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All wars have been begun for stupid reasons, but the ruins are not stupid.

Boris Cyrulnik (1937-)

Hannah Arendt on War

Statue on the Mort Homme Hill near Verdun remembering the
 fallenFrench soldiers there in the Battle of Verdun (1916).
"They didn't pass", as the text on the monument says.

“The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting certain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotalitarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other hand, by placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by selecting its inmates outside the juridical procedure in which a definite crime entails a predictable penalty.”
(Hannah Arendt The origins of totalitarianism. San Diego, etc.: Harvest Book, Harcourt, 1976; p.447).                                                                          

Currently we live in turbulent times. An already two years lasting world-wide pandemic still makes victims. It seems gradually to fade away (but maybe it will return; you never know), but now we are startled by a sudden war between Russia and Ukraine. This war is not just a local or regional conflict as they happen to take place, then here and then there (which is already bad enough), but the possibility exists that it will lead to a world war that even can result in a nuclear war, with all its devastating consequences. In these turbulent times, especially because it happened so suddenly (for who had expected that a war would break out in Europe?), people are looking for explanations. Then it is only one step to ask: What does Hannah Arendt tell us? Didn’t she live in a time that in many respects was not too different from what we experience today? For then we saw a dictator who attacked his neighbours looking for Lebensraum (“space to live”), now we see a dictatorship that has invaded a neighbouring country pretending to look for “security” (and both strove or strive for power, of course). And this dictatorship will certainly stretch its arms to other neighbours as well, if it will be successful in the present war (happily, it is not). Although we don’t find in Arendt’s work a real explanation of what it is going on now (for times have changed), nonetheless it can help us understand the present situation and draw our attention to important aspects.
Take, for example, the quotation at the top of this blog. Arendt refers there to the concentration camps in Nazi-Germany and the former Soviet Union. The quotation is not only striking because it seems to describe what has been happening in Russia during the past twenty years, but also because it refers to the same geographical place: Then the Soviet Union, now Russia. It is as if history is repeating itself, ten years after the dissolution of the USSR. In order to make an end of the chaos in Russia during the first years after this event, Putin came to power. Gradually he tightened his grip on the country until he had become the dictator he is today. One way to do so was “killing the juridical person in man” as Arendt calls it: Opponents were put aside by false accusations and sent to prisons or concentration camps, or they were murdered. Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny are clear examples of such victims. But listen, Putin, Arendt warns you: “Nothing is more characteristic of the totalitarian movements … than the startling swiftness with which [their leaders] are forgotten and the startling ease with which they can be replaced.” (ibid. p. 305)
Or take this quotation from Arendt’s The human condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958/1998), which I changed a little for editorial reasons: In modern warfare men go into action and use means of violence in order to achieve certain objectives for their own side and against the enemy. In these instances, speech becomes “mere talk”, simply one more means to the end, whether it serves to deceive the enemy or to dazzle everybody with propaganda; here words reveal nothing, so Arendt, p. 180. Don’t we see this also in the present war? The “truth” about the war in the Ukraine in the “official” media in Russia is a case in point. Here facts have become fake, or “alternative facts”, as some call it. For instance, just a little point, the war is called a “special operation” (which is a striking case of Orwellian newspeak). But we see this fear of what is real in a sense also in the Western countries, for why else has a TV sender like Russia Today been forbidden? Because they tell too much fake news, of course, but isn’t it an essential point in a liberal democracy that fake can be checked against facts by everybody and not only by an authority? In war, there is a fear of truth.
Hannah Arendt did not directly write about war (although she did write about violence), but her works are still relevant when we want to understand how wars come about and what is happening then. Arendt developed her ideas in a time that democratic and dictatorial systems clashed, first Nazi-Germany and the western democracies in the Second World War and then the latter and the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Such clashes still happen, unfortunately.

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I cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he happens to belong.

Primo Levi (1919-1987)

Enemy Images

When there is a war there are enemies. When there are enemies there are enemy images. An enemy image is “a negative perception, usually of a person or group of people, used either consciously or unconsciously to justify or promote discrimination, punishment, and/or violence”, as for instance yourdictionary defines the idea. Implicitly the idea involves that there are good guys and bad guys (and nothing in between). There are we (the good guys) and the others (the bad guys). Or, as sociologists and psychologists say, there is an ingroup (“we”) and an outgroup (“they”, the enemy). Moreover, “the enemy may be seen as stupid, selfish, deceitful, aggressive, hostile, or even evil. This perception remains, even if members of the out-group do nothing more selfish, deceitful, aggressive, or evil than do members of one's own group. However, when they are engaged in a serious conflict, people will normally project their own negative traits onto the other side, ignoring their own shortcomings or misdeeds, while emphasizing the same in the other.” (source) In short, the enemy is stereotyped as evil, or even as the devil. Often enemy images are developed by political leaders and by government-controlled media to prepare the people for a new war and to gain support for this war.
My next observations concern only the western view on the current Ukrainian-Russian War, so the EU and USA. As in all wars, also now enemy images are important. However, the present enemy image of Russia is atypical in some way. Usually, war leads to the development of opposite stereotypes in the heads of the people on both sides (we, the good guys vs. they, the bad guys). This stereotyping is promoted by the political leaders and the media they control, as said, and it is part of the war propaganda. However, in the western countries today political leaders and media just try to prevent such stereotyping. It’s not “the others” as a block who are seen as bad; it’s not Russia as a whole, so the Russian people, who are the culprits of this war; but it is their leaders who are, so those who wage this war, and especially the Russian president Putin and his circle. The Russian people are presented as their victims. So, on TV we see images of anti-war demonstrations in Russia and even images of a state security council whose members are intimidated by Putin.
Nevertheless, enemy images are not absent in this conflict. They are not made by government and media, which, as said, try to prevent that a traditional enemy image of Russia is created. As the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said: Not the Russian people are our enemies, but Putin is. Even Vitali Klitschko, the major of Kyiv, said: I have nothing against Russia. My mother is Russian. We see this distinction between Russian leaders and people also in the sanctions imposed by the western countries on Russia: They are meant to hit the political leadership, so Putin and his circle as well as the country as a whole but not the individual citizens (but, as it happens, in reality it is hardly possible to put this distinction into practice). The western sanctions try to avoid demonizing Russia and the Russian people as a whole. However, in this war, the enemy image is not created “at the top” but “at the bottom”, by individual citizens. For instance, in the Netherlands customers avoid “Russian” shops and restaurants, although in most cases the products and food sold there are from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, plus Russia. “Russian” is merely a label. Moreover, many of these shops and restaurants are owned by Armenians, Ukrainians, etc., and not by Russians. Another case is that the Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam has been plastered by opponents of the war, although the religious leaders of this church have distanced themselves from the war and want to break with the patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow. I have penfriends in Russia (and also in Ukraine) and some complain that penfriends have broken with them merely because they are Russian. To my knowledge, all my Russian penfriends are against this war and some have even expressed it openly on the Internet. Nevertheless, as some told me, they receive threats from foreigners and are cursed by them. Isn’t it stupid to blame individual citizens for what political leaders do, even without asking what the individual opinions of these citizens are? Isn’t it a clear case of making an enemy image? But also some Russian speaking Ukrainians begin to hate their mother tongue and switch to using the Ukrainian language instead (although Russian is spoken in many countries; not only in Russia and Ukraine).
Enemy images make the world neatly arranged and surveyable. They are practical to guide our actions and they make decisions simple. But do enemy images help us? They make the world simple, indeed, but they do it in the wrong way. In the end, the world is complicated and cannot be compartmentalized, and false views will lead to false decisions. Moreover, enemy images often hit the wrong people; in the case of the Ukrainian-Russian War, for instance, those who are against Putin and the war. Then, they make it more difficult that power and leadership in Russia are transferred to the right people (from Putin to Navalny, for example) and they make overtures to the enemy in a conflict more difficult. Enemy images lead only to inflexible stereotypes on both sides. We must just strengthen the ties with the right people who can undermine dictatorship and support democracy, for, as I concluded my last blog, democracy enhances the prospects for peace. 

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Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type.

Karl Popper (1902-1994)

Democracy and War

Breukelen, Netherlands: Memorial to those who died
for peace, freedom and democracy

Democracies don’t fight with each other. It’s a thesis that politicians in democratic countries often put forward. It’s one reason for them to stimulate the development of democracies in the world. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to find exceptions to this rule, for instance:
- the Sicilian Expedition: Athens vs. Sicily (415-413 BC).
- the War of 1812: USA vs. Britain.
- the US Civil War (1861-1865).
- the Fashoda Crisis: Britain vs. France (1898).
- Ecuador vs. Peru, a long-lasting conflict that several times led to war and violent incidents in the 20th century.
- the Cod Wars, more or less violent incidents between the UK and Iceland about fishing rights.
- the Spanish-American War (1898).
- the Kargil War: India vs. Pakistan (1999).
There have been more such wars and incidents, but it is striking that during the last hundred years military conflicts between democracies have become exceptional. Moreover, if they took place, in most cases there are good reasons to maintain that they are not contrary to the thesis (more about this below). Therefore, it is generally accepted that the thesis is true, especially formulated this way: Mature democracies do not fight each other. This is seen “as close as an empirical law” in political science. (source, p. 79) But then the political conclusion of this thesis simply follows: Do everything you can to promote the development of democracies, if you want peace.
I’ll pass over why democracies don’t wage war against other democracies (see Mintz and Geva, 1993). However, though I think that we absolutely must promote democracy (and not only because it is a way to prevent war), it’s not simply so that the more democracies there are, the less war there is. “Mature” democracies avoid war against each other, indeed, but wars are not only fought either between democracies themselves or between authoritarian states themselves, but also between democracies and authoritarian states against each other. Democratic states do wage war, but usually only against authoritarian states, although they still tend to be less warlike than authoritarian states. However, not without reason I talked about “mature” democracies, for the thesis doesn’t apply to democratic states in general. As Manfield and Snyder have shown in their article “Democratization and War”, young democracies that are in the process of becoming full democracies tend to be more bellicose than full or “mature” democracies. Young immature democracies often still have authoritarian traits and nationalism is often an important element in the political debate in these countries. Semi-authoritarian leadership usually represents more the interests of the economic and political elite than the interests of the people as a whole. Nationalism (which often just was a reason that such states became democratic; cf Eastern Europe) can also make that a country opposes to other countries in case of a conflict, instead of looking for ways to settle the conflict, especially when such countries are led by semi-authoritarian leaders. Then there is always the chance of a fallback on the road to democracy. For such reasons, young democracies can be more prone to wage war than mature democracies. The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is a case in point. The Serbia-Croatia conflict is another example. Here we can also mention the Kargil War and the later wars or violent conflicts between Ecuador and Peru. Young democracies are often not able to solve and absorb interior and exterior conflicts and tend to choose violent nationalist solutions. Or as Manfield and Snyder say (p.89): “In principle, mature democratic institutions can integrate even the widest spectrum of interests through competition for the favor of the average voter. But where political parties and representative institutions are still in their infancy, the diversity of interests may make political coalitions difficult to maintain. Often the solution is a belligerent nationalist coalition.” Then, an emergent democracy can even develop into a belligerent dictatorship, as we see in Russia today.
Nevertheless, it often happens that young democracies take the road to mature democracy without falling back into belligerent nationalism. After the Second World War, Germany and Japan smoothly developed into full democracies, “due to occupation by liberal democracies and the favorable international setting provided by the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods economic system, and the democratic military alliance against the Soviet threat”, so Manfield and Snyder (p.95). In recent years, the Latin American countries have democratized without nationalism and war. (ibid.) Therefore, there is no reason to be afraid of democratizing authoritarian states, thinking that it will increase the risk of war. As Manfield and Snyder conclude their article (p. 97): “In the long run, the enlargement of the zone of stable democracy will probably enhance prospects for peace. In the short run, much work remains to be done to minimize the dangers of the turbulent transition.”

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"This is a war where children and women are not near the frontline. They are the frontline".

Lyse Doucet, BBC correspondent in Ukraine.

Putin and the planning fallacy

Tower of the Oldehove, Leeuwarden, NL, built about 1530. Failed planning
 is of all times and we never  learn. During the construction of this tower so
much went wrong that it never has been finished.

Now, almost a week after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is already clear that the war doesn’t develop as Putin and his military staff had foreseen. They didn’t achieve the targets they had set, like a quick fall of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, beating the Ukrainian army and installing a puppet government. The invasion stagnates and the political resistance outside Ukraine is growing that fast that it is doubtful whether Russia (Putin) will achieve its targets anyway, even if Kyiv will be taken. Russia (Putin) has miscalculated what it could attain, and even if it will realize its plans as yet, it will have taken more time against much higher costs than foreseen. In other words, Russia (Putin) has become “victim” of the planning fallacy.
The planning fallacy (PF for short) has first been described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1979, see also their 1982). They also coined the term. Here I follow Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and some internet articles. The planning fallacy is usually defined “as an erroneous prediction of future task duration, despite the knowledge of how many hours were used to accomplish similar tasks in the past.” (source) However, as discussions about the PF make clear, it’s not only the planned time for a project that is underestimated but usually also the costs. There are several reasons why planners often trap into the PF fall, such as:
- Planners tend to overestimate their skills and capabilities, leading to an underestimation of the time and costs needed for the project concerned. So, they are often too optimistic.
- Disregard of historical cases, like how you executed your plans in the past, and how others executed comparable plans.
- Ignoring possible risks and uncertainties.
- Pressure to present too optimistic plans, for example because you must execute them within a certain time or against certain costs; or because someone else might get the order.
In short, so Kahneman, we depend too much on the inside view: Planners focus too much on their own specific circumstances and search for evidence in their own experiences, when making plans. Information from the outside that doesn’t directly relate to the project concerned is usually ignored. A project is too often seen as a unique individual case with its own dynamics.
However, there is more, and maybe this is the essence of the planning fallacy: We fail to allow for what former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld called the “unknown unknowns”. There are factors that we know to exist but cannot fill in or make concrete: the unknowns. However, there are also factors, the unknown unknowns, that we don’t know to exist and that only appear during the project execution. Planners seldom try to allow for them in some way.
The planning fallacy is not unescapable, though. We can do something about it or at least we can mitigate it, namely by taking the outside view. It involves that you must look for objective ways to judge your plans, especially:
- Look for reference cases and objective criteria to judge whether your plan is realistic. No plan is unique, and there are past cases (the so-called reference class of cases) you can learn from and that help improve your planning.
- Make several scenarios, both optimistic and pessimistic, how your project may develop. Usually a pessimistic scenario is more realistic than an optimistic scenario.
- Divide your project into parts and calculate the time and costs to execute them. Then add the time and costs necessary for the parts, and probably the sum will be higher (and more realistic) than the time and costs estimated for the project as a whole.
- Use reliable objective estimation techniques for your project and ask the opinion of outsiders.
If you take the outside view, certainly the effects of the planning fallacy will be mitigated if not avoided.
And how about Russia (Putin)? It’s clear that Russia (Putin) was overoptimistic about his military and political plans and trapped into the planning fallacy fall by leaning too much on the inside view, disregarding facts known to outsiders and ignoring warnings from third parties who felt themselves threatened by the invasion of Ukraine. Here are some planning mistakes that Russia (Putin) made, to my mind:
- Ignoring that often the defender is stronger than the attacker, as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote already 200 years ago.
- Ignoring that invading and occupying a country is not enough to win a war, so Clausewitz, but that you win only by breaking the will to resist. In 2014, when Russia (Putin) annexed Crimea, the Ukrainian will and power to resist was weak. However, since then and because of the annexation both have very much increased. Moreover, not only the will to resist of the Ukrainian people and the strength of its army have grown a lot since 2014, but this has been ignored or belittled by Russia (Putin).
- Russia (Putin) didn’t take seriously the warnings by third parties like the EU and the USA that they would feel themselves threatened by an invasion of Ukraine and that they would take serious countermeasures and would support Ukraine.
Briefly, although many see Putin as a very rationally calculating person who knows what he does, his calculations were based on the inside view. Putin disregarded the outside view and that’s why he trapped into the planning fallacy fall. 

Source
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books, 2012; pp. 245-252.

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The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

Genesis 4:10

Rondom Montaigne

Is mijn laatste blog over Macht en Poetin je bevallen? Je vindt meer van dergelijke essays in mijn boek Rondom Montaigne. Over Montaigne en zijn vriend La Boétie, maar niet alleen. Montaigne en ook La Boétie laten ons denken en zijn vandaag de dag nog steeds relevant.

Meer informatie en hoe te bestellen vind je hier:

http://www.bijdeweg.nl/RondomMontaigne.html