gerryadmin – Page 128 – Christmas Every Day

December 29

December 29, 2019December 28, 2019 by gerryadmin

1834

The death of Thomas Malthus

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an English clergyman and political scientist whose theories still generate controversy today. The following is a 19th-century reflection on his life:

This celebrated writer, whose theory on population has been the subject of so much unmerited abuse, was the son of a gentleman of independent fortune, who possessed a small estate in the county of Surrey. Young Malthus received his early education mainly from a private tutor, and subsequently entered Jesus’ College, Cambridge, where he studied for the church, and obtained a fellow-ship in 1797. For a time, he held the incumbency of a small parish in Surrey near his native place.

It was not in the church, however, that Mr. Malthus was to become famous. Through life, the bent of his genius seems to have led him in the direction of political economy and statistics; and in pursuit of information on this subject, he made extensive journeys and inquiries through various countries of Europe. The first edition of the work, which has conferred on him such notoriety, appeared in 1798, under the title of An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers. In subsequent issues, the title of the work was changed to its present form: An Essay on the Principle of Population; or a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, with an Inquiry into our Prospects respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils which it occasions.

The leading principle in this work is, that population, when unchecked, doubles itself at the end of every period of twenty-five years, and thus increases, in a geometrical progression, or the ratio of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32; whilst the means of subsistence increases only, in an arithmetical progression, or the ratio of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The author discusses the question of the various restrictions, physical and moral, which tend to keep population from increasing, and thus prevent it outstripping the means of subsistence in the race of life. A misapprehension of the writer’s views, combined with his apparent tendency to pessimism in the regarding of misery and suffering as the normal condition of humanity, has contributed, notwithstanding the philosophical soundness of many of his theories, to invest the name of Malthus with much opprobrium.

When the common or vulgar impression regarding Mr. Malthus’s celebrated essay is considered, it is surprising to find that the man was one of the most humane and amiable of mortals. His biographer tells us, it would be difficult to overestimate the beauty of his private life and character. His life was:

‘a perpetual flow of enlightened benevolence, contentment, and peace;’ ‘his temper mild and placid, his allowances for others large and considerate, his desires moderate, and his command over his own passions complete.’ ‘No unkind or uncharitable expression respecting any one, either present or absent, ever fell from his lips All the members of his family loved and honoured him; his servants lived with him till their marriage or settlement in life; and the humble and poor within his influence always found him disposed, not only to assist and improve them, but to treat them with kindness and respect’ ‘To his intimate friends, his loss can rarely, if ever, be supplied; there was in him a union of truth, judgment, and warmth of heart, which at once invited confidence, and set at nought all fear of being ridiculed or betrayed. You were always sure of his sympathy; and wherever the case allowed it, his assistance was as prompt and effective as his advice was sound and good.’

Shortly after his marriage in 1805 to Miss Eckersall, Mr. Malthus was appointed professor of modern history and political economy at the East India College at Haileybury, and held this office till his death. He expired on 29^th December 1834, at Bath, at the age of sixty-eight, leaving behind him a son and daughter.

December 26

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December 26, 2019December 25, 2019 by gerryadmin

A devoted reader has asked me about the motto of this website: “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” The phrase comes from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun and refers there to the weight of guilt and experience we carry with us, inescapably, through life.

For historians, particularly those interested in the history of culture and ideas, it takes on a slightly different meaning because we know how closely we are linked to events, artefacts, symbols, styles, stories, practices, and technologies of the past. They are all around us in our everyday lives though they are seldom noticed.

When I taught the history of Western Civilization I always played the following clip from Life of Brian in which the revolutionary Reg, leader of the People’s Front for Judea, learns that his culture owes a lot to the Romans. And so do we. As we have debts to the Greeks. And the Anglo-Saxons. And the Normans. And the Chinese. Even that murderous scabby crew, the Vikings influence us today.

A lesson for students of history.

Our architecture, language, literature, art, music, religions, dress, etc., etc., etc., are saturated in the past. We plunder the stories told by our predecessors for our entertainments: Norse sagas, Greek myths, Germanic epics, Regency novels, Egyptian religion fill our screens. Our technologies are built on thousands of inventions and insights of our ancestors – Indian mathematicians, Polish astronomers, Cistercian monks, Franciscan scientists, Muslim physicians. The foods we eat come to us from around the world, first cultivated in the Andes, Persian orchards, Indonesian islands, Mexican jungles, or the Ganges delta.

In our political systems, why do we speak of republics? Why is the American upper house called a Senate? Why did Charlemagne (a Germanic king originally named Karl) and Napoleon dress like a Roman emperor? Why did Hitler and Mussolini adopt Roman symbols? Why did the Turkish sultan call himself the Kayser-i-Rum, the Roman Emperor? Why was the Canadian Parliament built to resemble a medieval cathedral? Why were our banks, libraries and public buildings built to resemble Greek temples?

Because the past matters. We breathe it in every day; we wear it, eat it, read it, watch it, work in it, and hang it on our walls. That’s why being a historian is so much fun.

December 25

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December 25, 2019December 15, 2021 by gerryadmin

Merry Christmas, everyone. Or as they say in some Celtic parts of the British Isles: Blythe Yule!

I thought I might include a few curious Christmas facts to enlighten your journey through this sacred and festive season.

Let’s begin with The Pooper, or the “caganer” as he is known in northeastern Spain. In the Catalonian region it has long been the custom to place in every nativity scene a caganer, the figure of a red-capped peasant who has dropped his drawers and is in the act of defecating. This has been the case since at least the sixteenth century and is probably some sort of fertility symbol, though now retailers have got into the act and will happily sell you a figurine of a pooping pope, politician, soccer star or actress. In 2005 the administration of Barcelona committed an outrage on public decency by failing to include a caganer in the city’s official nativity scene. Many saw this an affront to Catalan customs and thus a not-so-subtle attack on demands for greater political autonomy in Catalonia. The government said this was not the case at all but that the city had just passed ordinances banning public urination and defecation which made the caganer a bad example for urban hygiene. A “Save the Caganer” campaign was launched with wide media support and the next year the official pooper was back on the scene.

As well as being the Feast of the Nativity, December 25 is also sacred to the memory of St. Anastasia. She was a Christian martyr, legendarily a noblewoman noted for her kindness to the poor and martyred on December 25 in Diocletian’s persecutions of the late third century. By the fifth century her cult was well-established in Rome with devotions centred on the Church of St Anastasia (which may have been named after the Greek word for resurrection). Though her popularity diminished in the Middle Ages, she is commemorated in the second of the three Christmas masses celebrated by the pope every Christmas morning in the church of St Anastasia.

You might wonder if Santa Claus really has a wife. As a bishop Saint Nicholas was, of course, celibate but his spiritual descendant Santa Claus has at various times and places been blessed with a spouse. Katherine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful”, spoke of her in the 1889 story “Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride”. There she asks

Santa, must I tease in vain, dear? Let me go and hold the reindeer,/ While you clamber down the chimneys. Don’t look savage as a Turk!/ Why should you have all the glory of the joyous Christmas story,/ And poor little Goody Santa Claus have nothing but the work?

In Finland she is known as Mother Christmas; in Austria she is the Nikolofrau and has the reputation of being a bit shrewish. In Switzerland she goes by the name of Lucy while in the Netherlands she has been known to answer to Molly Grietja.

December 24

Home / Today in History / December 24

December 24, 2019December 22, 2019 by gerryadmin

1166 The birth of a very bad king

King John was not a good man / —He had his little ways. / And sometimes no one spoke to him / For days and days and days. So wrote A.A. Milne about a monarch so universally despised that not a single English ruler in the 800 years since his rule has been named John.

John was the youngest son of King Henry II and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, rulers of England, Ireland and most of France: what is today called the Angevin Empire. His was a notoriously quarrelsome family with the sons and mother frequently combining to make war against the father or against each other. John was Henry’s favourite and stayed loyal to him longest but, in the end, he too turned on his aging father, siding with his brother Richard who would shortly inherit the throne.

Richard “Lionheart” became king in 1189 and immediately left on the Third Crusade. John had been bribed to keep him loyal in his brother’s absence but, predictably, he began conspiring with Philip of France who had treacherously returned early from the crusade intending to reduce Richard’s holdings in France. When Richard returned in 1194 he forgave his little brother but died in 1199 without clearly naming him as heir. John had to battle the forces of his nephew Arthur of Brittany before securing the English crown and his possessions in France. Unfortunately John was an incompetent and uninspiring leader who soon lost almost all of his continental holdings, earning the nickname “Softsword”.

Back in England John fared no better, quarrelling with the church and his nobility. He imposed his own candidate as the Archbishop of Canterbury, earning an excommunication from the pope, and alienated his political class with arrogance and greed. He was forced to accept the pope’s candidate for archbishop, turn England over as a papal fief, and sign the Magna Carta with his barons, promising in this founding constitutional document, to rule fairly or face a justified rebellion.

John died of dysentery in 1216, unwept, unhonoured and, mostly, unsung. With the exception of the 16th century when John was treated as a Protestant hero for having defied the pope, John’s historical reputation remained abysmally low.

December 23

Home / Today in Church History / December 23

December 23, 2019December 22, 2019 by gerryadmin

Feast of St Thorlak

Among the more obscure saints of the Advent season is St. Thorlak Thorhallsson (1133-1193), a medieval Icelandic monk and bishop of Skaholt famous for his attempts to reform and purify his nation’s churches and monasteries. His feast day is December 23, which is marked in Iceland by a meal of skate hash, similar to lutefisk, whose plain charms make the Christmas feast more appealing. It is also a day for decorating the Yule tree and shopping for last-minute gifts.

Though Thorlak was well-known in his native country it was not until 1984 that he was canonized by Pope John Paul II and named patron saint of Iceland.

1588

The murder of the Duke de Guise

The French Wars of Religion had raged for nearly 40 years and had divided France into three armed camps, each recognizing someone named Henri as the true ruler. The king was Henri III, of the Valois dynasty, leader of the royalist, moderate Catholic party nicknamed les Politiques, so called because they were said to value political stability above religious truth. He was opposed by Henri of Navarre, the leader of the French Protestants, and Henri, the Duke de Guise, who led the ultra-Catholic League. Guise had driven the king from Paris and allied himself with the Spanish to exterminate Protestantism in western Europe.

On December 23, 1588 Henry III invited his cousin, the Duke de Guise to his palace at Blois under the pretext of discussing a truce. There he was set upon by the royal bodyguard and murdered. The next day, his brother Louis, the Cardinal de Guise, was also assassinated. Henri III did not survive much longer; in August 1589 he was murdered by a young Catholic fanatic disguised as a priest. This left Henri de Navarre, the Protestant claimant, as the last man standing. Realizing the majority of Frenchmen would accept only a Catholic as king, Navarre converted and ended the French Wars of Religion.

December 22

Home / Today in Church History / December 22

December 22, 2019July 6, 2021 by gerryadmin

1216 The Dominican Order is officially confirmed.

In the early thirteenth century the power of the papacy was at its height but the reputation of the Church was not. New heresies were springing up among the people and the clergy had a reputation for being rich, unlearned and aloof. Two young men responded: in Italy, Francis of Assisi; in Spain, Dominic de Guzmán.

As a priest, Dominic encountered the Cathar heretics of France who were well supported by local nobles and popular with the poor. This led Dominic to realize that the Church required itinerant, well-educated preachers who could combat religious heterodoxy and that this new sort of clergy should embrace poverty. Living off charity and working among the common people was the ideal of this new order, called Dominicans after its founder, but chartered by the papacy in 1216 as the Order of Preachers. Clad in white robes with a black cloak they became highly effective exponents of Catholic doctrine in markets and churches. They also came to staff the great new universities of Europe, especially Paris where its members included Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and to be among the directors of the Inquisition. In Italy they produced famous mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Henry Suso; in Italy they included fierce opponents of papal corruption such as Girolamo Savonarola.

A Latin pun on their name, Domini canes, has caused them to be known as the “Hounds of the Lord”.

December 20

Home / Today in History / December 20

December 20, 2019December 15, 2019 by gerryadmin

1946

Premiere of It’s A Wonderful Life

“Merry Christmas, you beautiful old savings and loan! Merry Christmas, you beautiful beat-up old house!” So shouts George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) who has just been saved from suicide by an apprentice angel who convinces him of the value that his life has had by showing what the town of Bedford Falls would have looked like without his influence.

Philip Van Doren Stern wrote a short story called “The Greatest Gift” but could not interest any publisher in his work so he printed up the story as a Christmas card and sent it to 200 friends. Among the recipients was a Hollywood agent who convinced RKO studio that it would make a great movie. And it did. It was shown in theatres under the title It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time on this date in 1946.

This enormously popular Christmas-time movie was not a success when it was first released in 1946 and when its copyright expired in 1974 no one bothered to renew it, allowing television stations to broadcast it without charge. This allowed new generations to discover this finely-crafted Frank Capra film which also featured Donna Reed as Mary Bailey, Lionel Barrymore as nasty Mr. Potter and Ward Bond and Frank Faylen as the original Bert and Ernie. (Republic Entertainment assumed control of the copyright in 1993 and broadcast fees are once again in effect.) Remakes of the film include It Happened One Christmas and Merry Christmas, George Bailey.

Words matter

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December 19, 2019 by gerryadmin

There has been much talk recently about what constitutes a genocide. President Trump has opined that the atrocities visited on the Armenians by the Turks a century ago did not fit his definition of the term and a Marxist professor at the University of Alberta claimed that the reports of deliberate mass starvation in Ukraine under Stalin were merely Nazi and capitalist propaganda. This is a piece I wrote for the the Frontier Centre for Public Policy on the subject.

If you are an activist who wants to persuade your fellow citizens of the correctness of your views, the first thing you should do is take control of the English language. Change the meanings of words so that your enemies can be accused of any crime and your side can always claim the moral high ground.

Here is a good example. “Racist” used to mean someone who held nasty views about other people because of their racial ancestry. It is a terrible accusation which no one wants to be on the receiving end of, so you must be sure that it applies only to people you disagree with. You now define racism to be a sin that can only be committed by white people. You now accuse anyone who wishes to discuss immigration as being a racist. When, over time, that term gets to be shop-worn because you have pretty much accused everybody of it, you switch to “White Supremacist”. So, in our last election you tell Canada that all members of the People’s Party of Canada (even the Afghani refugee candidate in my constituency) are white supremacists. It works.

The same applies to terms such as “sexual assault” or “sexual harassment” whose borders are now so ill-defined that they can apply to conduct ranging from rape and gross indecency to putting up an auto-parts calendar with a pretty girl on it.

What about “holocaust”? That word moved from meaning a burnt offering to the calculated massacre of millions of Jews and non-Aryans at the hands of Nazis, but which now can be used, for example, by vegans who speak of “the Holocaust on your plate”, or open-border enthusiasts who liken illegal immigrant detention camps to Auschwitz.

And so it is with genocide, which most users of the English language would say was a word to describe a deliberate attempt to wipe out a whole people. History is replete with such atrocities which have been committed by people of every race on every continent. The most egregious misuse of that term is committed by Canadian aboriginal pressure groups who claim that the Canadian government carried out a “cultural genocide” in its residential schools and that the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls amount to “genocide.”

Let me tell you what a real genocide looks like. “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.” Signs to this effect appeared in the Soviet Ukraine during the Stalinist era in the early 1930s. They were necessary because the communist government had created a man-made famine so devastating that millions starved to death in 1932-33.

The USSR was no stranger to mass starvation. Lenin’s policy of “war communism” in 1918-21 had crushed private economic production and mandated confiscation of “surplus” grain from the peasantry. The result was a massive drop in the food supply and widespread starvation that necessitated accepting foreign aid from the hated West. A switch to the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the later 1920s encouraged peasants to keep some of their production with the result that granaries were full again. Learning nothing from this, Joseph Stalin instituted a set of economic reforms that collectivized agriculture which once more brought about peasant resistance and shrunken food production.

In 1931, a bad harvest forced the government to institute rationing and order the forcible seizure of peasant food stocks to feed the urban proletariat. Stalin, fearing a nationalist movement and despising the notion of a prosperous class of farmers, seems to have seized this opportunity to bring Ukraine more completely under his thumb. Hundreds of thousands of productive agricultural workers were shipped to Siberia, or conscripted for work in heavy industry, unrealistic levels of food confiscation, which included farm animals as well as grain, were set for Ukraine, Communist party officials relentlessly hunted for hidden food caches, and grain continued to be shipped out of the country for foreign cash as the people began to starve. The very possession of food was tantamount to a crime. Villages which failed to meet the production quotas were put on a blacklist with death by starvation or typhus a certainty. The life expectancy of a boy born in Ukraine in 1933 was less than 7 years but Moscow refused to alleviate the situation or accept the outside aid which was offered.

For internal consumption, Stalin blamed “saboteurs” among the peasantry and hidden enemies in the Party itself – special tribunals were set up to try and execute the traitors. For public opinion in the rest of the world, Stalin denied there was anything amiss, bringing in British and American leftists to testify what they saw in the well-stocked hotels of Kiev.

In his grim masterpiece The Bloodlands, historian Timothy Snyder sums up the effect: The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or to prostitute themselves died. Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.

This is what genocide looks like.

December 18

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December 18, 2019July 8, 2019 by gerryadmin

1833 First performance of the new Russian national anthem

Composed by Alexei Lvov, lyrics by court poet Vasily Zhukovsky, this song was the anthem of the Russian empire until the overthrow of the Romanovs in 1917.

God save the Tsar!

Strong, sovereign,

Reign for glory, For our glory!

Reign to foes’ fear,

Orthodox Tsar.

God, save the Tsar!

Though the words are less-than-inspired, the music was quoted several times by Tchaikovsky, including in “The 1812 Overture”, Glinka, Gounod, and in the score to the film Dr Zhivago. A number of American institutions haved used the tune. It is the alma mater song of Macalester College, in St Paul, Minnesota, titled “Dear Old Macalester”. The deathless lyrics of the latter are:

Dear Old Macalester, ever the same
to those whose hearts are thrilled
by thy dear name.
Cherished by all thy sons
loved by all thy daughters,
Hail, hail to thee
our college dear.

Macalester students have an unofficial song which they are pleased to sing at sports matches against any of the local Christian colleges:

Drink blood!/ Smoke crack!/ Worship Satan!/ Go Mac!

December 17

Home / Today in Church History / December 17

December 17, 2019December 15, 2019 by gerryadmin

The Feast of St Lazarus: “And he that was dead came forth”.

What we know for certain of this saint is contained in chapter 11 of John’s gospel. Lazarus, a close friend of Jesus and brother to Mary and Martha, has died and been buried when Jesus arrives:

Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.

Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him! And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.

Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days. Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God? Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go. Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him.

The only other canonical mention of Lazarus lies in noting his presence at a feast on the day before Palm Sunday but later legends are rich in their stories of this remarkable individual. One account dealing with his life after the resurrection of Jesus has him and other Christians miraculously escaping persecution by being transported to southern France in a boat without sails or oars and in the company of Mary Magdalene. He is said to have preached in the port of Marseilles where he was made the town’s first bishop. Though he remained safe during the persecutions by Nero he was caught up later in the century in that ordained by the emperor Domitian. He was executed and his remains can be found in the cathedral of Autun.

Other stories, told in the East, say that Lazarus fled to Cyrus where he became the first bishop of Lanarca. His remains were said to be transferred to Constantinople but a church, still standing, was built over his (second) tomb. There are a number of sites in Bethany claiming to be the spot of his original four-day burial. It was widely believed that Lazarus, after his resurrection, never smiled, being grimly aware of the plight of souls in Hades. His feast is celebrated on a number of different dates in different parts of Christendom.