Category Archives: History

Arts, Britain, Economic, History, Philosophy, Politics, Scotland, Society

Quantum Leaps: Adam Smith (1723-1790)…

‘UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF INTENDED ACTION’

Scottish philosopher of morals, politics and economics, Adam Smith was a contemporary of the Empiricist, David Hume (1711-1776), and is very close to him in outlook and philosophic temperament. His lectures on ethics and logic were published under the title Theory of the Moral Sentiments but he is most famous for his work of political economics, The Wealth of Nations.

Favoured philosopher of Margaret Thatcher and darling of Conservative economists, Smith is famous for his views on private property, the free market economy and the doctrine that ‘unintended consequences of intended action’ will be to the benefit of society at large. The idea behind this most fortunate if true of principles is that in intentionally serving one’s interests one unintentionally serves the interests of society as a whole.

'The Wealth of Nations' is one of the most important and deservedly read works of economic and political philosophy in the history of Western thought.

‘The Wealth of Nations’ is one of the most important and deservedly read works of economic and political philosophy in the history of Western thought.

A simple example will illustrate the essence of Smith’s idea. Suppose that Jones, in seeking his own fortune, decides to set up and run his own business, manufacturing some common item of everyday need. In seeking to provide for his own fortune, Jones’ entrepreneurial enterprise has a number of unintentional benefits to others. First, he provides a livelihood for the people in his employ, thus benefiting them directly. Second, he makes more readily available some common item which previously had been more difficult or more expensive to obtain for his customers, thus easing one, if only minor, aspect of their lives. The forces of market economy ensure that these unintentional benefits occur, for if Jones’ workers could find more profitable employ elsewhere they would either cease to work for him or he would have to raise their salaries in order to secure a workforce. Likewise, if Jones’ product was available more readily or less expensively from some other source, Jones would either go out of business or be forced to lower his prices to a competitive rate. The model assumes the absence of a monopoly, both in the labour and economic markets.

The belief that ‘unintended consequences of intended action’ will be of benefit to society held great imaginative power over the industrial philanthropists of the 18th and 19th Centuries and provided the philosophical groundwork for the later ethical theories of Bentham and Mill. However, criticism is not hard to come by. It is surely a blinkered view, if comforting for the entrepreneurial capitalist, to suppose that pursuing one’s own self-interest constitutes a magnanimous and philanthropic act towards society at large. One has only to review the social history of industrial Britain, to witness the treacherous and exploitative working practices of the industrial age, the extreme poverty and degrading social conditions of the suffering working classes, to realise Smith’s idealistic model has far more serious ‘unintended’ consequences. What has largely brought an end to such conditions in the industrialised West is not a triumphant adherence to Smith’s principles in Western economics, but a shifting of the poverty and exploitative working practices from one part of the world to another. In other words, the living conditions of those in the West has improved to the detriment of other countries just insofar as the labour required to support Smith’s economic philosophy has been removed from Western societies and transferred to those of the Third World.

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Regardless of one’s political views on Smith, The Wealth of Nations is one of the most important and deservedly read works of economic and political philosophy in the history of Western thought. It needs to be read and understood by its detractors as much as it does by its supporters.

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Arts, Books, History, Society, Spain

Book Review: ‘The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic’…

SPANISH CIVIL WAR

Following the bombing of a London warehouse in 1940 during the Blitz, copies of a book awaiting distribution of Henry Buckley’s eyewitness account of the Spanish civil war nearly never saw the light of day. A handful, however, did survive, and this posthumous publication of The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic should go some way to establishing his reputation as one of the finest foreign journalists to write on Spain.

Buckley died in 1972, but was the Daily Telegraph’s foreign correspondent in Madrid from 1929. For a decade he furiously filed dispatches from all corners of the country as its young democracy sparked, and eventually ignited and burst into full-scale civil war. With Spain’s current economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of Henry Buckley’s stature would have made of its present predicament.

Following a posting in Berlin, Buckley arrived in Madrid to find Spain about to be ripped apart by its own unresolved social and economic tensions. Through countless meetings and conversations with politicians, generals and workers he paints and depicts a vivid portrait of a country where ‘the mass of the people were solid in their desire to fight for their independence and for the future of the Republic as opposed to feudalism’, even though the military superiority of General Franco was to crush the country’s first experience of democracy.

In 1940, Daily Telegraph correspondent Henry Buckley published his eyewitness account of his experiences reporting form the Spanish civil war. The copies of the book, stored in a warehouse in London, were destroyed during the Blitz and only a handful of copies of his unique chronicle were saved.

In 1940, Daily Telegraph correspondent Henry Buckley published his eyewitness account of his experiences reporting form the Spanish civil war. The copies of the book, stored in a warehouse in London, were destroyed during the Blitz and only a handful of copies of his unique chronicle were saved.

Buckley’s reportage is not only of significance and great historical value, but is a model for foreign correspondents to follow. He offers passion and detailed knowledge on several leading political figures of the Republic, many of whom he knew personally, but who remain deeply controversial to this day in a Spain still struggling with the legacy of the civil war. In his collation, for instance, Buckley recalls with energy and vigour his conversations with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the charismatic young leader of the fascist Falange movement. Whilst he is highly critical of the thugs hired by the young lawyer and parliamentarian, Buckley refers to him as ‘one of the nicest people in Madrid’, and makes narrative on the revolutionary leader’s ‘charming’ English accent.

Henry Buckley’s greatest quality as a correspondent is his sensitivity to both the human suffering and the broader significance of the conflict – his accounts are rich in colour and historical detail, as well as portraying a deeply personal tone.  As a pious and devout Christian, coupled with being a reporter for a British broadsheet newspaper, he faced multiple internal conflicts. He is clearly dismayed by the position taken by the Church, and angered by British and French non-intervention, as Franco’s better armed and organised troops gain advantage over the internationally isolated Republic. Buckley notes how the outcome of the war ‘depended almost entirely on Paris and London’, and how foreign-based financiers backed Franco over the Republic with their credit.

Journaling events with honesty and humility, often in chaotic circumstances, he openly admits when he cannot verify things, but rigorously doing so when he can. The chronicled entry concerning the vastly exaggerated Nationalist claims about the number of dead in Madrid ahead of the fall of the capital is a pointed example.

Prior to his eventual escape over the Pyrenees with the defeated Republican forces in 1939, Buckley wearily noted how democracy’s fight against the forces of Franco appeared doomed from the outset, gloomily writing that the Republic’s disadvantages were in ’everything but manpower so overwhelming that it was inadequate to try and regard it as an equal struggle’.

The Spanish civil war is a subject that has been widely covered in the last 50 years, but Buckley’s work is a rare account which generates much excitement. Its re-emergence is a reminder – to both the specialist and general reader alike – that the best frontline reporting endures long after the final shot has been fired.

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Arts, Britain, Government, History, Military, Science, Second World War

Britain: ‘RAF and the ‘Battle of the Beams’…

R.V JONES: ‘RADIO WAVES & ELECTRONIC JAMMING’

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 7, 1940, the first German bombers came rumbling up the Thames, to drop their bombs on London in the opening act of what became known as the “Blitz.” They were followed by a further 250 Luftwaffe bombers, unloading the first instalment of a massive payload of some 14,000 tons of high explosive that rained down on London until May of the following year.

The trial by fire that started more than 70 years ago is often depicted as a triumph of human resilience, a refusal by ordinary people to submit to terror. And so it was. But it was also a victory for a less known aspect of applied science, for, alongside the ferocious aerial combat another secret, electronic war was taking place, known to very few at the time and little appreciated since.

We rightly celebrate military victory in the Battle of Britain and civilian grit in the Blitz, but Britain’s astonishing scientific triumph in what Winston Churchill later called “the Battle of the Beams” has often been too easily overlooked. It saved countless thousands of lives, confused the German assault and helped to stave off the threat of invasion. This battle was fought, not with bombs and bullets, but radio waves. In the age of Shock and Awe, this covert scientific battle offers a timely reminder that ingenuity is just as important in war as brute force.

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THREE MONTHS before the Blitz began, a 28-year-old scientist named Reginald Victor (R. V.) Jones was summoned to Downing Street to address the cabinet on the subject of radio beams. Churchill had become increasingly worried by intelligence reports suggesting that the Nazis had developed some kind of secret ray that could magically guide the Luftwaffe bombers to their targets, even when flying at night and in dense cloud.

Though outnumbered, heroic RAF pilots flying nimble and venomous Spitfires and Hurricanes saw off the Luftwaffe, their decisive victory finally coming on September 15, 1940.

An RAF officer working in technical intelligence, Jones had begun studying German radio navigation systems several months earlier and offered the Cabinet a most alarming conclusion: the Germans were using two narrow radio beams transmitted from separate locations in continental Europe to pinpoint strategic locations in Britain. In effect, the German bomber pilot could follow one radio beam until it intersected with the other beam and then drop his payload – directly over the target.

Night-bombing made bombers safer from interception by fighters and anti-aircraft systems, but finding a target in the blackout or bad weather using traditional navigation was tricky. German scientists, it seemed, had solved the problem: they codenamed it “Knickebein”, meaning “crooked leg”, a reference either to the shape of the intersecting beams or the bent appearance of the transmitting antennae. The Germans could never resist a hinting code-word – the German codename for their long-range radar system, for example, was “Heimdall”, after the Norse god with the power to see over vast distances. But the British were similarly addicted to code-wordplay. With admirable understatement, this threatening new German radio navigation system was given the codename “Headache”; the countermeasures required to defeat it were named, perhaps appropriately, “Aspirin”.

 

TO TACKLE the problem, R.V. Jones turned for help to medicine. Electro-diathermy sets were used in hospitals to destroy abnormal tissue and to cauterise wounds. Suitably modified, they also proved highly effective at jamming the Knickebein transmissions and were now deployed to send out a blizzard of radio noise over a wide range of frequencies.

Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, had given Hitler his personal pledge that the radio navigation system was invulnerable. He was far wide of the mark and so, increasingly, were his bombers. During the crucial months of September and October 1940, as the Luftwaffe night-raids mounted in intensity, Jones and his fellow scientists became ever more adept at jamming and diverting the radio beams, using more powerful radio transmitters to “inject” the Knickebein signals with confusing Morse code elements.

Deprived of reliable electronic direction, the Luftwaffe crews could become disorientated at night. One pilot was said to have landed in Dover, thinking he was back in France. Bombs intended for vital and heavily populated targets fell relatively harmlessly in fields and hills. According to some estimates, as much as 80 per cent of the German night bombs missed their target. Intercepted messages between German ground controllers and Luftwaffe pilots unable to locate their targets provided vital evidence that the beam-jammers were having the desired effect.

Even so, “Aspirin” was far from a cure-all remedy. The German bombers still caused appalling damage. London represented a target too vast to miss, even at night. A derivative of Knickebein radio navigation, known as “X Apparatus” was used to guide 400 Luftwaffe pilots to Coventry on November 14, 1940. Because of a technical error, the British jammer stations attacked the wrong frequency. The city was devastated, 568 people died, and Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Coventriert” to describe a particularly satisfactory level of destruction.

But how many more lives might have been lost, how many key military and industrial installations would have been destroyed and with what effect on the progress of war, if the Luftwaffe had been able to continue precise bombing under cover of darkness? Churchill was never in any doubt that science had played a pivotal role in blunting the Blitz. He dubbed R.V. Jones the “man who bent the bloody beams”.

 

R.V. JONES, who died in 1997, was a remarkable warrior, but one who believed in trickery and creativity as the antidote to savagery. In 1993, the CIA founded an intelligence award named in his honour, for “scientific acumen applied with art in the cause of freedom”. Yet, in this country, which he did so much to defend, so secretly, his is not a household name.

The Blitz and the Battle of Britain are synonymous terms that have left an enduring legacy of proud national stereotypes; the Spitfire pilot, the ambulance driver, the unbowed housewife sweeping up after the bombs had left their mark.

Just as important, although much less lauded, was the scientist in his lab, using a medical gadget to baffle and confuse Hitler’s bombers.

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