War and the Denial of Loss

(This post is part of a series on war, and a smaller set of posts for Armistice Day 2009.)

Nations wage unnecessary wars because their leaders lack wisdom or conscience, and the checks to force them to act wisely and conscientiously are tragically wanting. However, wars also start – and persist - because of the denial of loss. Scoundrels and fools in positions of power and influence can urge splendid, glorious war in large part because it's unlikely they'll pay the terrible costs. Soldiers, civilians and their loved ones bear those, as always.

The fashionably hawkish and zealously belligerent will blithely lie to the populace (and sometimes themselves) about the necessity of war and its consequences. However, those who bear the greatest costs of war can lie to themselves, too. Ironically, horribly, the victims and survivors can inadvertently perpetuate and sharpen the cruel tragedies of war.

Few works capture this dynamic as well as Luigi Pirandello's short story, "War." (Feel free to read the whole thing first if you'd like; I'll look at it in three parts.) Here's the beginning:

The passengers who had left Rome by the night express had had to stop until dawn at the small station of Fabriano in order to continue their journey by the small old-fashioned local joining the main line with Sulmona.

At dawn, in a stuffy and smoky second-class carriage in which five people had already spent the night, a bulky woman in deep mourning was hosted in - almost like a shapeless bundle. Behind her - puffing and moaning, followed her husband - a tiny man; thin and weakly, his face death-white, his eyes small and bright and looking shy and uneasy.

Having at last taken a seat he politely thanked the passengers who had helped his wife and who had made room for her; then he turned round to the woman trying to pull down the collar of her coat and politely inquired:

"Are you all right, dear?"

The wife, instead of answering, pulled up her collar again to her eyes, so as to hide her face.

"Nasty world," muttered the husband with a sad smile.

And he felt it his duty to explain to his traveling companions that the poor woman was to be pitied for the war was taking away from her her only son, a boy of twenty to whom both had devoted their entire life, even breaking up their home at Sulmona to follow him to Rome, where he had to go as a student, then allowing him to volunteer for war with an assurance, however, that at least six months he would not be sent to the front and now, all of a sudden, receiving a wire saying that he was due to leave in three days' time and asking them to go and see him off.

The woman under the big coat was twisting and wriggling, at times growling like a wild animal, feeling certain that all those explanations would not have aroused even a shadow of sympathy from those people who - most likely - were in the same plight as herself. One of them, who had been listening with particular attention, said:

"You should thank God that your son is only leaving now for the front. Mine was sent there the first day of the war. He has already come back twice wounded and been sent back again to the front."

"What about me? I have two sons and three nephews at the front," said another passenger.

"Maybe, but in our case it is our only son," ventured the husband.

"What difference can it make? You may spoil your only son by excessive attentions, but you cannot love him more than you would all your other children if you had any. Parental love is not like bread that can be broken to pieces and split amongst the children in equal shares. A father gives all his love to each one of his children without discrimination, whether it be one or ten, and if I am suffering now for my two sons, I am not suffering half for each of them but double..."

"True...true..." sighed the embarrassed husband, "but suppose (of course we all hope it will never be your case) a father has two sons at the front and he loses one of them, there is still one left to console him...while..."

"Yes," answered the other, getting cross, "a son left to console him but also a son left for whom he must survive, while in the case of the father of an only son if the son dies the father can die too and put an end to his distress. Which of the two positions is worse? Don 't you see how my case would be worse than yours?"

Pirandello's characters often feel the need to justify themselves. This is dark, absurd comedy – it's competitive grief, or actually pre-emptive competitive grief, competitive sympathy, competitive suffering.

In Man's Search for Meaning, Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl commented on both a sense of humor and suffering:

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the "size" of human suffering is absolutely relative.

To compare suffering like the passengers do, competing for sympathy as a zero-sum game, is silly. However, it's also very, very human.

Let's return to the story:

"True...true..." sighed the embarrassed husband, "but suppose (of course we all hope it will never be your case) a father has two sons at the front and he loses one of them, there is still one left to console him...while..."

"Yes," answered the other, getting cross, "a son left to console him but also a son left for whom he must survive, while in the case of the father of an only son if the son dies the father can die too and put an end to his distress. Which of the two positions is worse? Don 't you see how my case would be worse than yours?"

"Nonsense," interrupted another traveler, a fat, red-faced man with bloodshot eyes of the palest gray.

He was panting. From his bulging eyes seemed to spurt inner violence of an uncontrolled vitality which his weakened body could hardly contain.

"Nonsense," he repeated, trying to cover his mouth with his hand so as to hide the two missing front teeth. "Nonsense. Do we give life to our own children for our own benefit?"

The other travelers stared at him in distress. The one who had had his son at the front since the first day of the war sighed: "You are right. Our children do not belong to us, they belong to the country..."

"Bosh," retorted the fat traveler. "Do we think of the country when we give life to our children? Our sons are born because... well, because they must be born and when they come to life they take our own life with them. This is the truth. We belong to them but they never belong to us. And when they reach twenty they are exactly what we were at their age. We too had a father and mother, but there were so many other things as well... girls, cigarettes, illusions, new ties... and the Country, of course, whose call we would have answered - when we were twenty - even if father and mother had said no. Now, at our age, the love of our Country is still great, of course, but stronger than it is the love of our children. Is there any one of us here who wouldn't gladly take his son's place at the front if he could?"

There was a silence all round, everybody nodding as to approve.

"Why then," continued the fat man, "should we consider the feelings of our children when they are twenty? Isn't it natural that at their age they should consider the love for their Country (I am speaking of decent boys, of course) even greater than the love for us? Isn't it natural that it should be so, as after all they must look upon us as upon old boys who cannot move any more and must sit at home? If Country is a natural necessity like bread of which each of us must eat in order not to die of hunger, somebody must go to defend it. And our sons go, when they are twenty, and they don't want tears, because if they die, they die inflamed and happy (I am speaking, of course, of decent boys). Now, if one dies young and happy, without having the ugly sides of life, the boredom of it, the pettiness, the bitterness of disillusion... what more can we ask for him? Everyone should stop crying; everyone should laugh, as I do... or at least thank God - as I do - because my son, before dying, sent me a message saying that he was dying satisfied at having ended his life in the best way he could have wished. That is why, as you see, I do not even wear mourning..."

He shook his light fawn coat as to show it; his livid lip over his missing teeth was trembling, his eyes were watery and motionless, and soon after he ended with a shrill laugh which might well have been a sob.

"Quite so... quite so..." agreed the others.

Most of the passengers deal with their anxiety by competing with each other for sympathy, but the fat man claims to be above this game. He presents his perspective as a broader, wiser, more cosmic view. The notion of a 'good death,' especially in warfare, in service of one's country, is nothing new. Nor is the idea new that those who die young are spared life's many later disappointments. The third stanza of A.E. Houseman's poem "To an Athlete Dying Young" captures this:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

This sentiment sometimes takes a more aggressive, less reflective form, as in the letter to the editor from a WWI British "Little Mother" who taunts "pacifists" (examined in more depth in a previous post). The "Little Mother" has lost her son in the war, and she is insistent that "The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the 'common soldier' from his 'slight wounds' will not cry to us in vain." She takes the sentiment of the fat man's words further, insisting that the best way to serve British soldiers ("Tommy") is to face grief with militant stoicism:

Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it. Now we are giving it in a double sense. It's not likely we are going to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of 'Lights out', a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our secret chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men's memories have handed down to us for now and all eternity.

Of the many responses to the letter (printed by Robert Graves in Good-Bye to All That, covered in the previous post), the one that has always stuck with me is:

'I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over.' A Bereaved Mother.

Now, to accompany the passengers' competitive suffering, we have competitive stoicism. In a sense the fat man was doing just this – and changing the game in the carriage. The words of "A Bereaved Mother" may well be hyperbole. Likely the letter of the "Little Mother" gave the "Bereaved Mother" some comfort and consolation. And that form of "comfort" and personal reconciliation is one that means that - however fleetingly - she will accept her sons being killed in combat. She would even choose it. Likely she will support (probably zealously) the war and more mothers' sons being killed in combat - exactly as hers were.

Let's return to the story, and its ending:

"Quite so... quite so..." agreed the others.

The woman who, bundled in a corner under her coat, had been sitting and listening had - for the last three months - tried to find in the words of her husband and her friends something to console her in her deep sorrow, something that might show her how a mother should resign herself to send her son not even to death but to a probable danger of life. Yet not a word had she found amongst the many that had been said...and her grief had been greater in seeing that nobody - as she thought - could share her feelings.

But now the words of the traveler amazed and almost stunned her. She suddenly realized that it wasn't the others who were wrong and could not understand her but herself who could not rise up to the same height of those fathers and mothers willing to resign themselves, without crying, not only to the departure of their sons but even to their death.

She lifted her head, she bent over from her corner trying to listen with great attention to the details which the fat man was giving to his companions about the way his son had fallen as a hero, for his King and his Country, happy and without regrets. It seemed to her that she had stumbled into a world she had never dreamt of, a world so far unknown to her, and she was so pleased to hear everyone joining in congratulating that brave father who could so stoically speak of his child 's death.

Then suddenly, just as if she had heard nothing of what had been said and almost as if waking up from a dream, she turned to the old man, asking him:

"Then... is your son really dead?"

Everyone stared at her. The old man, too, turned to look at her, fixing his great, bulging, horribly watery light gray eyes, deep in her face. For some time he tried to answer, but words failed him. He looked and looked at her, almost as if only then - at that silly, incongruous question - he had suddenly realized at last that his son was really dead - gone for ever - forever. His face contracted, became horribly distorted, then he snatched in haste a handkerchief from his pocket and, to the amazement of everyone, broke into harrowing, heart-breaking, uncontrollable sobs.

This is the reality, and it comes crashing in. He told himself a tale to deal with a terrible loss, but when he told the same tale to the other passengers, the façade unexpectedly crumpled.

It's hard not to be sympathetic to the fat man. He didn't choose for his son to die. He might not have sent him to the front, he might not have recruited him, and he didn't give any military orders. Most likely, like most civilians in war, he was relatively powerless to prevent his loved one's death. He can only react to this cataclysm to his entire world. And he constructs a reason, a rationale, an excuse - that countless others have constructed before - to cope with a tragedy that might be unbearable if faced directly.

There's a Zen tale about a monk who's asked by a man to write a blessing for his newly born grandson. He writes, "Father dies, son dies, grandson dies." The family is outraged initially, but the monk explains that this is the natural order, and that, for instance, the father would be devastated if his son died before him. The family comes to understand. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows how painful it can be. Losing a friend or family member is horrible. Losing a parent is devastating enough, but losing a child is supposedly almost unbearable. In a sense, it's silly to "compare" grief, loss and suffering, as Frankl points out. (Sharing it is another matter.) So let us say instead that these deaths are important, because these lives were, are, important. Attention must be paid.

Scoundrels and fools in power often tell lies to start wars. They lie about the costs; they deny that there will be death and loss. The victims and survivors, like the fat man, are left to cope as best they can. But their coping mechanisms can amount to lying of a different sort. The fat man was in a sense lying to himself about his own pain, and denying his own loss. It's hard to fault him on a personal level. However, his coping mechanism can interfere with others' coping mechanisms. Even worse, his stance, just as with the Bereaved Mother responding to the Little Mother, could lead to other parents feeling the same horrible loss he feels. It's highly unlikely he would consciously choose to inflict that pain on anyone else, certainly not on any of the other passengers. And yet, ironically, horribly, by preaching the virtues of dying 'young, inflamed and happy' he may contribute to precisely that outcome.

Even if we suppose that some wars are necessary, is there any doubt that these dynamics of grief, loss and denial occur? Are they healthy? Should war policy be decided on these emotions?

As we've looked at in earlier posts, psychological issues do play a major role in war policy. Some leaders perpetuate wars with a sincere double-down mentality, while others might cynically play on the grief of survivors in a further act of exploitation.

On the human level, rather than competing with each other for sympathy, the (civilian) passengers could choose to support one another. Are there other means of coping the fat man and those in his horrible situation could choose?

Some, when confronted with the death of a loved one, may be religious, and find comfort in thinking of a better afterlife for the person who died. If that works for them, I wouldn't want to dissuade them. I've seen this be powerful, and vital for going on. But personally, it just makes me think of an exchange from late in the play The Elephant Man, where a bishop is left stunned by a deeply despairing Doctor Treves:

Bishop: I do wish I understood you, sir. But as for consolation, there is in Christ's church consolation.

Treves: I am sure we were not born for mere consolation.

Religion, or something similar, might help some. But it won't help everyone. And even then, in the case of war, it will only help some people deal with a violent, sudden loss in their lives – it will not prevent further loss, or prevent it altogether in the first place.

Numbing one's self can be a conscious, necessary, even courageous choice. Seasoned WWII vet E.B. Sledge (featured in an earlier post) told Studs Terkel about a Wilfred Owen poem, "Insensibility":

I
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers.
But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
For poets' tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.

II
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance's strange arithmetic
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies' decimation.

There's more. But Sledge felt Owen, also a combat vet, really captured what it was like to be on the front lines.

Faith, of a very secular sort, can also be a conscious choice. The most powerful installment of the NPR series "This I Believe" I've heard is probably "My Husband Will Call Me Tomorrow," recorded by Becky Herz in 2007. Her husband was serving in Iraq at the time:

I believe that my husband will call me tomorrow.

Tonight I'll say, "Have a great day," and "I love you" to my husband, who is 11 time zones away in Iraq. Then I'll hang up the phone. I'll fall asleep as I did last night, next to our baby daughter. We'll sleep in the guest bedroom downstairs — it's less lonely to sleep there for now.

First, I'll pet and talk to our dogs. I weaned them from sleeping with me a few months ago, but they still seem a bit disappointed when I go off to bed without them. I'll promise them a long walk tomorrow, and I'll make good.

In bed, I'll lay my hand on our daughter's chest several times before I fall asleep, just to make sure that she is breathing. I'll curl up in two blankets: one from Guatemala, one from Peru. I'll allow these souvenirs of past travels to warm the empty space in the bed. I'll get up three times during the night to feed our baby. Each of those times I'll tell her that she has a beautiful life to look forward to. I can say this because I believe that my husband will call me tomorrow.

In the morning after my cup of coffee, I'll change diapers and move around loads of laundry. I'll pour dog food, eat cereal, get dressed, and do the dishes — all with one hand, holding our baby in the other. I'll do the shopping, pay the bills, and stop in at work to see how my employees are getting by. Every three hours I'll stop what I'm doing to feed, change and play with our daughter. I'll make good on the promised walk with our baby strapped to my chest and a dog-leash in each hand. When people say, "Looks like you have your hands full," I'll smile and acknowledge that it's true, but I make the best of it because I believe that my husband will call me tomorrow.

If there is a letter addressed to me from the military, I'll open it because I believe that my husband will call me tomorrow. If there is a knock at the door, I'll answer it, because I believe that my husband will call me tomorrow.

And when he does, I'll talk to him and tell him again that I love him. I'll be able to hang up the phone, keeping my fear at bay, because I believe — I must believe — that my husband will call me tomorrow.

Jeff Leonard's "Did we do everything we could?" hits the same basic pang. And then there's this astounding piece by Minstrel Boy. Or consider Ewa Klonowski's story:

The grim reality of exhumation is something they don't have to deal with. One of the forensic scientists, a Polish woman by the name of Ewa Klonowski, who is usually the first to go down into a mass grave, speaks of what she found in the newly opened one near Prijedor. "I was digging with the knowledge that I'd found some children," she says.

It's all the same to me whether I dig up a child or an old person. Bones are bones. With the one difference that children have more small bones; they are less durable. And I came upon some small bones of the kind I was expecting to find. And a toy next to them - a Superman doll. I had to put it in a plastic bag. I couldn't do it. I was holding it in my hand, and the child's father was there above me. I felt as if I could no longer cope. I was about to start crying. I rationalized it to myself by thinking, "Ewa, someone has to work here. Bones are bones. This is a toy found next to some bones. You must put it in the plastic bag and get on with the next body."

Unlike the fat man in "War," Ewa Klonowski has a good sense of what has happened. But like the fat man, the reality and weight of what has occurred comes crashing in on her unexpectedly.

There is great courage in facing loss and tragedy of this depth. In contrast, it takes absolutely no courage, just cowardice and fecklessness, to inflict this level of pain on another human being.

The political rhetoric of "good deaths," and the emotional struggle to deal with loss, have very real consequences. The "we must keep going, so that their deaths will not have been in vain," argument is one that some feel very sincerely. In fact, it often appears on the national stage. Consider the tale of the dueling bracelets from the first presidential debate between McCain and Obama on September 26th, 2008:

McCain: So I have a record. I have a record of being involved in these national security issues, which involve the highest responsibility and the toughest decisions that any president can make, and that is to send our young men and women into harm's way.

And I'll tell you, I had a town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and a woman stood up and she said, "Senator McCain, I want you to do me the honor of wearing a bracelet with my son's name on it."

He was 22 years old and he was killed in combat outside of Baghdad, Matthew Stanley, before Christmas last year. This was last August, a year ago. And I said, "I will -- I will wear his bracelet with honor."

And this was August, a year ago. And then she said, "But, Senator McCain, I want you to do everything -- promise me one thing, that you'll do everything in your power to make sure that my son's death was not in vain."

That means that that mission succeeds, just like those young people who re-enlisted in Baghdad, just like the mother I met at the airport the other day whose son was killed. And they all say to me that we don't want defeat.

A war that I was in, where we had an Army, that it wasn't through any fault of their own, but they were defeated. And I know how hard it is for that -- for an Army and a military to recover from that. And it did and we will win this one and we won't come home in defeat and dishonor and probably have to go back if we fail.

Obama: Jim, let me just make a point. I've got a bracelet, too, from Sergeant - from the mother of Sergeant Ryan David Jopeck, given to me in Green Bay. She asked me, can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I'm going through.

No U.S. soldier ever dies in vain because they're carrying out the missions of their commander in chief. And we honor all the service that they've provided. Our troops have performed brilliantly. The question is for the next president, are we making good judgments about how to keep America safe precisely because sending our military into battle is such an enormous step.

And the point that I originally made is that we took our eye off Afghanistan, we took our eye off the folks who perpetrated 9/11, they are still sending out videotapes and Senator McCain, nobody is talking about defeat in Iraq, but I have to say we are having enormous problems in Afghanistan because of that decision.

And it is not true you have consistently been concerned about what happened in Afghanistan. At one point, while you were focused on Iraq, you said well, we can "muddle through" Afghanistan. You don't muddle through the central front on terror and you don't muddle through going after bin Laden. You don't muddle through stamping out the Taliban.

I think that is something we have to take seriously. And when I'm president, I will.

(And we shall see about that.)

Gary Trudeau satirized the "not die in vain" mentality superbly in a 2005 Sunday cartoon, which includes this line from his Bush: "Again, we'll stay the course. We cannot dishonor the upcoming sacrifice of those who have yet to die." (Read the whole thing.) I commented in a 2007 post on it:

The stupidity of leaders or the pointlessness of a mission do not diminish the heroism of the troops themselves. Troops only die in vain if we are too stupid to learn from our mistakes or face our own vanities. Having the courage to admit someone acted heroically, but died unnecessarily, can be essential for preventing more unnecessary deaths. No one should die for pride and image alone, and the pain of facing the harsh truth of a given mistake is as nothing to the pain of actually dying or the pain of mourning a loved one. To pretend otherwise is dreadful, deadly vanity.

Or (to quote an earlier post in this cycle), consider Pat Tillman, killed by "friendly fire." Clearly his service was honorable, but just as clearly, his death was unnecessary. One could say, of so many dead in senseless wars: They were honorable but the mission was flawed. They did not die for nothing. Or one could say: They died for nothing. But they will not have died in vain if you fight to prevent others from dying for nothing. Their deaths were meaningless only if you learn nothing from them, and let this needless, horrible waste continue.

But these are rational considerations, and ones that also requiring an enormous emotional courage. It is normally a long process to deal with a loss that acute. Grief drowns everything else out. It may never truly subside. As Walt Whitman wrote, "I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring."

Once again, the Little Mother:

To the man who pathetically calls himself a 'common soldier', may I say we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as "Peace! Peace!' where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over land watered by the blood was not split in vain. We only need that force of character behind all motives to see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending. The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the 'common soldier' from his 'slight wounds' will not cry to us in vain. They have all done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and without complaint.

And once again, Pirandello:

Everyone stared at her. The old man, too, turned to look at her, fixing his great, bulging, horribly watery light gray eyes, deep in her face. For some time he tried to answer, but words failed him. He looked and looked at her, almost as if only then - at that silly, incongruous question - he had suddenly realized at last that his son was really dead - gone for ever - forever. His face contracted, became horribly distorted, then he snatched in haste a handkerchief from his pocket and, to the amazement of everyone, broke into harrowing, heart-breaking, uncontrollable sobs.

One of the last exchanges in Kurosawa's epic tragedy Ran comes when one character (Kyoami the fool) yells at the gods for being cruel. Tango (the Kent figure) replies that it's not that the gods are cruel; they weep. But they cannot save humans from themselves, and their seeming love of chaos and self-inflicted tragedy.

Starting and stopping wars is a political battle. Anyone who has spoken out to stop an unnecessary war knows this all too well. When the powerful urge an unnecessary war, it may be due to corruption, greed, or imperialist ambitions. For politicians and pundits, urging war is often quite a stew: a failure of memory, rationality, decision-making, reflection, compassion and accountability. Sadly, hubris and vanity are almost always in fashion up high. But on another level, personal or societal, the continuation of war depends on the denial of loss, of grief, of mortality, and our own humanity.

To return to an earlier piece in this cycle, War is Hell. It's a moral imperative to remember this. No normal person who truly understands this, and the pain of great loss - understands this in their bones - would choose it lightly, or choose to inflict it on another human being. It's essential to understand these things not only rationally, but emotionally, and above all to really see. Attention must be paid. Luigi Pirandello understood this, as did Wilfred Owen, Walt Whitman, and many others featured above. So, to close, did Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo:

Marie

Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters were all gassed on arrival.
Her parents were too old, the children too young.
She says, "She was beautiful, my little sister.
You can't imagine how beautiful she was.
They mustn't have looked at her.
If they had, they would never have killed her.
They couldn't have."

The Little Mother

(British WWI poster.)

One of the most memorable sections of Robert Graves' WWI memoir, Good-Bye to All That, is his reprinting of a newspaper letter written "By a Little Mother" and the reactions it spurred. It might help to know that "Tommy Atkins" or "Tommy" is "a term for a common soldier in the British Army."

It's late in the year 1916, and a disillusioned Graves is recovering from injuries back in England:

England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war madness that ran about everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible. Quotation from a single typical document of this time will be enough to show what we were facing.

A MOTHER'S ANSWER TO 'A COMMON SOLDIER'

By a Little Mother
A Message to the Pacifists A Message to the Bereaved
A Message to the Trenches

Owing to the immense demand from home and from the trenches for the this letter, which appeared in the The Morning Post, the editor found in necessary to place it in the hands of London publishers to be reprinted in pamphlet form, seventy-five thousand copies of which were sold in less than a week direct from the publishers.

Extract from a letter from Her Majesty

The Queen was deeply touched at the 'Little Mother's' beautiful letter, and Her Majesty fully realizes what her words must mean to our soldiers in the trenches and in hospitals.

To the Editor of the 'The Morning Post'

Sir,–As a mother of an only child–a son who was early and eager to do his duty–may I be permitted to reply to Tommy Atkins, whose letter appeared in your issue of the 9th inst.? Perhaps he will kindly convey to his friends in the trenches, not what the Government thinks, not what the Pacifists think, but what the mothers of the British race think of our fighting men. It is a voice which demands to be heard, seeing that we play the most important part in the history of the world, for it is we who 'mother the men' who have to uphold the honour and traditions not only of our Empire but of the whole civilized world.

To the man who pathetically calls himself a 'common soldier', may I say we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as "Peace! Peace!' where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over land watered by the blood was not split in vain. We only need that force of character behind all motives to see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending. The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the 'common soldier' from his 'slight wounds' will not cry to us in vain. They have all done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and without complaint. Send the Pacifists to us and we shall very soon show them, and show the world, that in our homes at least there shall be no 'sitting at home warm and cosy in the winter, cool and "comfy" in the summer'. There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat. With those who disgrace their sacred trust of motherhood we have nothing in common. Our ears are not deaf to the cry that is ever ascending from the battlefield from men of flesh and blood whose indomitable courage is borne to us, so to speak, on every blast of the wind. We women pass on the human ammunition of 'only sons' to fill up the gaps, so that when the 'common soldier' looks back before going 'over the top' he may see the women of the British race at his hells, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining.

The reinforcements of women are, therefore, behind the 'common soldier'. We gentle-nurtured, timid sex did not want the war. It is no pleasure to us to have our homes made desolate and the apple of our eye taken away. We would sooner our lovable, promising, rollicking boy stayed at school. We would have much preferred to have gone on in a light-hearted way with our amusements and our hobbies. But the bugle call came, and we have hung up the tennis racquet, we've fetched our laddie from school, we've put his cap away, and we have glanced lovingly over his last report, which said 'Excellent'–we've wrapped them all in a Union Jack and locked them up, to be taken out only after the war to be looked at. A 'common soldier', perhaps, did not count on the women, but they have their part to play, and and we have risen to our responsibility. We are proud of our men, and they in turn have to be proud of us. If the men fail, Tommy Atkins, the women won't.

Tommy Atkins to the front,
He has gone to bear the brunt.
Shall 'stay-at-homes' do naught but snivel and but sigh?
No, while your eyes are filling
We are up and doing, willing
To face the music with you–or to die!

Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it. Now we are giving it in a double sense. It's not likely we are going to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of 'Lights out', a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our secret chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men's memories have handed down to us for now and all eternity.

Yours, etc.
A Little Mother

EXTRACTS AND PRESS CRITICISMS

"The widest possible circulation is of the utmost importance.' The Morning Post.

'Deservedly attracting a great deal of attention, as expressing with rare eloquence and force the feelings with which the British wives and mothers have faced and are facing the supreme sacrifice." The Morning Post.

'Excites widespread interest.' The Gentlewoman.

'A letter which has become celebrated.' The Star.

'We would like to see it hung up in our wards.' Hospital Blue.

'One of the grandest things ever written, for it combines a height of courage with a depth of tenderness which should be, and is, the stamp of all that is noblest and best in human nature.' A Soldier in France.

'Florence Nightingale did great and grand things for the soldiers of her day, but no woman has done more than the "Little Mother", whose now famous letter of The Morning Post has spread like wild-fire from trench to trench. I hope to God it will be handed down in history, for nothing like it has ever made such an impression on fighting men. I defy any man to feel weak-hearted after reading it... My God! she makes us die happy.' One who has Fought and Bled.

'Worthy of far more than a passing notice; it ought to be reprinted and sent out to every man at the front. It is a masterpiece and fills one with pride, noble, level-headed, and pathetic to a degree.' Severely Wounded.

'I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over.' A Bereaved Mother.

'The Little Mother's" letter should reach every corner of the earth–a letter of the loftiest ideal, tempered with courage and the most sublime sacrifice.' Percival H. Monkton.

"The exquisite letter by a "Letter Mother" is making us feel prouder every day. We women desire to fan the flame which she has so superbly kindled in our hearts.' A British Mother of an Only Son.

- As printed in Good-Bye to All That, by Robert Graves. Chapter 21, pp. 228-232.

Paul Fussell comments on the letter and its reaction in his introduction to the book, after relating how Graves had mistakenly been reported dead to his parents:

Thus, the world that the war has taught Graves to see is a world of contingency and constant mistakes, not to mention outright fatuity. Hence, the farcical mistransmission in Morse code that sends a battalion assigned to York to Cork instead.

But the prize mad document in Grave's collection is probably the Letter of the "Little Mother," which first appeared in the London Morning Post and was then widely reprinted to loud acclaim. It was designed as "A Message to the Pacifist" agitating for a negotiated peace. The "Little Mother" registers her pride in having supplied her only son to be killed. The testimonials earned by this famous letter suggest a society for which the only accurate term would be "sick": "A Bereaved Mother" writes, 'I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the "Little Mother's" beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over.'

The wide gulf separating Graves' vision from that of the ordinary patriotic British citizen can be measured in one letter from a outraged reader of Good-Bye to All That:

You are a discredit to the Service, disloyal to your comrades and typical of that miserable breed which tries to gain notoriety by belittling others. Your language is just "water-closet," and evidently your regiment resented such an undesirable member. The only good page is that quoting The Little Mother, but even there you betray the degenerate mind by interleaving it between obscenities.

Graves's fellow officers in his regiment did not go quite so far, but many were furious at his levities and what they considered his disrespect to those fallen in a noble cause. Sassoon and Edmund Blunden were so outraged that they set to work annotating a copy of the book, entering over five thousand words of corrections on two hundred and fifty pages. (They planned to deposit this annotated copy in the British Museum, but never did so.) And the book appalled some readers not directly concerned with the dignity of the army. Graves had taken a broad aim, saying good-bye not just to militarism but—as he said—to stylish chatter about politics, religion and literature, as well as such concerns of the empty-minded as drinking, dances, ad "fun." Those are what "all that" encompasses.

Graves's reliance on broad comedy to make very serious points about life and death seems to anticipate and illustrate Friedrich Dürrenmatt's post-Second World War conviction that "comedy alone is suitable for us." The reason? "Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility," none of which we have got:

In the Punch and Judy show of our century... there are no more guilty, and also, no responsible men. It is always, "We couldn't help it" and "We didn't really want that to happen." And indeed, things happen without anyone in particular being responsible for them. Everything is dragged along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the sweep of events. We are all collectively guilty, collectively bogged down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers... That is our misfortune, but not our guilt... Comedy alone is suitable for us.

As I wrote earlier, Graves' book is cynical and cerebral, witty and sarcastic, and may occasionally be unreliable in its details. But I'm reminded of Maynard Mack's observation about Shakespeare's King Lear, that "it abandons verisimilitude to find out truth," as well as Jan Kott's assertion that the cruelties of Lear and Titus Andronicus resonated more with contemporary audiences after WWI and WWII. Graves captures his own shifts in attitude, and creates a memorable, stark portrait of the insanity and horrors of WWI. It remains a valuable first-person account.

I'll discuss "the Little Mother" a bit more in the final piece today, but I thought its flag-waving, obstinate madness was remarkable enough it warranted its own post.

(This post is part of a series on war, and a smaller set of posts for Armistice Day 2009.)

Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels

(This is a long post in three parts. It's part of a series on war, and a smaller set of posts for Armistice Day 2009.)

Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.

- Henry IV on his deathbed to Prince Henry, Henry IV, Part 2, 4.5, 212-215.

There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. People tell me I don't act like an ex-marine. How is an ex-marine supposed to act? They have some Hollywood stereotype in mind. No, I don't look like John Wayne. We were in it to get it over with, so we could go back home and do what we wanted to do with our lives.

- WWII vet E.B. "Sledgehammer" Sledge, author of With the Old Breed, to Studs Terkel.

A Failure of Memory

"War is hell." It's a truth so well known it's considered a cliché. It's virtually impossible to graduate from high school or go to the movies without at least getting exposed to the idea. Certainly many people never experience war and its horrors first-hand. But so many accounts exist that convey how terrible war not only can be, but usually is. There are countless histories, first-hand accounts, television documentaries, novels, films, plays and poems. Depending on where one lives, there are a number of veterans to talk to, or visiting speakers to hear. The enduring stature of All Quiet on the Western Front (both the novel and film) and the more recent acclaim for Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers suggest that this view of war resonates with many, and has for a long time.

"War is hell." It might be a commonplace phrase, but some people, particularly pundits and politicians, can mouth the words, and no wisdom goes with it. There's no weight there, no understanding. Somehow, it always seems there's someone eager to suggest that war is glorious. For these people, going to war is simply too easy, too exciting, an option of quick resort and hardly a matter of grim necessity. These giddy minds, prone to trash talk and bluster, tend to sell war as a big football game, where we'll defeat our enemies, and better yet, crush and humiliate them. For some of them, every threat, real or imagined, is a new Hitler. They'll insist that it's imperative that we take military action, for honor, for pride, to show that America is badass. The more obnoxious will insist that anyone who questions this is a coward or a traitor. They rarely mention that in this war they favor, human beings will die as a result. It's normally a sanitized version of war they're shilling, or one where only the other side will bleed, and battle fatigue and post-traumatic stress disorder aren't epidemic (if they exist at all). To them, War is Glory.

"War is hell." It's not hard to find evidence of this. World War I was particularly horrific because so many of the nations involved wanted to go to war, and had little idea of what it would entail - early battles with cavalry charging machine guns, the use of mustard gas, endless waiting in trenches praying the latest whistling shell would miss. So many reckless command decisions were made, and despite a mounting, truly staggering body count, national leaders and a significant percentage of the public gave full-throated, occasionally ferocious endorsement to continuing the war. Britain and France each lost most of a generation, and the Treaty of Versailles helped sow World War II. World War II was considered "good" by comparison with WWI, although as Studs Terkel pointed out, "the adjective "good" mated to the noun "war" is so incongruous." American deaths in WWII were roughly 420,000, and other nations paid even more steeply (estimates of Soviet deaths approach 24 million). Some wars may be necessary, and there's definitely pride in service, camaraderie and heroism, but war itself should never be celebrated.

Delve into enough accounts of war, and you're liable to run into an attitude that can be described as "pro-soldier, anti-war." Most of the vets in Ken Burns' documentary The War express something like this, including Sam Hynes, who says:

I don't think there is such a thing a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars. And I think, one might say, just wars. And I never questioned the necessity of that war, and I still do not question it.

THE WAR | Preview | PBS

E.B. Sledge saw some of the ugliest fighting in World War II (hear him here). He also feels World War II was necessary, but has remarked:

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I've had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?...

My parents taught me the value of history. Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn't talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.

Being "pro-soldier, anti-war" normally means: given a war, the troops should be well equipped, the generals shouldn't be stupid with human lives, and the war should be fought to be won. However, the most obvious way to be "pro-soldier" is not to endanger any troopers unnecessarily. An unnecessary war, a fundamentally flawed mission, an assignment where the danger far outweighs the potential gains – none of these "supports" the troops. Being truly "pro-soldier" necessitates being "anti-war" in this sense. There are also times when it is sheer folly to continue a war. Heroism in war is to be honored, and the camaraderie between troopers in war is greatly prized, but this is because of helping one another through a horrible ordeal. There's nothing "good" about the ordeal itself. Surviving an atrocity does not somehow ennoble the atrocity. War is anything but glorious.

Honestly, I've never encountered or heard a combat veteran who hasn't had this basic attitude. Maybe there are others who feel differently. As an older post, "How to Hear a True War Story," examined, views in the military are not monolithic on any given conflict. Furthermore, "supporting the troops" is hardly the same as "supporting the generals' decisions" or "supporting the decisions of politicians ordering the generals." As an Army captain in Iraq pointed out, going to war, or staying, just isn't their call: "Soldiers don't make those decisions. They do what they're told. They bitch and moan, sure. But when the call comes, they pack their bags and go, knowing they may not come back." I certainly can't speak about war from personal experience. I can only go by what I've been told, or heard, or studied. I also never have considered myself particularly attuned to military culture, compared to vets and military history buffs I've known. Maybe growing up mostly in Arlington, Virginia simply meant I was exposed to a fair number of military families, veterans and speakers, and a decent amount of history. I don't know. Regardless, it sure as hell ain't first-hand experience. I just know that war, and going to war, are matters of great consequence, and not to be taken lightly. And being "pro-soldier, anti-war" has always seemed like pretty basic common sense. It also seems like basic human decency – I'm not going to advocate that someone else go and possibly die on my behalf in a war unless there's a pretty damn compelling reason. That sure as hell is the message of every Vietnam vet I've ever met (as well as vets from WWII). Moreover, committed pacifists understand these values, and reflect them, far more deeply than any chickenhawk. Advocating a war with no skin in the game takes no courage; it's easy, especially when war's in fashion. Actually fighting a war is often ugly. War is hell. I remained flabbergasted that so many pundits and politicians who lived through the Vietnam War were so gung-ho about invading Iraq - and still giddily espouse war with little to no change in attitude.

Obviously, opinions can and will differ on the necessity and wisdom of a specific war, specific strategy, specific battle plan, or specific mission. That's fine. But the people who claim to be pro-soldier and are clearly pro-war are not to be trusted.

A Failure of Decision-Making

Former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who has worked closely with both and who has been an ideological ally of Wolfowitz but a close friend of [then Marine Brigadier General Anthony] Zinni, when asked to compare the two, said, "They have more similarities than differences." Both are smart and tenacious, and both have strong interests in the Muslim world, from the Mideast to Indonesia — the latter a country in which both have done some work. "The main difference," Armitage continued, "is that Tony Zinni has been to war, and he's been to war a lot. So he understands what it is to ask a man to lose a limb for his country."

Wolfowitz would later say that the "realists" such as Zinni did not understand that their policies were prodding the Mideast toward terrorism. If you liked 9/11, he would say after that event, just keep up policies such as the containment of Iraq. Zinni, for his part, would come to view Wolfowitz as a dangerous idealist who knew little about Iraq and had spent no real time on the ground there. Zinni would warn that Wolfowitz's advocacy of toppling Saddam Hussein through supporting Iraqi rebels was a dangerous and naive approach whose consequences hadn't been adequately considered. Largely unnoticed by most Americans during the 1990s, these contrasting views amounted to a prototype of the debate that would later occur over the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

- A discussion centering on the first Gulf War and its influence on the current Iraq War, from chapter 1 of Tom Ricks' book Fiasco. My emphasis.

Going to war is not something to be chosen lightly. Going to war, or not going to war, is not a neutral decision, like choosing a flavor of ice cream. You wouldn't know this from most pundit blather. The burden of proof should always rest with those advocating war, not those opposed to it. This shouldn't be remotely controversial. This is because war is hell, it is a radical course of action, and against any possible benefit or necessity it brings with it known and probable costs: human beings killed, maimed, disfigured, or otherwise injured and traumatized; property, infrastructure and economies destroyed; resources depleted and treasuries emptied; lasting resentments that might lead to more violence. War is a necessary evil at best, so going to war is a threshold decision – there must be a pressing, compelling case for it. Different people will have different perceptions of a situation, and different thresholds, and that's fine. But if someone insists we need a war, then it's up to that person: Make the case. Prove it.

In some conflicts, that case may be easy to make. But the case must be made first, and it's up to a nation's institutions and citizenry to insist that happens. The Iraq War is the most recent example here in the United States, but the only two things necessary to personally oppose an unnecessary conflict are a sufficient threshold for war and a decent bullshit detector. Actually preventing an unnecessary war further depends on a political system that responds to basic sanity, or can be forced to do so by its population (should they possess basic sanity). Even if one supports a given conflict, if one is honorable, it's essential that the case for war be made honestly and openly. Going to war should not be easy, and in a democracy it should be according to the will of the people versus a small cadre. A society should also recognize: it's much easier for the powerful to sell an unnecessary war in an atmosphere of fear and bullying, where questioning is discouraged or even punished. It's much easier to make bad decisions when vengeance is en vogue and a lynch mob mentality reigns. It's much easier to start an unnecessary war when the collective memory of past wars fades or fails, and a sanitized, bloodless version of war is allowed to dominate the national chatter.

All of these dynamics should be familiar to those who have studied past conflicts (perhaps WWI especially). And regardless of the specific cases for and against a given conflict, certain pundits will give warning signs, like droppings. Regardless of their specific blather, there are certain tones, attitudes, dynamics, and styles of argument that should be a giant red flag that a given figure has dropped a steaming pile of shit.

Foremost among these is if a pundit or politician wants to go to war.

War is hell. It's not a football game. No sane and honorable person would want one. This is why the basic framework of "pro-soldier, anti-war" is so essential, and so telling. Trash talk and tough guy bluster normally make for disastrous foreign policy. It's one thing if troopers who are actually going to be fighting talk up going to battle. They might not have seen combat, or they might need to psyche themselves up for what they're going to face; they're entitled to talk like this, they deserve some slack. In diplomacy, trash talk can even have its place on occasion. But when a pundit - or the President of the United States - says something like "Bring it on," to the enemy, it's completely reckless and irresponsible. In sports, this is called giving the other team "bulletin board material." In warfare, it means the other "team" will likely get riled up, and attack and kill more of the troopers the trash talker supposedly cares so much about. Anyone who wants to go to war, or revels in it – especially from a safe distance - is not to be trusted.

Apart from our trooper exception, anyone who wants a war is an idiot.

Let's rephrase that. Anyone who wants a war is a fucking idiot. Or a goddam scoundrel.

For most potential conflicts, there will be some honest war advocates, and these can be engaged on the merits. But in the run-up to the Iraq War, honesty was not that popular among the hawks, and many in the same crowd haven't changed their approach much since. Some of the powerful will favor a war to seize resources, or power of some other sort. Advocating war may also be personally profitable to their fortunes and reputations – it's good for business. To "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" can distract from domestic issues and deplete domestic funding. Traditionally, the Beltway is giddy for war, and blithe advocacy of war is considered the Height of Seriousness. Still, in addition to personal gain or sincere imperialism, the powerful seem to urge unnecessary wars for two key, related reasons: they have no skin in the game, and it's fashionable.

Some dishonest war cheerleaders will couch their rhetoric in the language of necessity. They need to be rooted out and pushed on the merits. But if a pundit or politician won't even take the trouble to do that – if he won't even try to lie about his feelings, to make the prudent disclaimers, and it's obvious he wants to go to war – that's a huge red flag he is an idiot, a scoundrel, or both. Regardless of which it is, why listen to such a person? It didn't take much to realize that Bush and the Cheney gang wanted to go to war. It's never taken great powers of perception to realize that Bill Kristol is a scoundrel and Richard Cohen is an idiot and a fool. (If there was any doubt before, their lack of repentance for their hawkdom, and their continued baiting of Iraq War opponents, should clinch it.)

The best metaphor for war is probably amputation. It's all the more appropriate given war's actual consequences. (I've seen a few others use this example.) Amputating a limb is a threshold decision. "Amputating" and "not amputating" are not equally valid choices. A surgeon might amputate a limb, but it's a measure of last resort. And while other doctors might admire a surgeon's skill at amputation, none of them would rush into the patient's room afterwards and throw a party over it. If a patient went to the doctor with a pain in her hand, she'd be rather shocked if he quickly suggested amputation. She'd naturally ask: Why? "Why not?" But why do we have to amputate my hand? "The real question is, can we afford not to amputate your hand?" But is it necessary? "Are you a coward? Only traitors are anti-amputation!"

If one really can't figure out whether a pro-war argument is mendacious or not, rewriting it with "amputation" should expose it. For example:

A Bush White House spokesman, January, 2003: "The President considers this nation to be at war, and, as such, considers any opposition to amputation to be no less than an act of treason."

Richard Cohen, February 2003: "Only a fool - or possibly a Frenchman - could be anti-amputation."

William Kristol, March 2003: "But amputation itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction... It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared by amputating limbs than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain."

Megan McArdle, February 2003: "I can't be mad at these little dweebs. I'm too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of amputation all too well picks up a machete and teaches them how very effective amputation can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner."

Richard Cohen, November 2006: "In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of amputation could be therapeutic."

Tony Snow, November 2006: "You can’t say, ‘I support the troops, but I hate amputation,’ because that’s why they signed up."

If a war is necessary, those who believe this must make the case. And even if war is necessary, bullying protesters is horrible for democracy. Conscientious objection, peaceful and vigorous protest, asking important questions, is patriotic, and no one who's taken a basic civics class should be so idiotic as to think otherwise. Given humanity's knack for folly, vanity, vengeance and hubris, and our history of unnecessary wars, anyone pitching a war should be treated with skepticism and pressed rigorously (Dan Froomkin has an excellent list of guidelines). These dynamics are why pacifists, who are not asking for others to die on their behalf, always deserve a seat at the table, because they represent basic sanity in a way that the rotating crop of chickenhawks simply don't. If the case for war isn't made honestly, it's probably because it can't be made honestly. If a war advocate is dishonest or disingenuous, that's a big warning sign. Vengeance, McCarthyism, or a lynch mob mentality also should be huge warning signs. Again: Anyone who wants war is a fool or scoundrel, and not to be trusted. Such a person is letting you know this, and you will be a fool, too, if you ignore this warning. For decision-makers, going to war should have more of a funeral tone than one of a party. It should be obvious, but the ass yelling "Wolverines!!!" during the somber part of the eulogy is not the guy you want to be following.

A Failure of Reflection

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, August 26th, 2002.

We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
– Dick Cheney, March 16th, 2003.

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
- Dick Cheney, June 30th, 2005.

Jim Lehrer: You drew a lot of heat and ridicule when you said eight months ago, insurgency is in its last throes. You regret having said that?

Cheney: No. I think the way I think about it, as I just described. I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I'll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was in fact a turning point, that putting in place a democratic government in Iraq was the, sort of the cornerstone, if you will, of victory against the insurgency.
- February 7th, 2006.

I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered.
- Dick Cheney, June 20th, 2005.

Why go over the decision to invade Iraq again? It's important because it was an unnecessary war, the case for war was dishonestly made, the results have been mostly disastrous, and many of those who pushed for war are still claiming they were right. Where is the reflection and learning? Those who showed some wisdom, and were pilloried for it, are still often pilloried, while the fools and scoundrels urging it are still often heeded. The same fatally flawed decision-making exists, and the Beltway culture still supports and even celebrates such an approach. Most importantly, American troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This section will partially recap an older post, "Day of Shame," centering on the presentation by Colin Powell to the United Nations that played a crucial role in selling the Iraq War to the American public.

As I wrote then, I think average citizens deserve far more slack than politicians and journalists. It wasn't completely irrational to believe, back before the war started, that 'Surely the Vice President wouldn't lie about something so important. Surely Colin Powell, who knows the costs of war, wouldn't deceive us.' Average citizens often can't follow political arguments that closely, even if they would like to, and often substitute confidence in a trusted figure for a detailed evaluation. But journalists follow the arguments every day, and there's some professional expectation of fact-checking and skepticism. Meanwhile, politicians who must decide whether or not to go to war, pretty much the weightiest decision possible, should approach it accordingly. Average citizens should try to be informed, especially on an issue like war. But the level of responsibility grows significantly with power and influence.

Once again, about the only things necessary to oppose an unnecessary war are a sufficient threshold for war and a decent bullshit detector. I find it hard to believe that most journalists and politicians didn't know that Bush and his administration wanted to go to war. Bush officials and their pundit allies could often barely contain their excitement. That should have been the first, enormous red flag. The taunting of protestors and the McCarthyist rhetoric should have been warnings as well. It was obvious that many Americans were angry after 9/11, and it also should have been obvious that anger can be misdirected and exploited. Recognizing such a situation, cooler, wiser heads will become more vigilant about bad decision-making – and scoundrels will look to exploit it. Given a crisis, leaders typically respond to it according to their core nature – and Bush, Cheney, Addington and the rest did not have the vision, wisdom or restraint of a Lincoln, FDR, or JFK. The Bush administration did not say there was "nothing to fear but fear itself" - it stoked fear. 9/11 didn't change the members of the Bush administration as much as it unleashed them. Read Angler and The Dark Side especially, but the Bush-Cheney gang routinely lied to Congress when they told them anything at all, and ran roughshod over members of their own administration. It's not accidental that an administration makes bad decisions when it deliberately sabotages all the mechanisms that aid good decisions and curtail horrendous ones. Cheney especially held radical views, had horrible judgment, and was absolutely ruthless about getting his way. That was (and continues to be) a lethal combination. And Bush, bored with the actual duties of office, incurious about growing into the presidency, petulant and hating to make decisions, let Cheney have his run of the place until late into his second term.

Some of the specific abuses of the Bush administration, and their timeline, have only come out years later, and other details remain to be revealed. But their general approach, their character, their attitudes and the quality of their arguments were apparent early on. The Bush administration and their allies kept flinging out one reason after another to go to war, often being incoherent and illogical in the process. I know I wasn't the only one who heard Bush's 2003 State of the Union and thought, 'how is Iraq suddenly this horrible, imminent threat, virtually out of nowhere? Where's the proof? Why aren't they volunteering it? Bush seems like he wants to go to war.' Remember when Bush pointed out that Saddam Hussein was dangerous because he 'gassed his own people'? Didn't that occur all the way back in the late 80s, when Iraq was a United States ally, before Rumsfeld's photographed meeting with Hussein to reassure him, and before the first Gulf War with Iraq? Why was that suddenly pressing now? And what did it say about Bush's case for war that he would make such a cynical, disingenuous argument? It was extremely troubling.

As Mark Danner recently wrote:

In Iraq in 2003, there was an autocratic government but no genocide. Indeed, when Saddam Hussein’s army had engaged in mass killing — against the Kurds in 1989 and against the Shiites in 1991 — American officials, who had been supplying Saddam with critical intelligence in 1989 and who commanded a United States Army in Iraq in 1991, had stood aside and done and said nothing.

A dozen years later, many of the same officials who had looked on when tens of thousands of Iraqis were being killed had no compunction about pointing to those graves to drum up support for an invasion of Iraq. The Bush administration’s “humanitarian argument” for the Iraq war was shameful and dishonest from the start. Sadly, many of those who well understood its dishonesty and cynicism, and who could have served the country — and done their jobs — by acting to expose it, for their own reasons stood and cheered America on to war.

Bush officials, Cheney most of all, were going around conflating 9/11 and Al Qaeda with one of bin Laden's regional enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. While many of the pre-war assertions were noteworthy for their bullshit factor, one of the most amazing came from Dick Cheney on Meet the Press in September 2003, after the Iraq War had been going roughly six months:

"If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Honestly, this is one of the most bigoted, fear-mongering, deceptive and unconscionable statements I've ever seen from a high-ranking official. I've covered it before, but note that not only does Cheney indirectly suggest that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, he uses “geographic base” to conflate all Middle Eastern countries (or at least our “enemies”) and all of their inhabitants. This would be like invading Australia because of David Hicks. Presumably Cheney's "geographic base" would include the country that produced most of the 9/11 terrorists - our erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia. But really, who can really tell all those Middle Eastern people apart? Plus, they look and talk so funny. (It's often been quipped that invading Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.)

I understand that some people sincerely believed that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and believed that Iraq was a threat, even an imminent one. All right. But it's harder for me to understand trusting Bush and the gang. I think many people in positions of influence knew Bush and the gang wanted to go to war – it's just that they didn't care, or actually approved. There were some war advocates, but not many, who said, 'Yes, Bush is a scoundrel, yes, he's lying, but I still think we need to go to war.' It's something, I suppose, but this wasn't a particularly wise position, given that Bush would be in charge of that resulting war. It's easy to forget some details of the Iraq War timeline and the run-up to war. Bush has still never explained when precisely he decided to go to war, or why, but by deduction it's been placed in the summer of 2002 – even though he was pretending to the public that war was not certain right up to the moment of invasion. If Bush had cared about WMD, he wouldn't have told the weapons inspectors, who were doing their job, to get out of Iraq, and then invaded. Perhaps most maddeningly, in July 2005, Bush chose to rewrite history, claiming: "The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." Most members of media didn't call him on this outrageous lie. Perhaps some of them were still cowed, but I honestly think some of them just didn't care. Most of the Beltway crowd simply don't have a problem with war, unnecessary or not.

Then there is Bush himself. A wastrel like Henry V in his early days (Shakespeare's Henry, that is) but without Henry V's brains, talent or personal courage, Bush was very much intent on learning a lesson from his father about "giddy minds and foreign quarrels." However, in George W. Bush's case, he viewed his father not as a source of wisdom but as a cautionary tale:

“[Bush] was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said, ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He went on, ‘If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.‘”

In 2004, Bush was using language like "Kick ass!" and " We are going to wipe them out!" with his generals, and as late as 2008, he was speaking to American personnel in Afghanistan about being "a little envious" because what they were doing was "exciting" and "in some ways romantic." Obviously, these are not the words of someone who knows that War is Hell.

Two earlier posts looked at how psychological need can drive the push for war, its continuation, and war policies in general. But Bush fit right in with most of the Beltway crowd. From the book Hubris, here's a portrait of one the war's most eager shills:

On the eve of war in Washington, journalists and others gathered at a cocktail party at the home of Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times... Judy Miller was one of several Times reporters there, and she seemed excited. Another journalist present asked if she was planning to head over to Iraq to cover the invasion. Miller, according to the other guest, could barely contain herself. "Are you kidding?" she asked. "I've been waiting for this war for ten years. I wouldn't miss it for the world!"

These are scoundrels and fools. Our national discourse remains dominated by them.

All this is why I'm really sick of whining from unrepentant hawks, especially when they still insist on mischaracterizing opponents to the Iraq War. Honest, respectful proponents of the war who've acknowledged their mistakes candidly and fully are another matter. But it would be immoral to let committed scoundrels and fools off the hook, because they're still pulling the same crap. Opposing the Iraq War and "getting it right" was never "accidental" or the result of a lucky coin flip – opposing war as a general principle until convinced otherwise is the position of basic sanity and wisdom. This isn't about bragging rights or vindication - it's about stopping unnecessary human suffering. That should be fucking obvious. From "Day of Shame":

That expectation is that a halfway decent human being of average intelligence, who actually possessed the good will he claims to have had, would note his colossal error, not to mention the clusterfuck that is Iraq, bemoan the terrible devastation and loss of human life, feel horrible, and learn from it. [Michael] O'Hanlon, and more "liberal" hawks than I care to mention, haven't fulfilled their side of that gentleman's agreement...

The issue with the unrepentant hawks isn't that they advocated war. It's partially that they advocated this war, but even that isn't fully it. It's that their entire framework for thinking about war and deciding to go to war is fundamentally flawed, and it has not changed. They do not truly view war as hell. They do not treat it as an option of last and terrible resort. It is a failure of memory, of decision-making, of reflection. More bluntly: How in holy fuck can someone get that wrong?!? Especially if they lived through the Vietnam War? Liberal hawks who complain 'we're with you on everything else, so stop picking on us' simply don't get it – this is extremely important, but also in a sense, very basic stuff. Who gives a shit if war is in fashion at The New Republic? Did you learn nothing from your expensive education? (For god's sake, take in one of those classic war books or films again, at the very least, or better yet visit Walter Reed or a gathering of vets.) The imperialists will likely always be scoundrels; while they must be constantly confronted, too, I'm more concerned with the fools. The unrepentant hawks may lack the capacity to fully understand the framework of 'war as a bad thing,' but they also refuse to acknowledge that most Iraq war opponents were working from precisely this basic framework. Fools like Richard Cohen still claim, ludicrously, that he was wrong for the right reasons and war opponents were right for the wrong reasons. And Cohen initially supported the Vietnam War, too. As Hilzoy put it:

Everyone makes mistakes. Not everyone makes mistakes as serious as this in the very field in which they have set themselves up as an expert. And not everyone makes essentially the same mistake twice -- failing to think hard enough about why one is advocating a war that will cost tens of thousands of people their lives. That Cohen is capable of making this mistake, failing to learn from it, and then making it again, shows that while he may have many talents, he doesn't have the knowledge and the judgment needed to responsibly hold the position he holds. The decent thing to do would be to resign.

Most unrepentant hawks are similar. From "Day of Shame" again: "The problem with O'Hanlon is, he'll keep on going, because he feels his reputation is at stake, which depends on him having been right, not on actually being right. It's nothing more than vanity, but more people could die as a result."

Vanity, vanity! All is vanity. And it is an obstinate, deadly vanity. It's the horrible message of Wilfred Owen's "Parable of the Young Man and the Old."

As for continuing an unnecessary war, and doubling down so that those who have died "will not have died in vain," we'll get into that in far more depth in a subsequent post. I've said it before as well, but briefly: regardless of the rightness or mendacity of a given mission, a trooper's service can be honorable or even heroic. But their virtue does not necessarily ennoble the mission itself, nor does any heroism they show transfer to those making the decisions, no matter how many times those bold, intuitively brilliant, God-touched Deciders don a flight suit and show off their genitals. Consider Pat Tillman, killed by "friendly fire" – clearly his service was honorable, but just as clearly, his death was unnecessary. His death was a tragedy, but it becomes a tragedy compounded if more people die by continuing an unnecessary war.

Nations can wage unnecessary wars because of internal political structure and power. But they also can do it because it's the fashion. Unnecessary wars become more likely when there's a failure of memory, a failure of rationality, and failures of decision-making, reflection, compassion and accountability. (We'll look at this more on the personal, individual level in that subsequent post.) But, to close, perhaps the issue of curbing 'giddy minds eager for foreign quarrels' can be made more starkly and simply.

Consider this story from former CIA analyst and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Ray McGovern in 2007:

Could it be that many Americans remain silent because we are unwilling to recognize the Iraq war as the first of the resource wars of the 21st century; because we continue to be comfortable hogging far more than our share of the world’s resources and will look the other way if our leaders tell us that aggressive war is necessary to protect that siren-call, “our way of life,” from attack by those who are just plain jealous?

Perhaps a clue can be found in the remarkable reaction I received after a lecture I gave two and a half years ago in a very affluent suburb of Milwaukee. I had devoted much of my talk to what I consider the most important factoid of this century: the world is running out of oil.

Afterwards some 20 folks lingered in a small circle to ask follow-up questions. A persistent, handsomely dressed man, who just would not let go, dominated the questioning:

"Surely you agree that we need the oil. Then what's your problem? Some 1,450 killed thus far are far fewer than the toll in Vietnam where we lost 58,000; it's a small price to pay... a sustainable rate to bear. What IS your problem?"

I asked the man if he would feel differently if one of those (then) 1,450 killed were his own son. Judging from his abrupt, incredulous reaction, the suggestion struck him as so farfetched as to be beyond his ken. “It wouldn’t be my son,” he said.

Now here's E. B. Sledge again:

There was nothing macho about the war at all. We were a bunch of scared kids who had to do a job. People tell me I don't act like an ex-marine. How is an ex-marine supposed to act? They have some Hollywood stereotype in mind. No, I don't look like John Wayne. We were in it to get it over with, so we could go back home and do what we wanted to do with our lives...

People talk about Iwo Jima as the most glorious amphibious operation in history. I've had Iwo veterans tell me it was more similar to Peleliu than any other battle they read about. What in the hell was glorious about it?...

My parents taught me the value of history. Both my grandfathers were in the Confederate Army. They didn't talk about the glory of war. They talked about how terrible it was.

Is either of these men a scoundrel or fool? Does either possess wisdom? Which one is better to heed? And which one sounds more like the pundit or politician currently talking on TV?

11/11 Armistice Day 2009

(Click on the comic strip for a larger view)

In 1959, Pogo creator Walt Kelly wrote:

The eleventh day of the eleventh month has always seemed to me to be special. Even if the reason for it fell apart as the years went on, it was a symbol of something close to the high part of the heart. Perhaps a life that stretches through two or three wars takes its first war rather seriously, but I still think we should have kept the name "Armistice Day." Its implications were a little more profound, a little more hopeful.

Amen, brother.

Thanks to all who have served or are serving, on this Veterans' Day, or Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day.

This post is mostly a repeat I run every year, since I find it hard to top Kelly.

However, this year I'm also using this post for an overview, linking a set of new pieces I'm posting over the course of the day (as part of an ongoing series on war). The starred posts are the most important, but the list is:

"Élan in The Guns of August"

"Demonizing of the Enemy"

"The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen"

***"Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels"

"The Little Mother"

***"War and the Denial of Loss"

The most significant previous entries in the series are:

"How to Hear a True War Story"

"Day of Shame"

"The Poetry of War"

 

The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen

I've featured Wilfred Owen's poetry before, but his work relates to several posts this year, and it's always relevant for Armistice Day. The British (specifically English and Welsh) Owen was tragically killed in combat just a week before World War I ended.

Owen is widely considered to be one of the greatest of war poets. I first read his work in college in a course on World War I, and I've grown to appreciate it even more over the years. Last year, I featured poetry by his good friend, Siegfried Sassoon. The novel Regeneration deals with their friendship, and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem incorporates Owen's poems. I'd recommend reading all of Owen's work, but this year, here are four.

This is probably his most famous poem:

Anthem for Doomed Youth
By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.8
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

This remains my favorite:

Dulce Et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

As the British website War Poetry explains:

DULCE ET DECORUM EST - the first words of a Latin saying (taken from an ode by Horace). The words were widely understood and often quoted at the start of the First World War. They mean "It is sweet and right." The full saying ends the poem: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country.

I hold a soft spot for the following poem, because I think it captures the vanity and madness of those urging war, and its continuance beyond all reason or human feeling:

The Parable of the Young Man and the Old
By Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

I'm featuring this last poem because it's mentioned by a vet I'm quoting in another post. It's also quite extraordinary.

Insensibility
By Wilfred Owen

I
Happy are men who yet before they are killed
Can let their veins run cold.
Whom no compassion fleers
Or makes their feet
Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.
The front line withers.
But they are troops who fade, not flowers,
For poets' tearful fooling:
Men, gaps for filling:
Losses, who might have fought
Longer; but no one bothers.

II
And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling,
And Chance's strange arithmetic
Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.
They keep no check on armies' decimation.

III
Happy are these who lose imagination:
They have enough to carry with ammunition.
Their spirit drags no pack.
Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.
Having seen all things red,
Their eyes are rid
Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.
And terror's first constriction over,
Their hearts remain small-drawn.
Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle
Now long since ironed,
Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

IV
Happy the soldier home, with not a notion
How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,
And many sighs are drained.
Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:
His days are worth forgetting more than not.
He sings along the march
Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,
The long, forlorn, relentless trend
From larger day to huger night.

V
We wise, who with a thought besmirch
Blood over all our soul,
How should we see our task
But through his blunt and lashless eyes?
Alive, he is not vital overmuch;
Dying, not mortal overmuch;
Nor sad, nor proud,
Nor curious at all.
He cannot tell
Old men's placidity from his.

VI
But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,
That they should be as stones.
Wretched are they, and mean
With paucity that never was simplicity.
By choice they made themselves immune
To pity and whatever mourns in man
Before the last sea and the hapless stars;
Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;
Whatever shares
The eternal reciprocity of tears.

Demonizing the Enemy

(British WWI poster, from this helpful site. A few more are scattered throughout this post. Click them for a larger view.)

There's an observation I've seen attributed to several different people, that in a democracy, sustaining a war effort over a long time depends on increasingly demonizing of the enemy. The basic idea is that pitching honor, glory and country might be great for initial recruitment, but later on, as the body count piles up, and the costs of war become more apparent at home, ideals will not motivate young men to go to fight and die. Only pure, unyielding hatred will do that.

In the United States today, without a draft, and a Pentagon policy since at least the first Gulf War of hiding and sanitizing the violence of warfare, these dynamics might not apply in the same way. War in all its ugliness can be kept relatively tidy for those not actually fighting. Regardless, this was certainly not the case with World War I for most of the nations involved.

Major nations in World War I really had no idea how horrible it would be going in, and significant factions wanted war initially. More frighteningly, in some cases their furor grew over time.

An earlier post deals more with the outbreak of war. Meanwhile, I own a slim volume of essays titled, World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History. In "The Revolution in War and Diplomacy," Gordon A. Craig describes:

...The young idealists who dashed off to the front in 1914 with their hearts full of high resolve and their minds bent on that better world which would, they were sure, be the result of their sacrifice.

[p.24]

Many materials in 1914 and earlier express this idealism.



Consider Germany's Crown Prince Wilhelm on the Prospect of War, 1913:

Today, indeed, we live in a time which points with special satisfaction to the proud height of its culture, which is only too willing to boast of its international cosmopolitanism, and flatters itself with visionary dreams of the possibility of an everlasting peace throughout the world.

This view of life is un-German and does not suit us. The German who loves his people, who believes in the greatness and the future of our homeland, and who is unwilling to see its position diminished, dare not close his eyes in the indulgence of dreams such as these, he dare not allow himself to be lulled into indolent sleep by the lullabies of peace sung by the Utopians...

Therefore every one, to whom his country is dear, and who believes in a great future for our nation, must joyfully do his part in the task of seeing that the old military spirit of our fathers is not lost, and that it is not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. For the sword alone is not decisive, but the arm steeled in exercise which bears the sword...

The rest must be read to be believed. Some of this naïveté may be a class issue, but not entirely. He presents war as glorious and romantic, even more than so in "Charge of the Light Brigade."



Speaking of poetry, there's the idealized vision of war in Rupert Brooke's 1915 poem, part of a cycle:

The Soldier
By Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

One must account for poetic license, and this is quite stirring in its way. Additionally, Brooke died early in the war, before the worst of it. But this is also a stark contrast with the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who saw combat on the front lines.

Now we turn to one of their friends. One of the better first-person accounts of World War I is Good-Bye to All That by British soldier, poet and novelist Robert Graves. His book is cynical and cerebral, witty and sarcastic, and may occasionally be unreliable in its details. But Graves captures his own shifts in attitude, and creates a memorable, stark portrait of the insanity and horrors of WWI.

Public attitudes toward war are lighter, more full of talk of honor, early on in the book. Young men in Britain initially enlisted in large numbers, including a significant percent of the upper and upper-middle class. Graves himself was well-to-do. But the demonizing increases as the war goes on. This passage takes place in January 1917. After mistakenly being declared dead, mostly recovering from wounds, and shipping back to France, Graves has a new command and contends with new recruits and the local brothel:

There were no restraints in France; these boys had money to spend and knew they stood a good chance of being killed within a few weeks anyhow. They did not want to die virgins. The Drapeau Blanc saved the life of scores by incapacitating them for future trench service. Base venereal hospitals were always crowded. The troops took a lewd delight in exaggerating the proportion of Army chaplains to combatant officers treated there.

At the bull ring, the instructors were full of bullet-and-bayonet enthusiasm, with which they tried to infect the drafts. The drafts were now, for the most part, either forcibly enlisted men or wounded men returning; and at this dead season of the year could hardly be expected to feel enthusiastic on their arrival in France. The training principles had recently been revised. Infantry Training, 1914, laid it down politely that the soldier's ultimate aim was to put out of action or render ineffective the armed forces of the enemy. The War Office no longer considered this statement direct enough for a war of attrition. Troops learned instead that they must HATE the Germans, and KILL as many of them as possible. In bayonet-practice, the men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructor' faces were set in a permanent ghastly grin. 'Hurt him, now! In at the belly! Tear his guts out!' they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. 'Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes!... Naaoh! Anyone would think that you loved the bloody swine, patting and stroking 'em like that! BITE HIM, I SAY! STICK YOUR TEETH IN HIM AND WORRY HIM! EAT HIS HEART OUT!'

Once more I felt glad to be sent up to the trenches.

- Good-Bye to All That, chapter 21, pp. 236-237.

Nor was this attitude of bloodthirsty vengeance limited to military training. From "The Revolution in War and Diplomacy" by Gordon A. Craig again:

It is sometimes pointed out, as a proof of the power of special interest groups in the determination of Germany's wartime policy, that both Chancellor Theobald van Bethmann-Hollweg and Foreign Minister Richard von Kühlmann were forced out of office because they advocated a peace short of total victory. It is true that these officials were the victims of a military-big-business cabal that did not want a negotiated settlement, but it is surely worth noting that their dismissal elicited not the slightest evidence of any popular indignation over the treatment accorded them. Nor should it be forgotten that, when former Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne, sickened by the slaughter in the trenches, wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph in November, 1917, in which her urged that a negotiated peace be arranged while there was still something of a European civilization to save, he was viciously attacked by the Northcliffe and Rothermere press, denounced by politicians who described his letter as "craven" and "inept," and – in the words of his biographer – subjected to "a flood of invective and an incredible mass of abusive correspondence which, though largely incoherent, was marked by a violence rare in English political life."

[pp.15-16]

We'll see more of this insanity in "The Little Mother" and some of the other posts in this cycle, but some of these attitudes seem all too familiar today. Sadly, madness is often the fashion.



(Slightly revised for typos. This post is part of a series on war, and a smaller set of posts for Armistice Day 2009.)

Élan in The Guns of August

PRINCE HENRY
Why, thou owest God a death.

Exit Prince Henry.

FALSTAFF
'Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him
before his day. What need I be so forward with him
that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks
me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I
come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or
an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is
honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What
is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He
that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he
hear it? No. 'Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But
will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will
not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a
mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism.

- Henry IV, part 1 , 5.1, 126-140.

One of the best books on World War I I've read is Barbara W. Tuchman's The Guns of August, about the war's outbreak. I'm going to quote from several sections to highlight the madness surrounding the start of the war, because Tuchman does a superb job at this. I've always been particulary struck by how many people in the major nations were eager for war, and wanted it, not knowing what was to come. This post is mainly to give background for later posts today, but I'd recommend picking up a copy of the actual book.

From Chapter 3, "The Shadow of Sedan," before the war has started, as the nations plan:

French strategy did not ignore the threat of envelopment by a German right wing. On the contrary, the French General Staff believed that the stronger the Germans made their right wing, the corresponding weaker they would leave their center and left where the French Army planned to break through. French strategy turned its back to the Belgian frontier and its face to the Rhine. While the Germans were taking the long way around to fall upon the French flank, the French planned a two-pronged offensive that would smash through the German center and left on either side of the German fortified area at Metz and by victory there, sever the German right wing from its base, rendering it harmless. It was a bold plan born an idea- an idea inherent in the recovery of France from the humiliation of Sedan.

Under the peace terms dictated by Germany at Versailles in 1871, France had suffered amputation, indemnity, and occupation. Even a triumphal march by the German Army down the Champs Elysées was among the terms imposed. It took place along a silent, black-draped avenue empty of onlookers. At Bordeaux, when the French Assembly ratified the peace terms, the deputies of Alsace-Lorraine walked from the hall in tears, leaving behind their protest: "We proclaim forever the right of Alsatians and Lorrainers to remain members of the French nation." We swear for ourselves, our constituents, our children and our children's children to claim that right for all time, by every means, in the force of the usurper."

The annexation, though opposed by Bismark, who said it would be the Achilles' heel of the new German Empire, was required by the elder Moltke and his Staff. They insisted, and convinced the Emperor, that the border provinces with Metz, Strasbourg, and the crest of the Vosges must be sliced off in order to put France geographically forever on the defensive. They added a crushing indemnity of five billion francs intended to hobble France for a generation, and lodged an army of occupation until it should be paid. With one enormous effort the French raised and paid off the sum within three years, and their recovery began.

The memory of Sedan remained, a stationary dark shadow on the French consciousness. "N'en parlez jamias; pensez-y toujours" (Never speak of it; think of it always) had counseled Gambatta. For more than forty years the thought of "Again" was the single most fundamental factor of French policy. In the early years after 1870, instinct and military weakness dictated a fortress strategy. France walled herself in behind a system of entrenched camps connected by forts. Two fortified lines, Belfort-Epinal and Toul-Verdun, guarded the eastern frontier, and one, Maubeuge-Valenciennes-Lille, guarded the western half of the Belgian frontier, the gaps between were intended to canalize the invasion forces.

Behind her wall, as Victor Hugo urged at his most vibrant: "France will have but one thought: to reconstitute her forces, gather her energy, nourish her sacred anger, raise her young generation to form an army of the whole people, to work without cease, to study the methods and skills of our enemies, to become again a great France, the France of 1792, the France of an idea with a sword. Then one day she will be irresistible. Then she take back Alsace-Lorraine."

[pp. 28-30]

The entire chapter centers on this great psychic wound among the French and its profound effect on their plans. They developed a war strategy that satisfied this need, but was at great odds with geography and their forces.

Later on:

Living in the shadow of that unfinished business, France, reviving in spirit and strength, grew weary of being eternally on guard, eternally exhorted by her leaders to defend herself. As the century turned, her spirit rebelled against thirty years of the defensive with its implied avowal of inferiority. France knew herself to be physically weaker than Germany. Her population was less, her birth rate lower. She needed some weapon that Germany lacked to give herself confidence in her survival. The "idea with a sword" fulfilled the need. Expressed by Bergson it was called élan vital, the all-conquering will. Belief in its power convinced France that the human spirit, need not, after all, bow to the presdestined forces of evolution which Schopenhauer and Hegel had declared to be irresistible. The spirit of France would be the equalizing factor. Her will to win, her élan, would enable France to defeat her enemy. Her genius was in her spirit, the spirit of la glorie, of 1792, of the incomparable "Maseillaise," the spirit of General Margueritte's heroic cavalry charge before Sedan when even Wilhelm I, watching the battle, could not forbear the cry, "Oh, les braves gens!"

Belief in the fervor of France, in the furor Gallicae, revived France's faith in herself in the generation after 1870. It was that fervor, unfurling her banners, sounding her bugles, arming her soldiers, that would lead France to victory if the day of "Again" should come.

Translated into military terms Bergson's élan vital became the doctrine of the offensive. In proportion as a defensive gave way to an offensive strategy, the attention paid to the Belgian frontier gradually gave way in favor of a progressive shift of gravity eastward toward the point where the French offensive could be launched to break through to the Rhine. For the Germans the roundabout road through Flanders led to Paris; for the French it led nowhere. They could only get to Berlin by the shortest way. The more the thinking of the French General Staff approached the offensive, the greater the forces it concentrated at the attacking point and the fewer it left to defend the Belgain frontier.

The doctrine of the offensive had its fount in the Ecole-Supérieuse de la Guerre, or War College, the ark of the army's intellectual elite, whose director, General Ferdinand Foch, was the molder of French military theory of his time. Foch's mind, like a heart, contained two valves: one pumped spirit into strategy; the other circulated common sense. On the one hand Foch preached a mystique of will expressed in his famous aphorisms, "The will to conquer is the first condition of victory," or more succinctly, "Victoire c'est la volonté" and, "A battle won is a battle in which one will not confess one is beaten."

In practice this was to become the famous order at the Marne to attack when the situation called for retreat. His officers of those days remember him bellowing, "Attack! Attack!" with furious, sweeping gestures while he dashed about in short rushes as if charged by an electric battery. Why, he was later asked, did he advance at the Marne when he was technically beaten? "Why? I don't know. Because of my men, because I had a will. And then – God was there."

[pp. 31-32]

This attitude of the daring offensive was extremely fashionable, and influential:

[Director of the Bureau of Military Operations] Colonel Grandmaison grasped only the head and not the feet of Foch's principles. Expounding their élan without their sureté, he expressed a military philosophy that electrified his audience. He waved before their dazzled eyes an "idea with a sword" which showed them how France could win. Its essence was the offense à outrance, offense to the limit. Only this could achieve Clausewitz' decisive battle which "exploited to the finish is the essential act of war" and "once engaged, must be pushed to the end, with no second thoughts, up to the extremes of human endurance." Seizure of the initiative is the sine qua non. Preconceived arrangements based on a dogmatic judgment of what the enemy will do are premature. Liberty of action is achieved only by imposing one's will upon the enemy. "All command decisions must be inspired by the will to seize and retain the initiative." The defensive is forgotten, abandoned, discarded; its only possible justification is an occasional "economizing of forces at certain points with a view to adding them to the attack."

The effect on the General Staff was profound, and during the next two years was embodied in new Field Regulations for the conduct of the war and in a new plan of campaign called Plan 17, which was adopted in May, 1913. With a few months of Grandmaison's lectures, the President of the Republic, M. Fallières, announced: "The offensive alone is suited to the temperament of French soldiers... We are determined to march straight against the enemy without hesitation."...

"The offensive alone... leads to positive results."...

Nowhere in the eight commandments [of the new Field Regulations] was there mention of matérial or firepower or what Foch called sureté. The teaching of the Regulations became epitomized in the favorite word of the French officer corps, le cran, nerve, or, less politely, guts. Like the youth who set out for the mountaintop under the banner marked "Excelsior!" the French Army marched to war in 1914 under a banner marked "Cran."

[pp. 33-34]

I simply can't include everything, but Tuchman provides a wealth of further details. Personally, I see plenty of parallels with today's war rhetoric.

These were fateful decisions. Not all of the ideas were necessarily bad, but there wasn't much thought given to negative consequences or other alternatives. The French also completely misjudged the strength, numbers and composition of the German forces, despite some early warnings and reports. Psychologically, they just could not accept these assessments, because they were certain of their own assumptions (on reserves mixing with regular troops, on the proper weight of artillery, on the sheer size of the German Army, etc.).

The most glaring disconnect may be with the battle over the French uniform. It's a wonder that after past disasters, impractical battle uniforms were still so popular anywhere going into the 20th Century:

[French Minister of War] Messimy having fervently stamped out [General] Michel's heresy of the defensive [battle plan], did his best, as War Minister, to equip the army to fight a successful offensive but was in his turn frustrated in his most cherished prospect – the need to reform the French uniform. The British had adopted khaki after the Boer War, and the Germans were about to make the change from Prussian blue to field-gray. But in 1912 French soldiers still wore the same blue coats, red kepi, and red trousers they had worn in 1830 when rifle fire carried only two hundred paces and when armies, fighting at these close quarters, had no need for concealment. Visiting the Balkan front in 1912, Messimy saw the advantages gained by the dull-colored Bulgarians and came home determined to make the French soldier less visible. His project to clothe him in gray-blue or gray-green raised a howl of protest. Army pride was as intransigent about giving up its red trousers as it was about adopting heavy guns. Army prestige was once again felt to be at stake. To clothe the French soldier in some muddly, inglorious color, declared the army's champions, would be to realize the fondest hopes of Dreyfusards and Freemasons. To banish "all that is colorful, all that gives the soldier his vivid aspect," wrote the Echo de Paris, "is to go contrary bother to French taste and military function." Messimy pointed out that the two might no longer be synonymous, but his opponents proved immovable. At a parliamentary hearing, a former War Minister, M. Etienne, spoke for France.

"Eliminate the red trousers?" he cried. "Never! Le pantalon rouge c'est la France!"

"That blind and imbecile attachment to the most visible of all colors," wrote Messimy afteward, "was to have cruel consequences."

[pp. 37-38]

The idea of keeping the dress uniforms snazzy and the field uniforms practical was apparently too radical.

There's plenty more in that chapter alone. Again, I'd recommend picking up a copy. But reading these sections reminds me again of how much psychology, or the zeitgeist, or consensus among the powerful, shapes war policy more than reality or any practical assessment of the situation. Or rather, it reminds me that our Beltway dolts are nothing new. (I don't think most of the stay-the-course-in-Afghanistan crowd are very realistic or honest, for instance, but that's a subject that deserves its own post.)

In the run-up to World War I, madness was not limited to one country. I deal with Britain more in other posts today, but Tuchman's descriptions of Russia would be comic if not for the dread consequences of these attitudes:

Insofar as readiness for war was concerned, the regime was personified by its Minister for War, General Sukhomlinov, an artful, indolent pleasure-loving, chubby little man in his sixties of whom his colleague, Foreign Minister Sazanov, said, "It was difficult to make him work but to get him to tell the truth was well-night impossible." Having won the Cross of St. George as a dashing young cavalry officer in the war of 1877 against the Turks, Sukhomlinov believed that military knowledge acquired in that campaign was permanent truth. As Minister of War he scolded a meeting of Staff College instructors for interest in such "innovations" as the factor of firepower against the saber, lance and the bayonet charge. He could not hear the phrase "modern war," he said, without a sense of annoyance. "As war was, so it has remained... all these things are merely vicious innovations. Look at me, for instance; I have not read a military manual for the last twenty-five years." In 1913 he dismissed five instructors of the College who persisted in preaching the vicious heresy of "fire tactics."

[p. 61]

Sukhomlinov thrived by ingratiating himself at court. While it's a truism that generals are always fighting the last war, Sukhomlinov's Luddite, incurious habits are particularly alarming to read:

While Sukhomlinov left work to others, he allowed no freedom of ideas. Clinging stubbornly to obsolete theories and ancient glories, he claimed that Russia's past defeats had been due to mistakes of commanding officers rather than to any inadequacy of training, preparation, or supply. With invincible belief in the bayonet's supremacy over the bullet, he made no effort to build up factories for increased production of shells, rifles and cartridges. No country, its military critics invariably discover afterward, is ever adequately prepared in munitions. Britain's shell shortage was to become a national scandal; the French shortage of everything from heavy artillery to boots was a scandal before the war began; in Russia, Sukhomlinov did not even use up the funds the government appropriated for munitions. Russia began the war with 850 shells per gun compared to a reserve of 2,000 to 3,000 shells per gun used by the Western armies, although Sukhomlinov himself had agreed in 1912 to a compromise of 1,500 per gun. The Russian infantry division had 7 field-gun batteries compared with 14 in the German division. The whole Russian army had 60 batteries compared with 381 in the German Army. Warnings that war would be largely a duel of firepower Sukhomlinov treated with contempt.

[pp. 63-64]

Let's return to the French. From chapter 13, "Sambre et Meuse," the French advance:

The Germans had prepared the region against expected French attack with barbed wire, trenches, and gun emplacements. At both Sarrebourg and Morhange they had well-fortified positions from which they could only be dislodged by an attack of irresistible élan or bombardment by heavy artillery. The French counted on the first and scorned the second.

"Thank God we don't have any!" replied a General Staff artillery officer in 1909 when questioned about 105 mm. heavy field artillery. "What gives the French Army its force is the lightness of its cannon."

[pp. 206-207]

Shockingly, this was not the best of approaches. Psychological need does not make for good strategy, nor tactics, in a reality-based war.

From the end of the chapter "Debacle," after the battle of Namur:

The news shocked an incredulous world. The Times of London had said Namur would withstand a siege of six months; it had fallen in four days. In accents of stunned understatement it was said in England that the fall of Namur 'is recognized as a distinct disadvantage... and the chance of the war being brought to a speedy conclusion are considerably reduced."

How far reduced, how distant the end, no one yet knew. No one could realize that for numbers engaged and for rate and number of losses suffered over a comparable period of combat, the greatest battle of the war had already been fought. No one could yet foresee its consequences: how the ultimate occupation of all Belgium and northern France would put the Germans in possession of the industrial power of both countries, of the manufactures of Liège, the coal of the Borinage, the iron ore of Lorraine, the factories of Lille, the rivers and railroads and agriculture, and this occupation, feeding German ambition and fastening upon France the fixed resolve to fight to the last drop of recovery and reparation, would block all later attempts at compromise peace or "peace without victory" and would prolong the war for four more years.

All this is hindsight. On August 24 the Germans felt an immense surge of confidence. They saw only beaten armies ahead; the genius of Schlieffen had been proved; decisive victory seemed within German grasp. In France, President Poincaré wrote in his diary: We must make up our minds both to retreat and to invasion. So much for the illusions of the last fortnight. Now the future of France depends on her powers of resistance."

Élan had not been enough.

[p. 262]

No, it was enough, and these nations did not know what was to come. Nor did they adjust to war on a scale more horrific than any known before. In the slim collection of essays, World War I: A Turning Point in Modern History, editor Jack J. Roth writes in the introduction:

...World War I possibly played a unique role in this convulsion – it may have "stacked the cards for the future." The war was in many ways without precedent: never had so many nations been involved; never had a war absorbed so much of the resources of the combatants or left them so exhausted; and never had the slaughter been of such magnitude or so senseless. In the Battle of Verdun, for example, casualties on both sides numbered over 750,000; at the Somme it was over 1,200,000 and the battle lines hardly changed. One out of every two French males who were between the ages of twenty and thirty-two in 1914 was killed during the war. If Europeans could accept casualties on such a scale, they could accept almost anything in the way of slaughter. The greatest tragedy of our time – its monstrous violence – begins in the trenches of World War I. Verdun and the Somme opened the way to Auschwitz and Hiroshima...

[pp. 5-6]

The casualties in World War I were staggering, and the descriptions of many of the battles, and trench warfare in general, are chilling. And there was far more to come.

(Minor revisions for typos and clarity. This post is part of a series on war, and a smaller set of posts for Armistice Day 2009.)

Audio of British World War I POWs

Public Radio International's show The World has a short, fascinating piece on audio of British World War I prisoners of war in Germany. The audio was recorded by a German linguist. What's particularly valuable is that he recorded British regional dialects that in some cases don't exist anymore. The last sample is a bit moving (it's from a Scotsman, naturally).

Preventing People From Dying is Just Like Genocide

These photos from the teabagger rally of Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) have thankfully been getting some exposure:



The sign says “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau Germany – 1945." I first saw this item via Richard Blair of All Spin Zone. Distributorcap also has a brief item on this, and notes, "This was no Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin event - this was an event sponsored and pushed by the Republican leadership in the House and Senate - including Eric Fucking Cantor." Richard's post has contact information for Bachmann, Boehner and Cantor.

There's a point at which idiocy isn't funny, and being outrageous isn't so much offensive as it is grossly irresponsible and dangerous. It’s not as if there aren't legitimate criticisms of various health care reform proposals. But this isn't about respectable, 'different points of view' when one group is claiming that a government measure – one that could help people – is the same as one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated. One has to be pretty idiotic, or crazy, or irresponsible, to claim that giving people health care – which might save 22,000 – 45,000 lives a year, or more – is just like genocide, mass murder. And it's not as if this is an isolated incident, since this type of crap has been around for months now. This merely may be the most prominent example yet. It's sad that the light of day and being at the United States Capitol doesn't dissuade Michelle Bachmann, the Beck and Limbaugh fans, and the teabaggers from this poisonous bilge. Perhaps it only eggs them on.

I already linked an August post, "Deny Me Health Care or Give Me Death" in the previous post, and I have several more on the Holocaust. (Then there's more comically inept Holocaust references by right-wingers.) Sometimes Nazi analogies are appropriate, and sometimes they are irresponsible. I'm just very sick of the cavalier comparisons to Hitler and Stalin, especially when they're aimed at pretty centrist, establishmentarian politicians by far right authoritarians. It's all the more absurd when one considers - which group exactly is running around screaming about the dread menace of those who aren't real Germans, err, Americans, in our midst? This crap is dishonest, irresponsible, idiotically ahistorical, and just disgusting.

In late October, Scott Horton published a powerful short piece called "A Trip to Chon Tash" about novelist Chingiz Aitmatov and Aitmatov's struggle to deliver "a critical view of the legacy of Soviet rule in Central Asia and his native Kyrgyzstan." In 1938, Stalin had Aitmatov's father and 136 others among the intelligentsia murdered. This pattern will sound tragically familiar to those who know the history of Stalin. (Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror gives an overview, and I heard some heartbreaking stories in Russia during my brief study there.) In his piece, Horton visits the memorial erected near the pit where the bodies were buried (emphasis mine):

What transpired in Chon Tash occurred dozens of times across the vast frozen expanse of the Soviet Union, part of the policy that historians have come to call “decapitation,” the systematic murder of intellectuals and political leaders because of Stalin’s fear—part paranoid delusion and part real—that they would present some threat to him. Stalin’s object in dealing with the “nationalities” was to leave them leaderless and docile, and he was prepared to reach to the most brutal tools to achieve this.

In his novel [The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years], Aitmatov turns to the ancient Turkic legend of the mankurt. The head of a man taken prisoner is shaved and the moistened skin of a camel is applied to it. He is then sent into the desert, where the drying of the skin produces horrible torture. If the prisoner survives, his personality is destroyed by the process, and with it any recollection of the past. He is reduced to subservience to his master. The mankurt may look outwardly like a human being, but he is not. Aitmatov’s message, which struggled to escape censorship, was plain: this was what Stalin had done to Central Asia. And for Aitmatov, the lost memory was never more poignantly presented than in the fate of his father, a fate he learned only after the Soviet Union fell and the truth could be told.

Saturday was a brilliant autumn day in the foothills of the Alatoo Range of the Celestial Mountains. I traveled to Chon Tash to visit the memorial, ringed with blood-red roses, still in bloom after the season’s first snowfall. I went to pay respects to Chingiz Aitmatov, who died in June of last year leaving instructions that he be buried alongside his father at the site of that Stalinist act of terror. The sun shone with special intensity and the sky was cloudless. The willow birch trees had not yet released their golden leaves. A brook rustled in the valley below, and stately tall cypress-shaped pine trees could be seen on the hills above. A group of military cadets were there for an oath-taking ceremony held directly above the ground from which the remains had been excavated, and the message of the setting was clear to all: don’t forget the great wrong that can occur when the power of the state is wielded brutally and the spirit of the law is disrespected.

The crimes of the old regime were on exhibition to those swearing an oath to uphold the new order. In the museum at the site the possessions of many of the victims were displayed with some biographical details. Documents from the archives of the NKVD/KGB showed the trappings of legal formalism that accompanied the brutal deeds, every murder judicially authorized with a sentence stamped and sealed. The execution of the sentence was scrupulously documented. And on one wall was a simple display that spoke powerfully: a portrait of Stalin, and below it a skull, resting on stones taken from the pit.

In America today, the name and image of Stalin are invoked heavily by fringe critics of Barack Obama. The critics disagree with his policies on health care and see in it the basis for increasing power of the state. The role the state will play in the healthcare system is a legitimate political issue on which well-informed citizens can have different views. But the comparison to Stalin makes clear that these critics really have no inkling of who Joseph Stalin was, what he did, and why his name lives in special infamy at hallowed spots like the pit at Chon Tash. This frivolous use of his name and image cheapens our nation’s political dialogue, and it is also a mark of disrespect to his victims. And it points to the fundamental crisis of which Aitmatov wrote so powerfully: the failure to know the past, to be informed by it, and to distill guidance from it. The age of the mankurt, alas, has not passed.

Horton puts it very well. What's true of Chon Tash and Stalin is true of Dachau and Hitler, and I would hope that at the United States Capitol some basic sense, and sense of decency, would prevail. There's a common thread that runs through every account of a Holocaust survivor I've heard, and every tale of Soviet oppression: memory can be an act of conscience. Simply remembering things accurately, or grieving and honoring the dead, can become an act of virtue. I've no illusions that the sort of noxious crap the teabaggers are shilling will stop any time soon. But there's no reason it should go unchallenged.

Update: I forgot to mention the teabagger slurs against the Rothchilds, but it gets worse. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel denounced the Dachau poster, and in their wrath the teabaggers went even lower. Make sure you've got a strong stomach before reading the comments at the link.

Personally, when I read that crap, I think of a steady stream of obscenities, interlaced in a sentence like: "If Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel thinks your Dachau poster is inappropriate, you're on the wrong side of that argument, you historically illiterate people." Wiesel's short book Night remains one of the best introductions to the Holocaust, and I heard him speak back in the 90s. It's fine to disagree with the man on specific contemporary issues, but I felt he radiated a spiritual maturity, he spoke exceptionally well on the Holocaust, and it was a moving and inspiring address. The teabaggers are on one level experts at unintentional self-parody, as attacks on Wiesel show, but their authoritarian, delusional (and occasionally anti-Semitic) assaults aren’t just ironic – there's something dangerous there.

Glenn Beck, Stewart Style

This has been all over the blogosphere, but I'm still not tired of it, and it's an instant classic. Stewart plunges into the demagogic truthiness of Glenn Beck:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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If you're not familiar with Glenn Beck's shtick, Crooks and Liars has a good collection. The Daily Show has mocked him many times before, as has Colbert. I haven't written much on the guy, but this October post on Beck's McCarthyist style links several good pieces on him.

A few observations. Many Americans are feeling uneasy, with good reason. There are individual exceptions within them, but overall neither major political party is taking on the power players on Wall Street who nearly destroyed the world economy and are reckless about doing it again. Beck plays off of that real unease, although his main target is the teabagger crowd watching his show on Fox News, and their discomforts are more numerous, reactionary and alarming. Beck's a bit crazy, and he says grossly false, idiotic and illogical things all the time. But he's proven to be pretty successful as a demagogue because he knows his audience. Beck fans hear him speaking an emotional truth to them. He expresses their anxieties and he gives them scapegoats. I tried to cover some of the dangerous demagoguery on death panels and Nazis in an August post (" Obama can't be trusted because he doesn't hate the right people. And surely Obama must hate us as much as we hate him."). But as several others including Digby have noted, for Beck's audience, what he says doesn't need to make sense.

I've said it before, but The Daily Show and The Colber Report are truly brilliant with ridiculous frequency. That's very, very hard, and it's easy to take for granted because they make it look so effortless. This particular bit is also one of Stewart's best individual performances. Mocking the scoundrels and fools in power is extremely important, and sometimes all we have, so thank goodness for artists and comedians.

Amadou & Mariam - "Sabali"

The very last "bye-bye" is clipped here, and I wish the song was longer, but it's memorable.

Blue Gal Blogiversary

Champion of small blogs and scourge of the wicked, obtuse and humorless, the indispensable, indefatigable Blue Gal keeps the internet hamsters running. She also celebrates her fifth blogiversary today. Swing by to say hi.

The GOP's Non-Existent Health Care Plan

The GOP still doesn't have a health care plan. They never have. This has rarely seemed to bother them, or the media. It's been pointed out again, though, this time by Harry Reid. Maybe it'll get some coverage this time.

This comes via John Cole, who has some thoughts on the enduring myth-making around nasty partisan and policy dunce John McCain and his magical kumbaya powers.

Remember Republican hack Alex Castellanos telling Alan Grayson on CNN that the GOP did so have a health care plan? In addition to Castellanos making dubious claims, it turns out CNN failed to disclose Castellanos's ties to the insurance industry and the GOP campaign to kill health care reform. Speaking of Grayson – who movingly read stories of the dead on the House floor – there's a money bomb movement for him.

Why can't the GOP produce a health care plan? One answer is that they don't want to. Another is that they can't. As Anonymous Liberal points out, "The problem the GOP faces is a very simple one: it is impossible to translate their "principles" into a functional plan." The same goes for most movement conservative policies. Conservatives have opposed Medicare since its creation, and have constantly tried to slash it or destroy it altogether. Yet in the past few months, some prominent Republicans have pretended to champion the program, and claim to be protecting it against those evil Democrats. Added to this hypocrisy is the glaring incoherence of the GOP defending Medicare, a government-run health care program, while denouncing the evils of a national... government-run health care program. The lack of consistency and coherence is one of many tip-offs that they're bullshitting.

On the ideology front, we can see the same trend in the election in New York's conservative 23rd District. The local Watertown Daily Times has decided to endorse the Democrat, Bill Owens, over the right-wing teabagger Douglas Hoffman:

Mr. Hoffman is running as an ideologue. If he carries out his pledges on earmarks, taxation, labor law reform and other inflexible positions, Northern New York will suffer. This rural district depends on the federal government for an investment in Fort Drum and its soldiers, environmental protection of our international waterway and the Adirondack Park, and the livelihood of all our dairy farmers across the district, among other support. Our representative cannot be locked into rigid promises and policies that would jeopardize these critical sectors of our economy.

Again, this lack of grounding in reality is the case for most conservative policies.

On the incoherent, dangerous bullshit front, this also precisely describes Joe Lieberman. He's whining that people question his motives and won't debate him on substance when he's repeatedly shown he has no principles and no substance. His excuses for opposing reform (despite campaigning on it in the past) have kept shifting, and have never been coherent or sensible on their own, either. He is a corrupt shill for the insurance industry. His current position is radical and unconscionable. But for Lieberman, the only agenda is promoting Joe Lieberman.