Annoy your dad day!

Yes, I know I haven't been meeting my self-imposed standard of one post per day. Sometimes for understandable reasons like no internet access and other times (most recently) because I'm just lazy. This upcoming bout will be due to a trip abroad.

So as entertainment (humor me here), enjoy the singing of Richard cheese and his Lounge Against the Machine. More seriously (if I ever was), I must be the only kid who annoys his father with lounge music.

Yeah, I want to study National Security Law. How did you guess?

It occurs to me that one reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on such an heated character in the US and the EU is the imagery around it.

I write not of the photos of the wall and the actual dramatic carnage photographed but of the words. Few Americans and modern Europeans understand the essential questions, forces, or principles behind different kinds of armed conflicts. They barely know of any serious war other than WWI or WWII and the most dramatic aspect of the war for continental Europe that doesn't guarantee some harsh national -self criticism is the role played by the resistance. The resistance was militarily negligible outside of Yugoslavia but extremely significant in the intelligence war.

The imagery of heroic French resistance fighters shooting German soldiers from apartment windows is something that has stuck in the Western imagination. The customary laws of war have not. When the military term "Occupation" is used, it indicates a broader range of concepts than those people think when they remember Nazi Occupied France. German atrocities were plentiful and the continued presence of stories set in WWII France provides a very dramatic and stark emotional connotation to the word while not telling people what it denotates.

Occupation is, as the 1907 Hague Convention describes:

Art. 42.

Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.
The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

Art. 43.

The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country. 

In more everyday military usage, it can mean taking up a position. "Go and occupy that ridge before the invading force gets to it!" is a perfectly proper phrase. Of similar note is:

Art. 41.

A violation of the terms of the armistice by private persons acting on their own initiative only entitles the injured party to demand the punishment of the offenders or, if necessary, compensation for the losses sustained.

which rests on the premise that private individuals acting outside the bounds of their protection (by trying to block a military convoy, acting as a human shield, or trying to injure or kill military personnel) are acting illegally. A good chunk of the WWII resistance movements were the remnants of the not-quite-defeated continental European armies that refused to surrender and another chunk were clandestine military organizations which followed chains of command and were not the anarchic college dropouts making firebombs to "resist the fascist occupiers in our country, man!".

The bitter human toll of such conflict is visible in a book that includes the real contribution and the real carnage of the French Resistance. Other clandestine wars include the IRA-British conflict in Northern Ireland and the more overt bloodbath in Algeria. Both situations were bloody, destroyed fragile human bonds stretched over the chasm of language, nation, and soul, and cannot be easily linked by imagery to something even the most ignorant westerner can remember.

When Jacques the gratuitous French stereotype thinks of the conflict in the Levant, he can only compare it to things in his frame of reference. The US occupation of Japan is too distant, the occupation of German too uncontested, the troubles in Ireland and Ulster too remote from emotionally charged words. Occupation is a word associated both with what the Germans did to France and with the Israeli governance or incursions into PA administered territory. That the background, legal conduct, and security concerns are completely different has less emotional weight than the apparent match-up in terms.

Professional military personnel are less likely to make such mistakes because:

1: They know what the words mean.
2: They usually know what the security concerns are:
3: The better educated ones know what the laws covering military administration of un-annexed territory are.
4: They have a lot more knowledge about other wars to provide more relevant analogies than the anomalously atrocious actions of the Nazi government.

As people seek to understand the world, they resort to analogies, schemas, or whatever word psychologists use to interpret, understand and predict the input they are getting. When people have such a poor understanding of military history or matters that they make the leap from atrocities in Nazi occupied France to predicting atrocities in Israeli occupied territory, policy issues can no longer be debated with any connection to reality.

What this argues for is an improvement in the public's understanding of military concepts, history, and the laws of war. Seriously, a lot of how terrorists build public support is based on a target audience in the West not knowing what the questions are and (consciously or unconsciously) abetting the violation of the laws of armed conflict designed to protect innocent civilians and society.

Short, I know

Scope differs radically from person to person in the same field. As people see the field they operate in differently, they will act differently.

I suspect that a lot of bullying and macho bragging owes to this. A person who realizes that there is a bigger fish out there will probably act a lot more meekly in ego-building than the person who doesn't define the area of life so broadly. An example might help.

Imagine two privates in a transportation company. Both seek self-aggrandizement but one sees the Battalion Sergeant Major approaching. The one who doesn't see the most senior enlisted leader in his direct chain of command is probably going to be more willing to tease, belittle, or otherwise abuse the other private who knows a more powerful personality is not far away.

The same concept works in other respects. A young man may be the second person in the history of his village to go to law school and if he constrains his scope to that, he might be very happy. If he broadens his scope to compare himself to others of his score range, he might be bitterly disappointed that he didn't get accepted into Yale.

Again, this is not new. A good chunk of cognitive therapies for depression work by changing what a person compares himself to. This does may work for countering depression but it can also provide a useful explanation for why some people act the way they do in complete other circomstances.

Why would a person say that sex is harmless who is clearly familiar with the risk of STDs? The harm of impersonal sex is only felt visibly in the span of years or decades in impaired bonding, lost opportunities, and skewed expectations. If the question of harm is set for the next two years, visible harm is not particularly great. Set the time-frame for two decades, then harm can become more visible. Expand the scope to forty years, then the degraded life is evident for all and subject to denial by those optimists.

Public policy debates over moral-hazard rest heavily on the question of how severely government provision might weaken the private will to act responsibly. A short term effect is possible but the longer term effect is nearly impossible to measure until decades later (by which point any predictive power might be too late). To urge a policy and assume virtually nobody will abuse it in a free society without massive mutual enforcement requires the assumption that immediate levels of abuse will not rise as people continue to face social destructive moral choices or to assume that people will suddenly repent of previous abuses and overcome all the incentives to act in their own self-interest.

Apology warranted

That's exactly what you expected, more filler. I do have a real post planned about the differing psychological and social impact of scope.

A very rough filler about Russian Historical Demographics

The stereotype of Russia is a constantly freezing country populated by Scandinavian looking people all dedicated to Mother Russia. Except the most northerly parts of the country, the climate is comparable to parts of Germany and the populations of many areas are inhabited by Central Asians and other minorities with varying degrees of hostility or loyalty to Russia. Notably for demographic purposes, Central Asians have lower life expectancy, lower levels of education and wealth, and much higher levels of fertility. Social behavior such as massive rates of alcohol consumption, HIV infection, and drug use, and an urban disinclination to have children have resulted in the high mortality, low fertility state of Russia today. These are complex subjects so only childbearing and alcohol use will be covered.

Russian Demographics Prior to the Soviet Period

Russian history until 1861 has been notable for the institution of serfdom. The status of most peasants was that of serfs (roughly between slaves and freemen) and their inability to travel meant greater difficulties in filling labor demand, slower transmission of agricultural practices, and a distinctly unmotivated rural workforce. Counts of the population were difficult to achieve due to such records usually counting only males and taxable property.[1] The frequently shifting borders also meant that any record from one year would not be applicable after a short while. Illiteracy was a serious problem throughout the Eighteenth Century and it was only by the reign of Catherine I that an educated bureaucracy and clergy were able to keep and manage records well. Immigration of foreign settlers into Russia also provided an influx of functional societies with presumably lower mortality rates.

The Army was a constant drain on the manpower of the country as recruits (conscripts) were frequently held in prison until they were to be marched in chains to their units (when they could finally draw rations). The practice resulted in high deaths and weakness among the new recruits despite being outlawed. Medical care was also deficient with 276 doctors for over 400,000 troops. Roughly half the military population in 1802 (peacetime) was hospitalized and 4.03% of them died. It can be assumed that the mortality rate in general was 2% while the civilian rate for comparable males was a third of that.[2]

Infant mortality was nearly 50% but birth rates were around 40-50 per thousand in the 18^th Century.[3] The average age of marriage was in the early twenties. In the high birth and high mortality environment, growth rates of 1% were reached periodically.[4]

Figure 1

[5]

Like the Russian Empire of the 1700s, the 1800s saw a degree of territorial expansion but of relatively unpopulated territory (figure 1, figure 2).

Figure 2

[6]

Migration

While Peter I and Catherine I both encouraged (mainly German and Greek) settlers, migration statistics for their periods do not seem available. Likewise, there was a population exodus after the 1917 Bolshevik coup and the Civil War but no firm numbers exist. During the Soviet period, immigration and emigration were so restricted that the demographic effect must have been negligible. The Post-Soviet period did see a substantial rise in emigration but also had some immigration. Internal migration has been far more relevant as people settled in Siberia or were forcibly deported from their homelands under Stalin.

Pressures on Birthrates During the USSR

Figure 3

[7]

Figure 4

[8]

In 1920, the Bolshevik Party legalized abortion. The 1926 Family Code declared marriage to be a solely secular responsibility of the state and that cohabitation was granted equal relationship rights as marriage. Likewise, divorce was granted at the request of only one member of the couple. Even despite the radicalism of Kollontai (a key Bolshevik thinker on the undesirability of the family as an institution), vital interests within the Party urged caution and despaired of the social dangers such policies caused.[9]

It seems credible that, with the endemic poverty and lack of housing of Soviet society, many families chose not to have children due to space constraints. In 1989, average housing space per person was 15.8 square meters[10]. The overall reason for the decline in fertility could not be attributed to poverty though.  Despite the extreme loss of life in WWI, the Civil War, and the Soviet-Polish War, fertility rates in the USSR did not fall as fast as those of other major European powers in the 1920s. Despite that, deaths outnumbered births in Kharkov Oblast (equivalent to a small state in the US) 10-to-1. The crude birth rate fell from 42.2 per thousand people in 1928 to 31.0 per thousand people in 1932. S.G. Strumilin, a leading Soviet statistician, concluded that the drop correlated with the entry of women into the workforce and that groups with higher wages had lower fertility. Peasants had the highest fertility, migrants to the cities had lower fertility,  and urban workers and professionals had the lowest fertility of all. The inescapable conclusion was that the high abortion rate was depressing the birth rate.[11]

Soviet planners in the 1920s and 1930s remembered the manpower-intensive warfare of WWI and how birth rates had almost decided the outcome of the war. Quite possibly, the biggest factor in the fertility decline was the extremely high abortion rate in cities: in Moscow in 1934, there were 57,000 live births and 154,000 abortions. In 1936, the Soviet government enacted a law prohibiting abortion except in restricted medical cases, ensuring financial rewards for children, and attempting to maintain the productivity of the family.[12]

The 1936 law granted 2,000 rubles for each child after six and 5,000 rubles for each child after ten.[13] 1944 saw an expansion of such benefits including more honorifics (a major Soviet motivational tool that relied on public congratulations for an ego boost) and financial rewards. A 1941 tax shifted a tax burden to childless people. Divorce was subject to increasing fees and condemned as a bourgeois obscenity.[14]

1954 saw the turning point of the natalist[15] policies of Stalin. In 1954, women were absolved of criminal responsibility for abortions, exemptions to the tax on childlessness were introduced, and in 1955, abortion was legalized. Concerns over the vitality of family life were markedly reduced after 1956. Despite the abrupt change, it did not seem to be the result of strong ideological currents and did not serve as a focus of ideological revisionism (figure 5). [16]

Figure 5

[17]

Mortality in the USSR

Figure 6

[18]

Despite the rise in new medical facilities and the vast improvements in education in the USSR, life expectancy declined by roughly a year from 1960 to 1980 (figure 6). This could be due to the rise in alcoholism and declining alcohol quality during those years. The gravity of the situation can be seen from the fact that age-specific mortality was declining virtually every year from 1939-1964 but in 1963 that trend reversed itself for males. The life expectancy gap between males and females grew from eight years to ten. In 1964, alcohol consumption per capita was six liters and government statisticians blamed chronic alcoholism for the loss of 7.3% of national income.[19] Bootleg alcohol of dangerous quality became the main alcohol consumed due to periodic government efforts to wean the population off of their vodka addiction[20] By the 1980s, vodka consumption increased to 15 liters per person per year.[21] Soviet sociologists estimated the social cost of alcoholism in the late 1970s to have been 200 billion rubles and the revenues derived 45 billion rubles.[22]

Conclusion

The demographic situation for the USSR was grim after the 1960s. After the baby boom had worn off, it became clear that the Slavic nationalities in the USSR had much lower fertility rates than their Central Asian counterparts (figure 3). That was of grave concern to Soviet planners due to the general disloyalty and poor skills of their Central Asian subjects. Those demographic changes became most apparent in the Soviet military by the 1980s when Central Asians were shunted into jobs previously considered too sensitive for them. It was estimated in 1991, that by 2010, Central Asians would account for half of the USSR’s population growth and for half of all conscripts in the Soviet Army.[23]

Bibliography

Thomas S. Szayna, The Ethnic Factor in the Soviet Armed Forces: The Muslim Dimension, RAND Arroyo Center, Santa Monica, California, 1991

Dimitri Kesi, Russian Vodka – A National Tragedy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, 2009, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA496705

Vladimir G. Treml, Alcohol in the USSR: A Fiscal Dilemma1, Soviet Studies, Vol. 27, No.2, April 1975

John R. Wilmoth et. al., Human Mortality Database, University of California Berkeley, Russian Demographics, http://www.mortality.org/

Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum and Irina Troitskaya, The History of Abortion Statistics in Russia and the USSR from 1900 to 1991, Population: An English Selection , Vol. 7, (1995)

David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2003

Firstbook of Demographics for the Republics of the Former Soviet Union: 1951-1990, New World Demographics LLC, Maryland, 1992

John F. Besemeres, Socialist population Politics, M.E. Sharpe Inc., White Plains, New York, 1980

Joshua R. Goldstein et. al., Russian Demographics, Human Fertility Database,  http://www.humanfertility.org/

Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989

Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, The Hammer, And The Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1985

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[1] Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, The Hammer, And The Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1985, page 7 Note: Prof. Kahan died in 1982, the books by him are efforts by his colleagues to salvage what was possible from his secretive research notes.

[2] Kahan,1985, 9-10

[3] Those numbers are not unusually high. Even in my ethnic Russian family in a large village in Romania, infant mortality is 37.5%. At my birth and survival it was 50%.

[4] Kahan, 1985,  7

[5] Kahan, 1985,  8

[6] Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1989, page 69

[7]Joshua R. Goldstein et. al., Russian Demographics, Human Fertility Database,  http://www.humanfertility.org/cgi-bin/country.php?country=RUS&f=RUS\\20120417\\RUStfrRRbo.txt&tab=si

[8] Goldstein http://www.humanfertility.org/cgi-bin/country.php?country=RUS&f=RUS\\20120417\\RUStfrRRbo.txt&tab=si

[9] John F. Besemeres, Socialist population Politics, M.E. Sharpe Inc., White Plains, New York, 1980, page 21-23

[10] Firstbook of Demographics for the Republics of the Former Soviet Union: 1951-1990, New World Demographics LLC, Maryland, 1992, page G-3

[11]David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2003, page 98-99

[12] Hoffmann 100

[13] Hoffmann 101

[14] Besemeres 23

[15] While the OED listing is “nataliste” from the French word, the use by some historians and political scientists is without the final “e”. I choose to follow the practice of David L. Hoffmann.

[16] Besemeres 24-25

[17] Alexandre Avdeev, Alain Blum and Irina Troitskaya, The History of Abortion Statistics in Russia and the USSR from 1900 to 1991, Population: An English Selection , Vol. 7, (1995), page 60

[18] John R. Wilmoth et. al., Human Mortality Database, University of California Berkeley, Russian Demographics, http://www.mortality.org/hmd/RUS/STATS/E0per.txt

[19] Vladimir G. Treml, Alcohol in the USSR: A Fiscal Dilemma1, Soviet Studies, Vol. 27, No.2, April 1975, page 62-165

[20] Dimitri Kesi, Russian Vodka – A National Tragedy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, 2009, page 30-31http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA496705

[21] Kesi 35

[22] Kesi 34-35

[23] Thomas S. Szayna, The Ethnic Factor in the Soviet Armed Forces: The Muslim Dimension, RAND Arroyo Center, Santa Monica, California, 1991, page 10