Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2016

The Best Sniper Of World War 1 – Francis Pegahmagabow I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 18 Jul 2016

Francis Pegahmagabow was not only the most successful sniper of World War 1, but he is also among the most decorated aboriginal soldiers in history. He joined the Canadian Army in 1914 and quickly made a name for himself as a sniper during reconnaissance missions.

Sorting through the possibilities in Turkey

Filed under: Europe, Government, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the situation in Turkey stabilizes, Tom Kratman says it probably wasn’t Erdoğan’s version of the Reichstag fire:

So what are the possibilities?

A. The coup attempt could have been more or less spontaneous, incited by word that Erdoğan’s government was about to start arresting soldiers that either adhered to liberal Islamic cleric, Fethullah Gülen, or on some other pretext.

B. It could have been preplanned for a later date and only moved ahead because of the fear of arrest.

C. It could have been a small scale plot, as per B., above, but one of which Erdoğan was fully apprised, and the timing of which he was able to control by issuance of arrest warrants, as per A. and B.

D. It could have been, start to finish, Erdoğan and his party’s attempt at a Reichstag Fire, a staged incident, employing ignorant dupes, started and sabotaged in order to justify massive repression, bloodshed, and tyranny. You know; getting off the train.

E. It was a subplot of a larger Armed Forces-run plot for a real coup.

We can probably dispense with D right off; conspiracies of this kind are too difficult of execution, too unlikely to come off well, that it’s not for anyone but a fool to try. Erdoğan may be many things, and is possibly all of them, but a fool he is not. Likewise, one is inclined to discount E. Again, when the Turkish Army decides to do something it tends to do it forthrightly, competently, and without any undue restraint. If the Turkish armed forces as a whole had been not just doing the planning for a coup, but had such plans and preparations for execution well in hand, or, at least, well advanced, then the coup actors’ calls for assistance and support would not have been so ignored and the streets of Turkey would have seen enough soldiers on them, quickly enough, that defiance would have been unlikely in any case, and massive in no case.

A and B are both plausible, and there is evidence for both of those and C, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that what really happened was C, that there was a plot on a minor scale, that Erdoğan knew about it in considerable detail, that he let it go forward intending to dictate by his actions the time for the coup, and at the worst possible time for the coup, and that he was prepared to countercoup and to take full advantage of the opportunities that would open to him via a successful countercoup.

None of the evidence for C rises above the circumstantial, of course, but taken together, the body of evidence is persuasive. Consider: 1) Erdoğan was out of town at the precise right times, yet, 2) he was able to get back to Istanbul at the precise right times, while 3) easily avoiding capture, 4) having lists already prepared of military officers to dismiss, very nearly the entire Turkish officer corps above the rank of captain, I’ve heard, and 5) also had extensive lists of prosecutors and judges to purge.

That last one is the most persuasive to me, because we don’t have any evidence that the judges or prosecutors had anything to do with the coup. Mere opportunism? Maybe, but the speed of the thing and the thoroughness, given the lack of time…no, I’m not buying opportunism; Erdoğan was ready! Why? Because he knew! How? Because he was forewarned, possibly well in advance, even as to timing because he dictated the timing.

Attempting to make sense of the state of the Middle East

Filed under: History, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

At Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait links to an essay that summarizes some of the confusing and contradictory motives and actions that have roiled the Middle East for the last few years:

I haven’t much to say about all this, but one thought does occur to me, which is that it seems rather wrong for Americans to blame other Americans for this bloody shambles. (Haivry himself does not blame America.) The next silliest thing to believing that your country is an unchallengeably magnificent superpower that never ever errs is to believe that your country’s mistakes and crimes are overwhelmingly more important and blameworthy than those of any other country, these two attitudes being far more similar than those who indulge in the latter one typically realise. The Middle East would surely now be a bloody shambles whatever the Americans had recently tried to do about it.

If there are imperialist villains to be blaming, how about Britain and France? But one suspects that, again, even if those notorious “lines in the sand” had never been drawn around a century ago, what would be happening on top of this sand would still now be a bloody shambles.

The only rays of light that Haivry discerns are in the form of the various little non-Islamic and anti-Islamist statelets that are starting to form, such as the newly emerging Kurdistan. The Kurds aren’t the only ones doing this, apparently. Good to hear.

Here’s the link to the Ofir Haivry essay.

In 2007, in a seminar room in Jerusalem, a day-long session was devoted to Israeli regional strategic perspectives. I was among the participants together with several other scholars, a former Israeli interior minister, a future Israeli defense minister, and two future Israeli ambassadors to the U.S. At a certain point, the talk turned to various scenarios for the regional future and the opportunities or dangers each of these entailed for Israel. When the possible breakup and partition of Arab states like Iraq or Syria was raised, the near-unanimous response was that this was simply too fantastic a scenario to contemplate.

Now we live that scenario. The great Sunni Arab implosion that began with the 2011 “Arab Spring” was unforeseen in its suddenness, violence, and extent. But some, both inside and outside the Arab world, had long suspected that, sooner or later, a day of reckoning would indeed arrive. (Among Westerners, the names of Bernard Lewis and David Pryce-Jones come most readily to mind.) Today, those in the West who acknowledge this great collapse for what it is will be better able to face the emerging realities. But the first and most important step is to recognize that there is no going back.

[…]

And what would all this entail for Western interests and for the regional policy of the U.S. (should it wish to have an active one)? There is no point in dreaming any longer of a grand deal with Iran, or of rebooting the good old days with Turkey, let alone resuscitating an Arab hegemony led by Egypt and the Saudis. As with the huge, decades-long effort by Great Britain to prop up the Ottoman empire, finally blasted in World War I, so with the increasingly forlorn effort by the U.S. to save the Sunni Arab regional order from collapsing, now finally revealed as a road to nowhere. One might as well attempt to restore the Balkans to the Habsburg empire or the Ottoman fold, or to resuscitate Yugoslavia.

With artificial regimes and borders gone, people in the region seek protection and solidarity in the old identities that have survived the Arab reverie: their nation, their religion, their tribe. These are the only building blocks upon which a new and stable system can be founded. The process will be long, complex, and fraught with difficulty, but it offers a prospect of strategic as well as moral coherence. A region redrawn along lines of actual self-definition would give voice to the communities on the ground that will become invested in its success and work for its stability.

For Western observers and policy makers, the principle should be to look with appropriately cautious favor on significant groupings that possess their own voice and some degree of self-government, while ensuring that in the event of their political defeat, they will not be exterminated—which is far more than any of the Arab world’s political systems ever offered anyone. Some of these groupings will evolve into robust independent nations, others into weak federal states or new tribal confederations. Some, cherishing the opportunity, will build thriving and prosperous democracies, and perhaps even become natural allies of the West and Israel. Others will undoubtedly, yet again, waste their opportunities, devolving into another round of petty and corrupt tribal entities—though with the advantage to themselves of ethnic and religious cohesiveness and to outsiders of being too small to entertain dreams of internal or external genocide. In the Middle East, again, not such a bad outcome.

QotD: The battle against superstition

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Once more, alas, I find myself unable to follow the best Liberal thought. What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. … They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk, and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism. Any fool, once he is admitted to holy orders, becomes infallible. Any half-wit, by the simple device of ascribing his delusions to revelation, takes on an authority that is denied to all the rest of us. … What should be a civilized man’s attitude toward such superstitions? It seems to me that the only attitude possible to him is one of contempt. If he admits that they have any intellectual dignity whatever, he admits that he himself has none. If he pretends to a respect for those who believe in them, he pretends falsely, and sinks almost to their level. When he is challenged he must answer honestly, regardless of tender feelings.

H.L. Mencken, “Aftermath”, Baltimore Evening Sun, 1925-09-14.

Powered by WordPress