Invite Russia to Join NATO

The problem with U.S. foreign policy is that we have no collective memory. The failures in Iraq and especially Afghanistan were evidence of that. Now, a war in eastern Europe came into the news like a tropical storm and newscasters are already impatient that it  has dragged on for a week. Basically, we do not know what it is like to harbor a 1000-year grudge. And that informs our weakness regarding China whose gerontocracy executes petty criminals in order to harvest their organs. China has a 300-year plan and the people who formulated it intend to see it through.

Old times there are not forgotten.
Saints Cyril and Basil brought Roman religion.
Alexander Nevsky defeated German invaders.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we Americans think that whatever the situation was in 1990 was set eternally even backward in time. We toss out proper nouns like “France” and “Germany” that obscure the histories of Burgundy and Champagne, Saxony and Swabia and a hundred other locations which themselves were only the places where nomads ceased wandering. Andulsia in Spain was the new home of Germanic Vandals (Vandalusia) and even today, in Spanish, your brother and sister are not rooted in the Latin (frater and soros) but hermano and hermana: your Germans. So, as much as I enjoyed sharing Yule Brenner as Taras Bulba with my Ukrainian chums in junior high school, I have to ask: What makes the Ukraine a nation? And what makes it worth killing and dying for? 

 

The extension of Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries

The long and deep truth is that Russia faces West because the East has little to offer, except stunning landscapes, Mongols and Tartars. When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, Moscow became the Third Rome. Peter the Great was a welcomed visitor in England (which was not yet Great Britain or the United Kingdom). He brought savants of all kinds, (Leonhard Euler for one) from Europe to his new capital. That continued in the 19^th century. Friedrich Georg Struve of the Pulkovo Observatory also went by his Russian name: Vasily Yakovich Struve. That trans-national association continued even when another Struve was in charge of the McDonald Observatory in Texas. 

The Communist Revolution changed the relationship between Russia and the West. They set themselves apart as the enemies of capitalism and were not surprised when the UK and USA invaded. To get out of World War I, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ceding the Ukraine and the Baltic States. That was superseded by the Versailles Treaty, though Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland became recognized (by the Allies) as independent nations. Poland became a nation (again). Czecho-Slovakia and Jugoslavia were created from the Austrian empire. (They broke apart after 1990 because they had no reason to be unified.) Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria had fascist or pro-Nazi governments. Hungary sent troops into Russia alongside the German invaders. With the defeat of Germany, Russia protected itself with a wall of puppet states. 

Borders are fluid.
Left to Right: 1914, 1942, 1945

 

In response, the USA and the UK created NATO, which, oddly enough included Turkey. Not bordering the North Atlantic, Turkey had been an ally of Germany and then technically neutral until August 1944, finally declaring war on Germany only on 23 February 1945. During the Cold War, the USA placed Jupiter missiles in Turkey. In response the USSR put missiles in Cuba. And America was outraged. 

 

It is important not to fall in to moral relativism or equivalency. It makes a difference who rules. Liberal democracy means free trade and free minds. The Ukraine was a relatively benign place once the Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych was removed by the Revolution of Dignity. Russia has seldom been a benign place no matter who ruled. Benign neglect was the best that the Romanov tsars could deliver. 

 

In George Orwell’s 1984, the point is made that the incessant three-way wars are not intended for conquest or even victory, but as excuses to terrorize their own peoples into obedience. As O’Brien says to Winston Smith: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” When Donald Trump was President, he was friends with Vladimir Putin and China was the enemy with virus bioweapons. I did not vote for Trump, but I knew that if Hillary Clinton were elected, Russia would become the new enemy and we would be friends with China. 

Russia has nothing to lose.

It just seems to me that the war in the Ukraine could have been avoided. Russia did not want the Ukraine to join NATO. That is easy to understand. One solution could have been to bring Russia into NATO. Open Russia to the West. It is really all they ever wanted.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Sergei Magnitsky 

War is Good for Absolutely Nothin’! 

Book Review: The Second World Wars by Victor Hanson 

Reflections on Haldeman’s “Forever War” 

Brian Krebs’ Spam Nation 

 

 

Armistice Day

“On November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front in France suffered more than thirty-five hundred casualties, although it had been known unofficially for two days that the fighting would end that day and known with absolute certainty as of 5 o’clock that morning that it would end at 11 a.m.” (Army Times 10 November 2017 here.) 

“In particular, the Americans took heavy casualties on the last day of the war. This was because their commander, General John Pershing, believed that the Germans had to be severely defeated at a military level to effectively ‘teach them a lesson’. Pershing saw the terms of the Armistice as being soft on the Germans. Therefore, he supported those commanders who wanted to be pro-active in attacking German positions – even though he knew that an Armistice had been signed. In particular, the Americans suffered heavy casualties attempting to cross the River Meuse on the night of the 10th/11th with the US Marines taking over 1,100 casualties alone. However, if they had waited until 11.00, they could have crossed the river unhindered and with no casualties. The 89th US Division was ordered to attack and take the town of Stenay on the morning of November 11th. Stenay was the last town captured on the Western Front but at a cost of 300 casualties.”   https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-one/november-11th-1918/

“The Germans finally yielded and signed the armistice at 5:10 on the morning of the eleventh, backed up officially to 5 a.m. and to take effect within Foch’s deadline: the eleventh month, eleventh day, eleventh hour of 1918. Pershing’s postwar claim that he had had no official knowledge of the impending armistice before being informed by Foch’s headquarters at 6 a.m. was disingenuous. The moment when the fighting would cease had been clear from the time Foch handed Erzberger the deadline, information to which Pershing was privy. On the evening of November 10 and through that night, news of the impending end was repeatedly affirmed from radio transmissions received at Pershing’s AEF headquarters in Chaumont.”

[Editor’s note: This piece was first published by MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History] – Army Times 10 November 2017 here. 

And they called it the war to end all wars.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Choose Your Virtues

Soldiers of Peace

Armies Without Weapons

Peace is More Powerful

Why I Served

General Henri Guisan and Swiss Neutrality

Switzerland was surrounded and divided. Germany had annexed Austria. Italy was Germany’s ally. France had fallen. Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece also fell. Many Swiss were aligned to the German Nazi party. About 12,000 Germans of military age were in Switzerland in 1941; and they were organized under the German High Command. Germans and their agents carried out acts of sabotage. (Fifteen Swiss and two foreigners were executed for their crimes.) Others adopted an unsurprising and seemingly realistic and pragmatic attitude, accepting Germany’s domination of Europe. The central government of Switzerland was granted emergency powers to make laws without legislation. Any criticism of Germany by any newspaper was considered “unneutral conduct.” Independent journalism ceased.

  

Spying for Peace: General Guisan and Swiss Neutrality
by Jon Kimche (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961). 

The meaning of “neutrality” evolved over 400 years. The oldest and easiest definition is that a state (and they were mostly small) did not take sides in a dispute between two other states. In the 16^thcentury, the standard was not actively helping one side or the other. By the 18^thcentury, it was merely being inactive. (Consider the inactions of Spain and France in the early years of our War for Independence, despite their granting various helps or not enacting hindrances to our conduct.) By 1899, the Hague Conference, which was reconvened in 1915, set 47 articles of neutrality. (The Hague and Geneva Conventions are archived at the Yale Law School’s “Avalon Project” here.) The rules included protections for non-combatants and civilians in general.

Gen. Henri Guisan wanted those rules suspended. All male Swiss citizens age 20 to 60 served in their armed forces (and still do). And they were mobilized to meet the German threat. Eventually, many were released back to civilian life, but all remained available. Meanwhile, over four years, from 1939 to 1943, Gen. Guisan issued a series of orders to create, first, a line of defense facing Germany, and then, ultimately, an interior “redoubt” (reduit), a fortified central command in the middle of Switzerland, which could hold out against the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. Tunnels and bridges were armed to collapse, sealing the center of the nation. 

Gen. Guisan understood that however it was defined Switzerland's neutrality would be meaningless--in fact, it would be impossible--without Swiss independence.  Therefore, on July 25, 1940, he addressed his officers in speech known as the Rütli Rapport. Nascent nationalism in the 18th century established a historiography to explain Rütli as the site of the first Swiss Confederation. The Rütlischwur (lit: Rütli Swear = the Oath of Rütli) brought the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden into a common league traditionally dated to 1307. It was also associated with the legend of Wilhelm Tell, certainly as told by Friedrich Schiller.

"Everywhere, where the order is to hold, it is the duty of conscience of each fighter, even if he depends on himself alone, to fight at his assigned position. The riflemen, if overtaken or surrounded, fight in their position until no more ammunition exists. The cold steel is next. ... The machine-gunners, the cannoneers of heavy weapons, the artillerymen, if in the bunker or on the field, do not abandon or destroy their weapons, or allow the enemy to seize them. Then the crews fight further like riflemen. As long as a man has another cartridge or hand weapon to use, he does not yield. " -- from General Henri Guisan's order to Swiss troops, July 25, 1940. (http://www.swissworld.org) 

Germany held off. On the one hand, obviously, Switzerland would be a tough nut to crack. This is a nation of soldiers who hold shooting contests for fun and prizes, firing everything from crossbows to the most modern sniper rifles. On the other hand, Germany’s own fifth column assured them that rather than a tough nut, Switzerland was a ripe fruit, ready to fall into their hands. 

"Swiss Shooting Thaler"
commemorative coin
1872 Shooting Festival Zuerich
(Some local issues are rare,
but there is no shortage of the kind.)
Civitas Galleries, Calgary.

Then came Allen Dulles. For Dulles, espionage and counter-espionage were more important than guns. By 1943,. Hitler had lost the confidence of his military command and an agent known as “Viking Line” provided intelligence to the Swiss, and through them to the Allies. As Victor Davis Hanson argued in The Second World Wars this was not a simple matter of Three of Us versus Three of Them. Some Germans held back-channel communications with the USSR, the UK, and the USA. In Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito, acting in accordance with Stalin’s instructions, was willing to throw in with the Germans in order to prevent an Allied landing across the Adriatic. Heinrich Himmler’s SS was willing to write off most of Italy, if they could hold the Alps as the ramparts of Festung Europa. To that end German agents in Switzerland negotiated through Swiss contacts with the Americans and British. Eventually, the American point of view was made clear and the German army in Italy surrendered unconditionally. Switzerland was safe and secure.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Second World Wars

2LT Frances Y. Slanger: American Nightingale

Building a Team in Fact and Fiction

World War Two Sweetheart Dance (2019)

World War Two Sweetheart Dance (2017)

Chimes of Freedom

Flashing for the warrior whose strength is not to fight.
Flashing for the refugee on the unarmed road of flight.

And for each and every underdog solider in the night.
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Full lyrics on Bob Dylan dot com. 
Bruce Springsteen sings it in East Berlin 1988.
Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Youssour N'Dour Amnesty International 1988

Previously on Necessary Facts
A Century of May Days
Armies without Weapons
Peace is More Powerful
Soldiers of Peace
Happy May Day (2015)

Soldiers of Peace

The military teaches the way of peace, said Paul K. Chappell, because they praise in public and reprimand in private. I heard Paul K. Chappell interviewed on an KERA’s “Think” with Krys Boyd, on March 20, 2018. A West Point graduate, Chappell left the Army as a captain and now works for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. I bought two copies of his book, Soldiers of Peace, and gave one to the director of our state guard officer candidate school. I finished reading it this morning. Overall, it was easy to find much to disagree with but Chappell argues well for finding other solutions to our social problems.

Chappell repeats his claims, which begin (easily enough) with the observation that 200 years ago, slavery was accepted and women could neither vote nor own property. But here we are today. So, what about us now will seem short-sighted to people 200 years in the future? Chappell calls his program “peace literacy.” It is a path, a way of life, not a formula or a checklist. Peace literacy includes empathetic listening, respect, integrity, and selfless service. Peace literacy depends on knowing how to calm yourself so that you can calm others. All of this takes discipline.

Soldiers of Peace: How to Wield the Weapon 

of Nonviolence with Maximum Force 

by Paul K. Chappell, 

Prospecta Press, 2017; 272 pages; $16.  

Chappell denies moral relativism and epistemological subjectivism. He says that the truth exists and we can know it. He warns against romanticizing the past, and even against romanticizing nonviolence. He calls himself a realist, and differentiates that from the common “realism” that is only cynicism. It is not surprising that he repeatedly cites Socrates, Lao-tze, Gandhi, and King. I did find it curious that he echoed Ayn Rand (though Rand is not cited anywhere). Rand found the basis for morality in our mortality. She posited an indestructible robot and explained that it could have no values. Chappell makes exactly the same argument. Like Rand, Chappell points out that humans have no instinctive, automatic modes of survival. Oak trees and caterpillars, he says, have no need for mentors. We do. And he provides many. Among them are Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the heroes of the Iliad, and Lt. Gen. John Schofield, the superintendent of West Point.

I never learned anywhere else that one impetus for Rosa Parks to resist segregation on the city bus line was her experience with the integrated transports at Maxwell Air Force Base where she and her husband both worked. In fact, Chappell says (at least twice) that his mother yelled at him when he announced that he was leaving the military because nowhere else in her world could a mixed race (African-American/Asian) person be treated fairly.

Chappell also speaks well of the discipline of martial arts that teaches respect for one’s opponent as the path to avoiding conflict in the first place. Contrasting that, he notes that during World War I, in the mad charges from the trenches, cruel officers were sometimes shot in the back. In the military, everyone is armed and trained to kill, so the social formalities reinforce respect.

It is salient that the military succeeds by training. Chappell cites Julius Caesar who recorded that the Gauls, Celts, and Germans made fun of the small stature of the Romans—until the battle was engaged. And in the military, failures in the field are traced back to failures of training. Learning the literacy of peace requires deep and extensive training, of course. And Chappell and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation provide such classes (here) though he says nothing about them in this book. (His own website is here.)

Toward the close, Chappell says that the best use of the military would be for humanitarian aid and disaster relief. As killing the enemy still has not worked out very well, that seems hard to argue with.

Easier to take exception to are the very many glittering generalities, glib statements, easy oversights, and incomplete examinations that litter the book as Chappell wanders over the landscape of his personal life.

Just to take one point, the author asserts that women in ancient Athens were oppressed. It is the liberal, enlightened view. Women could not vote. They could not own property. Indeed, they were property. But so was everyone else. It is famous that the philosopher Diogenes was one of the very many who were captured on some voyage or on some road and were sold into slavery. Outside of your city, you had no protection. Even within the city, rights as we know them did not exist. Socrates is the most famous case in point, but not unique. On the other hand, Chappell at length cites Greek myths and Athenian dramas in which women were the driving force, the wise speaker, the effective agent. The god of war, Ares, was less powerful than Athena, the goddess of wisdom (and strategy). Beginning with the assumption that he seeks to prove, Chappell cannot reconcile that against the civil status of women.

A dozen other problems run through the book, repeated and restated, cast as assertions and reused as proofs.

In balance, Soldiers of Peace provides cogent reasons to re-examine our assumptions about war and peace. Chappell’s thesis includes the minor premise that nonviolence is not peace. Pacifism will not end war. Rage is an expression of pain, not of strength. Perhaps the most arguable and yet insightful assertion is that the threats to peace include disparities in wealth, rapid population growth in the cities, and climate change. Those threats were identified by the U.S. Army Sustainability Report (2009). “When the U.S. Army and the Occupy movement agree on something, I think we should pay attention.” 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Peace is More Powerful 

Armies Without Weapons

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

Do You Know Your Military? 

A Partial Index of Ideas within this Blog

I write about whatever interests me.  Below is a representative sample from the 454 previous posts.

Language and Thought

• Art as Ordered Narrative
• Language and Thought: As You Think, So You Speak 
• Linguistics Debate: What Colors are Your Rainbow? 
• The Living Fish Swims Under Water 
• Indian English: Totally Legend Like Anything  
• Akkadian Roots of Modern Semitic Languages  
• Sandor Kőrösi Csoma 
• Readability is the Only Metric  
• Not Less Grammar Errors  

Philosophy

• Understanding Objectivism  
• The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 
• Gregory M. Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths  
• More on Necessary Factual Truths  
• Harriman’s Logical Leap  
• Harriman’s Logical Leap AlmostMakes It  
• Browne on Kuhn 
• The Validity of the Senses  
• Imaginary Numbers are Real; Pegasus is Not  
• The Problem of Induction: Karl Popper and His Enemies  
• Knowledge Maps  
• George Boole’s Laws of Thought  
• Teaching Ethics to Student Engineers  
• Choose Your Virtues
• Morality and Ethics  
• Bringing Philosophy to Athens: Aspasia of Miletos  
• Hypatia of Alexandria  

Computers and Computer Security

• Documentation is Specification
• When Old Technologies Were New  
• Fortune Cookie in Hex Code 
• John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed 
• BASIC: Turing’s Truth 
• A Successful Imitation of AlanTuring  
• Turing’s Cathedral  
• Claude M. Watson (1922-2013) 
• Hackers Heart Small Talk 
• Passwords  
• Brian Krebs’s Spam Nation  
• The Code Book  
• BSides Austin 2016  
• BSides Austin 2015  
• LASCON 2014  
• Bleeding Data

Military 

• Your State Defense Force  
• State Guard Song: Texans ServingTexans 
• Leadership
• Primary Leadership Training 
• Texas State Guard BasicNon-Commissioned Officer Training 
• Hurricane Tejas  
• Away from the Keyboard 
• Challenge Coins  
• The Fourth Star  
• We Were Soldiers Once – and Young
• Love My Rifle More Than You
• Plenty of Time When We Get Home
• Atheists in Foxholes  
• Armies Without Weapons  
• Peace is More Powerful

Criminology and Protective Services

• The Fallibility of Fingerprinting  
• Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security  
• Laissez Faire Criminology 
• Integrating Criminologies  
• Criminalistics: Science or Folkway?  
• A Forensics Bibliography  
• Police in a Global Culture  
• Alternatives to Prison (Part 3)  
• Active Defense and Passive Aggression (Part 2) 

Scientific Fraud and Research Misconduct

• Misconduct in Scientific Research  
• 20% of Scientists are Crooks  
• Four Books about Bad Science  
• Science Fairs and Science Frauds  
• Another Case of Fraud in University Research
• Retraction Watch

Science and Mathematics

• The Unit Circle  
• Happy Pi Day of the Century  
• Visualizing Complex Data  
• The Man Who Loved Only Numbers   
• The Map that Changed the World  
• Epigenetics  
• Is Physics a Science?  
• BioBash Replicates Success  
• Biohackers  
• U.S. Patent Law Does Not Add Up  
• Teaching Ethics to Engineering Students    

Nerds

• Where All the Children are Above Average  
• She’s Such a Geek!   
• World Peace Through Massive Retaliation   
• Nerd Nation 
• Nerd Nation 4.5   
• Big Bang Theory vs. Modern Philosophy
• Genius by James Gleick  
• Feynman’sRainbow  

Science Fiction 

• Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard Serenity  
• Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with ScienceFiction  
• Monsters from the Id  
• From Texas to the Moon with John Leonard Riddell  
• The Girl Who Owned a City  
• Star Trek: Not Too Far Beyond  
• The Ferengi Rules of Commerce  

Industrial Design, Consumerism, Austin Culture

• The Genius of Design  
• Start the Presses  
• Objectified  
• Raymond Loewy  
• Creature Comforts Show No End to History
• Art & Copy
• Sunday at the Co-Op  
• Awesome Austin Foods  
• Brain Juice for Austin and the World 
• Hot Dang Vegie Burger Mix
• Sweet Deal: Epic Honey
• Epic Meat Bars
• Great Bean Chocolate
• Kalliope 
• Images from SXSW 2013 
• Formulas for Success  

Numismatics and Economics

• Numismatics informs Economics  
• Numismatics: the Standard of Proof in Economics 

• Money is Speech
• Money as Press and Speech
• Money as Living History
• The Art of Finance 
• Sacred Silver from the Roof of the World  

• Forgery and Fraud in Numismatics  
• William Sheldon: Psychologist, Numismatist, Thief

• The Remarkable Story of Risk
• To Make Money 
• Gresham’s Conjecture 
• Money as a Crusoe Concept 
• Debt: the Seed of Civilization  
• The Success of the WEIRD People  

MISCELLANEOUS

• Thank You Notes
• Before Email
• Reflections on the Passing of a Comrade
• The First Dagny

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Most Popular Page Views
Ten Most Popular Page Views
100,000 Pageviews
Most Popular Necessary Facts

Plenty of Time When We Get Home

The United States of American does not take care of our wounded warriors. We do not adequately acknowledge our combat veterans. We do little enough to reward them with tangible evidence of thanks. We are getting better, but it has been a long, hard struggle for the soldiers. To say that conditions and services and awareness are better now than they were in 2005 is to ignore 5,259,600 minutes of pain, uncertainty, confusion, loss, and frustration for 2.5 million soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen (citation here).

Sergeant Brian McGough took shrapnel to his head from a land mine. The Army found him unfit for duty, appropriately enough, and then shoved papers in front of him to sign. He was told that treatments were available, or not available. He was ordered to report to places he could not find for counseling that denied his problems. The searing headaches, the depression, and the mental confusion all left him unable to even read the envelopes in which the bills arrived. Fortunately, he had Sergeant Kayla Williams.

Plenty of Time When We Get Home:
Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War
by Kayla Williams (W. W. Norton, 2014).

They had met in Iraq. He was one of the few soldiers who did not harass her. It turned out that they shared a lot of opinions. Williams enlisted after college. McGough was a lifer, but it took him longer than most to make sergeant because of his attitude. Then he was caught by an IED, severely wounded, and sent home.  After she was released from duty and also back home, Williams looked him up to see how he was doing, and was shocked at what she found.

This is their story. It reads like a novel with a plot and theme, action and dialog. It is also at once a confession, a political statement, and a reflection.

We overheard people on their cell phones: “My latte took ten minutes at Star Bucks. This is the worst day of my life!” Of course we understood that people were exaggerating—but they seemed wrapped up in the most meaningless, trivial crap. The news was full of coverage of celebrities, while what still mattered to me and Brian—stories about American troops getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—was relegated to the little ticker at the bottom of the screen.” (p. 109)

Post traumatic stress syndrome is a normal reaction to abnormal events. McGough eventually healed enough to join a fire department. Williams became an EMT. They were instructed to call on the counselors for their departments because dealing with horrible events would be expected. But those departments had counselors. The Army’s response was “suck it up and drive on.”

As individuals, we may not be reducible. How McGough and Williams pulled through—pulled each other through, eventually; first she him, and then the roles were reversed—may not be repeatable. Their individuality is their own hallmark, their coat-of-arms.

“While many people automatically assumed that we would support John McCain for president since he was a decorated war veteran, his Senate record was actually not that strong on veterans’ issues. (http://www.veteranreportcard.org/reportcard.pdf) He had never supported the Post-9/11 GI Bill, a bipartisan effort to increase college benefits for today’s veterans, and wasn’t a strong supporter of increased funding for the VA. Conversely, Senator Obama’s record was solid. “ (p. 185)

But they are not an anomaly. Millions of other people, many of them couples and families, went down the same roads, with similar (though differing) outcomes. As McGough and Williams survived, endured, and overcame their problems, the Army finally got on top of its challenges. In the Appendix, Williams acknowledges the help they (finally) received from the Veterans Administration, and the Army. It is nice to hear… but you must not forget those first 1000 days, 24,000 hours, one million four hundred forty-four thousand minutes, in which McGough’s only medication was self-medication with alcohol – or the minute he put a gun to Kayla’s head. (Later, he remembered enough of it to disassemble the gun and throw the parts away.)  In that, their story is tragically all-too-statistically common. It was also statistically predictable.

We all know the cliché that the generals are always prepared to fight the previous war. For them, that was Desert Storm, horrible enough for some, but not in the huge numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan. And none of those generals had been in command during the previous harsh lesson, Viet Nam.  You can see the outcome of that on the streets of any city in America. 

Williams has disparaging words for the VFW in an oblique reference about clubs of old men who cannot perceive a woman as a combat veteran even when it is said twice plainly.  But she shares tears at receptions and dinners with Viet Nam veterans who finally have someone to talk to who knows what they went through, both during the war, and in the long, long aftermath.

Many of them [students on college campuses] had no idea, and shared common assumptions that troops were the dregs of society, who enlisted because they had no other options. Many asked me why I joined the Army, seeming to think that only dumb people and criminals enlisted. I got to challenge those assumptions with facts: today, 75 percent of young Americans don’t even qualify for the military. Most are too overweight, don’t have high school diplomas, or have criminal backgrounds. College recruiters and military recruiters are by and large targeting the same cohort—98 percent of troops have high school diplomas, compared to only 75 percent of the civilian population. (p. 167)

The story does have a happy ending. They have three children, and a dog. Williams works at the RAND Corporation. McGough takes up golf and considers college. That also underscores a counter-narrative. As destructive as war is, the overwhelming majority of veterans do re-integrate. Those who are wounded do recover with care, support, love, and guidance. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Love My Rifle More than You by Kayla Williams 

Firefighters 

Volunteering in an Emergency: What to Expect 

Locksporting 

ON SLIDESHARE

Physical Security for Data Centers 

Peace is More Powerful

Imagine a successful protest in Berlin 1943 against the Holocaust.  Between February 27 and March 6, about 200 German women stood outside a detainment center, demanding the release of their Jewish husbands.  Between March 1 and March 12, although 25 were sent to Auschwitz, about 2,000 prisoners were let go. Soon, they were picked up again, but sent to work in labor camps in Berlin and other cities where they lived out the war. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum here.

Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan (Columbia University Press, 2011, ppb 2012) grew out of a challenge. As a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she believed “back then [2006] power flows from the barrel of a gun.” What changed her mind was a challenge from the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict to prove her point.

Non-violent campaigns succeed more often.
They win compromise more often.
They fail completely less often.
(Chenoweth ICNC Webinar)

Chenoweth worked with Maria J. Stephan to gather data from every anti-government action since 1900 for reform or independence, whether violent or non-violent.  They published a paper, with only three exemplary cases, but dense with the mathematics of sociology parodied so well by Tom Lehrer (YouTube here). Nonetheless, they proved their point.  From that paper came several lectures and a book of narratives.

• International Center on Nonviolent Conflict Webinar (1hr 4min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Beep0xnonvk
• “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of  Nonviolent Conflict by Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth,” International Security, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer 2008), pp. 7–44  http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2008.33.1.7
• TEDx Boulder: September 2013 (12 minutes 33 secs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w

This new work by Chenoweth and Stephan validates earlier examinations, such as "A Force More Powerful" about peaceful resistance to modern dictatorships. 

DENMARK - LIVING WITH THE ENEMY:  By the summer of 1943, in the midst of World War II, Denmark had been occupied by German forces for more than three years. Resistance to the invaders was sporadic, mainly limited to displays of Danish cultural identity or scattered acts of sabotage. But then, provoked by German brutality, the Danes acted more boldly to resist the Nazi war machine. Mass nonviolent direct action began first with labor strikes. Then, when SS troops arrived to round up Danish Jews for deportation to the death camps, the Danes rescued their fellow citizens, ferrying most to safety in Sweden. The effort galvanized many Danes, and soon general strikes challenged German control. The Danish underground emphasized nonviolent operations. Although Denmark was not liberated until the end of the war, nonviolent resistance stymied German plans for extracting value from the occupation.  ("A Force More Powerful" from PBS here).
  

"Researchers used to say that no government could survive if just 5 percent of the population rose up against it," Chenoweth says. "Our data shows the number may be lower than that. No single campaign in that period failed after they'd achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population." She adds, "But get this: every single campaign that exceeded that 3.5 percent point was a nonviolent one. The nonviolent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaigns." – from Chenoweth’s TEDx Talk reported by Max Fisher, Washington Post, November 5, 2013 here. 

 

Non-violent campaigns (right) are more likely
to draw defections from the government
security forces.
Chenoweth ICNC Webinar.

The empirical results from Chenoweth and Stephan only validate many other narratives of successful peaceful resistance.  The American Civil Rights campaign took its lead from the independence movement in India led by Mohandas Gandhi.  That and many other stories – Chile, the Ukraine, Serbia – are told in A Force More Powerful, the premier product in a series of videos about social change through peace, produced by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. 

Confronting the Truth is another ICNC video explaining “truth and reconciliation campaigns.”  Perhaps the best known grew out of the genocide in Rwanda.  Rather than seeking punitive retribution, the commission's motive was to let the perpetrators admit their guilt and express their sorrow to the survivors.  Other commissions have worked in Peru, South Africa, East Timor, and Morocco. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Laissez Faire Criminology 

Active Defense and Passive Aggression 

Alternatives to Prison 

Money as Speech and Peacemaking