Author Archives: Martin van Creveld

What Political Correctness Is

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Some of you may already have seen this, and it is almost certainly a hoax. But I thought it worth posting nevertheless.

So here goes.

What is meant by the modern term referred to as ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’.

The definition is found in 4 telegrams at the Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri. The following are copies of four telegrams between President Harry Truman and Gen Douglas MacArthur on the day before the actual signing of the WWII Surrender Agreement in September 1945.  The contents of those four telegrams below are exactly as received at the end of the war – not a word has been added or deleted!

(1)  Tokyo, Japan 
0800-September 1,1945
To: President Harry S Truman 
From: General D A MacArthur 
Tomorrow we meet with those yellow-bellied bastards and sign the Surrender Documents, any last minute instructions? 
 
(2)  Washington , D C
1300-September 1, 1945
To: D A MacArthur 
From: H S Truman  
Congratulations, job well done, but you must  tone down your obvious dislike of the Japanese  when discussing the terms of the surrender with the press, because some of your remarks are fundamentally not politically correct!   
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(3) Tokyo, Japan 
1630-September 1, 1945
To: H S Truman 
From: D A MacArthur and C H Nimitz* 
Wilco Sir, but both Chester and I are somewhat confused, exactly what does the term politically correct mean?   
 
(4)  Washington , D C
2120-September 1, 1945 
To: D A MacArthur/C H Nimitz 
From: H S Truman 
 
Political Correctness is a doctrine, recently  fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and  promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end! 
 
Now, with special thanks to the Truman Museum and Harry himself, you and I finally have a full understanding of what ‘POLITICAL CORRECTNESS’ really means…

 

* Admiral Chester Nimitz.  Commander in Chief, U.S Pacific Fleet, 1941-45.

What is Love?

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What is love? Throughout the ages, as many answers have been given to this question as there are poets. Here, motivated by the fast-approaching 36th anniversary of my wife and myself, it pleases me to provide my own answer. Much of it I learnt from her. Needless to say, there are many kinds of love. Red-Rose-02However, the following discussion only refers to the one between a man and a woman. Or perhaps—I have no experience in the matter—also in same sex unions.

The kind of love I am speaking about involves one’s entire being. It has two parts, a mental and a physical. Both are equally important. When everything works as it should, they reinforce each other. The former has the power to magically transform physical spasms into a union that almost deserves the name sacred. The latter seals the former. I would, however, add that, if, after all these years, I had been forced to choose, I would go for the former. And do so, what is more, without regrets.

Love is a miracle. What attracted Julia to Romeo and Romeo to Julia? Why him? Why her? What made each of them so unique as to inspire the other to sacrifice his or her life? Shakespeare does not say. Nor do ten thousand psychologists and their even more numerous studies. Probably it is better that way. In one sense, pre-determined love is not love at all.

We do not love the other because he or she is particularly well-shaped or beautiful. To the contrary: the other becomes beautiful and well-shaped because we love her or him. Says the Bible: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh.” Not just for a moment, which is something animals do as well as we do. But all the time, sharing both pain and joy.

One very peculiar thing love does is to turn the other’s faults—and who does not have them?—into virtues. One loves coming into the bathroom and see that the other has forgotten to shut the toothpaste tube. The other loves seeing the note, complete with its characteristic spelling error, left for him or her in the kitchen with instructions to do this or that. These and a thousand similar things remind each of the other. They make them smile to themselves, knowing that the feeling is mutual.

There are also some things lovers should never say or do to one another. Some depend on personality and differ from one case to the next. Others are common to everybody. Never pull rank. Never badmouth your other in front of others. Never try to make him or her jealous. If you feel that criticize you must, do it in such a way as to make your good intentions obvious (humor, but not sarcasm, helps). And so on. To be sure, being human we make mistakes. Therefore, if we say or do such things, we should apologize just as soon as we can. And make sure the error is not repeated.

Love seems to work on three different levels simultaneously. The first consists of our—at any rate my—need to have somebody to look up to who is more than I am. More intelligent (at least in some ways), better, kinder, nobler. That does not mean the other is superior in every respect. As Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, a relationship based on inferiority versus superiority is not love. All it means is that the other is better than I am in some ways and that, as a result, I value and adore her like a queen.

The second level is that of partnership. We all need somebody whom we can trust. Absolutely, unconditionally and until death us part. Somebody who will stand with us at the time, to quote the great early twentieth-century Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, when, having armed the prow, we cast off and sail ahead. Life is a voyage into the unknown, and often a pretty hazardous one at that. One which very few people can, or should, embark on without the kind of partnership I am talking about here.

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The third level is that of trying to do what one can to make the other as happy as one can. Even to the point of spoiling him or her. Not just because what one gives is really needed. That would be either duty or charity, but not love. But simply because there is joy in giving.

Each of the three elements can and often does exist apart from the others. But it is only together that they amount to true love. They are symmetrical, i.e there is no difference between men and women. They also presuppose a certain kind of equality. That does not mean that each side must have exactly the same rights and duties. Rather, it refers to the kind of love that, making the strengths of each obviate the weaknesses of the other, enables both partners to make the maximum of their lives, both separately and together.

To this rule there is one very important exception. Physically men are considerably stronger and more robust than women on the average. Also, nature seems to value women’s lives more than men’s. These facts give women some rights men do not and should not have. Men are duty-bound to defend women. There used to be a name for that: chivalry. That is a word feminists, filled with hate and envy, have dragged through the mud as they have so many other things. The reverse does not apply. A man who lays down his life for a woman is looked upon as a hero, with good reason. A man who allows a woman go lay down her life for him becomes an object of derision. Also, in my view, with very good reason.

It is not enough to feel love. One must show one’s feelings. One early morning Richard Wagner had a small band assembled in front of his wife, Cosima’s, window. Waked by the music, she became the first to hear the notes of the Siegfried Idyll. How I envy him for being able to lay such a gift at her feet! Luckily we do not need to. A word of praise, a gesture of welcome. A smile, a hug, a kiss, a small present at the appropriate moment. Normally it should be done in private. However, here and there doing it when some others, friends, are present can cause no harm.

Finally, it is not true, as Freud and so many others thought and think, that time and habituation necessarily cause love to become tepid and wane away. Provided all the above elements are present, it is as likely to become stronger, deeper and more tolerant. But that does not happen on its own. It takes both goodwill and some effort.

For me, after thirty-one years, the most beautiful moments in life still remain the same. They are those in which she spontaneously breaks into song and I join her. Or the other way around.

The funny thing is, neither of us can sing very well.

What Plato Would Have Said

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My own interest in Plato got under way during the mid-1970s when I took some courses on him with my reverend teacher, Prof. Alexander Fuks. I’ll never forget how five or six of us young students used to spend Monday afternoons in his office, reading The Republic in the original, not only line by line but word by word and, when necessary, letter by letter, in an effort to get at his exact meaning. Since then that interest has never flagged; and no wonder, since there is hardly a topic about which the great Greek seer did not have something to say that was both interesting and important.

As the years went by, I have often spent an idle hour wondering what he would have said if, like Rip van Winkle, he would have been brought back to life. And having been brought back to life, put in a position where he could observe the modern world and form an informed opinion about some of its main characteristics.

So here goes.

First, confronted with the statistics, Plato would have been astonished at the approximately seventy-fold increase in the earth’s population that has taken place (from about 100,000,000 to over seven billion today). Here it is important to note that his own ideal polis only counted 5,400 citizens. He might well have asked how on earth they can be fed, clothed, and generally maintained, and wondered at the results.

Second, he would have wondered about the immense number of elderly and old people around. True, people’s maximum lifespan has not changed that much since his time. One of his own acquaintances, the sophist Gorgias, was said to have died at the ripe old age of 108; interestingly enough, he used to attribute his long-livedness to the fact that he had never accepted anyone’s invitation for dinner. What has increased, and greatly too, is the percentage of people above the age of fifty, sixty, seventh, eighty, and ninety. A true miracle, that.

Third, he would have acknowledged the achievements in science and technology that made all this, and much more, possible. Including, to mention but a few of the most important fields, mathematics—which he regarded as the queen of the sciences and in which he was very interested—physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, agriculture, construction, transport, communication, and whole hosts of others.

That said, and having spent some years studying to reach the point where he was no longer a total stranger in an unfamiliar world, most probably he would have focused on the things that world has not managed to achieve.

First, he would have been disappointed (but hardly surprised) by our continuing inability to provide firm answers to some of the most basic questions of all. Such as whether the gods (or God) “really” exist, whether they have a mind, and whether they care for us humans; the contradiction between nature and nurture (physis versus nomos, in his own terminology); the best system of education; the origins of evil and the best way to cope with it; as well as where we came from (what happened before the Great Bang? Do parallel universes exist?), where we may be going, what happens after death, and the meaning and purpose of it all, if any.

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Third, he would have observed that, the vast number of mental health experts notwithstanding, we today are no more able to understand human psychology and motivation better than he and his contemporaries did. As the French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, there was (and still) an uninvited guest seated among us: the human mind.

Fourth, he would have noted that we moderns have not come up with works of art—poetry, literature, drama, rhetoric, sculpture, architecture—at all superior to those already available in his day. Not to Aeschylus. Not to Sophocles, not to Euripides, not to Aristophanes. Not to Demosthenes, not to Phidias and Polycleitus. Not to the Parthenon.

Fifth, he would have dwelled on our failure to build a system of government capable of abolishing some of the greatest evils afflicting mankind. Including, besides the kind of minor “everyday” conflict and injustice we are all familiar with, war on one hand and the contrast between plutos (wealth) and penia (want) on the other.

Sixth, he would have been saddened by our utter failure to improve ourselves, morally speaking (to come closer to the Good, as he would have put it).

Seventh, he would have noted our continuing inability to foresee the future and control our fate any better than people around 400 BCE did.

Finally, he would have wondered why, these and other problems notwithstanding, so many of us still refuse to look reality in the face and cling to the idea of progress instead. But then what is the alternative?

 

Rich Man, Poor Man

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Whoever takes even a cursory look at today’s media cannot escape the impression that, in almost any country one may place under the loupe, economic inequality has been growing. To the point, indeed, where it now poses a real danger not only to democracy—which stands on the threshold of turning into a simple conspiracy between politicians and capitalists aimed at robbing everyone else—but to social order and, in the not so remote future, perhaps government as such. Such at any rate are the conclusions people draw from Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twentieth Century which, since it was published back in 2013, has not only turned into a best-seller but attained almost iconic status among many. Now there is no question that Picketty is as good an economist as they come. But did he get it right? Is the situation really as bad as it seems? For some very brief answers, consider the following.

First, there is some reason to believe that figures on economic inequality, especially those originating in the Left but sometimes those published by the “populist” Right as well, are often exaggerated. In the words of The Economist, which in its issue of 28 November 2019 devoted a long and quite detailed article to the question, this is done –

By focusing on gross, instead of net, income; by omitting all kinds of subsidies available only to certain groups such as the poor, the old, and the young [in my own country, Israel, this includes free dental treatment for children, a system that tends to favor Orthodox Jewish and Arabs families, which often have numerous young offspring, at the expense of  secular Jewish ones]; ignoring the fact that the young and the poor are less likely to be married, with the result that their income only supports a single person rather than two or more; and a whole host of similar miscalculations, deliberate or not.

Other oft-used methods include placing the income of self-employed people under the rubric of capital rather than that of wages, thus exaggerating the share of the former in GDP; assuming that the wealthy are more adept at tax evasion while minimizing the role of “black” work which, though all but unknown among the rich, often plays a considerable role in lower-class family finances; in developing countries, ignoring the role of transfer payments made by foreign workers abroad to their kin back at home; or simply taking, as one’s starting point, 1998, or 1970, or 1945, rather than the times when Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller each sat on more inflation-adjusted wealth than Jeff Bezos does today. Not to mention those when the Triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus boasted that no one was truly rich unless the interest he drew from his investments enabled him to maintain an army. Had these and other factors been taken into account, says The Economist, then they might have led to the conclusion that economic inequality in the U.S and Britain in particular has increased little, if at all, since the prosperous mid-1990s—or perhaps, according to others, since the equally prosperous mid-1960s.

In the end, so plentiful (and, often enough, too uncertain) are the data as to enable any good statistician to reach the conclusion he or she was aiming at from the beginning. I therefore found it more interesting to take up another volume, Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler (Princeton University Press, 2017). True, on Google.scholar it got just 315 citations as opposed to over 15,000 for Picketty’s. However, in terms of academic quality it will stand comparison with the latter; proof, if proof were needed, that people tend to review and read and buy what they think will reinforce what they already believe rather than that which may throw a spanner into the conventional wisdom of the age in which they live.

When there is wide case of muscle contraction, the brain tend to cut the process of sending stimulated signals to the penile nerve causing no erection process. order cheap viagra The discount web chemists give is actually their profit that they share with the end users. online order viagra Does your romantic moments with your partner end just with a sigh or embarrassment instead of fun and passion? Is that what is generic uk viagra djpaulkom.tv killing your happiness little by little? Do not worry if you have kamagra with you. viagra canadian Now, this cure is saving not only the men world but also countless relationships and families from going haywire! Sexual health can be defined as the state of being stressed, anxious, or depressed without any direct, specific cause seems to be a problem primarily of the wealthier, more highly developed nations. For all the wealth of data he has assembled, most of them lifted from tax records, Picketty only refers to a few Western societies over the last century or so. By contrast, Scheidel enjoys the very great advantage of casting his net over a much larger number of societies over a much longer period of time. Starting with tribal ones in various continents and passing through antiquity, the Middle Ages the early modern age, all the way to the last two centuries; throughout, discussions of Europe alternate with spotlights on other civilizations. Including, to mention just two examples, that of the Maya on one hand and China on the other. To be sure, the scarcity of sources—at any rate, for some of the societies under consideration—and the fact that there are limits to the amount of material even the best historian can compress into 528 pages mean that some of the chapters are a little superficial. Still one cannot help but marvel at the way the historian in question could ever have assembled such an enormous mass of material; let alone evaluated it and mastered it and put it in some kind of logical order.

As with all great books, Scheidel’s thesis is, at bottom, simple. First he shows that, by and large, equality is a characteristic of simple, not to say primitive, societies (such as, to speak with Thomas Hobbes, have “no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”) whereas inequality typifies more developed ones that have all those things. Second, he argues that, within societies where inequality prevails, that inequality generally coincides with periods of prosperity and economic expansion. As, for example, in the Roman Empire during its heyday—a period Scheidel, who started his career as an ancient historian, has researched at some depth—and also in pre-World War I Europe.

Such being the case, throughout history four phenomena—the horses of the apocalypse, as Scheidel, predictably, calls them—have tended to reduce inequality and make the distribution of resources more equal. The first is war which, starting in prehistoric times and extending right into the present, has often reduced the losers (assuming they survived at all) to a crowd of beggars. As the example of the Soviet Union during World War II shows, moreover, that may apply not just to the losers but to the victors as well. The second is transformative revolution; as, for example, when first the Soviet, and later the Chinese (to mention just the most important ones) revolutions deliberately set out to close the gap between the rich and the poor by first killing as many of the former as was considered necessary and then requisitioning whatever was left of their property. The third is plague, as exemplified by the Black Death of the fourteenth century; the fourth, political- and social collapse of the kind that, as in Zaire and Somalia and Libya, is quite capable of taking a society back to the state Hobbes so aptly described.

Manmade or natural, each of the four horses brought with it mountains of dead. Just recall the “killing fields” of Cambodia, a case Scheidel does not mention. Worse from the point of view of those who started number one, two and four, in no case did the leveling that took place last for very long. Partly that was because the new rulers brought to the fore by the revolution in question lost little time in enriching themselves; and partly because, once things settled down, socio-economic gaps quickly started re-establishing themselves. As, for example, happened in the wake of World War II and also after the Russian and Chinse Revolutions. To put it in the broadest possible way, starting at least 30-40,000 years ago the “natural” human condition seems to have been inequality, not equality. On the other hand, attempts to change that condition often counted their victims in the millions, and led to general impoverishment; even so, hardly ever did they last for very long.

The conclusion Scheidel draws from all this is worthy of an Edmund Burke. If, like Picketty and his followers, what you hope to achieve is equality, tread softly: or else the cure, for as long as it lasts, may very well be worse than the disease.

See the Conquering Hero!

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This was not 1746, the year in which Handel’s oratorio was first performed. Instead it was 1950, the year when I, aged four and accompanied by my parents and my two younger brothers moved from the Netherlands to the State of Israel. That State itself had been established a mere two years earlier at the cost of 6,000 dead (out of a population of 650,000). No wonder references to heroism were everywhere. Including a Hebrew version of this song, which we children were made to sing first in kindergarten and later at school.

The origins of the heroism in question went back 2,281 (or rather 2,280, since there never was a year zero) years, down to 330 BCE when Alexander the Great occupied Palestine. After Alexander’s death, which took place in 323 BCE, the country came first under Egyptian Ptolemaic rule and then, from 201 BCE on, under that of the Seleucid dynasty in Syria. However, in 190 BCE the reigning Seleucid, King Antiochus III (“the Great”) was badly defeated by the Romans at the battle of Magnesia in Asia Minor. From that point on the decline of the Seleucids got under way.

Antiochus’ successor but one was his son, Antiochus IV, nicknamed Epiphanes (“The Shining”). Ascending the throne in 175 BCE, well aware that his multi-ethnic, multi-language, kingdom was on the point of falling apart, he tried to cement it by instituting what, two millennia later, came to be known as a “personality cult” focused on himself. Epiphanes’ other subjects being pagan, they seldom had any difficulty in adding another deity to their already extensive pantheons. Not so the monotheistic Jews to whom doing so was sacrilege, especially because practicing the Jewish religion was also prohibited.

*

The year was 167 BCE, marking the beginning of a revolt led by Mattathias the Hasmonean of Modi’in, a small provincial town some forty kilometers west-northwest of Jerusalem. Right from the beginning, it was simultaneously a civil war between Mattathias’ rural followers on one hand and the so-called Hellenizers, an upper class movement centering on Jerusalem, whose members were more inclined to accept the king’s demands, on the other. As is shown, among other things, by the fact that the opening blow was delivered by Mattathias when he killed a Jew who was about to make sacrifice to an idol.

From Jerusalem, Mattathias escaped to the Judean desert where he died a year later. Leadership of the revolt devolved on his oldest son, Judah Maccabeus (“the Hammer,”). At first he and his followers resorted to terrorism, specifically including the kind directed against fellow-Jews who refused to join the uprising. Next, switching to guerrilla warfare in what, today, is the West Bank, they were able to ambush and defeat a Seleucid expeditionary force that was coming from the north with the objective of relieving Jerusalem, still in the “Hellenizers’” hands. The victory not only raised the rebels’ morale but caused weapons and equipment to fall into Judah’s hands, further assisting the rebellion and enabling it to expand as more Jews threw in their lot with him. In the same year, 166 BCE, two other Seleucid forces also tried their luck by marching to Jerusalem from the west. Both were badly defeated, the first at Beth Choron and the second at Emmaus.

Epiphanes himself died in 164 BCE. His demise led to a whole series of civil wars in Syria, preventing any of his would-be successors from husbanding all of the kingdom’s military resources and crushing the revolt; a fact that in turn translated into Maccabeus’ liberation of Jerusalem, which took place in the same year. By now the rebels felt sufficiently strong to abandon guerrilla in favor of pitched battles which, at peak, featured armies numbering 20-50,000 men on each side. Doing so, they were able to defeat various Seleucid expeditionary forces at locations such as Beth Tzur (163 BCE) and Beth Zecharia (162 BCE). Over two millennia after, all these locations are still easily identifiable in the terrain and known under the same names.

What most of these battles had in common was the fact that the Seleucid army had been designed primarily to fight others of its own kind. Consisting of heavy infantry (the famous phalanx, complete with sarissae, or long pikes), cavalry and elephants—the tanks of the ancient world, imported from India at enormous expense—it was ill suited for fighting in the rugged, often extremely difficult, terrain of Samaria and Judea.

The last battle known in any detail was fought at Elassa, near today’s Palestinian city of Ramallah, in 160 BCE. If our sources, 1. Maccabean and the second-century CE Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, may be believed, this time the Seleucids, outnumbered the Jews by about ten to one. However, there was a catch. Like Verdun in 1915 and Moscow in 1941, Jerusalem was the kind of objective that had to be defended at any cost. Unwilling to leave it to its fate Judah, rather than dispersing his forces and reverting to guerrilla warfare, gave battle. A desperate attempt to snatch victory from the jaws of impending defeat by going straight for the Seleucid commander, Bacchides, was repulsed with loss and Maccabeus himself was killed. Later he was succeeded by his younger brothers, first Jonathan and then Simeon (another brother, Eleazar, had already fallen four years earlier when an elephant which he was stabbing from beneath collapsed and crushed him). Yet the struggle, reverting back to guerrilla warfare, went on. In the end it was decided as much by the prevalent disorder in the Seleucid capital Antioch, as well as Roman pressure brought to bear on successive members of the Seleucids, as by any other factor.

The Jewish-Hasmonean kingdom that resulted lasted just one century before it finally went down in 63 BCE. Its history, as narrated above all by the abovementioned Josephus, consisted very largely of a highly unedifying struggle for power between various scions of the royal family. No method, not even biting off one’s rival‘s ear (to disqualify him from serving as high priest), slaughtering his entire family, or crucifying him was considered too cruel to use. The end came in 63 BCE when two Jewish princes, Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II, appealed to the Roman commander Pompey, who was then in Damascus, to settle their differences. Following a great many political and military maneuvers, including a three-month siege of Jerusalem that cost the lives of 12,000 Jews (and very few Romans, Josephus says), Pompey finally decided in favor of Aristobulus. But not before stripping him of his royal title, greatly reducing the extent of the land under his control, and effectively ending the country’s career as an independent kingdom for two millennia to come.

*

The Jewish victory over their enemies gave rise to an endless number of stories, most of them known to us from the Talmud whose authors wrote them down some 300-400 years after the events to which they refer. One of the most popular, which every Israeli child of school-going age was made to learn, concerned a woman named Chanah (Ann) who had seven sons. Put on trial in front of the wicked king Antiochus, and encouraged by their mother, they refused to worship him as if he were a god. One by one they were executed right in front of her eyes. Another story told of an episode that supposedly took place after the Jews had recaptured Jerusalem and sought to re-light the Menorah (candelabrum). Like most retreating armies at all times and places, those of Antiochus had tried to disguise their weakness by committing acts of vandalism on whatever they left behind. This time the “victim” was the oil in question, which had been deliberately polluted so it could not serve the purpose for which it was kept. Entering the temple the victorious Jews found just one small jar, recognizable by the high priest’s seal, of unpolluted oil, hardly enough to last for one day. It was at this point that a miracle took place; the oil, instead of running out, lasted for eight days, which later became the time appointed by the Jews’ “wise men” to celebrate the recent victory.

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Originally Chanukah was a celebration of the people’s firm faith in, and adherence to, God, which were ultimately rewarded by divine deliverance. So it remained throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, specifically the thirteenth century, were also the time when the most important Chanukah song, Maoz Tzur Yeshuati (My Refuge, My Salvation) was written and given a place in the standard Jewish prayer book. The song itself, consisting of six couplets, has little to say about war or human heroism in general. What it does is to provide a short history of the Jewish people and the miraculous way, each time it came under threat, God personally intervened in order to save it from its enemies.

It was during the centuries of the diaspora, too, that most of the remaining beliefs and customs associated with Chanukah were developed. One was the tradition by which it became Chag Haurim, the Feast of Lights (much like Christmas Chanuka is celebrated in midwinter, the season when any excuse to lighten up is welcome). It took the cozy form of a family reunion when parents and children lit the chanukiot, a sort of miniature Menorahs. It also involved giving children their pennies, playing with a sevivon, or dreidl, and consuming sufganiot, a kind of soft, sweet donuts.

There also exist some other, more esoteric and relatively obscure, customs that I shall spare you, my readers. To repeat, almost all of this is linked to worshipping and thanking God for the miracles He has wrought at various points in His people’s turbulent history. And not to anything like war, victory, militarism, or heroism.

*

Enter, around the turn of the twentieth century, Zionism and the Zionist Movement. In France as in the rest of Europe, this was the time when modern nationalism was nearing its peak; leading to the outbreak, first of the World War I and then of World War II. Whether for practical reasons—the need for self-defense against anti-Semitic attacks—or ideological ones, could anyone imagine a proper nationalist movement without its very own gallery of martial heroes?

Not surprisingly, the outcome was a more or less frenzied search for just such heroes. One took the form of so called “muscular Judaism.” Modeled after the “muscular Christianity” popular in England and the U.S at the time, it represented an attempt by Herzl’s close friend, Max Nordau, to convince Jews that they too needed to engage in body-building as so many goyim did. Another was the establishment of sport clubs with names such as Hakoach (the Force) and, you guessed it, Maccabee. Other Jewish heroes whom the Zionists dug up from history and set up as examples for youth to follow were King David, the fighters who died at Masada, and Bar Kochba (leader of an abortive revolt against Rome, 132-35 CE). However, many rabbis had no use for Bar Kochba who, as a result, only had a minor festival named after him. Given that suicide is prohibited by Jewish law, the same applied to Masada. David, while half-heartedly acknowledged as a hero (some rabbis claimed he was not a soldier at all, just a rabbi) was known primarily for his supposed authorship of Psalms. Absent any real competition, the importance of Chanuka and the traditions on which it rested increased.

As the Jewish community in Palestine came under Arab-Palestinian attack during the 1920s, the cult of heroism, the military and war gained in force. Celebrated by processions of torch-carrying youths—from my own youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, I can recall at least one song in praise of them, which we studied at school and had to learn by heart—here and there it took on a semi-pagan character. To this day in Israel, countless streets are named after the heroic Hasmonean and/or Maccabean commanders.

*

As one would expect, this kind of thing peaked during the years immediately following the 1967 Six Days’ War. In the eyes of Israelis as well as many foreigners, every Israeli became his own invincible hero. But only for a short time: come the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and this entire complex of attitudes and ideas was blown sky high. Later, as the years went on and outright military victory became almost as rare commodity in Israel as it did in other western countries, the glamor of war continued to wane. With it went the emphasis on Chanuka as a martial festival; instead of battle hymns, all that remained were compositions such as “a great miracle happened here” and “go round, and round, dreidel.”

Today it is mainly the national-religious Right, comprising about one in eight of Israel’s Jewish population, which still persists in seeing Chanuka as a celebration of heroism. For the rest it is principally an occasion to join the children in lighting candles—on each of the eight days the festival lasts, another one is added—as well as eating sufganiot. Much beloved by those with a sweet tooth, but detested and constantly warned against by those worried about gaining weight and diabetes.

Sic transit gloria martialis.

War-happy Female Politicians

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By: Karsten Riise*

 

(PM Mette Frederiksen wearing pretend camouflage dress).

Denmark is an interesting research-object for understanding the politics of contemporary wars – and get behind the constructed facades of gender.

Denmark is a war-happy country, hyper-actively seeking constant political advantage from war. Liberal Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen LOVED Iraq+Afghanistan. These wars propelled Fogh Rasmussen up to become General (secretary) of NATO. Fogh Rasmussen’s jump to NATO was not just a “collateral side-bonus” for Fogh Rasmussen: It was his career-plan already as he sent his country’s soldiers off to Afghanistan and Iraq. When the war was started and Fogh Rasmussen was still Prime Minister, a Danish Colonel at a reception quipped dryly to me: This is how you become Secretary General to NATO. I was mildly chocked, if this was the cynical reality. As it turned out, it was. At that time, it was still not public knowledge what the Colonel had referred to, that Fogh Rasmussen went for the NATO top-post. But it later became known, that the first thing Fogh Rasmussen had done, as he entered his Prime Minister’s office, was to secretly order his closest PM officials to go immediately hunting for his next job, which he demanded should be an international top-position. Becoming leader of NATO was from the beginning one of Fog Rasmussen’s top career-priorities, and he would never have got such a personal welcome with Bush II in the White House and Camp David https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/06/images/20060609-2_a6g2295-515h.html and eventually succeeded in securing Bush II’s support for the NATO top-post, if Fogh Rasmussen had not sent soldiers and produced corpses for the USA in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As demonstrated by professor Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen in his book The Good War? (“Den Gode Krig? Danmark i Afghanistan 2006-2010”), what gives value for the politicians of a small-country like Denmark is not whether a war like Afghanistan or Iraq is actually won or not. What prof. Vedby demonstrates is, that first of all it matters to the small-country’s politicians to “be part of it”. Band-wagoning. To be a camp follower. The small-country’s politicians choose to deliver blood to prove their allegiance to the stronger power (here, the USA) who is leading that war. Thus, a small-nation like Denmark can “win” a war, even if a war-of-choice is actually lost – provided that the politicians of the small-country through their tribute in loss of soldiers have increased their stockpile of goodwill with the leaders of the big power. Therefore, as Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen demonstrates, Denmark’s small-country politicians (both right-wing “Liberals” under Fogh Rasmussen and the left-wings with then-Parliament speaker Social Democrat Mogens Lykketoft), deliberately ordered their military to a “Goldilock” war-participation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Goldilock’s choice of of the medium-tempered bowl, Denmark’s politicians deliberately opt for a war-participation supporting the big-power, where combat is hot and creates dead bodies as tribute to the big-power, but not too hot, and hence not too many dead bodies. What Denmark’s politicians consider “hot but not too hot war” is, however, less subject to politician-humanitarian sensitivities in the welfare-state of Denmark. Compared to its country size, Denmark in Iraq and Afghanistan in total “produced” quite a lot of dead bodies in Iraq and Afghanistan for the USA: From 2002 up till today, Denmark’s military has in Iraq+Afghanistan booked a total loss of 52 dead and 233 wounded, out of a country of less than 6 million people http://forpers.dk/hr/Pages/Faldneogsaarede.aspx

In the beginning, Denmark’s Social Democrat Parliamentary Speaker Mogens Lykketoft had an extremely short hesitation, but very soon Social Democrat Mogens Lykketoft was a key figure for support of sending Denmark’s soldiers to the hot-but-not-too-hot bowl of the USA’s “wars of choice”. The “Goldilock” preference made Denmark opt for soldiering in the Helmand province of Afghanistan: Denmark’s politicians, incl. Fogh Rasmussen as well as Lykketoft, clearly expected soldiers to die in Helmand province, but only in limited numbers. When the porridge of the Afghanistan-war at a time got a bit too hot, Denmark actually chose to let others consume the porridge-bowl of the bloodier burden. This happened (not without bitterness from UK side), when 87 lesser equipped UK paratroopers in 2006 were asked to take-over from a larger unit of 120 better equipped Danish soldiers, when the “porridge” became too hot for Denmark’s “Goldilock” taste in Musa Qala (prof. Vedby, p.43). The smaller contingent from the UK then held on in Musa Qala for 2 months, double the time Denmark’s more than one third larger unit of better-equipped soldiers had been supposed to stay there.
But in the opinion of the next war-faring US President after Bush II, President Barack Obama, Denmark was “punching above its weight”. The USA continued to be happy with Denmark’s tribute. Mogens Lykketoft’s support for Denmark’s war-participation at that time was without doubt a good stockpile of goodwill for Lykketoft to get the supported he needed from a US President, when Lykketoft in 2013 ran for the office to become  President of the UN General Assembly, a post Lykketoft assumed in 2015-2016 https://www.un.org/pga/73/about/past-presidents/ .

These lessons by Fogh Rasmussen and Lykketoft in the immense personal political advantages which can be reaped from war have not only not been lost on Denmark’s women politicians. Denmark’s women politicians have now eagerly grabbed the political opportunities in sending men to fight and die in wars of choice. Women – also leftist women – perhaps even more eagerly than men jump the war wagon. Because women don’t have to do the dirty work themselves, they can send male soldiers to kill and be killed. 

As Professor Martin van Creveld has demonstrated (see for instance his book Pussycats), women soldiers are few and women cannot be forced or drafted to put their life on front line. Even those few women who volunteer to take on a uniform are nearly always widely protected from being sent to the dangerous front lines. As Martin van Creveld, who has also studied the actual roles of the much renowned women soldiers in the Israeli military, concludes, the dry reality of “woman soldiers” nearly everywhere in the world is that “Where there are women, there are no bullets – Where there are bullets, there are no women”.

Social Democrat female PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt LOVED to send (nearly all male) soldiers to wars (never mind how hopeless the wars were) in a bid to follow Fogh Rasmussen’s international top-career. Helle Thorning-Schmidt eventually just fell flat at her last election at home, and she became exiled as CEO of one of the many western state-sponsored do-good “NGO’s”, the “Save” the Children in the UK.

Today, both Denmark’s Social Democrat female PM Mette Frederiksen and her female Social Democrat war-minister Tine Bramsen, even more than their male political predecessors, LOVE war. https://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/politik/danskpolitik/mette-f.-opruster-sender-hundredvis-af-danskere-paa-mission/7779547 The list of new military engagements which Denmark’s PM Mette Frederiksen wants is no longer just a pair of countries, but a LONG list of all sorts of expensive and man-intensive missions. Syria. Africa. Afghanistan (still). The Baltic. The Arctic. a Danish Frigate to support US carrier fleets (as if the US Navy would be too weak without Denmark…). And of course PM Mette Frederiksen eagerly advocates US President Trump’s general wish for higher military spending without clearly defined needs. https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/live-regeringen-praesenterer-militaere-bidrag
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Recently, France suggested to intervene militarily in it’s former colony Syria (in the north), now the US is pulling back. Some would call that a brain-dead proposition. But guess WHO wanted to jump at such a splendid (even if disastrous) new war-opportunity? Denmark’s Social Democratic female PM Mette Frederiksen, of course. So it is not just about personal and national profiling in relations to the USA, but we see here a general instrumentalization of men for war-fighting for political profiling in just about any arising chance for war, also together with France, if the USA no longer wants.

The war-love of Denmark’s female Leftist politicians is now so hot, that they want to continue near 20 years of hopeless war-fighting in Afghanistan, even if their male soldiers and military experts warn against it, and even if the male right-wing President of the US should pull out of Afghanistan.https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/hvis-usa-ikke-er-i-afghanistan-giver-det-ikke-mening-vi-er-der-jo-mener-minister  

(read in English with Chrome and Google Translate)

These politics of Denmark as an example of a small war-happy US camp-follower are not only important for understanding the international politics of war – including the important value in war-legitimation and PR for a power like the USA to have a no.1 “do-good happy welfare-state” like Denmark fight along. These aspects are also important to understand the left-right and gender politics of war and violence.

War is violence. By definition.

We see here on display, that women are not more peaceful and anti-violent than men.
It should be researched, if women are even more violent than men, as long as women themselves can duck the consequences of violence by instrumentalizing men. In the USA, there was probably not a war, which female president-wannabe Hillary Clinton did not vote for in Congress. The Abu Ghraib torture of men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse was all commanded by a woman, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. And as described here, in Denmark we see examples how left-wing females from Denmark’s former PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt, till today Denmark’s current PM Mette Frederiksen and her female war-minister Tine Bramsen are probably even more war-happy than their male political predecessors, and even more war-happy than some US right-wings, like President Trump, who actually seeks to pull out of war in Syria and Afghanistan.

Women are vital to promote, legitimize and even instigate war and violence.

Women can (still) better get away with promoting war. Women, also when seriously wrongdoing, manage to get viewed mildly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janis_Karpinski. Women were always in history important for cheering, when the male troops marched off. And women denied love to men, who resisted to fight whichever cause their woman (mother or wife) cajoled them to fight for. 

With #MeToo we see today more than perhaps ever, how women in media are constructing a fakenews gender-image of themselves as more humane, “caring”, more victimized, and above all more truthful than men. Women claiming their gender as the “better humans” make women excellent political constructors for selling violence for their own purposes. Because as the fake-constructed woman propaganda runs today: Women must be believed…. (or must they always?).

Karsten Riise is Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from University of Copenhagen. Former senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden with a responsibility of US Dollars 1 billion. At time of appointment, the youngest and the first non-German in that top-position within Mercedes-Benz’ worldwide sales organization.

For Anyone Interested… It Is a Must

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Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Kindle edition, 2019.

Great books, like great teachers, are those which make you reexamine your assumptions. By that standard, there can be little doubt that Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is a very great book. To help you understand why, let me start with a brief description of the way we in Israel have been taught Jewish history for so long.

Once upon a time—no one knows just when—there was a man called Abraham. Born in Ur, modern Mesopotamia, he was 75 years old when God revealed Himself to him and told him to move to Canaan, aka the Land of Israel, aka (much later) Palestine. Which country, He solemnly promised, would forever belong to him and his offspring. A relative handful of converts apart, it was from Abraham’s loins that all subsequent Jews were and are descended. Their history is like that of no other people; after many twists and turns, they were finally driven (almost all of them) from Canaan by the wicked Romans. Scattered in all directions, but held together by their unique religion, for close to two thousand years they lived without a homeland of their own. Now tolerated and exploited, now subject to pogroms and/or driven away from one country into another, always at the mercy of their non-Jewish neighbors, they somehow succeeded in retaining their identity like no other people on earth. Something not even Adolf Hitler, who set out to exterminate them and killed one third of their number, was able to change.

In comes Yuri Slezkine, a Russian born (1956- ) Jew who currently lives in the United States. The Jews, he explains in the first chapter of the book, are not unique at all. Instead they are one among a great many nations whom he groups together under the rubric, “Mercurian.” Including, to mention but a few, the Gypsies of Europe, the Persians and the Jain of India, the Copts of Egypt, the Fuga of southern Ethiopia, the Ibo of modern Nigeria, the Eta of traditional Japan, the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, the Nestorians in the Middle East, the Mormons in the U.S—an example Slezkine does not mention–and, above all, the overseas Chinese.

“Mercurian” peoples were and are distinguished from the rest—Apollonians, is what Slezkine calls them—in two principal ways. First, they regard themselves as a people chosen by God. Not just any God, but specifically their own tribal one. To retain that status they develop and maintain a different religion, a different language, a different culture, different mores—as, for example, in wearing turbans (the Sikh community of India) and eating only kosher food—as well as an often strictly enforced endogamy. Second, whether out of their own will or because of the restrictions under which they live, they tend to avoid production—first agriculture, later industry—in favor of other, specifically urban, professions. Including money changers, bankers, peddlers, traders, physicians, pharmacists (both in my family and that of my wife there were several of those), scribes, writers, musicians, actors, fortune tellers, matchmakers, agents, lawyers, and middlemen of every kind. The sort of people who, compared with their mostly rural neighbors, tended to be well ahead in terms of literacy and modernity in general.

Thus, contrary to what I and countless Israelis have been taught, we Jews are not unique. True, Jews have tended to be more successful, were often persecuted more intensively, and survived longer than practically any other “Mercurians.” But that does not mean they are, in principle, different; let alone that their continued existence and the elevated socio-economic status they have achieved in many countries cannot be explained by history but is due to some special kind of divine favor.

That essential point having been made, Slezkine goes on to trace the history of his own “Mercurian” ancestors in Russia. Under the Czars Jews were discriminated against in any number of ways, though arguably not much more so than a great many other non-Russian peoples such as Poles, Greeks, Tatars, Armenians, and Turks. Their response was to leave, which was what between 1883 and 1924 well over a million of them did. Starting with Marx, who though not a Russian was the son of a converted Jew, others joined the forces that were even then preparing to launch the Revolution. Jews were attracted to socialism/communism because it promised them something the existing Russian state did not; namely, a life based on equality and brotherhood in which Jews could find their place without any regard to their ethnicity or religion.

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Yet Jewish vulnerability, due to their minority status over centuries on end, did not automatically vanish just because the change in regime. That is probably one reason why first Lenin—whose own paternal grandfather was Jewish—and then Stalin recruited many of their henchmen from among them. I use the term “henchmen” advisedly; in both the GPU and the NKVD between 1917 and 1945 it was often assimilated Jewish officers, completed with black cars, leather coats, and handguns, who arrested, interrogated, tortured, prosecuted, and executed the state’s prisoners by shooting them in the back of the neck. Jewish commissars also took a prominent part in some of the greatest atrocities of all, such as the destruction of the kulaks and causing millions of Ukrainians to die by starvation.

As the establishment of the “autonomous” Jewish province (oblast) in Birobidzhan shows, starting at the time he was serving as “Commissar for Nationalities” Stalin himself took an interest in the problem. The common fight against the invading Germans further reinforced the Russian Jews’ willingness, even eagerness, to assimilate, by which they meant abandoning circumcision and yarmulkes in favor of Pushkin on one hand and communism on the other.

When the time came for the state of Israel to be established it found looked for, and found, support in the Kremlin. Almost to a man, Israel’s founders were immigrants from Russia whose views on society and the economy were not too different from Stalin’s own—one Mandatory British police officer who interrogated Yitzhak Ben Tzvi, later Israel’s second president, called him “a perfect Bolshevik.” For that reason, but also because the dictator saw Israel as a lever with which to force the British to evacuate the Middle East, he supported it. By way of Czechoslovakia he even supplied it with arms; but for which the nascent Jewish State, laboring as it did under a U.N embargo, might not have survived.

What finally terminated Soviet support for Israel was the outbreak of the Korean War. As Slezkine does not say, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion worried least it might lead to a world war and thus to the severance of the country’s lifeline in the Mediterranean. This caused him to put his support, for whatever it was worth, firmly on the American/Western side. Much worse from Stalin’s point of view, Israel provided the Jews of the Soviet Union with an alternative homeland such as they had never had before. When Israel’s ambassador to Moscow, subsequent Prime Minister Golda Meir, took up her post she was absolutely mobbed by hysterically happy local Jews. No wonder the dictator changed course.

After Stalin died in 1953 his successors did not repeat anything as extreme as the notorious “doctors’ plot.” They did, however, put pressure on the Jews, subjecting them to various forms of discrimination in education and appointments to leading positions. The Jews on their part started resisting. Assisted by their co-religionists in the US, especially from 1967 on they demanded the right to leave. Once their demands were granted the newly-arrived Jews in the U.S quickly became as successful as their parents in Russia had been during the interwar years in particular. Such were their achievements in education, business, the law, the sciences, and the arts that they were even able to enter politics and make their mark there. It would be too much to say that “let my people go” (the Biblical slogan under which the fight for free emigration was waged) played the cardinal role in the success of that fight, let alone in causing the Soviet Union’s collapse; but a certain role it definitely did.

America’s gain was Russia’s loss; today fewer than a million Jews still live in the latter, as opposed to three million at the turn of the twentieth century. The other country which, following the collapse in question, became the goal of Russian-Jewish emigrants was Israel itself. In pointing out that many if not most of those Jews did not really want to go there and only started doing so in any numbers after no other option was left to them Slezkine is perfectly correct. He errs, however, in underestimating both the contribution that newly arriving Russian Jews made to Israel and the exceptional dynamism of Israel itself. Not knowing the country nearly as well as he knows Russia and the U.S, he has missed its amazing development into a military and high-tech powerhouse. Not to mention its proud ownership of the shekel, currently the strongest currency on earth. The root of the problem is found in the fact that the book was written in the early 2000s. Or else surely Slezkine would have provided a better explanation as to why so many Russian Jews did reach Israel after all than he actually does.

The period in which the book was written also explains why, in describing the U.S (and the West in general) as the new Jewish paradise, Slezkine has totally missed the new Moslem-led, (often right- but sometimes left wing), kind of anti-Semitism that seems to be gaining force on both sides of the Atlantic. Still I must confess that, to me with my Israeli education, his insistence that the Jewish nation was not nearly as unique as I had been made to believe came as a revelation. Only a little less impressive were his endless lists of successful Russian Jews, the kind that would never have been possible if Stalin had been as consistently anti-Semitic as he is often supposed to have been. Those lists in turn form but one part of an enormous body of research that has gone into this formidable, but on the whole quite readable and occasionally witty, volume. For anyone with the slightest interest in the Jewish nation, its recent past, its present and its future, it is a must.

Shooting Themselves in the Foot

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When women “leave the home” and take up paid jobs, very often they will end up doing the same work as before; as, for example, in nurturing, education, caring for the sick, etc. Except that, instead of doing it for the members of their own families at in their own way and their own pace, they now do it for strangers who control everything.

When women enter the labor force and take up positions and professions in it, very often those positions and those professions will start losing prestige and/or income. They also tend to turn into female ghettoes where there are few if any men. Examples are kindergarten—a nineteenth-century invention—mistresses, elementary school teachers, cashiers, home health care providers, secretaries, and more.

Taking 1970 as the year in which women have entered the labor force in large numbers, in many developed countries the gap in life expectancy between men and women, which for almost two centuries had been widening, has been shrinking.

The more successful a man, the more women will pursue him. For women, though, it often works the other way around. Partly because men are afraid to approach women who are successful, wealthy and powerful; and partly because women themselves want to have men whom they can look up to. As a male student of mine put it years ago: When will patriarchy come to an end? When women start looking for fashlonerim (colloquial Hebrew for “habitual failures”).

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When women followed men in an attempt to prove their “independence,” they could think of nothing better than to take up smoking,

When women decided that there were more important things for them to do than “simply” have and raise children, they deprived themselves of one of the key reasons why men loved and respected them.

When women demand divorce—for over a century now, in most “developed” countries about two thirds of all divorces have been initiated by women—they are likely to discover that recovering, both financially and in terms of finding a new partner, is harder for them than for men.

Finally, the old maxim: “The more like us you become, Mesdames, the less we shall like you” (Jean Jacques Rousseau).

It Is All There

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D. Finkel, The Good Soldiers, Kindle Edition, 2011.

Once in a while, one comes across a book that covers war as it really is. One such is the Iliad, which I first read when I was twelve years old and have re-read countless times since. Another was The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Mouminoux, aka Guy Sayer, the sixteen-year old Franco-German youth who joined the Wehrmacht back in 1942 and fought in its ranks right down to the end. I can think of a few others as good; the latest of which is The Good Soldiers by David Finkel.

Perhaps surprisingly, Finkel is not a soldier but a journalist. However, he spent seven months “embedded” in battalion 2-16, U.S Army, as it tried to clean up a part of Baghdad. Enough, judging by the contents of his work, for him to learn all he needed to know. An impressive achievement in itself, that.

A vast city, parts of it in ruins and almost all of it extremely dilapidated. Essential services such as water, waste and sewage disposal, fuel, and electricity, are provided, if at all, only intermittently. As a result, the city is literally drowning in shit; the smell, mixed with that of dust, is everywhere. A functioning police force, one capable of holding the countless criminal bands that sprung up following the collapse of government in check, is nowhere to be seen. To the extent that such a force exists at all, it is practically indistinguishable from the bands in question.

The troops number about eight hundred. Average age, nineteen. Ten to twenty percent of the men—there are no women among them—have minor criminal records. Many have no high school diploma; either way, they do not meet the army’s normal standards for admission. But this being the summer of 2007, four years after the beginning of the war in Iraq and in the middle of the so-called “surge” that is feeding additional cannon fodder into the cauldron, they are the best the army can get.

The men are well trained and, on the whole, willing enough. They grumble, often with very good reason; however, throughout the fifteen months of their deployment in Iraq there are few if any reports of desertion. After all, not knowing the language and surrounded by enemies whom they cannot distinguish from the civilian population, where would they go? Let alone of outright disobedience and fragging of the kind that was said to have been quite commonplace in Vietnam.

A forty-two year old lieutenant colonel, Ralph Kauzlarich, is in charge. He is an experienced officer and an excellent commander who, before being sent to Iraq, had never had a soldier under his direct command lose his life. Personally he is a born optimist whose motto, repeated at least once every day, is “it’s all good.” He really believes that, if only he and his men can kill or capture enough terrorists, they can make a difference and launch the population on the way to a better life. To this end he also oversees the rebuilding of a school, the launching of an illiteracy eradication program, and quite a number of similar civilian projects. He even takes the trouble to learn a little Arabic. A born leader, he seems to have retained his men’s confidence right to the end—a great achievement in itself, that, regardless of anything else.

The daily routine, consisting mostly of motorized excursions into the streets. A convoy of Humvees, the troops armed to the teeth and wearing every kind of protective device. Including, in some cases, good luck charms. A convoy drives along, On occasion it may be escorted by an attack helicopter or two hovering not far away, ready to respond to any call with a boom so loud as to make it sound as if the end of the world has come. The objective of the excursions? To follow up intelligence, much of it useless or misleading, concerning the whereabouts of terrorists, or insurgents, or extremists, or whatever they may be called. To maintain contact between headquarters and outlying posts in various parts of the city. Simply to display presence and impress the population as well as, hopefully, any terrorists who may be watching.

After collaborating with all of the creative team Christopher Snape – Lighting Designer to disclose to you the distinction between being spammers and cialis buy uk real businessmen is a blurred one. buy viagra italy Schedules and assignments should allow time for them to talk. check this now cialis generic usa The medicine works by widening and relaxing blood vessels for complete erection. The researchers said that the opioid modulators seemed to have changed the brain response to the baby schema and believed that it may tadalafil 20mg for sale modulate the motivation to get better. The dead and the wounded. Mostly killed by IEDs buried in roadside rubble and trash, and activated by either by radio or by means of an electric cable linked to a trigger somewhere in the neighborhood. An IED costing perhaps $ 100 to build can easily wreck a Humvee costing $ 150,000 (these, nota bene, are pre-2009 dollars, worth about twenty-five percent more than their 2019 successors). Some of the dead are killed instantly as the vehicles in which they rode are blown to smithereens by opponents they never saw. Some of the wounded are lucky enough to suffer only slight injuries, e.g. having one’s lip grazed by a bullet. Others, though, suffer horribly until they finally die in some hospital. Of those who stay alive many have lost arms, legs, noses, eyes, ears, genitals, what have you. Others, having suffered grievous damage to their internal organs, will spend the rest of their lives, if that is the correct term, drifting into and out of consciousness while drugged and hooked up to all kinds of machines.

For those who remain more or less intact, the mental effects of all this. Nightmares and/or sleeplessness. Bedwetting. Dejection. Apathy. A fearfulness that takes hold and can last for a long time after the soldier in question is back home. Here and there, a tendency towards quarrelsomeness. Perhaps most important of all, a sense of alienation; I am no longer of this world, and no one can really understand me,

The relatives. Ordinary people, none of them apparently either wealthy or very poor, who have lost a son or a husband. On the whole, they seem to take it courageously; or perhaps it is the fact that Finkel does not follow them at any length (one cannot do everything in a single book, after all) that creates that impression. Since most of the wounded are very young, the wives of those of them who are married tend to be the same. At least one is not even twenty years old. She reminds one of the characters in a 1950s-vintage “love comic.” How hilarious. And how sad.

A bureaucratic system that judges men partly by their ability to wear shoes of the exact right color and to exactly remember the four-digit number of the form used to make this or that report. The chapter describing the way some of the men, hoping for promotion, prepare for an exam and what the exam itself looks like is perhaps the funniest in the book. Or rather: it would have been funny if the process had not been so utterly idiotic and utterly unfair to the enlisted personnel who go through it.

A commander in chief, George Bush. Ensconced in the White House, or else visiting some foreign country, he keeps mouthing platitudes about kicking ass and the progress his troops are making in doing so. Is that because, isolated from reality by a sycophantic staff in- and out of uniform, he has not a clue about what he has let his troops in for? Or because he must keep up appearances? At all costs?

A theater commander, General David Petraeus, who does know what he is talking about. However, by this stage in his career he has metamorphosed from a fighting soldier into something very different that is hard even to define. Why? Because he must please his masters. Meaning, his commander in chief, Congress, the media, and public opinion at large. To each and every one of them he must pretend that, though the road ahead is long, arduous and not without sacrifice, the surge is on track and final victory, assured. Any doubts he may have on that account must remain well hidden; or else, spreading from the top down, they may well wreck whatever chance of victory still exists.

Civilian visitors, most of them politicians, or representatives of the media, or entertainers. They come by air, corkscrew their way to the nearest airfield that is deemed more or less safe, spend a few hours or a couple of days doing whatever it is that they are there to do, and corkscrew out again.

Baghdad’s hapless population, men, women and children who are desperately trying to survive amidst all the death and destruction raining down on them from all sides.

It is all there.

To be Old

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I never tried to find out how old my readers are. What I do know is that, when I was young, I seldom gave a thought to what being old means. The more so because my late grandparents in particular were of the kind who seldom complained about their health problems, and they had plenty. Now that I am seventy-three years old, I suspect that very few young people have any idea about what being old actually means.

Specifically, what ignited my interest in the question at this time was a visit I paid to Belin a few months ago. The three days I spent there were exceptionally hot with temperatures around 35 degrees and more. So for three days on end I went swimming at the Schlachtensee, a lake in the southwestern part of the city well-known to me from my previous visits. Arriving by suburban train, I found the lake absolutely flooded by thousands upon thousands of young people. Coming in all genders and colors, and speaking every language under the sun, they seemed, without exception, healthy and strong. I myself, I discovered, was practically the only person over thirty for miles around.

It was an eerie experience. And it certainly made me think about the things all those people do not yet know but which, willy–nilly, they are going to learn soon enough. For many of them, too soon by far. So to provide some perspective, here goes.

To be old means that “everything” happened long ago. One’s grains of insight. One’s small triumphs. One’s disappointments. One’s disillusionment. Gone they are, buried, growing less precise and more indistinct with every passing day.

On the other hand, to be old means to see one’s life as if it passed in a flash. Wasn’t it only yesterday that I was small, went to school, decided on a profession, met my love, married, and had children? The youngest, Uri, will be turning forty this very week. The oldest, Eldad, is almost forty-eight years old. His hair and beard are almost completely gray. Recently he has started wearing glasses. Strange.

Paradoxically, being old also means that the movement of time into the future seems to have slowed down. Or that at any rate is how it seems to me. Next week, next month, next year—they seem ages away. At times I feel I cannot wait for them; at others, that they will be with me soon enough.

To be old means losing one’s memory. Not in any systematic way, as when a computer file is erased; but in a haphazard one. Opening one’s mouth, one never knows what one will be able to come up with, what not, in relation to what, and when. What is there one moment is gone in the next, and the other way around. Personally I find this humiliating and as hard to bear as any other symptom of age. As far as writing is concerned, thank God for Google which usually enables one to find what one has forgotten fairly quickly.

Thus, with stronger cialis prices blood flow to the penile muscles. It means that the mutation responsible for autism is absent in order viagra click for more info parent?s genes. Now that you have gone through all the viagra online cheap methods, it must be quite evident that there is nothing like the best or perfect method. Psychological symptoms of menopause will include lowest price for viagra a lack of concentration, headache etc. To be old means to feel one’s physical strength waning away. Nothing very surprising about that, except that it is something most of us find it hard to imagine until it happens to us. I used to be a Marathon runner, and not such a bad one either. Now I can barely run a couple of steps without getting out of breath and feeling an old injury to my left leg beginning to hurt. I used to think that, provided I slowed down and did not push myself too hard, I would be able to continue cleaning my own house as I have enjoyed doing for so long. Now I am no longer sure.

To be old often means that, seeing one trying to use one’s strength, people volunteer their help. Strange experience, that; a girl of twenty offering me her seat on the train. But it happens time after time.

To be old means having to wear a hat to avoid the sun shining directly on one’s bald head. It also means going everywhere with an entire pharmacy full of miscellaneous drugs for treating miscellaneous symptoms. I hate that; I suppose it reminds me of my growing frailty as well as my dependence on others. But what choice do I have?

To be old means to suffer gradual loss of one’s senses, including sight, hearing, smell, and taste. I find trying to keep up with the doctors who look after such problems is both humiliating and very time consuming. Not to mention other problems my health service keeps insisting I should check and insure myself against; had I heeded their advice, I would have been left both without a moment to spare and penniless. So I try to ignore them as best I can, hoping that the future price to pay won’t be too high.

To be old is to lose many of one’s relatives, friends and acquaintances. They are gone and will not return. Some I miss, others not.

Finally, growing old means losing one’s enthusiasm for a great many things. For me, the thing that gives me the greatest pleasure is looking at my small garden. And watching little children at play.

And simply being with Dvora, of course.