Just ran into this post. Today an MH17 monument was displayed to markt the place where the victims bodies were returned.

Often, were the Volga-Dnepr Il-76s that were often present at hot cargo flying for NATO (Russians are not that difficult with dangerous cargo)

Interesting AirBridge Cargo (part of Volga-Dnepr) also flies a lot for Boeing (probably because they helped keeping the B747 production line open). Amsterdam is used as a transfer-hub for this. Because of sanctions they were losing slots at this airport. But this reduction hurts Boeing more than ABC, so they got the slots back.

Interesting how globalisation with offshoring, inshoring, outsourcing works. The new trade wars will have unsuspected effects.

But back on subject. MH17

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43457694

MH17 crash: Ukraine pilot blamed by Russia 'kills himself'

A Ukrainian military pilot blamed by Russia over the 2014 downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has killed himself, Ukrainian media report, quoting police.

Capt Vladyslav Voloshyn had called the Russian allegation a lie. Dutch investigators concluded that a Russian Buk missile had destroyed the Boeing 777 jet, killing 298 people.

...

Butusov expressed bewilderment over Voloshyn's death.

"Dear Vlad, how can this be?! Why?!" he wrote.

"He didn't let himself break down, he wasn't depressed at all - he always acted as an exemplary officer."

According to Butusov, Voloshyn had bombed Russian paratroops during the battle of Ilovaisk in August 2014, one of the bloodiest in the Donbass conflict. More than 300 Ukrainian soldiers died in the fighting there.

Voloshyn was shot down but ejected from his Su-25, and reached Ukrainian lines despite severe injuries, Butusov said.

"I didn't hear him speak of any enemies or unresolved problems," he wrote, adding that Voloshyn was happily married and adored his wife, his little boy and two-year-old girl.

We were better off only after the Uprising of 1956. Before that it was as bad here as in the baltic states.

William R. Cumming,

I have always thought that Russians regard Russia as all one country, smoothly sliding over the Urals all the way to the Pacific. I read that the Soviet leaders were intensely annoyed by de Gaulle's formulation of "Europe . . from the Atlantic to the Urals" and they were annoyed for Russian sentimental reasons.
Wouldn't all Russians regard any attempt to re-float the "European Russia west of the Urals" meme as an attempt to prepare the brainwar battlefield for dividing Russia into helpless colonizable pieces?

If Russia were to be "part" of Europe, wouldn't Russians consider that to mean Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific?

Colonel Lang,

I remember the story well, in particular the moment when your uncle got the strange force he found himself commanding over the wall by going first.

And I remembered your quoting him saying something along the lines of after the officer went over the top at Passchendaele, they followed -- 'what else could we do?' But maybe I misremember.

Thank you for your comments.

Every one likes a short victorious war; as Mr. Blair fully would attest to its veracity when being cheered by the crowds in Pristina.

I have thought for a very long time that Peace cannot be predicated - at least not completely - on balance of power. Rather I am led to contemplate the existence of "Peace Interest" to be the major dis-incentive for war.

By 1914, the foundations upon which Peace Interest had rested in Europe had eroded 20 years before or longer - such as the rise of Germany.

On the other hand, during the Cold War, you had to highly integrated and industrialized military blocks that did not and could not gain from war - they would not physically survive a nuclear war.

It is difficult for me to take the Cold War seriously when USSR was supplying Europe with its energy and US was supplying Russia with its food.

The present moment, in many way, is analogous to the world of 1914 - a globalized economy, a rising China, an America that is fighting small wars as Britain did, an assertive Russia & Iran, and more importantly the dissolution of the foundations of the order upon which the previous peace had rested - the Peace of Yalta.

We also can see the expectation of quick victory in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iran, and now in Russia by the NATO states and their allies.

If the passions of 1914 were nationalistic, those of today are clearly religious and, to a lesser extent, civilizational.

All the ingredients for a conflagration are there - in my opinion - just as what obtained in August 1914.

David Habakkuk

John was a sailorman through and through, first a bosun's mate and then quartermaster and navigator of a number of vessels, but the infantry thing never left him. At Nanjing, China in 1928 he suddenly and unexpectedly found himself acting leader of a squad of Japanese marines. This occurred when the Japanese sergeant was killed during a landing from the Yangtse by an international force. John was then in the ship's company of USS Palos and these marines had been embarked for the operation. John was coxswain of a boat in the landing. He took charge and led these men with hand and arm signals, pidgin Chinese and example for over a week. The Japanese command kept giving him more men. By the time he went back to his ship he had something like fifty. He received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum and his first Navy Cross. The Japanese battalion commander's last words to him at Nanjing were, "you are samurai." This tale is re-told in my story "Chrysanthemum." I am quite sure that he is the only enlisted man ever awarded the Order of the Chrysanthemum. pl

readerOfTeaLeaves, Babak Makkinejad,

I think that you are both in a way right. As readerOfTeaLeaves notes, there are crucial background transformations which need to be factored into an understanding of Europe's descent into war in 1914.

This is a matter I need to think about, but there are clearly two distinct if related aspects -- just as there are today. One has to with the effects of technology on culture, and the other with its effects on technical military planning questions.

As to the latter, the argument that the widespread belief that rapid mobilisation was the key to victory is central to understanding why the European powers found it difficult to avoid war is to my mind compelling. So also in my view is the argument that a crucial reason for the difficulty was the widespread inability to grasp that technological changes were likely to make dreams of a quick decisive victory unachievable.

I cannot see any incompatibility between these arguments.

The reasons for the widespread inability to grasp that the idea of a short war was a delusion are an interesting subject in themselves. Again, this is an area I have not revisited for some time, but there were lucid voices pointing out the likelihood that decisive and rapid victory would be unattainable. This was the view taken, if I recall right, in a study published by the Warsaw banker Ivan Bloch, and also by the German theorist Hans Delbruck (umlaut missing, but I can't think how to insert it in Typepad), and also by Kitchener and the Russian military intellectual Colonel Aleksandr Svechin.

It is, incidentally, interesting to reflect on similarities and differences with the Cold War. It was in fact nuclear weapons which made it possible for people both in the United States and the Soviet Union to imagine the possibilities of rapid and decisive victory and defeat.

Absent such weapons, a critical strategic question becomes whether their greater ability to maintain forces in being in peacetime meant that the Soviets could realistically expect to eliminate the bridgeheads on which the massively superior American military-industrial potential could be deployed, once it was remobilised.

If they could not, then eventually the Soviets would be likely to face defeat. Even if they could, they would then have been faced with the prospect of a protracted war of attrition against a power which not only had a vast economic and technological superiority, but also demonstrated capabilities at strategic bombing and at landing and supplying amphibious forces.

To initiate a war against the United States under these conditions would have been a clear case of what Marxist-Leninists called 'adventurism'.

Meanwhile, it is difficult to see why the United States should have initiated a war against the Soviets.

There is every reason, in my view, to believe that a conventional balance would between the Cold War antagonists would have been stable, while the nuclear 'balance of terror' was always latently unstable: the precise reverse of the conventional wisdom.

Colonel Lang,

I was fascinated by the story when you told it some years ago, partly perhaps because for different reasons none of the numerous members of my mother's family who served on the Western Front talked to me about it.

Whatever may be said about them, the old 'gentlemen' did not uncommonly recognise an obligation to serve.

My great-grandfather was vicar of a parish in Cornwall near where the River Fowey flows into the sea – one of the most beautiful places in the kingdom, in my view. On the war memorial in the church is the name of my great-uncle, who had gone out to work on a ranch in Canada and came back as a trooper in a Canadian regiment at the outset of the war. Subsequently he was commissioned into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and was killed in 1917.

Further up the river is one of the local great houses, Llanhydrock, home of the Agar-Robartes family, which had vast estates in the area. At the outset of the war, the eldest son of the family, Thomas Agar-Robartes, was a rising Liberal politician. One could argue that the more responsible course of action would have been to stay out of uniform.

His name heads the list of the war dead of Lanhydrock in the parish church. An account of them in an address given there three years ago quotes the episode at Loos in which 'Captain Tommy' was fatally injured:

'At about 6AM on September 16 1915, two sergeants, Hopkins and Printer ... went out in front of our trenches at the chalk pit ... to bring in a wounded man. When they were about to return Hopkins was shot down by a German sniper. Sgt Printer continued on with the wounded man and brought him into the lines. Captain Robartes who had been watching the whole episode, at once went out with Sgt Printer and brought back Sgt Hopkins who was severely wounded. The whole ground in front of the chalk pit was covered in enemy machine guns, Captain Robartes was severely wounded shortly afterwards.'

(See http://lanhydrock.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/the-war-dead-of-lanhydrock-parish/ .)

The family never really recovered, which is why the house, now owned by the National Trust, is preserved more or less as it was in 1914.

Could be wrong! I view the Ukraine as a side show as to whether Russia west of the Urals is or wants to be part of Europe! For the passage of time since Catherine and Peter the Greats this has been the key issue for Russia. Clearly arguments both ways and some view Russia as Asian in its politics and governance.

What does the US FP establishment have to say on this and the EU as after all even Marx and Engels were German were they not?

Can the EU make it the end of this Century without Russia and vice versa?

Obama and his co-governators are doing their part to drive us toward World War Nuke with Russia. Why?

I have spent my time and energy thinking Obama's motives were primarily or even only all the beautiful money he will collect after he leaves office. I haven't fully wanted to accept Walrus's warnings that Obama is driven by a very real and pathological narcissism which will eventually lead Obama to do something amazingly stupid, even to the point of harming Obama's own interests. And it would be stupid for Obama to help cause World War Nuke because that would incinerate all of his beautiful money as well as incinerating the rest of us and much of civilization. So why is he taking and allowing his creatures to take this risk?
He certainly seems to dislike and resent Putin. The more Putin visibly fails to honor and validate Obama's vast regard for himself the more angry and offended Obama becomes. Could Putin's nonworshipful nonvalidation of Obama's own opinion of his own wisdom and power drive Obama's fragile brittle ego to a point of toxic narcissistic lashout? Does Obama's Inner Child look like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT4YbO_1mvA
If Obama began approaching the kind of visible flipout that Nixon is thought by Hague and others to have been approaching in the last days before Resignation, are there people in the White House, Military, etc. who would seek to interdict or at least delay and ignore any truly crazy order coming from Obama or his innermost circle of creatures?

David,

Yes, come the anti-revolution we'll all be rounded up and confined to a soundproof glass cage as suitable objects of ridicule.

Lane's view seems reasonable. All these aspects are different forms of independence. Hardly unique to Russia, as he notes, but what probably makes it particularly hard to swallow is the powerful lingering sense that Russia had been dealt with. Long ago dammit.

Loved your elegant précis of the dynamics of pre-Putin Russia in your reply to rkka, by the way.

Thanks for the link! It is most useful.

There is something that I was thinking last few days that your mention of "false consciousness" reminded me of.

I originally started in physics and moved into social sciences, for the most part because I liked history, I suppose. While I have enjoyed the problems associated with social sciences more than I did physics, as they are actually more intellectually challenging, I found the mindset in social sciences to be peculiarly unscientific, ironically, the more they insist on their being a "science."

In physics, the aim of the enterprise is to understand the nature, not to insist on how it should be. A theory is merely the best guess we have for how it works, and if the nature says it's wrong, then it's wrong. That means you have to go back and rethink the steps until the theory matches up with what the nature says. Even engineers, who try to harness nature for human benefit, do not presume to lecture nature on what it should be. They merely take advantage of what nature is.

In principle, social sciences should be the same. The "nature" that we observe is the product of human behavior, but, not unlike physics, if humans behave in a manner incompatible with our theories, we should go back to rework the theories, not insist that the "nature" is wrong by defying our sacred theories.

But, the latter is exactly what many social science types do, although those who are most guilty are not necessarily academics in ivory towers, but those who presume to "apply" their understanding to "real life."

Instead of political examples, let me start with an economic one, about maximizing profits. The idea that firms maximize profits by "rationally" exploiting every opportunity is not even a theory, but just a simplifying assumption. In practice, no firm truly "maximizes" profit, ever. To a "scientist," this fact is "nature" telling the theorist that the theory is wrong and that it needs to be rethought. To their credit, most academic economists have done exactly that. There is a vast amount of research on why, in various contexts, firms don't maximize profit for perfectly "rational" reasons. Those who insist on the "rationality" of profit maximization are efficiency experts, management consultants, and corporate raiders. While it may be that they do stand to benefit financially by maximizing profits of the firms they work on, I think a focus on the pecuniary side of their work is misleading. From what I've seen of them, the really capable ones are not driven by money, but by a sense of mission. They really do believe that firms "should" maximize profits and the impediments to profits are evil. Some of these, such as organizational inefficiencies, might be. But tossed out along the way are things like social, ethical, and other considerations that keep profit maximization motive at bay, the perfectly "rational" reasons why firms might not want to maximize profits singled-mindedly. Many of these people may have an academic pedigree, in terms of degrees and such. But their motive is not curiosity, but a sense of mission. Unlike King Canute, they actually feel that waves should obey their command...and they think they have the means to make it happen, provided by their training in social sciences, even if they might remain ignorant of the larger picture.

In the world of politics, the political "consulting class" seems to operate in much the same fashion. They have a sense of how the universe "should" look like, perhaps in a manner more complex than "firms should maximize profits"--politics is more complex than economics, after all. They received an academic training that they feel equips them to achieve their vision, and to be fair, are quite clever, in a limited fashion, in setting up their game. But, ultimately, they are uncurious about the world beyond their fantasy-mission beyond that either it is in their way or a tool that can be coopted for their goals. "False consciousness" is really the reality telling them their theory is wrong and they should go back and think things through again. But since their "theory" is divine and infallible, it must be the evidence that is wrong. Complete antithesis to science, and this, more than the curious people who do no "relevant" work, is becoming the face of "relevant" social science today.

Thank you for your reply.

I do not think that "things got out of control" is an adequate explanation - I think that the war lasted more than they expected was the issue.

"The Su25 and the shadowy companion plane which Russian claim exist"....

are recorded on Russian military signals evidence (radar tracking). This is not some "he said she said" CNN equivalency. Also, I believe the (increasingly credible) air - air shoot-down hypothesis involving these two (tracked ,recorded, identified) Su25 aircraft, makes the claim that the crime was committed by at least 1 (Su25) firing its 30mm automatic cannons ("machine guns") and NOT a rocket or missile. Somehow you failed to mention that either in your report or in a reply to a comment that brought up the OSCE reps' "machine gun" statement - specifically. Also your constant insistence on characterizing all Russian media as "possibly state controlled" is, I think, a misleading strategy.Is Russian media "state controlled" ? Is the Russian media that you refer to "state controlled" ? Moreover, after witnessing the staggering, sickening, completely unprofessional US/EU media propaganda storm being unleashed,I have no doubt at all that British and American corporate media are "state controlled". They have done nothing but widely disseminate prepared US state department accusations and PR releases . Its very, very notable that the incessant drone of accusations coming from these western corporate media outlets are based on 0, none, Nil, No "evidence" at all -only more baseless accusations from the state department and nameless, faceless, "official" cited in corporate media reports, with the same TOTAL lack of substantiation. Clearly, the US govt is leading this propaganda attack. If the US has evidence LET THEM PRESENT IT. The Russian have presented their evidence for inspection.

Oops -- should be Matthew Parris. And you can get an Edward-Grey-with-bird-on-hat iPhone case...

http://www.zazzle.com.au/edward_grey_1st_viscount_grey_of_fallodon_iphone_case-256776052513761876

Peter,

Wonderful digression. Thanks.

DH,

Yes indeed, Rites is also on my list.

Would BoJo (or anyone in sight) be any better? Though learning Iliad Bk I by heart is a mark in his favour --

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2013/09/16/3847043.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQKRAJTgEuo

Boris might be a lot more fun until he blows up. With the bimillennial commemoration of the death of Augustus coming up on the 19th of this month, it is hard to think of any contemporaries who will have the names of actual months changed at their passing. In his doco "The Dream of Rome" a nice Italian archaeologist told Boris that he had the eyes of an emperor to which BoJo responded that he could "think of worse fates". (Everyone wants to be the new Augustus but they may end up as Pertinax novus.)

A. J. Balfour is another hobby of mine and there is this bit in Churchill's "Great Contemporaries" which illuminates him, Grey, Lloyd George and Churchill -- "A taste most truly refined, a judgment comprehensively balanced, an insight penetrating, a passion cold, long, slow, unyielding -- all these were his. He was quite fearless; but he had no reason to fear. Death was certain sooner or later. It only involved a change of state, or at the worst a serene oblivion. Poverty never entered his thoughts. Disgrace was impossible because of his character and behavior. When they took him to the Front to see the War, he admired with bland interest through his pince-nez the bursting shells. Luckily none came near enough to make him jump, as they will make any man jump, if they have their chance. Once I saw a furious scene in the House of Commons when an Irish member, rushing across the floor in a frenzy, shook his fist for a couple of minutes within a few inches of his face. We young fellows behind were all ready to spring to his aid upon a physical foe; but Arthur Balfour, Leader of the House, regarded the frantic figure with no more and no less than the interest of a biologist examining through a microscope the contortions of a rare and provoked insect. There was in fact no way of getting at him. Once during the War when we were rather dissatisfied with the vigor of Sir Edward Grey's policy, I, apologizing for him, said to Mr. Lloyd George, who was hot, 'Well, anyhow, we know that if the Germans were here and said to Grey, 'If you don't sign this Treaty, we will shoot you at once/' he would certainly reply, 'It would be most improper for a British minister to yield to a threat. That sort of thing is not done.' But Lloyd George rejoined, 'That's not what the Germans would say to him. They would say, 'If you don't sign this Treaty, we will scrag all your squirrels at Fallodon.' That would break him down.' Arthur Balfour had no squirrels. Neither on the big line nor on the small line, neither by dire threats nor by playing upon idiosyncrasies, could anyone overcome his central will or rupture his sense of duty."

"Serene oblivion" is pretty good, I think, and vastly to be preferred to the faux-passionate, vacuous intensity and cheap sentimentality we see rather too often.

By the way, do you know the photo of Grey with a bird on his hat?

http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/egi/egi-members/history-of-the-egi/

which you can apparently get as a mouse pad!

http://www.zazzle.com.au/edward+grey+gifts

There's also this oldish piece by Matthew Paris (one of the saner Spectatorers and BBCers, I think) on birds, Grey and the "link between political genius and the presence or absence of hinterland" -- http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/22nd-february-1997/8/another-voice

"Grey, famous for his remark in 1914, 'The lights are going out all over Europe', was elected Liberal MP for Berwick-on-Tweed in 1885. He was also a fanatical bird-watcher. In his spare time he was Foreign Secretary for a decade from 1906 to 1916, taking us into the Great War."

Thank you for this excellent post and discussion.

"if indeed elements among the Kiev authorities are responsible, it will be very difficult to suppress the fact."

Here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS8t3CfAEaQ&list=UUVPYbobPRzz0SjinWekjUBw) is a video in Russian with English subtitles, which explains why suppression of the facts might be possible. It presents a plausible hypothesis of a couple of "dogs that didn't bark" in the tragic story of MH17: total silence of the separatists, and relative silence of the Russian authorities. The author is a well-informed Ukrainian journalist, who was chased into exile by the Yanukovich government, given political asylum in Holland, and remains highly sceptical of the current Ukrainian government and firmly opposed to the war. The guy's work is certainly worth attention. E.g. he presented videos which place Ukrainian Buk launchers at the site of the shooting the day before, and demolished the official Ukrainian story of tracing the Buk launchers delivery from Russia.

Babak, i did not mean to say that these advances accounted for WWI, but they certainly seem to have affected the conditions under which ultimatums, threats, and deadlines were too-hastily issued.

That would support Collingwood's contention that things spun out of control -- people could not keep up with events.

This is an even more urgent problem today, IMVHO.
And I am an avid fan of the Internet, but the 24/7 news hawkers have become a danger to us all.

At this point, I think 'real leadership' might look like someone quietly but firmly telling the US cable outlets and many other news sources to 'get a grip', so to speak. Meanwhile, what I observe in my own small part of the world is people feeling so overwhelmed and powerless that they are 'tuning out' to the overload of urgency and pot-stirring.

DH, thanks for the suggestion -- Rites of Spring looks very interesting.

Ishmael Zechariah,

You raise what have long seemed to me absolutely critical questions. They are ones I find quite difficult, not least because the social milieus in which my wife and I have spent our lives are to a large extent Anglo-Jewish.

A further problem is that it is difficult to know when it is, and is not, appropriate to bring very close friends and family members into discussions like this one. However, I do not think that I am betraying anyone if I say something about my family's Christmas celebrations over recent years.

Sometimes they have been spent with West Ukrainian nationalists, whose family history however encapsulates many of the tensions which – encouraged by idiots in Washington, Warsaw, and London – have led Ukraine to disaster.

At other times, we have celebrated with descendants of a collaborator of Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, and also a descendant of a South African Jew who served in the British Army in both world wars.

I think he was underage when he volunteered for the 1914-18 war, rather than overage in its successor – these matters do get somewhat complex.

But it is difficult for me simply to denounce 'dual loyalty', because I know that there are many Jews for whom a deep commitment to Israel has coexisted with a deep loyalty to Britain. And such people have not uncommonly made a very valuable contribution to British life.

A lot more can be, and needs to be, said about all this. But, briefly, it increasingly seems to me that in looking at the current situation one needs to take into account two distinct but related elements.

There seems to be a consistent pattern, in the United States, where the empowerment of Jews has, in practice, meant the empowerment of those Jews who are happy – either through naivety, or cynicism, or some bizarre combination of the two – to buy into the delusional myths of American nationalism.

It is also important to take into account the fact that the Jewish enthusiasm for education produces over-educated idiots, as well as many people of learning and wisdom. (Contrast Richard Perle or Richard Pipes, with Stephen F. Cohen.)

Another matter of some moment has to do with the legacy of past traumas. The notion that all Jews belong to some kind of cohesive 'people', whose capital is in Jerusalem, and whose true leaders are Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni, Avigor Lieberman and other such thugs, is patent BS.

However, the legacies of the the past give thugs like these a hold on other Jews from which they commonly find it difficult to escape.

Ingolf,

Thanks.

What frightens me is not only the intensity of the animus against Russia, but the intolerance of Westerners who have reservations about it.

In exchanges of comments on a piece he posted back in April, the chief foreign affairs commentator of the FT, Gideon Rachman, wrote: 'Greetings from Kiev to all my readers. I must thank the Kremlin for taking out so many subscriptions to the FT.'

(See http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2014/04/putins-partying-with-schroeder-highlights-german-and-russian-ties/?infernofullcomment=1&SID=google .)

It would certainly in no way surprise me if there are 'information operations' orchestrated by the Russian security services. However, the kind of observations which provoked these denunciations are not significantly different from those which notorious Kremlin 'trolls' like VietnamVet, walrus, confusedponderer, and myself have posted on this site.

Indeed if TTG, who as we all know has strong family roots in the Lithuanian resistance, were to post on the FT site the kind of observations he has made here, he would find himself being vociferously accused of being a kind of Kremlin 'penny-a-liner.'

As to the origins of this animus, another interesting view comes from a Cambridge (UK) academic called David Lane. It may be too rationalistic, but it is I think at least worth thinking about. In conclusion, Lane writes:

"Why Putin and his associates are regarded so disapprovingly by many politicians and journalists is because they challenge the universality of the version of capitalist globalisation and electoral democracy advocated academically, and pursued politically, by the agents of the West. 'Sovereign democracy' is an ideological and political challenge to the Western notion of 'global democracy'. Putin's policy of strengthening a form of national capitalism presents an alternative, a model which already has an affinity with China, and has a resonance with countries such as India, and Latin America. It might also appeal to others in the West seeking to retain more powers for the nation state – as a depository of democracy and economic regulation, which is widely regarded as being undermined by interests benefitting from political and economic neo-liberal globalisation."

(See http://valdaiclub.com/politics/70060.html .)

And my view is that if you cannot afford to go to war, as the ultimate arbiter, then perhaps you need to fundamentally revise your policy postures.

I think that technical and organizational advances and changes that you have enumerated do not account for World War I; they were mere enablers.

The fundamental policy mistake by all actors was the assumption of quick war - one way or another.

This assumption particularly seems to afflict war planners and policy makers in many places and times; US Civil War being a notable one.

More often than not...

First off, thank you for your post!

Historian Tim Snyder seems to be one of those believers in reversibility, saying recently that what really took the West by surprise (in the Ukraine conflict) was the empire building project of Russia. Alex Braun gave an interview on CBC

Re 5th columns, a Chinese friend told me that, in response to the devastating economic collapse of Russia in the later 1990's after being flooded with western economic advisors, every child in China was taken aside by their teacher and told how it was proof positive that the U.S. could not be trusted.

I heard a recent interview of a Chinese academic who saw the tilt as an unfriendly gesture to China. He referred to the disputed islands between China and other Asian countries and said the tilt was not helpful in resolving them. On SST years ago the balance of power in the Pacific was discussed vis-a-vis, China but it doesn't seem to be under the (first few?) China threads. I couldn't even hazard a guess about the degree of willingness (to go to war) that the tilt signifies.

Xenophon,

'Unlike Cerberus with multiple heads, we have multiple tails'.

Absolutely. How one reconstructs some kind of foreign policy 'establishment' which can set define a foreign policy based upon a reasonably 'rational' conception of U.S. interests seems to me a $60,000 question.

In a recent lecture, Anatol Lieven said something along the lines of the uniformed military being the only significant conservative force in U.S. foreign policy. It is not a happy situation.

Tidewater,

As a sometimes television current affairs 'hack' who benefited enormous from having spent time as a graduate trainee on the Liverpool Echo, and later spent happy hours delving into the underworlds of local politics in London and Birmingham, the last thing I would be stupid enough to do would be to contemptuous of a 'police reporter hack.' A major problem with much of the MSM today is that those producing it are no longer down-to-earth, in the way that old-style newspaper reporters commonly were.

The piece to which 'Ingolf' links below, and also if I recall right an earlier comment he posted, argues that the impression that the patterns of damage match those one would expect from cannon is unfounded. It is also not clear to me whether an Su-25 operating at the limits of its altitude range, could use a cannon effectively (as distinct from a rocket.) That said, at the moment it seems to me sensible not to rule anything out until we have unambiguous evidence.

As to the scale of the furore which may be about to break, I think you could well be right. It may still be that I, and TTG, and others on this blog sceptical about the conventional wisdom about the MH17 affair are barking up the wrong tree. But if we are not, Western governments may have backed themselves into a corner. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that if indeed elements among the Kiev authorities are responsible, it will be very difficult to suppress the fact.

Re this "expert analysis", it's late here and I may be misinterpreting things but some of both his methodology and calculations on pages 6-8 seem iffy.

For those who haven't yet seen it, the Saker has a "detailed expert analysis" of the MH17 downing.

I've only read some of it so far (it's a 25 page PDF report) but it looks useful.

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/detailed-expert-analysis-of-mh17-downing.html

Reader of Tea Leaves! Thanks for tis comment! So will Social Media influence the outbreak of a new war in Europe west of the Urals? Perhaps a war already!

zanzibar,

Thanks.

With regard to economics, I share your scepticism. One problem, as I understand it, has to do with the nature of systems. Here I am out of my depth, but it seems that part of the problem with the use of mathematics has to do with facile assumptions about the kind of systems with which economists are dealing. In many complex systems, relationships are non-linear, so that small changes in one variable can lead to major and unpredictable changes in others. Meanwhile, rather than seeking a single -- benign -- equilibrium, such systems may have multiple equilibria, or even no propensity to seek equilibrium at all.

There is I believe a great deal of mathematics to do with such systems, but whether it can be applied to economics in a manner which is more than suggestive I simply do not know.

Meanwhile, anyone who watches markets at all closely becomes aware of the role of herd behaviour. This is characteristically a complex mixture of 'rational' and 'irrational' elements, which perhaps makes it unsurprising that economists have done so little work on it.

A bizarre upshot is that we have a situation where economics as a discipline is highly mathematical, but where the theoreticians who have taken over our central banks actually spend a great deal of time in what are essentially 'information operations', one of whose prime purposes appears to be to move the 'herd' in the desired direction.

An unfortunate side effect is that it becomes very difficult to have confidence in pronouncements of those in authority, in economics as in other matters.

As to the willingness of 'herds' to be led, in economics as in other matters, and the decline of the culture of independence, this is something which is patent. Doubtless some of this has to do with the ability of representative institutions to bribe people with their own money. But this cannot be an explanation for the diminishing willingness of journalists to question official claims, even where, as with MH17, these patently do not make sense.

Vaclav Linek, readerOfTeaLeaves,

Another interesting book by Modris Eksteins is 'Rites of Spring'. It deals with the relationship of Nazism to modernist culture, and covers some of the ground discussed by readerOfTeaLeaves in his fascinating comment below.

rkka, kao_hsien_chih

I broadly agree with rkka's last comment.

Another point may be worth bringing into the discussion. One thing that Oxford University does rather well nowadays, perhaps ironically, is mafia studies – they have two splendid Italian professors, Diego Gambetta and Federico Varese. As the latter put it in his 2011 study 'Mafias on the Move':

'A relatively recent body of research has shown that mafias emerge in societies that are undergoing a sudden and late transition to a market economy, lack a legal structure that reliably protects property rights or settles business disputes, and have a supply of people trained in violence who become unemployed at this specific juncture.'

An interesting feature of this work is that a great deal of it is really an application of 'rational choice' theory. Applied in the conditions of the Soviet Union in the Nineties, 'shock therapy' actually created pressing 'rational' incentives leading to extensive criminalisation.

If property rights cannot be protected by an effective state, they will be protected by private enterprise – which means mafias. And if at the same time a vast military, intelligence and internal security apparatus is being demobilised, some of its members have the strongest incentives to join mafias.

Some kind of reconstruction of the Russian state – and also of Russian patriotism – was clearly necessary if large parts of Eurasia were not to be permanently locked in a state of criminalised anarchy.

People can legitimately disagree about the merits and demerits of Putin's approaches, and the interpenetration between organised crime, supposedly 'legitimate' business and politics continues to be a massive problem.

However, any argument based upon the belief Russia was 'on the right lines' in the Yeltsin years quite patently makes it impossible to understand what the possibilities are in the country today – in particular as, precisely as rkka says, it leads to the conclusion that Putin's supporters are suffering from a massive case of 'false consciousness'.

Peter Brownlee,

As to Cameron, the only job he ever did before becoming an MP, apart from working for the Tory Party, was doing PR for a somewhat dodgy television company. He seems to me a rhetorician who cannot escape from the fantasy world created by his own rhetoric.

But then, is that Obama rather similar?

"Of course, this means that we know nothing of what Putin has managed to accomplish in Russia, beyond the fact that we apparently aren't supposed to like him much, or understand why he enjoys the kind of support that he apparently does."

Exactly. In the '90s, oligarchs felt no need to pay wages to workers or taxes to the government, preferring to offshore every kopek they could get their hands on. Hence, workers suffered and the government was bankrupt.

And the FreeMarketReformers were fine with this.

When Putin arrived, he offered the oligarchs a deal: Keep your swag from the '90s, but behave from this point on.

Most took him up on it. Several refused and tried to do as they had before. And when these were exiled or jailed, the Angosphere Foreign Policy Elite and Punditocracy (AFPE&P) howled with outrage at Putin 'violating their human rights'

However, the Russian people know by their own experience that they now live far better than they did while FreeMarketReformers were running the place. This is the simple reason Putin is popular with Russians. The AFPE&P say its because the Russian government dominates Russian media and propagandizes the ignorant masses. The AFPE&P lie about this, from both ignorance and malice.

kao_hsien_chih,

I would absolutely agree with everything you write.

Some tentative thoughts in response.

In relation to British imperial experience, it may be relevant that the distinctive nature of Indian society, both the religious issues involved and the critical issue of caste, facilitated imperial control over a population which was not simply 'primitive' in the way that was the case in, for instance, most of Africa.

But 'divide et impera' can only be practised on the basis of understanding. Moreover, there were clear penalties for obtuseness, as we discovered in 1857.

What is bizarre now is the combination of an unreal sense of danger relating to non-existent or grossly exaggerated threats, with a lack of any sense of danger relating to our current practice of making actually or potentially unstable areas of the world even more unstable (pushing Humpty-Dumpty off the wall, one might call it.)

As regards alien cultures, it is certainly not necessary either to agree with or to 'respect' them. What however strikes me is the apparent marginalisation of a sense of interest – which I think has catastrophic consequences for intelligence.

An example from British intelligence history may be to the point. The unit in MI6 which handled the material from Enigma relating to the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, was headed by Hugh Trevor-Roper. A classicist turned historian of early modern Europe – and a strange, feline creature – his response to the chaos of the time was to identify strongly with an eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition.

But he made sense of the accumulating evidence about the nature of the Nazi regime through a perspective shaped by a tradition of interpretation of despotism going back through Gibbon to Tacitus, and knowledge of millenarian and apocalyptic cults in early modern Europe.

Doing so enabled him to see something which both Roosevelt and Churchill failed to grasp – that the view of the Second World War as a continuation of its predecessor, and the enemy as 'Prussianism', was at best a half-truth, and a dangerous one at best, obscuring the radical gulf in attitudes between the nihilistic millenarians of the 'Sicherheitsdienst' and the German General Staff.

One of the most fascinating counterfactuals of the war is what might have happened had Trevor-Roper's attempts to get the British to respond to the overtures from the Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris born fruit.

Thank you readerOfTeaLeaves, especially for reminding me of All Quiet, which I actually read way back in school and had forgotten about! Would be worth rereading. Your first suggestion intrigues me as I read a book about the Van Gogh forgeries and life in the Weimar Republic by Modris Ecksteins, "Solar Dance", which dealt with some of the psychological impact on society of WWI. I am really not a horse person, I must say, but I could probably find a DVD of War Horse and give it a shot (no pun intended).

Thank you Dubhaltach, for your generous comment. You've made it a 3-way race between Guns, Sleepwalkers, and Stevenson's History. I've acquired bits and pieces picked up from odd places, e.g., I learned about anti-German sentiment in the U.S. prior to entry and "liberty cabbage" from a book on the Spanish flu, and I watched a talk online of Clark promoting his book. I actually have a copy of Guns somewhere, but thought to weigh it against the more recent books before digging in (after digging it out).

Thank you Margaret, that is a vote for Sleepwalkers. The trick now is to get started. I was aware of Macmillan's book as a competitor to Clark's, but most seem to prefer Clark's book.

walrus,

I had not noted the absence of Boeing involvement until Anna-Marina and VV pointed it out. It certainly does nothing to quieten suspicions.

One thing about which I am getting more confused is whether different hypotheses about how the plane was downed entail different conclusions about what would be likely to be on the 'black boxes'.

If they do, then the question of whether we have good reason to believe that the testing at Farnborough is done in such a manner as to guarantee that there is no possibility of fraud becomes critical.

It seems to me an open question whether analysts there could be manipulable. On the one hand, it appears that analysts at Porton Down were instrumental in bringing out the truth about the Ghouta atrocity; on the other, the history of tests for polonium contamination done by Aldermaston in relation to the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko strongly suggests they were complicit in a cover-up.

DH and all -

DH quotes Collingwood: "'It happened because a situation got out of hand. As it went on, the situation got more and more out of hand. When the peace treaty was signed, it was more out of hand than ever.'

The reasons behind things spiraling out of control are often attributed to the activities of diplomats, politicians, and military commanders. However, to my mind there are other more fundamental -- and worrying -- factors that ought to be included in the discussion.

Stephen Kern's "The Culture of Space and Time: 1880- 1918" covers many of the technical and cultural developments of the period leading up to WWI. The sense of space and time were being fundamentally altered -- by the telephone (1876), railroads (which required a standardized system of time), wireless, automobiles, airplanes -- all of which collapsed space and seemed to accelerate time in the decades leading up to 1914.

The shifts in perception were reflected in new forms of art: pointillism, Impressionism, Cubism (from which camouflage likely derived), jazz.

Cinema had broken time into discrete segments, and this had far-ranging implications on everything from industrial production to military planning.

Standardizing time had become a significant problem.

Kern explains that a person traveling in 1870 from DC to San
Francisco, if he set his watch at each town as he passed through, would have to set his watch over 200 times. In 1870, the US had 80 different railroad times (Philadelphia was 5 minutes behind NYC). The need to coordinate railroads and telegraph messages drove the need for a standard time; the railroads imposed Standard Time in Nov. 1883 -- a generation before the outbreak of WWI.

In 1891, German Count von Moltke appealed to the German Parliament for adoption of a standard time -- Germany had 5 time zones -- as a means to coordinate military planning. He did not foresee that the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan would occur because of a standardized system of time (as well as a strong railroad system).

The Germans had learned the value of railroads for mobilization against the French in 1870, and Moltke had ordered, "Build no more fortresses - build railways!" By the second decade of the 20th century, Germany had a solid network of railways.

By the time the first decades of the 20th century arrived, the novelties of the telephone and wireless were subverting the age-old traditions of aristocratic diplomats, who had valued face-to-face negotiations.

Instead, leading up to August 1914, the diplomats lost control of the policy process as new technologies enabled the Kaiser to phone his cousin the Czar, and threats, ultimatums, and short deadlines overtook the ability of diplomats to engage in nuanced negotiations.

News reports, memos, telegrams overtook the ability of diplomats and policy makers to do a thoughtful job, and probably also short-circuited the kinds of personal relationships that might have prevented war.

Between 23 July and 4 August 1914, there were 5 ultimatums with short timelines; each of these threatened war unless demands were made in short order. This built pressure on diplomats, while the newspapers inflamed public passions: the pressure for action increased.

The Schlieffen Plan was premised on first-action, and the Germans assumed they would win the war if they could implement their plan before their enemies could respond. Consequently, mobilization (perhaps for the first time in European history?) became the equivalent of initiating war.

The development of 'time-saving technology' seems to have precipitated a situation in which the pressure to act quickly outstripped sensible judgment. The new technologies were used to justify urgent threats, and the use of mass communication inflamed public sentiment.

In our present age of the Internet, Twitter, and 'rapid-response' ,have we have outstripped our ability to think judiciously?

Add onto this factor of compressed time, the problem of so-called leaders who behave in adolescent, almost juvenile fashion (think R2Pers, and Nuland). This kind of obnoxious behavior increases the risks of imprudent conduct.

Add onto these factors the *possibility* of a rogue operation out of Kiev, and we have a formula for disaster.

Like VV and a few others here, I am starting to live in a state of something like dread.

Cooler heads need to prevail. At present, those cooler heads seem to lie with Dempsey, and quite possibly Putin. The irony...!

I have some rather offbeat suggestions regarding WWI reading:

1. "The Great War and Modern Memory", by Paul Fussell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_and_Modern_Memory
It's been a few years since I read it, but IIRC, it gives a sense of how European ideas and psychology shifted in response to the psychic traumas of WWI.

2. "All Quiet on the Western Front"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front
The Nazi's burned it in the 30s, as subversive. Written from a German soldier's perspective, about the trenches.

3. "The Culture of Space and Time: 1880 - 1918", by Stephen Kern (1983)
I'll comment further below and hope that my remarks are relevant to this extraordinary post. I'd describe this book as a cultural history that provides rich context for the period leading up to WWI, and has some powerful insights about causes contributing to WWI that I've not encountered elsewhere.

----------------
Movies/Films:
"Gods and Monsters", with Lynn Redgrave, Ian McKellan, and Brendan Fraser.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_and_Monsters_(film)

"The War Horse"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Horse_(film)
(I actually saw the play onstage and it was stunning; the story is moving and it underscores the fact that men were still going off to war on horseback.... to fight in trenches and find themselves up against tanks.)

(I don't know whether you have video streaming; if so, these films should be available via Netflix if you have that service.)

USG is clearly out of date by at least a decade and a half, or more likely, two or more, when it comes to Russia. After all, isn't that when we supposedly "won" the Cold War? If my speculation is right and no serious Russia experts came near the loci of power in USG since then, I shudder to think how out of date our information about the rest of the world (besides Russia and its surroundings) are. Of course, this means that we know nothing of what Putin has managed to accomplish in Russia, beyond the fact that we apparently aren't supposed to like him much, or understand why he enjoys the kind of support that he apparently does.

DH,

We need several more lifetimes to read what we want to, let alone need to.

I first read Grey's "25 Years" and Trevelyan's "Grey of Fallodon" years ago and remember being very impressed with Grey's room as Foreign Secretary as well as his decency and therefore candour. (The realpolitik/Strangelove crowd have a lot to answer for.)

He was largely known for playing Royal Tennis and seems not to have won the British amateur championships only in the years he was in office -- when he was runner-up!

http://www.jdrtc.co.uk/about-us

Was it Lord Salisbury who said that British foreign policy was fundamentally to drift lazily downstream occasionally putting out a boat-hook to avoid collisions? (Which sounds OK to me.)

As to Cameron, Private Eye's Headmaster's Letter seems to have him about right. (And in Australia at the moment we have an even fruitier "conservative" clod yearning for a past that never was and given to ideological frolics that seem to fall rather flat.)

Perhaps we should all learn Royal Tennis?

David Habakkuk,

I thoroughly enjoyed your splendid post and follow on comments... as I always do. Oh how I wish the glorious concepts of truth and honor were more universally revered. I was blessed to be brought up in a family and community where truth and honor were more dear than the air we breathed. Perhaps that's why I find such comfort in this committee of correspondence.

I'm glad you mentioned Evans-Pritchard. He had a great influence on my study of anthropology, as he did on most students of anthropology in the 70s. IMHO his approach was foreshadowed by William Seabrook in his account of his explorations of West Africa. Seabrook was an odd bird, not an anthropologist, but an old fashioned explorer. I found a copy of this book while exploring the attic of our old house. I'm sure I was first drawn to it by the photo plates of bare breasted young native girls, but I also found Seabrook's writings fascinating. He was genuinely perplexed by the contradictions existing between his own western culture and the native African cultures he encountered. He came to the conclusion that westerners were in no position to judge these non-western cultures and could only attempt to understand them with humility and open minds.

I do see EU states marching to war to Russia - having been assured that the war would be quick and decisive.

If they wished otherwise, they would not be sanctioning Russia...

Lenin's was also quite good - "Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism" - packed with data and insights.

That was when he was a journalist, like Mussolini - who was also a socialist.