What Are You Currently Reading? 2013
Moderator at work
A series of new thread created to enable easier searching, so this once huge thread has now been split into years, starting with 2007. For an odd reasons it shows 132k views, no matter (ends).
So much of what we deal with today is shaped by the Cold War. At the confluence of politics and human nature one finds insurgency and terrorism. Not everywhere at the confluence, but in the dark corners where people perceive conditions to be insufferable and little effective legal recourse to address the same.
We all need to understand the Cold War better, to get past the spin and to better understand the realities. I look forward to giving this "Fifty Year Wound" a look.
Equally, Santa left me "Einstein - His Live and Universe" by Walter Isaacson." I find Einstein's insights on what I call "thinking about thinking" to be unparalleled. The military attempts to reduce thinking to a battle drill, and in so doing increases efficiency and uniformity at the expense of lost creativity and understanding (both being by their very nature neither efficient or uniform).
What has changed and what has not ...
Slogging through "the Changing Character of War", Ed. Hew Strachan & Sibylle Scheipers. Interesting thoughts on the definition of war and its political aspects.
Quote:
A number of chapters in this book come to the conclusion that the practice of war has changed over the past 500 years. The most striking factual changes in this respect are, first, the unlocking of the relationship between war and the state and, second, the unlocking of the relationship between war and the nation. However, this change is not to be misunderstood as a sudden dissolution of the 'normal' trinity consisting of war, the state, and the nation, and the dawn of a new, less orderly, and mor chaotic era of war. Rather, the interlocking of war and the state was, according to David Parrott, an exceptional case in the history of war that prevailed only for the rather short period from 1750 to 1950.
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welcome to the magic theatre
It is not for everyone. John Gray's Straw Dogs.
Quote:
The prevailing secular worldview is a pastiche of current scientific orthodoxy and pious hopes. Darwin has shown that we are animals; but - as humanists never tire of preaching - how we live is ‘up to us’. Unlike any other animal, we are told, we are free to live as we choose. Yet the idea of free will does not come from science. Its origins are in religion - not just any religion - but the Christian faith against which humanists rail so obsessively.
[...]
Some readers have seen Straw Dogs as an attempt to apply Darwinism to ethics and politics, but nowhere does it suggest that neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contains the final account of the human animal. Instead Darwinism is deployed strategically in order to break up the prevailing humanist worldview. Humanists turn to Darwin to support their shaky faith in progress; but there is no progress in the world he revealed. A truly naturalistic view of the world leaves no room for secular hope.
[...]
The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.
[...]
Having lost the skills of sewing, fishing and making fire, the indigenous people of Tasmania lived more simply than even Aboriginals on the Australian mainland from whom they had been isolated by rising sea levels around ten thousand years ago. When the ships bearing European settlers arrived in Tasmania in 1772, the indigenous people seem not to have noticed them. Unable to process a sight for which nothing had prepared them, they returned to their ways.
They had no defences against the settlers. By 1830, their numbers had been reduced from around five thousand to seventy-two. In the intervening years they had been used for slave labour and sexual pleasure, tortured and mutilated. They had been hunted like vermin and their skins had been sold for government bounty. When the males were killed, female survivors were turned loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were usually castrated. Children were clubbed to death. When the last indigenous Tasmanian male, William Lanner, died in 1869, his grave was opened by a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Dr George Stokell, who made a tobacco pouch from his skin. When the last ‘fullblood’ indigenous woman died a few years later, the genocide was complete.
Genocide is as human as art or prayer. This is not because humans are a uniquely aggressive species. The rate of violent death among some monkeys exceeds that among humans - if wars are excluded from the calculation; but as E.O. Wilson observes, ‘if hamdryas baboons had nuclear weapons, they would destroy the world in a week’. Mass murder is a side effect of progress in technology. From the stone axe onwards, humans have used their tools to slaughter one another. Humans are weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing. (from Straw Dogs by John Gray)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals - Amazon
John N. Gray - Wikipedia
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Straw Dogs review by Terry Eagleton:
Quote:
John Gray's political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy.
Not that nihilism is a term he would endorse. His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope. Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all. It isn't the best motivation for getting out of bed.
Guardian review of Straw Dogs by Terry Eagleton - Guardian - 7.11.2002
Terry Eagleton - Wikipedia
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The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma Translated by Red Pine.
Quote:
Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.
The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma - Amazon
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Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.
Quote:
I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall ... Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not noticed it. Perhaps it had been painted afresh ... it seemed to me in the dim light that a garland, or something gaily colored, was festooned round the doorway, and ... over the door I saw ... bright letters dancing and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once more.
MAGIC THEATER
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY (from Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse)
Magic Theater - american-buddha.com online library
Steppenwolf - Amazon
Steppenwolf (novel) - Wikipedia
Steppenwolf (Hawkind) youtube
Shorter than Clausewitz’s On War and shorter
When Sir Michael Howard, the pre-eminent British military historian (who is still attending conferences in London) writes a book review I notice; ah, yes I've not read the book he reviews!
Quote:
Some four decades ago, the TLS sent me a book to review by a young lecturer at Sandhurst entitled The Face of Battle. It impressed me so much that I described it as “one of the best half-dozen books on warfare to have appeared since the Second World War”. I wondered at the time if I had made a total fool of myself, but I need not have worried. The author, the late Sir John Keegan, proved to be one of the greatest military historians of his generation. It would be rash to put my money on such a dark horse again, but I shall. Emile Simpson’s War From the Ground Up is a work of such importance that it should be compulsory reading at every level in the military; from the most recently enlisted cadet to the Chief of the Defence Staff and, even more important, the members of the National Security Council who guide him.
He ends with:
Quote:
It is impossible to summarize Emile Simpson’s ideas without distorting them. ...... In short (and here I shall really go overboard) War From the Ground Up deserves to be seen as a coda to Clausewitz’s On War. But it has the advantage of being considerably shorter.
The book is 'War From The Ground Up: Twenty-first-century combat as politics' by Emile Simpson. 285pp. Publishers: Hurst. £25. 978 1 84904 255 0 and in the USA by Columbia University Press. $32.50. 978 0 231 70406 9.
Link to fuller review:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1239841.ece
Two reviews on Amazon UK:http://www.amazon.co.uk/War-Ground-U...at+as+politics and no reviews on Amazon USA:http://www.amazon.com/War-Ground-Up-...=emile+simpson
I finally found something on the Winter War
albeit only a few pages, chapter 35 of Roland Huntford’s Two planks and a passion. The book is a very well done history of skiing up to 1945. (There is a final chapter with a post-War history of skiing that feels a little tacked-on, but that period has already been covered by a number of books, in any case.)
An intellectual dance between foes
The former FBI agent and interviewer, Ali Soufan, wrote 'The Black Banners: Inside the hunt for al-Qaeda' and published in 2011, with extensive redactions, some of them a single letter or a short word. I waited till the book appeared in paperback in the UK and took time to read it last month.
I know some here have been critical of his recollections compared to others, but for the context of the LE and intelligence campaign that was aimed at AQ it is very good. Especially on working in the Yemen.
On the value of the interview -v- 'enhanced interrogation' his position is very clear - interviews got confessions, evidence and information; with arguments familiar to those who have followed the controversy and several threads. See 'One Stop Interrogation Resource', this includes pointers to all the relevant threads:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=9446
There are some references to his work in London which I shall have to read again; his comments on one person at liberty known for civil litigation are very interesting.
Link to Amazon, with many good reviews (71 on .com and 27 on UK site):http://www.amazon.com/Black-Banners-...rds=ali+soufan and http://www.amazon.co.uk/Black-Banner...rds=ali+soufan