December 2013 – Ramparts of Civilization

December 29, 2013

May 10th, 1940

On May 10th, 1940, His Royal Majesty advanced the seals of office of prime minister to Winston Spencer Churchill, thus finally placing Churchill in the leadership position he had coveted for 4 decades. The previous prime minsters Baldwin and Chamberlain had managed to coddle the bombastic dictator of Germany Hitler through the policy of appeasement, allowing the territorial acquisitions of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, followed by laying prostrate before the ruthless acquisition of Poland and Norway. The day before, May 9th, a hundred division German army exploded on the western front slicing through Luxemburg, Belgium, and the Netherlands and stunningly, out of the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest into the heart of France. Through these previous stalwart leaders Great Britain had responded to such aggression by symptomatically reducing its investment in Britain’s own forces leaving the home of the British Empire at a spectacular disadvantage to the Nazi war machine.

Now they turned this unsolvable mess and crisis over to Churchill. Thank You very much.

There are tremendous lessons that can be learned by watching what Churchill did with such a craptacular gift bestowed upon him.

It would be assumed the first response would be to whine. After all, he had spent the previous eight years warning of the impending and building disaster, only to be ignored, disdained, and humiliated by the very men who now expected him to somehow find a way out. Even at the moment of governmental collapse, amazingly Prime Minster Chamberlain and the King, hoped to avoid an ‘uncontrollable’ Churchill government, looked to Lord Halifax, one of the architects of the appeasement policy and sure to seek an accommodation with Germany, as their first choice to succeed Chamberlain. Halifax, a better politician than thinker, realized he had no hope of securing the confidence of now thoroughly disgusted and anxious House of Commons and deferred to Churchill. With such wobbly indications of support, Churchill became prime Minister.

Lesson #1 – no whining. Churchill’s first public announcement of where to start in such a crisis was to define , unequivocably, the end:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

The hand Churchill had been dealt was all but unwinnable, but he wasn’t about to compromise on the necessity of defining the end as complete victory, not a set of “make due, our time is past, the challenges are too great” compromises. The aim? Victory. The means? Whatever it takes, however long it takes. Churchill knew that in order to toughen people up for great hardship, it would be critical to assure them their leaders would not in the end sell their sacrifices out to some weak compromise that would ensure their enslavement. Everybody would be in together to victory, or annihilation. With such stark realities, there would be no time for whining or playing the blame game.

Lesson #2 – complete commitment. The first stunning surprise of the British governmental bureaucracy to the new Prime Minister’s style was ‘nobody rests until the goal of victory was secured’. Entering into the job at the advanced age of 65, no one was prepared for Churchill’s incredible work drive. Every minute of every day was committed to the goal, and the days were as long as even much younger men could possibly tolerate. Churchill drove everyone to care about everything, no matter or fact too small or unimportant if it might contribute to the fabric of victory. Churchill defined progress as Action- “Action this Day”. “Action in Three Days”, “Potential Action”. Moving, probing, challenging, resisting were the processes to be developed. Sitting back and reacting was defeatist, and would not be tolerated.

lesson #3 – Man’s best instincts evolve through crisis. Churchill had an unassailable historical perspective, and understood that true crisis often brought about great achievements of will. Once he had succeeded in focusing the national will not on achieving the best of possible outcomes of defeat, but on a future victory, he knew determination and creativity would take hold. Under the pressures of expected overwhelming defeat, Britain found the capacity to win the Battle of Britain, solve the Enigma code, advance the secrets of the atom, develop radar, and understand the complementary role it would have to play to the emerging super power the United States.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

Lesson #4 – Transparency. It was assumed by the British government before Churchill that the people were best left in the dark about the menace presented by the German military machine and the potential horrors of assault on the homeland. Churchill would have none of it. From the start he accepted the intelligence of his people to understand the task at hand, and the dangers they faced. Though not professing religiousity, Churchill embraced the Christian Virtues of Temperance, Patience, and Diligence as essential elements in the DNA of the people he led, and recognized the need to support the those traits with unvarnished Truth. He never underplayed the dangers or the sacrifices required, nor the difficulties that lay ahead.

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government-every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Lesson#5 – Tools of Victory. Great challenges are won by inexorable will, but Churchill knew that one could not fight modern battles with sticks and stones. The fundamental weapon in victory was a people’s understanding of their basic position in the battle as one of being in the Right. Victory however has to be achieved on a progressively level playing field, and Churchill looked to seal the leaks in capacity so permitted by his predecessors and look to all avenues to achieve capacity, including developing his relationship with the United States. He wanted to make clear that it was not expected by the British people that the world would need to share the sacrifice, but rather that the world would accept that the battle outcome was one worth winning. Churchill believed that the tenets of western civilization were a shared responsibility and advantage, and the investment in preservation was in the interests of not only Great Britain, but like minded democracies like the United States, and even the subjugated peoples of Europe now living under the Nazi tyranny. Churchill was not asking for sacrificing lives for British existence, he was interested in supporting the unalienable existence of western principles, and by providing the means where available to support and supply, stand up for those rights.

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

———–

On June 22nd, 1940, France capitulated and all of continental Europe was under the yoke of the Nazi war machine. Five weeks into his premiership, Winston Churchill faced the overwhelming crisis of our times – alone. Less than five years later, the omnipotent Nazi threat was crushed and no more. The achievement is truly stupefying, but grounded in the recognition that in all crisis management , principled focus on your inherent strengths, grim determination, and marshaling your resources can with destiny’s help achieve victory.

Unfortunately, I feel today’s western world is approaching similar moments of crisis and threats to their existence. Although the menace is not so much state sponsored, the pattern of defeatism, appeasement, and self destruction is progressively apparent, and our leaders reflect similar traits to the British bumblers of the 1930s. Progressive debt, isolation, appeasement of foreign tyrants, and draw down of a nation’s defenses are sowing a defeatism in our nation that make it increasing difficult to imagine defeating the impending crises of existence that our wayward habits are driving us toward. The President stands in a posture that almost seems blind to the tides of destruction, not dissimilar to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who seemed progressively denser as the risks grew higher. Churchill, in perfectly framing Stanley Baldwin, may have inadvertently defined perfectly our current President Obama as well.

“Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened”

As we gear ourselves up for what will be necessary to return to stability and progress as a people, let us hope that a Churchill awaits in the wilderness to tell us the truth, a show us the way out.

December 15, 2013

It Turns Out, the World is Still a Dangerous Place…

The Obama administration has had a fairly busy month trying to keep a wayward internet site from flummoxing up people’s health insurance coverage, charging inadvertently their bank accounts for insurance they did not yet have, and struggling to maintain the site with a capacity for volume and security remotely consistent with sites one fiftieth as big in scope. Its very stressful, and it absolutely doesn’t help that the rest of the world will not give America a break and allow it the space and time to be converted to a socialist utopia, without forcing international instability on the administration as well. After all, the governmental takeover of one sixth of the largest economy in the world was to be the Magnum Opus of this president, and his entire foreign policy was designed to put international issues behind him, so he could concentrate on domestic revolution.

The Obama Doctrine, removal of the United States as a determining force in world affairs, initiated with the infamous apology tour. the Russian Re-Set, and the extrication of American forces from the hard won military stability in Iraq. With the United States acting more like an absent uncle singularly concerned about the world’s environmental health, respectful and even submissive before all other nations, regardless of their malevolence or darker intent, Obama assumed a period of tranquility that would allow him the time to focus on the real enemy, America’s individualist tradition.

The roll call of untoward responses to this policy is mind boggling, starting with A and the Arab world chaos and ending at Z with Zawahiri and the re-emergence of Al Qaeda, and constituting a myriad of mis-steps in between. After a summer of ineffective and contrary bungling of the Syrian debacle and the dangerous appeasement of the Iranian totalitarians in their desire for nuclear armament, the last thing the President needed was two more cracks to develop in the Doctrine.

The above photo captured an event in Kiev, Ukraine last week but shadowed eerily the events of 1989. An enormous mob decides the period of Soviet dominance has stood long enough and pulls down and destroys the primary symbol of all powerful communist oppression, Vladimir Lenin. Across eastern Europe and even parts of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was an epic and essentially peaceful sight twenty years ago, but this time there is a more ominous pall to this event. The Ukrainian people are not celebrating the demise of a dictatorial foreign oppressor , but rather the re-insertion of it in their lives. The president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, on November 21, announced the reversal of a decades long movement of Ukraine into the European orbit pointing towards the establishment of ties with the European Union and NATO, instead directing Ukraine back into the sphere of direct Russian influence and dominance. President Yanukovych, who since his election in 2010, has succeeded in positioning his family and friends along the lines of a typical Russian criminal oligarchy, syphoning key Ukrainian industries and power into their hands, hoped to “seal the deal” with blessing of the ultimate overlord Putin, who has perfected the format in Russia and seeks to restore old fashioned Russian dominance on former Soviet Republics. The minority Russian population of Ukraine, ~18% of the Ukranian population has felt its influence diminish with independence and supports the president. The great majority of the Ukrainian population has no intention to go back to subservience and demands follow through with impending agreements with the European Union. The BBC has reported on the massive rallies in the Ukrainian capital and this time tearing down Lenin statues in Europe’s second biggest country may not go down so peacefully.

The Obama Doctrine would have suggested that the Russian Re-Set fashioned by the president and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have solved this issue, but no one bothered to tell the Ukrainians that their future might not jibe with the acclaimed Re-Set. Dealing with a more belligerent Russia certainly would be within the capabilities of the United States as long as the Pacific sphere of American influence was to remain – ‘pacific’. Unfortunately, not so much.

At the very moment the European door is coming off its stable hinges, the Pacific Rim, stable for decades is wobbling dangerously. China, seeing the bent knee nature of American foreign policy evidenced in a tired ‘here-we-go-again’ presidential bow to another tin horn dictator, this time Cuba’s Raul Castro, moved aggressively to declare the South China Sea in its sphere of influence, extending its military defacto control over strategic islands that just happen to be in the sweet spot of oil and gas deposits. Sphere of Influence just happens to be a sensitive subject in these parts, given that the Imperial Japan declared a Co-Prosperity Sphere of Influence leading to World War II, that wasn’t Co anything and was prosperous only for Japan. Japan and South Korea, having more than enough instability from the deranged Chinese client state North Korea, are in no mood for unilateral declarations of influence, and issue is setting up for some serious moments of potential conflict. Earlier this week a Chinese naval vessel attempted to get the US Guided Missile Warship the USS Cowpens to stop in its transit through previously accepted international waters in the South China Sea. This move was clearly designed to intimidate, and forced the 560 foot 10,000 ton craft to perform dangerous avoidance maneuvers. This kind of action, against naval vessels of countries such as Vietnam, Korea, and particularly Japan, may create a tension that is not so easily deflected, given the history of the region. Since the days of the British Imperial Navy ruling the waves, the maintenance of “open sea lanes” has been considered the critical ingredient to world trade and peace. China may see the current guarantor of safe and open international waters, the Untied States, weakening in its resolve. Somebody, somewhere is bound to make a fatal mistake in such a vacuum.

When you own the car, and drive the car, all the passengers are at the mercy of your skill in operating the car. The United States for decades has “owned” the position of guarantor of world stability, and its weaving all over the road, is making the passengers very nervous, and very leery of the driver’s competence. The best we can likely hope for under this administration is, despite their tendency to overt their eyes from the road and spend their time texting while driving, that we don’t end up in a major pile-up. The reality is putting incompetent drivers in charge of such a powerful car is bound to lead to multiple serious fender benders at the least, and nobody is going to want to be along for the ride.

December 1, 2013

The Savior of Private Enterprise(?)- Space

Space X Dragon capsule supplies ISS - space.com — Space X Dragon capsule supplies ISS – space.com

President Obama has maintained a consistent vision of converting America into a socialist utopia. Though he objects to the moniker ‘socialist’ , he has delivered an unceasing attack on the pillars of private enterprise through tax policies and regulation that create no doubt as to his ideological bent on the forces that brought America to economic greatness. The country’s priorities have been reset from economic vitality and defense supremacy to social investment, wealth redistribution, and marked retraction in defense expenditure. He has done what he could to suppress private sector financial creativity, energy exploration, small business enterprise, and most spectacularly, health care, in an effort to assure the ultimate direction, and with it power of determination, comes from the government.

In one industry, however, President Obama deserves credit as an economic visionary. Either through personal lack of interest in the subject, or the desire to remove the resources of the government from huge expenditures for which he could discern no social value, President Obama in 2009 declared a revolutionary privatized strategy regarding space exploration and development. Since 1961, the vision of the national government was for steady progress in manned space exploration, with the moon landing achieved by 1969, reusable space shuttle by 1981, and a permanent space station by 2000. The assumption was that the manned missions would progressively point outward toward the planets, with returns to the moon and ultimately Mars and the other planets envisioned. Given the spectacular costs and engineering support required for such goals, it was assumed that only a national consensus project could achieve the economic wherewithal for such undertakings.

President Obama declared, however, with the coming retirement of the space shuttle, that the national government would divorce itself from direct manned orbital flight, and would rely instead on private corporations to achieve the capacities to secure safe low earth orbit flight, satellite launch, and space station re-supply. The problem was, of course, no such capacity in the private sector existed, and the result of the policy was a howl protest from well informed traditional supporters of NASA, such as former astronauts Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell.

Four short years later, we should give the avowed socialist President Obama a private enterprise medal. A remarkable amount of progress has been made in the private sector, led by the particular entrepreneurial genius of Elon Musk (see Ramparts People We Should Know #21 ) and Space X. Space X has already achieved successful cargo delivery reproducibly to the space station, and the commercial exploitation of manned flight for both tourist and orbital ventures are progressing nicely. New companies such as Orbital Sciences Corp., Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and Sierra Nevada, as well as established aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin are preceeding to goals of successful manned space flight, and not just to low earth orbit. The directions each are taking are diverse, aggressive, and ultimately unbound by the typical stultifying bureaucracy of governmental creation usually dominated by congressional bias. The Washington Post has an exceptional overview of old versus new space development that is worth exploring fully to grasp this exciting development, as we live through so many other disappointments of the current economy.

The President deserves credit for stumbling upon a prime example of how trusting the arena of ideas and the process of private market competition can lead to dramatic improvements in human development and life quality. And if he’s not careful, might just make America an economic leader in the current century as great as the last. Were he only to have such stumbles in the other areas of our moribund economy. In reflecting upon the overarching principles of human behavior versus utopian ideal, we once again turn to Winston Churchill for some prescient words:

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”