Quotulatiousness

February 19, 2024

The CIA’s covert operations … as inspired by Vladimir Lenin

Filed under: Government, History, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Along with most people who’ve been paying attention to history since the start of the Cold War, I hold the CIA in dubious regard. They seem to have been involved in so many underhanded escapades in countries around the world — certainly by reputation, if not in reality — that they stand almost in direct opposition to how most Americans liked to think of their country. Jon Miltimore thinks that among their inspirations was the founder of the Soviet Union himself:

I bring all of this up because I recently came across an old document of some significance that I’d never heard of before titled, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare“.

It was authored by George Kennan, the State Department Policy Planning Director who’d go on to be a successful US diplomat, for the National Security Council (which governed the CIA), and the document explained how the US government had to mobilize national resources “for covert political warfare” to combat the Soviet Union.

Kennan was not, in my opinion, a bad man. He had good instincts and sound motives, at least compared to others in the US intelligence apparatus. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and later was one of the first diplomatic leaders to warn against the US policy of expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep, something he predicted would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”.

That said, it’s clear that Kennan was not appalled by the Soviet Union’s use of covert political warfare. He was impressed by it.

“Lenin so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history,” Kennan wrote in the document.

    We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting context outside of all political context, by a national tendency to seek for a political cure-all, and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations — the perpetual rhythm of [struggle, in and out of war].


The document is fascinating because it appears to mark the genesis of the US government’s first formal steps into the world of political warfare — a well-documented history that includes toppling governments, assassinating world leaders, tipping elections, and torturing enemies.

All of these efforts, of course, initially targeted external parties and countries to serve “the national interest”.

This is no longer the case. The CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies no longer restrict their covert political warfare to foreign states, and I’m not talking about just Operation Mockingbird and other domestic propaganda efforts.

The CIA is clearly putting its thumb on the scales of US elections in ways that should terrify all Americans.

December 18, 2023

QotD: A short history of the (long) Fifth Century

The chaotic nature of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire makes a short recounting of its history difficult but a sense of chronology and how this all played out is going to be necessary so I will try to just hit the highlights.

First, its important to understand that the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries was not the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries (all AD, to be clear). From 235 to 284, Rome had suffered a seemingly endless series of civil wars, waged against the backdrop of worsening security situations on the Rhine/Danube frontier and a peer conflict in the east against the Sassanid Empire. These wars clearly caused trade and economic disruptions as well as security problems and so the Roman Empire that emerges from the crisis under the rule of Diocletian (r. 284-305), while still powerful and rich by ancient standards, was not as powerful or as rich as in the first two centuries and also had substantially more difficult security problems. And the Romans subsequently are never quite able to shake the habit of regular civil wars.

One of Diocletian’s solutions to this problem was to attempt to split the job of running the empire between multiple emperors; Diocletian wanted a four emperor system (the “tetrarchy” or “rule of four”) but what stuck among his successors, particular Constantine (r. 306-337) and his family (who ruled till 363), was an east-west administrative divide, with one emperor in the east and one in the west, both in theory cooperating with each other ruling a single coherent empire. While this was supposed to be a purely administrative divide, in practice, as time went on, the two halves increasing had to make do with their own revenues, armies and administration; this proved catastrophic for the western half, which had less of all of these things (if you are wondering why the East didn’t ride to the rescue, the answer is that great power conflict with the Sassanids). In any event, with the death of Theodosius I in 395, the division of the empire became permanent; never again would one man rule both halves.

We’re going to focus here almost entirely on the western half of the empire […]

The situation on the Rhine/Danube frontier was complex. The peoples on the other side of the frontier were not strangers to Roman power; indeed they had been trading, interacting and occasionally raiding and fighting over the borders for some time. That was actually part of the Roman security problem: familiarity had begun to erode the Roman qualitative advantage which had allowed smaller professional Roman armies to consistently win fights on the frontier. The Germanic peoples on the other side had begun to adopt large political organizations (kingdoms, not tribes) and gained familiarity with Roman tactics and weapons. At the same time, population movements (particularly by the Huns) further east in Europe and on the Eurasian Steppe began creating pressure to push these “barbarians” into the empire. This was not necessarily a bad thing: the Romans, after conflict and plague in the late second and third centuries, needed troops and they needed farmers and these “barbarians” could supply both. But […] the Romans make a catastrophic mistake here: instead of reviving the Roman tradition of incorporation, they insisted on effectively permanent apartness for the new arrivals, even when they came – as most would – with initial Roman approval.

This problem blows up in 378 in an event – the Battle of Adrianople – which marks the beginning of the “decline and fall” and thus the start of our “long fifth century”. The Goths, a Germanic-language speaking people, pressured by the Huns had sought entry into Roman territory; the emperor in the East, Valens, agreed because he needed soldiers and farmers and the Goths might well be both. Local officials, however, mistreated the arriving Goth refugees leading to clashes and then a revolt; precisely because the Goths hadn’t been incorporated into the Roman military or civil system (they were settled with their own kings as “allies” – foederati – within Roman territory), when they revolted, they revolted as a united people under arms. The army sent to fight them, under Valens, engaged foolishly before reinforcements could arrive from the West and was defeated.

In the aftermath of the defeat, the Goths moved to settle in the Balkans and it would subsequently prove impossible for the Romans to move them out. Part of the reason for that was that the Romans themselves were hardly unified. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here except to note that usurpers and assassinations among the Roman elite are common in this period, which generally prevented any kind of unified Roman response. In particular, it leads Roman leaders (both generals and emperors) desperate for troops, often to fight civil wars against each other, to rely heavily on Gothic (and later other “barbarian”) war leaders. Those leaders, often the kings of their own peoples, were not generally looking to burn the empire down, but were looking to create a place for themselves in it and so understandably tended to militate for their own independence and recognition.

Indeed, it was in the context of these sorts of internal squabbles that Rome is first sacked, in 410 by the Visigothic leader Alaric. Alaric was not some wild-eyed barbarian freshly piled over the frontier, but a Roman commander who had joined the Roman army in 392 and probably rose to become king of the Visigoths as well in 395. Alaric had spent much of the decade before 410 alternately feuding with and working under Stilicho, a Romanized Vandal, who had been a key officer under the emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) and a major power-player after his death because he controlled Honorius, the young emperor in the West. Honorius’ decision to arrest and execute Stilicho in 408 seems to have precipitated Alaric’s move against Rome. Alaric’s aim was not to destroy Rome, but to get control of Honorius, in particular to get supplies and recognition from him.

That pattern: Roman emperors, generals and foederati kings – all notionally members of the Roman Empire – feuding, was the pattern that would steadily disassemble the Roman Empire in the west. Successful efforts to reassert the direct control of the emperors on foederati territory naturally created resentment among the foederati leaders but also dangerous rivalries in the imperial court; thus Flavius Aetius, a Roman general, after stopping Attila and assembling a coalition of Visigoths, Franks, Saxons and Burgundians, was assassinated by his own emperor, Valentinian III in 454, who was in turn promptly assassinated by Aetius’ supporters, leading to another crippling succession dispute in which the foederati leaders emerged as crucial power-brokers. Majorian (r. 457-461) looked during his reign like he might be able to reverse this fragmentation, but his efforts at reform offended the senatorial aristocracy in Rome, who then supported the foederati leader Ricimer (half-Seubic, half-Visigoth but also quite Romanized) in killing Majorian and putting the weak Libius Severus (r. 461-465) on the throne. The final act of all of this comes in 476 when another of these “barbarian” leaders, Odoacer, deposed the latest and weakest Roman emperor, the boy Romulus Augustus (generally called Romulus Augustulus – the “little” Augustus) and what was left of the Roman Empire in the west ceased to exist in practice (Odoacer offered to submit to the authority of the Roman Emperor in the East, though one doubts his real sincerity). Augustulus seems to have taken it fairly well – he retired to an estate in Campania originally built by the late Republican Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus and lived out his life there in leisure.

The point I want to draw out in all of this is that it is not the case that the Roman Empire in the west was swept over by some destructive military tide. Instead the process here is one in which the parts of the western Roman Empire steadily fragment apart as central control weakens: the empire isn’t destroyed from outside, but comes apart from within. While many of the key actors in that are the “barbarian” foederati generals and kings, many are Romans and indeed (as we’ll see next time) there were Romans on both sides of those fissures. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007) makes this point, that the western Empire is taken apart by actors within the empire, who are largely committed to the empire, acting to enhance their own position within a system the end of which they could not imagine.

It is perhaps too much to suggest the Roman Empire merely drifted apart peacefully – there was quite a bit of violence here and actors in the old Roman “center” clearly recognized that something was coming apart and made violent efforts to put it back together (as Halsall notes, “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”) – but it tore apart from the inside rather than being violently overrun from the outside by wholly alien forces.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.

July 21, 2023

The Führer Adolf Hitler is Dead!?

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 20 Jul 2023

Stauffenberg, Olbricht and the plotters launch Operation Valkyrie. The army moves in to seize power, troops surround the government quarter in Berlin, and Joseph Goebbels is arrested. But things start going wrong pretty much immediately and far away in East Prussia the Nazi fightback begins.
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July 14, 2023

How Hitler Approved His Own Assassination – WW2 Documentary Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2023

So far, the German resistance haven’t had much luck with their attempts to kill the Führer, Adolf Hitler. But now, the German war hero Claus von Stauffenberg, together with Friedrich Olbricht and Henning von Tresckow, drives the resistance forward. It’s time to kill Hitler. It’s time for Operation Valkyrie.
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May 28, 2023

This Gun Could Reach Space

Real Engineering
Published 18 Feb 2023
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April 19, 2023

Philip II of Macedon (359 to 336 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historia Civilis
Published 24 May 2017
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January 4, 2023

“Sarajevo” – Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – Sabaton History 116

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

Sabaton History
Published 3 Jan 2023

Where did the war to end all wars begin? The assassination in Sarajevo may have only killed two, but the repercussions killed millions, destroyed empires, and changed the course of history.
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July 25, 2022

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous

Filed under: Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson considers the character of Julius Caesar (as filtered through Plutach and Shakespeare), and the “Dominance-Oriented Status Seekers” identified in a recent paper:

La morte di Cesare (The death of Caesar)
Oil painting by Vincenzo Camuccini between 1804 and 1805. via Wikimedia Commons.

In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (which is drawn from Plutarch’s Lives), the commoners of Rome are seen celebrating Caesar’s recent triumph over Pompey.

Two tribunes (elected officials), Flavius and Marullus, accost two of the commoners, asking them to name their trades and explain why they are out in their best attire rather than working.

The commoners respond to the tribunes’ condescension with indirect answers and puns that annoy the tribunes even more.

Eventually, Flavius and Marullus learn that the plebeians are cheering Caesar. The tribunes scorn them for doing this.

They tell the commoners that Pompey was a Roman too. So Caesar’s success was not truly a triumph for Rome.

Flavius later tells Marullus that they should remove the decorations from Caesar’s statues during Caesar’s parade.

Marullus questions this plan, stating that it also happens to be the Feast of Lupercal, a celebration of fertility.

But Flavius is adamant that they remove the ornaments, because the removal will help prevent Caesar from seeing himself as too great.

This first scene of Julius Caesar shows that the tribunes want to prevent the rise of a potential tyrant. But they themselves are more than willing to push the commoners around.

Later, two other prominent Romans — Brutus and Cassius — are likewise shown expressing their concerns about Caesar’s growing popularity.

Cassius asks Brutus how Caesar has any more right to greatness than Brutus or himself.

Cassius tells Brutus a story: When they were young, Cassius saved young Julius Caesar from drowning. Cassius always viewed himself as superior for rescuing Caesar. He is now aggravated that Caesar has risen above him.

Cassius decides to orchestrate Caesar’s assassination. Cassius gradually convinces other members of the Roman elite to help him carry out the conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Caesar himself, speaking privately with Mark Antony, expresses suspicions about Cassius:

    CAESAR
    Let me have men about me that are fat,
    Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.
    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
    He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
    ANTONY
    Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous.
    He is a noble Roman, and well given.
    CAESAR
    Would he were fatter! But I fear him not.
    Yet if my name were liable to fear,
    I do not know the man I should avoid
    So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much,
    He is a great observer, and he looks
    Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays,
    As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
    Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
    As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit
    That could be moved to smile at anything.
    Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
    Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
    And therefore are they very dangerous.
    I rather tell thee what is to be feared
    Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar.
    Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
    And tell me truly what thou think’st of him.

Caesar is saying all men are hungry, either for food, entertainment (“he loves no plays … he hears no music”), or power. If prosperous men aren’t tempted by food and entertainment, then they crave power. Thus, prosperous men who are lean are dangerous.

Mark Antony dismisses Caesar’s concerns about Cassius, because Cassius is a “noble Roman”. But as events unfold, we see that Antony was misguided.

Caesar was correct in his judgment of Cassius.

The eminent literary critic (and my former professor) Harold Bloom has stated that Caesar’s “estimate of Cassius shows him to be the best analyst of another human being in all of Shakespeare”.

Bloom goes on to characterize Cassius as embodying a “spirit of resentment, unhappy as he is at contemplating greatness beyond him”.

Cassius secretly arranges to have fake notes sent to Brutus, who is fooled into thinking the notes have been written by ordinary Roman citizens who want the Roman elites to stand up against Caesar.

When persuading the other conspirators to help him carry out the assassination plot, Cassius’s stresses his concern for the future of Rome.

But Cassius’s story to Brutus indicates that the assassination was in part fueled by his resentment that Caesar grew into someone more powerful than himself, thus upending their former status disparity.

July 22, 2022

Why Did The First World War Break Out? (July Crisis 1914)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

[My 2014 series on “The Origins of World War I” can be read here. Although I’d read a fair bit of history on the period, once I began researching the period, even I was surprised at how many different contributing causes there were.]

The Great War
Published 15 Jul 2022

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914 kicked off a crisis among the European Powers. Tensions that built up in the decades before erupted and in early August 1914 the world was at war. But what happened in these fateful July weeks 1914?
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June 27, 2022

High Altitude Research Project and the Martlet Launch Vehicles; Gerald Bull’s dream of a space gun

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Space, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Polyus Studios
Published 26 Jun 2022

Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios

In 1968, 7 countries were operating satellites in orbit, while only 3 countries had the ability to launch one themselves. But they were on the verge of being joined by a Canadian university. Starting in the early 1960s, Montreal, Quebec based McGill University developed and began testing an ambitious concept to place small satellites into orbit. It was the culmination of decades of pioneering work across multiple fields. It was the High Altitude Research Project and the Martlet orbital launch vehicle.

Music:
Denmark – Portland Cello Project
Your Suggestions – Unicorn Heads

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:28 Bull’s early career
3:00 Birth of the Program
7:47 Getting HARP off the ground
10:52 Martlet 1
13:26 Early Martlet 2
15:41 Martlet 3
18:05 Enhanced Martlet 2s
21:40 Other HARP Guns
24:19 Quest for an Orbital Capability, the 2G-1
27:53 Satellite Delivery Model, Martlet 4
30:27 Advanced gun research
31:30 Hard times for HARP
32:30 Bull’s Ambition Gets The Best Of Him
35:28 Legacy of the HARP Project

June 21, 2022

The Early Emperors – Part 4: Caligula, The First Insane Tyrant

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

seangabb
Published 31 Oct 2021

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

June 15, 2022

Istanbul: City of Spies – WW2 – Spies & Ties 18

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Jun 2022

Neutral Turkey appears to be an island of peace in a sea of war. But if you look a little closer though and there’s another story. Assassins ply their deadly trade. Spies slip in and out of occupied Europe. The Allies and Axis battle for influence. The secret war is in full swing.
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May 25, 2022

The Spy Game That Killed Yamamoto – WW2 – Spies & Ties 17

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 May 2022

We’ve already seen the power of signals intelligence. Churchill loves being fed information from MI6’s Ultra. Now it brings a vengeance for his American allies. They manage to bag the scourge of Pearl Harbor, C-in-C of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
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May 20, 2022

The Crusades: Part 7 – The Third Crusade

seangabb
Published 5 Mar 2021

The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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May 17, 2022

The Crusades: Part 6 — The Loss of Jerusalem

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 27 Feb 2021

The Crusades are the defining event of the Middle Ages. They brought the very different civilisations of Western Europe, Byzantium and Islam into an extended period of both conflict and peaceful co-existence. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this long encounter with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

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