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Family and Civilization

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Carle Zimmerman, Family and Civilization, Washington DC, ICI, 2008 [1947].

I had my attention drawn to this book by a friend, Larry Kummer, editor of FabiusMaximus website. No sooner had I opened it than I realized I had a masterpiece on my hands. One, moreover, which, at a time when the average American household is smaller than ever before, half of all marriages end in divorce, and only one half of all children are fortunate enough to be raised by their biological parents, seems more opportune than ever before. Rather than review the book myself, I decided to post the splendid introduction to the 2008 edition, written by Allan C. Carlson. Not before receiving his permission first, of course.

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HAVING TAKEN A BREAK FROM planning the World Congress of Families IV, an international assembly that took place in 2007 and focused on Europe’s “demographic winter” and global family decline, I turned to consider again Carle Zimmerman’s magnum opus, Family and Civilization (1947). And there, near the end of chapter 8 in his list of sure signs of social catastrophe, I read: “Population and family congresses spring up among the lay population as frequently and as verbose as Church Councils [in earlier centuries].” It is disconcerting to find one’s work labeled, accurately I sometimes fear, as a symptom rather than as a solution to the crisis of our age. Such is the prescience and the humbling wisdom of this remarkable book.

With regard to the family, Carle Zimmerman was the most important American sociologist of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. His only rival for this label would be his friend, occasional coauthor, and colleague Pitirim Sorokin. Zimmerman was born to German-American parents and grew up in a Cass County, Missouri, village. Sorokin grew up in Russia, became a peasant revolutionary and a young minister in the brief Kerensky government, and barely survived the Bolsheviks, choosing banishment in 1921 over a death sentence. They were teamed up at the University of Minnesota in 1924 to teach a seminar on rural sociology. Five years later, this collaboration resulted in the volume Principles of Rural-Urban Sociology, and a few years thereafter in the multivolume A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology. These books directly launched the Rural Sociological Section of the American Sociological Association and the new journal Rural Sociology.

In all this activity, Zimmerman focused on the family virtues of farm people. “Rural people have greater vital indices than urban people,” he reported. Farm people had earlier and stronger marriages, more children, fewer divorces, and “more unity and mutual attachment and engulfment of the personalit[ies]” of its members than did their urban counterparts. Zimmerman’s thought ran sharply counter to the primary thrust of American sociology in this era. The so-called Chicago School dominated American social science, led by figures such as William F. Ogburn and Joseph K. Folsom. They focused on the family’s steady loss of functions under industrialization to both governments and corporations.

As Ogburn explained, many American homes had already become “merely parking places for parents and children who spend their active hours elsewhere.” Up to this point, Zimmerman would not have disagreed. But the Chicago School went on to argue that such changes were inevitable and that the state should help complete the process. Mothers should be mobilized for full-time employment, small children should be put into collective day care, and other measures should be adopted to effect “the individualization of the members of society.”

Where the Chicago School was neo-Marxist in orientation, Zimmerman looked to a different sociological tradition. He drew heavily on the insights of the mid-nineteenth-century French social investigator Frederic Le Play. The Frenchman had used detailed case studies, rather than vast statistical constructs, to explore the “stem family” as the social structure best adapted to insure adequate fertility under modern economic conditions. Le Play had also stressed the value of noncash “home production” to a family’s life and health. Zimmerman’s book from 1935, Family and Society, represented a broad application of Le Play’s techniques to modern America. Zimmerman claimed to find the “stem family” alive and well in America’s heartland: in the Appalachian-Ozark region and among the German- and Scandinavian-Americans in the Wheat Belt.

More importantly, Le Play had held to an unapologetically normative view of the family as the necessary center of critical human experiences, an orientation readily embraced by Zimmerman. This mooring explains his frequent denunciations of American sociology in the pages of Family and Civilization. “Most of family sociology,” he asserts, “is the work of amateurs” who utterly fail to comprehend the “inner meaning of their subject.” Zimmerman mocks the Chicago School’s new definition of the family as “a group of interacting personalities.” He lashes out at Ogburn for failing to understand that “the basis of familism is the birth rate.” He denounces Folsom for labeling Le Play’s “stem” family model as “fascistic” and for giving new modifiers—such as “democratic,” “liberal,” or “humane”—to otherwise disparate civilizations to reveal deeper and universal social traits.

To guide his investigation, Zimmerman asks: “Of the total power in [a] society, how much belongs to the family? Of the total amount of control of action in [a] society, how much is left for the family?” By analyzing these levels of family autonomy, Zimmerman identifies three basic family types: (1) the trustee family, with extensive power rooted in extended family and clan; (2) the atomistic family, which has virtually no power and little field of action; and (3) the domestic family (a variant of Le Play’s “stem” family), in which a balance exists between the power of the family and that of other agencies. He traces the dynamics as civilizations, or nations, move from one type to another. Zimmerman’s central thesis is that the “domestic family” is the system found in all civilizations at their peak of creativity and progress, for it “possesses a certain amount of mobility and freedom and still keeps up the minimum amount of familism necessary for carrying on the society.”
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So-called social history has exploded as a discipline since the early 1960s, stimulated at first by the French Annales school of interpretation and then by the new feminist historiography. Thousands upon thousands of detailed studies on marriage law, family consumption patterns, premarital sex, “gay culture,” and gender power relations now exist, material that Zimmerman never saw (and some of which he probably never even could have imagined). All the same, this mass of data has done little to undermine his basic argument. Zimmerman focuses on hard, albeit enduring truths. He affirms, for example, the virtue of early marriage: “Persons who do not start families when reasonably young often find that they are emotionally, physically, and psychologically unable to conceive, bear, and rear children at later ages.” The author emphasizes the intimate connection between voluntary and involuntary sterility, suggesting that they arise from a common mindset that rejects familism. He rejects the common argument that the widespread use of contraceptives would have the beneficial effect of eliminating human abortion. In actual practice, “the population which wishes to reduce its birth rate … seems to find the need for more abortions as well as more birth control.” Indeed, the primary theme of Family and Civilization is fertility. Zimmerman underscores the three functions of familism as articulated by historic Christianity: fides, proles, and sacramentum; or “fidelity, childbearing, and indissoluble unity.”

While describing at length the social value of premarital chastity, the health-giving effects of marriage, the costs of adultery, and the social devastation of divorce, Zimmerman zeros in on the birth rate. He concludes that “we [ever] more clearly abandon the role of proles or childbearing as the main stem of the family.” The very act of childbearing, he notes, “creates resistances to the breaking-up of the marriage.” In short, “the basis of familism is the birth rate. Societies that have numerous children have to have familism. Other societies (those with few children) do not have it.” This gives Zimmerman one easy measure of social success or decline: the marital fertility rate. A familistic society, he says, would average at least four children born per household.

Given current American debates, we should note that Zimmerman was also pro-immigration. In his era Anglo-Saxon populations around the globe had turned against familism, rejecting children. Familism survived in 1948 only on the borders of the Anglo-Saxon world—in “South Ireland, French Canada, and Mexico”—and in the American regions settled by 40 million non-English immigrants, mainly Celts and Germans. However, “when the doors of immigration were closed (first by war, later by law [1924], and finally by the disruption of familistic attitudes in the European sources themselves), the antifamilism of the old cultured classes … finally began to have effect.” In short, “within the same generation America became a world power and lost her fundamental familistic future.”

Rejecting the Marxist dialectic, Zimmerman asserts that the “domestic family” would not be the agent of its own decay. When trade increased or migration occurred, the domestic family could in fact grow stronger. Instead, decay came from external factors such as changes in religious or moral sentiments. The domestic family was also vulnerable to intellectual challenges by advocates for the atomistic family. Zimmerman was not optimistic in 1947 about America’s or, more broadly, Western civilization’s future. Drawing on his work from the 1920s and ’30s, he finds signs of continued family health in rural America: “Our farm and rural families are still to a large extent the domestic type”; their “birthrates are relatively higher.” All the same, he knew from the historical record that the pace of change could be rapid. Once familism had weakened among elites, “all the cultural elements take on an antifamily tinge.” He continues: The advertisements, the radio, the movies, housing construction, leasing of apartments, jobs—everything is individualized. … [T]he advertisers depict and appeal to the fashionably small family. … In the motion pictures, the family seems to be motivated by little more than self-love. … Dining rooms are reduced in size. … Children’s toys are cheaply made; they seldom last through the interest period of one child, much less several. … The whole system is unfamilistic.

Near the end of Family and Civilization, Zimmerman predicts that “the family of the immediate future will move further toward atomism,” that “unless some unforeseen renaissance occurs, the family system will continue headlong its present trend toward nihilism.” Indeed, he predicts that the United States, along with the other lands born of Western Christendom, would “reach the final phases of a great family crisis between now and the last of this century.” He adds: “The results will be much more drastic in the United States because, being the most extreme and inexperienced of the aggregates of Western civilization, it will take its first real ‘sickness’ most violently.”

In the short run, Zimmerman was wrong. Like every other observer writing in the mid-1940s, he failed to see the “marriage boom” and “the baby boom” already stirring in the United States (and with equal drama in a few other places, such as Australia). As early as 1949, two of his students reported that, for the first time in U.S. demographic history, “rural non-farm” (read “suburban”) women had higher fertility than in either urban or rural-farm regions. By 1960, Zimmerman concluded in his book, Successful American Families, that nothing short of a social miracle had occurred in the suburbs: This Twentieth Century … has produced an entirely new class of people, neither rural nor urban. They live in the country but have nothing to do with agriculture. … Never before in history have a free urban and sophisticated people made a positive change in the birth rate as have our American people this generation.” By 1967, near the end of his career, Zimmerman even abandoned his agrarian ideals. The American rural community had “lost its place as a home for a folk.” Old images of “rural goodness and urban badness” were now properly forgotten. The demographic future lay with the renewed “domestic families” replicating in the suburbs.

In the long run, however, the pessimism of Family and Civilization over the family in America in the second half of the twentieth century was fully justified. Even as Zimmerman wrote the elegy for rural familism noted above, the peculiar circumstances that had forged the suburban “family miracle” were rapidly crumbling. Old foes of the “domestic family” and friends of “atomism” came storming back: feminists, sexual libertines, neo-Malthusians, the “new” Left. By the 1970s, a massive retreat from marriage was in full swing, the marital birthrate was in free fall, illegitimacy was soaring, and nonmarital cohabitation was spreading among young adults. While some of these trends moderated during the late 1990s, the statistics have all worsened again since 2000. Zimmerman was right: America is taking its first real “sickness” most violently.

Any solution to our civilization’s family crisis, he argued, must begin “in the hands of our learned classes.” This group must come to understand the possibilities of “a recreated familism.” Accordingly, it is wholly appropriate for this new edition of Family and Civilization to appear from ISI Books in 2008. Zimmerman wrote the volume at the height of his powers of observation and analysis and as a form of scholarly prophecy. The times cry out for a new generation of “learned” readers for this exceptional book. It is important, too, to remember Zimmerman’s discovery that it had proven possible in times past for a “familistic remnant” to become a “vehicular agent in the reappearance of familism.” Hope for the future, Zimmerman concludes, “lay in the making of [voluntary] familism and childbearing [once again] the primary social duties of the citizen.” With the advantage of another sixty years, we can conclude that here he spoke the most essential, and the most difficult, of truths.

*

Need I say anything more?

The General in General

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I’ve just learnt that the new German government is preparing to put a former Bundeswehr general (he used to command a tank brigade) in charge of the country’s COVID-19 Crisis Staff. As a fairly well known military historian, it has been my good (or bad?) fortune to meet quite some generals in many of the world’s countries where I was invited to speak. Germany included. So when my editor, Andreas Rosenfelder, asked me to do a short article about generals—a sort of Jungian analysis of the architype, I suppose—I jumped at the opportunity.
Some members of the species I met were polite, thoughtful, soft-spoken and possessed of a fine sense of humor. As, for example, the late Colin Powell, who during the first Gulf War served as Chief of the Joint Chief of Staffs and later became President Bush Jr.’s secretary of state, did. Others, who in this essay will remain unnamed, were unpleasant and even offensive. At least one was a real bastard. Perhaps that was because, at the time we met, he had just been told that, contrary to his expectations, the post he was then holding would be his last. Too much of a roughneck, not sufficiently good as a diplomat, people said. Understandably, he was in a bad mood.
To generalize from this, on day X you are a great man. With thousands and even tens of thousands of soldiers obeying your orders and a staff that laughs at every joke you make. One general told me that, before he was promoted, he did not know what a good sense of humor he had. If you live on base, on day X+1 everyone can watch you as, having retired, you are evicted from your nice government-owned quarters. Trailed by your wife, you find yourself carrying your belongings to a waiting van. Some onlookers, especially those who took your place, enjoy the spectacle. But for you it is not fun.
Generals I met tended to have several things in common. First, they had big egos—they have to. Second, many of them look down on their civilian opposite numbers. In Germany in the bad old days before 1945, General Staff officers sometimes referred to the foreign ministry as The Idiot House. Not always without reason, I should add. One former Israeli general, a bona fide genius in fields such as math, computers and operations research, told me more or less the same about the Knesset of which, following his retirement, he was briefly a member. Only to run for his life as soon as he could.
Third, though there are exceptions (with, at their head, Helmut von Moltke Sr.) very few generals are scholarly types. I even suspect that the reason why some of them embarked on a military career was precisely because they thought, often mistakenly, that it would not involve them in much reading and writing. Some went so far as to express their contempt for scribblers such as myself. But not all. I vividly remember an evening I spent at Camberley, England, the base where the British Army’s Staff College was located. It being dark and foggy, like some figure out of a Brothers Grimm tale I lost my way. Blindly, I wandered about the base until I saw a light. I went up, and knocked at the door. It opened and I found myself standing in front of the commander of the Army’s officer education system, General Sir Charles Waters.
It was winter and, instead of shoes, he was wearing white socks. He recognized me and asked me to come in. He sat me down, gave me a glass of sherry, and pointed to the eight books he was reading at the same time—if memory serves me right, most of them about nonmilitary subjects. Then he told me that his next job would be that of commander in chief, British Army, Northern Ireland (I think this was in 1989, and the struggle with the IRA terrorists was still ongoing). In this post, he said, he would try to make sure that as few people as possible would die. On both sides. I thought then, and think now, that it was a very sensible approach indeed. As became clear some years later when, during the watch of another British general I knew, Sir Rupert Smith, a peace agreement was signed.
Fourth, given how rapidly complex modern technology changes, generals are used—as they have to be–to dealing with things they do not understand. Is that the reason why Germany’s new government is considering General Carsten Breuer for the job? Makes you wonder.
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There are also a few female generals. A close friend of mine, himself a former general, prefers them to male ones. Why? Because some of them have nice legs. Much better than beer bellies, he says
Here are some other considerations that people may find interesting.
First, generals are used to move from one job to another (starting with Napoleon, in all modern armies, officers, to gain promotion, are rotated between commanding units, staff work, and training).
Second, they tend to be good organizers. As, for example, Leslie Groves, the general who ran the Manhattan Project, was.
Third, they tend to be very hard workers. As a rule modern armies, with the American one at their head, do not tolerate layabouts. If there is no work to be done, sure as hell they will create it. Neither Kutusov, who commanded the Tsar’s armies against Napoleon in 1812, nor “Pere” Joffre, who saved France from the 1914 German invasion, would have made it today.
Fourth generals, assigned to a civilian job, may do very well. As, for example, Dwight Eisenhower did. Or take two of my own country’s generals, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. Rabin played a crucial part in the great Israeli victory of June 1967; later he became a good prime minister. Sharon was perhaps the greatest warrior Israel ever produced, and he too turned out to be a good and courageous prime minister. By contrast Ehud Barak, a protégé of Rabin’s and a superb soldier (special forces), made a less than mediocre one.
Finally, never forget that generals have the hardest job of all. To wit, sending men to their death. America’s general George Patton was not exactly known for his delicate feelings. Yet on one occasion, visiting the wounded in hospital, he broke down and said that, if only he had been a better general, these poor people would not have been where they were. Even if the story is fake, which it may well be, still it shows what being a general is really like.
Briefly, generals are a tribe of their own. There is no saying what a general may do; in that respect they are much like the rest of us. To repeat, I do not know why the German Government chose General Breuer for the job. So all I can say is, good luck.

On War

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Clauzewitz in cyber

Some time ago, a Polish TV station asked me for an interview. I found the questions they asked to be quite interesting; so much so that I decided to put them to my readers and answer them in a slightly more organized way.

Here they are.

  1. Modern public opinion is convinced that globalization rules out wars. What can wars look like in times when everyone knows everything about each other and often everyone cooperates?

 

  1. I am not so sure about global public opinion. I am, however, convinced that, if that is indeed what people believe, they could not be more wrong. Just look at the history of the twentieth century. From 1900 to the present there has been hardly a single day in which peace reigned all over the world; including not one but two of the largest and most deadly armed conflicts ever fought. The number of wars that took place since 1945 alone has been estimated at 200 or so. Of those 200, a few are ongoing even now. Perhaps more seriously still, not one of the causes of war been eliminated. Not one! Not human nature. Not fear of an increasing powerful enemy, as Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes thought. Not economic competition, as Marx and Lenin believed. Not religion. Not nationalism. Not the sheer ruthless ambition of certain leaders who, like Louis XIV, believed that going to war was the suitable thing for a prince to do. And not the absence of a powerful and widely recognized judiciary capable of deciding conflicts and have its decisions implemented.

As to knowing everything—that is simply not true. Surprise attacks have always been possible and remain so today. Why? Because, while many of the facts concerning each country’s intentions and capabilities are often known, interpreting them—deciding how they are linked, what they mean, and where they are leading–is often very difficult. Example: they say that, in 1973, Israeli intelligence knew that a quarter of a million Egyptian soldiers were massed on the Suez Canal. Rumor has it that they even knew the name of every Egyptian pilot’s girlfriend. The only thing they did not know was that those 250,000 were going to attack within 24 hours.

Concerning interstate cooperation, do you really believe it is greater (or smaller) today than it was, say, back in 1795 when Prussia, Russia and Austria divided Poland among themselves?

  1. Do the thoughts of old theorists of war like Clausewitz remain valid for the 21st century?

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  1. Many years ago I wrote an article about exactly this question. I called it, “The Eternal Clausewitz,” and you can still find it on the Internet. The argument was that plenty of military theorists, seeking to be of practical use to commanders, have focused on the question, how to successfully wage war. Now this is a question the answer to which depends on circumstances, specifically including rapidly changing technology. As a result, in the great majority of cases hardly had their work been published than it became out of date.

Clausewtiz, ”the philosopher in uniform” [philosoph im Waffenrock] as he has been called, took a different approach. He did not try to teach commanders how to wage war. Instead he focused on the following two questions: what war is, and what it is waged for. The first question enabled him to identify the most important characteristics of war: such as its strategic nature—the fact that it is a duel between two sides, each of whom is free to do as he pleases—its tendency towards escalation, the role of emotional factors as opposed to merely intellectual ones, the fact that the defense and not the offense is the stronger form of war, the role played by uncertainty and chance, and so on. The second pushed him towards the most famous sentence he ever wrote, namely that war is the continuation of politics (here understood in the broadest sense possible) with an admixture of other means.

So, yes. Much of Clausewitz’s famous book, On War, still retains much of its relevance right down to the present day.

  1. How have the Internet and digitization changed war? Isn’t it true that on-line operations, being as difficult to detect as they are, hold the advantage over physical ones?

 

  1. The Net and digitization have changed war in the following ways. First, they enable war to be waged from any telephone link to any other. In other words, from any point against any point on earth; and this, regardless of distance, intervening geographical features (mountains, deserts, oceans) or movement. Second, not being waged with the aid of physical movement but at the speed of light, they can make their effects felt instantaneously. Third, as you say, it is often very difficult to determine who is responsible for what move.

Whether, in the conduct of cyberwar, the defense still retains is advantage over the offense is uncertain. But cyberwar does share many other characteristics of war on Clausewitz’s list. Including its strategic nature—move, countermove, counter-counter move, and so on—its tendency to escalate, the role played by uncertainty—one never knows what the enemy is going to do next–its role as a servant of politics, and so on.

All in all, I’d argue that it leaves Clausewitz as relevant as he had ever been.

Hardly a Clever Thing to Do

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25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women (why against women? World-wide, far more men than women die a violent death) is coming along. Focusing on Israel, between 2019 and 2020 the number of women who called the hotline complaining about domestic violence is said to have risen 31.5 percent. Compared to a year earlier, the May 2020 number of battered (or, at any rate, claiming to have been battered) women asking to enroll in a shelter went up 27 percent. The number of femicides went up from 20 to 26, 13 of whom were killed by their spouses. That of attempted femicides went from 2 to 14—a seven hundred percent increase, no less. The numbers go on and on. I have neither the time nor the inclination to check each one of the world’s 200-odd countries. From the few cases that I did check, though, it would seem that the situation in them is hardly different.

Attempts to explain the phenomenon vary. One school of thought has it that corona is forcing more people to spend more of their time at home where they are in close, sometimes inescapable, contact with their apparently not so congenial spouses. People get on each other’s nerves, leading to violence. Another focuses on the economic hardship that corona has helped bring about in many cases. Businesses have closed, employees have been fired. Nothing like penury, or the fear of it, to make people quarrel.

Supported by two decades of research and countless publications I wrote about various aspects of the problem, and always assuming the data are genuine and not faked or doctored by all kinds of feminists, I have two other explanations to offer. One is that women who for any reason dislike their male spouses or acquaintances have learnt how to harness the system and make it work for their own benefit. Not just for legitimate causes, but to settle all kinds of accounts, obtain compensation, explain how they got pregnant, and simply draw attention to themselves. Confident that they will not be punished—regulations issued by Israel’s Ministry of Justice actually prohibit prosecutors from tackling women found to serve bear false charges—they do as they please. For launching a complaint that a woman beat them up, men can be, and have been, arrested. For daring to defend themselves in court, they have been execrated. As, by the way, their lawyers have also been.

Second, for decades now men have been humiliated and discriminated against. It all starts at kindergarten where toddlers, barely out of their diapers, are taught that girls are sacrosanct and should never be annoyed or touched in any way. Even in the face of provocation. It goes on at school where boys, subjected to “sex education” are taught that they are, all of them, potential rapists; it goes on throughout young (and by no means only young) peoples’ lives. So defective, so one sided is some of the “education” in question that, having undergone it, one sixteen-year old boy I know had never even heard the word syphilis mentioned.

Each grape looks like a blood cell and all of the tuberculosis germs a minimum cialis 20mg tablets click over here of six months. This therapy is given by a device that comfortingly perhaps look likes a computer mouse which passes on sound waves at a very low pressure. generic cialis prescriptions As more blood flows in, the level viagra samples no prescription of pressure enhances and the penile region gets stiffer. There are pills in the online market for erectile dysfunction but also cures different types of sexual sildenafil generic viagra dysfunction. When the time to be conscripted comes, Israeli men serve thirty-six months, Israeli women barely twenty-too. For a woman, to escape conscription altogether is also much easier. All she has to do is to declare she is religious; that done, the military are prohibited from following up and checking. In large part because of women’s physical weakness, the combat arms consist almost entirely of men. A handful of pilots apart, no IDF woman has even been sent to fight in enemy territory where, which heaven forbid, she might be taken prisoner and treat as captive women often have been. By contrast, a huge proportion of the cushy slots—primarily in intelligence and administration—are held by women. In proportion to their numbers, women also find it easier to earn a commission. Whereas men are often called up for reserve duty, in the case of women this hardly happens. In all the forty years I spent teaching at two different Israeli universities, not a single female student ever missed a single class for that reason.

At their wedding, Jewish men are required to sign a standard document known as Ketuba. It obliges them to provide their brides with “food, clothing, and [sexual] fulfilment;” a woman, by contrast, does not have to commit herself to anything. As long as the marriage lasts, public opinion always gives women the option of not working; whereas men who do not work and/or keep their families fed can expect to be treated with contempt. Men work longer hours, and in harder, dirtier, and more dangerous jobs than women do. Women retire at an earlier age than men.

When the time for divorce comes—in Israel as in other “advanced” countries, two thirds of all divorces are initiated by women—fathers of young children in particular are very likely to lose custody. Whether or not they do so, chances are they will be made to pay. As the existence of ads aimed specifically at such men shows, not seldom to the point where they are left practically penniless. And not seldom even though their spouses are much better off than they themselves are. As cases—and there are quite a few of them—when men, having killed their spouses, do not try to escape but either turn themselves in immediately or commit suicide show, some men are being driven to despair, even madness.

But nothing lasts forever. As I have told my readers several times, I am a Hegelian. By that I mean that I see social life—history—as unfolding, not in a straight line but in zig-zags: action, reaction, action, and so on. Could it be that the rise—supposing it is real and not just a figment of feminist propaganda—in femicide is at least partly a reaction to the way Israel, a Western society, has been (miss)treating men over the last few decades?  

Don’t get me wrong. I oppose femicide—and viricide, a term no one else seems to be using–as much as anyone else. I look forward to the day when social life improves to the point they, as well as the death penalty, are eliminated. Meanwhile, though, the world is what it is. As the trends seem to show, in their attacks on men women, with feminists at their head, have gone much too far. Considering that it is only men who can defend them against other men, hardly a clever thing to do.

Fighting Nonsense with Nonsense

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A young (well, everything is relative) acquaintance of mine has had some problems with his eleven-year old son who—oh, the horror of it!—insists on wearing a hat at school. The outcome was a model of the way nonsense can be used to fight nonsense—and win.

What follows is a word-by word record of the exchange. Minus anything that could identify the correspondents, of course. A stands for acquaintance, T for teacher.

 

5 messages

 

T to A

Hello,

 

I am [your son’s] physical education teacher at [our] middle school. [Your son] has been wearing his hat in class which is against school rules.  I have asked him many times to take it off in class and he refuses to do so. I checked with the school administrators and they confirmed that he should not be wearing his hat. I was hoping you could talk with him about this.

Thank you,

T

 

This email is intended for educational use only and must comply with the

Y Public Schools policies and state/federal laws. Please be advised

that under [Z] Law, any email created or received by an employee

of [Y] is considered a public record. All email correspondence is

subject to the requirements of M.G.L. Chapter 66. This email may contain

confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended

recipient. Any review or distribution by others is strictly prohibited. If

you are not the intended recipient please contact the sender and delete all

copies.

A to T

Good evening T,

 
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Thank you for reaching out.

I have read the students’ handbook and I understand that any type of headcover is not allowed in school.

With that being said, we had a long discussion. My son feels very strongly regarding his hat. It gives him a sense of confidence, helps his self-esteem, his ability to focus on school activities, and is a part of his identity.

We told him that regardless, he has to cooperate with his teachers, but I would like to ask, as this is such a major issue as far as my son is concerned, could there be an exception in some cases?

Are there students that are allowed to wear a skullcap or hijab, or some other garment on their heads?

If so, we would like the school to consider an exception to be made in [my son’s] case as well.

Regards,

A

[Quoted text hidden]

 

T to A

Thank you for getting back to me. I will talk to the administrators and get back to you. I’m sure we can work something out.

T

[Quoted text hidden]

 

T to A

We will make an exception for [your son]. Thank you for your patience.

A to T

Good morning.

This is amazing. Thank you.

Best,

[Quoted text hidden]

 

Much Ado about Very Little

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Ever since 1945 peace among the great powers, such as it is, has been guarded above all by nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles. Weapons so powerful, and so hard to stop on their way to target, that, should they ever be used in any numbers, they can literally put an end to mankind. The balance of terror, as Winston Churchill and others called it.

The outcome was a nuclear arms race that, costing hundreds of billions, went on seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Here and there some attempts were made to slow it down; however, not one of them was able to change the situation in which any use of nuclear weapons might quickly end in suicide. At any one time, the leader of the pack was almost certain to be the U.S. And no wonder, considering that country’s wealth, technological prowess, and, starting soon after President Eisenhower warned his countrymen against “the military-industrial complex,” the “new militarism,” as it has been called.

It was the US which built both the first atomic bomb and its bigger brother, the first hydrogen bomb. It was the US which built the first intercontinental bomber. The first tactical nukes (warheads small enough to be used in the field), the first atomic cannon, the first nuclear submarine, the first sea-launched ballistic missiles, the first MRVed and MIRVed ballistic missiles (which enabled several warheads to be put on top of a single missile, thus making interception enormously more difficult), and the first cruise missiles were all American inventions. Only occasionally did the Soviet Union, take the lead; and even when it did so, as in the case of intercontinental ballistic missiles and satellites in 1957-58, its supremacy was usually either quite short-lived or completely imaginary.

Each time the US seemed to gain an advantage it was said to signal a victory for the flag, freedom, democracy, etc. On the rare occasions when the Soviet Union did so, invariably the outcome was to make war more likely. In reality, none of the technological advances mattered very much. Whichever side got ahead, the balance of terror remained intact. As a result, no major clash of arms between nuclear powers—not just the US and the USSR but the US and China, the USSR and China, China and India, India and Pakistan—has ever broken out. Depending on whom you believe, no such a clash was ever even close to breaking out.

This effective solution has been sildenafil levitra greyandgrey.com launched in market under the fractional values of 10, 20, 40 and 80mg packs. Generally, suppliers that supply really low Herbalife Malaysia price can provide you fewer successful items. levitra online order For further information discount viagra uk visit us:- / This is the factor that will determine whether or not you will become at ease with that particular person. Partial and final examinations are expected to hit the doughnut hole this year, and many will face unpalatable choices: Do without viagra prices basics or do without medication. Just what the new Chinese missile, or satellite, or spaceship, is all about is a closely guarded secret. Apparently it is only about half as fast as ballistic missiles are; on the other hand, being maneuverable it can be re-targeted in mid-flight. Above all, being air-breathing it has practically unlimited range. These qualities enable it to reach US targets not only across the Pacific, which is old hat, but by following any trajectories the people in Beijing may choose. Including, above all, such as are beyond the reach of America’s existing anti-missile defenses. Secret? Yes, but no more so than the American X (for experimental) 37-B spacecraft which has now been around for a number of years and about whose mysterious missions hardly anything has been released. Potentially destabilizing? Not necessarily, since all it does is to make the nuclear balance between the two powers, which from 1963 (the year when China tested its first bomb) until recently was completely one sided, a little less so. Nor is Beijing the only one to engage on an arms race. Even as these words were being written, the world was told that the Pentagon is preparing to build something called a Space Superhighway as a first step towards using the moon to defend against China.

This raises the question, why all the brouhaha? That the US should take the necessary steps to counter the new Chinese missile is unquestionable. That, given the history of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles since 1945, the new missile is not going to upset the balance of power to the point of making a nuclear war much more likely is almost equally unquestionable.

It was US nuclear superiority that enabled it to use the bombs in war, the only country which has ever done so. It was US nuclear superiority, too, which explains why, right down to the present day, the US has always refused to promise they would not be the first to use the bomb. In this, incidentally, it differs from China. In the words of one Western source writing in 2017, “the most remarkable feature of China’s nuclear doctrine is its consistent no first-use policy. In other words, China pledges ‘not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances’.”

Absent war, what have previous generations of nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles achieved? Very little. What will the present Chinese one achieve? Almost certainly, very little. To be sure, nukes are terrifying monsters, but they do have one advantage. If they are not used, there is no reason to worry; if they are used, there won’t be any reason to worry either.

Akhmatova

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I have already devoted a post (“To Do and Not to Do,” 24 June 2021) to the Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova. Since then she has continued to haunt me, driving me to learn as much as I could about her without, unfortunately, being able to read her work in the original.

Born to a very well to do family in 1899, by the time the Revolution broke out Akhmatova had already established some reputation for herself as a poetess. Living through Stalin’s rule, stripped of practically all her and her family’s property, she did not complain about being discriminated against or having to do the dishes in her often freezing cold, one room, Leningrad apartment. She did not talk about rape, real or imagined; to the contrary, on one of the rare occasions when she described the preliminaries of a sexual encounter she had with a fellow poet her lines were full of joy. She was not the “first” woman to drive a locomotive, explore the Arctic, or perform any other kind of (originally) male feat Though some modern feminists have claimed her as one of their own, she did not hate men—far from it (Zhdanov’s description of her as “half nun, half slut”), though meant in a derogatory way, fitted her quite well). Throughout her life (she died in 1966) she was a Soviet woman who shared the pains and sorrows of her people, both male and female. Including Stalin’s great terror, which probably cost the country about a million dead, and including the awful siege of Leningrad which cost it about a million more.

Today I want to quote some of what Orlando Figs, a professor of Russian studies in London, has to say about her in his magisterial work, Natasha’s Dance (2014):

“[Her son] Lev was re-arrested in March 1938. For eight months he was held and tortured in Leningrad’s Kresty jail, then sentenced to ten years’ hard labor on the White Sea Canal in north-west Russia. This was at the height of the Stalin Terror, when millions of people disappeared. For eight months Akhmatova went every day to join the long queues at the Kresty jail, now just one of Russia’s many women waiting to hand in a letter or a parcel through a little window and, if it was accepted, to go away with joy at the knowledge that their loved one must be still alive. This was the background to her poetic cycle Requiem (written between 1935 and 1940; first published in Munich in 1963). As Akhmatova explained in the short prose piece ‘Instead of a Preface’ (1957):

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone ‘recognized’ me [she had long established herself as a poet]. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I answered, ‘Yes I can.’ Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

In Requiem Akhmatova became the people’s voice. The poem represented a decisive moment in her artistic evolution – the moment when the lyric poet of private experience became, in the words of Requiem, the ‘mouth through which a hundred million scream’. The poem is intensely personal. Yet it gives voice to an anguish felt by every person who had lost someone.

This was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

and like a useless appendage,

Leningrad,

Swung from its prisons. And when, senseless from torment,

Regiments of convicts marched.
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And the short songs of farewell

Were sung by locomotive whistles.

The stars of death stood above us

And innocent Russia writhed

Under bloody boots

And under the tyres of the Black Marias.”

This was when Akhmatova’s decision to remain in Russia began to make sense. She had shared in her people’s suffering. Her poem had become a monument to it – a dirge for the dead sung in whispered incantations among friends; and in some way it redeemed that suffering.

“No, not under the vault of alien skies,

And not under the shelter of alien wings –

I was with my people then,

There, where my people,

unfortunately, were.”

Alexandra

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History has not been kind to Alexandra Feodorovna. Born in 1872 to a fairly minor (as belle epoque grand dukes go), German grand duke, married (in 1894) to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, she is often presented as a melancholy, not too bright, woman. One whose chief interests—how dare she—was neither feminism nor any public role she might have played, but religion, her children, embroidery, and singing hymns. One who, it having been discovered that her only son, heir to the throne Alexei, was a hemophiliac, went almost out of her mind trying to look after him and worrying about him. With good reason, for more than once he was on the point of death and more than once he begged his parents to put him out of his misery by killing him. Things were made even worse when she turned to Rasputin, an uncouth, semiliterate, but highly charismatic self-proclaimed holy man from Siberia, for the kind of spiritual aid she so desperately needed but apparently could not find either at court or with her husband.

Partly because of her German origins, partly because many members of the Tsar’s family and court officials considered that he had betrayed them by marrying below his station, Alexandra was never popular at court. Nor, later on, did her closeness to Rasputin improve matters. But that was only part of it. Not only was Alexandra not the type that happily waves to crowds, but she never attained a complete mastery of Russian (she and her husband used to communicate in English). As a result, she was not terribly well received by the rest of the population either.

The outbreak of World War I did nothing to improve the lot of this unhappy woman. First she did her best to prevent her two countries from going to war against each other, storming into her husband’s presence and proclaiming, prophetically as it turned out, that “this is the end of everything.” Starting in 1915 she found herself accused of being in favor of Germany, even a German spy, a claim for which no evidence has ever been found. After the March 1917 Revolution she and her family were arrested, first by the Kerensky Government and then again by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Held first in Tobolsk (in Siberia) and then in Yekaterinburg (ditto) under conditions that grew steadily worse. In the spring of 1918 there was some talk of sending the royal family to England in quest of asylum; but these hopes were dashed when the Emperor’s cousin, King George V, fearing for his own throne, refused to let them in. The end came in July of the same year when, probably on Lenin’s personal order, the Tsar, his wife, and their five children (four daughters, one son) were taken to a cellar and died in a hail of submachine gun bullets.

So far the traditional view. It so happened, however, that I came across a work by one Anna Viroubova. Born in 1884, the daughter of a high Russian official, for twelve years (1905-12) she was the Empress’ closest companion and confidante. In 1917 she too was arrested, first by Kerensky and then by Lenin. Held under rather unpleasant conditions in the infamous Petrograd (as it then was) Fortress of Peter and Paul, later she was released and went to live with her mother in the same city. From that apartment she was able to keep up an illicit, but fairly regular, correspondence with her imprisoned former mistress, the latter’s husband the former emperor, and their offspring. In 1920 she escaped to newly independent Finland where she spent the rest of her life, finally dying in 1964.

Nothing like prison to clear the mind, they say. Perhaps that is why the Empress’ letters to Viroubova, as printed in the latter’s 1923 book, showed her in a light I had never known existed. Here was a courageous woman. One who, amidst all her tribulations, knew how to give and receive love.

I quote. From Anna Viroubova, Memories of the Russian Court Normandy Press. Kindle Edition, 2016, p. 167.

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“We are endlessly touched by all your love and thoughtfulness. Thank everybody for us, please, but really it is too bad to spoil us so, for you are among so many difficulties and we have not many privations, I assure you. We have enough to eat, and in many respects are rich compared with you. The children put on yesterday your lovely blouses. The hats also are very useful, as we have none of this sort. The pink jacket is far too pretty for an old woman like me, but the hat is all right for my gray hair. What a lot of things! The books I have already begun to read, and for all the rest such tender thanks. He [the Emperor] was so pleased by the military suit, vest, and trousers you sent him, and all the lovely things. From whom came the ancient image? I love it. Our last gifts to you, including the Easter eggs, will get off today. I can’t get much here except a little flour. Just now we are completely shut off from the south, but we did get, a short time ago, letters from Odessa. What they have gone through there is quite terrible…”

Ibid, p. 167.

“Well, all is God’s will. The deeper you look the more you understand that this is so. All sorrows are sent us to free us from our sins or as a test of our faith, an example to others. It requires good food to make plants grow strong and beautiful, and the gardener walking through his garden wants to be pleased with his flowers. If they do not grow properly he takes his pruning knife and cuts, waiting for the sunshine to coax them into growth again. I should like to be a painter, and make a picture of this beautiful garden and all that grows in it. I remember English gardens, and at Livadia [in the Crimea] Just now eleven men have passed on horseback, good faces, mere boys—this I have not seen the like of for a long time. They are the guard of the new Kommissar. Sometimes we see men with the most awful faces. I would not include them in my garden picture. The only place for them would be outside where the merciful sunshine could reach them and make them clean from all the dirt and evil with which they are covered. God bless you, darling child. Our prayers and blessings surround you. I was so pleased with the little mauve Easter egg, and all the rest. But I wish I could send you back the money I know you need for yourself. May the Holy Virgin guard you from all danger. Kiss your dear mother for me. Greetings to your old servant, the doctors, and Fathers John and Dosifei. Viroubova, Alexandra.”

Ibid, p. 168, 21 March.

“Darling child, we thank you for all your gifts, the little eggs, the cards, and the chocolate for the little one. Thank your mother for the books. Father was delighted with the cigarettes, which he found so good, and also with the sweets. Snow has fallen again, although the sunshine is bright. The little one’s leg is gradually getting better, he suffers less, and had a really good sleep last night. Today we are expecting to be searched—very agreeable! I don’t know how it will be later about sending letters. I only hope it will be possible, and I pray for help. The atmosphere around us is fairly electrified. We feel that a storm is approaching, but we know that God is merciful, and will care for us. Things are growing very anguishing. Today we shall have a small service at home, for which we are thankful, but it is hard, nevertheless, not to be allowed to go to Church. You understand how that is, my little martyr. I shall not send this, as ordinarily, through ———, as she too is going to be searched. It was so nice of you to send her a dress. I add my thanks to hers. Today is the twenty-fourth anniversary of our engagement. How sad it is to remember that we had to burn all our letters, yours too, and others as dear. But what was to be done? One must not attach one’s soul to earthly things, but words written by beloved hands penetrate the very heart, become a part of life itself. I wish I had something sweet to send you, but I haven’t anything. Why did you not keep that chocolate for yourself? You need it more than the children do. We are allowed one and a half pounds of sugar every month, but more is always given us by kind-hearted people here. I never touch sugar during Lent, but that does not seem to be a deprivation now. I was so sorry to hear that my poor lancer Ossorgine had been killed, and so many others besides. What a lot of misery and useless sacrifice! But they are all happier now in the other world. Though we know that the storm is coming nearer and nearer, our souls are at peace. Whatever happens will be through God’s will. Thank God, at least, the little one is better. May I send the money back to you? I am sure you will need it if you have to move again. God guard you. I bless and kiss you, and carry you always in my heart. Keep well and brave. Greetings to all from your ever loving, Alexandra.”

Facebook: A Parable

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Much as many people hate Nietzsche, I make no apologies for admiring him. To the contrary, each time I open one of his works I discover in him a new source of inspiration. One that, though put down on paper over a century ago, is as relevant, as fresh, and as biting as ever. Not for him politically correct, mealy-mouthed, discourse! Now that the Norwegian Nobel Committee (which hands out the Peace Prize) and the US Congress have joined forces in trying to destroy Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, the man who has done more to bring humanity together than all of their members combined, I find him more relevant than ever.

Just consider the following parable.

“My brothers,” said the oldest dwarf, “we are in danger. I understand his posture, this great Giant, this Number One. He means to do the little one, number one, and drizzle on us. When a Number One does number one, there is a Flood. If he drizzles on us, then we are lost. Not to mention the disgusting element in which we will drown.”

“Problem,” said the second dwarf: “How are we to keep a Big One, this Number One, from doing number one?”

“Problem,” said the third dwarf: “How are we to keep a Number One, this Big One, from doing the big one, a great thing and number two, and doing it with greatness and in a big way?”
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“I thank you,” replied the oldest dwarf with dignity. “Now the problem has taken a more philosophical turn, its interest has been doubled, and the approach has been cleared to its solution.”

“We need to scare him,” said the fourth dwarf.

“We need to tickle him,” said the fifth dwarf.

“We need to bite him on the toes,” said the sixth dwarf.

 “Let us do all these things, and do them all at the same time,” decided the oldest. “I see that we can measure up and rise to this occasion. This Number One will not do number one, this Giant will not drizzle.”

Focus on Taiwan

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Now that China’s star seems to be on the ascendant and that of the US, following its withdrawal from Afghanistan, on the decline, many people around the world wonder whether a military clash between the two behemoths and their allies is likely. And, if so, how it might come about, what it might look like, and what the outcome might be. The following represents a short attempt to answer these questions.

How did the current rivalry between China and the US originate?

Between the two world wars China and the US were actually allies, albeit very unequal ones. What kept them together was their common fear and hatred of Japan which invaded Manchuria, considered by many an outlying region of China, in 1931, and China itself six years later. True, prior to Pearl Harbor the US never officially declared war on Japan. But it did provide China’s ruler, General Chiang Kai-shek, with money, advisers, training, weapons, and the nucleus of a small air force (General Chennault’s Flying Tigers).

As World War II ended and it became clear that Mao and his communist legions would win China’s ongoing civil war, the US did what it could to prevent such an outcome. To no avail. By the end of 1949 Mao, actively supported by the Soviet Union, was in control of the whole of China. Whereas Chiang and his remaining adherents fled to the island of Taiwan, off China’s coast, where he and his successors enjoyed strong American support.

What happened next?

As long as the Soviet Union continued to exist, the US regarded Moscow as its own main rival. By comparison China, large but underdeveloped, was secondary. The Korean War having ended in 1953, now the US treated China as the Soviet Union’s most important ally; now it tried to exploit emerging differences between the two communist powers. As, for example, the Nixon administration did in 1969-72.

Following the Soviet collapse in 1990-91, it looked as if the US had no “peer competitors” (as the phrase went) left. This so-called “unilateral moment” lasted until about 2010. On one hand there was China’s economic and military power, which kept growing at a phenomenal rate. On the other, long before Washington withdrew from Iraq (2020) and Afghanistan (2021) it began to show signs of weakness in Afghanistan and Iraq. Though no shots were exchanged, before long the two behemoths, China and the US, found themselves locked in a struggle not unlike the Cold War of old.

Let’s stop here. Where does Taiwan fit into all this?

Over the years, the role played by Taiwan has changed. At first, following Chiang’s flight, it presented the Chinese people with an alternative model and focus of loyalty that might one day take over. True, this line of thought was never very credible; how can a flea swallow an elephant? However, there could be no doubt about the island’s strategic importance.

Taiwan is a critical link in a series of strongholds. They are, from north to south, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Together they block China’s access to the Pacific, much in the same way as the British Islands used to block the access of Germany and, before Germany, France, to the Atlantic and the world’s trade routes in general.

To make China’s position more difficult still, there are the Straits of Malacca which sit across its communications with the Indian Ocean, southeast and south Asia, and Africa. Including the Middle East, which now accounts for fifty percent of China’s oil imports. The recently announced Belt and Road Initiative notwithstanding, these five strongholds can be used by whoever owns them in order to control a huge chunk of China’s foreign trade. On which much of the country’s economic performance, and with it its political stability, depends.

What you are saying is that re-possession of Taiwan is critical to China’s future as a global superpower.

That’s right.

So is China going to invade Taiwan?

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Had it been simply a question of China versus Taiwan, and given the (im)balance of forces between those two, such a war could only have one outcome. Taiwan, however, has long received strong support from the US which does not want the island to fall to Beijing.

Suppose China does gird its loins and invades. What would the ensuing war be like?

Taiwan is an island. Accordingly, China’s first move would be to impose an air and naval blockade. If necessary, capturing or sinking a couple of Taiwanese ships so as to show it means business. Supposing Taiwan does not surrender, China might follow up with an air and missile strike aimed at its enemy’s air force, anti-aircraft defenses, and navy. That done, Beijing might use amphibious forces to invade. Or it might simply sit and wait for its quarry to surrender.

It is also possible, though less likely, that, to retain surprise, China would strike Taiwan’s defenses before imposing a blockade. However, such a move would be extremely risky and the principle of the thing would remain more or less the same.

But you have just said that Taiwan is not on its own.

That is correct. In such a war, everything would depend on the US. Initially the latter’s most likely move, perhaps joined by a few others such as South Korea and Australia, would be to send in a couple of carrier strike groups. The objective would be to break the Chinese blockade without actually firing. In case it works, fine. In case it does not, God knows what will follow.

Suppose such a war gets under way and escalates; who wins?

In such a war, China will be operating close to its own shores whereas America’s lines of communication would stretch all the way across the Pacific. As a result, for China to build up a local superiority will be relatively easy. The more so because some of America’s forces, especially the navy, will probably be tied up elsewhere. As a result, I’d put the chances of a Chinese victory—whatever that may mean—at over 50 percent.

However, there is an elephant in the room. Faced with the fall of Taiwan, at some point the US might threaten the use of nuclear weapons. For example, in case something goes wrong and a carrier with its 90 aircraft and 5,000 or so crew members is lost.

But China’s nuclear arsenal, complete with the necessary delivery vehicles, is growing. Do you really believe the US will put San Francisco and Los Angeles at risk in order to rescue Taipei?

Do you really believe China will put Beijing and Shanghai at risk in order to seize Taipei?

So what is your prognosis?

As you know, no nuclear weapon has been used in anger from 1945 on. Not during the 1948-49 Berlin Crisis. Not during the 1958 Quemoy Crisis, not during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and not during any number of other, less acute, crises both between the Superpowers and between other nuclear countries (e.g. India and Pakistan). Based on this record, it seems to me that both sides are far too aware of the dangers of nuclear war to risk one such breaking out. More likely the Chinese, in the hope that their rivals will be the first to blink, will go on putting as much pressure on Taiwan as they think they can away with. But without actually opening fire.