In my latest National Post column I say that identity politics is always divisive no matter how well-intentioned, and it's divisive in large part because it's necessarily false.
The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Ask the Professor, Feb. 9"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2017/February/Ask_Professor_78.mp3[/podcast]
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 20th 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)
"Don’t be afraid to speak up. Remember, whatever you say about the subject and however fallacious it might be, the same thing has already been said by some eminent economist." Ludwig von Mises in a seminar at New York University, as recalled by Murray Rothbard in "The Essential von Mises"
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 13th 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.