An End-of-Year Scrapbook

As the year draws to a close, I offer here a few anecdotes and observations that caught my attention from 2019's reading. Some may form the basis of future blog posts. I hope the rest prove as interesting (or startling) to my readers as to me.

Ashoka at Ramagrama, courtesy of Photo Dharma, Thailand

On the transmission of knowledge between Hellenistic Greece and India: Ashoka, the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, knew a fair amount about the “Yona” (Ionians, i.e., Greeks) living to his west and sent Buddhist missionaries to convert the subjects of “Antiyoho…and Turumaye” (Antiochus and Ptolomy). Apparently, they met with little success. Perhaps a fan of Harry Turtledove's could turn this episode into an alt-history tale. (Peter Thonemann, The Hellenistic Age: A Very Short Introduction (2018), p. 74.)

On live-action Dungeons and Dragons in the Middle Ages: To defend their subjects in southern Anatolia from Arab raiders, the Byzantines in the ninth and tenth centuries built “vast subterranean citadels” in which fleeing peasants could take refuge. These they carved into the soft rock in the vicinity of modern Cappadocia. (Peter Sarris, The Byzantines: A Very Short Introduction (2015), pp. 69-70.)

On bling: Like the modern Hmong, the medieval Norse literally wore their money. When purchasing goods, they would cut pieces off of the silver collars and arm bands they wore, and merchants would then weigh the “cash” they had received to determine its value. Archaeologists have found these merchants’ weights in sites from tenth-century Ireland, among other places. (Fintan O’Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects (2013). ch. 37.)
 

Drogheda Massacre (1651), courtesy of Wikimedia.

On making Ireland less attractive to tourists: After Oliver Cromwell’s scorched-earth campaign of 1651-52, a traveler in Ireland observed that “You may ride twenty miles and scarce discern any thing…but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets.” (ibid, ch, 63.) Unpleasant fellow, that Cromwell.

On Tsar’s Alexander’s misunderstanding of the relationship between autocracy and popular ignorance: During an 1814 visit to England, Alexander I of Russia saw a display of the new “Lancastrian” method of education, whereby older students helped train newer and younger students. He was sufficiently impressed that he opened a Lancastrian school for Russian soldiers billeted in France. It proved very effective. So began a slow but dangerous climb in Russian literacy rates. (Christine Haynes, Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon (2018), ch. 6.)

Roughly, "Shut up and win the war."

On Spanish antecedents to famous English novels: During the Civil War in Spain, George Orwell likely saw a Spanish communist poster “emblazoned with the image of a boot stamping ‘on all who resist forever.’” (D.J. Taylor, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (2019), p. 38.)

**

Happy holidays to all.

Any Good News in 2019?

I'm posting this a bit early this year because the mainstream (political) news in the United States has been so depressing, I figured my readers could use a cheerier alternative. I know I could.

Health:

2018 was a good year for those fighting malaria. Algeria and Argentina have now eradicated the disease. New cases of malaria dropped by half in India. Malawi is immunizing all children with the new vaccine; other African nations are expected to follow suit.

Vaccinations in Malawi, via Doctors without Borders.

2018-19 was also a positive year for public health. The Philippines introduced universal health insurance. Rwanda is vaccinating 95 percent of its children against measles and polio. Sudan vaccinated thirteen million children against these illnesses. Less remarked upon, but still important: India has since 2014 supplied 90 million sites with flush toilets. Most families now have access to one.

In Europe and North America (though perhaps not the White House), dementia rates have fallen by 15 percent in each decade since 1990. In 2018, U.S. drug overdose deaths declined, suicide rates in Japan fell to their lowest level ever, and life expectancy in Russia reached its highest level ever.

Globally, HIV deaths are down 33 percent since 2010.

Environmental improvement:

South Africa, England, Canada, Belize, and Argentina have created new marine conservation sites. Australia has initiated a re-wilding project on the Yorke Peninsula. Chile is turning 407,000 hectares of private land into a national park. The U.S. Senate has passed a law protecting 1.3 million acres of federal land. Perhaps Mitch McConnell isn't 100 percent evil.*

Ethiopia announced a plan to plant four billion new trees and monitor their growth with its new satellite. On 29 July the nation planted 350 million trees in twelve hours. China announced that forest now covers 22 percent of its land surface. Costa Rica has reached 50 percent forestation.

Tree planting, Ethiopia, via Smithsonianmag.com.

Poaching of rhinos and elephants declined by over 25 percent last year. Populations of Siberian tigers and humpback whales are recovering; the latter has reached 90 percent of its pre-hunting total.

Britain ran its electrical grid without coal for two weeks. Germany announced it will shut down all its coal-fired electrical plants by 2038. Senegal and Israel have joined an international anti-coal pact, Powering Past Coal. India in 2018 added to its grid 12 gigawatts of clean power. Paris has purchased 800 electric buses to begin replacing its old fleet.

Social and economic justice:

The number of human beings living in extreme poverty ($2/day) continues to decline. Between 1990 and 2018 this cohort shrank from 2 billion people to 600 million.

Nine U.S. cities have eliminated veteran homelessness. The 30 largest American cities experienced a 3.5 percent decline in crime last year. American states that have decriminalized marijuana report a precipitous drop in domestic violence injuries. I bet they all experience shortages of Doritos and miniature candy bars, though.

Nineteen African countries have since 2009 reached gender parity in primary schooling. Northern Ireland has legalized abortion and same-sex marriage. Saudi Arabia has granted women the right to travel alone, register vital records, and serve as legal guardians. Botswana and Angola have decriminalized homosexuality.

**

The news stories above are via FutureCrunch’s Good News page, which is worth the occasional visit.


* He is, in fact, 98.7 percent evil.

The Blessings of Liberty: 1950s Ireland

The champions of Irish independence attained their penultimate* goal, the establishment of the Irish Republic, in 1949, nearly three decades after the end of the independence war. Political freedom rarely brings immediate material happiness, and this became obvious enough in Eire during the following decade. The 1950s, an era of rapid economic recovery and growing prosperity throughout Europe, was for Ireland a “lost decade” of stagnation and decay. The economy remained agricultural and undercapitalized. Many rural households lacked electricity and running water. Few young people received more than a grammar-school education, there being no jobs at home for the better-trained. Dispirited teachers told their students that their only employment choices were “the collar or the dollar:” taking religious orders or moving to the United States. Emigration grew to a scandalous height: one of every six Irishmen and women left the country by 1960. Of all the nations of Europe, only two suffered a net loss of population in the Fifties: Ireland and East Germany.

Irish Emigrants to Britain, ca. 1950

Those who left the German Democratic Republic did so for both economic and ideological reasons. Some of those who fled Ireland must have found their homeland nearly as oppressive as the Eastern Bloc. The Catholic Church served as an arm of the Irish state, controlling many of the nation’s schools and much of its public-school curriculum, and imprisoning thousands of unmarried mothers in the slave-labor camps known as “Magdalene Laundries.” Birth control, abortion, and divorce all remained illegal. Under the bishops' direction, the Republic comprehensively censored movies and books - Edna O’Brien, today one of Ireland’s most celebrated authors, had her first novels banned in the early Sixties. City-dwellers could perhaps afford to watch a Western movie, or catch an uncensored radio broadcast from elsewhere in Europe. Farmers and their dependents lacked even those narrow avenues of escape, so long as they remained in Eire.

John McQuaid, Prince of Ireland (1940-71)

Ireland's two principal political parties, Fine Gael (successors of Cumann na nGaedheal) and Fianna Fail, swapped control of the Dail (parliament) throughout the decade. Both remained wedded to a romantic, pre-war vision of a self-sufficient Ireland, and crafted economic policy accordingly. Both kept tariffs high and industry in the hands of licensed national monopolies. Thanks to this protectionist program and an increasingly unfavorable trade balance, the Irish endured both rising prices and rising unemployment in the first postwar decade. Credit the Irish government, at least, with discovering stagflation more than two decades before the rest of the world. 

Let us also credit one of the ruling parties, Fianna Fail, with realizing that it had to abandon its dogmas to prevent more young people from voting with their feet. Following the 1957 elections the serpentine Eamon de Valera and his chief deputy, Sean Lemass, decided their nation needed foreign capital more than "frugal comfort." The new economic program of 1958-63 lowered tariffs and provided tax credits to foreign companies (chiefly West German, at first) willing to build factories in the Republic. The Sixties was no golden age, but Ireland's economy and population did resume growing, and television helped dissolve the island's cultural conservatism and isolation.


Sources: Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future (Gill and Macmillan, 2004); idem, News from a New Republic (Gill Books, 2011).


* The ultimate goal was the reunification of the island in a 32-county republic. The IRA attempted to do just that in Operation Harvest (1956-62), which failed to do more than get most of its operatives arrested or killed.