Tag: English people

Movies as an Education in Global Looting: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Movies and the World as an Arena of Violent Domination and Global Looting

The classic Warner Brothers swashbuckler, The Sea Hawk, from 1940, within its romantic adventures and intricate swordfights (perhaps comparable to the car chases of later movies) is a partly historical, partly fictional version of a world built on imperial struggles and ransacking and despoiling. The hegemonic power in the West (and perhaps worldwide) is Spain. Phillip II the king-emperor wants to own and dominate and rule the whole world. In 1588, his Spanish Armada loses to England. (The British of course want to compare this to the Battle of Britain against the German Luftwaffe.)

Set in 1585, The Sea Hawk opens with King Philip II of Spain plotting world domination, laughing that all world maps will soon read simply “Spain” — once England is out of the way, of course.

The Spanish ambassador departs for England to escort his niece to Queen Elizabeth’s court, but in a spectacular sea battle, the Spanish galley is soundly damaged, boarded, raided and sunk by a group of pirates led by Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a Sir Walter Raleigh stand-in played by Erroll Flynn. Thorpe rescues the galley slaves — they row the boat — and spares the crew, taking them aboard and delivering them to England. The jewels and other bounty (or a portion thereof) are a gift to the Queen.

His crew is part of a noble privateer coalition — the Sea Hawks — who justify their piracy as reclamation of English goods (and enslaved sailors) from the Spanish behemoth. The political fallout from Thorpe’s abduction of the ambassador forces Elizabeth to outlaw the Sea Hawks, including an official denial (and private approval) of his mission to Panama to steal a shipment of Aztec gold.

Inca gold is also mentioned in the movie as a target of robbing.

Sir John Hawkins (1532–1595), part of this group of global sailor-pirates and master-mariners, was one of the most notable sailors and naval commanders of the sixteenth century.

He is known for his pivotal role in the maritime history of England and the rise of the global slave trade.

John Hawkins, the son of a merchant, was born in Plymouth in 1532. He became a sea captain and in 1562 became the first Englishman to start capturing people in Sierra Leone and selling them as slaves to Spanish settlers in the Caribbean. (Notice that selling slaves does not discriminate against Spaniards even with Phillip II threatening England. Business is business.)

Stealing Aztec gold as part of colonial or imperial plundering and the slave trade were part of the dark side of history, something the standard history books “skate over” dishonestly.

A key scene between the Spanish aristocratic beauty and Captain Thorpe:

Doña María Álvarez de Córdoba: “I’m not in the habit of conversing with thieves. I thought I made that quite clear, Captain Thorpe.”

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe: “Why, yes, all except your definition. Tell me, is a thief an Englishman who steals?”

Doña María Álvarez de Córdoba: “It’s anybody who steals… whether it’s piracy or robbing women.”

Captain Geoffrey Thorpe: “Oh, I see. I’ve been admiring some of the jewels we found in your chest… particularly the wrought gold. It’s Aztec, isn’t it? I wonder just how those Indians were persuaded to part with it.”

The Sea Hawk (1940)

Donald Trump continues this tradition of looting when he says of Iraq’s oil:

“Think of it as our oil under their sand.”

Thus the whole world is an arena where the weak don’t have any property rights: not the oil or gold, not themselves (slavery) and not their country (colonialism).

This exploitative hierarchy and “world-system” is part of “the way of the world” and even a romantic adventure story like 1940’s The Sea Hawk gives you a Hollywoodized glimpse into its roots. Imperial struggles in the West spill over into colonization and ransacking and looting. History books one sees in high school are dishonest and in that sense uninformative or even disinformative.

The popular PBS travel series Rick Steves’ Europe unintentionally gives us a wonderful example of this notion of plunder and looting as a pillar of world history in the show on Venice. Rick Steves is talking about the various statues in Venice’s central St. Mark’s Square (Piazza San Marco), and comments “I’d call the style ‘Early Ransack.’”

This Rick Steves quip about ransacking and historical wealth-building is very informative.

Multiple Searchlights Give You Understanding

Naive views of world events and world history are mono-causal but the world is always “multifactorial.” The Left and the Right keep on pushing these “perfect myopia” analyses:

For example, in the movie masterpiece Reds from 1981, John Reed (played by Warren Beatty) keeps repeating that the cause of World War I is and will be J.P. Morgan’s loans and profits, a variant of “vulgar Marxism.”

We have already seen that one cannot understand World War I and the “winds of war” leading up to it without several layers of analysis including the globalization forces from 1870-1914 and the rise of an integrated Atlantic economy (Professor Jeffrey Williamson book); the rise of the Anglo-German antagonism (described in Paul Kennedy’s excellent book); the flow of loan capital and debts described in Herbert Feis’s classic, re-issued in 1965 and described here:

“This book, published for the Council on Foreign Relations, does not deal directly with the war or with its origins, but it has been included in this category because few books published in recent years have made more substantial contributions to the history of pre-war international relations in the broadest sense.

Feis’s book is the first adequate treatment of international loans in the years from 1870 to 1914, a subject the importance of which has long been recognized but the discussion of which has never got far beyond the stage of loose generalities. The scientific treatment of it involves a thorough command of the extensive literature of pre-war diplomacy as well as an intimate acquaintance with the sources of international finance.

So far as the reviewer can see, Feis has not missed anything of importance. He not only knows the material, but he knows how to use it; he understands the political motives and considerations which lay behind these financial transactions. A large part of the volume is taken up with a pioneer study of the character of British, French and German foreign investments and the general policies followed by the governments towards investments abroad. The remainder is devoted to a review of the major enterprises—the financing of Russia, the Balkan States, Egypt, Morocco, China and some of the less important countries. Other chapters deal with the vexed problems of Balkan and Asiatic railway. In many instances Feis’s treatment is the only adequate one in existence, but even in the larger sense the book is a reliable and thoroughly readable piece of research, one that no student of international relations can afford to overlook.”

(William L. Langer’s review of Europe: the World’s Banker, 1870-1914 by Herbert Feis)

On top of all this, we have the problem of parochial and tribal and personal “sleepwalking,” captured so well by Professor Christopher Clark:

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.

The drastic changes in attitudes, society, values and mentalities is then captured, for post-World War I England, by Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End:

Parade’s End (1924-1928) is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939). The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I.

Only this type of “multifactorial” panorama—what we call “circum-spective intelligence” or “meta-intelligence”—can give you the multiple searchlights you need.

Where the searchlight views intersect is where understanding begins.

Everything else is monomaniacal cartooning à la the “simp” analysis of John Reed in the brilliant movie Reds, from 1981.

Is Some Personal Experience More Understandable When Examined on a Larger Canvas?

We start with a personal experience and hope to illuminate it on a larger scale.

In 1965, one of us (RM) was in Munich Germany and reports this anecdote:

I decided one day for no reason to go to the beer hall called the Hofbräuhaus, Am Platzl 9, a Munich landmark and the place where Hitler read out the Nazi program of 25 points in February 1920. This beer hall was a major haunt or stomping ground of the Nazis. I sat quietly at a side table and nursed my Berliner Weisse beer.

An older man staggers past me, dressed in Bavarian lederhosen and for no reason sits across from me and starts making some small talk which I politely reply to. He asks me if I come from Berlin and to save time I say “sort of.”

Suddenly out of nowhere he says to me: “Let me tell you one thing. It all started in 1928.”

I ponder his words but have no idea what he’s getting at in his drunken maundering.

He then adds, “That’s when GM the American car company bought the German company Adam Opel.

He doesn’t explain what his family connection was to this merger and acquisition but one would have to guess someone in his family, himself or his father perhaps, got laid off.

(The preeminent business historian Alfred Chandler of Harvard Business School, who died in 2007, discusses this 1928 business merger in his books, but there’s no detailed description of secondary effects.)

The German uninvited interloper at my table begins to blame the merger on the Jews. I tell him that the car industry in America was itself very antisemitic with Henry Ford being the leader of this paranoia-based hatred. He answers cryptically, “you know what I mean.” His attitude is “don’t confuse me with facts.”

The German goes on and on with this Jew-bashing tirade and I finally get exasperated and say, “you mean people like me” do you?

He becomes whiter than a sheet and seems about to pass out. He gets out of his chair and stumbles and staggers out of the Hofbrauhaus.

I learnt from this experience that this man was probably not some evil madman but more likely “a little man” legitimately scared out of his wits by the global and local permanent instability in the economy at all levels and scales.

In fact, there’s a Hollywood movie, Little Man, What Now? based on the novel by the great German writer Hans Fallada, which depicts a young couple baffled and overwhelmed by the econo-gyrations of their moment in time.

Now we come to the perspectival question (i.e., the MetaIntelligence question): how to see this more clearly with some wider and deeper view?

We glimpse the deeper context in a book by the British historian David Thomson in his excellent England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, where he describes how industrialization, trade and global trends became entwined. This is for England, not Germany, but could serve as a rough template for all modernizing countries undergoing deep transformations and facing anxiety-stoking unknowns:

The Englishman was now nakedly at the mercy of vast economic changes beyond the control of his own government. he had the vote, and could at elections choose between alternative governments but if none of these governments could provide him with the sense of social and economic security he desired, what was the vote worth?

(David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, Penguin Books, 1978, page 190)

Think of the German at the Hofbräuhaus as bewildered (not unjustly) by the “little man, what now?” permanent insecurity problem of the modern industrial world.

It’s probably not instructive to think of him as an evil hater but rather as a person frightened out if his mind, for real reasons. He takes as his symbol for all this insecurity the 1928 Opel acquisition mentioned above. This is an example of going from one person’s (garbled) experience to a wider canvas.

To make this canvas deeper, add the anxiety about science expressed in our science anxiety/Sōseki essay previously.

One then gets an inkling of the modern sense of dread based on various nerve-wracking perceived threats which cannot be laughed off or dismissed.