Terror Terror Terror: The Solution to Muslim Terror
One of the downsides of my departure from AH.COM and the sheer volume of shit pushed out by my detractors about me is that I get emails from people who have views that make John Ringo and Tom Kratman look far-left. One of them – mentioning no names here – mentioned a rather odd book entitled Terror Terror Terror, written by a collaborative group under the name of V. Igilante. (Very cute, I don’t think.) The book’s own blurb says that this book was an email internet collaboration by over 60 authors and editors. The authors have a wide range of backgrounds and had a great time sharing and collaborating with each other.
It is complete and utter tripe.
The basic idea is simple. A moderate Muslim believes that Islam is in danger from radical Muslim terrorists, who want to impose their beliefs, not only on their own societies, but also on the entire world. He assembles a group of American and Russian terrorists to terrorize the terrorists, which they do by crashing a plane into Mecca and blowing up an entire city in Iran. Somehow, this convinces most terrorist leaders to stop fighting…what?
The book had, I will agree, an interesting core concept. The problem was that it fell apart quickly, because the book was very badly edited. We are treated to several discourses on the roots of Islamic terror – not always particularly accurate ones either – and too much attention is paid to details that are simply unimportant to the story. It also ignores other issues. Bombing Mecca would almost certainly trigger riots right across the world; bombing Iran would certainly cause suspicions that the US had provided the nuke, or even carried out the bombing raid itself.
And terrorists don’t break that easily. The root causes of what the book describes as ‘Muslim terror’ aren’t so easy to deal with. OBL and his fellow terrorists don’t give a shit about anything, but their own power; they will quite happily shit over their religion to win, kill their own people, commit vile acts and atrocities…let us not forget that the people who have suffered the most at the hands of AQ have been their so-called fellow Muslims.
There is much serious food for thought in this book, but it really needed a better editor and someone with a sense of perspective. It also needed less of the ‘all Muslims are bastards,’ particularly when one of the main characters was a Muslim.
Thursday, 9 December 2010
No Expenses Spared (Robert Winnett & Gordon Rayner)
No Expenses Spared
-Robert Winnett & Gordon Rayner
Why do we pay taxes again?
It is one of the ironies of Britain that despite frequent complaints about bad government from all sides of the political spectrum, the UK is actually reasonably well-governed. Certainly, there are exceptions and balls-ups aplenty, but by and large Britain is a far nicer place to live than…say, pretty much anywhere outside the First World. Just ask those nice protesters who throng through our major cities every time something happens outside Britain’s control – if they lived in Iran, or Zimbabwe, they would be dead.
And then the whole expenses scandal broke.
The elected leaders of the country – the MPs – receive a certain amount of money as a spending allowance. The idea was that poorer MPs would require assistance from public funds to handle their role. (Politics is an expensive business.) The whole problem was that the system suffered from incredibly limited oversight and it was almost tailor-made for abuse, and it was abused. The story presented by The Daily Telegraph was almost beyond belief. MPs were claiming expenses for almost anything you could imagine and defrauding the taxpayer of millions of pounds.
No Expenses Spared starts with a nod to Labour’s botched Freedom of Information Act – watered down to make it surprisingly hard to use – and the handful of campaigners who tried to learn the innermost secrets of MPs finances. Their successes were comparatively limited until a whistleblower – his name remains unknown – sent the Telegraph a CD containing the innermost details of expenses, implicating almost all of the Honourable Members, including Gordon Brown. The agonies the newspaper went through as it checked the data, worried constantly about legal repression and injunctions that might have buried the story, are depicted before the newspaper finally ran with the story. It was a bombshell.
Over the next few weeks and months, the British population was treated to discovery after discovery, from the criminal to the absurd. (One MP claimed a phantom mortgage, another claimed for a duck house and a third claimed for female sanitary supplies.) It may have started with Labour, yet all of the major parties were rapidly implicated. The Tories may have been the party of the wealthy, yet they had many MPs just as obnoxious as Labour MPs. The only party that seemed to be spared was the BNP!
There are villains aplenty in this book, starting with the Speaker, who was forced to resign, the Prime Minister and hundreds of MPs who seemed to have lost all touch with reality. There were a handful of MPs who were ‘saints’ with surprisingly clean hands. Gordon Brown had lost control so badly that his leadership was seriously challenged and had a prospective candidate come forward, he might have been voted out of the Labour party. His Cabinet seemed to be in a state of permanent disintegration ever since the scandal broke. MPs were walking around shell-shocked, wondering who would be the next to incur the public’s anger.
[The former Speaker was then shamefully granted a peerage and allowed to take a seat in the House of Lords.]
The major politician who came out of it best was unquestionably David Cameron. He reacted with speed, decisiveness and ruthlessness, coming down hard on any Tory MPs who were caught red-handed. (Cameron’s claims made boring reading.) Tory MPs would face a ‘Star Chamber’ in addition to the normal tests and any who refused would be expelled from the Party. It was, as some commenters remarked, the moment when Cameron first showed that he had PM potential. A number of Tory MPs were caught and decided that they would not stand for re-election, or left at once.
The book reads, at times, like a fantasy novel. The claims are just unbelievable. Shahid Malik, the UK's first Muslim to be a Government Minister, accused the newspaper of being racist, in printing a picture of him beside an image of a man who looked (just slightly) like Bin Laden. The man was actually a rather questionable businessman who was implicitly involved in Malik’s activities and Malik’s attempts at legal action went nowhere. Malik, while one of the villains of the piece, was luckier than most. He was allowed to rejoin the government after being whitewashed (hah) and cleared by a second inquiry into his conduct.
And yet he was far from the worst. What about the wealthy-as-Midas Tory who ordered a Duck House? The MPs who kept altering their second homes to claim expenses for needless repairs? The MPs who allowed their relatives to work in their offices, or live in their homes without rent, or…the list goes on and on. It’s sickening.
I tend to dislike books published immediately after – or even during – an event. They tend to lack the perspective of more balanced works, yet No Expenses Spared is surprisingly well-balanced and focused. The authors are clearly more at home in the newsroom than writing factual manuscripts, but the book – after a slightly clumsy start – gets going with a roar. It is, and remains, a very through review of the whole affair – at least until the book was published!
I would advise every Briton, of every political stripe, to read this book before the next election in 2010. Not only is it good reading, but it is of vital political importance to the British political landscape. The rot at the core of the House of Commons threatens the very heart of British democracy. No major Party escaped the taint.
Read it and pray.
-Robert Winnett & Gordon Rayner
Why do we pay taxes again?
It is one of the ironies of Britain that despite frequent complaints about bad government from all sides of the political spectrum, the UK is actually reasonably well-governed. Certainly, there are exceptions and balls-ups aplenty, but by and large Britain is a far nicer place to live than…say, pretty much anywhere outside the First World. Just ask those nice protesters who throng through our major cities every time something happens outside Britain’s control – if they lived in Iran, or Zimbabwe, they would be dead.
And then the whole expenses scandal broke.
The elected leaders of the country – the MPs – receive a certain amount of money as a spending allowance. The idea was that poorer MPs would require assistance from public funds to handle their role. (Politics is an expensive business.) The whole problem was that the system suffered from incredibly limited oversight and it was almost tailor-made for abuse, and it was abused. The story presented by The Daily Telegraph was almost beyond belief. MPs were claiming expenses for almost anything you could imagine and defrauding the taxpayer of millions of pounds.
No Expenses Spared starts with a nod to Labour’s botched Freedom of Information Act – watered down to make it surprisingly hard to use – and the handful of campaigners who tried to learn the innermost secrets of MPs finances. Their successes were comparatively limited until a whistleblower – his name remains unknown – sent the Telegraph a CD containing the innermost details of expenses, implicating almost all of the Honourable Members, including Gordon Brown. The agonies the newspaper went through as it checked the data, worried constantly about legal repression and injunctions that might have buried the story, are depicted before the newspaper finally ran with the story. It was a bombshell.
Over the next few weeks and months, the British population was treated to discovery after discovery, from the criminal to the absurd. (One MP claimed a phantom mortgage, another claimed for a duck house and a third claimed for female sanitary supplies.) It may have started with Labour, yet all of the major parties were rapidly implicated. The Tories may have been the party of the wealthy, yet they had many MPs just as obnoxious as Labour MPs. The only party that seemed to be spared was the BNP!
There are villains aplenty in this book, starting with the Speaker, who was forced to resign, the Prime Minister and hundreds of MPs who seemed to have lost all touch with reality. There were a handful of MPs who were ‘saints’ with surprisingly clean hands. Gordon Brown had lost control so badly that his leadership was seriously challenged and had a prospective candidate come forward, he might have been voted out of the Labour party. His Cabinet seemed to be in a state of permanent disintegration ever since the scandal broke. MPs were walking around shell-shocked, wondering who would be the next to incur the public’s anger.
[The former Speaker was then shamefully granted a peerage and allowed to take a seat in the House of Lords.]
The major politician who came out of it best was unquestionably David Cameron. He reacted with speed, decisiveness and ruthlessness, coming down hard on any Tory MPs who were caught red-handed. (Cameron’s claims made boring reading.) Tory MPs would face a ‘Star Chamber’ in addition to the normal tests and any who refused would be expelled from the Party. It was, as some commenters remarked, the moment when Cameron first showed that he had PM potential. A number of Tory MPs were caught and decided that they would not stand for re-election, or left at once.
The book reads, at times, like a fantasy novel. The claims are just unbelievable. Shahid Malik, the UK's first Muslim to be a Government Minister, accused the newspaper of being racist, in printing a picture of him beside an image of a man who looked (just slightly) like Bin Laden. The man was actually a rather questionable businessman who was implicitly involved in Malik’s activities and Malik’s attempts at legal action went nowhere. Malik, while one of the villains of the piece, was luckier than most. He was allowed to rejoin the government after being whitewashed (hah) and cleared by a second inquiry into his conduct.
And yet he was far from the worst. What about the wealthy-as-Midas Tory who ordered a Duck House? The MPs who kept altering their second homes to claim expenses for needless repairs? The MPs who allowed their relatives to work in their offices, or live in their homes without rent, or…the list goes on and on. It’s sickening.
I tend to dislike books published immediately after – or even during – an event. They tend to lack the perspective of more balanced works, yet No Expenses Spared is surprisingly well-balanced and focused. The authors are clearly more at home in the newsroom than writing factual manuscripts, but the book – after a slightly clumsy start – gets going with a roar. It is, and remains, a very through review of the whole affair – at least until the book was published!
I would advise every Briton, of every political stripe, to read this book before the next election in 2010. Not only is it good reading, but it is of vital political importance to the British political landscape. The rot at the core of the House of Commons threatens the very heart of British democracy. No major Party escaped the taint.
Read it and pray.
Monday, 15 November 2010
Out of the Dark (David Weber)
Out of the Dark
-David Weber
WARNING: Major Spoilers!
I’m going to be up-front about this. I found Out of the Dark to be a huge disappointment. This is all the more galling when David Weber is the genius who wrote such books as Mutineer’s Moon, On Basilisk Station, The Honour of the Queen and many others. I love Weber’s science-fiction, but I have never been so keen on his fantasy. This book shows all of David Weber’s weaknesses and few of his strengths. Worst of all, it ends with a Deus Ex Machina that came right out of left field.
Anyway…back when the English were fighting the French, Earth was visited by a scoutship from the Hegemony, an alien federation composed of (mostly) vegetarian alien races. The aliens, properly horrified at human vileness, eventually assigned the conquest of Earth to a meat-eating race called the Shongairi. The Shongairi, who have their own plans to eventually overthrow their superiors, decide that humans would make a perfect slave race and launch the invasion. Unluckily for them, the human race has advanced far faster than they believed possible and the world they are invading is the modern-day Earth. (Shades of Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar here.)
The aliens attack the Earth, starting their invasion with a massive bombardment that – just incidentally – kills off everyone who can offer to surrender. After a series of battles between organised human forces and the alien invaders – to be fair, those battles, particularly the F-22 encounters with the enemy, are very good – the fighting degenerates into an insurgency against an alien force. While the Shongairi struggle desperately to understand why the human race is just so damn weird, the humans keep pressing their attacks. The Shongairi are finally driven to the point where they retreat from the planet and intend to bombard the human race out of existence, only to discover that their ships have been boarded by…vampires! The poor aliens don’t stand a chance.
I would have found the idea much more believable if the vampires had been mentioned right from the start. The possibilities of a secret other race living on Earth are endless, if handled properly. David Weber could have done it very well, yet instead we get the vampires suddenly appearing and kicking butt.
That isn’t the only problem in the book. David Weber has a habit of including massive – and I mean massive – infodumps in his books. In most books, that is at least kept reasonably relevant to the plot. Here, the vast mountain of information is often unrelated to the plot. For example, there is a large section of the book based on how the survivalists created their secret lair. Later, the book digresses into how determined the women survivalists are to keep their children safe and how they would lay down their lives in order to save them. All very interesting, yet the survivalists aren’t even attacked!
This book really needed a rewrite. It came across as clunky. I think it would have worked better if it had been expanded into a WorldWar-sized series or perhaps condensed into a neater plot. There are true moments of greatness in this book, yet they fit together poorly.
Overall, it’s worth a read, but only in paperback.
(Sample chapters can be found here - http://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/site/book/OutoftheDark/-/)
-David Weber
WARNING: Major Spoilers!
I’m going to be up-front about this. I found Out of the Dark to be a huge disappointment. This is all the more galling when David Weber is the genius who wrote such books as Mutineer’s Moon, On Basilisk Station, The Honour of the Queen and many others. I love Weber’s science-fiction, but I have never been so keen on his fantasy. This book shows all of David Weber’s weaknesses and few of his strengths. Worst of all, it ends with a Deus Ex Machina that came right out of left field.
Anyway…back when the English were fighting the French, Earth was visited by a scoutship from the Hegemony, an alien federation composed of (mostly) vegetarian alien races. The aliens, properly horrified at human vileness, eventually assigned the conquest of Earth to a meat-eating race called the Shongairi. The Shongairi, who have their own plans to eventually overthrow their superiors, decide that humans would make a perfect slave race and launch the invasion. Unluckily for them, the human race has advanced far faster than they believed possible and the world they are invading is the modern-day Earth. (Shades of Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar here.)
The aliens attack the Earth, starting their invasion with a massive bombardment that – just incidentally – kills off everyone who can offer to surrender. After a series of battles between organised human forces and the alien invaders – to be fair, those battles, particularly the F-22 encounters with the enemy, are very good – the fighting degenerates into an insurgency against an alien force. While the Shongairi struggle desperately to understand why the human race is just so damn weird, the humans keep pressing their attacks. The Shongairi are finally driven to the point where they retreat from the planet and intend to bombard the human race out of existence, only to discover that their ships have been boarded by…vampires! The poor aliens don’t stand a chance.
I would have found the idea much more believable if the vampires had been mentioned right from the start. The possibilities of a secret other race living on Earth are endless, if handled properly. David Weber could have done it very well, yet instead we get the vampires suddenly appearing and kicking butt.
That isn’t the only problem in the book. David Weber has a habit of including massive – and I mean massive – infodumps in his books. In most books, that is at least kept reasonably relevant to the plot. Here, the vast mountain of information is often unrelated to the plot. For example, there is a large section of the book based on how the survivalists created their secret lair. Later, the book digresses into how determined the women survivalists are to keep their children safe and how they would lay down their lives in order to save them. All very interesting, yet the survivalists aren’t even attacked!
This book really needed a rewrite. It came across as clunky. I think it would have worked better if it had been expanded into a WorldWar-sized series or perhaps condensed into a neater plot. There are true moments of greatness in this book, yet they fit together poorly.
Overall, it’s worth a read, but only in paperback.
(Sample chapters can be found here - http://jiltanith.thefifthimperium.com/site/book/OutoftheDark/-/)
Monday, 18 October 2010
The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and only Liberals – Can Win The War On Terror and Make America Great Again (Peter Beinart)
The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and only Liberals – Can Win The War On Terror and Make America Great Again
-Peter Beinart
‘Liberal’ is something of a dirty word these days, as Peter Beinart ruefully notes; ‘Liberals’ are blamed for having caused, at least in part, the chaos of the War on Terror that we face today. The charge has a certain element of truth to it; liberals pushed through immigration compromises that were not compromises, liberals opposed the war on Iraq to the point where they half-convinced the enemy that they were stronger than they were, and liberals have often opposed security measures designed to make the world safer. Regardless, Peter Beinart, journalist and editor-at-large for The New Republic, believes that only liberals can win the War on Terror.
Beinart begins with a short history of post-WW2 liberalism in the United States, covering the Civil Rights era, the McCarthy period and the self-destruction of American liberalism. Liberals, according to Beinart, found themselves caught between the demands of their belief system – a theory that the US should always act with pure intentions – and the dictates of the real world. Internally, liberals opposed segregation and pushed for rights for blacks; externally, liberals found themselves caught between the belief that ‘Uncle Joe Stalin’ was a good guy, and the truth of soviet occupation of most of Europe. As Beinart puts it…
“Liberals like Pepper and Gahagan Douglas did not want Greece and Turkey to fall to Soviet aggression. Yet they could not bear to see the US back faulty governments.” (Page 7)
Or, perhaps, they did want to watch the countries fall, as long as it allowed them a chance to play at being morally superior to everyone else.
As the Cold War grew darker, it didn’t get much better. The liberal movement was fracturing and demands for ideological correctness became much more important than facts, facts, and more facts, while opposition to the government became a requirement. Parts of the liberal movement saw themselves as always cast in the role of opponent to the government, whatever was really happening.
“[Paul Berman’s (left-wing journalist)] article called the Sardinists Leninists and condemned their humans rights abuses…but [his] editor tried to kill the story, saying that it would play into the Regan administrations hands. It was an old argument; Berman was saying that liberals should oppose any denial of freedom. For [the editor], liberalism’s only struggle was against the right” (Page 71)
The editor’s name? Michael Moore.
A point that was not made by Beinart, although pretty important to his theory, lies in the distinction between the academic and the real world. Those who opposed civil rights didn’t just operate from racism; they thought that the government would be giving money – their money – to black men, in compensation for actions they personally had nothing to do with. Yes, racism is always wrong, but many – hell, almost all – of the people alive in 1960-70 had nothing to do with forming the conditions that the slaves and the former slaves lived under, and they were not prepared to pay, personally, for repairing the damage. Ideals are one thing, but on the real world, I would not be prepared to pay half my salary to help people who need it, not with my own family at stake.
“At its core, doughface liberalism offers an escape from the choices the real world requires.” (Page 172)
The end of the cold war allowed the liberals their own chance at governing. Many of the wounds within the body politic had healed, others had been allowed to fester, but liberalism failed to learn from experience. Liberals placed their faith in international institutions, failing to grasp that they depended upon almost universal agreement; there was no logical reason, for example, for North Korea or Iran to vote in favour of sanctioning Saddam, despite the evil nature of his regime. In effect…
“From Henry Wallace…to Michael Moore after September 11th, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world.” (Page xi)
Liberals – as a general rule – failed to grasp the simple fact that the world was not perfect and never would be perfect, regardless of how much money was poured down the drain of trying to help the remainder of the world. The net result was that the liberals lost touch with the working classes of America, and to some extent, their support in other areas was bleeding away as well.
And then came 9/11.
In a very real sense, liberals should have taken the War on Terror as a golden opportunity to re-examine and revitalise their beliefs. Although Beinart noted that “Today, however, there is no totalitarian superpower to put America’s actions in flattering context” (Page 195), he was incorrect; the world is full of states that put America in flattering context. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq…all of them acted in ways that should have horrified the liberal mind. Women are treated as second-class citizens at best – cattle at worst – homosexuals are stoned to death, non-Muslims or the wrong kind of Muslim face horrifying persecution, the schools are crammed with teachers who blame everything on the Great Satan and it’s motley collection of Jews, Homos and…you’ve guessed it, liberals. But liberals do not. As Beinart puts it…
“If today’s liberals cannot rouse as much passion for fighting a movement that flings acid at unveiled women as they do for taking back the Senate in 2006, they have strayed far from liberalism’s best traditions.” (Page xii)
Beinart, who supported the Iraq War, recognises that the War on Terror must be fought. But, for many liberals, the term ‘the War on Terror is the war that must be fought’ translates as ‘we must fight the War on Terror.’ Liberals, particularly the hardcore left, found themselves in the trap of believing that military action never solves anything, missing the simple fact that many Americans believed just that…and they were right. Liberals found themselves out in the cold.
“The premise that America could best fight terrorism by fighting its own imperialist impulses made it difficult [for liberals] to endorse a military response to 9/11.” (Page 171)
The net result of liberal actions is that liberals are often regarded as ivory-tower intellectuals at best, or outright traitors at worst. Liberals may be able to rise above the very human desire to just hit back – although I doubt it – but that is not true for the vast silent majority. The legal system that liberals are so fond of was never designed to handle an international terrorist organisation with no strong links to a government that was actually willing to help. Regardless of the deeper causes of problems, liberals – who have every incentive to get behind the War on Terror and push – ended up smearing themselves as enemies. Beinart may have supported the Iraq War, but he criticizes it heavily, apparently unaware of the simple fact that there were elements that were beyond the US’s ability to control.
“Had the Bush administration realised before the war that Iraqi democracy had to be built and not simply unleashed, the occupation would have gone better. But that does not mean that it would have gone well.” (Page 158)
It is in proposing alternatives that Beinart’s plan falls down. The main set of proposals cover international involvement and a long-term project of social work that might alter the face of the Middle East, perhaps based on the Marshall Plan. It is an interesting concept, but both of them fail; the international community simply could not provide any large-scale unified help for Iraq, regardless of how much the US offered for the help. French interests – not the same as American interests – dictated opposition. Russian interests dictated opposition. Turkish interests dictated opposition. There was nothing – literally – that America could have offered to make their support worthwhile…and as for states like Libya or North Korea, which had good reason to fear American military actions…well, would you expect them to vote in favour? They’d be signing their own death warrants.
And as for reshaping the face of the region? It is, I concede, a better suggestion, but again, it possesses fatal flaws. What Beinart fails to grasp – what most liberals fail to grasp – is that there is much about the liberal agenda (homosexual rights, female rights, religious freedom, to name, but three) that is anthemia to many of the people who live in the Middle East. Anyone trying to teach girls that they could be equal to a man would have to cope with the fact that the girls would probably be beaten back into submission, or that they would have no chance to actually use their education, or that…there would be no protection for them. The liberal vision of law and order misses the point that there is no law and order in the Middle East…and that no one will protect those who take his aid. If the price of accepting American aid is being killed by insurgents, no one is going to take American aid. The region needs law, order, and justice…and the only way of actually ensuring that is to take over, crush resistance, and rebuild the area. This is what we did in Germany and Japan…and it worked.
Dreams are interesting, Mr Beinart, but they have to be practical as well.
-Peter Beinart
‘Liberal’ is something of a dirty word these days, as Peter Beinart ruefully notes; ‘Liberals’ are blamed for having caused, at least in part, the chaos of the War on Terror that we face today. The charge has a certain element of truth to it; liberals pushed through immigration compromises that were not compromises, liberals opposed the war on Iraq to the point where they half-convinced the enemy that they were stronger than they were, and liberals have often opposed security measures designed to make the world safer. Regardless, Peter Beinart, journalist and editor-at-large for The New Republic, believes that only liberals can win the War on Terror.
Beinart begins with a short history of post-WW2 liberalism in the United States, covering the Civil Rights era, the McCarthy period and the self-destruction of American liberalism. Liberals, according to Beinart, found themselves caught between the demands of their belief system – a theory that the US should always act with pure intentions – and the dictates of the real world. Internally, liberals opposed segregation and pushed for rights for blacks; externally, liberals found themselves caught between the belief that ‘Uncle Joe Stalin’ was a good guy, and the truth of soviet occupation of most of Europe. As Beinart puts it…
“Liberals like Pepper and Gahagan Douglas did not want Greece and Turkey to fall to Soviet aggression. Yet they could not bear to see the US back faulty governments.” (Page 7)
Or, perhaps, they did want to watch the countries fall, as long as it allowed them a chance to play at being morally superior to everyone else.
As the Cold War grew darker, it didn’t get much better. The liberal movement was fracturing and demands for ideological correctness became much more important than facts, facts, and more facts, while opposition to the government became a requirement. Parts of the liberal movement saw themselves as always cast in the role of opponent to the government, whatever was really happening.
“[Paul Berman’s (left-wing journalist)] article called the Sardinists Leninists and condemned their humans rights abuses…but [his] editor tried to kill the story, saying that it would play into the Regan administrations hands. It was an old argument; Berman was saying that liberals should oppose any denial of freedom. For [the editor], liberalism’s only struggle was against the right” (Page 71)
The editor’s name? Michael Moore.
A point that was not made by Beinart, although pretty important to his theory, lies in the distinction between the academic and the real world. Those who opposed civil rights didn’t just operate from racism; they thought that the government would be giving money – their money – to black men, in compensation for actions they personally had nothing to do with. Yes, racism is always wrong, but many – hell, almost all – of the people alive in 1960-70 had nothing to do with forming the conditions that the slaves and the former slaves lived under, and they were not prepared to pay, personally, for repairing the damage. Ideals are one thing, but on the real world, I would not be prepared to pay half my salary to help people who need it, not with my own family at stake.
“At its core, doughface liberalism offers an escape from the choices the real world requires.” (Page 172)
The end of the cold war allowed the liberals their own chance at governing. Many of the wounds within the body politic had healed, others had been allowed to fester, but liberalism failed to learn from experience. Liberals placed their faith in international institutions, failing to grasp that they depended upon almost universal agreement; there was no logical reason, for example, for North Korea or Iran to vote in favour of sanctioning Saddam, despite the evil nature of his regime. In effect…
“From Henry Wallace…to Michael Moore after September 11th, some liberals have preferred inaction to the tragic reality that America must shed its moral innocence to act meaningfully in the world.” (Page xi)
Liberals – as a general rule – failed to grasp the simple fact that the world was not perfect and never would be perfect, regardless of how much money was poured down the drain of trying to help the remainder of the world. The net result was that the liberals lost touch with the working classes of America, and to some extent, their support in other areas was bleeding away as well.
And then came 9/11.
In a very real sense, liberals should have taken the War on Terror as a golden opportunity to re-examine and revitalise their beliefs. Although Beinart noted that “Today, however, there is no totalitarian superpower to put America’s actions in flattering context” (Page 195), he was incorrect; the world is full of states that put America in flattering context. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq…all of them acted in ways that should have horrified the liberal mind. Women are treated as second-class citizens at best – cattle at worst – homosexuals are stoned to death, non-Muslims or the wrong kind of Muslim face horrifying persecution, the schools are crammed with teachers who blame everything on the Great Satan and it’s motley collection of Jews, Homos and…you’ve guessed it, liberals. But liberals do not. As Beinart puts it…
“If today’s liberals cannot rouse as much passion for fighting a movement that flings acid at unveiled women as they do for taking back the Senate in 2006, they have strayed far from liberalism’s best traditions.” (Page xii)
Beinart, who supported the Iraq War, recognises that the War on Terror must be fought. But, for many liberals, the term ‘the War on Terror is the war that must be fought’ translates as ‘we must fight the War on Terror.’ Liberals, particularly the hardcore left, found themselves in the trap of believing that military action never solves anything, missing the simple fact that many Americans believed just that…and they were right. Liberals found themselves out in the cold.
“The premise that America could best fight terrorism by fighting its own imperialist impulses made it difficult [for liberals] to endorse a military response to 9/11.” (Page 171)
The net result of liberal actions is that liberals are often regarded as ivory-tower intellectuals at best, or outright traitors at worst. Liberals may be able to rise above the very human desire to just hit back – although I doubt it – but that is not true for the vast silent majority. The legal system that liberals are so fond of was never designed to handle an international terrorist organisation with no strong links to a government that was actually willing to help. Regardless of the deeper causes of problems, liberals – who have every incentive to get behind the War on Terror and push – ended up smearing themselves as enemies. Beinart may have supported the Iraq War, but he criticizes it heavily, apparently unaware of the simple fact that there were elements that were beyond the US’s ability to control.
“Had the Bush administration realised before the war that Iraqi democracy had to be built and not simply unleashed, the occupation would have gone better. But that does not mean that it would have gone well.” (Page 158)
It is in proposing alternatives that Beinart’s plan falls down. The main set of proposals cover international involvement and a long-term project of social work that might alter the face of the Middle East, perhaps based on the Marshall Plan. It is an interesting concept, but both of them fail; the international community simply could not provide any large-scale unified help for Iraq, regardless of how much the US offered for the help. French interests – not the same as American interests – dictated opposition. Russian interests dictated opposition. Turkish interests dictated opposition. There was nothing – literally – that America could have offered to make their support worthwhile…and as for states like Libya or North Korea, which had good reason to fear American military actions…well, would you expect them to vote in favour? They’d be signing their own death warrants.
And as for reshaping the face of the region? It is, I concede, a better suggestion, but again, it possesses fatal flaws. What Beinart fails to grasp – what most liberals fail to grasp – is that there is much about the liberal agenda (homosexual rights, female rights, religious freedom, to name, but three) that is anthemia to many of the people who live in the Middle East. Anyone trying to teach girls that they could be equal to a man would have to cope with the fact that the girls would probably be beaten back into submission, or that they would have no chance to actually use their education, or that…there would be no protection for them. The liberal vision of law and order misses the point that there is no law and order in the Middle East…and that no one will protect those who take his aid. If the price of accepting American aid is being killed by insurgents, no one is going to take American aid. The region needs law, order, and justice…and the only way of actually ensuring that is to take over, crush resistance, and rebuild the area. This is what we did in Germany and Japan…and it worked.
Dreams are interesting, Mr Beinart, but they have to be practical as well.
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Ministry of Defeat - Richard North
Ministry of Defeat
-Richard North
The odd thing about the American defeat – if such a word can be used – in Vietnam is that it came about through internal problems, not military defeat. The Viet Cong were beaten. The North Vietnamese Army was beaten. The bombing of North Vietnam was shockingly effective (although this was not appreciated at the time.) The US effectively won the war. It was defeated by the home front and an astonishingly effective propaganda campaign. Not for the first time, the communists probably didn’t believe their own success.
The odd thing about the British ‘victory’ in Southern Iraq is…well, it was a defeat. Worse, it was a defeat that came about because of flawed political and military decisions, taken not by the men on the spot, but men in Whitehall. The scale of the disaster was never understood by the home front – even I didn’t know the half of it, and I am as well-informed as any civilian could reasonably hope to be – due to a compliant media and a sheer lack of comprehension. The British government preferred to believe it’s own ‘spin’ rather than the truth. In doing so, they betrayed the British soldiers who went to war without the right equipment and no clear plan, and the country itself. Charges of treason would not be inappropriate.
That is the conclusion, one I strongly endorse, of this remarkable book. There are actually relatively few British writings on the subject of Iraq, although Sniper One and Eight Lives Down provide some insight into the lives of the soldiers there. It should be noted that Sniper One paints a picture of Basra – and Iraq – that was at variance with the official government-promoted version of events. Ministry of Defeat provides an overall history of the occupation – something that has been sorely lacking – and details, in a very ‘take no prisoners’ attitude, just went wrong in Iraq.
[EDIT - since writing this, many other books have been written on UK involvement in Iraq.]
The core of the matter, North writes, is that the British Government refused to recognise that it had a serious problem on its hands. As the militias gained power in Basra, the government preferred to believe that it wasn’t a serious issue – little more than a public order issue – and convinced itself that Britain’s expertise from Northern Ireland gave it an advantage over the US. That might have been true if the expertise had actually been used (it wasn’t)…but in any case, Basra was not Northern Ireland. This little piece of self-delusion cost lives, Mr Blair! The troops in Ireland had far better intelligence and much higher troop levels. Much has been made of the shortage of American troops after the Fall of Baghdad, but the British had the same problem and, unlike the US, the MOD learned fuck-all from the experience.
If that wasn't bad enough, the equipment procurement process was badly screwed up. When the RAF was being allowed to spend billions on the Eurofighter, the Army had to make do with the Snatch Land Rover – which Northern Ireland experience had shown was badly under-armoured – which caused the deaths of many British soldiers. The issue was not that the British Army was under-funded – although soldiers were being underpaid for their role – but that the money was being spent on long-term programs that would not provide useful equipment (if that) in time to be useful.
It is quite typical, as Donald Rumsfield pointed out years ago, that countries go to war with an army that is unprepared for the task. It is rather less typical that a country would go to war, find itself in serious shit…and then continue blithely developing technology that was effectively useless, prepared for the wrong war. Instead of fighting the last war, the UK was looking towards a hypothetical European RRF, one of Tony Blair’s pet projects. Billions have been spent – for nothing. Common sense would tell someone of Blair’s intelligence – surely – that a European force wasn't on the cards. When has the EU ever agreed on an enemy?
The British media also comes in for bashing. Not, it should be noted, for the largely American left-wing media army bashing, but for being the dog that didn’t bark. The MOD generally tried to spoon-feed propaganda to the British TV, which largely ate it up and came back and begged for more. Early signs of trouble were ignored, or taken out of context, and even when the media did pick up on signs of trouble, they never understood the underlying factors behind the war. The media did pick up on problems with the Snatch vehicles, but took the ‘under-funded military’ line rather than realising the truth. Reporters who questioned the army line, such as Christina Lamb in Afghanistan, found themselves blacklisted.
The core reason for British ‘success’ in Iraq, North notes, was that the UK never really had control over Basra. The Shia inhabitants of the area, after the events of 1991, preferred to organise themselves rather than trust the coalition. Iran was seen as a better ally by some, a deadly threat by others, but always as a far more significant player than the coalition. Under constant attack, the British forces were slowly withdrawn from the area, conceding control to the militias, who started to loot, rape and slaughter at will. The inglorious end to the story – the retaking of Basra by Iraqi forces with American support in 2008 – was barely a footnote in the British media.
The contrast between Iraq and the Falklands is staggering. The Falklands were another ‘come as you are’ war, one fought by a far more determined PM for limited goals…and one that Britain came closer to losing than anyone would like to admit. After that war, the lessons were learned and incorporated into new developments. Iraq seems, instead, to be the forgotten war. If that wasn't bad enough, most of the mistakes are already being repeated in Afghanistan.
This is an angry book, written by an angry man. It isn’t pleasant reading for anyone with a British heritage, but it is necessary reading. God help us.
-Richard North
The odd thing about the American defeat – if such a word can be used – in Vietnam is that it came about through internal problems, not military defeat. The Viet Cong were beaten. The North Vietnamese Army was beaten. The bombing of North Vietnam was shockingly effective (although this was not appreciated at the time.) The US effectively won the war. It was defeated by the home front and an astonishingly effective propaganda campaign. Not for the first time, the communists probably didn’t believe their own success.
The odd thing about the British ‘victory’ in Southern Iraq is…well, it was a defeat. Worse, it was a defeat that came about because of flawed political and military decisions, taken not by the men on the spot, but men in Whitehall. The scale of the disaster was never understood by the home front – even I didn’t know the half of it, and I am as well-informed as any civilian could reasonably hope to be – due to a compliant media and a sheer lack of comprehension. The British government preferred to believe it’s own ‘spin’ rather than the truth. In doing so, they betrayed the British soldiers who went to war without the right equipment and no clear plan, and the country itself. Charges of treason would not be inappropriate.
That is the conclusion, one I strongly endorse, of this remarkable book. There are actually relatively few British writings on the subject of Iraq, although Sniper One and Eight Lives Down provide some insight into the lives of the soldiers there. It should be noted that Sniper One paints a picture of Basra – and Iraq – that was at variance with the official government-promoted version of events. Ministry of Defeat provides an overall history of the occupation – something that has been sorely lacking – and details, in a very ‘take no prisoners’ attitude, just went wrong in Iraq.
[EDIT - since writing this, many other books have been written on UK involvement in Iraq.]
The core of the matter, North writes, is that the British Government refused to recognise that it had a serious problem on its hands. As the militias gained power in Basra, the government preferred to believe that it wasn’t a serious issue – little more than a public order issue – and convinced itself that Britain’s expertise from Northern Ireland gave it an advantage over the US. That might have been true if the expertise had actually been used (it wasn’t)…but in any case, Basra was not Northern Ireland. This little piece of self-delusion cost lives, Mr Blair! The troops in Ireland had far better intelligence and much higher troop levels. Much has been made of the shortage of American troops after the Fall of Baghdad, but the British had the same problem and, unlike the US, the MOD learned fuck-all from the experience.
If that wasn't bad enough, the equipment procurement process was badly screwed up. When the RAF was being allowed to spend billions on the Eurofighter, the Army had to make do with the Snatch Land Rover – which Northern Ireland experience had shown was badly under-armoured – which caused the deaths of many British soldiers. The issue was not that the British Army was under-funded – although soldiers were being underpaid for their role – but that the money was being spent on long-term programs that would not provide useful equipment (if that) in time to be useful.
It is quite typical, as Donald Rumsfield pointed out years ago, that countries go to war with an army that is unprepared for the task. It is rather less typical that a country would go to war, find itself in serious shit…and then continue blithely developing technology that was effectively useless, prepared for the wrong war. Instead of fighting the last war, the UK was looking towards a hypothetical European RRF, one of Tony Blair’s pet projects. Billions have been spent – for nothing. Common sense would tell someone of Blair’s intelligence – surely – that a European force wasn't on the cards. When has the EU ever agreed on an enemy?
The British media also comes in for bashing. Not, it should be noted, for the largely American left-wing media army bashing, but for being the dog that didn’t bark. The MOD generally tried to spoon-feed propaganda to the British TV, which largely ate it up and came back and begged for more. Early signs of trouble were ignored, or taken out of context, and even when the media did pick up on signs of trouble, they never understood the underlying factors behind the war. The media did pick up on problems with the Snatch vehicles, but took the ‘under-funded military’ line rather than realising the truth. Reporters who questioned the army line, such as Christina Lamb in Afghanistan, found themselves blacklisted.
The core reason for British ‘success’ in Iraq, North notes, was that the UK never really had control over Basra. The Shia inhabitants of the area, after the events of 1991, preferred to organise themselves rather than trust the coalition. Iran was seen as a better ally by some, a deadly threat by others, but always as a far more significant player than the coalition. Under constant attack, the British forces were slowly withdrawn from the area, conceding control to the militias, who started to loot, rape and slaughter at will. The inglorious end to the story – the retaking of Basra by Iraqi forces with American support in 2008 – was barely a footnote in the British media.
The contrast between Iraq and the Falklands is staggering. The Falklands were another ‘come as you are’ war, one fought by a far more determined PM for limited goals…and one that Britain came closer to losing than anyone would like to admit. After that war, the lessons were learned and incorporated into new developments. Iraq seems, instead, to be the forgotten war. If that wasn't bad enough, most of the mistakes are already being repeated in Afghanistan.
This is an angry book, written by an angry man. It isn’t pleasant reading for anyone with a British heritage, but it is necessary reading. God help us.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
After America - John Birmingham
After America
-John Birmingham
A world without America, five years on…
In the remarkably good Without Warning, John Birmingham introduced us to a whole new disaster novel, one where (in 2003, just prior to the invasion of Iraq) a wave of energy of unknown origin destroyed the continental United States overnight. The world went mad; global economies tanked, civil war and ethnic cleansing spread across Europe, all-out war in the Middle East led to the nuclear destruction of much of the Arab world, China fell into civil war and Russia started to reassert itself as a global power. The remains of the United States – the once-proud military machine and a handful of surviving locations – found itself struggling to survive in a demented world. It was a story where real-like characters such as Tommy Franks and Linda Lingle interacted with a fascinating cast of fictional characters.
A year after the Wave appeared; it vanished, leaving a devastated – and depopulated – United States behind. The American Government – under President Kipper – has moved to repossess its old territory, but powerful forces are preparing to strangle the reborn United States in its cradle. Four years after resettlement began, New York and much of the eastern seaboard is a battleground between different factions of illegal immigrants and the American military, while ethnic and racial strife threaten to shatter a fragile peace in Texas. The President of the United States goes to New York and barely escapes with his life, giving the order for a Fallujah-like push against terrorists and bandits within the remains of the once-great city.
In the meantime, a secret agent in Europe discovers a conspiracy to bring down the United States, one directed by a shadowy figure from her past. Caitlin (who is married to Bret, with one child) embarks on a tour through post-Wave Europe, from the fascist British state to the far too permissive Germany. Jules and the Rhino embark on a daring mission to recover a valuable item from the remains of New York before the American military destroys it. And other newer characters find themselves exploring the post-Wave world.
I should state at the start that After America suffers from being the second book in a trilogy. Some of the action seems largely pointless. Other action seems intensely focused on one particular battleground. Caitlin’s exploration of Germany is interesting, but Jules’s adventure seems completely pointless, particularly when the secret is finally revealed. All they do, it seems, is meet other characters. The story ends on a semi-cliffhanger with no clear resolution. The book is also wordy in the wrong places, with considerable attention being paid to irrelevant details. In short, the overall storyline is not much advanced.
Where the book shines is in its vivid description of the post-wave world. The image of a world without the one and only superpower – ‘oppressive everyone into behaving themselves,’ as one character points out in the first book – is sharp and depressing. Europe has fractured into a nightmare of multiple states, while Russia is growing more powerful and India and Pakistan have exchanged nuclear attacks. Some bits of the book are less believable than others, yet the overall effect is interesting and fascinating. Australia, it seems, has become considerably more powerful, while China simmers in constant ferment.
The descriptions of the various locations within the book shine; New York, the site of a complex battle between American soldiers and various fanatics, comes across as a ruined city. London and a German city come across as darker, warped by the post-wave world. I wished, however, that the author had looked at other locations in his work.
The characters have also grown and changed. Kipper, now President of the United States, comes across as slightly daunted by his new responsibilities. Caitlin combines motherhood with secret intelligence and commando work. Miguel seems to have grown the most, although part of me wondered at his sudden adoption of right-wing beliefs, contrasted oddly with his nemesis, the former CO of Seattle.
There are, however, a number of minor issues. One is the presence of jihadi fighters in New York, seemingly thousands of them. Just how did they get there with the USN covering the waters? Texas, it seems, is on the road to independence, something that is a little bit overdone in the AH world. The presence of green political factions makes little sense in the post-wave world, particularly when there is an obvious need to get as much food produced as possible. They come across as complete fools; quite rightly, IMHO. And, finally, what happened in the Caribbean, after Cuba had been occupied by Venezuela?
Most of the book is quite readable, but IMHO the entire Texas subplot should have been junked. It struck me as boring compared to the New York storyline. A subplot set in Russia or China might have been far more interesting.
Overall a good read, but not a great one.
-John Birmingham
A world without America, five years on…
In the remarkably good Without Warning, John Birmingham introduced us to a whole new disaster novel, one where (in 2003, just prior to the invasion of Iraq) a wave of energy of unknown origin destroyed the continental United States overnight. The world went mad; global economies tanked, civil war and ethnic cleansing spread across Europe, all-out war in the Middle East led to the nuclear destruction of much of the Arab world, China fell into civil war and Russia started to reassert itself as a global power. The remains of the United States – the once-proud military machine and a handful of surviving locations – found itself struggling to survive in a demented world. It was a story where real-like characters such as Tommy Franks and Linda Lingle interacted with a fascinating cast of fictional characters.
A year after the Wave appeared; it vanished, leaving a devastated – and depopulated – United States behind. The American Government – under President Kipper – has moved to repossess its old territory, but powerful forces are preparing to strangle the reborn United States in its cradle. Four years after resettlement began, New York and much of the eastern seaboard is a battleground between different factions of illegal immigrants and the American military, while ethnic and racial strife threaten to shatter a fragile peace in Texas. The President of the United States goes to New York and barely escapes with his life, giving the order for a Fallujah-like push against terrorists and bandits within the remains of the once-great city.
In the meantime, a secret agent in Europe discovers a conspiracy to bring down the United States, one directed by a shadowy figure from her past. Caitlin (who is married to Bret, with one child) embarks on a tour through post-Wave Europe, from the fascist British state to the far too permissive Germany. Jules and the Rhino embark on a daring mission to recover a valuable item from the remains of New York before the American military destroys it. And other newer characters find themselves exploring the post-Wave world.
I should state at the start that After America suffers from being the second book in a trilogy. Some of the action seems largely pointless. Other action seems intensely focused on one particular battleground. Caitlin’s exploration of Germany is interesting, but Jules’s adventure seems completely pointless, particularly when the secret is finally revealed. All they do, it seems, is meet other characters. The story ends on a semi-cliffhanger with no clear resolution. The book is also wordy in the wrong places, with considerable attention being paid to irrelevant details. In short, the overall storyline is not much advanced.
Where the book shines is in its vivid description of the post-wave world. The image of a world without the one and only superpower – ‘oppressive everyone into behaving themselves,’ as one character points out in the first book – is sharp and depressing. Europe has fractured into a nightmare of multiple states, while Russia is growing more powerful and India and Pakistan have exchanged nuclear attacks. Some bits of the book are less believable than others, yet the overall effect is interesting and fascinating. Australia, it seems, has become considerably more powerful, while China simmers in constant ferment.
The descriptions of the various locations within the book shine; New York, the site of a complex battle between American soldiers and various fanatics, comes across as a ruined city. London and a German city come across as darker, warped by the post-wave world. I wished, however, that the author had looked at other locations in his work.
The characters have also grown and changed. Kipper, now President of the United States, comes across as slightly daunted by his new responsibilities. Caitlin combines motherhood with secret intelligence and commando work. Miguel seems to have grown the most, although part of me wondered at his sudden adoption of right-wing beliefs, contrasted oddly with his nemesis, the former CO of Seattle.
There are, however, a number of minor issues. One is the presence of jihadi fighters in New York, seemingly thousands of them. Just how did they get there with the USN covering the waters? Texas, it seems, is on the road to independence, something that is a little bit overdone in the AH world. The presence of green political factions makes little sense in the post-wave world, particularly when there is an obvious need to get as much food produced as possible. They come across as complete fools; quite rightly, IMHO. And, finally, what happened in the Caribbean, after Cuba had been occupied by Venezuela?
Most of the book is quite readable, but IMHO the entire Texas subplot should have been junked. It struck me as boring compared to the New York storyline. A subplot set in Russia or China might have been far more interesting.
Overall a good read, but not a great one.
Watch on the Rhine - Tom Kratman
Watch on the Rhine (Posleen War)
Tom Kratman, John Ringo
A few months ago, I was trapped on a train for several hours (owing to REALLY bad weather on the line.) Having run out of my own books to read, I was lucky enough to be sitting next to a Star Trek fan who loaned me his copies of Star Trek: Destiny, a three-book novel that brought together heroes from many Star Trek franchises. I have never been much of a Star Trek fan, but they featured the Borg and so I read them. The Borg have finally launched an all-out invasion of Federation space and billions of humans and humanoids are being slaughtered mercilessly.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with WOTR? The answer is quite simple; towards the end of the third book in the series, Captain Picard approaches the blind engineer (whose name I have forgotten and I can't be bothered looking up) and orders him to build a superweapon to use against the Borg. The blind engineer refuses on moral grounds and declares his willingness to go to the brig rather than build the hellish weapon. And my reaction, basically, was WTF?
Let’s put this in perspective. The Borg are the single most dangerous race in the entire Star Trek universe. Their ships are effectively invincible. One Cube chopped its way through an entire Federation fleet; another did the same, and then tried to rewrite time so humanity would no longer exist. They assimilate anyone they come across and (unless you have a patriotic scriptwriter) this isn’t just death, but permanent slavery as part of the hive mind. Defeat means the end of the world. Against such an enemy, there is no such thing as an immoral weapon. Picard should have thrown his idiot of a chief engineer out of an airlock, instead of forgiving him, which he does in an emotional scene at the end.
Watch on the Rhine is a spin-off of John Ringo’s famous Posleen War series, in which the Earth (around 2001) is contacted by the Galactic Federation. The Federation warns that Earth is in the path of a rampaging race of alien centaurs who will kill us, eat us and turn our world into yet another spawning ground for the Posleen. Owing to the nature of the Posleen, the war against them will be fought out on the ground (rather than having them throwing rocks at us until we submit) and every country on Earth starts building up a massive army. As of the opening pages of WOTR, Ringo’s Gust Front has concluded, with Washington lying in ruins after the first Posleen landings.
Unfortunately for the Chancellor of Germany, there aren’t actually that many veterans of Germany’s wars left alive. (One of the Federation’s gifts to Earth is rejuvenation technology, which can literally turn an old man into a teenage kid, complete with overcharged hormones.) Facing the certainty of an invasion that will devastate Germany, he makes the very brave (and very politically incorrect) decision to rejuvenate the surviving SS soldiers. Yes, you read that right; the SS. Hitler’s Black Knights. The Order of the Death’s Head. Naturally, this decision provokes massive resistance among the liberal side of Germany, some of whom are in the pay of one of the Galactic Federation races.
I must admit that when I first heard of this idea, I wasn't intending to read the book. The SS are a repulsive historical nightmare, a warning of just how low the human race can sink. Yes, there is no doubting that the SS fought bravely and very well, but they also carried out the orders of some of the worst mass-murderers in human history. The only modern army that comes close to the level of atrocities they committed was the Japanese Army of the same era. Even the Red Army’s horrific march through Germany in 1945 doesn’t come close. The second objection is more practical, than moral; in the words of Basil Faulty, who won the damn war anyway? The SS didn’t win the war for Germany. That may have been because Hitler literally bit off much more than he could chew. Yet, at the same time, Germany didn’t lose the war in spite of the SS, but because of it. The atrocities they visited on their victims were repaid upon Germany itself.
But I had enjoyed reading Tom Kratman’s first book and I decided to give Watch on the Rhine a try. I must admit that I enjoyed it more than I expected.
The book can be effectively divided up into two sections; the prelude to war and the war itself. Tom takes us from the early meeting between the Chancellor and the senior surviving SS officer, to the political manoeuvrings and outright treachery carried out by the Left in hopes of stopping the SS. Sometimes this has its amusing moments. Sometimes this descends into farce.
"Were this true," said the chancellor, mildly, "then equally guilty would be Heinz Guderian, Erich Manstein, Erwin Rommel, or Gerd von Rundstedt. They actually did the higher level planning for that war. The people I propose to bring back were low-level players indeed compared to those famous and admired German soldiers."
"They murdered prisoners!" shrieked another legislator.
"In that war everyone murdered prisoners."
Well yes, in that war everyone did murder prisoners, but how many murdered six million people while following a nutty racial theory? Further, none of the Field Marshals the Chancellor mentions were SS.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that Tom was writing after 9/11. It is hard to see how that fits into the Posleen Universe, not least because 9/11 hadn’t taken place by the time John wrote the first two books in the series. Furthermore, WOTR takes place after the Posleen have torn Washington to shreds and made their presence indisputably known to the world. The level of denial is unbelievable. There might be a few nuts who don’t believe in the Posleen, but after Washington it would be impossible to convince the world that they don’t exist. Europe is painted as a completely insular society. The Posleen War is nothing like the Iraq War, yet the politics are the same. It makes little sense. WOTR Germany doesn’t feel like a society at war.
The book picks up rapidly as the first wave of invaders land in Germany. The German Army and the SS go into action against the invaders, hobbled by manipulations by the Federation – which secretly fears what humanity will do after the war. Tom’s military skill shows itself as the Germans contain and then drive back the Posleen. The harsh discipline of the SS comes to the fore as they deal with lines that were demoralised and broke. The traitors get swept up and jailed, while Germany goes onto a full war footing. The SS – now including French, Polish and Jewish units – makes a final stand as thousands of Germans flee to Norway and the redoubts prepared there.
Where Tom shines lies in the training and war-fighting experience of the young Germans who find themselves called to battle the alien enemy. Tom is an expert at training young soldiers (a theme he returns to in A Desert Called Peace) and the training sequences read out realistically. Once the war actually starts, Tom does an excellent job of portraying the fighting, although there are some odd points. The Posleen seem considerably more intelligent than Ringo depicts them in the original series, more than willing to comment on the absurdities of human nature and use our own weaknesses – such as human shields – against us. Human shields are a favoured tactic of the barbarians we fight these days, but I doubt that the Posleen could conceive of the tactic, let alone use it.
The portrayal of the SS does strike me as a slightly skewed, even though that may be because of my preconceptions and historical knowledge getting in the way. To the best of my knowledge, the SS never told Hitler and his goons to fuck off; in fact, the SS enforced Hitler’s increasingly foolish orders and certainly had a hand in prolonging the war. The assertion that the SS would have – eventually – had a Jewish formation within its ranks is almost certainly absurd. If there were any Jews serving within the SS, they were never identified as Jews. Furthermore, while the SS was good at incorporating non-Germans into their ranks, those units didn’t always perform very well. On the other hand, Tom is quite right to state that many in the SS – the early SS, at least – regarded Himmler’s devotion to racial purity and propagating the Aryan race as stupid.
(That said, even those who loathe WOTR for its politics have admitted to enjoying the battles.)
And yet, while the book is an enjoyable read, its political message is diluted by its own premise. The threat is overwhelmingly powerful; defeat means extermination. There are no rational grounds for opposing anything to help defeat the Posleen…
Yet are the SS the answer? As I said above, the Germans lost the war…and they lost it, in large part, because of the SS. The SS Himmler and his men created could not be separated from their nutty beliefs in racial destiny and the atrocities they carried out helped destroy Germany’s chance of winning the war. What if, one might ask, if the Germans had treated the Russians decently in 1941? Even as a tactical manoeuvre, with every intention of revenging on it after the war, it would have changed history.
WOTR is exciting, thought-provoking and provocative.
Tom Kratman, John Ringo
A few months ago, I was trapped on a train for several hours (owing to REALLY bad weather on the line.) Having run out of my own books to read, I was lucky enough to be sitting next to a Star Trek fan who loaned me his copies of Star Trek: Destiny, a three-book novel that brought together heroes from many Star Trek franchises. I have never been much of a Star Trek fan, but they featured the Borg and so I read them. The Borg have finally launched an all-out invasion of Federation space and billions of humans and humanoids are being slaughtered mercilessly.
What, you might ask, does this have to do with WOTR? The answer is quite simple; towards the end of the third book in the series, Captain Picard approaches the blind engineer (whose name I have forgotten and I can't be bothered looking up) and orders him to build a superweapon to use against the Borg. The blind engineer refuses on moral grounds and declares his willingness to go to the brig rather than build the hellish weapon. And my reaction, basically, was WTF?
Let’s put this in perspective. The Borg are the single most dangerous race in the entire Star Trek universe. Their ships are effectively invincible. One Cube chopped its way through an entire Federation fleet; another did the same, and then tried to rewrite time so humanity would no longer exist. They assimilate anyone they come across and (unless you have a patriotic scriptwriter) this isn’t just death, but permanent slavery as part of the hive mind. Defeat means the end of the world. Against such an enemy, there is no such thing as an immoral weapon. Picard should have thrown his idiot of a chief engineer out of an airlock, instead of forgiving him, which he does in an emotional scene at the end.
Watch on the Rhine is a spin-off of John Ringo’s famous Posleen War series, in which the Earth (around 2001) is contacted by the Galactic Federation. The Federation warns that Earth is in the path of a rampaging race of alien centaurs who will kill us, eat us and turn our world into yet another spawning ground for the Posleen. Owing to the nature of the Posleen, the war against them will be fought out on the ground (rather than having them throwing rocks at us until we submit) and every country on Earth starts building up a massive army. As of the opening pages of WOTR, Ringo’s Gust Front has concluded, with Washington lying in ruins after the first Posleen landings.
Unfortunately for the Chancellor of Germany, there aren’t actually that many veterans of Germany’s wars left alive. (One of the Federation’s gifts to Earth is rejuvenation technology, which can literally turn an old man into a teenage kid, complete with overcharged hormones.) Facing the certainty of an invasion that will devastate Germany, he makes the very brave (and very politically incorrect) decision to rejuvenate the surviving SS soldiers. Yes, you read that right; the SS. Hitler’s Black Knights. The Order of the Death’s Head. Naturally, this decision provokes massive resistance among the liberal side of Germany, some of whom are in the pay of one of the Galactic Federation races.
I must admit that when I first heard of this idea, I wasn't intending to read the book. The SS are a repulsive historical nightmare, a warning of just how low the human race can sink. Yes, there is no doubting that the SS fought bravely and very well, but they also carried out the orders of some of the worst mass-murderers in human history. The only modern army that comes close to the level of atrocities they committed was the Japanese Army of the same era. Even the Red Army’s horrific march through Germany in 1945 doesn’t come close. The second objection is more practical, than moral; in the words of Basil Faulty, who won the damn war anyway? The SS didn’t win the war for Germany. That may have been because Hitler literally bit off much more than he could chew. Yet, at the same time, Germany didn’t lose the war in spite of the SS, but because of it. The atrocities they visited on their victims were repaid upon Germany itself.
But I had enjoyed reading Tom Kratman’s first book and I decided to give Watch on the Rhine a try. I must admit that I enjoyed it more than I expected.
The book can be effectively divided up into two sections; the prelude to war and the war itself. Tom takes us from the early meeting between the Chancellor and the senior surviving SS officer, to the political manoeuvrings and outright treachery carried out by the Left in hopes of stopping the SS. Sometimes this has its amusing moments. Sometimes this descends into farce.
"Were this true," said the chancellor, mildly, "then equally guilty would be Heinz Guderian, Erich Manstein, Erwin Rommel, or Gerd von Rundstedt. They actually did the higher level planning for that war. The people I propose to bring back were low-level players indeed compared to those famous and admired German soldiers."
"They murdered prisoners!" shrieked another legislator.
"In that war everyone murdered prisoners."
Well yes, in that war everyone did murder prisoners, but how many murdered six million people while following a nutty racial theory? Further, none of the Field Marshals the Chancellor mentions were SS.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that Tom was writing after 9/11. It is hard to see how that fits into the Posleen Universe, not least because 9/11 hadn’t taken place by the time John wrote the first two books in the series. Furthermore, WOTR takes place after the Posleen have torn Washington to shreds and made their presence indisputably known to the world. The level of denial is unbelievable. There might be a few nuts who don’t believe in the Posleen, but after Washington it would be impossible to convince the world that they don’t exist. Europe is painted as a completely insular society. The Posleen War is nothing like the Iraq War, yet the politics are the same. It makes little sense. WOTR Germany doesn’t feel like a society at war.
The book picks up rapidly as the first wave of invaders land in Germany. The German Army and the SS go into action against the invaders, hobbled by manipulations by the Federation – which secretly fears what humanity will do after the war. Tom’s military skill shows itself as the Germans contain and then drive back the Posleen. The harsh discipline of the SS comes to the fore as they deal with lines that were demoralised and broke. The traitors get swept up and jailed, while Germany goes onto a full war footing. The SS – now including French, Polish and Jewish units – makes a final stand as thousands of Germans flee to Norway and the redoubts prepared there.
Where Tom shines lies in the training and war-fighting experience of the young Germans who find themselves called to battle the alien enemy. Tom is an expert at training young soldiers (a theme he returns to in A Desert Called Peace) and the training sequences read out realistically. Once the war actually starts, Tom does an excellent job of portraying the fighting, although there are some odd points. The Posleen seem considerably more intelligent than Ringo depicts them in the original series, more than willing to comment on the absurdities of human nature and use our own weaknesses – such as human shields – against us. Human shields are a favoured tactic of the barbarians we fight these days, but I doubt that the Posleen could conceive of the tactic, let alone use it.
The portrayal of the SS does strike me as a slightly skewed, even though that may be because of my preconceptions and historical knowledge getting in the way. To the best of my knowledge, the SS never told Hitler and his goons to fuck off; in fact, the SS enforced Hitler’s increasingly foolish orders and certainly had a hand in prolonging the war. The assertion that the SS would have – eventually – had a Jewish formation within its ranks is almost certainly absurd. If there were any Jews serving within the SS, they were never identified as Jews. Furthermore, while the SS was good at incorporating non-Germans into their ranks, those units didn’t always perform very well. On the other hand, Tom is quite right to state that many in the SS – the early SS, at least – regarded Himmler’s devotion to racial purity and propagating the Aryan race as stupid.
(That said, even those who loathe WOTR for its politics have admitted to enjoying the battles.)
And yet, while the book is an enjoyable read, its political message is diluted by its own premise. The threat is overwhelmingly powerful; defeat means extermination. There are no rational grounds for opposing anything to help defeat the Posleen…
Yet are the SS the answer? As I said above, the Germans lost the war…and they lost it, in large part, because of the SS. The SS Himmler and his men created could not be separated from their nutty beliefs in racial destiny and the atrocities they carried out helped destroy Germany’s chance of winning the war. What if, one might ask, if the Germans had treated the Russians decently in 1941? Even as a tactical manoeuvre, with every intention of revenging on it after the war, it would have changed history.
WOTR is exciting, thought-provoking and provocative.
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