Malcolm Coates Writing

Hello there. My name is Malcolm, I am a history teacher, and I want to share some of my musings with you. I know that most of you, like me, are inundated with content. The purpose of this blog is to let me think through some ideas in the written form – the posts are public for those who want to read along, but I have no expectations of finding a following. However, I believe it is important to write for an audience. Good writing is written to be read, and if I were to type into a void, there would be a temptation to slip into laziness or cliché. Therefore, I am creating a public blog, putting my name on it, in the hopes that this will force me to focus and refine my prose. In my mind, you, the reader, are literate, interested, and pressed for time – my goal therefore is to write things that are well written, thoughtful, and short. I plan to write, mostly, about history – with an eye toward our present epoch. I am interested with how we think about and understand the past, which i...

Note: As the date in the title suggests, this essay was finished on September 20, 2023. Later that day all of it was a moot point, as Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh, and all of the ethnic Armenians fled their ancestral homelands for the Republic of Armenia.     ***      In a remote part of the Lesser Caucasus mountains, a land of tree covered peaks and fecund farmlands, is a region called Nagorno Karabakh. Despite being internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan, the locals have maintained, since the fall of the Soviet Union, that they belong to an independent republic called Artsakh. There are an estimated one hundred and twenty thousand people in Nagorno Karabakh – and they are almost entirely ethnic Armenians. Over the last several years, Azerbaijan and the Republic of Armenia have engaged in a series of border wars over this disputed area, with the Azeris proving themselves the dominant power. Last December, under the pretense of “environme...

On July 12, 2021, Vladimir Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, an essay that lays out the casus belli for his recent invasion of Ukraine. According to Putin, Ukraine is a nation under threat of neo-Nazis, and in need of denazification - a process which was last used in the late 1940s. Many commentators have written about the way Putin uses history to justify his current invasion of Ukraine. In recasting the origins of the Kievan Rus - the ninth century polity that served as precursor to Russia and Ukraine - he has claimed that there is no historical Ukraine, and that this is a war of reunification. In unilaterally invading a sovereign nation, he has placed himself as the re-ascendent gendarme of Europe, in a similar mold to Tsar Nicholas I. In claiming the need to “denazify” Ukraine, Putin uses the events of the Second World War to tie his modern revanchist Russia to the Soviet Union that suffered the brunt of the Nazi war machine. There are a myriad...

    In the final song on the album Frankenchrist, Jello Biafra tells us that “our real test of strength is caring, not the war toys we sell the world”. With recent headlines bringing us stories of Haitian refugees and the sale of nuclear submarines to Australia, this line has been going through my mind a lot lately.        The world in general and the United States in particular owes more to Haiti than we can ever rightfully give. Back when France was having their revolution, the enslaved peoples of Saint Domingue insisted that the ideals of Liberty, Egalite, and Fraternity apply to peoples of all race, and freed themselves from their oppressors. Napoleon did not like the idea of the most profitable colony on the globe slipping through French fingers, so he sent the military to reinvade and reenslave. When this failed, the French simply refused to recognise the newly independent state of Haiti - the British and Americans, also both economies centred on the ...