Trump's imperial foreign policy and its moral and historical background

Sara Katib of TMJ News Network interviewed Matthew Hoh of Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace TMJ was interested in the Trumpian attacks on Venezuela but Hoh put it into a larger context. Here's a sample of this wide-ranging interview:

Sara: One other point that is actually growing among the public as well: many analysts, and now if you were to ask the American public, they would tell you that we know this is really not about drugs. It’s about power. It’s about oil. It’s about politics. And it’s interesting because now if you were to talk to most people because of what they have seen previously with U.S. interference in other countries, most people know that when the U.S. fixates on something like this, there’s definitely more than what meets the eye. The public narrative in this case differs significantly from the real motives behind U.S. policy here. The storyline that the United States is doing this to protect its citizens from nefarious and evil drug traffickers—you hear this from the president, from Donald Trump, who every time the United States destroys a boat, without any evidence, without any type of information or details as to who was on that boat, let alone what that boat was actually doing, let alone the whole counter to the narrative that these boats if they actually were coming to the United States, would have to be refueled 10 or 12 times because they’re so small, right? I mean, all these different things that belie the narrative. Well, the storyline, though, the explanation is that we’re protecting American citizens. Each of these boats has enough fentanyl on it to kill 25,000 Americans. That’s what you’ll hear the White House say repeatedly. And these types of stories, these types of narratives are used by governments, you know, around the world and throughout history to justify their actions. And all they want is just for their base, their core supporters to have a rationale, to have an explanation, right? It’s something that people who are outside of that core dismiss. No one believes it. I think anyone watching, most Americans don’t believe it and certainly those around the world, you know, don’t believe it. But that’s not what the government cares about. The government cares about ensuring that its people have some type of moral construct on which to base their actions. Because, if they don’t have that moral construct, right, they don’t have their rationale, their explanation. If you don’t tell U.S. Marines and soldiers that you’re invading Iraq to protect the United States from another 9-11, your invasion is not going to succeed. Your occupation is going to fall apart very quickly. And the same thing has to occur here in Venezuela. So while most of the United States don’t believe this is the case, and almost no one around the world believes this story of Venezuela trafficking drugs, killing tens and tens of thousands of Americans because of it, it doesn’t matter to the White House. It doesn’t matter to the Pentagon or the State Department. What matters is that the people who are carrying out these policies have some type of moral construct, have some type of narrative on which to fall back on so they won’t doubt what they’re doing. That’s essentially what’s occurring here.

Canada is heaven (2)

I believe I wrote a post a year or so ago with the title "Canada is Heaven" My point was not that Canada is perfect -- far from it -- but relatively speaking most of us Canadians have it awfully good compared to the other 8 billion human beings on this earth.

Here's a story that struck me much the same way. a bus hijacking (?) in Hamilton, Ontario, that went right (?).

The incident raises a number of questions and reflections.

Is hijack the right word ?

Is the cop's use of term "mental illness" at the press conference approriate?

Finally, it seems awfully clear that it is preferable to be at a bus stop in Hamilton than to be a school girl in the state of Niger, Nigeria, where you and your teachers might be kidnapped by gunmen with unclear motivations.

But if you use the Hamilton transit system at the wrong time, you might find yourself hard to make clear judgments.

An excellent review by Ken Mondschein of Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook.

If you have a general interest in the Middle Ages, you might want to subscribe to the Medieval Review. It is free and includes reviews on all sorts of scholarly subjcts. There are limitations. It is likely that most of the reviews you get will be of limited interest to you (I am not very interested in monographs on theologians and philosophers). The most important reviews of high profile books seem to appear in long-established journals -- but they are not free. The Medieval Review, however, will often provide you with information you didn't know you were interested in.

I am including an excellent review by Ken Mondschein of a book that I and some of my regular readers wll be interested in. I point out that it is reasonably priced! Hooray for the Liverpool University Press

In fact if you look around you'll find an open access version of the book!

The Mondchein review:

Brown-Grant, Rosalind, and Mario Damen, eds. Pas d’armes and Late Medieval Chivalry: A Casebook

Reviewed by Ken Mondschein Massachusetts Historical Swordsmanship ken@kenmondschein.com

Recent writings by Steven Muhlberger and others, as well as public history such as the Met’s 2019 exhibit about Maximillian I, have shown the late medieval tournament is a fertile field for studying elite alliances, politicking, and self-fashioning. Within the tournament, we can find worlds, much as one day historians will no doubt pick apart our own day’s professional sports. The difference is that in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, the ruling class was also the athletic class, making their sports and games of key interest. As the title makes clear, this is a casebook, but it is also the first work, save for a chapter in Barber and Barker’s oft-cited 1989 Tournaments, Jousts, Chivalry, and Pageants in the Late Middle Ages, specifically on this form of tournament. As such, it is a valuable addition to the literature.

The present volume is a study of pas d’armes, a form of late-medieval tournament that originated in Spain in the early fifteenth century. The pas featured a “home team” defending a locale, such as a pillar or stone (a perron), against all comers. Despite its theatrical trappings and rich symbolism, this was still a dangerous affair, and fatalities were not unknown, particularly in the earlier and less-regulated pas. From its birthplace in Iberia, this tournament form spread to France and, especially, Burgundy, where it both took on elements of state theatre and was made safer by being brought firmly under the control of rulers.

The first part of the book presents primary sources detailing fifteen pas spanning approximately 80 years, from 1428 to 1507, as well as one literary antecedent, the Romance of Ponthus and Sidoine. Interestingly for one interested in the study of medievalism, the literary exemplar shows more parallels with modern medieval combat-sport aesthetics--mighty men bashing each other with weighty swords to the point of exhaustion, yet forbidding the thrust--whereas the real-world accounts are both more vaguely described and also more contained--for instance, the pollaxe fight between Jacques de Lalaing and Pierre de Chandio in 1449 is limited to seventeen blows--and do use thrusts.

The primary sources regarding the fifteen pas d’armes, ranging from poetry to financial accounts, similarly have much to offer the reenactor, as well as the historian. Clothing, armor, and horse trappings are meticulously described. The particular forms, rules, and conditions to govern the emprise--in other words, the social structures meant to regulate and contain violence--are also specified, as are the richly symbolic and meaningful theatric trappings and heraldry.

The second part of the book contains some very interesting interpretive essays. Thalia Brero, Mario Damen, and Klaus Oschema detail how the pas d’armes changed over time from its fifteenth-century origins into the nascent state system of the sixteenth century. Anne D. Hedeman and Justin Strugeon look at heraldry and symbolism in the Pas de Samur. Mario Damen and Michelle Szkilnik examine the political and Arthurian literary environment of the 1463 Pas du Perron Fée in held in Bruges. Mariana Viallon discusses the later legacy of the roleplaying from the 1493 Pas des armes de Sandricourt. Alan V. Murray considers the spread of the pas d’armes to early sixteenth century Scotland with the Wild Knight of the Black Lady (as well as the possible racial overtones of the “Black Lady’s” identity). In the sixth and last essay, Rosalind Brown-Grant continues Ruth Mazo Karras’s work in From Boys to Men to extend the notion of the performance of elite masculinity from mere domination to display and conspicuous consumption. Finally, arms and armor expert Ralph Moffat contributes an excellent glossary.

Overall, this is an excellent book, and a much-needed and much-welcomed study of a previously neglected subject.

Kirth Gersen goes shopping

From Jack Vance's sf novel The Book of Dreams.

...Gersen sauntered along Corrib Place, looking into shops, which here affected a special eclat and offered only goods of eclat and distinction and elegance...Gersen paused ten minutes to watch a pair of puppets at a game of chess. Thhe puppets were Maholibus and Cascadine, characters from the Comic Masque. Each had captured several pieces; each in turn, after deliberation, made his move. When one captured a piece the other made gestures of rage and agitation. Maholibus made a move and spoke in a creaking voice:"Checkmate!" Cascadine cried out in anguish.He struck himself on the forehead and toppled backward off his chair. A moment later he picked himself up; the two arranged the pieces and started a new game....

Mexico: The advantages of having a woman as president

Politico covers https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/mexico-president-sheinbaum-presses-charges-after-street-groping-incident/ar-AA1PTFmC?ocid=BingNewsSerphe reaction to the groping of Mexican president Claudia Scheinbaum in the street.

IMAGE: President Sheinbaum at a press conference. She doesn't look like someone you'd want to cross.https://th.bing.com/th?q=Mexico.+Claudia+Sheinbaum&w=120&h=120&c=1&rs=1&qlt=70&o=7&cb=1&pid=InlineBlock&rm=3&mkt=en-CA&cc=CA&setlang=en&adlt=moderate&t=1&mw=247

Some wise words from Umair Haque

Months, nay years ago now, I used to post material from Umair Haque pretty regularly on this blog. He struck me as one of the few commentators who understood how bad the political situation was in the US and had a coherent analysis of the way fascicm worked and was working in America. His insistance on using the word "fascism" probably made him seem a nut. But I found him convincing, as prediction after prediction came true.

I stopped posting his material because I figured that those of my readers who cared what I thought about the issues he covered had got the messaage: read Umair Haque, he'll give you a dose of reality.

The November elections in the US seem to have changed the political landscape. Or have they? Maybe it's time for another dose of reality from Umair. Especially if you haven't read him before.

The organization of Early Medieval (Carolingian and Ottonian) armies

Medievalists.net has published an article by a distinguished historian, David Bachrach. He has written extensively on how Charlemagne and his German successors won their many campaigns by organizing logistics and mastering siege warfare. Nicely illustrated by images from the famous Utrecht Psalter.

AI generates a podcast reviewing my article " Heroic Kings and Unruly Generals: The "Copenhagen" Continuation of Prosper Reconsidered. Florilegium, 6 (1984) , 50–70.

Yesterday an unexpected item showed up in my mailbox: a podcast, based on my 1984 article analyzing an Italian chronicle which preserves unique material from the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries. (The chromicle's connection to Denmark is only the fact that the Danes own it.)

I don't quite know what to think of this. The first notification I got told me that "Our AI generated a professional podcast of your paper."I'm not sure what that means. Certainly a human being working for Academia.edu was involved -- his discussion was quite good. Today I got a comic interpretation of the material and a slide show. These seem to me less useful.

On one hand it's a compliment that a rather old paper of mine should be picked for this treatment, though it is a very useful paper in my not so humble opinion. But Academia.edu seems to expect me to pay and sign up. For what exactly?

Comments welcome.

The 20th Century is a long time ago

This morning I was reading a lecture by Alan Lupack The 2016 Loomis Lecture: Moral Chivalry and the Arthurian Revival. It started out rather slow, describing material I was quite familiar with, but became increasingly fascunating to me as it got into later times, especially late 19th century and early 20th century Arthurian revivals. (The title of the lecture is deceptive; Lupack himself shows that there is always an Arthurian revival, often more than one at the same time.

It struck me reading the section on 20th century material, seeing the 20th century as referring to a time when my grandmothers were young, that the 20th century was a long time ago!

Jack (the real) Vance -- as I see him

Jack Vance -- the sf and fantasy writer, not the guy who is US VP-- was a wonderful writer. He hhad a unique talent. His vast vocabulary, the place names, some of his proper placenanes which were wonderful,made his prose unmistakeable. Most of his characters, too.

One of his more obvious traits was the use of detail: One is seldom in any doubt what a character is wearing, especially what the colors of their costume. Consider this brief passage from The Star King. The action takes place at Smade's Tavern on Smade's Planet, which is entirely inhabited by Smade and his family.

"Will you drink?"

Without waiting for assent he signaled one of Smade's daughters, a girl of nine or ten, wearing a modest white bouse and a long black skirt. "I'll use whiskey, lass, and serve this gentleman whatever he decides for himself".

[two pages later]

Gersen signaled, and young Araminta Smade brought whiskey on a white jade tray, upon which she herself had painted a red and blue floral border.

And that's all we hear about young Araminta Smade! Nothing happens to her, good or bad. She's just part of the background --though I don't think of her as just... She is part of Vance's effort to make his universe real

You should see what he does with landscapes! More on Vance. Yes, Araminta is a real if rare name.

Tambora and the Year without Summer

Link to Substack pictures to come. Here's some striking paintings of the Year Without Summer . Thanks to xtracurriculars for this link.<

Cobalt, Ontario 1931 by Yvonne McKague Housser

Deir el-Medina and The Golden City -- looking at artisan life in Egypt

Material now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge gives us a look at daily life comparable to Pompeii according to experts. This post from ArtNet gives an amazing discussion and some great pics.

Timothy Burke summarizes one aspect of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"

Timothy Burke writes an extensive thought piece on Substack on how Trumpism is possible (Thanks to Brad DeLong for alerting me to this). Burke covers a lot of territory with reference to Graeber and Wendrow's The Dawn of Everything. I'm quoting what Burke has to say about this provocative book in hopes some of my readers will be inspired top read it (or Ibn Khaldun for that matter).

I think we’ve gone beyond reductionist paradigms that saw all such interactions as conquest, imitation, or appropriation, or that were alwaylot s defined by the unequal relationship between cores and peripheries. I like the synthesis proposed recently by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything where they argue that societies within some kind of contact zone sometimes reshape themselves as an answer to another society they’ve encountered, that they amplify or rework their systems and practices as a kind of commentary upon and contrast to a neighbor. For example, in the book, they argue that indigenous societies in Eastern North America intensified their own ideas about economic behavior, political freedom, and social cohesion as a response to their encounter with Western Europeans and their dislike of some aspects of Western European institutions and behavior.

It’s an approach that has some problems. It seems to put us back in the space of a “Tylorian” idea of relatively fixed and separable cultures that are a single coherent text that can be read for a few core ideas that shape everything else (or the Geertzian revision of that concept in looking for ‘thick descriptions’ that read into those opaque underlying cores), rather than think of cultures as having fuzzy boundaries, internal pluralism and contradiction, and considerable dynamism over time. But Graeber and Wengrow do point out that as societies reshape themselves as commentaries upon contrasting neighbors, they push some of their members who don’t care for the redefinition into those fuzzy boundaries and provoke forms of internal pluralism and dissent against such reshaping. There’s also the challenge of how to “read” the text of past societies, especially ones we know so little about: I love the idea of seeing practices, movements, material signs as embodied, experienced forms of political and social philosophy that are as sophisticated or complex as the written texts we normally fall back on, but there’s an inescapable hubris involved in doing that reading from the perspective of our present moment and the ways we read towards a kind of simplistic universalism.

What worries me in the context of thinking about Trump through Graeber and Wengrow’s perspective, however, is that they have a strong tendency to read away from domination, tyranny, violence and empire. That is, they want to restore contingency and variety to premodern human history, and to unshackle it from any form of teleology whatsoever. I’m with them on that goal: centralized states, agriculture, empires and a whole host of other political, economic and social forms have not been one-way inventions that automatically remake societies forever once they first appear. There’s a tremendous amount of evidence that societies switch in and out of sedentary agriculture, foraging, and pastoralism, between urbanism that is not controlled by a central state, centralized administrative states that are not empires or kingdoms, highly hierarchical societies that have no single head or ruler, and so on—that these are not fixed or linear sorts of choices. They also point out that none of these systems are necessarily applicable to whole “societies”—that there are communities where one part of the population lives within one kind of system and the other lives a different way, that are distinct while still living right alongside one another. But Graeber and Wengrow consequently take little interest in past societies which have developed highly regimented agriculture, brutal forms of labor servility, economies and social systems predicated on raiding and conquest, or are ruled by kings and emperors. They are so driven to show that none of this is inevitable or as common as many established perceptions might have it that they don’t really say much about the cases where it absolutely does happen. centralized monarchy next door or disdain the harsh servility of people forced to grow crops, there might also be societies (or at least some portion of societies) that dislike what they take to be the disorder, openness or pluralism of their neighbors and shape themselves to communicate that antipathy.

And here’s where I find myself on the edge of a thought that is a bit outside the comfort zone of a lot of contemporary history and anthropology. It’s pretty common in premodern world history to find that people living in one region who see themselves as the enemies—and victims—of some neighboring society tend to develop exaggeratedly negative caricatures of their antagonists, to see them as the opposite of everything that is good and right. The difference between that and modern forms of alterity is about power and totalization—the people If there are societies that decide that they really don’t like the who have been made into Europe’s “others” have been forced in various ways to live with that remaking. Whereas in a premodern context, it didn’t matter very much to the Scythians if the Greeks imagined them to be barbarians: the Greeks had no power to force that on the Scythians in their home territories and neither group let it get in the way of the practical business they wanted to conduct in the northern Black Sea.

So far, so good. The thought that is outside the comfort zone is that if we follow Graeber and Wengrow into thinking that some societies embed a critique of their neighbors within their own embodied institutions and practices, in an almost-dialectical kind of relationship, then perhaps sometimes some societies embrace and incorporate the negative “othering” of their neighbors to become more fearful enemies.

Contemporary historians are usually dedicated to rescuing past societies that have been depicted in negative ways by sedentary, literate neighbors from the stereotypes contained in the texts that the 19th Century imperial scholars of Western universities read as they learned more languages and developed a more universal perspective on global history. So historians look again at Scandinavian societies in the era of “Viking” raids, at waves of pastoralists moving out of central and east-central Asia up to and beyond the Mongols, at histories characterized as episodes of conquest and imperialism like the formation of the Zulu state under Shaka, and they’ve tried to shake them loose from a lot of preconceptions, to detail the complexity and heterogeneity of those societies and to offer more nuanced explanations of their raids, their conquests, their movements.

But I do wonder whether in some of those histories, there are also episodes of groups—not whole societies, sometimes just military units or raiding bands—who acquired a fairly sophisticated understanding of what their targets and enemies thought about them and decided to play it up to the hilt, to become the goblins and ghouls of a neighboring imaginary. And this maybe goes in more ways than the Western histories of the 19th Century often wrote it—say, various Crusades sacking Jerusalem, Constantinople, Zadar, Ma’aara and Nicaea with grotesque brutality, or more potently, in the savagery of European imperial conquest at precisely that moment. (Clifton Crais’ forthcoming The Killing Age I think will put that front and center of its account.)

So not so much “negative dialectics” in any sense but “negative emulation”, a decision to become the monsters that others believe you to be, to get the better of them.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this thought when I loop back to Trump. If it’s correct to imagine that at times, some groups or societies in conflict with others elect to embody the worst ways they are imagined, the question is whether that’s a short-term or limited performance or whether it gets incorporated into the deepest reservoirs of personhood and consciousness, whether it suffuses everything. That is often what we see as the violence of alterity, that the people who are forcibly made “other” find they can never get away from what the dominant group or people think of them. But if my outside-the-conventional thought has anything to it, and it’s true that sometimes groups and societies agentively “otherize” themselves, choose to inhabit some aspect of their enemies’ negative vision, what happens if that choice becomes so fully inhabited that it is no longer remembered as a positional gambit or situational performance?

I think there are two basic answers. One I’d take from the Muslim scholar and philosopher ibn Khaldun, who described a historical cycle in which pastoralists raid strong sedentary societies and as those societies fall pray to indolence, corruption and internal conflicts, the raiders overwhelm them and become their new ruling elite. At which point they begin to transform towards the institutional and cultural world that they defeated and the cycle starts over. It doesn’t do to take the most simplistic version of this vision at face value but there’s certainly a number of examples in premodern world history that have some resemblance to this dynamic. And in some of those cases, you could also say that the new rulers imported some of their own ideas and culture into the societies they now ruled—but the important thing is that inasmuch as they had internalized ideas of themselves as the fearsome enemy prowling in the wilderness, those ideas melted away once they came in from the cold.

The other answer is that negative emulation, if it exists at all as I’ve described it here, is a disfiguring trap, that it chains the aspiring monsters to a cycle of outrages and violations that don’t even come from them in the first place, that it makes the emulator into nothing more than that imaginative space that’s been reserved for them by enemies, hopelessly inauthentic and perpetually reactive. The monsters might even exterminate their enemies but they’ll be forced to resurrect them over and over again because they’re nothing except the nightmare of another culture, another society, another group now. I think a little about what the journalist George Anastasia has written about the decline of Italian organized crime, the “Mafia”, in part because as the oldest generation of mobsters went to jail, the younger Mafia members found themselves increasingly imitating the characters they saw up on screen in The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos. Many younger mobsters weren’t anything any more but “The Mafia” and as such, they had no autonomy or authenticity, no direction but to live into that representation, and were for that reason increasingly easy for law enforcement to deal with.

If Trump and Trumpism are negative emulators in this sense, people who’ve elected to become the terrors of people they have hated, I suspect their future is going to be more consistent with the latter of these two scenarios. Which means, unfortunately, we will be stuck in here with our monsters, who no longer have any sense of who they were or what they wanted before they chose to be what we most feared, until they exhaust themselves in some fashion. I hope if so that that the air can just go out of their bubble rather than the monsters chasing the full horror of their persona to its most nightmarish ends.

Words of Wisdom from Frank Zappa and Steve Vai

I was idly paging through YouTube shorts when I ran across this piece of an interview with the musician Steve Vai (who I don't know from Adam). Vai reports on something he learned from Frank Zappa.

It ends with a very hard-hitting observation.

See for yourself!