"The success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths"

"Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning. ... liberalism [they say] has proven incapable of filling the 'hole in people’s souls.' ... Liberalism 'nurtures the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency,' but not the 'loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love.' Although he considers himself a liberal, [the NY Times's David] Brooks thinks liberal societies are lonely, atomised, and even selfish.
    "Brooks joins a growing list of public intellectuals who maintain that the principles and institutions of liberalism—democracy, freedom of speech and conscience, individual rights, and the rule of law—aren’t sufficient for societies to flourish. They believe society needs an anchor that goes deeper than liberalism—what Brooks describes as 'faith, family, soil and flag.
    "There are different expressions of this belief. In an article for the 'Spectator,' journalist Ed West discusses a phenomenon he describes as 'New Theism'—an intellectual movement pushing back against the rising secularism in Western liberal societies. In a recent essay for 'Quillette,' the historian and author Adam Wakeling describes this phenomenon as 'political Christianity,' which he defines as the belief that 'Western civilisation has Christian foundations, and returning to those Christian roots can help protect Western values today.' Wakeling challenges both of these beliefs and argues that the 'success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights—not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths' ...
    "Liberalism has lasted for centuries because it is the only set of principles and practices that enables diverse societies to thrive. But liberalism is under threat today. From the emergence of an illiberal and zero-sum form of identity politics on the Left to the resurrection of blood-and-soil nationalism on the Right, the consensus on liberalism in many Western democracies is breaking down. ... Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion or some other 'comprehensive doctrine' to give life meaning. ...
    "The idea that we’re responsible for making our own meaning can be daunting. While religious believers have established doctrines, traditions, and communities, millions of their fellow citizens must find their way to lives of purpose without this scaffolding. Those who call for a religious revival in the West never explain what this looks like in practice. Does it merely mean refilling pews? Or some version of integralism, in which the state and religion are fused? What about the millions of people who simply can’t believe? Thomas Jefferson opens the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom by observing that the 'opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.' There’s a large and growing population of people in liberal societies who have followed the evidence away from religious faith, and they don’t need a surrogate faith to replace it.
    "The citizens of liberal democracies are fortunate to live in societies that afford them the luxury to have crises of meaning. In many other societies, and at many points in history, people faced more immediate crises: a king or a dictator who would kill them for believing the wrong thing; rival clans that would regularly raid their villages and destroy their homes; life at the mercy of nature, disease, poverty, and starvation. Liberal ideas and institutions like the rule of law, property rights and contract enforcement, and freedom of expression and conscience deserve much of the credit for the health, prosperity, and autonomy we enjoy today. The one thing liberalism can’t provide, however, is a sense of meaning and purpose—that’s up to us, and the responsibility of making our own meaning is a small price to pay. For many, it isn’t a price at all."

~ Matt Johnson from his article 'Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’'

"National 'service'"

"Translation: your life isn’t really yours. You have to buy it off from some higher entity. To be left alone, you have to pay ransom, in the form of some service to the group. Both the draft, or ‘volunteer weekends’ are this ransom. Despicable. The Tories are a disgusting Party. I wish them a historic annihilation in the elections."

~ Nikos Sotirakopoulos, from his tweet in response to Rishi Sunak's pledge to "bring back National Service" iff the Tories win the UK election

RELATED: 

"Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man’s fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man’s life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
    "If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state’s discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man’s protector any longer. What else is there left to protect? ...

"The years from about fifteen to twenty-five are the crucial formative years of a man’s life. This is the time when he confirms his impressions of the world, of other men, of the society in which he is to live, when he acquires conscious convictions, defines his moral values, chooses his goals, and plans his future, developing or renouncing ambition. These are the years that mark him for life. And it is these years that an allegedly humanitarian society [would force] him to spend in terror—the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle."

~ Ayn Rand from her 1967 lecture 'The Wreckage of the Consensus' [excerpt here]

It's Easter, so ...

Cartoon by Nick Kim

 

... so to save you searching for them, here are links to a few of my favourite Easter posts over the years here at NOT PC:

"What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.
    "That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year."
    Easter through art 

"Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity. Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word  'Easter' comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.
    "But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become a veneration of torture and sacrifice ..."
    Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell? 

"AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.
    "It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic."
    Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice 

"Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.
    "Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain."
    Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

"IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.
    "To celebrate what?
    "Why, to celebrate spring, of course. ..."
    Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week! 

There’s No Natural ‘Carrying Capacity’ for the Human Population

 

You may assume that this planet has a natural "carrying capacity" beyond which the human population just cannot go. Sounds reasonable, right? There are sonly so many billions the planet can support, right? Wrong, says Don Boudreaux in this guest post: for humans left free to produce, the planet has no natural carrying capacity. The reason, he explains, is that the planet's ultimate resource is the human mind ...

There’s No Natural ‘Carrying Capacity’ for the Human Population: An Essay Inspired by the Happy News that the Human Population Has Reached Eight Billion

by Don Boudreaux

The late, great Julian Simon spent decades battling intellectually against biologists and zoologists who were convinced that human population growth, if governments did not hold it in check with draconian measures, would spell doom for multitudes of humans. (I might as well have used the present tense above, because many of the scientists with whom Simon did battle, including the most prominent, Paul Ehrlich, are still alive.) These students of animal development and behaviour insist that every species inhabits an environment with a natural “carrying capacity.” If the population of a species grows in number beyond the limits of its environment’s carrying capacity, the death rate of members of that species will rise, while its members’ birth rate fall, because species members will confront unusual difficulty gaining access to food, water, and shelter. The species’ population is thus confined to the limits of its environment’s carrying capacity by the brutality of uncaring nature.

Simon argued that humans, at least those of us who live in free societies, are a categorically different sort of species. He observed that to the extent to which we, members of the human species, inhabit a social environment characterised by free and innovative markets, our species does not inhabit a natural environment with a finite carrying capacity. Simon’s argument starts with the fact that we humans are uniquely enterprising and innovative. When this fact combines with the further reality that market prices are signals about which specific resources are becoming more scarce relative to other resources, human entrepreneurship and creativity are incited to discover ways both to make currently known stocks of scarce resources go further and, more importantly, to discover either new sources of those resources or more abundant substitutes. When we succeed in these endeavours, as we now normally do, we literally produce more resources.

Simon’s explanation is revolutionary. Contrary to what most people seem to believe, we don’t obtain resources from an existing stock created for us by nature, leaving fewer resources available for use tomorrow each time we withdraw some amount for our use today. Instead, resources are ultimately fruits of the human mind and effort. And so we produce more petroleum, more tungsten, more copper, more bauxite in the same way that, when our demand for apple pies or Apple laptops increases, we produce more apple pies and Apple laptops.

For humans in market economies, therefore, the environment has no natural ‘carrying capacity.’

As Simon tirelessly documented, his account of humans’ relationship with the natural environment is amply confirmed by history, especially by modern history. Over the past few centuries the human population has grown remarkably – earlier this month it hit eight billion. At the same time there’s also been astounding growth in humans’ standard of living. Were there a natural carrying capacity on earth for the human population, history offers no evidence of it. Quite the contrary.

Despite the economic soundness of his argument and its consistency with the data – and despite his famous victory in a 1980 wager with Ehrlich on whether or not a bundle of five natural resources would become more scarce over the course of a decade – Simon’s argument left many biologists and zoologists unconvinced. And biologists and zoologists aren’t alone. Pick at random a professor, student, news reporter, or blogger and ask him if we humans are today threatening our long-term survival by over-using resources. Chances are high that the answer you’ll get is an unhesitating yes. You’ll likely be further told that our only hope of avoiding the terrible fate of billions of us being done in by natural forces is for us, especially those of us in rich countries, to dramatically reduce our consumption.

There is, I suppose, something gratifying in counselling personal sacrifice. Sacrifice often is admirable and worthwhile, as when you sacrifice your time to help a neighbour in distress, or sacrifice your comfort today in order to undergo painful medical treatments that will better ensure that you’ll survive past tomorrow. But sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake is, at best, pointless. Costs are incurred in exchange for no benefits....

If Simon is correct, green-inspired efforts to encourage or compel those of us in market economies to reduce our consumption today yield no benefits. Such efforts conserve no resources; they simply result in our producing fewer resources, an outcome that is utterly useless. The uselessness of this outcome lies in the reality that whenever we “need” new resources, we can produce these.

Was Simon naively pollyannaish? Has history’s apparent confirmation of his thesis simply been a matter of good luck? No.

Consider a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal – an essay whose title speaks volumes: “One Man’s Trash Is Another’s Clean Fuel.” The authors, Nick Stork and Joe Malchow, report very Simonesque news:

In a lesson about how the energy transition is likely to play out, landfill operators’ ability to make use of excess gas has exploded in recent years. New facilities are being created to convert trash into renewable natural gas, molecularly identical to the gas that heats homes. The process cuts down greenhouse-gas emissions while creating a low-carbon energy source…

The potential has spurred major sanitation and energy companies to break into this new market. This year Houston’s Waste Management Corp. announced an $825 million investment to boost renewable natural-gas capture. In October the British company BP agreed to acquire Archaea Energy (which one of us founded and the other invested in), a company that designs, builds and operates RNG plants in the U.S. to convert waste emissions. Archaea produces 6,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day through 13 RNG facilities with plans to construct 88 more to serve rising demand. Our only input is trash.

Quiet, private innovation in gas processing made this possible. Archaea sells largely to voluntary buyers who wish to lock in clean gas at fair prices. RNG still comes at a premium compared with other fuel sources, but driving down the cost of producing RNG will mean more of it is available to buyers on attractive terms. We are working to lower the price of RNG by creating standardized and modular production facilities with decreased operating costs, higher processing efficiency, and uptime rates that start above 90 percent.

Energy – indeed, low-carbon energy – from trash!

If turning trash into energy that’s transmissible over long distances nevertheless sounds either fanciful or likely insignificant in its long-term impact, imagine yourself as a native American roaming 600 years ago through the woodlands of what is today western Pennsylvania. You’re thirsty and bend down to enjoy a drink of water from a brook, only to discover that the water at that spot is undrinkable because it’s polluted with a smelly, oily, noxious substance oozing out a few feet upstream. How plausible would this You of 600 years ago have found a prediction that the icky stuff that pollutes your drinking water would, in just a few centuries, be a much-sought-after ‘natural’ resource that powers much of humanity’s activities?

Julian Simon died almost twenty-five years ago, just shy of his 66th birthday. Were he still alive today, he would surely celebrate our population of eight billion and remind anyone who would listen that, far from pushing humans closer to the earth’s carrying capacity, the creative potential of those eight billion human minds will further expand our access to resources. We need only to allow this creativity to operate freely.

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with American Institute for Economic Research and with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University; a Mercatus Center Board Member; and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University. He is the author of the books The Essential Hayek, Globalization, Hypocrites and Half-Wits, and his articles appear in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, US News & World Report as well as numerous scholarly journals. He writes a blog called Cafe Hayek and a regular column on economics for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Boudreaux earned a PhD in economics from Auburn University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.

This post originally appeared at the AIER blog.

"The anti-abortionists’ claim to being 'pro-life' is a classic Big Lie."

'Flaming June' by Frederick Leighton

"[Nearly [fif]ty years after Roe V. Wade, no one defends the right to abortion in fundamental, moral terms, which is why the pro-abortion rights forces are on the defensive.
    "Abortion-rights advocates should not cede the terms 'pro-life' and 'right to life' to the anti-abortionists. It is a woman’s right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy.
    "Nor should abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase 'a woman’s right to choose'” Does she have the right to choose murder? That’s what abortion would be, if the fetus were a person.
    "The status of the embryo in the first trimester is the basic issue that cannot be sidestepped. The embryo is clearly pre-human; only the mystical notions of religious dogma treat this clump of cells as constituting a person.
    "We must not confuse potentiality with actuality.... That tiny growth, that mass of protoplasm, exists as a part of a woman’s body. It is not an independently existing, biologically formed organism, let alone a person. That which lives within the body of another can claim no right against its host. Rights belong only to individuals, not to collectives or to parts of an individual.
    "('Independent' does not mean self-supporting–a child who depends on its parents for food, shelter, and clothing, has rights because it is an actual, separate human being.)
    "'Rights,' in Ayn Rand’s words, 'do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born.'
    "It is only on this base that we can support the woman’s political right to do what she chooses in this issue. No other person–not even her husband–has the right to dictate what she may do with her own body. That is a fundamental principle of freedom....
    "Abortions are private affairs and often involve painfully difficult decisions with life-long consequences. But, tragically, the lives of the parents are completely ignored by the anti-abortionists. Yet that is the essential issue. In any conflict it’s the actual, living persons who count, not the mere potential of the embryo....
    "The anti-abortionists’ attitude, however, is: 'The actual life of the parents be damned! Give up your life, liberty, property and the pursuit of your own happiness.
    "Sentencing a woman to sacrifice her life to an embryo is not upholding the 'right-to-life.'
    "The anti-abortionists’ claim to being 'pro-life' is a classic Big Lie. You cannot be in favour of life and yet demand the sacrifice of an actual, living individual to a clump of tissue.
    "Anti-abortionists are not lovers of life–lovers of tissue, maybe. But their stand marks them as haters of real human beings."

          ~ philosopher Leonard Peikoff, from his article 'Abortion Rights are Pro-Life'

#ANZAC: "year after year, the numbers grow fewer, who remember what it was we're not forgetting"

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

"It's gratifying, in a way, that we start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war.
    "This is healthy. This much is good.
    "'Lest we Forget!' we say"
    "It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting....

"THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANZAC is that the battle at the Dardanelles gave birth to two nations. If that’s true, it is an odd birth, fathered out of failure by way of disaster.
    "[And] the reason they embarked [was] not to beat the Hun, but to save the Czar [and] gift Constantinople to Russia.... as an altruistic gift to an 'ally' who was the most autocratic in Europe ... the price for the sacrifice to be paid for in the blood of those Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families....
    "In the end, the attempted occupation [of the Gallipoli peninsula] was decided upon partly because in any bureaucracy once plans are begun they are very hard to stop, and partly too as an altruistic gift to an “ally” who was the most autocratic in Europe, who had shown no sign of earning British trust -- the price for the sacrifice to be paid for in the blood of those Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families.
    "Such is the code of sacrifice under which the decision was made to go.... [in pursuit, said Churchill, of] 'a victory such as the war had not yet seen.'
    "It never would. It never could.
    "Instead, it all turned to omnishambles. The only thing in the end about which anyone had anything about which to boast was a successful and well-executed withdrawal.
    "It was a bloody mess that achieved nothing, that could achieve nothing, purchased at the price of a wholesale sacrifice of young lives that could have meant something. It was a total unmitigated disaster, but at least, now, dear reader, some reason for the whole, sordid shambles might be clearer.
    "The reason however for commemorating the shambles as the botched 'birth' (in some way) of our nation is very much less so."

~ excerpted from NOT PC's posts 'Lest we forget what?' and 'But what were the ANZACs fighting for, Grandad?'

"An individualist is a man who says: 'I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine'."

"Do not make the mistake of the ignorant who think that an individualist is a man who says: 'I’ll do as I please at everybody else’s expense.' An individualist is a man who recognises the inalienable individual rights of man—his own and those of others.
    "An individualist is a man who says: 'I will not run anyone’s life—nor let anyone run mine. I will not rule nor be ruled. I will not be a master nor a slave. I will not sacrifice myself to anyone—nor sacrifice anyone to myself'.”
          ~ Ayn Rand, from her “Textbook of Americanism"

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst..."

Lest we forget what?

It's gratifying, in a way, to start Anzac Day every year with a commemoration of a shambolic dawn landing that kicked off a pointless and wholly tragic military campaign that snuffed out some of the best young men of two young nations. It's not a victory march, but a sobering commemoration of the destruction of war.

This is healthy. This much is good.

"Lest we Forget!"

It's said every year. And yet year after year, the numbers grow fewer who remember what it was we're not forgetting.

In my own lifetime, the commemoration seems to have morphed from remembering the birth of a nation and the bungling of generals -- and all those who are gone -- to one in which the twin themes of nationalistic duty and blood sacrifice have come to thoroughly permeate the day.

Is it just the proximity to Easter that allows that commemoration's central theme to bleed so strongly into this one, I wonder? Or the co-opting of Anzac Day by so many Australian sporting franchises to sell tickets? Maybe. I fear instead that it's the increasing growth of the gruesome ethics of duty and altruism, and the demands of the State in collecting both.

Yes, war can be the ultimate antidote to tyranny. But what's increasingly praised each Anzac Day is not the price of victory over tyranny, but the alleged virtues of sacrifice itself.

But there is nothing -- nothing -- virtuous about sacrifice.

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue... “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t... 

A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values. 

There is nothing, nothing at all, that is noble about that.

.

The sculpture above and below is by Australian artist Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

It is called, appropriately, ‘Sacrifice.’

At the very focal point of what is virtually a temple to the slain, a stylised man-machine lies prostrate on his shield. Embossed upon it are the words “come home on either with your shield or on it,” the words said by wives whose husbands answered the call to war. His corpse is offered up across a sword too weighty to wield, atop a stylised column lauding the ultimate sacrifice of an individual life. "It tells," says the official description, "not only of the brutality of war and of the suffering it engenders, but of the noblest of all human qualities – self-sacrifice for duty." 

!

It is a brilliant union of art and architecture. Which makes it all the more horrifying. Few twentieth-century sculptures celebrate the morality of sacrifice in war more nobly. More starkly. More ... appropriately.

For never is the widespread acceptance of the morality of sacrifice exploited so thoroughly but in times of war. In World War One, that mis-named 'Great War,' the exploitation was explicit -- sacrifice exploited for recruitment, for economic savings, to diminish liberty, to justify and transmogrify the mass slaughter into something akin to a mass crusade.

Honour, Duty, Patriotism and -- clad in glittering white -- the great pinnacle of Sacrifice, pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. [1]

This disgusting cant was how Lloyd George combined the themes in a 1914 recruiting speech, the "great pinnacle" uniting the reasons to die on the State's chosen altar in history's most pointless war. To no-one's surprise, hymns were written in this vein, ringing to the drumbeat of sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice ...

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war
As who had heard God’s message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave,
To save mankind—yourselves you scorned to save [2]

... the sacrifice of self to others praised as the primary virtue, the hoped-for result of that sacrifice (final victory?) moving quietly into second place.

In the final days of that pointless war, and desperate to give meaning to the slaughter, the literal blood sacrifice of millions was being called up by the religious as constituting some form of great moral atonement akin to that called up by the Easter crucifixion. Said the Evangelical Alliance in 1918:

The men who, in days gone by, have recoiled from the plan statement of God's Word that 'without shedding blood there is no remission of sin' should find this doctrine easy of acceptance in these days when our lives in this Nation, as the lives of those in the Nations allied to us, are being redeemed by the blood of our sons. [3]

What grotesquerie is this: "Redeemed by the blood of our sons"! And this is said as words of praise! Thus are the transgressions of those who seek moral meaning in mass slaughter. Could anything be more foul? "At the centre of this," writes historian Adrian Gregory,

was an interpretation of war as in some sense 'a sign of grace' in the English people. Before the war all the indications were supposedly of some kind of a disaster; a disaster caused by materialism, selfishness and social division. The war had called forth a better nature. An altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness ... [4]

"We have been too comfortable and too indulgent," cried the goat-footed Lloyd George, "many, perhaps, too selfish." This by a man who conscripted men by the million to die in sheer blind terror. Thus is selfishness made the sin and the morality of altruism made explicit as a call to mass sacrifice -- that collective bloodshed 'atoning' in atavistic fashion for the pre-war "sin" of producing (all-too briefly) a peace-loving world.For having produced and enjoyed, in those years before the 1914-18 war, what was described as “the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history” -- or as Austrian author Stefan Zweig called it “individual freedom at its zenith, after [which, after that war,] I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years.” [5, 6] That was what mass slaughter had bought. A world war that brought about a Second World War. And, by the ethic of altruism, the soldier's sacrifice became a "'blood tax' against which everyone else had to measure themselves." [7]

We are still being asked to, every April 25.

What is it then we should least forget, every year? For these are among the things that I cannot. As Ayn Rand observed, when there is widespread call of sacrifice, there is always someone ready and willing to pick up the sacrifices. Not in military duty necessarily, today, but undoubtedly in calls for duty, for selflessness, for service to a higher cause -- either State, or Climate, or Great Cause -- that Great Cause to be selected for us by Great Leaders. Selfishness, still, the sin to be expunged. Following along -- in "kindness," in sacrifice, in forelock-tugging obedience -- the virtue to be encouraged.

For under a morality of sacrifice, the standard of value is never your own happiness, but that of others. Not your own prosperity, but that of others. Not even your own life, but those of others. (As W.H Auden sarcastically summarises, “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I can’t imagine.” [8])

The result of all this sacrifice amounts to nothing more than an often blood-soaked row of zeroes. And no wonder, for as this excerpt from Galt’s Speech points out: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality…" [9]

Think about it.

In the meantime, and as a much healthier antidote, let’s talk about what morality is for: not to teach us how to suffer and die, but to enjoy ourselves and live!

About happiness and its pursuit. Not war. Not sacrifice. But the thing -- and, flowing from freedom, perhaps the only thing -- that is ever worth fighting for. “What else could be more selfishly important?”

Let's not forget what we are here for: to pursue our own happiness in our own productive way, asking neither that others sacrifice for us, nor that we need to sacrifice ourselves to others.

Lest we forget that!

NOTES:

1. David Lloyd George, speech at Queen's Hall, September, 1914, quoted in Adrian Gregory's book The Last Great War,  2008, "an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war." (You might also say: of the moral means by which they were exploited.)
2. From the hymn 'O Valiant Heart,' taken from a poem by John Stanhope Arkwright, published in The Supreme Sacrifice, and other Poems in Time of War (1919)
3. The War and Sacrificial Death: A Warning, The Evangelical Alliance, 1918, quoted in Gregory

4. Gregory, 157

5. From Ayn Rand’s introduction to her essay collection The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.
6. From Stefan Zweig’s 1942 autobiography, which is also a biography of the collapse of Europe into barbarism, The World of Yesterday

7. Gregory, 150
8. Auden, Prose, vol. 2, p. 347
9. Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Collectivist movements don’t care about individuals. Changing one mind? It means nothing to them. It’s just one more pawn available to manufacture other pawns..."

"Collectivist movements don’t care about individuals. Changing one mind? It means nothing to them. It’s just one more pawn available to manufacture other pawns, all marching lockstep in a single direction, just waiting to be sacrificed for the cause. We are building a movement of individualists. And in a movement of individualists, every success matters, because each person matters—and because none of us is a pawn.
    "Whenever I become overwhelmed by the difficulty of our mission and the seemingly insurmountable odds of success, I remind myself of the importance of the individual—and of the impact a single individual can have on the world....
    "I don’t mean to diminish the importance of politics. Politics is important. Freedom is important. And in many ways, there has never been a bigger opportunity to impact politics than there is today. "Twenty years ago, people were generally satisfied with a status quo that was drifting slowly in the direction of statism. Today, we are no longer drifting. We are running toward statism at full speed.
    "That will cause many who value freedom to turn to purely political causes and activist organizations promising fast results. They have been promising fast results for as long as I’ve been alive. But if the last few decades have made anything clear, it’s that we will not move in a pro-freedom direction until people value freedom—and they will not value freedom until they learn to value living by their own mind and for their own sake. The battle for freedom is a battle for philosophy."
          ~ John Allison, from his letter on behalf of the Ayn Rand Institute
.

"There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned." #QotD

"There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
    "The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material. It is the principle of justice.
    "A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. He does not treat men as masters or slaves, but as independent equals. He deals with men by means of a free, voluntary, unforced, uncoerced exchange -- an exchange which benefits both parties by their own independent judgment. A trader does not expect to be paid for his defaults, only for his achievements. He does not switch to others the burden of his failures, and he does not mortgage his life into bondage to the failures of others.
    "In spiritual issues—(by 'spiritual' I mean: 'pertaining to man’s consciousness')—the currency or medium of exchange is different, but the principle is the same. Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character. Only a brute or an altruist would claim that the appreciation of another person’s virtues is an act of selflessness, that as far as one’s own selfish interest and pleasure are concerned, it makes no difference whether one deals with a genius or a fool, whether one meets a hero or a thug, whether one marries an ideal woman or a slut. In spiritual issues, a trader is a man who does not seek to be loved for his weaknesses or flaws, only for his virtues, and who does not grant his love to the weaknesses or the flaws of others, only to their virtues."
        ~ Ayn Rand on 'The Trader Principle'
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"No, you cannot claim both to be a victim and to have the right to sacrifice others in your quest for some form of justice. You are not a victim if you make other people victims; you are a bully." #QotD

"No, you cannot claim both to be a victim and to have the right to sacrifice others in your quest for some form of justice. You are not a victim if you make other people victims; you are a bully."
          ~ Per Bylund
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Nothing noble about sacrifice

Since so many have used the word today, let's define it:

Nothing noble about that. 

Let's examine it:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one.

And further:

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
    If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbour’s child and let your own die, it is.
    If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
    If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue [by this moral standard]: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—[by this depraved moral standard] that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.
    A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values.

There is nothing, nothing at all, that is noble about that.

Does that mean you should never fight at all? Never fight for those you love? No:

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
    Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
    But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband should sacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
    The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Fighting for your values, fighting for those you love, these are acts of integrity. Not of sacrifice.

We may honour a man acting in support of his values, even at the risk of his life. We should neither honour, nor call it, a sacrifice.

Why?

Because honouring their memory demands it. That's a question of our integrity.

And there is a practical reason:

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

Such people exist in every age. 

They called men to war in 1914 in the name of, says one historian, "an altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness." They call people now, Great Leaders of every description seeking sacrifice to a "higher cause" -- to the State, to the Climate, to any Great Cause selected by the Great Leaders, expunging the sin of selfishness in their answer to the call of "Duty."

But as a great writer once observed: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality itself."

There is nothing noble about sacrifice. 

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"Lest we forget" is said every year, and with increasing vehemence, as the twin themes of duty & blood sacrifice have come to permeate the day--the soldiers' sacrifice like a "blood tax against which everyone else must measure themselves." #AnzacDay

"'Lest we forget' is said every year, and with increasing vehemence, as the twin themes of duty and blood sacrifice have however come to permeate the day--the increasing link between the ethics of duty and of altruism ever more apparent--the soldiers' sacrifice still like 'a blood tax against which everyone else must measure themselves.'
    "But, as Ayn Rand observed, when there is widespread call of sacrifice, there is always someone ready and willing to pick up the sacrifices. Not in military duty necessarily, not today, but undoubtedly in calls for duty, for selflessness, for service to a higher cause -- to State, to Climate, or to someone else's Great Cause -- that Great Cause to be selected for us by Great Leaders. Selfishness, still, the great sin to be expunged."
          ~ excerpted and paraphrased from my 2018 Anzac Day post 'Lest We Forget What?'

[Sculpture by Australian artist Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park]
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Lest we forget *what*?

I grow increasingly uneasy every year with the growing laudation of Anzac Day.

Lest we forget, it is said, every year, with increasing vehemence. But what exactly is it we should be remembering, and are earnestely entreated not to forget?

In my own lifetime, the remembrance seems to have morphed from the birth of a nation and the bungling of generals and remembering those who are gone to one in which the twin themes of duty and blood sacrifice have come to thoroughly permeate the day. Is it just the proximity to Easter that allows that commemoration's central theme to bleed so strongly into this one, I wonder? But I fear instead that it's the increasing link between the ethics of duty and altruism, and the demands of the State in collecting both.

The sculpture above and below is by Australian artist Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

It is called, appropriately: ‘Sacrifice.’

At the very focal point of what is virtually a temple to the slain, a stylised man-machine lies prostrate on his shield (embossed upon it are the words “come home on either with your shield or on it,” the words said by wives whose husbands answered the call to war) across a sword too weighty to wield, atop a stylised column lauding the ultimate sacrifice of an individual life...

Few twentieth-century sculptures celebrate the morality of sacrifice in war more nobly. More starkly. More ... appropriately.

For never is the widespread acceptance of the morality of sacrifice exploited so thoroughly but in times of war. In World War One, that mis-named 'Great War,' the exploitation was explicit -- sacrifice exploited for recruitment, for economic savings, to diminish liberty, to justify and transmogrify the mass slaughter into something akin to a mass crusade.

Honour, Duty, Patriotism and -- clad in glittering white -- the great pinnacle of Sacrifice, pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. [1]

This disgusting cant was how Lloyd George combined the themes in a 1914 recruiting speech, the "great pinnacle" uniting the reasons to die on the State's chosen altar. To no-one's surprise, hymns were written in this vein,  ringing to the drumbeat of sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice ...

Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war
As who had heard God’s message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave,
To save mankind—yourselves you scorned to save [2]

In the final days of the war, desperate to give meaning to the slaughter, the literal blood sacrifice of millions was being called up by many as constituting some form of great moral atonement akin to that called up by the Easter crucifixion.

The men who, in days gone by, have recoiled from the plan statement of God's Word that 'without shedding blood there is no remission of sin' should find this doctrine easy of acceptance in these days when our lives in this Nation, as the lives of those in the Nations allied to us, are being redeemed by the blood of our sons. [3]

Thus are the transgressions of those who seek moral meaning in mass slaughter. Could anything be more foul? "At the centre of this," writes historian Adrian Gregory,

was an interpretation of war as in some sense 'a sign of grace' in the English people. Before the war all the indications were supposedly of some kind of a disaster; a disaster caused by materialism, selfishness and social division. The war had called forth a better nature. An altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness ... [4]

"We have been too comfortable and too indulgent," cried Lloyd George, "many, perhaps, too selfish." Thus is selfishness made the sin and the morality of altruism made explicit as a call to mass sacrifice -- that collective bloodshed 'atoning' in atavistic fashion for the pre-war sin in having produced and enjoyed what was described as “the last afterglow of the most radiant cultural atmosphere in human history” -- or as Austrian author Stefan Zweig called it “individual freedom at its zenith, after [which] I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years.” [5, 6] That was what mass slaughter had bought. By the ethic of altruism, the soldier's sacrifice was a "'blood tax' which everyone else had to measure themselves against." [7]

We are still being asked to, every April 25.

What is it then we should least forget, every year? For these are among the things that I cannot. As Ayn Rand observed, when there is widespread call of sacrifice, there is always someone ready and willing to pick up the sacrifices. Not in military duty necessarily, today, but undoubtedly in calls for duty, for selflessness, for service to a higher cause -- either State, or Climate, or Great Cause -- that Great Cause to be selected for us by Great Leaders. Selfishness, still, the sin to be expunged.

For under a morality of sacrifice, the standard of value is never your own happiness, but that of others. Not your own prosperity, but that of others. Not even your own life, but those of others. (As W.H Auden sarcastically summarises, “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I can’t imagine.” [8])

The result of all this sacrifice amounts to nothing more than an often blood-soaked row of zeroes; or as this excerpt from Galt’s Speech points out: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality…" [9]

Think about it.

In the meantime, and as a much healthier antidote , let’s talk about happiness. Not war. Not sacrifice. But the thing -- and, flowing from freedom, perhaps the only thing -- that is ever worth fighting for. “What else could be more selfishly important?”

NOTES:

1. David Lloyd George, speech at Queen's Hall, September, 1914, quoted in Adrian Gregory's book The Last Great War,  2008, "an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war." (You might also say: of the moral means by which they were exploited.)
2. From the hymn 'O Valiant Heart,' taken from a poem by John Stanhope Arkwright, published in The Supreme Sacrifice, and other Poems in Time of War (1919)
3. The War and Sacrificial Death: A Warning, The Evangelical Alliance, 1918, quoted in Gregory

4. Gregory, 157

5. From Ayn Rand’s introduction to her essay collection The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.
6. From Stefan Zweig’s 1942 autobiography, which is also a biography of the collapse of Europe into barbarism, The World of Yesterday

7. Gregory, 150
8. Auden, Prose, vol. 2, p. 347
9. Rand, Atlas Shrugged
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Q: But what were the ANZACs fighting *for*, Grandad?

Today, all the stories from Anzac Cove seem so inevitable. But what were all those ANZAC troops actually fighting for – and why were they doing it in Turkey, for Galt’s sakes!? 

What on earth were they hoping to achieve over there? 

And why exactly is their sacrifice and botched battle considered part of the “birth” of our two nations?

From the centenary’s Countdown to Anzac Day series here at NOT PC comes this blog’s answer to those questions.

* * * *

Did you know that Australian and New Zealand soldiers embarking in November 1914 on ships towards Britain thought they would be fighting for Britain on the Western Front, not fighting in Turkey to gift Constantinople to Russia --against whom for decades New Zealanders and Australians had been defending their shores and ships? Yet that is the reason they embarked – not to beat the Hun, but to save the Czar and to gift him a city … 

THE MYTHOLOGY OF ANZAC is that the battle at the Dardanelles gave birth to three nations. If that’s true, it is an odd birth, fathered out of failure by way of disaster. For modern Turkey, the mythology helps hide a genocide. For Australia and NZ, it gives us a birth date more unmired by difficult questions of colonialism than an earlier birth-date would bring.

Still, it’s mostly a modern invention, this mythology, and if there’s any truth to it at all then it applies more in Australia than it does in New Zealand, where they have made “the anniversary of a botched battle into virtually the country’s national day.”[1]

It’s truly, truly odd. In what way did a butchered battle give birth to these two nations so far away from the carnage, or from any genuine understanding of what the total waste of human life was for?

It’s true that for the first time, outside the few sports played internationally, NZers and Australians could compare themselves on a world stage and begin to identify (if they could) the sorts of national differences that distinguish one group of people from another. But NZers’ similarities with Britons were still greater than any real differences, and both at war’s beginning and end NZers still identified themselves thereat: Indeed, NZ’s war began with Prime Minister Massey’s abject declaration to parliament “that, if necessity unfortunately arose, New Zealand was prepared to send her utmost quota of help in support of the Empire,”[2] and at war’s end held even tighter to Britain than at war’s start, remaining for decades (especially by contrast with Australia) “a particularly Anglophile part of the Commonwealth.”[3]

So it’s not really clear why this legend even arises, in NZ at any rate.

Even in Australia, the legend has only a short heritage. The publicity poster for Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, released in 1981, tells a tale of the legend’s birth: “’From a place you have never heard of … comes a story you’ll never forget.”  Take careful note of that phrase “a place you have never heard of” – it describes where the ‘legend’ sat just three-and-one-half decades ago: nowehere. “[It says] a lot about where the Anzac saga had been,” says an Australian author who’s examined this frequently overlooked point, “and equally where it would be going.”[4]

ODDLY ENOUGH, FOR A BATTLE that supposedly gave birth to two nominally independent nations it was one hatched, devised, planned and bungled entirely without the input of either -- and the participation of the Australian and NZ Army Corps themselves was entirely accidental.

It couldn’t be more appropriate that the reason these two were chosen for the ill-fated mission was born out of battlefield disaster. "Chewing barbed wire" to little effect on the Western Front, and under political pressure to achieve a breakthrough somewhere (even a place no-one had heard of), the war chiefs found a plan drawn up years before that some of them thought might have legs.

Not Kitchener however. Britain’s wartime icon and then war chief Field Marshall Kitchener had declared that in this campaign Britain could afford neither British troops from the Western Front nor the British navy for escort duties, so when Churchill's plans for a naval breakthrough at the place of legend failed as dismally as naval tacticians had predicted, the fortunate happenstance of colonial troops already en route for the Suez escorted by Japanese warships was seized upon to reinforce a French/British force begrudgingly transferred from Belgium.

The resulting irony (among  many) was that, entirely unknown to anyone when they departed, these ANZAC troops were headed to a place they'd never heard of to deliver a city to a natural foe, escorted there by ships of a navy against whose threat (after Japan's stunning victories in the Russo-Japanese war) Australia and New Zealand had huddled even further beneath Britain's defensive skirts.

Perhaps the final irony in this disaster was that Britain cared nothing for those infant nations’ troops, throwing them away in a campaign of unmitigated disaster whose success, if it had even been possible, would have done nothing to shorten the war, and whose drawn-out failure few wanted to acknowledge.

IT WAS ARGUED BY no less than Lloyd George that knocking the Ottomans out of the war would “knock out Germany’s props” and leave its “soft underbelly” exposed. Nothing, really, could have been further from the truth. The campaign undermined whatever reputation remained of both Royal Navy and British military acumen – and if it were costing thousands of young lives on the flat and easily supplied Western Front “to move General Haig’s drinks cabinet a few yards closer to Berlin,”[5] then it swiftly became clear that in the distant and mountainous terrain between Constantinople and Berlin there lay no shortcut. Nonetheless, 1^st Baron Maurice Hankey, who as Secretary of Britain’s War Council “carried all before him [in cabinet] with his persuasive memorandum of 28 December 1914”[6] proposing British, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian troops “occupy” Constantinople. As if it were simply a matter of the the choosing being the doing.

For his part, Churchill, at this early stage of plans being hatched, favoured the “diversion” of landing troops on an island in the Baltic, for which he received the much-deserved disdain of his cabinet colleagues, but seeing a bandwagon driving past, when shown Hankey’s memo he jumped quickly on board, “commenting that he himself had advocated an attack at the Dardanelles two months earlier...”[7]

Not that failure of an attack was inevitable. Tragically, and

in retrospect, it seems clear that if the Greek army had marched on Constantinople in early 1915, alongside the British navy, the Ottoman capital would have been defenceless.[8]

It wasn’t to be—mostly because no-one saw any strategic advantage to Britain in occupying what is now Istanbul. 

Not until a desperate Russian high command pleaded for “a diversionary attack”[9] to help relieve its beleagured troops were plans finally drawn up – but for a naval-only attack on the Dardanelles: Kitchener refused to make troops available, and First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill boasted they would be unnecessary. But his Royal Navy blundered around there so long to so little effect that even the beleagured Bosche quickly worked out something was afoot in this mountainous underbelly of Europe, and encouraged its new Turkish ally to rapidly reinforce the peninsula to repel whatever it was perifdious Albion was cooking up there.

SO BEGAN THE BLUNDERING, even as the first of many ironies began piling on. Because the very reason Russian troops had been so beleaguered was an Ottoman attack on the Caucasus that had already been swiftly repelled three months before ANZAC troops landed to give them some relief. The attack itself was pointless:

Logically, after crushing the Ottoman invaders that month, the Russians should have told Lord Kitchener that it was no longer necessary for him to launch a diversionary attack on Constantinople in order to relieve it from a Turkish threat that no longer existed. [But this was not how these ‘allies’ operated.]
    Thus began the Dardanelles campaign, which was to so alter the fortunes of Churchill and Kitchener, [Prime Ministers] Asquith and Lloyd George, Britain and the Middle East [10].

And, of course, of Australia and New Zealand, and of the many bold, bright-eyed young men in their respective army corps.

In the end, the attempted occupation was decided upon for several very bad reasons:

• partly because in any bureaucracy once plans are begun they are very hard to stop; and
• partly as an altruistic gift to an “ally” who was the most autocratic in Europe, who had shown no sign of earning British trust.

The price for this unearned sacrifice to the Czar was to be paid for in the blood of those bright-eyed Australian, New Zealand and British young men and their families sent to fight an unwinnable battle on a an unimportant shore.

Such is the code of sacrifice under which the decision was made to go.

EVEN WITHOUT THE NEED for a diversion, however, the gift would have meant everything to the backward, autocratic Russian empire for whom the young Anzacs were asked to give their lives.

As an almost landlocked nation Russia had always been desperate for a warm-water port. For virtually the entire 19^th century, or at least since Napoleon had passed away, Britain had been manoeuvring in the Mediterranean to keep Russia out (this was after why the Light Brigade were famously and self-sacrificially charging the guns in Sebastapol only a few generations before), and in the Middle East to keep Russia away from India.

As long as Russia was held at arm’s length, the two aims were mutually reinforcing. The trouble began when the two aims were crossed in an increasingly muddled foreign policy by an increasingly distracted British Foreign Minister.

Russia’s desperation for a secure warm-water port had always set it on a collision course with the rest of Europe.

From Russia’s point of view it made eminent sense to search for secure warm-water ports but, as Kuropatkin had warned [Czar] Nicholas in 1900, it ran a great risk: ‘However just our attempts to possess the exit to the Black Sea, to acquire an outlet to the Indian Ocean, and to obtain an outlet to the Pacific, these missions touch so deeply on the interests of almost the entire world that in pursuit of them we must be prepared for a struggle with a coalition of Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, China, and Japan.’ Of all Russia’s potential enemies, Britain, with its worldwide empire, seemed to be the most immediately threatening.[11]

During the peace of the 19^th century, Russia’s Black Sea ports eventually came into their own commercially. “As Russia became a major exporter, especially in food, the passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles – known collectively at the time as ‘the Straits’ – became particularly vital; 37 per cent of all its exports and 75 per cent of its crucial grain exports were flowing past Constantinople by 1914.”[12]

But as its treaty with France made clear enough, it wanted these ports for military use as well – extracting France’s agreement that Russian interests should predominate at the east end of the Mediterranean.

Also clear enough from many centuries of Russian-Ottoman enmity was that the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, past which Russian grain, war materiel and battleships must pass, was under threat.

This should, of course, have put Russian plans on a direct and very visible collision course with British interests in Egypt, Malta and the Suez Canal that helped form Britain’s naval strategy of keeping The Med as “a British lake,” and the Ottoman Empire as, if not a friend, then at least a fairly benign neighbour. It should have put it on a collision course, but it didn’t, because Britain also wanted Russian kept away from India.

You see how I said things would get muddled?

Because the new 1905 Liberal government and its new Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, saw nothing in this conflict of interests to slow them down.

One of Grey’s first meetings after he took office in December 1905 was with Benckendorff to assure the Russian ambassador that he wanted an agreement with Russia. In May 1906 Sir Arthur Nicolson arrived as British ambassador in St Petersburg with authority from the Cabinet to sort out with Izvolsky the three main irritants in the relationship: Tibet, Persia and Afghanistan. The locals were not, of course, consulted while their fate was decided thousands of miles away. The negotiations were long and tedious as might be expected between two parties, ‘each of which thought the other was a liar and a thief.’[13]

The agreement worked moderately well in fending off Russian aggression on the North-West Frontier.

It worked appallingly in Europe, where it helped to set off the First World War.

The new British cosiness with Russia was seen by Germany (when combined with the coterminous Russian treaties with France) as a threat to its very existence – Russia, France and Britain forming an “iron ring” it was said that encircled and would eventually strangle them. (A man like Bismarck might perhaps have negotiated away this perceived threat; but Germany had no Bismarcks left, only a child-like Kaiser prone to tantrums. And a man like Gladstone may have recognised how the friendships would be seen by Germany, but Britain had no Gladstones left, just a Foreign Minister utterly out of his depth in a cabinet confused about Britain’s place in this new world).

It turned out this unlikely friendship between erstwhile rivals was the final link in the powder trail leading from Russia’s agreement to back Serbia that was finally ignited by “The Guns of August,” 1914.

It was not to be the only foreign-policy bungle from Sir Edward Grey, whose eleven-year tenure in the job offers few chances to transfer blame to others. It was the longest continuous tenure of any person in that office, and it could not have fallen to a less integrated thinker at a time when the world could not have been more complicated.

His own muddling, and that of his Prime Minister, made all the complications worse.

Because once war began (and you can read elsewhere here about the war’s beginnings) we can draw a straight line from the muddling to the murder on those beaches at the Dardanelles.

ONCE THE PLEADED-FOR “diversionary attack” had begun by naval means, even as the reasons for the pro-Russian diversion had disappeared (Russian troops no longer being so immediately beleagured), Russia quickly saw its chance for someone else to shed blood on their behalf anyway.

Simply assuming the inevitable success of what had begun as an ill-thought-out diversionary attack on his behalf, in March 1915 Czar Nicholas II already began issuing demands of his new Allies, insisting that at the operation’s end “the Allies turn over Constantinople and the Straits—and all adjacent territories—to Russia.” The response illuminate’s the intellectual and moral rot at the heart of the wartime Asquith Administration.

[British Foreign Minister] Grey and [his Prime Minister] Asquith, the leaders of the Liberal administration, were ... disposed to make the concession that Britain’s wartime ally required…
    At the outset of the Ottoman war, the Prime Minister wrote [to his young mistress Venetia Stanley] that ‘Few things wd. give me greater pleasure than to see … Constantinople either become Russian (which I think is its proper destiny) or if that is impossible neutralised…’
    In March 1915, when the issue arose, he wrote of Constantinople and the Straits that ‘It has become quite clear that Russia means to incorporate them in her own Empire,’ and added that ‘Personally I have always been & am in favour of Russia’s claim…’
    Unbeknown to the rest of the Cabinet [and of course to the Anzac troops who were eventually called upon to carry out his strategy], Sir Edward Grey had already committed the country [i.e., Britain and its Commenwealth] to eventual Russian control of Constantinople, having made promises along these lines to the Russian government [as long ago as] 1908[!]. His view [not supported by his advisers, nor by anything in Russian history before or since] was that if Russia’s legitimate [sic] aspirations were satisfied at the Straits, she would not press claims in Persia, eastern Europe, or elsewhere.[14]

If the British response to the illegimate demand of the Russian Czar could be truthfully characterised as anything, it would be a catastrophic combination of altruism and wishful thinking.

So less than ten years after Asquith’s musings had developed and Grey’s muddled Russian strategy had taken effect, and with Winston’s ships firing ineffectually and the battlefield now fully reinforced, Australian and NZ forces landed in the Dardanelles to carry out their ill-starred mission. The real reason for the mission, not that they knew it: not to open a route to Berlin, which was always impossible, but to take Constantinople for Russia.

TO BE FAIR TO Churchill, who shoulders a large part of history’s blame for the campaign’s failure, he was initially wary at the idea of a naval-only operation, but he and the Asquith Cabinet were swiftly persuaded by the commander of the British naval squadron off the Dardanelles, Admiral Sackville Carden, who cabled back answering Churchill’s early question on the possibility of naval interventions there that “while the Dardanelles could not be ‘rushed’—in other words, could not be seized by a single attack—“they might be forced by extended operations with a larger number of ships.”[15] Churchill jumped on board with a decision he himself had finessed, and the decision was just as swiftly made.[16]

Yet even as Admiralty opinion began turning against the idea of a purely naval venture, and as British naval warships began bombarding the Turkish coast to little effect apart from alerting the Central Poweres of their interest in the area, Kitchener suddenly declared that troops would be used after all: primarily Australian and New Zealand troops who had just arrived in Egypt ready for re-embarkation to Western Europe, who would instead, in Kitchener’s plan, go in “once the navy’s ships had won the battle of the straits.”[17]

That battle was never won. The troops however were sent in anyway.

Turkish guns and Turkish mines in the Straits were sufficient to see off Churchill’s “extended operations.” The eight weeks of failed naval bombardment, beginning February 19, 1915, gave the Turks notice of the attack and time to marshal their defences at the Narrows—as did the glowing British newspaper accounts of the expedition’s assembly and embarkation in Egypt, the lights and the military bands of the vast fleet as it headed noisily through the Aegean, and the reports of parliamentary debates about the coming combined operation. 

Who needs surprise when sending in colonial troops to fight a third-world opponent, they all thought. Turkish expert Sir Mark Sykes had already warned Churchill in late February that “though [Turkish troops] could be routed by a surprise attack, ‘Turks always grow formidable if given time to think.’”[18] And unlike the third-world troops British troops had slaughtered so easily in the Sudan, these Turks had machine guns. And these guns were marshalled behind defences expertly laid out by one military genius, the German Liman Von Sanders, and directed by the man for whom the battle would launch the legend known as Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey – the only modern country that was actually born out of the battle.[19]

IF YOU THINK THINGS were already muddled enough then hang on to your hats! On 15 March, before either Australian or New Zealand troops had even entered their ships for the operation, fearful Turkish negotiators met with British officials in European Turkey to discuss leaving the war they had never sought in return for the large, but not wounding, sum of four million pounds. This would have delivered everything British strategists had said they wanted to achieve by force of arms, delivered to them not by the blood of thousands but by money that would have been spent anyway on the cost of war. “The negotiations failed because the British government felt unable to give assurances that the Ottoman Empire could retain Constantinople—so deeply were the British now committed to satisfying Russian ambitions.”[20]

If it might be doubted why Australian and New Zealand soldiers were ordered to fight and die on Turkish beaches one month later, the reason by now could not be any clearer: Anzac troops were there to make real the single and long-held ambition against which Britain had fought for centuries.

This was a sacrifice with neither selfish purpose nor realistic prospect of success.

YET IF ATTACKING A place that pre-war British military studies had long ago concluded was “too risky to be undertaken”[21] wasn’t already made difficult enough, the commander of the land operation and his manner of appointment made things only more so.

Sir Ian Hamilton was appointed peremptorily on March 12, barely one month before the landings. Telling the disinterested War Minister “he knew nothing about Turkey,” he was briefed by the War Office “by showing him a map and a plan of attack borrowed from the Greek General Staff.” Despite the overwhelming strategic importance placed on the attack, and the lives of countless men and women being put in harm’s way, “the War Office had not even taken the time or trouble to work out their own [plan]." So not yet a month into his new appointment, General Hamilton was sent out to win the war "with an inaccurate and out-of-date map and very little else to guide him.”[22]

On arrival in the theatre he promptly called off the naval operation, delayed the landings for a further three weeks, and agreed to attack only the European side of the straits. Whereupon, when the landings did finally happen – and for the Australian and NZ forces at Ari Burnu they were at the wrong beach – Hamilton decided at the first sign of opposition to dig in rather than move ahead to take up the battlefields’ dominating positions, dooming the expedition to a drawn-out replay of the very Western Front stalemate the campaign had been intended to circumnavigate.

If you feel like resurrecting the phrase “lions led by donkeys,” now might be about the right time.

OF THE BATTLES THEMSELVES AT the Dardanelles, much more is known and very little more needs to be said about the shambles that ensued. You will no doubt hear and re-hear many of these stories today and tomorrow, and of the heroism in the face of this hell.

Except perhaps that with Turks dug in on the heights to fire down on Anzac troops entrenched on beaches below, and with no obvious hope for any success in the campaign and the only obvious decision being evacuation, we might wonder why the soldiers were condemned to die there for months on those hills and these beach-heads?

The answer is that, against limp Cabinet opposition, Churchill and Kitchener simply refused all requests to withdraw –“Churchill because he was never willing to accept defeat, and Kitchener because he believed it would be a disaster for a British[-led] army to be seen to be defeated by a Middle Eastern one.”[23] Especially after the recent and very public stain of near-defeat by impoverished Boer farmers was still so raw.

So the bloody, murderous shambles on the beaches continued on until January, 1916 -- with no hope of success -- with nothing to be gained from victory-- and with the death and destruction in the end of 400,000 young lives.

What must those men have thought if they read Churchill’s speech to his Dundee constituency in June that “the Allies were only “a few miles from victory” at the Dardanelles, “a victory such as the war had not yet seen.”[24] What might the friends and family of those 400,000 said to Mr Churchill had they been there to hear it?

The "victory" never would be seen. It never could have been seen. 

Instead, it all turned to omnishambles. The only thing in the end about which anyone had anything about which to boast was a successful and well-executed withdrawal.

It was a bloody mess that achieved nothing, that could achieve nothing, that was purchased at the price of a wholesale sacrifice of young lives that could and would have meant something very great indeed. 

It was a total, complete and unmitigated disaster -- but for you at least, dear reader, some reason for the whole, sordid shambles might now be somewhat clearer, if not any easier to swallow.

The reason however for commemorating the shambles as the botched “birth” in some way of our nation is very much less so.

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This post was part of NOT PC’s centenary series #CountdownToAnzacDay. Other posts in the series:

• Countdown to Anzac Day
• Q: But what were the ANZACs fighting *for*?
• Q: So why were Britain and NZ at war with Turkey at all?
• Q: So why was WWI so calamitous?
• Q: Who started the whole double-damned wholesale bloody mess?
• The Horsemen of non-apocalypse
• War and Peace

NOTES:

[1] From David Reynolds’s The Long Shadow: The Great War & the Twentieth Century, p. 376, who in his chapter 10 offers perhaps the best explanation for the birth of the mythology.[2] Quoted in Douglas Newton’s Hell-Bent: Australia's leap into the Great War. Kindle edition, location 1680[3] From David Reynolds’s The Long Shadow: The Great War & the Twentieth Century, p. 376[4] Ibid, p. 375[5] A quip pilfered from Black Adder Goes Forth.[6] From David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 127[7] Ibid, p. 127[8] Ibid, p. 128[9] A plea emulated throughout the next war by Stalin, whose constant refrain in the meetings of the “Big Three” was a demand that Roosevelt and Churchill implement “a second front” to relieve the beleaguered Soviets[10] From David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 129[11] From Margaret MacMillan’s book The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War, Kindle edition, location 3496[12] Ibid, location 3492[13] Ibid, location 3733[14] From David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 138
[15] “As Carden subsequently emphasized in his evidence to the Dardanelles commission, the operative word was ‘might’.” From Robert Rhodes James’sChurchill: A Study in Failure, 19900-1939, p. 66
[16] This may be being more than fair. Robert Rhodes James is one among many in arguing that Churchill cynically manipulated the callow Carden into his opinion, which Churchill himself had maintained without support since at least August 1914. Carden’s undistinguished prior experience was as supervisor of the Malta dockyard, “and one of the [many] puzzles of the operation is why Carden was not replaced when the importance of the naval attack was recognised.” [Rhodes James, p. 65 n. 8] Perhaps because he was so easily manipulated? In any case, at the Dardanelles Commission set up to examine the disaster,  it was seen that authorities cited by Churchill to Carden  as being in total agreement with his opinion were not, and in his own evidence to the Commission,“Churchill agreed that his telegram was framed to provide a favourable answer.” [Dardanelles Commission: Evidence, Q.1264][17] From David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 133[18] From Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Vol. 3, p. 343[19] In that sense, Gallipoli represented the birth of three nations, not just two. No wonder the bond at contemporary commemorations at the battlefield is so deep.[20] From David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 151[21] From Martin Gilbert’s Winston S. Churchill: Vol. 3, p. 358[22] From David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, p. 156[23] Ibid, p. 158[24] From Richard Toye’s Churchill’s Empire, p. 133.

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