Carpe Diem

Posted on September 9, 2021 by Martin van Creveld

Carpe diem, my grandmother (1894-1986) used to say. With corona making life hard for hundreds of millions if not billions around the world, I thought it would be appropriate to concentrate on a few of the good things by which I, and hopefully a great many others, are surrounded. Such as have always existed and, let’s hope, will return in full force once this nightmare is over. As, either because of medical advances or because we will get used to it, sooner or later it will be.

1. A good meal with family and friends. I am no gourmet. I dislike the kind of people who boast of being able to distinguish between fifty kinds of wine, and I do not particularly like restaurants. After a few days, even the best ones—not seldom, particularly the best ones—get on my nerves. Especially Israeli ones, which tend to play loud music, making it impossible to hear oneself and others think. Fortunately Dvora is as good a cook as they come. She also keeps experimenting, meaning that the food is never boring. Imagine a sunny winter morning or a cool summer evening here near Jerusalem, some 2,200 feet above sea level. Imagine a balcony looking out over a small but carefully kept and beautiful garden. A small group of family and friends, perhaps accompanied by some children, gathers. A bottle of wine is passed around, making everyone feel slightly—but only slightly—tipsy. As Herman Melville is supposed to have said, anyone who has that can feel like an emperor.

2. Music. When I was six or seven years old my mother tried to teach me to play the piano. I did not want to learn and she desisted, but not before telling me I would be sorry. In this she was right. Following my father, my tastes in music are mostly Western and classical, running from Church music (both Gregorian and Eastern Orthodox) through the Renaissance (Monteverdi and Palestrina; as sweet as honey, both of them) through the Baroque (Bach, Handel, Vivaldi) and the nineteenth century (Beethoven, Schubert. Wagner) to the years around 1900 (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov). But occasionally I also enjoy listening to Chinese music, Arabic music, and popular Israeli music. Two favorites that do not really fit into any of these categories are the Carmina Burana and the Misa Criolla.

To conclude this section, two additional comments. First, my son, Eldad, gave me a set of good speakers for my computer: they are one of the best presents I ever got. Let me take this opportunity to say, once again, thank you, Eldad. Second, our next door neighbor, a lady in her early sixties, has decided to take up the piano and is plinking away. I cannot say it, but hats off nevertheless.

3. Art. Not everyone can be a Michelangelo, a Bach, or a Sophocles. Creating beauty, the kind of beauty that wills survive for centuries, is something reserved for the very few. One in ten million who tried, I’d say. Such being the case, all that is left to me is to enjoy the art of others; particularly painting, sculpture, architecture, and design. My tastes run form the ancient Greeks to the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century (de Hooch, Cuyp, Vermeer, Rembrandt) all the way through Biedermeier—for me, a recent discovery I made during a brief visit to Warsaw a few years ago—the German Romantics and the Impressionists to Picasso and Fernando Botero. Nor will I miss a good show of Chinse, or, Indian, or Islamic, art. Flea markets are a joy to attend. Old posters, based on the history of the period in which they were created, are often wonderful. However, over the years I have come to dislike abstract art. Judging by the number of visitors I meet in the galleries, I am not the only one.

Normally I visit museums with Dvora, who herself is an accomplished painter. For those of you who do not know, looking at pictures in the company of a painter is a unique experience. Most people, including myself, tend to focus on what they see; the sea, say, as Painted by Turner, or the human body as presented by Rodin. Dvora, on the other hand, asks how the artists achieved the effect he did. To do so she comes so close to the painting that her nose is practically in it. How many times did she not alert the guard who came running!

4. Sport. Truth to say, I, was not born with the sportsman’s talents. In fact so bad was I that the coach who, sixty years ago, taught me to play tennis, a very nice man incidentally, later told me that, on seeing how clumsy I was, he had considered recommending that I take up another sport! Later I spent thirty-five years of my life long distance running up and down the hills surrounding Jerusalem. Rugged terrain, I can tell you. The kind that teaches you what determination is all about. Feeling one’s body go on automatic, so to speak. Floating in the air, as it were, and one’s thoughts freely fluttering about—there is nothing like it. Unfortunately my knees have long forced me to stop running. That was over twenty years ago, and I still miss it. But I do enjoy walking. And swimming in lakes, of course.

Even though these are not scientifically proven, they definitely deserve an honorable mention: Stress Food allergies Hormone changes (like menopause, for example) Genetics Many cases develop after gastroenteritis (stomach flu) Poor diet (processed, high sugar foods) As you can see, many of these Irritable Bowel Syndrome causes constipation symptoms but also alternates with diarrhea. cipla viagra online Apart from tablets, a patient can use the simplest cheap viagra from india form of genuine drug if getting issues to swallow a pill. It is a biologically active to the most gram-positive and gram-negative infections including Staphylococcus aureus and viagra without prescription canada Streptococcuspyogenes, and also other kinds of streptococci. This helps to generic levitra online ensure that the most important concepts are driven home and that your teen learns all of the safe and effective driving techniques the course is designed to teach. 5. Scholarship. For as long as I can remember myself I have always been a bookworm. If I had a great aim in life, it was Rerum causas cognoscere, to understand the causes of things. Probably not with success; looking back, I often think that I know and understand fewer things now than I did at the time I first gained consciousness of myself. I do not think I have made any great discoveries.

How these things work in the natural sciences I do not claim to know at first hand. In the humanities and the social sciences, though, practically everything has been said before by someone at some time at some place; with the result that making such discoveries is, in one sense, next to impossible. But the subjective feeling of having understood, or feeling one has understood, something one had never thought about before—that is an experience the quest for which is worth spending a lifetime at.

6. Nature. The expanse of a field, reaching far away into the horizon. A forest, dark and mysterious. A lofty mountain, enveloped in the kind of silence you only get where there are no people around. A lake, shimmering in the sun. The sea. The eternally changing, all-powerful, sea. It is enough to make you want to weep.

7. Love. It has been defined countless times by countless different people. My own favorite definition is as follows: love is when one’s beloved shortcomings make one laugh. As, for instance happens whenever Dvora sees me with my shirt buttoned the wrong way, smiles, and starts making fun of me. Another definition is that love is trust so great that one never has to say sorry. Not because one never hurts one’s beloved; only angels can do that, and they tend to be rather boring. But because he or she knows that it is not done on purpose.

Anyhow. Love, accompanied where appropriate by the kind of sex that makes the body and mind of both partners radiate with happiness, is the most wonderful thing life has to offer. Pity those, and the older I grow the more of them I think I see, who have not found it.

8. Last not least, a heartfelt email thanking me for one of my posts, such as I sometimes get.

On Footnotes

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Martin van Creveld

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scholars, Journalists, Spies

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Martin van Creveld

Here is a story I heard many years ago. On one occasion, someone asked US President Lyndon Johnson how important the various intelligence services—of which the US has plenty and to spare—were to his job. His response? I never got anything from the hush-hush crowd that I could not read next day on the pages of the New York Times. And there is a reason for that, Johnson is supposed to have added. Intelligence people are experts in gathering information. Journalists are also experts in gathering information. The difference is that the journalists are usually better.

The story may or may not be true. Assuming it is, Johnson may have meant what he said. Or else he may have been deliberately downplaying the role of secret intelligence so as to conceal the fact that he knew more; after all, dissimulation is said to have been one of his outstanding qualities. I can think of several other interpretations. No matter. Presumably we shall never know.

Why this story? Because, a couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to hold a public lecture here in Jerusalem. My topic was, “Where did the Iranian Threat Go?” A riddle indeed, considering the number of times Prime Minister Netanyahu referred to the issue; not to mention his repeated threats to bomb Iran so as to prevent it from building a bomb.

I took the occasion to argue, as I have often done on this site among other places, that the Iranian nuclear threat to my country was largely a myth. As I spoke, I did not have to wait for the Q&A to know what my audience was thinking—I have been through it so many times before. Do you, as a scholar, have access to secret intelligence? No, I do not (nor am I sure I would like to; such access creates its own constraints). If so, how do you know what you claim to know? Good question, that: and one which I want to address here.

Point No. 1. I do not claim to know nearly as much as the intelligence services about how many centrifuges Iran has, where they are located, by how many meters of concrete they are protected, how much enriched uranium they have produced, etc. Here I am largely dependent on the journalists, who themselves derive much of their information from the spies, who almost always have their own agenda in mind in releasing it at the time, and in the form, they do.

Point No. 2. Information of the kind just referred to, however accurate, is meaningless on its own. To understand its significance it is first necessary to answer much broader questions. Such as the roots of Iran’s behavior; its objectives; and its constraints. Briefly, its national strategy and the role its nuclear program is playing within that strategy. When it comes to these problems, the information at the disposal of scholars is often quite as good as, if not better than, that of the spies or, for that matter, the journalists.

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Point No. 3. When it comes to still broader questions, such as the impact of nuclear weapons on international relations, the history deterrence and of proliferation, and so on, scholars may well be better informed than either spies or journalists. The reason being that members of these professions are unlikely to have the leisure to look into such problems as thoroughly as they should.

Point No. 4. Spies and the agencies for which they work often come under political pressure to tell decision-makers what they want to hear. An outstanding, indeed outrageous, example was provided by the attempts of the Clinton and Bush administrations to “prove” the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. What things did they not do, what stories did they not invent! Such as mobile laboratories for manufacturing germs, and God knows what else. I once had the pleasure of spending an hour with Hans Blix, the UN commissioner who headed the team appointed to find those weapons. He told me, as he has told others, how the Americans did it. Scholars, working in an academic environment, are much less likely to come under pressures of this kind.

Briefly, spies have their advantages. For any government, military, and even large corporation they are a must. But they cannot operate on their own. To some extent, this is recognized by the intelligence services themselves. Or why else recruit, train and use “analysts” as well as “collectors”?

I myself have some experience with this. Time upon time over the years, I have had meetings with intelligence people and journalists from all over the world. Quite a few visited my hometown near Jerusalem specifically in order to discuss various issues with me. Including events in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Time upon time, I expressed my surprise at the fact that they, who had been to those countries, came to see me, who had not. The answer I got was always the same: by adding context, you can explain to us what we have seen, heard, and experienced.

To which I can only say, Amen.