God Save the Queen

Bourgeois values

The marvellous Marxists have said it very well about the 650 experts denouncing the war. Money quote:

'Democracy and human rights are safer in the hands of people who directly benefit from them, soberly appreciate their value and rightly fear the alternatives than they are in the hands of overpaid, overfed, overpraised intellectual snobs who take their considerable safety and excessive comfort for granted, and spend far too much of their time sneering at those who don’t belong to their self-regarding little subculture, but are expected to pay their salaries nonetheless.'

These sorts of human rights used to get called bourgeois by apologists for Stalin, Brezhnev and Mao. Well, God forbid that the Iraqis should become bourgeois. A lot of them are already.

Orwell noted in 1944 or thereabouts that all the military experts he had seen confidently predicting the collapse of Russia, or defeat at Alamein, or for that matter victory at Singapore, seemed never to admit mistakes, let alone lose their jobs. (Orwell himself, not long after, devoted a long article to exploring all his own faulty predictions: which tells you why he's the kind of writer who's still read today while the military experts of 1942 have sunk out of sight.) The foreign-policy experts of today are just as tiresome. A few months ago I put up a post complimenting Ronald Reagan, and meant to explain why, but never got round to it. My admiration for the man comes from his recognising instinctively that the experts were wrong. They believed that the USSR was - in the jargon of the time - legitimate, permanent and orderly. That is, its presence on the international scene increased the amount of order in the world system, that it was here to stay, and that it deserved to exist. Reagan didn't believe any of it and was therefore regarded as a dangerous senile warmonger. He was right and the International Relations scholars were wrong. Against that huge fact all other considerations, including those Latin American countries rendered more miserable partly as a result of his administration's policies, are simply of lesser weight, though never indifferent.

The short version: experts have a clear interest in thinking differently from the rest of us, because they have to justify their existence. Differently, not better.

A word of advice

...appropriate to Andrew Motion, Tom Paulin and anyone else who thinks they have the right to pontificate at the present time. I know that's not all Yeats is saying here, but the third line is just true.

On being asked for a War Poem

by William Butler Yeats

I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night.

(Via LovePoems.)

Dumb vs. evil

According to Roger L. Simon, the Republicans and Democrats have nicknames for each other: the dumb party and the evil party. Can you guess which is which? Now go to his site and have a look.

This sort of thing has a long history. The liberal and conservative factions in Mexico's endless civil wars used to be the 'thieves' and 'drunks' respectively, which sounds about right, though you could probably have reversed the epithets. But (without any patriotic bias) the most interesting party names are British, i.e. Whig and Tory. A Whig was originally a sort of Scottish bandit/rebel: the name was intended to smear the anti-monarchist party by association with Scotland and consequently the Presbyterians. Similarly a Tory (Gaelic toridhe) was a sort of Irish bandit/rebel, the intended smear in this case being that the monarchists were closet Catholics. We don't know for sure who started it, but we know when: around 1680, at the time of the Exclusion Crisis.
Could anyone out there think of some good further examples?

Useful links

Now that the mass graves are being finally investigated properly it won't be long before the anti-war pundits come out with their favourite old number 'We Armed Saddam' (lyrics by Bob Marshall-Andrews, tune by Mark Steel, performers: virtually anybody). A few salutary links:

- on the Iraqi conventional arsenal;

- and on the unconventional. Note that these reports come from a source not normally considered to be part of the neocon conspiracy. Also, though it's headed 'Britain's dirty secret' the company in question is German and that the US was actually trying to stop this sort of thing.

The point is not that our hands were clean. They were not. The point is that they were not remotely as dirty as is usually stated or assumed, and that other hands - all belonging to the Axis of Peace - were far dirtier.

Poem of the day

Too bludgeoned with other bloggers' opinions to have any of my own. So here's a poem instead. Would have been one of Larkin's, but today I'm not in the right mood for his brand of miserabilism. Lamenting the death of creativity seems more like it. He's right, of course.

To the Muses

Whether on Ida's shady brow
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the Sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceased;

Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air
Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wandering in many a coral grove;
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry;

How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.

William Blake

Conferences, yay!

Further to my post of yesterday, here's a clear example of the kind of international conference we clearly need lots more of. The money quotes:
"The meeting was summoned by the Spanish royal family and the socialist government as a "congress of dialogue" with representatives of the Arab and Jewish world... An academic speaking in English was heckled by jeering Arabs even though there were extensive translation facilities. In the end, he spoke in Arabic. But the peace was shortlived. There was more shouting when European historians touched on Islamic sensibilities by discussing the more liberal era when Muslim women did not wear the veil. An African Muslim was also heckled for complaining of Arab dominance of his faith. The only Jew to speak was heard in polite silence, but it was assumed that was because he was preaching the destruction of Israel, which he described as an apostatic state: a point of view which presumably went down rather well with the audience."

Can't you just visualise world peace this way?

Also at the same fine site, the most eloquent Afghan photo yet.

Tragedy and strategy

Have we turned a corner in the war? The human tragedy goes on, but strategically we are achieving important successes. As I’ve argued before, the media are focussed on the human angle to the exclusion of strategy: they conclude that a human tragedy must represent generic, definitive failure. But that’s untrue, and never has been true. ‘War is a succession of disasters ending in victory’. Or to turn specific, the battles at Alamein, sinking the Bismarck, and Omaha Beach were human tragedies and strategic successes. Of course, to see things in those terms requires one to accept the war as necessary and just: arguing about specific events in a war just shows up one’s general assumptions.
Strategic success number one is of course the Afghan election. There have been many complaints that the war is too military and insufficiently political or ideological, or, to use the current jargon, too much hard power and not enough soft. This sort of criticism is usually followed up by a demand for lots of international conferences and foreign aid payments. The criticism is somewhat unfair: an election is the clearest political and ideological signal imaginable, and will do more for victory than a dozen conferences and any amount of aid money. (That’s making the charitable assumption that international conferences and aid money of the sort envisaged by the critics wouldn’t actually make things worse.) When the history of the war is written some images will be seminal, for good or ill: this image falls into the former category.

In other news: Australia holds firm; the Iraqi National Guard comes of age; the Mahdists throw in the towel; Syria starts to make nice. The last is very significant because, as I’ve seen commented somewhere (with what’s becoming a bad habit of mine, I neglected to take note of where), the Syrians certainly know the real state of play in Iraq. If they thought the rebels stood a chance of winning they’d be hanging tough instead of repositioning their forces in Lebanon and muttering about peace negotiations with Israel without pre-conditions. Prediction: runaway win for the Allies.
The jihadis keep fighting without a hope of winning, spilling blood to no purpose. They can’t possibly win, the mismatch between their means and their ends is too huge, as is their disadvantage in resources (physical and spiritual) with respect to ours. But they keep fighting partly because they think they can win: it will take a few more years of bloodshed before it becomes evident even to them that they can’t. The Guardian and Channel 4 news are doing their bit to prolong the war by encouraging the enemy – that is, by refusing to acknowledge that the strategic balance in the war is favourable to our side – but then irresponsibility is the price we pay for a free press.
This is also the real reason for wanting Bush to beat Kerry: although both men have both faults and virtues, Bush represents determination to win the war, whereas Kerry isn’t totally certain that there is a war, or if there is who exactly it’s against, or how to win it, his talk of plans being essentially insubstantial. The risk is that Kerry would go soft on the need to act midwife on Iraqi democracy, bring the troops home prematurely, and then blame Bush if everything went belly-up. I don't think he necessarily would do that, but if there is even, say, a 30% risk of it, that's too much of a risk to take.
The considerations that move Andrew Sullivan – the US budget deficit, Republican homophobia, mismanagement of Iraq – don’t move me nearly so much. Deficit doom-mongers have been crying wolf since the seventeenth century at least: the wolf remains absent. Right-wing homophobic ranting is just froth, a substitute for action leading nowhere, as the failure of the FMA showed. As for the mismanagement of Iraq I’ve no doubt that different people would have avoided all the manifold mistakes of the Bush administration. They would just have made different ones instead. The thing is none of those mistakes were fatal, as flattening the Golden Mosque, for instance, would have been, or sending hordes of evangelical missionaries to Basra, as the anti-war movement liked to suggest was an objective.
So it's got to be Bush. For all his limitations, he's just the better of the two options.

A lifetime's enthusiasm

It’s harder to praise than to condemn. But I should say a word for the Royal Philharmonic under Daniele Gatti, who turned in a highly creditable performance of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony last Friday evening. This was one of the first pieces of classical music I ever encountered and I can still remember the mind-expanding effects of the finale. Few other pieces have ever had a similar effect on first listening: Mendelssohn’s Octet did something similar, as did the finale to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony (but don’t get me started on Beethoven), and the forceful, brooding opening of Mozart’s 40th Symphony. Then there’s Rhapsody in Blue, Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, and – in a perhaps slightly different fashion – Strayhorn’s Take the A Train played by Ellington. Some music does that: instant recognition, instant certainty that this piece will be a lifetime’s enthusiasm. Others grow more slowly in one’s consciousness: for instance Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony has eclipsed the 4th in my estimation recently, though it’s less accessible.

Here we go

Bill Whittle has launched another strategic strike against the enemy's command and control network, writing a pair of linked essays that are completely, totally and absolutely correct and right in every single last detail. Read the danged whole thing.

Ditto for Michael Totten.

Seventeenth century beauty

Particular recommendation in the new typelist: English Verse.com, from which I found this pearl:

Henry King, Bishop of Chichester

Exequy on his Wife (extract)

But hark! my pulse, like a soft drum,
Beats my approach, tells thee I come;
And slow howe'er my marches be
I shall at last sit down by thee.
The thought of this bids me go on
And wait my dissolution
With hope and comfort. Dear—forgive
The crime—I am content to live
Divided, with but half a heart,
Till we shall meet and never part.

Both beautiful in itself - the image of the heartbeat as the harbinger of approaching death is immediately arresting - and useful to bear in mind next time some academic zombie tries to tell you that pre-modern marriages were by nature essentially patriarchal. Maybe Henry King was patriarchal - seventeenth-century churchmen would usually have some such tendency - but that was evidently far from the whole story. It never is the whole story.

Also at the same site, this late poem by John Donne, from that same extraordinary century:

A Hymn to God the Father

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sins their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Is that a poem by a scared, sin-obsessed old man, his intelligence crushed by suffocating Christian dogma, or by a man (grown wise with age) making a serious attempt at coming to terms with his past faults, and not trying to pretend (as is usually the case today) that those faults aren't important or, worse, aren't faults at all? Well, in his later years, Donne was nothing if not serious.

For a last act I wanted to post the lyrics to a seventeenth-century anti-capitalist protest song called 'The Clothiers' Song', but they don't appear to be available. I can only recommend this site - the song is no.24 on the disc. (I have nothing to do with the performers or the production company, by the way.)
It begins:
'Of all sorts of callings that in England be
There is none that liveth so gallant as we;
Our trading maintains us as brave as a knight,
We scorn for to toil and taketh delight.
We heap up our bags of silver and gold,
and conscience and charity with us are cold;
By poor people's labour we fill up our purse,
Although we do get it with many a curse.'

And on for several verses in that vein. It's a very jolly song with a good tune. The only reservation I have about it is that it makes grinding the poor sound like fun, whereas as we know it's very hard work being a capitalist exploiter.