The War No One Wants

Before the start of the Great War, the prevailing sentiment in most, if not all, European countries was that victory in any major military conflict was guaranteed only if it was fought with a large, durable, well-trained, and modern army. The dawn of the 20th century established the environment in which countries entered the race to mobilize the largest part of the qualified population, to create faster motorized transport for troops and logistics, to use state-of-the-art communications and the greatest range of artillery, as well as to use various new drugs in medical treatments like morphine and even cocaine to boost the troops and fuel their fighting mood. Compared to 19th-century wars, new warfare was revolutionized and upped to the next level. By June 1914, the stage was set, and only a spark was needed to fire off the conflict.

But was it really inevitable? Was the military race alone enough to cause the conflict in which 20 million died and many more were wounded? Or did it need a plot to be played in just a specific order that would lead to the unavoidable horror? Did it need at least one party to actually want the war to happen? To honestly believe that a war on that scale could be won?

When asked if the Great War could have been avoided, Ronald Spector, professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, said that ’if Sir Edward Grey hadn't been the foreign secretary in Britain, then Britain might not have necessarily entered the conflict. Furthermore, if German Kaiser Wilhelm II hadn't been the flaky person he was, then the Germans may have made different decisions, and in the end, if Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who at the time was the head of the faction that wanted to avoid war, had not been killed, the outcome might have been different’. According to Professor Spector and many others, the real trigger for the First World War was indeed only a combination of these unfortunate coincidences that took place in the summer of 1914—military preparations, the alliances, the people in power—all of those steps that built one after another created the Great War.

In the aftermath, the war did happen, and to many, including me, the question was not who won it four years later but rather what stage it created in the following years. It ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire lost a lot of territory, and the Turkish Empire ceased to exist. On the other end, new statehoods arose along with a new wave of nationalism, as many felt they hadn't achieved enough for their sacrifices and losses. History books at the end of the war never really recognized the winner or the loser. It officially ended in the Compiègne railway car on November 11, 1918, and the final document was signed as an armistice.

But what about today, a century and a change after the war that could have been avoided and the war that allegedly nobody wanted? Is there a new similar danger we could repeat again? The one that, according to Ken Follett, could also be one tragic accident, all things considered. Is there a war that no one wants today? The one that could leave a permanent mark on the surface of humanity. The one that will not be fought in trenches and the one that will truly be worldwide this time.

I think we all know the answer to that question. Yet, just like before, and even though nobody really wants it to happen, it could happen nevertheless. Just like before, it only needs a plot that, if set in motion, step by step, spark by spark, decision by decision, can lead to the point of no return. Are we today, on the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, already walking that path? We already have everything the Great War had before it started. Countries have already been in the arms race for a long time—the race for ultimate supremacy and world military dominance. Army budgets are filled up to the roof. More than 10,000 nuclear warheads of various kinds are already in military stockpiles for use by missiles, aircraft, ships, and submarines. We also have questionable leaders like before, even flaky ones like in Professor Spector's description. Let's just hope we will have better luck this time.

However, in light of today's story, let's get back to Ken Follett's fiction. I am really a big fan of his work, and his current thriller, "Never", is his vision of how the Great War could repeat today. In a chronological order of events that one by one led to the brink of a nuclear war, he amazingly described a fictional story that looks so real and so familiar. And so possible. He begins the book with a quote from a Chinese proverb, "Two tigers cannot share the same mountain", and it amazingly describes the entire book premise. I couldn't agree more with Stephen King when he said that "Ken Follett can't write a bad book", and I could only add that "Never" is definitely more than a book. One of his best. One of those that keeps you thinking long after you finish it.

Refs:
https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/was-world-war-i-avoidable
https://thediplomat.com/2014/08/the-great-myth-world-war-i-was-no-accident/

https://www.dw.com/en/author-ken-follett-on-the-war-in-ukraine-our-only-hope/

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/drugs

What's Wrong with Society?

It's simple, really. Nothing is wrong with it. Society, like anything else created by our social behavior, has been following human evolution ever since we started living together within small and functionally organized communities. In the beginning there was a simple need for this—it was impossible for just one man to hunt down one, for example, mammoth or to defend a family from the herd of prehistoric saber-tooth tigers, and the only solution was to get together and organize a little for the mutual benefit. Not to mention the everlasting need for prolonging the species, which also required, sort of, well, socializing with a member of the opposite gender.

Mammoth hunt and prehistoric society*

We can only wish that things were as simple as they were millennia ago. If we disregard the fact that socializing in order to save the species didn't change much from the times when humans shared the habitat with mammoths, all other aspects of human society, due to the thousands of years of human evolution, changed a lot. We multiplied to enormous numbers, spread to the farthest corner of the Earth, used many different languages, started worshiping the divine and prominent members among us, created a money-based system of rewards, kept original differences between us and created new ones, built villages, cities, and countries to live inside, and ultimately developed a society as it is today with all its flaws and bright sides.

The question is "Did we do it wrong?"

Could we do it better, or was this the best we could do? Did we make wrong foundations in the first place, and is what we have now just a consequence of our ancestors's decisions and their poor vision of humanity as it is today? Or whatever they did, we would eventually evolve into this by its nature?

Let's not buzz our brains with "what if" questions too much. We can't change the past and explore different paths in human social evolution. Instead, what I want to write a little about in this post is just to "examine" some of the foundations we live in or use on a daily basis and take for granted as if they were always there. But before I just want to state something obvious—in this little mind experiment I am not trying to change something that needed thousands of years to emerge. That would be mission impossible. For example, we can try to advocate that living in big cities or dividing ourselves with borders and countries is not wise for many reasons, but in reality, efficient "canceling" of this way of life overnight is not possible. If we use the political metaphor, that would be similar to a revolution of some kind in order to change, for instance, an already established political system. We know from our history that all the revolutions didn't end without violent conflicts with lots of casualties and spilled blood. The less "bloody" disappointment, this time in the realm of information technologies, was felt by the mighty Google a couple of years ago when they tried to speed up the evolution of e-mail and tried to replace it with "Google Wave", an ambitious project with the power to bury email service forever with its sophisticated layers and new technology. I remember they advertised "The Wave" service as "how the e-mail would look if it were invented yesterday instead of twenty years ago". Like in the political arena, in a way, Wave was trying to revolutionize an already recognized system and expectedly failed big time.

Money, Money, Money**

No, social evolution is a very slow process, and just like the evolution of species, it is based on many tries and errors. Very few revolutionary methods succeeded in affecting it on a large scale, and I can't recall anything in the past that did it without turbulence.

But that doesn't stop us from using our imagination and trying to see one hypothetical future if we change some ground foundations a little. Just for fun.

So, for the very first ground property of our lives, let's think about how to improve the system behind the "money". Probably rudimentary trade in the form of simple barter was born with the very first societies long ago, but over time, when the amount of goods and services had risen to the point that simple exchange couldn't work anymore, it was natural that using a medium of exchange was something that was inevitably invented very soon. The history of the "medium of exchange" is very interesting, from the very beginning, when people in early civilized societies used barley grains to exchange things, through the times when different commodities were used as money, like shells, alcohol, cigarettes, and even cannabis. Today, after a long period of using gold, silver, and copper coins, we successfully created a system of banknotes that, by the beginning of the 20th century, all modern and industrialized countries accepted as the only means of use for all kinds of trades. However, even though an intermediary in the form of money was inevitable, it added other dimensions to the people's daily lives. I am sure greed existed long before money was invented in its rudimentary form, but in modern societies it received its pure meaning, or simple desire to acquire or possess more than one needs. Perhaps the only way to fix the basic problem with money, in which many people started to adore shiny banknotes more than the goods you can buy with them, is to remove one of its properties out of the equation. Cash. We need to ultimately stop using cash and replace it with a full electronic system. This way, "home money collectors" will be eliminated, and the system of individual wealth will become more transparent in many ways. I am sure "individual greed for money" would be significantly reduced, even though, as a psychological concept hidden deeply in our emotional brains, greed is simply impossible to remove.

Politics and Power***

On the other side, hypothetically speaking, removing worldwide banknotes and replacing them all with several or just one planetary electronic monetary value (let's call it credit or bitcoin?) could be possible, and that would efficiently remove so-called "corporate greed for money" and force worldwide stock markets to deal more with goods and services instead of dealing with money alone and their exchange rates. Not to mention the medical benefits of not using papers and coins that travel from one hand to another all the time. Payments in the future must be done completely without touching of any kind, preferably by wirelessly reading fingerprint-protected ID cards. Of course, there will still be people who will start worshiping 'credits' now instead of green banknotes, but hopefully their number will be significantly reduced due to a lack of physical connection in the hypothetical new system.

Ok, now that we fixed the money problem ;-), what else are we enjoying every day for granted? What is that thing that the average human being worships the same along with wealth and collecting treasures of any kind? Yes. The power. There is no society in nowadays planetary kingdoms, republics, states, provinces, or even the smallest municipalities with no rulers recognized and worshiped by the majority. No matter if they use simple dictatorship, communism, still live in African tribes, or live within highly evolved democracies, everything is organized within one or a couple "alpha" leader(s) in power, followed by the people designated in lower ranks ("betas" and "omegas" if we use the wolf herd analogy). These behaviors also came from our emotional inner beings, which we inherited from our animal origins. Fixing this problem is easy, and within current societies (evolutionary speaking), I can't see a better system than democracy. People are different in many aspects, and it is necessary that the majority select the rulers, and the only thing we need to do is improve democracy as it is in the current stage. In simple words, instead of voting for political parties that, if elected, govern the society for several years until the next elections, it became necessary to find a way to involve people and the voting system more frequently and for each and every agenda that requires important decisions to be made. Instead of voting for politicians, elections should be organized for each chairman, so to speak. Electronic voting is now possible, and counting the results can be done almost instantly, so we need a way to vote for the prime minister alone as well as for each member of the government. Also, voting should be selective, and it should not allow all members of the community to vote every time. For example, hypothetically speaking, why would I be involved in the election of the ministry of health when I committed and educated myself within the food and agriculture industry? I don't even know anybody from the medical institutions, so how would my vote be relevant? The same would be for the election of the ministry of agriculture, and only relevant people within this realm should participate in this election, and there is no need for doctors and nurses to bother voting for something that has so little in common. Anyway, a real democratic system requires many changes, and nowadays technologies allow the transformation. The only problem is that politicians would suffer the most and almost become extinct in the process, making this change as hard as the exchange of CRT television sets with flat screens. But it is inevitable, and in one way or another it will happen. Like in the case of "Cathode Ray Tube" TV sets, no matter how old technology spreads its roots, it is destined to die eventually.

Five Myths About Education****

So far we have encountered financial and political systems that actually create the rules responsible for one society's health. But what is even more important than these? Who is actually behind these systems? Yes. People. Individuals. But how did they come to be in the first place? Where did they learn all that they know? Yes. This is the final social link we need to improve. The Education. We all once were kids. No matter how talented we were, we needed to go through the educational system to become what we are today. This is where everything started and therefore the system that is the most responsible for the outcome of one society. What we have now in our societies, basically everything bad and good in our human existence, more or less, has to thank education. If one man or woman became a successful scientist responsible for some kind of breakthrough discovery that would change the world, the big portion of gratitude would go to the education institutions where he/she spent early days learning and acquiring knowledge and skills. The same amount of credit goes to the education institutions that actually provided installation of a mass murderer, serial killer, or lunatic war general, or at least didn't do enough to prevent their misfortune. The bottom line here is that the educational part of any society is something that must be the most important of them all. Sadly, there is no country in the world that prioritizes this part over anything else. Not even the highly evolved democracies and technocracies recognized the full potential and danger of one educational system. We now have mediocre politicians and bank employees that enjoy a wealthier life than highly educated teachers and university professors. Not to mention that military budgets in ALL countries are way bigger than their counterparts in educational and scientific systems, directly or indirectly funded by tax money taken from people. When I think of nowadays societies all over the world in relation to education and science, the title question, "What's Wrong with Society?" might not be accurate. Maybe the better question would be "Why is society turned upside down?"

Yes, education in private schools and universities is way better by the quality of given knowledge compared to tax funding and state institutions, but looking at it from the global scale, there are only a few of them, not to mention that the price of scholarships is way above the average income of the society they are located in, automatically excluding potentially extraordinary students from participating in the first place. The solution I have in mind is based on further fragmentation of class groups. Schools, especially elementary schools, are gathering kids away from their families every day, and it would be only fair to provide a family-like atmosphere inside the classroom. If we consider this, it seems reasonable that the number of students should not be bigger than 5 per group. These small selected groups would be enjoying classes in a more relaxing environment and over time get better results than a group of 15-30 pupils like today simply because each member of the smaller group would be more active on a daily basis. A family-like atmosphere would allow active tutoring of poor or lazy students as well as better acceptance of those who came from dysfunctional families. Furthermore, bright students and their interests would be spotted much earlier and therefore provided with more time in targeted education following their recognized talents and interests. The goal is also to get much better insight into the development of young people during their childhood and adolescent periods, when they are the most vulnerable and easy targets for various influences.

I will stop now and probably leave some more foundations and brainstorming about their improvements for some future posts (for example, dealing with social security with respect to medical and elderly insurance or demographic separations of different societies). The baseline here is that nothing is written in stone, and there is nothing wrong with thinking of how to change some social foundation, even though it has been in use for centuries. Times are passing fast, and sometimes we might be unaware that some technology already developed can help us live much better if we only try and dare to use it.

Without revolutionizing anything, of course.

Grisly find suggests humans inhabited Arctic 45,000 years ago*
http://www.sciencemag.org/grisly-find-suggests-humans-inhabited-arctic

Money, Money, Money**
http://sploid.gizmodo.com/holy-wow-you-can-actually-swim-like-scrooge-mcduck-in-1481547007

Politics and Power***
https://www.masonreport.com/donald-trumps-campaign-rhetoric

Five Myths About Education****
http://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/11/education.html

Warfare Then and Now

Lately I was watching the current stream of war-related news and the Syrian migrant crisis, and I thought of what I would say on the blog about actual, continuous, and devastating warfare in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and the stupidity of the literally inexplicable background of who is fighting whom in all those conflicts and what cause would justify the aftermaths in the form of devastated cities and long refugee corridors... Or even what words should I use to describe the foolishness of the new cold war between nuclear-powered "super countries" and what that will mean for our children and theirs in the future... Then I realized that reacting to meaningless affairs and worldwide political absurdity in a world so divided by racial, structural, governmental, and religious diversity is also meaningless. I also realized that I said enough in the past. There is nothing new to be added or said. There will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.

And to use a rifle, you need war, right?

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings when it comes to the military, soldiers, wars, battles, tactics, military gadgets, and stuff. On the 'interesting' side of the medal, warfare, if placed in history, good stories, or movies, is simply extraordinary, and I love it. Perhaps, in a way, it was also based on my experience as a soldier: I served in the army more than two decades ago within the mandatory military service, and I was situated in the surface-to-surface missile unit and trained for operating small rockets designed for targeting tanks and other heavy machinery. I couldn't say I enjoyed all the time spent in the service, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said that it wasn't interesting and educational, at least from the technical point of view.

The cannon from the Hill of Čegar

Speaking of history and tales, this summer, I mentioned one of the most famous last stands in the history of wars in the post "Fishermen and Pirates of Evia", when King Leonidas of Sparta confronted a large army of the Persian Empire and stood to the very end guarding a narrow pass in the battle of Thermopylae almost 2500 years ago. Anyhow, here, in Serbia, in our own history, we also have one of those suicide missions, conveniently called "last stands" by military vocabulary, and it happened only a couple of kilometers to the north from our house on the nearby hill called Čegar. Just like Leonidas, Serbian general Stevan Sindjelić, during the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire in the year 1809, confronted a huge Ottoman offensive after the Serbian army failed to capture the main Turkish fortress in the city. Outnumbered by 1 to 10, Serbian trenches only managed to reject several attacks, and after almost all day long of fighting, the battle turned out to be one of the best-known last stands in the long history of Ottoman occupation of Serbian lands. Ultimately, when the battle turned to be hand-to-hand combat in the trench, Stevan fired his flintlock pistol into a pile of gunpowder kegs in the moment when Ottoman soldiers swarmed the trench from all sides and headed for him personally. The explosion was tremendous, and the fall of Stevan's trench created time for other Serbian troops in the remaining 5 trenches to retreat on time, and, in the aftermath, Turks took all the Serbian soldiers' heads off and used the skulls to build a tower along the road to Constantinople as a warning to anyone rising against the Ottoman Empire.

Yesterday, we decided to visit the hill where it all happened and took some photos with two remaining cannons from the battle and from the monumental tower standing in the middle of the field. It was a one-of-a-kind experience that leaves a distressed feeling, especially after the glimpse from the top of the narrow tower toward the planes and the city.

Stevan Sindjelić & Remains of the Skull Tower in Niš

But there is another side of my mixed feelings regarding this topic. Simply put, if you place the warfare outside the history or fiction and experience it live, for me, all the magic from movies and books evaporates into thin air almost immediately. While I wasn't participating in any warfare in the army, I have witnessed real air strikes performed by NATO aircraft, dropping cluster bombs just hundreds of meters away from my house. I saw them explode*. I saw real damage in neighboring houses and streets and saw people injured from the impacts. Real people. Not soldiers. Collateral victims. Civilians. It wasn't fun. It seems that warfare two centuries before was more dignified, to say the least. The battles before were "organized" outside settlements, and most of them took place in the fields where no civilian casualties could be possible. Today, if you look at the aftermath of any wars happening everywhere on the globe, the first thing you will notice are devastated cities, villages, houses, schools, hospitals, even... Murdered innocent people and children. Ruins in all directions. It is easy today to pull the trigger. From the distance. There are no real heroes or knights today like before.

Modern times and technological advances perhaps ruined the very essence of war, but deep in its core, war was, is, and will always stay our darkest invention. Yes, it looks amazing with special effects in movies and written in our history books full of heroes and heroic events, but in a nutshell, it represents the worst genes we kept from our animal ancestors, evolutionary speaking.

View from Čegar's monumental tower with Viktor's plastic AK-47 toy gun

And the armies... They are a big part of it. The following words, said a couple of years before the battle of Čegar, on a different continent, are still fresh and valid, just like if they were said yesterday. Almost certainly, the famous James Madison quote will stay accurate for many more centuries. After all, as a species, humans are not really capable of learning from their own mistakes:

"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." - James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

I am sure proving his point is as easy as glimpsing the yearly statistics for the Global Firepower, aka GFP. The following numbers I acquired from "Business Insider" and "The Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation". They are collected for the latest year, and I summarized the data for only the top 5 armies in the world: the US, Russia, China, India, and the UK (and you can freely double these numbers for accounts of all other countries).

Anyway, more or less, give or take, believe it or not, in a nutshell, GFP numbers are:

6,000,000+ soldiers (human beings, men in the uniform)
35,000+ tanks (the iron amphibian combat vehicles with heavy guns on the top)
22,000+ aircraft (fighters, bombers, logistic planes, all kinds of military flying machines)
16,000+ nuclear warheads (only couple of them needed to cease all life on earth)
1000+ warships (cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, etc.)
15+ aircraft carriers (monster nuclear-powered ships)
230+ combat submarines (with large nuclear engines under the sea)
900,000,000,000+ dollars spent for military budgets (per year)

And don't forget to add an uncountable, and I really mean devastating, large number of missiles and rockets, all kinds of ballistics, regular weapons, drones, rifles, pistols, cold weapons, military-based factories, scientific research facilities, spy satellites and military space programs, state-of-the-art uniforms, etc. Indeed, we don't have a name for that big number in mathematics. Even the number of zeros in that count would probably be longer than the letters in this very sentence.

The 11 Most Powerful Militaries In The World**

Now, only by comparing these numbers with James Madison's words, it seems that after 200+ years, perhaps armies are not children of war anymore. In the dawn of the third millennium, it seems now that they are perfectly capable of creating wars just to justify their own existence. If only war could stay in history and fairy tales... But we all know that's not going to happen. With all that weaponry in existence, there will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.

Original post date: November 2014; Update: November 2015

Image ref:
**http://www.businessinsider.com/11-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-4

Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Čegar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Tower
http://armscontrolcenter.org/
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/nuclearweapons/articles/fact_sheet_2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison
http://www.businessinsider.com/35-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-7
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_bombing_of_Niš

Thassos Island Today and Before

The age of this blog is both old, in the sense of the fast maturing of the internet and IT technology in general, but also very young if we are counting human age in the old-fashioned way. When we first visited Thassos Island a dozen years before, the internet and social sharing technology were about to enter their unstable teenage years, so to speak. It was the time when I bought my first digital camera, the HP PhotoSmart C850, with its state-of-the-art optics and digital technology from the time. Pictures from Thassos back then in the summer of 2003 were probably my first attempt to take more artistic landscapes from our Greece vacations, and today is perhaps the time to compare both what changed in photography gadgets and also Thassos itself after a full 12 years.

Let's start with images first. After 12 years in time distance, I decided to choose the same number of images for this post—half of them shown above, all taken with the HP Photosmart C850 with a 4-megapixel CCD sensor, and half below, taken from this summer vacation with the Nikon D5200 and CMOS sensor with approximately 20 megapixels more than in the old HP. It is insufficient to say that 12 years of maturing of technology in optics, hardware, and software is easily noticeable.

As for Thassos Island, very little changed over the years. Local people are still the same, very hospitable and friendly; beaches are the same as they probably were hundreds of thousands of years before; the Aegean Sea is still crystal clear, just like in the time of Zeus; the company and the sun are the same hot, like in all Julys in previous millenniums and eons.

What is a little different are the people who are visiting Thasos—this year there were more tourists from Eastern European countries, like Romania, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Ukraine, and Russia, and fewer from Western Europe, which is probably the result of the anti-Greece media campaign due to the political conflict between the Greek government and the EU and the financial crisis in Greece these years. I have to say that at least during our stay on Thassos I couldn't notice any crisis or any problems whatsoever. Man-made crises are always like that; they always have profusely enhanced exposure in media, and the truth is never on either side in conflict and never in media. I know it is a cliche, but you have probably heard the phrase "trust no one", and if you ask me, it is always the ultimate truth when it comes to raw propaganda and news in media, especially if it is related to some political affairs like the current one in Greece vs. the EU (and by EU you can freely read Germany).

http://www.thassos-island.com/