Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream.
T. K. Whipple
Showing posts with label Repeats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Repeats. Show all posts
Saturday, July 13, 2024
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Lex Anteinternet: Recalling, or not, Operation Overlord (D-Day). A repeat from 2014.
Lex Anteinternet: Recalling, or not, Operation Overlord (D-Day):
Operation Overlord was an Allied, not an American, Operation
At least the US, UK, Canada and France contributed ships to the operation. In the air, the air forces of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all in action.
The United States did not "win World War Two".
D-Day brought the Allies back to Europe.
The French are a bunch of chickens
Recalling, or not, Operation Overlord (D-Day)
One of the major syndicated columnists has an article in today's paper decrying the lack of knowledge that college graduates in the United States have of World War Two. Having noted this myself in the past, and having found it even more profound in regards to World War One, I can understand his frustration. It isn't right that there can be college graduates who lack at least a basic college level understanding of history, and for that matter literature and science. I've stated here before, I'm sure, the basic point that for most people college is a type of training program for an anticipated job, but still broader knowledge should be held by college graduates in any field. Ironically, this may be even more the case today than it was in earlier eras prior to the Internet, as a certain level of easy information allows the ignorant to become really ignorant, by informing themselves with erroneous information easily. In prior eras when information was harder to come by there was probably actually a higher chance that a person seeking out information would get the correct information, as it's just harder to publish in print than electronically.
U.S. Troops on the hotly contested Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.
Anyhow, this topic came to my mind in a slightly different context given as June 6 of this year is the 70th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, that being the operational name for the Allied landings on the Norman coast of France in 1944. Given as I was at work, I didn't catch all the stuff running on television, but I caught some and caught some of the print stuff here and there that was out recalling the event.
I appreciate that this great event, the largest amphibious landing ever accomplished in warfare, and the largest one that shall ever occur, is still recalled. Still, I think that there are a few things that somehow get misrepresented that are important, and that those recalling the events should be aware of. So, in that spirit, here goes.
Operation Overlord was an Allied, not an American, Operation
There seem to be some people who labor under the belief that D-Day was an American operation. That's frankly absurd.
Canadian troops landing at Juno Beach, Operation Overlord.
The major troop contributors for Operation Overlord were the US, the UK, and Canada. The US, by 1944, had become the largest single western Allied nation in the war in Europe by that time, but the British effort was huge and the French effort would soon expand enormously.
In addition to the US, UK and Canada, at least France had ground troops involved in the form of some special units of Free French troops. Polish paratroopers were to have been committed to followup airborne operations in the British sector of operations (where Canadian paratroopers did participate in landings) but the followup drops were cancelled, something very common in airborne operations.
At least the US, UK, Canada and France contributed ships to the operation. In the air, the air forces of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were all in action.
The US effort was huge, no doubt, but the Canadian one was enormous in the context of the size of the Canadian population, and unlike the American effort nearly 100% of the Canadian troops had volunteered for service in Europe. The British effort at that point in the war was so vast that the UK had truly gone down to the absolute bottom of its manpower reserves, a massive effort.
Something this taps into which some people seem to be jingoistic about is the following.
The United States did not "win World War Two".
There's a certain type of jingoism out there that asserted the US won World War Two. No, the Allies did.
The US effort, as noted, was massive. But for some reason some people simply fail to grasp how big the Allied effort as a whole was, and the extent to which other nations were impacted.
The British effort was so deep that it basically wrecked the British economy and put an end to the British Empire. Rationing in the UK would extend into the 1950s as a result of World War Two. The Free French effort expanded from 1943 forward, even if it would never see the restoration of a French army the size of the of the one defeated by the Germans in 1940.
The Soviet effort was colossal, and is something that Americans simply tend not to look at. Over 80% of all German battlefield deaths were sustained fighting the Soviets. That doesn't mean that our effort was unimportant (which I think some people secretly fear would be the result of looking at the Soviet effort) and the USSR could not have sustained its effort without first British, and then American, material support. But this just goes to show the extent to which the war was an Allied effort.
It should be noted that when we look at the war against Japan, the equities of who did what are quite different. In the war against the Japanese, the US, UK, India, New Zealand, Australia, and China were the major Allied powers. The USSR did come in at the end, to be sure, but the US has a better claim really to being the singularly most important nation in the war against Japan, although the other Allies were indeed major contributors. Japan had more troops committed against China during the war than against any other power, which makes sense given that it was fighting in China prior to 1939 and had never failed to achieve a negotiated peace with Nationalist China, like it had hoped to.
The basic point is, however, that when looking at the Second World War, it isn't really possible to look at one nation and claim that it won the war. Without the British refusing to surrender in 1940, the Soviets likely would have been defeated by the Germans (with Italian, Hungarian and Romanian assistance) in 1941 (with the likely assistance of the Japanese, who didn't abandon plans to take on the Soviet Union until well into 1941). Without the massive Soviet contribution of ground forces in 1940 to 1945, it'd be difficult to see how the western Allies could have dislodged the Germans in 43 to 45 from western Europe. Without the huge material contribution to the Soviet Union by the British and the Americans, it is difficult to see how the USSR could have sustained its war effort in those years. It was truly an Allied effort.
D-Day brought the Allies back to Europe.
This is a historical canard that goes back to the early histories of Operation Overlord. Its never been close to true, and its odd how it's persisted.
U.S. troops crossing the Rhine in assault boats.
The western Allies returned to Europe with the invasion of Sicily, a joint British and American operation, which took place in August 1943, just under one year prior to Operation Overlord. The successful capture of Sicily from the Germans and Italians was followed up by Allied landings in Italy in September, 1943. The US captured Rome coincidentally with Operation Overlord.
There's a tendency to overlook the Italian campaign for some reason, and that's likely because it didn't have the obvious impact that landing in France did. Landing in Normandy actually positioned the main force of the western Allied effort within striking distance of Germany. That was hugely significant. It was quite clear that there was no earthly way that the Allies were ever going to be able to push up from Italy into France and then up into Germany, and some have even questioned if the entire Italian campaign was a waste of time, effort and blood. It probably was not, but what is actually the case is that landing in Normandy gave the Allies a straight, if bloody, path into the Third Reich. The war would last less than a year after that and while it saw a lot of hard fighting, the landings were indeed a critical factor, perhaps the critical factor, in ending the war in May 1945.
It wasn't, it might be noted, the last amphibious operation in Europe during the Second World War. Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, started a couple of months later in August, 1944. Like the invasion of Italy, Operation Dragoon has been criticized as unnecessary, but it probably wasn't. Dragoon allowed the Allies to commit troops to France from the Mediterranean, where the Allies had a massive effort already underway, and in the end troops committed to Dragoon advanced so far that they caught up with the forces that landed in Overlord and formed the right flank of the Allied advance into Germany, when the time came. Dragoon was a big operation, which, like Overlord, featured the deployment of airborne troops and landing craft.
Operation Overlord is often regarded, and probably rightly, as the opening of the second front in Europe that resulted in the final German collapse. But to the extent that it is truly a second front there can at least be a debate. The Germans, British and Italians had never really ceased being engaged in some ground combat due to the war continuing on in North Africa with the Germans and Italians being too over extended to be able to bring on a concluding result there. With the commitment of American troops to that effort in 1942, that front became a bigger one. The war had returned to the European mainland in the west by 1943. Operation Overlord, however, allowed the drive in Europe to form a campaign that undoubtedly sped up the end of the war and which made it possible for the Allies to win in 1945.
The French are a bunch of chickens
One persistently irritating comment that seems to get inserted into anything concerning France, including landing on it, is that the French are weenies. This is simply incorrect.
As I've noted elsewhere on this blog, France has a martial record which is pretty significant, including a large number of fights they've gotten into, not all wisely, since World War Two. We can accuse the French of being many things, but cowards is something they are not.
In regards to D-Day, the common theme is that we saved the French from the Nazis, to whom they'd cowardly surrendered, and they should be eternally grateful. Well, that just doesn't accurately reflect the record, for good or ill.
France did of course surrender to the Germans in 1940. But it isn't as if they just gave up. France found itself to be the battleground against an army that was highly mobile and had already proven itself in battle. Basically, France was outfought.
While it may be naive, most of the armies of early World War Two expected a new war against Germany to repeat the experience of World War One, and didn't take battlefield mobility to be a foregone conclusion. France planned on fighting behind the Maginot line, and in fact the line did really hold well. France had failed in its desire to extend it into Belgium, and so the Germans were able to do an end run around it, repeating the early history of World War One. The difference this time is that the Germans retained battlefield mobility, which they hadn't in 1914. France was flat out defeated on the battlefield.
Even at that, however, a remarkable number of Frenchmen kept on fighting. Sure, there were French collaborators, and that's a story that itself has never been fully developed. But quite a few Frenchmen decided to illegally take up arms and keep fighting with the British, either over the channel, or in France itself. That's pretty darned brave and quite remarkable. Following Operation Torch in North Africa those numbers grew, as the standing French army began to defect to the Allies.
That it was a defection tends not to be noted. France was a defeated nation, under partial occupation, and at peace when the Allies landed on French colonial soil in 1942. The legal obligation of French troops in 1942 was to fight the Allies, and some did, but not for long, and by and large French units defected wholesale to the Allied cause.
For that matter, some French forces, including naval forces, had years earlier.
There was no fighting on the British and Canadian beaches.
It's unfortunately the case that there is very little attention paid, in some American treatments of the landings, to the British and Canadian beaches and air landings, and there is by extension a belief that the Americans had the hard beaches and nothing occurred on the other ones.
In reality, the landings overall were amazingly successful, which is a tribute to the extremely effective overall nature of the planning, naval bombardments, etc. But all the landings were opposed.
It may be the case that the perception exists that the Americans had the hard targets as it turned out that Omaha Beach featured the toughest fighting, and it was really the only beach where the Germans were able to set the Allies behind for some time. Omaha was an American beach. The fact that it was stoutly defended turned out to be bad American luck, but it doesn't mean that there was no fighting on the other beaches, there was.
Additionally, one thing that's somewhat overlooked by Americans is that the British and Canadians were the beneficiaries of experience in landing on coast France due to the enormous Canadian raid at Dieppe. The scale of the raid was so huge that it's difficult to actually conceive of it as a raid. The British landed Canadian troops at Dieppe in such numbers that they actually landed vehicles and armor on the beaches, a far greater operation than a conventional raid. The goal of the August 1942 raid was to actually seize a port on a temporary basis. While it was a failure, the lessons learned in the huge effort were not lost on the British or the Canadians, who had effectively participated in what amounted to a seaborne invasion of France on a prior occasion. As part of this, they equipped themselves with specialized armor that they also offered to the US, but which the US largely rejected. The equipment they deployed was accordingly unique and very effective, resulting in very effective beach operations. Contrary to what some might suppose, this also aided the British and Canadian forces in moving rapidly off the beaches, a goal that they very much had in mind given their prior experience in amphibious operations.
Montgomery didn't know what he was doing.
This is a matter of opinion, rather than a "fact", per se, but having said that, this common American belief is ill founded in my view.
In the American folk view, and in quite a few historical works as well, Field Marshall Montgomery, the commander of the British forces, was slow moving in his command style and as a result British troops moved slowly. In the most romantic view of this topic, American generals, particularly Gen. George Patton, were quick thinking, quick moving commanders, and the British reluctance to follow our lead caused the war to last longer than it should have.
In reality, American generals like Patton (and Patton wasn't alone in favoring high mobility) were a minority. Nearly ever American general who favored speed was a cavalry office, and cavalry officer formed a minority of high ranking American officers. The Army was dominated by infantry officers.
Most American infantry officer believed that the war in France would resemble that of World War One, with advances being slow moving, slowly developed affairs. They opposed cavalry branch officers who thought that the way to progress was to dash forward and exploit any opening.
This is important in the context of this story as it is well known that the Allied advance ground down to a slow moving one only shortly after D-Day. This is commonly blamed on the Norman bocage, and on Montgomery. The bocage did prove to be a huge problem, but Montgomery was no more slow or fast moving that U.S. senior commanders were.
Indeed, Montgomery had a proven ability to bring around combat results, but his style required careful planning and training. This was largely because Montgomery was used to working with much thinner resources than any American commander was, and he was required to do so. He was very effective on the offensive, but he couldn't afford to waste anything in one, and didn't. He operated in this fashion in Europe as he had in North Africa and the Mediterranean. He didn't "break out" of Normandy, but then the American infantry commanders didn't either.
It was the armor that did break out, under Patton's command. The difference here, however, was that Patton was a cavalryman and when he got rolling it tended to panic his fellow infantry commanders who often wished he, and those who shared a similar view, would slow down. He deserves a lot of credit, but not to Montgomery's discredit.
The Operation wasn't named "D-Day"
As a minor note, operation which we often hear called "D-Day" wasn't called that. It was called Operation Overlord, as noted above, and the operation can be best described as a large scale amphibious landing in Normandy.
"D-Day", in military parlance, is the day on which an operation is to occur, with days before and after it being referred to in relation to it. The day an operation occurs is D-Day. The day after it commences is "D+1", the day before it occurs is "D-1". And so on.
Likewise, the hour a military plan commences is H-Hour. It's just the way these periods of time are referred to. June 6, 1944, became D-Day as it was the day Operation Overlord did commence for the ground forces landing on the beaches (for the air element, it commenced in the very late night of the day prior). There were a lot of D-Days during World War Two, however, as every Allied operation commenced on some day. The fact that we remember it as D-Day shows what a big operation this particular one was
Sunday, June 9, 2024
A repeat. June 9, 1954. The lesson of past hearings. . .
Lex Anteinternet: The lesson of past hearings. . .:
The lesson of past hearings. . .
Joseph Welch, hand in head, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Welch was the chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army when it fell under the gaze of Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy asserted that there were Communist that had not been brought to light by the Army in the Army, in defense plants, or in institutions associated with national defense. The claim wasn't actually wholly without merit, actually as at least a few Communists, in 1954, were in the service and more in industry, which was not surprising if we consider that the 1930s had been the high water mark of American Communism and there were more at that time, the 30s, than there ever would be again. Some would end up in the service by default, and indeed at least one openly Communist American officer, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, received the Silver Cross for heroism in the Pacific before later being killed in action. The Army certainly wasn't a hotbed of Communism, however, and the claims were seen as extreme at the time.
On June 9, 1954, Welch, now in day 30 of the hearings, challenged McCarthy confederate Roy Cohn to provide the Attorney General with the names of the 130 subversives that McCarthy claimed were working in American defense plants "before sundown" that day. That wasn't done, but McCarthy called out the name of a lawyer who worked in Welch's Boston law office as a member of a Communist front organization. The lawyer had indeed been a member of it in his youth (recall the comment about the 30s again).
When this occurred, the famous exchange resulted. Welch at first commented:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
McCarthy should have known better than to attempt to joust with a figure like Welch, but he kept on and didn't yield, resulting in:
Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
McCarthy still wouldn't yield. Welch rebuked him and informed him he wouldn't answer any more questions. The audience broke into applause.
McCarthy was wrecked forever.
Yesterday Republicans in the Impeachment hearings suggested that Lt.Col. Vindman, the child of Ukrainian immigrants, might not be fully loyal to the United States as the Ukrainian administration offered him a position as their defense chief several times. He declined every time. There's no suggestion that he ever entertained the offer, and to entertain it would not be a sign of anything in particular. After all, Douglas McArthur was head of the Philippine's army after retiring, the first time, from the U.S. Army. That didn't make him disloyal. And apparently at least one senior American Air Force officer with Eastern European ties has taken up such a position. Claire Chenault spent years in the service of the Nationalist Chinese, but he's never been considered to have been disloyal.
The real question should have been what did Lt. Col. Vindman hear, and what did it mean. Both Vindman and another witness said that they were distressed by what they heard, Vindman very much so, but that they didn't hear the word "bribe" and neither came so far as to claim what they heard was regarded as a bribe. Vindman did go further than the other witness in his opening remarks in upholding the reputation of the removed ambassador, a noble thing to do, but perhaps straying outsides of the confines of what he should have done.
Still, for the second time in two weeks the House Republicans have managed to attack a witness and have the attack fall back on themselves.
Joseph McCarthy attacked a lot of witnesses in his hearings in the early 1950s. Now forgotten, McCarthy's claims were a lot more accurate, indeed highly accurate, than recalled. He benefited from the work of a prior committee from the 1930s and he was also almost certainly getting information secretly and without Administration knowledge from the FBI. But his behavior just went to far. Attacking the Army itself went too far, and then attacking Fred Fischer in a collateral attack went way too far. It was so devastating, in fact, that McCarthy's apologist have accused Welch of cleverly setting it up. But McCarthy' set himself up.
Americans don't like politicians attacking servicemen, and the GOP, which has been closest to the service since World War Two, has members who dislike it most of all. McCarthy didn't survive attacking the Army. Today's House Republicans would have done well to remember that.
The results of these hearings, as already noted, are foreordained. But the election isn't. For undecided voters seeing a soldier like Vindman impugned may be hard to forget.
McCarthy ended up censured later that year. His career declined. He died in 1957 with the cause officially being hepatitis, but which is widely believed to have been due to alcoholism or contributed to by alcoholism. He was 48 years old. He left behind a wife of for years, Jean, whom was 33 years old at the time of his death.
Joseph Welch would die three years after that, at age 69. He's often best remembered today for his role as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder, which he played after his role in the Army McCarthy hearings.
Last prior (chronologicaly) edition:
Monday, May 27, 2024
Memorial Day, a repeat.
A 2022 Memorial Day Reflection.
Today is Memorial Day.
I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:
Memorial Day
Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.
This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit. At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor. The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.
Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday. In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War. The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s. The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two. The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967. In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.
The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years. In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead. This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent. Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled. This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.
Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide. The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.
On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.
It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War. That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.
Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way. It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.
And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.
The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.
And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to. Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.
Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them. In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.
The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.
We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will.
Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents. Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it. The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.
Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies. Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally. I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.
The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way. Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did. The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution. Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.
Much of the nation now does.
Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant. When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists. Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".
The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves. The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area. Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon. Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.
This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form. That's a different topic. But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy. Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.
That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas. In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).
All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not. No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other. Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.
That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.
Related threads:
Tuesday, May 30, 1922. Lincoln Memorial Dedicated.Labels: Civil War, Commentary, Conservatism, Democracy, Illiberal Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism, Memorial Day, Populism, Slavery, The 2021 Insurrection, United States, Vichy France
Saturday, October 28, 2023
Best Posts of the Week of October 22, 2023.
The best posts of the week of October 22, 2023.
Reportedly a speech by one of the lay women at the Synod drew applause and had a big impact.
Synchronicity and Synthesis. Agrarianism.
Note: This post was started a little while ago, so it predates the recent drama in the House of Representatives. I'm noting that as I don't want to give the impression that this post was inspired by it or the choosing of the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.
We've dealt with a bunch of interesting odds and ends in recent months, some of which have popped back up in surprising places.
There is, for instance, a series of threads on the Synod on Synodality and what it is, or is not, about and what it will, or will not take up. The Synod itself was immediately preceded by five cardinals publishing a Dubia, receiving a reply they deemed insufficient, and then following that up with another Dubia to which they did not receive a response. That in turn lead to the first reply being published, which was immediately badly analyzed, including bad analysis in both conservative and liberal Catholic news organs.
What caused all the furor was that Pope Francis, who has a real knack for ambiguity, is the Pope's reply to this question:
Which was:
Just after that, I listened to a First Things interview of Mary Eberstadt. The interview had actually been in 2019, but I'm that far behind on that podcast, which I'm not universally endorsing. This interview was very interesting, however, as Eberstadt had just published Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. The prolific author has published several more books since then, but this one touched on topics that I wouldn't have thought it did. Eberstadt is a real intellectual heavyweight and has to be taken seriously.
Eberstadt, speaking from those seemingly long ago pre-COVID-19 days, already was discussing some major issues that were already there, but now are much more there, seemingly having erupted to some degree after Western Society spent months in their hovels contemplating their reproductive organs. Most interesting, she took examples from the natural world, which caused the episode to be titled There Are No Lone Wolves. Indeed, there are no lone wolves in nature, that concept being a complete myth, but what Eberstadt did is to apply what I have also applied here, to the same topic I've applied it to. That subject being evolutionary biology.
Eberstand pointed out the degree to which behavior in the natural world, of which we are part, is actually learned. Wolf puts that grow up in an unnatural environment never learn how to be functioning wild wolves. Rhesus macaque's, which were subject to an experiment to derive the information, don't learn how to act in the typical manner of their species if raised in isolation, and in fact slip into psychotic behavior.
Eberstadt's point, which she's double downed on since then, is that father's children growing to be freakin' messes as they don't learn how to do anything. She had the data, moreover, to prove it. Some may feel that she's drawing too much from it, but statistically, she's not only firing with both barrels, but she's loaded up a 10 gauge with Double O. Anyone feeling that she's at least not 60% correct is fooling themselves.
Eberstadt, and she's not the first to do so, ties all of this to the Sexual Revolution.
What Eberstadt is noting is not only something we've noted here before, but what touches upon our fourth law of human behavior, which provides:
Yeoman's Third Law of Behavior. I know why the caged tiger paces.
Everyone has been to a zoo and has seen a tiger pace back and forth, back and forth. He'll look up occasionally as well, and the deluded believe "look, he wants to be petted," while the more realistic know that he's thinking "I'd like to eat you." You can keep him in the zoo, but he's still a tiger. He wants out. He wants to live in the jungle, and he wants to eat you for lunch. That's his nature, and no amount of fooling ourselves will change it.It's really no different with human beings. We've lived in the modern world we've created for only a very brief time. Depending upon your ancestry, your ancestors lived in a very rustic agrarian world for about 10,000 years, long enough, by some measures to actually impact your genetic heritage. Prior to that, and really dating back further than we know, due to Yeoman's First Law of History, we were hunters and gatherers, or hunters and gatherers/small scale farmers. Deep down in our DNA, that's who we still are.That matters, as just as the DNA of the tiger tells it what it wants, to some degree our DNA informs us of what we want as well. I do not discount any other influence, and human beings are far, far, more complicated than we can begin to suppose, but it's still the case. A species that started out eons and eons ago being really smart hunters combined with really smart gatherers/small farmers has specialized in a way that living in Major Metropolis isn't going to change very rapidly. Deep down, we remain those people, even if we don't know it, and for some, even if we don't like it.This also impacts the every sensitive roles of men and women. Primates have unusually great gender differentiation for a mammal. Male housecats, for example, aren't hugely different from female housecats. But male chimpanzees are vastly different from female chimpanzees. Male human beings are as well, but even much more so.That's really upsetting to some people, but it simply isn't understood. If understood, this does not imply any sort of a limitation on either sex, and indeed in aboriginal societies that are really, really, primitive there's much less than in any other society, including our modernized Western one. Inequality comes in pretty early in societies, but some change in condition from the most primitive seems to be necessary in order to create it. So, properly understood, those very ancient genetic impulses that were there when we were hiking across the velt hoping not to get eaten by a lion, and hoping to track down an antelope, and planting and raising small gardens, are still there. That they're experienced differently by the genders is tempered by the fact that, in those ancient times, a lot of early deaths meant that the opposite gender had to step into the other's role, and therefore we're also perfectly capable of doing that. It's the root basic natures we're talking about, however, that we're discussing here, and that spark to hunt, fish, defend and plant a garden are in there, no matter how much steel and concrete we may surround ourselves with.The reason that this matters is that all people have these instincts from antiquity, some to greater or lessor degrees. But many people, maybe most, aren't aware that they have them. Some in the modern world spend a lot of their time and effort acting desperately to suppress these instincts. But an instinct is an instinct, and the more desperately they act, the more disordered they become.This doesn't mean, of course, that everyone needs to revert to an aboriginal lifestyle, and that's not going to happen. Nor would it even mean that everyone needs to hunt or fish, or even raise a garden. But it does mean that the further we get from nature, both our own personal natures, and nature in chief, or to deny real nature, the more miserable they'll become. We can't and shouldn't pretend that we're not what we once were, or that we now live in a world where we are some sort of ethereal being that exists separate and apart from that world. In other words, a person can live on a diet of tofu if they want, and pretend that pigs and people are equal beings, but deep in that person's subconscious, they're eating pork and killing the pig with a spear.Nature, in the non Disney reality of it.
Somewhat related to this, interestingly enough, I also came upon an article by accident on the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa, who are branches of the Bushmen, or what some people still call "pygmies". They've been remarkably resilient in staying close to nature.
A hunter-gatherer people, they naturally fascinate Western urbanites, and have been studied for many years by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, a husband and wife anthropologist team. Starting off with something else, after a period of time the Washington State University pair "decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women, and they verified the men's assertions."
The study revealed some interesting things, besides that, which included that they regarded such interaction as a species of work, designed for procreation. Perhaps more surprising to our genital focused society, they had no concept of homosexuality at all, no practice of that at all, and additional had no practice or concept of, um. . . well . . .self gratification. You'll have to read between the lines on that one.
Perhaps the Synod on Synodality ought to take note of the reality of the monotheist Aka's and Ngandu's as that's exactly what the Catholic faith has always taught.1 And so it turns out in a society that's actually focused that way, what Catholics theology traditionally has termed disordered, just doesn't occur. It's also worth noting that the rise of homosexuality really comes about after men were dragged out of the household's on a daily basis by social and economic causes, and the rise of . . . um., well, anyhow, recently is heavily tied to the pornificaiton of the culture that was launched circa 1953.
In other words, those like Fr. James Martin who seek a broader acceptance of of sexual disorder, might actually be urging the acceptance of a byproduct of our overall economic and social disorder, which itself should be fixed.
We will also note that Pope Francis, timed with the opening of the Synod, issued a new Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum ("Praise God") on the environment.
Eh", you may be thinking. I thought this thread was on something else. One of these is not like the other.
Oh, they very much are.
Laudate Deum is a cri de coeur for the environment, and it's not the first time Pope Francis has spoken on these topics. He's not the first Apostolic Bishop to speak on it, either. The head of the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity has done so for many years, resulting in his being called The Green Patriarch. It's interesting, indeed, to note that Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew met just the day prior to Laudate Deum being released.
Laudate Deum, it should be noted, stated something that naturally caused some in the US to go all apoplectic. Of interest, the document stated:
Comments like that, of course, are just the kind of thing that sends a certain Presbyterian Wyoming Senator who is a fallen away Catholic right to the microphone to blurt into Twitter about Joe Biden's "radical green agenda" when they come from Joe Biden. They are also the kind of things that causes locals to use the rationale, "I make money from the energy sector. . . and I'm a good person. . . so this must be a fib."
We might as well note that there is also a certain Protestant strain of thought, which has crept into everything in the US, which is a Protestant country even if it doesn't recognize it, that this can't be true as our relationship with nature if purely economic and exploitative. It's the same line of thought that gives us things like the health and wealth gospel. A major proponent of that view in government was the late James Watt, who was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan. Watt held the view that Christ was coming very soon, so we should just charge ahead and use everything up, which we were, in his view, Biblically mandated to do anyhow. That's not most people's view, and it certainly isn't an Apostolic Christian view. A fair number of Americans have some sort of view like that, however, basically believing that God has promised them a trouble free life irrespective of their own conduct, something that also allows big box type churches to fill up with people who've divorced multiple times but who still feel good about themselves.
Indeed, while I don't know for sure, what little I know about Speaker of the House Johnson causes me to suspect he holds this view. He's a conservative Evangelical Christian of the young earth variety. Contrary to what pundits seem to believe, not all Evangelicals are conservative, nor do they hold by any means a uniform set of beliefs, but young earth Evangelicals, and he's a sincere one, tend to have a set of beliefs that link very heavily with resource consumption and suspicion of science. He's also a climate change denier, which is further evidence that this is the case.
On politics itself, however, the current political crisis in the United States specifically and the West in general seems to reflect this. People are mad, and to a large extent they're mad at the political order. The political order, over the past 80 to 90 years, has served the interest of liberalism, industrialism, and urbanism, even though often ignorantly, and often with the left and right seemingly being unaware that they were doing it. At the present time, the sense that something is deeply wrong and has been lost fuels populist rage, even if populist leaders, like Johnson, continue to serve in some ways the very forces that causes this to come about. Liberals, on the other hand, are baffled that having given people societal sanction to do nothing other than contemplate their genitals all day long and self define as whatever they want, people are unhappy. It's interesting expressed in the babble of economists, right and left, both of whom are focused on the economy, both loving the corporate capitalist economic system, and seemingly being unable to grasp that people figure that their lives at home and in their communities matter more than getting "good jobs" at Big Cubicle.
So the connection in all of this?
What Pope Francis is noting, in a way, stems from our disconnect with nature. So is what Mary Eberstadt and your truly earlier, with your humble author being an earlier observer of this than Eberstadt. A critic, for that matter, of Francis's encyclical accidentally sort of sum's up the topic in another way, which I don't think Francis would actually disagree with:
Let us just imagine for a moment that we really do waste too many resources, that we suck on too many plastic straws, and that cow flatulence is really the greatest threat facing humanity since the Black Plague; even if that were all true, the cause of the problem would be sin and apostasy from God.
Kennedy Hall in Crisis.
We're having environmental problems, political problems, psychological problems, sexual identify problems and are basically a bunch of unhappy people as we've separated ourselves from nature, and indeed, as Hall would note, or suggest, we've done it in a sinful fashion, which involved lust, greed, avarice, gluttony and denial of reality.
Is there a world view that counters any of this?
The philosophy that's noted that for a long time is Agrarianism.
Agrarianism occurs in different forms in different localities, but Western Agrarianism, broadly defined, which occured in the United States and in some regions of Europe, is soil, nature, localism, distributist, and family oriented by nature. Indeed, some of these things can turn people off of it, if too narrowly focused. For instance, you can find Agrarian blogs, or at least one, that's Calvinist in nature, or another one that's basically of the Protestant nature described above. We're talking, however, more of the sort of agrarianism that was present in Quebec up until mid-Century, or in the American Southwest until the mid 20th Century, or in Finland prior to the 1950s, and as written about by Chesterton, and frankly by the Southern Agrarians with the weird racism removed.
People don't like the modern world. It's depersonalized us, seperated us from the people we love, forced us into work environments on a daily basis which are based only on money, seperated us from nature, and it may, again in the name of money, be setting to damage everything.
We really don't have to do this. Getting back from this, however, will not be easily. It would take a purpose driven societal effort.
The template for it is already there, in the agrarian works of the not too distant past. It would also require, quite frankly, some education of the masses which believe in the home and business economics of the industrial revolution as being part of the human structure, when in fact they are not. It would also require asking "why?" a lot, particularly of boosters for one thing or another who always proclaim things to be for the public good.
It sounds like a pipe dream, of course, but something is in the air. It just isn't synthesized.
If it were. . .
Footnotes.
1. These Bushmen bands are not Christian, but their theology loosely is actualy remarkably close to it.
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