Category Archives: Blog

St Lucia – A Brief History

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St Lucia is a beautiful Caribbean island nation in the Lesser Antilles named by French colonizers after Lucy of Syracuse. Today the island is a renowned holiday destination with 5 star resorts and luxury property attracting visitors year round, many of which do not stop to take in its rich history.

The island’s first known inhabitants were the Arawak and Carib people for whom the entire Caribbean region was named. St Lucia was the object of European power struggles, a location of the darkest practices of slavery, and the home of brave freedom fighters. Remnants of the area’s rich history are still found in many parts of the economically thriving island today.

St Lucia: Spoil of War

The first permanent European settlers were the French who signed a treaty with the native Caribbeans in 1660. From 1660 until 1814, the island was part of a tug of war for power between the French and British. A visit to Fort Charlotte in Morne Fortune uncovers ruins of 18th century battlements used by the French to defend “their property” against the British. Pigeon Island an islet now belonging to St Lucia was the site of a British installation used to defend “its new territory” from the French Navy stationed in Martinique. The island was even used by the U.S. during World War II, and old bunkers are uniquely preserved at Pigeon Island National Park. Many of the French and British historic military buildings have been restored and repurposed for other functions. The two colonial powers each left remnants of their occupation in St Lucia that are still visible today.

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Nguyen Van Thieu – a summary

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Nguyen Van Thieu, president of South Vietnam from 1965–75, presided over two critical periods in the decline of South Vietnam, serving as president whilst the US withdrew from the country in 1973 and remaining in power until shortly before the final collapse of the country in April 1975.

Nguyen Van Thieu’s first major involvement in the country’s political fortunes came as a supporter of Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist movement, rising to the position of District commander. However, this dalliance with the VietMinh barely lasted a year, with an apparent realisation that the nationalist movement he had joined was, in fact, a front for communist insurgents.

After studying at various military academies, he fought with the French against the Vietminh until the end of the war in 1954. He was promoted to the rank of corps commander in the South Vietnamese Army, and spent time training in the USA. He was amongst the group of army officers who carried out the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president, in 1963, and then maintained his position within the army leadership during a succession of coups 1964-5.

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‘Nasty, brutish, and short’: the dangerous world of Thomas Hobbes

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There are many phrases which have remained in popular use but whose original context, and sometimes author, has been forgotten. A good example is the stark depiction of life being “nasty, brutish and short”. Only recently this phrase was evoked to describe the likely career path of modern football managers. The man who coined it was correctly identified as the 17th century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but what was the historical context in which it was made? It was the English Civil War. Simon Court explains.

Thomas HobbesThomas Hobbes was writing during the turbulent years of the 1640s and early 1650s which saw a bloody military conflict between the Royalist supporters of King Charles I and his Parliamentarian opponents; the defeat of the King and his trial and execution, and the imposition of a Commonwealth in which the monarchy and the House of Lords was abolished. Whilst not directly engaged in this political upheaval Hobbes was horrified by it, and he sought to show in his political theory how the catastrophe of the civil war could have been avoided, and how future conflicts could be averted.

A ‘state of nature’

Hobbes had been developing his political thought throughout the 1640s but it received its most famous (indeed notorious) articulation in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, in his work Leviathan. Hobbes’ central idea is wonderfully simple. He contemplates what life would be like for people if they were not organised under a sovereign political power. He looks at them in this ‘state of nature’ and sees that they are driven by a common passion: a desire to be superior to others for the dual purpose of self-gratification and self-protection. This is of course impossible to achieve: all men cannot dominate each other. So they find themselves in perpetual conflict with a restless anxiety about the future. It is a bleak world where there is:

“continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

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Descartes – Philosophy In An Hour

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By the end of the sixteenth century, philosophy had stopped. It was Descartes who started it up again.

Philosophy had begun for the first time in the sixth century B.C. in ancient Greece. Two centuries later it entered a golden era with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then, for nearly two thousand years, nothing happened. At least, nothing original happened.

Descartes IAHIntellectual conjuring trick

Nonetheless several distinguished philosophers appeared during this period. The third-century Alexandrian Plotinus refined Plato’s philosophy, in the process creating Neoplatonism. St. Augustine of Hippo then refined Neoplatonism to the point where it was acceptable to Christian theology. The Islamic scholar Averroës refined parts of Aristotle’s philosophy, and Thomas Aquinas in turn rendered these acceptable to Christian theology. All four of these disparate figures advanced the course of philosophy, but not one of them produced an entirely new philosophy of his own. Their work was essentially exegesis, commentary, and elaboration of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. In this way these two pagan philosophers (and their pagan philosophies) became pillars of the Christian church. This intellectual conjuring trick was the main foundation of Scholasticism, the name given to philosophical activity during the Middle Ages. Scholasticism was philosophy of the church and prided itself on its lack of originality. New philosophical ideas resulted only in heresy, the Inquisition, and burning at the stake. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle gradually became buried beneath layers of religiously correct Christian commentary, and philosophy dried up.

By the mid-fifteenth century this moribund stage had been reached in almost all fields of intellectual endeavor. The church reigned supreme throughout the medieval world. But already the first cracks were beginning to appear in this vast edifice of intellectual certainty. Ironically the main source of these cracks was the same classical world that had produced Plato and Aristotle. Much learning that had been lost or forgotten during the Dark Ages now began coming to light, inspiring a renaissance (or rebirth) of human knowledge.

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Cardinal Mindszenty – a summary

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Hungarian cardinal, Joseph Mindszenty, came to symbolise the church’s opposition to tyranny and totalitarianism.

Born Joseph Pehm on 29 March 1892 in the Hungarian village of Csehi-Mindszent (the name which, in 1941, Pehm took), Mindszenty was ordained a priest in 1915 at the age of 23. He spoke out against Hungary’s short-lived Soviet Republic and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned until its collapse in July 1919.

In March 1944, during the Second World War, he was consecrated as a bishop but later the same year was again imprisoned, this time by the Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross government, for protesting against Hungary’s treatment and oppression of its Jewish population.

I stand for God

Following the war, he was appointed Primate of Hungary and Archbishop of Esztergom, and in 1946 was made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII. But by now, the Hungarian communist party was looking to take over power, intimidating and silencing all opposition.

Mindszenty opposed the Hungarian communist regime of Matyas Rakosi and was known for his vocal criticism. The cardinal toured the country, urging people to resist the government’s plan to nationalise the church’s land and property and Hungary’s 4,813 Catholic schools. In a letter published written in November 1948 and broadcast on the Voice of America radio station, the cardinal said, ‘I stand for God, for the Church and for Hungary. . . . Compared with the sufferings of my people, my own fate is of no importance. I do not accuse my accusers. …I pray for those who, in the words of Our Lord, ‘know not what they do.’ I forgive them from the bottom of my heart.’

On 26 December 1948, Mindszenty was arrested. Stripped naked or dressed as a clown, Mindszenty was tortured, methods that included sleep deprivation, beatings, intense and incessant noise, and forced fed mind-altering drugs. Finally, after over forty days and nights of continuous torture, the cardinal signed his confession.

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Mangal Pandey – a summary

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As schoolchildren in Britain, we’ve always used the term the ‘Indian Mutiny’ to describe the momentous and violent events of 1857 in India. But the ‘First War of Independence’ or the ‘First Nationalist Uprising’ is perhaps a more realistic name. The events that led to the uprising stemmed from decades of grievances and unrest but it was something quite mundane that sparked the rebellion and it was a single man, Mangal Pandey, that fired the first shots.

The sepoys had been issued with a new Enfield rifle. In order to use the rifle, the soldier had to bite off the end of a lubricated cartridge before inserting the powder into the weapon. The problem was that the grease used to seal the cartridge was made from animal fat – both cow, a sacred beast to Hindus, and pork, an insult to the Muslim soldiers.

The East India Company, the monolithic, monopolising commercial company that conducted trade in India and had become the de facto rulers of India acting on behalf of the British government, made amends by substituting the forbidden fats with that of sheep or beeswax. Too late. The sepoys saw it as a deliberate ploy to undermine their respective religions and to convert them, through this perfidious route, to Christianity. The fact this was not the case did nothing to squash the rumour.

The first symptom of unrest came in January 1857, when the recently-opened telegraph office in Barrackpore (now Barrackpur, about 15 miles from Kolkata, or Calcutta) was burned down as a protest against the march of Westernization.

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William Westmoreland – a summary

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Born 26 March 1914, near Spartanburg, South Carolina, William Westmoreland went on to fight in most of America’s major areas of conflict during World War Two and the Cold War, and came to prominence during the Vietnam War. He served as Superintendent at West Point, and enjoyed the patronage of two US Presidents. However, by the end of 1968 his reputation was in tatters, and his stock had declined such that the aspiring nominee for the Republican party’s presidential candidate in 1980 refused to sit next to him on a flight for fear that he be tarnished by association with the disgraced former general.

William Westmoreland As commander of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), Westmoreland strongly believed in the policy of attrition, refusing to accept that a small nation such as North Vietnam could absorb huge losses. This belief led him to misinterpret the critical lessons of the war, none more so than the unsuitability of conventional big unit tactics to the jungles of Vietnam. Whilst he rightly pointed to the horrendous casualty figures on the communist side, this ignored the growing casualty lists, and equipment losses on the US side.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 turned out to be the beginning of the end of his military career in Vietnam. After announcing the light at the end of the tunnel in a press conference at the end of 1967, his claims of impending success were shown to be hollow as the North Vietnamese launched their largest campaign of the conflict thus far. Even as Westmoreland emphasized the success of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and US forces in crushing the offensive, images of Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas in the grounds of the US embassy, and holding out in the South Vietnamese city of Hue only served to undermine his credibility still further.

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The Sharpeville Massacre – a summary

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The Sharpeville Massacre of 21 March 1960, which left 69 unarmed black South Africans dead, and more than 180 injured, drew the world’s attention to the evil of the apartheid system practiced within South Africa.

Pass Laws

The protest at Sharpeville, a black township about forty miles south of Johannesburg, on 21 March 1960 was part of a campaign against the so-called Pass Laws. The law required South Africa’s black population to carry around at all times an identity book which contained pertinent information about themselves, such as name, address, employer details and even their tax code. Those caught without the books were liable to immediate arrest.

The demonstrations against the Pass Laws were organised and led by the PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress), an off-shoot of the ANC (African National Congress). The march on Sharpeville was to be the first in a series of non-violent actions due to take place over a five-day period. Participants on the march were to present themselves at the police station at Sharpeville without their pass books and demand to be arrested. If enough blacks were arrested and kept from going to work, the country’s economy would collapse. That, at least, was the theory according to Robert Sobukwe, leader of PAC.

Sobukwe fully informed the police beforehand of the Sharpeville demonstration, emphasising the non-violent intention of the marchers.

Down with the passes

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Vasily Stalin – a summary

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On 21 March 1921, Joseph Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, gave birth to Yasily Stalin, or Vasily Dzhugashvili. Their second child, Svetlana, was born five years later. On 9 November 1932, Nadezhda, suffering from depression, shot herself. Naturally, her death affected both children who, from then on, were brought up by a succession of nannies and security guards but it seemed to particularly disturb the 11-year-old Vasily.

Vasily StalinSpoilt boy

At the age of 17, Vasily joined an aviation school, despite only obtaining poor grades. His father’s aides had to ensure his entry. Stalin once described Vasily as a ‘spoilt boy of average abilities, a little savage… and not always truthful,’ and advised his son’s teachers to be stricter with him.

Once enrolled in the school, Vasily used his name to obtain privileges usually reserved for the most senior members. Stalin, on hearing of his son’s abuses, ordered an immediate end to his special treatment.

As a young man, Vasily continually used his name to further his career, to obtain perks and seduce women. It was a trait that his father deplored. Vasily drank to excess and, again exploiting the family name, denounced anyone he disliked or barred his way. Amazingly, he managed to graduate as a pilot. Continually drunk, he would commandeer planes and fly them while inebriated. Vasily was married twice but never managed to curtail his womanising.

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Aristotle – Philosophy In An Hour

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Aristotle was perhaps the first and the greatest of all polymaths. He is known to have written on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry and art, and even the interpretation of dreams. He is said to have transformed every field of knowledge that he touched (apart from mathematics, where Plato and Platonic thought remained supreme). Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic.

Aristotle IAHWhen Aristotle first divided human knowledge into separate categories, this enabled our understanding of the world to develop in a systematic fashion. But in recent centuries our knowledge expanded to the point where it was being seriously hindered by this categorisation. Such systems of thought allowed knowledge to develop only along certain predetermined paths, many of which were in danger of petering out. A radically different approach was needed. The result is the modern world of science.

Aristotelian thought

The fact that it took us over twenty centuries to discover these limitations in Aristotle’s thought only demonstrates his unparalleled originality. Yet even the demise of Aristotelian thought has given rise to many fascinating philosophical questions. How many more of these limitations have we yet to discover? How dangerous are these flaws in our way of thinking? And exactly what are they preventing us from learning?

On a promontory above the village of Stagira, in northern Greece, stands a rather uninspired modern statue of Aristotle. Its expressionless face gazes out over the lumpy wooded hills toward the distant blue Aegean. Aristotle’s pristine white marble form, almost luminescent in the brilliant sunlight, wears a décolleté toga and sandals, bearing a slightly chipped scroll in its left hand. (This damage is said to be the work of a souvenir-hunting Argentinean philosophy professor.) Carved into the plinth in Greek are the words ‘Aristotle the Stagirite’.

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