A Few Inconvenient Details about Western History, October 29, 2013
Herbert L. Calhoun
For centuries after the fall of Rome, Western Europe was unaccountably still locked in the dark ages, a period referred to as “dark” for good reasons. Despite the rich intellectual heritage from both Greece and Rome, it is not well known that little of it had seeped into the medieval feudal and violence-torn Western European veins before the thirteenth century. Even less well known is that what little did seep in came by way of the rich history and cultural institutions of the Arab dominated Near East, a region that drunk the intellectual wines of both Greece and Rome nearly a millennium earlier than the West did.
Although Western Europeans were ever ready to fight each other, most of them could not read, write or tell time. There were only a handful of libraries. Neither streets nor people had unique names or numbers. Violence and instability were the order of the day. Even as the Kingdom and the Catholic Church viciously vied for power, Europe was essentially a region being run by “outlaws,” the equivalent of petty warlords that we see today in places like Afghanistan.
I've had several translations of the I Ching Before, and this one is far superior to the rest. At first glance the advice in the various hexagrams may seem nearly the same, from one hexagram to the next; but the repetitions are examples of core Taoist philosophy, which tend to apply in almost any situation, like remaining calm, being flexible, and not letting ego battles determine one's course of action. That's what I like about this translation: it keeps reminding you to cultivate those qualities. In that sense it's almost like a Taoist master continually advising you. Of course it's not a master but the Tao itself that guides. The hexagrams simply alert you to qualities of the situation and the perspective of the Tao.
No one knows how the I Ching works, but it always seems to understand the exact situation you are consulting it about; or, that has always been true for me. Maybe it can give you insights into choosing your courses of action in the various endeavors of your life.
For centuries, The I Ching or Book of Changes has been consulted for sage advice at life's turning points. When its wisdom is sought with sincerity and sensitivity, this Chinese oracle will help to promote success and good fortune and to impart balance and perspective to your life. Its everlasting popularity lies in the lessons that it teaches about how to use your positive qualities in order to attain life's greatest rewards-prosperity, understanding, and peace of mind.
The other book is “365 Tao: Daily Meditations,” by Deng Ming-Dao. Again, this book is extraordinary. I've read many books on the Tao, but none compare to this one, because the book is laid out in 365 different topics—one for each day of the year. But I haven't been reading it that way. I've been flipping through it and reading any topic that peaks my curiosity. So the book is from the position of a Taoist master discussing a range of topics. And I'm continually amazed that Taoism is essentially a philosophy of integral thinking. The ancient sages were seeing things from the perspectives of systems thinking and complexity thousands of years before contemporary Western science.
Most important about this book: it uses language that explains clearly the concepts that you and I and the other posters at phibetaiota are always trying to articulate but have difficulty putting into words. So it's an excellent aid in trying to articulate a systems perspective in respect to social issues. In that regard, I doubt there's another book like it.
Here's the math that I was surprised to not see in the book: the top billion people that business focuses on are worth less than a trillion in potential sales. The bottom four billion, with less than $1000 a year in disposable income, are worth four trillion in potential sales.
In combination, Prahalad and Hart make it clear that business suffers from the same pathologies as the Central Intelligence Agency and other bureaucracies: they are in a rut.
I will end by emphasizing that I believe this author merits the Nobel Peace Prize. As the U.S. Department of Defense is now discovering, its $500 billion a year budget is being spent on a heavy metal military useful only 10% of the time. Stabilizization and reconstruction are a much more constructive form of national defense, because if we do not address poverty and instability globally, it will inevitably impact on the home front. This author has presented the most common sense case for turning business upside down. He can be credited with a paradigm shift, those shifts that Kuhn tells us come all too infrequently, but when they come, they change the world. It may take years to see this genius implemented in the real world, but he has, without question, changed the world for the better with this book, and make global prosperity a possibility.
Is this the Penultimate CIA hangout position, or just another “Case Closed?”, October 22, 2013
Herbert L. Calhoun
This is an interesting theory. In fact it is a slightly more robust and sophisticated off-shoot of the “renegade CIA officers did it” theory. However, the critical element — of linking it to Clint Murchison — shows up here as being mostly rhetorical, and thus is weak at best. The language used on page 155 is that “Murchison could have easily arranged the meeting between Cord Meyer and LBJ.” However, is it unfair to point out that the authors are way too far down the road and into the weeds to be using as the finally linking connection, a “mealy-mouth” phrase such as “could have easily been arranged?”
In any case, the LBJ/Cord Meyer angle is an E. Howard Hunt death bed concoction. Which raises another fair question to ask: Who in their right mind would believe anything that E. Howard Hunt would say, especially since he never admitted being the third “faux tramp” taken from a train in full view of the world and arrested only yards away from the Grassy Knoll the day of the assassination? Is that what he refers to as being a “bench warmer?” And with the exception of “Poppy Bush,” and Richard Nixon, Hunt is also the only man in the known universe who did not know where he was on the day JFK was murdered? (Did he not lose a million dollar law suit to the Liberty Lobby and Spotlight Magazine on the basis of lying about where he was on that fateful day?) And did his son, St. John Hunt, not confirm that Court verdict by insisting that his mom had told him “that daddy is on a business trip to Dallas” — as well as recognizing his father unmistakably as being the third tramp in the picture shown across the world on that fateful day?
Chapter Twenty-One, entitled the Imbangala, tells the story of how slavery got into the English colonial picture. It is such an interesting and unexpected story that I am including a rough summary of it here as well.
The transatlantic slave trade began under a license issued at Seville, in 1598 while Portugal was a province of Spain. At the time, Portugal had had much success in enlisting very unreliable local black armies to help it defeat local towns in Angola raided for large caches of slaves taken as spoils of war. That is, until it was routed by a chief of the Ndogolo people. Rather than continuing to rely on the unreliable “black armies,” Portugal hired the much more feared and ruthless, if not entirely barbaric, group of itinerant marauders called the “Imbangala,” best known for settling within a country, sucking it dry and then moving on.
5.0 out of 5 starsExtraordinary Effort, Surprise Turn, One Gap, October 16, 2013
FINAL REVIEW
The original review and its links remain valid. The book is misrepresented as a history of military strategy – despite flyleaf comments about the book also covering business strategy, the fullness of the book is not properly presented to the public.
Had this book included Herman Daly and the entire underlying foundation of true cost economics, perhaps augmented by holistic analytics, and had the book focused on win-win and non-zero strategies in its conclusion, it would easily have moved into my six-star (top ten percent) category. As it is the book is assuredly at the top of the five star group.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The author touches briefly on a core point where we converge: he states in passing that “victory” is a military concept while “peace” is a political concept. Across the book he addresses persistent conflicts as those whose underlying disputes are never fully resolved, with peace and prosperity made ever less likely by the persistence of rulers striving to optimize their self-interest rather than the public interest. Exactly! Strategy without integrity is not strategy, it is systemic looting.
REF A — 12 Years of Lessons Learned in Time for 2014, October 13, 2013
This is an extraordinary book that required a great deal of time, not in the reading, but in the reflection. This will be a longer review than usual, even for me, because this book contains all of the insights that the US and the Coalition have refused to embrace for the past twelve years. It is never too late to learn.
The author opens with a well-known quote on the dangers of drawing a line between fighting men and thinking men, lest one end up with the fighting being done by fools and the thinking by cowards. To this I would add another group, the “deciders,” who in the absence of any familiarity with fighting or access to intelligence with integrity, end up making decisions whose true cost in blood, treasure, and spirit crosses the line dividing legitimate actions “in the national interest” from “crimes against humanity.
Positive up front: US under Obama has given more of everything and progress has been made across both military (stronger Afghan army, degraded Taliban) and socio-economic (education, health, media) domains. To that I would add elections. Afghanistan is about to experience the most extraordinary election cycle it has ever been my privilege to observe.
In contrast, the author finds that Pakistan has worsened in every possible manner, in large part because the US has not understood Pakistan, has lacked a strategy (or the intelligence with which to devise a coherent sustainable strategy), and in failing, the US has allowed Pakistan to drag itself down and Afghanistan to be a regional albatross – a cancer on all others.
The author is quite blunt in describing an incoherent even infantile US decision-making environment characterized by “contradictory policies, intense political infighting, and uncertainty.” In being inept, the US opened the way for regional players to manipulate, exploit, and exacerbate.
Chapter 1 on the Bin Laden raid is utter nonsense, this may be the price the author pays to maintain access and avoid being assassinated. See instead The Bin Laden Story 00-90 at Phi Beta Iota.
The author points out that by 2014 the Coalition engagement in Afghanistan will have been longer than WWI and WWII. In my own mind this highlights the fact that the US in particular, but the Western nations in general, have lost their integrity. They are incapable of collecting and analyzing the truth, thinking holistically, evaluating true costs over time, or devising a sustainable strategy that ultimately achieves the desired end-state: peace and prosperity. A churlish skeptic would point out that no, the West has achieved precisely what it wants, public theater at home, a massive transfer of wealth from the individual taxpayer to the military-industrial complex, and personal enrichment of most policymakers, at least in the USA. Either way, the larger publics lose at home and abroad.
Pakistan and Afghanistan matter not only to Central Asia, where other countries such as Uzbekistan are beginning to implode, but to the Middle East and India. At the very end of the book the author ponders how Afghanistan might follow the Turkish example of Islamic/secular regeneration, and I cannot help but wish that 12 years ago the Coalition had had the brain to leave the British home and make Afghanistan a collaborative effort among Muslim nations led by Turkey.
QUOTE (19) “After a decade, NATO has achieved none of its strategic aims – rebuilding the Afghan state, defeating the Taliban, stabilizing the region – so what assurances can it now plausibly give that it will do so by 2014?
The author defines Afghanistan today (2012) as a corrupt and incompetent government, a dysfunctional bureaucracy and inoperable justice system, high on drugs and illiteracy, with a police force that has the highest desertion rate in the world.
The sucking chest wound: no indigenous economy. Bush specifically refused to invest in roads, dams, water, and power. Karzai has been a complete failure [the author gives Karzai credit and cause across the book, outlining the many ways in which the US failed to develop a relationship of trust with him.]
Pakistani military is out of control and the deal breaker. Nothing the US or other can do will overcome an arrogant ignorant Pakistani military continuing to support extremists and their violence within Afghanistan.
QUOTE (22): “If the west is to depart Afghanistan by 2014 and leave behind relatively stable regimes in Kabul and Islamabad, it will need a multidimensional political, diplomatic, economic, and military strategy.”
Answering this challenge is the purpose of the book.
My nine page detailed summary for professionals coping with Afghanistan and not having the time to read this excellent work, is posted at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
A Few Inconvenient Details about Western History, October 29, 2013
