Category Archives: History

History, Poetry, Security

Joseph Roth

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The Krakow Post paints a detailed portrait of the great writer from Galicia. He passed away seventy years ago today, May 27th, 1939 at the age of 45, only months before the start of WWII:

Some have called Roth a poet of “Austroslavism,” owing to his longing for a peaceful coexistence of a multitude of nations under the formal roof of monarchy. “I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland,” he wrote of the Habsburg Empire, “and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and shortcomings.”

History, Poetry, Security

Encounter

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by Czeslaw Milosz (Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

His Nobel Lecture is worth reading (english | polish)

…by choosing solitude and giving myself to a strange occupation, that is, to writing poems in Polish while living in France or America, I tried to maintain a certain ideal image of a poet, who, if he wants fame, he wants to be famous only in the village or the town of his birth. (…wybieraj±c samotno¶æ i oddaj±c siê dziwacznemu zajêciu jakim jest pisanie wierszy po polsku, choæ mieszka siê we Francji czy w Ameryce, podtrzymywa³em pewien idealny obraz poety, który je¿eli chce byæ s³awny, to tylko w swojej wiosce czy w swoim mie¶cie.)

[…]

Simone Weil, to whose writings I am profoundly indebted, says: “Distance is the soul of beauty.” Yet sometimes keeping distance is nearly impossible. (Simone Weil, której pismom wiele zawdziêczam, powiada: “Dystans jest dusz± piêkna”. Bywa jednak, ¿e jego uzyskanie jest niemal niemo¿liwo¶ci±.)

His poem “So Little” takes an even darker turn from Encounter:

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

Milosz passed away in August of 2004 in Krakow, Poland. His writing during postwar Europe is said to have influenced many generations by tackling difficult and inherent contradictions in life.

History, Security

Polish outrage over Spiegel Hitler story

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Spiegel Online apparently has opened a giant can of worms on itself with a recent cover story on who in Europe might have helped Hitler outside of Germany.

The feature describes how foreigners aided the Germans during World War II in the killing of 6 million Jews. Some of the accomplices — who represented a small minority in each of their countries — were forced into their roles, others denounced Jews in exchange for money. And some shared the Nazi’s anti-Semitic beliefs and joined in out of conviction.

Polish reactions to the story are titled “A Wave of Outrage”

“The article confirms the worst fears about the transformation taking shape in German thinking about World War II,” writes the conservative journalist Piotr Semka. For years, many Poles have seen a gradual change in the way Germany sees its history — a transformation, they say, to a victim mentality.

I agree with this but I would say German sentiment shifted to a victim mentality very quickly after the war, if not during the final stages. I suspect the Poles were less likely to have seen it before the wall came down so it seems gradual to them. I also disagree, however, with Spiegel’s assertion in the original story that “the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently”. History is rich in detail of the complicity of Ukranian camp guards under Nazi rule, for example, and the strife between Catholics and Jews in Poland that long pre-dated the German invasion.

Energy, History, Sailing, Security

US Navy Doom and Gloom

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The War Nerd has nothing good to say about the state of the US Navy in a story called This Is How the Carriers Will Die

You know that Garmin satnav you use to find the nearest Thai place when the in-laws are visiting? If you were the Navy brass, that should have scared you to death. The Mac on your kid’s bedroom desk should have scared you. Every time electronics got smaller, cheaper and more efficient, the carrier became more of a death trap. Every time stealth tech jumped another step, the carrier was more obviously a bad idea. Smaller, cooler-running engines: another bad sign for the carrier. Every single change in technology in the past half a century has had “Stop building carriers!” written all over it. And nobody in the navy brass paid any attention.

The lesson here is the same one all of you suckers should have learned from watching the financial news this year: the people at the top are just as dumb as you are, just meaner and greedier. And that goes for the ones running the US surface fleet as much as it does for the GM or Chrysler honchos. Hell, they even look the same. Take that Wagoner ass who just got the boot from GM and put him in a tailored uniform and he could walk on as an admiral in any officer’s club from Guam to Diego Garcia. You have to stop thinking somebody up there is looking out for you.

Remember that one sentence, get it branded onto your arm: “Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack.”

Recommendations are found in the analysis of middle-east combat:

The difference between the Israeli navy and ours is simple: the Israelis learned their lesson and switched to smaller, lighter missile craft. No more ocean-going muscle cars to act like giant magnetized targets. The newer Israeli boats are small enough that when you lose one, like they did in the 2006 war to land-based Hezbollah surface to surface missiles, you don’t suffer 100 casualties.

Got that? No more muscle cars. This is amazing stuff to think about as I find Americans who continue to emphasize “go big” as the best measure of success. The clear lesson is to go efficient, or maybe even to go small, or face a predictable catastrophe.