Tag Archives: wars and conflicts

Laurel Highlands Travel — Back to 1754

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George Washington, Fort Necessity, Laurel Highlands

Recreated Fort Necessity (photo: wikimedia)

George Washington definitely slept here! Last year, the excellent (and highly readable) Joseph J. Ellis biography, His Excellency George Washington (my review here), interested me in Washington’s early career as a Virginia regimental officer during the French and Indian Wars—“crash courses in the art of soldiering,” says Ellis. At age 22, Washington was second in command of troops bushwhacking in through the dense forests of the Allegheny Mountains toward the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to create the Ohio River. Today, Pittsburgh.

This was the Laurel Highlands, and Washington was leading Virginia troops whose aim was to recapture an old fort the French had seized at Three Rivers. One early morning in late May, Indian guides led the colonials through the forest to a stone outcrop from which they surprised a French patrol below. In the ensuing skirmish, in which Washington’s forces prevailed, the French Commander Monsieur De Jumonville was killed. Who shot first in the battle of Jumonville Glen has been long-debated, and Washington’s own explanations changed over time. Nevertheless, this tiny Laurel Highlands encounter ignited the Seven Years’ War, which eventually embroiled many European countries and their colonies scattered across the globe.

Since the French had a strong force in the area, the colonials built a modest circular fort in a small clearing, Fort Necessity. In early July a large French and Indian contingent attacked. Washington was forced to surrender, and in return for leaving the Ohio Valley for a year, he and his men were allowed to evacuate.

Meanwhile, the French built Fort Duquesne where the three rivers joined. But the British weren’t giving up. The following year they re-invaded the area, led by General Edward Braddock, who “knew all there was to know about drilling troops in garrison, something about waging war in the arenas of Europe, and nothing whatsoever about the kind of savage conditions and equally savage battlefields he would encounter in the American interior,” says Ellis.

Washington joined Braddock’s forces as an aide-de-camp, knowing the campaign’s planned route through more than a hundred miles of wilderness terrain was “almost impassable.” The steep hills and dense forests in many parts of the Laurel Highlands today give only a taste of how difficult traversing this country must have been. Unprepared as he was, Braddock’s forces were routed. From experiences like this, Washington developed a strategy of avoiding a fight his troops were sure to lose that stood him in good stead throughout the American Revolution.

Eventually the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, and the British replaced it with Fort Pitt. Fort Pitt was Britain’s most extensive fortification in North America, indicating the strategic importance of this position.

You can tour The National Park Service’s Fort Necessity museum (724-329-5512), and nearby sites, including a monument to Braddock, as well as follow the easy walking path (today!) through the woods to see Jumonville Glen. The outlines of the earlier forts, including Fort Duquesne, are recreated in granite on the grass of Pittsburgh’s Point State Park, which also includes a museum about Fort Pitt, within a replica of one of the fort’s five original bastions, as well as an original block house, the oldest architectural landmark in Western Pennsylvania, dating from 1764. Museum phone: 412-281-9284.

*****The Orphan Master’s Son

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Kim Jong Un, North Korea

Kim Jong Un, the Dear Leader (photo: petersnoopy, Creative Commons License)

By Adam Johnson – A prodigious creative imagination put together this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Few Americans have visited North Korea in recent decades; if they have, they’ve seen little other than what their minders are authorized to show them, and they’ve talked with no one outside their official itinerary. We cannot “see for ourselves” what living in such a massively regulated, brutal nation is like. In such a circumstance, it’s daunting to create a fully developed world, and it would be easy to create fictional characters who are two-dimensional, stereotypic. But Johnson has created such a world and peopled his book with true individuals who act believably, even when what they must do is unbelievably horrifying.

While the reader acquires a bone-chilling sense of North Korean life and how survival requires quick wits and artful deception, in no way does this novel feel like a political tract. What the reader comes to understand are the daily accommodations of action and speech and even thought that the system under Kim Jong Un, the Dear Leader, requires.

The first third of the book is about Jun Do (John Doe), the orphan master’s son who declares he is not an orphan. At various points, Jun Do has chances to escape, to defect to South Korea, to abandon ship in Japan, to hide out in the United States, but he doesn’t take them, in part because of the danger such an action would create for his companions and because (speaking of South Korea) “he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.”

Yet the book is rich in both love and humor. Seeing Jun Do cope with the disconnect between reality and the government’s constant diet of lies can be simultaneously amusing and heart-breaking.

In the second part of the book, the narration alternates among several sources, and includes this story told by a young interrogator of political prisoners about the talk every father has with his son, “in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family”:

father and son

(photo: pixshark)

 I was eight when my father had this talk with me . . . [After denouncing the boy in a terrifying way] . . [m]y father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If . . . someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”

Some chapters of this section are told via the official and ubiquitous government loudspeakers, which blare constantly in homes, factories, and public places. The extent to which the population is taken in by these jingoistic broadcasts is unclear, since cracks in the façade of total loyalty to the Dear Leader are dangerous.

Regarding the relentless suffering, one character says, “When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose.” He gave Jun Do love in the person of actress Sun Moon, and contrary to the Dear Leader’s expectation, love saved them both.

Despite all the paranoia, torture, starvation, slave labor camps, and dark and dripping prison cells, incredibly, I found this beautifully written novel uplifting; it engenders the feeling that the North Koreans will ultimately free themselves from their repressive government because the burden of believing in it will become too great.

Lore (2013)

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Lore, movie, NaziThe eponymous heroine of the movie Lore (trailer) is 14-year-old Hannalore. Her parents have been staunch National Socialists, and at the end of the war both have disappeared, and the only sure thing about their fates is that they are not coming back. Lore, her younger sister, twin brothers, and baby brother are alone in a cabin in the Black Forest with no food. The neighbors know whose children they are and want them out.

To find refuge, they must attempt to traverse the length of a ravaged Germany to their grandmother’s home in the north. Without papers, crossing from the American to the Russian to the British Zone is chancy and requires night travel. And the Russians hate them on sight. Along their laborious way, they encounter many unspeakable results of war, but little food, and Lore gradually depletes the cache of her mother’s jewelry for an egg or a little milk for the baby.

Gradually, Lore sees the consequences of her parents’ politics. In one town, she studies the photos posted of the death camps. Other people attempt to explain away how such pictures could come to be, but Lore sees something they do not—the SS officer managing the disposition of the prisoners is her father.

They meet a young Jewish man who turns out to be a useful guide, protector, and scavenger for food. But Lore cannot overcome the anti-Semitism drilled into her, and her relationship with him is both tense and confused, mixing repulsion and desire. The younger children recognize him for what he is: a friend.

Australian director Cate Shortland cast newcomer Saskia Rosendahl as Lore, and the young actress does a remarkable job, as do all the children (the baby was certainly an enthusiastic crier!). The film builds in power as the revelations of this difficult journey affect Lore, and she too faces moral choices and their consequences. “We know where this is going pretty early on,” says reviewer Steven Boone for Roger Ebert.com, “but that doesn’t prevent Lore from being riveting stuff, start to finish.”

****Bloodmoney: A Novel of Espionage

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Pakistan street scene

Street scene, Pakistan (photo: r12a, Creative Commons license)

By David Ignatius – narrated by Firdous Bamji. A friend recommended Ignatius to me, and I was lukewarm about the first book of his I read (The Director), but I’m glad I came back for a second try.The story in this 2012 spy thriller concerns a super-secret CIA offshoot working in Los Angeles under deep cover as a pseudo music-biz operation called the Hit Parade (a name the CIA officers use without apparent irony). But something is amiss, because a key undercover asset disappears from the streets of Pakistan, followed by the assassination of three more agents in postings around the world. It’s up to officer Sophie Marx to try to discover the truth, the compromises, the torturous path of violence and deception that instigated and supported the Hit Parade’s enemies.

This plot is more persuasive than that of many thrillers, with startling authenticity enabled by Ignatius’s journalistic career. (He is an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post and writes about foreign affairs.) The NPR review quotes one of the book’s great lines: “Americans did not like lying to others. It made them uncomfortable. Their specialty was lying to themselves.”

As important, the characters are well-drawn. I was happy to see the crusty old CIA hand Cyril Hoffman reappear in this book. He’s a devil, but an entertaining devil. And he’s ours. Mostly. I especially liked Ignatius’s characterization of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence chief, General Mohammed Malik, trying to make sense of the Americans.

Mostly the narration is fine, but Bamji puts a slight whine in Sophie’s voice that’s not just annoying, but inconsistent with her dogged character.

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In the Crosswind

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In the Crosswind, Martti Heide, Laura Peterson, Tarmo Song

Laura Peterson & Tarmo Song, In the Crosswind

If ever a movie deserved to be called an art film, this 2014 Estonian film is it (trailer). Director Martti Heide’s full-length debut chronicles Stalin’s 1941 sudden overnight deportation of 40,000 citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to forced labor camps in Siberia. Families were separated, people worked in slave-labor conditions, food was minimal, and many starved. No food was provided for children.

The story, based on a real-life diary, follows the experiences of Erna, a young wife and mother (played by Laura Peterson) desperate to reunite with her husband Heldur (Tarmo Song) and return home. While the story is perhaps typical for people in such brutal circumstances, the way of filming it is not. Heide took months sometimes to set up his shots, which are filmed in long, unedited, silent takes (with a soundtrack of gunshots, trains, creaking cartwheels, and so on added later). But the people do not move. Nor is there dialog. Peterson narrates in voice-over the entries from Erna’s diary, as a series of letters to Heldur.

Instead of action, the camera weaves among the actors, as they stand frozen in position. In an early scene, it circles Erna and Heldur embracing among the passengers waiting to be herded aboard a train, then moves on through the crowd. Then it finds Erna again, leaning out of the cattle car door, looking for Heldur, who stands in the distance. Watching this movie is like examining a series of richly detailed still photographs. Remarkable.

The technique symbolically mimics the way life stood still for the refugees. While it results in a slowly unfolding story, for me, the film was very powerful. Only when Erna is at home, in the beginning scenes and in reverie, do people move in a conventional way. To paraphrase what one refugee said, the Soviet Union might have my body, but my heart (what animates me) is still in Estonia.

IMDb reviewers give it a 7.9 out of 10.0 rating. It was a selection of the Trenton International Film Festival.

****Death of A Spy

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Central Asia

Nakhcivan (photo: wikimedia)

By Dan Mayland – Met this author at a conference and thought I’d give one of his books a test-drive. Quite engaging. Glad I read it. Especially intriguing was the setting—countries near and around the Caspian Sea: cities in Azerbaijan and its remote state Nakhchivan, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). Any book with maps at the front tells me the author has taken care to keep readers oriented. Sometimes it where you are really matters.

The protagonist, the likeable Mark Sava, a former CIA station chief in Azerbaijan is living in Kyrgyzstan, running a spies-for-hire business, when a former mentor and colleague is found dead in Tbilisi. This is something he has to take care of and should be an easy deal—contact the family, get the body on the way back to the States, “do this right,” he tells his wife. But once in the dead man’s hotel room, Sava knows something is seriously wrong. This was a hit, one whose roots are somewhere in his own past.

Soon his errand of mercy blossoms into a full-blown catastrophe involving Russian spies, a mysterious new Nakhchivan airfield, Sava’s former lover, and security officials from Azerbaijan who must stay a step ahead of their country’s own deteriorating politics.

Mayland has spent considerable time in the region where his Mark Sava thrillers are set (this is the fourth). His website includes “extras,” more maps and photos of places featured in this book. His dedication to authenticity has been rewarded by glowing reviews and Amazon best-seller status in the espionage category in both the US and UK.

Woman in Gold

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Klimt, Woman in Gold

Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt (photo: wikimedia)

In Woman in Gold (trailer), Helen Mirren, chameleon-like, inhabits the body and personality of Maria Altmann, niece and heir of a prominent Jewish family in pre-WWII Vienna. The family’s best-known member today is Maria’s aunt Adele, whose portrait Gustav Klimt painted in 1907.

The painting was appropriated during the Nazi era and for many years hung in the Austrian state’s famous Belvedere Gallery, as “the Mona Lisa of Vienna.”

After her sister’s death, Maria finds correspondence suggesting the painting was perhaps not left to the government of Austria in her aunt’s will, as it claimed, and therefore not rightfully Austrian property. She hires a family friend’s son, Randol Schoenberg (played by Ryan Reynolds), a young down-on-his-luck Los Angeles attorney, to look into the matter. Schoenberg, grandson of the composer—another refugee from Nazified Austria—is out of touch with his family’s past and slow to recognize the significance of Maria’s quest.

Initially unwilling to take on the case, he is gradually drawn into it. Their bureaucratic battles with stonewalling Austrian officials soon unite the pair, and they are joined by a crusading Austrian journalist, Hubertus Czernin. Formidable legal and bureaucratic hurdles stand in the way of Maria being reuniting with the painting—“When you look at this painting, you see a work of art,” Marie tells a reunification commission, “I see my aunt.”

The story is another in a long line of mostly not happy stories of stolen art works in World War II, brought to renewed public awareness by movies and books like The Monuments Men and Pictures at an Exhibition. The opportunity to reunite beloved works of art and their owners is rapidly disappearing, yet this beautifully filmed movie, directed by Simon Curtis, shows the importance of continuing these efforts.

Because this film is based on a true story, and I for one remembered how it ends, a certain inevitability about the outcome guides the plot. Perhaps this is what has caused reviewers (not me!) to find it dull, though they find the actors captivating. The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes critics rating is a paltry 49%, but audiences were more in my camp, giving a rating of 88%. As a result of the audience reception, the film’s distributor announced yesterday that it will greatly expand its national distribution. If you like stories that touch on beauty, truth, and justice, you will like it, too!

*****The International: A Novel of Belfast

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hotel bar, barman

(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International. The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” according to Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

Patterson’s writing style reflects the unadorned—and often wryly humorous—worldview of his young narrator, yet see how precisely he captures the sense of a departing wedding guest:

“You look like you enjoyed yourself,” I said.
He sucked air through his pursed lips and held a hand to his heart as though to say that any more enjoyment would have killed him.
“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” I said.
“Great people,” he said and the hand on his heart became his word of honour. “Not a bit of side to a one of them.”

The novel’s only violence of the kind that would become all-too-familiar happened somewhat before the book begins, when four Catholic barmen from The International were shot leaving another bar, late at night. One died, creating the opening that Daniel filled.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about the barmen who died, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

The Author

Princeton University, through the Fund for Irish Studies, brought Belfast author Glenn Patterson to campus last week. He talked about how his writing emphasizes history and politics and his deep sense of place. And, he said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” This theme is borne out in a postscript to The International, where Patterson recounts going back to newspaper archives from 1967 to see what they’d made of the NICRA’s formation, and the answer was “scarcely nothing.” In that gap, the novel grew.

Charming, disarming, Patterson told stories and read from several works, include four of the five short literary interludes he was commissioned to write for Philip Hammond’s “Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic,” which premiered April 14, 2012, the 100th anniversary of the night the ship—built in Belfast—sank. I regret I couldn’t find them online to share with you; they were extraordinary.

It still being (barely) March, the month of St. Patrick’s Day, also see: Glenn Patterson’s top 10 books about Belfast.

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NSA Chief Speaks in Princeton

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Mike Rogers, NSA, military

Adm. Mike Rogers (photo: wikipedia)

Admiral Mike Rogers—Director, National Security Agency, and Commander, U.S. Cyber Command (the military’s centralized operational command for cyberspace operations)—spoke at Princeton University yesterday, part of an ongoing effort to establish greater understanding of the NSA mission and encourage private sector partnerships .

He kept his own remarks short, describing the missions of the two agencies he heads, in order to maximize time for audience questions. A key challenge he noted is assuring that efforts to manage the nation’s cyber-threats and foreign intelligence-gathering are appropriately balanced against “the inherent right to privacy” of the American people. In the late 1960s and early 1970s (the Watergate era), revelations of government spying on U.S. citizens led to two new mechanisms for privacy protection: FISA courts (authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) and congressional oversight. Unfortunately, Rogers said, the public has lost confidence in both those approaches at a time when threats have rapidly escalated.

“Would we even be having this conversation if it weren’t for the whistleblowers?” an audience member asked.

Rogers responded, “I don’t know any whistleblowers. I only know of thieves who stole government information.” He went on to say that he wished he had that information back, because the loss of it has imperiled troops overseas and many other individuals and activities, as well as entailed considerable costs. He tells his staff that, if they see any information or process of gathering it that they consider illegal, immoral, or unethical, they should raise it within the chain of command, and it isn’t up to each individual person to pick and choose which laws to obey.

In deciding how to respond to a cyber-attack, his command uses the same principle of proportionality that the military does in general. The exact means of retaliation is a policy decision, not his alone. In North Korea’s hacking attack against Sony last November, for example, he urged the President to “think more broadly,” beyond just cyber-methods, and the U.S. government response to date includes economic sanctions against Pyongyang.

A questioner asked what happens when information amassed on foreigners includes information about Americans (“incidental” information). Rogers wouldn’t speak to whether the FBI or CIA access such information but said the NSA treats it differently, as to whether and how long it is kept, than it does information on foreigners.

Another controversy raised was the NSA’s practice of bulk data storage. Rogers said that at least some bulk data storage is necessary because the agency does not know now what may be useful down the road. There are limits on how long information is retained, but these are currently “more of an art than a science,” he said. A January report by an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, at present, there are no screening methods that are a viable alternative to bulk data collection, although privacy protections can be strengthened.

How ISIS is Different

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desert, man in desert

(photo: Ilker Ender, creative commons license)

The issue of terrorism and the response of secular societies to it is the sharp edge of international relations and of much current interest. Recently, this website has included my summary of Graeme Wood’s article in The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants,” as well as a review of the book The Terrorist’s Dilemma, by Princeton professor Jacob Shapiro about how covert organizations organize themselves.

Putting these two analysis side-by-side, ISIS appears to be both fundamentally and functionally different from the “traditional” terrorist organizations Shapiro describes in a number of key ways, including:

  • traditional terrorist organizations, including al-Qa’ida, have political aims (getting Westerners out of the Arabian peninsula, etc.), whereas ISIS’s aims are religious
  • because of their political goals, traditional terrorist organizations have at least some interest in controlling ultra-violence, as it decreases their political capital, whereas ISIS is focused on establishing absolute, undiluted Sharia and the accompanying violence is part of the package
  • traditional terrorist organizations want to protect their leaders, whereas ISIS appears to court confrontation, or at least is not dissuaded from pursuing its tactics by fear of Western reprisal and
  • traditional terrorist organizations must operate “underground” in their host countries, so their activities—including communication with their agents in the field—always carry a security risk, whereas ISIS is operating in the open in its captured territories, and indeed must hold those territories in order to maintain the caliphate it has declared.

With respect to how an organization can behave when it has territory (a safe haven), ISIS does follow the pattern of traditional terrorist organizations by exploiting that benefit. In addition, traditional terrorist organizations suffer when there is a complete security vacuum and see the need to establish social institutions; not surprisingly, then, ISIS’s plans include a kind of social agenda (albeit along lines endorsed by Mohammed), though whether the organization can pull it off is another question.

These differences call for different approaches, not approaching ISIS like a spinoff al-Qa’ida or the Provisional IRA. This is new.