Quick Shots - 02/Jul/2016

It's Freakin' Election Day

For a long campaign, it sure creeps up on you when you're doing your best to ignore it.
The pollsters are calling it 50-50 which usually means they don't know what they're talking about and there's about to be a massive swing. Or maybe they're right. Short theALP winning, it would actually be kind of fun to see if we get a hung parliament. Yes, that re-run would be fun too, and well deserved. See if Malcolm Turnbull can stick to his guns and say he won't form an extended coalition with the cross bench seats.

With 27% of those polled saying they haven't decided but they're likely to vote for  minor party, this is anybody's guess as to which way it will swing, let alone prognosticate by how much. Truly, there is no justice when it comes to elections so I'm just going to sit back and watch the carnage unfold. 2013 sucked so much I'm sort of possessed by schadenfreude. Secretly, I wish they all suffer - but they can't because somebody has to win.

Grunwald

I am researching the battle of Grunwald. It's the second last major engagement in the Crusades, and has the dubious distinction of pitting the Teutonic Knights against a coalition of Polish knights, Lithuanian light cavalry and some Tartars. The Poles were presumably Catholic at this point in time, and the Lithuanians were recent converts as well so, it was a kind of all-Catholic slugfest. As Crusade battles go, it is one of the less edifying moments. There is no Saladin or Richard the Lion Heart. Instead the leading characters are decidedly petty and perhaps a little personality disordered.  This is not a grand moment in the history of Crusades; it's more a lingering footnote, a cul de sac in history given that the Teutonic order, Lithuania and Poland all edged back from being big players after this battle.

The Teutonic Knights aren't exactly great protagonists. If anything they have the air of a psychotic cult, hellbent on conquering lands. A sort of an early version of the SS to come. Perhaps the SS even modelled themselves after the naked fanaticism and over-the-top brutality. If Crusade stories are told from the 'christian' side with the blessings of the Pope, then these would be your protagonists. It's kind of strange because the northern reaches of Central Europe don't exactly lend themselves to the Crusade project of taking and obtaining Jerusalem. But I guess heathens are everywhere if you look hard enough. The through the lens of religious fanaticism.

If of course you look at this battle from the point of view of the Poles and Lithuanians, this is the great defence of their motherland from the psycho cult Teutonic Knights. The reason I'm looking into this at all is because the battle of Grunwald represents the high watermark of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Lithuanians see this as their moment in history. They may be right.

The battle of Grunwald took place in 1410. The nuts and bolts of it aside, basically the Poles lured the Teutonic Knights into a battlefield of their choosing. The Lithuanians attacked first with their light cavalry and they were beaten back badly. They eventually regrouped to re-join the fray. By that point the Polish Knights had beaten the Teutonic Knights back to their lines. The Teutonic Knights eventually lost their leader and were routed.

The way the Lithuanians see it, they carried the day with their daring strategy of leaving the battlefield and then coming back. Something they allegedly learned in an earlier war. The way the Poles see it, the Lithuanians turned and fled, only to come back at the end so as not to be complete losers. As you can see , it's hard to draw a completely positive picture of the Lithuanian contribution to the battle. As for the Teutonic Knights, they never really recovered after this loss.

After the battle of Grunwald, there was the battle of Varna in 1444, followed by the fall of Constantinople in 1453. After the fall of Constantinople, the crusaders lost a vital way point on the way tot he Levant. Instead of sending more troops to the Levant, Europe then spent a good deal of time fending off the advancing Turks.
I won't go into the historic irony of the Turks now wanting to join the EU.

Speaking of which...

The Brexit Call We Don't See

I was chatting online with Somebody who voted for 'leave'. He's an educated guy; not necessarily a conservative; and not like some rabid xenophobe. His position was that the Euro project itself was in most part faulty, and therefore doomed to fail. Not only was Brussels faulty as a political organ, the entire Euro project had too many contradictions even before the GFC. Since the GFC, the Euro Zone has been - according to him - patching over the glaring problems, the most problematic of which is Greece and its debt problem. On a plain ledger, if Germany runs a surplus and Greece runs a deficit, Greece has to pay back Germany even though Greece really hasn't the means to do so. If Germany runs a surplus, it effectively constricts growth not just in Germany but also right across the Euro Zone. Yet there is no recourse for Greece or for that matter any other country.

According to him, Germany makes a lot of money exporting stuff it makes at a cheaper price that if they were doing it with Deutsche Marks. Gemran exports are competitive because the Euro currency depresses the price of Germany's exports - This depression of price happens because the entire Euro averages out all the productivity of its member states. Thus Germany clearly benefits from Greece being much less productive. Yet Germany is extra reluctant to share its spoils from this interaction. Why should Greece stick around to be punished by Germany at both ends of the ledger? And if that's the case, what other states are losing out?

He figures the UK is similarly losing out to France and Germany; which is a claim I don't quite get. He argues the Euro project is a house on fire and Brexit is merely the UK getting out of the burning building first. The Scots are crazy for wanting to run back into the burning building. It makes some kind of internal sense. It's not like the handling of Greece made the EU look good or accepting compromise.

The Crappiness Of This New War

Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition

The old war of the 21st century, as in 'the Bush-Blair-Howard Misadventures In Iraq', (a.k.a. the Coalition Of The Unwitting Go To A Quagmire For A Bath) was characterised by a one-sided whup-ass of the industrially and technologically inferior Iraqi forces followed by years of door-to-door combat culminating in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. If it was meant to be morally edifying - and war rarely is such a thing - then the 'BBHMII' was a thoroughly miserable travesty in the morality stakes. Then they pinned it on a woman with low IQ and whistled by in their black limos. All  of which reminds us of the tremendous Monty Python sketch. Just as the Inquisitors start with fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, devotion to the Pope and red uniforms and then their claims degenerate in meaning, the 'BBHMII' started with Shock and Awe and eventually ended up with a brawling kind of war, the sort of which nobody could make any sense.

Then there is Guantanamo Bay prison where people are still kept without trial or warrants as somewhere between insane asylum of the 19th century and a torture chamber. Barack Obama came to power in 2008 promising to close the prison but of course it still exists today. One would think that Obama could easily and readily close that damnable institution by releasing all the prisoners with microchips in their skulls. At least the torture ought to end. The fact that it doesn't end is rather emblematic, and we come to realise Frank Zappa wasn't exactly kidding when he sang that Torture Never Stops. Yes, it's all been one long night of the iron sausage for all of us. It's hard to claim any moral ascendancy when what our side is offering is victimhood in a military prison in Cuba.

Now we're about to go back in and do it all over again, mostly because we can find even more moral revulsion in ISIL/ISOR than we could in Saddam Hussein. Not many people in parliament are expressing objections to the deep hypocrisy and great folly in going back to war in Iraq.

What we can deduce from all of this is that there are certain cultural tropes in our leadership and military that go right back to the Dark Ages, and despite our iPhones and internet connectivity and social media and Lady Gaga and Katy Perry freedoms, our leadership in war is ethically no better than the kind of medieval kings. It is no wonder that something claiming to be an Islamic State and a Caliphate becomes our opposite number and promptly started beheading people like this is the Fall of Constantinople, where the Ottomans fired chopped heads out of bronze canons. We are in essence replaying the nightmares of the past because it amuses us as entertainment in the news cycle.

They Think It's A Real Crusade, Not A Metaphorical One

Some weeks go I noticed ion Facebook that a couple of people with whom I went to school had served in Afghanistan (a.k.a 'The Other Crappy War of the 21st Century'). Couple of good old boys from Sydneys North Shore, 'Phil' and 'Potty' doing their bit for the cause of enduring freedom... I mean 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. There they were, one in the ADF as a soldier and the other as a chaplain. They were smiling like they were having a good time, and maybe they were on their boys' own adventure.

The bit that caught my eye was the big crucifix on the collar of the chaplain 'Potty', which got me thinking, was he walking around Kandahar or Kabul or wherever they were stationed in that uniform? Doubtless he was; and it struck me that he was the living walking talking crusader in a nation of Muslims, wearing that dirty big crucifix on his uniform - losing over the hearts that might have just been won over by our good efforts. It's like spending all the good will you're earning on the slot machine of faith.

How could the ADF not looked like a bunch of Crusaders come to the land of the muslims. It got me depressed. I understand that there are many religious people amongst our services and that they would require spiritual guidance in the business of shooting and killing people and still wanting to go to a Christian heaven (and I do mean that with the utmost ironic contempt). I pity the soldiers who would be getting this spiritual guidance from 'Potty' who in his days as a high school kid was about as emotionally evolved as a raging haemorrhoid; but be that as it may, it made me sick to the pit of my stomach that the ADF thought this was worth the effort.

So you can see I am really thrilled and excited about the prospect of sending 'boots on the ground'; and 'Potty' with them, to offer spiritual guidance to our Rampaging Crusading Christian Solders so they can still go through the eye of the needle into a Christian heaven having dispatched a bunch of Islamist Beheading Bastards to Allah. It's a great concept isn't it? When do they get to sack Jerusalem and fill the streets ankle deep in heathen blood? Looking forward to that in the news cycle!

No, really it's appropriate to say Jesus wept.