Tags
Appeasement, Charles B. Slackman, Climate change, Counter-Reformation, Duke of Wellington, Edmund Stillman, Elizabeth Longford, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ho Chi Minh, Mediterranean Sea, Munich Crisis, Mycenaean civilisation, Rhys Carpenter, Sahara Desert, Sanche de Gramont, Spanish Civil War, Stratfield Saye House, Trade Winds, Vietnam War, World War II
In ‘Is there a “Lesson of Munich”?’, Edmund Stillman considers one of the justifications for US involvement in the Vietnam War: that Ho Chi Minh was like Hitler, and that the failure of the policy of ‘appeasement’ in the 1930s demonstrated that Ho had to be stopped in the way Hitler should have been before he became too strong:
The lesson of Munich must, in retrospect, seem a curiously specific one – that this Hitler, this Germany had to be stopped, just as the lesson of the Korean War was that Stalin, lord of a monolithic Communist empire, needed to be stopped. But that all aggressors everywhere, fascist or otherwise, need to be forcibly checked is questionable. The by-now canonical lesson of Munich simply will not bear the weight we put on it; it has already cost us too dearly.
Indeed, if there is any analogy between the 1930’s and the Vietnam War, it is not Munich but the Spanish Civil War – a bloody conflict in which surrounding states invested some men and material – and much delusion and emotion – to little ultimate effect.
…We are always looking for the Great Lessons of History when there may be none at all – only the smaller lessons: that wisdom lies not in ideological imagining but in pragmatism; that turmoil and aggression are likely to be with us always, sometimes threatening us and sometimes not; that any nation, however strong, must husband its strength against real challenges from real quarters; that no generation can truly replay history, redeeming ancient follies. And finally, that the elders must not carelessly bleed the young.
In ‘Bernini’, Sanche De Gramont writes about the Baroque sculptor and architect:
In the Saint Theresa and in his Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, in the Altieri chapel, Bernini adopted the Counter Reformation belief in ecstasy as an attitude of sainthood. Instead of the naïve, untroubled saints of a Fra Angelico, his are shown with muscles contorted in religious devotion, and faces expressing divine love in explicitly physical terms.
A pitiless, unromantic view of death was another Counter Reformation theme. Bernini went to the macabre iconography of the Middle Ages and borrowed the death’s head for his tombs. The skeletons holding an hourglass in the tomb of Alexander VII and a scroll in the tomb of Urban VIII proclaim that even such illustrious men cannot triumph over time, and that their judgment is yet to come.
Because his sculpture is narrative, Bernini experiments with techniques for conveying movement and emotion in stone. He sought sculptural alternatives for the painter’s use of shadow and color. In his depiction of the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence marble flames lick up towards the saint. (To get a lifelike expression, it has been said, Bernini scorched his leg with a brazier and sketched the reflection of his own grimaces in a mirror.) In Pluto and Proserpina, the god is carrying off the terrified maiden, whose flesh yields beneath his grasp. To show grief, Bernini sculpted its visible expression: a marble tear.
All this, as his critics have shown, is a highly theatrical sculpture of overstatement. Bernini had the hand of a sculptor and the instincts of a scenic designer. Not only are the religious figures intended to communicate intense devotion, but the composition of the chapels inside the churches serves as a link for the faithful between heaven and earth.
‘Climate and History’ is an excerpt from Rhys Carpenter’s Discontinuity in Greek Civilization (1966), in which he outlines how the Sahara turned from fertile land to rocky desert, why empires collapsed in the 12th century BC, and what brought desolation to Greece in the 7th century BC:
In brief, during an ice age there should not have been any desert where the Sahara is today, and geologists, zoologists, and ethnologists all agree that this was indeed the case. The geologists say that rivers were running full stream, carving out the gorges and stream beds whose dry courses may be seen today. The zoologists say that tropical varieties of fish and aquatic animals such as crocodiles and hippopotamuses made their way up these now dried-up rivers, to live and reproduce themselves in what is now the very heart of the desert. The ethnologists report that on the rocks of what were once the walls of water-filled gorges there are engraved drawings of giraffes and elephants, crocodiles and leopards, and others animals such as do not exist, and could not survive, in the present environment. When the great ice sheet retreated over northern Europe, the polar front moved back with it, and the zone of the trade wind expanded, thereby creating the desert that exists today.
Carpenter turns to the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation around 1200 BC:
Historians have made their usual suggestions – foreign invaders, barbarian hordes overwhelming the eastern Mediterranean; in Mycenaean Greece the Dorians, driving down from the Albanian highlands; in Asia Minor the Phrygians, crossing from the Balkan highlands. But archaeology does not bear out these explanations…It was a widespread collapse of prosperity and power almost unparalleled in any other place or period in the civilized career of man. Yet no one has been able to offer any adequate explanation for its occurrence.
To my thinking, after puzzling for many years over this, the greatest still-unsolved problem in Mediterranean history, there is only one solution that will meet all the varied aspects of the case, and that solution is – famine, a dropping of the food supply below the critical level for subsistence. And by famine I do not mean an occasional failure of several consecutive harvests, but such an enduring and disastrous destruction of the annual yield as only a drastic climatic change could have occasioned.
A third example of devastating ‘cultural retrogression’ caused by climate change in the Mediterranean
…deserves much more extensive treatment than it has received from historians. If it is discussed at all, its terrible toll of human misfortune is generally ascribed to disastrous contemporary events of a political or political-economic kind. But in most histories of the Mediterranean the seventh century A.D. is largely a blank; and of this blank in cultural history I have myself had some experience while digging on the site of ancient Corinth…Except for an occasional stray coin, the seventh and eight centuries are missing. What went wrong in the seventh century that it should have left no trace?…Elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean there are signs of similar catastrophes…The real problem seems to have been the failure of the local water supply due to a lack of adequate rainfall over a long period.
In ‘The Duke of Wellington’s Search for a Palace’, Elizabeth Longford, author of a two volume biography of Wellington, writes about how a grateful nation hoped to honour its hero suitably in 1814, when the Napoleonic wars appeared to have ended, and the difficulties that ensued. Illustrations are by Charles B. Slackman:
Stratfield Saye…stands today much as it stood when the Great Duke first set eyes on it in 1817, with the lovely river Loddon flowing through rushes and water crowfoot between its rising deer park and sloping green lawns. True, much valuable buhl furniture arrived from Paris in 1818, to be followed by marble columns from Italy (some of which, however, remained in their packing cases for a hundred and thirty years), a continual stream of books and pictures to take their places beside Stratfield Saye’s original rococo chimney pieces and Chippendale mirror, and the construction of two new outer wings for the west front.
But the “capabilities” of Stratfield Saye on which the Duke really concentrated were of a different order: windows with double glazing copied from Russia, nine water closets attached to bedrooms for his guests; patent Arnott stoves to warm his new conservatory; and a powerful central-heating system with indestructible iron pipes, to remind visitors, both then and now, that the Great Duke always put service before show.
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