Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 June 17

= June 17 =

Michael Collins - "Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him"
In we read "On August 22 Michael Collins had been killed by Republicans in an ambush in County Cork. A few days before he was killed he told a friend 'Tell Winston we could never have done anything without him'". Who was that friend, and what is the earliest record of the message? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 01:56, 17 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Churchill himself only identifies the messenger as "a friend" (presumably of Collins): see The World Crisis Volume IV: 1918-1928: The Aftermath p.369. Alansplodge (talk) 10:07, 17 June 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that - it leads me to suspect it was Tom Jones, who, like Collins, attended Arthur Griffith's funeral on the 16th. Jones was still at the Cabinet Office when Churchill was writing The Aftermath, and it probably would not have been politic to give his name. By the way, the quote appears on page 348 of the Macmillan (British) edition of The Aftermath, the chapter is 'The Rise of the Irish Free State' (I mention this for convenience in case anyone comes back to this in the future). DuncanHill (talk) 03:50, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Origin of the quote
I once encountered the quote "Everything will be as it should be, even if it is destined (to be) otherwise" allegedly sourced to Quran. My search for that quote was inconclusive. Some unreliable sources say it's the 53rd surah, An-Najm, but I failed to find it there. The quote is somewhat popular in Russian publications ("Все будет так, как должно быть, даже если будет иначе") and this dictionary of cinema phrases says it's from The Prisoner of Château d'If. A similar quote appears in Marcus Aurelius, "Everything that happens, happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so", but I'm not sure whether it's this one. Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes will do. Brandmeistertalk  11:25, 17 June 2021 (UTC)


 * There are similar sentiments in the Qur'an and elsewhere although I don't see this quote specifically...it doesn't really seem to match anything I can find, but see Predestination in Islam. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:29, 17 June 2021 (UTC)


 * One online russian thread (possibly the same unreliable source) links the quote to another russian movie (А я люблю женатого). Answers mention the 53rd surah, Marcus Aurelius, The Count of Monte Cristo, but also ru:Леви, Владимир Львович. His work Направляющая сила ума seems to really use (almost) the same phrase, not sure of copyvio, so no link. This naturally doesn't rule out older origins and I wouldn't be surprised if something similar can be found in the Islamic tradition. I may be wrong, but the russian version sounds to me more ironic (on the lines of "everything will be as it should be, even if it won't"), which reminds me of things like Candide or Jacques the Fatalist. Personuser (talk) 13:39, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The quote from The Prisoner of Château d'If seems to be here at around 2:34:00 (should be an official channel). The Count of Monte Cristo has some external links to the French text and English translation, but I couldn't find the relevant part this far. The phrase has a lot of minor variations and I couldn't find anything in Russian predating the film (at least not something including the second part of the sentence). Personuser (talk) 10:50, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks. Brandmeistertalk  11:26, 18 June 2021 (UTC)


 * The sentence spoken in the film is subtly different: Все будет так, как должно быть, даже если будет наоборот. It may have been original to the script and the source of later variations. Tout sera comme il se doit is common enough in French; Tout sera comme il se doit, même si c'est le contraire! has only one hit, on a Russian page. --Lambiam 14:19, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The attribution to the Quran can be traced at least to Валерий Аграновский (the number 53 is still a mystery). Some corpus search results and an odd variation . If the dates of creation (not publication) can be trusted, some may be older than the film. Personuser (talk) 16:45, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * The "odd" variation is from a letter by Yuli Daniel dated 13 August 1968, definitely earlier than the film. In context, it seems to be a sarcastic reference to some form of Newspeak. --Lambiam 23:08, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
 * If the following sentence in the letter (Будем утешаться банальными изречениями ~ “I will console myself with banal maxims”) refers to our phrase, this tells us two things: 1. It was already a popular saying 2. It was consolatory. I guess it may had a somewhat ambiguous ironic element, which may have been accentuated with sarcasm by Daniel in the same way phrasings like “даже если по-другом ” seem to point more clearly to an optimistic interpretation, closer to Marcus Aurelius. Another difference is whether the first part should be interpreted in the sense of determinism or in a moral sense. Not sure how clearly this is expressed by the variants надо/ нужно должно, but this seems something that could cause troubles in translations (if the phrase was translated). I would expect more older results for a popular saying, but this is easily explained by bias in online searching tools, number of variations, lack of an uncommon world/construct in the phrase, obfuscation by modern popularity and my poor understanding of Russian. "нужно" actually gives a couple of hits and would more clearly point to determinism, but seems uncommon. Personuser (talk) 13:39, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Good catch on Agranovsky and Daniel anyway. Brandmeistertalk  10:55, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

Lobbyists for slave sugar
I am unclear on the relationship between the West India Interest and the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants. Both lobbied the British Parliament on behalf of the plantocracy, i.e. the slave-owning ruling class. The latter apparently morphed into the West India Committee, still extant. A brief description here would be much appreciated; attention to the first two articles would be even better. Which WikiProjects should I alert? --Carbon Caryatid (talk) 22:23, 17 June 2021 (UTC)


 * I suspect that the former represented the large number of wealthy Britons who who had invested in the West Indian sugar trade, rather than the actual planters and sugar traders. According to Slavery and the British Country House from Historic England; "5 to 10 per cent of the national elites in Britain were close enough to slavery to appear in the Slave Compensation records. This proportion is fairly constant across the peerage, the baronetcy, sheriffs and MPs in the Commons between 1820 and 1833". Alansplodge (talk) 23:17, 17 June 2021 (UTC)