Chateau Lloyd

It's only a week since Walls of Men went live, but already my mind is turning to the next writing project.  This is because writing is what I do to unwind, and without it I get really bored.  I'm trying to fill the empty hours with chores and watching vintage TV and movies, but that's only a stopgap.

Sooner or later, I'll take on a new project.

I'm thinking it will be fiction.  Long Live Death was actually very easy to write (took 6 weeks or so) and while post-publication corrections were a headache, they were also a function of my desire to see it in print ASAP because of its applicability to the political situation.

Walls of Men, on the other hand, was really complicated and stressful.  Add in the fact that both books didn't really provide the escape from reality that fiction writing does.

On the plus side, non-fiction doesn't take the same creative energy - you set your thesis, do research and write what you find.  No dead-end plots or unconvincing characters.  You have to describe a world rather than create one.

Inspiration is also important.  This is why have never written a "fantasy" book in the style of J.R.R. Tolkien - I don't know what I would say that needs saying.  I've got at least half a dozen story ideas in the genre, but none rise above the level of Dungeons and Dragons-grade fan fiction.

I'm sure in time, this will work itself out and in the meantime I'll see what I can draw from my viewing.

Today is the commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr., and while I'm not watching the news, I'm pretty sure that instead of highlighting his message of compassion and forgiveness, people will be using it to further stir up anger and resentment.

Four years ago I wrote about this, and how "cancel culture" is the natural result of a society that no longer believes in mercy or forgiveness.

I think part of that comes from a belief on the part of the elites that they personally are justified in whatever they do.   Society is awash in yard sign Calvinism these days, and it's never been a better time to be one of the Elect.  Some obscure teenager makes a joke?  Crush them utterly.  They must have their entire life ruined.

But if you, say, kill someone out of gross negligence, well that's different.  I don't know how much longer this sort of thing can go on and a big part of why I'm cut myself off from as much of the outside world as possible is that I'm tired of watching it play out.  If we're going to do Spain 2.0, I'd just as soon skip the long, boring backstory.

A little pessimistic for a Monday?  Perhaps, but there is something deeply wrong on a spiritual level right now, and I'm not sure how that changes.  The United States of the 1960s was also wracked with turmoil, but there was a universal agreement by the people in charge that open warfare was a terrible idea and they did what they could to lower the temperature.  I wasn't around back then, but I'm getting a very different vibe.

For example, where did the peace movement go?  Anyone who suggests that maybe negotiation is better than mass killing is now denounced as a traitor to the nation - and many of the people doing this were carrying signs that read "Give Peace a Chance" only a few years ago.

It's all very strange.  In a recent Lord of Spirits podcast, the hosts discussed that there are collective spirits - spirits of the age, spirits that rule mobs and crowds.  I think we are very much being ruled by spirits who feed on hate, who seek to fuel death and rage.  Mercy and forgiveness are intolerable to them.

This is all the more reason to practice it, especially towards people we know personally.  In the current environment, forgiving certain things may be folly (and even immoral), but that does not mean we should abandon it altogether.  As I said four years ago, now is a great time to let someone you know off the hook.

In my previous post I examined Edward and Mrs. Simpson, a television series which provided (as far as I can tell) a pretty accurate picture of the disastrously short reign of Edward VIII.

One of Edward's recurring arguments in trying to make a twice-divorced woman his Queen Empress was "a king should be able to marry whom he likes."  A quick survey of British history reveals this to be an argument without merit or precedent. 

Indeed, one of the reason why it was socially acceptable for kings and princes to have mistresses was the fact that they often had little control over who would be their spouse.  Dynastic marriages were sometimes happy, but that was besides the point.  The goal was to unite royal houses (and their attendant lands) and hopefully produce an heir.  To do this often required elaborate arrangements depending on the laws of succession.

Perhaps because of the English Kingdom's muddled origins, these laws were fairly fluid.  For example, there was no Salic Law regarding male rulership, nor was there a requirement that heirs be of noble blood on both sides.  English kings could (and did) marry commoners (the current Prince of Wales has done so).

While some accounts of the crisis emphasize Wallis Simpson's American citizenship, that was a secondary concern.  Far more serious was the fact that she had two living ex-husbands, which was a violation of the Church of England's teachings regarding marriage.  As the titular head of the English Church, Edward was bound to abide by its rules. 

Some accounts of the crisis have to offer an explainer on this, noting that at the time this was indeed taken seriously.  Obviously, that is no longer the case, and I've seen citations claiming that in 1982 the C of E said "yeah, never mind about that bit."  Indeed, the last half-century has seen the various Archbishops of Canterbury pretty much rewrite scripture to legitimize all forms of sexual license, most recently deciding that "trans" individuals can have a form of re-baptism.

This is of course deeply ironic, given the number of people killed to create and then solidify its place in English society five centuries ago.  There are countless plays, movies and television adaptations that recreate the life and times of Henry VIII, most of them implicitly taking the position that Rome was wrong and his creation of the Church of England was an act of intellectual independence.

The truth is, it wasn't.  Contemporary events prove that by every measure, the English Reformation was an unmitigated disaster, unleashing centuries of persecution and war.  Henry's serial marriages did not produce a healthy, long-lived heir.  His intrigues bankrupted England, his confiscation of the monasteries undermined the social safety net and severing ties with Rome exacerbated divisions within English society that have yet to fully heal.  It's funny, but even at this late date, one still sees casual bigotry on the part of the English against Catholics.

I wrote at length about how "historian" Anthony Beevor included gratuitous and nonsensical anti-Catholic tropes in his book on the Spanish Civil War, outright saying that Spanish clergy were somehow intellectually incapable of any other occupation.  English period films with Catholics almost always have a scene showing self-flagellation.

American culture has incorporated a certain level of anti-Catholicism, no doubt because of its Puritan roots.  It's amusing to see people claim that the separation between church and state in the Constitution was somehow motivated by fear of the Catholic Church.  In fact, it was caused by the persecutions the Puritans suffered at the hands of the Church of England. 

What made the union of crown and altar so dangerous (and often deadly) was that it turned religious dissent into a form of treason.  Movies about Henry (and especially Elizabeth I) tend to downplay this, but both monarchs put their subjects to exquisite tortures in order to compel absolute obedience.  The Tudors didn't want intellectual freedom, they wanted control.

One could argue that all of this was part of God's plan, and that the martyrs created by Henry have in turn brought about many miracles and ultimately strengthened the faith.  That may be so, but I think it is still essential to fully dismantle the myth that the English Reformation was anything other than a naked power grab of breathtaking scope that brought ruin and war.

And lots of drama, which is why people still recreate it on stage and screen.

The test readers have finally finished their labors, and we're now coming down the home stretch of Walls of Men.

This project really got out of hand developed beyond what I expected.  Based on my experience with Long Live Death, I figured I could hammer out a concise military history of China in little over twice the time it took me to write about Spain.  I was wrong.

Badly wrong.

Target completion dates kept slipping backward, from March to May to July to September.  I'm now reasonably confident that I will at least have a proof copy printed in November.

On the plus side, the feedback is very positive, which is great.  On the other hand, I've got a bit of work ahead in terms of cleaning things up.  I'm not really bothered by that because almost every one of my books has required a post-publication update as new typos and mistakes are brought to light.  Given the scope of this particular work, I'm willing to delay final publication until it's as clean as can be reasonably expected.

What next?  I'm not sure, but I need a break from the non-fiction realm.  Things are too stressful and disappearing into a world of my own creation will do me some good.  Both Vampires of Michigan and Battle Officer Wolf are long overdue for sequels, and I've been thinking about both of them.

I'm also looking at a revised one-volume version of Man of Destiny with some new content added to it (along with improved cover art).

To put it another way, I've still got stories to tell and things to say and with my impending retirement from military service, I'll have a lot more time to do it.

The Mad Max series gave a big boost to the genre of "post-apocalyptic" fiction.  Foremost among them was The Road Warrior, which veered away from the Death Wish style social commentary of the first movie and dove straight into life after civilizational collapse.

I'll be honest: this is a pretty stupid movie.  It has plot holes the size of semi trucks and all sorts of hand-waving to push things forward, but it has had a huge impact on the public imagination. 

Which is funny, because the story makes no sense.  For example, there is no reason the protagonists and Lord Humongous can't simple do some sort of barter trade.  Even the most violent barbarian peoples - the Mongols, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths - were wiling to trade when it was profitable.

Also: where are the firearms?  No, I don't expect craft weapons, but they clearly have the metallurgy to soup up engines - machining barrels and bolts to make crude firearms is no great stretch.  In fact, we know these things exist in places like the Khyber Pass - which is a pretty anarchic place.

All that aside, the movie's distinct look has become part of popular culture, which means that even though it's deeply silly, it can't be classified as anything other than a smashing success.

Truth be told, the whole point of the film is to do a bunch of violent car wrecks.  That's what we really want to see and that's what we get.

There is also a lesson insofar as the people who work to overthrow the existing order often have no clear notion of what comes next.  In that sense, the plague of ultraviolent punk rocker biker dudes serve as a cautionary tale for our present age.

One of the (many) mistakes made by the Popular Front in the run-up to the Spanish Civil War was its decision to target Catholic churches and clergy.  By 1936, Spain was well on the way to being a secular society.  Mass attendance was low and falling, and there was little reason to believe the situation would change.

One of the many unique things about Francisco Franco was that he was a religious military officer, which was all but unheard of at that time.  Unless it was a wedding or a funeral, Spanish men didn't go to church. 

This changed when the Popular Front gained control of the Republic and its militias began a large-scale campaign of arson and murder.  As Stanley G. Payne has noted, in the run-up to the war and in the chaotic months that followed its outbreak, the Spanish clergy lost a higher percentage of its members than the Orthodox Church did in Communist Russia.

With historic cathedrals in flames, it was not surprising that the surviving Church leadership agreed that it was time to fight to defend what remained of Spanish Christianity. 

One could argue that this was the final straw in turning popular opinion decisively against the Republic.  As I note in Long Live Death, one did not have to be a practicing Catholic to find someone burning your home parish down and killing the local priest abhorrent.  Acts of desecration likewise stirred powerful - and ultimately homicidal - emotions.

This also had to have factored in the decision of the Carlist militias in Navarre to side with the Nationalists.  It is important to recall that the July Rising was originally to "save the Republic."  It was only later that a Nationalist ideology was developed.

The Carlists correctly reasoned that while neither side represented their interests, the annihilation of the Church was unacceptable.  The Requetes from Navarre would become the true elite of the Nationalist Army, outstripping even the Spanish Foreign Legion in their tenacity and determination.

It was a self-defeating tactic, but also an inevitable one.  Having decided to destroy traditional society, the Anarchists would also have to target the Church as well.

While the Orthodox Church was unable to mount much of a defense in Soviet Russia, history shows that Catholics often offer very effective resistance.

My writing on China has slowed to a crawl because I've been so busy reading new books.  Some are excellent, while others have been questionable.

The situation is not quite as bad as researching the Spanish Civil War, where a uniform scholarly bias exists that has only recently been challenged.

With China, the situation is more complex.  The crimes of Communism are undeniable, which makes it difficult to shower the Peoples' Republic with the same sort of soft-focus fan service rendered to the Second Spanish Republic.

The language barrier is also difficult, particularly with two translation schemes.  What this does is make it much easier for modern pro-CCP scholars to obscure unpleasant facts since the English renderings of most of the place-names have been changed.

Still, I'm reaching a point where I'm getting quite good at detecting the presence of revisionist propaganda, which is particularly important as my account has now reached the modern era.

Just as the bombing of Guernica has served as a useful litmus test on a source's reliability regarding the Spanish Civil War, the treatment of China's brutal imperialist history has provided a useful guide to gauging a source's reliability in other areas.

As a sidenote, I still don't have a title.  I'm sure one will come to me...eventually.

My decision to tune out the news for a few weeks has been a fruitful one.  Instead of fuming over various "hot takes" or arguing in comment sections, my China project has been moving at its fastest pace since December.  At this point, it's a given that it will be longer than Long Live Death, but even if it equals my longest book, I'm at least halfway there.

All of which is to say that I haven't tuned out the news entirely, and one thing I've noticed is the complete absence of any kind of peace movement.  With the exception of the Catholic Church and other religious leaders, everyone seems to be demanding that the combat become fiercer and bloodier. 

I've never seen anything like it.

All my life there have been vocal and high-profile politicians and activists whose response to any form of violence has been to call for immediate cease-fires and negotiations.  Again, I'm not following this closely, but even my cursory glances would have noticed something.  Where are the streets-filling "peace marches?" 

I don't think a single interventionist has been denounced as a war monger or had their office occupied by protestors. 

Did all those people change their minds?  Is violence now the answer?

I'd love to talk with someone who carried a "no blood for oil" sign and find out what they think.

Writing the last chapter of my book was a real chore.  The period between the fall of the Han Dynasty and the reunification of China under the Sui and then the Tang is pretty complex, and I was moving at a crawl.

I've finally finished and feel the need to get away from it for a few days.

I found Long Live Death very easy to write, but I was also dealing with a much narrower topic.  China's history is a lot broader, and trying to be focused takes a lot more effort.  Not only that, there's the language and name difficulties.

I'm also working on the index as I go which is slowing my down now, but should save me time on the back end because I won't have to go back through the manuscript to build it from scratch.

My timeline for completion is slipping a bit as a result, but since I don't have a firm deadline, it's somewhat irrelevant.  I was hoping to have the draft done by March, but that was when I thought I'd have 20,000 pages by the end of 2021.  I'm still 5,000 pages short of that goal.  I'm thinking April-May might be more realistic.

Over the past year, I've been all over the place on my next book project.  I looked at a sequel to Battle Officer Wolf, pondered writing The Vampires of Michigan: Pandemic, dabbled in doing a series of essays on spiritual warfare, and even took yet another stab (or two) at writing something in the fantasy genre.

Instead, I've settled on writing a concise, quick-moving military history of China.  I'm not sure how long it will be, but if you know me, you know it will be short.  Long books bore me.

I feel that Long Live Death was the right length for the topic and I'm very happy with it's reception.  It goes into just enough detail to make its point and inform the reader, and also points you to more detailed information in case you want it.

That's what I want to achieve with this new book.  At the moment, it's working title is "Something Something Dragon," because books about China almost always have "dragon" in the title.  You know, something like "The Dragon's Brittle Claws," because one of my themes is that Chinese military track record is uneven at best.

Hey, it took me a while to come up with Long Live Death, so no hurry.

I've not yet put together a deadline, or a projected completion date, but unlike other efforts, there is significant momentum.  I'm starting to get some good writing sessions and acquiring additional sources.  The mania is setting in.

I should note that like the Spanish Civil War, Chinese military history is another area that fascinated me in my late teens.  It was always somewhat obscure, and I found that a challenge.  At one point in college I came up with a Chinese version of Milton Bradley's Shogun game (which has been renamed a bunch, not sure what they call it now).  So a lot of my research is already floating around in my head, it's just a question of organizing it.