Word of the day: pre-history

September 4th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

A friend recently told me that she was really interested in pre-history. I wondered how this term is defined and, of course, I found the explanation on Wikipedia:

“Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems.

The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,000 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing spreading to almost all cultures by the 19th century.

The end of prehistory therefore came at very different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.”

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A review of a new book: “The Russo-Ukraiinan War” by Serhi Plokhy (2023)

August 26th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

On 22 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine, intending to occupy the country and install a puppet regime in a matter of weeks if not days. This book was written between March 2022 and February 2023, so it covers the holding of Kyiv by the Ukrainians, the recovery of the territory originally occupied by Russia in the north, and the establishment of a kind of stalemate between the two forces in the east and the south. I read the book in August 2023, by which time the Ukrainians had launched a long-awaited counter-offensive which is currently making only gradual and slow progress.

Plokhy was brought up in Ukraine and had an academic career there until, in the mid 1990s, he moved to Canada. Since 2007, he has been a professor of history at Harvard University. So he is not entirely neutral – who can be in what he calls “the first ‘good war'” since 1939-45? – but he is immensely knowledgeable and insightful and he has written a really informative and readable analysis that is thoroughly commended.

The first half of the 300 pages of main text (there are almost 60 more pages of notes) provides a very short history of the region followed by an extensive account of the build up to the 2022 invasion. The second half of the book describes the conduct of the war in each of the theatres and reviews the position of all the major actors (including Turkey and China).

This has been a war of surprises: that the Russians did not succeed in taking over Ukraine in short order; that the Ukrainians put up such a quick and effective resistance; that NATO adopted such a unified approach and moved so rapidly to impose unprecedented sanctions on Russia and supply ever-more numerous and sophisticated arms to Ukraine. What now? Plokhy makes no attempt to forecast when or how the war will end.

Instead he asserts: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine produced a nineteenth-century war fought with twentieth-century tactics and twenty-first-century weaponry.” What does he mean by this? “Its ideological underpinnings came from the visions of territorial expansion that characterized the Russian imperial era; its strategy was borrowed by the Kremlin from Word War II and postwar-era manuals of the Soviet Army; and its key features were not only precision-guided missiles but also intelligence-gathering satellites and cyber warfare used to different degrees by both sides.”

Plokhy is clear that “the Ukrainian nation will emerge from this war more united and certain of its identity than at any other point in its modern history.” Perceptively he suggests that: “China now has the best chance of any country to emerge as a key beneficiary of the current war and the enmity between Russia and the West that the conflict has created.” In his view: “Instead of the multipolar world that Russia was hoping for, the conflict presaged a return to the bipolar world of the Cold War, now centred not on Washington and Moscow but on Washington and Beijing.”

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Do you have a National Flag Day and, if not, would you want one?

August 24th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

My last holiday was to the three countries of the Caucasus: Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. I was struck by the observation that each of these three countries has a national flag day.

Wondering how common or how rare this practice is, I checked it out on Wikipedia and learned that over 50 countries – around one quarter of all nations – have a national flag day. Check out the full list here.

Notably absent from this list is my own country of the United Kingdom. Here public displays of patriotism – such as honouring the flag or singing the national anthem or displaying pictures of the national leader – are rare and the whole concept of national pride is somewhat understated. I confess that I rather like this.

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Is Lucy Letby a case of the banality of evil?

August 19th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

Understandably, the British media is awash with coverage of the recently-concluded, ten-month court case in which Lucy Letby has been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more. The newspaper which I read – the “Guardian” – today devotes its first 12 pages to the case.

I love children. I love babies. I really struggle to understand how anyone could harm them. But new-born babies murdered by a neonational nurse just defies comprehension. Lucy Letby seems to have had a very normal upbringing and her parent appear to believe in her innocence.

I am reminded of a recent Netflix movie based on a real case in the United States. “The Good Nurse” told the story of Charlie Cullen who was convicted of 29 murders but is thought to have been responsible for around 400 which would make him the most prolific killer in US history.

Cases like Lucy Letby and Charlie Cullen raise profoundly difficult questions. Are some people evil or should we reserve the word for acts or behaviours rather than persons? Should we solely blame the perpetrators of these crimes or the institutions for which they worked which, in both these cases, covered up their concerns to protect public reputation and legal liability? 

I am also reminded of the notion of “the banality of evil”, a controversial phrase associated with American philosopher and writer Hannah Arendt.

Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that Arendt grappled with when she reported for “The New Yorker” in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps as part of the Holocaust.

Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was “neither perverted nor sadistic”, but “terrifyingly normal”. She argued that he acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, “Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil” (1963).

We like to feel that we live in a rational world where people’s actions can be explained by their circumstances and their motives. But do we ever really know anybody? In certain circumstances, can any person do any thing? I don’t know …

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A review of the new action movie “Heart Of Stone”

August 14th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

Sadly, everything about this Netflix movie is contrived, starting with the title. Heart is the name of a super-powerful system of artificial intelligence, just like The Entity in the “Dead Reckoning” segment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. Stone is the surname of the special agent at the heart of the plot (see what I did there?. We know that Rachel does not have a heart of stone because she is kind to the cat.

The money men have obviously influenced the international casting. So Israeli Gal Godot is the eponymous spy and, while she was pretty as “Wonder Woman” and we know that she’s an expert in various martial arts, she is not a very good actor. The other plucky female role is filled by Alia Bhatt who is now a big star in the Indian film market. For female viewers, we have Jamie Dornan from “Fifty Shades Of Grey”. Don’t forget the wider Asian market: Jing Lusi and B D Wong are there. The one star actor in the cast is Glenn Close who is given very little to do.

From the very beginning, there are some lively action sequences, although they are very derivative, and there is some fine location shooting in Portugal, Morocco and Iceland. The main problem – as usual with action movies – is the script. The plotting is farcical and the dialogue is weak. But, as a TV movie, it fills an evening.

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A review of the novel “Heat And Dust” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

August 12th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

For a long time, I assumed that the author was of Indian ethnicity because of her name and her long association with film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. In fact, her parents were Polish Jews, she was born in German, and she came to England at the age of 12 when in 1939 her family fled the Nazi regime. Following her marriage to an Indian Parsi, she moved to India where she spent 24 years before relocating to New York City for the rest of her life.

So she brings a very special eye to this story which is largely set in India and utilises two timelines to compare and contrast the lives and the decisions of two loosely related English women with a fascination for India: Olivia, the new and young wife of a member of the British administration in the India of the 1923, and her modern-day, slightly older, step-granddaughter Anne who, some 50 years later, comes across Olivia’s letters to her sister and decides to visit the locations mentioned and try to understand better what happened.

The novel was published in 1975 and won the Booker prize. It was then filmed with a script by Jhabvala and Ivory as director and Merchant as producer. I saw the film in 1988 and so enjoyed it that I bought the novel but never read it. I viewed the film again in 2006, resolved again to read the book, and again never did. Then, in 2023, I caught the film for a third time and finally read the original work.

I found that the film follows the novel’s narrative very closely and even uses some of the book’s dialogue, but there is more literary detail and colour, so I was delighted to have read it at last.

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Searching for WIMPS in North Yorkshire

August 10th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

WIMPS are weakly interacting massive particles. These subatomic entities are the most likely source of dark matter which, it is believed, accounts for around 85% of the universe’s mass.

There’s a plan to discover these little WIMPS 3,000 feet underground in a working mine in North Yorkshire. Wouldn’t that be something?

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A review of the 1983 film “Heat and Dust”

August 7th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

One of the great collaborative teams of British cinema was the trio of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and “Heat And Dust” was one of their most successful enterprises.

Based on the eponymous novel by Jhabvala and set largely in northern India, it tells two parallel stories located in different time periods: the early life of Olivia (a first leading role for Greta Scacchi), the new and young wife of a member of the British administration in the India of the 1923, and her modern-day, slightly older, step-granddaughter Anne (the established star Julie Christie who was actually born in British India) who comes across Olivia’s letters to her sister and decides to visit the locations mentioned and try to understand better what happened. This narrative device enables the two protagonists to have similar experiences but make different choices. The film is beautifully shot and brilliantly acted.

Some reviewers criticised the work as presenting a kind of heritage or nostalgic view of empire but this is not fair. This is not a film about empire as such, but two coming-of-age portraits of young women set against cultural challenges and, while the injustices of colonialism are not fore-fronted, they are not overlooked. I’ve seen “Heat And Dust” three times – most latterly at the British Film Institute with an introduction by a film historian – and now I really must read the novel.

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A review of a book about the creation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War

August 6th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

“Dreams Of A Great Small Nation” by Kevin J McNamara

I have been visiting Prague regularly since 1988 and I have often crossed the Legion’s Bridge opposite the National Theatre, but it was only in 2023 when I visited a charity shop in Manchester that I found that there was a recent (2016) English-language work on this piece of history. McNamara, a scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in the United States, asserts at the start of his bibliography that “Very few books on the exploits and significance of the Czecho-Slovak [he always hyphenates the term] Legion have ever been published in English and fewer of those remain in print.” He claims that this is the first English-language book to make extensive use of collections of eye-witness testimony. So this is a welcome work.

It is the story of how, in the First World War, as many as 55,000 Czechs and Slovaks defected from the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to form their own legion in Russia which, at the time, was undergoing a revolution, followed by withdrawal from the world war, and then a brutal and messy civil war. The Czechs and Slovaks wished to fight alongside the Allies, but any route west would take them back to Austro-Hungary or to German-occupied territory, so the plan was that the Czecho-Slovaks would travel via the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way east to Vladivostok where Allied ships would somehow transport them to the Western Front.

It did not work out like this at all. In fact, the Czechs and Slovaks found themselves in the middle of Red, White and other forces, requiring them to fight a whole series of battles and skirmishes as they effectively took control of the railway and with it much of Siberia. They were stranded in Russia long after the Germans surrendered and the last ship transporting the legionnaires did not leave Vladivostok until September 1920. Most estimates say that just over 4,000 legionnaires died in Russia.

It was a confusing campaign and McNamara tells it in a rather confused way with much back and forth in terms of chronology and personages. However, the central theme is very clear: the bravery and sacrifice of the Czecho-Slovak Legion in Russia, and the substantial publicity which this experience received in Western (especially American) newspapers, played an important role in persuading the Allies to recognise and grant the demand for the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia which, between 1918 and 1938, was the only democratic state in the region.

The political architects of this independence were Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik. Masaryk – who was married to an American and added her surname to his own name – was especially influential in the USA and credited the exploits of the Legion as giving him valuable leverage in his campaign. Štefánik – the only wholly Slovak member of the trio – was killed in a flying accident in May 1919 and so was not around to urge the implementation of the promise in the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918 that Slovakia would have full autonomy. In the end, the Czechs and Slovaks settled for separate nations in 1993.

As an American, McNamara provides the viewpoint of events largely from the United States, but the political campaign for Czechoslovak independence was understandably focused on President Woodrow Wilson and it was the Americans who could have sent earlier and in larger numbers supporting troops and then rescuing vessels. McNamara is balanced though and opines that “America’s policy towards the legionnaires at times reached such chilling levels of indifference to their lives that it seemed almost as hostile, if not homicidal, as Moscow’s.”

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Word of the day: anabasis

August 5th, 2023 by Roger Darlington

The word means a military expedition or advance.

I came across it in a book about the Czech Legion in Siberia at the end of the First World War: “Dreams Of A Great Small Nation”.

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