I like Fred Thompson. Moreover, I think that whether or not a candidate -- or a noncandidate -- is liked, especially relative to the competition, is significant to how a race will play out. One must be able to take a candidate seriously as a human being before taking him seriously as a candidate, and, whatever commentary it makes on our society (or portions of it) that Arnold Schwarzenegger crossed this divide with flying colors, I have no problem reporting my like for Fred, and feel no sensation of giddy schoolgirl-ness at all.
That said I do want to pick at one of Fred's Op-Eds, the one on military history, which captures a fine idea for two important reasons but walks into the brambles on a related count. First, millitary history is good to learn because it explains all the key drivers of history, and in so doing shows just how undetermined that history is. Military history is history with a lowercase h, an exhibition of providence. The flipside of this, and the other important reason, is that military history shows just how quickly human beings degenerate into flagitious monsters -- deliberately or helplessly, despairingly or remorselessly. No matter how 'civilized' the time, how 'advanced' the civilization, how 'global' the advancements, the risk of monstrousness, the true momentary loss of humanity (moments sometimes being years) is always present, always stalking the battlefield. Robert E. Lee knew this as it happened, Abraham Lincoln seemed to internalize it belatedly and from a distance but still as profoundly as any human being -- possibly more so because the buck of Death stopped at his desk, and he knew it, and he told Death to take his feet off the desk and march back out there into the field.
Which leads me to the key couplet in Fred's piece:
Hansen writes [that's Victor Davis Hanson we're talking about here, sic; get out your copyeditors, NR], “The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s.” If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it.
Now nothing in this sequence is untrue or inaccurate, but I want to draw several critical distinctions. One is that between Gettysburg and Normandy. Another is between Hanson's hour of decisive bloodshed and Fred's hoped-for ideal of eternally postponed bloodshed. And the third is between pleading and studying.
I know that VDH is maligned in some quarters, burned in e-effigy, and generally declared to be vicious, bloodthirsty, pinheaded, and dense (in short that there's a dwarf star version of that thing from The Fifth Element atop his shoulders). I don't want to fall down the rabbit hole of that debate here. I do want to underscore how in some other quarters, when it comes to thinking about national security and war and the like, the comparison between winning on June 6, 1944 and winning on July 3, 1863 is natural, immediate, and unquestionable, and a fortiori the comparison between beating the Nazis and beating the South. It would appear there are two reasons for this: one, not to root wholeheartedly for your own side against a side which ended up somehow becoming your wartime adversary is to experience a failure of patriotism; two, your own side is the side of Freedom, and the mythopsychic link between beating the Nazis and beating the South is that in both cases the USA fulfilled its ongoing mission of Fighting for Freedom, which means kicking Enemies of Freedom to the curb and thereupon curbing them.
The trouble with this analogy, as any good paleocon and an assortment of libertarians knows, is that the Civil War was, in every way but one, actually a drawn-out orgy of deliberate tyranny, needless slaughter, federal overreach, irreversed power centralization, civil liberty abuse, unconstitutional statehood, constitutional evisceration, illegal occupation, and general horror for anyone who loved anything about the original USA. Of course the redeeming factor is understood to be the destruction of slavery -- a task which required not only the trampling of many vintages, the loosing of much lightning, and the terribly drawn-out slowness of a great deal of civil war surgery, but also the eating of rats on a mass scale in besieged major cities, the annihilation of an entire economy, the killing off of a record high of once and future Americans, and the institutionalization of a great deal that has continued to be wrong with America.
All of which might strike one still, in the balance, as a bargain worth taking, or at least worth praising with the right amount of humility in hindsight -- but none of which has anything remotely at all to do with World War Two, in which no portion of America was destroyed, no American civilians (outside of Pearl Harbor and, I think, the Alaskan islands) were starved, and only the Japanese US citizens were treated with crass fiat, and that for reasons utterly unconnected to Fightin' the Nazis. In short, linking the Best War (as WWII is morally judged) with the Worst War (not judged morally but judged in the terms that all wars' victims judge them) is a crude, inaccurate, and dangerous act of political rhetoric.
Now I like rhetoric, as I increasingly mention, and rhetoric gets a bad rap, but here's one example of why. To say that two days at Gettysburg was more "important" than a hundred years of talking it over is right, but no more or less so than saying that the day I shot my neighbor's dog was more important than the four years I'd put up with its constant yapping. When DeNiro pulls out the baseball pat in The Untouchables, you can be sure Something Important is about to happen. Violence is always more "important" than peace; war is always more 'momentous' than deliberative democracy, and invasion is always more 'interesting' than listening to Henry Clay. Power transfixes, and absolute power transfixes absolutely. Tying absolute conquest to absolute justice -- the nice matrix we get out of Pacifying the Nazis, when looped back mythopoetically to the Civil War and infused with all the proud guilt of the present-day US patriot, creates an unfortunately overwrought and oversimplified version of future history to which only a combination coward, bigot, and turncoat could refuse to subscribe: a future history in which all freedom opportunities are duties to be seized.
Since at least Aristotle, of course, students didn't seize, and it was precisely the point of studying to avoid and negate all the rotten things in life that derived from hot-tempered men running around seizing things in the name of pride, self-interest, desire, and honor. The awkwardness of Munich was in the stage-play feel of watching in the memory, from the perfect vantage point of two years later, a die-hard student pleading with a man (Hitler) who dismissed as a matter of principle the act of contemplation. Once he had gotten it out of his system in Mein Kampf, he realized that fascism meant nothing but to act against. If someone asks you, he thundered at the assembled, what you are against, you thunder at them: YOU! Mussolini's seriousness in describing fascism as an opportunity should not be dismissed based on his mixed results. The link Hanson draws between 'mere talk' over slavery and 'pathetic pleading' with Hitler manages to conflate being an obtuse peacenik with being a dedicatee to constitutional government and an opponent of all-out war between one half of the country and the other. One supposes the three-fifths compromise should have been shouted down in favor of the Revolutionary War version of 'marching all the way to Moscow' -- finishing the War of Independence by extending freedom to the American slaves.
The fact of the matter is that students have a duty not to the seizure of freedom opportunities but to particularly stern, ardent, and articulate forms of pleading, the sorts of pleading we hear every day from high-powered attorneys. For some odd reason we disparage this pleading not because it's lily-livered and weak but because of how Machiavellian it is -- these lizards will stop at nothing to win, make words mean whatever they want them to mean, twist the facts, obscure the truth, and distort reality by sheer force of will to secure victory for themselves and their clients! You hear all about how law and politics are the continuation of war by other means, and a lot of these high-powered guys with the brass gonads like to think of themselves as courtroom or boardroom or backroom warriors. But they're not killing one another. Their entire professional life -- their existence on planet Earth -- goes right out the window when the resort to violence kicks in. It might strike you as odd that I'm comparing Aristotle to David Boies or James Baker. But men -- even very prideful, combative, will-driven men -- who do not pass directly to massed slaughter have more in common, as students of nonviolent battle, with students of philosophy than they have with students of war who put their book-learning into practice. Their type of pleading is precisely not cowardly and weak. These are no surrender monkeys. It's good, of course, to have a staff of warriors on hand, and a supply of well-trained, honorable men to do their bidding when necessary. But it's even more important to have the right cadres of students of pleading in charge.
It should come now as now surprise that the study of war is a central component of being a student of pleading in the way that I've laid it out. Because the best thing one can say about the study of war -- and I think this is, in spite of Hanson, what Fred's saying in his plea to avoid war by default -- is that it gets you as close as you can get to war without being in one. In studying war you learn the reality of glory but also its cruel limits and bottomless opposite; you learn the advantages to be gained from victory and the merciless horrors of defeat; and you learn that even Machiavelli maxed out human power at the ability to control fortune half the time. With odds like those, you learn that warlike pleading holds a certain pride of place over pleading for war.
It appears brother Fred has a Claremont perspective on the War of Southern Secession. Sounds very much like another neocon, and we don't need anymore neocons!
Posted by: Robert C. Cheeks | May 21, 2007 at 08:22 AM
It appears you have a Ghandi perspective of Hitler's final solution. Therefore, we must sit on our cheeks lest they speak for us.
Posted by: Winghunter | May 21, 2007 at 01:42 PM
War can only be prevented, never cured: The cure is victory, conquest followed by generations of losers' misery plus inevitable hubris on the winners' side.
Alas, "prevention" can never be known: Had Britain and France deployed to block Hitler's re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, the German General Staff would have tossed out their "Bohemian Corporal". We might have had Pearl Harbor, but not blitzkrieg in Europe from 1939.
Absent Hitler and his Second German War, peace would have seemed inevitable... no Manhattan Project, so when Stalin swooped 100 hundred divisions West (say, 1946), Communism's exterminating menace quite probably would have succeeded where Nazism failed (think Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Oppenheimer and the Rosenbergs).
We simply cannot know. Perhaps facing the Third Reich earlier than genocidal Sovietism
actually prevented struggles more devastating and protracted than anyone today
can contemplate. The study of history, most especially the history of war, crucially illuminates not merely circumstance but human nature. "Peace at any price" is not an option... and the price that cultures and societies inevitably pay is a demeaning collectivist Statism, brutal and deadly as any they once fought against. As a survival mechanism in times of trial, civil societies
cannot live either with militarization or without it.
This is the stuff of tragedy. By AD 2500 the United States of America --representative democracy within a federal republic-- will most likely have joined China's Sung and T'ang dynasties as glorious in retrospect but rife with the same human flaws. Tamam.
Posted by: Jon Blake | May 21, 2007 at 06:29 PM
America and the World would be better off had we never went to war with Germany. I guarantee this war in Iraq wouldn't of happened as there surly would be no neoconservitives to start it. The so called "Good war" was good for Communists and International Jewry and that's about it.
Posted by: Caldier | May 22, 2007 at 02:35 AM