All in All: Magnificent

Posted on August 29, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

W. Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1918.

Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches history at Stanford University, California. His original specialty was ancient Greek and Roman economic and social history; this led to such works as Quantifying the Source of Slaves in the Early Roman Empire (1997) and Human Mobility in Roman Italy (2004-5). In this volume, representing Book 69 of The Princeton Economic History of the Western World, he aims much higher. The series’ title notwithstanding, he extends his reach so to devote at least some space to almost all periods and all continents. To be sure, the availability or lack of it of source material has caused some of those periods and some of those continents to be covered more thoroughly than others. Still within its special point of view, The Great Leveler comes as close to universal history as any work any single author can reasonably be expected to produce.

The way Scheidel sees it, the history of human economic inequality has run as follows. Starting some 30-40,000 years ago, some graves indicate that, even at that time, in at least some societies, some individuals owned or commanded resources—such as foodstuffs, ornamental objects, and weapons—others did not. Confirmation comes from a number of very simple near-present day societies spread through Africa, Asia, and Latin America some of whose members used to enjoy preferential access to food; and who, as a result, grew taller and stronger and were able to have and raise more offspring than others.

When agriculture started taking the place of gathering, hunting, gardening and herding about twelve thousand years ago, the gap between haves and have nots grew drmatically. In this, a particularly large role was played by the idea of property, the ability to transform it into a source of unearned income, and the possibility of leaving it to one’s heirs. As a general rule, the larger and more powerful a community the more conducive it was to the creation of such gaps. And the closer the gini coefficient, to the extent that modern scholars can calculate it, moved towards the magic—magic, because in practice it could never be attained—number 1. Beginning at least as far back as the earliest known settled civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, wealth came to depend on political power and political power, on wealth. Which explains why, from Egypt’s Pharaohs to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the very richest men—very rarely, women—have always been those who managed to combine the two in their own person.

So far, nothing that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing a quarter millennium ago, and Thomas Piketty, whose work was published just a few years before Scheidel’s, could not have agreed with. Where Scheidel really breaks new ground is by asking, not how inequality originated and what its effects were—though that question, too, takes up a great many pages in his book—but which factors have delayed it and, on occasion, put it into reverse gear. From the beginning, four such factors are identified. The first is mobilization warfare, AKA total warfare, of the kind that pits not just armies but entire societies against each other and, should the contest be prolonged, may well result in a large percentage of both sides’ populations being killed, taken prisoner, or, in antiquity as well as under Stalin, exiled. The second is attempts, the most important of which were those made first in the Soviet Union and then in China between 1917 and 1979, to “compress” (an excellent metaphor Scheidel often uses) economic inequality by finishing off the richest individuals and groups in a given society and distributing their assets and their rights among a much larger number of people.

The third is state collapse, anarchy, and the waning of civilizations. Of the kind, to mention the best-known example first, that took place in late antiquity and finally put an end to it. Other examples are the disappearance of the Minoan civilization around 1100 BCE, that of the T’ang Empire around 900 CE and that of the Maya civilization from 1200 CE on. Today something similar may be observed, albeit on a much smaller scale, in several present Asian and African states (Afghanistan, the Sudan, Somalia, Zaire, and others) in particular, The fourth is natural disasters as exemplified by the plague that swept away perhaps ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire round 180 CE and the Black Death which killed an ever larger proportion in fourteenth century. They are what the author, using another successful metaphor, calls the horses of the apocalypse.
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To what extent have the attempts, whether manmade or natural, to rein in the horses and reduce inequality been successful? Always taking the long view, and basing himself on a truly enormous scholarly apparatus, Scheidel argues that the answer is, not very. To pick but a few examples, the two World Wars of the twentieth century did cause inequality to be compressed. Especially in the countries that waged them, they continued to make their effects felt for years after the ended in 1945. However, by the late 1970s the impetus was spent; many measures (in particular, near-confiscatory taxation) began to be abolished, or mitigated, or simply circumvented. “Stand on your own feet” (the slogan of Margaret Thatcher) and “let’s get government off our back” (that of Ronald Reagan) rang around the world.

Both the Soviet and the Chinese attempts by taking the lives of tens of millions succeeded in leading to gini coefficients as low as 0.2-03. Doing so they turned the great majority of their citizens into beggars who lived not far from the subsistence level, causing them to be abandoned after a few decades. The same applies, albeit in a much attenuated form, to the welfare states that, in the West between about starting about, began to choke off growth and led to inflation. Whatever may have happened in the past, today anarchical conditions of the kind Hobbes wrote about seldom last for more than a few decades, after which a dictatorship of some kind is likely to emerge and start increasing inequality once again by rewarding its supporters and penalizing or exterminating everyone else. Finally, one of the greatest and most durable recorded example of levelling was not manmade but a result of the Black Death. Starting in 1348, it killed about one third of Europe’s entire population before it abated. Only a century and a half later were its effects completely overcome; today, however, given the progress that has taken place in medicine, the possibility that such a disaster could recur seems unlikely. As Charles de Gaulle once put it, an all-out nuclear war might well leave behind a world in which there are neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs; short of that, however, the prospects of suppressing inequality appear, let us say, dim.

Swhat are we—meaning, humanity as a whole—to do? For Piketty the most important answer is to impose a universal wealth tax. Needless to say, Scheidel is aware of that possibility. Utopian as it may be, he does include it in a long list of other kinds of progressive taxes other scholars have suggested. Nor is he in principle averse to some of them, as well as various subsidies to the less well to do, being instituted in some places and under some circumstances. What he does warn against, and emphatically so, is following the Soviet and Chinese, and Cambodian (“The Killing Fields,” for those who have forgotten), and Zimbabwean, examples by going too far too fast. “All of us,” Scheidel says, “would do well to remember that, with the rarest of exceptions, [greater equality] was only ever brought forth in sorrow.” Hence his advice: “Be careful what you wish for.”

Within the limits imposed by the book’s size—it is over 500 pages long—Scheidel is nothing but thorough. Reading it, one sometimes gets the impression that there is not a period, not a country and not an upheaval so small and so unimportant that he does not have at least something to say about the development of inequality in it. He covers the oldest known societies as well as the newest ones. The mighty U.S draws his attention—given it size and its role as the hub of the capitalists system, how could it fail to do so?—and so does the central Italian city of Prato during the Renaissance. Throughout all this, politics, economics, social affairs, and technology are all woven into his account, often in ways that can only be called masterful. Even religion is included, at least to the extent that it involves wealth. All this is done neither in the thunderous prose of many other would-be reformers nor in the breezy tones of a gadfly; but in a serious and dignified way which reminds one that the author’s roots are, after all, in academia.

In the face of such excellence, there are just two problems that seemed to me at all serious. The first is that the book is organized “horseman” by “horseman.” Though probably inevitable, that arrangement often leads to chronological somersaults even inside individual chapters and sometimes makes the text harder to follow than, perhaps, it could have been made. The second is the enormous mass of detail, which, at places, I found tedious and even intimidating.

All in all: magnificent.

Welcome to the World of Arthur Schnitzler

Posted on August 22, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

Imagine a world in which:

An unknown person comes to visit another without any previous appointment. The one he is looking for is not at home. Nevertheless, the porter allows him to enter the apartment and wait there until the owner returns.

An unmarried lady of advanced age is addressed as “Fraulein” (little woman).

Ushers inspecting your theater tickets wear white gloves.

“Real” art is supposed to be chaste.

A small provincial town such as Neu Ruppin, Brandenburg, 14,000 inhabitants, was expected to have a theater as a matter of course (it did: its name was The New Stage, and it continued in existence until 1950).

Where most rooms were illuminated, if at all, only by a couple of candles.

In which there are no public electronic methods of communication so that news depends entirely on the newspapers.
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Where a parcel arrives just one day after it has been sent.

Where men are fully entitled to command their wives and punish them.

Where men trying to get closer to a woman does not have to fear that she’ll cry “rape,” not that she will come up with demands for financial compensation.

Where it was not taken for granted that every woman is a saint or a victim.

Where it was taken for granted that an adult man could seduce a thirteen year old girl without the latter necessarily suffering all kinds of psychological traumas.

Where a man regularly calls his wife or beloved, child.”

Welcome to the world of Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the Jewish-Austrian author from whose work all this is taken.

Gusst Article: The Special Relationship after Brexit (Beatrice Heuser):

Posted on August 15, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

Beatrice Heuser*

web_Trump and Johnson

Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, respectively at the helm of the US and the UK, invite caricatures: two shockheaded blonde self-promoters allied against the EU and committed to the revival of narrow selfish nationalism. This is where the similarities stop: one is an American businessman who can hardly string together sentences of more than six words, the other an English establishment journalist-turned-comic-turned-politician with a knack for colorful rhetoric and metaphors. Where will they take the relationship between their countries? If the past is guidance to the future, it is so in two ways: first, to emphasize that everything is flux and changes, and secondly, that there were reasons why certain configurations arose in the past: if they disappear, these configurations should do as well.

First, then, let us remember that the United Kingdom was the USA’s first ever state-enemy. Moreover, the English, the lead nation within that Kingdom, were the oppressors from whose poor governance generations of Irishmen and Scots and Welshmen fled to America. To this day, the villains in Hollywood movies are identified by upper-class English accents.

Second, when the United Kingdom gradually advanced to become the USA’s tacit partner in keeping the world in order, and later America’s ally (in some respects its closest ally), there were reasons. US President Monroe’s Doctrine proclaimed the Western Hemisphere (the Americas) to be America’s chasse gardée which only worked if somebody else kept the Eastern Hemisphere (everything else) in some modicum of order. This presupposed a power that could do so, which the British managed to do, with a lot of bluff, in their world-wide-empire. That condition for partnership is gone.

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Then, the USA became Britain’s ally in two successive world wars because Britain (partly along with France) was a great power with colonies around the globe. Today, both powers are shorn of all but the last islands of their empires, with the lingering ghosts, the Commonwealth and the Francophonie, both more culture clubs than alliances. Indeed, even in the Second World War, Britain’s colonies Australia and New Zealand were forced to turn to the USA for defense support and have relied upon Washington, not London, ever since (a relationship enshrined in the ANZUS Treaty of 1951). In the two world wars, Britain was France) the major defender of Western Europe until GIs debarked in Europe. Today, Britain’s forces are withdrawing from their long-term deployment in Germany (the British Army of the Rhine) and have been downscaled to the point where Britain’s own military despair of her overstretch. Moreover, the UK is about to withdraw from its unconditional and all-out defense commitments in the Lisbon Treaty, while the NATO Article 5 commitments leave it utterly open to each member what it decides to do in case of an attack on another: protest loudly … or launch its entire nuclear force against the aggressor.

In the two world wars and for a long time after, Britain was America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, the secure base from which American aircraft and later missiles could fly on missions over Europe. The extended reach of aircraft and the development of intercontinental missiles and air- and sea-launched ballistic and cruise missiles has long depressed the value of Britain in this respect. Potential theatres of US operations have moved to the East, and if bases are really needed for frequent shorter-range operations, Britain is too far away from where it all happens.

From the date of its entry into the European Economic Communities (later renamed the EU), the UK was useful to the USA as the defender of an American viewpoint, and the key brake on the development of a European defense organization independent of NATO. With the UK out of the EU, it can no longer stop European initiatives. The French warning that Europe must hedge against an Amereican withdrawal can now be heard more loudly – for which there is, of course, a further reason: not just the muffling of European initiatives, but the alarming noises coming out of the USA itself.

So, just as Britain is losing the last of its assets that once made it so valuable to the US, President Trump is signaling that America’s commitment to NATO might not be eternal. Where since 1949 Britain and France merely provided useful complements to an American guarantor of the security of Western Europe, in the light of a gradual reduction of US forces in Europe since the 1990s, the importance of the two larger military and nuclear powers of Europe, Britain and France, becomes greater than ever. Yet it is just at this juncture that Britain is preparing to withdraw from the EU, instead sending its aircraft carrier to the South China Sea to show solidarity with faraway powers. But the aircraft carrier has no aircraft, substituting US fighter-planes for its own, as those have not yet come off the assembly line.

In short, since outright enmity between Britain and the USA ceased in the early 19^th century, Britain has never been of such limited value to the USA as today, when leading advocates of Brexit secretly want to turn their country into something like the 51^st state of America, with further reductions in social benefits and social security, with zero-hour employments and one-pound jobs, without statutory sick leave or holidays. Pity only that they can’t tow Britain across the Atlantic. Moreover, the entrepreneurs backing Brexit want to transform the medium-sized country with its 67 million inhabitants and an average per capita GDP of just under € 40 000 into a financial center comparable to the city-state of Singapore with its under 6 million citizens and an average per capita GDP of over € 91 000. Which presupposes that (a) the unemployed steel workers, car manufacturers and miners of the UK can all become bankers and insurance brokers, and (b) that the world needs umpteen millions more bankers and insurance brokers.

For America, this would mean competition for Wall Street, not necessarily something that would be celebrated in Trump Tower. While in the 19^th century, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston proclaimed that Britain had no permanent friends but only permanent interests, British diplomats and military men have since the Second World War believed that Britain has no permanent interests other than to keep the USA as permanent ally, and that just about any sacrifice should be made to keep this “special relationship” alive. It remains to be seen if Trump’s gut support for the Brexiteers will survive his realization that in relations between nationalist states, there are no allies, only competitors.

* Prof Beatrice Heuser is an historian and political scientist whose publications include many works on strategy. Currently she holds the chair of International Relations at the University of Glasgow.

Two Endings

Posted on August 9, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife

A Good Ending

All Israeli Suspects in Gang Rape in Cyprus To Be Released, Lawyer Says.”

Media reports say Cypriot police detain for questioning British tourist who says she was attacked Seven Israelis held in Cyprus on suspicion of gang raping a British tourist in Cyprus earlier this month are to be released Sunday, an attorney for some of the suspects said, as police reportedly turned their attention to their accuser.

The attorney, Nir Yaslovitzh, announced in a statement Sunday morning that the suspects, all teenagers, would be released.

“As I claimed throughout, there was no rape in Cyprus,” he said. “The youths who went on a vacation that became a nightmare will return to their homes today. All of them will return home to their families. Cypriot police carried out a professional and thorough investigation.”

Citing sources with knowledge of the investigation, Hebrew media reported that police were turning their attention to the British tourist who had filed the rape allegation after she changed her version of events. She was said to have been questioned under caution, and according to some reports was put under arrest.

Cypriot media said that she is suspected of filing a false rape complaint against the Israelis because they filmed her during the sex acts without having received her permission to do so.

Attorney Yaniv Havari, who represents a number of the suspects still being held, told the Kan public broadcaster that his clients were able to provide convincing evidence that they did not commit the crime.

“She lied, she said 12 of them raped, that is what she claimed,” Havari said. “For nearly two weeks that is what she has claimed and after all 12 of the detainees gave their version, it seems her version doesn’t stand up.”

The dramatic development came after last week five of the Israeli suspects in the case were released and returned to Israel, though Cypriot police seemed poised at the time to file rape charges against at least three of those still being held.

In addition to those three detained suspects, whose DNA had been found at the scene, police believe three more individuals currently not under arrest may have been involved in the alleged brutal sex crime — with analysis of DNA collected from the alleged victim’s body showing three unrecognized samples.

Twelve Israelis in all were arrested in the resort town of Ayia Napa last week on suspicion that they took part in the alleged gang rape. Some have reportedly admitted to having consensual sex with the woman, while others were thought to have possibly been present in the room at the time.
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A Bad Ending

Jacky Chen*

“Brian Banks was a standout high school football player at Polytechnic High School in California. An extremely talented linebacker, Banks had offers from various prestigious colleges for football and had verbally committed to USC. He was a surefire future NFL player at the time.

All of that was thrown away in his junior year when he pleaded guilty to dragging classmate Wanetta Gibson into a stairwell and raping her at his high school. At 17 years old, Banks accepted a plea deal He served 5 years of prison, 5 years of probation, and registered as a sex offender. His football career was effectively ended. The victim was awarded $1.5 million in a lawsuit against Polytechnic High School, in which she claimed that the school was unsafe.

HOWEVER:

The charges were all made up. In 2011, Gibson met up with Banks and admitted, in the presence of an attorney, that she had made up the charges. Banks was eventually exonerated. Gibson was ordered to pay a hefty sum of money to Polytechnic High Schoool, but she went into hiding soon afterward.

So what’s the problem here you ask?

False rape accusations have many repercussions and usually, those making the accusations are never punished. These accusations target many people whether they be celebrities, athletes, politicians, or common people like you and me. Criminal action is almost never taken against the accusers while the real victim’s lives and reputations are usually ruined. It doesn’t help that many rape cases are not treated with the customary “innocent until proven guilty” mind frame as with other cases. Yet the perpetrator always gets off with a slap on the wrist. This also creates a huge problem for real rape victims, who often see their real accusations discredited and/or questioned.

It’s time to start punishing people who make false accusations regarding rape and sexual assault. Criminally prosecuting false rape accusations are not only right but simply obvious in order to serve justice to those who attempt to undermine it.”

* I took this post from Quora and checked it on Wikipedia. Unfortunately my attempts to contact the author have led nowhere. So let me explain that my blog is not commercial. Also, of course, that I shall immediately take off the post if so desired.

“Overcoming” the Past

Posted on August 1, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

Living here in Germany, specifically in Potsdam near Berlin, as my wife and I are doing at the moment, one cannot but admire the Germans’ efforts to make up for what has long been the greatest national crime of all, i.e. the Holocaust. Including ten of billions paid in reparations to survivors, their families, and the State of Israel; including a total ban on the pubic display of Nazi symbols of every kind, from the swastika to the so-called Hitler Gruess; including many museums, big and small, that deal with the topic and do what they can to educate the public about it; including a foreign and defense policy that has long been consistently favorable to Israel; including any number of films, plays, public lectures, and books, all of them devoted to ensure that nothing of the ind wil ever recur; and so on and so on right down to the so called Stolpersteine, bricks that are cemented into the pavements of many cities, each one bearing the name of a Jewish individual or family who used to live nearby but lost his/her/their life/lives to the terrible events of 1939-1945. In the whole of history, no group and no people has ever done more to “come to terms” with its past.

And yet it is not “enough.” Nothing can be. What is not clear is why this should be so. After all, both Stalin and Mao Zedong killed more people than Hitler did. Looking back over history, including recent history, finding rulers who tried to do away with entire groups of people is all too easy. Besides, six million? Five? Four? Three? What difference does it make? Two factors may go some—but only some—way to explain the peculiar horror with which the holocaust is associated. First, most genocides took place during, and as a result of, a war waged against the groups in question, i.e enemies. However, the Jews as such were never enemies of Germany. If anything, to the contrary. Many foreign Jews, especially those of Central and Eastern Europe, saw Germany as a model their own countries might well adopt. Most German Jews were very proud to be not only German citizens but bearers of German Kultur; quite some would have joined the Nazi Party if only they had been permitted to do so.

The second explanation is that Hitler an his henchmen systematically targeted not only adults but children too. Not accidentally, by way of “collateral damage,” but deliberately and by design. As Israel’s national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, once wrote, “avenging a small child is something not even the devil has been able to do.” Enough said.

Help men who have impotence problem viagra no prescription australia to get and sustain the erection for several hours. Psychological factors play a major role cheap generic tadalafil in many conditions of low libido in younger men. But before you buy Kamagra jelly, check for the reviews of the product then you would actually find out that the exact combination of products that can only happen after first taking the time to master several important steps. viagra in india price If you are the one facing some problems with your vision then it’s high time for you to schedule an appointment tadalafil from india with an expert chiropractor Vista CA has to offer. In my experience, the great majority of Germans seem to be well aware of these realities. It was only yesterday that I heard an acquaintance of mine say that, whenever his country’s hymn was played in some international forum, he felt somewhat ashamed. Not exactly a sign of psychological health, given that anyone in Germany today who is less than 92 years old can hardly have had much to do with the crimes of yore. A few try to fight back by denying the Holocaust or belittling it; it is they who receive most attention both in- and outside Germany. As one would expect, most try to forget about them and go on with their lives as best they can.

So here is a little story of something that happened to me some time ago. I was having a snack and a tea in the lobby of Munich’s Vier Jahreszeiten, one of those hotels that like to add the title “noble” to their names. Doing so I noticed a young woman perhaps 18 or 19 years old. Wearing an apron, she was helping re-organize part of the lobby for a party or reception to be held later in the evening; spreading out table cloths, arranging glasses, and the like. I asked her whether she was aware of the fact that this lobby had been one of Hitler’ favorite haunts during this stays in Munich. In return, all I got was a bland stare.

Considering both the Germans and the Jews, taking the long view, perhaps it is better that way?

Guest Article: Is Playing Chess Good for You?

Posted on July 25, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

Renzo Verwer

Chess has been the subject to a torrent of publications. Chess is supposed to be popular among young people. Chess helps students do better at school. In particular, the Dutch psychologist Karel van Delft is an enthusiastic proponent of these ideas. Chess, he says, is capable of bestowing not a single benefit but several different ones. It brings people closer together. It promotes concentration, self confidence, and creativity. It is a kind of mental gymnastics and teaches players how to cope with difficult situations. By providing immediate and clearly visible feedback to one’s moves, it can even bring young offenders back to the straight and the narrow.

Speaking for myself, I love the game. More so, perhaps, than some grandmasters do; that is why I went to watch the recent Dutch championship tournament. However, the kind of worship mentioned in the previous paragraph always makes me a little uncomfortable. Is chess really what tea used to be in seventeenth-century Holland (and what cannabis supposedly is today), a cure for any- and everything? Some people, including the Dutch international master Hans Ree, are not so sure. The idea that chess can strengthen the will and develop logical thought, he says, is pure nonsense. To the contrary: authoritarian countries consciously and deliberately use the game in order to prevent people from thinking; this is done by canalizing them into an isolated culture that, separated as it is from ordinary life, has no further consequences for the latter. Chess as the opium of the people, perhaps? He also mentions the cruel joy he experienced as he saw his opponent squirming. Not the best or healthiest of emotions, he says.

This is something I know from my own experience. “What an idiot. He did not dare pursue his advantageous position but tried to husband his miserable pawns instead, with the result that he lost. What I felt was pure contempt. And if that causes you to despise me, that is your good right.

I asked Karel van de Weide, one-time Dutch grand master, to give me his considered view of the game. Here is what he told me:

Advantages? Chess is mental gymnastics. It helps you with your arithmetic and also to postpone the onset of dementia. Whoever is good as chess is someone. That is something I sometimes miss, for by now I am a nobody and will probably never recover my former status. As one of my colleagues, upon being dropped from the FIDE list, exclaimed: ‘I simply ceased to exist!’ (he may have been joking). Others argue that chess plays a useful role by providing some people who cannot easily fit into society with something they are good at. Agreed. And a certain kind of recognition too, of course.

And what are the disadvantages of chess? Chess may promote autism. It keeps you away from women [MvC: men play chess much better than women do, which is why, in tournaments, the sexes are separated] and is sufficiently demanding to keep you away from other, perhaps more useful, forms of training. It may make those who take it up as a career more accident prone, decreases their chances of making good, economically, and can even help turn them into social outcasts. As has been said about former Dutch champion Maarten Solleveld, had it not been for this obsession with chess he could have got his position as a professor of mathematics at Leiden much earlier than he did.
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Another prominent Dutch player and author, Tim Krabbé, told me about the less sympathetic aspects of chess, as experienced and observed by him. Especially in the kind of coffee house where the game is played:

Chess bears a strong resemblance to addiction, the kind you get by taking drugs—though I myself have never been addicted to them. Doing something you cannot resist even though you know that you should stop is very, very bad for your life. None of the prefaces to the books that teach the young how wonderful the game is and how to play it have a word to say about this danger. No, chess is always great, good for the brain and I do not know what else. Truth is, chess can be very dangerous and people should be made aware of that fact.

The psychologist Paul Kirchner criticizes the kind of research that “proves” that chess is good for all kinds of things. Nor is chess the only activity that has been advertised in this way. “Similar claims” he says, “have been made on behalf of other fields of study. Such as learning Latin, geometry, and, today, writing code; it all seems so simple and logical. Truth is, you can learn all kinds of procedures. But a procedure that will enable you to master all procedures does not exist.”

In other words: by learning how to play chess, the most important thing you learn is… how to play chess.

* Renzo Verwer (Woerden, the Netherlands, 1972) is an author and a dealer in second hand books. He has published books about love, work, and the chess master Bobby Fischer. His most recent one (in Dutch) is titled Freedom of Thought for Beginners. His website is www.artikelzeven.nu. His books: http://www.amazon.com/Renzo-Verwer/e/B00ITG41ES/chess.

Should Sex Change Operations Also Be Banned?

Posted on July 19, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

To this day, following thousands upon thousands of years of human history, no one knows whether God (or the gods, but in the present context that does not matter) “really” exists. Witness Immanuel Kant, no less. Raised in a Pietist household, for years he tried to prove the existence of God. Only to conclude that the question could not be settled either way and was, therefore, a matter of pure belief. However, that has not prevented billions of people, probably the majority of those who have ever lived, from believing that He does; nor from using their belief, real or pretended, as a basis on which to expand their own political and military power by rewarding those who agreed with them and persecuting those who did not. As Mao Zedong might very well have said, often religion grew out of the barrel of a gun. As I myself like to say, a religion is a sect that has acquired cannon. In quite some places around the world that remains true to the present day.

Similarly, after thousands upon thousands of years of history no one knows whether homosexuality is or isn’t “natural” to humankind. In the Christian West at any rate, following the book of Leviticus, it was long considered a deadly sin. As a result, those who practiced it were often subject to some of the cruelest available punishments from being burnt at the stake down. If this is no longer the case today, then that is not because modern science, breaking with Kant, has finally discovered “the truth” about the matter. But simply because a greater number of people are prepared to support, or at any rate tolerate, homosexuality than are not. As Napoleon said, victory goes to the big battalions. Particularly in modern democratic countries where most issues are ultimately settled by counting noses either during elections or with the aid of public opinion surveys. And particularly if, like the early Christians, using means fair or foul they succeed in getting the media on their side.

And why am I writing about this? Because, reflecting the situation in many other countries as well, currently in Israel a great debate—if “debate” is the right term to describe a rather ugly process whereby both sides do what they can to shut up the other—is going on. The person who triggered it is Netanyahu’s new minister of education, Rafi Peretz. Peretz is a practicing Jew as well as a rabbi who takes his religion seriously. No sooner was he appointed to his post then he suggested that gays might want to undergo conversion treatment and benefit from it. How dare he! What chutzpa!

He provides effective and best cheap levitra generic recommended for you ED treatment is available in different forms of consumption like tablets, jellies, and soft tablets. The particular filters are generic viagra germany as follows: Culligan WSH-C125, one of the best tips to cure aging effects is through managing stress. You will find, soon after all, cruises to be taken, many old friends to be visited, and plenty sildenafil online purchase of beaches to be walked hand-in-hand at sunset/sunrise. Kamagra is one of the best medicines available generic super viagra in the market but only few of them 1- In order to ensure yourself that the quality and quantity; both are critical from the pregnancy point of view. The response to Peretz was immediate and strong. Any number of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, educationalists and other learned worms crawled out of the woodworks and hurried to the printed page, the microphone, and the TV camera. So, of course, did leaders and activists of the Gay Liberation Movement; aware that their power depends largely on numbers, they do what they can to prevent people from deserting them. Peretz was a racist. He was a bigot. He was a “dark” figure emerging out of the equally “dark” middle ages. He was unfit to hold any public post, let alone one in which he was in charge of educating hundreds of thousands of young people. He should be denounced. He should be fired. He should be ostracized. He should, if the appropriate legal paragraph could be found (thankfully, as of the present, it could not) be put on trial and convicted and punished.

As to conversion treatment, it was carried out by quacks as if there were no quacks in other fields where consults are involved, from housing agents to e(con)omics. It was useless (as if no other forms of psychological treatment were). It was unscientific (as if any kind of psychological treatment is or can be “scientific”). It might make those who tried it develop all kinds of psychological problems (as if it were not psychological problems that made people turn to the treatment in the first place). The practice should be prohibited (as, in quite a few countries and states, it is), and those who engage in it, if they did so on a professional basis, disqualified.

All this, in the name of choice, equality, openness, toleration, and similar concepts held sacred by the politically correct crowd both in Israel and a great many other countries. All this, at least partly in order to prevent people from developing doubts and ceasing to support the Gay Rights Movement. And all this makes me ask: If this kind of conversion, voluntarily undertaken of course, is banned, shouldn’t the same apply to the much more problematic, much more dangerous, sex change operations as well?

Guest Article: How to Avoid War with Iran

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

William S Lind*

When President Trump called off an airstrike on Iran with the planes already in the air, he justified the hopes many of us had placed in him in 2016. No other president would have had the guts to do that.

Unfortunately, while that action avoided war with Iran last week, the danger of war remains high. The confrontation between the U.S. and Iran is almost certain to continue. It is strategically disadvantageous for both parties. But powerful domestic political factions will continue to drive it nonetheless. In Iran, the Revolutionary Guard Corps needs the American threat to justify its own domestic power and the benefits of corruption that flow from it. In Washington, the Likud lobby, which includes people highly placed in the White House, desperately wants a war between the U.S. and Iran so Israel’s Likud-led government can seize the West Bank (see my column, “Bait and Switch”, in the latest issue of The American Conservative). So, the question becomes, how do we continue to confront Iran without war breaking out? That seems to be the best realistic objective.

Both sides may have offered up the beginnings of an answer. President Trump called off the airstrike when he was told it would kill around 150 Iranians. Iran had only shot down an American drone. No American lives were endangered, and the Pentagon has no shortage of drones. Similarly, the Iranians said they did not shoot down an American P-8 naval patrol aircraft they claimed had also invaded their airspace because doing so would have killed Americans. In other words, both sides called a halt at the point where their actions would have caused casualties.

The same has been true of Iranian attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf–if the attacks were in fact actions of the state of Iran, which is by no means clear. They could have been done by elements of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that do want a war, without authorization. Those Revolutionary Guards could have been in the pay of another power that wants a war, such as Saudi Arabia or Israel. The “Iranian sailors” could have been German soldiers dressed up in Polish uniforms. History has witnessed such things.

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This kind of ritualization of war is historically common. Ritualized war is in fact far more frequent than total war. The reason is obvious: the cost is lower. Each side gets to preen, pump, do its victory dances and so on while their respective societies carry on normal life. Think of it as the NFL without the big salaries.

After a campaign of mutual annoyance but not war has gone on long enough, both Iran and the U.S. may come to realize a negotiated solution would benefit both. President Trump has made it clear he is open to that outcome. So far, Iran’s leadership is not. But I suspect the Iranian people are, and the Ayatollah cannot ignore them forever.

What everyone needs now, except Likud and its American agents, is no war, i.e., no casualties. If President Trump continues to insist on that rule and the Iranians do the same, the war fever will eventually break.

* William S. (”Bill”) Lind is the author of the Maneuver War Handbook (1985) and the 4^thGeneration Warfare Handbook (2011) as several other volumes that deal with war. This article was originally published on traditionalRight on 22.7.2019.

Then You Are a Thought Criminal

Posted on July 4, 2019 by Martin van Creveld

If you do not believe that what “everybody” thinks is necessarily true –