RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘I have not a shadow of a doubt that William Shakespeare would have voted to remain,’ writes Chris Bryant, in a piece of sustained click-bait.

The Euro-fanatical Labour MP was aiming to needle, and he succeeded magnificently. As the poet himself said, ‘he did provoke me with language that would make me spurn the sea, if it could so roar to me.’

In support of his claim that Shakespeare was a Europhile avant la lettre, Chris cites that ‘late, lumbering play Cymbeline’, which ends when ‘the English King agrees to pay tribute to the Roman Emperor’. Actually, Cymbeline is one of the rare Shakespeare plays which is not about England but about Britain – which, of course, did not exist as a political entity in the author’s time. None the less, Shakespeare has his ancient Britons anticipate modern attitudes with uncanny aptness:

Britain is
A world by itself; and we will nothing pay
For wearing our own noses.

Chris then trolls us with a few more misreadings (the Volscians weren’t Coriolanus’s ‘own people’, Chris: that’s rather the point) before, with vast chutzpah, trying to conscript John of Gaunt’s dying speech to his cause, arguing that it ‘ends with the words “this England … is now leased out … like to a tenement or pelting farm”.’

Hmm. Let’s recall the full version, bearing in mind that our country’s present subordination before the EU is the result of the inky blots of the Treaty of Rome:

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Eerily apposite, no? Was Shakespeare, then, a Eurosceptic? Of course not. If you try to claim him for any contemporary cause, you diminish rather than elevating that cause. Shakespeare will always argue both sides of a case better than you can. It’s part of his inexhaustible fecundity, his limitless ambiguity, what Keats called his ‘negative capability’.

The truly magical quality of Shakespeare’s plays is that, as Harold Bloom once put it, whatever experiences we bring to them, they illuminate our experiences more than our experiences illuminate the plays. Whenever we read his words, they seem narrowly aimed at our circumstances. The same passage can speak to us in opposite ways at different moments in our lives. How this sorcery works I shall probably never understand; but, if you’re familiar with the canon, you’ll know what I mean.

Immune to the plagues of hack academics that annually erupt to deplore what they insist is Anzac Day’s celebration of militarism, racism, sexism, you-name-it-ism, there towers the figure of the man who, more than any other general, brought the slaughter to an end.
In a paper written in the wake of the 2009 Victorian bushfire disaster, I drew a pointed analogy. The failed and failing bushfire policies and management strategies in Australia these days have a parallel with the disastrous military strategies adopted by the generals in the early years of the First World War. Both were designed in such a way that they must invariably fail, both ignored the lessons of history, and both resulted in terrible and unnecessary losses of lives.

In my paper I also drew attention to the role played by the Australian General Sir John Monash, who engineered the breakthrough on the Western Front in the final year of the war. Monash conceived and implemented a winning strategy. I called for a new Monash to lead a renaissance in modern Australian bushfire management. Since then I have been asked several times to explain World War One strategies and Monash’s role. I had taken it for granted that most people understood all this. The questions have come especially from Americans, who generally lack the intense interest in WW1 history felt by Australians — especially Australians of about my generation, most of whom had a grandfather or uncle who fought and died at the Dardanelles, or in Flanders.

So, a potted history for those who came in late. The war on the Western Front (that is, western Europe) fell roughly into three phases. The first was brief, taking only a few weeks in August and September of 1914, as the German army swept through Belgium and into France, taking all before it. The third phase was also brief, lasting only from about August to November of 1918, when the allied armies broke through and began the rout which led to the war’s end. In the long years of the in-between phase, the British, French and Germans dug in and confronted each other across a narrow no-man’s land over a ‘front’, stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland. This phase was characterised by a series of largely static and horrible battles, with the British and French flinging themselves repeatedly at the German defences. The position of the frontline scarcely changed for three years. Millions died. The Generals on the Allied side knew only one strategy: headlong attack by infantry, following an intense artillery bombardment of the German frontline trenches.

I have always been proud that it was an Australian who engineered a new strategy, and Australian troops who largely provided the strike force to carry it through.

Australians had started arriving at the Western Front[1] in late 1915, following the withdrawal from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Although the Australians had their own field commanders, they reported to British Generals and to the British Commander in Chief Field Marshal Douglas Haig. This highly unpopular arrangement was the result of some political argy-bargy between the British and Australian governments.[2] It meant that in 1916 and 1917, Australian troops were forced to follow a disastrous strategy, i.e., attack at all costs against well-defended positions and hardened German troops with expertise in the use of enfilading machine gun fire. Consequently, Australian infantry suffered shocking losses on the killing fields at Passchendael, Fromelle, Pozieres, Villers-Bretonneux and Messine Ridge[3].

The climate deal negotiated in Paris and signed in New York Friday is not a treaty. It is not enforceable against the U.S. or anybody else. It waves vaguely at the idea of a $100 billion adjustment fund for poorer countries, to be filled in later by somebody else, maybe.

Like all such international agreements, it’s a giant PR exercise designed to put a global imprimatur on what domestic politicians want to do anyway. In China and India, that’s grow their energy output any way they can. In President Obama’s case, it’s continue to dish out green mandates and subsidies that please his entourage.

Economist Bruce Yandle coined the term bootleggers and Baptists for political coalitions of true believers and their more self-interested fellow travelers. The climate movement is the ultimate example.

Having ginned up a climate “crisis” in the first place, it’s almost as if the movement has ginned up a fake victory to keep the game going. This week’s signing was preceded by an outpouring of fishy studies in the press about how renewable energy is on the verge of solving the problem.

The most paradoxical claim, regularly aired in the New York Times, is that the fate of the planet depends on how you vote in the U.S. presidential race because solar power is falling rapidly in cost and is now competitive with fossil fuels.

Well, then it doesn’t matter how you vote. Cheaper solar energy will displace fossil energy for purely economic reasons.

The fragment of truth here is that the cost of solar collectors has come down thanks to Chinese production, but this represents a small fraction of the actual cost of integrating solar into the power system.

Solar is free; the sun does not send us a bill. But solar is only competitive to the extent that fossil-fuel plants remain on hand to provide backup power when the sun is not shining. Unfortunately, fossil-fuel plant economics deteriorate rapidly when plants must stop and start to make up for fluctuating wind and solar. CONTINUE AT SITE