WSJ Historically Speaking: Tax Evasion’s Bite, From the Ancient World to Modern Days

PHOTO: ANDREAS SOLARO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTO: ANDREAS SOLARO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Despite nearly a half-dozen elections in as many years, the Greeks are still no closer to solving their debt crisis. The newly re-elected government under Alexis Tsipras must fix a country that has over 25% unemployment, an economy that has shrunk by about 30% since 2008 and a national debt that amounts to almost 200% of gross domestic product.

One issue stands out: tax evasion. Nearly a quarter of the country’s GDP is off the books. State revenue for 2015 is already $4.5 billion below target. This is nothing new for the Greeks, who have been dodging taxes for centuries, nonpayment having been a sign of patriotism during Ottoman rule (1453-1821).

Tax evasion has been around since ancient Mesopotamia, when the Sumerians were cheerfully working the black market. A 19th-century B.C. Sumerian cuneiform tablet warns that a trader named Pushuken has been imprisoned for receiving smuggled goods. “The guards are strong,” continues the writer of the tablet, “please don’t smuggle anything else.”

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The Sunday Times: To the barricades once more, ladies, and this time men shall not deny us

Photo: Steffan Hill

Photo: Steffan Hill

If the women-to-the-back debacle of Jeremy Corbyn’s new cabinet has a silver lining, it’s the reminder that women are good for revolutions, but not all revolutions are good for us. For many on the left this is a painful truth, and one often avoided for fear of giving ammunition to the right. Yet for the future, let alone the history, of women, it’s a truth that has to be confronted.

Since the 18th century it has been the same old pattern. The people become restless. Women mobilise against injustice and the status quo. Their participation tips the scale in favour of change. The old regime collapses. A new order emerges. Political reforms ensue. Women demand their fair share. They go home empty-handed.

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New Statesman: The Ascent of Woman isn’t perfect – but it does let female expertise shine

The Ascent of Woman isn’t perfect – but it does let female expertise shineBy Rachel Cooke

Amanda Foreman’s documentary series The Ascent of Woman (Wednesdays, BBC2, 9pm) is full of ambition and lavishly produced – somehow the BBC budget has got her to Vietnam and China, India and Turkey, as well as to the door of the V&A in London. In tone, it harks back very deliberately to the glory days of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969) and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973) but with the crucial difference that barely a male face can be seen. During the third episode, when some pasty, bespectacled chap from the University of East Anglia was wheeled on to discuss the 16th-century obsession with witchcraft, I felt vaguely amazed, like I was watching a giraffe wander through my local park. Oh, how I cherish this almost total reliance on female expertise, one clever, learned woman following another, as if it were not at all unusual for women to be clever and learned (though it isn’t in life, most television still conspires to suggest otherwise).

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The Pool: Why are women so absent from history?

Photo: Stencil of Mary Wollstonecraft by Stewy on Newington Green wall from Rex Features

Photo: Stencil of Mary Wollstonecraft by Stewy on Newington Green wall from Rex Features

Since ancient times, it has been the practice of the victors to obliterate the culture of the losers. The images of ISIS destroying the world’s historical monuments are a sad reminder of the totalitarian nature of conquest.

The first cultural conquest wasn’t of a nation or tribe however, it was of women and specifically their means to self-expression. In the 23rd Century BC, the high priestess of Sumer, Enheduanna, invented literature. She was the first person to realise that writing could do more than record a contract, send a message, or convey facts.  It was her genius and vision that resulted in the creation of the poet, poetry, and literary form.

Sargon the Great, her father, had appointed Enheduanna high priestess in the hope that she would be able to help him unite the disparate cities of Sumer into a single functioning empire. She more than rose to the challenge, using religious poetry to create a unified theological tradition that embraced all the Sumerian gods and goddesses under one political entity, the rule of Sargon.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: Gold That Glitters—and Kills

PHOTO: JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTO: JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Since ancient times, the desire for gold has had a way of turning human beings into monsters of greed. The Greek god Dionysus granted the mythical King Midas the golden touch, but only after the king had inadvertently turned his daughter into gold—and realized that he himself would starve to death—did he see his wish as a curse. The Roman poet Virgil wrote in “The Aeneid,” “Accursed thirst for gold! What dost thou not compel mortals to do?”

The alleged discovery last month in Poland of one of the lost Nazi “gold trains” is a case in point. Missing from the excitement over the train—supposedly dispatched at the end of the war (and buried since then), with millions of dollars worth of stolen loot, gold bars and armaments—is acknowledgment that this so-called treasure is the effluence of evil.

Prospectors have flooded the area where the train is said to be. Last week, regional authorities sought the help of the Polish army, as if to prove the famous line in John Huston’s 1948 film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”: “When the piles of gold begin to grow…that’s when the trouble starts.”

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DailyMail: The agony of living with bound feet: Chinese woman, 84, reveals how her feet were broken and bound when she was just six years old

Photo: BBC/Silver River

Photo: BBC/Silver River

By Lucy Waterlow

A Chinese woman has revealed how she endured having her feet bound when she was only six years old, even though the painful procedure had been outlawed.

Wang Huiyuan, now 84, who lives in the rural Tonghai County, Yunnan, had the ‘beauty treatment’ in the 1930s, decades after it had been officially banned in 1902.

‘Then it was fashionable to bind feet. Everyone did it. If not, you’d be laughed at, “look at her big, flat feet”. Once I was laughed at, I bound my feet,’ she explained to Dr Amanda Foreman on BBC documentary The Ascent Of Woman.

The octogenarian recalled how the process of binding her feet to make them smaller – an ancient practice that can be dated back to the 13th century – was unbearably painful.

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The Day: Women should run the world, claims historian

Women of the world: A new documentary series explores the history of gender inequality © BBC

Women of the world: A new documentary series explores the history of gender inequality © BBC

Despite women’s liberation and the global rise of feminism, there is still a clear gender imbalance in politics. Which is odd since there is so much evidence that women would do it better.

If women were in charge, the refugee crisis in Europe might have played out a little differently, argued the historian Dr Amanda Foreman this weekend. ‘It’s not in the female make-up to stand there idly by while women and children die like flies on the beach.’ This, she said, is why Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel has been most compassionate towards the desperate families seeking a new life, and has argued for a shared housing responsibility between nations.

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