History is a Family Business!

Historians have long noted that social decay, which sometimes precedes or causes the fall of a civilization, has a number of causes. In such social analysis, causation is often difficult to distinguish from mere correlation, but it is clear that among the causes for the decline of a nation are large and increasing cases of divorce, illegitimate birth, adultery, and a low birth rate.

To be precise, every culture, even those which are thriving and on their way up, experience some amount of these phenomena. Even in societies which are ascending, there will be a few cases of divorce, illegitimacy, and adultery. Small amounts of these circumstances can easily be absorbed by a vital civilization.

But large and increasing numbers of divorces, illegitimate births, and cases of adultery will weaken societal fabric. Fewer births, measured in total or per capita, also undermine political and economic stability.

Author Alvin Toffler notes, however, that there is a personal side to this sociological pattern. While historians are interested only in the macro-level, Toffler points out that there is a large amount of human pain in such trends. Toffler writes that "guilt is associated with the fracture of the family." Historians see a deeper cause underlying these patterns than mere personal choice.

We cannot blame the people who get divorced when divorce is rampant: rather, we blame society for failing to instruct generations of people about how to choose a mate, about how to make an inviolable commitment, and about how to maintain a marriage of mutual respect, affection, and supportiveness.

Toffler writes:

As millions of men and women clamber out of the strewn wreckage of their marriages they, too, suffer agonies of self-blame. And once more, much of the guilt is misplaced. When a tiny minority is involved, the crack-up of their families may reflect individual failures. But when divorce, separation, and other forms of familial disaster overtake millions at once in many countries, it is absurd to think the causes are purely personal. The fracture of the family today is, in fact, part of the general crisis of industrialism — the crack-up of all the institutions

which have served the human race in agricultural or industrial settings, around the globe in different nations, on different continents, in different languages, and with different cultures and religions. We face this pattern in our post-industrial, or late-industrial, era. It has been faced by other civilizations from Rome to China. Toffler reminds us that great societal declines, about which we can read and write so dispassionately, are often accompanied by personal pain.

Shane Harris on Security Technology

On Thursday, February 24, 2012, reporter Shane Harris spoke at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Shane has worked for a number of periodicals, currently for the Washingtonian, and was speaking on current trends in national defense. He earned the Gerald R. Ford prize for defense reporting.

His talk was entitled "The New Cold War: Hackers, Drones, and Cyber Spies" and his thesis was that the "Global War on Terror" is actually over, and than we have entered a new era. In Department of Defense documents, the abbreviation GWOT (Global War on Terror, or, Global War on Terrorism) was frequently used, but is now less so. Instead, Mr. Harris hypothesizes, we are in what he terms a "New Cold War" - beginning around the time at which Osama Bin Laden died, or perhaps a bit earlier, around the time of Hurricane Katrina. Those events would mark the end of the GWOT, and naturally the 9/11 attacks would mark its beginning.

The good news is that, according to Mr. Harris, we won the GWOT. The New Cold War is marked by a different anti-terrorism strategy, in which the drone (or 'RPA' for remotely piloted aircraft) is central. Obama has ordered more drone attacks in a single year than Bush ordered in his entire presidency. This marks a shift in tactics. Drones and assassinations are the hallmarks of this new anti-terrorism strategy.

Another aspect of the New Cold War is that it involves conflicts not on battlefields. Traditionally, military strategists have identified four domains: land, sea, air, and space. A fifth domain is now added: cyberspace. The Obama administration sees cyberspace as a strategic domain. We are entering an era which will feature conflicts not on battlefields, using new and unknown technologies.

It has now become an explicit objective of our military to defend its own cyberspace, and the cyberspace of our civilians.

The dawn of this New Cold War can be traced back to a meeting including Vice-President Dick Cheney, President Bush, and Director of National Intelligence John M. McConnell, among others. At this meeting, the ground action in Iraq was discussed, including the surge which would eventually and decisively turn the tide of the war in favor of America. The next item discussed was an introduction to the serious possibility of cyber attacks.

McConnell posed the question, what if 9/11 had been a cyber attack directed at our nation's financial system? It would have had far worse economic consequences than the actual WTC attack did. It would be a true nightmare scenario. Other administration officials at the meeting confirmed McConnell's description. This was a turning point in American defense strategy. President Bush said that we would have to do everything we could to defend our cyberspace.

At this point in time - the meeting in question would have been in 2007 - this was not a new problem, but there was a new awareness of it at the highest levels of government. Since that time, significant concrete steps have been taken.

The CIA hosted a meeting of major Department of Defense contractors. It informed them that China had been able to gain access to the computers of these contractors, and obtain classified information, for example, about the technology of the joint strike fighter aircraft. The CIA told the contractors that new and strict security would be implemented. This resulted in the Defense Industrial Base Initiative, which is to facilitate collaboration between different private-sector contractors and various security-related government agencies as they work toward better cyber-security.

After receiving his first classified security briefing about cyber-defense issues, prior to the November 2008 election, Obama commented that while he had previously been afraid of losing the election, he was now afraid of winning. Yet Obama has demonstrated perhaps somewhat more intuitive awareness of cyber issues, perhaps related to his age and own personal use of electronics.

In May 2009, Obama gave a speech, stating clearly that there was evidence of foreign organizations were penetrating, or attempting to penetrate, the computer networks which control the electrical power grid. These organizations seemed to be the Chinese government and shadowy entities inside Russia.

Soon thereafter, Google stated that it had evidence that the Chinese government was hacking into personal Gmail accounts.

The Obama administration stated, in November 2011, that Russians entities and the Chinese government had essentially an organized crime venture, stealing data and other intellectual property from U.S. companies.

Observers have speculated that the 'Stuxnet' virus (more properly, a 'worm') was designed by the intelligence or military agencies of some country (possibly Israel or the U.S.), because it seems to target the Iranian nuclear facilities. In any case, the Stuxnet infection at Iranian weapons facilities did slow Iran's progress in building nuclear weapons, and in doing so, may have bought a few months or years of security and peace, and delayed whatever heated confrontation between Iran and the bulk of the world's nations may yet occur.

Turning to drones, or UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicles), Mr. Harris observed that warfare is becoming not only mechanized, but self-running. Compared to a WWII bomber, which required a crew of ten men, UAV's can be controlled by one individual, and with greater accuracy. The trend is toward creating drones which will not require minute-by-minute control, but rather be given merely a general assignment (e.g., take out the target located at certain coordinates) and the drone will proceed to sort out the details for itself.

Drones will be able to communicate with each other and perform group assignments. In WWII, a raid of one thousand planes was staffed by ten thousand crewmen in the air. In the future, a raid of one thousand drones could be staffed by a small handful of computer operators on the ground, and they would only be needed to launch the operation - once given their orders, the drones would be self-directed.

Naturally, the United States is not the only country to realize this. China is actively developing more advanced generations of drones. Drones could do more than surveillance or bombing. In addition to photo-reconnaissance, drones would be capable of activating atomic, biological, or chemical weapons.

It is worth noting that drones will probably be a part of civilian life (in contexts not related to defense or security) in the future. Obvious applications include crop-dusters and cargo flights. The security concern here is that a terrorist could hack into the controls of a civilian drone, deflect it from its private-sector tasks, and use it to create danger.

Drones will be able to not only fly, but also move underwater, on the surface of the water, and on land. Capabilities like climbing up the outside of a tall building may allow drones to, for example, play a major role in rescuing hostages taken by terrorists.

In comparing the "Old Cold War" to the "New Cold War," Mr. Harris notes that both involved expanding the concept of "domain", involved the expansion and innovation of technology, and involved proxies. The U.S. military now has standardized the notion of 'info ops' - informational operations including hacking into a terrorist's cell phone or text messages and discovering who is posting what on the web.

Looking at both the drone aircraft and the issues around cyber-security, Shane Harris noted that there are issues around what is called 'supply-chain security' - many processors, chips, LCD screens, and plasma screens are built outside the U.S. (often East Asia or Pacific Rim areas), and at least two threats exist: first, in the diplomatic tensions leading up to an actual shooting war, suppliers could cut off the flow of such parts into America; second, such parts as do come in could, now or in the future, have hidden features which would be built into them for the purpose of giving a potential enemy of the U.S. - more likely a sovereign state than a terrorist group - access into either cyber capacity or drones, to either neutralize those drones and capacities, or co-opt those drones and capacities for uses other than those assigned to them by the U.S.

Shane Harris gave thought-provoking insight into the nature of security and defense in the coming decades.

A Different Type of Tax Revolution

Everyone knows that taxes are bad. Yes, we also know that they are necessary, but they are still bad. That's why we should have as few taxes as absolutely possible. This has been a guiding principle for meaningful or successful revolutions in many eras and in many places. In the early 1770's, one of the issues which motivated the American Revolution was taxes.

Some revolutions are quiet. Almost nobody noticed when an international tax revolution started between the ordinary consumers and the governments of oil-producing nations. Author Alvin Toffler recounts that

On August 8, 1960, a West Virginia-born chemical engineer named Monroe Rathbone, sitting in his office high over Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, made a decision that future historians might some day choose to symbolize the end of the

industrial economy as it had been know during the first half of the twentieth century, and earlier. Whether we say that we are moving into a different phase of industrialism or moving into a post-industrial phase is not important to the fact that what Mr. Rathbone was thinking about was taxes. The simple notion of taxes was once again about to change the world, just as it did when the American colonists perceived that they had an opportunity to escape British taxation. Two centuries totally changed technology, but they did not change the human desire for freedom.

Few paid any attention that day when Rathbone, chief executive of the giant Exxon Corporation, took steps to cut back on the taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries. His decision, though ignored by the Western press, struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments.

When we think of freedom, we are inclined to think of noble freedoms like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. To speak about freedom from taxation seems greedy, materialistic, and downright money-grubbing. But those noble freedoms could not exist if it were not for economic freedom. The freedom to use one's money, to buy or to sell, to save or to invest, is a necessary foundation for those more noble liberties. Taxation is a way of limiting economic freedom. Again, it is true that taxes are necessary; but it is also true that they are dangerous, and should be kept as small as possible.

Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon's lead. And one month later, on September 9, in the fabled city of Baghdad, delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council. Backed to the wall, they formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments.

Our narrative, thus far, could lend itself to the idea that large American oil companies were exploiting the poor people of third-world countries who happened to have oil beneath the surface of their land. But the citizens of these nations were not being harmed by the reduction in tax revenues which their governments felt. That's because those governments used that revenue, and any other revenue, to support an aristocratic leadership class.

The governments of the Middle East did not then, and do not now, use such revenue to in any way help the poor in their nations. These tax dollars, paid by American consumers, were not going to build schools and hospitals, or to support the elderly. The funds were used to support an extravagant lifestyle of luxury among the royal families and upper classes. So by seeking to avoid paying these taxes, the Americans were harming nobody.

As with all generalizations, there were exceptions. One oil-producing country was, in fact, using some of its tax revenue in the type of 'social' expenditures that western governments envision: Iran. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran was a progressive country. Education, health care, and women's rights were the political agenda.

Responsible historians do not speculate. But one cannot help but wonder, what if the Americans hadn't had a tax revolution, and what if the OPEC organization hadn't been formed in response? Would Iran have taken a different course with the extra income? Would its freedoms have expanded to the point that the 1979 takeover would not have been possible? Would Iran still be a free country today?

We will probably never know the answers to these questions. But we do know that revolutions start when people decide to throw off the oppression of taxes.

The Effects of the Treaty of Versailles

On November 11, 1918, a ceasefire went into effect, ending the First World War. Negotiating the final peace treaty would, however, take more than six months. Germany and Austria-Hungary were not allowed to participate in the discussions. Although a number of nations were present, England, France, and the United States were most influential; Japan and Italy somewhat influential, and the remaining nations relatively insignificant. There were several other treaties, both before and after the signing at Versailles in June 1919, which finalized the post-war situation, but Versailles was by far the most important.

Among the other treaties were the Treaty of Saint-Germain and the Treaty of Trianon (both of which dealt primarily with the Balkans), the Treaty of Sevres (which dismembered the Ottoman Empire), and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (a separate peace between Germany and Russia prior to the November 11 ceasefire).

Entering into negotiations, England had hoped to preserve an economically viable Germany, which it wanted as a trading partner. France, however, wanted punitive restrictions on Germany and demanded huge financial reparations, hoping to emerge as the undisputed superpower of Europe in contrast to a humiliated Germany. The United States, like England, was more tolerant toward Germany, but France would not listen to reason, and the final terms of the treaty were quite harsh.

In addition to being burdened with staggering financial payments, Germany lost significant amounts of territory. German land was placed under the domination of France, Poland, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and Lithuania. German colonies in Africa and the Pacific were divided among the victors.

The map of Europe was redrawn in more radical ways than merely confiscating land from Germany: new countries were created. Poland had not existed as a defined territory since the 1700's; it reappeared on maps in 1919. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were synthetic countries, concocted by diplomats, and fusing ethnic groups which viewed themselves as distinct and separate nations.

France further pushed its punitive agenda by insisting on limits on the German military. The total number of soldiers in the army and the number of ships in the navy were capped. The French also insisted on a fifteen-year military occupation of Germany's Rhineland area.

In the course of the Versailles negotiations, the League of Nations was formed. A precursor to the United Nations, this organization was to serve as a central clearing house for treaties, and a problem-solving agency to find diplomatic solutions to international tensions and thereby avoid war. Although largely the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, the United States would not join the League of Nations, because the Senate would not ratify the Treaty of Versailles.

Economically, the treaty pushed the German economy into a decade or more of misery, with periods of raging inflation mixed with periods of high unemployment. The German population perceived that its poverty was caused by French antagonism embodied in the treaty. The pain felt by the common people of Germany turned, in some cases, into resentment toward the French, who were deliberately inflicting this suffering upon them.

In the years after November 11, 1918, there were periods of intense labor unrest in the United States - strike and bitter rioting - but this does not seem to be a direct consequence of the Treaty of Versailles. Similar uprisings in other countries appear to be equally unrelated.

Historians generally agree that the terms of the treaty were so harsh on the Germans that the treaty can be said to be one of the causes of World War Two, and not, as its authors hoped, a document of perpetual peace.

The Causes of the First World War

The causes of World War I are many, complex, and disputed. In any case, the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 was not the cause of the war, but rather merely its occasion. The killing took place in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The murder was apparently the result of Serbian extremism.

Serbia was competing with the Austro-Hungarian Empire for influence over Bosnia. Each of the two powers wanted Bosnia in its camp to ensure dominance in the region. Serbia dreamed of collecting several of the Balkan states into a southern Slavic kingdom. Austria already had Hungary, (Czech) Bohemia, and related territories; Bosnia would have sealed Austrian preeminence in southeastern Europe. The archduke was the heir apparent, and a Serbian assassination would have aptly expressed Balkan rage at perceived Austrian arrogance.

Upon the death of his son, Emperor Franz Joseph issued a series of demands and ultimatums to the Serbian government. Given the already-tense relations between the two countries, the emperor's demands - which were severe and attached to short timelines - were rejected by Serbia. This brought Serbia to the brink of war with Austria-Hungary.

By any measure, Serbia was smaller and less powerful than Austria. It was willing to risk this lopsided confrontation because it was allied with Russia, and counted on the Tsar's support. Thus Russia was brought into the situation.

Austria, for its part, was counting on its alliance with Germany. If war were declared, Emperor Wilhelm II would support Emperor Franz Joseph. It is clear, however, that none of these parties really wanted war. They also did not want to be perceiving as backing away from confrontation - they were afraid that this would be perceived as cowardice.

What was originally a dispute between Austria and Serbia became a second-hand quarrel between Germany and Russia. Frantic, last-minute communications between Emperor Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II reveal that both sides still wanted to avoid war, but again neither was willing to show any conciliatory behavior.

Matters deteriorated still further when Russian military experts decided that its army could not be partially mobilized: it was an all-or-nothing proposition. The decision for full mobilization sent the wrong signal to Germany and Austria. War was by then inevitable.

This narrative reveals one cause of the war: a system of alliances and treaties, some public and some secret. What might have been a regional war between two powers turned into a World War.

Other causes were present: militarism, which despised diplomatic attempts at resolution and preferred to rely on threats, and which fostered an atmosphere in which a nation's military was the preeminent measure and symbol of a nation's strength; nationalism, which, although subject to varying definitions and stages, is often a value system which places the existence and growth of the nation-state as the ultimate value both for the individual and for the society as a whole, surpassing pacifying values like family and religious faith; and industrialism, which saw nations and armies as markets for military technology, and saw wars as opportunities for selling millions of rifles and uniforms.

France and England were brought into the war by further ripple-effects through the network of alliances and treaties. America, which entered the war much later, can safely be said to have had no hand in its cause.

In whichever ratio, these potential causes had one thing in common: they all created an atmosphere of competition rather than cooperation.

Monasteries

In the years after the Fall of Rome, monasteries played an important role in boosting the cultural life of Europe, and of the whole world. Monasteries are generally a group of buildings where monks live and work. Monks are men who have taken vows, or promises, to remain poor, to remain unmarried and without children, and to spend their time and energy helping others. Women who have made the same vows are called nuns, and their communities are called convents. The word 'cloister' is also used to refer to monasteries and convents.

Although it is the Christian monasteries in Europe which vitalized the world's intellectual life, there are other monasteries: a famous Buddhist monastery in the Tibetan city of Lhasa, or the Christian monasteries which were numerous in Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, and Persia until the Islamic armies destroyed them. (Today Babylonia and Persia are called Iraq and Iran.) But history is mainly concerned with the study of European Christian monasteries.

These monasteries played three roles in history: first, they functioned as libraries, schools, and homes for intellectual analysis of authors like Cicero, Homer, Vergil, Plato, and Aristotle; second, they are often architectural masterpieces, showing the skills of various designers and preserving prime specimens of various styles; finally, they provided food and assistance to the poor, providing a reliable support for those who might otherwise be ignored.

The monastery in the town of Corvey, located in central Germany, is one of the best-preserved examples of Carolingian architecture, and is visited by many to see its bold facade. Built around 822 A.D., the interior of the building preserves wall murals from the time, with images from Homer's tales. These paintings have been cited as evidence of popularity of Homeric stories throughout the early Middle Ages.

Although the monks and nuns had taken vows, there were, at times, individuals who broke those vows: either they allowed themselves to become wealthy, or they had children, or they failed to help the people around them. To deal with these situations, there were individuals whose task it was to return those monks and nuns to their proper activities. These individuals organized reform movements for the monasteries and convents, ensuring that monks and nuns did their work well. Some of these reformers and their movements were the Cistercians, the Mendicants, and the Clunaic reforms.

Gregor Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, is one of the many monks whose scientific work was carried out in the context of monasticism.