Socrates
It benefits from being refreshingly clear sighted about Socrates, portraying him as a more ambiguous character than the unimpeachably innocent victim of Plato’s accounts.
Plato
Waterfield’s thesis is doubtless controversial but no less entertaining or informative for all that.
Adam von Trott on trial for his life after failure of 20 July plot
Trott was well qualified for this role. He had been a Rhodes scholar to Oxford and as a result was well acquainted with leading British figures of the time including Stafford Cripps and Richard Crossman. He had also travelled extensively in the United States and China. But with only a few honourable exceptions, most of these contacts, some who had been friends, interpreted his decision to return to Germany with the rise of Nazism as a betrayal of democratic principles rather than the fundamental commitment to a democratic Germany that it was.
As Trott discovered during the war the Allies showed considerable distrust for his overtures. In part the distrust that the British had for this was because of a stunning German intelligence success early in the war, known as the Venlo incident, which resulted in the capture of a number of senior British intelligence officers who had been lured to a purported meeting with a Resistance group. But the origins of this distrust appear, in fact, deeper than the enormity of war. The first half of the book, which contains some of the chapters I found most difficult, deals in significant part with the relative alienness of British and German cultures in the 1930s which gave rise to diverse cultural and political misunderstandings between Trott and his British contemporaries. These misunderstandings contributed to the misinterpretation by many of Trott’s decision to return. Hence, in particular Crossman in British government during the war, denigrated his bona fides and undermined his attempts to establish contacts between the German Resistance and the Allies. This misinterpretation still echoes down the years with, for example, Tom Cruise’s Stauffenberg movie, Valkyrie, provoking an article in the Guardian by Justin Cartwright, which 60 years on raised the question that the German resisters may not have been the democratic allies that they are now generally accepted to be.
Claus von Stauffenberg
The issues that MacDonogh raises here are still relevant in our world at 21st Century war. Today even more alien cultures than the European powers of 1939 are finding themselves in confrontation and conflict. For there ever to be peace there must eventually be understanding, and an important starting point for such a process must be a realisation that the narratives of conflict, identity and responsibility may be wildly divergent.
Trott’s decision to work within for the undermining of Hitler was was not an unambiguous one. Trott, and many of his Resistance colleagues, questioned how their roles within the Nazi state may have contributed to advancing the ideology that they actually wished to destroy. One particularly interesting chapter highlighting this ambiguity deals with Trott’s foreign ministry responsibilities towards India and his relationship with Bose, the leader of the Axis aligned Indian National Army, and the Axis efforts to undermine one of his few true British friends, Stafford Cripps, efforts to come to a settlement in India during the war.
The final half of the book deals in considerable, sometimes dizzying, detail with the organisation of the 20 July coup. I found a parallel in the description of Trott’s efforts in this with that of Jean Moulin in the French Resistance at the same time as set out in Mathew Cobb’s book on the subject. Both expended considerable energy not just in removing the Nazis but thinking about what the post Nazi future would look like for their countries.
In spite of the knowledge of how things are going to turn out the final portions of this book are filled with dread. The courage of the 20 July conspirators is still an awe inspiring thing. This book shows the depth of their intellectual, administrative and philosophical efforts too. As such it is an important contribution to the literature of the Second World War.
Speech to 2014 Annual General Meeting of Dalit Solidarity Network
I started my professional career as a water engineer and spent years in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Angola focused on how water and sanitation interventions could help reduce poverty or mitigate the consequence of war.
There are millions of people alive today across the world because of the work of water and sanitation engineers and this work remains a vital, under-resourced and often under-appreciated strategy in long term poverty reduction and humanitarian response.
Badaun sisters’ rape-murders: ‘They could have been saved if police acted’, says family
But it’s not a panacea. And I was appalled last week to read an article on the BBC website, which presented seriously the idea that a new latrines programme in the Indian village of the two young girls found hanged in a tree in May, after they had gone to defecate in the open, was a sufficient response to their rape and murder.
The founder of the charity that put the new latrines into the village declared that “I believe no woman must lose her life just because she has to go out to defecate”, echoing Prime Minister Modi’s Independence Day speech on 15 August when he vowed to end open defecation.
“We are in the 21st Century and yet there is still no dignity for women as they have to go out in the open to defecate and they have to wait for darkness to fall,” he said. “Can you imagine the number of problems they have to face because of this?” he asked.
Open defecation was a problem in Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan when I worked there but while poor sanitation is a constraint particularly on girls education and renders millions of women vulnerable to all forms of sexual harassment and assault, it does not inevitably lead to an epidemic of rape and lynchings. Other factors are necessary for that to occur.
Anybody brought up with the Rockford Files knows that all crimes, particularly murders, have three fundamental elements: motive, means and opportunity. But starting with an article in the Guardian by the director of Wateraid shortly after these atrocities there has been a tendency amongst some leaders to substitute the motive for these rape-murders with the opportunity for them.
I would like to discuss why this has been happening because I feel it touches upon an important and troubling issue.
The American business theorist Chris Argyris identified the issue of “undiscussability” as a key factor in reducing the capacity of organizations and businesses to perform effectively. Organizations, he found, were unable to discuss risky or threatening issues especially if these issues question the underlying assumptions and policies of the organization.
That idea applies to states and communities as well as organizations. And so responses to the deaths of these two girls have avoided perhaps the most undiscussable issue in human history: that of the intrinsic violence of caste-based apartheid.
Arundhati Roy points out in The Doctor and the Saint that, “Poverty … is not just a question of having no money or no possessions, Poverty is about having no power”. Caste-based apartheid maintains that exclusion from power of hundreds of millions of citizens in a way that is vitally important politically and economically for powerful elements of society’s elites.
It is increasingly clear for example that the maintenance of this social system provides competitive advantage to South Asia, particularly India, in the globalising political economy. Caste-based apartheid underpins the “camp coolie” and “Sumangali” systems allowing the powerful to enslave with impunity vulnerable workers, often young Dalit women and girls, and hence to derive considerable profits from their enslavement. Each of us in this room is also benefiting from that enslavement as it allows, amongst other things, the provision of cheap clothes to our high streets and so, each of us is probably clad in at least one garment that has been produced in some part through the labour of enslaved people.
Making the issue of caste-based apartheid undiscussable insulates it politically and allows the elite greater security in their feudal level of aristocratic privilege: how can something become a political issue if one cannot even give voice to the question?
So I suppose I should not be shocked that a response to the rape-murder of two young Dalits is a sanitation programme. It comes from the same philosophical tradition as a compulsory education law to address child labour or a rural employment guarantee scheme to respond to bonded adult labour.
Each of these programmes hopes to treat a serious symptom of poverty, and indeed they do hold potential to do so. But they scrupulously avoid mentioning the cause of the problems. That is because the cause of the problems is caste-based apartheid and the child labour and slavery that this facilitates and there are too many vested interests who benefit from that for it to be a politically safe topic of conversation.
The failure to engage with the undiscussable issue of caste in South Asian society is a failure in the most basic principles of good development practice. There has been over the past decade a growing discourse of development as a technocratic project. That is an idea that poverty reduction is principally about the transfer of things to people who do not have things. Bill Gates has been a particularly powerful advocate of this approach and we see it reflected in, for example, Fairtrade’s fixation on prices paid to producers as the holy grail of poverty alleviation, to the exclusion of almost all other development issues.
But effective democratic development is not primarily a technocratic, or even an economic, challenge. It is a political one. Democratic community development should be about empowerment of vulnerable and at risk people. Sometimes the constraints on empowerment are material things. But much more often they are social systems which aim to exclude certain people from inclusion in society and in poverty reduction measures, and if these are unaddressed by development processes then the development project itself is constructed on foundations of sand. Dr Ambedkar’s words in relation to just revolution also pertain to just development: “What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of the justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights”.
But the challenge of caste-based apartheid and its undiscussability shows something more profound. Development is also a philosophical project: it is about finding the cause of injustice and calling it by its true name. Without this the system retains its power to warp and undermine even the most well-meaning efforts towards justice.
When I was thinking about what I was going to say here Seamus Heaney’s words from his poem “Whatever you say, say nothing” kept coming back to me:
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,
The outside world does not well understand the South Asian codes for caste discrimination allowing the perpetrators greater leeway to continue with what they are doing guarded by silence, and by this incomprehension, from criticism by the international community. And the enforced silence around caste-based apartheid now extends as far as the UK with this British government’s pusillanimous acquiescence to Brahminist lobbying by refusing fundamental protections of British law to British citizens who happen to be Dalits.
And so the trap of caste-based apartheid that has ensnared millions of people across the world still grips, and its grip threatens fundamentally the democracy of those states that tolerate it, not least the world’s largest democracy.
Heaney went on to describe the explosive potential that injustice stoked in oppressed communities. That explosive potential must also exist in contemporary India and the rest of South Asia so long as the violence of caste-based apartheid is unaddressed. There remains time to prevent conflagration by acting with justice. As Ambedkar pointed out “Law and order are the medicine of the body politic and when the body politic gets sick medicine must be administered“. Specifically effective rule of law across South Asia must be extended by expansion of the judiciary, rooting out of corruption in the police, criminalisation of caste discrimination and making sure that laws like the Indian rural employment guarantee scheme and compulsory education act are fully and effectively implemented.
But time is running out. And if the rest of us remain silent on this issue of caste-based apartheid then we will also have to accept some measure of responsibility next time we hear of other crucified Dalits hanging from trees.
Arundhati Roy’s introduction to this new edition of BR Ambedkar’s classic work has not been without controversy. For one thing it has meant that this new edition has been rendered unaffordable to most Dalits (previously called “Untouchables”) across India. Gandhi had already called it overpriced at 8 rupees when it was first published. But then Roy doesn’t have too much good to say about Gandhi either, and her analysis of his life and politics is likely to upset many particularly those who have bought into his deification. Of course Gandhi was human and as flawed as the rest of us, and Roy’s focus with this essay is on an area where Gandhi’s record is least defensible: his attitude to caste.
Roy’s stature as one of India’s finest contemporary writers has meant that her introduction to the Annihilation of Caste has brought, Ambedkar, his disputes with Gandhi, and the still bleeding wound of caste-based apartheid in India to much wider attention across the world: I have even seen the great American actor John Cusack enthusing about this introduction on twitter!
Roy is a stunningly gifted writer and a justly furious citizen. Both these traits come together brilliantly in this essay, which combines an excoriating critique of caste-based apartheid in India with biographical sketches of Ambedkar and Gandhi and a careful discussion of the contention between the two men in the struggle for Indian independence and social justice.
Gandhi may have had much to recommend him as a giant of the 20th Century but he does not come out of this comparison well. Roy makes a compelling case that Gandhi maintained deeply racist attitudes towards Dalits and Africans all his life: once, for example, he compared the teaching of the Christian Gospel to Dalits as like preaching to a cow. Hence Gandhi consistently sided with vested Bramhinist interests in entrenching caste prejudice in the Indian independence movement and hence in the emergent state. One contemptible tactic that Congress used that demonstrated the prevailing racist attitudes towards “low” castes was to nominate “Untouchable” candidates to the 1930 provincial elections. They did this not to promote Dalit rights but to destroy the British-sponsored elections. They knew that the nomination of “Untouchable” candidates would make sure that no “respectable” Hindus would run as independent candidates for bodies polluted by the presence of “Untouchables”. When the constitutional arrangements for the new Indian state were under discussion Congress ensured that Dalits were substantially excluded from representation by refusing to allow a separate electorate for them as had been established for the less numerous Sikhs. Gandhi had even threatened to starve himself to death at one point to ensure that no separate “Untouchable” electorate was ever established.
The attitude to caste of India’s founding generation is not an issue of mere historical curiosity. Dalits and other low caste and minority groups in India are still routinely subject to enslavement, rape, torture and murder with de facto impunity. And the impunity for these contemporary injustices was written into the modern Indian state by the errors and prejudices of those who founded the state.
Roy does not let her evident admiration of Ambedkar prevent her from giving a clear sighted portrait of him: she notes that as Gandhi was startlingly unempathetic towards Dalit liberation and empowerment so too Ambedkar had a dreadful blindspot towards the treatment of the Adivasi community of India. Roy recognises that the rationalist spirit that Ambedkar espoused demands that he is not deified but treated as the brilliant but flawed human that he was.
The Doctor and the Saint is remarkable work of advocacy, a passionate effort by a person of conscience to force the issue of caste onto India’s, and the world’s, political agenda. Given the violence and misogyny in large parts of Indian society and the looming election to the premiership of Narendra Modi, a member of the ultra-right RSS of whom she is scathing, at the time of writing, it also marks Roy out as a startlingly brave woman and an exemplary citizen.
Annihilation of Caste is a book of historical importance. Roy’s introduction does it, the cause Ambedkar espoused, and by extension all humanity, proud.
Whoops! is a clear, cogent and coherent explication of how the financial crisis came about, emerging from a culture of greed and a ludicrous, supposedly rational, belief that risk could, for all intents and purposes, be eliminated from financial transactions. More frightening is that almost nothing has been done to prevent such a crisis happening again – President Obama’s modest efforts having been eviscerated by the right of his own party and nothing notable in Europe at the time of publication in 2010.
So terrifying are the implications of the situation that even the regular and excellent jokes that pepper the narrative do little to alleviate the feeling of dread that the book evokes. It is a vital book and an indictment of pusillanimous politicians and economists who have defered to greedy bankers and consequently brought devastation to millions.
Summary: Two masterpieces of Second World War history that show the terrifyingly human face of the monstrous
Gitta Sereny’s subjects in these two seminal works are the war crimes and the industrialised genocides of the Nazis. But, as the prisms through which she explores these issues are the biographies of Franz Spangl and Albert Speer, she never loses sight, or lets the reader lose sight, of one of the most troubling truths about these, and all, atrocities: that the war criminals and monsters who perpetrate them are as human as any one of us.
Albert Speer on trial in Nuremberg
Speer was, amongst other roles, Hitler’s armaments minister and Sereny’s biography of him is rich in detail regarding the management of Germany’s wartime economy and Speer’s exceptionally effective efforts in keeping it functioning in the face of Allied bombing, Nazi in-fighting and Hitlerian fantasy. Stangl was a provincial police officer, transferred into the Nazis’ early experiments of murder with their “mercy killing” programme, and finally “promoted” to manage the death camp at Treblinka. The two biographies therefore provide chilling insights into both the highest echelons of Nazism and the horrific consequence of the decisions taken there.
Franz Stangl in prison in Dusseldorf
Sereny’s thorough research into her subjects included extensive interviews with both men. Almost of necessity she came to establish considerable sympathetic understanding with them. But she never lost sight of what they did. Her conversations in Dusseldorf prison with Stangl forced him, with devastating personal effect, to finally acknowledge what he had done. Speer, a much more intelligent man, arguably one with the potential for greatness, was altogether a more slippery character, and so much more sophisticated in evading, even to himself, similar acknowledgement of his measure of responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis. At the end of the war he had all but deluded himself into believing that the Allies would ask him to help lead in the reconstruction of a devastated Germany.
In spite of the bleakness of the books’ subjects they are not devoid of heroism: In Into That Darkness Rudy Masarek, a leader of the Treblinka uprising, stands in telling contrast to Stangl; in the case of Speer Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the 20 July plot against Hitler, stands in juxtaposition. Though they appear only fleetingly in the pages of these books the lives of these men, with their exceptional moral and physical courage, powerfully indict the evasions of both Stangl and Speer. These were men who came from similar backgrounds but whose moral choices were diametrically opposed to everything that Stangl and Speer came to stand for.
These are amongst the most extraordinary and important works of non-fiction of the 20th Century. They are compelling studies of the descent into evil of one ordinary man and an extraordinary one. They are powerful, elegantly written, gripping and vital for understanding how close to the abyss human beings and human society still hovers.
Summary: A gripping and insightful account of leadership in the days when the world almost came to an end.
Thirteen Days is Bobby Kennedy‘s memoir of the Cuban missiles crisis. It was incomplete at the time of his assassination and yet remains an arrestingly insightful work.
Bobby played a crucial role in the Cuban missiles crisis, being one of a minority of “doves” on the “ExComm” drawn together from the highest echelons of the government and military to advise the President. It was in no small part because of Bobby’s advocacy that the “doves” on ExComm won the crucial arguments to set the US strategy in relation to the crisis.
But, while being straightforward about his role, he sought in no way to present himself as the hero of the book. Rather this role is reserved for his brother Jack, the President.
In an introduction to the book Arthur Schlesinger, Jr notes that Bobby Kennedy once commented “The 10 or 12 people who had participated in all these [ExComm] discussions were bright and energetic people. We had perhaps amongst the most able in the country and if any one of half a dozen of them were President the world would have been very likely plunged into catastrophic war.”
That the world did not get plunged into such a catastrophic war is in large part a measure of the extraordinary calmness of Jack in his deliberations and, above all, his startling moral courage in being prepared to face down his military advisers who wanted to bomb Cuba and invade as first response to the discovery of the missile sites. Bobby commented on their attitude in the book, “I thought, as I listened, of the many times I had heard the military take positions which, if wrong, had the advantage that no one would be around at the end to know.” Afterwards Jack told his friend Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor, “The first advice I’m going to give my successor is to watch the generals and to avoid the feeling that because they were military men their opinions on military matters were worth a damn”.
It’s good advice not just for a political leader dealing with the military but also for one dealing with any professional group, particularly police and security forces, and indeed for any leader dealing with those claiming “expert” knowledge. A key theme of the book is the importance of debate and disagreement in decision making, as a process of obtaining the best options to even the most horrendous challenge and avoiding the sort of “groupthink” that can lead one unquestioningly towards stupid and undesirable choices.
Reading this book as the carnage of the 2014 war in Gaza seems to have begun again, it is striking how, in spite of being faced with a genuine existential threat to their country and the world, as opposed to the substantially imaginary one posed by Hamas to Israel currently, Jack and Bobby were hugely concerned with the thought of inflicting casualties.Listening to military proposals for a sneak attack on Cuba, Bobby passed a note to his brother, “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbour.” Both knew that bloodshed would lead to the situation spiralling out of control, and Jack and Bobby were both familiar enough with the military, and with the human consequences of war,to take this matter lightly. They knew that the lives of untold millions who had neither voted for them nor even heard of them depended on their decisions. So they weighed carefully the consequences of every choice, both immediate and long term. Jack in particular was always striving to empathise with Khrushchev’s position and to give him ways in which he also could exit the quagmire in which they found themselves. Ultimately Jack, again displaying enormous moral courage, took the considerable political risk of instructing Bobby to make a secret offer of withdrawing Nato missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet withdrawal of their missiles from Cuba.
Aside from the drama of the story the book is teeming with insights on war, politics, decision making, and the moral courage that is fundamental to leadership, and filled with vivid scenes: after the crisis is passed, Jack remains in his office is sitting at his desk writing a letter to the widow of the American pilot killed in the course of the crisis.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr called the book a minor classic. He was right. It’s a short but extraordinary work that will bear rereading.
Ireland, 1912 – 1985 is a wonderfully opinionated, highly entertaining and deeply erudite history of Ireland from the beginning of the Home Rule Crisis to the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
It is certainly the best single volume history of 20th century Ireland. Each chapter contains much that is novel and insightful even for those familiar with the periods under discussion. The author’s comparisons of Ireland to other countries on the periphery of Europe which obtained independence at about the same time, such as Finland and Poland, lifts the book out of any risk of parochialism: This approach places Irish history in its European context and allows for a more clear sighted assessment of what we, as a nation, can be proud of as well as what we have failed at and where we should be ashamed. Prof Lee is scathing in his judgements of the lazy and stupid, from political leaders through academics to journalists, but is highly sympathetic to those ordinary people, particularly Northern nationalists, who have found themselves on the losing side of history.
A work of genius.
The singer and artist Tommy Steele, who was the author of the Final Run, told the story that sometime after the second world war he discovered that his grandfather had been one of a group of Churchill lookalikes used to disguise and decoy the movements of the real wartime prime minister – an idea famously used in Jack Higgins’ “The Eagle has landed”. Taking this as a starting point he builds a very efficient thriller to imagine how such ruses could have been used to effect a pause in the German advance on Dunkirk.
Steele displays an impressive cold-heartedness in his imagining of how such a plot might play out. The historical liberties he takes never lose sight of either the ruthless efficiency or sadism of the Nazis.
The book compares favourably to the work of, for example, Higgins – not great literature but fine entertainment: a war thriller that does exactly what it says on the tin.
aidanjmcquade 