COMES THE MILLENNIUM - Revisited

 

Back in the 1990s, as the year 2000 was approaching and we started seeing various stories in the news about computer disasters, etc., I decided to write a book about what seemed to be happening around me, and titled it COMES THE MILLENNIUM. However, because in those years I was working in a part of the country where I knew a whole lot of people would be greatly offended by what was in that book, and some of those people had been exceedingly generous in supporting my work, I decided to publish CTM under a pen name, Jack Blake. Well, two things have happened since that book came out. First, my work in that part of the country ended, and second, the American people, in their predictable way, elected an individual as president in 2024 who made the subtitle of CTM even more relevant than it had been back in the 1990s. That subtitle, as you can see from the picture, is: A look at the burgeoning hysteria, religious mania, and anti-intellectualism as the millennium approaches. So, I decided that because CTM was becoming increasingly relevant, I got all the rights back from the publisher and decided to publish a second edition. What’s you’ll see in the next few weeks are the chapters from that book, although I’ll also put them up on my blog, fridaycoffee.blogspot.com.

Here are the first two paragraphs from COMES THE MILLENNIUM, to give you a sense of what will follow in the next few weeks:

If you are a rational person, then put this book back where you found it. Why? Because Comes the Millennium may make you furious. Nobody needs that kind of stress in his or her life. Besides, the last televangelist I watched said the world is going to end in rapture before very long anyway, so there’ll be no need for this book. But rational people should hang on to it just in case the guy was wrong.

The world is in a mess. On the other hand, some part of the world has always been in a mess. During the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, for example, the life of an average human being, at least in Europe, was hellish. If we had to live like people lived during the Dark Ages, then we’d think the world had already come to an end. If life as a serf seemed intolerable, then a person could join a Crusade and get a real taste of slaughter, rape, pillage, plunder, starvation, failure, and multiculturalism. Nowadays, parochial school athletic teams take up nicknames like “the Crusaders.”

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 - READING LIST

 

On September 11, 2001, I was a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. My assignment was teaching BIOS 101, Introductory Biology, MWF, in a large auditorium. But that Tuesday morning I was lying on a recliner at the Community Blood Bank with a needle in my arm when one of the nurses came in and said “you need to see what’s happening” and turned the television set so we could see it, just as the second plane hit. I’m sure that my reaction was the same as all other Americans: Oh hell! What’s going to happen next?!? What happened next in my classroom three weeks later was that I passed out a typical written assignment to those 260 students but added to it a reading list that I thought was appropriate for what I anticipated happening in the next few months, namely, a war.

This reading list was extracted from the larger one, of books that had made a major impression on me and essentially changed the way that I thought about history, the events of my time, and the people who made monumental decisions in both the historical and current events. The full list is available via the Educational Resources link on my website. Thanks to retired Marine Lt. Col. Gary Sampson, a former student, for a copy of the assignment and book list I passed out to that class in 2001. In general, here’s what you get from reading the list:

 

(1) Military conflict is highly complex, never the simplified versions you see in the movies or read about in fiction, and when political leaders assume simplicity, the outcome is never what they expected or hoped for.

 

(2) Culture, including religion, is a truly major factor in military conflict, and political leaders who initiate such conflict without understanding that fact are simply asking for failure to achieve their goals, whatever those goals might be.

 

(3) Technology never dies; when we invent something, nuclear weapons being a good example, that something is with us forever.

 

(4) Wars are not won by bombing alone; in most cases, bombing strengthens the will of the opposition. So, if you start a war by bombing and don’t then send in ground forces, failure to achieve an objective is the rule.

 

(5) Political leaders who ignore what experienced people on the ground are telling them, or trying to tell them, about a foreign situation are simply asking for failure. Expertise and experience are essential parts of any military organization.

 

(6) Dehumanization is a prelude to sanctioned violence against other humans and is always a factor in military conflict. The current administration’s dehumanization of immigrants, whether they be legal or not, is a prime example of this principle.

 

(7) Infectious disease is an enemy against which political genius and high-tech weaponry are useless. That’s a near quote from the Zinsser book.

 

Here’s the list that was given to those students that fall semester:

Diaz, T. 1999. Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America. The New Press, New York.

Dorner, D. 1996. The Logic of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong and What We Can Do to Make Them Right. Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Dyson, F. 1979. Disturbing the Universe. Harper and Row, New York.

Dyson, F. 1984. Weapons and Hope. Harper and Row, New York.

Fussell, P. 1989. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Oxford University Press, New York.

Hughes, R. 1987. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia. Collins Harvill, London.

LeShan, L. 1992. The Psychology of War: Comprehending its Mystique and its Madness. Nobel Press, Chicago, Illinois.

Montagu, A., and F. Matson. 1983. The Dehumanization of Man. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Sheehan, N. 1988. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Random House, New York.

Tuchman, B. 1970. Stillwell and the American Experience in China. Macmilllan, New York.

Wilson, E. O. 1978. On Human Nature. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Zinsser, H. 1934. Rats, Lice and History. Morrow