It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them to really converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion, bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values, culminated at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced trough any other agency than war. Other values such artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.
War - or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy - seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and labour. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation of nature would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defence, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of "democracy", it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort.
Although some don't like to admit it, we the Refusers, the resistors, and even the soldiers returning who saw the lie of the war, ended it. I refused and did not run. I told them to come and get me I was not going. After many threats from FBI and U.S. attorney, a year later they sent me a letter cancelling my induction order.
China’s winning without going to war. It’s absolutely not true that a nation closes ranks during a war, after it has been won or lost you get regiments colons of the death, but even more armies of traumatised, PTSD, generations lost, marriages broken, depersonalised, crime decay and a lifetime healing process never coming to an end .
I believe until 1968 the public was behind Vietnam more than opposed. College students having preferences for protest over study excepted. Korea did sell well. Firing MacArthur did not sell well. However it probably sold better than bombing China as he wanted to do to win.
Is there a "Moral Equivalent of War?" War on Poverty, War on Crime, War on Covid deniers, War on Climate Change-that word does seem to be invoked more frequently than Love. Of course when CBDC's are rolled out money will be called Love. Just like in China. https://twitter.com/i/status/1693019673913430186
Fire in the Lake was a good book on this topic. Cold War politics prevailed. Ike offered to help France with a couple atomic bombs. Operation Vulture.
Posted on April 24, 2016--https://johnprados.com/2016/04/24/two-atomic-bombs-for-dien-bien-phu/
April 24, 2016–Operation Vulture was the American plan to save the French forces at Dien Bien Phu by means of a maximum effort air strike using B-29 heavy bombers of the United States Far East Air Force (FEAF). It would have been carried out by FEAF’s Bomber Command, led by Brigadier General Joseph D. Caldara. A delegation of staffers went to Saigon with Caldara, using an older aircraft of the B-17 type so as not to attract attention, to meet officers of the French high command in Indochina. Caldara’s FEAF people completed their operations plan sixty-two years ago today, on April 24, 1954.
Bomber Command planned a maximum effort strike by B-29 bombers using conventional munitions. The French Union forces at Dien Bien Phu, being pressed back into a very small space by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s Viet Minh siege force, were increasingly desperate for some form of outside intervention, and rumors of a U.S. bombing raid were already current at the entrenched camp. The day before the Vulture plan was completed the French garrison had thrown its only fresh unit, the 2nd Foreign Legion Parachute Battalion, into a full-scale assault intended to gain some breathing space for Dien Bien Phu’s central defense complex. It had failed miserably, in part because commanders had tuned their radios to the wrong frequencies and not heard or responded to the evolving events on their radio net. By now the garrison was on its last legs.
From the view of William James-At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy. England and we, our army and navy authorities repeat without ceasing, are solely for “peace.” Germany and Japan it is who are bent on loot and glory. “Peace” in military mouths today is a synonym for “war expected.” The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that “peace” and “war” mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace”-interval.
It is plain that on this subject civilized man has developed a sort of double personality. If we take European nations, no legitimate interest of any one of them would seem to justify the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best utopian hypothesis, the most promising line of conciliation.
In my remarks, pacifist though I am, I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice to by many writers) and consider only the higher aspects of militaristic sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are the soul of any patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance. The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep’s paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.
Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic. Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities,” of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!
"Horrors of War" might be the right image to evoke to confront the noble abstract argument.
The French camped in a large valley at Dien Bien Phu, to draw the Vietnamese into open battle upon the plain, to annihilate them with heavy artillery.
General Giap managed to do the impossible. His men in flip flops dismantled light howitzers and somehow carried them into the steep and commanding heights, then carried up ammunition, and pounded the clever French, who depended upon American air-drops for their supplies.
As I understand it, the French could have been easily nuked in that valley, but not the Viet Minh in the surrounding peaks.
I don't know if you read Dispatches by Michael Herr who was a war correspondent for Esquire. His British friend was a war photographer. Tim Page. His war photography was also published.
Tim and Michael were having a conversation about taking the glamour out of war and Tim held it couldn't be done.
If you have a rich and influential person who wants to control the public square and also the megaphones for the town crier and ink for the news sheets all he has to do is eliminate the competitors access to the means of communication. While he is a private enterprise and can censor as he sees fit he cannot be touched. When everyone has to use his platform because all the others are still censoring openly and all the communications backbones are failing but his is growing what is going to happen?
People will use StarLink to connect to X because it works not realising they have been corralled into there.
Did you know there was a month or two back moves by the FCC to allow private interests to use the Amateur radio bands for high speed stock trading communications traffic, sot sure what the outcome was. They say it will be 20 ms faster than the optical fibre links that have to go through a number of relays over the same distance. What if these operators know that the optical fibre links will become very compromised soon and still want to play the high speed trading game and StarLink and other space comms will be much too slow?
Hmm, it would be real nice if any of the new aristocracy were to overtly or covertly finance the resistance. It would make a massive difference if just one legacy news source were to be taken over and stopped their censorship.
My Dad was a Marine officer in Korea and Vietnam. His mom grew up in a missionary family in China in the first decae of the 20th century. Her mother, my Great Grandmother, grew up in a Quaker family in Ohio. Her house had been an "underground railway" safe-house.
My mother's father came to Texas in a covered wagon, when to college, and served as a radio-operator and observer-gunner in the back of a Spad biplane, traveled the world on a tramp-steamer as a radio-operator, attended the Sorbonne and Harvard Grad School (Journalism), raised a family during the depression, built them a house by hand, and served in Army OSS counter-intelligence in WW-2. He became a cattle rancher by the time I knew him.
I was the one who listened to bth of them. They saw a lot the same, but not all the same.
I grew up on military bases and 2 years (8th & 9th grades) on my Grandfather's ranch.
I spent my first 6.5 years near my Dad's parents in San Diego (Camp Pendelton).
I went to my last 3 years of high school (after 2 years at the cattle ranch) in Yokohama, Japan.
That's how I come to have an eclectic view of our world.
Not only a wire war, cutting cables but most forget about cutting, sabotaging and shortcutting brain transmitters, the inner communication with our neurons, and redirecting them to a mainframe.
War is the health of the State. https://www.panarchy.org/bourne/state.1918.html
It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them to really converting them. Of course the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal but often their agitation instead of converting, merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion, bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values, culminated at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced trough any other agency than war. Other values such artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.
War - or at least modern war waged by a democratic republic against a powerful enemy - seems to achieve for a nation almost all that the most inflamed political idealist could desire. Citizens are no longer indifferent to their Government but each cell of the body politic is brimming with life and activity. We are at last on the way to full realization of that collective community in which each individual somehow contains the virtue of the whole. In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out. At war, the individual becomes almost identical with his society. He achieves a superb self-assurance, an intuition of the rightness of all his ideas and emotions, so that in the suppression of opponents or heretics he is invincibly strong; he feels behind him all the power of the collective community. The individual as social being in war seems to have achieved almost his apotheosis. Not for any religious impulse could the American nation have been expected to show such devotion en masse, such sacrifice and labour. Certainly not for any secular good, such as universal education or the subjugation of nature would it have poured forth its treasure and its life, or would it have permitted such stern coercive measures to be taken against it, such as conscripting its money and its men. But for the sake of a war of offensive self-defence, undertaken to support a difficult cause to the slogan of "democracy", it would reach the highest level ever known of collective effort.
This is stated as an absolute, but I think it's not, and it does not always happen. Think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, for instance.
I think we should work earnestly to prevent this societal War-Mind from taking over.
Although some don't like to admit it, we the Refusers, the resistors, and even the soldiers returning who saw the lie of the war, ended it. I refused and did not run. I told them to come and get me I was not going. After many threats from FBI and U.S. attorney, a year later they sent me a letter cancelling my induction order.
Thanks Thomas. They ended the registration for the draft about 30 days before I turned 18.
I was determined to burn my draft card. I never got one.
China’s winning without going to war. It’s absolutely not true that a nation closes ranks during a war, after it has been won or lost you get regiments colons of the death, but even more armies of traumatised, PTSD, generations lost, marriages broken, depersonalised, crime decay and a lifetime healing process never coming to an end .
I believe until 1968 the public was behind Vietnam more than opposed. College students having preferences for protest over study excepted. Korea did sell well. Firing MacArthur did not sell well. However it probably sold better than bombing China as he wanted to do to win.
Is there a "Moral Equivalent of War?" War on Poverty, War on Crime, War on Covid deniers, War on Climate Change-that word does seem to be invoked more frequently than Love. Of course when CBDC's are rolled out money will be called Love. Just like in China. https://twitter.com/i/status/1693019673913430186
"The moral equivalent of war" is sadistic-rape-murder, unless I am mistaken.
The VC who died in Tet-1968 really did die to change the war narrative in the US.
Thier defeat was later the victory of those Vietnamese in the resistance who did survive.
The US supported Ho Chi Minh in WW-2, and supported Vietnamese indepenenece, ... at first.
The US sided with colonial France (Michelin plantation), which was a strategig error.
FDR might not have done that.
The US should have backed, and pretended to back eventually ... Vietnamese reunification after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
Fire in the Lake was a good book on this topic. Cold War politics prevailed. Ike offered to help France with a couple atomic bombs. Operation Vulture.
Posted on April 24, 2016--https://johnprados.com/2016/04/24/two-atomic-bombs-for-dien-bien-phu/
April 24, 2016–Operation Vulture was the American plan to save the French forces at Dien Bien Phu by means of a maximum effort air strike using B-29 heavy bombers of the United States Far East Air Force (FEAF). It would have been carried out by FEAF’s Bomber Command, led by Brigadier General Joseph D. Caldara. A delegation of staffers went to Saigon with Caldara, using an older aircraft of the B-17 type so as not to attract attention, to meet officers of the French high command in Indochina. Caldara’s FEAF people completed their operations plan sixty-two years ago today, on April 24, 1954.
Bomber Command planned a maximum effort strike by B-29 bombers using conventional munitions. The French Union forces at Dien Bien Phu, being pressed back into a very small space by General Vo Nguyen Giap’s Viet Minh siege force, were increasingly desperate for some form of outside intervention, and rumors of a U.S. bombing raid were already current at the entrenched camp. The day before the Vulture plan was completed the French garrison had thrown its only fresh unit, the 2nd Foreign Legion Parachute Battalion, into a full-scale assault intended to gain some breathing space for Dien Bien Phu’s central defense complex. It had failed miserably, in part because commanders had tuned their radios to the wrong frequencies and not heard or responded to the evolving events on their radio net. By now the garrison was on its last legs.
From the view of William James-At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but they are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally allowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy. England and we, our army and navy authorities repeat without ceasing, are solely for “peace.” Germany and Japan it is who are bent on loot and glory. “Peace” in military mouths today is a synonym for “war expected.” The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that “peace” and “war” mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp preparation for war by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the “peace”-interval.
It is plain that on this subject civilized man has developed a sort of double personality. If we take European nations, no legitimate interest of any one of them would seem to justify the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would necessarily entail. It would seem that common sense and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-party and the war-party together, and I believe that the difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which set the military imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything one says must be abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and caution, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible mind seems the best utopian hypothesis, the most promising line of conciliation.
In my remarks, pacifist though I am, I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice to by many writers) and consider only the higher aspects of militaristic sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are the soul of any patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the soul of all romance. The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep’s paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.
Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic. Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities,” of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!
https://www.stephenhicks.org/2016/06/02/william-jamess-the-moral-equivalent-of-war/
That's a lot of words.
"Horrors of War" might be the right image to evoke to confront the noble abstract argument.
The French camped in a large valley at Dien Bien Phu, to draw the Vietnamese into open battle upon the plain, to annihilate them with heavy artillery.
General Giap managed to do the impossible. His men in flip flops dismantled light howitzers and somehow carried them into the steep and commanding heights, then carried up ammunition, and pounded the clever French, who depended upon American air-drops for their supplies.
As I understand it, the French could have been easily nuked in that valley, but not the Viet Minh in the surrounding peaks.
I suspect that war IS hell.
War within and war without.
I don't know if you read Dispatches by Michael Herr who was a war correspondent for Esquire. His British friend was a war photographer. Tim Page. His war photography was also published.
Tim and Michael were having a conversation about taking the glamour out of war and Tim held it couldn't be done.
I never read that.
Moths to flame.
Some humans to war.
;-(
Not me.
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/28/483776202/remembering-michael-herr-whose-dispatches-brought-the-war-in-vietnam-home
Judge Levy is an Obama-appointed judge, does not bode well for Dr. Nass.
We shall see... She is fighting the power system, fighting the corrupt hierarchy.
This is war.
If you have a rich and influential person who wants to control the public square and also the megaphones for the town crier and ink for the news sheets all he has to do is eliminate the competitors access to the means of communication. While he is a private enterprise and can censor as he sees fit he cannot be touched. When everyone has to use his platform because all the others are still censoring openly and all the communications backbones are failing but his is growing what is going to happen?
People will use StarLink to connect to X because it works not realising they have been corralled into there.
Did you know there was a month or two back moves by the FCC to allow private interests to use the Amateur radio bands for high speed stock trading communications traffic, sot sure what the outcome was. They say it will be 20 ms faster than the optical fibre links that have to go through a number of relays over the same distance. What if these operators know that the optical fibre links will become very compromised soon and still want to play the high speed trading game and StarLink and other space comms will be much too slow?
The powerful billionaires are not all in agreement. There is dischord between the oligarchic cliques.
Keep your head down and communicate while it is possible.
Prepare...
Hmm, it would be real nice if any of the new aristocracy were to overtly or covertly finance the resistance. It would make a massive difference if just one legacy news source were to be taken over and stopped their censorship.
It looks like podcasts are the information frontier these days, though I just do what I do with written text and links.
That bit of history on your Dad is very helpful to understand your comprehensive and realistic thinking.
That was not my Dad, but Pippa Malmgren's Dad.
My Dad was a Marine officer in Korea and Vietnam. His mom grew up in a missionary family in China in the first decae of the 20th century. Her mother, my Great Grandmother, grew up in a Quaker family in Ohio. Her house had been an "underground railway" safe-house.
My mother's father came to Texas in a covered wagon, when to college, and served as a radio-operator and observer-gunner in the back of a Spad biplane, traveled the world on a tramp-steamer as a radio-operator, attended the Sorbonne and Harvard Grad School (Journalism), raised a family during the depression, built them a house by hand, and served in Army OSS counter-intelligence in WW-2. He became a cattle rancher by the time I knew him.
I was the one who listened to bth of them. They saw a lot the same, but not all the same.
I grew up on military bases and 2 years (8th & 9th grades) on my Grandfather's ranch.
I spent my first 6.5 years near my Dad's parents in San Diego (Camp Pendelton).
I went to my last 3 years of high school (after 2 years at the cattle ranch) in Yokohama, Japan.
That's how I come to have an eclectic view of our world.
Not only a wire war, cutting cables but most forget about cutting, sabotaging and shortcutting brain transmitters, the inner communication with our neurons, and redirecting them to a mainframe.
Hi, Dr. Day - Re interview of Dr. Pippin Malmgren: … 'Spin Doctor’ extraordinaire!
And the interviewer? Well, … Frau ‘Spin Doctor’ just bowed and said she is honoured to meet me!
And the whole interview? An excellent example of how one use spin in interpreting information.
Best,
F.S.