Christmas Every Day

1945 The Igor Gouzenko Case

In early September 1945, an intelligence officer from the Russian embassy, Igor Gouzenko, and his family tramped around Ottawa for 2 days trying to get the Canadian police, journalists, and officials to believe that he was attempting to defect with proof of a Soviet spy ring operating in Canada.

Igor Gouzenko was born in 1919 at the start of the Russian Revolution and was drafted  into the Red Army during the Second World War. He became a cypher clerk for the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, with a posting in Ottawa where he was to assist in a spy operation led by Colonel Nikolai Zabotin. Gouzenko and his wife were impressed by the freedom and prosperity of Canada and, when summoned back to Moscow, began to think of defecting. With a bundle of documents stolen from the embassy, and his wife carrying their small child, he made the rounds of the RCMP, the Ottawa Journal, and a magistrate’s court in an attempt to win sanctuary. The Mackenzie King government was suspicious and not interested in causing trouble with the Soviets but eventually agreed to take him in.

Gouzenko and his purloined files were able to convince the government that Russian intelligence had penetrated Canadian political and scientific circles in an attempt to gain atomic secrets. The resulting investigation saw 12 suspects, including a Montreal Progressive Labour member of Parliament (Fred Rose, Canada’s only Communist MP), a scientist, bureaucrats (some in the National Film Board) and some army officers arrested. In retaliation, Canada expelled Russian diplomats and removed our ambassador from Moscow until 1953.

Rose was sentenced to 6 years in jail and died eventually in Poland where he had been born; Gouzenko was given a new identity (in public appearances such as the television quiz show Front Page Challenge he always wore a hood) and police protection. He eventually became an author and won a Governor-General’s prize for a 1954 novel. He died in a Toronto suburb in 1982.

The Gouzenko revelations led to further investigations of Soviet spying in the USA and Britain and helped to begin the period of frosty relations known as the Cold War.

1879 The Assault on the Kabul Residency

Given the current brouhaha in Afghanistan it may be worthwhile to consider the events taking place in Kabul on this date in 1879.

The British Raj never felt secure in its hold on northwest India unless it had made a satisfactory arrangement in Afghanistan from which, for uncounted centuries, tribal raiders had emerged to feast on their peaceful neighbours. The East India Company and its armies made numerous forays into the country, some successful, some disastrous. In 1842 a 16,000 man army under General Elphinstone was massacred in the first Retreat from Kabul. Bribery was often a more effective to buy peace on the border.

In 1879 an Anglo-Indian army took Kabul and won humiliating concessions in the Treaty of Gandamak. The British established a “residency”, effectively an embassy in the capital, headed by Sir Louis Cavagnari and guarded by 75 members of the Corps of Guides, a regiment of Indian Muslims. This was a small force meant to show trust in the Afghan leader Amir Yakub Khan and not provoke the locals.

Unfortunately, a mutinous unit of the Afghan army demanded its overdue back pay and when the Amir couldn’t come up with it they decided to insist that the British provide the cash. When this was not forthcoming, they attacked the residency with cannons and overwhelming force. Eventually all of the British officers were killed, including Lt. Walter Hamilton (pictured above) who died covering the withdrawal of some of his men. The Afghans offered to spare the Muslim Guides but they refused to surrender and were duly wiped out. 

The attack prompted the British to invade again. They retook Kabul, exiled Yakub Khan, and executed 100 Afghans for their part in the attack on the residency. Posthumous awards were made to Lt. Hamilton and the entire Guides unit.

 

 

Some pithy observations drawn from the very words of “A Curmudgeon’s Commonplace Book”.

You might as well hope to detect typographical errors in Finnegans Wake, as hope to detect factual or logical errors in Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, etc. It is a perfect waste of time to read authors, and wonder whether they have got things right, when there is no possible way one could tell if they had gone wrong. – David Stove, Cricket versus Republicanism, 1995

A pessimist is an optimist in full possession of the facts. – Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

It is, above all, autumn that moves the heart to tears. – Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness, c. 1330

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of old age, that age appears to be best in four things: old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. – Francis Bacon, Apothegms New and Old, 1625

One melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends. — Christopher Hitchens, Harper’s, 1999

1040 Macbeth’s forces slay King Duncan

William Shakespeare was not one for historical accuracy if altering the facts could make for a better plot. His 1606 thriller Macbeth portrayed Duncan’s death as a midnight murder at the hands of the thane of Cawdor and his wife, but, in reality ,the king of Scotland was killed in a punitive raid on Macbeth territory. Serves him right.

1385 Battle of Aljubarotta

This was the fight that secured Portuguese independence from Spanish kingdoms. Aided by French heavy cavalry, King John I of Castile invaded his neighbour in an attempt to incorporate the Portuguese realm into his own. He was met by a combined force of English longbow men and Portuguese infantry protected by ditches and the slope of a hill. The result was a bloody encounter that ended in a massacre of the invaders and the establishment of the Aviz dynasty.

1720 Defeat of the Villasur expedition

In the early 18th-century, penetration of the interior of North America by the French and the Spanish led to clashes as claims to territory overlapped. In 1720 the Spanish authorities in New Mexico sent a small force of cavalry and native Apache and Pueblo warriors into the Great Plains, where French priests and traders had been becoming active. At the confluence of the Loup and Platte Rivers in what is now Nebraska, the Spanish were ambushed by Otoe and Pawnee fighters who resented the intrusion. Very few survivors made it back to Santa Fe and the result of the battle was an end to Spanish interest in that area.

 

From the man who brought you The Kindly Curmudgeon, God and The Simpsons, and Santa Claus: A Biography comes this collection of wit, wisdom, and whimsy, gleaned from the most interesting writers through the ages. Socrates? He’s here. Goethe? Got him. What about P.G. Wodehouse? Yes, there’s lots of that guy. Also Woody Allen, Spike Milligan, Dorothy Parker, and O. Henry. Eric Hoffer, Jordan Peterson, Mother Teresa, and Leon Trotsky.

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A shark could swim faster than me, but could probably run faster than a shark. So in a triathlon, it would all come down to who is the better cyclist.
Emma Manzini

If you have anything better to be doing when death overtakes you, get to work on that.
Epictetus

The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I’ll walk carefully.
Russian proverb

Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.
David Bentley Hart

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1945 The destruction of Nagasaki

At 11:02 on the morning of August 9, 1945 an American B-29 bomber dropped an atomic weapon on the Japanese port of Nagasaki. That city was not the original target, but smoke and clouds over Kokura would have prevented an assessment of the damage that would have been inflicted by this experimental bomb, so the pilot diverted his plane to the secondary objective. The result was an explosion that obliterated the city centre, killed tens of thousands immediately, and doomed more tens of thousands to die later from burns or radiation sickness. The casualty list was overwhelmingly civilian, including Korean slave labour, as well as a small number of Allied prisoners of war. 

Ironically, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan and the one, historically, most open to foreign influence. Throughout the more than 200 years of self-imposed isolation from the rest of the world, Nagasaki had been the only port at which European vessels were allowed to land. The area in which the secret Christian congregations had lived during those years was hardest hit by the bomb. The 19th-century Catholic cathedral (see above) was the largest in east Asia.

Debate continues over the necessity and morality of the atomic warfare waged against Japan, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that these horrific weapons saved millions of lives that would otherwise have been lost to a continued naval blockade, a Soviet-American invasion, or the continuation of firebombing. Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book The Bomber Mafia discusses the effect of the urban bombing strategy carried out by Curtis LeMay.

2007 Barry Bonds hits record-breaking home run

I am old enough to remember when athletes were publicly revered, when their personal peccadillos were largely overlooked by the media, and their pictures were featured more often on the sports pages than in police mug shots. There was one heavyweight boxing champion of the world and every schoolboy knew his name. Every fan knew who held the world mark for the mile run and the hundred-yard dash. We thrilled when Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier and when Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, and John Walker duelled in track meets around the world.  Babe Ruth had long held the record for most home runs hit in a season and in a career and the toppling of these numbers by Roger Maris and Hank Aaron were the concern of every newspaper, radio station, and television channel. Then along came drugs and mega millions and everything went sour.

Track and field was once the focus of global attention but the drug accusations that brought down Ben Johnson and which dogged the careers of Florence Henderson, Carl Lewis and that generation of American stars sent the sport into a decline from which t has not recovered. Who holds the world 1500 metre record? Who is the world record holder in the women’s high jump. I used to know.

What the late 80s did to track and field, the late 1990s and early 2000s did for baseball. Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, sporting wonderfully bulked-up torsos, all smashed the home run records that had stood for years. McGwire admitted to using steroids but denied that it had aided his batting; Sosa was caught with a corked bat; Bonds was caught up in legal problems involving use of steroids but never copped to employing them. On this day in 2007 Bonds broke the Sultan of Swat’s career total. The Commissioner of Baseball was not in attendance, perhaps subtly signalling that there was a shadow over the achievement, but Bonds was the recipient of congratulations by President Bush. 

No major league team was interested in signing Bonds after that season and neither he, McGwire, nor Sosa have been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The ball which Bonds hit to set the record is inthe Hall of Fame but if you examine the picture above, you will note that it is marked with a huge asterisk.

 

 Gratitude and nationalism

In 1848 when the crowned heads of Europe were shaken by a continent-wide series of revolutions, the Tsar of Russia sent troops to help the Austrian emperor put down rebels in Vienna. When the Austrian foreign minister was asked if this would produce feelings of good will between his country and Russia, the prime minister, Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, replied, “Austria will astound the world with the magnitude of its ingratitude.”

Gratitude is a rare sentiments among nations. As Lord Russell, a 19th-century British politician said, “Britain has no permanent friends, only eternal interests.”

I was thinking of gratitude when examining this graph from 2020 which charted the results of a survey asking members of the British public which European countries they would be willing to aid in a financial crisis, and also asked Europeans if their country should help out a beleaguered Britain. It shows that the UK would assist any of its former EU partners but that most of Europe would turn their backs on Britain.

There are all kinds of conclusions one might draw. For example, the only four countries willing to help Britain have never been invaded by the British, but then again neither have hostile Finland, Hungary and Lithuania. Greeks might harbour resentment over British participation in their civil war in 1944-45, Spain might be sulking over Gibraltar, Germans might be remembering the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg, and the French have never shown gratitude to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The truth of that judgement about the French was borne out to me on reading Canada Between Vichy and Free France, 1940-45 by Olivier Courteaux, the story of my country’s relations with the rival governments of France during the Second World War. Nationalists in Quebec were enamoured of Mussolini before the war and took a shine to the Pétainist Vichy regime which collaborated with the Nazis after the collapse of France in 1940. Prime Minister Mackenzie King had to balance that (and Quebec’s opposition to Canadian participation in the war) with English Canada’s desire to fight the fascists and support the Free French. On several occasions King took the side of the notoriously prickly de Gaulle against British and American interests and at war’s end de Gaulle praised Canada for always being in his corner. The general famously showed his gratitude by trying to break up Canada and his 1967 Montreal speech in which he called for an independent Quebec.

1794 Execution of the Angel of Death

The Thermidorian Reaction which claimed the life of Maximilien Robespierre on this day in 1794 also ended the earthly existence of someone equally repellent, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just.

Saint-Just, born in 1767, came from the rural minor nobility and led an aimless life as a youth, dabbling in legal studies and poetry, but the outbreak of Revolution in 1789 gave him a cause for which to live passionately. From his home town he corresponded with politicians such as Robespierre and Camille Desmoulin and in 1791 he was elected as the youngest member of the national assembly. There he forgot his earlier ideas of a constitutional monarchy and a distaste for violence, aligning himself with the radical Jacobin Club.

In November 1792 he called for the execution of Louis XVI; “I see no middle ground: this man must reign or die! He oppressed a free nation; he declared himself its enemy; he abused the laws: he must die to assure the repose of the people.” Having helped send the king to the guillotine, Saint-Just then took aim at moderate politicians, He supported the deaths of members of the Girondin faction and was behind the infamous “Law of Suspects” which removed many legal protections for an accused and ushered in the Terror. One was deemed guilty if thought to be insufficiently enthusiastic for the Revolution.

Saint-Just won a shining revolution as a représentant en mission, (the equivalent of a Soviet commissar), to bolster the morale and effectiveness of troops at the front. Shooting some officers perked up military performance considerably and Saint-Just returned to Paris in early 1794 where he was elected head of the National Convention. He turned the apparatus of the Terror on the Hébertists for being too radical and on Georges Danton and his followers for being too moderate.

Here are a few of Saint-Just’s more sanguinary pronouncements:

 “The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood.”

“A nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses”

“Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs.”

“You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it.”

By the summer of 1794 many French politicians felt that, unless checked, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Committee of Public Safety might also endanger them. Thus they engineered a coup and saved their own necks by sending Saint-Just and twenty-one of their erstwhile leaders to the axe.

Few have expressed the mistaken anthropology of the Enlightenment as well as did Saint-Just in a speech to the National Convention in April, 1793:

Man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.

This notion, that humanity is born good and requires only a bit of social tinkering to be made happy and free, is at the heart of every -ism of the last two centuries and leads from the taking of the Bastille to the gulags, Auschwitz, the Cultural Revolution, Critical Race Theory, and Justin Trudeau.

1804 The death of Alexander Hamilton

The fame of American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton has blossomed in the 21st century, thanks largely to a Broadway musical whose charms are (I confess) lost on me. Readers might be interested in a 19th-century English assessment of the man, from Chambers’ Book of Days.

Although the name of Alexander Hamilton is not so popularly familiar as several others concerned in the construction of the American Union, yet there is scarcely another which so closely interests the profounder students of that momentous passage in the world’s history. Of Hamilton’s share in that work, [French politician and historian Françcois] Guizot testifies, ‘that there is not one element of order, strength, and durability in the constitution which he did not powerfully contribute to introduce into the scheme and cause to be adopted.’

Hamilton’s father was a Scotsman, and his mother a member of a Huguenot family, banished from France. He was born in 1757, on the island of Nevis; and whilst a youth serving as clerk in a merchant’s office, a hurricane of more than ordinary violence occurred, and Hamilton drew up an account of its ravages, which was inserted in a West Indian newspaper. The narrative was so well written, and excited so much attention, that the writer was deemed born for something better than mercantile drudgery, and was sent to New York to prosecute his education. The dispute between Great Britain and the colonies had begun to grow very warm, and Hamilton soon distinguished himself by eloquent speeches in advocacy of resistance. 

With the ardour of youth he commenced the study of military tactics, and turned his learning to good account in the first action between the British and Americans at Lexington in 1775. In the course of the unhappy war which followed, Hamilton was Washington’s most trusted and confidential aid. At the conclusion of hostilities he commenced practice at the bar, became secretary of the treasury under President Washington, and a leading actor in all those intricate, delicate, and perplexing discussions, which attended the consolidation of the thirteen independent colonies into one nation. 

Hamilton was the most conservative of republicans. He opposed the ultra-democratic doctrines of Jefferson. [That is putting it mildly. Here are Hamilton’s observations on America’s third president: The moral character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually puffing about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery he brought his own children to the hammer and made money out of his debaucheries.] He was an ardent admirer of the English constitution, and he beheld the course of the French Revolution with abhorrence and dismay.

But all the blessings which lay in store for America in the treasury of Hamilton’s fine intellect, were lost by a cruel mischance ere he had attained his forty-seventh year. With the feelings of an upright man, he had expressed his sense of the profligacy of Aaron, who thereon challenged him to a duel. Hamilton had all reasonable contempt for such a mode of settling differences, but fearing, as he wrote, that ‘his ability to be in future useful either in preventing mischief or effecting good was inseparable from a conformity to prejudice in this particular,’ he weakly yielded. With every precaution of secrecy, he met his adversary at Weehardken, near New York. Colonel Burr fired, and his ball entered Hamilton’s side. Hamilton fell mortally wounded, his pistol going involuntarily off as he staggered to the ground. After a day of agony, he expired on the 11^th of July 1804. Never, except at Washington’s death, was there such mourning in America.

Hamilton was a man under middle height, spare, erect, and of a most dignified presence. His writings in The Federalist are read by political philosophers with admiration to this day. He wrote rapidly, but with precision and method. His habit was to think well over his subject, and then, at whatever time of night, to go to bed and sleep for six or seven hours. On awaking, he drank a cup of strong coffee, sat down at his desk, and for five, six, seven, or even eight hours continued writing, until he had cleared the whole matter off his mind.