This is a great presentation that goes over modern hardware. It's primarily about cache misses and their impact on performance. Below are some notes on the presentation (time - note).
I recently finished this book and thought it was great. There were lots of little details and stories about Rand that I didn't know, and I didn't know how she fit into the history of libertarianism. This book is a relatively quick read, I'd highly recommend it.
Communism is a cruel system that crushes the virtuous and rewards the corrupt.
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The Nation doubted that "petty officials in Soviet Russia ride to the opera in foreign limousines while the worker goes wheatless and meatless."
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She was further unnerved by the radicals that seemed to swarm around Roosevelt and had wormed their way into the highest citadels of American intellectual and political life. Rand could see little difference between armed Communist revolution and Roosevelt's rapid expansion of the federal government. She rallied against both.
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Rand was suspicious of both democracy and capitalism, unsure if either system could be trusted to safeguard individual rights against the dangers of the mob.
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One day she probed this difference, asking the other woman what her "goal in life" was. Rand's abstract query, so typical of her approach to other people, brought a swift and ready response. "Here's what I want out of life," her neighbor lectured Rand. "If nobody had an automobile, I would not want one. If automobiles exist and some people don't have them, I want an automobile. If some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles."
Rand was aghast. This piece of petty Hollywood braggadocio opened an entire social universe to her. Here, she thought furiously, was someone who appeared selfish but was actually self-less. Under her neighbor's feverish scheming and desperate career maneuverings was simply a hollow desire to appear important in other people's eyes. It was a motivation Rand, the eternal outsider, could never understand. But once identified the concept seemed the key to understanding nearly everything around her.
Swiftly Rand expanded her neighbor's response into a whole theory of human psychology. The neighbor's daughter was a "second-hander," someone who followed the ideas and values of others. Her opposite would be an individualist like Rand, someone who wanted to create certain ideas, books, or movies rather than attain a generic level of success. Within days Rand had identified the differences between her and the neighbor as "the basic distinction between two types of people in the world." She visualized the dim outlines of two clashing characters, the second-ander and the individualist, who would drive the plot and theme of her next novel.
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To effect this transvaluation of values Rand had to carefully redefine selfishness itself. Egoism or selfishness typically described one who "puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself," she wrote. "Fine!" But this understanding was missing something critical. The important element, ethically speaking, was "not what one does or how one does it, but why one does it." Selfishness was a matter of motivation, not outcome. Therefore anyone who sought power for power's sake was not truly selfish. Like Rand's neighbor, the stereotypical egoist was seeking a goal defined by others, living as "they want him to live and conquer to the extent of a home, a yacht and a full stomach." By contrast, a true egoist, in Rand's sense of the term, would put "his own 'I,' his standard of values, above all things, and [conquer] to live as he pleases, as he chooses and as he believes." Nor would a truly selfish person seek to dominate others, for that would mean living for others, adjusting his values and standards to maintain his superiority. Instead, "an egoist is a man who lives for himself."
...
"A man has a code of ethics primarily for his own sake, not for anyone else's," Rand asserted.
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By contrast, her characters were starkly etched in her mind. Rand designed an elegant, almost geometric structure for the book. Howard Roark was her ideal man, an uncompromising individualist and creator. The other primary characters were variations on his theme. As she explained in a notebook, "Howard Roark: the man who can be and is. Gail Wynand: the man who could have been. Peter Keating: the man who never could be and doesn't know it. Ellsworth M. Toohey: the man who never could be -- and knows it." Rand also created two love interests for Roark Vesta Dunning and Dominique Francon.
Rand's characterizations flowed directly from her architectural research, her knowledge of current events, and her developing opposition to American liberalism. To give Roark form and specificity she drew on the career of the modernist pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright, whose avant-garde style she admired. Numerous details of Wright's life as described in his autobiography would recur in the novel, and she gave Roark a cranky, embittered mentor in the vein of Wright's own teacher, Louis Sullivan. Second-hander Peter Keating was based on a contemporary mediocrity, the popular architect Thomas Hastings. As Rand noted excitedly after reading a book on Hastings, "If I take this book and Wright's autobiography, there is practically the entire story."
Other titans appeared in the novel as well. Gail Wynand was modeled after William Randolph Hearst, whose career Rand had closely followed. She was struck in particular by his failed bids for mayor and governor of New York. Here was a man who claimed great influence but had little success in actually grasping the levers of power. Hearst had been thoroughly humbled, Rand thought, overlooking his two terms in Congress and the authority he continued to wield through his media empire. To her Hearst's strength was a chimera. His power was not his own, but could be granted or withheld by the masses whom he served. In her novel Wynand would illustrate this principle, with his failings contrasted starkly to Roark's independence and agency.
Her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, promised to transform Rand's supposedly nonpolitical novel into a sharp satire on the leftist literary culture of 1930 New York. One evening she and Frank reluctantly accompanied two friends to a a talk by the British socialist Harold Laski at the leftist New School for Social Research. When Laski took the stage Rand was thrilled. Here was Ellsworth Toohey himself! She scribbled frantically in her notebook, sketching out a brief picture of Laski's face and noting his every tic and mannerism. She and Frank went back twice more in the following evenings.
Most of Rand's notes on Laski's lecture, and her resultant description of Toohey, showcased her distate for all things feminine. Rand was repelled by the women in the New School audience, whom she characterized as sexless, unfashionable, and unfeminine. She and Frank scoffed at their dowdy lisle stockings, trading snide notes back and forth. Rand was infuriated most by the "intellectual vulgarity" of the audience, who seemed to her half-wits unable to comprehend the evil of Laski's socialism. What could be done about such a "horrible, horrible, horrible" spectacle, besides "perhaps restricting higher education, particularly for women?" she asked in her notes on the lecture. This misogyny rubbed off on Rand's portrait of Toohey, who was insipidly feminine, prone to gossip, and maliciously catty "in the manner of a woman or nance." Through Toohey, Rand would code leftism as fey, effeminate, and unnatural, as opposed to the rough-hewn masculinity of Roark's individualism.
Before she saw Laski, Toohey was an abstracted antithesis of Roark. But a socialist intellectual fit her purposes just as well, even as the characterization shifted the novel ever closer to a commentary on current events. Laski was not the sole inspiration, for Rand also used bits of the American critics Heywood Broun, Lewis Mumford, and Clifton Fadiman to round out Toohey's persona. Fitting Toohey so squarely into the leftist literary culture signaled Rand's emerging dual purposes for the book and ensured that when it was finally published, the novel would be understood as a political event as much as a literary achievement.
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The one organized anti-Roosevelt group, the Liberty League, was a secretive cabal of wealthy businessmen hoping to wrest control of government from the masses. Although the Liberty League made several awkward attempts at populism, it's main financial backers were the conservative Du Pont family. Tarred as fascists after several of the group's members praised Mussolini and called for an American dictator, the Liberty League disintegrated within a few years of its founding.
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These spontaneous sessions began to shake Rand loose from her preconceived notions about American voters. Before campaigning, Rand had been suspicious of American democracy. Instead of government of, for, and by the people, she thought the state should be "a means for the convenience of the higher type of man." Her earliest fiction, heavy with contempt for the masses, reflected this sensibility. Now she found herself impressed by the questions her working-class audience asked and their responsiveness to her capitalist message. She said of her timee in the theaters, "[It] supported my impression of the common man, that they really were much better to deal with than the office and the Madison Avenue Republicans." It seemed that the faceless crowds she condemned, rather than their social and intellectual betters, understood the dangers of the Roosevelt administration.
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The result was Rand's thirty-two-page "Manifesto of Individualism," the first full statement of her political and philosophical beliefs.
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She praised the American Revolution as a rare historic moment when men worked collectively to establish "the freedom of the Individual and the establishment of a society to ensure this freedom," and called "give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry's dramatic words in support of the American Revolution, "the statement of a profound truth."
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After another discussion of her novel, Watkins [[Her Agent]] told Rand, "You always ask for reasons. I can't always give reasons. I just go by feelings." The statement came as a "traumatic shock" to Rand. To her it was a shameful confession of personal and intellectual inadequacy. She could tolerate criticism of her book that was carefully and consciously justified, but to be attacked on the basis of unspecified feelings galled her. Watkins's confession also destroyed any possibility of an ongoing professional relationship. Rand told her as much in a long philosophical letter announcing that she no longer wanted Watkins to represent her work.
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Swayed by Roark's argument, the jury promptly votes unanimously to acquit. The jury proved critical, helping Rand democratize her vision and reaffirm the basic wisdom of the free-thinking, independent American. Although none of the jurors aren't the history-making creator that Roark represents, Rand makes clear that they can share in his glory simply by understanding and affirming the principle of individualism.
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The Fountainhead finessed this contradiction and escaped libertarianism's fatal elitism through Rand's theory of ethics. For all her bluster, Rand's ethics were rather anodyne. Roark tells the jury, "Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same; the degree of mans independence, initiative, and personal love for his work determine his talent as a worker and his worth as a man" (681). The book's hierarchy of values is not exclusive, for anyone could join Rand's elite simply by loving their work. Instead of talking about the wealthy, she talked about the independent, thereby sidestepping social class. Inequalities or differences between characters are discussed in specific, individual terms, without references to larger social structures. Denizens of Hell's Kitchen and the city's toniest drawing rooms are evaluated by the same standard of independence.
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The Fountainhead and The Road to Serfdom were even made into comic books, a testimony to their wide appeal.
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At the end of Hayek's second chapter Rand summarized her thoughts: "Nineteenth Century Liberalism made the mistake of associating liberty, rights of man etc. with the ideas of 'fighting for the people', 'for the downtrodden,' for the poor,' etc. They made it an altruistic movement. But altruism is collectivism. That is why collectivism took the liberals over." The solution, then, was to shift the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism onto different ethical grounds that avoided altruism. Rand had a ready candidate at hand: her own system of selfishness that she had articulated in the The Fountainhead.
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The film as never produced, but Rand's encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.
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From the start she pushed Read to assume a stance that mirrored her own. She was particularly insistent that Read promote her moral views. he must explain that profit and individual gain were "the capitalist's real and proper motive" and ought to be defended as such. Otherwise, if the very motive of capitalism was "declared to be immoral, the whole system becomes immoral, and the motor of the system stops dead." It was the same criticism she had made of Hayek: a partial case for the free market was worse than no argument at all. Read was naturally more cautious. Like Rand he believed that government functions such as rent control, public education, the Interstate Commerce Commission, military training, and the Post Office should all be done by "voluntary action."
...
Rand believed that Friedman and Stigler were insincere in their arguments against rent control because they failed to invoke any moral principles to support their case. And when they did mention morality, it was to speak favorably of equality and humanitarianism. She fumed to Mullendor, "Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners ... not one one word about any kind of principles. Just expediency ... and humanitarian ... concern for those who can find no houses." In addition to her eight-page letter to Mullendore, replete with exclamation points and capitalized sentences, Rand sent a short note to Read. She called the pamphlet "the most pernicious thing ever issued by an avowedly conservative organization" and told him she could have no further connection with FEE. To Rose Wilder Lane she described the incident as "a crushing disappointment," adding, "It is awfully hard to see a last hope go."
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Paterson responded with more New York gossip, including a tidbit about Don Levine's bizarre new concept of competing government agencies. It was the first glimmer of anarcho-capitalism, Rand's bete noire in the years ahead. But now Levine's strange views simply signaled to both Rand and Paterson that his newest venture was not worth supporting.
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While driving back from New York, she and Frank visited Ouray, Colorado, a small town tucked in a seam of mountains. Right away Rand knew Ouray would be the model for her capitalist Shangri-la, the valley where her strikers would create their own utopian society.
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Rand now had two arguments to deploy against anti-trust. The first was her moralistic argument that antitrust laws unfairly punished the successful. The second was Mises's contention that monopolies were not the fault of business, but of government regulation. Rand could therefore cite monopolies as evidence that the United States had never experienced true free-market capitalism. As Paterson had before, Mises helped Rand strengthen, define, and defend her ideas.
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Rand and Mises argued over conscription, which Rand saw as tantamount to slavery. Mises, his eyes on history, argued that only conscription could prevent the rise of dangerous mercenary armies.
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During the two years she struggled to write Galt's speech, Rand's pronounced nervous tension wreaked havoc on those closest to her.
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Chambers was also unsettled by Rand's godless capitalism, which might be even worse than godless Communism. Where Rand saw the free market as an essentially spiritual realm and competition as the meaning of life itself, Chambers saw only a heartless machine world. In the 1940s Rand had been one of man intellectuals seeking a plausible grounding for individual rights and democracy. By the 1950s conservatives had found an answer in religion. Defining Communism as essentially atheistic, they were able to frame Christianity and capitalism as natural partners in the fight against government regulation. If the two impulses were paradoxical or contradictory at base, that was the very point, for conservatives wanted the free market set within an explicitly Christian society. Only religion could balance the "materialism" of free enterprise, with the Christian emphasis on charity, humility, and equality blunting the harsher edges of laissez-faire. But now Rand appeared to be tacking back to the earlier nineteenth-century vision of Darwinian capitalist competition, absent the sooting balm of Christian egalitarianism.
Atlas Shrugged represented a fundamental challenge to the new conservative synthesis, for it argued explicitly that a true morality of capitalism would be diametrically opposed to Christianity. By spinning out the logic of capitalism to its ultimate conclusion Atlas Shrugged showcased the paradox of defending free market capitalism while at the same time advocating Christianity. Rand's ideas threatened to undermine or redirect the whole conservative venture. Even worse, given her popularity, there was the significant danger that Rand would be seized on by liberals as a spokesperson for conservatism. She might then confirm the liberal stereotype that conservatism was nothing more than an ideological cover for the naked class interests of the haves. For all these reasons, Rand would have to be cast out of the respectable right. More than just a literary judgement, the National Review article was an exercise in a talbet keeping. The review signified Buckley's breaking with the secular libertarian tradition Rand represented and his efforts to create a new ideological synthesis that gave religion a paramount role. It was as Nathan had foreseen: Rand and the conservatives were not on the same side.
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Instead, the academic conference became the grounds for a bitter final breakup between Rothbard and the Rand circle. Tensions had been building over Rothbard's stubborn allegiance to anarchism. After almost six months of regular contact Rand and the Collective expected Rothbard to be convinced that anarchism was unworkable. In July 1958 a special Saturday night session was scheduled for Rothbard and Rand to debate. By then Rothbard had realized, "I hated the guts of [Nathan] and Ayn and the rest of the gang."
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To Peikoff, Kant's argument that the means of perception structured humans' sense of reality undermined objective reality, reason, and all absolutes. Kan's ideas had opened the philosophical gates to destructive ideas lik relativism and existentialism, which created the poisonous atmosphere that greeted Atlas Shrugged.
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The reaction to Rand fell neatly into a pattern established years before. Since the advent of Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin's famously anti-Communist senator, liberals had trouble treating conservative ideas as legitimate. A prominent 1955 volumen, The Radical Right, set the tone by treating libertarianism and anti-Communism as psychological syndromes, an expression of paranoia or status anxiety. Accordingly liberal commentators derided Rand her following as a fringe element with little to contribue to the nation's intellectual life. But Rand's popularity appeared impervious to attack by the most esteemed members of the establishment. The more guardians of respectability criticized Rand, the more irresistible she became to conservatives who loved thumbing their noses at the ascendant liberal order.
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As the campaign wore on, Rand was outraged to see Goldwater caricatured as racist by the mass media. It was true that both she and Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a litmus test of liberal acceptability, but neither she nor Goldwater was truly prejudiced. Rand inveighed against racism as "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," and Goldwater had integrated his family's business years before and was even a member of the NAACP. But Goldwater's libertarianism trumped his racial liberalism. He was among a handful of senators who voted against the bill, a sweeping piece of legislation intended to address the intractable legacy of racial discrimination in the South. Goldwater's vote was based on principles he had held for years. A firm supporter of state's rights, he was alarmed at the expansive powers granted the federal government under the act. Following the analysis of his friends William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, he also believed the act was unconstitutional because it infringed on private property rights. In the scrum of electoral politics such distinctions were academic. Goldwater's vote went down as a vote segregation.
...
But she was equally appealed by the act's clauses II and VII, which forbade discrimination in public accommodations and employment. If the act passed it would be the "worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history," she wrote. Early civil rights activists who struggled against government-enforced segregation drew Rand's approval. Now she criticized "Negro leaders" for forfeiting their moral case against discrimination by "demanding special race privileges." Rand considered race a collectivist fiction, a peripheral category to be subsumed into her larger philosophy...
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... Rand proposed a new book, The Fascist New Frontier, after her essay of the same name.
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The title was intentionally provocative but also reflect Rand's deep revulsion at the Kennedy administration. The famous line from Kennedy's inaugural speech, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, " inflamed Rand. (Milton Friedman also found this sentiment objectionable, attacking Kennedy's statement in the very first sentence of Capitalism and Freedom.) In the title essay she juxtaposed excerpts from speeches by Kennedy and Hitler to demonstrate their similarity; to her, both were collectivists who demanded that men live for the state.
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She repeated the idea in Atlas Shrugged and For the New Intellectual, making it a basic tenet of her ethics: "No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others." Physical force was a core concern of Rand's political philosophy, for she held that rights could only be violated by physical force.
...
Although it sounded straightforward, Rand's definition of force was nuanced. She defined fraud, extortion, and breach of contract as force, thus enabling government to establish a legal regime that would create a framework for commerce. Critically, Rand also considered taxation to be an "initiation of physical force" since it was obtained, ultimately, "at the point of a gun." This led her to a radical conclusion: that taxation itself was immoral.
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Ted Turner, then a little-known media executive, personally paid for 248 billboards scattered throughout the South that read simply "Who is John Galt?" Ten years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged she was at the apex of her fame.
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Nathan closed with a strong attack against another group of Rand readers, the "craven parasites" who sought to use Objectivism for non-Objectivist ends. Into this category fell anyone who advocated political anarchism and anyone who tried to recruit NBI students into schemes for a new free market nation or territory.
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In 1962 Rothbard published his two-volume, Man, Economy, and the State, an exegesis of his mentor Ludwig Von Mises's thought. The book was written with a concluding set of chapters advocating anarchism, which Rothbard's sponsors at the Volker Fund quietly excised. Rothbard took his ideas to a more receptive audience, founding a magazine called Left and Right that hoped to attract student rebels from both ends of the political spectrum. Although anarchism was a minority position, to say the least, the very idea of it infuriated Rand. But some students saw anarchism as a the logical next step after Objectivism. Others, infatuated with Rand's idea of a capitalist utopia, hatched elaborate plans for a new libertarian Atlantis. A truly free market society could be found in uninhabited lands or even established on offshore floating platforms, they believed. Rand found these schemes ludicrous.
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Rand saw the draft as a sure sin that freedom was already in grave danger. She was deeply opposed to the draft and its implications for society. "Of all the statist violations of individual rights ... the military draft is the worst," she told her audience. "It negates man's fundamental right, the right to life, and establishes the fundamental principle of statism - that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time."
...
Framed as a statist violation of rights, conscription fit seamlessly into her larger opposition to coercion and the initiation of force.
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The schisms of the 1968 were a disaster for Rand but a boon for many of her readers.
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No longer "students of Objectivism," those who liked Rand were free to call themselves Objectivists or libertarians. They could follow the logic of their antistatism all the way to the newly popular position of anarchism or, with a nod to Rand, anarcho-capitalism. Rand's works were to potent and too popular to be confined or controlled, even by their creator.
...
The greatest contribution of Rand's Objectivism was to moor the libertarian movement to the right side of the political spectrum. In turn, libertarians kept Rand's ideas actively circulating in the years after NBI's demise. Rand denounced libertarian appropriation of her work, never accepting that with her success came a commensurate loss of control. Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt - they no longer belonged to Rand exclusively. She had set them loose in the world, and their fortunes were no longer tied to hers.
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Despite its stated orientation, The Rational Individualist published the first serious challenge to Rand's hegemony, an "Open Letter to Ayn Rand
by Roy Childs Jr., a student at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Childs admired Rand but questioned her stance on government as he gravitated toward an anarchist position. With his letter, sent to Rand on July 4, 1969, Childs repudiated Objectivism and debuted as the enfant terrible of anarcho-capitalism. Boldly Childs opened with a straightforward declaration: "The purpose of this letter is to convert you to free market anarchism." Relying heavily on Objectivist concepts and Randian words and phrases, Childs argued that Rand's advocacy of a limited state was contradicted by her own philosophy. Her(sp) told her, "Your political philosophy cannot be maintained without contradiction that, in fact , you are advocating the maintenance of an institution - the state - which is a moral evil." Beyond offering an ethical critique, Childs also turned Rand's terminology against her, arguing that her idea of a limited government that did not initiate force as a "floating abstraction." According to Childs, all governments must initiate force to survive as governments and maintain their monopoly on coercion. And if the initiation of force was forbidden in both the Objectivist and libertarian worlds, then the state itself must be opposed. Childs lectured Rand, "Your approach to the matter is not yet radical, not yet fundamental: it is the existence of the state itself which must be challenged by the new radicals. It must be understood that the state is an unnecessary evil. Rand was unimpressed by Childs's logic. Her only response was to cancel his subscription to The Objectivist.
...
How was it possible to oppose the initiation of force (a key Randian tenet), yet still defend a minimal state? R.W. Bradford, later an editor or Liberty magazine, remembered, "A few were willing to accept her obfuscations on the issue, but the overwhelming majority were unwilling to evade the problem. Virtually all these people became anarchists." To many libertarians tutored in Rand's absolutist style of thought, the steps were simple: the state was bad, so why not abolish it entirely? Childs put it this way: "As in ehtics there are only two sides to any question - the good and the evil - so too are the only two logical sides to the political question of the state: either you are for it, or you are against it."
...
... Atlas Shrugged had indelibly etched the idea of a stateless capitalist utopia onto the right-wing psyche. Anarchists were right to recognize that Rand's ideas had first opened them to the possibility of radical antistatism. By denying the morality of both conscription and taxation, Objectivism de-legitimized two fundamental functions of any state. At the same time Rand's fiction suggested that an alternative world was within reach. Once imagined, Galt's Gulch could never be forgotten.
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On the third day of the conference [[YAF Annual Conference (1969)]] libertarian frustration bubbled over when their anti-draft resolution went down to defeat. Not only did the convention reject the libertarian plank, but in the plank that passed they included a pointed clause condemning draft resistance and the burning of draft cards. The convention's decision to endorse abolition of the draft, but not resistance to it, was critical. It signaled that there were definite limits to YAF''s antistatism. The organization would remain firmly within the political establishment. Rhetorical support of limited government was fine, but anarchism and radical libertarianism were beyond the pale.
In the face of this insult, the libertarians could no longer resist their innate impulse to challenge authority. A small pack of students gathered in a conspiratorial knot. One of the group had a facsimile of his draft card. (Apparently the conservative within him lived still, for he was unwilling to sacrifice the actual card.) Another dissident seized a microphone and announced to the assembly that any person had a right to defend himself against violence, including state violence. Then "he raised a card, touched it with a flame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash." The symbol of YAF, a hand holding the torch of liberty, had been deftly satirized and openly mocked.
After a few moments of shocked silence, pandemonium erupted on the convention floor. "Kill the commies" yelled the patriotic majority. Amid shouts, shoving, and fisticuffs, the traitorous facsimile draft card burners were ejected from the convention floor. Around three hundred of their ideological brethren followed the rebels out of the convention, and out of Young Americans for Freedom. A chasm now separated the libertarians and the traditionalists. By the end of the year a substantial number of YAF chapters had either left the organization or had their charters rescinded. California alone lost twenty-four chapters.
This libertarian secession was the culmination of a dynamic that had plagued modern American conservatism since its emergence earlier in the century. Postwar conservatives had crafted a careful synthetic ideology with a productive contradiction at its core: the tension between free market capitalism and cultural traditionalism. Clashes over the balance of power had broken out regularly ever since, with Rand's excommunication by National Review among the most prominent. The cultural upheavals of the late 1960s were a watershed, for they made stark the difference between laissez-faire libertarians and tradition-bound conservatives. Taking inspiration from the revolutionary language of the New Left, libertarians finally had enough confidence and strength to identify themselves as a distinct political movement. They were no longer conservatives, but following in Rand's footsteps they would remain part of the right.
Immediately after the convention Murray Rothbard and his new comrade Karl Hess attempted to pull the exodus of libertarians to the left, but it was Rand who emerged as a more decisive influence.
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Rand had little appreciation for her new fan base. During her annual public appearances she called libertarians "scum," "intellectual cranks," and "plagiarists." Because she defined Objectivism as her personal property, she viewed libertarian use of her ideas as theft. What others would see as tribute or recognition of her work, Rand defined as "cashing in" or plagiarism. "If such hippies hope to make me their Marcuse, it will not work," she wrote sourly. Her comment was not far off the mark, for Rand's writings were a sort of ur-text for the libertarian movement. They could be challenged, interpreted, reinterpreted, adopted, celebrated - but never ignored. Whether she liked it or not, libertarians would always consider Rand a vital part of their intellectual heritage.
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As the joke went, "If you put half a dozen libertarians into a room together, you will eventually end up with four factions, 2 conspiracies, 3 newsletters, 2 splinter groups and 4 withdrawals of sanction!"
...
Rand helped libertarians create a cohesive subculture without sacrificing autonomy or independence.
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... 'Freedom' is the bill of goods we try to sell to the flower children and the leftists." Continuing in a Randian vein, he noted, "if we wish to advocate capitalism, we must advocate it from a moral stand - we must assert that production is aright for man, that rational self-interest is right for man, that aside from (and in addition to) the fact that man should be free, he should also be selfish and productive. Here the restrictions that Rand put on libertarianism were clear. Rand had made capitalism a sacrosanct ideal for most libertarians, an allegiance that rapidly marginalized leaders like Karl Hess who hoped to draw libertarians to the left.
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More substantively Rand's patriotism and her reverence for the Founding Fathers were controversial in a movement that considered the Constitution a coercive document (because it claimed justification over even those who had not signed). Rand's account of the Apollo 11 launch crystalized this difference for many. In the Objectivist she described how she had been invited to a VIP viewing of the rocket launch. Shepherded past the masses within three miles of the take-off, Rand was awestruck. Apollo 11 was "the concretized abstraction of man's greatness," and as she saw the rocket rise she had "a feeling that was not triumph: but more : the feeling that that white object's unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe." It was a masterful piece of writing that become one of Rand's personal favorites.
...
What libertarian critics of the "moon jaunt" missed was how Rand's appreciation of Apollo 11 was tied to her ever=present worry that the United States was going backward, regressing to Petrograd circa 1920. Her fears were stirred anew by the emergence of the environmental movement, which she viewed as a virulent atavism that would drag mankind back to primitive existence. In her 1970 lecture to the Ford Hall Forum she attacked environmentalism as "the Anti-Industrial Revolution."
...
"Clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists' crusade.... it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy," she told her listeners.
Nature was not benevolent to Rand, but a force to be kept at bay by man's reason.
...
In this context Apollo 11 stood out for Rand as a bright sign of hope; it was not the powers of the state that she celebrated, but the wonders of technology and human achievement.
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... foreshadowed the emerging culture of cyberspace, which was strikingly libertarian from the beginning.
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What infuriated Rand the most was that feminism, as she saw it, was a claim based on weakness, a rebellion "against strength as such, by those who neither attempt nor intend to develop it." Feminists elevated their gender above their individuality and intelligence and then expected unearned success, to be enforced by government quotas and regulations.
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The real rift between Rand and the libertarians came with the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971. The party's founder, David Nolan was an MIT graduate and Rand fan. He was galvanized to action by Nixon's announcement of wage and price controls, intended to curb inflation. (By contrast Rand endorsed Nixon twice, regarding him as the lesser of two evils.) Nolan and a few friends announced plans for a libertarian national convention, held in Denver the following year. At the convention libertarians organized themselves into a loose network of state parties, coordinated by an elected central committee. they adopted organizational bylaws and a platform calling for withdrawal from Vietnam, draft amnesty, and abolition of victimless crimes and the Federal Communications Commission. The Party's statement of principles declared, in hyperbolic language, "We the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual." By liberation standards the Party was a smashing success. At the June convention the Party claimed one thousand members and doubled its numbers by election day. By the end of 1973 it had three thousand members, with organizations in thirty-two states.
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Although the Party earned only 3,671 votes, it gained one electoral vote - and national media coverage - when a renegade Virginia elector, Roger MacBride, cast his vote for Hospers-Nathan. The nominally Republican MacBride had been tutored in the fundamentals of libertarianism b no less a luminary than Rose Wilder Lane, who considered him her adopted grandson and made him her literary heir. His rebellion made Nathan the first woman to receive an electoral college vote, an event that drew television news trucks to the normally said Richmond Capital building where electors voted. They Party's quixotic decision to run candidates had turned out to be a savvy move, garnering national news coverage far beyond what was warranted by the campaign. MacBride became an instant hero to Party members and sympathizers and would go on to be the Party's next presidential candidate.
Below is the track from our adventure at the Megamaze. I didn't charge my phone the night before, so the battery died while recording the track and missed the last portion of the maze.
So I recently read Grand Strategy by Charles Hill and thought it was AWESOME. It definitely increased my reading list quite a bit. I did find it lacking in an examination of the post state or anti-state world view, as exemplified by Rothbard, Nozick, Rand, or Nock - instead focusing on a theocratic world view as the antithesis of the Westphalian system. I highly recommend this book, it's a relatively quick read and superbly written.
Below you will find a list of passages that jumped out at me while reading, either stories I want to reference, things I disagree with, or thoughts that I found especially enlightening.
Page 4/5
... the modern international state system, launched in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religion-inflamed Thirty Years' War and which by the mid-twentieth century had become the recognized system through which states on every continent had agreed to conduct their official interactions.
....
The genius of the 1648 Westphalian system - the basis for today's international order, such as it is - was its one big "hedgehog" idea: that there must be many "foxes," organized through agreed procedures, to accommodate human diversity.
Page 7
To put it as Paul Nitze would, in a "logic-chain," it is that 1) statecraft is protean, incessantly assuming different forms and presenting new predicaments beyond the ken of established methodologies; 2) some of the greatest classical texts - the Iliad, theAeneid - deal with such challenges through their unboundedness, intertwining what would later be labeled as history, theology, psychology, literature, and philosophy before those modern disciplines were formalized; 3) literature, however, largely has remained unbounded, able to probe realms of statecraft which other disciplines have placed off-limits; and 4) some major works conventionally cataloged as nonfiction have jumped over methodological walls to become "fellow-travelers" of literature.
Page 16
The line that is crossed, from precivilization to civilization, has at least six concepts of continuing importance. The first is the shift from the family as the seat of governance to the state. Private interests, however, essential to human flourishing and societal productivity, may not over-top the public good. Status, largely related to family or clan, would in progressive societies shift "from status to contract." Personal and family honor, when calling for "taking the law into your own hands," gives way to justice, administered publicly. To administer justice properly, the integrity of the process must be maintained; regardless of the substance of the case, an ill-prepared court case must be dismissed even though the wrongdoer goes unpunished. Finally, there is marriage as an institution of civilization: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Status or kin relationship is superseded by contract: the marriage vows.
Page 28
Socrates, in Plato's Republic, intellectually attempts to design a new polis. The result is repulsive, perhaps an ironic demonstration of how pure intellect in its search for political utopia can produce a tyranny that would drain humanity of its capacity for virtue. Xenophon takes another route, literally the road of an actually army on the march. His polis emerges not from theory but from practice. The Ten Thousand achieve a new polity that works - but once they are safe from the Persians their political unity collapses. The result is a return to the low and disgraceful starting point of the saga. Anabasis, like Plato's Republic, shows the limits of politics.
Page 34/35
The Greek strategy is snakelike. Troy's King Priam asks Sinon directly:
But truly tell, was for Force or Guile
Or some Religious End, you raised the Pile?
Sinon, the gifted liar, says it was religious. Because Ulysses had stolen Minerva's image from her temple (the Palladium), the Greeks had built this great wooden horse in tribute to her, to assuage her anger. This will please Minerva, Sinon says, and she will soon help the Greeks return here to continue the war against Troy. If you Trojans violate the horse, Minerva will turn even more harshly against you. If you were to take the horse inside your walls to protected it, then you Trojans would prevail over all Greece. That's why, Sinon explains, the Greeks built the horse so large that it would not fit through your city gates. Although Sinon knows the horse is made of pine, he in passing refers to it as made of maple. This adds authenticity to this claim to have been a victim of the Greeks, cast out, and not part of their plot to take Troy by guile. Yet Sinon knows quite well that it is made of pine. This, it must be admitted, is guile indeed: a complicated and persuasive story. Sinon has presented a brilliant falsehood and made it plausible by embedding in it some facts known to the Trojans from their own experience or widely accepted reports.
...
So the Trojans, following Sinon's false advice, vote to bring the horse inside their walls, believing that to do so will give them the upper hand against the Greeks. Because of the size of the horse, the Trojans have to break open their own walls in order to make a hole big enough to get it through. This is somewhere around step six or seven in the Greek scheme. The Trojans by this point had to have believed seven levels, and about four subcategories, of Greek lies before the point of their construction of so large a horse comes into play. So the Trojans knock down their own walls and put wheels on the horse's feet, and it slides snakelike into Troy.
The rest is history. The Greek fleet slides snakelike toward the Trojan shore tacitae per amica silentia lunae (secretly under the benign silence of the moon). The Trojans sleep soundly. Sinon secretly unlocks the pine bolts of the trapdoor of the Horse, and down a cable slide Ulysses and the Greek soldiers.
Page 37/38
The greek grand strategy at the outset was not impressive. Marriage and xenia had been violated when Paris took Helen away. But to launch an expeditionary force to lay siege to a far-off citadel was far from promising. You would be away from your base. Your long logistic line could not be maintained and you could not easily live off the invaded land for long. As Clausewitz would later teach, the defensive position would have the stronger hand. What were the Greek assets? Achilles the best fighter and Ulysses/Odysseus the best schemer. But Achilles was always a problem, and after ten years of war he was killed. The at left three options: 1) Continue the siege with no hope of success; 2) Quit the war and go home; 3) Try something else: a stratagem of deception. Given the wily Ulysses as an asset, option 3 was the clear choice.
Surelyy the Trojans would anticipate something like this; they new about Ulysses and his reputation for sratagems. So a plausible - indeed ingenious - context had to be concocted in order to throw the Trojans off the trail:
A defector/traitor with an explanation for his turncoat decision: he had lost favor with the inner circle of leadership. This would be believable because the Greeks, a nation lacking unity, were always squabbling and defecting.
A second layer of narrative that certainly was true: the Greeks were weary after ten years of war and wanted to go home.
A third level, perhaps most compelling of all to the culture of the time and place. Everyone knew that the Greeks at the start of the war had to sacrifice one of their own, Iphigenia, in order to get favorable winds to carry their fleet to Troy. So the false story that the Delphic oracle required them to carry out another human sacrifice in order to get favorable winds to carry their ships home from Troy instantly made sense to the Trojans. It made the war into a "ring composition." (In fact, the whole tale Aeneas tells Dido is a contest, ring-composition-style, of sacrifices, six or seven in sequence, like a game of musical chairs, to see which side's sacrifice wins at the end.)
Fourth, the Greeks would sacrifice the defector because, after all, he already was out of favor. This gave added credibility to his story.
To all this was added another dimension, also based on a known fact; that Ulysses had made off with the palladium of Minerva (the shrine-image in her temple). So it seemed to make some sense that, to ensure that Minerva would not in anger thwart the Greek plan of withdrawal, they had constructed a giant wooded horse and dedicated it to her. And to make sure that the Trojans would not take the horse for their own and thereby shift Minerva's favor to themselves, the Greeks had built it so large that it could not be fit through the gates of Troy. (Here is something like Br'er Rabbit's briar patch ploy: fervently assert what you desperately do not want to happen in order to make sure it does happen.)
Here then is the new strategy designed by the Greeks:
it replaces a problematic and unsuccessful earlier strategy;
it takes full advantage of the Greeks' strongest remaining asset;
it provides a comprehensive story line which their opponents would be eager to adopt;
it is anchored in previously known facts about Greeks;
it is in accord with previous assumptions about Greeks;
and it is shored up by appropriately related religious practices.
All points are covered: individual, societal, divine; historical, military, psychological, emotional, and intellectual. It is carefully phased to unfold over time. The enemy's suspicions and objections have been foreseen and preemptively neutralized.
* Page 41/42 *
Aeneas is not an Iliadic warrior arousing himself to fury in battle to gain glory. He is not a Socratic citizen of the Athenian polis debating questions of justice and the good. Aeneas is dedicated to a mission for civilization and world order, and must sacrifice his personal interests - most dramatically his affair with Dido - for that grater good. The price civilization exacts is steep.
Page 44
To act in accordance with nature is Hellenic; to subdue nature in the service of the state is Roman.
...
Above all, Anchises tells Aeneas, the purpose of gaining power is to create and administer an international system that will crown peace with civilization.
Page 46
In complicated diplomatic steps, Aeneas seeks allies. After one effort fails, he concludes a pact with Evander, a tricky business, for Evander is of Greek origin. Associations are starting to form for reasons other than ethnicity or lineage. Accordingly Virgil enlists the greatest Greek here into the Trojan-Roman cause. Aeneas becomes a second Hercules, and in the far future, Augustus will be a third Hercules, slaying the monstrous Antony and Cleopatra as hercules slew the monster Cacus. There is a subtext of civilization versus barbarism here. Beheading one's enemies is the ultimate savagery. Marc Antony had the murdered Cicero's head displayed on the rostra. Augustus himself had Brutus's head cut off and displayed. Cacus, a monster who dwelt on the Aventine hill, hung the heads of victims on his gates. Hercules, for one of his twelve labors, slew Cacus on the future site of Rome, an act filled with Virgilian portent. Virgil is here calling upon Augustus, who, like Hercules, would have to defeat the enemies of world order and to preside over an international system with wisdom and justice. In 2001 terrorism was likened to Cerberus, the watchdog of Hades, who in Hercules's twelfth labor sprouted new heads to replace those lopped of.
...
The shield of Achilles depicted a world which cycles in plane, in alternation from peace to war and back again. In contrast, the shield of Aeneas spirals forward in time, more history than myth - moving upward toward a culmination in the future. When Aeneas shoulders this shield, he is taking up the burden of the future (in contrast to his shouldering the burden of the past when carrying his father out of Troy). Aeneas is no longer the son of Anchises; he is about to become the father of his country. There is no paradox here as there was with the shield of Achilles: Aeneas willingly takes up this visible representation of the grand strategy that will lead to Imperial Rome. The shield in the Aeneid, like the cutting of trees deep in the forest, tells of what can be told only through literature.
Big-power compromises are tried and fail, a cease-fire is set and then broken. Finally Jupiter takes a mediating role, and a grand compromise is struck with Juno. She will give up her efforts to block the Trojan mission to found Rom on condition that the Trojans give up their language, their customs, their national dress, and even the Trojan name itself. They will remain Trojans despite the loss of their state, but they will have to assimilate to their new land and culture.
The final contest pits two world-historical forces. Turnus represents the heroic code of Achilles: life is brief and death invetible, so extend your fame beyond death by feats of valor. Aeneas represents a new code: the fight is not for yourself but for civic code, for posterity, and victory is to be followed by magnanimity, generosity, and peaceful reconciliation with your enemy. The Aeneid is sprinkled with scenes that show the inadequacy and uselessness of the heroic code; now Aeneas himself will endeavor to leave it behind.
Page 62
It would result in the Edict of Nantes of 1598, giving legal recognition to minority religious rights, and make Henri IV the most revered king in French history.
Montaigne turns inward yet outward at the same time, investigating "the human condition" as universal, recognizing that as religious differences give rise to widening confrontations, there exists a global dimension in which all might be resolved. Montaigne is one of the first to critique Europe's actions in a global arena. As Emerson recognized, the report the world that Montaigne gave "was horizontal, not erect." This was no soft-headed one-worldism; Montaigne mocked the idea of one natural law. There is no consensus gentium. Contemplation of the diversity of peoples now becoming known to European explorers "will not result in a single conclusion which is inscribed beforehand in the fabric of human nature. The most that will emerge are the various preferences. The ultimate consequences of this point of view could not take effect in age that was deeply religious. But they emerged more and more with every weakening of the religious tie and every consequent growth of materialist beliefs.
Page 68/69
The Iliadic Greek warrior Odysseus - "Ulysses" in Shakespeare - declares that the established ways are coming apart. Rank-oder and established hierarchy have lost respect. The cosmos itself is in disarray "The specialty of rule hath been neglected":
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form
Office and custom, in all line of order ....
But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny
What raging of the ea, shaking of earth
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states.
Theatergoers might assume that Shakespeare was decrying the decay of the traditional structure. It's not that simple. Troilus and Cressida is a relentlessly intellectual examination of statecraft, a sour and often cynical work which furthers the demolition of the old courtly, chivalric, and hierarchical system. We may admire the Trojans, who exemplify the brave and noble past, and we may be revolted by the Machiavellian Greeks and their caustic "reason," but this, Shakespeare tells us, is how it's going to be; something new will be needed to replace the collapse of the old order.
Page 70/71
Diplomacy having failed to win Achilles' return to the Greek forces, Ulysses contrives a modern ploy - to ignore him while advancing the Machiavellian maxim that reputation matters more than reality. Achilles and Patroclus stand at the entrance to their tent; Agamemnon and Ulysses pretend to ignore them. Achilles:
What, comes the general to speak with me?
You know my mind: I'll fight no more 'gainst Troy
They ignore him. Achilles calls out to Ulysses, "What are you reading?" A clever Shakespearean twist: an Illiadic warrior reading a book. Ulysses is perusing a Platonic dialogue which argues:
That no man is the lord of anything
Though in and of him that be much consisting,
Till he communicate his parts to others.
Deeds, Achilles is made to understand, are discounted if no new ones are forthcoming. Achilles having taken himself out of combat, the Greeks will turn to Ajax as their champion.
Page 77
Before the Thirty Years' War there were hundreds of small political units in Europe, overlaid by various degrees of imperial power. A state-making process had been under way for a few hundred years, its key attributes being strong central sovereignty and clearly demarcated borders. Only in Germany, where the Holy Roman Empire blocked the modern state, and in Italy, where small city-states resisted political aggregation, was the state-making process immobilized. The Thirty Years' War would change this, its seemingly endless horrors demanding new ideas and new modes of behavior. Hugo de Groot, called Grotius, published his seminal work Dejure Belli ac Pacis (The Law of War and Peace) in 1625. He wrote it, he said, "to assuage, as far as I could, that savagery, unworthy of Christians, and even of men, in making and waging war" - the bestial scenes he saw in the early stages of the Thirty Years' War.
...
It would be recognized as the first treatise of international law, a work called into being by the profoundly felt need to establish some accepted limits on the use of force in wartime.
Page 79
The Thirty Years' War marked a transition from feudal to modern warfare. New technologies of killing and the devastation of whole civilian populations led Grotius to state principles of "law
to govern operations in international combat. Grotius accepted war as a fact of human existence and assumed that the warring parties would be legitimate states, not governments (governments would change while states remained), each willing to abide by international law as an institution of international society. Not to do so would be "uncivilized."
This was the first expression of the doctrine of the equality of states, a cornerstone of the international state system. The state would provide a stable basis of legitimacy beyond religious allegiance and in a secular public sphere. Grotius made modern an ancient perception - that the diversity of world's peoples are nonetheless an universal society, a "family of nations," or as is said today, "an international community." His concept is in opposition to Machiavelli's and would be a rival to that Hobbes.
Page 85/86
... Schiller also portrays the crises of legitimacy of the traditional policy. The once well-ordered system of governance has become confused and crumbling; anonymous new forces are at work and out of control. Schiller himself is sternly on the side of duty and loyalty and law. Neither the emperor whom Wallenstein serves nor his own troops can understand or accept an alliance with Sweden. Wallenstein falls because he fails to reconcile his absolute, ideal good with the bond of trust that holds society together. he is guilty of not truly standing for the great cause with which he is associated. True only to himself, he betrays himself.
...
After seven years and two sets of negotiations, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed on October 24, 1648, on the thirty-year anniversary of Defenestration of Prague. For a believer in the Great Dates of History, 1648 mars the founding of the modern world order, the year in which the traditional concept of peace as a universal phenomenon in God's keeping was replaced by the idea of peace as a relationship between states. The key was a change in the idea of war. Religion had been the center of the struggle to manage world affairs and so produced ever bloodier wars of religion until the Thirty Years' War provoked what would be called the "The Great Separation" of political and theological thought, institutionalized by the negotiators at Westphalia as the need to keep religion out of international politics. According to the Victorian historian Lecky, it worked: "Wars that were once regarded as simple duties became absolutely impossible. Alliances that were once deemed atrocious since became habitual and unchallenged. That which had long been the centre around which all other interests revolved, receded and disappeared, and a profound change in the actions of mankind indicated a profound change in their belief." This would largely hold true until the late twentieth centure. Adolf Hitler admired Wallenstein's ambition to pursue a statecraft beyond German borders. Hitler would not be a Grenzpolitier, he said, but a Raumpolitiker: he would wage war not merely to regain lost German lands but to acquire vast territories beyond. And would, he declared, impose his peace at Munster in Westphalia - to mark the end of the international state system created in 1648.
Page 97
Cromwell's personal motto was Pax Quaeritur Bello, let peace be sough through war. Milton's ode contained the to-be-famous line:
Peace hath her victories
No less renown'd than war.
* Page 98/99 *
The poem builds upon the Westphalian conclusion: keep religion out of affairs of state. In Paradise Lost, Milton may even be saying that God, once his plan is achieved, will abdicate as Cromwell gives up the kingship, as there will be no more need for hierarchical authority.
Then thou thy regal scepter shalt lay by,
For regal scepter then no more shall need,
God shall be all in all.
Satan, in Paradise Lost, describes Cromwell as a revolutionary against divine rule and the founder of parliamentary government.
...
The foundations of two opposing grand strategies now seem to be in place: God's expansiveness, aimed at self-reflection, assessment, and rectification; Satan's antagonistic defiance and self-regard. One aims at tempering power, the other at regaining, accumulating, and aggrandizing power.
Page 109/110
Marriage is the fundamental, prepolitical unit, as Aristotle explained to us. The private bond is the basis of the public good. The marriage of Adam and Eve will be the foundation stone of the republic.
At the end of the poem, Milton looks back at the Israelites on their journey in the wilderness -- their exodus to freedom. Israel is the model republic of biblical times. With the English republic gone, the Puritans would conduct their own exodus, their passage to the promised land of political reality of all Europe, including Britain, was being transformed by the rise of centralized political authority, just as Hobbes would have it. It was just then that the republican American polity took root in new England as a system not of centralized sovereign power but of a separation of powers, a republic such as Milton had envisioned.
...
The link between Paradise Lost and America has endlessly intrigued critics: if America had not been discovered, Paradise Lost would not have been written. America, the very idea of it, is transgressive, an upsetting, ongoing challenge to the way the Old World understood God's plan. The "logic chain" starts with Dante's Inferno, canto 26, when Ulysses sails out beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the limits of the known world, and for his effrontery, perishes with his entire crew. Columbus's voyages conveyed the idea of an earthly paradise; perhaps Saint Augustine was wrong and Joachim of Fiore's "Third Age" of heaven on earth was correct. Montaigne's cannibals and Shakespeare's Calibans present a dark and primitive dimension but perhaps a more authentic one.
...
In Paradise Lost the options were A) to refrain from seeking knowledge and obey God, or B) to disobey and go for the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Somewhere in this European sense of what the New World meant to the human condition may be the source of what by now has emerged as centuries of anti-Americanism. But for Milton it may be that the objective of his grand strategy is realized in the United Sates of America, which is a new Eden, a new man and woman, and a paradise lost - all set in the idea of history as "going someplace."
The peace settlement put forward at the Westphalia in 1648 challenged "Empire" as the preeminent form of governance. Increasingly, the state would be recognized as the basic component of what would become the international system of states, eventually adopted in every part of the world. But what kind of state? A state is a form or structure for governance; what would fill the form could vary widely.
Page 116
Similarly, most readers across the centuries have taken Plato's Republic seriously, rather than ionically, as it was intended. Socrates' arguments for the Kallipolis are delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, as one set of arguments after another leads his circle to fanatical results, such as the abolition of the family, women being held in common by men, and the eradication - Khmer Rouge style - of everyone over the age of ten. Swift's Houyhnhnms-Land is Plato's Republic, which Gulliver misreads as the typical modern misreads Plato. Gulliver represents the modern temptation and gives in to it, and what is truly human is overlooked, neglected, or rejected. When the ideal sate through reason alone provides all the answers, nothing is left for the soul to do.
Page 118/119
[Kant] ]With this came "critique" - reason contesting against reason to challenge the foundations of Western civilization, making it the only civilization in history whose major artists and intellects have radically questioned or rejected its core values.
The Enlightenment challenged three matters of significance:
Diplomacy: Would diplomacy be taken seriously as the legitimate mechanism for managing internal disputes? War and Peace: Is peace the overarching goal which the international system approaches, however imperfectly? Religion: What, if anything, would be the role of religion in the international state system?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared the international realm beyond his comprehension, did more than any thinker to shape it: by legitimating the authoritarian state; by inciting revolution against established order; and by mocking diplomacy as a problem-solving method.
...
[Venice] With its imperial power in decline, challenged by Islam, Venetian statecraft sought to define the social, economic, and political boundaries of the state and to strengthen those boundaries against outsiders. Ultimately, Venice failed to become a modern sate because of its inability to define and defend the first principle of sovereign statehood: clear borders.
...
Rousseau portrays diplomacy as a farcical game. His prose is light and frothy, corresponding to his critical aim of delegitimizing the sate, the international system, and the civilization they serve.
Page 122/123/124/125
In his "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality," Rousseau declares that there never has been, nor is there now, a legitimate government. Nor will there ever be a legitimate polity on earth until rousseau's guidelines are followed. Rousseau elaborates on these in his Social Contract. Each must "give all to all." Only then will "The People" be created (before this there were "people," but not "The People"). And The People's attribute would be The General Will, which would be all-determinative, although initially it would need to be guided by an exceptional genius - The Legislator, that is - someone as brilliant and unconstrained as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Here were the foundations for the idea, later developed not in witty insouciance but all grim earnestness, that all of Western civilization is an oppressive fraud and that some "Maximum Leader" or "Great Helmsman" will be needed to steer The People toward utopia on earth. And those who disagree? Well, as rousseau writes in his Social Contract, they "will be forced to be free." Humanity has been plagued by this version of the grand strategy idea ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote it down, in all his charmingly lighthearted, smiling, and cynical self-satisfaction.
...
Kant's brief essay "What Is Enlightenment?" explained that through Enlightenment, mankind would leave its "self-imposed immaturity"; that is give up any and all "foundations" - religion, tradition, and the like - that previously gave moral and intellectual guidance. With the mind liberated in this way, old problems could be though anew. Observation and reason would suffice to work out every issue from the ground up, ab initio. Kant's famous part in this effort was his "categorical imperative," a thinking-through of what might qualify as rightful human action without reference to outside authority.
Kant, admirably, took up the challenge of doing the same for international life. Political philosophers had previously devoted themselves to the quests for justice and good governance inside the borders of the political entity - polis, city-state, nation. The space beyond the borders of the sovereign states was ungoverned and unphilosophized about; Grotius's vision was as yet unrealized. The vast external realm was anarchic and could be survived only through the accumulation and wielding of power.
Hobbes regarded the international arena as ruled by the "law of nature" - nasty and brutish - and like Rousseau, he declared that his philosophy could not extend so far. Hobbes and Rousseau provided links in what Peter Gay called the great chain of treatises in political theory that began with Plato's Republic. All were attempts to provide a modern basis for governance within the boundaries of a political community; internal affairs were beyond them.
...
In Perpetual Peace, Kant thinks through the questions of international order without any reference to the Treaty of Westphalia or any other supposedly foundational principle supplied by the past, concluding by reasoning alone that yes the state is the basic unit of the international system. He then adds a new element as structurally essential: government by consent of the governed.
...
Ideally, it would seem that one universal, cosmopolitan government should arise for all the world, but politically that wouldn't work, because peoples and their lands vary so widely. There is no realistic possibility of global governance.
But the idealistic and the realistic, and the moral and the political, factors can yield an agreement on something. All human beings desire justice. For people to obtain justice, Kant says, there needs to be "publicity." Today it is called "transparency." The governed need to know what the government is doing. This means that the best form of government is a republic: a state in which sovereignty belongs to the people and which is administered by officials who in some real way are representative of, and answerable to, the people.
Then we turn to Kant's arguments in his "Definitive Articles, " in which the points made in the Supplements are translated into political recommendations. A republic is the best form of government not only because it is the best able to ensure justice for its citizens but also because it will act against inclinations to go to war. A king, Kant says, can simply order his army to march against a rival kingdom. But a republic's citizens will have a say in any such decisions. And because it is they who will provide soldiers, they will have a braking effect on the implementation of war plans.
If this is so, then the more republics, the better. An association of republics would be better still, because then the trend would be stronger for peace than war.
States also will be connected by mutual self-interest. Kant makes a utilitarian argument: "The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war .... Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from motives of morality." Put this together with the peaceful propensities of the individual republics and the world might be pointed toward the goal of "perpetual peace."
Kant's concepts amount to a form of grand strategy for an international system seeking world order, peace, justice and progress.
Page 127
Gibbon's paragraphs, chapters, and volumes demonstrate his ability to master vast amounts of material over great expanses of space and time. As one astute reader noted of Gibbon, "However far his eye may range, the clue is always firmly in his fingers, and the conclusion of the third volume was in draft before the first volume was written. This is the mark of an epic. An epic, it has been said, is a work of seriousness, amplitude (that's a Gibbonian word), and inclusiveness, an exercise of willpower over material, and an expression of the sense of an entire period or culture. If Virgil is the epic of Rome, if Dante is the epic of Christendom, if Milton is the epic of the Renaissance and Reformation, Gibbon is the epic of the Enlightenment. His work is universal, secular, skeptical, rational, and ironic - and eager to reveal the errors, misdeeds, failures, and deceptions of the past.
Page 129
And once in power, Gibbon says, Christianity's bigotry turned inward, splintering the Christian world into irreconcilable antagonist sects. For Gibbon, society, nature, and humanity, the love of pleasure and of action, tempered by reason and moderation, are the sources of happiness and virtue. But it was not in this world that the Christians wanted to make themselves useful or agreeable. Gibbon professed, ironically, to be surprised when his chapters on Christianity caused an uproar. He had thought, he declared, "that an age of light and liberty would receive, without scandal, an inquiry into the human causes of the process and establishment of Christianity."
...
Cicero gave Gibbon a glimpse of what politics should strive to create: a republic. When he read Cicero, "I breathed the spirit of freedom, and I imbibed from his precepts and examples the public and private sens of a man." ... Cicero sets out an ideal of excellence and insists that the ideal can be realized through a self-imposed discipline in which the passions are subjected to the control of reason. At one extreme is the oppression of tyranny; at the other is the anarchy of perfect equality. The best lies in the balance of freedom and justice in conditions of order. So Gibbon arrived at the same conclusion as Kant, but from a different angle: a republic is the best form of government for a state.
Page 130/131
If any religion can be admired by an Enlightenment savant, Gibbon seems to say, it is Islam, which is rooted in reason:
The creed of Mahomet is free from suspicion or ambiguity; and the koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God. The prophet of Mecca rejected the worship of idols and men, of satars and planets, on the rational principle that whatever rises must set, that whatever is born must die, that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish. In the Author of the universe his rational enthusiasm confessed and adored an infinite and eternal being, without form or place, without issue or similitude, present to our most secret thoughts, existing by the necessity of his own nature, and deriving from himself all moral and intellectual perfection. These sublime truths, thus announced in the language of the prophet, are firmly held by his disciples, and defined with metaphysical precision by the interpreters of the Koran. A philosophic theist might subscribe to the popular creed of Mohammedans: a creed to sublime perhaps for our present faculties.
Islam is the admirable counterexample to Gibbon's indictment of Christianity, and he uses "Mahomet" to represent the Muslim state. Here was a religion with a human founder, without monks or priests, that demanded simplicity and resisted complication, organizationally loose, so that human progress would not be obstructed as the Christian church had done. Islam was to Gibbon " a model of that judicious blend between rationally demonstrable verity and socially useful prejudice which is the best can be hoped for in a religion."
Gibbon's appreciation of Muhammad and Islam is praiseworthy at a time when Catholics and Protestants were vying to demonize Christianity's nearest alternative faith. But Gibbon's exalted proses masks his use of Islam merely as a foil in his anti-Christian polemic. He certainly had great success in debunking Christianity in the Europe of today, but his picture of a non-"priest-ridden" Islam is no longer recognizable in the Imam-, Mullah-, and Ayatollah-ruled Muslim world. Something in the practices of that world has turned out to "obstruct human progress" more effectively than Gibbon ever accused Christianity of doing.
Page 133
The End of History, Francis Fukuyama's influential work of political theory based on hegel's idea of the state and human freedom, depicts the end of the Cold War as the clarifying moment in history when the great question of the human condition, "What form of governance is best?" had been answered definitively. No alternative to liberal democracy could be found. The title brought the author scorn; every time trouble erupted anywhere in the world, Fukuyama's critics would gleefully point out that history had not come to an end. In replay, Fukuyama quite correctly said: "To refute my thesis it is not enough to suggest that the future holds in store momentous events. One has to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism." Communism had been just such a systematic ide, and it had been defeated. Now Islamism was coming forward as a systemic alternative, something glimpsed in the years of the European and American Enlightenment by Edward Gibbon and Washington Irvin.
Page 137
The papacy was a recognized authority in international affairs in the fifteenth century, particularly as arbiter of internal disputes and Christianization of the New World. Portugal in 1455 asked the pope to confirm its title to lands that its seafarers had discovered in Africa and beyond. Spain did the same in 1493 regarding the discoveries of Columbus. In 1494, in the Spanish town of Tordesillas, Portugal and Spain signed a treaty that divided the entire non-Christian world between them. In a papal bull, Pope Alexander VI drew a line passing through the north and South poles down what was thought to be the mid-Atlantic Ocean which handed almost the entire New World to Span, African and India to Portugal. This line, recorded in the Treaty of Tordesillas, ran through the eastern part of South America, thus giving Brazil to Portugal. This was how the world would order itself under the then-accepted international system.
Page 148/149
Within the immensely rich text of the Farewell Address [Washington's] can be found, or felt, virtually every major concept expressed in the literature of statecraft. First, the fear, well expressed by Thucydides, that popular (that is, direct) democracy is liable to break down into bitter factionalism: "The baneful effects of the spirit of party ... exist under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed, but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy." Second, unchecked popular democracy's tendency swiftly and heedlessly to propel the country into war without good cause. There is a healthy Hamiltonian suspicion of Kant's faith in the peacefulness of republics.
Hobbes's "realism" also lurks here. Every state on the international scene may be expected to strive ceaselessly to increase its power in order to advance its particular interests. Madison and Hamilton, in Federalist Papers 9,10, and 51, had devised a system to operate within the United Satesto provide security, order, justice, and energy. (Would it work? Washington's address answers: experience will tell us.) Outside the nation's borders however, a power struggle will go on. "There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation, " Washington says, and "against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people out to be constantly awake."
...
In this founding text of American Idealism, Washington concludes that America "will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by exalted justice and benevolence."
Page 159
Tocqueville declared democracy to be a force of history, inexorably moving across the centuries to undermine hierarchical political systems in its widening drive for ever more equality. We recall that the Founders of the United Sates were vividly aware that direct democracy had destroyed ancient Athens. Madison's Federalist no. 10 devised an unprecedentedly complex system to check democracy's excesses, defend the liberty of the individual in all his merit or eccentricity, and thus hold back the drive toward a leveling kind of equality.
Page 162
[Lincoln]
All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.
the whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it,
including himself in his physical, moral, and intellectual
nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely
various "leads" from which, man , from the first, was to
dig out his destiny.
In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it
Page 178/179
The first principle of grand strategy is that one must understand what is going on in the world. The question "What's happening?" is more than a cheerful greeting. Policies and decisions will from such an assessment, and confrontations may emerge from differing views about what is taking place and why. Yet those who are living through great historical events can rarely even glimpse the significance of what is going on all around them.
....
The turbulence in which Dickens's characters are immersed permits them only a hazy sense of what is happening. They are in the midst of a "revolution," but its meaning is not clear. None of the major real-life figures of the revolution - Marat or Robespierre- figures in this story; only the central events of the fall of the Bastille and the rise of the Terror frame the Tale. But Dickens leads the reader through stages of increasing clarity about its meaning.
Page 183
Cromwell had led a revolution in the cause of religion; Robespierre feared the REvolution might "de-Christianize" France and thus alienate the religious peasantry. This then might fuel counterrevolution by shifting support to the nobility. To avoid this, Robespierre, inspired by Rousseau, proposed a deistic new civic religion, a cult of "The Supreme Being," in a clever move to co-opt religion's mystery and charisma for the Revolution.
Robespierre immediately grasped the first principle of revolutionary oratory: be always ready to speak anywhere, at any time. In the Constituent Assembly alone he spoke 68 times in 1789, 125 times in 1790, and 328 times in 1791. He addressed the Jacobin Club innumerable times, demonstrating great persistence and zeal. The secret of his legitimacy and influence lay in his improbable presence at the podium. he was not a rabble-rouser; he did not harangue his hearers. As described in 1794: "When he mounts the rostrum, it is not with a studied indifference or exaggerated gravity, nor does he rush at it like Marat; but he is calm, as though he wished to show from the outset that this is the place which without challenge , is his by right.
Page 184/185
Speaking on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety on 17 Pluviose, Year II (February 5, 1794), Robespierre gave a speech revealingly entitle "On the Principles of Moral Policy That Ought to Guide the ational Convention in the Internal Administration of the REpublic." "In orderto lay the foundations of democracy and to consolidate it, " he says,
in order to arrive at the peaceful reign of constitutional law, we must finish the war of liberty against tyranny and safely cross through the storms of the revolution. ... Now, what is the fundamental principle of popular or democratic government, that is to say, the essential mainspring which sustains it and makes it move? It is virtue. I speak of public virtue which worked so many wonders in Greece and Rome and which ought to produce even more astonishing things in republican France - that virtue which is nothing other than the love of the nation and its laws.
Robespierre declares the French to be "the first people of the world who have established real democracy." The soul of their creation is virtue. Then comes the clang of logic being turned upside down.
If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time both virtue and terror. Virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, seve, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of justice.... Subdue liberty's enemies by terror, and you will be right, as Founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is it not to strike the heads of the proud that lightning is destined?
Robespierre makes ever error Thucydides said had occurred in Athens: direct democracy (which Robespierre never ceased to defend); disordered upheavals so great that "words lose their meaning" and terror is held to mean virtue. His oratory foreshadows the brutal ideologies of the twentieth century: the interminable speeches; allegations of conspiracy that foment a pernicious atmosphere of mistrust; demagogues claiming to be the "guardians of the people's rights"; and most telling of all, advocacy of "the Terror."
...
As he said to the Jacobin Club: "It is not up to me to indicate the measures, not I who am consumed by a slow fever and above all by the fever of patriotism. I have said that at this moment I have no further duties."
In response to a speech that promised even more terror, a coalition arose in the convention to arrest Robespierre on July 27, 1794. His jaw shattered by a pistol shot, he was unable to deploy his rhetoric in his own defense He was guillotined the next morning.
Page 193/194
Stavrogin is like the great Legislator of Rousseau's Social Contract. He has no official role or responsibility. He is nowhere and everywhere. He is Stalin, Mao, and Osama bin Laden. All are drawn to him, only to be turned to destructive and ultimately self-destructive purposes. The void of his personality is filled not by his own design but by the hopes and fears that others project onto him. He dominates, yet does nothing beyond suggesting, mocking, and conveying fear. He is, Thomas Mann wrote, "that icy and contemptible, masterful person before whom weaker creatures grovel in the dust, probably one of the most vividly attractive characters in world literature." He is the spirit of negation, the vacuum left by free will when the people have become exhausted of using it.
Stavrogin initiates the core plot of the revolutionary cell. Laughing as he does so, he tells Pyotr Stepanovich what forces make up such a circle: "Get four members of a circle to bump off a fifth on the pretense of his being an informer, and with this shed blood you'll immediately tie them together in a single knot. They'll become your slaves, they won't dare rebel or call you to account. Ha, ha, ha!"
The revolutionary cell gets the message, both strategically and tactically. "What I propose is ... earthly paradise," Shigalyov says. "Instead of paradise, "Lyamshin shouts, "I'd take these nine-tenths of mankind, since there's really nothing to do about them, and blow them sky-high." Soon the talk turns to "radically lopping off" a hundred million heads. As Lenin would later say, "It does not matter if three-fourths of mankind is destroyed; all that counts is that the laster quater become Communist."
Page 196/197/198
Verloc is a "revolutionary," active in radical societies. He poses as an anarchist but is really an agent-provocateur in the pay of the Russian embassy in London. Called one morning, most unusually, to the chancery, Verloc is berated by Vladimir, the first secretary of the embassy. Verloc has failed to produce the act of incomprehensible violence on British life that would cause the authorities to crack down on real anarchists and, at the same time, pass repressive legislation that would undermine the British people's faith and confidence in the legal system and legality itself.
The rhetoric of Vladimir's orders to Verloc reveals a theme of the novel as a whole: the ease with which the deadly enemies of civilized world order can use its values against itself. Vladimir uses the language of capitalism to pressure Verloc to act against the capitalist system: "I tell you plainly that you will have to earn your money. . . . No work, no pay. . . . When you cease to be useful you shall cease to be employed.
Similarly, the cultivated, liberal elite of society can be counted on to rhapsodize and subsidize the very revolutionaries who aim to eradicate them. And the police, the keepers of order and justice, are often so smug and obtuse that their efforts at counterterrorism only make the situation worse. In this sense, The Secret Agent can be read as a satire on civilized society. In the final pages, however, it shows us the unspeakable, unfathomable delusions of a death cultist, and his lust for obliterating himself and as many others as possible. Only then can the reader see the horrifying seriousness beneath the satire.
Vladimir analyzes for the dumbstruck Verloc exactly the kind of brilliant stroke that is needed. He presents "the philosophy of bomb throwing," the goal being "to make a clean sweep of social creation." Assassinations are no longer sensational; a murderous assault on a theater is a used-up idea; a bomb in the National Gallery would not be serious enough. What is needed is "an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable. . . . The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy." The target, Vladimir says, should be the Greenwich Observatory, a monument to science, to world civilization, the marker of the first meridian, the standard for universal time, an icon of which the whole civilized world has heard.
...
Which such labeling, the characters seem less substantial, more preposterous. The novel begins to suggest that terrorism is a farce, something that society just has to - and can - live with. Only the retarded Stevie posses the ability to carry out the kind of attack the revolutionaries fantasize about.
Page 206/209
... Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, locates the source of what goes wrong in the dehumanization of a society, in particular when language becomes debased, at those moments of unhinged crisis "when words lose their meaning." Lara says, "The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come was the loss of confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense." Falsity in language is a clue to something deeper, to a rot in the heart of the regime. Yury is unnerved and incapacitated by the verbiage spewed out by the regime, the gargantuan rhetoric made with an eye to obliterating the individual in all his uniqueness, to mold people into a type of being eager to bow down before cliches such as "sacrifice for the future" or "to build for tomorrow.
....
From its outset, the Soviet Union, as Sinyavsky recognized, sought to eliminate the very vocabulary connected with the concept of "the state." A linguistic revolution would be required to effectuage the political revolution. The title of "Minister" was replaced by "People's Commissar." "Gvernment" became "The Dicatatorship of the Proletariat." Governance itself was conducted by slogans: "all power to the Soviets!" except that the Soviets did not excercise power. "The Soviet people unanimously support the resolutions of the Twenty-Fifth Party Congress!" when no one had any idea what had been resolved, if anything, at the party congresss. All this is captured in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945), a satiric fable of the Soviet Union in which pigs and horses and other creatures in the barnyard revolt against a human farmer and are enslaved when their language is systematically distorted until: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Page 211
Settembrini thinks in terms of dualisms: force or justice, tyranny or freedom, reason or emotion, the modern Enlightenment versus the pre-modern Medieval mind. His aim is to reconcile liberalism with the state, to transform the international system of states into one world federation of republics.
Page 219
Saint-Loup perceives that the balance-of-power concept, one thought to be the best guarantor of stability, was a cause of the war, and that the international conference system that maintained the balance of power was defunct. "The age of the Congress of Vienna is dead and gone; the old secret diplomacy must be replaced by concrete diplomacy."
The rise of an alternative international system wa felt. Charlus deliers a long soliloquy declaring that "any day now I expect to see myself placed at table beneath a Russian revolutionary, " apparently in the belief that the greatest danger presented by the Bolsheviks lies in the protocol of being seated at the table. "So turns the wheel of the world, " he concludes.
Time Regained shows how " the abstract" triumphs in private, professional, national, and international life. The First World War, "far from being the last of the national conflicts, is the first of the great abstract conflicts of the twentieth century."
Page 221/222/223
On January 8, 1918, without previous notice, a courier arrived on Capitol Hill to convey the president's intention to appear that day before both houses of Congress to deliver an important message. This was "The Fourteen Points," the most influential document in American diplomatic history. It was Wilson's analysis of the fundamental causes of modern war in general and European war in particular. And it listed specific changes necessary for peace, with a sweeping elaboration of principles for the government of relations among nations.
Too the average reader today, the Fourteen Points are tedious and obscure. But the document bears close study as a rhetorical masterwork, in that its most specifically detailed provisions silently represented large principles. The memorandum of recommendations sent to Wilson states: "Every act of Germany towards Alsace-Lorraine for half a century has proclaimed that the provinces are foreign territory, and no genuine part of the German Empire. Germany cannot be permitted to escape the stern logic of her own conduct. The wrong done in 1871 must be undone."
...
The Fourteen Points emerge as a very Kantian document, not only in their prescription for an end to secret treaties and commitment to international trade, but in their far-reaching reconstitution of the international state system. Richelieu's seventeenth-century balance-of-power concept had become the guide for great power diplomacy from the Congress of Vienna's settlement of the Napoleonic Wars in 1814 to outbreak of war in 1914. But the concept accepted, even required, war as the way to redress the balance, again and again. To replace, or reconceptualize, balance of power, the idea of "collective security" was proposed.
...
The conflict that broke out in 1914 was regarded in retrospect as virtually inevitable because of an "arms race" among rival regiems - most prominently Germany and Great Britain - fueled by arms merchants and corporate makers of munitions. There would be have to be serious international efforts at "arms control" (Point IV).
A fundamental source of the confrontations that led to the Great War, indeed the the proximate cause, was thought to be suppression of self-determination. The restive south Slavic peoples, chafing under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sparked the war when a Serbian nationalist assassin struck down the Archduke Ferdinand in August 1914. Only an acceptance of self-determination, that is, the acceptance of new states into legitimate membership in the international state system, could hope to contain this source of war (Points V and X).
...
"The Stimson Doctrine" could not summon a collective military response to Japanese or German aggression, but it did provide a focus for world public opinion and an international commitment that the depredations of Imperial Japan and the Third Reich would never be accepted as legally valid.
Page 223/226/227
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, from its publication in 1922 to the present, has been the most persistent point of reference in modern literature.
...
A second marker of modernism is a fascination for the primitive, the primeval as a source of energy and authenticity. Eliot probes and pokes into various ancient, hieratic forms; in a search for this reference point he touches the Hebrew Bible, Anglo-Saxxon Ballads, tarot cards, Arthurian legends, back and farther back until the poet reaches the sources of the Indo-European linguistic family, Sanskrit scriptures from a time before recorded time, the famous Dattta, Dayadvam, Damyatta, Shantih, Shantih, Shantih. Here Elliot draws together the propensity in modern Western civilization, from Emerson to Nietzsche to Heidegger to the counterculture of the 1960s and after, to believe that civilization is fundamentally flawed, and that authenticity can be found only by reaching back before civilization (to, for example, Nietzsche's pre-Socratic thinkers.)
...
Admiration for the primitive and for authenticity came in the post-World War I recognition of the rights of self-determination of nations that had not before achieved statehood. "Nationalism" was seen as a force that represented land, blood, culture, language, and religion and which, bundled together in a people, must not, and could not, long be denied.
Page 228/229
[K- Kafka's The Castle] Like Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp in the snow, K has come, Virgil-like, the the netherworld, where he will learn his purpose in life. But this time, for the first time inliterature, the hero cannot gain access o the place and so never understands his mission. The lord of the castle, the suggestively named Count Westwest, is unreachable.
...
K and Don Quixote both carry out epic attempts to make the disorder of modern reality conform to an ideal order of the good. Don Quixote goes forth in the service of an epic order that no longer corresponds to reality, an order which has been replaced by forces whose underlying design cannot easily be grasped. The Don defends his epic certainties even as they are scorned or erased; he seeks to restore normative order to a crazy world and is himself pronounced crazy. K is a twentieth-century Don Quixote. Like the Don, K is trying to reaffirm a kind of universal library of virtuous works. But K's task is more difficult "when literary models are scattered, nuanced, confused, and attenuated, when new values are not so much opposed to the old as they are scrambled, lost in infinity, or , on the contrary, become highly specialized ... come to mirror each other's confusion and fragility." The Don and K share a common purpose: to apply the fictional truth of books ot an uncomprehending and brutal reality. Both fail, but each lives on in the imaginative awareness of the reader-citizens that a noble vision of virtue is needed.
Page 229/230
If Dante's "Ulysses" Canto (Inferno 26) begins a logic chain about the emergence of the idea of the New World in world order, Tennyson's 1833 poem "Ulysses" may mark the start of the old European world's recessional. The poem seems to be a hearty tribute of praise for bold forward-leaning adventure
Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding Furrows: for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die. . . .
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew . . .
To strive, to see, to find, and not to yield.
Tennyson said that "Ulysses was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and gave my feeling about the need of going forward, and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam.But Tennyson completed the poem before his friend died, and read at a different angle, it portrays a querulous and heedless adventurer, not someone the poet would take as a model. Ulysses'ways were not congenial to Tennyson's; the hero overreached and perished for his presumption. So much for the vaunted "New World."
Page 231
So as a myth, Palinrus "stands for a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-to-success, a desire to give up at the last minute, an urge toward loneliness, isolation, and obscurity." Palinurus deserts his post in the moment of victory and opts for the unknown shore. "With the sea - age old symbol of the unconscious = his relations were always close to harmonious, and not until he reaches land is he miserably done to death." Like many who resign from the struggle because they found something vulgar in success, he feels remorse at his abdication and wishes he had remained where he was: "Doing is overrated, and success undesirable, but the bitterness of failure even more so."
Page 235/236/237/238/239/240
The conflict would focus on trade. for China, trade was tribute, heavily regulated and assumed to benefit China one-sidedly. So long as the West embraced the doctrine of mercantilism, the two civilizations' economic views had a certain similarity. But when Adam Smith's ideas about free trade grew influential, confrontations arose.
Britain's East India Company established a post at Canton as early as 1699. The English bought tea and paid for it in silver. China did not buy English goods, so the Chinese saw the inflow under this "Canton System" as entirely right and proper.
Aggressive free traders began to move in. The East India Company, which controlled opium, sold the drug to private "country traders" who resold it along the China coast. Demand soared and buyers paid in silver. Quickly the balance of trade was reversed. The "tribute-trade" mentality of China was frontally challenged. And the opium trade proved unregulatable by the Imperial Court. Soon the British pressed for other ports on the China coast.
An "Opium War" broke out in 1839. Alarmed at the draining of China's silver coffers, the court ordered Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu to stop the opium traffic. The resulting clashes began what has been call the "Twenty-one Years' War," one of the pivotal conflicts in world history, the conflict of two fundamentally opposed concepts of how the world should be ordered.
....
The meaning was unmistakable: force China into the international state system. The result was a series of what would become known as the "unequal treaties," beginning in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking, in which China ceded fine "treaty ports," including Shanghai, to Britain under terms which granted "extraterritoriality," meaning that British law, not Chinese, would apply there. Hong Kong was handed over to Britain.
...
In 1856 a perceived Chinese insult to the British Union Jack sparked the Arrow War. Britain used the crisis to send Lord Elgin (he of the marbles) to Peking to insist on a treaty that would permit Western diplomats to reside there permanently. The Imperial Court resisted: the treaty violated the Chinese view of world order - the tributary system - by putting China and the state sending such diplomats on a basis of state-to-state equality. To overcome this opposition, Lord Elgin returned in 1860 with a fighting force, causing the emperor to flee the capital. The invading troops burned the Imperial Summer Palace.
China's foreign relations were thereby entirely reordered. The Sinocentric worldview and the tribute system were destroyed. In 1861 China established a new institution, the Tsungli Yamen or "Office for General Management of Affairs with the Various Nations," a kind of incipient ministry of foreign affairs. Within a few years, China sent its first diplomatic missions overseas, and by 1879 it had established some permanent embassies abroad.
China was hauled into the international state system on terms that made an appearance of equal treatment but which in fact left a culturally devastated China in a condition of inferiority and disarray. Although the British had dragged China into the system, China was not of it. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 was anti-Christian and antiforeign. The Imperial Court, expecting the rebels to succeed, supported their assault on the diplomatic quatter of Peking. The dynasty itself declared war on the foreign missions, a rejection of the international system it had been forced to accept through unequal treaties.. This brought the Boxer Relief Expedition to Peking in the international system's first act of "collective security, " with British, American, French, German, Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, Italian, Indian, and Japanese troops all involved.
...
Lao Ts'an and his friends take a nearby fishing boat to try to help the giant ship. The reason the ship is in trouble, Lao Ts'an says, is that it was not prepared for the storm and doesn't know where it is going. So the three will take modern navigational equipment to the captain (in other words, the answer to China's national distress lies in the adoption of modern Western technology).
When they reach the ship, one passenger is calling upon the others to take action. he collects money from them and tells them they must organize themselves. The outcome is that he gets the money while they shed their blood (this, the allegory tells us, is the way of revolution). When Lao Ts'an's boat comes alongside the great ship to deliver the navigational equipment, the would-be rescuers are denounced by the passengers because the equipment is foreign. The passengers begin to tear their own ship apart in order to throw planks at Lao Ts'an's small boat to sink it.
...
The immense shock of this culture in its attempt to comprehend and survive the coming of the international state system is revealed here in all aspects.
...
The revolution warned against in The Travels of Lao Ts'an would come, with devastating consequence. There began decades of cultural disintegration and political upheaval.
The Revolution of 1911 deposed the emperor and established the Republic of China. Officially, this seemed to install China as a member of the international system. But China was a state in name only. Traditional China was collapsing; modern China was not functional. Many leading intellectuals, as though emulating Lao Ts'an, withdrew from politics, among them the brilliant scholar-statesman Hu Shih, who had written an introduction to the novel's first publication.
Page 243/244/245
Terrorism is built into the Communist ideology (the class enemy, the counterrevolutionaries, must be eliminated), and Tchen takes to it as a dedicated Marxist. The thought that he might have private desires or needs apart from the great cause of the revolution is agonizing to him. But in fact, Tchen is one of those near-pathological human beings who cluster around any political movement, intellectually incorporating and thereby legitimizing terroristic cruelty and killing. when ideology authorizes terrorism, killers will come forward. Tchen has made the Communist coup possible when he crept into a Shanghai hotel room after midnight to stand silently at the bedside of a sleeping man. Should he lift the mosquito netting or strike through it? He strikes through the net "with a blow that would have split a plank." He gathers up the papers needed to gain control of a shipment of arms. when the coup has gained power and the Nationalists move into Shanghai to liquidate th e Communists, Tchen throws a bomb at Chiang Kai-shek's car, but the car is empty. he then turns himself into a bomb in another attempt to kill Chiang, but that attempt t fails too, and Tchen dies in agony. His death is not a revolutionary act; he simply destroys himself, because for him and those like him, terrorism is erotically irresistible, blurring metaphysics, politics, and sex.
...
Love between two individuals is something the party cannot tolerate, because it puts something above the necessity to sacrifice one's all for the revolution.
Chang's KMT takes Shanghai. He has selected an exquisite way to destroy the Communist leaders; throw them one by one, alive, into the boiler of a steam locomotive. Here is terrorism with no reference to ideology or individual commitment, just barbarism unleashed. As prisoners, Katov and Kyo, who have reached the mouth of the boiler from different paths and principles, can hear the locomotive whistle whose sound signals that another one of their comrades has been shoved into the steam boiler. Katov then breaks his own poison tablet in two and gives it to two terrified young Chinese boys who are next in line - the ultimate revolutionary sacrifice, as a KMT officer summons him to the fiery furnace.
...
Chiang Kai-shek's 1927 destruction of the Communist Party in Shanghai launched political, military, and intellectual changes that would reshape Chinese and world communist ideology. With the urban proletariat bas devastated, Mao established Communist bases in Chingkanshan, the almost impenetrable, steep-sided mountains inland from the coastal cities. To go with his geostrategic shift, Mao reformulated the ideology to feature peasants rather than urban workers. This was a radical shift from Marx and Lenin, both of whom viewed the peasantry as conservative and backward-looking, without the proletariat's revolutionary consciousness.
In the early 1930s Chiang's Nationalist army launched one "encirclement" campaign after another to try to destroy Mao's bases; each failed as the Communists simply evaded the assault's spearheadand then returned to their base one the Nationalists withdrew. Mao was perfecting a guerrilla strategy drawn from the ancient Chinese Art of War by Sun Tzu: "The enemy attacks, we retreat; the enemy halts, we harass; the enemy retreats, we pursue."
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Mao changed the economic base of China, but social transformation did not follow. So Mao turned Marxism on its head and launched the "Cultural Revolution." Culture - what was in people's heads - must change. Until it did, society as a whole could not accept the perfected form of human life that was communism. Mao therefore called for every aspect of traditional, bourgeois, intellectual Chinese culture to be destroyed. Peking Opera was abolished, and entirely new operas were written - revolutionary works like "Taking Tiger Mountain by Storm."
In this campaign the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of terrorism was expanded. In the Soviet ideology, the proletariat was the authentic class, the possessor of the revolutionary consciousness. Other classes would have to accept "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" or suffer the consequences, as when Stalin ordered the liquidation of the entire class of landed peasants, the kulaks. Under Mao, anyone suspected of retaining any shred of bourgeois mentality or counterrevolutionary sentiment might be "struggled" against or eliminated.
This approach was carried out more thoroughly by the Khmer Rouge in the genocide it inflicted upon Cambodia in the late 1970s. To wear glasses or carry a ballpoint pen was evidence of a bourgeois education; the consequence was to be sent to the countryside and worked to death, or to be executed at once. The Khmer rouge made careful records, with photographs and detailed explanations of each individual it eradicated. Under the doctrine of justified, indeed required, terror, Khmer Rouge members were proud to be able to prove what Communists they were.
...
[The Singapore Story]
At 10 am, the pop tunes on the radio were cut off abruptly. Stunned listeners heard the announcer read out a proclamation - 90 words that changed the lives of the people of Singapore and Malaysia:
Whereas it is the inalienable right of a people to be free and independent, I Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of Singapore, do hereby problem and declare on behalf of the people and the government of Singapore that as from today, the ninth day of August in the year one thousand and nine hundred and sixty-five, Singapore shall be forever a sovereign, democratic and independent nation founded upon the principles of liberty and justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of her people in a more just and equal society.
....
Here was the Westphalian moment: a new state comes into being,, enters the international system as a member state of the United Nations, and is given diplomatic recognition as legitimate, even permanent, and sovereign, with commitments by all to adhere to the norms of the established world order.
...
As a new state, Lee's Singapore would struggle desperately to avoid being taken over by the Communist Party backed by the People's Republic of China.
In 1970 Prime Minister Lee visited Harvard. About twenty faculty members invited him to dinner at the Faculty Club. As a Foreign Service officer then doing a fellowship at Harvard, I attended too. The intellectuals were in a jolly, self-satisfied mood, for the american war in Vietnam was going badly. The "New Left" had arrived on American campuses - new because the student left had turned to Mao's China and Red Guards as models, Stalin's Soviet crimes having been denounced in Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech." Mao's Cultural Revolution was inspiring student activism in Europe and the United States. At Harvard, I watched in horror as students "struggled" (in the Maoist sense of the term) against the distinguished China scholar John King Fairbank, viscously condemning him for his "counterrevolutionary" views. The campus was in its second year of upheaval, with students "on strike; the faculty members present at the dinner support "the kids" and were ready to acquiesce in their demands that classes, papers, and examinations - but not grades - be canceled.
...
Lee was having none of it. He lit into them with blistering rhetoric: "What America has done and is doing by helping the Republic of Vietnam survive the Communist attack is buying time for other Southeast Asian people to consolidate their independence as legitimate sovereign states. If the U.S. were not fighting in Vietnam, Singapore would be gone by now!" Lee meant that the American decision to support South Vietnam's resistance to Communist takeover was necessary for Singapore as well as Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand to battle communism in their own lands and consolidate their young states. The professors called an early end to the evening. not many years later, the emergence of the "Asian Tigers" as successful states in the global economy would prove Lee correct.
A half-century ago, Asia was the most violent, turbulent region of the world. communism, the deadly enemy of the international state system, was making it so. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Asia is firmly and for the most part comfortably ensconced in the Westphalian system. Singapore - Hindu, Malay, and Chinese in makeup - has been one of the exemplars. And no member of the international system is more assiduous in asserting the importance and inviolability of the privileges and immunities of the sovereign state than the People's Republic of China, though this may in part stem from Beijing's awareness that it in some sense remains an empire (with boundaries not much changed sin the Ch'ing Dynasty) in the clothing of a state. Overall, Asia is now as Westphalian as they come. The progress of Asian societies has demonstrated that despite decades or even a century or more of war, turbulence, and injustice, when a state is established and functions as a good citizen of the international system, things quickly improve for its people.
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The Ottoman Empire was "the sick man of Europe," and power in Constantinople-Istanbul had been seized by "the Young Turks." The future of it's region had long been debated and negotiated. in 1916 a secret exchange of notes among Britain, France, and Russia, known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, described how the middle East would be partitioned after the war: the Arabian Peninsula would be independent. Palestine west of the Jordan River would be under an international regime. A French sphere would stretch from the Mediterranean to Damascus to Mosul in Mesopotamia. A British sphere would run across the south from the Negev Desert to the east of the Jordan River into central Mesopotamia, with a northern arm reaching into Persia, a southern arm to the Persian Gulf and Baghdad under direct British control. Tsarist Russia agreed to all this in return for the right annex lands along its souther border.
The Sykes-Pico deal was discovered and published by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. Both Arabs and Zionists harshly criticized the agreement as contrary to the promises made by the Allies. although the French and the British envisioned semiautonomous Arab states coming into being within their spheres, the plan clearly was for Western dominance of all the Middle East formerly under the Ottoman Empire and Caliphate.
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When Feisal raised the Arab flag,"the pan-Islamic supra-national State, for which [the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph] Abdul Hamid has massacred and worked and died, and the German hope of the cooperation of Islam in the world-plans of the Kaiser, passed into the world of dreams."
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It was, at it still is, a narrative of moderation and passion, and as in The Mandelbaum Gate, religion is the key
....
Spark touches on the trial only here and there, but Eichmann's hovering presence hinges the question of good and evil, moderation and fanaticism, in the story. Hannah Arendt would famously address thesse issues in Eichmann in Jerusalem and coin the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the defendant's "ordinariness." Spark's conception in the Mandelbaum Gate is greater than Arendt's in placing the Eichmann example at the center of a wider, more universally human conundrum. Moderation can be essential for the good, and passion can be devastatingly bad. But moderation can also be wholly in the service of evil, and passion can be indispensable for the success of a rightful cause. in this sense, Spark's narrative is an extended examination of W.B. Yeats's dark observation, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." In this modern world of uncertainty and indeterminate identity, Eichmann has welcomed categorization by an oppressive regime. A malignantly, falsely integrated being, Eichmann is the antithesis of Barbara Vaughan in her search for identity.
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As Abba Eban wrote in his autobiography, in theory the sate, as a concept and as the fundamental entity of world affairs, ought to be in eclipse. The multiplicity of sates in a world where sovereignty has lost much of its meaning is "the central political anomaly of our age. . . . There is no sign that the individual nation-state is about to be superseded as the focus of allegiance and social pride."
Israel's vulnerability is much increased by the fact that we have not won any degree of international legitimacy for the present territorial and administrative structure. The realistic school of diplomacy held that military power was the dominant theme of the interstate relations. It has now been proved that the eclipse of legitimacy is a more potent issue.
After the Six-Day War, Arab regimes sought the most potent way to strike at Israel. They declared at Khartoum "The Three Nos": no peace (that is, no secure and recognized borders), no negotiation (no diplomacy), and no recognition (no legitimacy) - a rejection of all of Israel's claims to statehood. A fourth "no" was to refuse to utter the name of the "the Zionist entity." A decade later, Egypt signed a treaty of peace with Israel. In 1981 President Anwar Sadat was assassinated as payback for his apostasy.
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The Arab-Israeli conflict has emerged as only one dimension of a war against the international state system. The defenders of the international system are those states that are members of it in good standing, such as the Gulf Sates, Israel, and Jordan, and those that seek to move in that direction, like Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, and Iraq. Its enemies are oppressive regimes which have seized state power for their own enrichment and set themselves against the international state system. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was such a state until overthrown. Gaddafi's Libya was such an enemy too until recently. Most ideologically virulent are the nonstate, antistate, Islamists, the jihadists who oppose and would overthrow and replace the international state system. The Middle East is the main battleground of this world-spanning confrontation. It has been, and is, a matter of moderation or passion in the best or worst forms of each of those qualities.
Throughout most of the modern age, the worry about the state has been its exaltation, even deification, in its ceaseless drive to expand its powers. After the Cold War, another assessment has pointed to globalization, electronic communications, migration, and the devolution of power downward along with the voluntary transfer of power upward - new and centrifugal forces, possible heralding the end of the sovereign state. Yet the state, and the Westphalian international system of which it is the basic entity, remain the only working mechanism for world order.
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Early on the dark, cold evening of January 12, 1986, Secretary of State George Shultz was escorted up the grand staircase between Patience and Fortitude, the famous inquiring lions of the New York Public library. Shultz was greeted by Norman Mailer, then the president of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists). This was the first meeting of PEN International in the United States in twenty years; the topic was "How Does the State imagine." "PEN's chief business, " said the novelist richer Stern, "is rescuing the world's writers from the political and social consequences of their work. The world is older than the state state. Words form and reform state. Those who run states know the powers of words and attempt to control them. PEN, as much as any group, not only stands for liberty of the word but does something about it. It gets international petitions to parliaments and heads of states. Frequently it helps to unlock prison doors."
...
Grace Paley jumped up to show that the petition against his presence be read aloud from the podium, Shultz persevered. He praised
the creative literary writer as an individual of primary importance for the entire range of thought, culture and human existence . . . . America is proud to have you here. Diversity, debate, contrast, argumentativeness, are what we as a people thrive on . . . . Freedom - that is what we are talking about and why we are here. And the writer is at the heart of freedom.
No government or ideological system has ever yet succeeded in stopping the writer. . . . There are countries in which writers know that if their art appears to threaten the political fortunes of their ruler, they may be silenced, imprisoned, or even killed. . . . By contrast, there are other countries - and I'm proud to say that the United States is one of them - where writers can speak, write, and publish without political hindrance.
...
The hall erupted in outrage. Mailer rose to speak. Hoots and catcalls. "Read the protest!" "Up yours!" Mailer shouted.
Page 288
[In the USSR and PRC] The speeches and "toasts" were prepared with utmost care, far more than even the multiple-drafted products of the White House or State Department speechwriters. In the Kremlin, each sentence was number, and within each sentence the numbering sequence was refined. In this way "86.4" would take you directly to the point in question, should some member of the Politburo raise an issue of doctrine. All this was necessary in a culture where commissars and cadres - and Kremlinologists and Dragonologists - would scrutinize each text with intensity of a medieval scholastics searching for signs of ultimate meaning.
Page 289
At the United Nations, the world organization of states, the concept of the sate, under fire, has been pointedly reaffirmed: "The foundation-stone [of human security] is and must remain the State," declared Boutros Boutros-Ghali in th his first major document after taking office as secretary-general. "Respect for its fundamental sovereignty and integrity is crucial to any common international progress." During the 1990s the sovereign nations of the world made more ringing assertions of the essentiality of the state than had been made for generations. Institutions in decline are often zealously guarded.
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By referring to the Council of Constance, held from 1414 to 1418, John Paul [Pope JP2] offered a new base point for the start of the modern international era. Rather than the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and is generally considered the incubator of the modern state system, Constance is where nations first were recognized, at a time when the previous world system of Latin-speaking Christendom had effectively come to an end.
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... Kasch suggests that Westphalian structures have been hollowed out by the corrosive rationalism of modernity and that the example Talleyrand, "the last man to know anything about ceremonies," holds the door open to renovating the foundations of world order. At a critical moment in world affairs, Talleyrand recognized one of those rare occasions when an idea can shape the fate of nations - the concept of "legitimacy" so severely damaged today.
The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out. A sacral nature must infuse world order if it is to be legitimate. That order is not to be identified with a particular social system, but to be legitimate, the system at least must hint at the underlying divinely founded order. The modern Westphalian system was conceived when such was the case, but with the Enlightenment's addition of secularism, science, reason, and democracy, the system increasingly spurned, then forgot, its legitimizing sources of authority. This is what John Paul II strove to convey at the United nations' fiftieth anniversary. Revolutionary ideology radicalized secularism, science, and reason into the task of erasing original sin, of perfecting humanity - all requiring terror to create "the New Man." Modern efforts to create a sovereignty potent enough to fill the void produced the statist monstrosities of Stalin and Hitler. America became an empire but never gained the understanding to go with it. China is now on its own misguided course.
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Talleyrand was the last man who understood ceremony. Every ceremonial event recapitulates - or should recapitulate - all the history of its subject. This is the message of Confucius's Analects. Protocol, the proper conduct of ceremony because it protects abandoned symbols, is the first literary genre.
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Sir Lewis Namier, the relentlessly fact-based diplomatic historian, writing on the eve of the Second World War, saw something not dissimilar in Talleyrand, who saw at a critical moment in history "one of those rare occasions when an idea can shape the fate of nations," and so became "the apostle of legitimite." Legitimacy in governance remains a concept too esoteric for mere politicians to grasp. Literature and the book may be required.
....
As described by kissinger:
I put a proposition to you all: we have entered a time of total change in human consciousness of how people look at the world. Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships. You have to come to grips with who you are. A leader needs these qualities. But now we learn from fragments of facts. A book is a large intellectual construction; you can't hold it all in mind easily or at once. you have to struggle mentally to internalize it. No there is no need to internalize because each fact can be instantly called up on the computer. There is no context, no motive. information is not knowledge. People are not reads but researches, they float on the surface. Churchill understood context. This new thinking erases context. It disaggregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order nearly impossible to achieve.
I write this with much foreboding, hoping that the events of today do not indicate the nature of our trip, or we are in for a cluster**** of epic proportions. As should be expected the MBTA was running slow and consequently I arrived at the airport later than planned. Upon arrival I proceeded to the terminal to check in. USAIR pleasantly informs me that they contract this route out through Alaska Air. Already running late, I collect my belongings and haul ass to terminal A and queue in the Alaska Air line; however, when I try to check my bag I find out that they contract out this flight to American Airlines – forcing me to rush back to Terminal B, carrying 2 heavy duffle bags, and a backpack. As I enter the American Airline area, I am presented with the longest line I’ve ever seen at Logan Airport. Time is getting short, my flight leaves in less than an hour, so I tell one of the line wranglers that I need to be expedited if I’m going to make my flight, whereupon my needs are dismissed with a "there are agents expediting go to the back of the line”. After about 20 minutes, I progress through the line back to the attendant who decides that since my flight takes off in less than 30 minutes that I should be expedited. I then skip a 3+ hour line and get in one that takes about 10 minutes. I rush to security and get in line - realizing that I won't make it, I decide cut the line by ducking under the rope and board about 10 minutes before we pull away from the gate. After all this, I discover I'm stuck in a middle seat on a five-hour flight! I was unable to choose my seat due to the crazy contracting between airlines, and didn't have time to get the agent to give me a better seat.
Anyway, I’ll update when I'm in LA, and the adventure begins!!!!
Airport Line Disaster
July 23, 2010
The plane trip was mostly uneventful, when I first walked down the aisle I noticed this giant women sitting halfway into my seat. Luckily she was in the aisle seat and had to move for me to seat down, so as I slid into my seat I conveniently slammed down the arm rest and I honestly think she had a slight bit of trouble squeezing into the normal seat – disaster averted. The movies on the plane suxored – The first one I had already seen and the other was bad. There was no food served during the flight, not even snacks with the beverages. Around noon, I asked if there was going to be lunch and they said no, I then further inquired if I could purchase a sandwich or something to which they also responded no, all we have is this breakfast box. Since the breakfast box was unappetizing I opted against it, I can easily be hungry for a while.
LA is pretty awesome. Steven picked me up from the airport an we went straight to the Santa Monica beach where we battled on the balance beams, swung on the rings like Tarzan, got freshly made corndogs, checked out the pier and the ocean. Ran into an old friend from MITRE who now works @ RAND, which is like minutes from the beach (RAND has their shit figured out). Then we went back to his place and chilled out by the pool. Next we went to downtown LA and saw Little Tokyo and a bunch of other shit. From there we went to Edison http://www.edisondowntown.com/, which is now one of my favorite bars in the world, some others being Dr. Pong (Berlin), Tacheles (Berlin), Please Don’t Tell (NYC). Now, they weren't expert cocktails smiths -- they couldn't remember how to make a Corpse Reviver #2 or a Blood and Sand, but Steven reserved us a small table and their happy hour is pretty decent - 40% of all cocktails plus a decent 5$ menu. On the way home we grabbed some In and Out Burger and crashed for a few hours. I was pretty exhausted at that point having only gotten like 1-2 hours of sleep the night before.
Later that day:
An update for today, Yay!
It's 8pm local, 11pm EST.
Today started off well, I woke up 8am (11am) after a full nights sleep. Steven and I went to go and see the Watts Towers in Compton. While there we met an elderly couple, 85 or so, who were married in '46. The lady told us how she used to come over and watch the guy build the towers when she was a little girl, and the guy told us how he dropped out of high school and got drafted into the navy in WW2. They were both from out of town visiting the towers. From there we went to the farmers market where we got a weird Middle Eastern pizza and then got some Frozen Yogurt at Pink Berry. I got the palmagranite with kiwi, raspberries, strawberries, and a nut sauce thingy -- it was really good. From there we ventured out to the La Brea tar pits and I got money from a BOA ATM nearby. The tar pits were pretty cool and smelled like asphalt ;P We then drove around Hollywood for a bit checking out the sites. After that we went to the observatory, which is totally awesome. It's an awesome art deco building and it provides a great view of LA, and has some interesting exhibits inside. Each of us enjoyed a carbonated beverage and while observing the view. From there we drove down Mulholland drive; it eventually turns into a dirt road and we continued on it and found another road that looked like it went to a cell tower. It had big warning signs so we thought we would have to turn around, but upon closer inspection one of the signs said welcome -- so I decided to investigate further. Apparently it was a former NIKE radar site for the LA area - we went up the road to check it out; the warning signs were historical.
Steven In front of Watt's Towers
Observatory
NIKE Platform
Next up was to go to Malibu and visit Point Doom. The waves were quite large and Steven and I took turns running down by the water and being chased by the waves. Eventually one of the waves knocked me over and I fell into the ocean - I'm typing this up now. now. now.We're planning to get some food, do some stuff, and then pick up Rainville and Dave in about 4 hours.
Danny At Point Doom (Malibu)
Steven Running From Wave
Danny Running From Wave
July 25, 2010
(From my phone on the road to Mexico)
Steven and I were able to take a quick nap and then went to the airport to pick up Dave. It went exactly according to plan and the whole endeavor took less than 45 minutes.
Retrieving Nick from the airport was a little more involved; originally he was going to arrive at 12:30 and the plan was to pick up Dave, and wait for Rainville, he would be arriving 3o minutes or so later. Then airline travel happened –at first Nick would arrive before Dave and we would wait for Dave. Then Nick’s flight was delayed so we swapped the order. Then I get a call from Rainville saying his plane had to turn around, and that he would be arriving at 3am – in reality, his plane arrived at 4am. So after picking up Dave we went back to Stevens house and watched the first rap song about getting high with dinosaurs. We picked up Rainville and went home and slept.
July 26, 2010
The adventure continues...
I'm writing this on my laptop at in our hotel room in sunny El Rossario, Baja California. The recent superman flick is on TV and there is wifi in the hotel restaurant that we ate about 30 minutes ago. We were hoping to camp on the beach today, but were unable to determine where it was allowed, and were often far from the ocean on when on the highway.
Before I go on about today, I must, of course, finish up yesterday’s story. We awoke at about 8 am, after a few hours of sleep. We called the owner of the Nissan Pathfinder to arrange the handover. Steven and I called him repeatedly the day before with no response; this process repeated itself once again in the morning. After some brief discussion we decided to travel out the valley and see if we could buzz his apartment. We did not know his name, but assumed we'd be able to guess it from the apartment buzzer listing. As per our modus operandi the planning was substantially lacking.
When we arrived the buzzer system required us to enter his apartment # to buzz him and did not provide any information on the occupants. We once again attempted to call him, but as before we only received his voicemail. We could see the vehicle over the gate and after talking to a few of the residents one decided that since we purchased the car, to let us in -- this guy was very nice/sketchy but saved the day. He also mentioned that there was a plate in the pavement that when the car was over would cause the gate to open so we wouldn’t need a remote to open the gate.
We walk over to the car and found a key in the glove box; unfortunately the car failed to start when we turned the key. We then pushed the car around the parking lot, about 250 feet so that it was position on top of the plate in the pavement; this caused the gate to open. Steven then drove his car into parking lot and we pushed the Pathfinder back out of the way. We were able to jump start the Pathfinder and drive it to the parking lot next door. Rainville and Steven removed the license plates and replaced them with the New Hampshire ones Nick had ordered the week before. We tossed the old ones back over the fence into the empty space.
With the truck running we drove it to Steven's house to do a more thorough inspection before heading out for supplies. Steven left to go pick up his friend Alan who was attending SIGRAPH. After doing a quick onceover we decided to go and wash and vacuum the car and pick up some stuff at AutoZone. We were looking for a self-service carwash, but all we could find were hand-wash ones. We picked up the needed parts at AutoZone and then met Steven and his friends for lunch at a BBQ restaurant down the street from his house. The food was good, and we left to get the car washed; but first we stopped by a sweet army surplus store and picked up a bunch of gear. We then drove, and drove, and drove continuing to look for a self-service car wash, eventually gave up and got the hand-wash at the corner of Venice & Lincoln. It cost 20$ and they did a really good job vacuuming and washing the car -- better than we probably would have done in a significantly less amount of time.
All of us in the car
Back at Steven's base we packed up our stuff and decided to go to Mexico. We had to add a day to the Mexican insurance, but were unable to reach the insurance company as the office had already closed. We tried to find a place to stay in San Diego, but the prices were prohibitively expensive. We decided to just spend another night at Steven’s and then leave first thing in the morning.
We went to Target and purchased a bunch more gear and snacks, and then went to the Santa Monica Pier to get corn dogs and walk around. We explored the promenade on 3rd street in search of a suitable dining establishment, all the while thinking about the crazy happy hour Steven described. Steven told us that no one wants to be near the beach at night so it is empty and they offer crazy happy hour to attract customers - this appears not to be the case, at least as far as 3rd street is concerned. It was swamped with people; we wandered around and did our usual restaurant choice disaster and came across a magic show. We didn't attend due the fact that it cost 27$ and we were tired and hungry.
Santa Monica Beach
We went to a crappy British pub, the food was decent enough, but overall it was kinda meh. Exhausted, we went back to the base, which was unfortunately locked – where’s Motown when you need him. We walked around the house, trying the doors and windows. Dave eventually was able to enter through Steven's bedroom window. We then quickly unrolled our sleeping bags and went to sleep ... at 9pm ... we're that hardcore.
So now back to today -- the TV is off, Dave's 10% through Swans Way by Proust and Rainville is attempting to sleep. This morning we were on the road by 7 am and everything went according to plan. We stopped by Walmart and Trader Joes to pick up a few last minute supplies and crossed the border into Mexico extremely quickly. In fact, it took less the 30 seconds to cross the border since they didn't check our passports or in any communicate with us other than to have us stop and flag us on. In Tijuana we made a wrong turn off the highway and went through a somewhat seedy part of town where there was nothing but car repair shacks -- the mechanics of which violently waved at us, assuming by the appearance of the vehicle, that we were in Tijuana for inexpensive auto repairs/bodywork. We eventually got back on the highway Mexico 1 (M1) and were on our way.
Our fist stop was Ensenada, we had originally thought we'd camp here but after acquiring 2 maps, one from the information booth and the other a souvenir we decided that we might as well try to go farther south and find another tourist town -- this didn't work out as well as we though it might, but for now I'll tell you more about Ensenada. We wandered through the town and saw the docks, a giant Mexico flag, some giant bronze heads, and a lot of restaurants and street vendors. One interesting type of street vendor pushes around wheelbarrows with candy, nuts, and fruits in them. We walked down a small crowded alley that had taco places on the right side and fish market on the left. We chose one that looked interesting to us and grabbed lunch.
Giant Mexican Flag
At lunch we realized how unprepared we were as the only thing we knew to do was "to not drink the water". We didn't know the about salsa, fruits, vegetables, etc. We all ordered cokes, yummy coke with real cane sugar, and tacos and quesedias. The food was good and ordering it was not too painful with our limited Spanish. We meandered back through the town to our vehicle and hit the road. We didn't know where exactly we were going, but as there is only one road it was quite easy to pick a direction -- Go South.
After about an hour we found a winery to stop at where did some wine and olive oil tasting, and had a delightful cheese, fococia bread, and proscuito plate with our wine. We picked up some wine and olive oil and continued on the road.
Nick Tasting Some Wine
It was a great drive and pretty interesting, some places were quite desolate, others were crowded with buildings and shacks. We drove by a few extremely large farms, and saw quite a few buildings apparently abandoned in various stages of construction. It was quite remarkable as you’d see 3 or 4 buildings missing a wall and a roof or some buildings with a half built second floor, or sometimes just a really long wall that wasn't finished. This state of incomplete construction was quite baffling.
We thought about stopping in San Quintin, but I thought El Socorro looked better on the map and was closer to the ocean. When we got to El Socorro there was nothing there and we weren't sure if we were allowed to drive off road and camp on the beach so we continued on to our current location of El Rosario.
During the drive we went through four military checkpoints, the first waved us through. The second asked us to get out of the car; Dave and me stood in front while Rainville opened the back window of the Pathfinder with the soldier. Needless to say they were saying things to us that we could not understand. Often times they would say a bunch of stuff, we'd look confused and then they'd just wave us on. This was our experience at the last two checkpoints.
Tomorrow we hope to wake up and get an early start. We're going to try and start driving up the east side of Baja towards San Felipe. On the map it shows it as a long dirt road, so we'll probably stop someway along it and camp at the Sea of Cortez. I also intend to email to the list in the morning from the restaurant, and before I go to sleep read another chapter in the Nuremberg Interviews.
Here’s one small anecdote that escaped me earlier, when we were checking out at Trader Joes the checkout lady was asking us about our plans, and we said we're going camping at the beach and she was like that sounds great. A little later in our discussion we told her that we were go to Ensenada, and she was like -- I'm glad people still go down there, I used to go to TJ all the time but not anymore. She then looked at us, and said, "Oh, I'm sure you'll be safe and will have a goodtime." I think she assumed we were locals from LA who had made this trip before. We also tried to pick up a map at AAA near San Diego, but failed.
More to come in a day or two...
---
Sitting in the car in the parking lot getting wifi from the hotel office!!! It's a little cloudy, onward to adventure!
July 28, 2010
Back in the USSA.
We went through 7 military checkpoints; we only had to get out of the car for their searches 3 times. They only wrote down our passport info when we were 20 miles down an 80-mile dirt road up in a mountain pass – that was the friendliest checkpoint we found. Were at McDonalds on the road to Vegas.
July 30, 2010
Sitting at DEFCON in a talk about Feed Over Email (FOE), which is a project by Voice Of America (Radio Free Europe, etc). And the travelogue continues.
When I last left off we were just heading out from El Rosario. When we awoke Dave noticed a weird noise while in the bathroom, and stood on the toilet to look out the window. He then reported back to us that there was a dude outside sweeping a cow that was on the ground. Later, we watched them butchering the cow outside our bathroom window. I sent the email update from the car, just outside our hotel - the wireless didn’t quite reach our room. We filled up the pathfinder with petrol, or as the locals would say gasolina, and went to the auto part store to try and pick up some extra belts and equipment before we embarked on our 150 mile drive across the Baja desert on a dirt road of questionable quality. When we got to the store, it turned out to be closed - it was early in the morning. And then out of nowhere, seven dogs - some small, some large - surrounded our vehicle as we slowly drove out of the area.
Butchering Cow Behind Hotel
We started down the road to the turnoff, we had about 100 miles to go. Along the way we looked at the map and realized that there wasn't any gas along the way, and going off road with three quarters of a tank of gas was not something we wanted to do. There was a gas station 60 miles past the turnoff for the dirt road that we decided we would go to if we couldn't find gas along the way. We saw a giant cactus and took some pictures near it. We passed through many different landscapes; it was quite surreal. Throughout the drive as we’d pass through a valley or over a mountain the dirt, rocks, plants would suddenly and wildly change - it was really quite interesting.
Dave Standing Next To Giant Cactus
After the FOE talk we went around the vendor and contest areas, and met up with Motown and found Jason Scott in the vintage computer area. There Dave and Schuyler picked up a copy of GET LAMP, Jason gave Schuyler career advice on how to continue his lock obsession and not fade out, and he also gave us some info about the mystery book Who Killed Robert Prentice (Which I've since ordered), about a puzzle book which had clues that led to a buried jewel rabbit, and about a puzzle apartment in Manhattan. I'm currently in the EFF talk about laptop search and seizure. Dave is sitting just ahead of me, and Motown is to my left. Back to the adventure...
Schuyler & Dave Buying Get LAMP
As we drove down this road we crossed a lot of small towns, or perhaps more accurately a small group of dilapidated houses, and we saw an abandoned gas station with 2 guys sitting out front next to 2 large containers of gas with a board that said gasolina. We continued on past them hoping that their might be a proper gas station at the turnoff. When we reached the dirt road there was a small building about 500 ft down the road, we continued on and found a small restaurant that had no power, water, or telephone service and that sold gas from containers. They had solar panels, and some big tanks out back that they used for water. The TV, which was off, had a sweet rig that powered it off of car batteries, and in the phone booth in the corner there was a CB radio. We met a nice guy who was eating breakfast that spoke English, which was great since no one else there spoke any English at all. He said he could sell us some gas, again their was a board outside that said gasolina, and had us drive out back -- I believe we interrupted his breakfast.
Cool Off-Grid TV Setup
Gasolina Sign
Nick took the Pathfinder out back and they asked us how much gas we wanted to get. The price was 200 Pesos for 5 gallons, which turns out to be a little less than $4 per gallon. The guy then filled up a five-gallon metal can and used a tube to siphon the gas into the car; to start the siphon he used his mouth. After the first 5 gallons, we wanted to top off the tank but didn't need another 5 gallons so he pulled out a bleach bottle, and used that as intermediary when filling the five-gallon tank so that only 2 gallons were transferred. After filling up we went back inside to get some food, we got Heuvos Ranchos and it was excellent – Nick recognized it on the menu and ordered it for all three of us. We went to the cooler to grab drinks, and the gas guy told us they were warm and then got us Strawberry Fanta out of a cooler.
Getting Gas
Building We Ate Breakfast In
Nick At Breakfast
With our bellies full, we then embarked on the "extreme" portion of our trip. The dirt road was bumpy, but relatively flat and we were able to achieve 20 - 30 miles per hour. As we drove up into the mountains the road got a little narrower and a little rougher. About 20 miles in we hit a military checkpoint, this was the first time they requested our passports and actually wrote down our information and license plate number. I think the thoroughness of the stop resulted primarily from the fact that they have absolutely nothing to do out there since there are probably only one or two cars a day going through that pass, but they did not actually search our vehicle. They were; however, the friendliest of all the military that we would meet on our trip and asked where we were from and told us their names. The checkpoint seemed to be located at an excellent choke point in the mountain range.
Sign At Dirt Road Turnoff
The road was pretty rough, so we often took to driving on the sand path beside it because it was significantly smoother though more wild, less level and narrower. Along the drive we saw signs for Rancho Grande, but had no idea what it was. When we got to back to the Pacific, or more specifically the Sea of Cortez, we found a small town on Gonzaga Bay. In that town we fond a store small store called Rancho Grande. The bay turned out to have a gravel airport and Palapos, small thatched gazebo like buildings on the beach. We rented a Palapos and set up our camp underneath it.
Baja Dirt Road
Palapas on the Sea of Cortez
The wind was quite strong and coming from all directions so we parked the truck in the path of the wind and tied up a tarp to try and block the wind. It didn't really help that much. We also setup the tent groundsheets so that we could sleep on them, Dave setup the cuddle dome later in the day since he didn't want to sleep outside. We then went into the ocean and found a floating rock - yes a floating rock. It is probably the nicest beach I've ever been to and was almost empty, there was one small group down at the end of the beach that we didn’t get a chance to meet.
Camp Setup (Tarp & Truck are inadequate defense against the blower)
After we swam around in the ocean and got provisions: beer, ice, and snacks from the market we swam some more and then everyone decided to take nap back at our base.
Back at DEFCON, I'm in a 20 minute talk about web app fingerprinting with static files, the EFF talk was pretty good, but I don’t' think I learned anything new. Though I was able to document a fair amount of our trip during it, and now back to our story.
The blower, it comes on fierce and does not relent. Asleep, I awake to an extreme blast of heat -- the wind has picked up and the hot air over the desert is making its way to the ocean directly over us. I adjust my duffle bag and attempt to block the wind a little and just wait it out. Alas, the blower was just getting started with us. As the temperature increased, from blow dryer to furnace, a new ingredient was introduced, sand. So now we're laying there getting pelted by sand as hot air rushes around us. We put up a good fight, we managed to withstand the blower for about an hour and forty minutes at which point we decided to go to the market and wait it out there. At the market we purchased some drinks, made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, ate some salsa and chips, and played crazy eights. While there the few people that lived in the area congregated around the public televisions to watch the Spanish Soaps. The military from a checkpoint down the road came and setup their radio and watched the soaps too.
After two or so hours, the sun started to set and we went back to our camp. Went into the water again, hung out at our campsite, and as the sun set we decided to cook up some hotdogs. We made a small hole in the sand and put the charcoal in there, the Hebrew Nat's were great and we enjoyed our beers and looked at the moon and bay. I set up the lantern, but the moon was so bright that the lantern cast a shadow. After taking some pictures, Dave broke out his tripod, we went to sleep.
Sunset at Camp
Ouch! After a sleeping for a while I was woken up by a small beetle biting me, and I couldn't find the bug spray. Rainville was bitten a little earlier than me and moved the bug spray from where I had stored it. After applying the bug spray I was able to sleep without incident. We awoke to an awesome sunrise and set out on the road again. Went through a checkpoint as we exited the town, this was by far the most thorough search we encountered on the trip. In fact, it was more thorough than our inspection of the car as they lifted up the seats and looked in all sorts of compartments that we had never opened. As this was going on, I mentioned to Dave that I hope whoever owned this vehicle didn't hide anything it.
Just took a short break, hung out in the room for a bit and then grabbed some Chinese with Motown. I plan on camping in my current location, 4th row center in track 4 for awhile. The next talk up is about bouncing signals off the moon, then psychosonic attacks, and lastly UFOs and telepathy. It's going to be great – I love the crazy, but before I can enjoy the talks I must attempt to finish the tale.
Bouncing Signals off the Moon
We made it through the checkpoint the previous owners of vehicle didn’t introduce any false panels, or hide drugs/weapons/dead bodies in any of the compartments. Throughout all the checkpoints in Mexico no soldier inspected the back portion of our vehicle where all of our equipment was stored. I guess drug/gun runners don't just throw that stuff in the back of their car.
Checkpoint
The road was significantly worse the second day; we were not looking forward to 90+ miles of it. I mentioned that one of them maps hanging on the wall where we spent the night showed the road going farther south than our map did and that the road might be better before we had to travel the full length of the road. We were going about 20 MPH throughout the day, and we clung to the hope that a good road would eventually appear. After driving for two to three hours, we saw in the distance a mountain that had a road being cut through it. As we drove closer it appeared that they were building a real highway next to our dirt road. We had to drive for about 30 more minutes till we were able to drive on the brand new road, and I should note that it was the nicest road we saw in all of Mexico. So we were able to cut out over 30 miles of dirt road driving out of our trip and eventually made it San Felipe. I predict in a few years that the new road will be complete and the dirt road and the emptiness we experienced will be gone for good. So this may be the only chance to see what we saw.
More Dirt Road
In San Felipe we parked the car and decided to walk around. As we stopped and exited the vehicle a guy sitting on the street started talking at as quite loudly, and we couldn't understand what he was saying. At first we thought he was telling us to move or something to that effect, when in reality he was asking where New Hampshire is due to the plates on the car. We decided to walk around the town and check it out. We found a nice taco place grabbed some tacos, drank some more Mexican Coke and chilled out for a while (11:30 - 1:00). We walked down the street and up a small hill to visit the lighthouse and see a small little shrine at the top of the mountain. We decided to see if we should stay at a hotel so we walked down the strip again, grabbed a drink at the taco factory, and continued to the end and found a hotel.
Dave at the Taco Factory
After checking in we went swimming in the Sea of Cortez and the water was even hotter than before - It was like warm bath water. The waves crashed on us for about 30 minutes and then we went back to hotel and cleaned up a bit. We then went for dinner, Rainville had to leave early – sh*t tornado – and Dave and I drank a few beers and enjoyed the ocean view, we were in no rush to get back to the room. It turns out that Nick didn't even make it all the way home and had to use the restroom in a bar we drank at earlier in the day. Once back, we watched some TV back in the room and crashed for the night.
The next day we awoke, quickly packed, and were on the road to Vegas at about 7am. We drove up Mexico 5 and reached Mexicali where we crossed the border into Calexico. The line at the border into the US wasn't too long, and took about 45 minutes to go through. We were getting hungry and wanted to go to In and Out burger, I thought I saw one in the distance and it turned out to be an AutoZone. We picked up an extra belt, what we were looking for earlier, and then went to McDonalds, here I turned my phone back on and sent out "Back in the USSA" update.
Back in the USSA
Back to the present the talk at DEFCON about bouncing signals at the moon is awesome, unfortunately only Kait and I are attending -- the EE guys would love this shit.
At the McDonalds, I mentioned that Steven had suggested we go to Salvation Mountain and Slab City as they were not too far out of our way. Salvation Mountain was awesome. The creator was not there so we couldn't get the guided tour, but we were able to wander around it. Next we went to Slab City, "The Last Free Place" and drove around it. We stopped at the Oasis hoping to grab a drink, but it was closed. While there we did meet an interesting resident who gave us some info about the place and then we went to a small yard sale where I picked up an audiocassette for $.50. From there we decided to drive through Joshua Tree National Park. We drove along the Sultan Sea and would have stopped but the beaches were closed, Steven mentioned that there was a bacteria outbreak there.
Salvation Mountain Truck
Salvation Mountain
In Salvation Mountain
Guard Station - Slab City (The Last Free Place)
Slab City Yard Sale
At Joshua Tree we talked to the Ranger and he was less than helpful, for example: Q: "Is there anything to see” A: "Everything is on the map"
As we drove through the basin portion of the park we were less than impressed, but did see the cactus garden, which was sort of cool. As we got to the main portion of the park, where the Joshua Trees are, it became quite awesome. We got out at the Hidden Valley Campsite and climbed around on the rocks for a while. It was great fun and hope to go back there again, perhaps in the winter. From Joshua Tree we took Route 66 and drove across the some intense landscapes. At about 9:00pm we arrived in Vegas and quickly checked into the room. We grabbed some dinner at the Peppermill. About an hour later Schuyler and Kait arrived.
Joshua Tree
Dave & Danny at Hidden Valley Campsite
Dave at the Peppermill
The next day we got breakfast at a diner and went to the Pinball Hall of Fame. But alas, I'm tired and will send more on that later. Listening to the talk on Psychosonic attacks – it’s quite bogus, but entertaining.
Later July 30, 2010
The pinball hall of fame was great, it was way more fun than I had anticipated. I got a chance to play a wide range of pinball games from the 1950s to present day. I got to play some machines that I remembered from when I was a kid, and got to play some old arcade games. My favorite game was called "Cold Beer" and it involves navigating a ball bearing around some holes using two joysticks to move a bar that pushes the ball. It was really awesome. We had a little tournament on a two player hot seat pinball machine. The arcade had an excellent soda vending machine and a popcorn vending machine. The old games normally cost .25$ and a lot of the ones I liked were .50$ and some of the newer ones were .75$ I don't recall if the newest ones cost more than that since I wasn’y interested in playing them. My favorite game was only .25$. Nick and Kait took a break and went to the Atomic Test Museum, while Dave, Schuyler, and I played for a few more hours.
Danny's Favorite Game - Cold Beer
Nick & Kait at the Pinball Hall of Fame
Nick (Playing) vs Dave in a heated tournament, Kait & Schuyler are on deck
We then went back to the hotel, tried to find out if there were any shows we could see cheaply. The cost for the good shows were prohibitive so we lounged in the hotel so Schuyler could catch up with his co-speaker datagram. We got dinner at Beijing Noodle No. 9 at Caesar’s Palace and went to the MGM to play craps. Dave and I lost, damn the $10 dollar tables. All of us then grabbed some drinks at a bar in the MGM.
This morning Dave and I went to McDonalds to grab breakfast and then went to the Keynote presentation on Cyberwar. In my opinion it wasn’t too deep technically, but it did present a coherent picture and was interesting. And then I went to the FOE talk -- SELF REFERENTIAL RECURSIVE STRUCTURE COMPLETE
POST TRIP:
More stuff happened, Schuyler got a crosshawk, and tanked Gringo Warrior, there was jousting, and we saw some more talks and ate some awesome food. A great time was had.
Talk on Intercepting Cell Phones (Great demonstration)
Danny battling Kait
Still friends after the battle (creeopo motown face)
Throughout his memoirs he paints himself in the most positive light, and I felt that I needed an outside reference to even out his portrayal. To that end, I purchased a copy of Albert Speer: The End of a Myth. The book thoroughly addresses many of the claims made by Speer an shows how he went out of his way to distort the truth to present the best image of himself. There was; however, no smoking gun presented in this book -- his involvement in forced labor and relocation of the jews in Berlin is highlighted, but his involvement in the most egregious crimes is only hinted at. The main claim that is debunked is that Speer was a politically naive technician. Throughout my reading of the memoir, I too thought that this claim seemed to be a grand deception of an adept politician.
By demolishing Speer's carefully tailored image of himself, Matthias Schmidt has contributed to setting the record straight, even though he overestimates the extent to which historians have been misled by that image. One wishes only that Mr. Schmidt had driven home with even greater force the lasting lesson of Speer's role in the Third Reich. While his was without question a political role, it was not that of a fanatical Nazi, a true believer in that pernicious creed. Instead, Speer's politics were those of an opportunist, ever ready to advance his own interests by whatever methods he found would serve that purpose. His career serves to remind us that fanatics such as Adolf Hitler and his disciples can cope with the complexities of the modern world only if they can call upon the talents of unscrupulous, self-serving men like Albert Speer.
I'd recommend this book to balance out the memoirs -- but it doesn't add too much if the memoirs are read with a critical eye and with the knowledge that he is trying to portray himself in the best possible light.
In conclusion, to shed a little more light on this master politician, I'll end with a quote from: The Nuremberg Interviews
The defendants generally tried to get away with everything they could, and as one of them suggested, they sometimes succeeded. That claim was made by Hitler's architect Speer, often regarded as the shrewdest observer among the defendants. He was not pleased at the end of the trial when he saw that Fritzsche, Papen, and Schact got off while he was given twenty years. He noted in his diary that their "likes, smokescreens, and dissembling statements had paid off after all." Speer resented not being exonerated by the court, but it was certainly not because he had failed to like or cover up the truth. Speer and no doubt other defendants resented people like Goldensohn and Gilbert. So far as we can tell, Speer gave Goldensohn no more than a brief and tersely worded statement (included in this volume). He accused Gilbert of being "always eager to add to his psychological knowledge." In answer to Gilbert's question about his sentence, Speer lied when he said the twenty years he got "was fair enough. They couldn't have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can't complain." By his own later admission, Speer was not telling the truth, for in fact he felt unjustly treated by the court.
Notes from Albert Speer - The End of a Myth:
Page 7
During 1953 -54 Speer wrote detailed memoirs covering thousands of pages - pages of all kinds and sizes, even toilet paper. The material was smuggled out, little by little, from the Alliked prison for war criminals in Spandau, Berlin. It wound up in Coesfeld, where Wolters had once again become a successful architect. One of his employees typed up the material and the final typescript came to eleven hundred pages. Nevertheless, as the prisoner Speer stated when this work was completed, it was "only a first draft."
....
[he was] now designated Prisoner Number 5
Page 89
According to Speer's memoirs, mysterious things occurred during his medical crisis. the surgeon Gebhardt supposedly asked the internist Koch to operate. But Koch refused, because such an operation would have threatened the patient's life. The specter of a "medical assassination" by the SS-physician Gebhardt haunts Speer's description of the episode. however, toward the end of the wa, Koch could tell his ex-patient only that he, Koch, had had an angry dispute with Gebhardt about how to treat Speer's illness. Even in 1947, when Koch could have testified openly against the head SS-physician, all he remembered was that there had been "in the course of treatment differences between Gebhardt and me." Koch did not mention any life-threatening operation suggested by Gebhardt.
Page 13
By 1943, the wider German public sensed that Germany could not hold out against the mass of Allied arms potential.. now, non of Speer's talks lacked some variation of the statement that "the sheer quantity of Allied wapons could be not only balanced but outdone by higher quality." That year, according to the judgment of the historian Karl-Heinz Ludwig, the slogan "qualitative superiority" introduced "a new phase of lying to the German people - a phase the culminated in the myth of miracle weapons.
Page 116
Speer saw all this from the viewpoint of a sportsman. In fact, he told his fellow minister Schwerin von Krosigk "that the race between destruction and reconstruction was the most exciting contest in the history of the world."
Page 121
in 1944 -- the year of the stick-it-out and retaliation propaganda, the year that Speer had proclaimed the year of technological surprises in all areas - the Minister of Armaments made use of Hitler's edict. That Februrary, he asked Otto Thierack, Reich Minister of Justice, to institute prelminary proceedings against August Pagels, manager of the Linden Iron and Steel Works. "According to the documents in my possession, " said Speer, "there seems to be an especially flagrant case of sabotage of our war effort." In March of that same year, Speer asked the Minister of Justice to bring criminal action against Walter Kamaryt, a Viennese, who, according to Speer, had supplied false figuers on the need for, and available supplies of material crucial to the armaments industry.
Page 122
Looking back thirty-five years later, Speer offers an entirely different account of the Egger case in his last book Infiltration (Der Sklavenstaat). He uses it as an object lesson to depict his jurisdictional squabbles with the SS. He also tries to prove that the SS kept attacking him and his industrial managers for political reasons. Speer reprints the first part of a letter that indicates his annoyance at not being informed of Egger's arrest; Speer then doesn't forget to quote the last sentence: "I must protest against linking such proceedings with interventions by political offices based on political grounds." In his book, however, Speer conscientiously hides the fact that he wrote this letter in order to make three requests for a harsher punishment. Indeed, his distortion of the facts goes even further when he concludes his description of the case: "Egger was instantly released from custody. The accusations against him had proved to be unfounded." What reader would not conclude that Bussing's general manager had been set free only because of Speer's speedy intervention!.
Page 126
Hermann Giesler, Speer's adversary then and now, can only poke mordant fun at the "assassination plan" supposedly hatched by Hitler's one time minion: "The second most powerful man in the state lacked a ladder."
Page 191
There is no telling what negative consequences the more primitive constructions would have had for the prisoners. In any event, Speer issued an edict in March 1943, ordering that no more permanent structures were to be put up. The inmate house had to be makeshift. The outer and inner walls were to be lightweight, and there was to be no plastering inside or outside.
However, Speer changed his mind when he read the report on Auschwitz by his two assistants, who must have found catastrophic sanitary conditions there. Speer quickly wrote to Himmler and made building material available -- iron, cast-iron pipes, water pipes, and round bar steel -- especially for construction at Auschwitz. however, conditions in other concentration camps must have been presented to him a more favorable light. For in a handwritten addendum to his letter to Himmler, Speer remarked: "I am delighted that the inspection of the other concentration camps resulted in a highly positive picture."
Page 195
Nevertheless, Speer realized that the foundation of his honorableness as a contrite and converted national Socialist was his ignorance of "what was really beginning on November 9, 1938, and what ended in Auschwitz and Majadanek" (Speer). Consequently, the ex-Minister of Armaments never once accused himself of anything without simultaneously asseverating that he had that he had ultimately known nothing.
Page 201
Speer's favorite role -- as hitler's master builder -- comes across somewhat differently in the sources, documents, and eyewitness accounts than in Inside the Third Reich. Nothing could be further from the truth than the image of Speer as an architect with purely artistic ambitions, absorbed in his work, wearing a white smock, perched at the drawing board, designing one project after another for his supreme client. On the contrary: Speer very quickly realized that his position as Hitler's special architect involved practicable power as well, and Speer quickly learned how to wiled it. Everyone who tried to curb his ambitions learned about Speer's power the hard way. They had to experience his methods first-hand: his skillful use of intrigues and machinations to make his way to the top. Speer's position as hitler's premier architect was his novitiate for higher orders, and ultimately the highest orders in the Nazi hierarchy.
So my brother, Steven Gagne, is an animator in LA and is currently contracting with The Mill. As part of his work there, he is responsible for the animation in the following Verizon ad. His focus is on animation, so the models, lighting, etc are done by others on the team. In my opinion, it's pretty awesome.
