Europe

Max von Oppenheim, German counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia

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Max von Oppenheim was a German ancient historian, and archaeologist who also worked as a diplomat and spy for the German Empire during the First World War. In those latter two capacities, he basically tried to incite Jihad against the Entente powers. From Wikipedia:

During World War I, Oppenheim led the Intelligence Bureau for the East and was closely associated with German plans to initiate and support a rebellion in India and in Egypt. In 1915 Henry McMahon reported that Oppenheim had been encouraging the massacre of Armenians in Mosques.[12]
Oppenheim had been called to the Wilhelmstrasse from his Kurfurstendamm flat on 2 August 1914 and given the rank of Minister of Residence. He began establishing Berlin as a centre for pan-Islamic propaganda publishing anti-Entente texts. On August 18 1914 he wrote to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to tell him that Germany must arm the Muslim brotherhoods of Libya, Sudan and Yemen and fund Arab exile pretenders like the deposed Egyptian Khedive, Abbas Hilmi. He believed Germany must incite anti-colonial rebellion in French North Africa and Russian Central Asia and incite Habibullah Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan, to invade British India at the head of an Islamic army.[13] Oppenheim’s Exposé Concerning the Revolutionizing of the Islamic territories of our enemies contained holy war propaganda and ‘sketched out a blueprint for a global jihad engulfing hundreds of millions of people’. Armenians and Maronite Christians were dismissed as Entente sympathizers, quite useless to Germany nicht viel nutzen konnen. [14]

Because Germany was not an Islamic power the war on the Entente powers needed to be ‘endorsed with the seal of the Sultan-Caliph’ and on 14 November 1914 in a ceremony at Fatih Mosque the first ever global jihad had been inaugurated. The impetus for this move came from the German government, which subsidized distribution of the Ottoman holy war fetvas, and most of the accompanying commentaries from Muslim jurists, and Oppenheim’s jihad bureau played a significant role. By the end of November 1914 the jihad fetvas had been translated into French, Arabic, Persian and Urdu.[15] Thousands of pamphlets emerged under Oppenheim’s direction in Berlin at this period and his Exposé declared that, “the blood of infidels in the Islamic lands may be shed with impunity”, the “killing of the infidels who rule over the Islamic lands” , meaning British, French, Russian, and possibly Dutch and Italian nationals, had become ” a sacred duty”. And Oppenheim’s instructions, distinct from traditional ‘jihad by campaign’ led by the Caliph, urged the use of ‘individual Jihad’, assassinations of Entente officials with ‘cutting, killing instruments’ and ‘Jihad by bands’,- secret formations in Egypt, India and Central Asia.[16]
“During the First World War, he worked in the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, where he founded the so-called “message Centre for the Middle East”, as well as at the German Embassy in Istanbul. He sought to mobilize the Islamic population of the Middle East against England during the war and can be seen thus almost as a German counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia. The AA pursued a strategy of Islamic revolts in the colonial hinterland of the German enemy. The spiritual father of this double approach, the war first, by troops on the front line and secondly by people’s rebellion “in depth” was by Oppenheim.”[citation needed]
The German adventurer met with very little success in World War I. To this day, the British see him as a “master spy” because he founded the magazine El Jihad in 1914 in an effort to incite the Arabs to wage a holy war against the British and French occupiers in the Middle East. But his adversary Lawrence of Arabia, whom he knew personally, was far more successful at fomenting revolts.[17]

Lawrence of Arabia, aka T. E. Lawrence was successful because he didn’t appeal to religious fervor, but rather to the far more basic sentiment of ethnic solidarity against an oppressor of different ethnic origin. In other words, the Arabs cared far more about their struggle against the Turkish Empire than they did about religion, leave alone jihad.

WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING

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How did  Estonia  become a leader in technology?

Richard Fernandez on  the creation of a whole generation of risk-averse elites

Why is the golden age of television so dark?

Finding  the right balance between optimism and realism

How to evaluate your own emotional intelligence

How the politicized life is destroying society

Flying aboard the  PanAm–Boeing Clipper, circa 1940

Transoceanic aircraft navigation  in the Clipper era.  (The author uses the term “bearing” incorrectly: the proper term for the direction the airplane is headed in is actually “heading.)

The man who loved not wisely, but at least twice

‘Unseen World War I photos’

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I am posting these images with the kind permission from Dean Putney.

Dean Putney, a software developer at boing boing, is currently busy scanning in and publishing pictures from a family heirloom – a photo album with a huge number of photographs from World War I. They were taken by his great-grandfather Walter Koessler, who served as an officer in the German army during the war. Koessler later emigrated to the United States, where he worked as an art director at movie studios, even though he was trained as an architect.

The images are posted at his Tumblr blog, Walter Koessler project. A selection also has been posted at boing boing.

While there are a great many images from WW I, these are quite unique. As he writes at his blog:

1 Walter was German, and he was an independent photographer. Most surviving photos from the war are from the Allies, and they tend to be propaganda or journalistic. Walter’s photos are very personal.

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Photography was going through big changes at the time, and Walter was a major early adopter. Film cameras were fairly new, and he took his in the trenches and everywhere else. WWI saw the first major use of airplanes in war, and Walter took aerial reconnaissance photos from biplanes and hot air balloons.

He has a project at Kickstarter to publish the images in high quality form, and most importantly, as a coherent collection.

If you want to contribute, pledges start at a $1 minimum.

My longish piece about Ken Minogue

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It was actually late on Friday evening when an American friend put up the news on Facebook: he had heard from another friend and colleague that Ken Minogue had died on the way home from the Mont Pelerin Society meeting at the Galapagos. Why has it taken me so long to write about a man I liked and admired as a thinker, a great force in politics and as a dear friend? Somehow, I feel it is appropriate to write about him on July 4, American Independence Day, when many English and, as some of us say, Anglospheric ideas were codified on the other side of the Pond, even if it meant a break with the mother country.

….

Although Ken Minogue wrote for the fabled Encounter magazine at the time my father did as well, my own friendship with him is much more recent. Ken was one of the founders of the Bruges Group, chaired it for some years and retained a close interest in its doings. It was through that and other eurosceptic organizations that I knew him and through other friends became friends with him and Beverley. There are few things in my life I am more pleased and proud of than this friendship and few things I shall recall with greater pleasure than the various lunches, dinners, outings to the theatre (once to see the wonderful production of Guys and Dolls with Adam Cooper as Sky Masterson) and the cinema, and the many talks about subjects that ranged from musicals and Hollywood films to serious political ideas.

The rest of the posting is on my blog, Your Freedom and Ours.

Engineering for Failure

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While walking along Wacker Drive in a tourist-y part of downtown I passed this planter that had been recently rebuilt over the last few years.  Obviously the cold winters and the damage they cause were not contemplated by the “A” Team that built it.  While you can’t judge infrastructure capabilities based on a planter, it is easy to find many Chicago examples of large overruns and delays including Millenium Park (4 years late and budgeted at $150M, ended up costing $475M).

We aren’t the only ones screwing up.  Der Speigel (English) describes how high profile German engineering projects have been recently failing, as well.  Their airports, government buildings, and train tunnels have many prominent examples of being far behind schedule and way over budget.  The article also makes the provocative claim that authorities deliberately mislead constituents by downplaying costs at the time of the initial approval, figuring that it won’t be their problem years’ later when the effort is complete and the overrun’s are tallied.

In many instances, the false calculations are deliberate. Werner Rothengatter, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, has studied major public works projects around the world. He says there’s a similar pattern in democratic societies, where politicians have a tendency to deceive the public about the actual costs of these projects.
Rothengatter argues that cost overruns rarely come as a surprise — regardless of whether they are from the Berlin airport or Hamburg’s new Elbphilharmonie concert hall. During his research, he found that most politicians try to calculate the price to be as low as possible in order to obtain support for the projects — deliberately veiling the potential risks.
“Those who provide honest estimates for projects from the very beginning have little chance of getting them off the ground,” Rothengatter claims. Often those at the political helm take a calculated risk by assuming they won’t be held personally responsible if the costs start to explode.
In a 2009 study, “Survival of the Unfittest: Why the Worst Infrastructure Gets Built,” Danish researcher Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University argued that it often isn’t the best projects that are completed, but those that “are made to look best on paper.” Those, of course, are projects that “amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls.”

The idea that governments make poor project managers and select inefficient efforts for their largess (that they sponsor with your tax dollars) should be obvious, yet it is rarely commented on as a “core” reason for failure.  The idea that non-profit government institutions can make wise capital allocation decisions is actually quite popular and is likely a “given” among many of the young, given that the “free” market is demonized on most popular programming.  As the government makes up a larger and larger portion of our total economy, you can expect more bad decisions and lousy outcomes.

Government bodies inherently make impaired decisions, since they are insulated from failure and have many other parties to blame along the way.  In Chicago, in particular, if you are the selected candidate of the “blue” party and can slog through a primary, your election is guaranteed; many posts run unopposed (even in the primary).  It is hard to imagine anything short of epic failure resulting in being thrown from office.

Cross posted at LITGM