Comanche claim to be the lineal descendents of the empire of Montezuma, and the only legitimate owners of the whole Mexican country.
The Chiefs say that when Cortes landed in Mexico, he found the country torn to pieces by internal factions and was enabled, by employing the disaffected chiefs, to raise a force to seize upon their capital.
Those chiefs believed if they could destroy the power of Montezuma, they could easily dispatch the Spaniard, and have the control of the country in their own hands.
But too late they ascertained that they had introduced a harder master, and that unconditional servitude was all they had to expect.
They were required to change their ancient religion, and thousands of them were sent off to work in the mines from which they rarely ever made their escape.
A great proportion of them bowed their necks to the conqueror, and became serfs and slaves to the Spaniards; but a few, the noblest and best, preferred exile to servitude, and set out on a pilgrimage to the north, in hopes to find a land where they could enjoy their ancient institutions in peace.
They traveled for many weeks, and at last came to the great river north- the Rio Grande – where they encamped, and sent out twenty chosen men to examine the adjacent country.
They crossed the great river, and ascended one of the highest peaks of the mountain, which overlooked the adjacent plain.
The prairie was covered with buffalo, deer and antelopes, and they thought they had reached the happy hunting-ground, and the word “Tehas! Tehas! Tehas!” burst from every tongue. It was decided unanimously that it should go by the name apparently furnished them by the Great Spirit.
Tehas is the Camanchee name for the residence of the happy spirit in the other world, where they shall enjoy an eternal felicity, and have a plenty of deer and buffalo always at hand.
By taking the sound as they pronounce it, and giving it the Spanish orthography, it gives us the word “Texas, “ which is the “happy hunting ground” or the “Elysium,“ of the Camanches. This is the true history of the name as derived from Isowacuny himself.
Comanche Isowacony (pg 57 of pdf)
“SORROW WHISPERS IN THE WINDS”: THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS’S COMMANCHE INDIAN POLICY, 1836-1846 THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Carol A. Lipscomb, B.S. Denton, Texas December, 1994
Isawacony (Little Wolf) was a chief of the Penateka band of Comanches before the Comanches became a centralized nation.
Before the Comanche Nation was centralized, Comanches lived in disparate bands.
Though they were related and shared a culture and history, Comanche bands were autonomous and seldom worked together.
Isawacony was one of several chiefs of the Penateka band, which lived primarily throughout what is known today as Southern Texas and Northern Mexico.
He was unique among his fellow chiefs in that while other chiefs considered peace and violence equally as options in dealing with the incursion of Americans into their territory, Isawacony seemed dedicated primarily to peace.
This dedication to peacemaking and never compromising on what he thought was best for the Penateka Comanches are two traits that appear to define Isawacony’s life.
He was one of the principal negotiators in several treaties between the Republic of Texas and, later, the United States, and the Penateka band of Comanches.
In 1836, Isawacony was party to an attempt to draft a treaty between the Penateka band and the Texans that would allot a swath of land and create a boundary between the two groups.
While Sam Houston, who was an adopted Cherokee, was sympathetic to the Comanches’ cause, the majority of Texan settlers were unwilling to relinquish any land to tribal bands.
David Gouveneur Burnet, the first president of the Republic of Texas, wrote to M.B. Menard in 1836: “It is a matter of great importance to secure the entire neutrality at least of the Indian tribes …
But I must enjoin it upon you to avoid with great caution entering into any Specific treaty relating to boundaries, that may compromit the interests of actual settlers.”
The following year, the Texas Congress appointed a commission to work with peace-seeking Comanches and improve relations between the Republic and the Comanches.
However, members stipulated that “no fee simple right of soil be acknowledged.”
In 1838, 150 Comanches went to San Antonio to ask a group of Texans to return with them to Comanche territory to discuss a peace treaty with their chiefs, including Isawacony.
The Texans complied but were dismayed that the Comanche chiefs stipulated that any peace treaty include a boundary that would allot them some of the richest land in Texas.
The Comanches wanted the land north of the Guadelupe Mountains, which amounted to about a quarter of Texas’ territory.
They likewise warned that they would kill any surveyors who appeared on their land.
Sam Houston along with Noah Smithwick, a Texas ranger, drafted a treaty with five Comanche chiefs, including Isawacony, but in his letters Smithwick says he fails to recall the exact terms of the agreement.
It mattered little as neither side observed the terms of the treaty anyway.
Peace between Penateka Comanches and Texans continued for a while, though some settlers did move closer to the Comanche boundary.
One of the terms of the treaty was that a trading post be established on Brushy Creek at the site of an abandoned blockhouse.
The Republic reneged on its commitment to establish the trading post.
When the Penatekas came with their hides and other wares to trade and found no post, they sought Smithwick, who was unable to give them a convincing reason for refusing to build the promised trading post.
Smithwick lost favor with the Comanches by reneging on this stipulation of the treaty. However, he also lost favor with Texans for having drafted a treaty with the Comanches to begin with. To re-establish favor among the settlers, he set out to hunt Comanches with aplomb.
In his letters, he writes, “I really felt mean and almost ashamed of belonging to the superior race when listening to the recital of the wrongs the redmen had suffered at the hands of my people. Yet when they made hostile incursion into the settlements, I joined in the pursuit and hunted them as mercilessly as anyone.”
Smithwick did add, however, that he vividly remembered the “kindness and friendship shown (him) by the Comanches, especially the old chiefs” in 1837.
Isawacony was later party to another treaty in 1844 after yet another land dispute between Texas and the Comanches.
During negotiations, Sam Houston told the chiefs that “a bad chief,” meaning his nemesis Mirabeau Lamar, had broken the peace between Texans and the Comanches, referring to an attack on Comanche leaders in San Antonio.
Houston suggested that this wrong “be mended,” to which Buffalo Hump, another chief alongside Isawacony, replied: “The Great Spirit above is looking down and sees and hears my talk; the ground is my mother, and sees and hears that I tell the truth.
When I first heard the words of your chief I felt glad and I was uneasy until I struck the white path and came here to see him.
That is all I want to say. What I came here for was to hear the words of peace.
I have heard them and all is right; peace is peace – I have no more to say.”
Over the next couple of days, Houston drafted another treaty with Buffalo Hump and Isawacony in which he designated a line of settlement setting off Comanche lands from those of settlers.
Houston’s line ran from the Red River through upper Cross Timbers to Comanche Peak, then southwest to the old Spanish presidio on the San Saba and southwest again to the Rio Grande.
Isawacony and Buffalo Hump, as well as the other three chiefs present, rejected the terms, asserting that they should be able to follow their herds wherever they roamed on Comanche land. The chiefs proposed a new line, which would have granted the Comanches more land to the west, but Houston refused to redraw the proposed boundary.
Houston, however, persuaded the chiefs to sign the treaty after he struck the terms regarding any boundary between Texans and the Comanches, making the treaty more or less worthless. In 1846, the U.S. annexed Texas and assumed jurisdiction over the Penateka band of Comanches and other tribal nations in Texas.
The U.S. had previously dealt with the northern Comanches and wanted to have influence over the southern Comanches as well.
That spring the Comanches agreed to meet with the U.S. and sign the Treaty of Council Springs in which Comanches were to turn over stolen property and prisoners and keep the peace, while the U.S. would keep American trespassers off Comanche land.
As with other treaties, the U.S. showed it couldn’t control frontier citizens; and as land hunger grew (as did political expediency), the Comanches’ rights were ignored in Washington. After negotiating the treaty and seeing it fail, two Penateka chiefs, Old Owl and Santa Anna, visited Washington to try to speak directly to American politicians about enforcing the treaty. While in D.C., they saw the massive American population and weapons, and they became convinced of the U.S.’s military might.
After reporting back to their fellow chiefs on how violent resistance would be futile against the Americans, local skirmishes between Comanches and Texan settlers grew fewer.
The chiefs’ realization of the U.S.’s military capabilities diminished the Comanches’ resolve to consider violence against encroaching Americans. Isawacony, however, saw this realization as an opportunity to redouble peaceful efforts between the Comanches and Americans. He believed that Americans would be more willing to work with the Comanches if the Comanches were now known to be more peaceful.
Over the next couple of years, relations between Texans and Comanches were mildly hostile, but no major skirmishes occurred.
In 1849, however, the discovery of gold in California brought settlers westward, who in turn brought cholera with them.
The disease all but wiped out the Penatekas, though Isawacony, who was in Mexico at the time, managed to dodge the illness.
Over the next few years, the remaining Penatekas began negotiating with the U.S. for a reservation to keep away from American squatters and to have a sovereign space in which to govern themselves. In 1854, Shanaco, another Penateka peace chief, met with officials and agreed to reservation life. He said: “You come into our country and select a small patch of ground, around which you run a line, and tell us the President will make us a present of this to live upon, when everybody knows that the whole of the entire country, from the Red River to the Colorado, is now and always has been ours from time immemorial.
I suppose, however, if the President tells us to confine ourselves to these narrow limits, we shall be forced to do so, whether we desire it or not.”
Of all the chiefs present, only Isawacony refused the reservation proposal. He believed that being part of the reservation system was an affront to his people. He argued that the U.S. officials could not make white men out of Indians any more than they could make a “dog out of a wolf.” Instead, Isawacony proposed the usual line settlement, but the U.S. Indian agents refused.
Isawacony left the council feeling like the other chiefs had turned their backs on him and their people. Isawacony’s legacy, from my research, appears to be one of refusing to compromise on what he felt was best for his people and insisting on handling disagreements peaceably.
History on Comanches before the tribal nation was centralized is hard to come by.
Likewise, history on American Indians who preferred peace to violence is hard to come by as most of the “history” from that period was selectively written by white settlers who had an interest in portraying them as “savages.”
For example, you can find an entire book on Buffalo Hump, who was known more for leading raids on settlers than for peaceable dealings, while little information is available strictly on Isawacony’s leadership. That said, the little information on Isawacony reveals a Comanche leader who dedicated himself to Comanches’ cultural and political well-being as well as protecting as many Comanche lives as possible in the process.
Buffalo Hump
Born ca. late 1790s to early 1800’s in Edwards Plateau, Texas
Died: c. 1865/1870 Fort Sill, Oklahoma
Occupation: Medicine man and was a Native American War Chief of the Penateka band of the Comanche Indians. His N?m? tekwapu (Comanche) name, properly transliterated, was Po-cha-na-qua-hip which meant “erection that won’t go down”. He came to prominence after the Council House Fight when he led the Comanches on the Great Raid of 1840.
http://www.nativeamericanlinks.com/chiefs.htm#cite_note-2
Buffalo in Comanche is cuhtz.
The Washington Post
Washington D.C. Jan. 31, 1901
The Indian tribes regard white buffalo as big medicine and Catlin the painter while with the Mandans in 1832 saw a white buffalo robe on a pole in their village as a sacrifice to the great spirit. It had been purchased from the Blackfeet who had killed it. The Mandans gave the Blackfeet eight horses and a quantity of goods for it.
The Comanches always regarded the white animal as very dangerous to themselves.
In a history of the bison published in The American Naturalist, the author tells of meeting a young Comanche Indian returning to his camp nearly dead with fear because he had seen a white buffalo.
He was taken into camp, and for more than a week the medicine men of the tribe gathered and smoked medicine over him to drive away the bad effects of meeting the white buffalo. At last, the evil was smoked away and it was considered by the tribe that the young brave had had a very narrow escape from dire misfortune.
In 1863 a white man killed a white buffalo on the North Fork of the Red River and presented the skin to Gen Grierson.
In order to preserve the skin the general desired it dressed but for a long time, it was impossible to persuade any Indian- to undertake the task.
At last Horseback a noted Comanche chief attracted by the tempting offers contracted to dress the skin under several conditions.
When his conditions were accepted Horseback selected one of his many wives and placed her under the care of the medicine man of his tribe.
These medicine men went through various ceremonies to preserve her life against the evil of the white animal.
She was next taken to a tent a great distance off from the other tents and placed in it alone. Here the skin was brought to her by a white soldier. No other Indian in the tribe dared to approach the squaws’ tent while she was engaged in dressing the skin.
Her food was placed a great way off from her tent and she was not spoken to or looked upon while thus isolated. When the skin had been dressed the white soldier again came for it and once more the medicine men called in the Great Spirit before she was allowed to rejoin the others of her tribe.
...
He was the last Chief of the Comanche Tribe. Because Quanah Parker was never elected Chief by the Comanche tribe, but was rather appointed the role by federal agents, many assert that Chief Horseback is actually the last Comanche Chief. His Comanche name was Tir-ha-yah-gua-hip which translates to Horse’s Back.
He earned his name for his legendary grace and agility as a horseman.
His younger days were filled with raiding and terrorizing white settlers. He led a great raid into Texas in 1864, going as far as Gainesville, murdering and pillaging towns and villages.
Texas Ranger A. J. Sowell admiringly described Comanche Chief Oska Horseback at the 1872 battle scene on the Keep Ranch in upper Wise County: “He made several dashes towards us, and was the best rider I ever saw.
He was a slim, trim-made Indian, about twenty-two years old. He was mounted on a beautiful blood-bay horse, with black mane and tail, and star in the face.
This chief rode no saddle, but had a red blanket strapped around his horse. He could dismount and mount again, with his horse in a gallop; displaying an agility that was surprising.
He could drop down on the opposite side of his horse, as quick as a flash, and expose nothing but his hand and foot, his horse going at full speed. He wore red leggings, and fine beaded moccasins. He also wore a beautiful beaded ornament on his breast, which entirely covered it. He had his scalp-lock platted, and a prairie chicken’s head tied to the end of it, which hung down to the middle of his back. The chicken’s head was painted a deep red…” In his later years he became a man of peace and on October 21, 1867 he was one of the signers of the Medicine Lodge Treaty.
https://allaboutbison.com/natives/comanche/
Sigmund Freud believed that everyone was inherently bisexual, and that a preference for either sex was learned behavior.
But if sexual attraction is learned, then trying to rehabilitate gay people would actually work--it doesn't. So, inasmuch as a leopard can't change its spots, sexual attraction is innate. I don't think for gay people it is about sexual orientation though. I think they would understand that a cook and a cook doesn't make babies, or a bushy and a bushy. Their minds work on some level not apparent to straight people.
...
Didn't know emotion can be rationalized, lol
...
Sigmund Freud's theories lack scientific rigor.
No experiments have been conducted to test any of his hypothesis. Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Abraham, Maslow, all of their ideas are mere conjecture without scientific support.
Well, clinical studies are funded by research grants, and that's how all behavior psychologists make their living.Conjectures are what you tell your wife at the dinner table, lol
I thought is due to hormonal imbalance in your system. A gay woman would have excess of testosterone or a gay man has excess estrogen. Those are the real gays. Bisexuality would be learned behavior and could be rehabilitated.
Kinda make sense, either you're left or right handed, but not both. Predilection toward biased proclivity is the norm..unless both brain hemispheres are fused.
http://vietrealm.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=19e17eda27dfcfbbbe8aa6e28cf5254c&topic=13904.msg42319;topicseen#msg42319
Hermann Goering was very intelligent, and an experienced officer. Why did he make so many strategic mistakes(E.G. Dunkirk, Stalingrad)? Was he delusional?
One of the common denominators of accounts from Allied personnel who encountered Göring was that they were shocked at his intelligence. Allied prosecutors at the IMT tended to see him as one of the cannier defendants as did the journalists that covered the Tribunals. The RAF officer Eric Brown also found Göring to be intelligent and well-versed on technical matters after the fact.
These accounts of his intelligence were not just impressions either; IQ tests conducted by the Allied authorities placed Göring in the 99th percentile. This picture of a highly intelligent Reichsmarschall is at odds with though with Göring's leadership of the Luftwaffe.
Postwar accounts by Adolf Galland and many of the Jagdflieger veterans were often at pains to stress Göring's incompetence and unsuitability for his position. Nor was this postwar picture by Luftwaffe veterans entirely an attempt to blame-shift defeat on their military chief. Göring did have his hand in a number of disasters and did push the Luftwaffe down a number of strategic dead-ends.
These two pictures though- the foolish air leader and the intelligent, charismatic individual- are not too hard to reconcile though. Intelligence and bad leadership were not mutually exclusive in the National Socialist state. Pace the common perception of Göring as a complete failure, his leadership of the Luftwaffe in the early years was actually not that bad. Göring knew enough to delegate to various Reichswehr leaders that had been prepping for aerial rearmament since the 1920s.
In particular, Göring relied very much on the technocratic and capable Erhard Milch at the helm of Reichsluftfahrtministerium (aviation ministry/RLM) to resolve the major technical and personnel issues that occurred when expanding a military force from scratch.
Milch, in conjunction with Walter Wever formed a competent team that managed to create a structure that could be expanded quickly. Göring himself also had fairly decent technical instincts towards certain aircraft in this early period and appreciated that this was an era of great technical change.
Milch also had a knowledgeable relationship with nascent German aviation industry and knew its capabilities. The industry itself also formed a profitable relationship with Göring and the two worked in symbiosis in this period of expansion as Göring's duties for the Four-Year Plan meant he could funnel resources into the aviation sector to enhance his own prestige within the National Socialist state hierarchy.
The Luftwaffe's successes of the early war years was a beneficiary of this prewar system. Germany possessed a large, technically advanced air force in September 1939 with a great deal of trained personnel and a coherent doctrine.
This was no mean feat for a service that barely existed prior to 1933 beyond the Reichswehr's experimental units. The Luftwaffe procurement certainly did have its own boondoggles like the Ju-86. This bomber set to be powered by diesel engines, was obsolete before it even entered service and most Ju-86s were either sold or went immediately into training units.
The Ju-86 debacle and other mistakes like adding too many requirements to the Ju-88 program were problems, but every air force in this period also had similar failures and setbacks. Dead-ends like the Ju-86 were normal in an era of massive technological change when promising technology like diesel aviation engines never quite delivered.
Nonetheless, the victories of 1939 and 1940 did mask a significant number of problems within the Luftwaffe that became more prominent as the war dragged on. The losses in the 1940 campaigns in France and Britain were quite severe. Despite this, German industry could only barely cover operational losses and the same could be said of the Luftwaffe's training establishment.
Victory over France had vindicated the use of airpower, but no the Luftwaffe found itself facing a hard ceiling on its expansion. Milch's championship of American-style production techniques ran into resistance from aviation firms who came from an older German industrial tradition of craftsmanship and technical precision. The technocratic Milch was often abrasive to men like Willi Messerschmitt, and while industry could form a functional relationship with Milch in peace, this relationship suffered under wartime pressure.
Göring tended to side with industry over Milch in these internal squabbles as he both feared a potential rival within the Luftwaffe and he too found Milch abrasive. Technical issues also began to loom more seriously for the long-term prospects of the Luftwaffe. A 1939 decision to focus all future production on only four aircraft types- the He-177, Me-210, Bf-109, and Ju-88, proved to be disastrous as only the latter two aircraft were able to resolve technical hurdles to become operational.
A good deal of the blame for this problem was the leadership of Ernst Udet at the RLM technical office. Udet, who replaced Wever after the latter died in a crash landing, was like Göring an flying ace from the last war and chosen for his job largely because of his connections to the Reichsmarschall. Udet was patently unsuitable for his job and often wasted precious time and resources on dead-ends and chimeras like making every bomber capable of dive attacks.
Udet's leadership further exacerbated RLM's tendencies towards focusing too much on technical issues and solutions at the expense of the bigger picture. Additionally, Udet and the RLM's leadership as a whole was incapable of thinking flexibly about new roles and uses for aircraft despite their focus on high-technology solutions.
Roles and aircraft for them sometimes had to be implemented on the ground as opposed to Berlin. Such was the case with the FW-200 which was derived from a Japanese order of a militarized version of the airliner and came into service largely at the behest of Hauptmann Edgar Petersen, an officer of the X.Fliegerkorps (the unit tasked with maritime strike), after he visited Focke-Wulf in September 1939 to ascertain whether or not civilian aircraft could be used for this role. In fairness to Göring, not all of the problems with the Luftwaffe in this period were entirely his fault.
A number of postwar narratives have inflated his role in the decision to halt outside of Dunkirk. While Göring certainly did claim the Luftwaffe could destroy the pocket alone, research by Karl Heinz Frieser has shown that such assertions only came after Hitler and his generals had made the decision to halt the ground forces.
The decision to fight the Battle of Britain also fell in line with a number of air strategists around the world that felt that airpower alone was sufficient to force political results. Göring may have reveled in the idea that his air force could force a British capitulation, but even without this egoism, this thought was not all that out of line with contemporary thinking on airpower.
And Göring does deserve some credit for the Fw-190 program. He was sufficiently impressed by a demonstration of Kurt Tank's fighter and understood that relying too much on the Bf-109 was unwise given the bottlenecks of Messerschmitt's plane like the troubled production of the DB 600 series of engines. Cracks began to appear in the edifice of the Luftwaffe by 1941.
Udet's suicide may have been prompted by a love affair, but the man was under extraordinary pressures from his failures at RLM like the Me-210. German procurement was left in chaos as attempts to inject rationalism and streamlining the process ran afoul of existing power blocs and created unnecessary frictions. Udet though was emblematic of a deep-seated problem within the Luftwaffe's leadership in that Göring had a tendency to promote the wrong men to positions of authority.
The Luftwaffe's Chief of Staff, Hans Jeschonnek, was typical of the wrong man in the wrong place. Although Jeschonnek possessed a keen mind, he was also slavishly subservient to higher authority. This was one of the attributes that endeared him Göring, but also to Hitler. It was the Luftwaffe's chief of staff, not its commander, that assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could resupply the Stalingrad pocket. Jeschonnek had a tendency to agree with his superiors' desires and then try to find a way to make them work around existing capabilities.
In the Stalingrad airlift decision, both Göring and Hitler initially proceeded along Jeschonnek's optimistic assessments of German capabilities, and in fairness to the chief of staff, they were not inclined to investigate the matter on their own.
It was telling of the Luftwaffe's habits of leadership that even though Jeschonnek later figured out his errors after consulting with frontline commanders, he never really tried correct them and committed to this course of action. This was one of the byproducts of the Luftwaffe's swift expansion within a National Socialist milieu. Younger officers tended to be promoted to the upper echelons well past their experiences while the Nazi system prioritized a type of political loyalty that verged on cronyism.
The Western Allied bombing offensive laid bare a number of these preexisting problems within the Luftwaffe. Although the Luftwaffe managed to extract a high toll on both the USAAF and RAF, the continued bombing operations on Europe were a consistent embarrassment for Göring.
The pressures from the offensives revealed a number of deficiencies in his own leadership style. Horst Boog, one of the authors of the Bundeswehr's official study of the war, has a damning portrait of Göring in this period and is worth quoting at length: The minutes of the Reichmarschall’s conferences show very little sign of the systematic approach to the various problems that is so evident in records of meetings of senior commanders in the British and American air forces.
Instead we find a great many ad hoc decisions being taken, and matters of opinion on even the tiniest detail being discussed when they should have been dealt with in subordinate bodies and certainly not by the commander-in-chief of one of the armed services.
Göring waffed his way through the meetings, with constant appeals to National Socialist beliefs and exhortations for fighting spirit, and with the muddled language he used betraying his poor grasp of tactical and technical matters and the extent to which he was trapped within his outdated experience of fighting in the First World War. His was a ‘romantic’ style of leadership.
In the outside world he nonetheless continued to enjoy the sympathy of wide sections of the public, even—as his visits there showed—in cities in the Rhineland that had suffered particularly badly in the bombing. More and more, however, he directed his Luftwaffe like a gambler going for bust.
Occasionally he even took over direct control of the fighter formations, as, for instance, during one American raid when he sent the German fighters chasing the sound of their own engines back and forth all over Germany. The episode went down in the annals of the air defense of the Reich as ‘the Raid on Fort Köpenick’ (in German, a ‘Captain of Köpenick’ is someone who manages to hoodwink the public); distrusting even those commanding the fighter force, he had ignored the advice of experts.
Such "romantic" leadership and the poor management of personnel it engendered were two of the hallmarks of the NSDAP. The idea that willpower and force of action could transcend obstacles were common features among many fascist movements.
Göring's political position as Hitler's designated number two required the Reichsmarschall to constantly assume a National Socialist style of leadership to keep this position in a constantly shifting German power structure. Göring may have been quite intelligent, but he was still a creature of a specific political milieu that prioritized obedience and placed secondary importance on competence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6o5cj9/hermann_goering_was_very_intelligent_and_an/
No experiments have been conducted to test any of his hypothesis. Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Abraham, Maslow, all of their ideas are mere conjecture without scientific support.
Well, clinical studies are funded by research grants, and that's how all behavior psychologists make their living.Conjectures are what you tell your wife at the dinner table, lol
I thought is due to hormonal imbalance in your system. A gay woman would have excess of testosterone or a gay man has excess estrogen. Those are the real gays. Bisexuality would be learned behavior and could be rehabilitated.
Kinda make sense, either you're left or right handed, but not both. Predilection toward biased proclivity is the norm..unless both brain hemispheres are fused.
http://vietrealm.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=19e17eda27dfcfbbbe8aa6e28cf5254c&topic=13904.msg42319;topicseen#msg42319
Hermann Goering was very intelligent, and an experienced officer. Why did he make so many strategic mistakes(E.G. Dunkirk, Stalingrad)? Was he delusional?
One of the common denominators of accounts from Allied personnel who encountered Göring was that they were shocked at his intelligence. Allied prosecutors at the IMT tended to see him as one of the cannier defendants as did the journalists that covered the Tribunals. The RAF officer Eric Brown also found Göring to be intelligent and well-versed on technical matters after the fact.
These accounts of his intelligence were not just impressions either; IQ tests conducted by the Allied authorities placed Göring in the 99th percentile. This picture of a highly intelligent Reichsmarschall is at odds with though with Göring's leadership of the Luftwaffe.
Postwar accounts by Adolf Galland and many of the Jagdflieger veterans were often at pains to stress Göring's incompetence and unsuitability for his position. Nor was this postwar picture by Luftwaffe veterans entirely an attempt to blame-shift defeat on their military chief. Göring did have his hand in a number of disasters and did push the Luftwaffe down a number of strategic dead-ends.
These two pictures though- the foolish air leader and the intelligent, charismatic individual- are not too hard to reconcile though. Intelligence and bad leadership were not mutually exclusive in the National Socialist state. Pace the common perception of Göring as a complete failure, his leadership of the Luftwaffe in the early years was actually not that bad. Göring knew enough to delegate to various Reichswehr leaders that had been prepping for aerial rearmament since the 1920s.
In particular, Göring relied very much on the technocratic and capable Erhard Milch at the helm of Reichsluftfahrtministerium (aviation ministry/RLM) to resolve the major technical and personnel issues that occurred when expanding a military force from scratch.
Milch, in conjunction with Walter Wever formed a competent team that managed to create a structure that could be expanded quickly. Göring himself also had fairly decent technical instincts towards certain aircraft in this early period and appreciated that this was an era of great technical change.
Milch also had a knowledgeable relationship with nascent German aviation industry and knew its capabilities. The industry itself also formed a profitable relationship with Göring and the two worked in symbiosis in this period of expansion as Göring's duties for the Four-Year Plan meant he could funnel resources into the aviation sector to enhance his own prestige within the National Socialist state hierarchy.
The Luftwaffe's successes of the early war years was a beneficiary of this prewar system. Germany possessed a large, technically advanced air force in September 1939 with a great deal of trained personnel and a coherent doctrine.
This was no mean feat for a service that barely existed prior to 1933 beyond the Reichswehr's experimental units. The Luftwaffe procurement certainly did have its own boondoggles like the Ju-86. This bomber set to be powered by diesel engines, was obsolete before it even entered service and most Ju-86s were either sold or went immediately into training units.
The Ju-86 debacle and other mistakes like adding too many requirements to the Ju-88 program were problems, but every air force in this period also had similar failures and setbacks. Dead-ends like the Ju-86 were normal in an era of massive technological change when promising technology like diesel aviation engines never quite delivered.
Nonetheless, the victories of 1939 and 1940 did mask a significant number of problems within the Luftwaffe that became more prominent as the war dragged on. The losses in the 1940 campaigns in France and Britain were quite severe. Despite this, German industry could only barely cover operational losses and the same could be said of the Luftwaffe's training establishment.
Victory over France had vindicated the use of airpower, but no the Luftwaffe found itself facing a hard ceiling on its expansion. Milch's championship of American-style production techniques ran into resistance from aviation firms who came from an older German industrial tradition of craftsmanship and technical precision. The technocratic Milch was often abrasive to men like Willi Messerschmitt, and while industry could form a functional relationship with Milch in peace, this relationship suffered under wartime pressure.
Göring tended to side with industry over Milch in these internal squabbles as he both feared a potential rival within the Luftwaffe and he too found Milch abrasive. Technical issues also began to loom more seriously for the long-term prospects of the Luftwaffe. A 1939 decision to focus all future production on only four aircraft types- the He-177, Me-210, Bf-109, and Ju-88, proved to be disastrous as only the latter two aircraft were able to resolve technical hurdles to become operational.
A good deal of the blame for this problem was the leadership of Ernst Udet at the RLM technical office. Udet, who replaced Wever after the latter died in a crash landing, was like Göring an flying ace from the last war and chosen for his job largely because of his connections to the Reichsmarschall. Udet was patently unsuitable for his job and often wasted precious time and resources on dead-ends and chimeras like making every bomber capable of dive attacks.
Udet's leadership further exacerbated RLM's tendencies towards focusing too much on technical issues and solutions at the expense of the bigger picture. Additionally, Udet and the RLM's leadership as a whole was incapable of thinking flexibly about new roles and uses for aircraft despite their focus on high-technology solutions.
Roles and aircraft for them sometimes had to be implemented on the ground as opposed to Berlin. Such was the case with the FW-200 which was derived from a Japanese order of a militarized version of the airliner and came into service largely at the behest of Hauptmann Edgar Petersen, an officer of the X.Fliegerkorps (the unit tasked with maritime strike), after he visited Focke-Wulf in September 1939 to ascertain whether or not civilian aircraft could be used for this role. In fairness to Göring, not all of the problems with the Luftwaffe in this period were entirely his fault.
A number of postwar narratives have inflated his role in the decision to halt outside of Dunkirk. While Göring certainly did claim the Luftwaffe could destroy the pocket alone, research by Karl Heinz Frieser has shown that such assertions only came after Hitler and his generals had made the decision to halt the ground forces.
The decision to fight the Battle of Britain also fell in line with a number of air strategists around the world that felt that airpower alone was sufficient to force political results. Göring may have reveled in the idea that his air force could force a British capitulation, but even without this egoism, this thought was not all that out of line with contemporary thinking on airpower.
And Göring does deserve some credit for the Fw-190 program. He was sufficiently impressed by a demonstration of Kurt Tank's fighter and understood that relying too much on the Bf-109 was unwise given the bottlenecks of Messerschmitt's plane like the troubled production of the DB 600 series of engines. Cracks began to appear in the edifice of the Luftwaffe by 1941.
Udet's suicide may have been prompted by a love affair, but the man was under extraordinary pressures from his failures at RLM like the Me-210. German procurement was left in chaos as attempts to inject rationalism and streamlining the process ran afoul of existing power blocs and created unnecessary frictions. Udet though was emblematic of a deep-seated problem within the Luftwaffe's leadership in that Göring had a tendency to promote the wrong men to positions of authority.
The Luftwaffe's Chief of Staff, Hans Jeschonnek, was typical of the wrong man in the wrong place. Although Jeschonnek possessed a keen mind, he was also slavishly subservient to higher authority. This was one of the attributes that endeared him Göring, but also to Hitler. It was the Luftwaffe's chief of staff, not its commander, that assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could resupply the Stalingrad pocket. Jeschonnek had a tendency to agree with his superiors' desires and then try to find a way to make them work around existing capabilities.
In the Stalingrad airlift decision, both Göring and Hitler initially proceeded along Jeschonnek's optimistic assessments of German capabilities, and in fairness to the chief of staff, they were not inclined to investigate the matter on their own.
It was telling of the Luftwaffe's habits of leadership that even though Jeschonnek later figured out his errors after consulting with frontline commanders, he never really tried correct them and committed to this course of action. This was one of the byproducts of the Luftwaffe's swift expansion within a National Socialist milieu. Younger officers tended to be promoted to the upper echelons well past their experiences while the Nazi system prioritized a type of political loyalty that verged on cronyism.
The Western Allied bombing offensive laid bare a number of these preexisting problems within the Luftwaffe. Although the Luftwaffe managed to extract a high toll on both the USAAF and RAF, the continued bombing operations on Europe were a consistent embarrassment for Göring.
The pressures from the offensives revealed a number of deficiencies in his own leadership style. Horst Boog, one of the authors of the Bundeswehr's official study of the war, has a damning portrait of Göring in this period and is worth quoting at length: The minutes of the Reichmarschall’s conferences show very little sign of the systematic approach to the various problems that is so evident in records of meetings of senior commanders in the British and American air forces.
Instead we find a great many ad hoc decisions being taken, and matters of opinion on even the tiniest detail being discussed when they should have been dealt with in subordinate bodies and certainly not by the commander-in-chief of one of the armed services.
Göring waffed his way through the meetings, with constant appeals to National Socialist beliefs and exhortations for fighting spirit, and with the muddled language he used betraying his poor grasp of tactical and technical matters and the extent to which he was trapped within his outdated experience of fighting in the First World War. His was a ‘romantic’ style of leadership.
In the outside world he nonetheless continued to enjoy the sympathy of wide sections of the public, even—as his visits there showed—in cities in the Rhineland that had suffered particularly badly in the bombing. More and more, however, he directed his Luftwaffe like a gambler going for bust.
Occasionally he even took over direct control of the fighter formations, as, for instance, during one American raid when he sent the German fighters chasing the sound of their own engines back and forth all over Germany. The episode went down in the annals of the air defense of the Reich as ‘the Raid on Fort Köpenick’ (in German, a ‘Captain of Köpenick’ is someone who manages to hoodwink the public); distrusting even those commanding the fighter force, he had ignored the advice of experts.
Such "romantic" leadership and the poor management of personnel it engendered were two of the hallmarks of the NSDAP. The idea that willpower and force of action could transcend obstacles were common features among many fascist movements.
Göring's political position as Hitler's designated number two required the Reichsmarschall to constantly assume a National Socialist style of leadership to keep this position in a constantly shifting German power structure. Göring may have been quite intelligent, but he was still a creature of a specific political milieu that prioritized obedience and placed secondary importance on competence.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6o5cj9/hermann_goering_was_very_intelligent_and_an/
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