“The Story of Civilization. Volume 10: Rousseau and Revolution”, by Will and Ariel Durant

 

1091 pages, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-13: 978-1567310214

The Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books by the American writers, historians and philosophers Will and Ariel Durant that focuses on a philosophical understanding of Western history that was intended for the general reader. Written over a period of more than fifty years, Volume 10: Rousseau and Revolution was originally published in 1967, and centers on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his times (it was also the only Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of the whole series). Over the course of these 1000+ pages – one of the fattest books in the series – we learn all about the birth of the British Empire and the reign of George III, the decline of the Habsburgs and the rise of the Hohenzollerns and, consequently, the ongoing disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, the Seven Years’ War, the history of the papacy for, although the popes had lost a great deal of their political influence, they were still major figures in the Europe of the time, and their decisions had major consequences on the course that the Roman Church would take over the next century, and so much more, besides. Not only is this a work about the European powers during this period, but, true to the title of this volume, the Durants show how the writings of Rousseau and other authors created the intellectual climate that would lead to revolution.

While The Story of Civilization has a full complement of colorful characters and deep thoughts, the persons who populate Rousseau and Revolution is truly distinctive for the broad cast of poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage: enlightened despots like Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia and Joseph II of Austria; economists like Adam Smith, historians like Edward Gibbon and political theorists like Edmund Burke (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, naturally); philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Giambattista Vico and Cesare Beccaria (and, again, Rousseau); writers like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller (and Rousseau, once again); composers like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn and Christoph Willibald Gluck (and, you guessed it, Jean-Jacques); and artists like Canaletto, Francisco Goya, Jean-Antoine Houdon and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (but not, this time, you-know-who). This is some cast, no doubt, but in spite of all of these geniuses bouncing about, Rousseau and Revolution is a real joy to read, covering such disparate topics with ease and style; it is almost as if the Durants had written a kind of gestalt biography in which all of these great thinkers’ lives were somehow interconnected (in many ways, they were).

But it is Rousseau that is the cement that keeps this work from tumbling over, Rousseau and his hypothetical “State of Nature” in which there must have been a time before organized societies existed and in which Man lived in Peace and Harmony and that people were neither good nor bad, but were born as a Tabula rasa – a blank slate – and that artificial societies and the environment corrupted the purity of Mankind (a kind of secular version of Man’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden and a state of innocence). In Rousseau's state of nature, people did not know each other enough to come into serious conflict and they did have normal values. The modern society, and the ownership it entails, is blamed for the disruption of the state of nature which Rousseau sees as true freedom:

Hence although men had become less forbearing, and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a middle position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to upheavals and the best for man, and that he must have left it only by virtue of some fatal chance happening that, for the common good, ought never to have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found in this state, seems to confirm that the human race had been made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable youth of the world; and that all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species.

We have Rousseau to think for the modern-day Environmentalist Crusades and their desire to see Man reduced in his circumstances, who think that more that Man has deviated from the state of nature the worse he has become. Espousing the belief that all degenerates in the hands of Mankind, Rousseau taught that men would be free, wise and good in the state of nature and that instinct and emotion, when not distorted by the unnatural limitations of civilization, are nature’s voices and instructions to the good life; Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” stands in direct opposition to the man of culture. The modern-day Left has run with this idea, seeing the modern world in general – and the West in particular – as inherently bad and in need of correction, if not destruction. In Rousseau’s work one finds the foundations of socialism and can see the mass of contradictions and fallacies underlying this morally bankrupt ideology, unobstructed by the clever rhetorical devices of modern collectivists. The principles espoused by Rousseau haunt us even today and, until they are finally faced, the specter of tyranny will continue to hang like a pall over the Western conscience.

“Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, by John Earl and Harvey Klehr

 

504 pages, Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0300084627

The “Venona” referred to in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl and Harvey Klehr refers to the Venona Project, the counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service – later absorbed by the National Security Agency – and which was in service from February 1^st, 1943 all the way until October 1^st, 1980. From the start, Venona was meant to spy on our erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union, and decrypt messages transmitted by their ever evolving intelligence agencies – the NKVD, the KGB and the GRU, etc. – from and to the United States.

By all accounts, Venona was brilliantly successful, decrypting and translating upwards of over 3000 such messages over its 37-year lifespan and leading to many successes for the West, from Project Enormous (the Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project in the US) to the discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the UK. Perhaps the best indication of just how brilliant Venona was is the fact that it stayed secret, not only over the course of its operations, but for a full 15 years after it officially ended, with only about some 1% of the decoded Soviet messages not being declassified and published by the United States until 1995.

While fascinating, Venona is also depressing as all hell, as the treachery of supposed Americans in the pay of their Soviet Masters is something to behold, and not in a good way. So many Yanks were converted to the Red Cause, reaching all the way to the naïve Roosevelt White House where they even managed to direct American foreign policy during and immediately after World War II (for all you stubborn Alger Hiss defenders SHUT UP: the man was a traitor and deserved much more than the piddling three years and eight months he served of a pathetic five year sentence – like being fed to rabid dogs, for instance).

All of this leads to the most perplexing question that hangs still over our recent history, one whose aftermath remains with us today. Why? Why did so many Americans so enthusiastically embrace the Communist ideology and then work tirelessly to replace our free form of government with an enslaved one? Moreover, why did they continue to embrace Communism despite all of the available evidence that it was anything but a totalitarian oppressor intent on crushing all beneath its iron heel? Most of these conspirators were considered “Ordinary Americans”, patriotic and civic-minded; indeed, many had fought in WWI and, later, in WWII.

But the blunt truth was that they were NOT patriotic Americans, at least in the sense in which that term is normally understood; for they saw the American Experiment as a flawed and evil oppressor of…everything, while the Soviet Union was the true beacon of freedom in the world. A twisted and demented view of the world in which up is down, right is left, night is day and so on and so forth; in fact, to listen to all of those BLM and Antifa “activists” burning down American cities today, one would hear many of the same complaints and criticisms from the far left today as we did even during the height of the Cold War. The more things change…

“Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly”, by Andrew Cook

 

Tempus, 368 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0752429595

All I know about Sidney Reilly I learned from Reilly: Ace of Spies, the 1983 miniseries produced by ITV and staring Sam Neill as the eponymous sonovabitch. So, after having trolled through my DVD collection and rewatched it I naturally wondered just how accurate it was, so when I found this book, Ace of Spies: The True Story of Sidney Reilly by Andrew Cook, I naturally snatched it up and dove right in. The short answer? Not so much. The miniseries, you see, was based on the book Ace of Spies by Robin Bruce Lockhart, published in 1967 and based on the reminisces of his father, Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, who served with Reilly in Moscow. It turns out that many of the stories that Papa Lockhart told to little Robin were caca, made to make the British effort to stop the Bolsheviks – and Reilly’s role in these efforts – seem more daring and closer to success than they actually were. Pity, as Reilly: Ace of Spies is one of my all-time favorite miniseries; to learn that much of it is fiction was a great disappointment, indeed.

And it’s hard to get angry at Cook for making it so; after all, it is the historian’s job to uncover the past and present it to the present while preserving it for the future, and so if he discovers that Reilly was one of history’s greatest conmen well, then, there it is. For instance, there is little if any evidence to show that he engaged in any of the activity that speaks of his legendary spying, damnit, or that he was even recruited by “C” until before the Russian adventure (“C” being William Melville, the British law enforcement officer and the first chief of the British Secret Service Bureau). So it would seem that Robin Bruce Lockhart, no doubt following in his father’s footsteps, indulged freely in myth-making in the most famous account of Reilly’s life, while Cook sticks firmly to the facts as far as they can be established. Where he does indulge in some cautious hypothesizing, he clearly indicates that this is so, using only what available facts and realistic conjecture is open to him.

Thus, the overall result of Ace of Spies is a much diminished picture of Sidney Reilly: this is no super-spy who juggled with the fates of nations, but instead a rather nasty little conman and psychopath who didn’t hesitate to lie, cheat, steal and kill to advance his cause – which was always first and foremost Sidney Reilly – and so who came to the sticky end he so richly deserved. One really does not get the impression Cook particularly likes his subject (although he grudgingly admires his courage whilst facing death), but in bringing Reilly firmly down to earth, he makes his version of events all the more believable. Just what it was about this man that made Ian Fleming base James Bond upon him is a total mystery to me, seeing as that fictional spy is nothing like the real one, apart from the ruthless ability to kill if needs be. Cook’s final assessment of Reilly – that he wasn’t “in the conventional sense, a spy at all” – is sadly too true. This is one instance in which the book was not better than the movie.

“1913: In Search of the World before the Great War”, by Charles Emmerson

 

544 pages, PublicAffairs, ISBN-13: 978-1610393805

By publishing 1913: In Search of the World before the Great War in 2013, Charles Emmerson managed to create a tidy little century-long yardstick by which to offer an appraisal of a world long-gone, a more “innocent” world by many people’s estimations – the year before the industrial revolution at last found a place on the modern battlefield. And while a noble pursuit, one in which I was very excited to read about, I found Emmerson’s book to have failed in its purpose, as he managed to miss the world he was looking for. Oh, he travels the world of 1913, going from the capitols of Europe, to the major cities of America (Detroit! Whoo-hoo!) and Canada, as well as to other colonial hotspots the world over – but this book quickly descended into a kind of historical travelogue. He describes these places, alright, but the World he ostensibly seeks to find remains hidden to him: there is no poetry to the places he describes, no magic to the many persons who lived, thrived and survived during this last year of peace – and who, the men at least, would soon find their lives cut short in a cause the merits of which have not withstood the test of time.

I wanted this lost world to be brought to life once again, even if briefly, but it wasn’t. There are facts and figures and allusions and discussions and so on and so forth, but this is just dry knowledge. Telling me all about downtown Winnipeg filled a gap in my knowledge about our neighbors to the Great White North, but I learned nothing about Winnipeggers themselves: their worldview as Canadians but also subjects of a distant King, an independent nation that was also expected to fight and, if needs be, die for a Great Britain they were only tangentially a part of. This is a mindset that is so very different than my own, but one which still remains hidden to me. I wanted more on this culture, too, on the new modes of music and political thought and societal evolution, but – nothing, a sad and inexcusable series of omissions, if I may be so bold. The approach seems original with that vision across different cities, but fails, disperses. One expects a daily view of life in those cities, of their physiognomy, of their inhabitants, of what actually happened then, but the author is just lost in previous historical contexts and the surrounding countries and cities.

(And don’t get me started on the many factual errors: Tsar Nicholas II was not a descendent of Queen Victoria, the city of Weimar was not the capital of Weimar Germany and the Michigan Central Station was designed by the firms Reed & Stem and Warren & Wetmore, neither of whom designed Penn Station). While 1913 is an interesting global tour of the world of 1913, it in no way brought this world back to life, and it sadly remains hidden still.

“The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China”, by Sun Tzu, Wu Qi, Wei Liao and Sima Rangju (among others)

 

384 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1784289119, Sirius

The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China were first canonized under this name during the Song dynasty in the 11^th Century and, for imperial officers, either some or all of the works were required reading to merit promotion, very much like the requirement for all bureaucrats to learn and know the works of Confucius. This collection includes these seven famous military texts: The Art of War, Wuzi, Wei Liaozi, Taigong’s Six Secret Teachings, The Methods of the Sima, Three Strategies of Huang Shigong, and Questions and Replies Between Emperor Taizong of Tang and General Li Jing. This particular edition by Sirius Publishing features rather stripped-down version of these texts, without any superfluous introductions, prefaces or footnotes, while the translation itself is more than readable to English-speaking audiences (and while one must never judge a book by its cover, it’s also a gorgeously produced edition, with beautiful foil-stamping and an illustrated slipcase). Overall these new translations bring to light several classic Eastern military texts that display an understanding of strategy and warfare that still has relevance millennia after their original publication.

“Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes”, by Edith Hamilton, illustrated by Steele Savage

 

497 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316341516

Does anyone else remember Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes? I first found this book in grade school – grade school! – when I went trolling through the paperback bookshelves my 4^th Grade teacher, Mrs. Roberts, had in her classroom and was introduced, for the first time, to Achilles, Jason, Thor and so on (there was another book I remember reading at about this time, too, about a boy named Jud and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906…anyway). Mythology contains an introduction and seven sections:

• Greek Gods of Olympus and the Greek creation myths 
• Greek and Roman myths involving love and adventure, including the tales of Eros and Psyche and Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece
• Heroes before the Trojan War, such as Perseus, Theseus, Heracles and Atalanta
• The Trojan War and its heroes, including Odysseus, Aeneas and Achilles
• Significant families in Greek mythology: the house of Atreus, the royal house of Thebes and the royal house of Athens
• Lesser-known stories from Greek and Roman mythology
• Tales from Norse myths involving deities such as Odin, Thor and Loki (not the Marvel incarnations, mind you)

According to Hamilton, what distinguishes Greek mythology from others is it’s foundation on the factual reality; the nonsensical took place in a world, which was essentially rational and matter-of-fact. For example, Hercules always had his abode in the city of Thebes, save when he took of a journey to accomplish his twelve labors; Aphrodite’s birthplace was just offshore from the island of Cynthera; Pegasus’ comfy stable was in Corinth. There was a sense of reality in the mythological world but no place for magic. The aim of this book is to produce knowledge of the myths that had been recorded by ancient writers and poets. In fact, the myths as we know now are the creation of great poets, one of which is the Iliad by Homer. Unlike the Egyptians, the Greeks made their gods in their own image and breathed them with their emotions and feelings. It is uncertain how the genesis of Greek mythology came into being; however the earliest Greek poets arrived at a new point of view which had never been dreamed of in the world before them. It was at this point that mankind regarded itself as the center of the universe, intent upon promoting the beauty of Man, which was the very consummation of reality.

Mythology just may be the most comprehensive and lucidly accounted tales of mythology based upon Hamilton’s extensive collection of the sources from great ancient poets and writers. Of all other books on mythology of the western civilization, this book is by far the most excellent in providing readers with both entertainment and knowledge without academically esoteric approach or literary pompousness, succeeding as it does in offering education and appreciation of art that has been passed down to our present time for thousands of years. Hamilton’s great triumph was in writing a work doesn’t require perquisites for scholarly knowledge of academic languages, intellectual superiority or historical knowledge of ancient times; it is an anthology of entertaining and inspiring tales of gods, goddesses, nymphs and mortals who fell out of favor with the divine, written in plain English. We meet all from the mercurial gods and goddesses on the Mount Olympus and in Valhalla; are fascinated with tales of Cupid and Psyche, the Odyssey’s Golden Fleece and forlorn Clytie, whose love for Apollo went unrequited, and discover that Paris of Troy used to live with a nymph called Oenone before deserting her for Helen of Sparta.

The essence of myths is threefold: it is a branch of natural science, trying to explain what humans saw around them; it is also a genre of pure classical literature; lastly, mythology is religion, the deepening realization of what human beings needed in their gods and goddesses. In this light, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology breathes life into the Greek, Roman, and even Norse myths, which are the bedrock of  Western Civilization – the stories of gods, goddesses and heroes that have imbued the humankind with multifarious creativity from time immemorial to present.

“Animal Farm”, by George Orwell

 

 

128 pages, Penguin Books Signet Classics, ISBN-13: 9780451524669

 

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is not only one of the greatest allegorical novels ever written, it is also one of the most famous, and for good reason: the symbolism of the downtrodden animals (the Russian peasantry) rising up and seizing the farm (Russia) from the mismanagement of Farmer Jones (Tsar Nicholas II), only for the farm to morph into something else (the Soviet Union) with the pigs (the Communist elite) in control and their minions, the dogs (the Secret Police), enforcing their will as the horses, cattle and sheep (the Russian people) are terrorized and exploited and worse off than they ever were under Farmer Jones – is all easy enough to understand and follow. Even children can grasp it. But there are other animals that don’t quite fit within the social structure of the farm, whose purpose in Orwell’s book was to expose not only the terrors of Soviet Communism, but the flaws of Democratic Socialism, as well. These animals represent the archenemies of Communism, the entrepreneurs and innovators who are the true pioneers of society and who, throughout their endeavors, improve the lot of all.

 

Take Mollie the cat, for instance: portrayed by Orwell as two-faced and spoiled (she was the only animal allowed in the house, after all), the fact is that cats help their human puppets by hunting vermin and saving crops. Oh, interpretations of Mollie abound – she represents the spoilt bourgeoisie, the criminal underworld, even spies – but the most apt interpretation is that of independence and practicality; out of all of the animals in Animal Farm, Mollie was the only one who was truly free at the time of the revolution. It would be too much to say that Orwell identified Mollie with the middle or upper-middle classes as Mollie’s natural home, seeing as he thought that they “should sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong”, failing to recognize (like most on the left) that the working class hungered for the opposite, to rise into the ranks of the middle classes, then as now.

 

Or take the various feral creatures in the book, the rats especially. Perhaps they represent the great masses of the peasantry, the common folk in whose name the revolution – both animal and man – was ostensibly held. Orwell didn’t think much of humanity, and if he chose to portray them as rats it would have been, regrettably, par for course (never forget: for all the Left’s talk about being the friend and champion of the common man, they seek to control him first). Added to this mass of vermin are the other creatures that are and are not part of the farm, especially the rabbits (the cute vermin). All are the lowest of the low in the pecking order of the farm, before and after the revolution, and don’t really count as they consume resources without really producing anything of value (while the rats are declared as comrades, nothing more is ever said on the subject; the rabbits become non-persons, evidently).

 

Mustn’t forget the birds. We have geese and ducks and chickens galore, who would seem to represent the more well-to-do folks of the country; not the filthy lot of rats and rabbits, but those peasants who have actually achieved a level of comfort for themselves. The Left has a problem with country folk (and vice versa, for that matter), for being able to grow your own food makes you less dependent on a lot of intellectuals who have it All Figured Out; also, seeing as the cities the Left so admire are dependent on the farms for survival, not having the countryside under your thumb necessarily makes them a quasi-enemy. This is why, in Animal Farm, the pigs order the expropriation of the hen’s eggs and order their rations cut when the hens raise an almighty squawk. As a representative of the purposeful famine in Ukraine that killed millions and even led to cannibalism, this is a weak metaphor, to say the least.

 

Which all leads us to Moses the raven, the symbol of the defeated Russian Orthodox Church and of religion, in general. Moses was the Jones’ pet (even more so than Mollie the cat) who was a “clever talker” who told tales about “Sugarcandy Mountain”, the animal heaven reserved for the great and the good (could Marx’s line about religion being “the opium of the people” be presented more obviously?). But this is a rather weak representation, at best, for Moses, when the revolution comes, simply flies away; Orwell makes no attempt to represent the savage persecution that the Soviets inflicted on the church, both the priesthood and the laity. And while Moses makes a reappearance later on (referencing Stalin’s loosening of restrictions on the Church during the “Great Patriot War”), not much more is made of the raven’s return.

 

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”.