A Serious Philosophical Question

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus examines whether suicide is a logical course of action for a man to take after he realizes that his existence has no meaning. A reader might object that people commit suicide because of sorrow resulting from personal loss, not philosophical arguments about life's meaning. But according to Camus, the recognition that life is meaningless brings with it a feeling of alienation from the world, and this same alienation is experienced by people who commit suicide because of emotional pain resulting from things such as terminal disease, the death of a loved one, or professional scandal. A man can feel at home in the world only when he can give reasons, even bad ones, for his existence. But when he is no longer able to give reasons for existence--because he recognizes that God does not exist and life is meaningless, or because of personal loss that makes happiness impossible--he loses hope of a promised land and the memory of being at home in the world. This "divorce" between "the actor and his setting" is the feeling of absurdity. Camus wants to determine, strictly as a matter of logic, and not as a matter of habit, emotion, or fear, whether life is worth living when man is conscious of its absurdity.

By saying that human life is absurd, Camus means that human beings have basic psychological drives that go unfulfilled because of the nature of the world. Most people have an innate longing for a meaning that transcends their own lives, but that longing is inevitably frustrated because the universe has no moral structure or overarching purpose. Further, people cannot help but structure their lives around the attainment of their goals in the future; they live for that "someday" when they will have established a career, overcome some challenge, or started a family. The only thing the future certainly promises, however, is death. It makes no more sense for a man to structure his life around the accomplishment of his long-term goals than it does for him to strive for constant consciousness of his inevitable demise. Camus’s subject is whether, in the face of these contradictions, the value of human life can be affirmed without resorting to religious or philosophical doctrines that offer false solutions to the problem of absurdity. An intellectually honest man cannot resolve the problem by convincing himself that life has meaning or that the afterlife will provide him with an escape from death. Such solutions are false because the world has no meaning and death is unavoidable; these solutions simply deny the existence of the terms of the problem, which are the divorce between man’s need for a future and the absence of any future apart from death, and the divorce between man’s longing for meaning and the world’s meaninglessness.

Camus argues that human life can actually be lived all the more robustly because it is meaningless. To live a fate known to be absurd, man must strive to remain conscious of its absurdity. Revolt is one of the only coherent positions that can be held in an absurd world because it does not falsely deny the existence of any aspect of the absurdity of man's condition. The absurd man carries out his revolt against life by simultaneously acknowledging the meaninglessness of the world and his psychic need for meaning. He acknowledges his need to live for the future while rejecting the future because it will bring about his death. The conscious revolt that is carried out by the absurd man gives life its value. It is magnificent because of the discipline and will it requires. Suicide cannot be a logical response to the absurdity of existence, to the divorce between the world we inhabit and the world we want to inhabit, because it constitutes an acceptance of death. Suicide takes away one piece of the problem of absurdity--man’s horror toward death--and replaces it with complete acceptance.

On first reading this argument, I thought that Camus was guilty of circular reasoning when he claimed that suicide was an invalid response to absurdity because it replaced man's revulsion toward death with complete acceptance. I thought that a man rationally could opt for suicide if he found that he could not be happy and did not want to live in a meaningless world. But this rejoinder does not address Camus’s point because he is looking at suicide from a dispassionate, strictly logical standpoint. Certainly some people may for emotional or other subjective reasons choose death over living a meaningless life, but suicide does not follow as a logical consequence from the fact that life is meaningless, in the same way the conclusion of a syllogism follows from the major and minor premises.

And yet, how can Camus argue that a life without meaning can be lived more fully than a life that has meaning? It is because the lack of meaning gives man the freedom to make judgments about how to live out his life. While revolt is the first consequence Camus draws from the absurdity of life, the second is total freedom. By stripping man of any hope for freedom from death, of any reason to live for the future, consciousness of the absurd magnifies man's freedom of action. Before recognizing the absurdity of life, man acted as if his life was given meaning by the long-term aims he set for himself. He felt obliged to act according to whatever purposes he sought to achieve, as, for example, a father, engineer, leader, or clerk. Man’s false sense that his life took on meaning from his long-term goals created barriers that constrained his range of action. But the conscious man grasps that it is absurd to live for a future that means his own inevitable death. Thus, he is released from any obligation that may come from a sense that one’s life is given purpose through the goals he sets. A man’s goals create no obligation to act in a manner consistent with those goals because “there is no future.”

The third consequence Camus ascribes to the absurd is quantity. If life had a meaning, it would imply a scale of values that would allow us to say whether one life was more valuable than another, but the absurd rejects both meaning and the scale of values meaning implies. Because no scale enables us to rank a life filled with one set of experiences as better than a life filled with another, the sole criterion by which lives can be judged is the quantity of living they contain. But the importance of quantity does not mean that the purpose of life is to live as long as possible, that man should strive break all records and maximize one’s lifespan. Life has no purpose. Living to the maximum is a matter of luck.

The Absurd Hero

At the end of his investigation, Camus addresses the Greek myth that gives his essay its name. Sisyphus was a mortal who had been condemned by the gods to spend eternity in the underworld rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain. Whenever he reached the summit, the boulder rolled back down and he had to repeat his labor. Camus imagines that, when Sisyphus is returning to the plain before resuming his toil, he is conscious that he has no hope of succeeding in the work he must perform endlessly. It is Sisyphus’s lucidity on the descent--his awareness of the futility of the task that he must perform forever--that makes his story tragic and gives his futile work its element of torture. But it also makes Sisyphus superior to his fate. He is able to scorn his wretched, powerless condition. This contempt makes him superior to his fate.

At times on the return, Sisyphus remembers too vividly the pleasures he had enjoyed while alive--the beauty of the sea, the touch a woman’s hand, a glass of wine--and he is struck by sorrow for what he has lost. But the weight of his loss is bearable when he regards it coolly. He recognizes that his only link to the world is the memories of earth that brought on his sorrow. This recognition leads him to cry out, “All is well!” despite the eons of pointless labor that stand before him.

Sisyphus has a fate like that of the modern laborer, who works every day of his life performing the same pointless tasks. Both can be happy and proclaim that all is well because the futility of their work and the meaninglessness of their lives do not, or at least need not, exhaust them. Man’s awareness of the absurdity of life dispels his delusional fears and hopes about God and the future. He can glance backward over his life and coolly regard the series of meaningless actions that have come to define his fate. In his effort to maintain his absurd revolt--his striving for consciousness that the world has frustrated his need for knowledge, meaning, and a future--the absurd man undertakes a struggle like that of Sisyphus’s. That struggle by itself can provide him with a measure of happiness. Having abandoned any hope for the future, the absurd man recognizes himself in the “noble, soulless land” on which he lives out his time on earth.

Germany's Blunders in the First World War

Canadian historian Holger Herwig constructed a history of the Central Powers’ military operations in the First World War through a decade's worth of study devoted to the military archives of the German and Austro-Hungarian Armies and the letters and journals of the soldiers and officers who participated in the conflict. The result of Herwig’s labors, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918, is a bracing chronicle of the war that brought an end to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and imperial Russia. Some of the archival material Herwig used became available for the first time in the early 1990s, when Russia released documents that the Soviet Army had seized from Berlin and Vienna at the end of the Second World War. While most English-language histories have documented the Great War from the perspective of the Triple Entente powers, Herwig focuses on the decisionmaking of the leaders of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Herwig’s accounts of the major battles on the Western Front bring home the terrible futility of the war. From February to December 1916, Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff, tried to bleed the French Army to death through sustained infantry and artillery assaults on the French fortifications at Verdun, which guarded access to the plains northeast of Paris. Germany’s Meuse Group West gained two miles of territory in four months of fighting at a cost of 69,000 men. In the corridors of the forts, the stench of human excrement, putrefaction, and explosive gases from the German troops’ flamethrowers took combatants’ breath away. Herwig puts the total number of casualties at 350,000 on each side, or about 70,000 for each month of fighting. Due to the offensive’s failure, Kaiser Wilhelm II replaced Falkenhayn with Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. In December, French forces regained Fort Douaumant, whose capture by the Germans had been celebrated across Germany.

The duumvirate of Hindenburg and Ludendorff refined the German system of trench fortifications, which had consisted of three parallel trenches totaling a mile in depth. They replaced it with a system of trenches between six and eight miles in depth. Under the principle of defense in depth, front lines were lightly manned, and the mass of German machine guns were housed in steel-reinforced concrete bunkers located at half-mile intervals well behind the first lines. The first line troops were to resist assaults only as long was reasonable, allowing attacking forces to enter the killing zone behind the front created by German machine gun nests with their interlocking zones of fire.

Germany’s ally in the conflict, Austro-Hungary, was militarily useless. Germany repeatedly had to move troops from the west to rescue Austrian forces from defeat by Russia and Serbia. The head of the Austrian general staff, Conrad von Hotzendorf, drew up grandiose battle plans that didn’t account for weather, terrain, or his men's condition. By the end of 1916, Austria depended on German loans to finance the war, and the German general staff dictated most major decisions to their Austrian counterparts.

The German leadership overreached disastrously in its prosecution of the war. You can make a good case the Reich would have come out of the conflict with its frontiers intact and perhaps more territory than it entered the war with if it had avoided any one of three major blunders: resuming in February 1917 unrestricted submarine warfare, which drew the American republic into the conflict; imposing the onerous peace on Russia in December 1917; and making a final push for victory in 1918 instead of withdrawing to more defensible lines.

Germany’s most egregious mistake was its decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare against civilian ships bound for Great Britain. At the beginning of 1917, German planners concluded they could knock Britain out the war by destroying the vessels that brought the island nation food from the Western hemisphere. The Germans knew that submarine warfare targeting commercial ships would lead America to enter the war. In 1915, a German U-boat sunk the Lusitania, a civilian passenger ship. The dead included 128 Americans. President Wilson issued a note threatening Germany with war if it continued targeting civilian vessels. Germany apologized and suspended submarine war. But in early 1918, German leaders concluded that unrestricted sub warfare could force Britain out of the war before America could deploy enough troops on the Continent to affect the outcome. Germany greatly overestimated Britain's reliance on imported food, however. Seven months of submarine warfare failed to produce food shortages in Great Britain, contrary to the Germany’s predictions. In April 1917, after U-boats had destroyed several American merchant vessels, Congress passed a declaration of war against Germany. By March 1918, just as Germany was mounting its doomed final attempt to secure victory, 287,000 American soldiers had arrived in France. By July 1918, 250,000 Americans were arriving every month, and there were over 1,000,000 Americans on the Western Front by the autumn.

Although by the end of 1917 Germany had defeated and secured peace with Tsarist Russia, Serbia, and Romania, it failed to capitalize on its victories by moving enough troops from the east to the west. Serbian forces had repelled the Austro-Hungarian invasion, but the armies of Serbia and Romania were handily routed by the Germany Army, and the resources of those countries were being exploited to supply the Central Powers. The Germans transported Vladimir Lenin from Switzerland to Russia, where he led the Bolshevik revolution that ended the Tsar’s reign. Weeks later, Lenin signed a peace decree, proposing Russia’s immediate, unilateral withdrawal from the war. The Central Powers and Soviet Russia met at Brest-Litovsk to work out terms in December. When Soviet representatives initially refused to cede the territory demanded by the Germans, Quartermaster General Ludendorff re-mobilized the army and sent German ships into the icy Gulf of Finland to take Petrograd. The Russians returned to the negotiating table and ceded more territory than the Germans initially demanded.

Out of fear that Lenin would retake the lost territory, Ludendorff kept over a million German soldiers in the east. Months later, in March 1918, German troops on the Western Front carried out a last-ditch offensive to punch through the Allied lines and throw the British Expeditionary Force against the Channel. The German Army advanced to within 56 miles of Paris. The French and British leadership made contingency plans for the collapse of the French Army and the evacuation of the British off the Continent. The German Army, however, suffered over 600,000 casualties in three months of fighting. Due to insufficient manpower and resources, the Germans could not hold the territory they gained. By August, English, French and American forces pushed the Germans back to the lines that existed before the offensive. If Ludendorff had moved more troops to the Western Front, the Germany Army might have brought France to its knees before enough Americans arrived to change the war’s outcome.

After the initial operation failed to produce victory in the spring of 1918, Ludendorff persisted in offensives that wasted German lives without strengthening Germany’s position or materially weakening the Allied armies. Each month from March 1918 to June 1918, Germany suffered about 200,000 men taken prisoner, wounded, or killed. In July alone, Germany had 420,000 men killed and 340,000 captured or missing. Ludendorff could have withdrawn his forces to the Reich's antebellum frontiers or to more defensible positions behind the front. Instead, his isolated and ineffectual offensives nearly destroyed the army. In July, another officer described him as morally and physically broken, at wit’s end. In October, Ludendorff instructed the Kaiser to task the liberals and socialists--whom Ludendorff wrongly blamed for Germany’s defeat--with negotiating an armistice on the basis of President Wilson's 16 points.

If Germany had avoided defeat in the First World War, the Reich’s imperial government would not have been succeeded by the unstable Weimar Republic, which came to an end when Hitler took power in 1933. Had the imperial government survived the war, Hitler and the Nazis would not have brought on the Second World War or carried out an industrial-scale attempt to exterminate the European Jews. More than any other event, the Jewish holocaust led white Westerners to set anti-discrimination and racial equality as their highest moral values. Consequently, if the First World War had not planted the seeds for the Nazis’ rise to power, Western elites would not have opened up their countries to the mass immigration that has injected racial discord into the West and that will ultimately reduce whites to minority status. If Germany had avoided defeat in the First World War, Western civilization would not now be dying from the mass immigration that was brought on by racial egalitarianism.

Boozing It Up on the Campaign Trail

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is Hunter S. Thompson's account of the Democratic presidential primaries in 1972 and the general-election contest between the Democratic nominee, George McGovern, and the incumbent, Richard Nixon. The book features Thompson's mordant observations on American politics, in addition to a sharp-eyed analysis of how McGovern won the Democratic nomination, only to get crushed by Nixon in November.

The Democratic primaries in 1968 and 1972 saw the party's liberal wing clash with the party establishment over the Vietnam War, which Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson had begun in 1964. In the '68 primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ for the Democratic nomination, campaigning against the war. Although as the sitting president LBJ should have walked to the nomination, McCarthy nearly beat him in New Hampshire and was polling ahead of him in Wisconsin; other candidates, including Bobby Kennedy, entered the race on an antiwar platform.  Realizing that he had lost the support of the party due to the war, Johnson eventually withdrew.

At the '68 Democratic Convention, after Bobby Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles, LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, won the nomination in a deal brokered by party insiders. Outside the convention hall, Chicago police used tear gas and truncheons against antiwar protesters, many of whom supported McCarthy's anti-war campaign; the networks carried live footage of the clash.

While the police were beating down the protesters outside, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff gave a speech in the convention hall in support of George McGovern's late-starting bid for the nomination. Ribicoff claimed that with McGovern as the nominee Chicago cops wouldn't be using Gestapo tactics against the protesters outside the hall. TV cameras didn’t record the audio of Mayor Richard J. Daley's response to Ribicoff, but his lips could be read, saying, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!"

In the general election, Republican Richard Nixon defeated Humphrey by a margin of 0.7% of the popular vote, with one-time Democrat George Wallace carrying five southern states. Had the white Democrats who defected to Wallace voted for Humphrey instead, he would have won.

In a hilarious flashback to Nixon's inauguration in January 1969, Thompson imagined the crowd showering abuse on the inaugural parade as it proceeded through D.C.:

Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandant of the Marine Corp ... and as one time Presidential candidate George Romney [Mitt Romney's father] passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting "Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!"

Three years later, the candidates vying for the Democratic Party's nomination to challenge Nixon in November 1972 included Hubert Humphrey, the unsuccessful nominee from '68; George McGovern, the liberal senator from South Dakota; and Ed Muskie, the Maine senator who'd won the support of organized labor and big city bosses like Mayor Daley. In February, during the New Hampshire primary, which Muskie was supposed to walk away with, Thompson came out as a strong supporter of McGovern, who was then a dark horse candidate. McGovern had opposed the Vietnam War from the start (although he had grudgingly voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964). He supported amnesty for draft dodgers and campaigned as an anti-politician who said what he believed rather than what served his political interests. To the consternation of party bigwigs, McGovern established himself as a serious contender for the nomination by nearly beating Muskie in New Hampshire and easily winning Wisconsin.

Thompson hated Muskie and the party establishment that he represented. During the Florida primary, Thompson gave his Muskie press pass to a drunk, acid-fried jailbird, the Boohoo, who used Thompson's credentials to enter the chartered train that carried Muskie on a whistle-stop tour to Miami. When Muskie gave a speech from the balcony of the caboose in Miami, the Boohoo pulled on Muskie’s leg and shouted for the "old fart" to go inside and get him another gin. The Muskie campaign revoked Thompson's press pass in retaliation for the Boohoo incident.

Thompson said that Muskie sounded like he had spent decades trying to overcome a speech impediment only to end up talking like someone in a narcotic stupor. On first hearing a Muskie radio spot, Thompson thought it was a new Cheech & Chong record. He wrote in Rolling Stone that Muskie was secretly addicted to ibogaine, a hallucinogen that's used in African spiritual rites. He was amused when this baseless claim was taken seriously by other journalists.

Because of Thompson's enthusiasm for intoxicating drugs and his hatred of the political establishment, he felt like a foreigner in his native country. But he realized that this "sense of doomed alienation on your own turf is nothing new." He opened the chapter on the California primary by quoting a 15th-century poem in which Francois Villon said, "In my own country I am in a far-off land / I am strong but I have no force or power." Thompson had used the same poem as the epigraph for Hell's Angels, which dealt with a chapter of the  motorcycle gang that Thompson shadowed for a year. According to Thompson, motorcycle outlaws are socially useless losers who "make good copy" only because of their uncontrollable propensities toward rape, violence, and mayhem. But I think Thompson respected the outlaw's independence, however stupid and impulsive he is. At least while he is at large, the outlaw is the state's equal, not its subject. He recognizes no authority that limits his freedom of action.

Thompson drank a lot on the campaign trail, but the booze didn't cloud his account of the candidates' election strategies. It didn't get him arrested for DUI either, although a lot of his drinking took place behind the wheel. When he moved to D.C. in December 1971 to cover the campaign, he got half drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey on the drive from Chicago to Altoona. (28). Later he drove a rented sports car from Boston to New Hampshire for the February primary, with "a glass of iced Wild Turkey spilling onto [his] lap on every turn." (58). At the smorgasbord lunch for the few journalists covering McGovern during the New Hampshire primary, he had three Budweisers. After McGovern sewed up the nomination in Miami, Thompson drank himself into a mean-drunk stupor and swam in the ocean, where a rip-tide swept him out to sea. (318). In May, on visiting McGovern's original campaign headquarters in D.C., he picked up some Ballantine ale at the liquor store next door; the clerk was willing to charge it to McGovern's campaign but Thompson paid anyway. (407). Before sitting down to write his piece on the Republican convention in Miami, he picked up two six packs of Ballantine ale at a beachside shop. (337). He finished the book’s final chapter during an all-nighter at the Seal Rock Inn in San Francisco, drinking Wild Turkey and coffee and smoking short Jamaican cigars, with the Allman Brothers' "Mountain Jam" blasting out of four speakers hung from the ceiling. (503).

By the time Nixon trounced McGovern in the general election, winning 48 of 50 states, Thompson was exhausted from the campaign but also hopelessly hooked on politics. He said he would definitely cover the 1976 presidential election, and he was going to look into trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate from Colorado. He did neither.

On the book’s final page, Thompson described coming across a McDonald's advertisement that featured inspirational remarks about persistence. Without it, the ad claimed, talent, genius, and education were useless. Thompson mocked this message. After discussing it with McGovern's campaign director on the phone he headed out to a bar called the Loser's Club. Thus the book ended. The ending struck me as a statement that Thompson had given up on influencing American politics. Nixon's reelection also may have caused him to give up any ambition of writing serious books. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 marked the end of his peak period. Between 1960 and 1974, he had written four major pieces of literature that were as funny as Mark Twain's best stuff; in the three decades of his life that followed, he produced nothing of comparable quality.

When Every Creature Shall Be Purified

Even after mastering theology, medicine, and law, Dr. Faustus remained dissatisfied with his limited understanding of the world. Demonology offered him a means of extending his knowledge. He sold his soul to Lucifer in return for having the demon Mephistophilis at his service for a term of 20 years. In  Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the first use Faustus makes of  Mephistophilis is to ask where hell is. In response, Mephistophilis offers a striking image of Armageddon, in which every creature will be purged of evil and all of existence apart from heaven will be hell.

FAUSTUS. First will I question with thee about hell. Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

MEPHIST. Under the heavens. 

FAUSTUS. Ay, but whereabout? 

MEPHIST. Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortur'd and remain for ever:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd 
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be:
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

FAUSTUS. Come, I think hell's a fable. 

MEPHIST. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

Labor Force Participation Rate Keeps Dropping

The drop in the unemployment rate to 8.3% in January occurred only because the Bureau of Labor Statistics removed 1.2 million people from the labor force. The adult civilian population increased 1.69 million, to 242.27 million in January, but the labor force grew by only 508,000, to 154.39 million, and the number employed increased by 847,000, to 141.637 million. How can unemployment go down when the adult civilian population grows more than the number of people who are actually employed?  By excluding 1.2 million people from the labor force, so that they aren't counted as unemployed even though they're jobless. The labor force participate rate, which is the percentage of the civilian non-institutional population that is either employed or actively looking for work, has hit a 30-year low at 63.7% (154.39/242.27).

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

It's remarkable that the non-institutional population grew by over 1.5 million people in January. How long are increases in electricity and food production going to keep up with population growth, which is almost entirely driven by immigration?

Will a False-Flag Attack Be Used to Justify War Against Iran?

Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if Israel or the United States strike its suspected nuclear-weapons sites. About a fifth of world-traded oil (17.3 million barrels per day) gets shipped through the strait. By closing it Iran could drive up oil prices and perhaps send the American economy back into recession. Iran hopes its threat will deter the Obama administration from joining with or authorizing Israeli military strikes against Iran.

The two aircraft carriers that the United States already had sent to the strait were recently joined by the U.S.S. Enterprise, which is the oldest carrier in the fleet and due to be decommissioned next year. Cynics have pointed out that one reason America would put an old carrier in harm's way is to manufacture a casus belli that will lead the American public to support war against Iran. Israel could use its submarines to sink the Enterprise; the U.S. and Israel could then blame the attack on Iran; the media would pass the charge on and the gullible public would accept it unthinkingly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufdw21ltc-8&feature=player_embedded


This may sound outlandish but remember that the Bush administration concocted a false justification for our second war against Iraq. Iraq wasn't developing WMDs, it had no connection with the 9-11 attacks, and it posed no threat to the U.S. If and when America strikes Iran, there probably won't be any better justification than there was for the Iraq war.

Israel's False-Flag Operations Against Iran

According to leaked CIA memos, Israel began false-flag operations against Iran during the second term of George W. Bush. Israeli agents used American dollars and passports when they offered assistance to Jundalla, a terrorist group that has killed Iranian officials and civilians. Jundallah wants independence from Iran because its followers are Sunni and the Iranian government is Shiite. The purpose of the Israeli operation was to create the perception in Tehran that America is bankrolling a separatist group that is trying to break the country up.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/01/13/false_flag?page=full

If Great Britain wanted to create hostilities between the United States and Canada, it might try mislead Ottawa into believing that Washington was arming militant separatists who wanted to gain sovereignty for Quebec. Britain could create this perception if British agents who were disguised as American operatives offered Quebecois militants arms and money. If Washington learned of an operation like that, it would be less likely to cooperate with Britain; it might even temporarily recall its ambassador or suspend diplomatic ties. But Washington had no public response when the CIA learned of Israel's false-flag operations against Iran. America gives Israel over $2 billion in aid every year.

Western Civilization Commits Suicide

In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson analyzes alternate-history scenarios to explore whether the European powers made good decisions during the First World War. He argues that Great Britain would have been better off if it stayed out of the war. Germany did not want to dominate the Continent like a 20th-century Napoleon. Rather, its prewar aims were limited to neutralizing the threat posed by France and Russia and establishing a customs union little different from today’s E.U. A neutral Britain would have not have lost 700,000 men or spent itself into debt servitude; it would have emerged from the war with sufficient wealth to keep the British Empire intact and influence the Continental powers. In the actual event Britain became dependent on American loans, and the principle of self-determination underlying the postwar peace led to the breakup of the British Empire.

Ferguson argues that if Britain had made that it would fight with France instead of equivocating after the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by a Serb nationalist, Germany would have forced Austria to moderate its demands against Serbia, which in turn would have averted the calamitous chain reaction in which Austria's military mobilization against Serbia led to Russia's mobilization against Austria, which in turn led to Continent-wide conflagration when France refused Germany's request to commit to remaining neutral in the conflict. On the other hand, if Britain had stayed out of the war when war came, Germany could secured victory, which would have led to the establishment of a customs union little different from the European Union.

It is remarkable that the Triple Entente powers (Britain, France, Russia) were unable to defeat the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) when one considers the Triple Entente's pronounced superiority in terms of economic resources and population. Before the war began in 1914, the combined armies of the Triple Entente numbered over 5.7 m men, while the armies of the Central Powers numbered only 3.48 million. In 1914, the Triple Entente powers, including the British Empire, had a combined population of 656 m; they called up a total of 32 m men to fight. The Central Powers had a combined population of 144 m and called up about 25 m to fight. The combined national income of Russia, France and the British Empire was 60% greater than that of the Central Powers.

Given these gross disparities, how did the Central Powers defeat Russia, advance to within 40 kilometers of Paris, and avoid decisive defeat? The answer Ferguson gives is the tactical superiority of the German army and the "net body count": the Germans permanently incapacitated more French, Russian, and English soldiers than the Germans themselves lost. The Central Powers killed 5.4 million men fighting for the Triple Entente powers and their Allies, as against just over 4 million men who died fighting for the Central Powers. A similar net body count held for prisoners of war, with the Central Powers capturing between 3.8 and 5.1 million prisoners and the Triple Entente capturing 3.7 million.

Why did the Germans seek an armistice in October 1918 if their army was superior? According to Ferguson, Generalquartermaster Erich Ludendorff suffered  a nervous breakdown after his spring offensive, Operation Michael, failed to destroy the British and French armies. At that point, Ludendorff should have offered to restore Belgian independence in return for a negotiated peace, but he continued to make smaller offensives that cost lives without improving Germany’s position. Then there were only 325,000 American soldiers in France. British and French leaders believed Germany might still take Paris. After Amiens, instead of offering the Kaiser his resignation and publicly admitting that the German army had been defeated, Ludendorff should have withdrawn to the existing Germany frontiers while fighting a rearguard action. The net body count on the Western Front had swung against the Germans from July to September 1918, but it swung back in their favor in October 1918, when mass surrenders eased and German soldiers regained the will to fight. If Luddendorff had not hastily sought an armistice due to loss of nerve in October 1918, the Germans could have won a negotiated peace rather than an armistice in which the Allied Powers were able to dictate terms.