Christ is Risen!

Reality Reaches the Front-Page (finally)

In today’s New York Times, front page, upper-right, the headlines read:

ISLAMIST REBELS CREATE DILEMMA ON SYRIA POLICY

QAEDA  ALLY  VS.  ASSAD

Lack of Secular Fighters Leaves the U.S. With Little Influence

No longer hidden away in oblique references buried in articles on page 16, but in the first sentence of the lead story, we read this:

In Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries and head a court that applies Islamic law.  Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work and now profit from the crude they produce....Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists….Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.

And later:

The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the main constituency of the rebellion, which has been led since its start by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, mostly in conservative, marginalized areas. 

And:

The religious agenda of the combatants sets them apart from many civilian activists, protesters and aid workers who had hoped  (emphasis mine) the uprising would create a civil, democratic Syria.

And:

“My sense is that there are no seculars,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, of the Institute for the Study of War, who has made numerous trips to Syria in recent months to interview rebel commanders.

And:

Steven Heydemann, a senior adviser at the United States Institute of Peace, which works with the State Department…acknowledged that the current momentum toward radicalism could be hard to reverse.

Who would have ever expected that?  The article goes on at some length.  Read it here.  Now, will someone please remind me why we are so hell-bent on deposing Assad and putting these guys in charge?

The Old Texas, The New South and "Abiding Complacency"

     Two recent New York Times book reviews caught my attention.  The first concerned my home state.  Erica Grider, formerly of The Economist and now of Texas Monthly, is the author of the appropriately- titled Big, Hot,Cheap and Right:  What America Can Learn  from the Strange Genius of Texas.  She attempts to rebut “Northern writers” who characterize Texas as “corrupt, callous, racist, theocratic, stupid, belligerent, and most of all, dangerous.”  Indeed.  One wonders where such notions come from about a state currently represented at home by Rick Perry, in Washington by Ted Cruz and Louie Gohmert, John Hagee on the Bejeezus channels, and not one, but two Bush Libraries.  Grider’s basic point is that Texas “works,” which she attributes to a notoriously weak state government, few taxes, fewer regulations, and minimal services.  She finds the roots of this in our independent nationhood for nine years, the self-reliant cowboy era, and the oil-infused entrepreneurialism of the 2oth century, producing a culture that is “pragmatic, fiscally conservative, socially moderate and slightly disengaged.”

      The Texas Governor’s office is notoriously weak (yes, in every sense of the word,) largely due to our reactionary 1876 Constitution.  The Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker of the House hold the real power in Austin, and the governor is brought in for the photo-ops, official signings and the like (think Governor William J. Lepetomane in Blazing Saddles, or better yet, Charles Durning in TBLWIT.)  Back in my college days, some of us kept track of how many days (weeks) the lights were off in the Governor’s Mansion, meaning of course, that the then-governor was “out at the ranch.”   

      I doubt I will ever read the book, as Grider gives high praise to Gov. Rick Perry for his incentives to business.  Life is too short to endure that sort of thing.  She does find, however, that the most crucial component are Texans themselves, whom she finds to be “to be tolerant, optimistic and results-oriented.” 

     There is some truth to this.  While our politicians can be bat-shit crazy, we generally do not pay them too much attention.  “Texas voters are notoriously ambivalent about politics, in large part because the state Constitution gives politicians so little power. As a result, even the worst Texas leaders tend to do little damage.  Texans are, ultimately, a pragmatic people….So maybe it doesn’t matter if the state’s leaders breathe fire, pray for rain, turn up at Tea Party rallies and spend all day suing the federal government….Texas is a pretty good place to live; that’s why several million people have moved here since the beginning of this century.”

     So, yes there are jobs to be had in Texas.  Everybody come on down!  Put that snow-blower in the yard sale and head south.  I would highly recommend, however, they you become rich before doing so, just in case you want to provide your children with a good education, or expose them to culture, or if you happen to get sick, or if you happen to get old.  You will need your own resources for all that.

     The Times also carried a short interview with Tracy Thompson, author of The New Mind of the South.  This work shows more promise.  I expect to eventually read it, if for no other reason than its intentional deference to the neglected 1941 classic, The Mind of the South, by W. J. Cash.

(Whenever the subject of  “the South” comes up, I invariably remember the line from Carl Carmer’s 1934 autobiographical  Stars Fell on Alabama.  He arrived at Tuscaloosa in 1927 from upstate New York, a newly-hired professor at the University of Alabama.  After an eventful first day, he found himself in an upstairs hotel room, drinking corn whiskey with several new acquaintances.  Professor Saffold warned him, as leaving, “For God’s sake, get out of here before it is too late.”)

    I found the following interchange between the interviewer and Thompson to be of interest:

Question:

In your account, large parts of the South have stubbornly clung to thinking that the Civil War was not really about slavery and have not come to grips with the systemic violence against blacks that occurred as recently as the 1960s. Yet you also write that Southern cities are less segregated than their Northern counterparts and more openly discuss issues of race and class. How do you reconcile those things?

Answer:

They aren’t hard to reconcile; the fact that many white Southerners believe some distorted version of history doesn’t have anything to do with where they live or what they think about their neighbors. White Southerners are entirely capable of believing that slavery was a benign institution while at the same time living on cordial terms with the African-American family next door, or for that matter with their African-American son-in-law.

As for open discussions of race and class: I’ve never met a Southerner, black or white, who could not tell you with great specificity what class of people they came from, whether it was redneck prole, coastal aristocracy, black bourgeoisie, trailer trash, plain old country people or whatever. Honest discussions of race can be hard to find in the South — they are rare everywhere — but on a day-to-day basis, black and white Southerners are very comfortable with each other. We’ve lived together a long time, and we are big on being polite.

     I would say that Thompson’s answer is largely true, if a bit self-serving.  That is exactly the sort of thing Southerners like to say.  We think it makes up for all the bad stuff.

The Oxford American engages in a more thorough examination of Thompson’s book (and the journalist’s account of Southern small-talk in a Parisian salon is definitely worth a read.)     They give the book high marks, though finding her coverage of the South to be a bit spotty.  Thompson—a native of Atlanta who has lived in D.C. since 1989—devotes much of the book to her Georgian hometown, with a nod to Virginia and North Carolina, as well as a dip into Oxford (of course) and Clarksdale, Mississippi.  Much of the South cannot be characterized by any of those locales.  On Atlanta, Thompson concludes:
 
[Atlanta] is Southern in its inferiority complex…Southern in its reflexive need to sugarcoat racial realities, Southern in its resilience and adaptability in the face of calamity.  It is Southern in the same unintentional way Scarlett O’Hara was Southern:  shrewd, afflicted with a remarkable incuriosity about its own past and an almost childlike attachment to its illusions.  Over and over, it has been unafraid to morph into some new version of itself; over and over, it has chosen some kind of packaged myth…over authenticity.

     I often hear of how Atlanta is unrepresentative of the South, but it certainly is to the extent that Thompson’s characterization is true.  She follows very much in W. J. Cash’s footsteps.  This, from a Louis J. Rubin article:

      It doesn't really matter why W. J. Cash did what he did, but one is led inevitably to such speculation because of the way the book is written; it dramatizes the author's wrestling with his subject and himself. The Mind of the South is a virtuoso performance, a one-man show, written out of the author's impassioned identification with and revulsion at the South, and both its existence and the form it assumes are a testimony to the powerful hold of the South's community identity upon so many of its citizenry.
     What Cash develops throughout his book is what he identifies as the enormously hedonistic quality of the Southern people. He sees them as self-satisfied, complacent. They will not be diverted from their smugness, their unwillingness to look critically at what they are, with the result that throughout their history anyone who has attempted to point out to them the extent to which they are being used and manipulated for the benefit of those in power has been unable to get anywhere. Conversely, those who have flattered their self-esteem and confirmed them in their prejudices have been able to manipulate them to vote and act contrary to their own economic and political interests.
     During the antebellum period the rank and file of the white population permitted the planter establishment to conduct the South's national politics with a single-minded emphasis upon the protection of chattel slavery, even though their own economic interest was by no means best served by such protection. During the late 19th century the efforts of populist reformers were frustrated because the spectre of black domination was evoked to keep white voters from bolting the Democratic Party and supporting efforts to make the state governments responsive to the needs of disadvantaged agriculturalists. In the 20th century the attempt of labor unions to mobilize textile workers against victimization by the owners of mills was thwarted because the average Southern white refused to recognize the divergence between his interests and those of the very wealthy, complacently preferring things as they were to a fairer share of the benefits of government, and allowing himself to be easily beguiled into voting his prejudices instead of his economic welfare.
     Until Cash wrote his book, nobody had ever articulated that abiding complacency and hedonism quite so pointedly and vividly. The Mind of the South is an historic account of the enormous difficulties of getting the white people of the South to confront their own problems and do something about them.

     Modernity and Sam Walton have swept across the South, carrying away much of what should have been preserved.  Instead, we have held on to that which we should have relinquished.  Despite the momentous changes in the South, too much of Cash's "abiding complacency and hedonism" remains.  In that regard, Thompson's book is a welcome addition to the canon.   

 

 

The End of Endism

 

 

The Washington Post ran an interesting article noting the plethora of "The End of (Fill in the Blank)" books and essays.

In doing so, they naturally mention the best known example of this type of thing, Francis Fukuyama's 1989 The End of History.  In The National Interest that same year, however, a wise Samuel Huntington cautioned against buying into the concept.

 

First, endism overemphasizes the predictability of history and the permanence of the moment. Current trends may or may not continue into the future. Past experience certainly suggests that they are unlikely to do so. The record of past predictions by social scientists is not a happy one....Given the limitations of human foresight, endist predictions of the end of war and ideological conflict deserve a heavy dose of skepticism. Indeed, in the benign atmosphere of the moment, it is sobering to speculate on the possible future horrors that social analysts are now failing to predict.

 

Second, endism tends to ignore the weakness and irrationality of human nature. Endist arguments often assume that because it would be rational for human beings to focus on their economic well-being, they will act in that way, and therefore they will not engage in wars that do not meet the tests of cost-benefit analysis or in ideological conflicts that are much ado about nothing. Human beings are at times rational, generous, creative, and wise, but they are also often stupid, selfish, cruel, and sinful. The struggle that is history began with the eating of the forbidden fruit and is rooted in human nature. In history there may be total defeats, but there are no final solutions. So 'long as human beings exist, there is no exit from the traumas of history.

 

To hope for the benign end of history is human. To expect it to happen is unrealistic. To plan on it happening is disastrous.

 

Fukuyama's battered thesis has suffered much abuse in the intervening years.  And yet, it remains the accepted belief of Western leaders--that our liberal democratic institutions are the end-result of history--"the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

 

Somehow I find Huntington's sober realism--the belief that we will no doubt discover new, innovative and as yet unforeseen ways to screw it all up--to be more reassuring.  "Situation hopeless, but not serious " I always say.

Sunday Smorgasboard (IV)

Whenever the wolf at my financial door shows the slightest hint of backing away, my thoughts are not "What can I save?" or "What can I pay-off?" or "What can I repair around the house?" but rather, Where can I go?  Travel articles such as this one--about hiking in the Albanian Alps--really whet my appetite.

Sunday Smorgasbord (III)

If you appreciate good doom-and-gloomism, then check out Sundown in America, a review of David Stockman's The Great Deformation:  The Corruption of Capitalism in America.  A selection:

These policies have brought America to an end-stage metastasis. The way out would be so radical it can’t happen. It would necessitate a sweeping divorce of the state and the market economy. It would require a renunciation of crony capitalism and its first cousin: Keynesian economics in all its forms. The state would need to get out of the business of imperial hubris, economic uplift and social insurance and shift its focus to managing and financing an effective, affordable, means-tested safety net.

 

All this would require drastic deflation of the realm of politics and the abolition of incumbency itself, because the machinery of the state and the machinery of re-election have become conterminous. Prying them apart would entail sweeping constitutional surgery: amendments to give the president and members of Congress a single six-year term, with no re-election; providing 100 percent public financing for candidates; strictly limiting the duration of campaigns (say, to eight weeks); and prohibiting, for life, lobbying by anyone who has been on a legislative or executive payroll. It would also require overturning Citizens United and mandating that Congress pass a balanced budget, or face an automatic sequester of spending.

 

It would also require purging the corrosive financialization that has turned the economy into a giant casino since the 1970s. This would mean putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance. Banks would be able to take deposits and make commercial loans, but be banned from trading, underwriting and money management in all its forms.

 

It would require, finally, benching the Fed’s central planners, and restoring the central bank’s original mission: to provide liquidity in times of crisis but never to buy government debt or try to micromanage the economy. Getting the Fed out of the financial markets is the only way to put free markets and genuine wealth creation back into capitalism.

 

That, of course, will never happen because there are trillions of dollars of assets, from Shanghai skyscrapers to Fortune 1000 stocks to the latest housing market “recovery,” artificially propped up by the Fed’s interest-rate repression. The United States is broke — fiscally, morally, intellectually — and the Fed has incited a global currency war (Japan just signed up, the Brazilians and Chinese are angry, and the German-dominated euro zone is crumbling) that will soon overwhelm it. When the latest bubble pops, there will be nothing to stop the collapse. If this sounds like advice to get out of the markets and hide out in cash, it is.

Sunday Smorgasboard (II)

Another NYT article that caught my eye is the controversial sale of 40 acres in remote South Dakota.  The kicker is that it contains the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.  The present owner, a non-Indian named James A. Czywczynski of Rapid City, has owned the property for 45 years and wishes to sell.  In his defense, he has tried to sell it to the Sioux nation in the past.  The tribal leadership was divided and deeply in debt, however, and no agreement was ever reached (of course, many in the tribe are galled, rightly, that they would have to purchase this site.)  The cash-strapped Sioux would do so now, if not for the fact that Czywczynski is asking $3,900,000 for the 40-acre plot.  And so, this episode fits nicely into the entire narrative of American-Indian relations, where greed and dispossession go hand in hand.

Sunday Smorgasbord (I)

A heavy rain this morning took any Sunday afternoon yardwork plans off the table.  This enabled me to enjoy one of my favorite things--a Sunday afternoon with a fresh pot of coffee and the New York Times spread-out over the dining room table.  A number of articles caught my attention. First, there was this:

Wary Easter Weekend for Christians in Syria. 

"Either everything will be O.K. in one year, or there will be no Christians here."  That is the opinion of Ilias, a Damascene Christian.  The journalist spoke to a number of other Syrian Chrisitans during Good Friday observances (noting, of course, that most Syrian Christians are Orthodox and will be celebrating Easter on May 5.)  The situation was tense during the service at St. Kyrillos Church, as gunfire rattled a few blocks away.

Sam at Notes on Arab Orthodoxy is a good resource for articles on how the civil war (and our support for it) is harming the ancient Syrian Christian community.  Recent posts include:

Christians Slowly Fade from Tripoli's Troubled Landscape (30 March)
The plight of Syria's Christians:  'We left Homs because they were trying to kill us' (28 March)
An Interview with Bishop Luka Khoury on the Situation in Syria (27 March)
Syrian Rebels Target Christian Areas of Damascus (12 March)
Met. Saba Esber on the Crisis in Syria (20 February)

I am more pessimistic than I have been since the civil war started.  After it is all over, I particulary do not want to see U.S. politicians and bureaucrats shrug their shoulders as if to say, "it is not our fault--how could we have known?"

Runciman, the "Implausibility of American Democracy," and Manzikert

The 21 March 2013 issue of the London Review of Books (not yet online) contains an article by David Runciman entitled "How Can it Work?"  He has in mind, of course, American democracy.  Upon seeing the name of the author, I knew this would be an article I would read, rather than skim--if nothing more than out of respect for his great-uncle, famed Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman.  The younger Runciman teaches at Cambridge, writes about politics for the LRB and, I suppose, waits around to become the 4th Viscount of Doxford.   His thin wikipedia page contains a quote from Lebanese American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who described Runciman as "the second most stupid reviewer of his works," the first being an economist.  (A quick check of Taleb's extensive wikipedia entry also convinced me that I needed to become familiar with his writings.)

Well, no matter.   Even though Runciman goes off on some odd tangents--the significance of  first Tuesday in November as election day, for example--his subject interests me.  Scrolling down through our turbulent history, he asks the question:  "Can you really do politics like this and expect it to last."  He finds that there have always been two diametrically opposed answers to the inquiry.

The first answer is:  yes, of course it works.  Just look at it.  It has survived everything that's been thrown at it for more than two hundred years.  During that time the United States has got exponentially richer and more powerful, to become the richest and most powerful nation in history.  This is, by far, the most successful system of government the world has ever seen, certainly as judged by those measures...

The other obvious answer is:  no, of course it doesn't work.  Just look at it.  Commentators find it almost impossible to write about American democracy these days without reaching for the word 'dysfunctional'.  The country is massively in debt, and its elected politicians can't decide what to do about it.  American party politics is toxic and partisan in a way that seems to satisfy nobody....Over the past decade, the country has been getting markedly less powerful and less prosperous.  It has been fighting stupid wars--in Iraq, in Afghanistan--that it neither knows how to win nor how to exit satisfactorily.  Wealth creation is sputtering to a halt and wages have been stagnating, especially for the middle class...A democracy in which the majority is powerless in the face of this sort of rampant inequality looks fundamentally fraudulent.

So there we have it--the parameters of the debate.  He marshalls the ideas of two noted (and prescient) historians for each side of the argument.  Arthur Schlesinger's 1986 The Cycles of American History, advances the idea of cyclicality--that periodically in her history, when push comes to shove, America always pulls out of it and rebounds.  Paul Kennedy's 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers suggests, "not so much."  Both authors reference Toqueville and each side can point to our current dilemma and make their respective cases. 

The idea of cyclicality is a false consolation, though...American democracy is not doomed.  But it is too easy to suggest that, when the time is right, this flexible democracy will seize its moment to act decisively.  The waiting is likely to get in the way of the seizing.  Moreover, history suggests that the time will only be right when things have gone very badly wrong...    

And even the declinists (among whom I tend to number myself) have no real defined sense of being on the wrong side of an failed existential crisis.  Yet.

I have also been reading The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteen Century by Speros Vryonis, Jr. (1971.)  Despite its intimidating title, the book is a helluva good read--that is, if you like this sort of thing.  Byzantium on the downside interests me more than its ascendancy and glory days.  The defeat at Manzikert in 1071 is a good a marker as any to start with that.`

The striking thing about Alp Arslan's victory over Romanes Diogenes is the unforeseen consequences of the Byzantine defeat.  The armies of the East Roman Empire had met with loss before.  And this battle occurred on the far borders of empire, out on the Armenian plateau.  Nothing seemed to signal a national catastrophe.  And yet, it was as if the Byzantines suffered a momentarily collapse of the collective will, as most of the Empire swiftly sluffed-off to the advancing Seljuqids.  In short order, the Turks were looking across at Constantinople from the far shore of the Marmara.

To be sure, the Byzantines regrouped under the revanchist Komnenian restoration, pulling the rim of Anatolia back into the Empire.  But the die had been cast, you might say.  The Seljuqids, Turkomen and Danishmendids were in central Asia Minor to stay.

The severe consequences of Manzikert are understandable, according to Vryonis, once the strains of the preceding 45 years are considered.  Outside pressures existed, to be sure.  The rapacious Normans were not to be satisfied with the boot of Italy and Sicily, eying Constantinople with relish.  And the sheer number of Turkic tribes pushing westward off the central Asian steppes could not fail to impact the eastern fringes of Empire.  And yet, the real damage occurred internally: power struggles between the central government and the provincial magnates, the destruction of the free peasantry and the establishment of feudalism, collapse of the tax base due to immunities issued to Anatolian overlords, etc.

The themata system divided the Empire into themes, with the civil and military administration combined under the Strategos.  In case of an invasion, the Emperor could summon these militias from the provinces, under the command of the Strategos.  The soldiers were given free land to farm within the themes, which in time greatly supplemented the extent of the free peasantry.  The sons of these peasants would also be required to provide military service if needed.  And finally, these freeholders paid taxes to the Empire.  The system seemed to work well on all fronts.  The Emperor had a large standing army if needed.  The troops were often tied to the very areas they were defending.  The taxes paid by the free peasants supported the Empire, including the army. 

The system started to fray as the Anatolian magnates within each theme began to amass more land and power.  These well-connected families sucked up the productive farmland of the free peasants, who now worked for them as feudal tenants.  This removed the obligation of military service that was tied to their free holding, as well as greatly diminishing the taxes flowing into the coffers of Empire, as the wealthy Anatolian elite (think 1%) had secured generous tax immunities for themselves.  As their power and wealth increased, the magnates challenged the authority of Constantinople itself.  In turn, the Byzantine bureaucrats sought to weaken, even dismantle, the army any way they could.  The loyal Imperial troops were often engaged in putting down prospective coups generated by the provincial generals' over-weaning ambition.  Constantinople hired mercenary soldiers to supplement its ranks.  The diminishing tax base, however, delayed the salaries paid these foreign troops.  This caused the mercenaries to often raid the very lands they were purportedly protecting.  And so, when the Byzantine army retreated back to the capital after Manzikert, there was nothing left in place to keep the Seljuqids from over-running the entire peninsula.  The remarkable web of provincial militias formed from an indigenous free-holding peasant class had been irretrievably broken. 

I am not sure that any people truly learn the right lessons from history.  America is not Constantinople, just as it is not Rome.  In many ways, we are such a new thing that applicable historical precedents are hard to come by.  This narrative has elements of naked greed, unbridled partisan power politics, the overreach of a wealthy elite hungry for both land and tax abatements, and the destruction of what passed for a middle class.  As such, it should be a cautionary tale for all nations.

Again, I find it interesting that the catastrophe of Manzikert was only understood later on.  The fact that the social fabric had been damaged beyond repair was not immediately apparent.  Even so, these eastern Romans had a lot of life left in them, and quite a drama to play out over succeeding centuries.  Perhaps we do as well.

Aesthetic Irresponsibility in a Broad and Gentle Land (Part III)

     I finished reading W. E. D. Allen's A History of the Georgian People a few weeks back.  I found the work to be an altogether satisfying read.  Historians rarely write in this manner these days--he was talented, enthusiastic, and a bit idiosyncratic.  Allen could present the sweeping overview, as well as the detailed specificity of an event, and do so in an engaging manner.  He was not afraid to launch off into entertaining tangents. 

     His last sentence in the book is typical:

But the Georgians could always laugh, and laughter, where high principle goes down, can survive terror and it can outlive Empires.

      In places, however, the author tells us more about himself, his own prejudices and conceits, than he does his subject matter.  One such area concerns religion in Georgia.  A native of Northern Ireland, Allen (1901-1973) was very much a product of his times.  He prefaces the chapter on the Georgian church with about three pages of pontifications on Christianity in general.  In short, he finds it mostly to be superstitious nonsense, which hindered the advance of knowledge--"progress," if you will.  And perhaps reflecting his Ulster roots, Allen displays a militant antagonism towards the priesthood--any priesthood.  In its place, he offered up his own tortured modern nonsense.  A few selections illustrute his sentiments pretty clearly.

The vastness of the influence enjoyed by the Churches during the Middle Ages...is a monument to the credulity [and] ...the intellectual laziness...of the human mind.

The teaching of Christ--that lean and gentle Cynic, that humanistic Lover of men and of nature, than outspoken Paladin of the deceived, that Hater of the mean and hypocritical, bears as little relation to the body of the Church, as an oak tree, gleaming in the sun and freshened for ever by the winds, bears to an oak coffin, covered with homilies inscribed in silver and having inside the emptiness of death.

The Church--organized religion--is, like any other corporate institution, a product of the human mind....And long before the Christian era, the human mind, a credulous mind, had already created the wherewithal to satisfy its credulity--priesthoods which at once lived upon and satisfied "the believer."  For the human mind in its pathetic aching for finality, for an attainable perfection, always sets up fetishes, the idealization of hopes and the contrary embodiment of fears--religions and social systems--that encumber it.  And this will go on, in religion and in politics, until men realized, as they have been taught by experience, that there is no foreseeable finality; that all with change and that change is the salt of life; that faith rests in themselves; that divinity, untouchable and not to be imagined, rests here around ourselves and lies forward in the spaceless spaces of eternity.

The Georgian Church went the way of all other churches.  The bleak strong spirits built it--and passed into a memory revered and neglected by their sanctimonious successors.   The priest-mind took the rough clean spirit of the Founder and the rugged sacrifices of these old and dim-remembered men who found in it a divine message for humanity; and violent and abortive, cunning and obsequious, the priest-mind turned it into the sour wine of the Mediaeval church. 

It is difficult to appreciate the extent to which the Church checked the development of human knowledge during the Middle Ages. 

     You get the picture.  I believe Allen's modern British sensibilities blinded him to an essential element of the Georgian character.  He encountered Georgia during the Soviet era, and did not live long enough to witness the latter's passing.  Perhaps he would be incredulous by the resiliancy and vibrancy of their faith today.  Laughter is not the only thing that survives.

Levant Report

For some time now, I have refrained from commenting on the deteriorating situation in Syria (and Egypt, for that matter.)  The political circus that was the 2012 election cycle distracted me, to be sure.  But beyond that, I was truly depressed over the whole affair--the loss of innocent life in Syria, the destruction of churches and property, the refugee status of some acquaintances there, the almost universal misinformation (at least in the U.S.) about the true nature of the conflict.  I could not help but believe that the Devil we know was preferable to the untold demons we were doing our best to unleash.  Perhaps the most discouraging aspect, however, was watching helplessly as American foreign policy does what it always seems to do, regardless of the party in power.  Secretary of State Clinton breezily assures the world that Assad must go and that "democracy" will prevail, while  the media paid court to John McCain and Lindsey Graham (as if they know what the hell they are talking about) who howl that we are letting the rebellion slip away by not pouring more money and weapons into the conflict.  Yes, the tent of American Exceptionalism is broad indeed.

I was encouraged by a bit of news last week.  We learned that President Obama rejected the advice of Secretary of State Clinton and the Pentagon, who urged him to ramp-up support for the Syrian rebels.  That is a start.  But American voices should continue to question the accepted wisdom on the Syrian crisis, and what our response should be.  One certainly won't find this in conventional U.S. new sources.  But there are independent voices, such as the well-known  www.antiwar.com, for example. 

I also recommend my good friend's new blog, here.  He is a young man with a connection to Syria who is passionate about the subject.  Bookmark his blog and encourage him to continue his postings.  I know I look forward to what he has to say.

Andrew Bacevich is a National Treasure

  
     "How to revive the flagging fortunes of the Republican Party might matter to some people, but it's not a question that should concern principled conservatives.  Crypto-conservatives aplenty stand ready to shoulder that demeaning task.  Tune in Fox News  or pick up the latest issue of National Review or the Weekly Standard and you'll find them, yelping, whining, and fingering our recently reelected president as the Antichrist.
    

     Conservatives who prefer thinking to venting--those confident that a republic able to survive eight years of George W. Bush can probably survive eight years of Barack Obama--confront a question of a different order.  To wit:  does authentic American conservatism retain any political viability in this country in the present age?  That is, does homegrown conservatism have any lingering potential for gaining and exercising power at the local, state, or national levels?  Or has history consigned the conservative tradition--as it has Marxism--to a status where even if holding some residual utility as an analytical tool, it no longer possesses value as a basis for practical action?"

From Counterculture Conservatism:  The right needs less Ayn Rand, more Flannery O'Connor by Andrew Bacevich in the January/February 2013 issue of The American Conservative (not yet online)

2013 Georgian Monastery Tour

Once again I have the great pleasure of helping spread the word about the annual Georgian Monastery Tour.  If you have ever thought about visiting the country (and what right-thinking person hasn't,) then there is no better way to do so than with John and Luarsab and the crew.  I am not a tour person, but my 2007 visit was a highlight of my life.  I am seriously considering ways in which I could justify going this year.  I suppose the house could go another year without paint. 

Aesthetic Irresponsibility in a Broad and Mellow Land (Part II)

          With this post, I continue a few observations on W. E. D. Allen's 1932 A History of the Georgian People.  The author contends that in the late Middle Ages, and during the transition into the Modern Age, that Georgia's status differed little from that of Spain, France or England.  In other words, by comparison there was nothing intrinsically different about the obstacles the Georgians faced, when compared to these other peoples as they were developing into great empires.  So the question remains, why did the Spanish, French and English succeed (if that is the right word) and the Georgians failed?  Allen may be on to something, but in so doing may call into question traditional definitions of success and failure.
    
     ...the difficulties which impeded the consolidation of a strong Caucasian State were no greater than those which had stood in the way of the rising Houses of France and Castile in the West.  Set against Persian influence in the eastern Caucasus the predominance of the English in Anjou, Gascony and Guienne or of the Muslims in Andalusia; set against the dinintegrant local lordships in Imereti and Samtzkhe the dukedoms of Brittany and Burgundy or the powerful independencies of Aragon and Navarre; you have the same picture.  And the problem presented to the Bagratids by the mountaineers of Circassia, Osseti and Daghestan was no greater than to the Plantagenets and Tudors was the problem of "the Celtic fringe" in Ireland, Wales and Scotland.  For the Georgian Kingdom of the Bagratids, the possibilities of power, of nascent nationhood, the chances of history, were much the same as those of Aragon and Castle, little less than those of Valois France and of Plantagenet England.  And therefore we may inquire why at the  of the eighteenth century, when France and Spain and England had grown to be the proud world-empires of the West, Georgia was no more than a string of paltry principalities ready to the may of the Russian Emperors.  In history we speak much of economic forces, of geographical conditions, of universal political tendencies.  Yet so much of it is man-made and chance-made.  Character and luck are the fundaments of Empire.  The characters of individual men and the luck of not infrequently a loaded dice it was that gave England power in the five continents, and left German emerging tardily from mediaeval divisions to impotent resentful unity; that made the Castilians rise to Empire, while ancient cultured Italy remained a congeries of senile principalities; that thrust down Sweden with the feckless Vasas and reared up the Dutch, so careful, obstinate and grasping; that sank derelict the jabbering liberties of Poland, and founded the sombre rigidity of the Muscovian Monarchy.

     In Georgia history went askew....the Georgians had ample time, one hundred years, in which to consolidate a stable kingdom based on a common nationhood, which no less than sprawling, disjointed Poland might have resisted the onset of the Turks....Yet in that century the political battle of the Georgian people was lost, and the nation passed to a perpetual minimality....In Georgia, the shattered and dissected monarchy forgot even its vain pretension to rule "from Nikopsia to Derbend"; "the Mussulman third" of the Caucasus which in the twelfth and even in the fourteenth century had been partly won and might have been consolidated, was lost for ever.

     The Georgian rivals fought like chivalrous boys; they did not kill like kings.  The House of Bagrationi spawned far and wide its handsome knightly claimants, but not one of them grew cunning, mean and watchful-to scotch the rest.  Here were no cold, wary Tudors whetting the axe for their distant cousins, but a pack of Christian gentlemen wasting the land in chivalrous fracas.   (emphasis mine)  In this period the gallantry of one claimant towards another is as amazing as the futility of their plots and combinations.  From which let us remember that is is not Black Princes that have built the nations, but black livers [and]...that nations, like tunnels, roads and bridges, are not built by gentle men.

     One of my core beliefs about history is the fact that it can turn on a dime.  Character, circumstances and chance--what some would characterize as luck--are often more important to the direction of history than any socio-economic factors, or God forbid, ideologies.  I think Allen would certainly agree with all that.  In short, he finds that the Georgian Kingdom failed because its people were too foolish, too gallant, too romantic, too gentle, and dare I say it it--too Christian.  As my son put it, they were not serious enough about killing to become a "great" nation. 

     When the two of us traveled to Svaneti in 2006, our guide hired three armed guards to follow our rattle-trap old Lada up into the Caucasus.  I thought it was overkill at the time, as I have never concerned myself much about personal safety.  She explained that solitary vehicles on these mountain passes made easy targets for local bandits.  These brigands would rob travelers, but they never committed murder.  She went on to explain that if you had wine in the vehicle, they would probably uncork it and pass the bottle around with you before fading back into the forest.

          

Aesthetic Irresponsibility in a Broad and Mellow Land

Teimuraz I by Castelli

     I am still having quite a time with W.E.D. Allen's A History of the Georgian People (see three posts previous.)  The author detects a bit of the heroic in the Georgians--likening them to the Irish and the Spanish--and sees this as the defining characteristic of the nation.  This is not just literary hyperbole on his part.  Georgia is an altogether different place--you can see it, you can feel it, and somehow, you want to part of it.  The region worked its charms on me as much as it did on Allen.  I recall sitting in the airport terminal, awaiting my flight out of the country, and being unable to stop crying.  That has never happened to me, either going to or coming from anywhere else.  Even if I am never able to return there, Georgia will remain the great and grand adventure of my life. 

     A few of Allen's observations gave me pause, but only at first.  For example, he did not find them to be a particularly religious people.  I would beg to differ with Allen on this point, as that was not my experience at all.  I have to consider, however, that he was an Englishman viewing a Soviet republic during the 1930s, where outward religiosity was certainly circumscribed.  (I recall my visit with the caretaker of the small village church in the Caucasus where he allowed us to see the priceless 12th-century icon of St. George--hidden by villagers for the 70 years of Communist rule--then passing around a bottle of homemade vodka there in the sanctuary.)    The--shall we say--exuberance of the Georgian people (others might characterize it as boisterousness or even rambunctiousness) carries over wherever they are--yes, even in a church service.  Little of it would be recognizable as piety, as understood in the Western sense.  So, I get what Allen is saying, and will concur with him, but only up to a point.  (I also detect in Allen some antogonism to the particularities of Christiantiy, or rather anything beyond its cultural sheen, which is not unexpected of an English author of that era.) 

     He also noted that Georgian culture emphasized heroes rather than martyrs.  Here again, this struck me wrong at first--particularly after having visited Davit Gareja twice.  Upon on further reflection, however, I believe he may be on to something.  When you read accounts of the Georgians saints, they are quite often stories shot-through with the heroic grand gesture. 

     Allen is a romantic and when he compares the Georgian people to the Armenians, the latter comes-off at a decided disadvantage.  The term he employs for the former is "aesthetic irresponsibility," while the Armenians are described as "individual materialists."  Still later, Allen skillfully summarizes the Turkish interlopers in the region.  But enough of my commentary....

     The survival of the Georgians, not only as a people but as an individual cultural and political whole during these centuries of aggressive Imperial intervention from west and east and of formidable sporadic attack from nomads--Khazars, Turks and Mongols--is remarkable.


Gori by Castelli

     There is a curious element in the character of the Georgian people, a kind of irresponsible individuality of the nation as a unit, which is comparable to a somewhat similar individuality which may be observed in the national characters of both the Spaniards and the Irish.

     This characteristic of the Georgian people may be described as an aesthetic irresponsibility.  Thus the Georgians, like the Spanish and the Irish, have come under many forms of alien political and cultural coercion.  They accept this domination, but they do not take it seriously, and when the domination passes the people that have suffered it remain in character much the same as formerly.  It would be untrue to say that they do not resist such domination; they frequently resist it savagely, but they resist as a nation, as a living animal, and their resistance is not for a principle.  Thus we find throughout the history of Georgia, as of Spain and of Ireland, that it is the nation that is held sacred and not this or that principle.  And if one people or the other has fought with ostensibly religious aims, it will be found that it is because the religious cause represented the national cause.  The Georgians are not a religious people, neither are they a political people, but they have a very strong and abiding sense of their community as a nation, and their individuality as a nation.  This sense of national individuality is very old--far older than the clamant sense of nationhood which is voiced by so many of the comparatively young European nations.  The Georgian sense of themselves as a nation certainly dates from the time of the mediaeval Georgian kingdom, and it is voiced by Rusthaveli and other of their mediaeval poets.

     The sense of nation is in itself a kind of aestheticism--a form of sensual taste--a preference for one's kind in contrast to other kind.

     One the other hand no man--or no people--of essential aestheticism, of taste, can conceive a fixed preference for a certain religious or political conception.  Martyrdom is essentially a breach of aesthetics, while heroism on the other had is an orgasm of individualistic artistry.  Thus we find that the Georgians are often, indeed always, heroes and never, or very seldom, martyrs.

     In this "aesthetic irresponsibility" of the Georgians lies the secret both of their charm as a nation and of their survival as a strongly individualistic national unit.  The Georgians retain in a remarkable degree, both individually and as a people, the clear and gentle outlook, the free and inquiring intelligence and the high amoral and untrammelled mind of primitive man.  The generosity, the loving simplicity and the humanity, the animal love of life which characterizes the Homeric poems and the ancient literature of the Celts and Scandinavians lights the pages of the mediaeval Georgian epics and declares indeed the mind of the Georgian of these days.

     It is this "aesthetic irresponsibility" which has secured the integrity of the Georgians through the vicissitudes of their history.  Many political systems and many creeds have lain heavy on the country.  They have passed away, and the Georgian has remained, laughing, easy, unchanged and untroubled.

     The remoteness of the geographical position of the country has been one of the fundamental causes of the strong sense of kind--of national individuality--of the Georgians.  this remoteness has at once isolated them and caused them to develop a sentiment of long and ancient and independent communion among themselves.

     At the same time the climate is a mellow joyous climate and the wine is good, so that neither the air nor the diet are conducive to the worrying over principles and the gnawing over grievances.

     The unfortunate Armenians, on the other hand, nursing hard dogma upon their icy uplands, made material in this bleak economic want, have as a nation come very near at times to that physical extinction which usually awaits the martyr, and to that cultural extinction which falls to the lot of a community composed of individual materialists.  For during the early Middle Ages the Armenians fought doggedly against the Muhammadan invaders as the enemies of the Christian religion and they entered with enthusiastic heat into the interminable theological disputes that rent the East Christian world.  But the individual materialism which in inherent in men born in a sterile unfriendly land always drew off the most vigorous spirits of each succeeding generation into the service of rich masters--Byzantine, Arab, Mongol and Turk.  Thus we may view upon a very broad and general background of the history of these peoples--the Georgians in their broad and mellow land, with their troubadours and light philosophies, their joistings, their drinking-bouts, their heroes and their games; and the Armenians, a dour and dogged yet self-pitying people, with their dogmas and their rites, their monkish chroniclers, their hard soldiers, their merchants and their martyrs.


The Ambassador of Samegrelo in the Entrance Gate of the King of Imereti by Castelli

     The mediaeval Kingdom of Georgia struck the imagination of Western travellers, Marco Polo, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo and others, as an isolated community of Western culture and Christian religion surviving in the midst of powerful Mussulman tyrannies and half barbarous tribes and peoples.  And we now may marvel less at the military prowess which maintained the independence of this culture than at the tenacity of those Classic traditions of life and at the vigour of that East-Christian civilization which after every devastating storm cloud sprout new twigs of life upon the ancient soil of Colchis.        (pages 71-74.)

     And the Turks became masters of Anatolia and peopled it, which the earlier Asiatic powers, Persian and Arabian, could never do, really because they liked the land; it suited their dour northladn nature, and they wanted to inhabit it.  They brought with them the beliefs and ways of Islam, civil clothes but lately borrowed by spiritually naked pastoralists, and they found and used and lived upon, rather than built upon, the debris of the feudal culture of the East Christian world.  These needy reivers, fierce destroyers, now settled over their wide provinces as comfortable and unprogressive, but still warlike barons; they built their feudal states and pressed against the broken towers, left standing, of Eastern Christianity in the Mediterranean coastlands, along the Pontus, and in Georgia.  (pages 92-93.)
        

Homily 51

 

I thought I would start off the New Year on a high note by quoting from St. Isaac the Syrian.  The problem with doing this, however, is finding a place to stop.   Here is a selection from Homily 51:

Justice does not belong to the Christian way of life and there is no mention of it in Christ's teaching.  Rejoice with the joyous and weep with those who weep, for this is the sign of limpid purity.  Suffer with those who are ill and mourn with sinners; with those who repent, rejoice.  Be every man's friend, but in your mind remain alone.  Be a partaker in the sufferings of all men, but keep your body distant from all.  Rebuke no one, revile no one, not even men who live very wickedly.  Spread your cloak over the man who is falling and cover him.  And if you cannot take upon yourself his sins and receive his chastisement in his stead, then at least patiently suffer his shame and do not disgrace him.  Do not strive with men for the sake of the belly.   And do not hate for the sake of honour.  and do not find pleasure in judging....If you cannot be still within your heart, then at least make still your tongue.  If you cannot give right ordering to your thoughts, at least give right ordering to your senses.  If you cannot be solitary in your mind, at least be solitary in your body.  If you cannot labour with your body, at least be afflicted in mind.  If you cannot keep your vigil standing, keep vigil sitting on your pallet, or lying down.  If you cannot fast for two days at a time, at least fast till evening.  And if you cannot fast until evening, then at least keep yourself from satiety.  If you are not holy in your heart, at least be holy in body.  If you do not mourn in your heart, at least cover your face with mourning.  If you cannot be merciful, at least speak as though you are a sinner.  If you are not a peacemaker, at least do not be a troublemaker.  If you cannot be assiduous, at least in your thought be like a sluggard.  If you are not victorious, do not exalt yourself over the vanquished.  If you cannot close the mouth of a man who disparages his companion, at least refrain from joining him in this.

Know that if fire goes forth from you and consumes other men, God will demand from your hands the souls which your fire has burned.  And if you yourself do not put forth the fire, but are in agreement with him who does, and are pleased by it, in the judgement you will be reckoned as his accomplice.  If you love gentleness, be peaceful.  If you are deemed worthy of peace, you will rejoice at all times.  Seeks understanding, not gold.  Clothe yourself with humility, not fine linen.  Gain peace, not a kingdom.

The Untold History

      I have enjoyed watching Olver Stone's The Untold History of the United States.  A good friend of mine described it to another friend as "taking everything you' ve ever heard about American history, and flipping it on its head."  Unfortunately, that is not too much of an exaggeration, though it speaks more to our general ignorance of real history rather than to Stone's well-known agenda.  I find his account to be closer to the truth, rather than myth, end of things.
     Taki Theodoracopoulos, of all people, has some nice things to say about Stone in a recent column.  One would not normally think of the two as natural allies.  Taki admits as much.

Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States is a very courageous effort to set the record straight. Stone is an old adversary of mine with whom I’ve recently made my peace. I agree very much on certain parts of his extremely controversial theories about his country. But unlike most other historians, Oliver has paid his dues. He won a Bronze Star in Vietnam as a grunt, whereas he could have gotten deferments, since he was at Harvard and near the top of his class. Stone sees Uncle Sam as a rapacious imperialist. He cites American repression of the Filipino struggle for independence around the turn of the 20th century and the repeated US interventions and covert operations in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. He names capitalism as the bogeyman. He also says that the United States, not the Soviet Union, bore the lion’s share of responsibility for perpetuating the Cold War.

The Treasure Book

 

          From all accounts, everyone will be reading books on Kindles within five years time.  Please go on without me.  I appreciate the advances in technology as much as anyone.  I revel in the ease of online research--for any subject imaginable.  But if the future portends books that are not books at all, but mere passing images on a screen, then this is the stop where I get off.

     I recently purchased--after months of careful deliberation--a 1932 first edition of W. E. D. Allen's A History of the Georgian People.  I am slowly assembling books on the history and culture of the Caucasus region.   Allen's work is hard to find, but an essential component of such a collection.  I found only one copy online, in Adelaide, Australia.  What a book this is--running about 400 pages, with incredible plates and illustrations, and not one, but three fold-out maps!

     William E. D. Allen (1901-1973), a Belfast native, was an interesting character in his own right.  He covered the Greco-Turkish War as a military correspondent, and later the Rif War in North Africa.  During the 1920s, he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, and stumbled upon Georgia along the way.  He published this history when only 31 years of age.  He would write other books, but Allen always came back to the Caucasus, his first love.   He served in Parliament for a term, and during the 1930s became involved with Owen Mosley's Fascist movement in England, though there is speculation that he was, in fact, a M15 informant.  Allen covered the war in Abysinnia in the 1943.  Finally, in 1949, he returned to Ulster--and the family business--along with his third wife, Nathalie Maximovna.

    Allen never attained great reknown--outside Georgiophilic circles--as an historian.  And yet, he is an engaging writer, one who sweeps the reader up in his narrative.  For example, he wrote the following in the first chapter:

To cross the Caucasus imposes on the mind a great significance.  It is one of the journeys in life which are worth the making--and a certain tribulation.  You have left behind that drear Eurasian steppe--the breeding-ground of slaves and conquerors and passivistic thoughts, where the mists and flat forests and the oozing swamps can maudle men.  You are among the high shining mountains; the sparkling seas are near; the woods of this uneven country are ever changing--not always the lament birches and mean-visaged pines of the sandy steppe.  You are in the lands of Nearer Asia, where man, among the mountains, between the seas, and in the pellucid sunlight, early grew to prying intellect; lands of vivid life, of doings and undoings, or risings up and fallings down, of splendours and of shambles, of wisdom and of scattering.

Sadly, no one writes history like that today.

     A bookplate in the volume identifies its former owner as Frederic Hardwicke Knight (1911-2008), noted author and photographer.  Adventurous from his early youth, he bummed around Europe in the 1920s and 30s, often working as a photo-journalist.  Hardwicke Knight photographed archeological digs in Greece, was in Spain during the Civil War, crossed Mount Ararat, and finally found himself in Moscow during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. Knight registered as a  conscientious objector during World War II and served in the medical corps.  In 1957, he and his family relocated to southern New Zealand.  An avid collector, Knight donated some 20,000 items to a New Zealand museum in 1991.  His remaining items were auctioned-off in Australia in 2010, from whence my book found its way to an Adelaide bookseller.

     But the pages of A History of the Georgian People revealed treasures beyond the mere words themselves.  For starters, three pages of colored plates were stuck inside the front cover.  They depicted medieval Roman Christian religious art--one a profile of Saints Peter and Paul, another of the two saints flanking the Virgin Mary, one of Moses, and finally--the only one that could be considered an icon--a print of Saints Cornelius and Cyprian of Rome.  Someone--probably Knight-scribbled some notes on the side of a couple.  The one of Moses is said to be 11th-century. 

     A faded newspaper was also neatly folded within the front cover.  I carefully unfolded it to find the entire front page (and obviously, page two on the reverse) of the December 26, 1937 edition of the English language Moscow Daily News, sold for 10 kopeks.  The front page contained reports from the Spanish Civil War, a story noting the rise in deposits of Soviet savings banks which, in the paper's opinion, reflected the "constant rise of well-being of Soviet toilers," and the flight of the Soviet dirigible from Moscow to Sverdlovsk, heralding soon-to-be regularly scheduled commercial flights.  Yet the main story on the front page (contained in three articles no less) was the 750th anniversary of the writing of Shota Rustaveli's epic Georgian poem, The Knight in the Panther's Skin.  The fact that Stalin himself was Georgian probably goes a long way towards explaining why this particularly anniversary was such a really, really big deal.

Like the people of the whole of the Soviet Union, freed by the Great Socialist Revolution from exploitation and oppression by native and foreign landlords and capitalists, the Georgian people for the first time in their history possess the necessary political, economic and cultural conditions enabling them to restore, develop and enjoy the best heritage of their past.  The triumph of the Leninist-Stalinist national policy has made it possible for a reborn Georgia to commemorate the Rustaveli anniversary as a truly people's holiday.

The editor goes on at great length in that vein. And, the entire second page is devoted to Rustaveli--with a portrait, excerpts from the work, and analysis of the story and its importance to Georgian cultural history. 

     Hardwicke Knight was in Moscow during this time and undoubtedly purchased the newspaper.  He could have easily placed the article within the pages of the book later on, but I enjoy believing that the book was there with him in Mosocw at that time.  Hardwick Knight was a man of many interests--a book on Georgia history would not be out of place on his bookshelf.

     The next item was a typed, legal-size page, inserted next to a plate depicting Georgian King Irakli II.  The narrative outlines his (presumably Knight's) experiences at the Koban archeological dig "on the Military Road."  (The Military Road connects Tbilisi, by way of a tunnel through the Caucasus, with Russia.)  A little research revealed that the Koban site is in what we would now call North Ossetia.  The archeologists were employing native Kasbek tribesmen to help with the excavation of recently-discovered catacombs.  The workers were digging out the artifacts behind the archeologists' backs and then having their children sell them back the next day.  Knight decided to leave.

I have no desire to remain and work here for the search for untouched tombs is going to be a heartbreaking job and better fitted to the enthusiasm of a bunch of young communists....Archaeology has often been a military undertaking, and there is much to be said for it.  Discipline is most important.

     The next find is an undated "letter to the editor" of the Times of London by the author W. E. D. Allen, then of Tonacombe Manor, Morwenstowe, near Bude, Cornwall.  The letter is titled "Social Structure of Albania," and begins, as follows:

Sir,--The Begverlazzi referred to by your Special Correspondent in Tirana is presumably Shevket Bey Verlaci, who is undoubtedly the richest man in Albania, and who controls a wide area round Elbasan...

Allen knew a thing or two about a great many places, it seems--as did the owner of his book.  In comparison, we know nothing much at all.

     Between pages 274 and 275, I found a folded page with a simple sketch of a woman.  In one sense, it was little more than doodling, but obviously done by someone with artistic talent.  There is no clue as to her identity.

     A few pages further on, a small grainy photograph is inserted.  The pictures shows six children on some sort of cart, with a stone wall for a backdrop.  For someone who later made his career as a photographer, this snapshot is not particularly clear.  Maybe that is why is was stuck between the pages of a book.  One can only guess as to the location of the picture--but I would suggest the southern rim of the old Soviet Union, perhaps at the time of the Koban archaeological dig.

   Finally, there is a short note from Cambridge University Press, dated February 20, 1941 (this, I believe, during the Blitz) to W.W. Hill, Esq., "The Schoolmaster", Toddington Manor, nr. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.  I do not know how Prof. Hill fits into the narrative.    The publisher regretted to inform him that they would be unable to supply a review copy of W.E.D. Allen's The Ukraine, A History, "as the number of copies available was severely limited.

 

     I realize that I am merely the caretaker of this book and the treasures it contains.  Perhaps one day it will fall into someone else's care, and I can only hope they get as much enjoyment out of it as I have done.  Try doing that with a Kindle.