This Day in History: ‘Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more’
Thomas à Becket was a proverbial giant of his time. Through a series of promotions throughout his life Becket rose to prominence in both church and civic capacities. Most notably, he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162 and, prior to that, he also served as Chancellor, a government role requiring him to enforce the king’s land taxes. Becket came to be so admired and trusted that King Henry II sent his eldest son to live with Becket (an important mentoring practice common among nobles).
In short, Becket found tremendous success in both government and the church, which might be expected given that the line between the two was often blurred beyond recognition. Yet with Becket’s appointment to Archbishop, a power struggle began between him and the king. Becket continually sided with the church and Rome, while the king wanted ever-increasing control and authority the church.
Becket’s unyielding conviction and growing belief in church independence annoyed the king. The exact phrase the king muttered is disputed, but the most commonly quoted statement by the king reads, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Knights who heard the utterances interpreted it as a royal command and arrived in Canterbury on this day in 1170. Here is an account from one eyewitness:
…The wicked knight leapt suddenly upon him, cutting off the top of the crown which the unction of sacred chrism had dedicated to God. Next he received a second blow on the head, but still he stood firm and immovable. At the third blow he fell on his knees and elbows, offering himself a living sacrifice, and saying in a low voice, ‘For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I am ready to embrace death.’ But the third knight inflicted a terrible wound as he lay prostrate. By this stroke, the crown of his head was separated from the head in such a way that the blood white with the brain, and the brain no less red from the blood, dyed the floor of the cathedral. The same clerk who had entered with the knights placed his foot on the neck of the holy priest and precious martyr, and, horrible to relate, scattered the brains and blood about the pavements, crying to the others, ‘Let us away, knights; this fellow will arise no more.’
In one sense, the knight was correct. Becket was dead. But his martyrdom inspired a following that lasted for centuries, most famously captured in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Just three years after his death, Becket was canonised and revered as a martyr against secular interference in the Church.
Living Artifacts
If Josef Mengele was the last doctor you had seen, you might avoid seeing one for 65 years as well.
R.I.P., Cicero
Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Cicero (formally Marcus Tullius Cicero), the great Roman statesman and orator. Among Latin scholars he is probably known best for the text of his eloquent speech in favor of the natural law right to self-defense. David Kopel penned an article a few years ago in Chronicles where he looks at the political lessons which America’s Founders drew from Cicero and other Romans. Among the conclusions: the Founders saw how Rome had degenerated from a Republic to a military dictatorship, and traced the degeneration to the moral decline of the Roman citizeny. One of the causes of the decline was the replacement of the militia by a professional standing army.
Veteran’s Day
Today is Veterans Day, formerly called Armistice Day, in commemoration of the signing of the Armistice ending World War I. Because we also have Memorial Day, which primarily honors the dead, many unofficially observe Veteran’s Day as a day to honor living veterans. About 4.7 million American men and 33,000 women served in the military in WWI. Of those, it is estimated that only 3 veterans from that war remain alive today. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs offers this website to help commemorate the day. In November of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson issued his Armistice Day proclamation. The last paragraph set a good tone for future observances:
To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nation.
On a day such as this, honoring living veteran’s, perhaps the most important website is this one, which is dedicated to collecting oral histories from war veterans. Please consider urging the veterans you know to participate.
The Battle of Lepanto
Today is the four hundred and thirty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto. Set just off the western coast of Greece, the battle pitted an international fleet of over 40,000 Western Christian sailors and troops (called the “Holy League”) against 44,000 Ottomans. The battle has been called the most decisive naval battle anywhere on the globe since 31 BC. It was a watershed moment in Western Christianity turning back the tide of Islam’s march into Europe and the Mediterranean. As historian Serpil Atamaz Hazar put it, “after Lepanto the pendulum swung back the other way and the wealth began to flow from East to West” . . . it was “a crucial turning point in the ongoing conflict between the Middle East and Europe, which has not yet completely been resolved.”
Both sides attributed the victory to Divine Will and Pope Pius V created a new Catholic feast day of “Our Lady of Victory” to commemorate the victory. It is now celebrated by the Catholic Church as the “feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.”
Why Your Children Won’t Remember 9/11
Eli Saslow of the Washington Post has penned a nice piece titled, “9/11 as a Lesson, Not a Memory”. As ITA co-founder Paul Musgrave reminded me, the piece is reminiscent of an article by Musgrave which was first published years ago in Hoosier Review, a now defunct publication of Indiana University. For your reading pleasure I have reprinted the piece here:
Why your children won’t remember
September 11, a year laterSYNOPSIS: Part of a special edition of HR, this article looks at 9/11 in historical perspective.
It is difficult to imagine the world in thirty years, when our children will be college-aged. Some things seem inevitable: India and China will be more important in world politics, Japan and Western Europe less critical. Sub-Saharan Africa will be poorer, while Eastern Europeans will be as wealthy as West Germans today. Other things are more doubtful. Gene therapy will probably be commonplace, and artificial intelligence — smarter, perhaps, than humans — may be a reality. The oceans may have risen a few inches, and oil might run out. Some events, completely unforeseen today, will shape the world our children will study in their entry-level college courses — if universities still exist.
One thing the next generation won’t study will be September 11.
September 11 is a turning point in history. No one doubts that. But so was the Spanish Civil War, and who today remembers Franco? In a hundred years, if humans still exist, some historian may write a book proving that the world really changed in 2001 on a bright September day when Islamic fundamentalists destroyed the World Trade Center in the former United States. Or the dominant narrative may be completely different, tracing the darker ages to some event we don’t
see today — the bombing in Beirut, for example, or the establishment of the House of Saud.But the next generation won’t remember September 11.
They won’t remember because there will never be a “next thing,” no other incident that so clearly fits into a story that everyone remembers it. In that case, September 11 will be like the influenza epidemic of 1918: important, critical, unforgettable if you lived through it, but unremembered by everyone else. The other case is that there will be a next thing. Then September 11 will be the Japanese bombing of the U.S.S. Panay — important, prophetic, unforgettable if you were there, but overshadowed by the next part of the story.
The next generation won’t remember September 11.
They will remember April 28, or October 14, or February 6. They will remember the destruction of New York, or the killing of the 112th Congress, or the gassing of Berlin. They will visit the memorial to Los Angeles, or watch videos of the rebuilding of Beijing, or read of the Israeli-Egyptian nuclear conflict. Or they’ll skip over the boring parts in their textbooks about the early years of the Bush administration.
But they won’t remember September 11.
All content printed above copyright 2002, 2003, 2004 Paul Musgrave.
We Came in Peace For All Mankind
When Megan McArdle calls landing on the moon, “the most magnificent single feat our little tribe of East African Plains Apes has ever managed,” it’s hard to find the hyperbole. And if McArdle’s libertarianism is too squishy for you to give such high praise any merit, consider that Ayn Rand also considered Apollo 11, “the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential.”
I remember watching Moon Shot leading up to the 25th anniversary; after the last episode, my father took us outside to gaze at the moon. The sky was clear, and the moon was nearly full. It seemed closer than usual, as if I could see its topography in great detail. And yet I knew it was so very far away. When my mind finally wrapped itself around the reality that men had walked on that surface, according to the footage I had just watched, I was filled with such awe and wonder as I don’t believe I have experienced since.
Americans are understandably proud of this achievement, however vicarious our contribution. The problem “of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” was largely a technical one: it required a vast collection of brilliant engineers and scientists and the political will to give them virtually unlimited resources. On the first count, this nation’s ability to produce such talent is genuinely impressive. On the second count, it is odd to praise government for opening its purse so widely for a single project, and even odder to see such a boondoggle turn into the most dazzling and successful accomplishment the world has ever witnessed. (It’s also impressive that a nation had such a large purse in the first place.)
The nostalgia for the Apollo program is most prominent in complaints that come in two main varieties. The first are those who cry bitterly that America has lost her nerve for space exploration. They are right. We no longer have the Reds spooking us; manned space exploration turned out to have limited practical value; and the novelty simply wore off. This might be evidence that we do indeed lack imagination, but our pragmatism is commendable. The second complaint is that America, as embodied by her government, has lost her nerve for collective triumph over adversity.
Unfortunately, the spectacle of the moon landing led us to believe that all problems are merely so simple, and all that is required is some intangible political will to create, i.e., fund, technical solutions to all of our ills. This ignores the fact that the moon landing was the exception rather than the rule. Politicians were motivated by a vague but strong worry that the space race had existential implications, and that fear, as much as romantic notions of exploration and adventure, kept political interference to a minimum and the dollars flowing to where they were needed. And at the very least, no politician wanted to be responsible for the very public and visible deaths of the incredibly brave men who volunteered to be our Astronauts. Nothing since has quite so captured the attention of politicians or their constituents.
In Greek mythology, Apollo granted Cassandra the gift of prophecy — yet also cursed her so that no one would believe her predictions. How fitting that our modern would-be Cassandras, like Thomas Friedman, point to the Apollo program as a model of how we can solve their pet problems (the Manhattan Project being another model), and yet that panacea, political will, never materializes.
But even if the Cassandras were to prevail, it’s not so clear that any of our problems, e.g., energy, education, health care, etc., can be solved by pointing a fire hose of federal dollars at scientists and engineers, for reasons similar to what Megan McArdle lays out here. In the first place, none of our persistent problems is as simple as putting a man on the moon. This means that its very unclear where, exactly, that fire hose should be aimed. In the second place, there’s no inherent reason why government would be the only provider of these techno-solutions. On the contrary, the intervention of government funding may very well discourage just the sort of innovation we’d like to see. In other words, a modern version of the Apollo program would be more political than technical. I’ve never seen the Cassandras address such concerns, and their call for a blank check from Government to Science is merely a romantic gesture, and as such, hard for any practical man to take seriously.
The Apollo program may not have any larger implications than America is simply a land of talent, ambition, and luck, but I’m not sure what else it need imply. The moon landing deserves to be appreciated as a singular achievement, celebrated by even cynical minarchists. It seems somehow inappropriate to flog it for our current political passions. Alone, it is inspirational and overwhelming. Let that be enough.
Kenneth L. Reusser
Several high profile celebrities have passed away in recent days – Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and even Billy Mays, to name a few. But it was the death of a relatively unknown man, U.S. Marine Corps Col. Kenneth L. Reusser, which was the most powerful to me. Col. Reusser is the most decorated U.S. Marine Corps aviator in history, a veteran of three wars and the guy who, “when his guns froze, he flew his fighter into the Japanese observation plane, hacking off its tail with his propeller.” Read the whole story here.
At ease, soldier
It’s been said that we stand on the shoulders of giants. Sadly, one such giant passed away last week. Darrell “Shifty” Powers, made famous for his portrayal in the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers, passed away of natural causes at the age of 86.
“We (the German soldiers and I) might have had a lot in common. He might’ve liked to fish, you know, he might’ve liked to hunt. Of course, they were doing what they were supposed to do, and I was doing what I was supposed to do. But under different circumstances, we might have been good friends.”
– Shifty Powers
