War & Society
Timothy Snyder summing up Russia’s relationship to NATO from 1999 to 2010:
The eastward enlargement of NATO in 1999 was not presented by Putin as a threat. Instead, he tried to recruit the United States or NATO to cooperate with Russia to address what he saw as common security problems. After the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists in 2001, Putin offered to cooperate with NATO in territories that bordered Russia. Putin did not present the EU enlargement of 2004 as a threat. On the contrary, he spoke favorably that year of future EU membership for Ukraine. In 2008, Putin attended the NATO summit in Bucharest. In 2009, Medvedev allowed American aircraft to fly over Russia to supply troops in Afghanistan. In 2010, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, the radical nationalist Dmitry Rogozin, expressed his concern that NATO would leave Afghanistan. Rogozin complained of NATO’s lack of fighting spirit, its “mood of capitulation.” He wanted NATO troops at Russia’s border.
Source: Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), chap. 3.
📺 I watched the first episode of “Masters of the Air” (Apple TV+, 2024), and that was enough. Its soundtrack, emotional arc, and flat characters made it feel cliched, predictable, inauthentic.
The game just got bigger. Did you?
– Helen Hunt playing Nancy Campbell in “A World On Fire” (PBS, 2020), s. 1, ep. 1.
Bernard Clasen, “Trump und Selenskyj im Petersdom: Ein wundersamer Trump-Moment,” Die Tageszeitung, April 27, 2025.
Ein vertrautes Gespräch zwischen Trump und Selenskyj ist nur eine Momentaufnahme. Aber mehr Respekt ist in Zeiten von Krieg oder Frieden nicht wenig.
'Women and Children First' by Theo Matejko, ca. 1939
Source: "'Bombs Over Us': Prophetic Drawings by a German Artist," Life, September 11, 1939, pp. 27--28, via "a book … recently published in Germany," presumably Das Theo Matejko-Buch: Zeichnungen als Aufzeichnungen aus zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Kommodore-Verlag, 1938).
This drawing imagining an air war coming to Berlin was one of a series that Theo Matejko conceived before Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. It seems to convey antiwar sentiment, but the artist supported the Nazi regime, and he regularly contributed to the propaganda magazine, Die Wehrmacht. Given this context, his drawing and the following public explanation might be understood as projection instead.
An idea which came to me years ago with unholy force and persistence was the image of an air attack over a big city in some future war. I saw in this dreadful vision the merciless heavens pouring destruction upon peaceful people.… I offer these pictures in the deep and sincere hope that these nightmare visions may never become a reality.
The drawing doesn’t capture anywhere near the reality, but it offers up two powerful national symbols, the Brandenburg Gate and German motherhood. The choice of the latter was an effective way to underline the indiscriminate nature of this kind of warfare while portraying the Germans as innocent victims.
Powerful 13-minute short about a man who spoke up (and one who didn’t) during an unexpected ID check to filter out ostensible enemies on a train stopped by armed Serbs in Štrpci, Bosnia, on February 27, 1993: “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” (Croatia, 2024), youtu.be…. 📽️
📽️ “The Murderers Are Among Us” (Die Mörder sind unter uns), dir. Wolfgang Staudte (DEFA, 1946), is streaming on Arte. Filmed in the rubble of early postwar Berlin, it represents an important attempt to come to terms with Germany’s immediate past and to see a way through the present.
Hildegard Knef and Wilhelm Borchert
Drone Warfare in Ukraine
In a 14-minute explainer, Anders Puck Nielsen discusses how “NATO has missed the drone revolution” youtu.be…. The R word is thrown around far too easily in military studies, just as it is in tech; however, Nielsen’s argument is no mere cliché. Drones don’t just supplement other military hardware. In the large quantities in which they now appear, they change the very nature of battle. Wars of movement are once again giving way to wars of attrition, albeit in new ways.
See also the short piece by Valerii Zaluzhnyi that Nielsen talks about in his video: “How drones, data, and AI transformed our military—and why the US must follow suit,” defenseone.com….
It seems western armies cannot afford any arrogance vis-à-vis Ukraine. They need to learn from that countryʼs armed forces, just as the latter will continue to benefit from our armaments.
“The Israeli army is facing its biggest refusal crisis in decades” by Meron Rapoport for +972 Magazine, April 11, 2025.
Over 100,000 Israelis have reportedly stopped showing up for reserve duty. While their reasons differ, the scale demonstrates the war’s waning legitimacy.
I saw the first hour of Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen also Die” (United Artists, 1943) tonight. The story, inspired by Reinhard Heydrich’s shooting in Prague in 1942, was a collaboration between Lang and Bertolt Brecht. The film is good, but 135 minutes of wartime stereotypes is a lot. 📽️
📽️ The last time I saw “Three Days of the Condor,” dir. Sydney Pollack (Paramount, 1975), was long enough ago that I didn’t get as much out of its mid-seventies paranoia about the CIA as I did this time around. Or maybe it just didn’t gnaw away at me like it’s doing now. I grew up in a small rural town, but the grit in that movie pervaded a lot of popular television culture. I also heard my fair share of conspiracy-theory talk during my teens. Besides, the CIA was in the news.
I’m still not sure what to make of the mentality expressed in this film. It’s interesting, in any case, to speculate about how anti-establishment images and paranoia from the period have mapped onto both ends of our political spectrum.
"Maybe there's another CIA inside the CIA."
"Oil fields."
"We have games. That's all. We play games. What if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way to destabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do."
"How do you know they'll print it?"
📽️ Am watching “So Ends Our Night,” dir. John Cromwell (United Artists, 1941), a “story of people without passports” based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1939 novel Flotsam.
A great line early on spoken by an Austrian police officer sending two stateless Germans across the border to Czechoslovakia in 1937:
You refugees! It’s not like handling a first-class criminal. You’re detracting from the dignity of my profession.
📽️ This evening I saw “Secret Agent,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (UK, 1936). It was a box office hit in its time, but for me it’s less compelling than “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1936) and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934). The cinematography and moments of suspense were nonetheless entertaining and characteristically Hitchcock.
Unlike the protagonists in the other two movies, who become involved in espionage by chance and are clearly the good guys, the protagonists in this film play morally ambiguous roles. Their mission is to locate an enemy agent in Switzerland and assassinate him before he can carry British military secrets to the Ottomans. Only the playful, but dark character played by Peter Lorre enjoys the necessary close-up work of killing.
Silhouettes of hanged spies out a train window on the way through enemy territory underline the ultimate personal price during war, if caught. A Swiss hotel and casino serves as a glamorous counterpoint, with social banter, dress, and flirting more in line with the 1930s than 1916. That means viewers are treated to Madeleine Carroll’s bare shoulders while she is wrapped in a towel that covers the rest of her body in a scene with two men in full dress.
Distributor advertisement targeting cinema owners in The Film Daily, June 23, 1936, p. 3, via Internet Archive.
📽️ Just watched “Berlin Correspondent,” dir. Eugene Forde (20th Century Fox, 1942). It’s not so much about a reporter as it is about the Gestapo’s efforts to uncover his spying and then beat his escapes. Interesting to me were the overt references to euthanasia or “mercy killings” in the film.
Here, though, the commander of such a facility jokes about Germany soon being “100% insanity free”—nice irony for a wartime U.S. audience, but maybe less funny to 21st-century ears. In any case, the quick-thinking American journalist outwits the Gestapo. The tone doesn’t feel too far removed from the 1960s TV sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965–71).
📽️ For thievery and spying escapades set in the Blitz, “Counter-Espionage” (aka “The Lone Wolf in Scotland Yard”) dir. Edward Dmytryk (Columbia Pictures, 1942), isn’t bad. If its light tone, despite its air raids and bombs, seems out of place, it was produced for a wartime public in need of good tales.
By the way, the film has an odd science fiction component to it, though I have no idea how believable it would have been to the audience. First, there were plans for a lethal blue ray contraption (military figures in Berlin spoke of directional rays). Second, the spy ring transmitted information to Berlin with a large device that more or less functioned like a wireless fax. Finally, these people communicated between London and Berlin over the radio by voice.
📽️ I enjoyed “Diplomatic Courier,” dir. Henry Hathaway (20th Century Fox, 1952) this evening, available at archive.org… and youtu.be…. There were airplanes, trains, and cars from Washington to Salzburg to Trieste. One interesting twist for me: One of the leads was Hildegard Knef, who starred in the 1946 DEFA film “Die Mörder sind unter uns” (The Murderers Are Among Us).
📽️ After watching Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 “Rome Open City” (Roma città aperta) this weekend, I’ve started on his “Paisan” (1946). This is only the second time I’ve seen this remarkable collection of six stories about soldiers and civilians during the Allied liberation of Italy, and it feels raw.
I enjoy the short cartoons that @Freeonis makes about Russia’s war against Ukraine. The latest, “The Art of Ceasefire,” is no exception. youtu.be… 🇺🇦
Operator Starsky (@starskyua.bsky.social) talks with Ben Hodges about the current strategic situation in and around Ukraine. youtu.be… (19.5 min.) 🇺🇦
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