Category: war

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Ethnic cleansing with a vengeance

I had occasion to be in Poland this past week and thought I would check out the site of the Battle of Tannenberg, the site of an important victory in August 1914 of the German Empire over the Russian Empires. 2014 is the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1, a catastrophe from which we have not yet recovered, spiritually at any rate. My interest had been piqued by Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 and more recently by Sleepwalkers, How Europe went to war in 1914, by Christopher Clark.

I had been to Slovenia in an earlier European visit and had visited the scene of the Battle of Caporetto (Kobarid to the Slovenians) where the Austro-Hungarians and Germans had routed the Italians off the mountaintops of the Julian Alps in 1917. There was a museum in the town of Kobarid and an Italian war mausoleum for their dead. Below is the war museum in Kobarid, Slovenia.

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Accordingly I thought that perhaps there might be something similar in northern Poland, resembling what I had found in Slovenia. After all, the Slovenians were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then folded into Yugoslavia, and now on their own. Rather like the Poles in fact. Under German domination, then Communist domination, and now on their own, quite successfully.

Think again.

There had been an immense war monument built by the Germans to mark their victory in WW1.

Tannenberg denkmal

This is what remains of it today.

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You are looking at the same place. The depression in the ground is what marks the spot of the German war memorial. The rubble of its towers is used by local farmers as fill for emplacing their culverts. Nothing. Gone with the wind.

After World War 2, the Russians moved the Belorussian and Ukrainian borders 100 miles westward, displacing the Poles, who were forced to move into Prussian lands, which had always been predominantly ethnically German.

So the Germans were forced out at gunpoint on the pitiless road of refugees in the winter of 1945, and the displaced Poles, themselves forced out from eastern lands at gunpoint by Ukrainians and Belorussians, occupied their houses.

As Oban said to me, “ethnic cleansing is the attempt to overcome history with demography”. It appears to work. Look at this map. This is Prussia and Pomerania before World War 1.  Prussia in Prussian blue.

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Below is a map of Germany after World War 1.

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Below is a map of Germany after World War 2.

German lands after WW2

Cream colour  marks the territory that Stalin assigned to the Poles.

Wikipedia describes the process:

By 1950, a total of at least 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into the areas which would become post-war Germany and Allied-occupied Austria. Some sources put the total at 14 million, including migrants to Germany after 1950 and the children born to the expellees. During the Cold War, the West German government also considered as expellees about 1 million Nazi administrators and colonists settled in territories conquered by Nazi Germany in east and west Europe. The largest numbers came from territories ceded to Poland and the Soviet Union (about 7 million) and from Czechoslovakia (about 3 million). This was the largest of all the post-war expulsions from Central and Eastern Europe, which displaced more than 20 million people in total. The events have been variously described as population transfer, ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Here is the new sign that marks where the German war memorial to Tannenberg was:

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A little sign at the end of an agricultural lane near Olsztynek, in northern Poland is all that marks the battle site.

Shelley’s Ozymandias came to mind:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

In the case of Tannenberg, there remains not even the shattered image, but just a sign at the end of the farm lane saying: “Ozymandias used to be here”.

Leftist war-for-oil canard

Leftist are always fond coming up with hare-brained theories which are then amplified by the MSM and then further propagated by useful idiots amongst us. One of the oldest is “war-for-oil”, which is used to explain every military action in the middle east in context of access to oil. Perhaps leftist should consider this fact.

Last month the world witnessed a paradigm shift: China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest consumer of foreign oil, importing 6.3 million barrels per day compared to the United States’ 6.24 million. This trend is likely to continue and this gap is likely to grow, according to the EIA’s October short-term energy outlook. Wood Mackenzie, a leading global energy consultancy, echoed this prediction, estimating Chinese oil imports will rise to 9.2 million barrels per day (70% of total demand) by 2020.

Yes, all China had to do for that oil was to pay for it. An astonishing concept indeed, that further underscores Left’s limited understanding of economics.

Declaring independence

The purpose of declaring independence is to transform what otherwise might be a rebellion into an international war. In one case you can be shot for treason and in the second you can be shot as a combatant. You choose.

Quebec is getting all huffy about the federal government’s decision to join the legal case on Bill 99, which is Quebec’s declaration that a vote of 50% plus one of its population is sufficient to achieve independence, without further discussion with the federal government to which Quebecers still owe allegiance.

It is instructive to consider the significance of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, as a  guide to what can happen when states dissolve. I am indebted to Kevin Phillips’ 1775, A Good Year for Revolution, for this analysis.

In short, the Declaration of Independence was a practical document at the time of its publication, whose purpose was to transform what was then a rebellion into a war. In the period of May-July 1776, there was a brief window available to the Patriots, as Phillips styles them, before Britain’s immense naval and soldierly might began to bear down on the revolution. The Patriots had to act fast to secure the agreement of a sufficient number of provinces – as they then were – to formally dissociate themselves entirely from Great Britain, not just from the Parliament, but from the King himself.

Unless they established themselves as a separate state, and quickly, they would lack authority to call upon the help of foreign states to assist them in their cause and, more importantly, foreign states would not be allowed by international law of the time to assist a rebellion against  a sovereign power.

Phillips, citing David Armitage, writes:

In order to turn a civil war within the British Empire into a war between states outside the empire, it was necessary to create legitimate bodies of combatants – that is, states – out of individual rebels and traitors. (p443)

It is vital to to recall that the Battle of Bunker Hill and the shoot-out at Lexington had already occurred a year earlier  in 1775. One quarter of all British officers ever killed in that revolution, from 1775 to 1783, had been killed that June 17th, 1775 at Bunker Hill. The Patriots had been seeking arms and gunpowder from foreign sources for 18 months, and the Lexington affair was a failed attempt by the British to seize powder magazines. Yankees (that is, New Englanders) were fighting mad, and had organized highly effective armed forces to defend themselves from British soldiery.

I cite these facts to remind us that the American Revolution was a serious affair. The mutual provocations and escalations of rhetoric and violence by the Patriot party and British government, regardless of their legitimacy, demonstrate as nothing else could that the move to separate Quebec from Canada is, so far,  by comparison, a trivial affair.  It is in fact a disagreement about how low the barrier is to be before separation, with the federal government saying “you can negotiate your way out and must do so before juridical independence can be legally won”, and the Quebec government saying they do not even have to negotiate with the governments of their former compatriots in order to redraw what would become international rather interprovincial boundaries.

Until Quebec Patriotes face death by firing squad or death in combat, this dispute is chicken shit. And if the dispute is really about banning Islamic burqas on female public officials, I do not think I would take up arms to prevent the Quebecois from doing so. Would you?

Vo Nguyen Giap 1911-2013

You do not have to be on the side of liberal constitutional democracy to be a great general. He beat the French, he beat the Americans, and if he threw away lives like the Americans threw away munitions and air strikes, those were the weapons he had to spend.

Anyone who wants to know what went on should read Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. The bookstore links will take you to some very interesting memoirs and accounts of that time. Read them, and learn caution about the winnability of foreign wars.

Giap’s obituary in the Telegraph is here.

There is a branch of U.S. conservatism that is just crazy

I am referring to a school of American liberal  imperialists who end up as looney as the “responsibility to protect” crowd, the “neo”-conservatives of The Weekly Standard. I cite William Kristol in this article:

Still—despite everything, despite the infuriating incompetence and the irresponsible leaking and the weak-kneed hedging and the endless equivocating; despite the great likelihood that Obama will do much less than he should, much less effectively than he could; despite the ridiculous disavowal of regime change when he has previously called for regime change, and when regime change is the only serious way to deter prospective users of chemical weapons; despite his failure to articulate an easily articulated American national interest in punishing and indeed removing Assad—despite all this and much else besides, it would be disastrous for an American president to back off from the just and necessary use of military force when he has threatened it and prepared for it.

No. It is not disastrous to back off from the use of force when you have no idea what you mean to achieve by it.

Assad is tyrant. Despite some rumours to the contrary, I consider it likely he gassed his domestic enemies. He is a nasty piece of shit. The entire Middle East save Israel is governed by people who have to behave despotically to maintain their thrones. Some, like the Kings of Jordan and of Morocco , behave like enlightened despots. Others, like the generals running Egypt, are having to restore enlightened despotism, against the will of at least one third of their subject population.

Assad is no different from the men running Iran, except that he governs with the willing compliance only of his Shi’ite sect, the Alawites , who are not more than 13% of the Syrian population. The clergy who run Iran govern with the willing compliance of maybe 40% of their population, perhaps less. The difference between Canada, on the one hand, and Iran or Syria, on the other, is that our Prime Minister is not using artillery to quell riots in the Beaches area of Toronto, nor lobbing missiles into Liberal ridings to suppress Justin Trudeau’s jihad. Justin Trudeau expects to live to become Prime Minister, and Stephen Harper expects to see Trudeau into honourable retirement. They are not killing each other’s children. They do not need to; our constitutional system has been consciously evolved to allow for peaceful transitions of power, which means that the losers must be safe in their lives and property.

As the Shah of Iran once  said: “When my people behave like the Swedes, then I shall behave like the King of Sweden.” There is some truth in that observation, self-serving though it was.

Several civil wars  and revolutions among the English-speakers have got us to this stage, including  the English Civil War (1642-51) , the Glorious Revolution (the deposition of the Stuart monarchy, 1688), the Battle of the Boyne, which chased the Stuart kings out of Ireland, and the American Revolution 1776-1783, which established a North American English republic. Do not forget as well as many tumults, riots, insurrections (the rising of the Catholic Scottish clans against the Protestant succession to the throne of England in 1715 and 1745, which Scotch romantic reactionaries vainly glorify. (Bonny Prince Charlie and all that heroic nonsense.)

Syrians started this war, and we have every reason to want the Sunni and Shi’ite sects of Islam to have their own Thirty Years War, at the end of which, exhausted and half of them dead, they may decide that religious toleration is not such a bad idea.

People cannot be made to evolve, except by their own conclusions, and usually at the end of all other possible alternatives. A few missiles will cause neither Assad, nor his opponents, to change his calculation of interests. They need to kill each other for years, even decades. It is vital for our safety and prosperity not to be drawn into defending or assisting Sunni fanatics against Alawites fighting for their racial survival.