Contemporary

• 2 Comments

•

Orac at Respectful Insolence has called attention to the attempted arson attack on The Holocaust History Project, and called for other bloggers to link to the THHP home page as a show of solidarity. There's no proof as yet, but the suspicion is that Holocaust deniers are responsible.

Holocaust denial is pseudohistory, a pathological and degenerate form of history. It imitates the form of historical scholarship, but involves no critical inquiry; the conclusions reached are pre-determined, ideological and anti-Semitic. Holocaust deniers deserve scorn when they pretend to be historians. They do not in general deserve imprisonment, as has happened to David Irving in Austria recently. But they do deserve imprisonment if they use violent means to stifle the debate they cannot win, as may be the case here. The Holocaust is undeniable; there's simply too much evidence for it. Holocaust deniers need to admit that and move on. Until they do, we are lucky to have groups like THHP around, and they deserve our support.

•

Via Early Modern Notes comes the news that Gordon Brown wants to turn Remembrance Sunday into British Day. Aside from Sharon's remarks to the effect that this would obscure what is supposed to be remembered on that day - the human costs of war - to me, it seems like a pretty negative choice for a day to celebrate what it means to be British (or whatever they would be supposed to do on such a day). Admittedly, in Australia we come close to something similar with Anzac Day, which is a day of national pride as well as mourning and remembrance. But although Anzac day carries more emotional weight, we have a "proper" national day in Australia Day, 26 January, when it's usually nice and hot and there are fireworks and one-day cricket matches to watch. (That's not to say that the anniversary of white settlement is unproblematic ...) So at the least, I would suggest choosing a day in the summer, as opposed to late autumn, so you could get a decent celebration going outdoors. And let's face it, there probably isn't any one crucial anniversary that all could agree was unambiguously positive, and any compromise date would just seem insipid, so just why not just arbitrarily pick a day and say, right, this is when you all have permission to let your hair down and feel good about being British?

Well ... I'll get off my soapbox now, it's not my country! Instead, let's talk about something completely different: Englishness. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has set up a website for the public to choose the icons which best represent England (those other bits of the UK may get their chance one day). Of interest to me is that one of the initial twelve icons selected for people to vote on is the Spitfire. I think that's a cool choice, and if I were British ... er, English, I might vote for that - though really, I don't think you can go past a good cup of tea.

• 11 Comments

•

I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye - not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly names in modern British history: Sir Leo Chiozza Money. The silliest name, of course, belongs to Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, whose other claim to fame was leading the diplomatic mission to the USSR in August 1939 to see if Stalin was interested in an alliance with Britain. (He wasn't.) Sir Leo was a Liberal and then Labour politician who is unfortunately mostly remembered for having been caught in a park late at night with a young lady, while in the middle of giving her what he claimed was 'career advice' (apparently not intended as a euphemism). Anyway, he was also a writer, and his The Peril of the White was published in 1925. The 'peril' of the title is that of race suicide, due to the slowing birth-rate of European and European-descended peoples. More particularly, his worry was that this would place European control of the rest of the world's peoples in doubt, since their birth-rate remained high:

It is for ever true that we must renew or die. The European stock cannot presume to hold magnificent areas indefinitely, even while it refuses to people them, and to deny their use and cultivation to races that sorely need them.Leo Chiozza Money, The Peril of the White (London: W. Collins Sons & Co, 1925), 159.

He graphically illustrated the problem with this colour plate in the frontispiece (click to see larger version):

The Peril of the White

Pretty standard stuff for the time, I think. But it's interesting that Chiozza Money ends on a plea for racial tolerance, arguing strongly against any kind of slavery, formal or economic: 'Every private act and every act of legislation which denies respect to mankind of whatever race will have to be paid for a hundredfold'.Ibid, 168. Though of course, his ultimate reason for being nice to the natives was to keep them happy and therefore quiet.

Now, all of the above is interesting, but it's not why I am writing this. I found a slip of paper in between the pages of the book. Normally I love this kind of "found history" - it's a glimpse into and a connection with a previous reader's life. Things like tram tickets, pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, newspaper clippings, ex libris stamps and bookplates, gift inscriptions: for me, it's part of the pleasure of old books. But this was rather less pleasurable: it was a little leaflet entitled 'White and Proud!', calling for 'white pride' and apparently issued by a group called the White Student Union (with a PO Box in West Heidelberg). Somebody had obviously stuck it in The Peril of the White thinking that anyone interested in Chiozza Money's ideas might be receptive to an updated version. And indeed there are similarities: both list cultural and scientific achievements attributed to the 'White Race', and argue that its members need to remember these and thereby develop racial self-respect. But surely most people who go to the trouble to look up this obscure book are likely to be scholars who want to research Chiozza Money's ideas, not revive them!

But even that isn't really why I'm writing this. My initial reaction to the leaflet is why. The leaflet looks fairly old - pre-laser printer days, anyway: part of it even looks to be typed (you know, on a typewriter), and from "internal evidence" I would guess it was written some time during the 1980s. (It looks like the book itself may not have been borrowed since at least 1988, so it's possible that the leaflet could have lain there undisturbed since then.) When I first saw the leaflet, my first instinct was to put it back in the book and leave it there - because it's an historical artefact, a kind of primary text on racism in Australian universities in the 1980s, and as an historian I have no right to tamper with it! But then I thought, that's stupid. This was less than two weeks after the shameful race riots in Sydney, after which our esteemed Prime Minister had stated that 'I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country.' Well, here's some underlying racism right here, and I'm not leaving this filth lying around to possibly influence some impressionable young mind, as remote as that possibility may be. So I borrowed the book, and took the leaflet, and when the book gets returned, the leaflet won't.

Now, my initial reaction was pretty silly. It's not like libraries are in the business of preserving things that people stick in their books, and nor is it likely that some future PhD student will go trawling the library shelves in search of such found history for their thesis. So I'm under no obligation to leave the leaflet there. But it does raise the question of what's history and what isn't. Even as I wrote this post, I had no problems quoting and scanning parts of Chiozza Money's racialist (if not overtly racist) tract, but I can't bring myself to do the same for the White Student Union leaflet. It just feels wrong, somehow, even though they both express much the same ideas, and the leaflet carefully refrains from denigrating non-whites. I guess it's just too close to home, both in time and space. My rule of thumb is generally that if something happened in my lifetime, then it's not history, since it's that much harder to be objective about it. And on top of that, here's somebody perverting MY university's library system to disseminate their racist propaganda. As a scholar, I try to be disinterested about the things I study, but I should not be disinterested in important contemporary issues. My act was a completely trivial one, but after Cronulla, it's the least that I could do.

Anyway, it turns out that in 1931 Sir Leo wrote another book, called Can War be Averted?, which does in fact sound possibly relevant to my topic. So I'm off to the ERC to check it out - hopefully without an unpleasant surprise this time ...

• 9 Comments

•

OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably ...

Coming via Charlie's Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower". As Charlie Stross notes, this brings to mind British air control policies, in which bombers were used to pacify and control Iraq in the 1920s (which is what L.E.O. Charlton was criticising). So is this the same thing, but with F/A-18s instead of DH.9s? Could be, because as James Corum has argued, in fact air control did not succeed by airpower alone. It was more like a combined operation, with British Army units often playing a large role. Similarly, the US Air Force won't be working alone, but in conjunction with Iraqi ground forces. Now, Corum also argues that air control was not as effective as is often claimed - for example, rebellious tribes learned to adapt to this strange new aerial weapon by developing air raid precautions: slit trenches and early warning systems. Maybe modern insurgents can adapt too. On the other hand, the modern air weapon is far more precise and powerful than anything available back then.Hersh notes that a single Marine Aircraft Wing dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs in the Iraq war up to November 2004; that's roughly as much as the Allies dropped in Europe in 1945. So will the US exit strategy work? I guess we'll see.

Update: please ignore the footnote: as pointed out in the comments, Hersh's figure is an order of magnitude too large.

• 8 Comments

•

Well, not really. Still, it's an interesting parallel.

A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of Air Commodore L.E.O. Charlton, who refused to serve in Iraq in the 1920s (he was the RAF's chief of staff there in 1923-4, much more senior than Kendall-Smith). Two differences spring to mind. Firstly, in Charlton's case, there was no official inquiry (and so no public controversy); however, his career was effectively over and he retired in 1928. Why an example is being made of Kendall-Smith is unclear, since the top brass are said not to want to make him a martyr. Secondly, Charlton's objection was moral, not legal -- he opposed the casual use of bombing against Iraqi civilians. Kendall-Smith's defence explicitly rejects any such argument; he denies being a conscientious objector. Naively, you might have expected the doctor to have moral qualms, and the career officer to be concerned about the legality of his orders!

Sources: The Times, Guardian, Oxford DNB.

• 3 Comments

•

When you are writing a thesis, nearly everything starts to look relevant to your topic. Unfortunately, that's the case with the unfolding tragedy in New Orleans. Although it was a natural disaster, not man-made, and involved wind and water, not fire and gas, what Katrina did to New Orleans is something very like what the aerial "knock-out blow" was supposed to do to London. Although the casualty rates are (thankfully and so far) much lower than the hundreds of thousands or more projected for massed bombers attacking a large city back in the 1920s and 1930s, the scale of the physical destruction is similar, and the breakdown in law and order is almost exactly what authorities feared back then - though perhaps with less looting and more rioting (a particular worry in the nation's capital). London's test, when it came, was less severe than expected, and precisely because the threat was overestimated, Britain was well prepared for it. Sadly, it seems to have been the other way around with Katrina.

•

This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War and the strain was eventually made available to the Americans, who then passed in on the Iraq in the 1980s. A major reason for the British research was the fear that Germany would develop and use biological weapons against the UK, most likely from the air. Therefore, British fears of air attack in the mid-20th century helped fuel American fears of terrorist attack in the early 21st century.

Well, it works for me!

•

I haven't yet been to the UK National Archives (well, I haven't been to the UK at all yet ...) but I probably will at some point for the PhD, and I have ordered documents from them before. So it's more than a little disturbing to learn via Schneier on Security via Patahistory that forged documents have been found in the archives, which were used to support a claim that British intelligence murdered Heinrich Himmler in 1945. It's true that historians are routinely suspicious of their primary sources, but that doesn't usually extend to being suspicious of their being primary sources at all! At least the forgery was detected, and it's unlikely anyone would care enough about my areas of interest for this to be a big problem for me.

There's a terse note confirming this at the National Archives.

• 9 Comments

•

This happened a week ago, but it's rather cool - a re-enactment of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the British airmen Alcock and Brown in June 1919. They used a modified Vickers Vimy, a two-engined aircraft designed for bombing German cities. The Vimy was never used in this role, but a flight of just over 3000 km surely proved its potential - even if Brown had to keep climbing out onto the wings to remove ice from the engines! Also of note is that in completing the flight, they won the last of the Daily Mail's aviation prizes designed to promote innovation and airmindedness, a handsome £10000 - Lord Northcliffe's final legacy to aviation. (Earlier prizes included £1000 for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel, which was won by Louis Bleriot in 1909; the modern Ansari X-Prize is an astronautical version of the same idea.) The re-enactment used a beautiful replica Vimy.

1919 was a busy year for trans-Atlantic flights (compared to all the previous years, anyway). Alcock and Brown's flight overshadows the crossing made by the US Navy's NX-4 flying boat the previous month (which wasn't non-stop, and took 19 days), as well as the Royal Navy airship R34's double crossing the following month (ie there and back again). But then Alcock and Brown are themselves overshadowed by Lindbergh's non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927, admittedly a much longer distance of 5800 km.