Tag Archives: history

The Hundred Years War on Palestine – A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017

Starting with early Zionist writings, Rashid Khalidi takes the reader step by step through the intricacies of Israel’s founding and expansion – and the parallel displacements of the families which once called the same ground their home (aka, the ‘non-Jewish residents’, to those by whom the label ‘Palestinians’ is taken as an affront). No doubt there are some who will say his history is biased – despite being heavily referenced and filled with quotes from actual participants and documents – but then, what historian’s account is not shaped by their education and values?

The overall impression one gets from reading The Hundred Years War… is of a disorganized and unsophisticated populace whose interests have repeatedly and consistently been subordinated by stronger forces to those of the Jewish persons who chose to emigrate to the region starting in the late 19th century for the purpose of establishing a nation of, by and for Jewish people. It further claims that the colonial powers with the most control in those parts chose to favor the Zionists for a variety of geopolitical reasons, some about the Jewish people, some not, but which they hoped conveniently to sweep under the same geographic carpet.

After recounting events from 1917 to 2017, Khalidi (writing sometime between 2017 and 2020), completed his history on a note of strained optimism. Admitting that the year 2017 “… might seem an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians and declare victory,” he cautioned that “It is not likely to be quite so simple.” In explanation, he offered the possibility that shifting popular opinion around the world combined with a U. S. government tight-focused on Mr. Trumps avowed ‘America First’ reorientation might “allow Palestinians and others to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another.” Despite generations of poverty and virtual imprisonment in their ghetto territories, despite Mr. Trump’s obvious sympathies toward Netanyahu and his methods (which are after all, ones Mr. Trump would dearly love to emulate in dealing with any who do not genuflect to him) Khalidi at that time held out a slender hope that the balance of events might shift just enough to allow the non-Jewish inhabitants of the contested lands some form of self-determination and self-rule.

Reading today, we know that the years since 2017 have not been kind to that hope. The bright promise of 2011’s Arab Spring petered out, leaving autocracy the rule and cutthroat capitalism the guiding principle for much of the Middle East. Despite Biden’s election in 2020, progress toward any just solution was impeded by the fact so many interested parties bought the line that Jared Kushner’s so-called Abaham Accords meant peace was fully under way, rather than seeing them for the callous money-for-silence racket they actually represented.

Most tragically, the brutal Hamas attack on Israel beginning October 7, 2023 dashed whatever hopes remained by giving Netanyahu and his conservative buttresses the perfect pretext for what they may have wanted all along – the virtual elimination of a non-Jewish ‘people’ in the Palestinian region, paving the way for total and permanent Israeli control of all the lands once referred to as Palestine. Even avoiding the wilder conspiracy theories,* it is still possible to say that Israel has since taken full advantage of the attack as justification to bury any possible path to Palestinian self-determination. The U. S., far from becoming less of a player, has been drawn by Mr. Trump’s greed and ego into proposing a ‘Peace’ plan which is anything but, consisting of removing the non-Jewish indigenous people while his cronies rebuild their homeland (at significant profit) into a luxury resort wherein, if the original inhabitants are allowed to return at all it will be only to fill dead-end service jobs in the venture-capitalist’s high-dollar playground by the sea.

For over one hundred years, The Hundred Years War on Palestine… shows us, repression has generated pushback, military tactics have generated militant responses and violent repression has been met with more violence. There is, unfortunately, little reason to imagine that cycle will stop now – unless the result of Mr. Trump’s ‘Peace’ plan is that there will simply are no longer any ‘Palestinians’ in Palestine to remember that their ancestors once occupied those lands. In that case, this book may well be crucial in reminding future generations of how they were disappeared, and why, and by whom.

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible –and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that considers the enormity of what the U.S.A’s current leadership may cost our nation, and how even tragedy of that magnitude may yet spawn new possibilities for the future. It is currently being serialized and you can be among the first to read its opening pages here by opening the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus.’

* Among the conspiracy suggestions I’ve read are: Did Israel (and Netanyahu specifically) allow/encourag the Gulf States to provide many millions in funds to Hamas over the years because that would keep the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and other factions at one another’s throats, preventing the PA from unite the populace and so becoming more effective at dealing with Israel? Was it not obvious to Isreal and the U. S that the Abraham Accords, by leaving the Palestinians virtually no peaceful means of advancing their legitimate interests, would result in the most radical among them resorting to non-peaceful means? Did Israeli leadership in fact turn a blind eye to warning signs leading up to the Oct 7 attack because they were willing to risk some losses in order to have a pretext for their desired cleansing and achievement of the greater Zionist vision? And, if none of those claims are true, why has Netanyahu never allowed any substantive inquiry into the intelligence failures surrounding Oct. 7, when his entire administration is predicated on the claim that he and only he can keep Israel safe from exactly that sort of attack?

Age of Revolutions – Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Leave a reply

In the historical/political realm, the word ‘revolution’ is commonly applied to a singular event of momentous change. In the realms of physics and mechanics, as Fareed Zakaria reminds us early in this very timely political history, ‘revolution’ means movement of an object or a system around its center, in which any point other than that exact center moves in a circle, initially getting farther away from where it once was but eventually returning to that same point before repeating the cycle.

With that in mind, the author cogently and persuasively recounts several significant revolutions of the past 500 years, considering each as a cycle driven by some changed circumstances (new knowledge, new inventions, ravaging disease, etc.) and shaped by human choices (often with crucial contributions by extraordinary individuals). Most importantly, he points out how in each case, the great upheaval we tend to best remember was followed by counter-revolution, a complimentary (in the geometric sense, that is, not the conversational) effort by those not in favor of that revolution’s effects to roll back the cycle of history.

A second crucial point of Zakaria’s is visible in his choice of ‘revolutions’ on which to focus: not only the political (England’s supposedly ‘Glorious Revolution,’ France’s admittedly horrific one) but also technological, economic and social revolutions. Innovations in navigation and ship building lead to wider trade which brings different cultures into contact, at the same time it finances urbanization and thus greater education and innovation. Industrialization creates new occupations and allows leisure for intellectual pursuits while also allowing wealth to be generated with less reliance on slavery, conquest or serfdom. The printing press disseminates knowledge faster and wider than ever before, fostering ideals of personal choice and expectations that government should be a protector of freedom rather than an instrument of domination. Paper and print in turn are overtaken by an electronic information revolution leading – well, we’re not yet sure where this one is taking us.

Less bloody than overt political ‘Revolutions’, it is arguably these knowledge revolutions which played the greatest role in enabling most humans today to live healthier, more comfortable and perhaps more satisfying lives than any who came before us, even as they present our greatest challenges for the future.

That’s the bulk of the book as finished in late 2023, and it’s an engrossing and valuable analysis. Given how long it takes for even a veteran author’s work to navigate the publishing gauntlet, though, Zakaria has added an Afterword composed in the wake of Mr. Trump’s 2025 re-ascent to the highest office in our land.

This crucial update begins by recounting China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’(1966-1976), a backward-facing assault on what Mao perceived as the threat of modernization and ‘liberal’ thought among his subjects. Tellingly, the excesses and destruction of Mao’s minions soon led to their own counterrevolution; an opening up and partial shift toward capitalism and entrepreneurism resulting in tremendous economic progress for the people of the PRC (though far less on social fronts). This history serves as a lamp under which Zakaria examines the USA’s current leadership and direction, bringing to mind another observation about ‘revolutions’ in classical mechanics: that when a revolving object or system is simultaneously moving along a larger axis – a wheel, say, revolving around its axle as a cart moves along a road, or humankind’s cycle of innovation/reaction/regression/innovation as it moves along the axis of time, for another – what results is not an endless repetition of the same events, but a sine curve of events rising up and then sinking down before beginning to rise up again. At any given moment, in fact, some specific parts of the revolving system are moving ‘forward,’ others rising up or dropping down and some are even, for an equal moment, moving backward, despite the entire system continuing its overall progress along its axis of road or time.

Do not mistake one moment’s regression for permanence, Zakaria’s text reminds. Humanity throughout known history has been incessantly creative and innovative in seeking betterment. For all recorded history, despite individual points upon civilization’s wheel moving upward, downward or backward, the overall motion of us all has been forward, in the direction of greater equality, greater freedom and greater physical wellbeing for more and more of us. If we can avoid the greatest catastrophe of total self-destruction, there is every reason to believe that future revolutions of time’s wheel will see us our fitful history continuing to move in those directions.

A reassuring conclusion in this very daunting moment…

P. S.: E Unum Pluribus is a new novel that considers where our current divisiveness may lead in the near term, and how even tragic events can spawn possibilities for better futures. It is currently being serialized at robinandrew.net and you can be among the first to read its opening pages there in the post titled ‘E Unum Pluribus.’

If you like what you read here or at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible – and consider subscribing: it’s totally free!

Change your party – change the future!

Leave a reply

E Unum Pluribus – a tale of The Big Diss, imagines the United States of America dissolving into chaos because its elected representatives ceased to work together for the common good. While the novel is fiction, its premise is plausible, which begs the question – what can an individual do to avoid such a tragic outcome?

Plenty of folks more knowledgeable than I have commented that we’ve all gotten so isolated into our own bubbles – republicans/democrats, conservatives/liberals, red states/blue states, urban/rural, blue collar/elitist; however one summarizes it – that it’s easy to dismiss everyone on ‘the other side’ as unreasonable, unapproachable, unsalvageable or worse.

If (like me) you fear there is some truth to that description, and if (like me) you think forever encouraging division is a dead end – if you’ve ever felt the impulse to disagree when you’ve heard someone say the ‘X’ party is corrupt and they’re all a bunch of ‘z#fqt*^k!s,’ – how about switching your voter registration: to the X Party!

WTF?

First off, once you switch, you will know for certain that there is at least one reasonable person in the X Party – one grain of sand to begin a beachfront of unification.

Second, you may (depending on your state) gain the opportunity to vote in the X party’s primary and improve the chances of their most reasonable candidate. If enough of us do that, we could all have a better set of candidates to choose between in the actual election, instead of one we cannot stomach and one we can support if we have to, but only by holding our collective noses.

Third, although there is no need for any else to know about your switch, should you ever hear someone thoughtlessly badmouthing either party, you might choose to respond by pointing out your agreement or disagreement “even though I’m a registered X!” A single brick pulled out of a wall can improve communication between the two sides.

For whatever it’s worth: I switched to ‘the other party’ over a decade ago. Since that time, I have found myself much more open to hearing ‘other party’ statements and proposals. I certainly do not dismiss all members of my new party out of hand – I am one of them, after all! And I still do not always agree with their (our?) positions, but I feel obliged to at least listen, and much less resistance to acknowledging when a representative of my new party has proposed something worthwhile or productive.

Changing your party doesn’t mean voting for candidates you don’t support. It does mean choosing a future where each side is not so committed to smashing and trashing the other side that it’s virtually impossible to accomplish anything constructive.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people should not be a cage-fight; it should be – and it can be – a mission in which we all share, together.

Red Gold, Alan Furst

Leave a reply

Through half a dozen novels I’ve read since 2014, Furst has never disappointed. In a deceptively quiet voice he portrays the complexity of life in situations too often cartooned as ‘dramatic’, ‘heroic,’ or ‘epic.’ Heroes are not sprung from the loins of goddesses, he shows us, but grown from the soil of ordinariness, seeded by terrible circumstances, watered by relationships with other decent human beings and nourished by the force of life itself as they seek the paths which will allow them to go on for another day, a week or if they are very lucky, even longer.

For Red Gold, we travel in the company of one Jean Casson, a Parisian film producer trying to survive under the Nazi occupation. Having once been picked up by German intelligence and escaped their clutches, he must now hide in plain sight, growing a mustache and dressing poorly as he adopts a false in hopes of not being recognized contacts from his old life. Learning to watch in every direction at every moment Casson, who is himself no socialist, drifts into contact with Communist resistance fighters, directed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union. They in turn find his character and connections useful, loosely employing him as liaison to other factions – free French disruptors, conflicted Vichy collaborators and anti-Communist nationalists partially directed and intermittently supported by the Allies’ military for their own ends. All of these, and also the Nazis, of course, are quite willing to sacrifice any individual at any time, if it serves their particular ‘greater purpose.’

As always, Furst paints a convincing and absorbing picture of life under occupation: the drabness, the cold, shortages and unexpected moments of plenty. Casson’s inner voice is witty enough to entertain and resourceful enough to keep him and the reader out of the worst trouble, at the same time he manages to find enough minimalist romance to leaven the despair. These characters have no foreknowledge of how the war will turn out; at any moment this depressing moment in history may take their life and so define it – a tragedy deeper and more painful than the destructive result of any brilliant explosion or dramatic car chase.

Life goes on, even under the heavy hand of war, and as much as some persons may fight for glory or principle, what most really want is simply to keep on living, with perhaps a bit of food, a sip of drink, a smoke or a hint of love to make it worth the effort.

Definitely an author to return to, and with around fifteen novels focused on the war years in Europe (published between 1988 and 2019 and collectively referred to as ‘The Night Soldiers series’) there’s plenty of opportunity to keep Alan Furst on the shelf.

(Note: Furst’s The World at Night (1996) shares a common plot and protagonist with Red Gold, so other readers may benefit from reading that volume first. His three earliest novels, published in ’76, ’80 and ’81, concern drugs and crime in the U. S. I’ve not sampled them but hope one day to do so).

My own latest novel is currently being serialized on this site. You can read the first installment in the recent post titled E Unum Pluribus.

If you like what you read here at robinandrew.net, please share any posts as widely as possible, and consider subscribing – it’s totally free!

MAGA’s Great Replacement Fantasy (Delusions of the popu-lost)

Leave a reply

By now many observers have noted Mr. Trump’s tendency to accuse his detractors of whatever sin he himself is engaged in. Those observations suggest some thoughts around the Great Replacement Theory which, in Trumpian usage, holds that Democrats are intentionally perverting democracy by opening our sacred borders to untold millions of immigrants (who just coincidentally tend to be black, brown and/or from ‘shithole’ countries not part of the Anglo-European heritage which we are now being told defines true Americans).

Thought number one: acknowledging that Mr. Trump won the election in 2024 and so is legitimately occupying the Oval Office, he still received fewer than half the votes cast,* an inconvenient truth which makes one wonder if perhaps there is a hidden thread connecting several of his administration’s current priorities.

To whit: contrary to the populist image their leader loves to act out, he and any thoughtful members of his court must be aware that theirs is a minority faction and so will never be able to hold power by democratic means. Unable even to rely upon their slender majorities in Congress to do their bidding, they know they cannot govern by legislation (as the Constitution intends) but must rely almost exclusively on Executive Orders, Presidential Determinations, Proclamations, administrative directives by their chosen technocrats, petty prosecutions and the like – despite the dubious validity or effectiveness of many such.

Second, since he and they are unwilling to adjust their policies to the beliefs of the voting majority, they choose instead to speak and act as if the voting majority itself is invalid, tilted toward ‘radical’ outcomes by the presence of millions of non-citizen immigrants. If – goes the fantasy they imply to their base – the administration can eliminate enough of those ‘illegals’ through holding-camps, deportation, self-deportation, remigration or whatever other terms they come up with next, then the voters who are left will constitute their dream of a majority MAGA electorate. That hope energizes their base and recruits enforcers for ICE and other agencies, but unfortunately for MAGA, their inability to produce any credible evidence of voting by non-citizens in numbers that would make any difference in any election at any level demonstrates the fallacy of such hope. Illegal immigrants have never swung actual voting so even their complete extermination would not affect any future outcome. The pro-Trump minority is not democratically viable* and his power can only be ensured by non-democratic means.

Which explains the Administration’s doubling-down on tactics to frustrate the democratic will. Demands for state gerrymandering, discouragingly cumbersome voter ID requirements, restrictions on drop-boxes, voting locations, hours or mail-in options, false accusations of voting machine irregularities, placement of threatening ‘monitors’ at election sites, these and many other strategies are designed to deter enough voters to ensure MAGA victories whether or not the majority of eligible voters want them or, in the worst case, to provide excuses to override the true verdict when it proves they do not.

One can even interpret MAGA’s recent call for Americans to have more children as a supply side complement to these strategies. Refuse to naturalize any but the wealthy and pale at the same time the MAGA faithful produce more and more purebred American babies (who will, presumably, be groomed by their parents to vote the ruling party’s ticket from birth) and they might just turn their minority into a real majority – in twenty or thirty years.

All this can be seen as one more indication we’re lost on a dark and very slippery slope or, looked at from another angle, it may give a sliver of hope. Since the people he is tossing out the door were never part of the majority who voted against him, Mr. Trump’s epic cleansing will do nothing to change his minority status. In fact, if the callousness and brutality of it repels even a few of his past followers, it will actually drive his share of future vote tallies lower. In which case, the majority of the American electorate may one day reject Mr. Trump’s imperium by a large enough margin that not even doomed third-party candidates and the misrepresentative calculus of the Electoral College will be enough to save him.

Here’s hoping that whenever that day comes, there is still a nation left to rebuild!

*Of the three elections in which Donald J. Trump has ever competed, he has never won a majority of the votes cast. If that is any sort of mandate, it is a mandate against Mr. Trump, not for him. The fact that he was elected in 2016 reflected just how unsuited our present Electoral College structure is to today’s electorate, in which the population disparity between large states and small ones is more than five times as wide as it was at the time the Constitution was being developed, yet each of those states still gets an equal two Senate-related votes. The fact he was elected in 2024 despite not winning a majority is its own indictment of an election process held captive to two ossified major parties which cannot possibly represent the true diversity of their electorate.

Like this post? Feel free to share it.

Appreciate what you read here, please subscribe – it’s free!

Free Speech on Trial? I. F. Stone’s ‘The Trial of Socrates’

Leave a reply

Isidor Feinstein Stone was widely known and read as a liberal/socialist leaning journalist and newsletter writer from the 1930’s to the ‘80’s. His introduction to the paperback edition of this book suggests it was the product of a late in life desire to move away from investigating current injustices and stake a claim to something timeless.

In that, Stone acquits himself admirably, analyzing the works of Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Xenophon and others like a professor of the Classics, along the way citing a wealth of references both primary and secondary, some of which seem quite obscure. His commentary on specific words of Ancient Greek – their origins and multiple usages and especially the implications of how they’ve been translated (or mistranslated) over the ages – suggests an ability to read the original Greek language sources, which is impressive in one whose Wikipedia entry records only that he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania

Greatest take away for this unschooled reader is to reframe Socrates from a revered name in the pantheon of Athens’ great philosophers into a rather disreputable rascal; a gadfly and rabble-rouser accused of corrupting the state’s youth by arguing the efficacy of oligarchic tyranny at a moment when such evils had very recently taken advantage of democracy’s natural disorder to seize power for themselves – twice! – and stood eager to do so again at any time. Also, as Stone puts it, a man who habitually and resolutely argued the negative side of every issue without ever offering a single positive value to which he would actually commit. This, in Stone’s view, is the real reason Socrates seemed to actively seek and welcome his death sentence (at an age when he could otherwise look forward only to sickness and decline) and turned his own death into a performance calculated to seal his place in posterity. As likely as it was that a defense on the grounds of free speech might have saved his life (the last chapters of the book analyze this in extravagant detail), Socrates would not demean himself by pleading a principle against which he had previously argued with all his eloquence. Even more, he seemed purposely to alienate his judges so as to be sure they would not honor their own and their City’s principles by freeing him on those same grounds.

Which last leads into the second lesson of this author’s analysis. An ardent supporter himself of the right to speak freely, Stone reminds the reader that such a right has very rarely been the policy of any government or governing system. Even among the Golden Age Greeks it was a niche freedom, always tempered by its applicability only to those accredited for a specific body or forum, or only those of wealth and privilege, only those meeting citizenship requirements, only those owning property, only those not owned as slaves or reviled as foreigners or uncivilized – the list goes on. That freedom of speech was not a universal value even among those greats in that great time and place is a very valuable reminder for those of us living in this one (U.S. A, 2025)

Certainly worthwhile to read and know, Stone’s analytics in The Trial of Socrates feel repetitive and over-argued; one imagines the same points could have been made in an essay rather than a book. But then, an essay about such a scholarly subject would never have achieved the visibility and stickiness this stand-alone book has (much less been deemed a ‘NATIONAL BESTSELLER’ as the paperback jacket proudly proclaims). Pulling Socrates off his pedestal at the same time it raises the U. S. First Amendment’s guarantee of Free Speech up onto one of its own is pretty good work for a small volume (247 pages plus Notes) by the college-dropout son of an immigrant shop owner? Achievements well worthy of a space on the shelf.

Ripe for Amendment?

Leave a reply

Saw an excellent opinion piece recently about the history of Amendments to the U. S. Constitution, starting with the fact that the document’s authors fully intended it to be revised – the Amendment process is written in, after all (Article V) – and running up through our fifty-plus-year drought of amendments since the 1970’s. It can certainly be argued whether our current divisiveness and the dysfunctionality of Congress are one reason we’ve had no Amendments recently, or one result of that, but the phenomena are certainly related to one another.

Well-thought-through and widely-accepted new Amendments could allow our nation’s founding document to grow and adapt to conditions which have changed dramatically, including: a population which has gone from about four million peeps in 1790 to some 330 million in 2020; a mix of states which has gone from 13 small, young and rural ones to 50 with wildly varied histories, populations and urban/rural characters; multiple technological and cultural revolutions; and an international context the Founders might well struggle to recognize.

Given all that, here are a few modest proposals to be considered when the time seems right

Free the Courts: we’ve all been taught that the Federal government has three branches -the Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial (perhaps equal, perhaps not, depending…) and that this configuration ensures checks and balances on the power of each, thereby protecting the system and our freedoms. Current events are making clear that the Judicial branch is not really an effective check or balance so long as the Chief Executive appoints (even with Legislative approval required) and can fire (at will and whim) the Attorney General, thus allowing that Executive to direct and weild the enormous power of the Department of Justice as he or she wishes. A new Constitutional Convention, or a renewed and less-rigidly divided and more collaborative Congress would do well to consider an Amendment to remedy this by making Justice independent of the Executive branch and the Attorney General an elected office with a four year term, perhaps voted upon in Presidential off-years, and no longer a member of the President’s Cabinet (though still with other rights and privileges of Cabinet level responsibility and authority).

While we’re at it: how about also solidifying the makeup of the Supreme Court by fixing it’s number (rather than leaving it vulnerable to change by some future legislature) and specifying a limited term for justices (so the Court better reflects gradual changes in society and culture) with staggered start dates (so no one President/term gets to appoint more justices than another (whether by random happenstance or by McConnel-esque abuses of Congress’s approval authority). Those changes would work against the politicization some believe we are experiencing with the current Court. And, since we’re talking pie in the sky, maybe even consider requiring each Justice as they take their seat to designate a successor who will fill out the rest of their term should they die, be incapacitated or simply exhausted before it runs out (thus avoiding any lucky President – or violent actor – taking advantage of such an event to pack the court with their preferred jurists).

Speaking of elections: one aggravator of our recent discord has been the ascent of Presidents to office without receiving even the barest majority of the votes cast (not to mention those who did not even receive a plurality!). More than just casting doubt upon a leader’s legitimacy, this has led too many citizens to conclude that their votes are not worth casting. A constitutionally-mandated two-stage election would address this issue, with as many candidates/parties running in the first stage as wish to and then just the two top vote getters participating in a run-off election to decide who will hold the office. That format would ensure the winner receives a majority of votes, while also offering an unmistakable indicator of just how strong or weak is their mandate. It might also diminish the stranglehold of two-party politics, since a third-party or independent candidate need only defeat one of the two major parties to reach the runoff (and have a legitimate chance at the White House), rather than having to surpass both of them from a standing start as under the current system. Whatever expense or delay is incurred by this two-stage process might have ruled it out back in the founders’ days of carriage rides and snail mail but would be entirely manageable in today’s electronic age.

(Debating and reaching agreement on issues like those might even serve as a warm-up so said Congress or Convention could address the stalemate between small and large states with an amendment that retires or at least updates the Electoral College so Presidential Elections would more fairly deal with the enormous disparities in populations relative to Senatorial votes.)

Obviously, tons of other ideas for amendment are out there and more will quickly arise if the ball ever gets rolling, but those above seem to this writer to be top of the list. The time is ripe for us to use the tool those wise heads passed down to us in order that their legacy may be improved and sustained for many more generations!

P. S. – This post was inspired in part by “Amend It!” written by Jill Lepore and appearing in the print and online editions of The Atlantic, October 2025. Neither M. Lepore nor The Atlantic have any connection to this post or site, nor are either in any way responsible for its content.

If you find this post of interest,

please feel free to share it with others.

If you like what you find here at robinandrew.net,

please subscribe – it’s free!

Paris – The Biography of a City, Colin Jones

Leave a reply

Virtually a reference work, this self-confessed “Impossible history” of one of the world’s great cities comes buttressed by many pages of notes, a graduate level bibliographical guide, index, population table, modest number of illustrations, sequential maps showing the evolution of fortifications and boundaries, and even a list of the (major) buildings discussed.

For all that, the text itself is mostly quite readable, and manages to remain even-handed when discussing the political oscillations of the city’s fortunes. Jones’s personal viewpoint is most glimpseable in the depth with which he discusses the impacts of the real estate marketplace and urban planning (a discipline for which nineteenth century Paris was something of an origin point and test case). These, we hear, heavily influenced not only the visible face but also the economy, sociology and politics of the city, its surrounding suburbs (the banlieue), region and nation. The rise and growth of antiquarian/protectionist architectural sentiment is given an appropriate level of attention, since it is largely that movement and its successes which have bequeathed us today’s tourist and cultural mecca.

As for the aforementioned political oscillations, to one whose prejudices were shaped by the American education system within an Anglophile culture, Paris is eye-opening in relating the wave after wave of governments established, contested and washed away in favor of the next new or recycled concept. From far back in the era of multiple kingdoms, principalities and ecclesiastical domains to contesting Empires of the middle ages to the early-modern era of Communes, communists, Republicans, Vichy capitulation and Republics (five, to date), it is amazing that anyone has been able to establish any stable business, institution or assets at all. A thought worth considering as the USA is going through its own populist spasm which may – at best – be followed by a future swing in some opposing direction.

One thing which does seem to have remained relatively consistent through Paris’ administrative history: even when the city and nation were not overtly socialist, their governments have always exercised far greater powers of eminent domain than we in the USA are accustomed to. Some small justification, perhaps, for the disdain which some Americans profess toward anything ‘those Frenchies’ (or any Europeans for that matter), may have to say about social policy or virtues. Reading about the centuries-long role Paris has played in nurturing the very idea of self-government by the polity though, makes that disdain seem more short-sighted than ever.

Another significant takeaway: the wealth of literature generated in Paris’ Arrondissements over the centuries would require a lifetime of reading to consume and appreciate. Preferably in the original, since even my feeble attempt to learn French quickly convinced that its full nuance is unlikely to survive translation. One reason, perhaps that, Jones begins his introduction with a literary quote and analysis. In retrospect, this turns out to be a wholly appropriate entry point for what is as much a human story as a geographical one. At every stage of its history, the promise of Paris has called to millions, to such a degree that its population has always been largely non-native, immigrants increasing its numbers even as low birth-rate, high mortality and the exodus of those unwilling or unable to meet its demands were constantly working to diminish them.

Fascinating even in its occasional excesses (just like its subject), Paris – The Biography of a City easily earns its space on the shelf.

(Note: published in 2004, this volume necessarily does not cover the City’s most recent decades.)

If you know someone who might be interested in this post,

please feel free to share it.

If you like what you’ve read here,

please subscribe to RobinAndrew.net.

It’s totally free!

Pardon Who, Mr. Trump?!

Leave a reply

We learned yesterday that Mr. Trump has commuted the sentence of George Santos, the ex-congressman rightly convicted of fraud and identity theft. No reasonable explanation has been given for letting this criminal off after having served only a few months of a multi-year sentence with Mr. Trump’s wishes for “Good luck…” and “… a great life!”

Our executive has no concern, apparently, for the luck and lives of the people and organizations who now have absolutely zero chance of collecting the restitution due to them by judgement of the court which convicted Mr. Santos.

It is possible, perhaps, that Mr. Trump truly believes Santos “has been horribly mistreated…” and awarded this commutation to a political supporter for no reasons other than his love of justice and his compassion for the wronged. If so, let him demonstrate it by paying equal attention to the case of Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam, who was recently released from custody after serving 43 years in prison for a murder which reports say it is now clear he did not commit. Rather than being allowed to enjoy his “Good luck” and look forward to a “great life,” he was immediately taken into custody by ICE and placed in crude detention while they process him for deportation, based upon a drug offence to which he reportedly confessed as part of a plea deal; an offence which even if it has any validity, is entirely overshadowed by the exemplary behavior he displayed during 43 years of wrongful imprisonment..

If George Santos has been “horribly mistreated” in serving three months for multiple crimes which were obvious and adjudicated in full, how much more deserving of compassion is Mr. Vedam?

Mr. Trump, please demonstrate your thoughtful and compassionate nature by commuting his charges and allowing him to spend his remaining years with his family rather than in a nation thousands of miles away from them and to which he has virtually no connection. Or, if that is too heavy a lift, at the very least direct your Attorney General to initiate a full examination of Mr. Vedam’s treatment with even a fraction of the zeal she has exhibited in prosecuting your political opponents.

Show us your true colors, Mr. Trump!

Please share this Post

to bring more attention to Mr. Vedam’s

plight.

And, if you appreciate what you see on this site,

please subscribe – it’s absolutely free!

The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple

Leave a reply

It’s long been a curiosity to me that The Buddha lived and preached in the lands which we know as India, but the populace of that region today are mostly Hindu followers (with significant minorities of Muslims, Sikhs, and other less-publicized faiths). Conversely, Buddhism is mostly associated in the modern mind with lands beyond India: Tibet, China, Japan, Thailand, the other southeast Asian nations… And then, of course, there is Indonesia, a massively populated sleeper nation (in the ‘Western’ view) which I have read holds more Muslims than the entire Middle East! And BTW, how come Marco Polo’s fabled Silk Road doesn’t show up on any maps except those created to illustrate editions of his dubiously sourced travel memoir?

William Dalrymple, a Scottish-born historian living in Delhi, is eager to explain it all to us, beginning with a valuable Introduction that quickly spells out several themes. First, it demolishes the myth of ancient overland trade routes. In this telling, sea-borne trade was far more effective at moving goods – one ship able to carry many times the load of a donkey or camel and at the same time less vulnerable to the myriad possibly-hostile territories through which a long land route must pass between origin and destination. Add to that the reliable seasonal reversing of monsoon winds in the seas around India and you have a situation ripe for cross-culture pollination. Something I’d begun to consider recently through reading and viewing about Rome, its connections with Egypt, and recent archaeological work at Red sea ports which has yielded much evidence of sustained trade with India’s Western coast (via the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea).

As impressive as this dispersion is, it is hardly the end of the Golden Road’s story. Even as Buddhist missionaries (itself a new concept this small mind) were carrying their faith to the east where various rulers of ‘Chinese’ states endorsed it to various degrees, Mongols sweeping down from the north and Macedonians from the west were bringing other traditions to India, fracturing its Buddhist establishment and driving many back to the emotional refuge of the Vedic/Hindu tradition with its abundance of attractive gods and goddesses and the reassurance of the Brahmin caste system. (I know I am garbling these distinctions, it takes a scholar like Dalrymple to keep them straight, if even he can, so please forgive me.) Mix in the eventual arrival of Western Europeans and Christianity and one begins to see what a melting pot (to appropriate one of our local phrases) the Indian Peninsula has become.

Through it all, Dalrymple’s central objective is to remind us that wherever armies go, religion goes with them, and wherever religions go, other knowledge goes too. In astronomy, mathematics, medicine and other realms, residents of India were making momentous discoveries long before Europe or even China. Citing various early writings (most of them previously unknown, to me) he traces the origins of this scholarship and its dispersal through the various centers of study and libraries of texts it generated. Only when Islamic scholars brought those ideas and texts to the Middle East (Baghdad, etc.) and from there to the Iberian Peninsula (the Moors, as we tend to call them, thanks to Mr. Shakespeare), was it translated into Greek, Latin, Italian, German, etc. and thus available to fertilize the so-called Enlightenment which we like to think of as the foundation of our contemporary culture.

Dalrymple is an awesomely erudite guide to all this, his analysis of artwork in this or that cave in this or that obscure (to me) region of India is amazing, if sometimes overfilling. For those interested in the premise but not able to work through a 500 page tome, just reading the Introduction will give the basic premise. For those with time though, the depth and detail makes the case more convincing and imparts a vision of the rhythmic dance – the ebbing and flowing on a scale of centuries – which was required for this dance of cultures to bring us the world we know today.

At a time when the (supposedly) Enlightenment-based world order we have known and respected for generations seems in danger of self-destructing, it is appropriate to be reminded that we would never have gotten this far if not for the blossoming and dying of countless other orders. And also, it must be admitted, the clashes, conquests and destruction of kingdoms, nations and empires on multiple continents, over multiple millennia. No human creation lasts forever, but the best fruits of each can contribute to what comes next – though we may need to suffer a lot of wasted time, resources and lives before we get there.

Thank you, Mr. Dalrymple.