Memory and Perspective: Civil War, Pearl Harbor, Iraq

We have written before of the importance of memory, relying on "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting" as a shibboleth.

Today we would like to expand the discussion of memory as essential to progress, and start off with American pragmatist George Santayana's "The One who does not remember history is bound to live through it again", shown as an inscription at Auschwitz.

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First, we highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in the Atlantic, Why do so few blacks study the civil war?

In my opinion it's a landmark document. It's a pleasure to see a good person's oeuvre distilled into a single work that has the potential to change the culture.
Coates establishes slavery, explicit in the South but also exploited by the North, as the cause of the Civil War, and repositions the conflict as possibly the consummation of the Revolutionary War rather than it's current place as the war that white people all feel bad about.

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Second, we suggest Robert Wright's "Ron Paul Vindicated (Unfortunately):

A week ago Ron Paul tried to convey how the ever-tightening sanctions on Iran--which may soon include an embargo on its oil--look from an Iranian point of view: It's as if China were to blockade the Gulf of Mexico, he said--"an act of war".

This is sheer conjecture; Ron Paul is no expert on Iran. But now someone who does have relevant credentials has weighed in, and the picture he paints is disturbingly reminiscent of the one Paul painted. It suggests we may be closer to war than most people realize.

That piece leads to Vali Nasr's article in Bloomberg, "Hard-line U.S. Policy Tips Iran Toward Belligerence".

Tensions between Iran and the U.S. are so high, a conflagration could be tripped off without either country intending it. This latest spiral of hostility began after the U.S. and its European allies responded to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran’s nuclear activities by imposing and threatening additional, tougher sanctions. New U.S. measures may drastically cut Iran’s oil revenue.

To escape this self-defeating outcome, the Western powers should imagine how the situation looks from Tehran.

Robert Wright picks up on Vali Nasr's suggestion, and imagines how it looks from Tehran:

Iran's nuclear scientists have recently evinced a tendency to get assassinated, and a mysterious explosion at a military facility happened to kill the general in charge of Iran's missile program. These things were almost certainly done by Israel, possibly with American support. If you were Iranian, would you consider assassinations on your soil grounds for attacking the suspected perpetrators?

Underlying our Iran strategy is the assumption that if we keep ratcheting up the pressure, the regime will eventually say uncle. A problem with this premise is that throughout human history rulers have shown an aversion to being seen by their people as surrendering. Indeed, when you face dissent, as the Iranian regime does, there's actually a certain appeal to confronting an external threat, since confrontation tends to consolidate domestic support. As Nasr puts it, "the ruling clerics are responding with shows of strength to boost solidarity at home."

This doesn't mean Iran's rulers haven't wanted to make a deal. But it does mean the deal would have to leave these rulers with a domestically plausible claim to have benefited from it, and it also means these leaders can't afford to be seen begging for the deal. When President Ahmadinejad visited New York last year, he gave reporters unmistakable signals that he wanted to negotiate, but the Obama administration chose to ignore them. After Ahmadinejad "went home empty handed," reports Nasr, power increasingly shifted to Iranians who argued for confrontation over diplomacy.

Even so, Iran's foreign minister made another appeal to re-open talks only days ago, suggesting that they be held in Turkey. But, as the New York Times reported, western nations interpreted this overture "as an effort by Iran to buy time to continue its program." Got that? If Iranians refuse to negotiate it means they don't want a deal, and if they ask to negotiate it means they don't want a deal.

Nasr says the tightening of the screws is making Iran increasingly determined to get nuclear weapons--not to start a war, but to prevent one. Having seen what happened to Muammar Qaddafi, says Nasr, Iran's leaders worry that foreign powers would "feel safe enough to interfere in the affairs of a non-nuclear-armed state."

And so we go back to Santayana, remembering that while the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor was precipitated by many things, the final straw that moved plans into action was the US freezing all Japanese assets and Roosevelt's imposition of an oil embargo in July 1941. Which is pretty much what we're doing with Iran right now.

This is how a Japanese pilot saw Pearl Harbor in December 1941:


We can try to see their side first, and work for our goals within that understanding, or maybe we can eventually see what it looks like to them from their combat cameras.

Twitter, Nokia Siemens, and the Iran Mullahs

The last week has been reported as a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran. Partisans who do not believe the reported election results are protesting in the streets. There are videos of crowds facing police.

Sometimes revolutions hinge on a new technology, embraced by the challenger and under-appreciated by the incumbents. For instance, people believe that the printing press led to the Protestant Reformation. Others look at the anonymous and widespread communication afforded by the Web and wonder if the Internet, in a similar way, leads to the Islamic Reformation.

The Revolution will be Tweeted

This protest's new reported gadget is Twitter, with people posting 140-character text messages that answer the question, "What are you doing now?" Fox News reports, Iranian Protesters Cling to Twitter as Key Lifeline Amid Crackdown.

So there are Tweets reporting events. Let's parse that, and I'd like to sidetrack into a personal story.

Once upon a time, on a winter night, I wanted to teach my son a lesson about critical thinking. He sat with me while I spoofed his school's email server and sent out a note appearing to come from the principal, appearing to go to all the parents, but actually only going to my wife's email.

We sat together, watching my Wife surf the web, and in a few minutes we heard the "you've got mail" chime. She read the email - which said, the boiler's exploded, no school tomorrow, please don't call the school we're trying to keep the line open, we don't have all the email addresses so please call your friends and spread the word". As we watched, my Wife said, hey good news, and reached for the phone to call her buddy Carmella.

We interrupted her and explained that it was just a demonstration. What I wanted to show my son was that you can't believe something just because it's on a screen. Unfortunately, the lesson he took away was how cool it is to spoof an email server. Sigh.

So there are Tweets reporting events. Actually, there are text messages introduced into a network purporting to tell a story. There are multiple groups with a variety of stories they'd like to put in front of the American public. The Twitter network is easily entered, and there's no verification of who's who.

Some Westerners have tried to support the "tweeters" by hosting a Tor proxy server on their own computers that would disguise an Iranian's IP address. Of course, this also allowed any miscreant who wanted to pose as an Iranian tweeter to boldly proclaim their false message. Other westerners have set their own computer and phone settings to the Tehran time-zone, hoping to produce a flood of Tehran-timed tweets to make the genuine article untrackable. They also have the unintended effect of rendering phony tweets indistinguishable from the real ones.

Some people believe that the so-called Twitter Revolution is a domestic US event, being fed by inaccurate tweets sponsored by a third government. What third government has a motivation for making Americans and the American media space believe that the Iranian people are tired of the regime? Some say Israel has motive, method, and opportunity. This sort of manuever is well within the normal range of False Flag operations. In a way, it's sort of an anti-FUD campaign, hoping to instill confidence and certainty that the Iranian population desires to be freed of the reigning Mullahs.

Others contend that the tendency to re-tweet interesting messages results in a inordinately high noise-to-signal ratio; there may only be 45 Iranians twittering, with a thousand Americans retweeting. Check out this Cyberwar Guide for Iranian Elections written for domestic US consumption.

All you know when you see an electronic message, is that somebody (motivated by self-interest) wants you to accept it and act on it. We really don't know what the twitter message traffic is, other than great advertising for Twitter - which, by the way, is not a profitable business.


Technology is never ethical; it can cut both ways. When the timeframe of innovation was long, a technology advantage might be a sustaining advantage - think of archers against horsemen, or armor against infantry. When the timeframe of innovation is short, as it is today, the advantage is fleeting and may be quickly reversed by the side with more infrastructure and resources.

Nokia Siemens Networks and the Mullahs

There are reports that the Mullahs have an impressive array of technology to track tweets within their borders, and are simply allowing the logging programs enough time record the IP addresses of dissidents. The IP addresses can be matched to email header info, and message content can be identified using deep packet inspection. They may be giving the opposition time to hang themselves. There may be knocks on doors in the near future.

When question about the capabilities that Nokia-Siemens-Networks has delivered to the Iranian regime, their spokesman said that the company “does have a choice about whether to do business in any country” but said, “We believe providing people, wherever they are, with the ability to communicate is preferable to leaving them without the choice to be heard.” Ahh, George Orwell's Newspeak still lives.

Very Little New Under The Sun (VLNUS)

Current tech news reports that Nokia-Siemens has provided Iran with the technology to track protesters. We should not be shocked; the military-industrial complex is not known for an ideology other than profits. In the run-up to World War II, IBM provided the Nazis with technology to track Jews, and also sold the Nazis systems to keep the trains to the death camps running efficiently.

Tom Watson's IBM and the Nazis

CNET writes, Edwin Black's book "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" argues that information technology--in the form of IBM's Hollerith punch-card machines--provided the Nazis with a unique and critical tool in their task of cataloguing and dispatching their millions of victims.

Black attempts to establish that IBM didn't merely vend its products to Hitler--as did many American companies--but maintained a strategic alliance with the Third Reich in which it licensed, maintained and custom-designed its products for use in the machinery of the Holocaust.


IBM has responded to questions about its relationship with the Nazis largely by characterizing the information as old news. "The fact that Hollerith equipment manufactured by (IBM's German unit) Dehomag was used by the Nazi administration has long been known and is not new information," IBM representative Carol Makovich wrote in an e-mail interview. "This information was published in 1997 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and in 1998 in Washington Jewish Week."

In a CBS report, IBM spokeswoman Carol Malkovich said, "We are a technology company, we are not historians". That line is breathtaking in its chutzpah, and it could be used by arrogant blackguards everywhere. "I am a (activist, leader, visionary); we are not historians" -- this might be said by Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, etc.

From the Village Voice: Custom-designed, IBM-produced punch cards, sorted by IBM machines leased to the Nazis, helped organize and manage the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.

Recently discovered Nazi documents and Polish eyewitness testimony make clear that IBM's alliance with the Third Reich went far beyond its German subsidiary. A key factor in the Holocaust in Poland was IBM technology provided directly through a special wartime Polish subsidiary reporting to IBM New York, mainly to its headquarters at 590 Madison Avenue. And that's how the trains to Auschwitz ran on time.

My point is not that Nokia-Siemens are feckless, mercenary, and amoral businesses, trading with America's enemies. My point is that the entire information-industrial complex is feckless, mercenary, and amoral. Probably the main reason it's not a US firm that sold the technology to the Mullahs is that American companies supplied the previous strongman, Shah Pahlavi, and the locals haven't quite gotten over that yet.