The Battle Of Trenton, Or No Holiday for Hessians

This Sunday, December 26, 210 Marks the Anniversary of the battle of Trenton. If this Revolutionary War battle name does not jog one’s memory, ask yourself why Washington crossed the Delaware in the first place. Those now famous Hessians he fought were encamped in winter barracks in Trenton, New Jersey.

Washington achieved tactical and strategic surprise that day, routing the Hessians and raising the moral of his troops. It was a near run thing. Washington was delayed by foul weather. It was deep winter and New Jersey after all. Washington wanted to strike at midnight but the weather delayed the attack to dawn and caused some artillery units to be left behind.

Still the dawn attack was a very unpleasant surprise to the Hessians. The Hessian commander had some intelligence that Washington was up to something and was screaming for more troops and a change of venue, but he had no idea where or when Washington might strike. Thus when he was given his early wake up call, the Hessian commander was out of sorts.

The Hessian troops were not too happy either. They were sober, but the lack of a dawn post had left them bleary eyed, and lethargic. They attempted resistance, but tactical surprise and bad moral in the Hessian troops wrong-footed the mercenaries. The Hessian resistance quickly collapsed.

As battles go Trenton was minor both tactically and strategically. The real impact was psychological. After being pushed out of both New York and New Jersey moral was low in the Colonial Armies. Trenton was a much needed shot in the arm. Spirits rose after Trenton as did much needed recruitment and reenlistment efforts.

As for the British, they were shocked and dismayed by the news from the Garden State. Pacifying New Jersey was turning out to be a much taller order than suspected. Who knew such a small state could cause so much trouble? The Militia of New Jersey was especially irksome to the British, bloodying the noses of the Red Coats in several engagements.

The winter of 1776-1777 was none too jolly for British. The forces of King George III were getting the first taste of what was to be a long attritional struggle with an opponent that was often down, but never out.

So happy Delaware River crossing day. Hopefully December 26 will mean more to you than the first day you can return some of those awful gifts your clueless friends and relatives gave you.  “ A fruit cake; you shouldn’t have. No. Seriously. You really shouldn’t have. I’m allergic to the nuts.

Singularities in History

If one looks at history from the long view you will notice that certain times and certain epochs are denser than other. Take the history of France, the era of the Revolution and Napoleon has a density and a flavor that other sections of French history lack. Taking a long view one can see cultural, political and ideological forces coalescing into one point of hyper-importance. It is always hard to actually tease out the larger forces because they always collect around a singular personality. For example ancient Rome was tending toward absolute rule long before Julius Caesar ambled across the Rubicon but the specifics of the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Imperium are hard to imagine with out the central figure of Caesar and his overarching will to power.

The best way to understand these phenomena is to borrow an idea from astrophysics. Before starting down this path an apology is offered to any of the good scientists who labor in this field. Yes, a metaphor is going to be taken and run with far from its source material.

If one looks at the larger impersonal features of history they all have a specific heft and gravity to them. Economics, culture, religion, politics, society all have a certain gravitational pull to them. Just like the massive structures and forces in the physical world they too bend and distort the fabric of the landscape they reside in. As these forces move through time they interact with each other, attracting here and repelling there.

It is at very special times in history that all these forces will focus together and form a singularity. When the proper lynch-pin arrives, when the proper historical person appears, the whole fabric of human life changes.

Unfortunately just like their astronomical brothers these massive collections, these singularities of history, defy easy explanation. They have their own strange, chaotic rules. Just as no light can escape a black hole, the astrophysical singularity, no reason can escape a historical singularity.

Both phenomena are best observed at a distance. Get too close to either event horizon and you get sucked down a rabbit hole that has no exit. Good productive lives have been lost by people who have surrendered to the minutia of Napoleonic France for instance. The history of Hitler and the Third Reich is another massive reality-bending phenomenon.

Look one of the bigger of these events, WWI. Just as light bends and time unravels when passing a massive black hole in space, human events bends, twists and distorts around WWI. Before WWI colonialism was at its peak, after WWI it was mortally wounded. Before WWI the aristocracy and the bourgeois had reach an iron-clad social-political system that was self-perpetuating, self-regulating and kept the working class in check. After WWI the Aristocracy had imploded, the bourgeois were in a state of narcolepsy and the working class was grabbing the brass ring of power. Even the political map of Europe was radically altered by WWI. Four empires that had stood for hundreds of years had evaporated; the fifth empire of the UK was ambulatory corpse. Europe is still trying to adjust to the reality of the collapse of the Prussian, Austrian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Granted it took the collapse of the Iron Curtain to finally seal the end of the Russian hegemonic efforts.

People forget how big a historical wrecking ball WWI was because it was so quickly followed by the second swing of that ball known as WWII. Even the effect of that massive blow was obscured by the false stability of the Cold War. With the political and ideological freeze of the Cold War over, the pent-up political, social, and other forces liberated by the thaw are running wild. With the end of the Cold War we are not so much witnessing the end of history as we are witnessing the revenge of history.

It is hard to say what type of singularity of history we are racing toward. With their heads stuck in the past historians make the worst predictors of the future. Still the easy prediction for the next critical event is the most depressing for the U.S. The next great historical act is the end of United States hegemony. We are headed for a fall from grace.

One can see the signs already, the pervasive political corruption, the rigidity of political discourse, the lack of good will, the failure in leadership, the lack of political inventiveness, and the willingness of large portions of the population to sabotage compromise. Most importantly one can see the loss of core values, no not sexual mores but core political values. For nine years now the political system and the citizens of the US have allowed grave crimes to go unaccounted for. Massive violations of our civil rights (FISA) have been allowed to continue. Massive violations of the norms of civilized conduct (torture) have not been punished. It is hard to say if like Rome in the fourth century or Byzantium in the fifteenth that our doom is inevitable.

The even bigger elephant in the room is the confluence of forces that will bring about what can only be described as the cleaning of the fouled nest. Our present global disorganization is headed for a wall. Capitalism, which was once symbiotic with our global society, has now become parasitic. Worse it has become a metastatic cancer. Population growth is unsustainable and we are slowly poisoning the earth with CO2 and other toxic substances. Left unchecked these forces will coalesce into a singularity that will make the fall or Rome and the following Dark Age look like a refined tea party. It all depends of the personalities of the leaders.

Our problem is that we have systemic issues in how we are lead. In short we suffer under what can be described as the Addams Contradiction. In his five book trilogy (don’t ask, just go with it) The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Universe Douglas Addams sarcastically pointed out the central failure of our leadership. Simply put any one who wants the job of leader, any one who for instance who wants to be President of the United States, is a person who absolutely can not be trusted in that position. More and more that idea appears to be more truth than fiction. Our present political system seems to reward the very type of leaders we absolutely should not have.
Meanwhile the people who could actually help us out of our current predicament are de-incentivized to lead. Our brilliant personalities, our stellar individuals, are quickly weeded out by the political process and we are left with go-along-to-get-along glad-handers and other mediocrities. Nothing truly challenges the status quo and conventional wisdom. We continue on our way despite all the systemic flashing red lights. Entrenched interests continue to push their narrow, short-term goals while the long term accounting only gets worse. Instead of the flexibility we need in our society, we seem to only get more rigid and hence more brittle. The politics of personal destruction rules with each side throwing low blows and bathing deeply in the waters of hypocrisy.

It is hard to determine where this is all this is going other than we are headed to another singularity of history. Looking at the forces involved it looks like a big monster. It looks like the historical equivalent of those huge astronomical black holes that hold galaxies together. Buckle up dear reader it is going to be one hell of a ride.

Why I am never invited to parties: Ottoman History edition.

The passing of the great Anniversary of the end of WW1 is good as any reason to offer up a third article in less than seven days about the Great War. The last two articles were a rather Eurocentric affair only lightly brushing on the last Empire to get hit by that epic event.

Of all the Empires sucked into the vortex of the War To End All Wars the one that had the most peripheral interest in the machinations of Western Europe was the crumbling majesty of Osman’s realm.

The seed of destruction had been laid long before. The Europeans, fractured, bickering and disjointed had blundered into their salvation. Just a few decades after Mehmet II had achieved the goal capturing Constantine’s city in 1453, Portugal and Spain had run into the Americas. Stripped of the Mediterranean Sea, literally the ocean in the middle of the land, Europe, of necessity, focused its efforts on the bigger, nastier, more dangerous Atlantic.

In two generations Europe had found its way around the horn of Africa and had cut out the Muslim middlemen of Asia Minor. In 1492 a mad Genoese captain relying on terrible mathematics got seriously lucky and stumbled across a whole “new world.” Adding insult to injury Spain’s conquest of Mesoamerica flooded Europe with vast quantities of gold. As the Centuries passed Europe’s Colombian exchange slowly shifted the center of power to those nations that had cut their teeth on the Atlantic trade. It was Prince Henry the Navigator and his spiritual heirs that laid the foundations for Western European Hegemony.


The long, slow, systemic decay of the Ottomans began internally. Osman’s heirs succumbed to same dynastic dissolution that every other monarchy has suffered since the beginning of documentation. Sooner or later, the ruling family stops producing marvels and starts producing mere mortals. Those mortals are then succeeded by fools and incompetents. Self absorbed rulers let corrupt secondary personalities rule while they indulge themselves in debauchery. Worse for the dynasty are the centripetal forces that are allowed free reign. Finally the self-serving elites hamstring any ruler who has even the slightest notion of enacting reform.

It was Napoleon who laid bare the fecklessness of the Ottomans. Napoleon’s disciplined and modern infantry squares exposed the sorry state of the Sultans military strength. Only the strength of the British Navy spared the Sultan further embarrassment.

Still the 19th Century was one long trudge through humiliation for the former terror of Europe. The Janissary might of the Ottomans was not even a pale shadow of itself; it was mostly an internal threat to the Sultan who finally wiped it out in 1826.

The replacement army was not much better. One by one the Orthodox Christian peoples of the Empire slipped away from the Sultan. The first to go was Greece. Other nations followed. Beginning in 1877 and not really ending until 1913 Ottoman arms and Ottoman control were pushed out of the Balkans. In 1913 the Sultan only held a tiny sliver of land on the West side of the Bosporus.

Not only was Europe irretrievably lost but so too was the entire Maghreb. First local potentates had detached the land from Istanbul’s control. Then, like vultures on a fresh kill, the Colonial powers descended. Lands that had been part of Dar el Islam since the conquests of the Umayyad Caliphate now found themselves being under the thumb of Christian colonial rulers.

There was little the Sultan in the far off Topkapi Palace could do about it. A succession of ill advised rulers had literally mortgaged off their realm to those same Colonial Europeans. 80% of the tax revenue of the state was siphoned off to pay the debts the Sultans had racked up with European Bankers. Whole portions of the Ottoman economy were in the hands of foreign interlopers. Worse for the empire those portions of the economy not being run by external forces were run by non-Muslim Armenians and Greeks.

Other than Russia one would be hard pressed to find a political entity less prepared for the hideous pressures of a war of attrition than the Ottomans. It took one of the worst examples of British Diplomacy to mange to bring the armies of the Sultan into war.

Ever since Napoleon had crashed into Egypt the United Kingdom had been the Sultan’s shield. Brittan did this not out of any love for the heirs of Osman but to keep Russia and Austria-Hungry out of the collapsing Empire. Britain preferred the incompetent Ottomans controlling the Dardanelles to the ever expanding Russian Empire. The U.K and France even managed to temporarily put aside their century’s long antagonism to rob the Russians of the Crimea in 1858.

All this hard work in propping up “The Sick Man of Europe” by the British came to naught in the early part of the 20th Century. For all intents and purposes British Diplomacy gift wrapped the empire to the up and coming power of Germany. The real power in the Ottoman Empire, the military officers known as the “Young Turks,” had enough of the slights of John Bull and eagerly accepted the ministrations of the Germans.

Much to their chagrin the Young Turks' new found friends got them embroiled in a war that the empire had little chance of surviving. What was amazing was how long and how hard the Empire fought for its existence.

British contempt for the empire was fully reveled by the Gallipoli offensive. It was a mad campaign right from the start. The principles of successful amphibious landings were a full generation and one whole war away. It was the wrong tactic, at the wrong place, with the wrong technology, with the wrong enemy. To this day the Dardanelles Campaign is studied by military planers as an example of how not to run amphibious warfare.

WW1 was a war that favored defensive strategy and tactics. With the Ottomans entrenched with their backs to their capitol the result was a bloodbath for the Commonwealth troops. Dug into their trenches and holding the high ground the Ottomans mercilessly slaughtered the hapless invaders. The same horrible calculus that ruled the Western front accumulated the same numbers of pointless deaths for the attackers at Çanakkale.

Gallipoli was the last great victory for Ottoman arms. It was however a Pyrrhic victory. Coming through the Sultan’s back door, the British were able to use their superior arms and tactics to slowly grind the Ottomans into a powder. Even the land betrayed the cause. In Gallipoli the empire could use the terrain and the short lines of communications to win the battle. But in the Levant and in Mesopotamia it was a war of movement. Without the backstop of geography and entrenchment to aid the Ottomans the British slowly overwhelmed the Sultan’s armies. Indifference or outright hostility of the locals to the Ottoman cause was the last and superfluous straw added to an already broken back.

By the end of the war those structural failures of the empire were working overtime. The empire lacked critical resources of men and material. The corrosive ideas of self-determination and nationality ripped the social-political underpinnings of the empire. Islam was no longer an overarching identification. More local and parochial identifiers came to the fore. People like the Kurds began to dream of their own nation run by their own ethic leadership. No longer were they interested in the identity offered by the religion of the prophet. The long and incompetent rule by Sultan had too deeply poisoned that well.

The Muslim faithful no longer accepted the claim of the Sultan to be the Caliph of the religion. The arms of the prophet, while still hanging in the Topkapi Palace, no longer symbolized anything more than how far the heirs of Osman had fallen from the true faith. The disastrous 19th Century had evaporated any claim the Sultans had to being rightly guided guardians of Islamic world. The Sultans could not even prevent their Viziers from routinely deposing them. If the Sultan could not even keep his worthless palace servants in line who was he to try to rule over Dar el Islam? When the Sultan declared jihad at the urging of his German allies, the odd dog barked but the faithful studiously ignored the call. The very idea of Dar el Islam and its Caliph no longer held any sway. There was a new idea coming in from the infidel West.

That idea was nationalism. It was, and continues to be, the great bug bear of Dar el Islam. In the place of the rule of Islam, nationalism offers much more tempting and understandable prospects. People know their culture, they know their traditions, they know their ethnicities, they know their neighbors, they know their history, and they know their land. Nationalism revels in these particulars. Combined with secularism, the other bug bear of Islam, nationalism can deliver results. Power, Prestige, economic growth, and other benefits flow from nationalism. Islam could only offer vague promises in the afterlife and distant majesty that had no bearing on the present situation.

It was nationalism that saved Anatolian Asia Minor. Without the core idea of a Turkish nation and the man to lead it, the land would have been carved up into pieces by the Colonial machinations of Sikes-Picot. A huge, unsustainable Greece would control the coast while Kurdistan, Armenia and other creations of the fevered imaginations of far off Western Europe have left only a pathetic rump of territory to the Turks. Love him or hate him Mustafa Kemal, latter called Atatürk, saved Asia Minor that fate.

Islamists despise the man with good reason. Atatürk looking at the endemic weakness of the Ottoman Empire placed all of the blame for its sorry state on the concept of the Caliphate. When he gained power he went into secularist overdrive. What followed was nearly 75 years of the oppression of Turkey’s Islamic soul. The iron boot of a thinly disguised military dictatorship stood on the neck of a deeply religious and rural people. Western observers love to ramble on continuously about the “moderation” of Turkish Islam conveniently forgetting that it was “moderation” secured by a bayonet to the backside.

Turkish laïcité, brutally enforced by Atatürk and his heirs has been high price to pay for the salvation of the nation. Kemalist nationalism has also been a heavy burden on the non-Turkish peoples of the nation. The Kurds have been ruthlessly oppressed by Ankara and the Armenians have never forgotten there horrific slaughter at the founding of modern Turkey.

Still with all his faults Atatürk manage to do a credible job of saving something from the wreckage of the Great War. The late Ottoman Empire did not have the strength to survive that calamity. It had nearly insurmountable structural deficiencies. Reform, when it came, was always too little and too late. Even the modest and inadequate reforms were too much for the entrenched selfish interests driving the empire to ruin. Reforming Sultans were routinely and depressingly deposed by conniving, corrupt, conspirators who only cared about their own personal prerogatives. Court intriguers installed weak, incompetent rulers who only hastened the general collapse. The old guards were termites busily chewing away at the very structures that protected them. It is an old historical tale which repeats in many nations, many empires, and many cultures. It is the triumph of the mediocrities. It is the victory of the ants. Great cultures and great empires become corrupt, ridged, and unmanageable. At a point some great force of history comes in and kicks in the rotten structure.

The final death of the Ottoman Empire was both an accident of history and an inevitability. The social, political and religious underpinning of the empire had no real response to the huge, impersonal forces rising up to overwhelm it. The corrosive idea of nationalism had dissolved the structures of Europe that given it rise. The power of modern corporate capitalism had smashed the old ways of doing business. The ever accelerating speed of modern science and technology left the theological underpinnings of Islam choking in the dust of the past. Learned scholars, still trying to make heads or tales about whether the potato was haraam or not, could not adjust to the ever increasing novelties the West was dropping at their congregants’ doorstep. The Islamic scholars had no real response to fact that the infidel Christians had all the cool toys. They were left to splutter how evil, anti-traditional, and un-Islamic this all was but they had no real way to rectify the imbalance. All the angry Mullahs could do was to make the situation worse by stemming any and all reform. Totally tied to tradition, the empire was unable to cast off unnecessary ballast and the ship of the Ottoman state was unable to steer to a safe harbor. Instead it broke apart in the treacherous seas that sunk all the other Empires of the early 20th Century.

Like their Christian counterparts the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the only way the Ottomans could have survived the Great War was to not participate in it in the first place. Unfortunately for the leaders of the empire they did not have the ever crafty and totally amoral Atatürk to lead them. In the next war Atatürk's successor had learned the lesson of his feckless predecessors and stayed coolly, calmly and resolutely neutral. Give the devil his due; İsmet İnönü , having learned at Atatürk’s feet, knew a bad bet when he saw one.