The Committee of Public Safety

From Wikipedia:

As a potential vehicle for international understanding, Esperanto attracted the suspicion of many totalitarian states. The situation was especially pronounced in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin.

In Germany, there was additional motivation to persecute Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish. In his work, Mein Kampf, Hitler mentioned Esperanto as an example of a language that would be used by an International Jewish Conspiracy once they achieved world domination. Esperantists were executed during the Holocaust, with Zamenhof’s family in particular singled out for execution.

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Esperanto was given a measure of government support, and an officially recognized Soviet Esperanto Association came into being. However, in 1937, Stalin reversed this policy. He denounced Esperanto as “the language of spies” and had Esperantists exiled or executed. The use of Esperanto was effectively banned until 1956.

Esperanto on a Dvorak keyboard would be doubly dangerous.

An interesting line of historical development from one great song of liberation to another, starting with the most influential terrorist in American history. Says Wikipedia:

In 1890, George Kimball wrote the story of how the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, known as the “Tiger” Battalion, collectively worked out the lyrics to “John Brown’s Body”. Kimball wrote:

We had a jovial Scotchman in the battalion, named John Brown…and as he happened to bear the identical name of the old hero of Harper’s Ferry, he became at once the butt of his comrades. If he made his appearance a few minutes late among the working squad, or was a little tardy in falling into the company line, he was sure to be greeted with such expressions as “Come, old fellow, you ought to be at it if you are going to help us free the slaves”; or, “This can’t be John Brown–why, John Brown is dead.” And then some wag would add, in a solemn, drawling tone, as if it were his purpose to give particular emphasis to the fact that John Brown was really, actually dead: “Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave.”

According to Kimball, these sayings became by-words among the soldiers and, in a communal effort–similar in many ways to the spontaneous composition of camp meeting songs described above–were gradually put to the tune of “Say, Brothers”:

Finally ditties composed of the most nonsensical, doggerel rhymes, setting for the fact that John Brown was dead and that his body was undergoing the process of dissolution, began to be sung to the music of the hymn above given. These ditties underwent various ramifications, until eventually the lines were reached,–

“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

His soul’s marching on.”

And,–

“He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord,

His soul’s marching on.”

These lines seemed to give general satisfaction, the idea that Brown’s soul was “marching on” receiving recognition at once as having a germ of inspiration in it. They were sung over and over again with a great deal of gusto, the “Glory hallelujah” chorus being always added.

However these earthy lyrics offended the finer set:

Bishop’s battalion was dispatched to Washington, D.C. early in the Civil War, and Julia Ward Howe heard this song during a public review of the troops in Washington. Rufus R. Dawes, then in command of Company “K” of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, stated in his memoirs that the man who started the singing was Sergeant John Ticknor of his company. By this time the association with the diminutive Scotsman John Brown was forgotten or unknown to most listeners, who heard only a rough and somewhat oddly-phrased marching song about John Brown the abolitionist. Howe’s companion at the review, the Reverend James Clarke, suggested to Howe that she write new words for the fighting men’s song. Staying at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the night of November 18, 1861, Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”. Of the writing of the lyrics, Howe remembers, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

Many of the troops that marched deep into Dixie marched into battle singing one of these two songs. Many of the children of my generation sang a song of liberation set to the same music:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule
We went marching down the hall just to hang the principal
Our troops go marching on!

Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Met her in the dark with a man eating shark
Our troops go marching on!

Those were variations we used when I was a freedom fighter. Wikipedia has documented other variations:

Glory, Glory halleljah,
My teacher hit me with a ruler,
I hide behind the door with an AK-44
And that was the end of my teacher.
My dad was mad, My mom was sad
Me and my brother were laughing like mad.

We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule

We have even drowned the principal in the local swimming pool

And we’ll go marching on!

We have tortured all the teachers – we have broken every rule

When the principal tried to stop us we just flushed ‘em down the stool

Our truth is marching on!

We have ruptured all the teachers and we’ve broken all the rules,

And we’ll go marching on!

We have sliced the English teachers and have drowned them in their blood

And we’ll go marching on!

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

We have barbecued the principal and hung the janitor

Our school is burnin down!!

I went to her funeral and I went to her grave,

instead of throwing flowers I threw a handgrenade

We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule

We have plans to hang the principal tomorrow after school!

We have forgotten our multiplication tables, eaten our teachers and their families,

And we’ll go marching on!

We have shot the secretary and we hung the principal

Us brats keep marching on.

We have smashed up all the blackboards, we have thrown out all the books

The school is burning down.

We have wandered down the halls writing cuss words on the walls

The school is burning down.

We have bound and gagged the principal and tossed him in the pool

The school is burning down.

We have barbecued the principal, destroyed the PTA,

Our school keeps burning on.

They sent us to the office, so we hung the principal,

Our troops are marching on!

We are killing all the teachers, we are breaking all the rules

We broke into his office and we murdered the principal

Our troops go marching on!

We broke into his office and we tickled the principal

We have tortured every teacher and we’ve hung the principal.

We have broken every piece of chalk as well as every rule.

They have taken all the teachers out and broken every rule.

They have painted all the toilets black and all the lockers white.

There won’t be school no more!

We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken all the rules.

We’re marching down the hallway for to kill the principal.

We have tortured every teacher. We have broken every rule.

We have spit in every corner of the dirty, rotten school.

We have shot the secretary and destroyed the PTA!

Us kids are marching on!

We have tortured all the teachers, we have broken every rule

We have even spanked the principal and kept him after school

Examples of variations of the chorus:

Met her at the store with a loaded .44…

So I hit him in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

I hit her in the butt with a rotten coconut…

I hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

Met her in the attic with a semi-automatic…

Met her at the gate with a loaded .38…

I hid behind the door with a big ole’ two-by-four

I stood behind the door with a loaded .44…

I bopped her up the bean with an atomic submarine…

Shot her up to heaven with an AK47…

Shot her in the bean with an M-16…

Shot her out the door with a Magnum .44…

Shot her in the head and the teacher dropped dead…

Met her at the bank with a loaded German tank…

Reform school here I come!

And there ain’t no teacher no more

Now the teacher is no more

And she ran right out the door!

Met her at the door with my trusty .44

and she’s not my teacher anymore!

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats (1921)

• Isegoria links to this post on how many nuclear bombs it would take to destroy the world. An illustration:

How many nukes does it take to destroy the world?

• Classic crank Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes to Tory leader David Cameron on how to make a black swan safe world. You can hear Taleb gesticulating wildly as he writes:
  

  The solution is obvious: build an economy that increases the role of well-tested traditions. Ban financial derivatives that require advanced mathematics rather than trial and error. Look at mother nature. There is a complex system built around sound principles that has insured both evolution and survival. It does not let anything get too big to fail. It breaks things early. I don’t understand why people who stand against tampering with nature accept tampering with the economy that would have organically grown too. Work on building a “robust” society, capable of withstanding errors, in which the role of finance (hence debt) would be minimal. We want a society in which people can make mistakes without risk of total collapse. Silicon Valley offers a good example, where people have the chance to fail fast (and repeatedly).

  The best blueprint is the very opposite of the Obama administration’s economic policies (its foreign policy is commendable). It has been administering pain-killers without addressing the cause of disease. Obama is strengthening those who do the wrong thing. Take the “cash for clunkers” programme. It is a handout to those who bought the wrong – uneconomic – car. He is penalising people who did not make a mistake. The same applies to other “rescues”. By raising taxes after the crisis, the administration is hampering evolution. Those who do well in difficult times end up paying more tax and those who lost money in the crisis pay less. The rich who got us here are being rescued by regular Joes and being subsidised by the tax system.

Some links courtesy of Isegoria:

• What really happens in a gunfight?: The conclusions from twenty-five years of lethal force investigation.
• Political Survival: Thoughts on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and The Logic of Political Survival.
• Air Power, Mithril and National Self-Confidence: The Elvish Vietnam Syndrome, Fellowships of Convenience, and Dragons as the Eighth Air Force.

Tactical Generals: Leaders, Technology, and the Perils

The Dangers of LBJ, thinking war is a video game, and micromanagement.

Ape Brain Narcissism Misses the Singularity: An Artificial Life View

A reminder of the fundamental benchmark:

1: Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence, and…

2: There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence.

Kookiness

Curtis Gale Weeks wonders why, while the one hand is clapping, what is the other hand doing?

Cruel windfall: How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches

On how chronic instability leads to progress i.e.:

You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The deteriorating situation in Helmand, by Jonathan Mueller

I was struck by this passage:

When the security forces instead concentrate on protecting the population, they are applying Moltke the Elder’s maxim to seize a position the enemy must attack. Cut off their access to the people, and the insurgents must attack, or become irrelevant. Who has the initiative now?

Jersey Rules

Does paying more for politicians on the open market lead to better politicians?

Raymond Chandler

I ran across “The Simple Art of Murder“, an essay on writing detective fiction by Raymond Chandler, one of America’s great writers. Chandler pretty much eviscerates the Sayers-Christie school of English detective fiction, though he does observe:

This, the classic detective story, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It is the story you will find almost any week in the big shiny magazines, handsomely illustrated, and paying due deference to virginal love and the right kind of luxury goods. Perhaps the tempo has become a trifle faster, and the dialogue a little more glib. There are more frozen daiquiris and stingers ordered, and fewer glasses of crusty old port; more clothes by Vogue, and décors by the House Beautiful, more chic, but not more truth. We spend more time in Miami hotels and Cape Cod summer colonies and go not so often down by the old gray sundial in the Elizabethan garden. But fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pottington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakmé in the presence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingenue in fur-trimmed pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each other, while the flat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs, with their derby hats on.

Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

Dashiell Hammett

Chandler preferred the American sub-genre of hardboiled detective fiction as exemplified by the great Dashiell Hammett:

In the Long Week-End, which is a drastically competent account of English life and manners in the decade following the first World War, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge gave some attention to the detective story. They were just as traditionally English as the ornaments of the Golden Age, and they wrote of the time in which these writers were almost as well-known as any writers in the world. Their books in one form or another sold into the millions, and in a dozen languages. These were the people who fixed the form and established the rules and founded the famous Detection Club, which is a Parnassus of English writers of mystery. Its roster includes practically every important writer of detective fiction since Conan Doyle. But Graves and Hodge decided that during this whole period only one first-class writer had written detective stories at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. Traditional or not, Graves and Hodge were not fuddy-duddy connoisseurs of the second rate; they could see what went on in the world and that the detective story of their time didn’t; and they were aware that writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.

How original a writer Hammett really was, it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group, the only one who achieved critical recognition, but not the only one who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway. Yet for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett, as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and himself. A rather revolutionary debunking of both the language and material of fiction had been going on for some time. It probably started in poetry; almost everything does. You can take it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like. But Hammett applied it to the detective story, and this, because of its heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudo- gentility, was pretty hard to get moving. I doubt that Hammett had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a living by writing something he had first hand information about. He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it was made up out of real things. The only reality the English detection writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and Bognor Regis. If they wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they knew no more about them out of their own experience than the well-heeled Hollywood character knows about the French Modernists that hang in his Bel-Air château or the semi-antique Chippendale-cum-cobbler’s bench that he uses for a coffee table. Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

It’s curious that the cool, detached, cynical, cocky, wise-cracking protagonists like Hammett’s Sam Spade and Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe became the models for the modern cool, detached, cynical, cocky, wisecracking urban hipsters (at least in aspiration) that infest contemporary American culture. While the revolutionary models were groundbreaking in their time, their less sophisticated and degenerate successors have beaten the cool out of cool. It may have been a sophisticated 5GW play: Hammett was a prominent member of the American Communist party and The Maltese Falcon can claim to be the epitome of Socialist Realism. Maybe Uncle Joe was playing a deeper game. Chandler may even hint at this:

But all this (and Hammett too) is for me not quite enough. The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.

Gangsta Paradise

The pseudonymous Spengler, inveterate enemy of the Kung Fu Panda, has revealed his secret identity. Out of curiosity, I once went googling for Spengler’s true identity and it wasn’t terribly difficult to find. He will continue contributing to Asia Times but now posts under his real name over at First Things.

…with an agreeable cat. (props Naked Capitalism).

…at least in Paraguay. Hayes helped arbitrate the mess following the War of the Triple Alliance. The war pitted the combined might of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, the aforementioned triple alliance against tiny Paraguay. Paraguay was significantly outnumbered population-wise but, at the beginning of the war, had more troops due to the higher mobilization produced by its almost totalitarian political order. It took from 1864-1870 for the superior resources of the Triple Alliance to crush Paraguay. The Paraguayans fought fanatically, yielding territory only at the price of high bloodshed. Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López died fighting on the last patch of Paraguayan land held by the last Paraguayan guerrillas. Paraguay lost between 70% and 90% of its pre-war population,~90% of its male population, and 50% of its territory. The conflict can accurately be characterized as the World War of South America.