Category: History

Ulysses Obama

I’ve just been reading Ronald C. White’s wonderful new biography of Ulysses Grant, American Ulysses. Inspiring and depressing at the same time, it’s the story of a modest man with a peculiar foreign-sounding name. Possessed of enormous gifts of organisation and leadership, he rose from a decidedly modest background to become president. He was extremely popular during most of his eight years in office, and pursued vigorous high-minded policies as president, particularly focused on protecting civil rights of ethnic minorities, and repairing relations with other countries after a long war. At the end of his two terms he was still popular enough that he could easily have been re-elected for a third. 

His successors set about dismantling everything he had accomplished as president, and later generations judged his presidency an utter failure, partly in order to justify the racist policies that followed.

He was a talented writer, who wrote a celebrated memoir, but political opponents, who held his intellect in contempt, asserted without evidence that it had been ghost-written.

I’m not sure why this all seems relevant at the present moment.

Bullet not dodged

I thought I should post an email that I wrote yesterday morning, expressing my despair before the election, when I thought we might “dodge the bullet” of Trumpism, but still held out little hope for a political system that put us in front of the gun in the first place: Continue reading “Bullet not dodged”

Used and abandoned

Donald Trump has tried, with limited success it would appear, to convince African-Americans that they have been swindled by the Democrats, who use their votes but ignore their concerns. I don’t think that is actually true. We can argue about whether Democrats have done enough, or had the right priorities, and to what extent this is just another example of the Republicans blocking progress and then accusing the Democrats of not wanting it enough, not “leading” enough. But the needs of African-Americans — including affirmative action, housing integration, support for the poor — are clearly a significant concern of governing Democrats.

The people who were really used and abandoned by the Democrats were the white racists. The Democrats were happy to have their votes through the 1970s, and then abandoned them as the fraction of non-white voters made the racists seem electorally less significant. Shameful!

In the bunker

While accepting all the principles of the dangers of any political argument that involves Hitler, I couldn’t read this report from the NY Times about the desperate final days of the Trump campaign without thinking of Hitler in his bunker fantasising with his loyal paladins about being rescued by new rocket weapons:

On Oct. 28, the director of the F.B.I., James B. Comey, announced that his agency would review newly discovered emails potentially pertinent to its investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mr. Trump was unsure how to respond.
“What do you think this means?” he asked the small circle traveling with him… To the assembled men sitting in white leather seats, the answer was simple: It could turn the election around.

When real Americans protest

Republicans are shocked by what they see as the self-destructive fury of “Black Lives Matter” protestors. These people are driven by pure hatred of white people, they say. The land is descending into unprecedented chaos, they say, from which only Donald Trump can rescue us.

I was just reading Rick Perlstein’s history of the US in the 1970s, The Invisible Bridge, and came across this report about events immediately surrounding the 1974 election:

In West Virginia the Thursday before Election Day someone exploded fifteen sticks of dynamite under the gas meter at the school board building just minutes after the superintendent left… Dozens of white men patrolled Campbell Creek with shotguns, following rumors over citizens’ band radio that carloads of blacks were on their way to burn churches. The next day school buses were shot at, and a car owned by parents who insisted on sending their kids back to school was blown up. A police cruiser escorting a school bus was punctured by a rifle shot.

This was all because of disagreements about the choice of school textbooks. When things became more serious — a stabbing incident in a high school in South Boston — it led to this incident:

A mob of white parents formed a blockade around the school to trap the black students and made ready to storm the building. Shattering glass; police horses charging. “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!” “Niggers eat shit! Niggers eat shit!” A chorus of mothers led that cheer. President Ford put the 82nd Airborne on alert.

Like fascists everywhere, the Trumpsters work hard to gin up the disorder that they claim alone to be able to master.

Big notes

I remember reading, back in the late 1990s, an article in Spiegel, about the dubious decision of the Euro finance ministers to create a 500 euro banknote. Since the only people who use cash in significant quantities in this millennium tend to be shy people eager not to be singled out for their achievements by prosecutors, the question was raised, why would you want to create a unit of currency that enables law-abiding citizens (and others) to pack five times as much currency into a suitcase as the former favourite $100 bills?* The answer given by Edgar Meister, one of the directors of the Bundesbank, was that Germans had gotten used to having a 1000 Mark banknote, and that if the largest Euro banknote were worth less, people would think this new currency was a weakling.

Eine Währung, die es sich leisten kann, mit so hohen Noten herauszukommen muß wertbeständig sein.

A currency that can afford to produce such large banknotes must be solid.

As everyone knows, that’s why Germany produced this 50 million Mark note in 1923: Continue reading “Big notes”

Refer madness

Shortly after the EU referendum, someone asked me why the EU referendum was made to allow such an enormous change from a simple majority. After all, many countries have either supermajority threshold for referenda, or requirements that a majority be attained in a majority of regions or states. The answer, of course, is that

  1. The point of this referendum was to settle a conflict between two wings of the Conservative party. This was not an election, but a sporting contest — though sooner or later, in Britain, everything turns into a sporting contest — and it would have been completely unacceptable if both sides did not feel they had a reasonable chance of winning.
  2. There wasn’t any threshold at all. As many have pointed out, this wasn’t a referendum in the normal sense of the word. It was an opinion poll. The relevant law, the European Union Referendum Act 2015, orders only that the question be asked, and describes eligibility for voting. It says nothing about how the result is to be interpreted or enforced. (The most intricate part of the law seems to concern the question of which hereditary aristocrats are eligible to vote.)

There is nothing inevitable about concluding that the UK should withdraw from the EU because 52% voted that way in the referendum. Most democracies would not make it so easy for one group of citizens to deprive another group of citizens of cherished rights — particularly when the groups really are clearly defined social groups, whether age groups or semi-autonomous component nations (Scotland and Northern Ireland).

In principle, there’s a good argument that the government is constitutionally obliged to get clear authorisation from Parliament before pulling the Article 50 trigger. And if they do that, the MPs could reasonably point to the national divisions, or just the lack of an overwhelming majority, as justification for avoiding such wrenching change.

They won’t, though. Because it’s a sport, and nothing is more important to the British than appearing to be “good sports”. They call this “democracy”, and there have been any number of articles from left-wing Remain supporters, arguing that a commitment to democracy requires that they get behind the Brexit project now. The people have spoken, and any other response is an elitist insistence that you know better than the unwashed masses.

Where does that leave us, the foreigners? I am reminded of the work of David Blight and other historians on the “Lost Cause” historiography of the US Civil War. Americans of the North and the South decided to come together in a spirit of reconciliation, requiring that the Northerners agree to look past points of dispute, like the civil rights of African Americans. They — that is, the white people — pretty much all agreed that this was the charitable and democratic thing to do. Similarly, Britons are divided by economic and class differences, but they can all come together in agreement that the real problem is the foreigners. This is something I noticed when I first arrived here.

Things aren’t so bad in Oxford — though we all know people who have at least been menaced in public in the last couple of weeks for speaking a foreign language — and those of us with good professional jobs have a fairly easy out, if we want it, by acquiring UK citizenship. At least, that gets us to the other side of the rope line in terms of formal legal harassment. Elsewhere foreigners have to be thinking imminently about being driven out of places where they have resided for decades, and where they mistakenly thought they were at home.

“Different methods”

Boris Johnson, proud of his subtle grasp of history, and of the Second World War in particular, has contributed to the Brexit debate by comparing the EU to the Third Reich:

“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” he says. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”

I appreciate that goals and intentions are important, but one would tend to think that at some point, if the “methods” are sufficiently different, it does make a qualitative difference. Otherwise, one could attack the government’s attempts to calm ethnic tensions, and the grounds that Hitler also tried to resolve ethnic tensions through “different methods” (genocide rather than dialogue). Policies to ensure that businesses can find qualified workers? Sure, if you look at the details, improved education opportunities sound better than enslavement, but it’s really just quibbling over different methods.

Or plans to build motorways… well, I guess the methods weren’t particularly different, so that’s just fascist through and through.

Surfin’ NSDAP

I think we can all agree that the entire 20th century has conspired to make this sentence from the April 11 1933 NY Times the most bizarre political analogy since the New Jerusalem:

Screenshot 2016-05-12 09.28.28

Cleverly mixing his sports metaphors, Rev. Clinchy went on to say

Germany has been down for the count of nine and now she is arising to her feet and beginning to assert herself, and Hitler knows how to capitalize on that.

Hitler and Germany conducting a boxing match on a surfboard. The cartoon practically draws itself.