Who Determines The Winning Narrative?

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

Are there any articles or books you could recommend to me that decode why one narrative triumphs over all others? For example, the poets gave us the narrative of WWI to which all other narratives must bow.

A friend says: “Paul Roth does a lot of it. Lots of reviews and discussion of this book – The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation.”

Another friend says: “Hayden White was a “historiographer” of the 1980s. He was influential, wrote a dozen books or so. He popularized the idea/term “metahistory,” and in general he leads his readers to a skeptical position.”

Ed Caesar writes for British GQ May 15, 2018 about Tom Wolfe’s reporting on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination:

[Tom Wolfe:] “I went to Little Italy and everybody thought that their natural enemies had done it. You know, the Italians didn’t like the Jews so they blamed it on the Jews. The Jews blamed it on the Chinese. The Chinese blamed it on the Italians. And I thought these stories were hilarious. But when I got back to the newspaper… I’m sitting there looking for my piece and it’s not there. All they wanted was little old ladies collapsing in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. That was it. They didn’t want any turmoil in the population over who did it, and that kind of thing. Newspapers are the last redoubt of people who want to observe the niceties. It’s strange. Something big happens, and whatever the proper reaction should be, that’s what you get.”

…Wolfe sees – has always seen – individuals as representatives of their group. The Italians blamed the Jews who blamed the Chinese. People are first and foremost a member of a race, or a class, or a certain stratum of society. In this regard, he’s a sociologist.

Wolfe explained as much to me when we talked about his novels. “You need psychology. But you don’t have a choice: that vertical line [of psychology] is going to intersect with this broad plane which is the society. And nobody can be a true individual because whatever you want to be is going to be pushed around and changed. We are all tremendously affected by the society that we’re in.”

[Gay Talese recalled:] “We spent a few hours together – going from downtown Manhattan (Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy); then came uptown, walking around the theatre district in the West Forties, uptown toward Columbus Circle… And I personally did not see much reaction at all from New Yorkers. I didn’t see anybody crying in the streets, didn’t overhear anybody lamenting aloud about the fatal shooting in Dallas etc. Yes, people had heard the news over the radio, or people were talking about the event among themselves as they stood waiting for a traffic light on a street corner; but there was no sign of the mournful masses that would later be the signature image on television.

“After I reported what I’d seen in New York, the editor didn’t want me to write anything. What I’d seen, or had not seen, did not conform to the ‘expected’ or ‘ideal’ response the situation seemed to call for, at least in the editor’s eyes. So there was no story in the Times by me that day. Nor, as I recall, was there anything by Tom Wolfe in the Trib that day. Here, on the same assignment, were two young men who would be identified as ‘New Journalists’ covering the same story and [on this great, headline-making day] getting nothing about it in print. We could not write what we saw, because we didn’t see what the editors and TV directors ‘saw’.”

Who determined that Dallas was the city of right-wing hate and that was the prism through which to understand the Kennedy assassination carried out by a communist?

Video description: “Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.”

Here are some excerpts from this talk:

In a positivistic world, knowledge is just built up over time, and anytime you find out something that people didn’t know, you get to just add up to this model, and knowledge just keeps on growing and everybody’s happy. And that is dead.

There are conversations moving through time and there’s a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is.

Why on earth would these people get to say what knowledge is?

But the point is that’s the way it works. You may not like it, but that’s the way it works.

The good news is this thing does move through time. The other good news is this boundary is permeable. Stuff comes in and stuff goes out. Academic conversations excrete as they go.

They go along for a while and they say, whoa, we were doing that! Don’t do that anymore.

It’s not this buildup model. This buildup model assumed that everything was right. We don’t think that. We think a lot of what we think right now is wrong.

We just dunno what the wrong is and we don’t know what better is. We wanna know, we do, we wanna get better at it, but in order for us to do that, you have to be dealing with the stuff we say is knowledge.

The communities you’re entering have their own codes, a set of words that communicates value.

You must know the codes of the communities you’re working in and they are particular to communities.

Some codes are shared among a bunch of communities, some aren’t. You’ve got to know.

The code is, wow, are you smart!

You are so smart and you’ve contributed and you’ve advanced this, you’ve advanced this community through in fabulous ways, but there’s this little thing you got here that’s wrong. And now they say, oh yeah, well thank you for appreciating that. What do you think we have wrong? And then you better have an argument, not an explanation.

The University of Chicago writing program is not real popular in the world of writing programs and you can see why. A lot of people think we’re fascists.

Here’s what we teach people to do. We say, identify the people with power in your community and give them what they want. Lots of people have said to us in some version or another, you’re supposed to teach people to challenge the existing community. Well, actually, I just did, right? But notice that I did it inside the terms of the community.

You want me to go to this really important person, the editors of this journal and tell ’em they’re wrong? Yeah, I do. I need you to do it under the code. You wanna do it under the code. There’s polite ways to do it. There’s insulting ways to do it.

In his work in progress, Cultural Claims of Cultural Oppression, Rony Guldmann writes:

* …liberalism as now viewed by conservatives is an overarching cultural narrative of which the policy prescriptions are only symptoms. Liberalism is not just a political orientation, but a totalistic worldview and way of being that has crept into the American psyche itself and can always be discovered at work in the seeming trifles of social life and pop culture—suffocating conservatives from all sides. Liberalism is not sustained by reason and argument, but by the mores and pieties that liberals have quietly entrenched as the unquestioned, taken-for-granted background of things—a parochial ethos into which the populace has become progressively indoctrinated by small, often imperceptible increments. In issuing their claims of cultural oppression, conservatives seek to awaken their fellow Americans to this hidden reality.

* These disciplines and repressions have been culturally exalted as the achievement of a historically unprecedented self-possession, self-control, and self-transparency, the liberation of essential human faculties from the teleological illusions in which a benighted past once shackled them. But this self-congratulatory Enlightenment narrative conceals a darker and more complicated story that reveals molding and coercion where liberalism sees only liberation and “awareness.” What liberalism upholds as autonomous self-possession is in fact the internalization of the new restraints and inhibitions of the disciplinary society. The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount. These narratives trace our modern “innerness” to a certain psychic liberation from blind convention. But they overlook that this innerness is a kind of blind convention in its own right, the outcome of the disciplinary molding that quietly undergirds liberal ideals.

* …liberals believe in their heart of hearts that they enjoy a more self-regulating and self-transparent form of human agency than has been attained by conservatives, the “bitter clingers” lost in a hallucinatory world of imaginary cultural villains. But the Counter-Enlightenment narrative I defend reveals that what liberals celebrate as their higher-order rationality is in its subterranean structure a system of collective meaning-production, a hero-system that as such is on a par with the hero-systems of conservatism.

* Conservative claims of cultural oppression are right-wing populism turned post-modern. They protest liberalism, not as a public philosophy but as a meta-narrative—a way of thinking that, being no longer recognizable as such, has as Kimball says seeped into “the realm of habit, taste, and feeling.” Conservatives will frame the precise nature of liberals’ duplicity in a variety of ways. But they are united by the conviction that liberalism is sustained in existence by some all-pervasive social distortion, and that this distortion must be exposed if rhetorical parity between Left and Right is to be restored. Goldberg condemns the liberal denial of ideology as “offensive to logic, culturally pernicious, and, yes, infuriating.” And his exasperation is that of all conservatives, who find themselves perennially accused of moral and intellectual failure by those who lack any standing to condemn them. With acrobatic dexterity, liberals have eluded every attempt to hold them accountable, and have now been taken in by their own performances as dispassionate rationalists and pragmatists. With conservatives being the only remaining threat to those performances, to the liberal identity, they cannot but become another. The conservaphobia that oppresses them is neither a gratuitous free-floating vice nor a calculated political strategy, but thelogical corollary of liberalism’s basic self-understanding as somehow above the fray of sect and ideology.

* Conservative claimants of cultural oppression understand liberalism in much the same way that feminists understand patriarchy or post-colonial multiculturalists understand Eurocentrism: It is not just a just a set of political aims but an overarching ethos and narrative of which the explicitly political aims are only one expression, and not always the most important one. Liberalism inheres, not only in its principles and policies, but in the pre-reflective mores of the ambient culture, which are what prepare the population for those principles and policies.

* Goldberg urges conservatives to guard against being seduced by “the narrative of victimization.” That narrative is correct on the merits—conservatives “are called racists, bigots, fools, fascist, etc. every day by those who control the commanding heights of the culture.” But Goldberg believes that complaining about this can be counterproductive when it “concedes the authority of the liberal establishment to make such claims” and “encourages conservatives to internalize two unhealthy responses.” The first is “the burning desire to offend liberals just for kicks.” Though acceptable in moderation, this impulse can make conservatives come off as obnoxious, thus discrediting them. The other, antipodal but equally unhelpful, response is “self-hating conservatism,” which causes conservatives “to apologize for being ‘old-fashioned’” or to seek “to prove they ‘care’ too.” Hence the “abomination” of “compassionate conservatism.”

* The liberal narrative refuses to recognize this [1960s] chaos and its consequences. In occluding this, that narrative serves the twin ideological functions of 1) absolving liberalism of responsibility for the decay of traditional values and 2) portraying the ordinary American as still mired in unatoned racism, and so as requiring liberal interventions.

* The liberal narrative celebrates birth control as a crucial step in women’s liberation. But in like fashion, Goldberg observes that Margaret Sanger first promoted birth control by hitching a “racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation.” In persuading women that birth control was a “necessary tool for their own personal gratification,” Sanger “brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact ‘speaking truth to power.’”53Here as elsewhere, the problem with liberal individualism is not its excesses but its fraudulence, the hidden tribalistic impulses operating underneath the façade of that individualism, in which liberals do not truly believe.

* Moral relativism and subjectivism are not the transcendence of ideology—as the liberal narrative would have it—but, on the contrary, ideological weapons through which to disguise the injuries which the people of fashion would inflict on the common people. The latter’s moral degradation augments the political and cultural capital of the Left no less than vast armies of low-wage workers augment the profits of industrialists. This degradation is simply the currency of liberal ambition, merely another way for the anointed to set themselves against the benighted and their moral traditionalism.

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Decoding Christian Nationalism

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

Every organism acts on its environment, often for its own benefit and often against the benefit of other organisms.

Why would Christians not act like other organisms? Why would they be more passive than earthworms, lemon ants, beavers and the cuckoo?

I suspect most Christians want to reproduce with other Christians. In a more Christian America, they would have more chances to reproduce with another Christian. When elite Christians look out at the large swathes of America that are hostile to Christianity, why would they not want to subjugate these pagans and convert their women? Men know that women side with winners and loathe losers. If you beat the enemy’s men, the loser’s women will follow you. Christian men are incentivized to win in this world, conquer their enemies, and increase their odds of finding an attractive and compatible long-term partner.

From a 2023 paper published by Cambridge University:

Mate success is simply defined here as the probability that one can find a romantic long-term partner. The main claim is that if a niche is composed of individuals mostly of the out-party, and one holds negative affect toward the out-party, an individual’s perception of their probability of mate success will be hindered in that niche. As a result, highly partisan clustered areas repel out-partisan individuals the most, and negative affect magnifies this effect. Individuals are then incentivized to seek out niches with improved prospects or choose such niches when an opportunity arises. Additionally, such a mechanism could create a positive feedback loop between geographic and affective polarization.

When Christians move through a polarized America, why would they not want to end the polarization to create a state of affairs more to their liking?

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, philosopher Rony Guldmann notes:

* Tolerance “is touted as the highest virtue in our popular culture.” But that tolerance is not extended to Christians, who are denied “equal dignity, respect, and treatment.” If blacks were once maligned as the natural inferiors of whites, it is now, says [Angelo] Codevilla, the “Ruling Class” of liberal elites who “can no more believe that a Christian might be their intellectual and moral equal than white Southerners of the Jim Crow era could think the same of Negroes.” In the same vein, Cal Thomas charges that in their refusal to recognize Christian writing as “serious literature or scholarship,” many publishers are “treating the Christian market as a kind of ‘Negro league’ of publishing.” Liberalism “hides its bigotry behind the mask of reason” because it merely redirects without actually reducing the sum total of bigotry in the world, concealing its bigotry in what purports to be a fair-minded assessment of Christian intellectual limitations.

* Disney World decided to discontinue its “twenty-eight-year tradition of making on-site religious services available to Christian guests” at the same time as it “went out of its way to solicit the homosexual community, even having an annual ‘Gay Day’ event every year.” Where liberals see the arbitrary juxtaposition of two unrelated developments each of which can be assessed independently of the other, conservatives see varied manifestations of the same basic phenomenon, the supplanting of their moral traditionalism by ultra-liberalism, whose support for gays is inextricably bound up with its antipathy toward traditional Christians.

* Opposition to Christianity is just as intrinsic to homosexuality as opposition to homosexuality is intrinsic to Christianity.

* If the number of black scientists and inventors acknowledged in high school history textbooks is of sufficient importance to the self-esteem, and therefore the long-term life-prospects, of black students as to qualify as substantive rather than symbolic, then why should the question of whether America was at its inception a “Christian nation” be dismissed as a “distraction” from the bona fide “substantive” interests of religious conservatives? Is there not a double-standard here?

Wikipedia notes:

Niche construction is the process by which an organism alters its own (or another species’) local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism’s environment or encompass when an organism actively moves from one habitat to another to experience a different environment. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests and burrows by animals, and the creation of shade, influencing of wind speed, and alternation of nutrient cycling by plants. Although these alterations are often beneficial to the constructor, they are not always (for example, when organisms dump detritus, they can degrade their own environments).

For niche construction to affect evolution it must satisfy three criteria: 1) the organism must significantly modify environmental conditions, 2) these modifications must influence one or more selection pressures on a recipient organism, and 3) there must be an evolutionary response in at least one recipient population caused by the environmental modification. The first two criteria alone provide evidence of niche construction.

Recently, some biologists have argued that niche construction is an evolutionary process that works in conjunction with natural selection. Evolution entails networks of feedbacks in which previously selected organisms drive environmental changes, and organism-modified environments subsequently select for changes in organisms. The complementary match between an organism and its environment results from the two processes of natural selection and niche construction. The effect of niche construction is especially pronounced in situations where environmental alterations persist for several generations, introducing the evolutionary role of ecological inheritance. This theory emphasizes that organisms inherit two legacies from their ancestors: genes and a modified environment.

The following are some examples of niche construction:

Earthworms physically and chemically modify the soil in which they live. Only by changing the soil can these primarily aquatic organisms live on land. Earthworm soil processing benefits plant species and other biota present in the soil, as originally pointed out by Darwin in his book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.
Lemon ants (Myrmelachista schumanni) employ a specialized method of suppression that regulates the growth of certain trees. They live in the trunks of Duroia hirsuta trees found in the Amazonian rain forest of Peru. Lemon ants use formic acid (a chemical fairly common among species of ants) as a herbicide. By eliminating trees unsuitable for lemon ant colonies, these ants produce distinctive habitats known as Devil’s gardens.

Beavers build dams and thereby create lakes that drastically shape and alter riparian ecosystems. These activities modify nutrient cycling and decomposition dynamics, influence the water and materials transported downstream, and ultimately influence plant and community composition and diversity.

As creatures construct new niches, they can have a significant effect on the world around them.

An important consequence of niche construction is that it can affect the natural selection experienced by the species doing the constructing. The common cuckoo illustrates such a consequence. It parasitizes other birds by laying its eggs in their nests. This had led to several adaptations among the cuckoos, including a short incubation time for their eggs. The eggs need to hatch first so that the chick can push the host’s eggs out of the nest, ensuring it has no competition for the parents’ attention. Another adaptation it has acquired is that the chick mimics the calls of multiple young chicks, so that the parents are bringing in food not just for one offspring, but a whole brood.
Niche construction can also generate co-evolutionary interactions, as illustrated by the above earthworm, beaver and yeast examples.

The development of many organisms, and the recurrence of traits across generations, has been found to depend critically on the construction of developmental environments such as nests by ancestral organisms.

Niche construction is now recognized to have played important roles in human evolution, including the evolution of cognitive capabilities. Its impact is probably because it is immediately apparent that humans possess an unusually potent capability to regulate, construct and destroy their environments, and that this is generating some pressing current problems (e.g. climate change, deforestation, urbanization). However, human scientists have been attracted to the niche construction perspective because it recognizes human activities as a directing process, rather than merely the consequence of natural selection. Cultural niche construction can also feed back to affect other cultural processes, even affecting genetics.

Niche construction theory emphasizes how acquired characters play an evolutionary role, through transforming selective environments. This is particularly relevant to human evolution, where our species appears to have engaged in extensive environmental modification through cultural practices.[29] Such cultural practices are typically not themselves biological adaptations (rather, they are the adaptive product of those much more general adaptations, such as the ability to learn, particularly from others, to teach, to use language, and so forth, that underlie human culture).

Mathematical models have established that cultural niche construction can modify natural selection on human genes and drive evolutionary events. This interaction is known as gene-culture coevolution. There is now little doubt that human cultural niche construction has co-directed human evolution.[29] Humans have modified selection, for instance, by dispersing into new environments with different climatic regimes, devising agricultural practices or domesticating livestock. A well-researched example is the finding that dairy farming created the selection pressure that led to the spread of alleles for adult lactase persistence.[30] Analyses of the human genome have identified many hundreds of genes subject to recent selection, and human cultural activities are thought to be a major source of selection in many cases. The lactose persistence example may be representative of a very general pattern of gene-culture coevolution.

Niche construction is also now central to several accounts of how language evolved. For instance, Derek Bickerton describes how our ancestors constructed scavenging niches that required them to communicate in order to recruit sufficient individuals to drive off predators away from megafauna corpses. He maintains that our use of language, in turn, created a new niche in which sophisticated cognition was beneficial.

Three academics published a related paper in 2016:

Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions

The reshaping of global biodiversity is one of the most significant impacts humans have had on Earth’s ecosystems. As our planet experiences its sixth “mass extinction event” (1), the effect of anthropogenic landscape modification, habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, and species invasions could not be more apparent (2, 3). These transformations are linked largely to the industrial economies, burgeoning populations, and dense transport networks of contemporary human societies.

Given that most forms of life go extinct, why would Christians not fight for their survival and thriving?

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Revolutions in International Law: The Legacies of 1917

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

Amanda Alexander writes in this 2022 book:

Lenin at Nuremberg: Anti-Imperialism and the Juridification of Crimes against Humanity

The Nuremberg trials stand as a pivotal moment in any history of international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and international human rights.1 As Teitel writes, ‘the trials at Nuremberg represented a unique historical crossroads for the three legal orders that form the humanity law framework’.2 By introducing crimes
against humanity into international law, the trials are said to have contributed to the creation of a new normative order, aimed at protecting vulnerable humanity.3 For prosecuting individuals for these and other war crimes, they are presented as an example of the rationality and calm procedure of international law overcoming violence, power and the baser instincts of revenge.

These accounts of international criminal or international humanitarian law relate what could be described as a liberal or Enlightenment narrative of international law. International law, in these narratives, embodies the enlightened values of rationality, legality and humanity – and the Nuremberg trials represent an important moment in the (slow) movement towards the advancement and realisation of these values….

This approach to the Nuremberg trials not only places the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in an Enlightenment narrative about international law, it also looks to the trials to tell this narrative. The pedagogical role of the Nuremberg trials, and other war crimes trials, has been noted by a number of observers.6 Such trials are expected to relate an accurate, impartial history while demonstrating enlightened values through the ‘civilised institutional drama of a trial at law’.7 Mark Osiel termed such trials ‘liberal show trials’.8

…The Nuremberg trials therefore have an important place in any account of the advancement of humanitarian, liberal values in international law. Yet, when held up against these expectations, the Nuremberg trials often seem to fall short – both as a legal institution and as an historical account. The Nuremberg trials bear the stain of victors’ justice and they stir doubts about retrospective law.9 The trials were uninspiring;10 they relied too much on documentary evidence and listened too little to the voices of victims.11 Most importantly, crimes against humanity, observers note, were oddly limited.12 Under the Charter, they had to be linked to crimes against peace or war crimes.13 As a result, the IMT told a distorted history.14

In this chapter, I suggest that the IMT falls short when assessed according to these measures because it did not just tell the expected Enlightenment narrative and it did not intend to prosecute crimes against humanity in the way we understand them now. Rather, I will argue that the way the crimes were codified and then described at the
trials shows that another narrative was also at work. This was an antiimperial narrative that drew on Marxist theory and was given a practical impetus by the Bolshevik Revolution. It spread, in a diluted form, to ‘advanced opinion’ throughout the West.15 The Marxist approach described war, even European wars, as the result and expression of
imperialism. Imperialism was an economic institution, and its depredations were depicted primarily in economic terms. Aggressive, imperialist war was, in this narrative, the worst crime – the crime that led to all the other horrors of war. An international legal regime that condoned imperialist war was, therefore, so ethically misguided that it should be changed.

…There are lingering doubts about the legality of the new crimes that the IMT introduced – crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.25 Both lacked a clear pedigree in
international law…

…The exclusion of Allied crimes meant a partial historical account.31 The ‘peculiarity’32 of the decision to link crimes against humanity to crimes against peace, and the odd focus on aggressive war,33 meant that the prosecution had to distort the history of the persecution of the German Jews before the war, making it appear as part of the preparations for aggressive war.34 Indeed, as scholars have pointed out, the IMT did not relate the history of crimes that we now associate with the Second World War.35 It was not, in the main, a history of the Jewish Holocaust nor a record of the victims of the war. Victims’ voices were seldom heard in a trial that prioritised the probative value of
documentary evidence.36 These choices undermined the ability of the IMT to write a history that emphasised the value of humanity. They also made for a ‘boring’ trial37 that failed to produce the ‘compelling’ liberal narrative that Osiel expects war crimes trials to strive for.

…”crimes against humanity, has, from the very beginning, caught the imagination of international lawyers as laying down, prima facie, a set of novel principles of law. The
provisions relating to crimes against humanity have been acclaimed as ‘a revolution in international criminal law’. Others have described it as an innovation inconsistent with international law…”

…Crimes against peace were equally problematic. The UK90 and French91 delegations at the London Conference stated clearly that they did not consider aggression or crimes against peace to be part of international law.

…the initiation of a war was not deemed an international crime at the time…

…Sir David Maxwell Fyfe: “I have been approached by various Jewish organizations and should like to satisfy them if possible. I have in mind only such general treatment of the Jews as showed itself as a part of the general plan of aggression…”

…Robert Jackson: “The reason that this program of extermination of Jews and destruction of the rights of minorities becomes an international concern is this: it was a part of a plan for making an illegal war. Unless we have a war connection as a basis for reaching them, I would think we have no basis for dealing with atrocities.”

…that aggressive war was criminal, that there could be unjust, unlawful wars, did entail a significant change to international law. It was, however, a justified change; it meant leaving behind an imperial era where colonisation was acceptable and acknowledging the injustice of colonial wars. This would change the international order from an unethical order to a better one. The similarity of these sentiments in US thought and Soviet literature shows that the idea of a crime against peace was not just a bizarre obsession urged by Robert Jackson. Rather it was a widespread sensibility, found in Marxist and Western anti-imperial literature, that informed the way war could be described, understood and condemned.

…This was the story, the story of aggressive, imperialist war, that was presented at the Nuremberg trials. Once the trial began, the Soviet, English and US prosecution stifled any of their doubts about crimes against peace. Together, they agreed on the legal provenance of aggression.

…Aggressive war was, the Soviets, British and Americans insisted, the central and principal crime from which the other crimes stemmed.

…it was unwavering in its efforts to fit the events of the Nazi period into an overarching story of aggressive war. Nor was this just any aggressive war that the court described – it was an aggressive colonial war, and the crimes it produced were shown to be the consequences of imperialism…

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Battle: A History Of Combat And Culture by John A. Lynn

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2009 book:

Clausewitz begins with violence, hatred, and enmity, which he believes “mainly concerns the people,” for here he labels what is clearly the most novel and pressing matter of the day. 89 The French Revolution changed war from an affair of kings to an affair of peoples and transformed men in the ranks from hirelings to citizen soldiers. Clausewitz recognized this as the most critical watershed in the warfare of his day. The German reformers, Clausewitz among them, pressed the Prussian monarchy to enlist its people in the struggle against Napoleon. They identified popular commitment as the missing, and consequently the most urgently sought, element in the Prussian capacity for war. Therefore, Fichte’s attempt to rally patriotic feelings worked hand in hand with Scharnhorst’s concrete reforms. Art and politics mutually reinforced each other. Not long after Clausewitz returned to Berlin in 1807, he pleaded for the program of Romanticism: “A genuine need of our time [is] to return from the tendency to rationalize to the neglected riches of the emotions and of the imagination.” 90
In On War, Clausewitz’s concern for human psychology comes out repeatedly in his overriding emphasis on the human will. War is ultimately a “contest of wills” and the bloody cost of battle is simply a means to break the enemy’s will: “rather a killing of the enemy’s spirit than of his men.” 91 While will can mean political will, a rational choice, it also involves the passions of enemy peoples. After defining “the power of resistance,” as resulting from two factors, means and will, he made it clear that “subtleties of logic do not motivate the human will.” 92
Clausewitz linked chance and genius in a striking manner. The Military Enlightenment recognized the role chance could play, but sought to reduce it to a minimum, particularly by eschewing battle. Clausewitz found chance unavoidable and advocated battle, a theater where chance could dominate the stage.

…The critical Clausewitzian concept of “friction” constitutes a special role for chance. As early as 1812, in a piece written for his charge, the crown prince, Clausewitz turned to a mechanical metaphor, so appropriate in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution: “The conduct of war resembles the working of an intricate machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort.” 94 In On War, he defined friction as “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” 95 This is essential, because, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” (This is surprisingly similar to Napoleon’s statement that “The art of war is a simple art and everything depends upon execution.” 96 ) All things that complicate action in war, that go wrong or come up unexpectedly, constitute friction. “[T]his tremendous friction, which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.” In another striking metaphor, Clausewitz compares “action in war” to “movement in a resistant element”: “Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.” If general friction arises from the multitude of practical problems involved in military operations and from chance, it also results from lack of knowledge of the enemy, of the battlefield, etc., and generally from war’s unavoidable uncertainty and confusion, the fog of war. “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”

…[Peter] Paret would have us accept that Clausewitz did not impose himself and his own intellectual construct on reality but simply penetrated and portrayed the truth of it all. But this contention seems at odds with the character of his work; in fact, it runs counter to the very nature of intellectual endeavor. If Clausewitz must be seen as a product of his time and circumstance, his current popularity is worth pondering.

…In a violent response to the 1923 earthquake, Japanese police and mobs tortured and slew 6,000 Koreans resident in Japan — a display of vicious, mindless racism.

…the Japanese believed Americans to be soft, self – indulgent, and incapable of serious sacrifice; therefore, Americans would tire and withdraw from a contest with the far tougher and committed Japanese. 87 In what ranks as a monumental misperception, just before the battle of Midway, Mitsuo Fuchida, the air commander of the raid on Pearl Harbor and again to command at Midway, wrote a report dismissing the Americans as lacking the will to fight. 88 Without this prejudiced and fatally incorrect conviction, Japanese war plans did not make sense, since Tokyo always realized that the advantages of numbers in manpower and materiel always rested with the United States.
This certainty of spiritual superiority also led to doctrinal miscalculations.

…ask if racism played a role in defining American strategy and doctrine. Should we find evidence there, we might conclude that the conflict was, indeed, a race war. But the evidence does not exist. When war broke out, the United States applied a strategic blueprint that it had been drafting for over three decades. These plans were not dictated by racial bigotry but by geographical and technological imperatives. The same can be said for crucial elements of doctrine.

…From the start, the United States planned to take on Japan in a naval campaign rather than committing to a great and costly land war in Asia.

…the Marine Corps had guessed right and prepared for the kind of fighting that awaited it on Pacific islands. The preparation of the peacetime Corps is one of the great success stories of prewar planning and training, but it had little to do with defining the enemy as specifically Japanese. No derogatory assumptions about the Japanese influenced these plans. It is true that Americans made some mistakes that can be ascribed to racial stereotyping, such as dismissing the quality of Japanese aircraft before the rude awakening, but these were peripheral to the prosecution of the war.

…most Americans in combat fought for and with their comrades rather than against their enemies. In fact, there is little evidence to demonstrate that combat effectiveness under fire improves with strong hatred.

…This chapter closely follows the work of Kenneth M. Pollack. In his Arabs at War (2002), Pollack identifies the general ineffectiveness of Arab armies, seeks explanations in a number of possible failings, and concludes that the primary weaknesses have historically been in tactical leadership, information management, technical skills and weapons handling, and maintenance. He claims that these failings have been typical of “every single Arab army and air force between 1948 and 1991.” 3 It will be enough for this chapter if these generalizations fit the case study of Egypt — and they do. Above all, Egyptian shortcomings in Pollack’s categories of tactical leadership and information management proved most damaging. Pollack’s argument is all the more convincing because the high command of the Egyptian army itself reached similar conclusions.

…campaign plans ought to build upon the particular character of the army for which they are intended.

…Attrition warfare depends on superiority in manpower and materiel to batter an enemy into submission, and is usually costly. In contrast, maneuver warfare maximizes effect by movement, with the goal of achieving greater results at far less sacrifice of blood. Maneuver warfare probes, discovers, and exploits; it seeks advantage and strikes, ideally by attacking an enemy’s vulnerability with one’s own hardest and sharpest edge.

…Maneuver requires tactical flexibility and improvisation guided by accurate and timely intelligence, and Arab military culture, Pollack insists, repeatedly found these abilities to be elusive.

… The special character of Egyptian military culture, and the value of harmonizing technology and tactics with it, argues for the absolute necessity to appreciate the uniqueness of the different militaries. Concepts of a universal soldier and ideas of weaponry as dictating a single best way to fight seem naïve.

…”Arab armies and air forces did not suffer in combat because they lacked ammunition, food, water, fuel, lubricants, medical supplies, repair tools, spare parts, or other combat necessities.”

…Arab artillery pieces were often the best available, but they were poorly coordinated and commanded. Even successes, as in 1973, reveal core weaknesses in artillery usage, as we shall see. Arab tank crews usually were poor marksmen and maneuvered ineptly. Fighter pilots could not defeat technologically inferior enemy aircraft.

…Many critics of U.S. foreign policy charge that specific American actions, such as a virtual blank check for Israel, have alienated much of the Moslem world, and there is a great deal of truth to this accusation. However, these critics go on to argue that the U.S. could end the threat of extreme Islamic terrorism simply by reversing such policies. However, no matter what the origins of Moslem resentment, once it was transformed from political/rational to cultural/religious, the adoption of more enlightened policies by the United States, although valuable in the long run, would probably not diminish the terrorist threat soon.

Posted in Egypt, War | Comments Off on Battle: A History Of Combat And Culture by John A. Lynn

The “Good War”: Preparations for a War against Civilians

Posted on June 14, 2024 by Luke Ford

Professor Amanda Alexander writes in 2016:

This article argues that the narratives told about the Great War helped to establish the bombardment of civilians during World War II as an ethical, military and legal possibility. It shows that the literary representation of the Great War was antagonistic towards civilians, suggesting that a fairer war would affect the entire nation. Military strategists accepted this premise and planned for a future war that would be directed against civilian populations. International lawyers also adopted this narrative and, constrained by it and their disciplinary conventions, found it hard to posit any strong legal or ethical objections to aerial bombardment.

World War II is often described, by historians and lawyers, as a “Good War.” The inverted commas are used deliberately and ironically. They signal an unwillingness to naively accept the appellation; a sophisticated understanding of the moral complexity of the war. Yes, the cause was just. Yet, it is felt, there were deeply problematic aspects to the Allied campaign. Chief amongst these was the indiscriminate bombardment of civilian populations during the war.2 Commentators today point to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki as testimony to the brutality and inhumanity of Allied tactics – they speak against the “goodness” of the war.3 Indeed, for historians, one of the troubling questions about the war is why Britain and the United States were so ready to use these tactics.

To a modern international lawyer, these acts were also crimes against the laws of war. Lawyers have asked how and why the law broke down at this time and these questions have affected their faith in the strength of their discipline.5 The failure of the post-war tribunals to prosecute and punish these crimes further compromises the claims of international law. For many lawyers, the lack of attention given to aerial bombardment seems to undermine the legitimacy of those trials,6 exposing them as victors’ justice and a mockery of international justice at its inception.7

I will argue that the reason that aerial bombardment was accepted so readily was that it was not universally seen, in the interwar period, as a defilement of the idea of a good war, nor as illegal. Although there was some argument that bombardment of civilians was immoral or illegal, there was also a strong cultural narrative that suggested that a war against civilians could be an appropriate way of waging war. The story of the Great War that was established toward the end of the 1920s was strongly antagonistic towards civilians. It blamed non-combatants for sending young men out to be sacrificed while they remained (unfairly) safe from the horrors of war. The same account can be seen in the work of military strategists and it was deployed by the leaders of the nascent air forces. International lawyers, imbued with this cultural narrative and discomfited by the failures of their discipline, were unable to posit any strong legal, or even moral, prohibition on the bombardment of non-combatants. In this way, the hostility towards civilians left aerial bombardment as an unsettled legal problem and a military possibility that was eventually embraced.

…Until the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions were drafted in the 1970s, there were no rules to prevent the starvation of civilians, no consensus about illegality of area bombardment, no agreement about the usefulness or meaning of a principle of proportionality.9 Moreover, as I have argued, it was only in the 1990s that these principles were actually accepted as customary international law, binding on everyone.

The Great War introduced, for the first time, a large contingent of educated, scholarly men, steeped in the motifs and themes of a classical education, to battle.14 Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Erich Maria Remarque are the best known of these war writers; their work has been established as the canon of war literature.15 Their poetry and memoirs replaced traditional tales about honorable and patriotic warfare with a new story of disillusionment and betrayal, horror and pointlessness. They portrayed a war where young men were sacrificed by the “Old Men,” their patriotic fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts.

…It was at this time, the end of the 1920s, that “the disillusioned trench soldier emerged as the ‘authentic’ voice of the Great War.” From this moment on, their narrative pushed out the other accounts and became the only possible story about the war. Indeed, Watson shows that other experiences of the war had to be recast in these terms to be accepted as legitimate accounts of the Great War.

…In this now ascendant narrative, one of the most common themes was the juxtaposition of the trench poet’s pity and love for fellow soldiers with antagonism towards the
non-combatant population.

…The rest of the world, however, seemed to care little for the soldier’s suffering. The trench poets felt that non-combatants were indifferent to the plight of soldiers.

…Yet, the trench poets did not reserve their dislike only for these militant examples of womanhood. Their work displays a more general hostility towards women.35 Gilbert describes a disgust for the feminine that acted as a counterpoint to the love between soldiers.36 Others have pointed out that the war, and the vulnerability that men felt at the front, threatened traditional gender roles and created animosity towards women.

…The trench poets felt that these non-combatants were incapable of understanding the reality of the war. When they returned home they could not communicate with or feel
comfortable with their families.

…As a result, soldiers expressed a desire to bring the war home, to make the “smugfaced crowds”41 understand and take responsibility for their support of the war….The military strategists of the interwar period also had a narrative that they told about the last war…

…The strategists shared, with the poets, a willingness to replace this foolish “cannon-fodder” war with a war against the civilian population – for both strategic and moral reasons. It should be remembered, the strategists pointed out, that the purpose of war was to enforce a policy or, as Liddell Hart put it, to subdue the enemy’s will to resist, with the least possible human and economic loss to itself.53 The destruction of the opposing armed forces was “only one means, and not necessarily the best one, to the attainment of that goal.”54 If that could be achieved in a more effective way – such as by bringing the war to the people – then that was the method that should be used. And now the weapon was available to do this: “Aircraft enables us to jump over the army which shields the enemy government, industry and people, and so strike direct and immediately at the seat of the opposing will and policy.”

…consistent narrative was maintained by the military thinkers about the complicity of the non-combatant population in war, and the appropriateness and possibilities of bringing the war home to them.

…All this work and progress in [1920s] international law may well justify the interpretation of the period, overall, as one of utopian energy and enthusiasm. It is interesting, however, that very little of this effort was directed towards the position of civilians in warfare. …those idealist international lawyers, with an interest in warfare, tended to focus their energy on the maintenance of peace rather than the regulation of warfare. They considered that their job was to help prevent war… Lawyers accepted, willingly or unwillingly, a vision of totalitarian war, conflating the people, the nation and the state.

…[J.M. Spaight, the leading authority on air warfare] went even further, making an argument that the entire economic life of a nation should be considered a target… Even after World War II, Spaight still found himself able to state that at least nothing had happened in that war that was as bad as the “loss of the flower of the generation” in World War I.

…International lawyers, between the wars, agreed on a certain story about the laws of war. They knew that there was little protection for non-combatants and little could be expected; nations would not sacrifice military utility for humanitarian reasons. They considered that what law did exist was unsettled, complicit in the depredations of war or likely to be set aside as soon as war began… They knew that international law did little to actually protect civilians… Law would only be used where it facilitated military interests. …lawyers felt that any law that did exist was likely to be disregarded in a war, since there was nothing except the fear of reprisals that might stop military staff bent on winning a war.136 Lawyers expressed a general belief in the weakness of their discipline.

Posted in Human Rights, International Law | Comments Off on The “Good War”: Preparations for a War against Civilians