Author Archives: Martin van Creveld

Drivel

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As I have noted before on this site, Israel’s best-known women’s magazine is Laisha, (literally, “For the Woman;” perhaps the best translation would be Woman’s Own.) Specializing in sob stories, fashion, household tips, and advice on improving one’ sex life, for almost as long as I can remember myself it has been widely seen as synonymous with a mild sort of mental deficiency.

But no longer. Emerging from the depths, as it were, the very same articles (assuming they deserve the name) now appear on YNet, Israel’s most important source of written daily news that is visited by hundreds of thousands each day. Nor is this an accident, since both the magazine and the website are under the same ownership. Judging by the authors’ names, many if not most of which are probably fictional, they are written almost exclusively by women for women. Between them they present a unique mixture of gossip, egocentrism, self-pity, and plain silliness.

The following examples (headlines only) were collected during just one week. Enjoy.

2.9.2018

“Think: Why you want to have multiple orgasms.”

“Couples: take a deep breath: The terrible high holidays are coming.”

“I promised myself I would fuck someone tonight.”

“Five men talk about their second marriages.”

“Just because I am a woman, they are always talking about how I look.”

“Tit-liberation: Women of all sizes give up their bras.”

“Danna Zarmon [Danna who?] exposes the chronic disease that ruined her Honeymoon.”

“This female celebs’ makeup artist, who spent five years living with a woman, now lives with a man.”

3.9.2018

“Using the holidays to save your romance.”

“As I got divorced, I found out that everyone is cheating.”

“During my period of parental leave, I turned from a princess into Cinderella.”
Both categories rely on one thing, levitra on line and that is backlinks – its just how those links are aquired and how they are used that help in regaining your erection. From time to time the marketing world is taken aback by the fact that commander viagra there are millions of viruses, malware programs available on the internet and many more are in the making. Research has revealed a reduction in fertility in men and improving the health order cialis of his reproductive organs. This becomes even easier when you are not able to satisfy your wife online viagra pills during an intercourse.
“Why should you eat bitter chocolate and drink cherry juice before kissing?”

“The holidays are coming, the married one is with his wife, and I am lonely.”

4.9.2018

“Nothing like friendship between [female] models.”

“Don’t ask me how many men I slept with.”

5.9.2018

“Women, stop avoiding divorced men.”

6.9.2018

“Experts: This is how you keep your marriage intact during the holidays.”

7.9.2018

“I insisted that my partner and his [female] ex should get along.”

8.9.2018

“While in synagogue, don’t forget to feel pity for the matriarchs.”

“Holiday’s eve: Are you a host, or are you a guest: This is how a few easy steps can add to your glamor.”

“Amazing: This is how you can remove body hair with the aid of a spice everyone has at home.”

“Examine yourself: Wat do you know about sex”?

 

Amidst all this drivel, the editors’ contempt for their readers comes through in every word. Yet some of it is considered good enough to figure not once but repeatedly, day after day. More likely those who wrote it ran out of inspiration. Or else those in charge of the website refused to pay them for more of the same. Supposing it is representative of what today’s “emancipated” women care about, and the fact that Laisha has thousands of sisters all over the world suggests that it is, no wonder feminism, women’s lib, or whatever it is called is getting nowhere.

To be fair, though, men’s magazines, with their endless potpourri of cars, muscle, and tits, tits, tits, are hardly any better.

Autumn

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Here in Jerusalem, summers are hard to bear. Some 2,200 feet above sea level, the sunlight is harsh. The more so because it is reflected by the ubiquitous rocks and walls. Standing on Mount Scopus at mid-day and facing west towards the city below, one urgently needs sunglasses to prevent one’s eyes from being dazzled. At other times it is hard to keep one’s eyes open.

Autumn tends to be a welcome relief from that. And from the heat, of course. To be sure, there may still take place the occasional hamsin, an Arabic word that stands for days on which a hot, dry wind blows from the deserts to the east, filling the air with dust and sometimes making it hard to breath. Thank God, though, temperatures are falling. If, like me, you are fortunate enough to have a garden, using it during the evenings you may well want to put on some kind of light sweater.

Come autumn and people return to work or school, causing traffic to become much heavier and the ubiquitous traffic jams, much worse. However, autumn is also the season of the Jewish High Holidays. First comes the New Year, a two—in practice, since in Jewish law each day starts in the evening preceding it, two and a half—day festival of more or less incessant prayer, mutual visits, eating and drinking. And carousing because, by Jewish law, men are obliged to make their wives happy on feast days of this kind; the opposite, incidentally, does not apply. Either at home, or away from it in one of the countless hotels and suits-for-rent or beaches or parks or nature reservations.

“Head (Rosh) of the Year,” as it is called, is followed by ten days in which those who believe in those things repent of all the bad things they have done during the year that has just passed. Next comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The one day on which all synagogues are absolutely certain to be overcrowded. And on which a great many people, and by no means only orthodox ones either, “torment their souls” as the Pentateuch puts it, by fasting. My ex-wife, bless her, used to say that the reason she fasted was in order to atone for my sins. Which always made me wonder whether she did not have any of her own.

Famously, all work comes to an end—the religious injunction against it is observed more strictly than on an ordinary Shabbat—broadcasting services fall silent, and both public and private traffic comes to a halt. The system has the advantage that the roads empty themselves. Not only does blessed silence prevail, but droves of children of non-orthodox families in non-orthodox neighborhoods emerge from their homes, take out their bicycles, and ride them wherever they like. Year in year out, I and many other people find their happiness a joy to watch. So much so that I sometimes think we should have not one Yom Kippur but two, or three, or four. And why not?

Four days later, at the time of the full moon, it is time for the Feast of Tabernacles which lasts an entire week. For orthodox people it is time spent living and eating in a more or less makeshift structure erected in a garden or on a balcony constructed especially for the purpose. For unorthodox ones like myself, to operate in low gear, so to speak. The entire season lasts almost a month during which all activity is more or less muted. Trying to get anything done, especially but not exclusively where the public services are involved, the response one is most likely to get is, “after the Holidays.”
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But this is the Middle East. Year in- year out, celebration is tinged with more than a hint of fear. And not only because, as I just said, these are the days when God is supposed to decide one’s fate for the coming year. But because of the rains which may or may not come. And because, to recall a World War-II guide issued by His Majesty’s Army for visiting British soldiers I once saw, “the first thing you’ll notice is how arid the country is.” As the book of Genesis testifies, throughout the centuries famine was never far away.

It was famine which drove the patriarch Jacob and his sons to migrate to Egypt, where they were later enslaved and from where it took God fully four centuries to liberate them. That is why people prayed for rain to fall—and why, as they wrap up Tabernacles, they continue to do so ever year.

Today Israel is world champion in the kind of technology needed to distribute, recycle and desalinate water. That is why actual famine is all but inconceivable. Drought, however, is doing bad things to Israeli agriculture whose allocated supply of water—in Israel, all water is allocated by the state—has been decreasing for years. And also to Israeli customers who are being made to pay through the nose. The possibility that one may have to stop watering one’s garden and cut down on one’s laundering is always in the air.

Above all, people listen to the news and shudder. Going down again, the level of water in the Sea of Galilee has reached the “upper red line.” It has reached “the lower red line.” It has reached “the black line” So shallow has the sea become that an “island” has appeared in it. The island is linking up with the shore, creating a “peninsula.” And the water is getting saltier.

Relief on one hand, fear on the other. What will the coming year bring?

Seven Things that Will Not Change

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Ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution during the last decades of the eighteenth century, humanity has become obsessed with change. First in Europe, where the revolution originated. Then in Europe’s overseas offshoots, and finally in other places as well. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at the latest, it was clear that the world was being transformed at an unprecedented pace and would continue to do so in the future. As change accelerated there appeared a whole genre of visionaries who made it their job to try and look into that future—starting with Jules Verne and passing through H. G. Wells all the way to Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Harari.

Today it pleases me to try to put the idea on its head. Meaning, I am going to focus on some of the things I think are not going to change. Certainly not any time soon. Perhaps, not ever.

1. A world without war, meaning politically motivated and organized violence, is not in the cards. To be sure, starting in 1945 much of the planet has enjoyed what is sometimes known as the Long Peace. Meaning that, relative to the size of the earth’s population, fewer people have died in war than was the case during any other period from which figures are available. But let there be no illusions: the most important, if not the only, reason behind the decline is not the kind of sudden wish for peace (“the better angels of our nature”) some authors have postulated. It is nuclear deterrence, which has prevented the most important countries from fighting each other in earnest.

Unfortunately experience has shown that, under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, there is still plenty of room left for smaller but no less bloody conflicts. Especially, but certainly not exclusively, of the intrastate, or nontrinitarian, kind as opposed to the interstate, trinitarian one. Such being the case, a world without war would require two things. First, a situation where every person and every collective is always sufficiently happy with his/or its lot to refrain from resorting to violence. Second, a world government capable of identifying and deterring those who would resort to it from doing so. Since war is to a large extent a product of the emotions, moreover, such a government would have to pry into the hearts of every single person on earth. For good or ill, though, there is no indication that either of those conditions, let alone both, are anywhere close to being met.

2. Poverty will not be eradicated. Taking 1800 as their starting point, economic historians have estimated that, world-wide, real per capital product has risen thirtyfold. Based on this, there have been countless confident predictions concerning a golden future in which everyone will be, if not exactly as rich as Jeff Bezos, at any rate comfortably off. However, these predictions have failed to tqake into account two factors. First, wealth, poverty and of course comfort itself are not absolute but relative. In many ways, what was once seen as fit for a king is now not considered suitable even for a beggar. Second, though the production of material goods has in fact increased, the way those good are distributed has not become more equal. If anything, taking 1970 as our starting point, to the contrary.

3. We shall not gain immortality. It is true that, starting in late eighteenth-century France and Sweden and spreading to other countries, global life expectancy has more than doubled. Moreover, the pace at which years are being added to our lives has been accelrating. This has led some people to reason that, if only we could increase it fast enough (meaning, by more than a year every year), death would be postponed to the point where we shall become immortal. The first person to live for a thousand years, it has been claimed, has already been born or is about to be born soon enough. However, the calculation is flawed on two counts First, most of the increase in longevity has resulted from a decline in the mortality of the very young. Second, while the percentage of old people has been growing rapidly, there is no indication that the life span granted to us by nature has been increasing or is capable of being increased.
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4. There is no reason to think the world in which we live is happier than previous ones. Not only is happiness the product of many different interacting factors, but its presence or absence depends on circumstances. Does it presuppose a minimum of physical comfort? Yes, of course, but the extent of that comfort, and even what counts as comfort, is largely dictated by what we expect and do not expect. Does it require a belief in God? Possibly so, but there is no proof that religious people are happier than unbelievers. Does it require leisure? Yes, of course, but the fact that, in Rome during the second century CE, almost half of the year consisted of feast days does not mean that the contemporaries of Marcus Aurelius were happier than their ancestors or their successors. Does it require good interaction with at least some other people? Yes, of course, but there is no reason to believe that such interaction was less common and less satisfying in previous generations than in our own. Does it require purposeful activity? Yes of course, but then what does and does not count as purposeful is almost entirely up to the individual.

5. Whatever feminists may say, men and women will not play the same role in society, let alone become the same That is partly because they are not the same—witness the biologically-determined differences between them in respect to size, physical strength, and the reproductive functions (some experts would add a tendency towards risk-taking, aggression, dominance, and a penchant for mathematical science, but that is moot). And partly because they do not want to be. “The more like us you become, mes dames,” said that incorrigible skirt chaser, Jean Jacques Rousseau, “the less we shall like you.” Conversely, the worst thing one can say about a man is that he is like a woman. It is the differences between men and women, as much as the similarities, that attract them to each other. So it has been, and so it will remain,

6. The question how consciousness could have arisen will not be answered. Starting at least as long ago as the Old Testament, people have always wondered how dead material could ever give birth to a living, sentient being. Especially to the brain as the most important organ in which thought, emotion and, not least, dreaming take place. To answer the question, they invented a God who, to speak with Genesis, blew “the spirit of life” into man’s nostrils. Recent advances in neurology, made possible by the most sophisticated modern techniques, are indeed astonishing. However, they cannot tell us how objective chemical and electric signals translate into subjective experiences; no more than our ancestors knew why certain substances led to increased awareness and others, to torpor. To that extent, the advances in question have not really got us any closer to solving the problem.

7. Our ability to predict the future, let alone control it, has not improved and will not improve one iota. There used to be a time when looking into the future was the province of shamans, prophets, oracles, and Sibyls, and even the dead who were raised specially for the purpose. Other people tried their luck with astrology, palmistry, augury (watching the flight of birds), haruspicy (interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals), yarrow sticks, crystal balls, tarot cards, tea leaves, and patterns left by coffee in near-empty cups. Starting around 1800, at any rate among the better educated in Western countries, two techniques have dominated the field. One is extrapolating from history, i.e. the belief that what has been going up will continue to go up (until it doesn’t) and that what has gone down will continue to go down (ditto). The other is mathematical modelling, which consists of an attempt to identify the most important factors and link them together by means of algorithms. Of the two the second, especially as applied to very large numbers of people, has been the most successful. But only as long as conditions do not change in a radical way; and only at the cost of ignoring what to most people is the most important question of all, i.e. what will happen to them.

Is that enough to put change, that keynote of modernity about which everyone is talking all the time, into perspective?

More Definitions

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(See my post of 23.2.2017)

Abortion: Evil, but better than the alternative, which is being forced to be born as an unwanted child.

A bullshitter: A bulshitter is not the same as a liar. A liar knows he is lying; a bullshitter does not In fact he is not even aware that a difference between truth and falsehood exists. The question is not what is true, but what works for him (and for her). Examples: Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump.

“America first:” A clear, perhaps even panicky, symptom of decline.

Conscience: An uncommon word, meaning that which prevents us from stealing a wallet even though there is no chance of getting caught.

A conspiracy: Often, what people imagine when they do not understand what is going on.

Courage: That which is shown by anyone who, having heard a joke being told about him, does not immediately expire of grief but demands compensation instead.

Creationism: Should be regarded as a particularly vicious form of stupidity, but unfortunately isn’t always.

Diversity: The best way to combat and destroy talent and merit.

Divorce: When it is bad it is bad When it is not so bad, it is still pretty bad.

“Does not cooperate with the police:” A person who, how wicked of him, refrains from incriminating himself and others.

Education: What we call the process by which adults unload their complexes on their unfortunate children.

Equality; A quality which, in nature, does not exist and cannot exist.

Feminism: Another word for penis envy.

Food: Almost entirely bad for our health, but unfortunately we cannot do without it.

Greens: People and organizations that put frogs ahead of humans.
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Humor: What I like best in a woman, besides intelligence.

Life: a dangerous disease, to be cured by dieting.

Male chauvinism: What used to be known as male pride (and much sought after).

Marriage: The gate to both heaven and hell.

“Me too:” A bunch of bitches (“snakes in the grass,” as I have called them elsewhere) who want their fifteen seconds of fame.

A plea bargain: Very often, a method used by prosecutors to increase their own power by blackmailing and punishing the innocent.

A racist: Anyone who does not believe black equals white, and the other way around.

Religion: the opium of the masses.

Sex: The opposite from divorce. When it is good, it is good. When it is not so good, it is also quite good.

Sexual harassment: whatever a woman chooses to call by that name.

A spokesman (or woman): the hack who does your lying for you.

Terrorism: Anything someone else does that people do not like.

A survivor: see under courage.

A troll: Someone who thinks on his own and believes, mistakenly, that he has the right to do so.

Vox populi: Vox porci (look it up), not vox dei.

The Things That Have Not Changed

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In the field of war studies today, nothing is more fashionable than pointing to the prevalence, inexorability and rapidity of change. Meaning, among other things, social change, organizational change, and doctrinal change. And, of course, technological change, the kind that is often perceived as the factor that drives all the rest in front of it the way a shepherd drives his flock.

In this post, I want to do the opposite: To wit, say a few words about the things that have not changed. And which, to quote the nineteenth-century English poet Alfred Tennyson, “far as human eye can see” are not going to change either.

1.War as the continuation of politics by other means. War has never been, nor can be, an independent thing in itself. A war that does not serve politics, here understood not simply as the political process but in the broadest sense as the objectives which the belligerent community sets itself, is, in Clausewitz’s words, “a senseless thing without an object.”

2. A fight between individuals is known as a duel. War, however, is not an individual activity but a collective one. As is well known, a collective can be more than the sum of its parts. However, under the wrong conditions it can also be less. That is why factors such as cohesion, discipline, leadership etc. are as important as they are.

3. War is a strategic activity. Meaning that it is waged by two or more belligerents, each of whom is free and able to pursue his own objectives while at the same time interfering with the other so as to prevent him from doing the same. It is the strategic character of war which is behind its so-called principles. Such as initiative, attack, defense, decision, attrition, concentration, maintenance of aim, maneuver, flexibility, intelligence, security, and all the rest.
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Particularly important in this respect is the relationship between offense and defense. As Clausewitz says, there are two reasons why the latter is the stronger form of war. First, there is the analogy of the bucket; the more successful the attacker, the further away from his bases he gets and the more vulnerable his communications. Second, there is the element of time; whatever does not take place favors the defense. The outcome is the culminating point, the one at which an offense, unless it has ended in victory, inevitably turns into a defense. All this was true when war first made its appearance on earth some twelve thousand years ago. And all this will continue to apply even if and when it is waged by spaceships flying in outer space and firing laser beams.

4. As well as being a strategic activity, war is a violent one. Where no violence is involved there can be no war, only metaphors; as, for example, in “diplomatic war,” “economic war,” “psychological war,” and the like. Coming on top of war’s strategic character, it is the ever-present violence that makes it the domain of hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, suffering, danger, pain, death, and, last not least, sorrow and regret. And that requires, on the part of those who wage it and fight in it, qualities such as fortitude, determination, and presence of mind needed in order to endure it and be successful at it.

5. Finally, violence in turn means that the possibility, even likelihood, of escalation is always there. Side A delivers a blow. Side B responds with a more powerful blow. And so on. If irrational factors such as hate and vengefulness were not present at the beginning, very soon they surface and make their impact felt. Escalation quickly follows. It threatens to burst right through the bands imposed by the very political controls that provide it with its raison d’etre.

To return to the beginning, all this is true regardless of organization, doctrine, technology, and what have you. At this time when new gadgets that supposedly bring about “fundamental” changes in the conduct of war have become a daily phenomenon, let those with ears to listen, listen.

Tainted

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As Mark Twain, who is supposed to have said everything, is supposed to have said, Germany is the most beautiful country in the world. Especially in summer, when my wife and I like to visit. From the Alps in the south to the Baltic in the north, from the flat, wide-open spaces in the north east to the more densely settled, often rolling, provinces in the southwest, no country has more variety. And no country is better tended by its citizens. The mountains. The “fairy tale woods.” The clean rivers and equally clean lakes. The infinitely numerous hiking trails that lead everywhere and nowhere. The tree-lined streets, including the one on which we live at the moment. The parks, the greenery that graces most cities.

As Nietzsche, himself a German (though he did not like Germans one bit), says, at bottom history is nothing but a list of atrocities. Such as have been pruned to suit the historian and his readers and chronologically arranged. That is as true of Germany as it is of all other nations; including, in a minor but certainly not negligible way, the on to which I myself belong. However, until 1933, on which more in a moment, the list of German atrocities was no worse than that of most other countries. There were even times when things German were held up as examples for others to follow. The rude, but honest and courageous, tribesmen and tribeswomen the Roman historian Tacitus wrote about. The flourishing cities of northern and southern Germany during the middle ages and the Renaissance. Luther and the Reformation first ridding the Church of much accumulated mumbo-jumbo and then forcing it to reform itself. The German Aufklaerung (Enlightenment) and its contribution to world literature. “Athens on the Spree” (Berlin from about 1800 on).

The list does not end there. It also includes the modern German university system, the house of whose founder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, my wife and I went to visit the other day. German science, and medicine (from about 1860 to 1933). The best organized, most efficient, and least dishonest civil service and judiciary (during the same period). For those who care about such things, the most powerful, army the world had ever seen (ditto). I happen to own a replica of a 1903 Sears and Roebuck catalogue containing descriptions and drawings of thousands of products. Leafing through it, one cannot escape the impression that anything German was considered best. Including something known as a Heidelberg belt; a battery-operated device into which one sticks one’s penis by a of a cure for impotence.

Enter the Nazis. They too had, as perhaps their most central objective, building eine heile Welt, a clean and healthy world. One cleansed of democracy, an imported system which was not only slow and cumbersome but, by putting quantity ahead of quality, went against what Hitler personally saw as the eternal laws of nature. One cleansed both of communism and of the harshest, most exploitative, forms of capitalism. One cleansed of all sorts of incurably diseased people who were to be given a Genadentodt (mercy-death). Once cleansed of “degenerate” art which, deliberately designed to weaken the human spirit, produced not masterpieces but unseemly monsters. One cleansed of feminism, the product of the twisted brains of “unnatural” women who did not or could have children and were effectively eugenic duds. And cleansed of Jews, the race whose members united in their own persons all these bad things and then some.

Years ago, visiting the former concentration camp at Dachau, I came across a sign, not far away. I paraphrase. Visitor, it said, do not forget that our town, Dachau existed a thousand years before anyone ever heard of Hitler, National Socialism, concentration camps, etc. So please do not judge us solely through the prism of those terrible twelve years. Fair enough, many people would say. Me included.
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The problem is that it does not work that way. To be sure, the Nazi years only took up a tiny part of German history. Arguably, given that until 1871 a political entity called Germany did not exist, it is not even the most important part. Yet it is this tiny part that has taken over, forming a kind of telescope through which both the past and the future are seen. Almost without exception, works originating in, or dealing with, the pre-1945 period raise the question as to whether A, B, C or D was or was not a forerunner of, or at least had some affinities with, the extreme evil that was National Socialism. Almost without exception, those originating in, or dealing with, the post-1945 period are judged by whether or not they show traces of that dread disease. Do I have to add that anything originating during the Nazi period itself is bad by definition? Outside Germany, the situation is even worse. Out of every ten works on German history that are published in English, perhaps nine deal with the Nazi period. As has been said, whenever two persons argue for more than a few minutes at least one of them is going to call the other a Nazi.

Living in Germany, even for a short period as I do, one sees the consequences all around. I do not mean just the countless museums, exhibitions, memory sites, day tours, and the like that focus on the years from 1933 to 1945. I mean the kind of day-to-day politics in which the Left, taking the high ground, accuses the Right of being Nazis and the Right is constantly forced to defend itself against that accusation. Fear of being considered Nazi also does much to explain German foreign policy. Starting with the relationship between Berlin and Europe’s other capitals and ending with the way refugees are treated. Aliis licet, non tibi; what others are allowed to do, you, for historical reasons so obvious that they do not have to be pointed out, cannot.

Of my own acquaintances, not one is old enough to have reached maturity during those terrible days. The oldest is 86; how old he was back in 1945 you can figure out for yourself. He is a former East German, retired professor of economics who loves cats, likes gardening, and has a good sense of humor. He is also a kind man with whom my wife and I have enjoyed the best of relationships for almost twenty years. Others are much younger. Often so much so that not only they but their parents and even grandparents too cannot have done anything wrong.

Thus the Nazi attempt to create a wholesome word resulted in the latter’s opposite. Not only are Germans tainted, but practically all of them who are adults realize it. And will likely remain tainted to the end of days.

Bogus

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When I was very young, I read story about a wanderer (zwerfer, in Dutch). He was an itinerant peddler with no fixed address. Dressed in rags, he made his miserable living by selling self-made mousetraps; briefly, the lowest of the low. One day he was caught in a terrible snowstorm. Desperate lest he freeze to death, he knocked on the gate of the nearest estate, begging for shelter.

The owner, a nobleman, was just giving a feast for his friends. There was a warm hall with a roaring fire going, laid tables, sparkling wine, music, and conviviality. Called by the porter to see what the stranger was all about, he mistook the man for a former army comrade. The peddler’s protests that it was a case of mistaken identity were to no avail; the owner of the house insisted that he should come in. Properly cleaned, for the first time in weeks he spent the night in bed, sleeping.

Next morning he was summoned to his host, who immediately understood what had happened. He grew very angry, accusing the peddler of fraud and threatening to call the police. At this point his daughter intervened, pointing out that the man had done no harm and suggesting that, by way of Christian charity—it was Christmas, hence the party—he be allowed to stay for a few more days. So it was decided. The guest gave no trouble, hardly showing himself and spending most of his time in bed. Early on the third day he slinked away, leaving behind a present—a mousetrap.

And why am I telling you this story? Because yesterday I visited, for the second time running, an exhibition here in Berlin called, Wanderlust. Housed in the venerable Alte Nationalgalerie, it focuses on the theme in question as it was presented by artists, most of them German but a few French and Swiss, from about 1780 to the very end of the nineteenth century. Among the paintings on show are works by Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Blechen, Carl Edouard Biermann, Johann Christian Dahl, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Adloph Menzel (a favorite of Hitler’s, incidentally), Gustave Le Courbet, and August Renoir. Enough to take an art lover’s mouth water, and then some.

The theme, I learnt, appeared at the very end of the eighteenth century. Landscapes, of course, had been painted before; just think of Frans Hals’ magnificent seventeenth-century views of Haarlem. But this collection was different. It emphasized not the civilized and the tame but the uncultivated and the wild. Including lonesome cloud-shrouded peaks, torrents, wind-swept fields, and the ruins of medieval abbeys. Instead of forming the background of civilization, as previously, nature, populated by simple, unpretentious folks, was presented as the latter’s opposite. It was to nature that people, escaping the stress and corruption of city life, went in order to recover their powers.

Many of the paintings were supposed to be allegorical. What they showed was not just a more or less innocuous trip into the countryside but “the wanderings of life.” One in particular caught my attention. Unfortunately I forgot to take down the painter’s name, so I cannot present it to you here. It shows a “resting wanderer.” Fatigued, he is sitting on a tree trunk. It reminded me of a song our music teacher made us schoolchildren learn by heart and sing about sixty years ago:

Hello littlish road signs

Whitish stones.

Good it is to wander along

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Without any fixed goal.

Between Ayelet and Metula [two settlements in the north of Israel]

I got tired and sat down.

A pretty flower I picked me

And a splinter pierced my heart.

At the time the song was composed Israel, newly established and flooded by new immigrants from all over the world, was desperately trying to create a new “national” culture such as other nations had long had. And this was a typical result. Even as a child of twelve or so I could not help but wonder about the words. If wandering about with a rucksack was so great, why didn’t anyone I knew do engage in it? And why “without any fixed goal”? Now the painting in front of which I was standing fitted the song, down to every detail. There was the wanderer. He had a rucksack—a rather nice one to be sure—he was sitting down to rest, and he was picking a flower.

The more time I spent at the exhibition, the more uncomfortable I felt. The wanderers I saw were not at all like the one in the story I told you. All without exception they were in the countryside because they wanted to, not because they had to. Almost to a man (and to a woman, but that is a different story) they were good bourgeois. More or less well off, well fed, well dressed in appropriate clothes. None was poor, none was old, none was freezing of shivering with cold, none was exhausted; at most they were pleasantly fatigued. Many did not “wander” at all. Without a doubt, they had been staying at comfortable—or what, in the nineteenth century, went for comfortable—inns to which they would return for dinner and a glass or two of wine after having spent a nice, if slightly exhausting, day in the open. Some were accompanied by servants who carried impedimenta such as pic-nick baskets, art supplies, scientific equipment with which to carry out measurements, and so on.

Magnificent as many of the paintings were, what they showed was not wanderers but people on excursions. They were, in other words, bogus. Romantic, to be sure, but bogus still. In the entire exhibition there was only one exception. That was Ernst Barlach’s 1934 wooden sculpture, Man in a Snowstorm. It shows the subject, shoulders hunched, collar raised, cape over his head, struggling against what is obviously a sharp wind. I thought I would show it here, but could not find a pic on the Net.

So I had to make do with the best-known of the bogus ones.

Then I Shall Change My Mind

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As you may well imagine, over the years I have often been asked what it would take to make me change my reactionary, archaic, patriarchal, and male-chauvinist views on women and feminism. To wit, first, that basically very little has changed; and second, that almost the whole of modern feminism, both practical and theoretical, is an illusion at best and pure nonsense at worst. Need I add that the two questions are linked?

Being the hopeless egghead I am, I have always considered the matter intriguing. So here goes.

Anatomy and Physiology

If and when women grow as strong and robust, physically, as men, then I shall change my mind.

If and when men start squatting to pee as women do, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop growing breasts (or using every conceivable to enhance them when nature does not do its part), then I shall change my mind.

If and when women start speaking in tenor, baritone or bass voices, then I shall change my mind.

Psychology and Behavior

If and when women stop vacillating and decide whether they want to be more like men—in which case no man will want to come close to them—or different from them, then I shall change my mind.

If and when most women give up their desire to have children, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop reading “romantic” literature but study the dry-as-dust works of Spinoza instead, then I shall change my mind.

If and when more men than women start attending church, then I shall change my mind.

If and when men (other than those freaks, transgenders) start putting on female dress, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop trying to get rid of their body hair, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop undergoing the vast majority of surgical procedures to enhance their looks, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women no longer buy the vast majority of cosmetics and “accessories” of every kind, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop visiting doctors and ask for medical treatment far more often than men do, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women get rid of penis envy and stop desiring whatever men have (including, according to one German self-declared feminist philosopher, “potency”) then I shall change my mind.

Sex and Mating

If and when as many women as men express their readiness to have sex with strangers, then I shall change my mind.
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If and when most women stop looking for men who can provide for them and protect and defend them, then I shall change my mind.

If and when any number of female brothels succeed in staying open for any period of time, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women start earning kudos for having had numerous sexual encounters with men, then I shall change my mind.

If and when a great number of women, turning into “cougars,” start marrying younger men and staying with them, then I shall change my mind.

If and when fewer women than men start initiating divorce proceedings, then I shall change my mind

Work and Career

If and when the number of male nurses exceeds that of female ones, then I shall change my mind.

If and when female professions (meaning, such as are exercised mainly by women) are held in higher regard and become better paid than male ones, then I shall change my mind.

If and when as many women as men work in hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs, such as repairing cars, or forestry, or mining, or diving, or even garbage-collection, I shall change my mind.

If and when the list of the fifty, or hundred, people with the highest salaries in America (or any other country) contains more than a few women’s names near the bottom of the list, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women come to form more than a negligible fraction of heads of state and prime ministers (currently they are about 6 percent), then I shall change my mind.

Sports

If and when men and women start boxing against each other in earnest, rather than by way of burlesque, then I shall change my mind,

If and when co-ed teams consisting of grown men and women are formed and start playing football or soccer or basketball against each other, then I shall change my mind.

If and when organized bands of male drum majorets are formed to encourage female team players, then I shall change my mind.

War

If and when as many women are compelled to enlist in the military as men, then I shall change my mind.

If and when proportionally more women than men are killed while on active military operations, then I shall change my mind.

Unless and until most of these propositions are no longer true, Porsche Power courtesy of German painter Udo Lindenberger, will prevail.

In Praise of Potsdam

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An old post that rings true  today:

I am writing this from Potsdam, a smallish (160,000 inhabitants) German city southwest of Berlin where my wife and I go to stay for a month or so every year since 1999. Originally what brought us to Potsdam was the fact that it is home to the Bundeswehr’s historical service. They have the best military-historical library in Europe; enough said.

Potsdam, however, also has other attractions and it on them that I want to focus here. When we first visited back in 1992 it was a sad town. Many buildings were dilapidated; testifying to the fact that the very last battles of World War II took place in this area, many windows had not yet been repaired. The predominant color was grey. It took me awhile to realize the reason for this. It was due to the fact that, in a country that had only recently emerged from communism, there were no commercial signs and no advertisements in the streets. In the entire city the only halfway decent hotel was the Merkur, located not far from the railway station which, like the rest of the town, had been heavily bombed in 1945 and never properly repaired.

The hotel itself consisted of a high-rise building not far from the city center where it formed, and still forms, a real eyesore. Originally its rooms did not have private bathrooms. By the time we stayed there they had been installed, but only at the price of making the rooms themselves rather cramped. In the entire central district of the city there was just one restaurant. Located on the central square, the Brandenburger Platz, in good East German tradition it only served a small fraction of the items theoretically on the menu.

Over the years, watching the city shed its communist dress and put on a modern, liberal and commercial one has been a feast for the eyes. Potsdam is not nearly as wealthy as some of its West German counterparts. But like all small German towns it is clean and orderly. One can cycle wherever one wants. In the suburbs, especially Rehbruecke where we stay, many houses have flourishing gardens. The buses run, the trams arrive on time. Everything functions—to someone coming from the Middle East, that is anything but self-evident. Still I would not have written about Potsdam if, in addition to these qualities, there had not been some things which set it apart.

Potsdam_Sanssouci_PalaceFirst, there is culture. Starting in the early 18th century and ending in 1945, Potsdam was where the kings and princes of Prussia spent their summers. Though the Hohenzollerns are gone, that accounts for the fact that there is much to see and to do—museums, palaces, shows (in German, but for us that is no problem), concerts, you name it. Some of these attractions, notably the palace of San Souci (Worry-Free) built by Frederick the Great in the 1750s, are world famous. Others, such as the evangelical kindergarten that, during the early post-war years, served as an NKVD prison are merely interesting. Given that Potsdam used to a garrison city, many of the attractions have ties with Prussian/German military history. But by no means all: there is a Dutch quarter and there is a Russian colony and there is a Jewish cemetery. There is a mosque, built around 1740 to conceal the first steam engine in Germany. For anybody who wants more places to visit Berlin, a global city of three and a half million people, is only half an hour away.

Holding the aid receiver side down, gently pick away any wax or debris from the tadalafil india vents and receiver openings. Moreover, it causes the processing unit to malfunction. tadalafil sample The Recommended Dosage of Kamagra Oral Jelly You levitra cialis viagra should consult your doctor before taking Tadalafil and know whether Tadalafil will work for you or not. Erectile dysfunction stimulates emotional disorders, psychological, their website generic levitra online low self esteem,decreased confidence, irritation, depression and relation problems. Second, the walks. Potsdam and its surroundings are almost completely flat. You can spend entire days wandering in the fields and along the canals—with no danger that some redneck, gun in hand, will warn you to f—k off and shoot you if you do not do so fast enough. The horizon is far away, the land often somewhat swampy. Some of it was laid dry in the seventeenth-century by Dutch engineers. This is not a district with spectacular views; what we value is the monotony and the soothing effect. Here and there the land is punctuated by a Kneipe, certain to be clean, certain to be well-kept, where you can have a cup of coffee with cake or else a beer with a sandwich.

Third and most important, there are the lakes. Brandenburg has more water than any other German Land. Twenty years after reunification, and following a gigantic investment, the water in question is now clean enough not only to swim in but to drink. Personally I know no finer piece of countryside than the Caputher See, a lake located near a village—Caputh—four or so miles south of Potsdam. For those who are interested, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels used have a little house there. So did Albert Einstein; there is also a small Einstein Museum that a friend of ours now runs. The only aquatic sport we practice is swimming. I know that not everybody likes swimming, but that is their problem.Caputher_See_by_Area29ED6

What is it that makes swimming in Potsdam, and in former East Germany in general, so attractive? It took me a long time to figure out the answer. It is not the climate. As Napoleon is supposed to have said, Germany has eight months of winter and four months of no summer. It is not the water—you can find that in many other places around the world. Nor is it the views—lovely as they are, there are others that are as good.

It is, instead, the sense of freedom. The Caputher See is considerably larger than Walden Pond. Unlike the latter it is not a celebrity. The only way to reach it is by a short walk through the surrounding forest. So beautiful, so marked by chiaroscuro is the path that my then eight-year grandson dubbed it “the enchanted wood.” There is no gate and no gatekeeper to look you over and charge for entry. There are no kiosks trying to sell you this or that. Let alone the kind of blaring music you often get in open air cafes. You can strip naked and leave your things on the little beach, if that is what you like. There are no buoys to tell you how far you can go—in some American lakes I have visited, you are only allowed to wade up to your knees. The kind of rubber boats children use apart, there are no boats to pollute the water with noise and oil. Best of all, there is no lifeguard. You are even allowed to drown if that is what you want. There is no and there is no and there is no.

The moral? We citizens of “advanced” countries have bound ourselves in endless ribbons, like those used by the police to cordon off crime scenes. On them are printed, instead of the words “keep out,” “freedom, justice, and safety.” Growing tighter by the year, the ribbons have brought us to the point where we can hardly move a limb or open our mouth. We are surrounded by counselling, sensitivity training, surveillance cameras, mobile phones that track our movements, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, licenses, examinations, certifications, mandatory prerequisites, and mandatory insurance. Not to mention mandatory helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape when all we want to do is ride a bicycle to the post office. All, we are told, because we are not fit to look after ourselves. And all for our own good.

Thank goodness there are still a few places left where all these restraints can be cast off. At least for a couple of hours.

At Any Cost

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Tom Segev, David Ben Gurion: A State at Any Cost (2018)

He was short of stature—a well-developed upper body supported by legs so spindly and short that they barely touched he floor, as we Israelis say. His voice was squeaky and he had no sense of humor whatsoever. Possessed of a short temper, on occasion he liked to play the role of a tinpot dictator. As a leader, one of his most annoying habits was firing subordinates without telling them, leaving them in limbo. Or else pretending not to know who his visitor was. Not so different from President Trump, I am told.

Meet Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. judging by the number of streets, buildings, institutes etc., named after him in Israel itself he has been overtaken by Menahem Begin (whose very name, when they were both Knesset members, he refused to pronounce). Outside Israel, though, he is widely remembered as the man who founded the Jewish state and led it during the first fifteen years of its existence. He did what no other Jewish leader had succeeded in doing since the Roman commander Pompey occupied the country in 63 BCE: namely, restore its status an independent political entity free from foreign domination. It is also Ben Gurion, and not Begin, who has several places named after him in countries other than Israel.

His most recent biographer, Tom Segev, is a well-known Israeli journalist and author with several other books to his credit. This one is exceptionally well researched and so well written that, more than once, I found myself unable to stop turning the pages. Ben Gurion, original name Green, himself was born in 1886 to a lower middle class family in Plonsk, north of Warsaw. Much later it was claimed that, to become a top level Zionist-Israeli leader, one had to be born within 500 km. of that township. As he told the story, around 1900 the news reached his ears that the Messiah had come. He lived in Vienna, had a black beard, and, was called Herzl.

In 1906 he arrived in Eretz Israel. Right from the first moment its sky, climate, and vegetation struck him favorably, or that at any rate was what he wrote in his letters home. Yet to his future wife Paula, whom he met and married in the U.S in 1917, he described it as an Eretz Tzia, a Biblical phase meaning, roughly, “desolate country.” He was not the only one. Returning from a visit in 1898, Kaiser Wilhelm II in his diary wrote of it as “a terrible country, without shade and without shade.”

He spent somewhat over a year as an agricultural laborer, first in Petah Tikvah north of Tel Aviv and then at Sejera on what is now the border with Lebanon. Throughout his life he claimed to hold nothing dearer than agriculture; that was still true when, in 1953-54, he briefly gave up his post as prime minister and went to live in a kibbutz in the Negev. Yet already before 1914 he entered politics, helping found a party known as “The Zionist Worker.” Initially there were only some 150 members, but it was out of this group that the Labor Party, which dominated Jewish/Israeli politic from 1929 to 1977, eventually grew.

World War I caught him in Constantinople where he had gone to study law. Unable to return home he spent most it in London and the U.S. Living in New York he and a friend—Yitzhak Ben Tzi, who later became Israel’s first president—spent some of their time writing a book about Eretz Israel. It was meant to show that, contrary to the views of many, the country was sufficiently large and fertile to serve as the Jewish homeland. Also that the Arabs—no one yet spoke of Palestinians—living in it were, in reality, the descendants of the ancient Jews and could therefore be converted back to Judaism. Whether this claim was seriously meant is hard to say.

In the meantime, it was above all a question of rising to the top of the fermenting Zionist heap with its dozens of different groupings. Following an election campaign in which he showed his genius for mastering detail—he always made a point of writing everything down—by 1931 that objective had been largely achieved. In 1939 he also took the place of Chaim Weizmann as head of the Zionist Organization. From then on, if the Jewish people—not just that part of it which was coming together in Eretz Israel—had a single leader it was him.
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In this short review of a rather bulky volume—the Hebrew version, which is the one I read, takes up 800 pages—cannot go into every detail of “B.G’s”, as many Israelis called him, life. Suffice it to say that he emerged as a much more radical figure than I had thought. Already in the early 1920, Ben Gurion was determined that there would be a Jewish State, be the cost what it might. Already then he foresaw that the struggle against “the Arabs”—as yet, no one had heard of Palestinians—would be prolonged, tough, and bloody. Already at that time there was talk of the need to “evacuate” as many of them as possible to the neighboring countries. Meaning, since the Promised Land was considered to include not just the West Bank but territories east of the river Jordan, as far away as Iraq. He knew about the Holocaust at an early date and from that time on always felt terribly guilty for not having done more to save Jews, many members of his own family included. Not that there was much he could have done, one must admit

During the late 1940s he did more to instigate and support anti-British terrorism than most people at the time knew or suspected. He was something of a racist, believing that only Ashkenazi and not Sefardi Jews could build a state and often favoring “Western” immigrants at the expense of “Oriental” ones. He did not really want the 1956 Sinai War, but was pushed into it by his disciple, Chief of Staff General Moshe Dayan. He always kept in mind the possibility of one day occupying East Jerusalem and the West Bank; something which, his military advisers told him, would take no more than a couple of days. Whenever there was a political crisis, he had a tendency to fall ill.

During his last years in power he became erratic, quarrelling with his closest associates until, come June 1963, they finally united against him and got rid of him. This only made him more erratic still. Just before the 1967 War, so bleak was his outlook that he almost drove the Chief of Staff, Yitzhak Rabin, who had come to visit him, into despair. Once the war had ended in victory he became half-mad with euphoria, suggesting that the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem be demolished.

His private life was so-so. His three children did not interest him much. Originally, as far as anyone can judge, his marriage was based on love. However, judging by letters written by one of his fairly numerous occasional lovers, he was always too much in a hurry. He never quite learnt how to satisfy a woman or how to get real satisfaction himself. At one point Paula complained that he was always thinking only about himself and that she wanted a divorce. In the end divorce him she did not. Once he retired, though, she treated him as a watchdog treats its charge, guarding him closely and defending him against as many visitors as she could. She always called him Ben Gurion, never by his given name.

Personally the single paragraph I found most interesting was one dealing with an article about the future he wrote for Look Magazine in 1961. The Cold War would come to an end. Russia would become social-democratic. Europe would be united. Armed forces would be dissolved and replaced by a sort of global police force. There would be an international court based in Jerusalem. Science, particularly brain science, would make tremendous strides. Energy would be nuclear-based and so plentiful as to make interplanetary voyages possible. There would be a sort of injection enabling blacks to become white and whites, to become black (why anyone would want to do the latter is not clear); that way, the racial problem in the USA would finally be solved. Average life expectancy would rise to almost 100 years. Quirky, I would say. But, having spent the last two years looking at the methods people have designed to look into the future, not at all bad.

He died, very soon after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Beset by fears as to the future of the state he had done so much to build, a lonely, disappointed and bitter figure. Even in death he pursued his quarrel with other Zionist and Israeli leaders. He refused to be buried on Mount Herzl, the place where most Israeli “greats” are. Instead he nominated Sdeh Boker, the isolated Negev Kibbutz which, during his last years, he made his home.

A formidable visionary, politician and leader he was, one who rose from nothing to become a figure whom millions all over the world knew and admired. As my late grandmother, Francine Wijler, did. She once saw him in hotel lobby. Later she said that, had she known how approachable he was, she would have gone up to him and introduced herself.

Luckily for her, given how rude he could be, she did not.