Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one.*

Ad from the Sheridan newspaper, December 31, 1945.

December 31, 1945, marked the first peacetime New Years in much of the world, although not all of the world was at peace.

1945 marked the end of what we consider the oddly nostalgically recalled, but undeniably bloody, 1940s.  It's the operation of Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History, which provides:

Yeoman's Eleventh Law of History:  There are decades, but they are not decadal.

In common histories, people often reference the "40s", or the "50s", or the like.

The references are useful, but very imprecise.  Decades, as people recall them, really reflect eras, and the ears themselves do not device up so neatly.

The 1940s, for example, are heavily associated with World War Two.  The Second World War, however, in Asia really broke out in 1937 and in Europe in 1939.  Because the slide of one era into another is not precise, it's hard to say when the 1940s started, but 1938 would be a good place to begin it.  They clearly ended, however, in 1945.

The 1950s, in contrast, the way we remember them, started in 1955, with the end of the Korean War.  The period from 1945 to 1955 is really its own separate decade, and is nearly a forgotten one . It's sort of the Proto 1950s.  The 1950s we recall ended in 1964, at which time the 1960s, as we remember them, commenced.  The 60s lasted until about 1972, when the US was really pulling out of Vietnam, or perhaps to 1973.

And so on.  While this makes sense, as we do not tend to think of things in this fashion, we often miss that the flow of history works in this fashion, rather than in neat ten year groups.

1945 was the end of World War Two, and the beginning of the post war era, and era which we still live in.  It was the penultimate year of the 1940s, and to some degree, the penultimate year of the long 20th Century.¹  It was the year that the Second World War ended  with a massive technological nuclear flash, but it was also the year that featured the bloodiest fighting in a unified war that began as a series of wars in 1937 and 1939.

The end of the Second World War determined, or seemed to determine, questions that had arisen with the end of the Great War in 1918.  World War One had caused the death of the old order in much of Europe, an order that saw aristocracies dominate in varying degrees in many of the European, and indeed international, states.  The strain on the old order was obvious even before World War One, but it remained strong nonetheless.  The Great War killed it.

The death of the old order did not answer the question of what would replace it. Every nation that fought in the war, however, would see immediate political evolution due to the war, with all  of it reflecting forces that had been at work before the war.  In functioning democratic countries with stable governments, that resulted in an expanded franchise.  The UK extended the vote to entire classes that had not had it before the war, allowed Ireland to go independent, more or less, allowed its dominions to be actually independent, and extended the vote to women.  The US extended the vote to women and soon made Native Americans citizens, with new states being admitted to the union prior to the Second World War.  Canada and Australia obtained true political independence.

In countries that had strong aristocracies that opposed democracy, however, radical elements of the far left that had been underground to some degree leaped forward, the prime example being Imperial Russia, which became the Soviet Union.  As forces of the far left advanced, finding a great deal of support in in the formerly disenfranchised working class, forces of the far right appealed to the same base and to conservative aristocratic classes, crushing democratic forces in between, as in Germany, where the Nazis gained power.  In unstable democracies without long histories of democratic behavior, forces of the left and the right contested for total control, as in France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Mexico, with democracy faltering in many to some degree, sometimes totally.

World War Two was not, as some like to claim, a continuation of World War One, but rather a violent sorting out of the democratic, anti democratic, and populist forces it had unleashed.  Starting in the late 1920s it seemed that the question the world was faced with was whether the future was democratic, fascist or communist.  The Second World War determined, at least it seemed, that the world would not be fascist, but left the question of whether it would be communists or democratic undetermined.

Determining the question was bloody on a scale that we can no longer even imagine, although in terms of human history it was not all that long ago.  The expenditure of lives in the war by all contestants was enormous, with the fascist and the communists states freely willing to waste the lives of men, and the democratic ones emphasizing technology where they could.  All the combatants, however, acclimated themselves to conduct that at least the democratic ones would not have tolerated prior to the war, with mass bombing of urban targets being the most notable.  By 1945 the US, arguably the most moralistic of the combatants, was willing to engage in fire bombing and ultimately the atomic bomb to bring the war to a conclusion.

Truman as Time's Man of the Year, posted under fair use exception.

The significance of the atomic age, contrary to the way things are currently remembered, was appreciated immediately.  Truman was Time magazine's Man of the Year, pictured in front of a fist grasping nuclear firebolts.  Newspapers, even by late 1945, were pondering what atomic warfare would mean.

The war not only determined that fascism would not be the future of Europe, or Asia, but it it changed everything about everything, and much of that not for the good.

We've argued it here before, but the Second World War created the modern United States, and more than that, modern American culture, in both good, and bad, ways.

Tire rationing came to an end on this day in 1945.

The most oblivious, at first was the change to the economy, which was little understood.  Pent up consumer demand dating back to the start of the Great Depression  meant that the country did not slide back into the depression as nearly all Western economist had feared.  Adding to this, however, was the fact that none of the European industrial powers, along with Japan, had not suffered some level of industrial destruction. The U.S.'s industrial base was not only left intact, it had expanded.  Only Canada could claim to enjoy the same situation, although its economy was much smaller.  American workers took advantage of the situation nearly immediately with a wave of strikes demanding higher wages, strikes that were in fact largely successful.  The economic golden age that current Republican populists imagine to have existed in the past reached its most pronounced form in the 1950s which is still looked back upon fondly, if inaccurately, in the same way that singer Billy Joel imagined it to have been in his lamet Allentown

Well our fathers fought the Second World War

Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore

Met our mothers in the USO

Asked them to dance

Danced with them slow

And we're living here in Allentown

The obliteration of European industry created the illusion of some sort of American economic uniqueness that remains to this day and which the country is presently attempting to sort out by restoring it, which will not and cannot work.  Part of that also involves an imagined domestic perfection that doesn't' reflect what was going on in reality either.

Prior to the Second World War the domestic culture of the United States was different in nearly every fashion.  Even the horrors of World War One had not changes that.  Most Americans lived closer to the poverty line than they do today, even if most Americans lived in families.  Most Americans did not attend college or university, and most men didn't graduate from high school.  There was a minimum of surplus wealth on the part of the average, although that had started to change by imd 1920s, only to be retarded by the Great Depression.  Most people did not move far from home.  Most men and women married people who grew up near them and were part of the same class and religion, although a surprisingly large lifelong bachelor class existed, particularly in certain occupations.

The war changed nearly all of that, and even during the war itself.

The first peacetime Federal draft in the nation's history took thousands of young men away from their homes starting in 1940 and 41, and of course became the major wartime draft that continued on until after the war, and with some hiatus, basically until 1973.  The country would not have tolerated a peacetime draft prior to 1940, and barely did in 1940 and 1941.  The country's views on the military, which prior to the war was sort of a type of disdain but acceptance of it as necessary, as long as it was small, completely changed during the war so that by the war's end the concept of a large peacetime military was fully accepted, and even admired, although that would be disrupted again due to the Vietnam War for a time.  

Prior to the war, soldiering was, for enlisted men and junior officers, a bachelor occupation with servicemen largely looked down upon as lazy. The enlisted ranks often contained large numbers of immigrants, although that is still true.  After the war, the view of servicemen, many of whom for decades were conscripts on relatively short enlistments changed radically.

The expectation of marriage changed as well, even at a time that wartime marriages came into periods of great stress.  Prior to the war a fair number of blue collar workers and nearly all non owner agricultural workers were lifelong bachelors.

Cowboys Out Our Way from December 31, 1945.  The two working hands are discussing "Sugar", their former ranch cook, who just married a rich widow, and Stiffy, the oldest cowhand on the ranch.

This ended after the war for a variety of reasons, one simple one being that entire classes of men who had never really lived any other life now had seen at least much of the country, and some large sections of the globe.  Men who had planned on a life of working on the farm or ranch and living in a bunkhouse no longer found that appealing and no longer believed they had to do that.  For those who returned to their states of origin, and huge number of them did not, this often meant taking up a job in towns and cities, rather than in fields.  Quite a few used the GI Bill to advance an education that benefited them at a time in which a university education guaranteed a white collar job.  Regions that had large reservations found that many returning Native American veterans chose to live in towns and cities near the reservations they were from, rather than on them where living conditions remained comparatively primitive.  Lots of men married who would not have otherwise.  The average marriage age notably dropped for the first time in decades and remained depressed in the 1950s.

Lots of couples got divorced in fairly quick order as well.

This was because of a "marry in haste" situation that had broken out during the war.  Couples who figured that the male's chances of surviving the great blood letting were fairly slim and were willing to accordingly gamble, where as previously they would not have been.  Moreover, many of the couples that married were of different backgrounds and different regions of the country, and not the literal "girl next door" so often portrayed.  A really good portrayal of the this sort of situation was given in the brilliant 1946 film The Best Years of Their Lives, which gave a dramatic, but fairly accurate, examination of the domestic situation of the post war years.  Of note, 1946 also gave the country It's a Wonderful Life, which really portrayed the prewar, not the wartime or postwar, domestic ideal.

The amazing film The Best Years of Our Lives which captured the immediate impact of World War Two on Americans.

It's a Wonderful Life, also released in 1946, but which really portrayed the nature of American life from the 1910s until the late 1930s, although it was set in 1946.  It's gone on to be a sentimental Christmas classic.

One of the things The Best Years of Their Lives examined was divorce, which had been disdained, with good reason, prior to the war.  Now it was becoming rapidly accepted, which was a major evolution in American domestic culture, and not a good one.  And of course it wasn't just this.  Divorce became common post war in a way that it never had been before, and the concept of divorce without fault was introduced.  First introduced by a modern nation in 1917 in Russia, and codified by the Communist in 1926, it was introduced into the United States in California in 1969 where it was signed into law by the divorced (1949) and remarried (1952) Governor Ronald Reagan.

Final scene in The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.  It's emblematic that the film concludes with a recently divorced central character proposing, over the objection of her father, to a young woman who had vowed to break up that characters marriage (she doesn't).

The Best Years of Their Lives also depicts fairly heavy drinking, and not in an accepting fashion, but in a relatively realistic one .That was also something that the war really brought in.  Returning veterans were often very broken men, and alcohol abuse was an enduring feature of their lives, along with chronic cigarette smoking.  This bled over into the culture in general and an increased acceptance of heavy alcohol use became common, and indeed is something often featured in post war films in a routine fashion.  Men who had endured killing on a mass scale often never really adjusted back to a normal life, and resorted to the bottle in varying degrees.

At least by my observation, some of these men became downright mean.  We hate to say that about "The Greatest Generation", but it's an enduring theme of the recollections of many of their children.  Alcoholic fathers who were extremely demanding on their male children seems to have been routine.  Again, by my observation, many of the same children, who went on to rebel during the 1960s, returned to their childhood roots and became mean demanding fathers to their own children, making World War Two the domestic abuse gift that keeps on giving.

While certainly most returning veterans did not become mean, or abusive, it has to be noted that the Second World War started the country off on a destruction of the natural relationship between men and women we're also still dealing with.

Not since the American Civil War had so many young men been taken away from their homes and never in the country's history had so many young men been kept in the company of young men overseas.  War involves the ultimate vice, the killing of other human beings, and all other vices naturally come along with it, in varying degrees by personality, and by military culture.

All wars involve the abuse of women, the most spectacular example during the Second World War being the mass rapes, often accompanied by murder of the victims, by the Red Army late in the Second World War.  There are some examples by Western armies as well, but they are much smaller in scale.  Also notable, however, was the largescale outbreak of prostitution in Europe, some of which was conducted nearly publicly in places that would never have tolerated it before the war.  Economic desperation caused much of it in some areas, which included underaged European women prostituting themselves in some instances and the military simply accepting it.² 

Bill Mauldin in 1945.  The diminutive Mauldin appeared a little younger than he actually was, being 24 years old at the time of this photograph.  Indeed, Mauldin strongly resembled, oddly enough, Rockwell's Will Gillis depiction of an average GI.  Mauldin's appearance contributed to a public view of the cartoonist that fit very much in with the public's image of "fresh faced American boys" in general, but he'd already lived a hard life by the time he entered the service.  She son of New Mexican farmer/ranchers who were partially native American, Mauldin's early life had been somewhat chaotic and his teenage years were more so, being somewhat on his own by that time and living a somewhat odd life by the time he was in high school.  While Mauldin is associated with the typical GI, his status as a member of the staff of two separate Army newspapers lead to an atypical existence including have a teenage Italian mistress when he was in Italy.  In some ways Mauldin reflects the best and the worst of Army life in his cartoons and for that matter in actual service life.

Even where not completely sordid, plenty of misconduct occurred in all of the ranks.  This is depicted in the recent series Master of the Air with at least one of the affairs depicted actually having occurred.  In fictional form, it's portrayed in 1956's The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit.

The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit from 1956, but which starts off in World War Two and the moral failings in combat of the central character, including the violation of his marital vows.

This was bound to have some impact on the wider culture, and we've argued that it lead to the wider acceptance of the objectification of women.  Indeed, thousands of men became acclimated to the centerfolds in Yank during the war, making the introduction of Playboy in 1953 not all that much of the big leap as its claimed to be.

First issue of Yank's pinup girl.

Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold.  Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives.  Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection.  She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.

Actress Susan Hayward as a Yank centerfold.

Playboy often gets credit for firing the open shots of the disastrous Sexual Revolution, but it can be argued that Yank did.  At any rate, by the wars end, millions of men had served in places were morality of all types was at a low ebb, and had ogled the girls in Yank, and perhaps painted topless or nude figures on government aircraft.  That this would have some effect, particularly later when bogus sex studies were released as scientific texts, isn't too surprising. The major erosion of the natural order between men and women that came into full fruition after the late 1960s had some roots that went at least as far back as the 1910s, but World War Two gave it a major boost.

The war also gave a major boost to automobiles.

Prior to the war, and during it, the US relied on rail transportation. But new types of automobiles, notably 4x4s, were introduced during the war, and cars overall simply improved.  By 1950 it was clear that road building and automobiles had become a major American obsession, spawned in part by the heavy road use, in spite of automobiles, that occurred during the war.  4x4s, which were strictly an industrial vehicle, were introduced into civilian use shortly after the war, with pickup truck variants ending the need for ranches to have cowboys in the high country during the winter, and allowing any part of the country to be accessed to some degree by sportsmen or agriculturalist year around.

1947 Sheridan newspaper advertisement for what was probably a surplus Dodge WC.

Reliance on equine transportation, in contrast, started to decline markedly.  

December 31, 1945 brought the news that Hirohito had renounced claims to divinity, with the nature of the Japanese monarchical claim on that point never understood by Westerners in the first place.  He did not ever claim to have been a god, and it was soon learned that the majority of the Japanese had never believed in the imperial family's claim to a unique divine status in the first place.

The war ended, seemingly for good, Japanese militarism.  It also seems to have ended German militarism as well, something assisted by the fact that the Soviets ended up with Prussia, it's source.

The war, of course, also advanced the frontiers of Soviet domination beyond its 1940 status, something the Soviets had been working on since 1917.  This would prove to be temporary, as would the Soviet Union itself, but that could not be foreseen in 1945.  A world that had worried about whether fascism, communism, or democracy would prevail, now worried over whether communism or democracy would be the ultimate victors.

In China, where on this day an unsuccessful treaty between the Nationalist and the Communists would be signed, a contest more resembling the pre World War Two one was going on, revived from its 1927 start and temporary hiatus during the Second World War.

1945 was a fateful year.  For Americans it started with American troops fighting the Germans in Bulge in Operation Wachts am Rhein and in Alsatia in Operation Nordwind.  For the Soviets, January 1945 would be the bloodiest month of the war, as it would be for the Germans.  For the Japanese, it marked pitched resistance to Allied advances everywhere, and a desperate effort to advance in China.  It all came to an end in August, 1945, and by December 31, 1945, the world was trying to sort out where it was going.  Much of it could be anticipated, but much could not be.

Some additional items:

Today in World War II History—December 31, 1940 & 1945: 80 Years Ago—Dec. 31, 1945: US National War Labor Board is disbanded. US ends tire rationing. British Home Guard is officially disbanded.

The prewar world was gone forever.  Sorting that out is still going on.

Related threads:

Father Arne and the Greatest Failure of the Greatest Generation

Baby Boom Generation, Great Migration, It was because of World War Two, mehr Mensch sein, trends, World War II (Greatest) Generation, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Footnotes:

*I had typed out a very long and detailed look at the 1940s, and 1945, for the December 31, 1945 entry, before some computer glitch entirely wiped it out.  It's completely gone.

I may try to reconstruct it a bit, but the fact that I started working on it some time ago is a deterrent to that. And even if I do, a reconstructed post is never as good as the original.

1.  Like decades, centuries don't really track the calendar precisely either.  The 20th Century arguably began around 1898 or so, and continued on, perhaps, to 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed.

2.  An interesting sympathetic depiction of a woman engaging in prostitution due to economic desperation in found in the 1946 Italian film Paisa'.

Last edition:  

Saturday, December 29, 1945. Korean protests on US decision.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, 1948, Adolf Hitler, Army, Cartoons, Eva Braun, It was because of World War Two, J.R. Williams, Korea, Occupation of Korea, Operation Blacklist Forty, U.S. Coast Guard

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels, part two.

Monday, December 31, 1945. The end of a historical episode and the dawn of a new one, additional labels, part two.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 111th Edition. Letting Healthcare Fail, How War Really Works, Those Epstein Files, Calling names, Bear Care.

Letting healthcare fail.

No democratic nation has every taken away a social benefits program after extending it.  It's simply too difficult.

The Republicans have just done that in health care.

They know this is going to be popular, so they've very clearly received their marching orders.  It's all Joe Biden's fault, like everything else.  The truth is much more complicated.

The United States is the only first would nation on EArth that doesn't have national healthcare. It's part of what depresses the American standard of living and why, in spite of what we seem to think, we aren't exactly admired lifestyle and standard of living wise by any other advanced nation. Frankly, most of the rest of the developed world thinks we're a bunch of ignorant rednecks, a view that has a lot behind it, frankly.  Donald Trump, in one of his demented rages, wondered the other day why Norwegians don't come here as opposed to Somalians.

Why on Earth would they?

Anyhow, the dirty little secret of the ACHA, termed Obamacare, which was Romneycare before that, is that it was probably supposed to be transitional in the first place.  It was the best the Democrats could do under the circumstances, and the thought is that it would probably phase away, I suspect, into bonafide national health care.  The Republicans took their typical approach to the advancement of social programs, which was to complain and do nothing.  We've now had the ACHA for fifteen years.

The ACHA system really came under strain during COVID, and that in turn lead to the premium subsidies, a big advance towards a national health care system. Those are now coming off, which will cause a huge spike in premiums, followed by a massive loss of coverage, much of which will fall right on the backs of diehard Trump loyalist.  By next year quite a few of those people will be thinking that Bernie Sanders is the greatest politician of all time.

The destruction of the ACHA is a goal of NatCons, who really don't like a government role in such things at all.  Cassie Cravens did an op ed which edged up on really voicing their view recently, and while I really don't like Cravens' articles, I'll give her some credit for that one.  It's really undeniable that welfare programs create a dependence that is existentially problematic.

That really dealt with welfare more than healthcare, however, and here a real distinction can be made.  We'll look at that a bit below, but what we'd first note is that all the GOP howling about "it's Joe Biden's fault" can't cover up the fact that they did utterly nothing for fifteen years. They don't have any real plan at all.

Indeed, the real concept is that removing the subsidies will cause the ACHA to fail, reverting the situation to the status quo ante.  That's what they want.  Yes, that'll mean that a lot of people will be uninsured, but they really don't care.  Somehow, the magic of the marketplace is supposed to work all this out. 

It won't.

The law of unintended consequences works pretty strongly in areas like this, and the net result is likely to be large-scale populist outrage and a shifting towards the left.  Trump's already screwed farmers in the country with his tariffs, and more than a few of them will go into the polling stations in November 2026 wearing MAGA hats and then vote for Democrats.  People who start watching family members die due to no healthcare coverage, and that will happen, will react more strongly.  When the Democrats come back into power, which will start in 2026, and complete in 2028, they'll likely create a national healthcare system based on Medicare.  

In the interim three years the GOP is going to do nothing.

Doing something, frankly, is warranted and would not be all that difficult.  A single payer system could be created but which would bid the system out decadally to carriers.  The system wouldn't cover everything, just necessary medical.  Yes, it'd be paid for with taxes, but taxes graduated so they wealthy would bear more of them, which they should in general now.

Every other advanced nation in the world does this.

 A few thoughts, or reminders, on war.

The Trump administration is beating the war drum and in fact pretending that enforcing American laws on drug smuggling is the same thing as a war.

It isn't, in fact that's criminal in and of itself, but because this is the direction the administration is clearly going, there's some things that should be kept in mind.

The first thing is that if you treat something like a war, it might become one.  That raises this:

Yeoman's Fifth Law of History.  When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.

When nations start a war, they have a "war aim."  But that aim rarely determines when a war ends.  Wars are over when the party that is attacked decides that the war is over.

The Germans, during World War Two, thought that the war in the West was over when they knocked France out of the war, but the British did not believe that, so it did not end. In the East, the Germans thought advancing to the Volga meant victory over the USSR.  The Soviets, however, had no such concept so the war went on.  Conversely, the Imperial Russians in World War One gave up long before they were really defeated.  They just gave up.  Wars end when the party that was attacked decides that they are over.

Americans have long had the view that, because we're Americans, we're the toughest on the block and we'll win.  The wars we've fought since World War Two have shown that isn't the case.  Indeed, they've shown we're perfectly capable of being beaten, and moreover, our greatest weakness is that we get tired of war pretty easily.

Right now we're picking on Venezuela, which is not an admirable nation, but what if we go in?  Are we going to occupy the country until it becomes a democratic state?  What do the Venezuelans think of that.  Some of them probably don't like the idea much, and they'll resist it.  Are we prepared to be in the country for a decade, two decades, three?

Note also that in our last several major wars, and this would be a major war, the US has been very careful to pretend they aren't wars.

Yeoman's Fourth Law of History.  War changes everything

This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars.  I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything.  No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation.  People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.

We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated.  Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.

It'd behoove us to remember that our association with wars of choice is not a happy one.  For that matter, our association with wars in general isn't all that happy.

World War Two, nearly fondly looked back upon now, created so much social destruction that we've never really recovered from it.  While I've done a pretty poor job of defining it, nearly every single social ill Americans face today was amplified, if not created, due to the Second World War.  People like to imagine that the war gave us a generation of stalwart self sacrificing men, and there's a lot of truth to that.  It also, however, gave us a generation of men who crawled into the bottle and never came back out, and who were never able to really recover from having had their youth destroyed and every single value of a decent society made a mockery of.

We don't think much about the Korean War anymore, but the Korean War acclimated us to the concept of getting into big wars without a declaration of war, something we'd never done before.  That lead to Vietnam, which destroyed the American military and which helped create the drug problem we're dealing with now.  The Vietnam War was directly linked to the widespread use of all sorts of narcotics in the US which we've never been able to get a handle on.

What the impacts are of simply killing drug smugglers on the seas are isn't known yet, but we're already suffering from the impacts of exposing too many people to militarized violence.  It'd serve us well to remember that two of the most infamous killings of the 1960s were committed by Marine Corps veterans.  The Oklahoma City bombing was committed by an Army veteran.  People trained to kill, can kill more easily, particularly if they've already killed.

There are also real dangers to teaching an entire society that killing is the answer to problems.  Sen. Tom Cotton is running around doing that right now, in regard to boat murders, but where does it end?  If it's okay to kill suspected drug smugglers on the sea, why isn't it on the block?

That, unfortunately, feeds right into the paranoia that some on the very far right have been backing for years.  In the US crime is at an all time low, and it's been declining for decades.  Blowing up boats and getting young men, and women, used to extrajudicial killing isn't going help that trend to continue.

Every single human vice finds massively amplified expression during wartime, not just killing.  Soldiers at war will invariably, to some degree, engage in rape, theft and drug and alcohol use. There are no exceptions to this whatsoever.  The U.S. military already has internal problems with drugs and rape, the former being a problem that every military has had always, and the latter a feature of the increased number of women in the service.  War will make every single vice worse, and then that gets taken home.

Yeoman's Fifth Law of History.  When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.

When nations start a war, they have a "war aim."  But that aim rarely determines when a war ends.  Wars are over when the party that is attacked decides that the war is over.

The Germans, during World War Two, thought that the war in the West was over when they knocked France out of the war, but the British did not believe that, so it did not end. In the East, the Germans thought advancing to the Volga meant victory over the USSR.  The Soviets, however, had no such concept so the war went on.  Conversely, the Imperial Russians in World War One gave up long before they were really defeated.  They just gave up.  Wars end when the party that was attacked decides that they are over.

Every war the US has entered following the Korean War, which was a genuine emergency which we entered not knowing how it would come out, has been done with the concept that we were so dominant that nobody could defeat us.  Our track record is pretty poor that way.  In Korea, we were fought to a stalemate by the Red Chinese who had just come out of over two decades of civil war and which should not have been a match for a first world military.  In Vietnam, we did even worse and while our battlefield performance was good up until 1968, after that the service started to crumble.  We proved to have no staying power in Afghanistan and Trump surrendered to the Taliban.

The thing is here that we're dealing with criminal organizations, not real foreign armies, so far.  We've beaten organized crime before, but through dedicated law enforcement. The thing we've never beaten, however, is the existence of organized crime that seeks to fuel illicit desires. That is, the mafia is a shadow of its former self, but drugs and prostitution, two of its main sources of income, are as prevalent as ever.

The Trump interregnum seems to think that if you kill the middleman, the smugglers, this problem goes away.  It won't.  It just shifts to new trafficking routes. It might think that going right after the source will do it.  There's a little support for that view, as that's basically what Mussolini did to the mafia during his fascist rule of Italy, but we really don't know that.  If you start hitting drug manufacturing in Venezuela, you pretty much have to do it in Columbia and Mexico as well.  That's a pretty big task, particularly given our long border with Mexico.

And you have to accept that at some point, those you are trying to kill fight back.

We haven't really experienced that for a very long time, perhaps since the Punitive Expedition of 1916, but we're living in a much more fluid world than we did even a decade ago. The North Vietnamese were not going to hit back, even if they could.  But we have already seen an upset Afghani hit back.  And the conditions for doing just that are presently ideal.

The Trump Administration likes to pretend its ended nine wars.  What it has done iis made a lot of enemies, and a lot of those enemies are pretty smart.  Why wouldn't Iran make use of the current situation in the US?  Why wouldn't Venezuela, or the drug cartels.  Massive domestic reaction would occur, but that would practically be part of the point.  Conditions are ideal for Iran to engage in a false flag operation in the US.

Conditions are also ideal for Russia to do that.  Russia has a proven track record of manipulating US information and elections.  It's just approved of the Trump admin's strategic plan, which would give us pause.  Getting us bogged down in a South American war would really serve their interests, and would be frighteningly easy to do.  The same is true for China, or North Korea.

Chickenhawks.

One of the most pronounced trends in my life has been watching men in high office commit the country to war when they never served themselves.

This isn't completely true, if I consider every President who has been in my office during my lifetime.  Kennedy, for example, had certainly seen war.  But after Jimmy Carter things really changed.

People have come to admire Ronald Reagan as some sort of superhero.  He was quite  hawkish and deserves a lot of genuine credit for bringing the Cold War to a successful conclusion.  He was a cavalry officer in the Army Reserve prior to the Second World War, but served as an actor for the Army during the war.  

Not exactly John Ford.

Be that as it may, his role was his role, but one thing I wish he'd never done was to introduce the snappy salute into the Oval Office. The President is a civilian, not a soldier, and that lousy habit has been around every since.  

Anyhow, George Bush I had been in the Navy in the Second World War, and his son had been a Texas National Guard pilot.  George Bush II, however, really brought Dick Cheney into prominence, and Cheney had been in divinity school during the Vietnam War.  

Hmmm. . . 

Barack Obama  had, of course, never been in the service, but I wouldn't have expected him to be.  He's too young to have lived during a time of conscription. 

Neither Biden or Trump are, however.  No service there.  Trump had shin splints, we're told.

Trump seems to have a love hate relationship with war.  On some occasions he appears to genuinely abhor it, but at the same time he's having people murdered on the seas.  Some of that may have to do with an oddly narrow worldview.  We know that he likes money and women. That seems to be about it.

He does seem to abhor drugs.  That may mean the one thing he's okay killing over is that topic, although his recent pardon of a major drug runner raises a question about that.

Epstein

View those files yet?

No, you haven't, as they still haven't been released.

The Democrats have released some materials, however, from the Epstein materials, including a photo of Trump with some young women.  Their faces are blocked out, so you can't really tell how young they are, or for that matter, who they are.  Other materials are just weird, including photos of sex toys, and then this:

Demonizing people

We've really entered a period of full blown racist name calling like I've never seen in my entire lifetime.  It's now openly the case that Trump and some of his cronies say things that are blatantly racist.

Nobody seems to be willing to put a stop to it by calling it out.

Bear Care.

One of the interesting things going on in MAGA land is that in Wyoming, where the MAGAs now control  the legislature (we're always behind the curve) there's starting to be some real pushback. As the MAGAs pushback on the pushback, people's real views start to come out.

The Wyoming Department of Health, seeing that the Republican controlled Congress is going to let a huge number of Wyomingites lose their health insurance coverage, came up with an emergency coverage plan.  It'd cover things like car wrecks and bear attacks.  Because it covers bear attacks, they dubbed it Bear Care.

The Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which might as well be called the Leopards Won't Eat My Face Party, is opposed to it.  

Well of course they are. . . leopards won't eat my face, right?

One of the big wheels in the WFC is John Bear, ironically, who was interviewed on his views, which demonstrate he doesn't really see a separation between church and state being what most would.  That puts him, and therefore perhaps the WFC, squarely in the New Apostolic Reformation camp, something very much outside of the traditional Protestant mainstream, and even more outside of the Wyoming mainstream.

Anyhow, I think Bear Care is a good idea.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 110th Edition. Ballooning ballrooms and murder on the sea.

Labels: 2020s, 2025, 2025 White House Vandalization, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Eric Barlow, Kristi Noem, law, Mark Gordon, Pete Hegseth, Venezuela, White House, Zeitgeist