h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Melvyn,

I´m just dropping by to tell you that I´m back again (who knows how Long it will last this time, for the poor facilities of posting on this site).

I saw your new nine part Essay and thought I might have a read while you´re in France for your usual maintenance of house and garden there.

I hope you´re well and hopefully, we might be in touch on this site again.

Cheers,
Thomas

PS: I noticed your exchange with Chris about my reasons to quit here in February. Well, to tell it to you personally, I sometimes get really stressed with the complicated way to post on this site, not being able to see the post above to which I reply, no sofisticated way (which is standard on other sites) to make proper quotations and so on. The way the Peers on here have interfered with my Essay on which I refused to alter it, has given me the rest to quit and walk away. So, it´s your essays again that brought me back. I know that you have a special way to look at history on a more prosaic way, that´s something I don´t have but in some ways, I can get along with.

Hi Thomas

As I said welcome back...My main object today is to try to post a resume of my thoughts on "Brexit and the wider world" as widely as possible.

Melvyn

BREXIT AND THE WIDER WORLD
For the most part the Referendum campaigning so far has largely focussed on how Brexit would impact on the British people with scant reference, apart from contributions to the debate by concerned bystanders, as to how it might impact on the wider world, which is going through a crisis that has been compared in humanitarian terms to the aftermath of the Second World War, so it is hardly surprising that Donald Trump asked a few months ago “What the Hell is going on?”

And the simple answer is that to many people, who are dismayed about the state of the world, Donald Trump, in the very persona that he has adopted for his presidential campaign, has exemplified everything that they find distasteful about the American Superpower and its influence, in much the same way that Hitler and Stalin personified what was distasteful about the other two superpowers whose ambitions did so much to shape the last 140 years of world history.

It was around 1870 that Germany, Russia and the USA began to emerge as ‘super-states’ creating the global insecurities and instabilities that led to two world wars: and, though ‘the Great War’ of 1914-18 came to be fought as the “War to End All Wars”, that noble war aim proved fallacious at least in part because the none of these three great ‘motors, to borrow from J.M. Keynes’ description of Germany before 1914, actually threw their weight behind the Versailles Peace Settlement, but focussed instead on achieving their own economic miracles in pursuit of their different and conflicting visions of the future, leaving a greatly weakened combination of Great Britain and France faced with the challenge of making a success of the Peace.

Meanwhile the divergent aims of the USA, the USSR and Germany all played a major part in creating the World Chaos of 1932 and led to the Second World War: and, by 1945, the struggle to match and overcome Nazi Germany had transformed the USA of the “New Deal” and the USSR of Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” into ‘superpowers’, which, as Churchill realized at Yalta, had little regard for the views and ambitions of all lesser powers, even Great Britain. So there was no repeat of the great international peace conference at Versailles with both ‘superpowers’ totally committed to their own system of political economy and convinced both of the universality of their own system, and of the ‘evil imperialist’ pretensions of the other.

So the world lived through a Cold War division into nurseries of Capitalism and Communism, with the former German superpower divided between the two, a global division that was ever-renewed by a monstrous Arms Race that maintained a stalemate based on Mutually Assured Destruction, a dangerous ‘balance of power’ situation in which both sides tolerated or encouraged what were considered to be minor wars and conflicts, and supported less than perfect minor dictators and autocrats, and local abuses of human rights.

But eventually the Soviet Communist block collapsed, and the American-led “West” was faced with the challenge of living up to its promises and propaganda by spreading its own version of the materialist ‘Brave New World’ all around the Earth, one summed up in J.K. Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” (1958), with its version of individualistic Heroic Materialism in which the Capitalist system would provide all households with affluence, leisure and consumerism by applying the teachings of its own divinities like J.K. Galbraith’s “Trinity” of English-speaking economists ( Smith, Malthus and Ricardo), whose ‘Old Testaments’ were brought up to date by a new gospel, that of J.M. Keynes, the whole new orthodoxy being reinterpreted and applied to modern times by the great organs that were set up at the end of the Second World War- the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Centre, all of them in the post-Cold War era seen by many as inextricably associated with New York and the USA, now the world’s one remaining superpower.

But in his 1947 autobiography “I Chose Freedom” the Soviet defector, Victor Kravchenko, explained exactly what is likely to happen in this kind of situation, when he wrote about his military service in Central Asia around 1930.

During the era of Tsarist expansionism in the Nineteenth Century along the 3000 mile southern frontier of the Russian Empire, bordering Persia, Afghanistan, Kashmir and India, the Tsars had merely exacted a tribute from the local states, while leaving the native princes and mullahs in charge and showing respect for the established way of things.

But the First World War changed the world irrevocably and with the Bolsheviks seizing control of Russia, including Central Asia, where:- “The new governors … invoked the authority of new divinities called Lenin or Marx, chased the emirs out of office and made the Islamic faith a subject of derision; they brought in mechanics who were ‘infidels’ and ideas that risked dragging the nomadic peoples out of their thousand year slumber; they corrupted the youth with their western theories, going so far as to advise the women to burn their veils and leave the harems”.

As a result the Soviet authorities soon found themselves in a deathly struggle against the Islamic terrorists that they called ‘basmatchis’. Every so often it was announced that a whole region had been swept clear of this menace, until the ‘basmatchis’ suddenly became active once more and worse than ever. The newspaper reports were full of stories of their terrible ferocity, and these ‘basmatchis’ were variously described as bandits with an insatiable thirst for murder and rapine, or as people of extreme faith acting under the command of Muslim fanatics, or as mercenaries acting on behalf of deposed sultans, or even as instruments of British imperialism.

But - ”Later on, when I had the chance to study this problem with sober reflection, I realized that the soviet version of the frontier incidents contained a large dose of fiction, invented for the needs of propaganda. In reality the ‘basmatchis’ were patriotic guerrillas, and if they had taken up arms, it was to defend their national liberty which they judged as being threatened by these strange invaders; they risked their lives to repulse what appeared to them as an insult to their beliefs and their customs…it was for these reasons that they struggled with heroic zeal, holed up in the mountains, along the frontier of Persia, or grouped together in the towns of the Afghan plains and of Turkmenistan proper. And there can be no doubt that the ‘basmatchis’, at least at first, had the whole sympathy of the people of Central Asia. So it was not just by accident that it had been found necessary to send soldiers all the way from Russia itself, rather than contingents recruited locally, in order to try to destroy them.”

Reading this account 70 years later it is hard not to conclude, as the French say, that “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.

For it did not take long after the end of the Cold War, and the onset of the “Big Bang” impact of the American led “globalisation” of the Capitalist system, for this revolutionary ‘new order’ to provoke a reaction on behalf of the “little man”. Amongst others the task was taken up by John Ralston Saul in his capacity as secretary of PEN, and in 1992 he published “Voltaire's *******. The Dictatorship of Reason in the West” in 1992, as a new age of Sixties-type protest began to emerge based on a similar feeling of discontent about feeling oneself “Just another pawn in the game.”

For even in 1958 Galbraith acknowledged that much work needed to be done to improve American society, but also expressed confidence in the new-expertise that had been acquired by Social Sciences and assured his readers that all that was required to remedy the defects was the end of the Cold War, which kept taxation levels at the limit that the Economy would support for once there was peace the massive US Defence Budget could be re-allocated to ensure that the correct resources would be allocated to the improvement of public affairs.
Even by the 1960s, however, the blithe expectations of the 1950s that a new Civilization of Science and Technology was giving Humanity mastery over Nature and over its own destiny had not stood the test of time, giving way to a world of ‘technocrats’ who could only claim some expertise navigating from crisis to crisis by holding regular summit meetings which were by definition ‘way above the heads’ of the common people: and moreover once the Cold War was finally over the hoped-for “Peace Dividend” never materialised because corporate America needed vast amounts of venture Capital to fund the globalisation of Capitalism and during the Cold War Defence related activity had accounted for 25% of the US National Product, and the US Economy faced the problems of re-adjustment from a War Economy to a Peace Economy.
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So, by the late 1990s, works like Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” were reflecting a growing hostility to this American “Brave New World” amongst young people, many of whom, like Ms. Klein had been brought up with ‘alternative-’ and ‘counter-culture-’ values from the ‘Sixties’: and this hostility has merely found one form of expression in the Islamic Fundamentalist movements, which have to some extent filled the vacuum left by the collapse of Communist orthodoxy with their own anti-western version of Islamic Orthodoxy.

And that same hostility may well be reflected in the appeal of Brexit campaign which has much in common with the kind of struggle that Victor Kravchenko described- a struggle to defend national liberty which is judged as being threatened by strange invaders who insult our beliefs and customs; and this has certainly been suggested by the acerbic reactions by leading Brexit campaigners to pronouncements by President Obama, by Madame Lagarde as head of the IMF, and by just about every other part of the economic and financial ‘establishment’.

But, while those who argue for Brexit have sound Historical precedents for their case that Great Britain, or possibly just England, could successfully ‘go its own way’, for those of us whose infancies were overshadowed by names like Auschwitz and Hiroshima, in these troubles times in Europe and the wider world, it is worth remembering that Winston Churchill’s call for a ‘United Europe’ was based on the fact that European History had frequently taken such disastrous turns that England was forced to get involved and develop the monstrous strength that it took to ‘save Europe’ from its self-generated catastrophes.

I say “self-generated” in part because it has often been pointed out to me by French people that the “English” have the great advantage of living on an island so that it has been possible to keep our distance from forces of continental and monstrous scale that often invoke Newton’s Law of Motion that ‘to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’, a dangerous law in environments where the dynamics of the past and present and often seem to be overwhelming and produce an over-reaction. So, in 1895 Lord Acton, who had lived most of his adult life in Germany, pin-pointed the moment when Charles V compelled the Pope to anoint him as Holy Roman Emperor in 1530 as the moment when the dream of world dominion entered Modern History, a dream that had provided its rhythm ever since, as successive states became embodiments of the Machiavellian state that would spread its authority by acknowledging no bounds and no other morality than that its own chosen ends ‘the means’, only to be resisted by smaller states that love and value their own liberties and combine together in order to defeat it.

That almost supreme power of Charles V, uncle of Katherine of Aragon had much to do with Henry VIII “Break with Rome”, but it also reflected the fact that England’s island status had helped to shape a particularly English temperament that made it possible for England to carve out a very different destiny to that of Europe during centuries of gothic horror that left a dark legacy.

In fact the Anglophile French Historian Elie Halevy wrote in 1925 that the English were possibly the most peaceful people on Earth, though this may have owed something to the fact that so many British lives had been lost, as the French saw it, in the defending France against another German invasion, though the ‘entente’ between the two countries did not bind them to do so: and moreover in 1925 Halevy could hope that, as the main supporters of the Peace of Versailles, the ‘Anglo-French’ alliance might yet produce the world of peace and progress based on small self-governing sovereign nations states that posed no threat to anyone else had been the goal of British foreign policy since 1815.

And there is no doubt, as Matthew Arnold commented in the 1860s, and as the Brexit case argues, keeping apart from all the turbulence of European ‘mainstream’ had served England well up till then. In his account of “The Ascent of Man” Dr. Bronowski chose to highlight “tolerance and intellectual curiosity” as parts of his English heritage, and such things were both the cause and the consequence of the peace, stability and security that helped England to contribute so much to that story. It led to inventiveness, ingenuity and such a sense of progress that Charles Darwin could see ‘progressive evolution’ as the very fundamental creative drive of Life on Earth. And it was this England that attracted the immigration that all helped, and helps, to make England an ever more fertile nursery for invention, discovery and development, immigration that accounted for the presence in England of both Dr. Bronowski and his friend Leo Slizard, who made the crucial intellectual breakthrough that made it possible to build the Atomic bomb, while crossing a street in London on his way to work. But, when someone remarked in his hearing, in the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, that it was the tragedy of scientists that their discoveries were used for destruction, Slizard replied that it was not the tragedy of scientists: ‘It is the tragedy of mankind’.

And it is a tragedy that can be traced back in its present form to the 1760s when Matthew Boulton boasted to James Boswell “We sell here what the whole world wants- power”, for power of one kind or another has made it possible as Niall Ferguson described in “Empire” for Britain to make the modern world, in spite of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

But while historians of the “Industrial Revolution” have often chosen 1760 as a starting date because of the accession of George III, what was probably more important was the impact of the Seven Years War of 1756-1763 and the emergence of the kind of the War Economy required by the brilliance of William Pitt the Elder that produced the “year of miracles” in 1759 that defeated French pretensions to ‘world dominion’ through its ambitions in Europe and in the Indian sub-continent and North America and left Great Britain with unprecedented powers and responsibilities.

In general, however, the “Industrial Revolution” that has interested ‘men of power’ around the world in the last two hundred years was not the one of the age of canals and cottage industry, powered mostly by the sustainable and renewable energy of wind, water and muscle, but that of the steam engine and the associated engineering genius that powered the world in factories and on land and sea for 150 years. It was a revolution that was called into being in order to defeat a new French drive for glory and ‘world dominion’ as its political revolution that made Wordsworth feel that it was “Bliss to be Alive” turned into a Reign of Terror that set out to conquer Europe.

It was Great Britain, however, that emerged victorious and more powerful than ever from that Great War that lasted from 1793 to 1815. But in the difficult years of its aftermath, not least the post-war industrial and agricultural depression in Britain, Mary Shelley, a daughter of the French revolution, travelling across Europe with Lord Byron’s ‘’set’, had a revelatory insight to just where the human inventiveness that inspired men to ‘aspire to the knowledge of the gods’ would lead: and she wrote “Dr, Frankenstein”, her great and prophetic allegory of the horribly “gothic” nature of the world to come.

And ,indeed, in the almost two hundred years since Mary Shelley wrote that book, many things that were originally ‘made in Britain’ in response to British conditions have ‘conquered the world’ by being scaled up in order to meet the needs and exploit the opportunities of vast continental expanses, most obviously those of the three “superpowers” that were initially called into being when the very humble “Grand Experimental “ “Inter-City” English railway adventure was seized upon by revolutionary nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century and turned into a powerful instrument in the drive to ‘railroad’ a national vision over local ties, traditions, and communities most significantly in countries with no real tradition of ‘the sovereignty of the people’ so that the railway systems became instruments of central government.

And, while some people like Lord Byron looked Romantically towards a ‘Renaissance’ of the cultures and the peoples around the Mediterranean Sea, it was to the ports of the Baltic Sea and their hinterlands that the age of railways and steamships brought new vitality, increasing the wealth and power of Pan-German and Pan-Slav regions and creating a dangerous divide between wealth and poverty, and between ‘modernising’ but autocratic super-states in Northern Europe and conservatively orthodox and politically weak and ‘backward’ states around the Mediterranean. A North-South divide was bridged by ‘Axes’ that were connected with conflicting German and Slav, and Balkan and Italian, ambitions that could be traced back into convulsions that animated the Greco-Roman world.

In fact in the early years of the Second World War C. Delisle Burns described how these geopolitical forces had led to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in a way that brought out the continuity with the recent events that had just plunged Europe and the World into a “Darkest Hour”, hoping that Europe might yet learn from the way that it had recovered from “the Dark Ages” and had created “The First Europe” held together essentially merely by a universal respect for the Moral Authority of the two great elected monarchs, the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, in contrast to “The Second Europe” that had been held apart by division, difference, and struggles for wealth and temporal rather than spiritual power.

But by the time that Burns’ book “The First Europe” was published posthumously in 1947 the outbreak of the Cold War and the ‘descending of the “Iron Curtain” had made a mockery of Burns’ idea of a “Third Europe” of universal prosperity and peace between both nations and all classes of people.

Dr. Julian Huxley, an Oxford biology don and a popular member of the BBC ‘Brains’ Trust’, also put forward a vision of a new Europe during the war, most specifically in an article entitled “Peace and Reconstruction” that referred to the ‘New Order’ that Hitler sought to impose on Europe, seizing the logic of Keynes’ attack on the way that the Versailles Treaty had dismembered the German Empire in order to justify his vision of a Europe of client states built around the Third Reich and its Nazi “Master Race”.

Unlike his brother Aldous, who had written his own apocalyptic future vision of the “Brave New World” offered to Humankind by the Civilization of Science and Technology in the 1930s, Dr. Julian Huxley generally argued in the collection of pieces published in 1944 “On Living in a Revolution” argued that the world was living through one of those revolutionary episodes when the gentle pace and scale of evolution is speeded up so much that some face extinction because they fail to adapt quickly enough: and now Great Britain now found itself fighting “Two Wars Not One” having tried to pursue peace and disarmament in accordance with the Peace of Versailles Britain had allowed the totalitarian powers to ‘steal a march’ on peaceful nations by catching “the Wave of the Future” and developing the military power that would enable them to establish their own world dominion.

The democratic powers would have to catch up fast: but the same kind of Scientific understanding, efficiency, and forward planning that would make it possible to win the war, would also make it possible to plan in advance for the massive challenge of “Peace and Reconstruction” in a European continent badly ravaged by war and awash with refugees and displaced persons. And Huxley produced a map of the whole Europe up to the border of the Soviet Union, the exclusion of the USSR possibly reflecting the fact that Stalin’s Five Year Plans had already forced the kind of transnational approach that Science recommended on the various nations and communities of the former Russian Empire for Huxley proposed a not dissimilar transnational approach to the reconstruction of Europe that would be more rational use of scarce resources, and would lead to a more rational and coordinated economic order that would prevent the kind of problems that had vexed the inter-war years and brought Europe its own increment of “World Chaos”. But, ever hopeful that once again the inventiveness, creativity and industry of people who were accustomed to the freedoms and responsibilities associated with Liberty would eventually triumph over the continental tradition of authoritarianism and the imposed uniformity of ‘only following orders’, Huxley suggested that the “New European Order” should be built on the basis of the British idea of a commonwealth of self-governing independent states.

In the even after the Second World War, though the Marshall Aid that was offered to fund the European Reconstruction Programme called into being just that kind of approach to the reconstruction of Europe, the Soviet rejection of “Dollar Imperialism” for both the USSR and all of its occupied territories merely served to reinforce the ideological division of Europe, and the collapse of the Communist system and the triumphant survival of the “Dollar Imperialist” one has left Europe faced with ongoing challenges associated with the ageing legacy of an epoch of triumphant Capitalist and Communist Heroic Materialism on a continental scale that increasingly looks unfit to survive.

For many ‘Inconvenient Truths’ have been learned since the European Recovery Programmed set up ‘EURATOM’ the organization that was going to provide an endless supply of virtually free, inexhaustible and clean energy that the New Europe would need, and there is no doubt that there is a widespread discontent with the ‘status quo’ in Europe, which goes some way to explaining why Mr. Cameron found the rest of the EU very cooperative in meeting his preconditions for calling for a referendum on British membership of the EU, in which he could recommend the ‘Remain’ option, not least in recognition of England and Great Britain’s long history of being able to ‘make things that work’ and to make them work successfully, something that has been underlined by the success of the British Economy during this period of economic stagnation within the “developed world”, a success that did prove that the IMF can be wrong.

And significantly no one is suggesting that a Brexit would make the European Union stronger or make it easier for Europe to overcome the challenges that it faces. Within the UK those who advocate British withdrawal largely make their case in terms of British self-interest, and those who do express strong feelings about the EU seem to welcome the possibility that it would fall apart, which just makes it all the more strange that Brexit supporters assume that Great Britain would just continue to have the same relations with Europe from outside the union as it currently enjoys.

For, in my experience, it does not take too much for the French, for example, to remember that Anglo-French relations have not always been ‘wine and roses. In 2003, for example, when Britain and the USA launched the Iraq War, in spite of the French veto in Security Council of the United Nations, based on a longstanding French conviction that they have a very special insight into the ‘byzantine’ complexities of the Islamic world, I found old and less old historical resentments coming out in casual conversation.
In short a there have been plenty of precedents for an English or British ‘withdrawal’ from Europe, and in the event of a Brexit Europeans are unlikely to lose any sleep over whether the ‘English’ will survive a change that reflects the expressed will of the majority of a people accustomed to exercising their national sovereignty, for they will still have pressing problems and challenge to overcome. And there can be little doubt that Brexit would result in at least the attempt to use the new opportunities it would create for the ‘Rump EU’, for example to attract or develop some of the ‘growth industries’ that have helped the UK Economy to recover from the great crash of 2008: most obviously perhaps (a) Those enterprises that were first attracted to the new ‘entrepreneurial’ Britain that was relaunched during the years of Mrs. Thatcher’s programme of Liberalisation and a return to market economics, not just because of these favourable conditions, but also because investing in the UK provided them with an advance-base with access to the massive domestic market provided by the EU: and (b) Those parts of the UK Economy that have attracted workers from the EU and whose skill and talent could be repatriated, notably, perhaps, the very large contingent that have helped to re-establish the leading position of the London in global financial affairs.

And, with all the ongoing centenaries regarding the First World War, it is worth remembering that the Fabian Socialist Economist and Historian G.D.H. Cole reckoned in “The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos” that the First World War had become inevitable by 1914 because of the depth of anti-German feeling within Britain as the growth of the German Economy, initially based on the Zollverein ‘Customs Union’ that led to the creation of a new united German Empire, gradually squeezed the life and vitality out of the British Economy. And, in contrast to the British gospel of international Free Trade, Germany grew by means of its state policies of protectionism and state support for the infant industries that allowed Germany to develop the technologies of the latest phase of the Industrial Revolution based on electricity, oil, chemicals and advanced metallurgy, with an especially close relationship between the State and the Armaments Industry, superior German military technology playing a crucial part in the Boer War where German sympathies were very much on the side of the ‘Germanic’ Boers.
The consequence of the accelerating pace of change in the world economy, with Germany, Russia and the USA all playing their part in the increased global output, meant that from c1871, when the German Empire was founded, British money wages stagnated for more than thirty years and then in the ten years before 1914 Real Wages fell making these years of austerity, even though taxation had to go up to record levels in order to outdo Germany in the building of the mighty “Dreadnought” class battleships. All of this created a militant and angry mood of dissatisfaction within a divided and fractious UK that many ascribed to the over-competitiveness of a mighty and aggressive Germany that did not ‘play fair’ or ‘play by the rules’.

A hundred years later Chancellor Merkel’s Germany is once more the main arbiter of European affairs: and, while Frau Merkel threw her weight behind David Cameron’s search for a deal, in the event of a Brexit, Germany is the country most obviously well-placed to benefit from the challenge and the opportunities that British withdrawal from Europe would create.




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Hi Melvyn,

I´ve read your "BREXIT AND THE WIDER WORLD" Piece. Interesting parts in it. I´ve also read through your other 9 parts essay and skipped those parts I´ve known from the past by their titles. There´s nothing more to comment on them as I already did. Much of it is a repetition from former essays, but you´ve written it nearly six months ago.

I think that it would only be fair to tell you that I intent to stay on this site not so much regularily, rather dropping by from time to time. I´m still engaged with the Brexit topic elsewhere and reading the articles on the BBC News website.

We could have a conversation on that one if you like.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Thanks for reading my stuff...Saw a couple of interesting TV programmes the last couple of days-- one a History of Hamburg on Arte which more or less went along with my thesis of the continuity within the new continental superpowers since the 1860s as places locked into 'doing their own thing', hence the Third Reich in so far as it was as an economic superpower had a great continuity with the new Germany of Bismarck, and consciously so ... Another an French TV documentary that went back over the life of Mrs. Merkel- nothing new but its good to be reminded, plus discussion of where she is now...Students of Bismarck might well sum up her approach as "Realpolitik"....

PS. Answering your question on publishing I doubt whether I will ever get published, since no-one has taken any interest in my ideas about the long-term historical implications of Brexit over recent months.

It is about time I got on with my own life, and its new phases... Time is running out.

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

Thanks for your reply.

“PS. Answering your question on publishing I doubt whether I will ever get published, since no-one has taken any interest in my ideas about the long-term historical implications of Brexit over recent months.”

As I said about your Brexit essay, it´s been interesting to read and you´ve brought up things I didn´t know. I presume that many others might not know about it either. I´ve been following this Brexit debate in the UK via the Internet in recent months more closer. It might not give you some solace, but it´s obvious that people don´t give much of a thought on long period historical connections to the topic. The focus more on the recent past, say the past 25 years and what has developed since within the EU and the problems the UK has faced within that period. The use of historical connections is rather populistic (on both sides) and used for scaremongering.

You know that I was trying to help you on your publishing matter as good as I could or deemed able to do. This was limited right from the start because the many efforts had to be taken by yourself as you did. Frustrating as it is, this “Zeitgeist” of our time has no sense for new ideas and approaches on history that take up a time period which goes further back than just the past one hundred years. I always said that a real circle of readers and people who have an interest in your ideas would be a small one, maybe more consisting of academics such as you are, but not only limited to them. The publishers put their profit interests on top of their considerations and I think that this is what has prevented them from taking the opportunity to publish your works. Their demand on alterations of the content in your writings is another matter which I can understand that you were not inclined to yield too much.

I understand that you´re now about to close that matter for good or bad. Publishing by yourself wasn´t an option as I remember.

I don´t know whether you´ve tried these sites:

[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]

[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]



“It is about time I got on with my own life, and its new phases... Time is running out.”

Getting on with his own life mustn´t be that bad and can hold other opportunities than to get disappointed by publishers. As for time is running out, I do believe that you still have many years ahead.

Best wishes,

Thomas

Hi Thomas

Thanks as ever for your interest and support...Another interesting TV programme today was about Christianity in the Middle East, with an academic pointing out more or less just what you have written--but through the eyes of Christians who have remained committed to the idea of "good news" in the midst of well-established traditionalism....Old wine and new skins...And those who have fled persecution as Christians have gone to countries built on Christian values which have institutionalized Christianity so that it offers no "good news" for the future...But then this was why we Sixties people were determined the change things- and still are...

But we did it through song and music, and it is about time I got back to that...

Cheers for now.

Still in France till Monday.. with limited time 'on line'


Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

First I thought that you´re inclined giving up posting on this site, after your last post.

“But then this was why we Sixties people were determined the change things- and still are...

But we did it through song and music, and it is about time I got back to that...”

There´s a wind of change blowing now and it isn´t anymore the time of the Sixties people to being in charge of it, it´s the others, the right-wing to the far-right who are trying to get in charge of it. It´s time again to resist them. For that, song and music will not do. I rather think of the civilized resistance and solidarity of all democratic powers set against this evil that comes up again and led to the last European and World catastrophe.

I hope that you have a good and save journey home.

Cheers,

Thomas

PS: Although I have a subscription for the arte tv magazine, I watch their program rather oc-casionally. So, I missed both the broadcasts you´ve mentioned recently.

Hi Thomas

Hi Thomas

Mulling over your last message made me think about the Sixties in the light of the new-draft of the section about the EU as a would-be- superpower, very much associated with the emergence of President De Gaulle as one of the "Great Leaders" of the Twentieth Century...

De Gaulle was an almost consciously "Churchillian" figure who came out of ten years of obscurity during the Algerian Crisis, which made it possible for him to become the kind of President that he had always wanted to be… But that obscurity had merely repeated the “obscurity” from the real-life disasters in France 1940-44 which had allowed the French Communist Party to become the heroes of the French Resistance, and the most powerful democratic force in post-war France----until 1956, when (a) the Suez Crisis discredited the “new men” in power in France and Britain, which were humiliated by being ordered out of Suez by the USA, and (b) the Russia crushing of “Communism with a Human Face” in Hungary, which meant that Communists in France, Italy and perhaps West Germany lost faith and lost political support.

But 1956 was a time when the world needed more than just post-war survival and reconstruction. It needed people who could convincingly claim to be ‘special ones’, like the M.L.King Junior who from the first appearance at the age of 24 spoke like one who had been to the mountain top and seen the promised land..The seeds of the “I have a dream” speech were there… And JFK also gave people licence to dream… And so did De Gaulle because he had no cause to be ashamed of himself or of his France, like most French people. He was a proud French man, and a proud European, the kind of Europe created by Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, the new would-be English-style democratic Europe based around the “Sun King” model, that was the primacy of French art and culture.

And it suited the USA to have De Gaulle hostile to some US Policy and vigorously independent and European, because it made it easier for West Germany to become what Alexander Werth called the US “Trojan Horse” in Europe, its “Front Line” against the USSR.

And Under De Gaulle, and even more obviously when his Vice President, M. Pompidou, became President, France once more became a real cultural forcing house of modernité and modernism, so that what happened in London and the USA was just that French art and culture inspired the popular Youth culture of the Young, because French thinkers on the Left, including Communists like Sartre, were still very much part of “the scene”, so that French thought bridged the Cold War divide.

But, as you say, art is only art, and as one international pop star wrote of me in a song “Harry does not mind if he does not make the fancy scene, he’s got a full-time job, he is doing all right…” his very interpretation of my life priorities reveal the failure to understand what I was and am “about”..It was not about job” but the life-work that I had set myself, with two priorities (a) to create a successful family life which would project into the better future that I hoped for, and (b) to educate my pupils from the kind of difficult and deprived places that create so much anger and misery th rough the medium of History so that they individually and we collectively would gain the knowledge and wisdom nécessaire in order to take charge of what we do in the present with a eye to the future.

For in the Sixties those dreams were “réactionnary, as in the De Gaulle situation, our legacy in the post-war world was darkness and desolation, with a flicker and flame of hope. And a light amidst darkness can lead people, but it may not lead them to anywhere better…

But I believe that there are grounds to hope that the world could be a wiser place, in spite of the negative and nasty people around. Someone on FB has posted photo-collages of leading Brexit and Remain supporters, and to my mind the Brexits are sad and negative people.

All of which perhaps was summed up on the Ferry when I got talking to one of the crew who had called me “Darling”. Her Dad was British stationed in West Germany and her Mum was German: and they had been booked to sail on the Herald of Free Enterprise the day before the Zeebrugge Disaster not long before she was born. But she was excellent for my wife, who has been traumatised ever since just by hearing about it, for explanans just how much people had learned from such expériences, how the modern ships like this were so much better designed and how they had weekly briefings and updates. It was nice to get a Young and confident perspective.


Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

Thanks for your reply and I rather trust that you´re back in London by now.

As for De Gaulle, I don´t think that he was that a person coming out of obscurity after 1940. Before that famous speech he gave on the wireless in June 1940 after he made it to escape to England in due course of the German invasion, he was indeed a bit like Churchill, a warner in the wilderness. Ignored by those in charge of the French military. He organized the resistance of the Free French with the backing of the British and he saw to it that after D-Day and the eventual freeing of France towards the end of 1944, France would emerge later as one of the four allied forces to occupy and administer Germany for the years after the downfall of the Third Reich.

De Gaulle was rather disappointed by politics but also stuck to his word to abandon the wartime cabinet to set out for new GE in France to form a new government. That was in early 1946 and so he went into the wilderness again, waiting for the “call of the French people” to have him back. Well, they let him wait some ten years before he came back and then became the President as you said.

Some 8 years ago, there was a two part film about De Gaulle on arte tv. It is a French production and very interesting. It has the focus of his life on the years from 1940 onwards up to his death. I can´t remember the correct title now, but I´m rather sure that his name is part of it anyway.

No doubt, De Gaulle was a proud European and he managed to get French-German reconciliation on track together with the German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer in 1963. Since then, Germany and France are seen as the heart of the EU.

In one of your essays, I recall that you´ve mentioned the rivalry of the great powers in Europe for centuries. The centuries lasting rivalry between France and England later between France and Germany and the other power in the East, Russia which often kept herself out of the troubles in central and Western Europe. This is now replaced by the rivalry between Russia and the EU, since the Cold War ended. The influence of the USA on Europe seems to have been on the path to withdraw, but the threat from Russia that is felt among many of the former Soviet Satellite countries, has hold the Americans back to withdraw from Europe entirely as NATO is extending her presence in particular in the Baltic States and uses Rumania for tactical reasons recently.

Sartre is IMO what one calls a “Champaign Socialist”, or in other words a “Communist of the haute vole”. I´ve watched a biographical film about him and his partner Simone de Beauvoir. That was also some years ago on arte tv and is naturally a French production, but more with a focus on her life than on his, but also showing both in their relationship from the time they first met until the end. His partner was more living in the shadow of his success as a writer who loved to be at the centre in public life, not just literature. They were both too modern for the times they lived by their own mindsets and conventions.

Maybe Sartre has become overrated and more of an icon by the political left and far-left like
Che Guevara and Mao. IMO, he was just some selfish and egotistical writer who put himself above the talent of his partner de Beauvoir. But that is merely judged by his biography than by his works of which I´ve rather not read any book yet. It´s not plain ignorance that I have given that a miss, it´s just that this way of philosophy, which I regard as it is by the extracts and quotes I know of his works, isn´t my field. And if I have some interest in philosophy, it´s rather the classics, say the ancient ones, with the exemption of Hesse who is (respectively was) a modern writer and poet.

“But I believe that there are grounds to hope that the world could be a wiser place, in spite of the negative and nasty people around. Someone on FB has posted photo-collages of leading Brexit and Remain supporters, and to my mind the Brexits are sad and negative people.”

As you know, I don´t hold FB in high esteem and I don´t have an account there nor do I have one on another social media facility. Every time when I come across some FB sites and read there, it proves me right to stay away from it and not posting there. This FB and Twitter are developing by their users into more and more anti-social behaviour circles. The abuse is sometimes horrible, most when radicals of all different shades are posting there. Each one of them trying to impose their agenda on others and if they see that they don´t have any success, they are going nasty and bully on those who disagree with or oppose them.

Well, the place where I have been for the past years wasn´t much better. Same story, same people, same way of treating each other and always just a few sane people who can see both sides of the coin and can think beyond the ideology they are hanging on to.

The photo-collages of leading Brexit supporters with a sad and negative image are IMO selected pictures to help the agenda of the Remainers. So, I don´t follow that sort of propaganda anyway.

What I have gathered in my exchanges of posts on this other place is, that there is a substantial amount of people who are not just dissatisfied with the EU but more to the point, are fed up with the undemocratic leadership of it which is personified in Juncker, Schulz and Merkel. The EU has tried to keep herself out of the Brexit debate in the UK but despite that set out, some of her representatives gave their opinions and among those opinions, there was much what many people call “scaremongering” and “threats” to the UK in case she leaves the EU.

Some of the Brexiters may be sad and negative people in their appearance and their way of argumentation. The real negative and if you will sad thing is that the EU is unwilling, yes I say unwilling, and thus incapable to reform herself towards a better and more democratic legitimate institution that is more serving the people than the lobbyists and would, by such a consequent change, be carried by the people. That is not the case because Juncker don´t like to have it and Merkel don´t like to have it either. The only one who would have an interest in reforming the EU is Schulz, but that means that EU power had to be shifted from the EU Council to the EP and that you won´t get with the politicians currently in charge.

The BBC News has recently published an article in which they have shown a scale picture defining in which country the EU is perceived as either being desirable or undesirable. On top of the desirable was Poland with a majority of people, close to the bottom was France with 61% negative towards the EU (Greece was top bottom with 71% negative).

I personally am rather in favour of the Brexit because it might either lead to a change within the EU or its downfall because of her incapability to reform herself. There are surely many risks ahead in the event of a Brexit, but there are also chances to emerge or to form and to take. The way the EU stands today and the way people like Juncker and Merkel like to keep it has IMO no bright future.

What was once in the 1960s the generation of change is now a new generation of the 21st Century who aren´t that satisfied anymore with the way things are run in Europe and they demand more having their say in matters that affects them, more direct democracy, far less bureaucracy and interference by the EU into their daily lives. The bad thing in all this is, that far-right to right-wing populists and such parties are clever enough to hijack that spirit for their own negative and exclusive ideology.

The European dream was once a dream about a better and brighter future, it has been corrupted by the lobbyists and politicians who serve them in the first place and not the people. The European Parliament has less to no power and the work her members are doing appears to be meaningless to more and more people. Peak time for the likes of Farage, Wilders, Le Pen and the wretched people of the German AfD and PEGIDA.

The UK has the chance to free herself from this corrupted EU and seek her own luck outside of it for there´s the chance that after the Brexit, more countries might join the UK and leave the EU for good and maybe EFTA, which lives in the shadow of the EU might get more into the focus and thus more attention as the counter blue print of a European organization that has set her limits on trade and stick to that.

The European dream isn´t carried by many people anymore and that is the real problem because those who could make a change, are determined to avoid any change and the figure head of that camp is Juncker of which Cameron once said that he is the wrong person for any reformation in the EU. Well, he was perfectly right then but now he´s on the Remain camps side and is also using the same tactics of scaremongering and telling half-truths.

The trend is going upwards for the Brexiters and they have a real chance to win the referendum, despite some British MPs threatening to ignore the result if it ends with a majority in favour of the Brexit.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Reading your reply makes me feel like posting the actual section that I have written about the emergence of people who were sufficiently untainted by the "Age of Catastrophe" (1914-45) to appear to have somehow 'come through the fire' unscathed...which was the case with De Gaulle, because actually the real French Resistance was organized by the French Communist Party, which had obeyed Stalin in 1940 and observed the Non-Aggression Pact. Then when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa the cell structure of Bolshevik Communism that only accepted activists and not sympathisers provided the basic structure around which effective resistance could be organized... De Gaulle, like the British, had just not been around to actually help (rather than merely support) the resistance effort.. Which is why political Communism came out of the war so strongly in France, Italy and Greece...

But I can not post what I have written because my own laptop computer will not let me log on.

Cheers for now.


Melvyn

Hi Melvyn,

„… actually the real French Resistance was organized by the French Communist Party, which had obeyed Stalin in 1940 and observed the Non-Aggression Pact. Then when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa the cell structure of Bolshevik Communism that only accepted activists and not sympathisers provided the basic structure around which effective resistance could be organized ...”

The “real French Resistance” comprised not only of the French Communist Party, it was wider than that. Jean Moulin for example was one of the most famous and important members of the French Resistance and was hardly a Communist, he was a Socialist and civil servant as Prefect. There were often some quarrels between the factions of the French Resistance and some of them were even French Nationalists, maybe even former supporters of Vichy who turned away from Petain during the German occupation of France and the Vichy Regime.

This all brings back some things I´ve watched and as far as available read about France in that period (as long as it was either written in German or English, my French is very poor). Around the same time, when arte screened the De Gaulle biography film, there was another one about Jean Moulin, also a two part film, which I found very interesting. But there´s just one book in English about Moulin and that is rather expensive to buy. Hardly anything to say about any biography of him in German (I recall from my research on that at that time some eight years ago).

The trouble he had with the demands of the French Communists within the Resistance finally led De Gaulle to resign in 1946.

I wonder what your parents-in-law opinion is on that matter, they lived through those times.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Melvyn,

Just to let you know that I´m off-line for the next two weeks.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

I think that I may have watched the same TV Arte programmes about Jean Moulin and De Gaulle.. But those programmes reflected the modern desire for leaders and leadership once more, because of the failure of the "Structuralism" and the other aspects of the Civilization of Science and Technology that claimed the victory in 1945...because the "great leaders" like Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin knew just how dependent they were on the structures that they led...So there was little doubt in anyone's mind in post-war France that the revolutionary and activist structure of the Communist Party was almost the only French structure that remained intact and able to organise anything...But the true 'heroes' (as in so much Irish History) were the "martyrs" like Jean Moulin, which is the point that I was making about De Gaulle.

The point about 'martyrs', however, goes to the heart of the way that the terrible blood-letting of the First World War had a long-term impact on the French people...I was surprised to find that Jean Anouilh, one of my favourite writers back in the Sixties published "Three Dark Plays" c1933, which already carried his constant theme that became so popular during the Sixties, that the only acceptable 'way of life' for anyone of principle and values in the modern world was the way of death...In all of his plays the hero or heroine either commits suicide or runs their life in such a way that they are either murdered or executed- a theme that he took into his historical plays about Joan of Arc, Robespierre or Thomas A'Becket....

Now that our son-in-law has repaired my computer I may post-up some of what I wrote about this very dark legacy in French culture... But at least De Gaulle could regard himself (and be regarded) as blameless. He had written about "the shape of things to come" early enough,(not unlike Churchill) and had been largely ignored.

Cheers

Melvyn

Cheers Melvyn

Hi Thomas and anyone interested,
I have just started posting up my post-Brexit project "A LOFTY DREAM OF ENGLAND"

Cheers Casss