Happenstance Not Conspiracy Part One

History is both multicausal and complex. And sometimes those causes can be quite small and, perhaps, insignificant.

I recently wrote a long post about the fourth century Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (the original posts: Part One and Part Two) in which I speculated about whether we could have been spared the worst excesses of Roman Christianity had Julian not died in an ill-fated invasion of Persia. I even suggested (wishful thinking?) that without an belligerently Christian Rome, the world could have been saved from the youngest and most aggressive of the Abrahamic delusions.

Counterfactual history can be fun but is ultimately pointless. Unfortunately, some people want everything to be ‘explained’ and can be easy prey for conspiracy theories about both the past and the present.

As I said above, history is multicausal; however, not all causes of important events are themselves important. The following are a selection, my own selection, and there are many more examples…

* One of the assassins of Gaius Caligula, third emperor of Rome, Cassius Chaerea was allegedly repeatedly insulted and mocked by the emperor for his high-pitched voice and supposed effeminacy. Chaerea, a veteran of the disastrous defeat that saw three legions destroyed in Germany in 9AD, was offended by Caligula giving him obscene passwords and was the first of the assassins to strike a blow at the emperor. Thank goodness we don’t have arrogant royals with pretend military careers sneering at real people these days.

* The superstitious population of Europe looked fearfully at the sky for astrological reasons when the Black Death struck in the late 1340s, whipped themselves bloody to appease God’s wrath or murdered those Jews they accused of poisoning wells. They would have been astonished to learn that the plague was spread by something as commonplace as a fleabite.

* In 1588, the English celebrated a “Protestant wind” that wrecked the Spanish Armada. A wind in the Channel also delayed William of Normandy’s invasion in 1066 for more than a month allowing King Harold Godwinson and the core of his professional army to rush north to defeat the Vikings near York. (Incidentally, had Harold triumphed at Hastings the Battle of Stamford Bridge might rank with the Battle of Britain in national mythology as never again did the Vikings invade England in such force). Historians forget the weather at their peril. One of the reasons the Emperor Napoleon delayed his attack at Waterloo until nearly midday was to allow the ground to dry after torrential rain whilst Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was hampered by both a late Spring thaw and the early onset of Winter.

* George Armstrong Custer’s disastrous decisions in the war with the Northern Plains Indians that led to his death at the Battle of Little Bighorn may have been influenced by his presidential ambitions. This is not as absurd as it sounds. When Custer died in 1876, seven of eighteen US leaders (including the incumbent) had been generals and four of the next five presidents after his death had been Union generals in the Civil War.

* The murder of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, the event that sparked the First World War, occurred when the Archduke’s driver took a wrong turn (and stalled the car!) into the street where one of the assassins from the Serbian terrorist organisation the Black Hand, Gavrilo Princip, happened to be buying a sandwich.

I could go on but you get the point. Things sometimes happen for very mundane reasons – personal insult, the weather, a wrong turn. Humans are pattern-forming animals – that’s why the coat you hung on your bedroom door looks like an axe-murderer when you are half-awake at 3am. As poorly-evolved East African apes, better a false positive than getting eaten by a lion. But the search for what ‘really’ happened can, for some people, lead towards conspiracy theories.

I am currently reading Richard Evans’ new book The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination which deals with some of the false ideas that have grown up around the Nazis. The header picture for this post is from a Simpsons episode where the Fuehrer has escaped to live in South America (see here). Regular readers will know about my frustration with the obsession with 1930s Germany and the Second World War and how the Nazis (and the Crusades and the Atlantic slave trade) have been lifted out of their historical context to become timeless exemplars of evil. Nothing else can explain the praise for plastic hardman Danny Dyer calling BUF members “fascist slags” – far easier to get right-on points from Twittermongs than ask difficult questions about why some people followed Oswald Mosley (a Labour cabinet minister) to the far right. Incidentally, I worked in East London for more than a decade and never once heard anyone speak like Dyer. Evans sets out the various ‘conspiracies’ about the Nazis with a proper historical perspective. For example, he points out that the Nazis made very little use of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth about Germany’s defeat in 1918. As Evans says, Hitler served on the Western Front throughout the First World War and was well-aware of the scale of the disaster that overtook the German army in the late Summer and Autumn of 1918. He was also reluctant to blame those people whose votes he wanted in the 1920s and early 1930s for the defeat of 1918.

I will post the second half of this piece in a couple of days.