The End of Empire

As I mentioned last time, I’ve been listening to Patrick Wyman’s excellent podcast series “The Fall of Rome”.

One of the things that’s most interesting is the way Wyman fills in the gaps of how these kinds of power transitions occurred in practice. A particularly fascinating story is about the end of Roman Britain. As Wyman puts it:

The Irish came from across the sea to the west. The Picts came south, through and around Hadrian’s formerly great wall. And the Saxons came from the North Sea coast of the continent. They plundered and burned, pillaged and raped, killed and took captives. Without the Roman army to defend them, the Britons were helpless to beat back the attacks of these marauders. Within a generation, most of what remained of Roman Britain was lost and gone forever.

In the first episode of this show, I emphasized the importance of taking a regional approach. The fall of the roman empire happened in much different ways in different places. Some regions barely experienced anything we would call a disruption until the year 500 or even later, whereas others were barely recognizable in comparison to their former selves by that date. No province of the former Western Roman Empire went down faster or harder than Britain. And no region was more fundamentally or more deeply transformed by processes that we are calling the fall of the Roman Empire.

The island fragmented politically into a patchwork of new kingdoms ruled by petty tyrants, some of them native, some of them foreign born. The level of material sophistication dropped off drastically. By 500, nobody knew how to run a proper bathhouse, or, more seriously, even how to build in stone. The economy grew simpler, and barter replaced cash money. Urban centres shrank and all but disappeared. Roman Law Codes and legal concepts fell out of use. People stopped speaking Latin as an everyday language. Most strikingly, mass immigration from the continent completely rewrote the political, linguistic, and demographic map of the island. Britain represents the catastrophe side of the fall of the Roman Empire. In almost no facet of life was there recognizable continuity between Roman Britain in the 4th century and Anglo-Saxon England in the 7th.

For instance, how did Britain end up transitioning from Roman rule to Kings? Well, in Wyman’s telling, Britain was always at the periphery of the empire. Not just geographically, but also in terms of importance and focus. As the Empire experienced increasing turmoil during the late 4th century and early 5th century, attention simply turned elsewhere, and there was less and less interaction between the capital and the garrisons out in Britain. Wyman indicates that at a certain point in the early 5th Century, it would have been quite possible for Roman troops in Britain to have simply not heard anything from the central authorities for years at a time, nor been paid anything by them. In fact, the most significant effect of Rome was when usurpers like Magnus Maximus or Constantine III took a large number of their troops from Britain in their attempts to claim the throne. When the troops left, they didn’t come back, and that was about the last you would have heard on the matter.

So what was happening in the garrisons in the meantime? Well, what was left of the troops still in the the garrisons mostly supported themselves and stayed supplied by assessing taxes on the local population. By this point, these were mostly taxes in kind, as coin was becoming increasingly rare, another aspect of Empire receding. While it’s not like the locals exactly had a choice about paying these taxes to support the garrisons, it’s not obvious that they were unhappy with the arrangement either, as the garrison kept them defended from raiding parties like the Picts, the Scots or the Saxons. These groups had been increasing their raids even during the period of effective Roman rule in the 4th century, and this just got worse once Roman rule declined. In some places, such as along Hadrian's Wall, the garrisons continued to operate.  As long as the general was competent enough to keep the people happy and the troops loyal (since by this point, the troops had much more loyalty to their local leader than the far-distant Emperor they hadn’t heard from in years), things scraped by.

Though as you can imagine, losing the support of Rome did have disastrous effects on the ability of the garrisons to actually defend the people. In the 5th century, along Hadrian's wall or in the east of Britain, you were between three to five times more likely to have a blade wound visible in your skeletal remains as people during the height of Roman Britain. As some Britons wrote in 446 in a letter to the Roman general Aetius

To Aeutius, thrice consul, come the groans of the Britons. The barbarians drive us into the sea, the sea drives us back on the barbarians. Between them, two kinds of death face us. We are either slaughtered, or drowned.

But no help was forthcoming. Aetius had his own problems.

And so as Rome collapsed, the autonomy of these local generals gradually increased, until there wasn’t anyone giving them orders any more. But this didn’t come at a definite point where they were explicitly cut loose, and the nature of what they were doing didn’t experience any sharp shifts – it’s just that over time it become gradually apparent that nobody was coming anymore, and they were on their own. As a result, the distinction between “Roman general in an outlying garrison” and “local warlord” was a very blurred one in this period. There was a guy, he gave orders, they got obeyed. He may have nominally claimed to do so on behalf of Rome, but the frequency of invoking Rome as the basis of authority probably also declined until eventually it stopped altogether. At some point, the general started calling himself “King”. In an alternative timeline, maybe some future Roman Emperor might have turned up to re-establish authority. But it never happened.

In other places, the garrisons were sufficiently worthless that the job of defending the populace fell to local elites instead. Perhaps you armed some of your peasants to defend against the Saxon raiders, and gradually figured out enough how to fight them off. Again, like before, if you end up commanding enough people in battle for long enough, you effectively become a warlord.

The narrative of history that we tend to get taught is one filled with definite events and dates, especially for power transitions. The Nazis were defeated in 1945. Constantinople was taken over by the Ottomans in 1453. The American Revolutionary War ended (roughly) with the battle of Yorktown in 1781. In all these instances, the new power seems to get established fairly quickly, and our understanding is that it was readily apparent that a large transition had taken place. Whether this was exactly true even for these events is not clear, but it seems not a bad approximation of reality. And from hearing enough narratives of this structure, one ends up implicitly taking this as the rough template for when you’ve reached a sufficient understanding of What Actually Happened and Why.

But the fall of Rome just doesn’t look like that. For one thing, it’s not even clear exactly when you date the end of the Roman Empire. Before listening to this series, I naively assumed that the sack of Rome was the end of things, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. For starters, there were two of them, one in 410 and another in 455, and Western Roman Emperors continued to rule in some form or other before, during and after both. I also didn’t know that Rome wasn’t actually the administrative capital at this point, it was Ravenna. I’ve seen the “end date” given as 476 AD, when the last Western Roman Emperor Romulus was overthrown by Odoacer.  But this was as much as anything the last gasp of what was already a thoroughly decayed system.

And if this holds true for Rome, it holds doubly true for Roman Britain. Admittedly, we have very few written records from this period, making it hard to say for sure. The evidence for the stories above comes through things like evidence of garrisons near Hadrian's Wall being still functioning in the 6th century, the existence of hill forts in other parts of Britain around this time, and aristocratic burials emphasising military rather than civilian themes. But it seems safe to say that the end of empire was experienced partly as power and central authority just receding, until at some point it became apparent that it was gone altogether.

And the things that replace it are local power arrangements, especially those that are relatively self-sufficient. If you imagined this in modern America, if the Federal Government were to collapse, some much decayed form of New York City might survive as a separate autonomous city-state. After all, it has an existing private army in the form of the NYPD. While they only barely tolerate DeBlasio (and I doubt their restraint in this regard would survive the collapse of federal authority), it’s not hard to imagine a Giuliani or a Bloomberg continuing to run the city if the federal government disappeared. This seems much more plausible than, say, New York State – how many people with guns owe a strong primary allegiance to New York State, and how much territory are they in undisputed control of?

But then again, maybe somewhere like Idaho is a better bet. You wouldn't bet on the New York finance industry to keep functioning as usual if Washington collapsed. Nor would I bet on the continued smooth functioning of hundred storey skyscrapers in the event of an extended civil emergency. In the case of Britain, the urban centres emptied out almost entirely.

If the distinction between “general” and “warlord” is murky in the late Roman Empire, then even more murky is the distinction between “migration” and “invasion”. When the Goths crossed the Danube in 376 AD, they didn’t come as army – they were invited across by the Romans, and promised to pay taxes, serve in the  army, etc. And indeed, there had been Barbarians serving in the Roman army for a long time before this, including in positions of command. What was less common, however, and less ideal, was for entire tribes to join as a single unit, as they did with the Goths. In addition, armies at the time tended to travel with women and children. Look at them one way, and they’re a tribe or people migrating into an already multi-ethnic empire. Look at them another way, and they’re a notionally Roman but practically semi-autonomous military force with civilians supporting the camp. Either way, the result was disastrous.

So Roman armies being made up of mixed barbarian and Roman troops was not inherently unusual. But in this era, armies were independent power bases whose loyalty to the Empire couldn’t be guaranteed. The leaders of these armies would negotiate with the central authority to take part in campaigns. Was this just an amicable discussion over costs and supplies? Was it insubordinate generals being paid off instead of being made an example of (assuming that was still possible)? Or was it the Western Roman Empire making ad hoc treaties with incipient kingdoms? As with so many questions in a decaying empire, the answer is hard to pin down, and the answer you pick with the benefit of hindsight may not be the one you would have picked at the time. They’re all shades of grey, in an era when grey went from mostly white to increasingly black.

And this wasn’t just a problem for Barbarian-led armies either. Part of the reason that the Empire initially didn’t treat the barbarians as a serious threat is that the Emperors had to devote a lot of their efforts to fighting off usurpers. Some general or other amassed sufficient loyalty from troops and decided to try his hand at becoming Emperor himself. In this context, most Emperors treated these usurpations as a much more urgent and existential threat to their rule. Barbarians causing problems at the periphery of the empire could wait, but if you got overthrown today, you were toast. To the extent that you thought of the barbarians much at all, they might have been viewed as potential auxiliary forces to be dragooned in to assist you in your battles.

Of course, problems at the periphery don’t always stay at the periphery.

We look back and see “Rome”, threatened and eventually defeated by invaders. But the people at the time saw their other Roman rivals for power as the real issue. Their main aim was not maximising Rome as an abstract idea, but maximising their own power and influence. The Empire itself was just taken for granted, and all the serious efforts were devoted to the real enemy within.

It doesn’t map exactly to the Blue State / Red State conflict we see today, but the parallels are definitely there.

In late Rome, mass migration of potentially hostile peoples can be seen as both symptom and contributing cause of decline. The migrations themselves had disastrous consequences (like the loss at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, the first major defeat of a Roman Field Army in centuries). But you can also see the immigration itself as happening due to a divided and weakened state, where it was increasingly hard to staff armies, increasingly hard to maintain order, and increasingly riven with violent internal conflicts for power.

Even if the correlation is there, cause and effect may go the other way - a weakened state is unable or unwilling to prevent mass migration. This is certainly what post-Roman Britain looked like. The people who started out as raiding parties ended up as settlers. There is some dispute as to whether the Saxons arrived en masse uninvited, or whether some of them were brought over as warriors by local warlords to assist in the defence against other raiders, and just ended up pushing out the warlords once they had enough numbers. But the effect was the same - Roman Britain became Saxon England. If your local warlord wasn't strong enough to resist, you ended up being ruled by a new foreign warlord.

And how many people are we talking? To quote Wyman:

How big did a migration have to be to be a mass migration? Thousands? Tens of Thousands? Hundreds of thousands of people? I think say tens of thousands would be enough to qualify. They didn't all come at the same time, or even from the same places along that North Sea coast. A few thousand migrants per year doesn't sound like many in the context of a region with a couple of million inhabitants, but over a century or so, that's a huge number. Remember that idea of cultural diffusion, too. If those immigrants disproportionately end up forming the dominant class in that society, they can reshape it dramatically.

Do you find yourself wondering if historians of the future will say the same thing about Europe and America?

And so what starts out as a simple one-sentence narrative – the Roman Empire was destroyed by a disastrous decision to let in the Goths – ends up more nuanced. The original statement still has a significant kernel of truth, and you can see how it fits in the bigger picture. But history is complicated, and the more you look at the details, the harder it is to attribute everything to a single cause.

It's tempting to look at history and think that our lack of understanding comes mostly from a lack of source material and information. But as a friend of mine AL who studied it seriously once put it , we have almost all the source material you could want on the Iraq War - does that mean we fully understand it? Not really. The challenge is always what the economists call identification - we are always trying to tease out causation from a single timeline of events.

The economist would say that there is no hope of real identification from this kind of messy history.

The historian  might counter that when the issues are important enough, it is worth making the best attempt at it possible, even if it's imperfect. If there's a chance that you might be living through another major civilisational decline, that seems to be worth trying to figure out.

The metres lost, the metres gained

What is gone, but still remembered, is quite vivid and easy to see. What is yet to come is often only perceived dimly, if at all.

For a reactionary, taking a walk through the Basilique de Saint Denis in Paris is a singular and sobering experience.

Inside the church are the remains of 34 of the 37 Kings of France. This is a glorious history spanning from 481 A.D. to (depending on how you want to mark it) either 1792 or 1848. Just ponder how long that really is, and how many nations and empires rose and fell in that time.

It all was brutally cut down in the French revolution, though it recurred in fits and starts during the general chaos that was France in the 19th century.

But the tragedy is made all the more poignant by the fact that the glory of the institution is so utterly forgotten as to be almost irrelevant in modern France.

If you turn up in Saint Denis, dear reader, you will probably have the place almost to yourself. As indeed I did when I was there. Just me, Charles Martel, Louis XIV, and Clovis I.

I remember once asking a French friend of mine, "How exactly is the French Revolution portrayed in French schools? Is it an unalloyed good? Mostly good? Mostly bad? A mixture of good and bad? Opinions differ between good and bad?"

"Oh, it's a good thing", he replied. "You know, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - those things hadn't been tried before."

Deciding to elide over his odd narrative of the history of freedom, I instead opted for the more specific:
"But what about the Terror? And the 90-odd years of political instability that followed?"

His reply, "Oh yeah, I guess we don't talk about that stuff so much."

To the French, the only French history worth studying begins with the Revolution. Everything before that seems to just be lazily lumped in under the heading of "tyranny".

As ahistorical and contemptible as this is, the surest sign that nobody gives a damn about learning any of this is that the Church at Saint Denis remains relatively unruffled despite being located in what is now a heavily Muslim area of Paris. The last I heard of it being in the news was back in 2015 when the terrorists in the 2015 attack  on Paris were killed by police in Saint Denis in a massive shootout. But as far as I know, there is little evidence of vandalism of the tombs in modern times (unlike the looting of all the valuables in the French revolution). The simple truth is that even among the Muslims in the area nobody even knows or cares enough to attack it as a symbol. They attack the real symbols of France - theatres, football stadiums, cafes and restaurants.

Charles Martel weeps.

So we have a glorious and storied history of the French monarchy, dating all the way back to Clovis I, assigned to the dustbin.

We can see what is lost alright. I admit that I, unlike my French friend, am far less optimistic about what has been gained.

But somewhere in the back of one's mind while wandering around the Church, an odd niggling question pokes its way to the surface, to disturb one's reverie and melancholy. A question which, indeed, I've wondered about before.

What does it even mean to be the first King of France? Who was this Clovis I fellow? And what on earth happened before that?

Even relatively educated people often have large swathes of gaping ignorance about history, myself included. At the time I was walking around there, I didn't know at all.

The first thing to clarify is that Clovis I wasn't exactly the first King of France. Rather, he was the first King of the Franks. France is an area and a country - that came later. The Franks are a people, or a tribe.

And who were the Franks?

To give you the shortest and pithiest answer, you probably have heard of them and their exploits, but mostly under a different name.

They were the barbarians, destroying and preying on the last vestiges of the Western Roman Empire.

I've been learning about this in Patrick Wyman's excellent podcast series, The Fall of Rome.

They may not have been the Visigoths, sacking Rome under Alaric in 410, or the even more destructive Vandals, sacking it again in 455.

But make no mistake, if you were a supporter of the existing civilisational order at the time, you would have experienced the rise of Clovis I mostly in terms of his turning on and eventually defeating the few remaining serious Roman forces, such as at the Battle of Soissons in 486, and in his consolidating power over the other barbarian tribes.

In other words, Clovis became King of the Franks because he killed all the other Frankish chieftains and leaders, eventually uniting the various barbarian armies and tribes under his rule. That was how you became the first King of the Franks. What this replaced was the prior status of being one warlord of many, among a loose confederation of ethnically related tribes.

As Wyman points out in a number of places, during this period there wasn't actually a sharp distinction between concepts such as
i) 'an invading barbarian army',
ii) 'a barbarian people on the move' (since armies in those days often traveled with soldiers' wives and children, who lived with them), and
iii) 'a Roman army lead by a barbarian general with mixed Roman and barbarian troops' (since barbarians had fought on behalf of Rome, in one form or another, for a long time before this, and many of the leaders of this period were either allied with Rome or nominally Roman subordinates at some point, Clovis included) ,

Moreover, in the general disarray of this period, it's also hard to know how much to view the increasing power of these armies as the cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire, or just the symptom of other groups rising to fill the increasing power vacuum left in the wake of the collapsing state. The distinction is not a clear one, and it doesn't much change what it would have been like to be on the receiving end of it.

If you were a Roman, living through the destruction of the society and structures that had ruled for 800 years, it would be extraordinarily difficult to look at savages like the Franks and see the possibility for a glorious future monarchy lasting 1300-odd years.

You would only see chaos, slaughter, and despair.

And for a long time, you would be right. There are not many fun stories out of Europe in the 6th Century, or the 7th or 8th for that matter.

But out of the chaos and carnage eventually rose the 37 Kings of France.

I confess, in my darker moments it is indeed quite difficult to look around at this fallen world of ours and see anything but societal decay, warded off only temporarily by technology.

Perhaps right now, that's all there is. But whether this is true or not, your perceptions are apt to make it likely to seem that way. You would have an easier time guessing who will be seen as the Valentinian III of our era than who might ultimately be seen as our Clovis I.

What is being lost is easy to see.

It takes much more judgment to look at the chaos and see the potential in what is yet to come.

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

On the lessons of fall of Rome

To anyone of a vaguely reactionary persuasion, the fall of Rome is a melancholy and tantalising story. The inescapable conclusion, no matter how exactly you explain the fall, is that progress is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Civilisation is fragile, and can be destroyed by a sequence of wrong decisions. 

This fact used to be widely appreciated - empires and civilisations were considered to be subject to cycles of rise, power, decay and fall. You can see this, for instance, in Thomas Cole's series of paintings, "The Course of Empire", painted between 1833-1836.


The Savage State


The Arcadian or Pastoral State


The Consummation of Empire


Destruction


Desolation

Of course, we live in an age where Whig history is the only history there is. Americans seem to contemplate the possible end of the glorious American experiment the way most people contemplate death. That is to say, not very often. And when they do, usually only when pressed on the issue, they'll acknowledge that it probably will happen eventually, but then they act as if it is only likely to occur in a very long time.

Then again, that's what the Romans thought too.

Which, to the conservative, makes the matter more alarming. Thinking you're not about to collapse and be overrun is a relatively weak indicator that you aren't, in fact, about to collapse and be overrun.

And in some sense, the modern American position is less forgivable than the Roman one. Today, we have the Romans as an example to consider. When Rome fell, there had not been any comparably long-lived Empire that had ever gotten that far, let alone one that had and had subsequently collapsed.

And while the inevitability of decay is true, the timeline iteslf is not. The other view is the less fatalistic one - try to figure out what exactly Rome did wrong, and try to make sure the same mistake isn't made again, to at least cheat the reaper a little longer. Such as not letting in barbarian hordes in numbers so large that they can sack your capital.

This is true, and a very useful exercise. But it's necessarily quite speculative. Why, exactly, did Rome let in the Goths, and could that have been changed? Harder to say. Would it have fallen anyway at some subsequent point not too long after? Even harder to say.

But there is one lesson that does seem useful, if understudied.

As I've written about before, the major blind spot of many Europeans (pace the Greeks) is that they equate the end of Rome with the end of the Roman Empire. But this was only the end of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire, in Byzantium, continued on for roughly another thousand years. It may not have advanced to the same heights as the former, but you'd much rather be living there in 483AD than in Rome.

Which seems to suggest that if the collapse is coming, partition and separation may offer a better chance for partial survival.

The attitude of the West on these matters begins to resemble the process that Paul Fussell described pithily, if depressingly, about World War I:

This "slowly dawning and dreadful realisation" usually occurs as a result of two stages of rationalization and one of accurate perception:

1. It can't happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced / etc.

This persuasion gradually erodes into:

2. It can happen to me, and I'd better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by keeping extra alert at all times / watching more prudently the way I take cover or dig in or expose my position by firing my weapon / etc.

This conviction attenuates in turn to the perception that death and injury are matters more of bad luck than lack of skill, making inevitable the third stage of awareness:

3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it.

An individual may pack up and move, of course, but a country cannot.

A region can, however, choose to not be part of the same dysfunctional polity that is about to collapse.

Easier said than done, unfortunately. Rome had the virtue of having a Diocletian. America, however, does not.

Of the Personal and Statistical

The current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is a tragedy.

Should that sentence strike regular readers as a little trite, bear with me. I mean it in the classical sense that the Greeks thought of tragedy.

It is calamitous, deplorable, cathartic. It is a sorrowful tale of human misery stemming from root causes of human folly and flaws. It is a tale whose outcome the audience knows in advance, as they have seen the story many times before. It could have been prevented, perhaps, but we all knew it wasn't going to be.

The modern bastardisation of the concept of tragedy is that of a simple morality play, where good and evil are clearly delineated ahead of time. In the Disney-fied version, the upshot of all the sorrow is the lesson that Something Must Be Done.

I feel much has been lost by the Disney-fication of drama. We can no longer see the sadness of tradeoffs, of characters who are simultaneously victims and authors of their own misfortune, of the inevitability of human suffering.

So what, then, is the ultimate tragedy on display in this case?

It is this:

Individually, any one person is the undeserving and unfortunate victim of their broken society.

Collectively, all the people in a society are the reason that the society is broken in the first place.

Now, my instincts regarding public policy lean strongly towards emphasising the general, statistical formulation over the particular, personal formulation. The formulation as written may seem to suggest the primacy of the second statement over the first.

But do not misunderstand me here. It would not be a tragedy if it had such a simple resolution as that. Both parts are true. Try just reversing the order of the two statements to get a different feeling. The most common statement about the general and the specific has a very different connotation about which should be preferred. It is attributed, perhaps apocryphally but understandably, to the great monster - one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

The specific of the Syrian refugee exodus you have almost certainly seen by now. It is heartbreaking, and does not need any particular explanation:



Oof. The sheer sorrow hits you like a punch in the guts.

People's second thoughts after seeing this photo will vary wildly. You may be furious at the policies that let this happen. You may be suspicious of your emotions being manipulated here. You may wonder about what should be done in response. This is the intellectual question - what you make of it all.

But before that, I am almost certain your first thoughts, like mine, were of sadness and despair. Imagine if that were your child.

Humans are endowed with two great traits - empathy and reasoning. Those without empathy are sociopaths and monsters. Those without reasoning are dangerous imbeciles and fools.

Empathy yearns to try to end this senseless suffering by those in the middle of this war by granting them refuge. This is attempting to ward off the Scylla of heartless cynicism, and the gleeful egg-breaking-in-the-pursuit-of-omelettes that characterised the worst tyrants of the 20th century.

But what, then is the Charybdis? What gets ignored if we do not think about the general proposition?

Reasoning wants to know why Syria is the way it is, and what consequences will flow from possible responses to the current war.

What tends to get seldom emphasised in the face of such grief above is the heuristic I always associate with John Derbyshire (though I can't remember exactly where he wrote it) - that the more migrants you bring in from country X, the more your own country will resemble country X.

Several things are notable about this proposition.

One, it is extremely straightforward.

Two, it does not depend on one particular theory of development, and holds for many socially acceptable theories. If you think that poverty is driven by childhood nutrition, the result still holds, as long as the current adults are already impacted by malnutrition from years past. If you think that current ethnic conflict has its roots in colonial history, the result still holds, as long as the hatreds do not disappear upon touching foreign soil. As long as the trait is observable in citizens and fixed in the short term, then the Derbyshire result holds at least in the short term.

Third, it is completely outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion.

But is it true? You will have to decide that for yourself. The general result is always uncertain and contingent in a way that the emotional result is not. You have to dig a little deeper to find out. Why is Syria the way it is? And how much of that will be replicated if there is extensive Syrian immigration to a western country, such as from a refugee resettlement program? Hard to say, precisely. But here's something to ponder, from Australia in 2012:

A forum discussion on SBS TV's Insight program looking at the uprising in Syria further exposed the divide amongst Syrian Australians over the conflict....

The main sectarian divide in Australia's Syrian community, though, is between the two main Islamic sects, Shi'a and Sunni....

In February, a group of men stormed the Syrian embassy in Canberra, smashing up the ground floor.

Three staff members were there at the time but no one was hurt.

Just days later, there was a shooting in Sydney apparently linked to the Syrian conflict.

The injured man, Ali Ibrahim, was an Alawi, like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

After expressing pro-Assad views on Facebook, he was shot three times in the legs on the doorstep of his home.

His father, Jamel el-Ali, believed it was a warning from the anti-Assad camp.

It doesn't punch you in the guts in quite the same manner, does it?

But to the thinking person, rather than the feeling person, alarm bells are ringing. Australia did not used to be a country where embassies were stormed and people were shot for expressing political views in public forums. At the moment, this is at a small scale. But how many Syrians can one admit before this is no longer the case? If you bring all of Syria into your country, will you not have simply replicated Syria somewhere else?

This is all well and good, the particularist responds, but how many dead children are you willing to see washed up on a beach in order to forestall this speculative possibility?

It's a good question.

To get a flavor for the generalist argument, it is sometimes necessary to examine it in contexts that do not raise immediate emotional responses. Such as, for instance, the late Roman Empire's decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of Goths. Steve Sailer has a great summary of Edward Gibbon's take on the consequences of that here.

I suspect that the particularist temptation is to wave this away as a largely abstract and irrelevant example. It doesn't resonate emotionally, that's for sure.

But the human catastrophe that resulted from the destruction of the Western Roman Empire was a tragedy that affected Europe for the next thousand years.

If you're waving that away, which one of us is sounding like Stalin now?

The Charybdis, in other words, is that you become so focused on the emotional response to a single death that you forget to think about the long-term consequences of your actions, and end up causing many more deaths.

To my mind, the starting point of the answer, is to shut up and multiply.

This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

Whether a policy makes you feel good is less important than its ultimate consequences. Of course, this then comes back to your view of why the third world is the third world. This is why 'shut up and multiply' is only the start of the answer, not the end of it.

It would be ideal if the policy formulation that saved the most lives in the long run also made you feel emotionally good in the short run.

But what if the two aims are at odds? Are you willing to look clear-eyed on the photos of dead children and still see the lives that you think you're saving by not doing anything? Will you waver? Should you waver?

Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.

On London's greatness past

It is interesting to compare the fate of two St Paul’s Churches. The one in London was famously and mercifully intact and mostly unharmed after the German bombing during the blitz. Which was a pretty darn lucky outcome:


The Paulskirche in Frankfurt (which I wrote about here), however, was bombed out, and rebuilt hurriedly afterwards in a deliberately modern style to strip out nearly all of the original church elements. As a result, it’s a bland whitewashed circular room, where the only parts of interest are the flags from different regions and an organ at the front. It’s as if the post office were charged with building an assembly hall.

St Paul’s in London manages to capture both the glory and tragedy of Britain. The glory is in the rich history from when it was a world-bestriding empire. The tragedy, of course, is that the modern version of Britain is a shriveled, diminished entity, squatting in the remains left over from when it was still a serious country. Instead of Winston Churchill or Pitt the Elder, we have David Bloody Cameron. Put briefly, there is almost nothing good in Britain – institutional, architectural, cultural, literary, even for the most part scientific - dating from after 1945. Ponder that, if you will. Even the graffiti these days is worse. Consider the relative elegance of the lettering on this carving inside the stairwell of St Paul's.

But if you want to see what Britain once was, look at St Paul’s Crypt. What an inspiring monument to great men! The statues and plaques tell you what the society at the time valued. Most of them are tales of heroism, sacrifice, and leadership. Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington are justly revered, as are a number of military figures who died securing what was ultimately a victory. There is a large proportion of people from military backgrounds, but important people from other walks are represented too – Joseph Turner, John Constable, Christopher Wren, William Blake, Samuel Johnson. The only category of greatness that seems relatively underrepresented, for some reason, is science. If you are any kind of historian, it won't escape your notice that some of the accounts tend towards hagiography – you probably didn’t want to be on the receiving end of Lord Kitchener or General Gordon, for instance. It also becomes apparent that the men were drawn largely from the nobility. But rather than this fact being a source of embarrassment, as it would be today, it was a source of pride. This was how things were meant to be – nobility meant the requirement to perform acts of valor and leadership, often (in the military context) ending up killed in the process. These are not the tombs of kings or idle nobility. These are the tombs of citizens who were beloved enough by their countrymen for their deeds to warrant a place in the halls.

To take one random example that made my Australian heart glad, I was pleased to see the memorial to our former Governor General, the great Viscount Slim:

What kind of testimony does such a person produce from his contemporaries?

George MacDonald Fraser, later author of the Flashman novels, then a nineteen-year-old lance corporal, recalled:
"But the biggest boost to morale was the burly man who came to talk to the assembled battalion … it was unforgettable. Slim was like that: the only man I've ever seen who had a force that came out of him...British soldiers don't love their commanders much less worship them; Fourteenth Army trusted Slim and thought of him as one of themselves, and perhaps his real secret was that the feeling was mutual."

Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely has recommended Slim's memoirs (Defeat into Victory) (1956) describing Slim as "perhaps the Greatest Commander of the 20th Century"

Military historian Max Hastings:
"In contrast to almost every other outstanding commander of the war, Slim was a disarmingly normal human being, possessed of notable self-knowledge. He was without pretension, devoted to his wife, Aileen, their family and the Indian Army. His calm, robust style of leadership and concern for the interests of his men won the admiration of all who served under him ... His blunt honesty, lack of bombast and unwillingness to play courtier did him few favours in the corridors of power. Only his soldiers never wavered in their devotion."

That, my friends, is what greatness looks like.

But you will notice, if you look closely, a subtle change in the recent memorials. The last monuments to specific heroism date back to World War 2. Society is now so pathologically egalitarian that greatness often makes us uncomfortable. The only modern military memorials in St Paul's crypt are for groups, not individuals – lists of the dead from wars. What is celebrated is their sacrifice, not their achievement. And this is why all the dead are listed equally, as is common and indeed appropriate to war memorials. But St Pauls Crypt was formerly not primarily a war memorial, whose function was solemn remembrance of loss and sacrifice – it was a triumphal place of individual greatness and heroism. And that is something we no longer do. The only individual greatness we celebrate any more is athletic, and to a lesser extent, commercial (Steve Jobs, for instance). But neither would appropriately be described as fields of heroism. Instead, heroism, to the extent that the now-devalued term is used, is identified with actions mostly formed on compassion, rather than on achievement. Today's "heroes" are more likely to be people caring for the unfortunate, or looking after a sick or dying relative. That is noble, and praiseworthy, and admirable. But it is not heroic.

One view you might form is that such heroism no longer exists. But it does. If you doubt it, read at random some of the recent awardees of the Medal of Honor or the Victoria Cross. We simply do not celebrate it.

Doubt it not, if St Paul's had been destroyed during the London Blitz, whatever version they rebuilt would have never had most of the current monuments inside, if they included any at all. It seems more likely that they would have scrapped the whole idea altogether.

More shame us.

Update:

As if to emphasise the contrast, here's a modern individual memorial they are willing to include:

Working for nuclear disarmament, eh? How's that going? How would you compare that with, say, the Battle of Waterloo?

Are you, like me, embarrassed on behalf of modernity?

Notes from Heidelberg

-If you want to see how long-lived civic effects can operate, just compare Mannheim and Heidelberg. Both have quite famous universities. One also has the BASF chemical factory next door, and hence was bombed flat in World War 2. The other one is fairly well preserved. Hence, 70 years later, one is a kind of ugly but functional university town, and the other is chock a block with Japanese tourists. The relative price of old German buildings got a lot higher after WW2.

-Regarding the above, the spectre of the war still hangs heavy over the country, with little reminders like this everywhere you go. I well understand the rationale for why the towns were bombed, brutal though it was. If you don't believe me, read Paul Fussel's arrestingly-titled 'Thank God for the Atom Bomb'. Still, when you see how pretty Heidelberg is and how ugly Mannheim is, it made me sad for how much of German history was lost in WW2. But then I realised how much I was doing exactly what the War Nerd skewered so well in his great column on why Sherman was right to burn Atlanta:

But there does happen to be one demographic—an arguably insane one, indeed—which does not accept that war is cruel: the bitter white Southern neo-Confederate one to which Leigh belongs. For them, war was wonderful when it was just brave Southern gentlemen killing 360,000 loyal American soldiers.

That was the good war, as far as they were concerned. War became “intrinsically cruel” for them when that dastardly Sherman started visiting its consequences on rural Georgia, burning or destroying all supplies that could be used by the Confederate armies which had been slaughtering American troops for several years. Oh, that bad, bad Sherman!

You know what’s worse than a little girl asking “Mister Soldier” not to burn her house? Getting your leg sawed off by a drunken corpsman after a Minie ball fired by traitors turned your femur into bone shards. Or getting a letter that your son died of gangrene in one of those field hospitals where the screaming never stopped, and the stench endured weeks after the army had moved on. 

Of course, this is all lost on the Phil Leighs of the world, who—for reasons that cut deep into the ideology of the American right wing—always take burnt houses too seriously, and dead people far too lightly. To them, burning a house is a crime, while shooting a Yankee soldier in the eye is just part of war’s rich tapestry. So their horror of messing with private property joins their sense of emasculation, and their total ignorance of what war on one’s home ground actually means, to form a sediment that could never have been cured, even temporarily, except by the river of armed humanity Sherman sent pouring south and east from Atlanta on November 15, 1864. That cold shower woke them for a little while, at least—long enough to quicken the end of the war and save thousands of lives.

He's right, of course. In the context of the horror and atrocity of World War 2's 50-odd million dead, it is obscene to be worrying about lost buildings. The lost buildings, however, are salient and visible. The mountains of corpses, by contrast, are long gone.

 -I was talking to a German man, age early 30s or so. He was saying how his grandfather lived in Leipzig, which was also heavily bombed by the incendiary fire-bomb method. But the thing that his grandfather figured out is that the way these bombs worked is that they were just a flammable gel dropped into the house - the effects came because they set other stuff on fire, but only once they'd had a chance to get the blaze going. Of course, this always happened, because people hide in their basements during bombing raids. But the guy's grandfather decided instead to keep large piles of sand and buckets of water on all floors of his house. He put his family in the basement, and when a bomb went through the roof, he extinguished it. When the bombing raid was over, every other house on the street had been burnt to the ground, except his.

-Walking up the steep hill to the castle in Heidelberg, it gives one a strong sense of the wisdom of Sun Tzu's observation that 'it is a military axiom not to advance uphill against the enemy, nor to oppose him when he comes downhill'. I would not like to advance up that road while fighting hand-to-hand combat with swords and getting showered with arrows.

-For a reactionary like me, there is something quite stirring in seeing a castle with statues of kings from hundreds of years in the past. The tradition hangs thick in the air, in a way that is hard to describe. We indeed live in a kingless age.

-From the castle, I watched the sun set for the first time in quite a while. Because of the fog/smog/haze, the sun was a deep red while still relatively high in the sky, and actually faded into nothing before reaching the horizon. The last time I remember seeing this, incidentally, was 15 years ago in Munich. Perhaps there's something about German sunsets.

Thoughts from Frankfurt

-I never tire while in foreign countries of seeing the subtle differences in appearance of people. German men often have a certain demeanor about them that always seems very recognisable - soft-spoken, small wry smile, horn-rimmed glasses, well-dressed with clothes that are cut a little tighter than American or Australian fashion. I actually was reminded of it just by the clerk at the front desk of the hotel when I arrived. It's a different look from, say, the Danes, where I've spent a bit of time. Of course, a good part of this is probably just the power of suggestion - recognising Germanness once you know the nationality is a lot easier than being able to guess German heritage based on appearance alone. Based on the number of questions I've received in German while walking through the streets, apparently I don't look sufficiently Australian (or American, as some might argue is more relevant these days) for me to be identifiable as a foreigner.

-Another contrast between Frankfurt and Copenhagen is the nature of the public squares. Both cities share the same narrow, walkable streets common to cities designed before the automobile. But in central Copenhagen, huge swathes are filled with gorgeous old architecture from centuries in the past. Frankfurt, by contrast, had the misfortune of being bombed flat in 1944. No, really:



This, as it turns out was doubly unfortunate. Firstly, being bombed flat is bad news at the best of times. But the mid-1940's was far from the best of times aesthetically, because it meant that the city was being rebuilt just as the west was getting into some of the most ghastly forms of architecture in history. Hence even in the Frankfurt squares with old-looking buildings, not only are they noticeably of recent vintage, but they're next to horrible 50's and 60's looking square concrete and glass monstrosities. A shame, really. Wars have consequences, that's for sure. At least things improved with the modern skyscrapers, which are much nicer. I got to see the Commerzbank Tower up close, which I remember from a desktop photo on my old computer years ago, where the shape made it look like it was only half finished with bits sticking up off the top.



-I wrote last time from Copenhagen about the pleasures of walking idly through foreign cities. I can't improve much on those notes, except that since then I learned that the French have a term for this kind of activity - Flânerie, with me taking the role of the Flâneur.

-For a recovering introvert who occasionally enjoys relapsing into his natural state, it is glorious to be a monolingual English speaker in Germany. Nearly all the service staff here speak English, so you can order whatever you want (when you're trying to spend money, most people will find a way to figure out what you want). In addition, the museums are courteous enough to put nearly all their explanations in English and German (there was even a public statue of Goethe that had a translation of the plaque in English too - not sure what Goethe would have thought of that). But more than that, it is an active pleasure to not speak German. Especially in museums, most people's conversations are inane and distracting. When they're in a language you understand, you can't help but listen, even when it's annoying. But when it's just unintelligible German, you observe the people at a pleasant sociological distance, and their conversation is just the linguistic curiosity of different sound combinations than what you're used to.

-I went to an Impressionist exhibit at the art museum here, helpfully titled 'Monet' in huge letters. Of course, at least half the paintings weren't actually by Monet, but the museum folks know what sells. Just show the rubes some paintings and call them all Monet, they won't know the difference! I imagine Cezanne and Degas are spinning in their graves, but hey, what are you going to do?

-There was one aspect of the Monet exhibit that was really striking. In some of the side rooms, they displayed some contemporaneous black and white photographs of some of the areas being depicted in the paintings - men in row boats on rivers with cypresses next to them, Parisian street scenes with horses and carts. The effect was really quite shocking. The photographs looked incredibly drab and mundane. All these glorious scenes that one had simply imagined to be like the beautiful paintings instead looked like everyday stuff that you would walk past. Of course, they looked old, but in a vaguely dirty and primitive way, not in a romantic way. The effect was rather similar to when one sees photos of famous celebrities without their makeup on, and they look ugly and ordinary. It struck me that Impressionist painting does a similar job to makeup and a soft focus lens - brushing out the details that make the world imperfect and familiar. No wonder people like it, especially when they have very little sense of what the original source material was.

-In the Paulskirche church, they have a fascinating history of German politics during the 19th century. The building was the house of the first German Parliament, after the Germanic states started to unite once Napoleon no longer ran the place. The stories of the politicians really emphasise the Moldbug point about how much the world has moved left over time. Back then, the 'radical far left' believed that there should be democracy under universal (male) suffrage. The far right wanted the restoration of rule by hereditory aristocrats. Worth bearing mind next time someone talks about how 'extreme' the modern Republican party has become. What was also remarkable reading the stories is seeing right wing movements actually win for once. And decisively, too - the German parliament was shuttered. Take that, modernity! Of course, seeing where this increased nationalism ended up puts a bit of a dampener on the whole thing. But it depends where you finish the line - if you chart things up to World War I, the Allies hardly come off looking more civilised or just in their cause than the Axis powers. If you see German politics as a continual line from the mid-1800s to the Nazi party (which I suspect most modern Germans do), then it's a lot more problematic. Then again, the continuation from socialism to Communist atrocities is hardly edifying either, but somehow the left never seems to lose much sleep over that one. Cthulu swims left, after all, except for a hundred odd years in Germany.

Six Degrees of "Germany Should Pay"

Every time I hear EU politicians speak (other than a few hilarious exceptions), I like to mentally play a game called 'Six Degrees of "Germany Should Pay"'.

A la 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon', the prediction is that from the initial premise of the argument, within six steps of the chain of logic will come the conclusion that German taxpayers ought to be contributing more money.

For instance, here's one I heard a little while ago:

-Different European banks currently face a variety of different regulatory regimes, so...

-To overcome the discrepancies in liquidity and solvency that this creates, Europe needs a central banking regulator, so...

-As part of having a central banking regulator, there will be the need to have a central bank deposit guarantee, so...

-This will mean the need for a fund to bail out insolvent European banks, so...

-Germany should pay!

Here's one I didn't prepare in advance, taken from a random Google search of 'EU Politician Proposals'

EP President Schulz Proposes Economic (Bubble) Zones for Greece under EU Control

Let me merely number the quotes taken directly from the article, with the verbiage removed

Growth-Plan: Special Economic Zones to rescue Greece

[1] Greece has enacted a rigorous austerity program, but the country also needs a strategy to get the economy back on growth track.

(blah blah, boilerplate about creating growth)

[2] Cuts alone would not bring growth, Schulz said in a SPIEGEL interview, “so I’m looking for a special economic zone in Greece.”

[3] For it, a “Growth Agency” should be created, Schulz demands.

[4] In this agency, European and Greek politicians should jointly identify promoting eligible projects and control the cash flows.

(blah blah PR nonsense)

[5] Prerequisite for this SEZ is a commitment to the euro in Greece, a willingness to reform in Athens and investment allowances for companies that invest in Greece. And so... (drumroll)...

[6] Germany should pay!

And that's being generous with what counts as a step.

Try it with a few others and see how often I'm wrong.

As I've said, the $1 trillion question is when German taxpayers are going to get sick of of their designated role as  the chumps at the table week after week buying dinner for their friends who mysteriously keep forgetting their wallets. Let's kick that horse a little longer and find out!

There's a related EU politician game of 'Six Degrees of "Europe Needs Greater Centralisation"', but that's less fun to play because the number of degrees rarely exceeds two.

Just Circling the Drain Isn't Nearly Fast Enough! We Need A Vacuum Pump!

Some people think that Europe is a bloated, worthless bureacratic state that has managed to transform an attitude of self-important entitlement amongst its citizenry into some of the most inflexible labour regulations on the planet.

Some people may think that such regulations, making labour ever more costly and ever more difficult to fire, contribute to the massive unemployment and economic stagnation that has seen large parts of Europe unable to repay their national debt, thereby threatening the existence of the Euro and the economic security of European countries.

Some people may think that as the Euro, and European economies, appear to be on the brink of collapse, it would behoove any sensible leaders to be doing all they can to address these problems.

Some people may think that Europe's leaders, institutions, and ultimately, voters, have proven themselves unwilling or unable to address these issues, and would rather vote for more government-provided lollipops even as their countries collapse around them.

Such people are clearly nothing but embittered, Euro-hating capitalist pigs. And here to prove this to them comes the European Court of Justice! Their latest ruling is, as the New York Times puts it:

[W]orkers who happened to get sick on vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation.

Yep, that's going to be just the shot in the arm that sluggish European economies need. All those unemployed citizens who were afraid to take jobs because they worried that being sick might eat into their holiday time will now flood back into the labour force, reinvigorating national output and tax coffers.

Master of moral hazard, these clowns at the ECJ don't appear to have considered the possibility that claiming you were ill while in Tahiti is very difficult to disprove, and thereby easily allows workers to effortlessly expand their vacation time. Which, in case you Yanks had forgotten, currently is between four and six weeks.

Somebody give these countries a bailout!

At least the New York Times Reporter seems to have a sense of humour about the whole thing, evidenced by his closing line:

The ruling does not apply to the 25 percent of the Spanish labor force that is currently unemployed.

Ha! You don't say.

An exact model of Venice in 1744

Venice is a strange place.

I get this sense every time you see paintings of it from hundreds of years ago. This, for instance, is St Mark's square around 1742/1744



(image credit)

So how does it look today?

Well, something like this:



(image credit)

In other words, it's basically identical. The clothes of the people are different, and there's now cafe seating in some areas. There's also pigeons, which don't seem to feature in the early paintings. But that's about the only differences.

This isn't just for this particular view either. In lots of cities, there are some buildings that haven't changed in a long time - Notre Dame, the Houses of Parliament, the White House. But in Venice, virtually every famous painted scene in Venice looks nigh-on identical today, hundreds of years later.

I can't think of any other place remotely similar. In 1744, Manhattan was a few buildings. Sydney was nothing but bush, save for a few Aboriginal dwellings.

So why did Venice get frozen in time, when everywhere else changed?

I have only crude ideas.

One of them, though, comes from the massively different cost of new buildings. If you have a house that's situated on a canal, even today it ain't exactly simple to get a bulldozer in there to knock it down. It's probably easier to maintain it in roughly its current state. In addition, the original buildings were incredibly beautiful. This didn't stop people elsewhere knocking down glorious Victorian architecture, but it at least reduces the incentive somewhat.

I imagine it also helps that Venice has been on a path of economic decline since the 15th century.When there's increasing demand for land, people will bowl over formerly valuable buildings to make way for new ones. But if the place is in decline, there's less desire to build more valuable structures on the same scarce land. By the time Venice did display some economic liveliness in the 20th century, it was largely as a tourist town, by which point the buildings and scenery were the source of revenue.

But in the end, sometimes the what is more interesting than the why. It's only when you see how similar everything was hundreds of years ago that you realise you're walking through a living museum.

History has ultimately given us the answer to the question posed in Robert Browning's wonderful poem,
"A Toccata of Galuppi's". Browning's narrator is reflecting on what became of the past splendour of Venetian society, with its lavish hedonism of masked balls:

"As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
"Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:
"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

What was left, indeed?

The buildings.

When a society is strong, they are the badge of its vitality, the mark of economic dynamism that can produce exquisite architecture in the middle of the ocean.

When the society has decayed, they stand as a sombre reminder that decline arrives first in production. Eventually, everything from a fallen society crumbles to dust. But before that comes an intermediate stage - the monuments are still there, but the means to produce new ones has disappeared. All you can do is cling on to what remains of the past, forever cognisant of the rebuke it provides to the present.

Charles Krauthammer recently noted something similar about the retiring of the space shuttle.

I wonder if one day people will walk through Manhattan in the same way.

"Austerity Measures"

So Greece has been rioting again, as the parliament passed a set of "austerity measures" designed to combat their rampant budget deficit.

This headline from The Daily Beast is instructive, and typical of the way it gets written up:

Greece Riots: Have Greeks Had Enough of Austerity?

This is why it has been such a marketing disaster to call these rounds of budget cuts "austerity measures".

Austerity implies that the relevant aspect of these cuts is a kind of severity, a harshness of measures designed to achieve a strong outcome. More tellingly, it implies a choice. Austerity describes an action you take to limit your intake of something to more humble, and less pleasant, levels.

And who wants that?! Nobody. I've had enough of this austerity! Let's go back to the days of plenty.

The message that needs to be gotten into the heads of the marginal Greek voter is the following: riot all you want, but those days ain't coming back. Not if Greece defaults. Not if Greece raises taxes. Not if Greece prints money.

If it were me, I'd call these 'The New Normal Cuts'. That ought to indicate the correct mindset. Get used to it, because this is how it's going to be. I'd also settle for the "There's No More Money, Because It's All Been Spent Cuts". It's been spent, and borrowed, and spent again. And now there's nothing left, and no private investor with two braincells to rub together is going to lend the Greek government money again any time soon.

Because this is the problem - you can default on the debt, but it doesn't make the deficit go away. And once you default, you've got very little chance of being able to finance that deficit with borrowing at any reasonable rate. So sooner or later, the pensions and the government wages will get cut, by hook or by crook. The only other option is printing money to close the budget deficit, which is the triumph of imbeciles who think that money illusion is a fast track to prosperity. Sadly, it doesn't take much experience of hyperinflation to realise that this isn't actually the case. Ask Zimbabwe how it's working out.

These aren't the austerity cuts. These are the reality cuts. Which is why the headline is so inane:

Greece Riots: Have Greeks Had Enough of Reality?

You bet they have. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Tolstoy, you may not be interested in fiscal reality, but fiscal reality is interested in you.

Raise Those Prices, Jean-Pierre - The French Government Demands It

The French are determined to continue their unofficial national motto of 'Le Ass, Le Gas or Le Grass - Nobody Can Provide Stuff For Free'.

Check out this classic decision - Google Maps was fined for providing maps for free to businesses.

In a ruling Tuesday, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc. for providing free web mapping services to some businesses....

The French company provides the same services for a fee and claimed the Google strategy was aimed at undercutting competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.

Trying to provide maps for free, eh? That'll cost you 500,000 euros!

It's true that Google has begun charging for corporations that make large use of their mapping service.

So what can developers do against this vicious, anti-competitive behaviour?

One option is to switch to free, open-source mapping services. Which some companies have indeed started doing.

Now, you may look at this as evidence that there's plenty of competition for Google's free service.

But that just shows that you don't understand French courts! No, instead it is the open source mapping service being equally, if not more, anti-competitive. Once their open source product has driven out the competition, think how much they'll be able to exploit consumers by jacking up their prices!

This is of course in line with the French government putting mandatory prices on books, both electronic and paper. That'll teach you to try to sell products more cheaply.

Never mind that the benefits of lower prices tend to flow the most to the poor.

The French Government - putting the liberté in liberté économique.