George Friedman is the head of Stratfor, a strategic foreign policy thinker and writer. If you have not read his many books, you ought to. In this video, he speaks in a different way. He speaks first of the experience of his father as a Hungarian Jew, who survived a Hungarian labour battalion in the German-allied Hungarian army at Stalingrad, escaped, got back to Budapest, then escaped the Nazi round up of Jews in 1945, and then escaped the round up of Social Democrats by the Communists in 1947, got to Israel, and then to the United States.
Clearly his father was a man who was happy that there was no gunfire aimed at him on any particular day.
This is a clearly important testimony to what Europe is, and what it ever could be. As he says, any civilization that could invent a Mozart, he is ready to extent some slack to. But he says, as many have, that the Europeans destroyed themselves from 1914 to 1945, with over 100 million dead. He is persuaded they will do something catastrophic again.
This was published on February 12, 2015. It is still highly relevant, and a moving personal testament. “Who will die to save the European Union?” No one. The guns we hear in the Ukraine, he says, are the precursor to a larger split.
It was a strange and miserable spectacle to behold the savages of this continent at the time when the knell of their common ruin had already sounded. Civilization had gained a foothold on their borders. The long and gloomy reign of barbarism was drawing near its close, and their united efforts could scarcely have availed to sustain it. Yet, in this crisis of their destiny, these doomed tribes were tearing each other’s throats in a wolfish fury, joined to an intelligence that served little purpose but mutual destruction.
Read Parkman on the early relations between whites and “Indians”, and among Indians themselves. It is a tale of ghastly tortures, raids, massacres, enslavements, kidnappings and discriminate slaughters of men, women and children by Indians, our native brethren, of other Indians and whites. Do not believe a word of this stereotype of Indians as the peaceful ecological guardians; they were engaged in a wars of brutish domination. The Iroquois tribal alliance triumphed over Huron and other tribal alliances from Hudson’s Bay to Tennessee. The Iroquois alliance exterminated the Hurons and the Neutrals; even the Nazis did not get all the Jews, nor the Turks the entire Armenian nation. And do not think I mean any insult to the Haudenosay Alliance; they were just the victors in the situation, as were the Aztecs in Mexico.
As to the Aztecs, no understanding of Amerindian culture can take place without reading the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Diaz. The Aztec culture was based on ritual slaughter of victims whose hearts were torn out of their chests as they lay across stone altars at the top of cués, those sacrifice pyramids visited by tourists (which I view as an Auschwitz raised into a publicly proclaimed religion). Human sacrifice was their Mass. It was depicted in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. It is recorded that on the accession of Moctezuma to the Speakership of the Aztecs, 30,000 captives were slaughtered and eaten in a gigantic cannibal feast. In 1521, on the final assault of Cortez’ band across the causeways that protected the city of Mexico, some of the Spanish were captured. This is what happened:
“the dismal drum of Huichilobos [the Aztec sun god] sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns, and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue from which it came we wsaw our comrades who had been captured in Cortes’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. When they had hauled them up to a small platform in front of the shrine where they kept their accursed idols we saw them put plumes on the heads of many of them; and then they made them dance with a sort of fan in front of Huichilobos. Then after they had danced the papas laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces , which they afterward prepared like glove leather, with their beards on, and kept for their drunken festivals. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes. They sacrificed all our men this way, eating their legs and arms, offering their hearts and blood to their idols as I have said, and throwing their trunks and entrails to the lions and tigers and serpents and snakes that they kept in the wild beast houses I have described in an earlier chapter.
The Conquest of New Spain is a book of such astonishing marvels and ghastly deeds that it reads more like a science-fictional account of an alien planet than it does a sober history, but it has the rare distinction of being an account of what an intelligent young soldier actually saw with his own eyes. Its veracity is overwhelming.
Do not weep with false pity for our North American Indians; they fought us every step of the way and the last resisters did not lay down arms until the early 20th century.
At the core of Amerindian religious conceptions was human sacrifice. Even Quakers would have taken up arms against it.
Torture and human sacrifice of captives is not the whole story, nor is it a balanced story. But it happened, was endemic, and made wars with and among Indians particularly horrible.
The next time you hear some twat announce that he is giving a speech on traditional territories of the Ottawa, Huron, etc, do something rude.
PS: For more of the same, see the article in the Federalist on the same topic. Everyone has a cannibal and a slaver up the bloodline.
Iroquois Indian scalping white man in Canada from Encyclopedia of Voyages 1796 by Grasset de Saint Saveur and Labrousse
Too much time spent in hotel bedrooms on foreign travel has led me to some strange byways of the Internet. I found myself late one night in Brazil near Iguazu Falls sleepless in …Iguazu Falls. I will only lead you into one such youtube by-way, the amazing sub-world of Scottish pipe bands. [ I warn you that one leads to another]. They hail from everywhere: Los Angeles, Simon Fraser University, New Zealand, Western Australia and of course Northern Ireland and Scotland itself. The format is strict. The bands consist of bagpipes, snare drums, tenor drums, and a bass drum. Everyone knows the tunes. They have names like Lord Lovat’s Regret by Robert Drummond, or Jack McWatt’s Strathspey by Stuart McCrimmon. I imagine the bands have to meet in large public parks where they can practice unmolested. I reckon people devote their entire leisure time to the art, which is complex, but it stirs barbaric ardor in my heart.
After ten minutes you feel like taking fire and sword to your neighbours.
After twenty minutes you feel like taking fire and sword to your enemies.
After an hour of this you have reached a cheerfully berserker state.
After an hour or so of this, your enemies are starting to slip away from their trenches, as they know an attack is coming and they fear for their lives.
I cannot resist one the great scenes of all time in movies. The Canadians arrive to join a group of Americans in what became a joint operation, called the Devil’s Brigade.
We were about to sit down to a formal dinner. The lads were hungry, and we had been smoking some excellent weed and sipping beer and wine for some time. We had been listening to ZZ Top’s One Foot in the Blues. The acting guardian of good taste replaced it with Purcell’s Ode for the Birthday of Queen Mary, justifying the decision with:
“We need something more frankly élitist”.
The phrase struck a chord. Today, you need something more frankly élitist. I present two arias from Vivaldi’s opera, Bajazet. First Vivica Genaux, then Elena Garantsa, spelled Garanca.
Bajazet recounts, in baroque Italian operatic fashion, the fate of the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph Bayezid I when his armies were crushed by the forces of Timur in 1402 AD. Timur is known to us as Tamerlane.
The Wikipedia article says of him:
Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.[12][13]
An equivalent warlord today would have to kill or cause the deaths of 5% of 7.5 billion people, or 375 million people. With nukes it could be done. Hmmmn…..
For the first time, the Chinese government appears to have laid down a bottom-line with North Korea and is threatening Pyongyang with a response of “unprecedented ferocity” if the government of Kim Jong Un goes ahead with a test of either an intercontinental ballistic missile or a nuclear device. North Korea will celebrate the 105th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Kim Il Sung, on Saturday, and some type of military show of force is expected.
In an editorial in the semi-official Global Times on Wednesday, Pyongyang was put on notice that it must rein in its nuclear ambitions, or else China’s oil shipments to North Korea could be “severely limited.” It is extraordinary for China to make this kind of threat. For more than a decade, as part of its strategy to prop up one of its only allies, China refused to allow the U.N. Security Council to even consider cutting oil shipments to North Korea. Beijing’s calculus was that the maintenance of the North Korean regime took precedence over everything. Now Beijing seems to be reconsidering its position.
A fleet of North Korean cargo ships is heading home to the port of Nampo, the majority of it fully laden, after China ordered its trading companies to return coal from the isolated country, shipping data shows.
Following repeated missile tests that drew international criticism, China banned all imports of North Korean coal on Feb. 26, cutting off the country’s most important export product.
What role did Trump play in this? From the WaPo article above.
Something interesting is happening in China and perhaps President Trump deserves some credit….
These events, culminating with Trump’s strike on Syria, appear to have concentrated Chinese minds. The strategy of backing North Korea no matter what is bumping up against the risk of an unpredictable man in the White House.
“We have to figure out what this country’s strategy is,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on a political talk show on TVRain, an independent Russian channel, just hours after Tillerson touched down in Moscow, and hours before meetings were set to begin. “No one understands it right now. If you do, share your appraisal with us,” she said, flustered, to us journalists interviewing her. “We don’t understand what they’re going to do in Syria, and not only there. No one understands what they’re going to do in the Middle East, which is a very complicated region. … No one understands what they’re going to do with Iran, no one understands what they’re going to do with Afghanistan. Excuse me, and I still haven’t said anything about Iraq.”
It seems nobody has any idea what Trump is going to do. That is better than Obama, who in 2012 told the outgoing Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” Talk about showing your hand. Perhaps it is better than, “Let me be clear… I am not bluffing.”
Make Kim Jong Eun nervous for his regime and his life.
Is there something about this you do not understand?
Trump was not trying to depose Assad. He is enforcing a norm of warfare: blast and fire, okay; starvation of citizens maybe, nerve agents no.
But he also adds much-needed credibility to the use of force by the United States in other circumstances.
I am sure there is some expression in some language or other about being seen to eat a dog in front of the other dogs, just to remind them who is atop the food chain.
“The number of members of the press who have lauded the actions last night as ‘presidential’ is concerning,” he wrote. “War must never be considered a public relations operation. It is not a way for an Administration to gain a narrative. It is a step into a dangerous unknown and its full impact is impossible to predict, especially in the immediate wake of the first strike.”
I have bad news for you Bill. Public relations is the basis of popular support for wars. In a democracy, wars must be supported by large segments of the population. Support comes from people believing in the rightness of the cause. Consider the fate of Lyndon Johnson as support for the war in Vietnam declined.
More importantly, Trump’s action kills two birds with one stone. Review points 1 through 8 above.
My Early Life was Winston Churchill’s first best seller, and deservedly so. Written in 1930 about events from his birth in 1874 to 1902, it recounts his not-so-successful school days, his time at Sandhurst, and campaigning on the North-West Frontier against the Pashtuns and in the Sudan against the Islamic forces of the Mahdi. It also covers his capture by the Boers in the war of the same name and his escape from captivity.
He recounts how the thirst for knowledge grew in him from the age of 22 onward. Stationed in India with the his regiment, the 4th Hussars, he spent his time from noon to 5pm, the siesta hours, reading Gibbon, Macaulay, and other great historians, as well as Darwin, Plato, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, and authors now lost to time.
His observations on religion versus science, the fighting qualities of the Pashtuns, the futility of trying to educate young boys in schools, and the pageantry of life in the cavalry, are bathed in wit and good humour, and not a little tongue in cheek.
Having discussed the beauty of cavalry manoeuvres, in assembled masses of plumed and be-ribboned regiments, he writes:
“It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns. …War which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science. From the moment that either of these meddlers and muddlers was allowed to take part in actual fighting, the doom of War was sealed. Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country’s cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher’s bill. From the moment democracy was admitted to, or rather forced itself upon the battlefield, War ceased to be a gentleman’s game”.
“I wonder often whether any generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything materialor established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened”.
I was at a speech given by a senior federal bureaucrat last week, a man not normally given over to political correctness, or complete folly for that matter, and to my astonishment I heard him begin his speech by announcing piously that he was acknowledging standing on some tribe or other’s treaty territory. This seems to be the latest fad in virtue signaling.
As I write I am sitting in a chair on land that goes back to the time it emerged from retreating ice 9,000 years ago. It used to be the hunting grounds of indigenous Ottawas, who emigrated to the Ottawa River from around Manitoulin Island in the upper Lake Huron, and thence to the Ohio River valley in the 17th century, where they were rivals, as were most Algonkian speakers, of the Iroquois Confederacy. My land has at various times been claimed by the King of France until the Treaty of Paris assigned it to the King of England in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years’ War.
The Ottawa [Or Odawa, Canadian] originally lived along the Ottawa River in eastern Ontario and western Quebec at the time of European arrival in the early 1600s. Their historic homelands also included Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, and what is now Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The Ottawa moved into northern Ohio around 1740. They spoke an Algonquian language; and are thus related to the Delaware (Lenape), the Miami, and the Shawnee. Historically, the Ottawa were enemies with the Iroquois nation, and with the Wyandot because of the former’s ties to the Iroquois.
The Ottawa’s political alliances were complicated and changed with the times. Some Ottawa were allies of the French until British traders moved into the Ohio Country in the early 1700s. Many Ottawa moved into northern Ohio so that they could participate in the fur trade with the British.
And so forth. Normal people: fighting, trading, and moving with the tides of history to greater safety or greater opportunity.
In short, why is the claim of the Ottawas memorialized by the federal bureaucrat in a speech downtown last week – in what ought to have embarrassed him – over those of the King of France? Is anyone yet making a claim that I owe rent or acknowledgment to the remnants of the Ottawas or Hurons who still live around here? Or by contrast do I owe the same to the Bourbon pretender to the throne of France? Should I acknowledge the claims of the Count of Paris to the former New France? Perhaps I can send my loyalty by bank transfers to the Stuart Pretenders to the throne of England? For some hundreds of years the Stuart claim has been held by the Ducal House of Wittelsbach of Bavaria, and according to a certain friend of mine they are the rightful sovereigns of Canada.
Is it any more absurd to start one’s speech acknowledging the traditional rights of the Bourbons or the Wittelsbachs to the ground I stand on than to a bunch of Canadian Indians?
And what about the claims of the Iroquois Confederacy to the lands of the Hurons, whom they exterminated in the 1650s? Do I owe recognizance to the heirs of Joseph Brant, Mason, Loyalist, and Mohawk, in preference to those of the Ottawas? Or is the Roman Catholic style of the House of Wittelsbach more to your liking? Your call. The next time you make a public speech, throw in some other claimants to the ground you walk on.
Joseph Brant
Franz, Herzog (Duke) von Bayern at his investiture as a Knight of the Holy Grail of Jerusalem
I propose for your consideration the following: we should be happy. Mildly so. The Liberals, by actually making a decision to buy Super Hornets, have done something we should welcome. The issue was to fill a gap between what we have now, F-18s nearing the end of their life cycle, and what we may eventually have when we get the F-35 fighter. The Cabinet has made a decision on defence procurement. Mark the day!
The fact that the purchase of Boeing Super Hornets will be sole-sourced is not a sign the government has lost its moorings, as John Ivison proclaims. It never had any. The issue is not sole-sourcing. How much competition is there in the fighter aircraft market? How many alternative sources of fighters are available? French, Swedish, Russian? So let’s get real. The Americans have the only source of fighters that we can buy. And we have decided to buy some.
The decision – or the announcement of a decision – that we would not buy the F-35 in the election was superfluous political posturing, I grant you. By buying F-18 upgrades we simultaneously allow time to pass, and thereby let the public forget about the F-35s non-cancellation, and let the F-35 program have enough time to work out the kinks in this super-advanced fighter aircraft.
I would say the decision on Super-Hornets solves both a real problem of aircraft obsolescence, and an unreal self-created political problem, so it should be praised, mildly.
Most of all, it was a decision. Given Canada’s deplorable record of not making decisions on defence procurement, it should be welcomed.
To talk of Liberals losing their ethical moorings is to talk of things that cannot be, because to be a Liberal in Canada is to have abandoned ethical moorings in the first place. No, the Liberals are to be praised – mildly – for having made a decision at all. That it may actually be the right decision, or a reasonable one, is a bonus.
I am reading Erik Larson’s Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. It is an excellent read. One passage early in the book reminds me of the particular German capacity to lose a war for failure to understand what is at stake, to not see beyond their noses, to fail to understand what a tactical decision may actually mean.
The Lusitania was a huge Cunard liner that was sunk in 1915 by the largely successful U-boat campaign, one that came very near to starving the British war effort of munitions. It was broadly thought that the Germans would not be so ruthless as to sink a passenger ship, even if it flew the British flag, on account of the bad odour of targeting civilians. Little did they know of the German military mentality. The ship was sunk with heavy loss of life, which set in motion a series of events that led to the US entry into the war in 1917. By the end of the war the US was pouring 50,000 new troops per month into the war, and there is little doubt that the US entry tipped the scales in favour of allied victory, both by troops, by materiel, and by the certainty that with the United States on the Allied side, victory was inevitable.
A debate occurred back in 1914 in the German high command concerning the extent of discretion to be allowed U-boat captains. The maximalists won. As Larson writes:
The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination of which ships were to be spared, and which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now had the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war. As Chancellor Bethmann would later put it, “Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war”.
To review the facts for a moment, few can recall how very very close the Central Powers came to winning World War 1. By 1917 the Germans had knocked out the Russian Empire from the war (and successfully implanted Lenin in Russia to infect it with communism) and taken for themselves most of Ukraine for food supplies. They then attacked the Italians at Caporetto in the mountains of Slovenia and drove them back 75 miles out onto the plains of the Po river valley, with heavy loss of life and heavier loss of equipment. Two out of four fronts were in the hands of the Central Powers. The Brits were winning in Palestine and Syria against the Turks- which really was a sideshow -and things were stalemated on the Western Front. The French had been in mutiny and bled white , and were essentially doing no more than holding their lines. Into this front the Germans were able to pour all their resources, including 50 divisions from the east, and Ludendorff attacked the Allies with fresh tactics and more troops in March 1917, driving the British (including Canadians and Australians) back many miles. Once again the Germans doubled down rather than negotiate a peace, as they might well have done.
The Germans had realised that their only remaining chance of victory was to defeat the Allies before the overwhelming human and matériel resources of the United States could be fully deployed.
The very weakness of American military power encouraged Berlin to start its unrestricted submarine attacks in 1917. It knew this meant war with America, but it could discount the immediate risk because the US Army was negligible and the new warships would not be at sea until 1919 by which time the war would be over, Germany thought, with Germany victorious. The notion that armaments led to war was turned on its head: refusal to arm in 1916 led to war in 1917.
The story of the sinking of the Lusitania, and of how close Germany came in both world wars, but especially the first one, prompt melancholy reflections. When civilians are largely excluded from war-making decisions, as they were in Imperial Germany, the people left in charge know only one thing: more and more total war. A war-making culture, such as Germany’s was then, can distort political decisions to favour upping the ante, rather than consider limiting one’s losses. “Go for broke” may be resorted to more by soldiers than by civilians with a business background who answer to electors.
Generals are the only people in civilized society who are socially and legally authorized to kill people in great numbers. It is important to allow and empower them to do this when they have to, and just as important to ensure that civilians decide when and how far generals are to be allowed to engage in their deadly business.
Delegating that kind of decision to young men in their late twenties or early thirties is a bad idea. I think we can all agree on this.
