White Nights is the title of Menachem Begin's description of his travails from the day it was arrestged in Vilna to the day he arrived to Eretz Israel. He spent many months in the Arctic Gulag (in the Artctic you can read the papers at night) and after being liberated, months walking and travelling through the Soviet Union. His analysis of the Soviet Union (all from the view of a political Zionist leader) was that it was condemned to collapse - he wrote that in the fifties. The CIA and the Rand Institute, with unlimited resources, had the contrawry opinion, and even one day before Gorbachev dissolved the USSR, they sostained that it was rock solid. How a Polish Jew almost dying of hunger could see reality correctly and how is that the CIA, that had interviewed millions (yes) of people returning from the Soviet Union and could build statistical tables of how many hours had one to stand in qeue in each town to buy bread, had no idea of what was going on? I am no Begin but after seeing that 1.30 m tall apparition with the two months old skeletal baby hanging from her teat, I can clearly see the end of "the occupation" of Yehuda and Shomron. 2 meter tall secret policemen are no match for the young people on the hill's determination. Two meter tall secret policemen are afraid of showing their faces, they are paid employees aka mercenaries, and they will do what their bosses will say. And their bosses already have lost and a new generation is waiting for the turning point to move in to their offices. But the White Nights I am talking about is not the Arctic nor the Shomron. Unexpectedly, I had a so-called nocturnal emission (?) at night, while reworking ing in my memory a young mother I had been watching at the swimming pool. I am not a young man and this things dont happen to me anymore. They shouldnt. But I had eaten the smelling rotten fish, I had reduced my physical activities (because of my painful leg) and slept more than my regular hours. I'll have to think what to do after I complete my fast and start eating regularly. Also, as I am working less, I am taking an assistant engineer. Already I received hundred CVs.
26 comments:
The CIA does not have anyone who had a Yiddishe Kopf like Begin - they have a bunch of bureaucratic time servers. In any case, it was in their interest that the Soviet Union exist, or else they would be unemployed. Thank God for them that the US air security system was equally bad and that those Arabs were able to fly the planes into the WTC so that they now have new jobs.
All regimes, especially totalitarian ones, are destined to fall in the long run, so you are not much of a fortune teller if you predict their downfall. The question is when - in a week, a month , a year, a decade, a century? You can see that if circumstances had been just a little different the totalitarian regime might have managed to (barely) hold it together as they have continued to do in Cuba and N. Korea. You could even argue that Putin is in effect a resumption of the old system - he is the last (or at least the current) General Secretary in all but name, so that the pronouncements of the death of Sovietism were premature.
K
Sovietism is dead, but Russian nationalism is not and never (!) will be.
I always found it difficult, during the Cold War, to ascertain how much of Russian behaviour was driven by dedication to Marx/Lenin, and how much to nationalism.
I think, in reflection, they were never economically sophisticated, so swallowed the Central Planning stuff hook, line and sinker; but for the rest I feel they were motivated by nationalism. And that certainly survives, and who are we to deny they have a right to it.
As long as they behave themselves.
Anon.
K
I cant see why the CIA couldnt have any Yiddische Kopf like Menachem Begin. There are millions of poylische yidn like yourself in the USA and they would have worked their asses off just for being allowed to have a lunch in the cafeteria.
Regarding the USSR, sorry K, it did collapse. Totally. Finally. Putin's roots go more to the Kadets than the Bolsheviks. He has no connection to Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kaganovich and their faction.
I buy my suits (just kidding) in the shop of a Persian Jewish immigrant in Kever Benjamin's main street. It is a Persian bazaar but cheap and he can always find the fashion I like. In fact there is nowhere else that I can buy anything for myself. This man and his relatives (all sitting the whole day in the shop or in the street drinking tea) less than admire the current Persian leadership and think Persians will not land on the moon or do something smart. Dont forget that the Russians, the Chinese, Pakistan and India are nearer to Teheran than Tel Aviv. The Saudis also are worried. We need momentum.
The CIA was originally populated by old school WASPs, the same type who populated Wall Street and the prestigious law firms. Wall Street and the law firms have changed but the CIA didn't. I see 2 reasons -
1. There was money to be made on Wall St. and not at the CIA. (BTW, in recent years neither have WASPs been - during WWII top graduates went into gov. service because it was patriotic but now top Wasp Ivy League grads don't go to the CIA either).
2. What happened on Wall St. and in the law firms is that when the Jews were excluded from the WASP firms, they opened their own firms that competed and did even better. Eventually the WASP institutions realized that unless they evened the table by having Jews of their own, they would be out of business. The CIA had no Jewish competitors (except if you count Mossad) and so never reformed.
K
I don't see Putin as a Kadet at all. Despite his legal training, he is neither Constitutional nor a Democrat - he is a Chekist and an authoritarian at heart. Nabokov (the author) would spin in his grave if you told him that Putin was a liberal democrat (in the classic sense, not the current decadent one) like his father.
Russians tend to drink and indolence unless there is a master to order the serfs around, so maybe Putin is the czar that the Russians still need. I look forward to the day when Russia will be a normal Western country in all respects (if there still is a West) but it's not yet.
K
K
K,
Another reason why Jews were scarce in the CIA was fears of dual loyalties (e.g., Pollard).
You are right about Putin being a Chekist though. He has said so himself.
Pollard aside (he didn't work for the CIA anyway) the dual loyalty thing is a red herring. Did Aldrich Ames have dual loyalty? Robert Hanssen? Jews are no more likely to be traitors than any other race.
K
Soon, Russia will be the only 'western' country.
Anon.
They have plenty of Yiddishe kopfen, as well as goyishe kopfen that are just as good. The problem is that info is gathered, processed and disseminated by committee and through layers. Figure six (let's say) layers from collection to national command authority, and assume that at each of those layers, the odds of someone assigning a given piece of intel the wrong value or emphasis in context, and what are the odds of it being useful when it gets to the top? Starving Jew Begin had nothing riding on his assessment; not so for the analyst with 15 years in. A prognosis at odds with everyone else's draws attention, the price for it being wrong is potentially high, especially if there's a pattern. Add to this the difficulty in predicting a timeline ("the USSR will collapse...sometime." Thanks, Ms. Fucking Cleo! Get out of my office!) BTW, this is the same reason that no Major financial company accurately predicted the recent collapse.
The CIA may have been the major, last ethnic retreat of the WASPs, at least that what it was in the nineteen eighties. If the information about expense accounts in the Italian kidnapping operation are true, that they spent much government money in the bars, they we may assume that basically they have not changed. It is not that the CIA has no competition, what happens is that the USA has no enemies. No foreign armies are thinking of invading America, no terrorist organizations are dreaming of doing anything more than a getting in the evening news. We in Israel are fighting for our lives and mishaps are punished (we have one poor fellow in jail in Poland). Not by us, but by the Tao, a wonderful Chinese concept of God without the Jewish purpose and passion.
Tony Poshepny and Bill Laird were hardly Ivy League Wasps. What intelligence coups have your guys enjoyed recently? The Lebanon War did not impress me; nor the team that got exposed whackng that guy in Dubai, or the time before that, when they poisoned the dude, got caught and had to provide the antidote. Seems your intel organizations are comparably sclerotic to ours.
Sure, Israel had several major intelligence fiascos lately. Please let us put it proportion. Israel is very small country (7 million - and only half of it reliable, the rest - Arabs, Haredi fanatics, the academic left - openly hostile to the State). Our intelligence operations cover half of the world, if not more. Our security interests are almost of world power range & scale. I have the impression that the Mossad developes an activity that can be compared with, say, Great Britain? Am I exaggerating? May be. But certainly it is enormous. On the other hand, you have a very large country like the USA, 300 million richest people on Earth, and its very large intelligence community. They do a lot of work, and they are not sclerotic at all. In my note I was pointing out to one very large conceptual error, which was to assume the solid-rock stability of the Soviet Union during its last 20 years of existence, when it had been already hollowed out and was like an empty sack still standing. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan was too lazy to read CIA position papers and boldly "attacked" the USSR and caused its final collapse.
They do a lot of work, but they are quite sclerotic. Comparable to the KGB and GRU in the 1980's. Huge budgets, modest results.
What I am saying is that the only way intel gets transfromed into useful policy is through personal initiative and personal linkage from top to bottom. Both anathema to democratic bureaucracy.
I think the British hit on the right point. Their services were full of idiosyncretic excentrics who were tolerated to an incredible degree. I am reading about Turing and the Enigma telex machine, what is incredible is that the British intelligence could extract production from a most strange human being in war conditions. There is something with the British - they are the most boring people I know but somehow they manage to do extraordinary things.
"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained".
John Stuart Mill
Anon.
Unfortunately, post WW2, the Brits collapsed into the rule of mediocrity, a bureaucratic totalitarianism, as witnessed by Turing's fate. The US, too, leveraged some incredible individuals, like Feynman, Donovan, etc. The cooling-off period and the transformation of our govt into a red giant star took a bit longer, but we're sure there now.
We did to Oppenheimer what the Brits did to Turing. In time of war it is possible to overlook all deviancies in the interest of winning, but once the war is won there is room only for the straight and true. Fags and commies need not apply, even if they were the one that won the war for you.
K
Commies are different from fags. Their loyalty was to the Cremlin, or, should I say, they had a much closer to kinship to the dear party from its rise to power onwards than they did to the average American. Look at John Reed, for instance. Oppenheimer is on one side of the equation; on the other is most of Asia,half of Europe and a large chunk of Latin America being delivered into Communist hands by the dominant fraction of the American elite (Owen Lattimore, anybody?) along with the A-bomb. So while I have sympathy for Turing, I have none for those few (very few, comparative to their total numbers) members of the American elite who got their nuts crushed for being Communists or aligned with CPUSA. It's a shame that there weren't full-on purges, with the networks being fully exposed.
K-they never the won the war for us; they won it for them.
Take a look around.
Anon.
Although it is AM Turing's name comes up whenever the Enigma is discussed, he was not the only one one who did important work at Bletchley Park. Apparently Smiley's people allowed his eccentries to run riot in order to deflect attention from their even more powerful Colossus computers which saw service into the Cold War. The Colossus was the world's first electronic computer, designed by TH Flowers . In our age where some computer nerd who breaks into the Pentagon website claims bragging rights, it is humbling that the British pioneers were content watch as the Americans took all the credit.
B, there were full-on purges, but strangely enough, of the anticommunist side. I recall a few movies or it may be have been television shows, revolving around the pain of a target of McCarthyite witch-hunts. The plot has the form where a victim lost a comfortable sinecure at an Ivy League institution and is nursing his wounds as a teacher at high school. No movies were ever made of the thousands of elderly Chinese beaten to death in front of their children, or of Checzh boiler stokers with impressive qualifications. No sir, from among the countless crimes of Communism, the Ministry of Enlightenment couldn't find a single bedtime story.
I didnt say that the Enigma was solved by Turing or anyhing about his sexual activities. I said that Turing was a most strange individual that in peacetime conditions would not be tolerated anywhere for more than two months. Turing and his kin (excentrics) "survive" only in war conditions. I have nothing or little in common with Turing, but I felt most alive in stress conditions, such as war (we had a few here). While everybody around me was uncertain, trembling and cowed, I moved ahead with the certainty of a happy sleepwalker. In normal conditions I perform less well.
Ivan,
those weren't purges. That's a selection process that's never stopped, but continues to this day, with varying intensity. We know that the left is ever perpetually losing, barely keeping the dark forces of ignorance, intolerance and reaction at bay, as they march triumphantly through all the institutions, cleansing themselves of those comrades who are not enthusiastic enough. I remember being forced to read Miller's The Crucible in the eighth grade, which was used as an exposition of this kind of right-wing evil. Only a decade later I put two and two together and realized that Cotton Mather and his fellow Puritans were the most Progressive men of their day, and that they were the direct spiritual ancestors of the Nation and the President. Of course, any attempt to reverse Progress in our democracy/scientocracy is doomed, as Progress has on its side all the charismatic, ambitious, unscrupulousand fashionable people, a monopoly on graphic design and production values and so on. The right, which at this point is just the left short a couple of operating system updates, has a bunch of uncool weirdoes who make Joe McCarthy look like a socialite. To boot, some of them are hampered with vestigial scruples, and you know what Machiavelli said about conflicts between the scrupulous and the un-.
J, I emphathize. Life is much more fun and meaningful when you have a mission and the prospect of imminent death at your elbow.
I don't think Turing was used to deflect attention from anything. All the work at Bletchley Park was top secret and remained largely unknown for decades after the war. That is the nature of secret work - the CIA monument to its fallen operatives consists only of stars without names. Turing is a hero for OUR times - a gay martyr, a drama queen, so naturally he gets more attention today than the straight, even tempered family man Flowers. Think of a movie about Flowers muttering about his valves (radio tubes) - you'd fall asleep.
Very often great breakthrus are made simultaneously (think of Leibniz and Newton and the calculus) when conditions are ripe. But sometimes only 1 of the inventors gets credit or leads to commercialization. The modern computer as we know it is the direct descendant of Eniac. Luckily,its wartime function (computing ballistic tables) was less secret and so it was commercialized after the war (ENIAC wsa revealed to the public in 1946). The top secret code breaking nature of Colossus (especially in light of the Cold War that immediately followed WWII) meant that there could be no spin offs - Colossus remained classified until the '70s). That the British aristocracy thought that commerce was dirty didn't help either.
Mauchly and Eckert (the inventors of ENIAC) immediately realized the commercial potential of their invention and sought to commercialize it (the Unisys company which still exists today is the descendant of their efforts) and the nature of their contracts with the U. of Penn. and the government permitted this.
By the way, Colossus was not, unlike ENIAC, what is called "Turing complete" (which all modern computers are) - a Turing complete computer can be programmed to solve any arbitrary math problem and to emulate any other (Turing complete) computer. All you need is to change the program, which is stored in memory the same as the data. This chameleon quality is what has allowed the computer to take over the world. Colossus was hard wired in a way that it could solve only one particular class of problems, which would have made its post war usefulness (even if it had not been classified) quite limited.
K
The British can also claim credit for constructing possibly the first business computer, the Leo.
You will not believe it but in my youth built a "compuer" with relays, b ut relays were expensive and gave me shocks, then I went hydraulic with valves made of clay ceramics and a glass ball moving inside closing and opening a water stream. Then I lost interest, like everything I do.
The Leo has a legitimate claim to being one of the first business computers. Once the ENIAC (and more particularly the EDVAC) design became known, computer technology soon spread to all the advanced countries including the UK. At first it was not clear how widespread computers would become - they were expensive to build and operate and only suitable for the most difficult tasks, but the LEO was applied almost immediately to mundane jobs such as payroll accounting, etc. - probably before this role was even economical. There was some pundit who estimated the future US demand for computers and he came up with some small #, less than 10. One of the most famously wrong predictions in history.
K
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