What are you reading now - and then

[Stavros]

Cromwell David Horspool (2017)

This short biography in the series of books on English Monarchs is fluently written, covers most of the issues and is the perfect introduction to the life of this most peculiar Englishman. Cromwell even today, is revered and reviled, but in context was part of an experiment in politics that begs the question -was there a Revolution in the 17th century?

For there was a King, and then there was not, and then there was. There was a Church of England and an Archbishop of Canterbury, and then there was not, and then there was. There was a Parliament, and then there was not, and then there was. Those who were rich in 1640 were still rich in 1680, give or take losses from war and punitive taxes that came, and went. The Irish were under the English heel in 1640, and remained so following the extreme violence of Cromwell's wars, notably at Drogheda and Wexford. The Scots Presbyterians who had undermined the King, challenged the 'Independent' Cromwell, and were thrashed at Dunbar and, when they ventured south on behalf of the 'fake' King Charles II (crowned in Scone, if you please), were routed at Worcester, celebrated by John Milton (see below).

And yet, out of this maelstrom came the secular politics of liberty that was encapsulated during the 'Putney Debates' (but delivered in a speech in church) by Thomas Rainesborough, as 'One man, One vote' -Horspool does not discuss the theory that Rainesborugh was murdered on Cromwell's orders. Religious tolerance to a degree was thus something Cromwell sought, the irony being that England's dismissal of the Church of Rome, and his (re-)admission of the Jews, meant that by 1658 Jews in England had more rights than Roman Catholics, rights that would not be properly restored until 1822.

Cromwell failed to establish a new political system, which is why after his death the experiment with Republican government did not survive, while the Puritan excesses that abolished Christmas and much 'jollity' may have led to the hedonistic excesses of the Restoration, as the 18th century indulged in Gin Palaces, Molly Houses, and the King named the streets of London after his boyfriends. Cromwell was buried in Westminster Abbey, then dug up, his body or what was left of it abused and dismembered, his head put on a stick and all that Christian sort of thing. A statue of him outside the House of Commons was placed there in the late 19th century when the agitations over Home Rule in Ireland were expanding into what would become a revolution of more substance in Ireland than England. It was then a provocation, and today remains an eyesore to Roman Catholics and those who think Regicide was a big mistake. So the debates go on, with Cromwell at the core, a deeply religious man, capable to murdering people convinced that God's Providence allowed him, indeed compelled him to do so.


Milton's tribute is here-
Sonnet 16: Cromwell, our chief of men, who… | Poetry Foundation

[Stavros]

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Attwood, 1985.

I first encountered Attwood when The Edible Woman was published, but I was not impressed, so have tended to avoid her books. I read this on holiday, and although it it reasonably well written, albeit in Attwood's matter of fact, one dimensional prose, I never cared for the narrator.

The book may be seen as a story of the future to compare to 1984 or Brave New World, and claims to be the record on tape of a woman who lives at a time in the future when, in the aftermath of a nuclear war and the demolition of the US Government, a patriarchal, theocratic society has emerged in the US where women who are fertile are 'Handmaids' to Commanders and have no personal freedom. Although some have tried to link this phenomenal denial of women's freedom to Theocracies such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, in fact Attwood took most of her concepts from Puritan New England, where she claims one of her ancestors was tried as a Witch but survived a hanging.

Too many questions are left unanswered -most of all, is this what men want? Yes, there are flaws in the Theocracy, not just among the lower orders, as even Commanders break their own rules. The historical background that takes a young woman from marriage and a family in her late teens/early 20s, in her thirties into captivity is not properly explained, but the book does give some idea of what a militant Christian Theocracy might look like, and given the Republicans in the US who want the US to be a Christian Theocracy, The Handmaid's Tale may not just be fiction, it could be a warning. Attwood does explore some of the nuances of life in a dictatorship, but if one doesn't empathise with the main character, Offred (= Of Fred, a woman named after her Commander), then a major impulse in the book fails to excite.

[Stavros]

Mike Davis has died in Southern California. I first read City of Quartz not long after it was published and think it is a great read. Ironically for a man who actually loved the State he lived in, his book helped me explain why I don't like LA and never have. I suppose in common parlance I just don't 'get it' -after all there are plenty other places in the US with sunshine and beaches.

This is a fair obituary from the LA Times -
Mike Davis, author of 'City of Quartz,' dies - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

[diddyboponTOP]

Lullaby for witches Hester Fix. A Mystery/ Love story with a pinch of Witch in there as an Occultist I spend a lot of time reading Occult/Spiritual/Religious/Magick based texts I also enjoy novels along those lines as well as Classics, I just started the Moonstone, Finished the Pearl, and Dracula the Undead by stokers Great nephew based off of Brams notes

[Stavros]

Jeremy Bowen, The Making of the Modern Middle East, a Personal History (2022).

Bowen was the BBC's Middle East Correspondent from 1995-2000, Middle East editor from 2005-2022, and is currently International Editor. As if often but not always the case with journalists, the books they write are not as good as the reports they have filed. In this book the only real interest is the eyewitness accounts of events across the region, largely because Bowen's attempt to write the history is too basic although, if readers know little or nothing about it, they might be informed. He cannot present the history in all its complexity and the book suffers from his attempts to put the events he sees in their historical context. The book has notes and a bibliography, but no Index. I was given the book as a gift, for had I browsed it in the bookshop I would not have bought it. For what it's worth, I much preferred the BBC reports of the late Gerald Butt, and Jim Muir.

Journalists who have done better at this sort of thing, as far as it goes, are the late Robert Fisk, and the American journalist John Cooley whose 1991 book, Payback:America's Long War in the Middle East, is at times angry and bitter but a compelling read. To some these are biased accounts, and Bowen has also been accused of bias, mostly by Israel (the IDF shot and killed Bowen's driver in Lebanon, when he was not far away and believes it was deliberate etc), and indeed the BBC commissioned a report, known as the Balen Report into biased reporting. As far as I know the Balen Report has never been published.

[Stavros]

Owen Matthews, Overreach (2022)

Matthews, descended from a prominent Ukrainian family on his mother's side, has lived and worked in Ukraine and Russia for the best part of 30 years, building contacts and acquiring the depth and breadth of knowledge that makes this one of the most compelling books on Putin's war.

He does a good job of unravelling the complex origins of Ukraine, shaped largely by the Scandinavian Kings and Vikings who emerged after the end of the Roman Empire, and thus establishes how different Ukraine can be from Russia -I was not aware that Ukrainian is to Russian as English is to Dutch.

The book goes a long way to demolishing the conspiracy theory that much of the present crisis was 'Made in America', a sub-plot invented by Putin himself, and lobbed like a lollipop into the gaping mouths of idiots like Oliver Stone and Noam Chomsky. This war has been years in the making, and like a murder, it is best seen in terms of Motive, Means and Opportunity. Putin has never accepted that the demise of the USSR was a good thing. He witnessed the collapse of the East German Govt when he was in the KGB in Dresden in 1989, and though critical of Communism, his devotion to a strong, centralized State remained and remains fundamental to his concept of politics.

The Motive is the Glory of Russia, Ukraine being part of that fabulous Empire. The Means is War. The Opportunity was provided by Brexit, Merkel's retirement, and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Matthews, notably in Chapter 4 (Tomorrow Belongs to Me) profiles the friends, thinkers and supporters who have provided an ignorant thug from the slums of Leningrad, with a world view based on the argument that Russia is the last hope of Christian civilization, as 'Western Liberalism' has all but destroyed the troika of values he believes in: God, Family and Country. And if this sounds familiar, there is a correspondance between the militant view of Russia's Christian Nationalism and that found in Hungary, France and the USA. That this is also an anti-Semitic, violent form of Christinaity is no surprise, as these are themes in Russian history, the nightmare from which they cannot seem to escape -hence the idea that Russians can suffer like no other, as if the suffering and death that are the consequences of Putin are worth it. One wonders if this generation of Russians wants to suffer as their grandparents did. The multitudes of young people who have fled to Georgia, Armenia and the Central Asian Republics suggests otherwise.

The war has been catastrophic -the primary aim was to blitz Kyiv, eliminate the Govt, and establish a Russian Govt that would seek unification with Russia with the support of the Ukrainian people.

The plan failed because a) Ukrainians they expected to welcome the Russians had by 2022 sought alliances with the West so even ethnic Russians opposed 'Russification' -just as 75% of Ukraine's Jews left the country after 2014, so a substantial number of Ethnic Russians and Ukrainians -up to 45% of the population- abandoned Luhansk and Donetsk leaving behind only the most militant pro-Russian supporters.

Second, having failed to decapitate the govt in Kyiv, Russian forces met with a more decentralized but better equipped and motivated Ukraine military, one that had been trained and provided with materiel from NATO for the best part of 10 years. So, having failed in its political objectives, the Russians now began failing militarily, having sent into battle men without proper equipment, tanks and armoured vehicles that got stuck in the mud, staffed by demoralized troops whose only aim appears to be to get as much out of the war through looting as they can.

So no Glory for Putin. But just as important as it is that Putin is convinced of his own victory, is the intriguing argument Matthews offers, that because he has never lost an argument or been challenged, Putin doesn't know how to negotiate. His position is 'This is what Russia wants, give it to us'. He launched the war when he perceived Europe weakened by Brexit and the retirement of Angela Merkel, and the US weakened by its withdrawal from Afghanistan. But Russia has failed at more than war, as this telling passage illuminates one of the sources of what drives Putin -his colossal resentment that the West exploited Russia and saw it as a 'little' state to be pushed around and treated badly. Consider -

"Even after three decades, Russia still had not learned to manufacture anything the rest of the world wanted to buy (other than arms...). Everything that made Russia work, from mobile-phone routers to web servers and the engines of its Siemens built high speed trains and its fleet of Boeing and Airbus-produced planes-was invented and largely manufactured by the West and its Asian allies. Even after 2014 a national push to wean Russia off its import dependence had failed to produce a wholly Russian made mobile phone, laptop or even computer processing chip, much less a passenger plane" (page 173).

Where did all those trillions of dollars go from 1991-2022? Not invested in Russia, but real estate in London, New York and Paris. Into offshore bank accounts, yachts, football clubs. No wonder Putin is seething with resentment, but one wonders what he has achieved with his war of revenge.

Putin, Trump, Mohammed bin Salman -vastly rich men who want to change their world, convinced, absolutely, that they are right about everything, whose achievements in reality are measured in colossal debt, millions dead -from Covid or War- and a political agenda that only offers more of the same. For all its flaws, 'Western Liberalism with its policies on Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage, and Open Democracy, is not the end of civilization, but its continuation. And given the choice, I believe most people prefer to take their life chances in a Liberal Democracy than have them made for them by a pompous fool in Moscow, Riyadh or Mar-a-Lago.

Strongly recommended as a good read.

[Stavros]

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992).

I heard about this novel at the time and since but only decided to read it when I was in Vienna recently and without a book. In two parts at just over 600 pages the novel is fluently written and easy to read, but around 200 pages too long, and the writing towards the end becomes repetitious and boring. Tartt tries, and fails to integrate her story into the Greek studies the student circle in this novel are supposedly committed to and good at, though as the story unfolds we not only unravel their secret history but discover they are mostly obnoxious posers. A turning point in Part One is not convincing but determines the fates in Part Two where melodrama takes over. The only serious proposition I could find is this: Murder is a Selfish Act, discuss.
4/10 for effort, but I had no interest or sympathy with the characters. whom you can find in The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, and even Crime and Punishment.

[Stavros]

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf, (1927, English translation by David Horrocks, 2012)

I thought I read this in the 1970s when it was a trendy book, but I now realize I did not finish it at the time. The book concerns a man who has had a bourgeois life who in his middle years rejects it to become a 'lone wolf' in society, disdainful of all its promises and most of its pleasures, other than sex, drinking and eventually some narcotics. It appealed to those from the 1960s who did not follow the family aspiration to go from school to university to career marriage etc, but also takes a prompt from Nietzsche (not mentioned in the book) and the rejection of inherited morals in an effort to define one's self individually without the baggage of religion and philosophy, though the book read like a personal philosophical tract and tends to bore, and has references to Eastern Religions which focus on the Self, and often how to empty the mind to obtain an inner peace. In addition, there is the contrast extant from Ancient Greece, between Apollo -Reason and Order- and Dionysus -Emotion and Chaos- which later in the book leads Steppenwolf to have out-of-body experiences, and though it includes a murder, the person killed is not real but symbolic. The women in the book are obliging in a sexual way, being the physical/sensual/Dionysian alternative to the ascetic/intellectual/Apollonian Wolf.

I can't say I like the book, but have had a problem with Hesse's other books too, I just find them too preachy. The Glass Bead Game has a high reputation, but it is very long and I am not sure if I am motivated to read it.