Isegoria

I haven’t seen World War Z, but Tyler Cowen has:

I was surprised how serious a movie it is and also by how deeply politically incorrect it is, including on “third rail” issues such as immigration, ethnic conflict, North Korean totalitarianism, American urban decay as exemplified by Newark, gun control, Latino-Black relations, songs of peace, and the Middle East. Here is one (incomplete) discussion of the Middle East angle, from the AP, republished in el-Arabiya (here is a more detailed but less responsible take on the matter, by a sociology professor and Israeli, spoilers throughout).

The movie is set up to show sympathy for the “Spartan” regimes and to have a message which is deeply historically pessimistic and might broadly be called Old School Conservative, informed by the debates on martial virtue from pre-Christian antiquity. But they recut the final segment of the movie and changed the ending altogether, presumably because post-Christian test audiences and film executives didn’t like it. Here is one discussion of the originally planned finale. It sounds good to me. The actual movie as it was released reverts to a Christian ending of sorts. My preferred denouement would have relied on the idea of an asymptomatic carrier or two, go see it and figure out the rest yourself.

I recently read Hitler’s declaration of war against the US and some of his other speeches and writings, after realizing that we never read anything by the most infamous man in history in our history classes in school.

Commenter Wobbly though I might enjoy the BBC documentary, The Nazis, A Warning From History, and I did find it thought-provoking.

If you read what Hitler actually said and wrote, he does obsess about the Jews, and he does equate them with Bolsheviks — which is odd if they’re also a race of scheming bankers. The first episode explains where this “crazy” idea might have come from. For one thing, the leadership of the Munich Soviet Republic was almost entirely Jewish:

Hitler’s rise to power follows a familiar formula. Moderate conservatives need his far-right stormtroopers to keep far-left Communists in line, a crisis costs the moderates their credibility, and soon the most extreme wing of the (right-wing) revolution takes over — rather bloodlessly, in this case.

Once Hitler takes over as dictator though, he doesn’t do much dictating. For all the later complaints by the German generals that Hitler micromanaged the war and later excuses by war criminals that they were just following orders, Hitlers leads, for the most part, by simply providing the vision and letting his subordinates vie for his approval under their own initiative.

In fact, the warning from history appears to be that the Nazis did very little themselves. There were only a few dozen Gestapo for a region of millions of Germans, for instance, and there were always plenty of collaborators later in conquered territories. At the very least, people were happy to take Jewish homes, shops, winter coats, etc.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Rise of the Third Reich is fascinating, because Hitler seemed to solve Germany’s problems and to solve them quickly. He put men to work, and he restored Germany’s prestige. No one wanted to start another war over, say, German troops moving back into Rhineland. When Hitler moved his troops into Austria, crowds cheered them in the streets — and again in the Sudetenland. I suspect he could have made a move for the ethnically German portions of Poland, too — if he hadn’t seized the rest of Czechoslovakia first and given up all credibility as a simple uniter of the German people.

I suppose the Polish invasion seemed like a great victory at the time, and it seemed such an odd thing to push the French and British over the edge. Oops.

Set aside some time and heed the warning:

George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones has many real-life inspirations. The conflict between Starks and Lannisters clearly pays homage to the Wars of the Roses, between Yorks and Lancasters:

Both English families were branches of the House of Plantagenet who vied for the throne after the deposition of the last Plantagenet king, Richard II, in 1399 and before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between the characters in “Game of Thrones” and actual historical figures, but Martin was clearly inspired by Edward IV in creating, say, Robert Baratheon, the great, strapping warrior who became a stout, ailing king. There’s a dash of Edward, too, in Rob Stark, a brilliant commander who makes an impetuous, disadvantageous marriage.

Cersei Lannister, Robert’s ambitious, conniving widow, is thought by many to have been inspired by the hot-headed Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, the king Edward IV helped depose. Henry’s bouts of insanity left him frequently unable to rule, and Margaret, a leading Lancastrian, fought ferociously against those she saw as threatening her family’s hold on the crown. Historians view her as a prime driver in the Wars of the Roses, just as Cersei is substantively responsible for the War of the Five Kings in “A Clash of Kings.” Cersei also resembles Isabella of France, an earlier medieval English queen, who conspired with her adulterous lover to dethrone, and possibly to murder, her (bisexual) husband, Edward II, in the 1300s.

Cersei is a crude, incompetent politician, however, which cannot be said of Isabella. Although unpopular in England, where she was nicknamed “the She-wolf of France,” Isabella has acquired some sympathizers over the years, including the indefatigable Alison Weir, who wrote a contrarian biography of her in 2006, “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Weir has also written novels about various women in the Tudor era, no doubt aspiring to the success of Philippa Gregory, whose romantic historical novels routinely land on the New York Times Bestseller List.

For her own part, Gregory has already published three books in a series set during the Wars of the Roses, “The Cousins’ War” (an apt title, given the intricate blood relationships among the many combatants). The most recent of these, “The Lady of the Rivers,” may even be infused with enough magical elements to appeal to some “Game of Thrones” readers: In it, the character of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, possesses psychic abilities (the real duchess was tried for witchcraft by her political enemies) and is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by her first husband. For those who prefer a more grounded view, Gregory collaborated with two historians, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, on a nonfiction book, “The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother,” published last year.

You may have noticed that most of these books are about women, despite the fact that, with very few exceptions, the women of the Middle Ages had little power. Much of today’s popular historical fiction about the rulers of the Middle Ages is read by women who are primarily interested in the lives and problems of women. Since the historical record contains next to no information on this topic, fiction has stepped in to fill the breach.

Another, more manly, popular contemporary historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell, has set a series of novels, “The Grail Quest,” during a slightly earlier period. His hero, an archer named Thomas of Hookton who gets caught up in the Hundred Years’ War, is an entirely fictional commoner in search of that fabled relic. What Cornwell’s novels lack in historically based, Machiavellian aristocrats they make up for in action-packed, blood-soaked battle scenes.

For the ultimate in medieval scuttlebutt, however, you can’t do better than Barbara Tuchman’s prizewinning 1978 history, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” This account of the Hundred Years’ War centers around the life of a French nobleman who married an Englishwoman, but it’s more expansive than any novel, taking in such fascinating details as the bizarre fashion for long-toed shoes in court (so long, they had to be tied up with strings and were inveighed against by puritanical clergymen) to the legendarily brutal rampages of British mercenary John Hawkwood through Italy. If you really want to know how the peasants fared while their rulers skirmished, the peculiar challenges of sewage-management in a stone castle, what the real agenda was behind the Crusades, or just how dastardly the highborn and royal can behave when it suits them, then look no further.