As the U.S. Army celebrates its 250th birthday, we honor those who bravely go in harm’s way, often far from home and rarely at a time of their choosing (unless you’re the IDF).
Speaking of war planning, Tim Bouverie is out with his latest book, Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World. The Weekend Beacon welcomes first-time contributor Robert Messenger, who gives us a review.
“In Bouverie’s telling, each of the ‘Big Three’ played an essential and complementary role. It was Britain (principally Churchill) that kept the allied cause going in 1940 and 1941 when Hitler was everywhere victorious. Churchill’s actions in sinking a French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir and sending troops to help Greece showed the world courage and national resilience. But his cultivation of America was more important. For it would be the United States (thanks mostly to Franklin Roosevelt’s political mastery) that sustained Britain and the Soviet Union in their darkest hours. FDR performed the feat of turning U.S. public opinion toward support for Britain and preparing for war long before Pearl Harbor. What Stalin did was what he did so well: the killing. Germany lost more than five million men in the war, and 75 percent of them were killed by the Red Army. But Russia paid a terrifying price to defeat Hitler: Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens lost their lives between Barbarossa and VE-Day. As Bouverie notes, ‘More people died during the siege of Leningrad than the total number of British and American casualties for the entire war.’
“The book is dominated by the Big Three and the great set-pieces of the Allied conferences … where strategy was decided and the postwar world planned. Yet interspersed are chapters on lesser-known events that spiced allied relations: the Free French attack on Dakar; attempts to keep Spain neutral; the invasions of Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq; the Quit India movement; U.S. hopes to stand-up China as the world’s ‘Fourth Policeman’; the partisan battles across Europe; and the tragedy of Poland. These are well-narrated essays, though they can seem a distraction from the main issue of the love-hate triangle of Anglo-Soviet-American relations.
“While the fighting grew ever easier after the victories at Alamein and Stalingrad and the invasion of Italy, the alliance grew more difficult. With victory certain, agendas changed. By the Tehran conference in late 1943, the United States had moved to conciliating the USSR in hopes of postwar amity, and declining Britain began to seek backdoor deals. (Churchill traded Stalin any influence over the future governments of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria for a free hand in Greece.) Bouverie has no time for Cold War-era complaints that Eastern Europe was betrayed by Britain and the United States at Yalta—it was at Casablanca in January 1943, when Britain still held sway in the alliance, that the key decision was made. There would be no invasion of France in 1943 as the Americans and Soviets wanted. If this was wise in that such an operation was then but a throw of the dice, it meant that Soviet forces would liberate and occupy Eastern Europe from Lubeck all the way down the Elbe to Linz and the Adriatic. The USSR paid for victory in blood; Britain and the United States with the futures of Eastern Europeans.”
Speaking of ways to pay, Paul Tice is back with a review of The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto by Benjamin Wallace.
“In late 2008 during the depths of the global financial crisis, someone going by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto registered a website domain and posted a nine-page white paper describing the technical workings of something called Bitcoin, a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system,’ to an obscure moderated mailing list frequented by privacy-obsessed computer nerds. In January 2009, this shadowy Nakamoto figure released an alpha version of the open-source software for Bitcoin to the masses and then spent the next two years engaging in online discussions to answer questions and troubleshoot glitches with the new blockchain-based decentralized technology. In 2011, he (or she or they) abruptly went dark and disappeared into the ether, leaving the world with a self-perpetuating digital money-printing machine.
Wallace “chronicles his dogged multiyear search to find Bitcoin’s creator. First bitten by the ‘Where’s Satoshi?’ bug when he penned an article on Bitcoin for Wired magazine in 2011, Wallace has not been able to shake the nagging question over the intervening years. A decade later, he picks up the gauntlet again, quitting his day job as a magazine writer to devote himself full time to the hunt for Nakamoto.”
“Before setting out on his quest, Wallace teaches himself how to do basic coding and forces himself to transact using Bitcoin so that he can speak the native language. He also marshals the power of machine learning to aid in his search, using stylometry to analyze both the software code and text words (roughly 60,000) left behind by Nakamoto and then cross-checking for similarities with the body of work produced by his prime candidates. The extra effort is well worth it since one of the book’s strongest suits is its ability to translate the esoteric Tetris-like digital world of Bitcoin using plain language and terminology easily understood by a wider nontechnical audience—no mean feat for a self-described ‘liberal arts chump’ like Wallace.
“As the author works his way methodically through his target rogues’ gallery and confronts each cypherpunk suspect in turn, he is met by repeated denials (‘I am not Satoshi’) and the occasional unsubstantiated claim by an opportunistic scammer. Interestingly, many of the people he interviews try to warn him off from his pursuit, concerned about what he may discover and how it might undercut the mythology about Bitcoin, which has now taken on cult status in both the technology and financial worlds.”
Lyndal Roper intends to undercut the mythology of a popular uprising with his new book, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War. Kevin J. McNamara has a review.
“The German Peasants’ War was German only in the sense that its chief protagonists used that language, if few could read it; Germany proper wouldn’t exist for another 300-plus years. The realm that hosted the conflict was the Holy Roman Empire, a many-layered structure that, while it held on for longer than a thousand years, enjoyed no centralized authority it did not share with the Vatican, and little practical power. The empire was, in effect, an aspiration whose ideals were undermined by Martin Luther. In addition to present-day Germany, it included all or parts of modern Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. The uprising consumed more than half of the empire.
“Roper argues that the war was ‘the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution,’ a claim buttressed by the author’s extensive research in original sources, an impressive feat given that the era of the printed word (essential to historical research) was just getting started at the time. And Roper masters a complicated historical landscape; some lords joined the peasants, based in part on a shared faith, and secular demands jostled with religious claims.
“Roper’s research is deep and wide enough to help the reader gain a genuine understanding of these peasants, and one might be forgiven for thinking their anti-Catholic violence—smashing altars, shattering stained-glass windows, burning crucifixes, and destroying monasteries—was designed to forever sever their ties to Christianity. Her history reminds us, however, that these rioters were among the most devout people in all of Christendom. And that was a large part of the problem, originally.”
No doubt David Mamet would have thoughts on today’s rioters. He certainly has thoughts on some of our elected leaders and their sinister agenda, not to mention our current malaise. David Skinner explains in his review of The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment.
“What’s behind our political sickness, according to Mamet, if I read him correctly, is a compound of human failings. First, there is the mendacity of politicians whom he compares to the shill in a game of three-card monte—the shill being a person who pretends to be a player, encourages others to risk their money, but is working in cahoots with the dealer. Next is the gullibility of voters about whom it can be said that they basically want to be lied to. Here the similarities between politics and entertainment begin to stand out.
“‘The lights go down on stage or screen and we are involved in a complicity. We will suspend our disbelief in return for being told a story,’ Mamet writes.
“Finally, there is the all-too-human desire to be accepted into the tribe. Mamet psychologizes this as a misguided attempt to fit in and survive. ‘Membership in our various correct-thinking groups is actually an unconscious attempt to reconstitute the family—the group which might offer protection.’ This natural urge has been cranked into overdrive by the rise of the internet and those devices that keep us connected to it. ‘The addictive “connectedness” offered by the computer awakens our human instinct for constant connection to the group.’ Mass psychology takes over and people begin denying their own individual or subgroup identities.”
“Mamet’s book, even if you disagree with much of it (and I do), offers the frank example of a brilliant writer whose anger and frustration has placed him fully on one side of the great political divide in our polarized era. It is not, however, a work of persuasion. It speaks in its political essays almost only to the converted. But on the margins, especially where politics meets culture and history, it can still be compelling even to those who march to a different drummer.”
I hope David Skinner is reading this while having his cup of coffee. After all, coffee’s for closers.
Read the full article here
