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Wilfred Owen wrote Futility in May 1918, just a few months before death on the battlefield on 4 November during the crossing of the Sambre–Oise Canal. Futility documents an event where a group of soldiers discover one of their comrades. He has died and their attempts to revive him by moving him in to the sun fail.
The source.
See also The Callous Complacence of Those at Home and 28 July 1914 - Outbreak of World War I.
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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the "Great War" – World War I. This is how the catastrophe unfolded:
So then, we have the following remarkable sequence of events that led inexorably to the 'Great War' - a name that had been touted even before the coming of the conflict.
The source.
See also World War I, The World of Yesterday, World War I and the Aftermath.
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One hundred years ago today, the assassination of the archduke of Austria at Sarajevo triggered the bloody, destructive conflagration of the world’s nations known as the Great War.
In The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig gives a graphical account of the world left behind at that moment.
Ralf Raico offers an excellent panoramic account of the origins of World War I.
As for economic causes and consequences, make sure to read this article in which David Stockman explains that
[...] the Great Depression was born in the extraordinary but unsustainable boom of 1914-1929 that was, in turn, an artificial and bloated project of the warfare and central banking branches of the state, not the free market. Nominal GDP, which had been deformed and bloated to $103 billion by 1929, contracted massively, dropping to only $56 billion by 1933.
Crucially, the overwhelming portion of this unprecedented contraction was in exports, inventories, fixed plant and durable goods—the very sectors that had been artificially hyped. These components declined by $33 billion during the four year contraction and accounted for fully 70 percent of the entire drop in nominal GDP.
So there was no mysterious loss of that Keynesian economic ether called “aggregate demand”, but only the inevitable shrinkage of a state induced boom. It was not the depression bottom of 1933 that was too low, but the wartime debt and speculation bloated peak in 1929 that had been unsustainably too high.
The source.
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In a post entitled Deutsche Kreuzritter (German Crusaders) Alive and Kicking, I wrote in 2008:
I have predicted for quite some time that attacking and occupying Afghanistan is likely to meet support in Germany only as a matter of transient "political correctness".[...]
During the Nazi years, one could not observe broad sections of the German population demanding the killing of Jews - in fact, the Nazis knew that they would be going too far in disclosing or aggressively advertising the systematic extermination of Jews and, therefore, carefully hid the vile business from the public.
Today, it is easy to find support among the German public for the killing of certain sections of the Afghan population - just call them Taliban, and it will be deemed fine to take them out.
After all, German soldiers are over there for a "humanitarian" purpose - helping to support and stabilise (by bribery and other most dubious means) war lords and political coalitions in Kabul that on closer inspection betray, perhaps even more pronouncedly, the repugnant aspects implied in the term Taliban, a designation conveniently employed as a supposedly irrefutable all-purpose condemnation that must be accepted if one is not to commit the unspeakable sin of not being politically correct.
The media are largely silent about the actual circumstances of German collaboration in Afghanistan, portraying instead German involvement as a touching case of compassion and a generous act of bringing cultural advancement to savage tribes. [...]
"Humanitarian" aggression is not only the government line with regard to Afghanistan (and indeed other places), it is the position assumed by a growing industry of militarised charity. To my horror, I heard on the radio recently, a representative of CARITAS - a charity of the Roman Catholic church - demanding that German forces remain in Afghanistan to protect CARITAS in the pursuit of their various projects.
The source.
Six years later, DER SPIEGEL reports:
"They ran away," croaks the deputy police chief for the Kunduz province in his office and gestures dismissively. "They simply ran away. It was too soon."
"It was too soon. It was like an escape." One can hear almost exactly the same thing from the mouths of German soldiers, some of whom even compare the Bundeswehr's departure with that of the Americans from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. "If there is one thing the Bundeswehr is really good at, it's retreating," is a sentiment that can often be heard in the government quarter in Berlin these days.
What, though, did the Germans really manage to accomplish in Kunduz and what did the 25 Germans killed in the region die for? What did all the money buy? What remains of the mission? Berlin would rather not provide an answer to these questions: A complete evaluation of the Afghanistan engagement is not on the agenda.
Make sure to read the entire article.
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Kurt Schuler at Free Banking has an interesting article on the prehistory of Pearl Harbor:
Quite a few libertarians of my acquaintance have trouble thinking straight about World War II in the Pacific. The recent anniversary of Pearl Harbor brings them out with their arguments that U.S. government provoked the Japanese government into starting the war. Let’s review the facts, with a complementary glance at Japanese colonial monetary arrangements.
Japan emerged as an international power with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5.
Read on here for the full account of Japan's imperialism.
The author concludes:
That is the background to Pearl Harbor. For more than 40 years Japan had pursued a policy of aggression and conquest. In each case it was the aggressor. As an island nation with a modern military it was [in] no real danger of invasion from neighboring countries. In the territories it invaded, Japanese forces murdered civilian opponents of its rule by the thousands and suppressed them by the millions.
The 1940 U.S embargo of certain materials frequently used for military purposes was intended to pressure Japan to stop its campaign of invasion and murder in China. The embargo was a peaceful response to violent actions. Japan could have stopped; it would have been the libertarian thing to do. For libertarians to claim that the embargo was a provocation is like saying that it is a provocation to refuse to sell bullets to a killer.
Then, in December 1941, came not just the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, but an attack on the whole of Southeast Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, what is now Malaysia (British colonies), Indonesia (a Dutch colony), the Philippines (scheduled under American law to become independent in 1945), Thailand (independent). In 1942 there followed the invasion of Burma, a bit of India, and a few of the Aleutian Islands, plus the bombing of Darwin, Australia.
With that history in mind, how can anybody think that the United States could have made a durable peace with Japan? It would have lasted as long as would have been to Japan’s military advantage, no longer. Japan was hell-bent on conquest. Nothing since its emergence as a major international power suggested a limit to its ambitions. It only ceded in the face of superior force. Even as Allied forces retook territory, Japanese fanaticism was such that the government did not surrender until after the U.S. military dropped two atomic bombs. To ignore the long pattern of Japanese aggression as quite a few libertarians are wont to do is not just historically ignorant but dangerous, because it closes its eyes to the hard truth that some enemies are so implacable that the only choice is between fighting them and being subjugated by them. It took a prolonged U.S. military occupation to turn Japan from the aggressor it was to the peaceful country it has become.
The source.
Who wrote this?
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.
In my last post, I argued incidentally:
If oil were a serious consideration, the US would make an effort to keep the region stable. The true concerns are clearly of a different nature: distraction from domestic problems, boosting (presidential) popularity by appeal to jingoism, keeping the industrial-military complex in business.
In his excellent book The Great Deformation, David Stockman offers a fascinating background history of what I referred to as "keeping the industrial-military complex busy."
At the heart of the Reagan defense buildup was a great double shuffle. The war drums were sounding a strategic nuclear threat that virtually imperiled American civilization. Yet the money was actually being allocated to tanks, amphibious landing craft, close air support helicopters, and a vast conventional armada of ships and planes.
These weapons were of little use in the existing nuclear standoff, but were well suited to imperialistic missions of invasion and occupation. Ironically, therefore, the Reagan defense buildup was justified by an Evil Empire that was rapidly fading but was eventually used to launch elective wars against an Axis of Evil which didn’t even exist.
Make sure to read the entire section entitled How Obama Got His Tomahawks.
See also War - Spectator Sport ... and The Sport of Facile Killing ...
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Are these whistle-blowers too going to get 35 years in prison?
As for the oil meme, I can only repeat for the hundredth time that "war for oil" (in the context referred to by Wesley) does not make sense. If oil were a serious consideration, the US would make an effort to keep the region stable. The true concerns are clearly of a different nature: distratction from domestic problems, boosting (presidential) popularity by appeal to jingoism, keeping the industrial-military complex in business.
See my post Oil, and the links therein to further posts.
And at Zero Hedge, read more on this:
But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States’ knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.
Glenn Greenwald has revealed that a man named Edward Snowden is the NSA whistleblower. You can read the article on the Guardian's site.
My small discovery? He donated to Ron Paul in the 2012 campaign, which will no doubt be used in the savage smear campaign scheduled to begin shortly.
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OK, I have to admit that I'm an Adam Kokesh fan for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we can't have a revolution without revolutionaries.
I realize that sometimes he does outrageous things that drive people away from the liberty movement, like this moment, right before he was forcefully removed from the 2008 Republican Convention:
And sometimes he organizes events that seem silly, like the Dance-In at the Jefferson Memorial:
But sometimes, his methods give us a glimpse of what we're up against and reveal what the government really thinks of us. This weekend is one of those times.
Adam was speaking at a marijauna legalization rally. While I think that drug laws should belong to the states, to be honest this isn't one of my issues and that's partly because it isn't a freedom that the traditional GOP voter is ready to embrace (yet).
But Adam wasn't smoking pot, he wasn't carrying pot, and he didn't organize the event. However,the police moved in on him when he was speaking, and he was arrested.
The Kokesh wing of the movement has been aflutter all weekend about it, and if you want to know more specifics, I suggest you visit his Facebook page or click ont of the links at the bottom of this entry because I want to focus on one small event that will likely go unnoticed, and it's in this video.
This officer is answering phones that are apparently ringing quite a bit as people call to check on the status of a quasi-celebrity. You won't need to listen long, I promise:
Who is the provacatuer again?
This is why I like and admire Adam. He never loses his cool, and his ability to do so exposes small bits of the arrogant power structures we're facing.
And in case you doubt the authenticity of the video, this is Part II, where the kid who recorded the call shows evidence in his favor:
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“There are people who call government an evil, although a necessary evil. However, what is needed in order to attain a definite end must not be called an evil in the moral connotation of the term. It is a means, but not an evil. Government may even be called the most beneficial of all earthly institutions as without it no peaceful human cooperation, no civilization, and no moral life would be possible. In this sense the apostle declared that ‘the powers that be are ordained of God.’”
(Mises, L. von. 2010 [1944]. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Yale University Press, New Haven.)
There appear to be good theoretical grounds to suppose that the state, especially the modern state, has been a key factor in dramatically reducing violence amongst human beings.
Following up on How Much Destructiveness Can Man Afford?, What Noble Savage?, and Prosperity and Violence, in the below video Steven Pinker marshals intriguing evidence on the development path of violence throughout human history. The lecture starts at time mark 8:00.
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