The Quiet Road

Check out my new article at On This Deity…

5th April 1992: The Siege of Sarajevo.

On April 5th 1992 units of the Yugoslav People’s Army on orders from Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, in combination with Bosnian-Serb militia groups, took up positions in the hills surrounding the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. From there they opened fire on the city below with artillery, mortars and sniper rifles. It was the beginning of a three and a half year siege that left many thousands dead and heralded the disintegration of Yugoslavia in a decade-long series of conflicts, bringing to an end Tito’s dream of unifying the Balkans.

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I’ve got a new piece up at On This Deity…

24th March 1989: The Exxon Valdez oil spill.

At four minutes past midnight on March 24th 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. Despite not even being in the top 50 global oil spills by volume, the Exxon Valdez disaster quickly came to symbolise the destructive impact of modern industry on the natural environment. The remote location made mitigation and clean up efforts next to impossible (less than 10% of the oil was recovered) and the incredible beauty of the pristine wilderness into which the tanker dumped half a million barrels of crude oil served to magnify the tragedy. Even the more recent Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico – though it involved more oil and had a far greater direct human impact – does not compare to the Exxon Valdez spill in terms of the stark imagery it produced, graphically demonstrating humanity’s utter disregard for the planet that supports us.

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New article at On This Deity…

19th March 2003: The Beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

On March 19th 2003 US President George W. Bush announced that US and UK armed forces had launched strikes against “targets of military opportunity” in Iraq. It marked the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom; a disastrous conflict that would drag on for the rest of the decade resulting in massive casualties, a huge economic cost and the further destabilisation of a region already beset by conflict and strife.

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I have a new piece up at On This Deity…

14th March 1883: The Death of Karl Marx.

“On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.” Those were the words of Friedrich Engels at the funeral of his close friend and creative collaborator, Karl Marx. The funeral took place in Highgate Cemetery in London. The year was 1883 and there were less than a dozen mourners present. The world had yet to be exposed to the work of the man laid to rest in that small ceremony. But it would only be a few short years before the established political order would tremble at the name of Karl Marx and – in some places – be ripped down entirely by the words that flowed from his pen.

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The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that The Quiet Road has undergone a bit of an overhaul. Whaddyathink? Quite aside from the visual redesign, I’ve completely redone the back-end of the site. It’s still in WordPress but is no longer held together with bits of string, a twisted wire coat-hanger, some double-sided sticky tape and the infinte number of ugly code hacks that characterised my first attempts at using WordPress all those years ago. Now it’s all shiny and widget-compatible, the categories have been radically stream-lined (with tags taking over the bulk of the heavy-lifting), there’s proper social-media integration and even a mailing-list you can subscribe to (though I’d recommend RSS subscription… it’s the 21st century after all).

Anyways, during the upgrade there were a couple of minor hitches (some links and some quotes disappeared, but I should be able to salvage them from an old backup, but that can wait ’til tomorrow).

I’ve only done a very cursory cross-browser check, so I’d be grateful, dear reader, if you could report any issues / broken bits / obvious screw ups that you notice. Any and all feedback is welcome.

Check out my new piece over at On This Deity…

15th February 1989: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Empires fall. It’s what they do. It’s inevitable.

Sometimes the collapse is due to the depletion of essential resources. Sometimes it’s a result of being overwhelmed by external aggressors. Sometimes it’s plague or a natural disaster that does it. And if all else fails, invading Afghanistan will do the trick.

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My latest piece is up at On This Deity…

7th February 1992: The Maastricht Treaty.

Today we look back to 1992 and the signing of a treaty that would cause delight, despair and scepticism. A treaty that announced a radical evolution of the European Project from an economic trade pact to a political union. But taken in isolation, the Maastricht Treaty tells us very little, so let us use its anniversary to instead take a look at the remarkable history of that European Project as it rose from the ashes of two world wars and eventually brought us European passports, a pan-European currency and a continent-sized home.

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Written very late last night, I’m amazed it’s even semi-coherent, my latest piece is up at On This Deity…

2nd February 1970: The Death of Bertrand Russell.

On the 2nd of February 1970, after a long life in which he travelled far and wide, Bertrand Russell died less than a hundred miles from his Welsh birthplace. To some he was the most important philosopher of the 20th century… a Nobel-Laureate who produced seminal works in the areas of logic, mathematics, political philosophy, the philosophy of language, moral philosophy and more. Others saw him first and foremost as an heroic champion of peace, justice and liberal ideals… a tireless campaigner and activist; a pragmatist who never lost hold of his ideals. Unsurprisingly though, there were many who viewed him as a dangerous radical and a threat to the established order. So much so that he was ostracised by academia during the First World War, losing his job and eventually his liberty, ending up in Brixton Prison for several months as punishment for his tireless peace activism.

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Head on over to Dorian Cope’s On This Deity for my latest piece…

28th January 1939: The Death of William Butler Yeats.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the death and celebrate the life of William Butler Yeats. Poet and politician, mystic and modernist, revolutionary and traditionalist, WB Yeats lived a life filled with glorious contradiction. A man of rare wisdom and questionable judgment, his Nobel Prize-winning poetry graces us with some of the 20th century’s most enduring imagery. Steeped in mythological symbolism — mostly Celtic, but drawing also on the mythpoetry of Greece, Rome and beyond — the spellbinding blend of mysticism, contemporary commentary and Romanticism provided Ireland, and the wider world, with a truly illuminating voice (as well as revealing the debt this Irish poet owed to his English inspiration, William Blake).

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