War is the great exception, the great legitimizer of murder, the one arena in which ordinary humans routinely become killers. The special prevalence of the killer-ape myth in our time doubtless owes something to the horror and visibility of 20th-century war.
Campaigns of genocide and repressions such as the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s engineered famines, the Ankha massacres in Cambodia, and “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia loom even larger in the popular mind than war as support for the myth of man the killer. But they should not; such atrocities are invariably conceived and planned by selected, tiny minorities far fewer than 0.5% of the population.
We have seen that in normal circumstances, human beings are not killers; and, in fact, most have instincts which make it extremely difficult for them to engage in lethal violence. How do we reconcile this with the continuing pattern of human violence in war? And, to restate to one of our original questions, what is belief in the myth of man the killer doing to us?
We shall soon see that the answers to these two questions are intimately related — because there is a crucial commonality between war and genocide, one not shared with the comparatively negligible lethalities of criminals and the individually insane. Both war and genocide depend, critically, on the habit of killing on orders. Pierson observes, tellingly, that atrocities “are generally initiated by overcontrolled personality types in second-in-command positions, not by undercontrolled personality types.” Terrorism, too, depends on the habit of obedience; it is not Osama bin Laden who died in the 9/11 attack but his minions.
This is part of what Hannah Arendt was describing when, after the Nuremberg trials, she penned her unforgettable phrase “the banality of evil”. The instinct that facilitated the atrocities at Belsen-Bergen and Treblinka and Dachau was not a red-handed delight in murder, but rather uncritical submission to the orders of alpha males — even when those orders were for horror and death.
Human beings are social primates with social instincts. One of those instincts is docility, a predisposition to obey the tribe leader and other dominant males. This was originally adaptive; fewer status fights meant more able bodies in the tribe or hunting band. It was especially important that bachelor males, unmarried 15-to-25 year-old men, obey orders even when those orders involved risk and killing. These bachelors were the tribe’s hunters, warriors, scouts, and risk-takers; a band would flourish best if they were both aggressive towards outsiders and amenable to social control.
Over most of human evolutionary history, the multiplier effect of docility was limited by the small size (250 or less, usually much less) of human social units. But when a single alpha male or cooperating group of alpha males could command the aggressive bachelor males of a large city or entire nation, the rules changed. Warfare and genocide became possible.
Actually, neither war nor genocide needs more than a comparative handful of murderers — not much larger a cohort than the half-percent to percent that commits lethal violence in peacetime. Both, however, require the obedience of a large supporting population. Factories must work overtime. Ammunition trucks must be driven where the bullets are needed. People must agree not to see, not to hear, not to notice certain things. Orders must be obeyed.
Eric S. Raymond, “The Myth of Man the Killer”, Armed and Dangerous, 2003-07-15.
August 20, 2016
QotD: Violence in wartime – the great exception
August 19, 2016
Cadorna Snatches Defeat From The Jaws of Victory I THE GREAT WAR Week 108
Published on 18 Aug 2016
The Italian offensive taking Gorizia last week surprised everyone. Including Italian Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna who overlooks the huge strategical advantages now open in front of him. Instead he hesitates and “glorious” victory gets a few dents. At the same time, Romania is getting ready to join the war on the side of the Entente too and on the Western Front German morale is dwindling as the French and the British Army are getting more confident at the Somme and at Verdun.
Lindisfarne – An Age Borne in Fire – Extra History
Published on 30 Jul 2016
Bishops. Manuscripts. Pilgrimage. Wealth. In 793 CE, the island monastery of Lindisfarne thrived in a state of harmony. Then, everything changed when the Viking raiders attacked. Once they discovered Europe’s weakness, not even mighty kings like Charlemagne could stop them. They transformed their power at sea into an avenue for conquest and expansion: the Viking Age had begun.
____________Troubling omens were recorded in Lindisfarne prior to the Viking invasion on June 8, 793 CE. It was the seat of the bishop for much of Northeastern Britain. Monks in the scriptorium produced some of the most celebrated illustrated manuscripts, and abroad they helped convert the pagans of Britain. Lindisfarne had been the final resting place of St. Cuthbert, so pilgrims often came and enriched the priory and the town. It never occurred to anyone that when strange ships appeared on the horizon, that they might be hostile. The men who disembarked were fierce, unknown, and merciless. They cut down monks in the churches and looted the church… then left. Bishop Higbald survived, and sent the news across Europe. From there, the frequency of raids only increased and raged across all of Europe. The burgeoning flame of Lindisfarne was almost snuffed out. It was the first time in history that the reach of Christianity shrank, rather than expanded. But what about the other side of the story? These “barbarians,” who would become known as Vikings, were striking back at a culture that looked down on them, insulted their faith, and tried to swindle them at trade. They had realized how poorly defended these both the British Isles and mainland Europe were, and how rich they were in fertile land. They put their vast knowledge of shipcraft to work and turned trading routes into raiding routes, finding new lands for them to settle. The Viking Age had begun.
August 17, 2016
American Conservatives
David Warren helpfully outlines the job description of US conservatives, based on the last century or so of progress:
Often I am asked by correspondents to define something they call “conservatism.” I rather thought I’d answered this question before, though it is always possible I was mumbling. So lest there be confusion, or perchance new readers, let me give the definition again.
Conservatism is a form of embarrassment or timidity; in an American context, the politics of the cartoon character, Caspar Milquetoast (see here). It is a way of standing astride history to say, “Please watch where you are going,” while being run over. It is a form of apology for being alive.
And no, Trump is not a conservative. He is what is called a “populist,” or to use the older term, insane.
The problem with these “conservatives” today is that they are too conservative. They merely oppose change. Each new generation of them becomes the rearguard for the previous liberal vanguard. They accept the revolutionary advances imposed by the last team of social engineers as “a fact of political life,” that only a fool would gainsay. They survive by breeding, I suppose, but also by adding new constituencies to their ranks, as the liberals safely discard them; then selling out each in turn.
“Free trade” was an example from decades ago. The liberals didn’t want that any more, so the conservatives became the free trade party. Skip forward another three score and ten, and the conservatives are now becoming the “gay” party. They are defending the right of homosexual persons to stay gay on their own terms, as the liberal agenda “moves on.” Along the way they (the cons) bought into second- then third-wave feminism, and now they are the old-fashioned, liberated women’s party, too. In another generation they’ll be defending old-fashioned mixed bathrooms, and the old-fashioned post-sexed against … what? (We must wait and see.)
The function of the modern conservative is to be sincerely appalled by the engineers’ latest proposal, without being able to remember why. And they will resist, cautiously, in the certainty that they will lose. Whenupon their children will go to work, consolidating their loss, to prepare for surrender in the mop-up round.
I hope I have made their position clear.
August 16, 2016
Austro-Hungarian Pistols of WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
Published on 15 Aug 2016
Check out Othais channel C&Rsenal to learn all about the history of WW1 firearms: https://www.youtube.com/c/candrsenal
We partnered with Othais again a few months ago for a livestream showing the Austro-Hungarian weapons of WW1. This is the 2nd episode about the surprising variety of pistols.
August 14, 2016
Captured Tanks – Bagpipers I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
Published on 13 Aug 2016
Indy sits in the chair of wisdom again to answer your questions about World War 1.
August 13, 2016
QotD: The aftermath of the Spanish Civil War
The declared portion of the Spanish Civil War lasted from 1936 to 1939. It has passed into legend among Western leftists as a heroic struggle between the Communist-backed Republican government and Nazi-backed Franco, one that the good guys lost. The truth seems rather darker; the war was fought by two collections of squabbling, atrocity-prone factions, each backed by one of the two most evil totalitarianisms in human history. They intrigued, massacred, wrecked, and looted fairly indiscriminately until one side collapsed from exhaustion. Franco was the last man left standing.
Franco had no aspirations to conquer or reinvent the world, or to found a dynasty. His greatest achievements were the things that didn’t happen. He prevented the Stalinist coup that would certainly have followed a Republican victory. He then kept Spain out of World War II against heavy German pressure to join the Axis.
Domestically, Spain could have suffered worse. Spanish Fascism was quite brutal against its direct political enemies, but never developed the expansionism or racist doctrines of the Italian or German model. In fact it had almost no ideology beyond freezing the power relationships of pre-Republican Spain in place. Thus, there were no massacres even remotely comparable to Hussein’s nerve-gassing of Kurds and Shi’as, Hitler’s Final Solution or Stalin’s far bloodier though less-known liquidation of the kulaks.
Francisco Franco remained a monarchist all his life, and named the heir to the Spanish throne as his successor. The later `fascist’ regimes of South and Central America resembled the Francoite, conservative model more than they did the Italo/German/Baathist revolutionary variety.
One historian put it well. “Hitler was a fascist pretending to be a conservative. Franco was a conservative pretending to be a fascist.” (One might add that Hussein was not really pretending to be about anything but the raw will to power; perhaps this is progress, of a sort.) On those terms Franco was rather successful. If he had died shortly after WWII, rather than lingering for thirty years while presiding over an increasingly stultified and backward Spain, he might even have been remembered as a hero of his country.
As it is, the best that can be said is that (unlike the truly major tyrants of his day, or Saddam Hussein in ours) Franco was not a particularly evil man, and was probably less bad for his country than his opponents would have been.
Eric S. Raymond, “Fascism is not dead”, Armed and Dangerous, 2003-04-22.
August 12, 2016
Italy Breaks Through – Cadorna’s Triumph I THE GREAT WAR Week 107
Published on 11 Aug 2016
Italy’s war in the alps wasn’t very successful so far but this week they took Gorizia, a major triumph for the Duke of Aosta and Italian Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna.
August 11, 2016
Urbino – The Light of Italy: Federico da Montefeltro – Extra History
Published on 16 Jul 2016
Federico da Montefeltro shone brightly as the “Light of Italy,” one of many torches that helped light the flame of Renaissance. He made his name as a wily yet honest mercenary captain, but he also ruled as prince of the small, remote town of Urbino. There, he and his wife built an illustrious court that celebrated creativity, knowledge, and justice.
____________Born an illegitimate son, Federico da Montefeltro became the heir of Urbino when his family got the Pope to legitimize him. As a child, he was sent to Venice to serve as a hostage for his family’s part in the wars of Lombardy, and by 15 he had turned his fate around to become knighted by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. At 16, he became a condotierre, a mercenary. Although he was technically prince of Urbino, his land was isolated and poor, so mercenary service allowed him to make money. He excelled at it: he never lost and never broke a contract. Cities began paying him NOT to fight against them, and he channeled their riches into his hometown. He looked after his soldiers families in Urbino, walked the markets every day, and held court in his garden where all citizens were treated equally under the law. Since he loved history and philosophy, he built one of the greatest libraries in all of Italy, hiring scribes to find and copy classical works that might have been lost if not for him. He also built a palace where he fostered art of all kinds, and young people from noble houses across the continent flocked to his court. His wife, especially his second wife Battista Sforza, built Urbino alongside him. She’d received the same liberal education he had and often counseled him on politics When he was away, she held court in his stead. Sadly, she died of complications while bearing Federico’s only son, whom he named Guidobaldo. Guidobaldo was intelligent and well read, but he was sickly and could never be his father’s equal in war. After Federico died, the Borgia came and seized Urbino from Guidobaldo, but although his family lost its holdings, his legacy lived on as the ideas and attitudes he’d nurtured in his court survived and spread far enough to help spur the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy.
Debunking myths from the Muslim occupation of Al-Andalus
Recently returned from a trip to her native Portugal, Sarah Hoyt explains why the stories of Muslim-occupied Iberia being a wonderfully tolerant and humane place are not likely to have been true:
I’ve been reading a debunking of the myths of the “Convivencia” paradise that Al Andalus and generally Islamic Hispania is supposed to have been.
It’s not exactly a shock to me. First of all, my preferred reading, as soon as I could read, was history, most of it written in the early 20th century, and a lot of it local histories or histories of regions of Portugal and Spain. I won’t say that the authors universally rejected the myth of Islam as a civilizing/science-bearing force. I will say that when they applied it (in elementary school we were forced to memorize the improvements the Arabs brought to the peninsula — we did that with each invader, and boy did the area get invaded — almonds, pillows (al-mofadas), the sort of fountains that spout by themselves (you build them by making the water gravity fed from above where you want it to spout. I’m explaining very badly, but I am still not fully sleep recovered, and there’s a hole where the name for the fountains should be, orange trees. There might be something about the way oxen were yoked, but I doubt it. Oh, yeah, the way we write our numbers.) it left me curiously unconvinced.
It was little things, you see, having actually been born/grown up in one of the areas/near the area where this supposed paradise existed. Yeah, sure, the North of Portugal got off lightly. We were freed fairly early on (we were a crusade land and were freed mostly by French crusaders, one of whom, having married a daughter of the king of Castille became father to our first king.)
More specifically, though there are no specific histories of the village (duh) I heard more than once from people I trusted, that we were the sort of place that got by with one or two Berber supervisors, and local toadies… er, I mean functionaries.
But Portugal is a small place, and I went to other places. And there are things…
In a truly multicultural society, with REAL religious tolerance, the local church wouldn’t have been commandeered as a mosque (apparently this was a standard humiliation technique for captive populations.) It was returned to use as a church, and has been such for centuries now, the interior having been ALMOST completely scrubbed clean of arabesque decorations. ALMOST. Why almost, you ask? The wall near the door, around the door, where you can’t avoid seeing them as you leave, was left “decorated.” It was left so that people would never forget.
Then there are churches that were pulled down by the Muslim invaders, and into which people were buried through all the years of occupation. It was the only consecrated ground around, you see. The poor bastards weren’t allowed to have their own religious cemeteries/bury their dead in peace. Oh, and this was often in areas that were considered solid Muslim (this ties in to something else later on, so stay tuned.)
But there is more than that. I never BOUGHT the idea that Muslims were kind and gentle overlords for a more bone-deep reason.
Look, people with ancient cultures all in the same place REMEMBER. They remember in ways that no academic gaslighting, no professorial assurances to the contrary can erase. For instance, do you know how you can tell which Roman emperors were considered decent by the local people? They give their names to their kids. Still. Trajan, for instance. And then there are the bad ones, that are also still remembered, but whose names are given to dogs (Nero.) And then there are the unspeakable ones. Neither child nor dog is named Caligula.
Well, in the local area, you find some kids named Ibrahim (though that is a bit confusing since local custom does weird things to spelling) but NONE named Mohammed. (This might be different now, since the Conquista II — this time we pretend to be innofensive — is in progress.) But back then there were no Moes around.
And that is plain weird in a place that has forgotten nothing. (Seriously, there are still people around named after Roman gods, because the name runs in the family. And Greek Heroes. And Carthaginian heroes, too. My brother went to school with Hannibal, Hasdrubal, and a bunch of Roman historical names — I want to say Cipius, but I’m probably wrong.)
QotD: The Great Vowel Shift and “Canadian Raising”
Linguists do not generally attempt to answer questions of causality. “Why? I can’t answer that,” said Dailey-O’Cain when I asked. “You can look at ongoing changes sometimes if you have the right kind of data but it’s very, very hard.” But there are theories. One particularly fascinating explanation has to do with what’s called the Great Vowel Shift. If you’ve ever wondered why English is such a legendarily horrible language to learn, a lot of the problems can be traced back to the Great Vowel Shift.
There is no firm date on the beginning and end of the Great Vowel Shift, but at most, we can say it happened between the 1100s and the 1700s, with probably the most important and biggest changes happening in the 1400s and 1500s. This coincides with the shift from Middle English to Modern English, and also with the standardization of spelling. The shift itself? Every single “long vowel” — ”ey,” “ee,” “aye,” “oh,” “ooh” — changed. (Nobody knows why. Linguistics is turtles all the way down.)
Before the Great Vowel Shift, “bite” was pronounced more like “beet.” “Meat” was more like “mate.” Everything just kind of slipped one notch over. This happened in stages; that first word, “bite,” started out as “beet,” then became “bait,” then “beyt,” then “bite.” You can hear a nice spoken-aloud rundown of those here.
If you’re wondering what the difference between “bait” and “beyt” is, well, there you have one possible origin of Canadian Raising. “Beyt,” one of the later but not the final stage of the Great Vowel Shift, is extremely similar to the Canadian Raised sound spoken today. There is a theory — not necessarily accepted by all — that Canadian Raised vowels are actually a preserved remnant of the Great Vowel Shift, an in-between vowel sound that was somehow stuck in amber in the Great White North.
Maybe a certain population of Englishmen from that particular time period, around 1600, landed in Canada and due to its isolation failed to observe the further changes happening in England. Maybe.
But I like this explanation. Canadians aren’t weird; they’re respecting the past. One very specific past, that everyone else skipped on by. It’s an awfully nice-sounding diphthong.
Dan Nosowitz, “What’s Going On with the Way Canadians Say ‘About’? It’s not pronounced how you think it is”, Atlas Obscura, 2016-06-01.
August 10, 2016
The Year Of Battles I THE GREAT WAR Summary Part 6
Published on 9 Aug 2016
1916 is known as the year of battles and in the summer of that year this name was truly earned. The Battle of Verdun, the Brusilov Offensive and the Battle of the Somme were all fought simultaneously. On top of that, the Austrians launched a “punishment expedition” against the Italians, the Arab Revolt was declared and the slowly but steadily the Balkan front was built up once more.
August 9, 2016
The British Naval Blockade of Germany I THE GREAT WAR Special
Published on 8 Aug 2016
The big and decisive naval battle that the Royal Navy had hoped for did not happen during World War 1. But another naval strategy slowly but surely ground the German economy down.
August 8, 2016
The legacy of the Loeb Classical Library editions
While I sometimes feel old enough to have construed Latin in school, it departed the curriculum a few years before I reached high school. As a result, while I was vaguely aware of the Loeb Classical Library, I never had a need to obtain or depend on them for my academic career (thank goodness). Back in 2011, John Talbot described them as the “bright ghosts of antiquity” for New Criterion:
The gist of an old joke — it has a dozen local iterations — is that the Loeb Classical Library translations are so baffling that you have to consult the original Greek or Latin on the left-hand page to decipher the English translation on the right.
Funny or not, the wisecrack catches the condescension long directed at the Loebs, that venerable series of Greek and Latin classics in uniform volumes with facing English translations. Professors of classics in particular used to frown upon them. Until recently, merely to be seen on campus with a Loeb was to court scandal. There were gradations of disgrace. Those Loeb editions of Boethius, Bede, and Augustine I saw on the shelves of the professor who taught me Anglo-Saxon: those were permissible for an English scholar. But I, as a classics major, was to eschew the very same volumes. Even as an undergraduate, though I prized my Loeb edition of The Republic, edited and imaginatively annotated by Paul Shorey, I knew better than bring it to my seminar on Plato. That same tact — that same hypocrisy — accounts for the care I took, as a graduate student, to avoid detection as I sifted the used bookshops of Cambridge for second-hand Loebs. For many of us, the pleasure we took in the Loebs was tinged with guilt.
But attitudes are changing. Once treated as evidence of the decline of Western civilization, the Loeb Classical Library is now, in its centennial year, more often regarded as, if not quite a pillar of our culture, at least one of its more enduring and useful props. The centenary invites consideration of how the Loebs have both reflected and, increasingly, shaped our literary culture.
First, to deal with that joke: Are the Loeb translations really so convoluted? They are not. What is true, though not true enough to justify the slur, is that some of the translations, especially those of the Library’s first few decades, do make hard going for the reader, not because they are incomprehensible but because they are written in one of two different varieties of translationese. About the first kind, the Times Literary Supplement reviewer got it right when he complained that the 1913 Loeb Catullus was translated not into English exactly, but that other dialect, “the construing lingo beloved of schoolboys, but abhorred by man and gods.” He had in mind such clunking touches as “remains to be slept the sleep of one unbroken night” for Catullus’ suave nox est perpetua una dormienda, a solution which confirms, as though to satisfy a schoolteacher, the translator’s grasp of the future perfect passive, whatever the cost to English idiom.
H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.
QotD: Peace
Almost everyone wants peace, the problem is that we’ve had peace in this country for so long that most people don’t recognize it for the aberration that it is. Because of this, a curiously contradictory mindset holds sway over a large segment of the population, most of them on the left side of the political spectrum. It goes something like this: “Well, we want peace, so we’ll just refuse to fight. If we refuse to fight, the other guy will have no reason to fight us.” If you point out to them that the other guy just might not want peace, you’ll get a predictable response: “Well, since peace is the default state of the world, if we can figure out what we did to make the other guy mad at us and desirous of war, and make it up to him, then he’ll feel comfortable with allowing the default state to resume.”
The problem is, of course, that peace isn’t the default state of the world, war is. Human beings are predators, and we are genetically designed to be in competition with other human beings, either individually or in groups. If group A has something group B wants, the natural instinct of group B is to attack group A and take it. The only way that group A can prevent this from happening is to be stronger than group B. For centuries, the Mongol tribes roamed the countryside of Mongolia, squabbling with and fighting each other. The great neighboring dynasties, the Xia and Jin, had little to fear from the Mongols beyond nuisance raids, because they were stronger. Then Temujin united the tribes, assumed the title Genghis Khan, and swept both empires off the face of the earth. The empires had enjoyed peace for generations — because they were strong. When they ceased to be stronger than their foes, they soon ceased to be entirely.
So what? Primitives. Barbarians. Savages. We’re different now. Civilized. Cultured. Superior.
I hate to break it to you, but we’re not. 13th century man is behaviorally identical to modern man. 8 centuries is nowhere near long enough for that kind of evolutionary change in the human animal. People are … people. Always have been, always will be. The reason that we’ve enjoyed centuries of peace in America (even our wars haven’t been fought here since the 1860s) is because we’ve been strong enough that nobody has had the ability to fight us over here, and we’ve had the ability to go fight them over there when we needed to. There is nothing about this situation that is written in stone. Our homeland is peaceful because we’ve had the military might necessary to make it impossible for foes to make it not peaceful.
But now, with so many believing that peace is the natural order of things, we are in grave danger of finding out that peace is not the natural order of things, it’s a luxury, one that is paid for in blood and the willingness and ability to shed it. Our military is a shell of its former self, hollowed out to buy bread and circuses for the masses. Our diplomacy a joke, conducted insecurely and thus transparent to our foes. Our foreign policy is a hot mess of appeasement and apology. All of this makes us look weaker and weaker to the world, and so now they believe that they can take what they want from us because we can no longer defend it. Bill Clinton gave Ukraine a rock solid guarantee of protection in return for them giving up their nukes to ensure “peace”. That’s gone, along with half that country. Our strongest allies are realizing that they are on their own against genocidal aggressions and prepare to act alone or in concert with new allies. We issue ultimatums and draw red lines and the world laughs at us. This isn’t peace, it’s the prelude to destruction. Our destruction.
Weirddave, “Fundamental Concepts – Weakness Invites Aggression”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2015-03-07.
