The General and World War III (1995) | Hacker News Reader

The General and World War III (1995)

newyorker.com

31 pointsbenbreen16 comments

I highly recommend Errol Morris “Fog Of War” which also gives a glimpse of CLM. https://youtu.be/tmJUDIVvua4

The opening part of the documentary going over the Cuban Missile Crisis is amazing. I can watch it over and over.

Fog Of War is probably the best documentary i've ever seen.

I really wonder just how much of the perceived "danger" the world was in during the cold war came down to the paranoid delusions of these hot headed, rough and violent men who had just fought the most destructive conflict in world history. It took Kennedy to talk the joint chiefs off the ledge during the Cuban missile crisis, and thankfully for America's hard seperation of military power in the hands of civilians he was there to do so. I'm not sure a more martially led nation would have done so. Looking back and reading the facts, it seems utterly absurd to think that the entire situation wasn't just one big bluff on the part of Fidel. But you had guys like Lemay who missed the action of war, spent all day fantasizing of it, and would take any opportunity given to escalate things.

Kennedy had been in WWII, too. At a low level. Look up "PT-109".

There was much misreading of enemy intention. The US people had aerial photographs of the missile installations in Cuba, and noticed that they were laid out just like other USSR installations in colder climates. This was taken to mean that the USSR wanted the US to recognize them. That was more of a direct threat than putting them in secretly.

In the 1990s, some of the high-level participants from both sides had a get-together.[1] This subject came up. The Russian officer who'd been in charge of the base construction said "Oh, no, we just did it that way because that was what it said to do in the field manual".

Of course. They had a prefab missile base and assembly instructions.

[1] https://robertmcnamara.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Rabe-1...

“War is too important to be left to the generals” - Clemenceau

“When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

-General Jack D. Ripper (who I suspect is partly based on ol’ Curt LeMay)

> who I suspect is partly based on ol’ Curt LeMay

Oh most definitely

I feel like WWIII already started, on the internet. Its only a matter of time before it spills over into meat space.

It's not just the hack attacks. It's the troll farms spreading lies on social media, the kompromat, blackmail, and bribery of senior politicians, and the obvious attempts to disassemble social democracy around the world.

"Sponsored" regime change is so much cheaper and more efficient than lobbing nukes at your enemies.

If that's all it takes to dismantle social democracy, it wasn't going to last anyways.

Its not like propaganda is a new phenomenon.

I think this is the greatest argument that we've achieved peace in our time, when the horrors of war are so far removed, that we see low level corporate espinage/sabotage and assume that a hot war is around the corner.

Malcolm Gladwell published a pretty interesting history on LeMay in his new book The Bomber Mafia https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobook/bomber-mafia/

Seems apropos:

" We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted."

⇐ Robert Steele, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto

Archived link: https://archive.ph/KrMwC

interesting perspective on the "what are we going to do about drone attacks" question - I guess LeMay would say they're unstoppable and proffer the deterrence of having an even sharper and/or more massive drone force, basically the same old air war concepts ...

100m dead...

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