Monthly Archives: April 2021

The Riddle

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Almost half a century has passed, yet the riddle still persists. As the years go by its importance, far from diminishing, seems to grow. So much so that many people throughout the globe now look at what took place on 30 April 1973 as a historical turning point. One at which the decline of a superpower that used to dominate the globe began.

*

By way of an excuse, they apparently fabricated an attack on one of their destroyers (the Maddox) that never took place.

They had a population of 200,000,000; the other side only had about one tenth of that number.

They were world famous for their efficiency and “can do” attitude; the other side was supposed to be backward, lazy and slow.

They were history’s wealthiest nation by far; the other side was an impoverished “developing” country. Translated into per capita GDP, the economic gap may have been about thirty to one.

They were the world’s most industrialized country by far; the other side, having barely emerged from colonial rule, had hardly any industry at all.

In country, they and their local allies outnumbered the other side by about three to one.

They had absolute command of the sea; a few antiquated torpedo boats apart, the other side had no navy of any kind.

They had the world’s largest and most sophisticated logistic system, one fully capable of supporting 650,000 men (hardly any women yet) across the largest ocean on earth, transporting a quarter million tons of cargo a month, no less. The other side relied on bicycles, sampans (which could only carry their loads if they were carefully concealed), and human porters. To be fair, it also had some trucks. Though certainly not nearly as many as its enemy did.
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For communication they used the most modern equipment available at the time: including transistors (which had recently replaced vacuum tubes), satellites, topographic scatter, and VHF. The other side had nothing like it; especially during the early phases of the conflict, they were more likely to rely on underage runners.

They had the world’s most powerful air force and used it to drop three times as many bombs as were dropped on Germany and Japan together during World War II. Still not content, they used defoliants with which to devastate entire districts so as to deny the other side cover. Whereas the other side barely had an air force at all; throughout the years that the conflict lasted, they did not drop a single bomb on their enemy on the ground.

They could reach, attack and demolish every square inch of the other side’s territory; that side’s ability to do the same was exactly zero.

They had tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and vast fleets of vehicles of every kind. The other side only got some of these things towards the end of the conflict, long after its outcome had been decided.

Mainly relying on helicopters, their MEDEVAC (medical evacuation) system was the best in history; as a result, far fewer of their troops who were wounded died. The other side never had a single helicopter.

Wherever their troops went, they enjoyed creature comforts of every kind, from beer to ice cream; whereas the other side walked about in black pajamas and sandals cut out of discarded tires.

In the whole of history, a more asymmetrical conflict would be hard to find. They won every engagement, yet still managed to lose—in the most humiliating possible way. With the last remaining troops clinging to their helicopters’ skids.

*

The more I think about it, the more I wonder. How on earth did they do it? What does it say about them? What does it say about the other side?

Honestly, I do not know.

Fighting Power

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Note: This is a somewhat edited version of an article I did for a German magazine. While aimed at German readers and focusing on the state of the German Bundeswehr, I hope it will interest some non-German readers as well.

*

War is the most important thing in the world. When hard meets hard it rules over the existence of every single country, government, and individual. As current events in Tigray are showing once again, neither the old nor the young are immune against its horrors. That is why, though it may come but once in a hundred years, it must be prepared for every day. When the bodies lie cold and stiff and the survivors mourn over them, those in charge have not done their duty, said the ancient Chinese commander/philosopher Wu Zu.

To accomplish anything great the cooperation of many people is required. As, for example, when 100,000 men spent twenty years erecting the great pyramid at Giza. To be sure, the requirement for cooperation is similar in peace and war. However, war is not like building a pyramid. Ancient or modern, what sets war apart is that this cooperation must be achieved and maintained in the face, not just of every kind of hardship but of an enemy who is deliberately trying to kill you.

Organizing, equipping, supplying and training an army is difficult enough. Yet motivating the troops to the point where they are ready to give their lives for the Cause, as well as each other, is much more so still. Unless it is imbued with this spirit, an army is but a broken reed. From the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon in 490 BCE to the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, countless are the cases when small but determined forces clashed with larger, stronger, better armed enemies—and defeated them.

War is a chameleon; everything in it keeps changing all the time. Including technology—from stones and clubs to laser weapons—tactics, strategy, logistics, communication, intelligence, the lot. By contrast, the prerequisites of fighting power being rooted in human nature, have remained always the same. Caesar had his troops decorate their scabbards with gold and silver studs. Napoleon said that it is with colored ribbons that soldiers are led.

The ancient Greeks had a saying: X, or Y, was brave that day. Meaning that a person’s record in war is of limited use in predicting his future performance. The same applies to fighting power of an army. The fact that it fought well in the past does not necessarily mean it will do so again. And the other way around.

*

The role of fighting power in war cannot be exaggerated. But how is it created and, which is even more difficult, maintained over time? The following is a very short list of the principles involved.

* War is the continuation of politics with an admixture of other means. Nevertheless fighting power is only partly dependent on politics. Historically speaking, some despotic societies have possessed it to a very high degree. On the other hand, as France in 1939-40 showed, democracies are not necessarily immune against defeatism.

* Whatever the political regime, it is essential that the troops have the support and respect of civilian society. Above all, male soldiers—even today in every army, practically all combat troops are male—must enjoy the support and respect of their womenfolk. The right to “kiss and be kissed,” as Plato puts it. Or else why should they fight?
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* The cause for which troops are called upon must be, or at any rate must be experienced as, just. Why? Because no soldiers are so foolish as to lay down their lives for a cause they consider unjust.

* Turning recruits into an army prepared to fight and die if necessary requires that they know and trust both their commander and each other. However, such knowledge and trust are not born in a day. That is why the authorities should do everything to make the troops stay together for as long as possible. As, for example, by returning those who have recovered from their injuries to their own units rather than to some centralized pool.

* Another indispensable prerequisite of fighting power is discipline. Both trust and discipline require that the troops be treated in a way that is, and is seen to be, just. Rewards and punishments must be distributed in proportion to each soldier’s merits, the risks he is made to take, and the responsibility he carries. They must also be timely; or else they are going to lose much of their force.

* The first concern of commanders must be to accomplish their mission. The second, to look after their troops; to do so they must live with them and share joy and sorrow with them. Overall, the best way to command is by example.

* Fighting power is the outgrowth of shared effort, suffering, and risk-taking.  Conversely, any training that does not involve at least some danger will end by degenerating into a childish game.

* Finally, the form manifest of fighting power is what, in one of my books, I have called the culture of war. Including certain forms of shared bearing, discipline, dress, symbols, language, music, ceremonies, etc. As with trust, these things, if they are to mean anything, cannot be stamped out of the ground. They can only emerge from a long tradition, and, ultimately, history. To be sure, spit and polish, as it is known, can be overdone. In case it is it may turn a military into an army of soul-less robots; as, for example, happened in the Prussian Army between 1786 (the death of Frederick the Great) and 1806 (the disastrous battle of Jena). On the other hand, a military that cannot look on its history with pride is, in reality, not a military at all.

*

I am not a German and I do not live in Germany. Though I have studied German military history in some depth, present-day German security is only of marginal interest to me. It is not I but Germans who should answer the following questions: does the Bundeswehr have the fighting power it needs to fight? If not, why? What can be done to change the situation? How to deal with the, how shall I put it, not so glorious past?

The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

Flying Cars

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J Storrs Hall, Where Is My Flying Car?: A Memoir of Future Past, Kindle Edition., 2018.

These days when the Biden administration is planning to spend two trillion—yes, two trillion—dollars on America’s crumbling infrastructure, it is refreshing to read is book about flying cars. It was recommended to me by a friend, Larry Kummer, Iowa based proprietor of the well regarded Fabius Maximus website.

On his website, Hall describes himself as a “writer.” Judging by the text, though, he knows plenty about engineering/robotics/high tech and flying a light aircraft (he is a licensed/pilot). Above all, he has a consuming interest in innovation of every kind; one who takes nothing, not even the most obvious “truths” the media keeps flooding us with, at face value. Drawing as it does on technology, science, science fiction, history, economics and sociology, the book is far too wide ranging to summarize. Let alone evaluate, in a few hundred words. Instead of trying to do so, therefore I shall simply quote a few passages in the hope that posting them will make some others buy it (it’s very cheap), read it, and yes, take it as seriously as, in my opinion, it deserves to be.

Page 536: “[Contrary to the doomsayers,] the major problem in the Second Atomic Age –[meaning, when restrictions are finally lifted and nuclear power, which the author considers the safest, cleanest, most plentiful, source of energy on earth, is allowed to come into its own] era is most likely to be too little CO2 in the air rather than too much. Go look at a cornfield: as I write it is still weeks until the Fourth of July, but in these parts the corn isn’t just knee-high, it’s more than head-high. All of that plant material was created by molecular machines, powered by energy from the sun, out of carbon from the CO2 in the air. In still air on a clear, sunshiny day, a cornfield depletes all the CO2 in the ambient air in 5 minutes flat.”

Page 537: “Just by way of context, too little CO2 in the air is a lot more dangerous than too much. Current levels (400 ppm) are much lower than are optimal for green plants; commercial greenhouses operate at 1000 ppm. If we cut CO2 in half, we would be in serious danger of starving all the green plants of Earth. So when everyone starts carrying a pocket iPrinter capable of conjuring up anything from snacks to items of clothing out of thin air, we may have to reopen the coal mines and pump out CO2 just to keep our ecosystem from collapsing.”
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Page. 550: “The one invariant in futurism before roughly 1980 was that predictions of social change overestimated, and of technological change underestimated, what actually happened. Now this invariant itself has been broken. With the notable exception of information technology, technological change has slowed and social change has mounted its crazy horse and galloped madly off in all directions. H. G. Wells’ image of the feckless Eloi, a lampoon of the effete idle English upper classes of a century ago, describes us better than he could have imagined.”

Page 551-52: “In the 1970s, the centuries-long growth trend in energy (the “Henry Adams curve”, which shows that any advance in material civilization is ultimately the result of greater per capita use of energy] flatlined. Most of the techno-predictions from 50s and 60s SF had assumed, at least implicitly, that it would continue. The failed predictions strongly correlate to dependence on plentiful energy. American investment and innovation in transportation languished; no new developments of comparable impact have succeeded highways and airliners. Also in the 70s, academia became a major locus of counter-cultural fervor, as it morphed into a largely virtue-signaling institution driven by competitive self-deception. This set up a classic Baptists-and-Bootleggers bedfellowship between those who really believed that progressive prescriptions would improve the world, and those who mostly enjoyed the new money, prestige, and policy-making influence. Public spending, and PhDs granted, tripled from 1960 to 1980. The war on cars was handed off from beatniks to bureaucrats in the 70s. Supersonic flight was banned. Bridge building had peaked in the 1960s, and traffic congestion now is 5 times as bad as then.

Around 1980, developments in liability law destroyed the private aviation industry. Regulation exploded; a significant proportion of decisions in business went from being made by people who were forced to balance costs with benefits to being made by bureaucrats with no concern for costs. Increasingly in our economy, the cost disease replaced the learning curve. The nuclear industry found its costs jacked up by an order of magnitude and was essentially frozen in place. Interest and research in nuclear physics languished. Over the period of interest, Green fundamentalism has become the unofficial state church of the US (and to an even greater extent Western Europe). Its catechism is a litany of apocalyptic prophecies, each forgotten in detail as it failed, but adding in vague spirit to an overall angst of original sin and impending doom. This has contributed in no small part to the neurotic pessimism of our current culture, by objective measures the richest, safest, and healthiest in history. In technological terms, bottom line is simple: we could very easily have flying cars today. Indeed we could have had them in 1950, but for the Depression and WWII. The proximate reason we don’t have them now is [because, instead of using existing nuclear- solar- and nano- technologies to produce more energy and put it at our service], we have let complacent nay-sayers metamorphose from pundits uttering “It can’t be done” predictions a century ago, into bureaucrats uttering “It won’t be done” prescriptions today.”

Page 553: “Yes, we should have power too cheap to meter [as some nuclear power enthusiasts argued back in the 1960s]. Yes, we should have orbital hotels and a base on the moon. Average family income in the US should be $200k by now, and growing at a sustained 6%. But what has actually happened is that cultural reaction and regulatory ossification have combined to dam up the normal flow of experimentation in high power technology.”

Page 556: “At a weighted average, the world could be 16 times as wealthy as it is now, if only our political systems were honest and competent. 15 times the world’s output is an enormous value, simply sitting there waiting to be reaped. As a futurist, I will go out on a limb and make this prediction: when someone invents a method of turning a Nicaragua into a Norway, extracting only a 1% profit from the improvement, they will become rich beyond the dreams of avarice and the world will become a much better, happier, place. Wise incorruptible robots may have something to do with it.”

Is that provocative enough to make some people think?

The Blueberry Fräuleins and The Frivolity of Evil

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By Bob Barancik

 

Historians estimate about 1,000,000 Jews were exterminated at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland by German Nazi military personnel during World War II.

Another 200,000 innocent people were also murdered there. They included non-Jewish Poles, the mentally challenged, Roma people, homosexuals, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Auschwitz has become the ultimate symbol of man’s inhumanity to man and a stark warning where unchecked antisemitism ends up — at gas chambers and smoking crematoria.

One might easily conclude that the Nazis who organized, administrated, and operated the death camps were raging lunatics and sadists who were consumed by a burning visceral hatred of non-Aryans deemed “life unworthy of life.”

But the reality often is much different and more nuanced.

The first major scholar to publicly expose the more mundane aspects of the world-shattering human evil unleashed by Adolf Hitler was Hannah Arendt. It was her 1963 feature article in the New Yorker Magazine titled “Eichmann in Jerusalem” that brought attention to the routine bureaucracy of mass murder.

Adolf Eichmann was the “architect of the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem.” He was a key operator in the Holocaust, responsible for the assembly and transportation of many of the victims from their countries or origin, mainly the West and the Balkans, to the death camps.

Eichmann had recently been captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem for public trial. The popular image of him was as a monster “in the glass booth.” But Arendt saw this genocidal mastermind as “banal,” i.e., ordinary, unexceptional, diminutive, boring.

This led to the conclusion that average, everyday people can easily commit acts of savage brutality and murder under certain types of extreme conditions. Modern social science has largely validated that concept.

But there is another aspect to the personalities of Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust that is seldom talked about or explored. It is the “frivolity of evil” in the hearts and minds of the perpetrators.

By that, I mean a lightheartedness, a silliness, and lack of seriousness.

The Nazi genocide of the Jews required many hundreds of well-trained secretaries, typists, stenographers, clerks, and office supervisors. Although they did not directly work with the Jewish prisoners, these minor administrators were on the premises of the killing centers. This large personnel pool was composed of average young women, largely recruited from the German lower and middle classes.

At Auschwitz, these young women were under the command of senior male military officers. The chief adjutant to the commandant of the camp was a man named Karl Höcker. He was quite respected by his boss and enjoyed hobnobbing with Auschwitz’s elite.

Höcker informally documented many official and unofficial moments of an officer’s life at Auschwitz. The photo album was for his personal enjoyment and a valued souvenir of his military service.

There were many historically significant images among the photos. But the ones that caught my eye and captured my imagination were taken at Solahütte, a little-known rustic SS resort some 20 miles south of Auschwitz. it was a place where the camp’s senior officers and select underlings could go for rest and relaxation from their various tasks. Their leisure pursuits continued even towards the end of the war.

These images were of happy, healthy young women on a fence rail eating fresh blueberries.

The following insights about these photos are from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. (The USHMM now owns the Höcker Album.)

“Several pages are devoted to a day trip for SS Helferinnen (female auxiliaries, young women who worked for the SS as communications specialists) on July 22, 1944. They arrive at Solahütte and run down a ramp accompanied to the music of an accordionist. A full-page spread of six photographs entitled ‘Hier gibt es Blaubeeren’ (Here there are blueberries) shows Höcker passing out bowls of fresh blueberries to the young women sitting on a fence. When the girls theatrically finish eating their blueberries for the camera, one girl poses with fake tears and an inverted bowl. Only miles away on the very same day, 150 prisoners (Jews and non-Jews) arrived on a transport to Auschwitz. The SS selected 21 men and 12 women for work and killed the remaining members of the transport in the gas chambers.”

The frivolity of the situation, captured on black-and-white film, is deeply consequential because of being so inconsequential. If the viewer does not know the context of these images, one could easily mistake them for public relations photos for a countryside resort or wholesome berry product.

For me, it is not just that normal human beings can be so sadistic or apathetic to the suffering of others — but that their core happiness might not be affected by daily exposure to mass murder.

In a media-saturated online world, horrible events and despicable people become pixelated figures of fun and momentary celebrity. It becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate one’s moral compass when staring at a screen. Disturbing situations that should make us indignant or sick to our stomachs often just get laughed at or intentionally ignored in the endless cavalcade of audio-visual stimulation.

It is easy to condemn these normal fräuleins who could eat fresh blueberries after participating in the mass murder of innocent Jews from a vantage point of 75 years after the end of World War II.

Metaphorically, we are all sitting on a fence rail eating berries. But we can choose to stand up and begin to walk away from our prejudices and hatreds. That is much easier said than done. But even small change of mind and heart can make a difference for the better.

Below are relevant web links for further information on the subject:

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Bob Barancik is an award-winning painter, print maker, and video producer. He received an M.A. from the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, dual degrees in fine arts and architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design, and did postgraduate work in organizational development at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City  He was an active member of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Middle East Forum, both in Philadelphia.

His videos on Holocaust and political themes have been screened internationally, including the JVC Tokyo Video Festival and Toronto Jewish Film Festival. In 2010, the Florida Holocaust Museum gave him a large retrospective exhibit from its archive of his artwork.

He and his wife Amy are full-time residents of St. Petersburg, Florida. They also maintain deep connections to Philadelphia and Maine.

Everyone

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For many years now, what I have liked most about the Net is that it is full of surprises. Press a few keys, even at random, even by mistake, and you never know what is going to pop up at you from around the corner. Just a few days ago, purely by accident, I came across the following sentence: “when everyone thinks alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). So, to make myself and perhaps a few of my readers think, I thought I’d draw up a (very incomplete) list of a few of the things everyone thinks are true.

Well, almost everyone.

  • Global warming is real and threatens to put an end to us all.
  • The earth’s resources are about to run out.
  • “Natural” (as opposed, I suppose, to “unnatural” and “supernatural”) is always better.
  • Thin is good.
  • Our understanding of, and control over, nature is growing all the time.
  • What one author has called, “the better angels of our nature” have been steadily gaining the upper hand. As, for example, abolishing slavery, granting women equal rights, and so on.
  • The singularity is near. Computers, aka artificial intelligence, can, or will soon be able to, think as well as, or better than, we do.
  • Psychology is a science and has made great advances since, let us say, the time of Homer.
  • All people are equal. The only differences between people of different races are slight physiological ones: such as the color of their skin, the shape of their nose, and the like.
  • It is better for some innocent people to be falsely convicted than for some guilty ones to go unpunished.
  • Liberal democracy is the best form of government (that is why even totalitarian governments, such as the Chinese one, claim to be democratic).
  • Colonialism was/is absolutely bad and had/has no redeeming characteristics at all.
  • Whatever a man can do, a woman can do too.
  • Men have it better and oppress women.
  • Depending on the time, place, and the gender to which you belong, unless you are over 17, or 16, or 13, sex is bad for you. The more so if you have it with someone who is older than you.
  • Starting with the Biblical Joseph, Every time a woman cries “rape,” or “sexual harassment,” she was speaking gospel truth.
  • For any half way competent woman to stay at home and raise her children is demeaning and a waste of her precious talents.
  • The best way to raise children is to separate them from their parents at an early age—often, no more than a few weeks—and send them first to a nursery and then to school where the most important thing they will learn is to sit down and shut up for so and so many hours each day.
  • Children under 12, or 14, or 16, should be prohibited from doing any kind of paid work and, by so doing, gain confidence and self-esteem.
  • Children who, rather than doing homework, watch TV or play computer games are wasting their time.

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Note: I do not claim that even one of the above propositions is necessarily false. Only that, and if only because (to repeat), when everyone thinks alike no one thinks at all, rethinking them from time to time may have some real benefits. So thank God for the few among us who do have what it takes—and, believe me, it can take a lot—not to think alike.