Posted: October 30th, 2010 | Author: danny | Filed under: Book Notes | No Comments »
The introduction provides an excellent critique of the concept of war crimes. Particularly of the first two indictments. For instance, how were Stalin and other Russian leaders not indicted for crimes against peace since they were just as guilty as Germany was for the start of the war.
Page ix
Over dinner on November 29, Stalin suggested in passing that if at the end of the war about fifty thousand leaders of the German armed forced were rounded up and liquidated, then Germany's military might would be ended once and for all. Churchill was taken aback by the scale of the liquidations envisioned by Stalin. He said simply that the British Parliament and public would never accept such mass executions. But Roosevelt responded to Stalin more warmly, and when Churchill became upset (or so Churchill recalled), FDR said that the Allies should execute not fifty thousand, but "only 49,000. " Elliott Roosevelt, the president's son, who happened to be present, chimed in to say he was sure the United States Army "would support it."
Page xxiii
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 Schacht got off, while he was given twenty years. He noted in his diary that their "lies, 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 lie or to 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 traded by the court.
Page 29/30
[Hans Frank] "I met my wife in 1924. The relationship was one of a chance happening and was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I certainly don't want to say anything against the character of my wife, but she is too old - five years older than I am -- and I am of the opinion that it's just to bad.
Page 43
[Wilhelm Frick] Asked if he had any comment to offer on the Reichstag fire, Frick replied: "It can be argued both ways. At the trial some Communists were convicted. There is the rumor that Goering and the SA started it. But I don't know." What is your own opinion? "The only thing I can say is based on the viewpoint of gained what. If the Communists had done it, they were stupid because they were prohibited thereafter. If Goering and the SA did it, I'm unable to say. So far it has not come up in this trial." At the time, what was your opinion? "I had no reason to be suspicious, though rumors, of course, existed at that time, too."
Page 59/60/61/67
[Hans Fritzsche] Propaganda is always done by bringing the attention of the people to one side and taking the attention from the other side. Thus, propaganda is always one-sided, be it for good or for bad. Now during the past year and a half I have been thinking of the propaganda I broadcasted. I can say that I did not try to bring the attention of people to something bad, but to something one-sided - and I did that during all those ten years of my activity. I painted only in black-and-white - no in-between colors. Your country and other Allies did the same thing."
...
"Speaking for myself, I did not believe what the Allies said, though I had opportunity to always listen to Allied stations. The reasons for my not believing it was that it had been drummed into us that the Allies were telling lies in the form of propaganda. The tragedy of it all is that what these Allied broadcasting stations said was literally true. I must have said at least a hundred times during the war, whenever the Allied broadcasting stations talked about cruelties and atrocities, that the same type of Allied propaganda went on in the last war. I would say to my friends that in the last war the Allies talked about Germans chopping off the hands of Belgian children and that after the First World War it was admitted by the Allies that such allegations were false and merely propagandistic. I will say even today, that at the beginning of this war, hundreds of lies about Nazism were spread over the Allied stations. They even broadcast things about me personally -- things that could be proven false. Therefore, that is what I mean by saying that the guilt lies on both sides, because propaganda, whether it be evil or good, tends to make one doubt it. If one refers to the many false statements made by Allied broadcasters at the beginning of the war, then one's belief in foreign broadcasts would necessarily be minimized.
...
This is the satanic triumph of propaganda. It simply closes one's ears to what is right or what is wrong.
....
The only reason for my not believing these statements was that I had heard so much false propaganda and lies from the very same broadcasting stations.
Page ~68 - ~123
[Some good stuff on propaganda]
Page 124
[Hermann Goering] I said that Schirach also told me that Hess was said to have had a pendulum in his office, which he used to detect whether the letters he received were worthy of answering or not - whether the writer was a friend or enemy. If the pendulum swung in one direction, the letter was all right; if it swung another way, the letter was a bad one. Did Goering know anything as the validity of this tale?
"Sure. I saw Hess's pendulum and he used it. I never paid any attention to his strange ideas. he was quiet and bother nobody. I knew a great surgeon who believed in a similar pendulum, using it the same way Hess did. Apparently it's a common superstition." Goering went on to say that obviously it was not Hitler's idea that Hess fly to England, because it was too stupid. "There were many other means to negotiate a peace with England if Hitler wanted that. We could use our representatives in Sweden or Switzerland."
Page 131
I asked him to give me further reflections or impressions about the trials as far as his opinion was concerned. Goering seemed wary and not too inclined to speak at length. he did say, however, "Frankly, it is my intention to make this trial a mockery. I feel that a foreign country has no right tot try the government of a sovereign state. I have desisted from making any critical remarks about my codefendants. Yet they are a mixed-up, unrepresentative group. Some of them are so unimportant, I never even heard of them. I'll admit they are right in including me among the big Nazis who ran Germany. But why include Fritzsche? He was one of many section chiefs in the Propaganda Ministry. And then they try a man like Funk, who is guilty of nothing. He followed orders, and they were my orders. And then they try a fellow like Keitel, who, although he was called a field marshal, was a small person who did whatever Hitler instructed. Of all the defendants, the only ones who are big enough to merit being tried are me, Schacht, Ribbentrop perhaps, although he was a weak echo of Hitler, Frick, who proposed the Nuremberg Laws, and maybe a few others, like Rosenberg and Seyss-Inquart. The rest of them were followers and showed little initiative.
"Then there is the farce of the case against the general staff. These military men were not a part of any conspiracy to wage war but simply accepted orders and obeyed them as any German soldier or officer would do. If there was a conspiracy, it lay among those who are dead or missing - i mean Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, and naturally, Hitler. I always felt that Bormann was a primitive criminal type and I never trusted Himmler. I would have dismissed them." Goering smiled knowingly and added, "You know, you can get rid of a man in many subtle ways. For example, you can dismiss a man suddenly, but that is less effective if that individual has some power and backing than by slowly diminishing his power by giving him more and more meaningless titles. In the case of Himmler, I would have promoted him on paper and made him chief of this and chief of that, but in the end his power would be gone. I would have taken away from him the police power first, and later I would have assumed control of the SS myself. In this way there would have been no such thing as mass murders. For all that Hitler was a genius and a strong character, he nevertheless was suggestible, and Himmler and Goebbels or both must have influenced him to go ahead with such an idiotic scheme as gas chambers and crematoriums to eliminate millions of people.
Page 132
I don't believe in the Bible or in a lot of things which religious people think. But I revere women and I think it unsportsmanlike to kill children.
...
For myself I feel quite free of responsibility for the mass murders. Certainly as second man in the state under Hitler, I heard rumors about mass killings of Jews, but I could do nothing about it and I knew that it was useless to investigate these rumors and to find out about them accurately, which would not have been too hard, but I was busy with other things, and if I had found out what was going on regarding the mass murders , it would simply have made me feel bad and I could do very little to prevent it anyway."
Page 136
On his desk Hess had written certain words in German, which seemed to be rules for keeping in good health whih he had probably jotted down in order to facilitate his memory. Mr Triest took down notes, which in translation are as follows:
Eat little. Don't take any sleeping pills. They will only lose the effect in case that you should really need them. Also take little other medicine [analgesics]. Instead of egg, ask for marmalade and bread. Don't eat or drink in the morning in order not to get tired. Ask the doctor for orange or lemon juice once in a while. Don't eat salty food. Otherwise the cramps may become more frequent.
Page 147
[Earnst Kaltenbrunner]
"Hitler had an excellent memory for numbers and he knew exactly the tonnage of each warship any nation possessed. He knew this even better than the naval and finance experts. Hitler believed that America had to find a place to get rid of its investments in lend-lease, armaments, et cetera, and that it had to realize the money it had invested over her. That was Hitler's idea. Any attempt to talk peacefully or negotiate a peace with America was unsuccessful because Hitler felt that Germany could not offer America this financial settlement which it desired. Thus Hitler thought that the war with the United States was not an ideological war but one that stemmed purely from economic reasons.
Page 151
Earnst Kaltenbrunner]
"The Hague Convention does not mention a preventive war because owing to modern weapons, preventive war had not yet existed. The quicker humanity advances, the more important it is to be the one who deals the first blow. It was still possible in times of old-fashioned warfare to put up an ultimatum, but with all the new and modern weapons, tanks, and especially the atom bomb, this is impossible."
Page 155/156
The neutrality of Turkey was guaranteed by several countries so that it could perform that job. Any historian will recognize that this is the same as the capture of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea. In other words, the English-Russian route through the Mediterranean is not being endangered by Russian boats. Therefore , the neutrality of Turkey, as seen by England, is only an armed neutrality which favors the British Empire.
On the other hand, German foreign policy in Turkey was, of course, conditioned by these things. Turkey only in the first line had to be afraid of Russia. for its neutrality Turkey was paid by England, with money and armaments; and at the same time Turkey was paid by Germany through commercial treaties and armaments. At the very moment when Germany was weakest, Turkey turned to England. As long as Germany was strong, Turkish neutrality was tremendously friendly to Germany. Those are the basic principles of Turkish policy.
One has to add that the Russian interests were exactly the opposite because Russia wanted free access to the Mediterranean either by having possession of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles or by having hem opened by international agreement. Secondly, Turkey is the thinnest-populated country in Europe and western Asia, with only twelve inhabitants to the square kilometer. Therefore, it is an open invitation for southern Russia to spread and place its population. this can be seen y two demands of Russia for Turkish lands: one, Russia demanded souther Turkey, the Black Sea, which would mean the destruction of the whole Turkish commerce, and , two , Russia demanded Armenian territories, very cleverly using long-standing, bitter fights between Armenians and Turks.
...
From the time of Bismark, Germany always kept away from Turkey and gave many assurances to England that it should not be afraid, that it was English territory and would remain as such. The same neutrality was always promised by Hitler and respected by him constantly.
Page 198/199
[Alfred Rosenberg]
The Jewish question was one which required a knowledge of history, philosophy, the Greeks, a study of races, music, art, and so forth. This is not literal but a summation of the generalities and quasi-learned arguments he propounded. The cause of the Jewish question was, of course, the Jews themselves. The Jews are a nation, and like very nation, have a nationalistic spirit. That's all very well, but they should be in their own homeland. Now there were several places for Jews proposed in 1936 by the English (I believe he said the French and Germans, too - implying that a joint proposal was made that the Jews turned down). These places were Alaska, Guiana (didn't say which of the islands), Madagascar, and Uganda.
Why couldn't the Jews be allowed to remain where they were, in other lands? That would have been all right if they didn't do bad things, but they did. What did the Jew do? They spat at German culture. How? They controlled the theater, publishing, the stores, and so on. Of course, Jews have a two-thousand-year-old culture, too, but it is not the German culture, which is so different.
...
Every doctor knows that there are different types of blood, various classes, Rosenberg said at one point, in discussing the differences between races. Would, for example, a blood transfusion from a Negro cause any character differences to ensue if given to an Aryan? Rosenberg said quite seriously, with his "philosophic" smile, he didn't know. That would be a brutal experiment such as was done in the concentration camps. He smiled as if he had scored a triumph of reasoning. We pressed the point though for his opinion; suppose a Nazi soldier were injured and given some Jewish blood, or Negro blood. Would character changes occur? It wasn't proven, he said. Negroes beget Negroes, Jews Jews, so it must be that blood will tell.
...
What was Rosenberg's main objection to Bolshevism? He seemed surprised at that question, as if it were a subject which needed no explanation. After a few moments he said vehemently, "Bolshevism wants to destroy by power a very sensitive state culture without any consideration for the history of the nation. Secondly, Bolshevism wants to do this for the benefit of a single class of the population. Thirdly, Bolshevism fights principally against private property. It creates a collectives among the farmers and destroys the agricultural system. it works against the principles upon which more or less all states are based.
"The Communist Party is under the control of a central office. This central office is in Moscow. Therefor, Communism in various countries is in the making of the individual state or an expression of nationalism. This international Communistic Bolshevism gathers its support from a strong state - Russia. Communism not only makes its policy in Russia but it prescribes the policy of Bolsheviks all over the world."
Page 201
I can mention men like Averell Harriman and Curle, the may of Boston. [who were against the Versailles treaty]
Page 204/205
[Fritz Sauckel]
the main stream of thought which he presented today consisted of the following currents:
- National Socialism did a good job in Germany until the latter years of the war, when too many enemies of Germany banded against her.
- The excesses, atrocities, exterminations within and without the concentration camps were unknown to honorable men like himself, and could be attributed to Himmler, who apparently was not a good man.
- The causes of the war lay in the Versailles Treaty and the economic depression within Germany ever since the end of the last war, augmented by the failure of other countries to buy German products in exchange for wheat, without which Germany would starve. There was a virtual boycott of Germany.
- Anti-Semitism was not Sauckel's department, and the specialists in that were Streicher and Rosenberg, who had devoted almost their entire lives to the subject; but he, Sauckel, believed it was brought on because there was too high a percentage of Jews in positions of prominence in Germany, in state offices, professions, the stage, radio, and so forth. Sauckel stated that the Jews were not really persecuted until late in the war, 1942 perhaps, and then it was part of the general "war psychology" and not really known to him or other Germans, but again the work of Himmler. Sauckel's conscience was clear, and he would do anything he had done over again because it all had been honorable.
Page 209
I asked him what he knew of the reports of the mistreatment of slave labor, of families being cruelly separated in occupied countries and the able ones brought as workers to Germany, and of people having been seized in theaters and public places and shipped without notice as workers to Germany. His reply was evasive. "What would you do if your country's welfare depend on labor? When a ship is in a storm it requires one captain."
Page 218
[Hjalmar Schact]
Schact repeated his indignation "that a man who has never been associated with anything but high finance for forty years, and who was never a soldier and never did anything to hurt anyone, should be locked up and tried as a common war criminal." Again he repeated that he did nothing but live on his farm since 1939 , and besides, he was a party to the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.
It becomes obvious in talking to Schact that he is attempting to devise two distinctly paradoxical pictures of himself: the one , that he was a harmless old man who had been inactive since 1939; the other, a picture of a great national German patriot who worked ceaselessly for Hitler's downfall and frustration, and was actively a participant in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Clinically, it is obvious that Schact has tremendous energy and vitality for a man of his years.
Page 222/223
"Now what did the Treaty of Versailles do to us? It took away from Germany all of the private assets of Germans. do you realize what this means, Dr. Goldensohn? It liquidated the private assets of German citizens, a thing which has not been done since medieval times. By this, they destroyed one of the foundations of our life. For example, if we had an import or export house in Rio de Janeiro or new York, they took away our license and put us out of business. Such losses amounted to $11 billion, aside from reparations. By doing this the Allies destroyed not only a half-billion-dollar income, but also spoiled our whole sales organization. Then, furthermore, after Versailles, they imposed reparation payments on Germany, and as we had no foreign assets anymore, we could only pay by new exports. How could we pay the Allies otherwise? Therefore, the need for export trade became more urgent since we needed foreign money in order to pay for food and raw material, as well as reparations. The reparations amounted to $50 billion in cash! Can you imagine that? That means fifty thousand million dollars.
"Now, of course, Germany could not do that. An annual amount of money and reparation payment was fixed at about a billion dollars a year, and we could not afford that. And then, you must recall that after the First World War we had for the most part socialist governments, and these socialists followed a very lighthearted policy. they borrowed money from the outside, and with that money they paid for reparations. mostly, the money came from America, and so Germany contracted many foreign debts. During the six years 1924-29, our foreign debts were not less than 8 billion. That is exactly as much as the United States borrowed before the First world war over a period of four decades. And then came the movement when foreign creditors said that they couldn't go on, and not only stopped lending but withdrew all short credits at maturity. This led to a financial crash of frightful proportions in the summer of 1931.
"Immediately after these credits were stopped, the economic situation of Germany became worse and worse. the Bruening government of the middle-class parties, the so-called bourgeois government, followed a deflationary policy. They cut wages and salaries so much that many industries collapsed; and at the same time, the Allied countries had raised customs tariffs. Finally, we arrived at a situation of more than 6 million unemployed. Now if you take into consideration the fact that the farmer is never unemployed, but that only industrial folk are, it means that every third family suffered from unemployment. Therefore, people lost confidence in the socialists as well as in the middle-class parties and wen to the extremes.
"There was only the choice between Communism and Hitler, and I will tell you why Hitler won. People will not give up religion, rights, freedom of personality, the opportunity to develop by individual effort - which includes private property. And the other reason for Hitlers' winning is that if a whole people is treated as the Germans were, everyone will say, 'Are we worse people than others? Are we of a minor race?' Just as every single individual needs and must have self-respect, just as every family is proud of decent traditions s, so every nation want s to maintain her individual manner, culture, language, and customs.
Page 232
I was never a soldier. I detest uniforms because they make one unfree. There is an old quotation that goes something like this: 'Your mind will be trained will, but confined to Spanish boots.' That quotation is very apt. It signifies how narrow the military mind becomes."
Page 245
[Baldur von Schirach]
But in retrospect, and realizing where we have come to, I am absolutely sure that a real system of government must prevent one man or twenty or thirty men from getting all the power of the state into their hands. Power is what spoils people. Yes, it seems to me that the seeking after power is the great danger and the great corrupter of mankind.
"Some of the defendant say that dictatorship can be good if there is a good dictator. But I say that a man cannot stay good if he becomes a dictator. Authoritarianism is a system that destroys man's morality. If you take a saint and give him power, he will change into a Hitler or a devil."
Page 255
[Julius Streicher]
As usual, Streicher had no rational explanation for what he called this devilish procedure, but made some inconsequential remarks about how, if circumcision was Jewish, it should not be inflicted on non-Jews. It was clear that he considered circumcision as something which had no medical or surgical import, but merely a racial custom.
...
Pinning Streicher down to any particular subject was most difficult because his ability to discuss anything logically was quite limited.
Page 258
For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.
Page 295
[Rudolf Hoess]
Why didn't you give yourself up before? I queried. "I thought I could get away with it."
Page 296
The general Government of Poland was under my supervision, bu concentration camps farther on in Russia itself came under the aegis of SS generals.
"I was commandant at Auschwitz for four years, from May 1940 until the first of December, 1943." I asked how many people were executed at Auschwitz during his time. "The exact umber cannot be determined. I estimate about 2.5 million Jews." Only Jews? "Yes." Women and children as well? "Yes."
What do you think of it? Hoess looked blank and apathetic. I repeated my question and asked him whether he approved of what went on at Auschwitz. "I had my personal orders from Himmler." Did you ever protest? "I couldn't do that The reasons Himmler gave me Ii had to accept." In other words, you think it was justified to kill 2.5 million men, women, and children? "Not justified - but Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews."
How could the Jews exterminate the Germans? "I don't know, that is what Himmler said. Himmler didn't explain." Don't you have a mind or opinion of your own? "Yes, but when Himmler told us something, it was so correct and so natural we just blindly obeyed it." Do you have any feelings of guilt for this? "Yes, now naturally it makes me think that it was not right."
Page 298
Hoess said that while he was commandant of Auschwitz, soap was not manufactured from human fat. "We cut the hair from women after they had been exterminated in the gas chambers. The hair was then sent to factories, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets." Was this hair also from men and children? "No, in 1943 I received the first orders to do it. We cut the hair only from women and only after they were dead." Did you supervise gas chamber murders? "Yes, I had the whole supervision of that business. I was often, but not always, present when the gas chambers were being used." You must be a hard man. "You become hard when you carry out such orders." It seems to me you must be hard to begin with. "Well, you certainly can't have soft feelings, whether it is shooting of people or killing them in gas chambers."
People were shot at Auschwitz also? "Not Jews, but Poles of the resistance movement were shot. This was done under orders of Rudolf Mildner." Were you a friend of Mildner? "He often came to Auschwitz." Did he have his court at Auschwitz? "After the Poles were sentenced, after the party district administrator signed the death sentences, then they came to Auschwitz to Mildner's court and were told that they were sentenced to death. This amounted to about sixty or seventy men per month." How many months was Mildner there? "Mildner came in 1941 and left in 1943. I would estimate about 1,500 men were sentenced to death by Mildner's court."
Page 300
"In the summer of 1941, I was called to Berlin to see Himmler. I was given the order to erect extermination camps. I can almost give you Himmler's actual words, which were to the effect: 'The Fuhrer has ordered the final solution to the Jewish problem. Those of us in the SS must execute these plans. This is a hard job, but if the act is not carried out at once, instead of us exterminating the Jews, the Jews will exterminate the Germans at a later date.'
"That was Himmler's explanation. Then he explained to me why he selected Auschwitz. There were extermination camps already in the East bu they were incapable of carrying out a large-scale action of extermination. Himmler could not give me the exact number, but he said that at the proper time Eichmann would get in touch with me and tell me more about it. He would keep me informed about incoming transports and like matters.
"I was ordered by Himmler to submit precise plans as to my ideas on how the extermination program should be executed in Auschwitz. I was supposed to inspect a camp in the East, namely Treblinka, and to learn from the mistakes committed there.
"A few weeks later, Eichmann visited me in Auschwitz and told me that the first transports from the General Government and Slovakia were to be expected. he added that this action should not be delayed in any way so that no technical difficulties would arise and that the schedules of transports should be maintained at all costs.
Page 301/302/303
How many people at a time were exterminated in each farmhouse? Hoess stared at the floor and thought for several moments. He shifted his eyes from me to the floor to Mr. Triest, and finally after about thirty seconds of silence, said: "In each farmhouse eighteen hundred to two thousand persons could be gassed at one time. The two farmhouses were separated by a distance of six hundred to eight hundred meters. They were completely closed off from the outside by woods and fences."
How often were these buildings used? "Well, it was like this. These transports didn't come daily; sometimes two or three trains arrived on a single day, every train containing two thousand people, but there were periods when no transports arrived for three to six weeks." How long were these people kept at Auschwitz? "No time at all. A side track went to Birkenau and unloaded, and there the selection was made. Those who were able to work were sifted from those unable to work." What criteria for selection were used? "Well, we had two SS doctors and they sat at tables, and the people from the transports got off the train and walked by these doctors. These people were fully clothed; they just walked by and the doctors judged by their looks, age, and strength."
Out of the transport of two thousand, approximately how many were saved for work? "In all of those years, I figured an average of twenty to thirty percent of the people were able to work." And then what happened? "Those not able to work were marched to the farmhouses. These were a good kilometer from the side track. There they were made to undress. At first they had to undress in he open, where we had erected walls made of straw and branches of trees that kept them from onlookers. After a while we built barracks. We had big signs, all of which read 'To Disinfection' or 'Baths.' That was in order to give the people the impression that they would merely receive a bath or be disinfected, in order to not have any technical difficulty in the extermination process.
"And the internees whom we used as interpreters and general helpers in those stations instructed the people that they should take care of their clothing when they laid it on the ground in neat piles so that they should be able to find their clothe when the came out of the bath or disinfecting room. These internees helped quiet all of the people by answering their questions in a reassuring manner and telling them they would only be bathed in those houses.
" Then the people were brought to the chambers and the internees who accompanied them went along with the people into the extermination chambers so that the people would be quiet, since they saw the attendants go inside themselves It was so done that all of the chambers were filled up at the same time. At the last moment, when the chambers were filled, the internees who worked for us slipped out, the doors were jammed shut, and the Zyklon B gas was thrown through small openings." Was there any panic among the people prior to their murder? "Yes, sometimes, but we worked it smoothly, more smoothly as time went on. The men were always exterminated in a separate chamber, and the women an children together in the same chamber." At what age for example, did you distinguish between a child and a grown-up, that is between a boy and a man? "I can't say. We judged by the looks of the boys - you know, some are grown-up at fifteen years, others at seventeen. We judged mainly by stature."
Page 306/307
From the time you left Auschwitz until the end of the war, how many people were exterminated there? "The figure 2.5 million takes care of 1944" Were there any exterminated in 1945? "No, at the end of 1944 the whole thing stopped. It was forbidden by Himmler." What happened to the transports that arrive in 1945? "Hardly any transports arrived in 1945, and the only people who came were those able to work." Why did the exterminations stop? Was it because there were no more Jews to exterminate? "In November 1944 I was with Eichmann in Budapest and he told me that there were negotiations going on between Himmler and representatives of the Jews in Switzerland through various middlemen and that from then on exterminations would have to stop immediately."
Page 309
Who invented the gas chambers? "They developed out of the situation. the courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I aways objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootins, so we used gas chambers instead."
How many concentration camps in Germany or outside of it had gas chambers? "Mauthausen, Dachau, Auschwitz, and in the east, Treblinka; in Russia, they used gas wagons." What about Majdanek? "They had temporary gas chambers but that camp came under the Security Polic - the Einsatzkommando and Security Police. In Lublin there was a concentration camp which came under our inspection and supervision but it was not an extermination camp. Majdanek was near the city of Lublin and was an extermination camp under the direction of Lieutenant General Globocnik, who was the SS and political leader of Lublin.
Page 314/315
I asked him whether he subscribed to any religious belief. "I left the church in 1922 and my wife left it in 1935." Why did you leave the church? "During my experiences at the front in Iraq and Palestine I thought that there was a lot of humbug connected with the so-called holy places and that things were not done right, especially by the Catholic Church, of which I was a member. And that diverted me from my formerly rigid, strict Catholicism. Just what humbug did you did you see and what in particular was wrong with Catholic religion as you found it in Palestine and Iraq? "I don't know, it is a long time ago and I was so busy since then I have had no time for thinking about religion, but all of this money that wen to the church, well, it seemed to me that it was humbug."
...
Does the fact that you put the phenomenal number of 2. 5 million men, women, and children to death, not to mention your supervision of exterminations and excursions in all of the other camps that you supervised since 1943 - does that fact not upset you a little at times? "I thought I was doing the right thing, I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don't know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn't personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination program in Auschwitz. I twas Hitler who ordered it through Himmler and it was Eichmann who gave me the order regarding transports." Do you ever have any thoughts of these executions, gassings, or burning of corpses - in other words, do such thoughts come upon you at times and in any way haunt you? "No. I have not such fantasies."
...
That's an interesting observation: you murdered 2.5 million Jews but you disapprove of Der Sturmer. "Oh yes, all people with any sense disapproved of Der Sturmer."
Page 323
[Albert Kesselring]
Do you think your father would approve of National Socialism? "I think that as a Freemason, he would have opposed it. But aside from his own Freemasonry, everyone to his own liking, I don't think he would have opposed it. Father was an absolute German man, and his belonging to the Freemasons was not against that." What was Hitler's objection to Freemasonry? "Because it was international. A cousin of mine was a member of a lodge in Bayreuth and was looked on askance. Understanding of other nations does no mean a feeling against your own country. That's the whole trouble with Germans. They can see only their own country, the local church steeples only. If only German youth could go abroad, and youth from other countries come to Germany. You always have to have criticism if you with sot become better."
Page 326/327
[Keitel's order of December 16, 1942 to Kesselring]
The furher has ordered that the enemy employs in partisan warfare Communist-trained fanatics who do not hesitate to commit any atrocity. It is more than ever a question of life and death. This fight has nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or principles of the Geneva Convention. If the fight against the partisans in the East, as well as in the Balkans, is not waged with the most brutal means, we will shortly reach the point where the available forces are insufficient to control the area. It is therefore not only justified, but is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as it ensures success. Any consideration for the partisans is a crime against the German people.
Kesselring remembered the order. He was then confronted with his own order of June 17, 1944, which read:
The partisan situation in the Italian theater, particularly central Italy, had deteriorated to such an extent that it constitutes a serious danger to troops, supply lines, war industry and economic potential. The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. i will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of severity of methods he adopts against partisans. In this connection the older principle applies that a mistake in the choice of methods in executing one's orders is better than failure or neglect to act.
Kesselring admitted having issued that order. Furthermore, three days later he issued another "top secret" order saying:
It is the duty of all troops and police in my command to adopt the severest measures. Every act of violence committed by partisans must be punished immediately. Reports submitted must also give details of countermeasures taken. Wherever there is evidence of a considerable number of partisan groups a proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the event of an act of violence being committed these men will be shot.
Kesselring was reminded of two instances of how his words were carried out. A Colonel von Gablentz was captured by bandits. The entire male populate of the villages on the stretch of road concerned were arrested. As reprisal for the capture of this colonel, 660 persons, including 250 men, were arrested. Maxwell Fyfe asked him if taking 410 women and children into custody was what was meant by his order of "steps necessary to deal with partisan warfare." Kesselring answered equivocally that it was unnecessary.
Page 342/343
[Ewald von Kleist]
he then led a panzer army corps, which consisted of about two divisions and attached troops, in the blitz against Poland. "I was very successful in this operation because I able to use cavalry tactics. I was in Poland for only sixteen days in all. Then I left Poland and got together with the Russians for the first time, on friendly terms. That was the time of the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact, and there was a division of Poland between Germany and Russia. My impression of the Russians then was that they were exceedingly good troops, advanced in military technique, motorized to a surprising extent, and very correct in their behavior."
He then assumed command of three panzer corps which were known to as Kleist groups. "This was in may 1940, and I began organizing this small army, which bore my name, in the territory behind Dusseldor. We then went to the West and if I say so myself, it was my army which is largely responsible for the rapid victory in France. I broke through the Sedan and Maginot Lines and I reached the coast of France within seven days near Abbeville. In the course of my victories I took the towns of Bastogne and Calais and it was the Kleist groups that attacked Dunkirk from the west. This was during the tremendous British disaster which occurred there.
"I must say that the English managed to escape that trap in Dunkirk, which I had so carefully laid, only with the personal help of Hitler. There was a channel from Arras to Dunkirk. I had already crossed this channel and my troops occupied the heights which jutted out over Flanders. Therefore, my panzer group had complete control of Dunkirk and the area in which the British were trapped. The fact of the matter is that the English would have been unable to get into Dunkirk because I had them covered. then Hitler personally ordered that I should withdraw my troops from these heights."
Why had Hitler ordered this? "Hitler thought tit was too risky. It was nonsense - those orders of Hitler's in those days. We could have wiped out the British army completely or taken the whole army as captive if weren't for the stupid order of Hitler. The proof of it is that three days later the English occupied the heights and I was obliged to attack them again to take them back. The masses of English troops, however, had already reached Dunkirk and were escaping in small boats. The sad part of it is that I could have captured the whole English army, or such a great part of it, at any rate, that an invasion of England would have been a simple affair. I did capture man French soldiers, including General Henri Giraud.
"Altogether I captured 1 million prisoners of war on all fronts. I think I did pretty well. Giraud's capture was very amusing. An intelligence officer conveyed an English radio message that the French front had been torn open through tank attacks. My intelligence officer said that the English radio had broadcasted, 'The French general, the beloved General Giraud, would take over command of the French front and restore the situation.' Now the amusing thing about it is that as I was reading this intelligence report, the door opened and in walked a good looking French general who turned out to be Giraud. He had been very brave but was a little mistaken about the situation. He had taken a reconnaissance car and driven into our territory searching for his troops but instead he found mine, and had been taken prisoner by a couple of enlisted men." Kleist chuckled.
Page 346
I asked Kleist what occasioned his retirement at that time. "Well, on December 1, 1943, I told Hitler to give up his supreme command. On March 29, 1944, I again had a very severe argument with Hitler and I had the impression that it was more the people around Hitler than Hitler himself who said that I was an inconvenient subordinate. Hitler himself told me when I said good-bye to him that he could find no fault with me as a soldier. Hitler said many friendly things to me. He said that he had very few people who were capable of leading an operational war. He advised me to take a rest because I had worked so hard and he implied that I would be asked to serve again. I really think that the reason for my going home at that time was that I always told Hitler my frank opinions."
* Page 350 *
"Planned economy is used in Germany at present by he occupying powers. It is done in all countries with the exception of the United States, and sooner or later your country will get around to it. For example, there are the questions of wheat, gold, silver. If the U.S.A wants to sell two hundred pounds of wheat for five marks, and Russia will sell the same amount of wheat for three marks, then you can easily see that free economies cannot exist. It would take only a few such instances and the entire stock exchange would break down."
Page 365
[Erhard Milch]
I also asked him about his statements obtained from records of minutes of meetings of the Central Planning Board, of which he was a member, that Russian labor should be supplied to work the mines and that Russian women should be enlisted in agricultural work. Milch was as evasive as he was in court. He looked more uncomfortable than he had managed to appear in court two days ago, however, and said that "many things were said in the heat of a war, and not all were calculated to be read back to you later."
...
I inquired: What about the statement you are reported to have made regarding the draining off of French young men to work in Germany, so that in the event of an attack of the mainland by the Allies, these Frenchman could not act as partisans? Milch said he gathered that the interpretation put on his words regarding clearing France, and Italy for that matter, of partisans or possible partisans was that he was in favor of forced labor. "Nothing could be further from the truth! But our Fatherland was threatened by defeat from these bands of Maquis and other wild groups, and what else could be done by a loyal German anxious to achieve a victory for his Fatherland?"
Page 366
But Milch looked worried and harried. It was the first time I had seen this little compact man, who looks younger than his fifty-six years, in any way ruffled. I said in parting that his testimony for Goering had incriminated him, in my opinion. he replied, "No. Let them try me. I shall have plenty to say about the Allies. I have some very good friends among the Americans and English, and the French industrialists, too. i have done nothing of which I am ashamed."
It was true enough, he did not appear ashamed - merely worried about his own immunity from trial as a war criminal.
Page 375/376/377
[Rudolf Mildner]
"On September 17, 1943, I got to Denmark. I carried an oder with me from Mueller, to arrest Niels Bohr, a famous atomic physicist. He was a Jew or half Jew. That was the reason for the order." Mildner said he imagined his work was to be different because he had known many Danes in the past fifteen years, including Danish girls. he didn't know actual Danish conditions, he said. "I knew there might be some resistance but I didn't want to mix into Danish affairs any more than I had to. Bohr was a Danish citizen and I didn't like the order Mueller gave me. I was not in Denmark long, but during that time I received an order from Himmler through Best. I had already established a central office of the Security Police in Denmark in the five larger cities. The telegram said that "the evacuation of Danish Jews was to start at once. There were six thousand Jews in Denmark."
These Jews, said Mildner, were people who had fled Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and lived in Denmark for hundreds of years. "I was very distressed. I went to Best and asked why the Jews should be evacuated. They kept quiet and did no harm. They were Danish citizens and Denmark was a sovereign state. Best explained that Ribbentrop had spoken to Hitler and said he thought it was best to have the Jews evacuated from Denmark. Ribbentrop was afraid he might be called on the carpet for not having taken any action against the Jews in Denmark." in other words, Ribbentrop anticipated Hitler's wishes in this regard. "Yes. That was what Best said. I can say that the reason for the deportation of Jews from Denmark is Ribbentrop. Whether it would have been ordered later by Hitler, I don't know." Do you know of any documents int hat regard? "No. Best told me. All of us were distressed, Best as well as my coworkers."
"I immediately sent a telegram to Mueller with recommendations that deportation of Jews of Denmark would cause many misgivings. First because the Jews were quiet politically, and did not appear in any way disturbing. Second, the deportation would have serious consequences for the German-Danish relationship, because Danish agriculture sent food to Germany and Danish industry also worked for Germany. Then there were the repercussions it would have on the Scandinavians and in North America. I added that all the Danish people object to it. i said in the telegram, too, that it would result in more sabotage and unrest. I requested that the order for deportation be canceled."
In a few days the order came from Himmler to best, informing him to proceed with the given order. "Desperate about it, I wen tot the airport and flew to Berlin. I wanted to see Kaltenbrunner. I actually saw Mueller. I again told Mueller all the misgivings, although I had to omit the humane reasons - I had to use other arguments." Mueller called his secretary, in Mildner's presence, and dictated a telegram to Himmler. He wrote all that Mildner told him. "I flew back although Mueller said the cable wouldn't do much good. I still had some hope. Paul Kanstein was assigned for liaison between Best and the Danish government. Kanstein knew Denmark well. He was very friendly with all the Danish ministers. A meeting was called with Kanstein, Best, and myself present and we decided that all Jews should be warned. If the order had to be carried out, I had no interest that any Jews should fall into our hands. A few days later another cable came from Himmler - to deport the Jews at once. A representative of Eichmann came with two ships and a detachment from Oslo consisting of a battalion of Ordinary Police. One night, October 1, I think, the action began. I spent that evening with Kanstein. In all they seized four to five hundred Jews. They were put on a ship, and I believe went via Oslo to Stettin to Theresiensadt [Czechoslovakia]. The other Jews, who were warned, were hidden by Danes and by night fled to Sweden. There was very lively traffic. One could
go by rowboat - the distance was only three kilometers. That was the whole action.
...
"In addition, I didn't arrest Niels Bohr because I didn't want to arrest Danish scientists. Bohr fled to Sweden. That was long after the Jewish deportation. From Sweden Bohr went to England, was received by Churchill, and Radio London announced that Bohr decided to his work to the Allies.
Page 378
"I told Mueller that it would be useless to use countersabotage - that it was just murder." What did countersabotage mean? "That I shall explain in a moment. It's very interesting. Whenever a Danish or German businessman who did business with the Germans was murdered, an important Dane should be murdered - at first unofficially; later it became quite official. Or if a Danish factory working for Germany was blown up by sabotage, another factory working only for the Danes should be destroyed." A crazy idea. "Yes. It was Hitler's idea, not Himmler's, I can prove it. And if such was the case, the work of the Security Police in Denmark was finished because there would be continuous murderous activity, blowing up of businesses, and giving the Reich a bad name.
Page 387/388/389/390/391/392
[Otto Ohlendorf]
There were a large number of Jews who held more favorable positions than they should have, according to their percentage of the population. Germans should have held those positions. This accounted for the 1938 action of Goebbels against the Jews." Therefore, all Jews were dispossessed? "No that was the November 1938 action of Goebbels against the Jews without the consent of Hitler. That was in reprisal for the murder of a Paris Nazi official by the Jew Herschel Grynszpan." Do you believe that? "No. Goebbels was just looking for an excuse." did you know Goebbels personally? "Yes." What sort of person was he? "I met him several times. He was clever, fanatic, having a clubfoot he might have suffered a minority inferiority complex, knowing that because of his physical appearance, he knew he never could reach leadership. he was unscrupulous in his propaganda. I always oppose Goebbels. I always tried to have people educated on a broad basis, while Goebbels tried to supply them with knowledge for the moment. Goebbels considered humans as objects to be used for political purposes - for the moment."
Did you do anything concretely against Goebbels? "My reports in the SD always referred to these facts." Anything else about Goebbels? "I always had the feeling that Goebbels didn't respect people as a whole. He was reckless in his contacts in his own office. He had no consideration for anyone. He was only concerned about governing. He took his way of governing from the Catholic hierarchy. As far as I know, Goebbels attended a Catholic school and was brought up in a cloister." He seems to have turned against the Catholics. "Yes. But it did not hinder him from agreeing with authoritarian methods of governing. Goebbels kept faith only with himself."
...
He spent one year in Italy and studied fascism - in 1931. It was an academic exchange service. "I returned as a fanatic antifascist."
...
Were you still in the NSDAP? "Yes." How could you be in a fascist party and be a fanatic antifascist? "It's regrettable that you think they are the same. There is much difference. Fascism is a purely stately principle. Mussolini said in 1932, 'The first thing is the state - and from the state are derived the rights and fate of the people. Humans come second.' In National Socialism, it was the opposite. People and humans come first, and the state is secondary."
Do you believe that? "I did. The bad thing was that Hitler hated the state so much, the government never functioned." Do you think Hitler really liked people? "Oh, yes. The fault I see in Hitler is that he left his original base, his liking of the people, and sought the recognition of other nations by waging wars." Do you think Hitler really liked people if he ordered millions of Jews destroyed? "In this was Hitler's downfall." But do you think Hitler liked people? "In 1933 - 1939, Hitler did tremendous things for the German people." Do you think Hitler liked people in general, or only a concept known as the Volk? "I can't answer it generally." Be as specific as you care to be. "Well, he liked the German people." Any other people? "I don't know." Do you think Hitler liked people when he ordered men, women, and children killed regardless of race, color, or creed, in cold blood, not in battle against a town, or air raids, but in files near ditches, as you know the process better than I do? "I can't answer the questions generally or specifically. I don't know the psychological reasons which brought Hitler to do this."
What do you think of it yourself? "One can't generalize, looking at it from a German point of view. Just how many people were shot because of race or creed, I don't know. not many Germans were shot. Hitler believed in having it done for the good of the German people." How could Hitler love people and shot others? "Hitler did it for his people. Hitler didn't believe it would end this way." What do you think? "Hitler didn't expect world war." The whole world seemed to expect war. "I don' think such questions can be answered simply." What is your own idea? "I didn't say he was a wonderful man - we started out with a discussion on the definition of fascism and Nazism." As it worked out, was there any difference? "The chief of state in Germany adopted imperialistic beliefs. The extermination of the Jews goes back to the campaigns of Streicher, Goebbels, and Ley, who continually stressed the fact that Jews were enemies of the German people." how did you figure a six-month-old Jewish infant must be killed - was it an enemy? "In the child we see the grown-up. I see the problem differently." How? "I saw the Jewish question in 1933-34 in this way: Give the Jews a region where they would have a base and they could have minorities in other countries. Nothing particular happened - and then came the Goebbels action in 1938. Until 1938 there was no plan to exclude Jews from economic life. the econoic experts never agreed with it."
What was you testimony in court? "I described how an Einsatzgruppe received an order to liquidate Jews in Russia. This was not an anti-Semitc order; rather the Jews in Russia were said to be the main carrier of Bolshevism there. It was against my will that I was ordered to an Einsatzgruppe in Russia. There were five hundred men. Mostly Ordinary Police and armed SS. The region included Odessa and from Nikolaiev to Rostov and Crimea." Did you know what your function was to be? "Yes. I knew the orders. Einsatzkommandos in the charge of colonels general executed the orders." And you were a lieutenant general in charge of the Einsatzgruppe? "No. I was only a brigadier general at the time. It was 1941-42." What did your Einsatzgruppe do/ "The Jews were shot in a military manner in a cordon. There were fifteen-men firing squads. One bullet per Jew. In other words, one firing squad of fifteen executed fifteen Jews at a time." Did you supervise or witness? "O was there twice, for short periods. " Were the victims men, women, and children? "Yes." Were the children shot? "Yes." Was Uman in your territory? "No. Uman is in Ukraine." How many Jews were killed by your group? "Ninety thousand reported. I figure actually only sixty to seventy thousand were shot." Any records kept? "Not individual names." Where did these Jews who were shot come from? "From Russian towns."
Did you fell that you were doing the right thing? "I myself didn't have to do it." Didn't you direct it? "Yes. But orders were given to the Einsatzkommandos leaders. All I had to do was see to it that it was done as humanely as possible." Would you do it again? "I didn't do anything." Would you direct it again or obey such an order again? "I don't think such a question is right. I think you can save that question. I suffered enough for years. Many people had to carry out orders they disapproved of. I rejected the order twice, but had to obey it the third time. The order came from Heydrich." Was your appetite or sleep disturbed? "Of course. And I had to relieve people who had nervous breakdowns." Many? "A few." Any sadists among the executioners or on your staff? "No. These people were ordered to do i - they were not selected. They were ordered to do it , and so they did it."
At this point, Ohlendorf is glumly reminiscent. He has shifted the burden of the mass murder onto Heydrich. He feels no remorse now except nominally. he looks like a burned-out ghoul, and his conscience, if t can be called such, is clean as a whistle and empty. There is a dearth of affect, but nothing clinically remarkable. His attitude is "Why blame me? I didn't do anything"
...
Then why did you shoot ninety thousand Jews? "First, I didn't shoot them. Firing squads did that. Secondly, I didn't approve of it."
Then why did you go through with it? "What else could I do?" If you disapproved of it, you could have protested and refused, it seems to me. "Where could I desert to? I was under oath to Hitler." Under oath to commit mass murder? "Under oath." For what? What did the oath state? "I could not have prevented it if I had killed myself. It would still have gone off according to schedule. These orders were given to the Einsatzkommandos in Berlin before they joined my group." Does the commando leader have more power than the group leader - is that what you mean? "No. I too received orders from Berlin."
...
"I told you how I spent sleepless nights, how it upset my inner self." But you went right on working for the Nazis and reached the rank of lieutenant general? Ohlendorf does not answer this, just sits tight-lipped and rather hostile. None of the questions were expressed in a hostile manner.
Did your wife know of this business of the Einsatzgruppe? "No." Have you seen her since 1941-42? "I saw her, but never talked to her about those things. I didn't think it was good conversation for a woman."
But it's all right to shoot women, not all right to talk to them about shootings? "In the first place, I didn't shoot women. I merely supervised."
...
Who is responsible for these crimes? "The Fuhrer and Himmler."
Page 407
[Oswald Pohl]
I asked Pohl if he considered himself in any way responsible or guilty, as an accomplice or a direct participant, in the murder of the 5 million Jews in the concentration camps, and he the countless other thousands of internees who perished through disease, neglect, starvation, beatings, hangings, and shootings. By this time, Pohl looked anxious and no longer the composed practical businessman talking about stocks and bond. That he could still not visualize his own importance in the criminal world of the Nazis was clear, but he was beginning to get an inkling at least of one individual's view of his activities. He replied, "In no way am I responsible or guilty for the murder of the 5 million Jews or the deaths of others in the concentration camps. About the murder of the 5 million Jews, I had nothing whatever to do with it. The fact that I was in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany from 1942 until the end is beside the point. I have explained and explained again that I sent Gluecks, one of my subordinates, to take charge of this program, and that I stayed out of it. Now, as far as the others who died in concentration camps or who were punished because of bad behavior or who might have been executed because of the hostage system - the reprisal system - that too is not my responsibility, but was ordered by the local party district administrator, or police functionary, or Himmler and the Gestapo, and it was a bad policy. I was just an administrator.
Page 420/421
[Walter Schellenberg]
"Himmler hated Russia but I had him convinced that Russia could not be defeated." Was Himmler convinced? "At first Himmler hated me for it but then he began to think about it because of my documentary evidence." It's fantastic. "Yes, but I did it. In 1943 I began to astrology with Himmler. I needed it as an instrument to get more influence with Himmler because he believed in astrology. In my horoscope of Hitler I predicted the Attentat against Hitler in February 1944; as you know it actually took place on July 20, 1944. When the Attentat began, Himmler was very much convinced. Although Himmler himself played a small part in the Attentat, he was convinced. I also predicted Hitler would not survive April 1945. When Hitler did kill himself, Himmler was more than ever convinced."
That was rather late in the game, was it not? "But not too late. I purposely told Himmler that he was supposed to be the successor to Hitler - to be a reformer, and that then he himself must step down."
Himmler a reformer, the man who ordered 5 million Jews murdered, and who according to Bach-Zeleski wanted 3 million Slavs exterminated? "Himmler believed there would be chaos, and I strengthened in him that belief - I used him as a political tool for my own political purposes. i told him that he had to make good all the bad things - that he had to release all political prisoners. Jews were to be released." What Jews? Hoettl said that in August 1944 Eichmann told him between 4 and 5 million of them had been killed to that time. " I didn't know that. In October 1944 I had a conference with jean-Marie Musy, former president of Switzerland, with Himmler present, and later Himmler and Musy had a conference alone. I learned at a later date that Himmler gave positive orders on the treatment of the Jews, showing that my ideas had taken root in him."
Peculiar, because when Allied troops moved into Germany, concentration camps were burned and the inmates burned alive or shot. "I know. I was allowed to take 1,200 Jews into Switzerland. That began in January 1945. Every two weeks a train with 1,200 Jews could leave Germany for Switzerland. It only happened once because Kaltenbrunner went up to Hitler and had the whole ting stopped.
Was Kaltenbrunner then, in your opinion, worse than Himmler? "Yes. Especially during the last phase of the war. Kaltenbrunner had more influence with Hitler - in practice Kalentbrunner was worse than Himmler.
Page 440
[Paul O. Schmidt]
"Therefore, I was opposed to these treaty-breaking methods. I was in opposition both privately and personally. I had a taste of the darker aspects of militarism when I was a corporal in the First World War. I don't believe in the educational value of military training. I felt that military training as practiced in Germany or elsewhere was bad. I disliked the caste system, and bullies. From this general point of view, I was against the reintroduction of compulsory military service. Compulsory military service began again in Germany in 1936. It was a decision taken by Germany in violation of the terms of the Versailles Treaty."
Page 442/443
"In September 1938, there was a meeting at Berchtesgarden between Hitler and Chamberlain. Hitler put forth Germany's claim to the Sudeten territories. Chamberlain did not agree. There were no Czech representatives. The Czechs were not even invited and were hardly informed. One ally quietly signed away territory belonging to another ally. It was a terrible encouragement to Hitler, who saw the weakness of the Allied situation. France was an ally of Czechoslovakia but also ceded Czech territory through the French prime minister, Daladier.
"There was a meeting at Bad Godesberg seven to ten days after the one at Berchtesgaden. Chaberlain and Hitler met without any other parties present, except myself. The famous Munich Conference of September 29-30, 1938, took place two week after Bad Godesberg. The parties met on the basis of the proposition put forth by Mussolini to the French. Mussolini made the initial Munich draft. he saw things more realistically than my own people. That was always so. The Mediterraneans are always greater realists than the people of the north. The fact that war was avoided in 1938 was as much due to Mussolini as to Chamberlain. We Germans had no part in it. Hitler was quite prepared to to go war.
"At Berchtesgaden feelings were strained. The atmosphere improved a little at the Godesberg meeting. At Munich the personal relationships were again strained. But once the agreement had been reached and the famous 'no more war' agreement was arranged between Britain and Germany, the atmosphere was better. I though Chamberlain was very happy to have Hitler sin the paper he had typed and brought along with him from England. Chamberlain was warmly welcomed at Munich. He was the hero of the German people in Munich - not Hitler. the German masses gave flowers to Chamberlain. One could see on their faces that they thanked Chamberlain for saving the peace of Europe despite Hitler.
"Hitler didn't like this show at all. He feared that it would give the impression that the German people were pacifists, which, of course, would be unpardonable in the eyes of the Nazis. Therefore, the Nazis didn't like this Munich show at all."
Page 444
[October 1940]
Franco and Hitler talked together for a long time. Between the lines of the conversation Gibraltar was discussed. It was our idea to conquer Gibraltar. Special troops were being trained in fortress warfare. Specialists in taking fortified places were trained near Liege in Belgium. There were new methods of approach and attack, studied with a view to an assault on Gibraltar. Of course, it was necessary to obtain Franco's consent. As I said, this was one of the subjects of discussion between the lines. The meeting didn't go well at all.
"In the first place, Franco was hesitating, uncertain; he is of weak character. He obviously played for time. WE wanted to precipitate matters as usual. We thought that getting Franco's consent for the attack on Gibraltar would be a matter of one afternoon and that would be enough - but it wasn't. Hitler and Franco separated without achieving anything. Hitler was disappointed and so was Franco.
Page 447
Had Schmidt any impression of Sauckel? "That man who is responsible for slave labor in Germany does not have my sympathy. I did not like the whole idea of what he did. After ll, there are limits to what one can do with foreign populations in the forced labor business. In the first place, the whole idea is completely unproductive. One needs three or four men to watch one compulsory worker. Sauckel deserves the severest punishment. You can see that there were no strong characters surrounding Hitler. There were only weaklings like Ribbentrop, Funk, and so forth. Hitler wanted a silent audience. Even Goering, who superficially gives the appearance of a strong man, was in reality childlike, weak character who was known as a dope addict in the inner circles."
Posted: October 21st, 2010 | Author: danny | Filed under: Book Notes | No Comments »
Our Enemy, The State
A PDF of the book is available: http://mises.org/etexts/ourenemy.pdf
Page 1
There's only one way to improve society, he used to say; present it with one improved unit -- yourself.
Page 4/5
Old Whig and Classical Liberal philosophy would schematize competing political theories in the form of answers to three questions:
- The first question put by non-Whig theorists is: Who shall wield power? Answers range from Monarch backed by divine right to Democracy based on "majority rule."
- The second question is: For whose benefit shall this power be wilded? Power is a heady thing in itself, but beyond power for its own sake power is invariable sought and used for the economic advantage power bestows. The royal family lived rather well, and so did their aristocratic friends. These two sets of people, in virtue of their privileged position, got something for nothing; the goods and services they enjoyed were not obtained from the goods and services they had produced and offered in voluntary exchanges; they lived on the fruits of others' toil. This was "the good old rule, the simple plan, that they should take who have the power , and they should keep who can."
- And so there is a third question: At whose expense shall this power be wielded? It follows from the answers given to the first two questions that a society structured along the lines they lay down must have its victims. The victims are people whose interests are deliberately sacrificed in order to prosper those who hold public office and their friends - who comprise The State.
Page 6
If robbery is the first labor saving device, the State is surely the second, and it si by far the safer way to live without working.
...
Homo sapiens will do almost anything to avoid work, so he naturally gravitates to the employment of the political means for the satisfaction of his economic wants and needs -- which is the state.
Page 13
Its [The State] legitimate concern is with but two matters: first, freedom; second, justice.
Page 17/18
Putting the case in plain language, the individual was living in a condition of servitude to the state. The fact that he "furnished the means by which he suffered" - that he was a member of a nominally sovereign body - made his condition none the less one of servitude. Slavery is slavery whether it be voluntary or involuntary, nor is its character at all altered by the nature of the agency that exercises it. A man is in slavery when all his rights lie at the arbitrary discretion of some agency other than himself; when his life, liberty, property, and the whole direction of his activities are liable to arbitrary and irresponsible confiscation at any time - and this appeared to be the exact relation that I saw obtaining between the individual and the state.
...
Mussolini sums up this doctrine very handsomely in a single phrase, "Everything for the state; nothing outside the state; nothing against the state," ...
Page 25
If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely:
a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the
student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing,
wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, “agricultural adjustment,” and similar items of State policy
that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run
up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they
monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State
power and a corresponding decrease of social power.
...
Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.
Page 26
Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called "the old trick of fuming every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government;" and the passage of time has proved that they were right.
Page 27
We can get some kind of rough measure of this general atrophy by our own disposition when approached by a
beggar. Two years ago we might have been moved to give him something; today we are moved to
refer him to the State’s relief-agency. The State has said to society, You are either not exercising
enough power to meet the emergency, or are exercising it in what I think is an incompetent way,
so I shall confiscate your power, and exercise it to suit myself.
Page 33
When, therefore, the inquiring student of civilization has occasion to observe this or any other
apparent recession upon any point of our present regime, he may content himself with asking the
one question, What effect has this upon the sum-total of State power? The answer he gives
himself will show conclusively whether the recession is actual or apparent, and this is all he is
concerned to know.
Page 35
Indeed, it is by this means that the aim of the collectivists seems likeliest to be attained in this
country; this aim being the complete extinction of social power through absorption by the State.
Their fundamental doctrine was formulated and invested with a quasi-religious sanction by the
idealist philosophers of the last century; and among peoples who have accepted it in terms as well
as in fact, it is expressed in formulas almost identical with theirs. Thus, for example, when Hitler
says that “the State dominates the nation because it alone represents it,” he is only putting into
loose popular language the formula of Hegel, that “the State is the general substance, whereof
individuals are but accidents.” Or, again, when Mussolini says, “Everything for the State; nothing
outside the State; nothing against the State,” he is merely vulgarizing the doctrine of Fichte, that
“the State is the superior power, ultimate and beyond appeal, absolutely independent.”
Page 36/37
Mr. Jefferson wrote in 1823 that there was no danger he dreaded so much as "the consolidation [i.e. centralization] of our government by the noiseless and therefor unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.
...
Even the coup d'Etat of 1932 was noiseless and unalarming. In Russia, Italy, Germany, the coup d'Etat was violent and spectacular; it had to be; but here it was neither. Under cover of a nation-wide, State-managed mobilization of inane buffoonery and aimless commotion, it took place in so unspectacular a way that its true nature escaped notice, and even now is not generally understood. The mehtod of consolidating the ensuing regime, moreover, was also noiseless and un-alarming
...
The force of phrase and name distorts the identification of our own actual acceptances and acquiescences.
Page 40
There appears to be a curious difficulty about exercising reflective thought upon the actual nature
of an institution into which one was born and one’s ancestors were born. One accepts it as one
does the atmosphere; one’s practical adjustments to it are made by a kind of reflex. One seldom
thinks about the air until one notices some change, favourable or unfavourable, and then one’s
thought about it is special; one thinks about purer air, lighter air, heavier air, not about air. So it is
with certain human institutions. We know that they exist, that they affect us in various ways, but
we do not ask how they came to exist, or what their original intention was, or what primary
function it is that they are actually fulfilling; and when they affect us so unfavourably that we rebel
against them, we contemplate substituting nothing beyond some modification or variant of the
same institution. Thus colonial America, oppressed by the monarchical State, brings in the
republican State; Germany gives up the republican State for the Hitlerian State; Russia exchanges
the monocratic State for the collectivist State; Italy exchanges the constitutionalist State for the
“totalitarian” State.
Page 45/48
As far back as one can follow the run of civilization, it presents two fundamentally different types of
political organization. This difference is not one of degree, but of kind. It does not do to take the
one type as merely marking a lower order of civilization and the other a higher; they are commonly
so taken, but erroneously. Still less does it do to classify both as species of the same genus – to
classify both under the generic name of “government,” though this also, until very lately, has been
done, and has always led to confusion and misunderstanding.
...
They are so different in theory that drawing a sharp distinction between them is now probably the most important duty that civilization owes to its own safety. Hence it is by no means either an arbitrary or academic proceeding to give the one type the name of government, and to call the second type simple the State .
Page 50
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and
confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. On the negative
side, it has been proved beyond peradventure that no primitive State could possibly have had any
other origin. Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation
of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer
defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution “forced on a defeated group by a
conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the
conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This
domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by
the victorious group.”
...
"Nations in general," he [John Jay] said, "will go to war whenever there is a prospect of getting something by it."
Page 53
The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention,
is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual
has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice
costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality
whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.
So far from encouraging a wholesome development of social power, it has invariably, as Madison
said, turned every contingency into a resource for depleting social power and enhancing State
power. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever
shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime. In
Russia and Germany, for example, we have lately seen the State moving with great alacrity against
infringement of its private monopoly by private persons, while at the same time exercising that
monopoly with unconscionable ruthlessness. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its
history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators
and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class
Page 57
Spencer does not discuss what he calls “the perennial faith of mankind” in State action, but
contents himself with elaborating the sententious observations of Guizot, that “a belief in the
sovereign power of political machinery” is nothing less than “a gross delusion.” This faith is chiefly
an effect of the immense prestige which the State has diligently built up for itself in the century or
more since the doctrine of jure divino rulership gave way. We need not consider the various
instruments that the State employs in building up its prestige; most of them are well known, and
their uses well understood. There is one, however, which is in a sense peculiar to the republican
State. Republicanism permits the individual to persuade himself that the State is his creation, that
State action is his action, that when it expresses itself it expresses him, and when it is glorified he
is glorified. The republican State encourages this persuasion with all its power, aware that it is the
most efficient instrument for enhancing its own prestige. Lincoln’s phrase, “of the people, by the
people, for the people” was probably the most effective single stroke of propaganda ever made in
behalf of republican State prestige.
Page 58/59
There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be
satisfied. One is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means.17 The other
is the uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means. The
primitive exercise of the political means was, as we have seen, by conquest, confiscation,
expropriation, and the introduction of a slave-economy. The conqueror parcelled out the conquered
territory among beneficiaries, who thenceforth satisfied their needs and desires by exploiting the
labour of the enslaved inhabitants.
Page 73
Thus the merchant-polity amounted to an attempt, more or less disingenuous, at reconciling
matters which in their nature can not be reconciled. The ideas of natural rights and popular
sovereignty were, as we have seen, highly acceptable and highly animating to all the forces allied
against the feudal idea; but while these ideas might be easily reconcilable with a system of simple
government, such a system would not answer the purpose. Only the State-system would do that.
The problem therefore was, how to keep these ideas well in the forefront of political theory, and at
the same time prevent their practical application from undermining the organization of the political
means. It was a difficult problem. The best that could be done with it was by making certain
structural alterations in the State, which would give it the appearance of expressing these ideas,
without the reality. The most important of these structural changes was that of bringing in the socalled
representative or parliamentary system, which Puritanism introduced into the modern world,
and which has received a great deal of praise as an advance towards democracy. This praise,
however, is exaggerated. The change was one of form only, and its bearing on democracy has been
inconsiderable.
Page 76/77/78/79/83
Thus "- and here is the important observation, so important that I venture to italicize it - "every essential element long afterward found in the government of the American State appeared in the chartered corporation that started English civilization in America." Generally speaking, the system of civil order established in America was the State-system of the "mother countries" operating over a considerable body of water; the only thing that distinguished it was that the exploited and dependent class was situated at an unusual distance from the owning and exploiting class. The headquarters of the autonomous State were on one side of the Atlantic, and its subjects on the other.
...
A point of greatest importance to remember is that the merchant-State is the only form of the State that ever existed in America. Whether under the rule of a trading0company or a provincial governor or a republican representative legislature, Americans have never known any other form of the State.
...
Their remarkable success in these pursuits is well known; it is worth mention here in order to account for many of the complications and collisions of interest subsequently ensuing upon the merchant-State's fundamental doctrine that the primary function of government is not to maintain freedom and security, but to "help business."
...
By way of summing up, it is enough to say that nowhere in the American colonial civil order was
there ever the trace of a democracy. The political structure was always that of the merchant-State;
Americans have never known any other. Furthermore, the philosophy of natural rights and popular
sovereignty was never once exhibited anywhere in American political practice during the colonial
period, from the first settlement in 1607 down to the revolution of 1776.
Page 85
After conquest and confiscation have been effected, and the State set up, its first concern is with
the land. The State assumes the right of eminent domain over its territorial basis, whereby every
landholder becomes in theory a tenant of the State. In its capacity as ultimate landlord, the State
distributes the land among its beneficiaries on its own terms.
Page 94
Patrick Henry was an inveterate and voracious engrosser of land lying beyond the dead-line set by
the British State; later he was heavily involved in the affairs of one of the notorious Yazoo
companies, operating in Georgia. He seems to have been most unscrupulous. His company’s
holdings in Georgia, amounting to more than ten million acres, were to be paid for in Georgia scrip,
which was much depreciated. Henry bought up all these certificates that he could get his hands on,
at ten cents on the dollar, and made a great profit on them by their rise in value when Hamilton put
through his measure for having the central government assume the debts they represented.
Undoubtedly it was this trait of unrestrained avarice which earned him the dislike of Mr. Jefferson,
who said, rather contemptuously, that he was “insatiable in money.”
Page 98/99
The main conclusion, however, towards which these observations tend, is that one general frame of
mind existed among the colonists with reference to the nature and primary function of the State.
This frame of mind was not peculiar to them; they shared it with the beneficiaries of the merchant-
State in England, and with those of the feudal State as far back as the State’s history can be
traced. Voltaire, surveying the debris of the feudal State, said that in essence the State is “a device
for taking money out of one set of pockets and putting it into another.” The beneficiaries of the
feudal State had precisely this view, and they bequeathed it unchanged and unmodified to the
actual and potential beneficiaries of the merchant-State. The colonists regarded the State primarily
as an instrument whereby one might help oneself and hurt others; that is to say, first and foremost
they regarded it as the organization of the political means. No other view of the State was ever
held in colonial America. Romance and poetry were brought to bear on the subject in the
customary way; glamorous myths about it were propagated with the customary intent; but when
all came to all, nowhere in colonial America were actual practical relations with the State ever
determined by any other view than this.
Page 101/102/103
There was complete unanimity also regarding the nature of the new and independent political
institution which the Declaration contemplated as within “the right of the people” to set up. There
was a great and memorable dissension about its form, but none about its nature. It should be in
essence the mere continuator of the merchant-State already existing. There was no idea of setting
up government, the purely social institution which should have no other object than, as the
Declaration put it, to secure the natural rights of the individual; or as Paine put it, which should
contemplate nothing beyond the maintenance of freedom and security – the institution which
should make no positive interventions of any kind upon the individual, but should confine itself
exclusively to such negative interventions as the maintenance of freedom might indicate. The idea
was to perpetuate an institution of another character entirely, the State, the organization of the
political means; and this was accordingly done.
There is no disparagement implied in this observation; for, all questions of motive aside, nothing
else was to be expected. No one knew any other kind of political organization. The causes of
American complaint were conceived of as due only to interested and culpable mal-administration,
not to the essentially anti-social nature of the institution administered. Dissatisfaction was directed
against administrators, not against the institution itself. Violent dislike of the form of the institution
– the monarchical form – was engendered, but no distrust or suspicion of its nature. The character
of the State had never been subjected to scrutiny; the cooperation of the Zeitgeist was needed for
that, and it was not yet to be had.
One may see here a parallel with the revolutionary movements against the Church in the sixteenth
century – and indeed with revolutionary movements in general. They are incited by abuses and
misfeasances, more or less specific and always secondary, and are carried on with no idea beyond
getting them rectified or avenged, usually by the sacrifice of conspicuous scapegoats. The
philosophy of the institution that gives play to these misfeasances is never examined, and hence
they recur promptly under another form or other auspices, or else their place is taken by others
which are in character precisely like them. Thus the notorious failure of reforming and revolutionary
movements in the long-run may as a rule be found due to their incorrigible superficiality.
One mind, indeed, came within reaching distance of the fundamentals of the matter, not by
employing the historical method, but by a homespun kind of reasoning, aided by a sound and
sensitive instinct. The common view of Mr. Jefferson as a doctrinaire believer in the stark principle
of “states’ rights” is most incompetent and misleading. He believed in states’ rights, assuredly, but
he went much farther; states’ rights were only an incident in his general system of political
organization. He believed that the ultimate political unit, the repository and source of political
authority and initiative, should be the smallest unit; not the federal unit, state unit or county unit,
but the township, or, as he called it, the “ward.” The township, and the township only, should
determine the delegation of power upwards to the county, the state, and the federal units. His
system of extreme decentralization is interesting and perhaps worth a moment’s examination,
because if the idea of the State is ever displaced by the idea of government, it seems probable that
the practical expression of this idea would come out very nearly in that form.
There is probably no need to say that the consideration of such a displacement involves a long look
ahead, and over a field of view that is cluttered with the debris of a most discouraging number, not
of nations alone, but of whole civilizations. Nevertheless it is interesting to remind ourselves that
more than a hundred and fifty years ago, one American succeeded in getting below the surface of
things, and that he probably to some degree anticipated the judgment of an immeasurably distant
future.
Page 105
Thus while the American architects assented “in principle” to the philosophy of natural rights and
popular sovereignty, and found it in a general way highly congenial as a sort of voucher for their
self-esteem, their practical interpretation of it left it pretty well hamstrung. They were not
especially concerned with consistency; their practical interest in this philosophy stopped short at
the point which we have already noted, of its presumptive justification of a ruthless economic
pseudo-individualism, and an exercise of political self-expression by the general electorate which
should be so managed as to be, in all essential respects, futile. In this they took precise pattern by
the English Whig exponents and practitioners of this philosophy. Locke himself, whom we have seen
putting the natural rights of property so high above those of life and liberty, was equally
discriminating in his view of popular sovereignty. He was no believer in what he called “a numerous
democracy,” and did not contemplate a political organization that should countenance anything of
the kind.
Page 106/107
The sum of the matter is that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty
afforded a set of principles upon which all interests could unite, and practically all did unite, with
the aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on which
to found the new American State. When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of
the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving.
The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to
eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple
executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights attending “the pursuit of happiness” was
narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke’s doctrine of the preeminent rights of property,
with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty,
the new State had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general temper of the
people; and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without
the reality.
....
... the device of judicial review and interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process whereby anything may be made to mean anything ...
Page 108
No
one spoke of natural rights and popular sovereignty; it would seem actually that no one had ever
heard of them. On the contrary, everyone was talking about the pressing need of a strong central
coercive authority, able to check the incursions which “the democratic spirit” was likely to incite
upon “the men of principle and property.” Mr. Jefferson wrote despondently of the contrast of all this with the sort of thing he had been
hearing in the France which he had just left “in the first year of her revolution, in the fervour of
natural rights and zeal for reformation.” In the process of possessing himself anew of the spirit and
ideas of his countrymen, he said, “I can not describe the wonder and mortification with which
the table conversations filled me.” Clearly, though the Declaration might have been the charter for
American independence, it was in no sense the charter of the new American State.
Page 112/113
A direct drive at effecting these changes comes as a
rule to nothing, or more often than not turns out to be retarding. They are so largely the work of
those unimpassioned and imperturbable agencies for which Prince de Bismarck had such vast
respect – he called them the imponderabilia – that any effort which disregards them, or thrusts
them violently aside, will in the long run find them stepping in to abort its fruit.
....
Instead of recognizing the State as “the common enemy of all well-disposed,
industrious and decent men,” the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a
final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent. The mass-man, ignorant of its
history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is
willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its
administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of
social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the
activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the
belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its
indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share – he is, pro tanto,
aggrandizing himself. Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The
mass- man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State, “sees it, admires it, knows that
there it is.... Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling
himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the
public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend
to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense
and unassailable resources.... When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong
appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without
effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in
motion.”
Page 114
Footnote 3
It seems to be very imperfectly understood that the cost of State intervention must be paid out of production, this being the only source from which any payment for anything can be derived. Intervention retards production; then resulting stringency and inconvenience enable further intervention, which in turn still further retards production; and this process goes on until, as in Rome, in the third century, production ceases entirely, and the source of payment dries up.
Page 118/119/120/121/122
The situation, in a word, was that American economic interests had fallen into two grand divisions,
the special interests in each having made common cause with a view to capturing control of the
political means.One division comprised the speculating, industrial-commercial and creditor
interests, with their natural allies of the bar and bench, the pulpit and the press. The other
comprised chiefly the farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally. From the first, these two
grand divisions were colliding briskly here and there in the several units, the most serious collision
occurring over the terms of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780. The State in each of the thirteen units was a class-State, as every State known to history has
been; and the work of manoeuvring it in its function of enabling the economic exploitation of one
class by another went steadily on.
...
Mr. Jefferson's idea of a political organization which should be national in foreign affairs and non-national in domestic affairs might be found continuously practicable.
...
But the general scheme itself was as a whole objectionable to the interests grouped in the first
grand division. The grounds of their dissatisfaction are obvious enough. When one bears in mind
the vast prospect of the continent, one need use but little imagination to perceive that the national
scheme was by far the more congenial to those interests, because it enabled an ever-closer
centralization of control over the political means. For instance, leaving aside the advantage of
having but one central tariff-making body to chaffer with, instead of twelve, any industrialist could
see the great primary advantage of being able to extend his exploiting operations over a nationwide
free-trade area walled-in by a general tariff; the closer the centralization, the larger the
exploitable area. Any speculator in rental-values would be quick to see the advantage of bringing
this form of opportunity under unified control. Any speculator in depreciated public securities would be strongly for a system that could offer him
the use of the political means to bring back their face-value. Any shipowner or foreign trader would be quick to see that his bread was buttered on the side of a
national State which, if properly approached, might lend him the use of the political means by way
of a subsidy, or would be able to back up some profitable but dubious freebooting enterprise with
“diplomatic representations” or with reprisals.
The farmers and the debtor class in general, on the other hand, were not interested in those
considerations, but were strongly for letting things stay, for the most part, as they stood.
...
They had an impressive object-lesson in the immediate shift that took place in Massachusetts after the adoption of John Adams's local constitution of 1780. They naturally did not care to see this sort of
thing put into operation on a nation-wide scale, and they therefore looked with extreme disfavour upon any bait put forth for amending the Articles out of existence.
...
Finally, however, a constitutional convention was assembled, on the distinct understanding that it
should do no more than revise the Articles in such a way, as Hamilton cleverly phrased it, as to
make them “adequate to the exigencies of the nation,” and on the further understanding that all
the thirteen units should assent to the amendments before they went into effect; in short, that the
method of amendment provided by the Articles themselves should be followed. Neither
understanding was fulfilled. The convention was made up wholly of men representing the economic
interests of the first division. The great majority of them, possibly as many as four-fifths, were
public creditors; one-third were land- speculators; some were money-lenders; one-fifth were
industrialists, traders, shippers; and many of them were lawyers. They planned and executed a
coup d’Etat, simply tossing the Articles of Confederation into the waste-basket, and drafting a
constitution de novo, with the audacious provision that it should go into effect when ratified by nine
units instead of by all thirteen. Moreover, with like audacity, they provided that the document
should not be submitted either to the Congress or to the local legislatures, but that it should go
direct to a popular vote!
...
We
therefore go on to observe that in order to secure ratification by even the nine necessary units, the
document had to conform to certain very exacting and difficult requirements. The political structure
which is contemplated had to be republican in form, yet capable of resisting what Gerry unctuously
called “the excess of democracy,” and what Randolph termed its “turbulence and follies.” The task
of the delegates was precisely analogous to that of the earlier architects who had designed the
structure of the British merchant-State, with its system of economics, politics and judicial control;
they had to contrive something that could pass muster as showing a good semblance of popular
sovereignty, without the reality. Madison defined their task explicitly in saying that the convention’s
purpose was “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction [i.e.,
a democratic faction], and at the same time preserve the spirit and form of popular government.”
Page 124/125/126
Of all the legislative measures enacted to implement the new constitution, the one best calculated
to ensure a rapid and steady progress in the centralization of political power was the Judiciary Act
of 1789.15 This measure created a federal supreme court of six members (subsequently enlarged
to nine) and a federal district court in each state, with its own complete personnel, and a complete
apparatus for enforcing its decrees. The Act established federal oversight of state legislation by the
familiar device of “interpretation,” whereby the Supreme Court might nullify state legislative or
judicial action which for any reason it saw fit to regard as unconstitutional. One feature of the Act
which for our purposes is most noteworthy is that it made the tenure of all these federal judgeships
appointive, not elective, and for life; thus marking almost the farthest conceivable departure from
the doctrine of popular sovereignty.
...
We may now see from this necessarily brief survey, which anyone may amplify and particularize at
his pleasure, what the circumstances were which rooted a certain definite idea of the State still
deeper in the general consciousness. That idea was precisely the same in the constitutional period
as that which we have seen prevailing in the two periods already examined – the colonial period,
and the eight- year period following the revolution. Nowhere in the history of the constitutional
period do we find the faintest suggestion of the Declaration’s doctrine of natural rights; and we find
its doctrine of popular sovereignty not only continuing in abeyance, but constitutionally estopped
from ever reappearing. Nowhere do we find a trace of the Declaration’s theory of government; on
the contrary, we find it expressly repudiated. The new political mechanism was a faithful replica of
the old disestablished British model, but so far improved and strengthened as to be incomparably
more close-working and efficient, and hence presenting incomparably more attractive possibilities
of capture and control. By consequence, therefore, we find more firmly implanted than ever the
same general idea of the State that we have observed as prevailing hitherto – the idea of an
organization of the political means, an irresponsible and all-powerful agency standing always ready
to be put into use for the service of one set of economic interests as against another.
Footnote: 16
The authority of the Supreme Court was disregarded by Jackson, and overruled by Lincoln,
thus converting the mode of the State temporarily from an oligarchy to an autocracy. It is
interesting to observe that just such a contingency was foreseen by the framers of the constitution,
in particular by Hamilton. They were apparently well aware of the ease with which, in any period of
crisis, a quasi-republican mode of the State slips off into executive tyranny. Oddly enough, Mr.
Jefferson at one time considered nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts by executive action, but did
not do so. Lincoln overruled the opinion of Chief Justice Taney that suspension of the habeas corpus
was unconstitutional, and in consequence the mode of the State was, until 1865, a monocratic
military despotism. In fact, from the date of his proclamation of blockade, Lincoln ruled
unconstitutionally throughout his term. The doctrine of “reserved powers” was knaved up ex post
facto as a justification of his acts, but as far as the intent of the constitution is concerned, it was
obviously a pure invention. In fact, a very good case could be made out for the assertion that
Lincoln’s acts resulted in a permanent radical change in the entire system of constitutional
“interpretation” – that since his time “interpretations” have not been interpretations of the
constitution, but merely of public policy; or, as our most acute and profound critic put it, “th’
Supreme Court follows th’ iliction rayturns.” A strict constitutionalist might indeed say that the
constitution died in 1861, and one would have to scratch one’s head pretty diligently to refute him.
Footnote: 17
17. Marshall was appointed by John Adams at the end of his Presidential term, when the interests
grouped in the first division were becoming very anxious about the opposition developing against
them among the exploited interests. A letter written by Oliver Wolcott to Fisher Ames gives a good
idea of where the doctrine of popular sovereignty stood; his reference to military measures is
particularly striking. He says, “The steady men in Congress will attempt to extend the judicial
department, and I hope that their measures will be very decided. It is impossible in this country to
render an army an engine of government; and there is no way to combat the state opposition but
by an efficient and extended organization of judges, magistrates, and other civil officers.” Marshall’s
appointment followed, and also the creation of twenty-three new federal judgeships. Marshall’s
cardinal decisions were made in the cases of Marbury, of Fletcher, of McCulloch, of Dartmouth
College, and of Cohens. It is perhaps not generally understood that as a result of Marshall’s efforts,
the Supreme Court became not only the highest law-interpreting body, but the highest law-making
body as well; the precedents established by its decisions have the force of constitutional law. Since
1800, therefore, the actual mode of the State in America is normally that of a small and
irresponsible oligarchy! Mr. Jefferson, regarding Marshall quite justly as “a crafty chief judge who
sophisticates the law to his mind by the turn of his own reasoning,” made in 1821 the very
remarkable prophecy that “our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what
road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary
consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the
corrupting and corrupted instruments.” Another prophetic comment on the effect of centralization
was his remark that “when we must wait for Washington to tell us when to sow and when to reap,
we shall soon want bread.” A survey of our present political circumstances makes comment on
these prophecies superfluous.
Page 127
In his second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards
bipartisanship, and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have elsewhere remarked his
curious inability to understand how the cohesive power of public plunder works straight towards
political bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves Republicans favouring the
Federalist policy of centralization, he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as “pseudo-
Republicans, but real Federalists.” But most naturally any Republican who saw a chance of profiting
by the political means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any tendency within the
party to impair the general system which held out such a prospect. In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely nominal, and the stated issues
between parties become progressively trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up with no
other object than to cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both parties.
Page 128
The anti-Federalist party took office in 1800 as the party of strict construction; yet,
once in office, it played ducks and drakes with the constitution, in behalf of the special interests
that it represented. The Federalists were nominally for loose construction, yet they fought bitterly every one of the
opposing party’s loose-constructionist measures – the embargo, the protective tariff and the
national bank. They were the constitutional nationalists of the deepest dye, as we have seen; yet in
their centre and stronghold, New England, they held the threat of secession over the country
throughout the period of what they harshly called “Mr. Madison’s war,” the War of 1812, which was
in fact a purely imperialist adventure after annexation of Floridian and Canadian territory, in behalf
of stiffening agrarian control of the political means; but when the planting interests of the South
made the same threat in 1861, they became fervid nationalists again
Page 130
In fact, such popular terms of electioneering appeal are uniformly and notoriously what Jeremy
Bentham called impostor-terms, and their use invariably marks one thing and one only; it marks a
state of apprehension, either fearful or expectant, as the case may be, concerning access to the
political means. As we are seeing at the moment, once let this access come under threat of
straitening or stoppage, the menaced interests immediately trot out the spavined, glandered hobby
of “state rights” or “a return to the constitution,” and put it through its galvanic movements. Let
the incidence of exploitation show the first sign of shifting, and we hear at once from one source of
“interested clamours and sophistry” that “democracy” is in danger, and that the unparalleled
excellences of our civilization have come about solely through a policy of “rugged individualism,”
carried out under terms of “free competition”; while from another source we hear that the
enormities of laissez-faire have ground the faces of the poor, and obstructed entrance into the More
Abundant Life.
Page 137
The State is not, as he would have it, a social institution administered in an anti-social
way. It is an anti-social institution administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be
administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such
service.
Page 134/135/136
Every intervention by the State enables another, and this in turn another, and so on indefinitely;
and the State stands ever ready and eager to make them, often on its own motion, often again
wangling plausibility for them through the specious suggestion of interested persons. Sometimes
the matter at issue is in its nature simple, socially necessary, and devoid of any character that
would bring it into the purview of politics. For convenience, however, complications are erected on it; then presently someone sees that these
complications are exploitable, and proceeds to exploit them; then another, and another, until the
rivalries and collisions of interest thus generated issue in a more or less general disorder. When this
takes place, the logical thing, obviously, is to recede, and let the disorder be settled in the slower
and more troublesome way, through the operation of natural laws. But in such circumstances
recession is never for a moment thought of; the suggestion would be put down as sheer lunacy.
Instead, the interests unfavourably affected – little aware, perhaps, how much worse the cure is
than the disease, or at any rate little caring – immediately call on the State to cut in arbitrarily
between cause and effect, and clear up the disorder out of hand. The State then intervenes by imposing another set of complications upon the first; these in turn
are found exploitable, another demand arises, another set of complications, still more intricate, is
erected upon the first two;6 and the same sequence is gone through again and again until the
recurrent disorder becomes acute enough to open the way for a sharking political adventurer to
come forward and, always alleging “necessity, the tyrant’s plea,” to organize a coup d’Etat.
Page 138/139
Thus we see how ignorance and delusion concerning the nature of the State combine with extreme
moral debility and myopic self-interest – what Ernest Renan so well calls la bassesse de l’homme
interesse – to enable the steadily accelerated conversion of social power into State power that has
gone on from the beginning of our political independence. It is a curious anomaly. State power has
an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or
honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of
the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage
banking-practice in this-or-that special instance – then let the State, which never has shown itself
able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness
and corruption, intervene to “supervise” or “regulate” the whole body of banking-practice, or even
take it over entire. Does social power, in this-or-that case, bungle the business of railwaymanagement
– then let the State, which has bungled every business it has ever undertaken,
intervene and put its hand to the business of “regulating” railway- operation. Does social power
now and then send out an unseaworthy ship to disaster – then let the State, which inspected and
passed the Morro Castle, be given a freer swing at controlling the routine of the shipping trade.
Does social power here and there exercise a grinding monopoly over the generation and
distribution of electric current – then let the State, which allots and maintains monopoly, come in
and intervene with a general scheme of price-fixing which works more unforeseen hardships than it
heals, or else let it go into direct competition; or, as the collectivists urge, let it take over the
monopoly bodily. “Ever since society has existed,” says Herbert Spencer, “disappointment has been
preaching, ‘Put not your trust in legislation’; and yet the trust in legislation seems hardly
diminished.”
Page 141
It will be clear to anyone who takes the trouble to think the matter through, that under a regime of
natural order, that is to say under government, which makes no positive interventions whatever on
the individual, but only negative interventions in behalf of simple justice – not law, but justice –
misuses of social power would be effectively corrected; whereas we know by interminable
experience that the State’s positive interventions do not correct them. Under a regime of actual
individualism, actually free competition, actual laissez-faire – a regime which, as we have seen, can
not possibly coexist with the State – a serious or continuous misuse of social power would be
virtually impracticable.
Footnote 14:
... Their miser and degradation did not lie at the door of individualism; they lay nowhere but at the door of the State. Adam Smith's economics are not the economics of individualism, they are the economics of land-owners and mill-owners.
Page 144/145
But there is no need to dwell lugubriously upon the probable circumstances of a future so far
distant. What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in
collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily
growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in
social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national
income; production languishing, the State in consequence taking over one “essential industry” after
another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally
resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State
interests, at least as general as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and
financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will
be left to “the rusty death of machinery,” and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be
supreme.
Page 146
[The remnant]
The special reason has to do with the fact that in every civilization, however generally prosaic,
however addicted to the short-time point of view on human affairs, there are always certain alien
spirits who, while outwardly conforming to the requirements of the civilization around them, still
keep a disinterested regard for the plain intelligible law of things, irrespective of any practical end.
They have an intellectual curiosity, sometimes touched with emotion, concerning the august order
of nature; they are impressed by the contemplation of it, and like to know as much about it as they
can, even in circumstances where its operation is ever so manifestly unfavourable to their best
hopes and wishes. For these, a work like this, however in the current sense impractical, is not quite
useless; and those of them it reaches will be aware that for such as themselves, and such only, it
was written.
Posted: October 14th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Page 255
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.
Page 257
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."
Page 268/269
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.
Page 270/271
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.
Page 281
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.
Page 285/286
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.
Page 291
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.
Page 293/294
... 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.
Page 296
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.
Posted: October 10th, 2010 | Author: danny | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
This is a slightly cleaned up account of the trip based on emails I sent, the structure is maintained.
Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/dantheman/BajaDeathAdventure
July 22, 2010
Stage 0
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)
Schuyler shooting video for his talk
Picture from the tamper resistant competition
Schuyler and Datagram giving their talk
Kait & Dave at lunch in the Riveria