| the car breaks again. an interesting talk on how we get here from there. |
[Mar. 31st, 2007|01:07 am] |
A number of things went wrong today. After Carin dropped me off, I got a call notifying me that the front passenger-side tire had gone flat. I took Doug's car out there, and attempted to put on the spare. Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to forget to move the car to a flat place, and while Carin was tightening the lug nuts on the spare, the jack fell out from underneath the car. Luckily the tire was on and Carin wasn't underneath the car, so no real damage was done. The spare was flattened, however, and I had to go back to the office. She called AAA and dealt with it herself--she got towed to the nearest tire place, and got a new tire put on I still need to get a spare, though. Funny that they let her sign the credit card receipt on my behalf, though.
After work, I dropped the car off to Carin (she worked an evening shift) and got picked up by my father. I ran a quick in-mall errand (I hadn't dropped off a deposit with Chen yet, so he hadn't started the drawing I'd left him a reference for), my father got us some chocolate-dipped banana-and-strawberry kebabs, and we went off to pick up my sister at the train station: she'll be up here for the weekend and Passover. She snoozed in the back while we talked, mostly. (Brace yourself, I'm going to touch on politics.)
I had a very interesting talk with my father, prompted by a Harper's article, Dead end: Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice. In short, insurgencies persist because of the support of the population--they may not like the insurgents, but they fear them more than they fear the forces that the insurgency fights. Imperial armies throughout history have defeated insurgencies by getting that kind of fear to work for them, through the use of insanely excessive reprisals for any attack on the imperial forces. The Romans, the Ottoman Turks, the Germans and the British did it--and it works.
An example: during World War II, the British backed Czech assassins to attack high-ranking Nazis. They succeeded with Operation Anthropoid, which killed Reinhard Heydrich (head of the secret police)... but in reprisal, Hitler ordered his troops to "wade in blood" through Czechoslovakia. He ended up softening his orders, so that the main effect was that two Czech villages were razed. Churchill wanted to respond by leveling three German villages for every Czech village the Nazis destroyed, but the Allies instead discontinued the assassination program. Overwhelming force works.
More to the point, there's an insurgency because we like to think that we're not evil, that we don't do the things that empires do. This may be a false image of ourselves, but because of it, we don't instill terror, and that's the one reliable way to get a population under control. (Note that this statement should not be confused with "those people only understand force".) But we don't instill terror in our own people, and we don't have roving bands of anarchists blowing people up here. How did we get from there (ruled by fear, by the guy with the biggest stick) to here (ruled by laws, by a consensus that civil society beats anarchy)? See, Iraq was there, and the administration pretended that it could easily be brought here. But the reason vile dictators are in charge is because they work. Getting rid of dictatorships isn't as easy as just getting rid of the dictator.
I asked how we (by which I mean the systems of government from which the one I live in is descended) got here from there, and my father offered the establishment of the Magna Carta and the idea that even kings obeyed the law... which is all quite a ways back. I certainly don't have a good answer to the question of how we got here from there, but I'm curious as to what people might think it was.
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