The arbitrariness of history - the following recorded on this date, not because it happened on this date, but because I happened to learn it on this date. Which makes it historic to me anyway!
Continuing my love of keeping alive those from the past who have been forgotten, or are simply overlooked - we humans have a tendency to develop a very small canon, and to imagine that these few were alone; so we limit our capacity to learn and grow, denying ourselves some of the greatest, and adding new meaning to the word ignor-ance: a true stupidity; and it is true in every branch of human life, from art to science, from music to politics. And not that I had ever thought my thought original, but I have discovered, in Anne Wroe's splendidly conjectural biography of Pontius Pilate (Random House, 2001) - that I am a Pyrrhonist (not to be confused with the followers of a recent Argentine despot - they were Peronists).
“Pyrrhon taught that certain knowledge of anything was unattainable. For any given proposition, the opposite could be proposed with equal reason; no assertion was more valid than another. The man of wisdom, rather than declaring ‘this is so’ could only say ‘this seems so’."
Which does sound rather like the first half of Descartes' famous maxim (see Feb 11), and sums up both Nietzschean Nihilism and the motto of the Royal Academy of Science, to questionable perfection.
Wroe may be wrong in one regard (I think that is the correct Pyrrhonistic way of phrasing this but I will need to check); his name was not Pyrrhon but Pyrrho (scholars are divided on the issue). Born at Elis, Greece, in 360 BCE, according to Chambers; died 270 BCE - which makes him the heir of Plato, the contemporary of Aristotle, but of neither school (as part of our process of limiting the canon, we tend to think of Greece as being divided exclusively into the Platonic and Aristotelian schools when there were actually many, many, many). He was also the teacher of Timon (the Sillographer, not Shakespeare's misanthrope). Chambers says:
"he taught that we can know nothing of the nature of things, but that the best attitude of mind is suspense of judgement, which brings with it calmness of mind. Pyrrhonism is often regarded as the ne plus ultra of philosophical scepticism."
And this:
"Consistent sceptics were said even to doubt that they doubted.”
To which I can only reply, my tongue pressed firmly to my cheek: "Did they? Did they really?"
And then add, what Newton added in an appendix to the second edition of the "Principia Mathematica", expressing the same view somewhat more succinctly, somewhat more plainly and straightforwardly, as: "Hypotheses non fingo"; and then somewhat less so:
"For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”
In short, there are no facts, no proofs, no certainties, in life let alone in science. A proven fact is, in fact, merely the current state of our ignorance, a hypothesis waiting to be disproven.
Finding a devious way to mention Argentina (above) was less a coincidence than a piece of naughty authorial pre-figuration or foreshadowing, the process of establishing something that seems incongruous or simply unimportant at the time, but then turns out to be a key link in the plot, a key character in the tale, later on.
Juan Domingo Peron served as Dictator, sorry, I mean the hugely popular and completely fairly elected President of Argentina, on three occasions, 1946–52, 1952–55 and 1973–74, so while he was responsible for an awful lot of bad things that happened in his country, he can't be blamed for what took place in Buenos Aires today in 1960, at 10.20pm to be absolutely precise, Operation Finale to give it its formal name, when a group of Mossad agents, led by the Polish-born Peter Z. Malkin (that's him in the picture, above), simply walked up to a local man named Ricardo Klement as he was getting off the bus, took him in a most friendly manner by the arms, him on one side and a companion on the other, led him to a comfortable limousine that was following behind them, and helped him home.
Once there, and given a glass of wine, Klement confirmed that he was really Adolf Eichmann (see my page for January 11, and go to September 6 for a piece about his diaries), the former Nazi bureaucrat who had been in charge of the Final Solution. Three days later an El Al jet bringing a fake Israeli delegation for a pretend official visit to Buenos Aires left with - so he was listed anyway - one of the airline's staff on board, in pilot's uniform, but visibly far too sick (from sedatives, though to anyone who looked he could just have had the flu) to do more than take a seat among the passengers.
Two years later, on May 31st 1962, Eichmann was found guilty of multiple murders by a court in Jerusalem, and hanged.
Malkin (born May 27th 1927, Żółkiewka, Poland; died: March 1st 2005, New York), the man who planned and led the kidnapping, would have made a much better James Bond than even Ian Fleming could have imagined: an explosives expert, trained in karaté, a practitioner of disguises, he often posed as an itinerant painter, and in fact was designing stained glass windows for Buenos Aires churches as his cover for the Eichmann grab. Afterwards he became the head of Mossad back in Israel, and in his retirement painted in New York, while secretly assisting the Manhattan DA’s office with anti-terrorism issues.
Amber pages:
1904: Salvador Dalí born, today in 1904
Einstein's "Theory of Relativity" presented, today in 1916
Israel admitted to the United Nations, today in 1949, on the same day that Siam changed its name to Thailand
Death of Bob Marley, today in 1981 (born on April 6)
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