Category Archives: History

History, Poetry

War Pigs

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by Black Sabbath from their 1970 album Paranoid

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerers of death’s construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds

Oh lord yeah!

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Yeah

Time will tell on their power minds
Making war just for fun
Treating people just like pawns in chess
Wait ’till their judgment day comes

Yeah

Now in darkness world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of judgment, God is calling
On their knees the war pig’s crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan laughing spreads his wings

Oh lord yeah!

It’s fascinating to reflect back on how a young cold-sober god-fearing band were writing an obvious anti-war pacifist song, which was interpreted as being the exact opposite and attacked viciously by white American “Christian” groups.

The band’s “innovative” sound borrowed heavily from a long tradition of “wailing” in American blues.

Consider, for example, how famous and controversial Janis Joplin was already for using a loud and raw screaming style that “scared” people. The following rough newspaper review of Joplin is from 1969, labeling her whitewashed blues style with very prototypical “metal” language an entire year before Black Sabbath released even their first song.

Click to read entire review

Clearly British musicians emulating American music would have seen an opportunity to capitalize on such a style to express their own “blues” of that time.

Black Sabbath’s bassist Geezer Butler explained in a 2010 interview in Noisecreep that he was keying into British working class themes of protest against inequality and powerlessness.

Noisecreep: It’s no secret that you guys drank a lot and experimented with all sorts of drugs. Did that contribute to the creative vibe on Paranoid?

Butler: No, because we really weren’t doing anything back then besides sharing the occasional joint. We couldn’t afford it. We couldn’t even afford booze, so none of us were drinking yet. The music we were making was more a reflection of what we were thinking and experiencing at the time. We weren’t into flower power and good vibes. That was crap to us, because from where we were, everything was bleak and dark. […] We were four working class people in the most industrial part of England, and all we had to look forward to was dead-end jobs in factories. And we thought at any second we’d be called up to drop in to the Vietnam War, because it looked like Britain was going to get involved in it as well. So there wasn’t much future in anything for us.

Butler goes on to explain it was an anti-war protest behind this particular song.

The song was written as ‘Walpurgis,’ which sounds a little like ‘War Pigs.’ But ‘Walpurgis’ is sort of like Christmas for Satanists. And to me, war was the big Satan. It wasn’t about politics or government or anything. It was evil. So I was saying “generals gathered in the masses/just like witches at black masses” to make an analogy. But when we brought it to the record company, they thought ‘Walpurgis’ sounded too Satanic. And that’s when we turned it into ‘War Pigs.’ But we didn’t change the lyrics, because they were already finished.

In an interview from 2015 Butler even doubles-down on his religious upbringing and pacifism.

I was brought up strictly Catholic and I guess I was naïve in thinking that religion shouldn’t be fought over. I always felt that God and Jesus wanted us to love each other. It was just a bad time in Northern Ireland, setting bombs off in England and such. We all believed in Jesus — and yet people were killing each other over it. To me, it was just ridiculous. I thought that if God could see us killing each other in his name, he’d be disgusted.

At this point I have to mention how the latest research on WWI based on documentary evidence suggests that British troops sometimes reported that being sent into outdoor killing fields was an improvement over being drafted into the slow, agonizing programmed death of the class-enforced loneliness and toxicity from indoor factory work.

I am definitely not saying Black Sabbath members would have been happier being drafted into the Vietnam War instead, just that the recorded misery of British life was severe enough some before them even called it a life worse than trench warfare.

Black Sabbath was singing the blues.

War Pigs thus fits quite simply as another anti-war blues song, drawing from the brash “wailing” style of guitar licks and screaming voice popularized decades before in America. Here are some obvious examples from the mid-1960s:

Black Sabbath (who found their band name upon noticing long lines of people trying to get into a 1963 Italian horror film called Black Sabbath) inventively drew from old American blues styles, added Italian horror film marketing, and then wrote lyrics of British mysticism and a post-world-war trend of the youth very intentionally and directly trying to shock a culture trained to not be shocked (given horrors of war) — force audiences to notice and have any kind of reaction.

It was the opposite and arguably more potent method than “hippie” group shame tactics in Lennon’s 1969 syrupy anti-war blues piece “Give Peace a Chance“.

A sardonic Joy Division in 1979 bridged these two styles when they ripped Black Sabbath’s guitar solo to put it into their passive negative sentiment song called New Dawn Fades.

All that being said, Butler wrote the War Pigs lyrics so we have to take his word for it (pun not intended) when he explains the true meaning and motives.

In a SPIN interview from 2013 you can even read why the religiously suggestive word “masses” was repeated at the start.

SPIN: For some reason in “War Pigs,” it always bothered me that you rhymed “generals in their masses” with “just like witches at black masses.” Why use “masses” twice? Did you try to think of a different word?

Butler: I just couldn’t think of anything else to rhyme with it. And a lot of the old Victorian poets used to do stuff like that — rhyming the same word together. It didn’t really bother me. It wasn’t a lesson in poetry or anything.

And as a final thought on musicians borrowing, Ice-T was perhaps being ironic when he sampled War Pigs in his far more poetic 1987 song “Rhyme Pays” (1:50 guitar riff).

Energy, Food, History, Security

Armies Around the World Testing Electric Bikes (Yet Again)

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A nod to military bike history can be found in a new article about the British military called “Charge of the light brigade: Army Parachute Regiment trial electric bikes”

Eighty years ago, wartime necessitated the introduction of the Royal Enfield WD/RE ‘Flying Flea’ and the Welbike, which were parachuted into occupied Europe, providing a means for airborne and assault troops to transmit messages. […] “Motorcycles have been in military use ever since they were invented. So, what we’re doing is nothing new – what’s new is the electrification side of it and the opportunities that presents…they can be used in a way where a petrol engine would just give your position away.”

Electric bikes have many obvious advantages, already getting a lot of attention from special forces in America: given low sound and heat profiles they are much safer, faster, lighter and easier to maneuver than liquid fuel bikes, not to mention an easier and safer supply chain.

What’s not to like about electric bikes?

Even more broadly, the bike in most cases is a far better tool for modern military application than any automobile including trucks. It’s not really any kind of news or secret.

Without a Motorcycle in Kandahar, ‘You Are Like a Prisoner’. A foreshadowing of how the Afghan war would be won and lost by distributed / localization networks, hit & run tactics, and terrain advantages.

See also:

In terms of the US Army, consider how they rode mountain-bike field tests way back in 1896, as I’ve written here before, so the Ogden Bolton electric bike from 1895 might be a better “nothing new” reference than a smelly, greasy 1939 Royal Enfield.

Source: ElectricBike

Speaking of references, in 1991 there was even a book published that detailed a century of bikes used in war. It’s kind of amazing to think how many better references there may be versus that WWII Enfield.

Swiss book that gets far less attention than it should

In WWI soldiers allegedly even were pulling heavy gear into battle using bicycles as if some kind of direct replacement for horse power. You’d think electricity would be on their mind.

Source: Leeds Bikes

Journalists in 1914 indeed mention that a bike has a major advantage because it can be dropped flat to the ground and completely hidden from enemy fire, which seems an odd point to make today yet it was an innovation in military thinking at the time.

Being completely hidden, of course, is again why the electric motor signature has been so compelling for 100 years versus oil burners.

And from there, the 1938 McDonald seems even more relevant, especially because by this time Japan was using bicycles in major offensive campaigns (1937 invasion of China).

Source: ElectricBike

Given the superiority of electric, it’s a wonder anyone bothered with gasoline bikes at all.

It seems all too easy to find evidence of electric bikes in military projects throughout history that are far more relevant to today’s British paratrooper than an Enfield of WWII. Here’s a good one:

In 1997, [US Government was] seeking a way to move military troops and equipment without the heat or noise signatures of a combustion engine and due to Montague’s experience in the field, they won the grant to develop the Tactical Electric No Signature (TENS) Mountain Bike. Montague worked closely with Currie Technologies on their earliest electric systems to equip these military models with the best electric motor technology of the time. Currie is still making electric drive systems used on many e-bikes today.

US military Tactical Electric No Signature (TENS) Mountain Bike. Source: Montague bikes

Someone in the US military surely thought TENS would be an hilarious acronym for an 18-speed electric bicycle.

So what really is new? The oil industry seems to be losing its death grip. In retrospect, bikes never should have been anything but electric this whole time.

I mean I know it’s fashionable to say electric bikes have short range, have trouble keeping a charge in extreme weather… but let’s be honest about such nonsense.

You can’t pull gasoline out of thin air or water like you can electricity. Even diesel has potential to be created from local sources that gasoline clearly does not. I’ve always found electricity available in even the most remote locations, places oil was nowhere to be found.

In fact, WWII motorcyclists reminisce about their leaky and wasteful fuel cans, which could never serve modern operations.

“We had flimsy cans of petrol, so you cut them in half, pierced it with a lot of holes, three-quarter fill it with earth, pour petrol and put a match on it and it would burn for a long while. That’s how we used to brew up [tea] while we’re on the road!”

With an electric bike he would have just heated water using a simple pad or pole plugged into the battery, having none of the signature/footprint issues of a setting that petrol can on fire.

History, Sailing, Security

USS Pueblo Capture by North Korea: Weak Translation to Blame?

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USS Pueblo at the War Museum, Pyongyang

An inability to translate clear signals is perhaps the most interesting lesson I’ve found from an analysis of North Korea’s 1968 capture of the USS Pueblo spy ship.

The following paragraph comes from unclassified CIA files: Studies in Intelligence Vol 59, No. 1 (Extracts, March 2015).

The ship would gain little insight or warning from monitoring the North’s clear-voice communications because the rusty language skills of two Korean linguists belatedly assigned to the ship’s SIGINT detachment were not up to the job of rapidly translating fast-moving tactical traffic. At a tactical level, NSA observed that had the linguists been qualified they would have understood a full 20 minutes before the first shots were fired at Pueblo that North Korean patrol boats were maneuvering to fire.

The CIA might be making a subtle yet very poignant argument that all the best high-tech in the world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when basic skills and wisdom for placement and use are missing.

As a corollary, someone thought it a good idea to mount exposed machine guns on the high deck of this “oceanographic research” vessel — too small to defend against threats, too large to be denied, and completely exposed to ice and enemy fire in a way nobody ever could want to use in bone-chilling hostile waters.

USS Pueblo

The CIA also has pointed out key material for stolen cryptography machines were leaked to the KGB around the same time by a US Navy Chief Warrant Officer, John Walker.

For a KGB station chief personally to meet a prospective agent was unprecedented, but Solomatin spent the next two hours talking privately with Walker. The American favorably impressed him by saying nothing about love for communism, which most phonies emphasized. This was strictly business.

That wasn’t a backdoor risk from engineering, but rather a front-door insider threat, made possible due to weakness in key management processes.

Because the KW-7 used key-lists it was considered expendable as long as the monthly key-list cards themselves were not compromised. […] KW-7 cryptographic machines were most certainly lost prior to the unit that was aboard
Pueblo. […] he one thing that the Soviets or the East Germans did not obtain was the key-lists. They may have possessed a few key-cards at various times but John Walker provided the constant flow that was needed to make penetration of US Naval communications by the Soviets such a continuing success. […] The flaw in the system was the assumption that the outdated key-cards had been destroyed. Walker certified he had destroyed the cards, when in actuality he simply took them and gave them to the Soviets. No one verified that Walker had indeed destroyed the previous month’s cards.

I find this all worth consideration today given how journalists repeatedly cast a negative light on the chief of security at platforms like Facebook (e.g. Alex Stamos), who clearly and repeatedly failed to deploy basic proficiency in spaces where information risks were known to be the highest.

Did the NSA come to any similar conclusions as the CIA about this fundamental failure in risk monitoring (skill for clear-voice translation), let alone management of how and where crypto should sail or not?

As I stood there Don Peppard came up behind me and asked if I had any idea of where we were. I said that I didn’t have the foggiest idea. When we’d left Japan and headed north, my knowledge of geography must have been on hold — it simply never dawned on me that the only countries west of us had to be China, Korea or Russia. Where were we?

On 28 July 1969, a document in the NSA files called “Report on the Assessment of Cryptographic Damage“, offered itself as the final assessment of the incident:

Source: NSA Declassified Documents

That rosy picture of risk definitely wasn’t carried into the 2015 CIA files, which argue significant damage was done by compromise of intelligence gathering materials as well as the link to Walker.

Congress was on to these things right away in their 1969 “Inquiry Into the U.S.S. Pueblo and EC-121 Plane Incidents: Hearings, Ninety-first Congress, First Session” (US Government Printing Office, page 729):

The National Security Agency, which questioned the risk of the Pueblo mission, had neither the responsibility nor the authority to do so. […] There is a great difference of opinion at high intelligence levels as to whether or not the loss of the Pueblo was very serious in terms of our national security and national intelligence effort.

The NSA today offers readers a raft (no pun intended) of related documents available to the public, which purports to be lessons learned.

Indeed, much of this history is directly relevant to the nature of problems faced by security officers today.

I just don’t see the clear-eyed analysis from the NSA. And in current context I wonder if anyone at Facebook security (often hired out of the NSA) thought about the Pueblo incident before claiming they didn’t anticipate basic translation skill or insider threats would be so important given all their fancy communication equipment being repurposed today in hostile countries.

Food, History, Security

“He seemed to find it surprising soldiers would have good things to say about him”

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A fascinating profile of the US Army’s top enlisted leader, Sgt Maj Michael Grinston, reminds me very much of the brilliant modesty found in American heroes like President Grant.

…while much of Grinston’s motivation over the years stems from his belief and desire to be with and help soldiers, that doesn’t mean his soldiers always liked him…. “I was mean,” he said. “There’s no way I could lie to you, if you were to talk to my soldiers … I was not nice, I was not fun. I wouldn’t want me as a drill sergeant.” That’s not all there is to it, of course. Soldiers who have served with him described him as technically proficient — impressively so. […] To those who know him, that is the real Michael Grinston — a soldier who confronts things head-on, not some soft leader who is more focused on nail polish than winning wars. […] Despite the many things he’s accomplished over his long career, he seemed to find it surprising that the soldiers who he served with would have overwhelmingly good things to say about him. When he learned that they did, he responded, “I don’t know why.”

Clearly this is a man who cares deeply about others, who works hard and takes care of those in need. He is the very definition of the “Alpha” personality, the doting pack leader — a proficient parent who can take on development of dependents (the “Betas” capable mostly of caring only for themselves) to help ensure they will survive.

Interesting to read that being so good at leadership by establishing care made him perceived both as mean (high Alpha standards for his pack) and also soft (applying standards in a way that undermines the influence of Beta personalities).

It reminded me of an old post I wrote about how wolves in reality prefer fishing to hunting since risk of casualty is lower.