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A banker who last year published a book that took as its subject Winston Churchill's finances and which was reviewed in June in the New York Review of Books said that "I have never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale."[1] -- In general, writes reviewer Geoffrey Wheatcraft, in his private affairs Churchill "defied every idea of sanctity of contract, or even of gentlemanly behavior." -- "[H]e was spendthrift beyond imagining." -- "[H]e was always years behind with his cigar merchant’s accounts, as with those of every other tradesman." -- In the period 1929-1937 when Churchill was out of politics, he turned his home at Chartwell into a "a veritable word factory, with a team of researchers and ghostwriters, notably Edward Marsh, a fastidious civil servant and patron of the arts, and an obscure journalist, Adam Marshall Diston"; even the preface to his Thoughts and Adventures was ghost-written. -- Also reviewed by Wheatcraft is a biography of Churchill's wife, Clementine, revealing that "at the height of the [World W]ar [II] the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was sleeping with the prime minister’s daughter, and the president’s special envoy was sleeping with the prime minister’s daughter-in-law. -- Special relationships indeed. -- The ambassador was Gil Winant, a former Republican governor of New Hampshire, a very popular replacement for the old monster Joseph Kennedy. -- He discreetly took up with Sarah, [Churchill's 30-year-old daughter]." -- The other relationship referred to was Pamela Churchill, the wife of Churchill's son Randolph, and Averill Harriman, the Democratic power broker; Harriman and Pamela Churchill would ultimately marry, in 1971, and Pamela Harriman remained an important player in Democratic party politics to the end of her life, serving as Bill Clinton's U.S. ambassador to France in 1993-1997. -- From the two books, "a sharp dissonance emerges between Churchill as the jovial bulldog of popular American imagination and the somber reality of a life scarred by bitterness and tragedy: in all, suicides close to Churchill included a brother-in-law, a former stepfather, a daughter’s estranged lover, a former daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, and a daughter." -- Clementine was ultimately hospitalized for depression. -- Nevertheless, Churchill's historical importance is indubitable, and he "abides still, a vast looming presence, defying the biographer, his greatness matched by his meanness, his nobility by his brutality, his courage by his rapacity; 'the man of the century,' and as elusive as ever." ...
A long-simmering international dispute has been threatening to boil over in the South China Sea as China asserts itself more and more forcefully and unilaterally there. -- In a July primer, the BBC summarized the background of the dispute, which purports to be about the sovereignty of island groups but is really about control of natural resources and shipping routes.[1] -- In its own review, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that "Washington’s defense treaty with Manila could draw the United States into a China-Philippines conflict over the substantial natural gas deposits in the disputed Reed Bank or the lucrative fishing grounds of the Scarborough Shoal," 100 miles from the Philippines and 500 miles from the Chinese mainland. [2] -- Last week, two Chinese scholars published two articles in shaky English defending China, criticizing U.S. policy, and claiming that China had been "deliberately humiliated."[3] -- On Aug. 2, WSWS called attention to a Chinese article warning Australia against meddling in the dispute, and noted that "The Chinese foreign ministry announced last week that China and Russia would conduct naval exercises in the South China Sea in September. -- While the two navies have held joint war games before, next month’s operations are far from 'routine' as claimed by spokesman Yang Yujun. -- In the wake of The Hague ruling, the U.S. could well seize on the opportunity to once again raise tensions in the strategic waters. -- Russia has backed China’s claims in the South China Sea."[4] ...
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the failed July 2016 coup attempt to rewrite Turkish history, and "[t]he narrative is one of heroic defiance in the name of Islam, against foreign powers, including the United States," the New York Times reported Monday.[1] -- The struggle in July is being called "Turkey’s second war of independence," the first one being Ataturk's post-WWI one that was "at the center of constructing a Turkish identity centered on secular and nationalist principles," Tim Arango said. -- Erdogan's government had already "angered secular Turks by canceling several celebrations honoring Ataturk . . . while it has commemorated historic Ottoman victories and the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad." -- Some say that "Mr. Erdogan is essentially using the coup events to create a founding myth of an Islamist Turkey." -- It will be recalled that "Mr. Erdogan, who was once jailed by Turkey’s old secular elite for reciting a religious poem in public [in 1997, when he was mayor of Istanbul; the poem included verses translated as "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers" --H.A.], came to power in 2003 as the voice of Turkey’s religious masses. He empowered an entire class of people who had historically been treated as second-class citizens, and gave them a sense that they mattered in the country’s affairs." -- BACKGROUND: On Jul. 22 Shlomo Avineri reviewed the history that forms the basis of the Ergodan's historical project.[2] -- A passage from vol. 6 of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History gives an idea of the gargantuan extent of Ataturk's attempt to turn Turkish history in a new direction, an attempt that at first succeeded (to the delight of many in the West, despite its dictatorial nature) but that now, increasingly, appears to be failing.[3] -- Toynbee met Ataturk in person once in 1923, and described the meeting in a volume entitled Acquaintances (1967).[4] -- It's an interesting passage that makes clear that if Toynbee was an admirer of Ataturk, mentioning him frequently in his writings, his was a very critical sort of admiration....