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Saturday, May 17, 2008
| So, I promised a discussion of Franceschi and Weider's the Wars Against Napoleon. I greatly regretted this promise, because it required I actually finish the book, a task which I would have just as well let drop uncompleted. Even if I did pay hardback prices for the thrice-blasted thing. The book is being sold as a revisionist work arguing the diplomatic case of Napoleon I's innocence and genuinely peaceable nature. This would be a substantial burden for the most scholarly and clever of authors, as Napoleon has become a by-word in the English-speaking world as an aggressor, a tyrant, and a degenerate. Franceschi and Weider are neither clever, nor do they demonstrate any scholarly characteristics, I must report. First of all, diplomatic history is a long-winded and detailing sort of affair. I should have been well-warned to note that this work of diplomatic history was barely more than two hundred pages long. What detail is contained within its few pages tends more towards the military, than the diplomatic. Perhaps the authors were confused by the word "Wars" in their title, and concluded that they were obliged to include great swathes of text about the operational and tactical events of Napoleon's many, many campaigns. Nevertheless, in a book proporting to tear the diplomatic mask from the warlike visage of the Bonaparte family's wicked royalist enemies, the material on diplomacy and politics is sparse, spotty, and underwhelming. We get barely three pages on Tilsit, two or three pages scattered here and there on Amiens, and maybe a page and a half on Luneville. A few paragraphs here and there about Campoformio, etc. Meanwhile, the maneuvering behind the establishment of the myriad Bonapartist puppet-states justifying what still looks to me like Napoleon's many aggressions and invasions are airly dismissed with bald nonsense which the North Korean's propagandists would blush to commit to print. For instance, this on the enthroning of a Bonaparte brother over the Netherlands: On the institutional plane, the Dutch threw themselves into the arms of Revolutionary France to escape the stadholders (governors of the country.) At the time, the Netherlands had a republican regime presided by the "Grand Pensioner" Schimmelpenninck. In 1806 the Batavian authorities took advantage of their leader's illness to request of Napoleon that he give them his brother Joseph as king. Joseph had earned their respect the previous year while commanding a Franco-Dutch corps. The proclamation was issued on June 5. Thus was one of the oldest republics in Europe placed under a monarchy by the banner-carriers of the revolutionary Rights of Man! Kindly note, the lack of citation in the above quote. There is none. In the entire book. Apparently the authors received their enlightenment on the subject via divine revelation, because there is no worldly credit given anywhere outside the obsequious acknowledgments contained within the brief preface. Not even quotes from correspondence and contemporary works are properly cited such that a reader not inclined to take the authors at their word might consult the originals. This book is an act of contrascholasticism. The authors appear actively contemptuous of the notion of active readership, of the idea that their book might act as any sort of gateway for a journey deeper into the subject. Their word is, apparently final. They also seem disinclined to persuade or convince an uncertain or open-minded audience. The text is littered with rhetorical, unearned daggers flung at the enemies of Napoleon, often out of context. Bernadotte, the general who turned against Napoleon once he became Crown Prince of Sweden, never appears in the text without an accompanying shriek of rage against his eventual betrayal of the peaceable emperor. Every other personage of note who did not stand with Napoleon until Saint Helena are likewise pummelled about their unworthy heads and shoulders. Look, I was willing to entertain the idea that the monarchs of Europe were perfidious and brought Napoleon's catastrophes upon their own heads. Hell, I bought the book, didn't I? But once you wade through two hundred pages of: In foreign affairs, the domain more relevant to our subject, Napoleon's first concern was to reassure the European monarchies. He attempted to disarm their hysterical hostility by informing them that he accepted the Treaty of Paris, thereby indicating that he renounced any claim to reconquer the frontiers of 1792 and instead engaged to respect those of 1789. it becomes difficult to maintain equanimity and balance. Oh, and please note - the above was a description of the diplomatic maneuvers during "Hundred Days", and Napoleon fought the whole of that spring's campaign in Belgium, which is decidedly on the wrong side of the 1789 borders. Really, this book is naked apologetic. They write to defend their hero, against every insult ever essayed by an opponent. Check this out - this is their defense of the then-Consul's slaughter of prisoners in Jaffa during the Egyptian campaign: Confronted with a fait accompli, Bonaparte found himself in a nightmarish issue of conscience. Already suffering from a shortage of provisions for his soldiers, he was unable to feed this additional mass of humanity under any circumstances. Nor could he spare sufficient soldiers to guard them, being cruelly undermanned as a result of operations. Simply to abandon these men to their fate would be to condemn them to a slow and horrible death in the desert. Finally, in the rigid oriental mindset, any measure of clemency would be perceived as a weakeness of will tha would probably encourage even more ferocious resistence in future combats. It was thus that Bonaparte was obliged to resolve his moral crisis by taking the terrible decision to exterminate the prisoners under indescribable conditions. What a prince. In short, this book leaves me more ignorant of the subject than I was when I first opened its leaves. What few new facts one might glean from the authors' presentation are so compromised by their unrelenting partisanship, refusal to cite sources, and blatant bias that I find myself unable to accept any of it as true. Their endorsement of interpretations I've encountered previously have undermined the legitimacy of said interpretations by that very endorsement. In short, I regret that I ever encountered this horrid little volume of pestiferous Bonapartist propaganda. |
Friday, May 02, 2008
| Dude. Oh, and btw? The Wars Against Napoleon is shaping up to be a ripe piece of unaddorned sophistry, a bare-bones apologia for tyranny. I'm regretting having bought it. I'll have to track back to see who talked me into it - it was either someone on the Corner or Dimitri, I think. |
Thursday, May 01, 2008
| Huh. Iron Man's playing at the Garman tonight. Sounds like a plan. |
| So it's National History Day season, and the Valentine Hill Road was echoing this fine morning with the outraged bellows of yours truly, reading his way through the senior papers. Vietnam War papers. [shudder] |
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
| So I've been watching fansubs of the first season of Space Battleship Yamato. It's more fun than I had expected, but lord, the science! The continuity errors! The enemy race changes *skin color* ten episodes into the show! With no in-story explanation why the Gamilons were a healthy pink until the Pluto base was destroyed! Well, except for that subordinate of Desslar's - he was always a sickly purple. There's no women on board the Yamato, except for one episode, where they're all over the place, then after that, it's just Yuki again. The travel-times make my head ache, and the galactic geography makes the original Battlestar Galactica seem reasonable and rational in comparison. But on the other hand, you've got mad Seventies futuristic designs, great music, those trippy Matsumoto characters, and Captain Okita. Gotta love Captain Okita. And Sanada, grinning suicidally as he blows up the Gamilon-trap-of-the week with bombs in his own prosthetic limbs. He rocks. |
Monday, April 28, 2008
| Fred: Obama will say any pin-headed thing he feels like on foreign affairs, so long as it doesn't require him to actually follow through with any of it. I'm not president or running for president; if I say "invade Pakistan!", it'd just be some fool saying something stupid on the internet. Obama, on the other hand, had somebody mis-brief him & blurted out, stupidly, some idiocy about invading a nominal allied state during the campaign season. The reason that Pakistan is such a hellacious problem is that they're nominally our allies. (Same with the Saudis, but the Royal Family isn't a nuclear power. Yet.) Without causus belli, we can't out-right invade the technically sovereign state of Pakistan. The CIA crawls all over that county with the half-hearted connivance of the Pakistanis - there was one heck of a wild-west show in the Kyber Agency recently. We conduct quiet cross-border attacks all the time. But I *don't* think we should declare open war on the Frontier Agencies. It's not the delicate or nuanced way to go about things. But more importantly, Afghanistan isn't a cultural or political priority. Afghanistan is a proxy to a proxy, at least two removes from the strategic pivot. All we can do in Afghanistan is kill jihadis. More importantly, we can *lose* in Afghanistan, but we can't win there. It's an attritional fight, and the modern United States isn't a power which can win on attritional terms. It only works if we change our terms, our definitions. Afghanistan is far enough out of the Islamic heartland that it'll never register as anything other than "an affair of posts". You can win hearts and minds locally in Afghanistan proper, but what you do in that country won't swing the Islamic public regionally or internationally one way or the other. Iraq is the emotional heartland of the modern Islamic world, or at least as close as we can get without waging war on a nominal sovereign allied state. And last year the Salafis wrecked themselves in front of the Muslim world, right in the heart of the old caliphate. They butchered and they slaughtered and they demonstrated their ideals before the cameras. Iraq was where we could show the Islamic world a choice of definitions: does "Muslim" mean takfirism, salafism? Or are the Takfiri devil-worshipers, nihilistic, solipistic, savages, criminals - safely *not Muslim*? I'm sanguine about Iraq because it looks like Iraq broke the Sunni regional threat. Since last summer, it's been a worry about whether there would be a count-rout and regional civil war between the resurgent Shia trends - the "Shia Crescent" - and a beaten Sunni cultural trend. The unexpected "Iranian subversion" mini-civil war seems to have put paid to the threat of the "Shia Crescent", though. On a related note, I'm having difficulty figuring out what the heck happened last month in Basra and Sadr City, but there are a couple of alternate interpretations. 1) The various Iranian-suborned groups in the Iraqi Shia community had a falling-out-between-thieves, and the Iranians tried to salvage the situation by throwing the Sadrists to the wolves. 2) al Maliki had a sudden surge of patriotic feeling, and decided to assert national control over Basra. 3) Sadr failed to impress anyone in Teheran with his ability to mobilize the masses, and the fighting was *started* by Iranian intervention, against Sadr. 4) al Maliki and SIIC finally gave in to American badgering, and decided to reconcile with the Sunni Awakening folks by waging their own little demonstrative war-against-terrrorists-and-takfiri. Sadr, being the least politically apt and by far the youngest and dumbest of Shia powerbrokers, got chosen as the judas goat for this demonstration. The governmental Shia factions, having fought and won a much more conventional war against their own head-choppers and lunatics, are now exploiting an opportunity to meet on common terms with the newly-sympathetic Sunni Awakening community leaders. I like #4 much more than the other explanations of what's going on. It explains what happened to the abortive "Shia Awakening" movement from last winter. If the Shias in government let that go on for too long, they would have failed to protect their phoney-baloney jobs. In order to avoid another bottom-up counter-insurgency, they and the Iranians are colluding to make the pacification of the south a top-down national project. It *sounds* like the Iranians may have out-maneuvered themselves, though. And there was always a chance that the Iranians would shoot themselves in the foot like this. Whenever you try to buy everybody in a factional snake-pit, you end up buying nobody; because all the factions are bought off equally, none of them feel beholden for the money and support delivered. Aid becomes tribute when it is expected, and leverage depends upon uncertainty. |
| Huh, long weekends. I'm feeling kind of optimistic about the war this morning, but then, I haven't read the news sites yet this morning. I'm going to put a placer down and say that I believe that we're winning in Iraq today, and that it'll finally settle down into a low-level series of terroristic outbursts and border flareups with Iran. I'm not as sanguine about the prospect of war with Iran, and the ongoing deterioration of Afghanistan. We've ceded a certain amount of control in Afghanistan to NATO, so to one degree or another that situation is kind of out of control, and that's always worrisome. One of the things I'll be looking for in a future administration is a healthy re-engagement with Afghanistan, and the proxy-war with Pakistan's demons which "Afghanistan" represents. I spent part of this last weekend talking with a once-estranged friend who's going to be deploying to Iraq by the end of the year with one of the new Stryker brigades. He seems pretty optimistic, but then, he hasn't been actively deployed since the second year of the Bosnia deployment. I didn't hear anything I haven't been hearing elsewhere in my own little personal echo-chamber, so take that as you will. But Fred, I can't imagine that it's a good idea to use adjectives like "savage" when talking about Muslims, Shia or Sunni. Words have meaning, and I like to reserve such explosive and loaded terms for actual savages, like the takfiri and the terrorists and the criminals hired by both. |
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
| Huh. The Clearfield wallah beat my-neighbor-the-carpetbagger. Guess I'll definitely be voting Republican in the generals, unless this Thompson fellow turns out to be a sheep-molester or something like that. And, since they seem to have done well enough in shaking the trees & emptying the closets of skeletons - Walker, sucks to be you, dude - I'm guessing that possibility is pretty slight. But it's not good when the Democrats roll out more primary votes than the Republicans in such a traditionally Republican, rural district, especially when the Republican congressional race is that heavily-contested. About 69.5k to more than 71k? Not good, folks. Pennsyltucky is starting to go blue in the face. And yes, the Shrew made her numbers. It's gonna go to a second ballot at the least. Woo-hoo! Contested convention! |
