Horizon, Summer 1971 – 2

Tags

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, American Civil War, Charles II, Correlli Barnett, Georges Seurat, Karl Maria von Clausewitz, Nell Gwyn, On War, Pointillism, Roy McMullen, Samuel Pepys, Vietnam War

Part 2 of this issue:

In ‘How Not to Win a War’ the eminent British historian Correlli Barnett writes about the book that was a key influence on him, and which he says could help explain what he calls ‘the American defeat in Vietnam‘, though the end of the war was still four years away:

General Karl Maria von Clausewitz was the first man to make conceptual sense of war as a social and political activity and to deduce its governing principles. Clausewitz is the starting point of all later theorizing about war, and often the finishing point as well. He significantly influenced the German and French general staffs before 1914; he is the fountainhead of present-day Communist thinking about war; and he ought to be a part of every Western young man’s education. His great work On War (Vom Kriege), casts more light than any other single book on all the facets of collective human rivalry…

…Clausewitz’s philosophy of war has been garbled into dogma, with regrettable results.

Horizon caption: ‘Who would have won the honors if Clausewitz had taught a seminar on war? In Edward Sorel’s reunion portrait, the bright students sit up front below their master.’ Front row, L-R: Marx, Mao, Frederick the Great, Bismarck. Second row, L-R: Elizabeth I, Lenin. ‘Dunces’ in the rear, L-R: Napoleon, Eisenhower, F.D. Roosevelt, Churchill, Wilson, Marshall.

War for Clausewitz was no meaningless episode of violence, nor was it absolutely distinct and separate from peace. War, on the contrary,

‘belongs…to the province of social life. It is a conflict of great interests which is settled by bloodshed, and only in that is it different from others. It would be better…to liken it to business competition, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still more like State policy, which again…may be looked upon as a kind of business competition on a grand scale.’

This simple proposition is Clausewitz’s greatest and most illuminating insight. In the words of his most quoted aphorism, “War is only a continuation of policy by other means.” Clausewitz returns again and again to this theme of the continuity of international relations, from peace via war to peace again, speaking of a diplomacy that (in war) employs battles instead of notes. It follows that the conduct of war ought to be constantly governed by political considerations.

In Clausewitz’s view, it is absurd to try to “win” wars by military means alone, because, as he says, no major plan of war can be made without political understanding and insight. The political setting not only determines the aims and decisions of war strategy but also colors the whole character of the war…

It was not the nature of nineteenth-century warfare that made the American Civil War so long and bloody but the irreconcilable political and social issues of secession and union, slavery and emancipation. And it is political, not military, considerations that have prevented the United States from using nuclear weapons in Vietnam – on the contrary, nothing would so economically and efficiently block the Vietcong supply routes.

In his study of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Roy McMullen explores the hostile response to it:

Nervousness and defensiveness are, of course, unprovable, but they become at least a faint, mischievous possibility when we remember that viewers in 1886 were still uncowed by avant-garde art and were without our modern emphasis on the formal and abstract elements in painting, and were therefore more sensitive than we are likely to be to the figurative message – the moral, to use a nineteenth-century term – of La Grande Jatte.

For there actually is such a message, or moral, in the picture, however much it is ignored by art historians intent on optical effects and spatial organization or by ordinary appreciators engrossed in summertime and bustles. And a similar message can be detected nearly everywhere in Seurat’s mature achievement, rising like a slightly corrosive odor from his characteristic mixture of loveliness, banality, delicacy, and pedantry.

A whiff could have made a boulevardier at the Maison Dorée feel obscurely menaced. Consider, as an example, the pipe-smoking boater and his two elegant neighbors in the left foreground of La Grande Jatte…At first glance these impressively monumental figures – naked, the boater could be an antique river deity – seem drenched in the sedative bliss of a sunlit holiday; at second glance the bliss drains away. One of today’s veristic film directors could scarcely ask for more eloquent images of urban man’s loneliness in a crowd and his inability to communicate with his fellow men.

The same solitude seems to shroud, with a few doubtful exceptions, everyone in the picture, including the mysteriously motivated hornblower in the tropical helmet and even the “superb cocotte” despite her decorative pet and her evidently affluent protector.

‘The World of Samuel Pepys’ is a lavishly illustrated look at the life of the Restoration diarist:

Also included with this issue is a supplement: an eight-page panorama of London in 1647.

Horizon, Summer 1971 – 1

Tags

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Arabs, David Daiches, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Georges Seurat, Islam, Israel, James Morris, Jewish Law, Jewish Revolt, Jews, Judaism, Leslie Fiedler, Lubavitcher Rebbe, Palestinians, Pharisees, Rabbis, Roy McMullen, Sadducees, Walter Karp

A bumper issue, in two parts.

This issue’s cover shows a detail from Georges Seurat’s  A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte:

It illustrates an article on the painting by Roy McMullen.

Also in this issue:

In an introductory letter, ‘Arab and Jew’, Contributing Editor Walter Karp writes about the special section on The Middle East:

Writings about Arabs and Jews these days strike a common note. The sound like the claims and counterclaims of litigants in a protracted lawsuit, the suit, of course, being the Arab-Israeli conflict. As in most protracted lawsuits, the rights and wrongs at issue have grown increasingly obscure. This being so, we thought it useful to step back from the contemporary fray and look at matters from a different standpoint. Instead of airing the dispute between the contending parties, we asked two authors to help us identify the contenders. What is an Arab? What is a Jew? What kind of history, what fundamental experiences, have made these two peoples what they are and brought them to their present impasse?

In ‘What is an Arab?’, James (later Jan) Morris gives a brief history of the Arabs and Islam, then sums up the position in 1971, reflecting on moves for Arab unity, before the rise of Islamism both in and beyond Arab countries in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution:

Oil also gave the Arabs new confidence. They discovered, through no merit of their own, a new importance in themselves. They were not born to be poor after all, but to be immensely rich. They did not inhabit a backwater, but rode the mainstream of world affairs. The possession of oil gave the Arabs a tremendously powerful instrument of persuasion – or blackmail.

Horizon Caption: ‘an Arab version of Virgo – the red dots represent the individual stars – adorns a Treatise on the Fixed Stars, written in 1009. By then, Arab universities thrived in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, antedating Europe’s by two centuries.’

Two more developments gave a new vitality to the Arabs. The first was the emergence, in the 1950s, of a remarkable young leader, the first Arab statesman of world importance since Saladin resisted the Crusades: Gamal Abdel Nasser, who made Egypt the epicentre of Arab progress and gave to all the Arab peoples, not prosperity, nor even serenity, but a new pride. The second was the existence of Israel, an alien body planted on the shores of the Arab world by the intervention of the West, which acted as a catalyst to the energies of the Arabs, spurring them on to a common cause and intermittently reviving their sense of camaraderie.

Horizon caption: ‘Palestinian refugee children undergo guerilla training. They are the “lion cubs” of Fatah, the Arab paramilitary force dedicated to the destruction of Israel.’

All these factors have combined to bring the Arabs nearer to political unity than they have been since the heyday of their empire. The dream of unity is vivid and inescapable: it enters every Arab declaration and is a sine qua non of political respectability…

Somehow, it never works. Arab co-operation, let alone unity, remains fitful and unreliable. The leaders of the Arab world seldom trust each other – and not surprisingly, for each country’s leadership shifts from figure to figure, ideology to ideology, incessantly down the years.

In ‘What is a Jew?’, David Daiches considers ‘the criterion of Jewishness’:

If the Jews are, as is sometimes maintained, a “socio-religious group,” then neither Freud nor Marx could be considered Jews – nor could Spinoza after his expulsion from the Jewish community. One cannot solve the problem by arguing that Jewish identity is cultural rather than biological: there is a far greater cultural difference between an American Jewish businessman living in Westchester County and a Yemenite Jew then between an American Jew and a non-Jewish American. There is today no cultural unity among the Jews of the world, or even among the Jews of America: The Lubavitcher Rebbe and (shall I say?) Leslie Fiedler have no common language. To be Jewish does not necessarily involve membership in a specific race, a specific religion, or a specific culture. Yet a Jew remains a Jew until generations of assimilation have removed the memory of his origins.

 

Horizon caption: ‘before the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a youth in ritual shawl takes part in the ancient bar mitzvah ceremony initiating him into manhood. All that remains of the Second Temple, which was destroyed by the Romans, the wall was taken by the Israeli army during the 1967 war with the Arabs: after 1900 years, it belongs to the Jews once again.’

He looks at the origins of current Jewish identity:

At the time of the rebellion against Rome, there were two main ideological groups in Judea, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The former were conservative and priestly, concerned with temple worship, and the latter were concerned with the interpretation of the Law and its application to daily life. The Sadducees mostly perished with the destruction of the Temple; in a way this was fortunate for Jewish survival, for it meant that the Pharisaic interpretation of Judaism, which was in any case the more popular, became dominant. More than a mere profession of faith or a pattern of ritual was needed to maintain the identity of the Jewish people. But the Pharisees made the Law adaptable to circumstances widely different from those that had prevailed in earlier periods of Jewish history. It was their insistence on knowledge of the Law and in interpreting it far beyond its literal meaning that enabled Judaism to survive as a way of life in all parts of the world. From now on the rabbi – the scholar and interpreter of the Law – and not the priest, determined the nature of Jewish religious life.

 

Horizon caption: ‘the frontispiece of a thirteenth-century Hebrew Bible is decorated with scenes from the Pentateuch, or first five books. In the center are the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning…”‘