Not much here. Voting has been slow at polling sites. After all, eligible Californians received ballots by mail and have multiple options to turn them in.
Spent the day piloting an election protection scheme, on standby for disruption that wasn't going to happen today. But come November, might it?
Two very quiet polling sites.
Mainstream media have been sharing the news that Israeli forces have seized Beaufort Castle, a Crusader-era high point and fortification on the southern border of Lebanon in a region which is home turf to Israel's foe, Hezbollah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to push deeper into Lebanon after his military took over the medieval castle of Beaufort on Sunday, May 31, calling it a "dramatic shift" in Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The Iran-backed militant group, meanwhile, said it targeted Israeli forces near the fortress as well as army positions and infrastructure in Shlomi and Nahariya in northern Israel, while air raid sirens blared in the Acre area. Israeli forces used the Beaufort castle, also known as Qalaat al-Chakif, as a base during their previous two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon that ended in 2000.
"We have returned united, determined and stronger than ever," Netanyahu said in a video statement released after the military took Beaufort. "Now my directive is to deepen and expand our hold in places that were under Hezbollah's control. The capture of Beaufort is a dramatic stage and a dramatic shift in the policy we are leading."
Erudite Partner and I had the chance, thanks to a Lebanese friend, to walk about this eerie spot in 2006, just weeks before that year's Israeli assault on the proud and battered country.
The yellow banner of Hezbollah flew defiantly from the castle's pinnacle then. We didn't see any fighters, though there were rumors that they had tunneled somewhere underneath.
belowbeaufort.jpg)
For over a decade, Erudite Partner has been publishing occasional essays at the news site TomDispatch. The editor, Tom Engelhardt, came to publishing from the New England Free Press where he worked in the late 1960s -- in those days, radical publishing meant literally becoming printers of physical flyers as well as books. When I passed through Boston and visited in the spring of 1969, I imagine I met him; there were a lot of nice, earnest young men in the loft where they ran the presses. He later built TomDispatch into a syndication service for writing and distribution of progressive thinking.
... For most of history, a lot of the budget of every kingdom, empire, republic, city state was invested or wasted on soldiers and fortresses and warships and things like that and nobody felt safe.
One of the miracles of the international systems of recent decades — and this is not about writing pacifist poetry, it’s about government budgets: You look at the budgets, and you see that on average, in the early 21st century, about 6 to 7 percent of the government budget went to defense, to the military, compared with 10 percent on average that went to health care.
It’s the first time in history that humanity spent more on health care than on defense. They felt more secure than in any previous time in history because there was this taboo on invading and conquering other countries by force.
If we now break this taboo, it will force everybody to arm themselves to the teeth at the expense of health care, education, welfare and so forth — and nobody will feel safer as a result.
Because countries and leaders constantly miscalculate.
In the Vietnam War, the Americans thought they were stronger. It turned out they were wrong.
Putin was convinced he would crush Ukraine in 48 hours. He was wrong.
So this vision of basing the peace and order of the world on a hierarchy of strong and weak, with the weak always obeying the strong and thereby buying peace, it has been tried over thousands of years, and we know where it leads.
It leads, on the one hand, to empire — and on the other hand, to endless wars.
I am not confident I know enough history to confirm Harari's observation about where humans have spent the product of our labor, but it seems plausible. The strong always want to seize it for their lethal pissing contests.
And I am willing to opine that ordinary people will always, if given a chance, turn the product of their labor to that which enables human flourishing, even though we can be greedy and foolish. Worth thinking about.
Actually just the lower flanks of the neighborhood, but it's quite clear what people care about here.
If only most of the world weren't going to suffer for his foolish hubris.
From Noah Berlatsky:
You lost a war. Now what?
Trump ... launched a war of aggression against Iran without clear goals, without building domestic political support, without coordinating with allies, and without logistical preparation.
This was not a formula for success, and sure enough, when Iran seized and closed down the Strait of Hormuz instead of capitulating immediately, Trump and his team of dunderheaded and cowardly fascists hesitated briefly and then gave up. Ever since, the president has been searching for a way to back out of his enormously unpopular war in a way that doesn’t make him look like the cowardly dunderheaded fascist he is.Unfortunately for Trump, though, the people who won the war (that is, Iran) have little to no incentive to let him set terms to make himself look good, or even adequate. Neither do other leaders in the region. As foreign policy scholar Elizabeth N. Saunders explains, Trump has two choices: “Humiliation or (increasingly futile) escalation.”
Escalation is a terrible option for Trump. The US has already shown that bombing alone cannot defeat the Iranian regime. That leaves a ground invasion as the only possible path to something like victory.
But a YouGov poll at the end of March found that only 14 percent of US adults support sending ground troops into Iran. Among independents, nine percent support ground troops against 66 percent who oppose, and even among Republicans an invasion is a loser, with 30 percent support against 37 percent opposition.
These figures are dismal enough to suggest that significantly ramping up the war could actually cause Trump’s terrible overall approval to fall even further — especially with Republicans (73 percent of whom support the war), and especially if significant numbers of US service people are killed in combat.
So that leaves accepting humiliation.
Unfortunately for Trump, taking the L is also a bad option, because while analysts and experts recognize that he’s lost the war, most of the public hasn’t yet gotten the message. In a poll last week, 32 percent believed that the US is winning the war, while only 16 percent thought the US was losing; 37 percent believed the US would eventually win. That is a significant number of people who are going to be startled if Trump negotiates a “deal” and there are weeks of headlines about how the US lost.
... To sum up, if Trump escalates, people are going to hate him. If he surrenders, people are going to hate him. If he dithers, people are going to hate him. He has no good options, which is why he’s spinning in place, hoping someone, anyone, will rescue him.
My emphasis. Before reading this, I had not realized that the majority in the U.S. don't yet know Trump had managed to launch a military campaign that our armed forces could not "win" at an acceptable price in lives -- Iranian, U.S. and others. If they weren't being chickenshit, the relevant generals and admirals undoubtedly told him this. Even Trump isn't dumb enough to get his advice from Pete Hegseth. I think ...
For some reason, major U.S. media keep trying to pretend that Iran is going to give Trump a way out. The New York Times has one of those silly headlines as I am writing: "U.S. Officials Say They Are Closing In on Arrangement to Reopen Strait of Hormuz." And then the more likely accurate subhead: "President Trump has not signed off on the emerging framework, according to U.S. officials. But it could set the table for extending the cease-fire and more substantive negotiations." That is, no genuine deal.
Media outlets have been passing along the same false story for weeks. I'll believe it when I see it. I guess we can deduce why so many of us don't yet know the mighty USofA lost Trump's war.
They title this video "Justice." I post this Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee video today, NOT because I think it is either uplifting or effective. I wish it were; there's plenty of injustice afoot in our MAGA moment to be called out and resisted. Take a look -- it is only one minute. What do you think?
My comments, for what they are worth...
• I love Rachel Maddow. She's a truth teller and smart and informed. But if we are to be enlisted by the long struggle of Black Americans, couldn't they have found a Black narrator?
• The historic footage of beatings and tear gas from the 1960s Civil Rights wave of struggle for Black justice are both moving and striking. They always are. We're certainly living in a moment when similar atrocities are possible -- even likely. Thousands of ordinary citizens have been risking their lives to protest thuggish federal overreach; two demonstrators lost their lives in Minnesota. In this time, a few legislators have gotten a bit of the same treatment -- New Jersey Senator Andy Kim tear gassed just a day ago; California Senator Alex Padilla tackled at an LA courthouse -- both on camera. The outraged Black Congressmen here can't verbally convey an authenticity to match the message of intense struggle implied by the Civil Rights era footage.
• The clip of former President Obama is just weird: he looks exhausted and, dare I say it, simply old. I've seen current clips that aren't like that; couldn't they have found footage with a little more energy?
I don't know whether professional Democratic Party communicators can do better. I wish they would. The Trump shit show certainly demonstrates to all of us that effective resistance has to lead with the people. As the old saying goes, perhaps if the people lead, our leaders will follow.
... As this book is being completed, the greatest example of this reality of personal grand-strategy-making is playing out before us.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, an attempt to create a greater, more powerful Russia, shows once again that grand strategy can be hijacked by deeply flawed individuals over bureaucracies or structures. In no rational world could the Russian invasion of Ukraine be seen as something well thought out or in the Russian national interest. It was poorly conceived, based on a hopeless misreading of Ukrainian intentions and capabilities. The Russian Army was also constructed in such a way that it was far less than the sum of its parts.
While Putin might have had an ends-ways-means plan in his own mind, we can say now that he had poorly constructed means, which he employed in wholly unrealistic ways in a vain attempt to achieve completely unrealistic ends. Yet just before the invasion he was considered perhaps the most savvy and intelligent leader of a major power in the world.
Putin’s grand-strategic performance has in many ways combined the worst strategic traits of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In a rational world, with a sober evaluation of the Russian Army, one would have imagined a state’s decision-making bureaucracy would have tried to halt his invasion of Ukraine—as one would have imagined the Italian state might have restrained Mussolini from invading Greece, or German influences might have kept Hitler from attacking the Soviet Union with Britain still fighting.
Like the Axis leaders of the 1940s, Putin made war on the Ukraine of his imagination with a military greatly debilitated by corruption and incompetence of which he was either ignorant or unconcerned. Russia ran into something unanticipated in Ukraine. O'Brien's substack chronicles the consequences. It's my go-to source on the Ukraine war and seems honest, though not objective. He knows who he supports.
Of course, Putin is not the only contemporary leader of a powerful military and country who ignorantly substitutes his fantasies for any coherent plan or strategy.
For the purposes of this book, the strategic decision is the choice by the leader, with or without the opinions of advisers, of the strategic plan that the state should follow. The implementation is the translation of that plan into action. ... One of the great tests of grand-strategic leadership is learning what not to do as well as what to do.O'Brien's subjects were two men born in the 1870s (Stalin, Churchill) and three in the 1880s (Roosevelt, Mussolini, Hitler). They were all, in some sense, survivors.
Stalin’s fundamental problem was that he was not competent enough to fulfill the purposes of his command. ... You can work very hard to create the reality you want, and with enough power you can often succeed. ... Playing up the idea of a vast conspiracy of traitors in their midst ... helped Stalin appeal to Lenin. He might not have been terribly competent, but he would take extreme measures to protect the Leninist line against all possible enemies—even those who were not enemies yet. Lenin approved of Stalin’s willingness to use the most brutal means against possible enemies, even when he was aware Stalin was making things up. ...Churchill traveled around the British empire as a young privileged adventurer, then took up political party politics, and got himself appointed in 1914 as First Lord of the Admiralty in time to be held responsible for the British/Australian landing in Turkey which ended in a massacre. More to his credit, he also used his position to inspect the trench warfare in France and took enduring lessons:
Churchill now understood that modern weapons had made a mockery of bravery. Machines would determine the outcome of this war, and exposing oneself was more likely to lead to injury or death than anything else. ... If he had retained many boyish traits when the war started, the man that returned to London was more sober, cautious and methodical in his strategic outlook. He now had a holistic war strategy that stretched from the production of weapons to the deployment of forces in the field, all underlined by a coherent geopolitical vision.O'Brien skims only lightly over the personal crisis of which Roosevelt was a survivor. During World War I he worked for the Wilson administration in the Department of the Navy and came away with an understanding of how controlling the oceans might be America's great strength. He was a political up-and-comer, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate on a losing 1920 ticket. And then he barely survived polio and emerged with paralyzed legs. Despite this seemingly insurmountable setback, he won the governorship of New York State in 1928 and then the presidency in 1932, in time to confront the Depression depths of bank failures and mass unemployment. But he also repudiated his non-militarist foreign policy positions.
During a time of financial hardship and growing military threats in both Europe and Asia, Roosevelt’s agenda strengthened the US Navy while providing desperately needed industrial jobs in shipyards up and down the country. It would be the start of Roosevelt’s military preparations for World War II, and would reveal the enduring legacy of his earlier experiences.The three who became the leaders of the Allied powers had held responsible, although subordinate, positions during World War I; the two Axis dictators had been ordinary soldiers in the Great War.
Making Italy great, and himself even greater, would be his foundational strategic mindset—even if he had as of yet no clear idea [in 1918] how to achieve it. ...
... Much of the time within the narrative of World War I, the Italian experience is overlooked in favour of the great battles of the Western and even Eastern Fronts. Yet by Western Front standards, the Italian soldier made an equal, and in some ways greater, sacrifice to that of his British and French comrades. By the end of the war, five million Italians had served in the armed forces, and 650,000 of them had died (or would soon perish because of war-received wounds)
... trincerocrazia (rule by those who had served in the trenches) would form the core of a “new and better elite” which [Mussolini] claimed should rule Italy after the war. Of course, he was too modest to point out that a prominent newspaper editor who had served in the army would be ideally suited to lead this new trench-ocracy. Mussolini was coming closer and closer to arguing for an overthrow of the Italian state. The journey to a personal dictatorship was shortening. ...Mussolini had a prescription for regaining Italy's imagined former military greatness.
He said the Germans had made a terrible mistake going on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917, as this was actually “more expensive” than going on the offensive. How anyone who had witnessed how machine guns and modern artillery could devastate attacking infantrymen could still think the defensive was more expensive boggles the mind. However, instilling the right values remained to Mussolini the key to preparing soldiers to advance.
... In the balance between morale and equipment, willpower always triumphed over steel. Mussolini was “certain that thousands of cannons and machine guns are not enough for victory, if the spirit of the soldiers is lacking.”Having posed the question of Italian "greatness," he made himself the answer for attaining it after that war.
If the Allies had unfairly thwarted Italy at Paris [in the Versailles Treaty], Mussolini would be the man to make Italy great again. He created his own political movement in the midst of this supposed humiliation ... In November 1921 the Fascist Party itself was founded with Mussolini as its leader, and in 1922 he seized power over all of Italy. It was the culmination of his wartime learning.
Mussolini viewed the Italian state, not insensibly, as too weak and chaotic to save itself. He thus threatened a march on Rome more as an act of bluster than any widespread violent action. Indeed, he was prepared to call the whole thing off if the government reacted with force. Luckily for him they didn’t, and the indecisive King was only too happy to invite Mussolini to take power to end the chaos. Il Duce was made.
World War I had taught Mussolini how to seize and manipulate power, and the value of acting like a great power even if you were not one. The only trouble with this strategic outlook would come if someone called Mussolini’s bluff.The rest of O'Brien's account of Mussolini's role in World War II amounts to how Churchill and then Hitler did indeed call the Italian's bluff. Italian fighters executed their deposed dictator in 1945.
Hitler’s wound, in the thigh, was relatively light, but he was pulled off the line and sent to a military hospital near Berlin. Once there, due to the vagaries of military bureaucracy as much as anything, he would wait approximately six months before returning to the Western Front. Hitler was shocked by what he discovered in Germany. Instead of a people united in support for the war, he came face to face with widespread dissatisfaction, even defeatism, in both the army and the general public.
Though his doubts about the true resilience of the German people remained, he did not want to admit that Germans might honestly doubt that this miserable war, which had already killed hundreds of thousands and brought misery and famine to their doorstep, was a mistake. No, the real culprit had to be the Jews. In his fact-free world, the Jews had used the war to embed their domination throughout the production process and to stoke animosity between Bavaria and Prussia, all the while skillfully avoiding military service themselves.He did take one practical if over-blown lesson from his war experience:
Hitler had a much greater focus on the importance of military equipment in determining the outcome of modern battles. ... Hitler’s fascination with the largest, heaviest firepower reveals something common in dictators: a stress on strength, without a corresponding ability to understand rational trade-offs. ...Hitler's wartime service convinced him that he had found his destiny:
... To answer the question of why [the 1918 German] disaster had occurred, Hitler fell back on the conspiracy theories he had been nursing for years and magnified them to enormous proportions. An internal, criminal enemy had poisoned the mind of the German people, leading them to betray the valiant troops at the front and transforming a possible war-winning situation into a humiliating defeat.
This is the crucial piece of the puzzle in understanding Hitler as a war leader in World War II. It combined his grasp of how to win wars (heavy equipment based on German technology which carried the biggest punch possible) with how Germany lost this one (home front weakened and then betrayed by evil influences—particularly Jews).
The combination of these ideas also seems to have been the motivation he needed to change professions. If Hitler went into the army in 1914 still thinking he would become a great artist or architect, by 1918 he had decided to immerse himself in politics.Having explored the life lessons these five men brought to World War II, O'Brien's actual recounting of the events of that war is more sparse. Pretty much all of them acted in accord with pre-existing character.
Hitler, whose ego was already massive, started telling people that everything now depended on him and him alone, and that he needed to act in case he died early and Germany was deprived of his historic leadership. ...Hitler's war became a parade of strategic failures for Germany.
After December 7, 1941, neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Winston Churchill had any doubts about the outcome of World War II. They were both convinced that Germany, Italy and Japan would all be crushed. ... Their earlier experiences with war had taught both Roosevelt and Churchill the vital importance of controlling the air-sea super-battlefield—and in that way they had a massive advantage over Adolf Hitler, with his more parochial war and life experiences.The Russian ruler was the one who learned and adapted most over the course of the war. Because Stalin enjoyed the material support of Britain and the United States and led a country where war had evoked patriotic nationalism, he had time and opportunity to learn to be a successful war leader.
Stalin’s meeting with [Roosevelt's envoy] Harry Hopkins was just one example of how he reacted to adversity not by doubling down on his own brilliance, but by trying to cultivate and benefit from the support of others. This was not because of any change of personality; it was because he had calculated, accurately, that the chances of his personal survival and that of the USSR (and then later of their further successes) would be better assured by taking help where he could get it, even if this showed him doing things that ideologically or personally he had not done before. ... Stalin had the capacity to learn. In 1941 and early 1942, Hitler and Stalin were quite similar as military commanders. ...When Stalin let his generals lead, with Allied materiel arriving, the immense size and valor of the Russian army came into play and turned the tide against Germany. Stalin learned.
Though one does not want to analyse Roosevelt’s psyche too much, part of him seemed to believe that, as long as he was president, he could not really die. ... in 1944, Roosevelt would make one of the most selfish choices in international relations history, something so profoundly self-centred that historians still shy away from addressing it. He not only decided to run for office while dying; he decided to change vice president to someone he did not like, would not confide in and would not prepare in any way to be president. ...
... In refusing to provide the US government with an idea of concrete war aims and purposes, Roosevelt was making a mockery of the Clausewitzian notion of strategy being a connection between ends, ways and means. Roosevelt, more than any war leader, had a clear idea of ways and means—fighting the war with air-sea power and many machines over soldiers, etc.—but [these] seemed disconnected from the ends. The ends were what he wanted at any given moment.
... By the end of the war, three of the five were dead: Hitler by suicide, Mussolini gunned down on a street corner and Roosevelt whose body failed after all his exertions. Even the two survivors, Churchill and Stalin, had aged greatly because of the stress of war leadership. Neither was the same forceful figure after the war that he had been when it started.O'Brien concludes by arguing in favor of greater focus in historical accounts on the character and capacities of leaders. (Yes, now as then, that seems forever to mean all men.) I greatly enjoyed this book; it rounded my understanding of massive events which I've studied through other lenses. But I wonder -- is this truly the best way to greater understanding?
... grand strategy in World War II was far more personal than we might believe. ... then, now and in the future—we have to try to understand the minds of the individual leaders who make the crucial choices. Though we use phrases like “national interest” or “greater good,” these are abstract concepts in grand-strategy-making. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt had very personal notions of what national interest was; in some cases, notions that led to the lives of their fellow citizens being made far worse. All of them also believed that they were personally indispensable in terms of making their countries greater, and all imposed their own visions on their states during the course of the war. As such, they regularly acted like their personal views of the world were in the national interest of their countries, when they were decidedly not. If we want to understand strategy, we must also understand the strategist.Perhaps. Certainly any contemporary American is forced to see what horrors a leader with no moral character at all can lead to.
Over the years, I've written a quite often on Memorial Day (and also on Veterans Day) about various relatives who served in the US military. But seldom about this one, who I actually knew.
My first cousin (my father's sister's son) Kirby Atterbury has been gone over twenty years now. When he was still with us, I was cautious about introducing or explaining him to my friends. The result of any encounter could be unpredictably explosive.
He was born in 1921; yes, the generations are long and screwy in my family. At age 20, he left college to serve as a navigator in the US Merchant Marine on the arctic Murmansk Run delivering essential war supplies to our Russian allies in World War II.
An historical description: "This was no glamorous sea campaign, with full-sail, tall-masted men-of-war firing broadside after broadside into their enemy’s rigging. It was a cold, dirty, dangerous business in which seamen might be blown into a flaming sea of burning oil and left to die of wounds, burns, or hypothermia."
By the way, because the US used private shipping for this hazardous duty, Kirby was not technically a veteran. That seems an injustice. He served.
Kirby came through, married, settled in Marin County, fathered five daughters (several younger than me) and became known as a bon-vivant restaurateur opening a place in Tiburon he named "Caprice." This was also the name of one of the daughters; I don't know which came first.
He was a local fixture according to this nice obituary by longtime Chronicle journalist Peter Fimrite.
Reading between the lines even of this public obit, it's possible to discern what happened with Kirby. He became well known for consuming the fine alcoholic beverages he specialized in; by the time that, as an adult, I knew him he was a high-functioning drunk. A rage would come out; he needed to offend. When drunk enough, this man would insist "Hitler had some good ideas."
I'm just glad this angry man didn't live to become an enthusiast for Donald Trump; I'm sure he'd have enjoyed promoting MAGA. Even when justified, war is terrible for living things, for living people.
