More wisdom from Babylon 5

Londo, the Centauri ambassador, is editing a report on potential enemies to make them seem more menacing.
Naïve assistant: "But they are a very spiritual people!"
Londo: "Leave that in. That always scares them!"

A war to end war

Today in the Globe and Mail, "There was a war in 1812? Really?"
Earlier this month, Peter Jones in the Globe and Mail:

But the real legacy of the War of 1812, government claims aside, is simply that there was never a repeat. Tensions remained, small cross-border incursions took place, and fortifications continued to be built and maintained for another half-century, but the primary lesson both sides drew (and which was slowly reinforced) was not to bother again.

This may sound rather uninspiring – it is difficult to gather a group of colourfully dressed re-enactors to flail around in a field but not actually fight each other – but it probably explains much in terms of the incredible success North America’s two northern nations have enjoyed since.
For from the War of 1812, and its aftermath of avoiding another conflict, slowly emerged what might be called the North American regional consensus. It is now largely unspoken; most who live here probably couldn’t articulate it if they had to, but it has dominated the lives of both countries, and especially Canada, ever since.

Simply put, the North American regional consensus boils down to a realization that the cost of fighting for any possible treasure on the other side of the border is patently ridiculous when it is simply easier and cheaper to exchange these things by trade; that two quite different systems of government can coexist perfectly well; and (for Canadians) that maintaining stability and security in the northern half of the continent ourselves means that the United States will not feel compelled to do it for us
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We may take all of this for granted, but we shouldn’t. It took those sophisticated Europeans another 150 years (and two of the bloodiest wars in history) to figure it out. Most regions of the world still haven’t.
Of course, the fact that the British had a growing concern for their own relations with the United States probably had something to do with the lack of fighting after 1814. We tend to forget that, after 1814, the British often sided with the U.S. in various arbitration exercises, when they probably should have acted differently if strictly Canadian interests were uppermost in their minds. The Alaska panhandle is a case in point.

Whatever the reasons, the North American regional consensus is now so deeply ingrained on both sides of the border that anyone who tried to promote the idea of fighting a war over anything would rightly be regarded in both countries as insane. Social scientists refer to such regions as “security communities” – places in the world where the idea of conflict is so remote that societies and individuals have developed, as Karl Deutsch put it many years ago, “dependable expectations of peaceful change.”
So there you have it. The real legacy of the War of 1812 is that it helped set the stage for a regional security community. Hardly stirring stuff, but, if you look around the world today, you will quickly realize just how rare a thing ours is. And it is a thing very much worth celebrating.

Breivik, coward

Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, deserves no better than to be classified as a malicious coward and exhibitionist.

If he was really dedicated to the cause he proclaimed, he would have shot or blown up someone important.

Instead he went for a large number of easy kills.

The Sultan's Organ, by John Mole

John Mole noticed my personal and professional interest in Islamic history and sent me a most interesting book, The Sultan's Organ, a book that is not salacious in the least, concerns an Englishman, Thomas Dallam, who around 1600 transported a gift from Queen Elizabeth and a  number of her merchants trading with Turkey to the Ottoman Sultan: a massive organ that not only played music but was festooned with  mechanical figures.

It's a good read.

I've often thought from other reading that through most of history has been little difference between a sailor and a pirate. This account clearly confirms that impression with regard  to the Elizabethan era.

There is also some really down to earth description of the daily life of a traveler: the search for provisions on an infertile Mediterranean island that results in the searchers finding only some garlic for sale – garlic that their fellow travelers are very interested in acquiring once they hear of  it;. or the amazing story of how these English travelers, spending the night in an abandoned house, almost scare themselves to death because they mistake a loose garter for an attacking snake.

John Mole has written a number of other books, which can be acquired on his website here. One that appeals to me is his story of being "a potato oligarch in the new Russia." You can read the first page here and see why I am considering following up.

One of the best things I've written

Those allergic to even the slightest touch of braggadocio should stop reading now.

Last night and this morning I reread something I wrote a while back that I think is really very good, in its conception,  its analysis, and in its expression as an effective piece of writing.

It wasn't "Democracy's Place in World History," which I wrote back in 1991 with Phil Paine; I hope that article did some good in the world, and I think it did. No, not that.

It wasn't my first book, the Fifth-century Chroniclers, a solid piece of work on how contemporaries understood what we think of as the fall of the Roman Empire. I got some good compliments on that, and I know it's one of those specialized studies that has a long scholarly half-life, maybe a century or so.

What gave me such satisfaction?

It was the chapter called "Will a Frenchman fight?" In my book Deeds of Arms. In what could almost stand as an article by itself, I tackled what for me is perhaps the most important passage in Froissart, the one which discusses the deeds of arms done at Vannes in 1381. Some of you will remember them – French and English champions fighting on foot, climaxing with an Englishman thrusting his lance  into an off–target area of his opponent and disgracing himself. To understand what was going on in this passage, I had to read all of Froissart's Chronicles (and much more) to see the big picture, what Froissart and his audience thought was chivalric and what they did not. I had to  be able to explain not just these deeds of arms, but many more depicted by Froissart and other way medieval writers.

And I think I succeeded. It's a good feeling.

Some readers may know that I am the editor of the Deeds of Arms series that Freelance Academy Press is putting out.  (Volume 1, Royal jousts at the end of the 14th century is already in print. )    I hope in ayear or so to make a book called Will a Frenchman fight? available in that series. It won't be a duplicate of the analytical chapter I have just been talking about: instead, it will be a collection of the original accounts of those famous deeds of arms and the campaign through France that they were part of, introduced by yours truly.

In the meantime, the volume on the Combat of the Thirty should be out very soon, including a full modern translation of the best account, plus much more. Stay tuned.               

Old Ironsides!

OK, despite my critical view of the War of 1812, I remain a fan of the USS Constitution.  With luck, she  sails again tomorrow.

Nevsky, by Ben McCool and Mario Guevera

In our time artists have a lot of choices of which genre  they will use to tell stories that inspire them. One common strategy has been to take tales that originate in comic books or graphic novels and fill them out by using all the resources of the movies. The Marvel superhero saga dominates film production these days. A somewhat different example can be seen in the transformation of a popular graphic novel,300, into a film whose artistic roots are unapologetically in comics.

Here we have an example of other artists  going the other direction: taking an epic film and turning it into a book that can be held in one's hands. I would be interested, sometime down the pike, to know how successful, commercially and artistically, this project is, how popular it turns out to be with the target audience.

This is certainly a labor of love. It is a faithful rendering of the 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, one of the most famous products of Sergei Eisenstein's filmmaking genius. There is no effort to disguise how much the authors owe to the original version of this story. In fact, quite a bit of space is devoted to telling the reader about both the historical Alexander Nevsky and his interpreter, Eisenstein.

Alexander Nevsky was a 13th-century Russian warrior who was remembered for fighting for Mother  Russia against two dangerous enemies, and East (the Mongol Golden horde) and West (the Teutonic Knights). In the late 1930s the story seemed both relevant and useful to Eisenstein and the Soviet regime that employed and often abused him. Japan loomed in one direction, Nazi Germany in the other. Whatever the facts of the historical Nevsky, he was needed as a symbol of Russian/Soviet determination in the face of daunting odds.

A story of great courage and heroism defeating treason and cruelty was right up Eisenstein's alley. If you like your heroes unsullied and your enemies black as black can be, Eisenstein is your man. The successful conjuring up of such figures makes the movie unforgettable once you see it. And the stark contrast is clearly what has inspired the two creators to take on this remarkable project.

Of course, the success of Nevsky will depend to a very great extent on its artistic appeal to aficionados of the genre. I'm not really in that crew. To my eye it looks pretty good. The art combines rich colors, heavy shading, and the occasional use of odd angles to emphasize some aspect of a scene.

I have to wonder whether this book will result in a new audience finding Eisenstein's films.