I have no enemies ... I've had them all shot

'Do you forgive your enemies?' a nineteenth century Duke of Valencia [this one] is asked on his deathbed in a famous Spanish anecdote. 'I have no enemies,' he retorts, 'I've had them all shot.'


J. Morris, Spain (1964. revised 1979), 47

She has a fatal weakness for the past

Party it is plain old-fashionedness that makes Spain feel so special. She has a fatal weakness for the past. When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved to the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic. She retained her medieval values when they had long been abandoned elsewhere in Europe, so at the Spanish universities in the eighteenth century they were still wondering whether Copernicus was right,  and anxiously debating whether sky was made of metal or fluid.

J. Morris, Spain (1964. revised 1979), 26

More often plunging helplessly downwards in a welter of despair and recrimination

Spanish geographers are very fond of elevation graphs - diagrams which, by cutting an imaginary slice through the Iberian Peninsula, show how its altitudes vary from sea to sea. If you apply this approach to the slab of Spanish history, you will find that though the graph is often bumpy, its general outline is all too sadly simple.From the beginning of history to the sixteenth century, the Spaniards gradually climbed towards the pinnacle of their success - hindered often by wars and invasions, but steadily accumulating wealth, culture, prestige, and unity. From the sixteenth century until our times, on the other hand, they have been constantly slithering downhill, sometimes bravely digging their heels in, more often plunging helplessly downwards in a welter of despair and recrimination. Spanish history does not form a happy pattern, but at least it looks symmetrical.

J. Morris, Spain (1964. revised 1979), 12

[Burke]

[The state] becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Each contract of the particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society.

Individuals were tenants, not freeholders, of the political communities into which they had been born, by which they had been shaped and into which their descendants would be born in turn. From that insight sprang an ethic of stewardship, closer to today's Greens than to any conventional political party, and utterly at variance with the Trinity of Choice, Freedom and the Individual.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 199

I obviously agree with the author's and commentator's lines here. I find the identification of this approach with the Greens alone preposterous.

Democracy has never been a single monolithic entity available for export to all parts of the world

Democracy has never been a single monolithic entity available for export to all parts of the world, as George W. Bush and Tony Blair imagined. It is plural, not singular; it depends on tacit understandings of particular cultures as much as on formal rules. ... For Abraham Lincoln, democracy meant 'government of the people, by the people, for the people. For the British High Tory Leo Amery it meant 'government of the people, for the people, with but not by the people'.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 154

I am with Amery, save I do not believe that is democracy, though it is desirable.

They did not emerge peacefully from the womb of philosophical or legal argument. They were secured by political action and debate.

But they [Human rights] are not the only rights that sustain the bonds of the United Kingdom's public realm. Supplementing them are more specifically British rights, such as the right to strike; the right to free health care; the right to safe working conditions; the right to equal pay for equal work; and the right t free primary and secondary education. Most of these British rights have foreign analogues but that does not detract from their British origins. They did not emerge peacefully from the womb of philosophical or legal argument. They were secured by political action and debate. .... [The Public Realm] is a gift of history, precious but also vulnerable. We, and not just remote elites, are responsible for its health; it is up to us to make sure it survives and prospers. We demean ourselves if we try to shuffle off the primordial responsibility onto others.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 97-98

What follows (p. 103-109) is excellent on the history.

Was there really no one in the White House or No. 10 Downing Street who remembered Kipling?

However, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are the the grossest examples of what presentism mean in practice. No one with any knowledge of the murky manoeuvres that carved what is now Iraq out of the defeated Ottoman Empire after the First World War could possibly have thought it a good idea to try, by force of arms, to turn that artificial, riven state into a beacon of democracy for the Middle East. No one who had studied the defeats inflicted on British forces in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century would willingly have dispatched troops, with no knowledge of the local languages and culture, to that harsh terrain with its warrior ethos. Was there really no one in the White House or No. 10 Downing Street who remembered Kipling?

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 66

Personally, I find it comforting that some people also base their opposition to Iraq and Afhganistan on  practical grounds rather than the absurdity of UN sanctioned international law.