Don't Worship at the Altar of Andrew Marshall

[jingofever]

A Catholic review of an apparent hagiography of Andrew Marshall aka Yoda: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the ... ?page=show

This post is mostly a reminder that the man is still alive and working and an announcement that he is retiring next year, having spent over six decades thinking up more efficient ways to kill people. I may as well remind everybody that Licio Gelli apparently is still alive at 95 years young.

[cptmarginal]

Thanks for posting this; I know next-to-nothing about Andrew Marshall & it looks like a good read.

I may as well remind everybody that Licio Gelli apparently is still alive at 95 years young.

He still shows up regularly in the Italian press making comments, too.

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"You should know that I joined the intelligence services of the Italian state after a meeting with Mussolini, who wanted to meet me. I, the volunteer 'Licio Gommina' of the Spanish Civil War, in which he had killed my brother. The Duce asked me what could be the reward that the Italian could give my family. On that occasion, I said that I certainly would be interested to know the world of Intelligence ... Since then I went out of it. "

[...]

Do not hide the fact that I see, with some satisfaction, the people suffer. Do not misunderstand me: I am not happy with this situation. I am glad, however, that are increasingly afloat responsibilities of bad policy. Because, probably, only a tribute of blood can make a change, let's say revolutionary, this poor Italian

Check this out:

Art work raises the symbol of P2, Facebook is mobilized: "Remove it"

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Within hours are already hundreds of people who have joined the call. "Remove that work", is the request that bounces from Facebook. The work in the viewfinder is the installation of Luca headwork "Do elephants ever forget?", Which reconstructs the symbol of P2. E 'was set up on the bridge via Matteotti, a few meters from the symbol of massacres in Bologna, the central station.

The promoters of the page "Via the P2 from heaven Bologna" "while recognizing art its freedom of expression, believe that the work of Luca Vitone represents an unacceptable insult to the memory of the victims of the Bologna train station of 2 August 1980, at which the subversive plan of the P2 Lodge is tragically linked. It causes unnecessary pain to see that symbol camp in the evenings Christmas. It would be painful to see him at any other date. We ask, therefore, out of respect to the city of Bologna, to its citizens and to the victims of the massacre, which is immediately removed. "

To support the appeal, with a "like" on the page, are among others the former secretary of the CGIL Danilo Groups, Democrats David Us and Raffaella Saints Casali, former provincial councilor Gabriella Montera.

A user who has joined, Alessandro, writes: "The site of the City of Bologna explains that the work in question was designed especially so to remember the responsibilities of P2 in the massacre of August 2. So why not also put a nice (you so to speak) swastika or a fasces (in the form of lights) to Porta Lame to commemorate the famous battle where they died many partisans? "

[Wombaticus Rex]

As a mentor memorably told me: "Study him. That guy stayed silent until problems blew up and solutions were obvious. Then he drops some position paper back-dated to prove he was right all along."

I didn't study him, though ... mostly because I don't give a fuck about the future that mentor had in mind for me. I don't want political power, I just want an apple orchard on a mountain somewhere.

Still, in terms of surviving and thriving in a dysfunctional bureaucracy....there's a study to be made there. Thanks for an entertaining read.

Edit: Standout passage....

FINALLY, KREPINEVICH and Watts fail to discuss Marshall’s close professional and personal relationship with Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, in any depth. As a young Harvard graduate student, Ellsberg interned at RAND in the summer of 1958, serving as rapporteur for a strategy group that included such luminaries as Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn, Harry Rowen and Marshall himself. Once Ellsberg joined RAND full-time, Marshall and his first wife Mary became very close to Ellsberg and his first wife Carol. Tom Wells’s biography of Ellsberg, Wild Man, draws heavily upon interviews with the Marshalls—the title coming from Mary’s description of him.

In Wells’s account, it is clear that the Marshalls were intimately familiar with Ellsberg’s character flaws—his reckless womanizing with RAND employees or wives of RAND colleagues and his desultory work ethic, about which Mary complained that the RAND leadership was “always excusing him, indulging him.” Indeed, it was to Mary that Carol Ellsberg first confessed her suspicions that her husband was the source of the Pentagon Papers leaks. The two of them tried to alert RAND president Harry Rowen about it, to no avail. After Ellsberg’s arrest and release on bail, it was from the Marshalls’ Los Angeles house that Ellsberg called his children.

We should not, of course, judge people by the behavior of their close friends; standing with them in their moment of tribulation is in many respects admirable, and the Marshalls were as dismayed and angered by their close friend’s breach of trust as anyone else at RAND. But the absence of this story from Marshall’s professional and personal life seems strange. It would be interesting to know what Marshall learned from his experience with the brilliant but complicated strategic wunderkind he took under his wing. Krepinevich and Watts themselves open the door to pondering this episode with their insistence that Andy and Mary Marshall were such shrewd judges of his colleagues.