Dr Mark Venables

I was awarded my PhD by the University of London, King’s College for my research into air warfare strategy during and after the Second World War. The title of my thesis is: “The place of Air Power Doctrine in post-war British defence planning, and its influence on the genesis and development of the theory of Nuclear Deterrence.” So I am a military historian by academic training, and by inclination - with pretensions on the side in the direction of philosophy.

 

Instead of then taking up an academic post (which was my plan), I chose rather to go and work for J. Sainsbury, the British supermarket business, for the next 20 years. Looking back from today’s perspective, that was a very wise move! I am both much happier than I would have been, and much better off as well.

 

When I retired from the company in 2002, I decided to pursue the opportunities associated with consumer data, which was by then being collected in copious volumes by retailers all over the world. This quest took me to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

 

It was an interesting and exciting time to live in the Gulf - Dubai was vibrant and expanding at an alarming pace. There were lots of absolutely fabulous golf courses.

So when I finally, formally retired from wage slavery in 2011, my wife and I stayed on for 4 years in a delightful little town called Ras al Khaimah, and I played golf most days. In spite of such a large number of good walks ruined, I still play an awful round of golf, but remain full of hope that my 19 handicap will eventually reform itself. (Sue played a lot as well, until she got sick of it)

 

So a blog. Why?

 

Blogging is communication. You are opening lines to your own network - making it easier for them to read what you have to say, and in the same way, to the near infinite wider-world of chance connection on the web. My motivation is of the academic who lives to have his ideas and interests open for discussion.

 

Academics write compulsively, and all academics have an inner belief that they will publish a book, even books.

 

Clutching my printed thesis back in the day, I felt convinced that eventually I would re-engage with the academic community - and publish a book. And now I am there, well under way with research and writing up a volume on Civil Wars. So the blog serves, I hope, to connect with a network, and thus to generate a community centred on my writing.

Adam Tooze, in the acknowledgement pages of his book on the financial, diplomatic and international political consequences of the First World War, which he subtitles “Remaking of Global Order” comments -

 

“Writing books is not easy, but some books are harder to write than others. This was not an easy book. Those who have friends and colleagues to help them must count themselves lucky, and I am truly so. In England I was fortunate to have Bernhard Fulda, Melissa Lane, Chris Clark, David Reynolds, Matt Inniss and David Edgerton as conversational companions and readers of the manuscript. After moving to Yale in 2009 ….. I found intellectual community. Community is woven of many threads.” (p. xxi)

 

Understood. Indeed I too struggle with the writing discipline and research rigours that are inescapable when writing history. Most of all, however, I suffer from the isolation of an individual with very few academic connections, studiously ensconced in a delightful but remote home deep in the English West Country.

 

Tooze is now considered to be one of the foremost intellectuals of our time, and is of course deeply embedded within his academic community. Tooze’s network is immense, he has taught at Cambridge and Yale, and is currently with the History Department at Columbia, New York. The writing discipline required is one matter - the benefit of an intellectual community, that community woven of many threads, is of quite another order of importance for the matter of creative and insightful authorship.

 

Constructing such a community is the central aim of this blog. Of course, we cannot realistically hope to recreate 30 years of an immensely successful academic career with a few intermittent essays thrown out into cyberspace! But, already in existence there is an extensive network of friends, and established correspondents, who I will invite to join the blog. Some of them will, I hope, comment, and most of those who do will, I am certain, comment constructively and creatively.

 

The so-called network effect is proven. It will work in some measure or other with this blog, so it becomes possible that professors Tooze, Edgerton, Reynolds and Overy may in due course discover these random essays and feel constrained to add to the commentary. Perhaps?

 

I have organised the blog in 4 sections:

 

• Military History

• Comments and Reviews

• War Games

• Projects

 

I intend the section on military history to function as the core point of reference for the book I am writing. In this section I will post, in the form of stand alone essays, passages from the book as I write them, in the hope of eliciting comment and critique.

 

The category of comments and reviews will be a repository for short thoughts on books and articles, ideas, and passing interests and inflections. Here I’ll also include posts on start up and investment opportunities (which became an interest of mine while in Dubai). Not necessarily including much by way of investment management postings as such, there will be a sense in which I’ll encourage an interest in hearing from people with ideas and proposals. You never know when someone will drop a line with a really compelling opportunity.

 

War Games speaks for itself - an interest in map board and cardboard unit military simulations has been an abiding passion of mine since the early 1970’s. In spite of this activity being a vanishingly small minority pastime, there is in fact a very active community of players (not all of whom need a magnifying glass to read the maps, by any means), who write on the subject, analyse the games and swap notes. My views expressed here will join that conversation, in a subsidiary manner to the much wider boardgamegeek.com blog network.

 

The Projects.

 

Human affairs are as troubled and fractious across the globe now as, in my judgement, they have been at any time since the 1930’s. Bitterness, resentments and hatreds have replaced constructive discoursed and reasoned analysis, amongst putative friends as well as between inveterate opponents - who have now become entrenched enemies. It has been quite surprising to me, over the last 3 or 4 years, how many apparent friends, let alone tolerated opponents, have broken off all contact with me, all the while expressing venom and rancour. Reasonable disagreement has been replaced with sneering, derogatory assertions and downright insults.

 

This condition of civic rupture is not, it seems to me, to be primarily about Brexit, identity politics and attitudes towards how the viral epidemic should be managed by governments, and how the illness should influence the behaviour of individual citizens. (Although these issues have not helped matters.)

 

Rather, I would argue, the financial crisis that was initiated by the collapse of the Northern Rock Bank in 2007, and which became a full blown emergency during 2008/2009, signals, increasingly clearly, the gradual termination of the American led, liberal and neoliberal post-1945 global settlement.

 

For many people who think of themselves as “progressives,” this is not merely the unfortunate end of an ideological era in which they were supremely comfortable. It marks the conclusion of an epoch during which they grew rich, pampered, and smugly convinced of the certainty of their opinions and morality. They have more, much more, than ideology to lose. And now, they declare themselves mightily distressed that the golden age of the Boomer is ending two decades before they’re ready to throw their toys out of their cradle/grave.

 

They blame their critics, and disparage the dissenters, especially those who point out the price that other generations (and cultures) have paid and will have to pay. Their malice and rancour are especially reserved for critics of the Boomer lifestyle, which is characterised by gluttonous consumerism and wanton consumption of energy.

 

If I am at all accurate on the subject of sybaritic post-war consumerism, I believe it follows that the brexits, the culture wars and the epidemics exacerbate, and partially mask, the far deeper trauma that has been driven by the great American Neo-liberal era. Emerging contemporary with American victories in 1945 and 1989, four trends of great urgency have come into play - it is these trends (and their sub-trends) to which I will seek to apply cool and acute analysis in the Projects section this blog.

 

• Inequality

• Resurgent militarism and a new arms race

• Climate change

• Human population migrations

 

You ask, do we need more analysis? I believe we do. It continues to astonish me how infrequently and how analytically poorly these existential matters are served by blogs on the internet. There are a few blogs that I consult regularly, Wolfgang Munchau’s “Eurointelligence"; Emily Atkin, who publishes “Heated” on Substack. My daily reference to news is the Financial Times of London - one of the few serious and measured newspapers published in the English language.

 

Talking of Substack, I also subscribe to the posts of Dominic Cummings which appear on that system. Much as the man is reviled by progressives and the British elite as a whole, I admire his willingness to think and write radically, and regard him as a source of clear understanding that critical deficiencies demand disruptive solutions. He is the English equivalent of Slavoj Zizek, if such a being is imaginable!

 

In the case of journals, I follow Foreign Affairs for military developments, and the New Statesman because week by week it succeeds in publishing writing by some of the better minds of our day - including John Gray, Lawrence Freedman, Adam Tooze and Helen Thompson.

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Finally I reluctantly read The Economist Weekly, of London. Its pained determination to import classical 19th Century Liberalism into the 21st Century means the essays are burdens of Pollyanna sentiment and Panglossian delusion in an age of resurgent Machiavellianism. However, this emotional determination does mean that the journal is a model of factual evidence gathering, which bases its analysis on by far the most reliable numerical data readily available to the public. The daily morning edition, known as espresso, is worth the price of the subscription.

 

I welcome other suggestions for regular reading on the internet!