The Great War
Published on 16 Jul 2018John Monash was one of the most capable commanders of World War 1 but his rise to fame didn’t come unopposed.
July 17, 2018
Australian General John Monash I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1
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July 15, 2018
Alcibiades, the Athenian Byron
Not for poetry, but for the Byronian swathe he cut through a large portion of Classical Greece:
“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
Of all personality traits, charisma is the hardest to appreciate at second hand. We read Cicero’s letters and can instantly tell that he was vain, insecure and ferociously clever; we read scraps of Samuel Johnson’s conversation in Boswell’s biography and know at once that he was magnificent, lovable and desperately unhappy. But as to what it was like to have Lord Byron turn the full force of his attention onto you – well, we have no conceivable way of knowing. We just have to trust his contemporaries that it felt like ‘the opening of the gate of heaven’.
This causes problems for a biographer of Alcibiades. On the face of it, the man was utterly insufferable. Born in around 450 BC into one of the oldest and richest families of ancient Athens, Alcibiades was the only Old Etonian (as it were) to play a leading role in the late-fifth-century radical democracy. The account of his childhood in Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades suggests a bad case of antisocial personality disorder: biting during wrestling, mutilating dogs, punching his future father-in-law in the face for a dare. His later political career makes Boris Johnson seem like a man of firm and unbending principle. Exiled from Athens in 415 BC over some particularly odious Bullingdon Club antics, Alcibiades promptly sold his services to Sparta (where he seduced the king’s wife) before double-crossing both sides and wheedling his way into the court of a Persian satrap.
But Alcibiades, like Byron, clearly had that indefinable something. One catches a glimpse of it in the unforgettable last scene of Plato’s Symposium, when he crashes into the room, blind drunk, flirting with everything on legs, shouting about his love for Socrates. Thucydides captures it in his report of Alcibiades’s speech whipping up the Athenian assembly to vote for the disastrous Sicilian expedition of 415 BC – an extraordinary stew of egotistic bragging (about how successful his racehorses are), mendacious demagoguery and brilliantly acute strategic thinking. The unwashed Athenian masses, not usually prone to atavistic toff-grovelling, absolutely adored him: when Alcibiades finally returned to Athens in 407 BC after eight years of exile, sailing coolly into Piraeus on a ship with purple sails, they welcomed him back with paroxysms of joy.
Behind the Peloponnese-sized ego, Alcibiades was a general of spectacular genius – when he could be bothered. In 410 BC, shortly after his controversial reinstatement as admiral of the Athenian navy (on the back of a bogus promise of Persian support), he wiped out the entire Spartan fleet at the Battle of Cyzicus; two years later, through sheer chutzpah, he captured the city of Selymbria near Byzantium with only fifty soldiers, and without striking a blow. When things went wrong – as in 406 BC, after a disastrous campaigning season in the eastern Aegean – he showed an infuriating ability to wriggle out of trouble. His final years (406–404 BC) were spent once again in exile from Athens, holed up in a private castle on the Gallipoli peninsula. The circumstances of his death are still shrouded in mystery. One story tells that he died in the remote mountains of central Turkey at the hands of the brothers of a Phrygian noblewoman whom he had decided to seduce. This is, I fear, all too believable.
This is the introduction to a review by Peter Thonemann of a new biography of Alcibiades by David Stuttard in the Literary Review for July, 2018. H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.
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July 7, 2018
History Buffs: Gettysburg
History Buffs
Published on 19 Feb 2018
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June 30, 2018
Crown Prince Wilhelm – Front Line Visits – Trench Entertainment I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 30 Jun 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
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June 16, 2018
QotD: Term limits
The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in politics.
Thomas Sowell, “A Few Assorted Thoughts About Sex, Lies And Human Race”, Sun Sentinel, 1998-11-28.
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June 15, 2018
QotD: Churchill on Montgomery
There was a brief firestorm in Britain when a photograph appeared in the press of Montgomery and Gen. Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, the commander of the Afrika Korps and the highest-ranking German captured at Alamein. After his capture Thoma was brought to the Eighth Army command post, where Montgomery accorded him the respect of one honorable professional soldier to another. The two dined that night, and the photograph of the two generals led Brendan Bracken to send Churchill a memo criticizing Montgomery’s naïveté and noting that it created a bad impression with the public. Churchill merely commented: “I sympathize with Gen. von Thoma. Defeated, humiliated, in captivity, and,” after pausing for effect, “dinner with General Montgomery.”
Carlo d’Este, Warlord: A life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874-1945, 2008.
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June 9, 2018
D-Day – IV: The Atlantic Wall – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 29 Jun 2017The Germans had established a secure barrier against the Allied invasion of France – or so they believed, until the D-Day landings in Normandy caught them by surprise and the Atlantic Wall quickly fell apart.
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June 8, 2018
The Battle of Belleau Wood Begins I THE GREAT WAR Week 202
The Great War
Published on 7 Jun 2018The German Army is still threatening Paris and the situation for the Allies looks dire. Reluctantly, General Pershing agrees to put some of the American troops into action at Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry.
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QotD: The cult of Steve Jobs
Have you noticed how programs and apps and websites have taken to “improving” by taking away functions you liked and used every day?
Now, everybody thinks they know what you want better than you do. With the extra added side benefit of “molding” your actions to conform to what they think is preferable.
Again, Jobs was very, very good at actually determining what people really wanted, versus what they held onto simply because it was familiar. He killed the floppy disk drive. He veered away from power-on buttons. He got lots of changes through that seemed huge at the time, but in hindsight are natural.
And because of his precedent, in addition to (at least) fifty-plus years of marketing “wisdom” that treats customers as mindless sheep, everybody now treats you, the user, as a “moist robot” who does not think, but merely needs the proper stimulus to behave the way they want you to.
Steve Jobs was the outlyingest outlier there is: He was a jerk, but he actually was a genius, and he actually did want to change the world, and he actually was very good at figuring out what people would want before they even knew they wanted it.
The foundation on which the Cult of Jobs was built was, wonder of wonders, actually pretty solid.
I would bet that not one single emulator of his has the same solid basis on which to stand. They all learned how to imitate him, to give the impression of integrity as it is currently misunderstood, thanks in part to Jobs’s antics. But I would be surprised if any copied his substance. Because genius cannot be faked. Only the appearance of it can.
D. Jason Fleming, “The Steve Jobs Myth”, According to Hoyt, 2016-09-12.
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June 6, 2018
June 3, 2018
Conrad von Hötzendorf – A Military Genius? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 2 Jun 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
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May 15, 2018
Evolution of French Infantry During World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 14 May 2018The French soldier in 1914 was already very different from the one in 1918 if you looked at his uniform or equipment. Also the combat tactics evolved considerably in four years of war. The Battle of Verdun, the Nivelle Offensive or the Battle of La Malmaison were important steps during that evolution in which the Poilu became a modern French soldier.
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May 10, 2018
QotD: Langue de bois
The attendees [of a medical leadership conference] would learn about something called “lean management,” one feebly-attempted definition of which is as follows:
If someone tells you that “lean management is this” and not something else, if someone puts it in a box and ties a bow around it and presents it in a neat package with four walls around it, then that someone knows not of what they speak. Why? Because it is in motion and not a framed picture hanging on the wall. It is a melody, a rhythm, and not a single note.
This is the mysticism of apparatchiks, the romanticism of bureaucrats, the poetry of clerks. From my limited observations of management in public hospitals and other parts of the public health care system, it seeks to be not lean, in the commonly used sense of the word, but fat, indeed as fat as possible; nor are large private institutions very much different.
It seems, then, that we have entered, gradually and without any central direction or decree, a golden age of langue de bois or even of Newspeak. Langue de bois is the pompous, vague, and abstract words that have some kind of connotation but no real denotation used by those who have to hide their real motives and activities by a smokescreen of scientific- or benevolent-sounding verbiage. Newspeak is the language in Nineteen Eighty-Four whose object is to limit human minds to a few simple politically permissible thoughts, excluding all others, and making doublethink — the frictionless assent to incompatible propositions — part of everyday mentation.
Langue de bois and Newspeak are no longer languages into which normal thought must be translated; rather they have become the languages in which thought itself, or rather cerebral activity, takes place, at least in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy that rules us. If you ask someone who speaks either of them to translate what he has said or written into normal language, it is more than likely he will be unable to do so: His translation will be indistinguishable from the words translated. It is therefore clear that, where culture is concerned, the Soviet Union scored a decisive and probably irreversible victory in the Cold War.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Life de Bois”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-09-10.
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April 7, 2018
The Danelaw – Alfred vs. Guthrum – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Apr 2018The Vikings moved from Scandinavia to the coasts of Britain, intent on establishing a new kingdom by any blood necessary. What they probably didn’t expect was that one of their own leaders, Guthrum, and the local king, Alfred, would end up cooperating on the creation of a kingdom for the Danes.
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April 1, 2018
Genghis Khan – Lies – Extra History – #7
Extra Credits
Published on 31 Mar 2018How DO you pronounce Genghis Khan’s name? What cool stories did we have to leave out of the main animated series? And how does Walpole fit into all this? It’s time for Lies, featuring Jac Kjellberg (writer) and James Portnow!
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