The Australian Department of Defence has been accused of ignoring the religious beliefs of Australian soldiers killed in World War I currently being re-buried, by assuming they were all Christians. This assumption is a very odd one for the DoD to make, given that the first Australian-born commander of Australian troops, General Sir John Monash, in command of all Australian forces by the end of that war, promoted to General in the field, and knighted on the battlefield (the first such elevation by a British monarch in 200 years), was Jewish. I think the DoD needs to make a change in its burial policy and officially apologize to the affected families.
Archive for the 'History' Category
Further to my post speculating about Robert Mugabe’s personality, here is some news from The Times about his physiology. Apparently, he nods off to sleep every few minutes, even when meeting foreign visitors. (HT: Normblog)
The Times article mentions the two main contenders for the leadership of ZANU (PF) following Bob’s always-imminently-predicted-but-never-quite-arriving retirement: Emmerson Mnangagwa and Solomon Mujuru. One would think that the Zimbabwean Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, who is likewise a ZANU (PF) nomenklatura, would perhaps also be a contender, but she is married to Solomon, so he takes precedence. She is more famous in Zimbabwe under her chimurenga name, Teurai Ropa (or Spill-Blood) Nhongo, and for leading a team of guerrilla fighters into battle while pregnant. Because she joined the struggle (for Independence) in her teens, she did not finish high-school; to her great personal credit, she completed her O-levels after Independence and while a Cabinet Minister. In the year she did O-level English, a novel by George Orwell was on the syllabus, leading to her infamous stage whisper at the official opening by then Prime Minister Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe Institute for Development Studies; when the VIPs were led to a different (and much better) buffet than that provided for the other people present, she was heard by all to exclaim, “But this is just like Animal Farm!”
Her husband also had a loud voice. When I first met him, he was calling himself Rex Nhongo, and I did not then know what he looked like. A mutual friend introduced us using only first names as we happened upon each other buying groceries one evening after work in a Greek delicatessen in the low-density (ie, formerly whites-only) suburbs of Salisbury (as it then was). Making conversation while we stood in the queue, I asked, “And what do you do for a living, Rex?” In a booming voice which scared the daylights out of the white customers in the shop, he replied, “Oh, I’m Commander-in-Chief of the Army, son!” Whether intended or not, this statement got the three of us to the front of the queue immediately.
FOOTNOTE:
Note that in maShona custom, a person may be given or may adopt different names over their life, and may prefer different names at different times or for different purposes. In addition, for reasons of security during the liberation struggle many people adopted noms de guerre, so-called chimurenga names.
I wondered here whether Robert Mugabe had been an informant for CIA in the years prior to Zimbabwean Independence in 1980. If so, many strange events in Zimbabwean politics, before and after Independence, would be explained. The thought has now occurred to me that such a relationship, if it had existed, would also explain an odd trait of Mugabe’s personality in the period after his return from exile in December 1979. I realize my thoughts here are pure speculation, and, moreover, speculation about another person’s personality.
Because informants working for espionage agencies provide information on a regular basis to an employee of that agency, informants and their agents often develop quite close relationships. Each has a secret which he or she usually cannot tell to other relatives or friends or colleagues – informants cannot usually divulge their information-passing actions to those around them, and agents usually do not divulge the names of their informants to their fellow employees. Each also has to trust the other to some extent, and so the pair can develop quite a close relationship with one another; examples can be seen in Larry Devlin’s account of his close relationship with Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Robert Baer’s account of his time working for CIA in the Middle East.
If our Robert had indeed been an informant (paid or unpaid) for CIA, then we would probably expect the agency to release him from that relationship when he was elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. If he had developed a close relationship with his agency handler, then becoming PM would mean he would no longer have a close, neutral confidant. Is this then why Mugabe became close to Lord Christopher Soames, the temporary Governor sent by Britain to oversee the election and the transfer of power at Independence? Their relationship became so close that Mugabe asked Soames to stay on (as Governor? as President?) for a couple of years after Independence, a request Soames declined. Is this also why Mugabe met weekly with his political enemy, Ian Smith, for about 18 months following Independence? Until it fell apart in 1981, their relationship was sufficiently close that they were able to dance with each other’s wives at official functions, such as the ball held for the African Parliamentary Union meeting in Zimbabwe in 1981.
The closeness of both these relationships (Mugabe-Soames, Mugabe-Smith) has always struck me as odd. But, if true, an ex-informant seeking another regular confidant could explain them both.
References:
Robert Baer [2002]: See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. Crown Publishing Group.
Larry Devlin [ 2007]: Chief of Station, Congo. New York, NY, USA: Public Affairs.
Cosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth cannot understand why people desire original works of visual art rather than printed reproductions, especially when we’ve been buying printed books rather than manuscript codexes for centuries now. He presents – and demolishes too quickly, I believe - some potential reasons for this. I am very surprised by his view, but perhaps its the sheltered life I lead.
First, let me say as a computer scientist, that a map is not the territory. It is easy to confuse a representation of some object with that object itself, and the people now singing the praises for e-books seem to be doing just that. Au contraire, I believe that hard, physical books will continue to be purchased and kept yet for hundreds of years, and possibly many more years, because books are souvenirs of our experience of reading them. The same is true of works of visual art. If you have had some hand in the commissioning, the creation (for example, as subject of the artwork or as patron of the artist), or the selection and purchase of a work of art, you want the work of art itself, not a copy, to remind yourself of that experience.
Second, let me say as a former mathematician, that printed reproductions of artworks are projections onto 2 dimensions of 3-dimensional objects. By definition, such projections will lose something. If you think that what is lost thereby in visual art is unimportant, as Cosma seems to, then you’ve not been looking very closely at real paintings or drawings. There are too many examples to recount, so let me just point to: the brush-strokes in JMW Turner’s seascapes, which manifest and convey the torment of the scenes (and that of the painter); or the drip effects in Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, which likewise manifest and convey the energy of the creation process; or the careful, visible brushwork of the leaves and blades of grass in Pre-Raphaelite art or in the art of the Yangzhou painters of the early Qing Dynasty; or the brush-strokes in Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. These effects are either invisible or can barely be seen in printed reproductions. It is also worth noting that Chinese art has, for hundreds of years, supported “factory production” of 3-D paintings, using lesser-skilled artists to make approved copies of paintings by famous artists, usually under the direct, personal supervision of the famous artist him or herself; that these copies are purchased rather than printed reproductions indicates that the 3-D object has qualities perceived to be lacking in any 2-D print.
Third, let me say as a former statistician, that it seems to be easy for people familiar with Andrei Kolmogorov’s theory of complexity to imagine they have represented faithfully some object, when all they have captured is its surface form (its syntax). As I have argued before, the canonical example used in discussions of algorithmic complexity is Kazimir Malevich’s painting Black Square, which is alleged to be easy to reproduce with an algorithm such as:
Paint a pixel of black in each pixel throughout the square.
At best what this algorithm generates is a copy not of the 3-dimensional painting itself, but of a 2-dimensional projection of it. But even were it to recreate the 3-D object, such an algorithm ignores the meaning of the painting and the historical context of its creation – in linguistic terms, its semantics (or its use-context-independent meaning) and its pragmatics (its use-context-dependent meaning). Both these aspects are immensely important to understanding and appreciating the work, and for explaining why it appeared when it did and not before, and understanding its reception and influence. As I noted before, one can just about imagine the 18th-century Welsh landscape painter Thomas Jones eventually creating something similar to Black Square, since he painted contemplative, Zen-like depictions of seemingly-featureless Neapolitan walls (such as A Wall in Naples, pictured above), but no other artist before Malevich.
How is this relevant? Well, once you’ve seen and admired Malevich’s painting, no printed reproduction would satisfy you for an instant.
Finally, paintings – even when traditional, representational art – are best understood, not as representations of objects or scenes or feelings or indeed of anything at all, but as attempts at solutions to problems in painting. Most solutions fail, so the artist abandons that attempt, and tries again. In the meantime, the abandoned partial solution may provide pleasure and joy (or other responses) to those who view it, and to those who seek to emulate the methods of its painting which a careful study of it may disclose.
FOOTNOTE: The post title is a reference to an Ambitious Lovers song.
Rory Stewart, in his book about walking across Afghanistan, has this to say about the post-colonial cadres working for the UN and other international agencies in developing countries:
Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neo-colonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.
Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual offices are never in any one place and rarely in one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neo-colonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation or oppression.
Reference:
Rory Stewart [2004]: The Places in Between. London, UK: Picador, p.272, footnote #59.
I am a great fan of the films of Terence Malick, and so I was delighted to read John Patterson’s recent article proclaiming Malick’s The New World as the single film masterpiece of the decade just ending.
It may seem like an exaggeration, but with The New World cinema has reached its culmination, its apotheosis. It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined, made with much the same tools as were available in the infancy of the form a century ago to the Lumières, to Griffith and Murnau. Barring a few adjustments for modernity – colour, sound, developments in editing, a hyper-cine-literate audience – it could conceivably have been made 80 years ago (like Murnau and Flaherty’s Tabu). This is why, I believe, when all the middlebrow Oscar-dross of our time has eroded away to its constituent molecules of celluloid, The New World will stand tall, isolated and magnificent, like Kubrick’s black monolith. Anything else that survives from now till then will by comparison probably resemble 2001’s grunting apes. To quote, simultaneously, Godard’s Pierrot le Fou and primitivist auteur Sam Fuller – whose 1957 western Run of the Arrow is a sort of thematic inbred bastard cousin of The New World – Malick is seeking “in a word: emotion!”
Recently, I have listed the teachers and writers who have influenced me, along with the managers whom I admire. I now list the politicians and political activists whom I admire. Some of these led conventional political careers, others were community organizers or single-issue advocates, and yet others were spies, or were accused of being such.
Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, Thomas Aikenhead, Tom Paine, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Sol Plaatje, Franklin Roosevelt, Ted Theodore, John Curtin, Doc Evatt, Richard Sorge, Imre Nagy, Zhou Enlai, Milada Horakova, Bram Fischer, Salvador Allende Gossens, Lyndon Johnson, Donal Lamont, Rudolf Margolius, Gough Whitlam, Helen Suzman, Alexander Dubcek, Nelson Mandela, Zhao Ziyang, Martin Luther King Jr, Zdenek Mlynar, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Paul Keating, Barack Obama and Rory Stewart.
Australia (5), Czechoslovakia (5), and South Africa (4) have produced more than their per capita share of political heroes, it would seem, but the distribution no doubt reflects my reading and interests. Of course, it hardly needs to be said that I do not necessarily agree with any or all the views these people have expressed or hold, nor necessarily support all their actions.
Talking about Zimbabwean history reminded me that there are some unsung heroes of Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule whom I wish to salute. These are the people who, rejecting the racist policies of the Rhodesian Front government, organized an illegal underground railroad to secretly transport black and white resisters across the border, usually to Botswana and Zambia. The whites transported were usually resisting military conscription to fight in a war they disagreed with, a war in support of a cause they believed immoral. I knew a couple of these railwaymen: AP (”Knotty”) Knottenbelt, who had been headmaster of Fletcher High School, a state boarding school for black boys, from where he resigned in 1969 rather than raise a Rhodesian flag; he later tutored at the University of Zimbabwe, and the Mugabe Government appointed him to the board of the Posts and Telecommunications Corporation after Independence. Another railwayman was his bridge partner, Nick Holman, father of the (now former) Financial Times Africa Editor, Michael Holman. These men and their collaborators deserve praise and admiration for their great personal courage in support of a non-racial society.
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Lancaster House Agreement between the British Government and the major political forces in Zimbabwe, an agreement which led to Zimbabwe momentarily becoming – for the first time in its history – a British colony. Before 1979, Rhodesia had initially been governed from the first European settlement in 1890 as a concession of the British South African Company (advised from 1898 to 1923 by a semi-elected council), and then from 1923 as a self-governing British territory with dominion-like status. From 1898 onwards the franchise, as in other British-controlled territories in Southern Africa starting in 1836, was a conditional one – in order to vote one had to satisfy certain conditions: age, gender, literacy, education, income, and property-ownership. These conditions were biased against non-whites, but did not exclude them completely, as I explained here. Because the franchise was not race-based, white Rhodesians like Ian Smith could delude sympathetic foreigners, and themselves, that they were running a democratic and non-racial government.
Robert Draper has an interesting essay in GQ on Barack Obama the writer. As I noted before, Obama shares this characteristic with Teddy Roosevelt (and with no other US President). And like TR and JFK, Bam is also a cosmopolitan urbanite.
“I think he sees the world through a writer’s eye,” says senior White House adviser and former Chicago journalist David Axelrod. “I’ve always appreciated about him his ability to participate in a scene and also reflect on it. I mean, I remember when we were meeting clandestinely with the guys who were vetting the vice presidential candidates. There was this courtly southern gentleman who was doing the vetting. The president said to me, ‘This whole scene’s right out of a Grisham novel.’
“I also have to say, one of the great thrills is to watch him work on a speech. It’s not just the content—he’s very focused on that—but more than anyone I’ve ever worked with, he’s focused on the rhythm of the words. Like, he’ll invert words. He’ll say, ‘I need a one-beat word here.’ There’s no question who the best writer in the [speech-writing] group is.”
Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1953, after writing – or perhaps supervising the writing of – his History of the English Speaking Peoples), so there’s hope yet for Bam’s next Nobel.