Neal Ascherson > Quotes

“To be defeated, but not to give in, is victory.

- Jósef Piłsudski”
― Neal Ascherson, Wojtek the Bear: Polish War Hero

“All human populations are in some sense immigrants. All hostility between different cultures in one place has an aspect of the classic immigrant grudge against the next boatload approaching the shore. To defend one’s home and fields and ancestral graves against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession – to compound the fact of settlement with the aspect of a landscape into an abstract of eternal and immutable ownership – is a joke.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“History — the product, not the raw material — is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea

“The disjuncture from politics, on the other hand, springs from something which concerns all these poets: the shattered nature of Scottish consciousness, which isn't a low flat floor of peasant culture on which all stand together but a wild junk-yard of high culture fragments, English imports, oral traditions of 'the Scots commons' and proletarian 'socialist realism' from the thirties.”
― Neal Ascherson, Seven Poets: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, Robert Garioch, Sorley MacLean, Edwin Morgan

“For the first time, intellectuals set out to give the Pontians an ethnic national consciousness. That required ‘origins’ and ‘roots’. Anthony Bryer relates how ‘Triantaphyllides, a Chaldian schoolmaster … christened his son Pericles and sent him to Athens, whence he returned after 1842 to teach Xenophon and classical Greek at the Trebizond Phrontisterion … By 1846, schoolmasters had renamed Gümüshane a fancy “Argyropolis”.’ In a typical example of cultural nation-invention, the teachers proceeded to graft the Pontos onto the stock not just of Byzantium but of Periclean Athens itself. All round the Greek world of the Black Sea, the same process was going on. The teachers and the school curricula came from Athens, bringing with them a new concept of Greekness which linked the Greek Orthodox communities of the Black Sea and the ‘nation’ of Greece.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin

“But nomadic pastoralism was not a ‘primitive’ condition. It was, on the contrary, a specialisation which developed out of settled agricultural communities. To move large herds of domesticated animals hundreds of miles twice a year, north into summer pastures and south again in winter, requires, above all, horses and high skill at riding them. It requires the wheel, if the population is to migrate with its herds by cart or wagon. This way of life needs many kinds of craftsman or specialist, far more than family subsistence farming. And it cannot be carried on without a central leadership able to take rapid and effective decisions in emergency. That emergency could be economic – a traditional pasture destroyed by drought or flooding – or it could be military. The power to ride a horse created armed elites, who were now able to lead their followers out to plunder farming communities or to migrate and conquer distant regions of grassland.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin

“At the end of most streets of Edinburgh's Old Town rises the crimson wall of Salisbury Craigs, a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world. The Craigs are a basalt intrusion, a fossil tide of volcanic rock which surged through the foundations of a dead volcano some 200 million years ago. Geology and paleontology, with their revelations of deep time and alien life-forms, towered up wherever 19th century Scots turned their eyes. the 'testimony of the rocks' threatened their moral universe, its narrative incompatible with a creation myth or even a creator... Old Edinburgh is shaped like a gigantic lecture theatre with the end wall covered by a chart of the earth's origins.”
― Neal Ascherson, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland

“As soon as it occurred to our ancestors that government might be about happiness rather than obedience, it was seen that punishment under the law must be designed to achieve something good, rather than balance something evil.”
― Neal Ascherson

“I was tidying old papers when I came across a faded "1979" folder. Remember what a bad year that was for those who believed in a self-governing Scotland? In March, a referendum for a "Scottish Assembly", its terms skewed to ensure failure. Then a General Election which slaughtered the SNP down to a mere two MPs and brought Mrs. Thatcher to power. End of a dream?

Two things fell out of the folder. One was a giant paper rosette, all blood-red tartan and ribbons, inscribed "Have yourself a Dreich Decade!" The rosette came from irrepressible Murray Grigor, whose films and happenings still teach Scots to find self-confidence through self-mockery. Get a grip, he seemed to be saying, and you can turn these dreich 1980s into what they did in fact become - the most intense eruption of Scottish literature, drama, painting and history publication for a hundred years.

The other thing was a note from Tom Nairn. It began: "Dear Neal, the incorrigible optimist strikes again...”
― Neal Ascherson

“Politically, Cossack unity was never more than a matter of short episodes in history. Nothing emerged with the stability and complexity of the Scythian kingdoms, or of the Crimean Tatar Khanate. When commercial port-cities revived again along the Black Sea coast after the Russian conquests of Peter and Catherine, the Cossacks were not capable of acting as partners and protectors, as the Scythian steppe lords had been to the Greek cities and the Tatar khans to the Italians, but fell instead into subjection. Compared to the Indo-Iranian peoples of antiquity, and to some of the Turkic peoples who followed them, the Cossacks were primitive. Force, race and maleness are seldom the values of a stable and traditional society, but rather of bandits.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin

“To reach the country of the Lazi, you have to drive about fifty miles eastwards from Trabzon. It is a fast, dangerous road, a new coastal highway along the entire southern shore of the Black Sea which cuts off every town and village from the sea with a barrier of concrete.”
― Neal Ascherson, Black Sea: From Pericles to Putin