Happy Fourth of July

Oh, come on! You knew it was coming. July 4th? The most patriotic day on the U.S. calendar? It just cries out for one of my “anti-American” screeds, doesn’t it?

Well, not quite.

Make no mistake, I still loathe what our government descended to over the last eight years (and more) and that it appears to want to remain in the sewer under Obama but I don’t have any new targets. Sites like AlterNet.org or programs like Frontline or Bill Moyer’s Journal do far better and more credible jobs than I can aspire to in exposing how rotten and corrupt this country has (unfortunately) become.

No, I want to look back today at the founding of our Republic and ask “Was the Revolution really necessary?” or, at least, was a war necessary to wrest the colonies from Britain? I was reminded of the topic because this month’s issue of The Progressive carries an essay by the historian Howard Zinn, “A Just Cause ≠ A Just War.” In it he asks us to consider what alternatives there may have been not just to the Revolutionary War but to the other “good” wars in American history – the Civil War and World War II. I don’t think I can entirely agree with his contention that there were alternatives to war in the latter two cases. From my reading of Civil War history, Lincoln bent over backwards to placate Southern fears, and it was South Carolina’s precipitate action at Fort Sumter that forced the federal government to act. True, the president could have let the South go, and good riddance, but that would have left I-don’t-know-how-many African-Americans slaves. What, possibly bloodier, violence would have lain ahead if that cancer hadn’t been addressed? And, if the South had successfully seceded, what would have happened to the idea of the Union? More than any other president before him, Lincoln made “these United States” into “the United States,” a truly unified nation.

In the case of World War II, the fascist dictatorships forced war on us. Again, it’s true, preceding actions on all sides often didn’t help defuse tensions or actively abetted the fascists (the Versailles Treaty being just the poster boy of a long string of foolish mistakes) but fascist ideology needed war. No matter what the Allies did, even if they had made no mistakes, it was only a matter of time.

That doesn’t make these wars “just” or “good.” Violence is never so but I can’t make the case to myself (much less you) that it’s never necessary.

The Revolutionary War, on the other hand? Maybe not so necessary. After all, who were we revolting against? The British Empire? A nation on the cutting-edge of democratic reform at least from the Glorious Revolution in 1688? As oppressive dictators go, George III was pretty tame; and given the inevitable change in government, the colonists’ complaints (so eloquently set out in the Declaration of Independence) could have been addressed by a new Prime Minister. Zinn points out in his essay that a year before “the shot heard round the world,” “…farmers in Western Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to the British officials.” Zinn argues that it was the richer colonists’ desire for land that provoked their decisive break with London. After the French and Indian War, treaties with Native Americans blocked the Colonies’ expansion westward, and that, more even than stamp taxes or no representation in Parliament, incensed certain sectors to no end. Of course, it wasn’t as simple as all that but it does suggest that the motives behind the rebellion were not as pure as the common wisdom would pretend, and there were alternatives, if anyone had had the vision to pursue them.

Would the Colonies have eventually won their independence without war? Almost certainly. Look at Canada or Australia or any other province of the Empire. Even if they hadn’t, would things really be so bloody awful today? I can’t think so. Perhaps the abolition of slavery (which came about quite bloodlessly in the British case) wouldn’t have required 600,000+ dead and a further 150 years of segregation and Jim Crow. Perhaps a Great Britain that included the “kingdoms” of England, Scotland, Ireland and the Thirteen Colonies would have been too daunting for the fascists to challenge. Perhaps a happier relationship could have pertained between us and the Native nations. Perhaps.

Perhaps, too, the world would be in even worse shape politically, economically and environmentally today (though that’s hard to imagine).

The point is, however, not “might have beens” but that violence unleashes so much chaos, destruction and pointless death that its justification has to be nigh unassailable. It’s not a Manichaean choice between war and pacifism but one between war and how do we create a world where that option is not ever on the table.

Was the death and destruction of the Revolutionary War a necessary price to pay?

Collateral Damage Day - November 18

COLLATERAL
DAMAGE
DAY

Unfortunately it is all too easy to find images of the people who are paying the price to keep us "free." "Free" being a relative term as Congress and the judiciary has acquiesced over the last 60 years (but particularly in the last 8) in eviscerating the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th Amendments.

Isn't it great to live in the land of the free, home of the brave?

The image above was lifted from the blogsite Nixon Is In Hell, and the boy's name (at least from what I can tell from the file name) is Ali.

I know that the overwhelming majority of our soldiers are "good" people (heck, my brother was a Marine and he's not so bad) but they're also individuals with a moral conscience. When they surrender that conscience to collaborate in the murderous policies of the Bush (or any other) Administration, then they become culpable in those crimes.

I'll quote again from Ursula Le Guin's translation of Chapter 31 of Tao Te Ching:

"It is right that the murder of many people

be mourned and lamented.

It is right that a victor in war

be received with funeral ceremonies."

A few books to recommend

I just finished reading two marvelous books and thought I would share:

The first is James O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire, which I mentioned in a previous post. The review is still on my GoodReads site here. What I like about it is O'Donnell's attempt to strip away the detritus of historiography and his incorporation of the latest archaeological and prosopographic evidence to create a "truer" picture of the period than any I've read before. It's not perfect and suffers from the author's own prejudices but it shakes up a reader's perceptions of a period that many would think has been mined out.

The second book to recommend this Sunday a.m. is James Wood's How Fiction Works. It's a very readable and interesting look at a noted critic's opinion about what makes good writing, and its review is here.

I've also been directed to a potentially hugely interesting site known as the Internet Archive, and I owe it all to my presence on GoodReads. It came about because someone read my review of J.B. Post's The Atlas of Fantasy, where I mentioned an interest in Thomas Malkin. Thomas was a young prodigy who unfortunately died at the age of six. Before he died, however, he created a fantasy world called Allestone - a history and culture, a calendar and maps, as well as a number of stories. His father wrote a biography, A Father's Memoirs of His Child, in 1806 appending all of the Allestone stories and maps. I despaired of finding a copy of this 200-year-old book but the wonders of modern technology and the Internet came to my rescue. The Internet Archive scans well known and obscure texts, videos, audio, etc. to a common database anyone can access. And there, in a variety of formats, lay A Father's Memoirs. I haven't had the opportunity to read the entire tome; I've only skimmed it since printing it out. From what little I have read, though, I think Post's opinion is sound - we lost a remarkable mind when we lost Thomas Malkin.

On that same site, I've found many of James Branch Cabell's work as well. I've already downloaded Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship. The formatting is straight text, nothing fancy but I'm not interested in Cabell for the packaging so that's not a great impediment.

Finally, I'm taking this opportunity to declare (strictly on my own authority) November 18 Collateral Damage Day (see previous post). I'm working on a suitable memorial for this Tuesday.

In a related vein and before I go entirely today - I was reading a reader's review of Peter Mansoor's Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq (on GoodReads, where else?) where he (the reviewer) made the comment that Mansoor opposed going to war but believed that, now that we were there, we couldn't leave without victory. This opinion (if it accurately reflects Mansoor's) struck me as another example of the insanity of war. It's as if the Germans overthrew Hitler in 1942 but continued to prosecute the war because they hadn't "won."