France

My Skewed History

by

A while back I was going through all the books that line my shelves, culling some in order to make room for potential new entrants. Although I am trying to branch out a bit, a lot of the books are on military history, particularly of the WW2 and WW1 vintage (I am trying to read some more light-hearted materials).

One of the main participants in history of that era is of course the Germans and in particular the German General Staff. A lot of the books that had lain unread for a while related to various German military campaigns and biographies of their commanders.

As I sat looking at the stack of books going to various recyclers I started to think about how focusing on that era, and in particular the Germans, is so irrelevant to the world that we face today. I am not talking about war in the abstract or the fact that the Germans were excellent planners and professionals in many dimensions (although not all) which is always relevant, but the fact that today the Germans are such minor players on the world military stage and their past history, so to speak, is totally irrelevant towards future behavior.

I then noticed a news release about Germans being killed in battle… but they were German nationals killed by a drone attack working against coalition forces in the middle east! I realize that this is sensationalistic and under values the hard work and lives lost that the Germans as coalition members have suffered as part of their support in Afghanistan but still it was a jolt.

Here is the oddest thought of all… as Americans we have long made jokes at the expense of the French about their military prowess, with some foundation particularly the WW2 era. But today, which country is more likely to stand up for themselves in a time of crisis and utilize military power – I’d put my money on France, which still has entanglements in Africa and attempts to burn a fierce nationalistic pride, while the Germans de-emphasize national identity in particular a military outlook post WW2.

These books lining my shelves were telling me about the past, but not the future. There are many countries that will drive the future for military purposes, but the Germans aren’t one of them. While today our military is locked in struggles against terrorists and IED’s (as well as a civil war of sorts in Afghanistan) there certainly could be a showdown someday against an armed and organized nation state, whether it is Iran or China. It isn’t that the nation to nation showdowns, which have been pushed to the back burner in our current era, won’t come back – it is just that the players will be very different and while we may have a lot to learn from the past it is unknown how much of the WW2 experience in particular will be valuable for consideration.

I need to start over, and clear the shelves, literally as well as figuratively.

Cross posted at LITGM

It’s Finally Over (sort of)

by

The First World War, that is.

The Telegraph reports that Germany has made the final payment on its reparation obligations for World War I. (Actually, it appears that the payments being made by Germany since the end of WWII were not technically the reparations themselves, but rather repayment of bonds that were issued under Weimar to help fund the reparations. See this link.)

Read more

The Late Christopher Lasch on the Tea Parties

by

Team Sarah

This post, entitled Tea Party Has Elites on the Run, by Tony Blankley writing in Rasmussen Reports, is very much worth reading. It analyzes the Tea Party in light of the “remarkably prescient book, Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

Lasch described the emergence of elites who “…control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate.” These elites would undermine American democracy in order to fulfill their insatiable desire for wealth and power and to perpetuate their social and political advantages. Middle-class values, Lasch warned, would be hollowed out by a value-neutral educational system preaching multiculturalism. Their replacement would be narcissistic values based on self-gratification and worshipful of fame and celebrity as the ultimate values in a world devoid of deeper meaning.

This very similar to the argument of Angelo Codevilla, both book form and article form.

Blankley goes on:

The tea party movement will assert middle-class values, economic nationalism, patriotism and other concepts derided by post-modern elitists. The movement’s central tenets — small government, decentralization of power and end to profligate spending — are precisely what Lasch prescribed to restore American democracy.

RTWT.

BTW: This article about the Tea Party, by Jonathan Raban, from the usually Lefty New York Review of Books, from last February, is remarkable fair. Worth reading.

(I should mention that the NYRB’s review essays on historical subjects, including military history, are often very good. For example, this article about the French Foreign Legion by Max Hastings is very good. He warns “… only the foolish seek to romanticize this bleak, cruel fighting machine, loyal only to its own. ” But the foolish, myself included, continue to do so. And while we are at it here is Max Hastings’ list of the Ten Best Books About War. I’ve read five of them.)

[Photo credit: The picture above is from the Raban article in the NYRB.]

Sure Took Them Long Enough

by

France says they are now at war with al Qaeda.

Well, sorta-kinda. Retribution military raids, really. No one is saying that France is going to go full bore on this.

Not that they really could anymore, considering how they have allowed their ability to project force rot on the vine in favor of social welfare giveaways to the voters. Unless they are conducting military operations inside their own borders, the options for France are kinda limited.

“There is no law here…”

by

Creeping Sharia, via a commenter on this thread:
 


 
Richard Landes, in the post that began the discussion:

Whenever honor-shame rules assert themselves in civil society, the forces are badly matched unless the police is firm. In cases where the aggressors operate with impunity (essentially the situation in France), the pressure on civic communities will be either to get tribal (i.e., self-help justice), or to back off (which is what most français de souche are doing).
 
In this sense, it’s similar to the fall of the Roman Empire: tribal honor-shame, gang behavior coarsens the cultural scene and eventually brings down the rule of law as the areas where imperial writ runs retreat.
 
The parallel goes further. In the “experiment that got a little out of hand,” the Romans “invited” in the Germanic tribes and allowed them a legal advantage (a Frank or a Visigoths wergeld [manprice] was double that of a Roman. Similarly, the unofficial acceptance of Sharia puts the Muslim community at a tactical advantage in the daily conflicts.
 
This is how a civilization dies.

UPDATE: Richard Landes responds in the comments to criticisms of his Rome parallel.