“Lions led by donkeys”

Circling back.

The Narrative is controlled in the retelling of the story.

Steve Sailer

This is certainly true when we look at the image of the British Army in World War One: Stupid callous, pompous officers blithely ordering men to slaughter from the comfort of their chateaus.

'Twas not always so. As Professor Stephen Badsey reminds us, WWI “was also, for Britain, one of the most popular and widely supported wars the country has ever fought, from its beginning to its end. It was also one of the most successful.”





FM Douglas Haig was celebrated as a hero when he died in 1928. It was only later that his reputation fell into decline.

A strong case can be made that it is teachers of English, not history, that have had the greatest impact on the shaping of views on the First World War through the teaching of war poetry. It is not generals and politicians but the ‘War Poets’, a small and unrepresentative group of junior officers, who are the most frequently quoted British figures of 1914-18, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg (who actually served in the ranks), Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden are still remembered, while the very names of most British generals of the First World War have slipped from public consciousness.
Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory

The “war poets” were consequential, but their influence was slow to take hold. In the 1920s popular culture still was more likely to have heroes who were bored by the peace rather than disillusioned by the war. (Bulldog Drummond, for example, or Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence Beresford).

Agatha Christie, however, was not taught in universities. The War Poets and Paris expatriates were. Over time, this led to a complete reversal of the image of the war, the generals, and the experience of the soldiers.

A half-century after his death, the revision was complete.

One doesn't want to be too hard on Haig, who doubtless did all he could and who has been wll calumniated already. But it must be said that it now appears that the one thing the war was testing was the usefulness of the earnest Scottish character in a situation demanding the military equivalent of wit and invention. Haig had none. He was stubborn, self-righteous, inflexible, intolerant –especially of the French-- and quite humorless. And he was provincial: at his French headquarters he insisted on attending a Church of Scotland service every Sunday. Bullheaded as he was, he was the perfect commander for an enterprise committed to endless abortive assaulting.

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory )

Fussell, a professor of English, sounds uncomfortably like Bill Haydon here. His verdict substitutes an aesthetic sensibility for strategic analysis. It also manages to combine snobbery with moralizing. (Never a good look for a historian.)

A few years after Fussell published his book the tide began to turn. Historians who studied the war (as opposed to reading poets and novelists) made it quite clear that the Western Front generals rarely had good options in 1915-1917. The correlation of forces was such that if the war was going to continue then it would have to be a war of frontal assaults and strategic attrition. Contra Fussel, “wit and invention” could not provide any path to bloodless victory.

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Rational actors choosing self-destruction

Sheep ruled by donkeys?

“Lions led by Donkeys” One of the enduring images about World War One. Brave soldiers sent to their deaths by callous and stupid generals who remained safe and coddled in their chateau headquarters.

This myth is interesting on two counts. First, this image of the detached, unfeeling general pointlessly sacrificing his men's lives is false. But let's circle back to that.

One reason the myth persists is that we find it hard to sympathize with the “donkeys”., As Richard Holmes put it, the generals appear, to us, to be “comfortable, well-breakfasted, privileged, and remote”.

While that is unfair to FM Haig, et. al., the description fits our modern mandarins to a T. It seems completely fair to describe the US today as a nation of “sheep ruled by donkeys”.

The past year has been devastating to the nation: schools closed, students abandoned, senior citizens condemned to unending solitary confinement, the economy crushed, civil liberties shredded. All of this was done at the whim of bureaucrats and governors largely insulated from the consequences of the policies they inflict on the citizenry.

It's bad enough that policy is being made by people with many opinions but no skin in the game. Even worse, every day brings new examples of their arrogant refusal to live by the rules they impose on others.

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This strikes close to home
“Exhausting the resources of the country, they only bolstered the power of the state without elevating the self-confidence of the people.... The state swelled up; the people grew lean. “

And let's not forget the role journalists played in this disaster. Nearly every news outlet spread misinformation and promoted pandemic porn. But as the honchos at CNN happily admit it was good for ratings and hurt President Trump. So totally worth it.

This is a calculus that is only open to the comfortable and the privileged. Sadly,much of the legacy media has become the preserve of such people.

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Kaus-Reynolds in the UK

The Kaus-Reynolds Paradox:

1. A government agency fails.

2. When it finally ‘fesses up, the failure is immediately consigned to the memory hole and no one in power is held responsible.

3. The consequences of its failure are then used as a justification for giving that agency more power over ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with the failed policies and botched operations.

Shot:

Green Party's Baroness Jones suggests 6pm curfew for men

Chaser:

UK police officer arrested over the disappearance of Sarah Everard, authorities say

Sarah Everard suspect probed over 'indecent exposure' 3 days before she vanished

Give more power to the police after a policeman commits murder. The logic of the Administrative State is something out of Lewis Carroll. The answer to every problems always involves increasing the power of government-- even when the problems come from government in the first place.

There are no consequences for failure and malfeasance. To the contrary, they are rewarded and, hence, encouraged.

Saturday in London we saw one of the results that arise when the Kaus-Reynolds Paradox is ignored.

London police face backlash after dragging mourners from vigil for murdered woman

Having failed to protect Sarah Everard and having failed to police their own ranks, the London Metropolitan Police took the opportunity to remind the people of London who was in charge.

The Met cannot keep London's streets safe, but they can still bring the hammer down on women at a vigil for a murder victim.

This is becoming a troubling pattern for the UK. After the revelations about grooming gangs and the exploitation of thousands of young girls, police departments across the country re-doubled their efforts – to shut down mean posts on social media.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Honore de Balzac, The Bureaucrats

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

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This strikes close to home

Exhausting the resources of the country, they only bolstered the power of the state without elevating the self-confidence of the people.... The state swelled up; the people grew lean.

It is not a bad description of what public health “experts” and pandemic porn addicts have done to the US over the last twelve months.

It is from historian Vasily Klyuchevsky (1841-1911) and he is describing the effects of Tsarist authoritarianism on Russian society.

Given all the performative concern about the threat posed by Putin/Russia/Trump/authoritarianism, we should probably ponder what Tsar Fauci and the corona panic are doing to us.

Just don't expect to see this sort of analysis on CNN or the Washington Post. The worst consequencs are not felt by the people who work for those operations. To the contrary, the pandemic has been, in many ways, an enormous benefit for them.

Vide:

WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar APOLOGIZES after saying COVID has been 'really good for CNN's ratings'

Amazon posted record sales and profit for the second consecutive quarter, as it continues to capitalize on a pandemic-driven surge in online shopping.

Blue-checks are afraid of life getting back to normal.

At least one astute observer recognized this aspect of the crisis from the get-go.

The closest I have seen to class war in #coronavirus is those employed by the state (esp its political and media arms) almost sneer at Normals concerned less about the low risk of their illness than the almost now certainty of financial oblivion

— Gray Connolly (@GrayConnolly) March 22, 2020

The only sound basis for a great State is stately egoism and not romanticism, and it is not worthy for a great state to fight for a cause which has nothing to do with its own interest.

Otto von Bismarck (1850)