The Red, White and Green March

I write slowly and occasionally these days. Life gets busy (generally for good reasons, if you were worried), and the weeks slip by. Mostly, this is unfortunate for my writing, as I feel myself slipping into being a consumer of other people's thoughts, rather than a producer of something new. But one advantage is that sometimes I'm tempted to write about something, then events overtake me before I get around to it, and I'm forced to think harder about it.

Back in early April, you may remember a story about a coming gigantic migrant caravan making its way up from Honduras, through Mexico, to the US border.

April 2nd:

This year, the annual US-bound migrant caravan sparked a Trump tweetstorm

I'll bet you didn't know that America received an annual caravan of migrants turning up en masse before Trump tweeted about it, did you?

April 3rd:

Trump threatens Honduras' foreign aid over migrant caravan

April 7th

Trump Administration Sends Hundreds of National Guard Troops to U.S.-Mexico Border

You can tell that this was a big story, just by plotting the Google Trends search volume for "Camp of the Saints", Jean Raspail's prophetic novel about a mass refugee takeover of Europe. This really felt like the Camp of the Saints had arrived. Admittedly it was only a thousand people, whereas the million or so in Europe is much closer to Raspail's vision, but the organised aspect got people highly alarmed.

It was at about this point that I remember thinking about the two options given: threaten Mexico and Honduras to fix the problem, versus send the US troops to the border.

The first option seemed like a credible possibility. Unlike in Raspail's book, the caravan was coming over the land, not over sea. This means that if the land is owned by someone, and that someone can be threatened or cajoled by the US, you've probably got a good chance at it being in their interests to shut it down.

But it's worth pondering the following. Mexico is a broke, third world country, who ships lots of its own underclass to America, which is a large part of the overall immigration problem. And yet America is apparently relying on Mexico to police the flow of people from the even more wretched Honduras.  Which makes you wonder - why doesn't America do the job itself?

Which gets to the second policy - sending troops to the border. When I first heard about this, I suspected that it might turn into an absolute catastrophe.

You send the might of the US Army to the border. Then what?

Well, there's two possibilities, both of them bad. And both of them have actually happened.

The first is that the troops actually fire. This one played out in Israel, around the same time:

Israeli forces kill three Gaza border protesters, wound 600: medics

So what of that, you may say? 600 wounded to only 3 killed is actually a damn good ratio if you're trying to not kill them and you're vastly outnumbered.

But remember, this is America we're talking about, not Israel. And the key difference is that in Israel, there's enough political consensus backing these troops' actions that there was an effective fence there in the first place.

In America, the border wall will never get built, notwithstanding the hopes of Trump supporters. This is because the overwhelming majority of important political players oppose such a development. And this tells you what the reaction would be if the same thing happened here.

Let's consider the event where the protesters mass at the Mexican border and begin to stream across. Nation Guard units stand opposed, with instructions to stop them at all costs. The order is given to fire. Against all likelihood, the troops actually fire.

Congratulations, random National Guardsman who gave the order! You get to be painted as the modern William Calley, subjected to imprisonment and approbation for the rest of your life. Except it's The Current Year, not 1971, and some Democrat-appointed judge just can't wait to paste you with life in prison to set an example to not violate Steve Sailer's Zeroth Ammendment to the Constitution.

But deep down, everyone knows this is what will happen, and calculates accordingly. Plus people sign up for the US military with (optimistically) hopes of fighting against ISIS, not firing on women and children. And so, even if the order is given, nobody will actually fire.

Then what?

We'll we've seen that too. Welcome to one of the most criminally under-appreciated events of the 20th Century - the Green March.

The Green March was, to borrow from Boldmug, a little piece of 21st Century European history that somehow dropped into 20th Century Africa. 

Western Sahara was a Spanish Colony in the desert on the coast of North-West Africa. It was 1975, Franco was dying, and pretty much everybody knew the colonialism game in Africa was up. Spain was clinging onto control of the colony against an insurgency that had been going on for two years, out of Mauritania. Algeria and Morocco were similarly circling the sick wildebeest that the Spanish colony had become, hoping to take over once the Spanish retreated or were driven out.

And in this context, Morocco decided in November 1975 to do something brilliant. Instead of sending in the army, it assembled 350,000 Moroccan civilians, mostly women and children. This was symbolically chosen to be the number of births in Morocco that year. They were given the order to march on Western Sahara, waving flags and banners, green, the color of Islam.

It is an axiom of firearms training that you should understand the purpose of a gun. It is not a magic wand, a holy cross, or an amulet to ward off evil doers. It is a device constructed to end the life of its intended target. One of the first lessons any competent firearms instructor will tell you is to never, ever point a gun at anything you are not willing and intending to destroy right then.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't use a gun as a bluff. People do this all the time. But bluffing with a gun is a very dangerous game. You might be intending to bluff, and the gun goes off by accident. You might get your bluff called, and now you're in an even worse position than before. Your opponent now knows that you're unwilling to fire, and has a good chance of taking the gun off you.

An army is a merely a collection of men with guns. And having your troops point guns that they are unwilling to fire works no better at a national level than it does with the burglar in your home.

The bluff was called. The Moroccans marched, and the Spanish were unwilling to fire. Sensing that the jig was up, they even cleared away mines from some of the areas to avoid bloodshed. Ironically, Morocco's bigger problem turned out to be not the well-equipped but demoralised Spanish military, but the ramshackle yet willing troops of the Polisario Front out of Mauritania, with whom Morocco fought an ongoing insurgency for years afterwards. But win they did, and Morocco now firmly controls Western Sahara.

The Green March was a combination of weaponised mass immigration and weaponised non-violent protest. King Hassan II understood the Keyser Soze principle: to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. He was willing to get hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Spain was not.

It is prophetic, because it forces starry-eyed immigration supporters to confront something quite uncomfortable. We can haggle over whether the current torrent of immigrants from Africa and the Middle East flooding Europe right now ought to be considered an invasion. Your mileage may vary. But it is very, very hard to argue that the Green March was anything other than an invasion. The fact that women and children armed with flags proved more effective than young men armed with AK-47s is irrelevant. Sovereign control was transferred, involuntarily. The population was replaced, involuntarily.  The fact that this met with virtually no resistance in the end is as irrelevant as the fact that Nazi Germany met with virtually no resistance when it took Denmark.

A rinky-dink group like "Pueblo Sin Fronteras" can organise a thousand Central Americans to turn up at once. Decentralized incentives, combined will pull factors like Angela Merkel idiotically signalling that everybody could come on in, will get you a million people shambolically turning up over a year or two.

But if you want 350,000 people to turn up, at the same place and time, with co-ordinated flags and banners, there is simply no substitute for a nation-state doing the organising. This allows for a formal transfer of sovereignty. But many similar effects are achieved by an informal transformation by population inundation.

Or, if one is talking to a progressive, there is an even stronger example. How should the Native Americans have thought of the Pilgrims turning up at Plymouth Rock in 1620? They may be just a small number of civilians at the time, against a far larger combined group of Native Americans. And they may not be immediately attacking you, or doing anything hostile. But make no mistake: they're here to take everything you have. And if you don't treat them as an existential threat and a military invasion, right now, they'll succeed.

Immigration can very easily be weaponised. And the distinctions between the weaponised and non-weaponised forms are surprisingly difficult to pin down.

But for our purposes, regardless of where you think the present case falls on the spectrum, the response of western authorities against undesired migrants tells you a lot about the defenses available to the west if immigration were to be weaponised.

The answer is not universal. Weaponised immigration is a powerful weapon against an opponent riddled with virtue-signalling, pathological altruism, and a divided political system. It is literal suicide against an opponent who lacks these traits.

And the western response is not uniform. It failed spectacularly in Israel, repeatedly. It failed recently in Hungary and Poland. It worked well in Italy, Germany and France.

How well might it do in America?

For better or worse, Trump in his presidency is much better at talking a big game than he is at delivering a big game. This goes triply so for cases where the achievement of the goal cannot be established just by executive edict, or by provoking an easily-outraged media. If the goal requires the assent of a large bureaucracy, expect a lot of talk and little action. See, for instance, The Wall.

The charitable reading of this is that Trump is an expert at understanding the problem of kings from time immemorial. The central challenge of a king with notionally broad powers is to know what orders will actually be obeyed if given, and limit oneself to only those orders. Do not brandish a gun you are unwilling to fire. Do not attempt to fire a gun that is empty. Do not give orders that will be openly disobeyed. So he'll go for a stripped down version that achieves some limited media victory, and can be implemented. Because giving an order and seeing it flouted would be worse than nothing. It would undermine his authority, on top of not getting the actions implemented.

The uncharitable explanations mostly involve him being too lazy and inattentive to see complicated things through, too narcissistic to properly co-ordinate with a faceless bureacracy, or an outright conman just tricking the right-wing rubes with empty promises.

Pick your theory. But the prediction is pretty reliable.

After threatening to send the troops, within a few days came the first signs that those hoping for a military confrontation would come away disappointed.

On April 9, the Washington Post openly mocked:

Troops sent by Trump to border will fly drones, gather intel — and clear brush, too

He's sending troops, alright, just not sending them to actually confront the people marching on the border.

The right was probably disappointed in this. I can't share this view at all. We can thank our lucky stars that Trump, or someone near to him, understood what a catastrophe it would have been to send armed troops to confront the caravan.

Behind Door Number One is My Lai. Behind Door Number 2 is Western Sahara. Which one would you prefer?

In this respect, Trump's initial instinct is right. Threatening Honduras and Mexico is actually the best possible response, because the alternatives are calamitous in The Current Year. It is much, much easier for Trump to effectively threaten the Mexican government than to effectively assert control of his own government. And if you're going to lose, it is far better to lose quietly, than to lose noisily with all the TV cameras rolling.

Here, I'm going to make a pretty confident prediction, for those of you that remember hearing about the initial story in early April.

You never heard about how the whole thing ended, did you? How do I know this? Same picture as before.

In our ADHD culture, the caravan simply took too long to arrive, and by the time it did, people had lost interest.

So allow me to fill you in. From April 30th, when the Caravan finally reached San Diego:

Everyone who has been waiting is still here. Nobody has been processed,” said Alex Mensing, from the group Pueblo Sin Fronteras.

“They have not processed anybody at San Ysidro port of entry,” Mensing said.

Organizers of the group told ABC News that there are about 100 people sleeping outside a port of entry in San Diego. 

...

 On Sunday evening, Border Patrol commissioner Kevin McAleenan released a statement saying that the San Ysidro port of entry had "reached capacity."

He suggested that could change but gave no timetable, saying that in the meantime "those individuals may need to wait in Mexico as CBP officers work to process those already within our facilities."

"As sufficient space and resources become available, CBP officers will be able to take additional individuals into the port for processing," McAleenan said in the statement.

From May 1st:

Slowly but steadily, caravan migrants who trekked across Mexico are pleading their cases to US authorities on why they should be granted asylum.

More than half of them have now been accepted to begin processing by US authorities at the border with Mexico, Alex Mensing -- whose group, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, organized the caravan -- said Wednesday.

Even though it's only a hundred of you, our boldest claim made by a government employee under the Trump presidency is that you may face some delays as the faceless bureaucracy processes your case. You start out claiming to be the mighty Parliament that toppled King Charles I. You end up being the modern House of Lords, with the ability to create mild inconvenience through small delay.

This much can be reliably inferred.

If the Mexican government ever decides to pull a King Hassan II, you would be a brave and foolish man to bet against them.

On the thorniness of historical counterfactuals

Both the economist and the historian are students of human organisations and behaviour.

The economist (at least in his empiricist manifestation) is usually interested in understanding causation - what causes drive what outcomes. This is at least one way of testing our models. The aim is to understand the structure of the world we live in, with the ultimate aims being prediction and policy improvements.

The historian has a choice to be either an economist or a journalist. The economist version wants to understand why things happened the way they did, and what can be learned about the world as a result. The journalist version scorns the grandiose conceit of trying to pin down causality, and instead sticks to the smaller question of "what happened", telling the stories of the past.

Of course, economists are also historians - they take a series of events that have happened, and assert that they're comparable along the dimensions that matter and thus worthy of being used to understand general principles.

For a genuine historian, especially of world events, the tools needed are different. One must treat historical events as case studies, to be explored in detail, rather than line items in a spreadsheet. If you're understanding World War 2, for instance, for many questions there's pretty much only one line in the spreadsheet. So running a regression isn't exactly on offer, and you probably would do better to crack open a book instead.

Even though it's generally out of fashion among historians, understanding causality and counterfactuals is very important if you want to draw actual lessons from history. The counterfactual says what could have been, if some other choice had been made. It aims to make, in a literary sense, the claim to causally identifying the effect of a single decision.

It goes without saying that this is incredibly hard to do. But for those of us not bound by the standards of academic publishing, it's among the more interesting ways of thinking about history.

Getting the counterfactual right, of course, is largely a matter of judgment and opinion, since we can't actually re-run the past and find out.

But there is one aspect of thinking about counterfactuals that is beyond dispute. If you don't have a clear sense of what the counterfactual is, then you don't have any idea what the actual impact of the decision was.

You might think that nobody could possibly be this stupid, but you'd be wrong. The surest sign is when people complain about some decision that was followed by bad consequences, but never explain exactly what the alternative was and how it was meant to work.

One case where I've come across this is in the role of the British in partitioning India in 1947 into two countries (India and Pakistan) when they left. This is part of the long list of standard recitations given as to how beastly the British were in all matters of administering the British Empire.

As everybody knows, what happened after partition was a total disaster, with widespread violence and population transfers under extreme duress. Estimates of the deaths involved range from several hundred thousand to two million, according to La Wik. The problem is the classic one in the colonial critic's playbook - that the lines drawn on the map didn't correspond to messy demographic reality. When the two came into conflict, the result was maybe a million deaths.

Which sounds pretty bad, no?

But again, bad compared to what? What other choices did they have, and what would the consequences have been?

Here, the dilemma is not so much the "what" as the "consequences". The main alternative was leaving the two places as a single country. The issue, of course, is how that would have actually played out. But for some reason, the people who denounce Britain never seem to spend much time discussing this aspect.

There are, to be fair, arguments that partition was a mistake, because a single country would have done a better job of calming ethnic tensions. To my mind, the strongest of these is the relative levels of antagonism between Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims, versus the antagonism between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims. 

People have a tendency to forget that the last-mentioned category of Indian Muslims not only exists, but is enormous, around 172 million (almost as many, in fact, as the 193 million in Pakistan). And while there is violence and conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India, it's not on anything like the scale or seriousness as the tension between India and Pakistan. The latter could actually devolve into a nuclear missile exchange. 

By contrast, I don't even hear about serious pushes for Muslim separatism in India. I'm sure it exists in some form. But it's less prominent than, say Quebec or Belgium. Indeed, India is perhaps the only other exception (along with Switzerland) to the Holmes rule that there are no stable multilingual countries. Somehow, they mostly manage to rub along. The surest sign that the conflict with India's Muslims is probably not an existential threat to the country is that it's possible to go months without reading any newspaper stories on "Indian Muslims". Certainly, you go a lot longer than you do without reading something about the India/Pakistan tensions.

So this reads like a pretty bad indictment of the British, at least ex post. 

But there's another counterfactual which gets discussed even less.

What if Britain left them as a single country, but they had a bloody separatist war afterwards anyway?

The amazing thing about this example is that it's not even a hypothetical. It literally happened.

Where?

Bangladesh. It used to be called East Pakistan, and was part of the same country. They were divided by geography, but shared a common religion. Surely, we would reason, they should work well in a single polity!

Except they didn't. Bangladesh fought a bloody war of independence against what was (and I quote La Wik):

An academic consensus prevails that the atrocities committed by the Pakistani military were a genocide.

As coincidence would turn out (it seems in poor taste to call it "luck" in this context), the estimated number of civilian deaths ranges from 300,000 to 3 million, rather close to the deaths during partition. 

Huh! Doesn't seem quite so cut and dried now, does it?

It leaves me actually quite agnostic on the whole question, to be honest. It seems very unclear whether things would have actually turned out better or worse if the British hadn't partitioned India when they left. It may just be that when they left the place, there was a high chance there was going to be widespread ethnic conflict no matter what they did.

And yet, to slightly paraphrase the great Mr Bastiat, people have a tendency to judge actions primarily by what is seen, not what is unseen.

The people that might have died under an alternative political arrangement are not salient at all. The deaths during partition are highly salient. 

Sometimes there are just no good options, at least based on what you can reasonably know at the time. Sometimes, you have to call things as you see them, suspecting that a lot of people might die either way.

It seems depressing, but likely, that the only actual lesson of partition is the one that the Bard wrote centuries ago - uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

No Exit, Part 2: Coups

Last time I tackled the question of exit, we talked about the feasibility of secession, and how I thought that scenario would play out (short version: not likely, because the government will use the courts to pre-emptively squelch any peaceful way of achieving it).

But the other exit possibility is to take over some other crummy country via a coup. How might that play out?

Let's ignore the question of the logistics of the coup itself. This is hard to judge - on the one hand, there are lots of possible basket case countries out there to target. But the leaders of those countries, even if their countries are ramshackle, will likely have a lot more manpower on the ground. Taking over from the outside is likely to be hard. Just ask Sir Mark Thatcher.

The more interesting question would be what happens afterwards if you actually succeed, and set up your reactionary state in some or other Godforsaken part of earth? Could such a state survive? Would the US let it?

Like in the case of secession, it's hard to tell, because there's no direct example to compare.  One has to go off various different responses to similar cases.

Given that one is presumably limited to taking over a basket case country, the first point to note, which may seem trivial, is that the political fallout from the US would probably vary greatly with the ethnicity of the host country.

Put simply, the west would simply not stand for a white unelected leader of an African country. Just ask Ian Smith or P W Botha. The West treated Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa with a hateful vitriol that they never quite mustered for the Soviets, and those places were still partly democratic. Unless you were able to immediately turn yourself into North Korea, mostly self-sufficient and able to threaten to bring the crazy,  you could expect the full fury of the US to destroy you as soon as they could.

Unelected whites ruling over blacks simply sets off too many slavery alarm bells. Of course, if pressed nobody would say that's it's actually morally preferable for unelected whites to rule over Hispanics, South-East Asians, or Pacific Islanders. But the modern world being what it is, I somehow doubt that a coup in Fiji or Honduras would trigger quite the same visceral response.

Even better, pick somewhere dysfunctional that's  full of vaguely white people (Belarus? Turkmenistan?), or have a person of the same skin color (and ideally the same nationality as well) to lead the coup. That would help neutralise the imperialism/racism angle. The world would still be pissed, but at least you'd take away their biggest propaganda card against you.

Would that be sufficient? Hard to say, but probably not. The State Department may not actually assert control over the entire planet, but they sure as hell don't like it when you do things without consulting them first.

My basis for thinking this is the response they had to a grimly hilarious story from last December where a bunch of Ghanaian-born US citizens decided to launch a coup against the dictator of that country.

Seriously, check out this great long report on it from the Guardian. It's amazing stuff. The whole thing is like something from a Steve Sailer content generator - invade the world, invite the world. There's even a bizarre government-funded diversity angle, as one of the main financial backers of the coup made his money through getting government grants to build "affordable housing" projects in mostly white areas of Texas.

Meanwhile, the main focus of the article is about a man called Njaga Jagne, about whom the Guardian can speak more freely since he died in the coup attempt. He was a US National Guard member who served in Iraq. Iraq, as you'll no doubt remember in between the never-ending reports about ISIS, was the US's way of bringing the glories of multiparty democracy to a ramshackle dictatorship in the Middle East, as part of the crucial 'Bombing Muslims for Freedom' campaign.

Well, unfortunately Njaga imbibed the democracy Kool-Aid a little more deeply than the powers that be wanted him to. Hey, if it's such a good thing to turn dictatorships into democracies, surely the US government would be happy if I did this myself, right? After all, they've already employed me to do this once.

Yeah, it turns out, not so much.

The first problem, it seems, was plotting the coup on Facebook. Good thinking! Nobody else could infiltrate that. Things went as well as you might expect when they turned up

He and Njaga went with the team that approached the front door, while Faal went with the team taking the rear. The plan was for Njaga to fire his M4 rifle once in the air as a signal to their Gambian collaborators. But when the shot went up, the guards out front instead opened fire on him.

Afterwards, the survivors came to the bitter conclusion that they had been betrayed. But by whom? They blamed Sanneh’s moles. Some also wondered why Faal had turned himself in so quickly. But Faal told me that when he was flown back to the US and told his story to FBI agents, they indicated they had been aware of the plot all along. He claims that without prompting, they held up a picture of Njie, and asked: “Is this Dave?”

In May, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had visited Sanneh at his home in Maryland prior to his departure, asking why he had purchased a plane ticket to Dakar. The agency alerted the State Department, the Post reported, which in turn “secretly tipped off” an unnamed west African country – generally presumed to be Senegal – in the hope that it would intercept Sanneh. The coup plotters suspect that the information instead ended up in Jammeh’s [the dictator's] hands. 

Huh! It's almost like the State Department doesn't like people engaging in freelance foreign policy.

Also, how dumb do you have to be that when you're being asked questions by the FBI about the purpose of your coup-related plane trip, you aren't able to piece together the possibility that something has gone wrong in the op-sec process?

Amid the frantic uncertainty, Sigga [Njaga's sister] called the US embassy in Banjul. “They were more focused on saying, ‘If your brother is involved, it was a crime,’” she said. 

You don't say.

Talk about some stone cold diplomacy - the dead guy's sister is on the phone, and you're focused on imparting the message that the Federal Government plans to indict his corpse.

It all seems quite reminiscent of the police response to the Texas secessionists - woe be to the people that threaten the hegemony of the US Federal Government.

When the US says that it's important that all the countries of the world become democratic, what they mean is that it's important that the US make them democratic, on the US's terms.

This is very different from, say, the Russians organising a referendum for the people of Donetsk in the Ukraine to vote if they'd like to become part of Russia. THAT kind of democracy is far more problematic.

And some random pissant US National Guardsman deciding to create democracy himself in Gambia? That, my friend, simply will not fly.

I quite enjoyed the Moldbug quip that:

[T]he phrase "international community" could be profitably replaced, in all contexts, by "State Department," without any change in meaning.

I once told this line to a friend of mine who actually works for State. He laughed and said it was mostly true, in the inimitable way of diplomats in private circles who are glad to have an excuse to partially acknowledge from the mouths of others things that it would be imprudent for them to note themselves.

The international community takes coups very seriously, citizen. So if you're going to plan one, you need to think not just about how to take over, but how to resist the full might of the US government once you do. There are no partially sovereign nations. Either you have the ability to tell the US government to go screw themselves, or you don't. It would serve you well beforehand to figure out which of the two categories you fall into.

It's the US Government's world. We just live in it.

Eating Crow

Back in 2003, in the lead-up to the Iraq War, a younger Shylock Holmes was an ardent neoconservative. Democracy was, in my view at the time, both an inherent moral good and a practical instrumental good (though I probably wouldn't have expressed it in those terms). More importantly, I took the Krauthammer position that the time to bomb a country seeking to acquire nuclear weapons was before the weapons were completed, not afterwards. Once they have the nukes, it's rather more difficult to threaten them (see, for instance, North Korea). Which is fine, as far as it goes, and indeed a short, sharp war along these lines might not have been nearly so bad. It sure would have made Iran think twice. There was, of course, a big question of 'yeah, and then what do you plan to do after the place is bombed?', to which I would have had only vague notions about trying out consensual democracy as a cure for the ongoing slow-motion calamity that is the Middle East.

Around the same time, the country group The Dixie Chicks were performing at a concert in London when lead singer Natalie Maines decided to unburden herself of the following observation:

"Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas."

It has long been a bugbear of mine when artists needlessly inject their political views into situations that do not call for them. In an audience of thousands of people, it is inconceivable that all of them will share your political preoccupations. It seems needlessly rude and antagonistic to turn everything into a political issue, particularly when most people just came to see you sing. 

Not only that, but I still feel that the moral righteousness of the left at the time was enormously overblown. I remember thinking at the time that the Dixie chicks seemed like complete morons. The whole tenor of the left's argument appeared to be mainly thinly dressed up pacifism and a knee-jerk dislike of whatever it was George Bush was doing. Regarding the former, if Saddam had in fact possessed weapons of mass destruction, would they have felt any differently about the ex-post outcome? I sure would have, but for most of the left, I honestly don't know if it would affect their assessment. Regarding the latter, I note that the urgency of getting out of Iraq among the left seemed to drop off a cliff as soon as Barack Obama was elected. I also note, however, that the same election result also made the right a whole lot more willing to consider frankly the possibility that it was a corpse-strewn fool's errand to try to turn Baghdad into Geneva. Hey, no-one said thinking in a non-partisan way was easy.

And yet...

When in comes to predictions, reality is a very equal-opportunity master. You have your views on how the world will evolve, and you may feel clever, or educated or erudite. You may feel that the people who predict differently from you are worthless imbecilic fools. And indeed they may be. But when you say that X will happen, and someone else says that Y will happen, you will find out, at least ex post, who was right.

So with more than ten years of hindsight, here are some randomly chosen recent headlines about Iraq:

ISIS commits mass murder, advertises it’: Iraq executions detailed

Death squads, Isis and a new generation of fighters - why Iraq is facing break-up

With ISIS surging in Iraq, Europe fears rise in ‘jihadi-tourists’

et cetera, et depressing cetera.

So it is time to ask the question the Moldbug asked about Zimbabwe -given what we know now, who was right? Putting aside haggling over the specific reasoning and argumentation, who had the better overall gist of the wisdom of the Iraq war?

The answer, alas (for both my ego and the people of Iraq), is a clean sweep to the Dixie Chicks. They were right, and I was wrong. Dead wrong.

The narrow lesson, which I took to heart, is a general skepticism of democracy, especially when applied to third world hellholes, as a cure of society's ills.

But the broader lesson, which it is much easier to forget, is that one should be less certain of one's models of the world. Reality is usually messier and more surprising than you think. Overconfidence springs eternal, notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) how clever you think you are.

Let pride be taught by this rebuke, as Mr Swift put it. 

Holger Danske

The statue of Holger Danske sits in Kronborg castle in Helsingør, Denmark. According to the legend, as told by the guide at Helsingør, Holger was a knight who was the son of the Danish King. He was lent to Emperor Charlemagne as a surety by the Danish King to guarantee the payment of a debt after the King unsuccessfully fought against Charlemagne in battle. The Dane didn't pay up, and after a few years Charlemagne was going to kill Holger. Right before the execution, a messenger came in saying that the border lands had been invaded, and the emperor left for the battle, taking Holger with him. While on the field, Holger came across a knight riding scared away from battle. Holger took his armor, and went into battle, fighting bravely for Charlemagne. At the end of the battle, Charlemagne went to congratulate one of his knights, and when he lifted his visor, he was surprised to see it was Holger. He decided to set him free. Holger began the long walk back to Denmark. When he finally arrived, he sat in a chair in the basement of the castle, waiting for the castle members to come back. He stayed asleep, and his beard grew so long it touched the floor. The legend concludes by saying that Holger dreams and sees all that goes on in Denmark, and will rise again to defend Denmark in its time of need against foreign invaders.

You can learn a lot about a culture from its mythology. The Danes were a fearsome, militarily powerful people. If they turned up on your doorstep in 1000AD, you would have done well to follow the advice of AC/DC to 'lock up your daughters, lock up your wife, lock up your back door and run for your life'. It would be trite, but nonetheless true, to note that the possibility of modern-day Danes (or indeed any of the Scandinavian descendants of the Vikings) inspiring the same response is ludicrously, preposterously unthinkable. And this holds true no matter how large a military force they were commanding - the shift is first and foremost in mindset.

Holger Danske still inspires Danish people though. The great Hans Christian Andersen wrote a short story about it. The Danish resistance group in World War 2 named themselves after him. But it does so because of the history. The story on its own strikes a strange chord that clashes with modern sensibilities. Even if this were the age of legends, I cannot imagine a story like Holger Danske resonating enough today to get started and spread through the populace, were it not already a famous story.

The notion of military heroism is largely an anachronism in the West. The ideal modern image is the soldier as a brave and tragic victim. They are noble when killed or injured. They are suffering when separated from their loved ones, and selfless in their sacrifices. Even the right buys into this narrative to some extent. We must 'support our troops'. You hear this more than that we must 'celebrate our troops'. The stories about troops that resonate are those of pathos. We want to hear about the man who died bravely on the battlefield to save his companions, not the guy who bravely kicked tons of enemy ass and lived unscathed to tell the tale.There's no shortage of stories of incredible bravery in Iraq or Afghanistan. But for some reason, you mostly hear about them in the context of soldiers who have died. The heroism is mainly there to add poignancy.

Holger Danske is old fashioned because it envisages a natural warrior aristocracy. In an age of radical egalitarianism, we can have 'heroes', but not a 'hero'. Because most people will never be truly heroic in their whole lives, the whole concept must be sufficiently diluted to cover nearly everybody. Today, you are a 'hero' for volunteering in a soup kitchen, or doing an AIDS fun run. What word, then, would you use to describe Simo Häyhä? Or Ben Grierson? Or, indeed, Holger Danske? He's not administering to the needy, he's not interested in being a glorious victim in a fatal last stand. He's interested only in kicking enemy ass on your behalf to keep the land safe for those of his countrymen without his courage, strength or skill. And that is what modern man truly cannot abide - the implication that nature has furnished us with natural betters, and we should celebrate and admire them, and be grateful when they lead our country to great achievements. They are not servants of the public. They are kings, ruling over us by right of their strength of character and proud lineage.

We live indeed in a Kingless age.

Brecher on the War of 1812

The American/British version, not the Russian/French one.

Check it out. It starts here, and is up to part 9 so far. Do yourself a favor and read it.

Seriously, if you collected these into a short book, it would be by far the most entertaining account I've read of the whole thing. Brecher starts with the observation that very few people have a clear idea what the war was actually about:

We’ve got a soundbite for all our wars except 1812 and Korea. Try it and you’ll pop up the right cliché easy as spitting. American Revolution: three-cornered hats, redcoats falling in a line like chorus girls, cold feet at Valley Forge. Civil War: big beautiful tragedy that either was or wasn’t about slavery depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you live on. WW II: The Greatest Generation, and Nazis’r’bad, mmmmkay? Viet Nam: tur’ble, tur’ble shame, all them fine young men.

But those two, 1812 and Korea—we don’t talk about them much. For one thing, they both ended in a draw. And like coaches always say, a military tie is like bayoneting your sister. It’s a shame, because they were both wild, funny wars — much more interesting, if you ask me, than that overrated WW II.

Maybe the problem is that both those wars featured big bug-outs by American infantry—something we don’t much like to remember. But then both those wars also had moments of real glory: Inchon and Chosin in Korea, Baltimore and New Orleans in the War of 1812.

For a taste of the awesome, check out this description of the embarrassing American performance at the Battle of Bladensburg:

Like a lot of battles, this one was a matter of deployment; the few minutes of actual noise and smoke were one of those foregone conclusions, like a Raiders game. The Americans had a couple of decent artillery units, which delayed the inevitable, but a few of those Congreve rockets whooshing overhead was enough to send the civilians in uniform thinking of going home. Yeah, if Francis Scott Key had been at the Battle of Bladensburg instead of the Siege of Baltimore, the anthem would’ve had some different lyrics: “Oh say can you see, the rockets’ red glare?/Oh God, I sure can, and I’m right outta there.” The few units of regular artillery who’d stood their ground were deserted and exposed, and the whole American line gave way.

Ha! Comedy gold.

In other news, I'm now back in the US of A, and regularly scheduled blogging will commence shortly. Huzzah!

Brecher's Back!

If I had to nominate my favourite aspect of the internet, it's the ability to come across writers with uniquely interesting perspectives on the world that aren't likely to be covered in the popular press. Lots of the time, you won't agree with everything (or even most things) they write, but you'll usually at least learn something new.

Sailer, Derbyshire, and Heartiste rank highly in that department. But my two favourites both sadly were not very active recently. Moldbug was my favourite overall, with truly unusual reactionary perspectives on history and politics, but he doesn't write much any more. (The archives should be read in full). The other was Gary Brecher, a.k.a. The War Nerd, whose perspectives on military matters are both hilarious and insightful. He's been on a bit of a hiatus.

But he's back! Now writing regularly over at NSFWCorp (which is, incidentally, entirely safe for work). Initially they put it all behind a paywall, but now they've opened it up. Which, in the end, caused me to read them and subscribe - score one for freemium-based content.

Where else are you likely to read:

-An account of living in Saudi Arabia as an ex-pat, including discussing the character traits of different Muslim peoples that's neither a hagiography nor a 'they're all terrorists' screed?

-About uprisings against the Saudis that don't make the media?

-An attack on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter from someone who actually wants a strong air force?

-A genuinely funny discussion on Turkey's historical relationship with Syria?

Huzzah! I don't think I've read many of the other NSFW writers (although Pancho Montana's descriptions of the drug war in Mexico are great too), but I've signed up for a subscription purely for Mr Brecher.

Go, read!

Truly Understanding What Combat Mortality Statistics Mean

I find it interesting sometimes to imagine how my worldview might change if I experienced different events.

It seems elementary that if you've made the best use of the data available, you should only change your mind based on new information. Merely experiencing an event without finding out anything you didn't know before ought not change your perception of things.

So it's funny to read about how the average person's views change with a particular experience, and try to hypothesize where your current views fit along the claimed evolution.

What prompted this (and continuing with the 'All-Fussell-All-The-Time' theme of the blog of late) was Paul Fussell's description of how the average soldier's views on the chances of death change over time.

In war it is not just the weak soldiers, or the sensitive ones, or the highly imaginative or cowardly ones, who will break down. All will break down if in combat long enough. "Long enough" is now defined by physicians and psychiatrists as between 200 and 240 days. For every frontline soldier in the Second World War, according to John Ellis, there was the "slowly dawning and dreadful realisation that there was no way out, that . . . it was only a matter of time before they got killed or maimed or broke down completely." As one British officer put it, "You go in, you come out, you go in again and you keep doing it until they break you or you are dead." This "slowly dawning and dreadful realisation" usually occurs as a result of two stages of rationalization and one of accurate perception:

1. It can't happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced / etc.

Personally, I can't imagine ever thinking this. Death is always certain, and there's always a chance that you're going to draw the unlucky number even in much safer events than combat. So while this might be a subconscious starting point, I doubt it. What about the second stage?

This persuasion gradually erodes into

2. It can happen to me, and I'd better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by keeping extra alert at all times / watching more prudently the way I take cover or dig in or expose my position by firing my weapon / etc.

This conviction attenuates in turn to the perception that death and injury are matters more of bad luck than lack of skill...

At a minimum, I think I'd start at this stage (or the first half, anyway) - it definitely can happen to you. The question is how much agency you have over the matter. Note that the description above tends to not focus on probabilities - it can happen, but if I do X, then it can't. I think this is empirically a good description of the world - most people don't think in probabilities.

But to those that do, it's obvious that you dying in warfare can be both a) largely determined by chance, and b) something you can still shift a bit at the margin by not doing stupid things.

In essence, you're spinning a roulette wheel, and any number above 3 means you're dead, or something equivalent. You can have crummy odds and still understand what the odds are.

So that, in short, would be where I think I'd view World War 2 combat probabilities.

But I don't think I would have gotten to the conclusion that makes up Fussell's stage 3:

...making inevitable the third stage of awareness:

3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it.

Huh.

On a number of dimensions, that is actually incredibly clear-sighted. Granted, it still makes the mistake of not thinking in the probabilistic way (a probability of 99% is not the same thing as a probability of 100%).

But which bias are you more likely to be succumbing to? Being overly optimistic that you will somehow be different and escape it all, or ignoring the tiny chance that you might actually make it? To ask the question is to know the answer. The bias is all on the side of optimism - if you round your estimated survival probability down to zero, it won't change the answer by much, the same way as if you assume that you'll never win the lottery you'll almost certainly make better choices than if you assume any non-trivial probability of the event occurring.

And indeed, it only takes a minor modification to the premise to make it technically correct as well, by beginning the sentence with the phrase 'Given long enough, ...' . This is expressed most memorably in the motto of Zero Hedge - on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

In wartime, you don't even need the timeline to be that long.

Which makes the second half of the sentence all the more powerful - the only way out is to not be there.

That is something that I wouldn't have figured out with equivalent clarity.

In the middle of combat, there are also very few ways out. Desert and you run a good chance of getting shot.

I can imagine that goes a fair way to explaining why people go insane in war - you figure out that it is now inevitable that you'll die a horrible, gruesome death at some random (but imminent) point, and until then you're going to be surrounded by horror and brutality.

The phrase 'only my not being there is going to prevent it' can also be paraphrased as 'the only winning move is not to play.'

'Wartime', by Paul Fussell

After the previous post on the subject, I've been making my way through Paul Fussell's book on World War II, 'Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War'.

Like his essay on the same subject, it's very eye-opening.

On the tendency of bomber crews to place enormous importance on medallions and other tokens of luck:

In a world whose behavior seems to define it as nothing but mad, "You cannot call the things that happen to bomber crews superstition." In the midst of calmly committed mass murder, reliance on amulets will seem about the most reasonable thing around. 

On the frequent indignities suffered by soldiers at the hands of their own officers, a concept that Fussell describes as 'chickens***':

'I joined the army to fight facsim', says [a British soldier], 'only to find the army full of fascists.'

On the German understanding of why, just because they were fighting the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, they wanted to invade Europe as well:

Few in Germany had any idea why the Americans had invaded Europe. One German officer could conclude only, as he told his interrogator, that they had attacked the Reich "in order to save Churchill and the Jews". 

On the reputation of the Italian army:

This myth of Italian military haplessness served a useful psychological function in the Second World War, helping secretly to define what Allied soldiers wanted the "enemy" universally to be - pacifists, dandies, sensitive and civilized non-idealogues, even clowns. The antithesis of committed, fanatic National Socialists. At the same time the Italians could serve as the definition of incompetence, fraudulence, and cowardice: no one really wanted to be like them to be sure, but how everyone wished it were possible! The world was laughing at Italy, and yet the Italians were sensibly declining to be murdered. The Allied soldier couldn't help wondering that if contempt and ridicule are the price of staying alive, perhaps the price is worth paying.  

Interesting stuff indeed.

Rough, Serious Business

Via Hacker News comes this amazing article from The Atlantic in 1989, written by Paul Fussell. It describes what World War II was like from the perspective of ground troops. It makes for rather shocking reading, describing in unflinching detail the parts that tend to get left out of the traditional narratives:

You would expect frontline soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends' bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or Marine what hit him, you'd hardly be ready for the answer "My buddy's head," or his sergeant's heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain's severed hand. 

Or try this description of fear in war, for something I knew but had forgotten:

More than a quarter of the soldiers in one division admitted that they'd been so scared they'd vomited, and almost a quarter said that at terrifying moments they'd lost control of their bowels. Ten percent had urinated in their pants. 

Or this description of corpse-robbers in civilian London during the Blitz:

The first thing which the rescue squads and the firemen saw, as their torches poked through the gloom and the smoke and the bloody pit which had lately been the most chic cellar in London, was a frieze of other shadowy men, night-creatures who had scuttled within as soon as the echoes ceased, crouching over any dead or wounded woman, any soignée corpse they could find, and ripping off its necklace, or earrings, or brooch: rifling its handbag, scooping up its loose change.

When they say war is hell, they mean more than they tend to describe in detail.

It is easy to look on a scene such as this:


and think of the immense sacrifice that such soldiers made.

It is altogether another to look openly on the sheer horror that they faced, stripped of the gauzy image that Hollywood gives us.

I don't think it diminishes what they did, but rather makes it more incredible when you reflect on those that came back, and managed to get on with their lives.

Fussell recounts the words of a frontline infantryman to a somewhat naive reporter on the front lines:

Tell 'em it's rough as hell. Tell 'em it's rough. Tell 'em it's rough, serious business. That's all. That's all.

It surely is.

Read the whole thing.

The cause of military suicides

A statistic that I had a strong hunch was true as soon as I heard it:

The suicide rates are at all time highs and rising in the Army and Marine Corps. Over 70% of the sucides are because a man’s wife or girlfriend is leaving him while deployed to a war zone. She is almost always taking the kids if there are any and quite often( most of the time) depleting (legally stealing) his bank accounts too. She is often enough cheating on him.

Sure enough, the base statistic holds up:

Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Peter Chiarelli reviewed investigations on Soldier suicides, which reached a three-decade high in 2008, and reported that in over 70 percent of the cases, “you have one constant, and that was a problem with a relationship.”

Yeah, translate that from the officialspeak and I'm pretty sure that a 'problem with the relationship' when one party is in a combat zone probably looks a lot like the first quote. You can disagree with the agency in the first quote (the woman is 'leaving', and thus is implied to be making the selfish choice), but it probably doesn't change much from the perspective of the man.

But if I had to hazard a guess at the actual agency, let's put it this way - if you're in an all-male combat unit living in a military base overseas, you probably don't have a whole lot of options to pick up women, nor would I imagine that you'd be likely to stop calling your wife at every chance in preference for playing X-Box. It's possible that he slept with a hooker, but the situation of a man in a warzone suddenly deciding he's sick of his wife and wanting to leave... let's just say it sound psychologically less likely than the alternative .

But the problem is not divorce - relationships end for lots of reasons, and given the tendency for military people to marry young, they may have been likely to end that way anyway.

No, the real horror stories are much worse. The first quote comes from some truly repulsive stories of a guy in the Army:

Then of course there was the soldier in my company who had a baby with his wife and she sent him streaming videos via internet of her having sex with other men while his baby son was in the house...

Read on, and be appalled.

The law is necessarily an imperfect instrument for enforcing proper conduct. In other words, laws can never be a substitute for morality. They can circumscribe some of the worst behavior (and much behavior that is completely trivial), but they are a very weak guide for what one ought to do. A society that organises itself around restraining only behaviour that is illegal will quickly turn into rampant misery.

It is illegal to cross at the traffic lights when the walk sign isn't flashing.

It is not illegal to sleep with the wife of a man who is risking getting a bullet in the ass to defend your freedom, nor is it illegal to maliciously screw said wife on camera and send the footage to the husband while he is in a warzone.

If there is any justice in the world, both the man and the woman who did this would be on the receiving end of life-threatening levels of ass-kicking, ideally from the husband himself, but failing that, from friends, family members, or just strangers with an interest in fairness.

Of course, there isn't any justice in the world for this kind of outrage, so both of them will get away with it completely.

Human nature being what it is, people in war zones are sometimes driven mad by the atrocity and horror that they have to witness. But men can be very resilient in dealing with this challenges, knowing that there is a higher purpose to their actions, and having been prepared to face these difficulties.

But to expect them to do all this while their own personal world that they fight and die for is being senselessly lost to them as they're away, and it's their own loved ones who are twisting the knife - that is too much to bear. That is when people lose hope, and wonder what this is all for. And frankly, what would you say to them? Other than the fact that this is all stupendously unjust, and there's nothing that can be done? Plenty of fish in the sea, old chap?

As Eric Bogle sang about war - I never knew there was worse things than dying.