That reference to Jefferson was interesting. Although preventing automatic primogeniture was then and remains the classic way to prevent wealth accumulation and fits his presumed vision of a republic of yeoman farmers, still that would have been a progressive position coming from a man of the landowning classes.

But what exactly did he advocate for American inheritance law? Presumably, in a system of freely determined bequests, anyone who wanted to keep his estate intact would retain the right to will it all to a single one of his offspring. And they in turn could do the same if they wanted. To prevent that, one would specifically have to legislate equal or otherwise at least partible inheritances, which would itself be a gross infringement of liberty. Since, presumably, any children [then male, and nowadays both sexes] not inheriting could be told to get a job. Or at least fobbed off with a tiny share as seed money. Then again, I’ve always been pretty absolutist on the right of a man to dispose of his money however he likes, presuming no dependent spouses or minors are involved.

“By the way, don’t think for a moment that war never solved a problem, or achieved a goal for an imperial or other regime, or that countries didn’t regularly find victory in arms. History is filled with such examples. So what if, in some still-to-be-understood way, something has changed on planet Earth? What if something in the nature of imperial war now precludes victory, the achieving of goals, the “solving” of problems in our present world? Given the American record, it’s at least a thought worth considering.”

I think this is potentially valid, although the ‘war no longer works’ meme has been around a while in multiple contexts and it isn’t problem-free either.

But overall, the US needs to at least consider it and to also contemplate making better use of other policy tools. The US thinks it is good at diplomacy and has unparalleled soft power to go with it but these beliefs are false, or at least flawed. US diplomacy consists of condemning others for doing things the US reserves the right to do and of browbeating others to observe US interests while denying any other state has interests or insisting their interests, but not US ones, be subordinated to international ‘norms’. Which are defined as those things consistent with US interests, or with ‘American values’, a notion that shifts around a lot and allows exceptions for, you bet, the US only. The US needs to get better and more realistic on these fronts. And stop assuming the world wants to be America. Even the countries most similar to and friendly toward America don’t want to be America.

Still, there is a supporting case to be made that the US way of war doesn’t achieve US goals, not necessarily because the world no longer allows it, but because of three additional factors:

1. The US doesn’t know what its goals are. Whether overall, or in any specific conflict. I can think of no example where it did from your list. Except perhaps the two tiny missions that more or less worked. A connection? And is it the scale that meant US failure in the others, or the lack of clarity? Or both?

2. When the US tries to define its goals, it is both too maximalist and too vague. Hence, it always ends up as some vague notion of liberation or nation-building. Force is, agreed, at best a partial tool for these ends. Perhaps the problem is not the tool, but the ends.

This is partly, but only partly, a problem of the political culture. Voters are fools and cannot be sold on anything like plausible, let alone pragmatic goals. Only the great cause will get them to vote in favor, or just clam up. Relatively modern and liberal empires like the UK and France were slightly prone to PR demands [anti-slavery, eg.] but their statecraft was not wholly prey to it and their voters were more willing to tolerate reasons of state when the troops were regulars.

Perhaps that number 3 is what has changed. It may be insoluble. Just try selling an intervention in Afghanistan that ended in roughly 2005 with the US restoring the King and a Pashtun-led coalition government with tribal backing, and a warning not to play host to AQ. Or an intervention in Iraq ending with Saddam dragged out of his hole and a US puppet general in power [or whatever solution a more informed person deems practical]. Regardless of whether or not either country then descends into civil war.

3. The US is not willing to accept that its policy may not result in a net increase of peace, or stability, or democracy, in any given region, at least not in immediate terms. These may not necessarily mean defeat. It depends on who gains. The failure of the invasion of Iraq is only that it has allowed the possibility of Iranian gains there. All else that has happened has not been to America’s disadvantage. Except that America foolishly left good men to die there while it fell apart.

Well, there will doubtless be some on this site who disagree, but I still consider it beyond dispute that the Allies of the second world war were the “good guys”, notwithstanding that they had colonial empires and used aerial bombing or let some German POWs starve in 1946. None of their empires compared in barbarity to Nazi administration, aerial bombing though inherently barbaric had been anticipated by all in the 1930s and the Allies innovation was mainly in scale, and letting a percentage of POWs starve in a food-deprived and wrecked continent does not equal setting out to slaughter them or let them die at slave labor. And although the USSR was not less barbaric than the Third Reich, I recognize the pragmatism of allying with the former over the latter. One allies with the murderous barbarians that are farther away and pose the less immediate threat in order to crush the ones that pose the immediate one.

But beyond the ambiguities of WW2, why do Americans [overwhelmingly and seemingly ineradicably] and to a lesser extent other Western peoples [recently and to my mind under American psychological influence] seem so insistent on the need for good and bad guys, and for wars that are both initially justified and run with these distinctions in mind? Having professional regular armies was historically supposed to reduce the need for this sort of crusading nonsense. One does not waste the lives of one’s people on trivialities, and one should do better by them in terms of gear and care during and after, but professional soldiers are not draftees.

The decision to invade Afghanistan or not, or invade Iraq or not, how long to stay and under what circumstances, and what conditions to strive for or leave behind, should not have anything to do with “good” or “bad” but with advantage and disadvantage. That can be narrow US advantage, advantage of some coalition of players with the US role determined by whether the advantage of those others will also benefit the US in some way, or overall advantage to some strategic concept like “stability”, again presuming US leaders determine that this is to America’s advantage. Everybody else piles on or doesn’t based on how they see their advantage benefiting or not, including if they think their sole advantage will be the favor of the US on some totally unrelated issue.

Why is all that so hard to get across, to politicians or to the electorate?

Now that all may seem callous. Let me stress that I am of the view that wars of this sort should not be frequent, need not be, and need not last so long. America’s choices and failures to choose prolong them. It is not forced on America.

If conflicts were really decided for on realist grounds, that might mean some risk and loss to military personnel on grounds that American voters might consider appallingly cynical and even unjustified. And it would almost certainly mean ends that could not be justified on CNN. It might even mean more military actions, but I am willing to be they would be shorter, more useful, and have fewer American losses in total.

Afghan or Iraqi, or any other host nation losses, are of course irrelevant. Especially if they are generated by local on local grievances.

Pity we have reached the point at which the native youth are only to be motivated by the same cheap conceits that were used to reach out to minorities- curricula in which they can see “their lives” “reflected”.

I’d like to see a curriculum that has nothing to do with any of their meaningless little lives, native or foreign, or mine for that matter, in any direct sense as the curriculum-mongers always mean it. Try teaching them math, science, history, etc. The point is to take children out of their natural, tawdry, day to day concerns and show them something broader and more important. And then see which of them aspire to join that world. I would no more want to see education reflect the quotidian blather of working class Britain than that of refugee class Pakistan.

Now, once having dismissed the educrat notion that children ought to be educated by tying the content to their daily dross, we can discuss the actual content. At that point, I would endorse a wholly Britannocentric approach. Subjects should be taught accurately, with due account of where innovations came from. If Muslims find inspiration in some of that, that’s fine. Ditto Greeks, Indians, Chinese, what have you. Italians, Germans and Russians can find similar inspiration, or French, Poles, Czechs depending on subject. But the history of the subject and how it is used are the point, not who contributed what.

And if anything about contributions is stressed, Britain should stress Britons. God knows few peoples have contributed as much or more. If the native working class cannot find inspiration in that, especially with the outstanding lists noted above, they can go back to football and beer.

Will no one here volunteer to compose the marching song of the human resistance in the new simiocracy?

It must begin, at minimum, by quoting Troy McClure, “I hate every ape I see from chimpan a to chimpan z….”

Pop culture can really distort one’s view of these things.

I remember reading this book in the late 80s [ordered it from some publisher based on a small ad in National Review[!]].

Shortly thereafter, I saw “The March”, a largely execrable but somewhat prophetic British movie in which EU [!] politicians and bureaucrats feared the approach of a horde of refugees under a charismatic new leader leading them across the desert. They even deployed EU troops [!] in blue helmets in Spain and Sicly.

In 1992 I watched a tv movie, fairly good,in which a Louisiana family led by Craig Nelson left the impoverished fishing coast where he had made his living and joined AMerican economic and environmental refugees heading north across a collapsing USA, hoping to get into Canada to find his distant Acadian relatives. They had some trouble with the fascist looking Canadian border police. As a Canadian, I wish we had those.

Then in 2004 that absurd Day After Tomorrow came out.

In 2004, I remember thinking, get real. Those Americans wouldn’t be refugees in MExico. MExico would become USA 2.0 with that much stray military power around. The only problem would be resources to maintain it, controlling the MExicans, and maintaining control over anything of value left in CONUS.

In 1992, I had to speculate about how Canada could hope to maintain independence in the scenario offered, and what measures wouldI advocate to control and/or resist the entry of huge numbers of Americans, many of whom would seem a close kindred people, but frankly all of whom would mean near-term chaos in our country and long term would far more likely assimilate us and alter our country and its institutions than the reverse. I eventually concluded there would have to be rather rigorous and politically impossible screening criteria, not only by ethnicity, and there would be a compulsory oath of allegiance to the Queen or you’d have to be shot right there. We’d have to seriously alter the harshness of Canadian jurisprudence to make things like that stick.

So I’ve thought about it all more than a few different ways, not least what it means when the refugees are a kindred people, from a long allied nation, but still radically different and more numerous. Or, as in that 2004 movie and 1992 telefilm, when the refugees represent the former dominant power and still have power. Imagine what it would have been like to be a Sarmatian and find that some Mediterranean catastrophe had caused the entire population of a collapsing Roman Empire to disgorge itself, with Legions, onto the Pontic steppes via Crimea.

But when it comes to the March or Raspail’s scenario, I can still only see tactical and logistical problems.

That preface by the editor was among the most disgusting displays of contemporary weasel-speak I have seen in ages, so full of magnificently deployed cliches I at first thought it must be fake. But then I read it again and could hear it in the kindergarten-teacherish manner with which I was myself corrected/upbraided by peers in more than one undergrad seminar 25 years ago. Those peers would appear to now be in command, and their pupils after them.

What kind of a man could write that sort of thing with a clear conscience and in the belief it has valid intellectual content?

Also, the content of Jog…’s post suggests the degree to which even a slavishly pomo left wing sensibility is subject to the shifting diktats of the inner party. His post was itself a tiresome read, and his self-correction all the more so.

Almost the only point on which I could understand his criticism of Feynman was the moment when he suggested disapproval of adultery, which struck me as shockingly quaint and inconsistent with the rest of his worldview. If women are free to pursue various mating strategies along the same lines as men, and men are free to do with women whatever women consent to, what place is there for the marital restrictions of the old world, with their tedious moral obligations?

As inconsistent as this seems to me, how gratifying to learn that even now the enforcers of orthodox relations between [among?] the sexes [gender identity matrices?] condemn adultery as though marriage vows have meaning.

Also, perhaps the more important question, why did any of this ridiculous baffle appear on Scientific American? I saw nothing about Feynman’s work in science, pro or con. Is SA just a gossip rag and scandal sheet now?

Karen,

“French…is the language of the most prestigious grade schools in Canada. ”

That seems a little strong. Not a lot, just a little.

I live and work in Ottawa and know a fair number of Canadian foreign service who put their kids in the lycee system, which is represented here. That is, the actual international French lycee system following the French Ministry of Ed curriculum. That’s partly a function of prestige, probably justified [i assume so and although I have heard mixed opinions they were mainly critical of non academic aspects of lycee culture], and of utility for people being posted abroad. The lycee is widely found in other countries and so kids can have a consistent education. The fact it is French helps bring up the kids in the foreign service’s supposed-to-be-bilingual culture.

More broadly, it gives them a leg up for that part of Canada’s elite that most values bilingualism- so, gives them possible futures in senior government, diplomacy, politics at the federal level. Less valuable in business, but hardly valueless. Also, a leg up if they also want to follow international careers at the fancy-suit level, though less so than once would have been the case. French being now more prestigious than practical, at least outside the EU.

Similarly, there is French immersion education in both private schools and public schools of quality. But, again, the linkage of French to academic quality, or even to perception of academic quality or overall social prestige is hardly 1-1. French immersion is idealized for political, cultural and social reasons by elements of the upper middle class, variably by province, for reasons much like those above, so it makes sense that it would often coincide with the kinds of other qualities these parents seek in their kids’ schools. But one can hardly say, for any province, that all or even most of the best or even most prestigious public or private schools make French their routine language of instruction. Some will.

I may be behind the times of course. But I haven’t seen any evidence for any more extravagant statement on French education.

eah said: “shot down this plane (accident or no accident), one of the more hideous atrocities in my lifetime”.

Wow.

Others have noted that the second clause of that is pretty overstated unless one was born after 2000. And maybe even then.

But let’s focus on the as yet uncriticized first part of the thought. The clear implication is that even if it was an accident it was an atrocity. There IS precendent for that attitude, I am sure. But has it been generally conceded that an accident can be an atrocity, especially in the context in which one is accusing someone of a committing an atrocity?

Canadian (Ontario) public schools all the way here, from JK at the age of just short of 4 in September 1974. High school class of ’88. [Go Phoenix!] Two degrees since then, most emphatically not STEM. Though I did remember for a while a bunch of astronomy calculations and formulae from first year undergrad.

Damn. Still getting used to the fact that as of next year, the distant 30 year future cited at the end of Back to the Future will be here, and nary a sign of antigrav skateboards, Mr Fusion auto engines, etc.

Now that’s out of the way…

We experienced what, in retrospect, must have been the absorption of American new math at some point in the 1970s, but it seemed very sporadically implemented and dependent on principals’ and teachers’ tastes during that time, and must have faded away or been partially retained at best. There was a lot of references to sets at various points. I don’t know let alone remember enough to say for sure what was new or old.

I also concede I was never among the best at math. Worst subject and there WERE times I was having trouble getting it at a conceptual level. With all that in mind, I find it interesting to reflect on what I can and can’t do now, and what it seems to mean for math in everyday life.

Calculus, trig, geometry and algebra are basically gone now from complete atrophy. I miss them on the level of, “wow that would be nice to remember and I’d feel a little more comfortable in certain situations”, but it is not a worry for my work or daily life.

Curiously, I have dim memories as a really small child of having trouble with subtraction, not the concept of course but the mechanics of doing it on paper as opposed to the brute force in the head method, still faster. I had it down soon enough but once you stop doing paper math in class it seems to fade as well. I still sometimes have to make myself remember that procedure. Never really comes up, but that’s a bit more embarrassing. Funny to me that it is harder than addition.Again, just the paper and pencil mechanics, not the concept or the accurate result.

I also remember something with division. Somehow or other I had learned short division first and it struck me as easy and I had trouble learning the mechanics for long division. Once I had learned the latter, I struggled with the former. Which was new and which old, or whether both were “old”, I don’t know. Now I can do long division effortlessly, so it must have really stuck. Still can’t remember the short division procedure. As with subtraction, do most daily divisions in the noggin anyway. As you can see, not an engineer.

So I think of math as one of those subjects we are taught to see which of us really get it and will make our careers in a closely related field, which of us need to know it as part of knowing the breadth and scope of human knowledge and how what we know and retain and use fits into that, and which of us need to be aware of it so we go through our own endeavours without being wholly ignorant of human achievements and our own limitations within them. But we all need some kind of basic numeracy.

I generally assume that I have managed to achieve items 2-4 with flying colours and I haven’t needed more, though I wish it had been more within my capacity.

With all that in mind, I am still broadly willing to accept that most people do not need math in everyday life beyond a certain point, and that point generally does not include calculus, trig, geometry or algebra in any serious way. Although I would not wish to understate the number of fields of professional endeavour in which they are needed, either. Neither would I wish to suggest that it would not be better for individuals and society to retain more of these skills if they could be taught more effectively, presuming there is such a way. But on the whole, ability to count, familiarity with the scale of numbers, units of measure, fractions/percentages, and the four basic arithmetical functions have served me well. In my foolishness, I have assumed these skills were omnipresent in society.

I have resisted drawing the conclusion that they are not, despite the numbers of people unfamiliar with the distinctions among thousand, million, billion and trillion, despite people who cannot make change or tell the difference between positive and negative [I don’t mean using them in arithmetic, either, just that they exist], to the detriment of their understanding of personal and public finance.

And then I read that example about the thermometer and had the terrifying thought that there may well be North American adults of whom that is true. Along the lines of those who cannot read an analogue clock for the time. With kids, I can at least understand. They might never have seen the analogue forms of any kind of gauge.

Sorry to have banged on to get to that rather simple concern. In retrospect, it seems rather futile…

That lemonade example seems like one of those situations in which familiarity with test requirements would be a plus.

Given a set of choices, I would easily recognize 15+(2×15) as correct [I forgot to add that order of operations is something I retained in core memory from algebra; go figure]. Simply told to write it in arithmetical form I might well put 15+30 if not feeling snotty enough to write 45.

Just being a tad facetious.

Still, I’d be satisfied if a numerate citizenry could arrive at 45, with an awareness that Sunday was clearly the better sales day by a factor of 2. I concede that the basic algebraic symbols seem simple enough that the formula they want should come easily to most.

Skip Foreplay #25-

I didn’t expect to laugh out loud on this post. Many thanks.

I’m sympathetic to a number of points from the generally Russophilic side of this argument-

That the US and west should not intervene and have no interest or rights involved; that if the US gets to meddle in other countries and arm its proxies then Russia and others can’t be criticized solely for doing the same; that the world is overblowing what seems to be the accident of MH17 [not the first airborne or seaborne neutral loss in a war zone] and underplaying Russophone deaths; that the world cares more for Palestinian [or, from the other side, Israeli] deaths than Russians [or Ukrainians for that matter].

But here’s the thing.

If Russia gets to slaughter Chechens to keep Russia together, as Moscow sees it, then Ukraine gets to slaughter ethnic Russians to keep Ukraine together. At least as far as moral appraisal from outside is concerned. [Quite apart from the fact that Chechnya is geographically and economically a lot more marginal to Russian well-being than the Donbas is to Ukraine; let’s assume that Chechnya is as important to Russia as Donbas is to Ukraine.]

Fairly limited numbers of people in the west complained about the fate of the Chechens [presumably due to the Law of “Eww, Muslims”] and nobody contemplated military intervention or indeed any serious diplomatic intervention to stop the Russians or save Chechen lives, let alone to support the Chechens’ claim to independence from Moscow. So, if the Chechens die to maintain the integrity of Moscow’s borders, Russians die to maintain the integrity of Kiev’s borders.

[On an unrelated note, if Russia gets to kill Chechens to maintain Russia’s external borders, why exactly doesn’t Georgia get to kill Abkhazians to maintain Georgia’s borders? This question does not preclude the reality that Saakashvili was stupid to poke the beast or was directly the instigator of the last war.]

On Crimea, I would say the Russians have actually a much better case based on history, demography and interests than the US had for the Gadsden purchase, for which it paid Mexico cash, or any of the rest of the gains of the Mexican war, which the US took by force. Russia is taking back what once was its own, and is populated by many Russians, and which is of considerable military significance. The US made the Gadsden purchase to rationalize the border at the margins of the huge territory it had just stolen from Mexico by force. So, agreed, the Ukrainians should be willing to deal if Moscow is even willing to offer compensation after all this.

But that puts Mexico in the Ukrainian position with the US as Russia. Here’s a more interesting Mexico-based analogy. While it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Mexico will ever be economically let alone militarily competitive with the US, it is not impossible to imagine one in which the US is so divided and paralyzed that it cannot and/or will not bring all its resources to bear in a dispute and everyone knows that. So in 100 years or less when the Mexican population of the southwest decides it wants to be part of Mexico, presuming it wants that, and Mexico perhaps grabs a bit of land outright and provides vaguely covert support to Mexicans in the rest of the territory of Spanish-speaking dominance, does the US retain the right to take military action against them in defense of its territorial integrity?

iStevefan-

I’m very supportive of the idea that Mexico’s claim on those territories was weak. It rests on the fact that they also were part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, governed from Mexico City. I for one would have considered it legit for Spain to send troops to defend California against Mexico and fight a running war against them over the rest of it. Distance would probably have triumphed.

But Mexico’s claim is not so weak as all that. Many of the Thirteen colonies had territorial claims on unsettled lands west of the Appalachians, just assuming they had that right. They all assumed an automatic right of Americans to settle and, ultimately, possess the Ohio lands even though these were recent British conquests not administered from any colony’s capital. Americans were quite vehement that these were valid claims, despite being beyond the borders of their colonies and not even administered by them.

The founders even thought they had a valid claim to absorb Quebec and the maritime colonies like Nova Scotia, which would have been the equivalent of Mexico laying claim to rule Cuba or Hispaniola. I’m content they didn’t manage to make that lot stck.

That’s all fair, and there is core truth in your first statement. In that sense, Russia can get away with stuff Ukraine can’t, much like the US figures it can get away with stuff the Russians shouldn’t. Pragmatism and hypocrisy do go together.

I think I was mainly reacting to what has often been a Russophilic tone around here, in which Russia should be allowed to get away with its proxy wars because, after all, the US does that all the time and is still doing it. And I think that’s fair. So I pointed out that, at least in fora like this where it is the law/ethics/morality that gets us all in high moral dudgeon, the same principle applies between Russia and Ukraine. If Russia can maintain its borders with massive force, then Ukraine gets the same privilege. Even if the victims are Russians.

That may not mean they can succeed like the Russians, but it should mean they don’t have to take any heat for it from the outside world that the Russians wouldn’t, and Russian moaning about it should be taken at face value.

If Russia gets to slaughter Chechens to keep Russia together, as Moscow sees it, then Ukraine gets to slaughter ethnic Russians to keep Ukraine together.

Does Serbia get to slaughter Kosavars to keep Serbia together? You are just question-begging.

I don’t think I am question-begging. There is no need to rehearse the entire history of western cynicism on these matters [not that I condemn cynicism or the ranking of human lives for the purposes of foreign policy at all, I entirely endorse it]. The west intervenes where it thinks it has an interest to be served. Whether it is right is a question for debate. The Russians are acting now for the same reason, I get that.

I merely wished to point out that the Russians’ whingeing about how their co-ethnics are being massacred by Ukrainians makes them the current world leaders in hypocrisy, and that even if one wishes to treat Russian claims fairly in this situation one should be aware that nothing Ukraine is doing is any different from what Russia would do, and has done, on a vastly greater scale, over longer time, and with a higher body count. The only difference is that this time it is Russians getting killed.

That’s all fine, but the West Lothian question was originally posed as applying to a situation in which a devolved Scottish parliament would vote on Scottish laws, while the UK parliament including Scottish members would vote on laws applicable only to England.

It doesn’t even matter what the powers of such a devolved parliament are, or how broad or narrow their scope. Whatever they are, they become exempt from the votes of English MPs and the equivalent English laws are still subject to Scottish MPs voting.

The situation as it is now, as it happens. Also true for Wales and NI for admittedly much smaller spheres.

If there were no devolevd assemblies, the WLQ would not apply.

The problem I would see with your retort is that it already assumes the existence of separate countries as distinct political entities within the UK. That’s the mentality that drives and further grows from devolution. [I appreciate that the UKgovt has long since adopted this meme to the great confusion of the world, wherein “country” and “sovereign state” are almost if not quite functionally equivalent terms, though they were not so in the past]. You have to already look at things in those terms to imagine that the unitary state involves the rule of an English majority over other countries and the passage of inapplicable laws. If you assume it is one country, then Scotland actually is overrepresented in the common parliament that decides laws for the whole country. How is that unfair?

I always wanted to ask the Gaelic type nats whether they would agree to a separate Scotland that started at the line between Firth and Forth, roughly the borders of Alba.

They could kick the English out if they wanted.

The Lowlands were, at the time Scotland was born, British [Welsh] in the west and English in the east. Both peoples are plankowners of Scotland.

It is true that the British element in the west faded, partly replaced by Norse Gaels, and that the Gaelic kingdom rooted in the north and west long dominated the country even with the English element in the southeast. Still, the ENglish element was native the the time the kingdom was born and never absent thereafter. It took 500 years to dominate, and had absorbed some Norman, but it was always there. SO if Scotland were to separate as a Gael-driven bantustan, it doesn’t get the Lothians or the Borders, or most of the southwest either. For good measure, the old Briton lands of Strathclyde up to Dumbarton also stay out of Alba.

Some nats might observe the English arrived in the 6th century as invaders from Europe. True. The people they displaced were Britons, not Gaels or even Picts. One might also observed the Gaels arrived at the same time as invaders from Ireland. Damned foreign Irish settlers.

Exactly, and well put.

I am always left slightly unnerved by these Caplan posts. I feel that he is reporting from Mars.

Your post has clarified it for me. He appears to actually think the rights of all humans are worldwide and encompass global freedom of movement and settlement, since countries are their authorities and claimed “national” identities however defined are all fake concepts, and therefore their application is inherently totalitarian.

He writes as though his opponents all recognize this obvious reality too and are simply being either obtuse or totalitarian in refusing to acknowledge it. He does not seem to consider the possibility that his opponents do not recognize the oneness of the world or the universal mobility of humans as among their rights. Curious.

I am glad to see a couple of posters already tackled the Roman question. I quite agree. But you are understating it with your last point. Siegecraft? Didn’t the Zulus maximum settlements amount to wooden kraals? Just burn ’em down.

Though, being Romans, the Legions would surely have first built elaborate camps and circumvallations whose ditchwork and palisades [presuming there was any wood left in the country] would dwarf the besieged kraal itself.

If the Romans managed to get to Zululand with anything like 40% [to be generous] of the Zulus’ numbers and didn’t die off at once [I don’t think South Africa itself is much of a natural disease hotbed- it’s pretty temperate for one thing] they’d have MUCH less trouble at Ulundi than they had at Alesia.

Sorry, I see others have commented on the lost great cities of Zululand already. What a great concept, though, if the pulp writers hadn’t already sucked the marrow out of the “lost cities” meme already. Good meme, though.

Still, in the context of the alleged primitivism of northern Europe, I did manage a shout out for the Gauls.

It seems to me that the relative primitivism of the north compared to the mediterranean was largely true throughout pre-Roman antiquity [or all of antiquity for the extra-imperial areas], but it was mainly based on the [not insignificant] absence of much written language or many cities made of reasonably permanent materials [or wooden communities larger than towns]. It was real, but can be carried too far. The Celtic [ish] world eventually managed fairly productive and organized agriculture, towns, river commerce, clannish polities organized on a fairly large scale, and in a number of cases galley type ships at least comparable to those of the mediterranean world, albeit perhaps a century behind on size in some cases. And those cultures could support fairly territorially large political jurisdictions of settled populations, albeit still organized on tribal lines. And all of that in place when the Romans showed up. Of course, still lagging behind the Mediterranean world on all those measures, and having benefitted from contact with it, but still, not that far behind except in a few big areas. That’s why they could be Romanized to a degree so quickly. And, more typical of less developed peoples but still remarkable as a display of material culture, first rate metalworking.

The Germans were farther behind, but under Roman influence they advanced pretty far between the death of Varus and the rise of Alaric. They could up sticks and move even in the latter era, but they knew about farming life and towns.

Wikipedia has these figures:

The numbers of communicants are uncertain, given the illegal status of Catholicism. In 1755 it was estimated that there were some 16,500 communicants, mainly in the north and west.[13] In 1764, “the total Catholic population in Scotland would have been about 33,000 or 2.6% of the total population. Of these 23,000 were in the Highlands”.[14] Another estimate for 1764 is of 13,166 Catholics in the Highlands, perhaps a quarter of whom had emigrated by 1790,[15]

Now, granted, those are figures that start ten years after the ’45 and include proportions of the whole Scottish population in some cases. But still. This is the period that emigration really got going. That at least suggests the possibility that the Catholic figures in the early 18th century would not support the claim that “most” Highlanders were Catholic.

At the very least, it is common to forget that huge numbers of the Highlanders who rallied to the Jacobites were Episcopalians rather than Catholics. There was still a strong tradition of intra-Protestant sectarianism over the conjoined causes of whether or not to have bishops and whether or not to follow a Stuart King. At least in Scotland, the political dividing lines of the 1680s lived on.

You would think it would have been any number of other articles on this or similarly-themed sites, but somehow this post was the one that made me want to give up.

I made it through her unintentionally self-parodic remarks about being too dumb to know what an editorial is and too lazy and stupid to have read one before, and was into her parochial musings on giving Colombians political asylum and then it hit me that there is nothing to be gained by going on.

For a brief moment, I might have considered a retort along the lines of how Colombia isn’t a place in which the US or Europe claimed a piece of land, unless she means the Spanish from whom the Colombians and she are descended, and whose conflict is internally driven.

Then I visualized the madness of focusing on logic and listened to a wav file of Jack Nicholson explaining how to write female characters from “As Good as it Gets”. Only half of the issue at hand or less, but still partly on topic.

Is “family” any longer any better defined than “polity”? Both have begun being defined by kinship and both have evolved to the point at which kinship is blended by adoption through legal contract.

Granted, family is more tightly tied to kinship even now than the citizenship of a country like the US, but both ideas partake of both blood and voluntary ties. Adoptive children are presumed to have the inheritance rights of natural children, as a rule.

Different societies define the scope of citizenship differently, but they also have and do define the scope of family differently.

And all of that is just something I would offer within the scope of human societies as they have existed historically. At this point, I would say progressivism is rapidly redefining both the family and the polity and is actually way far out in front with the redefinition of family.

If only on those grounds, I don’t see that one can rhetorically dismiss arguments in defence of borderism that take on the family as a basis of comparison.

As to the Golden Rule, surely none of familism, citizenism or borderism fall afoul of it. It requires that one treat others as one would wish to be treated oneself. I don’t know anyone asking to have equal rights to inherit the family property of others and I certainly am not, ergo I am not obligated to share mine equally with all. Ditto my benefits of citizenship in my country.

Apologies if someone has already noted this, but I can’t help but thinking that German artists’ romanticization of tribal barbarism produced Wagner while African American artists’ romanticization of tribal barbarism has produced hip hop.

Perhaps that comparison just reflects by cultural biases or personal taste.

One might retort that the Germans also produced Nazism. Then again, let’s look more closely at the recent history of Africa itself…

Excellent point. The various prominent Nazis were all over the map in their attitudes to the “barbaric” ideal of Germanism. Himmler sort of exalted it, but his imagery was actually more like a retconned sort of medievalism with a pagan gloss, kind of a dark side Arthurian mythos, rather than any real exaltation of mud hut forest dwellers. Goebbels probably thought it a distraction from scientific materialism, useful only as propaganda. Hitler seemed to prefer the idea that the modern Germans were at least spiritual heirs of Athens, Sparta and Rome, the actual heirs having been debased a bit by events.

Worth also noting that by the time they swarmed into the Empire, the Germans really weren’t all that culturally or technically backward anyway.

There should probably be some limits on the rehab of the Middle Ages but it has been a necessary corrective- it’s not as though imperial Rome was making too much progress any longer, and the negative trends we call medieval were largely in place under its rule from roughly the 3-4 century, and I don’t especially or necessarily mean Christianity either. There was enough going on in various segments of the “medieval” world to qualify as civilization – the pre-Arab conquest era [I deny that Pirenne has ever been disproved], the Carolingian empire before its arguably more destructive collapse], the 13-14 c, etc.

The Italians above all should not forget their own achievements in that last period.

13-14c Europe was plenty impressive as premodern societies go.

The hereditary peers no longer sit in the House of Lords en masse by writ of summons, as they did for so many centuries. Since 1999 they elect some of their number to fill a limited number of places, that is to say that a small number of hereditaries sit in the Lords as representatives of a corporate group and elected by them. [Scottish peers used to do that.] The rest are no longer a part of Parliament by virtue of their titles.

Whether the majority of hereditary peers not in the Lords are therefore eligible to be elected to the Commons I am not sure, but they should be. If not members of the Lords, the original reason for their being disqualified for the Commons is gone.

Therefore a hereditary peer should be able to be elected to the Commons, and as such overcome the 20th century customary barrier to being a Prime Minister. [it was assumed after the Marquess of Salisbury, an excellent PM, that nevertheless a Peer could not any longer be PM in a democratic age as he would not have been elected to the Commons. This was a point against Lord Halifax in 1940, and recognized by Halifax as such.]

Sons of hereditary peers, as they were themselves NOT peers but technically commoners, could and did always served as elected MPs in the Commons. That’s why there were so many MPs using courtesy titles belonging to their Peer fathers but still serving as MPs. And Ministers.

Since the 1960s, hereditary peers were also able to disclaim titles to allow them to be elected.

So I can’t think of any reason now that a hereditary Peer or son or daughter thereof could not follow them into politics. So if a PM were granted a hereditary title, that would not be an inherent barrier for their offspring so inclined to try to start a political dynasty.

Also, hardly any hereditary Peerages have been granted since Life Peers were created in the 1960s. Peerages to former Ministers have pretty uniformly been Life tenure. Thatcher may have been an exception, but not sure. I thought her title died with her.

The overwhelming majority of members of the Lords are Life Peers since the 1999 reforms expelled the hereditaries as a class.

The son or daughter of a Life Peer is a commoner and thus eligible to stand for election to the Commons.

So I can’t think of any remaining legal or customary reason why the offspring of a retired Prime Minister who has been awarded a Peerage of any kind could not themselves try to become PM in their time. If the peerage is hereditary and they inherit it, they nevertheless need not become a member of the House of Lords as once would have been automatic, and if the peerage is Life then the offspring will never inherit it anyway.

British political culture HAS tended away from political family dynasties getting the top job more than once since Victorian times- even with the Chamberlains, a Liberal upper middle class family from the industrial west, hardly aristocracy but producing three men in Cabinet over two generations, only one was ever actually Prime Minister. But Britain has had quite a few family dynasties producing MPs- I think the Commons has a whole whack of legacies in it right now. Even the socialists have done this many times- there may still be a Benn in the house today.

It is definitely a neologism- I didn’t formally do British history as an undergrad 20+ years ago but was interested- few if any sources seemed to be using it then. Now it’s everywhere. It might even be cited in Wikipedia.

But it is indeed very useful if not to be overused. It helps to clarify not only what Lurker posted but also that there were three kingdoms sharing a king, but theoretically separate and with varying practical control from England. The timelines, issues, and participants in Ireland and especially Scotland were not identical with those in England and were following their own course while tracking the relevant events in the much larger and more powerful England, and both influencing and being influenced by them. King Charles’ flailing about in Ireland and his need to enforce his government and Church policy in Scotland against the adherents of the Covenant were why he needed to call the Parliament of England after so many years without one, to raise and fund an English army to invade Scotland.

But the Scots [all sides] mainly stood aloof from the subsequent English war for a while, with the Covenanter regime intervening for Parliament at one point but later [unsuccessfully] in the name of Charles II. Despite similarities with Puritanism the Scots Covenanters hewed to Presbyterianism and their English Presbyterian counterparts were being pressed by the Puritan regime in England [to simplify]. Also, because the English had executed Charles I. Scots Covenanter ideology about Scotland’s place as the new Israel demanded that there be a King to stand in the place of David. Even they would have no truck with Cromwell’s republic.

Apropos of all that, and although I have little sympathy with modern Scots nationalism or identity politics, as a Scots descendant it annoys me that one of the charges against Charles I was treason on account of seeking to recruit Scots or Irish troops to recoup the military situation in England. This from a parliament that not only had waged war on him but had raised no principled objection to the idea of funding an English army to invade Scotland to alter its political situation, and indeed itself eventually invaded both Scotland and Ireland.

Water under the bridge, perhaps, but still.

I can’t say I ever heard “Paki” used in any way other than disparagingly, and that’s going back 40 years.

It’s one of those abbreviations that seem always intended to have been an insult, rather than a short form, and a mid-serious insult at that. There wasn’t a really more serious insult in general circulation for them, no equivalent to those available for black people, for example. It was not regarded as quite as serious an insult to Pakistanis as the latter were for black people, but still the most uniformly insulting. And I can’t say anyone using it intended it as a mere abbreviation either. YMMV, but we had plenty of Pakistanis in Toronto 40 years ago. It was an insult in that time and place.

It was of course doubly insulting to South Asians who were Indians or Sri Lankans, but that was inadvertent on the part of the users- few would have known the difference. It would have been trebly insulting to most of the hearers, since they were predominantly Bangladeshis who had just got out from Pakistan’s genocidal war against their secession movement. But, similarly, few white Canadians in everyday life were aware of that.

For comparison, “Paki” used to describe a Pakistani would be like wop or dago for an Italian, more or less. Worse by a mile than “limey” or “pom” for a Brit, and certainly not the equivalent of the mere abbreviation “Brit”. Which some oversensitive Brits now take as an insult, as it happens.

Worse than “Jap” used for a Japanese person as Americans used it in the 1940s, but perhaps equivalent to “Nip”, these both being also simple abbreviations that were plainly used as insults.

Arguably comparable to “Chink”, which is a sort of abbreviation married to the mockery of Chinese speech patterns.

Arguably also comparable to Gook, which I can only assume was originally insulting slang for Koreans based on their real name for their country in their own language.

Of course using “Paki” to refer to non-Pakistani South Asians was more like using “Chink” for a Japanese or “Jap” for a Chinese. Fighting words, as I remember.

Good times, Canada in the 1970s, early 1980s. I remember in roughly the 7th grade having some Croatian kid singing Irish rebel songs about killing Protestants to me because he assumed I must be a Catholic like him. He must have misframed my affirmative answer when he had asked me if I were Christian. Diversity just rocks.

“Paks” I didn’t hear until adulthood, and it is still somewhat common short form in some lines of work, with no insults really intended.

Still, nobody likes hearing their people routinely described with patronizing abbreviations, even when widely considered not intentional insults.

It is also worse when your people aren’t, like Americans, the top dog and scarcely capable of imagining themselves in any other role, or observing that some peoples grate at neverending locker room bonhomie.

Imagine if the Japanese had actually supplanted the US as some [it now seems like an absurd dream] once feared, and a declining US was constantly the subject of Japanese policy interventions, military actions, and floods of Japanese bureaucrats. And all the latter were on tv referring to Americans as Yanks, never Americans. How mild and neutral would the term seem after a time?

The major continental monarchies and aristocracies indeed practiced primogeniture, at least after a certain early stage of their histories, and for the fringe ones as they became more integrated with the System.

The Franks had practiced equal inheritance and constant redivision of the kingdom through the Merovingians and to a lesser extent the Carolingians. Among other social and institutional changes in the wake of the Carolingian empire’s prolonged and destructive collapse, this lesson was learned. Both the Western and Eastern Franks [later slowly reconceived as “France” and “Germany” aka the German kingdom aka the German core of the ‘Empire’] initially practiced elective monarchy among lingering Carolingian heirs and from among the great ducal houses. But always in both realms for one throne apiece.

The German houses squabbled enough for control and to keep the monarchy strong, with the result that this prize kept passing back and forth and, combined with genealogical failure, kept one house from making it permanently hereditary. By the time the Hapsburgs managed this feat centuries later, it was a much more convoluted and decentralized system. And still formally elective. But every attempt at hereditary succession assumed primogeniture.

In France, the Capetians in practice accepted the rapid disintegration of royal power over the great feudal lands and concentrated on entrenching hereditary succession in law and custom. They succeeded, and a few centuries later the idea that a king could come from any other lineage would have been considered absurd, and even pro forma elections were long forgotten. Even the English claim was because Edward III had a Capetian mother and thought his claim nearer genealogically than the cadet Valois house, when the main Capetian male line finally failed after nearly 400 years. All claimants to French kingly titles, ever since, have been by descendants of Hugh Capet elected and crowned in 987 and, except for the English claim, they have been claims by male successors in unbroken male succession by primogeniture. The current genealogically senior male in unbroken male line from Hugh is Luis Duke of Anjou, from the Spanish branch of the Bourbons, who is titular Louis XX. The Orleans candidate is from a Bourbon lineage from Louis XIV’s younger brother.

The “English primogeniture” was only in England because it was imported from France by the Normans. It was the French system in all respects. It later absorbed variations like allowing male succession in female line [The accession of Henry II in light of his mother Matilda, daughter of Henry I, required a long civil war to make the point; this principle being established albeit not again followed for centuries, allowed Edward III to make his female-line claim to the French crown; Since the Plantagenet Kings of England, Dukes of etc. in France were not able to make this stick by war or by persuading enough other French dukes and jurists, the French constitutional tradition henceforth assumed that only uninterrupted male lineage would do], and eventually female succession to the throne [tested by Matilda but never confirmed until Mary I took the throne 400 years later, and was followed by her sister] but it was initially a full on French import. The Saxons had practiced something more like Scandinavian royal succession, a kind of primogeniture with a strong elements of tanistry within the royal line, selected by the nobles. Princes were occasionally passed over. King Alfred was a younger brother. There is a disputed argument that the final king Harold was an heir of his older brother, centuries later.

Like the Saxons, the other Scandinavians adopted French practices as they integrated with the core European norms.

Salic law technically applied to all inheritance of land, not just royal status. But it never applied in England. Not that they exactly assumed women could inherit property equally until nearer modern times, but the rules for that typically were more relaxed than the continent, and as I said collapsed in two stages wrt to royal succession itself . ANd English jurists always assumed that Salic law could not be the basis of anything in England, since England had never been part of Salic land or of any Frankish realm. For the same reason, Salic law never applied in Spain, or Southern Italy or Poland. The English lawyers in Shakespeare’s Henry V pull that one out to claim that Salic law does not bar the English claim to France either, because Salic land is in Germany, not France. That’s a tad vacuous, since the law was applied to France by Salian Frankish kings who conquered it for centuries, but it was clever insofar as the Salians came from Franconia.

But I digress.

Your note about male line descendants always succeeding has some support in England, but from fairly early on there are some biases in favour of daughters of sonless men as against brothers of the same men. Inheritance was biased by law to pass downward rather than laterally. Took a while for that to reach succession to noble and royal titles as opposed to pure estate law, though.

Morganatic marriages were very Germanic, applied to Germany in its broadest geo cultural sense, but in addition were eventually imported into Russia. Obviously the Russians didn’t start that way, since Peter the Great married a peasant woman who first succeeded him [Catherine I] and then passed the throne to a daughter for a time. But Russia had them later. They could have worked in France, since France and Germany shared similar caste-based approaches to defining nobility, but were not really a French practice. Couldn’t have worked at all in England- class social prejudice is one thing, but the only legal noble status was Peer, and that applied only to the real title-holders.

The subject of President Tyler having living grandson reminds me of something that Derb [I think] mentioned in a column long ago- something about an Englishman in the 20th century knowing someone who had in youth known someone born under Cromwell. Something like that- the timelines were really remarkable. If Derb is on this thread- does this ring a bell?

Thank you Sir!

On two counts.

1. For making that connection explicit. I was thinking about Tradition [to which idea I was introduced long ago by reading John Reilly’s site] and wondering whether Houellebecq was being pro or con throughout Torn and Frayed’s review. Glad to not be the only one.

2. For that link. Overjoyed to see someone archiving Reilly’s outstanding work. His was one of the most preservation-worthy blogs of the turn of the millennium and its first decade. I’m sorry I never downloaded the whole site. Reilly’s illness and eventual death deprived us of an intelligent and humane observer whose thinking would have suited this decade just as well.

Hmmm.

I see how Situationism, the Milgram experiments and indeed other forms of postwar psychology could be taken to have progressive assumptions behind them and progressive conclusions emerging from them.

I even see, if one puts it in terms of the presence or absence of ‘personal character’, why the elements of the Milgram experiments could be taken to prove a leftist point.

Still I find it hard not to conclude that Milgram, if indeed what he showed is that given the right circumstances any human could do anything, proved the validity of one of the most conservative of all truths.

The same truth that underlies Lord of the Flies. I don’t care what anyone says, not even Golding. That book makes the case for a conservative understanding of humanity, order and civilization.

The same truths that underlie the Copybook Headings, for that matter.

To paraphrase something Derb once wrote, civilization is the product of centuries of painful effort and is never held on to by more than our collective fingernails. And we all have it in us to to horrible things, to survive, to thrive, or even just to deprive the other guy. It is part of what we are, and it’s the part that runs things for most humans when the chips are down.

I’m not even sure that truth is un-Christian. We are fallen men in a fallen world, after all.

They are certainly anti-Sufi, but ISIS and al-Qaida are also militant factions embedded in tribal alliances, not unlike Chechens of all stripes, so why should they have developed their own nukes any more than the Chechens?

The Saudis ARE a tribe that has developed a state around themselves, so ditto. On the other hand, they did develop that state and now field regular armed forces, so that only reinforced the original point. More state, better weaponry.

The Pakistanis have missiles and nukes, sure. Worth noting the Saudis paid for a lot of that. Worth also noting that as the Islamic world goes, Pakistan is one of the LESS tribalized societies, at least as far as the Punjabi core of the state goes, and one of the more organized states ditto.

Iran has likely the closest thing to a modern society in the entire Islamic world, and the ruling structures that most resemble a modern state. ARE a modern state, for practical purposes. And fairly atomized society, both in the “positive” way that reinforces allegiance to a larger state identity and culture and generates desire for cultural experience [at least in cities], and the negative way that follows the West down the path of cultural suicide. Guess that’s why they can develop advanced engineering programs and nuclear kit.

“But the thing is, when people take it upon themselves to exact revenge, not only does it fail to prevent future harm but it also ultimately doesn’t make the avenger feel any better. While they may experience an initial intoxicating rush, research indicates that upon reflection, people feel far less satisfied after they take revenge than they imagined.”

1. It does prevent future harm if you do it right.

2. It does make the avenger feel better, as the para goes on to admit in the next sentence.

3. The intoxicating rush ought to be reward enough. Don’t be greedy.

4. Probably one does feel less satisfied than one imagined beforehand. Still more satisfied than if one had taken no action at all. Marginal gain is not no gain.

Also, eliminating Chechen terrorists is not “revenge” it’s sanitation. I was all set to post these sentiments on the NYT but I couldn’t find a comment section.

White people didn’t kill any more Bengalis than other Indians have, or other foreign invaders like the Mughals, and no European power killed anything like a fraction of the Chinese killed by Japan, and even Japan has not killed anywhere as many Chinese in modern times as have been killed by other Chinese. The record for killing of Chinese people, in all Chinese history, and as a percentage of all Chinese alive at the given time is probably in contention between 13th century Mongols and 8th century fellow Chinese.

SO those examples are terrible evidence against Whites.

Punjabis- hard to say. That wasn’t just based on Amritsar was it? Not exactly the British Empire’s moment of moral awesome but hardly exemplary in the long history of Indian war and rapine, even among wholly subcontinental peoples. Perhaps you refer to the Anglo-Sikh wars? I don’t see the problem. They were stand-up fights and, if the British were coming into the Sikh homeland with the intent of subjugating it, so to the Sikhs were fighting to preserve Ranjit Singh’s empire which included plenty of conquered neighbours.

Native AMericans, as was their right as humans, seem to have spent 10 millennia warring among themselves, a truth to which I offer no objection. If they had invented more stuff, they would have been both reproducing and killing one another at old world levels. They did what they could, where they were, with what they had. The arrival of Europeans certainly destroyed their demographic edge and prospects, but most of that was accomplished well in advance by the spread of diseases of which Europeans had no more understanding of the mechanics than the natives did. Hardly a strategy. Hardly culpable. It’d be tough to argue that natives are better off even now their numbers have been recovering at last. They are still the great losers of the hemisphere. Then again, they are now arguing for better treatment by rich, modern, technologically advanced cultures whose existence is wholly the product of Europeans developing these things in the old world and then planting them in the new. From guns and steel blades for hunting, to vast agrarian surplus, roads, medicine, welfare payments, and a ready supply of casino patrons.

Can’t say for sure about the Kenyans and Congolese. Sucked to be tagged as Mau Mau by the British, but in the long history of oppression the numbers were low. Whether they exceed the traditional wars among the tribes, Somali invasions of yore, etc, I can’s say. The Congolese got the roughest handling by Europeans in Africa. They could be the only good example in your list.

The Jews would be an excellent example, except that you framed your comment as a response to the idea that removing European history removes the good stuff and leaves most of the bad. If you remove European history, of which the emergence and thriving of Ashkenazim was a part, then you remove both the Holocaust and the people who were its victims. No Europe = no Ashkenazi to begin with and no European Jewish culture, and only then to no Holocaust. SO it is a null example- it removed good and bad inseparably.

On a harsher note, a century or two of technological improvement is worth a lot. Many civilizations have made that bargain with their own peoples’ lives one way or another. And it doesn’t vanish that quickly unless the receiving culture screws it up.

If your point is that German Christians were responsible for World War II and the Holocaust, etc., that would be a reasonable point and I would hardly quibble about how Christian they were or how well they were acting on their faith. There is a case to be made for your view.

But there is a difference between saying a bunch of Christians did something and saying they did it FOR Christianity or out of Christian motives, or in obedience to Christian requirements, EVEN if those requirements are understood in the most reactionary or obscurantist terms. The Germans writ large seem to have believed they were carrying out their war [in ascending order of “naziness”] to: defend their country from threats as they understood them; for the more realistic, to fight an expansionist war to advance national interests; to fight an expansionist war to access living space for the German volk; to fight an expansionist war to remove other volks from their living spaces; to fight an exterminationist war to eliminate other races in a kind of eternal survivalist war of all against all; to purify the German people through all of the above; and lastly to build the Germans into the seed of a future master race in accordance with a variety of vague esoteric principles.

Hitler probably goes as far as the penultimate of those motives. Himmler all the way.

Those motives ascend from standard issue foreign policy through geopolitical strategy through degrees of racialism to the fringes of New Age mysticism. All but the last are secular.

SO while many, perhaps the great majority of the German people and military considered themselves Christians and perhaps were by all other standards, their stated, demonstrable motives were overwhelmingly non-religious. And the element that was religious was pagan.

Crimes committed by Christians, sure. Crimes committed by or for Christianity, no.

If that standard of religion’s relevance is applied to blame Nazism on Christianity, it creates huge analytical problems. At least some Soviets were still Christian. That system was not Christian. The western Allies were overwhelmingly Christian. Their motives for fighting were strategic and ideological, but rhetoric aside not specifically Christian.

For that matter, the French were Catholic in the Thirty Years War but intervened on the Protestant side. Were they motivated by their religion?

The distinctions are between people who belong to a religion or belief system doing something for that belief system and according to its teachings, for it but in contradiction to its teachings, or just doing something for unrelated motives but still belonging to the religion.

The Crusaders arguably fit category one or two of that.

I’m confused by the number and variety of Arquettes so I googled them.

When did Wikipedia start using this convention?

“The Arquette family is a European-American show business family.”

Pashtuns, Arabs more or less, many traditional societies overall.

Me against everyone else.

Me and my brother against our cousins.

We and cousins against the rest of the clan.

Clan against clan within tribe.

Tribe against tribe.

Nation [barely, and in exceptional cases]

political ideology [ sometimes]

Islam.

Granted, some occasionally jump their place in the queue, but then the system is evolved to be a near-pure form of situational ethics anyway. The decisive allegiance is determined by whoever is the rival of the moment and on what level the distinction exists between oneself and him. Fluidity of these allegiances is a feature, not a bug.

The entire history of the Holy Roman Empire is the political working out of the relations between Pope and Emperor, in which separation of Church and State was acted out in its original form: everybody assumed that the church should have the support of the state in a Christian civilization, and that the state was legitimate because it had the support of the church, but they were two powers.

Every so often the leader of one or the other would get it in his head to change that, as men will. The Pope to make himself something like the emperor, the emperor to subjugate the church to his will. In essence, each aiming to make himself like the Emperor at Constantinople or like a Caliph of Islam. The union of the two swords. Never worked out.

The Holy Roman Emperor’s titles never included anything like the eastern Emperor’s honorific “Equal of the Apostles”, a theoretical imperial superiority over the Ecumenical Patriarch that emperors regularly implemented in practice in matters of church governance.

By what standard could 7th century Persia or 4th century Rome be described as either “police states” [a term that is barely possible or meaningful prior to very modern times] or as feminized societies? Empires run by rich male landowners operating patriarchal dynasties and governments in the form of military oligarchies in a state of regular internal and external war could be called a lot of things but feminized is not one of them. Also, pretty much zero welfare or other social provision by contemporary standards, even American ones.

I don’t think he was referring to the US invasion of Panama in 1989, but rather to the [1903?] US manipulation of events so that separatists in the isthmus could take that territory out of Colombia, and form the independent nation of Panama, mainly so the US could get the new puppet state in Panama to allow the building of the canal, which the Colombian government had opposed.

That would make the US analogous to Putin’s Russia, Colombia to Ukraine, and Panama to the Donetsk republic.

“If you have any doubt that the entire history of the United States is one of murder and mayhem, you need to read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.”

The chief problem with the Zinn narrative is that it tries to paint America’s history as one of murder and mayhem on a unique scale, uniquely integral to the nation. America as great Satan, even to itself.

That’s ludicrous. Just a dark side version of the boosterism of American Exceptionalism [tm National Review, these days].

America behaved like any country with the manpower and capacity to tame a continent in its own interest and then to extend its interests overseas for political, military and economic gain. Given the capacity, America used it. Apart perhaps from certain technological limitations, America does and has done nothing that Britain did not do in its prime. For example, the inventors of air policing hardly have moral lessons to teach drone warriors. Saving, I suppose, that air policing was more sporting in that the aircrew had to actually be posted to sweaty places and risk the one in a million chance of being downed by rifle fire.

Implausible scenario, but a clear and concise description of admirably clear and meaningful war aims.

Please apply for a teaching position at any US war college and try to get US leaders to think and speak in these terms.

In an ideal world Stalin should have been told to get stuffed for that cynical argument.

The Dominions getting UN seats had all been wholly self governed at home since 1867, 1901, 1907 or earlier, and 1910. Although all had been at war automatically in 1914 as part of a united empire, Britain already had no means in law or policy to compel any particular military contribution from any, and all determined the scope and nature of their contributions at will in the context of their own politics.

They had all been sovereign states in foreign policy [the usual last hurdle] since 1931 in law and earlier in practice. Canada had made a point of declaring war in 1939 in its own name.

And if all had demonstrated that they would sign on with Britain in wars comparable to WW2 [South Africa almost didn’t], they had all also demonstrated that they could not be counted on for automatic military or even diplomatic support in Britain’s wars of choice and imperial interest. The key moment was the Chanak Crisis, when it became clear they would not back adventurism against nationalist Turks.

Sorry for the length. I am Canadian and this bit of Soviet claptrap ticked me off when I first heard it in history classes and it still does. I refuse to have my country’s foreign policy or military contributions of that era compared to the conditions of a Georgian slave driver, his Russian minions, or their hordes of conscripted unfortunate Ukrainian peasant troops driven into the German fields of fire like so many Egyptians before the Persian whip.

Nothing personal. I don’t even mean to imply a complete lack of sympathy with Russian interests. But their BS quotient is always fairly high, whether now or in 1945. One admires the brio with which it is delivered, but sometimes they need a smacking.

“American” in the geographic sense, born on the [or an] American continent, the same way her parents born in England were European, part of European culture.

But by that definition she was in no sense the first “American”- and I don’t just mean the Indians. Plenty of Spanish and Portuguese and other descendants of the Old world born in America by then.

And Virginia Dare cannot be considered an American in the modern sense, since there was no American state, nation, identity, people or culture, let alone ethnicity. As a matter of what we would now call nationality or citizenship, she was an English girl and a subject of the English king, born in an English possession in America rather than in England or in an English possession in the Old World. The United States does not stand outside time and space.

Does that mean the Iraqi people are more worthy of our concern than the eastern European peoples?

From a strictly moral perspective, what is there to choose? From a more usual human/cultural perspective, the west has more heritage in common with eastern Europe and owed them priority. And from a strategic/national interest perspective, even more so.

Also, worth noting that while most of what has happened in Iraq was reasonably foreseeable, had been foreseen by some, should have been better understood by the US at least as a possibility, and was made possible by conditions the US created, still the US did not do more than a fraction of the killing. The various phases of civil war have done that.

If your country is a fractious mess of peoples desperate to finish off their neighbors at long last, and someone else creates conditions in which this is possible and you all go to it, YOU, not the someone else, are chiefly responsible for that killing. The Shia, Sunni, Kurds and what have you of Iraq are old peoples with long histories, and as peoples they have the moral rights of peoples. If, given a moment in which they could choose another path, the weight of history is too great and settling scores is the order of the day, they have that right and I would neither condemn them for the choice [I might make it myself in their places] nor attach opprobrium for doing what is natural.

Neither would I let them offload blame for it. The US occupation created an opportunity that Washington should have known they would not likely take, and did it to get rid of the US’ own enemy not for the Iraqi people [a wholly legit thing to do], but it created that opportunity all the same.

Some percentage of Sunni decided to fight for their old position on the possibly correct assumption that they must be top dog or dead. Perhaps they were right. But they also decided by 2006 to provoke the relatively dormant Shia into making a full on sectarian war a reality. The Shia decided now was the time to reduce the Sunni once and for all. And now we have the next phase of backlash going on.

If that’s how they all wanted to handle things, good luck to them. Peoples get to settle things however they want. They should own it.

I am reminded of the Afghans after 1989 complaining the US “abandoned them”. Perhaps the US just assumed that having helped them with their war, they should be let alone to make of the future what they would. Apparently that didn’t work either.

Even in the 20th century you could probably find more than a couple of other culprits to fill in the gaps between Hitler’s Germany and the US- there are a lot of contenders.

Chiang’s China should be in there and, no, the US is not responsible for all his killings. For one thing, people are responsible for what they do far more than the people who place the means in their hands with other ends in mind, even if the crimes ought to have been foreseen. For another, Chiang’s previous patrons when consolidating power were Russia and Germany, not the US.

Also, Imperial Japan itself was doing pretty well in the mass slaughter games in a fairly short window.

You could probably find others.

More generally, unless you can rack up DIRECT killings by the US as direct acts of US policy that get up toward 10 million or better, there must be some pretty wide daylight between the US and the top 3 on that list. Iraqis killing one another to settle their own conflicts do not count.

Indeed, if everything that is a direct or indirect result of policy regardless of intent, capacity, or the choices of local peoples on the ground, then Britain is probably worse than the US.

Or to be fair, make it direct killings by the US as direct acts of policy with the killings as their goal that gets up to 10 million or better, and/or killings that are foreseeable results of US policy and serve some policy end of the US by the fact of the killings taking place that get up into the tens of millions, and excludes the wilful choice of peoples on the ground to take up arms against one another regardless of the US forces’ actions or intentions.

The Germans, Soviets, Red Chinese and likely Nat Chinese can claim body counts up to 10 million as direct actions by their forces, as direct policy choices with the killing the aim of the policy. They can claim millions more [for the Russians possibly and the Chinese definitely tens of millions more] as killings that may not have been explicitly intended goals of a policy but which were easily foreseeable and by happening served some regime interest.

From another angle, YMMV but I have always felt on some gut level that it is more abhorrent and morally outrageous when a state sets out to murder millions of its own people for reasons of state or ideology, worse than when it is other peoples. Perhaps I feel it is unnatural in the sense that if a state has any responsibility at all, it is to its own. The Germans, Russians and Chinese among others murdered their own in huge numbers. Civilians at that, and not in battle. I haven’t seen anything in Howard Zinn or for that matter the views of the militia world or Confederate die-hards that gives any US equivalent in scale or malevolent intentions to the Holocaust, Stalin, or Mao.

Or, to be more broad minded, look at it in terms of states killing civilians of other countries. Here the picture is more mixed. The Chinese have few sins to answer for here. They mostly slaughter their own. At least in the last couple of centuries. The Russian record is a tad worse, but even they preferred their own.

The US has caused a lot of civilian dead by its blunt instruments, and even by its precision ones in recent years, but callous indifference is still better than actively trying to kill innocents. The Germans set out to kill innocents in neighboring countries in large numbers, proclaimed it a core element of their war aims, diverted resources to it from military operations, and by the end spoke and wrote as though this slaughter of the helpless was of paramount importance, the very heart of the war they believed themselves to be fighting.

Well, that doesn’t really address my concerns but never mind.

Cards on the table- I disagree with that statement. Always will. It was fatuous of the allies to include that count in the indictment and for Jackson to say that, not least because every one of their countries had by then been guilty of launching many wars of aggression. Whatever one may think of that as a tool of policy, or how best to eliminate it, it is not in fact as bad as setting out to wage said war of aggression by the deliberate mass murder of millions of helpless civilians, with that as an express tactic, and the elimination of those peoples as an explicit war aim.

I am only too aware that the Allies did not fight to end the Holocaust or save Jews. FAr from it. They fought to defend their own interests, in some cases their national existence, and their vision of a European order. That was not a wholly realist cause- there was plenty moral in it. And they probably would have gone on to do something like Nuremberg regardless. But the hard fact of the matter is that the revelations of the Holocaust made moralizing the war a whole lot easier. If the Germans had not done that, Crimes Against Humanity would have been a null indictment. If the Germans had lived up to Hague and Geneva in other ways better than they did, or kept their violations comparable to allied ones, the Allies would still have had a case for the War Crimes part of the bill, but a weaker one. The Aggressive War charge was what the allies really cared about but it was the most fatuous element, and the one most easily laid at their own doors in past cases. It was the most hypocritical, at any rate.

Also, Iraq in 2003 was a sovereign state whose sovereignty was officially and legally subject to ceasefire conditions from 1991 which it had been in continuous breach of almost all the intervening time, including firing on coalition aircraft operating in its airspace in enforcement of those conditions. That alone would have justified military action against Iraq at any time, and determined that it was not in fact a “war of aggression”. It does not matter if the UNSC takes a different view. A dog has four legs, not five, even if you call a tail a leg. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it so. And the Security Council does not have the power to change reality.

Oh, I’d worship them all the more.

But then I’m a Canadian. My country itself doesn’t have any external wars of aggression but we commercially benefitted from some of theirs, I’m sure, somehow at various times. And of course we exist because they conquered New France, not to mention we have our own westward expansion that may have been much less violent than America’s but we still took it all. Woohoo.

More broadly, I’m of the view that wars are among the worst things that can happen to a people and I don’t want to ever experience one or my country be the venue for one. Neither do I particularly wish it on anyone else, but a) better them than me, b) my country is peaceful because we govern ourselves like adults, live nearest others who broadly do the same, and have allied militarily with them, and c) that latter means sometimes going to war abroad in common causes and sometimes even backing their interests. I’d prefer they don’t advance them by war with no good reason, and realize mileage varies a lot on defining good reason.

As to Britain, it has been a sinner to that degree, and it has done things in its own service that wouldn’t pass muster with the Hague or Geneva Conventions. But as matters of authorized policy, it mostly did them before those agreements, not after. SO to whatever extent one is open to arguments from either pure legalism or evolving moral standards, or both, they are not too bad. Or arguments for reciprocity, for that matter. Britain’s besetting sin was aerial bombing of Germany, certainly its sin on comparable scale of numbers and moral failings. But then that ship had already sailed as methods of warfare go.

And while, as few fail to note, they “invented” concentration camps for civilians [I don’t believe that; hard to believe it was a previously unthought innovation] and allowed people to starve and get sick, they did not set out to kill the internees let alone wipe out the Afrikaner people. So they don’t win the German Reich Memorial Prize, anyway.

Stalin was not an “immigrant” to either of those entities. He was born before the USSR was created but on what would become its soil, and was born a native subject of the Russian Empire in a place that had been part of it for over three generations:

Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი) on 18 December 1878[1] in the town of Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Georgia).

Unless one presumes he was trying to actually justify imperial German war aims, what’s wrong with that argument?

This is a known and widely written about element of pre-1914 German strategic thinking. And it was a valid one, from their perspective.

It was valid because Russia was in fact industrializing rapidly before 1914, more output of all the period priorities- steel, munitions, railway lines, the works. Significantly expanding population, too.

Not at all clear that the revolution and the Soviet approach did anything to speed up Russian economic development, though it’s tough to call it a controlled experiment considering how much damage was done by the war, revolution and civil war. Whether a non-Soviet Russia could have recovered as fast in the 1930s is a fair question. But if the war and revolution had not happened at all, Russia would have been at least as industrialized in 1940 as it was. The politics are less clear, of course.

Presuming that description actually describes the ‘neocon’ strategy [I have a hard time crediting them with this level of pragmatism, but am open to being convinced this is the hidden agenda], how is it not western?

The classical political tradition of Greece and Rome and basically every ancient world ruler would have recognized that strategy, and so would Machiavelli, and every Christian ruler too for all that they would deny it as unchristian.

More importantly, if this is the secret strategy, what’s not to like?

I’m not sure interest in science fiction really qualifies, stereotypes notwithstanding. From a mass culture angle, going to see implausible space fantasies or robot movies is not meaningfully a less sophisticated pursuit than all consuming pro-sports obsession. The two are parallel in terms of level of cultural sophistication and contribution to society, and reflect comparably unrealistic wish fulfillment fantasies, for the overwhelming majority of sports fans who play no sport themselves at least.

On the printed page, science fiction is a genre fiction like westerns, mysteries, police procedurals, and so forth, all of which attract fans of varying age groups today, usually skewing older, and/or were once more popular. Or romance fiction. In each category, there are more or less sophisticated examples in every author generation, to be sure, but not notably to the disadvantage of science fiction. All contain a lot of slop reliant on absurd tropes, moralized plot lines and weak characterization. All also contain better output than that.

Your average old duffer circa 1960 devouring Zane Grey was not engaging in a more intellectual or more real-life reflective experience than some nerd at the same time reading Asimov or Bester or Clarke. Arguably less so.

Not that I want real life to be the standard of judgment for literature, though. Most “serious” or “literary” fiction today seems to be either women obsessing about female characters with tedious problems that a rational person could easily solve, various gen x [my own generation] or millennials obsessing that life isn’t all they had hoped for [life spoiler alert!], or boomers with the same problem. Not to necessarily knock the works of Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, or John Updike, but postwar American literary fiction had its own characteristic flaw- endless rumination on the sexual fixations and misunderstandings of the middle class male.

I refuse to accept the argument that any of this is in any way more sophisticated or useful than ruminations on possible future societies, disasters, technical challenges, exploratory endeavours, or indeed efforts at constructed mythologies that mimic the ancient storytelling traditions.

Granted, matters of taste. But a trip to a bookstore today can be a dispiriting experience.

Nice that he was able to combine liberal piety and Hollywood macho as well as a sort of humblebrag in that last bit.

Guns are not “cowardly killing machines”. They are efficient killing machines useable by the overwhelming majority who have neither time nor money nor physical condition to become masters of unarmed martial arts, knifework or fencing. And who should not be required to pursue these disciplines or place themselves at unnecessary risk in a defensive situation.

Again Penn demonstrates he is a pompous fool. I’d rather listen to Cruise bang on about Scientology. Theron at least has good reason for her attitude. If Penn had just quietly had his guns disabled and disposed of, and if ever asked had just said it was to make his girl feel more comfortable, that would have been respectable.

Wow, the NYT closes their comments section tout de suite by any standard.

I don’t think the difference in potential life experience for comparable individuals and groups between the first and 16th positions on that list, or between any two in between, is different enough to be worried about. This supposition is only reinforced by the comparatively low position of contemporary Germany.

As to some of his specifics, cellphone usage in North America is a bit problematic because so many providers use service models that rely on obtuse calling plans, make service inflexible and difficult, are too expensive for what they provide, and are unreliable when compared to many providers and networks in other First World, and some Third World countries.

Also, any society with nearly 100 years of entrenched landline service typically lags in cell takeup compared with countries that had little to none.

Cambodia didn’t get to let its territory be used to wage war against the RVN and then claim to be a pure hearted neutral. Either they allowed it, or they couldn’t control the territory well enough to prevent it. Either way, a legit casus belli for the RVN and anyone acting in its stead.

Then again, I don’t claim to want a moral west in any sense other than its own expectations of its citizens, and how and where it demands they take risks for it. I want the west to regard others according to pure cynicism. You can trade and be friendly on that basis, but you keep your eyes open for the consequences for #1.

Plato personally has his pros as a moral model, but his ideal society leaves too much to be desired. Cicero was emblematic of a virtuous aristocratic Roman of his times, in that his virtues encompassed traditional Roman ideas about the power and demands of the state and the distinctions to be made between one’s own people and the Other. I don’t see that classical Romans or Greeks could or would have offered any objection to the conquest of the Philippines, the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, or even the war in Vietnam on any grounds other than questionable handling.

If a server can’t remember from whom he or she accepted a credit card in this scenario, then maybe there really is subconscious racism involved. Or the server is just too stupid or lazy to really be suited to a customer service position. Actually paying attention to your customers, above all during the payment transaction, ought to be a core requirement.

But in that bus/subway scenario, I genuinely do not understand, from the information offered, what subtle racism scenario is being played out.

“On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station. …”

The race of the viewpoint character is presumably black. Is the woman cited also black and standing despite a seat being open, thereby signalling to the new arrival that blacks must stand and so should she? Is the woman white and if so how does her leaving a seat vacant suggest her racism? As a transit user, I have stood when seats were available for all sorts of reasons, even when not getting off very soon. Maybe the woman’s back hurts. Does our author actually not ride transit often, or just lacks mundane imagination?

Also, if a seat is available and no one is taking it, either someone sitting next to it is menacing looking, smells bad, or perhaps just no one wants to sit down. The seat is free, sit in it if you want. It’s transit, not a private jet.

I’m willing to be pretty reactionary by the standards of today, or of 40 years ago or more, but how many people living today even among white males with a bit of money and a bit of religion wish to live in the kind of society envisioned by 19th century Catholic royalists?

Ideology needs to be filtered by self-interest.

What more does one need to label Israel as a fascist state?

Although Frost doesn’t get into it, I would require such a state to have a political economy that resembles fascist political economy. Indeed, given how most of the West now works, to label a country fascist it would have to have a political economy that MORE closely resembles the fascist model than the rest of us.

It is not clear at all that the degree of Israeli state interference in the economy is greater than that of any other advanced nation, not even the United States.

It certainly does not qualify according to “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.

It is not a corporatist economic model by Italian standards, or even the hybridized German standard, not even compared to societies like Spain or Portugal under Franco and Salazar, which were themselves only imperfectly ‘fascist’ on this score.

Neither is Israeli society very dramatically organized along these lines. There are many subcultures, but their group/corporate entities do not directly enter the state institutions any more than America’s myriad of corporatist ethnic and economic lobbies do. They form political parties and compete for election, or lobby, or both, as everywhere else. This is not the fascist model for the organization of society, or the interaction of society and politics.

And all of these institutions are rather raucously independent of state direction, and can and will challenge it.

Similarly, open electoral and partisan politics is practiced in a way more comparable to liberal and now republican Italy than to the fascist era. More openly than in the US, at any rate.

SO not fascist.

An apartheid state, maybe. Not the same thing. [Side note, arguably apartheid South Africa’s socioeconomic model by the end was closer to fascism than Israel today, but not really fascist either.]

Then again, Arab citizens are a minority and however abused they are, they get to live, move, own property, vote in elections, have parties, and serve in parliament. That’s more than Black South Africans got even under the 1980s RSA. No doubt possible only because Arabs are a minority and SA Blacks were the crushing majority [Coloureds and Indians got a low-impact franchise and representation under the Botha reforms] but true just the same.

The Palestinians in the territories aren’t legally citizens and would rather be citizens of their own state anyway. That is not comparable to the Black SA experience. The latter always wanted to be citizens in the same country, their own.

The Palestinians could have had their own state, an excellent one by current standards in both size and resources, in 1948. I respect their adherence to an all or nothing attitude, then as now, but the concomitant of that approach to life is that if you can’t have it all you get nothing.

They could still have a state, albeit a much poorer and weaker one, under Israeli military control essentially indefinitely, nearly at the hour they concede Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. And make anyone believe it. Then again, anyone making that declaration would be such a reversal of policy that there would be an instinct to believe it. Of course, that Arab would be killed in minutes by his own, so he could never make it stick.

Of course, if the Palestinians had been willing to coexist with a Jewish state in 1948, they would have had an equal division and no outside power would have for a second conceded Israel had any grounds to occupy any part of it or control its external borders.

I’m not an American but I would want my own country to have a pretty clear hierarchy of importance:

1. Our own citizens, in our own country.

2. Our own citizens, abroad in places where they inherently assume risks of all foreign travel, but these are low to comparable to conditions at home.

3. Our own citizens, abroad in places where they should be aware of the risks involved and where the government’s travel warnings make these clear enough for those smart enough to look, but said citizens are there because we have sent them or on non-government missions that the government encourages [NGOs, etc.].

4. Our own citizens, abroad in places where they should be aware of the risks involved and where the government’s travel warnings make these clear enough for those smart enough to look, and said citizens are there of their own volition.

5. Our own citizens engaged in armed conflict contrary to our interests and contrary to law, but toward whom we retain constitutional obligations.

6. Citizens of close allies, internally ranked in the same sequence, but to whom ultimately our obligations are those of courtesy and friendship, not law and shared citizenship.

7. Citizens of all other countries.

8. Family members of enemy combatants in proximity to same. This doesn’t make them guilty or themselves valid targets, but if I wouldn’t apologize to Germany or Japan for collateral damage, I probably wouldn’t now either.

None of which necessarily implies that the current drone war, on the current administration’s scale, is either necessary or prudent for US interests, or consistent with the ‘values’ the US so loudly advertises under every administration. But it does suggest there is no need for rending of garments.

And since all the available anthropology would suggest that the Yemeni, Pashtun, etc cultures ought to fully understand the moral calculus involved and indeed have their own similar approach to the world, the warranted grief of the directly affected families should not be accompanied by unwarranted hypocrisy from their compatriots.

A lot of enduring value here. Thanks for this column. By the merest coincidence I read this May 15 having just yesterday stumbled on this older piece:

http://www.informationdissemination.net/2013/08/syria-one-more-reason-for-return-of.html

I find myself worried by the convergence of so many trends that I can’t count them easily and if I tried to do a wiring diagram it would choke a mule and drive me nuts. So in this context I’ll just tag 4:

1. The US military’s increasingly loud and aggressive idea of itself as a “warrior” culture. Not citizen soldiers. Not for that matter even professional soldiers. “Warriors”, not “soldiers”. I never served myself, so take it for what it is. And perhaps the distinction is artificial, implanted by what I read in the 80s. Still, the warrior/soldier distinction seems real to me and the US military is moving to the wrong side of it. IF the US needs professional soldiers to pursue its interests, fine. It won’t be the first or the only country, and that’s what professionals are for. But too much hoorah segregation is dangerous.

2. Despite raising a self-identifying caste of “warriors”, the US still feels obliged to double-down on mercenary troops, like some sort of Sultanate. I see they fill some niches that perhaps there could never be costly regular personnel to do, but it is still out of hand.

3. The overwhelming reliance on force as not only the means of policy but its end. Hammer and nail exemplified. I don’t object to use of force for national interest. But the US cannot even articulate its interests clearly enough let alone effectively use full-spectrum national policy tools that include but are not limited to armed force.

4. As a result, everything from grand strategy to procurement is driven by ever costlier gee-whiz technology and doctrine, with no sign of goals or any idea of means-ends.

The only problem I had with this column in the context of all that is this bit:

“It’s a confusing moment. After all, the Soviet Union was forever (until it wasn’t) and Saddam had been a stalwart U.S. friend, his country a bulwark against the Iran of the Ayatollahs. (For anyone who doubts that history, just check out the now-infamous 1983 photo of Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy for President Reagan, all smiles and shaking hands with Saddam in Baghdad.)”

There is no need to doubt that Saddam was a ‘bulwark’ until he wasn’t. That’s how international relations works. He wasn’t an ally in any deep meaningful romantic-American sense and I doubt anyone thought he was in the way the UK or West Germany/Germany or Japan after 1951 were. He and the US had a common aim in one area so the US backed his plays. Then he overshot his mark, perhaps because the US even then couldn’t convey messaging properly or even make up its mind, and suddenly he was a problem. So the US turned on him. All perfectly clear. The last time a really high level US official [inevitably, long retired] said anything really sensible was Kissinger when he said of the Iran/Iraq war, it’s a shame they can’t both lose.

Say what you will about French foreign policy, but they don’t seem to have these kinds of conceptual challenges.

It lacks the evidence of US intent to exterminate Iraqis [as opposed to the laziness and stupidity of top-level US planning for the postwar environment in 2003], any actual prospect of Iraqis being exterminated by the past 12 years of war at the scale it was being fought, and most importantly any evidence that the US was the direct cause of most of the deaths.

You can validly argue that the US set it all in motion, but when most of the dead are Shia on Sunni or vice-versa, you have to grant some kind of agency to the local peoples. They have as much right as any other peoples to settle their disputes by these methods.

That certainly struck me. Another case where the actual rule generates a whole lot of secondary rules- don’t withdraw 10k, and by the way don’t withdraw 10k minus 1 either, etc. No wonder it is impossible not to commit a felony in the US.

I don’t live in the US, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised but I was also struck by the fact that one would have to pay a tax to give someone else money, and that one cannot give a person more than 12,000 a year. Does that includes one’s family members?

Well, one could argue for pure agnatic primogeniture after the French Legitimist customs, and I would sympathize on many levels.

But succession to both the English and the Scottish crowns had been manipulated through acts of the respective parliaments before, going right back to medieval times. [More anciently, the Scots had tanistry as well and the Saxons had a sort of it, but let’s stick with medieval Norman style monarchy as it evolved after the 11th century]. Granted, generally with more impetus coming from a reigning monarch manipulating his own succession, but also with royal dynasts and aristocrats politicking over it too. The basic precedent that parliament could be at least the forum for settling the dispute and the instrument for legislating it existed by at least the 14th century in England and not much later in Scotland.

Henry VIII used his will to manipulate the ranking of his heirs, itself a violation of pure primogeniture under which the monarch would not choose his successor. Henry got his will passed as an act of parliament. When his son Edward VI, knowing he was dying young, tried to disinherit his sisters Mary [because Catholic] and Elizabeth [Protestant but Edward’s case against Mary relied on both sisters being illegitimate] in favour of his cousins in the Grey family, there was uproar. And not just for the pragmatic reason that Mary had allies with arms. The public was even outraged that Mary’s rights were to be violated, because Edward had neglected to get his will enacted by parliament so as to override his father’s. So Henry’s will lived on.

Now, all of that and earlier precedent created the notion that parliament could be used to legitimize a king’s choice of successor, and to adjudicate disputes thereon. What it did not do was create the precedent that parliament could either depose a king in place, or end the monarchy altogether. Quite apart from the fact that the 1660 settlement introduced a period of political reaction, from a strict constitutional perspective only a parliament called by the king is legal, and its powers are not wholly separable. So how could the actions of the rump in 1649 be lawful? It had no authority to do that, nor then to govern alone. What parliament COULD do, when the survivors of the Long parliament assembled in full in 1660, was recognize that Charles II was king and ask him to return to take up his office.

Apply all that to 1688 and what does it produce? Parliament cannot depose a king nor change the dynasty completely with any kind of precedent. But it can identify a successor from among the heirs of a former king and it possibly can declare the throne vacant [I feel there was 15th century precedent at minimum for that]. It has also been used many times before to legislate on religious matters and to uphold the king’s supremacy over a protestant church.

So my interpretation would be: Parliament could not abolish the crown and still cannot. It sits by right of being summoned as well as by election. Parliament could not [arguably] lawfully depose James II, although his oaths and obligations and his actions in upholding them were certainly disputable in matters of both law and religion. It could not disinherit all heirs of former monarchs and select someone without blood descent or of unrelated foreign descent [arguably]. But it could require the king follow his oaths, it could uphold constitutional precedent against him, it might have found precedent for ejecting him on these bases, but in his fortuitous decision to flee and toss the seal in the river he gave serious heft to their declaration that he had constructively abdicated. His decision to go and carry on in his Irish realm and to levy war against England could be considered refutation of that, but then it would also be considered raising an army to suppress England in violation of his oaths. So with the throne vacant, parliament could identify a successor, and it would be within its rights and duties to identify successors from among the royal family who would fulfill the coronation oaths to the law and the Protestant religion.

Parliament was obliged to defend the Protestant identity of church and state, and it found monarchs who would do that. And all from the royal house. Mary and Anne were James’ own daughters, and William was a descendant of the Stuarts in his own right. The Hanoverians were not a random choice after Anne died either. They were the genealogically nearest heirs of James I, and through him via the Stuarts back to Henry VII of England, who would uphold the customary laws and religious settlement that parliament was bound to defend. And by prior monarchs at that.

Sorry to be long winded. Given time, I might be able to expel all that more clearly.

At any rate, genealogy being what it is, the traditional Anglo-Scottish custom of agnatic male-preference primogeniture without regard to 1688 would indeed produce Jacobite heirs more senior than the descendants of Sophia of Hanover, but they’d also be Germans. It’s been the Wittelsbach house of Bavaria for over a century now.

They’re not full Celts. Neither are the Irish, of course, but the Scots are more thoroughly a mix of peoples at the founding, though without too much admixture between that and the 20th century thereafter.

The southeast was Angle [Northumbrian] for several centuries before anything like a Scottish realm coalesced, and when it did those Angles were a founding part of it even if the Gaelic speakers [who arrived in the west at about the time the Angles did in the east] dominated the country for about 350 years after that.

The north and west are full of Norwegian, also. Although much of that settlement started at around the time a Scottish realm was forming, they probably qualify as founding peoples as well.

That’s two streams of Germanic of which the earlier was specifically Anglos, one albeit initially dominant stream of Irish [Gaelic] Celt, all of the foregoing being settler colonists in historical times, plus the indigenous to the south British Celts [Welsh] and whatever the Picts were [maybe Celts].

I call that a mixed people, proudly, by Robert E. Howard standards.

Presuming the language and cultural history has any bearing on the actual ethnicity of any of these people, of course.

I agree that last notion is pretty stupid. The Celts of Ireland have some Norse in them but more than that they are capable of producing blondes albeit at a much lesser rate, and redheads at a much greater rate, than the Scandinavians. There is nothing whiter than a pale, freckled redhead.

Also, since Celts were the previous inhabitants of most of what is now Germany, Britain, the low countries and France, among other places, and possibly still provide a good chunk of the genome in all of them, I like to think of them as the original Europeans. The original white bread, as it were.

I’m not sure I get the distinction you are making here. If Buchanan is a Catholic he is a member of an organized tradition of which the Jesuits are and claim to be important representatives and indeed an important executive arm.

Surely he would be entitled to some opinion about what they DO in the course of carrying out that role, and on whether what they do is consistent with their claims to be acting for the religion in both educating its members and propagating its message, which are missions the Jesuits claim for themselves.

If not, the same principle would apply to whether or not US citizens can have a valid opinion on the actions of the Department of Education, or for that matter the US military. Not a teacher, don’t have an ed degree, or aren’t in uniform, what business do you have commenting.

Now if he wants to have an actual impact on decisions, he should have to be a member of the board of governors, or perhaps of the Order writ large. They make their decisions on their own authority just as any institution does within its remit. But he is perfectly entitled to comment on it.

Quite apart from any valid issues raised [eg., whether it was in US interest to support Israel’s foundation, or the many ways in which Israel has abused its power in recent decades especially], I don’t see how it is shocking that Israel is a state that “benefits only one religious group”.

Despite the comical debate recently about formally writing it down that Israel is a Jewish state, it was indisputably founded as a Jewish state, in order to ensure that there WAS a Jewish state, and most if not all of the discourse on it the past 67 years has referred to it one way or another as “the Jewish state”. Even looking at it purely from a religious perspective, at the time it was founded this idea was not shocking to most people. America may have largely been legally secular in some sense, and fairly egalitarian toward non-Christian citizens as its principles required, but plenty of law and practice biased towards the Christian religion by current standards. MANY Western nations continued to have state churches at the time and the laws on education and many aspects of social life benefited Christians disproportionately. The entire Muslim world operated on the assumption that Islam and the state were massively overlapping where not wholly coextensive.

A good deal of that is still true today, albeit decreasingly so. In the Muslim world, it has arguably increased since 1948. They of all peoples have no business complaining about identifying the state with one religion.

And since a majority of the world, Jewish and not, seems agreed on the idea that “Jewish” describes a people as well as a religion [Miliband seemed to think he would have been the UK’s first Jewish PM, despite explicitly not following the Jewish faith], there is an equally important dimension. If the Jews are a people, why should their state not be identified as the Jewish state?

The Arabs aren’t about to declare any of their states multicultural despite Arabs being a conquest population in many of them, and despite the ongoing existence of large pre-Muslim and pre-Arab populations in some of them. The Iranians are a bit more broad-minded, although they have done some work Persianizing the state at various times. They have to be, since Iranians are barely a majority and huge chunks of their history were actually driven by Turkic peoples.

Westerners have moved away from this attitude, although the average person perhaps less so than the elites. But it was not so long ago that no one would have challenged the idea that the French state is such, the possession of the French people. And not too long before that they even closely identified Frenchness with the Catholic religion. The Irish took a similar view until the day before yesterday. And they likely still see that island as the rightful possession of people whose ancestors were there before 1170, with maybe a bit of flexibility for those whose Old English forebears stuck to the old religion in the convulsions of the Reformation.

And normally I expect this site to be a place where Westerners generally still favour that attitude.

It’s fair to note that Jews generally don’t grant these privileges to others and to find it annoying. But overall I’m prepared to grant them the forms of identity and possession and statehood I would like to claim for my own country if I could.

As to ethnic cleansing, come on. How many countries have not done that?

I can’t say I am at all convinced by a racial analysis of either Alien or Blade Runner- human life versus artificial life perhaps, but the white/non-white interpretation seems wholly contrived.

On the other hand, obscure syndicated sci-fi series of the 1990s “Time Trax” explicitly had this premise. The hero was a detective sent back to the past to recapture fugitive scientists and other rebels against the relatively utopian future. The detective was white, and he came from a world in which he was a despised minority and had to prove himself. Interestingly, some of the fugitive villains had racialist views, though not all. One amounted to a sort of National Socialist, who employed a native Hawaiian henchman in the past [episode set in Hawaii]. He betrayed the henchman eventually, and emphasized he thought the Hawaiians were a defeated people, but at one point gifted him with a war club “such as your ancestors used in their days of glory”.

The mastermind villain was never ethnically identified, but he had a great villain name “Dr Mordecai Sahmbi”. No idea if it was meant to sound like “zombie”- this was when zombies were a boutique player even in horror culture.

That was worth my first lol of the day, at least from the web. Much thanks.

It sounds like an Indian Bond girl, which as it happens is something I would like to see more of. The only one I can think of was the unnamed hotel assistant in Delhi in an early scene of 1983’s “Octopussy”.

Sadly, Hebrew is not Hindi. Yoni is a diminutive of Jonathan.

“Of course, much depends on who is doing what to whom.”

“An effect of the pack instinct is the suppression of cognitive dissonance.”

The two successive paragraphs that begin with these sentences certainly struck me as the essential point.

Much depends on who is doing what to whom. Yup. That isn’t a failure of cognition, or morality, or ethics. It’s the essence of the human condition. It’s not a cognitive dissonance problem unless one is attempting to believe in a universalist religion or in one of the [irrational when stripped of the religious rationales at their heart] secular philosophies that evolved out of them.

As to the rest, there’s a lot of rarely spoken truth in this and I agree. But the level of bitterness about it as presented could only come from an American, and only at the end of 14 or so years of trying to maintain a degree of just such national cognitive dissonance that always characterizes America at war more than most other countries, from the beginning but especially since the victory of the idea of a proposition nation.

The idealistic youth still left in me might argue that plenty of young men still sign up for reasons of patriotism, perhaps foolishly, to be sure, and even if it is just one among many reasons including those you cite. A paid professional army is not the same creature as a conscript army or a mass volunteer army in wartime, and it is not justified by the same rationales. The three types should not be used in the same way, either. But a professional national army of citizens [or even with a few wannabes] isn’t quite the same as a mercenary warband either. [Give it time until the PMC’s take it all over]. It still goes to kill where the duly constituted government wants it to go and kill.

In theory it does so in service to the national interest, which is a legitimate thing to do, the more so with professionals than conscripts or volunteers in the aforementioned sense. That’s what professional armies are for, and nations do have interests. That’s a more pragmatic idea of patriotism than trying to make every war a crusade for liberty and humanity, but it is patriotism as most of the world always knew it. [Even the Greeks in full crusading mode fought for the liberty and expansion of Greek culture, not everybody else. And most of the time they weren’t in crusade mode, just fighting for stuff.]

If the interests being fought for do not coincide with the interests of the people, or even if they do but are carried on by a government neglecting other and more urgent security interests of same people, well ’twas ever thus. That’s why you don’t use conscripts. I’m Euro-influenced by the idea that states have interests of their own, and that over the long sweep their strength more likely coincides than not with the preservation of the people they represent, so I’d be willing to tolerate a lot of abuse in the near term if I had confidence in that much at least. Until recently, the French people did not let their republican ideals get too much in the way of strategic cynicism at the state level, and this was wise of them. Pity France has fallen into bad habits.

If the US state running foreign policy has become radically detached from the true security and strategic interests of the United States, let alone the aims of the American people, that’s a problem of the constitution, of government, politics and the electorate. Ceasing to have a military able to serve national interests is not the answer. The answer is at the political level. Given the degree of disagreement on everything in modern America, it may be impossible. But that’s where the problem is.

All of which is also why US troops are not exactly comparable to Guido and Vito. The latter take orders from a private authority to kill, in general, fellow citizens of the res publica/polis/commonwealth against the laws of same, for violations that are not punishable by those laws. The military takes orders FROM the commonwealth to kill, in general, non-citizens.

Maybe that’s my own form of silly idealism, but it never occurred to me to think of the state’s obligations to all humanity as equal to its obligations to its own. Must be not being religious.

Again, if the orders coming from the institutions of the commonwealth are no longer either representative of the people’s will or needs, or justifiable in terms of national interest, that’s a bigger but distinct problem.

Hmm. Apologies for being verbose, though.

“We like to think that all people feel empathy to the same degree.”

Who in the world thinks that? I’m not exactly a grade A student of humanity but I never thought that. Nor that the only distinction is between the mass of men who ‘feel empathy to the same degree’ and psychopaths. How can anyone get out of childhood and not see it as more like a spotty continuum?

FYI I am a Canadian.

Our political class is divided between those who want to send troops abroad to die in American wars that may or may not be marginally in our national interest, albeit sucking up to Washington is at least defensible as our ONLY vital national interest, and those who want to send troops abroad on UN missions in which their chance of dying is a bit less but there is not even theoretically a national interest involved. Similarly, each has a rah-rah ideology in play- neocon democratic triumphalism on the one hand, utopian multilateralism on the other.

Needless to say I am a bit divorced from both. Still, I can see the general point of both some of the time. If we get diplomatic credits or some such. The problem is no government ever stays focused on that and all get sucked into one or the other version of the romantic idealism. Most Canadians have no business complaining though. We mostly fall into one or another camp ourselves. No other foreign policy is sellable.

Still, given our position in the world at the time, I’m not going to apologize for atrocities committed by Canadians in WW2. Our RCAF provided the third largest component of the bomber offensive [integrated as N06 Bomb Group RAF and a few other places] and I am only sorry at how many Canadian airmen died in that, especially given the doubts about its efficacy. I have never been troubled by the ruins of German cities.

A fairly dark-humoured German buddy of mine years ago [he was German-Chinese, two broadly phlegmatic peoples at their respective bests] took me around Hamburg and showed me the building in which his grandmother had lived and where they had dumped UXO in the nearby river once. He said his grandmother had once [I think I would have liked her] mock-wistfully described the war to him as, “Goebbels asked us, ‘Do you want the Total War?’; We said yes…it was nice…”

I’d be curious if anyone was arguing at Rome that maybe they shouldn’t let in so many Germans.

At least the Germans had the courtesy to pose an actual military threat sometimes, demonstrating willingness to work for the concessions they demanded of the Roman state. A conqueror earns privileges an illegal immigrant does not. On the other hand, the Visigoths were a population of armed refugees, and they first turned on their Roman hosts when denied free food subsidies in their version of refugee camps. Just goes to show, if you are going to admit dangerous peoples and then turn on them, do it right. Or, genuinely assimilate them rather than letting them have concentrated lands and their own community leaders.

These lessons have all been learned before. To paraphrase Derb, “why don’t people listen?”

I had assumed he meant it to refer to “the Other”, the social science constructed term in use to refer to any person/culture/entity outside of one’s own frame of reference and identity. Empathy would mean the capacity to recognize the similarity of the Other and to appreciate that it might share one’s feelings and reactions.

That would make the grammar correct.

I think I get where you are coming from but there are problems with characterizing Hitler as “rational”. Not psychopathic, perhaps, even at the end, but definitely irrational by customary standards.

He made too many huge strategic and operational military decisions not only without seeking the best information, but even ignoring or aggressively rejecting information available to him. Some early gambles, taken by rejecting professional advice but within reasonable boundaries of total information, paid off. Later, such gambles were taken on ever grander scale and in the face of overwhelming contrary information, and he doubled down all the time despite repeated massive disaster.

That’s nearly the essence of irrationality.

There is a strong case to be made that rationality is purely instrumental- nothing is objectively reasonable, a course is reasonable if it tends to move toward the achievement of a desired goal. The definition of goals is a fundamentally irrational and separate process.

Even by that standard, Hitler’s behaviour from at least December 1941 was irrational in the extreme if his goals actually included: winning the war, expanding German power in Europe, building a basis for future world power, or keeping a Nazi regime in power. His actions tended to undermine these potentially rational goals, and his actions therefore must be called irrational.

If his goal actually was to destroy Europe in a Wagnerian contest of German and Slav, and he didn’t care which was the winner because the winner would by definition be the strongest [there is a last days quote from him expressing disinterested surprise that the Slav had proved himself stronger after all], then his actions were rational if defined as steps toward that goal.

While I am actually persuaded by the aforementioned idea that goals are always pre-rational and reason can only be tested instrumentally, colloquially I can’t find a better term to rate the goal of national suicide other than to call it “irrational”.

Many have also remarked on the irrationality of his wasting so much manpower and resources on killing Jews instead of fighting enemies actually putting troops in the field. If one accepts his idea that his enemy was the Jews, and the others merely their instruments, then this becomes more rational on some level. And yet it was irrational still, since the Jews he was killing were all helpless civilians, whereas his actual enemies were deploying millions of armed men and thousands of tanks, guns and aircraft against him. Even if all were merely the military arm of the Jews, it makes no sense to waste resources on non-threatening targets to the detriment of the fight against threatening ones.

Especially since it should have been clear early on that doing so was not even negatively affecting the morale of the enemy, as why should it have… The victims were not citizens of the western allied nations and Hitler should have been well aware that Stalin didn’t care about his own citizens. By that standard, it was less rational even than Allied bombing. It too failed to break enemy morale, but at least attempting to do so made some kind of theoretical sense until disproved. They were at least killing the enemies’ civilians on their home soil, marginally reducing manpower, draining off military resources, and smashing up some hardware and production capacity. The Holocaust had no impact on the warmaking capacity of the Allied or Soviet nations at all. Complete waste of time and resources unless pretty sure the Allies were defeated or near as not, which was never the case after 1941.

Again, unless national suicide is already the expected and accepted outcome and the sole purpose of the war is to take as many of those unarmed populations along for the ride.

This is, to use the scientific term, batsh*t crazy.

Not to mention launching a rerun of a war Germany had already lost once and expecting a better result. Granted, he gambled that France was a shell of its former self and was right. Clever clogs. On the other hand, it should have been fairly clear that Russia would prove stronger than before. If only because they had invested so much more heavily in artillery, had so many tanks [even the crappy early ones were not obviously worse than the panzer 1 and 2 Hitler started with, and the T34 was known about in June 1941] and had an obviously more motivationally capable regime than that of Nicholas II. And America had essentially come out of the First war richer and stronger and with its manpower capacity and morale intact.

And of course Germany in 1939 was smaller, and poorer relative to major competitors than Germany of 1914. He did well with that starting point, and France’s collapse was a radical improvement for Germany, but it’s still hard to see how the Germany of 1939 could defeat the same constellation of foes the Kaiser’s empire had failed to defeat.

Right up until June 22 1941, and perhaps even up to December 8 1941, German policy could be considered rational albeit reckless. From December 8 1941 at the latest it can be called rational only if the Wagnerian scenario was the desired goal. Or if Hitler had been playing the battlefield elements with some sign of seeking a settlement that involved keeping some gains.

Yes, I see that connection.

Oddly, it hadn’t occurred to me in this context. Not because I am unaware of the blank slate idea, of course. I had it myself for long years, from a vaguely libertarian conservative perspective.

But I didn’t necessarily assume it would imply that all people would end up sharing empathy, or any other attribute/capability, equally. Even if one is the pure product of one’s environment and inputs, those inputs differ so widely that any human would still reach adulthood with variant qualities of all kinds.

Surely even blank slatists would admit that society has not actually reached the stage in which every human actually grows up in an identically secure, stimulating, progressive environment; it is the heart of their policy to say that we have not and must strive to do so. With that in mind, even they should expect that humans, being differently raised, will have different outcomes.

I don’t get it. You mean because I went on too long, was not sufficiently well-structured, or because I argued that Hitler cannot be described as rational even on his own terms, unless his terms are defined in the most apocalyptic possible way?

I was even going to add that Hitler’s ostensible war against “the Jews” was itself a sign of irrationality, since conjuring fictitious enemies and then focusing on them to the detriment of the real military enemies one has made, and claiming they are the same in the face of available information, is irrational insofar as it is willful rejection of one’s environment. But around here you can never be too sure who will find that provocative.

If you mean my reply would provoke Enrique, well maybe so. But I was theoretically at least replying to someone else.

The implication of hypocrisy here doesn’t hold water.

Granted I have not read every pronouncement or newspaper opinion from the 1940-41 period nor will, but I never had the sense that the official opinion of Britain at the time or the mass of public opinion specifically claimed the Blitz was ‘barbaric’ or anything like that. Perhaps some did, but it would be unlikely the official line, or even majority public opinion, apart perhaps from the overall belief that war in general is barbaric.

[Maybe Rotterdam or Warsaw were so regarded in British opinion, but compared to London those cities were near totally defenceless against the Luftwaffe when bombed, so they score higher on the barbarism scale than the Blitz would. Similarly, German cities were heavily defended and allied aircrew took huge losses. That distinction was likely considered important in the traditional moral calculus of war. Rather like the distinction in earlier codes between sacking a city after taking by storm against defenders and just burning and massacring an undefended one while passing by.]

After all, every major government had spent the 1930s not only preparing to wage such a war, but preparing their populations with air raid and even aerial gas attack drills. It was part of the general expectations of war held in Britain, as elsewhere. Similarly, the British propaganda machine would have been foolish to let a condemnation of its barbarism slip out, as they had fleets of bombers ready or building themselves and the upper echelons knew that.

It wasn’t even against international law as understood at the time. Granted the allies could hardly have cited it against the Germans at Nuremberg given they had done it much better themselves, but it would have been pointless anyway- nothing in the Hague Conventions had been read as prohibiting the practice by any major power, and it had to be specifically outlawed after the war.

Recognition of that latter fact ensured that even the Germans officially treated bomber crew as POWs, for all the rhetoric about ‘terror flyers’. On the occasions when they did not, the Germans rather than the allied airmen were guilty of violating the laws of war.

Older Britons never seemed to remember the Blitz as a noteworthy example of German ‘barbarism’, or as anything exceptional as an element of the war save for the obvious danger it had presented to people at the time and the losses of lives and property in their neighbourhoods. There can have been few who held specific grudges against the Germans for it- certainly none I met, and both my parents were born under the bombs. Most Britons of that generation seemed to retain respect for the Germans overall, unless kin had been specifically abused or killed in POW camps toward the end as the Germans started to take the leash off, and tended not even to emphasize the Holocaust all that much unless refugees from it. Certainly there was no national culture of moaning about the evils of the Blitz. Only a tad overdone triumphalism about the Battle of Britain. Most of the older Britons I knew tended to remember the Japanese as the greater barbarians of the day, as part of the general popular memory as well as among those who had kin or had themselves been POWs of the Japanese.

So, no, I can’t see any hypocrisy in the British attitude toward aerial bombing or the culpability of the Germans or themselves in the practice. More like general acceptance that both had anticipated the tactic and considered it lawful at the time, both had done it, and the British [and Americans and Canadians] had just been better at it.

Pity the Germans no longer take the same sensible view. Too many seem to think the comparatively pitiful preparations and performance of the Luftwaffe in 1940-41 was the result of moral limits or provides an excuse from what they now consider to have been a war crime but did not at the time any more than anyone else did.

This from a country that rounded up millions of civilians on the ground and machine gunned them into pits or gassed them, including collecting and deporting most of them from their own countries to other occupied territories for the purpose of killing them, including populations of civilians from surrendered states like Belgium, trucial states like France, occupied states that had never been at war with Germany until invaded by it [Belgium, Netherlands, Norway] and citizens of states allied to Germany like Hungary. And attempted to round up civilians from a neutral that had not been at war with Germany until occupied and which offered no resistance, Denmark, and another German ally, Bulgaria.

And, unlike the German civilians under the bombing, most of those civilians were not even participants in an enemy society [some were nationals of German allies or neutrals, others nationals of states already defeated and hors de combat, still others nationals of states still combatant against Germany but living in German occupied territory and therefore not a threat on any level and entitled to protection under occupation law] let alone potential contributors to an enemy war economy or military capacity. Even taking allied aims at their worst, specifically the aim of killing German civilians to break morale and force Germany out of the war that way, the Germans’ terrestrial practices come off worse. They were killing civilians already under their control for the sole purpose of killing them without assuming it would have any impact at all on the ability of enemy states to stay in the war.

All of which was actually against the laws of war and of occupation rights to which Germany and others had signed up. Germany followed occupation law quite well in other ways, even when not to their advantage on occasion, but not when it came to handling enemy civilians they wanted dead for what amounted to the personal amusement of the ruling party echelons.

And in Poland it suited them to not even follow the basics of occupation law, which required them to establish occupation regulations, accountable military government and some sort of continuation of civil authority under occupation, as they did elsewhere, with the disposition of Polish state and territory to await settlement. Instead they declared the Polish state extinguished and set out to liquidate Polish identity while using their territory as Europe’s charnel house. All of which also against international law to which they were an actual signatory.

THAT was barbarism.

The major belligerents acceded to FDR’s request at the start of the war that they confine themselves to bombing military targets [all reserved the right to withdraw unless their enemies upheld the bargain], although this could include “fortified cities”. That was perhaps a difficult concept in the arena of air warfare, but I understand it to have included cities with military production capacity, military targets like headquarters, communications junctions and so forth, and which were defended against attack rather than being left open.

The Germans stretched this almost to the breaking point at Warsaw already in September 1939, but it’s just about defensible as the city was the seat of government and defence headquarters and Poland writ large was still being defended, albeit Warsaw barely against air attack.

The Germans discarded the policy first at Rotterdam May 14 1940, if the key issues are military targets and being defended. The attack on Rotterdam was at the edge of legitimacy only if, as a commercial port, it is considered to be within the definition of war production or war economy.

One day later the UK expanded its own policy to include industrial targets and on the night of May 15 launched the first raid on the Ruhr. If that was illegitimate, then so was Rotterdam. If Rotterdam was legitimate, so was the Ruhr raid.

Either way, the Germans set the pattern. Nothing the allies did later deviated from it except in sheer scale of destruction, not in kind.

OK, I’ll buy that. Especially as to the contemporary political use. Even perhaps to the point of questioning whether “psychopath” would be an accurate description of him- I agree probably it is not accurate. There are plenty of bad and/or nuts categories without inaccurately applying the empathy-excluding category of psychopath. Agreed on all of that.

Although psychopaths and sociopaths are very prone to mad gambles and thrill seeking [read the fascinating memoir “Confessions of a Sociopath”] which certainly applies to Hitler’s style in some ways, on the whole Hitler’s behaviour seems far too emotional to be considered psychopathic or beyond empathy. If anything, his empathic capacity was just directed in peculiar ways toward targets of affection not everyone else could see. But not psychopathy.

OK, just read the author’s 44. For the record, as I hope was clear, I am on the anti-Nazi side, but point well taken.

On a more relevant note, I appreciate this clarifying summary of the evolutionary development of empathy in humans. I am less worried than some others by the prospect that an evolutionary or neurological understanding of empathy will undermine its more traditional ‘moral’ standing. I get it, as with other human qualities whose biological underpinnings are being explored, I’m just not sold by the idea that understanding will undermine practice.

On that note, Art 42 made some interesting points although I didn’t necessarily find them convincing either.

“This is hog wash – apes have natural empathy – all kinds of animals exhibit empathy.”

I am interpreting the animal empathy to which Art refers as more akin to human’s affective empathy. Is this a misunderstanding on my part and/or Art’s? Perhaps by assuming too much ’emotion’ for lack of a better term into what is just recognition of the other on the part of said animals?

“The notion expressed in this “cognitive empathy” is an oxymoron. Language is being perverted – empathy without caring is not empathy. Please find some other way of explanation. Just say “false empathy.”

Here I’m just going to leap out and say I don’t think that’s right. I thought empathy just meant recognition of the other as similar and ability to understand the other’s predicament. We tend to use empathy as an extension of and expansion on sympathy- as understanding of the other’s feelings as well as mere sympathy with them. That is to say, it goes beyond ‘mere’ sympathy and is therefore more or better than sympathy. I seem to remember that view being expressed in the past. But that’s colloquial usage. Just as one can have sympathy without empathy [happens all the time, and is not to be spat on on that account], presumably one can have empathy without sympathy, ie. without ‘caring’.

No, it’s like saying “some working class slob” etc. lied and convinced a regular bank to give him a loan at normal rates like everyone else pays so he could have income while sitting around on his fat ass doing nothing but swilling cheap wine all day while paying all his no account relatives to also sit around on their fat asses all day, while all the time whining like a little girl about how he is being oppressed by the banks because those unconscionable blackguards actually want their money back with the agreed interest.

There is a case to be made in such situations that the lenders were fools and should lose their money. There is NO case to be made that the borrower is an injured party or should get to withhold payment as of right.

Once upon a time Calvin Coolidge was supposed to have said, of a plan to restructure British and other WW1 debts, “well, they hired the money, didn’t they?” [It is now considered apocryphal. Great and Coolidgean line, though].

On a certain level, that is an unwarranted attitude. Even in the America of that day, banks could be persuaded to restructure loans in the hope of a more likely or even better eventual payout, and the practice was well known among countries. America itself had benefited from such commercial pragmatism in its early indebted days [and if it hasn’t happened again already, it will soon enough]. It was perhaps even more unwarranted given the debts were incurred fighting a war America ultimately decided was in its own interest and joined.

Still, the principle is an honourable one. Borrow money, pay it back on time and according to the terms.

At least the British and French were fighting for their futures. The Greeks hired money for decades so they could pay the civil service 13 months wages for every 12 month period, for at most 6 months of work from those who even had to show up. And a variety of similar nonsense. Those who think civil servants everywhere are coddled, fair enough. None in the English speaking world were ever paid or given benefits the way the Greeks were, or expected to work as poorly or infrequently for them. And the Greeks have already had their share of restructurings and pragmatic interventions.

They hired the money and used it in such a way they might as well have blown it all at the track, and now they won’t pay it back. Stuff them. If they don’t pay, may the Germans grind them into the dirt.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the idea that in common usage, to the extent the term or idea empathy even is in everyday use distinct from sympathy, empathy implies what Peter Frost calls “affective empathy”. I also assume caring. It’s just that it doesn’t seem to be the only or the most generic definition.

On that note, the wiki you cite gives four variations of a definition of empathy, only the first of which necessarily includes “caring”, at least as written in that excerpt. The second includes recognizing and mirroring emotions, which is not at all the same thing. The other two can imply but do not require ’emotional’ connection. All of these as written describe cognitive processes, which is not a term that requires either the presence or absence of emotion. EMotion is a cognitive process.

It’s not a divine edict, but not so long ago it would have been a widely understood pair of ideas.

1. If you are a lender and lend to someone you know or suspect can’t repay, you deserve to lose your money. I still think this. I merely bow to pragmatism in cases where the lenders have been SO stupid that applying this rule will bring the economy down, and idly wish governments would legislate in such a way that we might be able to apply the rule next time. I also have some charity for the lenders in those few situations under which they lent stupidly because the law requires them not to discriminate against borrowers on the racist grounds that the borrowers have no money or any prospect of money to repay. If anything, I see some agreement between us here. You also note the eurocrats and bankers should have known Greece would eventually be in this state, and imply they should now lose their money. I am tempted to agree based on this very principle. Although I would note that in fact Greece could have paid if they weren’t a nation of self-deluded profligates and had actually done something productive with the money.

2. Even in situations where lenders should be told they were fools and must give up hope of their money ever being repaid, it is not correspondingly the case that the defaulting borrower is morally elevated to the status of innocent. They still borrowed money they could never repay and likely knew they had no interest in repaying. Either they were desperate and took a gamble, in which case we can pity them, even try to help. Or they took the money because they wanted to show off like a rich man and live larger than they could afford for 30 odd years and then expect to be treated like hapless victims of fate. In that case, they are thieves.

Since the corrupt Greek elite are also Greeks, as far as I am concerned “Greece” writ large, the entity that is so often being discussed, is to blame. As the corrupt Greek political class was repeatedly elected, there is no reason not to include the citizens. All the more so since the basis of those repeated elections was the promises said elite made to the voters of endless comfort and free stuff at the expense of other nations. Greek citizens benefited, now Greek citizens owe.

As to the Gotti analogy, no. The Greeks were not asked to pay the international equivalent of loan shark rates. They paid what any country would pay in their financial state, if even that. They were not borrowing to finance the national equivalent of their daughter’s kidney operation, but rather to finance an upper middle class lifestyle on pauper’s resources and wastrel’s work ethic.

Nobody said the Greeks were subhuman, or subhumanly lazy. Don’t put words in my mouth. All this is VERY human. It doesn’t even imply laziness on the part of individual Greek people. Just refusal to pay money back that was borrowed. We all might be in that place one day. It doesn’t mean we aren’t reneging on a debt.

I quite agree that the Greek government was corrupt. The ministers and MPs were all Greeks and so were the bankers and economists at the Athens end of the deals. They were the leaders and professionals that Greece produced, they had the support of the Greek people. If that means they snowed the Greeks with lies and fantasies and paid them off with goodies, I don’t disagree with you there. But the Greeks bought the lies and took the goodies and now the price is left to be paid.

And if Greeks are willing to free themselves, they have only to reintroduce the drachma and devalue. It would have hurt less 10 years ago, less still if they had never joined the euro. It will hurt a lot now. But just as the only reason to join the euro was to borrow at euro-rates, the only reason not to leave now is to keep borrowing. Why should the Germans back that play if they can’t expect returns?

Better than WW1, yes. But they still lost over 200,000 military dead and another 350,000 civilians due to military action or actions by the occupation forces.

That’s just under half the military dead of the United States, and of course nearly 30 times as many civilians.

The ruins of German cities are still some of the most magnificent images of the 1940s. Biblical in power. They earned it the hard way, let’s not deprive them of their sacrifice.

Your defence of France is well taken. No need to sully it with dishonesty.

British troops, albeit they were far fewer in number, performed no less bravely or skilfully in 1940 than the French troops. They failed, to be sure. So did the French, despite superior numbers across the board in defence of their own territory. The failings of both countries’ military and political establishments prior to the war and in that first dreadful year have been raked over fully equally and at length, and British accounts have never stinted on their own failures.

Indeed, typical of the British, they have long relished tearing apart their own institutions and leaders of that day for their lack of insight. Certainly there is not shortage of accounts in English of such failures as Singapore, the loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse, Hong Kong, Burma, the weaker parts of North Africa, Dunkirk, Dieppe, and on and on. To a fault, really. You’d think they just assumed victory would be handed to them, and any failure to win is some kind of existential crisis. That’s almost as silly as failing to acknowledge defeat at all would be.

In that context, I am aware of no British accounts that condemn France for its performance in 1940 any more than their own. Even France’s decision to seek armistice, though it worsened Britain’s situation severely, is rarely given more than due criticism. And that criticism IS due. Every country save France and Belgium determined to fight on, with legal government and military forces in exile demonstrating the illegitimacy of collaborator regimes at home.

Had Germany won, those governments might have appeared fools in retrospect. But Germany didn’t win, and that is history’s judgment.

The legal French government sought and obtained armistice with the full backing of the military command, not least because they assumed Britain would quickly fall and from their point of view could go hang. And despite the fact that France could have exported far more military power to a far larger overseas footprint to continue the fight than most of the other exile governments.

These moves were not insane or criminal, arguably they were sensible statecraft and even wise moves to preserve the French state and people. But they were a gamble that didn’t pay off in the end. And given the facts in the previous para, the outcome certainly entitles Britain or any of the other fighting nations to look sideways at France on certain anniversaries. The Poles should be entitled to ritually thumb their noses at France annually on VE Day.

None of which takes away from the gallantry of the French soldier or sailor. Plenty who chose to follow De Gaulle, who was NOT the legal French government, or those who signed on after 1942, earned honour for France.

Although I am not willing to take Mencken’s list at face value, let me stipulate it for these purposes.

Would that not merely prove either that these countries had their backs to the wall and had no choice but to go to war solo, or that they had just decided to do so of their own volition and were thus by definition not that bright?

I assume you are discounting colonial wars, in which cases the British went to war alone plenty of times just as the French and others did.

Discounting those wars [which means Algeria and Indochina as well] I can only think of one major war in which France fought without allies- the rather disappointing Franco-Prussian war. If embarrassing defeats of one’s own making are allowed to count for France, then Britain should be allowed to count the American revolutionary war. Notably, the final battles [at sea] involved the British defeating the French, but the main element of the war was certainly an embarrassing British defeat and it was the French army and navy mainly responsible, so fair’s fair.

At least Germany, whose only example I can think of is also the Franco-Prussian war, actually WON their solo war instead of losing in a rout. Of course, that is presuming we can count “Germany” as a single victorious power, when it was in fact a coalition of the Prussian led North German Confederation and south German allies not yet absorbed into one nation. I assume Mencken was retroactively doing that.

For France, maybe the earliest days of the Revolution can count, but by the time that got going in any serious way they had found some allies. And they had them thereafter through 1814.

Prior to that, France was always smart enough to line up some kind of ally, even if it was just some lackeys to hold one front down. The Bavarians and Saxons contributed respectable armies and performed well enough in multiple French wars. At times France had Austria and Russia against Prussia, and at other times Prussia against Austria. She had Spain as ally most of the 18th century including in the American war. She had German and Italian allies in the War of Spanish Succession, and German allies in Louis XIVs’ earlier wars. She for decades had the Turks collaborating against both Austria and Spain. In the 17th century she even had England at times.

Before that they liked to use up the Scots, a fact that galls me whenever historically minded Scots nationalists romanticize the old French connection. The sequence of events was always, France goes to war with England and calls on Scotland. Scotland rallies to open a second front. France makes peace or loses massively and then makes peace, England turns and crushes Scotland. Not cool.

France’s allies didn’t necessarily always contribute much, let alone equally, but that can be said for Britain’s allies from time to time.

Their flyers, like German flyers over Britain before them, risked their lives against substantial air defences and knowingly accepted huge losses to accomplish their missions.

Like those Luftwaffe flyers of 1940, the allied ones were carrying on a perhaps unjustifiable but then legal act of war, against enemy forces arrayed in defence, and risked all. If the allied effort is to be condemned, so is the German. If not the latter, not the former. Superior scale and efficiency is not grounds for condemnation when the act and the policy are the same.

The allies also didn’t amass a record of years of rounding up helpless civilians on the ground by the millions, defended by no forces and in no position to defend themselves, from territory already occupied in which they were contributing nothing to any allied war effort and were entitled to protection under the occupation provisions of the laws of war, in some cases being in fact citizens of neutral states or German allies or indeed Germany itself, and then machine gunning them into pits or carting them off to be gassed, etc.

Allied aircrew killed plenty of German civilians but at least they were the ENEMY’s citizens, in enemy-governed territory, still active as citizens of the enemy country, the adults at least contributors to its war effort, and they did it after fighting through enemy defences at great cost. Far too many Germans spent their war killing civilians under their control and legal protection, who were undefended, contributing nothing against Germany, and were not always even enemy nationals.

Flying a bomber to Berlin was a lot less gutless or evil than shooting a bunch of peasants in the back or shoving them in the gas hut.

Also, the bombing, Allied or German, was considered lawful by all until after 1945. The GErmans were already way farther out beyond the law their country was signatory too.

Now if you say I should mourn the children of Germany killed under the bombs, fair enough. They weren’t old enough to have earned it by their allegiance. Neither were the children of Poland, the Low Countries, France, England, or Russia.

And even then, with their up close and personal on-the-ground methods the Germans actually COULD have spared children, and chose to massacre them as well as a matter of policy.

I am off now to listen to some Mozart or Beethoven or Bach, and remember the German civilization I have loved since youth. I do not want to follow the instinct this subject always puts in me, which would be to cackle at a big photo of the ruins of Nuremberg.