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Freddie de Boer at L’Hôte has a great post about the Libyan situation, which you all should read. It has set me thinking about two points that were not exactly relevant to the point of that post, (which is why I didn’t mention them in the comments) but nevertheless might be important to the Libya discussion.

-In the first place, it must be remembered that while the rationale for the attacks on Col. Gaddafi’s men seems ill-considered, the U.N. is probably privy to all manner of intelligence which the news media is not. Therefore, their actions may appear sudden and inexplicable when reported by the press, even if they are not.

This is not to excuse the “infantile Manicheanism”, as de Boer calls it, of the media’s presentation, which no one is happy with. Nor is it some attempt at defusing all criticism of the operation, as similar claims made by the Bush administration were. But it needs to be remembered.

-Secondly, there is claim that, again to quote de Boer that: “You cannot enforce democracy from without.” [Italics his.] This is technically true, but foreign intervention may be necessary for a revolution to succeed. Although some Nationalists would undoubtedly prefer to forget this, the colonists defeated the British at Yorktown with the aid of the French navy. So perhaps it is not wholly foolish for Americans to suppose that, if we wanted to remake another country in the image of our own, (and note I am not judging here whether this is moral or even possible) it would be possible to do so through military intervention on behalf of their rebels.

Neither of these are really “critiques” of his point in any way, but they occurred to me as I was mulling his post over.

I’ll probably post many more thoughts on this whole Libyan war later.

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“Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has no regrets about how the Iraq War was handled, according to leaked portions of his memoir” writes Jonathan Karl at ABC news.

To be fair, later on the article does say he regrets not stepping down after Abu Ghraib and not sending more troops in the first place, although he doesn’t seem to take responsibility for the latter.

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“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
  In Flanders fields.”

-Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. In Flanders Fields. 1915.
Although in the United States November 11 is a day to honor soldiers generally, it must be noted that the date of Veterans Day is the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I. To many other countries in the world, it is called “Remembrance Day”, and places more emphasis on the World War I anniversary. Also, because of my own interest in that period of history, I cannot help but think of that war in particular. (The above poem was one of the most famous written in World War I.)
In many ways, it is grimly appropriate that it should have evolved from being a holiday in honor of those who fought in World War I to being one in honor of all who served. For World War I was an event that radically shocked people. I think that, more so than previous conflicts, it laid bare the horrors of war for all to see. I think people came to have a better understanding of how much suffering soldiers must endure, and why we must honor them for their sacrifice.

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On October 3rd, Germany will make its last payment on reparations for World War I.

It’s an odd thing; World War I was one of the most tremendous conflicts in history, and yet people know relatively little about it because it is so massively overshadowed by World War II.

Which is ironic, really, because World War II was just a continuation of World War I. Germany was bitter about the treatment they received at Versailles, and it was that which brought about the rise of the Nazi party.

I guess what’s really interesting is to think that the reparations are only ending now. I mean, World War I is still impacting Germany’s budget and economic policy. The war is ended in 1918, but its consequences are still being felt today.

I always find that kind of thing interesting, in a very tragic way.

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South Korea has placed robots with machine guns along the North Korean border. The most interesting/troubling quote:

 “Techwin spokesman Huh Kwang-hak was quoted as saying by Stars and Stripes: ‘But these robots have automatic surveillance, which doesn’t leave room for anything resembling human laziness. They also won’t have any fear (of) enemy attackers on the front lines.'”

 Yes, can’t leave that sort of thing up to the meatbags, can we?

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For the past year, I’ve been telling all my friends and family that General Petraeus is the man to be in charge of Afghanistan. I was baffled by the fact that he wasn’t from the minute Obama took Office. He had some serious successes in Iraq, I reasoned, so it seems only logical to put the guy in charge of our other major theater of war.

So, what didn’t I do? I didn’t say anything about that on this blog! If just one time I’d written on here: “Gee, I wish Petraeus were in charge”, I could now say that I was brilliant; ahead of the curve. But I didn’t. So now I can’t style myself as “Mysterious Military Genius from the Shadows.”

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Interesting post by Sady at Tiger Beatdown. It’s worth reading the whole thing (unless you don’t like strong language), but here’s the main thing:

“Every time I yell at some pathetic anonymous commenter and people cheer, every time I get all righteously outraged without talking about what I’ve done that is the same or worse as what the person I’m outraged about has done, every time I play the toreador and gore a bull for your entertainment, I shudder a little. Because I’m helping it happen: Aiding in the creation of a discussion where we reward outrage and scorn and hatred and Othering of the ideologically impure, the bad feminists and unfeminists and anti-feminists…” 

Hmmm. This reminds me of something…. But she goes on:

“I’m letting you glorify me; I’m giving you a false impression of how things actually work, letting you believe that the world consists of Good People and Bad People. I’m telling you that I am Good, and that you are Good to the extent you agree with me, and that people — other people, people on the outside of this discussion, not us, certainly — are Bad if they disagree with us. I mean: This is basically how every terrible thing in the history of humanity has started, the decision that there’s an Us and a Them and the former is good and the latter is bad.”

She’s right, I suppose. But what she describes is not merely the cause of “every terrible thing in the history of humanity”. It is the history of humanity.

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So, it sounds like robots might not be the future of the military after all. At least, that’s what this guy Fred Kaplan says. He claims there isn’t going to be much demand for armed ground robots, contrary to conventional wisdom.  I’m inclined to disagree with him, though. I think it’s inevitable, but it will probably take longer than anyone thinks.

More generally, I have mixed feelings about this stuff. I’ve praised President Obama for his increased use of drones to fight terrorists, but at the same time, it does raise some troubling legal issues. And the ground robots they have now do look pretty pathetic, to be honest. I imagine it’s harder to control a thing that has to maneuver on the ground than in the air, in some ways.

The major leap, of course, is going to be when the military decides to have autonomous robot soldiers. I know, I know, it sounds insane, but I think that A.I. will ultimately reach a point where we trust limited combat programs more than we’ll trust a human being to be able to make decisions in the heat of battle.

After all, they’ll say, it’s much too serious to leave that up to an emotional meatbag.

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Peter Cook once said that his nightclub “The Establishment Club” was inspired by “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War.”

I am reminded of this quote by the recent “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day“, in which, as a response to fanatical Islamic extremists threatening violence over an episode of the show “South Park” that (sort of) depicted Mohammed, people are to, well, draw him.

I suppose I approve of the activity, since I am firmly of the opinion that absolutely no good can come from religious extremism. And yet I can’t help but feel the whole exercise is… pointless. I mean, did it really win anything for us? Did it change any minds, or, much more importantly, make us in any way safer from further attacks by radical Islamic terrorists?

The problem here is a problem I see not only in satire, but in protest marches, in protest songs, and even in everyday discourse, where passively insulting something or someone acts as a substitute for actively fighting against it.

Put plainly, I worry that this will make us complacent. It’s all well and good to draw Mohammed, if it makes you feel better about things, but let us not think for one moment that we have taken any actual effective action towards combating this violent extremism.

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At the end of the film The Wrath of Khan, when Spock is exposing himself to deadly radiation in order to save the crew of the Enterprise, he reminds Kirk that: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.Or the one.” When I saw this, my first thought–probably because of reading Ayn Rand–was “this is a rather neat description of Socialism.” It’s the sacrifice of the individual for the collective. And it is this notion from which all the other aspects of Socialism derive.

Supposedly, this idea is alien to the United States of America, where we value individualism. Part of the idea of “American exceptionalism” is that we are more friendly to the rights of the individual than other nations; hence, Socialism is a philosophy that Americans seemingly reject.

Or do we?

In an earlier post, I said that “War is a fundamentally Socialist undertaking.” And, indeed, it is in wartime that the Socialists and anti-individualist philosophies gain the greatest acceptance in the United States of America. Witness Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, the efforts at managing the war economy in World War I, or even the very idea of conscription. All these sacrifice the rights of individuals for the purpose of winning a war.

One of the redeeming factors of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism is that he seems to have grasped this point. It sort of undermines his own thesis, of course, but nonetheless he figures out that the United States is, historically, susceptible to this sort of socialistic mood. Of course, Goldberg calls it “fascism”, and he may be right about that as well.

I have said in the past that “Fascism is nothing more than a particularly militaristic brand of Socialism”, and while I’m no longer sure if that’s the only difference, I think it’s clear that fascism is more militaristic than socialism. So, perhaps I should rephrase my earlier statement: war is a fundamentally socialist undertaking–and it’s called fascism. Again, Goldberg makes something of a decent case that socialism and fascism have some similarities that people don’t know about. (Of course, he seems to think they’re almost interchangeable.)

I realize this post is somewhat disjointed and confusing–it’s a combination of a post I’d been working on for a while, plus the stuff about Goldberg’s book that I was reminded of by this–but what I’m ultimately trying to do here is figure out just what the hell fascism actually is, and how it relates to socialism. Anyone care to help? So far, the best explanation I’ve read is here.