1.5 million years ago, pre-modern hominids moved out of Africa, migrated across the Levant, into the Caucasus, past the Carpathian Mountains, north of the Danube, and on to the great vast “mammoth” steppe of grasslands, and great herds of animals. This is where the big brain hominids could hunt and eat the big stomach mammals who lived on the grasses. This huge savannah, which stretched across Europe and Asia and the Bering Sea land bridge all the way to Alaska and northern Canada, nourished these hominids who eventually became the Neanderthal, who then flourished in the southern temperate regions, north of the alpine mountains, along the north and south valleys of the Pyrenees mountains on the present day border of France and Spain, and west to the Atlantic. This was the garden of eden. It was the time of the animals.
And then modern humans came, leaving Africa some 100,000 years ago, again traveling thru the Levant and on to the steppe, and then west and east, all the way to Australia. In southern France and central Spain, about 40,000 years ago, they encountered the Neanderthal, and over next the 12,000 years, as the modern humans flourished, the Neanderthal retreated, first into small areas of France and Spain, and finally to a last stand near Gilbraltor.
We have no archeology of a war. Neanderthal had bigger brains, and stronger bodies, but modern humans had something else, and that something gave them larger group cooperation, better tools, more successful hunting. They unleashed a veritable ‘explosion’ of cultural creativity.
In the river ledge caves of the valleys of the Pyrenees, at Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, and many others, there is the luxuriant, compelling art of these pre-historic modern humans. There are life-size paintings of running, prancing, rearing, and charging horses, bison, tigers and reindeer. The animals are regal and robust, boastful and healthy, herding and crowding, standing off and mocking. They are relishing their lives on these great, lush grasslands, with gleaming eyes, suspicion, intention, pride, and fear. They own the world. Their human artists hold them in awe.
It was the mind’s eye, in these caves, that painted these paintings. Modern humans had something new. They could hold their visual memories, consciously, long enough and intensely enough to recreate the vivid images of these animals in the darkness of the caves. And not just descriptive details, . . no, also details of salience – posture, emotion, and personality.
Intelligence is the strong use of memory. It is rich retrieval of memory, conscious analysis of memory, and parsing of the key elements of memories. This power, the artistic power, the power of the mind’s eye, is the new power that came with modern humans.
Modern humans made success in virtually all of the ecological niches of the world, harvesting the bounty of wild animals.
And then, 10,000 years ago, from the fertile crescent came the farmers, and the Anthropocene, the time of humans, began.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2011-03-19 21:52:522011-03-19 21:52:52In the time of animals
“Like most people, I think that there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of our maps. But this is because I can’t help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it.” Steven Weinberg, New York Review of Books, February 10, 2011.
Great Scientists today hold that it is an open question if anything is really real, and they are pretty sure that we can never really know. They echo the great debate of their towering forebears – Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein.
At the turn of the twentieth century, science turned its attention to the very small, and found the quantum. Max Planck, (whose son Irwin was tortured and hanged by the Nazi’s in 1944, for participating in a plot against Hitler) was investigating the strange creation of light from the heating of matter, when he discovered that energy changes always occurred in discrete quantum jumps. These jumps were mysteriously instantaneous, with no travel in space in between.
Subatomic investigations soon revealed the strange fact that matter and light behave both as discrete particles that collide and bounce, and as continuous waves of flow that peak and trough with patterns of interference. A wave’s mathematical equation seemed to represent the probability of a particle’s location, yet even a single particle was found to act like a wave. Detecting a particle’s location, by measuring its position or momentum, would mysteriously make a particle appear out of the flow of the wave, and then the wave itself would disappear. Reality was a strange chameleon. 100 years later this is still so.
Niels Bohr accepted this. Albert Einstein could not. For Einstein, an observer-independent reality, and a continuous, uninterrupted causality are fundamentals of truth. The Quantum’s instantaneous ‘jumps’- entanglement “spooky action at a distance”, particles created by the act of measurement, these could not be the full story, there must be “hidden variables”.
“God doesn’t play dice.” “Do you really believe the moon doesn’t exist when you are not looking at it?”
In this, and only in this, Einstein has so far been wrong.
Bohr grasped that science was encountering a fundamental limit of knowledge. We can only know what is knowable – measurable attributes, which must be either/or essences – like the quantum, like bits. We can only know the information of reality, not its ultimate essence. We can’t know what isn’t measureable.
“any property or feature of reality “out there” can only be based on information we receive. . . the distinction between information and reality is devoid of any meaning. . . information is quantized in truth-values of propositions. . .the quantization in physics is the same as the quantization of information.” Anton Zeilinger, Science and Ultimate Reality, 2004
Bohr may not have realized that he was bringing forth the science of information. At a meeting in Europe, he and Claude Shannon crossed paths. Shannon went on to create the modern theory of information, the theory that led to computers.
“Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”
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Seth Kantor was a news correspondent in Dallas the day JFK was killed, and he knew Jack Ruby. At Parkland Hospital, just after the assassination, Ruby tapped Kantor on the back, and said hello. Kantor is absolutely sure of this. Later, Ruby denied ever being there.
“What would make Jack Ruby seek out a news reporter he knew at the hospital on Friday and then, after Sunday, deny having been there? It’s because Ruby was not involved in a plot to kill anyone on Friday. But by Sunday he was.” The Ruby Cover-up, Seth Kantor, 1978.
In 1959, the mob has difficulties with Castro’s Cuba. A Chicago ‘messenger boy’ – Jack Ruby, moves to Dallas, which is a ‘border town’, a stopover to Mexico and Havana. Jack Ruby visits Santos Trafficante, who was in comfortable house arrest in a Havana jail. By 1963 Ruby is heavily in debt. On the same day that Lee Harvey Oswald moves to Dallas from New Orleans – June 5, 1963 – Ruby takes a call from New Orleans, and then promptly travels there, where he has phone conversations with Chicago gangsters. He visits Cuba. On November 11, 1963, he gives power of attorney over his finances to his tax lawyer. He installs a safe. He calls associates of James Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and John Roselli. He meets with a crime syndicate pay master. He becomes very anxious, and gets prescriptions for tranquilizers. He visits Las Vegas. On November 19, 1963 he tells his tax attorney that his debts will soon be settled.
During the JFR assassination, Ruby is nearby, at the offices of the Dallas Morning News. In the evening, he is trying to get into the interrogation room, with a gun in his pocket, where Oswald is held, but is turned away. That night he is with reporters when Oswald is brought before them. He corrects the District Attorney who misnames the Fair Play for Cuba Committee! Very late that night he meets with a Dallas police officer, Harry N.Olsen, an officer with a poor record, an officer who rents from the sister of the woman who rents to Lee Harvey Oswald.
On November 24, at 11:17 AM, Ruby is at the Western Union station next to the police station, just before Oswald’s transfer. A car horn sounds. At 11:21 Ruby is stepping in front of a policeman to shoot Oswald, the fatal way, into the spleen and across the upper abdomen. He is visibly nervous until he knows that Oswald has died.
In June 1964, Earl Warren visits Ruby, who has been sentenced to die. The transcript is a must read. Ruby talks of things not asked that seem like hints. He asks eight times to be taken to Washington. He is emphatic that his life is in danger. “I can’t say it here . . .why my act was committed”. “I have been used for a purpose“.
Ruby fails a lie detector test on questions about his comings and goings in the police station. He passes on: no he was not part of a conspiracy, no he did not know Oswald beforehand . . . .and no he was not at Parkland.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2011-03-06 22:46:102011-03-06 22:46:10Who was Jack Ruby?
“The utopias in summer 1941 had been four: a lightning victory that would destroy the Soviet Union in weeks; a Hunger Plan that would starve thirty million people in months; a Final Solution that would eliminate European Jews after the war; and a General Plan Ost that would make of the western Soviet Union a German colony.” The BloodLands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder, 2010.
In their Hunger Plan, the Nazi’s planned to feed German soldiers and German civilians by intentionally starving the millions of Soviet citizens they would conquer. They would destroy the cities, and the industry in Ukraine and Southern Russia, and “the terrain would be returned to natural forest“. They particularly wanted the forests of Poland, for hunting. The eastern Soviet Union and Ukraine would be returned to a preindustrial state, and Germany would become “a massive land empire in Europe” to eventually “rival the British and the Americans“. They would do to the Ukraine, for Germany, what Stalin had already done, for Bolshevism, – starve the population of that valuable bread basket nation. A Leningrad, starved “from the face of the earth”, would be given to the Finn’s. This was directed, in writing, on May 23, 1941.
As time fades, there can be a temptation to think of the Nazi’s as like other conquering leaders in history, albeit brutal, sort of like we think of Genghis Kahn. But no, they were, from the beginning, vicious Ted Bundy killers, bent on murder. And murder they did.
To recount, only partially, in the East, in 1941, and these are civilians, not soldiers, mostly shot point blank outside of their homes: 72,000 at Ponary, Lithuania, in Latvia, 69,750, in Estonia, 5,000, in Bialystok, 1000, 19,655 in Eastern Poland, 13,778 between Belarus and Ukraine, 23,600 outside of Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine, 33,761 from Kiev at Babi Yar, 12,000 at Dnipropetrovsk, 10,000 in Kharkiv, 6,000 in Mahileu, Belarus, 14,000 in Riga, 17,000 from Rivne, Ukraine, in the Sosensky woods. In 1942, the remaining 10,000 of Rivne, at Kostopil, Ukraine, 10,000 at Hirka Polonka, from Kovel, 14,000 near Kamin-Kashyrshkyi, 6,624 and then another 5,000 from Minsk, at Tuchinka.
Notes are found. “My beloved Mama! There was no escape. They brought us here from outside the ghetto, and now we must die a terrible death.” “One wants to live, and they won’t allow it.” “I am strangely calm, though it is hard to die at twenty“.
Himmler is treated to ‘show’ executions in Minsk, and this is made into a movie, for enjoyment back in Berlin. Another 3,412 are shot in Minsk. German SS try to kill all Jews ‘in their territory’ by April 20 to honor Hitler’s birthday. A ‘death facility’ built in Minsk kills 40,000, and 208,089 are killed in Belarus, 30,000 alone by one monster SS Commander, Oskar Dirlewanger .
“As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War“.
As the war against Russia failed, the Hunger Plan became the Final Solution. Murder became the whole point of the war. “A war to destroy the Soviet Union became a war to murder the Jews.”
In 1914, Petr Durnovo, police chief and interior minister of Russia, wrote a letter to Tsar Nicholas II. He foresaw the disaster that World War I would be for Russia, and he urged the Tsar to change course. It was not meant to be.
In the early 1900’s, in America and in Europe and Russia, material progress was improving quality of life. People were living better, and populations were growing. But productivity was not increasing as fast. And so nations needed land, and access to colonies for food and resources. And they went after them. And this led to war.
Durnovo foresaw that the continental empire of Germany would seek to extend its power into the seas, where it would clash with England. As each would not have the power to overcome the other, both will build alliances with others, a world war would follow. Russia was allied with France, and had normally been friendly with Germany. Since the Russ0-Japanese War, however, Russia renounced its “traditional policy of distrust of England” and created the Triple Entente with France and England against Germany. This was the looming disaster for Russia, for Russia would bear the brunt of any continental assault on Germany. Petr Durnovo knew the state of modern armaments and “military technique“. He could foresee the ghastly results.
Durnovo was sure Russia would lose. She was not adequately prepared, weakened as he saw it, by the Tsar’s naive political liberalization. “The fault lies, in a considerable measure, in our young legislative institutions, which have taken a dilettante interest in our defenses, but are far from grasping the seriousness of the political situation arising from the new orientation which, with the sympathy of the public, has been followed in recent years by our Ministry of Foreign Affairs“. “Every previous war has invariably been followed by something new in the realm of military technique, but the technical backwardness of our industries does not create favorable conditions for our adoption of the new inventions.”
He reasoned that Russia didn’t need land, didn’t need colonies, and so didn’t need to go to war. He knew that Russia was on the precipice of social upheaval as the masses awakened. “An especially favorable soil for social upheavals is found in Russia, where the masses undoubtedly profess, unconsciously, the principals of Socialism. . . The Russian masses, whether workmen or peasants, are not looking for political rights, which they neither want nor comprehend. . . The peasant dreams of obtaining a gratuitous share of somebody else’s land; the workman, of getting hold of the entire capital and profits of the manufacturer. . .Beyond this they have no aspirations.” He knew a great war would break the nation’s finances, and its frail political cohesion.
A defeated Germany, too, would degenerate. “The effect of a disastrous war upon the population will be too severe not to bring to the surface destructive tendencies, now deeply hidden.” The widespread suffering “will offer fertile soil for anti-agrarian and later anti-social propaganda by the Socialist parties.”
And so after World War I came the Nazi’s and the Bolsheviks.
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In the time of animals
/in All, art, Ideas1.5 million years ago, pre-modern hominids moved out of Africa, migrated across the Levant, into the Caucasus, past the Carpathian Mountains, north of the Danube, and on to the great vast “mammoth” steppe of grasslands, and great herds of animals. This is where the big brain hominids could hunt and eat the big stomach mammals who lived on the grasses. This huge savannah, which stretched across Europe and Asia and the Bering Sea land bridge all the way to Alaska and northern Canada, nourished these hominids who eventually became the Neanderthal, who then flourished in the southern temperate regions, north of the alpine mountains, along the north and south valleys of the Pyrenees mountains on the present day border of France and Spain, and west to the Atlantic. This was the garden of eden. It was the time of the animals.
And then modern humans came, leaving Africa some 100,000 years ago, again traveling thru the Levant and on to the steppe, and then west and east, all the way to Australia. In southern France and central Spain, about 40,000 years ago, they encountered the Neanderthal, and over next the 12,000 years, as the modern humans flourished, the Neanderthal retreated, first into small areas of France and Spain, and finally to a last stand near Gilbraltor.
We have no archeology of a war. Neanderthal had bigger brains, and stronger bodies, but modern humans had something else, and that something gave them larger group cooperation, better tools, more successful hunting. They unleashed a veritable ‘explosion’ of cultural creativity.
In the river ledge caves of the valleys of the Pyrenees, at Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, and many others, there is the luxuriant, compelling art of these pre-historic modern humans. There are life-size paintings of running, prancing, rearing, and charging horses, bison, tigers and reindeer. The animals are regal and robust, boastful and healthy, herding and crowding, standing off and mocking. They are relishing their lives on these great, lush grasslands, with gleaming eyes, suspicion, intention, pride, and fear. They own the world. Their human artists hold them in awe.
It was the mind’s eye, in these caves, that painted these paintings. Modern humans had something new. They could hold their visual memories, consciously, long enough and intensely enough to recreate the vivid images of these animals in the darkness of the caves. And not just descriptive details, . . no, also details of salience – posture, emotion, and personality.
Intelligence is the strong use of memory. It is rich retrieval of memory, conscious analysis of memory, and parsing of the key elements of memories. This power, the artistic power, the power of the mind’s eye, is the new power that came with modern humans.
Modern humans made success in virtually all of the ecological niches of the world, harvesting the bounty of wild animals.
And then, 10,000 years ago, from the fertile crescent came the farmers, and the Anthropocene, the time of humans, began.
Einstein and Bohr Reality
/in All, Ideas“Like most people, I think that there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of our maps. But this is because I can’t help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it.” Steven Weinberg, New York Review of Books, February 10, 2011.
Great Scientists today hold that it is an open question if anything is really real, and they are pretty sure that we can never really know. They echo the great debate of their towering forebears – Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein.
At the turn of the twentieth century, science turned its attention to the very small, and found the quantum. Max Planck, (whose son Irwin was tortured and hanged by the Nazi’s in 1944, for participating in a plot against Hitler) was investigating the strange creation of light from the heating of matter, when he discovered that energy changes always occurred in discrete quantum jumps. These jumps were mysteriously instantaneous, with no travel in space in between.
Subatomic investigations soon revealed the strange fact that matter and light behave both as discrete particles that collide and bounce, and as continuous waves of flow that peak and trough with patterns of interference. A wave’s mathematical equation seemed to represent the probability of a particle’s location, yet even a single particle was found to act like a wave. Detecting a particle’s location, by measuring its position or momentum, would mysteriously make a particle appear out of the flow of the wave, and then the wave itself would disappear. Reality was a strange chameleon. 100 years later this is still so.
Niels Bohr accepted this. Albert Einstein could not. For Einstein, an observer-independent reality, and a continuous, uninterrupted causality are fundamentals of truth. The Quantum’s instantaneous ‘jumps’- entanglement “spooky action at a distance”, particles created by the act of measurement, these could not be the full story, there must be “hidden variables”.
“God doesn’t play dice.” “Do you really believe the moon doesn’t exist when you are not looking at it?”
In this, and only in this, Einstein has so far been wrong.
Bohr grasped that science was encountering a fundamental limit of knowledge. We can only know what is knowable – measurable attributes, which must be either/or essences – like the quantum, like bits. We can only know the information of reality, not its ultimate essence. We can’t know what isn’t measureable.
“any property or feature of reality “out there” can only be based on information we receive. . . the distinction between information and reality is devoid of any meaning. . . information is quantized in truth-values of propositions. . .the quantization in physics is the same as the quantization of information.” Anton Zeilinger, Science and Ultimate Reality, 2004
Bohr may not have realized that he was bringing forth the science of information. At a meeting in Europe, he and Claude Shannon crossed paths. Shannon went on to create the modern theory of information, the theory that led to computers.
“Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”
Who was Jack Ruby?
/in All, PoliticsSeth Kantor was a news correspondent in Dallas the day JFK was killed, and he knew Jack Ruby. At Parkland Hospital, just after the assassination, Ruby tapped Kantor on the back, and said hello. Kantor is absolutely sure of this. Later, Ruby denied ever being there.
“What would make Jack Ruby seek out a news reporter he knew at the hospital on Friday and then, after Sunday, deny having been there? It’s because Ruby was not involved in a plot to kill anyone on Friday. But by Sunday he was.” The Ruby Cover-up, Seth Kantor, 1978.
In 1959, the mob has difficulties with Castro’s Cuba. A Chicago ‘messenger boy’ – Jack Ruby, moves to Dallas, which is a ‘border town’, a stopover to Mexico and Havana. Jack Ruby visits Santos Trafficante, who was in comfortable house arrest in a Havana jail. By 1963 Ruby is heavily in debt. On the same day that Lee Harvey Oswald moves to Dallas from New Orleans – June 5, 1963 – Ruby takes a call from New Orleans, and then promptly travels there, where he has phone conversations with Chicago gangsters. He visits Cuba. On November 11, 1963, he gives power of attorney over his finances to his tax lawyer. He installs a safe. He calls associates of James Hoffa, Carlos Marcello, and John Roselli. He meets with a crime syndicate pay master. He becomes very anxious, and gets prescriptions for tranquilizers. He visits Las Vegas. On November 19, 1963 he tells his tax attorney that his debts will soon be settled.
During the JFR assassination, Ruby is nearby, at the offices of the Dallas Morning News. In the evening, he is trying to get into the interrogation room, with a gun in his pocket, where Oswald is held, but is turned away. That night he is with reporters when Oswald is brought before them. He corrects the District Attorney who misnames the Fair Play for Cuba Committee! Very late that night he meets with a Dallas police officer, Harry N.Olsen, an officer with a poor record, an officer who rents from the sister of the woman who rents to Lee Harvey Oswald.
On November 24, at 11:17 AM, Ruby is at the Western Union station next to the police station, just before Oswald’s transfer. A car horn sounds. At 11:21 Ruby is stepping in front of a policeman to shoot Oswald, the fatal way, into the spleen and across the upper abdomen. He is visibly nervous until he knows that Oswald has died.
In June 1964, Earl Warren visits Ruby, who has been sentenced to die. The transcript is a must read. Ruby talks of things not asked that seem like hints. He asks eight times to be taken to Washington. He is emphatic that his life is in danger. “I can’t say it here . . .why my act was committed”. “I have been used for a purpose“.
Ruby fails a lie detector test on questions about his comings and goings in the police station. He passes on: no he was not part of a conspiracy, no he did not know Oswald beforehand . . . .and no he was not at Parkland.
Murder Leaders
/in All, Books, PoliticsWhen criminals take over . . .
“The utopias in summer 1941 had been four: a lightning victory that would destroy the Soviet Union in weeks; a Hunger Plan that would starve thirty million people in months; a Final Solution that would eliminate European Jews after the war; and a General Plan Ost that would make of the western Soviet Union a German colony.” The BloodLands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Timothy Snyder, 2010.
In their Hunger Plan, the Nazi’s planned to feed German soldiers and German civilians by intentionally starving the millions of Soviet citizens they would conquer. They would destroy the cities, and the industry in Ukraine and Southern Russia, and “the terrain would be returned to natural forest“. They particularly wanted the forests of Poland, for hunting. The eastern Soviet Union and Ukraine would be returned to a preindustrial state, and Germany would become “a massive land empire in Europe” to eventually “rival the British and the Americans“. They would do to the Ukraine, for Germany, what Stalin had already done, for Bolshevism, – starve the population of that valuable bread basket nation. A Leningrad, starved “from the face of the earth”, would be given to the Finn’s. This was directed, in writing, on May 23, 1941.
As time fades, there can be a temptation to think of the Nazi’s as like other conquering leaders in history, albeit brutal, sort of like we think of Genghis Kahn. But no, they were, from the beginning, vicious Ted Bundy killers, bent on murder. And murder they did.
To recount, only partially, in the East, in 1941, and these are civilians, not soldiers, mostly shot point blank outside of their homes: 72,000 at Ponary, Lithuania, in Latvia, 69,750, in Estonia, 5,000, in Bialystok, 1000, 19,655 in Eastern Poland, 13,778 between Belarus and Ukraine, 23,600 outside of Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine, 33,761 from Kiev at Babi Yar, 12,000 at Dnipropetrovsk, 10,000 in Kharkiv, 6,000 in Mahileu, Belarus, 14,000 in Riga, 17,000 from Rivne, Ukraine, in the Sosensky woods. In 1942, the remaining 10,000 of Rivne, at Kostopil, Ukraine, 10,000 at Hirka Polonka, from Kovel, 14,000 near Kamin-Kashyrshkyi, 6,624 and then another 5,000 from Minsk, at Tuchinka.
Notes are found. “My beloved Mama! There was no escape. They brought us here from outside the ghetto, and now we must die a terrible death.” “One wants to live, and they won’t allow it.” “I am strangely calm, though it is hard to die at twenty“.
Himmler is treated to ‘show’ executions in Minsk, and this is made into a movie, for enjoyment back in Berlin. Another 3,412 are shot in Minsk. German SS try to kill all Jews ‘in their territory’ by April 20 to honor Hitler’s birthday. A ‘death facility’ built in Minsk kills 40,000, and 208,089 are killed in Belarus, 30,000 alone by one monster SS Commander, Oskar Dirlewanger .
“As many Soviet prisoners of war died on a single given day in autumn 1941 as did British and American prisoners of war over the course of the entire Second World War“.
As the war against Russia failed, the Hunger Plan became the Final Solution. Murder became the whole point of the war. “A war to destroy the Soviet Union became a war to murder the Jews.”
Warning the Tsar
/in All, PoliticsIn 1914, Petr Durnovo, police chief and interior minister of Russia, wrote a letter to Tsar Nicholas II. He foresaw the disaster that World War I would be for Russia, and he urged the Tsar to change course. It was not meant to be.
In the early 1900’s, in America and in Europe and Russia, material progress was improving quality of life. People were living better, and populations were growing. But productivity was not increasing as fast. And so nations needed land, and access to colonies for food and resources. And they went after them. And this led to war.
Durnovo foresaw that the continental empire of Germany would seek to extend its power into the seas, where it would clash with England. As each would not have the power to overcome the other, both will build alliances with others, a world war would follow. Russia was allied with France, and had normally been friendly with Germany. Since the Russ0-Japanese War, however, Russia renounced its “traditional policy of distrust of England” and created the Triple Entente with France and England against Germany. This was the looming disaster for Russia, for Russia would bear the brunt of any continental assault on Germany. Petr Durnovo knew the state of modern armaments and “military technique“. He could foresee the ghastly results.
Durnovo was sure Russia would lose. She was not adequately prepared, weakened as he saw it, by the Tsar’s naive political liberalization. “The fault lies, in a considerable measure, in our young legislative institutions, which have taken a dilettante interest in our defenses, but are far from grasping the seriousness of the political situation arising from the new orientation which, with the sympathy of the public, has been followed in recent years by our Ministry of Foreign Affairs“. “Every previous war has invariably been followed by something new in the realm of military technique, but the technical backwardness of our industries does not create favorable conditions for our adoption of the new inventions.”
He reasoned that Russia didn’t need land, didn’t need colonies, and so didn’t need to go to war. He knew that Russia was on the precipice of social upheaval as the masses awakened. “An especially favorable soil for social upheavals is found in Russia, where the masses undoubtedly profess, unconsciously, the principals of Socialism. . . The Russian masses, whether workmen or peasants, are not looking for political rights, which they neither want nor comprehend. . . The peasant dreams of obtaining a gratuitous share of somebody else’s land; the workman, of getting hold of the entire capital and profits of the manufacturer. . .Beyond this they have no aspirations.” He knew a great war would break the nation’s finances, and its frail political cohesion.
A defeated Germany, too, would degenerate. “The effect of a disastrous war upon the population will be too severe not to bring to the surface destructive tendencies, now deeply hidden.” The widespread suffering “will offer fertile soil for anti-agrarian and later anti-social propaganda by the Socialist parties.”
And so after World War I came the Nazi’s and the Bolsheviks.