Religion

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(Another essay I found in the drafts folder.)

Just saw another of those blog essays making the social media rounds that asserts that Christianity grew into a world religion because it killed its way to the top. It describes inquisitions and crusades and other bloody events. There’s no denying those. But the problem is that the author has the timeline wrong. Christianity spread without many inquisitions at all. Those came later when western civilization came close to being an afterthought in the medieval era (hammered as it was then by Islam, the Mongols, the Black Plague, poverty, endless warfare, backwardness, and low population growth). One of the reasons that Christianity spread like it did in Roman times was because the Middle East and Mediterranean world had already been leaning towards monotheism or ditheism anyway.  (Ditheism here means good vs. evil, basically, a god of good and a god of evil, and Christianity with its God vs. Satan shows just how closely related “monotheistic” and “ditheistic’ religions actually are.) The Good vs. Evil god (or two gods) was pretty much a Persian invention, and when Persia ruled the western world for several centuries their one god idea took root (including influencing early Judaism).  All the later western monotheisms came from it. Alexander the Great diffused it even more so by mixing Greek and Persian civilizations, giving Persian religious ideas access to areas throughout the Mediterranean world (and even into India) where they were unknown before. And then when Rome took over most of the Mediterranean, western Europe and Middle East, its own pre-Constantine religious tolerance protected monotheistic (and ditheistic) as well as polytheistic religions. In fact, monotheism/ditheism was particularly popular within the Roman military, and where there were legions, there was variations of both, especially the Persian form known as Mithraism (related to Zoroastrianism).  Christianity’s primary competition in ancient Rome was Mithraism…which was Persian religion. Other competitors included Manichaeism, Gnostic religions like Bogomilism and Mandeism (which still exists), even Judaism. To this day there are tiny remnants of other ancient religions in Iran and Iraq (including Zoroastrianism, the original Persian imperial religion, and Yazidism, a syncretic blend of pre-Zoroastrian Iranian monotheism with ancient Mesopotamian polytheist traditions and Sufism and currently under threat by ISIS), all of them monotheistic or ditheistic but neither Christian nor Moslem. Each is a fragment of the incredibly rich patchwork of religions in the ancient Middle East, any of which could have been big as Christianity or Islam had history run a different course. Christianity just won out by luck. The inevitability we see in its rise to dominance now is merely the innate tendency to see the course of history as inevitable. But it never is.

Christianity also spread the way Mormonism is doing so now–it provided a welfare state within a state that Rome did not supply. It took care of its own. It also developed a solid literary tradition, more so than most of its competitors (though Manichaeism matched it in output there.) And maybe most importantly, it patterned it structure on the Roman political system itself (a Catholic mass is like a Roman imperial time capsule) so that as Roman power weakened the Church was able to take its place in an almost identical form. Clever. Indeed, one of the reasons the pagan Roman government began to crack down on Christianity was because of its alternative power structure…a state within a state is always a threat. When Rome turned officially Christian, the state church began appropriating pagan sites, facilities and rites. It was easy to do because Christianity in Roman times was already a Roman political structure. As the pagan power structure disappeared the Christian power structure replaced it seamlessly…very little change in daily life happened. Taxes were collected the same, rituals performed in the same places, attire was even the same. Christians didn’t take over by force but by assimilation. The Roman empire (a republic ruling an empire at the time) that fought Hannibal in the third century BC was the same country that fell when the Turks finally took Constantinople in 1453. The Byzantine Empire certainly saw itself as Roman, up till the very end. That’s because the split between pagans and Christians that we see now as a great dividing line was not so visible to the Romans themselves. To them it was the same place with a new religion…but still, the same place.

As for the crusades…remember that those were very bloody (and mostly very unsuccessful) attempts to reclaim lands and peoples lost to Christianity. The Moslem conquest took most of the Christian world away. All that remained were the underpopulated areas of Europe–and even some of that was lost. People don’t realize that Christianity was, until the 8th century, overwhelmingly an Asian religion. Europe represented perhaps a third of it. Then Islam spread like wildfire, in large part because it was spread by conquest and the conquered were generally given the choice of convert or die. Or at least convert or pay a nasty infidel tax. So people converted, and Christianity virtually disappeared east and south of the Mediterranean. Not entirely, and there remained large and influential minorities (such as the Copts in Egypt and Greeks in Asian Minor), and Armenia and Georgia remained Christian (as did Ethiopia) but what Islam gained in its first couple centuries at Christianity’s expense they still mostly hold today. Only Iberia, southern France, southern Italy, and Sicily were lost again to Islam. (A later expansion of Islam into the Balkan peninsula, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the Ottoman Turks, was almost completely reversed. Apparently the conversions didn’t have the same vigor as those made when Islam was new. Still, the Bosnian massacres in the 1990’s were a glimpse of how competing monotheisms had once routinely spread the Word.)

You will be hard pressed to find a major religion that has not been murderous, even genocidal, in its history. That even includes Buddhism, believe it or not. (Tibet in particular was a land of Buddhist warriors who raided Chinese domains mercilessly for centuries). And though I’m an atheist, always have been, it’s important to remember that atheism killed more people in sheer numbers than any religion ever did. The numbers of people killed by communist regimes in the 20th century is astonishing. Atheist revolutions–going back to Revolutionary France, have nearly always involved large scale state-ordered massacres, killings, genocide, repression, state controlled famine and murder. It’s a ghastly record. It’s hard to find anything in history more murderous than the fanatically atheist Khmer Rouge. But then communist regimes have an advantage of technology that earlier conquerors would have given their eternal souls for. It became vastly easier to kill enormous numbers of people in the twentieth century. Give medieval crusaders or Mohammed’s legions automatic weapons and they would have piled up the dead just as impressively as anything Mao or Stalin ever did. Indeed, you can think of Himmler’s demented SS quasi-pagan religion (we’ll never know what that would have developed into) as something right out of Roman times armed with state of the art 20th century weaponry and logistics. There was nothing new about the Holocaust–there had been ethnic cleansing for thousands of years–except that it was carried out with all the organizational skill that modern civilization offered. The Albigensian Crusade of the 13th century, where the French crown and the Church annihilated the dualist Cathars in a particularly brutal genocide could have been done in a fraction of the time by the Nazis.

The problem isn’t Christianity, or religion, or lack of religion, the problem is Homo sapiens. We find it very easy to kill when situations become unstable. Chimpanzees (but not bonobos) are the same. It’s not god or no god. It’s just that some of the great apes are prone to extreme violence. And Homo sapiens are one of those great apes. But we are killing each other at a much slower rate anymore–homicide is far less frequent than it was in Roman times, and is far less frequent than it was in the early 20th century, when people slaughtered each other at an astonishing rate. But it’s hard to tell if we are becoming less homicidal, or if our impulses are just in a lull, waiting.

Maps

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So last night a response I began to a one line email turned into a thousand word essay touching on the Falklands War, the Monroe Doctrine, South American fascism, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Chaco War, Argentina’s make believe empire, Great Britain’s real empire and how the U.S. dismembered it through post-war monetary policy, and the map I used to stare at while in line at the Argentine consulate down on Wilshire Blvd. I just re-read my essay today, a little embarrassed at how off topic I’d gotten. I do get carried away at times. But it got me to thinking again about that map in the Argentine consulate.  It ran from Paraguay to the South Pole and halfway across the Atlantic, all a brilliant Argentine orange. The clerks there were  rude and superior, like they knew something we didn’t. Like they knew Argentina stretched all the way to the South Pole, and we only went to Texas.

I wonder what the rest of the world’s maps look like? What other fantasy empires show up in bright colors, stretching across locations and free of inconvenient reality? There is something dream-like about maps. Not local maps, road maps, or Thomas Guides, but big sweeping maps, National Geographic maps, and big leather-bound atlases full of continents and oceans and great sweeping deserts. Sometimes entire civilizations are laid out, pyramids and all, only to disappear on the next page in another time. It doesn’t take much to create a whole other reality on a map. A world empire, or world peace, a just a few pieces here and there lost in a war long ago and rightfully yours, you think. You insist. You dream. Sometimes dreams are turned into reality and states come to, really come to, with capitols and everything. You can see that on a world map today. All these countries where the Soviet Union used to be, Ukraine (which hadn’t been a country in centuries) and Belorussia (which had never been a country), the Baltic states who had a fleeting couple decades there between the wars, all those countries in the Caucasus and others dreaming of being countries with their own maps. Then there’s all those ‘Stans, little ones and huge ones like Kazakhstan that used to have a nuclear arsenal and might still have a hockey team.  My favorite former Soviet country is Moldova. It’s just a sliver, really, and poor and corrupt and was never a country ever. I think everyone–maybe even Moldovans (who used to be Moldovians)–were surprised as hell to find Moldavia was suddenly a country with a map and everything. Last I heard, though, there were two maps. Seems part of Moldova has seceded or something. That map had them either their own country with its own map or attached to Romania, though I don’t know if Romanian maps show it. There are probably maps all over Europe with countries we never heard of, or may have even–a unified Ireland, an independent Basque homeland,  a separate Catalonia, or an independent Corsica or Sardinia or a map of Belgium sliced in two, one half Walloon, the other Flemish.

And that’s just Europe. Give me another hour and I could rattle off probably dozens more and still never leave Europe. Ones you or I or almost nobody has ever heard of. The Balkans must be a warren of overlapping maps, and every once in a while people get massacred because of them.

That’s the thing, the massacres, the wars, the terrorism and inexplicable madnesses that seize people, often perfectly normal people, who look too long at these fantasy maps. Show me a car bomb and I’ll show you a map with borders you won’t recognize. Sometimes they reflect borders that used to be. Sometimes borders that never were, but have been sought forever. Think the Kurds. Sometimes they follow linguistic maps (a whole different sort of map I’d rather not go into here), sometimes religious, sometimes who knows. Sometimes they follow lines that colonial empires laid out from thousands of miles away. Africa’s been fighting over those since then, sometimes with horrible slaughter, sometimes just with occasional words.

There are fantasy maps that don’t really hurt anybody…no one explodes car bombs over Atlantis, no one massacres anyone for Lemuria (or is that Mu?) People who spend too much time staring at maps of Middle-Earth are harmless. Then there are fantasy maps that are just weird and annoying but also a little spooky, like those crazed Glenn Beck things that have everything all wrong. Someone should collect those Glenn Beck maps in an atlas. Though once they did, the maps would suddenly have a permanence they don’t have now and somebody would wind up blowing up somebody. Osama Bin Laden’s maps turned out to be not so funny after all. I saw a fringey Israeli map that went all the way to Turkey, a fringier US map that included Canada and Mexico,  a map of California divided in three, a neo-Confederate map that included more states that the Confederacy ever dreamed of, a map of Aztlan that included most of the American southwest and a chunk of Central America besides. The Nazis had some amazing maps that went all the way to India, the English had some amazing maps that went all the way around the world…and they really did. Then. Now Englishmen stare at them and sigh. The French stare at old maps and sigh too, and so do the Portuguese, the Japanese, the Dutch, even Belgians who now dream of maps of Belgium sliced in two. The Spanish must look a maps three centuries old and can’t even imagine. Can the Iranians, who used to be Persians? The Greeks can, and their arch enemies the Turks have maps that include everyone around them that speaks anything vaguely Turkish, though those people beg to differ. China, big as it is now, used to be even bigger, and doubtless there are Chinese who stare at old maps and sigh too. Do Mongols do the same? I hope not. They nearly conquered the world. So did Rome once, too, a good chunk of it…it certainly inspired Mussolini to seize Ethiopia. The Ethiopians have their maps too, with no country called Eritrea on them, and there are Eritreans who have maps that don’t include themselves as part of Ethiopia. Even the US and the Philippines and Cuba used to be the same blue color for a spell (and I’ve seen maps of the US diced into pieces and who knows that might happen too.). I bet there are Paraguayan maps that include all the Chaco and there are definitely Bolivian borders that run all the way to the sea. Armenian maps include parts of Azerbaijan that are still Azerbaijani. I’ve seen them on the walls of little businesses in Glendale. I never ask about them.

I never asked about that map of Argentina either. It had only been a few years since the Falkland Islands War, and I thought it would be impolite.

 

(And here’s some cool links full of maps.) Continue reading →

Zoroaster

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(Apparently dashed off in November, 2014, just after the European Space Agency landed Rosetta on the comet Philae and a scientist wore a naked lady shirt)

Science is complicated and requires quite a bit of knowledge to discuss intelligently. Unfortunately scientific awareness in the social media is about at high school level, often even among super smart people. So thank god that scientist wore that rather “garish bowling shirt“. It allowed a huge news story to be brought down to a level that Facebook could understand. On Twitter even more so. Social media renders all conversation absurd eventually, you have to struggle to keep it from getting there. Every conversation degenerates into good versus evil, no matter what the discussion is about. It’s not the medium itself, though…I suspect in China it’s not like that. But pretty much all of western civilization is built on good vs evil, right vs wrong, light vs dark, it is the template for all debate, all our thinking, really. Blame it on Zoroaster, the Zarathustra who spake thus. About 4000 years ago he reduced the Persian gods down to two forces, one of light, one of dark. Good versus evil. The notion made it way across the ancient middle east–which was a warren of trade and communication, across which news and ideas spread with remarkable speed. Zoroaster’s new doctrine–itself a new thing, a doctrine–was reinforced as law once Persia began creating an empire. It was the first great empire, reaching from the western edge of India to the eastern edge of Libya, from Central Asia to the Balkans. Persian law became world law, Persian religion a world religion. In almost every place the Persians ruled, and beyond, where its influence was felt, Zoroastrianism left a lasting impression, and ancient gods became good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong. It even introduced the promise of a messiah. Christianity and Islam are both descendants, both fit their theologies into Zoroastrian constructs. Indeed, both see each other now in that construct. Good Christianity versus evil Islam, good Islam versus evil Christianity. It’s no accident that a fierce new Islam originated in Iran a few decades ago. Persia has gotten bad press since Alexander the Great destroyed its empire, and we don’t realize just how fundamental the Persian Empire was to western civilization and the western way of thought. But today our popular thinking is more like that of ancient Persians than ancient Greeks. The Greeks were polytheists. Almost anything was possible to a classic Greek. Very little is possible to us today. Something is either right or wrong, good or bad. Light or dark. There is rarely a debate today across the social media that does not boil down to those two points of view. I am wrong, you are right. Even when we agree to disagree, it is merely a truce, leaving me right and you wrong. The pull of right and wrong is so strong that in the social media everything is reduced to polar opposites, even issues that seem to have no possible right vs wrong interpretation will be debated that way. Something will be found–a naked lady shirt, say–that will force a story into the right vs wrong debate. If you look at comments to news stories, you will see an endless series of threads that go off into right versus wrong debates that rarely have anything to do with story and create entire new right versus wrong debates that can go on endlessly, until the webmaster gets bored or appalled and closes comments. It’s all made worse because in person we are able to restrain this right versus wrong tendency because reality isn’t actually so dualist. Spoken language isn’t dualist at all, it’s ancient, pre-moral, and eminently flexible. Written language is not as free as spoken language, It’s riddled with rules–there’s all that right grammar and wrong grammar–and designed for debate. It is much, much easier to take a hard stance in a debate than a measured one. The nuances of spoken communication are lost in the way we learn to write. You can see that in the way people argue on Facebook. Put those same people into a bar and they will talk. Put them on Facebook and they hate each other. Blame it on Zoroaster.

Artistic license

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I always get Céline and Ezra Pound confused, I said. I was being snide. You can be snide discussing Louis Ferdinand Céline and Ezra Pound. But I had to explain this time. How I’d only made that comparison because both were vicious anti-Semites and fascists. Céline was pro-Nazi (but not necessarily pro-Hitler) to the point of being a collaborator. The only thing that kept him from the firing squad–which he deserved–was his reputation as a writer. He was a seminal figure in Holocaust Denial as well. Just an evil bastard all around. Loathsome. Not that he cared what other people–aside, perhaps from his fellow collaborators–thought. The more one is hated, he said, the happier one is. I believe the Resistance had him marked for assassination but the war ended first and he became something for the liberated and restored judicial system. They let him go.

Ezra Pound was not much better, though unlike Céline at least he seemed to be certifiably mad. It probably saved him from the gallows. He spent the war in Mussolini’s employ, delivering viciously treasonous and unhinged anti-Semitic broadcasts. He was captured after the war by a literary-minded American officer. Bad luck. They kept him in a cage and he railed and ranted. The worm had turned.

But what writers they were, both of them. Pound one of the finest ever in the English language, certainly in American English. His stuff utterly mystifies me, I could spend years trying to crack it. It’s bare boned, gorgeous, magnificent. Céline was one of the greatest of French writers, we had nobody like him in American literature till Burroughs, who in fact idolized Céline. It’s weird how so many Americans took Céline to heart–but then the United States had never experienced a Nazi occupation. We could read his prose and separate the writer from the times, I suppose. (Ginsberg befriending him, though, remains a little hard to figure out.) I know that my rule has always been you have to separate the art from the asshole. I know a lot of literary types like to excuse Céline and Pound’s “excesses”, as if writers are different from you and me. But a war criminal is a war criminal. Some just write really well.

In his defense at his trial Céline composed Réponses aux accusations formulées contre moi par la justice française au titre de trahison et reproduites par la Police Judiciaire danoise au cours de mes interrogatoires, pendant mon incarcération 1945–1946 à Copenhague. You’ll find it in his canon, in English, titled Reply to Charges of Treason Made by the French Department of Justice. I’ve never seen it, though I’d love to, as its prose apparently swept the judges off their feet. He never served another day in jail. Céline should have hung but he wrote so well. Pound too. They hanged that hack Lord Haw Haw (real name William Joyce) even though his copy was nowhere near as vile as the spew that came from Pound’s pen and mouth during the war, nor as corrosive as any of Celine’s wartime pamphlets. But Céline got off with a one year sentence, suspended, and later an amnesty. Genius has its perks. Artistic license. The Americans, not so literary minded, were a little harsher on Pound, who was locked up in a psychiatric hospital for twelve years. Not that he was actually insane, he was just eccentric and vile and hypergraphically talented, yet weird enough to pass for a lunatic. He wrote The Pisan Cantos during his stay. Hot wind came from the marshes and death-chill from the mountains.

Lord Haw Haw, a lousy writer, received no mercy. His fellow Englishmen, who’d listened to him on Nazi radio every day till the end of the war, felt no pity. Nor did anyone clamber to save his scrawny neck as they had Pound’s and Céline’s. The sentence was death. May the swastika be raised from the dust! he yelled artlessly. His neck snapped seconds afterward.

The Nazis themselves had no soft spot for wayward intellectuals. Thus they tortured and shot without compunction one of the greatest historians of modern times, Marc Bloch. Though his influence is imperceptible in the United States, he had revolutionized the study of history when he co-founded (with Lucian Febvre) the Annales School of thought. Bloch and Lefebvre’s methods were to narrative history what Thucydides was to Homer. To the Nazis, however, Bloch was just another resistance member who wouldn’t talk. Not that they were unaware who he was. No mercy was shown despite his brilliance. Klaus Barbie himself is said to have tortured him. You can imagine their conversations. Yet Bloch still wouldn’t talk. Then, with the Americans already in France, Barbie had a squad take him into the courtyard of the Gestapo building and execute him. Vive La France! Bloch cried out. He was 57 and looked like a rumpled college professor. He’d been working on Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien. In English they titled it The Historian’s Craft, seeming to utterly miss the point. Bloch wrote his last pages in his cell. 

Barbie was finally caught in 1983. He’d been in Bolivia since the war, surrounded by like-minded Nazis while enchanting successive dictators. He helped to overthrow a democratically elected government or two, dealt in arms, taught torture. It was a good life. Then his luck ran out and he was extradited to France in chains. It was a huge trial, every day in the papers. The Butcher of Lyon, they called him. He had killed, either by his own hand or his own direct order, fourteen thousand people. Men and women. The elderly and children. Entire families. He never wrote anything that I know of, but he performed exquisitely painful tortures. He literally–not metaphorically–skinned men alive during interrogations. In an era of abundant state sanctioned sadists, Barbie stood out for the quality of his work. If pain were literature he was a Céline. If pain were poetry he was an Ezra Pound. He was that good.

The evidence against Barbie was overwhelming–the Germans kept accurate, detailed records of everything they did, no matter how horrible–and he was convicted of crimes against humanity, among them the killing of Marc Bloch. They threw him in jail for the rest of his life. That life lasted till 1991, when cancer ate up his insides and he died at aged 77 in agony and awfulness and alone. When I stand before the throne of God, he said, I shall be judged innocent. 

What a strange little essay this was. It just gushed out while I was watching Zorba the Greek. Kazantzakis, you know, he can do that. I saw a photo of his headstone once. A Greek friend translated it for me. I don’t hope for anything, it read, I don’t fear anything. I’m free.

History in the Digital Age

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You know it’s all downhill from here when every article you read about the days of your youth does not remind you of days of your youth. Maybe that’s how history works. On the one hand I want to tell the writer he’s got it all wrong, on the other hand I know he’d never let facts get in the way of a good theory. Soon we all die and that history becomes the way it was. It has always been this way.

There was a great scene in that John Adams mini-series where Douglas Trumbull shows John Adams his rendering of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This is all wrong, Adams yells, it wasn’t like this at all. We were never in that room at the same time! There was a war on! We dropped by when to sign when we could! He went on, a livid old curmudgeon, glorying in being an old curmudgeon. But he was serious, too, because from his vantage point of actually having been there, Trumbull’s now iconic painting was a travesty, totally misrepresenting the truth as he, John Adams, had experienced it. But to Trumbull, even if it were not literally accurate, it got the point across. All these patriots, bravely signing a document that could have been their death warrant. And to us, that is the way it actually happened, in one dramatic scene. The misrepresentation became reality. That has to be what riled Adams. And he had to know there was nothing to be done about it but rail.

Good historians write vast books proving Adams right. Good historians go to the original sources to discover how things actually were. But who reads vast books anymore? And who double checks what passes for the history of my youth in Slate or wherever? You can tell in the comments section to the article [what article it was I have no idea, not that it matters] this battle is lost anyway, not that we–those of us who actually experienced those days–even put up a fight. It’s so strange to read articles in which all sorts of modern concepts are applied to us, things we didn’t even know existed. This is a current academic trend, applying current theory to old events. That’s the influence of the Marxist theory of history, really, although Marx, like Latin, is dead everywhere but academia. But how could we then have done things according to theories and concepts and categories that weren’t invented yet? Or, with even more absurdity, theories and concepts and categories that had never existed at all, except as theories, concepts and categories developed and assigned retroactively by later historians.

I think what I was going on about when I began this essay some years ago was reading articles about bands in my day written by today’s Pop Critics. We didn’t have “pop critics” in my day, just “rock critics”, as pop would have put you in the same league as Steve and Edie. The basketfuls of throwaway bands who rediscovered by later “pop historians” were not yet given an importance that it utterly ridiculous if you stop and think about it. They didn’t really categorize so much then, and the sad thing about creating categories is that one must squeeze things into them, which essentially alters what they actually had been. Not that it matters to the one who, years later, is doing the categorizing. There’s a scientific concept that neatly describes this in a few words…but I’m trying to avoid concepts here. Concepts and categories and theories that pass for reality in universities. There are only a few theories that actually work, and they are born out by reams of evidence. They are nearly all hard science, too. Theories about culture crumble once you leave the campus. You have to live a cloistered life to think they still hold true, and a sadder life to think they are important.

I began this ages ago–years in fact–complaining about how those pop historians fit our reality then into concepts and categories they learned in college. Concepts and categories that did not exist at the time, and thus render every article you read that uses them into fiction. Badly written fiction at that–pop critics are far too often mediocre writers at best, sheesh. And now ages later I’ve ended this piece condemning the intellectual fashion of refusing to look at past events as they actually were, as things you could hear and touch and feel, and insist instead on absurd theorizing and categorization and big words and desperate intellectualism.

I hate all that. I want history, real history. But they don’t teach real history in college, it seems. They teach theory. Historians are dull. They write footnotes, plod through archives, get excited over details. And that stuff goes nowhere online. When reading is something done on a smartphone in an elevator, details are irrelevant at best, annoying as a rule. Truth has become relative, or even insignificant. History ain’t exactly dead, it’s just ignored.

Sometimes I listen to old time radio and marvel at just how effective a medium it was for the imagination. With everything invisible anything was possible. The mind’s eye is a powerful medium, all you need to do is suggest something and the audience pictures it. Jack Benny’s radio household included a parrot, a polar bear, an ostrich and a levitating tenant. On television only the parrot remained. The digital medium of the internet allows for the same sort of imaginary reality. We suspend our disbelief and believe anything we read. The photoshopped pictures and faked videos we’ve become hip to, but we still tend to take whatever we read at face value. There’s almost no skepticism at all for things read on blogs or Facebook. It’s as if what we read becomes vivid reality in our imagination, something we stopped doing with analog mediums long ago. Magazines and newspapers people read with skepticism. But you can write the wildest things on Facebook or in a blog and people will believe it. They can picture chemtrails or bizarre conspiracies or completely made up stories and believe every word. Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds would fool millions all over again online. And in a digital environment where the perception of reality can approach Medieval thinking in its irrationality, something as dry as history–real history, researched and sweated over–is an anachronism. History itself is history in the digital world. Virtual reality is reality, and there is no one to say it isn’t. All history is fiction, someone said on Facebook recently. No one disagreed. History is whatever you want it to be someone responded. I thought about arguing the point, but let it go.

Horses were not an option because the Wehrmacht ate them.

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(2015)

Being dull, I spend a lot of time that could be spent watching the Weather Channel instead watching (or listening, actually) to lectures online. Science and history, for the most part. Arcane, big words, hopelessly obscure, badly rendered power points, that kind of thing. On the Weather Channel the meteorologist babe had legs to die for, but on my computer a guy was going on about the Wehrmacht. I kept listening. He said it was a mess, that Wehrmacht, nothing like you see on Combat! In 1942 their reconnaissance units had run out of motorcycles–those nifty sidecar things Vic Morrow is always ducking from on Combat!–because the motors had all frozen, seized, and self-destructed in the Russian winter. Horses were not an option because the Wehrmacht ate them. So they gave the reconnaissance units bicycles. Bicycles. Blitzkrieg with a low carbon bootprint.

The lecturer, Dr. Robert Citino, is a smartass (“cheeky” doesn’t quite cut it) who is one of America’s leading experts on things German and military, apparently. A fascinating talker. The perfect blend of details and anecdotes, the personal and the whole picture. He knows his scheiss, and he’s funny as hell, too. Weird even:
“….my book on the Russian campaign in 1942, which I will attempt to explain without the use of maps–I will ask several people in the front row to come up and pretend to be various terrain features, if you wouldn’t mind….”

The room full of cadets laughs nervously. Especially the plebes.

It turns out that the German generals weren’t as smart as their uniforms. Flipping through the comments below the video, his describing the Wehrmacht command as often stupid is not going over well. And we’re not even talking Wehrmacht involvement in war crimes, he adds. That’s another lecture. Actually I just saw another lecture on just that. The lecturer, Dr. Geoffrey Megargee, a tad cheeky himself, was an expert on the Holocaust on the Eastern Front. Einsatzgruppen, etc. Army involvement in genocidal war crimes was pervasive, he said. The Nuremberg Trials found commanders-in-chief Keitel and Jodl guilty of crimes against humanity, but could have carried those war crimes trials down to dozens of army and even corps level commanders too. And hanged them all, he added. It was a startling afterthought, and off topic–he was discussing the German general staff–but it was obvious even in this purely academic setting how much he hated Nazis. You don’t hang the people you love. The YouTube Neo-Nazis hated him back.

And now the Nazis really hate this funny Wehrmacht expert guy too. Amazing how many Nazis there are on YouTube. Apparently Dr. Citino is a Jew loving stooge. Or is a Jew himself. He’s Italian someone pointed out. He’s from Cleveland, but his people came from Sicily. Then he’s a race traitor too, a Nazi added. Another pointed out that Italians were not Aryans, and stabbed the Reich in the back. Others jumped in, trashing all things Nazi. A strange sort of alternative reality melee erupts, refighting the war in catty comments. Meanwhile the professor is saying how a magazine asked him to list the ten best German generals on World War Two. It was kind of absurd, he said, like picking out the ten best heavy metal guitar players. More laughter. This time the plebes join in. Apparently air guitar is not a West Point hazing ritual.

Later I’m in the car and flip on the radio and it’s Highway Star by Deep Purple. Richie Blackmore is laying out his solo with heavy metal perfection. Erich Von Manstein, I think to myself, definitely.

Mission San Miguel

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(Unpublished essay, early 90’s, updated later…though it’s strange reading stuff from maybe two decades ago….guess I’ve written maybe a million words since then and this stuff seems like it was written by somebody else. Somebody with better manners and terribly serious about being a writer.)

About midway between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area lies Mission San Miguel. Only yards away traffic speeds between the two metropolises; only a few cars pull off the highway and stop at the old mission.  The parking area is dirt, the grounds old and a handful of chickens strut about. There is a well with a busted pump, indeed lots of machinery, piles of it back in the plaza and the surrounding storerooms, where the evidence of the factory nature of the place lies about in broken abundance. A dusty diorama recreates the extent of the mission and surrounding acreage of vines and orchards and grain and pastures. The local Salinan indians were impressed as laborers. They lived in barrack conditions; so too did the clergy and garrison. Little San Miguel, just a speck on the highway, had once been an outpost on the frontier of the Spanish empire. A garrison town, it brought together soldiers and the no less military Jesuit order [though I think San Miguel was a Franciscan mission] to hold sway over the native population, convert them to into loyal and productive subjects of the Bourbon kings. Crops were raised to support the mission and its populace, as well as to trade with the other portions of the empire. The authority of Spain was represented here in the Church, whose building is quite a spectacle. Much, much larger than one would expect from the term “chapel”, it is a building designed to hold a couple of hundred worshippers within its imposing walls. It is a living church, serving the local Roman Catholics, and votive candles flicker in the dim light and missals lay scattered about the pews. But the presence of powers past is strongly present in the extraordinary paintings gracing every surface in the most vivid hues. The artist had come from Spain, though materials were scarce and he used Indian apprentices and local materials to make the paints. Thus many of the images are through the eyes of a Spaniard, the hues the choice of an Indian; whiles others are by the hand of an Indian directed by a Spaniard. It’s an extraordinary mixture. In the little museum in the gift shop (for that’s what San Miguel is, a small diocese with a gift shop) stands an imposing statue of Saint Michael himself, in Spanish armor, holding an immense sword to the throat of a prostrate Lucifer. Where they saw this Lucifer we can only imagine, but Lilies of the Field the Mission San Miguel was not.

Spanish power ebbed away with the 18th century, Madrid ceased to care about its outer works in far flung territories and San Miguel languished in obscurity. That’s what the mission is now. An abandoned outpost of a long gone civilization. The outer edges of empires always end like this, sometimes dead, sometimes alive but barely. The change here was brutal….California became a U.S. state, a protestant land, English speaking. The Indians disappeared, nearly wiped out in the decades after the Gold Rush. The descendants of the Spanish Empire were reduced to peasants. The mission itself became a whorehouse for drunken white men. That was shut down, eventually, and the place sat empty. Then a century ago the chapel sprang to life again, a small parish, for the local peasants and sundry Catholics. The terrifying sword wielding San Miguel of the conquistadores was long gone, though, just a statue in the museum. This was the home of Jesus and Maria and a simpler, more forgiving San Miguel. A saint of the underclass. The new occupants refurbished the place, cleaned it up, touched up the walls, held services. We showed up during mass. I watched from outside the door. The candles glowed red, the people murmured their prayers, the priest went through the timeless motions, some in English, some Spanish, some Latin. He blessed them, sprinkled holy water, and mass ended. When the parishioners had filed out and the padre disappeared into his chambers we slipped in to look around. The walls and ceiling were beautiful, the still vibrant colors, European imagery rendered by an Indian hand. I went up into the balcony where the choir sat for big events, Christmas and Easter. It was dusty and a sparrow lay on the window sill, limp, dead, its neck broken, fooled by all that blue sky beyond the glass.

Mission San Miguel

Mission San Miguel

My hard currency went to China and all I got was this lousy capitalism

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(Riffing on China and the origins of capitalism, 2009 and 2012)

China in one of its periodic surges–when Chinese civilization is on the upswing it’s unstoppable, though within a certain historically geographic space (they don’t do oceans well). This debt acquisition too–that is such an ancient trend. I know as far back as the Roman Empire western currency went east and Chinese products west. China becomes awash in western money (or now, bonds) while we continue to crave all that China produces. The only thing that can reverse it is political disorder within Chinese civilization itself. Which is a regular occurrence. You can’t say the patterns are like clockwork, but they do repeat themselves regularly, and follow the same pattern. It’s a kind of regularity that we in the west are not familiar with. China doesn’t suffer from variation and unpredictability. It is so amazing to see these ancient trends reasserting themselves. Sometime in the future, maybe decades, maybe centuries from now, China will dissolve again into warring states and the west will get all its money back again. Until a new regime unifies China again and all our money again goes east.

It’s funny but I think that the very creation of capitalism in medieval Europe was due in part to this imbalance of trade…there was such a shortage of specie in Europe in medieval times that other instruments of exchange had to be created.  It’ll be interesting to see what we come up with now.

I think a lot of western journalists (and NeoCons) don’t understand just how capitalism itself developed….without that long term imbalance of trade there would not have been such a dire shortage of specie in the west, and without that shortage of specie there would have been no need to create instruments like bills of credit that could fill in for hard money being so short. We wouldn’t be who we are without the Chinese having most of our gold and silver.

Perhaps that is an over-simplification (ahem). But it wasn’t too many centuries ago that you went shopping in a Chinese city with a flattened roll of silver in your pocket and a big shears on a cord around your waist. You see some eggs you wanted, take out your silver and use the shears and slice off a stretch. The merchant would weigh it and see if you needed more. Think about it…they had so much silver that sometimes they didn’t bother with coinage at all, just carried around a foot or two of flattened silver cut into strips. And think about this…..very little of that silver came from China. It came from China’s trading partners. That was in the 1500’s, the Ming Dynasty. The Silk Road–which served like an ATM for the Chinese since Roman times–had been shut down (due to the rise of Ottoman Empire, mainly) so now Western traders sought out Chinese goods at Chinese ports. And the West had money to burn…all that silver pouring in from New Spain. It was like the West had won the lottery and went on a wild spending spree. They couldn’t get enough silk, porcelain, trinkets, whatever. Importers showed up with hard cash, you can imagine the inflation. So all that hard money pouring into western Europe not only didn’t stay in Europe, but what did remain set off crazy inflation and finally settled into a steady rise in prices that has never let up. The low level inflation that we all accept as a fact of life (it’s the high inflation that weirds us out) began about the time that American gold and especially silver hit Europe and was immediately forwarded  (a huge part of it anyway) to China to buy non-essential goods for the rich or at least comfortably well off (the beginnings of the middle class). Maybe this is beginning to sound familiar. So when the Chinese went to market with a strip of flattened silver and a shears that silver had come from the mines at San Luis Potosi, sailed to Spain, and sailed from Spain to China. Capitalism didn’t really exist in China nor did “instruments of exchange”. An instrument of exchange was typically a piece of paper promising to pay x amount of dollars (pounds or reals or ducats or guilders or whatever) that could be passed on until somebody finally turned it in for genuine money. An IOU put into the pot in a poker game is the same thing.) Chinese didn’t play that game, nor did they especially invest in a venture with the idea of making more than they invested in the end (i.e., capitalism). They wanted silver. No silver, no deal. But Europeans loved silk and loved delicate little plates. Things like that. Trade thrived and money was exchanged as never before. The Silk Road had never dumped silver at this rate into China before. In China even peasants paid with silver. In Europe the shortage or precious metals continued. Smart bankers became immensely powerful as governments were forced to borrow from them. Commerce, always short of funds, turned increasingly to the local bourse–the stock market–to raise money. Governments centralized and enforced ruinous taxation. War became a vital way of raising revenue. A pattern was set in Europe that would eventually lead to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the birth of the modern world. By then, though, the trade imbalance with China had ended for a couple centuries. China, as it is wont to, disintegrated into warring states. Trade was severely impacted. Warlords spent their time fighting with each other instead of producing goods for trade. And the English discovered that the Chinese liked tea. Finally the west found something the Chinese wanted from them. Tea could take the place of silver (and probably also introduced the use of instruments of credit to the Chinese, but never mind that.) Then the English found out that the Chinese really liked opium.  Now that’s a business model. England became the biggest drug dealer of all time. The government even went to war twice to force the Chinese government to allow the trade to continue. You’d have a hard time finding a sleazier economic policy than that. But it certainly took care of that balance of trade problem neatly. Between tea and opium all that extra silver disappeared.

Of course, you can’t do that anymore. Forcing the Chinese to buy narcotics is a no no. Plus if they wanted it that bad, they could probably make it themselves. They probably do. They make everything themselves. The west doesn’t make anything anymore. Most of us are in the service industry. That’s not, fundamentally, the greatest business model. I think the last time I had a gig that wasn’t in the service industry, that actually made something, was 25 years ago. But almost all the manufacturing we once did has been shipped abroad, mostly to China. They have all those people, ya know. They work ridiculously hard and for not much money. They made probably ever single thing I am using to write this blog.

You know one of the things that rich people do when they got so much money they don’t know what to do with it?  They buy art. They don’t buy writing. If they did I wouldn’t be at this day gig. I’d be in some big office somewhere surfing the web while my gorgeous secretary typed this up. She’d typ this yp and correct all my spelling erors.  She’d make it look nice. She’s bring me coffee and remind me I’m married. I’d apologize and think about the Chinese again. The rich Chinese. They have all that money, our money, and like rich people do they buy art. But not our art. They buy their art. The art of theirs that we have over here. Westerners did some big time looting after the fall of the Ming Dynasty. When a county is fucked there’s art to be plucked. And we did. Well, we’re the ones that are fucked now. And the Chinese are back here buying what we took. You can see it on Antiques Road Show.  Guy brings in a doorstop and it’s worth five figures, six figures, more even. He near to swoons, the appraiser pisses his pants, and we all sit out there hating the guy because he’s suddenly a one per center because of that stupid doorstop and we’re working a day job, clacking away on a Chinese made computer.

Well, you’ll get yours, all you Chinese Chinese art collectors. All that stuff you buy back, it’ll be ours again. The present dynasty will fall and we’ll be back looting. Then you’ll buy it all back again. The cycle will continue.

Not now though. Clack clack. Clack clack clack. I wish it was Friday already.

Fountain pen

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[I just noticed that at some point in the few years WordPress voided the formatting in the photo captions. Pardon the mess.]

Note: A friend tells me she likes my stuff but it needs pictures. No one looks at anything on Facebook without a picture, she says. I immediately thought of this piece. I’d written it (back in 2012) only wrote it because I thought it was one of the dullest things you could write about. It was a challenge. But no one is gonna stop what they’re doing to read a piece called “Fountain Pen”. I know I wouldn’t. So I’ve added pictures. Old school sexist advertising pictures even, keeping with the current Mad Men vibe, though I’ve never actually seen Mad Men. It worked too, a zillion people read this. Nothing like a lady holding a Bic to get people’s attention.


“Stock photo: Sexy woman with fountain pen.” You can find anything on the internet.

Listening to an old Jack Benny radio show. Christmas shopping. Jack buys a fountain pen for $4. I looked it up–that’d be $64 today. It’s not gold plated or anything, it’s just a fountain pen. And they don’t even make a joke out of it being expensive. People used to pay a helluva lot of money for a technology as simple as a fountain pen.

Ball point pens came in at the end of WW2 (I like to think the ball point pen factory had until then been making B-17s or Liberty ships or huge artillery pieces). They sold at Gimbels for $9.75. That is $125 dollars in today’s money. I just asked my wife if I could have $125 to buy a pen and she gave me one of those looks. Did husbands get those looks in 1945, or did it seem like a bargain? Or maybe state of the art pens were like iPhones now. Something a man just had to have. A guy would whip out his ballpoint pen to sign a check and a crowd would appear, oohing and ahhing.

I googled ball point pen and got this. Amazing. I googled ball point pen and got this. Amazing.

In 1954 Parker–remember them?–sold millions of ball point pens priced from $3 to $9…that is, from $25 to $75 dollars in our money. How much did a pen cost to manufacture? The shipping costs were close to nothing, and they certainly seemed to sell themselves so advertising would have been fairly limited. What an incredible business to be in.

Bic hit the market in the sixties (“Writes the first time, every time!”). It was about then that prices began to tumble. And tumble. Soon ballpoints were cheap and disposable and not classy at all. I have a vague recollection from the early sixties that a pen was a big deal. You’d have it in your breast pocket, visible, you’d pull it from your pocket with a flourish, with grace even, and do a bit of the Norton on The Honeymooners thing–your hands swirling about, getting ready for the big moment–before you signed your name. Then carefully the pen would be returned to its pocket. A cool thing, a pen. By the seventies, though, they were just cheap plastic things with blue, black or red caps (green was a rarity), they left thin, weak letters on paper, not the heavy, masculine lines of a manly, expensive pen. But the post-war boom was over, everyone was broke, quality replaced by quantity, and we had endless amounts of paperwork to sign. A pen was just a pen, a tool, with about as much significance as a plastic spoon. They came in boxes of I think eight, office workers would just stuff one in a pocket and no one ever noticed it was gone. You didn’t go to Gimbels to buy those pens. You went to Newberry’s or Zody’s or Kmart. You could still buy really nice pens–I found one, recently, from back then. A Papermate. It’s heavy, solid, shiny, and when I ran it across my arm (no paper being handy) it left a firm, decisive, manly stroke. It felt good. It felt powerful. A guy could get laid with one of these. But a Bic? Good luck.

Papermate or Bic? Papermate or Bic?

I follow the Wikipedia link to rollerball pens. Rollerball makes me think of Rollerball, James Caan vs the Man, a sport more ridiculous than hockey, even. Bob Miller is the announcer. Bodies litter the rink like bodies once littered the ice when there were only six teams in the whole NHL and not many rules. I love Rollerball. It gets me excited, that game. If I were Canadian I’d want to play it. But it’s a movie, fiction, not real. Hell, it’s from my high school days, the seventies, when we used Bic disposable pens and wished we made enough money to write with something better. Now we use rollerballs, the pens. They used to be exciting, rollerball pens. They came in boxes, black, blue, red (and sometimes green). They have different point thicknesses. They were sexy, somehow, like you could bring a couple boxes to that secretary down the aisle, the gorgeous, perfect one, and she’d remember who you were. Rollerballs exuded a sort of state of the art coolness. Women liked that. I always had boxes of them in my desk drawers, and knew where vast stocks lay in supply rooms. My desk here at home is littered with them.

Eine hübsche Dame schreibt mit einem Rollerball. Eine hübsche Dame schreibt mit einem Rollerball.

Alas, I rarely use them anymore. I jot notes with them, maybe, little marks on post it notes. I make quick calculations. I scrawl sentences in my increasingly degenerating penmanship–never good to begin with–that later, often as not, wound up typed somewhere. Sometimes I just grab a few old rollerball pens and toss them in the recycle bin just to thin them out. To think these once had office sexual power. Now they’re not even relics. They’re just wastes of space.

The Sheaffer Glidewriter, and free love, 1967. The Sheaffer Glidewriter and free love, 1967.

A couple years ago I was in an office with all these built-in cabinets. We were using all of the cabinets but the last one was locked. Three whole drawers we could not access. They weren’t empty…you could tap them and tell that. You could tap them and tell they were nearly full, in fact. (Life long office workers have percussive skills like that…you can garner all sorts of information rapping lightly on doors, cabinets, machines.) Finally I made some calls, pulled in some favors, and got someone to find the key that would open them. A small crowd circled round as he pulled open the drawers The lower ones were full of various odd pads of paper, file folders in a myriad of colors, things like that. Dullsville. The bottom drawer held ancient technologies–calculators, an adding machine with extra tape rolls. We looked at them almost nostalgically. An intern asked what they were. I let her have the electric pencil sharpener. She lolled it about in her hands, studying it, wondering. I described how you inserted the pencil in the hole and let it whir. It sounded obscene. I doubt it sounded obscene way back when. It was new and exciting once.

But it was the top drawer that blew our minds. It was a treasure trove of a long lost department that disappeared in lay offs who knows how long ago. Maybe a decade even. Certainly the secretary had been let go, the poor thing, because this had been her pride and joy, the supply drawer. Anyone in the department looking for something, they found it here. And it was left untouched, not even plundered. HR must have come in and walked them out, that whole department, on an hour’s notice. And this drawer was a time capsule of a long lost analog time.

Money had been good then. I’d never seen such a well stocked supply drawer. Pencils–pencils–in numbers 2 and 3 (I can’t remember what the numbers meant), and colored pencils, red and green. You’d correct things with red pencils back then, draw long red lines through sentences, leave helpful criticism in the margins. I don’t know what green pencils were for. There were erasers too. Big block erasers, the pink for pencils, the heavy whitish ones for ink. And there were lots of those pink erasers you’d slip over the end of a pencil when you’d worn the built-in eraser down to a stub. And then there was this plastic box full of hundreds of those little erasers but in all sorts of colors. Blue, pink, green, yellow….pencil erasers as fashion statements. Wow. I opened the box up and picked one up and it began to crumble in my hand, like papyrus. Same with the bag of several hundred rubber bands. I could see no use for so many rubber bands, aside from a righteous rubber band fight. (I used to love rubber fan fights, I was a great shot. You shoot me, I hurt you. But they’d shoot me anyway.) I tried to draw a bead with one, and it disintegrated in my hand. It takes years to reach that state of decomposition. Years sitting in this coffin of a supply drawer, in the dark, unused, forgotten.

Smiling babe with fountain pen. Smiling babe with fountain pen.

What must have been hundreds of post it notes in a riot of colors were heaped in a corner of the drawer. Lots of pastels, some vivid pinks, so vivid guys would never have them on their desks. I dug through the pile to see what was underneath. There was a beautiful wooden box. It was of walnut and put together lovingly, polished, with copper hinges and looked like a miniature royal coffin. Something you’d find tossed aside in a looted tomb in the Valley of the Kings. I had a helluva time opening it. It had been frozen shut so long the hinges needed some WD40. I jimmied it open with a letter opened (the drawer had a whole arsenal of them) and there it was. A magnificent fountain pen. A Parker. Silver and shiny and authoritative. The executive model. The Salesman of the Year model. It was heavy, an ounce at least. I put it to a post it note and the ink flowed immediately. It left a strong masculine line across the note. I pulled out a larger post note and wrote my name. It look like an executive’s name. One of the ladies passed by. I showed her the pen. Ooooh she said. Wow.

I put the pen back in its box and put the box back into the drawer. I wanted that pen. But too many people had seen it. You just don’t pocket a sterling silver pen. But I wanted that pen. People around me were talking excitedly about their new iPhones. But I remember when a pen like that meant something. So on my last day on the job I went back to that drawer, looked around to see that no one was looking, and copped that pen. It’s on my desk here now. Occasionally I’ll sign something with it, something significant. It feels big and manly in my hand. It leaves a bold signature. Brick in big strong letters, just right for a big strong man. Show me your pen, I think aloud, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Then I put it lovingly back in its box, and put it back on the desk behind the computer monitor. Otherwise it gets in the way as I type.

PICASSO 902A Fountain Pen PICASSO 902A Fountain Pen “Jazz Dream Woman” Gold Carven Fountain Pen (Two-Tone Clip)

Operation Bagration

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June 22, 2014 will be the 70th anniversary of the beginning of Operation Bagration, when the Russians broke the back of the mighty Wehrmacht, the German army. It’s not very well known in the West, partly due to the drama of D-Day, partly because of the Cold War and perhaps mainly because until perestroika the records of the Red Army were inaccessible to historians outside the USSR. But it’s well known to Germans. More of them were left there than on any other field with the possible exception of the Stalingrad campaign. Bagration was the most massive defeat ever inflicted on the Wehrmacht, the most massive success ever achieved by Russia’s Red Army, and probably the most underappreciated war changing event of WW2.

Military history isn’t easy to understand. It’s complicated, the terminology difficult, the concepts counter-intuitive. Plus people get killed. Sometimes lots and lots of people, and you can see why that bothers the average reader. So basically it’s difficult to comprehend for the vast majority of people because there’s no way to visualize it without being confused or grossed out. So let’s picture it this way. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are teams in the National Football League. It’s been a rough game. The Germans blitzed the Russians in the first quarter. The Russians held their own in the second and scored big as the clock ran out. The third quarter was a brutal slugfest but the Russians wound up dominating the field. In the fourth, after the kickoff the two teams met at the fifty yard line. The Nazis misread the Russian signals, the ball was snapped, there was a cloud of dust, and the only German players left standing were running for their lives towards their own end zone. That play was Operation Bagration.

Soviets-bagration-06

Russian infantry aboard T-34 tanks approaching German positions somewhere in Belarus during Operation Bagration.

The Russians managed a surprise attack along a front of several hundred miles–the entire central portion of the Russian Front, what the Germans had designated as their Army Group Center–and blitzed through with remarkable speed. The Red Army achieved massive superiority wherever they attacked (ten Russian tanks to every one German tank, for example) and the German army units facing them were annihilated. Many divisions were completely destroyed. Nearly all the rest were reduced to remnants. Vehicles–from Tiger tanks to trucks to horse carts–were destroyed or abandoned.  There are stunning photos of roads littered with equipment that had been left pell mell as the retreating columns were overrun by Russian tanks and blown apart by waves of Russian aircraft, like negatives of photographs taken on the same roads in 1941.

Destroyed German column

Destroyed German column in Belarus, 1944

Indeed by 1944 the Russians had such control of the skies on the Russian Front that German units could move only by night, and in June the darkness lasted only a few hours, leaving the retreating Germans visible for twenty hours a day. The Russian air force was merciless. Tank busting Sturmovik ground attack aircraft destroyed German vehicles by the hundreds. And then behind German lines in the woods and marshes were hundreds of thousands of partisans, organized, well armed and devastatingly effective. Between the Red Army, Red Air Force and the partisans, the Germans were under assault by Russian forces on all sides, front, flank, rear, from above and even from inside, where partisans popped up out nowhere.

Russian partisans behind German lines somewhere.

Russian partisans.

Some of the German forces took refuge in towns and cities, giving them some respite from tanks, planes and partisans, but trapping them far behind the advancing Russian armies. They either surrendered–fifty thousand were taken at Minsk–or were destroyed by Russian infantry and artillery in vicious urban conflict. Among the units making their escape west, the renowned German military discipline often disintegrated, turning a thorough defeat into a panicky rout. The degree of the collapse is borne out by the losses among general officers–never before had so many German generals–thirty one of Army Group Center’s forty seven division and corps commanders–been killed or captured in one campaign. Three weeks into the offensive a triumphant Stalin had those fifty thousand German prisoners from Minsk paraded, twenty abreast, through Red Square. The humiliation must have been total, even surreal. Afterward the streets where they’d marched were washed down, an insult if there ever was one.

German prisoners paraded through Moscow, July 17, 1944.

German prisoners paraded through Moscow, July 17, 1944.

Those prisoners were but a fraction, though, of the German losses throughout the offensive. In a two month period, from June 22 though August, a half million German soldiers of Army Group Center were lost–killed, captured, wounded. That is a loss of fifty percent. And the damage went deep. When divisions surrendered en masse, and when Russian tanks overran rear areas, officers, non-coms, specialists, skilled mechanics, logistics experts, administrators, instructors, and medical personnel were killed or captured. The bones and sinew of a military machine, lost forever. You can’t replace those people with 17 year old conscripts. Conscripts don’t know anything, and the people who would have taught them were dead or being paraded through Red Square.

Looking at the Warsaw Rebellion from the far bank of the Vistula.

Watching the Warsaw Rebellion from the far bank of the Vistula.

The Russian offensive ran out of steam two months later outside Warsaw, hundreds of miles west of where it started. Russian casualties (as always) had been high, the soldiers were exhausted, tanks worn out, supply lines over reached. The Red Army units settled down on the eastern bank of the Vistula river to regroup and rest and rearm. It had reconquered all of Belarus–left utterly ruined by the Nazi administration and the retreating Wehrmacht, evoking promises of revenge by the Red Army–and half of Poland. That’s a lot of Lebensraum. To the south the Balkan front caved in throughout autumn all the way to Hungary. And in the west, the Allied forces at last broke into the open and virtually annihilated another German army, the survivors running till they reached the German border and dug in. Meanwhile in Prussia an attempt was made on Hitler’s life (Operation Valkyrie they called it) by Wehrmacht officers who could read the writing on the wall. It failed. Retribution was savage. And in Warsaw Stalin let the Nazis put down the rebellion by the Polish Home Army. The Russians watched it all from across the Vistula. It would have been so easy to intervene, but Stalin had no use for the Poles in charge. He had his own plans for Poland. The Germans leveled Warsaw block by block, adding it to the long list of cities utterly destroyed during Operation Bagration. Nazi nihilism and Soviet realpolitik came together that summer on the banks of the Vistula. But Warsaw, like Valkyrie, was only a sideshow.

Replacements for the Eastern front, November, 1944.

Replacements for the Eastern front, November, 1944.

After Operation Bagration Hitler no longer had any way to prevent the Russians from conquering Germany. It was simply a matter of time. So it’s a lucky thing for the western allies that we did land on June 6. Luckier still that we broke out of Normandy when we did and in such spectacular fashion. We’d been bogged down in the hedgerows while the Russians were moving twenty miles a day through the German armies. It is said–you heard it over and over this past June 6–that D-Day was the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. It wasn’t. The beginning of the end was June 22 in Belarus. We helped. Operation Overlord was hard fought, costly, and in the long run, a decisive Allied victory and complete humiliation for the German Army in France. But in terms of scale, Operation Bagration, like everything on the Russian Front, was much larger, the fighting more violent, the destruction more total, the losses much larger. It was war on a scale that matched all the other theatres of WW2 put together. When two giant totalitarian civilizations fight to the death, everything else pales. And with Operation Bagration the Soviets delivered the mortal wound. The Reich would survive ten more months, and would even manage one last offensive in the west, the Battle of the Bulge, and attempt one disastrously around Budapest, but they were the thrashings of a dying animal.

German soldiers, somewhere on the eastern front 1944-45, captured by Russian soldiers and stripped of their boots.

Young German POWs in 1944-45, stripped of their boots by their Russian captors. Military age had dropped to fourteen after the losses in Operation Bagration, and uniforms weren’t always to be had.

I say it was lucky for the Allies that we landed when we did because I think the real significance of the Normandy invasion was that it put the western democracies back on the continent. And just in time. After Bagration the Third Reich was effectively over, it was just a matter of when. It still functioned as a state, the Final Solution roared full blast, and it kept churning out cannon fodder (another million of whom died, mostly in Poland and the eastern provinces of Germany), but there was absolutely nothing the Germans could do that would keep the Red Army from rolling all the way to the Rhine. Even if Overlord had never happened and all the panzer divisions and Waffen SS and veteran infantry units in France had been transferred east, the Russians would only have been delayed. Perhaps the remnants of Army Group North trapped on Latvia’s Courland Peninsula till the end of the war would have managed to escape before the Red Army reached the Baltic and cut them off. Perhaps East Prussia and Silesia could have held out a little longer. Perhaps.

Some of the Red Army's several thousand Katyusha Rocket launchers pounding German positions on July 22. Thirty thousand guns opened fire on the front lines of Army Group Center for two hours before the infantry and tanks joined in.

Some of the Red Army’s several thousand Katyusha rocket launchers pounding German positions on July 22. Thirty thousand guns bombarded the front lines of Army Group Center for two hours, before Red Army infantry and tanks went in for the kill. German survivors remembered it as the most terrifying barrage of the entire war.

But at most that would have delayed the Russians two or three months. The remaining German armies in the East–full of old men and Hitler Youth armed with rifles captured from the Belgians and French and Dutch and whomever–were just stopgaps. In January of 1945 the Red Army rolled from Warsaw to the outskirts of Berlin, annihilating another German army group. In April they attacked again, taking Berlin and stopping only when they came into contact with the Western Allies—the American, British, French, and Canadian armies pushing east as fast as the autobahns could carry them. It was only then that Germany surrendered. But Germany would not have surrendered after the fall of Berlin had the western allies not been on the continent, or more realistically had we invaded later in the summer or early autumn and still been fighting in France. Hitler would not have shot himself in the Fuhrerbunker, not with all his wonder weapons and fantasies and SS and Hitler Youth fanatics. He would have had Himmler and Goebbels and Goering and Bormann and all the rest with him, he would have had Speer to keep the last factories running, and V-2 rockets and ME262 jet fighters, and some excellent generals. They would have put together one last rag tag line west of Berlin to defend the string of bombed out cities, concentration camps, frightened people, slave laborers, and Nazi officials that made up the Third Reich. And then the Russians would have utterly destroyed that line in the middle of summer and pushed on to the Rhine. All of Germany would have been under Stalin’s control, one big German Democratic Republic. That is something to wonder about. East Germany went from Nazism to Stalinism almost instantly…it proved a far easier transition than denazification and democracy. Would it have been the same though out a united Germany under Soviet control? We had to build up West Germany’s institutions from the ground up. In East Germany all they did was change the name on the door.

Geman Panzers IVs with crews in a vision of unimaginable violence.

German Panzers IVs with silent crews in a vision of unimaginable violence.  Atop the tank, a Russian soldier.

Seventy years later all that remains of Hitler’s empire in the east are the dead. The Russian dead fill graveyards by the millions, soldiers, civilians, entire populations of Jews. There are also hundreds of thousands of German soldiers buried in cemeteries in the former Soviet Union. That’s remarkably decent of the Russians, considering. Belarus hasn’t been quite so forgiving. Nazi rule was especially brutal there. A quarter, maybe even a third of the population died. Virtually all the Jews were murdered. Nearly half of the population forced from their homes. Nine thousand villages reduced to scorched earth. If you had to pick one land where the Third Reich reached its zenith of barbarity, that place would be Belarus (with Poland a close second). Even so, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers’ remains have been located and disinterred and reburied. Some go home. Some go to cemeteries established in Russia just for German war dead. And they find another forty thousand a year. It’s all done quietly, no parades, no speeches. The authorities in Minsk say they know the whereabouts of another hundred thousand or so German remains. The vast majority would have died during Operation Bagration. Belarus must be thick with them. They must litter the forest, those German bones. I suppose they must be buried. Loose bones seem to make us nervous, no matter what side they were once on.

Operation Bagration. The Russians in red, the Germans blue.

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