In which the pond does its ritual Sunday dance with prattling Polonius ...

 

Did the reptiles just mark down the bloviating bromancer from extreme hysterical triumphalism to a milder form of delusional scribbling?

Of course there are other versions of the "triumph", as by Maureen Dowd, a scribbler who did the Donald a few favours back in the day when it mattered, but unleashed recently in the NY Times here …

The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id. 
President Trump obstructed on nearly every page of Volume II of the Mueller report, even though Robert Mueller was too lost in legalese to throw the book at him. The report counts as the Worst Exoneration Ever, replete with incrimination. 
And Trump’s motivation for trying to subvert justice and turn the White House into a writhing nest of liars? His ego...

And so on, and so it goes …

And today the reptiles decided to brush the bromancer aside, with his blather about victory, and get an alternative WSJ version, though coyly refusing to acknowledge the source in the top of the page digital splash...

It suggested that the bromancer had stopped researching after he'd seen the front page of the New York Post ...

The pond has a few quibbles. Might not the piece have been headed Mueller shows a frequently bankrupt businessman living on his daddy's dime, a born liar and an inveterate coward?

On and on it went, right down to the capper:

When Mr. Trump sought in January 2018 to have Mr. McGahn dispute an accurate press report, he had a question for his White House counsel.

“Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Mueller’s report, which cited an interview with Mr. McGahn.

Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump that he is a “real lawyer,” and that notes created a record, according to the report, to which Mr. Trump shot back: “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He didn’t take notes.”

Mr. Cohn was a hard-driving attorney best known for his role in GOP senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s anti-Communist hearings. He was disbarred in New York in the 1980s for unethical conduct.

Some lawyer, some tribute to Joe McCarthy, some victory. 

But enough of reliving yesterday's lizard Oz and the bromancer found wanting, it's time for an annual ritual which pleases the pond, as it joins yet again the prattling Polonial dance …

This is how it goes: Polonius prattles on at some length about Gallipoli, and the pond honours Polonius's dedicated service.

It's not easy conducting war from the comfort of a leather chair in the Sydney Institute and the pond never forgets to be impressed by Polonius's dedication to duty. Conscript a bunch of country folk and send them off to Vietnam to participate in a doomed and completely meaningless war? Polonius was born for exactly that kind of service. 

Now some might think this is a sorry kind of service, but the pond appreciates the way that Polonius remains steadfast and true, and never revises his thinking or expresses regrets for the odd death along the way. Heavy is the burden if the leather chair seated warrior, light is the crown of righteousness that graces Polonius's brow …

And so to another ancient war, as the ritual ordains and requires …

As frequently happens with Polonius, the cure is sometimes worse than disease. Seeking to strike down dissenters, and ne'er do wells, what's the best that Polonius can come up with for an interest in Anzac Day?

The full to over flowing intertubes and genealogy!

And yet bizarrely, the piece is headed "We march to honour Anzacs' unfashionable truths." It seems passing odd then that apparently "we march for a growing fascination with genealogy, thanks to the intertubes" …

Is genealogy an unfashionable truth? Who knows, these are the deeper kinds of mysteries that beset the pond whenever it steps into the murky world of the armchair general, and so the pond pressed on for the next Polonial koan …

Well, yes, it goes without saying, except in the world of armchair warriors, where words must do the killing, that an army is by definition a gathering of professionally trained killers, equipped to go about the business of professional killing …

This produces some interesting complications ...

"Once the bullets start flying, most combatants stop thinking with the forebrain (that portion of the brain that makes us human) and start thinking with the midbrain (the primitive portion of our brain, which is indistinguishable from that of an animal)," writes retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former U.S. Army ranger and West Point professor of military science who coined the term, on his Web site killology.com. "In conflict situations, this primitive, midbrain processing can be observed in the existence of a powerful resistance to killing one's own kind. ... This is an essential survival mechanism that prevents a species from destroying itself during territorial and mating rituals."
The only thing that has any hope of silencing the midbrain, he argues, is what influenced Pavlov's dogs: conditioning.
The need for new drills became apparent once researchers noted that a majority who had been trained in other ways to kill, surreptitiously refused to do it.
In World War II, when U.S. soldiers got a clear shot at the enemy, only about 1 in 5 actually fired, according to sensational and controversial research by Army historian Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall. It wasn't that they were cowards: On the contrary, they performed other perilous feats, including running onto the battlefield to rescue fellow soldiers, and sometimes they even placed themselves in greater personal danger by refusing to fire. And yet at the moment of truth, they just couldn't kill. (here, in The Science of Creating Killers)

Killing, after all, is what it's all about, it's in the job description and people are trained to be killers, a process which requires losing a few conventional inhibitions while building an immunity to the sight of death:

Humans have natural inhibitions about killing, as Dave Grossman describes in his book, On Killing. According to Grossman, we have become good at training people to kill as a reflex and creating cold-blooded killers. The key to this is conditioning through desensitisation in training.
A brutal method of removing inhibitions was practised in World War One already, as shown by a photo from the US Army from 1917: killing with a bayonet.
A soldier of the Royal Fusiliers described it as follows: "This great big sack was hung up on a string and we had to assume that it was a person. You had to push it in, you were told how to twist it and pull it out again. That was the part of the training when you really began to think that you've got to beat a man in front of you." (here)

Of course in war, all sides are trained to be killers, and the question then is whether sending off people to kill or be killed involves considered decisions, or instead, the bizarre paranoia of domino-driven armchair generals sitting far away, and happy for others to do the dirty work … as in the case of Vietnam, where people of a certain ideological bent were quite happy to sit in the armchairs, while others waited for their marbles to turn up …

But now the pond comes to the most sacred part of the ritual ...

For once, the pond will gingerly step around the causes of the first world war, which aren't as clear cut as Polonius routinely insists …writing as he does as a British-empire loving partisan hack squatting in his bunkered leather chair. All the sides involved have a share in bringing about that momentous folly … and to blame the Germans alone is simplistic, with the British ready to go the biff too and thinking teaching the Hun a lesson might be a jolly good romp ...

Instead the pond would like to concentrate a little on the bizarre notion that the Dardanelles campaign was a perfectly valid act of war, when in reality it was a perfectly valid act of folly, in keeping with Churchill's inclination to adventurism …

Churchill showed an inclination to this throughout his life …with the pond recently reviving its interest in the disaster in Norway that started off the second world war. 

This whimsical description is as good a way as any to start:

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’. (here)

As for the conduct of the campaign itself, Greg Hunters can go here,  but this gives more of a feeling for Churchill's contribution:

...Winston Churchill awarded the campaign 50 pages of his 3,000-page history The Second World War; Shakespeare gives it a full 150 pages. They make uncomfortable reading for those who like to think of Churchill as a born war leader. Imagine an English village cricket team turning up for pre-season training to find themselves facing a professional squad already match-hardened by early fixtures against Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland – and you have the campaign in a nutshell.
Shakespeare lists one disastrous decision after another taken by the British Cabinet’s military coordination committee (fittingly, the “MCC”): Churchill, its chairman, changes his mind repeatedly over whether the main thrust of the counter-attack should be toward Narvik or Trondheim; troops embark, disembark, then re-embark in new ships without their original equipment; German troops have snowshoes, the British none.
Churchill had warned about Germany’s air power for five years, but the threat he had in mind was of German bombers above British cities. Neither he nor military planners had anticipated that local air supremacy would transform naval and land engagements. The Luftwaffe operated at will over Norway; when the British belatedly sent 30 Gladiators from an aircraft carrier to land on a frozen lake, their carburettors froze on the first night. The Luftwaffe finished them off the next morning.
“A second Gallipoli” was the phrase on many lips. “Considering the prominent part I played in these events,” Churchill conceded years later, “it was a miracle that I survived and maintained my position in public esteem.” Shakespeare clearly agrees. He has little time for Churchill’s own defence of it, set out in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war history. There Churchill claimed that Britain’s “machinery of war conduct” was quite unfit for purpose: for example, although chairman of the MCC he could not issue orders to the chiefs of staff of the Army or Air Force; and endless layers of consultation had consumed precious time. Seen in this light, Norway provided the short, sharp shock that any democratic society needs before it can abandon its normal habits to compete at war on equal terms with a totalitarian enemy.
Shakespeare is more convinced by the testimony of contemporary diarists such as General Ironside, the head of the Army, and Admiral Godfrey, who witnessed Churchill at close quarters in the Admiralty. According to Godfrey, the “battery of weapons” that Churchill used to get his way in the conduct of the campaign included “persuasion, real or simulated anger, mockery, vituperation, tantrums, ridicule, derision, abuse and tears”. (here)

By one of those singular strokes of luck, this singular act of folly saw Chamberlain cop the blame and Churchill reap the rewards.

The same couldn't be said for Gallipoli.  Everyone knew it was a dud, and everyone knew it was Churchill wot did it, and he subsequently sent himself off to battle and spent a long time in the political wilderness.

There was very little prospect, even if the Dardanelles had gone swimmingly, that it would have achieved its aims and shortened the war. It was a desperate throw of the dice, conceived in folly and executed in folly:

...He wanted to be both general and politician, something the British constitution, happily, does not allow for.
This cast of mind was shown in the plan, inspired by Kitchener but executed with enthusiasm by Churchill, to sail a fleet through the Dardanelles to Constantinople, inspire panic in Turkey and cause that country to withdraw from the war. But the naval attack failed; a military operation to support it was a disaster; Fisher, whom Churchill had brought back as first sea lord – though he was then 73 and mildly unhinged – resigned and left Churchill exposed. The operation cost 46,000 lives, a quarter of them Australians and New Zealanders: one of Churchill’s biographers, Paul Addison, has described it as “a cross to which he nailed himself”.

And in turn, in minds other than thosewith a Polonial hue, considering that epic failure should lead to some genuine insights about the man, his flaws and his successes …

Despite a record of failure and misjudgement that in any other politician would offset even the most considerable achievements, Churchill in death has become largely untouchable by all, apart from those who are dismissed as mavericks and sectarians. The myth keeps us from an honest interpretation of our history in the first half of the 20th century. The false and romanticised picture we have of him, created by his reputation from 1940-45, is a huge obstacle to true understanding.
Despite a record of failure and misjudgement that in any other politician would offset even the most considerable achievements, Churchill in death has become largely untouchable by all, apart from those who are dismissed as mavericks and sectarians. The myth keeps us from an honest interpretation of our history in the first half of the 20th century. The false and romanticised picture we have of him, created by his reputation from 1940-45, is a huge obstacle to true understanding. (here)

Uh huh, but in the Polonial world, it seems having the best of intentions is sufficient, though if the best of intentions was all it took, why the pond would have solved world hunger, sorted climate science and produced world peace by yesterday ...

Well the pond likes to remember all aspects of war, because it's an ugly business, what with professional killers going about their work on the killing fields, so perhaps it's time for an unfashionable truth, the messy business at Surafend, to be remembered.

Most assume the massacre was the work of New Zealanders alone - Greg Hunters can see the details here  - but there has long been suspicion about Australian involvement:

...At the time the destruction of Surafend was occurring, the YMCA was screening a movie which was watched by many men of the Anzac Mounted Division. On hearing reports about the fighting, the Anzac Mounted Division Headquarters ordered the division to "stand to" with an immediate roll call to be taken and every man's location accounted for at that moment. The result of this roll call was that the location of most Australians were accounted for. In addition to the rolls, police pickets surrounded the village, finding many Australians viewing the burning houses. These were ordered back to their units. No police report indicated the presence of Australian soldiers in the village.

That being so, involvement of Australian soldiers in the massacre at Surafend had been assumed, but never proven. Historian Henry Gullett's volume of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 mentioned that New Zealand troops had conducted the massacre and the destruction of the village, but with the "hearty support" and "full sympathy" of the Australians.

In 2009, journalist Paul Daley was researching a book, Beersheba, and discovered an audio recording in the archives of the Australian War Memorial in which Australian former Light Horseman Ted O'Brien described how he and his comrades had "had a good issue of rum" and "went through [the village] with a bayonet." O'Brien described the actions he and his fellow Australians as "ungodly" and "a real bad thing."

Of course your average armchair general jingoist sitting in his leather chair at some institute or other, far from the action he has ordained as right, just and proper, rarely acknowledges the details of what might take place in the killing fields, including the needless and senseless deaths of civilians … an art form of chemical warfare and bombing that reached some sort of arcane peak in the Vietnam war …

But perhaps more attention should be paid … especially as our prattling Polonius furiously scribbled away but then failed to come up with a closing line which honoured his argument:

"Nevertheless, defying Bogle, increasing numbers still march in honour of the genealogy that litters the full to overflowing intertubes."

And so to a footnote on a recent reptile obsession, together with a reptile cartoon … so quickly the world changes in the days of our lives …