Great passions

Bertrand Russell asserted that throughout his life he was driven by three great passions – the longing for love, the quest for knowledge, and heart-rending pity for the suffering of humanity. He sought the first in order to escape an unendurable loneliness, and because the ecstasy it brought him was so great he claimed he would willingly have sacrificed his life for such bliss. His pursuit of knowledge was equally passionate. He needed to know ‘why the stars shine’ and the power ‘by which numbers hold sway above the flux’. His philosophy always took deep account of science, a necessity that eluded many philosophers during a century in which science transformed the world.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was still new when Russell was born; the unraveling of the structure of DNA was under way by the time he died in 1970. In between, relativity, quantum physics, nuclear fission, and the Big Bang theory had changed forever the way we viewed our universe. Yet in many ways Russell’s philosophical outlook – deeply rooted as it was in both logic and empiricism – remained essentially unchanged. For the most part his manner was both lucid and commonsensical, though he would characterise common sense itself as ‘the metaphysics of savages’, and refused to let the content of his thought (as distinct from its mode of expression) be distorted by its malign influence.

Bertrand Russell was aristocratic enough not to mind appearing ludicrous. Indeed, a number of his more extreme political stances were largely viewed as just this. His character was a potent mix of elitist arrogance, candid honesty, and unbending principle. He could see into the depths of the world (both philosophically and politically), but he was often blind concerning his own inner world. Yet it was this psychological unknowingness which appeared to drive him, giving emotional force to even his most intellectual inquiries as well as his frequent affairs of the heart.

Contradictory and controversial

A passionate approach indeed for a philosopher, this driven quest for love and knowledge. As Russell himself acknowledged, such pursuits led him toward the heavens. Yet it was his third passion, his pity for suffering humanity, that brought him back to earth. The victims of the world’s human-inflicted evils – war, poverty, torture, pain – would again and again stir him to quixotic action.

Throughout his life Russell remained a figure of contradiction and controversy. The man who was for a period regarded as the world’s leading philosopher would also be reviled for his advanced liberal views on love and other social matters. The man who was honoured with the Nobel Prize was also twice sent to jail. The man who sought to establish a demonstrably certain logical philosophy would encourage the very philosopher whose work superseded and undermined this philosophy.

Yet if Russell’s logical philosophy can be said to have failed, his political philosophy arguably succeeded. (No matter that philosophers regarded the latter as philosophically trivial, or even outrageous: he certainly did not.) Nowadays the accepted social mores of the Western world much more closely resemble Russell’s liberal ideas than those of many more widely regarded contemporary political and ethical thinkers. Likewise, his vehement campaign against nuclear weapons laid the foundations for nuclear disarmament – though he would doubtless point out that this process remains far from complete and may still result in the disaster he sought to avoid.

Universal truth

Ultimately Bertrand Russell himself admitted that he made his greatest efforts in the field of traditional philosophy – in epistemology, the search for the ultimate grounds of our knowledge about the world. How can we be certain that what we claim to know is true? Where lies the certainty in our experience of the world? Can even the most precise knowledge – such as mathematics – be said to rest on any sure logical foundation? These were the questions that Russell sought to answer during the periods of his most profound philosophical thinking. They have remained the perennial questions of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Descartes, Hume, and Kant, to Russell and Wittgenstein.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw a concerted attempt to undermine such questions. (‘There is no such thing as universal truth.’ ‘All knowledge is relative to the historical era or culture in which it is accepted.’) But the persistence of scientific-philosophical thinking ensures that the questions Russell addressed remain very much central to present-day thought. His thinking, and the advances he made in epistemology, remain utterly relevant to our contemporary philosophical situation. The age of seemingly ever expanding scientific knowledge requires more than ever a philosophy to underpin that knowledge.

In an overall sense this has yet to be found. Possibly it never will be. Yet the attempt to see how such a philosophy might support our scientific knowledge remains fruitful. In trying to discover its certainty we understand more about what such knowledge is. We think scientifically about an apparently scientific world. What does this mean about us and about the world we inhabit? What is the link between these two disparate entities, if any? Bertrand Russell’s thought was one of the later, and more illuminating, stages in this age-old philosophical quest.

Read more in Bertrand Russell: Philosophy In An Hour by Paul Strathern, published by Harper Press, and available in various digital formats, only 99p / $1.99.

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Forced Resettlement

The internment of Polish Jews in ghettos began in October 1939, mere weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland and consequent outbreak of World War Two. Hitler’s regime had been implementing anti-Semitic policies in Germany since its rise to power in early 1933 and as the Third Reich expanded, discriminatory measures were steadily instigated against Jews living in the other areas of Europe that came under Nazi rule.

Poland was home to around two million Jews in 1939 and following the Nazi invasion, large parts of the country were immediately incorporated into Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles from these areas were then forcibly moved from their homes so that Lebensraum (living space) would become available for ethnic Germans.

The initial destination of these displaced people was the Generalgouvernement, an area under civil administration situated between the Soviet and Nazi occupied zones, which included the Polish capital city of Warsaw. Jews were subsequently crowded into designated areas of towns and cities where they were segregated from non-Jewish society and could be contained and controlled: ghettos.

Inhumane Conditions

The Warsaw ghetto became the largest in Poland, where at its fullest over 400,000 Jews were crammed into an area of just 1.36 square miles. Such overcrowding was a common feature of ghetto life in any city, with several generations of the same family often living in just one small room. A lack of basic amenities resulted in filthy conditions both in houses and on the ghetto streets, which in turn led to the inevitable spread of lice and of diseases such as typhus. Malnutrition was the norm and many people starved to death.

Whilst some ghettos were open, permitting residents to move beyond the boundaries during hours when a curfew was not in place, the majority were closed, with high walls, barbed wire and armed soldiers preventing anyone from leaving. As the war progressed and the Nazi campaign against the Jews twisted brutally towards a policy of annihilation, many ghettos that had previously been open were sealed.

This was the case in Warsaw, which was sealed in mid-November 1940 and from which deportations began in earnest in the summer of 1942. Between July and September, an estimated 265,000 Jews were deported from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp and upwards of 11,000 more were sent to labour camps. Between 55,000 and 60,000 Jews remained in the ghetto.

Initial Resistance

Although the Jews taken away during the summer months were told they were being resettled for work purposes, few people who remained in the Warsaw ghetto were under any illusion as to the true fate of the deportees. In the autumn of 1942, a decision was made amongst members of numerous self-defence groups and political factions to try and resist future deportations.

Two such groups determined to oppose the Nazis were the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) and the Jewish Military Union (ZZW). They managed to smuggle some weapons into the ghetto via links with the Polish underground and when the SS began a surprise deportation on 18 January 1943, ZOB and ZZW members launched an attack, taking the soldiers by surprise.

Fighting lasted for several days until the SS eventually withdrew. It was a significant victory for the resisters in the ghetto, who perceived that their actions had prevented a mass deportation. The Nazis, however, were furious and under orders from Heinrich Himmler (pictured), preparations began for the complete destruction of the ghetto.

The Uprising

On the morning of 19 April 1943, the eve of Passover and also of Hitler’s birthday, SS forces closed in to commence liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.  Since January, the resistant factions in the ghetto had amassed more weapons and dug underground bunkers, where many Jews now took shelter.

Upon entering the ghetto the SS found the streets largely deserted, rendering round ups impossible. Around 750 Jews who were not in hiding attacked the soldiers with pistols, hand grenades and homemade explosives, though their weapons were rudimentary compared to the German machine guns, tanks and flamethrowers.

Realising that the ZOB, ZZW and other armed factions were not going to surrender despite being vastly outnumbered, within a few days the SS set fire to the ghetto. Buildings were systematically burned to the ground and as Jews were forced from their hiding places by the smoke and flames, they were rounded up by Nazi soldiers and subsequently deported en masse to extermination and labour camps.

The Nazis had aimed to empty the ghetto within three days but incredibly, the resisters held out for almost a month, until 16 May 1943. On this day the fighting came to an end and the central Tlomacki Synagogue was blown up by the SS. All buildings had been razed to the ground, effectively obliterating what had once been Warsaw’s Jewish quarter.

Over 7,000 Jews lost their lives in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, compared to an estimated 300 Nazi soldiers. Whilst a few Jews were able to avoid deportation by escaping through the sewers, of the thousands who were captured and deported to the death camps, only a minority were still alive at the end of the war.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the first sustained armed resistance to the Nazis and inspired subsequent rebellions in other ghettos and even in extermination camps. The resisters knew that their position was weak and never anticipated a victory, yet they still chose to fight. A Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (pictured), unveiled on the fifth anniversary of the start of the uprising, in 1948, stands in the area which was once the Warsaw ghetto and in Israel, the National Day of Holocaust Remembrance corresponds with the anniversary of the uprising. A new Museum of the History of Polish Jews is scheduled to open in Warsaw this month, coinciding with the 70^th anniversary of what remains one of the most significant Jewish resistance efforts of World War Two.

Jemma Saunders

See also Jemma’s article on the Anne Frank app.

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Native Americans figured prominently on both sides of the hostilities. Far from being pawns of European powers, tribe leaders were pursuing their economic and historic interests.

Brief Overview of the French and Indian War (1756-1763)

The war was primarily a contest between imperial France and Britain for control over lucrative colonies in North America. Quebec and the Ohio River Valley were at the heart of the competition — and were the primary battlegrounds.

French and British forces didn’t fight any major battles south of the Ohio River Valley. But the southern arena had strategic importance, because it lay between the valley and the French colony of Louisiana. Raids by native forces allied with the British complicated French resupply efforts from the south. Thus, France not only had difficulty equipping its troops, but often lacked sufficient trade goods for securing Native American alliances.

After an early string of French victories, the war turned in Britain’s favor after 1757, when William Pitt the Elder (pictured) became Britain’s secretary of state. Determined to expand the British Empire, Pitt began borrowing heavily to finance the war effort in North America. He paid Prussia to tie down French forces in Europe — just as Native American war parties were harassing French forces in America.

Native American Jockeying

In Canada, Britain enlisted support from the Iroquois, while France attracted the Huron Confederacy. The Huron had enjoyed profitable trade ties with the French since the mid-16th century. Equally important, however, was the Huron’s centuries-old enmity with the Iroquois. Whichever European partner the Iroquois chose, the Huron would inevitably choose the opposing side.

The same dynamic initially impacted the Chickasaw and Choctaw, similarly historic rivals. The Choctaw had been trading amicably with the French for decades. Chickasaw-French relations were considerably less amicable. After Chickasaw fighters blockaded French commerce on the Mississippi River in the 1730s, France countered with a military offensive – and suffered its worst defeat ever at the hands of Native Americans.

The Trade Factor

Decades before the war, manufactured goods from Europe became essential to the economy of Native America. European goods had symbolic, as well as intrinsic value – they were signs of affluence among chiefs and a means of buying allies.

Via its multiple colonies along the Eastern Seaboard, Britain was a highly reliable source of trade goods. This was not the case with France, relying primarily on Louisiana ports. Such economic realities prompted far more Indian nations (especially in the future United States) to support the British. Britain’s allies included the Cherokee, Seneca, Mohawk, Montauk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Creek, Tuscarora and Chickasaw. The French counterparts, south of Canada, consisted of the Choctaw, Kickapoo, Sandusky, Seneca, Shawnee and Wea. And even the Choctaw eventually saw greater economic advantage with the British.

Today, the French-Indian War is glossed over in many history books. It’s not as popular as the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, so our children learn less about it, despite its massive importance in securing our future as an English-speaking nation. If you’d like for your children to learn more about it, consider visiting museums like the Chickasaw Cultural Center, where the tribe’s “Unconquered and Unconquerable” motto still rings.

Emily Clay.

See also articles on four Native American cultures that shaped the US; the Trail of Tears; and What’s in a name? Cultural significance of Native American monikers.

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By 1857, the East India Company, the monolithic, monopolising commercial company that conducted trade in India and had become the de facto rulers of the country on behalf of the British government, ruled two thirds of India. The remaining third was overseen by Indian princes who paid tribute to the British. That the East India Company could maintain its authority was down to the might of its huge army, consisting of 45,000 Europeans and 230,000 Indian sepoys. While most sepoys were glad and even proud to serve in the army, their loyalty to it always took second place to their religion

Religious sensibilities

Sepoys of all faiths were concerned for their respective religions. The prospect of being made to serve overseas, for example, alarmed Hindu sepoys as travelling over water was a compromise of caste.

Their fears were not without foundation – there was among the British an evangelical element keen on converting the Indian masses to Christianity and to persuade them to turn their backs on the ‘monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty’, to use William Wilberforce (1759-1833)’s phrase to describe Hindu divinities. In the early nineteenth century, the British had outlawed various religious traditions, and were now spreading their influence, building Christian schools and snatching orphaned Indian children to be brought up as Christians. (A Western education, the British believed, would eventually lead to greater responsibility and equip the Indian for eventual self-rule.)

The British were also rapidly expanding Indian infrastructure on Western lines – expanding the network of railways and roads. The Hindus, in adhering to their caste system, could not tolerate such an imposition on their tradition – Hindus of differing castes could not share the same road, let alone the same train. The British, they assumed, were trying to destroy the caste system.

Unrest

The first symptom of unrest came in January 1857, when the recently-opened telegraph office in Barrackpore was burned down as a protest against the march of Westernized progress. Two months later, on 29 March 1857, a 29-year-old sepoy called Mangal Pandey (pictured), stoned with opium and brandishing a sword and a musket, urged his fellow sepoys to rebel. He wounded two officers by sword before turning the gun on himself, attempting to pull the trigger with his toe. He fired but managed only to wound himself. He was hanged for his efforts and was soon to become a martyr to the rebels’ cause.

The Rifle

But it was something rather mundane that sparked the Indian Mutiny of 1857. 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 made amends by substituting the forbidden fats with that of sheep or, instead, beeswax. Too late. The sepoys saw it as another example of 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.

On the evening of 9 May 1857, 85 Indian dissenters in Meerut, 40 miles from Delhi, who had been court-martialled for refusing to touch the new cartridges, were marched onto a parade ground, stripped of their uniforms, shackled with fetters and thrown into jail to serve sentences from five to ten years. Yet these were not recalcitrant men seething with anger but loyal subjects of the Company’s army who obeyed every order but simply could not defile their religion.

When, that evening, Lieutenant Hugh Gough (later a general and recipient of the Victoria Cross) was warned by a sepoy of the impending mutiny in Meerut, he rushed to tell his senior officers only to have his concerns brushed aside.

Mutiny

On the late afternoon of the following day, 10 May, as the British residents prepared to go to evening song, the Indian comrades of the imprisoned sepoys broke open the jail and together they revolted, dragging the British out and hacking them to death. The violence was swift and intense; civilians joining the sepoys in an orgy of killing and arson. (Pictured: a bungalow at Meerut being attacked).

None who came within sight of the enraged horde were spared – the sick, the pregnant and the very young were among the victims. Two particular atrocities inflamed the passions of the British – Mrs Chambers, a pregnant women whose unborn baby was ripped from her womb, and Mrs Dawson, recovering from smallpox, who was burnt to death. Fifty or more were left dead. Come late evening, the rebels took to their horses and made for Delhi forty miles away.

Put the English to death

Upon arriving in the capital, the rebels sought to restore the old Mughal Empire and have the 82-year-old Bahadur Shah II as their figurehead. Bahadur Shah had had to suffer a demotion in title, the British stripping him of the title emperor and proclaiming him ‘merely’ the King of Delhi. Having been pensioned off by the British, he was content to wile away his remaining years writing poetry and painting. When the rebels made their demands, he reluctantly gave them his support and issued a proclamation declaring a holy war and urging his ‘subjects’ to rise up and ‘put the English to death’.

It would take two years and two months before the British were able to proclaim: ‘War is at an end; [the] rebellion is put down.’

*The name ‘Indian Mutiny’, as it was taught to generations of British schoolchildren, has a very Eurocentric ring to it; Indians prefer to call it the First War of Independence or the First Nationalist Uprising.

Rupert Colley

See also articles on Mangal Pandey, and the Siege of Cawnpore.

The post Indian Mutiny – a summary appeared first on History in an Hour.

According to BBC News, ‘three Royal Navy warships will arrive in London before a special evensong in St Paul’s Cathedral at 17:00 BST. The events mark the seventieth anniversary of the climax of the battle, May 1943, when Germany’s submarine fleet suffered heavy losses in the Atlantic. The milestone is also being marked in Londonderry and Liverpool.’

So what exactly was the Battle of the Atlantic? History In An Hour provides a brief summary.

The war at sea began immediately in September 1939 with the Germans sinking merchant ships in the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic. On 13 December 1939, the Battle of River Plate in the South Atlantic took place. The German battleship Graf Spee attacked a squadron of British ships off the coast of Uruguay but in doing so was damaged herself. Hitler ordered her captain, Hans Langsdorff, to scuttle the ship rather than let her fall into enemy hands. Langsdorff followed his orders and the Graf Spee was sunk (pictured). A week later, Langsdorff, draped in the German flag, shot himself.

The U-boat peril

In his memoirs, Winston Churchill later confessed: “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.” Britain depended heavily on imports – from iron ore and fuel to almost 70 per cent of all her food. Convoys of merchant ships crossing the Atlantic were escorted by the Royal Navy and, as far as it could reach, the RAF. But there was only so far the planes could travel, leaving a ‘mid-Atlantic gap” where the convoys were particularly vulnerable to German submarines, or U-boats, which hunted in groups or ‘wolf packs’.

On 9 May 1941, a British destroyer attacked a U-boat, and a boarding party managed to capture the German navy (Kriegsmarine)’s full-scale Enigma coding machine and code books. Although Bletchley Park was already having some success at deciphering the codes, they were now able to do so at will and re-route the convoys in order to avoid the wolf packs. Subsequently, within two months British losses at sea fell by 80 per cent. The cracking of the Enigma code helped the Allies throughout the war in all operations.

Sink the Bismarck

The champion of U-boats was Commodore Karl Donitz but his superior, Admiral Erich Raeder, advocated the use of large warships. In May 1941, the Kriegsmarine’s greatest warship, the Bismarck, one sixth of a mile long, pitted its strength against the equally impressive HMS Hood, the pride of the British fleet. On the 24th, exchanging fire from thirteen miles’ distance, the Hood was sunk (pictured), losing all but three of its 1,400 crew. The Bismarck had been damaged but, despite leaking oil, managed to escape the British light cruisers following her. However, Bletchley Park intercepted the Bismarck’s codes and knew of her destination – Brest, on the western coast of France – where a fleet of British destroyers sought her out and, on 27 May, sunk her. Raeder and his warships fell from Hitler’s favour and it became the turn of Donitz and his U-boats.

From August 1941, British merchant convoys started delivering supplies to the Soviet Union from bases in Scotland and Iceland. A seventeen-day journey, the Arctic Convoys were fraught with danger, not just from the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe but the treacherous weather and freezing conditions. However, the convoys’ contribution to the Soviet war effort, supplying tanks and guns as well as raw materials, was invaluable in the fight against Hitler.

Iron Coffins

During 1943, the British managed to breach the ‘mid-Atlantic gap’ with the introduction of ‘Very Long-Range Liberators’ and with Portugal allowing the use of its airbases in the Azores. Once the US had entered the war, America was launching more ships than the U-boats could sink and destroying more U-boats than Germany could replace. The RAF was by now successfully destroying U-boats with the aid of radar, and bombing shipyards and docks within Germany. With the Enigma decoding technology still playing its part and with three-quarters of U-boat crewmen being killed in action, the once menacing U-boat had become an ‘iron coffin’. Although U-boats continued to be employed throughout the war, the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, as Churchill coined it, had been won. From mid-1943, the Kriegsmarine’s role was not so much offensive, as defensive, protecting German-occupied European coasts from the Allied attack they knew, one day, would come.

Rupert Colley

Read more about the war in World War Two: History In An Hour published by Harper Press and available in various digital formats, only 99p / $1.99, and audio.

See also articles on the development of radar, Pearl Harbor, and the British submarine sunk near Malta.

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Being judged an atheist was not an enviable accolade for philosophers, or anyone else. Society had a way of dealing with such unorthodox thinkers – from ancient Greece (poison) to the Middle Ages (the Inquisition). Philosophers thus went to great lengths to convince everybody (and themselves) that they were not atheists. David Hume’s admission of theological bankruptcy was treated as a public scandal – but attempts to dissuade him were made with philosophical argument rather than the rack. This says as much for the tolerance of eighteenth-century British society as it does for Hume. Yet if he wished to remain consistent with his philosophy, Hume could have taken no other stance.

Denial of existence

David Hume is the only philosopher whose ideas remain plausible to us today. The ancient Greeks are readable as high literature, but their philosophy seems like brilliant fairy tales. The medievalism of Augustine and Aquinas is alien to the modern sensibility. Descartes and the rationalists make us realise that the human condition is not rational; the earlier empiricists seem self-evident, wrong-headed, or absurd. And the philosophers after Hume fall mostly into either of the last two categories.

What I have just tried to do, Hume succeeded in doing – he reduced philosophy to ruins. Hume went one step further even than Berkeley and thought the empirical situation through to its logical conclusion. He denied the existence of everything – except our actual perceptions themselves. In doing this, he placed us in a difficult position. This is solipsism: I alone exist, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Here we arrive at the endgame of philosophy, one from which it’s impossible to escape. Checkmate.

Scientific deductions

Then suddenly we realise that this doesn’t matter. Regardless of what the philosophers say, the world remains there – we go on as before. As did Hume, whose gargantuan frame and ready wit were not that of a bewildered, Beckett-like solipsist thinking himself to bits. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world. Neither the world of religion nor the world of science are certain. We can choose to believe in religion if we wish, but we do so on no certain evidence. And we can choose to make scientific deductions in order to impose our will upon the world. But neither religion nor science exist in themselves. They are merely our reactions to experience, one of any number of possible reactions.

David Hume was descended from an auld Scots family. His biography by E. C. Mossner includes a family tree tracing his ancestors back to the Home of Home, who died in 1424. The philosopher’s later ancestors include a number of unappealing but apparently distinguished Scottish names, such as a Belcher of Tofts, a Home of Blackadder, and a Norvell of Boghall.

Lack of a male parental figure

David Hume was born 24 April 1711 (7 May, New Style), in Edinburgh. His father died when he was three. A remarkably high proportion of the major philosophers lost their father at an early age, and this has produced the usual psychoanalytical theories. The gist of these is that the lack of a male parental figure creates a profound need for certainty. This in turn causes the bereft son to create an abstract system that takes the place of the ‘abstracted’ parent. Such psychoanalytical theories can be brilliant, entertaining, and possibly even informative (though about what, I’m not quite sure). In other words, their resemblance to the philosophers they describe is uncanny in many aspects – except that of intellectual rigour.

By the time David Hume arrived on the scene, his branch of the distinguished family tree had descended to the point where it was living on the chilly little estate of Ninewells. This was nine miles west of Berwick-upon-Tweed, near the village of Chirnside on the Scottish border. The original house where the philosopher grew up no longer exists, but the gullible philosophic tourist is shown the ‘Philosopher’s cave’, down the slope to the south-east of the present house. This dank, cramped, uninviting aperture is where Hume is said to have meditated as a boy, as well as during his later years (when its inner reaches might have proved something of a tight fit for his ample form). If our thought is affected by our surroundings, we would expect Hume’s meditations in this instance to have produced a somewhat neolithic philosophy with claustrophobic tendencies – and indeed this is much how the great German philosophers who came after him were to regard Hume’s work.

This was inevitable, as the Germans were intent upon constructing vast philosophical systems – baroque palaces of metaphysics, no less – and had no wish to occupy the primitive philosophic cave that Hume had bequeathed them. Alas, philosophy should not be confused with architectural aspiration.

Read more in Hume: Philosophy In An Hour by Paul Strathern, published by Harper Press, and available in various digital formats, only 99p / $1.99.

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Soren Kierkegaard, born 5 May 1813, wasn’t really a philosopher at all. At least not in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn’t write about the world, he wrote about life – how we live, and how we choose to live. Kierkegaard philosophised about what it means to be alive. His subject was the individual and his or her existence: the ‘existing being’.

In Kierkegaard’s view, this purely subjective entity lay beyond the reach of reason, logic, philosophical systems, theology, or even ‘the pretences of psychology’. Nonetheless it was the source of all these subjects. As a result of such thinking, philosophers, theologians, and psychologists have all at some time disowned Kierkegaard. The branch of philosophy – or nonphilosophy, for many purists – to which Kierkegaard gave birth has come to be known as existentialism.

It took some time for existentialism to catch on. Some philosophers – such as Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger – were existentialists without realising it (according to the existentialists). Heidegger vehemently denied this, and Nietzsche died before anyone could tell him. Indeed, it wasn’t until almost a century after Kierkegaard’s death that existentialism came into its own, with the emergence of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris after World War Two.

The café and university philosophy

The intellectuals of postwar Paris were in despair: there was nothing for them to believe in anymore. Surrealism, which had gained intellectual credence by describing itself as absurd, had now been recognised as ridiculous. And with the rise of Stalin, French intellectuals even found it difficult to believe in communism (though they certainly tried). Then along came existentialism, which didn’t require one to believe in anything at all. Indeed, it even emphasized that despair was part of the human condition.

Existentialism soon became the rage and spread beyond the cafés of the Left Bank, as far afield as the cafés of Greenwich Village, the coffee bars of London, and the beatnik haunts of San Francisco. It also attracted attention in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Existentialism was both a café and a university philosophy – an unusual blend of the spurious and the deeply insightful. This proved equally attractive to artists, writers, philosophers, and charlatans, all of whom made their contribution to its growth. In this way, existentialism proved a suitable forerunner to behaviourism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and the like, which were to become the rage in the following decades. Existentialism’s core philosophy – ‘the problem of existence’ – was considered very much a product of the twentieth century, with its characteristic alienation, angst, absurdity, and preoccupation with similar buzzwords. But all this derives directly from Kierkegaard, who was born almost a century before Sartre.

What is existence?

Kierkegaard was certainly ahead of his time. Yet he also brought about a long-overdue reexamination of one of the first philosophical questions ever to be asked: ‘What is existence?’ This question had of course continued to be asked ever since, by almost everyone except philosophers. To them the question was either laughable, invalid, or answered so completely by their own philosophy that there was no need whatsoever to go on asking it. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, insisted that every individual should not only ask this question but should make his very life his own subjective answer to it. This stress on subjectivity is Kierkegaard’s main contribution.

The problem of existence – or ‘being’ – was central to the thinking of many of the earliest philosophers. Before Socrates and Plato introduced an element of reason into philosophy (thus making it academically respectable), philosophers had been much concerned with the question of being. What did it mean to be alive? What was the meaning of existence? they wondered. Such naïve questions are nowadays laughed out of court by serious philosophers. Asking these questions is simply meaningless, we are told. Yet we mere mortals stubbornly continue to ask them. In our artless fashion, some of us even expect philosophy to provide an answer. Several pre- Socratic philosophers, blithely unaware of the sophistication of philosophers to come, even insisted upon taking such questions seriously.

Read more in Kierkegaard: Philosophy In An Hour by Paul Strathern, published by Harper Press, and available in various digital formats, currently FREE.

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The rich history of Bintan Island is a tale of piracy and a battle for shipping links. Throughout the last thousand years, countries such as Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain and Sumatra have made the comparatively small island their home, building bases, ports and even Sultanates within its lands.

The Pirate Island

Chinese chronicles mention Bintan Island as having been inhabited back in 231 AD, but the first noted rulership on the island is believed to have been the Srivijaya Empire of Sumatra, who held sway over Bintan from the 12^th to the 13^th century. The queen of Bintan met with Sri Tri Buana – who was a member of the royal family of Palembang – and agreed to make a strategic alliance, 800 vessels moved with them to settle on the island, with Sri Tri Buana as the new king.

During this period the island obtained a bad reputation for piracy, with Malay pirates frequently seizing Chinese ships that were returning from the Indian oceans into the island’s ports, and looting their cargo. Any ships that resisted the robberies were attacked. Ibn Battuta, who was an Arabian chronicler, said of the Bintan region: ‘here are little islands, from which armed black pirates with poised arrows emerged, possessing armed warships: they plunder people but do not enslave them’. Interestingly, this reputation has clung to island as many people still refer to Bintan as the ‘Pirate Island’.

A political base

The island first attracted major attention from foreign countries in 1511, when the Sultan Mahmud (of the fallen sultanate of Malacca) fled to Bintan in order to create a resistance base when the sultanate was taken by Portuguese forces. The base was eventually destroyed by the Portuguese in 1526. However, two years later, the son of the Sultan Mahmud was able to restore a new sultanate back on the Malay Peninsula.

It took until the beginning of the 18^th century for the new Sultanate of Johor (which Mahmud’s son had begun) to succumb to the latest group who sought to take control of the area – the Bugis. Through the intervention of the Bugis, Bintan began to genuinely thrive, becoming a powerful trading port that attracted attention from all of the world, including some western countries and traders from China and India.

European rule

As a consequence of its flourishing trade, various European powers sought to take control of the Bintan port. The British, who at that time had control of Penang, were seeking to aggressively expand their control of the area to the south of the Straits of Malacca, and saw the port as a valuable asset.

By the end of the 18^th century, the Bintan rulers had been overthrown and the island was under control of the Dutch, the local trading supremacy ending as a result. Though Britain still desired to take Bintan because of its crucial position in the Riau, the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 conceded that the UK would not establish an office on the island, with the Dutch in turn agreeing that Britain would not have to leave Singapore, which they had recently taken control of. From this point, the importance of the port at Bintan declined.

Modern times

During the Second World War, the Japanese occupied the whole of the Malay region with Singapore as their HQ, and many locals were forced to join the Imperial army.

Interestingly, from 1950 to 1963 the Archipelago was actually a duty-free zone. Since then, Bintan has become an increasingly popular tourist destination as part of the Sijori Growth Triangle, in which Singapore and Indonesia agreed to invest money in Bintan leading to many Indonesian hotel developments.

Ian Bintan

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Machiavelli’s masterpiece, the single short work for which he will always be remembered, is The Prince. This is a book of advice to a prince on how to run his state. It is highly rational, psychologically perceptive, and addresses the heart of the matter with no nonsense. If you are a prince running a state, your chief aim is to remain in power and run your state to your best advantage. Machiavelli sets down how to do this, using a wealth of historical examples, and with a complete lack of sentimentality. No pussyfooting about: here’s the formula.

Truths of the human condition

Machiavelli’s political philosophy intimately reflects his life, times, and circumstances. Most of his life was spent deeply involved in the politics of Renaissance Italy. As his life progresses, we see the lineaments of his philosophy beginning to emerge, feature by feature, until suddenly he falls from grace and is stripped of all that he considers to be his life. Bereft, and in complete despair, he sits down and writes his masterpiece, The Prince. In just a few months of supreme inspiration, he delivers himself of his entire political philosophy, complete and intact. Its harshness reflects the harshness of the political life he has seen, as well as the harshness of the blow he has just experienced. But this is more than just a political philosophy of its time. Machiavelli’s thought pinpoints a central aspect of the political philosophy of all time – from Alexander the Great to Saddam Hussein. And as we shall see, it also reflects one of the most profound, and profoundly disturbing, truths of the human condition.

I learned to do without

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence on May 3, 1469. He came from an old Tuscan family, which had in the past achieved some eminence – though his was not one of the great powerful families of Florence, such as the Pazzi bankers or the Medici. And by the time Niccolò arrived on the scene, his branch of the family had fallen on hard times.

Machiavelli’s father Bernardo was a lawyer who had fallen foul of the tax man and been declared an insolvent debtor. As such he was forbidden by law from practicing his profession. But no lawyer can be expected to take the law literally. Bernardo managed to practice on the quiet, offering cut-rate service for those who found themselves in an impecunious position similar to this own. His only other source of income was the small estate he had inherited, seven miles south of Florence on the road to Siena. This was an idyllic spot amidst the Tuscan hills, but the grapes and goat cheese hardly provided enough cash to support a family. Life was austere at casa

Machiavelli. As Niccolò later remarked: ‘I learned to do without before I learned to enjoy’. Bernardo could afford no formal education for his son. Occasionally a scholar on hard times would be hired as a tutor. But Bernardo had not always been a broken-down lawyer. He had his own library, and young Niccolò was soon reading extensively, especially in classical texts. The pale, deprived boy found his imagination fired by the wonders of ancient Rome.

Solitary adolescent

The isolated child gave way to a solitary adolescent with an apprehensive, sidelong look, which made him appear curiously guilty. He became aware of the world around him: coolly measuring himself against it, measuring it against what he knew from his reading. Even in his isolation he couldn’t help realising his superior intelligence. Likewise, he quickly perceived the new humanist outlook that was beginning to permeate so many aspects of the city around him. Florence was emerging from the intellectual torpor of medieval life: the city felt awake, alive, self-confident. Italy was leading Western civilization into the Renaissance. It was possible to dream that Italy might again be united and great, as it had been in the days of the Roman Empire.

The perceptive young Niccolò began seeing (and imagining) resemblances between the city around him and Rome at the height of its power: the Rome of the second century CE, in the era leading up to Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher, general, emperor. This was the period when the empire stretched from the Persian Gulf to Hadrian’s Wall, when the Senate still had sufficient power to make itself heard, when the citizens of Rome had been happiest and most prosperous. Heady stuff for a quicksilver young mind whose broken father could provide no role model. Instead, history would provide a more abstract dream.

Read more in Machiavelli: Philosophy In An Hour by Paul Strathern, published by Harper Press, and available in various digital formats, only 99p / $1.99.

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But then, in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s purges, Bystrolyotov was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Tortured and crippled, and made to ‘confess’ to fantastical charges, he was sentenced to 20 years hard labour. Incarcerated and broken, Bystrolyotov felt the full force of the corrupt regime he had served so loyally for so long. But always one to take risks, Bystrolyotov recorded his experience within the gulags. With the help of contacts he smuggled out, page by page, his damning first-hand account of Stalin’s labour camps.

Now, 38 years after his death, the life of Dmitri Bystrolyotov is retold in a dramatic new book, Emil Draitser’s Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative.

The name is Bystrolyotov, Dmitri Bystrolyotov

Dmitri Bystrolyotov is a well-known name in Russia, an action hero for today reclaimed from the myths of yesteryear. Hailed on TV and film, subject of books and documentaries, Bystrolyotov is to Russia what James Bond is to the West but with one slight difference – Bystrolyotov was real.

Born in 1901, Bystrolyotov belief in the Soviet cause was total. As a teenager, he watched from the sidelines as the Russian Revolution of 1917 unfurled then spent half a decade cruising round Central Europe, looking for direction. He didn’t find it – it found him; Soviet Foreign Intelligence in Czechoslovakia recruited the 25-year-old drifter who happened to be a polyglot. Furnished with a series of false passports and different IDs, Bystrolyotov used his flair for languages to good effect in the capital cities of Europe – London, Paris and Berlin.

But it wasn’t his main tool in his box of tricks – that was in his good looks; his Clark Gable moustache, his perfect centre parting, the raised eyebrow. And armed with his looks, he seduced many an unsuspecting female into bed and into loosening their tongues. On his very own wedding night, Bystrolyotov abandoned his bride, Iolanta, in order to seduce a potentially-useful female source.

‘The wonderful garden’

He soon recruited Iolanta into his game, persuading her to sleep with an informant. She did so; doing so for the ‘greater good’, for Stalin; and then very probably hating herself for it – for she left Bystrolyotov. He told her why he played such a dangerous game – he was, he said, “swimming across a stormy river, risking his own life and drowning those who happen to be in his way”. She retorted that this “wonderful garden” was nothing more than an illusion.

Bystrolyotov returned to the Soviet Union in 1937, at the very time Stalin’s Great Purge was decimating the country like a virus. If Bystrolyotov thought his loyal and impressive contribution to the cause would provide him with immunity, he was very much mistaken. Stalin bore a deep distrust of foreigners, especially capitalist ones, and anyone who had been tainted by such foreigners. His wife and mother, both labelled as ‘enemies of the people’ took their own lives.

He served seventeen years in the gulag during which time he met and married his second wife, before being released as part of the post-Stalin amnesty. Dmitri Bystrolyotov died 3 May 1975, aged 74.

Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative by Emil Draitser.

Read more at stalinsromeospy.com

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