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More Books for the Antilibrary

Wednesday, August 13th, 2014

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. "zen"]
        

 Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics by Frederic Spotts 

Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind by Mark Pagel 

How Hitler Could have Won WWII by Bevin Alexander

The American Way of War: A History of American Military Strategy and Policy by Russell F. Weigley 

All the Factors of Victory by Thomas Wildenberg 

The Longest War by Peter Bergen 

In my struggle with my Antilibrary, I must concede the Antilibrary has won. It has become the “research tool” that Nassim Nicholas Taleb once advised and I have small hope of ever reading through it, given my rate of book purchases:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. he is the owner of a large personal library ( containing thirty thousand books), and separates vistors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others – a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You wil accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growig number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.

I am also currently, temporarily out of shelf space and I am pondering the future, when the Eldest goes to college, how much of a library could be shelved in her room ;) I find, in wistful moments, that it would also be nice, if some eccentric billionaire handed out “reading fellowships” to itinerant bloggers to retire to a cabin, a lighthouse or a hermitage for a year of reading. I could put a sizable dent in the antilibrary that way and would come out of the affair having greatly added to my store of knowledge.

Of the books above, I am most interested in Spotts’ take on Hitler and the Arts. Following the historical example of Jacques Louis David during the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s regime, Fascism and National Socialism harnessed the power of music, architecture, poetry, sculpture, choreography and cinema in particular for political purposes that were sometimes monumental and dramatic  triumphs of propaganda and at times tawdry, comical or sterile gestures of bureaucratic totalitarianism. Hitler, to his dying day, conceived of himself as an “artist”, something he vaguely held to be of a station above that of a politician or military leader.  Hitler intervened in the arts in the Reich and conquered Europe in ways both trivial and criminal and possessed an intuitive judgement on the mass psychological effects of design and image. The Fuhrer used his powers to collect the art of a minor 19th century symbolist painter, Franz Stuck, he dictated what was to be considered “degenerate art“, personally tore up the draft records of German artists to spare them conscription, waded deeply into the details of massive building projects, critiquing designs and conferring with architects like Paul Troost  and Albert Speer.

All the Factors of Victory intrigues me primarily because my reading in naval history and strategy is very limited.

Comments welcome….

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REVIEW: The Orientalist by Tom Reiss

Monday, August 4th, 2014

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. "zen"]

The Orientalist by Tom Reiss 

Some biographies are as much about the era or the milieu as the man. The Orientalist is one of them.

This is not to say that Tom Reiss has written a bad book. On the contrary, it is an enlightening and informative one, even for someone well read in the history of Russia and Germany in the twentieth century, will find that The Orientalist has a rich store of little known anecdotes. In an effort to unlock the mystery of “Kurban Said“, the alleged author of the modern Azeri national epic, Ali and Nino: A Love Story, whose identity is hotly disputed, Reiss became a cultural archaeologist excavating the graveyards of Empires, Tsarist, Wilhemine and Ottoman. It was a search that brought Reiss to a remarkable character, Lev “Essad Bey” Nussimbaum, who had narrowly escaped the Bolshevik CHEKA, made fame and fortune as a literary freebooter in Weimar Germany only to sink into obscurity during WWII, dying in poverty and illness in Fascist Italy.

Lev, who was the son of a millionaire Russian-Jewish oil magnate from Baku, was a cultural chameleon, reinventing himself numerous times, converting to Islam, passing himself off variously as Muslim prince, a Transcaucasian “Wild Jew”, Orientalist scholar, monarchist and anti-Communist writer, briefly a literary star on Germany’s radical far Right. Even in the early days of the Third Reich, despite accusations of being a “Jewish story-swindler”, the many anti-Soviet books of “Essad Bey” were warmly endorsed by Josef Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda for reading by the Nazi Party faithful. The famous individuals who reputedly crossed Lev’s path are remarkable - Joseph Stalin, Fyodor Vinberg, Vladimir Nabokov, Walter Benjamin,  Giovanni Gentile, Walter Mehring,  Benito Mussolini, Egon Kisch, George Sylvester Viereck, Grand Duke Cyril Romanov, Max Brod, Stefan Zwieg, Hertha Pauli, and Ezra Pound among others.  ”Essad Bey” was the denouement of the respectable intellectual tradition of 19th century Orientalism, particularly that of Jewish European scholars and ethnographer-explorers. Lev Nussimbaum was less a Martin Buber (whom Lev knew) than he was the Karl May of the East, a dime store mythologizer of  Transcaucasia, old Qajar Persia and Islam for popular audiences accustomed to a tabloid press.

Essad Bey as a character reflects the contradictions and juxtapositions of an interwar Europe, especially Germany, ravaged by the Great War and Communist Revolution in ways that would be highly improbable today.  Lev was a talented writer, a  Jewish refugee who was an exponent of Islam and an admirer of Fascism, more glib than insightful, more clever than wise, at home playing the outsider but his place never secure. When the official black sedans of the Fascist secret police rolled up to an ailing Lev’s hotel and found him dead, villagers assumed the OVRA men where there to arrest “the Muslim”; in reality, it was to take Lev to make wartime propaganda broadcasts for Italy in Persian.

Recommended.

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New E-Book from John Robb

Saturday, July 26th, 2014

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. "zen"]

I have been a long time fan of John Robb’s Global Guerrillas blog for many years and strongly recommend his military theory book  Brave New War for anyone interested in changes in warfare in the 21st century.  If you have been following GG, you know that John’s interests have turned in recent years  from the destructive part of  Boyd’s strategic continuum (tactics-operations/grand tactics -strategy) more toward the constructive ( grand strategy – theme for vitality and growth) with increasing examination of economic, ethical, legal, cultural and moral dimensions of societal rule-sets.

John has a new E-Book out, first of a series, that lays out his thinking in this area and how we can fix what ails America.

The American Way

My new booklet, “The American Way” is now on Amazon.  

If you are wondering what is wrong with America.  This booklet provides a concise answer.  

Also, this booklet provides a way to get us back on a path towards economic progress.  

Be forewarned, this booklet is just the start.  I’ll have more concrete ways to do it in booklets to be released over the next three months.  

Enjoy.  

PS:  I’ve got a booklet on iWar coming out next month too.

John gave me a preview of the manuscript and I thoroughly endorse the direction in which he is going with The American Way. America’s economic and political problems and strategic dysfunction have epistemological and moral roots.

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Many New Books

Thursday, July 10th, 2014

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. "zen"]
            

Buda’s wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis

An Enemy we Created by Alex Strick van Linschoten & Felix Kuehn 

A Troublesome Inheritance by Nicholas Wade  

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made can set Big things in Motion  by John Hagel, John Seely Brown & Lang Davison

Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz 

Guerrilla Leader: T.E. Lawrence & the Arab Revolt by James Schneider

Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov by Geoffrey Roberts 

Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of Crossfit and the Primal Future of Fitness by J.C. Herz

Almost finished with a very lengthy book review of  American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant by Ann Scott Tyson. Have probably three to five more paragraphs to go, so that should be up in a day or two. The books above are what I have purchased in the interim.

Most of these books, though not all, are controversial. Or their authors may be.  Nicholas Wade was recently fired  retired from his longtime gig as the science editor for The New York Times because his book explored the biological/evolutionary aspect of race;  British historian Geoffrey Roberts has been accused by other scholars of being an apologist and sympathizer with Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin; and conservative writer Stanley Kurtz’s investigation of President Obama’s personal ties to radical extremists made him the beta noire  of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008. In other cases, it is the topic that is controversial – the nature of the Taliban-al Qaida relationship, the historical importance of Lawrence of Arabia or the value of Crossfit as a model of exercise ( the intensity of feelings about Crossfit seems to surpass that of mere partisan politics or debating the best anti-terrorism strategy).

Readers who have read any of these, or who are reading something else we all should know about, are welcome to sound off in the comments. I will get to some of these before summer’s end, but not all.

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BOOK REVIEW: Adaptive Leadership Handbook by Leland & Vandergriff

Monday, June 16th, 2014

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. "zen"]

Adaptive Leadership Handbook: :Law Enforcement & Security by Fred Leland & Don Vandergriff 

The Adaptive Leadership Handbook is an unusual book. It is a work about thinking for men and women of action. It is an argument about learning for people whose professional life is governed by their training. Finally, it is a call for dynamic reflection for those accustomed to following proper procedure.  The authors have written a guide to reinventing an organization’s institutional epistemology, the “cognitive culture” in which high stakes decisions are made, how challenges are met and the standards by which outcomes are judged.  They are well qualified to make their case:

Fred Leland, a police lieutenant, former sheriff’s deputy and Marine “….is the Founder and Principal Trainer of LESC: Law Enforcement & Security Consulting and a certified instructor. He specializes in homeland security exercise and evaluation programs (HSEEP), red teaming, ongoing deadly action (active shootings), handling dynamic and violent encounters, recognizing the signs and signals of danger(body language), police operational art, use of force, and decision making under pressure. He develops leaders with the adaptive leadership methodology. His focus is translating theory to practice and facilitating training workshops to law enforcement, military, public and private, campus and university security professionals, in an effort to continually improve officer safety and effectiveness.”

Don Vandergriff is a retired Army major, military consultant, a nationally regarded trainer on leadership development and adaptive decision game methodology, well-regarded author on military affairs whose works include Raising the Bar (required reading at West Point), The Path to Victory and Manning the Future Legions of the United States. For much of the past year Don has been working in Afghanistan, teaching some of what the book is preaching.

I have also had the pleasure of seeing both authors presenting and conducting exercises at Boyd & Beyond conferences and can recommend them strongly. On to the review….

First of all, who is the intended audience for Adaptive Leadership Handbook? Who would benefit from reading it?

1. Any law enforcement personnel at any level – Federal, State, county or municipal. The book has been written with the perspective and problems of their field in mind.

2.  Security professionals, private or public, who provide supplementary or complementary services to law enforcement, public safety, government agencies, corporations or individuals

3.  First responders other than law enforcement

4.  Military personnel who will be engaged in humanitarian relief deployments or constabulary duties among foreign civilian populations in conflict zones or National Guardsmen who might be assigned to disaster relief or civil disorder operations at home.

5.  Academics and journalists who study law enforcement and security issues or MOOTW, FID and COIN

6.  Anyone struggling to reconcile ongoing development of a genuinely professional culture within a bureaucratic-political context

As a reviewer, I fall primarily into categories 6 and 5, so in terms of details, as an outsider, reading the book for me was also a window into the world of professional policing and procedure, especially in terms of making good tactical decisions in real life situations. While for a police officer the authors are discussing familiar scenarios that go to the heart of the law enforcement profession’s work on the street, for me these were illuminating vignettes.  Police facing uncooperative or indecisive or mentally ill suspects, active shooter scenarios, the traffic stop gone bad, possible suicidal individuals and intoxicated parties to a domestic dispute are among the examples used to illustrate how officers can adapt tactically or suffer the consequences if they fail to do so. Each scenario is analyzed with a view not just to alternative tactics but alternative ways to think differently to respond more effectively.

Drawing on  thinkers as diverse as Gary Klein, John Boyd, Clausewitz, John Poole, Sid Heal , Hans  von Seeckt, Paul Van Riper, Sun Tzu and Heraclitus, the thrust of Adaptive Leadership Handbook is the authors attempt to bring police officers beyond the culture of ingrained procedure and rote training methods who react to situations into oriented, intuitive decision-makers and learning, thinking, reflective professionals. A shift of tactical mentality from “Go get him” to “Set him up to get him with an adaptive response”  A variety of methods are advocated to be used regularly in order to cultivate adaptive leaders – After Action Reviews (AAR), Tactical Decision Games (TDG),  Decision Making Critique (DMC) free play exercises, fingerspitzengefuhl, reading body language and pattern recognition. Some examples:

…..A flood of questions will come to mind in the heat of a violent encounter. My point is, the questions will be there but the answers will come in a form of judgment – implicit and intuitive decisions based on your experience and training.

Attention to detail is not the sole answer in the non-linear world of violence. Instead, it’s paying attention to detail that has meaning in the heat of the moment. [p.143]

and

….Can those of us involved in extreme situations where life and death are at stake actually make decisions without thinking, without analyzing options, intuitively?

The answer is clearly yes.

Dr. Gary Klein in his research of cognitive development talks about making decisions under pressure in what he describes as “Recognition-Primed Decision Making”. What Klein found working with the united States marine Corps, Emergency workers and Businesses across the country was, “It was not that commanders were refusing to compare options. I had become so fixated on what they were not doing that I had missed the real finding: that the commanders could come up with a good course of action from the start. That is what the stories were telling us. Even when faced with a complex situation, the commanders could see it as familiar and know how to react. [....] the commanders secret was that their experience let them see a situation, even a non-routine one, as an example of a prototype, so they knew the typical course of action right away. Their experience let them identify a reasonable reaction as the first one they considered, so they did not bother thinking of others. They were not being perverse. They were being skillful.” [p. 89]

and

With an adversary who says NO and takes action to thwart our efforts we will always have to be prepared to use our awareness, insight imagination and initiative applying the science and art of tactics, operationally, while striving ouselves to overcome the effects of friction, while interacting with an adversary. We must attempt at the same time to raise our adversary’s friction to a level that weakens his ability to fight. This interplay is necessary in an effort to shape and reshape the climate of a situation and win without fighting if possible.

Leland and Vandergriff are aiming at reshaping police organizations cognitive culture to permit decentralized decision-making as close to the problem on the street as possible, with officers confident and capable of taking the initiative and exercising good judgment in the context of circumstances. This entails a reframing of procedures from rules to tools, from being directions to being a map or template for independent decision making. A shift on the spectrum from training toward learning to make each officer more effective and more adaptive.

Strongly recommended.

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