avanneman

[avanneman]

Literature R Us has moved!

It's true. All future posts to my long-running blog will be at avanneman.com. Please come and join me!

[avanneman]

Myth Busters! Afghanistan ain’t that rich!

Well, it ain’t. Propagating the myth is the sometimes sensible paleo-populist James K. Pinkerton, who, while parking his fedora at the American Conservative, serves up a sensible take on Afghanistan, a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ that his sometime main man Donald Trump would not listen to the military intellectual complex and get the hell out of central Asia. Yet in his penultimate paragraph, he strikes a wistful note:

Yes, it’s intriguing to note that Afghanistan has trillions of dollars’ worth of natural resources waiting to be mined. And so if a stable regime could ever be established in that war-crossed land, great wealth could spring forth. But that’s a manifest destiny for someone else, not Uncle Sam.

In fact, I remember reading, and scoffing at, a piece in the New York Times back in 2010, touting, naturally, a Pentagon study touting the untold mineral riches of Afghanistan, “U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan”, recounting, in those tones of breathless innocence that the Times traditionally reserves for Pentagon press releases, the wonders that lay beneath the Afghan’s stony soil:

“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

I scoffed because I’d heard the exact same thing about Vietnam, where I spent some time, and I have continued scoffing (silently) because since reading that article back in 2010, I’ve heard exactly zero discussion about that potential huge significance, which, apparently, has remained far more potential than huge.

Yet something else occurred to me as well. How rich is “rich”? The Times story says “nearly a trillion.” Jim says “trillions” and links to Wikipedia, which says “US$3 trillion”, linking to the Independent, “Afghanistan's resources could make it the richest mining region on earth”, published, like the Times piece, back in 2010 and citing the same Pentagon study: “Afghanistan, often dismissed in the West as an impoverished and failed state, is sitting on $1 trillion of untapped minerals, according to new calculations from surveys conducted jointly by the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey.”

Well, one trillion, three trillion, what’s the difference? Once you get past a trillion, it’s all gravy, right?

Well, no. The U.S. and China, to name two countries, are well past the ten trillion mark in GDP, so one trillion ain’t all that, and the difference between one trillion and three trillion is larger than the difference between one and three.

And then I did some more thinking. What are the natural resources of other countries worth? Is everyone being simply being hypnotized by “a trillion”? Yeah, I’d like to have a trillion dollars, but being a trillion-dollar dude and a trillion-dollar country are two different things. So I went back to the Internet and searched for information on countries’ estimated natural resources and this is what I found:

Well, actually, I found several sources who said several things, but (it seems) an outfit called “Statista” was the ultimate source of the data, which got mangled and misunderstood by others. Anyway, the way Statista ranked it was this: Russia, $75 trillion; US, $45 trillion; Saudi Arabia, $34 trillion; Canada, $33 trillion; Iran, $27 trillion; China, $23 trillion; Brazil, $22 trillion; Australia, $20 trillion; Iraq, $16 trillion; Venezuela, $14 trillion. So, again, one trillion ain’t all that.

Furthermore, don’t believe everything you read in the American Conservative, the New York Times, Wikipedia, the Independent, or (I guess), anywhere else. Particularly if it comes from the Pentagon.

[avanneman]

Three Bullets revivified!

If you’ve been trying, in vain, to download my free Nero Wolfe threesome, Three Bullets, well, I apologize. Thanks to a computer glitch unseen by me, they were unavailable. But that’s all in the past! The three novellas, Invitation to a Shooting Party, Fame Will Tell, and Politics Is Murder, all featuring Rex Stout's inimitable orchid-fancying crime fighter, not to mention Archie Goodwin, Fritz, and the ever dangerous Ms. Lily Rowan, can be downloaded here and now in the following formats:

EPUB version

MOBI/Kindle version

webpage version

Problems? Please let me know.

Afterwords I also have up on this blog two Nero Wolfe short stories, A Social Call and Truffles To Die For, narrated by Fritz, Nero Wolfe's cook, rather than Archie himself.

[avanneman]

Yes, Republicans, the FBI is corrupt. THANKS TO YOU!

Over at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes explains the tragedy/farce farce/tragedy of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe’s dismissal and now impending indictment for false statements made in the course of an internal investigation. The record is perfectly clear: Andrew McCabe was fired immediately prior to the vesting of his pension and now very likely will be facing criminal charges in federal court for the sin of making Donald Trump angry.

This is not the first time that unscrupulous Republican politicians have bent the FBI to their will. Not too long ago, then FBI director James Comey got on his high horse to lecture Hillary Clinton on her non-criminal misbehavior while secretary of state, which is not the FBI director’s job. House Republicans called Jim into a hearing, where they ripped him several dozen new ones—one for each representative—for not personally locking up Hillary for life sans trial. As I wrote following Hillary’s defeat

When Comey first testified before the House Oversight Committee on July 7 regarding his decision not to recommend the prosecution of Hillary Clinton on charges of mishandling classified information, he (probably) expected that if he explained himself honestly and fairly, Republicans on the committee would realize that he had been honest and fair. He soon learned, however, that Republicans on the committee did not want an honest, fair account of what James Comey had done. What they wanted was Hillary Clinton’s head on a pike, and until he gave them that, they would loathe him with the same unreasoning hatred as they loathed Hillary herself. And it is a rare federal bureaucrat with the courage to stand up to the loathing of Congress.

When Trump took over, he naturally fired Comey for not accommodating himself to Trump’s every need. But of course that wasn’t enough for Trump. He had to punish others as well. McCabe was deprived of his pension in an extremely unjust manner and now it appears he will have to undergo the agony of a criminal trial. And Republicans are calling this justice.

Afterwords The FBI, of course, has a long and sordid record. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI spent millions spying on possibly subversive types, everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to John Lennon, with no legal justification whatsoever. Hoover’s original “plan”—supposedly—was to keep track of everyone who could be considered “dangerous” in wartime (my word) and then lock them up sans indictment and sans trial when and if war arrived. When World War II did arrive, naturally, Hoover did not lock up anyone (the FBI was not a part of interment of Japanese residents and citizens), but old habits are hard to break, and Hoover continued his spying until the day he died.

More recently, the FBI has been arresting, and convicting, all sorts of “terrorists” whose only crime was being dumb enough to fall for FBI entrapment schemes. But subjecting high ranking government officials to vindictive criminal prosecutions takes things up to a whole ‘nother level. It was Republicans who prepared the hog wallow, and it was Herr Donald who jumped right in.

And James Comey? Sometimes he was too full of himself. He’s also the guy who insisted on charging Martha Stewart with a felony for a trivial lie and sending her to jail. Comey explained that he once sent an “African-American minister” to jail for a year for lying, so why not Martha Stewart? Were the lies similar in significance? Was it a good idea to send the minister to jail for a year in the first place? Details make a difference.

Rod Rosenstein (yeah, that Rod Rosentein) gave the following reasons for condemning Comey’s treatment of Hillary, which I strongly agree with:

Announcing that Clinton would not be prosecuted: “It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said that the F.B.I. had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors.”

“Compounding the error, the Director ignored another long standing principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation. The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.

“Concerning his letter to Congress on October 28, 2016, the Director cast his decision as a choice between whether he would ‘speak’ about the decision to investigate the newly-discovered email messages or ‘conceal’ it. ‘Conceal’ is a loaded term that misstates the issue. When federal agents and prosecutors quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the longstanding policy that we refrain from publicizing non-public information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”

At his original press conference, Comey first said that Clinton could not be charged with a crime because she lacked any criminal intent. Then he stated later that if she hadn’t been secretary of state she would have been punished for what she did, implying that she hadn’t been indicted merely because of her office, which contradicted his original statement, though what he “meant” was that she would have been punished bureaucratically, which was mere speculation on his part, which, as Rosenstein observed, was emphatically not part of his job.

UPDATE: More bad stuff about Comey The Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General not too surprisingly treats Comey pretty much as Comey treated Hillary: deplorable but not indictable. Reason's Scott Shackford gives a nice overview, casting shade where shade is due, adding several links for good measure, while I can find another as well, of my own, back in the pre-Hillary/Donald days, when Jim expressed a belief in a "chill wind," one somehow related to the whole Black Lives Matter thing, that was somehow causing cops to, you know, sit on their asses and, you know, not do their jobs.

[avanneman]

Dolchstosslegende at the Washington Post

Over at the American Conservative, Gil Barndollar, former Marine Corps officer and currently Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America’s Center for the Study of Statesmanship, has an excellent article on the modern American version of Dolchstosslegende (“dagger stab myth”)—the claim made by the German Right and immensely amplified by Adolf Hitler that Germany’s defeat in World War I was the result of a “stab in the back” administered by the hated liberals, socialists, and communists, all of them manipulated, of course, by those master manipulators, the Jews.

As Barndollar demonstrates, what I myself have repeatedly claimed, while the German Right had only one disastrous war to explain and explain away, the American Right has had many—Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria—every one of them, with the partial exception of Syria,1 utterly unnecessary and counterproductive—and, of course, they are anxious to add at least one more in Iran. They never learn because they do not wish to learn. “Progressive” Randolph Bourne, denouncing his fellow Progressives for their support of American involvement in World War I, famously declared “War is the health of the State.” Today, war is the health of the Republican Party, and the AIPAC nation.

The election of Donald Trump has put an enormous strain on the American Right, driving many “moderate” neocons, like Washington Post editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt to, well, “moderation”, a welcome change indeed. But old habits die hard, and the prospect of an American withdrawal from the longest war in our history—and one of the most ill-conceived—has driven the Post back to the dolchstosslegende bottle.

“Trump risks turning a chance for success in Afghanistan into a shameful failure”, bellows the Post in full dolchstosslegende mode:

Mr. Trump’s politically motivated zeal resembles that of Mr. Obama, who in 2011 insisted on a full U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, ignoring warnings — later tragically proved correct — that it could lead to the resurgence of jihadist movements there.

No, Washington Post. It’s not nice to lie to your readers. It really isn’t. President George Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqi government—signed it because they demanded he sign it—requiring withdrawal of American combat forces by 2011. Obama simply executed the agreement that Bush made. The notion that things fell apart because we left is utterly false. Things fell apart because we arrived.

The American presence in Afghanistan is a continuing disaster, which should have ended long ago, and would have been ended by President Obama, had not the sudden appearance of ISIS on the scene made any lack of “aggressiveness” political poison. And so because ISIS horrified the world with a handful of atrocities, a useless and bloody war has rumbled on for another five years and more, with, clearly, no resolution in sight—none acceptable to the Washington Post, at least.

For the Post must have war—a little one, at least. Iraq taught the Right that big wars are dangerous. They cost too many lives and are far too expensive. But to have no wars at all might suggest that the whole massive Military Intellectual Complex, which surely creates almost half the jobs—half the good ones, anyway—inside the Beltway, might be deprived of its whole reason for existence, like a mighty arch spanning a great river that mysteriously dried up in the night, leaving not a trace behind.

The Post truly despises Trump and all his works and longs to make common cause with us old-fashioned Democrats. Lying about our record—calling us cowards, and weaklings, and traitors—is not the way to go about it.

Yet even the Post isn’t all bad No indeedy. The Post really surprised me with another editorial, this one, “The hype over possible U.S.-Iran talks obscured something much more ominous”, which accuses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of needless, and dangerously provocative attacks on Iran.

Mr. Netanyahu faces a tough election next month, and he has been a staunch opponent of any U.S.-Iranian rapprochement. He might consider this a good moment to escalate with Iran; he may also believe that Mr. Trump will not object, even if the result is damage to U.S. interests in Iraq and a greater risk of a full-scale war. Unfortunately, on the latter point, he’s probably right.

So the Washington Post is in favor of U.S-Iranian rapprochement, a word I can’t even spell? You surprise me, Washington Post! I like that! Do it again!

The U.S. was successful in Syria, as Barndollar explains, but the Right refuses to end a war just because it’s over. ↩︎

[avanneman]

Michel Petrucciani—“Round Midnight”

1993 – Stuttgarte. Posted by boogieonlineat

[avanneman]

The New York Times, more sinned against than sinning. Or not.

The New York Times has caught a lot of grief for its “1619 Project”, which claims to explain all of American history in terms of slavery. And much of it is justified. Damon Linker, writing in The Week, gives a reasonable overview: “The New York Times surrenders to the left on race”, Damon offers praise where praise is due:

Now, there is a lot to admire in the paper's presentation of the 1619 Project — searing photographs, illuminating quotations from archival material, samples of poetry and fiction giving powerful voice to the black experience, and gripping journalistic summaries of scholarly histories. Much of it is wrenching, moving, and infuriating. The country's treatment of the slaves and their descendants through the century following emancipation and, in some respects, on down to the present was and is appalling — and the story of how it happened, and keeps happening, is extremely important for understanding the United States. Bringing this story to a wide audience is a worthwhile public service.

But there is a whopping downside as well:

Throughout the issue of the NYTM, headlines make, with just slight variations, the same rhetorical move over and over again: "Here is something unpleasant, unjust, or even downright evil about life in the present-day United States. Bet you didn't realize that slavery is ultimately to blame." Lack of universal access to health care? High rates of sugar consumption? Callous treatment of incarcerated prisoners? White recording artists "stealing" black music? Harsh labor practices? That's right — all of it, and far more, follows from slavery.

In fact, I found the packaging so off-putting—so portentous, condescending, and cheesy—“Everything you learned about slavery in school is wrong!”—as if we were all a nation of Homer Simpsons stretched out in our lazee-boys before our beloved wide screens shoveling honey-glazed pork rinds into our gaping Caucasian maws with both hands for fourteen hours a day—all of us who don’t work for the New York Times, that is—that at first I skipped the whole goddamn thing, only to go back and discover the same mixed bag that Damon described.

Many of the articles were good, but, shockingly—so shocking, in fact, that Timesfolk may not even believe me—I knew a lot of it already. When I was a boy, which was waaayyy back in the fifties, I read Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, a book about slavery written by someone who’d actually been a slave, inspired to do so after first reading a “Classic Comic Book” version of Washington’s story. Later, in the tenth grade, I stumbled across Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, just sitting there on the library shelf, where any dumb ass could pick it up. (I thought it might be like H. G. Wells. As it turned out, it was even better!)

And what about James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”? How about The Autobiography of Malcolm X? Or Soul on Ice? These were all works that received immense publicity decades ago—before, I suspect, many Timesfolk were even born. And what about “today”? I remember several decades ago a black woman telling me she thought interracial couples were crazy to expose themselves to the sort of hatred they received from both blacks and whites. Today, interracial marriage is (almost) passé. Recently, the Times own Thomas Edsall published a long piece examining the impressive gains in both education and income levels for some (but not all) blacks. But the 1619 Project isn’t interested in “good news.” Over a century ago, House Speaker Thomas Reed congratulated Theodore Roosevelt on this “original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” One could offer similar praise to the New York Times.

I was intrigued in particular by the “Everything you learned about slavery in school is wrong!” pitch. Well, if so, New York Times, tell me, what are our kids learning, not 60 years ago, when I went to school, but today? Nikita Stewart fills us in: ‘We are committing educational malpractice’: Why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in American schools.

Nikita begins her piece by quoting a text book written in 1863 (not a misprint) in the South. Guess what? It’s totally racist! Totally! Who could have imagined? Also guess what? Things haven’t changed that much! How do we know? Nikita tells us so.

Stewart follows the pattern used in many of the pieces, taking an egregious example from the past and then “explaining” that things haven’t changed much. For the meat of her article, she relies almost entirely on a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has done good work in the past but now is largely a solution (and a very well funded one, at that) in search of a problem. Of course the SPLC is going to find that America’s school books don’t adequately teach the role of slavery in American history. How could they not?

Part of the problem, Stewart says, is this: “Unlike math and reading, states are not required to meet academic content standards for teaching social studies and United States history.” She’s presumably referring to the “Common Core” standards, but states are not “required” to meet them, and in fact the whole “standards” movement, pushed by the Obama administration back in the day, has since fallen into considerable confusion, in conjunction with the entire Trumpian revolt against “experts”.

Speaking of her own schooling, Stewart tells us, “I was lucky; my Advanced Placement United States history teacher regularly engaged my nearly all-white class in debate, and there was a clear focus on learning about slavery beyond [Harriet] Tubman, Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, the people I saw hanging on the bulletin board during Black History Month.” How does she know she was “lucky”? Doesn’t she “mean” “My own experience was contrary to my thesis and therefore it must be exceptional”?

Instead of selectively quoting a handful of “experts” she chose to tell her what she wanted to hear, why didn’t Stewart do some actual leg work, or chair work, by reviewing the textbooks used in, say, California, Texas, New York, and Florida, the four largest states, containing about one third of the entire U.S. population, and including two states from the Confederacy? Isn’t that what the “1619 Project” is supposed to be about?

Because we most definitely need to examine the way the history of slavery and the Civil War is taught and understood in today’s USA. Nothing is more obvious than that leading figures, or “would be” figures, in the Trump Administration, starting most obviously with Donald Trump himself, and including former chief of staff/four-star Marine General John Kelly and dumped (dumped and disgraced) putative Federal Reserve Board appointee Stephen Moore, all cling to the absurd and disgusting notion that the North was the “bad guy” in the Civil War. As Moore “explained”, “The Civil War was about the South having its own rights”—you know, the right to enslave and oppress millions of human beings.

But it isn’t only the Trumpians who still maintain a soft spot—and a grossly meretricious soft spot it is—for the “Lost Cause”. Poor David French, who gets it from both the left (for being a conservative and, worse, an evangelical Christian) and the right (for being insufficiently bad ass), is going to get a little for me. There’s good Dave, as in this excellent article in which he both describes his laudable efforts to prevent the muzzling of “wicked” Christian groups on campus and denounces proposals on the right to restrict the First Amendment rights of those on the left (largely “the media” and “Big Tech”):

Never in my life have I seen such victimhood on the right. Never in my life have I seen conservatives more eager to rationalize passivity and seek the aid of politicians to make their lives easier. They look to politicians — even incompetent, depraved politicians — and cry out, “Protect us!”

Admirable words. But here are some not so admirable, in an unfortunate piece with the unfortunate title “Don’t Tear Down the Confederate Battle Flag”.1 After launching into a scarcely objective account of the South’s motivation for succession—scarcely better than Moore’s—French falls into total small-boy, flag-waving, saber-waving mode:

Those men [the southern armies] fought against a larger, better-supplied force, yet — under some of history’s more brilliant military commanders — were arguably a few better-timed attacks away from prevailing in America’s deadliest conflict.

So yay Team Dixie, right? If only “we” had won. Then slavery forever! Is that what French dreams of? That southerners could continue to exercise their “right” to whip millions of black men, rape millions of black women, and sell their children for profit? If only those few attacks had been better timed! Damn it!

Couldn’t the Germans say the same thing about World War II? If only we had won. Then the Master Race forever!

These “brave men” at whose shrine French worships, wantonly murdered all black Union troops they captured, in utter violation of the most basic “laws” of war. When Robert E. Lee (French’s “gallant” hero, of course) marched into Maryland and Pennsylvania, he captured black American citizens and impressed them into slavery, sent them south to labor in defense of their own oppression. Mr. French fancies himself a Christian. But sometimes, it seems, Christians forget.

Afterwords It’s “interesting” that both Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist and Supreme Court Justice Antonine Scalia felt somehow compelled to parade their opposition to Brown v. Board of Education, Scalia “explaining” that liking the sort of judicial thinking that produced Brown because it produced Brown was like liking Hitler because he developed the Volkswagen—which by the way is entirely untrue,2 but whatever, Brown equals Hitler, got it?

French says “battle flag” because as a true southerner he knows that the familiar “stars and bars” was not the flag of the Confederacy. ↩︎

The Volkswagen was largely designed by an Austro-Hungarian designer named Béla Barényi in the mid-twenties and then “modified”, sans credit to Barényi, by Ferdinand Porsche a few years later. Hitler planned to put the car into production as a "people's car" but, unsurprisingly, the cars that were built were all for military use. After the war, an enterprising British major thought the bombed out VW factory could be repaired and used to create jobs for workers in a shattered Germany. ↩︎

[avanneman]

Lyin’ Paulie Ryan, livin’ in Infamy, which is right next to Potomac

“A line that will live in infamy.” That’s what Mitt Romney Republican (and former Paul Ryan Republican) Tim Alberta had to say about Paulie’s paean to Bossman Donnie, thanking the Trumpster for his “exquisite presidential leadership” when Ryan stepped down from the speakership of the House of Representatives earlier this year.

Tim Alberta studies the wreckage of his kind of Republican Party in a recent book, American Carnage, subtitled “On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump.” Alberta now works for Politico but formerly wrote for such conservative outfits as the National Review and the Wall Street Journal. In his book, Alberta offers both conscious and unconscious perspective on the triumph of Trump because he’s convinced that the “old Republican Party” was the party of honor and virtue, leaving him particularly stunned by Paulie’s encomium, to the extent that poor Mr. Alberta, who once thought Mr. Ryan the epitome of Republican “values,” could do no less than paraphrase FDR and compare Ryan’s mendacious sycophancy with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Well, now Paulie has one-upped even himself, abandoning the lie that, while his entire adult career was spent in Washington, DC, his heart was always in Janesville, Wisconsin, because he’s moving his family here. Though, of course, it’s only “temporary.”

So that sob you might have heard recently if you live in DC? It was Tim Alberta’s heart breaking. Again.

Afterwords Alberta’s self-delusion regarding Paul Ryan is monumental. Ryan played the same game as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, denouncing all government social programs, including Social Security and Medicare, as acid eating away at the heart of American greatness, “self reliance.” But in practice they only attacked programs targeted to the poor—“welfare”. If Ryan had wanted to prove that he meant what he said about reducing government subsidies, he would have proposed cutting farm price supports—welfare for the rich—but of course he never did. Alberta gives us this long song and dance about how after running for the vice presidency with Mitt Romney in 2012, Ryan went on a journey to learn about the poor, to understand their problems. So the first thing he did when he had power was to try to cut billions out of Medicaid so he could reduce taxes on the rich, something Mr. Alberta signally fails to mention. If you want to read a lot more about how terrible all Republicans are, with special attention paid to John McCain and Paulie, go here.

[avanneman]

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: not entirely the all-out misogynistic gore-fest I had been expecting!

When Quentin Tarantino was a young man, he had dreams, as young men do. These are among the things that Quentin Tarantino dreamed:

That he would kick Bruce Lee’s ass;

That he would save Sharon Tate’s ass;

That he would have a pitbull that would bite people on the ass (also the nuts);

That he would share a “moment”—an extended one, actually—with an insanely precocious eight-year-old girl, like that Eloise of the Plaza girl or maybe that Esmé girl in that Salinger story;1

That he would have maybe murdered someone (like his wife, just for example);

That he would beat the crap out of some dames; and

That he would be a bottom.

Tarantino reveals his dreams in a meticulously tricked out mélange of fake reality, real reality, fake dreams and reals ones, all basking in the warm California sun that shines over the capital of dreams, fake and real, Hollywood, California, the place that makes Oz seem normal. Tarantino subjects us to an elaborate collage of fake and real film clips, fake ads for fake tv shows, fake promos for fake tv shows, fake versions of real tv shows, fake movies, real movies, even fantasy versions of real films, in the service of four separate story lines, all set, naturally, to a carefully honed and seriously swinging sixties soundtrack, much of it heard on car radios, complete with “period’ DJs, jingles, and ads.2 But despite all the artifice, once the narrative gets going, the whole story is very simple, despite all the detours, which generally come off as self-indulgent and sentimental, since Tarantino is self-indulgent and sentimental—except when it comes to dames.

I’m sure that the idea for Once Upon A Time must have been kicking around in Tarantino’s head for years, if not decades, but the film’s basic vibe still seems heavily influenced by James Franco’s recent semi-classic The Disaster Artist, the now-legendary tale of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero,3 two star-struck shaggy-dog scooby-doo dudes adrift and a-dreamin’ in the LA LA Land shark tank who escape eating only because they aren’t worth the consumption. Tarantino’s leads, Leonardo DiCaprio as “Rick Dalton” and Brad Pitt as “Cliff Booth”, are a little bit further up the food chain. Once upon a time, Rick was a star, with a big house and the whole schmear, the star of the TV western Bounty Law that finished its run in 1963. Six years later, he’s still got the big house, but the career is flagging. In fact, he’s so down on his luck his posse consists exclusively of his main man/stunt man Cliff, who chauffeurs Rick around (because, of course, Rick lost his license), listens to his frequent tales of woe, and tries, ever so gently, to keep him on the straight and narrow, while always assuring him that he’s still the Man, and always will be.

We first pick up on Rick and Cliff, the first two strands of our story, via what strikes me as an, well, insanely unnecessary device—a black and white TV “featurette” on Bounty Law when the show was still running, featuring both men, in which Rick explains to the folks at home just what a stunt man is and why they’re so necessary—as if audiences in 2019 need to know this. The Bounty Law stuff is intercut with the third thread—a Pan Am jet arriving in LAX bearing a pair of obvious big shots, a short dude and a tall blonde who stride through the place surrounded by a crowd of paparazzi before transferring to a cute little vintage MG TF, whose 1250 cc engine bellows like a Ferrari 12 cylinder sans muffler4 when they hit the freeway.

After the black and white clip ends we catch up with Rick and Cliff in real life as Cliff drives Rick to a lunch meeting with agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino, actin’ all Jewish on our ass and clearly having a ball), both Rick and Cliff enjoying lushly photographed mixed drinks in the grand tradition of Hollywood eye-openers while they wait for Marvin to show. When Marvin does, Rick introduces him to Cliff, “explaining” that his car is in the shop, so Cliff is filling in as his wheel man. “A good friend!” exclaims Marvin. “I try,” says Cliff.

Marvin and Rick have a sitdown and Marvin does a lot of talking, his spiel giving us more backstory on Rick, and it ain’t pretty. After Bounty Law died, Rick made a few movies (Tarantino naturally shows us some clips, including one of Rick incinerating some Nazis with a flamethrower) that died at the box office, and we even see a “kinescope” of Rick singing a fifties oldie, “The Green Door”, on Hullabaloo.5 Now he’s reduced to appearing as a “guest star” on other TV westerns, the villain du jour whose job is to be plugged by the real leading man. “Face it, Rick,” Schwarz tells him. “You’re in the rear-view mirror in this town, fading to black. Italy’s the place, and spaghetti westerns are the future! Give me the word and I’ll make it happen! But give me your decision soon, ‘cause I ain’t getting’ any younger, and, more to the point, neither are you!”5

Rick staggers out into a California sun that ain’t so much warm as scalding, throwing himself bodily into Cliff’s arms. I’m fucked, motherfucker! Fucked! I’m a fucked-up fucking former cowboy star who ain’t worth a damn! Italy, for Christ’s sake! Italy! Fuckin’ Italy! That’s all I’m goddamn good for any more! Goddamn fucking Italy!

Gently, Cliff talks him down, as he clearly does once or twice a week. Take it easy, big guy. You’re still the man. You’re still the man! And so they head out in Rick’s Caddy, Cliff at the wheel, a classic case of LA co-dependency, a West Coast version of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo, two guys chasin’ that dream, that dream that don’t seem to be getting all that closer, but, well, when you’re headin’ down La Cienega6 in a sweet Caddy, rockin’ those sweet sixties tunes, it still seems like it could come true.

As they pass down La Cienega, or wherever they are, they pass a bunch of dumpster-divin’ hippie chicks, setting up what will be the fourth strand of the story. After that, well, it seems that time passes, because all of a sudden it’s gettin’ dark, and Cliff takes the Caddy up a winding private drive, dropping Rick off at his big house, giving Rick a chance to fill us in on some more exposition. You know the secret of LA? Real estate, my man, real estate! Own, don’t rent! Then you belong here. Right on cue, the MG we saw earlier rumbles up the drive. It’s Rick’s neighbor, who, unlike Rick, has a gated entrance. See what I mean! You know who that is? Roman fucking Polanski, that’s all! Hottest director in Hollywood! What did I just say? What did I just say? In this town, you’re just one pool party away from the big time!. Cliff nods, as if he hasn’t heard all this a dozen times before, and then lectures Rick on the need for punctuality, for like tomorrow— “7:15! 7:15 out the door! 7:15 in the car”—before taking off in his sweet ride, a Karmann Ghia, which, by the sound, also seems to have had a Ferrari implant, replacing its stock four-cylinder VW mill with a V-12.7

Cliff blasts down the mountain-side in total LA bad boy mode, top down, hair ripplin’ in the wind, and heavy tunes blastin’ on the radio. Fuckin’ LA, man, fuckin’ LA! This is how we roll!

Well, this is how Cliff rolls until he gets out of the car, because LA is all about the wheels. Cliff doesn’t live in the canyon. He lives in the serious low-rent district (that is to say, Van Nuys), in a trailer, with both a pumping oil well and a drive-in movie theater to create a little noise pollution, which he combats, once he’s inside, with a black and white tv featuring Bob Goulet belting out “MacArthur Park”! The horror, man, the goddamn horror!

But he does have some company, in the form of “Brandy”, perhaps the world’s best-trained pitbull.8 To let us know that we’re watching a Quentin Tarantino movie—we were starting to wonder—Quentin ups the grossisity level considerably by having Cliff feed Brandy “Wolf Tooth” dog food (“raccoon” and “rat flavor”, no less), which looks exactly like shit, letting the slop drop plop in the bowl from about waist level. Two cans of the slop, plus a pound or two of kibble, make quite a mess, but real men ain’t neat. Cliff makes himself a saucepan of mac and cheese, pops open a beer, and plops in front of the tv. Life is good!

Life is good because Cliff is really happy that Rick is a loser. If Rick were a star, a real star, he wouldn’t need Rick. He’d use him, because that’s what stars do, but he wouldn’t need him. And Cliff needs to be needed.

Rick, meanwhile, is slurpin’ whiskey sours and learning his lines for the morrow’s shoot, the pilot for a new show called Lancer, while floating in his elegant, kidney-shaped pool, which, remarkably enough, has a killer view,9 as Tarantino’s elegant camera work will elegantly reveal.

Next door, things are a bit more lively. Roman and Sharon (she isn’t named, but of course we figure it out) slip on their glad rags and head for just the hippest place in town, the Playboy Mansion! Which didn’t actually exist yet in 1969, but whatever. One could wish—a little—that poor old Hugh Hefner were still alive (alive and, well, sentient) to see his old haunt pictured as the place where all the cool kids hung out back in the day.10 For whatever reason, Tarantino actually labels some of the big shots present so we’ll know who’s who, including Steve McQueen and Michelle Phillips and “Mama Cass” Elliot,11 the female singers of the sixties group The Mamas and the Papas.12

The shindig at the Mansion turns out to be the most carefully choreographed shindig I’ve ever seen. Everyone can dance—even the folks in the pool—and everyone’s in perfect time! It’s also the most chaste Playboy Mansion shindig I’ve ever seen—not a nipple in sight. But, even more strangely, we get a sour disquisition from wallflower Steve McQueen, no less, staring at Sharon’s sweet, swingin bod and moaning strangely about her strange taste in men, that leaves him shit out of luck. Hey, lighten up, Steve, and join the party! Why Tarantino thought we needed to know all this is beyond me. (Whether Steve really did have the hots for Sharon is also beyond me.)

The next morning, Roman is up, bright and early—at around 7:15, as a matter of fact—enjoying an outdoor French press while Sharon still slumbers—slumbers and snores, actually, because when you get up close, all chicks are just a little gross.13

Rick actually is up at 7:15 as well and heads off to the shoot with Cliff, though he clearly feels, if he does not exactly look, like shit, bent over double with one coughing fit after another and hacking up so much phlegm we figure he doesn’t have to worry about lung cancer because he won’t live long enough to get it. He tells Cliff that, no, he won’t be needed on the set—and he knows damn well why—so he might as well go back to Rick’s place and fix Rick’s tv antenna, because it needs fixin’. Cliff nods and takes off.

Rick stumbles through the set of Lancer looking for wardrobe. When he finds it he soaks his face in ice water—gotta tighten the damn pores, after all. Any star knows that. Plus it might help him remember his name, or even his lines. While Rick is still no more than half conscious, director Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond) bursts in, maybe not gay, but seriously exquisite. “Rick Dalton! Have I got plans for you! This is going to be amazing!”

Sam rattles and prattles on in a fit of aesthetic ecstasy, while Rick stares in semi-conscious horror. He doesn’t need this much enthusiasm. He’s here for a paycheck and this dude is talkin’ about “zeitgeists”, whatever the fuck they are. Seriously! Zeitgeists! And it’s waaayyyy too early for fuckin’ zeitgeists!

While Rick suffers, Cliff heads back to the canyon, running into the hippie chicks once more before reaching Rick’s place. It what seems like a parody of gay porno, he straps on a tool belt, and then leaps to the top of first one wall and then another until he’s up on the roof, much like a cat and not at all like the 40-year-old man he’s supposed to be. Then he pulls off his shirt, lights a cigarette and dons a pair of work gloves. Ready for action? Hell, yeah!

But before he starts to work Cliff has time for an extended reverie on just why he isn’t welcome on the Lancer set. Earlier, he had a job as Rick’s stunt man in an (imaginary) tv series starring Bruce Lee. Bruce, played by Mike Moh, comes off as a pretentious asshole, prompting Cliff to give him some serious sass. In real life, one suspects, sassing a star would get you not merely booted off the set but out of Hollywood forever, but instead Bruce and Rick agree to a genteel face-off, no punches to the head, just knock the other fellow down, best two out of three. Cliff goes down the first time, but then throws Bruce bodily against the side of a Lincoln Continental, causing a dent that looks like it was made by a 500-pound wrecking ball rather than a 130-pound Asian. That’s what you get for stealing our jobs, hot shot!14

But that isn’t the only reason why Cliff isn’t welcome on the set: there’s this crazy rumor that he killed his wife, which Tarantino encourages us to believe is true by showing us a flashback—whether Cliff “remembering” or Tarantino showing us “the truth” isn’t clear—of Cliff in skin diver gear on a boat listening to his bikini-clad wife bitching her head off about what a loser he is and Cliff maybe pointing his spear gun at her. Uh, so what is the point of all this? It has no payoff in the rest of the movie, leaving us to feel that Tarantino sort of wishes that people, especially women, would be afraid of him. You know that guy, Quentin Tarantino? Oh, yeah, he looks harmless, but I hear he killed his wife! Seriously!

Once Cliff finishes his reverie, he has a glimpse of the future instead of the past: a weird, hippie-lookin’ dude at the Polanski place asking about the previous tenant. We aren’t clued in, but if you know your back story you know this is Charles Manson.

While all this is going on in and out of Cliff’s head, Rick is having multiple adventures on the Lancer set. The whole Lancer episode is a curious mish-mash of fact and fancy. The “real” Sam Wanamaker did direct the pilot of Lancer. Whether Sam was as exquisite as portrayed seems a pretty open question. The actual Lancer series was a short-lived rip-off of Bonanza, which Tarantino sort of follows and sort of not, and sometimes it seems that Rick’s character “Caleb” is the good guy and the Lancers are the bad guys, and sometimes the other way around. We see several large chunks of the show, presented to us as the audience would see them—no crew or equipment visible—and in fact what we see is not at all what a sixties tv series would look like but rather a sort of ideal spaghetti western that Tarantino probably dreamed of making back in the day.

Before we even get there, however, Rick, dressed in character as “Caleb” has several “pregnant” conversations, the first with the stunningly precocious (and precociously PC) “actor” “Trudi Fraser” (Julia Butters), already in character as “Maribella”. Rick can’t eat lunch because of his makeup and “Maribella” likes to stay lean and hungry before a shoot. “We aim for 100% efficiency. We never achieve it, of course. But it’s the pursuit that counts.”

Rick, conveniently hocking up another loogie, looks like there’s nothing he’d like to pursue other than a whiskey sour or two and maybe a nap, but he takes a seat next to her to read his paperback western—a little surprising since I never saw him as having much appetite for print. Maribella, after correcting Rick’s pronunciation of his character’s last name (it’s not “Dakota”) and generally playing the eight-year-old dominatrix to a tee (though, as an “actor”, she would object to the feminine suffix), asks him what his book is about, and Rick launches into an extended précis: see, there’s this guy, he used to be just the coolest, toughest bronco buster around, but now, well, he’s getting’ old, his back ain’t so good no more, and every day he gets up knowin’ that, every day, he’s less of a man.

Rick tears up/chokes up as he’s delivering this thumbnail—because it’s his fucking story, get it? Maribella, as conveniently obtuse now as she was prescient before, misses the subtext. “It sounds like a really good story!” she exclaims, thinking he’s moved purely by the power of art. “In 15 years you’ll be livin’ it!” Rick gasps, and fortunately she doesn’t get this one either. And so she comforts him, not knowing just how very much he needs her solace. It’s sort of ironic when you think about it. But, you know, touching!

Somewhere about this time we cut to Sharon, who’s finally in motion in a spiffy new Porsche, heading to, where else, a book store! To get a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a gift for Roman!15 Which may be true, or may be the biggest whopper in the movie. Anyway, who would figure Tarantino for a “reader”? Not me!

Once Sharon gets her book, she spots a movie theater showing The Wrecking Crew, one of the “Matt Helms” sixties flicks ripping off James Bond, starring the very tongue in cheek, and semi-over-the-hill Dean Martin, but co-starring, yes, Sharon Tate!16 When she’s inside we see clips of the real film featuring Sharon, first a meet cute with Matt/Dean that features clumsy Sharon falling on her ass and showing us her panties, and later a fight scene between good Sharon and evil Nancy Kwan, with Nancy falling on her ass and showing us her panties! Take that, Asian bitch!

Well, it’s always good to see chicks’ panties, but Sharon’s repeated piano key smiles as the audience conveniently laughs and cheers her on get a little self-congratulatory for my ass. Sharon is clearly depicted as the “new Marilyn,” speaking in the same breathy, little girl voice, utterly stunning and cool, yet innocent and sweet, a combination not often found in the real world.

Rick, meanwhile, is having his second serious sitdown, this time with the budding star of Lancer, Timothy Olyphant as “James Stacy” as gunfighter “Johnny Madrid”, Since James Stacy is supposed to be the new kid on the way up, he might be expected to look younger than Rick, and thus intimidating. In fact, Olyphant is six years older than Leo and pretty much looks it, and Stacy treats Rick with surprising respect. (Surprising to me, at least. Aren’t young actors supposed to be assholes?) But the real point of this is for Jim to ask Rick if it’s true that he was once up for Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape, the film that made Steve a star?17

Rick modestly denies the story, or at least strongly soft-pedals it. Me in Steve’s big part? No, not really. Brief possibility, that’s all. Very brief. But then we see, more or less, “Rick’s dream”—clips from the real Great Escape with Leo/Rick visually dubbed in to replace Steve. It could have been him. He could have had Steve’s career. Bullitt? The Thomas Crown Affair? It could have been him. It could have been him. He coulda had class. He coulda been a contendah.18

The thing is, Rick has never been presented to us this way. He’s been the big, strong, good-looking boy with the big, strong shoulders, who could get on and off a horse without falling on his ass, and that’s it. Rick is the kind of pretty boy who cruises through life as long as everything comes easy and then crashes in middle age, like Erik Estrada, not the relentless egomaniacal striver who never takes no for an answer no matter how many times he gets it, like William Shatner.

In the meantime, finally, Cliff makes actual contact with one of the hippie chicks, the cute ‘n wanton Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), swinging her tight little butt around like she owns the world. The thing is, she probably does.19 He agrees to give her a lift, but won’t let her give him a blowjob, “explaining” that he doesn’t want to go to jail, although we can tell that the real reason is that he’s a gentlemen. Cliff has the definite vibe of the old-fashioned B-movie cowboy hero that I grew up watching on tv, utterly chaste and emotionally devoted only to his horse (Cliff has Brandy, of course), too complete in himself to even consider sharing his essence with anything as, well, as common, as a woman.

Cliff gets a jolt when he learns that Pussycat is living at the “Spahn movie ranch”, where Cliff and Rick used to film Bounty Law. He explains to her that he used to be a stunt man there, allowing her to explain to us that stunt men are the real heroes, because what they do is real, they aren’t phonies like actors. Just in case we couldn’t figure that part out for ourselves.

Well, back to Rick now, I think, and get to see an actual chunk of Lancer, filmed far more extravagantly, and elegantly, than any tv western would have been, yet with a pretty much standard script, though with some pretty spectacular behind the back shooting from Johnny Madrid, putting an uppity “businessman” in his place. Better stick to your ledgers, pencilneck!

The bit rumbles on, with plenty of moody, “intense” attitude from Rick, a seen it all, done it all, existential cowpoke who might remind some us of another Rick, the one who ran Rick's Café Américain down Casablanca way. But midway through the scene he starts blowing his lines and ends up stalking back to his trailer (but would he really have one?) to explode at himself in a predicable yet enjoyable scene. You goddamned asshole! You’re going to quit drinking, you hear me, you goddamned alcoholic! God damn it!

Well, back to Cliff, I think, in what is easily the most impressive section of the film, the visit to the Spahn ranch to see Charlie’s angels. The girls are beautifully creepy, staring at the intruder like so many marmosets, Dakota Fanning particularly memorable as ruthless boss lady Squeaky Fromme, who in real life was not involved directly in any of the murders but became notorious as the “spokeswoman” for the Manson family during his trial, and more notorious several years later when she tried to assassinate President Ford.

Squeaky sends a girl to fetch “Tex”, Charles Watson, played by Austin Butler, who played the lead role in the Sharon Tate murders, to check out the new guy. Tex arrives on horseback, suitably enough, and, in some serious dick measuring, Cliff reminisces about his visit to Houston, where he spent two weeks on a chain gang. “That was the last time I broke a policeman’s jaw, I can tell you that!” Although I expect that if you broke a policeman’s jaw in Houston, Texas back in the fifties you probably wouldn’t live to talk about it.

Pussycat really digs guys who break cops’ jaws, and it must sound good to Tex as well, so he rides off, getting back to his job as guide for dudes who want to visit the mountains. But once he’s gone, Cliff starts to get a little pushy. Is old George Spahn still around? Sure would like to visit old George and see how he’s doing. The girls all tell him no, clearly infuriated by his decision to penetrate beneath the surface of their groupthink. Word gets back to Squeaky, holed up in what Cliff knows is George’s old house, so she sends all the girls away and tries to face down Cliff, but he faces her down instead and finally has a thoroughly creepy conversation with old George (Bruce Dern), blind and helpless and utterly dependent on the girls.

Cliff, utterly frustrated by George’s utter dependence—he can’t be “saved” because he doesn’t want to be—strides out to meet the glaring, feral eyes of the assembled family. As he passes, Pussycat leaps onto the hood of a car and screams “George isn’t blind! You’re the one who’s blind!”

Cliff keeps on walking, only to find out that Rick’s Caddy has a flat, thanks to a giggly, half-naked Jesus clone with hillbilly teeth. Definitely time to kick some goddamn hippie ass! Something Tarantino clearly digs almost as much as smelling chick’s feet.

Cliff grabs the punk by the hair and pummels him half to death. That’ll teach you! Now fix the goddamn flat! “Gypsy” (Lena Dunham) sends one of the girls off on a horse to get Tex—something she might have thought of earlier—and Tex comes riding up in an excellent display of horsemanship, that is as gratuitous as the beatdown Cliff gives the Jesus dude,20 because by the time he gets back Cliff is gone.

Finally (I guess), we cut back to Rick, headed back on the set for one last shot at redemption. Spaghetti western “bullfighter/showdown” music blares operatically on the soundtrack, as Rick walks through the soundstage for the final showdown, the one between Rick Dalton and ... Rick Dalton! Can he cut it, or is he history?

In Rick’s big scene, he’s kidnapped Maribella, holding her on his lap with his six-shooter pointed at her head while he holds forth in a swaggering conversation with “Scott Lancer” (Luke Perry in his last role, as the actor Wayne Maunder). Since Rick/Caleb clearly has the upper hand, fancy-pants Scott (he apparently went to Harvard) can do nothing other than listen to Caleb’s trash talk, which Caleb concludes by throwing Maribella violently to the floor in a display of his ruthlessness. Cut! Cut! Rick made it all the way through the scene! In flying colors!

“I didn’t hurt you, did I, darlin’?” Rick asks.

“I’m fine,” Maribella reassures him, popping up to show him her arm. “See, I have padding!”

Sam Wanamaker (Sam the director) rushes up.

“Rick, you were fabulous! Exactly what I wanted! Evil, sexy Hamlet!”

Rick sits there, a little stunned by the outpouring of passion he’s achieved.

“Rick, Rick, your adlibs were amazing! ‘Beaner bronco-buster’?21 Why, that’s triple alliteration! And throwing the little girl on the floor! Beautiful!”

Yeah, but, uh, if the toss was an adlib, why was Maribella wearing padding?22 Anyway, tossing an eight-year-old around like a ping-pong ball as an adlib sounds a little dubious to me. Good thing her parents weren’t around!

But Tarantino isn’t done gilding the lily. Trudi/Maribella, whose dedication to her craft makes Stanislavski look like a slacker, tells him “that’s the best acting I’ve ever seen!”

Which is all a little silly, because no one, but no one has ever suggested that he had any real talent as an actor, and he’s never expressed any interest in his “craft”, other than not looking like an asshole and not losing his paycheck. But Tarantino somehow can’t resist violating Rick’s real character in order to make him look heroic, a goddamn Laurence Olivier in chaps!

After all this, we have a grotesquely awkward “transition”, narrated by Kurt Russell, about Rick and Cliff’s excellent Italian adventure, which one can very easily believe was originally intended to take up a good chunk of the film, probably extending its running time to something close to three and half hours, but, for whatever reason, that doesn’t happen. Instead, we get a few cutesy movie posters, and a few little anti-PC snickers directed at American Indians, who seem to rub Quentin the wrong way for whatever reason, and also Rick gets married to this Italian broad, who snores a lot, just like Sharon. As for “acting”—evil, sexy Hamlet and all that—well, Quentin seems to have forgotten all about it, and Rick is back in character as the self-indulgent bad boy who loafs through life, traveling first class thanks to his broad shoulders and pretty face, while devoted Cliff sits in coach and chugs Bloody Marys, because, it seems, Rick’s cutting him loose. Can’t afford a wife and a bottom at the same time!

Once Rick and “Francesca” (Lorenza Izzo) are installed in Rick’s old place, Russell continues his tiresome narration, setting up that fateful night when all four story lines will coincide. Rick and Cliff head out for one last celebratory drunk and then head back, Russell constantly stressing to us, for some reason, that Rick and Cliff are like totally blind, stinking drunk, even though they don’t really act that way. Francesca’s already in bed (she stayed home, naturally), Rick’s mixing margheritas, and Cliff’s taking Brandy for a walk. S/He’s there, for some reason (really, of course, for plot reasons). Cliff decides he’ll smoke this LSD-soaked cigarette that Pussycat sold him, even though, the web informs me, “smoking” LSD destroys its hallucinogenic power (because the heat causes it to break down chemically).

While Cliff’s gone, Tex and three of the Manson girls—Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison), Patricia Krenwinkle (Madisen Beaty), and Linda Kasabian (Maya Hawke)—arrive to do the Polanski household in, pulling up in a noisy, busted muffler car. Rick stumbles out with his carafe full of margheritas to tell those goddamn hippies to get off his goddamn private drive and smoke their goddamn pot someplace else. Tex, apparently not wanting to have to kill this guy, backs the car down the drive, while Rick takes his margheritas out to one of his favorite retreats, the chair floating in his kidney-shaped pool.

The hippies reconnoiter. “You know who that was? Rick Dalton!” “Rick Dalton? Rick fucking Dalton?” “Rick Fucking Dalton!” “Fuck! You know what? Guys like that, they taught us to murder. I say, let’s murder the murderers!”

As it turns out, Kasabian bails, driving away in the car,23 but Tex, with a six-shooter shoved in his pants, and Patricia and Susan, armed with knives, head up the drive.

Cliff, by this time, is back inside the house, fixing Brandy dinner when the kids show up. After some cutesy, high on LSD antics, the action finally starts, Tex pointing his six-shooter at Cliff’s head. Brandy, flying through the air, disarms him and then fixes her teeth in his balls while Cliff brains Atkins with a can of Wolf’s Tooth. Krenwinkle stabs Cliff in the thigh, causing him to grab her by the hair and smash her face into a variety of unyielding surfaces, which starts to look a little sadistic on Tarantino’s part after the third or fourth smash. Somewhere along the line Brandy switches from Tex to Atkins, dragging her around the room like the shark in the beginning of Jaws. Tex stumbles to his feet and tries to stab Cliff, but gets stabbed instead, then gets knocked down and then (I think) Cliff breaks his neck. But then Atkins gets hold of Tex’s gun and shoots Cliff, causing him to fall over as though he were dead. The girl staggers to her feet, her face covered in blood and screaming like a maniac, and stumbles out to the pool, waving Tex’s gun and firing off a round or two, finally catching Rick’s attention. Guess what, headphones!

Atkins crashes into the pool, still firing the gun. Rick sobers up quickly and, finding his trusty flamethrower—you didn’t see that coming? Amateur!—roasts the bitch.

The police arrive to figure things out. Guess what? Cliff ain’t dead! Sounding awfully coherent for a guy who’s drunk, high on LSD, stabbed in the thigh, and shot, he tells Rick not to come to the hospital with him but tend to his lady. Because greater love hath no bottom than to give up his life, not for his top, but for his top’s lady!

“You’re a good friend, Cliff,” Rick tells him.

“I try,” says Cliff.

Hey! Didn’t we hear that line before?

But the good news isn’t over yet! Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), one of Sharon’s houseguests, hears the commotion and asks Rick what’s happening. Rick fills him in and, one way or another, Sharon hears their conversation and calls down on the intercom to invite Rick up for a drink. And so the gates to the magic kingdom—the magic kingdom of A-listers and Playboy Mansion attenders—open for Rick. Let the pool parties begin!

Afterwords I Movie Violence

When I first heard that Tarantino was making a movie about “old” Hollywood starring Leo and Brad I was intrigued. When I learned that Leo would be living next door to Sharon Tate, not so much. I hated Tarantino’s chef d'œuvre Pulp Fiction, and I detested Kill Bill Volume I, and one thing I did not want to see was Tarantino’s take on the Tate/Manson murders. When I learned that Quentin was rewriting history—in tune, really, with my own squeamish predilections—I thought I would take a chance. In any event, there are lots of violent films that I do like, including Bonnie & Clyde and Terminator 2. What’s the difference between “good violence” and “bad violence” other than the eye of the beholder?

Well, not much, obviously. The “sword blade through the milk carton and the mouth and out the back of the head” shot from Terminator 2 is “classic”,24 but you wouldn’t like it if someone did that to you, would you?

Much of the violence in Once Upon A Time is gratuitous in that it’s clearly wish fulfillment on Tarantino’s part, but there’s little that I found outright sadistic, which is what I really object to. It’s notably less sadistic than the coming features that I saw advertised with the film—It Chapter 2, Hide and Seek, and Joker. Obviously, audiences like sadistic.

Afterwords II Helter Skelter Despite the “massive” sixties soundtrack, in one sense the silence is deafening, because there is, unsurprisingly, nothing from the “White Album”. Like several million other people, Charles Manson thought the Beatles recorded this famous double album just for him, and that every song had a particular meaning. “Helter Skelter” (in Great Britain, an amusement park ride) was for Manson the signal for the start of a race war in America, which would some how allow him to seize power, in some manner. The Tate murders were intended, more or less, to provoke that war because the police were intended to believe that black revolutionaries had committed them. Vincent Bugliosi, the district attorney who prosecuted Manson and the others, wrote a book, with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter, about the case, which was later turned into a television mini-series.

Esmé was thirteen. Making “Trudi Fraser” eight seems really a stretch to me. ↩︎

Did Tarantino invent “fake” sixties tunes as well? Not impossible, but it seems unlikely. ↩︎

Word can spell “Sestero” but not “Wiseau”? Tommy won’t like that! Greg’s book, The Disaster Artist, which he co-wrote with Tom Bissell, revealed to the world the bizarre backstory behind Wiseau’s cult classic di tutti cult classics, The Room, and is definitely superior to Franco’s film, which derives half its considerable charm by simply recreating classic scenes from Wiseau’s ineffable creation. ↩︎

Dunno if Tarantino just wanted the car to sound cool or if he was parodying this frequent device as used by other directors. Anyone who knows anything about cars knows that tiny, underpowered English sports cars do not sound like this. As dubious car enthusiast Mort Sahl put it, “MGs are great if you don’t mind being blown off by housewives in Plymouth station wagons.” Jews are into cars? ↩︎

Marvin says “kinescope” rather than “tape” because consumer videotape machines didn’t exist in 1969. The networks used tape, but Marvin would have needed a film version, a “kinescope”, which is what the networks used before the development of videotape, to view using a projector. *Once Upon A Time” is filled with anachronisms, but film buff Tarantino gets this one right. However, the “Hullabaloo” clip is filmed in wide-screen, which of course is totally inaccurate. Leo’s performance looks as though it were based on the persona of fifties super-square Pat Boone. ↩︎ ↩︎

I have no grasp of LA geography, so I have no idea of where Rick and Cliff are. ↩︎

The Karmann Ghia was simply an Italian-bodied Volkswagen bug. If Cliff had the “big” engine (presumably, he did), he could hit 90. If not, 75 was probably the top. ↩︎

Brad addresses Brandy as “man” in this scene even though the actual dog, "Sayuri", is a female and is referred to as such in the final scenes. ↩︎

A place like Rick’s would of course require constant upkeep to avoid turning into a mess, but, as is so often the case in film, the place somehow cleans itself. ↩︎

Jay Leno described his one Mansion visit as “a lot of middle-aged men hitting on a lot of young women.” ↩︎

Cass Elliot grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, which is next to Falls Church, where I grew up. On the M&Ps’ cover of the Martha and the Vandellas hit “Dancin’ in the Street”, the M&Ps fade out the song with the list of the cities where they’re, you know, dancing in the street—“Baltimore and DC now”—with the following barely audible dialogue: “Alexandria?” “In Virginia, Virginia.” “Falls Church?” “Never heard of it.” Both are suburbs of Washington, DC. Falls Church is supposedly the setting for at least two tv shows, JAG and The Americans. ↩︎

Three of their songs are heard on the soundtrack, though they only sing one of them—“Twelve Thirty”. Both “Twelve Thirty” and “Straight Shooter” are explicitly about heroin addiction, while the third and most famous, “California Dreamin’”, strongly hints at it. The sheet music for “Straight Shooter” was found on a piano at the scene of the actual Manson/Tate murders. ↩︎

“Stella shits!” exclaimed Jonathan Swift regarding Esther Johnson, his life-long obsessive love, whom he first met when she was eight. Quentin seems to hate women yet want to smell their feet. ↩︎

In an interview, Tarantino has “explained” that in “real life” Cliff would kick Bruce Lee’s ass because war hero Cliff was a Green Beret. Since Cliff, like Rick, is supposed to be pushing 40, he would have to have been a “war hero” in Korea. Combat operations in Korea ended with the 1954 armistice. Special forces troops never wore the green beret until 1955, and it was almost immediately discontinued until revived in 1961. They received enormous publicity in the sixties. I don’t know why they’ve been supplanted by the Seals as the ultimate bad asses. ↩︎

Anyone who likes books likes first editions, but I very much dislike the use of first editions as a way to make books expensive status symbols. Go Kindle! (And, in any event, if I had a copy of a 90-year-old first edition, I wouldn’t carry it unprotected in my sweaty little hand, as Sharon does.) ↩︎

I rented one of Matt’s/Dean’s films for some purpose—I can’t remember why—and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t The Wrecking Crew, but it was so slow-paced and boring that I couldn’t watch it, il Dino wandering around like he’d had more whiskey sours than Rick Dalton. ↩︎

McQueen started out in tv as the star of Wanted Dead or Alive, the very obvious “inspiration” for Bounty Law. McQueen, a very big star in 1969, thanks to Bullit and Crown Affair, which were in fact his only two films to be remembered, was supposedly “targeted” by Manson as part of his plan to cause the U.S. to erupt in a race war. Which may be why he’s such a presence in this film. Or not. ↩︎

“Instead of a bum, which is what I am”—Marlon Brando’s lines from On the Waterfront, once among the most quoted in American film, bitterly complaining to his brother, played by Rod Steiger, that his career as a boxer was ruined when he was forced, by his brother, to throw a fight. ↩︎

Qualley, who has had extensive ballet training, is probably the best dancer in the whole film. ↩︎

It would also likely leave the horse exhausted for the rest of the day. Horse races only last a mile or so because horses can’t gallop for much longer than that. ↩︎

Not exactly that, probably, anyway, three “b’s”. ↩︎

Also, the camera backs up to keep Maribella in the shot, which it wouldn’t have done if Cliff’s action had been an adlib. ↩︎

In “real life”, Kasabian did not drive away but remained behind as a lookout. Kasabian was involved—always as a bystander, she claimed—in many of the murders committed by Manson and his followers, but was able to avoid prison time by serving as the key witness against the others. ↩︎

“God damn it! How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t drink out of the carton?” It’s “nice” that the T-1000 stays in character as the past her limit housewife as “she” pulls her blade/hand from the dumb shit’s head. ↩︎

[avanneman]

This just in: Stephen S. Fuller is a liar

WashPost reporter Dalton Bennett provides this item for the “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along” file:

A prominent Washington-area economist wrote an opinion piece welcoming the arrival of Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia at the suggestion of a company official who hoped to build public support for the project before a key Arlington County Board vote, emails show.

Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, also showed the article to Amazon public relations staff before publication and invited them to suggest changes — although he rejected their revisions.

But wait, there’s more:

Fuller has conducted economic research for pay for both government and private entities. In November, he was the principal author of a state-sponsored study on the impact of locating the new Amazon headquarters in Arlington.

GMU received $45,980 for the paper, which was commissioned by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the agency that led the effort to woo Amazon to the state. The contract specified that Fuller would conduct media interviews about his results at no extra cost.

Fuller didn’t bother to tell the Washington Business Journal, which published his piece, about any of this because, he told the Post, “I didn’t think it was material”, even though the Journal, after the fact, disagreed.

Folks at GMU, like GMU Provost S. David Wu, were happy to defend Fuller, since, after all, he didn’t get paid for it—at least not directly. As Fuller himself explained, “It’s very complicated, but I didn’t sell out.”

Actually, I don’t think it’s very complicated. He didn’t sell out, because he had already sold out. And so had GMU.

Afterwords Actually, I myself approved of the Amazon deal to locate in Crystal City and particularly defended CC-town from its snobbish detractors up the road in Manhattanville, but I didn’t get paid for it. I guess I should learn to monetize my opinions, like the Fuller Center folks at GMU.

[avanneman]

Short takes

Donald Trump not a nice person, Megan McArdle discovers Well, he isn’t. As Megan explains, following the announcement by Texas Republican Representative Will Hurd, the sole black Republican in the House, that he is retiring:

All of which [Hurd’s intelligence, honesty, and decency] makes Hurd’s impending departure the perfect symbol of what has happened to the Republican Party over the past few years. It has stopped trying to build a broad coalition, and instead is simply catering to the angriest partisans in deep-red districts.

Well, yeah, but that should have been obvious as far back as the summer of 2016, when Trump was tromping all over the Republican field, when he was accusing the Mexican government of sending us rapists, when he was complaining that when the U.S. invaded Iraq we should have stolen their oil, when he was threatening to torture the families of suspected terrorists. But I guess Megan didn’t want to get too far ahead of the curve.

Donald Trump not a nice person, Ramesh Ponnuru discovers Well, he isn’t. “How Long Can Real Conservatives Make Excuses for Trump?” demands Ramesh, following the whole “Go back where you came from” shtick. Well, I don’t know, Ramesh, but it seems to me that you were doing a pretty good job of it as recently as, well a week ago, when you opined/gushed the following regarding The Donald:

Reform conservatives were among the groups on the right most hostile to Donald Trump in 2016. Yet in some respects we have been more successful since his election than we were in the years before it.

Hey, and how about that tax cut?

The tax cut, while not ideal from the perspective of either one of us [Michael R. Strain], followed the advice reformicons had been giving for years: Concentrate less on cutting the top income tax rate and more on cutting the corporate tax rate and expanding the tax credit for children.

It's hard to imagine a more candy-assed ass-covering than that. Did the “reformicons” want a massive giveaway to the rich that would add some $1.5 trillion to the deficit over ten years? Because that’s what this fabulous tax cut did, massively cutting the corporate tax while not correcting any of the many loopholes that turned the “official” 35% tax rate of the old law into something more like 15%, as well as handing out new loopholes for those unfortunate rich folks who otherwise wouldn’t have benefited from the “reform” because they weren’t “corporate”. The tax bill was of the lobbyists, for the lobbyists, and by the lobbyists, as New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall explained at the time: “You Cannot Be Too Cynical About the Republican Tax Bill”.

Ramesh Ponnuru, short-term memory loss at its most convenient.

[avanneman]

The Corcoran Street McDonalds: From urban to urbane

Damn straight Mickey D’s gone uptown, at its once seriously downtown 17th & Corcoran location two blocks from my place. The renovation's complete and those flowers in those pots are real, man! Once you’re inside, you can order and pay for your meal electronically and then have a seat while they bring it to you!

What about the actual food? Well, a couple of months ago I tried one of those “monster burgers”, which proved to be seriously greasy and not much else. The grilled chicken won’t make you fat, but it won’t make you excited either. Best bet, and the only bet, that I’ve discovered, is the caramel sundae, which is small, so it won’t make you too fat, paired, of course, with black coffee, which is decent. If you want to be seriously la-di-da, you can stop off at Whole Foods and pick up some pecans or hazel nuts to sprinkle on your sundae, instead of the diced peanuts Mickey gives you. Bon appétit!

[avanneman]

Daniel Drezner and the Darkening Detritus of Doom

A few months ago, WashPost columnist Daniel Drezner blossomed forth with a series of articles on the future lying before us whose tone was so gloomy that I may start wishing I won’t live long enough to see it. His biggest “big picture” picture appeared in Reason last April, titled “Will Today's Global Trade Wars Lead to World War III?”, springing off a recent dispute between rebel province/newly independent nation Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia in 2008, reminding Dan all too fatally of an earlier contretemps in the Balkans, leading to a further contretemps later to be known as World War I. As I read, I became a bit exercised over what Dan had to say, to the extent that I decided that I would take it on myself to explain why Dan was getting World War I all wrong—though the present day, it would seem, perhaps not so much.

Unfortunately, when I started to explain the errors of Dan’s ways, I discovered that I didn’t know quite so much about WWI as I thought. When I finished bringing myself up to speed, I then discovered that I had so much to say about how Dan got the war wrong that, unlike Dan, I couldn’t cover both past and present in one post, even a post as long as this one. To simplify a bit, the “nut” of my argument is that Dan, and the scholars he quotes, overemphasize the determinative power of economic arrangements between nations, leading to my conclusion that “mere” politics—when driven by powerful class interests—can dominate economic advantage.

Easy to say, but once I started talking I found it hard to shut up, feeling it somehow “necessary” to refute (with utter conclusiveness, I might add) everyone else’s “wrong’ ideas about the Great War, attacking in particular detail the argument that Dan more accepts than argues, that Europe “slipped” into war. I believe that, instead, the war was practically inevitable, though fortunately the present, I hope, isn’t so gloomy. But I’ll have to explain that in a different post.

To return to Dan, and to modern day Kosovo, Dan explains that shortly after declaring its independence, the new country began seeking to free itself economically from Serbia by shutting off trade with that country, and two of its Balkan neighbors, Bosnia and Herzegovina, who have been siding with Serbia. Dan is worried, and, both to do his worries justice and to set up my ripostes, I will quote him at length:

Even if this particular trade dispute is resolved, a larger challenge remains: The Kosovar government's explicit aim is to reduce its economic dependence on its former occupier. So far, it's been successful; imports fell by 99 percent from a year earlier.

This is the kind of kerfuffle that causes world-weary observers of international affairs to shrug their shoulders and say, "the Balkans" with a knowing smile. That would be fair enough if not for the déjà vu it inspires among attentive students of economic history.

In the first decade of the 1900s, it was the newly independent Serbia taking actions to try to reduce its economic dependence on the Austro-Hungarian empire. The country increased its imports from France and signed a customs union with Bulgaria. In 1906, Austria-Hungary responded by slapping high tariffs on Serbia's chief export: pork. The "Pig War" lasted another five years, during which time Serbia painfully weaned itself from economic dependence on the Habsburg empire. Austria-Hungary's share of Serbian trade fell from 90 percent to 30 percent.

The Pig War prompted Austria-Hungary to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina [in 1909], a move that escalated tensions with Russia—and sowed the seeds for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 by a Bosnian Serb.

Economic closure in the Balkans did not ignite the First World War. It did make the kindling that much easier to spark, however.

Before the First World War started, powers great and small took a variety of steps to thwart the globalization of the 19th century. Each of these steps made it easier for the key combatants to conceive of a general war.

We are beginning to see a similar approach to the globalization of the 21st century. One by one, the economic constraints on military aggression are eroding. And too many have forgotten—or never knew—how this played out a century ago.

The problem with this sort of analogizing is that Dan is putting the economic cart before the political horse in both past and present. Today’s Serbia doesn’t want Kosovo to be recognized as an independent country, while Kosovo is, naturally, striving to make itself as independent as possible from the country of which it was once a part. Past Serbia, in turn, was striving to free itself from economic dependence on the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both on general principles and to free itself in order to launch a campaign of nationalist agitation ultimately directed at territorial expansion of Serbia, largely at the expense of the province of Bosnia, officially a part of the Ottoman Empire but administered by Austria and ultimately scheduled, in Austria’s eyes at least, for ultimate absorption into the “Dual Monarchy”, as it was known.1

Up until 1903 Serbia’s king had been in the pay (literally) of Austria, ever since Serbia’s creation as a “modern” nation in 1878 by the “Congress of Berlin”, a peace conference called into existence to tidy up after a war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire had cost the Ottomans about half of their Balkan Empire. But a brutal coup in that year brought a new king to the throne, one reliant on radical nationalist supporters who dreamed of recreating the 14th-century Serbian Empire, which covered much of the Balkan Peninsula and was ultimately overthrown by the Ottomans in the famous Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The “Pig War” was definitely a thing, but it was much more about politics than economics. Serbia “painfully weaned itself” from Austria not because it had to but because it wanted to, and Austria formally absorbed Bosnia and Herzegovina into its empire not for economic reasons, as Dan implies, but to forestall Serbian political agitation and in response to a change in the political situation in the Ottoman Empire, which, Austria feared, might now try to reclaim administrative control over the two provinces.

Dan makes his elaborate comparison between past and present because, as he tells us “A central tenet of the liberal approach to international relations is that economic interdependence reduces the likelihood of war.” The era before World War I is frequently described as the first heyday of globalization, a heyday that did not end well. What might that say about the current, second heyday, which also has its problems, to say the least?

Dan tells us that he won’t give us a “potted history” of the state of affairs in Europe just prior to World War I, but what he supplies is heavily repotted from John Maynard Keynes, who wrote rather foolishly about that golden epoch, "the inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep,” ignoring the fact that the vast majority of London’s inhabitants did not start the day sipping tea in bed bur rather rose early to put in an honest 10 to 12 hours of hard manual labor, did not own a telephone, and rarely had anything delivered to their doorstep from anywhere.

Drezner acknowledges what many others have pointed out, that early 20th century Europe was not at all an era of free trade—many tariffs had been lowered in the middle of the 19th century but as the 20th approached they were often increased in response to increasing economic competition from imports. The era, however, was an era of dramatically increasing international trade, because prices of imported goods fell despite the increases in tariffs, thanks to scientific breakthroughs, inventions, and improvements in transportation—most spectacularly the development of ocean-going steam ships, which tripled the carrying capacity of the world’s commercial fleet without increasing overall tonnage. But this takes away from his argument that the years immediately preceding World War I were marked by a pulling away from economic interdependence. In fact, as he tells us, the rejection started decades before, and was counteracted, as he says, by rapidly falling prices. So why was the “retreat” from free trade significant at all?

In his analysis, Dan relies extensively on two (fairly) recent scholarly articles, The Achilles' Heel Of Liberal IR Theory? Globalization And Conflict In The Pre-World War I Era, by Patrick J. McDonald and Kevin Sweeney (World Politics 59, April 2007) and Trading on Preconceptions Why World War I Was Not a Failure of Economic Interdependence, by Erik Gartzke and Yonatan Lupu, (International Security, Vol. 36, No. 4 Spring 2012). (Both publications available via online services but require a fee unless you have access.) I’ll briefly summarize each to get the ball rolling.

McDonald and Sweeney argue, correctly, that “economic interdependence” has different effects on the various economic interests within a nation. Economic interests that do not benefit demand protection, and if these interests gain control of national policy, the nation will be more likely to engage in an aggressive foreign policy, one with, of course, a greater likelihood of war. Gartzke and Lupo2 point out that World War I started in the Balkans, where there was less economic interdependence, and, in fact, a long history of war, which, unlike the case of western Europe, did not end after 1870 (the date of the Franco-Prussian War).

Neither article strikes me as impressive, certainly not sufficient to base any sort of theory on the limitations of economic “globalization” to create peace among nations, largely because they assume that economic analysis—correct economic analysis—can explain everything. They develop models, that, seemingly, could be applied to the Babylonian Empire, or the Aztec, and could be expected to crank out reasonably accurate descriptions of the actual course of events. And this seems to me to neglect the historical record entirely, to not notice what many other studies have pointed out, that the Industrial Revolution was creating in Europe a crisis that no traditional society had ever experienced before. It was creating a world in which a land-owning aristocratic elite no longer possessed overwhelming financial and social power.

In Great Britain, the rural folk had a saying about their “masters”: “They have all the land, all the money, and all the power.” By 1900, that was becoming increasingly untrue. The aristocrats saw with ever-increasing horror the ever-rising power of both the bourgeoise and the “masses”. Although only France was actually a republic, and the rulers of the German, Austrian, and Russian empires were all men who claimed to rule by divine right, that was only a pose. The passions engendered by the French revolution were alive and spreading throughout Europe and demanded satisfaction in one form or another. Bismarck had shown how martial glory, coupled with social reforms that gave the bourgeoise the economic if not the political freedom they desired, could revive the prestige of the traditional ruling cliques and allow them to maintain their grip on power. But after a generation, the effects were wearing off. New victories were needed.

The people living around the turn of the 20th century saw themselves living in an age not of beneficent and benevolent free trade, as imagined by Keynes, but one of ever-growing international competition. “It is a pushing age and we must shove with the rest,” wrote the arch imperialist and eminently pushy Winston Churchill to his mother. To other European nations, it seemed that Britain was doing most of the pushing and getting the most out of it. The Brits seemed to have figured out how to handle the masses: Create a vast overseas empire and let the “lesser breeds” in the colonies do all the real dirty work, or at least most of it. Let them provide agricultural products and raw materials to the mother country at low prices while selling them manufactured goods at high ones, thus avoiding the disagreeable effects of “free markets.” The resulting surplus would provide enough crumbs to satisfy the lower classes while allowing those at the top to enjoy themselves in a manner befitting their rank.

The colonies would be of course taxed for the costs of their administration, with the very convenient benefit, as George Orwell observed, of allowing impecunious “gentlemen” like himself to live like real gentlemen, which they could never afford to do in Britain itself. Best of all, the colonies allowed for occasional “splendid little wars”, in which European regulars, armed with breech-loading precision rifles and machine guns could slaughter any number of sword-wielding “natives” with impunity, allowing the military “glory” an otherwise useless aristocracy so desperately craved. In this way an increasingly out of date and dysfunctional social structure could be maintained.

It’s true, as McDonald and Sweeney argue, that the aristocratic landowners wanted, and got, protective tariffs, but simply maintaining their absolute wealth meant nothing when the manufacturers and the financiers of the modern age were enjoying wealth that surpassed anything the world had ever seen. At the same time, of course, the lower classes, which in the past had counted for nothing, became ever more obstreperous. Only empire, it seemed, could direct the multiple aggressions of the various classes outward, towards a common goal, and a common victim, the hapless inhabitants of Africa—all this despite the fact that the British had plenty of domestic problems of their own, which their empire did not solve for them.

In 1898 Germany began its famous challenge to British naval supremacy, with the goal of forcing Great Britain to accept Germany as the co-equal ruler of the seas, thus enabling German expansion abroad. In both 1905 and 1911 it sought to pressure France to allow expansion of German “interests” in the quasi French colony of Morocco, with the ultimate goal of laying claim to a massive empire in Africa. The German search for “big wins” short of war ended in frustrating failures. They couldn’t force the issue in Morocco both because the British backed the French and because no one in Germany thought Morocco was worth fighting over, and they couldn’t achieve “parity” at sea against the British because they harder they pushed the more the British resisted.

The rulers of Austria and Russia were even more desperate for wins than the Germans. The Russian Czar had sought to expand his empire in the east in what turned into the Russo-Japanese War, and it almost cost him his throne. After its eastern debacle, the Russians turned their attention west, to the Balkans, where they had long played the role as the champion and big brother of the Slavs, oppressed by both the Ottoman Empire and Austria, seeking to emulate Bismarck by enlisting the spirit of nationalism, born of the French Revolution, in support of the throne instead of against it, while also hoping to achieve Russian’s long-time dream of ultimately conquering Istanbul and returning the Hagia Sophia to the Orthodox Church, and also obtaining control of the famous straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles, allowing Russia free access to the Mediterranean and, what she had always lacked, an ice-free port.

Austria was in the worst shape of all, a multi-national empire that was simply being torn apart by the forces of “modern” nationalism. There were no “Austrians”, only a collection of nationalities that, increasingly, hated each other. Furthermore, there were millions of Serbs and Romanians within the Empire whose recently reborn “mother countries” bordered the Empire, countries whose rulers were anxious to play the nationalism card as well, for further aggrandizement. “I do not know who would win a general European war,” said Bismarck, “but the three Emperors [of Germany, Austria, and Russia] would pay the bill.” Yet it was precisely the three emperors who were most imperiled by the social changes sweeping Europe, who were most in need of a “cause” and a triumph to justify their increasingly absurd privileges. “War is the ultimate argument of kings” and the ultimate excuse for an aristocracy, whose role it is to fight. Without a war, who needs them?

Drezner underplays all this social and ethnic stress to a remarkable degree. For whatever reason—perhaps only for dramatic effect—Drezner relies on Keynes again to describe the general atmosphere of society just prior to World War I:

The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of [the average person's] daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice."

Keyne’s description—apparently, of what “others” thought—is quite clichéd, and scarcely accurate. In the first place, it reflects the view of an Englishman, the one country where, in 1914, the arms race had cooled down, as the Germans realized, but would not admit publicly, that in the naval spending war between the two nations the English would not let themselves be outbuilt. Furthermore, Great Britain was distinctly the odd man out among the Great Powers for being the only one without a million-man conscript army, which made the state of military preparedness omni-present everywhere else. What was out of sight was out of mind.

Drezner, like so many others, can’t, or at least doesn’t, resist having fun with poor Norman Angell, who wrote a bestseller in 1909, The Great Illusion, in which he proposed what is actually Drezner’s own thesis, though somehow Drezner can’t recognize it. Angell, Drezner says, argued that “globalization had rendered territorial conquest unprofitable: ‘Since trade [said Angell] depends upon the existence of natural wealth and a population capable of working it, an invader cannot 'utterly destroy it' except by destroying the population, which is not practicable.’ Angell concluded that war for profit was inconceivable to any rational human being.” Even though Drezner laughs at Angell’s naïveté, the whole point of his article, as well as the two scholarly pieces he cites as his inspirations, is to “explain away” the outbreak of World War I, by claiming that the WWI globalized economy really wasn’t so globalized.

One could argue that Angell’s “problem” was in part that he wrote his book a few years too early. From the time of the second Moroccan crisis in 1911 (the “Agadir” crisis) to the start of the war in 1914, the mood on the continent was entirely different. Each crisis triggered another one, and each caused each nation to tighten its relations with its allies, expand its armies, and increase their preparedness. After France expanded its “interests” in Morocco in 1911, the Italians thought they ought to do the same thing in neighboring Libya. Since Libya was unfortunately still in form part of the Ottoman Empire (unlike Morocco, which had its own sultan), that meant that, also unfortunately, Italy would have to go to war with the Ottomans. But if Italy did that, would not the Balkan states take the opportunity to declare war on the Ottomans as well? And if they were successful, wouldn’t that create a more powerful Serbia, and might not that Serbia start agitating to expand its territory at the expense of Austria, and mightn’t Austria then invade Serbia in response, and mightn’t Russia then declare war on Austria, thus triggering a general European war? According to David Stevenson, writing in his excellent study, Armaments and the Coming of War,3 Italian prime minister Giovanni Giulitti and his foreign minister San Giuliano foresaw this very possibility: “Both men knew that they were playing with fire, but Italy’s and their interests were their main preoccupation, rather than the peace of Europe.”

Drezner has his own discussion of the aftermath of the 1911 Morocco crisis, that both runs counter to his basic thesis—that economic stresses caused by globalization led countries to move back to more self-contained economies, reducing the obvious costs of war—and leaves out more than a few significant details. Drezner argues that, among other things, that as one of the pre-conditions for war, the European central banks stopped supporting each other.

That cooperation [between the banks] came to an end in 1911 with the Agadir crisis, which drew its name from a Moroccan port where Germany dispatched warships as a challenge to French pre-eminence in the region. Just as Germany was fomenting conflict overseas, it faced a financial panic at home. Its stock market plunged 30 percent in a single day, and German citizens began converting their paper currency into gold.

Unaided by other central banks, the Reichsbank came perilously close to having to suspend the gold standard. Germany eventually backed down in Morocco—but Kaiser Wilhelm II told his bankers to be prepared to fund a general war as quickly as possible. In the next few years, the Reichsbank more than doubled its holdings in gold, and German banks began restricting loans to foreigners. By the time the First World War started, German gold reserves were more than twice as large as the Bank of England's.

Drezner makes it sound as though the stock market crash, the Agadir crisis, and the refusal of the other central banks to assist Germany were coincidental. In fact, they were all linked. The German stock market crashed because there was no support in Germany for a war with France, and Russia, and Great Britain, over German interests in Morocco, which were utterly trivial. The other banks did not cooperate because their governments were angry with Germany for its behavior in Morocco. If Germany had persisted with its aggressive behavior, simply having more gold with which to pay out panicky investors would have contributed nothing. And none of the thirty or forty odd books I have read on World War I have suggested that Germany started the war in 1914 because it had “enough” gold. The German stock market did not crash in August 1914 because the country was united. And, in war time, all the major governments denied their citizens the right to convert paper money into gold anyway. Furthermore, even if Drezner’s thesis were true, it would be a case of politics overriding economics, not economic conflicts leading to political ones.

The true situation in Europe was apparent to Col. House, President Wilson’s famous emissary, who happened to reach Europe on a fact-finding tour on what proved to be the very eve of war, in May and June 1914. Summing up his experience, House wrote to Wilson as follows:

The situation is extraordinary. It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding, there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies. Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria. England does not want Germany wholly crushed, for she would then have to reckon alone with her ancient enemy, Russia; but if Germany insists upon an ever increasing navy, then England will have no choice. The best chance for peace is an understanding between England and Germany in regard to naval armaments and yet there is some disadvantage to us by these two getting too close.

According to British historian Robert Ensor, who lived through the WWI era, House warned the British leadership of his dire impressions of German militarism, telling them that the German generals were “ready to dethrone the Kaiser the moment he showed indications of taking a course that would lead to peace” (Clearly, Ensor wasn’t aware that House was skeptical of Britain’s intentions as well, though House seems to have over-estimated the significance of the “dreadnaught war”.) Writing in his book England 1870-1914, published in 1936, Ensor said that he was personally told similar things by “other good observers.” Ensor claims that Grey and Asquith based their expectations for German behavior too heavily on the “Anglophile” German Ambassador Prince Lichnowsky and the assumed ability of Reich Chancellor Bethmann Holweg to overrule the military and didn’t take House, a mere American, after all, seriously.

After the war, the inconceivable havoc that had been wrought naturally made everyone wish that it hadn’t happened, and they searched for reasons to explain it away, a feeling particularly strong in Great Britain, which was the one major nation that did hesitate. The notion that Europe “slipped into war”, argued in retrospect by Lloyd George, reflected, in part, a guilty conscience, since he had been one of the leading men in power at the time, and was also gratefully embraced by Germans as freeing them from the “war guilt” demanded by the Versailles Treaty.

A few people in Great Britain had noticed what was happening in Europe. “The world is arming as it has never armed before,” said Winston Churchill on the floor of the House of Commons in 1913, and it was true. The recurrent crises of the early 20th century—the first Moroccan crisis in 1905, the Bosnian crisis in 1909, the second Moroccan crisis in 1911, the first Balkan War in 1912, the second in 1913—pushed the alliances closer and closer together, created spiraling budgets, increased confidence and readiness, while the compromise settlements that “saved” the peace left nations smarting and resentful, feeling they had been denied the victory they deserved, and needed. There had been “breathers” after 1905 and 1909, but after 1911 the pace never slackened. In fact, it always increased.

Austria in particular felt threatened by the outcomes of the first and second Balkan wars, which saw the Ottoman Empire simply disappear from Europe, after having been a “Great Power” for centuries. The Austrians were convinced that they should have gone to war following the Second Balkan War, against Montenegro, before the tiny nation unfortunately agreed to behave itself and surrender some disputed territory. Austrian Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf is the single individual most responsible for World War I, having convinced himself at least as early as 1909 that only a “great victory”—against Italy, or Russia, or Serbia—could ensure the survival of the Hapsburgs. After the experiences of the Second Balkan War, the rest of the Austrian leaders, including the Emperor Franz Joseph, agreed with him. During both Balkan wars, Austria and Russia, while not actually mobilizing, increased both the size and the readiness of their forces for an extended period of time. A short war (Conrad was sure it would be short) would be both cheaper and far more glorious. Most of all, it would demonstrate that Austria, as a “Great Power”, had both the right and the ability to act unilaterally when it felt that its “vital interests” were being threatened.

Two factors made the Austrian enthusiasm for war particularly dangerous. The first was that Austria felt that they had “backed Russia down” in both Balkan wars, and that Russia had ultimately discouraged Serbia and the other Balkan nations from direct confrontation with Austria. It is a fact that the Russians were backed down in the Bosnian crisis in 1909—by Germany, when Russia was still struggling to recover from its massive defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the domestic turmoil that followed that defeat. Whether it was Russia or the Balkan nations themselves that decided to accept a diplomatic compromise in the two Balkan wars is probably impossible to determine.

The second and unfortunately conclusive factor is that Germany now agreed that Serbia (and also Romania),4 by both their existence and aggressive nationalism, constituted a mortal threat to the survival of the Austrian Empire, something that the German leadership had not believed during the two Balkan wars. Worst of all, Germans unwisely and (probably) unnecessarily felt that Austria was necessary to the survival of the German Empire, at least of one ruled by the tiny aristocratic clique clustered around the imperial throne. Both nations agreed that a conclusive war waged by Austria against Serbia was necessary and should be embarked upon as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, fatally, both agreed that such a war should be embarked upon even if Russia responded by declaring war on Austria and Germany as well, because both expected Russia to assume (correctly) that Austria would not start such a war without explicit German approval and backing.

The opportunity presented itself, of course, in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne, the Arch Duke Ferdinand.5 The original plan, as formulated by the Austrians and approved by the Germans, was for Austria to launch a surprise attack on Serbia, with no “warning” at all, aiming not merely to defeat but to destroy the Serbian army, leaving Austria to dictate such terms as it saw fit. The Austrians, unsurprisingly, were not in fact capable of carrying out such a decisive course of action, and, thanks to pressure from the Hungarian government, went through the process of appearing to seek a diplomatic resolution, even though they were in fact determined not to accept one.

It was this delay that, paradoxically enough, has helped perpetuate the belief that Europe “slipped” or “stumbled” into war, an argument that originated in the self-exculpatory memoirs of many of the individuals involved, and has since been perpetuated, often “naïvely”, by those either seeking to excuse their country’s “war guilt”—principally Germany, of course, since few people today identify with either Hapsburg Austria6 or Czarist Russia—or else wishing somehow that such a gigantic tragedy could have been avoided. Both of Drezner’s “sources”, McDonald and Sweeney and Gartzke and Lupo mistakenly apply modern game theory to try to determine what went “wrong”—why the Austrians, Germans, and Russians let themselves get caught in a game of “chicken” instead of pulling out before it got too late. That didn’t happen because the Austrians weren’t playing chicken—they weren’t trying to reap the profits of war without engaging in war. They didn’t want the Serbians to back down, and didn’t care if they did: they were going to attack anyway. War was not a threat—not a means to an end—but rather the end and purpose of the entire enterprise. A number of the European wars that preceded World War I, notably the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Russo-Japanese War, were “arguably” wars of miscalculation, but World War I was not.

It’s true that both Austria and Germany hoped that Russia would not come to Serbia’s defense, but both knew that if Russia abandoned the Serbs its prestige would take an enormous hit. Championing Slavic nationalism allowed the Czar to tap into the strongest passion of the age. He almost lost his throne by losing the Russo-Japanese War; if he lost the Austro-Serbian War by default, the result might be even worse. The Germans and Austrians knew they were backing the Czarist regime into a corner that might prove disastrous, but they didn’t care. They would not be dissuaded. And it is “interesting” that neither Russia nor France hesitated. The Russian leadership felt it could not afford another humiliation, and the French knew that it was only the alliance with Russia that allowed France to pretend to the role of a great power, and that its failure to stand with Russia on this occasion would be the end of the alliance. In the weeks before the outbreak of war, French officials repeatedly assured their Russian counterparts that France would stand by Russia no matter what. The French army, they believed, was ready, and, after all, the great goal of every French politician was the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, which never could be accomplished without a major war. Of course, because of the German war plan, the French had no choice anyway.

Richard J. Evans, in his excellent recent history of 19th century Europe, The Pursuit of Power, presents the last-minute exchange of messages between the Kaiser and the Czar as the “last chance” to prevent war. But Wilhelm was simply asking Nicholas to step willingly into the trap that he and the Austrians had prepared for him—to stand by and let Austria overwhelm Serbia. Wilhelm could have announced that Germany would not support Austria in the face of Russian intervention, but a more outrageous betrayal could hardly be imagined. The alliance between Germany and Austria would have been destroyed, and the House of Hapsburg would probably collapse as well. Wilhelm had nothing to offer Nicholas, and it’s no wonder the Czar refused to back off.

Remarkably, it was Germany that was most nervous of the continental powers at the approach of war. Since all the “real proceedings” had been concealed from the general public, the German leadership had no idea how the Social Democratic Party—which was officially committed to the position that all wars were devices of the ruling class to exploit the workers—would react. Sadly, the decision of the Russians to order a general mobilization before Germany was enough to convince the German working class that the barbaric Slav was the aggressor, thanks in significant part to the German government’s predictably unscrupulous decision to act as though the Russian mobilization constituted an “existential threat” to Germany, which it did not. Unfortunately, the poison of nationalism had done its work: the leadership of the SPD dared not stand against the emotional outpourings of their membership, terrified by the prospect of hordes of Russian “barbarians” pouring across the border. Only one member of the German parliament, Karl Liebknecht, had the nerve to speak the truth, that the Russian mobilization did not mean that the Russians were the aggressors, and his voice was drowned in the patriotic fervor of the moment.

The famous timetables did “push” the decisions for war. The military elites of all the major European powers had convinced themselves that all the advantages lay with the power that seized the initiative and struck first. And the more aggressive the offense, the more immediate and complete the victory.7 It is (very) easy to believe that both doctrines were self-serving—a general who predicted that a “modern” war would be similar to the American Civil War, only ten times as lethal, would probably not receive a second audience. If the Russians had had the nerve to go against the conventional wisdom, to have had faith in their defense and forced the Germans to mobilize first, German unity could have been much less certain.

In the west, the French were determined to force the Germans accept responsibility for aggression, in particular the violation of Belgian neutrality, out of respect for British opinion, both official and public, which proved to be extremely wise, for Great Britain was, of course, the one great power that did hesitate. Lord Grey, foreign secretary for the ruling Liberal Party, has received a great deal of blame, much of it deserved, for concealing the level of British commitment to France prior to the war. Grey, a “Whig” far more than a Liberal, had the firm aristocratic conviction that foreign affairs were best handled by gentlemen in as private a manner as possible.

He had a strong ally in prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith, a “new man” but far more “Imperial” in his thinking than previous Liberal prime ministers. Furthermore, the other “strong men” in the Cabinet, notably Lloyd George and his protégé Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, were of a similar mind. Both men had earlier been “Radicals”—suspicious of big military budgets and longing to spend money on social programs—but both were of pugnacious temperaments and both recognized the extent of German power, due both to the pressure Germany exerted on France during the second Libyan crisis and the continuing “war of the dreadnaughts” conducted with Great Britain.

By 1914 it was clear that Germany had abandoned its goal of matching the British navy ship for ship, but by that time the damage was done. The great struggle over dreadnaught funding occurred in Great Britain in 1909, when the Liberals, buckling under Conservative pressure, ended up building eight of the big ships rather than four. It ultimately suited the purposes of both parties to pretend that as long as Great Britain had twice as many dreadnaughts as Germany, the Empire was invulnerable, which was entirely untrue.8

Even though it was clear that the dreadnaught race had slowed, leading some historians to conclude that “tensions were easing”, the Germans for prestige reasons naturally refused to admit that such was the case, and in any event the Germans had, perhaps inadvertently, already cemented a Franco-British alliance. To assure British dominance in the North Sea, where the British would face the Germans, Churchill had withdrawn the British fleet from the Mediterranean, with the understanding that France would protect British interests. Unrestricted access to the Mediterranean was essential to the British for two reasons. One was the traditional access to India through the Suez Canal. The other was access to Middle Eastern oil, particularly from Persia. The British were equipping all their new ships, including the new “super dreadnaughts,” to use oil as fuel. If Germany defeated France in a major war, it would be the Italian and Austrian navies, both allies of Germany, that would dominate the Mediterranean. A British fleet without oil would wither on the vine.

Even more dramatically, of course, a victorious Germany would surely claim effective control of the mouth of the Rhine, dominating both the Netherlands and Belgium if it did not absorb them directly. Germany’s industrial base was almost twice the size of Great Britain’s, and, freed from the burden of maintaining a “two-front army” against France and Russia, the Germans would have no trouble outbuilding the British navy. Luckily for Asquith, the German invasion of Belgium made the implicit threat of German domination of the “Channel Ports” explicit rather than implicit. Asquith had endured several brutal political battles with the Conservatives in the years prior to World War I9 and was determined to bring Great Britain into the war with a united Liberal Party, something he hardly could have done if the Germans had respected Belgian neutrality.

Grey has been criticized “both ways”—for drawing Britain into a war it didn’t need to fight and for failing to back the French from the first, the theory being that if the Germans knew they would face France, Russia, and Great Britain, they would not have given Austria the “blank check.” This ignores several factors. First of all, the German military were confident that they could defeat France before the British could mount an effective force—the “myth of the offensive” once more. In particular, if the German generals were worried about the British, they wouldn't have developed an invasion plan that sent their troops into Belgium. Furthermore, in the granting of the “blank check”, neither the Kaiser nor Reich Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg expressed any particular concern about British participation. The idea was for Austria to demonstrate its willingness to unilaterally defend its “vital interests” regardless of what other nations felt. It was only when the worst case scenario of the general European war, which they had explicitly foreseen and accepted, became a reality that they suddenly tried to minimize what they had done.

Secondly, Grey had reason to fear an emboldened France. When Germany complained of “encirclement”, they were quite accurate. France was providing loans and arms to the Balkan nations, equipping what could, and quite likely what would, have been a second Balkan League, this time directed at Austria rather than the Ottomans. France was also providing loans to Russia to finance railways—as long as the railways were specifically tailored to facilitate movement of Russian troops to the German border. The danger was not that France would unilaterally start a war of conquest against Germany if assured of uncritical British support but rather that it would constantly pursue a “forward” policy that would sooner or later end in war. Since the British couldn’t allow the Germans to inflict a decisive defeat on the French even if the French “started it”, Grey went out of his way not to tell France that they could rely on Britain.

During the August crisis, Grey’s obvious handicap was that he simply didn’t know what was going on. He assumed, on the basis of the settlements following the two previous Balkan crises, that “everyone” wanted a peaceful solution, which was precisely the opposite of the truth. He didn’t know that the Austrians felt they should have resolved the Second Balkan Crisis with a war rather than a settlement, and he didn’t know that the Germans had given Austria a blank check that would be honored even in case of the general European war. And he didn’t know these things because the Austrians and Germans deliberately concealed them.

Furthermore, even if he had divined the Central Powers’ plans, Grey utterly lacked the authority, either formal or informal, to threaten them with war. Not even Asquith could do that. Only the House of Commons could do so, and, prior to the German invasion of Belgium, a declaration of war would never have passed the Commons. The notion that a “Great Man” can commit his nation to war merely on his own authority—the sort of “If only a Disraeli/Lord Salisbury/Bismarck/Theodore Roosevelt had been at the helm” sort of nonsense—is a complete fiction, granting historical figures not only the certainty of hindsight but the uncanny ability to convince others of that invisible, impossible truth as well.

In the years immediately following World War I, the issue of Germany’s “war guilt” largely turned on the invasion of Belgium and supposed “atrocities” that were committed during that invasion, events that were given enormous publicity in “real time”. Then in the reaction against the war, arguments regarding war guilt were regarded as examples of British hypocrisy. In fact, there were a large number of atrocities committed during the German invasion of western Europe, as there are in any modern war. And, since the war in the west took place entirely on Belgian and French soil, it’s not surprising that almost all of the atrocities in the west were committed by the Germans. But the real German war guilt took place in the east, in the decision to explicitly back Austria’s invasion of Serbia even in the event of a Russian response, guilt that was masked by Russia’s decision to order full mobilization before the Germans did.

The notion that the Germans’ “war guilt” was simply British propaganda was popular in the U.S. as well in the 1920s and 1930s, when a large majority of the population felt that we had been tricked into fighting a pointless war, and, of course, popular most of all in Germany. This “consensus view”, which absolved everyone of guilt while charging all the politicians in power with equal incompetence, proved equally convenient in the 1950s, a classic example of “Cold War Thinking”, very similar to the notion that the virulently anti-Semitic Vichy government in France from 1940-1945 was a pure accident, as was indeed the similar government in Germany from 1933 to 1945.

As anyone who has read at all in the World War I literature knows, this “no fault” thesis, blaming everyone and no one, was upended in 1961 by the German historian Fritz Fischer in his famous book, published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War. Like many other people, I think Fischer went too far in accusing the Kaiser and the German high command of deliberately conspiring to provoke a general European war as the only way to keep themselves in power and head off a socialist revolution. I don’t think anyone had the nerve to deliberately provoke such a war, particularly the Kaiser, who enjoyed talking tough but not acting tough. Furthermore, we have “proof” of the Kaiser’s lack of ruthlessness in his refusal to wage a war of aggression against France in 1905, a decision the Kaiser made on the sensible ground that such a war would be immensely unpopular and divide Germany, despite the enthusiasm from armchair strategists like Max Weber.

Friedrich Engels, writing at the very end of his life in 1895, supplying a new introduction to the Marxist classic, The Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850, argued that modern armaments, and the gigantic conscript armies of modern Europe, precluded any “little wars” of the sort that Germany had fought as recently as 1870. Wars had grown so destructive that it would only be possible to lead a nation into war on the grounds that its very existence was at stake. Of course, that is precisely what the German leadership argued when Russia mobilized—succeeding beyond its expectations. It’s very true that many in the German and Austrian leadership were fearful of Russia’s growing power, and once the August crisis was fully underway, some—though not the Kaiser—were glad that Russia was coming in. “Better fight them now than later.” But that doesn’t prove that they were plotting this from the first. In fact, the German “plan”, which Austria failed to execute, was to present Europe with a fait accompli—the Serbian army crushed before anyone knew what was happening—a plan intended to reduce the likelihood of a Russian attack, not to provoke it.

The second half of Fischer’s thesis—that Germany was aiming at a war of conquest from the very first—has more validity. The German military, because they feared Russia, wanted to crush her “forever” by stripping her of her entire eastern European empire—basically what has happened to Russia today. The multitude of small states would be dominated both politically and economically by Germany as its empire, in lieu of the African empire that Britain and France had denied them. The staggering losses endured by the major combatants during the opening months of the war probably ensured that it would be politically impossible for any of them to make peace except on the basis of either victory or complete exhaustion, but the extravagance of Germany’s war aims from the beginning—the immediate crushing of France, to be followed by a conqueror’s peace in Russia—guaranteed it.

For centuries, the explicit goal of British foreign policy had been to prevent one power from dominating all of western Europe. But the economic and population growth of Germany on either side of 1900, coupled with near stagnation on the part of France, allowed that to happen without a war. During Bismarck’s time in office (he left in 1890), the thought of a two-front war that pitted Germany against both France and Russia seemed the height of lunacy. By 1905, it was sole strategy of the German army.

The near collapse of Russia following the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution gave Germany and Austria a sort of holiday from history in that they could behave in a truculent manner without fear of war—Austria took the opportunity to seize Bosnia and Herzegovina—though waging an unprovoked war of aggression against France remained fortunately out of the question. But the revival of Russian strength ended the “holiday” even as the first Balkan War created a power vacuum that, in retrospect, almost guaranteed a clash between Austria and Russia in an area that Bismarck once grandly declared was “not worth the bones of one Pomeranian grenadier.” Germany, so proud of her strength that she deliberately courted, and obtained, a war against France, Great Britain, and Russia all at once, insisted on tying herself to the moribund Hapsburg dynasty—because useless aristocrats had to stick together.

The overwhelming cost of the war—not only of the war itself but both the Great Depression and World War II, which were its all but inevitable consequences—make it impossible not to wish it never happened, but the alternatives are more than dubious. The war was not an “accident” or a miscalculation, other than, to my mind, Germany’s conviction that they “had” to stand by Austria. Serbia and Romania surely would have attacked Austria in a second Balkan league, which could easily have been successful, leading to the rapid collapse of the entire Austrian Empire. Conversely, the failure of Russia to “stand by” Serbia could easily have weakened the Czar’s support among right-wing nationalists while emboldening leftist criticism, thus further weakening his throne. The French, of course, had no choice but to participate and I have already described why a German victory would have been be a disaster for the British. At the same time, Germany’s belief that she could defeat France, Great Britain, and Russia all at once was largely born out by events. If Germany had been patient—if she hadn’t resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, which naturally failed to achieve the results promised—there is no question but that France and Great Britain would have been compelled to sue for peace on largely German terms.10

“Contemporary” reconsideration of the war was largely awakened by Niall Ferguson’s massive though meretricious work The Pity of War, published in 1998, based entirely on Ferguson’s absurd nostalgia for the British empire, a nostalgia never shared by those who had to bear its weight. Ferguson, who furiously denounced the British leaders who led the nation into war, adopted the “thesis” of a man he otherwise must surely have detested, philosopher Bertrand Russell, who had it in “real time”, that if Britain had stayed out, Germany would have won quickly, and, without the terrible bitterness the real war produced, would have established a “reasonable” peace (my word), trading British acceptance of German dominance in Europe for German acceptance of the continuance of the British empire. The problem for Dr. Ferguson is that no one in 1914 who wasn’t an extreme left-wing Fabian socialist believed Russell’s argument, which did little more than ask for mercy from a nation not well known for it. And it’s equally hard to believe today.

In 2013, Christopher Clark published The Sleepwalkers, repeating the “slipped into war” thesis, while reflecting the modern awareness of terrorism by investigating in great detail the complicity of Serbian officials in the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. The research is impressive, but, as the author uncomfortably admits half way through his book, the information was unknown to the Austrian government at the time, and, in any event, the Austrians were determined to attack regardless of any involvement by the Serbian government. In the same year, Margaret MacMillan, author of an excellent book on the end of the war, Paris 1919, recently wrote another on its start, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, whose thesis, Dr. Drezner says, is similar to his own. I haven’t read MacMillan’s book, but in her introduction she calls Austria’s decision to attack Serbia “mad”. As I’ve argued, it wasn’t mad at all if you accept the ruling clique’s self-centered belief, which they at least never doubted, that their downfall would be the ruin and degradation of some two thousand years of “civilization”. A world without the Hapsburgs would be a world of unrelieved barbarism and ruin, worse than the fall of Rome itself. And, again, if Germany had been patient, the Central Powers might have “won”, for a decade or two, before the whole thing fell to pieces once more.

Bibliographic Note I have read thirty or forty books on World War 1, including The Sleepwalkers and Germany’s Aims in the First World War, though I have only “sampled” Ferguson’s and MacMillan’s books. The books I relied on most heavily in putting this response together are David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War, as well as his overall study Cataclysm, Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War, V. R. Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914, Zara S. Steiner and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War, Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., Austria Hungary and the Origins of the First World War, and D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War.

For centuries, the Austrian Empire had been “Austria”. However, after Austria’s defeat by Prussia in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, the former province of Hungary was able to achieve virtual equal billing as a separate kingdom, though under the same monarch, Emperor Franz-Joseph. ↩︎

Alas, poor Lupo! Word can spell “Gartzke” but not “Lupo”? Ridiculous! Publish or perish, dude! Publish or perish! ↩︎

A better title would be “The Arming of Europe and the Coming of War”, because the book is about the constant expansion and improvement of equipment and general readiness of the European armies rather than ordnance and armor plate. It is Stevenson’s general thesis that the constant pushing and shoving between the Great Powers caused each to improve its military readiness to the point that the war came when everyone felt “ready” for war, and when all of the major nations involved felt that they were confronted with an “existential threat”—in particular an existential threat that would be accepted by the vast majority of their populace. ↩︎

About three million Romanians lived in Hungary, whose Hungarian, or “Magyar”, majority felt it their sacred duty to oppress everyone else. ↩︎

Of the 30 or 40 authors I have read on the subject, only one, A.J.P. Taylor, remarks that the Arch Duke’s decision to appear in public in Serbian territory on June 28, the date of the historic battle of Kosovo, during which the Ottomans decisively defeated Serbia and the day on which a Serbian assassinated the Ottoman sultan, was a deliberate provocation. “If the King of England presented himself in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day, he could expect to be shot at.” ↩︎

Except the Hapsburgs themselves, of course, who remain numerous. ↩︎

As many scholars have pointed out, the actual wars that the generals had to study—for example, the Boer War, which lasted four years, and the Russo-Japanese War, in which the “aggressive” Japanese armies suffered three times the casualties as the Russians, a war that was actually won at sea—tended to contradict rather than confirm their theories. This is not unusual in military “science”. ↩︎

Among other things, the public was encouraged to believe that the big ships were unsinkable, which was entirely false, as German mines and submarines would soon prove. If today you visit one of the four “Iowa class” American battleships still extant, you will be told a version of the same lie. In fact, Admiral “Jacky” Fisher, the father of the dreadnaught, supposedly believed that the ships, in existence for less than a decade, were already passé prior to the outbreak of the war. Fisher felt that submarines and battlecruisers, relying on speed rather than armament for defense, represented the future of naval warfare. Naturally, Fisher lacked the nerve to tell the general public that the “great ships” of which they were so proud were obsolete less than a decade after their launching. ↩︎

Just prior to the outbreak of the war, Asquith and the Liberals had been bracing themselves to take up the most contentious issue in British politics, Home Rule for Ireland. The Conservatives had used their dominance in the House of Lords to block all “controversial” legislation—that is to say, Liberal legislation—since Gladstone had first tried to pass Home Rule in 1893, in blatant violation of the unwritten British constitution, which required the Lords to subordinate itself to the Commons on major issues. Asquith had been forced to obtain the support of the monarch in order to overcome the lords, and in fact had to do it twice because Edward VII died during the middle of negotiations. Asquith, who was not a “gentleman”, would have found it extremely difficult to demand political favors from his “sovereign,” and the experience of having to go through it twice surely left him bitter at the Conservatives for their utter refusal to “play the game.” For a less sympathetic take (that is to say, an “Irish” take) on Asquith’s behavior, see Michael Brendan Dougherty’s recent article on the subject. ↩︎

Throughout the war, the British made massive purchases and received substantial loans from the U.S. By the spring of 1917, just before the U.S. entered the war, they had only enough gold and securities on hand for three more weeks of purchases and the Wilson government was discouraging U.S. citizens from buying foreign securities. The Allied war effort would not have shut down, but it would have been significantly weakened. By June 1917 the Russian armies, now operating under the revolutionary Kerensky government, were clearly foundering. Without the prospect of millions of fresh American troops arriving in 1918, the Allies would have had a hard time making it through the winter and very likely would have given up by the spring of 1918. ↩︎

[avanneman]

Donald Trump not a good guy, Paul Ryan discovers

“Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time. We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of these knee-jerk reactions.”

Thus former House Speaker Paul Ryan on Donald Trump, in Tim Alberta’s American Carnage, detailing Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Yes, you may have thought of Paulie as a lying, two-faced pretty boy with not an honest bone in his body—and you’d be right. In fact, Paulie was one of Trump’s biggest enablers, as another former Republican congressman, Mickey Edwards, wrote in the New York Times in 2017, under the snappy title “Stand Up, Paul Ryan, or Step Aside”, in which he had this to say about Ryan’s utter failure to maintain the co-equal status of the House of Representatives to the presidency assigned to it by the U.S. Constitution:

The toadiness of the legislative leadership, and the low regard in which it is held by the president’s entourage, have led to such previously unimaginable scenes as Stephen Bannon, a senior White House staff member, giving orders to members of Congress and demanding a copy of the leadership’s secret vote counts to create an enemies list for possible reprisals. Mr. Bannon should have been ordered to leave the Capitol.

Instead, of course, it was Ryan who left, joining the Board of Directors of Fox News. Recently, he was chosen by President Trump to head a delegation sent to Taiwan, something that probably won’t happen again. Ryan was Trump’s chiefest enabler, passing the notorious and disgusting “tax cut”, aka, the “billionaires delight”, which is Trump’s only tangible “achievement”, and which solidified the financial community’s previously “fluid” support for Trump, much to the country’s misfortune. If Ryan had actually insisted on his “principles”—which in fact he never had—his supposed devotion to “fiscal sanity”—the tax cut never would have passed, because it added about $100 billion to the deficit every year. Paulie then followed that up with a budget-bustin’ budget that kicked in with a similar overrun. Ryan spent the eight years of the Obama Administration decrying “wild spending” and then as Trump’s minion blew up the store. What a disgusting man.

[avanneman]

Ponnuru doubles to left

Or right. Or center. Whatever. Supply your own metaphor. While others seem too polite to speak, my sometime pal Ramesh lays the wood to Judy Shelton, one of President Trump’s two new picks for the Federal Reserve, to wit: “Trump’s choice for the Fed Board is now disavowing some of her terrible economic ideas. It's hard to believe her.”

As Ramesh crisply explains, the “old” Judy had lots of bad ideas. Her new ones, custom-tailored to meet Donald Trump’s Trumpian appetite for unrestrained economic expansion, are even worse. Unfortunately (for us), Judy, unlike Trump’s previous, failed picks, probably doesn’t have a past record of sexual harassment.

[avanneman]

The four-star general with a two-star mind

Okay, that headline is more euphonious than accurate, not to say meaningful, so here’s the gist of what I'm trying to say: Politico has a story up by Eliana Johnson claiming that Donald Trump held off bombing Iran on the basis of comments on Fox News by retired four star Jack Keane, to wit:

“Our viewers may have forgotten, but during the tanker war in the late ‘80s when Reagan did take some action, we actually made a mistake,” Keane said, referring to President Ronald Reagan. “We had a USS warship shoot down an Iranian airliner in Iranian airspace. Two-hundred ninety people killed. Sixty-six of them were children. And we took that for a Tomahawk F-14. That was clearly a mistake by the ship's crew in doing that. And we acknowledged that we made a horrific mistake.”

Eliana goes on to say that she has it on good authority that President Trump pronounced himself “spooked” by the story and held off on the bombing as a result. Well, speculating on actual events occurring in that maelstrom of ego, ignorance, and vanity that forever swirls in Donald Trump’s cranium is a mug’s game if ever there was one, but if the account is true we all certainly owe the general a solid, and a serious one at that.

However, I certainly won’t resist remarking that the general’s account of what actually went down back in the day isn't precisely le mot juste, and, because Eliana is silent as well, I will take it on myself to supply that mot juste. What happened was that the American warship, the U.S.S. Vincennes, was sailing in Iranian waters, in specific violation of its orders. Although it had notification of the Iranian Airlines flight, flight number 655, which was traveling in its regularly scheduled flight path about 20 minutes behind schedule, the crew of the Vincennes shot it down anyway. The Defense Department lied about the fact that the Vincennes was in Iranian waters, and later then Vice President George Bush gave a speech at the UN during which he claimed that the aircraft had been outside its flight path, which was another lie. The Reagan Administration refused to apologize, and eventually gave the commander of the Vincennes a certificate of commendation after the vessel completed its voyage. The U.S. continued to refuse to apologize during Bush’s single term as president, leaving it up to that damn hippie Bill Clinton to (slightly) cleanse America’s shameful record in the matter. Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan, who covered the story back in the day, has more on “one of the Pentagon’s most inexcusable disgraces.”

I’m glad that General Keane had the nerve to mention on Fox News that the U.S. murdered 66 children. And if Donald Trump flinched at the thought of murdering more children, well, I’m touched and impressed. But let’s not forget the full story, the real story, of “one of the Pentagon’s [and America’s] most inexcusable disgraces”—one of all too many, one might remark.

[avanneman]

Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie—“Round Midnight”

More Diz, actually playing this time, with Thelonious himself, and the rest of the "Giants of Jazz," including Sonny Stitt, sax, Kai Winding, trombone, Al McKibbon, bass, and Art Blakey, drums. The Giants were not happy campers, because only a few years before, they'd all been headliners, and now they were a nostalgia act. Remarkably, they all played well, though Monk, largely relegated to the role of house pianist on most of the numbers (the group's repetoire was essentially a collection of "greatest hits"), reportedly spoke not a single word the whole tour. Posted by Funkenfryd

Here's the way Dizzy did it with his own big band back in 1948 (in an excellent live, "extended" version, posted by Okmusix:

And here's the way Dizzy did it with Charlie Parker in 1951 (ragged, live recording. Skip a minute to avoid announcer's inane patter). Also posted by Okmusix:

Uh, sorry, but I'm afraid it's Fats Navarro on trumpet here. Well, don't believe everything you read on the internet. Bud Powell or Walter Bishop in the piano, Curly Russell on bass, and either Art Blakey or someone else on drums.