In May of 1940, the Third Reich brought force of such strategic brilliance to Belgium, the Netherlands and neighbouring chocolatier states, they all surrendered to the Nazis immediately, apologised for any inconvenience caused to the invader population by the shamefully low land elevation of the chocolate bloc states they had been busily invading, and then they offered all Nazi divisional managers excellent written directions to France, at whose entry point their own former nations had once been so selfishly located.
By June of 1940, Paris had fallen to this campaign of German military excellence known to no one as Lightning War, but as Blitzkrieg, a wonderful Nazi term we utter in German even today.
Lightning War is the brilliant and unprecedented manoeuvre of throwing everything you’ve got at your chosen site of invasion at the same time thereby increasing the likelihood of casualties and infrastructure damage.
All weapons deployed at once?! This technique had surely never occurred to any person drawn to any conflict of any scale at any time in human history.
Ask your dad. He’ll tell you the Nazis were brilliant. If he reads those hardback history hack books for the Allied perv, he’ll explain how he admires Hitler for his extraordinary innovations in war, such as shouting angrily on camera and asking the lady director if she could make it look like he was shouting angrily at a big audience and not six unpleasant simpletons who got lost on their way to a putsch.
Dad will heil you all afternoon with this lionising garbage, which does not help a girl understand the world’s bloodiest conflict to date that transformed history and brought the world the technology of apocalypse. The US deployed the fucker twice on two living populations in Japan, and neither detonation led to surrender. Stalin did.
Sure, Stalin ain’t history’s most loveable leader, but he did (a) tell the Red Army to kill all the Nazis, seeing as how nobody else was doing it, and (b) secure the surrender he’d been negotiating for ages with Japan.
Do not repeat this observation to another person, even in order to mock the stupidity of its author.
You might very well be sectioned for praising Russian military strategy of any sort today—which is unfortunate, as those Bolsheviks were quite “disruptive” warriors, particularly in the revolutionary coup sector. But Nazis? No biggie. Pop a figleaf on your Hitler boner. Wear it on public transport if you fancy. Gotta give it to those Nazis, they really knew how to let a lot of bombs off at the same time and get some tanks and highly trained sadists in on the action.
As is abundantly clear to the reader familiar with words, sentences and/or the Roman alphabet, I’m no expert where WWII is concerned. I am, in fact, averse to receiving knowledge of military strategies, due in great part to my father’s ongoing Rommel crush and in some part to the atrocities committed by the Panzer division Rommel led. Further, I am generally squeamish about mass murder, even if it is legitimised by the state. And, it must be disclosed, I’m just not okay with Nazis. I’m aware this intolerance for Nazis is very OK Boomer and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is living proof that Nazis can bring democracy and ethnic cleansing to the free world in one beautiful package of a nation-state on which every cunt became suddenly became a credentialed professor of International Relations.
I know a little of post-Soviet bloc relations. But my ignorance of history’s most genocidal feats is complete. I wish to know nothing of the fine men who planned death with fearless determination and ensured how working men should best die fighting other working men with whom they had no actual quarrel. A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends. A powerful figure who choreographs this atrocity is not worthy of my attention.
A point about the Battle for France will soon emerge. You may or may not despise the Brave and Personal preamble.
Shortly before a highly transmissible virus brought drowning death to millions in the world’s poorest nations and thousands of elders detained in Australian aged care hell, I lost the little legitimate understanding of war I’d had. Which is to say, I went the full mental; so bonkers, not even the insurance company could continue to refuse the price of my medical care.
Major Depressive Disorder has many symptoms, and many informational podcasts, tv panel shows, and public health messaging work hard to describe just a few. I knew this well before my diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder sent me to hospital in the weeks before COVID. By then, I had reported so often of the thing, Major Depressive Disorder had sort of become my beat. I thought I’d memorised all diagnostic criteria and likely symptom clusters before the last bout of MDD. There was one, however, that I had assiduously ignored: MDD can make you pretty dumb. I had been previously familiar with MDD and generally, I recognised the signs. I had not hitherto found myself without literacy, memory or cutlery placed elsewhere than the cutlery drawer.
Cognitive basics, like knowing left from right, can apparently take a vacay. Remembering the reason for your presence in a room is an occasional glitch known even to the general population, but when you’ve gone the full mental, the palpable fact that you are sitting on a lavatory may not be sufficient to tip you off to the forgotten task.
An old Swedish psychiatric journal describes this particularly poor state of brain function as “pseudodementia.” It stuck. Some mental health providers find it “non-inclusive” but I find “non-inclusive” a term that some mental health providers can shove right up their frock. TBH, “pseudodementia” is too often too apposite to my internal decor, so I’m keeping it.
A few months before admission, I began losing things at an accelerated rate. I began accumulating ideas and words at a rate so accelerated, they simply collided into nothing, save for slide-show presentations of self-harm that appeared to be inspired by Quentin Tarantino, whom I do not particularly admire. These, I eventually recalled, had been preceded by images of war, which were far worse due to their veracity. I did not imagine horrific visions of Palestine. I did imagine the lurid gore selfies, so found them preferable.
At around the time the involuntary cinema of Yellow Jackets beaten and Black Jackets slain and nurses shot by the IDF for tending the wounded at a peaceful demonstration began, my literacy concluded. My reports acquired all the grace and logic of a toilet graffito left unfinished by a drunk lady who had forgotten with whom or what she was angry.
It was and remains an unpleasant state. To be stripped of one’s trade is easy for no one. To see one’s trade as the source of one’s decay is also pretty common, I bet.
It seemed to me that my mind had acquired the diseased labour with which one can easily become complicit. All the war and all the instantaneity with which news media had begun to erase it as soon as it appeared reminded me of a quote that I could not remember until last night as a loop on the reels in my head played it as a requiem for the war dead.
In June of 1940, a little boy just evacuated from Paris listened to the radio in Nantes. Paul Virilio, who died in 2018, was 8 when a broadcast he has described in several interviews warned of the German approach. He recalls hearing “that the Germans had reached Orléans, and then, almost simultaneously, hearing the sound of tanks outside my window.” The accounts of this Virilio moment differ but they all include his declaration that, “War was my university.”
The bombardment strategy of the Germans did not lead them so quickly to home of young Paul whose future as a futurist led him to recognise the role radio communications had played in Hitler’s bloody success.
Paris fell for reasons other than a technology that brought new simultaneity to warfare. The signals that synchronised murder and devastation are a part of a puzzle whose clues include collaborationist French leadership, the end of colonial imperialism, “governments who have dragooned the peoples into the slaughter … a labour bureaucracy which supports the warring bourgeoisie.” The disaster of war is both planned and overdetermined.
I persuaded a chap at breakfast one morning to chat with me. This is not an easy chore in psychiatric hospital as conversations tends to the topic of psychiatric hospital and then to the reasons for one’s admission. There are patients who are eager to speak of their horror, and others very eager not to hear these accounts. As it turned out, our conversation was mutually non-traumatising. A bus driver, he had lost his memory of routes he’d been riding for years. A journalist necessarily prolific for decades of freelance pay now lost her way through Uber messages. Our disasters were not really planned, but they were overdetermined.
The chance to publish my understanding of war was lost either way. It didn’t matter much that I would pick a paragraph to pieces before euthanising the nonsense it had somehow become. The day of Donald Trump’s election ended any scant chance to write of all the US wars.
As soon as real wars ignited, they were consigned to darkness by my editors. Before fascist coups could be named and honestly described, they had already been rebranded as “a people’s revolution.” The pain of those dispossessed and murdered in Palestine became a pleasure for my editor to kibosh as a pitch. The brutal occupation of Kashmir was as nothing while the clownish Donald Trump continued the policies of the previous administration, albeit with a greater thirst for nuclear missiles, a hardened determination to keep Julian Assange in detention for life and a boost to the tradition of distributing wealth upwards born the day of FDR’s death.
A semi-friend whose irregular interest in drunk-dialing me is buoyed by his conviction that he could take me down an intellectual peg or two with Historical Facts galore called to talk of Roosevelt one night. I perked up at the chance to talk of that era of and ask if its achievements could meaningfully inform the current economic crisis. The New Deal is not my favousrite political moment of all time but compared to some shit about Ghengis Khan and flank attacks or some other shit about Hillary’s marvellous invasion of Libya, I’ll take taxing the rich and appeasing the communist unions every time.
No such luck. FDR’s creation of a welfare state, national infrastructure and wages sufficient to quash the US fascist threat were not the topic du jour. It was just some shitpost about Pearl Harbour and Roosevelt’s failure to issue some sort of command. Or something. I don’t care. I do care that the one presidential grave I wouldn’t be tempted to piss on he filled with facts, figures and psycho-biographical crap. This is not a serious effort in understanding war. It’s a bloated corpse that makes a formaldehyde mockery of our human history. Read that Howard Zinn book, pussy.
Military strategy is never so fascinating nor complex that it eclipses the New Deal or excuses the industrialised murder of 6 million Jews. This is not a moral point; clearly, the reader finds the mass death of their fellow creaturse repugnant and has neither need nor time to make human life a moral question. Or, the reader gets the hose again.
Human life is itself the answer, whereas Peter Singer is a sociopath lacking in both charm and anything better to question than if the human life that does not flourish should be executed by rats in a barrel. Fuck off, Pete. Just as there is no question that every human life should flourish, there is none that human life is stripped of its right to flourish by its decaying systems of social control at the fucking time.
It doesn’t take a genius to ruin, murder or deprive the many of their right to flourish. It takes less talent to fuck things so badly that 1.7 billion people in the global south live every day near death than it does to not shit on the copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War some git brought to every marketing meeting I was forced to attend for the entire 1990s.
War is easy. You just need to amass the world’s most vulgar assortment of weapons and demonstrate once or twice that you are fucking crazy enough to use them on living populations, preferably of “ethnic” appearance. Understanding war is hard. Regrettably, it is necessary to attain a legitimate understanding of war should flourishing in peace be among your interests. If my broken brain ever permits my return to the university of war, I’ll do my best to talk it through with you.
when i am depressed i become stupider too
Hi Helen. I love your writing. I would love to see you active on the Assange campaign circut.