BBC: The ‘banned’ Star Trek episode that promised a united Ireland

1 day ago

By Michael Sheils McNameeBBC News

ParamountAndroid character Data describes the “Irish unification of 2024” as a successful example of violence used to achieve political aims

When sci-fi writer Melinda M Snodgrass sat down to write Star Trek episode The High Ground, she had little idea of the unexpected ripples of controversy it would still be making more than three decades later.

“We became aware of it later… and there isn’t much you can do about it,” she says, speaking to the BBC from her home in New Mexico. “Writing for television is like laying track for a train that’s about 300 feet behind you. You really don’t have time to stop.”

While the series has legions of followers steeped in its lore, that one particular episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation has lived long and prospered in infamy.

It comes down to a scene in which the android character Data, played by actor Brent Spiner, talks about the “Irish unification of 2024” as an example of violence successfully achieving a political aim.

Originally shown in the US in 1990, there was so much concern over the exchange that the episode was not broadcast on the BBC or Irish public broadcaster RTÉ.

At the time, US TV shows often debuted internationally several years after their original broadcast.

Satellite broadcaster Sky reportedly aired an edited version in 1992, cutting the crucial scene. But The High Ground was not shown by the BBC until 02:39 GMT, 29 September 2007 – and BBC Archives says it is confident this is its only transmission.

The decision not to air the episode reflects a time when a bloody conflict continued to rage in Northern Ireland, with the Provisional IRA – a paramilitary group with the stated aim of ending British rule in Northern Ireland – one of its main protagonists.

Now it is 2024 – and Sinn Féin, which emerged as the political wing of the IRA, is the largest party in the devolved Stormont assembly.

The party’s leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O’Neill, became first minister last month and has predicted a referendum on Irish unity within a decade.

She strikes a very different tone to Sir Keir Starmer, favourite to be the UK’s next prime minister, who has said such a poll is “not even on the horizon”.Michelle O’Neill became Northern Ireland’s first minister last month, the first time a Irish nationalist politician has held that role

On social media, people have been sharing screenshots of Data’s prediction and drawing links to Sinn Féin’s electoral success.

Back when Ms Snodgrass was writing the script, she did not think it would cause any problems. “Science fiction is incredibly important because it allows people to discuss difficult topics – but at arm’s length,” she says.

In the episode, Data’s line does not come out of the blue.

The High Ground is based on the theme of terrorism, after the Starship Enterprise’s chief medical officer Dr Beverly Crusher is abducted by the separatist Ansata group, who use murder and violence to pursue their aim of independence.

“I’ve been reviewing the history of armed rebellion, and it appears that terrorism is an effective way to promote political change,” says Data.

“Yes it can be,” responds Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, “but I have never subscribed to the theory that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.”

“Yet there are numerous examples of when it was successful,” Data says. “The independence of the Mexican state from Spain, the Irish unification of 2024, and the Kenzie rebellion.”

Getty ImagesStar Trek: The Next Generation featured Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, in what has become one of his most iconic roles

“I’m aware of them,” says Picard, to which Data asks: “Would it then be accurate to say that terrorism is acceptable when all options for peaceful settlement have been foreclosed?”

“Data, these are questions that mankind has been struggling with throughout history. Your confusion is only human.”

The story has parallels with the situation in Northern Ireland at the time – something Ms Snodgrass says was deliberate.

“I was a history major before I went to law school and I wanted to get into that; discuss the fact that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” she says.

“I mean, these are complicated issues. And when do people feel like their back is so much against the wall that they have no choice but to turn to violence? And is that actually ever justified?

“I think what I wanted to say was: if we’re talking and not shooting, we’re in a better place.”

Melinda M Snodgrass says science fiction provides a way of examining current issues through a different lens

In 1992, when the episode was due to air in the UK, the IRA ceasefire of 1994 and 1998 Good Friday Agreement were still years away.

In April of that year, the Baltic Exchange bombing carried out by the IRA in the heart of London’s financial centre killed three people, and injured more than 90.

Such was the atmosphere from 1988 to 1994, a ban was enforced on broadcasting the voices of members of certain groups from Northern Ireland on television and radio. Restrictions were seen as specifically targeting Sinn Féin.

It resulted in the bizarre situation where prominent politicians including Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams had their voices dubbed by actors (Mr Adams, famously, was voiced at times by Oscar-nominated actor Stephen Rea).

Reflecting on the Star Trek episode, Prof Robert Savage of Boston College says: “It was amazing it was censored.”

His latest book – Northern Ireland, the BBC, and Censorship in Thatcher’s Britain – covers the period when the episode was pulled.

“The argument I think the robot [Data] asks you is basically just: does terrorism work? If there are no alternatives, if you’ve tried every other avenue to try to affect change, is it acceptable? To use terrorism?

“And it’s a very human question. But [Jean-Luc Picard] doesn’t answer the question! That would have unsettled somebody like Thatcher,” Prof Savage adds.The roots of Northern Ireland’s Troubles lie deep in Irish history

There is some murkiness about how a decision was reached not to broadcast the programme at the time.

BBC Archives confirmed the 2007 broadcast of the episode and was “satisfied” any other screening would have been listed.

The BBC’s press office said it had spoken to “a number of people” about why a ban may have been implemented, but was unable to get this information “as it dates quite far back”.

A spokesman for Sky said he had looked into it, but could not confirm it had broadcast an edited version of the episode in 1992 – or what its reasoning might have been for doing so.

RTÉ noted that TV guides from the time show it had broadcast Star Trek: The Next Generation, but did not have further information in its acquisitions system, and could not find anyone from the time to speak to.

“I think this would probably have stirred a memory if I had been made aware of this at the time, but I am afraid it rings no bells at all,” said Lord John Birt, who was director general of the BBC from 1992 to 2000, and before this served as deputy director general.

If the episode had been removed, it would probably have been a decision made at operational level in Network Television, he said.

More than three decades on, the picture in Northern Ireland has changed.

Ms Snodgrass says she was “thrilled” when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, adding it had allowed Northern Ireland to prosper.

She notes Games of Thrones, a television series based on books by George RR Martin (who she knows well and has co-authored work with) was filmed in the region in recent years – something which has given a big boost to the economy.

D/C: 1984 seemed a long way off too!!

In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have “first thought of [the book] in 1943”, while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943’s Tehran Conference as inspiration: “What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into ‘Zones of Influence’ (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism”.^[Orwell had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvering he thought would likely lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.

The Tehran Conference (codenamed Eureka^]) was a strategy meeting of Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill from 28 November to 1 December 1943. It was held at the Soviet Union’s embassy at Tehran in Iran. It was the first of the World War II conferences of the “Big Three” Allied leaders (the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom)

Zones of influence .. sound familiar! (US China Russia AI)

J. Edgar Hoover: The Epitome of the Deep State that Many Democrats Now Embrace and Many Republicans Loathe…

…,or, as the political world turns. From an opinion piece at the New York Times (full text at link below):

To Understand the F.B.I., You Have to Understand J. Edgar Hoover

By Beverly Gage

In recent years, as I finished writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover [review here], director of the F.B.I. for nearly half a century, liberal-minded friends often came to me with a confession. They were, they whispered, cheering for the F.B.I. During the Trump era, they began to see the bureau as the last best hope of the Republic, after a lifetime of viewing it as a bastion of political repression.

Public opinion polls bear out this shift in opinion. In 2003, Republicans liked the F.B.I. far better than Democrats did, by a margin of 19 points, at 63 percent to 44 percent. Today, nearly 20 years later, that equation has flipped and then some. According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 75 percent of Democrats now have a favorable view of the F.B.I., in contrast to 30 percent of Republicans. Gallup puts the numbers further apart, with 79 percent of Democrats expressing approval and 29 percent of Republicans disapproval…

Since the 1960s, liberals have tended to associate the bureau with its misdeeds against the left, including its outrageous efforts to discredit the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists. Before those activities were exposed, though, liberals often admired and embraced the F.B.I., especially when it seemed to be a hedge against demagogy and abuses of power elsewhere in government.

They pointed to the bureau’s role as an objective, nonpartisan investigative force seeking to ferret out the truth amid an often complicated and depressing political morass. And they viewed Hoover as one the greatest embodiments of that ethic: a long-serving and long-suffering federal civil servant who managed to win the respect of both Republicans and Democrats…

Roosevelt did more than any other president to expand the F.B.I.’s power: first, by inviting Hoover to take a more active role in crime fighting, then by licensing him to become the nation’s domestic intelligence chief. Hoover’s agents became known as G-men, or government men, the avenging angels of the New Deal state.

Today’s F.B.I. still bears the stamp of the decisions Roosevelt made nearly a century ago. A hybrid institution, the F.B.I. remains one part law-enforcement agency, one part domestic-intelligence force — an awkward combination [emphasis added, only one in the Five Eyes–see article by intelligence expert John Schindler at bottom of the post], if one that we now take for granted.

It also retains Hoover’s dual political identity, with a conservative internal culture but also a powerful commitment to professional nonpartisan government service. This combination of attributes has helped to produce the F.B.I.’s inconsistent and sometimes contradictory reputation, as different groups pick and choose which aspects to embrace and which to condemn.

…Hoover’s current reputation stems largely from this late-career period, when the F.B.I.’s shocking campaigns against the civil rights, antiwar and New Left movements began to erode earlier conceptions of Hoover as a man of restraint…

[In the 1970’s] While conservatives still expressed widespread admiration for the F.B.I. director, liberals increasingly described him as a danger to the nation. The decline was especially precipitous among coastal elites and university-educated young people. By contrast, working-class white Americans in the Midwest and South expressed support.

Today, those sentiments are reversed. According to Rasmussen, the F.B.I. is now most popular among Americans making more than $200,000 per year. Young voters like the F.B.I. better than older voters do. This division is being driven by national politics: When Mr. Trump attacks the F.B.I. as part of an overweening “deep state,” his supporters follow while his critics run the other way.

But it also reflects a larger clash of values. Mr. Trump has long scored political points by attacking the administrative state and its legions of career government servants, whether at the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the State Department or, improbably, the National Archives. In response, Democrats have been forced to reaffirm what once seemed to be settled notions: that expertise and professionalism matter in government, that the rule of law applies to every American, that it’s worth employing skilled, nonpartisan investigators who can determine the facts.

Hoover failed to live up to those principles — often spectacularly so. And today’s F.B.I. has made its own questionable choices, from surveillance of Black Lives Matter protesters to mismanagement of delicate political inquiries. But its history of professional federal service, of loyalty to the facts and the law, is still worth championing, especially in an era when suspicion of government, rather than faith in its possibilities, so often dominates our discourse. Whatever else we may think of Hoover’s legacy, that tradition is the best part of the institution he built.

Beverly Gage (@beverlygage) is a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”

That article:

Here’s how to reform the FBI

By

John Schindler

…Although few Americans realize it, the Bureau is an anomaly. Few advanced democracies share our system, in which the domestic intelligence service is also the top law enforcement agency. This setup, established by Hoover a century ago, is anachronistic and needs to end…

But we all know how hard major institutional reform to key agencies in the US (and many other countries) is.

(Caption for photo at top of the post: “J. Edgar Hoover in his office in 1935. He led the F.B.I. and its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, in eight presidential administrations.Credit…Times Wide World Photos”.)

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

Theme song:

The Primacy of the Defence in Land War, from World War I until Now (and wonder weapons)

Extracts from an article at War on the Rocks:

Ukraine and the Future of Offensive Maneuver

Stephen Biddle

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a two-part series on the contemporary challenges to offensive maneuver based on observations from the war in Ukraine, and the implications for the U.S. Army.

…In the popular imagination, World War II replaced trench stalemate with a war of maneuver. But mid- and late-war offensives against properly prepared defenses commonly produced results that looked less like blitzkrieg and more like the slow, costly, grinding advance of the Hundred Days offensives of 1918. Concentrated, armor-heavy attackers at the Mareth Line in 1943, Kursk in 1943, Operations Epsom, Goodwood, or Market Garden in 1944, the Siegfried Line in 1944, or the Gothic Line in 1944-45 all failed to produce quick breakthroughs and devolved into slow, methodical slogs at best, and “death rides of the armored divisions” (as historian Alexander McKee characterized Goodwood) at worst [see post noted at bottom of this on the 1944-45 North-West European theatre]. 

Nor did this pattern end in 1945. Iraqi armored offensives bogged down against even moderately deep Iranian defenses at Khorramshahr and Abadan in 1980-81, and Iranian offensives failed to penetrate prepared Iraqi defenses in depth at Basra in 1987. More recently, the 1999 battle of Tsorona between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 2006, and Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia in 2008 all showed a similar pattern wherein mechanized offensives made slow progress when they encountered deep, prepared defenses. 

Of course there have also been dramatic offensive successes since 1917. The German invasion of France in 1940 knocked the French out of World War II in a month. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 destroyed over 100 Soviet divisions and advanced to the gates of Moscow in a season. Operation Cobra in 1944 broke through German lines and retook most of metropolitan France in a month. The Israeli invasion of the Sinai in 1967 triumphed in just six days. The American counteroffensive in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 evicted the Iraqis from Kuwait in 100 hours of ground fighting. The 2020 Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh drove the Armenians from the Aras River Valley in less than two months. 

Force Employment and Combat Outcomes

But this pattern does not suggest any epochal transition from defense dominance in World War I to offense dominance in World War II and after to some new era of defense now dawning in the 21st century. Instead, as I argue in my book, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, the reality of war since at least 1917 has been a consistently powerful relationship between force employment — the tactics and operational methods adopted by the combatants — and combat outcomes in the face of progressively more lethal firepower. Where defenses have been deep, supported by operational reserves and well-prepared at the front, quick blitzkrieg success has been all but impossible over more than a century of changing technology. Well-trained, astutely employed attackers with numerical superiority can take ground against such defenses, but slowly and at great cost. Clean breakthroughs followed by exploitation and the decisive conquest of large theaters has long required a permissive opponent  — that is, a defender who lacks depth, who has failed to withhold a meaningful reserve, who has failed to ensure cover and concealment at the front, and, often, whose troops lack the motivation to fight hard in the defense of those positions…

The contours of combat so far in Ukraine give little reason to expect some coming transformation of this pattern. Rapid early ground gains against shallow, forward defenses followed by successful counterattacks against overextended attackers are far more similar to the past than different from it — nor is subsequent offensive frustration against deeper, better prepared defenses a radical break from historical experience. Of course there is a range of new equipment in Ukraine, from drones to anti-tank guided missiles to long-range surface-to-air missiles and more. But every war brings new equipment. And most wars bring claims that this new equipment is revolutionizing warfare to radically favor attackers or defenders — certainly this was a major feature of the debates following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, or the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. For Ukraine so far, neither the fighting nor the debate over the fighting has posed any radical departure from these tendencies. 

…while offensive breakthrough is still possible under the right conditions, it remains very hard to accomplish against deep, prepared defenses with adequate supplies and operational reserves behind them. This is not a novel feature of new technology — it is an enduring consequence of the post-1900 lethality of ever-evolving weapons that has been observed repeatedly over more than a century of combat experience. Exposed defenders are increasingly vulnerable to long-range weapons and sensors, but covered and concealed positions remain highly resistant to precision engagement. Shallow, forward defenses can be ruptured with well-organized combined arms attacks, but deep defenses with meaningful reserves behind them still pose much harder problems for attackers. Overextended positions without secure supply lines can be overwhelmed, but consolidated positions with viable logistical support are still much harder and more costly to overcome. 

…neither shallow, vulnerable defenses nor deep, robust ones are universal features of modern war. Both have occurred regularly since 1900, and both have occurred, at various times and places, in Ukraine since February. 

And this in turn casts doubt on the advisability of redesigning modern militaries around an assumption that new technology has made effective offensive maneuver either impossible or available on demand. Successful offense has long been very difficult, and it has normally required both demanding preparations and a permissive defender. But it offers decisive outcomes when conditions allow it, and such conditions recur with enough frequency to suggest that its demands are worth meeting. 

Stephen Biddle is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. 

Image: Ukrainian Ministry of Defense

Makes a lot of sense to me. That post:

The Brutal Allied Campaign in North-West Europe, 1944-45, American View

And for World War I:

“The Lord of the Rings’” Origin at the Bloody Somme

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

 

The US’ Bloody Hands in Colombia

One really does wonder sometimes if the Americans’ ends justify their means–brief excerpts from a major article at the London Review of Books, by an assistant professor and historian of modern Latin America at Boston University (tweets here):

Sixty Years On

Rachel Nolan on Colombia’s Truth Commission Report

If Colombia​ held a minute’s silence for every victim of its six-decade armed conflict, then no one would speak for the next seventeen years. This fact is mentioned in passing in the 895-page final report of Colombia’s Truth Commission, in a section about the near impossibility of memorialising the conflict. The report tries to leave nothing out. Its findings go beyond the historical and the political – counting the dead, apportioning blame, recommending the founding of a civilian police force and the decriminalisation of drugs – to the psychological and spiritual. Presenting the report on its release in June, the commission’s president, Francisco de Roux, a Jesuit priest and economist, said that the list of victims was ‘unending’ and the ‘accumulated pain unbearable’. Between 1985 and 2018, the worst years of the conflict, 450,664 people were killed, 90 per cent of them civilians [emphasis added]. ‘Why did we watch the massacres on television, day after day, as if they were a cheap soap opera?’ he asked…

The US had backed anti-communist forces in Colombia, but the real money taps opened with the War on Drugs. In 2000 Bill Clinton signed Plan Colombia, which was originally intended to promote development as well as pumping up the military but mostly did the latter. Three years later, the US had spent $3 billion, three-quarters of it on military aid – putting Colombia third after Egypt and Israel as a recipient of US funding. By the time the plan wound down, fifteen years and $10 billion later, it was considered by many in the US to have been a success – though as the Truth Commission shows, Washington knew all along that the Colombian military was working with paramilitaries and involved in extrajudicial killings. The report includes declassified DEA and CIA documents which make clear that, as early as 1988, assassinations of ‘leftists and communists’ were a ‘joint effort’ between the intelligence chief of the Colombian Army Fourth Brigade and members of the Medellín cartel. Later documents show that the US knew oil companies were paying paramilitaries for protection, and, in at least one case, informing the Colombian military about potential targets. The US was pumping money to the Colombian military at a time when the civilian death toll was at its highest, and the documents show they knew what the money was being used for. In an irony the report doesn’t dwell on, some of it ended up in the hands of the very people the War on Drugs was supposed to target: the US was indirectly funding paramilitaries known to be big in the drug trade…

Nice foreign policy. Raison d’État and all that, don’t you know?

Two earlier posts dealing with US foreign policy and foreign blood:

Nixon, Kissinger and the Birth of Bangladesh: Blood on Their Hands

UK, US Complicity in Indonesian Military’s Mass Murder of Hundreds of Thousands while Suppressing Communists, 1965-66

Well?

This may surprise a lot of people:

Did not realize that #Colombia has second largest population in #SouthAmerica, after behemoth #Brazil. Also #Peru's population a surprise, bigger than #Venezuela's–from @adam_tooze https://t.co/svNXSOxSU7 #OAS

— Mark Collins (@Mark3Ds) August 3, 2020

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

A 19th Century Indian View of the Rapacious British Opium Trade from the Raj to China

Here’s an account of that trade at the Encyclopædia Britannica; it is certainly neither forgotten nor forgiven in today’s PRC–quite the contrary, scroll down to the sixth paragraph here.

Now from p. 213 and pp. 217-19 of To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics, edited by Rahul Sagar–a very informative collection of material, well worth the read:

…

British Opium Policy and its Results, 1880

Shoshee Chunder Dutt

…

We have established, with sufficient clearness we think, that the opium monopoly, as it now stands, cannot be defended on either moral or political grounds. Its only defence is the one commercial plea of large profits realized from a foreign country, to the great relief of the people of India. For the sake of these profits the British government has nearly for a hundred years designedly and deliberately contravened the law of a foreign State to sell interdicted poison among its subject, and, persisting in this course, has eventually compelled that State to legalize the trade [rather the reverse of the American “War on Drugs” abroad, what?], so far as the imposition of an import duty on the drug has done so….[ellipsis in original] The morality of the course it has pursued does not admit of defence, nor has the British Government itself ever ventured to defend its policy on moral grounds. The wisdom of its position is, if possible, even less defensible, seeing as we do that, while every part of the world is now mutually open for traffic and friendly communication, China has, on account of this unfortunate traffic mainly, shown no disposition to be equally friend to us, and that all the concession she has made in this respect has been extorted from her by the one unanswerable argument of force. [This paragraph would be music to President Xi’s ears, one thinks.]

…No government ought to make private vice a source of public revenue.

See all those legal lotteries and sorts of legal gambling in North America these days.

Prof. Sagar tweets here, his website is here (he’s a Balliol and Harvard man). This is the cover of the Indian edition of the book:

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

Maps and International Relations, for Better or Worse

From a nice little piece at War on the Rocks:

The Return of Cartography

Nicholas Danforth

Editor’s Note: This is a preview of Midafternoon Map, War on the Rocks’ latest members-only newsletter. Midafternoon Map provides a cartographic perspective on current events, geopolitics, and history. In each installment we’ll explore the role of maps in reflecting, distorting, and ultimately creating reality. At best, cartography can play a unique role in simplifying matters that appear complex and complicating matters that appear simple. Ranging over the world from the Caucasus to the Carolinas, Midafternoon Map aspires to do both. Members can look forward to a new map delivered to their inbox every two weeks: good maps and bad maps, beautiful maps and ugly ones — and bizarre maps whenever possible.

For better or worse, the map is back. 

Repeatedly over the past century, the end of history appeared poised to render maps obsolete. Conflict, it turns out, is eminently mappable. Peace and prosperity, less so. Just consider one of the more fanciful attempts, The Mercator Map of the World United: A Pictorial History of Transport and Communications and Paths to Permanent Peace. [see map at top of the post].

Drawn by American illustrator Ernest Dudley Chase at the end of World War II, it captures the heady optimism surrounding the defeat of fascism and the foundation of the United Nations..

If Chase’s optimism proved premature, so did the pessimism of the map-loving protagonist in the 1913 short story “The Cupboard Of The Yesterdays.” Written by British satirist H. H. Munro during the Balkan Wars, the story features a young man lamenting that “good governance” and “the intrusion of civilised monotony” will strip the Balkans of their picturesqueness and charm. “When I was a child,” he explains, “I remember a sunburnt, soldierly man putting little pin-flags in a war-map, red flags for the Turkish forces and yellow flags for the Russians. And there was a battle called Plevna that went on and on with varying fortunes for what seemed like a great part of a lifetime; I remember the day of wrath and mourning when the little red flag had to be taken away from Plevna.”

When the Balkan Wars end, he worries, “the dust of formality and bureaucratic neatness will slowly settle” over the region. In place of map pins, wolves, and bandits, the next generation will be left to read headlines like: “Socialist Congress at Uskub, election riot at Monastir, great dock strike at Salonika, visit of the Y.M.C.A. to Varna.” One day, he warned, ladies will go for tea on the shores of the Black Sea “and write home about it as the Bexhill of the East.”..

…those who expected their maps to offer ironclad insights into geopolitics have often come up short as well. In the next installment of Midafternoon Map, we’ll consider some of the misleading cartography that accompanied the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the early days of the conflict, explainers appeared that used topography to highlight Putin’s defensive war aims or skewed color schemes to exaggerate Ukraine’s internal divisions. No less than with Dudley’s vision of world unity, understanding what these maps missed proved crucial to predicting the future. 

Nicholas Danforth is an editor at War on the Rocks. He is also a senior visiting fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy and the author of The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Image: David Rumsey Map Collection

An example of maps being back:

NEW: #Iranian state-run outlet Nour News Agency reported that #Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev arrived in #Tehran on November 8, likely to discuss the potential sale of Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia.https://t.co/wxdunjNccG pic.twitter.com/5ZR3GnVCqj

— Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar) November 9, 2022

There still remains a tendency to romanticize the Balkans. See the latter part of this post for an example from the 1930s:

Bloody Balkans: Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks Section

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

Karsh and an Audrey Hepburn Fan–Cool Dude Leonid Brezhnev

Ottawa photographer Yousuf Karsh visited Moscow in 1963 when Nikita Khrushchev was still head of the Communist Party and the Soviet government; after Khrushchev was ousted in 1964 Brezhnev ended up as the top man. The photo at the top of the post, taken during Karsh’s visit, represents a side of Comrade Leonid of which one had previously been unaware, note the cufflinks in the full photo here {(h/t my friend Fred Litwin, tweets here),

From the official Karsh website: Brezhnev…

… apparently told Karsh he would sit for a portrait if Karsh made him look as good as Audrey Hepburn…

Karsh photographed several people on his visit to the USSR in 1963. See a list.

And from an image Fred Litwin has sent me, presumably from a Karsh publication/catlogue:

Who’d a thunk it?

And a post with perhaps the most famous Karsh portrait:

World War II and Churchill in Ottawa, December 1941: “Some Chicken. Some Neck!”

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

Cannon Capabilities, the National Interest, the Arms Trade and Merchants of Death…

…an early English example. A letter the London Review of Books, October 6:

Keys to the World

‘Since at least the 15th century,’ Tom Stevenson writes, ‘naval strength has been a central component of national power’ (LRB, 8 September). A key factor in England’s naval superiority in the 15th century was the cost and efficacy of its cannon. Austrian bronze cannon were expensive compared to Sussex cast-iron cannon. The hardwood chestnut coppice woodlands of Sussex and Kent produced dense charcoal, which facilitated the high smelting temperatures needed to produce cannons that didn’t crack or shatter when fired. They also cooled quickly after being fired and could fire another cannonball within a quarter of an hour [ten shots per hour it says for the 1592 cast-iron cannon described at the image above], while bronze cannons needed 45 minutes to cool down. So, in a side-by-side naval engagement a ship armed with English cast-iron cannon could fire off three shots in the time it took a ship with bronze cannon to fire one. The demand for English cannon boomed and Sussex ironmasters rose from social obscurity to positions of great wealth and status. Questions were asked in Parliament as to why we were selling cannon to the Dutch, the Spanish and other naval enemies. In reply, Sussex MPs highlighted the balance of payments and employment benefits of the cannon trade.

Craig Sams
Hastings, East Sussex

Interesting location. I do not know how accurate the letter is about cannon capabilities.

Mark Collins

Twitter: @mark3ds

What a German Jewish Writer Tried to Do about the Nazis…Message for Today?

From an article the NY Times Book Review, print edition October 23 (I recently ordered the latest edition of Feuchtwanger’s book):

Essay

A Classic Novel of the Nazis’ Rise That Holds Lessons for Today

Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” newly reissued, raises salient questions about the relationship between art and politics.

By Joshua Cohen

There is a famous saying in Talmud, attributed to the sage Tarfon: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.” For Tarfon, “the work” was the study of Torah — that is, the unfinishable task of trying to understand God’s word. But with the gradual and tenuous emancipations of European Jewry throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Tarfon’s injunction to study became assimilated too, as Jews were admitted to secular schools and exchanged the traditional texts for the sciences. In effect, the task stayed the same, while “the work” itself changed, from the study of God’s word to the study of (for example) medicine and law. For German Jews in particular, “the work” came to stand for the free transmission of knowledge, the assertion of moral absolutes and ethical standards, and the preservation of the Enlightenment-era democratic rationality that had finally liberated them from the ghettos in the revolutions of 1848, and that would keep them out of the ghettos for just under a century.

One of the last masterpieces of German Jewish culture, Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” offers its own version of Tarfon: “It is upon us to begin the work. It is not upon us to complete it.” Superficially, “The Oppermanns” is a novel about the decline and fall of a bourgeois German Jewish furniture dynasty whose members are unable to countenance the rising threat of National Socialism. It is also, in a way, a novel about this phrase, which recurs in its pages like a psychological test or a trial of identity.

The phrase first appears on a postcard written by the hero of this novel, Gustav Oppermann, to himself on his 50th birthday; “the work” he’s referring to is the biography he is attempting to write of the German philosopher and dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Later, as a refugee in Switzerland, Gustav finds the unsent postcard mixed up with a bundle of smuggled documents detailing Nazi atrocities. This is where “the work” becomes political: an exhortation to parse truth from lie and publicize the evil. Next, the phrase occurs to Gustav on the shores of Lake Lugano, where the Oppermann family has gathered to hold a final Passover: “The work” is now the perpetuation of Jewishness in the face of an enemy even crueler than Pharaoh. We meet the phrase one last time, when Gustav — having survived capture by the Nazis and a stint in a forced labor camp — has the postcard sent to his nephew, who has escaped to England. For the younger generation, Feuchtwanger implies, “the work” must mean something else again, perhaps the work of self-reinvention, perhaps the work of healing…

Feuchtwanger’s Oppermanns are a family “established in Germany from time immemorial.” Immanuel Oppermann, a merchant, was the first of the family to come to Berlin; he supplied the Prussian Army and founded the furniture firm that bears his name. The novel’s principal characters are Immanuel’s grandchildren, who with their own children make up a refined cast that would formerly have filled a long and leisurely family-saga-as-national-epic-type-novel like “Buddenbrooks” or one of Tolstoy’s glorious doorstops. Instead, the Oppermanns were the creation of an author on the run — short on time, short on paper and ink, short on everything but purpose. In the nine months between the spring and the fall of 1933, he conjured an entire world and chronicled its destruction, which he set within another nine-month span, more-or-less simultaneous — specifically, between the last free elections of the Weimar Republic in winter 1932 and Hitler’s outlawing of non-Nazi parties and dissolution of the Reichstag in summer 1933.

In other words, Feuchtwanger wrote “The Oppermanns” in real time, as the events he was writing about were still unfolding, and even while he was suffering the same tragedies as his characters: In 1933, his property in Berlin was seized; his books were purged from German libraries and burned; he was banned from publishing in the Reich; and he was stripped of his German citizenship.

…Feuchtwanger finished the novel by October 1933; a U.S. edition appeared a few months later. On its original publication, “The Oppermanns” sold approximately 20,000 copies in German, was translated into 10 other languages besides English, and sold an estimated quarter-million copies worldwide…

Given that Feuchtwanger’s books were so explicitly and accessibly addressed to a general audience, it’s poignant that he has none now. His novels go unread; his plays go unperformed; he’s a first-class writer without a first-class berth; a classic firebrand without a canon. Most of his work was clearly meant as a commentary on the Weimar Republic, yet America — where he eventually settled and became an eminence of the émigré circuit — proved singularly unreceptive to the socialist-realist principle that art can have a message; and that such art-with-a-message, which will always be dismissed as propaganda, is in fact the only available corrective to the real and actual propaganda of entrenched power.

Feuchtwanger expected his work not just to be something, but to do something…which can bring about a change. But the German-language novelists of his era whose reputations have survived were of another mind entirely. They didn’t think their novels should do anything; their novels were just novels, objects entombing subjectivity and all that it entails, including political agendas [see the post about Thomas Mann noted below]…

Feuchtwanger’s life, and his afterlife, provide cautionary lessons for these writers of the left. His example shows that art can challenge power, as it were, “powerfully,” and yet have no political effect. Still, “The Oppermanns” also shows that a work intended to sound an alarm can echo beyond its emergency, if written with honest detail, great dramatic skill and a deep feeling for the individual human, whose experience of the news is called “life.”

This is the work, which it is not upon us to complete, only to begin.

Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction this year for his novel “The Netanyahus.” This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new edition of “The Oppermanns,” to be published by McNally Editions this month.

That post on Thomas Mann:

Art, not Politics or Posturing, or Thomas Mann’s Enduring Reactionary Side

And a post on an Austrian Jewish author and novelist, renowned before World War II but now largely forgotten in the anglophone world (he committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942), that points to the dangers that also exist on the hard left:

1928: The Subtly Savage Soviet Union and Stefan Zweig, or…

Mark Collins

Twitter: @Mark3ds

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Hitler’s Willing Intellectuals, Heydrich/SD (Sicherheitsdienst–Security Service) Section

(Himmler left, Heydrich right in photo at top of the post.)

Further to this post,

Hitler’s–Willing–Intellectuals

more on some of the Führer‘s best and brightest, from a review at the NY Review of Books:

My Husband the War Criminal

David Motadel

Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife portrays Reinhard Heydrich as a cold, apolitical technocrat while downplaying his ideological commitment to Nazism.

The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich

by Nancy Dougherty, edited and with a foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

…in the summer of 1931 Heydrich met Himmler, chief of the SS, then a small, elite paramilitary unit of the rising Nazi Party. Impressed by the tall, blond Heydrich, Himmler, on impulse, offered him the position of head of SS intelligence. Provided with a shoebox full of cards on Himmler’s enemies within the party, Heydrich rapidly built a substantial, well-run organization, the SD. He recruited the brightest young men he could find, and the SD quickly gained a reputation for being staffed by the SS’s most intelligent members—an elite within the elite. Many had university degrees, most were under thirty, and all were ambitious…

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Heydrich’s SD expanded its intelligence networks beyond the party into every sphere of German society. Its general reports about the Germans’ attitudes toward the regime were often frank, sometimes critical, and not very popular among the party’s higher echelons. Heydrich also established a foreign intelligence branch, splitting the SD into the domestic security service (Inland-SD) under Otto Ohlendorf and the foreign security service (Ausland-SD) under Heinz Jost and his powerful aide (and later successor) Schellenberg…

Brains and goodness are not related. Another post (also drawing on a review by David Motadel):

Hitler’s–Willing–Intellectuals: The Case of SS-Brigadeführer Otto Wächter

As for brains and goodness, consider this post:

The Bookish Butcher Vozhd, or, Stalin the Literary Man

Mark Collins

Twitter: @Mark3ds