There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.
More from Gervasi:
I recently managed to find (ebay!) a book I have been looking for for quite a while: Tom Gervasi’s 1986 The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. (ISBN 0-06-015574-4)
Over on Daily Kos, I encountered someone proclaiming officially that it is anti-semitism to conflate the actions of Israel with the actions of nazis. I’d like to noodle around that idea a bit, because it makes me quite uncomfortable.
Dan Arrows does some really interesting stuff about Germany, and fascism, from an actual German perspective. I find his view to be accurate within my existing understanding of history, and his perspective is valuable.
This is from Jeffrey St Clair’s “Roaming Charges” column over at Counterpunch [cp]
When I encounter wildly different perspectives, I freeze in place like the proverbial rabbit in headlights. My brain just locks up for a couple seconds then starts running furiously trying to re-establish some kind of understanding of what’s going on. Sometimes, I reach for meta-understanding, i.e.: “I don’t know what’s going on but this is really messed up.”
Like in Vietnam, the US continued a bloody war well past the time at which losing was inevitable. And, now it’s over. There’s going to be some people put up against walls and shot, in Afghanistan, which is a return to normal of sorts.
A dozen years ago, I read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and that provoked a lengthy peripheral interest in the problem of using legalisms to deal with the unexpectedly nasty monsters that occasionally crop up in humanity. As a moral nihilist [*] the nazi elite seemed tractable to me: they were just a bunch of power-drunk assholes who managed to gain power over a country with a great military, and they went on a great rampage, doing whatever got them off.
When I was a kid I went through a period where I was interested in nautical disasters. Perhaps that has something to do with my general fear of being on a boat out of sight of shore.