Posted by: john ||
09/26/2005 18:22 ||
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#1
How to win friends and influence people
"A reminder of that challenge came recently when its Bombay-based consul general -- throwing diplomatic norms to the wind -- audaciously talked down to the Indian defense minister at a seminar and then received public support from his ambassador in New Delhi."
Posted by: john ||
09/26/2005 21:03 Comments ||
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New Orleans sank in a matter of hours, although we now know that the man-made erosion of the Mississippi Delta through flood control made the disaster inevitable. What astonishes us after the fact is not the scale of suffering, but the depth of denial that allowed the burghers of New Orleans to ignore widely available evidence that life as they knew it must come to an unpleasant end.
Hurricane Katrina should put us in the right frame of mind to consider two new studies on the fall of the Roman Empire, the historical archetype for denial in the manifest presence of doom. Katrina destroyed the city, just as the Huns' invasion of 376 AD destroyed the Western Roman Empire; but Rome had spent centuries digging its own grave, just as the levee builders on the Mississippi had spent decades with New Orleans. What explains such passivity in the manifest presence of doom? In his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky reviewed Nicholas II's 1917 diaries, attentive to domestic gossip but deaf to the footsteps of approaching nemesis and quipped that whom history wishes to destroy, she first makes insensate. That is a bon mot but not an answer. Men do not have beliefs so much as they have lives and cannot easily change beliefs that have such deep roots in their lives. Those who are closest to great events may have the poorest vantage point with which to see them. Europe and Japan face a demographic catastrophe, as I have observed frequently, but can change their behavior no more easily than Chinese pandas, endangered by the shrinkage of bamboo groves, can learn to eat potato crisps.
We may excuse the peoples whose presence of mind fails in the face of existential threats, but we cannot excuse the historians who should have sufficient distance from events to judge them. Prevailing scholarship in today's academy does the complacent Romans one better: it denies that a decline and fall of the Western Empire ever took place. That may surprise laymen, but it is not an exaggeration. Peter Brown, the editor of Harvard University Press' Guide to the Postclassical World, lauds the middle of the First Millennium as "a quite decisive period of history that stands on its own", as opposed to "the story of the unraveling of a once glorious and 'higher' state of civilization".
Bryan Ward-Perkins, an archeologist, explains, "In the modern post-colonial world, the very concept of 'a civilization', be it ancient or modern, is now uncomfortable, because it is seen as demeaning to those societies that are excluded from the label. Nowadays, instead of 'civilizations', we apply universally the neutral word 'cultures'; all cultures are equal, and no cultures are more equal than others."
His compelling book is not only about the fall of Rome, but about the nature of denial. He warns us:
The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope we never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.
Was there a decline and fall? The population of the Western Empire fell by at least half, and perhaps three-quarters, between the 4th and 7th centuries, while every material index of the quality of life deteriorated. Ward-Perkins has arrayed the evidence in a lean and compelling narrative that shows that Rome not only fell, but fell with a sickening crash that spread misery on a horrifying scale. To cite a few of his examples:
- Rural settlements revealed by pottery discoveries fell by three quarters in the northern vicinity of Rome between 100 AD and 400-700 AD. That does not mean that the population fell by as much, but clearly it fell drastically.
- Use of the pottery wheel, brick-making and other Roman skills disappeared from Britain for three centuries.
- High-quality manufactured pottery was available to peasant households in the 3rd century, while royalty ate off rough hand-shaped pottery in the 7th century.
- Rome's largest dump of discarded pottery prior to the 5th century contains the shards of 53 million amphorae (two-handled jars with narrow necks); the largest 7th-century dump contains the remains of only 500, half the load of a contemporary cargo ship. So many wrecked cargo ships have been found that some scholars contend that Mediterranean trade did not regain its 1st century volume until the 19th century.
- Copper coinage, freely available until the 4th century, disappeared thereafter in the Western Empire, along with trade.
Ward-Perkins' review of the archeological clues makes short work of the "no decline" theorists. The more difficult question is, how did a technologically complex and commercially sophisticated economy from the Pillars of Hercules to Asia Minor collapse back into Iron Age primitivism within less than two centuries?
Heather's book is not much help. He sticks to the simplest explanation, namely that the Goths, Vandals, Alans and Sueves, driven into Roman territory by the migrating Huns, reduced a complex and vibrant economy to a shuddering ruin within a century. Yet at first count there were not sufficient barbarians to anything of this sort. Ward-Perkins notes, "A large Germanic group probably numbered a few tens of thousands, while regions like Italy and Roman Africa had populations of several millions," supporting a standing army of 600,000 during the 4th century.
Why did such small numbers overwhelm the much larger population of Romans? There are several answers suggested by Ward-Perkins, whose admiration for Rome's economic sophistication makes him reluctant to draw what seem rather obvious conclusions. Roman sources warned of a declining population due to falling fertility from the 1st century, although present-day demographers have been unable to document a fall in the population [1].
But archeological evidence tells a clearer story, notes Ward-Perkins. "Much of central Italy and parts of Gaul seem to have been in decline during the third and fourth centuries," while Britain was abandoned, shrinking the recruitment base for the Roman legions and the tax base with which to pay them. It is telling that central Italy, the Latin heartland, showed the sharpest decline. I tend to credit the old-fashioned view, unpopular in the academy, that infertility due to infanticide, contraception, promiscuity and general immorality rotted out Rome long before it collapsed.
Ward-Perkins cautions that the economy of the Eastern Mediterranean remained robust, and that the "the jury should remain out on the important question of whether the overall economy of the Western Empire, and hence its military strength, was in decline before it was hit by the problems of the early fifth century."
But that is like saying that the jury should remain out as to whether the economy of New Orleans was in decline before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. The levees holding back Lake Ponchartrain could not withstand a storm of that magnitude. The complex Roman economy depended on masses of slave labor, and it was the Roman social system that could not withstand the barbarian storm.
Rome's economy worked its slaves to death and required a constant new supply (unlike the American South, where the slave population grew through natural increase). It already was under stress due to diminishing returns of conquest and a high proportion of the slaves recently captured coming from the same barbarian tribes that were about to invade.
"Even as early as 376-8 discontents and fortune-seekers were swelling Gothic ranks soon after they had crossed into the empire - the historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that their numbers were increased significantly, not only by fleeing Gothic slaves, but also by miners escaping the harsh conditions of the state's gold mines and by people oppressed by the burden of imperial taxation."
During the Goths' siege of Rome in the winter of 408-409, a contemporary source reported, "Almost all the slaves who were in Rome, poured out of the city to join the barbarians."
In 399-400, the Germanic general Tribigild revolted in Asia Minor and was joined "by such a mass of slaves and outcasts that the whole of Asia was in grave danger".
Mayan cities came to a sudden end by denuding their land of trees; Rome came to a sudden end by denuding their empire of people. Roman society was as vulnerable as the Louisiana levees and needed only a smart blow to crumble. At least 80% of the Roman tax base vanished in the wake of the Gothic incursion of the early 5th century and the death-spiral of the Western Empire began.
The European Union now occupies more or less the same territory on which the Roman Empire stood. A century from now, will it go with a whimper or a bang?
Note
[1] See John C. Caldwell, "Fertility Control in the Classical World," Journal of Population Research vol. 21, no 1, 2004 (available on the Internet).
The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. Oxford University Press, September 2005. ISBN 0192805649. Price $20, 248 pages.
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History by Peter Heather. MacMillan, 2005. ISBN 0333989147. 500 pages; $74.
#3
The European Union now occupies more or less the same territory on which the Roman Empire stood. A century from now, will it go with a whimper or a bang?
Yet another excuse for french-bashing, I must be masochistic or something... Sorry, JFM, seems like you'll have to defend France's honor once again. Still, I saw "Marianne"'s cover about GWB in a newstand a while back, and was shocked too (but then again, "Marianne" is one of the most anti-Us and anti-Bush news outlets out there, along with the "Guignols" tv puppet show).
Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writer
Commentators argue about whether Katrina is providing an excuse for anti-Americanism.
PARIS â Like other U.S. allies, France helped after Hurricane Katrina hit.
The French government sent about 20 tons of relief supplies to the Gulf Coast as well as military divers and other emergency workers. The Total oil company donated $1 million. The U.S. Embassy reports an outpouring of public donations and condolences.
But in a sign of the continuing tension in France's 2-century-old alliance with the United States, a debate has arisen here about whether Katrina has also reopened the floodgates of anti-Americanism.
Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic. Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.
"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyondâŠ. Derision and demonizing are out of place."
The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."
Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."
Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises â from Iraq to global warming â that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.
In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."
The U.S. media has also been tough on the administration for its response to the hurricane. But the invective here has been particularly harsh and grows partly out of an "old anti-American undercurrent reawakened by the war in Iraq," columnist Laurent Joffrin wrote in Nouvel Observateur.
In the past, the anger about Iraq sometimes distorted reality, some analysts say. In 2003, author Alain Herthogue undertook a day-by-day analysis of French media accounts of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and compiled his findings in a book titled "The War of Outrages." His study focused exclusively on the three-week invasion, not the unproven prior allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or the insurgency that began after Saddam Hussein fell.
Herthogue asserted that the French media consistently, and erroneously, gave the impression that the military operation was about to collapse even as tanks rumbled into Baghdad.
French criticism of the Katrina crisis also shows fundamental differences in the role of the state in France and the U.S.
The French national government controls everything from law enforcement to healthcare to transportation. City and regional officials have more limited powers and duties than their U.S. counterparts, especially when it comes to disaster response. So New Orleans' woes appear to confirm suspicions that Washington leaves Americans at the mercy of the forces of nature as well as markets.
Some pundits predict that Americans will now want a more muscular, "French" approach to government. But others suggest that it's best not to point fingers. They recall the heat wave two years ago that killed about 15,000 people in France.
In that tragedy, many elderly people perished in hospitals and nursing homes that lacked air conditioning. Thousands of corpses were discovered in sweltering apartments as the death toll escalated and French leaders, as well as some relatives of the dead, were criticized for remaining on summer vacation.
"The denigrators have rushed to condemn the 'American model,' " wrote Ivan Rioufol in Le Figaro. "But have they looked at the state of their own country? The Third World, exposed in the [American] South, exists in French housing projectsâŠ. The indifference to the marooned corpses recalls the 15,000 elderly, dead and abandoned in the 2003 heat waveâŠ. It's indecent to suggest, in this jubilation at describing a humiliated superpower, that France would have fared better."
In a recent letter to this newspaper's Paris Bureau from the southwestern town of Frejus, a retired contractor named Cesar Orefice complained that the media coverage of Katrina had been "absurdly triumphant" and gleefully anti-American.
It "leaves me disillusioned, overwhelmed, heartbroken by the simplistic anti-Americanism served to us like a dish a thousand times warmed-over," wrote Orefice, 71. "We talk about these events essentially to criticize with a few accompanying giggles the incapacity of the American administration to reactâŠ. I wonder what efficiency we would have seen if a city like Lille, Lyon or Bordeaux had been wiped off the map."
With the letter, Orefice enclosed a check for 50 euros (about $61) for Katrina's victims.
#1
More people died in a heat wave in France than died in two record-strength hurricanes in the US.
I suspect the heat wave death count is higher than the US has suffered from hurricanes in the last decade or two.
France should pluck the freaking redwood from its eye before it goes lecturing us about the mote in ours.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
09/26/2005 7:43 Comments ||
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#2
Sorry but I will not defend the French, or more exactly their MSM, on this occasion
Some of my ROE:
I hate anti-French racism a la "How many troops take it to defend Paris? Never has been tried" (tell that to the people who fell at Verdun and at the two battles of la Marne).
I tend to dislike disparaging remarks about the 1940 soldier: this was a battle lost by the generals not by the soldiers. BTW: the day I open my own blog one of the very first posts will be about the structural reasons explaining why the French officer corps has sucked so much after Waterloo.
I would tend to remind people that there are more pro-American French that shown in the polls: for reasons who go from leftism to natinal-europeism the MSM and the French scholar system have made very difficult to say that one is pro-American: a columnist who approved Iraqui Freedom was boycotted by his friends and even got physical threats. After two years he folded. You have no idea of the barrage of hate issued by the French MSM. Worse than in Soviet Union except that the Russians knew their press lied, the French don't and they believe it. It would take a looooong time of desintoxication in order to undo its effects (time to have Radio Free Europe target France). However when I was at Coleville (aka Omaha Beach) I saw an old man who had come to flower a grave and he was definitely French.
Meaning that it is OK for me to say all you want about the French elites and MSM but have some restraint but before bashing French foot citizens remember both this old man and the Gospel: "Father, forgive them because they don't know what they are doing".
When I post an explanatory post don't rebound on it for French bashing. Makes me feel a traitor.
#3
JFM, I can understand your frustration. It's hard to see a country that used to be at the forefront of Western Civilization pouring its heritage down the pissour out of sheer resentment.
You probably wouldn't get this kind of reaction if your government would just be honestly opposed to us, like Putin, rather than pretending to be an ally. As they say in Texas, don't urinate on our leg and then tell us that it is raining.
Posted by: Ernest Brown ||
09/26/2005 9:11 Comments ||
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#4
Note: The French MSM has pontified a LOT about the Blacks in New Orleans (1) and just this morning they were hinting that the difference betweeen Katrina's and Rita's death tolls was due to Rita hitting a whiter population. So, if one day you meet a French talking of racist America don't forget of mentionning the Ivory Coast and France's help to the Rwandan genociders, ask how many votes were lost by the French politicians involved . Then scream ZERO and bash him on the head about French racism and how they are only interested in Blacks when it allows bashing America.
(1) And they presented its major as a hero. A Black and Democratic Rudolf Giuliani.
We too got popular stereotypes about the USA, which may surprize Us readers (did you know that the americans can't fight and are pîss-poor soldiers? ;-)), but anti-americanism is much more than simple "ethnic" prejudice, and is in fine very unhealthy for France itself, as it is irrational and a camouflage for our own very serious problems. I'd suggest reading Jean-François (another JF) Revel about that, his book on anti-americanism is very revealing and was translated in english IIRC.
#6
"the day I open my own blog one of the very first posts will be about the structural reasons explaining why the French officer corps has sucked so much after Waterloo"
Pleas do,I'll be looking forward to read & discus that subject.
Posted by: Evert V. in NL ||
09/26/2005 9:48 Comments ||
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#7
JFM: Rita was a much weaker storm than Katrina. It hit the beach with 120 mph sustained wind speed. Katrina's sustained wind speed was somewhere in the 160-170 mph speed range.
While not an exact comparison, a 175 mph wind has about twice the kinetic energy of a 125 mph wind. That doesn't give you a comparison of the total storm energies, but it's the only yardstick I have handy right now.
Posted by: Phil Fraering ||
09/26/2005 9:53 Comments ||
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#8
To JFM and A5089, I just wanted to say how much I appreciate your commentary, and how glad we are to have your wisdom, insight, and patience here at RB. Us Yanks tend to give you and La Belle France a hard time, but you return each day with good humor and teach us a little more. So, thanks.
#10
The difference is that we in the U.S. have always assumed that our elites are only in it for themselves (just like the rest of us) and we don't trust them farther than we can throw them.
#11
"the day I open my own blog one of the very first posts will be about the structural reasons explaining why the French officer corps has sucked so much after Waterloo."
Posted by: Ernest Brown ||
09/26/2005 12:32 Comments ||
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#12
It's Joan of Arc syndrome, the French elites will stab true French patriots in the back everytime they get the chance.
Posted by: Ernest Brown ||
09/26/2005 12:33 Comments ||
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#13
In my experience there is also a difference between Parisians and all other French people.
Posted by: Mrs. Davis ||
09/26/2005 13:42 Comments ||
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#14
"the day I open my own blog one of the very first posts will be about the structural reasons explaining why the French officer corps has sucked so much after Waterloo."
I theorize Napoleon III took the Batons out of the knapsacks.
#15
To JFM and A5089,I agree your comments and insights are informative and welcome.JFM when you start your blog it will go in my daily reading,I look forward to it.It would be a great help to us if you could link to some English speaking French blogs and try to get some of your friends to stop in here at RB once in awhile.
I'm as guilty as(if not more so)of France bashing as anyone else,I mean no offense to you personally.I like you,your a smart,personable person and enjoy our talks.
(personable,person...sheesh)
#16
A scholar friend told me of how the French newspapers heaped scorn on Napoleon Bonaparte in exile. When he landed on the French coast they were still negative, but on a daily basis, as he came overland to Paris, they turned 180 degrees. By the time he arrived, they were overflowing with praise and admiration of their emperor, almost lost for words at their excitement and joy at his victorious return.
Feh. He was not impressed. He had long known what they were.
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
