Joe Biden isn’t just a fabulist about his own life. The WSJ Political Diary (subscription only, but a mere $7.95/month) has an account of one of his ventures into creative historicizing:
Consider a speech he gave to the Council for the United States and Italy in Venice last June, before he was tapped as Barack Obama’s running mate. I was there. He speech was about “inflection points.”
“Venice,” he intoned, “is a place that grew from very little and, by good fortune and good management, came to be the de facto center of the world by the 13th century. It was the richest city in Europe, and arguably the most powerful.”
At this point, Mr. Biden started to lay the parallels on pretty thick: “Then, beginning in 1453, its leaders launched an unsuccessful war in the Middle East. They failed to respond to growing international economic competition. They faced a devastating pandemic. And they were slow to invest in and adopt newtechnologies.” . . .
“The Venetians,” Mr. Biden explained, “lost their military and economic edge in part because they were slow in transitioning away from old, inefficient oared galleys to sailing vessels powered by renewable energy – in their case, the wind. This gave countries with merchant and naval fleets that were not reliant on oar power a huge competitive advantage.”
Like the Venetians, Mr. Biden concluded, America risks missing out on the future by eschewing “wind power.”
As the saying goes, this would get an F in freshman history. Venice was indeed rich and powerful, and it did decline. The rest is mostly spun out of the imagination of the Senator or his speech writer. Particularly startling is the assertion that “beginning in 1453, its leaders launched an unsuccessful war in the Middle East”. In 1453, the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople and liquidated the Byzantine Empire. A small Venetian contingent assisted (not very enthusiastically) in the city’s defense. After that, Venice spent the next two centuries defending its possessions in the eastern Mediterranean against Ottoman attacks. Is that Senator Biden’s notion of launching a war? Just how invested is he in the notion of Moslems as the perpetual innocent victims of Western aggression?
The environmentalist stuff is silly, too, if not so pernicious. The navies of both the Venetians and their enemies were comprised largely of oared galleys. So long as ramming and boarding were more important than broadsides in naval warfare, galleys were superior to sailing ships, especially in the relatively smooth and often becalmed Mediterranean.
Actually, Venice’s Arsenal, the center of its shipbuilding, remained Europe’s largest and most advanced industrial complex until the 18th Century. As Macaulay’s schoolboy would have known, Venice ceased to be a great power not because it fell behind technologically but because Spain and Portugal opened new routes to the Far East the ended its domination of the spice trade, and because the rise of vast nation states doomed independent cities to second tier status. Neither of those was a development that Venice could have prevented or turned to its advantage.
The “devastating pandemic”, by which the Senator must mean the Black Death, was at least real, though it fits his story line rather poorly. It broke out in 1348, over a century before the “unsuccessful war in the Middle East”, and had little long-term effect on the city’s prosperity.
Quite simply, this whole morality tale is fiction. Where Senator Biden got it from, I can’t imagine, but it certainly suggests that assimilating facts and putting them to use is not one of his talents.
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