Wis[s]e Words

The Wages of Destruction – Adam Tooze

Published on January 9, 2011

Cover of The Wages of Destruction

The Wages of Destruction
Adam Tooze
800 pages including notes and index
published in 2006

When I read Hitler’s Empire back in August, I had actually wanted to read The Wages of Destruction, due to Alex Harrowell’s review when it came out. I couldn’t find it so Mark Mazower’s book was a more than acceptable substitute. Both books look at the economy of Nazi Germany and the empire it carved out, each in their own way. Whereas Mazower’s point of view is that of a historian turned economist, Tooze approached the subject from the other side: economicst first, historian second. And while Mazower primarily looked at the interaction and tensions between nazi ideology, economci reality and the demands of war, Tooze goes for the more fundamental question of how the fundamental constrains of the German economy influenced nazi decision making, argueing that seemingly irrational decisions made by Hitler and the nazi leadership, not the least the decision to invade Russia, made perfect sense when looking at the economic context.

Which is not to say, nor does Tooze, that Nazi ideology wasn’t not irrational or evil, but that if you take into account their worldview, that in this context their decisions were rational and clearheaded and clearly informed by the economic realities of Germany. To the Nazis, as to most intelligent observers between the wars, it was clear that Germany was doomed to be a second rate power, not big or rich enough to seriously challenge countries like England, with its vast colonial empire, let alone America or the USSR. Under the Weimar Republic, the best it could hope to achieve was to become a middling European power, growing rich on American coat tails. Nazism set out to change this, to conquer a larger living space for the German race by force and through pure willpower and technology transform the German economy into the equal or even the superior of the American. This struggle lies behind all strategic decisions the Nazi leadership made in the runup to the war and during it, each time putting their faith into another great leap forward, each time still finding themselves in the same box, in the end not having been able to overcome these fundamental limitations.

Saturday is music day

Published on January 8, 2011

Here, have a video:

I hadn’t heard of Dearling Physique before, until Rydra Wong linked to it, but this is a great video and a good song too.

In more personal music news, last Tuesday, in the fifteen seconds between my ipod slipping out of my coat pocket and me noticing this and cycling back, some fscker must have spotted it and swiped it, as prolonged searching has gotten no result. It was only a 2GB mini ipod, once gotten as an incentive for going to a job interview I was reasonably sure I wasn’t actually going to accept if I got through, but it was my little friend and for now has left me musicless during my commute. Grumble.

Creeping back into Afghanistan

Published on January 7, 20112 Comments

The government today announced that it would propose a new police mission in Afghanistan to parliament, even though it was this exact same issue that caused the previous government to stumble. But with the coalition partner (PvdA/Dutch Labour) that then objected now in opposition and the two parties that form the current minority government both having been firm supporters of the original proposal, it was just a question of time before it would be back on the agenda again.

At first view it looks innocent enough, to get some twohundred or so civilian cops to Afghanistan to help train the locals, but the devil is in the details. With them some 300 odd soldiers would be traveling back into Afghanistan as well, to provide security, support and liason duties with other NATO forces in the area. There would be four F-16 jets coming along as well, again to provide air support for this supposedly civilian mission. I can’t help but see this as the thin end of the wedge — once we have some fivehundred plus soldiers and cops stationed again in northern Afghanistan, it will become that much easier to extend and enlargen their mission and before you know it we’re creeping back into the war again. Which is something the current government parties, who didn’t agree with the end of the original Dutch involvement in the War in the first place, would not mind at all.

Ironically, the opposition against this proposal is likely to contain both Geert Wilders’ party and its fiercest critics, the PvdA and Socialist Party. The latter because it’s opposed in principle to any involvement, the former because it sees no good in letting “our boys” risk their skins for foreigners, especially when the government needs to cut spending on policing anyway and we need those cops on our streets….

Some links

Published on January 6, 2011

Strange Horizons has put out their science fiction year in review and the interesting thing is: no mention of Iain M. Banks. Funny, for me Surface Detail was one of the best books I read this year, but no peep of it in SH’s list. Reviews elsewhere have been lacklustre as well, something that I’ve noticed before with the previous “new” Culture novels. It’s as if the original three novels have set expectations so high that everything that Banks has done afterwards is consciously or not compared to the impact the original trilogy had. Hardly fair, but perhaps inescapable.

Now for something completely different. We knew crows were clever, but they are even more clever than we thought. New Caledonian crows have long been known to use twigs to pry insects out of trees, but now experiments have proven that these crows know how to adapt their tools for multifunctional use by poking at a rubber spider with a twig. It sounds like nothing, but these are probably the first non-mammal species shown to have the mental capacity and creativity to not only use tools, but adapt them for other uses and, as the Wired article also notes, use them in sequence: using a twig to get a twig to get food. I’ve had co-workers who showed less promise…

Finally, would you like some cheese with that white whine?

More government bullying of coffeeshops

Published on January 5, 2011

prerolled joints for sale

I’ve posted before about the “wietpas“, the current Dutch government’s attempt to slowly strangle the coffeeshops by depriving them of foreign customers, but that’s not the only measure they want to introduce. Another proposal doing the rounds right now is the idea to close any coffeeshop that’s too near a school, for the sake of the children of course. Exactly what is too near a school and which kind of schools will fall under this new proposal is still unclear. The only thing we know so far of the plans is that the governments wants to ban all coffeeshops in a range of 350 metres distance from a school, but not how this will be measured — as the crow flies, or based on the shortest route from a given school to a shop. That last measurement would probably the least harmful to existing coffeeshops, but even then almost sixty percent of coffeeshops in the Netherlands would have to close, according to the NRC newspaper.

They looked at the fourteen municipalities with ten or more coffeeshops within their borders, who together account for 442 out of the 660 shops in the country. Judging by the most positive interpretation of the proposed law, some 57,9 percent of these shops would have to close — in Amsterdam it would mean 187 out of a total of 223, including the world famous Bulldog. Combine that with the restrictions on selling to tourists and it would basically mean the end of the coffeeshop as we know it.

It’s an absurd measure, supposedly meant to protect children from the dangers of drugs, but the idea that teenagers looking for dope would bike 350 metres but not 351 metres to go to the coffeeshop is silly. What’s more, it’s already illegal for coffeeshops to sell softdrugs to people younger than 18 and the decent ones do check, as I know from my own experience. They have to, because if they do get caught selling to underage kids, it means they’ll lose their license and are barred from owning any coffeeshop.

Nobody, — coffeeshop owners, police, city councils, social workers or even the government themselves — thinks this measure will actually solve anything, especially considering the Netherlands is doing quite well already anyway, with one of the lowest addiction and hard drug use rates of any western country. The truth is that this government has an ideological hatred for soft drugs, partially from Christian moralism on the part of the CDA, partially from the “fact” that the pseudolegalisation of soft drugs in Holland is a leftwing legacy of “the seventies” and this government puts great pleasure in destroying “leftwing hobby horses” just for the sake of it.