Binston Birchill > Recent Status Updates

dire was the noise of conflict, overhead the dismal hiss of fiery darts in flaming volleys flew

If there is any lesson to be learned from Afghanistan after 2001 and subsequent interventions in the Middle East, it is that bombing and attempting to oust unpleasant and unfriendly regimes from power, without giving serious thought to the composition of civil government, state building and the strengthening of civil society, creates more problems than it solves.

A famous student of war, Mao Tse-tung, found wisdom in Sun-tzu's Art of War: "Know your enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster." Mao wrote that war, the highest form of struggle, is the most difficult social phenomenon to understand cor-rectly. Yet man inevitably goes to war and when he does, his mistakes arise from ignorance of the enemy and himself.

The Imperial Army march into Manchuria was presented as an act of self-defense… North China and Inner Mongolia had to be controlled to guard Manchuria. Protecting these areas required further advances into the heartland of China.
This pattern of ever-expanding military operations confirmed a truism about international conflict: once started, a war escalates uncontrollably in the quest for elusive victory.

It was a viscous cycle: the weakness of democracy was one cause of the war, and the war further eroded freedom.

Before marriage… one should keep one’s eyes open, but after marriage, one should keep them half shut for fear of what he should see, it had always been her unbiased judgment, though she could not speak from the narrow experience which others experienced, for she was single and single-minded, no man looking at her a second time or perhaps even a first, her life being almost over and the battle perhaps already lost

p.375 Edward Granville Browne The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909

She had taken the girl simply because no one else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral mauvaise honte which makes the public display of selfishness difficult, though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act.

The commander of the Army of Northern Virginia never aspired to be an innovator (unlike the man to whom he would eventually surrender, Ulysses
S. Grant, who understood that "War is progressive, because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive"). Whenever Robert E. Lee found a tactical trick that worked, he liked to keep using it until it broke.

The Minié rifle musket system had actually made its debut in the Crimea in 1854 in the form of both the Minié rifle and its British-made counterpart, the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle musket, and from there, the rifle musket become the weapon of choice for both the British infantry in the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the French and Austrian infantry in the North Italian War in 1859

Metafictional nonfiction

“It is hope that preserves life, not fear. Fear only preserves survival. You wanted to preserve art historically when poetry preserves history artistically. And what have you achieved? Losing the classical world and your love, what you wanted to preserve and what you believed you had started. You have fallen into what you intended to avoid, and you have behaved barbarously,

The book is speckled with such observations as

“The wind knows well that the sail is more powerful than the wall, even if the sea gives it more runway than the land. The rain knows well that thin grass is more powerful than a thick dam. And so, Attila's tent crackled with more wisdom than rage.”

Part II descriptions are insane

p.42 Fleeces of amethyst gas, ripped from green chaparral by the western blush, pirouetted gracelessly in their ascent toward the rust, where an oscillating breath vaporized old blood clots. In its insoluble sulfur, the turquoise-toned sky acted as broiler, which heightened the bitterness of that mired opal.

White supremacy does not demand deep conviction. Ruthless self interest, not sincere belief, is the signature feature of the doctrine. It finds its greatest expression, and most devastating effect, in the determination to state, live by, and act on the basis of ideas one knows are untrue when doing so will yield important benefits and privileges that one does not care to relinquish.

Vyasas Mahabharata boasts that 1.6 billion people died on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in northern India, an unimaginable death toll in premodernity designed to highlight the clash's catastrophic nature. The globe did not support this population until maybe 1900 CE, and humanity's bloodiest historical war to date, World War II, resulted in the deaths of about one-third that grotesque number.

Umm… excuse me?

South India, for instance, gets left out when we fixate on political dynasties but comes into focus when we explore trade routes and even fashion around 2,500 years ago. By surveying a mix of topics, we glimpse a layered picture of Indian experiences in different areas of the subcontinent during the dynamic sixth-fourth centuries BCE.

p.119

His café life and all the newspaper articles he had read without understanding them had turned him into a terrible ranter. He spouted the strangest political ideas. You need to have heard one of those malcontents, who have little understanding of what they read, haranguing an audience in some provincial taproom to have any conception of the degree of spite and idiocy Macquart displayed.

Feels like he’s writing an impressionist painting - a focus on lighting.

Egotism is at the base of almost all great historical characters; egotism is the real mainspring that causes all great actions to be executed.
Quiroga possessed this political gift to an eminent degree, and exercised it by concentrating about him everything he saw disseminated in his surrounding, uncultured society; wealth, power, authority, all this he had…”

The “great man” theory of Carlyle

haven't copied them. When Your Grace dictates in circular form, order of the Perpetual Dictator, I write his words down in the Perpetual Circular. When Your Grace thinks out loud, in the voice of the Supreme Man, I note his words down in the Spiral Notebook. If, that is, I am able to, Excellency, what I mean to say is if I manage to net those words that caracole out of your mouth, mounting ever more swiftly upward.

“So tell this Monsieur Grandsire that we don't speak French here and that the Government of Paraguay is not prepared to pay an interpreter to attend to or contend with pretensions whose intention is to deceive.”

Wordplay that likely inspired Rick Harsch

Would you do such a thing, my spiritual-minded secretary? Not I, Sire! God save and keep this loyal servant! Such things shouldn't be done helter-skelet, Patiño. When my eye itches, I look for eyewash, not a spine of coconut palm. In your case, it's your rear that itches. Don't think you can stop the itching by rubbing it on my seat. What you'll end up with is a noose round your neck.

Finiquidate

“For the moment God does not occupy my mind. The question that preoccupies it is ruling over chance. Putting my daedal digit on the die, the die in the dicebox. Getting the country out of its labyrinth.”

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

El Supremo’s interactions with his head clerk/amanuensis are quite fun.

“Give me your hand. Are you going to get up, Sire? Let me have your hand. A very great honor for this servant to have Your Excellency extend his hand to me. I'm not holding my hand out to you. I'm ordering you to hold yours out to me. It's not a reconciliation I'm proposing to you; simply a simulacrum of temporary identification.”

Almost all of you are servants of long standing. The majority of you,however,have not had time to study in depth these questions of our history, since all your time has necessarily been devoted to your duties.I have preferred you to be loyal functionaries rather than cultivated men.
Capable of carrying out my commands.I am not concerned with the sort of capabilities a man possesses. I require only that he be capable.

Suspicion falls on his sycophants immediately