theory. We don’t trust ideologues. And philosophy, especially political philosophy, has even less going for it than economics. We prefer experience, evidence, tradition and something like natural growth. Evolution hadn’t even been invented when Machiavelli was floating his theories. But they have taken effect, and not noticeably to our benefit.

The Prince was mainly about contemporary or recent rulers in Italy. The Discourses was more about republics, the form of government more favoured by the author. If you know anything about the Medicis, Borgias, or Renaissance popes, you know that praise, much less idolatry, is out of the question. In the eyes of most, Cesare Borgia was a model of depravity. Here is part of what Jacob Burckhardt had to say about the ‘great criminal’ Cesare Borgia.

‘Every night four or five murdered men are discovered – bishops, prelates, and others – so that all Rome is trembling for fear of being destroyed by the Duke’ (Cesare). He himself used to wander about Rome in the night-time with his guards, and there is every reason to believe that he did so not only because, like Tiberius, he shrank from showing his now repulsive features by daylight, but also to gratify his insane thirst for blood, perhaps even on persons unknown to him….those whom the Borgias could not assail with open violence fell victim to their poison.

On any view, the bloodlines were less than charming, and the Borgias were not nice people to have dinner with. If Machiavelli says he sees nothing to reproach in Cesare Borgia, and he does, he is obviously taking the mickey – unless he is morally insane. Some have called it satire; others call it comical irony. While Burckhardt may be out of fashion, he did understand Italy at this time, and he thought the real reason for Machiavelli’s sympathy for Cesare was that Cesare was the only one who could have secularised the Papal States. (Now there is a proposition to conjure with!)

We are looking at the difference between facts in history and politics, and values in ethics or morals. That’s what I wanted my new lawyers to come to terms with – together with the dangers of talking in such abstractions. Can you have any politics without any morals at all? Even Stalin and Hitler found room for loyalty to the nation and party, and obedience to the leader.

This realism had its upside. Machiavelli criticised the Church because by its conduct it had undermined religious belief. But there was a downside. A prince should seem to be religious – an implacable law for American presidents – but the Prince emphatically rejects morals for princes. Rulers who are always good will fail. They must be as cunning as a fox. In the year of Our Lord 2016, this attempt to divorce morals from politics came home to bite us all. And the point was made by people who worked on the equally objectionable principle that the ends justify the means – a notion that figures largely in Machiavelli’s writings.

Russell introduced the subject this way (back in 1946, the year after I was born).

His political philosophy is scientific and empirical, based upon his own experience of affairs, concerned to set forth the means to assigned ends, regardless of the question whether the ends are to be considered good or bad. When, on occasion, he allows himself to mention the ends that he desires, they are such as we can all applaud. Much of the conventional obloquy that attaches to his name is due to the indignation of hypocrites who hate the frank avowal of evil-doing. There remains, it is true, a good deal that genuinely demands criticism, but in this he is an expression of his age. Such intellectual honesty about political dishonesty would have been hardly possible at any other time or in any other country…..

This assessment looks fair and sensible to me, and I doubt whether Ms Benner would dissent from it. But it is not a bookselling headline. How then does Ms Benner unveil her revelation?

But he has learned to avoid lecturing princes on what they should and should not do. Instead, he gives free reign to his old talent for ambiguous writing, so useful when writing diplomatic dispatches. [35] He adopts the persona of a cold-blooded adviser to new rulers, one who teaches them to use other princes, foreign peoples, and their own subjects to serve their soaring ambitions. Yet his writing turns hot, nearly bursts into flame, when he describes how free peoples avenge themselves on those who attack their freedom….On closer scrutiny, though, one begins to notice hesitations and caveats that compromise the praise…..Yet the book’s long discussion of Cesare’s career teams with insinuations that undercut the praise….look more closely and you start to notice details that subvert the artist’s glowing portrait….When reading the Prince, one often has the impression that the book speaks in two different voices, sometimes in the same sentence…..If the louder voice of the amoral adviser goads princely readers to accumulate more and more power, the Prince’s lower register voice – Nicco beneath his bestial disguise – constantly hints that well-ordered republics are stronger, safer, and more natural for the human animal.

Now, whether you regard ‘bestial disguise’ as an improvement on ‘fraud’ may involve issues of taste as much as judgment, but there is nothing new here. When you could be killed or mutilated for saying the wrong thing, it was natural to equivocate, or be deliberately ambiguous, or to speak with a forked tongue.

All of Machiavelli’s books were banned; he had already been tortured not for what he said, but because someone else put his name in a list; and that most notorious controversialist of the Renaissance, Galileo, had sought to pull off the same stunt by dressing his heresy up in a dialogue. He said that he just wanted to show both sides. Well, as we know, the Inquisition did not buy that argument, and Galileo was convicted of being ‘vehemently suspect of heresy.’ Two could play the ambiguity game – but it was and is a well-worn game.

Well, if nothing is new, what’s all the fuss about? The author’s argument begins with the reference to the ambiguity of diplomacy. I have included the footnote [35] for which the citation is:

‘35 See Benner, Machiavelli’s Prince.’

Passim? The whole bloody book? Has it all been said before? Is the good book right after all – is there nothing new under the sun?

So, give us a break Mr Allen Lane, and go a bit easier on the bullshit.