Heat and light

Up in a small village full of antique stuff. An old gas-lamp:

and an old stove:

UPDATE: better scan of the stove.

Murder

In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (which I am about a third of the way through), Raskolnikov decides to kill a rather unpleasant old woman, and immediately finds he needs to commit another, unplanned murder. There’s a reason in context, but he’s discovered that killing has a logic and a momentum of its own which has disrupted his plans. This reminds me of an event in a place where I used to live (though before I lived there): a man had noisy and antisocial neighbours who made his life miserable, and he finally snapped, took a gun, and killed them all, the entire family, adults and children. Then he walked down the street shooting anyone he saw. You could hardly put that in a book; you’d need to explain what was going on in the killer’s mind.

Revolutions have a similar logic, but for more easily-identifiable reasons: they famously eat their own children, because once you’ve started using force and death to overhaul the political system, it’s a small step to disposing of rivals and dissisdents the way you disposed of the ancien regime. The Russian Revolution led to gulags and mass murders, the French Revolution led to atrocities and many of the original revolutionaries getting their heads chopped off. The exceptions are the things labelled “revolutions” that weren’t so thoroughly revolutionary (the American Revolution was primarily a war for independence, and the Glorious Revolution was a foreign power replacing one British monarch with another one more aligned with its interests.)

—

The logic of killing can be contained, to a degree, by discipline, rules, principles – overlaying some structure. Police sometimes use (or abuse) deadly force, but don’t tend to go round killing people when out of uniform. Executioners chop people’s heads off for a living but seldom for fun. Similarly for soldiers – the categories of “war” and “peace” seem instinctive enough that you don’t generally get soldiers running round killing people when the war’s over. While the war’s going on, though, you need a lot of discipline to stop the killing from spilling over onto the civilian population – massacres were common in days of old, and can still happen even in modern western militaries (cf. My Lai).

Wars also tend not to go as planned, and they unleash forces that are hard to predict or control. Fred Reed:

When the Japanese attacked Pearl, their military thought it would win, Yamamoto excepted. When the Wehrmacht went into Russia, it thought it would win. So did Napoleon. When the Germans attacked in 1914, they thought they would win, the Schlieffen Plan being infallible. When the Confederates shelled Sumter, they thought they could win. When the French took on the Viet Minh, they thought they would win. When the Americans went into Viet Nam, they thought they would win. When they went into Iraq, Somalia, Beirut, Afghanistan….

– Advice to a Generic Candidate

In this context, General Thomas S. Power’s words on nuclear war have something to be said for them: arguing in favour of targeting Russian cities in a nuclear war, he said

Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!

– Gen. Thomas S. Power

If your generals are talking like that, your politicians are going to be under no illusions that some nice, clean, quick, minimal-casualties nuclear war is possible.

(Disclaimer: I have never gone to war, participated in a revolution, nor murdered anyone. My first-hand knowledge here is, happily, limited. I did support the Iraq war back in the day, and that turned into something rather different from what almost all of its supporters expected.)

Grumpy

Wound down

The current state of the artist after a slight lack of sleep last night…

EDIT: 2 years of following my posting schedule! It’s getting harder to find time, inspiration and energy, though (for a variety of reasons that I shall summarise as “life getting busier”) so I may have to switch from weekly to fortnightly posting. I’ll see how it goes through July.