For Whom the Bells Toll

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

For Bashir Assad, the bells have been tolling. If one believes the media, he and the regime he represents are on their last legs. Whether or not that is true is not at issue here—similar predictions have been heard ever since civil war broke out in Syria four years ago. What I do want to do is take a look at the origins of the war, the way it has been going, and what the future may look like in case the predictions come true.

The decisive fact about the Assad—meaning, in Arabic, “Lion”—family is that they are Alawites. The Alawites are a section within the Sunni tradition. They do not, however, form part of the mainstream. Some Islamic scholars do not even regard them as Muslims; claiming that they are basically pagans who worship the moon and the stars. The community is scattered among Syria, Turkey and Lebanon. It is, however, only in Syria that they form a significant minority, counting perhaps one seventh of the population. That explains why Bashir’s paternal grandfather, Ali Suleiman al Assad (1875-1963), supported French colonial rule. He and his fellow Alawites knew well enough how majority Muslims deal with minority ones.

Suleiman’s son Hafez made his career as an air force officer. In 1963 he took part in a coup that brought the Ba’ath, a party that professed a curious mixture of secularism, nationalism, and socialism, to power. In 1966 he co-authored another coup, this time one that took place inside the Ba’ath leadership; in 1970, following a third coup, he assumed power as a military dictator. He did not, however, do much to change the nature of the regime. The latter remained what it had been. An amalgam of secularism, nationalism, “Arab” socialism; and of course the kind of brutal police state which seems to be more or less the only kind most Arabs understand and can live under.

Assad Père governed Syria with an iron fist. In 1973 he and Egypt’s Sadat launched a massive war against Israel; the way he and most Arabs understood the outcome, it was a major success. To be sure, it did not return the Golan Heights to Syria. But it did increase Assad’s popularity and helped consolidate his rule. When civil war broke out in Lebanon in 1976 he played a major role in the conflict. Supporting now this militia, now that, at one point he made himself the de facto ruler of the country. So much so, in fact, that not even a major Israeli invasion of Lebanon succeeded in dislodging him for very long.

Assad’s greatest challenge came in early 1982. It took the form of a Sunni—Sunnis form just under 90 percent of Syria’s population—uprising against his Alawite, secular rule. So bad was it that, for several months, it looked as if he the regime was about to disintegrate. In response Assad had his troops, commanded by his own brother Rif’at, surround the city of Hama where the head of the snake was located. Opening fire, Rif’at turned much of it into a sea of ruins. Later reporters asked Rif’at whether he had really killed 25,000 men, women and children. Looking them straight in the face, he answered that he had probably killed more.

From that time on Assad no longer faced any serious opponents inside Syria. Though his troops withdrew from Lebanon in 1990, he remained a major player in the complicated ethnic politics of that country. The same applied to his son Basher who took over in the year 2000. Both Hafez and Basher tried to negotiate with Israel in an attempt to reach a deal that would return the Golan Heights. To no avail. Both Hafez and Bashir supported Hezbollah in Lebanon, causing Israel endless trouble along its northern border. Both were themselves supported by faraway Iran which provided arms as well as training. However, being concerned above all with the stability of their regime, neither launched a major war against anybody. To that extent they were a stabilizing factor in the Middle East.

In April 2011 civil war broke out. As in 1982, the perpetrators were mainly Sunni Moslems, combined with a sprinkling of “liberals.” Bashir used his army to respond in kind. However, unlike his father he was unable to quell the rebellion, causing it to go on and on. To-date, the death-toll is estimated to approach a quarter million people. Millions of others have fled, mainly into Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. There is nothing very special about any of this. To the contrary: in the absence of democracy violence, great or small is simply the way Arabs normally use to settle their political differences.

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What is remarkable about the conflict is not so much the butchery as the way the ropes are drawn around the rink. Assad Jr.’s only supporters are Iran, which does not want to lose its right-hand man on the Mediterranean, and Russia. He has, arrayed against him, practically the entire world—including most Arab countries, Israel and the West. Some of these actively assist his opponents; others pray for them day by day. They do so in spite of the fact that most of those opponents are associated with the kind of militant Islamic movement that, over the last four decades or so, has wrought havoc wherever and whenever it appeared; in Lebanon, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and, most recently, Yemen. Not to mention any number of other countries all over the world where its troops have engaged in terrorism, including the single largest terrorist act of all time. And notwithstanding the fact that, as experience shows, it is only strong Arab dictators who are able to hold Arab countries together and keep them from causing even more trouble for themselves, each other, and the rest of the world they already do.

Much the most important of the numerous militias that are trying to unseat Assad is IS, also known as Daesh. Truth to say, Arabs have never been exactly famous for the gentle way they fight their wars. Daesh, however, prides itself on being even worse than most. That is why, writing on this site, I have called it “The Monster.” Why any kind of regime, Arab, Muslim, Israeli, or Western should support Daesh and its fellow Sunni militias is a riddle that does not have a solution. Unless, of course, that solution is simply called stupidity.

To repeat, Assad is not a nice guy. He and his Alawite cronies have plenty of blood on their hands and are going to have lots more. Nevertheless, his ties to Hezbollah and Iran notwithstanding, on the whole he and his regime have been stabilizing factors in the Middle East. Should Assad fall, then the consequences may well be unimaginable. The first to suffer will be Syria’s Alawites or, at any rate, those of them who have not yet fled. Having sustained the regime for so long, they are going to face genocide on a scale that may make that committed by the Turks on the Armenians a century ago blanche. The same applies to other minorities such as the Druze and the Shiites. But Daesh does not want to rule just Syria. It wants Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Yemen as well. Whether or not it succeeds, in the short and medium run that means destabilization, terrorism, guerrilla, and civil war. In Iraq and Yemen, all this has already happened. Do we really want the same to happen in other countries too?

In the face of all this, it is high time for countries, leaders, and people to reconsider and stop ringing the bells for Assad’s funeral. Rather than trying to hasten his fall, they should finally agree to take for what he is: namely, the devil we know.

Or else.

Here They Go Again

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

For several decades now, female Congress staffers have complained about being subject to “sexual harassment” by their usually male, usually elderly, often (they say) lecherous bosses. To prevent it from taking place, they have demanded and got all kinds of precautions. Now that people have got used to those complaints and do what they can to avoid them, the women are looking for new ways to draw attention to themselves. With success: their latest complaint is about being “shut out” of one-on-one meetings with the same bosses. Nor are they the only ones. Corporate women and women working for the universities have been heard saying the same thing.

Having been a university professor for over forty years, I have some experience in the matter. When I started teaching back in 1971 the idea that male and female students were exactly the same, had exactly the same rights and duties, and should be treated exactly the same way was taken for granted. So much so that nobody ever thought of it or spoke of it. I used to spend some of my time at cafeterias etc, talking to both male and female students. In fact it was partly in the cafeterias of the Hebrew University that my former student and wife of over thirty years, Dvora, and I courted. Since then not a day has passed on which both of us do not bless the Lord for allowing us to meet, fall in love, and move in together long before all this nonsense got under way.

Since then, things have changed. Any professor who meets a female student anywhere, for any reason, and under any circumstances without a chaperone must be out of his mind, crazy, nuts. The least he can do is use a CCTV. But take care: there will be complaints, this time about the loss of privacy. Again I have some experience in the mater. A few years ago I caught a female student who had plagiarized a seminar paper she submitted. I asked her—per email, of course, not in person—for an explanation. A lively correspondence developed in which she failed to convince me she had not stolen her paper, word by word, from some official Israeli documents. In fact I was able to find the paper she had used on the Net, at one of those sites that sell papers! Seeing that I remained unconvinced, she repeatedly asked for permission to visit me. And I, suspecting a rat that may or may not have been there, repeatedly refused. In the end I had no choice but to inform the university. What, if anything, has happened since then I have never been able to find out.

And so it goes. Here are a few examples out of thousands that might be named. Forty-something years ago women first started working on the assembly lines in Detroit. When they were not given as much overtime work to do as their male colleagues, they complained. When, in response, they were made to do obligatory overtime as those male colleagues were doing all the time, they also complained. Their contradictory demands drove the Union of Automobile Workers, which incidentally financed some of the early feminist efforts, to distraction. More recently many women have been heard complaining that the demands of their career are forcing them to postpone childbirth and that, as a result, they have difficulty conceiving when they finally decide they are ready to do so. But when Apple proposed to pay for extracting the eggs of its female employees and keeping them refrigerated so that they might be impregnated at any moment, they also complained.

Long ago, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that everything about women was a mystery and that the mystery has one answer: pregnancy. I myself would modify the sentence as follows: everything about women—real women, not masculine half-women—is weakness. And those who are weak have but two possible ways to go: either charm, or else complain.

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That women are weak hardly needs to be pointed out. They are weak in the sense that they do not have the physical strength of men. They are also weak in the sense that they are less robust and, owing to their anatomy, less resistant to dirt of every kind and more exposed to infectious diseases. At no time more so than when they are pregnant or lactating. These facts mattered a great deal when most of humanity was still living on the farm and scratching the earth. Now that most of it spends its days in front of computers they still matter; though perhaps—perhaps—in a slightly different form and to a slightly different extent. Or else, why don’t we find any number of women in any of the most physically demanding, dirtiest, most dangerous occupations?

Had women been exposed to the full rigors of “the struggle for existence,” as men are, they would not have survived even for a single generation. Nor, of course, would humanity. Conversely, if women did survive then that was primarily because they succeeded in charming men, marrying them, sleeping with them (not necessarily in that order) and bearing children for them.

Women who, for one reason or another, did not succeed in charming a man to look after them complained. Men are supposed “to take it,” as the popular saying goes. Should they complain, then they are almost certain to be either despised or ridiculed. The situation of a woman is entirely different. Her weakness, real or perceived, means that her complaints are much more likely to be taken seriously by men and, though perhaps to a lesser extent, women (women know how good their sisters are at putting on a show). Especially if she makes sure that her femininity, in the form of a cleavage, shows just a little bit; and especially if she opens the waterworks and makes them speak for her.

Nowadays women who know how to charm seem to be a vanishing minority. Nowhere more so than in the US where, truth to say, they have always been somewhat scarce. More and more, the field is dominated by the majority who complain instead. The more aggressive among the complainers call themselves feminists (the term, incidentally, was coined by a man, Charles Fourier, in 1837). Their whole life is one long complaint about the disadvantages from which they allegedly suffer. By complaining, though, all they do is emphasize their own weakness. That is why, fifty-two years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, the vast majority of the top positions society has to offer still remain in the hands of men.

So it has been. So it is, and so, in spite of fashionable literature about the decline of the male, it will be for all generations to come as long as there are still men and women on this earth. Perhaps, considering the alternatives—such as Plato’s Republic, where neither men nor women are allowed to know their own children—it is better that way.

Guest Article: Why we lose so many wars, and how we can win.

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

By the Editor of the Fabius Maximus website

Summary

As the western nations begin a new round of interventions against insurgencies in the Middle East, let’s look at the record of such conflicts since WWII. They teach a simple lesson that if widely recognized could change our future. But the leaders of our national defense institutions do not want to see it, so we probably will not either. Failure to learn is among the most expensive of weaknesses, one which can offset even the power of even great nations.

Among the dumbest advice ever. Churchill didn’t say it.

Our wars since WWII

The local fighter is therefore often an accidental guerrilla — fighting us because we are in his space, not because he wishes to invade ours. He follows folk-ways of tribal warfare that are mediated by traditional cultural norms, values, and perceptual lenses; he is engaged (from his point of view) in “resistance” rather than “insurgency” and fights principally to be left alone.

— David Kilcullen in The Accidental Guerrilla (2011).

Most of the West’s wars since WWII have been fight insurgencies in foreign lands. Although an ancient form of conflict, the odds shifted when Mao brought non-trinitarian (aka 4th generation) warfare to maturity. Not until the late 1950’s did many realize that war had evolved again.

It took more decades more for the West to understand what they faced. Only after the failure of our occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq did the essential aspect of this new era become known, as described in Chapter 6.2 of Martin van Creveld’s The Changing Face of War (2006).

What is known, though, is that attempts by post-1945 armed forces to suppress guerrillas and terrorists have constituted a long, almost unbroken record of failure … {W}hat changed was the fact that, whereas previously it had been the main Western powers that failed, now the list included other countries as well. Portugal’s expulsion from Africa in 1975 was followed by the failure of the South Africans in Namibia, the Ethiopians in Eritrea, the Indians in Sri Lanka, the Americans in Somalia, and the Israelis in Lebanon. … Even in Denmark {during WWII}, “the model protectorate”, resistance increased as time went on.

Many of these nations used force up to the level of genocide in their failed attempts to defeat local insurgencies. Despite that, foreign forces have an almost uniform record of defeat. Such as the French-Algerian War, which the French waged until their government collapsed.

The two kinds of insurgencies

In January 2007 I gave a more detailed explanation to van Creveld’s conclusion. As a simple dichotomy for analytical purposes, we can sort insurgencies by the degree of involvement of outside armed forces (of course, there are other ways to characterize 4GW).

Violence between two or more local groups, who can form from any combination of clans, governments, ethnicities, religions, gangs, and tribes.
Violence between two or more sides, where at least one is led by foreigners – comprising, as above, any imaginable combination of factions.

Local governments often win conflicts of the first kind, often with valuable foreign assistance — so long as the locals control political strategy, tactics, and the major combat forces. For example, see David Kilcullen’s insightful analysis of the Indonesian government’s defeat of insurgencies in West Java and East Timor. These conflicts are often conflated with those of the second kind, as if victories by the local governments are similar to the defeats by foreign armies.

An intermediate kind of conflict occurs when a colonial power grants independence to the local elites through whom it has ruled, winning by trading away sovereignty for an influence with the newly independent State. Examples are the British wars in Malaysia (1948 – 1960) and Kenya (1952-1960) (in which the British took full credit in the histories they wrote).

Foreign forces almost always lose when they take the lead — as always, with exceptions from unusual circumstances — because the locals have two great advantages. First, they play defense and need only to outlast the foreigners. As Clausewitz said in On War, Book 1, Chapter 1…

“As we shall show, defense is a stronger form of fighting than attack. … I am convinced that the superiority of the defensive (if rightly understood) is very great, far greater than appears at first sight.”

Second, locals have the home court advantage. David Kilcullen unintentionally described this in his famous “Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency” (Military Review, May – June 2006). For example, consider article #1…

“Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.”

This is delusional advice to an American or British company commander. The world expert on “your” district already lives there and probably was born there. US company commanders on twelve month rotations cannot acquire such deep knowledge in foreign cultures, no matter how thick their briefing books. It might be difficult for some of them to do so in Watts or Harlem.

Time brings insight to those who pay attention

Time made this clear to a widening circle of observers. Chet Richards (Colonel, USAF, retired) expanded this insight in his 2008 magnum opus If We Can Keep It: A National Security Manifesto for the Next Administration. In 2008 RAND came to the same conclusion after examining “Eighty-Nine Insurgencies: Outcomes and Endings” (Appendix A by Martin C. Libicki in “War by Other Means – Building Complete and Balanced Capabilities for Counterinsurgency“ by David Gompert and John Gordon et al). Here is a summary.

Some with experience on the front lines tried to warn us, as in this quote from Doug Sanders “Afghanistan: colonialism or counterinsurgency? Americans bring Afghans their new 60-year plan” (Globe and Mail, 31 May 2008).

One thing this cloak is hiding is the likelihood that once a nation finds itself relying on counterinsurgency for military success in a foreign setting it has already lost. … The insurmountable problem that the COIN Team faces is that expressed by a senior French commander who told journalist Eric Walberg that: “We do not believe in counterinsurgency” because “if you find yourself needing to use counterinsurgency, it means the entire population has become the subject of your war, and you either will have to stay there forever or you have lost”.

In 2010 Andrew Exum referred us to the doctoral dissertation of Erin Marie Simpson in Political Science from Harvard: “The Perils of Third-Party Counterinsurgency Campaigns” (17 June 2010; available through Proquest). Her conclusion was expressed in a DoD-sympathetic fashion…

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Ultimately, I argue that third parties {foreign armies} win when they’re able to overcome these intelligence challenges before public support runs out. This typically requires rather substantial military reforms and complex deal-making with local leaders. Unfortunately, the nature of selection effects in these cases gives rise to a population of insurgencies whereby these conditions are very unlikely to be met.

Too bad they keep losing.

The core problem.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
— Upton Sinclair in I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935).

This data clearly shows our problem. Why do so few people see this history (e.g., see the near-total refusal to see it at this Small Wars Council comment thread)? Why do our armies — led by the best-educated officers in history — repeat the tactics that have failed in so many similar wars? This is especially unfortunate, since we face foes that have learned so much from the wars of the post-WWII era.

The most plausible reason, as so many have explained since 9/11, is that the leaders of our national security apparatus run it for the money. They run wars to keep the funds flowing and build the power of the Deep State. Victory is nice but optional. “War is the health of the state“, as true today as when Randolph Bourne wrote those words in 1918.

How can we win?

“Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”
— Abba Ebban (Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs), 19 March 1967. Let’s not wait until then.

The first step is to stop “repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results” (that’s insanity per an ancient insight of Alcoholics Anonymous, who know all about dysfunctionality). Eventually this will go badly for us. Second, admit that we do not have the best military in the world at fighting these “unconventional wars“ (i.e., most wars of the post-WWII era). Third, fight only where the stakes are high and we have reason to believe we can win (see this post for details).

Fourth, stop listening to people whose advice has been so wrong. As Martin van Creveld’s said in “On Counterinsurgency: How to triumph in the age of asymmetric warfare“, a speech given at the Henry Jackson Society (26 February 2008).

So when people ask about how we should study counterinsurgency, the first step should be to gather 95% of all the literature on the subject, put it aboard the Titanic and sink it. In fact, there is so much of it that if you put it aboard the Titanic the iceberg becomes unnecessary!

The logical answer for why the materials on counterinsurgency are so inferior is that most of them were written by people who failed to achieve victory. Ninety-five percent of the literature is written by the losers, who in trying to justify their own actions, put the blame for their failure on others. Therefore there is little reason to expect the literature to be any good. Indeed, the best thing to do with it is to put it away.

Last, rely on methods that have worked in the past. For details see Martin van Creveld’s essay “On Counterinsurgency” in Combating Terrorism, edited by Rohan Gunaratna (2005), posted in four parts…

How We Got to Where We Are gives a brief history of insurgency since 1941 and of the repeated failures in dealing with it.
Two Methods describes President Assad’s suppression of the uprising at Hama in 1983 and British operations in Northern Ireland, case studies of opposite ways to win at counterinsurgency.
On Power and Compromises draws the lessons from the methods just presented and goes on to explain how, by vacillating between them, most counterinsurgents have guaranteed their own failure.
Conclusions.

Both the Hama and Northern Ireland solutions are difficult; neither fits how we see war, let alone how we wage it. War often forces harsh choices. We will continue to lose until we confront them. The pressure to do so must come from below the most senior ranks of our defense agencies and from civilians. Neither will happen fast or easily, but time is not our ally.

A fake quote (here are his actual words), but it is good advice.

For More Information

For a deeper analysis of these matters see The Transformation of War: The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz by Martin van Creveld and The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by Rupert Smith.

If you found this post of use, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter . Also see the history of COIN (we close our eyes so as not to learn from it):

Max Boot: history suggests we will win in Afghanistan, with better than 50-50 odds. Here’s the real story.
A major discovery! It could change the course of US geopolitical strategy, if we’d only see it. — About the doctoral dissertation of Erin Marie Simpson in Political Science from Harvard.
A look at the history of victories over insurgents. — A study by RAND.
COINistas point to Kenya as a COIN success. In fact it was an expensive bloody failure.
Return of the COIN-istas (the zombies of military theory).

The Decline and Rise of the Humanities

Posted on May 21, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

In the winter of 2013, my wife and I went to see the visitor center at CERN, the Centre Européene de Recherche Nucléaire near Geneva. We found it one of the worst arranged, least comprehensible shows of its kind we had ever seen. Somewhere on the wall—if it was a wall at all—was a shield that stated the Center’s mission: to find out “who we are, where we come from, where we may be going.”

I am not a physicist, let alone a nuclear scientist. I think I understand that by “we,” whoever had put up the shield did not mean poor little humanity, but the universe instead. But that is precisely the point. To be sure, the universe is very interesting. It has galaxies and stars and black holes and dark matter and so many other curious things as to dazzle the mind. Yet when everything is said and done, what interests each of us most is his (or her) personal fate and that of his (or her) fellow human beings. It occurred to me then, as it does now, that to answer the question, the last place I would turn to is a cyclotron, however gigantic, however powerful, and however expensive it is.

Instead I would go to the humanities or, as they are sometimes known, the liberal arts. As the former term implies, the humanities are the field of study that deals with the thoughts, emotions behavior and activities of men (and women, of course). As the latter implies, they are a field fit for free men (and women, of course) to study. As such they are at least as old as the Biblical Book of Proverbs. Today they comprise such fields as history—to me, the undisputed queen of all the sciences—as well as every sort of culture. Including religion, philosophy, linguistics, literature, all forms of art, music, and more. Many of the disciplines often grouped under the social sciences should also be included: such as political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, economics (including, perhaps, business administration), communications, international relations, war studies, and the like. All these form a seamless cloth. And all are essential to understand us human beings both individually and collectively.

A few of these fields, which are supposed to be profitable to those who earn diplomas in them, are still flourishing. This applies to psychology, law, economics, communications, and, for some reason I have never been able to understand, “political science.” In my experience many political scientists have raised the art of spouting rubbish to what can only be descried as mystical heights. Thank God there are a few exceptions; they, however, are practically indistinguishable from historians. The other fields are in a real pickle. Several US Sate Governors have vowed not to give the humanities one penny if they can possibly avoid doing so. And the US Congress is following suit.

Profitability, or lack of it, is but one part of the problem. Professors in most of the humanities may indeed be facing empty classes. But outside academia there is no shortage of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of courses of every kind. They teach, or claim to teach, everything from writing skills to Kabballah and from Zen to the best way people can spend thirty or forty years sharing home and bed without going ballistic. Many are taught by all kinds of self-appointed “experts” with no obvious qualifications. And many are quite expensive.

Clearly, then, the humanities are not obsolete. The questions they are supposed to study and discuss, if perhaps not to answer, retain their importance. People are no less interested in them today than their ancestors were when Plato and Aristotle taught in Athens. Not to mention Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus Christ. Clearly, too, what is wrong is the way they are studied. Here are some of the problems I see, and have been seeing, for many years:

* A tendency toward overspecialization. Recently, skimming a newly published Oxford University Press Catalogue, I was surprised to find how small, how picayune and unimaginative, most of the titles were. I shall not name any names. However, clearly anyone whose interests are wider than, say, the way bread was baked in Exeter in the middle of the eighteenth century had better look elsewhere.

* The tendency, which is even more obvious in the social sciences than in the humanities, to define everything at great length. As a result, the typical political science book looks as follows. First the author spends 145 pages explaining all the various definitions, of, say, politics. Next, having concluded that none of them really fits, he (or she) provides his (or her) five-page long definition. So complicated is it that nobody, presumably not even the author, can understand it. This process is known as “laying the theoretical framework” or “creating a paradigm.” There follow the remaining 150 pages of the book. Which, invariably, are written as if the first 150 did not exist.

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* The tendency to use as many polysyllabic words as possible. Such words are considered proof of learning. The harder to understand the text, the better. Yet, the road to take is the exact opposite. If you want to reach people, make a splash, and, perhaps, exert a little influence, then simplicity should be your goal. Let me give just one example from my own field. Sir Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) studied history at Cambridge. Owing to the outbreak of World War I he never took his degree. After the war he started his career as a sports correspondent. It is said that he could describe the same game of tennis for four different papers. That experience was one major reason why he was as successful as he was. So simple, so clear were his texts that even generals could understand them. For forty years he was the world’s best-known military pundit. Eventually the Queen gave him a Knighthood.

* The need to expound every possible point of view in addition to one’s own. One writes, for example, about a topic such as heroism. Where it originated (can animals be heroes?), how people understood it at various times and places, how it changed, what place it takes in modern life, and so on. A truly fascinating topic, I would think! Ere you are allowed to address these questions, though, you must first discuss, at the greatest possible length, all the other books that have seen written about the subject. As if anybody cares.

* The excessive use of footnotes, Footnotes, in some ways, are shelters where cowards hide. If something is not sufficiently important to be put into the text, but too important to be left out, one can always put it in a footnote. The same applies to reference material. I am not aware that the Bible, or Thucydides, or Plato, or Aristotle, or Thomas Hobbes, or Adam Smith, bristle with little numbers or brackets whose purpose is to tell the reader where this or that idea, this or that fact, was taken from. Indeed I have often noticed that, the less is known about a topic, the larger the so-called “scientific apparatus” supporting it. If that is scholarship, then I am happy to do without it. So are many others who vote with their feet.

* Political correctness. Political correctness is the blight of the modern humanities. So fearful are universities of being sued that they are actively preventing their faculty from speaking his (or her) mind on any subject, and in any way, that might be the least “offensive” to anyone. To understand what it is all about, read and re-read Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain. There a highly respected professor, referring to two students who had never showed up, asked the class whether anybody had seen the “spooks.” It quickly turned out that the students in question were black. But the professor, not having set his eyes on the students in question, could not know that. This, as well as the fact that most people do not even know that “spook” can be used to mean “black,” did not save him from being crucified. His colleagues turned against him. He lost his job, his wife died of chagrin, and he became an unperson.

The crossroads where these and other problems meet is in the PhD dissertation. The real purpose of a dissertation is simply to prove that one has indeed attained mastery in one’s field. Instead, in the above ways as well as some others, so dumb are the demands PhD students are expected to meet that most of them spend years upon years to produce texts not even their own professors are eager to read. Next, to pile insult upon injury, they are expected to turn their work into a book! The implication, of course, being that what they have written is no such thing.

So high are the piles of rubbish students are expected first to climb and then to add to that they are deserting the humanities in droves. Yet I am not one bit worried about the “decline” of the disciplines in question. In the past they produced such towering figures as Epicurus, Lucretius, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and many others. Some of them never even attended a university. Others, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, left the one where they taught because they considered it the last place where true intellectual work could be performed.

Without any doubt, people will continue to ask who they are, where they came from, and where they may be going. Above all, they will keep asking how they may best spend their brief lives here on earth. They will do so with or without the universities, bless them. Provided the universities can burst the straightjacket imposed on them by less than mediocre, cowardly, administrators and professors, surely they will flourish and blossom. Or else, if they do not, they will surely wither and the search will continue without them.

As, to a growing extent, it already does.

Sic Transit

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Last week I got a request, one of many I have received over the years. Two scholars asked me to do a chapter in a book they were going to edit. The topic? Security challenges facing European states. That includes strategic and doctrinal responses, technological and industrial capabilities, European armed forces in action, the web of alliances, etc, etc. The book was going to be published by Oxford University Press. My role was to do the chapter on land forces.

I told my father, who is 96 years old. He responded with one word: nebbish (Yiddish for “poor bastards”). I on my part turned down the offer. Why? Because there was no challenge in it. Starting in 1571, when the Turks were defeated at Lepanto, no other non-European navy has ever dared challenge the Europeans at sea. Starting in 1683, when they tried to capture Vienna and failed, the same was true on land.

European navies and armies together ruled the world for several centuries. What were often almost ridiculously small expeditionary forces easily swept away any opposition they encountered. The point was reached where, in 1914, five European states—plus one that was an offspring or Europe, plus one that had successfully started to imitate the Europeans’ methods—dominated practically the entire earth. By 1939, owing to the rise of the USA, the USSR and Japan, that domination was no longer as complete as it had been at the beginning of the twentieth-century. Still it was strong enough.

Depending on how things are calculated and whom one believes, World War II is said to have caused the deaths of anything between 50 and 80 million people. Perhaps as many as two thirds of them were Europeans. Especially in 1944-45, when the Allies were closing on Berlin from east and west, the Continent was hell on earth. Entire armies were being destroyed or captured. Entire cities were being pulverized from the air; until, in Germany, hardly two stones were kept standing on each other. No wonder the survivors turned towards pacifism. The Continent which for several centuries had produced the world’s best sailors and soldiers wanted nothing more to do with war.

To be sure, some European States still tried to behave as if nothing had changed. Many of them sent their troops to fight in the colonies. “Over there,” as the phrase went, they tried to put down rebellions, uprisings, brushfire wars—a term frequently used during the 1950s—guerrilla, terrorism, or whatever. In all cases their opponents were puny (sometimes literally so, like the Viet Minh). Often the attempts involved massive bloodshed and even more massive cruelty; one need only think of the interesting methods the French “paras” used to “win” the battle of Algiers.

In the end, all of them failed. In my view that even applies to the British “victory” in Malaysia which has so often been held up as an example of what could be achieved. In reality it was a triumph of propaganda, not arms. It was orchestrated by none other than Winston Churchill. Returning to office in 1951, Churchill had the good sense to announce that “we shall win this war, then we shall get out.” He did “win,” and he did get out.

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The end of the Algerian War in 1962 marked the last time when any European power seriously tried to hold on to its overseas possession. True, in Europe itself the Soviet Union continued to pose a formidable challenge. However, those who carried the main burden of dealing with that challenge were not the Europeans but their American Allies. The latter spent about twice as much on defense as all European states combined.

To be sure, things developed differently in different countries. By and large, though, all kept cutting their defense budgets and, with them, their armed forces’ size and capabilities. Starting in 1967, almost all of them also did away with conscription. So strong did pacifist sentiment become that many forces found it almost impossible to attract high-quality manpower. That, incidentally, was one reason why they increasingly turned to women; who, as everybody knows but nobody dares say, for many purposes, are no more than half soldiers.

As the Cold War came to an end the process accelerated. Take the Bundeswehr, which during the first few days at any rate would have to bear the brunt of an eventual Soviet attack. In 1989 it had 500,000 soldiers in twelve superbly armed divisions. Now it has 186,000 and three respectively. Much of its equipment is out of date, inoperable, or both. The armed forces of NATO’s remaining members are no better off. Most of the countries in question only spend between 1 and 2 percent of GDP on their militaries. In late 2014 it was decided to raise the figure to 2 percent. No sooner did this happen, though, than the resolution was declared to be “non-binding.”

The Europeans’ miserable failure to deal with the challenges facing them over the last quarter century speaks for itself. Had it not been the US, no doubt Saddam Hussein would still have been in power. In 1992-95 it was the US and not the Europeans which put an end to the war in the former Yugoslavia. In 1999 it was the US and not the Europeans who did what had to be done, if it had to be done, in Kosovo. In both 2002—the war in Afghanistan—and 2003—the invasion of Iraq—so limited was the role most Europeans played as to be barely visible. But for the US, the Persian Gulf would long ago have become a Persian Lake. And so it goes.

There used to be a time when the French prided themselves on their furor Gallicus and the Germans on their furor Teutonicus. Others had similar beliefs—I vividly remember the British officer who, long ago, looked at me down his nose as he said that they, the British, were rather good at “the smacking business.” They may have been. But by now they have become pussycats like all the rest.

In view of this total lack of the will to fight—in the face of a growing challenge from Moscow, what is more—of what value and interest are strategic and doctrinal responses, technological and industrial capabilities, the web of alliances, and all the rest?

As so often, the answer is blowing in the wind.

The Things that did Not Happen

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Seventy years ago, World War II in Europe came to an end. No sooner had it done so—in fact, for a couple of years before it had done so—people everywhere had been wondering what the post war world would look like. Here it pleases me to outline a few of their expectations that did not become reality.

* In 1945, much of Europe—and not just Europe—was devastated. Tens of millions had been killed or crippled. Millions more had been uprooted from hearth and home. Scurrying about the continent, they were desperately seeking to rebuild their lives either in their original countries or elsewhere. Entire cities had been turned into moonscapes. This was true not only in Germany (and Japan), where British and American bombers had left hardly a stone standing on top of another, but in Britain (Bristol, Coventry), France (Caen, Brest), Belgium (the Port of Antwerp), the Netherlands (Rotterdam and Eindhoven), Hungary (Budapest), and Yugoslavia (Belgrade). Transportation and industry were in chaos. With unemployment, cold—the nineteen forties witnessed some of the harshest winters of the century—and even hunger rife, many expected large parts of the continent to go Communist.

In fact, it was only Eastern Europe that became Communist. And then not because its inhabitants, war-ravaged as they were, liked Communism, but because Stalin and the Red Army forced it on them. Many west-European countries, especially France and Italy, also witnessed the rise of powerful left-wing parties. So did Greece, which went through a civil war as vicious as any. None, however, succumbed to the red pest. By 1950 production was back to pre-1939 levels. By the late 1950s, though eastern countries continued to lag behind western ones as they had begun to do as early as 1600, most of the continent was more prosperous than it had ever been.

* During the first years after 1945 many people worried about a possible revival of Prussian-German militarism and aggression. It was that fear which, in September 1944, led US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to propose the plan named after him. Had it been adopted, it would have deprived Germany of many of its territories which would have gone to its various neighbors not only in the east, as actually happened, but in the west as well. The rest would have been divided into several separate states. That accomplished, “all industrial plants and equipment not destroyed by military action” was to be dismantled. That even included the mines, which were to be “thoroughly wrecked.” Since both Roosevelt and Churchill at some points supported various versions of the plan, the chances of its being turned into reality looked pretty good.

In the event, Germany was dismembered and lost large tracts of land that had been part of it for centuries past. It was also partitioned, though not along the lines Morgenthau had proposed. Both the Soviets and the West, but the former in particular, dismantled parts of the German industrial plant that fell into their hands. However, Germany never came close to being a “primarily agricultural and pastoral country.” For example, by the end of 1945 Volkswagen, thanks to a British order for 20,000 vehicles, was back in business. In 1950 the firm celebrated the production of the 100,000^th Beetle; the rest is history.

Furthermore, the reconstruction of German industry did not lead to the much-feared revival of Prussian-German militarism. Let alone of National Socialism and “revanchism.” Instead, Germany was turned into a federal democracy with human-rights guarantees as strong as those of any other democratic country. With the slogan “nie wieder krieg” (no more war) on almost everyone’s lips, by the time of the 1976 election-campaign, which I happened to witness, the country was being touted as “the most successful society in Europe.”

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The Wiedervereinigung (re-unification) of 1989-90 gave rise to some renewed fears among Germany’s neighbors. It was to counter those fears that Prof. Michael Wolfson, a German-Israeli teaching at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, penned his best-seller, Keine Angst vor Deutschland (No Fear of Germany). He turned out to be right. Not only has there been no revival of National Socialism and militarism, but at no time since 1945 has Germany posed the slightest danger to any of its neighbors. By now, with Putin doing what he is doing in the Ukraine, some people would argue that its unwillingness and inability to do so are precisely the problem.

* Above all, there has been no World War III. The objective of World War I, at least according to President Wilson, had been to put an end to war. In 1945, its miserable failure to do so had long become a matter of record. Everybody and his neighbor expected another world war—this time, one waged between the US and the Soviet Union and fought, if that is the word, with the aid of nuclear weapons. As a friend of mine, a retired Bundeswehr colonel whose grandfather and father were killed in 1914-18 and 1939-45 respectively, put it to me: “When I joined the Bundeswehr I did not expect to live.”

Only during the 1960s did fear of another “total” war, as the phrase went, slowly begin to wane away. As late as 1968, American planners claimed to be preparing for “two and a half wars;” a major one in Europe, another major one in the Pacific, and a smaller one somewhere else. Since then they have gradually lowered their sights. So much so that, by now, the most they can hope for is the ability to wage two small wars, such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, simultaneously. Even that is becoming a little doubtful. Rather than go through world wars III and IV, as all historical precedents seemed to suggest would happen, humanity has entered into the so-called “long peace.” As a result, and in spite of the terrible things that are going on in quite some places, the chances of the average person of dying in war are now the lowest they have ever been.

The factors that have brought along the long peace have been hotly debated. Personally I believe that ninety percent or more or the credit belongs to nuclear weapons and the fear they inspire. To be sure, the weapons in question could not prevent all forms of war. There have been plenty of those, and quite a few are ongoing even at this moment. They did, however, prevent its most important and most deadly forms, namely those waged by important states against each other.

Other factors that contributed to the largely peaceful, and by all previous standards unbelievably prosperous, nature of the post-1945 decades have been the relatively benign nature of the American Empire; the rise, side by side with that empire, of numerous international institutions that are daily entwining more states in their coils; and the restraint and sagacity shown by at least some governments—as, for example, when Mikhail Gorbachev ensured that the USSR would the only empire in history to fall apart without major bloodshed. Most important still, success was grounded the hard work of billions of ordinary people who tried to do the best for themselves and their families; and who often succeeded in doing just that.

Have a happy anniversary, Europe. Have a happy anniversary, world.

In Praise of Old Age

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

I was born in 1946. That means that Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison—here listed in the order in which they were born—all were or are a little older than me. Now I am 69, which is a few years more than the character about whom, in one of their most memorable compositions, they sang:

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now
Will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I’d been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?

You’ll be older too
Ah
And, if you say the word, I could stay with you

I could be handy, mending a fuse, when your lights have gone
You can knit a sweater by the fireside, Sunday mornings, go for a ride
Doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?

Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Ah
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Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say, yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form, mine forever more
Will you still need me, will you still feed me when I’m sixty-four?

They wrote and performed the song, and I first listened to it, back in 1967. At the time my own parents were in their late forties and being sixty-four years old seemed so far away as to be almost inconceivable. Here I want to address the question, to what extent did the Beatles’ expectations—happy expectations—match my experience?

Thinking about it, I must say, to a very large extent. To proceed in reverse order, yes, my wife of thirty-something years is still with me. We keep nourishing each other in every sense of the word—day by day, week by week. Yes, we have several darling grandchildren, aged 11 years to six months, on or near our knees. Yes, we rent a cottage every summer—not in the Isle of Wight, mind you, but in Potsdam near Berlin. Luckily we do not have to scrimp and save for doing so.

I do work in the garden, a very small one to be sure, and I do dig up weeds. Dvora does knit a sweater occasionally (most of the time she paints). We often go for drives on the weekend, either taking a walk somewhere or visiting friends and relatives. We do enjoy anniversaries, birthdays, greetings, and a bottle of wine. And, yes, I have lost practically all my hair.

But there are also some differences. Turning around 180 degrees and proceeding from the beginning of the song to its end, normally it is she and not me who does most of the minor technical jobs that have to be done. She is also the one who deals with the occasional help we need to do work we cannot do or can no longer do; such as, for example, re-painting the townhouse in which we live.

The most important difference, though, is that, at sixty-nine, I do not just potter around. Instead I work harder than ever, writing one book after another. The reason why I do so is because I enjoy writing as much as, or more than, I have ever done. And the reason for that is because old age, in spite of all its problems, often brings in its wake certain kinds of freedom younger people cannot readily imagine. That includes freedom from the need to constantly worry about one’s offspring, who are now adults and fully able to look after themselves. Freedom from the need to please employers and/or clients; freedom (in my case) from publishers, given that I can post anything I please on this blog or on Amazon.com; and, finally, the freedom only the knowledge that death is no longer so very far away can bring.

And then there are the things that did not happen. True, physically neither of us is what we used to be. Where the lithe woman I once met? Where is the athlete who used to run miles and miles up and down the hills around Jerusalem, feeling like a god as he did so? The answer, in both cases: long gone.

On the other hand, neither of us is “wasting away” either. Perhaps that is because, over the last half-century people’s life expectancy has gone up by almost a decade. If so, bless the doctors, bless the pills, and bless whoever and whatever is responsible. And yes, we do suffer from some ailments—Dvora more than I—which the Beatles did not mention. However, to-date these are comparatively minor matters. All in all, “Who could ask for more?”

And that, all you hard-working, stressed, twenty- thirty- and forty-somethings with mortgages to pay and kids to raise, who worry about what life may have in store for you when you are sixty-four, is why I am writing in praise of old age.

Your old age, I hope.

Happy Birthday, Israel

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Back in 2010, in my book The Land of Blood and Honey, I argued that Israel was the greatest political success story of the entire twentieth century. Today, on my country’s 67^th birthday, I want to bring that story up to date. Most of the figures are taken from a recent posting by Dr. Adam Reuter, chairman of Reuter Meydan Investment House and CEO of Financial Immunities Ltd. The starting line is 1984; 1984 being the year in which the country, embroiled in Operation peace for Galilee (the First Lebanon War) and with a 450% inflation rate, was on the brink of bankruptcy.

As always, success had many fathers. The then minister of finance, Yitzhak Modai (1926-98), took the credit for himself. Nonsense, says then Prime Minister Shimon Peres. He, Modai, did not even know what was going on. Surely some credit must also be given to the extra $ 1.5 billion (coming on top of the annual $ 3 billion) in American aid. Be this as it may, Israel’s economic heart, which since the October 1973 War had been all but paralyzed, started beating again. Follow some of the results.

In 1984 the country had 4.1 million inhabitants. By now the figure is 8.2 million, a 100 percent increase. Following the post-2008 economic recession as well as new anti-Semitism in many countries, immigration has been picking up. Moreover, compared to other OECD countries Israel’s population is very young, a fact that has important implications for the continuation of growth. Yet the tremendous demographic increase has not prevented the number of rooms per person from growing from 0.92 to 1.26, a 37 percent increase. The number of vehicles per capita has more than doubled, with results that can be seen on every road and street every day. GDP, calculated in dollar terms, has increased ninefold. Per capita GDP has increased 414 percent, foreign currency reserves 2,866 percent. The national debt has gone down from 280 percent of GDP to just 66 percent.

Whatever one thinks of the Second Lebanon War nine years ago, since then the border with Lebanon has been almost completely quiet. Whatever one thinks of Operation Protective Edge nine months ago, since then the border with Gaza has been almost completely quiet as well. That, plus the collapse of Syria and Egypt, helps explain why Defense, which used to take up 20 percent of GDP, has gone down to no much more than 5 percent. Taxation, which took up 45 percent of GDP, went down to 32 percent. American aid went down from 10 percent of GDP in 1984 to just 1 percent today. Exports, measured in dollar terms, went up 860 percent.

Back in 1984 Israel had zero—zero—indigenous supplies of energy and water. By now, thanks to the discovery of vast gas fields on one hand and the construction of the world’s largest complex of desalination plants on the other, both are available in very large quantities and can be increased almost at will. As a result of all this, even the Economist, the smart-Alec British magazine which back in 2008 honored Israel’s 60s birthday with a cover story about “the dysfunctional Jewish state,” has been forced to admit that, since the country joined OECD five years ago, it has done better than most of its fellow-members in that august organization.

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“Israel has a disproportionate amount of brains and energy,” said Warren Buffet (who, putting his pocket where his mouth was, by spent some $ 2 billion buying some Israeli companies). In the UN’s Human Development Index it is rated nineteenth. The Wall Street Journal has rated Tel Aviv third in the world in high-tech, behind Austin and San Francisco but ahead of New York, Stockholm, London, Singapore, and others. In terms of innovation, Israel heads a list of 148 countries. In terms of entrepreneurship it comes second. 300 leading international companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Apple, HP, Cisco, Motorola, Philipps, and Siemens either already have R&D centers in Israel or are building them now. During the first decade of the twenty-first century Israel also led the world in terms of the number of Nobel-Prize winners per capita.

Nor is it just a question of economic and technological development. Israel is the only country in the world that has more trees now than it did a century ago (living in Mevasseret Zion west of Jerusalem, and having in my possession photographs of the area taken by the German Air Force during World War I, I can testify to that fact). The number of museums per capita is the highest in the world. So is the number of published scientific articles. The same applies to the share of R&D in GDP as well as the proportion of high-tech workers in the labor force. The bad reputation of Israeli drivers notwithstanding, the number of those killed in traffic accidents per 100,000 of the population is much lower than in most other countries.

Finally, polls show that, in terms of happiness Israel ranks sixth among OECD countries and eleventh among 146 countries world-wide. All this has been achieved in spite of the country’s small size; in spite of its location in the Middle East, not exactly the most peaceful or most benevolent part of the world; in spite of continuing security problems more dangerous and more persistent than those affecting any other developed country; and without for one moment surrendering the most precious possessions of all: such as democracy, human rights (for the non-Palestinian population, at any rate) and an independent judiciary.

To be sure, there are problems. There are several hundreds of thousands illegal immigrants (although, since the completion of a security fence between the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula, the number of new ones coming in has dropped to practically zero). The gap between rich and poor has been growing, as has the number of the working poor. Some communities, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Arabs, are lagging behind in terms of socio-economic development (although, in both cases, change has finally got under way). There is still no peace with most of the neighboring countries. However, with the exception of the last-named two, all these are problems of a developed country, not of a developing one such as Israel used to be a few decades ago.

Unfortunately, one field in which no progress whatsoever has been made is the question of the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem included. I do not want to enter into the question as to whose fault this is, Israel or the Palestinians. As the saying goes, one needs two to tango—a point of view, incidentally, that many Israeli Arabs also share. In the eyes of many both in Israel and abroad, the occupation is the most important problem that has to be solved one way or another. Personally I agree that such is indeed the case. Let us hope that, when I write another column on my country a year from now, there will finally be some good news in that department too.

Feminist Follies

Posted on April 16, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

Fifty-two years have passed since Betty Friedan with her book, The Feminine Mystique, jump-started the great feminist revolt against oppression, discrimination, and any other number of horrible things those bad, bad, creatures known as men have been doing to poor deluded women. Looking back, has women’s situation improved? Or has it deteriorated? Here are some of the facts:

* Today as ever, the higher one climbs on the slippery pole of power, richness and fame the fewer women one meets. Only about five percent of the world’s countries have female presidents or prime ministers. From the late Ms. Gandhi down, even many of those got their jobs mainly because they were the relatives of male ones. The percentage of top level female executives in Fortune 500 companies is considerably smaller still. The highest-paid female executive in America is Marillyn Rothblatt of United Therapeutics Corporation, ranks 20^th on the relevant Fortune Magazine list. Interestingly enough, “she” was born a man.

* About two thirds of all working women in advanced countries are still employed in a small number of vast, low-paid, female ghettoes where there are few if any men: whether as teachers, nurses, social workers, communicators, administrators—the last two, euphemisms for what used to be called secretaries—or bank- and supermarket cashiers. As if to add insult to injury, many of those who head the relevant professional associations are men. A phenomenon sufficiently common to have acquired a name, “the glass elevator”.

* Starting as far back as the Roman Empire, and other things (beauty, sex appeal, education, etc.) equal, a female slave, owing to her lesser ability to do hard labor, has always been assessed at about two thirds of the price of a male one. In today’s developed countries, that is almost exactly the rate of female to male earnings.

* Most women, by joining the labor force, have failed to improve either their own economic situation or that of their families. That is because, as Senator (Massachusetts, D.) Elizabeth Warren in The Two Income Trap (2003) has shown, working mothers inevitably incur extra expenses. Such as an additional car; clothing; help in taking care of the household; and all kinds of people and organizations to look after the children either in the afternoon or during the holidays. As a result, and taking inflation into account, in many, perhaps most, cases their discretionary income, i.e. that part of it they are free to spend as they like, is actually less than it used to be.

* Another reason why going to work has failed to improve the economic situation of many, perhaps most, women is taxation. First, imagine a—much simplified, to be sure—situation where two women decide not to mind their own children. Instead they swap them and pay each other for doing what has to be done. As a result, both will start having to pay taxes. Second, many countries do not allow spouses to file separately. As a result, two incomes may well move a family into a higher tax bracket. Either way, the only winners are the statistics on one hand and that insatiable beast, the treasury, on the other. No wonder each time more women start working the lords of the latter boast of it as a feather in their cap.

* Interestingly enough, almost all of those who take the place of working women in any of the above capacities are themselves women. In other words, for every “successful” woman there are now several others whose “careers” consist of doing the kinds of work she no longer wants; such as cleaning, laundering, serving food, cooking, looking after children, and the like. Other women, mainly elderly family members, do the same work without pay. Either way, feminism has failed to liberate women from housework and childcare. Instead, what has happened is that “successful” women are exploiting less successful ones to an extent that has no precedent in history.

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* Before World War II, it was often thought that the ability of most married women not to work was “God’s gift” to them. Now, since most young men can no longer support a family on their own, most women have to work outside the home whether they want to or not. Losing their freedom, they have been turned into wage slaves” just as their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons are. To say nothing about the famous “double burden;” which has resulted in any number of books that advise women how to manage their time to appearing on the best-seller lists.

* It is true that women are making gains in education. However, that is primarily a reflection of inflation in the field. As the number of students grew, the social prestige diplomas and degrees conferred on their holders went down. Especially since the start of the 2008 economic crisis, a situation has been created where a college education no longer necessarily translates into a good job. Meanwhile, thanks to their stronger bodies, blue collar men with considerably fewer years of school behind them can often make as much or more money as “pink collar” women who do have such an education. That indeed is one reason why more boys than girls are dropping out of school. Furthermore, at the highest levels men still dominate, and by a huge margin. Since Marie Currie early in the twentieth century there has not been one female scientist whose name has turned into a household word.

* Today as ever, the most “successful” women tend to be childless or, at any rate, have far fewer children than the rest. So much do they seem to hate themselves that they are waging war on their own genes! Many other “successful” women are postponing childbirth until it is too late. Indeed it could be argued that the greatest beneficiaries of the feminist revolution are not women, who have to fork out and undergo all kinds of unpleasant and often unsuccessful procedures, but adoption agencies on one hand and fertility clinics on the other.

* As the most cursory look at women’s magazines and department stores will confirm, feminist attempts to convince women to stop pandering to men by dropping high heels, cosmetic surgery, makeup, and every other kind of beauty aid supposedly forced on them by men have been a total failure. Women undergoing cosmetic surgery, always at the cost of money as well as some pain and suffering, also outnumber men by a huge margin. Now as ever, the Biblical saying applies: “unto your man your desire and he shall rule you” (Genesis 3.16).

* Women’s attempts to make a significant impact on the military have been a miserable failure. Rather, what we got is a host of uniformed female medical personnel, public relations advisers, “organization experts” (who needs those?) and secretaries. As the fact that only about 2.5 percent of the casualties in America’s “war on terror” have been women shows, female combat soldiers remain as rare as water in the Sahara. Where there are bullets there are no women, and where there are women there are no bullets. And fortunately so; in all countries that tried to train women to male standards without exception, the outcome has been a very large number of injuries, some of them incapacitating.

* Finally, the first period in history when large numbers of women in Western countries started living longer than men was the early nineteenth century; precisely the period when the ideal of the non-working, stay-at-home woman was born. In both the US and Britain, the greatest gap in life expectancy between people of both sexes prevailed around 1975. Since then, as more and more women entered the labor force and took up what was long seen as a typical male activity, i.e. smoking, it has been cut by almost half. Feminism, in other words, is literally killing women.

Women, it is claimed, are as intelligent and as able to form their own opinions as men are. Therefore, how countless women around the world allow themselves to be led by the nose by a relatively small coterie of extreme feminists is by no means clear. But who cares? Certainly not I. If women, other than my wife of course, want to ruin their lives by trying to emulate men and become second-rate men, who am I to stand in their way?

Just Published! A Biography of Conscience

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Martin van Creveld

M. van Creveld, A Biography of Conscience, London, Reaktion, 2015.

Many would consider conscience to be one of the most important, if not the most important, quality that distinguished humans from animals on one hand and machines on the other. However, what is conscience? Is it a product of our biological roots, as Darwin thought, or is it a purely human invention? If so, how did it come into the world? Who invented it, where, when, and against what social background? What did the ancient philosophers have to say about it? How does it relate to religion, Judaism and Christianity in particular? How did conscience survive the secularization of the Western world after 1600 or so, and where is it today? Are there any societies that, not recognizing the idea of conscience, have developed and used other methods for internalizing social control? If so, what are those mechanism like?

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The present volume, the only one of its kind, attempts to provide answers to these and other questions. Well-documented but written in simple, jargon-free language, it starts in ancient Egypt. From there it leads all the way to present day campaigns aimed at hammering issues such as human rights, health and environmental into our consciences. Readers will learn about the Old Testament which, erroneously as it turns out, is normally seen as the fountainhead from which the Western idea of conscience has sprung. They will also meet Antigone, the first person on record ever to explicitly speak of conscience, syneidēsis in Greek, as a basis for action.

Next they will encounter the philosophers Zeno, Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca; outstanding Christian thinkers such as Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and, above all, Luther with his famous saying, “here I stand, I cannot otherwise;” as well as modern intellectual giants. The list opens with Machiavelli, the man who, drawing a sharp line between private and public behavior, admitting conscience into the former but not into the latter. Next come Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Burton Skinner.

Separate chapters are devoted to Japan and China. Both are societies that, rather than relying on conscience as a method of social control, put their trust in shame and reverence instead. There are chapters dealing with the Nazis—starting with Hitler and proceeding downward, did the Nazis have any kind of conscience at all?—as well as the most recent discoveries in robotics and brain science. On the way readers will follow the evolution of conscience in many of its numerous, occasionally strange and even surprising, permutations.

The book concludes by arguing that, the claims of workers in artificial intelligence and brain science notwithstanding, we today are no closer to understanding the nature of conscience than we have ever been. In the words of one contemporary computer expert cum psychotherapist, probably we shall be able to build machines able to mimic conscience before we ever know what conscience really is.