If you want to know how not to do it, sadly, you can very often ask the Russian government. Like that business with the beard tax.

Huh? Beard tax? Wouldn’t they just shave? And the funny thing is that’s what the government, also known as Peter the Great, was hoping for when he brought it in on September 5, 1698.

You don’t often get a situation where a government introduces a tax hoping it won’t bring in money. But cynics, or perhaps realists, will not be surprised to hear that even then it failed.

Perhaps, as classic radio PI Brad “the Fat Man” Runyon once said, that could stand a little clarification. So here goes.

Peter the Great was a determined “modernizer.” He understood that to rival the West in military might to avoid being overwhelmed by it, Russia or any other what we would now call “underdeveloped” nation had to become prosperous and dynamic. And to do so it would have to adopt many Western cultural habits.

As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s a fatal paradox in any such attempt. Since the fundamental impulse here is to resist Western military power in order to resist its cultural sway, the necessity of adopting its culture to fend off its culture necessarily negates itself. But it also cannot work because the key element in western dynamic spontaneity is its spontaneity. It comes from within, from below, organically. If you have to force it, you just break it.

Which brings us to Peter. He understood full well the power of the West, especially its apparently chaotic, bafflingly successful approach of questioning everything and letting people work things out for themselves in the economy, in government, increasingly at that point even in religion. And he hated it. But he needed it. So he decided, as a singlehanded autocrat, to force it on his people.

Provided, of course, that instead of questioning everything they didn’t question anything, and didn’t think of working anything out for themselves in any important area. He created a new capital, further west and westward-looking, St. Petersburg. With slave labour.

He created a new social hierarchy with bureaucrats in place of aristocrats. The only way you could make it worse, one is tempted to say. But of course if merit had displaced birth spontaneously it would be good. It’s only bad when the whole thing is forced on a sullen populace, not just the serfs but everyone.

Likewise, Peter ordered his courtiers and officials to wear western clothing instead of traditional oriental robes, a legacy of the Mongols. And to shave off their old-tyme beards. The aristocrats balked. God wanted them to have beards. And so Peter placed a heavy tax on beards and in some cases forcibly shaved people himself.

Not only an absolute monarch, Peter was also a scary giant, 6’ 8”. When he shaved you, you stayed shaved. But evidently some of his victims actually carried their severed beards around with them so on the Second Coming they could fish them from their pockets and say see, I would have kept it if I’d dared or something equally unimpressive.

If people had decided in a decentralized, genuinely voluntary way to adopt new habits it would have been a desperately needed breath, nay gust, of invigorating fresh air in a stale and closed Russia. Instead it was a fiery blast that withered society further. Like all such violent modernizers, Peter squeezed more performance out of his government and his people in the short run. But he further weakened their capacity for genuine dynamism.

The result, ironically, was to make Russia even less Western while seeming more so. But in exactly the opposite way to his intention. In that sense, the beard tax was triply counter-productive. Designed to fail to raise money, it raised money, while worsening the problem it was meant to help solve.

Even by the standards of government, it’s an impressive failure.

Here’s a curious-sounding item. On September 4 of 1812, the siege of Fort Harrison began when the place was set on fire. Normally you’d think the fort being set on fire would be the end of the siege.

Not this time. Fort Harrison was held by a tiny American garrison, 15 soldiers and five or so able-bodied civilians along with about three dozen sick soldiers, all commanded by Captain (later President) Zachary Taylor. A very large Indian war band approached, asked for a truce and parley on September 3, and then during the night one of them set the fort on fire and the others attacked.

Unsuccessfully. Things looked pretty grim, with the fire out of control partly because the whiskey went up (there was often strange stuff in frontier whiskey including kerosene and gunpowder – “firewater” wasn’t just an expression). A couple of defenders with working legs made use of them to flee. But Taylor shouted “Taylor never surrenders” and got his men organized to fight the fire.

Did I say men? I should say people. A certain Julia Lambert even got herself lowered into the well to fill buckets faster. And the flames even helped illuminate the attackers as targets.

Well, the long and short of it is that the fort held out successfully for 11 days before being relieved, after somehow patching a 20-foot fire-burned gap in the outer wall and despite having most of their food as well as their hooch consumed in the flames and two attempted relief expeditions ambushed and destroyed.

There is much to be said about the clashes between aboriginals and Europeans in the Americas, and a lot of it is to the discredit of the Europeans. But as I have repeatedly mentioned including in this series, the whole situation cannot be understood without grasping the enormous differences in culture and technology, and indeed the appalling vulnerability of the original Americans to diseases that were carried over the Atlantic from Europe’s farms and cities.

Among these is the degree of organization that let 20 able-bodied Europeans hold off 600 determined aboriginal warriors for a week and a half. And the fact that the attackers asked for a truce then struck during it hoping for the advantage of surprise. Such conduct was neither to their credit nor isolated, and if Europeans said natives’ promises were not to be relied on it wasn’t entirely an invention.

Call it a cultural clash or a misunderstanding if you like. But don’t pretend such things never happened.

Charles II of England was up a tree after the Battle of Worcester. No. Really.

The battle, on September 3 1651, was a decisive defeat for the last intact Royalist army, mostly Scottish, by Cromwell’s New Model Army, mostly Puritans. And the king watched it from the spire of Worcester Cathedral which I suppose is as good a place as any from which to watch your army and hopes be crushed unless, of course, you wanted to be among them and risk sharing their fate. (And no, Charles II in 1651 is not a typo – he claimed the throne as soon as his father was beheaded in 1649, even if he didn’t sit in it until Cromwell had died and his son “Tumbledown Dick” had tumbled off the stage (see the May 25, 2016 It Happened Today.)

As for the tree, he climbed it later, during his flight first north and then to France where he spent nearly a decade. It was a massive oak called the Boscobel Oak or more often The Royal Oak, popular in pictures including on plates and yes, that does explain why so many pubs have that name. But let us return to Worcester, a suitable place for a Royalist last stand because the region had been firmly pro-King since the days of King John and Magna Carta. And we actually were at the site on Fort Royal Hill where the battle ended and seen the spire of the cathedral.

We also saw a plaque that quotes the words future U.S. President John Adams wrote after visiting in 1786 along with another future president, Thomas Jefferson, back when they were friends before they became bitter enemies and then in old age friends again.

“Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as scenes where freemen had fought for their rights. The people in the neighborhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester, that I was provoked, and asked, ‘And do Englishmen so soon forget the ground where liberty was fought for? Tell your neighbors and your children that this is holy ground; much holier than that on which your churches stand. All England should come in pilgrimage to this hill once a year.’ This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their awkwardness before might arise from their uncertainty of our sentiments concerning the civil wars.”

I am no fan of Cromwell, who disposed of one tyrant with the aid of an army before making himself another using the same instrument. It was much better that the ancient institutions be restored and refurbished, as they were after 1660 and especially 1689. And I think Adams spoke a bit slightingly of English churches. But he was right that when they have been trampled, the people must recover and restore them. And then remember, as the English then did.

It is from such people that Canada claims its political descent. So we should remember it too. As our Right to Arms documentary (www.arighttoarms.com) will remind people when it is finished later this fall. Complete with footage from Fort Royal Hill.

Who is Cicero? The short answer is he’s like this famous orator who um well he was a Roman and he talked real good. A slightly longer answer is a man on the wrong end of whose tongue or pen you would not want to be, because his oratory was famously polemical. Hence on September 2^nd we should remember, and to some extent celebrate, the first of the “Philippics” that made him famous and dead.

Huh? Dead. Yup. I’ll get to that. But first the Philippics.

It’s a term for a singularly harsh political denunciation. Or at least it used to be. And as you may notice, I’m sidling up to a commentary of the O Tempora O Mores kind about declining cultural standards in which we no longer remember such things and as a result our politics is at least as abusive but far less eloquent. Where’s any sort of Cicero today? Or Demosthenes?

I bring him in because the term “Philippic” originated with his denunciations of Philip of Macedon. Which didn’t work. Thanks in part to Demosthenes, Athens and Thebes did revolt against the dominance of Macedon but got walloped at Chaeronea in 338 BC and for all practical purposes lost its independence permanently.

Somebody assassinated Philip two years later for reasons that are unclear but apparently weren’t related to Athens. Demosthenes again persuaded the Athenians to revolt and again it failed, and with Macedonian agents hot on his heels Demosthenes committed suicide. History remembers him more favourably and rightly so. But his tongue was a double-edged weapon.

Still, I’m meant to be killing Cicero, right? So here we go.

He unleashed his tongue on Mark Antony, the guy who came to bury Caesar not praise him in Shakespeare. Cicero actually objected to the fact that Mark Antony hadn’t helped murder Caesar. And he gave him what for in classic style, even classical, including deliberately adopting Demosthenes’ own Philippics as a model.

He went on and on, 14 of these things in less than two years. And it rather backfired, I have to admit. For one thing, Mark Antony had him killed and his head and hands displayed in the forum to frighten opponents of Antony and his new buddies Octavian and Lepidus. For another, Cicero got so carried away over Mark Antony that he overlooked the danger of Octavian, even endorsing his raising of a private army.

In the end Mark Antony also overlooked the danger of Octavian, who defeated Antony and drove him to suicide, and shuffled Lepidus off into obscurity in which he at least lived out his days in humiliating peace.

As for Cicero, well, he sure gave a great speech. The sort we should imitate. Starting by being aware of it, and even studying it in schools. While also giving a little attention to the need to be a little more prudent about practical matters.

September 1 was a bad day for France back in 1870. They lost the crucial battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, forcing the surrender of their army and their Emperor Napoleon III the next day. Now for my money they were well rid of the latter. But their defeat, despite the efforts of the promptly proclaimed Third Republic to fight on, had to hurt. And in the end, it turned out to be a very bad day for the rest of the world too.

It’s not that they had much of a dog in this fight. And the establishment, bloody course and violent suppression of the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the war was mostly bad for France while offering an object lesson about political radicalism to those willing to learn it. But the Franco-Prussian War had several pernicious consequences.

First, it allowed Bismarck and company to complete the unification of Germany and establishment of the German Empire whose subsequent aggressive course was the main cause of the disastrous First World War, which in turn set in motion the events leading to Hitler’s aggression and the Second World War.

Second, and related, the fact that the Franco-Prussian War was such a quick affair led politicians and the public alike, in Germany, France, Britain and throughout Europe, to overlook the possibility that the next major war would be protracted. It’s easy in retrospect to say that developments in weaponry and logistics in the 19^th century, the implications of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions for wars between advanced countries, would almost certainly lead to the long, hideous stalemate of World War I, with its muddy, bloody trenches and millions killed.

In fact it could have turned out otherwise (for more on this see my documentary The Great War Remembered and stay tuned for my book of the same name). But it was a possibility given too little weight in the run-up to 1914; far too few people pondered the risk that the long, sanguinary American Civil War was a harbinger of worse to come. If Sedan had gone the other way, if the Franco-Prussian War had lasted several years, even if the French had ultimately succumbed, it might have opened men’s eyes a little wider to the really nightmarish possibilities of allowing an assassination to escalate into a general war in the summer of 1914.

If assassination really never has changed the history of the world, as Disraeli claimed, it’s not for want of trying. And with World War I much on my mind as I finish up a book on it, I’m thinking the assassination of Franz Ferdinand certainly triggered events that even if they were more or less waiting to happen do seem to have been unleashed by his assassination even though he wasn’t likely to do anything worthwhile had he lived. But I also think it’s something of a historical finger in the eye of various assassins to reflect on the ways in which disease has done what they could not.

Take Henry V. Please. I mean, he is dead. Take him and bury him. He died on August 31, 1422 while campaigning in France, of… dysentery. And really, why not? Lots of people did. Kings don’t have some special dispensation to die only of elevated-sounding or elegant maladies. So yes, the hero of Shakespeare’s play (or plays if you count the two where he’s a wild child as well as the one where he grows up) with that Agincourt speech ended up not victorious and reigning happily ever after nor even dying heroically in battle but instead… how shall I put this tactfully?... kind of pooped his guts out.

Ugh. But that’s more or less what it amounts to.

OK. So he’s dead. And dead young, just 36, after just 9 years on the throne, before he could fulfil his promise as a king if any.

Much as I love Shakespeare, his judgement in such matters or at least his publications are not to be relied on. He was a propagandist for the Tudors who had taken the throne by killing off the last reigning Yorkist king Richard III and helping dispose of any other potential claimants not wiped out in the Wars of the Roses between Yorks and Lancasters. And thus he, or his patrons who might have caused him to perish if he’d gotten out of line, had a vested interest in making the Lancasters look good to make the Yorks look bad. (His negative portrayal of Richard II, predecessor to the Lancasters, is by contrast entirely justified, even insufficiently harsh.) But were they?

I don’t mean were the Yorks bad. I’ve addressed that elsewhere and the answer seems pretty clearly to be no, not even Richard III whose reputation was blackened by Shakespeare on his way to the parking lot under which he was recently found buried. I mean were the Lancasters good?

There were only three of them so it should be easy to answer. And crucially, Henry VI was not. I’ve heard his character praised. But he was a weak king and mentally unstable and his inability to rule contributed to the Yorkist rise to power, or lunge for it by some accounts. And he was also handicapped by coming to the throne very young because his father died early. That being, of course, Henry V. All the Lancasters were Henrys.

I can’t really tell if Henry IV was a good king. Shakespeare portrays him as such, with Henry V growing into a worthy heir throughout the cycle of plays. But his reign was marked by endless troubles, revolts and plots. And if he showed skill and even judgement in surviving them, he didn’t have much chance to establish a domestic record before dying of some unidentified disease or diseases that caused disfigurement, seizures and his early demise at age 45 after just 13 years on the throne.

As I’ve said before, if he’d just admitted he wasn’t king of France and gone home, he would have done his kingdom considerable good. And himself, as it turns out, because war is always a risky business and poor sanitation in those days sure didn’t make it safer.

Thus Henry VI took over, in name at least, at age nine. Months not years. So he was a pawn, puppet and object of a tug of war for the first 15 years of his reign, and never developed a strong character.

Had his own father lived even to the same age that his father had, Henry VI would at least have been nine years old when he took over, and presumably had a more stable childhood with at least some guidance and certainty from his father. Had Henry V lived to be, say, 60, then Henry VI would have come to the throne in 1446 in his mid-30s.

Of course he might still have been an awful king, harsh and greedy, weak and treacherous or just lazy. He might have been an OK king. He might even have been a good one. And if he had been good, or really bad, the Wars of the Roses would probably have been avoided altogether or, alternatively, been less destructive because the Yorkist cause would have been more obviously just and commanded greater support.

Either way, the end result, with the Tudor usurpation and subsequent brutally cynical break with Rome, would have been highly unlikely. We cannot know what would have happened, naturally. Possibly something even weirder or more outrageous. Maybe something worse for the future rise of England and the Anglosphere with its unique liberty under law.

My crystal ball tends to cloud over in such cases. But before doing so, it says to me that Henry V’s ignominious death did help destabilize England with far-reaching consequences in ways that your average assassin can only envy. And envying a bacterium, virus, worm or amoeba (dysentery is a syndrome not a disease and can have various causes) is exceptionally ignominious too.

OK. Here comes some weird stuff. Now you may say history is full of strange things, many of them also horrible. And you’d be right. But in this instance I have prehistory in mind.

Don’t think I can’t count when I then allude to the discovery on August 30 1909 of the Burgess Shale in southeastern B.C. by Charles Walcott. I realize 19-09 is not prehistory and Walcott is not a trilobite. But here’s an interesting bit. For reasons best known to rocks, the Burgess Shale formation was exceptionally good at preserving the soft bits of fossils normally lost (think how much we know about dinosaur skeletons and how little about their skin, feathers or ears if they even had any).

In fact the Burgess Shale is one of the oldest formations yet found with soft fossils, dating back a mind-bogging half billion years. And so Walcott found a bunch of odd critters, so many that he spent 15 more years there, collecting and struggling to categorize more than 65,000 fossils and fossil fragments.

Zzzzzzz.

No, wait. It gets weirder. You see, the rather linear, even plodding vision of them evolutions at that point didn’t have much room for mass extinctions of entire kinds of animals.

Dinosaurs, you cry? But no. They were held to be big lumbering inferior lizards well into the 1960s, as my beloved childhood How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs could testify if it too had not gone extinct. Since evolution kept improving things, it wasn’t meant to have gigantic dead ends. So Walcott tried to fit his finds into existing taxa.

Taxa is the plural of taxum, which isn’t what governments do to everybody. It’s one of those categories in the evolutionary tree, the kingdom phylum class order family genus species business that scientists still insist everything must fit into in an orderly mathematical way. But whatever the validity of this arrangement, one thing is sure. Not every little turtle makes it to the ocean and not every taxum makes it to the 20^th century.

By the 1960s this idea was becoming widely accepted, along with a more dynamic, even chaotic vision of evolution, with long periods of quiet and bursts of innovation (“punctuated equilibrium”) and specialization that took a good thing too far and went thud. And thus in 1962 someone took another look at Walcott’s actual stuff instead of descriptions and analyses of things that didn’t seem to fit well into extant taxa.

I should note here that I’m not sneering. Virtually every significant museum has huge storerooms full of stuff that has piled up over the years that they don’t have space to display or time to examine. And when someone does examine it they often find surprises.

That was certainly true when Alberto Simonetta went into the dusty Burgess Shale boxes and found a great deal of really strange stuff including so-called “hopeful monsters” like Opabina, with five eyes and an aardvark-type schnozzle, and the famous or infamous Hallucigenia, well-suited to convincing scientists that they or Mother Nature had been taking banned substances.

Scientists have been quarreling over them ever since, with varying degrees of good and ill humour. But I’ll tell you what. I’m very glad Walcott dug them up and then Simonetta dug them out of storage. Because there’s some wonderfully weird beasties in it.

Not that I would have wanted to meet one for real. Even a small one. Too many spines. Too many eyes. Fascinating, yes. And wonderful. But a bit horrible as well. There are some things about nature you want to admire from behind a sheet of glass a few hundred million years thick.

The line between good and evil may as Solzhenitsyn said run through every human heart. But some systems do tend to encourage the former and others the latter. For instance what is one to make, even three quarters of a century later, of the fact that on August 29 of 1942 the Red Cross was obliged to reveal that the Japanese government had refused to allow free passage of food, medicine and other supplies for American POWs in its custody?

Even the Nazis allowed supplies in through Switzerland to POWs. And they were guilty of enormous evil of every sort. Yet after enormous local efforts by the American Red Cross to collect blood, food, bandages and so on, the Japanese flatly refused to allow neutral ships to bring it in.

The weird thing is you could just have killed POWs. The Japanese were certainly known to behead captives and worse. Yet in their treatment of, for instance, the Canadians seized when Hong Kong fell, or Filipinos, Americans and others on the “Bataan Death March” had an extra streak of malevolent cruelty.

The purpose clearly was not just to kill, but to inflict suffering. And not for any instrumental reason, to intimidate or to extort. Nor was it done reluctantly by most of the guards and others involved, at the behest of a small sinister group who would torture and kill their families if they did not cooperate.

As with the Holocaust, there was a surprising degree of popular enthusiasm. Yet such things do not, with rare and appalling exceptions, break out spontaneously. Somehow or other a system is created that exacerbates the tendency toward cruelty in such a way that superiors press it on subordinates who in turn eagerly engage in such practices and push superiors toward greater cruelty. And even if it begins with some sense of purpose, to create discipline, frighten enemies or punish opponents, it eventually gains a kind of momentum of its own that is staggering in its wanton cruelty, and often baffling in retrospect even to those who were enthusiastically part of it at the time.

For the Japanese to accept Red Cross contributions to POWs would even have helped their own war effort by reducing the already limited diversion of food and medicine to POWs that were at least temporarily being kept alive. And so even as we examine our own conduct and thoughts carefully at all times and in all situations, so we must also keep a wary eye on our own institutions and those elsewhere that can, indeed, exacerbate the problem of evil in the human heart.