History

1983: The World at the Brink — Taylor Downing

History, Warfare and military history
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Cover of 1983


1983: The World at the Brink
Taylor Downing
391 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

If there ever was a movie that embodied the fears about nuclear war I had living through the early eighties, just old enough to understand the concept, it has to be Threads. I turned nine that year, just old enough to start to comprehend what nuclear war would be like. We had an insane cowboy in the White House who talked about a winneable nuclear war and a series of rapidly decomposing, extremely paranoid leaders in the Kremlin. One small mistake and the world would’ve ended. And while I didn’t learn about Threads long after the cold War had ended, I really didn’t need it to have nightmares. Any mention of anything nuclear on the news was enough to set them off. It didn’t help either that pop culture at that point was saturated with nuclear war imagery.

Fortunately, Threads was never broadcast in the Netherlands at that time, or I would’ve never been able to sleep ever again. Learning about it in a BBC retrospective somewhere around the turn of the millennium was traumatising enough already for the nightmares to return. That shot of the mushroom cloud going up over Sheffield with the old lady in the foreground pissing herself. That was the sort of fear and anxiety, that feeling of helplessness I grew up with in the eighties, in a country where you couldn’t pretend that you could have cool adventures fighting mutants afterwards. No, you either be dead or wishing you were. Being a sensitive kid I didn’t need to see nuclear war movies to imagine how horrible it would be. Which is why I won’t be celebrating Threads day by finally watching it.

Threads: Thursday May 26th 08:00

No, I prefer to feed my nightmares through print, like with Nigel Calder’s Nuclear Nightmares which I reread a couple of years ago. As with so many people my age I know, I can’t help but occasionally pick at that scab. Especially as I got older and learned more about the realities behind my nightmares, I can’t help but want to learn more about it, to confirm my fears weren’t unfounded. 1983: The World at the Brink is very good at doing exactly that. It not only confirmed that my childhood nuclear war paranoia was justified, it showed things were so much worse than I could’ve ever imagined back then. 1983 may very well have been the most dangerous year of the entire Cold War.

The way Taylor Downing sets about showing why this is the case is by providing a chronological overview of the year and its crisises, until about two-thirds into the book we hit the ultimate crisis point, the moment civilisation could’ve ended if things had gone even slightly differently. He starts with a short explanation of the context in which these incidents took place. How the detente of the seventies had ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan, gun-ho to take on the Evil Empire, in 1980. That with the death of Brezhnev in 1982, the head of the KGB, Andropov would be made the leader of the USSR,a man made paranoid by the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which he played a role in suppressing. Here there was a leader of the Free West who started talking about a winnable nuclear war opposite a Soviet leader deadly paranoid about attacks on his ‘socialist paradise’. Not a good combination in a time when tensions were already rising due to Afghanistan.

In 1981, while still head of the KGB, Andropov had already launched Operation RYAN, an intelligence programme aimed at determining whether the US and NATO were preparing for a nuclear first strike. By 1983 this operation was intensified as the US was starting to deploy cruise missile and Pershing II nuclear missiles to Europe as part of Reagan’s general re-armament plans. While RYAN was intended as a safety measure, its real effect was to feed Andropov’s paranoia, making him increasingly concerned that the US was planning a first strike. Reagan meanwhile, cheerfully unaware of this, was talking up plans to create a missile defence system against nuclear attacks, making America invulnerable. Regardless of the technical merits of Star Wars, even thinking about such a defence against nuclear attack was threatening the status quo of mutually assured destruction. Peace was being maintained because both sides could destroy the other completely, regardless of who shot first. There was no advantage in starting a nuclear war as long as everybody died in it. But if an increasing technological advance meant the US could defend itself, or could unleash such a devastating first strike that retaliation was impossible, that put the USSR in a dilemma. If the US was preparing a strike, the Soviets should strike immediately before the strike had even launched, or risk being caught off guard. And that was much more ripe for error than if you wait until the missiles have actually launched.

And then, in September 1983, a Korean airliner blundered into Soviet airspace, was mistaken for an American military spy plane and through a series of tragic errors, shut down with all passengers and crew killed. That immediately shut down any tentative prospect of unfreezing the Cold War. It strengthened Reagan’s opinion about the USSR being an evil empire, while it also fed Andropov’s paranoia about the country’s vulnerabilities, that an airliner had been allowed to enter sensitive airspace unchallenged. All this set the stage for Able Archer, a NATO military exercise, which simulated a Soviet invasion of West Germany culminating in a NATO nuclear strike to stop the advance. A so-called command post exercise, in which the various military headquarters were involved but not so much soldiers out in the field, the USSR was convinced it would be cover for a real first strike against it. It had take measures to reduce its vulnerability, by putting its nuclear forces on high alert, by making the preparations for a strike so that if it was necessary it could be done almost immediately. All that was needed was for Andropov to become convinced America was about to strike and give the order to strike first. And the moment that would happen came increasingly close as the NATO exercise grew in intensity.

At this point in the book Downing had thrown me deep into that paranoid mindset; my relief when the crisis passed was palpable, even knowing full well nuclear war hadn’t happened in November 1983. The rest of 1983: The World at the Brink is more cheerful, describing how both leaders walk themselves back from the abyss. How with the deaths of first Andropov and then his successor Chernenko the way was freed up for Gorbachev, a true reformer who managed to build a personal bond with Reagan, who set in motion the events that would lead to the end of the Cold War as well as the Soviet Union. Even more than three decades onwards, it’s still a miracle such a vast and powerful empire could be dissolved mostly peacefully, that we didn’t all die in nuclear shock waves in November 1983.

If you’re my generation, this book then is the confirmation of all the old bad dreams you had back then. If you’re too young to have lived through it yourself, a good look back a period where all this was normal.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd — Peter Verlinden

History, Politics
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Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd
Peter Verlinden
177 pages
published in 1995

Published in 1995 after the Rwandan genocide had just ended, Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd tries to explain the context and history in which it took place. The writer, Peter Verlinden is a Belgian journalist who had been covering events in both Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi for several years before. This is not a book about the genocide itself, which is only briefly touched upon in the last few chapters, but an explainer of what made it possible. With only 177 pages to cover the whole history of Rwanda it’s of necessity more of a sketch than a complete picture. As the title Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd (Hutu and Tutsi: Centuries of Conflict) indicates Verlinden argues that the genocide was only the latest in a long line of conflicts between the two ethnic groups and should be seen as such, not as some inexplicable outburst of violence. The genocide, together with what was happening at the same time in former Yugoslavia was what broke the short lived optimism brought on by the end of the Cold War. The idea that now the civilised world (sic) would be able to intervene in conflicts and resolve them was proven wrong by the inability or unwillingness of the UN to stop the genocide as it was happening.

By focusing on the supposed long standing history of ethnic violence in Rwanda you might read this as an excuse for the failure of Belgium and other interested nations to stop the genocide. We saw that line of thinking trotted out a lot during the early years of the Yugoslav civil wars, the idea that Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks just naturally hate each other which you couldn’t do anything about. I was a bit wary of this myself when I first read this, but on the whole I think Verlinden did a good job explaining the circumstances and history driving the genocide without excusing it. Verlinden lets the facts speak for themselves and it’s up to the reader to draw the conclusions and lament the missed opportunities to stop the genocide.

After setting out what the book is about, Verlinden starts with a short history of pre-colonial Rwandaand its first inhabitants, the Twa. These were forest dwellers until the Hutu appeared, some 200-3000 years ago, who brought agriculture with them. The Tutsi arrived later and were pastoralist herders. To say that the Tutsi conquered Rwanda from the Hutu would be wrong, but over the centuries their power did grow, conquering the various Hutu kingdoms. By the nineteenth century it was Tutsi king who ruled most of Rwanda and a Tutsi elite that shared that power, while the Hutu majority were mostly small farmers. A roughyl feudal society, with the Hutu farmers obliged to service their Tutsi masters in various ways through unpaid labour and taxes in kind. At the same time, there were no hard ethnic borders between Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu could become part of the elite even if that was rare and whether you were either depended as much perhaps on your social status as your ethnicity.

As per usual it was the colonisers that fucked things up. First the Germans, then the Belgians took that existing divide between Tutsi and Hutu and codified it as strict ethnicity. For various bullshit racist reasons the Tutsi were elevated as closest to being white and therefore natural leaders, which meant that they got most of the positions of power in government, church and trade. The Belgians especially favoured the Tutsi at first. It was only post-war, in the fifties that this stopped as new generations of Belgian colonial administrators and church officials started instead to take the impoverished Hutu’s side. Belgium never ruled Rwanda directly, but through the existing Tutsi kings, the same way the Germans had done. By now supporting a new generation of Hutu activists and intellectuals demanding a greater share of power, they of course threatened the monarchy and its power structures. Matters came to a head as Rwanda prepared for independence.

An attack on a Hutu politician led to mass attacks on Tutsi leaders and others. The kingdom collapsed, a republic was declared and hundred thousands of Tutsi fled abroad. In Rwanda itself Hutu took over much of Tutsi power and the republic lasted until 1973 when a coup deposed the government and the second republic was proclaimed. Throughout this there were low level tensions between the two groups and occassional outburst of violence, but the real trouble started in 1990, when Tutsi refugees invaded the country to liberate it. That led to several years of civil war and more mass violence against both Tutsi and Hutu, until a peace treaty was signed in early 1994. Everything seemed to be calming down again until the president was killed in an attack on his plane coming back from the peace conference. That was the point at which the genocide started, as at first the Tutsi rebels and sympathetic Tutsi leaders were targeted but quickly escalated to include all Tutsi or ‘Tutsi looking’ people were attacked, as well as moderate Hutu.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd concludes at this point. At the time of writing Rwanda was still in an uneasy peace, with Tutsi refugees from that first wave of violence at the establishment of the Rwandan Republic returning home after decades, while million others, mostly Hutu had now fled abroad. Many of the Rwandan Tutsi had died in the genocide and their place was taken over by the returnees, who became the new elite. You can see the fires for the next conflict already being stoked while the embers of this one were still glowing, the way Verlinden describes it. In the almost three decades that have been passed since a new genocide fortunately hasn’t happened, but the conflict ia still ongoing, with Hutu refugees in Burundi and the DRC continuing low level guerilla campaigns, while Rwande has intervened in the Congolean civil wars twice as well.

I first read this in 2002 when I got it as an ex-library book and reread it today purely because my eye fell on it. This was a decent primer on the context of the genocide, but these days you might as well read the Wikipedia articles on Rwanda and its history. that of course wasn’t an option in 1995 and barely one in 2002, so I’m grateful to Verlinden for this.

The Riddle of the Labyrinth — Margalit Fox

History, language
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Cover of The Riddle of the Labyrinth


The Riddle of the Labyrinth
Margalit Fox
363 pages, including notes & index
published in 2013

Linear B is one of those ‘mysteries from history” I’d read about in the local library in the early eighties as a child, browsing through the stacks of occult, ancient astronaut and weird history books, listed along with better known examples like Schliemann’s quest for Troy. It’s one of those pieces of history I sort of, kind of knew about, of how tablets in an unknown language were found on Crete, providing evidence for the existence of a literate, “advanced” Bronze Age civilisation hundreds of years before the rise of the Classical Greek civilisations. But I never read much more about it because other subjects like Schliemann’s discovery of Troy looked much more interesting.

in The Riddle of the Labyrinth Margalit Fox sets out to prove me wrong by telling the real story of the decyphering of Linear B and Alice Kober, the largely forgotten woman at the heart of it, as well as of the archaeologist who found the tablets, Arthur J. Evans and the amateur linguist who finally decrypted them, Michael Ventris. In many ways this is a sad story: both Alice Kober and Michael Ventris died young, one dead of cancer, the other in a car accident, with Kober’s role in the decypherment for a long time remaining obscure because of her untimely death, while Ventris’ accident came at a time he was feeling depressed about what to do with the rest of his life… It’s also a detective story, as Fox tells the story of how the three of them each in turn helped the process of decyphering along.

Unlike the story of e.g. Rosalind Franklin — the uncredited woman behind the discovery of DNA, however — what this isn’t is yet another story about how a woman got swindled out of the credit for a major scientific discovery. It’s purely her illness and subsequent death that robbed her of her chance to decypher Linear B herself. Had those not interfered she might have done so years before Ventris had gotten the chance, the latter being careful to acknowledge his debt to her.

Fox starts her story with the discovery by Evans of the strange symbols on a Cretan sealstone given to him by a friend, symbols that he recognised as writing and his determined search to find more of it. Ultimately it led him, through the discovery of more such sealstones in Greek antiquaty shops to Knossos, which had been discovered in 1878 and where in 1900 Evans found his treasure trove of documents, fired clay tablets, part of the palace’s bookkeeping. More of the same would be found later at other Myceanean palaces.

The problem with Evans though was that he firmly believed Linear B was the alphabet for a hithero unknown Myceanean language, rather than Greek. He spent much of the rest of his life attempting to write the definitive treatment of the Minoean languages found on Crete, hoarding access to the existing Linear B tables to safeguard his project. It was this attitude as much as anything that delayed decyphering the language.

It’s at this point that Alice Kober enters the story, getting gripped by the Linear B bug in the 1930ties. Somewhat of a language geek, she spent her free time studying the language systematically as much as she could, ignoring the wild theorising that had sprung up about it in favour of an analytic approach. Her work was both helped and hindered when she gained the acquaintance of one of Evans disciplines and agreed to help him proofread Evan’s masterwork in return for access to his stack of Linear B tablets. What she discovered was that Linear B represented an inflected language being written in a syllabic script, something that had helped mislead earlier investigators.

Sadly though she died of cancer before she could’ve done more than lay the foundations for a sustained assault on the language and it was left to the architect and amateur linguist Michael Ventris to complete her work. Ventris had gotten intrigued by the language when he’d met Evans as a child and was told it was still undecyphered. that’s when Linear B got in his blood and what kept him working on it throughout his life, not helped by his somewhat diffident personality. At times he completely withdraw from the research, sinking into depression. In fact, Fox speculates that perhaps, once the initial euphoria about finally cracking the language had left him, his inner melancholy overwhelmed him and the car accident he died in might not have been entirely accidental…

Remains the language itself, interesting, but apparantly only used to hold inventories and help the palace bureaucracy; no stories had been written in it, no national epics discovered in it. A bit of a anticlimax perhaps, but the story as told by Fox is intriguing nonetheless.

A History of Future Cities — Daniel Brook

History
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A History of Future Cities
Daniel Brook
457 pages including index
published in 2013

I took the title more literally than it was intended when I took it out of the library, thinking this was some sort of futuristic look at how cities were likely to evolve in the twentyfirst century and beyond. Instead it turned out to be a cultural history and comparison between four cities explicitly founded and developed to provide a vision of the future for their respective countries: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay/Mumbai and Dubai. This looked just as interesting so I kept reading despite the initial disappointment.

The problems with any comparative history book like this is that it’s easy to get lost in the historical narrative of each city and to a certain extent this happened here, as Brook tells the story of each of these four cities in a chronological order, with most chapters focusing on a single city. There is however a certain theme to these stories, one that tells of how modernity is introduced by authoritarian regimes of one stripe or another with the intention to limit its reach to those sectors of society it thinks needs modernising, only to have the city’s influence reach beyond it, for which it is punished, only to ultimately triumph. It’s a very western, neoliberal view of the world, as culminating in the slightly sycophantic look at Dubai.

So, to recap: St. Petersburg was born out of the desire of czar Peter to make Russia into a modern, European military power, deliberately emulating the city of Amsterdam, populated with imported crafts people from Holland and other western European countries. With them and the ideas they brought also came unwelcome imports about things like how serfdom isn’t cool and czarism a drag, which were harshly surpressed but never quite disappeared. As czarist Russia became the stalinist USSR, now Leningrad was downgraded because the totalitarian rulers could never quite trust it.

Meanwhile, Bombay/Mumbai and later Shanghai were cities created out of a coloniser’s need for trade ports, with the British ruling India directly while Shanghai was created into an international free city open to all Europeans but not so much Chinese. In both cases, the cities evolved into a modern, mixed population metropolis of great economic importance, but their respective roles during their countries’ colonial eras meant that those too were shackled by India and China’s new rulers, their values incompatible with those in favour in the rest of the country.

Dubai meanwhile is the post-modern equivalent of these cities, an attempt to emulate them and provide its country with a modern financial and business capital that can maintain its value long after Dubai’s relatively modest oil wealth would run out. The youngest of the four, it’s also the city Brook pays the least attention to.

Brook sees all four cities as sort of precursors for the modern, cosmopolitan, globalised twentyfirst century world, which he largely sees as positive. And to be honest, there is much to be admired in those cities, even a city like Shanghai, which I’d always seen as the quintessential example of western arrogance with regards to China, had its good side. It would actually make for a great model to nick for a space opera setting. A breezy read, as long as you don’t take everything Brook tells you as gospel, this is interesting enough to take a punt on.

The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe — Adriaan Verhulst

History
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The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe


The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe
Adriaan Verhulst
172 pages including bibliography and index
published in 1999

Sometimes I’m unsure myself why I persist in reading a book I’m not getting any enjoyment from nor learn much from, but apparantly my boredom threshold is much higher for non-fiction books. The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe is one of those deceptively slim volumes of history that promise more than they deliver, looked much more interesting on the library shelves than it turned out to be. But is that the fault of the writer or the reader, coming to the subject cold and wanting a more pop historical approach?

Nevertheless, there is the question of the title. It’s a bit overbroad for what turns out to be a historical and archaeological survey of the origins of cities in the region between the rivers Somme and Meuse, not entirely what I’d call “North-West Europe” myself. To be honest however, this is the most urbanised area of North-West Europe in the period Verhulst examines here, from the late Roman period up to the twelfth century. And Verhulst is careful not to draw wider conclusions from the fifteen cities he studied in detail here.

The impulse to write this book, according to the introduction was because the subject hadn’t had a proper treatment in half a century and new research had made much of it outdated. The explanations offered for why this region in particular had such a rapid and early urbanisation when comparable regions elsewhere in Europe were no longer seen as sufficient. This book then is an attempt to tell the history of this urbanisation better. Whereas previously it was thought that long distance trade between the Southern Netherlands and the Mediterranean regions was the impulse that drove these cities to expand, Verhulst argues that instead the reasons should be found in the region’s own particular circumstances.

One of which is of course the location of this region, criss crossed with excellent waterways, though some of which only became navigable in the period discussed, excellently positioned for trade with e.g. England or Northern France. At first this trade flowed through socalled emporia, trading places under protection of a king or located near large abbeys and royal residences. When these disappeared, trade switched to towns and cities, as the merchants no longer were bound to the manors of the church or their lord. The weakness of the manorial economy in this region, also enabled artisans to move out from the manors to the towns.

The South-Western Netherlands had from the end of the great migrations of Germanic peoples been more densely populated than was the norm in Europe, with agriculture being more advanced, again enabling the growth of larger and more cities than could be supported elsewhere. Combine that with a more splintered political environment, with no strong king to curb the independence of the cities and you have a recipe for growth.

The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe was an interesting, if tough read. One of those books that’s not entirely meant as a general history, but more as a synthetic overview, more of use to an actual historian. One of those books you can’t quite recommend, through no fault of its own.