Playing Fields and Bombs

My grandfather and father both went to Eton College, the public school founded in 1440 by special endowment of King Henry VI. I would have gone too if had been a boy, continuing in a family tradition. For those who are not English I should make it clear that public does not mean public but private, as in private and highly exclusive! It has a reputation that carries far and wide, generating more than a few myths in the process.

The Duke of Wellington, another alumnus, said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Perhaps you’ve heard that one? A good many people have. Actually he said nothing of the sort. The comment, though not in that exact form, first appears in the French memoirs of Charles Count de Montalembert, published in 1856, four years after Wellington’s death.

There was one great conflict won on the playing fields of Eton, or rather by the discipline and training induced by the school’s officer corps, a far grander field of combat than Waterloo – the First World War no less. Yes, indeed; or it least it was according to Adolf Hitler.

Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary and himself an old Etonian, visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden in the months leading up to the partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Clearly war was on Hitler’s mind, particularly Germany’s defeat in the First World War. British victory was no surprise, he rambled on, given the school’s military ethos. Eton clearly acquired a paramount importance in his mind as the cradle of the British establishment, the cradle of all its glory!

Of course when Hitler was convinced of something it was impossible to change his mind. Eden’s objection that the College officer corps was shambolic was simply shrugged off. I dare say he concluded it was an act of dissimulation on the Foreign Secretary’s part. Apparently, though I can’t find any hard evidence of this, he even ordered the school bombed during the Second World War. Two bombs did fall on the College in 1940, one just missing the Library, hardly proof, though, of a systemic campaign. Still, it may prove one thing: that Luftwaffe pilots were not the types ever to grace the playing fields of Eton.

Winter of Discontent

I’m a polemicist by nature and inclination; I simply can’t help myself. Questioning and debating are habits I learned early. I’ve been refining them all of my life. I love taking people by surprise, appearing as if by ambush. Give me a nice meaty subject I can get my teeth into and, boy, that’s when I really bite!

The French Revolution was a ‘good thing’, a view that was put to me not so long ago. Yes, the Terror was bad but think of all the virtues, the Rights of Man and the Citizen and so on, a positive step forward for France; a positive step forward in history. What rot, what complete rot. It was a view that was originally expressed by that pain Paine, who professed himself competent in The Rights of Man to speak on behalf of the English nation.

I can only ever speak for myself but when I look at events like the French Revolution, when I see references to abstractions like the ‘rights of man,’ I see ideological purity translated into political action; and when purity acquires arms it kills and kills with abandon, removing all of the perceived impurities of life. From Rousseau and the Social Contract to Robespierre and Madame Guillotine, it’s a path followed through Virtue.

And for France, what did the Revolution bring? Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood were the watchwords, proved in practice to be no more than lying hypocrisy. What it brought was fanaticism, dictatorship and war and more war. How prescient Edmund Burke was in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. If anything his single fault was in underestimating the scale of the disaster to come. If the French could only have looked far into their own future, one of sudden and frantic energy followed by long and slow decline, they would have hurried back to the Ancien Régime, the old gentle monarchy of Louis XVI.

Think of France in the two hundred years after 1789, a whirlwind of political turmoil and instability, an ever downward spiral, a nation in search of a stable political identity, achieved at one point only to be lost at another. What a progression it is from monarchy, to republic, to empire, to monarchy, to empire, to monarchy, to another form of monarchy, to republic, to empire, to republic, to authoritarian state, to republic and then to another republic! Exhausted? I am.

The Fifth Republic, the latest metamorphosis, is still with us. Fifty-four years old this year it may exceed the seventy years of the Third Republic. I say may because when it comes to French politics and history it makes sense to err on the side of caution. With the euro crisis set to deepen, with the country facing uncertain economic and political times, with a crisis affecting the very identity of the French nation, a nation being consumed by the European Monster, a nation being eroded by culturally alien elements from within, who can say what the future will bring. Wise countries avoid revolutions. They do not usher in the springtime of the people but the winter of their discontent.

The Mouse in a Spin

Politics is a constant surprise to me, politicians an endless source of bemusement. I look at a silly little man like the preening Nicholas Sarkozy and wonder how this laughable Mouse, a kind of music hall turn, ever became president of France. It’s a sign of our age, I suppose, the relentless advance of mediocrity, evidenced by Obama in America and Sarkozy in France. The Daily Mail describes him as a ‘right wing conservative.’ Well, if that’s what passes for a ‘right wing conservative’ in France I would really hate to come across a ‘left wing socialist.’

The Mouse is looking pretty desperate these days, ever more fearful that the French public has finally seen him for what he is, a built-up personality in his built-up shoes. He and his shallow wife, all glamour and no substance, may have to hand back the keys of the Élysée Palace soon. With the first round of the presidential election scheduled for the end of April, it looks likely that the French people will send an eviction notice.

Poor little Mouse; he’s been in such a tizzy since David Cameron vetoed the European treaty amendments last December. There he is, throwing the occasional tantrum, the baby who did not get his way. He’s in the huff with Cameron, in the huff with England.

On Sunday, in defending a sharp hike in French value added tax (VAT - a sales tax), he appeared on national TV, even more fatuous than usual. It’s all part of an attempt to breathe a little vitality into the failing French economy. When told by a journalist that a similar hike in British VAT led to a rise in prices, he sneered (there is no mistaking the Sarko sneer) that “The United Kingdom has no industry anymore.”

Au contraire, monsieur, came the response, not from these islands but from his own national press. Le Monde, the leading evening newspaper, pointed out that Britain actually has more industry than France, with production standing at five per cent higher. The claim of the Élysée Mouse was ‘totally false', it went on to stress the point. It also inconveniently mentioned that the rate of industrial decline is stronger in France. Ah, le weekend, labour protection legislation, early retirement and short working weeks, not to mention the interminable lunch, must surely all factor in here.

When I think of Sarkozy I think of the character of Will Roper, the muddle-headed hot head from A Man for all Seasons, Robert Bolt’s play about Sir Thomas More. Roper, much given to changing his mind on questions of faith, is admonished by More “Now listen well. Two years ago you were a passionate churchman. Now you are a passionate Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head’s finished turning your face is to the front again.”

Last year Sarkozy claimed that a similar VAT rise in England had absolutely failed to stimulate the economy. This year he is all in favour, adopting the measure from Germany, where he says that it helped to boost that nation’s competitiveness. I rather suspect that his head will still be turning when he faces the electorate in April, a people with less money in their pockets and even less competitiveness.

Yes, price rises in a country with a declining industrial base and some three million unemployed, a country which recently lost its triple-A credit rating. “If we lose the triple-A, I’m dead”, he said some time previously. At least that’s one point he and I can agree on

Meanwhile Germany’s Angela Merkel has offered to support the embattled Mouse in campaign rallies. Angela on the hustings; the French being lectured to by the fat Reich’s Chancellor. Yes, things really are that bad.

How Are the Mighty Fallen

I admire China; I admire the present Chinese government. Oh, please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying that I admire communism; I don’t; I loath it, but it’s doubtful that the Chinese system has anything to do with communism in any meaningful ideological sense. No, as an idea it was effectively abandoned at the same time as the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia and China then took the high road to capitalism, chaotic for the former, controlled for the latter.

What I admire is the technique of realpolitik, the wholly Machiavellian outlook of the Chinese. This is likely to be their century not simply because of their economic power but because they play the game carefully, looking always to their own interests.

What a sense of humour Clio, the goddess of history, has, what an acute love of irony. There was America at the end of the Cold War, the only great power left in the world. There was Francis Fukuyama saying that history itself had come to an end, a humourless plagiarism of Sellar and Yeatman’s contention in 1066 and All That, published in the 1930s, that America was clearly Top Nation and history came to a .

But it didn’t, did it? America, the paramount power in 1991, has frittered it all away in one fruitless crusade after another, war after war, intervention hard upon intervention, the gift of the neo cons who have nothing at all to do with genuine conservatism or any kind of political realism. All they achieved was more and more spending with fewer and fewer results. Now the country has reached the lowest point in its history, the nadir, headed by the hopeless and incompetent Barack Obama, not a neo con just a con, a Marxist in Marxist clothing.

Now look at China, the communist capitalist super power. This is a country with the good sense to stand and stare, to consolidate its power, not waste it all away. This is the new empire, extending its influence over much of the developing world, particularly Africa, large parts of which are effectively a Chinese economic colony. I simply could not imagine the Chinese getting bogged down in a hopeless place like Afghanistan for a hopeless cause. I simply can’t imagine any country headed by an intelligent leader doing so, a leader with even the lightest grasp of history.

But America did, here, there and everywhere, taking the wolf by the ears, unable thereafter to let it go. Good sense and good politics would have kept America out of Iraq, a country which, no matter how repellent its dictator, kept a check on the regional ambitions of Iran. But good sense and good politics was not at a premium in the Bush Whitehouse; it has not been at a premium ever since. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle.

Brokeback Bureau

I waited an age for one biopic only to have two come along at once! Well, almost at once. It’s not long since I saw Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a stunning performance in a less than stunning film. Now I’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio, one of my favourite actors, play J. Edgar Hoover in J. Edgar, a stunning performance in a less than stunning film.

Hoover, the long standing Director – Dictator might be a better word - of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is in many ways an even more controversial figure than Thatcher. A man of impeccable moral stature, the self-appointed guardian of all that was good in American life, he had no scruples at all in subverting civil liberties in pursuit of his particular ends. At his funeral then President Nixon said that he was;

…one of the giants…He personified integrity, he personified honour, he personified principle, he personified courage, he personified discipline, he personified dedication, he personified loyalty, he personified patriotism.

Oh, but how are the mighty fallen. He also, according to his many detractors, personified venality and corruption, a message that his been relentless hammered ever since, to the point where his legacy, his very real contribution to fighting crime and subversion using the latest techniques, has been obscured under a mountain of superfluous and vicious tittle-tattle.

J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a script by Dustin Lance Black, goes some way towards rehabilitation. It paints a more nuanced portrait of a complex and driven man. Still, it does not avoid the old canards, the wholly unproven contention that Hoover was a closet homosexual and cross-dresser.

That the old queen never came out is clearly the fault of his mother, a commanding performance by Judi Dench, who tells him that she’d rather have a dead son than a daffodil for a son. A life of frustrated sexual tension lies ahead, touched on in Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), his long-standing deputy at the FBI.

My criticism here is that Hoover’s sexual preferences, whatever they were, are not that material to the story of his life and times. His principle relationship was not with Tolson or with Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts), his life-long secretary and confidant, but with the FBI, the organisation which he created virtually single-handed, or rather shaped into a tough, modern crime fighting force out of the old amateurish and bumbling Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department.

I admire Eastwood as a director; I hugely admired movies as diverse as Gran Torino and Million Dollar Baby. But I have to say that there is a falling off with J. Edgar, signs that he is no longer quite in command of the medium as he once was. The pace is uneven and too much of the story is taken for granted, particularly over the kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindberg, the aviator, a defining moment in the history of crime in America.

Incidentally, speaking of aviators, DiCaprio seems to slightly reprise his depiction of Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Like Hughes his Hoover uses a handkerchief to clean his hands after he greets someone, another hint, presumably, of deep-seated personal neurosis.

On a more technical point it was a huge mistake to allow actors playing their young selves also to play their old selves, caked under ever more grotesque and ridiculous layers of rubber, to the point where they resemble puppets. This was an error avoided in The Iron Lady, where the young Margaret and the old Margaret are entirely different people. As J. Edgar cuts back and forward between the present and the past a considerable amount of time must have been spent in donning and discarding prosthetics!

It's a thoughtful film, though perhaps not thoughtful enough. Even so, setting the central performances to one side, it’s also a plodding and ponderous one, coming close to its subject, then skipping away. After some two hours I was no closer to understanding the real Hoover than I was at the outset.

The thing I found most frustrating was the failure to draw parallels between the Red Scare that swept America after the First World War, touched upon in detail, and more modern concerns and threats. The central question about Hoover’s career surely must the extent to which it is legitimate to subordinate civil liberties to national security in times of emergency, not his chaste and asexual personal affairs. Director and writer are to be commended for humanising the man, but, as another reviewer writes, they have in the process created a kind of bureaucratic version of Brokeback Mountain.

Nietzsche in America

In an article I wrote about the infamous prosecution of John T Scopes (Monkey Trial, 14 October, 2009), an American teacher put on trial in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee for teaching the Darwinian view of evolution, contrary to local law, I made the point that Clarence Darrow, Scope’s defence attorney, was an enthusiast for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the biology of Charles Darwin.

He was influenced here by H. L. Mencken, a leading American journalist. It was Mencken who introduced the German thinker to America in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His Nietzsche came as an angry Moses, a prophet armed, ready to knock away the cosy nostrums of American life. The strong only grow stronger by despising the weak and, so far as Mencken was concerned, by despising Christian morality. The Scopes trial was an ideal opportunity to pour scorn on “booboisie”, the backward ignoramuses of the Southern Bible Belt.

That’s one American perspective on Nietzsche. Interestingly a totally different one was to come from another participant in the Scopes trial - William Jennings Bryant, a former presidential candidate, who acted for the prosecution. The year before he appeared at the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb – this time for the defence -, both accused on the kidnap and murder of a teenage boy, for no better reason than to prove that they were Supermen, beyond all conventional notions of good and evil. At least that was Darrow’s argument, claiming that they were acting under the influence of Beyond Good and Evil!

Bryant won both cases, clear in the first (at least insofar as his clients escaped the death penalty), pyrrhic in the second. But perhaps his more immediate victory was over Mencken and Nietzsche. His view certainly was more in harmony with American thought, insofar as Americans thought of Nietzsche at all. After all, this was a thinker contaminated by association with German militarism, then even more contaminated by association with the Nazis. What is the philosophy of an anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman doing in a culture like ours? Why Nietzsche? Why in America?

Actually these questions are not mine. They are posed by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen in American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas, published by the University of Chicago Press at the end of last year. The answers she makes clear in the course of this lively, thoughtful and entertaining book. It begins with America and it ends with America; or, rather, it begins with American thought and ends with American thought. You see, when I was a teenager I was reading Nietzsche; when Nietzsche was a teenager he was reading Emerson!

It was in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that Nietzsche found a “brother soul”, as he puts it. Here was a thinker free from all inherited burden, a believer in the sovereignty of the self, full of scepticism about traditional morality and received religion. “The most fertile author this century so far has been an American”, he declared. Nietzsche used Emerson not to get closer to him but to get closer to himself, as Ratner-Rosenhagen puts it. I would simply add that Americans, in their various ways, have used Nietzsche to get closer to themselves.

To use the cliché, here is a man and a thinker who has been all things to all people. His admirers did not just include obvious social Darwinists like Mencken, but Emma Goldman and others on the left, who saw Nietzsche’s attacks on democracy and religion as a way of arousing the masses from their lethargy.

He was also admired by Jack London, a socialist whose views on the ‘degeneracy’ of the herd are not so far removed from those of Mencken. There is also Margaret Sanger, the high-priestess of American birth control, who read Nietzsche selectively, attracted to his views on Christian sexual ethics, ignoring his obvious misogyny.

That’s just the thing about Nietzsche and America – he has been read selectively, something the author herself is mildly guilty of, a point I’ll come to a bit later. He has been sanitised, if you like, made acceptable to an American audience, a democratic audience; an audience where every man, and woman, has the capacity for endless self-discovery. It’s the Superman as the ordinary man!

It’s true that his reputation suffered – unjustly – by association with the Nazis, but after the war America was given a new reading. Here was a soulful voyager for the existential age, an interpretation advanced – irony of ironies – by Walter Kaufmann, a Jewish scholar and translator who escaped to the States from Nazi Germany in 1939.

The American Nietzsche, as Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear in a dedicated chapter, is largely Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. I have to be frank and say it’s a slightly dishonest interpretation, more wholesome and less challenging than the raw original!

In some of the more bizarre readings I’m reminded of the character of Otto in the movie A Fish Called Wanda, who, when accused of being an ape, said that apes don’t read philosophy. “Yes they do, Otto”, came Wanda’s response, “They just don’t understand it.” How else is one to interpret the view of Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Movement, that Nietzsche thought “slave morality” was a good thing?!

One of my favourite chapters is devoted to the ‘fan mail’ sent by ordinary and unknown Americans and kept by Elizabeth, the philosopher’s Nazi-sympathising sister, a woman who did more to poison his legacy than any other individual. Some of theses missives are beyond eccentric. There is one letter of condolence sent after the philosopher’s death in 1900 by John I Bush of Duluth, Minnesota, who announced to Elizabeth that he was the Superman her brother had been looking for;

May you hereby have the consolation and delight to have lived long enough to know that the visions, prophecies, and hopes of your brother have been fulfilled to the very letter; for the author of this scribbling is the very man prognosticated in Zarathustra.

Bush, hmm; is there any connection here, I wonder?

Now, I said earlier that the author is slightly guilty over her own misreading. Her book, she claims, is less about Nietzsche than interpretations of Nietzsche. But if she begins with Emerson she also ends with Emerson by way of Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty, all of whom have tamed Nietzsche to a degree, leaving out his more anti-democratic sentiments.

Yes, it’s Nietzsche by way of Emerson, a transcendentalist, free of the sarcasm and aggression so evident in his manner of thought and mode of expression. This is a philosopher for all seasons, a philosopher for an American season. It is perhaps a misreading, but who cares. I’m sure Nietzsche, the greatest of all of the great iconoclasts, would have loved it, as much as I loved this book, as much as I admire a country and a people who are continually striving for fresh and novel interpretations. It’s the very thing that keeps thought alive.

Restraint of Appeals

Following my recent piece on the European Court of Human Right’s ruling that England should be a refuge for the huddled masses of foreign terrorist, yearning to breathe havoc, I read Following in Henry’s Footsteps?, a thought-provoking article by Stephen Cooper in the January issue of History Today.

We, as a nation, are the plaything of a supra-national power, a new Roman conglomerate, if you will. But this is not unique in our history; we have been here before, subject to the decrees and laws of an old Roman conglomerate.

David Cameron has talked in general terms about the repatriation of powers from Europe. Henry VIII, suffering from a little local marriage difficulty, did not just talk; he acted. He wanted a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his first queen, but in such matters the Vatican acted as the Supreme Court. Pope Clement VII was not inclined to go along with the royal wishes; he was not ‘simpatico to the direction of change’, as Tony Blair would doubtless express the point.

So, with the aid of Thomas Cromwell, his chief minister, the king cut the umbilical cord, the age-old link between the English and the Universal Church. He repatriated all legal powers to England in the 1533 Act of Restraint of Appeals. This had the effect of ending all appeals to Rome, allowing matters to be settled on the spot, declaring to the world that England was an empire, not subject to the rule of a foreign princes or courts. How wonderful!

The thing is, you see, up to that point England effectively had two legal systems; it had ever since the Norman Conquest. There was the common law of the land and there was canon law, the law of the Church. Two sets of laws meant two sets of courts, with the ultimate arbiter in all matters affecting canon law being the Vatican. This included all family law, issues pertaining to wills and, of course, marriage. This was the basis of Papal power in England, which by the early middle ages was considerable.

Papal interference got so bad that, in a deeply anti-clerical mood, Parliament enacted the Statute of Provisors and Praemunire in the reign of Edward III, which attempted to curb papal interference. But the two systems still remained in place until Henry’s marriage problems saw not just a break with the Roman Church but an amalgamation of law, or, if you prefer, the repatriation of law.

The Act of Restraint of Appeals had great significance in English history, far beyond offering Henry, as head on an independent English Church, a way of ending the Roman logjam. It was a declaration of political sovereignty, an Act of Parliament rather than a royal proclamation.

The danger in this usurpation of canon powers is that Rome would place the country under an interdict, as it had in the time of Innocent III, the great medieval pontiff, which put a rebellious King John firmly in his place – the papal pocket. To prevent this, the Act allowed for imprisonment of any priest who refused to perform the sacraments. More than that, the provisions of the fourteenth century Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire was brought to bear, threatening those who invoked the authority of the Pope with confiscation of property.

The Act was so successful that even during the Catholic reaction of Henry’s daughter, Mary, it was never repealed. For all her orthodoxy Mary remained Supreme Head of the Church, effectively the Pope in England. There were no more appeals to the Papal Curia, no more foreign laws.

If only we could have a new of repatriation, an Act of Restraint of Foreign Legal Stupidity, one that would serve the same purpose, one that would end the diktats of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.

We were warned, but too few were prepared to listen, warned of the approaching flood of alien law, set to drown our own inherited traditions. In 1975 the people in this country were deceived, deliberately so. They thought they were voting for an economic union, but the small print contained so much more.

The year before the referendum on membership of what was then the European Economic Community, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, in Bulmer v Bollinger observed –“When it comes to matters with a European element the Treaty is like an incoming tide. It flows into estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back.”

History has been reversed. We are far more in thrall to the new Roman power than we ever were to the old. How I admire the audacity of Bluff King Hal. Henry! Thou should be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.