Debate the teachings of Tolstoy as to the disposal of Kevin mccaffrey and otb without the involvement of the FBI or former. FBI agents now lawyers, like the one who told the town of Hempstead to settle with butch yamali and Dover caterers , lest they
Otb pundits& TV Military Pundits Should Read Leo Tolstoy
No one had a better understanding of war’s unpredictability.
Leo Tolstoy, 1880.
PHOTO: LIGHTROOM PHOTOS/ZUMA PRESS
Television news programs often call on retired generals, colonels and the occasional lieutenant colonel to comment on the war in Ukraine. They opine, they speculate, they predict. None I have seen appears foolish, intemperate or unthoughtful. Yet not one I know of predicted the radical flaws in Russia’s military or the prowess and courage of the Ukrainian army and volunteers.
It’s a shame television news producers were unable to call in a retired Russian lieutenant who fought in the Crimean War and was on hand for the nearly year-long siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55—a fellow named Leo Tolstoy. He could have set us all straight on how difficult it is to discuss war, an irrational enterprise, on entirely rational terms. “Man cannot achieve more than a certain insight into the correlation between the life of the bee and other manifestations of life,” Tolstoy wrote toward the close of “War and Peace.” “And the same is true with regard to the final purpose of historical characters and nations.”
The novel describes the utter disorder and chaos of battle. The orders of the generals on both sides of the Napoleonic war he chronicles “were seldom carried out, and then only partially. For the most part the opposite happened to what they enjoined. Soldiers ordered to advance fell back on meeting grape-shot; soldiers ordered to remain where they were, suddenly, seeing an unexpected body of the enemy before them, would turn tail or rush forward, and the cavalry dashed unbidden in pursuit of the flying Russians.” Orders everywhere, Tolstoy writes, “fell victim to the fear of death and a blind stampede in all directions.” War, along with being hell, is usually marked by complete disarray.
Add to the general chaos the role chance plays in it. Take the rise of Napoleon, whom Tolstoy considers “a man of no convictions, no habits, no traditions, no name, not even a Frenchman, who emerges . . . and is borne forward to a prominent position. The incompetence of his colleagues, the weakness and inanity of his rivals, his frankness and falsehoods and his brilliant and self-confident mediocrity raise him to the head of the army.”
Until his mistaken attack on Russia, Napoleon was the prince of good luck. “Whatever he does succeeds,” Tolstoy writes. “The plague does not touch him. Responsibility for the cruel massacring of prisoners is not laid at his door. His childishly incautious, unreasoning, and ignoble departure from Africa, leaving his comrades in distress, is accounted to his credit, and again the enemy’s fleet twice lets him slip past.” Even the disruption of the French Revolution works in his favor. “He arrives in Paris just when the disintegration of the Republican government, which a year before might have made an end of him, has reached its utmost limit and his presence there now, as a newcomer free from party entanglements, can only lift him to the heights.”
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