Dutch-born Israeli Martin van Creveld, former professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of more than twenty books, is a scholar we often hear quoted and referred to as one of the leading military historians and strategists in the world.  Here is his web-site:  http://www.martinvancreveld.com/ .

He was quoted as follows in this excerpt from a 2003 Guardian article:

The threatening of wild, irrational violence in response to political pressure has been an Israeli impulse from the very earliest days.  It was first authoritatively documented in the 1950s by Moshe Sharett, the dovish Prime Minister, who wrote of his Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon that he “constantly preached for acts of madness” or “going crazy” if ever Israel was crossed.  Without a “just, comprehensive and lasting” peace which only America can bring to pass, Israel will remain at least as likely a candidate as Iran, and a far more enduring one, for the role of “nuclear-crazy” state.

Iran can never be threatened in its very existence.  Israel can.  Indeed, such a threat could even grow out of the current intifada.  [This is from 2003.]
That, at least, is the pessimistic opinion of Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  “If it went on much longer,” he said, “the Israeli government [would] lose control of the people.  In campaigns like this the anti-terror forces lose because they don’t win and the rebels win by not losing.  I regard a total Israeli defeat as unavoidable.  That will mean the collapse of the Israeli state and society.  We’ll destroy ourselves.”

In this situation, he went on, more and more Israelis were coming to regard the “transfer” of the Palestinians as the only salvation; resort to it was growing “more probable” with each passing day.  Sharon “wants to escalate the conflict and knows that nothing else will succeed.”

But would the world permit such ethnic cleansing?  “That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens.  We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome.  Most European capitals are targets for our air force.  Let me quote General Moshe Dayan:  ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’  I consider it all hopeless at this point.  We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible.  Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third.  We have the capability to take the world down with us.  And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

[ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/21/israelandthepalestinians.bookextracts ]

I’ve always found that Israeli threat to nuke Europe’s capital cities disturbing.  For one thing, who knew Europe’s cities were targeted for nuclear attack by Israel’s missiles and long-range bombers?  Certainly not the typical European man-in-the-street.  Well, that man-in-the-street needs to know, so it’s good that it’s been divulged.  For another, are Europe’s nuclear powers, France, Britain, and Russia, reciprocally targeting Tel-Aviv?  I thought that would go without saying, if you’re being targeted with nukes you at the very least have to target the one who’s targeting you if only as a deterrent.  No?  So either Paris and London have already targeted Tel-Aviv “just in case,” or they’re derelict in their duty to their own populations, according to the rules of war and deterrence, no?  It’s one or the other.  And there are other disturbing things about that statement we could go into.

Since reading that statement and seeing Prof. van Creveld quoted so much on military questions I’ve been wondering what his thoughts are on things in general but had never read anything by him till recently when I happened to see this interview in German from this past August.  I’ve translated it in case others are curious about him.

Translation of Martin van Creveld interview:

( http://www.jungefreiheit.de/Single-News-Display.154+M562a0ca5c0f.0.html?&tx;_ttnews[swords]=van Creveld )
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<u>ONLY THE DEAD WILL SEE THE END OF WAR</u>

Professor van Creveld, does war still have a future?

Prof. van Creveld:  I’m afraid it does.  As Plato said, “Only the dead will live to see the end of war.”

You said recently in a Swiss news magazine that women were to blame for the whole thing.  Why?

Van Creveld:  That was meant to be humorous.  But seriously, the significance of war for women cannot be overestimated.  Because from time imemorial women have expected men to fight for home and hearth in wars.  It was they who awaited the men’s homecoming, who prayed for their survival, who welcomed them with open arms when they returned home, or tended to their wounds, or wept when they fell in battle.  Without all that there would be no wars.  The Roman Horace knew it two thousand years ago, as did Lysistrata, the heroïne of the play of the same name by the Attic poet Aristophanes.

Women hate war and would do away with it if they could.

Van Creveld:  I don’t believe that.  At every ancient gladitorial contest, at every medieval tournament, at every modern-day boxing match or soccer game women figure prominently among the spectators.  And in all ages they employed every variety of sexual seduction in order to attract the victors.  Wasn’t it during such a situation that Pamela Anderson, queen of lips and breasts, was discovered? 

In your 2001 book, “Women and War,” you hold women responsible for war’s decline since women in the army lead to its internal dissolution.  So, in your opinion women are to blame for everything?

Van Creveld:  No, my argument goes exactly the opposite way.  As Margaret Mead, the most famous woman anthropologist, once wrote, an undertaking in which too many women participate loses prestige in the end — and that according to both men and women!  So, what are we to make of this creeping feminization of the militaries of the West?  Clearly, of course, that the military institution is going through a decline.  This interpretation meshes very well with the change from standard warfare to terrorism and guerilla war which we can observe.  Under the Taliban, at any rate, are few to no women.

“Men love war, and women the warrior.”

So, what remains of the feminist claim that war is the result of the aggressive and mindless nature of men?

Van Creveld:  Not much.  As I’ve already pointed out in my book, “The Future of War,” the real reason there are wars is men love war while women love the warrior.

Are you speaking as a scholar or a polemicist?

Van Creveld:  Thirty-five years ago when I decided to become a historian, I believed I was going to devote my life to discovering the truth.  Now, at 63, I’m no longer so certain there’s any such thing as truth at all.  Nevertheless I still try, because to abandon this endeavor would amount to something resembling committing suicide.

It is said you became a military historian in order to take revenge on the army, because it had rejected you.  Truth or fiction?

Van Creveld:  I would say partly true.  And why not?  Vengeance is as good a motive as any.

Another theory:  war is a product of irrationality.  When rationality prevails in politics, wars decline.  Is that the cure for war?

Van Creveld:  War is the result, finally, of human emotions such as fear, hate, greed, revenge.  I agree with Friedrich Nietzsche, the only one whose writings I keep always within reach at my desk, to the effect that reason is a weak force compared to emotion.

Last try:  Nationalism and right-wing extremism are to blame for war.  Do away with the right wing, and there will also be no more war.  Might that work?

Van Creveld:  There were wars thousands of years before there was nationalism and before there were extreme right wingers.  Besides, history shows wars are also waged by the left, and even by pacifists.  One has only to think back to the height of the peace movement in your country, Germany, to recall how many of the protests against weapons and nuclear missiles weren’t altogether peaceful.

So, there can’t be a world without war?

Van Creveld:  I didn’t say that.  Conceivably that’s already not so far-fetched, perhaps even no longer far-fetched at all.  But to eliminate war would require the elimination of human emotions.  One imagines a world in which every newborn would have a capsule implanted which, throughout life, would inject psychotropic drugs whenever the level of hormones associated with aggression rose.  At the same time the implant would in each instance send a report to a central computer in the Interior Ministry, where information could be gathered and methods for control of emotions further refined. 

Peace through the administration of sedatives—that sounds like Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, “Brave New World.”

Van Creveld:  A frightening vision indeed although for many people — criminals and the mentally ill — it’s already becoming reality.  And I worry that in the next few decades it could become the turn of the rest of us.  [interview continued in the comments]

[Prof. van Creveld interview continued]

The Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke once said, “Permanent peace is a dream, and not even a pleasant one.”  Was the second part of his statement, therefore, right?

Van Creveld:  No one in his right mind doubts that war is a horrific thing, least of all Moltke (who was a highly educated man, and of whom it is said, never did a harsh word pass his lips).  However, a world without war –  which could only come about in the way I outlined –  would be even worse by far, all the more as emotions like curiosity, love of adventure, love of amusements, or the human longing to test oneself would have to be suppressed to an even greater degree.

“That’s a question for philosophers.”

So that means in a world in which there is war, freedom and humanity also exist.  Doesn’t that sound absurd?

Van Creveld:  A world without war can be had only at the price of mankind changing itself into a zombie race.  Sooner or later modern science will arrive at a point where this is a possibility, and we will have to decide whether we want it or not – whether we will be ready to pay that price.  But that’s a question for philosophers.

With the 1991 publication of your standard work, “The Future of War,” you have risen to the rank of one of the world’s leading military theorists.  The prediction you made in it, that the future of war would be “asymmetrical,” is today a politically certain commonplace.  Why was that still a revolutionary new insight in 1991?

Van Creveld:  Actually, I wasn’t the first to make that argument.  In 1989 a friend of mine, U.S. military expert William Lind, had already published an article in The Marine Corps Gazette titled “The Changing Face of War:  Into the Fourth Generation.”  By fourth generation warfare he meant denationalized wars, as opposed to the classical doctrine of Clausewitz according to which only a large-scale apparatus such as the state can organize war properly.

Why hadn’t we hit upon this earlier in our thinking?  Because of the Cold War.  In the West at that time we were in the habit of thinking the only significant danger for us was a nuclear power like ourselves.  Also, there were lots of interest groups for whom looking reality in the face was inconvenient, as they were profiting from the Cold War status quo.

Your new book, “Faces of War,” has just been published.  What face will war have in the XXIst Century?

Van Creveld:  War in the XXIst Century will be characterized above all by terrorism, guerilla tactics, insurgency movements, piracy, and the like.  Actually, that’s how it’s been for something like fifty years now.

But is this so-called asymmetrical warfare — that is, war waged by a high-tech power against an irregular guerilla-type or terrorist opponent — still war?  Or do we just call it that because in the XXIst Century we have no more “proper” wars?

Van Creveld:  A French Foreign Minister once asked me the same thing.  I told him as far as I was concerned, armed conflict of the future could be called “a pool party” but that wouldn’t change reality.

The pitched battle is the strategy of classical warfare.  What’s the strategy of asymmetrical warfare?

Van Creveld:  Asymmetrical warfare is what you have when a classical apparatus of the state and army faces an opponent that is neither under the control of a warfare-organizing state apparatus nor led by regular uniformed armed forces.  Thus is one obliged to organize and operate in some other way.

Asymmetrical warfare will not make use of battlefields?

Van Creveld:  The XXIst Century battlefield in asymmetrical warfare will increasingly be the civil sphere.  However, one shouldn’t go too far:  in asymmetrical warfare, uniformed soldiers of our scurity forces also play a central role.

If the civil sphere becomes a battlefield, civilians must become, as a consequence, the new combattants?

Van Creveld:  Yes, and the reverse too.  In the XXIst Century they’ll become increasingly indistinguishable.  Moreover, people will change roles from one moment to the next.

So, is it possible that in future the West will be faced with “democratic wars of attrition”?

Van Creveld:  You’re asking if there will be killings of civilians until Western governments and public opinion can’t hold out any more, and surrender?  Now, for sure asymmetrical warfare can be bloody, as Algeria, Vietnam, and Bosnia demonstrated, but first, seldom is there war in which one side is really “bled white” (as it was called in the First World War) to the point where casualties are so high that one is no longer in a position to continue hostilities.  The decision to suspend hostilities is normally a question of wartime morale, and that goes for classical conflict as well as for asymmetrical.

You’re saying the denationalizing of war on the one hand leads to the privatizing of war on the other hand.

Van Creveld:  Defeating enemies like terrorists, guerillas, or rebels requires professional troops.  Conscript levies, which still formed the backbone of armies in the 19th and 20th Centuries, are no longer an option as they will lack sufficient experience and training.  The answer is long-serving career soldiery or the hiring of short-serving private professional mercenaries.  Today it is already the case that the mercenary route is becoming more and more prominent.

If the asymmetrical warfare of the future has its own rules, does it still make sense to talk of “terror” and “terrorism”?

Van Creveld:  Good question.  Each epoch creates its own terminology to deal with the conditions of its time.  But in the last analysis, whether future generations speak of “terrorism” or of “war” makes no difference. 

”The West has lost all asymmetrical wars — with one exception.”

If wars are going to be waged differently, victories will have to be won differently:  how does one win an asymmetrical war?

Van Creveld:  Clausewitz teaches that victory is achieved when the will of one of the opponents is broken — and that applies to the 21st Century too.  As I explain in “Faces of War,” that can be achieved in two ways:  either one stands firm and convinces the terrorists that time is working against them (which worked for the British in Northern Ireland), or one strikes the enemy with such force and destructiveness that he will never again rise (as President Hafez el-Assad did to his enemies in Syria in 1982).

In “Faces of War” you maintain that heavily-armed states normally lose asymmetrical conflicts.

Van Creveld:  That’s correct.  Since 1945 almost all developed countries that have fought asymmetrical wars have lost.  After the Second World War a handful of Jews in 1947 forced the British Empire to withdraw from Palestine.  That was the beginning.  After that the British lost Malaysia, Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, the Dutch Indonesia, and the French Indochina and Algeria.  Thereafter we saw the Americans in their turn lose in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan.  In addition were Portugal which lost in Angola, South Africa in Namibia, Ethiopia in Eritrea, India in Sri Lanka, and finally the USA again in Somalia.  The history of young asymmetrical warfare is a chronology of failure for the developed nations involved.

Why are Britain in Northern Ireland and Hafez el-Assad in Syria exceptions?

Van Creveld:  Because they decided in favor of two extreme strategies. 

A condition for the success of the British in Northern Ireland was their unusual readiness to tolerate more of their own casualties than they inflicted on the IRA.  In Northern Ireland, Great Britain lost around 1,000 soldiers and some 1,700 civilians while killing, in contrast, only 300 terrorists.  Suffering these casualties without letting itself be provoked finally took the wind out of the IRA’s sails. 

Hafez el-Assad, on the other hand, in 1982 attacked his opponents’ stronghold, the town of Hama, in such a brutal and decisive way that he was successful in completely eliminating the opposition.  And instead of concealing his harsh action from the world’s gaze he even boasted of it before the press, letting his spokesman brazenly exaggerate the victim-count. 

Both strategies seem, all things considered, inappropriate for western democracies:  what critical public will normally tolerate a death toll such as the British suffered, without even mentioning a massacre like Hama?

Van Creveld:  Nevertheless, one of those two strategies was successfully applied by a democratic country, namely Great Britain.  It’s not true that democratic countries are in principle never able to win such conflicts.  It is true that no democratic state has thus far applied the Syrian method.  But what does that prove?  Only that apparently there hasn’t been a need for it, thank God! 

Or are we mistaken, and what will come in the XXIst Century will be a new version of symmetrical warfare — keyword:  new superpowers such as China or India?

Van Creveld:  That’s unlikely, because in this regard the Bomb has brought peace to the world.

Thanks to the atomic bomb the world is become better?

Van Creveld:  At least there’s this:  wherever the atomic bomb is, there’s been no more large-scale war.  A glance back through time since Hiroshima confirms it:  wherever atomic weapons have appeared, large-scale war between heavily-armed states has disappeared.  And so it is highly likely to be in future. 

[continued]

[van Creveld interview continued]

What about Iran and North Korea who are building atomic weapons?

Van Creveld:  Fundamentally that goes for those countries too — besides, what choice do we have?  It’s too late for a preventive war against those countries.  That would only lead to unimaginable disaster.

As an Israeli, you have no fear of an Iranian atomic bomb?

Van Creveld:  No.  Israel possesses everything required to wipe Iran off the map if the need should arise, and the Iranians know it perfectly.  The ones with reason to be concerned are the Gulf States.  But that’s not Israel’s problem.

Will there be a change in the essence of war in the XXIst Century, along with the new ways of waging war, or does there exist a constant of war which stays always the same through time?

Van Creveld:  Lots of things never change.  War, by definition, is organized force employed in the service of some political interest.  It is also by definition a mutual action; that is, on both sides one kills and gets killed.  If killing is only done to one side, then one speaks no longer, really, of war but of a massacre, as happened for example at Babi Yar.

“In Afghanistan the Germans are neither waging war nor safeguarding the peace.”

For many in the West, the war against Islamism is a “struggle for freedom.”  For many Moslems, on the contrary, the Islamist war against the West is a “struggle for freedom.”  Which side is right?

Van Creveld:  I don’t see this question as within my competency, because my understandings are such that it falls out of my area of expertise.  Therefore I can only say that, personally, I naturally sympathize rather with the West — first and foremost because its social system stipulates freedom of expression.  That freedom is today under threat — although not just from Islam, but also from the Left. 

How?

Van Creveld:  The danger goes back to Herbert Marcuse who argued that in order to combat societal oppression, doing away with freedom of expression was not just a possibility but a duty.  Since then, too many people have internalized this. 

Is it only the Right today that is so stupid as to openly wage war while the Left, on the other hand, as is known, practices “international solidarity” and Liberals engage in “faraway humanitarian interventions with a strong mandate”?

Van Creveld:  Ah, who still takes any notice of the boneheads of the Left?  Let them yell and complain as much as they want.

Still, Germany, too, is officially “not waging war” in Afghanistan but is “safeguarding the peace there.”

Van Creveld:  Actually, German soldiers in Afghanistan are neither waging war nor safeguarding the peace.  All they’re doing is finding ways of keeping themselves busy while constantly praying quietly that they won’t vex anybody who could then end up shooting at them.

There can be no doubt about Germans’ sincere intention since 1945 not to wage any more wars.  How did we manage to get ourselves in this situation of waging war without wanting to? 

Van Creveld:  I would ask you to put that question to your politicians or, better yet, to German voters themselves, not to me.  And could you please let me know their answer?

The Germans are very enthusiastic about every integration of their armed forces into transnational organizations and cooperation.  In so doing, is Germany making the right decision?

Van Creveld:  The yearning of Germans for integration — not just in regard to your army — is understandable.  It is part of an effort to cast off their own past and gain the approval of other countries.  Were I a German politician I’d certainly do the same.

Armed forces are an expression of national sovereignty.  What does it signify, than, for armed forced to become integrated?

Van Creveld:  Without any doubt, integration signifies a partial loss of sovereignty.  But it’s not only happening with Germany.  It’s a global development.

Is one possible result of the integration of the West’s armed forces that we’ll always be exposed to getting sucked into involvement in the U.S.’s conflicts?

Van Creveld:  That’s an exaggeration.  Germany, after all, didn’t take part in the Iraq War.

You have described the armed forces of Germany as being at the null ranking of armies:  in their effort to be unwarlike they’ve succeeded in being “a government office in uniform.”

Van Creveld:  Not just I, many people see it that way, people both in and outside of the German armed forces, incidentally.  I remember a German officer telling me German generals were as a rule the most cowardly bunch, forever jittery only about their career.

You’re very often a guest of the German Army?

Van Creveld:  No longer.  A couple of years ago I referred to two individuals at the Bundeswehr leadership academy as “dinosaurs.”  Well, actually I was only making a joke, but apparently they took offense, and never invited me again. 

The military high command would reply that in all its foreign missions the Bundeswehr has done a good job, for which it has received much praise and recognition from its partners.

Van Creveld:  I live in Israel.  People familiar with the operations of U.N. troops in Southern Lebanon have told me otherwise.

Namely?

Van Creveld:  They say the best soldiers there are the Spaniards and, surprisingly, the Italian paratroopers.  The German soldiers of the UNIFIL mission, on the contrary, were viewed rather as weaklings.

In an age of computerized remote-controlled weapons why must an army be warlike at all?

Van Creveld:  Without that which Clausewitz calls “the warlike virtues” there is no military capability, no skill, for defending oneself when the need arises.  It was Sun Tzu, I believe, a Chinese general and philosopher around 500 BC and author of The Art of War, the first book on strategy and still today one of the most important works on the subject, who said “war might come only once every hundred years, but one must nevertheless be always armed, as it could break out any day.  If that is not done, the bodies of the fallen will lie stiffening on the field of battle with us weeping over them.  Whoever permits that will not succeed in attaining Tao, the path in heaven.”

”Will the Germans of the future still be ready to fight for their country?”

In Germany conventional war — that is, killing in the national interest — is a social taboo.  Are Germans and their military living a lie?

Van Creveld:  War is not just a question of killing, but also of dying.  Not just Germany, but almost all the developed countries of the West are living a lie.  May peace, which allows them to persist in this lie, long endure, and may they never again find themselves in a situation like that described by Sun Tzu.

On a visit to an exhibition at the Air Force Museum in Berlin-Gatow you noticed how they put the word heros, referring to German combat pilots of the World Wars, in quotation marks.  You commented on that spirit by saying, this is “the beginning of the end.”

Van Creveld:  A country that treats men who fought and died for it in such a way can only pray that — to quote Clausewitz — no one with a sharp sword will come around and cut its head off.  Because it’s absolutely certain no one will fight for it.

In your books the German Army between 1914 and 1945 comes across mostly as an imposing example of ideal military fitness.  Wherein lay the “German secret” of that era?

Van Creveld:  Mainly in the fact that the German military planners of that time apparently understood that the most important factor in fighting strength is the comradely cohesion in a military unit.  This cohesion arises as a result of tight organization combined with long and persistent training together as a unit.  Their above-average practices in this regard are not the least of what permitted the German armies of the First and Second World Wars to endure so long.

Your critics hold against you that you view the German armies in isolation from the moral aspects for the most part.

Van Creveld:  I don’t feel these criticisms are just.  My book “Fighting Power” (in which I delve into the secret of the Wehrmacht’s success and compare the Wehrmacht and the U.S. Army of World War II) contains not just one but two forwards dealing with this question.  If my critics ignore that, that’s their problem.

Israel is a country that asserts its national interests in a clear and bellicose way without — like the U.S.A. — hiding behind world opinion.  Is Israel a positive counterexample to Germany?

Van Creveld:  I would say that until the Six Day War in 1967, until the Yom Kippur War in 1973, or until the First Lebanon War in 1982 that was to a large extent true.  Since then, however, Israel has only fought enemies that were much weaker than itself.  And that with results which put our armed forces in a rather bad light. 

Actually, one can say that — with the exception of the 2006 Lebanon War, which apparently broke the will of Hezbollah to continue its provocations — the Israeli Army hasn’t conquered anyone in 36 years.

[continued]

[van Creveld interview continued]

Recently Israeli soldiers confessed to firing on Palestinian women and children with the approval of their superiors.

Van Creveld:  From what I understand, these soldiers later conceded they didn’t actually see these atrocities, but only heard about them.  I don’t think the Israeli Army has a bigger problem in this regard than other Western armies in Iraq or Afghanistan.  But let me add something:  during the Gaza operation my grandson lived within range of Palestinian rockets.  (His name is Or, which means light, he’s five years old and has blue eyes, blond hair, and freckles.)  He asked me why these people were trying to kill him.  If you or anyone else think you can answer this question for him I’ll pay for your first-class round-trip ticket to Israel and back!

Can Israel survive as the West’s last militaristic state?  Or will it, because of its warlike character, bring about sooner or later its own destruction as many German critics of Israel warn?

Van Creveld:  I view Israel as the most successful political quantity of the XXth Century.  It has only one serious problem, namely its ongoing occupation of Palestinian land.  When we finally decide to withdraw from the West Bank territories as we withdrew from the Sinaï in 1982 and Gaza in 2005, Israel will not just survive, it will thrive.  I believe that sooner or later this realization will prevail in Israel.

But won’t Arab demography one day force Israel to act, if it doesn’t want to be innundated?

Van Creveld:  Not if, as I’ve been calling for for twenty years, we have a wall between us and the occupied territories and we finally withdraw.  We have a wall for Gaza, and hopefully we are getting one around the West Bank too.

Could a XXIst Century world war be ignited here, as the First World War was ignited in Serbia?

Van Creveld:  No, I think the Israeli Bomb will prevent it.  It is believed we possess weapons in the megaton range that can deter any Arab country.  But if against all expectations that doesn’t work, the answer to your question would be yes — and the world had better know it!
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[end of interview]

On the subject of Prof. van Creveld’s views on “women and war” (see the opening portion of the interview) here’s English social commentator Anthony Ludovici (1882-1971) writing in the mid-1950s:

Suffragettes promised eternal peace

Again, with their usual intrepid mendacity, the Suffragettes repeatedly assured us that when once women acquired political power we should, amid other untold blessings, enjoy perpetual peace.  Olive Schreiner, for instance, in 1911, exclaimed emotionally, “On that day, when woman takes her place beside man in the governance and arrangement of the external affairs of the race, will also be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human affairs.” (Woman and Labour, Chap. IV).

This utterly insincere claim, taken up by a chorus of women’s voices, was repeated even as recently as 1936 by the authoress S. Frumkin (A Woman’s Party, Chaps. 17 & 18).  Indeed, as Lord Winterton has said, the advocates of Female Suffrage claimed “that the grant of votes for women [. . .] would usher in an era of peace and prosperity such as the world has never seen” (op. cit., Chap. V.).

Yet, within three years of Olive Schreiner’s empty boast, women were showing such frenzied enthusiasm for World War I that they caused some consternation among onlookers.  R.N. Bradley, for instance, observed of the English woman, “She likes to see her boy in khaki, and presents white feathers to those who are not.”  He then adds significantly, “There is undoubtedly a deep-rooted unconscious antagonism between the sexes and I have often wondered whether this in an instance of it.”  (Duality, 1923, Chap. VIII, 2).

John Cowper Powys also speaks of “those ambiguous feminine emotions which seemed to delight in sending handsome young men to the battlefield.”  (Autobiography, 1943, Chap. VI, ii).  H.C. Fisher and Dr. E.X. Dubois remark that “many men who had a free choice in the matter were literally sent to war by their women,” and they add, “it is impossible to relieve women, as a sex, from all responsibility for the war.”  (Sexual Life During the War, 1937, Chap. II).  Norwood Young shares this view and declares:  “Women are on balance for war rather than peace.”  (England Conquers the World, 1937, Chap. II).  Seventy years earlier, however, Ruskin had already told English women, “There is not a war in the world but you women are answerable for it.”  (Sesame and Lilies, Para. 91).

Christabel Pankhurst

When on leave during World War I, I confess that I was often shocked by the women, young and old, who every day could eat hearty breakfasts whilst from their newspapers, propped against the milk jug, they announced between their mouthfuls the tragic end of some relative or friend; whilst, despite the lethal misery we were all enduring in the trenches, there were those deplorable weekly meetings at the Pavilion, Piccadilly, where Christabel Pankhurst secured unanimous votes from her female audiences to continue prosecuting the war “to the last young man.”

Seeing that neither she nor her listeners were suffering the cruel hardships and deaths of this stationary warfare, it was indecent of them as ambusquées, under the dubious cloak of “patriotism,” to advocate the prolongation of the slaughter.

In World War II

But in World War II women’s ardour for war was even more blatant.  In the months preceding it, few could have failed to observe that it was the English middle-class women who were the most rabid agitators for a war with Germany.  Animated by their secret loathing of the masculine accent over the Dictatorships, they fiercely opposed what was called “appeasement.”

Nor was I alone in noticing this; for Duffer Coop (later Lord Norwich), himself an opponent of appeasement, writes of the year 1938:  “I could count at that time, among my acquaintances, twelve happily married couples who were divided upon the issue of Munich, and in every case it was the husband who supported and the wife who opposed Chamberlain.”  (Old Men Forget, 1953, Chap. XV).  Philip Wylie noticed the same spirit in the U.S.A.; for he says of World War II, “it was the moms who have made the war.”  (Generation of Vipers, 1942).

Thus the political influence of women, whether direct or otherwise, has been the source neither of any urgently needed reforms in our society, nor of any increase in our prosperity, nor of any guarantee of peace.  By and large they have shown that there was nothing specific in the form of real progress which they, as a sex, had to contribute to the national life.  On the contrary, the enhancement of their power has been conterminous not only with a steady decline in English prestige, prosperity, and psycho-physical standards, but also with the greatest and most ruinous war in all history.

[ http://www.anthonymludovici.com/womans.htm ]

Gday Fred , I do not know how to articulate the point that you make; - Other than to say that Religious connotations have their effect – juxtaposed to Ideological- You know already that the Ideological is a Psychological effects of creating a perception ; but the responsible party become exonerated of evil do’igns ;  I can only make a common deductive notion of propaganda outbursts.
The Ideological need an enemy to substantiate THEIR POSITION; I SEE THINGS TO BE DEVOID OF AN MATTER; OR LATIN – Reductio Ad Absurdum; Or the man mad expression – Creating a red herring- The personage responsible for; - re- creating the normal perception are the same people who will game the most;
Kevin Rudd is not a Jew- nor is black cunt Obama- Ideology is paradigmatic to reality to reality – Propaganda as Media is the answer to a question; Asshole are as hols and not god ; ; Poly theistic or Monotheistic ?
At least with one of those theories you know where we stand – the other realms – is a psychotic Utopia;
Reality dictates my thought; but I see Evil other than the obvious propaganda.

I can proclaimed the misery of the world to many – only because we know it - To portion blame to another to me is weakness in reasoning – only by definition by my words ; I do not subscribe to the Blue Moon theology .
There are many reasons to hate and despise – be it primordial survival ; I know who the enemy – or cancer cell is – and like any cancer , it must be removed – Black cunt Obama is anti Semitic – so please Fred – Please tell me you do not support him; And that is my point.
There are many reasons to kill cancer – but it is not a common cold.

Andrew - 15 November 2009 09:57 AM

Gday Fred , I do not know how to articulate the point that you make; [...].  – Black cunt Obama is anti Semitic – so please Fred – Please tell me you do not support him; And that is my point.

Good day, Andrew—I hope it’s needless to say I didn’t understand 99% of your comment.  Regarding the bit I did understand:  I don’t support Obama but I think he is preferable to John McCain so I’m glad he beat McCain.  (I didn’t vote for either man but if someone had held a gun to my head and forced me to vote for one or the other, I would have voted for Obama.  Yes, McCain is that bad.  Believe it.)  Obama is preferable in that, while indistinguishable from McCain in all other ways, he’s far less likely than McCain to 1) attack Iran, and 2) try to make it so we’ll be stuck in Afghanistan and Iraq forever.  In all other ways—pushing race-replacment, making cultural-marxist Supreme Court appointments, pushing homosexualism, pushing women’s lib, pushing general societal decline, and so on—the two men, McInsane and The Magic Negro, are indistinguishable.  So, The Magic Negro is McInsane without the nuclear sneak-attack on Iran the minute he’s sworn in, which we would have gotten with McInsane, and without making it so we’ll stay mired in the Mideastern Wars for Oil and Israel for the next hundred years.

As for The Magic Negro being anti-Semitic, “anti-Semitic” is not a concept I deal in:  the way that expression is used by the Jews makes it impossible to discover any meaning in it.  It’s meaningless.

I just went back and checked if the links in the van Creveld interview all worked.  The one to the original interview in August doesn’t.  Strangely, you also can’t get to it by typing Martin van Creveld into the JungeFreiheit site search box (one would think all van Creveld stuff would come up, but none does). 

I found where it is:

Go to http://www.jungefreiheit.de/ .

Click on Archiv underneath the masthead at top of page.

Scroll down a bit to Chronologisches Archiv and click on 2009.

Scroll down to August and click on “34/09 vom 14. August 2009.”

Scroll down to “S. 6 – 7 IM GESPRÄCH” and click on „Nur die Toten erleben das Ende des Krieges.“

You’re at the interview.  Apparently it doesn’t have its own URL address.

Exactly Fred, I had read your post after a few beers; - Philosophical theories are never-ending - and that be a main point; Black cunt Obama is a Hollywood invention made to me metaphysical – That does not transpire into reality- That be obvious.
Merry Charismas Fred ;  I will refrain from drink writing , hahhahaha

Thanks Andrew, and I hope you had a Merry Christmas—and here’s wishing you a Happy Boxing Day!  (We’re still the 26th over here.)