Winston Churchill loved India but hated Indians, a seemingly anomalous stance which is all too common among imperialists, who tend to disdain inhabitants of coveted lands. It’s worth asking how these divergent strands of Churchill’s thought – his desire to keep India under British rule and his extreme distaste for the real people who lived in that country – coexisted.

In opposition to granting India independence, Churchill once famously declared that “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Yet virtually everything Churchill said about India demonstrates that for him those who lived in India were, quite frankly, beneath contempt.

“I hate Indians,” Churchill once said, “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” On another occasion Churchill said that Indians were “the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans.”

Hindus, Churchill thought, were a “foul race protected by their pollution from the doom that is their due.” (This attitude, common enough among the British ruling class, had far-reaching consequences: it led the rulers of the Raj to try and divide Hindus from Muslims, cultivate an Islamic elite as an alternative to the Indian National Congress, and ultimately to support the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines).

As historian Christopher Thorne noted in his masterful 1978 book Allies of a Kind, Churchill’s ethnic hubris had real consequences on policy, notably in the low priority that was given to famine relief in the 1940s (at least a million Indians starved to death during those years). Tales of hunger and misery in India were often occasions for Churchill and his cronies to make quips. On one occasion, urged to release food stocks to alleviate a famine, “Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.”

Thorne’s summary of how Churchill’s government handled of Indian policy is worth quoting: “It was not simply that these affairs showed up a side of Churchill that was ignorant, ugly and at times vicious… or that they revealed something of the way in which Cherwell approached the sufferings of the coloured peoples he found so distasteful. The Cabinet as a whole, with obvious exceptions such as Bevin, were wont to discuss India’s problems, be they starvation, communal strife, or the country’s economic structure, in a manner which, as we have seen, Wavell for one found appalling in its insouciance.”  

Insouciance is a very good word, suggesting as it does a kind of aristocratic fecklessness.

The Churchill paradox – a desire to rule coupled with a contempt for those ruled, leading to irresponsible governance – is common to many different types of imperialists. Don’t we see something like this in our own time? Isn’t it the case that those who are most eager to extend American power in the Middle East are also the very people who are most contemptuous of living, breathing Muslims? (Mark Steyn and Norman Podhoretz come to mind as examples). And doesn’t this combination of a desire to exercise imperial power fused with a disdain for those ruled lead to a repeated advocacy of policies that are not just wrong-headed but actually feckless, irresponsible, and divorced from reality?

In this sense, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are right to see themselves as heirs to Churchill.

I’m not a fan of Winston Churchill. The man had his virtues and did some good but he was also a militarist (of the type that romanticizes war as a grand adventure), an imperialist, a bungling administrator (Gallipoli being only the most famous of his many botched operations), a racist, and a militant supporter of ruling class interests. Still, reading Pat Buchanan’s new book Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World had the unexpected effect of creating in me some sympathy and affection for the old reprobate British bulldog.

I’ll have more to say about Churchill in some subsequent posts, but in the meantime, my initial take on Buchanan’s book can be found in this Guardian column.

Here is a slightly amended version of the article:

Challenging the Cult of Churchill

The cult of Winston Churchill, although strong among Anglo-American conservatives since the end of the second world war, flourished as never before in the United States after the attacks of 9/11. To show his resolve in the war on terror, President Bush asked the British embassy to supply him with a bronze bust of Churchill, which now comforts the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. Republican leaders like Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani worship Churchill with a devotional intensity that would embarrass a medieval peasant on a pilgrimage.

These political figures pore over Churchillian anecdotes (some of which are as apocryphal as any saint’s tale) in search of wisdom and guidance, and take comfort in the stock phrases of the Churchill legend: the folly of Munich-like appeasement; never surrender; finest hour; blood, sweat and tears. For wartime leaders, the appeal of invoking Churchill is clear, especially if you accept the standard account of his career: he was a scorned Cassandra who accurately prophesied the dangers of Hitler, stood alone as leader against Nazi-occupied Europe in the lonely aftermath of the French defeat and ultimately led his country to a great victory. What leader wouldn’t want to be labelled the new Churchill?

This view of Churchill’s achievement has been so often reiterated that it seems self-evidently true, but Pat Buchanan, long a maverick on the American right and the publisher of the American Conservative, hopes to challenge it in his new book Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World.

Churchill, Buchanan contends, was a disaster for western civilisation. Instead of fighting Hitler, Britain should have followed a policy of “dual containment” keeping out of Europe to let Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia fight among themselves. This policy would have allowed Britain to maintain its empire for generations to come, rather than become a shrivelled post-war welfare state at the margins of the European Union. In sum, Buchanan’s Churchill is an epic failure.

It’s easy to dismiss Buchanan as a crank. His alternative history scenario is built on the type of half-baked speculations that make scholars wary of counterfactual history: What if Napoleon hadn’t attacked Russia? What if Abraham Lincoln had allowed the South to secede? What if Superman had been a Nazi? These are questions for an undergraduate bull session or a pub argument, not serious scholarship.

Laughable as a historian, Buchanan is interesting as an ideological symptom. Buchanan’s thinking on this is hardly a personal eccentricity and reflects the larger worldview of the anti-communist right, both in the distant past and the present. If you listen to Bush and Cheney, Churchill worship seems like an inherit part of conservatism. But the fact is that both in the past and the present, many right-wingers have hated Churchill. Buchanan is both a throwback to an earlier conservatism and perhaps the harbinger of coming trends.

From 1939 to 1940 conservatives throughout the English-speaking world (ranging from Lord Halifax to Herbert Hoover to Robert Taft to HL Mencken to the very young William F Buckley Jr) thought that making war with Hitler was a mistake. They believed, as Buchanan still does, that Britain should have let Germany rule Europe and be a bulwark against communism, which would have allowed the English-speaking world to continue to dominate Africa and Asia. In 1940 Hoover, the former Republican president, was appalled that Churchill was unwilling to accept Hitler’s peace terms. The following year Robert Taft, like Hoover a Republican big-wig, said that he felt “very strongly that Hitler’s defeat is not vital to us”.

Buchanan grew up in an isolationist household, where Charles Lindberg was regarded as a hero for trying to keep America out of the second world war. As Buchanan recalled in his 1988 autobiography Right From the Beginning, his father agreed with the popular late 1930s American adage “Let Hitler and Stalin fight it out”. This sentiment still undergirds Buchanan’s thinking about the second world war.

The dividing line between Churchill and his conservative critics was Nazism and anti-communism. Churchill thought that Nazism was a greater evil than communism. His critics feared communism more, so much that they were willing to tolerate a Nazi-dominated Europe. But Buchanan isn’t just channelling long-dead isolationists. His new book also builds on the work of recent scholars, many of them British conservatives, who take a dim view of Churchill, seeing the roots of Britain’s post-war diminishment in his failed leadership.

As historian John Lukacs, a confirmed Churchill devotee, noted in his 1999 book Five Days in London, the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a school of revisionist historians that included Maurice Cowling, David Reynolds, Sheila Lawlor and John Charmley. Although their works had different approaches and arguments, Lukacs saw them as united by a common theme: “that Churchill had no plan in May 1940 except to keep fighting, hoping that something might turn up (Micawber-like), though he hardly knew what and that Churchill’s obsessive hatred of Hitler may have blinded him, for had he accepted an accommodation with Hitler by 1941 at the latest, the Empire might have been saved.”

Although Buchanan is sometimes dismissed as an Anglophobe, he’s essentially popularising the works of these revisionist British scholars (most of who are conservative Thatcherites). In effect, Buchanan’s book fuses together two mutually contradictory strands of nationalist history. On the one hand, Buchanan frequently evokes the themes of traditional American isolationism, an Anglophobic tradition that argues that England suckered the United States into the two world wars. But on other occasions Buchanan rehearses the themes of English right-wing historians, an often anti-American tradition that contends that Churchill’s attachment to the “special relationship” with the United States led to a radical decrease in British power. Of course, both these intellectual traditions are flawed, but Buchanan’s attempt to combine the two together makes for a very incoherent brew.

The British revisionist school Buchanan relies on is often remarkably feckless. John Charmley, for example, wrote that defeating Nazism was “a great achievement, but it buttered no parsnips”. The moral problems of leaving Europe at the mercy of Hitler are obvious. But there is another weakness in this type of revisionism that is less often noticed. It’s absurd to think that the life of the British Empire could have been extended more than a decade or two. By the 1930s, you already had a full-fledged nationalist movement in India and embryonic stirrings throughout the empire. It’s inconceivable that Britain could have held on as a global power for much longer than it did in the real world. In a nutshell: the second world war was caused in part by Britain’s weakness; the war was not the cause of Britain’s weakness.

Because of the ridiculous way that Bush and Cheney use Churchill to lend a sheen to their own tawdry war policies, it’s tempting to search out an alternative view of the second world war. Alas, the strand of Churchill-bashing indulged in by Buchanan and his revisionist friends is as much a travesty of history as Bush’s invocation of Britain’s finest hour.

As the 1960s sitcom Get Smart makes its way back into popular culture with the release of the film adaptation starring Steve Carrell, it is amusing to note that the series has also had an unlikely impact on legal discourse. In both Canadian and American legal briefs and court rulings, the idea of the ‘cone of silence’ - which never worked on the show - is discussed earnestly and interchangeably with another metaphor with an interesting lineage - ‘Chinese walls.’

Here’s Canada’s Supreme Court in 1990 in MacDonald Estate v. Martin:

“… The courts in the United States have generally adopted the stricter ‘possibility of real mischief’ test. According to this approach, once it is established that there is a ’substantial relationship’ between the matter out of which the confidential information is said to arise and the matter at hand, there is an irrebuttable presumption that the attorney received relevant information. If the attorney practises in a firm, there is a presumption that lawyers who work together share each other’s confidences. Knowledge of confidential matters is therefore imputed to other members of the firm. This latter presumption can, however, in some circumstances, be rebutted. The usual methods used to rebut the presumption are the setting up of a ‘Chinese Wall’ or a ‘cone of silence’ at the time that the possibility of the unauthorized communication of confidential information arises. A ‘Chinese Wall’ involves effective ’screening’ to prevent communication between the tainted lawyer and other members of the firm. A ‘cone of silence’ is achieved by means of a solemn undertaking not to disclose by the tainted solicitor. Other means which would constitute clear and convincing evidence that no improper disclosure has or can take place are not ruled out.”

Here’s to hoping we may see a shoe phone reference the next time a telecom matter is before the court.

Like his friend Michael Ledeen, Edward Luttwak lives in the weird nether-land where scholarship meets espionage and intellectual journalism meets military adventurism. When he’s not writing learned books on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire or crisp essays for the London Review of Books, Luttwak works as a consultant for the various military and police agencies, going so far so to assist in the interrogation of prisoners (always legally, he assures us). My friend and occasionally collaborator Laura Rozen wrote a splendid profile of Luttwak for the Forward, one that captures the contradictions of the man nicely.

Here’s an excerpt:

When we met, in February, the Drug Enforcement Agency was his latest client; Luttwak says he went to Colombia to help arrest and deliver a couple of Mexican drug runners wanted by the DEA.

Luttwak is of course better known as a public intellectual, the author of some 16 books, as well as a forthcoming study on warfare in Byzantium, set to be published next year by Harvard University Press. “We will never be the Roman empire,” Luttwak said, summarizing his thesis. “Bush, the genius, if he’s lucky, will create a situation as in Byzantium, where the different enemies fight each other.” In fact, his two identities have always been intertwined: On a first name basis with the heads of Italian and other foreign government security agencies, Luttwak performs such quasi paramilitary operations — under the vague title of “consultant” — while maintaining a public image as a military historian, thinker and writer, if a frequently (and deliberately) controversial one.

Why is this 65-year-old intellectual — on the editorial boards of Harper’s, Britain’s Prospect and France’s Geopolitique, an emeritus fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — still in the business of arresting fugitives and interrogating drug dealers, I asked Luttwak. It was evident he didn’t even believe in some of the missions he was doing (the drug war is futile, he howled, a fraud, and the heads of the DEA know it’s a fraud). Is it a thrill? Luttwak admitted, that yes, it’s thrilling. He enjoys the physical thrill of it all.

As my Sans Everything colleague A.M. Lamey  has observed, there are certain strands of radical thought, even forms of Marxism, which are surprisingly sympathetic to cultural conservatism. One of the best examples of this tendency is the late historian Christopher Lasch (1932-1994). In works like The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The True and Only Heaven (1991), Lasch was a bracing and far-reaching critic of mainstream American life, in particular the comfortable illusions of liberal thought. As I pointed out in my previous posting, Lasch was particularly effective in dissecting the shoddy way liberals think about foreign policy, their tendency to become entrapped in the snares of militarism and imperialism.

Yet Lasch’s very stance as a radical anti-liberal made him susceptible to his own brand of illusions. When writing about family life he tended to be a nostalgist, celebrating the home as a haven and distrusting all modern attempts to reform domestic life in the name of gender equality. A good example of Lasch’s cultural conservatism is the chapter on late 19^th and early 20^th century feminism in his 1965 book The New Radicalism In America. In criticising these pioneering feminist, Lasch fell back on the cheapest sort of stereotyping, describing them as man-haters motivated by envy.

In one remarkable passage Lasch wrote: “Whatever one thinks of the justice of the feminists’ cause, one has to admit that the envy of men was very pronounced in American feminism. Sometimes it amounted to outright antagonism. The feminists talked a great deal abut the need for a freer and more spontaneous companionship between men and women, but in practice they often seemed to assume a state of perpetual war. Even when the envy of men did not reach the point of hostility – and it is possible to exaggerate the Lesbian and castrating aspects of the feminist revolt – the envy nevertheless remained.”

Especially revealing in this quote is the qualifying clause (“it is possible to exaggerate the Lesbian and castrating aspects of the feminist revolt”). When he wrote it Lasch no doubt thought he was being magnanimous and gallant but in retrospect it’s an amazing example of offhand, unthinking chauvinism.

If there is one thing historians understand, it’s that history does really repeat itself exactly. History is the study of the past in all it’s local and unique particularity. Yet still, some forms of human behavior do fall into patterns, and when people make the same mistakes over and over again, it’s worth asking why.

The New Republic was born in the fateful year 1914, on the eve of the first global war. Throughout it’s history, this magazine, a leading organ of American liberalism, has time and again found itself loudly supporting wars, using progressive rhetoric to defend militarism, only to suffer regrets afterwards.

Here is how The New Republic experience the World War I. At first, they were unsure whether to support the war or not since both sides included autocratic nations (Russia on one side, Germany on the other). But even so, the magazine focused most of its energy on attacking anti-war radicals, caricaturing them as pacifists). As the war progressed, The New Republic started to see it as an opportunity for spreading progressive values both at home and abroad, floating the idea that Russia was on the verge of redemption through a democratic revolution. (As the editors argued in their April 7, 1917 issue, there was a possibility of a “democratic revolution the world over.”) Lining up behind Woodrow Wilson’s interventionist policies, the magazine purged anti-war radicals like Randolph Bourne from their pages. When the war ended not with a flourishing of democracy but a vindictive peace at Versailles, the magazine was filled with regrets and second-thoughts, asking how they had been snookered into supporting an imperialist agenda.

That’s what happened from 1914 to 1919. Yet almost the same script, updated with new names but with very similar dialogue took place from 2003 to 2008. Again The New Republic attacked anti-war writers for allegedly being feckless and irresponsible; again they were snookered by a rhetoric promising a democratic revolution, again they ignored the dangers of militarism and imperialism; again they were shocked at the outcome and came to regret the carnage they helped unleash.

In his 1965 book The New Radicalism in America, historian Christopher Lasch has an excellent chapter on “The New Republic and the War.” Virtually everything he writes about The New Republic in its early days was replicated in recent years. “Faced with questions of which their principals supplied no answers, the editors of The New Republic, like so many ‘pragmatic liberals’ after them, took refuge in the rhetoric of hard-boiled realism, evidently hoping that the outward appearance of tough-mindedness would conceal the flabbiness of their thought,” Lasch writes. “They took particular comfort in ridiculing the pacifists, for whom they professed a fine disdain.”

Lasch locates The New Republic’s errors in their unthinking, vulgar pragmatism, which made them susceptible to calls for activism, even if the results were foredoomed from the start: “It was as if The New Republic upheld activism, internationalism, and commitment not because they promised better results than a policy of non-intervention but because they were somehow desirable in themselves, not as policiees but as attitudes which it was appropriate for political pragmatists to hold.”

The lure of power was also a factor. The magazine wanted to be a player in the world of policy: to influence Woodrow Wilson they had to sign on to his crusade. To be anti-war was to risk being marginal.

I would add one other factor: American liberals are very uncomfortable thinking about militarism and imperialism. Liberals tend to see international relations through the prism of the law: the problems of the world are due to outlaw regimes (with the Kaiser’s Germany or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). What gets lost in this framework is the fact that there are international problems that are caused by unequal power relations among nations, by the fact that the world’s most powerful nations (the United States and its allies) can set the agenda of global politics. It’s not just “rogue states” that cause wars. Unless liberals learn to think about imperialism and militerism as problems, they will go on repeating the mistakes of World War I and Iraq.

Comics were once a gutter art form, barely more respectable than pornography. Now comics are perhaps all too cherished by the establishment, showered with attention by academic studies and museum shows. More than anyone else Art Speigelman is responsible for this shift, thanks not only to his celebrated graphic novel Maus but also his many lectures and essays on comics history.

But even Spiegelman has some misgivings about the newfound legitimacy of comics. As he recently told the Globe and Mail: “The careful-what-you-wish-for thing is, I really like comics’ grittiness and disrepute, their raffish and scruffy qualities. And I don’t really want to see them turned into something that’s so academicized that one can approach them with the same suspicion I used to approach art in my lower-middle class childhood.”

Are comics better off in the gutter? That’s an issue I’ll take up this Friday with three very smart writers (Douglas Wolk, David Hajdu and Hillary Chute) in a panel discussion hosted by the New York Institute For the Humanities as part of an all day symposium on “the growing cultural significance of comics.” For more on the symposium see here

The whole symposium looks very interesting and will have many distinguished guests, including Lynda Barry, Francoise Mouly, Sarah Boxer, Gary Panter, and of course Art Spiegelman.

An evil omen — of that there’s no doubt. After Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hero of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, shoots and wounds a deer while hunting in the West Texas desert, he comes across a trail of fresh blood crossing at right angles the trail of deer blood that he has set out to follow. Looking through his binoculars, he sees a heavy black fighting dog limping away through the sagebrush. The dog glances back, unaware of Moss’s presence and perhaps looking out for a pursuer, and then continues on.

In medieval folklore, a black dog was one of the forms taken by the devil in his wanderings in the world of men; to the English, a spectral black dog was seen as a portent of death, as were the hounds that took part in the ghostly Wild Hunt of Herne the Hunter. In Goethe’s Faust, somewhat amusingly (to modern minds, at least), Mephisto takes the form of a black poodle, while in the 1976 film The Omen, Gregory Peck’s character is attacked by aggressive Rottweilers in the Etruscan cemetary where he has found the body of the jackal (another important member of this canine mythology) that gave birth to his adopted son and future Antichrist.

(spoiler warning) Yet religious symbolism is not the full extent of No Country’s engagement with higher powers. As other reviewers have observed, the psychopathic hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) seems to embody a force that goes beyond the mundane, perhaps beyond even the human. He is both relentless and remorseless, and is motivated by things at least partly beyond our ken. As professional troubleshooter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) explains to the fugitive Moss, “You don’t understand. You can’t make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you. He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He’s not like you. He’s not even like me.”

By the end of the film, Moss is dead and the money has been retrieved by its owners - yet Chigurh pays a visit nonetheless on Moss’s wife Carla Jean, because Moss had earlier rejected a deal that Chigurh had offered: to spare his wife in exchange for the money. Keeping her dignity, Carla Jean struggles to understand Chigurh’s reasoning:

CARLA JEAN: … You got no cause to hurt me.
CHIGURH: No. But I gave my word.
CARLA JEAN: You gave your word?
CHIGURH: To your husband.
CARLA JEAN: That don’t make sense. You gave your word to my husband to kill me?
CHIGURH: Your husband had the opportunity to remove you from harm’s way. Instead, he used you to try to save himself.
CARLA JEAN: Not like that. Not like you say.
CHIGURH: What’s done can’t be undone.

It is scenes like this one that has lead reviewers to see Chigurh as a metaphor for God, or Satan, or evil, or the Furies. Even Fate itself: when Chigurh flips a coin for the life of the proprietor of a gas station, he seems to be the agent of the man’s destiny. “You know what date is on this coin?” he asks. “Nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it.” Later, talking with Wells as he points his shotgun at his chest, he seems more like a philosopher-judge: “Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Wells, seeing his life about to run out, is in no mood for reflection. “Do you have any idea how goddamn crazy you are?”

God, Fate, philosopher-judge. Yet when Chigurh pulls a coin from his pocket, offering to allow Carla Jean’s life or death to hinge on this trivial tool of randomness, the young woman sees through Chigurh’s grand metaphors and points a finger at the human being underneath:

CHIGURH: Call it.
CARLA JEAN: No. I ain’t gonna call it.
CHIGURH: Call it.
CARLA JEAN: The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.

Chigurh’s response, “I got here the same way the coin did,” seems weak and posed by comparison with Carla Jean’s simple statement of truth and moral accountability. At root, Chigurh’s image — both his fidelity to his obscure but lethal principals and his unsettling ruminations on fate, inevitability, and chance — is nothing more than a vanity. Far from immortal or godlike, in the movie’s penultimate scene Chigurh is hit and severly wounded in a fluke car accident. Could have been anyone. Happened to have been him.

Vanity plays a similar role with No Country’s other male characters. Moss, who is just a welder, believes that he can outwit a drug cartel, a hired assassin, and the police. “Llewelyn would never ask for help. He never thinks he needs any,” Carla Jean tells Sheriff Bell not long before Moss is killed. Carson Wells, a former colonel who served in Vietnam, is certain that he can eliminate the “loose cannon” Chigurh. “He killed three men in a motel in Del Rio yesterday. And two others at that colossal goatfuck out in the desert,” the American businessman who hired Chigurh explains to Wells, whose response is relaxed and confident. “Okay. We can stop that.” But in the end, Chigurh kills Wells without even a fight.

The final and most profound vanity is Sheriff Bell’s. As a lawman with old-time principles, he is appalled at the violence around him, and he spends much of the movie commenting sadly on what he perceives to be a slide into moral anarchy, one he feels he should be able to stop. His pursuit of Moss and his witnessing of Chigurh’s crimes push him into despair and retirement. Yet his visit to his Uncle Ellis, a former policeman crippled in the line of duty, provokes an unexpected lecture about humility. Ellis tells him of his Uncle Mac’s murder in 1909 by seven or eight Indians, “Shot down on his own porch there in Hudspeth County.”

ELLIS: …What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.
BELL: Most don’t.
ELLIS: You’re discouraged.
BELL: I’m… discouraged.
ELLIS: You can’t stop what’s comin. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. …That’s vanity.

You can’t stop what’s comin. Moss couldn’t stop the Mexicans, though he thought he could. Wells couldn’t stop Chigurh, though he thought he could. Chigurh couldn’t stop the truck at the crossroads. And Sherriff Bell couldn’t stop any of this.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
- William Shakespeare, King Lear

For those of you interested in the rather big question of how concepts like East and West have evolved, and how such abstractions have influenced global history and continue to influence the politics of our day, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East & West is very much worth reading. Here’s a snippet from my recent review of it in the Spectator:

There is much to admire about Pagden’s book. His breadth of knowledge across two and a half millennia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive, and he introduces the reader to a series of fascinating thinkers and travellers: Herodotus, Aelius Aristides, St. Augustine, Constantin-François Volney, John Stuart Mill. He also displays a clear-eyed awareness of how myths are created and sustained. The battle of Lepanto, in which the Venetians and Spanish defeated the Ottoman navy, ‘was hailed far and wide across Europe as a new Actium, a new Salamis,’ he writes. But ‘the analogies were, of course, entirely empty . . . The Spain of Philip II was hardly less despotic than the Ottoman Empire and in many respects was a good deal more so.’ As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary.

Which is why it is so surprising to find Pagden’s frequently long stretches of good sense undermined by sweeping simplifications…

As you can tell from that last sentence, I do think that despite its many merits the book is far from flawless. In fact, its flaws are one of its most interesting attributes, as they reflect, I believe, the very mentality that leads inevitably to the division of the world into what we think of as a progressive West and a stagnant East.

Read the whole review and let me know if you agree — particularly if you’ve already read the book itself. And for an additional perspective on Pagden’s book, I’d recommend John Gray’s excellent and elegant analysis of it in the March issue of Literary Review.

A page from John Stanley’s Melvin Monster series.

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There are not many cartoonists who have claims to greatness; perhaps a dozen or a score. Of this elite group, the least known to the general public and most underrated even by the cartooning cognoscenti is John Stanley (1914-1993). To the extent that he’s remembered at all, Stanley is known as the writer for the Little Lulu comic book series published Dell Comics. Stanley worked on the series from 1945 till around 1961 but during his long tenure at Dell worked on many other titles, ranging from characters created by others (Tubby, Nancy, Andy Panda) as well as characters he himself invented (the horror-spoof Melvin Monster, as well as teen comics like Dunc and Loo, Thirteen, and Kookie).

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Fortunately we seem to be going through a small John Stanley renaissance right now. Dark Horse has released an 18-volume series reprinting the first decade of his Little Lulu work while Drawn and Quarterly has announced a new series that will reprint the books where Stanley worked on his own characters (Melvin Monster, Dunc and Loo and the other teen books). The Drawn and Quarterly series is especially exciting because this work is among Stanley’s best and the series as a whole will be designed by longtime Stanley admirer Seth (Seth’s graphic novel Wimbledon Green contains an extended homage to Stanley.)

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For the uninitiated, one way to describe Stanley’s work is to compare him to his celebrated peer Carl Barks (1901-2000), who worked for Dell comics during roughly the same period as Stanley. Like Stanley, Barks mainly worked on other peoples characters (most famously Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie) but also managed to come up with is own cast as well (Uncle Scrooge and the many other denizens of Duckburg came from Barks). Working within the constraints of children’s comics Barks and Stanley both managed to do stories that were surprisingly sophisticated, even sly and satirical.

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But having read both Barks and Stanley, I’ve come to a heretical conclusion: that Stanley was a much greater writer than Barks. Compared to Stanley, Bark’s characters had a very narrow emotional register: Donald is capable of anger, shame, frustration and ambition; his three nephews are occasionally disobedient but mostly models of competence; Uncle Scrooge is a miser redeemed by his passionate attachment to what he’s earned. The more minor characters operate out of an even smaller behavioral range: Gladstone Gander’s laziness, for example.

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At first glance, it might seem that the Little Lulu cast is suffers from a similar problem: Lulu is a do gooding busy-body; Tubby a showboat who loves attention; Alvin an annoying pest. Yet as you read more of the stories, you start noticing that there are all sorts of emotional shadings that make these characters more complicated. For example, for all their bickering Tubby and Lulu really are friends and enjoy each others company. They miss each other when separated. Nobody in the Barks universe seems to have this sort of affection: the nephews worry about Donald when he’s in trouble, but don’t really seem to care for him or need him. To use economic language, everyone in Barks is a profit-maximizer, out to better themselves (either by gaining riches like Scrooge or Junior Woodchuck merit badges like the nephews).

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The nephews in Barks don’t seem like real kids at all: they are super-competent (much more-so than Donald) and have few fears. By contrast, the Stanley kids have some of the real anxieties that are common to all children: the nervousness that comes from living in a universe controlled by bigger, more capricious creatures (adults). I’ve been particularly struck by the stories where Lulu or Tubby have nightmares: Stanley had a genuine knack for unfolding the crazy, inexorable logic of dreams, where one embarrassing situation piles on another until you feel completely humiliated.

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Finally, Stanley was smart about gender in way that Barks doesn’t even approach. Many of the Lulu stories involve a long-running feud between the girls and boys of the neighborhood. The bluster of the boys as they try to preserve their masculine enclave (“No girls allowed”) is mocked with a nice light touch. But the boys, especially Tubby who dreams of being a ladies man, also want to be admired by the girls, giving the stories an added ironic edge. By contrast, in Barks the women tend to be either harpies, hags, sex-pots or gold diggers. (Grandma Duck is a little more gentle, but only because of her age). In a nutshell, Barks shared in the larger cultures anxiety about feminine power whereas Stanley critiqued the fear of girls. Lulu was something of a proto-feminist, as my friend Gail Singer once argued, and much admired by prepubescent girls in the 1940s and 1950s for her spiritedness and independence.

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For all these reasons, I’d say Stanley was a better writer than Barks. The one area where Barks has an edge is in the art. Stanley usually wrote and the the initial layouts for his stories, but had other artists do the finished pencils and inks. Drawing his own stories, Barks’ pictures had an expressive sparkle that the Lulu stories lack. But this complaint isn’t true of all of Stanley’s work. When Stanley was drawing his own work, as in Melvin Monster, the cartooning really took off.

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John Stanley is due for a major reappraisal and I think the new Drawn and Quarterly reprints will make many readers newly appreciate this great cartoonist.