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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-143
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
b: If my summing up is correct the report lists Ukrainian losses due to failed mass attacks over the last 24 hours as:
68 tanks, 64 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, 74 Armored Combat Vehicle and 860 950 personnel. Those were enough combat vehicles for two complete brigades!
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Other issues:
Assange:
Aukus:
RIP Daniel Ellsberg:
> During the course of our hour- and-20-minute interview, Ellsberg contended America still runs a “covert empire” around the world, embodied in the U.S. domination of NATO. He believes Washington deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into invading Ukraine by pushing its seat of power eastward toward Russia’s borders; that the mainstream media is “complicit” in allowing the government to keep secrets it has no right to withhold; and that any notion Americans are ever the “good guys” abroad “has always been false.”
…
“I think very few Americans are aware of what our actual influence in the former colonial world has been, and that is to keep it colonial,” Ellsberg says. “King Charles III [of Britain] is no longer an emperor, as I understand it, but for all practical purposes Joe Biden is … Here’s a point I haven’t made to anyone but would like to in my last days here. Very simply, how many Americans would know any one of the following cases, let alone three or four of them?” Ellsberg then rattles off a series of U.S. orchestrated coups, most of them fairly well documented, starting with Iran in 1953, and then in Guatemala, Indonesia, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Brazil and Chile. <
Nukes:
> Vladimir Putin: I reject this. It is certainly theoretically possible to use nuclear weapons this way. For Russia, it is possible if there is a threat to our territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty, an existential threat to the Russian state. Nuclear weapons are created to ensure our security, in the broadest sense of the word, and the existence of the Russian state.
First, we see no need to use it; and second, considering this, even as a possibility, factors into lowering the threshold for the use of such weapons. This is my first point.
The second point is that we have more such nuclear weapons than NATO countries. They know about it and never stop trying to persuade us to start nuclear reduction talks. Like hell we will, right? A popular phrase. (Laughter.) Because, putting it in the dry language of economic essays, it is our competitive advantage.<
The 'popular phrase' was 'Fuck you'.
Use as open (not Ukraine related) thread …
Posted by: persiflo | Jun 21 2023 1:20 utc | 187
On to Mencius. He is a great discovery, and there are lots of historical links in the dark, connecting chinese culture with european renaissance. But the most important thing is that Mencius has a profoundly superior ethic, about which I know fairly little, but which can probably somewhat be summarized through his remark that “everybody values something more than his own life”. I promise to elaborate on that another time, and connect it with a few thoughts on the sensus communis which will be of interest here.
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Thanks for that book reference and solid commentary. Nemesis cited ‘Stalin’s War’ as well, which have not read. I dimly recall from the Mueller tapes (which seem to have been scrubbed from the internet these days) that the German High Command – a powerful group he often had great difficulty managing being only a jumped-up Corporal himself – recoiled in horror at the notion of taking on Russia. But they didn’t have access to Mueller’s Intel. So they were not ready to invade Russia but waiting until Russia invaded them would have been disastrous. (Unless of course the whole story is a Blood Libel as bevin believes or states.)
No doubt there will be arguments about this forever. Because of course what we call ‘facts’ end up being remarkably close to ‘beliefs.’ Establishing as facts complex matters that took place almost a century ago, let alone ones far earlier, always comes down to matters of opinion since any document one cites as evidence could be disinformation.
The way I look at it is incomplete but:
a) the Big Lie principle is a fact of Life
b) not only but often it is organized interests who promote such Big Lies to benefit themselves not society at large
c) much of our meta-narratives regarding major historical events (like The Great War of 1913 – 1949) are Big Lies
d) a huge number of otherwise well-meaning and intelligent people are fooled by these Lies and take umbrage when they are challenged or outright debunked
e) people are unjustly punished in large and small ways for questioning, challenging or debunking
f) society muddles along in the slime and muck of an ever-encroaching Dark Age
g) or it doesn’t, which means it is finding ways to increase rather than decrease virtue. There is no middle ground. Which is where Confucian schools of societal management begin.
As to Mencius, yes he is special. I need to study him more and have some books on the reading list lined up but…. his core thesis, I believe, is what can be called that of ‘basic goodness.’ If you look back and back and back to the depths of the most profound profundities in Heaven (!) you find that it is basically good, primordially good. In the Tibetan Dzogchen tradition, which is at least 20,000 years old so pre-dating the last Buddha Shakyamuni, their core symbolic deity is Samantabhadra in Sanskrit which translates as the All-Good. From this point of view, evil is a deviation from the norm. Good and evil, or wisdom and confusion, equally arise (coemergently in the technical jargon) but the innate programming is fundamentally good.
We see this vividly in Nature, case closed. Along with good there is some sort of order or rules. This is why plant leaf structures work in ways that are both functional, resilient, intelligent and beautiful. The One manifests as The Many and what we in the realm of the Many can witness is all fundamentally good. I believe this is the thrust Mencius was making. (In the Yi, the rules aspect is reflected in mathematical structures. Math is the study of ratios and relations combining fixed qualities with infinite permutations.) And Mencius was a master at boiling deep topics down to ordinary, human example. Because ultimately this is all about the ordinary, the real. And Nature really is the best teacher in this regard, both external and internal nature.
Will people choose to go against this primordial goodness? Yes, they can and do because the price we pay for being independent particular beings, little individual souls emanating from Great Soul or Big Mind or God etc., is a sense of being separate and unique and this separation can result in distorted perception and behavior which comes from the initial confusion and bewilderment caused by being apparently separate whilst actually still being a part of, not apart from, the overall Whole. An existential conundrum we all share and dealing with which many believe provides life’s meaning.
Which is why humans organize societies: to discourage that sort of pathology and promote connection, togetherness, sanity and compassion – because of point g) above: there is no neutral resting place. It is the dilemma all beings face individually and collectively once individuated as participants in the relative realm of the Many – they are many because each is particular, like particular waves and ripples, an infinite number of them, on the Ocean which is One. So although on the profound level we inhabit an All-Good universe, on the relative level we are faced with no end of either-or dilemmas each and every moment of existence. In the Tarahumara tradition they say the spirit-warrior (sage) strives to overcome the ‘enemy-within.’ A great insight. That enemy is the tendency to stray from primordial goodness due to being confused by the agendas thrown up along with maintaining an individuated existence.
Philosophers can get lost arguing about such things; politicians have to be practical. But the latter are products of their society and rarely rise far above the level of collective wisdom or confusion. What the Confucian approach attempts is to create a cultural, philosophical and spiritual container within which properly aligned societies can grow and flourish so that the best will rise to the top and all will benefit accordingly since good societies promote, indeed treasure, virtuous lives. It’s that simple. And also that hard.
Posted by: Scorpion | Jun 21 2023 15:25 utc | 209
On May 2, 1941, a group of highly-ranked Nazis held a meeting where it was decided that during the coming invasion of the USSR, all food in Velikorussia (RSFSR) would be taken to Germany, which would result in up to 30 million deaths among Velikorussians (Russians).
Three weeks later, on May 23, 1941, these decisions were formalized in a policy paper called “Wirtschaftspolitische Richtlinien für Wirtschaftsorganisation Ost, Gruppe Landwirtschaft” [Economic policy directives for the East Economic Organization, Agriculture Group]. The policy paper can be read (in German) in Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (known as “The Blue Series”), volume XXXVI, page 135 (document 126-EC).
Curiously, this policy paper has never been published in Russian in full—until yesterday. To provide the neccessary context, Russian historian Yegor Yakovlev has written an introductory article. Here’s my translation of it:
The Hunger Plan: The Complete Text of the Nazi Directives — Introductory Article (Istoriya.RF, Yegor N. Yakovlev, June 21, 2023 — in Russian)
Directives on economic policy for the agricultural group of the Ost economic staff, found in 1945 in the papers of the German High Command, are one of the most important additions to the well-known Barbarossa plan. This Nazi document contains instructions on how exactly to carry out the economic robbery of the territories of the USSR after their capture.
This note, it would seem, has been known for a long time. As document EC-126, submitted by the U.S. side, it appeared at the Nuremberg trials, where the U.S. prosecutor Whitney Harris described it as follows:
“The pages of this document reveal a prearranged plan to kill millions of innocent Soviet citizens by starvation. The document clearly states that the killing of millions of innocents was premeditated. The document shows that this murder plan had to be carried out on such a huge scale that it exceeded all boundaries of human imagination.” (Nyurnbergskiy protsess…, vol. 4, p. 282.)
It is all the more striking that these stark directives have not yet been fully translated into Russian. The publication of more or less lengthy extracts from the document took place in the USSR only in 1987 in the collection Prestupnyye tseli gitlerovskoy Germanii v voyne protiv Sovetskogo Soyuza, and most of the text was omitted, including one of the most cannibalistic phrases (“Many dozens of millions in this territory will become redundant and die or be forced to move to Siberia”) (Prestupnyye tseli gitlerovskoy Germanii v voyne protiv Sovetskogo Soyuza…, pp. 250–254). The original paragraph containing the phrase was published without this sentence and even without an ellipsis before the excised fragment.
The second time excerpts from the directives appeared in Russian was in 1991, in the 4th volume of the publication of the materials of the Nuremberg Trials, however, not as a separate document, but as part of the speech by Whitney Harris, who quoted it before the High Court (Nyurnbergskiy protsess…, vol. 4, p. 282). It is not surprising that this most important text remained and still remains practically unused in Russian historiography.
Even on the website of the state project “Crimes of the Nazis and their accomplices against the civilian population of the USSR in 1941–1945,” to this day, only excerpts are provided. For example, it completely omits the description of the agricultural exports system of the Russian Empire and the indication of the growth in Soviet population as the primary factor in the sharp decrease in grain surpluses for export to foreign markets. Meanwhile, it was precisely from these arguments that the Nazi thesis about starvation of millions of citizens of the Soviet Union after a forced return to the export model of 1914 followed.
Meanwhile, in recent years, this document and its background have attracted more and more attention from European and U.S. researchers (Gerlach 1999, Kay 2011, Benz 2011, Dieckmann 2015, Tooze 2018). The leading scientists see it as the basis of the so-called hunger plan—a system of measures that were supposed to lead to the transformation of the Third Reich into economic autarky at the cost of starvation of millions of Soviet citizens. Western historiography has stated, in the words of the famous British historian Adam Tooze, that “the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union with the intention of carrying out not one, but two programs of mass murder” (Tooze 2018, p. 609). From the very beginning of the war against the USSR, it was not only the Jews who were targeted for destruction by the political elite of the Third Reich—their tragedy was terrible and no one is doubting it—but also a very wide group of Soviet citizens of other nationalities that was estimated by Nazi planners at 20–30 million people.
This program was prepared in the bowels of the Ost economic staff (originally, Oldenburg staff), created for the economic management of the occupied Soviet lands. The staff began work in March 1941. General der Luftwaffe Wilhelm Schubert, a military officer from the team of the Four-Year Plan Plenipotentiary Hermann Göring, was appointed head of the organization. The extremely important agricultural group of the staff was headed by the State Secretary of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture Herbert Backe—a devoted Nazi, close to Hitler and Göring, a personal friend of the head of the SS Himmler. It was he who was the main author of the directives.
The history of the preparation of the Backe plan is as follows. After the beginning of the British naval blockade of the German coast, the Third Reich began to experience serious problems with food, primarily with grain. Nazi economists proposed to fill the resulting gap by massive plundering the USSR, with which both political leaders and military command happily agreed. At the same time, while the inhabitants of the occupied black earth territories (the Ukraine, the South of Russia and the North Caucasus) were initially supposed to be a semi-slave labor force that would cultivate fertile lands for German masters, the inhabitants of the so-called forest zone, the non–black earth zone (Belarus, North-West and Central Russia) became superfluous, unnecessary people. No one was going to supply them with the resources of the abundant territories, since the grain was to be sent to supply either the Wehrmacht or the German layman. It followed from this that a significant part of the inhabitants of the USSR would simply die as a result of a man-made humanitarian catastrophe.
The economic considerations of extermination were not the only ones: they linked up with the political plans to conquer the living space in the East, undermine the demographic resources of the enemy and subsequently replace the indigenous population with German colonists. In other words, in order to secure the coveted lands for themselves, the Nazis had to drastically reduce the indigenous population. The hunger plan gave them the tool to do it fast.
It is very characteristic that the paper of the Ost economic staff mentions not only economic, but also ethnic motivation for the destruction.
“…The Velikorussians [Russians — S], no matter whether under the Tsar or under the Bolsheviks, always remain the main enemy not only of Germany, but also of Europe. It also follows from this that market regulation and product rationing for this region [i.e., Russia — translator] are out of the question, because such rationing would suggest that the German administration has some obligations to the population. We dismiss such claims out of hand.”
Moreover, from the directives we learn that the Nazi leadership pursued a political line against a specific people:
“Since the political line is directed against the Velikorussians, it becomes an important task to push the Velikorussians into the forest zone [the famine zone — Yegor Yakovlev], and to occupy the vacated collective farms with the remaining Malorussians [Ukrainians — S].” It is curious that this fragment of the document has never been included in the “extracts” that were published in Russian earlier.
The essence of the Nazi “political line” is best expressed in the statements of the leaders of the Third Reich. On June 10, 1941, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, met with the author of the hunger plan, Herbert Backe, after which he went to Wewelsburg Castle to meet with his closest employees who were to work in the occupied territories. There, the Reichsführer, according to the testimony of a meeting participant, General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, declared: “The purpose of the campaign against Russia is to reduce the number of Slavs by 30 million people” (IMT, vol. IV, p. 482). During the days of the battles on the Eastern Front, the Führer himself [Hitler — S] confidently declared: the success of the settlers in North America was due to the fact that the colonists “brought down the number of redskins from several million to several hundred thousand.” “In the East, the head of the Third Reich argued, the same thing would happen a second time…” (Kershaw 2001, pp. 434–35).
Many more such frank statements by the leaders of Nazi Germany can be cited.
Thus, although in the calculations of economists the economic background of the extermination is most clearly traced, the political leadership purposefully sought not only to obtain food surpluses, but also to undermine the demographic resources of the enemy, as well as to clear the land for its subsequent settlement by the Germans (for more details, see Yakovlev 2020).
The political line of the Nazis for the partial extermination of the Slavs/Velikorussians wasn’t implemented in full, of course. Hitler’s Germany failed to seize all the black earth territories of the USSR and completely isolate the population of the non–black earth regions from food sources. Nevertheless, the plans of the NSDAP were partially implemented. The victims of the deliberate policy of hunger were Soviet prisoners of war, of which 2.5 to 3.3 million people died.
The destruction of the inhabitants [during] the blockade of Leningrad, the first large city of the non–black earth zone lying in Wehrmacht’s path, was genetically linked to the Backe plan. Today, Russian and German scholars mostly agree that the blockade was precisely a genocide, that is, the goal was not to seize the city as a fortress, but to kill its population. Führer’s unwillingness to feed the residents of Leningrad is recorded in the war diary of Franz Halder (entry dated July 8, 1941, Halder 2003, p. 54). Later, Hitler dictated to Admiral Kurt Fricke a directive explaining why he was going not to occupy, but to destroy and starve Leningrad: “In this war, waged for the right to exist, we are not interested in preserving at least a part of the population” (Organy gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti SSSR…, p. 538). On October 7, the OKW [High Command of the Armed Forces — S] issued a directive to Army Group North not to accept the surrender of an already encircled city, even if it is proposed. This exposed the genocidal plans of the Nazi elite once and for all. Moreover, on the same day, a similar directive was issued to Army Group Centre regarding Moscow: the plan was to surround it and not to accept its surrender, too.
In addition, the hunger plan also worked in the occupied territories, where a large-scale robbery of the indigenous population was carried out. Moreover, while initially the policy of artificial famine was not intended for the large cities of the black soil region, in reality it also affected this region: for example, in 1941–42, the Nazis organized a famine in Kiev and Kharkov, which, in its consequences, of course, is incomparable with the situation of besieged Leningrad, yet nevertheless claimed tens of thousands of lives. Among the victims of the Backe plan were residents of the occupied cities of the BSSR and the RSFSR, the front-line cities of the Leningrad Oblast, primarily Pushkin, Pavlovsk, Shlisselburg. The population of the front-line zones, whom the German command deported to the rear, not caring much about feeding them or supplying them to any degree, was systematically starved to death. Thus, although the plan, traces of which we see in Backe’s directives, was much larger than what happened in reality, it nevertheless brought death to millions of Soviet citizens.
References
Nyurnbergskiy protsess. Sbornik materialov. Vol. 4. Moscow. 1991.
Prestupnyye tseli gitlerovskoy Germanii v voyne protiv Sovetskogo Soyuza. Moscow. 1987.
Gerlach, Christian (1999). Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944. Hamburg.
Kay, Alex J. (2011). Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941. New York.
Benz, Wigbert (2011). Der Hungerplan im „Unternehmen Barbarossa“ 1941. Berlin.
Dieckmann, Christoph (2015). “Das Scheitern des Hungerplans und die Praxis der selektiven Hungerpolitik im deutschen Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion.” Kriegführung und Hunger 1939–1945. Zum Verhältnis von militärischen, wirtschaftlichen und politischen Interessen. Göttingen: Wallstein. pp. 88–122.
Tooze, Adam (2018). Tsena razrusheniya. Sozdaniye i gibel natsistskoy ekonomiki. Moscow. [The Russian edition of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2008). — S]
Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946 (IMT). Vol. IV. Nuremberg. 1947. [Available here. — S]
Kershaw, Ian (2001). Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis. New York.
Yakovlev, Yegor N. (2020). Voyna na unichtozheniye. Tretiy reykh i genotsid sovetskogo naroda. Saint Petersburg.
Halder, Franz (2003). Voyennyy dnevnik 1941–1942. Moscow. [Original English publication: volumes I (partial), II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII. — S]
Organy gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyne: sbornik dokumentov. Vol. 2: Nachalo. Book 2 (September 1 – December 31, 1941). Moscow. 2000.
Posted by: S | Jun 22 2023 19:11 utc | 240
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