Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Category War

  • What I'm reading: the bazaar is open for business

    Jacob Weisberg, The Lucky One (NY Review of Books)

    On screen and facing the public, he was a conviction politician. But behind the scenes—as with the arms for hostages trading—the bazaar was open for business.

    Ronald Reagan has been a central figure in my reading lately. Rick Perlstein's Reaganland, and the above review of Max Boot's biography, which I think I'll get to soon. Reagan seems to be a central figure also in our current affairs; a world-historical reactionary with a sunny show on his face of American virtue---in which he fully believed---covering over a core of pragmatic transactionism. Reagan's America is the one that endures into the post-Cold War: sunny in speech, dirty in acts, religious and sordid, a dynamic culture in a gerontocratic and ossified political system.

    Like everyone else I have been shocked at the United States' rush under its current President to withdraw from its commitments and alliances. Call it a pair to the moral shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a moment of sheer clarity, about what the world is and what Australia's part in it is (very little). I don't think we're ever going to see those submarines, no matter what promises are on paper. But the shock is I think less at the unexpectedness than from, in the philosopher's phrase, being at last compelled to face, in sober senses, the real conditions of American realism and transactionalism in the way it treats other countries and its friends.

    Reagan's habit of telling stories about American exceptional virtue was based on genuine belief. His practice of acting according to interests, rather than values, was what made him significant. This present moment was always there and the shock of American cynicism is just our own recognition---we knew all along.

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  • Fighting

    THE AMERICAN WAY OF war is well known and extensively written about; it's that of massing tremendous amounts of logistical material and aiming for a crushing, annihilating, victory. In the 20th and 21st centuries that's involved an emphasis, even a dependence, on air power. There's a curious symmetry I think, between that well observed fact, with the obvious emphasis on air power in American disaster response.

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  • Orcs

    ORCS ARE CREATURES FROM Tolkien, and specifically Tolkien, who created them as fantastic creatures of dread, and large numbers. Certainly, JRR Tolkien worked in veins of antiquarianism, and everything he wrote was a meta-reference to some Old English or Celtic or Norse forebear, as anyone who's got bored by his books knows, but the forebears of orc-dom in British, Irish, and Northern European myth are not the orcs of modern myth. Traditional goblins are solitary, intelligent, skilful, tricky. Hobgoblins are humorous, though the butt of the joke might be you. Elves will definitely steal your baby, and fairies will definitely trick you. Demons, though certainly folkloric, relate specifically to the rules of Christianity and formal religion. The orcdom of uncountable ugly barbarian numbers, who are enemies and only enemies, and who have been made massively popular in the Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K games franchises, appear to arrive fresh, culturally whole, in the late 20th century. Or did they?

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  • What I'm reading

    James Meek, Nobody Wants To Hear This, London Review of Books, v46 n22, 21 November 2024

    Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.

    Tim Judah, Ukraine Divided, New York Review of Books, 5 December 2024

    In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it.

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  • Time Honoured Disguise And Borrowed Language

    THE TRADITION OF ALL dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

    —-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852

    The monument to Lenin that was installed in occupied Henichesk, Kherson Oblast, yesterday.
    The photo was published by local collaborator Hennadiy Maliukov.

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  • Try It For A Change

    MODERN WAR, IN ITS present shape, calls for the sort of initiative that arises from democracy. That is, I believe, the principal meaning of this book...

    ---Tom Wintringham, 'English Captain', 1939

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  • Machines

    IN A DECISION OF the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal, the senior member was asked to rule—amongst other things—on whether a particular kind of rifle, that the applicant wanted to import into Australia and own, was 'of a kind that is designed or adapted for military purposes'. Unless you're particularly interested in the arcane details of specific 20thC weapons, which I'm not, it's an interesting judgement for the sheer taxonomic argument that must have gone on between the two parties, discussing what particularly about this object set it in either a prohibited or a permissible category.

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  • Virtue

    IF THE SPRING OF popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

    It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty's despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime?

    —Robespierre, Maximilien

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  • Private Plumb

    THE AUSTRALIAN DEFENCE FORCE (ADF) is now supporting the States in their response to coronavirus isolation. This includes things like transporting people, doing contact tracing, and packing Foodbank lunches, but also helping the NSW Police with self-isolation directions. The National Communicable Disease Incidence of National Significance Plan (CD Plan) provides for Defence to 'Assist the national response to a communicable disease emergency by filling capability shortfalls within other government departments'.

    This is not an accidental choice of words, and also refers to the application of new powers established by law in 2018, and trained with in exercises in 2019.

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  • John Bolton

    John Bolton holding a shotgun

    I HAVE LONG BEEN fascinated not by American politics—the most tedious of hobbies—but by one of its characters in particular: John Bolton. If you were an adult during the time of the leadup to the 2003 Iraq War you’ll remember him for his part in war-cheerleading, if you’re younger you’ll know him as the most foreign-policy aggressive of the current President’s constantly rotating staff, but if, like me, you’re a connoisseur of the worst people in the world, you’ll know Bolton simply as the most hawkish person ever to haunt Washington DC.

    A logical process works in John Bolton’s head, and it’s extremely simple:

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