The Guns of August

[mgc1961]

In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.

So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq? Where are we, as we impose sanctions on Iran and North Korea (and threaten worse), while sending our latest wonder weapons, pilotless drones armed with bombs and missiles, into Pakistan's tribal borderlands, Yemen, and who knows where else, tasked with endless "targeted killings" which, in blunter times, used to be called assassinations? Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services?

I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of our own guns of August in 2060. The fog of war, after all, is just a stand-in for what might be called "the fog of the future," the inability of humans to peer with any accuracy far into the world to come. Let me nonetheless try to offer a few glimpses of what that foggy landscape some years ahead might reveal, and even hazard a few predictions about what possibilities await still-imperial America.

Read it all at http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175286/tomgram:_chalmers_johnson,_portrait_of_a_sagging_empire__/

[Citizen Worker]

1. Where are we, you ask? Broke and hurtling toward third world status and the political leadership is

clueless.

[swilton]

2. Chalmers Johnson and Barbara Tuchman

two of my favorite authors and well worth reading.

A perhaps more appropriate Barbara Tuchman reference would be her work MARCH OF FOLLY in which she describes from ancient history to the then present (Vietnam War era) cases in which states pursued disasterous international policies despite overwhelming evidence that those policies were not in the states' best interests.

[Recursion]

9. I liked "A Distant Mirror"

It's a very interesting bio of one random nobleman from the 14th century. Really fascinating.

[swilton]

10. I loved DISTANT MIRROR as well

There is one conclusion there that I will always prize - the gist of it is (I'll have to recall from memory) that the emergence from the Dark Ages was the beginning of when the concerns for the life on earth (i.e., accumulation of wealth) began to surpass the concerns for the afterlife. In essence Tuchman is documenting rudementary capitalism.

[Recursion]

11. And I loved that when Enguerrand was a young man...

...nobody thought it was weird that he was a Frenchman married to the King of England's niece and fighting for the English King against his own King, but by the time he was middle aged (no pun intended) he had to pick sides. It was the beginning of "The State" as we think of it today.

[KoKo]

3. A good read. K&R

[mgc1961]

4. I really enjoyed Tuchman's The Guns of August and...

A Distant Mirror.

Blowback's a good read too.

[Stuart G]

5. I remember reading part of that book in 1962...

What a horrific mess that was. Each power playing against each other for power..like a stupid chess game..That is what I recall from that book..
This movement that counter movement..mobilazations etc.....

Further, none of the players of that fatefull game had a sence of what kind of game they were playing,
An awful war that would waste millions of lives..over what??

The players thought that they were playing l800s game...troops movements, small encounters etc...not trench warfare and its results.....
.but the Civil War in the U.S. proved that it would be different..so the jackasses
in 1914 had no idea, they didn't think that this war would be like the U.S.Civil War..or just didn't know better
What a bunch of Fools..
... And no one could have imagined another war, based on some of the nonsence that became the Treaty of Versailles..with war guilt clases and reparations..

[mgc1961]

6. Tuchman's Law

My book is indebted to all these groups, beginning with the primary chroniclers. I realize it is unfashionable among medievalists today to rely on the chroniclers, but for a sense of the period and its attitudes I find them indispensable. Furthermore, their form is narrative and so is mine.

With all this wealth, empty spaces nevertheless exist where the problem is not contradictory information but no information. To bridge the gap, one must make use of what seems the likely and natural explanation, which accounts for the proliferation of "probably" and "presumable" in my text - annoying but, in the absence of documented certainty, unavoidable.

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side - of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean heavily on crisis and calamity, crime, and misbehavior, because such things are the subject matter of the documentary process - of lawsuits, treaties, moralists' denunciations, literary satire, papal Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de Clamanges, who, in denouncing unfit and worldly prelates in 1401, said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good clerics because "they do not count beside the perverse men."

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strike, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening - on a lucky day - without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

Tuchman, Barbara, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, 1978, pg. xviii

[The Traveler]

7. A fabulous book

Definitely one of my favorites.

[Jefferson23]

8. K&R, great read from a smart guy. n/t