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Aswad -> RE: The real cost of war (2/10/2012 9:58:39 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Edwynn
I am proud to say that I'm getting less and less cold natured as time goes on.
This is good, is it not?
Me, I've compartmentalized the cold from the warm; not sure which is the preferrable approach.
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I too had heard and read enough about WWII a long time ago, because it was repetitious and, though I didn't even know then just how much, quite limited.
Yeah, and probably pretty skewed in its presentation.
Though, of course, not as much as around these parts, where we make a big deal about suffering during the occupation (there was very little of that, except the trade embargo by the British and French, and the actions against civilians were almost exclusively targetted at the resistance movement and those that hid resistance members that were actively hunted), and we quite readily ignore the fact that part of the postwar persecutions on our end included things like blatantly ignoring the constitution (it expressly prohibits retroactive laws, and we sentenced some 40.000 people on a retroactive law, some of them to a death sentence, which had been illegal in times of peace since 1902), ignoring that our own laws considered the country ceded to Germany with the act of capitulation, disregarding all administrative collaboration (except members of the national socialist party, all of whom were convicted of treason for 'ideological fraternization') and most economic and industrial collaboration, and so forth.
Perhaps most damning in terms of perspective, we used German prisoners of war to run through mine fields to trigger the mines as a means of clearing the minefields, which is not mentioned once in any of the books used in public education, and most books that mention it have been banned (though most of those bans have now been repealed, since their subjects are no longer prestigeous politicians, and the population has been thoroughly innoculated against any interest in what happened). The Germans only ever treated one village that poorly, as far as such indiscriminatory excesses go. Everything else was quite targetted.
Also, you'll never find mention in Norwegian history books of the atrocities perpetrated by the Red Army against the Germans in the time immediately before and after the capitulation. As I'm sure you're aware, a lot of what they did bordered on comparability to the Nanking massacre, particularly as regards rape (and, generally, violent war crimes before, during and/or after). Not a word about it anywhere. In fact, a lot of otherwise educated people think any mention of it is invented by Neo-Nazi groups. It's like the Holocaust deniers in reverse on that point here.
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We all know what happened, but after ignoring it as a subject thereafter I nevertheless would catch a few things from reading non-historical subjects that related some information not in the "usual suspects" history books.
It's amazing how much one can learn indirectly, yes. And it's amazing how historians disregard their own best practices when it comes to WW2, with firsthand accounts given precedence over more reliable and objective evidence. Quite frankly, it's appaling. I'm certain an objective investigation of the facts will be in agreement that it was a bleak time in human history, with many atrocities and ample missteps of every sort. WW2 can stand to be in the light without looking any less scary, while the light can add the realism and real lessons to be learned that are obscured by the sideways, peeping through the fingers, hidden in shadows means of looking at it.
For instance, beurocrats are notoriously meticulous about certain kinds of records, and logistics requires forms and budgets and so forth. You can get a pretty good idea of some of the events that took place by examining such indirect records (although, in some cases, the records have been destroyed; still, most had copies filed elsewhere, some of which have been uncovered in more recent years). Still historians neglect to even use it as supplementary evidence in some cases.
I only stumbled across some of the things we (Norway) did after WW2 when reading about an obscure aspect of the legislation that has to do with the allocation of mandates to voting districts. Our euthanasia and sterilization programmes were better covered in the case files pertaining to a political dissident being committed to an insane asylum on a diagnosis of "symptomless schizophrenia" by the Labor party (I kid you not; that's an exact translation of the official diagnosis in the medical journal, which was released for a brief time in '99 before the police seized the server that housed it).
Indirect sources can be quite intriguing.
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I did not learn from the standard treatment in those books how prevalent 'racial hygiene' studies and societies were in the US and elsewhere in the 30's.
Yeah, there were real complaints about the U.S. falling behind with regard to the rate of sterilization of hybrid (interracial) offspring and other "unfit" individuals. And significant concerns in the medical community when the "anti-vivisectionist" movement gained traction, undoubtedly part of the reason why most of the supervising personell disappeared from the Tuguskee syphilis trials that continued well into the modern era. Nazi doc type stuff was pretty common in the US and UK up to the 80's or so.
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Standard oil provided the tetraethyl lead necessary to make leaded gasoline, which the Luftwaffe planes could not have flown with out.
Just one of many classic examples of how many of the people that were heavily involved with the Nazi regime were let off the hook. We provided them with metallurgy, chemistry and other fields during the war, with many prominent industrial leaders profiting immensely during the occupation and being let off the hook afterwards (together with politicians, of course; the fine art of covering one's asses collegially).
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So then it appears that all those ball bearings and other military parts that Switzerland sent to Germany did not violate such generous definition of 'neutrality' after all, though their clandestine way of providing and shipping the parts indicates that they were aware this severely strained the spirit of neutrality in any case.
More like it threatened to cause others to end their neutrality. Just as the UK and France were planning to invade Norway, and then Sweden, as a part of their war efforts, in complete disregard for any notions of neutrality, so too would they have been inclined to invade or attack Switzerland (or at least the Swiss trade routes, with blockades or otherwise) if they had known the extent to which Germany relied on the Swiss neutrality for many important parts of their war effort.
One of the first orders of war is to attack the logistics apparatus. That's why the FSK (the Norwegian top commando units) have attacked the heroin production supply chain in Afghanistan, torching the crops of opium poppies after the farmers have received payment for them, but before they can be picked up by the people doing the refining, for instance. We're talking rented spy satelites for realtime intelligence support in areas that have been scouted by people living in tiny camouflaged positions for weeks, packing up the feces and taking it back home to avoid changes in local animal behaviour and foraging patterns revealing that someone has been there, hand brushing the sand back into place over a two day trek to and from the insertion/extraction points. That's how crucial it is to hit their logistics. Remember: the objective is not to kill people, but to win a war.
Sometimes, the most convenient way to hit the logistics of a belligerent in a conflict is to invade or attack a country that is crucial to the logistics chain. Switzerland is fortunate that their role was not obvious. The USA was wise to make themselves undesireable to attack. Sweden, as the principal supplier of iron to the German war machine, was fortunate that Norway became the battleground in the west, and that Finland made it infeasible for Stalin to attack from the east (after the Winter War, it was pretty clear that you just don't try to include moving through Finland in any plan of war: hundreds of thousands of dead Soviets attest to the Finnish will to resist such follies).
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Of course what was being sought was some boring moral dilemma treatment, because that's what all those humanities and political folks want.
That's one of the reasons I really appreciated my history teacher back in IB, who took me from hating the subject and everything to do with it, to studying it on my own time ever since out of personal interest and a love of the subject. He never wanted all the boring answers. He just wanted to know what we'd learned about humanity, and that we had a grasp of how multifaceted history is, along with some idea of the way things unfold and why. Evil bugger gave me a research assignment on CIA black ops in the 50's.
He was the sort of guy that would give you a passing grade on the conventional views, but would give you a far better grade if you came up with a controversial or novel point of view and could argue well to support your position, even if the position was wrong (though, for top grades, you would have to also be able to make a sufficient case that you were either right or well aware of different aspects of an argument that is undecidable on the evidence alone).
He was also the only teacher ever to grin as I put forth the view that we owe our way of life to Hitler. A lot of what we take for granted today is only a major factor in our lives because it was cemented by the propaganda machine in WW2, or otherwise directly influenced by the postwar procedings. For instance, medical experimentation on unwilling human subjects only became "unthinkable" because of WW2 and the Nazi doctors, while democracy as a concept was cemented via opposition to totalitarianism. Lots of topics that were gaining traction, ideas that were perfectly acceptable, and things on their way out, were fixed in their current status as a direct consequence of Hitler's actions (and our reactions).
He was similarly amused when I pointed out that Hitler's predictions were coming true with regard to the weak-willed and decadent West being outdone by the disciplined and determined East, in particular with China and India growing to be real international factors (at the time, only the contours of the situation we know today were visible, while spotting it prior to WW2 was a pretty damn astute observation and a good prediction). I've often wondered how that man might have turned out in better circumstances, and with the knowledge we have today. Take eugenics, for instance. Today, it's more likely that it would have been realized with an incentive based, passive approach, and we now know that diversity is valuable and to be supported as far as possible in the interest of avoiding local minima and the susceptibilities associated with monoculture. Of course, 'today' would also look a lot different without him, so it's kind of a moot point, except in the interest of understanding the man (which I consider important to understanding how things went wrong, and avoiding a repeat of a very dark chapter in human history).
The ones that want a precooked, ready to eat answer, I prefer to hand them a mystery meal.
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Study of German history is quite the chore in libraries over here.
Or anywhere.
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Here's how it goes as one searches the shelves [...] You get the idea.
Quite the same as here, in other words: the interesting and important subjects are missing. For instance, I was quite enamored with the Weimar Republic, ever since I first read its constitution (arguably one of the best constitutions ever written, if not the best) but it was impossible to find good non-fiction works that dealt with it until I no longer had the time for dedicated study. Weimar and post-war Berlin were two of the most interesting times in European history.
And I'm not just talking about the cabaret. [8D]
(Speaking of which, Jill Tracy is worth checking out for a modern revival of cabaret noir.)
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the latter concept being apparently quite foreign to countries further West (at least to their governments).
It's a difficult concept to get right, but I think it's more a matter of aversion than an inability.
Interestingly enough, Germany today is possibly one of the most economically and industrially sound countries is the West, and with some of the greatest social stability. This in spite of wars, division and punitive measures, among the many hardships they have overcome to get to where they are today. It's pretty much their economy alone that now carries the EU through the present difficulties, for instance, and that's while working off the baggage from the reuniting of West Germany and East Germany (the two of them had a 3:1 economic disparity when the wall fell, for instance).
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Sorry for the side-track, but in a way it's not. The thinking is that if resources of the 'human capital' sort were better allocated and utilized, then the need for natural resources should be naturally diminished. The latter is what all the fighting is about, so greater attention to the former in the way of incentivization would seem to be in order.
That implies a very different way of working and thinking and living than is currently normative in the West, which in turn requires a revolution (because politicians truly are representative of their electorates, much as we would like to hang the blame for our ills on them as if they were a different species and in some way disconnected from the general zeitgeist; it's not going to happen that politicians suddenly stop behaving as they do, just as it's not going to happen that the general population cries out for heavier taxes on gasoline).
Probably, we'll keep pushing the broken wagon ahead of us until it falls apart, and then have a period of total chaos until China or some other then-active world superpower intervenes. Unless, of course, people go the Mormon route of preparing for such a collapse and being ready to assert some control to impose sanity on the process afterwards. I lean in that direction, seeing as my country is likely to experience such a period sooner than most in the West.
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There are many reasons besides reducing war to go this route; that would just be (for most) a desirable natural side effect.
Indeed. Which just underlines how much war is a natural mechanism, an expression of something that is in itself non-pathological, but which tends to point at underlying pathologies of societies. Sometimes, a war is inevitable (resources aren't infinite, and people don't regulate nearly as much as we'd like to think, so it's probable that there will be wars over food, phosphate and neodymium, among other things), but a lot of wars originate with poor management decisions that reflect diseased cultures.
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I like the way Germany is implementing their alternative energy program.
I wish Norway had one. On the surface, we do, but only as far as is needed to make us look good. That's our primary political concern as a country, looking good, such as by exporting LNG and importing the electricity produced from it after selling the CO2 quotas for burning it (which makes it look as if we're way ahead of the Kyoto protocols). It's also the primary concern of politicians, who generally see their stint in Norwegian politics as a stepping stone to jobs in the UN, WHO and so forth.
Actual measures are nonexistent. If you run a farm on a hobby basis, you'll receive non-optional funds from the state because a hobby run farm doesn't meet production quotas for making a living off it. (The only way to get rid of the subsidies is by running an ecological farm, because then the subsidies are cut.) But produce synthetic diesel (which burns with no particulates, no sulfur release and virtually no NOx) and you'll be taxed into debt slavery for the rest of your life for even trying (yes, this has happened, literally). And make electric cars or hybrids, and you'll find the tax benefits set up to make it profitable to start in the business pulled once your production line gets going, making the loans unserviceable, and you can't expect a single dollar of subsidies (while banks are bailed out for the same reasons as in the U.S.). Wind power, forget it, that's coming out of your own pockets. Trying to upgrade your home to zero-footprint or even reducing the footprint, that's going to get slammed with luxury taxes. Driving an SUV without any passengers, however, will get you tax benefits. Transitioning to fossil fuels for heating will result in enormous savings (our electricity is primarily clean, renewable water power).
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Thanks for the informative discussion and enlightening perspective from Norse Land.
Thank you, too.
And, always happy to provide national/comparative perspectives. That's part of the reason I've been translating the articles on veterans from the local newspaper. Incidentally, on a good note, the current doctrine is that maintaining your mental health is as important as maintaining your gear, in those words. It's something that has been a long time coming, and is now actively pursued, among other things to limit the number of veterans with mental health disabilities and also as a safeguard against war crimes and the like. One of the primary tasks of any Norwegian officer is to ensure the mental health of his unit, with an extra keen eye to adequately dealing with the emotional fallout from killed or injured comrades-in-arms to prevent vindictive behavior and the like (they're there to win a war, not settle scores, however good it might feel at the time to do so).
One can only hope such a doctrine becomes more widely adopted, researched and refined by NATO more generally.
It's also done a lot to open up questionable incidents to public inspection. By contrast, the Danish armed forces have done things like actively hiding figures from the civilian government to prevent inquiries into their role in torture and extrajudicial killing, for instance. Such things are most effectively counteracted with openness, transparency and a strong focus on codes and discipline (in the sense of doing a job, with professionals that get the tools, training, healthcare and oversight required to maintain professionalism in the job).
With the improved long term outcomes, one can hope such things can help reduce the immense personal (and financial) cost of war.
Health,
al-Aswad.
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