We all know about “Potemkin Villages” and we may even be aware that they were originally facades erected on the banks of the Dnieper River by Prince Grigory Potemkin to fool Catherine the Great into thinking Russia’s new southern territories that he governed absolutely and ruthlessly were prosperous and happy. So of course he had a battleship named after him. Which revolted on June 27, 1905, leading to a Potemkin movie about the Russian Revolution’s antecedents.

Potemkin himself was quite the “chancer,” to use a British phrase. A mid-ranking nobleman by birth, he helped Catherine seize power in 1762, became her lover despite being 10 years younger, kept her friendship after leaving her boudoir, and was a successful military leader including in the second Russo-Turkish War, an effective ruler in the Russian sense of that term, a successful builder and a successful hedonist. After a fashion: Early in his fatal illness while on campaign, he felt sufficiently better to eat a ham, a goose and several chickens. Despite or due to which, he died at 52 of pneumonia, poison or both. But I digress.

The point is, by Russian standards he was a reasonably admirable political figure and the pre-dreadnought battleship was by Russian standards a pretty good vessel that performed fairly well in World War II. Never mind the oil fire that forced conversion of all her boilers to coal. But it is still revealing that his lasting claim to fame was for fakery (despite revisionist efforts to say his villages were demonstrations of future posterity not facsimiles of it in the present), his rise was the result of adroit maneuvering vertical and horizontal rather than anything resembling a stand on principle, and his enduring success due to his increasing the power of absolutism rather than checking it.

As for the revolt on Potemkin, triggered by loathsome food and brutal discipline, it rapidly turned bloody and pathetic. And while Eisenstein was a genius, his 1925 film is not merely laboured by modern standards, it is deliberate falsification especially of the role of the Bolsheviks in the mutiny.

I think even the real Potemkin deserved better.

Hey buddy, got a match? That is NOT funny. At least, it wouldn’t have been on June 25, 1923, when Captain Lowell H. Smith and Lt. John P. Richter became the first men to perform an aerial refueling.

It’s amazing. Not twenty years after Kitty Hawk. It’s a tribute to human ingenuity and courage, not to say recklessness (Smith had personally already had an airplane destroyed by fire, albeit on the ground, during the 1919 Great Continental Air Race, which he completed anyway by mooching a plane off Major Carl Andrew Spaatz.) But it’s also a warning about the blinding speed with which progress occurs nowadays.

Before you can blink, Lowell’s commanding the first ever flight right around the world. Not consecutive. They kept landing or, in the case of one of the four planes, crashing in thick fog in Alaska. But they also kept taking off, except that one, and they made it. In 1924.

Lowell himself, interestingly, died a rather old-fashioned death, not from the dysentery he contracted during the flight around the world but on falling from a horse. But he certainly was part of the amazing acceleration of airplane technology that took us from Kitty Hawk to Hiroshima, which happened months before he died in November 1945.

Aged just 53, he had lived from the railway into the atomic age. If he’d lived to be, say, 80, he’d have seen LSD as well. And things are just getting faster.

Not safer, though. Even if we no longer smoke much, we can sure still explode.

On this date in 217 B.C., June 24, Hannibal Barca inflicted a crushing defeat on the Romans at the Battle of Lake Trasimene in central Italy. Along with his subsequent annihilation of an entire Roman army at Cannae, eight legions, between 48,000 and 70,000 men, it crushed Rome decisively.

Not.

As Victor Davis Hanson notes, the astounding thing about Rome is that the result of such defeats, long before it became a world power, was not collapse but fresh armies arising from the citizens one after another. Hanson has been criticized for his thesis about the superiority of the Western way of war, including because Hannibal did win these battles, forcing Rome to fight a long, defensive, harassing war, avoiding decisive conflicts and wearing Carthage out. But the fact is that they did wear Carthage out. And no amount of rationalizing can conceal the fact that for 2,500 years, wars between Western and non-Western nations have been absurdly lopsided.

Even the wars the West loses, like Vietnam, see enormously higher casualties on the other side.

The Punic War is a partial exception. At Trebia in 218 B.C., though numbers from ancient battles are notoriously unreliable, the Romans seem to have lost between five and seven times as many as the Carthaginians despite having superior numbers. At Trasimene itself, Hannibal had superior numbers coming in, and again his forces suffered perhaps one-sixth the casualties of the severely beaten Romans. At Cannae, the most perfect encirclement battle in history, it was 10 to one. (Curious coincidence: one of the Roman commanders at Cannae, along with the fatally impetuous Gaius Terentius Varro, was Lucius Aemilius Paullus. In the second most perfect encirclement battle in history, at Stalingrad in World War II, the losing commander was von Paulus. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just weird.)

So here’s the thing. Why didn’t Rome collapse? Why were they able, after such losses on their own doorstep, estimated at one-fifth of all male citizens over 17, with southern Italy revolting and joining Hannibal’s cause, to raise fresh armies, slog on, and win?

Sure, details matter, including the wisdom of putting Fabius Maximum back in charge after Cannae to resume the delaying and harrying tactics that had so frustrated them that they’d let Varro rush into that disaster. And the reorganization of battle tactics to provide greater flexibility after Hannibal had repeatedly outmaneuvered their standard unwieldy formations. But all of this, the capacity to do it and the resilience to make it stick, have deeper roots.

If Trasimene had proved fatal to the Roman cause, along with Trebia and if necessary Cannae, it would be wholly unremarkable. That it did not is therefore necessarily remarkable. Something was different about Rome, something that is still different about the West.

“How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” That’s from Samuel Johnson. And I wish it were engraved in legislatures and especially executive and judicial branch buildings. And taken to heart by too many who place faith in politics. Politicians don’t create parades, they only lead them. And the parades don’t originate in the political system at all.

Indeed, as Andrew Breitbart apparently originally said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” And, I dare say, from history. Because on this date in 1960, June 23, something happened that was far more important than the election of John Kennedy that November, his selection of Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, the antics surrounding John Diefenbaker, the looming prime ministership of Lester Pearson who brought Pierre Trudeau to Ottawa or any number of inspiring or infuriating things that made the headlines.

Specifically, the United States FDA approved “the pill.” There were a number of important pills in the 1960s, from Mick Jagger’s housewives’ “little yellow pill” to Augustus Owsley Stanley’s little purple one. But “the pill,” the one that supposedly let women have sex without consequences, turned the world upside down far more dramatically even than LSD.

It let all kinds of feminist theories become practice. With, I think, very mixed and often disastrous results. But there’s a difference between disliking something and pretending it didn’t happen or didn’t matter. The pill was invented, and approved, and gender relations changed in enormously important ways that we are all still struggling with today.

It didn’t make the headlines. But it made the history books. It’s often that way.

On June 22 the Dutch attacked the Portuguese in Macau in 1622. Wikipedia says “To date, the battle remains the only major engagement that was fought between two European powers on the Chinese mainland.” And frankly I’m not sure what that “to date” is about. Do they know something we don’t but should? Meanwhile, can I just focus on how odd that there should have been even one such battle?

I mean, how many battles have been fought in Europe between Chinese forces, or Asian powers generally? Or in Africa, or the Americas? Does that sort of thing happen a lot? But of course it does, provided you’re talking about Europeans. They have fought in all kinds of places definitely including Africa; Britain and France nearly came to blows there as recently as 1898 before realizing they were both far more scared of Germany than of each other.

Now various explanations have been offered for the imbalance, some unreasonably flattering to Europeans and others unreasonably insulting. But it comes back, once again, to the arguments in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel about how the unequal distribution of geographical blessings and of domesticable plants and animals at the end of the last glaciation. The greater prosperity and more vigorous exchange of ideas in and near the “fertile crescent” around the eastern end of the Mediterranean gave rise to civilizations astoundingly more dynamic than elsewhere without any inherent difference in the people.

By 1500 its impact was still small enough that the rest of the world didn’t see it coming. But the European “Voyages of Discovery” would make worlds collide in ways whose aftershocks are still with us today and resulted in Europeans fighting over other parts of the world as though nobody who lived there got to have an opinion.

In this case, the outnumbered and outgunned Portuguese fought off the Dutch in rather a desperate engagement lasting three days. And kept Macau in one form or another until 1999. Arguably it’s not better off under China even though the Portuguese Empire was not exactly a distinguished venture in any meaningful regard. But note how the Dutch, rather a small country and only briefly a major power, could sail all the way around the world and come pretty close to snatching it from the Portuguese whereas the Chinese just had to sit there steaming at the indignity of it all for nearly four centuries.

It’s an imbalance so pervasive we rather take it for granted, or devise fatuous explanations. I urge you to read Diamond, and also but secondarily Thomas Sowell’s Conquests and Cultures, to get to the root of the matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NQ55Qp78mo On this date in history, June 21, the Duke of Wellington inflicted a signal defeat on Napoleon and brought the war to a successful conclusion. Eh? What’s that you say? Didn’t we already have Waterloo and wasn’t it on June 18 of 1815? True. But I’m talking about Vitoria, on June 21 1813, which drove the French out of Spain and ended the Peninsular War.

I actually like Wellington for all sorts of reasons. He was a conservatives’ conservative opposed to the Reform Bill. And he had a gift for blunt bon mots like “I have seen their backs before” when some French officers turned their backs on him at a ball as well as the possibly apocryphal comment on new troops arriving in Spain that “I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God, they terrify me.”

He was also part of the classic stiff-upper-lip exchange with Lord Uxbridge when the latter was struck by a cannonball at Waterloo: “By God, sir, I've lost my leg!” “By God, sir, so you have!” And when someone greeted him in the street with “Mr. Jones, I believe” he replied “If you believe that you will believe anything.” (I also rather like his fellow commander at Waterloo, the valiant if somewhat impetuous Marshal Blucher, despite the latter’s delusion at one point that he was pregnant with an elephant – I am not making that up.)

But if there’s one thing I really like about Wellington, it’s the way he kept beating Napoleon through determined leadership, military ability and sheer persistence.

Beethoven even composed his Opus 91, “Wellington’s Victory,” in reaction to Vitoria. The least we can do is clap.

If I talk about slavers raiding Ireland you’re thinking Roman times, right? Well, think again. The largest Barbary Pirate attack anywhere in the British Isles happened on June 20, 1631, the “sack of Baltimore” in West Cork, Ireland. A hundred and eight people were seized.

Oddly, the leader of the raid was one “Murad Reis the Younger” whose actual name was “Jan Janszoon van Haarlem” which does indeed mean John son of John from Haarlem and as you surmised means he was Dutch. Originally a Dutch privateer harassing Spanish ships on behalf of his government during the Eighty Years’ War, he found this career insufficiently lucrative so set up in the political chaos of the Barbary Coast (a set of semi-independent city-states under loose and belligerent Ottoman influence), converted to Islam and under another Dutch pirate convert to Islam renamed Slemen Reis began a career of piracy, robbery, villainy and ransom negotiation.

He was eventually captured by the Knights of Malta, imprisoned and tortured. But he escaped after a massive “corsair” attack and apparently died old, honoured and in luxury.

As for the Barbary pirates themselves, they carried on in loathsome style harrying and enslaving infidels for fun and profit until Britain and Spain intimidated them into quiescence, Jefferson sent the Marines (it is often forgotten these days that the reason he had a Koran was to discover whether it really did authorize enslaving infidels as he had been told by a North African diplomat), Monroe sent them back and the British navy followed up when the Algerian ruler repudiated the treaty and threatened to kill all Christian inhabitants, and then the US and European nations adopted a firm policy of sending lead and iron rather than gold and silver and then colonized the region and pretty much squashed the repulsive business.

Nowadays the region is again in turmoil and aggressive capturing of slaves has reappeared. History isn’t was, it’s is. And we need the same clarity of purpose and determination that the West exhibited after the Napoleonic Wars to deal with it again.

On this date in history, the Roanoke Island settlement was abandoned. And you can see why. No, I’m not talking about the mysterious, never-solved disappearance of the colony founded in 1587. I’m talking about the first group, in 1585, who fled on June 19 1586 onto Sir Francis Drake’s ship, fresh from attacking the Spanish at St. Augustine.

I’m always amazed by the courage, mixed with apparently complete lack of judgement or even instinct for self-preservation, exhibited by these early colonists. The first group was dropped off by Sir Richard Grenville who promised to return with supplies but was delayed. So the colonists figured the best plan was an unprovoked attack on the local Algonquian group that was keeping them alive.

It wasn’t. But you guessed that. So facing starvation and revenge attacks they left. Except for 15 exceptionally bright guys who stayed behind.

Only to have another group show up in 1587 and find, you saw this coming, their bones. OK. We have a winner.

You see, John White, who was governor of the 1587 settlement established by Sir Walter Raleigh (yes, Drake and Raleigh – they are names in books because they were real adventurous people), led 113 people back to the region including his own recently married daughter Eleanor and her husband Ananias Dare to, well, they were aiming for the Chesapeake Bay but their navigator Simon Fernandez, nicknamed “the Swine (and why not set off into the total unknown in such hands or perhaps trotters), let them off for a break at Roanoke then wouldn’t let them back on board his ship or guide them any further, being apparently keen to set off and resume his old career as… a pirate.

So they settled down to make houses and farms, attack hostile Indians but accidentally strike their allies instead and generally otherwise become unable to purchase life insurance. Now Roanoke Island does seem to have been a reasonable site, big enough for a settlement but small enough to defend (eight miles by two miles) and inside the barrier islands, close enough to the mainland to trade but far enough for some security.

Let’s do it. White’s daughter gave birth three months after they arrived, to Virginia Dare, the first European child born in North America unless the Vikings got up to something we don’t know about. Unfortunately people need food, so White returned to England for more supplies (yes, they kept a ship when Fernandez left) with a cheery “Back soon… I hope” or words to that effect. Possibly not cheery because the anchor got fouled as they were leaving and many were hurt trying to free it. Then came bad weather driving those not dead of scurvy or starvation onto the west coast of Ireland, where White found he could not go back due to the imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada and a general embargo on ships leaving England until that mess was settled.

Finally he got two small unseaworthy ships and set out in 1588 only to get his rear end shot off by pirates – literally. He was hit “in the side of the buttoke”. It wasn’t until 1590 that he finally managed to stagger back to Roanoke through storms and piracy and drownings, to find nothing but ruined buildings and the mysterious inscriptions CRO on a tree and CROATOAN on a post, probably the name of a local tribe or their island. The rest is silence.

Well, not really. Evidently these events were seen as such a rousing success back in England, by people who hadn’t gone and weren’t about to, that a fresh expedition was mounted that established Jamestown and through a remarkable combination of poor planning and bad judgement somehow laid the foundations of the United States.

Maybe people figured life was short and uncertain anyway. But you have to admire the courage with which they figured in that case it would be good to get pregnant and head to that island where there was no food and the Indians were justifiably keen to slay you. The judgement is another question altogether.