John Cairns’s Reviews > The Penguin History of the World > Status Update

The moon landing was a baby playing with its rattle. 'Sectarian Irishmen disputed the future of their country in the vocabulary of 17th century religious wars.' China's dictatorship is economically successful. Its racism against the Uighurs has been revealed. Its resentment of Soviet policy had to be expressed in Marxist jargon. 'Coloured peoples'! No prissy euphemisms for him! Vietnam muted American arrogance.

Traditional culture still is 'too limited in its exclusion of the resources...' which lie in the unconscious. I've read half Freud. Rationality isn't an illusion but is directed; we are un-'consciously motivated individuals'. Hitler had won the war by 1940 but continued it with Operation Barbarossa, after an emperor found dead by a river (maybe drowned). The Japanese were bound to lose after Pearl Harbour.

It wasn't sexual satisfaction Mum was pursuing without the obligation of marriage, more likely me. Grandma still had gas lighting when Aunt Nell had electricity. Why the Ottoman Empire joined in the First World War isn't explained. By 1917 France suffered 3,350,000 casualties. On Turkey's secularisation 'vikend' became Turkish. In 'An instance from which' etc, in Chomu's 'Dadaoism', I go beyond consciousness.

Filipinos complain of their colonial past that it was five hundred years in a convent and fifty in Disneyland. Because of the press, acts of terror had publicity value, now as then. Institutional sexism was worse than racism. Giving women the franchise was an issue in Switzerland in the late Fifties. New jobs gave women economic power, without which Mum could not have afforded me without being obliged to marry.

The US stated it would intervene in any state whose disorder might tempt Europe's intervention! The tradition of incompetence in the British army was upheld in the Boer War. Nine hundred British civil servants governed three hundred million Indians. If the latter all spat at once the former would be drowned. Bengal was split into a Hindu West and Muslim East to undermine nationalism. The Empire's impressive!

The church quite correctly from its point of view put all Descartes' work on the Index. I read a copy of Engel's Condition of the English Working Class from the New College, Edinburgh Faculty of Divinity library. Our civilisation doesn't have a structure of religious belief as the industrial population was alienated from traditional authority. The USA constitution established the principle of popular sovereignty.

From smallpox and other diseases the population of Mexico fell by three quarters in the sixteenth century. The evil of slavery was compounded by the intrusion of Xianity.

Charles V co-ruled with his mad mother, Joanna. The life-expectancy of a French peasant before 1800 was - wait for it - 22! 'As new lands were annexed, their population passed into serfdom even if they hadn't known it before.' Peter had his own son tortured to death. That's Russia for you. The unlikely challenger for Indian Ocean supremacy was England. Flag followed trade, giving a structure to live under.

A protestant ethic doesn't explain capitalism because Scotland 'long remained backward, poor and feudal; nor did the proceeds of slavery finance the industrial revolution.

Transubstantiation was imposed from the 13th century, that Christ's body and blood were present in bread and wine - palpable nonsense. After Boniface the papacy was condemned for standing in the way of reforms, churchmen for failing in their religious task. St George's slaying the dragon arose from mixing him up with Perseus.