History « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Tuesday, March 8, 2016

History ... Society ...

Every now and then I come across an historical speculation article that ponders the question of what would have happened had Germany had won the First World War. One of the more interesting of these articles appeared several years ago on the Guardian web site. The article raises an interesting and thought provoking question — was WW1 really about anything? Here’s a quote from the article:

[We are] likely to witness plenty of debate about . . . whether the war achieved anything. At present, argument about the war mainly consists of two mutually uncomprehending camps. On the one hand, there are those who, as Margaret MacMillan put it recently, think the war was “an unmitigated catastrophe in a sea of mud”. On the other, there are those who insist that it was nevertheless “about something”.

Hmmm. So what WAS World War 1 about? What is any war about? For most of history, wars were ultimately about a nation or tribe trying to increase its strength and economic well-being at the expense of some other nation or tribe; or conversely, trying to keep its strength and economic well-being from being taken away by some other nation or tribe.

Nonetheless, there is sometimes a “higher theory” behind a war. Often in the past, this has involved religion. The fight was for God! One group assumed that the other group had an improper and dangerous concept of what God is and what God demands of us, e.g. the Crusades or the many European Protestant-Catholic battles in the 16th and 17th Centuries (and yes, modern radical Islamic violence, with the current day poster-child being ISIS). Occasionally, one side assumes that its opponents entirely and wrongfully deny the existence of God, e.g. the 40 year “Cold War” which pitted the enlightened West against “Godless Communism” (let’s not forget that the war against Communism became pretty hot » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:27 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Friday, December 11, 2015

◊ Evolving Military Threats, Real and Risible

Foreign Relations/World Affairs ... History ... Technology ...

I read up recently on international military news. Once you get past all the crazy, never-ending Middle Eastern stuff, you next get a big dose of bad news from China. You’d think that the main Chinese threat would be its huge army, but no more; times have changed. In the past few years, the Chinese have been designing and building an increasingly sophisticated network of high-tech satellites, drones, stealth planes, subs and missiles, with the intent of keeping the US Navy and any of its cronies (especially Japan) far away from its coastline. Thus leaving China to do as it pleases with Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.

Until recently, the US Pacific Fleet, even with its huge sitting-duck aircraft carriers, could cruise the Taiwan Straits and South China Sea feeling relatively safe. The Chinese Navy generally couldn’t find our ships, as it didn’t have the sea-borne tracking and recognizance capacities that we do; and even if it could, it didn’t have enough modern subs and jets and destroyers to put up a credible challenge. That ain’t so today. What’s even worse, the Chinese now have missiles that can be launched by land or sea which are accurate enough (when coupled with a monitoring system of satellites and airborne radar drones and tracking planes) to hit a ship out in the open sea, thousands of miles away. Nuclear warheads are not needed; these missiles and their guidance systems are so good and so accurate that they can hit a carrier deck out in mid-ocean with a heavy conventional explosive warhead.

So, that’s a big headache for the US. And as if that weren’t enough, you can throw in what the North Koreans and Iranians are doing to develop long-range nuclear missiles, which in a few years could reach the US mainland. Yes, we are building anti-missile systems, but we are not sure if they are ready for prime time yet. As for the Chinese anti-ship missiles, the US Navy has » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:57 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Sunday, September 27, 2015

◊ John Boehner and Joe Johnston, Reconsidered

Current Affairs ... History ... Politics ...

Another one of the “not entirely crazy” Republican leaders has bitten the dust. I’m talking about House Speaker John Boehner, who on Friday announced that he was giving up his Speakership position and resigning his seat as a Congressman from Ohio in about a month. Boehner is 65 years old (will be 66 in November), and was first elected to the House in 1990. He beat a Republican incumbent named Buz Lukens in a primary and then defeating the Democrat candidate by a 60-40 margin. (“Buz” . . . now there’s a real middle-American name! Although lunar astronaut Buzz Aldrin hails from the same part of metropolitan New Jersey where I am based. I can’t say that I know of any other Buz[z]’s from this neck of the woods.)

Since then, Boehner has maintained a safe seat, beating his Democratic alternative by margins close to 70-30 every two years. Boehner’s biggest nightmare of course is from within his own party. He could well face a strong primary challenge in 2016; the defeat of seven-term Republican Congressman Eric Cantor last year to a Tea Party primary candidate casts a dark shadow on Boehner’s prospects (recall that Cantor was the House Majority Leader). So, Boehner is getting out while the getting is good.

I never thought much of Boehner. He appeared to dead set on blocking President Obama at every turn, with no regard for the merits. Whenever Obama took action, you could depend on seeing or hearing Boehner on the news that night criticizing whatever was ordered (sometimes in an annoying, whiny fashion). And yet . . . all of that just wasn’t good enough for the “conservative base” of the GOP. They expected that Boehner would get the House » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 6:56 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, August 15, 2015

◊ How Civil Were the Civilized Tribes (and those who called them that)?

History ...

Over the past year or two, race relationships have become a big political topic in the US once again. This is not an entirely good thing, given that the issue has been brought back from the 1960s because of a series of recent police killings of unarmed black men and women. Hopefully, something good can still come out of it, just as the the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s helped to change and reduce some of the many injustices against blacks (some but not all, unfortunately) that were embedded in American government and society up to them.

One interesting side-effect is that certain writers are taking a new look at the historical components that have contributed to the vexed and unsettled issues of race and equality today. One of the biggest historical institutions that still today affects how we get along is slavery. History has a lot of lessons to teach about slavery, both big and small. Let me share something I just came across, one of the smaller stories about slavery in America.

American slavery is usually thought of in the context of a rich white landowner of European heritage using African slaves for agricultural labor, i.e. planting and harvesting cash crops like peanuts, cotton and tobacco (and doing so in quite a cruel fashion). Interestingly, not all African slaves were owned » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:14 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

◊ A Bavarian Madman’s Art Lives On

Art & Entertainment ... History ...

I read a short article in the NY Times the other day about an auction of various artwork painted by Adolph Hitler, from his earlier years. Turns out that there are quite a few extant paintings from Hitler (he might have created over 2,000 drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings), and there is an active market for them. You’d think that no one outside of a government archival office or an historical institution would have any interest in artwork by Hitler. But to the contrary, art investors from around the globe shell out upwards of $100,000 or more per painting.

At first this seems like nothing more than a morbid fascination on the part of certain people who have more money on their hands then they know what to do with. But given my own historical and semi-morbid interests, I decided to take a look at some of Hitler’s artistic expressions. Here is a site, and another site, and another, where you too can see what I’m talking about.

OK, first impression: this is actually credible artwork; certainly not genius level, but better than what the average amateur could do. It reminded me of two American styles — first off, much of Hitler’s subject matter and painting techniques have a lot in common with the works of the “painter of light”, the late Thomas Kinnade. There is a certain sentimentality that both Hitler and Kinnade try to capture, a dream-like quality, an emphasis on » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:21 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

◊ A.D. The Bible Continues . . . Hidden in Plain Sight

Art & Entertainment ... History ... Religion ...

Despite my aversion to television shows, I’m trying to catch up with NBC‘s “A.D., The Bible Continues“, a weekly 12-part series that began this past Easter Sunday (of course). There have been plenty of video renditions of the life of Jesus, but not a heck of a lot has been done regarding what happened after his death on the Roman cross. For almost 30 years (not counting infancy) I was a practicing Catholic, and was subject to a lot of this Jesus material, in Sunday school classes, adult education series, or via popular entertainment channels (TV shows, movies, etc.). I thus suspect that for most Catholics and other Christians, the matter of how the long story of world-wide Christianity unfolded from a small band of 1st Century Jews in Palestine reflects a huge gap in popular understanding of religious faith.

A.D. will no doubt serve to fill in some of this gap. But from what I’ve seen of the series thus far (I will admit that I haven’t seen every minute of each of the 5 episodes that have aired to date; but I have done some supplementary reading about the series, and I think I get the general flavor of it), I would say that the writers and producers of A.D. did not necessarily intend it to reinforce the official teachings of the various Christian churches. It does not directly contradict anything said in the Bible (the series is based on the first 10 chapters of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles); but it adds a whole lot of speculative material about what could have happened in-between the events of the early Christ-followers that are discussed in Scripture.

And it’s the flavor of this “added narrative” that points A.D. in an interesting direction. The faith-and-miracles stuff is all there, such that believing Christians can still bask in the glow of the Resurrection and » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:31 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, April 30, 2015

◊ A Little Reminder of the Past

History ... Photo ...

If you are under the age of 30, maybe even 35, you probably don’t know why the telephone poles in this picture have red and white painted bands around them. Unless you are a real local trivia fan (or maybe when you were around 7 or 8, you were very curious about your neighborhood), you probably wouldn’t even notice them as you drive down the road (in this case, Grove Street in Montclair, NJ). And even if you did, you probably wouldn’t ask yourself, hmmm, why are there poles with red and white paint on them every quarter mile or so?

But now that I’ve made you think about it . . . here’s the answer. Once upon a time, most urban and suburban town of any appreciable population density had fire alarm boxes spread throughout the town. Every box had an individual number, and was electrically wired into a central location at the town’s main fire station. So, if a fire were to break out and a citizen walking down the street happened to see it, they could run to the corner and push or pull on a little button in the firebox that would send an electrical signal alerting the police and fire department that they should get out to the vicinity of the fire box, on the double.

Now you might ask, with all the telephones out there, even if you go back a decade or so when pocket phones weren’t yet universal, why were these street fireboxes needed? Wouldn’t it be better to wait for someone to call and explain the situation? And wouldn’t it be tempting for wrong-doers to push the alarm button as a false alarm, given that probably no one could see or trace it back to you? That’s all true. But once upon a time, telephones were NOT all over the place. Before 1950, not every household had one. Up to the end of World War 2, telephones were an expensive luxury, mostly used by the bigger businesses and affluent families.

Obviously then, these fireboxes go way back to the early part of the 20th Century, when you couldn’t count on a telephone being available if a building suddenly caught fire. The thing that got most cities to invest in public firebox systems was » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:09 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Monday, April 20, 2015

◊ A Marked Man

History ... Personal Reflections ... Society ...

A few days ago I was looking for a book in my apartment, and I just happened to brush across an interesting collection of spiritual writings from the late Dag Hammarskjold. This book, called “Markings”, was NOT the book that I was looking for; but in another sense, perhaps it was. Markings is Dr. Hammarskjold’s life-long spiritual diary, a collection of reflections on his inner struggle for truth, meaning and transcendence. I.e., a place where you write stuff like:

Courage and love: equivalent and related expressions for your bargain with Life. You are willing to pay what your heart commands you to give.

Night is drawing nigh – How long the road is. But, for all the time the journey has already taken, how you have needed every second of it in order to learn what the road passes by.

Deep thoughts, indeed. So I moved the book from a bottom shelf in a remote storage area to my bedside nightstand, where I can take in some of Dag’s reflections before retiring. The book itself brings back memories for me. It’s a 1977 printing and is now turning brown and brittle around the edges. I received it in 1978, when I was a young man who himself was not yet turning brown and brittle. It was given to me as a going-away present by some nice people at a social services agency that I volunteered with » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 4:07 pm Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

Thursday, April 16, 2015

◊ December 8, a Date That Will Live . . .

History ... Zen ...

My Zen group recently held a “zazen-kai”, which is basically a long day of meditation and other Zen ceremonial accoutrements. Our normal weekly zazen service lasts 2 hours; zazen-kai goes about 6 and 1/2. Most of the extra time goes to sitting quietly in meditation. And that’s a good thing, as far as I am concerned. But some of it goes into more chanting, more walking around (i.e. “kinhin”), breaking for refreshments (in silence, thank goodness), and listening to the wise teacher ruminate on the contrarian glories of the Zen / Buddhist traditions. During our zazen-kai, our sensei talked about the traditional December sesshin commemorating the anniversary of the Buddha’s enlightenment. The last day of this week-long ceremony marks the morning when Buddha awoke before dawn, saw the morning star (the planet Venus) shining brightly over the horizon, and decided that he was finally seeing the big picture. I.e., the Buddha realized enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the holy grail of the whole Buddhist enterprise, so the date on which this happened is treated as a holiday in many parts of the East. During his talk, sensei named the date on which the big man supposedly had his great celestial insight — i.e., December 8th. Being a supposedly anti-intellectual tradition, it’s a no-no in Zen to stimulate the mind (or let it be stimulated). But my mind was nonetheless stimulated by this little factoid. December 8th — pretty close to December 7th, the day of infamy, Pearl Harbor Day.

Hold on a minute — Zen is largely a Japanese tradition; it has ancient historical roots in China and India, but Japan is where it all came together during the Middle Ages, where the legendary Zen masters such as Dogen and » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:34 am Read Comments (2) / Leave a Comment

Saturday, March 28, 2015

◊ On Our Knees: The Grand Design of Humankind

Health / Nutrition ... History ... Spirituality ...

The human body is a wonderful thing, from an engineering perspective. It is amazingly designed, as proven by how much it can do and how adaptable it is to a wide variety of operating conditions. The body is an extremely complicated machine that can perform a whole lot of different functions, and for the most part it does them very well. The brain of course is the crowning peak of complexity, but the rest of the body is pretty incredible too; everything below the eyebrow is still more complex and well-engineered than say the Space Shuttle or an aircraft carrier.

I’m not going to get into the whole thing about whether or to what degree such design reflects an intentional theological authorship. I accept the existence of a natural process of biological evolution, along with the concept that it is driven by random variation and environmental feedback loops stemming from DNA inheritance and natural selection. I further accept that given the right conditions and enough time, such a process can “blindly” author a masterpiece like the human brain and body system. I don’t believe that any sort of divine transcendent power had a pre-packaged blueprint for the human race, and somehow impressed such an “intelligent design” mandate upon the Earth’s biosphere This is not to say that a beneficent deity does not exist; nor that a conceivable deity would have nothing at all to do with the dynamics that allowed our universe and the world we know to come into existence. But I don’t look at such a deity as a master designer with huge rolls of blueprints in arms, specifying every detail of the human body.

Because if you did imagine that, you might have to conclude that this deity isn’t so smart and perfect after all; the human body has some significant flaws in its design. In various ways, you can see that it is a “work in process”, which makes sense » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 9:08 am Read Comment (1) / Leave a Comment

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