timelets

When Pompey and Caesar took opposite sides, he said, ‘I know from whom I flee without knowing to whom to flee.’

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0193%3Achapter%3D90%3Asection%3D14

First off, active resisters before D-Day constituted not a small minority of the French population but a tiny one—perhaps as low as two percent of the people were actively engaged in publishing underground newspapers, sabotage operations, intelligence gathering, recruiting, or participating in one of the networks designed to rescue Allied fliers.

Only another eight percent were passive resisters—that is, they were willing to read subversive publications, celebrate traditional national holidays privately and quietly despite German bans, and provide crucial moral support to active Resistance networks.

The vast majority of French people simply tried to muddle through and survive increasingly tough times, while a certain undefined, but uncomfortably large number either supported Vichy in the (forlorn) hope that it would ultimately form a bulwark against German repression, or actively collaborated with the Petain regime.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-story-of-the-french-resistance
Review of Fighting in the Shadows, by Robert Gildea https://www.amazon.com/Fighters-Shadows-History-French-Resistance/dp/0674286103

Is time irreversible? Would that it were! On the contrary, it is reversible-so reversible that it is possible not to have made any progress since the time of the Romans. Now if things stagnate, we can hardly make a distinction between 1871 and 1875, except on the calendar, which does not amount to very much.

--- Bruno Latour. TPoF, 1993.

During this siege he had a dream in which he saw Heracles stretching out his hand to him from the wall and calling him. And many of the Tyrians dreamed that Apollo told them he was going away to Alexander, since he was displeased at what was going on in the city. Whereupon, as if the god had been a common deserter caught in the act of going over to the enemy, they encircled his colossal figure with cords and nailed it down to its pedestal, calling him an Alexandrist.

--- Plutarch: Life of Alexander

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alexander*/4.html

People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.

“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a ‘genius.’”

“Temperament functions similarly [to long poles for tightrope walkers -- ], I think, in strategy. It’s not a compass—that’s intellect. But it is a gyroscope: an inner ear complementing Clausewitz’s “inward eye.” Like poles on tightropes, temperament makes the difference between slips and safe arrivals.”
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-- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

“...he [Lincoln] managed polarities: they didn’t manage him.
...
Scale sets the ranges within which experience accrues. If, in evolution, edges of chaos reward adaptation; if, in history, adaptation fortifies resilience; and if, in individuals, resilience accommodates unknowns more readily than rigidity, then it stands to reason that a gradual expansion of edges better equips leaders for the unexpected than those that shock, leaving little time to adapt, or those inherited, which breed entitlement and arrogance, its companion.
..
Space is where expectations and circumstances intersect."
...
Tolstoy suggests, in the last pages of War and Peace, that the interdependence of time, space, and scale simultaneously reflects choice and necessity: the illusion of agency causes us to believe in free will even as inexorable laws deny the possibility. ”

---John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

“When asked, years later, to specify his education, Lincoln wrote a single word: “defective.” *

...he perfected performance: no one used humor more readily, more aptly, or with less recycling. His anecdotes, often scatological, flowed as easily as the paper the shaky banks of his day issued as currency, but the stories never lacked point or purpose: it was said of Lincoln that he could “make a cat laugh.”

John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

"Pivoting requires gyroscopes,...

Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion. Such princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”

---- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”