Cav > Books: ww1‎ (24)

"More than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control.
Once the regime’s sword was lifted, Communist parties crumbled quickly; if the sword remained, the party did too.
Nor, for that matter, was the emergence of Communist governments in the twentieth century in the first place preordained by some Hegelian- Marxist law of history, however much Karl Marx and his acolytes would have wished it so. As we will see in the pages ahead, the emergence of Communism in Russia, China, and their satellites required a series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions of angry and impressionable young men. Despite the party’s claim to speak for the proletarian masses of humanity, and several much ballyhooed near misses, Communists nowhere came to power through the ballot box."

"To promote Beijing’s entry into the WTO at the turn of the millennium, Washington politicians promised Americans that opening China for trade would moderate Communism. As Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, put it, “By entering the WTO, China committed to free itself from the ‘House that Mao Built,’ including state-run enterprises [and] central planning institutes,” leading to “more institutions and associations free from Communist party control.” Nothing of the kind has happened. Instead of Communist China converging on Western liberal norms, Western technology has allowed the Chinese government to ratchet up surveillance of its citizens. It uses data mining made possible by US internet search engines, tracking features on smartphones, and the like to keep tabs on people’s movements and activities in the most invasive “social credit system” in the world. Dissidents are denied access to jobs, travel, and credit cards. With “Zero COVID” contact tracing and forcible house quarantining, the CCP under China’s increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, carried out population controls the KGB could only have dreamed of..."

"...And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West?"

"Thus the question this book addresses is not whether the British were heroic. That is settled for all time. But were their statesmen wise? For if they were wise, how did Britain pass in one generation from being mistress of the most awesome of empires into a nation whose only hope for avoiding defeat and ruin was an America that bore no love for the empire? By 1942, Britain relied on the United States for all the necessities of national survival: the munitions to keep fighting, the ships to bring her supplies, the troops to rescue a continent from which Britain had been expelled in three weeks by the Panzers of Rommel and Guderian. Who blundered? Who failed Britain? Who lost the empire? Was it only the appeasers, the Guilty Men?"

"Had Britain never given the war guarantee, the Soviet Union would almost surely have borne the brunt of the blow that fell on France. The Red Army, ravaged by Stalin’s purge of senior officers, might have collapsed. Bolshevism might have been crushed. Communism might have perished in 1940, instead of living on for fifty years and murdering tens of millions more in Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. A Hitler-Stalin war might have been the only war in Europe in the 1940s. Tens of millions might never have died terrible deaths in the greatest war in all history."

"...Its passion and parables, and its characters, are nowadays better known than those of the Bible. Instead of the triumphal ride into Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the betrayal at Gethsemane, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, the Supper at Emmaus and the coming of the Holy Ghost in tongues of fire, we have a modern substitute: Winston the outcast prophet in the wilderness, living on cigars and champagne rather than locusts and wild honey, but slighted, exiled and prophetic all the same. We have the betrayal at Munich, the miraculous survival of virtue amid defeat at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain, and the resurrection of freedom and democracy on D-Day."

"...One day, this dangerous fable of the glorious anti-fascist war against evil may destroy us all simply because we have a government too vain and inexperienced to restrain itself. That is why it is so important to dispel it."

"There is little doubt that much of the bombing of Germany was done to please and appease Josef Stalin. Stalin jeered at Churchill for his failure to open a Second Front and to fight Hitler’s armies in Europe, and ceaselessly pressed him to open such a front – something Churchill was politically and militarily reluctant to do. Bombing Germany, though it did not satisfy Stalin’s demands for an invasion, at least reassured him that we were doing something, and so lessened his pressure on us to open a second front.
Pleasing Stalin – or at least avoiding his disfavour – would be one of Winston Churchill’s preoccupations in the years that followed...
...the killing of German civilians, and the disruption of German rule in central Europe, was an effective and practicable way of soothing the Soviet monster’s rages...
...Soon after his first ill-tempered encounter with Stalin, Churchill was pressed by Harris for a commitment to a bombing offensive. Churchill responded that he was committed to bombing, partly because it would look bad to stop such a major part of Britain’s war effort, but he did not expect it to have decisive results in 1943 or bring the war to an end. But it was, Churchill said, ‘better than doing nothing’."

"March 1945. Tokyo hit by Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid of this or any war. 16 square miles of central Tokyo annihilated, over 1 million made homeless, with an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths. (To put these figures into context, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima some months later killed 70,000, and the one dropped on Nagasaki killed 35,000.)"

"It is true that nobody could have known at the time that the National Socialist persecution of Jews would end in the extermination camps. Even Hitler had not yet conceived of them. Yet when undoubted evidence of these camps later reached the USA and Britain, these countries took no direct action to prevent the murder, to destroy railway tracks leading to the murder camps or to rescue those who remained trapped in Europe. The Bermuda Conference of April 1943 likewise rejected any plans to relax immigration quotas, either in the USA or in Palestine, or to take special measures to allow Europe’s remaining Jews to escape Hitler. Yet by then many credible reports strongly suggesting large-scale murder had reached the outside world."

"And what can we say about World War II’s final settlement, at Yalta? Viewed coldly, this cynical action, a sort of large-scale protection racket in which Stalin played the racketeer and the Western Allies his cowed victims, was a far more disgraceful episode of appeasement than anything even contemplated at Munich in 1938. This unheroic pact meant the handing over of millions of innocent and defenceless people to a cruel foreign conqueror. Some of them – such as the Cossacks – were disgracefully sent in locked railway cars into the custody of Stalin’s NKVD execution squads. They had good reason to fear for their lives, but their frantic pleas to remain in the West were ignored. No doubt the penetration of our establishment by sympathisers of the Communist empire prevented us for many years from admitting the revolting nature of the Soviet state. But perhaps our embarrassment about having had such people as valued allies also played its part in that reticence."

"I am not saying that Britain should have remained neutral throughout the European War that began in 1939. I am saying that we might have done better to follow the wise example of the USA, and wait until we and our allies were militarily and diplomatically ready before entering that conflict. I am suggesting that our diplomacy, especially after March 1939, allowed others to dictate and hasten the timing of that war in ways that did not suit us or our main ally, France.
Above all, I am not saying that the war against Hitler was unnecessary. At some point, for the good of Germany, Europe and the world, Hitler’s career had to be ended, probably by force, from within or without. Even if you do not believe that the internal affairs of other countries are the business of other countries, you may hope that repulsive regimes may be brought to an end. And sometimes the most effective way of doing so is inflicting foreign policy defeats on them, robbing them of prestige at home.
The startling thing is that, as matters turned out, Britain ended up playing a surprisingly small part in the overthrow of Hitler. It was not British troops who stormed Hitler’s bunker or planted their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag. It is still difficult to mention this, or to criticise aspects of our war effort. But it is so."

"I am concerned to understand what happened, not to vindicate or to condemn. I was an anti-appeaser from the day that Hitler came to power; and no doubt should be again under similar circumstances. But the point has no relevance in the writing of history. In retrospect, though many were guilty, none was innocent. The purpose of political activity is to provide peace and prosperity; and in this every statesman failed, for whatever reason..."

"...Why do so many leaders make catastrophic mistakes and lead their militaries and countries to defeat?
At the core of this book is the notion that winning wars is about understanding and following basic principles. Although war is fiendishly complex, wars are almost always lost due to the same simple ideas being misapplied or ignored. War is a psychological phenomenon—a competition between evolved human brains—and its core nature has altered hardly at all since humans first began to live in groups hundreds of thousands of years ago."

"How to Fight a War was written as a reference guide for the Commander in Chief of a nation’s military. In an age of inevitable and more frequent wars, our leaders must have the strategic, operational, and tactical skills to prosecute wars successfully. The ability to do so means that we may arrive at durable strategic answers to the pressing geopolitical questions of the day quicker and more efficiently than might otherwise be the case. This makes me sound like a warmonger, which I most certainly am not, having experienced war first-hand."

"The first key lesson is that war is political. In a famous encapsulation, war is simply politics by other means. Very often you will see war on the one hand, and politics and diplomacy on the other, discussed as if they were discrete spheres of activity, with only the narrowest of connections between them.
War is a subset of politics. It is how humans conduct politics when they have failed to reach a decision through talking. It is, some have called it, armed politics."

"...Clouds spared one city, while one couple’s vacation decades earlier saved another. The story of Kyoto and Kokura poses an immediate challenge to our convenient, simplified assumptions of cause and effect following a rational, ordered progression. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We want a rational explanation to make sense of the chaos of life. The world isn’t supposed to be a place where hundreds of thousands of people live or die from decades-old nostalgia for one couple’s pleasant vacation, or because clouds flitted across the sky at just the right moment."

"...Whenever we revisit the dog-eared pages within our personal histories, we’ve all experienced Kokura’s luck (though, hopefully, on a less consequential scale).
When we consider the what-if moments, it’s obvious that arbitrary, tiny changes and seemingly random, happenstance events can divert our career paths, rearrange our relationships, and transform how we see the world. To explain how we came to be who we are, we recognize pivot points that so often were out of our control. But what we ignore are the invisible pivots, the moments that we will never realize were consequential, the near misses and near hits that are unknown to us because we have never seen, and will never see, our alternative possible lives. We can’t know what matters most because we can’t see how it might have been.
If hundreds of thousands of people could live or die based on one couple’s vacation choice decades earlier, which seemingly trivial choices or accidents could end up drastically changing the course of your life, even far into the future? Could being late to a meeting or missing an exit off the highway not just change your life, but alter the course of history? And if that happened, would you even realize it? Or would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?"

"I am a (disillusioned) social scientist. Disillusioned because I’ve long had a nagging feeling that the world doesn’t work the way that we pretend it does. The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rationality onto a world defined by disorder, chance, and chaos.
But I also began to flirt with an alluring thought: that we could find new meaning in that chaos, learning to celebrate a messy, uncertain reality, by accepting that we, and everything around us, are all just flukes, spit out by a universe that can’t be tamed..."

We will tackle six big questions:
1. Does everything happen for a reason, or does stuff… just happen?
2. Why do tiny changes sometimes produce huge impacts?
3. Why do we cling to a storybook version of reality even if it’s not true?
4. Can’t we just tame flukes with better data and more sophisticated probability models?
5. Where do flukes come from—and why do they blindside us?
6. Can we live better, happier lives if we embrace the chaos of our world?

"Who has been the most influential person of the twenty-firstbcentury so far? Some might say Xi Jinping, or Vladimir Putin, or Donald Trump. I disagree. My nomination would be an unnamed person. The COVID- 19 pandemic likely started with a single person, in a single event, in Wuhan, China.VIII The lives of literally billions of people were drastically changed, for years, by one virus infecting one individual. Never in human history have the daily lives of so many people been so drastically affected, for so long, by one small, contingent event. Welcome to the swarm..."

"...By 2010, increasing numbers of Americans were beginning to express fears that they were losing the country they grew up in, and that they had hoped—or perhaps too complacently assumed—that they would be passing on to their children and grandchildren.
No one issue and no one administration in Washington has been enough to create a perfect storm for a great nation that has weathered many storms in its more than two centuries of existence. But the Roman Empire lasted many times longer, and weathered many storms in its turbulent times—and yet it ultimately collapsed completely.
It has been estimated that a thousand years passed before the standard of living in Europe rose again to the level it had achieved in Roman times. The collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the ruins.
Is that where America is headed? I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet—and that nothing is inevitable until it happens."

"When we look back at the decades-long erosions and distortions of our educational system, our legal system and our political system, we must acknowledge the chilling fact that the kinds of dangers we face now were always inherent in these degenerating trends. The essays that follow deal with these trends individually, but it may help to keep in mind that they were all going on at the same time, and that these are the dangers whose coming together can create a perfect storm."

“Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes Henry Kissinger. “They aspire to be the international system.” That’s the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today..."

"...The prevailing consensus, in Washington and abroad, is that an ascendant Beijing is threatening to overtake a slumping America. “If we don’t get moving,” said President Biden in 2021, “they’re going to eat our lunch.” Countries in every region, a veteran Asian diplomat reports, are “making preparations for a world” in which China will be “number one.”
China is certainly acting like it wants to run the show. The CCP is laying plans to create a Sino-centric Asia and reclaim what it sees as China’s rightful place atop the global hierarchy. Beijing is using an impressive array of military, economic, diplomatic, technological, and ideological tools to protect the power and project the influence of a brutal authoritarian regime. The United States, for its part, is trying to defend a liberal international order it has anchored for generations and prevent Beijing from making the twenty-first century an age of autocratic ascendancy. America and China are thus locked in a fierce global struggle.
It has become conventional wisdom in Washington—a rare point of agreement in a bitterly divided capital—that the two countries are running a “superpower marathon” that may last a century..."

"Our core argument in this book is that the conventional wisdom is wrong on both points. Americans urgently need to start seeing the Sino- American rivalry less as a 100-year marathon and more as a blistering, decade-long sprint. That’s because China will be a falling power far sooner than most people think..."

"Why write a book that warns about a coming conflict with China during a year in which Russia started a major war in Europe? The simple answer is that Russian aggression in Ukraine has made the successful containment of China all the more imperative.
If China were to follow in Russia’s footsteps and expand violently in its region, Eurasia would be engulfed in conflict. The United States would again face the prospect of a two-front war, only this time against nuclear-armed aggressors fighting “back to back” along their shared border.
America’s military would be overstretched and, likely, overwhelmed; America’s alliance system might come under unbearable strain. The postwar international order could collapse as countries across Eurasia scramble to defend themselves and cope with the knock-on effects of majorpower war, including economic crises and mass refugee flows. A world already shaken by Russian aggression could be shattered by a Chinese offensive."

"This book offers a contrarian take on China by explaining why that country is in more trouble than most analysts think, why that trend makes the coming years so perilous, and how America can prepare for the storm that is about to strike. We also challenge the received wisdom about the origins of major war and the rise and fall of great powers..."
"...China’s predicament offers good news and bad news for America. The good news is that, over the long run, the Chinese challenge may prove more manageable than many pessimists now believe. An unhealthy, totalitarian China won’t effortlessly surge past America as the world’s leading power.
We may one day look back on China as we now view the Soviet Union—as a formidable foe whose evident strengths obscured fatal vulnerabilities. The bad news is that getting to the long run won’t be easy. During the 2020s, the pace of rivalry will be torrid, and the prospect of war will be frighteningly real..."

"America’s task, in this decade, is to prevent a peaking China from imposing its will on the world. Yet strategic urgency must be followed by strategic patience: Washington’s reward for getting through the danger zone could be a ticket to a longer struggle in which America’s advantages prove decisive only over a generation or more. That may seem like a meager prize for a country that likes quick, decisive solutions. But it is surely worth winning, in view of the perils that America and the world confront today."

"Clausewitz was no desk soldier. He received his baptism of fire at the age of 13, when the Prussian Army, on the left wing of the forces of the First Coalition containing and driving back the armies of the First French Republic, was campaigning first on the Rhine, then in the Vosges.
Advancing across that broad valley, trudging up and down those steep, wooded mountain tracks, he acquired that infantryman’s familiarity with terrain that was to inspire so many of the pages of On War."

"So it was with war. One could only learn how to conduct war, said Clausewitz, by learning, and learning from, what had already been done; by studying war not in the abstract but in the reality. Only thus could a truly comprehensive theory of war be developed, one that would make it possible not only to understand (as with painting or architecture) what the great masters had achieved, but to appreciate how their achievements came to be creative and not imitative acts, unique in themselves but enlarging the scope of expression available to their successors.
This meant studying the history of war, for ‘in the art of war experience counts for more than any number of abstract truths’ (p. 164). But the study of that history had itself to be an exercise of critical judgement.
One could not take for granted the reliability of historians. The bulk of histories, Clausewitz warned, were indeed so unreliable as to be almost useless. Most of what had come down from antiquity or the Middle Ages was too incomplete and inaccurate to be of value, even when it was not pure myth. Clausewitz was prepared to accept as material for study only those campaigns about which full and accurate knowledge was obtainable, which effectively restricted him to those fought in Europe,
and predominantly Western Europe, during the past two centuries."

"War is a clash between major interests that is resolved by bloodshed – that is the only way in which it differs from other conflicts. Rather than comparing it to an art we could more accurately compare it to commerce, which is also a conflict of human interests and activities; and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale. (p. 149)
Any theory of war was thus a branch of social and political theory and had to be considered in the context of politics, ‘the womb in which war develops – where its outlines already exist in their hidden, rudimentary form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos’...

"It is not easy, however, to give a fair and comprehensive summary of Clausewitz’s strategic doctrine, since it is presented with infuriating incoherence. Key passages relating to it are scattered almost at random throughout On War, fully bearing out his gloomy prophecy that his readers would find in the book only ‘a collection of material from which a theory of war was to have been distilled’. The section of the work entitled ‘On Strategy in General’ is only a collection of chapters on diverse topics linked by no very evident common theme. A casual reader might very reasonably assume that Clausewitz’s interest in the overall problems of strategy was slight in comparison with his almost obsessive concern with what he saw as the main tool of the strategist – the engagement, and in particular the major battle; a topic to which he devoted an entire book, perhaps the most powerfully written and best organized in the whole of On War."

"...there is no stopping-place short of the extreme."

"Soldiers, sailors, and airmen involved worldwide: 65,038,810.
Military deaths worldwide: 8,020,780.
Civilian deaths worldwide: 6,642,633.
Military wounded world wide: 21,228,813.
Approximate monetary cost in early twentieth-century dollars: $281,887,000,000."

"Crowds cheered men who believed that they were on their way to a great adventure that called to mind the bygone days of crusades and chivalry..."

"French commanders believed that the French soldier was animated by an overpowering patriotism amounting to a kind of Gallic life force that they called élan vital or simply élan. It was a concept borrowed from the prominent French philosopher Henri Bergson, and planners managed to persuade themselves that this spiritual force would prove irresistible on the field of battle. French generals believed that a charge into German territory would utterly disrupt German war plans and send the invaders running back to their homeland..."

"A sense of superiority is not an incidental happenstance, for superiority has been essential to getting intellectuals where they are. They are in fact often very superior within the narrow band of human concerns with which they deal. But so too are not only chess grandmasters and musical prodigies but also computer software engineers, professional athletes and people in many mundane occupations whose complexities can only be appreciated by those who have had to master them.
The fatal misstep of many among the intelligentsia is in generalizing from their mastery of a certain kind of knowledge to a general wisdom in the affairs of the world—which is to say, in the affairs of other people, whose knowledge of their own affairs is far greater than what any given intellectual can hope to have. It has been said that a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him..."

"...Similarly, many of the intelligentsia express not only surprise but outrage at the number of shots fired by the police in some confrontation with a criminal, even if many of these intellectuals have never fired a gun in their lives, much less faced life-and-death dangers requiring split-second decisions. Seldom, if ever, do the intelligentsia find it necessary to seek out any information on the accuracy of pistols when fired under stress, before venting their feelings and demanding changes. In reality, a study by the New York City Police Department found that, even within a range of only six feet, just over half the shots fired by police missed completely. At distances from 16 to 25 yards—less than the distance from first base to second base on a baseball diamond—only 14 percent of the shots hit..."

"...The two visions differ fundamentally, not only in how they see the world but also in how those who believe in these visions see themselves. If you happen to believe in free markets, judicial restraint, traditional values and other features of the tragic vision, then you are just someone who believes in free markets, judicial restraint and traditional values. There is no personal
exaltation resulting from those beliefs. But to be for “social justice” and “saving the environment,” or to be “anti-war” is more than just a set of beliefs about empirical facts. This vision puts you on a higher moral plane as someone concerned and compassionate, someone who is for peace in the world, a defender of the downtrodden, and someone who wants to preserve the beauty of nature and save the planet from being polluted by others less caring. In short, one vision makes you somebody special and the other vision does not. These visions are not symmetrical..."
"...Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls—and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their vision are not surprising under these circumstances. But for people with opposite views, who may for example believe that most things work out better if left to free markets, traditions, families, etc., these are just a set of hypotheses about external events, and there is no such huge personal ego stake in whether those hypotheses are confirmed by empirical evidence. Obviously everyone would prefer to be proved right rather than proved wrong, but the point here is that there are no such comparable ego stakes involved among believers in the tragic vision.
This difference may help explain a striking pattern that goes back at least two centuries—the greater tendency of those with the vision of the anointed to see those they disagree with as enemies who are morally lacking. While there are individual variations in this, as with most things, there are nevertheless general patterns, which many have noticed, both in our times and in earlier centuries. For example, a contemporary account has noted: Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, a sell-out, insensitive, possibly evil..."

"Here, as in many other situations, the intelligentsia’s effect on the course of events did not depend upon their convincing the holders of power. All they had to do was convince enough of the public so that the holders of power became fearful of losing that power if they went against the prevailing vision—pacifism, in this case. If Baldwin had lost power, he would have lost it to those who would turn the pacifist vision into a reality potentially disastrous to the country. Britain, after all, narrowly escaped being invaded and conquered in 1940, and only because of a belated development of its interceptor fighter planes that shot down German bombers during the aerial blitz that was intended to prepare the way for the invasion force being mobilized across the English Channel. Had the pacifists in the Labor Party come to power in 1933, it is by no means clear that this narrow margin of survival would have been in place..."

"...They have romanticized cultures that have left people mired in poverty, violence, disease and chaos, while trashing cultures that have led the world in prosperity, medical advances and law and order..."
"...To condemn their country’s enemies would be to be like the masses but to condemn their own society itself sets the anointed apart as moral exemplars and incisive minds—at least to like-minded peers. Given the incentives and constraints, it is hard to see how they could do otherwise, when whatever significance that they might have in the larger society so often depends on their criticisms of that society and their claims to have special “solutions” to whatever they define as its “problems....”