J.M. MEYER, PH.D.
  • Bio
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Research
    • Orde Wingate
    • Anthropology of Organized Violence
    • Special Forces in 20th and 21st Centuries
    • Internal Competition in Great Powers Conflict
    • Thinkery & Verse >
      • Press Coverage
      • Projects >
        • Westhusing in the House of Atreus
        • American Volunteers
        • The Priceless Slave
        • Cryptomnesia
        • Veterans' Voices
        • Thinkery and Verse
  • Contact

Gone with the wind?

5/3/2015

0 Comments

 
Here is a lousy quote from the opening scene in Gone with the Wind:
"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave...Look for it only in books for it is no more than a dream remembered... A Civilization gone with the wind."

There is a tendency in the state of Texas, and in southern literature, to imagine and fantasize about the 'Old South' as the last gasp of feudalism, feudal honor, feudal obligation, and its accompanying virtues and vices. This tendency credits the Old South with retaining special vestiges of nobility, and a connection between the earth and the people on it.

Let's try to clarify when and where feudalism existed. It was a form of politics, or social organization, that predominated in some parts of Europe, especially England, during the medieval period. It began falling to pieces in the Early Modern period, beginning with the Tudor monarchy; that is to say , it began falling apart under Henry VII. Henry VII's successor, Henry VIII, used parliamentary process to destroy the feudal lords that put his ancestors on the throne in 1066; the destruction culminated in the English Civil War, which diminished not only the feudal lords, but the monarchy as well. 

During this same time period in Early Modern England, feudal lords began severing their relationships with their serfs and vassals; the lords sought to shift away from subsistence farming so as to enter the English wool industry and conduct lucrative trade with Europe. The movement to kick the serfs off the manor and to introduce shepherding was known as the 'enclosure' movement. While it temporarily solved some debt and financial problems for the English nobility, it ultimately created a wealthy merchant class that could maximize its own benefits from European trade. Henry VII and his successors saw the new professional bourgeoisie class as a source of power that would allow them to confront their dangerous nobles. 

So the feudal system in England began collapsing in the mid 16th century, just prior to the establishment of the first English colonies in America. 

Let's look at the South. Remember, Southern legends often associate the Old South with the feudalism of Old England.

Two facts about the Southern economy undermine the notion that it was a feudal system:

First, the dominant economic activity of the south was capitalist, and it came in two forms. First, cotton dominated the economic landscape. Cotton tended to exhaust the soil, and required the opening of new lands to continue its growth. Most of this cotton was sold to Great Britain, where it was processed into cloth. Southern planters sold the remainder to northern industrial states like New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

The original southern lands--those that rested along the Atlantic, like the Carolinas and Georgia, were exhausted after generations of growing tobacco and cotton. So these states, especially after the banning of the international slave trade in 1808, specialized in breeding and exporting slaves to cotton plantations opening in Texas and in the territory belonging to the Louisiana purchase.

Now--what do these two facts tell us? Well, first, they bear no serious relationship to feudalism. In feudalism, both lord and peasant were stuck to the land, and as the land went, so they went. Land ownership was primarily a status symbol and a useful political lever; lords and peasant were judged on their ability to maintain a calm sense of order and habit despite raids, violence, and encroaching rivals. Though lands changed hands, this was viewed as ignoble, and lesser than maintaining custom and holding on to what one already had.

In the Southern United States, on the other hand, Westward expansion allowed the depletion and shuffling off of old soil, and old obligations for new frontiers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

The South was not feudal in character. Though feudalism, and more specifically, classical notions of liberty, served as a productive intellectual scaffolding for the processes that occurred on any given plantation. So did traditional morality as found in the Bible. Southerners also used a sort 'scientism' to argue for the 'naturalness' of slavery due to the perceived inferiority of people of African descent. Through Southern society looked conservative and later, after the war, became conservative, it was in fact fairly radical form of agricultural capitalism. No one had ever quite used up soil and labor the way the South did in the years leading up to the civil war. Never before had there been such a worldwide demand for cotton, which we must remember is an inedible agricultural product. Southern planters used the land to grow a product that held no nutritional value. They relied on international trade to maintain their lifestyles, and to help feed their families, their workers, and their slaves. There was nothing feudal about it. The planters were bourgeois, callous, and rich.

By some accounts, when one assesses capital in the United States in 1860, slaves accounted for more wealth than all the railroads and all the manufacturing combined. Southern states viewed the Republicans as a dual threat, both to their wealth and their way of life. Republican candidates, including Abraham Lincoln, did not even appear on state ballots in many Southern states. When Lincoln won 180 electoral votes, and virtually all of the northern states, he only obtained a plurality of the popular vote, and not a majority. Southern states were shocked and outraged, though they had astutely avoided any displays of outrage when the mere plurality favored the South in 1844, 1848, and 1856 presidential elections. 

Now, I do not mean to denigrate the south simply to raise up the northern states as a collection of model states. States both north and south refused women the right to vote. Northern states treated untrained immigrant labor as expendable. Since northern manufacturing could not compete with European manufacturing, the northern industrialists demanded tariff protections to allow them to capture the supply chain to Midwest farmers and Southern planters. 

But as Barrington Moore points out in his classic treatise, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), the North did see a short-lived union between the interests of Northern industrialists and small farmers. What allowed this alliance? In part, it was the rapid formation of the Republican party, and the party's desperate attempt to pull together disparate elements of society to win elections that would swing the balance of power towards the creation of government-sponsored infrastructures like better roads, new cut canals, and continental railroads. 

The broader Republican campaign in 1860 made the alliance between small farmers and northern industrialists quite clear: "Vote yourself a farm--vote yourself a tariff."

Tariffs and hard scrabble farms along the Ohio River are not especially romantic. But they are a superior part of the American memory to the disturbing nostalgia of some Americans for a feudal Southern society that never existed. 
0 Comments

book review: allenby--a study in greatness

5/3/2015

0 Comments

 
Wavell, Archibald. Allenby: A Study in Greatness, George G. Harrap & Co. (Vol. 1 1940; Vol. II 1943.)

 The life of Edmund Allenby, a soldier and a statesman, in many ways anticipated the trials of his first biographer, Archibald Wavell. Born of "old-rooted English stock," Allenby grew into a tall, barrel-chested young cavalry officer. He served among the first generation of officers in which attendance at Staff College, rather than purchase, ensured promotion. He loved literature, the outdoors, and hunting; his letters to his wife rarely depict warfare, but often mention nature. Allenby's first  experience in a contest of arms occurred during the Boer War of 1899-1902. He served ably, but more importantly he developed connections with the soldiers who later became the key officers of the First World War. Such connections helped ensure his promotion through the ranks. When the Great War began he immediately assumed command of a division of cavalry as a major-general. But the weight of command transformed his personality, so that an "easy-going young officer and a good-humoured squadron leader [became] a strict colonel, an irascible brigadier, and an explosive general." Out of fear and resentment, his men coined him "The Bull." The early years of the First World War cemented his reputation, as thousands of men died under Allenby's command as he bluntly executed orders from above. The year 1917 proved particularly fateful. Allenby began the year with serious losses at the Battle of Arrass, removal from the Western front, and the loss of his only son to German artillery shells; Allenby ended the year in the Middle East with the conquest of Jerusalem. The next year, he conquered Damascus. Given fresh resources and a weakened enemy, Allenby commanded one of the most decisive and efficient campaigns in the history of modern warfare as he swept up the Mediterranean coast and destroyed the Ottoman Empire. His relentless energy provided the Egyptian Expeditionary Force with the necessary momentum to decisively defeat the enemy.


 T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom gives a far more heroic portrait of Allenby than Wavell does here; in fact, Wavell goes to great lengths to temper Lawrence's praise with a sober assessment of Allenby's flaws: his zeal for rules, loyalty, and unquestioned service. Wavell writes with praise, and yet a subtle sense of irony creeps into the biography, as though Wavell no longer believes in greatness. While it lacks the humor of some of Wavell's other works, the book sustains interest as a surprisingly impersonal reflection on Wavell's views of military and civilian leadership.

Archibald Wavell (Field Marshal, Viscount, and Viceroy of India) published his two volume biography of Field Marshall Edmund Allenby in the midst of his own challenges. Wavell served under Allenby in the First World War as a liaison and a staff officer with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. As Wavell finished the first volume of the biography, he served as Commander in Chief in the Middle East, a status similar to the command Allenby once held. As Wavell finished the second volume, he held the Viceroyalty of India, a status somewhat greater than Allenby's eventual post of High Commissioner of Egypt and the Sudan.

0 Comments

lawrence in art, not lawrence in strategy

5/3/2015

0 Comments

 
Ever since Basil Liddel Hart's glowing statements on T.E. Lawrence strategic genius, Lawrence's reputation has centered on his military accomplishments, rather than his achievements in art. This is a mistake. 

Orde Wingate despised Lawrence's record as a war-leader, possibly because Wingate recognized something of his own failings in Lawrence. But Wingate also felt that Lawrence abdicated his personal responsibilities as an officer to play too much the desert warrior. There are no records of Wingate actually shooting an enemy in combat--he was too busy maintaining his supply line and keeping his troops on the march. Lawrence fired his weapon often, and preferred the emotional rush of battle to the more mundane tasks typically required of officers in combat. Lawrence's emphasis on action, in Wingate's view, was an abdication of responsibility. 

Lawrence's campaigns are often held up as a positive example of irregular warfare, and as a better way of fighting than what soldiers faced in the trenches of the First World War. Lawrence himself was not so sure that he was actually preserving life, or winning battles more efficiently. The numbers, in fact, indicate that he lost men at a higher rate than most British units that faced action on the Western front. This is not surprising. State control and industrial efficiency seems to reduce  casualties, either because men lose their willingness to die as a mere part of a 'machine' rather than as an individual warrior, or else because industrial society provides soldiers with better access to medicine and stable rations. State control also increases the number of prisoners taken, and reduces the number of prisoners slaughtered. 

British methods of warfare and 'state control' might outright reduce the 'proportion' of people who die violently. Lawrence noticed this, which explains why he heaps praise upon Allenby above and beyond any other soldier in the First World War, and why he denigrates Allenby's rival commanders not as butchers, but as unimaginative sticks-in-the-mud. 

So why does Lawrence seem attracted to desert warfare? His writings indicate that he appreciated the straightforward human practicality of 'desert' warfare. Yes, the violence in the desert was terrible, but it was coupled with a familiarity, a spirit of adventure, and a sense of honor that Lawrence never felt while working for the British military in Cairo prior to his desert campaigns. 

The Arab 'irregulars' that fought beside Lawrence risked hearth and home in an immediate way. More than one of Lawrence's fighters, in fact, saw their homes destroyed by the Turks in retaliation for joining with the Arab revolt. More than one Arab also saw his village destroyed, and his family annihilated, during the panicked Turkish retreats from Palestine and western Jordan. And so the Arabs often risked not only their lives, but their families and tribes to fight the Turks--and sometimes each other. The Arab revolt involved a type of warfare that was less organized in the sense of mass bureaucracy and written protocol, and yet no less sophisticated in its nuance and complexity. 

And so Lawrence wrestles with the following, implicit idea throughout Seven Pillars of Wisdom: He senses that the Arab way of war is more virtuous, honorable, and personally fulfilling than the sort of violence that destroyed the lives of his friends and brothers along the European Western Front. But given that Lawrence knows the superiority of British warfare for battlefield outcomes (Lawrence always suspects the British will emerge triumphant), is it morally acceptable for him to dabble in Arab nationalism and 'desert warfare'? Lawrence believes that Arabia, Syria, and Mesopotamia rightfully belong to the Arabs--but he is a student of history, and knows that even as he props up a certain brand of Arab nationalism, he is setting in motion a thousand difficulties for hundreds of extant ethnic and religious groups living in the same region.

Throughout Seven Pillars Lawrence examines his conscience, and recognizes that ultimately he has fought this war to satisfy his own peculiar appetite for violence, warfare, and chivalry. Many of his Arab friends admire him for it, but he considers himself a sham. The Arab irregulars, in Lawrence's eyes, live with the virtues of the desert; but he, their leader, merely wears the costume--he possesses the heart, but not the mind.

The Arabs who followed Lawrence died at tremendous rates--nearly sixty of Lawrence's two-hundred personal bodyguards perished within a year. Their villages burned. Their children and wives lived unprotected, and hungry. 

The European powers, on the other hand, featured stronger, centralized state governments compared with Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria-Palestine. Even on the Western and Eastern fronts, preserved a macabre sense of decorum. Yes, terrible acts took place in the First World War--murder, rape, pillaging, poison gas and vicious trench fighting. But even then, the war in Europe obeyed strange rules: the taking of prisoners, the feeding of troops, and the separation between the war-front and the home-front. 

I conclude this letter with a couple of quotes from General Archibald Wavell, a man who fought alongside Lawrence in the Palestine campaign. 
"Lawrence had many fairy godmothers at his cradle, with gifts of fearlessness, of understanding, of a love of learning, of craftsmanship, of humour, of Spartan endurance, of frugality, of selflessness. But at last came the uninvited bad fairy to spoil his enjoyment...[she left him] with the gift of self-consciousness."
 That is to say, Lawrence was too aware of who he was, and who he was not. He was British, and a bastard-born, and not of Arabia. His education positively dripped with the soaking benefits wrought from state-sanctioned security and comfort. But he fought alongside his friends as though he were an Arab prince. He never forgave himself. He loathed the Turks, and often justified his actions in the war as a chance to destroy something he loathed. In this light, Wavell viewed Lawrence as "a Hamlet who had slain his uncle neatly and efficiently at the beginning of Act II, and spent the remainder of the play in repenting his act and writing a long explanation of it to Horatio." (Wavell The Good Soldier, 1948, 59-61).

Lawrence of Arabia versus Seven Pillars of Wisdom

David Lean's film, Lawrence of Arabia was a wild act of filmmaking. In today's terms it costs very little money, but it took the lavish resources of time and energy and passion.

I want to quote a film critic, the late, great Roger Ebert on this film:
"What a bold, mad act of genius it was, to make “Lawrence of Arabia,” or even think that it could be made. In the words years later of one of its stars, Omar Sharif: “If you are the man with the money and somebody comes to you and says he wants to make a film that's four hours long, with no stars, and no women, and no love story, and not much action either, and he wants to spend a huge amount of money to go film it in the desert--what would you say?”
I think most people would say 'no.' Just like most people would refuse to follow Lawrence into Syria in 1911, before the war, much less in 1916, when the Arab revolt faced destruction along the shores of the Red Sea. But the people in our lives almost always say 'no.' That is what makes leadership, and art, and astonishing success so very rare. People say 'no,' because they are weak, and saying 'no' is easy.

And yet, people said 'yes' to making 'Lawrence of Arabia.' Perhaps it was perhaps, the sort of British thing to do, as when Lionel de Rothschild loaned Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the money to purchase the Egyptian shares of the Suez Canal.

To return to Roger Ebert:
"The impulse to make this movie was based, above all, on imagination. The story of “Lawrence” is not founded on violent battle scenes or cheap melodrama, but on David Lean's ability to imagine what it would look like to see...a speck appear...on the horizon of the desert, and slowly grow into a human being...He had to know how that would feel before he could convince himself that the project had a chance of being successful."
Lean's film ultimately cost fifteen million, a fortune at the time, and it required Peter O'Toole to "stay in character" for almost two years of filming. 

Lean rejected the original draft of the script, written by Michael Wilson, because it emphasized historical detail and political context. Lean wanted a portrait of human soul in a moment of crisis and exaltation, not a history lesson.  

Something must be said of the use of an Italian actor, a British actor and an Egyptian actor to play three of the key Arab roles. On the one hand it dangerously reminds us of the use of makeup to present stereotypes of other ethnic cultures. On the other hand, the actors, went to great lengths in their portrayals, going so far as to meeting with either their real life counterparts, or their descendants. Further, twenty-first century Hollywood would probably not insist on genuine, racially appropriate casting--but instead I suspect modern Hollywood simply would not fund the film whatsoever. I invite you all to talk about this more at another time.  

T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom rates as one of the greatest war memoirs of the 20th century. In its original published form, the memoir is filled with scores of full color portraits and wildly evocative abstract dreams that parallel the flights of fancy taken in the writing. It is a work of spiritual crisis measured through the changes of a millennium, rather than a single century.

From that epic story, David Lean carved out what is often regarded as one of the top ten films of all time. The two works are almost not recognizable side by side. The film, which is easier to comprehend, obscures Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is dense, and usually badly printed. It is an epic film, not because of its cost or its sets, but because Lawrence's character arc is as strong and as visible as a Roman arch. Lawrence's book devours a mythic feast among the bloodshed of the First World War, but Lean's film exists outside of the First World War altogether. They are two wholly different modes of art.  

Both are wonderful. Neither is a lesson for strategists. 
0 Comments

wingate and palestine

5/3/2015

0 Comments

 
      After his death, onlookers referred to Orde Wingate as a religious fanatic, an original thinker, and as a ruthless killer. Many of these charges stem from Wingate's time as the leader of the Special Night Squads. In 1938, in British Palestine, Wingate founded Jewish-British units called Special Night Squads; these units are now considered the forerunners of the modern Israeli Defense Forces. Many Israeli leaders, like Moshe Dayan, credited Wingate for inspiring Zionist leaders to adopt a more aggressive posture throughout British Palestine. None of these terms really apply to Wingate. Today, people speak of atrocities. But it is more helpful to understand what people are willing to do in the name of justice and against injustice. Wingate turned the secular Jewish partisans back to Gideon. The Special Night Squads were the formative event in the lives of some of the most important individuals in the history of Israel. No streets in Israel are named after Wavell or Dill. Some for Allenby, but most for Wingate. After Balfour, Wingate had the largest cultural impact on Israel. What did British, white, protestant, gentleman raised Orde Wingate think of the illiterate, tribal Arab farmers and shepherds? Very poorly. 

          In the years just prior to the Second World War, Wingate stumbled across an all too human problem in his own life, and came across what was a practical, if unexpected, solution. The solutions available to him depended entirely on previous life circumstances. As those solutions matured out of perceived necessity and into deliberate, planned action, their character--and the presumed character of their author--shifted, the way the sound of siren can sound different depending upon whether its vehicle is moving towards you, or moving away. 

          In 1938, Wingate became a Zionist. Nothing about his previous experiences quite forecast his sudden determination to help European Jews establish a Palestinian homeland. We, in the twenty-first century, know of events that Wingate never lived to see, and so the word Zionism tastes clear and strong in our mouths, giving off flavors either bitter or sweet. For the British, the word lacked some (though not all) of its pungency in 1938. 

          Here is the key fact to understanding Wingate's adoption of Zionism: It occurred in the company of his wife. He had sold himself as a man of action, and now had to prove it after months of relative indolence and sloth. The fallout from this impulse would bend (but not break) the Wingate marriage, and would permanently reshape their social and political interactions with their peers, followers, friends, and leaders. 
0 Comments

Wingate's environment: the second world war

5/2/2015

0 Comments

 
To understand Orde Wingate, one has to understand the stakes of war in the twentieth century. Those stakes are best understood in two measures: the first human and individualistic, and the second interstate and chaotic; the first is the most important. The stakes for individual human beings included the uncertainty of crashing governments and desecrated traditions; kings became paupers, lieutenants became generals, abject subjects became freedmen and tyrants. 

Meanwhile, the world order collapsed and reformed without any definite end in sight. It began with the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the rush of bolshevism on cold steppes and basins; Marxism, like water down a wadi, poured forth with no fertile soil to soak up its precepts. Instead it cut the earth with Leninist interpretations, followed on with deeper cuts from Stalin; soon the waters began to dry, leaving a malformed ditch of communist collapse in the region least suited to thrive from the wash of its bright ideas. 

South of Russia, the Ottoman Empire's medieval bureaucracy, like that of Russia, failed the test of the First World War. It gave way to the pencil markings of the feverish, soon to take sick British Empire, France, and their local allies; the modern map of the Middle East has retained nearly the same fragmented aspect, despite the passage of a hundred years (Anderson, 2013). 

Italy and Japan allied themselves with Britain and France in the First World War; they suffered sleights both real and imaginary. Mussolini encouraged Italian efficiency and centralized state power, but he also mobilized puffed up armies who never mastered the force they so readily projected on parade grounds and against unindustrialized African states (Taylor, 1978). 

In imperial Japan, a generation of young officers seized control of the state and outbid one another in the sentiments of aggression (Taylor, 1978). The Japanese coterie rightly understood European colonialism prevented Japanese ascendancy as the dominant regional power, and that the United States would not allow them the natural resources necessary to challenge the European holdings. As the economic noose tightened, the Japanese kicked wildly at their American and European executioners. They inflicted blows, but ultimately knocked out the stool beneath their feet, and into the noose they fell; after the war, the Americans restored the stool. Failure was followed by submission, and an eventual rebirth. 

Meanwhile, China--the most significant victim of the bloody Japanese outburst--saw its own meager attempts at fascism collapse with the post-war defeat of the Chiang-Kai Shek government; the Maoists wiped the mainland Chinese state free of American intervention. Then Mao, like Lenin and Stalin before him, thrust the same Marxists waters down a different dry wadi; the death of Mao, and the eventual Soviet collapse, allowed Chinese communist party leaders to adapt to the rapidly changing global environment without a sudden loss of power. Three-thousand miles west of Japan, India chaffed under the increasingly ill fit of colonial rule; the reckoning of the Second World War shattered the final confidence of the British Empire--the same empire that Wingate was fated to die for. Wingate served across the wide world in the service of the British Empire. By mid-century it was a political body clawing for survival in the last years of life, sinking tired claws into its furthest outposts, ismuths, and islands. The empire failed the local peoples it promised to protect, and its vulnerability sent shockwaves that shattered generations of expectations (Bayly & Harper, 2004). 

The continents of South America and Africa, though not spared intervention and exploitation, saw unprecedented gains in population. Latin America and the Caribbean witnessed seven-fold growth, to upwards of 521,000,000 persons. Africa's population climbed six-fold to 800,000,000 ("Geohive," 2011).

A friend once suggested to me that personal stakes are higher than political stakes; but political stakes are personal; in times of peace this requires wit to notice, but in times of war it is unflinchingly obvious. Political life dictates not only what you can get, but shapes what you can want, think, and feel; politics shapes who you desire and, having obtained your desires, politics determines under what conditions you will keep them and for how long. Politics can shorten your attention span, heighten your aggression, mitigate (or exacerbate) your fear. Politics can seem a toy, a plaything, a luxury. But politics is as inescapable as breathing--as are, incidentally, toys, playthings, and luxuries. We are the sum of our activity, not a severable aspect. The great political stakes of the 20th century shaped the personal views and ambitions of people like Orde Wingate--not the other way around. 

0 Comments

a quote from muki betser

5/2/2015

0 Comments

 
Special operations soldiers are often identified with classified information and covert operations: quiet, secretive missions that go without much notice or reward. But there is an ironic element to this description. Many special operations soldiers do in fact publish detailed accounts of their actions that tend to valorize their friends and validate their own actions. 

But Wikipedia provides a list of many Delta Force members, some of whom published memoirs of their experiences. This seems to violate the aura of secrecy. A similar pattern can be found throughout the world. One of the most famous soldiers in Israeli history is Muki Betser, a special operations soldier who published an account of his life in a book ironically entitled Secret Soldier: A True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando.
"In special operations...you know how you're going in and how you're coming out. It is your initiative, based on your plan. That moment of paranoia crossing the border--and the alert serenity that follows--is almost a luxury compared to the feeling on the eve of war. In [conventional] war, all you know is how to go in. You never know how you will come out."
Soldiers face tremendous uncertainty in conventional warfare, where the strategic mission is often influenced by far off political events and rapidly changing local conditions. One of the compelling reasons for joining  special operations is to mitigate that uncertainty by taking part in narrowly defined missions that consist of carefully planned operations. Not all special operations missions are well planned, or well defined. But as Betser suggests, special operations soldiers are able to control at least some aspects of their mission. This can provide a source of comfort, and a sense of confidence. There is not necessarily a correlation between thoroughly planned operations and useful strategic accomplishments, but special ops can nevertheless provide a sense of stability and purpose. Narrowly defined objectives may be easier to achieve, and provide a stable platform for small successes. Stability and trust and good planning are not the only reasons that soldiers seek to join (or form) special operations units. But Muki Betser's quote demonstrates that this is an important part of the puzzle. 

Curiously, special operations soldiers, often noted for their courage, desire to control war, and make fear palatable and manageable. War is not chess, but sometimes one can choose to develop a game within war for the sake of sanity and survival. 
0 Comments

    Author

    J. M. Meyer is a playwright and social scientist studying at the University of Texas at Austin.

    Photo Credit: ISS Expidition 7.

    Archives

    December 2019
    October 2019
    July 2018
    May 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    September 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    Categories

    All
    Africa
    Article Review
    Art Sighting
    Biography
    Book Review
    British Empire
    Churchill
    David Stirling
    Dudley Clarke
    Education
    Film Review
    Gandhi
    Harold Pinter
    Hermione Lee
    Hermione Lee
    Humanities
    India
    Jawaharlal Nehru
    Jinnah
    Johnny Meyer
    Justice
    Middle East
    Military History
    Orde Wingate
    Orde Wingate
    Plutarch
    Psychology
    Relationships
    Robert Graves
    Second World War
    Strategy
    Tactics
    T. E. Lawrence
    Theater Essay
    Theatre
    Verse
    W. B. Yeats
    Werner Herzog
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.