I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

War is universally a bad thing. On this, all agree.

However, once shooting has begun, there’s usually two main ways a war can go. The bad guys can win, or the good guys can win. Obviously, you can’t just let the bad guys win, they’ll fuck everything up.

But how do you tell the good guys from the bad? Why is it so difficult lately, and why was it so easy back in say, world war II?

Well, the real answer is “It was never easy. The ethics of war haven’t changed much in thousands of years - but in the last century public perception of war has been revolutionised.”

World War One, in one paragraph

A bosnian Serb shot and killed an Austrian/Hungarian prince and princess in Sarajevo. Austria-Hungary demanded Serbia act against the [terrorist organisation] that the assassin was a member of. Serbia did not comply, and Austria-Hungary declared war. Russia moved to support their allies the Serbs. Germany, allied to Austria-Hungary, saw this one coming and invaded France, then allied to Russia, in an attempt to get ahead of the other side. England, then allied to France, was obligated to move in and help. Germany invaded france via Belgium, bringing them briefly into the war. The war fell into a deadlock of trench warfare, with mass produced machine guns and artillery giving such a heavy advantage to entrenched defense that neither side could gain any advantage by attacking. Germany attempted to bleed the then-superpower British Empire dry by spreading conflict to all corners of the british empire - and therefore the globe, making this a truly World war. Eventually, the combination of attrition, new technology (notably tanks and combined air-ground assault methods), and the arrival of more than a million US troops on the western front caused Germany and Austria-Hungary to collapse and surrender.

Hang on a minute, I hear you say… weren’t Germany the bad guys in that war? Is James making it out like they were an innocent bystander obligated by alliance treaty to join in the “fun”?

Lesson one in the ethics of war: There are no innocent bystanders who are holding guns. If you’re shooting people, you’re guilty.

World War Two, in one paragraph

Germany was decimated by WWI and the treaty which followed, which caused it financial ruin, especially when combined with the great depression of the 1930’s. In germany between the wars, there rose to power a very strong and authoritarian figure who obtained and held popular support by taking a hard line against the German people’s various apparent (economic) oppressors - including restrictive foreign treaties, a lack of available land in Germany and a wealthy ethnic group who seemed relatively immune to the economic depression. A heavy militarisation of Germany followed, and a series of bullying land-grabs from neighbours, which culminated in the eventual blatant invasion of Poland. Meanwhile, the Japanese emperor, egged on by his generals, decided to rule all of Asia and started by invading China. After Germany’s early successes, Italy leaped on the bandwagon and screwed up a lot in Africa, spreading the war there. Japan destroyed most of the US pacific fleet in a surprise attack on Perl Harbour, and the US joined the war. Hitler then screwed up twice - once by declaring war on the USA because they were bothering his dubious allies the Japanese, and a second time by invading Russia, which is never a good idea. A general shit-blizzard followed, but the end result was mostly the US crushing Japan in the pacific and Germany on the western front, while Russia smashed Germany flat on the eastern front. War ended in Europe with the fall of Berlin to the Russians, while the pacific dragged on until the US bombed every major Japanese city flat and deployed two tiny nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hang on a minute I hear you say… is James a an anti-semitic neo-Nazi who blames economic opression of Germany for WWII?

Lesson two of the ethics of war: Don’t oppress people and expect them to accept it. They wont.

Lesson three of the ethics of war: Don’t leave evil dictators in power and expect everything to be okay.

What happened to lesson one though? If Germany and Japan are so obviously guilty, weren’t the Allies simply the Good Guys?

Well, yes and no. You see, war is a messy, messy motherfucker. While Germany probably murdered around 15-20 million civilians, they also lost around 2 million civilians to bombing and russian ground forces. Japan inflicted around 7 million civilian casualties in china lone, but American bombing of their cities, including the only use of nuclear weapons in anger in history killed perhaps 600,000 civilians. World war two stained pretty well everyone’s hands black with dried blood and put both sides deep into ethical grey, if not black areas.

The Cold War, in one paragraph

At the end of the world war II, the USA and every other allied country bar one liberated the nations their armies were standing upon, even including West Germany and Japan. The exception was Russia, which, terrifyingly, kept every nation its armies were in physical control of, including East Germany and virtually all of Eastern Europe. This indicated a clear ideological division in the allies which spread into a series of global political machinations known as the Cold War. Both sides avoided direct conflict with the other due to mutually assured nuclear destruction, but both manipulated other nations to their viewpoint using politics, economics, finance, bribery, assassination, terrorism, espionage, sex drugs and rock’n'roll. The non-nuclear cold war continued as an unabated conventional warfare arms race, with the USSR maintaining a much larger and more powerful standing army, and the USA spending consistently more resources on research from about the 60’s onwards, while maintaining a huge margin of superiority (in quality and number both) of nuclear weapons. In the late 1980’s, the USSR was economically bankrupt due mostly to its overlarge military and largely collapsed. with Russia ceding control of Eastern Europe and withdrawing from most international activity, while simultaneously switching to a system of capitalism and demoracy rather than socialism and totalitarianism. The cold war continues to this day, but its importance on both the global political scene and the actions of the US is slipping.

Lesson four of the ethics of war: The enemy of my enemy might still be my enemy.

What does all of this historical war and politics bullshit have to do with the US, and today?

Back to history for a moment. Let’s say…
It’s word war one, only the US never joins in for some reason. Maybe they just like peace (there was a strong anti-war and anti-intervention movement in the US at the time.) WWI would continue for longer, and the costs to Europe would be far higher. Its possible that without US intervention, Germany may have continued to hold Belgium and parts of France right up until the start of WWII, giving the allies an early handicap.

Or it’s world war two, only the US never joins in. Maybe Japan never attacks perl harbour, and within the US the anti-war movement holds sway over public opinion. Well, to start with, this blog, written in 2007 would now be written in Japanese, and would probably praise the Emperor of Greater Japan and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. Either Germany & Italy or Russia would still be in posession of all of mainland Europe and possibly the middle east and north Africa. It’s even likely that eventually Britain would have fallen to whichever power held control over Europe.

Or the cold war happened but the US sat silent. Well again the USSR would have invaded and conquered europe, and probably proceeded to do the same with the rest of the world, except maybe China. No democracy or capitalist nation would be safe. Except the US.

Or the cold war happened and the US didn’t do as much. Well, maybe the US held off the USSR from taking down europe by threatening nuclear war in the event of an invasion. But then, they would have to prevent the USSR from taking out the middle east too - the democratic and capitalist world depends on that oil! Well, maybe just asia and africa would have fallen under the totalitarian hammer. The fact is, almost all of the world’s disadvantaged nations today are nations which pursued a policy of economic isolationism in the past - be it due to reasons of totalitarianism, socialism or even isolationist communism. There would simply be more suffering in the world on the day the USSR collapsed. Or maybe the USSR would have never collapsed, and the overwhelming majority of the world’s population would be living in poverty with no freedoms and no change on the horison.

Well, that’s all in the past. They can stop interfering now can’t they?

Well, let’s examine that for moment. Let’s say the next US president announces a firm and strict policy of “no further international military intervention.” We can expect the following steps to occur:

1. China invades taiwan. Probably not the same day. Give it a week - maybe a month!

2. War breaks out between israel and all of its neighbours, backed by Iran. It’s going to be vicious and close-fought, but with the backing of Iran and no further aid from the US, you can expect Israel to be wiped of the map within the year. Israel probably deploys its secret nuclear weapons, but this wont stop the millions of armed fundamentalists from sweeping over their borders. Zionism becomes an anti-islamic terrorist movement.

3. Meanwhile, Iran invades Iraq. Iraq, fragmented and alone, falling apart with the withdrawal of all foreign troops, falls almost immediately under Iranian control.

4. North Korea invades South Korea. After a pretty one-sided and short war, Korea becomes a united communist, totalitarian hellhole. There is now a _lot_ you can’t do in a Daewoo.

5. Europe watches all of this. A great deal of discsussion between european powers occurs about what should be done.

6. Dictators and totalitarian governments worldwide begin sizing up their neighbours. Welcome to the new world order. Watch your back - the weak will be short lived.

If any of the above is even remotely surprising to you, you have some reading to do. The above is my opinion on what would happen based on what I know. What do you know? Is your predictive model different? How and why? What - you don’t have a prediction? Then why do you want the US to stop interfering in global affairs?

Lesson five of the ethics of war: Most of the time, if the good guys stay at home and do nothing, the situation will only get worse.

In the modern age, the average citizen of the average democracy is given the opportunity to influence their government’s decisions. With this opportunity, with this privelege comes the logical need, and some might say the ethical obligation to educate ourselves about what is really going on, and the actual ramifications of acting in one way or the other - or indeed of not acting at all.

[Editor's note. No, James does not condone anti-semitism, or indeed any avoidable non-consenting violence between human beings. If you somehow managed to read that into this blog post, you should read it again with your own prejudices disabled. To find out how to disable your prejudices, open Microsoft Windows Help Assistant, and click on the Insecurity tab]

So I’m sitting here surrounded by powerful home computer equipment in an expensive shaggy towel big enough to wear as a robe (just taken off our heated towel-rack), in a large air conditioned room living room with sound-killing double glazed third-floor windows overlooking St Kilda and the bay, having just got out of the gigantic shower (next to the spa-bath in the palacial bathroom) and combed my hair in front of the wall of mirror that is our bathroom cabinets, and I’m wondering why the fuck I’m not asleep in bed with my arm around the beautiful and clever girl who hunted this place down while I was stuck at work day after day at my very high-paying job.

Why am I wanderingly numbly into the kitchen to fetch a drink from our brand new $900 fridge to pour into a clean glass fetched from our near-silent and well hidden dishwasher instead of dreaming about a giant sentient dandelion pouring me a drink on a beach somewhere?

I don’t really have a good answer, except that I’ve always been a restless motherfucker with a strong propensity to avoid sleeping when I really, really, really should be asleep. I’m getting up in a few hours and going to work, why am I still awake? It can’t all be the coffee I had with dinner, or the fact that I slept until 2pm?

Is there, perhaps, a touch of guilt here in my soul? Why am I living in such abject luxury?

It didn’t all happen overnight, realistically this is the end of a long line of little nibbles I’ve taken at the little things which bothered me, a little money thrown at hiring a cleaner here, an air conditioner purchase there, a dishwasher buy to avoid arguments about washing up… it’s been building for a while, this attitude that because I have money, I should use it to erase life’s financially eraseable problems. The new house reflects that, a lot of these things were inbuilt, and they were on our list of compulsory criteria without which we would not consider a place.

What’s my problem? Don’t I deserve it? Aren’t I a good guy? Didn’t I work very, very hard to get here, and take risks - and many times PAY for taking risks - spending years with next to no money… did I mention I used to live in a garage? Didn’t I just leave a job I was happy with, to take the leap, more money, more responsibility and more problems? Is this not Just Compensation thereof?

I think the problem I have is that while I live like this, many people do not. As someone who believes in a level of equality, I’m intensely uncomfortable with that. So I worked hard and took risks? Well, I had opportunities to do so. I was also born with intelligence that gives me an unfair advantage. Had I been born in Zimbabwe with the same brain, my prospects would be a lot grimmer. Grimmer still if I was less gifted.

When I was young, I believed in total socialism, total communism. All wealth shared perfectly equally. I used to think people who claimed “ah but a lot of people would just bludge” were greedy fucks, until I actually worked as a contractor in a local government and watched a lot of people “just bludge” for no better reason than that they could get away with it. I don’t mean people bludging on the dole here, scraping by day-to-day on a few handout dollars, I mean people earning good salaries and doing jack shit with their day. In some cases, _really_ good salaries and doing jack shit.

A lot of other things slowly led me to a new understanding, but that was the crunch. Some people just aren’t idealistic at all. They care about absolutely nothing but themselves, and if given the chance will _do_ absolutely nothing but the bare minimum to get what they want and need. When I say some, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might even be a majority of people who are that way, or have strong leanings in that direction. Perhaps they can be inspired to idealism, but by default they’re looking out for #1 only. So the capitalist model actually makes these people more productive, to the potential, if not actual benefit of everyone - including themselves.

Another key thing I noticed is that business has vastly outstripped government in terms of efficiency. Vastly. Government entities can’t achieve shit - even with the huge advantage of not needing to make a profit, they just can’t get organised. While the obvious solution to this is for government managers to learn from business examples and get it together, its clear that the new methodologies which are so successful have come about as a result of the competitive process out in the business world.

Even in a business which in theory has competition, but whose competition is held at arms-length (no threat to us for another four years) I can see and even feel the lack of competitive drive around the place. People who are working hard are doing it for idealistic reasons, and anyone without such reasons just isn’t working hard. The competition isn’t breathing down our neck waiting to strike. It’s nowher near like the Council was, but some of the same feeling is there.

And then you’ve got the “magic” of the market. As overrated as this has been in recent times (it can’t fix everything), this is a powerful tool for distributing goods and services in exchange for wealth, and determining the value of things.

As a socialist, I see competition and the free market as tools society can use to improve the efficiency of the systems that hold it together. Production of the essentials, exchanges of services, luxuries and entertainment. We can in theory get more of it all for less effort, by using these tools to maximise efficiency.

But we don’t. We’re still doing virtually everything wrong, and the vast majority of the criticism I levelled at society at age 16 still applies. There’s achres of room within the business world to improve efficiency still - I’ll get into that in another post. We’re putting idiots in charge of countries, because we don’t reward or value these top jobs enough, and because we’re sticking to a two-party democratic system which Just Doesn’t Work. We’re putting people with the wrong experience in the wrong cabinet positions, because they’re appointed by our prime minister according to political criteria, not fitness for the job by an objective panel or even the entire voting populace.

We’re still making decisions based on uneducated public opinion (instead of going the hard way and educating the public), on the influence of uneducated media (instead of fostering a better researched media), or on the writings in ancient religious texts, instead of scientifically peer-reviewed ‘fact’ or statistically valid data.

Pick any issue in the media at the moment - anything from the war in iraq, the war on drugs, the water shortage, global warming, copyright laws - anything, and you could easily list five facts about each that the public is just totally ignoring or totally ignorant of, that would change opinion dramatically if awareness was supplied. We’re throwing away efficiency left right and centre, throwing away many peoples’ chance at a better life, throwing away many peoples’ future happines, by persistently making the wrong decisions.

Back to economics for a second, and take a look at Privatisation. Look at the banks, looks at Telstra. Privatisation is fucking us up the arse on both fronts, because these are infrastructural systems. Clearly capitalism falls in a shitheap when it comes to infrastructure - it needs to be efficient and comprehensive but _nobody_ wants to pay for it, buy everybody needs it so the opportunities to extract profit are immense. It also requires massive investment to build.

A brief look at Somalia, where little to no effective government or taxation has taken place in many years reveals that while consumer services are booming (Great mobile phone system over there), infrastructure sucks cock (find me _one_ good road or railway). Capitalism sucks at infrastructure. Stop using the wrong tools already.

I guess what I’m getting at, is that just because capitalist tools work, is no justification for being a fucking asshole or a lion by the waterhole. You may be an animal, but you don’t have to act like one. Socialist ideals and capitalism systems are compatible on some level, but that level isn’t endless, mindless greed. Sometimes if you don’t want to live in a human-made version of Hell, you might have to actually do the right thing.

Back to reality! It’s 4:10am and I’m sitting here typing to you instead of sleeping. Getting up in just a few short hours now, this is really intensely dumb.

But I was reaching out for a point here, and its an important one because it’s my place in the world, my purpose, my reason for being. The reason why I feel justified in my pampered little existence.

I want to actually help, to actually change things and improve them. In the western world, things don’t need that much improvement (By comparison with the underdeveloped world anyway - I truly wish I could concentrate on it because the problems are more complex and thereby more interesting), but in the Shitty world, things really suck. And should be relatively easy to fix.

For years now, I’ve been educating myself (half the reason for leaving my Happy Job was to teach myself management skills) and building up resources in the form of money, in an investment. One day, I hope to combine the two (educated and experienced James, with lots of resources) and Achieve Something that will affect an area of the then underdeveloped world. My loose targets were 10-15 years time, a million dollars and whatever the fuck can be achieved with that and whatever the hell I can learn between then and now.

And surprisingly, up until this year, I’ve been on track! Many a month has gone by where I’ve invested 25% of my income. In other months, it’s been 30% or higher. Quite often I’ve allowed myself to sink a little further into debt to keep the investment growing at an acceptable rate. But the last few months have been fucked. I had to hold onto about $4k in cash to move to a more expensive suburb closer to work, and there’s been a small mountain of little bites and stings which have sapped the income. The new income is higher yes, but I’ve only been there for a few paycheques and it’s only now beginning to look good.

So anyway, I think I’ve found the thing bothering me. Today and yesterday, I was looking at Projector prices, and budgeting $3k for a new home theatre system so I can watch my documentaries on a 100″ projector panel with surround sound and whatnot, instead of smiling happily at how much I can put on my investment for the future, my one hope that all the things I’ve suffered through in life have not been in vain. That I’m here for a reason, and that this reason is worthwhile.

So I’ve put $2k on my investment instead for now, which brings me up to Febuary this year in my usual personal investment goals, despite the costs of moving etc. I’m satisfied with that, and can finally go to sleep.

As to the rest of my life of luxury - I long ago discovered that I was a human being. It takes this - all of it - to maintain myself at the level I’m trying to work at. In the past I’ve found it impossible to stay motivated and happy enough to try to Save The World if I leave no reward for James the Person.

I think there’s something in that for all of us.