From Boadicea to Pinochet

[robinturner]

I mentioned in a previous entry that I was looking for texts on how Boadicea became a legend. As I suspected, it seems as though anyone can make anything they want of her, including her name (Boudicca, Bodica, Bunduica—no one seems to know what she was really called, though you could probably classify authors' opinions by the way they spell her name). For feminists, she's a "strong woman" resisting male domination and avenging the rape of her daughters; for nationalists, she's a symbol of British resistance to foreign aggression. Elizabeth I and Victoria were both fans for obvious reasons. For skeptical historians, she is perhaps an example of how people can go gooey over tall red-heads while ignoring all the innocent people they massacred.

Paul Johnson in his book Heroes (an extract of which I read in the Daily Mail) provides a neat summary of Boadicea's life and subsequent incarnations. What struck me, though, was the part where he mentions some of his other personal heroes, including a fruit seller who has swum the channel several times for charity and General Augusto Pinochet. As Oberst Steiner says in The Eagle Has Landed, "I can always tell a thorough-going bastard when I see one," and one clue is admiration for Pinochet. Pinochet is a kind of masonic handshake for totally evil people: "Well you have to admit he put the Chilean economy back on track." "Ah, you are One Of Us. Come this way; the child sacrifice is waiting." It's a more modern and less obvious code than "Hitler made good motorways" or "Nero was a damned fine musician." The really funny thing is that Johnson describes the president before Pinochet as "my friend Salvador Allende." So this guy has your friend killed and then becomes your hero? This is the kind of thing that might happen in a Jacobean tragedy, but only when the protagonist doesn't know that the knave has killed his friend; once he finds out, it's revenge all the way to the last act where the stage is strewn with bodies.

So can we really find out anything about people from the company they keep or the heroes they worship? Obviously not in the case of Boadicea; an attraction to this warrior queen can indicate romantic nationalism, hard-core feminism, or just a dislike of Colchester.

Comments

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

If I may just quibble ever so slightly, drawing attention to any good things that were done by an evil leader does not necessarily indicate that one admires the said evil leader. I am not, for instance, in any way a fan of Mussolini, but whenever the subject of Italian railways is mentioned I have to admit, for the sake of sheer fairness, that it was Mussolini who got them working properly. I don't for a single minute think that the excellent work Mussolini did on the Italian railways is any kind of excuse or justification for everything else he did. Nonetheless, my appreciation of Italy's efficient rail system is not lessened by the fact that it owes so much to a tyrant. It simply makes me wish that he'd been put in a position where he had nothing to do but sort out the railways.

[solri.livejournal.com]

my appreciation of Italy's efficient rail system

Either you're joking, or your experience of Italian trains was very different from mine!

Of course you are right that one can admire something an evil person did while detesting their evil qualities. Qin Shi Huang Di was a thoroughly evil person, but you have to admit the Great Wall of China is pretty impressive (and standardising weights, measures and axle-widths was useful too). I don't like the Nazis, but I love their uniforms. (I have a theory that they lost WWII because they spent too much of their military budget on clothes.) And so on. But like I said, with Pinochet, it's almost a masonic handshake. It's like closet gays sounding each other out by dropping allusions to The Wizard of Oz (or maybe these days it's 300—I'm a bit out of touch now).

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I must admit that my experience is rather limited, having travelled by train only between Rome and Assisi; the trains on that route were incredibly smooth and efficient. I've since been told that Italy's rail network is good overall, but the rolling stock on it varies wildly, possibly depending on the route.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Actually the Eurostar trains (for which you pay extra) are good, but the local trains are awful. Of course everything's relative; I wouldn't say they were any worse than Turkish trains, and they're certainly better than the Balkans.

[vret.livejournal.com]

I think you will find that all the investment required to get the Italian railways working so well was supplied by the previous government, but it took a little while to implement the improvements, by which time Mussolini was in charge.

A similar thing happened in Britain with the telephone system. A huge investment was put into the nationalised system in the 1970s to upgrade it from a mechanical system to a very advanced and flexible electronic system, which is the infrastructure we now have. It was privatised, in an exceptionally corrupt manner, in the 1980s, and everyone noticed massive improvements, which the government and press insisted were the result of privatisation but that would actually have happened anyway.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I bow to your superior knowledge; I should have remembered that these things tend to happen with governments!

[ironed_orchid]

According to QI, Mussolini made sure the train ran on time once: when he had to get from Milan to Rome to take power.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen much of QI, but I know they tend to get their facts right.

That is a great username, by the way. :-)

[ironed_orchid]

Thanks. On the rare occasion when QI get something wrong, they tend to announce it in the next season.

[osymandus.livejournal.com]

she is perhaps an example of how people can go gooey over tall red-heads while ignoring all the innocent people they massacred.


I thought everyone was aware thats what they did to Colchester (mind not living to far away from it its understanable ;).
The other thing we must of course be careful about is judging our ancestors my our moral standards .

[vret.livejournal.com]

Have you come across the version in which Seneca made a high-interest loan to Prasutagus, which he then called in on hearing of his death, and that's what started all the nastiness because there was no way to pay it back?

I'm trying to remember where I read that. I think it was in one of Mandy's philosophy books which I would have read in 1981. I think it was most likely in the intro or notes of a Penguin edition of a book of essays by Seneca, and was probably there to contrast with his polemics against usury, but I can't swear to that.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I can't remember where I read it either - might have been in Terry Jones' Barbarians (the book of the TV series). Seneca seems to have put his philosophy into practice very admirably at some times, and hardly at all at others.

[sjcarpediem.livejournal.com]

I just read that article.

It was okay until the author started writing a different article without bothering to make it a separate article.

This alone (okay, not alone, also the points the author seemed to be making and the author's chosen "support") has convinced me the author is actually a complete moron, who is also dangerously psychologically unstable and detached from any recognizable, shared, global reality.

Until we got to that point, though, I thought it was a decent article and was pretty interesting.

Just goes to show how important maintaining focus is in coherent writing...

Edit: Apparently I am the one detached from reality, and the bit about Boadicea was just an aside, anyway. Still. If that's a "sample" of the book, it is probably best not to read the whole book. That man seems like he might be a good candidate for martyrdom, though (if only he/we could find a good cause for which to disregard all news/media and steel his personal courage...).