Sometimes things are just too easy to ridicule. Like Poland's "Wedding to the Sea" on February 10, 1920. It was so popular there that they had another one in 1945 under the Communists. In fact quite a few. But we should not let Communism, or cynicism, spoil things for us. And in fact the 1920 ceremony, though absurd, is also touching.

The reason it happened, or at least the occasion, was that following World War I Poland had regained access to the Baltic Sea, lost more than a century earlier in 1793 when its neighbours had partitioned it again but not for the last time. Including in the 20^th century when Hitler and Stalin did it in 1939. Poland is in a bad neighbourhood and quite frankly has deserved better of history than it has usually received.

It was partly dismembered in 1772 by Prussia and Russia. They did it again in 1793 at which point Poland lost access to the sea, and then in 1795 they and Austria did it and Poland lost access to Poland, vanishing from the map.

It was briefly sort of resurrected by Napoleon, as the Duchy of Warsaw, after which Russia created a Kingdom of Poland from which it later removed another chunk including Warsaw itself which you’d think was sort of clearly Polish. And after crushing a Polish uprising in 1831 the Russians decided to teach their ungrateful slaves a lesson and recrushed them. Ditto after the 1863 uprising when they tried to replace Polish with Russian.

Things were better in the Austrian bit. But not, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, the Prussian one. Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that after Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary all managed to lose World War I, Poland reappeared thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. Russia attacked again, of all things. But lost.

Back to our wedding.

In October 1919 General Jozef Haller was given the task of peacefully reoccuping formerly German formerly Polish Pomerelia, which has Gdansk in it. As the Germans mostly yielded it peacefully, with a bit of sabotage, the 16th Infantry Division under Haller reached the Baltic Sea. And at Puck, which has nothing to do with hockey or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Haller conjured up a rather touching if theatrical ceremony with a sermon, raising of the Polish Navy flag to a 21 gun salute, and after local fishermen cut a hole in the ice Haller threw in a platinum ring and said "In the name of the Holy Republic of Poland, I, General Jozef Haller, am taking control of this ancient Slavic Baltic Sea shore".

A commemorative post was erected and, predictably, destroyed by the Nazis 19 years later. But a replica now stands in the Port of Puck next to Haller’s bust.

Obviously the great pride and relief Poles took in getting their nation back was short-lived as they got brutally rumbled by their neighbours again and then subjected to hideous Nazi and Stalinist tyranny. And it took some gall for the Stalinists to pose as liberators in 1945 right down to permitting new versions of the ceremony. But there are still reenactments to this day.

OK, so it’s not exactly canonical. But despite the superficial absurdity, when I think of all that Poland has endured, I find it endearing, even moving.

Happy anniversary.

My latest for The Rebel:

February 9 is a nice anniversary for people who like nuclear missiles. Because on this date in 1959 the first ever ICBM became operational, the R-7 Semyorka, at Plesetsk. Yes, you are correct. It was a Soviet weapon. Indeed the reason people panicked over Sputnik, itself a harmless little beeping satellite, wasn’t just that the dang Russkis seemed to be getting ahead in the knowledge economy of the 20^th century so American students would have to hit the math books harder or be outproduced and left in the dust. (Yes, that chestnut is getting a little stale; can you go into a frenzy over "STEM" in schools?) It was that precisely the same technology that could put a satellite into orbit could also take a nuclear warhead up there and then release it onto an inexorable unpowered downward "ballistic" course toward, um, your house.

Now it is true that once both superpowers developed reasonably reliable launch-on-warning rockets it created a balance of terror that kept the peace. Absent nuclear weapons I think it is inconceivable that there would not have been a third conventional war in Europe by the 1980s. And there was a certain wilful embrace of neurosis by intellectuals in the 1950s with the imminence of nuclear annihilation as a bit of an excuse. But that’s about all I have to say of an encouraging nature here.

The R-7 is a classic Soviet story in many ways including that its name was always classified so it was code-named SS-6 Sapwood by NATO. (The Soviets always refused to give the names they used for their missiles during strategic arms talks, manifesting a fetish for counterproductive and offensive secrecy that made their general mantra of "trust us" through clenched teeth exceptionally ludicrous.) Apparently they called it by its GRAU index moniker "8K71" when in a formal mood whereas "Semyorka" means "the seven" so R7 Semyorka is a bit of redundant unnecessary repetition of the same thing again. (If you’re wondering, GRAU is the Russian acronym for the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defence, for Glavnoye raketno-artilleriyskoye upravleniye.)

The "Semyorka" was a bit of a beast, weighing 280 metric tons, 112 feet long and burning kerosene plus liquid oxygen. It took 20 hours to prepare for launch, its massive launch system could not be hidden from US spy planes, and it could not stay on alert for more than a day. And it wasn’t very accurate or reliable. In fact it was never deployed operationally although it did get Sputnik up there and led to a family of rockets that got the Soviets into space although never to the moon and in fact failed more often than they succeeded for years.

It didn’t help that the R7s were in Plesetsk, which even Russians might consider to be in the middle of nowhere and with inclement weather unfriendly to construction and machinery. (It’s about 500 miles northeast of Moscow.) But basically the Semyorka was hugely inexpensive, worked really badly and scared other people into making better weapons of their own and regarding the Soviet government as hostile and mindlessly belligerent.

So not a nice anniversary for the rest of us.

"A man can have too much civilization, just as a man can have too much beer." G.K. Chesterton, quoted in "Chesterton’s Mail Bag" in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (July-August 2004)

In 1865 the United States finally abolished slavery. It happened far too late and tragically it happened without abolishing bigotry or extending legal equality to the freed slaves and other blacks. Hatred is an amazingly, grimly persistent thing. As was underlined on February 8 of 1865.

Slavery was abolished according to the dictates of the United States Constitution, specifically through the 13^th Amendment, passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864 and the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865. Obviously it could not be enforced through the South until the Civil War was officially ended by the Confederate surrender. But it also could not take effect until it was ratified by three quarters of the states following appropriate formal procedures.

Well, sort of. The Union having won the Civil War, it was in a position forcibly to impose governments on the defeated Southern states that did things genuinely elected governments would not do, like ratify the 13th Amendment. (Even, in many states, if those governments resulted from elections in which federal troops forced local whites to let their black neighbours vote.)

Thus Georgia became the crucial 27th state to ratify the Amendment in on December 6, 1865, putting it over the required three-quarters of the 36 states then in the Union including those that had rebelled in 1860-61. The rest subsequently tagged along, though Mississippi unsurprisingly didn’t get to it until March 1995 and "forgot" to send the required notification to the U.S. Archivist for another 18 years until Mississippi resident Ranjan Batra watched the movie Lincoln and started asking awkward questions. But here’s something even worse.

In Delaware, voters rejected the 13th Amendment on February 8, 1865. Yes, rejected it. In Delaware, a state whose inhabitants had voted against secession on January 3, 1861 and supplied 9 infantry regiments to the Union Army. Another Union state, New Jersey, also rejected it in March 1865 but relented in early 1866. But Delaware only ratified it in 1901.

Are you kidding me? Even after the Civil War, which you helped win, you voted to keep slavery? Sadly, it is so.

P.S. Kentucky, formally a Union state but with divided loyalties and dozens of units fighting on both sides in the war, said nay in 1865 and did not repent formally until 1976.

"How small," Dr. Johnson rhymed, "of all that human hearts endure,/ That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." It’s a useful reminder, and one somebody ought perhaps to put to music, with a backbeat, in honour of February 7, 1964, when the Beatles arrived in the United States to spearhead the first really successful British invasion since the Seven Years’ War.

It was the eruption onto the main Western stage of an amazing array of musical talent and innovation that showed that Britain was far from exhausted as a cultural force. I do not think it is merely a reflection of my particular advancing age that I call The Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and you can pick many others from the Yardbirds to Herman’s Hermits an exceptional flowering of brilliance. And it is certainly not simply a reflection of my own preferences to say that when these acts showed up in an America whose youth were growing sick of sugary pop songs, it changed the world in ways Elvis Presley alone could not have done.

"The Sixties" had many causes beyond a group of talented Brits giving voice and legitimacy to sometimes juvenile frustration. But rock was the backdrop, and once the Beatles and others had touched down and lit things up, nothing could ever be the same.

I would go further and say the Beatles in particular smoothed the path of social change by being so earnest, so "with it" as one could once say without irony or corn, and yet so decent, blowing the whistle on angry radicalism and somehow placing a kindly, steadying hand on the whole counterculture. "You say you want a revolution? … when you talk about destruction/ Don’t you know that you can count me out".

One can point to laws, kings and wars contributing to the upheaval of the 1960s including obviously Vietnam, the "imperial president" Richard Nixon and the civil rights acts. But politicians jump out to lead parades that are already underway, they don’t create or steer them. It was the ambiance of the period that made the anti-war movement so important, not the other way around. And it was the final, long-overdue change of heart among many Americans including Southerners that finally made formal civil rights a social and political possibility.

There were other contributors to the wildness of that decade including darker forces like the Weathermen and of course pharmaceuticals. And here I think "the pill" mattered more than things like LSD or even marijuana. So the Beatles were far from alone. But they were both surfing on and helping shape a massive social movement that changed what politicians could do or duck.

When you saw the way young people reacted to their arrival in the United States, you knew the world was changing radically and laws and kings would have to scramble to keep up with fast-beating hearts.

A reminder that "Wish I'd said that" needs your help. If you think it's worth my time and effort to produce it, make a monthly pledge so I can keep it going. "the lotus-eaters... call shame silliness and drive it into disgrace and exile; they call self-control cowardice and expel it with abuse..."

Socrates in Plato, The Republic

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On February 6 in 1820 something really foolish happened. Which of course does not distinguish it from any other day on the calendar. But this one is a fairly trivial incident in itself that manages at the same time to be a historical whopper.

It is the departure from New York of the Elizabeth, bound for Liberia in West Africa with three white American Colonization Society members and 88 American blacks to solve the whole vexed slavery question by sending freed slaves back to West Africa to establish their own country.

It is hard to overestimate the foolishness of the venture. The fact that all the ACS members and a quarter of the blacks were dead within three weeks from yellow fever while the rest fled back to Sierre Leone to await reinforcements gives you some idea of the early difficulties although to be fair Jamestown was sort of like that too and it worked out eventually.

Liberia never could, in a very fundamental sense. The colony not only survived but prospered, and might have done better still if better-prepared settlers had succeeded in creating a genuine self-governing republic. And if so it might have done considerable good in demonstrating what American slaves could do, and be, once the shackles were struck off.

It failed even at that, as the descendants of the colonists formed a closed elite that subjugated the indigenous population; in rather ghastly typical African fashion it is not even certain when the latter got the vote. So it failed as an example. But Liberia was meant to do more than that.

It was meant to solve America’s slavery problem by exporting it. It was meant to permit emancipation by bigots and among bigots, by promising that once freed the blacks would be sent far away where Americans would not have to put up with them. It was always logistically impossible because there was obviously no way to transport millions of people across the Atlantic with tools and other necessities (there were then nearly 2 million American slaves and 200,000 free blacks) even if they could all have been freed. Dragging them to the New World as naked slaves, with high mortality rates on the dreadful "Middle Passage," was technically feasible if morally repellent. Doing the reverse was morally repellent and technically impossible.

The moral repellence was the worst thing of all. Some ACS members were genuinely unprejudiced but figured that until their countrymen and women had a change of heart the best bet for the freedman or woman was to get to a country not run by whites, as Liberia was not after 1847. Others were benevolent by the standards of the day in rejecting slavery but failed to embrace equality, while a few actually felt colonization was a deft trick for getting rid of troublemaking free blacks to help keep slaves more docile and thus preserve the "peculiar institution".

I know it is easy to say from this distance. But the only proper solution to slavery was to accept that all men are created equal, and to reject both the legal and the social subjugation of any race. If it had been necessary to proceed by abolishing the legal subjugation first and then moving on to the social, I think it would have been an acceptable second best. But nothing good was going to happen as long as people insisted that blacks were inferior and based their solutions on that premise, whether or not those solutions they were as technically absurd as sending them all to West Africa one shipload at a time. Even those genuinely unbigoted ACS members who bowed to their neighbours’ prejudice, though they come out of the story looking a lot better than anyone else, let pragmatism trump principle in ways that ultimately failed badly as they generally do.

Whatever the Liberian colonization experiment did, it utterly failed to solve the problem of American racial slavery that erupted into the internecine Civil War and even once it was done left a poisonous legacy of segregation, injustice and bitterness. As anyone capable of math, let alone moral reasoning, would have known would happen.