Maggie's Farm

The London Blitz

Scroll down this page and check the "Bomb Damage" section, which they offer in three levels of map resolution. The preservation of St. Paul's is as remarkable as the extent of the devastation of the bombing and the V1 and V2 rockets.

Afghanistan's Railroads

A Brit railroad buff named Grantham has written an interesting history of Afghanistan's railroads, which ends up being a history of Afghanistan itself. Afghanistan has been a part of "The Great Game" of international politics for a long time. At present, the country is basically a railroad-free zone.

Thanks, Chris, for forwarding this piece which, without the web, almost no-one would ever read.

Savonarola, Erasmus, and the pre-Reformation

I found a piece (actually, part of a lecture series by Kreis) which nicely and succinctly addresses what was going on in Italy, and in Europe, during the 1400s and early 1500s. Specifically, the differences in trends between northern and southern Europe; the power of Savonarola and his Bonfires of the Vanities; and the poor reputation of the Church at that time leading up to Luther.

To view Savonarola as a "bad guy" is to make the error of viewing history through our present point of view. He was a reformer, an evangelist, and a true believer with many intellectuals and artists as followers (including Lorenzo the Magnificent and Botticelli), and it was the Church's fear and distrust of him which led to his execution at the spot below, outside the Palazzo Vecchio, where I took this photo 12 days ago.

Tomb of Machiavelli

In Santa Croce, ten paces from Michelangelo's, and twenty paces from Galileo's. Lousy photo - they don't allow flash.

As Maggie's Farm readers know, Nick Machiavelli (1469-1527), the father of modern political science, was no dark, cynical, sinister thinker, just a hard-headed realist about human nature and the handling of political power. Practical, and a good writer, too.

A few of my favorite sound bites:

"Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society."

"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him."

"The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous." 

"The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love." 

Xenophon's Anabasis, and the March of the Ten Thousand

VDH has a nice piece on Xenophon's report of the adventures and misadventures of the Greek mercenaries who were hired by Cyrus in 401 BC to remove his brother, Artaxerxes, from power in Persia.

Also, because of our appreciation of VDH, a free ad for his new book on the Peloponnesian War, which shortly preceded the Persian adventure of the tough, battle-hardened Greek hoplites.

Choooo chooo

Good timeline of railroad history. And the Central Pacific Railroad photo history website.

Admiral Nelson's t-shirt

and other personal items to be auctioned. His undershirt expected to bring $500,000. Says Sotheby's re the Admiral:

"He was remarkably brave in battle, but he also wanted recognition for this, and was remarkably weak in his personal life," Grist said. "He'd face the French and Spanish fleet much easier than he would face his first wife."

Who wouldn't? Piece here.

A Comment on War, Peace, Freedom, and Bombs

It isn't every day that we at Maggie's are honored by a lengthy comment from a Sgt., USMC WW2 and Korea vet. This from Jim Baxter from Choicemaker:

Every September, I recall that is more than half a
century since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light- hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."

In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.

B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.

We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.

Read his whole comment on Maggie's, here. And thanks, Jim

The V1

An excellent review of the history of the V1 buzz-bombs of WW2, with schematics, defensive strategies, and good detailed history of the V1 attacks on Britain.

Does this sound familiar? "Please tread on me."

Max Boot in the LA Times compares appeasement and anti-war attitudes of the "intelligentsia," in 1940 and today:

Savage naively wondered, "Who is to say that a British victory will be less disastrous than a German one?" Savage thought the real problem was that Britain had lost "her meaning, her soul," but "the unloading of a billion tons of bombs on Germany won't help this forward an inch." "Personally," he added, with hilarious understatement, "I do not care for Hitler." But he thought the way to resist Hitler was by not resisting him: "Whereas the rest of the nation is content with calling down obloquy on Hitler's head, we regard this as superficial. Hitler requires, not condemnation, but understanding."

Read the whole thing.

OK, I get it: Hitler - and Germany - needed love maybe, or therapy? Remember "Better Red than Dead" ? The Pacifist Left had the same idea during the Cold War, too, and Vietnam. Boot's piece has got me thinking about pacifism and its necessary corrollaries - the ideas that nothing is worth defending, and that evil does not exist. I read that, in England, it is a crime to assault a burglar or an intruder. You are supposed to just call the cops...I mean the Bobbies. Is that like calling the UN? Not in my house - we are ARMED, thanks to the US Constitution. Don't tread on Maggie's Farm. We know about evil and were raised with firearms, and we shoot first and ask questions later. If you can still talk, which would be doubtful, with a face - and brain - full of #6 birdshot. It is called "lead poisoning."

Daily Life in London, 1662, June 20

We already posted the Samuel Pepys site, but I just want to underline how fine it is. You can just follow him through day by day, without having to sit in bed with the heavy book or the big volumes. This has become a fine moment in my day, along with Pejmanesque, Powerline, etc. Part of the charm is his writing, part of the charm are the details, and part of the interest is how similar his life was to ours - balancing his checkbook, and doing errands and buying a pair of tweezers! Sam would have been an interesting slice-of-life blogger. Name pronounced "peeps." A bit about his impressive career - did not realize that he had been First Sea Lord - here. June 20 excerpt:

Then I went to the Exchange, and hear that the merchants have a great fear of a breach with the Spaniard; for they think he will not brook our having Tangier, Dunkirk, and Jamaica; and our merchants begin to draw home their estates as fast as they can. Then to Pope’s Head Ally, and there bought me a pair of tweezers, cost me 14s., the first thing like a bawble I have bought a good while, but I do it with some trouble of mind, though my conscience tells me that I do it with an apprehension of service in my office to have a book to write memorandums in, and a pair of compasses in it; but I confess myself the willinger to do it because I perceive by my accounts that I shall be better by 30l. than I expected to be. But by tomorrow night I intend to see to the bottom of all my accounts. Then home to dinner, where Mr. Moore met me. Then he went away, and I to the office and dispatch much business. So in the evening, my wife and I and Jane over the water to the Halfway-house, a pretty, pleasant walk, but the wind high. So home again and to bed.

The Worst President?

Tom Brewton puts into words what many have come to believe:

"One of his (Roosevelt's)advisors, Stuart Chase (who coined the term New Deal), wrote that anyone, from private citizen to Supreme Court Justice, who believed that the Constitution should stand in the way of socializing the nation had better step aside or be crushed.

Liberals allege that Roosevelt’s policies ended the depression.  Yet, for eight years, unemployment remained above 10 percent (not bad for today’s socialist Germany and France, but unheard of in the United States).  Anyone looking at the facts must conclude that Emperor Hirohito, not Mr. Roosevelt, ended the American Depression.

In my assessment, Franklin Roosevelt stands alone as the worst President in our nation’s history, a man who corrupted the nation’s founding ethos in almost every respect and destroyed the single most important element in the Constitution’s checks and balances: the independent power of the states and local governments.  When Mr. Roosevelt took office, more than 70 percent of taxes were collected at the state and local levels.  During his tenure, the ratios were reversed."

Indeed. "Follow the money." Roosevelt's distortion of the Constitution has led to an array of evils. And much national strife would be eliminated if states still had the power and autonomy they once had to follow their own paths - short of slavery and human rights abuses. We suspect FDR was not wise enough to know what he was doing as a tool for the Left, but that is giving him the benefit of the doubt. (Hey, "He cared, right?") We prefer Teddy Roosevelt, much more. Read entire Brewton letter.

Too Cool

If only Samuel Pepys had the internet. He would be thrilled to know that you can follow his diary daily or weekly at The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Don't miss the June 14th entry, about a hanging. This is the right way to read his wonderful diary, a day or two at a time.

Carnival of History Blogs

On Spinning Clio

The Collapse of the Soviet Union

Austin Bay has posted Part 2 of Tom Nichol's "Reform to Collapse in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, 1988-1991". Nichols is a Prof. at the Naval War College. The piece is not short, quite detailed, and a fascinating look at the recent past. Here.

Wymeswold Airfield

There is something hauntingly appealing about abandoned military sites, like bare ruined choirs. At the old English airfields of WW2, you can almost hear the sound of the engines warming up, almost see that recent past among the slowly crumbling buildings and the weedy landing strips. Wymsewold has its own website.

Paul Berman on Daniel Bell

Berman recounts his travels through the campus travails of the 60s and the adolescent foolishnesses of the "New Left", under the mentorship of the wise sociologist and ex-socialist Daniel Bell:

Now all this was fairly idiotic. Nothing is more bovine than a student movement, with the uneducated leading the anti-educated and mooing all the way. I'm glad to recall, looking back at those times, that my own radical activities pretty much avoided the student custom of persecuting the professors. I was much too fascinated by them to want to rail against them, except now and then. Besides, the anti-intellectual atmosphere began to weigh a little heavy on the bookish students. Hofstadter, in his study of American anti-intellectualism, had already put his finger on these moods and fads, as if predicting the uprising at his own university. And so I can understand, in restrospect, why Bell chose to flee Morningside Heights. To be sure, though, the student uprisings spread to Cambridge, too. There was no escape.

Berman's pal Szymanski lost persepctive on what was going on, while Berman took his own path through ideological mazes:

My own response to the Columbia strike and its revolutionary offshoots differed from Szymanski's almost entirely. The fervor for Marxism-Leninism in its several variations dismayed me from the start. The conservative Bolshevik instinct on cultural matters struck me as absurd. And so I rebelled against the rebels, and I did this by veering off in anarchist and anti-Communist directions—which always seemed to me truer to the original spirit of the New Left. I mentioned this to Bell, and he told me that he too had come under an anarchist influence as a kid. He had known the New York group around the German emigré anarchist Rudolf Rocker, and because of those connections he had come across an early exposé of Soviet tyranny by Alexander Berkman. Berkman's pamphlet had inoculated Bell against any temptation to join so many others of his generation in venerating the Soviet revolution.

He quotes Bell's powerful observation:

"Among the radical, as among the religious minded," he wrote, "there are the once born and the twice born. The former is the enthusiast, the ‘sky-blue healthy-minded moralist' to whom sin and evil—the ‘soul's mumps and measles and whooping coughs,' in Emerson's phrase—are merely transient episodes to be glanced at and ignored in the cheerful saunter of life. To the twice born, the world is ‘a double-storied mystery' which shrouds the evil and renders false the good; and in order to find truth, one must lift the veil and look Medusa in the face."

Read the entire piece in BookForum - it's a piece of school-yard history which has attracted far more attention than it deserves, and Berman seems to agree.

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Ernie Pyle's Death of the Captain

The great war correspondent, on Jan 10, 1944, here. With thanks to Michelle Malkin.