Chasing the Sun

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As those familiar with my work will know, I’ve always tried to avoid the trap of overspecialization. I’ve also tried to impress on my students that that there never has been, nor can there ever be, a good student of military history whose only interest is military history. Some took my advice, others did not. One of those who did, I am proud to say, is Yuval Harari.

Having risen to become publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton, Cohen was never in danger of overspecialization. Instead he became the author of any number of books dealing with any number of topics; including, to mention but two, Israel; Is It Good for the Jews?  (2014) and How to Write Like Tolstoy (2021). Add the fact that he is a five-time U.K national saber champion and was repeatedly selected for the British Olympic Team, and one can barely suppress one’s awe in front of his achievement.

As the title suggests, Cohen spent years traveling. So much so that, when people tried to reach him by phone, his wife often had to say that he was, once again, chasing the sun. On his way he visited eighteen different countries. He witnessed eclipses, listened to explanation about the way tides work, and read ancient Greek and Latin works on astronomy. Above all, he listened—to astronomers, to physicists, to geographers, to anyone who seemed sufficiently well informed to be worth talking to. Of course he could have done even more; e.g by spending a few million dollars to go up in a spacecraft to see what the sun and its fellow stars look like from orbit. But enough is enough.

The way Cohen sees it, we humans have related to the sun in two different ways. One, which is the oldest (probably, by far) leads through religion and magic; unable to understand, people tended to use their imaginations and invent. The outcome was countless priests, temples, fables, myths, cults, hymns, re-enactments—possibly, the origins of the theater—and prayers. And sacrifices, including some human ones. On the receiving end of all this were sun gods, sun beings, sun spirits, and the like. Starting with the Egyptian Pharos, who claimed to be sons of the sun god Ra and many of whom were portrayed with his emblem, a disk, above their heads; and reaching all the way to the self-styled Sun King, France’s Louis XIV, who loved the idea of people and things revolving around him as few others did.

The other way to relate to the sun was by means of science. As far back as we can look, the earliest attempts to do so were made in ancient Mesopotamia, China and Egypt. All three were highly developed agricultural civilizations whose system of keeping themselves fed demanded close attention to the calendar. This caused all three to take a keen interest in astronomy as the basis for timing various agricultural activities such as planting, sowing, watering, harvesting and the like. At least equally important, astronomy was needed for astrological calculations to forecast the fate of people, cities and rulers. Either way, studying the sun as well as other heavenly phenomena was vital.

In all three of these civilizations, science, religion and magic long remained so closely related as to make any attempt to separate them almost impossible. Apparently the first to do away with religion and magic and adopt a purely scientific, meaning observation- and math based, approach were the ancient Greeks. Many “pre-Socratic” philosophers, but chiefly Democritus and Pythagoras, took part, coming up with impressive contributions. Among them was the idea, first put forward by Eratosthenes in the second century BCE, that the earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa; the first attempt to calculate the distance between the earth and the sun as well as the latter’s size; the first attempt to determine the distance between the earth and the moon; and the first attempt to determine the radius of the earth as well as its circumference.

Ancient attempts to work out the nature, size and movements of the cosmos (as the Greek called it) and the various heavenly bodies culminated around 160 CE with the publication of Ptolemy’s Almagest. Originally written in Greek, later it was translated into Arabic which gave it the name by which it is known even today. It certainly contained some errors: including the idea that the earth is at the center of the cosmos, that it does not move, and that all other bodies, as well as the universe itself, move at constant speed and in perfect cycles around it. The trouble with the Almagest was not that it did not provide a mathematically-based model of the universe—it did—but that time exposed inaccuracies to correct which it was necessary to bring in changes that made it so complex as to be unmanageable. Until, in 1543, an obscure monk in Koenigsberg (today, Kaliningrad) proposed another model; one which, by putting the sun in the middle and making the earth move around it, got rid of many of the difficulties.

This is hardly the place to elaborate on the way Copernicus’ work made it from a mere mathematical theory into what we today see as a solid model of the way the solar system actually works. As it did so, increasingly it received support from the works of Tycho Brahe (who, though he himself stuck to the idea that the earth was in the center of the world, raised observation of the heavens to a completely new level of accuracy), Johan Kepler (who showed that the planets’ trajectories are not circular but elliptical), and Galileo Galilei (who, using his telescope, proved that the moon is not “perfect” but made of the same materials as the earth itself). Galileo himself was followed by Isaac Newton who, proposing a new mathematical model based solely on mass, force (gravity) and movement, completed the process by which astronomy became purely scientific.

As time went on Newton’s theories went from one triumph to the next, even to the point where they were used to predict the existence of previously unknown planets hundreds of millions of miles away. During the second half of the nineteenth century the incorporation into them, at the hands of Michael Faraday and James Maxwell, of magnetism and electricity led many physicists to the conclusion that man’s understanding of the cosmos was now complete and that only minor adjustments remained to be made. Never in history did predictions turn more wrong! First quantum theory, pronounced by Max Planck in 1900, showed that, contrary to Newton (but in line with Democritus and his “a-toms”) neither space nor energy were infinitely divisible. Also that, at the subatomic level, things did not behave the way Newton’s theories predicted. Next relativity, first introduced by Albert Einstein in 1905 and completed by him in 1915, completely overturned our ideas of the relationship between mass, time, energy and space, showing that, far from being independent and stable under any circumstances they were related and convertible into each other.

Whereas Planck’s theories were shown to work at the subatomic level, Einstein’s ideas referred to intergalactic space where distances are measured by lightyears. Notwithstanding that the two contradict each other, and notwithstanding too that very few people can be said to understand the true meaning, and hence the implications, of quantum theory in particular, taken together their work still underpins our present-day understanding of the universe. Complete with its hordes of subatomic particles, many of which are supposed to be both “real” and “unreal” at the same time; cesium clocks so accurate that they only miss “true” time by one second every 100 million years; black holes, gravity waves, and a great many other phenomena so strange that they can only be described, if at all, in mathematical language; and, as if to crown it all, nuclear weapons capable of putting an end to it all.

There are four other points that need to be made. First, Cohen is a physicist. As such he has a lot to say about physics but comparatively little about the sun’s impact on living creatures: in other words, biology. Yet it is photosynthesis alone which makes possible all life except for the kind recently discovered at the bottom of the deepest oceans; hence the rather short shrift Cohen give it constitutes a serious omission.

Second, until it reaches 1650 or so Cohen’s account gives about equal space to scientific astronomy on one hand and all kinds of other frames of reference the other. After that, however, such frames all but disappear from the text. That again is a serious omission. Just think of Japan’s sun-goddess, Amaterasu, and of Stalin having himself called “the Sun of Nations.” Today as ever, for every person who reads Einstein, let alone Planck, there must be thousands who believe the book of Judges (chapter 13) when it says that God made the sun stop in its orbit so as to assist the Israelites in their fight against the Canaanites. Countless others believe in astrology and consult astrologers; the fact that it is all nonsense makes no difference. A few chapters on these and similar topics would have completed the book and made it more balanced.

Third, as Cohen rightly points out many of the questions physicists ask today are the very same ones Democritus and Co. asked themselves two and a half millennia ago. Did the universe always exist, or did it have a beginning? If the latter, will it one day come to an end? What is it made of? How far does it stretch? Is there just one universe, or are there more? What is it made of (today’s scientists claim that over 90 percent of it consists dark of dark matter and dark energy, a mysterious something that neither our senses nor our instruments can register)? What is time? Does it “really” exist or is it—as some physicists believe—simply whatever our instruments record?

Finally, does the fact that many of the questions Democritus asked are still with us today suggest that, in trying to answer them, we have been moving around in circles and that it is all a waste of time?  Along with Cohen, I believe the answer to this question is negative. There is no doubt that we at present know far more about the universe than our elders did even a couple of decades ago; our success in reaching the moon as well as Mars provides sufficient proof of that. Nor can there be any question of progress coming to a halt any time soon. Each time a new discovery is made, causing a mystery to be solved, another and often greater one seems to present itself. The sense of wonder, which drives the questions, still permeates us. As long as it keeps doing so, human we remain.

The Transformation of War

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I am an old guy. Perhaps that is why a friend recently asked me what I see as my most important single message. In response I immediately pointed to The Transformation of War (1991), pp. 173-79.

I quote.

Danger is the raison d’etre of war, opposition its indispensable prerequisite; conversely unopposed killing does not count as fighting but as murder or, in case it takes place under legal auspices, as execution. The absence of opposition makes military strategy impossible and for an army to fight under such conditions would be both unnecessary and foolish. All this is to say that, be describing uncertainty as a characteristic of war, Clausewitz and his modern followers have put reality upside down. Uncertainty is not just the medium in which war moves and which helps govern the opponent’s moves; above all, it is a condition for the existence of armed conflict.

Where the outcome of a struggle is a foregone conclusion the fighting will tend to cease, as much because one side gives up as because the other gets bored. Throughout history, individuals and armies who felt that their situation was hopeless asked for quarter. The victors, so long as they remained in possession of their senses and were not carried away by such emotions as rage and the lust for revenge, usually accepted. Whatever unpleasantness followed later—and sometimes what did follow later was even more unpleasant than the war itself–was not considered part of the fighting but, to use the Roman phrase, retaliation.  Such retaliation may be more or less necessary, more or less justifiable, more or less in accord with the prevailing war convention. Since the outcome is not in doubt, however, it does not involve the tension that constitutes the essence of fighting. Nor are those who engage in it or profit form it normally regarded as deserving special honors: on the contrary…

Here we are concerned with a situation where the relationship between strength and weakness is skewed; in other words, where one belligerent is much stronger than the other. Under such circumstances, the conduct of war can become problematic even as a matter of definition. Imagine a grown man who purposefully kills a small child, even such a one as came at him knife in hand; such a man is almost certain to stand trial and convicted, if not of murder than of some lesser crime. In the same way, legally speaking, the very existence of belligerence, war and fighting already implies that the opponents, even violence that is organized, purposeful, politically-motivated, and on a fairly large scale. However, usually the name such violence is given is not war but disturbance, uprising, or crime. They are accompanied by their opposite numbers, namely, repression, counterinsurgency, and police work…

A war waged by the weak against the strong is dangerous by definition. Therefore, as long as the differential in force is not such as to render the situation altogether hopeless, it presents few difficulties beyond the tactical question, how to inflict the maximum amount of damage without exposing oneself in open fighting. By contrast, a war waged by the strong against the weak sis problematic for that very reason. Given time, the fighting itself will cause the two sides to become more like each other, even to the point where opposites converge and change places. Weakness turns into strength, strength into weakness. The principal reason behind this phenomenon is that war presents perhaps the most imitative activity known to man. The whole secret of victory consists of trying to understand the enemy in order to outwit him. A mutual learning process ensues. Even as the struggle proceeds both sides adapt their tactical methods, the means that they employ and—most important of all—their morale to fit the opponent. Doing so, sooner or later the point will come where they are no longer distinguishable.

A small, weak force confronting a large, strong one will need very high fighting spirit to make up for its deficiencies in other fields. Still, since survival itself counts as no mean feat, that fighting spirit will feed on every victory, however minor. Conversely, a strong force fighting a weak one for any length of time is almost certain to suffer from a drop in morale, the reason being that nothing is more futile than a string of victories forever repeated. Conscious of the problem, such armies often sought to compensate the troops by providing them with creature comforts; one is reminded of the iced beer that was helicoptered to American units operating in the Vietnamese jungle and, a more absurd example still, the mobile banks that accompanied the Israelis into Lebanon. However, over the long run no amount of pampering can make up for the fact that fighting the weak demeans those who engage in it and therefore undermines its own purpose. He who loses out to the weak loses; he who triumphs over the weak also loses. In such an enterprise there can be neither profit nor honor. Provided only the exercise is repeated often enough, as surely as night follows day the point will come when enterprise collapses.

Another very important reason why, over time, the strong and the weak will come to resemble each other even to the point of changing places is rooted in the different ethical circumstances under which they operate. Necessity known no bounds; hence he who is weak can afford to go to the greatest lengths, resort to the most underhand means, and commit every kind of atrocity without compromising his political support and, much more important still, his own moral principles. Conversely, almost anything that the strong does or does not do is, in one sense, unnecessary and therefore cruel. For him, the only road to salvation is to win quickly in order to escape the worst consequences of his own cruelty; swift, ruthless brutality may well prove more merciful than prolonged restrained. A terrible end is better than endless terror and is certainly more effective…[Thus] the question of right and wrong itself turns out to depend in large part on the balance of forces… a good war, like a good game, almost by definition is one fought against forces that are at least as strong as, or preferably stronger than, oneself.

Troops who do not believe their cause to be good will end up by refusing to fight. Since fighting the weak is sordid by definition, over time the effect of such a struggle is to put the strong into an intolerable position. Constantly provoked, they are damned if they do and damned if they do not. Should they fail to respond to persistent provocation, then their morale will probably break down, passive waiting being the most difficult game of all to play. Should they hit back, then the opponent’s very weakness means that they will descend into cruelty and, since most people are not cut out to be sadists for very long, end up hating themselves. Self-hatred will easily lead to disintegration, mutiny and surrender. People will burn their daft cards, flee the country, go to prison, even “frag” their own officers or commit suicide, anything to avoid the indignity that fighting the weak implies. Nor is the fate of those who do fight much better; returning from the “battlefield,” they will find themselves treated as outcasts rather than as heroes. The results are inevitable. Often, as in Vietnam, to evacuate the field will be the only alternative to complete defeat.

Since the very act of fighting the weak invites excess, in fact is excess, it obliges the strong to impose controls in the form of laws, regulations, and rules of engagement. For example, Westmoreland’s own headquarters drew up rules of engagement regarding tactical air strikes, artillery strikes, and ground fire that were issued to the troops upon their arrival in the country and updated every six months. Operating in complex terrain, Israeli troops combating the intifada (first Palestinian Uprising] have been subjected to even more complicated regulations. Arms may not be used except by explicit order under certain circumstances and against certain kinds of targets. Standing orders determine who may be hit, at what distance, and by what kind of bullets; theoretically, to react to a Molotov cocktail thrown at one it is first necessary to open the book and consult the relevant paragraph. The net effect of such regulations is to demoralize the troops who are prevented from operating freely and using their initiative. They are contrary to sound command practice if they are observed and subversive of discipline if they are not. Hence the truth of Clausewitz’s dictum, plainly observable in every low-intensity [today we would say, asymmetric] conflict fought since World War II, that regular forces combating a Volkskrieg are like robots to men.

A sword, plunged into salt water, will rust. How long it will take to do so depends on circumstances. A professional force, isolated from the rest of society, carefully trained and habituated to fighting as its lifeblood, will probably stand up better than one that is made up of conscripts, particularly if the conscripts are changed every twelve months. Discipline, itself an attribute of professionalism, counts for a lot. Control over the sources of information, both internal and external, may also be useful up to a point. By carefully managing the news and exercising selective censorship it is possible to prevent the worst atrocities—to repeat, almost anything committed by the strong against the weak counts as an atrocity—from reaching the public at home. The time when that public will turn against the war and those responsible for it can be postponed, though not indefinitely. In the long run such controls will prove counterproductive as troops, civilians and neutrals cease to believe what they are told. At that point, either they look for alternative information or start inventing it.

Perhaps the most important quality that a strong force engaged a weaker one needs is self-control; and indeed the ability to withstand provocation without losing one’s head, without overreacting and thereby playing into the enemy’s hands, is itself the best possible measure of self-control.  There must be a voluntary weakening, even disarming, of one’s own forces in order to meet the opponent on approximately equal terms, much as the sporting fisherman uses rod and hook rather than relying on dynamite. A good case in point is provided by the British who have been fighting and taking casualties in Northern Ireland for the last twenty years. Now the war against the Irish Republican Army is very hard on the British troops and has not been without occasional excesses. Still, strict discipline and careful training—the characteristics of professionalism par excellence—have enabled the Royal Army to hold out quite well. Never at any point has it engaged in indiscriminate violence or meted out collective punishments, nor has it brought in heavy weapons. As a result, it has not alienated the bulk of the population. Since they are operating in a country that in one way or another has been experiencing trouble for the last eight centuries, the British may not be able to win, but at any rate they need not lose.

Where iron self-control is lacking, a strong force made to confront the weak for any length of time will violate its own regulations and commit crimes, some inadvertent and others not. Forced to lie in order to conceal its crimes, it will find the system of military justice undermined, the process of command distorted, and a credibility gap opening up at its feet. In such a process there are neither heroes nor villains, but only victims; whom the gods want to destroy, they first strike blind. So difficult to counteract are the processes just described that those caught in them may well never recover. In the end, the only way to revive a country’s ability to wage war may be to tear down the existing armed forces and set up new ones in their stead, which in turn will probably require a political revolution of some kind.

An army that has suffered defeat at the hands of the strong may nourish its wounds and wait for another opportunity. This is what the Prussians did after 1806, the French after 1871, and the Germans after 1918. However, once a force has been vanquished by the weak it will grow timid and wary of repeating its experience; and it will forever look for reasons not to fight again. Confronted by a real enemy—one who is as strong as, or stronger than, itself—a force accustomed to “fighting” the weak is almost certain to break and run, as the Argentinian Army did in the Falklands. Thus it is probably no exaggeration to say that, until the [1990-1] Gulf Crisis finally presented them with an opportunity that was too good to miss, the U.S forces till had not put Vietnam behind them. Meanwhile whether the armed forces of the Soviet State—following their failure in Afghanistan—will ever be able to fight another war outside their own borders is also doubtful. For the moment, it looks as if they are going to have their hands full trying to prevent their own society from disintegrating.

We have been dealing with “squishy” factors such as good and evil because, far from being divorced form warfare, ethics constitute its central core. On the whole, the relationship between strength and weakness and the moral dilemmas to which it gives rise probably represents the best available explanation why, over the last few decades, modern armies on both sides of the ex-Iron Curtain have been so singularly ineffective combating low-intensity conflict. After all colonial rebellions definition were the province of the downtrodden and the weak. Often the insurgents were scarcely considered human, being called by such names as gook (Vietnam), kafir (Rhodesia), or Arabush (Israel). Conversely, low-intensity conflict may well be regarded as the coming revenge of these people. Refusing to play the game according to the rules that “civilized” countries have established for their own convenience, they have developed their own form of war and began exporting it. Since the rules exist mainly in the mind, once broken they will not easily be restored. Though hardly a day passes anywhere in the world without some act of terrorism taking place, it appears that the process has only just begun, and the prospects for combating or even containing it are bleak.  

Gaza: Time to Prepare for the Next Round

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When Louis Alexandre Berthier, then at the beginning of his career as Napoleon’s chief of staff, entered Gaza with a French army on 24-5 February 1799, he noted that it was a nice—well, everything is relative—city. One with a good climate, sufficient water, plenty of good agricultural land, and many flourishing gardens. Coming as the French troops did from the Sinai Desert where they had almost died of thirst, what a relief! No source I have consulted could tell me how many people lived in what, since 1948, has been known as the Strip. It cannot, however, have been more than 10-20,000.

Fast forward to 2024. Today the Strip’s population is said to stand at 2,300,000. Not bad for a territory that, at the time Israel occupied it in 1967, only numbered about 400,000. And not bad for a territory that, if the Palestinian Authority may be believed, is even now subjected to “genocide” at the wicked Israelis’ hands.

Now let’s turn to Hamas. The idea of helping the inhabitants of the West Bank set up a party to counter the Palestinian Liberation Organization was first proposed to Israel’s then minister of defense General Ariel Sharon, around 1980.  The way he and his advisers saw it, Hamas, with its heavy emphasis on Islam (“submission to the will of God”), would be the ideal instrument to divert Palestinian energies away from fighting Israel towards practicing Islam. How wrong can some people be?  Rather than content themselves with prayer, fasting, charity, and the obligatory journey to Mecca, from early on Hamas’ leaders adopted a radical line, vowing never to recognize the “Zionist Entity” and never to establish peaceful relations peace with it. This remains the organization’s official stance right down to the present day.

By 2006-7 Hamas, in spite of more or less coordinated efforts by Israel and the Palestinian authority, had become the leading political entity in Gaza. The outcome was a coup meant to establish its rule over the Strip, killing many—no one knows how many—Palestinian Authority personnel and sending the rest running in every direction. Since then hardly a week has passed without terrorists—Hamas itself calls them shahids, martyrs—from Gaza mounting some kind of operation, large or small, against Israel. Particularly vulnerable were the Israeli towns and kibbutzim close to the border which soon became the targets of intermittent salvoes of rockets. The rationale, Hamas claimed, was to make Israel pay a price for continuing its occupation; never mind that, by 2023, that occupation had ended a decade and a half ago. Its only remnant was strict border controls maintained by the Israelis to ensure that no weapons or other military equipment would enter the Strip for use against their own country.

As if to confirm Berthier’s estimate, Gaza is not necessarily a bad place to live and prosper even now. The Strip has a population similar to that of Singapore. What figures we have show that its population density, high as it is, is considerably lower. Labor is as cheap as it was, say, in China before it started opening to capitalism back in 1979-80. Located on the sea and forming the link between Asia and Africa on one hand and the EU as one of the largest consumer markets on earth on the other, with some assistance it could develop into a pearl of the Middle East. Fresh desalinated water, though no longer as plentiful (relative to the population) as it used to be, could be provided by Israel which, in this respect, is a world leader. But no: as Hamas’ leaders have repeatedly said, having set themselves the objective of doing away with Israel, recognizing the latter, let alone signing a peace deal with it, is something they are simply do not going to do.

All wars, even including the so-called Hundred Years War, have to end. To some extent, this has already happened. Whether because Hamas is running out of rockets or for some other reason, the number of those it launches on Israel has been falling. Judging by the published casualty figures—not, admittedly, the most reliable in the world—the fighting inside Gaza has also grown less intense.

Prime Minister Netanyahu on his part has announced that operation “Iron Swords” has two objectives. One is to obtain the return of every one of the Israeli captives Hamas is holing. The other, to “finish off” Hamas to the point where it can no longer launch attacks on Israel. Straight from the horse’s mouth! Provided Israel makes the necessary concessions—meaning a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange at the rate of perhaps 100 to 1—the second objective is probably attainable; the first almost certainly is not. Of the two belligerents, Israel and Hamas, the former is indisputably the stronger by far. Which paradoxically is why, almost regardless of the terms of an eventual deal, it will signify a victory for Hamas.

Time to prepare for the next round.

War without Kitsch

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One thing, and by no means not the least important thing, war always produces a tsunami of kitsch. The kind that seeks to show how utterly wicked, utterly cruel and utterly depraved, the enemy is. The kind that claims to weep for, and commiserate with, the losses on one’s own side. The kind that contrasts our heroes’ indomitable courage and commitment to the sacred cause with the dastardly cowardice and treachery so characteristic of, so inherent in, the other side. The kind that, by its very nature, stokes the flames and undermines any kind of rational thought. If, indeed, it does not prohibit such thought altogether.

Needless to say, Israel—my Israel—is not exempt. Some of the stuff that has been drowning us since the 7th of October is the product of genuine emotion. But much of it—especially that pronounced by, or commissioned by, politicians—is patently false. At times, so obvious is the fakery as to make one want to puke.

Given this background, I found myself seeking an expression of grief that would not overflow with kitsch. The kind that is simple and noble. The kind that can actually do some good. Doing so, I recalled a speech given by Moshe Dayan, at that time Israel’s chief of the general staff. The occasion was the kidnapping and assassination of a young Israeli, Roi Rotberg. Rotberg, aged 21, was a member of a kibbutz not far from the Gaza Strip, exactly the area where the current war started, where he was in charge of the local security squad. On 29 April 1956 he was caught in an ambush and killed. Later his body, which had been dragged into the Strip, was returned to Israel.

The following is a translation, taken straight from good old Wikipedia, of Dayan’s address. Every word, every full stop and comma and question mark, is as relevant today as it was 68 years ago.

“Early yesterday morning Roi was murdered. The quiet of the spring morning dazzled him and he did not see those waiting in ambush for him, at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How did we shut our eyes and refuse to look squarely at our fate, and see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation? Have we forgotten that this group of young people dwelling at Nahal Oz is bearing the heavy gates of Gaza[1] on its shoulders? Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path, for the day when we will heed the ambassadors of malevolent hypocrisy who call upon us to lay down our arms. Roi’s blood is crying out to us and only to us from his torn body. Although we have sworn a thousandfold that our blood shall not flow in vain, yesterday again we were tempted, we listened, we believed.

We will make our reckoning with ourselves today; we are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us. Let us not avert our eyes lest our arms weaken. This is the fate of our generation. This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down. The young Roi who left Tel Aviv to build his home at the gates of Gaza to be a wall for us was blinded by the light in his heart and he did not see the flash of the sword. The yearning for peace deafened his ears and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and overcame him.“

[1] A reference to the Biblical book of Judges where the hero Samson escapes the then Philistine city of Gaza by ripping out the city’s gates and carrying them away on his shoulders.

New Under the Sun?

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No. I will not tell you who authored the following text, when, where and on what occasion. You will, in any case, have no trouble in finding out for yourselves.

“After all, how near one to the other is every part of the world! Modern inventors have brought into close relation widely separated peoples and made them better acquainted. Geographic and political divisions will continue to exist, but distances have been effaced. Swift ships and fast trains are becoming cosmopolitan. They invade fields which a few years ago were impenetrable. The world’s products are exchanged as never before, and with increasing transportation facilities come increasing knowledge and larger trade. Prices are fixed with mathematical precision by supply and demand. The world’s selling prices are regulated by market and crop reports. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of by the fathers. Isolation is no longer possible or desirable. The same important news is read, though in different languages, the same day in all Christendom. The telegraph keeps us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the press foreshadows, with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of the nations. Market prices of products and of securities are hourly known in every commercial mart, and the investments of the people extend beyond their own national boundaries into the remotest parts of the earth. Vast transactions are conducted and international exchanges are made by the tick of the cable. Every event of interest is immediately bulletined. The quick gathering and transmission of news, like rapid transit, are of recent origin, and are only made possible by the genius of the inventor and the courage of the investor. It took a special messenger of the government, with every facility known at the time for rapid travel, nineteen days to go from the city of Washington to New Orleans with a message to General Jackson that the war with England had ceased and a treaty of peace had been signed. How different now!

Annihilation of distance.

We reached General Miles in Porto Rico by cable, and he was able through the military telegraph to stop his army on the firing-line with the message that the United States and Spain had signed a protocol suspending hostilities. We knew almost instantly of the first shot fired at Santiago, and the subsequent surrender of the Spanish forces was known at Washington within less than an hour of its consummation. The first ship of Cervera‘s fleet had hardly emerged from that historic harbor when the fact was flashed to our capital, and the swift destruction that followed was announced immediately through the wonderful medium of telegraphy. So accustomed are we to safe and easy communication with distant lands that its temporary interruption even in ordinary times results in loss and inconvenience. We shall never forget the days of anxious waiting and awful suspense when no information was permitted to be sent from Peking. and the diplomatic representatives of the nations in China, cut off from all communication inside and outside of the walled capital, were surrounded by an angry and misguided mob that threatened their lives; nor the joy that thrilled the world when a single message from the government of the United States brought through our minister the first news of the safety of the besieged diplomats.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not a mile of steam railroad on the globe. Now there are enough miles to make its circuit many times. Then there was not a line of electric telegraph; now we have a vast mileage traversing all lands and all seas. God and man have linked the nations together. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other the less occasion is there for misunderstanding, and the stronger the disposition, when we have differences, to adjust them in the court of arbitration, which is the noblest forum for the settlement of international disputes.”

Having read all this, do you still think there is anything new under the sun?

Change and Continuity (Again)

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As a few readers may recall, this is the third time I’ve addressed this topic, which has now been haunting me for several years, in this blog. Partly that is because I believe, with Nietzsche, that the fact that everyone thinks something does not prove it is true. If anything, to the contrary. And partly because, if the study of history, to which I have devoted my life, is to go beyond mere incoherent tales and be of any use at all, some things must remain the same.

What I wanted to know is this: against the background of the constant and often tumultuous change that everyone keeps talking about, is there anything that does not and will not change? Originally I hoped to write a book about that question; having already published a volume about the history of man’s attempts to see into the future, at first I thought the task would be fairly easy. Never have I been more mistaken! In the event writing the new book proved to be beyond my powers, at least for the moment. So I let it go, more or less.

Doing some shopping earlier this morning, for some mysterious reason I found myself thinking about the topic. As many others have also noted, often the best ideas seem to come out of nowhere. Especially during exercise; and especially if the exercise is neither too strenuous to allow for thought or too light to make a difference to the heart and lung system in particular. Think of James Watt who had the idea of a separate boiler, leading to the modern steam engine and thus to the industrial revolution, come to him, completely unexpected, during a Sunday walk in Edinburgh Common.

So what I am going to do today is draw up a list, however incomplete and however superficial, of some propositions that, as far as I can see, have been, are and presumably always will remain true. Such as form a sort of skeleton, or chassis, or framework, for social life to hang itself on, so to speak.  As I do so, maybe, just maybe, one thing will lead to another. Until, probably by working by fits and starts, one day I shall have something to say on the topic that is more inclusive, more solid, and more worth publishing in some other suitable format.

*

The laws of physics the laws of physics provide just what I’ve been looking for: namely, a sort of skeleton, or chassis, or framework, for social life to hang itself on. The laws of physics do not change—or else they would not be laws.

*

Emotion, Thought, Knowledge and Understanding

Just how emotion, thought, knowledge and understanding grow out of, and interact with, our biological makeup on one hand and the surrounding physical world is unknown. And unknown it will almost certainly remain until the end of time.

Now as ever, so much of our thought is governed by our cultural background on one hand and wishful thinking on the other as to make “objectivity” very difficult, often all but impossible.

Everyone believes he is the most intelligent, except for a few who agree with him (Thomas Hobbes).

The more we learn about the world, the more numerous and more difficult the questions that present themselves and demand an answer.

Obtaining a good picture of the past is hard enough; obtaining a good picture of the future, all but impossible.

Economic Life

Man does not live by bread—here broadly understood as nutrients of every kind—alone. That said, the need for bread goes a long way—though never all the way—to govern the shape and functioning of every individual and every society. And the other way around.

There never has been a human society whose members, or at any rate many of them, did not produce/work for a living.

Where an army cannot go, an ass loaded with gold will (Philip II, father of Alexander the Great).

Resources, whether in the form of nutrients, or living space, or mates, or allies, or honors, are always limited. Those who pursue them will face competition and pay a price; those who own them will have to defend them.

Prices are governed by the interaction between supply and demand.

Gresham’s law: Bad money will drive out good.

Wealth is always relative. That is why poverty will never disappear from the face of the earth.

Psychology

The essence of life (not just human life, but that is beside the point in the present context) is the quest for growth/power in its endlessly varied forms (Nietzsche). Conversely, when the quest comes to a halt death cannot be very far away.

Freud was right. Not only does the sub-consciousness really exist, but it strongly influences everything we are, think and do.

Given the right circumstances, almost any person on earth is capable of extreme tenderness and extreme cruelty. Not seldom, both.

As often as our senses tell us the truth, they deceive. Ditto, our memory.

Very often, when circumstances prevent us from venting our anger on others we will direct it at ourselves. And vice versa.

The one thing we humans cannot do is sit still and alone in a room and do nothing (Blaise Pascal).

Social Life

Everything in social life is interwoven with everything else and impacts on everything else,

Man is a social animal (said Aristotle). No man can live on his own.

Absolute freedom can only exist in a desert.

If only because they cannot cope on their own, the young are always subject to some kind of education.

No society has ever been, or ever will be, without religion, art, music, fashion, ceremonies, feast days, games, etc.

No society has ever been, nor will be, completely egalitarian in the sense that every one of its members occupies a similar position, owns the same amount of goods, is addressed in the same manner, and always treats all the rest equally.

Politics

Man is the conspiring animal (Lyndon LaRouche).

Politics is the art of the possible (Otto von Bismarck).

It is politics that determine who gets what (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin).

Any government is better than no government (Thomas Hobbes).

Telling truth to power is always difficult, often dangerous.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton).

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

Had it been possible to open a tyrant’s soul, it would be found covered with scars.

Niccolò Machiavelli: Amidst so many who are bad, how can a good one maintain himself?

Aside: Gender and Sex

Women form half of humanity, and not the least important half.

So powerful and potentially so disruptive is the drive to mate that no society has ever existed that did not do its best to regulate it in one way or another.

Everything about women is a riddle, and the riddle has one solution: pregnancy (Nietzsche).

The relationship between the sexes is highly asymmetrical. The more manly a man, the more women will like him. The more a woman tries to become/behave like a man, the less men will like her (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

Now as ever, women do most household work. Ditto childcare, nursing, social work, etc.

Society is run by men and strong women (Margaret Mead).

Women on average are smaller, lighter, weaker, less robust and more vulnerable than men. That is why they need the protection of men. Not only does that need go a long way to govern the relationship between men and women, but it guarantees that, in the future as in the past, women will be dependent on men. And, to some extent, subordinate to them.

A man who sacrifices himself for a woman will be admired. A man who allows a woman to sacrifice herself for him will be ridiculed, despised, or both.

A man who competes against a woman and loses, loses. A man who competes against a woman and wins, also loses.

A man’s pleasure is in a woman’s hand (Aristophanes).

Where women are respected, the gods dwell (Hindu proverb).

War

No known human society has ever been, nor ever will be, without some form of legalized group violence. Aka, war.

If you want peace, prepare for war (Roman proverb).

A centralized state is hard to conquer but easy to hold. With a decentralized one the opposite applies (Machiavelli).

Dulce bellum inexpertis (Desiderius Erasmus: sweet is war for those who have not experienced it). But don’t get me wrong: terrible as war is, and precisely for that reason, it can also provide the greatest joy there is.

War is motivated by a combination of interest—hence Clausewitz’s famous dictum—on one hand and emotion on the other. The two can, and sometimes do, pull in opposite directions.

War is a moral and physical struggle waged by means of the latter (Clausewitz again).

The essence of war is fighting around which everything else revolves. No fighting, no war.

The cardinal coordinates of war are violence, pain, danger, fatigue, uncertainty and friction.

War is a duel on an extended scale. Ancient or modern, large or small, it is governed by the rules of strategy just as many games are.

The principles of war—intelligence, deception, surprise, concentration, economy of force, and the like—are eternal. Not one of them has changed, and not one of them ever will.

The larger the distance between base and front, the more expensive and the more difficult waging war becomes.

Other things equal, the stronger form of war is the defense. Still, no war has ever been won by a pure defense.

A stream of water pouring out of a bucket will only spread for so long before coming to a halt. Similarly, attackers only have limited time at their disposal. Either they win within that time, or else they will be forced on the defense. For the defender, provided only he can hold out long enough, the opposite is the case.

A sword, plunged into salt water, will rust!

The longer a war, the less profitable it is likely to be.

Only the dead will see the end of war.

*

Given these and tens of thousands of other truths, how can anyone seriously maintain that nothing ever changes?

So Many Deflated Hopes

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As Nietzsche—my favorite philosopher—once said, history is a succession of atrocities. Overrunning the Middle East, the ancient Assyrians must have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Julius Caesar probably killed a million Gauls—one fifth of the entire population—and sold another million into slavery. Genghis Khan slaughtered millions. Taking into account sickness and famine, the Thirty Years War cost the lives of an estimated twelve million people. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are estimated to have killed about three and a half million. All this before we get to the vast and extremely bloody upheavals China went through during the nineteenth century. Before we get to the two world wars which, between them, may have killed 60 million. And before we get to Auschwitz on one hand and Hiroshima/Nagasaki on the other.

That is not to say there have been no hopes. The Greeks and Romans had their visions of a long-past golden Age before iron weapons were invented and enabled people to slaughter each other on an unprecedented scale. Medieval Christians hoped to enter heaven when they died. Looking back on the Pax Romana—approximately 29 BCE to 200 CE—the late eighteen-century English historian Edward Gibbon considered it the happiest in the whole of history. A contemporary of the French author and pundit Francois-Marie Voltaire, the German poet Friedrich Schiller, and the equally German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, he agreed with them that national differences were being eradicated and that progress was making the world a happier place almost by the day.

Stimulated by the spread of mechanical transport, around 1870 an international pacifist movement started making its impact felt. In 1889 (the year Hitler was born, incidentally) the Austrian Baroness Bertha von Suttner published Nieder die Waffen, down with the arms, in which she denounced war and argued in favor of universal disarmament. In 1909 the British economist and writer Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, a book in which he argued that rising productivity and expanding communications were encouraging trade while driving war into obsolescence. Both authors ended by being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: Suttner in 1911 and Angel in 1933. 1919-20 saw the establishment of the League of Nations, an organization specifically intended to ensure that the war that had just ended would also be the last one.

Probably never at any time were such hopes more intense, and shared by a greater number of people, than in the years immediately following 1989. It all started in 1945 when, following the most destructive war in history, much of the world saw itself divided between two camps: the “Western.” or free, or capitalist, one on one hand and the “Eastern,” or socialist, or communist, one on the other. Both looked at the other as the incarnation of evil. Both proclaimed themselves carriers of the one ideology that would lead mankind towards a dazzling future. While armed to the teeth, both saw themselves as “peace loving.”

For decades on end the two camps confronted one another. Doing so they fought many wars by proxy. So in Asia, so in Africa, so in the Middle East; and so, albeit on a much smaller scale, in Latin America. Taking into account such massive meat-grinders  as the Chinese Civil War (1946-49), the Korean War (1950-53), and the two Vietnam Wars (1949-1975), the number of those killed in these and other armed conflicts may well  have exceeded that of those who died in 1914-45, albeit that they were spread over forty years instead of thirty. Twice did humanity, or at any rate large parts of it, seem to stand on the verge of nuclear annihilation. Once in 1962, when the US and USSR clashed head-on over Cuba and may only have been saved by a disobedient Soviet officer. And once in 1973, when the same Powers found themselves at loggerheads over the Arab-Israeli War of that year.

Come 1989, the year of miracles. The Berlin Wall, which for decades had stood as the very symbol of the world’s partition between the two camps, came crashing down. So did the East Bloc—perhaps the one case in all of history when a major empire fell not by means of war and massive bloodshed but because almost all of its people had lost faith in it. Much of the loss of faith in question was due to the fact, which in the age of radio and television (soon to be joined by a myriad other newfangled devices) could no longer be concealed, that the East had fallen way behind. Not just in terms of affluence but in others as well; including health, education, freedom of speech and movement, the quality of the environment, and so on. Put together, they and other criteria were known as the “human development” index.

Playing the role of Norman Angell in the immediate post-Cold War period was an American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. His 1989 article, The End of History, which was later expanded into a book, told people what millions upon millions of them wanted to believe: namely that humankind was standing on the threshold of a new epoch. One in which democracy (as defined by the West) would become the religion of almost everyone, power politics abolished, and war, if not completely disappear, at any rate confined to unimportant, relatively backward but forward-looking, regions and countries. Providing strong support for Fukuyama was another American academic, the psychologist Steven Pinker. The list of contents of his most important book, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) say it all.  I quote. “The Pacification Process.” “The Civilizing Process.” “The Humanitarian Revolution.” “The Long Peace,” “The New Peace.” “The Rights Revolutions.” “Better Angels.” And, most pretentious of all, “On Angels’ Wings.”

It reads like paradise, doesn’t it? Not just political and social change, but the kind of moral improvement we poor humans have always been looking for but always failed to achieve. The kind the Biblical prophets spoke about. The kind Mahatma Gandhi had in mind before he was assassinated. Alas, it was not to be. Not in much of Asia and Africa, where what we got was an exploding population that can hardly be fed, let alone provided with a decent standard of living where everyone has access to clean water. Not, in North America, greater freedom but a repressive social regime known as political correctness that, in so far as the repression comes from below rather than above, is without precedent in history. Not in the EU, where massive immigration is even now leading to an almost equally massive movement away from neighborly love towards the xenophobia of the “extremist” political right; and that, even as once lovely city centers are being converted into hotbeds of violence and crime. Not well behaved electorates casting their votes for such things as a better education for their children but, especially in Russia and several other former Soviet republics, an entire series of new bloodthirsty dictatorships taking the place of the old. Not peace among nations, but new wars—in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Zaire, in the Sudan, in the Middle East, to mention but a few—also taking the place of the old.

So many deflated hopes. So many broken lives.

On Happiness

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There once was a certain king who fell gravely ill and was very unhappy. So he said to his servants: I will give half my kingdom to whomever can cure me. Whereupon all the realm’s wise men gathered and conferred on how to cure the king. But none knew what to do. Until one of them, the wisest of the wise, came up with an idea: they had to search for the happiest man and, having found him, ask him to take off his shirt so the king could put it on. Thus they would cure the king and make him happy again.

The king took the wise man’s advice and sent his servants all over the realm to look for a happy man and bring him to the palace. However, the task proved anything but easy; wherever the servants went, all they found was unhappiness. Wealthy people were sick. Healthy people were poor. The few who were both rich and healthy had wives who made their lives a misery. And those who had good wives found that something was wrong with their offspring who either had accidents or disobeyed their parents. Not one man who was happy with his lot.

Enter the king’s eldest son. One evening he went for a walk and passed the shack of a poor peasant. “Thank God,” he heard a voice say. “Today I had useful work to do. Now I can go to bed with a full belly. That’s all one needs to be happy, isn’t it?”

The king’s son listened and rejoiced. Next he told his servants to knock on the door, pay the peasant anything he might ask for, and get hold of the shirt. The servants hastened to carry out the prince’s order. Only to discover that the peasant did not have a shirt.

(Following Leo Tolstoy).

Konseptsia

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As you may have guessed, konseptsia (plural, konseptsiot) is a Hebrew word we Israelis often use. It means, roughly, a system of interlocking ideas (sometimes known, in English, as “parameters”) that, taken together, form a framework for thought. Rather than try to provide a closer definition, I will provide you with three examples of past konseptsiot that have paid a critically important role in the Israel’s history and are helping shape world history right down to the present day.

Konseptsia No. 1. To say that Israel has long history of fighting many of its Arab neighbors would be an understatement. The Arab Revolt of 1936-39, the 1948 War of Independence, the 1956 Suez Campaign, and countless smaller incidents followed each other in an almost unbroken chain. Still, as of the winter of 1966-67 there seemed to be no sign of an immediate threat. At the General Staff, the Intelligence Division was inclined to attribute this to the fact that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had sent some of his best troops to Yemen to assist rebels against the government there. As a result, it was thought, he was in no position to wage war against Israel until further notice.

So far so good. But then, all of a sudden, things began to happen. Rather than allowing events in Yemen to give up any plans for a war with Israel, Nasser, perhaps because he worried lest Israel would soon be in possession of its first nuclear warheads, decided to use the prevailing tension between Israel and Syria to withdraw his troops from Yemen. Next, on 14 May 1967, he sent 110,000 of them into the Sinai Peninsula. Not content with this, on 18 May Nasser demanded that the UN withdraw its troops which had been stationed there since 1956-7 and were meant to separate the two sides. Granted his wish, on 22 May he closed the Red Sea to Israeli shipping, thereby undoing the fruit of the 1956 Suez Campaign and effectively cutting Israel’s maritime communications with the Far East. On 30 May King Hussein of Jordan arrived in Cairo where he signed a mutual defense pact with Egypt; a few days later Iraq too joined the alliance. As Israel watched the konseptsia, which said that another war any time soon was highly unlikely, collapsed, triggering a crisis in the government and near panic among the population. In the end it was only by means of a full-scale Israeli offensive against its neighbors that the situation was saved.

Konseptsia No. 2. Following its spectacular victory of June 1967, Israel was left in possession of the Sinai Peninsula (taken from Egypt), the Golan Heights (taken from Syria) and the West Bank (taken from Jordan). Six years later, in spite of the so-called War of Attrition waged by Israel and Egypt along the Suez Canal in in 1968-70, this situation still prevailed. Central to the confidence Israel exuded during those years was the belief, firmly held by the General Staff, that neither Egypt nor Syria would dare go to war without making sure they had air superiority first. Since this kind of superiority was deemed to be beyond those countries’ reach, Israeli Intelligence considered war to be highly unlikely.

However, reality refused to agree with theory. Instead of building up their air forces to the point where they could match the Israeli one the Egyptian and Syrians armies, lavishly supported by the Soviet Union, focused on vast arrays of anti-aircraft defenses to provide them with the cover they needed. On 6 October 1973, with some 350,000 first line troops between them, they attacked. They crossed the Suez Canal and, in the north, came very close to overrunning the Golan Heights. It took the Israelis eighteen days of ferocious fighting, as well as some 3,000 casualties (KIA only), to redress the situation. Once again, the konseptsia had failed.

Konseptsia No. 3. Though they fought outnumbered two or three to one, the October 1973 War did bring out the best in Israel’s fighting forces. Still the outcome of the war in question was much less decisive than that of its 1967 predecessor. Which explains why, starting late in that year and spilling over into 1974-75, an inquiry was held to discover the origins of the intelligence failure that had caused Israel to be taken by surprise and made possible the Arab’s early victories. The investigation appears to have been thorough, leading to the dismissal of the chief of staff and the chief of intelligence. A third high ranking casualty was the commander, Southern Front. Perhaps more important in the long run, both the intelligence-gathering process and the organization responsible for obtaining and disseminating it were reformed, albeit in ways that are not always available to the public.

Fifty years passed. By late 2023 Israel had been battling terrorism, especially but not exclusively that launched from Gaza, for ages. Assuredly it was a nuisance; but one to which the Israel Defense Forces had become accustomed and with which it had learnt to live, more or less. The border was fortified—with the aid, among other things, of a one-of-its-type heavy steel, sensor-studded, partition that surrounded the Strip and prevented the construction of underground tunnels—and equipped with lookout posts positioned so as to support each other and leave no square inch of land uncovered. Fences, searchlights, killing zones, and any number of other devices combined to make crossing the border without being detected almost impossible. For months prior to 7 October intelligence, some of it electronic, some obtained with the aid of drones, and some originating in the (mostly female, incidentally) lookouts in their lightly fortified positions, showed signs that something was afoot. Including, in particular, exercises mounted by Hamas by way of rehearsing an attack. Repeatedly, warnings went up the chain of command. As repeatedly, they were pushed aside. With Hamas’s past performance in mind, neither the Intelligence Division nor Southern Command could bring themselves to think that Hamas was capable of much more than mounting a company-size raid.

*

Came 7 October, a Jewish holiday. In a replay of 1973, several key commanders were with their families, enjoying a well-deserved break from duty. Presumably that was one reason why the Israelis were slow to react, requiring hours and hours before its armored forces and air force took up the fight. What happened next has been told many times and will surely continue to be told many times in the future. Instead of coming up with a company sized attack or two, Hamas sent in the equivalent of a brigade. In its wake came a mob of less disciplined marauders who, it turns out, were responsible for many if not most the atrocities committed by Hamas on that day. Instead of operating by stealth while trying to infiltrate the defenses, they brought bulldozers to tear them down. Instead of trying to avoid the lookouts, they attacked them head-on in their bunker-like, but still all too light, fortifications. Having crossed the frontier they spread out westward. Blocking Israeli roads, shooting up Israeli traffic, overrunning some nearby Israeli settlements, disrupting a music festival held nearby, and inflicting over a thousand casualties in dead alone—the largest number, as has been pointed out, of Jews killed in a single day since the end of the Holocaust. As these lines were being written over two months later Israel, its society and its armed forces were still fighting to deal with the consequences of the attack.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that those who did not see the writing on the wall were idiots. Or that they neglected their duty, “falling asleep while on guard,” as the Hebrew phrase goes. Or that the technology deployed along the frontier was not good enough. Far from that being the case, it was some of the best and most advanced ever seen. What I am saying is something far more profound and much more important: namely that, much as people blame the konseptsia as the factor that guided and misguided Israel’s political-military thought, without some kind of konseptsia thought itself is impossible. Sticking with it may mean disaster; dismantling it risks leaving behind a jumble of incoherent, often vague and conflicting and misleading, ideas. When Clausewitz famously wrote about war, waged by fallible human beings under the most intense kind of pressure, being the province of confusion and misunderstanding he knew what he was talking about.

And so, dear readers, regardless of what technological progress, specifically including AI, may still some up with, it will remain. And not just in the military sphere either.

Disabled

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As the Israeli-Palestinian fighting in the Gaza Strip drags on and on, it is time to say a word about the human cost of war. Of all war, let me quickly add, and on both sides. To my knowledge, no one has tackled this difficult topic better than Wilfred Owen did. A British officer who fought in World War I, he was killed in action just a week before the ceasefire of 11.11.1918. He left behind the following lines:

Disabled

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark,

And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,

Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park

Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,

Voices of play and pleasure after day,

Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

                *        *        *        *        *

About this time Town used to swing so gay

When glow-lamps budded in the light-blue trees, 

And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,—

In the old times, before he threw away his knees.

Now he will never feel again how slim

Girls’ waists are, or how warm their subtle hands,

All of them touch him like some queer disease.

               *        *        *        *        *

There was an artist silly for his face,

For it was younger than his youth, last year.

Now, he is old; his back will never brace;

He’s lost his colour very far from here,

Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry,

And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race 

And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.

                  *        *        *        *        *

One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg,

After the matches carried shoulder-high.

It was after football, when he’d drunk a peg,

He thought he’d better join. He wonders why.

Someone had said he’d look a god in kilts.

That’s why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg,

Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts,

He asked to join. He didn’t have to beg;

Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.

Germans he scarcely thought of, all their guilt,

And Austria’s, did not move him. And no fears

Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts

For daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes;

And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;

Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits.

And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

                  *        *        *        *        *

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal.

Only a solemn man who brought him fruits

Thanked him; and then inquired about his soul.

                  *        *        *        *        *

Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes,

And do what things the rules consider wise,

And take whatever pity they may dole.

Tonight he noticed how the women’s eyes

Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.

How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come

And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?