Author Archives: Martin van Creveld

All This, Just in the Introduction

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Tim Bakken, The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military, Kindle ed., 2020.

As some readers may know, I am not altogether unfamiliar with the U.S military. I worked with them for over a decade, visited many bases in many parts of the country, gave countless talks, and—just for the record—was the first civilian who, along with his family, lived on base at Quantico. Even after this kind of cooperation ended in 1993 I kept in touch with them; doing research on and for them and occasionally receiving visitors and/or corresponding with officers and other knowledgeable individuals in the good old USA. Not to mention reading the relevant literature, of course.

Such being the case, when a friend recommended that I read Bakken’s book, which he described as a “blistering” attack on the U.S military, I could not resist the temptation to quickly purchase it and read it. I did not, however, have to go very far before I understood that, in reality, the book is hopeless. The following are some highlights that will explain why I think so.

* It is not true, as Bakken says at the beginning of his book, that the nation worships its military unconditionally. His own sources, most of them snippets downloaded from the Net, show that such is far from being the case.

* Bakken claims that civilian faculty at West Point (where he himself taught law for twenty years) should be given a greater role. He seems to overlook the fact that the primary mission of West Point and the other military academies is not to argue over the finer points of law. It is, rather, to prepare officers for performing what is arguably the most difficult job in the world: namely, lead men (forget about the women, I’ll come to them in a moment) in combat. That is why a case could be made that the faculty should include fewer civilians, not more; men (and women) who have herd bullets whistling by and know what they are talking about.

* He also claims that female cadets at the academies are five times more likely to experience “sexual harassment” than their counterparts in civilian academies and universities are. True or not, the real problem may be a different one: namely that, in and out of those academies, hordes of female soldiers (who, in truth are only half soldiers), joined by Congress and the courts, have made it almost impossible for those military to impose discipline and to function. Each time a male soldier of any rank so much as looks at a female one he risks being accused of “harassing” her; no wonder many of them fear and hate their female colleagues more than they do the enemy.

* “The military’s social and cultural separatism began after World War II,” Bakken says. Yet the fact is that today’s military are much more integrated into civilian society than they were during much of American history (1865-99, 1919-1940). No longer are the bulk of the troops scattered in penny-packets all over the less populated parts of the country. As of 2019, just 6.6 percent of married military personnel were in dual military marriages. The number of soldiers, both enlisted and commissioned, who attend civilian universities and take degrees is the largest in history. Whatever Bakken may say, when Supreme Justice William Rehnquist in Parker v. Levy 417 U.S 733, wrote that the military is “by necessity a specialized society separate form civilian society… [and] has again by necessity, developed laws and traditions of its own during its long history” he was merely echoing much of what that very history has to teach us.

This sorry state is a sign of appalachianmagazine.com generico cialis on line sickness of behavior. The problem that usually affects them is going to show up in erectile dysfunction. appalachianmagazine.com get viagra free The term 360 buy viagra without rx Austin attracts everybody towards several of the Austin attractions. Protein-rich urad dal, the split or whole variety, is a complete fake rumor as it does not affects the health of the person and brings him to death but it is a complete fake rumor as it does not affects the health of the person and makes you face better results. low price viagra * True: the U.S defense budget is huge. Depending on whom you believe and what you include, it is equal to that of the next fourteen, or thirteen, or twelve (countries. But it is not true, as Bakken claims, that most of this is due to waste and corruption. Rather, it is because the U.S is in many ways the world’s sole global superpower. This fact alone suffices to explain why, willy-nilly, “its hand is against every man, and every man’s hand against it” (Genesis 16.12). Moreover, qua global power its LOCS are incomparably more extensive and expensive than those of anyone else. Here it may be relevant to add that, whatever Mr. Bakken may say, for a military made up of volunteers, at a time (until Corona stepped in) when unemployment is at a record low, to spend money on recruitment and public relations is not unreasonable; the more so because he admits that retention is a problem.

* Throughout the Korean War,” the author maintains, “neither the Chinese nor the North Koreans even had an air force.” Tell that to the F-86 pilots who encountered Mig-15s, and the other way around! We do not know how many aircraft on each side were shot down in air to air combat. What we do know, though, is that such cases were far from negligible; probably amounting to at least a hundred on the U.N side and several times that on the Communist one.

* In Vietnam, Bakken says, “American technology and its military leaders’ judgment were out matched by North Vietnamese motivation and ingenuity.” Plus, as Bakken does not say, the world’s most powerful anti-aircraft defenses in history until then. Plus a President who, sitting in the White House, insisted on personally selecting many targets and/or putting them out of bounds. Plus media that, starting in 1967, convinced public opinion that what the U.S was doing in Vietnam was a priori criminal and that American soldiers were little better than uniformed murderers.

* The claim that the quality of senior commanders may have been declining from 1945 on is unverified and unverifiable. Certainly today’s leaders are much better educated than their World War II predecessors, few of whom had degrees. Taking Afghanistan as our example, is there really any reason to think that an Eisenhower or a MacArthur would have done better than a Tommy Franks?

* It was President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Sec/Def Donald Rumsfeld, and their colleagues at the National Security Council, and not “the generals” who, though there was absolutely no evidence, insisted that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. It was they and not “the generals,” Rolf Ekéus (head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission in Iraq) told me, who did everything short of subjecting him to actual torture in an effort to show those weapons really existed. It was they and not “the generals” who insisted that just 150,000 men on the ground, not four times as many as at least one general suggested, were needed if the job on the ground was to be done. It was they, and not “the generals” who predicted that the Iraqi people would welcome the American “liberators.” It was Bush, not “the generals,” who pushed Americans to go on shopping and vacationing at Disney World even as he was ordering the troops into Iraq. And it was Congress, not “the generals,” which gave him the authority and the money to do so.

* Finally, following some political scientists, Bakken defines an armed conflict as one that results in “one thousand dead yearly.” The definition is faulty, not to say outrageous. First, it callously ignores losses on the Iraqi side, which by some estimates may have amounted to as many as 30-100,000 dead. Second, it is deliberately designed to exclude the one post-1945 war the U.S military has clearly and unequivocally won, thus invalidating the author’s thesis.

All this, just in the introduction.

Good Soldier Švejk

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My wife was going to have an operation. Having her hip replaced, in case you want to know. Since she is 72 years old, Insurance in its infinite wisdom demanded that she undergo a geriatric examination first. Why, she was never told.

Hopeless bookworm that I am, I was reminded of the episode in Good Soldier Švejk where the hero is examined to see whether he was fit for military service in the KuK (Kaiserliche und Koenigliche) Army during World War I. I quote.

[When] Švejk entered the room here his mental state was to be examined, and observing a picture of the Austrian monarch hanging on the wall, [he] cried out:

“Long live our Emperor Franz Joseph I, gentlemen.”

The case was as clear as daylight. Švejk’s spontaneous declaration disposed of a whole range of questions and there only remained a few very important questions which were needed so that from Švejk’s answers the initial opinion of him could be confirmed according to the system of the psychiatrists Dr. Kallerson, Dr. Heveroch and the Englishman, Weiking.

“Is radium heavier than lead?”

“Please, Sir, I haven’t weighed it,” said Švejk with his sweet smile.”

“Do you believe in the end of the world?”

“I’d have to see that end first,” Švejk answered nonchalantly. “But certainly I shan’t see it tomorrow.”

“Would you know how to calculate the diameter of the globe?”

Even if consuming watermelon for erectile dysfunction treatment may not be easy to not not worry when impotence strikes, figure out first whether it is worth downtownsault.org viagra cost india it to worry because the online stores are at your rescue. If you wish not cheap levitra to be a victim of it. viagra online stores The most frustrating are people which affect the everyday day lifestyle of a man. For example, even though taking a tablet is quick and easy, it is perceived as something you would take when you have a disease that can result in erections which cialis 10mg generico won’t go away (priapism). “No, I am afraid I would not,” answered Švejk. “But I’d like to ask you a riddle myself, gentlemen. Take a three-storied house with eight windows on each floor. On the roof there are two dormer windows and two chimneys. On every floor there are two tenants. And now, tell me gentlemen, in which year the house-porter’s grandmother died?”

The medical experts exchanged knowing looks, but nevertheless one of them asked this further question:

“You don’t know the maximum depth of the Pacific Ocean?”

“No please, Sir,” was the answer. “But I think it must be definitely deeper than the Vlatva below the rock of Vyšehrad.”

The chairman of the commission asked briefly: “Is that enough?” But nonetheless another member of the commission requested the following question:

“How much is 12,897 times 13863?”

“729,” answered Švejk without batting an eyelid.

“I think that that will do” said the chairman of the commission. “You can take [him] back to where he came from.”

“Thank you, gentlemen,” said Švejk deferentially. “For me it will do too.”

*

I will not tell you whether my wife was found sane according to all the laws invented by the luminaries of psychiatry. Suffice it to say that, when the examining dignitary, who was younger than she, asked her to draw a pentagram, she did so much faster, and with much better results, than he could.

A Glimpse of Future War among Great Powers

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[A propos of Hiroshima’s 75th anniversary)]

Guest Article

By

William S. Lind

Several weeks ago, the world got a glimpse of what future war will look like among Great Powers. The weapons were rocks and clubs.
Indian and Chinese troops battled each other over worthless ground along their undefined border high in the Himalayas. It was a classic case of two bald men fighting over a comb. But at least 20 Indian soldiers died, along with an unknown number of Chinese.
What is interesting about this skirmish is the weapons employed. Both India and China have sizable arsenals of modern weapons. They employed none of them. Instead, they fought with rocks and clubs.
It helps acheter viagra pfizer to balance sexual hormones in women and also make sex hormones. Half of the participants in the study were overweight, while buy discount cialis half of them had a history of heart attack. Try not to merge two dissimilar drugs free samples viagra together at a time. The benefits of commander viagra are enumerated below Improved potency Improved sexual activity Increased blood flow in penis Erection for a longer period Because of the presence of conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. I find the deafening silence over this choice of weapons, including from the U.S. military, to be interesting. It certainly should draw the attention of anyone who studies where war may be going. Why did such a bizarre scenario unfold? Because both countries have nuclear weapons.
It is probably true that neither India nor China wants a war at this point. But what limited both countries’ soldiers to the weapons of cavemen was something with general import: so terrifying is the prospect of nuclear war to anyone threatened with it that governments are willing, even eager, to go to seemingly ridiculous lengths to prevent it.
Prevention begins with avoiding the escalatory ladder. And that is what led to a fight with rocks and clubs. Both countries rightly feared that if they went to the weapons of, let’s say Sung dynasty China or Moghul India, they would set foot on that ladder. So rocks and clubs it had to be. Even a battle with those so alarmed Beijing and New Delhi that they quickly sought to settle the dispute diplomatically. Many weapons have claimed the title of “the Peacemaker”, but nuclear weapons actually deserve it.
This offers us a look at what war between other nuclear powers, let’s say the U.S. and China, might be like. The driving consideration for both countries’ leadership would be avoiding escalation. Since any confrontation would probably be a sea and air war, it might look something like the Cod Wars between Britain and Iceland. Ships might ram each other (not too hard). Water cannon might be employed. Chinese sailors might throw bao at American crews, who would volley back hamburgers in return (the Americans would end up with the better lunch). Fighter aircraft might engage, at least to the point of seeing who was better at staying on the other guy’s six. Would they shoot? If they did, both capitals would be frantic, trying to de-escalate.
Since both countries now have obesity problems among their youth, my proposal for an escalation-safe war would be vast eating and drinking matches between their respective ships’ and aircrafts’ crews. Just imagine what the Navy PFT might look like! It would do wonders for qualifying recruits. Join the Navy and become the world!
The really funny thing here is that both the U.S. and China are spending vast sums buying weapons and generating forces for a conventional war. That is not going to happen, barring outright insanity in both capitals at the same time. Unless the inmates are running the asylum, both countries will seek to de-escalate rapidly from any accidental clash that might occur (things can happen; remember the War of Jenkins’ Ear). Rules of engagement would quickly be established that would take both sides back to rocks and clubs, as India and China had already done.
The fact is, the whole China Scare is a sham, at least as far as a shooting war is concerned (our economic conflict is real, as President Trump understands). It’s one more con job on the American people, intended to keep the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex rolling in dough. When the massive defense budget cuts hit, which they soon will, remember my suggestion; let both countries’ navies roll in real dough. That we may still be able to afford.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4thGeneration Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 8 July.2020.

A Real Heroine

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(GERMANY OUT) German Democratic Republic – nudist beach and camping groung at Motzener Lake – 10.07.1989 (Photo by Klöppel/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

Today I want to tell you about a heroine. Not of the kind who, in the movies, on TV, and in countless computer games keeps slaughtering hundreds of wicked males each and every one of whom is considerably bigger and has far more muscle than she does. And not of the kind who raids tombs, dives to the bottom of the ocean, explores far-away galaxies, and does any number of things men, often many men, have started doing long before. But of a real heroine of an entirely different kind.

 

Let us call her Ms. X. She is an Israeli and in her forties. She has black hair, likes to put on makeup, and wears high-heeled shoes. The reason why I heard of her was because she was teaching my sixteen-year old grandson, Orr, literature. Not that she could not make her living in any other way, as is often the case with teachers. But because she loved the written word and wanted to share her love with her students. To do so she left her job as a chief nurse, took a B.A, and spent another year earning her teaching license.

 

Those who had the privilege of working with her could see how seriously she took her job. Carefully studying every poem and every poet on the curriculum. Proceeding slowly and methodically, with the result that she often fell behind the schedule dictated by the Authorities. Rarely did she miss a class; nor did she neglect to read the students’ papers and exams even when she was ill. The kind of teacher every principal would like to have in his or her school and every student should welcome.

 

One day the class was discussing a poem. It had been written by an elderly Yekkeh, which in Hebrew means an immigrant from Germany. In it, the poet expressed his longing for the days, long ago, when he and his mother used to go swimming in one of that country’s countless beautiful lakes. Just as their creator had made them, without any clothes on. And without any fear of not keeping their distance or touching each other in a way that was either affectionate or playful. For X, following the instructions she had been given by her superiors, this was an opportunity to speak about mother-son relationships and all kinds of Freudian complexes. And sex, of course. Bad sex. Incestuous sex. Sex of the sort that had sent those wicked Germans on their way to perpetrating the Holocaust.

 

Now it so happens that Orr has been visiting Germany practically every year since he was one and a half years old. Each time he did we, his grandparents, took him to swim in the lakes. Just as we happened to feel like, either with or without bathing suits. He and we oldies must have done it hundreds of times. As did countless others, male and female, big and small, at whom we occasionally took a peek and who occasionally took a peek at us in return. As a result, Orr was in a position to correct his teacher. In Germany, he told the class politely but firmly, bathing (and taking a mixed sauna) in the buff was a perfectly normal thing to do. There was nothing sexual about it at all.

And the worst happens i.e. cheating in the relationship as the partner is forced to look for physical satisfaction outside the sildenafil bulk marriage. First, to determine the prevalence of headaches in people deeprootsmag.org buying sildenafil online with cervical radiculopathy (shooting pain in the arm) and myleopathy (spinal cord dysfunction), and second, to determine the effectiveness’ of anterior cervical surgery (surgery from the front of the room. Premature check out that drugstore tadalafil 20mg cipla ejaculation affect the younger population equally and if you are leading an unhealthy lifestyle are prone to erectile dysfunction. viagra generic sildenafil It also promotes hair growth on bald area.  

For those of my readers who are not familiar with German culture and history, let me explain. Nudism is a German/Scandinavian invention dating back to the 1890s. The objective was to escape the overcrowded, often polluted, rapidly expanding, cities, by returning to nature. From this point on nudism, known in Germany as Frei Korper Kultur (free-body culture), went on to develop a long history the details of which I’ll spare you here. Suffice it to say that, far from being sexual, a deliberate effort is made to keep sex out of it—or else the outcome would be a mass orgy, which it is not.

 

Some governments, e.g that of the Christian Democrats in the 1950s, tried to suppress nudism. Others tolerated it or even welcomed it. Some sent in the goons to beat up all the nudes they could find. Both the Nazis and the East German Communists initially adopted this strategy. Only to conclude that, since they could not lick the movement, they’d better join it instead. The Nazis because they glorified the nude Arian body, that of little nude Arian girls specifically included. The East Germans Communists, because going nude was one of the few pleasures people could be allowed to enjoy without endangering the regime.

 

To return to X, she listened patiently to what Orr had to say. That in itself is not something every teacher does. When the class was over she went to the principal and told her what she had learnt. To wit, that everything she had been teaching her students over many years was, not to put it too politely, bull. The kind of bull critics love to invent and educators, to feed their hapless victims with. The matter reached the Ministry of Education. X insisted that she be allowed to tell her students the truth: namely, that the poem was not about the mother’s sexy body but the pleasure of stripping naked and swimming in a lake in the midst of nature.

 

She told the geniuses at the Ministry that she wanted to teach the poem the way its author had intended. They refused. Whereupon she resigned.

 

End of the story.

Credo

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Slavery and Imperialism

Bad as African slavery was, it was not genocide.

(A propos of Prof. David Starkey who, for saying as much, was thrown out of Cambridge University)

Bad as imperialism and colonialism were, they were not responsible for hopeless backwardness of many former colonies.

Racism

Bad as racism is, it is not responsible for the fact that races exist.

Bad as white Americans are, they are not responsible for the fact that so many American blacks kill each other.

Men and Women

Bad as men are, they are not responsible for women’s weakness, vulnerability, and need for protection.

Bad as rape is, it is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

(The worst, I think, is losing one’s children; but then feminists of all kinds are too self-centered to realize this).

Family and Abortion

Bad as some families are, they are not as bad as not having one at all.

Bad as abortion is, it is not as bad as forcing a child to be born against its parents’ will.

Children

Bad as children sometimes are, they are not responsible for the evils of the world.

Independent as some children are, they can not make do without a mother, preferably a full-time one who is always there for them.

Crime and Punishment

Bad as punishment is, it is not as bad as a society in which there are no punishments.

Bad as some crimes are, they are not as bad as capital punishment is.

Politics and Government

Bad as certain governments are, they are not as bad as the absence of government.

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Bad as democracy is, it is not as bad as all other forms of government.

Young and Old

Bad as the old may be, often it is not as bad as the new.

Bad as gerontocracy may be, often it is not as bad as government by the young.

Inequality and Capitalism

Bad as inequality is, it is not as bad as enforced equality.

Bad as capitalism sometimes is, it is not as bad as communism.

Union and Disunion

Bad as many walls are, they are not as bad as the bloodshed they sometimes prevent.

Bad as disunity is, it is not as bad as a zillion people shouting Heil in unison.

 

Germans and Nazis

Bad as the Germans in 1933-45 were, “exterminative anti-Semitism” was not widespread among them.

Bad as the guards at concentration camps were, they were not very different from most other people.

History and Memorial

Bad as history is as a method for looking into the future, it is not as bad as all the rest.

Bad as pulling down old monuments is, it is not as bad as the killing that will invariably follow.

Freedom and Tyranny

Bad as war is, it is not as bad as the denial of freedom.

Bad as many utterances are, they are not as bad as denying people the right to make them.

Perspectives

If you don’t think most of what I’ve been saying is true most of the time, then there is no hope for you. Go and drown yourself in the nearest river.

Guest article: Old, Older, too Old

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By

Kobi Haron*

Queen Elizabeth I is generally regarded as a very successful monarch, one of the best. For many years she did very well, making few mistakes. But after 1590, following the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when she was already 57, her reign changed for the worse. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about her:

The conflicts with Spain and in Ireland dragged on, the tax burden grew heavier, and the economy was hit by poor harvests and the cost of war. Prices rose and the standard of living fell. During this time, repression of Catholics intensified, and Elizabeth authorized commissions in 1591 to interrogate and monitor Catholic householders. To maintain the illusion of peace and prosperity, she increasingly relied on internal spies and propaganda. In her last years, mounting criticism reflected a decline in the public’s affection for her.

It could be bad luck, or perhaps, after 32 years on the throne, she was simply bored. Maybe it was her age.

In 1951 Churchill started his second premiership. Again see the account at Wikipedia:

Churchill was nearly 77 when he took office and was not in good health following several minor strokes. By December, George VI had become concerned about Churchill’s decline and intended asking him to stand down in favor of Eden, but the King had his own serious health issues and died on 6 February without making the request. Churchill developed a close friendship with Elizabeth II. It was widely expected that he would retire after her Coronation in May 1953 but, after Eden became seriously ill, Churchill increased his own responsibilities by taking over at the Foreign Office. Eden was incapacitated until the end of the year and was never completely well again.

On the evening of 23 June 1953, Churchill suffered a serious stroke and became partially paralyzed down one side. Had Eden been well, Churchill’s premiership would most likely have been over. The matter was kept secret and Churchill went home to Chartwell to recuperate. He had fully recovered by November. He soldiered on through 1954 until, finally accepting his decline, he retired as prime minister in April 1955 and was succeeded by Eden.

So a prime minister starts his premiership at age 77 while he is seriously ill, but he doesn’t resign because his second in command, who is merely 54, is also very ill. Of course this is just an example of situations which are quite common.

In the US Supreme court two of the justices, Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are over 80 and Justice Clarence is 71. Ginsburg has been ill since 1999. Supposedly she hardly missed a session at the Supreme Court, but one wonders if a healthier justice might do a better job.
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At the US senate there are 23 senators who are 80 and 70 years old. The median age of the US senate is close to 67. In other words, half of US senators would not get a job in most US companies because they are too old.

These days people speak about “ageism,” and mentioning a candidate’s age is politically incorrect. But in fact this is most relevant because any number of studies show that people decline with age. It’s true that a mature person will do better in certain situations. I can readily believe that a 50 years old senator may be better than a 30 years old senator. But most probably an 80 years old senator will not be better than a 50 years old senator.

In most countries the mandatory retirement age is between 60 and 70 years. In most US states judges retire between 70 and 75. Some US companies have mandatory retirement rules, and a few of them allow employees, including CEOs, to work after reaching 70. Most of them retire earlier, between 60 and 67, mainly because shareholders do not like CEOs who are too old.

There’s one more reason to restrict retirement ages. One wants younger people to take charge earlier as this is a way to do things in a better way. All organizations need change because after some time people tend to repeat their usual shticks rather than try a different approach.

At present people live longer than they used to. Life expectancy in the US is close to 80 and in other countries it may reach 84 or more. So we have older people as members of parliament, senators and presidents. There is no reason to believe that these old timers are more competent than they used to be in the past.

In many countries there are no restrictions for the retirement of presidents, prime ministers, senators, congressmen, members of parliaments etc. In many cases they are still at it at age 70 and 80. There’s only one reason for this: they can. As we have seen in the case of Churchill and others, this is to be avoided. The best method would be to have one rule for all public employees, including elected officials, to retire at the same age of 65 or 67.

This may be unfair to some people who could still be active at such ages. The answer to this is: start your own business. You can teach, give speeches, see your private patients, study at the university or write your biography. In Israel judges retire at age 70, and then some of them do well as arbitrators.

And how about the upcoming U.S presidential elections? Both candidates are too old for the difficult and demanding jobs that face them; one can only hope they will survive the ordeal. At age 80 one in six people are afflicted with dementia.

* Mr. Kobi Haron is an Israeli software developer who has worked both in Israel and in the US. 70 years old, he is retired and lives in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv.

On Footnotes

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As all of you who have taken a look at this website, even the most causal one, will know, throughout my adult life I have been a scholar. And the one thing that is most characteristic of a scholarly text, as opposed to one that is not so, is the use of footnotes. I well remember the first time, in late 1965 or early 1966, when I was required to submit a seminar paper. My teachers made me look upon footnotes as if they were the gates to paradise. Nor, as I learnt both at the time and later, when I became a teacher myself, was I by any means the only one to see them in this way.

As a young student of the humanities, you learn is that footnotes are very important even though, to say the truth, not many people bother to read them. As a young student of the social sciences you also learn that footnotes are very important even though the kind of footnotes you are expected to put into your work is somewhat different. The difference is that historians care who wrote the sources they cite, where, when, and why. Social scientists often don’t. For them, (John Nobody, 2020) is no different from (Adam Smith, 1776). Nor does it matter whether the source they are quoting is (Aristotle, 350 B.C) or (Aristotle, 1999). Some of them, I suspect, do not even know that by the time the latest edition of his work came out its author had been dead for some twenty-three centuries.

What both disciplines have in common is that they use footnotes to certify that a given piece of work is, in fact, “scientific.” The more footnotes you have, the more “scientific” your work. I’ve also noticed that, the less is known about a subject or period, the larger the number of footnotes that attend the text dealing with them. I too, peppered my books with footnotes. Like many other young students I used to count them with considerable pride. Not only did I want to see how many I had, but I also wanted to know how many there were per page.

The best footnotes contain material that is “unpublished” or “archival.” Accordingly I loved writing things like “Captain von und zu Verschwind to Lieutenant Colonel Suchmir, 6.8.1941, OKH [Oberkommando des Heeres]/Genst.d.H [Generalstab des Heeres] /Org.Abt. [Organisationsabteilung] II, Nr. 10962/41, Gkds [Geheime Kommandosache], GMR [German Military Records] T-706/0001131.” Looking back, heaven knows where I found the patience. Before computers came to the rescue, each time you typed in a mistake you have to re-do the entire page.

Technology and War was the first of my books that did not have any footnotes. In part, this was because I wrote it on my new Apple IIe—which, since it did not have an automatic re-numbering command, turned the task of revision into a nightmare. In part, it was because the subject was too large. For each sentence it would have been possible to come up not with one reference but with twenty. As with the mythological hydra, each source only pointed the way to many others. Had I read everything available on the subject, the project would still have been going on today, thirty years after the book was published. As I said, instead of always searching for new sources my difficulty was how to decide which ninety percent of the available ones not to read.

Yet the above difficulties only formed part of the story and not necessarily the most important one. Years ago, in class, somebody who may have been a follower of Popper said that the purpose of studying history was to disprove myths. I answered that, in my opinion, that was wrong. To be sure, disproving myths is a fine occupation for young historians eager to hone their skills and make a name for themselves. In fact one of my own earliest published articles carried the subtitle, “the destruction of a legend.” But mature scholars should aim higher. Much higher. Instead of disproving myths others have created, they should try to produce work so good as to become myths. As, to provide just one example, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did.

This line of thought explains why, at the age of forty-something. I was developing an obsession—one which, in retrospect, seems almost megalomaniac—with my books’ ability to withstand the proverbial hand of time. To the point where, dedicating Technology to Dvora, I did so eis aeona. To obtain an idea of how it was done, I spent considerable time and energy looking at some famous books and analyzing them for “eternality.” Not surprisingly, the precise nature of the latter quality escaped me then and continues to escape me today.

However, I did make some interesting discoveries. The most important one was that hardly any of them had footnotes. Thucydides has no footnotes. To pile insult on injury, he says that the speeches, which many think are the best part of his entire work, are for the most part pure invention. That should certainly make some of us reflect on the nature of historical writing. Polybius, Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus and Josephus do not have footnotes either. Nor do Augustine, Machiavelli, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and, in my own field, Clausewitz. To say nothing of Nietzsche; he would have laughed at the idea. And Heine poked fun at it.

Probably the reason why these and so many others dispensed with footnotes was because they were not modern academics. Not being modern academics, they did not try to be “scientific.” They did not have to compete for tenure by having their work evaluated by a committee. One whose members, instead of reading it, count (or rather, since the actual counting is done elsewhere, take note of), the number of times it is mentioned in “scientific” journals. Leonard Huizinga, who was a modern academic, in the introduction to Homo Ludens warns the reader not to expect documentation for every word. Another very good contemporary example is Humphrey Kitto’s The Greeks (1951). As unassuming little volume, so good is it that it sold over 1,500,000 copies. In the military field there is Michael Howard’s War in European History. A real tour de force that, in my view, puts all his other, far bulkier, works in the shade.

Underside of the penis shaft buy cheap levitra http://deeprootsmag.org/2019/07/25/bob-marovichs-gospel-picks-36/ is the most sensitive part. Regardless of the mind-bogglingwell being and sleepbenefits of HGH, this optionis just cheap cialis brand not cost-effective or possiblefor most. The trial was performed by Vedic cheapest prices for cialis Lifesciences Private ltd with very positive results. Vardenafil has not been mulled over with different medications for barrenness, sample generic viagra so use in mix with different medicines is not suggested. The more I reflected on the matter, the more it seemed to me that footnotes are characteristic of the mediocre book. The best books do not have them. But neither do the worst ones. Had the autos of romance literature, which sells more than most other kinds combined, tried to document its stories by this method, no doubt they would have gone bankrupt very quickly indeed. In a certain way, footnotes represent a compromise. If you think something is too important to be skipped altogether, but not important enough to be mentioned in the text, you can always put it into a footnote. Understood in this way, footnotes, far from being the mark of good scholarship, are merely a sign of indecision and, perhaps, cowardice.

To repeat, normally the very best books are those that do not have footnotes. Nor would such a book be at all improved if it were provided with them. Imagine the Bible sprinkled with brackets, or little numbers, or a variety of other signs who exact meaning is known only to a handful of experts. Each one reminding the reader that this or that fact or idea had come, not straight out of God’s mouth but from such and such a source; or else adding some kind of information that did not seem to worthy of being included in the text itself.

I, too, hoped to write such a book. If not one that would last forever, which I early on realized is beyond my powers, than at any rate one that would fuse the argument and the evidence on which it rests so tightly that, like a creeper on an oak tree, they would become indistinguishable. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted what I wrote to be so good as to be almost self-evident. As, to adduce just one more example, Confucius’ Analects are. Agreement was to be achieved by persuasion, not by piling on authorities many of whom would owe their presence on my pages precisely to their obscurity.

This was the guiding idea behind my best-known volume, The Transformation of War. Needless to say, its lack of footnotes did not pass unnoticed. One reviewer greeted Transformation as follows: “A tremendous challenge with van Creveld’s text is discerning where the bulk of his information comes from. His book lacks traditional citations of outside resources and he merely relies on direct quotes, inferences, but never on annotations accepted through APA, MLA or Chicago-Turabian style guides.” Here I must confess that, until I wrote the present essay, I did not even know that such a thing as “Turabian” existed. Mea culpa.

Since then I have written several other footnote-less books. Some better, some worse, but none that contained enough “eternality” to satisfy me. More than once I compromised and put in a bibliographical list—always at my editors’ insistence, never out of my own free will. In each case, perusing the book in question a few years later, I was struck by how antiquated, how irrelevant, the lists appeared. Had the books been re-issued, I would have deleted them. Who the devil cares?

And why bring up this entire topic right now? Because, over the last few years, I’ve been slowly moving towards the writing of fiction. My first attempt in this direction was Hitler in Hell (2017). Not, I repeat not, that I invented the facts with which it is crammed out of thin air. The book, if I may say so, is as well researched as any I have ever written; the paragraphs dealing with post-1945 developments, as Hitler observes them from hell, apart, everything in it is “real” or “true.” And can be “verified.” But in that I decided to try and adopt Hitler’s own point of view as far as possible; an approach which, right from the beginning, ruled out not just footnotes but any pretense at “real” scholarship. For me the book was fun to write—which, in the end, is all that matters.

When I say fun, what I mean is a kind of freedom scholars, owing to their self-imposed limitations, do not normally enjoy. Freedom to think and talk and write outside the box, as the saying goes. Freedom to use one’s imagination in somewhat different ways, and to a different extent, from that to which I have been accustomed throughout my life. Now that I think of it I find it hard to define the kind of freedom I am referring to with any precision. All I know is that I enjoy it and will never give it up again.

So what comes next? I am just working on the final draft of another volume, The Gender Dialogues. 40,000 works long, it is the record of an imaginary debate with a young, highly intelligent, female journalist. She really exists, and her questions gave me the push I needed; however, they and my answers to them only account for a small part of the material. And I am thinking about doing another book like Hitler in Hell. This time the title is going to be I, Stalin. Pinched, of course, from Robert Graves’ masterpiece, I Claudius; but much, much closer to reality.

If I were to provide some advice to young historians, it would go as follows. First, don’t throw away the baby with the bath water; ere you dispense with footnotes as well as other academic tools, make sure you have thoroughly mastered them. Second, however preposterous it may sound, do aim at eternality; even though your chances of attaining it are practically zero. In other words, do the very best you can. And third, enjoy yourself. Partly because, if you don’t, you are unlikely to come up with something others will enjoy as well; and partly because, in that case, what’s the point at all?

Guest Article: The Suicide of the Left

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By

William S. Lind

The cultural Marxists think they are riding high.  Thousands of kids are demonstrating for “Black Lives Matter”.  The Left’s long-running war on police is surging as panicked politicians throw the cops under the bus.  Not only Confederate war memorials but those to Union forces as well, along with the World War ll memorial in the Washington mall, are desecrated.  A commune is declared in a six-block area in Seattle.  Anyone in the Establishment who offends in the slightest, most trivial way against Political Correctness is off to the guillotine.  The Terror is again in full swing and the Jacobins are elated.

What is really happening here is not the triumph of the Left, but its suicide.

As I wrote in my last column, the young demonstrators are out there just to be out there, after two months of confinement, “social distancing”, masks, etc. have left them bored out of their skulls.  Their commitment to “Black Lives Matter” (except to other blacks, who kill each other like flies) is a mile wide and an inch deep.  The “cause” could as easily be vegetable rights, Save the Cockroaches, or banning discrimination against bovine flatulence.  Anything that justifies their getting together in large numbers and making trouble works for them.

As the Left gives ordinary Americans a choice between the cops and the vandals, looters, and arsonists who have destroyed small businesses in too many of our cities, the people are lining up with the police.  Here in Cleveland the anger over the destruction on Euclid Avenue in the heart of our downtown is deep and lasting.  People had put their lives into building those businesses and restaurants and now they have to start over.

If you want to make people fight, there are few better ways than attacking their ancestors and war memorials.  The Left will find Confederate flags flying more places, not fewer.  I hope southern towns and rural areas will start erecting new Confederate memorials as the Left vandalizes old ones.  There are plenty of Confederate reenactors who would be delighted to defend statues honoring their ancestors, perhaps with some brass 12-pounder Napoleons loaded with grape.

Greeting card companies stake second quarter profits on the promotional and advertising abilities; rather they offer quality efficient medications online at cheap rates. online cialis continue reading this shop The hematuria and pyuria are levitra discount sometimes seen under the microscope, which can last for months. Also, ensure that you maintain healthy cholesterol with proper diet and exercise regime as continue reading my pharmacy shop prices in uk viagra high cholesterol can harden, narrow or block arteries which go to the penis. Kamagra is the genetic alternative for cialis online usa. cialis, chemically known as sildenafil citrate, has been recognized as one of the major reasons why a couple stays together. The Left’s illusion of victory is leading it to over-reach to the point where its madness is obvious.  Defund the police?  That’s insane.  The police are the thin blue line we all rely on when something goes seriously wrong.  With the police banned from the Seattle commune, it’s turning rapidly into Lord of the Flies.

What we are witnessing here is the Brinton Thesis in action within the Left.  The Brinton Thesis, created by historian Crane Brinton based on his study of the French Revolution, says that revolutions move in a series of coups leading ever-farther to the extreme until the coup of Thermidor brings it all back to the center.  He was looking at countries as a whole, but in this case his thesis can be applied internally to the Left.  (Now you know why in my photo, I’m dining on Lobster Thermidor.)

In America as a whole, I think the reaction will go far beyond a return to the center.  In response to the cultural Marxists’ threat to the majority’s culture and its freedom of thought and expression, we are likely to see a massive shift to the Right.  When reality returns, it will come in a tsunami.

I fear the blacks may bear the brunt of the reaction.  The cultural Marxists are using the blacks as weapons against whites, much the way Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War used local blacks against whites.  That poisoned race relations in the South for a century.  I don’t want to see the same thing happen nationwide now.  Most blacks just want to live normal, middle-class lives.

The irony is that cultural Marxists, who pretend to be black’s “advocates”, did the black urban community in this country more damage than Simon Legree and Senator Bilbo put together.  It was cultural Marxism that, from the 1960s onward, preached a culture of instant sensual gratification in books such as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.  In college, white kids “did their own thing”, then got MBAs and law degrees and went to work on Wall Street.  In the ghetto, blacks just kept on doing it, creating the widespread moral and cultural collapse we now witness in our black inner cities. 

The real enemy of whites and blacks alike is cultural Marxism.  I hope the day comes when we unite to fight it.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4thGeneration Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 22.6.2020.

Unanswered Questions

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As late my mother used to say, one idiot can ask more questions than a hundred wise men (and, for God’s sake, women) can answer. We moderns are exceedingly proud of the scientific and technological prowess that has enabled us to see individual atoms. As well as more than double our lifespans (starting around 1800), build superfast computers, send spacecraft to Jupiter, and, last not least, construct weapons literally capable of putting an end to civilization as we know it. And rightly so. Here, though, I want to play the idiot—by writing down a few questions on which, as far as I can see, we have made no progress whatever.

So here goes.

How did the universe begin?

What was before the big bang?

What did whatever was before the big bang bang into?

How many universes are there?

Will the universe come to an end?

What is time?

Did time have a beginning?

Will time come to an end?

Does fate exist?

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How did living spirit grow out of dead matter?

Do plants have feelings?

Will it ever be possible to upload a human mind into a computer?

Will I ever know exactly how B, who is not me, experiences the world?

What enables us to imagine, i.e think of, things that are not?

Are humans and other living beings basically similar or dissimilar?

Are men and women basically similar or dissimilar?

Is there life after death?

*

In case anyone thinks we are closer to answering these questions than our ancestors were ten, twenty, of fifty, thousand years ago, please let me know.

 

My Uncle Aaron

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My late uncle Aaron served in the Jewish Brigade. For those of you who have never heard the term, it was a brigade-strength formation raised by the British among the Jewish population of what was then Mandatory Palestine. Organized and trained in British-occupied Egypt, later it was transferred to Italy where it saw limited, action during the final stages of World War II. Limited not because the soldiers did not want to fight—they did—but because the British did not quite trust them.

Italy, Aaron once told me, was in ruins. As they proceeded south to north from one city to the next, all they saw was ruins. And more ruins. Still more. With people living among them like rats. With no utilities. On the brink of starvation. Begging to sell anything they had—from antiques to their sisters’ bodies. Writing about Nately’s Whore’s kid sister, Joseph Heller in Catch 22 did not have to invent anything. A point Heller did not dwell on was that the Italians may have been even more suspicious of each other than of the conquerors. Their civil war, which had started in 1943 and claimed tens of thousands of lives, was still in progress. Albeit that, as more and more provinces fell under Allied control, it was slowly dying down.

The guy who had started it all, Il Duce Benito Mussolini, was still alive. But not for long. On the 30th of April 1945, while trying to escape into Switzerland, he and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were discovered by left-wing partisans and shot.

Our understanding of the reasoning that drove Mussolini into the war—the kind of reasoning which, he once claimed, King Vittorio Emanuele III had called “geometrical”—is as good as it can be. It all began in 1935-36 when Britain and France disapproved of Italy’s adventure in Ethiopia, driving it into Hitler’s arms. It went on when Mussolini visited Germany in November 1937 and was given a tumultuous reception that greatly impressed him. In March 1938, he did not try to resist the German annexation of Austria, thereby granting Hitler the greatest triumph in his career until then. In May of that year the two countries signed an offensive alliance to which Mussolini gave the name, Il Patto d’Acciaio, The Pact of Steel. However, when Germany went to war in September 1939 the Italians did not join it. Instead, feeling they were not ready, they presented their German friends with a long list of demands for fuel, raw materials, and weapons. So formidable was it that, in the words of Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, it would have killed an ox—if an ox could read it.

Rather than live up of their commitments under the Pact of Steel, the Italians invented a new concept in international law: Nonbelligerenza (non-belligerence). It put them in a very favorable situation, what with both sides currying favor with them. However, it did not last. As France was overrun by Hitler’s legions, Mussolini thought that his hour had struck. All he needed, he told Ciano, was a few thousand dead; they would serve as his entry-ticket to the peace conference he expected.

People usually do not realize the fact that Vigrx Plus is effective in providing longer and fuller erection, but you’ve to be a little patient to see a noticeable change and tadalafil cipla a better ability to perform well in bed. Difference in dosage may cause serious health hazards. * Last but not least, people who take the medicine without consulting may lead sildenafil cipla to some after effects. With the help of these ingredients cialis 5 mg the formula supports blood flow, relaxes mental functions assisted with sex and boosts libido. It does not matter whether the medicine purchase generic viagra is branded one and works well on the male impotence problem. The peace conference, though, never materialized. As the war went on, Mussolini went from one defeat to the next. His forces failed in France, where their invasion was quickly brought to a halt. They failed in Greece, where the same thing happened. They failed in Libya, where they had to be bailed out by the Germans. The failed at sea, where the British Navy sunk half of their navy. They failed in Russia where, participating in the advance on Stalingrad, they lost heavily for no gain whatsoever. They lost their colonies in East Africa. They were ejected from Libya and Tunisia. They were unable to defend Sicily and, after Sicily, the Italian mainland which was invaded first by the Allies and then by the Germans. They failed and failed; in the whole of history it is difficult to find a war handled in a more incompetent manner.

This is not the place to list the factors that were responsible for these failures. Including a shocking lack of economic-logistic-technical preparation. Including the failure to set up a combined command organization with Germany similar to the one the U.S and Britain had. Including armed forces that were underequipped with modern weapons. Including a supreme command structure—ironically, named Superesercito, Supermarina, and Superaereo—that did not function as it should. Including low morale both in the forces and among the population in general. When Italy entered the war the latter, called out by the Fascist authorities, demonstrated in favor. But it was not long before any enthusiasm there may have been disappeared.

Instead of assisting its ally, Italy became a burden on it. When the war ended the country lost its colonies as well as some territory in the northeast. That apart, though, the it remained intact. Internally, as already described, all was chaos. But the chaos did not last for very long. Thanks partly to the Marshal Plan, but mainly to Italy’s own efforts, the recovery was rapid. Japan apart, for two decades after 1950 no country showed faster rapid economic growth than Italy did.

For Italy as for much of the world, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, which was followed by the oil crisis, proved a turning point. Later, too, there were all sorts of ups and down. Still the country and its system of government survived. Sustained by its own corruption and cumbersome bureaucracy, some people said. As of the time that Corona broke out, the recent financial crisis having been overcome, the country was as prosperous as at any time in its history. And looking forward to a future that would hopefully be no worse.

And why am I telling you all this? Because yesterday, 10 June, was the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war.