War of attrition

Victims of a war of attrition: The First World War. Douamont
National Cemetery, France, for the victims of the Battle of Verdun

One year ago, the Russia invaded Ukraine under the pretext that it was governed by Nazis. The aim was to topple the government and to change the country into a vassal state, if not to annex parts of it. The Russian leadership – say president Putin – expected that the job could be done within a few weeks. It didn’t happen. Russia completely underestimated the will of the Ukrainian people to resist, the vigour of the its leadership, and the strength of the Ukrainian army. Moreover, Ukraine was from the beginning strongly supported by the Western countries, which were united in their support, unlike what the Russian leadership hoped. The Ukrainian army forced the Russian troops to leave parts of the occupied areas, but the war led to much destruction, human suffering and violation of humanitarian laws. Gradually, the character of the war changed and what had begun as a mobile war turned into a war of attrition. As it looks now, it will remain so for the time to come, and it’s not unlikely that this war will last many years. Sometimes one party will make a step forward, then the other party will, but a military breakthrough is not likely to happen for the time to come. The parties will continue fighting till one of them has become so exhausted that it wants to stop or collapses.
What actually is a war of attrition? In short, it is a military strategy by which you try to wear out the enemy that way that his resources become exhausted, so that he cannot keep up the war. This is usually done by small or sometimes massive attacks, then here, then there, without a big strategic aim. Or rather, exhaustion of the enemy is the strategic aim. The attacks, so it is hoped, will cost the enemy so many troops and military resources (weapons) that in the end they cannot be replaced any longer. Often the aim is not only the destruction of military resources but also the resources of the enemy country as a whole and the will of its people to continue the war. This can involve an economic boycott and destructing the enemy’s infrastructure by bombing roads, power stations, etc. if not its cities. However, by doing so you risk that you’ll also wear out yourself. For being able to destroy your enemy step by step does also cost many resources, and if your enemy is strong, your own resources can become exhausted. Moreover, your enemy can also try to exhaust you.
Winning a war by exhausting the enemy has often been tried in history. The best-known case is the First World War (1914-1918) (WW1). When in August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and France, it thought to win the war quickly, but when it suffered a defeat in the Battle of the Marne, the German military staff saw no other option than to dig in. So the trench war on the Western Front started, and with it the war of attrition. Most of the time the war consisted in small attacks to win a few square metres of land. All attempts to break through the front failed and led to exhausting long-lasting combats. After four years Germany was so worn out that the war of attrition changed again into a mobile war and the Allied forces (France, the UK, the USA, etc.) could push back the German army and win the war.
Will this happen also in the Ukrainian-Russian War? I’ll not predict how it will develop, but understanding the phenomenon of attrition war and a historical comparison can help us understand what is going on. During WW1 the Allied countries succeeded to effectively blockade Germany and to stop the import of most goods it needed. Some goods could be replaced by inland products, but most could not. This boycott was a major contribution to the Allied victory. The German try to blockade the Allied countries was not successful.
Now the present war. Being a large country, Russia has many resources, although a big part of the population is certainly not behind this war. Ukraine is weaker, but it is militarily and economically supported by the Western countries. Moreover, the Western countries try to reduce the Russian resources by an economic boycott; though as yet the result of this boycott is meagre. However, the West is and will not be prepared to send troops, and since Ukraine is much smaller than Russia, its human resources may become exhausted.
In WW1, both parties tried to destruct the infrastructure of the other, but then the means to do so hardly existed. Now, with some success Russia tries to destroy the Ukrainian infrastructure by direct attacks, while Ukraine cannot break the Russian infrastructure for political and practical reasons.
Finally, I want to mention the Battle of Bakhmut. It has some similarities with the Battle of Verdun. The then commander in chief of the German army Erich von Falkenhayn got the idea that the French army would defend the town of Verdun to the extreme, when attacked. For the French, defending the town would be a matter of prestige, but it would exhaust the French army, so Falkenhayn. And indeed, when Verdun was attacked in February 1916, the French defended the town. The defence was a military success, but the battle lasted till the end of the year and the French suffered 370,000 casualties (dead, wounded, missed). The French army was almost exhausted. But also the German army was, and with 330,000 casualties it had to pay a high price as well. Probably, this battle has contributed to the German defeat. In the present Battle of Bakhmut we see something like this. However, Bakhmut is not attacked by the Russian army in order to exhaust Ukraine, but because it needs a victory, after the many losses since the start of the war. From a military point of view, it would not be really necessary for the Ukrainian army to defend the town, but the idea is that by letting the Russians attack, the latter will lead a lot of losses, and that a massive loss of life can lead to political unrest in Russia. However, also the Ukrainian army pays dearly. What the balance of this battle will be cannot yet be said.
Soon after its start it became clear that the Ukrainian-Russian war would not be a Blitz Krieg. After a year, the war seems to have become a war of attrition. Attrition wars are usually long-lasting. The death toll is high, both of soldiers and of civilians. The costs are enormous. There is much destruction – both direct military destruction and economic destruction. There are also indirect losses of civilian lives. Once the war ended, the impact on the nations involved will be long-lasting. It can lead to political destabilization. Etc. Is it worth it? 

Random quote
It is easier to start a war than to end it.

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)

Diogenes in anecdotes

Painting of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, Rembrandt style,
by the OpenAI program DALL.E (to my mind it is not Diogenes
but Plato at a later age)

Actually, Diogenes’s whole life as a philosopher, so the period after his arrival in Athens until his death in Corinth, was a kind of performance, and since Diogenes lived from then on most of his life on the streets, we can see him as a kind of philosophical street performer. But what did he actually do? And what were his philosophical views? Diogenes did not write down any theory or view on life and since no one during or just after his life time wrote his biography (Diogenes Laërtius wrote his biography only seven centuries later), we know about Diogenes’s life and views only from anecdotes. But that these anecdotes were told and handed down through the ages, shows how famous the man was. He made a big impression on others by what he did and said, already during his life.
We can best characterize Diogenes’s view on life as anti-authoritarian, unconventional, practical and concrete. He broke rules that everybody else accepted as normal; he had no respect for authority; abstract things didn’t exist for him. I have given already an example of Diogenes’s anti-authoritarianism in my blog last week, when he said to Alexander the Great “Stand out of my sunlight”. Although then Alexander hadn’t earned yet the epithet “the Great”, he had already conquered the Greek city states and was already a mighty man.
We can see Diogenes’s practical and concrete views in several anecdotes about his discussions with Plato. Plato had defined man as an upright biped without feathers. So Diogenes took a picked chicken and said: Look, Plato’s man! Therefore, Plato changed his definition to: “Man is an upright, featherless biped with broad, flat nails”. Plato is also known by his theory of forms or ideas. It says that there exist abstract forms (ideas) of everything in the world. The concrete objects are reflections of the abstract forms. So, a table is the concrete expression of the form of “tablehood”; a measuring cup is the reflection of “measuring-cup-hood”, etc. Once when Plato was talking about this, Diogenes said: “Plato, I see only a table and a measuring cup, but no tablehood and measuring-cup-hood.” (Plato replied then: “You do have the eyes to see tables and measuring cups, but not the brains to behold tablehood and measuring-cup-hood.”) Also known is the anecdote that Diogenes went to look for Plato’s man with a lantern in his hand, in broad daylight. In this way, Diogenes not only ridiculed Plato’s abstractionism, but he also wanted to say that he found the ethical question what it means to be a good man more important than the ontological question what man is.
Diogenes broke the rules. By doing so, he questioned them. He often ate in public, which was considered taboo then. When he was told that it was inappropriate, he replied that it is appropriate to eat when you are hungry and that now he was hungry.
A few more anecdotes:
- When Antisthenes, Diogenes’s tutor in Athens was ill and said “Who will deliver me from these evils?” Diogenes, who had come to visit him, “This,” said he, presenting him a knife, “soon enough, if thou wilt.” “I do not mean from my life,” Antisthenes replied, “but from my sufferings.” (quoted from Montaigne, Essays II-37).
- Or another one, quoted by Montaigne: “A man harbours anger by concealing it, as Diogenes told Demosthenes, who, for fear of being seen in a tavern, withdrew himself the more retiredly into it: ‘The more you retire backward, the farther you enter in.’ ” (II-31)
- Someone was enthusiastically talking about the celestial bodies, but Diogenes asked him: “How long ago was it that you arrived from the sky?” In other words: Don’t speak about what you haven’t seen from nearby.
- During a lecture Diogenes begins to eat: You cannot live on beautiful words.
- Diogenes destroyed the single wooden bowl he possessed on seeing a peasant boy drink from the hollow of his hands. He then exclaimed: “Fool that I am, to have been carrying superfluous baggage all this time!”
- When Diogenes was approached for masturbating in public, he would say “If only it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing one’s stomach…”
- Diogenes, washing the dirt from his vegetables, saw the philosopher Aristippus passing and said to him, “If you had learnt to make these your diet, you would not have to flatter kings,” to which Aristippus replied, “And if you knew how to associate with men, you would not be washing vegetables.” There is also another version of this anecdote: Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus to Diogenes, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils,” to which Diogenes replied: “Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king".
- When Diogenes wanted money, he used to say, that he redemanded it of his friends, not that he demanded it.
- They asked Diogenes what time of the day one should eat, and he replied: “The rich eats whenever he wants, the poor whenever he has.”
“Nothing is as practical as a good theory,” the psychologist Kurt Lewin said, but if it would depend on Diogenes, it would be rather the other way round.

Sources
- Inger N.I. Kuin, Diogenes. Leven en denken van een autonome geest. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak&Van Gennep; 2022
- “Diogenes” in Wikipedia
- Anecdotes of Diogenes and other websites

Random quote
Each individual, having no taste for any other plan of government than that which suits his particular interest, finds it difficult to realise the advantages he might hope to draw from the continual privations good laws impose.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Diogenes

Diogenes in his barrel (Lantern console, Utrecht, NL)

A well-known Dutch drinking song, composed by the poet and play writer Willem Godschalck van Focquenbroch (1640-1670) tells us that the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404?-323 BC) lived in a barrel. Specifically, Diogenes lived in fact in a wine barrel, which was not unusual in his days for poor people. It says much about the man: He was unconventional if not eccentric, for if he had wished so, he could have lived in a house, but he preferred a simple life. Although less known than the great classical philosophers, Diogenes would have great influence on western thinking. Who was this man?
Diogenes was born in Sinope on the north coast of the present Turkey, but he lived most of his life in Athens and Corinth and the years there were his most fertile years as a philosopher. He had to leave Sinope because of a certain affaire and went to live in exile in Athens. While on a voyage to Aegina on the Peloponnesus, he was captured by pirates and in Crete he was sold as a slave to a certain Xeniades, who lived in Corinth. Xeniades, who seems to have liked Diogenes, made him the tutor to his children. It was also in Corinth that Diogenes met Alexander the Great. When asked by Alexander, what he (A.) could do for him, Diogenes replied: “Stand out of my sunlight”. Diogenes died in Corinth, but his body wasn’t given to the wild animals, as he wished, but he got a grave next to a town gate with a memory pillar on which rested a marble dog. In the second century AD, the monument was still there.
The dog was placed on the memory pillar, since this animal symbolized Diogenes’s way of life. He wanted, so he said, to live as a dog. Diogenes wanted to live a simple life and to live on what he got; he didn’t strive for power. Diogenes probably didn’t write books with his ideas, which is according to his life philosophy, for he simply wanted to live life as he encountered it. Nevertheless, in his time he was already famous – and that’s why Alexander wanted to see him – by his lifestyle and by the answers he gave to those who asked him questions. Much of what is known about him is known by hearsay. Anyway, we know that he was a pupil of Antisthenes, a student of Socrates. Antisthenes didn’t want to have students and chased them away. When Antisthenes said to Diogenes “I’ll beat you, when you don’t go away”, Diogenes replied “Beat me”. So, Diogenes became the only pupil of this philosopher. Diogenes met also Plato. They had fierce discussions with each other. In these discussions, we find the essence of Diogenes’s philosophy. Plato called Diogenes a dog, but for Diogenes this was not an insult but a badge of honour. “Dog” in Greek is “kunos”, and from this word the word cynic is derived. For Diogenes a cynic life meant a simple life that you take as it is. Don’t desire wealth. It’s not important and it will give you nothing. But a dog’s life was also symbolic of an independent life, independent from the state. Plato called Diogenes also worse than Socrates, meaning that he went too far in his choice for poverty, his dedication to philosophy and his independence from the state. On the other hand, for Diogenes Plato’s ideas were too theoretical and they had nothing to do with the practice of life. For Diogenes they were meaningless. Moreover, Plato made himself dependent on the power of others, so Diogenes, for instance when he entered the service of the King of Syracuse.
Diogenes didn’t hesitate to shock others, for example by masturbating in public or – what’s normal today but then it wasn’t – by eating in public. Diogenes was also antiauthoritarian, and he stated that all humans are equal and he rejected slavery. He declared himself a citizen of the world and not of a certain state. One must not be connected to one place only. Diogenes is said to be the first person to have used the word cosmopolitan. This was radical in a world where your identity was determined by the city-state you belonged to.
Diogenes’s way of life and his ideas, which he not only expressed in words (when asked) but which he also lived, made a profound impression on others. He became one of the founders of the “school” of Cynicism (which was not a formal school), a philosophical view on life that has been influential till the present. Note that the word cynic, which refers to the ideas of Diogenes and his followers, must not be confused with the word cynical, which actually is the same, but which is more or less equal to the word sarcastic. “Cynical” is a later derivation from “cynic” and it got a different meaning (in some languages, they still use the same word for “cynic” and “cynical”).
Diogenes’s Cynicism had also an influence on other philosophical currents and views. Via his pupils Crates and Stilpo Diogenes’s ideas reached Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism. Moreover, cynic ideas had an influence on Pyrrhonism (Montaigne has been influenced by this philosophical current), and on Epicureanism. It’s even not unlikely that cynic ideas, like those about simple life and equality, have influenced the first Christians and the New Testament, and maybe also the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth, although this is controversial.

Sources
- Inger N.I. Kuin, Diogenes. Leven en denken van een autonome geest. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak&Van Gennep; 2022

A poem by OpenAI

I wondered whether OpenAI/ChatGPT could write poems, so I asked the Playground of OpenAI: Write a war poem on the Ukrainian war in the style of Wilfred Owen. See below, what I got. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) is the most important English war poet, who fought and died in the First World War (1914-1918).
Since I wanted to have also a picture for this blog I asked the OpenAI program DALL.E to make an image of Wilfred Owen in the style of Otto Dix. Otto Dix (1891-1969) was a German painter, who also fought in the First World War. After the war he has become famous by his anti-war paintings. See above what I got. By way of comparison, I have pasted also a photo of Owen next to the Dix-style image.
I have called the Owen-style poem "Trench War". Judge for yourself the result. 

Trench War

In trenches deep we lie,

the enemy on our side;

The fighting never ends

Though we try to hide.

We fight for our land

Though they take it away;

Our cries unheard,

Our dreams astray.

The bullets fly through air

As we fall to the ground;

Our blood stains the earth

As our courage we have found.

Our friends fall around us

As we hold our hands in prayer;

Our families far away,

Our hearts in despair.

These fields of death

We will never forget;

The pain and sorrow

We try to forget.

Our freedom we will fight for

In the Ukrainian war;

Our courage will never die

Till the battle is no more.

The Strawman

In these blogs, sometimes I pay attention to correct reasoning. I simply find it interesting, but I think that it’s also important. False argumentations can have important consequences, especially when done by politicians. And don’t we all make mistakes in this respect, often because we don’t know better or inadvertently? Moreover, how often doesn’t it happen that people try to mislead you with deliberately false reasonings? Therefore, it’s important to know when an argument is false and when it is correct.
There are hundreds of ways you can go wrong, when you try to convince others with your arguments. Some false reasonings have funny names, like “red herring”, a fallacy that I discussed already some time ago (see here). Now I want to write about a fallacy called “strawman”. Actually, a strawman is a human figure made of straw. Sometimes it takes the place of a real person, like a scarecrow or a puppet that functions as a shooting target in military training. A strawman is weaker than a real person and that’s also the essence of this fallacy: You don’t attack the real argument of your opponent but one you have constructed and ascribed to him or her: The argument you attack is weaker or otherwise different from the actual argument used by your opponent. For instance, I read many philosophical articles and I am always annoyed, when an author first constructs a view he or she disagrees with and then attacks this constructed view with her or his own arguments. It’s essential in this case that such a constructed view doesn’t contain precise references to other authors, quotations of their works, etc. It’s not more than a kind of summary of the view that the author wants to refute made by the refuter. Then this constructed view is a strawman, a dummy that takes the place of what the author’s opponent really said. Such a strawman is problematic not only, because an opponent can be attacked with the wrong arguments (if the constructed view isn’t correct), but it can also stop useful discussion, if the opponent says “I don’t need to react, for it’s not about me”; or if the author of the constructed view says “I didn’t mean you” against his/her opponent, which makes it difficult to correct a false view.
Strawman argumentations can be of at least of three types. (quotes from Aikin/Casey; see below) The first type of the strawman fallacy is the representational strawman or actual strawman: “What one does here is represent the opponent’s views in worse or less defensible form [or at least in a different form] than that given by the opponent.” (p, 223) See my example above. Even when honestly done, it’s not correct. The second type of the strawman fallacy is the selectional strawman or weak strawman. Instead of distorting the opponent’s view, “one simply finds the worst representative of the opposition and takes it to represent the entire group.” For example, a conservative may say that socialists want to increase all taxes, because Peterson, a member of the Socialist Party said so, though in fact the party program only says that the wealth taxes and profit taxes must be increased. The third type of the strawman fallacy is called the hollow man. “One doesn’t take any particular opponent’s view and distort it but rather one just invents a ridiculous view for one’s opponent’s whole cloth.” (p. 224) “The hollow man argument is a complete fabrication, where both the viewpoint and the opponent expressing it do not in fact exist, or at the very least the arguer has never encountered them.” (Wikipedia) We can call this also the “some say argument”, for who has the view concerned cannot be identified, since the person or organisation referred to with the word “some” simply doesn’t exist. Islamophobic arguments are often of this kind.
Straw manning, for short, is a certain kind of distortion of the opponent’s view in a negative way in order to reject it. This requires, so Aikin and Casey, an audience that must not know better, for if the audience knows that the view of the opponent is not correct, the strawman argument doesn’t work. The speaker doesn’t want to engage in an honest discussion with the opponent (present or not) but to run him or her down, if not put the opponent in a bad light. “Straw man arguments not only produce bad argumentative results at the times they are given, but they have lasting repercussions on the communities they convince.” (245) One such a repercussion can be an increasing polarization as the present debates in democratic countries show.

P.S. The smart reader will have noted that sometimes I had to base my explanations on strawmen in order to make this blog not too long.

Sources
- Scott Aikin and John Casey, “Straw Man”, in Robert Arp; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019; pp. 223-226.
- “Straw man”, in Wikipedia.

Random quote
Don’t we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty of thinking? Nothing more is needed than to live in constant distraction and never leave the company of others.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)