Values: Bushidō, Seppuku in WWII: Who are we to Judge?

The Japanese were never truly, “held to account,” after WWII. The fact that neither they, nor Russia had ratified the Geneva Accords, made finding a legal basis from which to prosecute, extremely difficult. The ensuing cold war and Japan’s geographical relationship with respect to Russia, necessitated their future cooperation.

The Far-Eastern culture, like the Native American people, evolved independently from the Euro-Asian peoples for the vast majority of history. Their entire ethos, especially when it comes to warfare, is impossible to accurately judge by our (western) standards. If we were to hold them to our standards of justice, another problem would be: where would you start? By our standards, the vast majority of common soldiers, officers and politicians would be guilty of numerous crimes. We couldn’t prosecute everyone.

The response of the U.S. Soldiers and Marines to the Japanese cruelty was to become equally brutal and cruel. This is not to say that we weren’t justified in responding in kind… hell no! But certainly, if we aggressively prosecuted uniformed soldiers on the Japanese side, some of the tactics that our soldiers employed in response, would surely be brought to light… and the American people who were not there, and did not experience it first hand, might not have understood. The ultimate act of dropping Two Atomic Bombs on the Japanese was of course the most vivid example of our ability to respond to inhumanity in kind. The nation was more than ready to forget the horrible depths, which the Japanese brought us to, in order to fight them. I think as a whole, the nation did not want to confront these issues… opting to just forget instead. I can’t say I blame them.

The Japanese employed a perverted, “Bushidō,” ethos to the war (“way of the warrior”)… attempting to take this anachronistic, samurai code into the 20^th century. Bushidō holds one’s honor above all else. Defeat to them was an unspeakable, ultimate shame. This warrior code required an honorable death in battle or victory as the only two acceptable outcomes. Dishonor could only be remedied by, “seppuku:” a ritualized form of suicide. Thus, when the Japanese took American prisoners, they were worse than dead to them. Killing their prisoners, according to Bushidō, was like doing them a favor. A swift and painless death was to the Japanese, the best thing that they could do for their prisoners. Therefore, is it possible to judge these things by our standards?

The Bushidō code did not explain everything however… there were things that certainly fell outside that code during the conflict. In those cases, some were prosecuted and some, executed… and most, unfortunately were never held to account.

You see the inherent difficulties with respect to the Japanese: a) we needed them for the cold war; b) It is difficult to apply western standards of justice to a completely different culture, especially since they did not ratify the Geneva accords; c) we were forced to sink to their level at times and no one wanted to be reminded of that.

Some 60 years have passed since then and we have all come to realize that war is hell. I was not there, therefore I haven’t the need to forgive or the right to judge… merely the responsibility to learn from the lessons therein.

Rommel: Analysis

I recently took up reading about Erwin Rommel, the German Field Marshall nicknamed: The Dessert Fox. He was arguably the best military tactician who ever lived. It seems that just about anyone who faced him in combat, quickly gained a healthy respect for his abilities. The book I am now reading, is a sort of “lessons-learned,” critique of his own exploits during WWI. In reading this, I am gaining an appreciation of just how he learned his art.

The book is a dispassionate account of his first battles as a young officer with the 124^th infantry regiment, during WWI. Though what he was describing represented the most desperate of circumstances, you do not get that feeling from his words. The most harrowing of circumstances are set fourth in succinct, dispassionate terms, which belie the seriousness of what he must be experiencing. However, what he lacks in emotion, he makes up for in terms of clarity… he imparts only the pertinent information, critiques his performance and then summarizes the important lessons that he learned. This style would not work for a lesser man than he… it is only because of who he is, and the absolute intensity of what he is describing that I find it enjoyable. I want to know what he knows: but first, I must understand the man and how he came into being. His writing accomplishes this effectively.

In the end, regardless of all that he accomplished… he lost. His forces were eventually routed from North Africa. His defense of France did not stop the allied invasion. His half-hearted support of the plot to assassinate Hitler resulted in Hitler’s continued reign and Rommel’s coerced suicide. In his defense, he was given impossible tasks against an overwhelming force with a madman at the helm of state. He fought harder and more skillfully than most could have in his place and there are few who disagree… least of all, those who battled against him.

Russian Bloggers: Shut Up!

I am reading mainstream, Russia-Press excerpts, suggesting that Dick Cheney created the Georgian situation to influence the US Presidential election. The blogosphere is overflowing with Russian and American backers of this theory.

You know what Russia? I am just not in the mood for your leftest, “bushaphobia,” right now… I have had my fill of that particular psychosis from my own countrymen. If you think Putin has some sort of moral superiority over Cheney:

I would tell you to ask Alexander Litvinenko, however he somehow inhaled a lethal dose of Polonium-210.

Maybe you could ask Mikhail Khodorkovsky what he thinks… if you can find whatever prison he is locked away in…. and if he hasn’t already had an unfortunate accident.

Ivan Safronov … oops, he “accidentally,” fell out a window

Paul Joyal: shot and killed while shopping. (Still alive, my bad) (he was walking on his driveway)

Anna Politkovskaya: gunned down.

You Russian bloggers have got to be kidding… worry about your own guy.

Russia, Georgia and Soviet Union Redux

The Russian bear has awakened from it’s post-Soviet slumber. The Georgians find themselves in the unenviable position of being the first meal of a very hungry bear. The fall of the greater, Soviet Union was strictly a matter of economics… not an ideological collapse, as is commonly believed. I suspect that very few of the ruling class have had ideological epiphanies in the intervening years. Certainly what has ensued since the fall of the Soviet Union has not been a stunning example of the advantages of free-markets and/or democracies. The same people who brought you the KGB, re-education camps, gulags, proxy wars, expansionism and the cold war… are still there albeit 19 years older.

Russia, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, is masterfully positioned to be the dominant supplier of Europe’s energy needs. The recent spike in oil prices, has given Russia the one thing it really lacked: cold, hard cash.

With this new infusion of cash, all of the ingredients now exist, and another incarnation of the evil empire, is about to emerge. Putin spent the better part of this decade, consolidating power within his own country and now it appears, that the time has come to consolidate power throughout the region.

Unfortunately, the Georgians somehow convinced themselves that they were ready to take on the Russians and oust them from their ill-gotten, national territory. This is not to say it wouldn’t have happened anyway… but in this case, it certainly looks as though the Georgians gave them the excuse they needed. Maybe in forcing the Russian’s hand, so early in the game, the west will be shaken from it’s post cold-war euphoria, before it’s too late.

Simply training the Georgians was obviously a mistake… maybe we showed them one too many Rambo movies. I would have to guess that the Georgian leadership allowed emotions to rule their military and political judgments. What else could make a 19000 man, ill-equipped, militia… take on a 650000 man, professional army with thousands of advanced jets, tanks and precision munitions? Whomever came up with that battle plan should be shot. This is yet another reason I would like to cite when I read the, “where is America,” comments in the news reports. You want us to put our children in that situation? American soldiers fight alongside other professional soldiers, in matters of national interests and security. The Georgian army went into South Ossetia, did some horrible things of their own (to civilians) and then went to pieces when the Russian army came to throw them back out. That is not the behavior of a professional army… we couldn’t have taught you that! God, I hope the Ukrainians have better leaders and/or better soldiers than that, otherwise, I hope you all remember how to speak Russian.

I envision a much friendlier Europe in the coming years. Our post-cold war position of, “most evil country,” will soon be replaced with the unspoken title of, “lesser of the two evils.” I kind of missed Russia all of these years… it was nice to have a sane, rational enemy who you could count on. These intervening years of fanatical terrorists and bomb-laying Iraqis, has not had the same ambiance as did the Soviet days. No one pretended to like us as they did when you were around. Being the most evil country just hasn’t given us the same thrill as it did you. I guess every ying needs it yang?

Quantum “Reality…” as I see it anyway.

The quantum world is an elusive, strange place, which doesn’t appear to resemble the one in which we live. All things in this world sit atop the bubbling froth of Plank-scale, space-time, and is not unlike the white-speckled static seen on a television with no signal. A confusing level of reality, which blurs both time and space to the macro-world observer. Time jumps around randomly, both forwards and back, resulting in a blur of recent-past, present and near-future. Euclidean concepts such as up, down, back and fourth are scrambled into a blurry cloud. If you think of it as a blur in space-time, you needn’t concern yourself with the quasi-realistic precepts of the Uncertainty Principle. Suffice to say that nothing you might divine from a given state of a quantum mechanical system will predict any future state of that system. One can only say that a given state, has a certain likelihood of being found, within the scope of all possible states, at any given instant. This says nothing about what the object is or exactly how it works only how it and others exactly like it should behave.

 

 A quantum mechanical object has a physical manifestation in the macro-world sense. It is a bit of matter which occupies a given point in space-time. It’s proximity to the quantum froth distorts it’s existence with respect to our, macro-world, point of view. It’s macroscopic manifestation is best understood in terms of a cloud or field, such that the “bit” of matter is occupying a range of space-time, with near simultaneity. The complete description must take into account it’s macroscopic, cloud manifestation and it’s quantum-world, point-particle manifestation.

 

As an exercise, think of space-time as a body of clear water, having an observer at the surface, and another at the bottom…the water being agitated by a vibrating force, which causes the light rays travailing through the medium to become erratic. The two observers have not changed, but to the other, each appears as a distorted jumble of color. If these vibrations were regular enough and applied equally throughout the entire body of water, the patterns of distortion would become fairly uniform. The distorted images, though not an accurate representation of the original object, will distort the real picture, in a constant way. Each observer would be able to create some sort of representative, albeit distorted model of the other side.

 

Extending this analogy to our experience of the quantum world: quantum fluctuations distort the true nature of whatever quantum object we are observing, in some sort of universally-regular way; that rather than representing a illusion of light which could be swept aside, with no real-world consequences; the distortions we observe in space-time are in fact real consequences which can not be swept aside. When two objects in the water world come together, the apparent distortions eventually disappear as they approach each other and they simply interact as two macroscopic objects normally would. When a quantum object interacts, the space-time distortions do not disappear, and in fact, are/become reality… therefore, the object interacts with other things as both the macroscopic manifestation (field/cloud) and the microscopic manifestation (Particle).

 

Quantum mechanics requires a random, chaotic, universe to explain it’s predictions. This is antithetical to the placid, smooth, space-time for which Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity requires. He once asserted that,”god does not play dice with the universe.” In fact, this very divide still exists today and renders quantum mechanics and general relativity, mutually-exclusive to each other. Either one, or both of these theories must be incomplete. There has to be something missing… something more fundamental to at least one of them. Einstein worked on this problem in the latter 1/3 of his life, taking the fruitless effort all the way onto his deathbed. The unification of these two theories, yielding a complete description of the universe is the, “Holy Grail,” of physics, still today. It is sometimes called, “The Theory of Everything (TOE).”

 

 Another consequence of the quantum mechanics is a bizarre interconnection found to exist between certain spatially-separate, quantum-mechanical systems. Quantum Entanglement, as it’s called, has been demonstrated experimentally. Einstein sarcastically refereed to this as “spukhafte Fernwirkung (translation: “Spooky Action at a distance).” His theory of Special Relativity placed an absolute speed limit on the universe: 3.0 x 10 8 m/s/s (aka: speed of light). The problem arises with the instantaneous nature of the entangled relationship… how do the two systems know what the other is going to do? He even stated that he would rather be a cobbler, than a physicist, if this universe were truly this way. Einstein was convinced that entanglement was nothing more than an error in the mathematics, which would eventually be discovered.

 

 Quantum Entanglement has walked the gauntlet of science since that time, and has taken it’s place as a distinct sub-set of theoretical physics. In recent years, there has been an unparalleled effort to exploit this phenomena by scientists and industry alike. The computer-chip manufacturers have considerable interest in this area.

 

 Computer-chip manufacturers have doubled the speed, resolution and capacity of computer components about every two years (More’s Law). Manufacturers have already began to run into roadblocks, stemming from the physical laws, which govern the macro-universe. Speed of light (relativistic) issues, entropy(order)/enthalpy(heat) issues (thermodynamics), and quantum mechanical limitations all stand in the way of progress. The speed of computer processors has already began to approach these limitations, forcing manufacturers to concentrate on distributing tasks to multiple, parallel, processors instead. It won’t be long before this approach reaches it’s limitations. The quantum world provides the only known hope in circumventing the relativistic limitations which surely apply here, in the macro-world. Entanglement theory boasts the most obvious breach of relativity and therefore, is a good place to begin looking. Many, if not all of the largest manufacturers have teamed up with academia to investigate this and other quantum phenomena.

 

 Quantum Information Theory (QIT) as it’s called, is a collaboration of Academic Physicists, Academic Computer Scientists, Computer Software Companies and chip manufacturers. The goal of this effort it to exploit quantum effects, and make a faster, more powerful computer. Theoretically, processing would not be restricted to the normal linearity of normal space-time, operations could occur in the cloud of quantum-mechanical space-time. This would allow for simultaneous operations to occur in a distribution of time around a given moment, instead of the restrictive, sequential nature of time that applies to the macro-world. Entanglement might allow for instantaneous, wireless communication; possibly allowing separate quantum computers to act as one. The possibilities are numerous and exciting however, there is no guarantee that any of this effort will pay off.

 

 There are few other human endeavors which require the better part of one’s lifetime to learn and, probably the rest of it fruitlessly toiling away, in obscurity. The investments in material and resources to merely make an attempt to detect things in the quantum world are outside the means of all but the wealthiest nations. All of this investment must be made knowing full and well that the thing you spend your whole life and national fortune on, may have never, really existed in the first place. Even worse (and much more likely), you will never get close enough to the object of your quest, to determine if it is real or not. Failure is not just a possibility but is mostly probable. In spite of all these things, there are individuals and societies willing to make these sacrifices for the greater good of mankind. This is not to say that the payoff wouldn’t be monumental and deservedly so, but to devote an entire life or an entire fortune in the pursuit of these elusive concepts is quite a tall order indeed.