On December 18, 1972, Richard Nixon began the “Christmas bombing” of North Vietnam. No, he wasn’t confused about the date, or the season. But he knew geopolitics doesn’t take holidays.

His critics, who dubbed it the Christmas bombing, thought he was insane, and said so in terms that raised questions about their own mental balance. Even scholars rave about “systematic terror strikes... calculated barbarianism... final savagery”. Supposedly peace was at hand in Vietnam, they objected, thanks to the statesmanlike approach of, uh, Richard Nixon. And it was the season of peace on earth. What could have prompted this atavistic eruption?

The answer is simple. Nixon had indeed brought peace within reach in Vietnam by a cunning combination of sticks and carrots, not so much directed at the Vietnamese themselves but at their Soviet sponsors. By withdrawing American troops steadily from Indochina while periodically striking hard blows with what was left he had bought time there. And meanwhile he had been at work on a “structure of peace” through a détente strategy of trading economic benefits and to some extent recognition as a reputable state to the Soviets in return for nuclear and Third World military restraint on their part.

Critics might disagree, and did at the time, as to how tough a bargain Nixon was really driving. But he knew he had to be tough, that the Soviets would take as much as they could and give as little. And so it was that, with peace in sight and Nixon safely reelected, the Soviets’ clients in Hanoi suddenly walked away from the table, Nixon knew he had to strike hard. And strike he did.

After two weeks of bombing, the talks uncollapsed. The North Vietnamese came back to the table, accepted the terms they had earlier rejected, and a peace agreement was signed. As Henry Kissinger reportedly said, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.” As for it being Christmas, well, the North Vietnamese had been no more reluctant to unleash their Viet Cong allies during the traditional lunar festival of Tet in 1968 than Muslim nations were to attack Israel on Yom Kippur during Ramadan in 1973.

The North Vietnamese were also lying, of course, when they accepted Nixon’s terms. Or at least they were not fully sincere. They would only keep their end of the bargain, that they would stop trying to invade South Vietnam, if the United States continued to be resolute.

It did not, for various reasons including the Watergate scandal into which Nixon foolishly stumbled. Actually I dislike the word “scandal” here almost as much as I dislike the press sticking –gate onto every piece of misconduct. Watergate was I think worse than a routine scandal. It was an abuse of power on a menacing scale.

However that may be, after Nixon resigned the Democratic Congress absolutely rejected all Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger’s efforts to support their ally in Saigon against renewed aggression. Instead of grasping the lesson of the Christmas bombing, that peace is only bought by resolution and vigilance, they concluded that Nixon had achieved peace in spite of his willingness to take military action not through it. And the limited freedom of the South Vietnamese was lost; among other ironic developments the Communist victors burned books by Jean Paul Sartre, who had accused the U.S. of genocide in Vietnam in 1968. And the Khmer Rouge unleashed a real genocide.

Maybe Nixon was onto something after all.

Today is of course the 112^th anniversary of the first successful manned flight on Dec. 17, 1903, by… oh please. We all know it was the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, NC. And we never looked back.

We all know, of course, that their first airplane was a ludicrously unsafe box kite of death that never, ever would have passed the precautionary principle. The actual flight took place at Kill Devils Hills but kill pilot hills might have seemed a better name. Except this time it didn’t.

Instead, three days after Wilbur suffered a minor crash on takeoff on Dec. 14, Orville soared to a majestic 10 feet above the ground and covered 120 feet in 12 seconds, nearly 7 mph. Wilbur and Orville then made flights of 175 and 200 feet. Amazing, huh?

Well, it is, considering the technology of the day. But here’s what amazes me even more. Within 15 years the Red Baron had made a name for himself in agile fighters armed with synchronized machine guns and died. Within four decades the Battle of Britain had been won by Spitfires capable of flying over 500 mph and going eight miles up into the sky. Indeed, 42 years after Kitty Hawk, while Orville Wright was still alive (Wilbur died of typhoid aggravated by exhaustion in 1912), an airplane dropped an atomic bomb on a city.

The moral here, it seems to me, is that technology is galloping away with us. Sure, it’s cool, and yes, I fly a lot and find it very convenient. But one invention after another appears, changes our lives, becomes indispensable, and creates a host of new problems.

People are now all gaga about drones and self-teaching robots as though these could not possibly be transformed far more rapidly than the airplane into technologies we cannot manage. As for the Internet, 20 years ago we were using Trumpet Winsock and dialup modems and now we have state hackers poised to shut down our power grid.

Ah, progress.

Charles Lindbergh, a U.S. Air Mail pilot and U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve officer, became instantly hugely famous when he made the first nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927, less than a quarter century after the first halting 120-foot flight. Although he misused his fame to be foolishly isolationist if not worse in the run-up to World War II, and suffered the personal tragedy of the kidnapping and murder of his son, he also built on it to fashion an extremely exciting and successful career as an author, explorer, inventor, and, crucially, environmentalist.

A product of the technological age, he remarked wistfully later in life that “I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes. In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia. Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization.”

In our mad pursuit of new technological toys and terrors, we are in danger of forgetting that insight. And at the pace with which technology goes from laughable prototype to transformative, indispensable and uncontrollable, we won’t have much time to remember it if we are not very careful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCQCWCAJovw December 16 is a great day in history. It’s when the Boston Tea Party happened.

I like it because I’m all for tax revolts. Indeed, we need one now, peaceful but absolutely resolute. But I also like it because it is history’s most principled tax revolt. It was a protest against a tax cut.

Wait. What? Why’s that good? Don’t tell me you’re one of those liberals rushing to the barricades demanding higher taxes, even volunteering for them?

Good guess. No. I’m not. What I am doing is praising the revolutionaries in Boston because they would not sell their birthright for a mess of pottage of a nice cuppa.

You see, the British government had already made a right mess of things in their North American colonies by trying to deprive them of the rights Englishmen had had since Magna Carta and indeed before. And in an effort to pull the teabag out of the boiling water London had actually backed off on a number of its more repressive measures by 1770 while still asserting their theoretical right to govern the colonists without their consent.

Then in 1773, faced with the possibility of the East India Company going bankrupt, they granted it the right to import tea directly into the colonies without paying the duty on tea that was all that was left of the ill-judged “Townshend Duties” of 1767. The authorities made the materialist assumption that this tax cut would buy the colonists.

It did not. They were outraged. Some were outraged on material grounds, such as American merchants who’d been making a killing smuggling tea to evade the duty. But most were outraged on principle.

Their reasoning, as impeccable as it was unexpected, was that if the British could lower their taxes without their consent it meant they could change their taxes without their consent which meant they could raise them or impose new ones without their consent. And that went directly against Magna Carta, the 1297 statute De Tallagio non Concedendo and a whole host of other measures binding the executive via the purse strings.

The British cracked down hard after the Boston Tea Party, only to find that free people throughout the colonies rallied to the cause of frequently despised Puritan Massachusetts when its ancient liberties were threatened. “Give me liberty or give me death,” cried Patrick Henry, not “Give me money or lose my vote.”

Today politicians assume that we will accept virtually anything if it brings us material benefits, whether a tax cut for the middle class, a tax break or a flat-out subsidy cheque.

It was not true in Boston in 1773. And it should not be true today.

On this date in 1791 the United States Bill of Rights became fundamental law. And rightly so.

There are all kinds of things to like about it. Rights are good. These were real rights; basically they’re a long list of “Thou shalt nots” aimed squarely at the federal government. They were clear and simple, hard even for determined judges to misconstrue or twist.

Almost everyone now tries to guarantee rights in their constitutions, however badly they botch it in terms of content or procedure. And the American example, based on the British Bill of Rights exactly a century earlier, is a major reason why.

Reading accounts of the adoption of the Bill of Rights one encounters the influence of the British example, the Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by George Mason who pushed for a federal equivalent and so on. You also discover that there were originally 12 amendments in the package, one of which was ratified a mere 202 years later (it says no pay raise for Congress takes effect until the next Congress) and one of which, an entirely harmless formula for determining the size of the House of Representatives, was never ratified but is technically still pending.

Some people find such things fascinating. But what I want to draw to your attention isn’t the details of the Bill of Rights but the decisive argument put forward for its adoption. At the time of the debates over the Constitution itself, the main issue was whether, in creating a real national government in place of the feeble imitation that existed under the Articles of Confederation, the drafters hadn’t gone too far in centralizing power.

Obviously the government they created was tiny by modern standards. I do not think there was a person active in politics at that time, even on the arch-Tory side, who would not howl with outrage at the scope, powers and arrogance of the current U.S. government. But even then the anti-Federalists said it was too big.

In those days people tended to have less deliberately unintelligent political discussions than they do today. It wasn’t a bunch of insults and sloganeering into which a charlatan like Donald Trump could comfortably insert himself.

Instead, the anti-Federalists said there was a danger that the list of powers granted to the federal government, instead of being read as exhaustive, might one day be taken as merely illustrative, and that the government might start to claim and use powers it wasn’t meant to have. So they asked for a series of explicit statements of things the government could not do including, via what became the 9^th and 10^th Amendments, an unmistakable statement that it did not have powers it was not expressly granted.

The Federalists replied that the danger was a phantom, that the text was quite clear that the federal government had only those powers it was expressly granted. So there was no need of a detailed list of what it couldn’t do or a statement that it had no powers it didn’t have. No one can mistake what we have done.

If that’s the case, replied the anti-Federalists, there’s still no harm in adding that list and that statement, is there? Whereas if you’re wrong it’s very important to add them. So we should do it, since we lose nothing either way and might gain a lot.

Instead of running a negative ad at this point, the Federalists basically went oh yeah, you’re right, thanks for pointing it out. Let’s do it. And they did. The amendments that went on to become the Bill of Rights weren’t in the original Constitution but it was understood, and this understanding was crucial to ratification, that they would be added. And though politics could be ugly in those days, that promise was actually kept honorably.

In the end, the government burst its bounds anyway. Especially from the New Deal of the 1930s on, politicians have made and courts have endorsed preposterous claims about the powers conferred on the federal government by the Constitution. My favourite, in a grisly way, was the absurd 1942 case of Wickburn v Filburn where the Supreme Court said the Interstate Commerce Clause let Washington make rules about wheat a man in Ohio grew on his own farm for his own consumption or that of his livestock because, by reducing the amount of wheat he would go and buy, possibly from another state, it affected interstate commerce.

By that standard, everything is potentially subject to federal control and, in the intervening years, most everything actually has been subjected to it. But it took 150 years for the government really to burst its bonds, and a series of massive upheavals including a Civil War fought over the egregious denial of basic rights of slavery that, in complex ways, empowered the national government against perverse localism. It was very hard to erode the Founders’ original intent thanks, in no small measure, to the intellectually bipartisan consensus about including the Bill of Rights.

If only we could do things that way today. Really limiting government in plain, effective language with a broad consensus. Those were the days.

On this day in 1911, December 14, Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole. I feel a bit the way I do about people climbing Everest before it became a tourist trap, or some forbidding lonely mountain today. Way to go, dude. Amazing accomplishment. Now ruuuuuun.

I mean, there are places you go because you want to be there. Some are easy to reach, others mind-bogglingly hard. But once you get there you kick back, satisfied not only with what you have achieved but where you are. Mountaintops aren’t like that.

Mountains are amazing, magnificent, forbidding, dangerous, scary things. I have always remembered a warning line from the pioneering back-to-the-land-adventurously classic Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills that “mountains are always more topologically complex than they appear from a distance”. Which means getting up them is way harder than it looks and getting around them is no picnic either. And that’s just peanuts to Antarctica.

Its name is Latin for big white place where you die. No, actually, it’s not. And yes, I stole that line from Leslie Nielsen’s hilarious documentary on the ocean. Antarctica is of course boring Latin for “place that isn’t the Arctic”. But might as well be in terms of its equal or even worse inherent hostility to human life.

I grant that at the South Pole at least you can’t drown, unlike the North Pole much of the time. (David Suzuki et al please note, the Arctic has had large stretches of open water many times in the past. What’s happening currently is not unique nor is it THE END.)

Getting to the South Pole is an amazing achievement even if he cheated by doing it in summer. Just ask Robert Falcon Scott, whose team lost the race to the pole by just over a month and their lives. It is amazing. It is worth doing if only because it is there. But you shouldn’t be for long.

Myself, I’m hoping to achieve some sort of fame by getting to the East Pole someday. Or perhaps the West Pole. Obviously it’s a lot less dangerous. But I figure it’s somewhere warm in the gorgeous tropical Pacific. So while you might not fancy my chances of making it, at least if I do, it will be worth hanging my hat on the thing and staying a while.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyKlcQ_HiD4 On this date in 2000 Al Gore conceded the U.S. election. For the second time. He had actually called George Bush to admit defeat on election night then retracted it. This time it stuck.

Well, sort of. All kinds of people continued to insist bitterly that Bush hadn’t really won the election, on the grounds that every attempt to count Florida’s ballots properly despite the infamous “hanging chads” produced by deficient voting machines had confirmed Bush’s win. And Gore himself wasn’t exactly gracious.

In his pseudo-concession speech he said he disagreed with the Supreme Court decision that put the chad circus to an end, but that “partisan rancor must now be put aside.” He then proceeded to stoke it by saying “I accept the finality of the outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

What he did not say is that he accepted the legitimacy of the outcome. And accepting it for the sake of unity and the strength of American democracy amounts to saying he knew it was wrong but was being gracious. He should have said he lost, however closely, and left it at that, perhaps while also calling for a review of voting procedures across the country.

I confess to thinking at the time that Gore might well be relieved at the outcome once he got used to it. He had been groomed not just for a high-flying political career but for the presidency by his ambitious high-flying parents; his father served seven terms as a Congressman from Tennessee then three as a Senator for a total of 32 years in Congress. And while Al Gore Jr. was good at politics, I was never sure he really found his path in it.

Indeed, for a while he looked happier as an environmental activist, and arguably even more successful. But the flagrant contradiction between his message and his lifestyle, and other signs of an ongoing desperate effort to prove something he could never prove throughout his life, make me think that the political detour, if it was one, went on too long for him ever to find his way back.

I might add that a lot of people were really upset with the outcome in 2000, however it happened, because they too attach too much importance to politics. They thought the world would end if George Bush became president (as many Republicans thought the same thing about Al Gore). Well, it didn’t. Bush wasn’t really Democrats’ nightmare however hysterical some on the left became. And he certainly wasn’t Republicans’ dream however hysterical some of them became.

As for Al Gore, well, I found his concessions to be singularly ungracious. And, I feel in retrospect, not uncharacteristic. Politics is not good for the character or serenity of most of those who devote themselves to it, and it wasn’t for him.

On December 12 1987 United States Secretary of State George Shultz called on America’s European allies to increase defence spending… increase defence spending… increase defence spending. Sorry, is there an echo in here?

Must be. The United States has had plenty of disagreements over the years with its allies in Europe, and North America, over whether particular missions made sense. But a constant refrain throughout all these debates, regardless of who sent troops where, was that if action was to be undertaken the United States would be doing most of the heavy lifting. And the allies have responded.

Just not in a good way. Despite repeatedly promising to spend 2% of their GDP on defence most are well under that number and heading south, including Canada.

In the early 1990s, for instance, Britain really did stand shoulder to shoulder with the U.S., sort of, spending about 3.6% of GDP on its military. Today it’s at 2.4% and sliding. France has gone from 3.3 to 1.9. Italy from 2.0 to 1.2. And so on. Meanwhile the United States has gone from 4.5% to 4.4.

It is true, of course, that the United States has a larger population and is richer than its European allies. Partly because it has a more robust attitude toward the measures actually needed to promote national security, prosperity and so on. But the fact that its overall spending is understandably larger is no excuse for the gap as a share of GDP.

The basic fact is that Europeans no longer believe in defending themselves. Whether they do not believe it is worthwhile, do not believe it is possible or do not believe it is necessary because Uncle Sam will do it anyway is not immediately relevant.

The simple fact is that they are not doing it. They are free riding, sometimes cheering on American intervention and sometimes hissing at it but always leaving it to the United States to make it happen if it’s going to. Oh, as for Canada, we were around 1.8% in the early 1990s and today stand, or rather slouch insouciantly, at 1%.

George Shultz might not be surprised. But he would be bothered, and he’d be right to be. Then and now.

While I’m tearing a strip off the Soviets, perhaps I should go for the proletarian emperor’s whole outfit. Especially as on December 11 back in 1969 a major Soviet spokesman, the children’s author Sergei Mikhailkov who was secretary of the Moscow writer’s union, went ape over nudity in Western culture, taking particular aim at the play “Oh! Calcutta!”

Keep your shirt on, Sergei, one is tempted to say. But perhaps unbutton the collar slightly. This sort of rant about people in their “birthday suits” just makes you look ridiculous. Still, he had hold of a serious point, though by the wrong end.

Mikhailkov declared the Broadway show, and pornography generally, “a general striptease-that is one of the slogans of modern bourgeois art.” And, he complained in a fatal admission, such “bourgeois” thinking was infecting Russian youth. Gosh, who’d rather look at a naked girl than Leonid Brezhnev giving a speech. I mean really, comrades

It is of course tempting to dismiss this shot at the bourgeoisie as part of the boilerplate of Soviet abuse that poured with hilariously stilted implausibility out of Radio Moscow and such outfits. Even Russians mocked it. (Soviet-era joke: How can you make sure there’s always baloney in your fridge? Plug it into Radio Moscow.) Surely the epithet “bourgeois” was not applied as part of a serious thought process but simply slapped on with mechanical cynicism.

It might even be supposed that the people who made such statements in the Soviet Union knew they were babbling politicized nonsense and deliberately went over the top into self-parody to preserve their integrity and sanity or even warn the world that it was all lies. After all Oh! Calcutta!, in case you like me have never had the dubious pleasure of watching it, was written by radical intellectuals, non-conformists and challengers of bourgeois convention like Samuel Beckett, John Lennon and Edna O’Brien. How on earth could these people be lumped in with suburban Republicans in lime-green pants, except by someone trying to undercut their own message?

Alas, it is not so. As I’ve noted previously, cynics would be far less dangerous because they would be aware of their own limitations and deceptions and concerned that pushing either your hollow words or false deeds too far will give away the whole deceptive show. Instead, in the words of Michel Tournier, a novelist only a commissar could call bourgeois, “Alas, it is nearly always high-minded men who make history, and so the flames destroy everything and blood flows in torrents.” The Soviets really meant what they said about a corrupt, decadent, materialist society they identified as “bourgeois,” a word essentially meaning… here we go again… Western.

The West is disconcerting. Its insistence on questioning everything, on establishing truth through debate not intimidation, can be upsetting. Sometimes it upsets not just fragile individuals but robust institutions. When Mikhailkov deplored Soviet youth who preferred “the theater of the absurd and the novel without a hero and all kinds of modern bourgeois reactionary tendencies in the literature and art of the West” to “the past and present of the literature of their fatherland” what he failed to grasp was not the ridiculous tone of his prose. It is that his statement was a scathing indictment of officially approved Soviet prose that couldn’t even compete with the rubbish and dangling bits of “Oh! Calcutta!”

You can’t keep ‘em on the farm once they’ve seen Paris. If you worry about modern decadence, you have to plunge in and try to fix the West from inside through inquiry and debate. Otherwise you end up looking both ridiculous and vicious, and the rubbish heap of history beckons irresistibly to emperors without clothes.