How Not Win Friends and Influence People

An article on AlterNet claims the House defense budget, at $601 billion, "dwarfs spending during the Vietnam War." Even the source cited gives 1968 defense spending as $554 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. 1968's defense budget was 8.7% of GDP. The current proposed defense budget is 3.6% of GDP. (GDP % calculated personally from available data.)

I agree defense spending is currently too high, given the size and nature of the threat now and for 20 years out. But fudging the adjectives and numbers the way AlterNet did is a sure way to lose the argument, you're preaching to the choir, which gets you no new support. And the opposition will quickly point out that your presentation of the data is not reliable, and put the same label on you.

http://www.alternet.org/world/endless-war-5-disturbing-things-americas-military-budget

Book Review: The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter.

Painter's The History of White People is a well-written, thoroughly-researched account of how the definition of "white people" changed though history, from ancient Greece to northern Europe to the United States. (Note that as she moves forward in time, Painter's geographic scope narrows.)  As a tall, blonde, blue-eyed (male) of northern European ancestry but born of native-born US citizens for a couple generations back (one great-grandfather served in the Union Army, 1864-1866), I was prepared for this book to annoy,  insult or belittle me, to "call me out on my privilege."  That was not Painter's goal, and instead her book helped me think some more about the role of "others" in society, particularly American society.

I will agree that the title is misleading,  to those who wish to be mislead. This is not so much a history of folks with white skin, as it is (as described right on the spine of the dust cover) an examination of race theory, as "constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others." 

Painter's tale is that of the ever-changing "other" - of European stock, but not "white" at a given time in history. Of particular interest to me was Chapter 6, "Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Names White People 'Caucasian'"; how a remote group gave its tribal name to an entire "race", on account of the beauty attributed to some of its women. (I do disagree with Painter, who on the basis of one 1946 photo asserts that Georgians are (no longer) beautiful; Painter's judgment indulges the same stereotyping as Blumenbach's 18th Century generalizations.)

Painter's device of linking an era's definition of "whiteness" to its particular proponents makes her story more accessible, but at the same time weakens its validity.  The History of White People is anecdotal, not analytical. 

Notably missing from Painter's account is why the dominant peoples began to accept, in stages, other "non-white" Europeans as white, and just where the source of the push to "enlarge" "whiteness" lay. Was it with the dominant class/race, who sought to co-opt others to hold back different groups of, shall we say, inferior "others"? Was it the "new" "whites" pushing for inclusion?  She also at most only briefly examines the effects of exclusion from "whiteness," except in the case of wholesale near-exclusion of "non-whites" from immigration to the US between 1920 and 1965.

Nor does Painter give us good markers by which to distinguish "bad" science, like "race science" from good. If we want policy-makers to make good policy on the basis of good science, it would be useful to examine the history of "race science" not just for what it said, and how its proponents came to their views (both of which Painter does well), but also to look at those who disagreed with "race science," and whether and how that disagreement affected the decisions of contemporaneous policy-makers.

These are more than quibbles; they are deficiencies in the text. But as Painter herself notes, she had to limit her focus if she wanted a managable text.  In the end, her book is a valuable, readable account for anyone who wants to understand how Americans have viewed "race," particularly before the beginning of the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s.

Book Review: Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. (2013)

I read MacMillan's earlier work, Paris 1919: Six Months That Ended the World, with interest and found it a valuable account of the negotiations that led to the Versailles Peace Treaty ending World War I.  The War That Ended Peace? Not really worth the time to read. MacMillan really adds nothing to either the analysis or narrative of the first years of the 20th Century in Europe. I must admit, she warns her readers that the book was not her idea.  She viewed "the path too well-trodden" and so she "resisted" the suggestion to write War.  (p 648).

She views the events through an Anglocentric lens; often the thoughts of foreign decision-makers (and that is her focus, the Great Men of History) are depicted as  "How will the UK react if I do this?"  This is especially true for Austria-Hungary, Germany and most of all Russia, which she paints as near dictatorships under the thumb of their hereditary emperors. Oh, except of course when new-fangled public opinion forces their  hand, that, and "honor." 

 I am writing this on Montenegro's eighth anniversary of renewed independence (May 21, 2008), an independence lost to Serb military occupation and French connivance as WWI ended. MacMillan is not kind to Montenegro's King Nikola,  (whose name she insists on spelling as Nicholas, even as she uses the local spelling for Serbian PM Nikola Pasic), viewing his well-married daughters (to the future King of Italy and to the Russian imperial family) as impediments to peace. And in her brief summary of the war and the aftermath itself, she merely ellipses Serbia's forceful annexation of its ally. Perhaps because it does not fit her thesis.

Again, we are warned of her thesis. "Some ... were more culpable than others. Austria-Hungary's mad determination to destroy Serbia in 1914, Germany's decision to back it to the hilt, Russia's impatience to mobilize, ...." (p. xxxv) The old standbys on the origins of the Great War.  MacMillan also subscribes to the hoary view that Austria's ultimatum to Serbia after the death of the Emperor's heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, assassinated in Sarajevo June 28, 1914, was an intolerable affront to Serbia's "sovereignty", a pretext for war. She neatly glosses over the clear evidence that the Archduke's death was planned in Belgrade, by Serbian Military Intelligence, which trained, armed, and conveyed the terrorists to Sarajevo. The "intolerable" clauses, that Austria participate in the investigation in Serbia, and that the accused be extradited to Austria to stand trial, are surely a lesser affront to sovereignty than killing the heir to a dynastic throne.  But of course the head of Serbian Military Intelligence had already tried that before: twice, unsuccessfully, against Montenegro, and once against his own King and Queen.

Unfortunately, MacMillan's Anglocentric lens does not give us any insight into the UK's decisions.   It is reduced down to the "balance of power" and an unexplained if repeated assertion that German domination over France or Belgium would be intolerable to British interests.  We are never told why - and this after all was the Germany of the Kaiser, the grandson of Queen Victoria who held the rank of Admiral in the Royal Navy - not the Germany of Hitler.

The all-too brief chapter entitled "Dreaming of Peace" whetted my appetite to read more of the efforts of the Socialists and advocates for disarmament in the twenty or thirty years before the War.  For that, I will have to turn to her sources. (Reviews forthcoming once I have received and read a few key books in her bibliography.)

As others have noted, I too wearied of MacMillan's overly facile comparisons of the challenges faced by modern leaders to those faced in The Road to 1914.  Those similes will rapidly yellow and age - perhaps not an ill effect, if it removes this work from the standard literature on the outbreak of WWI.

Term Limits (Federal Elective Office)

For a long time, I opposed term limits, as I saw them as a smokescreen covering efforts to eliminate politicians who had the support of other voters in other districts. But with 318 million people in this country, (about half eligible for office), there is no reason to let the same handful run (or mis-run) things year after year, decade after decade. Let's allow an individual 12 (or 18) years in Federal elective office, excluding the Presidency. VP is a freebie, given VP Garner's accurate description of the office. Oh, and no government pensions for elected officials. That's for career folks who put in 20 to 40 years, and political office shouldn't be a career. The pols get enough to fund their own retirements.

Send in the Marines (?)

Senator McCain said he would send in US troops to rescue the girls in Nigeria kidnapped by Islamic terrorists. “If they knew where they were, I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country,” McCain told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan,” he added, referring to the president of Nigeria.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/13/mccain-send-u-s-special-forces-to-rescue-nigerian-girls.html

I'd like to rededicate the following to Senator McCain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93n-EmGknEU

(Tom Lehrer's Send in the Marines.) 

Guns at Last Light - a book review

Guns at Last Light is Rick Atkinson's final installment in his "Liberation Trilogy", a history of the US Army in World War II in the European Theater of Operations (North Africa, Italy and France & Germany).

Guns at Last Light is the conclusion to a well-written story of World War II as experienced in 1944-45 by members of the US ground forces in Europe, for a reader who is willing to read through 600+ pages on just that one narrow topic, without analysis, judgment and evaluation. What we learn from Atkinson's book is that the infantry rifleman at the very front edge of battle is often cold, tired and confused, that his officers in the field have lives in America to which they wish to return, often in vain, and that US generals tried their best, but that often was not good enough. We also learn that British General Montgomery and  French General de Gaulle were prima donnas, trying to advance national interests (oh so unlike the US Army), with inflated notions of their competence. Of the decisive Yalta conference in February 1945, we learn of arrangements for transport, liquor, banquets, and the insights of Churchill's personal physician regarding the dying FDR. Of even the results of negotiations we hear but very little. We do get six pages on Task Force Baum, the late March 1945 fiasco wherein General Patton oped to rescue his son-in-law, a POW sixty miles behind the lines. But even with the author's access to the son-in-law's papers, we learn nothing not recorded and released elsewhere.

I note that the back cover has "praise" for the earlier installments of the trilogy (which I read when they came out, in 2002 and 2007). Four of the six blurbs feature the word "narrative." It is a very apt adjective to employ. Narrative is the art of story-telling, the core of entertainment. It creates social identity through its use of description and focus on specific anecdotes over analysis. But I do not, cannot, agree that narrative is history.  History is the study of the past that allows us to understand, it analyzes the why, not simply the who, what and when. Atkinson, in his narrative tale, never scratches at the why, and has not written a history, but merely a story.

I have read, and own, copious amounts of World War 2 and military history, from memoirs and official histories, quasi-fictional retellings, mythological biographies, dry technical manuals, interactive fiction, contemporaneous news stories (did you know the Germans flew the attacking aircraft at Pearl Harbor? So asserts the Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year for 1942). I am glad I finished Atkinson's book, and his trilogy. But I can't recommend it. It is too long and too narrow for the newcomer to WW2, and too anecdotal, too merely assertive for the seasoned reader.