The Great War
Published on 15 Mar 2018While Germany is occupying a territory from the Baltics to the Black Sea and planning its huge spring offensive, the Allies are still trying to get behind the idea of a unified command.
March 16, 2018
Allied Unified Command On The Horizon I THE GREAT WAR Week 190
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The Imperial German Army’s final throw of the dice – Operation Michael, March 1918
Victor Davis Hanson summarizes the Central Powers’ brief moment of strength early in 1918:
One hundred years ago this month, all hell broke loose in France. On March 21, 1918, the German army on the Western Front unleashed a series of massive attacks on the exhausted British and French armies.
German General Erich Ludendorff thought he could win World War I with one final blow. He planned to punch holes between the French and British armies. Then he would drive through their trenches to the English Channel, isolating and destroying the British army.
The Germans thought they had no choice but to gamble.
The British naval blockade of Germany after three years had reduced Germany to near famine. More than 200,000 American reinforcement troops were arriving each month in France. (Nearly 2 million would land altogether.) American farms and factories were sending over huge shipments of food and munitions to the Allies.
Yet for a brief moment, the war had suddenly swung in Germany’s favor by March 1918. The German army had just knocked Russia and its new Bolshevik government out of the war. The victory on the Eastern Front freed up nearly 1 million German and Austrian soldiers, who were transferred west.
Germany had refined new rolling artillery barrages. Its dreaded “Stormtroopers” had mastered dispersed advances. The result was a brief window of advantage before the American juggernaut changed the war’s arithmetic.
The Spring Offensive almost worked. Within days, the British army had suffered some 50,000 casualties. Altogether, about a half-million French, British and American troops were killed or wounded during the entire offensive.
But within a month, the Germans were sputtering. They could get neither supplies nor reinforcements to the English Channel. Germany had greedily left 1 million soldiers behind in the east to occupy and annex huge sections of conquered Eastern Europe and western Russia.
The British and French had learned new ways of strategic retreat. By summer of 2018, the Germans were exhausted. In August, the Allies began their own (even bigger) offensive and finally crushed the retreating Germans, ending the war in November 1918.
Click to see full-sized image.
For more information on Operation Michael, sometimes known as “The Kaiser’s Battle”, here’s the Wikipedia entry.
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Mostly Weekly Series Finale: Creative Destruction
ReasonTV
Published on 14 Mar 2018In the final episode of the webseries, we tackle how markets make and break stuff.
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In free and open markets people are able to make new technologies and business models, which displace older, established ones. That process of starting new companies and jobs destroys some professions while creating others.
It’s entirely understandable that people who lose their jobs want to keep them. But industries like manufacturing, coal mining, and mall retailers aren’t dying out because of competition from China, they’re being outmoded by automation, cheaper fuel sources, and online sales.
Despite the uncertainty that markets bring, they also create new jobs and entirely new professions. There aren’t gangs of unemployed lamplighters roaming the land; their descendants became Uber drivers, social media coordinators, and webseries producers.
In the end, it’s better for everyone to look at the world as it is and to move forward than to try and halt progress through the force of law.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.
Script by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Brian Sack.
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
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Anti-semitism and the alt-right
Jonathan Anomaly and Nathan Cofnas discuss the widespread anti-semitism of the various groups we generally lump together as “alt-right”:
For many on the alt-right, every grievance is, at root, about Jews. Andrew Anglin, host of the most popular alt-right/neo-Nazi website, explains: “the only thing in our movement that really matters [is] anti-Semitism.” If only the Jews were gone, he argues, the white race, freed from bondage, would immediately overcome all of its problems. Where does this attitude come from?
Jews are a conspicuous people, small in number but large in footprint. As Mark Twain wrote in 1899:
If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race….Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk….What is the secret of his immortality?
For many people throughout history, the answer to Twain’s question was simple: Jews conspire among themselves to dominate and disadvantage gentiles. This answer fell out of fashion, at least in polite society, after World War II. Since the 1990s, however, the conspiratorial account of Jewish prominence has taken on a new, more meretricious form in the work of (now retired) California State University, Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald, known affectionately among alt-righters as “KMac.” According to Richard Spencer, the inventor of the term “alt-right” and unofficial leader of the movement: “There is no man on the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald.” And: “KMac…may be the most essential man in our movement in terms of thought leader[ship].” To understand the alt-right’s anti-Semitism, we must understand MacDonald’s ideas, particularly as outlined in his most influential book, The Culture of Critique.
According to MacDonald, Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy.” Jews possess both genetic and cultural adaptations (including, on the genetic side, high IQ and ethnocentrism) that allow them to develop successful intellectual movements that undermine gentile society and promote their own group continuity. “Jewish intellectual movements,” MacDonald argues, are led by charismatic figures analogous to rabbis. They attack white nationalism while promoting Jewish nationalism, and use pseudoscience to “pathologize” anti-Semitism, which in reality is a justified response to “Jewish aggression.” According to MacDonald, Jewish intellectual movements include Freudianism, Frankfurt School critical theory, and multiculturalism. These movements, MacDonald claims, taught white gentiles to reject ethnocentrism and accept high levels of nonwhite immigration to their countries while tolerating Jewish ethnocentrism and racially restrictive immigration policies in Israel.
MacDonald’s theory and the anti-Semitism of many on the alt-right are largely reactions to the perceived liberalism of Jews. One of us (Cofnas) has just published an academic paper that examines MacDonald’s most influential book, The Culture of Critique, and finds that it is chock full of misrepresented sources, cherry-picked facts, and egregious distortions of history. MacDonald and the alt-righters are, nevertheless, correct that many liberal leaders over the last hundred years have been Jewish. We’d like to offer an explanation for this phenomenon, as well as determine whether Jewish liberalism is the cause or the result of anti-Semitism.
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How Rifles & Railroads influenced Warfare in the 19th Century
Military History Vlogs
Published on 23 Feb 2018The introduction of the breech-loading rifle and the railroad had a tremendous influence on Warfare in the 19th Century. Although, not everyone was as fast or able to adopt then the Prussians. Austria, France and Russia had major issues. Most notably visible in the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871).
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