I just heard a passing reference to something which reminded me that everything you (think) you know really can be wrong. Hugely and dangerously wrong.
Back in the Cold War, specifically in the late 1950s and early '60s, the Missile Gap was a thing. The idea that the Soviet Union had an overwhelming numerical superiority in nuclear missiles. It was a notion largely kicked off by some boastful comments of Khrushchev's which were probably intended as an unsubtle bluff to warn off the US.
The US media and military-industrial complex picked up Khrushchev's ball and ran with it:
"Over six columns starting on January 23 [1960], [US journalist Joseph] Alsop laid out the case for believing the Soviets were well ahead in missile development. He built his argument on Power's premise that with 150 ICBMs and 150 intermediate-range missiles firing on European targets, the Soviets could destroy all of NATO's nuclear weapons. He then set out to explain that if the Soviet missile factories were as efficient as the factory that produced SAC's Atlas rockets, then Khrushchev would have 150 ICBMs in ten months. Alsop charged the Eisenhower administration with playing Russian roulette in refusing to accelerate the arms race because of lack of firm proof that the Soviets had as many missiles as they could have."
"The public controversy was actually only the tip of the iceberg, for the real sparks flew within the American intelligence community, particularly between the US Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency. Air Force analysts claimed that there could be hundreds of Soviet ICBMs, whereas CIA analysts argued that there were no more than a dozen.
We now know that there were only four."
It's worth pausing to let the weight of that fact sink in. A nuclear arms race fueled by a public and military perception that other side had hundreds of ICBMs when, in fact, it had four.
Eisenhower was damn right to speak up about the malign influence of the military-industrial complex.
There are two aspects of this story which seem to illustrate more general truths:
1. There are plenty of flat-out insane conspiracy theories swirling around these days, which deserve to be mocked and rejected. But the example of the illusory Missile Gap shows that sometimes, some groups of insiders really can engineer real conpiracies against the laity
2. Sometimes, the aggressive interests of deadly enemies coincide in ways which make the world a far worse place for the majority who are just trying to get on with their lives without harming anybody. Khrushchev wanted to signal strength, in order to make his enemies fear him and leave him alone. The US military-industrial complex needed a credible threat in order to maintain its power, influence and funding. In a sense, both frenemies got some of what they wanted, while an emergent threat to the entire human race, in the form of a nuclear arms race grew out of both sides' attempts to bolster their own positions.
There's a similar symbiosis between, for example, violent terrorist organisations, trying to provoke states into a backlash which they hope will validate the terrorists' cause and recruit more followers, and states' military-industrial-security complexes, which grow and become more powerful, the greater the perceived terrorist threat.
After the high drama of the Trumpists' attempted putsch, there's a temptation to think that putting the violent, heavily-armed minority back in its box will solve the problem. And certain direct, specific actions would be good. Identify all the perps and their enablers, then ensure that they face legal consequences, to publicly demonstrate that people who indulge in this sort of violence and intimidation don't get to be above the law.
And, probably most important, disrupt the violent far-right and white supremacist networks which have self-evidently infiltrated various police departments. Black folks won't have needed the wake-up call of the attack on the Capitol to alert them to the fact that this shit has been going on for far too long.
All of this is necessary, but not sufficient. Firefighting this outbreak of violence is good, but it won't solve the underlying problems which got America into this mess. A thought-provoking post on the Minor Heresies blog (no less immediately relevant for being posted last September) views the state of early 21st Century America through the historical lens of Early Modern Europe, the Counter-Reformation, and what happens when an established order loses power and tries to claw it back:
"First, I’d like you to imagine yourself as an average peasant in Western Europe in 1516, the year before Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The Protestant Reformation is not yet even an idea. There is no “Catholic Church.” There is just “The Church.” It permeates personal, family, economic, and political life. For someone living in Koln, or Naples or Lyon in 1516 there is nothing else. Sure, there are a few Jews about, and you’ve heard, perhaps, of Muslims and Hindus, but these are oddities. Tuck this idea away for later; there was a time when, for the people of Western Europe, there was only one spiritual option, and no concept of any other.
Then, after 1517, there were other versions of Christianity. Lutheranism, of course, and Calvinism. John Knox took Luther’s ideas to Scotland and founded the Presbyterian Church. Suddenly, there were options. The Catholic Church did not tolerate this loss of power and preeminence.
The century between the mid-1500s and mid-1600s is the era of what is now known as the Counter Reformation. It was fought on an array of battle fronts: political, legal, military, theological, and organizational. The Vatican engaged in diplomacy, cracked down on dissent, and fomented wars. It also formed new organizations, such as the Jesuits, set scholars to work clarifying its theology, and actually engaged in some internal reforms. I won’t dig too deeply into this, since the Counter Reformation has filled a stack of books. It is enough to say that it got brutally violent, with torture and executions, and was finally ended by a vicious war, now known as the Thirty Years War. The terrorism and starvation partially depopulated northern Germany by its end in 1648. Catholicism didn’t yield power quietly, and the aftershocks of that fight persist to this day.
Now imagine yourself as a heterosexual Christian white man in 1947. Perhaps you are working in a unionized factory job or farming. Perhaps you are going to college on the GI Bill, preparing yourself for the white collar world. Whatever your path, your place is analogous to the peasant of 1516, in terms of your demographic identity. Desegregation is in the future. The heyday of the civil rights movement hasn’t arrived. Women’s rights aren’t a thing. Likewise LGBT rights, or even their existence. Secularism is a fringe idea, and psychotherapy is for rich kooks. Like a fish not understanding water, your preeminence in American society isn’t something you even consider. It’s just the way things are."
Read the whole thing here - it's well worth your time, especially for the way it draws your attention away from the immediate fireworks of the ragtag army of MAGA chuds, their disturbingly hilarous mid-rampage selfies and their touching faith that their transgressions will be wiped clean by a personal pardon from The Donald.
These people and their actions are just the symptoms of a deeper malaise, in particular the general powerlessness of voters of all persuasions in a nation where both major political parties have, to a greater or lesser extent, been captured by the money of oligarchs & corporate interests, to such an extent that they don't represent the people who vote for them (or those disillusioned people who don't vote, for that matter).
In common with most far-right rallies/insurrections, there were flags. Lots of flags. So many flags.
America's Swastika, AKA the Confederate Flag was a popular choice among the flag-shagging Trumpist ultras because of course it was:
Image credit Reuters.
Now the thing about this "Confederate Flag", as quite a few people know, is that it wasn't the national flag of the Confederacy. The reason that this now-established and instantly recognisable symbol of white supremacy differs from the national flag(s) of the Confederacy is an interesting one. It's all to do with identity, and not just in the obvious, ideological sense of political identity, but in the direct, practical sense of distinguishing friend from foe.
When the Confederate States seceded, like every new state, they wanted a flag of their own, and this was what they came up with:
As you can see, it's inspired by the flag of the USA, but with fewer stripes and a Betsy Ross-style circle of seven white stars in the blue canton, representing the original seven breakaway states (more stars were added to the original design as the number of rebel states joining the Confederacy increased).
Can you see what's wrong with this picture? Well, if you were a Confederate soldier, going into battle under this banner, you soon would have. It looked way too much like the opposition's flag, especially in the heat of battle, or when the wind dropped so the design of the flag wasn't clearly discernible.
By the end of 1861, the Army of Northern Virginia had come up with a solution. A flag (based on a previously rejected proposal for a Confederate national flag) which looked nothing like the ones the Yankees were carrying in to battle. It was a square battle flag with a dark blue saltire on a red background, outlined in white, and bearing the Confederate states' stars on the arms of the saltire:
The rectangular variant of this flag, as carried by the Trumpist in the first picture started life as another battle flag inspired by the North Virginian version, namely the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee.
As for the original national flag, the unfortunate symbolism of it looking like the other sides' flag, plus all those friendly fire incidents, made it unpopular and the Confederates decided to go for a rebrand.
And, boy, was this one a doozy.
One part of the redesign actually made rational sense. The new flag design took the USA-like stars-on-a-blue background design out of the canton & replaced it with the dissimilar Confederate battle flag.
But the background colour of the flag was pure ideology, with zero concessions to common sense. Out went the red and white stripes of the previous versions, replaced by a pure white background.
"Our idea is simply to combine the present battle-flag with a pure white
standard sheet; our Southern Cross, blue on a red field, to take the
place on the white flag that is occupied by the blue union in the old
United States flag, or the St. George’s cross in the British flag. As a
people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the
white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be
emblematical of our cause."
So the ideology was there, right in your face. Something you couldn't say about the practicality of the redesign. OK, you couldn't mistake the bearer for a damn Yankee on the battlefield. What you could easily mistake his flag for was a white flag of truce, with hilariously tragic consequences.
White supremacists, folks. Shooting themselves in the balls since 1863.
The mainly-white flag (AKA the "Stainless Banner") was such a tactical self-own that a third major redesign of the Confederate national flag was inevitable from day one. By 1865 the Confederates had got their shit together sufficiently to design a national flag that didn't signal surrender to the enemy, by adding a vertical red identification stripe to the design (this iteration was nicknamed the "Blood-Stained Banner"):
Unfortunately for the Confederates, by this stage time was running out for both the Confederacy and for recognition of the final version of its national flag to become embedded. Which is why the only flags of the insurrectionist South that are widely recognised today are variants of its distinctive battle flag.
So now that we're all up to speed with Confederate vexillology, we're also better equipped to engage in the battle of ideas with those inevitable apologists who claim, falsely that Confederate iconography has nothing to do with white supremacy and racism, and that the Civil War wasn't a war to defend slavery and white supremacy, but "States' rights" or some such nonsense.
So, if you're some alt-right wannabe edgelord hanging around waiting to "destroy" me with BS talking points like this, come at me, bro. I'm so ready for you.
I know the enemy.
Update: Rebecca Watson gave a great summary of the probably apocryphal auto-tasered testicles story:
A slightly late Happy New Year to everybody out there in Blogland. How are we all enjoying living in those interesting times the Chinese (allegedly) warned us about?
Like most people, I've spent most of the past year doing whatever it takes to get me through the day. Like reading books, then meeting up with friends to talk about them ... only with an extra helping of everybody being on the other end of a Zoom call and a side order of silently screaming "You're on mute!" Happy days.
Apart from the social interaction, however degraded by Zoom fatigue, reading groups have two great features. They introduce you to books you wouldn't otherwise have read, and reading a more diverse selection of books means that some of those books will fulfill what those old Heineken adverts used to promise, and refresh the parts other books cannot reach.
Our last two books were good examples. Both fiction, but each one refreshing completely different parts:
On different levels, I enjoyed both books, although they're chalk and cheese. Of course, opinions differed, but I'm not here to debate whether any specific book was "good" or "bad." I am here to say that your reading diet, like your actual diet, is healthier if it's varied.
Fifty-Fifty is a plot-driven courtroom drama and thriller, which kicks off with the discovery that a colourful Italian-American former mayor of New York has been brutally murdered in his own home.
Yikes! Be careful, Rudy!
The central mystery is that, when the ex-mayor was murdered, the only other two people in the house were his grown-up offspring, Alexandra and Sofia Giuliani Avellino. In this whodunnit, each sister accuses the other one of the murder and there seems to be no conclusive evidence to show which one of them actually did it (or, for that matter, whether the two sisters conspired together to do their old man in).
Enter hard-boiled criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, defending the sister who, his gut instinct tells him, is the innocent party. Is Eddie's instinct right? Expect the classic whodunnit menu of red herrings, the killer(s) covering her/their tracks with acts of ruthless brutality and twisted ingenuity, unexpected plot twists and startling revelations.
Fifty-Fifty is your classic airport thriller done well (in my opinion). The part of me it reached was the part that wants straightforward entertainment, puzzles and distraction. It's not going to change me on a fundamental level. Now that I've read it and know how the mystery gets solved, I've no particular desire to re-read it, but it passed the time pleasantly enough.
But it does what it does pretty well. It's easy to dismiss this sort of genre writing, especially when, like Fifty-Fifty, the book gets singled out as a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick of the week, the literary equivalent of getting kissed by your mum at the school gates and for ever blowing your chances of hanging out with the cool kids.
But, literary snobbery aside, think about these facts. It's easy to write. Almost all of us leaned that stuff at school. But it's hard to write well enough that people want to read what you've written, and carry on reading it for several hundred pages. Even if you have this talent, it requires a pretty special blend of talent, determination and luck to actually get published. Most books which make it into print don't sell that well. Fifty-Fifty did pretty well and, although it reads well enough as a stand-alone novel, it's only one of a series of books that Steve Cavanagh's written about the reformed con artist turned criminal lawyer Eddie Flynn, showing that the guy's not just a flukeish one-hit wonder.
But it's also a work of genre, which stands at a remove from the real world. It contains several tropes of the crime genre. Eddie Flynn, for example, is an instantly recognisable type - the dogged, incorruptible, rebellious, maverick outsider hero with a troubled personal life. The same goes for what he's up against - out there, there's a devilish plot, an elaborate game being played against law enforcement and natural justice, planned by a brilliant, but warped, mind (or minds - you'll have to read to the end to find out which). We've been here before, from the evil schemes of Professor Moriarty and Hannibal Lecter, to the elaborate mind games of a TV series like The Bridge.
Now I'm no expert on crimes and solving crimes,* but I'm pretty sure that, in real life, this isn't generally how it works. From what I gather, solving crimes is a team effort and most stuff gets solved by following established, tested procedures, at least in functioning systems of law enforcement. Where there's systemic corruption, incompetence, or even just institutional groupthink, some team members need to stand up and go against the flow but, in real life, I don't think most crimes end up being solved by some Eddie Flynn or Philip Marlowe type going rogue and kicking doors open.
As for violent crimes, yes, in a lot of real-life cases the victim and perpetrator are known to one another, so that's like the crime scene in Fifty-Fifty. But that's where the similarity ends; in real life, these sorts of crimes are mostly unplanned or poorly-planned and easy to solve. Even in those very rare cases of ruthless, high-functioning game-playing killers who plan and carry out their crimes methodically, the offenders rarely turn out to be warped geniuses of the crime fiction trope, but exceptions who fall through the cracks due at least partly to luck, or to an outbreak of the groupthink. incompetence or corruption I've already alluded to on the part of the authorities.
Although the rules of the genre are not the same as the rules of real life, Fifty-Fifty does a pretty decent job within the conventions and limits of the genre. Most of what happens is internally consistent and believable within the world of the book. The police and court procedure stuff sounded convincing and well-researched to me and, though it was a work of genre fiction it also touched on real-world social issues from unequal access to justice for rich and poor, to sexism, which gave it more of a feeling of heft and believability than many less accomplished crime novels.
Redhead by the Side of the Road is a different kind of novel altogether. From the opening, I had a sinking feeling that this book wasn't going to be a barrel of laughs:
"You have to wonder what goes through the mind of a man like Micah Mortimer. He lives alone; he keeps himself to himself; his routine is etched in stone."
Sure enough, it turns out that Micah is a self-employed tech guy, living the proverbial life of quiet desperation, just about getting by with very few limited and unsatisfactory relationships with his fellow humans, scraping just enough of a living to afford a rented apartment which he keeps spotless with an unvarying cleaning routine. In his rented box, Micah writes notes to the other residents of his block, complaining about their persistent failure to flatten their cardboard packaging when the recycling goes out on bin days.
At this point, I cheered myself up by checking the page count. Only 178 pages? Phew! At least it looked like I wouldn't be spending too much of my down time with Micah and his rather bleak little life.
So I stuck with it, and was very surprised at how much I ended up enjoying this book. Unlike the event-packed Fifty-Fifty, nothing much happens for most of the book. Only once does something fairly major, dramatic and unexpected happen to Micah, But what does happen turns out to be surprisingly compelling.
Unlike Fifty-Fifty, the entertainment here isn't straightforward. There's lots of everyday miscommunication and conflicts, especially between orderly, routine ways of living and messy, spontaneous lives, observed in a way that can be simultaneously sad and hilarious (there are points where both you're seriously willing Micah not to innocently say that wildly inappropriate thing he's about to say to his semi-detached girlfriend and can't help finding it funny at the same time).
There are puzzles here, too but, again, they're not the slightly detached clear-cut "It was Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room" puzzles of the whodunnit but as messy, ambiguous and often unresolved as the ones from everyday life.
As for distraction, there doesn't seem to be a lot of it. Except that, by a chapter or so in, there is. It's just a change of mental gears from Fifty-Fifty, slowing down and seeing the universe of small detail you miss when you're speeding, pedal to the metal, through the big, noisy world of the plot-driven thriller.
That's a wonderful thing about books. They're fractal - you can zoom in or out to any scale and still be drawn into a dense, engaging landscape where you can uttely lose yourself.
I don't think I've done justice to how well-written and unexpectedly absorbing Redhead By The Side of the Road is, but just take my word for it and give it a go. After all, what have you got to lose? It's only 178 pages and, if you're stuck in lockdown while the world around you burns, you might as well try something new.
Anyway, as the omnishambles that was 2020 lurches into the existential horror show of 2021, have a good one and stay safe, everybody. I don't know about you, but after a weird and terrible year, I'm starting to feel a bit more chipper about life. There are obvious reasons to be more cheerful (we have vaccines, alleluia!), but I'm sensing another sort of shift.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a feeling that we're pretty damn close to rock bottom and the only way is up. The abject failure of the Trump putsch only heightened a sense that a toxic boil is bursting and change is coming. It feels like a time for reflection, a time to take stock. So, after sharing a couple of literary discoveries from the last year, I'd like to close by sharing my piece of music of the year which, I think, perfectly captures the zeitgeist.
It's not celebratory, in fact it's downright mournful. But it's also spine-tinglingly powerful, beautiful and utterly appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen, sit back and enjoy the legend that is Annie Lennox and the socially distanced London Voices Choir, totally smashing it with this awesome rendition of Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas:
"We have always been surrounded by terror and by the beauty that is an inseparable part of it."
*If you are, examples, corrections and clarifications are welcome in the comments (comments moderated by me, but I'm happy to publish any reasonable feedback).
No yearly round robin letter from me - just a blog about anything odd, entertaining, surprising or interesting enough to share with friends, family and other sentient lifeforms.
Also contains witterings about politics, society and the economy (mainly from the socially liberal/left quadrant of the political compass), along with a bit of marvelling in stunned disbelief at religion, Brexit and other odd belief systems.
I am not really called Robin, nor have I ever been.
Occasional tweets at twitter.com/2primates
