Newsletter: April, 01

Table of Contents:

[Sobering Thoughts on Lifeboats] [The Soviet Submarine Legacy] [One Experience of War] [On Re-reading the Bible] [Voices of Freedom]

Editor’s Remarks

A federal election season looks to come upon us… early, but whatever else one can accuse the Federal Liberals of, they have always been masterful tacticians. Certainly, they will catch the Canadian Alliance off-guard and unprepared, with a new leader and so many riding associations (and candidates) in the middle of their preparations.

It seems safe to predict that there will be two losers in the election: The NDP and the Federal Conservatives. Canadian politics are much more confused than many people realize. Commentators have noticed that the Canadian Alliance straddles Social Conservative, Fiscal Conservative and Libertarian perspectives -- while the Liberals are being pulled between those who recognize the fiscal limitations of government and those who cannot. Even the Bloc Quebecois, united by a vague support for a different relationship between their province and Ottawa has wingtips stretching from Social Democrat to pure Conservative.

But two parties might attract more support out of habit than conviction. Both the Progressive Conservatives and the NDP seem to have even less sense of who they are and what they stand for than the other three parties. The PCs look to try a hand of poker, bluffing with a couple of deuces and a single Jack, while the NDP seems to be along for the ride. Neither party should gain any support, but one — or perhaps both — might end up in a coalition with the Liberals should they end up in a minority situation. And that seems to be the best either can hope for.

In the 1970s, the Club of Rome and Paul Ehrlich’s book on resource depletion were leading to a disturbing "lifeboat" analogy about large sections of humanity. The thinking was that, with a poor and overcrowded planet, large numbers of people (especially in what was then the "Third World") would have to be abandoned, as wealthier societies turned to their own survival in our increasingly grim future.

Paul Ehrlich has been dead wrong in virtually all of his prognostications, and the Club of Rome is now well off the map. The quality of apocalyptic analysis then (and now) can be guessed at by the dire predictions in the 1970s of a global ice age to be caused by pollution. The agitated chicken-littles who then predicted rampaging glaciers by 2000 AD are all currently advocates of the global warming theory. Incidentally, while global warming does seem to be underway, the hand of man is a distant second to those of nature. The world has been warmer in the past 10,000 years than it currently is, and our ancestors were not burning coal and oil in the balmy days when Stonehenge was built.

However, it might not be time to put the lifeboat away yet. Lifeboats serve two purposes… when the ship sinks, they might save the crew and passengers. Or sometimes, they might be used when the complement of a vessel became fed-up with others on the vessel. Both Henry Hudson and Captain Bligh were removed from command and floated off in lifeboats by their mutinous crews. The old and much-parodied sea shanty What Shall We do with the Drunken Sailor? includes the verse "tow him in the life-boat till he’s sober."

The original 1970s analogy was that there might not be room on the "lifeboat" for all of desperate humanity in the future. Perhaps the current analogy might be that some of the errant humanity might have to be floated off on a lifeboat until they sort themselves out.

Uncomfortable thoughts are often triggered by events. On one recent day, the Institute received another e-mails from one of the ubiquitous West African scam artists, describing a situation in which he would need tens of thousands of dollars in order to free up his tens of millions from the country. Those who responded would then be able to reap a million or more from their investment — which was assuredly only necessary to clear some red tape out of the way. The new twist was a claim to be suffering from persecution, and so the appeal of easy money was gilded with the luster of a kind gesture. (For those unfamiliar with the scam, any cabled money to "free up" the trapped millions is gone forever.)

Naturally a blistering reply was fired back to the scam artist and a copy of his message was forwarded to interested parties in the law enforcement community.

On the same day, the news carried a story about Robert Mugabe, the apparent dictator-for-life in Zimbabwe. He pardoned his followers for terrorizing the opposition during the recent election. For the cynical abuse of power in a supposedly democratic nation, one is hard put to find its equal without reaching back to Hitler’s quasi-legalistic justifications for Nazi bullyboys in the 1930s. Mugabe was also proving to be as ugly a racist as any Klansman ever was… and much more dangerous to boot. No Klansman ever had an army of his own, or diplomatic privilege, or any of the other appurtenances of a nation.

A newsletter from a colleague in South Africa described the continuing deterioration of law, order and the public health system, in that unhappy country. For all the magnificent promise of Nelson Mandela (perhaps one of the most noteworthy human beings of the 1990s), his party is thinking of playing the race card as a way of averting popular unrest. The nation may yet dissolve in a sea of blood — much of it hopelessly contaminated by the AIDS virus.

There were other, equally hopeless stories from the seven-way Civil War in the Congo, and from the ragged cocaine-addled insurrections in several West African Countries. That afternoon added the caboose to an unsettled train of thought with a series of photos from some decrepit city in Sierra Leone. A black American doctor and his wife had come there to provide medical help. The price of his generosity was for her to be gang-raped and tossed on a garbage heap with severed leg-muscles (where the town’s starving dogs finished her off). The doctor was dragged out into a field and shot through the head by men with a fraction of his education, talent and principles.

Receiving all this news and information in one day was too much to handle and it resulted in a disturbing reverie — one where the World slung Africa into the lifeboat. We cut the continent off; severed all phone lines and communications systems, cratered their airport runways with smart bombs, tossed their diplomats out of our cities, and ignored the place for a century.

This ugly daydream concluded by imagining that a century passed before anyone tucked their heads into Freetown, Lagos or Maputo to see if the survivors were willing to give things a fresh start.

Harsh draconian policies are all right in daydreams but never work in reality. Besides, Africa’s problems are Africa’s problems, but the World is our World. We can no more turn our backs on hundreds of millions of people and the larger half of an entire continent than we could on any other portion of the planet. While Africa is the main author of its own problems, many Africans deserve our help. (Those who are inclined to blame all Africa’s problems on the West are invited to live in Sierra Leone or the Congo for a year and see if they still hold to that thesis… if they live that long.)

Abandoning Africa to the likes of Mugabe or adolescent bandits with AK-47s means abandoning the millions of decent Africans who deserve better and try to achieve it. Mugabe unleashed his thugs on his opposition (black and white alike) because they were trying to reverse the degeneration of their country. The parasitic gun-wielding savages of the West African militias killed that doctor and thousands like him because they still feel insecure in the presence of anyone who has proved that perseverance and intelligence can be successfully harnessed.

For every con-man in the corrupt stew of Nigeria or racialist demagogue in South Africa, there must be at least a hundred, or a thousand — or ten thousand, other people whose sole hope is that they can live a decent life free from fear.

There are even whole nations there that have worked hard to first stabilize and then modernize. Ghana (where Jerry Rawlings deserves careful attention) may be about to actually hold a peaceful and honest election. If Botswana hasn’t been in the news much, it is perhaps because it has not been wracked by endless crisis and violence — unlike all of its neighbors. Like a flower in a frost, these countries deserve our careful and cautious support, but support all the same.

But how do we help those who deserve to be helped?

The Western nations have already tried to help Africa. The imperial drive of the 19^th Century was as much fueled by altruism as it was by greed or pride. The work of the District Commissioners only had a few years to take root and certainly often wasn’t appreciated. Then came the anti-colonialist period where dozens of new nations emerged in the hope that they would all become prosperous democratic states. They didn’t. Then came the foreign aid period coupled with the ready provision of loans and easy capital. This didn’t succeed either.

Yet there still must be a strategy that can be pursued short of casting the whole subcontinent adrift. We can’t abandon Africa, and we certainly won’t take them over again. Maybe firmness should be applied instead. If it becomes necessary for troops to restore order in Sierra Leone or elsewhere, then we should let them do whatever it takes to quell the local militias. When the likes of Mugabe or Omar Bongo come abroad, playing at being national leaders on an even footing in international forums, we should forget the niceties of protocol and reserve respect for those leaders who do try to govern fairly. We should send our money and volunteers only to support countries and leaders that do tip the hat to the rule of law.

We should find success and reward it wherever it is in Africa. Any country that does not meet simple criteria — like respecting individual rights (for everyone) and whose leaders observe the rule of law -- can be ignored. Otherwise, lets keep the lifeboat secure in its divots for now

The Soviet Union killed tens of millions of people in massacres, the gulags and deliberate famines. Another legacy of Soviet contempt for human life is now sitting on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean -- the 118 sailors of the Oscar Class Submarine Kursk. Following an accident, presumably with the hydrogen-peroxide fueled torpedoes carried forward, the cruise missile armed submarine sank with all hands in early August 2000.

The Kursk was another of the many products from the massive military expenditures wrought by the Soviet Union. Few people remember the USSR’s militaristic nature, but it produced an amazing amount of weaponry — often making more of some (tanks and artillery for example) than the rest of the world combined. However, the Soviet’s social and industrial infrastructure decayed as the 20^th Century wore on.

From 1960 onwards, the Soviets grew incapable of matching the quality of equipment produced in Western Nations. To overcome this, they relied on vast amounts of equipment instead. To achieve this end, Soviet designers made compromises in safety and reliability that no Western Army would ever accept. For example, many Soviet tanks (the T-64, T-72 and T-80 family) had an automatic loading device for the main gun that frequently ripped off the arm of the gunner and stuffed it into the breach.

The Soviet Army was not alone in accepting dangerous trade-offs to get a measure of enhanced performance. In an underwater duel, the submarine with the fastest torpedoes might be able to compensate for its weaker electronics and noisier hull. While the Russians are reluctant to describe some aspects of their military technology, the Kursk was certainly armed with torpedoes fueled with hydrogen peroxide. These provide an awesome speed (70 knots or more in the basic model and 250 in an advanced one), but the fuel is incredibly corrosive and explosive. This is not a substance that should be mixed up with sailors and machinery all crowded together in the tight confines of a submarine. However, this inevitable result of theoretical performance over real safety was typical of Soviet thinking.

Even now, a decade after the USSR disintegrated, the Russian military is still almost entirely equipped with Soviet-era material.

There are few things as complicated as a warship, where everything is a compromise between firepower, sea-worthiness, protection, speed, sensors and crew endurance. The Soviets gave low priority to the latter. The problem is worse in submarines where size is even more important, and the operating environment is deadlier.

The history of submarines is a fatal one, and hundreds of sailors have died in them through normal accidents. As nuclear reactors, deeper diving depths and faster speeds appeared in the 1950s, submariners faced even more hazardous challenges.

Since the 1950s, the US Navy lost the USS Thresher in 1963 and USS Scorpion in 1968. Neither the British nor the French navy lost any nuclear submarines. The Soviet penchant for sloppy workmanship and rushing unproven designs into production led to a worse record.

Another unpleasant aspect of Soviet ideology was the refusal to acknowledge accidents or disasters. For example, if no foreigners were killed in a Soviet air-crash, it might not be officially reported. The Soviet penchant for secrecy still applies to many incidents where hundreds of people were killed. As the families of the Kursk’s crew have discovered, old habits can die hard.

The Soviet record of their submarine losses is incomplete. Instead, émigrés, veterans and an occasional intelligence leak suggest the following:

A Soviet sub vanished without a trace in 1962, presumably when its external missile bays accidentally flooded. A nuclear-armed diesel-electric submarine sank off Hawaii in 1968. (Part of this was later raised by the US, whose experts were stunned at the crude technology in the vessel).

Three Soviet subs may have been lost in 1970. One sank in shallow water near Severomorsk. While the crew died of suffocation, the vessel was later recovered. A November class submarine sank under tow -- presumably after a reactor failure -- southwest of Great Britain, and another unidentified one sank after a major naval exercise near the Faeroe Islands.

In 1972, two subs were towed home after lethal reactor leaks (the Soviet military joke that men from the submarine fleet glowed in the dark had a strong currency). The same thing reportedly happened to a Soviet submarine in the Indian Ocean in 1977. While the Japanese didn’t notice the transit of such a sub in 1977, they did in 1978. A reactor leak on another Soviet sub prompted the evacuation of 12 crewmen off Newfoundland in 1977. An Echo Class submarine was towed home from off Scotland in 1978.

A fire on another submarine killed 9 sailors off Okinawa in 1980, and yet another influx of irradiated sailors into Soviet hospitals was noticed in 1981 after an undisclosed incident in the Baltic.

A Charlie-I submarine sank off the Kamchatka Peninsula in June 1983. In October 1986, the Soviets lost a Yankee-I submarine near Bermuda. Finally, the experimental Mike Class submarine Komsomolets sank near Norway in April 1988.

The USSR lost at least four nuclear submarines between 1960 and 1989, and may have lost nine altogether. There were also at least another eight cases (that seem obvious) where lethal levels of contamination or fires occurred on board a nuclear submarine.

Fortunately for Russian submariners, the end of the USSR meant an enormous reduction in the size of the fleet. Many of the elderly subs were scrapped or abandoned, and the smaller fleet also meant a huge increase in crew quality as the proportion of officers to conscripts narrowed dramatically.

It is to the credit of submariners like those of the Kursk, that more accidents did not occur between 1988 and today. Unfortunately, they put to sea in vessels that were designed and built by a society that placed little value on safety and reliability. The legacy of the Soviet Union is still lethal.

This column was submitted to the Ottawa Citizen, and was published on November 10^th. Dick Field is now in his 76^th year and of all his wartime recollections, this is the one that was the hardest to recall.

The youngest of Canada’s Second World War veterans are now past 75. Except for a few vets from Korea or the former Yugoslavian "peacekeeping" missions, few Canadians understand war. One vet is a friend of mine, and recently he told me there was only one time he cried during the War.

Dick Field was a 19 year old from Toronto when he joined the 4^th Field Artillery, then resting in Antwerp in September 1944. The regiment (chronicled in George Blackburn’s magnificent trilogy) was part of the Second Canadian Division — veterans of Dieppe and the savage weeks that followed D-Day. Two operations of almost similar magnitude awaited it: The slog in the flooded Scheldt Estuary in the autumn of 1944, and the February-March offensive to clear the Rhineland.

Dick survived these and the Liberation of Holland as a signaller and often was with a forward observation officer — those who stay with the infantry to summon and direct artillery fire. He was a tough and practical kid. He was smart enough to find out how to stay alive, and hardened enough to impassively watch the trapped crew of a Sherman tank burn alive… and calmly watch the German who doomed them with a panzerfaust rocket get cut down as he tried to surrender a second later.

The German Army in the Rhineland in February 1945 was the last large one Hitler had in the West, and the last chance he had of keeping the Allies out of Germany. However, the spring thaw came early and flooding stalled the US contribution to the offensive. The British and Canadians of the 1^st Canadian Army then advanced down a narrow muddy front, and the Germans moved their reserves to meet them. The fighting was brutal and lasted for weeks.

In the second and third week of the Rhineland offensive, three Canadian Divisions took the lead against Germany’s paratroopers and panzers. The Canadians made slow progress while both sides took very heavy losses. On February 21^st, the Canadians halted while British troops passed through them to continue the attack.

The 4^th Field Artillery was deployed in a field near Goch, and Dick was among the gunners relaxing in nearby houses. This was a chance for a dry sleeping place and to write letters. Late that afternoon, trucks from a Canadian infantry battalion (the Canadian Scottish) pulled up, and their drivers laid out soldiers’ packs in the road -- in four neat blocks of 120 for the battalion’s four rifle companies. These contained clean clothing and personal effects, each stenciled with the name and number of its owner.

Nearby, there was a POW cage, and a temporary Canadian cemetery — both starting to fill up. Bandsmen from the Canadian Scottish were also forming up with their instruments.

War is noisy. Always, there is the sound of small arms fire. Always, there is the sound of guns firing, shells passing overhead and then exploding. These become a background that soldiers tune out until it becomes personal. However, the troops in the village also soon heard the sound of a lone piper, and then from the next road they heard another.

Soon Canadian troops came lurching up the road in the dusk — dirty and tired as only infantry can be, a state those who have never soldiered cannot imagine. These were men drained by constant tension, who went days with no sleep beyond an hour or so in a muddy hole while daily attacking a dangerous and active enemy.

As the Canadian Scottish heard their band join the pipers, they instantly moved from a tired shuffle and fell into step -- marching like proud guardsmen into the village. Dick and the other gunners marched alongside them, in a spontaneous gesture of solidarity and respect. Then they stood to one side, as the infantry were quietly addressed by their CO and dismissed to rest.

Each soldier sought out his pack and gunners escorted him to a dry place in a nearby house. It was over quickly. Of the 120 for "A" Company, only 12 were taken: from the block of 120 for "B" Company, only 26. The other companies did not fare much better.

Some gunners stood and stared at the blocks of packs, with only a few empty spaces where the survivors had taken their gear. Four hundred packs abandoned in the new moonlight stood as mute substitutes for their dead or wounded owners.

Dick told me he only cried once during the War.

There are a few books that should be re-read every few years, only because there is either always something fresh in them, or because the lessons -- or warnings -- they offer need to be kept current.

A list that would come highly recommend ought to include Norm Dixon’s The Psychology of Military Incompetence, because it provides a constant warning on complacency in human institutions. George Orwell’s 1984 and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom should always be there too, just to keep one alert to the techniques of totalitarianism.

For pleasure, this list should include a selection of Shakespeare’s plays — just because language should be a toy as well as a tool. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and a selection of poetry belong on the list too… just because one can never discover everything in the superbly written fantasy trilogy, or in the works of any single poet.

Finally, there is always the Bible. It is sometimes hard to pick up and is certainly difficult to read consecutively, but there is always something in it. Perhaps many of the stories and verses are already well known, but reading it always sets trains of thought in motion. It is not a comfortable book to read for that reason alone.

Reading the Bible from the perspective of one interested in organized violence and political instability is an interesting exercise.

First off, God can be really hard to work with. Notwithstanding the casual cruelty of the testing God in Job, but one wonders at the horrible cruelty of the plagues in Egypt or the Massacre of the Innocents in Judea after Christ’s birth. The homicidal enthusiasm of the People of Israel as they entered into their new land makes for unpleasant reading too — but the military historian can mine a lot out of these passages.

One of the simplest arguments against the existence of God is to ask: "Why, if God is supposed to be so good, did he permit [insert atrocity here] to happen?" Actually, God is not the guilty party here.

The disasters that attended the Egypt of the stubborn Pharoah, including the deaths of all the first-born (remember that chilling depiction of this plague in the movie version of the Ten Commandments?) were not God’s handiwork. It all could have been avoided if the King of Egypt had indeed let Moses’ people go, but he didn’t despite ample warning.

Twice in the Bible, before Moses’ birth and that of Christ, there were massacres of children. Again, this is the handiwork of men who sought to circumvent God’s will. It is man who is crueler than God, and the 20^th Century can provide ample evidence of this — it is interesting that both the Nazis and the Soviets denied God’s existence. Both were developed into the most murderous creeds we have ever known. While the cruelty of men who claim they are acting for God can also be stunning, Muslim and Christian crusaders were usually on the make for themselves, and still never managed the callousness that the 20^th Century has seen.

Pope John Paul II, in another of the re-definitions and re-working of the Catholic Church’s teachings stated that Hell is existence in the absence of God. This leads to the comforting daydream that perhaps the instigators of the 20^th Century’s worst moments may get to spend an eternity in the very hell that they created… One can imagine Hitler scrabbling at the doors of a gas chamber or a starving Stalin forever waist-deep in ice water in a Kolyma mineshaft.

Another point of interest from the massacres of children in Exodus and the Gospels… both Moses and the Holy Family ended up as refugees. Moses fled from justice after killing an overseer who was abusing a Hebrew slave, and the Holy Family went as refugees to escape Herod’s attempt to short-circuit prophecy through mass infanticide.

Any Canadian who gets fed-up with the repeated abuse of our refugee system might want to take the Bible as a point of interest. There were a few false claims filed there by someone seeking escape from trouble too. No matter how badly our system becomes abused, it may be that accepting refugees is pleasing to the Almighty. However, it should also be pointed out that Biblical refugees usually returned home as soon as it was safe to do so.

This leads to another point. Anyone can be kind or charitable to their family, friends and even their neighbors… this is all well and good. Yet God seems to regard kindness to strangers even more highly. The story of the Good Samaritan for example, still has much to say on this point. The wounded and destitute wayfarer was totally ignored by two leading members of society, to be picked up by a complete pariah. One can imagine a homeless beggar (never mind why he is there but he is there nonetheless) being passed by a politician who then sternly resolves to do something on homelessness and a citizen who flips a dollar at the beggar and regards her duty as done. But the volunteer — or concerned passer-by who pulls the inebriated pan-handler out of a doorway on a night of freezing rain and escorts him to a shelter has done that which is most pleasing to God.

Kindness to strangers might not just be its own reward, it might also save your life. The Jewish spies in Jericho who were saved by a prostitute saw to it that her family subsequently survived the destruction of the city. Another question to mull over is whether God was as annoyed with the sexual practices in Sodom as he was with their atrocious sense of hospitality and the abuse they offered his messenger. Considering Christ’s tolerance for riff-raff like anarchist rebels, prostitutes, and Quisling-like tax collectors, one might well wonder.

A trained theologian might take issue with this suggestion, but perhaps the greatest sins are these: The denial of dignity (and individual worth) to others — perhaps by type-casting them into roles that make each individual less than human; and denying or suppressing your own humanity and thus passing opportunities to enhance that of other people. Perhaps, then, the most perfect form of freedom begins by acknowledging that all people are individuals — and that each of them deserves as much respect and attention as you do. In the end, the Bible contains a revolutionary manifesto and a simple idea that is so stunningly easy, we still have not got it figured out.

"I love liberals - they always want to exempt themselves from the very laws they want to slap on everyone else."

"The devil finds some mischief still for hands that have not learned to be idle."

From the You-Said-It, Sister! File

Most of my new comrades in Disarmament [a peace movement group in the 1980s] were taciturn, touchy neurotics with no clear sources of income and relaxed attitudes about personal hygiene. … It wasn’t all bad. Unlike their po-faced Commie counterparts (whom we mocked mercilessly at every demo), anarchists cultivate whimsy.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca