Margherita Sarfatti: the Woman Who Destroyed Mussolini

A ghostly image of Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961), a remarkably interesting Italian intellectual, known mostly because she was the lover of the Duce, Benito Mussolini, at the beginning of his career. She might have been much more than just a lover, and she may have played an important part both in Mussolini's successes and in his eventual downfall. Margherita Sarfatti makes a cameo appearance in my novel "The Etruscan Quest" and, here, I expand my interpretation of her role in history by proposing that she may have been one of the causes, perhaps the main one, of the doom of her former lover. Of course, I cannot prove this interpretation, but I can at least say that it cannot be disproven, either. As for many things in history, truth is now with the ghosts who lived the events that we read about. So, why not try to ask them?

Italian Version

Ah.... sorry, Ugo, I didn't want to scare you.

No... no, I am not scared. Just a little surprised. Who are you? 

Don't you recognize me? I know that I am all white and a little transparent, but maybe you can.

Hmmm.... not sure. Did we ever meet before?

In a way, yes. I am a character in your novel, "The Etruscan Quest" Actually, not just a character. But I do appear in your story.

Now that I look at you, well, maybe yes.  You look like... a lot like.... a portrait I saw. Are you Margherita Sarfatti?

Yes! That was very good, Ugo!  

Well, as I said, I am surprised, but I do recognize you. It is a pleasure to meet you, Donna Margherita. 

You don't have to call me 'Donna Margherita.' Just Margherita is fine. Where I am now, certain things are not important.

I imagine not. But I hope you were not displeased by what I wrote about you in my book.

Not displeased, Ugo. I liked what you wrote. So, I thought I could pay you a visit.

Ah... thanks, Margherita. It was a pleasure to write about you. Although, of course, it was just a cameo role in my novel. 

I know. Yes, but it was nice of you. You wrote good things about me. Though, I think you were missing something. 

Mmm.... maybe I understand. But I didn't know if I had the right answer to the questions I had. 

Well, now you can ask me. Wouldn't you?

Yes, it is a remarkable chance. Even though I guess you are just a mental projection of mine. 

Maybe. Or maybe I am a real ghost; how can you tell?

Whatever you are, Margherita, there is this nagging question that I have had in mind for a long time. And I think I can ask you about it. What happened to Mussolini that made him change so much in the 1930s? I mean, from a shrewd leader to a stumbling boor? How did he get involved in this mad idea of rebuilding the Roman Empire? 

And, Ugo, if you are asking me, I think you believe I have the answer, right?

Well, yes. After all, you were placed in a position where you could know things nobody else knew. The lover of the Duce; you had access to the highest ranks of the government. And you were even received by President Roosevelt in 1934..... 

But if I am just a projection of your mind.....

You are teasing me, Margherita. 

Ah, sorry, Ugo. Well, after all, it doesn't matter if I am a ghost or just part of your mind. You never know what the boundaries of one's mind are. And in Hades, we may know things that living people can't know. So, let me see if I can answer your question. For that, I have to start from the beginning. And, please understand that this story is still painful for me. So far, I never told it completely to anyone. 

It is an honor, Margherita. I appreciate it. 

Thanks, Ugo. I know that you do. So, you know that I was Mussolini’s mistress for more than 20 years; from when he was an unknown journalist up to when he became the "Duce degli Italiani". He changed so much in those 20 years. And then he dumped me for a younger woman. I think it was in 1932 that he met her, Claretta Petacci was her name. See? Even as a ghost, you can be upset. That is why ghosts are said to howl in desolate places, clank chains, and things like that. I am not doing anything like that, but if I remember this story.... well. Think about how many things I did for Benito. I found money for him, invented slogans for him, taught him how to deal with powerful people, even table manners. And do you know who invented the term "Duce"?

But wasn't it invented by Gabriele D'Annunzio? 

Yes, D'Annunzio used it. But the idea that Benito should use it as a title was mine. And it was so successful! Incredibly so. By the 1930s, everyone was using it in Italy. And that was bad for several reasons. Anyhow, let me go back to your question. Yes, Mussolini was a shrew leader when he became Prime Minister in 1922. Everything he touched seemed to be a success. And then, everything changed. But to explain how it happened, I must tell you a few things about earlier times. First of all, do you know that Mussolini was a shill for the British Secret Service?

It is known. Historians agree that he was paid by the British as a propagandist to push Italy into the war against the Central Empires.

Yes, he did. And have you ever wondered why the British came to choose him?

Good point, Margherita. I hadn't thought about this. 

Well, you should have. The story is that in 1912 I met Benito for the first time when he was the director of the "Popolo d'Italia." He was a fascinating man; he had an inner force; unusual. I have to tell you that I fell in love with him. Desperately in love, it happens. But I also thought that all that force could be directed to something useful. So, in 1914, when the Services contacted me....

The British Secret Service? But why you, Margherita?

Shouldn't it be obvious? Don't you know that I can speak five languages?

Yes, I knew that, but....

My family. They were international bankers, industrialists, traders... We had connections everywhere. And you also know that we were a Jewish family. 

I knew that, too. 

Well, so, no surprise that I had many connections. In business, and also in politics. So, you could say that I was a shill for the British, too. But don't misunderstand me. I am Italian; I did what I did because I thought that it could help Italy -- but also Britain. Britain and Italy were sister countries at that time. I saw nothing wrong with helping the British get a little help from Italy in their fight against Germany. And so I told them of this young journalist, a smart man, a person who could help them.

I see.... this is not written in the history books. 

Of course not. But if you ask yourself the right questions, you can find good answers. Benito spoke no English; he wasn't known at all outside Italy. He was, by all means, a small player in the great game. There had to be a good reason why the Services looked for him. 

And that was you, Margherita. I am amazed, but it sounds true. 

Indeed, Ugo, indeed. Benito accepted to work for the British. He did that for the money, but it was also a shrewd decision for him. He knew that he could use the support of the Services to make a political career in Italy. Shrewd and lucky at the same time. You know that he was drafted into the army in 1915, right?

I know, yes. He wrote a diary of his experience in the war. 

The army treated him as a useful asset -- they didn't want him to die. So, they sent him to a quiet area of the front. But it was still dangerous, and he was lucky enough that he was wounded by an Italian gun that exploded near him. It gave him the fame of a war hero. Shrewd and lucky, as I said. 

Yes. Lucky, but only up to a certain point. 

Ah, in life, it is not such a good thing to be lucky. If you are, you arrive to think that you deserve to be lucky.... and that's what happened to Benito. But let me go in order. You know what happened after the war was over, right?

Of course I know. The years of civil strife, then the March on Rome. Mussolini taking power....

Yes. And the Services played a role in that, too. Obviously, they didn't want Italy to fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks, and they didn't want it to collapse again into statelets. We arrived close to that. So, they helped Benito to take over. It was part of my task, too. You know, my family was rich, but still I needed money. And the Services were not stingy. They understood that Benito badly needed me to set up his plan.

You won't find that written in the history books. 

No, of course not. But there are many things not written in history books that are true, nevertheless. But let me continue. The March on Rome was a success; the King of Italy made Benito Prime Minister, then he gradually gained more and more power. Things were going well. Italy was recovering from the disaster of the Great War, the economy was expanding, the civil strife had disappeared, and many good things were done by the Fascist government. Yes, they had not been light-handed when they took power, but it could have been much worse. I had no official position in the government, but as the Duce's lover, I had a lot of influence in many things. And I could indulge in my passion: art. I was collecting artwork, setting up a coterie of top-level artists; I could say that life for me was fine in the best of words, or almost so. And I was still in love with Benito. Yet, I could see that something was not so well. Dark clouds at the horizon, if I am to use the imagery I read in your novel. 

Oh... sure, in my novel, there is a discussion on the haruspices being able to interpret the signs in the sky. 

Yes. I could say that I was seeing ominous signs in the sky. At some point, I started thinking that there was something wrong with the whole story. Simply said, Benito was gathering too much power. There was this idea that "Mussolini is Always Right" -- it started as a joke, but then people started believing in it for real. And then there were the elections of 1929, where there was only one party you could vote for, and there was a "yes" already printed on the ballot. No wonder the Fascists won with more than 99% of the votes. But that wasn't the way to go. It was a dangerous road, too much power in the hands of a single person. I tried to tell Benito, but he won't listen to me. By this time, he was already changing. He had always been.... how to say, "strong-willed," maybe. By then, he was simply stubborn and believing only in himself. 

The way he is often described....

He had not always been like that, Ugo. But yes, things were going down a slippery road. In parallel, there was that odious man, Adolf Hitler, who was taking power in Germany. And the British were starting to understand that, with Mussolini, they had created a golem that they couldn't control anymore. Do you know the story of the Golem, right?

Of course. The monster created by the Rabbi of Prague. 

So it is. When people have power, they tend to create monsters that they can't control. Maybe I had that power when I created the Duce...

Margherita, I do think you did that with good intentions....

.... and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Anyway, let me continue with the story. In 1932, I turned 50, and I discovered that I had become too old for Benito. He was three years younger than me. He met that woman, Clara Petacci, and he wasn't interested in me any longer. But that wasn't the worst thing. I was losing him -- sometimes he was still listening to me, but mostly he would just do what he wanted. Any idiocy that came to his mind was immediately hailed by his coterie as a great strategic insight. And he was fascinated by that other golem in Germany, Hitler. At that time, I met my contacts in the Services, and they told me about their plan. Just like the Rabbi of Prague destroyed his golem, the British had concocted a plan to destroy the golem called Benito Mussolini. 

Ah... Margherita, that sounds fascinating. And what was the plan?

It was simple, but well thought out. These people, you could say that they were evil, but you can't say they are not smart. So, they started with the fact that Italy had a small colony in the Horn of Africa, Somalia; they had conquered it in the 19th century. But the region also had a British colony and a French one. And the only African land that was not in European hands, Ethiopia, was right there, at the border with Somalia. It was still ruled by the king of kings, the Negus Neghesti. Italy had tried, once, to expand in Ethiopia, but they had been defeated at the battle of Adua, back in 1886.

I know this story. I guess the Italians wanted revenge for that defeat, right?

Yes, there was this idea of getting revenge, but it wasn't considered an important thing. Ethiopia had never been part of the propaganda baggage of the Fascist party. Benito barely knew it existed, and he had never mentioned the story of Adua in his writings. It was something dormant. I would call it a dormant evil. But the British had focused on that. I think they specialize in evil. See, the idea was to convince Benito to seek revenge for the defeat of Adua. 

And how would that be useful to them?

Simple, as I said. The idea was to push the Duce to attack Ethiopia. And for that, he would have had to assemble a large force: men, equipment, and resources committed to a remote land. Then, of course, the Ethiopians would resist, and Italy would be forced to commit even more resources to the task. And, while the fight was going on, the British would intervene with a naval blockade. They could do that easily; the British rule the waves, don't they? No way for the Italian navy to contest that. And, without the possibility of resupplying the army in Ethiopia, the Italians would have had to surrender. Maybe the British would have graciously intervened to save the poor Italians from being exterminated by the angry Ethiopians. And that was the basic idea: the Duce would lose face; then, he would have had to resign. Job done.

The Perfidious Albion; as they say about Britain. 

Indeed, perfidious. But that's the way they operate. There is a reason why Britain has been ruling the waves for so long. There are things I know that you can know only from this side.... But I think it is better if I don't tell you. Anyway, let me continue with this story. I thought the plan was elegant. It implied some bloodshed, of course, but it might have prevented a much worse disaster later on. So, I enthusiastically accepted to cooperate. And you may ask now who had this idea of the new Roman Empire that would be created by the conquest of Ethiopia. 

I can guess that, Margherita.....

Yes. I concocted this absurd idea that Italy could rebuild the Roman Empire by conquering a country that had never been part of the Roman Empire. I thought of it mostly as a joke, but people believed it! It was all over the place.  Everyone was saying that, and everyone was convinced of that. You have that thing you call "Ngrams," don't you? 

We have that. I am surprised that you know about that, Margherita.

Why surprised? We ghost know a lot of things. But never mind that. You can use Ngrams to see how certain ideas penetrate the public consciousness. And if you look up the word "Ethiopia," you'll see how it picked up interest all of a sudden around 1932. At my time, I didn't need Ngrams. I was one of the sources of this propaganda operation and I could see how things were moving. I had the Italian secret service passing to me their reports. They were going to the Duce, too, but he wouldn't read them, and if he did, he didn't care so much. But I did. The idea of attacking Ethiopia truly exploded with the public. You have a term for this kind of thing, right?

Yes, we call them "psyops." 

That is a nice term. We didn't have it, but we knew how to set certain things in motion. I was not the only one working at that, of course. The British government did a good job by signing a memorandum of understanding with the Italians, where they said that if Italy attacked Ethiopia, Britain wouldn't move a finger to help the Ethiopians. The Perfidious Albion, indeed. Anyway, I do think I played a role in convincing Benito that conquering Ethiopia was a good idea. I even hinted that he could become the new Roman Emperor. 'Benito Caesar,' or something like that. And I think he believed me! How silly men can be! I wrote a lot of propaganda to favor the intervention; you can still find what I wrote. You have this thing you call "The Web."

Yes, Margherita. I read something you wrote about Ethiopia. I commented by saying that it was the best piece of propaganda ever written. 

That was kind of you. 

No.... you were really great. Although I would say....

.... a little evil, maybe?

I wouldn't say exactly that, but....

Ah... Ugo, I am ashamed of some of the things I wrote. But I did believe that I was acting for a good purpose. Anyway, I was heavily engaged in this propaganda operation. In a sense, it was fun: these things get you engrossed. I even went to meet President Roosevelt in 1934. You may have wondered how it was that he received me as if I were a head of state, even though I had no official role in the Italian Government. It was because of the plan. In 1934, it was in full swing, and Roosevelt wanted to know about it from me. Not that I was the only source of information for him. But he asked me a lot of things, and I understood that there were things that I had not been told about the plan. Much darker things than what I knew. But Roosevelt didn't tell me much. I was dismissed, and I went back to Italy. I went to see Benito, and he was suspicious about me, about the British, about the Americans, about everyone. It was a critical moment... 

Maybe you could have told him about the plan?

Sure: the perfect way to have me shot by a firing squad as a traitoress. But I could have done that if I thought he would have believed me. But, no. He has already arrived at the stage where he would believe only the things he wanted to believe. I found that my propaganda operation had gone so well that it had affected him, too. He was convinced that Italy could become an Empire again by conquering Ethiopia. Fully convinced. He had swallowed that, as they say in Britain, "lock, stock, and barrel." In a sense, it was a success for me. But it was one of those successes that count as defeats. That day, I saw myself as a relic. Whatever I had done was done; from then on, there was nothing anymore I could do. I remember I left Benito's Palace, "Palazzo Venezia," thinking I would never set foot there again. And I didn't. I came to know that he had instructed the guards at the entrance to deny me entrance if I were to appear. 

Again, Margherita, a fascinating story. But the plan didn't work as it was supposed to work, right?

No, it worked exactly the way it was supposed to work. Just not the way I was told it would. In 1935, Italy attacked Ethiopia, and the war started. I was expecting -- hoping -- that the British navy would start the blockade, but I knew that the plan was more devilish than that. The British did nothing to help the Ethiopians, but they enacted economic sanctions against Italy. It had no effect on the war, but it was as if they wanted Italians to get mad at them. And they succeeded at that: The Italians were raving mad at the British. You should have been there to understand. 

I read something about that, yes. 

Then, Ethiopia surrendered in 1936, and the king of Italy became "Emperor of Ethiopia," and no one found that silly. It was an incredible success for Benito. He was loved, adored, nearly worshipped. People really believed that Italy had become an Empire again. And that Italians were going to trash those decadent plutocracies of Northern Europe, including their Jewish masters. 

It was hard on you, right?

Yes, even though I had converted to Christianity, I was still considered a Jew. Even by Benito himself. You know what he wrote about me? That I was smelling bad because I was a Jewess.... that kind of man, he was. 

I am sorry about that, Margherita. 

You don't have to be sorry, Ugo. It is the way things went. Anyway, the naval blockade of Ethiopia was still part of the plan; it was just postponed. It was enacted in 1941, after  Italy declared war on France and Britain. And things went as planned. Italy had 250,000 troops in Ethiopia, they couldn't be resupplied from the mainland. They soon surrendered; what else could they have done? An easy victory for the British, and a terrible loss for Italy. Those troops could have changed how the war went if they had been available in Europe. 

So, it was a plan.... I hadn't thought about that, but it makes a lot of sense. It was a truly devilish plan by the Perfidious Albion.

Yes, you see, they didn't just want to get rid of Mussolini. They wanted to destroy him and make sure that Italy was thoroughly destroyed, too. No more a threat to the British Empire. It worked incredibly well. Of course, it was possible only because Benito was so dumb. But it was not just him. You see, propaganda is a beast that's nearly impossible to control. You sell dreams to people, and people become enamored with their dreams. And every attempt to wake them up fails or, worse, makes them angry at you. 

I know. You risked your life in 1938.

Yes, it was very hard for me. With the racial laws, I was targeted directly as a Jew. Fortunately, I could run away from Italy fast enough. And you may wonder how I could do that.

Your friends in the British Secret Service, right?

Yes. They helped me run away to France and from there to Argentina. They gave me a pension, and the agreement was that I shouldn't tell anything to anyone about the plan. The Italians agreed that that was the best way to get rid of me. Better than a bullet into my head -- it could have raised suspicions. And it was fine for me, too. Even if I had told the story of the plan, who would have believed me? I can do that only now, when I am a ghost. I was lucky, most of the Italian Jews were not so lucky. My sister Nella was deported to Auschwitz in Germany, and she was killed there. 

I am sorry about that. But can I ask you a question, Margherita?

Of course, you can.

Did you really believe in what you were doing, Margherita? I mean, propaganda? Or was it because you were....

.... paid?

Yes, I mean, I don't want to offend you, but....

Let me answer you with another question, Ugo. I know that your career was as a scientist, right?

Right. 

And you were paid to be a scientist, right? 

Of course, yes. 

But you believed in science, right?

I still do, Margherita..... Even though....

I understand. I know something about what's happening in your world. Yes, and I am sorry for the people like you who believed in science and were so badly betrayed by it. It was the same for me with Benito and the Fascist party. But, in the beginning, I believed in him. I deeply believed that Italy needed a man like him. How things change! He changed so much. It was as if a cancer devoured him from the inside. Yet, something of the old Benito remained. And, in a way, I can understand how that woman, Petacci, loved him to the point of following him to the end. A sad story; she didn't have to. I am sorry for her. But so things are. Sooner or later, everyone ends up where I am, in Hades. 

Yes, you know, Margherita. I was wondering. It is not often that I see ghosts... are you some kind of....

You make me laugh, Ugo. No, I am not a psychopomp. I am not announcing your death!

Ah... that's nice to know! 

I am happy to see that you are relieved! Anyway, it was a pleasure to speak with you. I understand that you are writing another novel, right?

Yes, it is about Mata Hari. 

Oh, such a nice woman. I met her a few times here in Hades. 

The way you say it, it seems that Hades is a nice place. 

Not really, You'll find it boring, I think. 

Well, so things are, I guess. 

So things are. And have nice writing, Ugo. Maybe Mata Hari will come to visit you as a ghost, too. Let me disappear the way ghosts know how to do.......

______________________________________________________________________

Ugo Bardi's novel, "The Etruscan Quest," was published in 2023 by "Lu::Ce Edizioni". The story told in the novel takes place during the time of Fascism in Italy, and it touches many of the elements of madness that overcame the country at that time. Margherita Sarfatti, a real historical figure, makes a cameo appearance in the novel. 

Here is Sarfatti's text that I described as "The Best Piece of Propaganda Ever Written"

More details about the Italian adventure in Ethiopia can be found in this post and this one. 

This post was in part inspired by a conversation with Anastassia Makarieva

 

The Drones are Coming! The Drones are Coming! The Twilight of the Global Empire?

 

This clip looks like a videogame, but it is not (caution, disturbing images). You are seeing Azeri drones destroying Armenian military units during the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Is this the harbinger of the collapse of the Global Empire?

 

Many things have been happening in 2020 that will reverberate for many years in the future. While the West is busy with its "great reset," a small war was fought in a region of the world that you probably had never heard about before: the Nagorno-Karabakh. There, the army of Azerbaijan soundly defeated the Armenian army. 

What made this campaign peculiar is that it was the first time in history that a military confrontation was decided by drones. After that the Azeris (the people of Azerbaijan) had gained control of the sky, their drones could pick the Armenian military units one by one and destroy them at ease. There are video clips all over the Web showing vehicles and other installations being destroyed, and people being shredded to pieces and tossed around like ragdolls.

No surprise: the writing was on the rotor blades. Already in 2012, I had started thinking about the consequences of the development of military robots in a chapter that I wrote for Jorgen Randers' "2052" book. I returned to the subject in 2019, noting how cheap drones would change the rules of war because they could be managed by small organizations, possibly by private military contractors. 

We don't know exactly who managed the drones used by the Azerbaijan forces, but we know that they were made in Turkey, not a major player in the world's power game. Azerbaijan, then, could afford to deploy a number of drones sufficient to overwhelm the Armenian forces even though it is a small country with a GDP of just about 44 billion dollars per year. If Bill Gates, alone, had decided to fight Azerbaijan, he could won the war just using his private financial assets, estimated at more than $100B. 

Surely, the Azeri could never dream to be able to afford even a single carrier strike group of the kind that the Western empire deploys: each group costs about 30 billion dollars and the US has 9 of them. We don't know if the Azeri drones would be able to defeat an American carrier group. But we may be reasonably sure that, in terms of kills/cost, drones greatly outperform aircraft carriers. 

So, we know that drones can fight wars and win them. And now what? Are drones going to make all other weapon systems obsolete, just like tanks did to horses? Maybe, but things are not so simple. They never are. 

At the end of the story, war is simply about control, it is not about pulverizing people to atoms. You may want to use weapons to attain control over others, but that means you have to control the weapons you use. And not all weapons are easy to control. During the 20th century, we saw the development of new weapon systems that were incredibly powerful, but difficult to control. Chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, all have a high kills/cost ratio, so much that they are called "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). But they are difficult to aim at specific targets and the very fact that they are so cheap invites retaliation even from a weaker opponent. 

For example, chemical weapons were used several times in war, but they were decisive only in one case: during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. In that case, the Italians could happily go on gassing the Ethiopians without fear of retaliation since Ethiopia had no air force. It was a different canister of chlorine when Italy decided to go bombing Britain a few years later, in 1940. In that case, the Italians didn't even dream to use chemical weapons, knowing all too well that Britain could have retaliated in kind. 

Drones are cheap enough that, if manufactured in great numbers, they can kill a sufficient number of people that you can define them as weapons of mass destruction. But they look much better than the classic WMDs in terms of control: they can be aimed at very specific targets, even single persons. That's nice (in a certain sense), but things are not so simple. They never are.

Let me state this again: wars are not about pulverizing enemies, they are about controlling them. That brings the question, who controls drones? Behind this question, there is a deeper one: who controls the people who control drones? 

And we are at the core question: the human society is a complex system, and complex systems are never easy to control. The peculiar kind of complex system that we call a "national state" is normally able to reach a condition in which it engages in a common effort, a "war," against another state. But who decides that it is a good idea to go to war? It is rarely (if ever) the result of logic and reason. 

The minds of adult human beings are hard-wired in terms of likes and dislikes and that can hardly be changed except by means of drastic and unreliable actions, torture, electroshock, de-programming, and the like. Instead, it is relatively easy is to trigger aggressive reactions which are pre-programmed inside human brains. It can be done using the technology that we call "propaganda."

We can see propaganda as another kind of WMD: it has a very high kills/cost ratio, but it has control problems, too. It is relatively easy to use it to convince people to hate someone, much more difficult to convince them to stop. That's why most modern wars, dominated by propaganda, are wars of extermination. As usual, control is everything.

Of course, drones, unlike human brains, can be programmed to do exactly what their users want them to do. But that's a boon and a problem at the same time. If someone can hack into the drone's control system, the drone might well be re-programmed to attack its former owners or, simply, to fly harmlessly toward the horizon. Of course, there are ways to harden drones against this kind of attack, but no defensive system is ever perfect. At the limit, drones could be hard-wired in such a way that they would act in complete autonomy, without anyone being able to affect their behavior once they are activated. It was the way the first drones in history, the German V1s of WW2, worked: once fired, their trajectory couldn't be altered anymore. Their strength was in their stupidity: they had no "brain" whatsoever. But modern drones are supposed to be smart weapons: turning them into dumb ones would bring the same problems of the other WMDs. With this kind of drones, we would return to the "MAD" strategy, mutually assured destruction. No control, no way to win a war.

So, we return to the original point: wars are about controlling humans. Then, how do you control the people who control the drones? Would you be able to use standard propaganda techniques for that purpose? Maybe, but there is a big problem here. Modern propaganda was developed to control large masses of people and to convince them to line up on the battlefield to kill each other for the profit of people who would comfortably stay at home. Drone operators (let's call them "droners") are a different breed. They are specialists who might well decide that they won't be so easily tricked into killing people for the profit of others. It was the point I was making in my post where I compared modern droners to the European condottieri of the Renaissance, the leaders of troops of mercenaries specialized in the use of the newly developed firearms.

Controlling the condottieri was notoriously difficult: they tended to be unruly and easily switch sides. Droners might show the same tendencies. Mercenaries are like professional killers: you can hire one to kill someone you don't like, but there is no guarantee that the intended victim won't be able to pay the killer more than you do. One possible way to control droners might be returning to communication technologies developed during the Middle Ages, when the problem was how to control the most sophisticated weapon of the time: armored knights. For droners, it may be possible to develop something similar to the idea of the noble knight who fights for justice. You may object that there is nothing noble in pressing a button to kill a person, which is the job of droners. But, on the other hand, it was the same for an armored knight when he sliced in half a peasant, his main job. So, could we see in the future something like an epic of "Sir Lancelot and the droners of the round table"? Who knows? It might happen. 

A simpler solution to the drone problem would be to limit or even abolish drones by means of international treaties and straight threats to the smaller players. It was done, with a certain degree of success, with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. There are good reasons to do the same with drones: it is very much in the interest of the big powers to avoid that cheap drone technology could spread to smaller states and then challenge the top dogs of the game. So, people seem to be getting the message and there are ongoing efforts in this sense. Abolishing military drones would allow the Western Empire to keep the expensive toys its military like so much, carrier strike groups and others, at least for a while. 

Unfortunately, that would just hasten the speed at which the Empire is rushing toward disintegration. This is the way empires fall: they tend to bankrupt themselves by excessive military expenses. It is a deadly mechanism that sees empires gradually running out of resources while pollution does its damage, too. As a result, Empires become poorer but their leaders don't understand that they should cut down on military expenses. They do exactly the opposite, trying to maintain a military power they can't afford anymore. The result is well known: collapse, often in the rapid form called "Seneca Collapse". 

But, no matter how rapid collapse is, during the twilight phase that precedes it there is a phase of mayhem when the blackberry jam hits the fan. Then, the game of war follows no rules. It happened when economic decline forced the Roman Empire to abandon its expensive heavy infantry units, together with its even more expensive static defense systems: the great walls built along the Empire's borders. The old cumbersome system was replaced with nimble cavalry units, patterned on the Barbarian forces they had once despised. It was a much cheaper army, but the Empire had lost its advantage over its enemies and the result was that it lost control over much of its territory. The result was a period of continuous small scale wars that further hastened the collapse of the Empire.

In our age, the Global Empire may soon become too weak to be able to outlaw drones or any other weapon system -- maybe it is already too weak. So, maybe drones are really coming and they will become the main tool for war, while the mighty carrier groups fall prey to rust. Think of something like the Armenia vs. Azerbaijan war that spreads all over the world (and do watch the clip above to see what it would look like, not good for humans, to say the least).

Bad times for human beings but, as usual, history marches onward and you can't stop it just by hoping things wont' change. And, who knows? Drones might turn out to be smarter than us and decide by themselves whom they want, or don't want, to kill. Pacifist drones?(*) You never know what AI could lead us to! 

(*) When we discuss these matters, we often go back to Isaac Asimov and his "three laws of robotics" which, among other things, forbid robots from harming human beings. Implementing these laws with modern AI technologies would be far from easy, as Asimov himself understood very well. Eventually, he arrived to consider the three laws as a moral code for robots that made them superior to human beings as being who could never be evil. Unfortunately, we are far away from such a thing. But, who knows?

The lure of imperial dreams: What are our leaders going to do to us?

Donald Trump is often represented wearing some kind of imperial garb. Actually, his presidency may have been less imperial than that of his predecessors. Yet, his style as president is very much "imperial" and his winning slogan in the 2016 elections, "MAGA," (make America great again) has a deep imperial ring to it. Earlier on, Benito Mussolini, the leader of the Italian government between the two world wars, was destroyed (and with him Italy and not just Italy) by his Imperial ambitions.

 

When things get tough, people seem to think that they need tough leaders and this is a clear trend in the world, nowadays. It is a deadly mechanism that tends to bring dangerous psychotic personalities to the top government positions. I already noted in a previous post how imperial ambitions coupled with incompetence (both common conditions in high-level leaders) can destroy entire countries. 

Here, let me examine an interesting feature of how Benito Mussolini (1883 -1945) ruled Italy. Despite his warlike rhetoric, during the first phase of his government he pursued a moderate foreign policy, avoiding wars. Then, the second phase of his rule was characterized by a series of disastrous wars that led to the destruction of Italy (and not just of Italy) and to the downfall of Mussolini himself. Whether this story can tell us something about a possible second term for Donald Trump as president, is left to the readers to decide. 

Benito Mussolini and the Italian Empire: How Leaders' Absurd Decisions Lead to Collapse.

Benito Mussolini ruled Italy for 21 years after the "March on Rome" of 1922. Many things happened during those years but, on the whole, you could think of the Fascist rule as having two phases: one before and the other after the turning point that was the invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935. 

During his first 12 years of rule, Mussolini pursued a relatively moderate foreign policy, carefully avoiding major conflicts. He didn't even increase the military budget that the previous government had slashed down after that WW1 was over. Things changed abruptly in the early 1930s. Maybe it was because of the financial crisis of 1929, maybe because the British coal production was starting to show signs of decline -- and Britain was the main exporter of coal to Italy. Or maybe it was something else that went on in the high ranks of the Fascist Party, or perhaps inside Mussolini's head. In any case, the government started increasing the state budget, and that involved doubling the military expenses that reached over 20% of the government budget. The government was putting the economy on a war footing.

Preparing for war usually leads to starting one. It happened with a bang (literally) when Italy sent a large contingent of troops to attack Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa. It was no minor affair: the sources speak of more than half a million troops engaged in the campaign. After a few months of war, a few hundred thousand civilians exterminated, and various war crimes on both sides, (all things we don't do anymore, as we all know). Ethiopia was defeated and annexed. The King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III was proclaimed "Emperor of Ethiopia," and the "Italian Empire" was born. As you can see in the image, the Italian propaganda of the time wasn't too shy in showing that chemical weapons had been used against the Ethiopians  (of course we don't do that anymore), even though that was never officially admitted.

What's written in history books acquires a certain aura of inevitability and that's true for Italy conquering Ethiopia. It happened, so there had to be a reason for it to happen. But let's pause for a moment to consider the logic of the event. Why exactly did the Italian government take this decision? That's not an easy question to answer. Take a look at the map below, and see how the Italian Empire was arranged in the years that followed the Ethiopian conquest:

The first thing you note is how the Italian Empire was formed of two chunks of land not connected to each other. In between, there was the Sahara desert, practically impossible to cross. By sea, Ethiopia was reachable from Italy either by going through the Suez Canal or by circumnavigating Africa, both impossible if opposed by the main naval power of the time: Britain. And it was not just a question of distance: the Italian colonies in the Horn of Africa were part of a puzzle of different regions controlled by potentially hostile, and surely more powerful, empires: the British and the French. Setting up a major colony in that region was risky, to say the least. More correctly, it was a completely stupid idea, as it was to be clear in a few years.

Let's take a look at the situation from the viewpoint of Britain. At that time, the British Empire was the largest and the most powerful in the world, but it was not unchallenged. The rivalry was especially strong with the French, who maintained a smaller empire and who never had completely renounced to their dreams of world domination. In the Horn of Africa, France controlled an area, French Somaliland, that was strategically crucial for the control of the maritime traffic in the Red Sea. That, of course, could negate the advantages that the British had with the control of the Suez canal.

So, the Horn of Africa was a three-player strategic game involving Italy, France, and Britain (Ethiopia had no outlet to the sea). The British traditionally excelled in this kind of game and their strategy, in this case, was to play Italy against France. It was a strategy that had already worked in stopping the French expansion into the Mediterranean Sea. For the British, the best way of ensuring that the ports on the Red Sea stayed out of French hands was by having the Italians move in. 

One further reason for this attitude was that the British tended to see Italy as their traditional ally. Probably, in 1935, they couldn't imagine that Italy would turn on them just a few years later, but they may have reasoned that even if that were to happen, that couldn't have been a big problem. By far, the Italians were the weakest player in the game being played in the Horn of Africa. Their colonies there could continue to exist only as long as the British navy allowed them to be resupplied from the mainland. They were, at all effects, hostages to the British. That explains why, in 1935, Britain didn't do anything to stop Mussolini's plans of conquest, except engaging in a series of ineffective economic sanctions that only succeeded in enraging the Italian public and strengthening the Italian resolve to defeat Ethiopia. 

Did the Italian government, and Mussolini in particular, realize that they were being played by the British as an anti-French tool? Probably not, but it is also possible that they did, but they greatly overestimated the advantages of the Ethiopian conquest.

Reviewing this story nearly one century later, it is impressive to see how naive and overoptimistic the Italian expectations were. Incredibly, Ethiopia was expected to produce precious metals and even crude oil -- but it was pure illusion. Even more incredibly, Italy was sitting over the petroleum resources of Libya that years later were to become among the most abundant of the world -- but these resources were not exploited at that time. As a further layer of incredibility, the existence of these Libyan resources was at least suspected in the late 1930s. It is an interesting speculation to think of what the history of the world would have been if the Italian government had dedicated to Libyan oil just a one-hundredth of the resources it had wasted in Ethiopia. The concept of the "Italian Empire" would have been completely different (and maybe you would be reading this post in Italian). 

But the Italian government, and Mussolini in particular, were stuck in an obsolete view that saw Italy as the "Proletarian Nation," perpetually in need of a "Place in the Sun" to host its burgeoning population. Even worse, most people in Italy seemed to be affected by a collective form of delusion that made them believe that, somehow, Italy was actually rebuilding the ancient Roman Empire. No joke: everybody loved the idea. The enthusiasm was nothing less than stellar and the documents of that time are still widely available for us to look at and scratch our heads about. 

It goes without saying that Italian peasants never flocked to Ethiopia to build a new imperial province there. Even though the land may have been free, setting up farms in a foreign country requires economic resources to invest in the task, and those resources just weren't there. The Ethiopian conquest remained a horrendous burden for the Italian state that was forced to keep there an army of more than 100 thousand troops to "pacify" the region, plus an even larger number of civilians to take care of the administration. 

The whole madness came to an end when Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. Did the Italian government realize that they were condemning to death or captivity the whole army of Ethiopia? Didn't they realize how badly they would have needed 120 thousand fully-equipped troops closer to home? One can only imagine that if these troops had been available in North Africa, maybe the Italian defeat at El Alamein wouldn't have taken place (and, again, you might be reading this post in Italian). 

As things stood, the British were surely happy to see that the Italians had renounced to a sizeable fraction of their armed forces just when they badly needed them. The British could simply have starved the Italians in Ethiopia. But let's say in honor of the Perfidious Albion that they allowed to the Italian troops a chance of a honorable fight before surrendering. It was hopeless anyway: it was over in just a little more than one year. The Italian Empire disappeared just about five years after its creation. At least, it may have gained a place in the historical records as the shortest-lived empire ever. 

What did Mussolini have in mind that led him to such a monumental mistake? What we can say is that the Ethiopian campaign was just one of the several mistakes that followed: afterward, Italy's armed forces intervened in Spain, in Albania, in France, in Greece, in North Africa, in Russia, in England and, in a final disastrous mistake, Italy declared war on the United States in 1941. Too many wars for a small country that dreamed to be an Empire, but wasn't one.

What was going on in Mussolini's head at that time? From what we know from the documents available, Mussolini was a lone man in power. He had no friends, only adulators. No collaborators, just yes-men. No disciples, only adorers. And no close family, except his lover, Claretta Petacci, a woman of honor who was the only person faithful to him up to the last moment of his life. 

It may well be that, already in the 1930s, Mussolini had passed the "criticism barrier." No one could contradict him and what he said was supposed to be obeyed without questions. Over the years, that was enough to turn a shrewd politician, as the young Mussolini had been, into a bumbling idiot. I wrote in a previous post about Mussolini that:

There is the possibility that his brain was not functioning well. We know that Mussolini suffered from syphilis, an illness that can lead to brain damage. But a biopsy was performed on a fragment of his brain after his death and the results were reasonably clear: no trace of brain damage. It was the functional brain of a 62 year old man, as Mussolini was at the time of his death. . . . the case of Mussolini tells us that dictators are not necessarily insane or evil in the way comics or movie characters are described. Rather, they are best described as persons who suffer from a "narcissistic personality disorder" (NPD). That syndrome describes their vindictive, paranoid, and cruel behavior, but also their ability of finding followers and becoming popular. So, it may be that the NPD syndrome is not really a "disorder" but, rather, something functional for becoming a leader. . . . An NPD affected leader may not be necessarily evil, but he (very rarely she) will be almost certainly incompetent. . . . The problem with this situation is that, everywhere in the world, NPD affected individuals aim at obtaining high level government positions and often they succeed. Then, ruling a whole country gives them plenty of chances to be not just incompetents, but the kind of person that we describe as "criminally incompetent."

Translating all this to our times, the impression is that we are watching a horror movie in which you don't know exactly who can turn into a monster as the story unfolds. We elect leaders on the basis of what they did in the past and on what they tell us they will do. But of what they'll decide to do once they are in power, what can we say? And the Titanic keeps steaming ahead in the night. 

 

 

Fighting Overpopulation: Ten methods to exterminate most of humankind

First of all, a disclaimer: I am not advocating the extermination of anyone! This post is just an attempt of mine to place myself in the boots of the bad guys who could think of doing such a thing and examine how they could do it. Could these scenarios occur for real? I don't know but, as I say at the beginning of this blog, "always plan for the worst case hypothesis"

You know that there are people whom we call the "powers that be" (PTB) who can do things that we commoners can't even dream of doing. Obviously, they can't miss the fact that for decades the world's best scientists have been speaking about a coming collapse of the global ecosystem, mainly because of climate change. So, would they act on this knowledge? And, if so, how?

Like everybody else, the PTBs think in terms of their personal survival and some of them reacted to the threat by buying desert bunkers and stockpiling food and weapons in there. But what if some of them decided to take a more proactive stance? When the PTB decide that something is to be done, they usually succeed by a combination of propaganda, money, and sheer force. And you don't have to think that they are especially smart. They may well reason in simplified terms: what is the cause of the coming collapse? Those pesky humans, of course. Then, an obvious solution is to get rid of most of them.

The bad guys who plan the extermination of humankind are a classic element of science fiction, but large scale exterminations are a constant of real history. So, what shape could a large scale extermination plan take, nowadays? In the following, I tried to provide an answer. I don't know if I am evil enough for the task and, fortunately, I am not in the position to implement any of these plans. Also, I am sure I am teaching nothing to people who are much more evil than me. But here is what I came up with. The list doesn't include ways to reduce natality, only straight extermination. No "Armageddon Machines" either, I am considering methods that would leave at least someone alive. The methods are classed from the least efficient to the most efficient.


1. Biological warfare. A much-touted weapon that never delivered the promises it made. It is very difficult to attack a healthy population with a pathogen sufficiently lethal to generate a true extermination. The recent Covid-19 epidemic shows the problem: it was highly contagious but not very deadly. Indeed, if it had been much more lethal, it couldn't have diffused so fast. In the end, it caused little damage. At the end of the current cycle, the number of victims will probably be around 2 million, maybe more, but that's hardly a way to exterminate humankind if you consider that every year in the world some 60 million people die and about 140 million are born. Then, there is a worse problem: even if a pathogen with the appropriate lethality and infectivity could be developed, how can the exterminators avoid being exterminated? They may have a secret vaccine, but vaccines are never perfectly efficient and pathogens rapidly mutate, making vaccines useless. Overall evaluation: It just doesn't work.

2. Warfare. Wars can kill a large number of people but they normally stop short of exterminating whole populations. A state or coalition of states may wipe out the military forces of a less powerful coalition, but then the war is over and there is little incentive to keep killing civilians who are more useful as slaves than as cadavers. That's why in history wars are associated at most with a short term drop in population for the losing side. Besides, war is hugely expensive. You may use bullets, bombs, poison gases, or even just machetes, but you still have to manage armies, people, supplies, weapons, etc. All that just exterminate defenseless civilians? It makes little sense. Overall evaluation: too expensive.

3. Mass Poisoning. Food or water poisoning is a time-tested killing method that can be applied at various scales. In the simplest case, you can drop some rat poison in your aunt's coffee to cash in on her inheritance. On a larger scale, you could try to poison the food supply or the water supply of an entire country. The problem is how to do that without the targets reacting to the threat. That may not be difficult with an old aunt, but not so easy with a whole country. One trick could be to use a slow poison that doesn't kill before at least a few years. Indeed, much of what people eat nowadays can be considered as poison: excess sugar, heavy metals, plastic microparticles, carcinogenic chemicals, and more. But most of these systemic poisons are too slow to be useful as mass-extermination weapons since they tend to kill people only after they had a chance to reproduce. Psychoactive drugs may do better, but they also tend to be too slow. For instance, in the case of heroin, perhaps the most powerful drug available today, the number of lost years of life expectancy for average users is around 18. So, if the life expectancy in the US is 79, it means that heroin addicts die at 60 on the average -- not fast enough for meaningful mass extermination. We would need something like the fictional "Vibr" psychoactive drug invented by Antonio Turiel that kills users in five years. Such a drug doesn't exist so far, but it may be possible to create it. If it were cheap enough, it would indeed be a weapon of mass extermination. Overall evaluation: promising but not yet practical.

4. Climate Weapons. Altering the climate can surely kill a lot of people and that's exactly what the current global warming caused by human emission is geared to do in the coming decades. But this change will be long-lasting: we may not return to the pre-warming conditions before several tens of thousands of years have passed, and perhaps it will never happen. That's not what the PTB want: their objective is to get rid of most of the current population while leaving the planet mostly intact. Can we think of some climate weapon that would leave a habitable planet to the survivors? An interesting possibility is of engineering a "volcanic winter" by spreading large amounts of dust in the atmosphere, blocking the sun and starving people because of the damage to agriculture. In principle, the dust would settle after a few years and the planetary climate would return to what it was before. This scenario could be created by lobbing nukes into active volcanoes. The dust generated in this way should remain in the atmosphere long enough to starve to death most of the human population, while the rich would survive in their well-stocked bunkers. The main problem is how to calibrate the dust injection. If you exaggerate, you may damage the ecosystem so badly that it will need millions of years to recover, and you probably can't survive for so long in a bunker. Conversely, if the eruptions kill "just" a few billion people, the survivors won't be kind to you when they see you emerging unscathed out of your bunker. Overall evaluation: tempting, but too risky. 

5. Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It is a very popular concept, but not easy to define. Apart from being used as a propaganda tool to demonize 2nd-rate dictators, what do we mean exactly with "weapons of mass destruction"? The answer seems to be weapons involving a large kills/cost ratio and that can be used on a large scale, the typical example is nuclear weapons. There is little else that could qualify as "WMD," maybe radioactive poisoning substances and powerful electromagnetic pulses could do the job, but both need to be triggered by nuclear explosions so one could as well use the real thing. There is no doubt that a large scale nuclear war would exterminate a lot of people. The problem is that, although these weapons in themselves are not very expensive, the damage they do to infrastructures is gigantic, among other things making large areas uninhabitable for decades or even centuries -- to say nothing about possible disastrous climatic effects. That's not what a rational exterminator would want. Overall evaluation: may work, but it is too destructive.

6. Ethnic/political/ideological cleansing. It seems to be easy to convince people that their neighbors are evil because they speak a different language, their skin color is slightly different, or they tend to eat disgusting stuff. Sometimes, it happens even without the need of a propaganda operation. The result is often the extermination of a minority singled out as "bad," with the majority happily collaborating with the government in the task, or doing the extermination themselves. There have been many historical cases, the most recent one being the extermination of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Remarkably, that extermination was carried out by willing executioners who did the work for free and used weapons that weren't more sophisticated than machetes. So, it is a very cheap method of getting rid of a large number of people. The problem is that, for obvious reasons, a minority cannot normally exterminate a majority. So, in history, the method didn't normally result in an overall reduction of the population of the area where it was applied. Even the Rwandan disaster caused just a small bump in a population curve that later on restarted growing. Overall evaluation: risky and not very effective.

7. Eugenics. Eugenic policies are not normally thought of as ways to exterminate large numbers of people, but that may well be their side effect. Typical methods used involve forced sterilization, but may arrive at the physical elimination of people judged to be a burden to society. In modern times, eugenics in the form of "involuntary euthanasia" was used in practice only in Germany, during the Nazi rule. The number of German citizens eliminated in this way can be estimated as of the order of 100,000, not enough to have an effect on the German population. But, given enough time, the idea of getting rid of the useless people who are just a burden for society could be expanded and used for true mass extermination. Imagine laws that sentence everyone to death after reaching a certain age. So far they have been only described in fiction, such as in the 1978 movie "Logan's run," but fiction has a certain way to trickle into reality. Overall evaluation: a promising method, but not proven. 

8. Slaughterbots. Drones are the most fashionable weapon of our times and the concept of "slaughterbots" has been recently proposed: the idea is to build small and cheap drones that locate human beings and explode near their heads -- or do something equally nasty that kills people. Such small bots could cost no more than a smartphone and we know that more than 10 billion such phones were built since 2007. So, it would be reasonably possible to build billions of slaughterbots in a decade or so and spread them around the world. The poor would be the easiest to target, while the rich would be able to escape by having passwords to stop the bots, or simply hiding in suitable bunkers. Is it farfetched? Not at all: killer drones are being built right now. So far, they are very expensive and the reported number of people killed is in the range of a few thousands, at least officially. But the cost per kill ratio could be greatly reduced, just as it happened for cell phones. And, then, all the options are on the rotors. Overall evaluation: very promising and already in progress. 

9. Famines. Famines are well-known mass killers. Perhaps the most interesting case is the Irish famine of the mid 19th century. The Irish population depended on a monoculture, the potato crop, and when it failed for a few years in a row, half of the population of Ireland was wiped out. Today, the world's crops are much more resilient and agriculture seems to be still able to produce large amounts of food. But the problem, as I described in a previous post, is not food production, it is food supply. The world's food supply is vulnerable to a single factor: the globalized marine transportation system that carries food from producers to consumers and fertilizers and pesticides from the manufacturers to the users. If this system can be disrupted, the likely result will be that several billions of people would die by starvation. Wrecking the transportation system could be obtained by a war or, even more simply, by a downturn in the globalized financial system. In several respects, famine is the perfect extermination weapon. It costs little in comparison to its effects, it kills the poor while sparing the rich, it has long-lasting effects. It may not even need a specific intervention by the PTB, since it may develop by itself. Overall evaluation: Among the most effective methods available. 

10. Propaganda. "Consensus Building" (also known as "propaganda" or "psyops") is a set of technologies that define the structure and the functioning of the Western society. Propaganda seems to be able to convince people of just about anything, so could it be used for depopulating a country? Of course, it is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but it was attempted at least once in history. During the last phases of WW2, the British diffused postcards in Germany, supposedly issued by the German government, with detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (coded H1321 and H.1380). Nobody can say if the several thousand German civilians who committed suicide before the arrival of the allied troops did that as an effect of the British pro-suicide propaganda, surely it was an interesting attempt. But propaganda can be used in different and more creative ways. Typically, people can be convinced to do something that's contrary to their own interest if they are sufficiently scared that not doing that would lead to worse consequences. So, propaganda could convince most people in the US that a universal health care system is bad for them because it would be "communism". Then, propaganda can be used to convince people to eat unhealthy food, use health-damaging medicaments, refuse life-saving cures, and more. All that is being done right now, but the scare tactics can be stepped up with more rapid results. For instance, some people were so scared of the coronavirus epidemic that they thought it was a good idea to drink bleach to fight it. This effect was probably not expected, but ways to obtain it on a much larger scale could surely be developed. Overall evaluation: Still to be studied, but shows great promise. 
____________________________________________________________

And here we stand. After this exercise, I thought I would feel shocked just because of having thought of these ideas. But, really, I wasn't. What you discover by thinking the unthinkable is that nothing is too evil that it wasn't thought at some time in history, and sometimes put into practice. Also, I am not really worried that I could inspire someone into being more evil than they already are. So, I leave this text here as an exercise. Hopefully, none of these methods will ever be used, but the future always surprises you.





A comment from Ugo Bardi's personal troll, Mr. Kunning-Druger

And I see, Mr. Bardi, that as usual, you are stupid enough to reveal the plans of your friends and acolytes. The people who are engaged in these extermination plans are not those you call the "PTB" but the greenies who have been engaged in that task since the idea was proposed for the first time by the evil group of which you are part, the Club of Rome. Fortunately, their predictions turned out to be all wrong and they were discovered and prevented from carrying out their plans. Now we know that there are no limits to growth and your evil ideas will keep being thwarted and it is good that it will be so. 

KD

21 Years Ago: The end of the Bombing of Serbia. And the Start of the Decline of the Western Empire

Nato Bombing of the city of Novi Sad, Serbia, 1999 (image from Wikipedia)

21 years ago, on June 10, 1999, the NATO campaign against Serbia ended after 78 days of bombing. We still don't know exactly the number of victims, civilian and military, nor the amount of damage and it would be difficult to say who actually "won" the bloody mess. But the bombing of Serbia was a turning point for many reasons.

In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of the "cold war" and gave rise to expectations of a "peace dividend" once the old enemy of the West had folded out. Needless to say, that never happened. It appeared clear with the Serbian campaign that saw the whole Western world allied against a single state of less than 8 million inhabited.

There was nothing special in the Western Empire taking an aggressive posture after the fall of the rival Soviet Empire. It is the way empires work: they are military organizations dedicated to shifting economic resources from the periphery to the center. So, empires last as long as the cost of their huge military apparatus can be paid for by the resources they can control. Since resources are never infinite, they tend to be overexploited and empires suffer of a classic economic problem: diminishing returns. That's the reason for the cycles of growth and collapse of empires in history.

One peculiarity of empires is their capability to mask their mechanisms of operation. After the end of WW2, the Western Empire had managed to paint itself as a "non-empire," a force for the good of humankind. Within some limits, it was not wrong: The Imperial Government in Washington did a lot to rebuild Western Europe, to restore peace and justice, to promote democracy, to keep in check the rival Soviet Empire. Up to the 1990s, it was still possible to believe that, although it required a certain degree of faith.

We can say that the turning point of the way the empire presented itself was the bombing campaign of Serbia. With the best of good will, the idea of "humanitarian bombing" sounded hollow and absurd, no matter how many times it was repeated by the mainstream media. The bombing of the Chinese Embassy of Belgrade, on May 7, 1999, was the turning point in the perception of the campaign. Perhaps, it was also the turning point that led to the end of the bombing about one month later.

Again, no big surprise: the declining trajectory of empires in history starts when their propaganda ceases being believable -- and believed. It had to happen, and it did. It is the moment when the empire starts discovering that it is not so mighty as it believed to be. It is when the imperial coffers start being emptied by the gigantic expenses of keeping alive a monstrously overgrown military machine that has become not only too expensive but also obsolete.

21 years after the end of the Serbian campaign, we have moved to a point in which the decline of the Western Empire is evident. Mr. Trump as a noisy and despised emperor who seems to be unable to keep the empire together among external and internal problems. The main problem may simply be that the Empire is not believable anymore as a force of justice and democracy. There is nothing that can be done about that, it is history moving onward. And we all move with it

The Profession of Arms: Of Vile Leaders and Courageous Ones

Above, you can see an amazing clip from the 2001 movie by Ermanno Olmi "The Profession of Arms". It is the story of the march on Rome of the German Landsknechts led by Georg von Frundsberg in 1526. They were faced by an army commanded by Giovanni de' Medici, known as Giovanni Dalle Bande Nere (Italian: Giovanni of the Black Bands). Giovanni was killed in battle near Mantua on Nov 30, 1526, while Von Frundsberg's army went on to sack Rome in 1527.

The movie has defects, like all movies, and the attempt to cast Giovanni de Medici as an early patriot means stretching the historical reality more than a little. But it remains a beautiful and intense movie. It manages to make you feel like you were in battle yourself in an age when firearms had just started to make armor obsolete. It was, possibly, the last period in history when leaders fought on the front line.

The scene of Giovanni's death summarizes the whole movie. It shows the two enemy commanders facing each other for a few moments and saluting each other before starting the battle where Giovanni will be mortally wounded. It may not be a completely realistic scene, but its intensity is unbelievable. It grips your attention from the first instant to the last. And it has a deep meaning that you can't miss.

Maybe Giovanni de Medici was not a hero, maybe he was just a mercenary, and he might have had plenty of human failings. But a hero is someone who does his duty when facing difficult tasks and the historical Giovanni de' Medici did just that, personally facing his enemies in battle. Just for this, we are authorized to remember him as a hero.

Things have changed from those ancient times and weapons are not the same as they were. But there remains a duty for a leader to take upon himself the risks and the consequences of is actions. If he does, he will be remembered and revered. If he doesn't, he will be considered a spineless coward, as he deserves to be.

Polyphonic Music and the Angst of the West: A Christmas Post

Sicut Cervus, by Pierluigi da Palestrina, published in 1604. It sings Psalm 42 of the Vulgata Bible. Maybe this old motet can be seen as a Christmas gift from the Western culture to the rest of humankind

(reposted from "Chimeras")

With the waning of the Middle Ages, Europe was coming out of a terrible period. The crusades had ended with a series of crushing defeats and the tremendous war effort had backfired, generating famines and the black death pandemics that killed more than 100 million Europeans. It is estimated that around 45–50% of the population perished, in some areas probably closer to 75–80%.

Yet, Europe rebounded from the disaster -- perhaps because of it. As I described in a previous post, with the 15th century the European population restarted growing, faster than before. It was probably because it could find intact natural resources that the previous collapse had left free to regrow: forests and arable land.

The 15th century was the time of the Renaissance, an age that was the start of the incredible expansion that led Western Europe to dominate most of the world after a few centuries of conquests. But the tumultuous expansion was not without internal struggle: every European state wanted a slice of the overseas bounty. Eventually, the competition would generate the great struggles of the 17th century, with Europe turning against itself with the 30-years war, the witch-burning age, and other disasters. Much before that happened, the older European cultural unity had been lost: Latin, the old universal language that had bound Medieval Europe together, was rapidly losing ground. It wasn't needed anymore.

But, before disappearing, Latin had a last moment of glory. It was the age of polyphonic music in Western Europe, a kind of delicate, sophisticated, intricate, incredibly beautiful kind of music never seen before in the world. Not that polyphony didn't exist before, it was possibly the most ancient kind of music in human history. But the Western European version that lasted from ca. 1400 to 1600 CE, was something different. Earlier on, Gregorian music -- monophonic -- had been mostly an embellishment of the sacred Latin words of the Bible. With polyphony, music asserted itself in an age when Latin was not understood anymore.

To be sure, polyphonic music was still sung in Latin and it often had religious subjects, but it was a completely different story. It was an expression of the European willingness to expand into new realms. Just in the same way as the European galleons were exploring new lands, European polyphonic music was exploring new harmonies and new ways of communications: lacking a shared language, music had to come to the rescue. Polyphonic music could be religious, but it was not necessarily so. It could take the form of a madrigal, a secular kind of music.

For some two centuries, a new harmony, never heard before, resonated in Europe. Then, as the political struggle became harsher and wider, polyphony gave way to symphonic music, better suited to the tragic and violent age that started with the great carnage of the 30-years war and expanded all the way to the disasters of the two world wars of the 20th century. It lasted until English became the new universal language. With English, music could become again linked to the human voice and to words that could be understood. A modern genre such as the rap is, after all, a return to the Gregorian approach to music as an embellishment of human language. 

Today, polyphonic music is still alive and well as a religious form of music in Eastern Europe, but it is a relic of a bygone time in Western Europe and in all the regions that recognize themselves under the wide label of "The West." Yet, we can still appreciate the technical mastery of the composers of that time, one of them was Pierluigi da Palestrina, who composed Sicut Cervus, from Psalm 45 of the Bible.

Actually, the Sicut Cervus is not just a beautiful harmony, it is something more. Its theme is a thirsty deer looking for water. It says, “Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.” Which you can translate as: “As a deer longs for a spring of water, so my soul longs for you, oh God.” And that, I think, can express the burning desire of the West, the angst for something that Westerners themselves don't understand but have been seeking for centuries with such a reckless enthusiasm that they set half of the world on fire. And, whatever it was that they were seeking, it seems clear that they didn't find it. Today, the parable of the Western world domination seems to be mostly concluded, even though it still flares here and there. But there remains to us something distilled from so much ardor, the music of a remote age when our ancestors had managed to create something eerie and beautiful that we can still admire, today: polyphonic music.

I noted in a previous post how all human cultures have treasures that they cherish and revere. These treasures are not the property of anyone but gifts for everyone. In that post, I cited Greta Thunberg, the young bearer of the rights of the planet, as a gift that the West may be able to offer to the world nowadays. But also a treasure from the past, Western polyphonic music, can be seen as a gift to all humankind. Will we ever see a time when human cultures will exchange only gifts and not bombs? We are not there yet but, who knows? For the time being, the West seems to be still desperately searching for something, but nobody knows exactly what.

The Art of War According to the Science of Complex Systems: The Seneca Cliff as a strategic weapon

Music has always been part of the war effort: a way to build up network connections in such a way to make the fighting system more resilient and more effective. Here, an especially effective version: "The Sacred War" sung by Elena Vaenga. I wouldn't say that the Soviets defeated the Germans in ww2 because they had better music, but it surely it must have helped.

On military matters described in terms of system science, see also the post on drone warfare published last week on "Cassandra's Legacy" and also our study on the statistical patterns of conflicts in history




The science of complex systems turns out to be especially interesting and fascinating when applied to one of the most complex activities in which human beings engage: warfare. Below, you'll find a revised and condensed excerpt from my book "The Seneca Effect" (2017). A more detailed and in-depth discussion of how the concept of Seneca Collapse may affect war is part of my new book "Before Collapse: A Guide to the Other Side of Growth" that should appear in print and on the web before the end of the year.


From "The Seneca Effect" (Springer 2017)
by Ugo Bardi
(revised and condensed)

Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. (Sun Tzu, the Art of War)

The idea that collapse can be a tool to be used in warfare may go back to the Chinese historian and military theorist Sun Tzu in his “The Art of War” (5th century BCE), where he emphasizes the idea of winning battles by exploiting the enemy’s weakness rather than by brute force.

It is a normal feature of warfare that conflict ends with the collapse of one of the two sides but, in some cases, the collapse takes place without extensive fighting or even none at all. An especially impressive example is that of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that followed several decades of "cold war" that never erupted into open conflict. As Sun Tzu had already noted, the capability of triggering the collapse of the enemy’s military or socio-economic structure is possibly the most effective conflict-resolving strategy of all. But how to attain this result? The modern science of complex systems can tell us many things about the factors involved in the collapse of complex systems, although it cannot provide recipes good for all situations.

Collapse is a characteristic of systems kept together by a network of relationships involving feedback: societies, economies, groups, companies, armies, and more, systems that we call “complex.” Feedback enhances or dampens the effect of perturbations on the various elements of the system and it may generate the kind of collapse called “Seneca Collapse” or “Seneca Cliff.” This collapse occurs when several elements of the system act together in such a way to enhance a perturbation that, eventually, brings down the whole system.

Warfare is, after all, mostly a question of feedback between fighting entities. Armies maneuver, clash against each other, retreat or advance, but the final result is always the same: the struggle ends when feedbacks accumulate in such a way that one of the sides collapses. Then, the battle is over.

We can see armies as networks of soldiers, each one connected to the nearby soldiers. In a military struggle, the loss of a single node, that is of a single soldier, in itself has little effect on the performance of the system. But it may be devastating if the deadly feedback mechanism kicks in. One soldier runs away, another soldier sees him running he does the same. Others follow. That may cause the whole army to melt away – a typical example of feedback-generated collapse and the nightmare of commanders all over history. Of course, things are not so simple in real armies but it is true that ancient armies often had a poorly defined chain of command. That made them susceptible to abrupt collapse. For instance, at the battle of Manzikert, in 1071 AD the Byzantines were defeated by the Turks because - among other factors – some sections of the army panicked and ran away.

Once we start seeing see warfare in terms of complex systems interacting with each other, we can understand how the natural selection on the battlefield led to the evolution of armies into structures that made them resistant to collapse. In the 1800s, the Prussians had developed an army where each soldier was supposed to keep reloading and shooting, oblivious to what was happening around him. Ideally, he would keep shooting even if he was the last one left standing. Basically, the Prussians had severed the horizontal connections of the army network, leaving only the "vertical" ones connecting soldiers to their officers. It was the concept, attributed to Frederick the Great, that common soldiers should fear their own officers more than the enemy. That made the network resilient toward collapse: losing one node would not lead to an avalanche of node losses generated by feedback

The Prussian idea was successful and it is still the way modern armies are organized. But if it made "bottom-up" collapse more difficult, it increased the chances of a top-down" collapse. A vertically structured army is vulnerable to a “decapitation strike,” a concept already well known to those who, long ago, invented the game of chess. A modern occurrence of this kind of collapse took place in Italy in September 1943. After the earlier removal of the charismatic Italian leader, Benito Mussolini, Italy's armed forces virtually disintegrated when the King of Italy fled the capital, Rome, leaving the army without command and without clear instructions. In this way, he brought to real-life the concept of “checkmate” of chess. Other examples of decapitation collapse exist in history, one was the collapse of the Albanian forces against the Italian invasion in 1939. It was a hopeless fight in any case, but the flight of the king of Albany, Zog, led to the total cessation of all resistance -- another case of a chessmate in real life.

Other cases of decapitation strikes failed. An example is the attempt of some German officers to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. They failed, so we will never know what would have happened had Hitler died that day. Another example was the strike against Iraq in 2003, which aimed at killing most of the members of the Iraqi government. Alalso that attempt failed.
The problem with the idea of destroying a military structure by decapitation is two-fold: the first is that the enemy knows that its leadership is a good target and therefore it works at hardening it as much as possible. One is reminded here of the kagemusha the “shadow warriors” of Japanese military history, whose task was to impersonate a military leader, having the enemy wasting their efforts on them rather than on the right target. Then, it is also true that in modern times armies have developed a less rigid structure in which small units can continue fighting even if they lose contact with their command center. It is a way of fighting that was pioneered by Edwin Rommel during the First World War and extensively used by Heinz Guderian during the Second. Another recent example of resilience in an armed conflict is the 2006 confrontation between Israel and the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Hezbollah’s fighting machine was far from being a traditional army: it was a highly resilient system based on small units weakly connected to each other. In the end, it was successful against a theoretically much more powerful adversary. Giving a certain degree of freedom to small units is risky, since the units may not behave the way the central control wants them to. But it seems to pay handsomely in modern times, also because of the development of modern propaganda techniques. Today, soldiers don’t normally fight for money, they are heavily conditioned by propaganda or by religious beliefs.


In the end, waging a war is mainly a question of command and control and there exist many possible interpretations of how to control an army in such a way to make it resilient against collapse. To this day, propaganda remains the main tool motivating soldiers to fight but, as I argued in a previous post, modern warfare seems to be more and more based on remote-controlled, or even autonomous, robotic weapons.

A concept related to the rise of military robots is that of “Network Centered Warfare” also called, sometimes, “Effect Based Operations.” The idea is to transform an army into a single weapon using sophisticated communication techniques. The question, then, is who controls that weapon? If there is a single central control system, the whole system becomes again vulnerable to a decapitation strike. An attack on its operational center that might leave it as useless as the chess pieces on the chessboard after that their king is checkmated.
 
But it is also perfectly possible to organize military robots in small, relatively independent units. It doesn't change the main question: who controls the military robots? It is a question that, so far, has found no simple answer. Obviously, the robots themselves are not sensitive to propaganda, but their controllers are still human beings. But propaganda is a tool developed to control infantrymen facing the enemy while stuck in a trench, now we need tools to control the robots' controllers who are specialized professionals operating from the safety of remote locations. Appropriate techniques have not been seveloped yet and we don't know what shape they could take and how they will affect the way warfare is conducted.

So, it is difficult to predict what the future of war will be but, clearly, nothing changes in its basic features: war is a struggle that can be fought in real space, in virtual space, or both. We'll probably see a remarkable shift to virtual war, but it is a tortuous path that we are following. As always, the future will be what it had to be.