Trying to pretend that somehow the 20th century is still amongst us

Thursday, June 4th, 2020

I mentioned recently that I somehow managed to go this whole time without reading a single Tom Clancy novel — or watching a single movie adaptation, except for The Hunt for Red October — and only just listened to the audiobook version of Patriot Games, which was originally published in 1987.

I’ve continued working through the Jack Ryan UniverseThe Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears — and a point Clancy keeps making is how much the intelligence community relies on the mainstream media for information, especially cable news, which was new and exciting at the time.

When Russ Roberts interviewed Martin Gurri on a recent EconTalk, I was naturally interested, since Arnold Kling has been mentioning Gurri regularly, but I wasn’t expecting a connection to Tom Clancy. Then Roberts introduced Gurri:

Today is February 20th, 2020, and my guest is author Martin Gurri. He is a former CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] analyst and the author of The Revolt of the Public. Martin, welcome to EconTalk.

Gurri explains his position:

Well, as you say, I was an analyst in CIA. I probably had the least glamorous job there. I didn’t have my 00 [Double-O] license to kill or the beautiful girls. I was an analyst of global media, and for the earliest part of my career, that was very straightforward. There was a trickle of open information and every country had its equivalent of the New York Times, a source that set the agenda. So, if the president wanted to know how his policies were playing in France, you went to Le Monde or you went to Le Figaro. Just, literally, two newspapers.

Then things went haywire: just the world turned upside down. A digital earthquake epicenter, say, somewhere between Mountain View and Palo Alto, generated this tsunami of information that just swept over the world.

And, ‘tsunami,’ I think is a good word. Numbers can be boring, but sometimes they can be illustrative. Some very clever people from Berkeley tried to measure how the information of the world had developed, and they came up with the fact that in the year 2001, as you just tip into this era, that year produced double the amount of information of all previous human history going back to the cave paintings and the dawn of culture.

So, 2002 doubled 2001. So, if you chart that you do get something that looks like a gigantic wave; and I call it a tsunami. Now, for those of us who worked in CIA, that was like, ‘Now what the heck do we do with this enormous amount of information? Where do we get our stuff?’ But, what really mattered was the effect of the information in different nations of the world. We could see, as the tsunami swept across the world at different speeds in different countries, tremendously increased levels of social and political turbulence. And, the question was why? So, that was the seed of the book.

After I left government, the question that haunted me was the one that my CIA masters always asked, which was, like, ‘So, what? Okay, so the people get–they start to write bad things about government in Egypt. So what? What are they going to do when the cops come? Hit them with their laptops?’ That was an internal CIA joke: Are they going to hit them with their laptops?

[...]

2011 is a year I call the Phase Change Year, where it really showed the effect of this tide of information could affect power. And you had, of course, the Arab Spring in the Middle East, probably misnamed. You had the Indignados in Spain. You had a revolt called the 10 People Revolt or Social Justice Revolt in Israel. You had the Occupiers here in the United States. And, these all had similar origin. So the question, now, was what was going on? What caused these eruptions from below?

And, to my thinking, it has to do with the kinds of institutions that we have inherited from the 20th century, from the industrial age. They’re all–how many people are aware of Frederick Taylor? He’s sort of a forgotten figure in history. But he was sort of the prophet of industrialism and scientific management. And, if you read his writings, everything happens from the top down: the top manager figures everything is going to happen, all the tools that you need, and essentially what everybody, every layer below you–and there are many, many layers below you–is going to do. Everything is scripted.

Well, our institutions, which we think or tend to think were created in the 18th century by the Founders, in fact are the product of the industrial age, and of political Taylorism, in essence. And, one of the things that they required, to maintain their authority–and they had, in their day, a great deal of authority: that they believe in expertise, they believe in science–one of the things that they were–the primary foundation was a monopoly of information in their domains.

So that, if you’re in government you have a control over a certain set of government information. If you’re in politics, you and the media, you as the politicians and the media share a certain set of information that nobody else had access to in the 20th century. Nobody talked back.

And, what that tsunami has done was destroy that monopoly. In brief, it has destroyed that monopoly; and it turns out these institutions can’t seem to function without that and have lost their authority. Where, before there was a sort of instinctive reliance–the President says something at the age of JFK [John Fitzgerald Kennedy], somewhere between 70% and 80% of Americans trusted the government. Today, if you’re the President, you are instinctively distrusted: somewhere between 20% and 30% today, trust the Presidency and the Federal Government.

So, I think it has been a crisis that these institutions have lapsed into. And, I think the elites that manage and inhabit these institutions have reacted pretty badly in the sense of not really being aware of what’s happening, and trying to pretend that somehow the 20th century is still amongst us and that the internet and the web and the digital universe has never exploded around them.

Comments

  1. Wang Wei Lin says:

    Information is important, but only in the way it is used since ones and zeroes no inherent value. Western civilization has lost its moral core to the point that civil society is ‘returning to the mean’ of history. Or as Thomas Hobbes concluded the loss of the social contract results in solitary lives that are nasty, brutish and short. None of which has nothing to do with information.

  2. CVLR says:

    “People have lost trust in the authorities not because the authorities have become radically less trustworthy in increasingly flagrant ways but because of literally anything else.”

    Okay, CIA.

    Institutional control has been “upset”, if you ignore the fact that a five-part Silicon Valley oligopoly now controls, in theory if not yet in practice, all of the world’s information. This theory will become practice within five to ten years, as the machine learning technique to empower the reliable automatic flagging of undesirable content catch up to the needs of the Oligarchs. There is only one wild card, and that is if Donald J. Trump successfully antitrusts these new world hegemons before they reach escape velocity vis-à-vis the Westphalian nation-state.

    To the spooks reading this:

    The Internet was incepted by elements present in DARPA and elsewhere for two purposes: 1) to perform the greatest MITM attack of all time; 2) to serve as the infotechnological substrate of a NEW WORLD ORDER.

    Maneuver yourself into possession of the right TS/SCI clearances.

    You will see.

    666

  3. Bomag says:

    “not because the authorities have become radically less trustworthy…”

    Or maybe they have.

    Government looks more accomplished in the past: interstate highways, moon program. Now they are purveyors of regulations and paperwork that make our lives worse.

  4. Harry Jones says:

    I can’t help but notice that all the great and admirable accomplishments of big government were a long time ago.

    If government is just another word for the things we do together, then the things we do together aren’t what they used to be. It seems there has been a loss of cultural vision. The visionaries now are visible only in the private sector because they are few, and it’s harder to outvote them in the private sector.

  5. CVLR says:

    “Government looks more accomplished in the past: interstate highways, moon program.”

    Interstate highways, in America as in their pioneering state, Germany, were designed from the very beginning to facilitate the movement of troops and equipment into “states” at will. This, not the “free movement of people” or some other such nonsense, is their true, primary purpose. That you are permitted to drive your Corvette on them is merely their exoteric function.

    “moon program”

    Bad example.

  6. CVLR says:

    *You are permitted to drive your Corvette on them, but this is merely their exoteric function.

  7. CVLR says:

    “I can’t help but notice that all the great and admirable accomplishments of big government were a long time ago.”

    That’s because you are living in a fake reality in which you think that the state is motivated to do great works to impress you.

    The incentives of the factions of the state to dazzle you with their prowess, to the extent that these incentives ever existed, have been in steady decline for generations.

    Here is a litmus test:

    Do you think that, if “they” were to successfully levitate aircraft or other objects by non-Newtonian means, you are likely to ever see a working demonstration of this technology?

  8. Harry Jones says:

    I think CVLR has a good point. I’m trying to figure out what that point is.

    Perhaps it’s that the US government needed the Cold War to motivate it to great works? It seems to me the innovation petered out some years before the Soviet Union imploded.

  9. Sam J. says:

    CVLR,”…This theory will become practice within five to ten years, as the machine learning technique to empower the reliable automatic flagging of undesirable content catch up to the needs of the Oligarchs…”

    This is what they want but they will fail. Right now people are building information sources that do not rely on the gate keepers. It’s essentially a internet that rides under or over the controlled net. It will take a while but is inevitable. The only way around it I can see is if AI’s are allowed onto those nets to garble the info. There appears to be some of this now with a hefty dose of people spitting out garbage to confuse. I wonder if this can go on. Can the government continue to take the taxpayers money to confuse it? People are fairly annoyed by this behavior already and sources designed to confuse have a huge bleed off effect when people realize, and eventually they do, that they are spouting nonsense. There’s also the problem that all the best propaganda is truth mixed with nonsense. If you pay attention you can get a sense of the truth from discarding the nonsense and ferreting out the truth from the propagandist. Don’t lose hope and support distributed and encrypted internet in any way you can.

    Bomag,”…Government looks more accomplished in the past: interstate highways, moon program. Now they are purveyors of regulations and paperwork that make our lives worse.”

    Harry Jones,”…I can’t help but notice that all the great and admirable accomplishments of big government were a long time ago.

    If government is just another word for the things we do together, then the things we do together aren’t what they used to be…”

    This is because the Jews run our government in most cases from top to bottom and they only care about hollowing out our finances, destroying our self esteem, degrading us and packing as many different races into the US as possible to disintegrate cohesion and cause strife. Anyone who thinks different can, first, explain to me how building 7 on 9-11, not hit by a plane, fell roughly 108 feet with the only resistance to it being “air”. It free fell as if only air held it up. Second immediately after 9-11 the US attacked most all of the Jews enemies in the middle east and used our army and treasury to fight for the Jews. The majority of the media in all forms, all controlled by the Jews, can as easily see like me buildings with fires on three or four floors can’t drop like only air was holding them up so it’s obvious who did this. It’s also as easily obvious, especially after Epstein was let go, that there’s a great deal of blackmail involved with underage girls which keeps our legislature from doing anything about it.

  10. CVLR says:

    There are a lot of people living in a fake reality, by the way. Almost all of them are. And the vast majority are far less enlightened than you.

    But the “programming” (television and otherwise) goes so very deep. “Get them while they’re young” is the modus operandi, and it is extraordinarily effective. By applying the right stimuli at the right phases of neuroplasticity, the world scientific system is able to achieve results that would shock and awe B. F. Skinner himself.

    Regarding the Cold War…

    The story of technological innovation since the World War consists predominantly of the exploits of a few elite covert and quasi-covert state and quasi-state laboratories inventing things which over the course of two or three decades percolated out to the general public by way of the publicly listed corporations. The labs typically orbited one or more of organizations of intelligence, telecommunications, or military; in the absence of a great power struggle, it is probable that it is safer to simply stash inventions away for a rainy day than it is to let them out into the world, where they may be captured and copied.

    Some of these technologies are simply transformative. Let us consider the extreme case.

    Imagine that America had been able to invent the atomic bomb just as she did while also possessing a command structure not riddled with foreign interests. She could have crushed the European “aristocrats” and their * bankers with her pinky finger and proceeded to Moscow without delay.

    For four years the bankers and the so-called “Evil Empire” lay absolutely prostrate before her overwhelming force, her INFINITY ARMAGEDDON DOOMSDAY atomic weaponry.

    You know the outcome: the great General George Patton abruptly died in a low-speed vehicular crash, and with her UNLIMITED MILITARY MIGHT, a power so TOTAL and ABSOLUTE as to defy COMPREHENSION ITSELF, America did not even bother to conquer the rest of Berlin.

    How is this possible?

    It can only be that the world is not as it seems.

  11. Gavin Longmuir says:

    “America did not even bother to conquer the rest of Berlin.”

    That really does not defy Comprehension. The simple explanation is that, at Yalta, FDR & Churchill had already agreed to divide up the world with Stalin.

    England had declared war on Germany in defense of poor little Poland — and yet Churchill ended that war by giving Poland over to the tender mercies of Stalin. Who even cared about eastern Germany?

    Peeling back the onion, why had FDR given away the store at Yalta?

    Today we know that FDR’s Administration was riddled with Communists and fellow travelers. Unless we want to assert that FDR was an idiot, we have to assume he had a fairly good idea about the sympathies of the people he appointed and chose for his advisers. FDR was fully on-board with handing Eastern Europe to the Soviets.

  12. CVLR says:

    Sam, you are evidently impervious to the * force field, which shields * from all criticism and preemptively terminates all critical thought. It is a potent defense, one that most normal people will never penetrate, let alone the intelligent and educated.

    Here, just watch Donald J. Trump bait Joe “Intern Killer” Scarborough into asking him if * knocked down the World Trade Center:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf3ydZVYPU8

    Wait, that isn’t right. Hang on.

    https://tinyurl.com/yywnoshs

    No, that isn’t right either. Sorry!

    Here it is.

    http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

    Or maybe here?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcKlPhFIE7w

    Weird.

    I can’t find the video. It isn’t on Bing, DDG, Google, Yahoo, or Yandex.

    It’s been scrubbed from the web.

    Just what is happening here?

  13. CVLR says:

    Gavin, it is my regret to inform you that FDR died in 1945, months before the first nuclear test, under circumstances as normal and unremarkable as the great General George Patton.

  14. Sam J. says:

    CVLR says,”…But the “programming” (television and otherwise) goes so very deep…”

    Yes. it does. I don’t deny this but I see all kinds of regular people that while they might not know exactly what happened they know that they are being lied to. That means it will irritate them. Matters of great importance being ignored irritates people and they start looking around for explanations. I’m not so sure that I would have become wish to the Jews if they had not done 9-11. It was the dumbest move the Jews have made in their whole entire history. I know a shit load of people when I say anything about 9-11 they immediately know what I’m talking about. Some get the Jew thing some not but the Jews control so much and are gorging themselves so blatantly at the banks it’s inevitable they will eventually come to the same conclusions as I have. They’re just too fucking greedy. This has worked for them in the past where they could decamp to another White country but with world wide communications…they’re in trouble. Big trouble. It’s why I very much, well actually I know but can’t prove they did the latest corona.

    CVLR I appreciate the links. I’ve seen most of these but not stuck together. There’s one part that as many 9-11 videos I’ve seen I can’t remeber if I’ve seen or not where Bush explains about the explosives being placed where people couldn’t get out.

    What a fuck wit. Talk about giving it all away. These are the kind of imbeciles we are up against. They have a shit load of money but they are not our superiors at all.

    As for Trump we will see very soon if he is a plant or not. If he loses the election and has not done anything about 9-11 then…he was a plant. There’s just no other rational explanation.

  15. Harry Jones says:

    Culture is brainwashing. The way in which we instill values and norms into a child exactly mirrors standard brainwashing techniques.

    We all get brainwashed. Some of us recover from it.

    Kohlberg’s theory of stages of moral development puts most adults and teens in “conventional morality,” which is pure programming. He says there are two stages above that, but can only prove the existence of one. That one stage is where a minority of individuals learn to think for themselves.

    (The final stage, which probably doesn’t exist, seems to be some sort of Kantian claptrap.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development

  16. Gavin Longmuir says:

    CVLR: “… FDR died in 1945, months before the first nuclear test …”.

    And your point is … ?

    A nuclear bomb is simply a bigger bang. It is a Leftie lie that nuclear war would be any worse than any other war. (Compare Nagasaki & Detroit today — enough said). The Allies had successfully obliterated Tokyo, Dresden, and many other cities with old-fashioned explosives and fire bombs. Possession of nuclear weapons arguably gave the US a temporary military advantage in the aftermath of WWII — but not an insuperable advantage.

    Why did the Brits boot Churchill out of office at the first opportunity, before the dust had settled on WWII? One version is that the Brits were weary of war, and were afraid that Churchill would have continued the war by attacking the Soviets. There are many constraints on a country’s use of force.

  17. Turbo Beholder says:

    CVLR: “the world scientific system is able to achieve results that would shock and awe B. F. Skinner himself.”

    That’s smoke and mirrors. Currently, “the world scientific system” seriously discusses “dog rape culture” and similar subjects. After it became a part of power structure, huge parts of it inevitably got corrupted and then descended into drooling idiocy. Even the parts that don’t smell funny (yet) are badly poisoned by this rot.

    See also: good old ozone panic, or plain fraud by Peter Gleick, or very recent kerfluffle with pet researchers of Gilead suddenly discovering dangers of a drug used for well over half a century.

    If someone actually have tried to salvage non-rotten parts of academia (and no one seems to), it would still take another generation… after removing it from the source of corruption first. I therefore have no doubt that papers on behavioristic magic can be churned out by hundreds per year, but would be highly surprised if even one of those turns out to be worth more than a prize cow of comrade Lysenko.

  18. Sam J. says:

    “…A nuclear bomb is simply a bigger bang. It is a Leftie lie that nuclear war would be any worse than any other war…”

    I don’t agree with this. A typical nuke is 900 kilotons, Think how many planes or rockets or whatever it would take to deliver this compared to one 1,000 pound bomb. So it would take 1,800,000 bombs to equal it. That’s A LOT. That’s not even counting the radiation which can be varied to super kill levels.

    I’m not saying a nuclear strike would kill everyone. Even back in 80′s when the USSR had, 30,000 or so??? but…it would be very, very tough to survive. There wouldn’t be much left but cannibal Negros and Rednecks.

  19. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Sam,

    Remember there are diminishing returns from making bombs larger. Doubling the explosive power of a bomb does not double the damage it does. That is why there has been so much effort put into improving targeting accuracy. A small bomb closer to the intended target can do all the damage that needs to be done.

    Remember also we are engaged in a discussion about the situation at the end of WWII, when the US was the only country with nuclear weapons, but had a very limited number of them. Throwing those few bombs at the Soviets in 1945–46 would have started a war, not ended it. The Soviets had demonstrated they could absorb tens of millions of casualties from conventional weapons — and keep on fighting.

  20. Albion says:

    Gavin Longmuir: “Why did the Brits boot Churchill out of office at the first opportunity, before the dust had settled on WWII? One version is that the Brits were weary of war, and were afraid that Churchill would have continued the war by attacking the Soviets. ”

    Possibly. Don’t forget that Labour offered lots of freebies if they won. After a long period of rationing, the thought of lots of free stuff including the NHS (Britain’s largest employer now, propped up by huge taxes and burdened by a huge managerial weight including, of all things art buyers and diversity officers when people want more nurses and doctors) was a winner.

    The fact that socialism never delivers happiness doesn’t stop them promising it, time after time to people who forget it never deliver ed previously. Post WW2 Britain was ripe for a free dollop of happiness and if anyone argued the promise of nationalisation and the diminishing of the Empire was bad, the reality was more voters wanted more for less. They always do.

  21. Sam J. says:

    Gavin Longmuir: “Sam – Remember there are diminishing returns from making bombs larger…”

    Yes, yes, yes of course I know that but diminishing returns or not something roughly 1,800,000 times more powerful is…well it’s just really fucking big. You ever play with nuke map? I have. No matter how you slice it these things are super powerful and MOST IMPORTANTLY they require WAY less equipment to carry this immense power. Just one, just one B-52 can carry,

    “The nuclear weapons capacity includes 12 AGM-129 advanced cruise missiles (ACMS), 20 AGM-86A air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM) and eight bombs.”

    – From Airforce-Technology.com”

    Plug these numbers into nuke map and spread them out a little over Chicago and see what you get.

    “…Remember also we are engaged in a discussion about the situation at the end of WWII — when the US was the only country with nuclear weapons..”

    I think the reason that we didn’t attack the USSR was the simplest. We had no intention of running the world and didn’t want the massive casualties it would entail. Maybe it would have been better maybe not. I certainly have never advocated that it would have been a good idea to attack the USSR but that doesn’t make me a pacifist, just a pragmatist.

    “…The simple explanation is that, at Yalta, FDR & Churchill had already agreed to divide up the world with Stalin…”

    He had to keep Stalin fighting and to do so he had to be told he would get something out of it. I expect there was nothing so vulgar as,”well we’ll get this and you get that”, they probably didn’t discuss it but their aides might have. It didn’t matter because Stalin occupied it and was not going to give it up without a fight and he had a mass of tanks, planes and other material to fight with. It would have taken a LOT of bloodletting to move him out.

    If we were willing to commit genocide we could have beat them though. We could have built enough nukes to destroy all their major population centers and industry using V-2′s to deliver and they could have done nothing but it would have been awful. To turn around and destroy and ally like that. What a stab in the back. Jews might do this sort of thing but I’m not a Jew.

  22. CVLR says:

    Gavin: “And your point is … ?”

    FDR can be blamed inasmuch as he selected Truman as his VP, but the president has total authority over the military, and in an unconditional military victory situation such as that after the conclusion of the World War, the greatest victory in the history of the world, this power is literally ”outside the law”.

    The vice presidency is, as a certain well-known scion recently commented, a “service position”, “like a butler”. As a vice president, Truman may have been reliable and effective. As a president, he was a disaster, a cataclysm, a catastrophe.

    Worse than the most profligate and degenerate trust fund heir, Truman is solely and entirely responsible for totally and completely squandering the greatest geopolitikal winnings in all of human history.

    Even Wikipedia alludes to this:

    Presidency (1945–1953)

    Truman surrounded himself with his old friends, and appointed several to high positions that seemed well beyond their competence, including his two secretaries of the treasury, Fred Vinson and John Snyder. His closest friend in the White House was his military aide Harry H. Vaughan, who was criticized for trading access to the White House for expensive gifts. Truman loved to spend as much time as possible playing poker, telling stories and sipping bourbon. Alonzo Hamby notes that:

    … to many in the general public, gambling and bourbon swilling, however low-key, were not quite presidential. Neither was the intemperant “give ‘em hell” campaign style nor the occasional profane phrase uttered in public. Poker exemplified a larger problem: the tension between his attempts at an image of leadership necessarily a cut above the ordinary and an informality that at times appeared to verge on crudeness.

    Just as America stood poised to ascend to her throne, her preternaturally cunning leader was replaced by a bumbler and a fool.

    Coincidence?

  23. CVLR says:

    “A nuclear bomb is simply a bigger bang.”

    “Fake and gay,” sez Sam.

    I concur.

  24. CVLR says:

    Turbo:

    “If someone actually have tried to salvage non-rotten parts of academia…”

    Nothing will ever change because people like you think that the state is the thing that you can see.

    No, friend — the thing that you can see is what is called the government.

    “That’s smoke and mirrors…dog rape…&c.”

    Identity politics &c. was the principal response to Occupy Wall Street, a grassroots protest by ordinary people against the magic money power of the hegemon banker-lords who create all value. It was released and promoted by the Central Intelligence Complex to distract and confuse. That is its purpose, that is why it was invented, and it is exceptionally well designed.

    I tip my hat to the fellas on the PSYOP team responsible for its genesis and dissemination, but especially its genesis. Fine work, lads. Very fine work.

  25. CVLR says:

    “Identity politics” is used in the conventional sense. It should be called “social justice theology” or some other such thing, since all politics is identity politics.

  26. Sam J. says:

    Turbo:

    “If someone actually have tried to salvage non-rotten parts of academia…”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-TT3tnFcRQ

  27. Sam J. says:

    There should be a law passed that the CIA should always put out the most accurate information to keep the American people informed. There should be a % reliability indicator on each information report from 0% to 100%. Imagine if their job was to deliver accurate information and with penalties at the least firing from the CIA at the minimum if they did not. It could make the CIA an asset by providing well thought out highly sourced information. The CIA does skirt the law but as a general rule they try to follow it. I know what we “think publicly” is the law they break but the actual law itself they can follow fairly close most of the time and still do whatever they want. We could close those loopholes. The law will of course be broken. Striving for perfection is a waste of time but a really consistent “good enough” is very effective.

  28. CVLR says:

    If CIA broke the law, how would you know?

    If you knew, how would you prosecute?

    Presidents and Congressmen have tried.

    Around 1962 JFK allegedly tried to splinter it.

    In 1974 Nixon lost to it.

    In 1975 Church tried to unmask it. He got trinkets and minor documents.

    In 1989 it became president.

    As everyone knows, Alex Jones is right about almost everything.

    Pray to your redeemer. Kneel before your G-D.

  29. CVLR says:

    Sam: “He had to keep Stalin fighting and to do so he had to be told he would get something out of it. I expect there was nothing so vulgar as,”well we’ll get this and you get that”, they probably didn’t discuss it but their aides might have. It didn’t matter because Stalin occupied it and was not going to give it up without a fight and he had a mass of tanks, planes and other material to fight with. It would have taken a LOT of bloodletting to move him out.”

    I consider the great General George Patton to be the authoritative source here.

    I understand the situation. Their (the Soviet) supply system is inadequate to maintain them in a serious action such as I could put to them. They have chickens in the coop and cattle on the hoof — that’s their supply system. They could probably maintain themselves in the type of fighting I could give them for five days. After that it would make no difference how many million men they have, and if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you. They lived on the land coming down. There is insufficient left for them to maintain themselves going back. Let’s not give them time to build up their supplies. If we do, then . . . we have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but we have failed in the liberation of Europe; we have lost the war!

    But Antony Sutton is instructive also.

  30. Sam J. says:

    “…They could probably maintain themselves in the type of fighting I could give them for five days…”

    Sure Patton is right about the five days but it would take A LOT more than five days to take the USSR and a massive amount of Men and supplies far, far, far out weighing anything in Patton’s command to summon.

  31. CVLR says:

    Followed immediately by, “After that it would make no difference how many million men they have, and if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you.”

    Recall Germany’s Lightningwar, which if not for a fatal series of unfortunate circumstances, probably including crypto-treason, would have scrubbed Bolshevism out of history by 1942.

    The industrial war is not a war of individual heroism. It is not merely a war of perfectly indoctrinated slave soldiers marching off to their collective doom. It is a war of logistics.

    The soldier is not a warrior. He is the absolute subject of another, for he has no autonomy. He has no autonomy because he cannot sustain himself in the field. He cannot sustain himself in the field for he is but a fleshy point on the tip of the spear of a vast, sprawling industrial machinery of incomprehensible complexity.

    The well-executed industrial war is a symphony of the timely moving of men, colossal quantities of bullets, grenades, rockets, shells, and other armaments, and heavy machinery from one place to another. Indeed, directly out of the World War came most of the logistical and psychological technique used to this day.

    People don’t know this because the Warner Brothers were too smart to make movies about the heroic wartime initiatives of green-visored accountants and pocket-protectored logistics nerds.

    Had Hoover been re-elected there would have been no Lend-Lease. With no Lend-Lease Moscow would have been squashed like cockroach and British Bolshevism would have folded like wet paper bag.

    Learn that the great George Patton felt himself the unwitting executioner of the last decent race in Europe.

  32. Sam J. says:

    And in the immortal words of that philosopher Mike Tyson,”everyone has a plan until they get hit in the head”.

  33. CVLR says:

    You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information.

Leave a Reply