Academia

Kindle Launch: The Handbook of 5GW

by

h5gwc_close.png

The Handbook of 5GW– Dr. Daniel H. Abbott, Editor

Self-promotion department…. :)

Nimble Books has published the first authoritative book on the competing interpretations of the military and political theory referred to as “Fifth Generation Warfare“, edited by my friend and collegue Dr. Daniel Abbott. The many contributing authors include academics, journalists such as David Axe, and many blogfriends associated with the former theory site, Dreaming5GW.

My chapter was entitled “5GW: Into the Heart of Darkness“. It is oriented more toward historical case studies than theory and is not in any way, shape or form, a “feel-good” piece. Here is a snippet:

“….This brings us to the probability that for the aforementioned states, their actual options for their ruling elites for adapting to the threat of 4GW will be between accepting varying degrees of failure-from conceding a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) to rebels, to being overthrown, to imploding into anarchy as insurgents encroach-or “taking the gloves off” and using the indiscriminate, unrestricted violence of genocide to annihilate real and potential enemies before the international community can mobilize to prevent it. History suggests they might well succeed.”

The views within The Handbook of 5GW vary widely, as does the disciplinary approach of the authors, intending to stimulate thought, explore possible scenarios that range from the pragmatic and real to the imaginative and ideal.

Hardcover launch in September, 2010.

Angelo Codevilla – America’s Milovan Djilas

by

Older readers may recall the once famous but now largely forgotten Cold War figure of Milovan Djilas. While other dissidents from Communism like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers acheived a more epic historical stature, Djilas was the first high Communist official, the adviser and likely successor to Yugoslavian dictator Tito, to turn against Communism as a system. More importantly, Djilas wrote New Class in 1957, a damning analysis that accurately castigated the hierarchy of Communist Party and government officials an exploitive and tyrannical ruling class that in the Soviet context was later termed “Nomenklatura“. For this act, Djilas would suffer in Tito’s prisons, but he outlived both Tito and Communism and his Party enemies were never able to shake off the truth of his bitter critique.

As related here in his post the other day by David Foster, Claremont scholar and Boston U. international relations professor Angelo Codevilla has published in The American Spectator a very lengthy, often brilliant, sometimes meandering, essay that is part analysis, part cri de coeur, but primarily the most devastating attack on America’s emerging, bipartisan, technocratic Oligarchy that I have ever read:

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

….Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Read more

“This I fabricated. This I lived.”

by

Shakespeare wrote to please the Tudors. Hawthorne saw a great metaphor for the rule of law & of the mind over the heart in the Puritans. The Romantic depiction of a world two centuries gone is accurate in many ways, but The Scarlet Letter also obscures the extraordinary revolutions in thought that would lead from the Puritans to the Enlightenment. We cut his fiction slack. It describes some truths – the folly of pride and passion, the power of love. We welcome this understanding and in that it rings true. It is fiction.

Few see Shakespeare as gatekeeper of British history nor Hawthorne as definer of Puritan theology. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a different role. It reports, offers opinion, includes want ads. As newspaper to the academy, it bridges disciplines. A few years ago, Arts & Letters Daily became sponsored by the Chronicle. I daily reckon A&L a great service. The editor is one of the most able and generative of evolutionary scholars, Denis Dutton. He makes the net accessible; I gratefully & often link to him here. Recently A&L noted a Chronicle essay in its pithy, aggregator, fashion:

Michael Bellesiles, who teaches military history, knows his job is easier in peace time. When the brother of one of his students was killed in Iraq,

Read more

A Nexus Between Academic Medicine and Government

by

The Wall Street Journal has one more article on the effect of Obamacare on doctors. A couple of interesting statements bring up some comments on an excellent medical blog I read.

First the WSJ points about Obamacare.

The act will reinforce the worst features of existing third-party payment arrangements in both the private and public sectors — arrangements that already compromise the professional independence and integrity of the medical profession.

Doctors will find themselves subject to more, not less, government regulation and oversight. Moreover, they will become increasingly dependent on unreliable government reimbursement for medical services. Medicare and Medicaid payment, including irrational government payment updates, are preserved (though shaved) and expanded to larger portions of the population.

The Act creates even more bureaucracies with authority over the kinds of health benefits, medical treatments and procedures that Americans get through public and private health insurance. The new law provides no serious relief for tort liability. Not surprisingly, various surveys reveal deep dissatisfaction and demoralization among medical professionals.

I’ve been posting about this for a couple of years and it is no surprise.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

Read more

Enabling Political Thuggery

by

J Christian Adams, formerly an attorney with the US Department of Justice:

On Election Day 2008, armed men wearing the uniforms and jackboots of the New Black Panther Party were posted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the entrance to a polling site. They brandished a weapon and intimidated voters. After the election, the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice brought a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and these armed thugs. I, and other Justice lawyers, obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the case against them.

Before a final judgment could be entered, however, our superiors ordered dismissal of the claims.

Read the whole thing.

For some time, I have been concerned about the rise of political violence and intimidation in America. This has been most apparent in universities, where administrators have too often allowed leftists and Islamic radicals to interfere with the expression of opinion by others. For example, in this post I cited the behavior of some “anti-war” and anti-Israel activists:

At Concordia College (Toronto), Benhamin Netanyahu was prevented from speaking by a riot of Palestinian students and their supporters. Thomas Hecht, a Holocaust survivor, was pushed against a wall, spat on, and reportedly kicked in the groin. A woman said that during the same incident, attackers “aimed their punches at my breasts.” Two weeks later, at the same college, a Jewish student was beaten bloody by an Arab student.

At Berkeley, someone thre a cinder block through the glass door at the Hillel (Jewish) center, and wrote “F___ Jews” on the wall. At San Francisco State University, a rally of Jewish students and other was disrupted by pro-Palestinian students screaming “Go back to Russia,” and “We will kill you.” Some students were reportedly shoved against the wall, and the Jewish group had to be escorted out by police. Laurie Zoloth, a campus Jewish leader, summed up the campus situation in these words: “This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.”

Read more