Israel as the Dutch Republic in the Thirty Years War

Tue, Sept 13, 2011 | Asia Times Online | By Spengler (h/t crethiplethi)

Bartholomeus van der Helst - Banquet of the Amsterdam Civic Guard in Celebration of the Peace of Münster. 1648: The Treaty of Münster and Osnabrück is signed, ending the Eighty Years' War: The Dutch Republic is recognised as an independent country. (www.militaryphotos.net)

Israel as the Dutch Republic in the Thirty Years War

Originally published in the Asia Times Online.

A small country, its land reclaimed from a hostile nature, fights for survival against overwhelming odds for 80 years. Surrounded by enemies dedicated to its destruction, it fields the world’s most innovative army and beats them. Despite three generations of war, the arts, sciences and commerce flourish. Its population grows quickly while the conflict empties the failed states that surround it. And it becomes a beacon of hope for the cause of freedom.
I refer not to Israel, but to the Dutch Republic of the 17th century, whose struggle for freedom against Spain set the precedent for the American Revolution. The final three decades of the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) coincided with the terrible Thirty Years War.
In 1600, a million-and-a-half Dutchmen faced an Austrian-Spanish alliance with more than 10 times their population; by 1648, the people of the Netherlands numbered two million, while the Spanish and Austrians had perhaps a quarter of their people. Holland had become the richest land in the world, with 16,000 merchant vessels supplying a global trading empire, graced by artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer and scientists like Huygens and Leeuwenhoek.
We might speak of the “isolation” of the Dutch at the outset of the Thirty Years War, although England backed them from the outset; that is why Philip II of Spain launched the Great Armada in 1588. Holland faced more formidable enemies than modern Israel; in place of the feckless Third World armies of Egypt and Syria, the Dutch fought Spain, the superpower of the 16th century, with the world’s best professional infantry bought with New World loot. The superior Dutch navy disrupted Spanish lines of communication, and a new kind of mobile infantry defeated the static Spanish square with continuous musket fire.
Holland confronted a formidable adversary, determined to extirpate its Protestant religion; Israel faces a group of failed or gradually-failing states whose capacity to make war is eroding. Seven months after the start of the Arab uprisings, Israel’s position is a paradox.
The prospects for a formal peace are the worst since 1977, while Israel’s military position has improved. The Syrian army is too busy butchering protesters to attack the Jewish state, and the uncertain position of the Bashar al-Assad regime weakens its Lebanese client Hezbollah. Egyptian popular sentiment has turned nastily against Israel, but the last thing the Egyptian army needs at the moment is a war with Israel that it inevitably would lose.
[...]

The Dutch had revolted against the Spanish Crown in 1568 and proclaimed their independence in 1581. However, it was not until the Twelve Years Truce of 1609 that war with Spanish forces ceased (temporarily), and not until 1648 that Spain finally acknowledged Dutch independence. Small in territory, the United Provinces grew extremely wealthy on the profits from shipping, fishing, extensive trade and efficient agriculture. (http://history.wisc.edu)

A country that knows it must fight daily for its existence may thrive under interrupted stress. That is unimaginable for the Israeli peace camp, which dwindled into political insignificance after the Intifada of 2000, as well as for America’s liberal Jews. But most Israelis seem to have adapted well to a long-term war regime.
The Dutch certainly did. When the Thirty Years War began in 1618 over Bohemia’s attempts to cast off Austrian rule, Holland knew that Spain would take the opportunity to settle accounts with its breakaway Protestant province. Expecting a Spanish invasion, the English Separatists living in Holland decided instead to become Pilgrims to the New World. ”The Spaniard,” their leader William Bradford wrote in 1618, ”might prove as cruel as the savages of America, and the famine and pestilence as sore here as there.”
A year after the Mayflower sailed to Plymouth Rock in 1620, Spain sent an army into Holland, and in 1625 the Spanish took the great Dutch fortress of Breda, just 90 kilometers from Amsterdam; Velasquez’s canvas depicting the city’s surrender hangs in Madrid’s Prado Museum. The Dutch defenders kept the Spanish army away from their coastal cities only by opening the dikes and flooding the countryside. Had the Pilgrims stayed and the Spanish won, the Pilgrims likely would have been burned as heretics.
Spain embargoed Dutch trade and succeeded in damaging its economy, although Dutch attacks on the Spanish fleets bringing treasure from the New World provided some breathing room. One by one, Holland saw its German and Danish Protestant allies beaten by Austro-Spanish alliance, and by 1625 was fighting alone. By the late 1620s, though, Holland was winning a war of attrition against overextended Spain, and could match the Spanish in the field.
The military balance remained precarious; in 1629 the Spanish army within 40 kilometers of Amsterdam. The turning point came in 1632, when the Dutch took the Flemish city of Maastricht, breaking Spain’s hold on the Catholic Low Countries. When Spain and France went to war in 1635, the victorious Netherlands dominated European trade and its “Golden Age” reached fruition.
Holland boasted the world’s strongest navy and a dominant position in world shipping trade, and its home provinces became impregnable.
The Dutch were smart and tough, but they beat the Spanish empire in large part by being better than their adversaries. The Dutch republic offered Europe’s first example of religious toleration. Iberian Jews and French Huguenot found refuge in Holland against religious toleration, and the skilled immigrants made invaluable contributions to the Dutch economic miracle – something like the Russian immigrants to Israel today.
When Dutch armies invaded the Spanish Netherlands (now Belgium) they offered religious freedom to the Catholics they absorbed. Countries that attract talented people have an enormous advantage over countries that drive them out.
Without stretching the analogy too far, the religious conflict that surrounded 17th century Holland have something in common with today’s Middle East. Americans know almost nothing of the Thirty Years War; not a single Hollywood film nor one popular novel recounts its major events. It is a tale of unrelenting misery, of battles and marches and countermarches that left nearly half of Central Europe dead.
[...]

Read full article…

Dennis Ritchie RIP

(Guardian.co.uk) The American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who has died aged 70 after a long illness, was one of the co-inventors of the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Unix and C provided the infrastructure software and tools that created much of today's computing environment – from the internet to smartphones – and so their development proved a key element in shaping the modern world.

The origins of Unix go back to the 1960s, long before the microchip and personal computers had been invented. The nearest thing to personal computing was the so-called computer utility. This consisted of a large mainframe computer that was used simultaneously, and at great expense, by a couple of dozen users sitting at typewriter terminals.
By the middle of the decade, the computer utility appeared to provide the way ahead, and a consortium of General Electric, Bell Labs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) embarked on a project called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). Multics would be the world's largest computer utility, supporting several hundred simultaneous users. Bell Labs was responsible for the operating software.
Ritchie joined the programming division of Bell Labs in 1967. His father, Alistair Ritchie, had had a long career there, and had co-authored an influential book, The Design of Switching Circuits (1951). Dennis was born in the northern New York suburb of Bronxville, grew up in New Jersey, and studied physics and applied mathematics for a bachelor's degree (1963) and computer science for a PhD (1968) at Harvard University.
Multics was in crisis when he arrived at Bell Labs. Indeed, many big software projects were in crisis – people were just beginning to learn that writing large programs was horrendously difficult and costly. In 1969, after four years of development, Bell Labs pulled out of the project.
Ritchie and another lead programmer on Multics, Ken Thompson, were left somewhat bereft by the project's demise. Multics promised a wonderful computing experience, but the operating system was too complex to build. This led them to rethink their software philosophy. They would build a simpler, smaller system that they would call Unix – the name was "a kind of treacherous pun on Multics", Ritchie once explained.
The idea was not immediately appreciated by their managers, and they had to "scrounge around" for an obsolete computer to develop Unix. The computer had just 16 kilobytes of memory, and this alone was an encouragement to keep things simple. If Multics was the victim of baroque software architecture, then Unix would be pure Bauhaus.
Unix was designed over a period of a few months in 1969, and a prototype was running early the following year. Their colleagues remained unconvinced. However, by offering to write some text-processing software, Ritchie and Thompson managed to persuade the Bell Labs patent department to acquire a full-size computer and run Unix on it.
They decided to rewrite the operating system entirely for the new machine. The first version of Unix had been written in the computers' native machine code, which was difficult and slow. For this next version of Unix, Ritchie invented a new language called C, which bridged the gap between machine code and programming languages such as Fortran and Cobol.
C also had an interesting ancestry. The progenitor was a language jointly designed at Cambridge and London universities in 1964 and known as CPL (Combined Programming Language). CPL never survived, but one of the development team, Martin Richards, became a visitor at MIT. There he designed a simpler version of the language for systems implementation, BCPL (Basic CPL).
Once Thompson and Ritchie discovered BCPL, they decided to use it for writing Unix: to do so they squeezed it into 8 kilobytes and renamed it B. Finally, a new and improved version was developed and named C, which, Ritchie mused, "left open the question whether the name represented a progression through the alphabet or through the letters BCPL".
C made writing software immeasurably easier and it also made software portable – so that a program written in C could run on any machine. The new version of Unix was completed in 1973, and since it was written in C, it, too, was portable.
Because Bell Labs's parent, AT&T, was a regulated telephone monopoly, it was prohibited from competing in the computer industry, and so had no pecuniary interest in Unix. This allowed Ritchie and Thompson to distribute Unix free of charge to universities and research institutions, who loved its clean, economical design.
Universities began to train their students in Unix and C, and when they graduated they took the culture into industry, where it blossomed. In 1978 Ritchie and a colleague, Brian Kernighan, wrote a textbook, The C Programming Language, which became a bestselling programming primer for the next 15 years. Despite the prosaic title, it was equally a book about programming style, and it shaped programming practices worldwide.
Ritchie and Thompson got early recognition for their work when they received the 1983 Turing award of the Association of Computing Machinery, often dubbed the Nobel prize of computing. But the Unix story was just beginning.The Advanced Projects Research Agency of the US department of defence adopted Unix for the network research that eventually created the internet, and it remains the software glue that binds everything together.
Steve Jobs was a Unix devotee. When he was ousted from Apple Computer in 1985, he used Unix as the basis for his NeXT computer workstation. After his return to Apple ten years later, he brought Unix with him and it became the foundation for all of Apple's current products.
Unix is also at the heart of today's open-source software movement. In the 1980s, following deregulation, AT&T began to assert its intellectual property rights in Unix. A Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds decided that the world needed a free version of Unix, which became known as Linux. The system was written by hundreds of programmers, mostly steeped in the Unix and C culture, collaborating over the internet. Today, the free Linux operating system powers billions of electronic devices, from smartphones to set-top boxes.
Ritchie and Thompson – usually together – received many honours and awards, culminating with the National Medal of Science awarded by President Clinton in 1998. The citation described their inventions has having "led to enormous advances in hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated the growth of an entire industry." Earlier this year, the pair won a Japan prize. Ritchie spent all his career at Bell Labs, retiring as head of systems software research in 2007.
• Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, computer scientist, born 9 September 1941; died 8 October 2011

Dominique Strauss-Kahn Cleared of Attempted Rape Charges in France

(Libra Bunda) THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Paris prosecutors on Thursday dropped all attempted rape charges against Dominique Strauss Kahn – but said he had "sexually assaulted" his alleged victim.

The 62-year-old former International Monetary Fund chief had been accused by French writer Tristane Banon of attacking her in a flat in the French capital in 2003. She claimed he had acted like a "rutting chimpanzee".
Following a three[-]month inquiry, judges said the violence shown by Mr Strauss-Kahn happened such a long time ago that a criminal case could not be launched.While the statute of limitations for attempted rape is 10 years in France, it is only three years for sexual assault

If you support a state of Palestine and kiss all the right leftist assholes in France... you can get away with anything

Michael Coren: Toronto plans Islamic hate fest

           

(h/t Vlad Tepes)