Monthly Archives: January 2013

I Know: Dog Bites Man (Again)

Posted on by

The pervasive pattern of lefties demanding ever-more-intrusive government activity and burdens which they manage to avoid is one that only the willfully blind can ignore.

A penny-ante local newspaper posts an interactive map showing the names and addresses of all people in its circulation area who have gun permits . . . so that the burglars will know where to go to steal the guns for their next crime, or alternatively so that the they’ll know which houses are more likely to be safe to burgle because the owners (if home) won’t be armed.  When people point out just how monstrous was what they did, the newspaper’s folks . . . post armed guards outside their offices.  The Hollywood hand-wringers parade across the television screens about how necessary it is to take away all private citizens’ weapons . . . prior to getting into their enormous SUV with its blacked-out windows and their private (armed, of course) security detail.

Warren Buffett burns copious amounts of oxygen about how death taxes need to be preserved and in fact increased.  He fails to mention that he owns about six (was the last number I saw; it might be more, now) life insurance companies, an industry about 20% of the business of which is selling financial products the only purpose for which is estate planning to avoid or ameliorate the effects of death taxes.  Buffett also doesn’t bother to elaborate on the details of his own estate plan.  Oh sure, he’s pledged all these assets to charity; his heirs will have to squeak by on a measly few hundred million . . . each.  But here’s the un-told story:  Buffett, like pretty much everyone in this country who’s got more than just a few nickels to rub together, long ago will have put together a very sophisticated estate plan the results of which will be to keep the vast majority of his wealth from being “includible” (I do a lot of estate planning work, and “includible” is the nastiest word in the lexicon) in his gross estate for death tax purposes.  When you hear newspaper reports about how wealthy Warren Buffett is, they’re counting all those assets of his which he’s long ago put past the reach of the tax man.

We hear senior university officials lamenting how awful them ‘orrible gun-clinging, Bible-thumpin’ beetle-brow types are because they have the temerity to suggest that forever-increasing tax burdens are a bad thing.  They don’t mention that they’re living in a house provided by a tax-exempt entity which has been increasing the prices it charges its customers by triple and quadruple the rate of inflation for decades, and has funnelled most of that increased revenue into additional “administration” make-work jobs, and jacking up the pay and benefits for those jobs, instead of providing better instruction to more students.

I could go on, of course, but why?  Victor Davis Hanson points out the similarities of today’s lefties to the penance industry of the Roman Catholic church in the Middle Ages.  The medieval Roman church did not reform from within.  It took not only the Reformation, the wars of religion, and massive exodus to the New World to get them the message.  Across most of Europe the prelacy was still living not just well but nearly obscenely well three hundred years after Luther left history’s most important post-it note. 

Back in March, 2011, I was in Germany and had a day to kill.  I was coming from Dresden and needed to stay overnight close enough to the airport that I could catch an 11:00 a.m. flight home, but I did not want to stay anywhere near Frankfurt.  I’d never been to Fulda but had always wanted to go see dear ol’ St. Boniface.  The train schedules worked out right so I got to spend my last full afternoon in Germany wandering around the city (gorgeous, and highly recommended).  The archbishop of Fulda was also abbot of the monastery (or vice-versa; I can’t recall which was ex officio, but the offices were tied), and more to the point was also an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.  The archepiscopal palace now belongs to the city and in addition to housing several city offices is also (of course) in part a museum.  So I went to visit.  The dear ol’ Prince-Bishop’s private apartments are open to visitors.  His quarters look like what some Hollywood set-designer would come up with if you gave him the general concept of “gaudy whorehouse, with extra-cloying furnishings, please.”

It took Napoleon to shift the Prince-Bishop from his teat.  Napoleon liquidated the monasteries and under his pressure the Habsburgs liquidated the Empire.

I don’t know where the U.S. is going to come up with a Napoleon.

Shame She Didn’t Have One of Them Awful “High-Capacity” Mags

Posted on by

Let’s see how this works.  Man, arrested six times since 2008, knocks on door to house.  Work-at-home wife, with nine year-old twins in home with her, fails to open door.  Man returns to car and fetches his crowbar, with which he proceeds to prize open the door.

 This chap is not looking for jewelry, a television, or even money.  When she heard him breaking into the door, she grabbed her kids, her phone . . . and her .38 cal. revolver (that last is important, Best Beloved), and headed not to a bedroom, or to a closet, or to a bathroom, but all the way up into the attic.  The perp follows them up.  He’s actually hunting them inside their own house.  He found what he was looking for and got it, good and hard.  He pops open the door and instead of staring down at a helpless victim he’s staring down the business end of a firearm.

The woman empties her revolver (and that’s important, Best Beloved) and hits him with five of the shots, all in places potentially deadly.  She punctures his lungs, his liver, and his stomach.

And this, Best Beloved, is where the revolver becomes important.  Her revolver had only six shots.  Six shots and she’s out of bullets.  Even if she had a speed loader it would take her several seconds to swing out the cylinder and re-load.  Several seconds in which a perp who’s still functional could overpower her, render her unconscious or otherwise unable to act in further protection of herself or her children.  Several seconds in which a perp who’s himself armed but hasn’t deployed yet could get to his gun and use it.

The woman was counting her shots.  The perp wasn’t.  He was on the floor, begging her to stop shooting.  He didn’t realize that she was done shooting for that day.  She ran from the house with her children to a neighbor’s.

What did this perp do, with five bullets in him?  He was able to rise from the floor, get all the way downstairs, out of the house and into his car, start the car, and drive off.  He lost it a short distance away and wrecked in some woods.  But what with adrenaline or whatever else he had in him he was still able to do all that . . . with five bullets in his body, any of which might have proven fatal.

 And all this played out before the police ever got to the scene.  The one mistake she made was to call her husband and have him call 911 rather than do it directly.  So she introduced maybe, what? 30 seconds’ delay into it.

If she’d had something with, say, a 13-round magazine, she could have pumped double the number of rounds into him, and would have had some room to put one or more through his head.  If she’d run out it would have taken two seconds, max, to drop one magazine and load another, and be back up and firing.  Or what if the perp had had company with him?  With her low-capacity weapon she’s got two moving targets and six shots to allocate between them.  With one of them awful “high-capacity” magazines she might have stood a chance.

So remember, when Congress sets out to ban “high-capacity magazines,” what they’re really saying is that people like this woman only get X chances to save their and their families’ lives, and if that turns out to be insufficient . . . well, they’re just the broken eggs we’ve got to accept in making our omelette of unarmed paradise.

Just in Case Anyone Didn’t Get It

Posted on by

This is how Washington works.  This is how those people actually behave who tirelessly, tiresomely lecture us here in flyover country about paying one’s fair share.

Look at all the green nonsense in there:  This is an industry that would not exist were it not for taxpayer hand-outs.  Little Bobby Kennedy’s firm even says as much in SEC filings.  Its business model is to keep the taxpayers’ money rolling in, in the form of grants, low- or zero-interest loans, and of course piles of tax breaks.

It’s not just the great big Cinderella’s pumpkin that is the Green Boondoggle that made out, however.  General Electric — you know, the cottage industry — gets an extension of a tax break that allowed it to offshore enough of its profits that, while it made $5.1 billion in U.S. profits in 2011, paid exactly $0 in U.S. income tax.  Don’t get me wrong:  I think the entire corporate tax scam should be repealed.  The U.S. has among the very highest corporate tax systems in the world, and in a global economy that hamstrings them.  They lose a good chunk of the comparative advantage they’d otherwise have from being U.S. based, solely because of the tax code.  So I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that G.E. managed to pay nothing in taxes on over five billion in profits.  What chaps me is that G.E. managed to get that break . . . and those tens of thousands of companies who can’t offshore their profits haven’t, didn’t, and won’t.  G.E. may lose some comparative advantage relative to its foreign competition, but it makes a bunch of it back up at the expense of other Americans, their owners and employees.

Isn’t that comforting?

Crony capitalism is not a tax code-specific disease, either.  If giving you a clandestine leg up through the tax law is one manifestation, another important one is simply to legislate your competition off the playing field.  Like hooking up the Wal-Marts of the world by prohibiting bogus “loopholes” that really aren’t loopholes in anything.  So Dear Leader is looking to enlist the biggest players to stump up spurious support for gun control by promising them to get rid of those pesky gun show sellers. 

I have a question, and I’m sure the data exist out there, somewhere, to answer it:  How many felons committing a crime with a gun (and not a crime in which the mere ownership or possession of the gun is itself the crime) used a gun which they bought at a gun show?  If you want to show how god-awful dangerous gun show sales are, then surely there would be piles of statistics showing that the guy who decides to shoot up the crack house, or the school playground, or his former employer’s front office, went to a gun show and bought that gun with some sort of criminal intent to use it.  It doesn’t count if he stole it from someone who bought it at a gun show; he could just as easily have stolen it from someone who bought it only after being waterboarded to disclose any criminal tendencies or other Wrong Thinking.  I also don’t think it would be very important if, say, this fellow bought the gun eight years ago at a gun show.  The whole objection to gun show sales is that they don’t allow for vetting of the purchaser.  If, however, there’s nothing in the purchaser’s background to flag the system, then no matter where he bought the gun you wouldn’t catch him.  So what I want to know is, for the last ten years or so, how many violent criminals who used a firearm in their crime had gone to a gun show and bought the weapon they used within, say, six months before the crime.  If that answer is zero or some very small number, then there just isn’t a “loophole” that needs closing.

And then of course you’ve got the final leg in the triad of crony capitalism, the direct hand-out.  Like Solyndra, in which $535 million of taxpayers’ money was “loaned” to Solyndra, but was subordinated to the equity position of the donors to Dear Leader who owned the bulk of the company.  If there is one single lodestar in the firmament of commercial lending, it is that debt trumps equity.  In fact, in the world of bankruptcy, it’s called the “absolute priority rule” (or at least it’s absolute unless you’re a labor union and Dear Leader decides he’s just going to hand the shop over to you).  I’m not saying that there are no exceptions, at all,ever, to that rule.  But there sure aren’t any when, according to the lender’s own evaluation of the borrower, the borrower is already going down the tubes and will not be going anywhere other than down the tubes even with your loan in his pocket.  As was the case with Solyndra.

And there you have the Holy Trinity of Dear Leader’s administration (note that it was at Dear Leader’s express demand that Baucus’s tax code give-away to his donors was pasted verbatim into the final “fiscal cliff” deal).

These Two Posts Remind Me of Each Other

Posted on by

Here, at Sarah Hoyt’s blog, we have her as-usual well-articulated musings about those folks who, confronted with a leaking roof, conclude that the remedy is to start jerking stones from the building’s foundation walls as fast as possible.  And here we have a searching inquiry into what Oswald Spengler, a German writing during the Great War, may have to say about how 21st Century Americans understand themselves.  These two posts remind me of each other, and I’m sure it’s because they both have a tie-in to the Great War, which is among my particular fetishes. 

Mme. Hoyt is a writer, science fiction I gather, and so her post has a heavily literary cast to it.  She also was born and brought up (as we say around here) in Portugal — admittedly a very socialistic Portugal, but no one gets all that far above his raisin’, not societies and not their members.  So I’d wager that a good deal of the Portugal in which she grew up fairly resonated with, and way down deep in her bones she can still feel, the tugs of Iberian heritage, not least of which would be the restless gaze of Henry the Navigator (even perhaps more than England, where no spot of dirt is more than 90 miles from salt water, I just don’t think you can grow up Portuguese and not have the enormous Fact of the ocean soak into your pores).  That would of course mean that she’s got some coils that are still tuned to a European frequency (never met the ol’ gal, but I don’t get any points for figuring that out; she’s forever pointing out how tiresomely conventionally leftist are the standard bearers of today’s American Deep Thinkers; “been there, done that, you might take a look at how it’s workin’ out in Europe” is a big theme in the blog posts of hers I’ve read).  Portugal did fight on the Western Front.  Fact.  Didn’t take quite the killin’ that the other Allies did, but in a country the size and population of Portugal it wouldn’t have taken a very large number of corpses to hit the point at which the entire populace internalizes the war’s trauma.

We Americans forget what a catastrophic event the Great War was, at every level, for the peoples caught up in it.  We got into the war, legally at least, in 1917.  But even comparatively late into 1918 we still didn’t have a whole lot of doughboys on the front.  Beyond Belleau Wood (look: I like Marines, even though I’m ex-navy, but you can’t read how clumsily that battle was fought and not want retroactively to court-martial the commanders; they were fighting in 1918 using essentially the same tactics the Brits used at Loos in 1915, viz. march lines of infantry across open ground against concealed machine guns, and with very predictably similar results) and the Meuse-Argonne — another badly botched battle, from the commanders’ perspective — we just didn’t really get into it.  As a professor of mine in college pointed out, the principal effect on American consciousness of World War I was the fact that before the war the only interaction most Americans had with their federal government was the local post office.  All that changed, radically, in consequence of the mobilization effort.  My professor pointed out how many of FDR’s socialistic New Dealers had cut their teeth in 1917-18; Jonah Goldberg provides a very helpful exegesis of the extent to which Wilson looked upon the exercise as an opportunity.

For Europeans, the Great War was the End of the World.  I mean, Serbia lost 16% of its gross pre-war population.  Huge slices were taken from the British and French male populations of service age.  And that’s just the dead; it doesn’t count the maimed, or those so wounded in spirit as to be dead losses to society for, in some cases, decades.  Phrased in terms of Hoyt’s and Merry’s respective posts, there was legitimate reason to look about oneself and ask, if We, where “we” is Western Civilization, had done this — to ourselves, no less — were we at the end of the line?

Mme. Hoyt makes her central point:  “World War I was terrible, and for many reasons, including the prevalence of pictures and news, the fratricide/civil-war quality of it, the massive number of casualties.  It shocked an entire generation into … writing an awful lot about it, and into trying to tear down the pillars of civilization, believing that Western Civilization (and not human nature, itself) was what had brought about the carnage and the waste. * * *  So, I say – break the cycle.  Speak real truth to power.  Write of war and evil, sure, but as human ills, and not as the result of the unique badness of Western Civilization (or civilization) or capitalism, or affluence, or industrialization.  Dare point out that while humanity has had savages aplenty, few of them were noble.  Dare point out that while civilized man can be conventional, conventional behavior is often decent and moral and better for everyone.”

Hoyt’s post is mostly about how the Deep Thinkers “throw off” on Agatha Christie and Robt Heinlein, for their supposed . . . well, because they just don’t seem to have had the right villains, or their characters don’t Think Correctly or don’t want the Right Things, as far as I can tell (I don’t read fiction as a general rule, and when I do it seems it’s either Kafka or Wodehouse, so I’m just dead-reckoning from Hoyt).  Their communists and fellow-travellers are depicted as “poseurs” and charlatans (compare Charlotte Corday Rowbotham, anyone?).  Today’s (very conventional, always very conventional, and predictable) lefties just get all of a twitter that they didn’t think of it first.  And if they didn’t think of it first, it means they’re . . . well, they’re maybe not so special as they demand to be treated, maybe?  The personal is political, and vice versa.  The failure of one’s politics to be accepted in toto is not just verification that lot of folks don’t think like I do.  No, failure is a total rejection of oneself.  Not acceptable, in other words.

Per Merry’s post on Spengler, some guy who took two shots to pass his university examinations (and you must understand how traumatic to a German is the experience of Not Passing one’s examinations; I have personally known German students who failed for a second time, and after seven years in college were faced with the alternative of starting all over in another field or crawling back home to be . . . well, whatever Failed People became in 1980s Germany) made some incredibly prescient observation about cultures in general and Western Civilization in particular.  More particularly, from a reading of Spengler it seems that the question relevant to today’s Americans is whether we of Western Civilization find ourselves on a terminal glide path, and whether our (Americans’, that is) popular and political urges are symptomatic of imminent triumph or imminent catastrophe. 

More to the point, Spengler it seems identifies certain phases or trajectories of major civilizations (or probably better expressed, civilizational families).  Accordig to Spengler each goes through a period of genesis, of growth and development — self-actualization we’d most likely say nowadays — and then eventually decline and death (not merely eclipse, by the way, which implies some continuing existence, but extinguishment).  One of the characteristics of the decline — what he calls the “civilizational” phase — is characterized by a “surge of imperial fervor and a flight toward Caesarism. Hegemonic impulses come to the fore along with forms of dictatorship.”  One would have to be monumentally purblind not to see the implications of that observation for 21st Century America.  Nation-building, anyone?

A couple of random notes.  Robt Merry does not point it out, but in the German original, Spengler would have used the expressions “Kultur,” “Zivilization,” and “Bildung,” which do not mean the same things.  Without going too deeply into it, for a German, and German understanding, the distinctions are fundamental and of extreme importance.  See, e.g., Peter Watson’s German Genius, which I’ve linked to on this blog repeatedly and which has as one of its over-arching themes the societal and political play of the German distinction between Kultur and Bildung.  So in any translation one might read, one must be careful to observe the fact that there may be points of distinction that lie outside the text.

Secondly, and of more immediate importance to us, American society was founded 400 years ago explicitly as the City on a Hill.  Our zeal to project outward our image of ourselves is inseparable from the notion of Who We Are.  Can America’s understanding of itself survive a Spenglerian filter?  As Merry makes clear, the fundamental points of Spengler come down to the points that We Are Not Special.  We are not universal.  The universal striving towards commonly understandable human-centered goals is a pious fraud.  We too are bound to the Wheel of Fortune (a concept which, as Barbara Tuchman points out, Medieval understanding would have grasped very quickly); the conceit of the “Idea of Progress” is traced to its first tentative beginning in the 13th Century, the bitter, bloody, fag-end of the Middle Ages.

Either we are or we are not on a trajectory that ends in a hillside.  Either decline is a choice or it is not.  Spengler wrote at a time when he had not the advantages of modern economic theory, modern game theory, modern data analysis tools.  The Austrians and their progeny, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, and others, do extremely well explaining the past, accounting for the present, and thus far at predicting the future.  But what if a great deal — at least insofar as I’ve been exposed to it, which is admittedly not comprehensively — of why their ideas seem to work so well is that what we’re looking at are essentially Western modes of existence, even in “non-Western” societies.  What if those ideas have no application outside the confines of our own civilization?  To phrase it in terms of mathematics, what if we’re exercising ourselves over Fermat’s last theorem, all the while we’re about to be swamped by a world in which 2+2>4?

Merry chides Spengler somewhat for being too “deterministic,” and identifies this as being a “philosophical” objection to his thesis.  That is as it may be.  But Spengler was looking at several thousand years of recorded human history (which is, by the way, only a fraction of its total history).  To identify a pattern which holds true across times, places, and peoples who have nothing in common other than their physiological similarity is not to leap to a conclusion.  If you look at groups of anything (whether it’s stars, or terrestrial species, or human societies) which start from different places, are exposed over their lives to very different stressors, evolve distinct internal rules of action . . . yet still end up following very similar upper-level pathways, does not that suggest that there is an element of commonality which transcends the specifics which we can observe on a ground-level basis?

And here we get to the concepts of metacognition and Heisenberg.  As I understand the technical concept, “metacognition” may be described as the awareness of awareness.  Heisenberg of course enunciated the principle of uncertainty, in that we can know a body’s location or its velocity, but not both simultaneously.  The very act of observation alters at least one or the other.  I won’t claim that today’s humans are the most self-absorbed creatures, ever, but if not we’re really in the running for it.  We are intensely aware of what we are aware of; we study it, ruminate over it, argue over it constantly.  And in our self-observation of where we are, do we or not alter our velocity (which has both amplitude and direction)?

May, in other words, our awareness of the truths as observed by Spengler enable us to confound them?  Unless, of course, we indulge the puerile logic of the Deep Thinkers described by Hoyt.

I’ve not read Spengler, but by God I’m going to.

They Obviously Didn’t Get the Memo

Posted on by

Via the Daily Mail, we have some nice color pictures of what the latter days of the Soviet Union looked like.

I like color pictures, and not just because I’m simple-minded.  Color pictures show you . . . well, they show you the color.  They convey a more-or-less faithful visual impression of the reality that other people, in other parts of the world, and at other times, confronted in their day-to-day lives.  I just wish there were some technology by which we could have captured the smells of scenes depicted in pictures.  Bureaucratic antiseptic, institutional scrubbed, masses of unwashed human body . . . for me at least smell has some of the most evocative powers.  In evolutionary terms, we humans probably, like most animals, evolved a sense of smell very early on.  Smell can’t be hidden behind a tree, or in tall grass.  You can be as quiet as you please but you can’t hide the stink.  Born by air’s movement scents can be detected by the sensitive much farther away.  For a hunter as well as for prey smell is important.

I could be, of course, full of it.

But back to my point, the other reason I like color pictures is that color shows things that simply don’t show up well in black-and-white.  Specifically, dirt shows as dirt, not just some miscellaneous shadow that might be of any particular origin.  A dark area in a picture showing X will look pretty much a shade of gray that tells you very little about the specific X you’re looking at.  There’s a picture — I think it’s in Anne Applebaum’s history of the Gulag — showing the inside of a Cheka execution cellar.  It shows just bare floor, bare walls, and some ceiling.  On one wall and the adjoining floor, there’s an enormous dark smear that runs from the floor all the way up the wall, and well across the ceiling.  Most of the smear is solid black/dark gray in the photo, but there are loops, spatters, and so forth around the edges.  It shows, of course, human blood.  A color picture would have shown all the different tints within that enormous blood stain.  We might have seen something of how recently the cellar had been put to use.

And what, if you dare think of it, might that room have smelled like?

In any event, the linked pictures from the latter days of the Soviet Union are instructional.  Remember, while looking through them, that the world depicted in them had, and had for decades had enjoyed —

      (i)  free, universal, single-payer healthcare;

      (ii)  effectively no privately-held for-profit corporations;

      (iii)  no government-established religion, or even so much as prayer in schools;

      (iv)  universally free education at all levels;

      (vi)  comprehensive government regulation of pretty much everything, every last little facet of social or economic interaction between humans;

      (vii)  no corporate CEOs making $20 million per year;

      (viii)  fully-nationalized natural resources and exploitation of same;

      (ix)  fully-nationalized transportation networks;

      (x)  fully-nationalized means of production of every tangible object of any significance;

      (xi)  no private banking or other financial services industries, all such being provided exclusively by government-owned providers; and,

      (xii)  last but far from least, a cohort of cheerleaders, admirers, and would-be imitators all over the Western world, including a fellow born to an American marxist female who hated her country as only the wealthy white can, and a sub-Saharan African marxist father, who just wanted to bed every woman he could and drink himself into oblivion (which he later did).

Russia has always been desperately poor.  But Russia hadn’t always looked like that, in color.  For a view of the world Dear Leader’s heroes destroyed, the Library of Congress has a collection of rare color pictures taken between 1900 and 1915, all across Imperial Russia.  Some of them are obviously staged (like the peasant girls, got up in their finest, cleanest clothes), but even in them the background is not staged.  Take a hard look at the buildings in the villages and on the farms, at the interiors of the factories, at the roads, rivers, and horses.  Those are not dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ best.  No one has scrubbed the sides of the buildings for the photographer’s benefit.  In the country which invented them, these are not Potemkin villages and factories.

Now go back and look at what 70 years of the proletarian dictatorship accomplished.

This is what Dear Leader and his friends have in mind for us.  We’re promised heaven on earth if we’ll just run our country like the Soviets did theirs.  From the pictures at the Daily Mail, it seems the Soviets didn’t get the memo that when you run your country that way, what you’re supposed to end up with is heaven on earth, not 18 year-old whores plying their trade on the most prominent thoroughfares in your nation’s capital city.

 

 

Well . . . How Noble of Them

Posted on by

Today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has an article on why sanctions only help tyrants, specifically the Iranian ones.

This seems to me to be a rather curious position to be taken by folks who twice in the past century were brought to and in fact past the brink of starvation and collapse precisely by successful efforts to intercept their trade relationships.  In both those situations the Germans were the subject of dictatorships, in the Great War a military dictatorship run through the mouthpiece of a monarch and in the second round by a political dictatorship.  In both instances the final collapse of the system was brought about by battlefield collapse which had its origins in economic collapse.

By March 20, 1918, the German civil populace had survived the “turnip winter,” in which that’s exactly what they were reduced to eating in their freezing houses, coal being almost unobtainable across wide areas.  But they’d knocked Russia out of the war and in fact were in the process of establishing military occupation of parts of the country to ensure the timely delivery of supplies which the Bolsheviks had agreed to fork over.  That military occupation wasn’t just a bunch of desk-jockeys, either.  The Germans, down to their last throw of the dice in the West, devoted dozens of thousands of troops (and their associated supply chains) to that occupation of a defeated enemy.  Why?  The British blockade had reduced their war-making capacity that far that the Germans absolutely, at whatever cost, had to have those supplies.  It was a race to see whether they could get them flowing in time.

The thousands upon thousands (I’m thinking it was well over 100,000, but I’ve slept since I last read the specifics, so don’t hold me to that) of coal-scuttle helmets remaining in the East to pacify and plunder prostrate (but thoroughly chaotic) Russia were not in the line on March 21, 1918, when Ludendorff launched his last gambit against the Western allies.  He almost won the bet, too.  Exhausted, famished, unreinforced, the German offensive petered out just a couple of miles from breaking the line between the British and French.  German soldiers were literally stopping in the middle of battle to raid Allied kitchens, they were that hungry.  What difference might — say, another 50,000 — fresh troops have made?  How different might European history for the last 90 years have looked with the British pinned against the Channel ports, and French armies collapsing back on Paris (sort of like what happened in 1940), and the Kaiser in a position actually to negotiate if not from a position of strength then at least not from desperation?

Fast forward to 1944.  Albert Speer has taken over German war production.  It’s going through the roof.  There are more guns, more tanks, more aircraft coming off the assembly lines than ever before.  Production would continue to rise until the very end, by which time, with the transportation network wrecked by Allied air forces, the factories literally choked on their own output.  But there was a problem:  Germany couldn’t make enough synthetic fuel to run its tanks or aircraft.  It had no domestic supplies of chromium and several other strategic minerals.  When it lost access to Ploesti (the Romanian oil fields) and imports of Turkish chromium, Speer went to Hitler and explained to him, down to the day, how long Germany’s war effort could continue.  By the end Germany’s armies were reduced to foot and horse transportation.  A good part of the reason that the Western allies so rapidly advanced across France was air superiority.  When they didn’t have it, as in the Ardennes in December, 1944, they didn’t do so well.  And it took Hitler just about siphoning gas from every tank he could lay hands on to scrape up the fuel to launch the offensive we know as the Battle of the Bulge.

Compare and contrast:  In Italy, where the terrain was much less favorable to the material preponderance the Allies brought to bear, and aircraft, while important and operational, could not exercise nearly the dominance of the battlefield they could on the open plains of northern Europe, it took the Allies nine months to advance from the Straits of Messina to Rome, and then even by the end of the war, nearly ten months later, they’d still only fought their way into the northern reaches of Italy.

To put a bow on it:  Both World Wars were first and foremost battles of material.  It took a lot of bleeding and dying by the “P.B.I.” (as the other British services called the “poor bloody infantry”), but in both cases the winner was the guy with the biggest shopping basket.

The FAZ article, written by some fellow identified as a German-Iranian political scientist currently earning his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, recites all the usual theoretical objections to sanctions — they hit the “innocent” civilians; they only widen the disparity in power between the tyrant and his subjects; they don’t even stop the tyrants from in fact achieving the material advances in aggressive capacity which is the principal moral foundation for them; by demoralizing the civilians they make it less likely rather than more that the middle orders which have without exception been the backbone of democracy everywhere will rise up against their tormenters.  The author observes (truthfully) that thirty years ago when sanctions were first pasted on Iran, it had no centrifuges; now it has thousands.  He recites (again, truthfully) that the Revolutionary Guard, far from being hollowed out, has taken over enormous swathes of the Iranian economy.

The author allows that with sanctions, the West has constructed a “narrative” under which both it and the Iranian regime may “conveniently” live.  From the regime’s side arises the author’s objections that sanctions don’t work.  From the Western side arises the objection that it’s a question of “human rights” which are being denied to the Iranian people, and the author turns his cards face-up in rhetorically asking whether everyone, no matter under how oppressive a regime, has or does not the same human rights.

As an initial matter, the reader can draw some very useful conclusions about this author’s understanding of the world in his pretty-much explicit  moral equation of the West with the Iranian theo-criminal thugocracy, which has announced as its objective of state the eradication of Israel from the map and the slaughter of every Jew it can lay hands on.  He sees no worthwhile distinction between the two sides, or at least not one he thinks sufficiently exercised to comment on.  He points out that the Iranian populace suffers under the regime, and it suffers under the sanctions.  Therefore both sources of its suffering are morally equivalent.  I’m sure there’s an expression in formal logic for this sort of fallacy, but I prefer Lincoln’s comments:  “‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

Allow me to repeat a point I made a number of years ago to someone, genuinely pious, who stated, in exactly so many words, that there was “no difference” between “Christian fundamentalists” and “Muslim fundamentalists.”  Seriously; this person actually said that.  I allowed that I was not (and remain not) interested in any god who cannot discern any distinction between a group of people on the one hand who express the opinion that homosexuality is sinful and should be discouraged, or that abortion is the killing of a human being, or that the Ten Commandments should not be hustled off from every location where they might be seen by a random passer-by, and on the other hand people who will slaughter a fifteen year-old daughter (mom doing the holding down, dad doing the stabbing) because she dated someone from another faith, or will strap a remotely detonated explosive vest to a retarded child and send him into a crowded market place, or throw sulfuric acid in a woman’s face because she had the effrontery to show it in public.  I’m not interested in that god; I’m not interested in his teachings; I’m not interested in worshipping him.

On a more practical level, I’ll just observe that nothing works that is not taken seriously by the person doing it.  You’d think that dynamic would be sufficiently obvious that someone getting his doctorate would have tumbled to it by now.  But no.  And here we must ask just how seriously has the West taken its sanctions against Iran?  Well, not very, if what you’re thinking of is the € 25 billion in business that Germany has done with Iran just since 2005.  It’s currently running at € 3 billion per annum.  And Germany’s not the only sinner, not by a long shot.  The Chinese are propping them up, as are the Russians.  In fact, Germany’s not even the only Western country merrily doing business while wiping the blood off the currency they get.  Through the end of 2009, the EU had done € 65 billion of business with Iran in the preceding three years.  Top traders?  Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Spain, and Belgium.

The author of the FAZ article mentions none of the above in his denunciation of sanctions as ineffective.  Of course they’re not effective, if your own side is undercutting them.

In terms of whether the populace is so demoralized as to be incapable or unwilling of uprise, the author also (“conveniently,” to use his own expression) omits to mention the massive uprising of summer, 2009.  Millions of Iranians took to the streets, at first to protest vote fraud in elections, but then rapidly expanding their demands for fundamental changes in government.  And what did the West do to help them?  Beyond words, nothing of any substance.  It came out later that Dear Leader at the time was trying to initiate negotiations with the folks killing the protesters (much in fact as he’d announced as a candidate, to meet with them “without preconditions”).  This past fall Romney foolishly claimed Dear Leader had been “silent,” when in fact — after dithering for weeks, while the Revolutionary Guard slaughtered the protesters in the streets — he offered them . . . words.  No, what Romney should have claimed was that Dear Leader was inert.  But Dear Leader was in good company; no one in the West did a damned thing to help the people in Iran throw the bums out.

It’s those two omissions in the FAZ article which reveal it to be no more than propaganda.  In tyrannies the effectiveness of propaganda relies on deprivation of alternative sources of information; in societies which at least nominally endorse freedom of speech its effectiveness must rely on ignorance.  Fortunately for our German-Iranian omissionist, he’s got extremely fertile soil to plow in that respect.

While we’re at it let’s . . . ah . . . contrast how the West responded to civilians trying to overthrow an overtly Islamist regime (nothing more than words) with how it responded to Islamists trying to overthrow non-Islamist regimes (active military intervention in support of the terrorists, expressions of “relief” by Dear Leader, and money, always money).  The U.S. is in the process of handing over top-of-the-line F-16 combat planes to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in fact.  A man (former Sen. Hagel) is presently still in the running to be appointed Secretary of Defense, when he has a long, long track record of vehement anti-Israel statements and actions to his credit. 

Dear Leader and his ilk can’t quite seem to make up their mind on Syria, though.  The people on both sides want to slaughter Jews.  It must be so confusing for the Deep Thinkers in the West.

I don’t know whether the author of today’s FAZ article is just a conventional lefty Jew-hater, or whether he’s a paid stooge for the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Someone’s paying his tuition, after all.  Maybe he’s working down the local Tesco’s.  Maybe not.  But no matter his motivation, his article is demonstrably nonsense.

Defender of the Realm

Posted on by

Is the subtitle of the third and last (posthumous) volume of Wm. Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion.  Manchester died in 2004, before he could begin writing this final installment, which covers the period from Churchill’s first appointment as prime minister in the chaos of the German invasion of France, in May, 1940, up through his death.  I ran across and bought the first two volumes during the summer of 1993, when I was working my 1L summer out in the middle of nowhere and had little to do of an evening but read, drink beer, and sweat in my un-air-conditioned apartment.  I ran through those books pretty fast (in fact I may have read them twice during the course of the summer) and enjoyed them tremendously.

In the first two volumes I thought Manchester did a phenomenal job of communicating just how unusual a person Churchill really was.  There’s one vignette that’s very telling.  Churchill’s still a young man, and was visiting some people at their ancient country house.  The house caught on fire, and ended up destroying everything, including some priceless manuscripts from the Middle Ages.  Churchill writes about the fire to his then Sweetie Pie, later wife, Clementine Hozier.  The fire was tremendous fun, he writes, very exciting, the blaze consuming everything before it, etc. etc. etc.  All his best efforts in the bucket brigade, as he climbed up on the roof, were unavailing, and the place was a total loss.  One mourned for the devastated owners, of course, but what fun and excitement it all was.  Manchester notes several revealing things about the letter, the first being his thoughtlessness in scaring the bejesus out of Clementine.  She fully expected to marry him, and here he’s just sort of off-handedly relating how he almost got himself killed traipsing about on the roof of a house that’s in the process of burning to its foundations.  That thoughtlessness of others, especially those nearest to him and fondest of him, is a recurring theme throughout his life (and one that he learned at mommy and daddy’s knees).  Secondly is the apparent callousness of his description of the fire which destroyed centuries of this family’s existence in a matter of minutes:  it’s all great fun, a tremendous spectacle, and a stage for Churchill’s enactment of his own prominence.  But last and ultimately of greatest importance is the salient point that, jolly fun though he found this family’s tragedy, it was Churchill alone who climbed onto the roof, risking his life to try to douse the flames.

Of Manchester’s other books I’ve read only A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance Portrait of an Age, his placing of Magellan’s circumnavigation in its socio-historical context, and The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty That Armed Germany at War, the title of which is self-explanatory.  The former is as much about a world and humans’ understanding of themselves in it as it is about a specific person; the latter is a book which spans the period 1587 to 1968 and includes within it some truly unsavory characters (Alfried Krupp, who during the war so abused his slave laborers that even the SS complained about it, comes as close to the incarnation of what the Occupy “movement” thinks of business in general as anyone I’ve ever heard tell of).  So I can’t tell if it’s a Manchester trait to identify as warmly with his subjects as he so obviously does with Churchill.  It’s pretty clear that Manchester just plain likes Winston, in addition to being massively impressed with him.  In several passages in the book (I’m speaking specifically of those relating to the Gallipoli campaign, but there are others) he comes across as nearly an advocate.  That may or may not be true; certainly that particular campaign, had it succeeded, might well have been the game-changer it’s portrayed as having had the potential to be.  That is, however, as it may be.

I’ve spent the past 19 years waiting for the next chapter, and was mightily disappointed when Manchester died without having published it.  I’d understood (incorrectly, as it turns out) that he’d got the book more or less written, but ran out of time and energy before getting it in final form.  As it was, by the mid-1990s Manchester was so enfeebled that he wasn’t able to write any more at all, and had not even started the writing of this final book.  So the book is listed as by William Manchester and Paul Reid.  Manchester had done the vast majority of the research, the note-taking, the collating into themes, and so forth, although there was still quite a bit to be done, and of course all the actual text is Paul Reid’s (they’d become friends several years before, and it was Manchester who out of the blue one day asked him to finish the book when he was gone).

Reid’s and Manchester’s writing styles are not dissimilar, although certainly not identical.  I don’t pick up from Reid quite the reverential tone towards the subject that I did from Manchester.  For example, Churchill is portrayed in this final book as being more given to alcoholic intake than in the first two, and in fact being noticeably elevated on more than one occasion.  This is in marked contrast to the same topic as treated in the first two volumes.  In numerous places Reid goes out of his way to describe specific meals eaten by Churchill and company during the war, and more particularly to describe their sumptuousness.  While he doesn’t say as much, the contrast must be intentional with the constant hunger that the vast majority of British, and especially the urban populace, experienced both during the war and for several years afterward.  But is it really necessary to go into that kind of detail, repeatedly?

Churchill’s war ended up being divided into three phases, the first being his period close to power, but without the ability to grasp the wheel alone.  He came back to the Admiralty on September 3, 1939, but with Chamberlain stll in charge Churchill was both responsible and muzzled.  Then of course the debate of May, 1940, after the disaster of Norway and the launch of the German western campaign, brought Churchill what he’d been after since about 1895.  That phase lasted until December, 1941, and was in the epitaph of his long-time personal doctor, Lord Moran, “his finest hour” during which he “held inviolate” the soil of his beloved England.  And in point of fact, if the first step in winning is not losing, and the key element of not losing is not admitting, even to yourself, that you might lose, then what Churchill did for England during those months alone will ensure him immortal memory, or at least as long as Western memory endures.

The final phase, which lasted until his ousting from power in his moment of victory, can best be described as a long slide towards the contumely which must have grated on him more than nearly anything else.  As he told Violet Asquith (as she then was, in 1906, when he was 32 and she nineteen), he did believe himself to be a glowworm.  Which he was.  Yet once Britain had been drained financially, bled down physically, its capital bombed into rubble over wide areas, and the United States had swept into the room, Churchill inexorably became Yesterday’s Girl.  The progress of his relationship with Roosevelt takes on the character of supplicant and high-handed adored object. 

It’s only to be expected, of course, that three allies as different from each other as the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union would have war objectives different from each other.  It’s also only natural that each ally should attempt to extend its vision as far as possible in the post-war world.  Stalin spoke a great truth when he observed that in that war, the winner would not merely seek territorial relief but also impose his own social system on the conquered.  That in fact happened, both in the areas occupied by the West and of course in Eastern Europe as well.   But Reid’s portrayal of FDR and how dismissively he dealt with Churchill casts a sobering (and IMHO necessary) corrective across the hagiographic understanding of Roosevelt which pervades American consciousness.  On any number of occasions Churchill would propose things to FDR, from meetings to clarify and resolve conflicts of strategic vision to dealing with Stalin, who apart from Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek may have been the most difficult ally of any nation ever.  And FDR would — literally — blow off answering for days or even weeks.  He treated Churchill like he treated his cabinet members, as someone to be lied to as desired or convenient in order to get what he wanted. 

Whatever other faults Churchill may have had, and he had them in abundance, no one ever departed a meeting with him under any misapprehension of what he thought.  Lying through his teeth was a Roosevelt trademark, which he indulged with Congress, with his cabinet, and with the press.  He was the kind of fellow who’d pat you on the back, piss down your pants leg, and tell you it was raining, all the while smiling in your face.  No one can deny FDR his crown as master politician, in the sense that he clung grimly to power through a whatever-it-takes program, and in the process crafted a theory and practice of politics which is still very much alive and well.  Cobble together as many different constituencies and promise to beggar the world to line their pockets, and they’ll vote for you.  Thanks to exactly this approach to electoral alignment we are looking forward to another four years of the only expressly anti-American president ever.  If partisanship was the lodestar of Churchill’s political life, dishonesty was that of his ally.

I would also note here that FDR was very much a late-comer to the notion that Hitler and national socialism were things which needed exterminating at any cost.  If Hitler had as his next-door neighbor Japan, instead of Poland and France, you really have to wonder whether the U.S. would have gone to war against him at all.  If he’d undertaken to rid the African continent of its native population, instead of Europe of its Jews, would Roosevelt have put any effort behind amending the neutrality laws, or pushing Lend-Lease through?

In any event, the story of the U.S.-British alliance in World War II is an illustration of the thought Stalin was getting at when he once asked someone what he thought the Soviet Union weighed.  The unspoken question being of course what was to happen to the poor individual on whom that weight chose to fall.  Once the wealth and manpower of the U.S. were tossed into the scales of the Western alliance, Churchill and the British were doomed to becoming what they in fact did: junior partners asked to shoulder the burden and die in the process, but beyond that to take what scraps might be handed them.

Not that Churchill and the British were necessarily the saviors and strategic geniuses that might have Won the War Overnight if only the U.S. had done as told.  One of my favorite quotations from Geo. C. Marshall, when — yet again, for the umpteenth time — Churchill was flogging his notion of invading the Balkans, a man-killing battleground in which the chief advantages of the U.S. — massive hardware in the air and on the ground, deployed on massive scales — would have been effectively neutralized, all to be launched by invading Rhodes, was the blunt observation, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddam beach.”  End of conversation.

A recurring element in this book is quotation from the diary kept by Field Marshall Alan Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff.  To say that he thought poorly of everyone except himself is understatement beyond the call of duty.  He thought everyone in every room he was in was a moron who had no strategic vision at all, didn’t know his business, was a footling amateur.  It was Brooke’s self-consciously shouldered cross to have to bear with all those drooling imbeciles.  This is a book about Churchill, of course, and so we don’t get much idea of what alternatives Brooke proposed, in light of the constraints of both the political realities of the situation and the material realities of time, manpower, and hardware (a quick check on Amazon.com shows only an edition of his war diaries, but no proper biography).  Reid does observe in several places that a key element in understanding the differences in strategic visions between the Americans and the British is that the British commanders, being raised with the dynamics of sea power as part of their background intellectual fabric, thought like sea generals, the Americans thinking like land generals.

Perhaps that’s true.  And perhaps in a war of smaller scale the strategic approach would work of continually shifting about the perimeter of a vast land power, probing for weak spots to attack and exploit, and if not playing it by ear then nonetheless allowing one’s specific actions to be guided by results on the ground as they unfolded.  But I beg leave to question whether when you’re steering around hundreds of thousands of troops, backed by logistics chains thousands of miles long, with the days of living off the land decades in the past, and the outcome of battle driven as much by how fast a magneto can get from Dayton, Ohio to the Meuse River in France as it is by the niceties of wheel, pivot, and entrenchment, that approach of we’ll just nip ashore here and there, and see what happens will work.  I am surely doing them an injustice on at least some level, but in a world in which the Dodge 2½-ton truck has claim to be the weapon that won the war (the Red Army marched to battle in U.S.-made lined boots, and its equipment rode Mopar), I get the impression that F.M. Brooke’s thinking was more than a little tilted towards the world of the Retreat from Mons.  The Old Contemptibles marched themselves out of the tidal wave of field gray.  In contrast, those trucks don’t run on hay that you can get from any pasture you pass.  They and their fuel and parts have to move as seamlessly as possible from their point of manufacture to the front.  Places with poor transportation networks, lack of access to deepwater ports, and with rugged terrain are just not conducive to moving modern armies.  Going ashore in the Balkans would have frittered away the one advantage the inexperienced Americans brought to the table: sheer mass of men and material.

At any rate, I think Reid did a worthy job of discharging his promise to Manchester.  There are a few places in the book where ordinary bad editing sets one’s teeth on edge (this seems to be my fate, that some of my favorite books have stuff that wouldn’t pass a WordPerfect spell checker, like several spots in Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern).  There’s a place where the French soldier is a “poliu,” even though elsewhere it’s invariably given correctly.  Then there is the bad fact-checking of identifying Tirpitz as a “battle cruiser.”  And then there’s the statement that Churchill was “nearing early middle age” when the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.  Huh?  Churchill was born in 1874; the Wrights flew in 1903.  My math tells me that would make Churchill in the neighborhood of 29 years old.  Whatever 29 may be it is emphatically not middle age or even close to it.  But all those are penny-ante quibbles.

The book’s a terrific read, and coming to the end is a disappointment.  If that’s the measure of a book’s success then Brer Reid’s done a very good day’s work.  I just wish Manchester were here to enjoy his friend’s success with him.