These days in the English-speaking world with a few notable and noble exceptions we can look for leadership only in the past. Below is another instance.
In the 1930s and 1940s Eleanor Roosevelt concluded that she would damned no matter what she did, so she might as well do as she thought was right. She did, early and often. ‘Eleanor Everywhere’ is what husband Franklin called her. She invited blacks to the White House. Lend her name to early women’s rights groups. Picked fruit with migrant workers. Signed over the income from her journalism to a children’s charity. Held the hands of GIs dying of war wounds in the Pacific. For all of this she vilified by the Pox News professional haters of the day.
She is the only First Lady with a statue in D.C. and that seems right. A biography of Eleanor Everywhere is discussed on my blog.
Goodreads meta-data is 432 pages, rated 3.55 by 38 litizens.
Genre: History
Verdict: All trees, no forest.
In 1940 Finland fought and lost the four-month Winter War with the Soviet Union, and to preserve its independence made extensive territorial concessions to the victor. The concessions involved about 15% of Finland’s population. These people were expelled from the territory taken over by the Soviets and had to be resettled in the remainder of the country in some productive way. It was major trauma. Virtually everyone in the country was affected by it. Yet it seemed better than the fate of the other Baltic states.
Through this period Finland was a parliamentary democracy with free political parties and a free press. This is a point to stress: Finland was an electoral democracy. As important as Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was and as powerful as he became as field marshal, commander in chief, and then head of government, he worked with elected parliamentarians, rather than dictated to them.
When the Winter War ended, Finns thought that it was merely an armistice and that the Soviets would be back for more in their own time. During the Winter War, Finland had appealed for help to its fraternal democracies in Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, France, USA, and England. None was forthcoming, though vague promises were made and some individuals — several thousand Swedes — went to Finland. The Comintern did not organise an internal brigade this time, nor did anyone else.
However, badly the Winter War initially went for the Soviet Union, and it went very badly, the result was a foregone conclusion. Thus, if and when, the Soviet Union wanted to re-open the conflict everyone in Helsinki assumed the remaining Western democracies (Sweden, USA, and GB) would again leave small, isolated, and democratic Finland to fend for itself. The precedent in 1938 had been the abandonment of democratic Czechoslovakia.
England faced Germany by November 1940 more or less alone and was unlikely to have the will or way to make a major commitment in Finland, and it would take a major commitment to check Soviet might. Sweden was locked into neutrality while it supplied Germany with vast amounts of raw materials and ball bearings for war, and as long as it shipped the goods its neutrality was accepted by the Nazis. France, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway were now off the board. The USA clung to fig leaf neutrality.
Finland was thus effectively surrounded, and alone. In that situation the enemy’s enemy is a friend. This axiom applied both to Finland and to Germany. The latter wanted to keep Finland independent both as a threat on the Soviet flank and as a source of nickel and other metals and minerals for its war machine. Finland was desperate to re-arm itself after the near complete depletion of its forces and resources in the Winter War, because the War had stripped men and women from the production of wherewithal of daily life it needed food and clothing to exist.
Moreover, Germany’s string of early victories made it seem to be the side of history. That and the Soviets miserable performance against minuscule Finland in the Winter War led both Germans and Finns to suppose that a war with the Soviet Union would be a short war in which a knock-out blow would destroy Red armies once and for all. That assumption explains the poor preparation and planning that went into the German-Finnish alliance. Six weeks was the estimate the Germans suggested to the Finns.
Accordingly, Nazi Germany and democratic Finland began negotiations for mutual assistance. There was precedent for this rapprochement when in 1917-1918 German troops had helped Finns gain independence by driving out Russians and had then supplied the White Finns in a civil war against Red Finns, even as Germany itself was collapsing. Out of that bloody and merciless civil war Finland became an electoral democracy with a free press, scheduled elections, competing political parties, and changes of government.
Back to 1940-1941, German aid to Finland was essential to the latter. It had to have help and Germany was the only available source. While for the Germans at the start aid to Finland was small and convenient but not essential, but when the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union developed, using Finland as a staging area to attack the northern seaports of Murmansk and Archangel, and to surround Leningrad became central in the German plans.
That the Germans would turn Finland into a battleground whether Finns liked it or not, was another assumption made in Helsinki. That is, in a war between Germany and Russia, neither of these combatants would allow a neutral Finland. Germany became the lesser evil because it was further away and there was no historic enmity with it as there was with Russia on the border. The conclusion was to try to negotiate with Germany an arrangement that preserved some Finnish degrees of freedom.
It would become a German ally – a co-belligerent – against the Soviet Union, rather than be occupied and ruled by Germans as a puppet state, an example being Croatia, and could, then perhaps set their own ground rules for co-operating with the Nazis. In the event Finland allied with Germany but only declared war on the Soviet Union and stated its war aim was the restoration of the territory lost in the 1940 Winter War. When the German attacks on the Soviet Union began Finns advanced to Finland’s 1939 borders as they were before the Winter War and stopped, dug in, and waited, while the Germans pressed on toward the sea ports in the far north and Leningrad.
The Continuation War was to recover the lost territories in red above.
In particular, the Finns took no aggressive action against Leningrad. Mannerheim was adamant that the Russians would neither forgive nor forget an assault on Leningrad, and that Russia would always be there after the war. He also flatly refused Finnish participation in the attack on the Murmansk railway. The post-War futures of Finland and Russia were fixed by geography. See the two volume biography of Mannerheim by J. O. Screen discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Officially, the Finnish government referred to this conflict as the Continuation War, a continuation of the Winter War. However, it is true that Finland troops did on occasion advance beyond the 1939 border and even approached Leningrad to create a buffer against a Soviet counter-offensive which came in 1944. During the Continuation War about 20% of the Finnish population (old and young, male and female) was in uniform. The loss of labor from industry and agriculture made Finland completely reliant on German imports of food and clothing as well as war materials.
As time went on to please its Soviet ally Great Britain did declare war on Finland, but the United States did not. N.B. Finland did not reciprocate with a declaration of war on England until Nazi pressure made supplies of food contingent on it. As things got difficult for the Germans, efforts were made to draw Finland closer to Germany – including an unwelcome personal visit by Hitler on Mannerheim’s birthday. To keep the profile of this visit as low as possible Mannerheim claimed he had to stay at the front with the army and the meeting was held in a forest well away from journalists, photographers, and passers-by. No parades. No speeches. No flags. No public pledges of unity. No crowds. No banners. No cheers.
Finnish diplomacy made semantic distinctions to create a space between Finland and Germany, and when the prophesied short war became a long one, Finland began to enlarge that space in word and deed. In word diplomatic flirtations in nearby Stockholm (with the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States) increased and military cooperation became estranged (every German request was misunderstood, parsed, and squeezed and the responses were so slow that events often overtook the situation.)
During its alliance with Nazi Germany parliamentary democracy continued in Finland. It also did NOT take action against resident Jews, and on one remarkable occasion Mannerheim did leave the army to attend a ceremony in Helsinki honouring Finns killed in the war explicitly including Jews who had served the Finnish army. This occasion was reported to Hitler who flew into a rage that burned itself out.
The Continuation War lasted until 29 August 1944 when Finland sued for a separate peace with the Soviet Union. War did not end there, though, because one of the peace terms imposed by the Soviet Union was that Finland drive the German Army of Lapland in the far north out of its country. The Soviets did not offer any support, say by replacing the food and armaments the Germans had been supplying, but insisted that the Finns do it themselves. Now!
This German Lapland army numbered as many as 200,000 troops and this, so-called Lapland War went on from 15 September 1944 to April 1945 when the Germans evacuated nearly all these troops and their equipment from the Arctic north in a remarkable exploit comparable to Dunkirk, but seldom noted in Western Europe. By the way, more than half this German army consisted of Austrians.
To prevent pursuit by either the Soviets or the Finns, the retreating Germans scorched the earth in the far north. After the war Soviet pressure prevented Finland from accepting the Marshall Plan and it was years before the far north was rebuilt.
Finland is not the only country that tried to limit its inevitable association with Nazi Germany. Bulgaria confined its military operations to Greece, and so its army did not cross into Soviet territory, but that did not save it from Soviet imperialism later. That paper-state Yugoslavia had toyed with some kind of limited association but those deliberations were pre-empted by a German invasion to assist Italian adventures in the Balkans. When Hungary in 1944 tried to switch sides, the Nazis retaliated and this example caused Finns to walk softly.
End of the Lapland War
In the end, Mannerheim repudiated the association with Germany and made a separate peace with the Soviet Union. The terms were hard but not as impossible as had been feared. He had acted to defend Finland from destruction rather than continue to be bound to Germany. It had been a balancing act. In 1944 Finland needed German food imports to continue to resist the Russians so as to achieve a stable front from which negotiations with the Russians could occur to abandon the Germans. Of course, both the Germans and Russians were aware of what was going on and applied pressure and threats.
Likewise to keep the German food coming the Finns had to earn it by working with the Germans, but … at a distance rather than alienate the good will of the Western allies. The line they walked was to prevent the United States from declaring war on the Finland, and in that they succeeded.
Henrik Lunde
For reasons lost in the mists of time, Finland’s four-month Winter War with the Soviet Union stuck in my mind long ago and prompted me to add a stay in Helsinki when we visited Russia 2016. In preparation for the visit I read Screen’s biography of Mannerheim from which I learned a lot, and in Helsinki we went to museums and locales related to this period and more recently I have feasted on Indy Neidell’s superb Time Ghost You Tube channel. Even so I still had an appetite for more and read this book, but 80% of it concerns orders of battle and the movement of army units which is of zero (0) interest to me.
GoodReads meta-data is 362 pages, rated 3.81 by 997 litizens.
Genre: Autobiography.
Verdict: ….ellipses…, indeed!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In a southeast corner of Bavaria is the small town (population 17,000 in 2018) of Sigmaringen, which had been the seat of the principality of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen until 1850, there is a castle befitting that status. The town has since remained the personal property of the Hohenzollern family. Fascinating, uh?
In September 1944 the castle became home to the remnant of the Vichy government in exile, one of the more bizarre twists of fate in World War II. More than a thousand people, including Maréchal Phillip Pétain, President of the council of the Vichy government and his prime minister, Fernand de Brinon were trucked out of Vichy and ensconced in and around that Hohenzollern Castle at Sigmaringen. The others were Vichy loyalists, officials, army officers, clerks, ministers, telephonists, typists, janitors, archivists, aides, butlers, factotums, secretaries, churchmen, sycophants, diplomats, hangers-on, however, initially there were few of the French fascist zealots from Paris who were left to fend for themselves. Along with the loyalists went their families and retainers. This castle would qualify as an Old Dark House with dungeons, hidden doors, spy holes, caves, secret passages, bricked up passage ways, concealed rooms, and the ghosts of Hohenzollerns past. In residence was the last Hohenzollern princess who occasionally appeared from her private apartment.
This crew was officially known as – get this – first as la Commission gouvernementale de Sigmaringen, which was changed a few days later to la Délégation gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts français en Allemagne, and then la Commission gouvernementale française pour la défense des intérêts nationaux. Even in 1944, even in extremis managers reorganise and rename to justify their existence, it would seem. Whatever the nomenclature, it was the government in exile of Vichy France until April 1945. By a personal order from Hitler, the Castle and its environs were designated a French enclave ruled by the aforementioned government in exile.
Now why Hitler would bother with this lot is another question, perhaps for Indy Neidell one day. Hitler had rescued Mussolini and set him up with a rump government at Salo, yes, true, but that made some sense in that the Salo government kept order in northern Italy behind German lines. The Sigmaringen government had nothing to order but itself for the seven months of its tenuous existence. One speculation is that the Vichy Government, house of cards though it was, was kept intact so that should the the tide of war change it could be quickly re-installed. Chalk that up to optimism.
Neither Pétain nor Pierre Laval, for though deposed as prime minister the latter remained a power behind the throne, or so he thought, wanted to leave France, though what their fate would be if they remained requires no imagination, yet possibly both these men were so deluded they alone would have been surprised by the lynch mob. The solution was to make the enclave French territory on the model of an embassy. This German legal fiction was grudgingly accepted by the Vichy loyalists. Hence both Laval and Pétain could say they had not left French territory while in that castle in Germany. Look up legal fiction for details.
Meanwhile, some of those zealots who had fled from Paris joined the group. This was not a homogeneous lot. The zealots from Paris had long criticised the Vichy government for its sloth, incompetence, semitism, fashion sense, defeatism, and lack of commitment to the cause of fascism, failure to retain the French Empire, and poor grammar. Parisien leaders of factions, cults, and publicists put themselves forward at this eleventh and dark hour as alternative governments to the Germans in this city-state of one thousand damned souls. These rivalries are partly reflected in the name changes noted above, as the splinter groups of a few dozen jockeyed for position. The Germans had no interest in rocking the already sinking boat and stuck with the Vichy comedy.
Among the number in the castle were the medical doctor and novelist Céline, Lucette, his wife, and Bébert, their cat, and later in 1957 desperate to make a living, he penned this screed about those dying days. It consists of his well known ellipses in stream of consciousness. It seems to this reader it was published only because it had Céline’s name on it. After the war he had been judged a traitor and suffered national denigration for his collaboration. That denigration meant he was excluded from social services and even could not ride public transport. To see a doctor, to buy a metro ticket in those days one had to show the carte d’identité, and his card was marked. But he had been a celebrated novelist and his postwar notoriety, perhaps, added to the caché of the book, or so the publisher may have estimated.
A page of his text shows the ellipsis.
The Vichy French flag flew over the Castle, a newspaper of sorts was produced, a radio station was set up but seldom had enough electricity to broadcast, and some other accoutrements of a state, like – believe it or not – postage stamps were designed. The file clerks filed; the typists typed; the factotums factoted. There were also three foreign ambassadors in attendance, Italian, Japanese, and German. And it had its own army, a gang of the dreaded Milice. However, the aged Maréchal, who was well over eighty years old by this time, went into a sulk and refused to participate in this last charade.
Food was scarce, aerial bombardment an ever-present threat, drinking water often contaminated, the German-uniformed (mostly Croat) guards were warders who made sure none of their charges left, and they, too, were anxious. The more desperate the circumstances the more the exiles turned on each other. Leading the way, Céline shrilly denouncing them all as Jews.
News of the Christmas Nazi Ardennes offensive, rumours of Nazi secret weapons all gave hope to these desperate and despicable people, but the reality of no food, no paper, no wine, no soap, no fuel for heat, no hot water, no drugs, no clean bandages, no socks, no thread to mend ripped clothing, no nothing was crushing.
As Free French forces approached, Pétain and Laval and few others in their retinue fled into Switzerland. (Some sources say the French Free army was slowed to allow the inmates to escape as the Free French had no desire to deal with them.) Once in Switzerland Pétain demanded that he be returned to France and he was, while Laval demanded asylum in Switzerland which was denied and he, too, was returned to France. Meanwhile back at the castle the German-Croat guards disappeared as the Free French rolled in and bagged the remainder, though in the confusion a few individuals escaped to Italy.
The book is sprinkled with hindsight and it was all written well after the fact. Céline did not keep a diary, though he did practice medicine among the exiles and kept notes for that.
It is a story reminiscent of that other, smaller castle crew at Château Itter (Austria) where from 1940 the Germans held as hostages to fortune French officials of the Third Republic. Among them were former prime ministers Éduoard Daladier, who had sat in a numb silence at Munich, and Paul Reynaud, who in 1940 had wanted to continue the fight from Algeria, former Vichy cabinet minister Jean Borotera who resisted Vichy’s anti-semitism, and Generals Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand, along with politicians Andre François-Poncet, Michel Clemenceau, and Albert Lebrun, as well as one of Charles de Gaulle’s sisters, and a few others totalling perhaps thirty. LeBrun had been the President of the Senate who had authorised Pétain to sound out the Germans about terms and was then surprised when Pétain used the commission to surrender without attempting negotiation.
There would have been no love lost among these people. Gamelin and Weygand were each at work on memoirs blaming the other for the Defeat, as were Daladier and Reynaud. Léon Blum, another one-time prime minister was not here, because Vichy officials had in mind a show trial to blame him for anything and everything, and kept him apart. The Itter was liberated in late 1944.
But let’s not forget that the most significant hostages to fortune that the Nazis had, namely, a million plus French prisoners of war, working as slave labor in German war industries and on farms. In addition to these unfortunates, there were also as many as another million French citizens sent to Germany as forced labor by the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO). The Vichy Regime made little effort to secure the release of the POWs or to stymie the STO. Indeed, as to the latter, sometimes it sent more conscripts than ordered by the Nazis to show how enthusiastic it was. In addition the production of millions of others in France was harvested and sent to Germany.
N.B. In 1941 the Vichy Regime did try to negotiate a return of prisoners by offering German unlimited access to Syria and Lebanon. This was attractive to Germany as a threat both to the Suez Canal and the Iraq oil fields. It took the Allied conquest of the Levant (in which Australians participated) to block that move. NSW Governor Roden Cutler had his leg shot off there.
The Case of the Ancient Astronauts, BBC Horizon (1977) and PBS Nova (1978).
IMDb meta-data is 50 minutes, unrated.
Genre: Documentary
Verdict: Gravity is not a matter of opinion.
This episode offers a root and branch refutation of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. Researchers for the production company visited each of the places and sites EvD asserted as evidence of mysteries that could only be explained by alien intervention and refuted his childish claims point by point. Accomplishments that were beyond ‘these primitive people’ (a favourite EvD phrase) were readily and easily explained. Throughout his main argument is: ‘What other explanation could there be?’ To find out what other explanations there were the producers went to those sites and showed how it was done. Building pyramids required a stick and string to make a false horizon, water (hot and cold), mallets, and pegs to quarry stones, sand dunes, well organised work gangs with incentives (but not Cecil B. DeMille’s whips), and a broad social commitment. These combined with the close observation of nature to equip those so-called primitive people to do the work.
The Nazca lines, Easter Island Moai, Palenque slab, and more are considered, including interviews with scholars who have made each subject a life’s work. Every time they found that the unfathomable mysteries that EvD attributes to aliens arose from human ingenuity and social organisation, and sometimes compounded by the megalomania of a ruler and ruling class.
The Nazca lines, for example, expressed the ambition of the ruler to placate the gods with the images, as many other rulers have done with animal and human sacrifices. In other words, he had it done because he could. Sound familiar?
Such was EvD’s confidence in the gullibility of his audience that he agreed to take part in this program. When confronted with simple alternative explanations he declared them to be beside the point, the term ‘fake news’ had not yet been coined. He simply asserted that it was not done that way, as though he were an eye witness. When he pointed to an object as evidence of alien artefacts, the Horizon researchers produced the local artisan who had made the very exhibit that EvD used, which he then dismissed as an example. His confidence in the credulity of the audience is, well, incredible. And, accurate.
But he was right, was he not, i.e., about the credulity of the audience? Remember that Time-Life promoted The Chariots of the Gods (1970), and published the companion books that were sold in supermarkets far and wide, one source puts the sales in the 1970s as eight million. No doubt many more millions have been sold since. For the current state of play see the Wikipedia entry which is edited almost daily in a low-level Wiki war.
Others have since also tried a hand at refuting this nonsense.
Love the first two titles.
As late as 2018 EvD was dining on the credulity trail, speaking at conferences on aliens, and signing his books. In Pasadena three thousand people paid to hear him lie to them. Meanwhile, Season 13 of Ancient Aliens was aired in that year, and is available on Amazon Prime. He collects royalties from this series; he is proud to say.
There are many You Tube videos about EvD, and reading the comments they elicit is depressing. There is so much idiocy, despite more than a century of free public education, it is quite impossible either to correct, disabuse, or fathom. Alas, stupidity seems to be a virus that is ineradicable.
I came across my copy of this video (which I acquired decades ago thanks to the diligence of a librarian) on the office shelf when looking for something else, and watched it again while munching lunch. The quality of the video I have is terrible but I noticed that it is available on Amazon Prime in the USA (in what I hope would be a better video quality) by Nova on PBS but not here. Tant pis for me.
I fear that the effort the librarian put into finding this obscure film for me was at the expense of the KPIs, which would not have included investing so much time on one customer’s inquiry when there were so many meetings to attend about customer service.
Ellery Queen (EQ) started work in 1929 and has little rest since then. Frederic Danny and Manfred Lee wrote more than thirty novels and scores of short stories featuring Ellery Queen until 1971. Then ghost writers took over the franchise. Then there have been radio, film and television adaptations. These are puzzle mysteries, locked rooms, disappearing items, and the like.
Confession: I have not read word one. I know Ellery Queen only from the air.
Radio:
The Adventures of Ellery Queen 1939-1949 on CBS, NBC, and then ABC voiced by Hugh Marlowe and others.
Here are some of the television series:
The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950-1952) with Richard Hunt/Lee Bowman/Hugh Marlowe
The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen (1958-1959) with George Nader
Ellery Queen (1975-1976) with Jim Hutton
Films:
The Spanish Cape Mystery 1935 Donald Cook
The Mandarin Mystery 1936 with Eddie Quillan
Ellery Queen, Master Detective 1940 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay
Ellery Queen’s Penthouse Mystery 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay
Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay
Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring 1941 with Ralph Bellamy and Margaret Lindsay
A Close Call for Ellery Queen 1942 with William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay
Enemy Agents meet Ellery Queen 1942 William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay
A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen1942 with William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay
Ellery Queen Don’t Look Behind You 1971 with Peter Lawford
Too Many Suspects 1975 with Jim Hutton
Nor should we overlook the Ellery Queen(‘) Mystery Magazine (1941+). It started with the possessive comma which it has since shed. It seems to be digital as well as print now, but it continues with an official web site where officiating occurs.
I rather liked best the sophomoric enthusiasm of Eddie Quillan. He projected energy, wit, and tenacity. The staging of Hutton’s television series was engaging and some episodes can be found on You Tube and Daily Motion.
The July/August 2020 issue.
Iowa’s Margaret Lindsay played Ellery Queen’s typist seven straight times and steals the show when the opportunity occurs. She is bright, energetic, and engaging unlike the catatonic Ralph Bellamy and the comatose William Gargan, but in the conventions of the time, often she is confined largely to the screaming and fainting duties.
Nota Bene, Ralph Bellamy is credited with keeping the ravening beast HUAC off Broadway later during his tenure as President of the actors guild. The easy success of dividing and pillorying Hollywood for headlines tempted the cannibals of HUAC turn east for more flesh to eat but Bellamy secured a nearly unanimous front of Broadway actors, producers, directors, and investors to refuse to cooperate. That must have taken some doing among all those enemies, rivalries, and egos. Read the details in his biography on Wikipedia.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 6.1 by 406 cinematizens
Genre: ODH
Verdict: Whoosh!
C Henry Gordon
Firecracker Joan Blondell plays a nurse in an Old Dark House inhabited by odd balls from the hunchback butler to the squinting, sinister maid, and the suspicious looking doctor (C. Henry Gordon who always looks dyspeptic). The Nurse’s Secret (1941) was a re-make almost word for word, and is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Blondell gets top billing and dominates the camera, as usual, as she gathers the pieces of the puzzle. The plot is…., wait, what plot? Nor is much made of the ODH, more is the pity. While there are plenty of menacing shadows to rouse a scream, there are no sliding panels, hidden chambers, eyes moving on portraits, ejection seats, or any of that good stuff. Instead we have repeated shots of those shadows. Oh hum.
Indeed, it is a vehicle for the winning ways of Miss Pinkerton, as she is nicknamed.
A prize goes to the viewer who can infer what the dying statement of the mother revealed, because it is not revealed in the film, though much is made of it.
This is a book about nothing and how important it is. Get that, and get it straight! Lear was right about nothing. Something times nothing is nothing. See? Yet nothing is always with us.
Babylonians with their sixty-based number system counted with abaci and started to use a space holder(s) to distinguish 1 on the first line from 10 on the second from 100 on the third, etc. They used slashes (/) to indicate the next line so 1 is 1, 1/ is 10, 1// is 100/,etc. Thus, like the numbers, zero came from the East to the West, and some of that passage was vexed.
Arabic numbers, derived from India, combined with zero (0) are much more efficient and effective than Roman numerals. Ever tried multiplying Roman numerals? Long division? Even writing them down shows that: Arabic 678 is Roman DCLXXVIII. And because there are fewer characters the margin of error in transcription is reduced. Plus the Arabic numbers are more distinctive one from another than the numerals with fewer inscription errors.
But nothing, zero, has metaphysical and mystical connotations that disturbed many. The Pythagoreans regarded it as a sign of the beast or hit-and-run and tried to keep it locked up. To some zero represented both nothing and everything. Both ends of that continuum were threatening. If there was nothing, where was it? Could nothing be anywhere?
On the other hand, it represent infinity, everything, say in Zeno’s paradox about going half-way to a goal ad infinitum and never getting there. Once infinity is considered, well, there is a lot of that to think about and our place in it must be pretty small.
When we are born are we one-year old? No when were are born we are zero-years old and twelve months later we are one year old. Everyone, even Republicans, well, maybe, knows that. But…., what about the calendar? There was no year zero there: 1 BC and 1 AD are adjacent with no intervening zero, which is one of the many reasons why the calendars of different civilisations vary as they do.
Zero became a number in India. When 2, a number, is subtracted from 2, a number, the result is 0 which, being the product of two numbers zero must itself be a number. Indian mathematicians accepted this logical result sooner and more easily than those to the West who resisted this obvious conclusion with some Olympian mathletics for nearly two millennia.
When zero (0) was a placeholder as in the Babylonian system it was put to the right of the numbers 1, 2, 3, ….9, and 0. But when it was promoted to a number it becomes the base 0, 1, 2, 3, …9. Ah, but that is counterintuitive. We do not count apples starting with 0 and then 1, and 2. We have three apples but only count up to 2 if we do, and we don’t (do that). So it went back to the right side of the sequence where it is on keyboards today. Although in England and Australia the ground floor of a building is in effect zero (0) and the second level is the first floor. Go figure. I still stumble over this fact.
The Indians were so phlegmatic that they also accepted negative numbers. When 3 is subtracted from 2 the result is -1. This conclusion was resisted to the last ditch in the West even to René Descartes’s day and age. In his determination to resist the negative, Descartes denigrated such numbers, e.g., the square root of negative number, as imaginary. See the Wikipedia entry for more mist and fog on the topic.
What a change since then. Nowadays everyone brags about Zero Tolerance.
The vanishing point in art also gets a look in. (Get it?) Leonardo was just one artist who saw mathematics in painting perspective. So does the elliptical orbit of planets from Johannas Kepler. Wide ranging indeed.
Then along came set theory, thermodynamics, string theory, a Cepheid variable, the Kelvin scale, the Casimir effect, cosmic Doppler shift, Mack the Knife, the Golden Ratio, and even rational numbers. For nothing zero has stirred up a lot somethings. Even the Black Hole comes into the equation. Is nothing sacred? Zero is everywhere and everything!
The book considers everyday examples like the Year Zero above, but also abstruse mathematics (e.g., projective geometry) , and even more abstruse metaphysics (infinity, as above) that I found it tough going, but, being tough, I kept going.
Charles Seife
All in all, the book is Much Ado about Nothing. (Yuk, yuk.) But surely Jean-Paul gets the last words with his Being and Nothingness. For the the fraternity brothers, let me explain: zero is something, so it has being; zero is nothing, so it has nothingness. Sartre could have called his book Zero and been done with it. (Maybe he feared a shelver would get it mixed up with Zorro.)
But wait there is more, the book ends with an appendix in which it is proven that Winston Churchill was a carrot. See for yourself…., if you dare.
In the Temple of the Muses (1992) of John Robert Maddox’s diverting SPQR series the protagonist Decius encountered an Egyptian mathematician, a woman, who is onto zero and spends all of her time, according to the jaded Decius, talking about nothing when there is much else they could do together that would be something.
GoodReads meta-data is 374 pages, rated 3.92 by 2710 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Whoosh!
It had to happen! McKinsey management has made it to the afterlife, and there, after a 360-degree review accompanied by all the mod clichés of corporate-speak, Satan’s performance has been found unsatisfactory. St Peter has mined the data on his computer tablet and there is no denying the optics of the spreadsheets: things in Hell are bad, but no thanks to Satan. Well, things are so bad many condemned souls cannot even get into Hell so long are the poorly managed entrance lines, but must abandon even that hope. Yet that is one of Satan’s core competencies.
His KPIs are no longer scalable, indeed, they are no longer visible. No amount of thinking outside the box, colouring outside the lines, corporate values, empowerment, leverage, over the wall(ness), bench-marking, peeling the onion, breaking down the silos, pushing the envelope, increasing the bandwidth, paradigm shifting, data-driving, closing the loop, low-hanging fruit, return on investment, SWOTing, or reaching out can take Hell down to the next level. When asked if his management of Hell represents best practice, well, what is Satan to say? Who’s is better?
After the usual collegial backbiting, some of it literal, Satan appeals this decision because St Peter is sending too many souls to Hell for parking in disabled zones, DVD copying, nose picking, unreturned library books, and the like. But the review committee to hear his appeal, packed with angels unlikely to be sympathetic with the Lord of Darkness, is implacable: Satan is being out-placed. G-o-n-e.
He is condemned to live on earth as an earthling! This is, indeed, for him a fate worse than death. Hell is certainly other people, vide Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.
And where is he sent as an alternative to Hell? Birmingham England that is where. A place, it seems, where there is no respect for evil incarnate, and it is forever cold and wet.
There he adjusts slowly to the new circumstances, and seeks out Satanists to worship himself, but finds them useless poseurs who have never pitch-forked writhing souls into the Lake of Eternal Fire. He’s got nothing to learn from them. Then by chance he finds his métier in Heavy Metal music and for a time is a sin-sation. But even that grows boring: shouting damnation at dunderheads who pay for the privilege is fun and profitable but the amusement wanes. That low boredom threshold may have been his problem in managing Hell.
In an effort to fit in with his new neighbours Satan prepares a dinner party, like nothing anyone has ever had before. (Did I mention that he had a part-time job – more of a hobby to remind him of the old days – at a mortuary?) Then there was the flamethrower, he does like fire, for the crème brulée. It did not end well.
In time he discovers his dismissal was rigged in a management coup and finds unlikely allies (including Jeanne d’Arc) to put things back to rights, er, well, wrongs.
It is a cackle and since there is a murder (followed by a resurrection) it is classified as a krimi above. Well, two of each to be technical.
Heide Goody and Iain Grant.
When we were planning a trip to Birmingham I found a few novels set in Britain’s second largest city, this among them. Though that trip was cancelled, by then I had the book sample on the Kindle and when I started reading it, there was no stopping. It is the first title in a series and I have already finished the second which has more twists and turns than a dean at a budget meeting and started the third in which eternally young and bored Jeanne goes on an away mission. In the fourth, yes I have read that one, too, we learn where work-weary demons go for a quiet life. And I am now up to volume seven, ah hmm, eight.
GoodReads meta-data is 235 pages, rated 3.70 by 57 litizens.
Verdict: [Blank]
Charles XII in a Stockholm park
Charles XII of Sweden figured in the biography of Peter the Great I read before we travelled to Russia in 2016. That was the first time I had heard of him, but he seemed to be a snow and ice version of Alexander the Great. From that hostile, secondhand view, as Peter’s nemesis, aside from Charles’s warrior prowess, what was remarkable was that Sweden remained stable while Charles constantly campaigned. That stimulated me to find a biography. I tried samples of The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731) by Voltarie; Charles XII, King of Sweden (2012) by Carl G. Klingspor, and A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Decline of Sweden as a Military Superpower (2014) by Henrik Lunde. The scholarly one by Lunde has so much indigestible front matter about sources, acknowledgements, definitions, summaries that the sample ends just as the text begins. Voltaire’s pamphlet is a vehicle to excoriate the barbarian Peter the Great. Klingspor is hagiography. That left Bain.
Charles XII (1682-1718) was king of Sweden from age fifteen and made endless war with Danes, Germans (the Hanseatic League, Saxony, Prussia, Hannover), Poles, Danes, and Russians singly or in alliances. For the Hansa Stockholm was a backwater that had no business in Baltic commerce (timber, amber, felts and furs). For the Poles, and Poland was a power in this day, Sweden was the protector of hated Protestants and it was, accordingly, god’s work to destroy Swedes. For the Danes, Sweden had once been a colony in all but name and should stay that. For Russia Sweden blocked access to the Baltic.
Then there were the outsiders, Catholic France wanted to undermine Protestant Netherlands by weakening its Swedish protector, and Protestant England that wanted to undermine Catholic France by encouraging continental Protestants.
Got it so far?
Two generations earlier Sweden had intervened in continental religious wars and earned the title of Protector of Protestants. Sweden then was little more than a geographic expression, however, Swedes, though few in number, proved to be organised, thorough, and committed and so had military success. The artillery helped. Swedish armies were among the first and most proficient at combined arms operations where cavalry, artillery, and infantry co-operated and co-ordinated in attack or defence. By the time Charles took the field this was old news.
Once enmeshed in the geo-politics of the region, Sweden could not extricate itself and instead waded in deeper and deeper. By age fifteen Charles conceived of a Swedish Empire that enveloped the Baltic and drove the hated Danes onto the peninsula shorn of a navy. Sword in hand he set out to make it so – this became the Great Northern War (1700-1721) that in time drew in the Ukraine, Ottomans, Bulgars, Tatars, Hannover, Prussia, Danes, Saxony, Poland, Cossacks, Tatars, and more.
When Charles took the throne the Swedish Empire was at its peak, encompassing all modern Sweden, a good chunk of the middle of Norway, all of Finland, the Karelia peninsula some of which is now in Russia, the Baltic islands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and some of the Polish Baltic coast. There were also two overseas colonies in Delaware in America and in Benin in Africa. It was a power of its day to rival the Netherlands and England, though not golden Spain nor vast France. That is, it was a middle power.
What followed in the reign of Charles XII was continuous war that led to defeat and by 1721 Sweden had shrunk to the borders it now has. He left Sweden spent, depleted, exhausted, and impoverished by his appetite for war with the hordes of Russia, the masses of Poland, the might of the Germans and Prussians, and he never seemed to know when to quit. When adversaries offered favourable peace terms, he spurned them. The comparison to Alexander the Great makes itself.
Greater Sweden
One historian estimates that one fourth of all men between 20 and 40 years old during his tenure died in war. Nearly every man served in the army at one time, stripping the land of labor in the fields, orchards, ports, markets, tanneries, smiths, and so on. By his death vast stretches of contemporary Sweden were ghost towns. If young(er) men are away at war for twenty years there are fewer young children.
King Charles departed Stockholm in 1700 and never returned to that capital. He spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life mainly with the army on campaign. Yet with his absence for more than two decades back home Sweden remained stable and willing, if not always able, to supply his financial and human requirements for the army. Despite his long, and costly absence from Stockholm, there was no usurper, no rebellion by the nobles at the war taxes, no deterioration in the civil administration for lack of funds, no palace coup, no secret deals with the Russians, Poles, or Germans to end the war. Or so it seems. That is what I found fascinating when I read about Charles in the biography of Peter the Great. Regrettably Bain offers no explanation for this remarkable stability in the permanent crisis.
If Peter the Great had spent twenty-one years away from Moscow there would have been a palace coup and/or an uprising by the nobles in the first six months. French kings seldom travelled further than Versailles, fearing that when absent the nobility would plot even more than it did when the king was present. Elizabeth in England had a secret service actively blocking internal threats to her seat. Alexander had secured his home base with a trusted emeritus general and a small but dedicated palace guard in Macedonia, but nothing like any of that seems to have been the case, or to have been necessary, in Stockholm.
While he was away, he was, in fact, not always with the army. Here is a quirk of history. After defeat at what proved to be the last major battle of the Northern War in central Russia, Charles found it impossible geographically to return to Sweden and so he went south on the reasoning that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. He found his way to the Ottoman Empire which sheltered him from the Russians for many years, while he always plotted a return to the battlefield and always urged the Ottomans to strike at Russia. He was there for years, and wore out his welcome.
When he finally returned north he continued to make war on all comers, and whenever the Senate or Chancellor in Stockholm cried for peace, he sent a stern letter reminding them who was king, and they then dutifully complied to his latest demand for yet more money and yet more men.
While he was polite in person he had a stubborn streak that had no bounds. With no political sense he went at everything straight ahead. Likewise his military tactics consisted of frontal assaults. There was no Napoleonic manoeuvring or artillery preparation. He usually plunged ahead so rapidly that artillery could not keep pace and in some campaigns he dispensed with it altogether. His wars were as destructive as Napoleon’s it is true but there is nothing constructive in his reign as there was in Napoleon’s: schools, laws, reforms, science, bridges, roads, weights and measures, tolerance….
Charles was nearly as ascetic as any stylite, wearing one uniform until it was bloody rag and then changing to a new one, eating the soldier’s gruel, sleeping on the ground in a Russian winter, and so on. He was usually at the front in combat and that is where he was killed in a meaningless skirmish with Danes. In these ways he led by example. But he had none of Napoleon’s charm in dealing with the rank and file. He remembered no names, handed out no medals, did not promote individuals for special contributions, offered no pensions, seldom even acknowledged the men as more than tin soldiers.
In sum, it remains a mystery to me why Swedes put up with this self-destructive man who was willing to take the whole Swedish people with him to the grave.
GoodReads meta-data is 110 pages, rated 3.96 by 324 litizens.
Genre: Biography (sort of).
Verdict: Wash your hands and fasten your seatbelts.
Ignaz Semmelweis
Hands up if you know Semmelweis (1818–1865)! He is the man who explained why we should wash our hands. His assiduous research into morbidly rates in maternity hospitals in Vienna led him to the conclusion that infections were transmitted by the hands of the doctors from one patient to another. From that finding he advocated hand washing and more hand washing. On that subject more in a minute, but first a few words about the book.
The Life and Works of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was an eighty-page thesis submitted to meet the requirements of the medical degree Céline earned. But there is nothing thesis-like about it. An indication of its tone and style hits the reader in the first lines: ‘Mirabeau howled so loudly that Versailles was frightened. Not since the Fall of the Roman Empire had such a tempest come crashing down upon men…. ‘ This opening passage goes on the characterise the French Revolution as a carnival of blood. Only three chapters later does Semmelweis appear, well, first his mother appears.
To return to the story, for that hand-washing advocacy Semmelweis was shunned, ridiculed, demoted, demonised, exiled, and finally driven mad; in the latter state he took his own life by the very infection he had identified.
Members of the obstetrics profession had long been resigned to high mortality in pregnant women, and accepted it. According to this upstart Semmelweis, doctors themselves caused these deaths! Ridiculous! Moreover, hand washing was undignified! Hmmph!
The fact that women who gave birth at home, or even on the street, had lower death rates than those who gave birth in all modern-conveniences maternity hospitals was written off as false news.
John Stuart Mill once opined that if the laws of geometry annoyed Republicans they would immediately declare them false. (He may not have mentioned Republicans but I got the hint.) Semmelweis’s intrusion upset a very elaborate and complacent medical establishment and the reaction was to shoot, stab, garrotte, strangle, quarter, and bludgeon the messenger.
In Paris, Prague, Berlin, and London as well as Vienna the medical profession united against this tiresome interloper and his pages and pages of data. In truth he was an easy man to reject, being rude and crude; he was quite unwilling to proceed by half-measures. It was all or nothing for him with the result that it was nothing. On more that one occasion he barged in the office of a hospital director and berated him about hand washing. Likewise he burst into wards when doctors were doing the rounds and berated them in front of patients and students. The Austrian emperor at one point exiled him because of these disruptive antics.
N.B. Semmelweis worked from aggregate data and there is nary a mention of a microscope observing little critters. That came later. What he had was a mass of data that showed a correlation between no hand washing and death. Reason and evidence are feeble assailants of the fortress of conventional wisdom and it took forty years for Semmelweis to be vindicated, and countless thousands of maternal deaths that soap and water would have prevented.
All of the above can be gleaned from the Wikipedia entry. And it bears little resemblance to the book at hand by one of the most remarkable figures in French literature: Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894-1961) who used the nom de plume Céline. He was invalided out of the Army in 1915 with a wound at Ypres. Later he took a job with the League of Nations in Francophone Africa where he travelled extensively. Upon returning to France he trained as medical doctor and laboured in the working class districts of Paris where he was seldom paid. At the time he was a rabid communist only later to because an equally rabid fascist (and energetic anti-Semite) during the war years. He could be as rude and crude as Semmelweis.
Dr Destouches
His most famous novel was Journey to the End of Night (1932) about his observations in Africa, followed by Death on Credit (1936) about working class life and death in the slums of Paris. He wrote in the argot of the people he chronicled and not the stylised prose of the Academy and was thus reviled by the literary establishment for generations. These establishment gatekeepers are now gone and forgotten, while Céline is still in print.
Declaration of interest: One of the first reading assignments I had in graduate school concerned Semmelweis and his empirical data. That is all I can remember but the name stuck because of the association with hand washing.
