A camel came to Italy

From a wall in Venice, snapped by Bo.

Rest your eyes, weary traveller

From August, a little painting on the wall of a B&B, a place up several flights of stairs on the top floor of a tall old building squeezed in with many others on the top of a hill in Ventimiglia, across the river from the train station. Bed good, breakfast sweet and pretty, coffee the best of the holiday.

One party wall was shared with a little church that had a carved stone skull over the door, and inside in silent and deserted darkness, a corpse: a life-size and lifelike Christ laid out on a sheet in the centre of the room.

Pisa

Machiavelli on mercenaries

From Libya, reports of East European mercenaries surrendering, and of Libyan revolutionaries receiving fresh weapons. But even with that, what hope have the people of Libya of winning a fight against professional mercenaries?

From Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, Chapter Twelve:

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are both useless and dangerous. Anyone who relies on mercenary troops to keep himself in power will never be safe or secure, for they are fractious, ambitious, ill-disciplined, treacherous. They show off to your allies and run away from your enemies. They do not fear God and do not keep faith with mankind. A mercenary army puts off defeat for only so long as it postpones going into battle. In peacetime they pillage you, in wartime they let the enemy do it. This is why: They have no motive or principle for joining up beyond the desire to collect their pay. And what you pay them is not enough to make them want to die for you. They are delighted to be your soldiers when you are not at war; when you are at war, they walk away when they do not run.
[...]
It is true that occasionally a ruler seems to benefit from their use, and they boast of their own prowess, but as soon as they face foreign troops their true worth becomes apparent.
[...]
Experience shows individual sovereigns and republics that arm the masses are capable of making vast conquests; but mercenary troops are always a liability.

From the translation by David Wootton, copyright © 1995 by Hackett Publishing Company.

From the ghost of radio blogging past, via the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, Joe Queenan gives A Brief History of Cunning, on Machiavelli and more. MP3 here.

From the archives of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, a 2004 episode on Machiavelli and the Italian city states.

From the pen of Don MacDonald, a biography of Machiavelli in comics, starting here. As he explains, The Prince is not a satire, and via Don’s blog, Timo Laine’s guide to Machiavelli on the net.



From the Hollywood version of Machiavelli’s Italy, Orson Welles as Cesare Borgia, the tyrant ultimately unable to conquer the people in Prince of Foxes. Tyrone Power plays the political officer who betrays his paymaster in pursuit of his own interests, in the form of Wanda Hendrix.

An earlier post on Machiavelli is here.

Fleeing by land and by sea

Fleeing Guilin by the North Station, print by Cai Dizhi, 1945.

From the book art blog, A Journey Round My Skull.

Navio de emigrantes (Ship of Emigrants), painting by Lasar Segall, 1939.

From the art blog Weimar.

La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars), a film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1982.

We watched this film last night, and the mirroring of what’s happening now in Libya was almost too painful to bear.

The dictator’s loss of power is now a certainty, so every killing by his forces in these days is a murder to no end, but still it goes on.

Make note of who still supports him, and by this know them well.

_

PRI’s The World produced a series of reports on migration last year centering on the story of one Somalian man fleeing war. Read and listen here, and learn how Gaddafi's thugs went about preventing migrants from reaching the EU.

“Adolf Hitler was a Roman Catholic”

Pope to Queen on Thursday last:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially to the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

I also recall the regime's attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a 'reductive vision of the person and his destiny.

Full text and video at BBC News.

Response by Richard Dawkins at the Protest the Pope rally on Saturday:

Hitler, Adolf Hitler, was a Roman Catholic. He was baptised, he never renounced his baptism. The figure of five million British Catholics is presumably obtained from baptismal figures. I don’t believe a word of it, I don’t believe there are five or six million British Catholics; there may have been five or six million who were baptised, but if the church wants to claim them as Catholics, then they have to claim Hitler as a Catholic.

And it gets worse, or better depending on your point of view. Full speech in this video:



More on Hitler the declared anti-atheist, his grounding in a ‘real Christianity’, and his support for faith schools, from Johnny Guitar.

Two posts at Shiraz Socialist, Letters to the ‘Graun’: the Catholic Church and Nazism, and Betrayal, Conspiracies, Sacrilege, Heresies.

Rosie Bell writes More Vatican PR.

Ophelia Benson at Butterflies & Wheels has several short posts on the Pope’s botheration of Britain, but I recommend this one in particular: Siding with the already strong.

The drawing at the top is one of a set for an article on Italian food from In Dublin magazine, issue No. 296, 18 February 1988. The rest are below.

Counterinsurgency on the screen

Above, broadcast on PBS yesterday, a Frontline documentary on Afghanistan, Obama’s War. There’s a discussion on the programme at Abu Muqawama.

Below, from 1961, counterinsurgency in Sicily: Salvatore Giuliano, directed by Francesco Rosi. Available on YouTube, but watch the DVD to do it justice.

I also highly recommend Rosi’s Hands Over the City on politics and corruption in Naples. (Thanks to HJ for suggesting them.)

Update: the SWJ has started compiling a long list of COIN-related films.

Today

Francis Sedgemore: Holocaust Memorial Day 2009

Norman Geras: Remembering Auschwitz and Forgetting the Holocaust, and earlier, Iniquity of the fathers?

Flesh is Grass: Remembering the Holocaust

Peter Ryley: Remembering 

(with a follow up from Bob: Remembering)

Noga: Holocaust Memorial Day

Sarah Franco: Aristides de Sousa Mendes: small tribute on Holocaust Memorial Day

Deborah Lipstadt: Holocaust Denier Bishop Williamson in his own Words

From the 25th, Richard Bartholomew: Some Thoughts of Bishop Richard Williamson

From the 26th, David T: Muslim Council of Britain Boycotts Holocaust Memorial Day Again

Martin: Remember

Update Jan 28th, David T: Holocaust Memorial Day on Al-Rahma TV