The Virtual Stoa

Some scallywag has put the Bodleian Library up for sale on eBay [via]. The current bid’s �5,000,100.00.

Over here.

The Virtual Stoa, five today.

Paul Nizan, French communist, novelist and philosopher, born 7 February 1905, killed at Dunkirk, 23 May 1940.

David Lewis, Canadian social democrat; born 23 June 1909, died 23 May 1989.

Chick-lit writer Louise Bagshawe takes pride in her work: “I write books that have no literary merit whatsoever”. But there’s more to Bagshawe than crappy writing: the claim is often made that she was “the youngest-ever contributor to The Tablet“, my goodness, and she’s also a noted economic analyst, believing, for example, that “With his tax cuts he [i.e. President Bush] has single-handedly pulled America out of the Clinton Recession”.

Charilaos Florakis, Greek Communist; born 20 July 1914, died 22 May 2005.

The next Carnivalesque for Early Modern History (Loosely Defined) is going to take place here at the Virtual Stoa some time in the middle of June, so do send in your candidates for inclusion using the Official Submission Form, which will probably make its way back to me in the fullness of time. More over here.

It’s all very nice waking up and finding out that there’s another European country out there. But was the referendum result affected by the proximity of the vote to the Eurovision Song Contest (which I thought this year was excellent)? There seem to be both push factors and pull factors at work here: on the one hand, here and here; on the other hand - and more ominously for the rest of us - I’m afraid it does look as if Montenegrin independence will contribute towards an unbreakable Balkans / Former Yugoslav lock on the contest for the foreseeable future, given the patterns of regional block-voting we’ve seen in recent years.

Possibly Britain’s only black farmer, and a man who “makes Lenny Henry seem like a shy introvert”, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones has a terrific website at theblackfarmer.com and even has a blog, though it hasn’t been updated for a while. Nancy Banks-Smith has more. Certainly the most - or perhaps the only - impressive A-Listee I’ve considered so far, at least on the evidence of five minutes with Google (which, let’s face it, is all that most of these people deserve).

Julie Rook is a councillor in Deal with a poor prose style and an interest in stamping out anti-social behaviour. (She’s the local “Cabinet Member for Citizenship”.) When the local cops tried to fine some poor kid �80 for saying the words “fuck all” in a conversation with a friend that took place within the hearing of a police officer, Councillor Rook was asked about the incident. Forgetting to say the words, “This is outrageous, whatever happened to civil liberties?”, she instead came out with the weaselly, “Swearing and abusive behaviour certainly is not normal behaviour and I feel it should never be used in a public place.” Mr Walker sensibly opted not to pay the fine and to have his day in court, there was a bit of publicity, and - surprise, surprise - the charge was dropped.

Noel Browne, Irish social democrat, expelled from four political parties over the course of his career, born 20 December 1915, died 21 May 1997.

Once you’re done downloading all those Ralph Miliband pieces, you might also want to get your sweaty little paws on another fine publication: my friend Ben Jackson’s pamphlet for the think-tank Catalyst, Why Inequality Matters (co-authored with Paul Segal). It’s recently been made freely available here [pdf] (I probably spent £5 on my copy; do you detect a pattern?). There’s a bit more about it here.

Ralph Miliband, Belgian socialist. Born 7 January 1924, died 21 May 1994.

You can now get the first thirty-five years or so of the Socialist Register, which Miliband founded and edited until his death, over here (making my own successful effort to assemble a complete set a little redundant, but not to worry). Miliband’s own contributions (excluding editorial front matter) are as follows (with all links to .pdfs):

1964: Socialism and the Myth of the Golden Past
1964: Labour Policy and the Labour Left (with John Saville)
1965: What Does the Left Want?
1965: Marx and the State
1966: The Labour Government and Beyond
1967: Vietnam and Western Socialism
1968: Professor Galbraith and American Capitalism
1970: Lenin’s The State and Revolution
1973: Stalin and After
1973: The Coup in Chile
1975: Political Forms and Historical Materialism
1976: Moving On
1977: The Future of Socialism in England
1978: Constitution and Revolution: Notes on Eurocommunism
1979: A Comment on Rudolf Bahro’s Alternative
1980: Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism
1982: Ruth First
1983: Socialist Advance in Britain
1984: Reflections on Anti-Communism (with Marcel Liebman)
1987: Freedom, Democracy and the American Alliance
1987: Socialists and the ‘New Conservatism’ (with Panitch)
1988: Problems and Promise of Socialist Renewal (with Panitch and Saville)
1991: What Comes After Communist Regimes?
1992: The New World Order and the Socialist Agenda (with Panitch)
1994: Thirty Years of the Socialist Register
1995: Harold Laski’s Socialism

The 1995 volume also contains a memorial tribute by Leo Panitch, a select bibliography of Miliband’s writings, and Marion Kozak’s memoir of the journal’s earliest days.

I can’t find two articles: (i) “Beyond Social Democracy” (1985/6), co-written with Marcel Liebman and (ii) “Counter-Hegemonic Struggles” (1990). But the rest of them seem to be there OK.

200 today…

When proper allowance has been made for geographical exigencies, another more purely moral and social consideration offers itself. Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilised and cultivated people—to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power—than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation.

More sensible Mill Birthday Blogging over here.

UPDATE [3pm]: Apparently my great-great-grandfather preached a sermon against the Times’s hatchet-job of an obituary of JSM in 1873. I wonder if I’ll be able to chase down a copy. (Where do you go for Victorian sermons, anyway?)

Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist, baseball obsessive and socialist, born 10 September 1941, died 20 May 2002.

I think we’ve got a classic Cameroonian A-Listee here. Caroline Righton (what a name!) appears to be a TV newsreader (and scroll down) who went on to work for Carlton TV (hence the Cameron connection?), and has written a self-help book, The Life Audit, which at a glance looks like every other self-help book ever written, though maybe that’s just me.

As late as 1987, Mrs Thatcher was saying that anybody who thought that the ANC was going to form the government of South Africa was “living in Cloud-Cuckoo Land”, and she repeatedly expressed the view that the ANC was a terrorist organisation, much like the IRA. In the new-look David Cameron-led Conservative Party, we can see new ways in which today’s Tories are positioning themselves with respect to the anti-apartheid tradition. Here’s A-Lister Philippa Stroud, addressing the question, “Do you really believe that the laws of this land can be changed to protect the lives of unborn children?”:

“I hear this so often from people who are firmly pro-life in their thinking, but who have lost sight of the hope of change. Let me explain why I am utterly convinced that it is only a matter of time before the laws of this land are changed. When Nelson Mandela was fighting apartheid he said that he never lost the conviction that he would win because he knew he had truth on his side. He argued that, when an ideology is fundamentally flawed, it will fall in the end. Who could have foreseen the collapse of the Berlin wall or the downfall of apartheid? Gradually momentum builds and creates such pressure that a one-time impenetrable stronghold of thinking comes tumbling down.”

[source]

Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the (so-called) utopian (so-called) socialists,

“All the faithful who live at least one day’s walk away from a temple will go down into the mausoleum of Newton once each year through an entrance consecrated for that purpose. Children will be brought there by their parents as soon as possible after their birth. Everyone who fails to obey this commandment will be regarded by the faithful as an enemy of the religion.”Any mortal who enters the mausoleum may be transported to another planet if Newton considers it necessary for my purpose…”

Born 17 October 1760, died 19 May 1825.

The committee appointed to investigate various complaints about his work has just published its report. Two excerpts:

“The other two apparently independent third-party sources cited in footnotes 63 and 64 are essays published in the same volume, The State of Native America, one under the name of a person named Rebecca Robbins and the other under the name of M. Annette Jaimes, the editor of the volume. Since both essays do contain statements of the type that Professor Churchill claims, that might have put an end to the matter of research misconduct regarding this allegation, except for the fact that in response to the separate allegation that he had plagiarized the Robbins essay in another later published piece, Professor Churchill said in Submission E that he had in fact ghostwritten both the Robbins and the Jaimes essays, in full…” [pp.23-24]”Judging the seriousness of the misconduct described in this report requires consideration of the damage Professor Churchill�s conduct imposes on other scholarship in the field of ethnic studies, especially Native American studies. This damage is particularly likely to be felt by those whose work concerns the mistreatment of Native Americans by European explorers, traders, settlers, and military personnel. Plenty of reliable evidence supports the conclusion that Native Americans were on more than one occasion subjected to racist genocidal campaigns by some of these actors. There is no need for any scholar to exaggerate data to support that conclusion. Those who do so inflict harm on other scholars doing meticulous work that documents aspects of the racism and genocide inflicted on Indian peoples of the Americas by the settler society, and on the enterprise of such scholarship more generally. Since this area of scholarly inquiry is often targeted by the hateful, the na�ve, and those bent on denying alternative historic truths, it is especially vulnerable to injury by association with work employing unacceptable scholarly techniques.” [p.97]

Full report here [pdf]; news report here. [via]

Priti Patel, just below, devoted two years of her life to working for Jimmy Goldsmith’s loony Referendum Party. But UKIP, she says, is “completely different”. Another A-Lister who campaigned for the Referendum Party was Zac Goldsmith, who worked for his dad in Putney in 1997 — and he has admitted to voting UKIP, too. (It’d probably be too much to hope that someone on the A-List has a background with Veritas.)

(Oh, and I liked the Guardian’s description of Goldsmith as “an old Etonian, poker-playing plutocrat who runs a play farm funded from daddy’s inheritance in Devon.”)

She writes of her past involvement with the loony Referendum Party, where she ran the press office: “Personally I felt that there was a fantastic debate to be had and also that the public were desperate to know more. The Referendum Party was a compelling prospect because they wanted to be very proactive on generating a debate on Europe and they brought in the element of choice… I worked with the Referendum Party for two years and it was a real baptism of fire. It was an amazing experience and I learnt a great deal about campaigning.”

Enkidu and Andromache have just had their first birthday, over the week-end, so I’m now going officially to consider them cats rather than kittens, even though they are still quite small, at least compared to the enormous beasts that roam the streets of North Oxford.

By way of celebration, here’s the earliest picture I have of them, taken on 15 May last year when they were all of two days old. It’s pretty obvious which one Enkidu is; a little harder in the case of Andromache.

Like my grandmother between 1954 and 1964, Margot James is Vice-Chairman [sic] of the Conservative Party. But the similarities end there, for Margot James’s partner is a “personal shopper” whose TV credits include Hotter Sex.