Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "12-monkeys"
Sewing Shut the Lips of the Prophet: Ivan Bloch, Bruce Willis, and Death in the Desert
I had first heard of Ivan Bloch (also known as Jan Gotlib Bloch) from a truly memorable history professor I had as an undergrad. This professor was small, a bit of a nebbish with thick glasses and a little bit of a mean streak to go with his wit. Still, he always kept the attention of the class with the raising and lowering of his voice, his gesticulations, and his evident passion that kept even the most millennial of millennials engaged with the material.
Ivan Bloch was one of the few people who predicted that the Great War would not only be different from all previous wars, but would quickly come to a nihilistic stalemate that would forever change human perceptions of war and technology. Others, such as the German writer Ernst Junger, were convinced that technology was going to advance to such a stage that we would reenter the age of Titanism, which in brief would mean that man would challenge the sphere of the Gods, and in doing so alter his own mundane world and that of the Olympians in unforeseen ways and perhaps pay dearly for his hubris with something greater than his mere life as forfeit.
This would obviously not be a change for the better. Old ideals and beliefs upon which all martial glory had been predicated throughout history (the metaphysics of war, as Julius Evola would have it) would alter and corrode, since the tools man had created now made it impossible for man to test his courage, bravery, and even capacity for savagery (that’s been an asset throughout most of history, no matter what we think of it now). The fundamental wrongness (for lack of a better word) of using something like a predator drone to fight the enemy while still calling oneself a soldier was already a topic of discussion among military theorists and philosophers of technology (as per Ernst Kapp) during and after the Great War.
Before the Great War, though, the general consensus was that old tactics dating back to shoulder-to-shoulder pike advances and old tools (such as the horse) would carry the day. Yes, the machine gun had existed for some time in one form or another (the Germans would use the crew-serve Spandau and the English had the roughly equivalent Vickers), but a lot of commanders didn’t like these dreaded machines. The brass was convinced they could control the machinegun’s use and dissemination on the field. They thought they could convince men to keep these cheating weapons not fit for intra-European conflict behind the lines. Such savage arms were designed to be used by underwhelmed colonials to put down rebellions in places like Togoland or India. Conversely, if the guns were used, they would chop through the enemy and his defenses so quickly that the advance of troops would proceed as swiftly as a transcontinental train. The plan for the Germans, the Schliefen Strategy, was supposed to be delivered with the force of a giant’s (or a Titan’s) left hook, aimed at the fromage blanc / maquée of Belgium and then France, and then on through the wide chalk cliffs of Dover. The Germans were good students of history (at least military history) and knew from the derring-do of the Sea Dogs that he who ruled the sea ruled the world. If they could break through France, secure, mine, and patrol the English Channel, they could establish a route from the North Sea through the Channel that would give them a beachhead to run the world (this is considered an evil ambition when being pursued by any nation besides England or the United States). Germany would no longer be beholden to the whims of the Atlanticist powers, nor their embargoes, sanctions, or blockades.
The Germans knew they needed this and the Allies knew they could not allow them to do this at any cost. The result of this was the death of around 37 million people, military and civilian casualties combined, lives lost mostly over inches of ground on coal slagheaps and nameless hummocks and craters. It would not be hyperbole to say that everything humanity thought it knew about itself foundered on thick strands of barbed wire where finely attired men, their steeds, and their dreams died. Don Quixote had more success against windmills than some of the smartest military theorists had in predicting what the combat of the Great War would look like, and the political upheavals to which it would lead.
Getting back to Bloch, however, here’s what the prophet without honor actually had to say on what he imagined this impending conflict would look like: “war will become a kind of stalemate… Everybody will be entrenched. It will be a great war of entrenchment. The spade will be as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle… It will of a necessity partake of the character of siege operations… There will be increased slaughter… On so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt forever.”
It was one thing to hear my loveably neurotic prof rant about Bloch in class, but it was something entirely different to actually grapple with the man’s words. Reading them, I experienced a chill, felt perhaps what Madeleine Stowe’s character must have felt in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys when she sees that the drooling, baldheaded violent lunatic (played by Bruce Willis) who claims he travelled through time was actually visible in a photograph from the Great War displayed on a projector at a symposium she was attending, after she had escaped the supposed madman’s clutches.
Bruce Willis’s character was laughed at and prodded and poked at in the movie when he tried to warn people of what was coming, and his kindred real world spirit, Bloch, experienced the same fate, although the derision was probably compounded by the fact Bloch was a Jewish banker when continental political antipathy toward Jews was reaching a simmer (the boil would come a couple of decades later).
Bloch was laughed at for trying to keep the species from killing itself.
I suppose it could be worse, and we should consider the mockery he endured in light of the far harsher treatment meted out, or at least alleged to have been meted out, in a bit of soldier’s apocrypha related by Frank Richards in his memoir of service to the English project in India.
Mr. Richards, a hard-bitten and humorous enlisted man with very few illusions about life and war, related the tale in the last chapters of his book Old Soldier Sahib, about the occasion on which the Amir of Afghanistan decided to visit India. While the Amir was touring the land, a man with a reputation as a prophet travelled from town to town, shadowing the Amir and warning him that he would die by assassination.
Eventually the Amir had his fill of this man (who I picture as sandaled and wearing a toga, looking like a less dignified Gandhi). He ordered some of his guards to take the man into custody and bring him to an out-of-the-way location. There they were to sew the man’s lips shut with thread, place him in a basket (which I envision like that of a snake charmer), and then stick him, sewn-lips, basket and all, in the fork where several branches of an old tree met.
The Amir was not entirely heartless (and was actually considered a bit of a softy for a Saracen of his day and place) and was nothing if not sporting. He instructed his guards that if he, the Amir, were assassinated as the man foretold, the man in the box was to be removed from his prison, his lips were to be unsealed, and he was to be given adequate nourishment, food and water. After the prophet recovered, he was to be granted riches from the Amir’s estate, way beyond the wildest dreams of the low-caster who had shadowed and dogged the Amir from village to village.
If, however, the Amir was not assassinated while on his royal visit, then the false prophet was to be left in the basket with his lips sealed and allowed to bake in the sun until presumably dead, after which the carrion would undoubtedly peck their way inside his straw hamper where the man with the parched and bleeding lips lay. The vultures would have their druthers with the eyes and other soft delicacies, and then the smaller foragers like maggots would move in and macerate in ammonizing waves, after which the beetles would nest in the mummified corpse of the man whose tongue had led him to such a sad fate.
Needless to say, the Amir was not killed while on tour of India, and the man in the box in the tree with the lips sewn shut died painfully and slowly, as ordered. The twist was that the Amir was later assassinated upon returning home to Afghanistan.
The human tendency to suppress unwanted information is a pretty natural one, especially if one is enjoying the high ground in the present arrangement of things (and Prussian and Austro-Hungarian generals were demigods, potentates perhaps equal to or even higher in the estimation of their own people than the apocryphal Amir of great cruelty).
It’s most important to remember the lessons it’s also easiest to forget. Still, it would help to remember that when someone is telling us something we don’t want to hear, and consensus is on our side, the best reaction is probably not to laugh or sew the other man’s lips shut. He might be right.
Ivan Bloch was one of the few people who predicted that the Great War would not only be different from all previous wars, but would quickly come to a nihilistic stalemate that would forever change human perceptions of war and technology. Others, such as the German writer Ernst Junger, were convinced that technology was going to advance to such a stage that we would reenter the age of Titanism, which in brief would mean that man would challenge the sphere of the Gods, and in doing so alter his own mundane world and that of the Olympians in unforeseen ways and perhaps pay dearly for his hubris with something greater than his mere life as forfeit.
This would obviously not be a change for the better. Old ideals and beliefs upon which all martial glory had been predicated throughout history (the metaphysics of war, as Julius Evola would have it) would alter and corrode, since the tools man had created now made it impossible for man to test his courage, bravery, and even capacity for savagery (that’s been an asset throughout most of history, no matter what we think of it now). The fundamental wrongness (for lack of a better word) of using something like a predator drone to fight the enemy while still calling oneself a soldier was already a topic of discussion among military theorists and philosophers of technology (as per Ernst Kapp) during and after the Great War.
Before the Great War, though, the general consensus was that old tactics dating back to shoulder-to-shoulder pike advances and old tools (such as the horse) would carry the day. Yes, the machine gun had existed for some time in one form or another (the Germans would use the crew-serve Spandau and the English had the roughly equivalent Vickers), but a lot of commanders didn’t like these dreaded machines. The brass was convinced they could control the machinegun’s use and dissemination on the field. They thought they could convince men to keep these cheating weapons not fit for intra-European conflict behind the lines. Such savage arms were designed to be used by underwhelmed colonials to put down rebellions in places like Togoland or India. Conversely, if the guns were used, they would chop through the enemy and his defenses so quickly that the advance of troops would proceed as swiftly as a transcontinental train. The plan for the Germans, the Schliefen Strategy, was supposed to be delivered with the force of a giant’s (or a Titan’s) left hook, aimed at the fromage blanc / maquée of Belgium and then France, and then on through the wide chalk cliffs of Dover. The Germans were good students of history (at least military history) and knew from the derring-do of the Sea Dogs that he who ruled the sea ruled the world. If they could break through France, secure, mine, and patrol the English Channel, they could establish a route from the North Sea through the Channel that would give them a beachhead to run the world (this is considered an evil ambition when being pursued by any nation besides England or the United States). Germany would no longer be beholden to the whims of the Atlanticist powers, nor their embargoes, sanctions, or blockades.
The Germans knew they needed this and the Allies knew they could not allow them to do this at any cost. The result of this was the death of around 37 million people, military and civilian casualties combined, lives lost mostly over inches of ground on coal slagheaps and nameless hummocks and craters. It would not be hyperbole to say that everything humanity thought it knew about itself foundered on thick strands of barbed wire where finely attired men, their steeds, and their dreams died. Don Quixote had more success against windmills than some of the smartest military theorists had in predicting what the combat of the Great War would look like, and the political upheavals to which it would lead.
Getting back to Bloch, however, here’s what the prophet without honor actually had to say on what he imagined this impending conflict would look like: “war will become a kind of stalemate… Everybody will be entrenched. It will be a great war of entrenchment. The spade will be as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle… It will of a necessity partake of the character of siege operations… There will be increased slaughter… On so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking that they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt forever.”
It was one thing to hear my loveably neurotic prof rant about Bloch in class, but it was something entirely different to actually grapple with the man’s words. Reading them, I experienced a chill, felt perhaps what Madeleine Stowe’s character must have felt in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys when she sees that the drooling, baldheaded violent lunatic (played by Bruce Willis) who claims he travelled through time was actually visible in a photograph from the Great War displayed on a projector at a symposium she was attending, after she had escaped the supposed madman’s clutches.
Bruce Willis’s character was laughed at and prodded and poked at in the movie when he tried to warn people of what was coming, and his kindred real world spirit, Bloch, experienced the same fate, although the derision was probably compounded by the fact Bloch was a Jewish banker when continental political antipathy toward Jews was reaching a simmer (the boil would come a couple of decades later).
Bloch was laughed at for trying to keep the species from killing itself.
I suppose it could be worse, and we should consider the mockery he endured in light of the far harsher treatment meted out, or at least alleged to have been meted out, in a bit of soldier’s apocrypha related by Frank Richards in his memoir of service to the English project in India.
Mr. Richards, a hard-bitten and humorous enlisted man with very few illusions about life and war, related the tale in the last chapters of his book Old Soldier Sahib, about the occasion on which the Amir of Afghanistan decided to visit India. While the Amir was touring the land, a man with a reputation as a prophet travelled from town to town, shadowing the Amir and warning him that he would die by assassination.
Eventually the Amir had his fill of this man (who I picture as sandaled and wearing a toga, looking like a less dignified Gandhi). He ordered some of his guards to take the man into custody and bring him to an out-of-the-way location. There they were to sew the man’s lips shut with thread, place him in a basket (which I envision like that of a snake charmer), and then stick him, sewn-lips, basket and all, in the fork where several branches of an old tree met.
The Amir was not entirely heartless (and was actually considered a bit of a softy for a Saracen of his day and place) and was nothing if not sporting. He instructed his guards that if he, the Amir, were assassinated as the man foretold, the man in the box was to be removed from his prison, his lips were to be unsealed, and he was to be given adequate nourishment, food and water. After the prophet recovered, he was to be granted riches from the Amir’s estate, way beyond the wildest dreams of the low-caster who had shadowed and dogged the Amir from village to village.
If, however, the Amir was not assassinated while on his royal visit, then the false prophet was to be left in the basket with his lips sealed and allowed to bake in the sun until presumably dead, after which the carrion would undoubtedly peck their way inside his straw hamper where the man with the parched and bleeding lips lay. The vultures would have their druthers with the eyes and other soft delicacies, and then the smaller foragers like maggots would move in and macerate in ammonizing waves, after which the beetles would nest in the mummified corpse of the man whose tongue had led him to such a sad fate.
Needless to say, the Amir was not killed while on tour of India, and the man in the box in the tree with the lips sewn shut died painfully and slowly, as ordered. The twist was that the Amir was later assassinated upon returning home to Afghanistan.
The human tendency to suppress unwanted information is a pretty natural one, especially if one is enjoying the high ground in the present arrangement of things (and Prussian and Austro-Hungarian generals were demigods, potentates perhaps equal to or even higher in the estimation of their own people than the apocryphal Amir of great cruelty).
It’s most important to remember the lessons it’s also easiest to forget. Still, it would help to remember that when someone is telling us something we don’t want to hear, and consensus is on our side, the best reaction is probably not to laugh or sew the other man’s lips shut. He might be right.
