The Duchess came out last year and the plot of the movie seemed to be about some young lady in the 18th century who wears nice frocks and marries some member of the landed gentry and gets upset because she is meant to have babies and he is in charge.

A female friend found all this quite moving, and I must admit I found, not so much the movie itself (which I have no intention of seeing), but rather the reaction to it a bit annoying.

I couldn’t really pin down my basis of my feelings until I saw an article in the Washington Post: Michael Dirda on ‘Mrs. Woolf and the Servants’. A room of one’s own — and someone to clean it. The book examines the relationship between Virginia Woolfe and her servant. Yes she had a number of female servants. Woolfe was a feminist for herself but happy to receive servitude from her fellow women.

!8th century society was established on class based oppression. The life of some frocked minor royal was irrelevant in that system of oppression. In fact she was far, far better off than most; due to her wealth. If she really cared about oppression she would have been campaigning for the working class poor and not for herself on minor issue (gee, her husband had a mistress, how terrible for her, as she sits in her silk gown eating strawberries).

Some things never change…

I was just listening to the BBC program Thinking Allowed which this week was about the history of “gangs”.

The two main gangs discussed are the Scuttlers – youth gangs around Manchester in the late nineteenth century – and the Hooligans – street gangs around London at the same time.

A contemporary report blames the violence of these youth gangs on the corrupting nature of the Theatre, which showed cheap crowd pleasing plays of murder and mayhem.

Its over a hundred years later, and its now TV and gangsta rap, but the old traditions still live on.

Growing up I always saw all these images of “cigar-shaped” rocket ships which I thought kind of quaint because I was used to the “straight as an arrow” Apollo mission rocket ships.

An example is the ship in the Tintin story: “Destination moon”.

Source Wikipedia

But I saw a video of the original Nazi V2 rocket that made me realise where the image came from:

While researching the below post on US pennies, I cam across the odd fact that the Australian dollar was nearly called the “Royal”. With the introduction of decimal currency, it was considered that the name should be changed from the Pound, and while their were no stand-out alternatives the Government decided on the Royal, although public pressure soon turned that decision around (but not before specimen notes had been produced). See this RBA article.

I came across this image of the Nuremberg Rally while watching the new Ken Burns documentary of World War 2. It is a quite amazing site, all those people in a row. And I could not help thinking, with all those people, surely one of them has to go to the toilet, but where do they go?

I read somewhere a few weeks ago about the Chinese attitude to the West being heavily influenced by their experience with the west over the last few centuries.

So I went and looked up the Opium Wars and it becomes reasonably clear how a suspect attitude to the West could develop. In the 19th century the United Kingdom imported a lot of goods from China (not the least China, in order to drink their tea in), but had few reciprocal items to trade. But rather than send straight gold to China for trade, they grew opium in India and shipped that to China with the result that there were a lot of opium addicted Chinese.

In order to deal with this problem, the Chinese proposed to ban the import of opium. The British did not agree to that and sent their gunboats and soldiers into China and defeated the Chinese military, made opium trade legal, forced Chinese to give trade privileges to Britain and to give Britain the area of Hong Kong.

In effect the British sailed up the Yangtze River and forced the Chinese at gunpoint to accept their heroin, anding over their autonomy and sovereignty. You can understand why that experience would make you very wary of handing over control over any of their industries to the West.

The etymology of the terms first rate and second rate is quite interesting. They come from the age of sail warships, when new forms of warships were developed. European warships of the 15th and 16th century started to have “castles” built at both ends of the ship to allow archers to fire down on enemy ships, and these castles were eventually built into the hull leading to ships such as the Mary Rose, carrying cannons along both sides, which could be fired all at once in a “broadside”.

Naval war-fighting changed with the new forms of ships in the 17th and 18th centuries. The tactics of the time were for the ships to sail past one another in a line firing broadsides in and attempt to force back and destroy the enemy. The ships that sailed in these formations were called Ships-of-the-Line. Given the destructive forces involved only the biggest and best ships could sail in the line. The British Navy developed a rating system to describe the ships of the line. The best were the large warships with 100 or more guns on three decks (such as Lord Nelson’s Victory). These were rated first: First Rate. Of course these ships were expensive to build and to operate and smaller and cheaper ships with 90-98 guns were built, known as Second Rate ships.

Hence the terms, First Rate: best quality, Second rate: of lesser quality than First Rate.

I was wandering through wikipedia and I came across these photos of a French town, before the World War One (or at least serious battle) and after a major battle/campaign. As can be seen, so much artillery was fired that the town itself was obliterated. All that remains of the buildings is a discolouration in the soil, although one building (presumably the town church/cathederal) looks to be at least partially standing. This brings home how much artillery was the driving force of the Western Front, and the terrible experience it must have been for the soldiers on the ground. (i cannot of course, find the place in wikipedia where I found them).

I have often wondered why we have Melbourne’s inner city crammed with single fronted homes on exceedingly long and narrow blocks. Someone recently offered the explanation that the local government rates and/or land tax were levied on the frontage of the property. This makes sense, current land taxes are based on the undeveloped value of the property, it is not unlikely that prior to this, a more simple system was used, and block frontage would be easily measurable. The consequence of this is that the blocks developed to be thin and exceedingly long, with long thin houses and equally long and thin back yards.

I think this demonstrates two interesting economic effects. First, government regulation can have a significant effect on the economy. This tax significantly impacted on the nature and design of housing. Second, it demonstrates the fallacy of composition. This fallacy is where one assumes that what is true for the individual is true also for the whole. The classic example of this is attending a football match. In order to see better a person stands up, this works for them, but if everyone stands up, then no one is better off, they may have well keep sitting. In the housing context, it might benefit an individual to narrow their frontage, but if everyone does it it would not have any effect, the government will still attempt to raise the same amount of revenue from the same amount of street frontage, assumable with a higher tax rate per foot.

Watching Iron Chef the other night, the panel of judges included a member of the Japanese lower house.Given the fairly recent introduction of democracy to Japan, it is interesting that they adopted the two house (bicameral) system of parliamentary democracy. It is an interesting display of the reach of cultural institutions. The bicameral system of parliament is a essentially European invention (and particularly British), developed to accommodate the two great realms of power; the aristocracy and church in the upper house and the “new money”, merchant, industrialist, middle-class in the lower house. A structure specific to the cultural setting of the time. Despite this, that particular system of Parliament (and even the terms upper and lower house) have found their way to the institutions of Japan, a country half way round the world and of vastly different cultural development.

George Orwell wrote “Homage to Catalonia” in 1937, when the outcome of the Spanish Civil War was still unknown. It recounts his time living in Spain and fighting with the independent Marxist group, the POUM, against the Spanish fascists, a fight where he was wounded and eventually managed to escape with life (and his wife).

The novel is a matter of fact telling of his short time in Spain, highlighting all the characteristics of this particularly Spanish war: “Fortunately this was Spain not Germany. The Spanish secret police had some of the spirit of the Gestapo, but not much of its competence”. It is told in his own low key, and particularly English middle class style:

“During the May trouble, as I had seen for myself, he had prevented fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. And all they could do in return was to fling him into jail. It was a waste of time to be angry, but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one’s patience”.

It is of course an “of the time” telling of the war, between the Fascists under Franco, and the democratic Republicans, a hodge-podge of anarchists, social democrat, independent Marxists and Russian controlled Communists. As the war progressed the republic came more and more under the sway of the Communists; the anarchists and independent Marxists were increasingly maligned and suppressed. In the geo-political thinking of the Russians, this made sense; they did not want an independent socialist country upsetting the balance of power in Europe.

It is disturbing, even now, to read of the fighting spirit of the trade union members who had spontaneously rushed to the front line, with antique weapons, to defend the Republic, while the communists fought, but also conspired, behind the lines to defeat independent thought and action. Orwell only just escaped with his life when the communist controlled Government banned the independent POUM, arresting their members when they were on leave from the front fighting the Fascists.

And it is in this period that Orwell sees his first distortions of the truth. The papers describe heroic battles that never occurred, failing to mention those that had, describing the loyal POUM as a Fascist fifth column and distorting the truth as required by the masters in Moscow. It is here that the first stirrings of the world of ’1984′ become apparent as the truth, or even basic facts, become slaves to ideology.Despite being written nearly a decade before 1984, the power of propaganda (telling outright lies to support a political motive) becomes apparent. His disillusionment with the mainstream left, and his independent clear thinking mind shines through.

Orwell has been overblown recently as some kind of prophet. Yet the power of his writing, his insistence on writing what he sees, on thinking about issues and keeping an open mind, not to be drawn into ideology or dogma, shines through. This was a period of the clash of the greatest forces in the 20th Century, Fascism and Communism, and this is a view of them up front and personal. At 220 pages, a must read for anyone interested in politics and history.