The latest essay by our Israeli correspondent MC discusses the necessity for publicly acknowledging that we are at war.
For the past hundred years we have slowly changed the face of war, particularly the run up to war and its aftermath. The result has been disastrous.
In traditional war, there is the lead-up, the fighting and the financial consequences, but in the 20th century there was a slow move away from the traditional ‘occupation’ as a foregone conclusion of the struggle. As a consequence, some modern wars have never really ended.
Take, for example the Arab-Israeli war that is so close to home for me. The roots of this conflict are in the defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1918 and the subsequent carving up of the Ottoman empire, mainly between Britain and France. The intent of the League of Nations at the time was very clear: the formation of a Jewish Homeland in the designated area (now Jordan, Israel and Judea/Samaria/Gaza) ratified by the 53 nations of the League at the Treaty of Lausanne.
The British apparently had no real intention of creating a Jewish Homeland and immediately, and unilaterally handed 87% of the land to the ‘oil’ sheikhs (what is now Jordan). The Jews of Palestine/Israel have been under pressure ever since Britain who, by example, gave the Arabs (who had mostly supported the Turks) the credibility to challenge the League. They needed no more encouragement to take the ‘law’ into their own hands, a ‘law’ redefined by a consistent propaganda barrage from the usual sources of anti-Semitism (BBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, etc.).
Whenever Israel really wants to end the war and annihilate the enemy, a Western power or two yank her lead. Thus the conflict is never-ending. they call it a ‘peace’ process, but we all know that it is really a (low-intensity) war process.
The failure to occupy and administer Germany following WW1 meant that strong war-like elements in Germany were able to survive and grow in the well fertilized dirt of leftist dissatisfaction and hatred. By 1925 the embryo Wehrmacht was forming and training in the Russian steppes, and blitzkrieg was born. Unlike many Western nations including France, the Germans read and took to heart a book written by the then Lt. Col. Charles de Gaulle about mobile armoured warfare (Vers l’Armée de Métier 1934).
The net result was the gross destruction of Europe at the hands of Hitler and Stalin. The real enemy was socialism, of course, but Western intellectuals failed (or refused) to recognize it, let alone deal with it Indeed, they even promoted the very problem in the wildly idealistic possibility that it could be controlled and used. Socialism is a form of Feudalism where the lives of the peasant classes (everybody except the elite) are controlled without their knowledge by using advanced techniques of ‘soft touch’ mind control and environmental manipulation to induce fear.
This technique requires physical stability but emotional stress and anxiety. One needs to constantly create emotional canards in order to produce the required level of friction and fear; political correctness and multiculturalism, climate change, terrorism, financial uncertainty, unemployment, debt and no doubt other factors as well, plus an ever easier set of delivery systems to keep the common emotional kettle at boiling point.
Constant low-level wars, with no defined end point create a constant cultural ulcer, dripping fear and confusion, and the horrific ISIS decapitation videos are heaven hell-sent.
It is time to give war a chance. We, the West, can declare war against ISIS. We can utterly defeat and destroy it; it would not even be costly. So what stops us?
The cynical answer to this is that the ISIS/Islamist terror is exactly what our cultural Marxist masters want. Petronius Arbiter tells us “if you want peace, prepare for war”, and peace is indeed characterized by a powerful world hegemon. Between the two wars we all prepared for peace, and the more we all prepared for peace, the bigger the actual cost when the war eventually came.
Had Britain and France stood their ground at Munich in 1938 and risked the war, then Adolf would have backed down — 52 Czech divisions and over a thousand tanks plus those of England and France would have been too much for him. Had Chamberlin sent tanks towards Munich rather than worthless paper, he would have saved many millions of lives.
We have spent the last fifty years mostly giving peace a chance. The result is that we are now at war with diffuse enemies who can (and do) strike us at their leisure, knowing that we lack the manly generative equipment to make the appropriate responses. Jaw-jaw, not war-war: who said that? Sir Winston did, but he also knew that you have to pick your time; there is no jaw-jaw unless you are also prepared to also make war-war. Jaw-jaw with no war-war as backup is called surrender.
We are now at war because we want peace at any cost, and the enemy(ies) know(s) it, and more importantly, the enemies within know it too. If we were first prepared to make war on the enemies within, the traitors, those in their domed marble mausoleums and their whited Washington residences, we would make immediate progress against the enemies without.
I cannot write what I really think because others are more vulnerable than I am. But I can say this: the enemy is well-funded, their warriors are men and women of means, they are supported by their sponsors, and they do not lack the financial means to bring the war to their enemy (that’s us). In contrast, the Counterjihad movement is poverty-stricken, mainly relying on volunteers to write and fight supported by their own meagre means.
For this reason alone we deserve to lose. We will each spend thousands on the latest of the enemy’s electronic brainwashing tool, and then blanch at donating a tenner to the cause.
“What did you do in the war daddy?”
“Shhhh, be quiet, dear. Find your teddy bear and put on your burka; your husband-to-be is coming to collect you in 30 minutes’ time.”
“But daddy, he’s old.”
“Yes, dear, but he’s also rich and powerful and will give you a better life. Now be a good girl and do as you are told.
Is this what we want?
Or:
“What did you do in the war, daddy?”
“Well, dear, I was one of the original ‘Sons of CJ Liberty’. I fought at the Gates of Vienna — you will learn about that at school. Now time for bed, and put out your nice new jeans and a top, we’re going to the theme park tomorrow.”
Today may not look like a war on TV. It may not feel like a war. But try publishing a Mohammed cartoon, and war will come to you very, very quickly, and there may not be a sharp-shooting sheriff there next time.
Curiously enough, if you get shot in an undeclared war in Garland in Texas, you are just as dead as if you were shot in a declared war in Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands.
It is just less of a surprise in the latter.
MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.
Give war a chance….. [material which I deprecate]. The west declared war on the Talibs and aQ. And utterly failed, both counts, a decade long at ruinous cost. Indeed, our misguided occupation of Iraq created Isis.
And of academic curiosity, how does the treaty of Lausanne relate to any of this? The text of which reveals precisely zero mention of the subject? Is this being confused with the 1949 Lausanne conference?
We created Islam by occupying Iraq?
What you seem to be failing to understand is that ISIS, the Taliban (translation: “Students (of Islam)”), al Qaeda, and anything else they’re calling themselves these days are the same enemy: Islam.
The problem is that we never declared war on Islam, so big surprise… Islam never changed one bit.
Imagine that the allies had occupied Germany but told everyone the whole time that “National Socialism is the religion of peace” and that the war had “nothing to do with national socialism.” Would you really be surprised if there were Nazi insurgents running around the whole time shooting at people?
If this had been done, we’d have people running around accusing the allies of “creating the nazi insurgency by occupying nazi germany”.
The whole problem has been that we’ve never been at war with the real problem which is Islam. Instead we’ve only been “at war” with a few militant groups that emerge from Islam. This is as stupid as telling everyone that National Socialism is all a great and beautiful thing but we’re just going to declare war on only a few “violent extremist” Nazi groups. Or if we had told everyone that Communism was a great and wonderful world religion but we’re just going to declare war on a few “violent extremist” communist groups.
You can’t expect to win a conflict by fighting only a few militant groups while telling everyone with the same political philosophy that their beliefs are all perfectly valid and wonderful.
“Or if we had told everyone that Communism was a great and wonderful world religion but we’re just going to declare war on a few “violent extremist” communist groups.”
Um, emphasis added. Our current global problems mostly are the result, not of an “if we had” but rather “because the intellectual class did” tell everyone that Communism was great and wonderful despite “a few” violent extremists, who weren’t really as bad as the reactionary capitalists were claiming.
People today say “just a few bad apples” because, not having any personal experience with storing apples in quantity, they have forgotten the original expression, “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.” This is a very unambiguous literal truth which applies not just to apples, but nearly all collections of similar organic entities subject to the same contagions. You could as easily say, “One sick chicken (or whatever) infects the whole flock (or whatever).”
If you have a group of any kind of organic entities, and just one of them becomes corrupted somehow, you must immediately root out and eliminate the source of the infection and any other infected specimens or the entire group will inevitably become corrupted. This is a fundamental biological truth…and human bodies and minds are organic entities.
Yes, that’s a good point. Opposition to communism was hardly universal.
And with Islam we’re seeing the same problem, though the islamodenialism seems to have dovetailed from Neo-Marxism.
Islam created the Islamic State.
Irrespective of one’s opinion on the justifiability or reasons for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it wasn’t the “occupation” that created Daesh; the Islamic State rose to prominence because of the power vacuum created when the U.S. bugged out. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, before morphing into Daesh, was telling their leadership not to send any more fighters to Iraq because as long as the U.S. was in-country it was a waste of manpower: the “surge” worked.
Daesh is, first and foremost, a creation of al-Qaeda, which existed long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. More immediately, the Islamic State is a product of the Syrian civil war (their ostensible capital is Raqqa), which in turn is a by-product of the so-called Arab Spring, precipitated by the unrest in Tunisia and the fall of Mubarak in Egypt, whose ouster was openly encouraged by Washington. The destabilization of Syria has everything to do with the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood and the rise of political Islam (yeah, that’s redundant, I know) that was unleashed by the Arab Spring.
If any blame for the rise of Daesh is directly attributable to U.S. foreign policy it is the destabilization of Egypt, the rise of Muslim Brotherhood to political preeminence, the emboldening of Islamists regionally with a spillover affect that led to the downfall of Qaddafi in Libya, abetted by France and the UK with the U.S. “leading from behind.” A then chaotic Libya allowed arms to be smuggled to Syria from Benghazi via Turkey along with fighters. And, of course, throw in some Qatari and Saudi petrodollars funding various anti-Assad (i.e. Iran) forces and you have one big fustercluck.
To say that the “occupation,” or even the invasion, of Iraq is directly responsible for Daesh is to play right into the Left’s narrative: blame Bush (and I’m no fan). This is a ploy meant to mask the failures of the current administration’s disastrous foreign policies; if we’re to “blame America first” then it is this administration that deserves the blame more than the previous. As in Vietnam, militarily the war had been won; but Democrats once again decided that domestic politics, placating their base, was more important than securing hard fought victories, even if it means standing by and then allowing tens of thousands of people be murdered (millions if we go back to Indochina and Cambodia). Democrats are evil.
“In November 1922, the Conference of Lausanne began, with the intention to negotiate a treaty to replace the failed Treaty of Sèvres. In the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923 and ratified on 28 September 1923,[82] the Turkish government finally recognised the detachment of the regions south of the frontier agreed in the Treaty of Ankara (1921), thereby making a general renunciation of its sovereignty over Palestine.[82]”
Indeed. But the treaty itself appears to makes precisely 0 (zero) mention of Palestine or Jordan, except for that one map of the mandate areas which pretty clearly delineates and labels the two.
Jerusalem is mentioned … in regards to pilgrimage and observation of sanitation standards.
Where did the clear intent of the league of nations come into it, considering they were not a party?
For that you need to go to the Mandates part, Lausanne established that the ottomans gave up all claim to southern Syria and established, amongst other things the Southern borders of ‘Turkey’ and is thus the ruling treaty for the British Mandate of Palestine as approved by the League of Nations which is still the standing law of the area as it has never been repealed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine
Would you like to let us know what you are trying to prove? I cannot put enormous amounts of detail in an essay.
That which we have established is rather far from what was written originally, no? The third paragraph of the post cannot be reconciled with history. That is all.
“That which we have established is rather far from what was written originally, no? The third paragraph of the post cannot be reconciled with history. That is all.”
[Material which I deprecate]!
We lost (And are still losing) the war because there was no plan to DEFEAT the muslims. We went into the war fairly well, but soon the “progressives” demanded that we stop insulting islam (We can’t even say “the enemy”) and not kill them. Our solders can’t shoot them when they run away, or fire from mosques,. According to the rules of war and international law, if someone is captured while fighting without a recognized uniform or anything that identifies him as a solder, he can be shot without trial. That’s not allowed in the muslim war. Propaganda was suggested by a U.S officer, but was rejected as “mean”. He asked if they could publish stories about all the rebuilding and humanitarian efforts they did, but that was disallowed also. There are mulims in the Pentagon saying what we can and can’t do in this war.
The muslims are fighting to dominate the world while the U.S. government is worried that they might be offended by someone exercising his freedom.
Nimrod, well said.
MC, don’t give up — there are many of us who support admirable Israel over the barbarians surrounding them.
To be perfectly honest, I barely understand what the author is suggesting we do here. I also don’t agree with his conclusions. Not even where Czechoslovakia is concerned because I’m not sure that Britain and France were actually powerful enough to take on Germany in 1938, but they weren’t in 1939.
Perhaps if they had intervened at the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, I’m not sure.
Anyway, the principle is nonsense. Napoleon also wanted a decisive battle that would give him Russia, but Russia never let him have it and the Grand Armee died of attrition. America wanted that in Vietnam, but that’s not the nature of guerilla and insurgent warfare.
In short, your enemies will decide the nature of the battle, not you.
In 1938 the German war machine could not have coped with a war on two fronts (Sudeten and France/Belgium). The Skoda tanks were eventually used to invade Poland and France, denying those alone would have been worth the effeort.
In 1938 the military high command was not behind Hitler, and would not have allowed him to proceed. Hitler would then have been deposed by a military coup :-
“Beck resented Adolf Hitler for his efforts to curb the army’s position of influence. Beck tried very early—as Chief of the General Staff—to deter Hitler from using the grievances of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, the population of which was mostly ethnic-German, as an excuse for war against the latter state in 1938.
Beck had no moral objection to the idea of war of aggression to eliminate Czechoslovakia as a state.[6] In 1935, he had a series of meetings with Prince Bernard von Bülow, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Office and the Chief of the Hungarian General Staff to discuss plans “for the division of Czechoslovakia”.[15] On 12 November 1937, Beck submitted a memorandum stating that “various facts” show the requirement “for an imminent solution by force” of the problem of Czechoslovakia and that it was desirable to start preparing “the political ground among those powers which stood on our side or who were not against us”, and that the “military discussion in either the one case or the other should begin at once”.[15]
However, Beck felt that Germany needed more time to rearm before starting such a war.[15] In Beck’s assessment, the earliest date Germany could risk a war was 1940, and any war started in 1938 would be a “premature war” that Germany would lose.[16] In the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937, Hitler had expressed his belief that Britain and France would not intervene in the event of German aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia, a conviction strengthened by the Anschluss earlier in the year, and they would not stand in his way if he should try again to enlarge the Reich. Beck, however, believed that the French would honor the terms of the Franco-Czechoslovak alliance of 1924, and that, should France go to war with Germany, Britain would then almost certainly enter the war on the Allied side. He also felt that Germany did not have the raw materials to fight a European war.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Beck
MC
Agreed, 1938 was the Western allies ‘window of opportunity’ however we have the benefit of hindsight.
Chamberlain had the relative dispositions available, he would also have known of AH’s problems with the army high command.
What he did not value was “a small country far away”
Those Skoda tanks gave the Germans exactly what they needed to bring forwards the aggression, they were good modern tanks by anybody’s standards.
What Chamberlain did not understand was the nature of his enemy, he expected ‘reason’ not religion. A very common mistake amongst politicians even today.
AH also desperately needed the Czech gold reserves, to pay for his expensive socialism, denial of this would also have stopped him, and Chamberlain should also have known this.
In terms of relative power in relation to Germany, the principle, for Britain and France would have been ‘the earlier, the better’ because Nazi Germany was slower than Britain to mobilise for total war.
By 1939 it was too late, if Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht would not have been destroyed and Europeans today would probably celebrate the Fuehrer’s birthday.
“In short, your enemies will decide the nature of the battle, not you.”
This is arrant nonsense. In battle, YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF THE ENEMY, so you decide their conditions just as much as they decide yours.
Sun Tzu said: anciently the expert in war first made themselves invulnerable, and then waited for the enemy to expose vulnerabilities. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy’s mistakes.
Note the unsubtle difference here between intelligible and wise counsel and pure defeatist gibberish imitating it.
This blog is so fantastic. If everyone read it there wouldn’t be a world of gullible fools. Thank you for what you do.
Why should the west lead in the attack on ISIS when western allies like Turkey and Israel are right next door and failing to act?
We should be securing our own borders from the hordes of shiftless parasites that the left deigns to call refugees – yet strangely these refugees are largely made up of men of fighting age – men who otherwise have no skills in a post-industrial west.
Or what of Saudi Arabia, also considered an ally yet does nothing but fund mosques built in our nations?
Our problems are closer to home than Syria and Iraq, we wouldn’t even have an association with the region if generations of leftists hadn’t allowed the disaffected sons of islam across our borders – now we’re insulted by the media in constant claims of ‘British’, ‘French’ and ‘Australian’ youth going off to fight for ISIS as though these are somehow misguided sons and daughters of the founding populations that gave breath to those cultures and not what they really are – foreigners who identity with their real culture – islam – who are off to wage war against everything that their host nations stand for.
Our problems are closer to home.
If you hadn’t noticed, Turkey is also part of the problem, and Israel cannot move unless the entity in the white hut gives permission, which he won’t ‘cos he’s part of the problem too.
When the most powerful nation in the world is erratic and narcissistic then it is very difficult for smaller nations to act, they just might end up with the US marines storming their beaches instead…..
“The failure to occupy and administer Germany following WW1 meant that strong war-like elements in Germany were able to survive and grow in the well fertilized dirt of leftist dissatisfaction and hatred.”
[Redacted] A typical biased view on history. First, the West simply wasn’t strong enough in 1918 to occupy Germany, let alone to administer her. One should not forget that as late as in spring 1918 the Entente had been close to a military disaster in Italy and on the Western front. Second, the seed of hatred was sown by the Versailles treaty, not by the survival of alleged German “war-like elements” – as if they hadn’t existed in Britain and France as well.
“…the seed of hatred was sown by the Versailles treaty…”
This is the kind of comment I find most difficult to moderate.
It is composed of a [redacted] insult
followed by several unsourced conclusions.
and ends with a tossed-off opinion re the Treaty of Versailles – again, with no sources for this conclusion…
By the end of the war, the rest of the West (except for some pro-Germanic factions in Britain and America – see Fred Siegel’s book** on this) was sick of Germany’s warrior class. After the horror and waste, the determination to make sure Germany could never again brutalize anyone was paramount in the minds of the victors.
But was Versailles a “treaty” in the real sense? Germany was never even a party to the endless negotiations, never mind the final terms in all their minutiae.
The return of a Koran to some Saudi King, outlines of the first modern attempts at drug control, the endless schemes that this “Treaty” was party to make a mockery of the document in ‘grand’ historical terms. But it will make good reading and ‘what-ifs’ for future historians.
Here are a few conclusions, all worth following back to their origins:
According to David Stevenson, since the opening of French archives, most commentators have remarked on French restraint and reasonableness at the conference, though Stevenson notes that “[t]he jury is still out”, and that “there have been signs that the pendulum of judgement is swinging back the other way.”[102]
In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes referred to the Treaty of Versailles as a “Carthaginian peace”, a misguided attempt to destroy Germany on behalf of French revanchism, rather than to follow the fairer principles for a lasting peace set out in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which Germany had accepted at the armistice. He stated: “I believe that the campaign for securing out of Germany the general costs of the war was one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.”[103] Keynes had been the principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, and used in his passionate book arguments that he and others (including some US officials) had used at Paris.[104] He believed the sums being asked of Germany in reparations were many times more than it was possible for Germany to pay, and that these would produce drastic instability.[105]
French economist Étienne Mantoux disputed that analysis. During the 1940s, Mantoux wrote a posthumously published book titled “The Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes” in an attempt to rebut Keynes’ claims. More recently economists have argued that the restriction of Germany to a small army saved it so much money it could afford the reparations payments.[106]
It has been argued (for instance by historian Gerhard Weinberg in his book “A World At Arms”[107]) that the treaty was in fact quite advantageous to Germany. The Bismarckian Reich was maintained as a political unit instead of being broken up, and Germany largely escaped post-war military occupation (in contrast to the situation following World War II.) In a 1995 essay, Weinberg noted that with the disappearance of Austria-Hungary and with Russia withdrawn from Europe, that Germany was now the dominant power in Eastern Europe.[108]
The British military historian Correlli Barnett claimed that the Treaty of Versailles was “extremely lenient in comparison with the peace terms that Germany herself, when she was expecting to win the war, had had in mind to impose on the Allies”. Furthermore, he claimed, it was “hardly a slap on the wrist” when contrasted with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia in March 1918, which had taken away a third of Russia’s population (albeit of non-Russian ethnicity), one-half of Russia’s industrial undertakings and nine-tenths of Russia’s coal mines, coupled with an indemnity of six billion Marks.[109] Eventually, even under the “cruel” terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany′s economy had been restored to its pre-war status.
Barnett also claims that, in strategic terms, Germany was in fact in a superior position following the Treaty than she had been in 1914. Germany′s eastern frontiers faced Russia and Austria, who had both in the past balanced German power. Barnett asserts that its post-war eastern borders were safer, because the former Austrian Empire fractured after the war into smaller, weaker states, Russia was wracked by revolution and civil war, and the newly restored Poland was no match for even a defeated Germany. In the West, Germany was balanced only by France and Belgium, both of which were smaller in population and less economically vibrant than Germany. Barnett concludes by saying that instead of weakening Germany, the Treaty “much enhanced” German power.[110] Britain and France should have (according to Barnett) “divided and permanently weakened” Germany by undoing Bismarck’s work and partitioning Germany into smaller, weaker states so it could never have disrupted the peace of Europe again.[111] By failing to do this and therefore not solving the problem of German power and restoring the equilibrium of Europe, Britain “had failed in her main purpose in taking part in the Great War”.[112]
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles#Historical_assessments
====================================
In other words, the seed of hatred sown by Versailles was not nearly so awful as the seeds Germany proposed to sow had it won in 1918. Sometimes the immigrant Turkish invasion of Germany seems to be of karmic proportions.
**The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class
So I have a biased view of world history, OK I expect I have, the current consensus history is mainly the product of collectivist sources. I happen not to be a collectivist.
Most historians have a biased view of history, ever read Eric Hobsbawm? or AJP Taylor? or even Paul Johnson. Corelli Barnet also has a unique view of things as mentioned by D.
So thank-you for including me amongst the great and the good!
You’re good at taking criticism, even the non-constructive kind. Yes, every single historian has his own agenda and world view. The honest ones tell you up-front.