Portrait of the Thinker as a Man

If you want to understand Ludwig Wittgenstein, the thinker and the man, turn to the very last page of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only philosophical work published in his lifetime.  There you will find in all of its gnomic beauty one of the best remembered and most quoted propositions of all: Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must be silent. 

That’s just the thing: he wasn’t silent.  Most of his life after the publication of the Tractatus was a pursuit of the very things that could not be touched on in a work of uncompromising logic, whether it be the nature of language, the way language is used in practical terms, the nature of thought, of ethics, of psychology, of the relationship of philosophy to the wider world of human experience.

 “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him”, he wrote in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations.  Wittgenstein spoke.  Most who followed, particularly the Vienna School of Logical Positivists, which had as good a claim as any to be the apostles of the text, could not understand him.

Even Bertrand Russell, who wrote a preface for the Tractatus, could not understand his brilliant protégée.  The truly remarkable thing is that when the two met at Cambridge before the First World War Wittgenstein was a novice, Russell a mature and respected professor of philosophy, the author with A. N. Whitehead of Principia Mathematica, a seminal work of mathematical logic. 

But Wittgenstein quickly established complete intellectual dominance, so much so that by 1912 Russell told his sister that he expected the next big step in philosophy to be taken by her brother.  It’s salutary to remember that he was still only a twenty-three-year old undergraduate! 

Ray Monk understands the man, the thought and the life in thought, enough to write Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.  I came to this lately, in the paperback edition, determined to get to grips with one of the great thinkers of the last century. 

He is one of the people I have long admired for his clarity of expression, for those parts of his work that are accessible to me, those parts that are not too deep in an ethereal and mathematical mode of expression.  Admired, yes, but from afar, like some intimidating demigod.  Monk has brought me far closer to the man in what is a surprisingly readable and at points gripping biography.

Surprising?  It’s just that I did not expect so difficult a thinker to be reducible to such ordinary human terms.  This is the key, in fact, to this book: in its own brilliant and lucid way it humanises the idol, if that makes sense, painting a detailed and comprehensive portrait.  Monk has a commendable grasp of the material to hand, quoting liberally from letters, diaries, notebooks and interviews, coming close to understanding the thinker as a whole.  There is Wittgenstein, uncompromising in his self-critical brilliance, relentless in the pursuit of ideas and of people, full of self-assurance at some points, and at others full of the most crushing and debilitating forms of self-doubt. 

As usual, given that this is the paperback edition, the cover is replete with laudatory praise.  I have no argument here; it’s richly deserved.  It is, as the Observer says, a book that is much to be recommended.  The Guardian adds that Monk’s biography is deeply intelligent and generous to the ordinary reader, statements with which I fully concur.  But the reviewer goes that one step further, saying that it’s a beautiful portrait of a beautiful life.  Hmm…a beautiful portrait?  Well, yes. I suppose, though I think the expression just a tad hyperbolic.  But was it a ‘beautiful life’?  I’m not sure.  It was an important one, yes, but that’s quite different. 

Ecce homo; behold in whole.  The fact is the more I delved into the thinker the less I began to like the man.  He was far too intense, far too opinionated, far too wearing.  This is genius, and supposedly everything is excused, all normal standards suspended.  But I still came away with a feeling that, for all his brilliance, this was a man better not to know; better for some of the less able children in the Austrian elementary schools he taught not to know; better not to know a man rather too free with his fists. 

He was a huge influence on the young men who came his way, turning some away from academic philosophy and Cambridge, both of which he paradoxically despised, towards more ‘practical’ endeavours.  He embraced a kind of Tolstoyan view of life, encouraging others to work alongside ‘ordinary’ people in preference to academia.  I could not help but feel that Francis Skinner, a brilliant mathematical scholar, Wittgenstein’s disciple and sometimes lover, might have been happier if he had never met him.  In his pursuit of a bogus authenticity he went to work in screw factory at the behest of his mentor, a place where he was deeply unhappy.  Earlier on he and Skinner had planed to go to Soviet Russia in the mid-1930s to work as labourers.  Fortunately for them, at least fortunately for Skinner, the harebrained project failed to mature. 

I suppose it’s another measure of Monk’s skill as a biographer that he gives us a cogent warts and all portrait.  I’m probably far too conscious of the warts, but it’s comforting to see that while Wittgenstein could be a mystic he was no saint!  He is a man whom I would both loved and hated to have known, with the latter perhaps now a little more pronounced than the former.  If I had met him I would have one question to ask: who could anyone, least of all a man with your degree of insight and sensitivity, have been taken in by Otto Weiniger’s bizarre, misogynist and self-hating monograph Sex and Character?  It’s complete trash!  I’m glad to say that Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius is not.  Rather, in itself, it's a biography of genius.  

Laughing at a Clown

George Galloway; now there’s a name to conjure with, the Member of Parliament for Bradford West, formerly of the Labour Party and now of Respect.  In some ways he’s the modern political equivalent of the actor and director Erich von Stroheim, of whom it was said in his Hollywood heyday that he was ‘the man you love to hate.’  Galloway is the politician so many love to hate, an accolade, I feel sure, which brings him a particular delight. 

Douglas Murray, writing in the Spectator, talks of the sheer awfulness of this man; and, yes, he is awful, an unprincipled, ugly opportunist who latches onto any cause that will serve to advance GGG, the Greater Good of George.  A sort of socialist at one moment, and a sort of Muslim at the next, it really does not matter what the façade or the fraud is; it’s all to the good.

Do I love to hate him?  He certainly gives me the creeps, never more so when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother.  To see him pretending to be a cat was one of the great cringe-worthy moments of modern broadcasting.  Even worse was his appearance on the same show dressed in a tight leotard, his balls, not to be coy on the point, on clear display.  Oh, yuck, yuck, yuck.  It put me off sex for a week! 

Yes, he is one of the creepiest people on the scene, but I don’t hate him; he really attracts no positive emotion at all, other than a general background noise of low level disgust,  humming away.  He is occasionally referred to as ‘Gorgeous George’ for reasons that wholly escape me.  There must be something here, though what exactly I simply don’t know. 

Surely there must be something, something beyond the piggy eyes and the cruel mouth, because he persuaded enough of the benighted voters of Bradford West to send him back to Parliament, a measure less of his political skill, I suspect, than the intelligence of the voters of Bradford West.  Are they all window lickers, I have to ask?  Please be patient; an explanation will follow, not one that will be needed by Gorgeous George

Licking, yes; he rather likes licking.  In his cat guise he pretended to lick milk from the hands of a woman.  Politically he has established a reputation for licking the arse of this dictator or that tyrant, once notoriously saluting the indefatigability of Saddam Hussein, something he’s rather tried to weasel out of in his inimitable weasel-like way. 

He’s gone on to praise such enlightened figures as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr I’m in a Dinner Jacket, as I like to call him, and Syria’s Bashing Bashar al-Assad.  Ah, follow the money, always follow the money, Gorgeous George having followed it all the way to Lebanon, where he is reputedly receiving £80,000 a year for intermittent appearances on a television show with links to Iran and Syria.  Not bad work if you can get it and he has got it.  There he is, saying that he doesn’t like jihad in Damascus but he would be all for it in Jeddah.  Perhaps the Saudis might consider a better offer? 

Back home his latest come-hate-me spat concerns the use of the expression window licker, or windae licker, to use his own Scoticism, to describe disabled people.  It’s not an expression I’m familiar with but I understand its use is considered a cardinal sin.  I’ve since read that the term was voted the third most offensive that could be used relating to disability in a poll run for the BBC's Ouch! disability talk show in 2003. 

So, now you know.  I have no idea what one and two are but they might also have some thing to do with licking, hands, perhaps, and backsides.  So far as I can see the only triple licker is George himself, a talent that he has perfected to a fine degree.  His windae expression caused a lot of windy comment about hate crime blah de blah, something that doubtless pleases him, all the more power to his politician you love to hate image. 

People are far too serious.  George is a much misunderstood man.  Please see him for what he truly is, the court jester of modern politics, dancing for your delectation and delight.  The mature reaction should be laughter, not hate, the appropriate response when faced with a clown.  

No Gold at the End of the Rainbow

When I think of the new South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s so-called Rainbow Nation, the South Africa of President Jacob Zuma and the African National Congress (ANC), George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm comes to mind.  The ending is most pertinent;

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Look away of the old apartheid nation; look from the faces of the white Boers to those of the black Bores of the ANC; long since it has been impossible to say which is which.  One form of oppression and corruption has simply been replaced by another form of oppression and corruption.  The old East European joke comes to mind.  Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; socialism is just the reverse.  Practically speaking skin colour is quite irrelevant.  South Africa’s new black masters stopped the gravy train, as has been said, only for as long as it took to get onboard. 

Last month thirty-four rioting workers at the Marikana platinum works were shot dead by police, the worst incident of such violence since the fall of apartheid.  I suppose there was some comfort in the fact that 270 people were subsequently charged with their murder. 

What, 270 policemen; so many?  No, they were not police; they were miners caught up and arrested in the same riot.  They were charged with murder under a bizarre ‘common purpose’ law, a legislative hangover from the good old bad old days.  The crazy rationale here is that, by their actions, they ‘provoked’ the police into firing and were thus responsible not just for the death of their colleagues but their unlawful murder.

It’s caused a bit of a fuss.  The charges were raised by the National Prosecution Authority (NPA), a wholly ‘independent’ body.  Of course it is.  When lawyers acting for the accused went to see President Zuma, urging that the charges be dropped, they were told that it was not up to him to tell the prosecution service what to do. 

It’s certainly up to somebody.  No sooner had the lawyers left than it was announced that the detained miners would be released in batches, proceedings taken up and just as quickly discarded.  But the anger just grows and grows, the dispute itself a festering sore, not just at Marikana but at mines elsewhere in South Africa. 

The strikers at Marikana want better pay and conditions (they live in townships no better than the old days), but at least they are paid.   Not so the workers at the East Rand goldmine, who have received no wages for two years, yes, two years, because of a liquidation dispute.  The mine was partly owned by Khulubuse Zuma, the president’s son, and Zondawa Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson.  

Meanwhile, Julius Malema, the former youth leader of the ANC, expelled from the party (that’s the operative word) for his outspoken criticism of Zuma, has been busy mining some political capital.  This notorious black racist, an admirer of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, has announced, to all who are prepared to listen, that the white mine owners have co-opted a small elite of corrupt blacks to be allowed to remain in charge. 

Ah, yes, the pigs, you see, black and white.  The thing is Malema, who may very well be using the dispute as a point of entry back into a post-Zuma ANC, has is own snout deep in the trough, his populist demagoguery notwithstanding. 

His swinishness was detailed a couple of years ago by Fiona Forde, an Irish journalist, in An Inconvenient Youth: Julius Malema and the ‘New’ ANC.  I have no idea what his present circumstances are, but when she wrote he had more than eight known properties, including a farm and a $2million mansion in Johannesburg. He demolished one house valued at $700,000, to be replaced with one at an estimated cost of $2.8million, complete with a bunker.  A bunker; what a sensible precaution that is.  One simply never knows when the Russians will come.

His expensive tastes run to designer suits, several Breitling wristwatches at $17,000 each and Luis Vuitton manbags. All gifts from friends, who also offer him the use of several luxury cars, he told Forde. Not friends and comrades from the townships, one assumes; not South Africa’s beleaguered mining community, that’s for sure.

The truth is modern South Africa is a corrupt and ill-managed kleptocracy.  The gold at the end of the rainbow has been snaffled.  There is no racism though; the black pigs and the white pigs feed from the same trough.  A great comfort, that must be, to those who find it difficult to feed at all.  As ever, all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.  

To the Death

In the 1830s David Strauss, a German theologian on the margins of the Young Hegelian school of thought, published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet – The Life of Jesus Critically Examined.  It was a sensation, the beginning of a quest for the real historical Jesus, as opposed to the miracle-maker of the gospels.  A lot of the reaction, as you may imagine, was hostile, some of it hysterically so.  In England the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, the highest of Tory Anglicans, described the 1846 English translation as “the most pestilential book ever vomited out from the jaws of hell.”

Now Channel Four, one of the terrestrial TV channels in England, seems to have produced the most pestilential documentary ever vomited out from the jaws of hell, or you might think so if you take heed of some of the Shaftesbury-like criticisms.  The show in question was called Islam: The Untold Story, presented by Tom Holland.  I’d never heard of him, either as a historian’s historian or a telly historian.  Well, now I have!  The long and the short of the Holland thesis is that the Arab Empire produced Islam; Islam did not produce the Arab Empire. 

I didn’t actually watch this when it was broadcast, principally because I did not know that it was on.  If I had I might still have given it a miss because, on the basis of past showings, I think that Channel 4’s history horse is kept in the same stables as that for shows like Big Brother. 

Now I have watched it on 4OD, the company’s catch-up service.  I simply had to before it was banned, censored, dropped down the memory hole or otherwise disposed of.  I read in the Mail that it had attracted nearly 550 complaints, which must surely count as a record for a documentary.  Holland himself has been subject to a deluge of abusive Tweets, not stopping short of physical threats.  Mohammed Shafiq, the chief executive of an organisation called the Ramadhan Foundation, wrote to the television company, saying that;

The Ramadhan Foundation calls on Channel 4 to apologise for this programme, withdraw it from online viewing and also order an immediate inquiry into why this was allowed to be broadcast.  How many Muslim Scholars, community leaders were given a copy of this programme before transmission?  Whether historic facts in relation to Islam were verified by the presenter and who his sources were. 

I have no idea what the Ramadhan Foundation is and I have no idea who Mohammed Shafiq is, but the suggestion that television programmes have to be submitted to him and his people for approval before transmission is absolutely outrageous.  Who on earth does this ridiculous man think he is, or where does he think he is living?  In case there is any confusion over the point this is England, not Saudi Arabia.  I expect, though, that there will be an attempt to have Holland indicted under the blasphemy laws, Saudi-style legislation introduced into our legal system by the wretched Tony Blair. 

Islam and the origins of Islam is a legitimate subject for historical enquiry.  Let’s get that straight to begin with, least this fundamental point is lost in the midst of the fuss.  Another thing in danger of being lost is that Holland’s documentary was a horse of a Big Brother colour.  In other words, it was telly history at its worst, glib and silly.  It may have dealt with a legitimate subject but there were too many preconceptions and unexamined assumptions to make it a legitimate enquiry. 

Dan Snow, another superficial showman, rushed to Holland’s defence on Twitter, in just as silly a fashion as his detractors – “Dear angry, mad people – it is conceivable that you know more than the world’s leading scholars, but very unlikely.”.  Gosh, I seriously hope that Holland, a sort of impoverished man’s Indiana Jones, is not being placed in the same category as the “world’s leading scholars.”  If he is then the world’s leading scholarship is in trouble.

All religions have sacred and syncretic roots.  Islam is no different in this regard from Judaism and Christianity, both of which drew on older traditions, both of which resist and are resistant to forms of empirical enquiry.  Here faith really does move mountains…and make empires.

That fundamental point was lost by the presenter.  In presentation, delivery and style, he seemed to be looking for sensation rather than substance.  There was silliness to the whole thing, fairly typical of Channel 4.  In some ways laughter would be the best criticism rather than hysteria, laughter over the superficiality of it all. It was full of visual absurdities, bogus images and vacant verbal gestures.  Overall it was appallingly disjointed.  The scene of Holland half bending in patently insincere ‘prayer’ among his Bedouin hosts was risible in the extreme.  What on earth was the point of it all? 

Then there are the questions.  It puzzled Holland that it took sixty years after Mohammed’s death for his name to appear on coins, those issued by the first caliph.  Sixty years – is that all?  The suggestion here is that Mohammed’s name is being used in the same way that Constantine used that of Christ, namely to provide a unifying focus.  But it took three hundred years for the Romans to become partial Christians, and that only after some fierce phases of persecution.  The reasonable deduction, the scholarly deduction, if you like, is that for Mohammed to have acquired such prominence so quickly he, and Islam, must already have had a substantial following.  This was not conjured out of the desert air on the fancies of Bedouins.   

Apparently, according to Holland, Mecca is not mentioned in the Quran, just a place ambiguously referred to as ‘Becca’.  But Mecca is there, in Sura 48:24 – "He is the one who withheld their hands of aggression against you, and withheld your hands of aggression against them in the valley of Mecca, after He had granted you victory over them. God is Seer of everything you do.”

I see in his statement of defence on the Channel Four website he writes that he did say on film that Mecca is mentioned.  Well, if I find the time, I shall have to watch the whole thing again, because I have no recollection at all about that, just lots of speculation about the possible location of ‘Becca.’ 

Look, the facts are simple enough: this was bad history badly presented.  It was history dancing to a preconceived tune, sensation for the sake of sensation; it really is no more complicated than that.  Christianity survived Strauss just as Islam will survive Holland.  The hysteria, the demands that TV shows dealing with a particular subject should be vetted beforehand by ‘community leaders’, gives him and his silly show far more significance than it deserves; it will only add to the sales of his forthcoming book.  Muslims really need to develop a greater sense of detachment, a suggestion that doubtless marks my card as just another infidel.  Here I am, caught by a classic paradox.  I disapprove of what Holland says but will defend to the death his right to say it. 

Raiders of the Lost King

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of battle…and buried under council car parks.  This, according to recent speculation, was the fate of Richard III, England’s last Plantagenet king, killed at the Battle of Bosworth in August, 1485.  Now archaeologists working in Leicester say that they may be close to finding his remains, under the said municipal car park. 

Actually what they are really saying is that they may have found part of a Franciscan foundation known as Greyfriars – dissolved and destroyed during the Reformation - , where the monarch may have been buried after his naked body had been gawped at for several days after death. 

While I have no desire to criticise the team headed by Professor Richard Buckley of Leicester University (nonsense, I do!) it all seems a tad premature.  Yes, OK, it attracts attention, though not in the best archaeological tradition.  Well, maybe we are playing at Raiders of the Lost King. 

At the risk of being accused of academic snobbishness there seems to me to be a strong element of wishful thinking and pop archaeology here, not really that surprising in that the dig is to be featured in a forthcoming Channel 4 documentary. 

On reflection that might not be that bad – after all Time Team, a Channel 4 show, is pop archaeology at its best – but for the fact the Richard III Society is also involved in this sack him up project. 

Now, the Richard III Society, as you may very well know, has an agenda, not one, I have to say, that is politically or academically disinterested.  No, for them Richard is a much misunderstood man, a black villain only in Tudor propaganda, the wicked hunchback of Shakespeare’s fertile imagination.  Their man, rather, is more sinned against than sinning. 

I’ve never quite understood why Richard, who ruled for only two fairly disastrous years, has excited such fascination.  He was a bad king, a bad politician and an appalling strategist.  But for his miscalculations the Lancastrian cause, comprehensively defeated in the so-called Wars of the Roses (it was the Scot Scott who gave it that title) may itself have been buried forever. 

His fall began with a crime - the murder in the Tower of his young nephews Edward V and Richard, duke of York.  Oh, there is no doubt about that, despite the objections of the Richard III Society, as anyone who has the least knowledge of medieval records like Close Rolls and Pipe Rolls will confirm. 

These documents are an exhaustive account of royal grants and expenditure, mention often being made of the most politically insignificant people.  The Princes are there, at least until the summer of 1483, when they vanish altogether from the record, receiving no further mention.  To save himself, and to completely undercut Henry Tudor in 1485, Richard only had to produce them in public.  He could not.  He was Banquo and they were the ghosts at his feast. 

So, let’s get back to the dig.  I read in the press that the archaeologists and their Richardian allies hope that finding the remains, if they find the remains, will help change the way the king is viewed historically.  Really?  Do bones speak?  How on earth could a few broken fragments change the past? 

The Richard III Society view is that it would end the “enormous disparagement” of his reputation.  Quite frankly that’s just nonsense.  All the dry bones could prove - if there are enough of them - is that he wasn’t a hunchback with a withered arm, but that’s a perception that has long been discarded.  Hunchbacks with withered arms don’t generally ride into battle. 

I welcome archaeology as genuine archaeology and I really do hope that Richard is found, if only to answer a long-standing mystery.  But so far as his reputation is concerned, any remains, no matter how complete, will stay stubbornly silent.  

Hannibal’s Ghost

I’m off on a trip to Tunisia at the beginning of October, my first to the North African country.  There are various reasons I want to go, among the uppermost is to stand among the stones of Carthage. 

Of course this is Roman Carthage, not the Punic city.  That was completely obliterated in 146BC in one of the most complete acts of vindictive retribution in all of history.  Carthego delenda est – Carthage must be destroyed – Cato the Elder was in the habit of saying to the point of absurdity; and it was, completely.  It was re-founded a hundred years later, a ghost of the past.

Speaking of ghosts, if you want to know why the Romans behaved with such malice you could do no better than turn to The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic by Robert L O’Connell, an American military historian. 

That’s it in a word or, rather, in a name – Hannibal, one of the greatest generals and tacticians in history, the nemesis of Rome, a name fearful enough to send the city’s children scurrying to their beds, least he come.  He came alright; he came in the summer of 216 to the battlefield of Cannae in southern Italy, there inflicting in a single day a defeat and a human tragedy unmatched in all of military history. 

Perhaps you think that an exaggeration, just a flight of hyperbole?  Then I would just ask you to consider this sombre fact.  Fifty thousand Romans died on that day in August, twice as many as the British soldiers killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, during the height of a mechanised war. 

Although O’Connell rightly refuses to dwell on what he refers to as the “pornography of violence” there are enough hints to give one a picture of that terrible day, “If it is possible to conceive of hell on earth, this human abattoir at Cannae must have been equal of any hell that history in all of its perversity has managed to concoct.”  The thing about Cannae is that it was the kind of encounter that victorious generals dream of – a battle of total encirclement.  Neither able to advance nor retreat, the Romans could only stand and die.

The Ghosts of Cannae is about much more than this seminal battle which acts as a centrepiece.  More broadly it paints a picture of the entire course of the Second Punic War, part two of a three round bout, when the two giants of the ancient world slugged it out for dominance in the Western Mediterranean.  It tells the story of some commanding personalities, not just of Hannibal, the most commanding of all, but of Publius Cornelius Scipio, eventually to be honoured with the name of Africanus, his nemesis. 

As I said above, the author is a military historian, and as military history The Ghosts of Cannae excels in so many regards.  But he is not narrowly focused in the way that makes so much of this field hopelessly one-dimensional.  Cannae and the events of the Second Punic War are given a far greater political significance in the evolution of the Roman Republic.  It’s the beginning of the eclipse of the Senate and the system of Consular authority.  In times to come Roman armies would look to their commanders to protect their interests, not the institutions of the Republic.

Scipio, I was fascinated to discover, was the first man in Roman history to take the title of ‘imperator’, less politically loaded than ‘king’ with which his Spanish allies wished to honour him.  In the end it might very well be said that Hannibal did succeed in his aim of destroying the Roman Republic.  Scipio, you see, is the beginning of a succession, one that works through Sulla on through Caesar and maturing with Augustus.  In the end Imperator was a far more potent title than mere King.

Although the Second Punic War is really Hannibal’s War, although he transformed what was essentially a naval into a land-based power, and although he won some startling victories, culminating in the masterpiece of Cannae, for me the real hero of The Ghosts of Cannae is Scipio.  In the end he proved himself to be the better tactician and the better soldier.  But most important of all he proved himself to be the better strategist and the better politician.

The paradox is that for Hannibal Cannae, his great battle of annihilation, was little better than a defeat, at least in practical terms.  He failed to exploit his victory; he failed to march on Rome.  For years after he was to move impotently in ever decreasing circles in southern Italy, while Scipio took the war to Spain and eventually to Africa.  Hannibal’s was the greatest triumph and the greatest missed opportunity in all of history.

It’s gripping history grippingly told, in prose that is racy and exciting but delivered without loss of proper academic focus.  That’s the thing; history does not need to be dry; history is the most exciting and rewarding area of study, even if one is only looking for simple entertainment.  The author uses the available sources, particularly Polybius and Livy, to great effect in a study that I found largely commendable.

Largely?  Yes, I do have a few criticisms.  I think the maps let the book down badly.  With this kind of thing one really needs more detail.  The Cannae maps were fair enough, if basic, though those dealing with the Spanish theatre served merely as a outline.  And why, oh why was there no map of the Battle of Zama, where Hannibal and Scipio met face to face? 

The bigger problem for me comes with the lacunae in the sources, gaps which the author fills with speculative ‘musts’: there must have been he must have thought and on and on.  No, no, no.  How that sort of thing drives me mad.  If one has no evidence, please, must me no musts! 

I was a little surprised that the epilogue, dealing with the significance of Cannae in military thinking and history, made no mention of Stalingrad, the most significant battle of encirclement and annihilation in the modern age.  It did not escape the attention of German officers caught in the Russian trap that their commander was called Paulus, just as one of the joint commanders killed at Cannae was Lucius Aemilius Paullus.  It’s little coincidences like these that give the story an added piquancy. 

If this book has a lesson, and it assuredly does, it’s one that soldiers would do well to take heed.  It’s this: war really is politics by other means.  Hannibal, for all his brilliance as a commander, never understood that fundamental truth.  Tactics, quite simply, is never enough. If that needs to be driven home then we only have to think of Afghanistan.  

Let's Kill All the Lawyers

Henry the Sixth is probably the least memorable of Shakespeare's history cycle of plays.  It contains a particularly memorable line, though, delivered by one of the minor characters.  It comes in Part Two, Act Four, where Dick the Butcher, in responding to a speech by Jack Cade, the rebel leader, says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."

You may very well know these words; a lot of people do.  I'm sure they struck a cord which the playwright's audience when it was first performed; people all too well aware of the frustrations and failures of interminable legal process, of the law's delays and of the insolence of office.  

They've crossed my mind more than once, particularly on reading about some legal idiocy or other.  They came to mind most recently on hearing William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, pontificate last month about the value of our new legal world order.  "The British government", he announced, "will redouble our calls on all states to co-operate with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and apprehend those it has indicted.  There should be no hiding place or sanctuary for people indicted for crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide."

Do you think politicians ever think?  Do you think that they pause for a moment's reflection before coming out with high-sounding and meretricious nonsense?  Oh, for the days of Machiavelli, days when political life was so much simpler, when states acted in their own best interests and not out of bogus moralising claptrap.

Now, please do not jump to conclusions.  I do not for a moment approve of crimes against humanity, war crimes and acts of genocide; I do not approve of leaders and states that are capable of such things.  But there are fundamental questions here, questions that clearly have never crossed the mind of vague Hague about The Hague.  Has International Justice - I feel compelled to write that in Olympian caps - done anything to deter dictators and perpetrators of genocide?  Has it not, in fact, made matters worse?  Is it not simply - what heresy! - a charter for lawyers? 

The whole issue is addressed by Douglas Murray in the latest edition of the Spectator.  All I can say is that it's about time this was taken seriously.  There was Gaddafi, hanging on to the bitter end, at goodness knows what human cost.  There is Assad, hanging on to the bitterest of ends, at goodness knows what human cost.  What alternative is there, when the examples of Serbia's Slobodan Milošević and Liberia's Charles Taylor are there to see?  The ICC, in other words, encourages a bunker mentality. 

The sensible thing, as Murray says, would be to allow Assad to retire to a villa in Tehran or a bungalow in Vladivostok, a punishment, some might feel, befitting the crimes.  But, no; he has no hiding place: it's either swinging from a lamppost in Damascus or sitting on a bench in The Hague...indefinitely.  So, on we go - "By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good, all causes shall give way: I am in blood stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er."

The ICC has done nothing to stop genocide.  That's not really the issue.  Does it really want to stop genocide?  That is the issue.  After all, what function would it have in the absence of crimes against humanity?  Dictators and tyrants murder; that's their business.  The ICC produces genocide experts of all sorts; that's its business.  Universities are now apparently offering 'genocide degrees', so people clearly see a future in this growth industry. Murray puts it persuasively:

Such people need jobs to graduate to, and there is now a growing professional class for whom the year is always 1939, the enemy is always Nazi and the answer is always Nuremberg.  Distrustful of armies, but endlessly reliant on lawyers, our national and international institutions now swarm with people who actively need accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity to stay in work.  Surrounded as they tend to be by unfettered praise, the actual effectiveness of these bodies goes almost unquestioned.  Even to resist the claims to supernational authority of the ICC - as the US government has done - is to leave yourself open to accusations that you must be pro-genocide. 

Yes, the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.  Oops, I better be careful, least I find myself indicted in The Hague, there to suffer from interminable boredom, a punishment before than punishment that must surely qualify as cruel and unusual.