Author Archives: Martin van Creveld

Under Fire (2)

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Note: This article was first posted in July 2014. Almost word for word.

 

My wife and I live on our own in a townhouse a few miles west of Jerusalem, within range of the rockets from Gaza. Several times over the last few days the alarm was sounded. We react by leaving the living room, which has glass doors facing the garden. Should a rocket explode nearby, then flying shards will cut us to ribbons. So we move into the stairwell which, made of reinforced concrete, offers good protection. We are lucky to have it, for my wife has had her knee operated on and could not run if her life depended on it. I suppose something similar would apply to hundreds of thousands of others both in Israel and in Gaza. We wait until the sirens stop wailing—a hateful sound—and we have heard a few booms. Then we check, on the news, whether the booms originated in rockets being intercepted by Iron Dome or in such as have not been intercepted hitting the earth. A few telephone calls to or from our children, and everything returns to normal until the next time.

And so it goes. One gets up each morning, sees that the surroundings look much as usual, heaves a sigh of relief, and prepares for the coming day. Yet for several days now, much of Israel has been under fire. That is especially true of the southern part of the country. Over there ranges are short and incoming rockets smaller, harder to intercept, and much more numerous. There are several dozen wounded—most of them hurt not by incoming rockets but while in a hurry to find shelter. As of the evening of Tuesday, 19 July [2014], following eight days of fighting, just one Israeli, a civilian, has been killed by Hamas fire.

Several factors explain the low number of casualties. First, the rockets coming from Gaza are enormously inaccurate. They hit targets, if they do, almost at random. Second, the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system works better than anyone had expected.  The system has the inestimable advantage in that it can calculate the places where the rockets will land. Consequently it only goes into action against those—approximately one in five or six—that are clearly about to hit an inhabited area. The outcome is vast savings; in some cases, realizing that the incoming rockets are not going to hit anybody or anything, the authorities do not even bother to sound the alarm. Third, civil defense seems to be working well; people obey instructions and are, in any case, getting used to this kind of thing. Fourth, as always in war, one needs luck.

In short, generic medicines should meet the same standards generico viagra on line of quality, safety and efficacy as the original, this is often not the case. What are the side-effects? Its Side effects are generally mild and manageable. viagra samples Available in tablets, kamagra is one among the main reproductive disorders affecting satisfactory marital life. viagra 100mg You can buy them online or also visiting best price levitra the stores. In turn, the small number of Arab casualties and the limited amount of damage inflicted has enabled the government of Israel to keep the lid on its own actions in the face of extremist demands. It suggests a degree of control and precision never before attained or maintained in any war in history. But while the Israelis have been extremely effective in avoiding collateral deaths, the impact of their strikes against Hamas’ short-range rockets in particular is limited.

Israel’s lucky run will not last forever.  Sooner or later, a Hamas rocket that for one reason or another has not been intercepted is bound to hit a real target in Israel and cause real damage. Imagine a school or kindergarten being hit, resulting in numerous deaths. In that case public pressure on the government and the Israel Defense Forces “to do something” will mount until it becomes intolerable.

What can the IDF do? Not much, it would seem. It can give up some restraints and kill more—far more—people in Gaza in the hope of terrorizing Hamas into surrender. However, such a solution, if that is the proper term, will not necessarily yield results while certainly drawing the ire of much of the world. It can send in ground troops to tackle the kind of targets, such as tunnels, that cannot be reached from the air. However, doing so will almost certainly lead to just the kind of friendly casualties that the IDF, by striking from the air, has sought to avoid.

Whether a ground operation can kill or capture sufficient Hamas members to break the backbone of the organization is also doubtful. Even supposing it can do so, the outcome may well be the kind of political vacuum in which other, perhaps more extreme, organizations such as the Islamic Jihad will flourish. Either way, how long will such an operation last? And how are the forces ever going to withdraw, given the likelihood that, by doing so, they will only be preparing for the next round?

And so the most likely outcome is a struggle of attrition. It may last for weeks, perhaps more. Humanitarian efforts to help the population of Gaza, however well meant, may just prolong the agony. In such a struggle the stakes would hardly be symmetrical. On one hand there are the inhabitants of Gaza. Increasingly they have their lives turned upside down by the constant alarms, strikes, and people who are wounded or killed. On the other are those of Israel who, though their lives have also been affected, have so far remained remarkably calm and resilient under fire. Though some areas are badly affected, the Israeli economy has also been holding up well.

Perhaps because the number of Gazans killed and wounded is fairly small, international reaction, which is always hostile to Israel, has been relatively muted. One reason for this appears to be that no outsiders have what it takes to push either side towards a ceasefire. In a struggle of attrition it is the last ounce of willpower on both sides that will decide the issue. So far, it does not seem that the willpower in question has been exhausted on either side.

Conquistadores

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Conquistador Voices: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas as Recounted Largely by the Participants, K. H. Siepel, ed.,  Kindle edition, 2015.

We do not have to accept at face value all the claims made by New Age historians for whom everything Colored is good and everything White, bad if not positively devilish. Witness the Conquistadores’ own accounts as recorded in their written works and, interlaced with the editor’s comments providing the context, assembled in the volumes under discussion. Following Columbus, the most important among them were Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (cowhead, in case you are interested), and Hernando de Soto. Most were scions of the Hidalgo, i.e minor nobility, class. With the notable exception of Pizarro, who was illiterate and remained so throughout his life, by the standards of the time most were fairly well educated. Again with the notable exception of Pizarro, a true never-do-good who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, all were more or less comfortably off even before they started on the grand adventure. The one that, for good or ill, would leave their names engraved on the historical record.

All insisted on their absolute devotion both to the Church and to the Emperor in whose name, and on whose behalf, they claimed to be acting. Thus motivated they purchased ships—often by borrowing—enlisted crews, gathered supplies, embarked, and sailed westward across the ocean. Having either hit on unknown lands or heard of them, they went on until they found what they had sought or thought they did. There they killed. They raped (by present-day standards, not by contemporary ones; most of the women with whom they slept were not simply captured but put at their disposal by the Indian caciques, or minor chiefs, they met and subdued). They robbed. They enslaved, using the victims as porters and forcing them to go on grueling marches from which few of them returned. They tortured—at least one Inca chief had his feet fried in boiling oil. Countless others were racked, crucified, burnt, and what not. Most important in the long run, they brought along deadly diseases and, deliberately or not, spread them, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. They depopulated entire districts. They committed genocide.

All that is a matter of record. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a sneaking admiration for the men—except for a few translators, especially Cortes’ Dona Marina, a Mexican princess who early on cast her lot with him, there were very, very few women among them—who, seeking their fortune, did all those things. All were leaders, born and bred. As indeed they had to be, given not only the obstacles they had to overcome but the frequent tendency among their men to disobey orders, split off, and engage in conspiracies of every kind; as, for example, Pizarro’s own brothers did. All were possessed of what can almost be called superhuman energy, courage, determination, and ruthlessness. It was these qualities above all that enabled them to operate thousands of miles from home, at the far end of lines of communication that caused months to pass from the moment a missive was sent to the time an answer was received (if it was). All set foot on unknown lands. There everything –the climate, the geology, the flora, the fauna, the people—was strange and, as often as not, menacing and even dangerous. To make things worse, often they were deaf and mute in the sense that they could not communicate with the natives and either pass information to them or receive it. What information they did receive—mainly concerning the objectives they sought, the routs to those objectives, and any resources and obstacles found on the way—was often misleading.

The particular medical operation depends on the diagnosis as well as treatment can help sildenafil generico online in fast cure. It is probably the most preferred solution when it comes to attaining desired and harder lowest priced viagra erection. Do you suffer from erectile dysfunction or impotence? Erectile dysfunction is something many men suffer from but you must understand that there are a number of methods that a person can use to cut down on cost in getting Florida drivers license find out this link canadian viagra permit. Why men experience penile weakness? A normal penile erection is cialis canada cheap an essential element for healthy and enjoyable sexual activities. The reception they got from the natives varied. At times it was fairly friendly, meaning that their immediate needs—food, above all—could be provided for by trade in the form of barter. As often though, it was hostile; and now wonder, given that their reputation preceded them. The hostility in turn could be either concealed or open. Either way the outcome was countless battles between the invaders—who seldom if ever numbered more than a few hundred at any one spot—and their unwilling hosts. In each and every one of those battles the conquistadores were outnumbered, whether by ten to one, fifty to one, or a hundred to one.  From each and every one (well, almost each and every one) they emerged triumphant. In part, that was because of the steel weapons and armor they possessed; in part because of their own indomitable courage, rooted as it was in their realization that they had no choice and that the price of defeat would be swift and presumably very, very painful death.

Facing critical shortages, at times the Conquistadores manufactured their own; as by hammering nails into armor (or the other way around) and building ships to replace those that had been lost. At times they suffered great cold, at others terrible cold. At times they went naked, or practically so. At times there was a bonanza of food; at others, so scarce was the latter that they were forced to eat insects (this was long before anyone thought of them as “superfood”), lizards, roots, grass, and the bark of trees. On some occasions they were reduced to cannibalism. Well aware of how few they were, they looked after their injured comrades as well as they could. Their doing so may have done something to keep their numbers up; it certainly helped maintain morale.

Ploughing my way through all of this, I could not help but compare the Conquistadores with some others. Including, above all, the Western forces that, during the last few decades, repeatedly invaded Asian countries but failed to achieve their objectives or even hold their own.  On that, though, I’ve already written in Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West.

All these virtues apart, Siepel’s book reads exceptionally well. Once I had started I could hardly pull myself away from it, resulting in the present post. It also made me think—once again—about why certain human enterprises succeed and others, fail.

Highly recommended for anyone interested not just in the Conquista but in human nature as a whole.

The Riddle

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Almost half a century has passed, yet the riddle still persists. As the years go by its importance, far from diminishing, seems to grow. So much so that many people throughout the globe now look at what took place on 30 April 1973 as a historical turning point. One at which the decline of a superpower that used to dominate the globe began.

*

By way of an excuse, they apparently fabricated an attack on one of their destroyers (the Maddox) that never took place.

They had a population of 200,000,000; the other side only had about one tenth of that number.

They were world famous for their efficiency and “can do” attitude; the other side was supposed to be backward, lazy and slow.

They were history’s wealthiest nation by far; the other side was an impoverished “developing” country. Translated into per capita GDP, the economic gap may have been about thirty to one.

They were the world’s most industrialized country by far; the other side, having barely emerged from colonial rule, had hardly any industry at all.

In country, they and their local allies outnumbered the other side by about three to one.

They had absolute command of the sea; a few antiquated torpedo boats apart, the other side had no navy of any kind.

They had the world’s largest and most sophisticated logistic system, one fully capable of supporting 650,000 men (hardly any women yet) across the largest ocean on earth, transporting a quarter million tons of cargo a month, no less. The other side relied on bicycles, sampans (which could only carry their loads if they were carefully concealed), and human porters. To be fair, it also had some trucks. Though certainly not nearly as many as its enemy did.
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For communication they used the most modern equipment available at the time: including transistors (which had recently replaced vacuum tubes), satellites, topographic scatter, and VHF. The other side had nothing like it; especially during the early phases of the conflict, they were more likely to rely on underage runners.

They had the world’s most powerful air force and used it to drop three times as many bombs as were dropped on Germany and Japan together during World War II. Still not content, they used defoliants with which to devastate entire districts so as to deny the other side cover. Whereas the other side barely had an air force at all; throughout the years that the conflict lasted, they did not drop a single bomb on their enemy on the ground.

They could reach, attack and demolish every square inch of the other side’s territory; that side’s ability to do the same was exactly zero.

They had tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and vast fleets of vehicles of every kind. The other side only got some of these things towards the end of the conflict, long after its outcome had been decided.

Mainly relying on helicopters, their MEDEVAC (medical evacuation) system was the best in history; as a result, far fewer of their troops who were wounded died. The other side never had a single helicopter.

Wherever their troops went, they enjoyed creature comforts of every kind, from beer to ice cream; whereas the other side walked about in black pajamas and sandals cut out of discarded tires.

In the whole of history, a more asymmetrical conflict would be hard to find. They won every engagement, yet still managed to lose—in the most humiliating possible way. With the last remaining troops clinging to their helicopters’ skids.

*

The more I think about it, the more I wonder. How on earth did they do it? What does it say about them? What does it say about the other side?

Honestly, I do not know.

Fighting Power

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Note: This is a somewhat edited version of an article I did for a German magazine. While aimed at German readers and focusing on the state of the German Bundeswehr, I hope it will interest some non-German readers as well.

*

War is the most important thing in the world. When hard meets hard it rules over the existence of every single country, government, and individual. As current events in Tigray are showing once again, neither the old nor the young are immune against its horrors. That is why, though it may come but once in a hundred years, it must be prepared for every day. When the bodies lie cold and stiff and the survivors mourn over them, those in charge have not done their duty, said the ancient Chinese commander/philosopher Wu Zu.

To accomplish anything great the cooperation of many people is required. As, for example, when 100,000 men spent twenty years erecting the great pyramid at Giza. To be sure, the requirement for cooperation is similar in peace and war. However, war is not like building a pyramid. Ancient or modern, what sets war apart is that this cooperation must be achieved and maintained in the face, not just of every kind of hardship but of an enemy who is deliberately trying to kill you.

Organizing, equipping, supplying and training an army is difficult enough. Yet motivating the troops to the point where they are ready to give their lives for the Cause, as well as each other, is much more so still. Unless it is imbued with this spirit, an army is but a broken reed. From the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE to the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, countless are the cases when small but determined forces clashed with larger, stronger, better armed enemies—and defeated them.

War is a chameleon; everything in it keeps changing all the time. Including technology—from stones and clubs to laser weapons—tactics, strategy, logistics, communication, intelligence, the lot. By contrast, the prerequisites of fighting power being rooted in human nature, have remained always the same. Caesar had his troops decorate their scabbards with gold and silver studs. Napoleon said that it is with colored ribbons that soldiers are led.

The ancient Greeks had a saying: X, or Y, was brave that day. Meaning that a person’s record in war is of limited use in predicting his future performance. The same applies to fighting power of an army. The fact that it fought well in the past does not necessarily mean it will do so again. And the other way around.

*

The role of fighting power in war cannot be exaggerated. But how is it created and, which is even more difficult, maintained over time? The following is a very short list of the principles involved.

* War is the continuation of politics with an admixture of other means. Nevertheless fighting power is only partly dependent on politics. Historically speaking, some despotic societies have possessed it to a very high degree. On the other hand, as France in 1939-40 showed, democracies are not necessarily immune against defeatism.

* Whatever the political regime, it is essential that the troops have the support and respect of civilian society. Above all, male soldiers—even today in every army, practically all combat troops are male—must enjoy the support and respect of their womenfolk. The right to “kiss and be kissed,” as Plato puts it. Or else why should they fight?
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* The cause for which troops are called upon must be, or at any rate must be experienced as, just. Why? Because no soldiers are so foolish as to lay down their lives for a cause they consider unjust.

* Turning recruits into an army prepared to fight and die if necessary requires that they know and trust both their commander and each other. However, such knowledge and trust are not born in a day. That is why the authorities should do everything to make the troops stay together for as long as possible. As, for example, by returning those who have recovered from their injuries to their own units rather than to some centralized pool.

* Another indispensable prerequisite of fighting power is discipline. Both trust and discipline require that the troops be treated in a way that is, and is seen to be, just. Rewards and punishments must be distributed in proportion to each soldier’s merits, the risks he is made to take, and the responsibility he carries. They must also be timely; or else they are going to lose much of their force.

* The first concern of commanders must be to accomplish their mission. The second, to look after their troops; to do so they must live with them and share joy and sorrow with them. Overall, the best way to command is by example.

* Fighting power is the outgrowth of shared effort, suffering, and risk-taking.  Conversely, any training that does not involve at least some danger will end by degenerating into a childish game.

* Finally, the form manifest of fighting power is what, in one of my books, I have called the culture of war. Including certain forms of shared bearing, discipline, dress, symbols, language, music, ceremonies, etc. As with trust, these things, if they are to mean anything, cannot be stamped out of the ground. They can only emerge from a long tradition, and, ultimately, history. To be sure, spit and polish, as it is known, can be overdone. In case it is it may turn a military into an army of soul-less robots; as, for example, happened in the Prussian Army between 1786 (the death of Frederick the Great) and 1806 (the disastrous battle of Jena). On the other hand, a military that cannot look on its history with pride is, in reality, not a military at all.

*

I am not a German and I do not live in Germany. Though I have studied German military history in some depth, present-day German security is only of marginal interest to me. It is not I but Germans who should answer the following questions: does the Bundeswehr have the fighting power it needs to fight? If not, why? What can be done to change the situation? How to deal with the, how shall I put it, not so glorious past?

The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

Flying Cars

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J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past, Kindle Edition., 2018.

These days when the Biden administration is planning to spend two trillion—yes, two trillion—dollars on America’s crumbling infrastructure, it is refreshing to read is book about flying cars. It was recommended to me by a friend, Larry Kummer, Iowa based proprietor of the well regarded Fabius Maximus website.

On his website, Hall describes himself as a “writer.” Judging by the text, though, he knows plenty about engineering/robotics/high tech and flying a light aircraft (he is a licensed/pilot). Above all, he has a consuming interest in innovation of every kind; one who takes nothing, not even the most obvious “truths” the media keeps flooding us with, at face value. Drawing as it does on technology, science, science fiction, history, economics and sociology, the book is far too wide ranging to summarize. Let alone evaluate, in a few hundred words. Instead of trying to do so, therefore I shall simply quote a few passages in the hope that posting them will make some others buy it (it’s very cheap), read it, and yes, take it as seriously as, in my opinion, it deserves to be.

Page 536: “[Contrary to the doomsayers,] the major problem in the Second Atomic Age –[meaning, when restrictions are finally lifted and nuclear power, which the author considers the safest, cleanest, most plentiful, source of energy on earth, is allowed to come into its own] era is most likely to be too little CO2 in the air rather than too much. Go look at a cornfield: as I write it is still weeks until the Fourth of July, but in these parts the corn isn’t just knee-high, it’s more than head-high. All of that plant material was created by molecular machines, powered by energy from the sun, out of carbon from the CO2 in the air. In still air on a clear, sunshiny day, a cornfield depletes all the CO2 in the ambient air in 5 minutes flat.”

Page 537: “Just by way of context, too little CO2 in the air is a lot more dangerous than too much. Current levels (400 ppm) are much lower than are optimal for green plants; commercial greenhouses operate at 1000 ppm. If we cut CO2 in half, we would be in serious danger of starving all the green plants of Earth. So when everyone starts carrying a pocket iPrinter capable of conjuring up anything from snacks to items of clothing out of thin air, we may have to reopen the coal mines and pump out CO2 just to keep our ecosystem from collapsing.”
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Page. 550: “The one invariant in futurism before roughly 1980 was that predictions of social change overestimated, and of technological change underestimated, what actually happened. Now this invariant itself has been broken. With the notable exception of information technology, technological change has slowed and social change has mounted its crazy horse and galloped madly off in all directions. H. G. Wells’ image of the feckless Eloi, a lampoon of the effete idle English upper classes of a century ago, describes us better than he could have imagined.”

Page 551-52: “In the 1970s, the centuries-long growth trend in energy (the “Henry Adams curve”, which shows that any advance in material civilization is ultimately the result of greater per capita use of energy] flatlined. Most of the techno-predictions from 50s and 60s SF had assumed, at least implicitly, that it would continue. The failed predictions strongly correlate to dependence on plentiful energy. American investment and innovation in transportation languished; no new developments of comparable impact have succeeded highways and airliners. Also in the 70s, academia became a major locus of counter-cultural fervor, as it morphed into a largely virtue-signaling institution driven by competitive self-deception. This set up a classic Baptists-and-Bootleggers bedfellowship between those who really believed that progressive prescriptions would improve the world, and those who mostly enjoyed the new money, prestige, and policy-making influence. Public spending, and PhDs granted, tripled from 1960 to 1980. The war on cars was handed off from beatniks to bureaucrats in the 70s. Supersonic flight was banned. Bridge building had peaked in the 1960s, and traffic congestion now is 5 times as bad as then.

Around 1980, developments in liability law destroyed the private aviation industry. Regulation exploded; a significant proportion of decisions in business went from being made by people who were forced to balance costs with benefits to being made by bureaucrats with no concern for costs. Increasingly in our economy, the cost disease replaced the learning curve. The nuclear industry found its costs jacked up by an order of magnitude and was essentially frozen in place. Interest and research in nuclear physics languished. Over the period of interest, Green fundamentalism has become the unofficial state church of the US (and to an even greater extent Western Europe). Its catechism is a litany of apocalyptic prophecies, each forgotten in detail as it failed, but adding in vague spirit to an overall angst of original sin and impending doom. This has contributed in no small part to the neurotic pessimism of our current culture, by objective measures the richest, safest, and healthiest in history. In technological terms, bottom line is simple: we could very easily have flying cars today. Indeed we could have had them in 1950, but for the Depression and WWII. The proximate reason we don’t have them now is [because, instead of using existing nuclear- solar- and nano- technologies to produce more energy and put it at our service], we have let complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering “It can’t be done” predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering “It won’t be done” prescriptions today.”

Page 553: “Yes, we should have power too cheap to meter [as some nuclear power enthusiasts argued back in the 1960s]. Yes, we should have orbital hotels and a base on the moon. Average family income in the US should be $200k by now, and growing at a sustained 6%. But what has actually happened is that cultural reaction and regulatory ossification have combined to dam up the normal flow of experimentation in high power technology.”

Page 556: “At a weighted average, the world could be 16 times as wealthy as it is now, if only our political systems were honest and competent. 15 times the world’s output is an enormous value, simply sitting there waiting to be reaped. As a futurist, I will go out on a limb and make this prediction: when someone invents a method of turning a Nicaragua into a Norway, extracting only a 1% profit from the improvement, they will become rich beyond the dreams of avarice and the world will become a much better, happier, place. Wise incorruptible robots may have something to do with it.”

Is that provocative enough to make some people think?

The Blueberry Fräuleins and The Frivolity of Evil

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By Bob Barancik

 

Historians estimate about 1,000,000 Jews were exterminated at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland by German Nazi military personnel during World War II.

Another 200,000 innocent people were also murdered there. They included non-Jewish Poles, the mentally challenged, Roma people, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Auschwitz has become the ultimate symbol of man’s inhumanity to man and a stark warning where unchecked antisemitism ends up — at gas chambers and smoking crematoria.

One might easily conclude that the Nazis who organized, administrated, and operated the death camps were raging lunatics and sadists who were consumed by a burning visceral hatred of non-Aryans deemed “life unworthy of life.”

But the reality often is much different and more nuanced.

The first major scholar to publicly expose the more mundane aspects of the world-shattering human evil unleashed by Adolf Hitler was Hannah Arendt. It was her 1963 feature article in the New Yorker Magazine titled “Eichmann in Jerusalem” that brought attention to the routine bureaucracy of mass murder.

Adolf Eichmann was the “architect of the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem.” He was a key operator in the Holocaust, responsible for the assembly and transportation of many of the victims from their countries or origin, mainly the West and the Balkans, to the death camps.

Eichmann had recently been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem for public trial. The popular image of him was as a monster “in the glass booth.” But Arendt saw this genocidal mastermind as “banal,” i.e., ordinary, unexceptional, diminutive, boring.

This led to the conclusion that average, everyday people can easily commit acts of savage brutality and murder under certain types of extreme conditions. Modern social science has largely validated that concept.

But there is another aspect to the personalities of Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust that is seldom talked about or explored. It is the “frivolity of evil” in the hearts and minds of the perpetrators.

By that, I mean a lightheartedness, a silliness, and lack of seriousness.

The Nazi genocide of the Jews required many hundreds of well-trained secretaries, typists, stenographers, clerks, and office supervisors. Although they did not directly work with the Jewish prisoners, these minor administrators were on the premises of the killing centers. This large personnel pool was composed of average young women, largely recruited from the German lower and middle classes.

At Auschwitz, these young women were under the command of senior male military officers. The chief adjutant to the commandant of the camp was a man named Karl Höcker. He was quite respected by his boss and enjoyed hobnobbing with Auschwitz’s elite.

Höcker informally documented many official and unofficial moments of an officer’s life at Auschwitz. The photo album was for his personal enjoyment and a valued souvenir of his military service.

There were many historically significant images among the photos. But the ones that caught my eye and captured my imagination were taken at Solahütte, a little-known rustic SS resort some 20 miles south of Auschwitz. it was a place where the camp’s senior officers and select underlings could go for rest and relaxation from their various tasks. Their leisure pursuits continued even towards the end of the war.

These images were of happy, healthy young women on a fence rail eating fresh blueberries.

The following insights about these photos are from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. (The USHMM now owns the Höcker Album.)

“Several pages are devoted to a day trip for SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries, young women who worked for the SS as communications specialists) on July 22, 1944. They arrive at Solahütte and run down a ramp accompanied to the music of an accordionist. A full-page spread of six photographs entitled ‘Hier gibt es Blaubeeren’ (Here there are blueberries) shows Höcker passing out bowls of fresh blueberries to the young women sitting on a fence. When the girls theatrically finish eating their blueberries for the camera, one girl poses with fake tears and an inverted bowl. Only miles away on the very same day, 150 prisoners (Jews and non-Jews) arrived on a transport to Auschwitz. The SS selected 21 men and 12 women for work and killed the remaining members of the transport in the gas chambers.”

The frivolity of the situation, captured on black-and-white film, is deeply consequential because of being so inconsequential. If the viewer does not know the context of these images, one could easily mistake them for public relations photos for a countryside resort or wholesome berry product.

For me, it is not just that normal human beings can be so sadistic or apathetic to the suffering of others — but that their core happiness might not be affected by daily exposure to mass murder.

In a media-saturated online world, horrible events and despicable people become pixelated figures of fun and momentary celebrity. It becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate one’s moral compass when staring at a screen. Disturbing situations that should make us indignant or sick to our stomachs often just get laughed at or intentionally ignored in the endless cavalcade of audio-visual stimulation.

It is easy to condemn these normal fräuleins who could eat fresh blueberries after participating in the mass murder of innocent Jews from a vantage point of 75 years after the end of World War II.

Metaphorically, we are all sitting on a fence rail eating berries. But we can choose to stand up and begin to walk away from our prejudices and hatreds. That is much easier said than done. But even small change of mind and heart can make a difference for the better.

Below are relevant web links for further information on the subject:

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Bob Barancik is an award-winning painter, print maker, and video producer. He received an M.A. from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, dual degrees in fine arts and architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and did postgraduate work in organizational development at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City  He was an active member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Middle East Forum, both in Philadelphia.

His videos on Holocaust and political themes have been screened internationally, including the JVC Tokyo Video Festival and Toronto Jewish Film Festival. In 2010, the Florida Holocaust Museum gave him a large retrospective exhibit from its archive of his artwork.

He and his wife Amy are full-time residents of St. Petersburg, Florida. They also maintain deep connections to Philadelphia and Maine.

Everyone

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For many years now, what I have liked most about the Net is that it is full of surprises. Press a few keys, even at random, even by mistake, and you never know what is going to pop up at you from around the corner. Just a few days ago, purely by accident, I came across the following sentence: “when everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). So, to make myself and perhaps a few of my readers think, I thought I’d draw up a (very incomplete) list of a few of the things everyone thinks are true.

Well, almost everyone.

  • Global warming is real and threatens to put an end to us all.
  • The earth’s resources are about to run out.
  • “Natural” (as opposed, I suppose, to “unnatural” and “supernatural”) is always better.
  • Thin is good.
  • Our understanding of, and control over, nature is growing all the time.
  • What one author has called, “the better angels of our nature” have been steadily gaining the upper hand. As, for example, abolishing slavery, granting women equal rights, and so on.
  • The singularity is near. Computers, aka artificial intelligence, can, or will soon be able to, think as well as, or better than, we do.
  • Psychology is a science and has made great advances since, let us say, the time of Homer.
  • All people are equal. The only differences between people of different races are slight physiological ones: such as the color of their skin, the shape of their nose, and the like.
  • It is better for some innocent people to be falsely convicted than for some guilty ones to go unpunished.
  • Liberal democracy is the best form of government (that is why even totalitarian governments, such as the Chinese one, claim to be democratic).
  • Colonialism was/is absolutely bad and had/has no redeeming characteristics at all.
  • Whatever a man can do, a woman can do too.
  • Men have it better and oppress women.
  • Depending on the time, place, and the gender to which you belong, unless you are over 17, or 16, or 13, sex is bad for you. The more so if you have it with someone who is older than you.
  • Starting with the Biblical Joseph, Every time a woman cries “rape,” or “sexual harassment,” she was speaking gospel truth.
  • For any half way competent woman to stay at home and raise her children is demeaning and a waste of her precious talents.
  • The best way to raise children is to separate them from their parents at an early age—often, no more than a few weeks—and send them first to a nursery and then to school where the most important thing they will learn is to sit down and shut up for so and so many hours each day.
  • Children under 12, or 14, or 16, should be prohibited from doing any kind of paid work and, by so doing, gain confidence and self-esteem.
  • Children who, rather than doing homework, watch TV or play computer games are wasting their time.

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Note: I do not claim that even one of the above propositions is necessarily false. Only that, and if only because (to repeat), when everyone thinks alike no one thinks at all, rethinking them from time to time may have some real benefits. So thank God for the few among us who do have what it takes—and, believe me, it can take a lot—not to think alike.

Hurray, I am on the Index!

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Some weeks ago I got an email from a stranger in England. Here goes:

“I work at a top UK school and was asked to give a lecture on a controversial topic for a course intended to provoke debate. I chose the patriarchy.

I quoted your comment in The Privileged Sex that, in a world without men,

‘Mining, oil extraction, heavy and chemical industry, long-distance transportation, most forms of construction, many kinds of agriculture, such as forestry and the herding of large domestic animals, would all but cease. So would deep-sea fishing. Under such conditions, over 90% of the world’s present-day population would die of starvation. The women that survived such a calamity would likely revert to a primitive life based on horticulture, dwelling in huts and suffering from a permanent shortage of animal protein. Judging by historical and pre-historical precedent, their life expectancy would be reduced to less than 40 years.’

My point was simply about the traditional division of labor. A lot of men die doing those jobs, and most societies have avoided risking women’s lives.”

Next thing I learnt that, for daring to quote me and defying political correctness in general, the teacher was accused of “gross misconduct” and fired.

Let readers decide two things. First, whether there is any truth in the lines I wrote; and second, whether anyone deserves to be fired for quoting them. Here I want to discuss some other books that have been banned by the authorities that be. Taking a look at history, it turns out that, starting long, long ago, there have been any number of such books. Either because they contradicted the dominant religion, or because they were considered politically subversive, or because they celebrated sex. Thinking of it, it seems to me that there has hardly been a literate civilization that did not have a list of them.

That is why, in the discussion that follows, I shall limit myself to one such list, i.e the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Not because it was by any means the first. And not because it was the worst of the lot. At any rate it banned books because of what the authors had to say, not because of the race to which they, the authors, belonged. But because many of the books it banned were, or later became, world famous. Already in 1559, the year its first edition was issued by Pope Paul IV, it contained the names of 550 authors whose works were considered heretical. Individual titles by many additional ones not included. Over the next four centuries the number grew and grew until it reached into the thousands.

Some books were banned in certain countries but not in others. Some were banned entirely, others only until certain changes were made in the text. As the intellectual ambience changed, others still were dropped from the list. Keeping it up to date provided generations of Catholic scholars—not the world’s most foolish or worst informed, by the way—with lifetime sinecures. All to no avail, of course. Neither the printing presses nor any number of curious readers could be stopped. The harder the Holy See fought, the more it turned itself into a laughing stock. Until, in 1966, Pope Paul VI took the long overdue step of doing away with the whole thing.

Whether the sperm donor should be known or unknown? It generic levitra 5mg is always advisable to go for unknown donor. Former is expensive and latter is affordable. buy generic sildenafil Both of prescription free cialis http://www.unica-web.com/archive/2012/baca.html these numbers are important. Causes of weak erection in men include reduced sildenafil 100mg hop over to these guys blood supply due to damaged nerves and tissues. A full history of the list, let alone even a short description of the books on it, would easily fill the shelves of a library (or, these days, a hard disk). Here, all I can do is to present you, my faithful readers, with a few examples, selected for no other reason than that, as I’ve just said, the authors in question ended up by becoming world famous.

Nicolas Copernicus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies). In the West, the idea that the sun and all other heavenly bodies revolved around the earth reigned supreme from the second century CE on. Enter Copernicus, a monk from Torun in Poland. In On the Revolutions, published in the year of his death (1543), he argued that the opposite was the case. In 1616 it was placed on the Index. Today there are statues of him all over Poland as well as one in Chicago.

Galileo Galilei Dialogue on the Two Systems of the World. Galileo was a widely known, widely respected, early seventeenth-century scientist with many discoveries to his name. Including sunspots, including the mountains on the face of the moon, and including the moons of Jupiter. In this work, published in 1632, he argued, as Copernicus had done, that the earth was not the center of the universe. The Church immediately had the publication suspended. Later it put the author on trial, the details of which are too well known to be retold here.

Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in Leviathan and other words tried to bridge the gap between biology and social life on one hand and the physics of his day on the other. On the way he invented the modern state as an “artificial man,” for which I personally consider him, along with Aristotle, as one of the two most important political scientists of all time. Also on the way. he came very close to denying the existence both of God and the human soul. If he personally escaped punishment, then only because he fled from his native England to the Netherlands.

Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire. Voltaire’s (1694-1778) ability to combine serious philosophy with a light, almost flippant, touch has probably never been equaled. For advocating the rights of nonconformists of every kind, religious ones included, most of his books were put on the Index. Today many see him as the greatest of all Enlightenment writers.

Antonio Rosmini, On the Five Wounds of the Catholic Church (1883). A relatively obscure figure, Rosmini was an Italian priest and theologian. In this work, each of the crucified Christ’s wounds is made to stand for a serious defect of the Church. The one on the left hand represents the division between the people and the clergy in public worship. The one on the right hand does the same for the insufficient education of the clergy. And so on, wound by wound. In 1849 it was placed on the index, along with another one of Rosmini’s works. Why did I put him on this short list? Because, 158 years later, his concern for the poor and downtrodden caused him to be formally beatified.

Jean-Paul Sartre. Opera Omnia. Sartre (1905-80) was a French philosopher who clashed with the Church on almost every point. Many consider him the twentieth century’s most important atheist. Which did not prevent him from being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for literature.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86). De Beauvoir was Sartre’s lifelong companion. Her books, The Second Sex (1949) and The Mandarins (1954) were among the last to be put on the Index and also among the fairly rare ones written by women. Her sin? As well as joining Sartre in his atheism, she was perhaps the twentieth century’s most important feminist writer. As such, she opposed patriarchy and accused the Church of having supported it for two thousand years.

Now I too have been put on the index. If not on that of the Holy See, which has finally woken up to the folly of trying to control thought, then at any rate on the much more odious, because much less well-defined, of feminism/political correctness. To which I can only say, hurray! Who knows, perhaps there is hope for me, The Privileged Sex, and The Gender Dialogues as well.

P.S A few years ago the BBC, “punishing” me for something in wrote on this blog concerning (nonexistent?) Kurdish female warriors, canceled an interview with me. So I was very happy to learn that 1,300,000,000 Chinese are now prevented from watching it or listening to it. Serves it right, I suppose.

Spring

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Alas, I am no poet. Or else I would have used my own words to celebrate the coming of spring. Before I serve you another person’s flowers, though, I want to tell you of something I used to do many years ago. You think it is funny, you think it is weird? Be my guest.

Along with my young family, I spent the years 1969-71 and 1975-76 in London. First, working on my dissertation (Hitler’s Strategy, 1940-1941: The Balkan Clue). Later, on sabbatical writing Supplying War. Though the landlords were kind—I have nothing but good memories of them—the lodgings were, by today’s standards, quite miserable. We did not even have a toilet to call our own, sharing the one we used with another couple instead. Rent being cheap, though, we were able to afford a little Hillman Imp. Second hand, of course, white, with a red stripe along the side. It had two doors and an opening rear window. Numerous breakdowns notwithstanding, never did I enjoy a car more. Probably not a country house within a hundred miles of London we did not visit!

However, its most important use was to take me a couple of miles northeast from Kilburn to Hampstead Heath where I used to go running two or three times a week. Each year, come late February/early March the crocuses, yellow, blue and white would show themselves. Just as in the pic. And you know what? Coming back from my run, I used to lie down on the ground and kiss them. Yes. Kiss them.

With that off my chest, here is my favorite description of spring (by Ada Limon):

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
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that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

 

By the way, my second wife and I do have fuchsias in our tiny front-door garden.

International Women’s Day

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This week countless people around the world have been celebrating “international women’s day.” Wherever one looks, one sees “heroic” and “exceptional” women who have done this or that. E.g the Israeli female civil servant who, using a female architect, built a wonderful villa for herself not far from Jerusalem (the article, carried by Israel’s most popular website, does not say who paid the bill or did the physical labor). The female Senegalese cleaning lady who now owns a hotel. The American actress who claims, forty years after he alleged deed and without providing the slightest proof, that a bad man came along and raped her. Needless to say, I do not begrudge them their fifteen minutes of fame. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is men who deserve to be celebrated, not women.

Here is why.

Since time immemorial, whenever there has been a danger to be faced, be it in war or as a result of an accident or natural catastrophe, it is almost exclusively men who are mobilized and called upon to lay down their lives. Ditto in respect to work that is hard or dirty.

Starting in ancient Egypt and China, women’s health has attracted far more attention, and commanded more resources, than that of men. It does so still.

Throughout history, women in need have found it much easier to attract charity and/or some form of social security than men in a similar position.

Throughout history, young men’s education, meant to prepare them for the hazards of life to come, has been much harsher than that of women.

In all Western countries women, when charged with offenses similar to those of men, stand a much better chance of getting a lighter sentence or none at all. In today’s feminist age, this has been carried to the point where a woman who injures or kills a man is as likely to be praised as to be punished.

In today’s feminist age women can say almost anything about men; but when men respond in kind they will find themselves ostracized, boycotted, fired from their jobs.

All the world’s great religions—Judaism (Moses), Confucianism (Confucius), Buddhism (the Buddha), Christianity (Jesus Christ), and Islam (Mohammed)—have been founded by men.
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Starting with Thales, Pythagoras, etc., and ending with Einstein and Stephen Hawking, practically all great philosophers and scientists have been male. To this day, asked to name a great female scientist, most people can only think of one—Madame Curie.

Starting with Sappho, there have been some great female writers/poets. But not nearly as many as there have been male ones; a female Homer, or Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Tolstoy, is nowhere in sight. Neither is a female Mozart.

Thousands and thousands of years after the earliest known rock paintings were made, a female Phidias, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Manet, Rodin, Picasso, remains to be discovered.

It is men, not women, who have been behind practically all the inventions that made modern industrial society possible; including, to mention but a few, the steam engine, the railways, the telegraph, the automobile, the aircraft, and so on right down to today’s computers.* And it was men who, by investing their money and taking the risk, turned those inventions from experimental devices into the pillars of modern civilization.

A recent movie (The Queen’s Gambit, 2020) notwithstanding, the woman who can stand up to the very best male chess players has not yet been found. As of March 2020, the highest rated FIDE woman player was the Chinese Hou Yifan at No. 87.

Finally, recently some transgender women—in other words, artificially modified men—have been making inroads into female domains. As, for example, by taking over from “real” women in all sorts of slots; by winning women’s sports events, as with tennis and running; and even as beauty queens. Men, in other words, are better than women even at being women.

To repeat, I do not begrudge women their fifteen minutes of fame. But don’t men’s achievements, as well as their efforts on behalf of women, deserve to be celebrated a thousand times more?

* Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, has often been credited with being the first to point out to the uses computers might have in fields other than mathematics, thus opening the door to the world in which we live. In fact, though, all she did was translate an article by a Piedmontese artillery officer and provide it with notes.