War – Page 7 – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The recent flare-up in Israel, explained by Massachusetts public school principal

October 12, 2023October 10, 2023 by philg

The public high school for kids in our former suburb of Boston has a new principal (source):

The Lincoln-Sudbury Regional District has appointed Dr. Andrew Stephens as the new Superintendent/Principal of Schools. Stephens had been principal of Lexington high School since 2017.

Prior to that he spent 10 years as Principal of Duxbury High School and four years heading Hull High School. He began his career as a history teacher in Vermont before returning to Massachusetts, where he taught for three years at Newton North High School spent another three as an assistant housemaster. Stephens is a graduate of Colgate University, where he obtained a B.A. in history, and Johnson State College in Vermont, where he got his master’s degree in education. He also holds a Certificate of Advanced Educational Studies from Boston College and an Ed.D. from Northeastern.

Dr. Stephens applied all of the above education to an analysis of the flare-up in the war that Arabs declared 75 years ago, with an email to the students, taxpayers, and parents who enjoy life in means-tested public housing (they’re not “on welfare”, though they pay nothing for housing, health care, food, home broadband, and smartphone):

Dear [Lincoln-Sudbury] Students and Families:

I write tonight with a large measure of sadness over the events that occurred over the past few days and want to acknowledge the violent conflict occurring between Israel and Palestine. While the conflict seems very far away from LS, it is not. We have members of the LS Jewish and Muslim communities who are directly impacted by this conflict and its consequences both from an affinity standpoint, and from the fact that folks here may have family and friends who live in that area. It is important that we as a school and learning community are cognizant of this fact.

Given the news coverage and access we all have to images of the atrocities from the past weekend, there is an emotional impact on all of us, particularly with our young people and those with connections to the region where this conflict is occurring. It is essential that we as a learning community acknowledge what is happening and express empathy and kindness to one another, especially during times like this. It is essential that we all work to provide our students and staff with safe spaces at LS that bring life to our values that everyone belongs and that we will support those who need it.

To that end, it is likely that our students and staff have been following the events over the past few days and engaging in conversations about the causes and impact this conflict may have from a global and local standpoint. Here are some resources to help families navigate such conversations with our young people. At school, we want to support anyone impacted during this significant and impactful conflict and strongly urge students who are impacted by the recent events to access in-school supports from their counselor and/or any trusted adult.

These are difficult times in the world and I hope that you join me in sending thoughts and prayers to the Israelis and Palestinians who are living through this terrible conflict.

This is a strange thing for Dr. Stephens to be concerned about when one considers that both Lincoln and Sudbury are crammed with Climate Doomers (maybe this is why “These are difficult times in the world”?). If humanity is going extinct in the medium-term, what difference does it make if a small percentage of humans are killed via war?

The email gives full nationhood status to “Palestine”. Note also the assumptions that Muslims from, e.g., Pakistan or Indonesia, will be anti-Israel and pro-Hamas (“an affinity standpoint”) and that a public school counselor in Massachusetts will be able to “support” a Muslim student who is upset that some of those who carry guns on behalf of Hamas have been killed by the Zionist entity.

Apparently, some recipients complained about the above email. Part of a follow-up from Dr. Stephens:

The message was not clear with respect to the fact that the attacks on Israel over the past weekend were perpetrated by terrorists and resulted in violence and atrocities that have shocked the global community. These attacks, which do not represent the views of many Palestinians and Muslims, should be condemned and were impactful at a deeply personal level to many people in our school and community.

Note the inconsistency with the first message. If Palestine is a country and Hamas is the government of that country (with broader support than Joe Biden enjoys among Americans), why are the armed men directed by Hamas “terrorists”? Why aren’t they “soldiers”? In the first message, the assumption was that Muslim students at the school would naturally have “affinity” for Hamas. In the second message, it turns out that there are “many” Muslims (among 1.8 billion worldwide) who do not support Hamas.

When did school bureaucrats start having sufficient time to comment on climate change, shootings thousands of miles away, wars on the other side of the globe, etc.? Maybe it coincides with a reduced workload on the job due to an increase in the number of school employees per student? Example:

Finally, let’s have a look at the expert on events in what he refers to as the country of Palestine:

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Are American taxpayers the biggest funders of Hamas?

October 10, 2023October 10, 2023 by philg

“Trump’s Claim that U.S. Taxpayer Money Funded Hamas Attacks Is False” (New York Times, October 8). If the NYT says that something is “false” and Trump is involved, perhaps it is worth investigating..

Although we say that we don’t like Hamas, they are the legitimate government of millions of Palestinians and have more popular support than Joe Biden does among Americans (AP: “The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is ‘most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,’ while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.”)

The most expensive services provided by the U.S. government to residents of the U.S. are, in Gaza, paid for by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), established in 1949. UNRWA pays for health care, schools, food, etc. for as many Palestinians as want them (fueled by these unlimited resources, Gaza has one of the world’s highest rates of population growth and, thus, there are more customers every day).

The U.S. is the largest donor to UNRWA (source):

Every American tax dollar that the U.S. sends to UNRWA to fund standard government services frees up a dollar for Hamas to spend on whatever it may choose.

From the NYT, a few months after Joe Biden took office, “Reversing Trump, Biden Restores Aid to Palestinians”:

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would restore hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid to Palestinians, its strongest move yet to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s policy on the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. … The move will once again make the United States a leading donor to the United Nations agency that assists about 5.7 million Palestinians in the Middle East.

It is true that we haven’t directly funded Hamas’s military operations, but by funding UNRWA to provision Palestinians with education, health care, food, etc. we are the primary enablers of Hamas’s military (much larger than the economic activity of Palestinians would otherwise be able to support).

My personal rating of Trump’s statement: Substantially True. The U.S. seems to be the biggest money source for Hamas, which “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” (charter, which also says, “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim”).

[Of course, schizophrenically the U.S. also funds Hamas’s enemies, sending $billions to Egypt, which keeps its border with Gaza closed and won’t allow Palestinians to emigrate to Egypt (they built a wall, bizarrely with help from the U.S., which says that walls don’t work), Jordan, which has opposed Palestinian military efforts, and Israel (“the Zionist entity”). So it would similarly be accurate to say that the U.S. enables larger militaries in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.]

Curiously, quite a few American Democrats who don’t identify as Muslim are now tweeting about “standing with Israel” (they’re also going to stand with Ukraine, with the 2SLGBTQQIA+, and in how many other places?). In other words, the very people who have been funding Hamas since the beginning of the Biden administration are now saying that they somehow support Hamas’s enemy.

Here’s the principal funder himself:

The top Democrat in Congress:

The top Democrat in Congress when the funding for Hamas was restored:

The #2 Democrat in Congress:

Governor French Laundry:

The Democrat who runs San Francisco:

The Democrat who runs Los Angeles:

New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker 2018 (source):

Senator Booker today:

How was Hamas going to achieve Booker’s 2018 objective of getting rid of walls in Palestine if not via military action against Israel?

The Black Lives Matter folks in Chicago (relevant to a comment, below):

Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.

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Recent settlers in the U.S. demand decolonialization in Israel

October 9, 2023October 9, 2023 by philg

I hope that everyone is engaged in solemn reflection on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

A recent rally in New York City included attacks on Jewish Israelis for being colonizers/settlers. What’s interesting about this? The photos of the pro-Arab group appears to include many Americans who are either recent immigrants of children of recent immigrants (i.e., “settlers” or “colonizers”, part of the continued displacement/replacement/dilution of Native Americans and part of a global wave of Arab/Muslim expansion that started with the original Arab conquests (622-750 AD)). People from Arab and Muslim countries were generally ineligible for immigration to the U.S. until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

How would they feel if Native Americans could gain political power here and begin a program of decolonialization by deporting everyone who didn’t have at least an Elizabeth Warren-style claim of Native American ancestry?

From the Daily Mail:

No outdoor event in NYC would be complete without Faucists wearing their masks against an aerosol virus (primitive surgical mask in the background for the image below):

The pro-Israel counter-protesters fight under the banner of the scared rainbow:

Note that the sacred rainbow can also be used by those opposed to Israel, e.g., “Queers for Palestine”. From the folks who boycott Israel:

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New York Times on the crisis in Israel

October 8, 2023October 8, 2023 by philg

The New York Times has been predicting doom for Israel for months.

July 2023, “In Israel, High Stakes for High Court: Democracy’s Fate”:

From Hungary to India to Brazil, how judges responded to attacks on their independence helped decide whether would-be autocrats prevailed in constraining the courts.

Over the last few decades, attempts to weaken the courts around the world have become recurring signals that a democracy is in trouble. Attacks on judicial independence were early steps toward one-party dominance in Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, for example.

But a move to limit the authority of the courts — like the new law adopted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition barring judges from using the longstanding legal principle of “reasonableness” to overrule government decisions — does not make democratic collapse inevitable. It’s more like a flashing red light, and how the judiciary responds can begin to decide how much damage is done.

From climate change alarmist Thomas Friedman, July 2023, “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun”:

Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?

The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values…

They just find it hard to believe that Bibi would allow himself to be led around by the nose by people like Ben-Gvir, would be ready to risk Israel’s relations with America and with global investors and WOULD BE READY TO RISK A CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL just to stay in power with a group of ciphers and ultranationalists.

But it is what it is — and it’s ugly. Tens of thousands of Israeli democracy protectors blocked roads and highways and besieged the Tel Aviv airport on Tuesday to make clear to Netanyahu that if he thinks he can snuff out Israel’s democracy just like that, he’s badly mistaken.

If the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy defenders, who have taken to the streets every Saturday for over half a year, can’t stop the Netanyahu juggernaut from slamming this bill through, it will, as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote the other day in Haaretz, “degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society, isolate the country” and end “the democratic chapter” of Israel’s history.

Friedman says that he’s unhappy about Hamas’s recent military success in the war that the Arabs started 75 years ago (see my Israel background article from 2003; no need for an update because nothing substantive has changed):

Any prolonged Israel-Hamas war could divert more U.S. military equipment needed by Kyiv to Tel Aviv

(i.e., Ukraine is the real ally)

Separately, let’s keep in mind that a country’s resources are finite. The Arabs in Gaza are among those who have vowed to destroy Israel (as U.S. Congressional Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). Instead of spending the summer keeping track of what practical steps these Arabs were taking toward Rashida Tlaib’s goal, Israeli progressives were out protesting. They perceived Netanyahu as their biggest enemy and didn’t consider the possibility that the pen wasn’t mightier than the sword. The protests against cutting back the power of Israel’s courts were negligible, however, compared to the time, money, and energy that Israel spent fighting SARS-CoV-2. This fight apparently yielded no benefits because the country ended up with a higher rate of “excess deaths” than do-almost-nothing Sweden. Instead of cowering at home, Israelis under 65 could have been in military refresher training, manufacturing weapons;, etc.

One strange aspect of media coverage of this fight is that it is characterized as being against “terrorists” or “militants” and not soldiers of a legitimate government. Hamas enjoys more support among Palestinians than Joe Biden does among Americans. Why aren’t the people carrying guns on behalf of Hamas, which represents the interests of a majority of Palestinian Arabs, then referred to as “soldiers”?

From 2021, “Poll finds dramatic rise in Palestinian support for Hamas” (AP):

A new poll released Tuesday finds a dramatic surge in Palestinian support for Hamas following last month’s Gaza war, with around three quarters viewing the Islamic militants as victors in a battle against Israel to defend Jerusalem and its holy sites.

The scientific poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research also found plummeting support for President Mahmoud Abbas, who was sidelined by the war but is seen internationally as a partner for reviving the long-defunct peace process.

The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.

“Gaza struggles to accommodate the living and the dead as population grows” (Reuters, 2022): “Its population is set to more than double within the next 30 years to 4.8 million and already land is running out.”
from the United Nations, which guarantees health care, education, food, etc. to every baby born in Gaza: “The population growth rate stands high at 2.8% and it is expected to remain stable due to decline in mortality rates while fertility rate remains one of the highest in the Arab region standing at 4.06, with high disparity between Gaza and West Bank, 4.5 and 3.6 respectively. … The increase of youth population in Palestine for the past 20 years reflects the highest increase in the Arab countries”
“UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism despite pledge to remove — watchdog” (The Times of Israel, 2022): Among the content [taught in the United Nations-run schools] that IMPACT-se flagged was a grammar exercise teaching that “the Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” the statement said. Other exercises include sentences about “Jihad warriors” against “the occupier,” commitment to “liberate” Palestine, and “resisting the enemy courageously,” according to the report. A poem teaches students that to die as a martyr by killing Israelis is a “hobby.” Islamic education material depicts Jews as “inherently treacherous, and hostile to Islam and Muslims,” including another grammar exercise implying that Jews are impure and defiling the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. “Israel is described as having been implanted by an imperialist, European, colonial, anti-Arab conspiracy with the goal of dividing the Arab world,” IMPACT-se said. Israel is erased from the UNRWA material and the entire area of the Jewish state is labeled as modern-day Palestine. Students are given exercises of naming Israeli cities as Palestinian, it added. …. Sheff said the majority of the $338 million that the US funds for UNRWA goes to education. [i.e., American taxpayers fund all of the above]

From Ilhan Omar:

Harvard perspective:

Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine

We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.

Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.

The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.

Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.

African American Resistance Organization
Amnesty International at Harvard
Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College
Harvard Act on a Dream
Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association
Harvard Chan Muslim Student Association
Harvard Chan Students for Health Equity and Justice in Palestine
Harvard College Pakistan Student Association
Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association
Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association
Harvard Graduate School of Education Islamic Society
Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine
Harvard Islamic Society
Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine
Harvard Divinity School Students for Justice in Palestine
Harvard Jews for Liberation
Harvard Kennedy School Bangladesh Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Women’s Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Palestine Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School South Asia Caucus Leadership
Harvard Muslim Law School Association
Harvard Pakistan Forum
Harvard Prison Divest Coalition
Harvard South Asian Law Students Association
Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research
Harvard TPS Coalition
Harvard Undergraduate Arab Women’s Collective
Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo
Harvard Undergraduate Muslim Women’s Medical Alliance
Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Students Association
Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee
Middle East and North African Graduate School of Design Student Society
Neighbor Program Cambridge
Sikhs and Companions of Harvard Undergraduates
Society of Arab Students

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The Spanish Civil War started as a medium-size resource allocation dispute

September 12, 2023September 12, 2023 by philg

“How the Spanish Civil War Became Europe’s Battlefield” is an interesting lecture series by Pamela Radcliff, a professor at UCSD.

According to the teacher, the political fight that started the war was about how much low-skill workers should be paid. The progressive Republicans wanted workers to be richer without them having to learn more (e.g., to read) or work harder. The conservative Monarchists, who became the Nationalists, did not want the government intervening in the labor market or allocating farmland, especially out of concern for small business owners.

The conservatives called the progressives “Communists” and the progressives called the conservatives “Fascists.” These monikers were inaccurate at first, but eventually each side lived up to the other’s worst caricatures. The progressives seized the means of production and had the workers take over from the capitalists. Farms were collectivized. The conservatives joined up with fascists in Germany and Italy. Both sides killed anyone who disagreed with them. (About 500,000 people were killed, including thousands of Catholic priests killed by the progressives.)

In other words, the political situation in mid-1930s Spain wasn’t that different from what we have here in the U.S. today! The Spanish, of course, did not enjoy the abundant natural resources that we stole from the Native Americans. And Spain did not have a big flood of low-skill immigrants like the one that is purportedly continuously enriching the United States (or at least the elites).

It would have been interesting if the Republicans had won the civil war. This would have been a tough challenge because, though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted to assist his fellow progressive economic reformers, anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S. Congress prevented him from sending weapons and U.S. tax dollars. The Soviet Union did send weapons and personnel, but they were no match for what the Germans and Italians were providing to the Nationalists and the progressives did a lot of fighting and purging amongst themselves (anyone who didn’t follow the Communist line was labeled a Trotskyite). But if the Republicans had won, it would have been interesting to see their collective farms spread all across Spain, their central planning, their workers’ paradise in the heart of 1950s Europe.

Separately, Spain today is acting against its own economic interests, if our politicians are to be believed, by trying to reduce the number of economy-boosting low-skill immigrants:

Note that this lecture series is also available on Audible.

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How’s Afghanistan doing?

September 11, 2023September 11, 2023 by philg

It’s the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 jihad to which we responded by invading Afghanistan. How’s the country doing?

“How the Taliban Suppressed Opium in Afghanistan—and Why There’s Little to Celebrate” (TIME, July 17, 2023):

The Taliban has been remarkably effective in maintaining brisk trade and crucial minerals exports, stabilizing the Afghan economy, significantly reducing corruption in taxes and customs, and generating some $2 billion in yearly revenues—the same as what the Afghan Republic did under far more generous international circumstances. … As the economist Bill Byrd puts it, the Taliban’s economic stabilization is one of a “famine equilibrium.” With 90% of the population stuck in poverty, what has kept Afghans from starving is humanitarian aid. Yet that aid has been rapidly declining this year—by at least $1 billion out of the $3 billion provided in 2022. … If the ban is maintained and in another year or so Europe starts experiencing a heroin drought not yet felt, a fentanyl epidemic will likely surge… it’s clear that cutting off supply doesn’t end use. It just forces those with substance use disorder and without treatment to switch to more dangerous drugs or new suppliers. For these reasons, the Taliban should not be praised for or encouraged to persist in its drug ban.

So the Taliban have accomplished more in a couple of years than the U.S. has in 50+ years (our War on Drugs), but they should not be praised for this accomplishment, which was not worth striving for in the first place (which is why we strove for it for 50+ years).

Humanity is going extinct, according to planetary physicist Professor Dr. Joe Biden, Ph.D. The Taliban will come to the rescue, says the Washington Post… “Rich lode of EV metals could boost Taliban and its new Chinese partners”:

In a 2010 memo, the Pentagon’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which examined Afghanistan’s development potential, dubbed the country the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” A year later, the U.S. Geological Survey published a map showing the location of major deposits and highlighted the magnitude of the underground wealth, saying Afghanistan “could be considered as the world’s recognized future principal source of lithium.”

But now, in a great twist of modern Afghan history, it is the Taliban — which overthrew the U.S.-backed government two years ago — that is finally looking to exploit those vast lithium reserves, at a time when the soaring global popularity of electric vehicles is spurring an urgent need for the mineral, a vital ingredient in their batteries. By 2040, demand for lithium could rise 40-fold from 2020 levels, according to the International Energy Agency.

In other words, the Taliban in a couple of years have done more than the U.S. and its puppet government accomplished in 10+ years.

How about coronapanic, the standard by which Americans judge the success of any society. Afghanistan, a country of 40 million (double the population of 20 million when we invaded), has suffered about 8,000 COVID-tagged deaths. Compare to 1.12 million in the U.S., a country of 335 million. 1 in 300 Americans was killed by COVID, in other words, compared to just 1 in 5,000 Afghans. The Taliban, in other words, have done a far better job of “controlling the virus” than the U.S. federal and state governments have.

Speaking of muscular human control of the weak flabby virus, what are the Scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention up to on this day of solemn remembrance?

LGBTQ+ youth with a support system have lower rates of #suicide. Suicide is preventable!@TrevorProject's crisis counselors are available 24/7/365 and understand issues faced by LGBTQ+ youth. Text "START" to 678-678 to connect.

Learn more: https://t.co/R9YZHMP4CF #SPM23 pic.twitter.com/9PQSuKNEDR
— CDC (@CDCgov) September 11, 2023

In case the above gets memory-holed, a screen shot:

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World War I and the current war in Ukraine

January 13, 2023January 3, 2023 by philg

It’s Friday the 13th, an unlucky day. Let’s talk about an unlucky human experience: war. For some potentially relevant background on the current war in Ukraine, I decided to read Keegan’s The First World War.

How can a 100-year-old war be relevant to anything that is happening today? The author says that World War I is highly relevant to World War II:

… no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots. The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct outcome of the First. On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain … No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance!”

(for those who aren’t familiar with Adolf Hitler, he was the Donald Trump of his day)

Just as the Ukraine war arrived in a Europe that was not mentally prepared for the idea, so did World War I:

In 1939 the apprehension of war was strong, so was its menace, so, too, was knowledge of its reality. In 1914, by contrast, war came, out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent.

Just as folks who’ve started wars recently have been overly optimistic about the timeline and the results (the U.S. being a notable example going back to Vietnam), the Germans had a detailed plan in which the war would be won within about 40 days:

“It is the thirty-fifth day,” the Kaiser exulted to a delegation of ministers to his Luxembourg headquarters on 4 September, “we are besieging Rheims, we are thirty miles from Paris.”94 The thirty-fifth day had an acute significance to the German General Staff of 1914. It lay halfway between the thirty-first day since mobilisation, when a map drawn by Schlieffen himself showed the German armies poised on the Somme to begin their descent on Paris, and the fortieth, when his calculations determined that there would have been a decisive battle.95 That battle’s outcome was critical. Schlieffen, and his successors, had calculated that the deficiencies of the Russian railways would ensure that not until the fortieth day would the Tsar’s armies be assembled in sufficient strength to launch an offensive in the east. Between the thirty-fifth and the fortieth day, therefore, the outcome of the war was to be decided.

Russia got off to a bad start in World War I, but ramped up eventually:

Russia, despite the terrible fatalities of 1914–15 and the large loss of soldiers to captivity after Gorlice-Tarnow, had been able to fill the gaps with new conscripts, so that by the spring of 1916 it would have two million men in the field army. Almost all, moreover, would be properly equipped, thanks to a striking expansion of Russian industry. Engineering output increased fourfold between the last year of peace and 1916, chemical output, essential to shell-filling, doubled. As a result there was a 2,000 per cent increase in the production of shells, 1,000 per cent in that of artillery, 1,100 per cent in that of rifles. Output of the standard field-artillery shell had risen from 358,000 per month in January 1915 to 1,512,000 in November. The Russian armies would in future attack with a thousand rounds of shell available per gun, a stock equivalent to that current in the German and French armies, and its formations were acquiring plentiful quantities of all the other equipment—trucks, telephones and aircraft (as many as 222 per month)—essential to modern armies.

Then as now a respiratory virus was an important consideration:

The German inability to sustain pressure was also hampered by the first outbreak of the so-called “Spanish” influenza, in fact a worldwide epidemic originating in South Africa, which was to recur in the autumn with devastating effects in Europe but in June laid low nearly half a million German soldiers whose resistance, depressed by poor diet, was far lower than that of the well-fed Allied troops in the trenches opposite.

(The book was written at the end of the 1990s. Science then said that the flu originated in South Africa. Wikipedia today says that Science has narrowed things down to just three possibilities for the origin of the influenza that was so much more lethal than SARS-CoV-2: the U.S., Europe, and China.)

The author, writing in the 1990s, might have been a little too optimistic about Europe!

The legacy of the war’s political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent folk. All that was worst in the century which the First World War had opened, the deliberate starvation of peasant enemies of the people by provinces, the extermination of racial outcasts, the persecution of ideology’s intellectual and cultural hate-objects, the massacre of ethnic minorities, the extinction of small national sovereignties, the destruction of parliaments and the elevation of commissars, gauleiters and warlords to power over voiceless millions, had its origins in the chaos it left behind. Of that, at the end of the century, little thankfully is left. Europe is once again, as it was in 1900, prosperous, peaceful and a power for good in the world.

The author hatefully says that diversity is not anyone’s strength and, in fact, is a huge threat to political stability.

The liberation of the peoples of Eastern Europe from the imperial rule of German-speaking dynasties, Hohenzollern or Habsburg, brought equally little tranquillity to the successor states they founded. None of them—Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes or, as it became known in 1929, Yugoslavia—emerged into independence with sufficient homogeneity to undertake a settled political life.

According to one of the foremost historians of the past 100 years, a country with a mixture of ethnicities and religions will eventually become too weak to defend itself:

Czechoslovakia’s inheritance from the Habsburgs of another German minority in the Sudetenland equally robbed the new state of ethnic equilibrium, with fatal consequences for its integrity in 1938. Yugoslavia’s unequal racial composition might have been brought into balance with good will; as events turned out, the determination of the Orthodox Christian Serbs to dominate, particularly over the Catholic Croats, undermined its coherence from an early date. Internal antipathies were to rob it of the power to resist Italian and German attack in 1941.

Even one of the world’s best historians can’t figure out the “War, what is it good for?” question:

But then the First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict? Why, when the hope of bringing the conflict to a quick and decisive conclusion was everywhere dashed to the ground within months of its outbreak, did the combatants decide nevertheless to persist in their military effort, to mobilise for total war and eventually to commit the totality of their young manhood to mutual and existentially pointless slaughter?

Do I recommend the book? Not as a way of understanding the action of the World War I. There are so many battles that I think that story of the war needs to be presented as a video animation with voiceover to explain which armies are moving and why. Nobody has sufficient memory plus spatial thinking skills to follow a text narrative of the entire war. Here’s how the grand 40-day plan to beat France is presented in the Windows Kindle app:

Clear as mud! Still, the book has a lot of interesting and surprising facts. Mostly, the reader is left amazed that so many people sacrificed their lives for nothing. See, for example, “Britain entering first world war was ‘biggest error in modern history” (The Guardian):

Ferguson is unequivocal: “We should not think of this as some great victory or dreadful crime, but more as the biggest error in modern history.”

He continued: “The cost, let me emphasise, of the first world war to Britain was catastrophic, and it left the British empire at the end of it all in a much weakened state … It had accumulated a vast debt, the cost of which really limited Britain’s military capability throughout the interwar period. Then there was the manpower loss – not just all those aristocratic officers, but the many, many, many skilled workers who died or were permanently incapacitated in the war.

More: Read Keegan’s The First World War.

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National WASP WWII Museum

December 7, 2022November 25, 2022 by philg

As we remember Pearl Harbor today, I will share some photos from a recent visit to the National WASP WWII Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. I learned that just over 1,800 women who’d already earned at least Private certificates were invited to train as Women Airforce Service Pilots (closer to 1,000 completed the program). The museum does a good job of walking visitors through the progression of training to fly military aircraft.

I knew that WASPs had ferried new aircraft from the factory to military bases, but I didn’t realize that they’d also towed targets for live fire practice (video interview). Remarkably, none of the women were killed during this activity.

Some details on the admissions and training processes:

Note that an interview with Florida-native superstar pilot Jacqueline Cochran was required.

The museum preserves some of the trainer aircraft (airworthy, apparently; note the oil drip pans) and shows off the skeleton of a “Bamboo Bomber”:

There are some poignant stories and memorials regarding each of the 38 WASPs who died during the two years that the program existed. No WASP was ever in combat, but there was plenty of potential for a mechanical problem in an airplane made without CNC machine tools. There was no moving map, no GPS, no NEXRAD for weather, etc.

WASPs were civilians, though Jimmy Carter retroactively made them military personnel (on the one hand, their job was nowhere near as dangerous as being a combat pilot and they never had to deploy overseas; on the other hand, their job entailed far more danger than that faced by millions of military men, e.g., those who worked stateside at desks). The museum highlights later female-identifying military pilots. The sign below makes it sound like an F-14 crash was the plane’s fault (after mismanaging an approach, Kara Hultgreen stomped on the rudder like a student pilot, which killed one engine, and then failed to manage the single-engine go-around).

The sign below about Colleen Cain caused me to search for more. She and two fellow crewmembers died going out at night into horrific weather to try to save seven sailors on a fishing boat. They had trouble with navigation, plainly, and ended up hitting terrain. They would all likely still be alive today given GPS and moving terrain maps. It is tough to understand how people can be brave enough to fly helicopters for the Coast Guard. A core part of their job is going out into weather bad enough to sink ships.

The museum’s conference room featured incredibly comfortable “sled” chairs that allowed a slight recline and had sufficient cushioning. It looks like they are Office Master OM5 stacker chairs. I am tempted to order some for kitchen table use!

Admission is free, but donations are welcome.

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A visit to the Nobel Peace Center

September 11, 2022September 4, 2022 by philg

Today is 9/11, the anniversary of the 2001 jihad, our reaction to which was to engage in years of war. I’m going to devote today to describing a visit to the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo.

The Peace Center is in a former train station, no longer needed because Oslo, unlike Boston, constructed a tunnel to unify all of its trains into one station. A view from the National Museum (mostly art):

The red brick towers behind the building are the City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is actually awarded.

The visitor experience begins with a history of Alfred Nobel, whose father was an impoverished entrepreneur and engineer. In addition to being a chemistry nerd, he loved to write fiction:

When he was young and poor, women refused to marry him. When he was old and rich, he didn’t want to get married.

This is what set him up to die without heirs and, therefore, endow the Nobel Prizes.

Treason is not just for Donald Trump and the January 6 insurrectionists. Alfred Nobel was also convicted of treason:

The visitor can use a touchscreen “peace personality” explorer. If you put in zero interest in helping anyone, the software says that your closest match among Peace Prize recipients is Barack Obama.

Moving upstairs, we find a room devoted to polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who later become a diplomat. Nansen seems to have been one of the originators of the idea that people in non-Malthusian situations are obligated to send money, food, and other aid to prevent the consequences of Malthusianism. His lecture in 1922:

“When one has stood face to face with famine, with death by starvation itself, then surely one should have had one’s eyes opened to the full extent of this misfortune. When one has beheld the great beseeching eyes in the starved faces of children staring hopelessly into the fading daylight, the eyes of agonized mothers while they press their dying children to their empty breasts in silent despair, and the ghostlike men lying exhausted on mats on cabin floors, with only the merciful release of death to wait for, then surely one must understand where all this is leading, understand a little of the true nature of the question. This is not the struggle for power, but a single and terrible accusation against those who still do not want to see, a single great prayer for a drop of mercy to give men a chance to live.”

In the spirit of Nansen, the UN World Food Programme won the prize in 2020 “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.”

There is a room of tablets on sticks, a bit like some of the installations in Marfa, Texas (“Visitors are required to wear masks indoors”, said the site on September 4, 2022). Each prize winner gets a tablet:

Following Olympic viewing procedure, we will concern ourselves only with Americans. Barack Obama (2009) is featured for creating “a new climate in international politics”. Quite a few winners are featured for ending wars, but somehow the Big Guy didn’t win in 2021 for ending our war in Afghanistan? Al Gore won in 2007 and Jimmy Carter in 2002. Notorious racist Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for his role in founding the quixotic League of Nations. Norman Borlaug won for deferring our date with Malthus via the Green Revolution.

A notable non-American winner is the Dalai Lama, some decades before “Dalai Lama Says Europe is for Europeans, Refugees Should Go Home and Rebuild” (Newsweek 2018) and “Dalai Lama Says a Female Successor Must Be Attractive, or People Won’t Want to Look at Her Face” (Newsweek 2019).

The museum promotes “freedom of expression”, but the gift shop suggests that some perspectives are more welcome than others. A sampling:

Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister from 1990-1996, liked to say “It’s typically Norwegian to be good at things.” (source) The Nobel Peace Center is certainly consistent with this point of view.

Readers: What are you thinking about today with respect to the events of 9/11/2001?

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