One hundred years ago today, the bloodiest year yet in Europe’s long history was coming to its painful conclusion. On December 17, 1916, the guns fell silent around Verdun, a wrecked fortress-city in northeastern France, for the first time in 10 months.
The catastrophe had commenced on February 21, when German forces launched what was supposed to be a limited offensive around Verdun. The Western Front had grown static by the end of 1914, when the quick, decisive victories that all Europe’s armies anticipated would occur failed to materialize. Unable to achieve breakthroughs, soldiers on all sides dug in to avoid shells and machine gun fire. Soon the opposing trenches ran from the Swiss frontier all the way to the English Channel.
The big missed story for 1916 is the Brusilov offensive, Imperial Russia’s last great success on the battlefield. Named after Aleksei Brusilov, the tsar’s best general and the architect of the victory, it began on June 4—the “glorious fourth of June” in Russian telling.
German help saved Austria-Hungary and its defeated army in Galicia in the summer of 1916, and soon Brusilov’s battlefield triumph devolved into the familiar pattern of offensives begetting counteroffensives, producing nothing but mountains of corpses. By the time the brutal slugfest petered out in late September, the Austrians had lost almost a million men, including more than 400,000 taken prisoner. Brusilov had nearly knocked Vienna out of the war, having taken considerable ground in east Galicia, but not quite.
Moreover, Russia’s losses in the end were as great as Austria-Hungary’s, and morale at home began to suffer as hopes of winning the war gave way to horrific casualties. Brusilov’s victory would be Imperial Russia’s last. Less than five months after the offensive ended, Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, beginning that country’s decades-long nightmare of revolution, civil war and Communist mass repression that would make the bloodbath in Galicia seem small.
France triumphed at Verdun, in a sense, but the cost of that victory dogged the country for decades to come. In 1917, the French army mutinied rather than endure another such victory. The Germans indeed did not pass at Verdun, but the bloodbath required to halt them left France shell-shocked. The less-than-stellar performance of the French military in spring 1940, when the Germans invaded again, this time successfully, can be attributed in no small part to the lingering effects of Verdun.
The British, too, took from the Somme that they must never do it again. The horrific cost—above all the futile July 1 bloodbath—reverberates in Britain today. The 100th anniversary of the offensive’s start was commemorated this summer with sorrow and regret. It says something important that virtually all Britons have heard of the Somme but probably not one in a hundred knows anything about the Hundred Days of 1918, when Haig finally broke the back of the German army in the greatest victories in the long history of British arms, thereby winning the war.
One hundred years ago, Europe was busy killing itself and its civilization. In truth, that self-confident continent never recovered from 1916, when all participants in the Great War became fully committed to final victory—or defeat—so great was the cost of that terrible year. Such unprecedented horror created the world we are still living in today, with lingering consequences great and small.
#1
Maybe if we had taken Jefferson's approach embargo all trade with the lot but offered the offices for negotiation would have been the better choice than getting dragged into the never ending morass so many of our ancestors came here to escape.
[Breitbart] Breitbart News National Security Editor Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Friday that "the alpha males are back" when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
When Hannity asked if Dr. Gorka agreed with President Obama’s assertion he had followed the best possible course in Syria, Gorka replied, "No, because I live in the real world, Sean."
"It’s a catastrophe," he continued. "Remember the red lines? The real reason he calls it ISIL and not ISIS is because he doesn’t want to remind people that ’S’ stands for Syria, and that he drew the red lines again, and again, and again. And what happened? Assad kept on marching. The jihadis kept on marching."
"The fact is, this is all going to end on January the 21st. Our foreign policy has been a disaster. We’ve neglected and abandoned our allies. We’ve emboldened our enemies," said Gorka. "The message I have, it’s a very simple one. It’s a bumper sticker, Sean: The era of the Pajama Boy is over January 20th, and the alpha males are back."
#6
From what I've read about Mattis the perfumed princes who have half a brain will leave before January 21. The rest will be riffed by Mad Dog's interview process. Power point commandos are doomed.
...Still, Trump might surprise observers. It is already emerging that he does, in fact, have clear preferences in global affairs. It seems he likes Russia (or, specifically, Vladimir Putin) and dislikes China, the two most powerful international actors other than the US. Trump probably admires Putin as a strong, charismatic leader who is intent on making Russia great again. Trump’s nomination of Rex Tillerson, a man with excellent contacts in Moscow, as Secretary of State signals a planned thaw in American-Russian relations.
In contrast, when Trump looks at China, he sees an economic rival that needs to be cut down to size. Trump feels that American industries and jobs have been stolen by China, and that Beijing is playing unfairly with its currency and taxes on US-made products. Significantly, Trump has already departed from America’s qualified "One China" policy (dating back to 1979) by taking a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. This, together with the presence of strong Taiwan backers in the incoming administration, and with Trump’s recent meeting with Prime Minister Abe of Japan, hint that Trump might be heading towards a policy of confrontation with China.
It is possible that these moves are purely tactical, and are aimed at securing a better opening position in negotiations over elements of the US-China bilateral relationship. But Trump will soon hear from his foreign policy and defense advisers that a rising China is a major challenge to "making America great again" in a geopolitical sense.
Acting on his basic instincts, Trump may well be capable of grand Kissingerian diplomacy, without possessing Kissinger’s historic, intellectual and strategic baggage. Trump could be aiming for détente with Russia and the enlistment of Putin against China.
#1
I don't want a new world order. I just want to have strong borders and protection from the State and islamic nutcases. And to be left alone by our own govt.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
12/19/2016 18:49 Comments ||
Top||
#2
If he keeps just 2 or 3 of his major campaign promises (e.g. repeal obamacare) then he's already one of the better presidents. Why over promise?
[The Hill] Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is accusing CIA Director John Brennan of leaking Russian hacking information to the press and is calling for an investigation into "the hit job" that King says Brennan is conducting against President-elect Donald Trump.
"That's what infuriates me about this, Martha, is that we have John Brennan, supposedly John Brennan, leaking to The Washington Post, to a biased newspaper like The New York Times, findings and conclusion that is he's not telling the intelligence committee," King told ABC’s "This Week" on Sunday.
King said while he is "willing to accept" that the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee, it is "uncertain" whether or not the Russians were responsible for the hack of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails.
"It seems like to me -- there should be an investigation what the Russians did but also an investigation of John Brennan and the hit job he seems to be orchestrating against the president-elect," he said.
The Washington Post reported earlier this month on a secret CIA assessment that found Russia had meddled in the U.S. election in an effort to help Trump win.
#4
Gotta say it with that New Yawk twang: Petah King, blowhahd...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/19/2016 7:32 Comments ||
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#5
I think the article got it wrong. The CIA Director John Brennan is a Muslim convert and as such he is meddling in the election to try to keep Trump from the presidency. He needs to either show the proof or shut up and retract his previous comments.
#6
Yes Dopey, John Brennan is said to be a Saudi asset
Saudi has money and influence, spent decades getting its allies all the way up the tree in government, intel agencies etc.
Now the Saudis are trying to drag the US into war with Russia so as to defeat Russia/Iran in their proxy war in Syria
Islamofascists are our enemy our leaders are STUPID for not always siding with the secular against the theocrat and dropping the hammer on them after 9/11
Pamela Geller is right: in any war between the civilised man and the savage you back the civilised man. The enemy of our enemy was NOT our friend!!
Just like Obammer! [FOX] Saddam Hussein was an inept dictator during his final years in charge, thought 9/11 would bring Iraq and America closer together and took partial blame for his eventual fall from power after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to a new book by one of the men who interrogated the ex-Iraqi president.
The revelations are contained in the upcoming John Nixon book "Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein." Nixon was a CIA analyst in Iraq who had been assigned the task of finding Hussein, and then getting information out of him. But he quickly found that "Saddam seemed clueless."
"He was inattentive to what his government was doing, had no real plan for the defense of Iraq and could not comprehend the immensity of the approaching storm," Nixon wrote in the book excerpt published by The Daily Mail.
Hussein, who was hanged and killed in 2006 for crimes against humanity, was frequently defiant while being interviewed and even mocked the U.S. rationale for the war: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
"You found a traitor who led you to Saddam Hussein. Isn’t there one traitor who can tell you where the WMDs are?" Hussein said shortly after he was found hiding, dirty and grizzled, inside an underground "spider hole" on Dec. 13, 2003.
#1
So the guy seemed clueless and distracted? I dunno. Maybe because his personal empire came suddenly crashing down. The gravy train stopped and he was hiding in a hole. Yeah, that might do it.
h/t Instapundit
In 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the danger of a military-industrial complex. This powerful public-private collaboration, he said, had the potential to exert "unwarranted influence" over America's democratic processes. A half-century later, there are still those on the left who cling to this fear. But it seems that Eisenhower's warning had its intended effect--and perhaps then some. In 1961 defense spending constituted 9.1 percent of the gross domestic product, and there were 2,483,000 uniformed military personnel. Today, defense spending is 3.2 percent of GDP and 1,390,000 men and women serve in the uniformed military. If this behemoth is threatening America's democratic processes, it is not doing so very successfully.
There is, however, another interlocking public-private collaboration that is at once more insidious, more powerful, and more straightforwardly partisan: the liberal ideological complex. We do not always see this collaboration so clearly, because we tend to view each aspect of it as unique and not part of a larger picture. We look, for example, at public sector unions as a labor issue. We look at funding for Planned Parenthood through the lens of abortion policy. We look at EPA regulations and grants in terms of global warming and job destruction. And so on and so forth, down to the smallest, most narrowly tailored grant awards of the federal government.
Yet in each of these cases, the complex functions in essentially the same way. Federal funds are provided for organizations that carry out liberal policies. In turn, these groups employ like-minded staff and both the leadership and the staff of these groups contribute money, time, and services to the politicians who favor this use of federal funds. This creates a vicious circle in which campaign funds are indirectly skimmed off the top of taxpayer-funded organizations, all in the service of liberal ideology.
When progressives helped to replace the spoils system with government by so-called experts, they aimed to professionalize the government. The goal was to put policy decisions into the hands of intelligent and highly trained bureaucrats who would know the interests of Americans better than average Americans did themselves. Here is the basis for the extraordinary willfulness of progressive government, a matter that has been remarked upon frequently.
What has been less clearly observed is the effect of progressive government upon the governing class itself.
...While there was perhaps never any such thing as objectivity in governance, the belief that there was kept executive branch actions within certain bounds and restrained partisanship and ideological predispositions. So too did the traditional idea that except for national emergencies and wars, government spending and government revenues should be kept in rough balance.
This world is gone. Over the past decades, we have seen the rise of executive branch governance in the service of the liberal ideological state. This kind of governance is marked by four characteristics: (1) a bias toward increasing the size and scope of government across every department and agency, no matter which political party controls the White House or Congress; (2) a nonmilitary executive branch workforce comprised overwhelmingly (though in different degrees in different departments) of liberal officials, who are ideologically disposed to support this growth, and who are no longer representative of the populace as a whole; (3) a broad support system of direct government funding for liberal groups that reinforces the bias toward ever larger and more intrusive government; and (4) the development of a privileged set of rules and rewards for the governing experts (including compensation levels, bonuses, guaranteed job security, defined benefit retirement systems, and a different set of standards by which to measure their own actions as opposed to those of the governed). That's the dragon that Sir Donald will have to take on
#3
President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the danger of a military-industrial complex.
However, in the same speech he also warned -
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
#5
And the Dems used an earlier version of the playbook on his calling Eisenhower, lazy because he delegated work and dumb...can you imagine calling Eisenhower dumb?
They've used that same ploy with every Republican president since. They called Reagan lazy and dumb and they called George W lazy and dumb...
[AmericanThinker] Decades ago while in high school I read John Dos Passos’s USA. It was published in the 1930s before television or cable news. But it presaged well the strange mixture of important and ridiculous news we receive today. News today is largely fashioned into narratives by mostly young, unworldly reporters and biased news editors, repeated on TV by well-coiffed, fashionably garbed and cosmetically buffed up news readers, jazzed up by often highly biased photo editors and presented on a plate to passive consumers.
When I read USA, my hometown had -- like most larger cities -- two major newspapers, one liberal, the other conservative, and like most homes we got both and read both so we had a fairer picture of what was happening in the world. The reporters were often grizzled veterans of the world who drank hard, smoked a lot, and believed no one or nothing without evidence.
With the advent of television and the monopolization of print markets it seems to me we lost the ability to forensically analyze the news; we have become passive consumers and got what we deserved -- propaganda, largely megaphoning the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democratic Party and various “nonprofit” organizations who promote scare stories about food, health, and the weather and challenge wars only when a Republican is in office. To be sure, there are some fine people (operating largely online) who take the time to read the accounts with a critical eye. Among the best are James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, bloggers Don Surber, Glenn Reynolds, Sheryl Attkisson, and Tom Maguire. If you read them daily you may reacquire this lost, but important art.
This week the clash between fake and real news became even more obvious.
Sharyl Attkisson who has sued the Department of Justice and the U.S. Postal Service for matters relating to intrusions on her computer and who is known for her outstanding reportage, took aim this week at the Obama-Clinton suggestion that Clinton lost because of fake news reports. Obama called “fake news” a “dust cloud of nonsense” and Clinton dubbed it “an epidemic”. Much more at the link
#1
In Germany and I suppose in other countries news is currently going the same way as here. Contrary opinion is fake news to the established order of things. Fake News.
Then this; Heiko Maas wants to up to five years in prison for "fake news"? the end of the German Journalists Association (Djv) is coming
Heiko Maas has justice courts calls against fake news in social networks. Should, therefore, the entire image-editing now spend behind bars.
The Spirit of the "Guardianship and Regency Government" - a slogan of the gdr-Civil Rights Movement of 1989-seems to be back. It also fits the recent announcement by the minister for internal affairs Boris Pisto Rius, you'll need in Germany for journalists a new " Official Press Card ", the authorities can guarantee you a professional rapporteur ' years ago ".
The New Id should " by recognised bodies.
It is, that's for sure, and in order. The established want themselves, without interference from other, decide what truth is and who is a journalist. Since they apparently even in this increasingly use of propaganda to further their credibility is waning, which, in turn, increased the pressure of public opinion "under control". There is a vicious circle, a delusional, ghostly staging in whose current act the chief propagandist themselves become fighters for the pure truth.
The audience for this performance is hardly a standing ovation.
A brief look at recent history shows why the worry more than is justified. For example, in 1990, there were almost all newspapers and television stations that Iraqi soldiers in occupied kuwait infants from incubators and cracks on the cold floor die miserably. The news hit, the "International Community" was outraged and George Bush could his long-planned invasion of Iraq started.
What followed was the first Iraq war, sanctions, and around 1.500.000 deaths. It turned out later that the story was a perfect lie the PR Agency Hill & Knowlton on behalf of the Kuwaiti government in exile. A hoax or "fake news", as you can today, so to speak.
Almost ten years later, in April 1999, the German media also showed how far-reaching "fake news" Mingle. In Kosovo, the serbs pursued a " Horseshoe plan "; kosovars in catacombs were rounded up, humanity needs now is a " second " Prevent Auschwitz. Also in the news ran these stories, as in a mirror and all other so "serious" quality media. The Germans believed the stories that were outraged and the red-Green Government could the people on the first German aggression. Since 1945 The truth of these stories? It was lies, "fake news", about 13.000 victims.
That "fake news" are of paramount body, proved us secretary of state Colin Powell on 5. February 2003 in front of the un security council. Would faktenreich - today it looks more like "post" - in fact he presented evidence from which clearly showed that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. And since the source yes beyond any doubt, showed the media worldwide Powell's Powerpoint slides and bush jr., Blair and their ' Coalition of the willing ' to back for the second Iraq war. Weapons of mass destruction were found, Powell's " evidence " were forgeries, the reports of " fake news ".
Sources:
Justice Minister calls for tough action against "fake news"
http://de.reuters.com/article/deutschland-internet-fake-news-idDEKBN1470DO
Part Commentary from the " fake news "- hysteria and the new " Guardian scientific state ". by Paul Schreyer
http://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=36055
Fake news? It's an old hat
http://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=36218
#Fakenews #post in fact
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#2
The reporters were often grizzled veterans of the world who drank hard, smoked a lot, and believed no one or nothing without evidence.
That was the old Master-Journeyman-Apprentice trade times, before academics got into the act and the money flow to 'certify' the process with a piece of paper and indoctrinate along the way. See - Academic-Technological Complex
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Hill] Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) is accusing CIA Director John Brennan of leaking Russian hacking information to the press and is calling for an investigation into "the hit job" that King says Brennan is conducting against President-elect Donald Trump.
[FOX] Saddam Hussein was an inept dictator during his final years in charge, thought 9/11 would bring Iraq and America closer together and took partial blame for his eventual fall from power after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to a new book by one of the men who interrogated the ex-Iraqi president.
