Sunday West 48

Canon Club #2

Good morning. Firstly, the video of the second Canon Club event is now up, given by Paul Lay on the subject of Richard Wagner.

As I said on the night…

Paul is the Senior Editor at Engelsberg Ideas, and former editor of History Today. He is also the author of an excellent book on Cromwell, Providence Lost, which rather changed my views on the Lord Protector, although I’m not raising that issue with my Irish relatives. (I will post about this book when I have the time.)

Paul is also an opera fanatic. Much to my embarrassment, I know very little about Richard Wagner. I know Ride of the Valkyries, which is the bit with the helicopters from Apocalypse Now, and that he wrote some very long operas and (I believe) helped to popularise the idea that Vikings wore helmets with horns. And that he was supported by Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig, famous for building a fairy-tale castle.

I know about his influence on German nationalism and that he had views that the kids would describe as ‘problematic’. But I know that to real opera-heads Wagner is considered the best, and perhaps most influential….

It was a great talk! I learned a lot.

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Moving to other things, since the past newsletter…

I have written about how politicians love to miss the point, following a horrible murder and alkali attack; I’m still of the view that social media and smart phones are bad for teens, but I don’t think they were relevant in this case.

I wrote about love in the medieval world (free).

I wrote about the problem with Khanism, the divisive form of culture war politics that pretends to be the opposite.

On the strange lure of Russia for conservatives.

Why courage is the most important virtue, following Parliament’s capitulation to the threat of violence.

And on The Zone of Interest, and the colourless men who carried out the worst crime in history.

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I was also interviewed by John Gillam for the Thinking Class podcast. And for the New Culture Forum’s Deprogrammed show.

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Elsewhere, Katja Hoyer on the man who survived Hitler and Stalin.

Many of Erwin’s fellow prisoners were sent to Siberia or murdered outright. But not Erwin. When the Soviets found out that he had been a concentration camp inmate in Germany, they wanted to question him. He was taken to the infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow, which is still in use today – still as a prison and as the headquarters for the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation).

Figuring they didn’t need to bloody their own hands with Erwin, the Soviets sentenced him to deportation to Germany, knowing full well that a Gestapo officer would be waiting on the train for the young communist. So in April 1938, Erwin was once again arrested, this time by the Nazis who flung him into Berlin’s Moabit prison where the former communist leader Ernst Thälmann had been brutally tortured. 

But Thälmann was shot at Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944 (probably on Hitler’s direct orders), while Erwin was once again judged ‘curable’ of his communist follies. Instead of murdering him like so many others, the Nazi government drafted him into the Wehrmacht and sent him to the Eastern Front as a soldier. He survived four long years in a theater of war where over 3.8 million Germans perished, two thirds of all war dead on Hitler’s side. Then he ran out of luck in the very last moments of the war. During the Battle of Berlin, he was captured by the Soviets. 

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In the Telegraph, Madeline Grant on the latest craze sweeping Britain – being really unreasonably loud and antisocial on public transport.

So it happened to me recently. Another day, another goon blasting out his foyer music to the entire carriage. Even if I enjoyed the music, it would be annoying. But I didn’t like the music, I hated it – almost as much as I hated myself for not speaking up about it. “Thud thud thud.” On and on it went. And there I sat, in the same state of apoplexy as everyone else on the coach for the next hour; each of us either too English, or too cowardly, to intervene.

The Friday before last I was at King’s Cross St Pancras station and entered the platform to find that there was music blaring out from what I thought was the speaker system. No, it turned out, someone was just playing incredibly loud music on a large stereo (what was called a ghettoblaster when I was a kid; no idea what they’re called now). No one stopped him, in part because he looked like he’d just been released into the community by some overworked hospital manager.

Getting the train to Kent a couple of weeks back I was surprised to find that two sets of couples opposite me were either conducting phone calls or playing videos on speaker. One couple were quite elderly, whereas this used to be something that only unsocialised adolescents did.

It’s also really notable after visiting Japan, just how poor general civility is now. We need a public information campaign to shame people into behaving; I like the slogan ‘Public transport is not your living room’.

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In Works in Progress, Samuel Watling on the greatest economic reform of all time – in tsarist Russia.

However, even given the acute constraint of state resources, the results on the ground were impressive. From 1906 to 1915, a sizable minority of the population was able to complete the options given to it by the government. By 1915 an area of 12.7 million dessiatine (approximately 140,000 square kilometers, greater than the size of England) had been transferred from communal land tenure to personal property. Slightly under 2.4 million households – 22 percent of total peasant households – had their claims processed and enacted by 1915. Approximately half (1.23 million) went through individual consolidation – people leaving the commune – ​and the other half (1.14 million) went through the consolidation of the whole commune itself.

In this short period, the effect of the reforms on Russian agricultural productivity was significant. Imports of fertilizer sextupled between 1900 and 1912 while domestic fertilizer production doubled in the four years between 1908 and 1912 alone. Large increases were also recorded in the import and production of agricultural machinery. Recent econometric estimates from Paul Castañeda Dower and Andrei Markevich suggest the effect of the reforms was to double land productivity in communes that completed them.

Overall agricultural productivity increased by approximately 12 percent (or 1.9 percent per year) during the period of the reforms. Although not all of this can be directly attributed to the impacts of the nascent reform process, it is worth noting that data from government surveys in 1913 found that agriculturally consolidated tracts had higher levels of productivity than those that had remained communal, with gains of between 5 and 60 percent depending on the crop. By 1913 Russia had become the world’s largest grain exporter.

Pyotr Stolypin was a fascinating figure: 

His method involved personally leading the few soldiers and policemen he had to rebellious towns and villages to break up crowds and settle disputes. This meant defusing situations through a combination of ​authority and intimidation, or, in the words of his daughter, ‘his country gentleman’s knowledge of how to dominate peasants’, which put him in considerable personal danger.

Examples include persuading a would-be assassin to drop his gun by opening his overcoat and challenging him to shoot him in front of the crowd. On another occasion, when confronting an angry mob, a ‘sturdy man’ came up behind him with a club. His response was to throw his greatcoat at the man and order him to hold it. As Stolypin was the governor the armed man instinctively did so, dropping his club in the process. Having disarmed the situation literally and metaphorically, Stolypin turned to the crowd and successfully ordered them to disperse.

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Niall Gooch on citizens’ assemblies.

The problem is that if the authority of Parliament is watered down in this way, it undermines the simple mechanisms of accountability which are meant to be at the heart of the British constitution. At the risk of over-simplification, Parliament – in practice the House of Commons – is supreme within our system, and the Commons, in its turn, must answer to the electorate. Of course, this approach has already come under serious threat in recent years.

Prominent dangers to parliamentary sovereignty include constant judicial review of government decision-making, and the limits placed on legislation by vast and often arbitrary human rights requirements and equality impact assessments. There is also the growing powers of parliamentary standards bodies, which combine quasi-judicial powers of investigation and censure with very weak protections for due process. But citizens’ assemblies would further reduce the powers and prerogatives of MPs. They would blur lines of responsibility and enable cowardly and weak politicians to kick difficult issues into the long grass, by passing the buck to extra-parliamentary bodies with extremely limited mandates.

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Finally, James O’Malley on AI on the Tube.

For example, if a passenger falls over on the platform, the AI will spot them on the ground. This will then trigger a notification on the iPads used by station staff, so that they can then run over and help them back up. Or if the AI spots someone standing close to the platform edge, looking like they are planning to jump, it will alert staff to intervene before it is too late.

In total, the system could apparently identify up to 77 different ‘use cases’ – though only eleven were used during trial. This ranges from significant incidents, like fare evasion, crime and anti-social behaviour, all the way down to more trivial matters, like spilled drinks or even discarded newspapers.

Presumably they can also sense if people are playing music on their phone and some bots can turn up and give them an electric shock. The future possibilities are quite exciting.

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