Holiday reading

[ewx]

Surrender: How British industry gave up the ghost 1952-2012 (Nicholas Comfort)

A history of post-war British industry. The narrative history given by the book is interesting enough but in places leaves the protagonists’ motivations mysterious: at more than one point management are said to “lose interest” in some product or other, with little explanation of why they might have done so, making it hard to judge whether it was a rational decision at the time (a reasonable question to ask no matter how foolish it might have proved in retrospect).

The underlying theme of course is the decline of British industry, something that Comfort argues wasn’t inevitable, with poor decisions by governments, business leaders and unions all contributing.

Two Sides of Hell - They Spent Weeks Killing Each Other, Now Soldiers From Both Sides of The Falklands War Tell Their Story (Vince Bramley)

The author is a Para who took part in the Battle of Mount Longdon, a key engagement in the Falklands War. Subsequently he interviewed both colleagues and Argentine soldiers to get their various experiences of the war in general and this battle in particular. The accounts are personal, detailed, fascinating and absolutely not for the faint-hearted.

The Argentine army seems to have treated its soldiers atrociously; their treatment, training, equipment and supplies were largely dreadful. That doesn’t seem to have stopped them putting up a fierce resistance. The Paras mostly had it better but still had plenty to complain about - a point made more than once is that the Argentine troops seem to have had much superior boots (no small matter when your job is to walk across East Falkland and then up a hill for a fight). Post-war treatment of both sides’ soldiers seems to have been very poor.

Them (Jon Ronson)

A journalist spends time with extremists. Omar Bakri is a contradiction-ridden Muslim fundamentalist; somehow every bit of racial hatred is a joke, or someone trying to discredit him, or otherwise not his fault. David Icke is convinced that the great and good are secretly lizards; Canadian anti-racists are convinced that this is code for there being a Jewish conspiracy. (They’re probably wrong; Icke really does mean lizards.) Then there’s the KKK man trying to clean his image. You get the idea…

There turn out to be a common theme to the thinking of quite disparate brands of extremist: that there is a Secret World Government, under Jewish control of course, plotting a New World Order - and that this is called the Bilderberg Group. To Ronson’s surprise the Bilderberg group turns out to be real; his efforts to infiltrate it (in somewhat unsavoury company) lead to some hair-raising experiences.

(These days the Bilderberg Group appears to have a website which seems far too prosaic to be a hoax. “Secret World Government” is going much too far though as Denis Healey admits to Ronson, it’s not without occasional influence.)

The Last Slave Market (Alastair Hazell)

An account of the last days of the east African slave trade, and the low-key but persistent campaign to understand and destroy it by John Kirk, a British official stationed there in the C19th. Trained as a doctor Kirk went exploring with Livingstone (who seems to have been completely insufferable) before becoming the medical officer at the British consulate in Zanzibar. Becoming after a while the acting British consul on the island he gained the trust the locals and spent years meticulously documenting the activities of the slavers, powerful to do anything else in the face of the indifference of his superiors. When the political winds in Britain finally shift the first clumsy attempt to force the local sultan to change course with them foundered, but Kirk was able to use his knowledge of local politics to but them back on course. A detailed and interesting read.

Misadventure in the Middle East: Travels as Tramp, Artist and Spy (Henry Hemming)

Hemming and friend paint their way across the middle east, receiving varying mixes of welcome and suspicion and meeting a wide range of interesting people. No actual spying, but they’re mistaken for Western spies, Islamic extremists, etc.

In The Shadow Of The Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World (Tom Holland)

An attempt to put current research into the earliest days of Islam into an accessible form. After a big chunk of background information Holland gets into the credibility of the traditional story and what may be said with any certainty about the reality. Much is discarded; what is left is that Mohammed did exist and wrote the Quran, but that much else attributed to him has more to do with much later political arguments. The geography is uncertain, but Holland argues for a location much further north than the traditional story (albeit retaining a role for Medina). Fascinating stuff.

German: Biography of a Language (Ruth H. Sanders)

An account of the development of the German language, starting with ancient Germanic languages and their precursors and ending in the present. Adopts the interesting strategy of resolving the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses for the PIE homeland by picking both. This is mostly the history of significant and influential people and events in the development of the language rather than detailed unpicking of phonological and grammatical changes, and entirely suitable for a general reader. The Kindle version is let down by bad OCR and poor or absent proofreading (most instances of italic h is rendered as b).

Comments

Two sides of hell

[em788.livejournal.com]

Re your comments about the Argentinian army, Lizzie Collingham in The Taste of War, World War Two and the Battle for Food showed that looking after soldiers, even their basic needs like that for food, wasn't deemed necessary by many armies. I was interested in the fact that the Japanese army, at that time, had no messes for soldiers. Instead they were either issued with rice and expected to cook it themselves, or with nothing and expected to live off the land, cultivating it themselves if necessary. In the infamous Japanese concentration camps, the guards were often only marginally better fed than the inmates.

Re: Two sides of hell

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Napoleon famously understood that one, but it’s amazing how many generals seem not to. IIRC from other accounts the Argentine army did have good supplies but neglected to get them from Port Stanley to the front line; at any rate Bramley’s book has multiple accounts of Argentine conscripts sneaking back to Stanley to steal food, go through bins, etc.

[gerald_duck]

I bought Them and first read it before 2001-09-11; those events certainly put a different complexion on the chapters about Islamic extremists. From various other sources, I had already heard of the Bilderberg Group and had no doubt it existed. The only question — now, as then — is what kind of power it projects. I suspect quite a lot, actually.

(Another group that definitely exists and of which I'm somewhat suspicious is SMOM, but last time I looked their membership fee was a "nominal" $50,000 per annum, plus character references from two senior Catholic clergy. I'm not sure he could reailstically have infiltrated that one…)