Bull—-

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

At first sight, ours is the healthiest period in history. Infant mortality, which depending on the time and the place used to affect as many as one out of five newborn babies, is way down. So is maternal perinatal mortality which for millennia was one of the main, if not the main, cause why young women in particular died. Many dreadful diseases that used to plague us have been all but eradicated. So much so that some doctors would not recognize them if they saw them. Others were made curable by antibiotics and other means. Physiotherapy, surgery, and whole armies of other treatments are daily performing miracles.

All this helps explain the population explosion that has taken place since 1945 in particular. Several times over the last three decades or so the alarm bells have been set ringing. First came AIDS, then SARS, then swine flu, then Ebola. And this list only includes a few of the better-known cases. Each outbreak led to apocalyptic predictions about the terrible things that would happen to humanity. In the event, thanks partly to the fact that the reports were exaggerated and partly to medical science, almost nothing happened.

As recently as 1800, even in developed countries such as France, life-expectancy stood at twenty-something years. Since then it has shot up until, in the West, it is now around eighty. The most impressive increases took place during the last few decades. So great were they that they generated a number of new problems. A good example is the rising incidence of various forms of cancer. One cause of the increase is probably the pollution generated by many modern industries. Another may be the simple fact that, until not so long ago, many more people died before they contracted the disease.

Yet good health also has another face that is seldom mentioned. I am referring to the almost divine delight of feeling one’s body in action while not having to worry about it. By that standard our health, far from being the best in history, is probably the worst. Countless millions worry about what insufficient stress/too much stress will do to their health. The same applies to not enough sun/too much sun, not enough physical activity/too much physical activity, not enough sleep/too much sleep, not enough sex/too much sex, etc. Not to mention the effects of radiation, various kinds of pollution, noise, and what not.

We have become addicted to devices that monitor our breath, our heartbeat, our blood pressure, and similar things on a twenty-four hour a day basis. We have legions of health professionals—bureaucrats, physicians, nutrition-experts, exercise coaches, psychiatrists, psychologists, what have you—looking after us. Often, and if only because their livelihood depends on it, instead of reducing our fears they reinforce them. That again helps explain why, in the U.S the “health-care industry”—over 8 million hits on Google.com—now accounts for almost 20 percent of GDP. Other developed countries are not far behind.

Living, it seems, is bad for your health. Here I want to focus on one of the things people worry about most i.e. their food. Superficially, never before have so many eaten so well. Partly that is because regulation has become far, far stricter than it used to be. Partly it is because, as the most cursory look at the media shows, people have become more interested in what they eat. That is why “food additives,” many of them totally useless, have become a huge industry that generates billions in profits. Tens of thousands of scientists around the world spend their entire working life trying to find out what is good for us and what is not. Especially, it seems, what is not.

Search and thou shall find, says the Bible. The number of bad foods has become almost infinite. Fat food is bad and should be avoided. The same applies to “junk” food, fast food, processed food, and genetically modified food (in Europe). Also to any kind of food that is not “natural.” This, incidentally, begs the question as to whether there also exist such things as un-natural and supernatural foods; what they are like; and who has the privileged of consuming them.

Meat is bad. Both salt and sugar are bad. So are some of the things used as substitutes for the latter. So bad are soft drinks that they have been called “the devil’s weapon against the body.” But water too is bad. Unless that is, it comes out of a plastic bottle and is fluoridated (or not, depending on whom you ask). In that case, provided it has sufficient minerals added to it and consequently costs ten times as much as it should, it becomes good. Tea is bad, but gracious nature has also created coffee. For many years it used to be bad; but recently it has changed its spots and become good.

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Not just individual foods but many combinations of them are bad. By one list they include cheese and meat omelets; tomato and cheese pasta sauce; bananas and milk; yogurt with fruit; lemon dressing on cucumber and tomato salad; and melon with prosciutto. Whether these “facts” have anything to do with the widespread popularity of the combinations in question I leave for the reader to decide.

Especially in the U.S, the outcome has been to make people see pleasurable and healthy eating as mutually exclusive. If it tastes good it must be bad, and the other way around. Many foods that used to be good have suddenly turned bad. The prime example are potatoes. For several centuries past they were good—so much so that entire nations lived on them and starved if the crop failed. To this day, grateful citizens continue to put them on the grave of Frederick the Great who introduced them to Prussia around 1750. However, of late the chair of Harvard University Department of Nutrition, no less, in its wisdom has proclaimed that they are actually bad.

The same applies to bread and other wheat products such as pasta. Never mind that Italy where pasta is consumed as a staple food, is a Mediterranean country and that the so-called Mediterranean diet is supposed to be the best in the world. Never mind, incidentally, that Italians actually have a shorter life-span than do the inhabitants of several other European countries. Meat, which at many historical times and places used to be so desirable and so expensive that most people rarely ate it, has also become bad. Milk used to be very good—after all, we all lived on it when we were very young. Now it is good only, if at all, in case the cardboard or plastic container has the words non-, un-, de- or low- printed on it. Never mind, incidentally, that none of these products is “natural.”

Fortunately the opposite is also true. Thanks to the unceasing labors of the Harvard Department of Nutrition among others, many kinds of bad food have turned out to be good after all. Eggs used to be bad because they contained cholesterol. But they were rehabilitated when it became clear that some of the cholesterol is actually good. The same applies to alcohol (“a glass of red wine a day keeps the doctor away”) and chocolate. The first two have even performed the remarkable feat of moving from good to bad and back again. The most recent example is saturated fat. For years it was blamed for all kinds of terrible things from heart attacks down. But “many recent studies” have come to the conclusion that it is “mostly benign.”

Of a former Israeli minister it used to be said that he was normal two days a week, but one never knew which. Likewise, 95 percent of everything published on the subject of nutrition appears to be bull—-.

But which 95 percent?

*Henri Matisse, Blue Nude, 1952.

Reining in the Macho

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

In a recent speech, Swedish foreign minister Margot Wallström expressed the hope that, by adopting a “feminist foreign policy, Sweden would help rein in Mr. Putin’s “macho aggression.” It is, however, much more likely that the opposite will happen. Directly or indirectly, Putin’s macho aggression will put an end to feminism. In Sweden and abroad, the least it will do is to prevent it from spreading its tentacles more than it already Feminism is, and always has been, a peacetime luxury. Come war, or even the threat of war, and it disappears like raindrops off the back of a duck.

There are several reasons for this. It is not for nothing that, with some rare exceptions most of which merely prove the rule, women have never worn armor or uniform. Physically they are just not suitable for the task. In terms of strength (especially upper-body strength), robustness, aerobic capacity, running speed, endurance, and the ability to throw things only a few of the strongest women can keep up even with the weakest of men. To this must be added the fact that, for obvious anatomical reasons, men’s bodies are much better adapted for leading rough, filthy, unwashed lives in the field.

Here and there attempts have been made to ignore these facts by making women train as hard as men do. The outcome has been a rate of injuries much higher than that which men undergoing similar training sustained. Quite some of the injuries damaged the women’s ability to have children more or less permanently. A few proved deadly.

Partly as a result of this weakness, partly because somebody must look after hearth and children (or else waging war would be pointless to begin with), historically whenever war broke out women have remained at home. Or, else, in case the enemy was near and the opportunity still offered itself, they were evacuated as were the Athenian women in front of the Persian invasion. Staying at home, the last thing they had on their minds was feminism, here understood—and the number of different definitions is as large as, if not greater than, that of feminists—to mean the idea that women should be independent of men.

Again, there are a number of reasons for this. First, women were kept too busy doing all kinds of heavy, dirty, and sometimes dangerous work men normally do to get all kinds of ideas into their heads. Second, with the enemy ante portas even the dullest, man-hating women understood well enough that only men could protect them against conquest, subjugation, and rape (sometimes said, in my view wrongly, to be “a fate worse than death”). Third, with the men gone to the front, some never to return, women did much as they pleased in any case.

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Surely it is no accident that Sparta, the most militaristic Greek city-state of all, was also the one where women enjoyed greater freedom and more rights than in any other. Indeed this freedom and those rights may not have been altogether unconnected to the famous Spartan woman order to her son, “come back with your shield of on it.” After all, the more Spartan men were killed in action the richer Spartan women became. Aristotle claims that women ended up by owning most of Sparta’s land. Enough said.

Too, the inverse link between the occurrence of war on one hand and the spread of feminism on the other has other implications. It helps explain why women apparently enjoyed greater rights in the large, massive Hellenistic monarchies than they did during the classical period when all city-states were constantly fighting all the rest. It also explains why the shift from republic to empire was accompanied by an improvement in the status of Roman women. It is no accident that Sweden, as perhaps the world’s leading feminist state, has not engaged in even one war for the last two hundred years.

And the future? Nobody knows. Currently, in spite of intensive efforts to recruit more, only about five percent of Sweden’s uniformed personnel are female. That is considerably less than is the case in the U.K (9 percent), Russia (said to be 10 percent, though the real number may be smaller), and the U.S (15-6 percent). It is much less than the Israeli figure which, counting conscripts only, stands around 25-30 percent. Even some countries where feminism is notoriously weak, such as China (7.5 percent) have more women in their armed forces than Sweden does. From Ms. Wallström down, Swedish women seem to be more inclined to claim their “equality” and “rights” than to defend their country, and of course the rights themselves, weapon in hand, against a “macho” enemy.

Such being the case, not a person in the world, perhaps not even Ms. Wallström herself, knows what a feminist foreign policy could mean. In her speech, all she did was utter some vague phrases about the need to adopt a “soft” foreign policy and put more women in charge of it. Whether doing so will greatly impress Mr. Putin with his 850,000 active troops, ballistic missiles capable of turning much of the world into a radioactive desert, and, last not least, black judo belt, is, to say the least, a little doubtful.

Personally I can only imagine one kind of Swedish feminist foreign policy: it is called appeasement. Not to use less polite terms. I wish it much success.

What War is Good For

Posted on December 3, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

I. Morris, War! What Is It Good For? New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, pp.xi+496.*

Morris, a professor of classics and of history at Stanford University, thinks he can distinguish between two kinds of war. The first kind, which he calls “counterproductive war,” is waged by non-state entities against each other and also against what more developed communities exist. It is the oldest form of war by far, consisting of skirmishes and raids and leading to little but death and destruction. It prevalence was responsible for the fact that, among the simplest known societies such as the Yanomamo of Brazil, as many as 10-20 percent of all people used to come to a violent end. It goes without saying that a population consisting of tribes, all constantly fighting each other for honor and for resources such as water, cattle and women cannot produce much by way of a civilization. As Morris, quoting Thomas Hobbes, says, its members’ lives are almost certain to be nasty, brutish and short.

Enter the other kind of war, which Morris calls “productive.” Productive war was made possible by certain technical and organizational innovations the first and most important of which was the invention of agriculture. It enabled the “stationary bandits” who best knew how to use them to break the cycle and set out on the way to empire-building. To be sure, doing so was a slow process with many ups and downs. Some 9,000 years, Morris says, had to pass from the time the first steps were taken to about 200 B.C. By that date four mighty empires had arisen. One in the Mediterranean (Rome); one in the Middle East (the Parthian); one in India the Mauryan); and one in the Far East (China). All had this in common that they were, or soon became, centralized organizations under a powerful monarch. All extracted money from the peasantry and used it to hire soldiers, set up standing armies, and pacify the country.

Life under absolute government was not always fun. Still that government, and the armies on which it rested, did enable towns, i.e. the kind of civilization in which at least some people do more than just scratch the earth, to exist and, quite often, to flourish. Even more important: as they did so, the proportion of people who met a violent end went down by as much as four fifths.

Unfortunately it did not last. By about 200 A.D all four empires just mentioned were in a state of decay. In all cases the decay was brought about by nomads who, seeking “living space” as well as riches, overcame the empires’ defenses and poured across the borders. Attempts to stem the flood by using some of the invaders against the rest might work in the short term but proved counterproductive in the long run. Furthermore, as the rulers of each empire were left helpless to assist their subjects the latter sought shelter with local grandees. The outcome was what the author calls “feudal anarchy.” As dozens, sometimes hundreds, of tiny principalities fought each other tooth and nail the number of war-dead increased in proportion.

It was not until 1400 that the wheel—one is tempted to say, the wheel of fortune—again reversed course. This time the main trigger was the invention of firearms. However much tribesmen might excel in using the weapons they had purchased or captured, producing them was beyond their capabilities. Combined with the re-construction of standing armies, firearms enabled their owners to expand their power on a scale not even the ancient empires had approached. By 1700 or so, says Morris, death-by-violence had again fallen to Roman levels, though in fact the figures are too uncertain to allow definite conclusions to be drawn.

More and more “leviathans” (as Morris calls them) appeared in various parts of the world. Some fell, some rose again, in an infinitely complex process. Often they waged bloody war both against each other and inside their own outlying provides; by the first half of the nineteenth century, though, things had developed to the point where one of them, Britain, was able to act as a “globocop” and maintain a Pax Britannica over much of the world.

After 1945, following two ferocious world wars, that role was assumed by the United States. Throughout this, starting somewhere in the seventeenth century, the chances of any single individual around the world of dying by violence gradually went down to the point where it is now much smaller than it has ever been. In this way, “paradoxically” as Morris says more than once, war, “productive war,” has acted as the basis not just of power but of civilization itself. Nowhere more so than during the post-1945 years which, so far, seem to have been the most peaceful in the whole of history.

So far, the past. How about the future? Will the “long peace” endure and expand? Or will the wheel of fortune turn back as it did after 200 A.D? At the end of World War II there were only about sixty states in the world. Now there are three times as many. The splintering process does not appear to be over yet. Some of the new states gained their independence by peaceful means. But many did so by using armed violence or, at the very least, threatening to do so. That, incidentally, is something even the saintly Mahatma Gandhi did on occasion.

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A few of the new states went on to build highly successful modern societies with relatively low levels of violence. Good examples are Malta, Israel—which, its problems with the Palestinians apart, has a very low murder rate—and, above all, Singapore. Many others did not do so and became known as “failed” states. In them, as events in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the Sudan, the Congo, and others show, politically-organized lethal violence, AKA war, remains as widespread as it has ever been. The fate of many others, including the Central Asian Republics and large parts of Africa, seems to hang in the balance. A political scientist who tells the people of these countries that theirs is the most peaceful period in history will just make them smile.

Furthermore, as past events in Yugoslavia and current ones in the Ukraine indicate, even Europe, long considered (along with North America, Australia and Japan) one of the most peaceful regions of all, is not necessarily immune. The more so because the American globocop, under which Western Europe has lived since 1945 and Eastern Europe since 1990, seems to be losing some of its power. And the more so because of massive immigration from less successful countries; a factor which, though Morris does not even mention in this context, is becoming more important every day.

As I have written elsewhere, the most significant military development of our times seems to be the decline, much of it due to nuclear proliferation and deterrence, of large-scale conventional interstate war. In its place we see the rise of “non-trinitarian” war. Those who wage non-trinitarian war are the barbarians of old; fanatical and organized in ever-shifting groups that operate in a decentralized way.

As the atrocities Daesh is committing show, in point of ruthlessness they have nothing to learn. Unlike some of their predecessors they are often at home with the most advanced technologies. That includes computers and communications as well as propaganda techniques. In fact one could argue that, given the ability of those technologies to cross borders, they are more suited for the use of all sorts of terrorists, guerrillas and insurgents than in helping states to put them down. Assuming that such is indeed the case, the future does not look at all bright.

Morris’ book is not quite as original as he, and those who provided him with blurbs, would like us to think. Similar ideas concerning the rise of the state have long been advocated by the sociologist Charles Tilly. Some of Morris’ assertions are erroneous or at least too sweeping. For example, his claim (which has by no means been proved) that the barbarians who brought down the Roman empire fought mounted; or when, seeking to show how events happened more or less simultaneously in different places around the world, he exaggerates the decline of China from the end of the Han dynasty on. Contrary to what he says, one could argue that, in spite of some interruptions, the T’ang centuries, and even more so those of Song and Ming, were precisely the ones under which Chinese civilization outshone all the rest. Thus they do not fit the timetable he has postulated.

At other times Morris goes into more tactical and operational detail than is needed to substantiate his thesis. That is particularly true of chapter 5, which is basically a politico-military history of the years 1914-1990 and does not have much new to say. Since he only uses footnotes for quotes, some of his data cannot be checked.

On the whole, the closer the text gets to the present the more questionable it becomes. Nevertheless, the book’s very title—the idea that war, or at any rate some kinds of war, may actually be good for something—poses a challenge not only to incorrigible peaceniks but to serious scholars as well. Thanks to the easy and sometimes breezy style in which it is written, it is also accessible.

If you are at all interested in war and its impact on history, do yourself a favor and get a copy.

* Thanks to Morgan Norval who first brought War! What Is It Good For? to my attention.

Guest Article by Michael Klonovsky

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Arrows and Maxims

Michel Klonovsky*

One of the achievements of modern art has been to provide even coprophils with a proper aesthetic environment.

What is worse: communication or ex-communication?

When enough zealots subscribe to it, democracy may well turn totalitarian.

The height of hypocrisy; the idea that in every child there is a Mozart or an Einstein.

Had it not been for the numerous men who cooperate with it, feminism would have been limited to case studies in psychology textbooks.

Where there is no enemy, the pariah is needed to create unity.

Only when there are no elites does the term “elite” turn into a swearword.

To be a “politically engaged” artist means dreaming of many engagements.

The more just the war, the more numerous the dead civilians.

One handout to a beggar is worth more than twenty volumes on the origins of poverty.

The cathedrals of feminism are the abortion clinics.

Never do the eyes of the devil shine as much as when he hears the words: liberty, equality, fraternity.

Modern dialectics; a woman works longer and longer hours so as to be able to afford proper child care.

Real cowardice starts at a certain age.

The more committed to an ideology a historian is, the more likely he is to claim his works are “scientific.”

Five Frenchmen, five opinions, Five Jews, ten opinions. Five Germans, one opinion.

No blue-blooded family, however degenerate, could have produced the idiots one finds in any parliament.

I like feminism. It brings good news. Its emergence means that society’s most important problems have been solved.

When it comes to trivia shows, the well-educated fail miserably.

How can one respect a boss who sits behind a computer?

A so-called “creative” person may be recognized by the fact that he has never invented anything.

Chess, considered as a test for the intellect, must be unimportant; or else surely there would have been more female grand-masters.

Gender-equality rests on the idea that one can climb the sea and swim the mountains.

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Not to believe in the effectiveness of prayer, but to cast one’s ballot in elections, does not exactly point to realism.

What I would love to read: a study of the way Greens behave under a dictatorship.

Professors are often blinded by their own theories.

When a woman says no, says the macho, what she means is yes. When a woman says no, say the feminists, what she means is no. Both are right. When a woman says no she may mean either yes or no.

To denounce racial discrimination is part and parcel of a civilized society; to deny the differences between races, sheer hypocrisy.

Literary criticism: the parasite needs the tree.

One outcome of the “sexual revolution” has been to turn Western men and women into slaves of their sexual drives.

Populism is the democrats’ mistrust of democracy.

The height of absurdity: to discuss the limits of freedom of expression within those limits.

As Jonathan Swift wrote, a genius may be recognized by the fact that all the idiots unite against him. Example: Steve Jobs.

Whoever so much as mentions political correctness immediately becomes its accomplice.

My generation was the last which had to discover the secrets of sexuality on its own. Nowadays to have sex is to imitate pornographic actors on screen.

When feminists reach the point where they can no longer find plausible examples of discrimination in their own countries they turn to Africa or else to the ancient world.

Thank God it was good bourgeois scholars who re-discovered classical antiquity. One shudders to think what would have happened if the field had been left to left-wing “social scientists” or to female professors of gender studies.

So high is the quality of modern plastic art that none of its creators has ever produced a single failed work.

Today it is not the Pope who claims to be infallible, it is his opponents

To be a socialist means preferring the unfreedom of the many to the freedom of a few.

Wherever right and left are said to have been abolished, it is the left that rules.

“Adept at multitasking” is what we call those who are incapable of solving an equation or following the thought of a philosopher.

What a wonderful feeling, to despise a person accused of despising others!

He would like to become immortal. She would be content with a nice home of her own.

The nice thing about dying is not having to cope with future technology.

No tourist has ever stopped to admire a building erected by a socialist, an environmentalist, or a feminist.

* Michael Klonovsky is an author and journalists who works for Focus magazine in Munich. The above is a selection from his book, Aphorisms (in German).

And Then There Were Five

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Former Spanish defense minister Carme Chacon reviews her troops

As Margaret Mead, perhaps the greatest female anthropologist of all time, wrote in 1948, in all known societies whatever men do is considered most important by both men and women. As she also wrote, when any number of women enter fields previously reserved for men the latter start leaving. Unless the hemorrhage is stopped, the social and economic rewards attached to the field in question decline. As the history of professions such as secretaries, teachers, social workers, and the like show, often the end result is a female ghetto with few if any men about.

The process also works the other way around. If women start entering a field previously dominated by men, one can be well-nigh certain that, in one way or another, that field is in decline. That is true both in terms of the prestige that is attached to it and the economic rewards it can provide. Dozens of scholars, many of them female, have confirmed Ms. Mead’s findings in fields as diverse as pharmacy, book-editing, and school-teaching. For good or ill, it is the way the world works.

So what do we make of the fact that the number of female defense ministers is growing and that, as of November 2014, no fewer than five European countries had female secretaries of defense? Does this prove, as many feminists claim, that even the last “male bastions” are crumbling in front of the onslaught of the fair sex? Or is there a different, and perhaps better, explanation?

The countries in question are Albania (Mimi Kodheli), Germany (Ursula von der Leyen), Roberta Pinotti (Italy), the Netherlands (Jeanine Hennis-Plasshaert, and Norway (Marie Eriksen Soreide). With the exception of Albania, which during the 1999 Kosovo conflict was located too close for comfort, what all these countries have in common is that, for seven decades now, they have not fought a single serious war anywhere near, let alone inside, their own borders.

Especially since the end of the Cold War, their basic security—the fact that nobody would try to invade them, or bomb them, or blockade them—was taken very much for granted. What military operations they undertook, if they undertook any at all, were invariably conducted in faraway places against third- and fourth rate opponents such as the
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Occasional alarms to the contrary, everywhere the feeling was that there was no threat. Absent a threat, many armed forces did away with conscription. A surer sign that no enemy is ante portas would be hard to find. The armed forces were cut and cut. For example, in Germany the number of troops went down from 500,000 in 1990—750,000, if the former East German forces are included—to well under 200,000 today. The equivalent figures for Albania are 120,000 (excluding 500,000 reservists) and 15,000. Considered as part of GDP, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Norway have all cut their spending by about one half.

Thus the female invasion of defense establishments—not just at the top, but at the bottom too—has been gathering steam just as a growing number of people in Western countries concluded that those establishments were losing their relevance. That, in turn, meant that their potential as springboards for further advancement was limited. For example, it is said that the reason why German Angela Merkel appointed Ms. von der Leyen was not her mastery of the field, about which the former minister for family affairs, senior citizens, women and youth knew next to nothing. It was because she expected her to fail in the job. Having failed, which given the sad state of the Bundeswehr was likely to happen, she would no longer present a political threat to the Chancellor.

It may be true, as one female defense analyst has written, that “women could actually make a difference in how Europe reacts” to “Russian sabre rattling in nearby Ukraine.” After all, she says, “women tend to find a more reasonable approach and could de-escalate” the conflict. As that conflict and quite some others in other places around the world also shows, though, it simply is not true that “defense is no longer about lining up soldiers against each other to do battle;” nor that, as a result, some kind of “military service experience” has become superfluous.

Briefly, those who go the way of all females should not be surprised if they get f—ed. Decades of neglect have left the defenses of most Western countries in a disgraceful state. Like it or not, of this neglect the ongoing feminization of many defense establishments is a vital part. Faced with kindly, gentle characters such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Daesh’s Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, it will take more than five women, however reasonable and adept at de-escalation they may be, to put things right again.

Guest Article by Vox Day

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Tears of the Major Publishers

Vox Day*

The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the Bonnier Media Group in Germany.

But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of publishing. Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.

Late Friday afternoon [23.5.2014], Hachette made by far its strongest comment on the conflict: “We are determined to protect the value of our authors’ books and our own work in editing, distributing and marketing them,” said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president. “We hope this difficult situation will not last a long time, but we are sparing no effort and exploring all options.”

What is hilarious is the authors and publishers crying about how Amazon is “raising the prices” of their books. It’s an absolutely ridiculous charge. What Amazon is actually doing is refusing to continue its extreme discounting on the artificially high retail price of books.

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And Amazon sells more copies of the lower-priced books. At $4.99 Awake in the Night Land is #18,816 on Kindle. At $27.99 reduced to $12.99, Judge of Ages is #41,075. Ebook prices are elastic, so if Amazon can sell 2 low-price ebooks for every 1 high price ebook, it not only makes a) about twice the margin, but also b) about fifty cents more.

No wonder Amazon is unwilling to continue the conventional arrangement. Amazon can only successfully sell its books up to a certain price, depending upon the format and length. Due to the distribution discount system, a higher retail price means a higher distribution price, so Amazon makes half the margin on the more expensive, more steeply discounted books from the major publishers. Amazon is not only perfectly within its rights, but logically needs to stop discounting the book from what is, after all, the publisher’s suggested retail price; Hatchette’s complaint is rooted in the fact that Amazon is now selling its books for the price that Hatchette itself suggests!

By the way, this showdown between Amazon and the major publishers is a development that I predicted would be taking place soon during my campaign for SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] President. The possibility was pooh-poohed by the business geniuses there, including the eventual winner. Nevertheless, the outcome will likely have a huge effect on authors with major publishers because the reason the publishers are fighting this uphill battle is their inability to support their current overhead structure without the additional revenue they receive from their inflated retail prices on ebooks. If either Amazon or the author were to receive a more equitable share, no major publisher could survive in its current form.

What the publishers should do – what they should have done a long time ago – is to set up a joint online store and then stop distributing books through Amazon. But they didn’t have either the nerve or the foresight, so now they’re faced with trying to develop some sort of alternative as Amazon begins to dip its toes into its own publishing line. Their best bet, in my opinion, would be to buy the Nook Store from Barnes&Noble, embrace a truly open standard, and go into competition.

However, they won’t embrace the open standard, and in doing so, they are giving up one of their two advantages over Amazon.

* Vox Day is an author and game designer.

Pussycats V, Or Finding Dr. Livingstone

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

At the time he arrived in Zanzibar in March 1871 he was thirty years old. He took just 28 days to find out what was needed and put together an expedition into the east African wilderness. Next, having crossed the strait that separates the island from the continent, he found his way into the interior. A country so rarely before travelled by white men that wherever he passed the entire population, infants included, came out to gape at the Musungu.

The fact that the terrain was almost entirely unmapped did not deter him. Neither did the fact that parts of it were densely inhabited by unfriendly native populations. Like his fellow explorers, he did not fear isolation and the absence of communications—no telegraphs, no radio, no phones, np fax machines, no GPS. All this made him entirely dependent on his own resources.

He had the stamina to travel hundreds of miles, on foot or else on the back of a donkey. It being the wet season—for fear that his prey might elude him, he did not dare delay his departure—he braved endless tropical rain. He waded for hours through lakes that reached up to his and his men’s chests, crossed streams some of which were crocodile-infested, and marched through mountain ranges, jungles, and dry plains where any delay would have meant dying by thirst. All this, while often on an unappetizing, unnourishing diet and frequently drinking rather dubious water.

He acted as physician-in-chief to about 200 men who, normally travelling in several separate columns, served under his orders. Later the number went down to 50. Along with him, they suffered from all kinds of festering wounds with no antibiotics to help them. Many were struck down by disease. Unsurprisingly, some died. He himself not only survived repeated attacks of the same diseases, including malaria and dysentery, but hardly allowed them to delay him on his journey.

Though no geologist, he took a vivid interest in different kinds of soil, rivers, rocks and boulders. Using either English or some native language, he seems to have been able to name almost every one of the numerous plants, animals and birds he met on his way. Not even the various kinds of fly that pestered him and his men escaped a fairly close examination under the microscope.

He knew how to drag his men, animals and equipment across a raging mountain stream. He knew how to build a boat and dismantle it. He knew how to cook. He knew how to butcher animals and dissect a horse’s carcass so as to find out the cause of its death (one horse, presented to him as a parting-gift by the Sultan of Zanzibar, turned out to have cancer).

He also knew how to capture a sleeping man and cut off his head as some of his Arab associates did at one point, though he does not say he participated in such an act. And he knew how to fight a battle. After all, he was one of very few men who, having moved from his native Wales to the U.S in 1859, successively served in the Confederate Army, the Federal Army, and the Federal Navy during the Civil War.

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Over nineteen years after 1871 he periodically left Africa but always returned to lead other expeditions. In 1890, aged forty-nine, he finally decided that his travelling days were over. He married Dorothy Tennant, fourteen years younger than him and a painter of typical Victorian themes. Since they had no children they adopted a son. A Welshman by birth, he died in London in 1904. By that time he had long been world-famous.

Needless to say, Henry Morton Stanley’s—an adopted name, not his original one—fame had everything to do with the various books of memoirs he published. Though he never went to journalism school (an illegitimate child as well as an orphan, he spent much of his youth in a workhouse), he was a superb writer. That was one reason why James Gordon Bennett, son of the proprietor of the New York Herald, had recruited him in the first place.

Some of the authors of the enormous literature that grew up around him even during his lifetime accused him of falsification. Like all good writers of memoirs from Julius Caesar down, he may indeed have embellished the truth or bent it to his purposes. Even the most famous sentence he ever uttered, “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” may very well have been invented post facto. Certainly Livingstone’s own account of their meeting does not mention it; but then Galileo’s most famous words, “nevertheless, it moves,” are not firmly attested either.

Other biographers, particularly but not exclusively those writing after World War I, accused him of excessively brutal behavior both towards his own men and any natives he met who in one way or another stood in his way. The accusations may well have been justified. One problem was the need to deal with petty local rulers. Some had armies at their disposal. Without exception, all were determined to extort as much as they possibly could both from Stanley himself and from his chief subordinates.

Another very difficult problem was thieves and deserters among his own men. They belonged to various nations—today we would have said “ethnic groups.” Serving for pay, mostly in the form of cloth, wire and beads, they did not form a cohesive team of any sort. Engaged on an enterprise of immense difficulty, often anticipating nothing but suffering, presumably the only way they could be kept in line was by punishment, mainly beatings. Given that the alternative was often his own death, Stanley’s brutality, if not forgivable, is understandable. The more so because, as he makes clear, friends and enemies alike behaved in a similar way as a matter of course.

Gun in hand, at one point he even had to quell a mutiny. Nothing could stop him. In the words of Mark Twain, “when I contrast what I have achieved in my measurably brief life with what [Stanley] has achieved in his possibly briefer one, the effect is to sweep utterly away the ten-story edifice of my own self-appreciation and leave nothing behind but the cellar.” As he himself wrote when unexpectedly having to build a bridge across a stream, “be sure it was made quickly, for where the civilized white is found, a difficulty must vanish.” As he also wrote, he would die rather than return with his mission unfulfilled. On the other hand, his experience with Arabs, some friendly other hostile, made him see them as hopeless cowards.

With Western nations determined to send in no ground troops and only attacking Daesh from 20,000 feet, who are the cowards now?

Pussycats IV: Or Learning to Say No

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

The first Pussycat article, posted here on 21.5.2014, dealt with the frequent defeats of modern Western armed forces at the hand of irregulars in the Middle East, Asia and Africa and pointed out some of the underlying causes behind this phenomenon. Pussycats II, posted on 24.9.2014, explained how war was associated first with excellence, then with honor, then with wisdom (“the ultimate experience”) and then with PTSD. Whereas Pussycats III, posted on 8.10.2014, traced the way in which, time after time, rude but brave conquerors were turned into soft, lazy, effeminate losers. Here I want to analyze the contribution of yet another factor: to wit, the rise of the right to say no.

Principled resistance to military service can be traced as far back as early Christianity under the Roman Empire. Whether, at that time, it was rooted in moral objections to war as such or in religion has long been moot. The fact that, no sooner did the empire turn Christian in the fourth century A.D, many Christians started joining the army suggests that the latter interpretation is closer to the truth. Once God had told Emperor Constantine that in hoc signo vinces most problems disappeared. From the time of Charlemagne’s campaigns in Spain and Saxony to that of Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War, countless Christians went into battle under the sign of the cross. In 1999, the Serbs did so still.

Following the Reformation, some Protestant Sects took the opposite tack. Citing Jesus’ command to “love your enemies,” they asked to be exempted from military service on religious grounds. Among them were the Anabaptists, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, and others. In the Netherlands, in Switzerland, and in parts of Germany they often got their way, normally in return for paying a special tax. England too had some sects whose members refused to take part in the 1642-51 Civil War. However, the role they played should not be exaggerated. On one hand the numbers involved were never large. On the other, during the second half of the seventeenth century one country after another started creating professional armed forces made up, in principle at any rate, entirely of volunteers. This made dealing with objectors easier than it had been.

In America, where there was no “standing army” but where each colony had its own militia, the situation was different. As in England, the most important and best organized sect was formed by the Quakers. Like the rest, they were sometimes willing to contribute money for building fortifications and maintaining the various state militias. They also provided shelter to (white) refugees from war. Still they adamantly refused to take up arms and fight. On the eve of the War of the American Revolution, so strong were the sects that every one of the Thirteen Colonies recognized conscientious objection as a valid ground for exemption from service.

The 1793 decision of the National Assembly to adopt general conscription, the famous levée en masse that “permanently requisitioned” every (male) citizen, formed a critical turning point. In France itself the near complete absence of radical Protestant sects meant that the impact of conscientious objection, as opposed to draft-dodging and the like, was limited to nonexistent. Those, a mere handful, who did object were often assigned to depots, lines of communication, hospitals and the like, a solution that subsequent armed forces also adopted on occasion. However, as conscription spread from France to other countries objections to military service were bound to increase in number. As before, most were religiously based.

During the American Civil War both sides followed the old practice of permitting objectors to hire substitutes. Those who could or would not do so went to prison; Lincoln at one point personally pardoned some Quakers and Mennonites who were serving time for this reason. It was, after all, hard to fight for freedom while at the same time holding those who demanded it in their own way prisoner. The Confederate authorities, though they did recognize conscientious objection in principle, were not as tolerant in practice. Many Southern objectors were mobbed, arrested, abused, starved and whipped. A few, it has been claimed, had muskets strapped to their bodies and were forcibly transported to the battlefield, to no avail.

What made the period different from its predecessors was the rise of secular pacifism. It condemned war and violence not on religious grounds but on purely moral ones. No longer as isolated as they had normally been in the past, pacifists could be found in many walks of life from the highest to the lowest. The most prominent pacifist of all was the Russian writer Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910). Having seen action during the Crimean War, during the 1880s he converted to nonviolence. From then on he issued a whole series of treatises, denouncing war as “the absolute evil.” Another famous pacifist was an Austrian noblewoman, Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), agitator, lecturer and troublemaker. Her 1889 novel, Die Waffen Nieder, went through thirty-seven German editions and was translated into sixteen languages. None of this either had a noticeable impact on the outbreak and course of World War I. For example, as against some 3,000,000 American men who were drafted in 1917-18, just some 2,000 objectors of all kinds were arrested and convicted.

Yet even while the conflict lasted the British government, having introduced conscription for the first time in the country’s history, decided to recognize conscientious objectors by granting them the right to perform alternative civil service. In part this was done to assuage those veteran anti-war activists, the Quakers. Later, taking their cue from Britain, several other countries, mostly Protestant ones in Western and Northern Europe, passed similar legislation. Denmark did so in 1917, Sweden in 1920, the Netherlands in 1922, and Finland in 1931.

In both World Wars, compared with those who were drafted, the number of those who refused to be inducted on conscientious grounds and obtained a release was very small. Still their ability, in many cases, to get what they wanted or at least rouse some public sympathy for their views signified the various states’ tacit admission, previously all but inconceivable, that they themselves no longer necessarily held the moral high ground. As the saying goes, if you cannot lick them join them or at least try to ignore them as best you can. Increasingly, states admitted that some individual rights could not and should not be violated even when the state was fighting for its existence.

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A landmark of sorts was set in January 1967 when the Council of Europe adopted Resolution No. 337. The Resolution declared that “persons liable to conscription for military service who, for reasons of conscience or profound conviction, arising from religious, ethical, moral, humanitarian, philosophical or similar motives, refuse to perform armed service shall enjoy a personal right to be released from the obligation to perform such service. This right shall be regarded as deriving logically from the fundamental rights of the individual in democratic Rule of Law states.” It was based on “Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights which binds member States to respect the individual’s freedom of conscience and religion.” By issuing the declaration, the states in question to a large extent pulled the objectors’ sting. Previously a principled refusal to serve had often had something heroic about it. Now it became just one of the numerous, if rather tepid and uninteresting, rights citizens in liberal democracies enjoy or are told they enjoy—without, nota bene, having to give anything in return..

Concurrently on the other side of the Atlantic the Vietnam War led to a sharp rise in the number of U.S citizens who made similar claims. Almost 10,000 were put on trial and convicted; the number of those who, refusing to serve, found various ways to do so was much larger. This time the objectors, merging into a broader protest movement that opposed U.S policies in Southeast Asia, seriously interfered with the war effort.

Several Supreme Court rulings expanded the right to gain an exemption so as to include not only those who based their objections on religious belief but on “deeply held moral and ethical” ones as well. Those rulings in turn contributed to the decision of the Nixon Administration to end conscription in favor of a professional, all- volunteer, force; the kind with which the U.S has fought all is wars since. Starting in the mid-1970s, one developed country after another followed suit. In 1996 even France, which two centuries earlier had pioneered modern conscription, decided to do away with it and re-build professional armed forces instead.

The end of conscription should have caused conscientious objectors to become extinct. But this did not happen. Instead, the more rights they obtained the greater their demands. Nowadays in the U.S even uniformed military personnel who joined out of their own free will are entitled to cite conscientious objection to war and ask not to be deployed. In 2014, three quarters of German troops who asked for such an exemption got what they wanted. With this reductio ad absurdum, the state’s surrender to conscience was complete.

Politically speaking, three factors made the surrender possible. The first was the fact that, in the wake of World War II and the defeat of Germany and Japan, “militarism” became one of the worst terms of abuse of all. Niagaras of ink were spilled in an effort to expose it and denounce it evils. Resistance to militarism has helped spread the idea that refusing to wear uniform was a good and honorable thing to do.

The second was the vast and still growing increase in the cost of weapons and weapon systems. As a result, not even the richest countries could any more afford the gigantic, militia-like, armed forces so characteristic of the period between 1790 and 1970. Making it much easier to grant a dispensation to those who asked for it.

The third, and probably the most important, reason was the waning of major war between major powers brought about by nuclear proliferation. Practically without exception, what wars the countries in question have waged from 1945 on had nothing to do with national survival. Quite often they revolved around issues so picayune, and geographically so far removed from home, as to be almost invisible.

No wonder pussycats multiplied!

Geopolitics and Today’s Foreign- and Security Policy – a German View

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Erich Vad*

We all know: 100 years ago the First World War and 75 years ago the Second World War started. The lessons of both wars show us the importance of an early reconciliation of interests, a balance of power, and ongoing communication between the strategic players. Another lesson is that appeasement has its limits. Against totalitarian world views, appeasement has never been successful.

But what do these lessons mean with regard to current security questions? What do they teach us as we are being challenged by the Islamic threat and fundamentalism and movements like the Hamas, the Hizbolla in the near east, Boko Haram in Africa, Al Qaeda worldwide, and the reckless actions of the so called “Islamic State” Movement?

And what do these lessons mean with regard to the current Russian attempt to change the European order by annexing the Crimea and destabilizing the eastern Ukraine?

The world wars brought fundamental changes. They ended the German desire to achieve a hegemonic position in and over Europe as well as the Japanese attempt to extend their power and gain predominance over East Asia. Wold War II also terminated the worldwide supremacy of the British Empire and the dominant geostrategic position of Europe as a whole. The European era, which had shaped and characterised the world since the beginning of the early modern age, was finally over. A new geopolitical reality, a new “Nomos of the Earth” – as Carl Schmitt once puts it – was established by the victors in the Second World War, i.e. the USA and the former Soviet Union.

During the Cold War these strategic players divided Europe into two spheres of influence. The United States saw Western Europe primarily as its strategic bridgehead to Eurasia. Its leaders built up NATO and established close economic ties across the Atlantic. This enabled Western Europe to enjoy freedom, democracy, wealth and the rule of law and human rights. By contrast, Eastern Europe suffered under the strong and brutal rule of Communism.

In the end, it was the policies of Ronald Reagan which broke the geostrategic supremacy of the Soviet Union in Europe. Coming to power, Mikhail Gorbachv quickly understood that the USSR could never win the arms race and that only cooperation wih the west and political freedom for the Soviet sattelites could help Russia overcome the disastrous economic situation.

As we know, his opponents held a very different view. So does Vladimir Putin. They see the world in geopolitical categories which we Europeans thought had been overcome. It is Putin’s geopolitical aim to create a great power capable of competing with the US, the EU and China. The Russians’ problem is that all they have is their military; they do not have so-called “soft power” comparable to that of the rest. A modern world-power cannot simply threaten and intimidate its neighbors. It must also be attractive and innovative for other nations to accept it as a leading nation.

Reminding the world that NATO has already taken over the Baltic States, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, the Russians have made it clear that they will never accept a further extension of NATO (and the EU) eastwards. Also that, for specific economic, industrial and strategic reasons, they will only accept a neutral Ukraine. Accordingly the task is to weigh the justified desire and the right of sovereign states to freely select the alliances they wish to join on one hand and the preservation of geopolitical and strategic stability – in this case affirming the Russian sphere of interest in its neigbourhood – on the other.

It is not just Russia which understands the world primarily in geostrategic terms. The US, too, has long been aware of them. So far the emergence of the virtual world, important as it is, has made little difference in this respect. Ever since 1823, the basic Charter underlying US Foreign and Security Policy in Latin America has been the Monroe Doctrine. Both in the 19^th and in the 20^th century the Doctrine led to innumerable interventions, some of them involving the large-sale use of force, in many places around the world. Not only is geopolitical thought just as familiar to the US as to Russia, but its principles have remained unchanged. Neither developments in transport, nor in information processing, nor in money-flows, nor in military technology, have changed those principles one whit.

The violent reclamation of land, which Carl Schmitt once described as the “radical title,” seems to be back. With hindsight, one could argue that it has never gone away and that it was only the losers in the 20^th-century’s geopolitical shifts who saw, or rather were forced to see, the world in more idealistic terms. Nowhere was this more true than in Germany. However, the victors continued to see the world in geopolitical terms. The same applied to other emerging countries such as China, Brazil and India which want to become global players.

Why should the Russian approach to their nearest neighbourhood and geostrategic sphere of interests differ from the US American one worldwide or the Chinese one in the South China Sea? How would the US act if, instead of an American fleet manoeuvring in the Black Sea, a Russian one did the same in the Caribbean? This does not mean that the Russian actions against Ukraine and the Crimea were right and legal. But considering that Russia is, and will continue to be, a world power with nuclear weapons, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a country with enormous resources, they are understandable.

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Some hawks in Washington today, such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brezezinki, understand this very well. For them any powerful nation which intends to control Eurasia always presents a potential challenge to the US. In this respect little has changed from the first half of the 20^th century when first Germany and then the Soviet Union represented the principal danger. Today their place has been taken by Russia and China; as to Western Europe, it is a strategic bridgehead and America’s closest ally.

But the European geopolitical perspective has to be different: for us Russia remains a powerful neighbour. A friendly relationship with it remains essential to our security and well-being. This does not mean that the Russians should be allowed to do whatever they want—their actions in the East Ukraine and in the Crimea are clearly unacceptable.

To deal with Russia we Europeans must do more than continue economic sanctions or show-the-flag operations. What we need is a double-track strategy. We must continue a straightforward dialogue with the Russians in order to convince them that they are not on the right track. On the other hand we must strenghten our defence posture and the deterrence capabilities of NATO, primarily in the east-European member states.

A successful defense of Eastern Europe against a conventional attack coming from the east is only feasable by using nuclear weapons, probably at a very early stage of the conflict. However, such an attack is unlikely. Most probably the Russians would not send tanks as they did in earlier their history. Instead they would use so-called hybrid methods of warfare: a combination of cyberattacks, destabilizing measures, secret service operations, and irregular fighters. A high probability exists that Russian aggression, if and when it comes, would strongly resemble the approach used in the Ukraine. The Russian minorities, for example in the Baltic States, could be very useful for them.

Ultimately we should not accept a division of the Ukraine. On the other hand, we should not kid ourselves that incorporating that country into the EU and NATO is still an option. One could even argue that Putin has deserved a NATO Order of Merit for strengthening the inner cohesion of the Alliance and motivating us to build up our deterrence, and spend more on defense.

The Russians have taught us Europeans a useful lesson concerning the true conditions and dangers of our international system. They taught us that peaceful dialogue, diplomatic interchange and permanent communications are not the only principles of international politics as many Germans believe.

The same applies to other critical hot spots of security worldwide. Take the South China Sea with its huge oil and gas resources and the straits where 80 % of world-wide oil deliveries have to pass. Here global players such as the US, as well as regional ones such as China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and India wrestle with each other in an attempt to look after their geostrategic interests. In this dynamic economic region, the Indian and American interests are being challenged. The present situation shows very clearly that the political and economic sovereignty of the involved nations can only be sustained by military readiness and modern defense capabilities in the air, at sea, and on land.

The same is true in regard to the great challenge Islamic fundamentalism, especially the so-called Islamic State, poses to Western Civilization. In both Syria and northern Iraq, these warriors cannot be beaten by political or diplomatic measures alone. The delivery of weapons and airpower, on their own, are unlikely to do the job either. They don’t want to “engage” with us; that is why we have to respond to them in ways they can and will understand.

Even in Europe we cannot survive without the political will and modern military capacities to defend ourselves. Not pacifism and antimilitarism and the typical German goodness, but the old Roman principle, “si vis pacem, para bellum,” continues to be valid.

Clausewitz wrote that it is not the aggressor who starts a war. Instead it is the defender. The former wants to occupy us without resorting to violence; the latter does not agree, resists, and by doing so the starts the war. Long after Clausewitz wrote, Lenin was deeply amused by this insight of the Prussian master.

Geopolitics cannot be impartial or neutral. Instead they must be directed by interests. The latter in turn depend on each country’s perspective and are often embedded in a political ideology which, as in the case of the old colonial world, follows a historically-determined path. However, idealism and the way the adversaries of geopolitical thinking see the world, is also largely determined by historical experiences and ideology.

Today Germany, which in 1945 was defeated by a powerful worldwide coalition, has again turned into an influential economic and financial world power and is able to play a leading role in Europe. But this may no longer be the case in the future, because the German elites do not have the will and defense technologies and capabilities to prevail in the long-term and on a sustainable basis. Most of them have forgotten how to think in geopolitical terms such as strategic spheres of influence and national interests. That is why they cannot formulate a national strategy. This is the real challenge facing Germany, and indeed Europe, today: can they develop the political will and the necessesary means and capabilities to safeguard their freedom and way of life? We must define what keeps us together and which values and strategic interests guide and drive us. If we don`t, we will lose the future and our freedom.

* Dr. Brigadier General (ret.) Erich Vad is Angela Merkel’s former military adviser.

My Wish List

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Martin van Creveld

Grégoire Delacourt’s La Liste de Mes Envies, is a novel first published in 2012 and translated into English two years later. A middle-aged Frenchwoman, Jocelyne, is married to her equally middle-aged husband, Jocelyn. They live in Arras, a provincial town, where he works for Hagen Dazs while she runs a haberdashery shop. She also has a website on which she writes about the joys of doing handicrafts. She gets many favorable responses and even attracts some journalistic attention. The marriage, while not perfect, is fairly good, or so Jocelyne thinks. She would be happy to live with her husband to the end of their days.

They have two adult children. There is a daughter who lives with an Irish guy in London; and a no-good son who periodically changes his equally useless girlfriends and, following them, drifts from one place to another.

One day, pressed by friends (two women, twins) who run a nearby haircutting shop, she buys a lottery ticket. Lo and behold, she wins! A little over 18,000,000 Euro (about 25,000,000 US Dollars)! What is she going to do with the money? It is a question I have often asked myself and of the answer to which I feel fairly sure.

I would start by distributing a considerable sum among my children. Not in order to “secure their future,” as the saying goes; that is something they should do for themselves. But only so as to help them improve the quality of their lives and have things a little easier than they are. I would also help out our “adopted” children Amihai and Shmulik (a homosexual couple, incidentally)—not with money, for presumably they would refuse to take it, but in some other way.

I might change my beloved townhouse in Mevasseret Zion, near Jerusalem, where I have lived for thirty years, for a single-floor house. Not because I want to, but because such a house would be more suitable to the needs of my wife who is having growing difficulties walking. Instead of flying economy class, as is my wont, I would use business.

There are a few more things. New sofas, perhaps, though that can wait. New night stands; ours are forty years old. Yet so minor are they as to be hardly worth mentioning. I could easily afford them even now. But I want to spend my days reading and writing, not house-hunting etc. Having money would make the move easier.

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I would spend some of the money on charity. I like Wikipedia—to any thinking person today, it has become indispensable. So I would help out. I like Wikileaks—hopefully it helps keep our dear rulers a little more honest than they would otherwise be. I would give money to the kind of radio station that broadcasts lots of early modern and classical music. I might also give some money to an institute of higher learning. But not, I am sorry to say, to my own former alma mater in Jerusalem. The condition would be that political correctness be thrown out of the window and that everybody, students and faculty, be allowed to speak his or her mind on any subject without fear of reprisal.

A late uncle of mine, who was very wealthy, once told me that the one thing harder than making money is to distribute it properly. I know he was right. But back to the novel. The lottery employs a psychologist, a woman, whose job it is to tell winners to take care. Beware of every kind of beggar who, with true and untrue stories at the ready, will approach her asking for money. Of bankers with their unctuous smiles and false promises; and of relatives who, crazed with greed, will do what they can to try and put their hands on some or even all of her money. Should she need help, Jocelyne is told, the psychologist will always be there. Having received the cheque, she visits one of those shops where “celebrities” get their fancy stuff. Only to find there is nothing she really needs or is worth buying.

Returning home, she hides the cheque in a shoe. Some days later, while cleaning a cupboard, she notices it has disappeared. Jocelyn has found it. Suspecting—rightly—that she might throw it away, he tricked her into believing that his employers were sending him on a course and took off. Later she finds out he is in Brussels. The shock is terrible.

Time passes. She imagines Jocelyn spending money like water. A luxurious flat; an expensive red Audi; suits; and, of course, women. Both of the kind with whom he hopes to start some relationship and of the kind he pays for meeting, or trying to meet, his sexual needs. He is, however, desperately lonely and longs for his old life. That includes Jocelyne, his house, his friends, his job. Returning from imagination to reality, one day Jocelyne receives a letter with a cheque for the bulk of the money, some 15,000,000 Euro. He begs her forgiveness and asks her to take him back. She does not answer. Not receiving one, he starves himself to death.

But now Jocelyne knows what to do with her own life. She gives each of the twins who made her buy the winning lottery ticket a small car. She helps her pregnant daughter and sets up a trust for her shiftless son. She leaves Arras and moves to a larger house on the seashore. There she lives with a man who, years earlier, had noted her distress—caused by a stillbirth that in turn had caused a marital crisis—and offered help, a cup of good tea, and a kiss. His appearance, incidentally, is the only detail in the entire novel that I found incredible. She takes in her old, senile father so she can look after him better and cheer up his last years. Having gone through a crisis, and by helping others, she grows.

And you?