Pragmatism and Principle

The reason why Gladstone and Disraeli took such opposite views over the Turkish massacres in Bulgaria in 1876 comes down to one simple thing: the 'ethics of opposition' versus the 'pragmatism of power.' William Ewart Gladstone famously called for the Turks to be removed 'bag and baggage' from the areas they had devastated in the Batak outrages; Benjamin Disraeli, the Prime Minister of the day, held steady to the established British position in maintaining the Ottoman Empire as a counter to the expansionist ambitions of Russia.

Would Gladstone in office, it is fair to ask, have behaved any differently? Yes, I think he may very well have, and not purely for reasons of moral outrage. There was simply no reason to suppose, as Disraeli did, that an independent Bulgaria would have been little more than a Russian puppet. In fact, there was a pragmatic dimension to Gladstone's whole perception of the issue, and it is this: a line of vigorous independent Balkan nations would, in the long run, have served the British purpose far better than a weak and weakening Turkish Empire.

Not many years after the Treaty of Berlin had greatly reduced the Bulgarian borders previously established at San Stephano the country was behaving in a determinedly independent manner, much to the frustration of the Russians. Indeed, when Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia joined to together in 1885, in defiance of the Treaty of Berlin, the move was opposed by Russia, though it was supported by Lord Salisbury, the British Prime Minister, who had been Disraeli's Foreign Secretary at Berlin. Thus the diplomatic world was turned upside down. So, in the end, even the Tories recognised that the Grand Old Man had not been entirely wrong!

The problem is not the weapon

The recent shooting outrage in Cumbria is just too dreadful. Anything I write will almost certainly minimise the depth of the tragedy, an obscene carnival that left twelve people dead and eleven injured, some seriously. I can’t even bring myself to name the perpetrator of this massacre, who finished by killing himself with one of his weapons. Mass shootings are always a horror no matter where they occur. But they are all the more shocking in England precisely because they are so rare.

It’s too soon to make judgements of a general nature but the call has already gone out that our strict gun laws should be made even stricter. At the risk of being misunderstood, or at the risk of being considered insensitive in raising this issue at such I time, I really have to say that this is a serious mistake.

The thing is I enjoy shooting, which opens be to an additional accusation- that of selfishness. I have licences for both a .22 rifle and a four-ten shotgun. I enjoy target practice and I enjoy rough shooting. I really do have to stress that all of the people I have met through this sport are sensible, intelligent and well-balanced. I have no hesitation at all in suggesting that this is true of virtually all of the shooters in this country. It would be wrong to penalise us because of the actions of a single madman.

I was greatly heartened by the comment of David Cameron, our Prime Minister, himself a one-time sports shooter, that it would be a mistake to rush to further gun control. “Of course we should look at the issue”, he said, “but we should not leap to a knee-jerk conclusion on what should be done on the regulatory front. We do have some of the toughest legislation in the world. You can’t legislate to stop a flick switching in someone’s head and for this dreadful sort of action to take place.”

This is just so true. Quick legislation, legislation drafted in the heat of a particular event, is almost always bad legislation; the Dangerous Dog Act of 1991 is a case in point, as the Daily Telegraph said in its Friday leader page. The piece continued with a simple but pertinent truth, the same truth touched on by David;

…one cannot legislate for the actions of madmen, and it is fatuous to try. Nearly three quarters of a million people in this country possess shotgun or firearm licences. We can tighten the restrictions all we want, but in the end the problem is not the weapon, but the wielder.

In that same issue a reader made the point on the letter's page that after the Dunblane Massacre in 1996 the then government passed an act banning the private ownership of all cartridge ammunition handguns, no matter the calibre. Not even the Olympic shooting team was exempted, who ever since have been obliged to train outside the country. Yet now, thirteen years later, there are more illegal weapons in the country than ever before and gun crime has increased steadily. It’s impossible to legislate against this, or if legislation there is it’s all so much whistling in a hurricane.

Civil liberties are already restricted, have been steadily restricted over the years. Now is not the time to turn the light on me or the other three quarter of a million decent and law-binding gun owners.

West is Best

Having been singularly impressed by my reading of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon I've since carried out a brief spot of research on Rebecca West, the author. What a truly remarkable person she was, a person with whom I can identify so strongly in so many ways. She is one of those people almost impossible to put in an easy intellectual or political compartment.

An early feminist, her causes would appear to have been largely of the left, and there is much on her book on Yugoslavia which would identify her with a form of socialism. But like George Orwell I think she is best understood as an English radical, a radical in the tradition set down by Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, the one a great Tory and the other a great Whig. They were all, in their individual ways, haters of ideology and the carriers of ideology.

West was one of the first to understand that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a fraud. She was alerted to the violence of the new regime by Emma Goldman, an American anarchist who had experienced it at first hand, and was frustrated that her message was ignored by others on the left, most of whom were to remain blind to the realities of communism right through the period of Stalin's tyranny. For West people like Stalin had a criminal mentality that communism simply facilitated.

Loving Yugoslavia, she was outraged during the Second World War when the Allies decided to back Tito and his communist partisans rather than the royalist Chetniks, headed by Draža Mihailović. Her anti-communism intensified after the war when she saw the old states of Eastern Europe fall to Soviet imperialism. Unlike others on the liberal left she also took a relatively sanguine view of the Senator Joseph McCartney's pursuit of communist subversives in the United States.

I would say that by this point in her life West was objectively a figure of the libertarian right rather than the socialist left, completing a journey that George Orwell might have taken, though she never considered herself a conservative. But for the Labour Party, whose victory she welcomed in 1945, she was an uncomfortable ally, constantly critical of the domination of the trade unions and singularly unimpressed by such leaders as Michael Foot.

Paradoxically she was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, both for her achievement as a woman in rising to the top of a male-dominated establishment and for her readiness to stand up to bullying trade unionists like the reptilian Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. The point is, I suppose, that she, unlike many others, was consistent in her radicalism, though she never quite slaked off the snake skin of socialism. Towards the end of her life the true radicals were all on the right, whereas the left was the captive of outmoded thought and political practices restrictive of choice and personal liberty.

Panther, panther, burning bright

In the late 1760s William Cobbett, then only seven years old, saw something unusual in the grounds of Waverly Abbey near Farnham in Surrey. It was a cat but nothing like any cat he had ever seen before, for it was as big as a middle-sized spaniel.

Years later, now established as one of the great radical campaigners of the day, he was to recall the incident in Rural Rides, a kind of personal Doomsday Book. His sighting all those years before is thought to be the first recorded evidence of that most elusive of creatures – the British Big Cats, sometimes known as Alien or Anomalous Big Cats (ABCs), phantom cats or mystery cats. The Beast of Bodmin and the Beast of Exmoor are probably the most famous of the species, ever present and ever distant.

These cats, often described as puma or panther-like in appearance, inhabit the regions between crypto-zoology and folklore. Sometimes a rational explanation for their existence is offered: that they are the descendants of escapees or animals released by their owners into the wild by the passage in 1976 of the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, making them too expensive to keep. Other times more supernatural explanations are suggested. It is one of these I want to focus one, bizarre in the extreme. It concerns a grim and awful ritual originating in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, a ritual known as the in Gaelic as the Taigheirm.

Carl van Vechten, an American writer and photographer, reports a story he lifted from Deuteroscopy, a book on second sight by one C. G. Horst, published in the early nineteenth century. This describes a cat sacrifice, clearly originating in pagan times, but allegedly practiced into the seventeenth century. There is an article on this also in the recent issue of The Fortean Times.

The ‘recipe’ goes like this. Take as many cats as you can find. Truss them up on a spit and then roast them one by one before a slow fire, having first dedicated them to all the devils. The howling of the tortured cats must not cease for a moment over the four days and nights required to complete the ritual, so just make sure plenty of cats are on hand. Oh, I almost forgot: they should all be black.

So, sticking carefully to this step by step guide, after a time the infernal spirits will be conjured up in the shape of black cats. More and more of these other worldly entities should appear, adding their own terrible howls to that of their roasting living cousins. Finally a cat of monstrous size appears. Those who conducted the ceremony only desist after granted some boon by the great cat spirit.

The last of these ceremonies was, according to Horst, held in the middle of the seventeenth century on the Hebridean island of Mull. However, the great black cat, once brought into existence, seemingly never went away. It’s most recent appearance on the island was last summer, reported by two walkers. A black panther or a black legend, I can’t really decide which.

Memories of A Huntress

The rippling grass without a flaw,
The rain that tear drops never saw,
Yet who is this that rides beside,
The pack that scurries from her stride.

For those who see the hunt today,
There will be no chorus in the fray,
No dreams are needed when running wild,
The harvest reaper offers no smile.

The sky that blew a welcome breeze,
And sings a lark of subtle praise,
Her shadow tall beneath the trees,
And leaves a mark cross seasons’ page.

The tolling defences of the garden,
With pleasure and sorrow caught between,
Thoughts of youth free of overgrowth hardened,
For age on this brow is by no man seen.

The trumpets sound the sigh of morning,
The hooves are clashing without warning,
The dirt is tumbled with hounds’ bark breaking,
The half filled glass holds claret shaking.

No cadence for a march asunder,
The world is rife with predictable wonder,
But only for the house proud gentleman and lady,
They say they know her, but that’s as maybe.

For who but the Huntress knows her prey,
When others are basking in their lurid attainment,
Theirs the twilight whilst hers is day,
When to vulgar envy they find enslavement.

They see her on six legs a-leaping,
Though they are far away for now,
There is a secret she is keeping,
But where and when they can’t know how.

Hers the catch and they the caught,
Defining themselves by all they’re not,
Lacking the means to hunt the hunter,
As whispers scream a song of blunder.


She cares not for their trifle praise,
Their insincerity shan’t e’er amaze,
They cannot hope to feign her glory,
For they are the bookends of her story.

Her Annette so white—their hearts torched black,
Their cowardice grows as distant slips her back,
Into a wilderness of warmth she cavorts so gently
Her harvest, the liturgy of plenty.

As those in her wake stand only in memory,
Her triumphs linger and augment,
Her fortune the privilege of the free,
No price too high for honour spent.

No hill to climb o’er Elysian bend,
That taunts the lessons long ago learnt,
Love cannot be wasted nor o’er enemies sent,
Crossed bridges are best departed burnt.

They are gone and she’s tall still,
Every hunter’s burden is their own kill,
To keep their fellow riders lost at bay,
In a place where children and fools down lay.

She is the Huntress of gold that’s shown,
When glory is granted all her own,
The pack lie sleeping—all others vanquished,
In the forests where the fox has languished.

They do not dare to run the race,
For they cannot gaze upon such a face,
The Huntress of victory,
That only the killed are blessed to see.

Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire

I have in the past compared the European Union to the old Soviet Union simply in terms of the political structures in place; the one is as unresponsive to popular pressure and as bureaucratic as the other. But there are other historical examples which are perhaps even more meaningful in explaining the political condition of modern Europe, a place where the nation state appears to be dying, replaced by a supranational empire. But what kind of empire, it’s legitimate to ask? Will it be a new Roman Empire? A Roman Empire, certainly, but not the one that normally comes to mind, not the realm of the great Caesars, merely that of the petty tyrants.

Consider it this way. The nation-state, in its modern form, is a largely artificial creation; the child, not of nationalism, as is usually assumed, but of the Age of Enlightenment. The European Union might be said to be a reaction against this, a process by which the nation state will be rendered obsolete. But all the evidence suggests that there is no European identity as such. Rather what can be seen is the liberation of a patch-work of local identities, formerly sublimated within the nation state. What we can see, in other words, is Transylvanian, Basque, Breton, Flemish, Scottish and a host of other fragmentations; what we can see is a revival, it might be said, of the crazy patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire. How the Gods of History love irony!

This process of division and subdivision is likely to continue, always looking inwards, towards ever more parochial loyalties. Consider the Scots, whose sense of identity - once the bogus tartanry is removed - has an entirely negative basis, along the lines of 'we are Scots because we are not English'. But once the old 'oppressive' English state is factored out, once the sense of historical grievance is removed, what then? How will the Gaelic Highlands see the Saxon Lowlands? How will the east sit with the west? How will Glasgow sit with Edinburgh? I can’t answer these questions; I do not have sufficient prescience. All I can say is that more and more prince-bishops and margraves are likely to emerge in a modern form as we move wider still and wider.

Dances with Devils

When it comes to historical topics I often find the small details more compelling than the overall picture, the details that reveal some feature or other of past lives. I have a copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s recently published The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It’s about one of the seminal conflicts of the Old West, the day in June 1876 when units of the Seventh Cavalry, led by George Armstrong Custer, were overwhelmed by a larger force of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians (I simply refuse to use the term ‘native’ Americans).

The big picture is exciting, yes, but in glancing through the pages I became engrossed in the information he gives on the lives of the ordinary troopers. Many of them were born abroad, the highest proportion of the foreign contingent coming from Ireland, the Germans and the English following on. Most of the native Americans – and here I really do mean native! – came from east of the Mississippi and had no real idea of what life would be like in the West, with its endless and monotonous plains.

That was bad enough but they apparently also found it difficult to accustom the constant reek of horse-hair and human sweat. At night the smell could be particularly bad, compounded by the fact that latrines had to be dug close to camp. If the soldiers died with their boots on it’s simply because that they were often too frightened to take them off. As any rider knows boots have a tendency to shrink when damp or wet, making them difficult to get off and just as difficult to get on. For men who had to be ready at a moment’s notice this was of particular concern.

It occurs to me also, though the author makes no mention of this in the passages I’ve read, that the day of the battle may very well have been the first time that many of the troopers had ever seen an Indian. Contrary to popular legend they were not quite as numerous as supposed and the plains were vast. For most soldiers stationed on remote frontier posts the greatest enemy was boredom and the only solace drink. It was a case of dancing with the devil more than dancing with wolves.