This February marks the 100 year anniversary of an event that transformed Europe, brought the US into WWI, and nearly led to the destruction of capitalism. While it seems farfetched from the perspective of our western-dominated consumer-capitalist world order, a union between workers and soldiers—February Revolution, in Petrograd (now St. Petersberg)—toppled Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and terrified the US and Europe.

These events also led to a (briefly) independent Ukraine. After it declared independence, Ukraine was embroiled in its first war for sovereignty and self-governance.

Military background

It’s impossible to imagine an independent Ukraine or the Russian revolution that made independence possible without WWI. Contemporary discussions of the feasibility of leftist organization or revolution in Europe or the US often overlook the importance of that extraordinarily damaging war to Lenin’s success.

And it didn’t take much war—the workers and soldiers of Petrograd rejected Moscow's authority after a bit more than two years of fighting. Consider by contrast that Germany would not surrender until 1918, and only after pushing Great Britain and France to the very brink of their own capitulation. Germany and Austria-Hungary differed from Russia, of course, in that both of them incorporated democratic mechanisms into their governance—whereas the Russian government was barely changed from that which had resisted Napoleon in 1812.

Critically, too, Russia was not directly attacked by Germany or Austria-Hungary—from the outset, those nations were fighting a war of self-defense, where Russia was the aggressor. Its largely-disenfranchised citizens did not see throwing millions of lives away in the name of "alliance" and land grabs as a good exchange.

Fighting in WWI was bloody, dramatic, industrial. As a country whose industrial base was more thoroughly exploited than others, the blood Russian soldiers shed told more deeply. Brusilov’s Offensive—a battle that lasted from June to September of 1916 that ended in major Russian gains, still entailed millions of killed and wounded on both sides. More than any other battle, Brusilov's offensive was responsible for creating the conditions necessary for an independent Ukraine in both Austria Hungary and Russia.

As Russia's social order frayed, Germany and Austria-Hungary held on along the Western Front, scored important victories against the Romanians and Italians, and slowly fell back along the Eastern Front. While Russia advanced into Austro-Hungarian Galicia (part of modern-day Ukraine), trading heavy casualties for territory, its ctizens grew increasingly disgusted with the war. This disgust took different forms for the Russians, Fins, Estonians, Ukrainians, and Poles fighting for the Russian military.

It also wrecked Austria-Hungary's military and strained their society to the limit. These conditions were perfect for granting constituent populations greater political power and autonomy within Austria-Hungary. So long as groups were working against Russia and Russian interests, they were permitted to go about their business.

So it was that Russia traded battlefield success for social stability. The empire was teetering on the brink of revolution, and when workers and soldiers revolted in Petrograd, the Tsar abdicated his throne. He was replaced by a Soviet-friendly government led by Alexander Kerensky. 

This could have been the end of Russia's problems. Seeking to follow up on victories in 1916, however, and eager to propitiate military committments to France and England, Kerensky pushed the Russian military further. Despite making some progress at the beginning of an offensive operation, when the Germans and Austro-Hungarians counterattacked and the Russians began taking heavy casualties, the offensive halted, then turned into a rout. Rather than unifying his country and quieting social unrest as Kerensky had hoped, the military failure resulted instead in the total collapse of Russian morale.

By June of 1917, moderate socialists declared the “Ukrainian People’s Republic” in Kyiv. In October of 1917, Kerensky's government collapsed, and he was forced to evacuate in front of Bolshevik forces. Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March of 1918, bringing Russia's role in WWI to an official end.

Social Background

Ukraine experienced a wave of nationalist sentiment during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Many Ukrainians believe that this understanding of themselves as Ukrainian dates back to their national literary and artistic icon, Taras Shevchenko. Shevchenko wrote in Ukrainian in the mid-19th century about a Ukrainian nation. Publishing in Ukrainian was forbidden in Russia then, as was doing anything that could be construed as advocating for autonomy or independence. 

A counter to the “Ukrainians were waiting for a hero to unite them” narrative can be found with Russian historians, who claim that Ukrainian nationalism (like the language) was an invention of the Austro-Hungarians, a 19^th-century example of one nation attempting to destabilize another. On its face, it sounds reasonable—Russia has distinct ethnicities, and using them as a lever to undermine Moscow’s authority would be a brilliant plan. It’s also what the Russian empire did with the Kingdom of Serbia, which helped lead to WWI.

There are problems with the Russian reading of history. If Austria-Hungary invented Ukrainian in the mid-late 19^th century, then why did Russia ban Ukrainian in the early 19^th century? Why was Taras Schevchenko’s poetry, written in Ukrainian, perceived as a powerful tool of subversion to Russian interests? One can’t “invent” a language overnight, nor can one compel people to read or speak a language in sufficient numbers to make rebellion, resistance, or alternate identities feasible. The popularity of Shevchenko’s poetry and the threat with which it was viewed by the Russians offers powerful testimony against some Russians’ claim that Ukraine was a Russian-speaking part of Russia with no sense of itself as having a history or culture separate from Russia.

Furthermore, Austria-Hungary is rarely mentioned in histories as a net exporter of intrigue—the empire’s strengths included administration, bureaucracy, and multiculturalism, but its weaknesses included modern force projection and subterfuge. There was no legion of Austro-Hungarian spies flooding into its neighbors to undermine or destroy native sovereignty.

Still, there is some truth to the Russian claims. Austria-Hungary did not have the same laws restricting publication of books in minority-ethnicity languages as did Russia. So the poetry of Taras Shevchenko was free to spread and germinate outside Russia’s borders, in a way that it wasn’t inside Russian-occupied Ukraine. The free spread of powerful anti-Russian ideas did, then, occur in Austria Hungary—but not because it was part of an Austro-Hungarian plan. Rather, anti-Russian ideas spread because there was a group of people, Ukrainians, with their own distinctive language and culture, and it spread because there was a nearby nation-state that offered Ukrainians freedom of speech, thought, and identity, as well as political opportunity. Austria-Hungary may have given Ukrainians reason to hope for independence, but it did not do so deliberately.

Russia exiled Taras Shevchenko and denied that Ukrainians were a people apart from Russians, while referring to them separately as “Little Brothers” and banning the publication of any literature in the language most “Little Brothers” spoke. Still, the idea spread among Ukrainians that they were a group apart from Russia. This was true for Austria-Hungary as well. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and western Ukraine all lay within Austria-Hungary’s borders (to say nothing of Austria and Hungary).

It is worth pointing out here that an expansion of this idea, self-determination, used so effectively as a tool against the Austro-Hungarians, ultimately resulted in the destruction of the British, French, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires.

So while the Allies were encouraging western Ukraine (then called Galicia) to understand itself as separate and distinct from Austria-Hungary, the Austro-Hungarians (who had always seen ethnic minorities as entitled to their own languages and cultures so long as they did not interfere with governance, conscription, or the collection of taxes) were permitting Ukrainian identity to germinate and spread in their own territory. Those western Ukrainians, who saw themselves as part of an entirely different nation that, historically, had extended far into Russia, cooperated with Ukrainians living under Russian occupation.

Political Background

At the same time that the Brusilov Offensive was breaking the Russian military’s morale, wrecking Austria-Hungary’s military capacity to fight, and outraging Russia’s industrial population against the Tsar, many populations were preparing to declare themselves independent. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania all date their modern independence to 1917 or 1918.

The Allies – Great Britain, France, and (as of April 1917) the USA—were in a bind. Ostensibly supportive of Russia as a military ally, they were hostile to Russia’s absolutist monarchy and what they perceived as its unenlightened social order. Supporting movements that promised ethnicities independent, sovereign nations apart from Russia would be in accordance with their ethical logic, but would also assist Germany, their enemy.

While the Allies were deliberating how to respond to Russia’s political situation, Russia was engulfed in flames. Before the Allies could mount an effective campaign to support Russia's Tsar, he abdicated his throne. His successor, Alexander Kerensky, attempted to work with the Allies by continuing Russia’s participation in WWI on the side of the Allies, and ordered an offensive that was turned back by the Germans, who then overran Ukraine and Belarus.

Aftermath

Ukraine's ambitions for an independent state unraveled swiftly after 1917. The provisional Ukrainian governments in Kyiv and in Lviv were both willing to work with the Germans at first. That changed when they learned that Ukrainian independence was not part of Germany's plans for the region, and Germany began cracking down on Ukrainian politicians and nationalists. If Imperial Russia was unable to contain Ukraine’s ambitions for a State, several German divisions had no chance. Nationalism continued to spread, and while the minor German occupying force was enough to enforce a superficial subjection to German rule, it also bought Ukraine time to organize while the Central Powers fought it out with the Allies. It wasn't enough: after Germany’s defeat in 1918, a republic in the West of Ukraine was defeated by a joint French/US/Polish force. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian republic based in Kyiv was steamrolled by the Red Army.

Ukraine did not become legally independent from the USSR until 1991, and continued its status as a de facto Russian proxy until 2014. It is a strange accident that it should have taken nearly 100 years, but in fighting against Russia’s latest invasion, Ukrainians may have finally achieved that for which many of them had hoped 100 years ago—a real nation of their own.

How can a society so disconnected from its wars welcome back its fighting women and men? What do we lose when we privilege individuality over collectivity? WBT Writer Drew Pham joined in a panel discussion with Sebastian Junger on his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, alongside Columbia University Professors Beth Fisher-Yoshida, Peter Coleman. Venera Kusari of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Program at Columbia moderated.

Watch the recorded discussion below:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feCPYV1MN8E]

Sebastian Junger is the New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War and Tribe.  As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo, a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.   

Dr. Peter T. Coleman specializes in the field of conflict resolution and sustainable peace. Dr. Coleman holds a Ph.D. in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, where he today serves as Professor of Psychology and Education. He directs the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Teachers College, and is the Executive Director of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity at the Earth Institute. 

Dr. Beth Fisher-Yoshida is a faculty member and the academic director of the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program, Director of the Youth, Peace and Security program and Co-Executive Director of AC4, all at Columbia University. Dr. Fisher-Yoshida teaches classes in conflict resolution and related fields and conducts participatory action research, and research in the areas of conflict and conflict resolution with a focus on intercultural communication, transformative learning and Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). She i received her Ph.D. in Human and Organizational Systems from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California.

We have leaders, in the USA, it's always been that way. I don’t believe in some magical, fairyland communal or egalitarian America that was free from hierarchy. The settlers who occupied the land through Siberia and Asia did so in tribal societies some of which were patriarchies, and some of which were matriarchies. The invading Europeans all arrived from their own feudal or quasi-democratic traditions—they were not free from the assumptions or rules of their parents or grandparents, though they may have loathed them.

 

The original American settlers – whether the Native Americans or the Europeans – were all people who called someone master, and elevated that person above the rest, for a variety of reasons. They had to, in order to survive.

 

Even so, after several generations of European immigrants arrived in the late 18^th century, and following certain intellectual innovations in political and moral thought in Europe, a choice was made. Many of the colonists decided to create a new system of government, based on the idea that white, male humans all had some inherent dignity apart from their financial responsibilities. While that dignity has often been couched in financial terms, the original statement of human rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is idealistic and totally (by luck or design) abstract.

 

Those white men revolted against their political masters, the kingdom of Great Britain. They fought British soldiers, German mercenaries, and neighbors who disagreed with them. With the help of France, the pro-humanism white supremicist European colonists won, and the United States of America was born.

 

Since then, people have extrapolated a great many things from that original idea about human dignity—that it should apply to non-white people, and also that it should apply to women. These notions seem self-evident to most today, but were not at the time. Every one of those social revelations (black humans are entitled to these rights, female humans are entitled to these rights, etc.) depends on a single, overwhelming and revolutionary idea: that government owes something to the people it serves, because it is the people it serves.

 

In the US, we have yet to reach even an approximation of that ideal. One reason behind this inability to think or view government as belonging to the people is that in word and thought, we consistently place ourselves below elected political representatives.

 

This problem comes down to an infatuation with hierarchy. No single factor—not the electoral college, not gerrymandering, not money in politics—is more dangerous or damaging to democracy than the tolerance for giving titles and honorifics to people who serve as elected or appointed officials in whatever it is we call the American democratic experiment. “Secretary Clinton,” “President Trump,” “Senator Cotton,” “The Honorable Clarence Thomas.” Our use of titles—our enthusiastic desire to label and categorize damns us as authoritarian collaborators, as servile scum to be used and abused at any and every opportunity.

 

And abuse by the authorities is precisely what happens in America, routinely. Our elected leadership and their political appointees use and harm us. Who can blame them? We tell them that they’re powerful, and that exploitation is okay. Not just okay: good.

 

If we want to reform our system, the first thing to do is to strip every politician of their title. Him, her, they – the titles must go. In their place, we should mandate that they be addressed using insulting and offensive nicknames, the more humiliating the better, to be used whenever and wherever possible. The potential criticism that this is what Trump did to be elected might be countered by pointing out that now that he has become elected, he would be subjected to precisely the same obligatory disrespect he has encouraged, which seems like something he doesn't like. 

 

More precisely, elected and appointed citizens with political power, for their part – members of Congress, judges, the President, members of the Presidential cabinet—should address every U.S. citizen as “sir” or “ma’am.” They must also say, upon greeting an American citizen: “you’re stronger, smarter, and more beautiful/handsome than I am. Because I am weak and stupid and look like shit, like actual dogshit.” If they fail to say this, it should be legal and necessary to kick them—not too hard, but not soft, either. In the ass—like they are a dog, that has annoyed you. When doing so, you (the citizen) must say something like “I’m kicking you with my foot instead of slapping you because one uses one's foot to kick a dog or some other unclean thing. I don’t want to get my hand filthy by touching you.” Elected representatives should address felons convicted of brutal and appalling crimes as “brother” or “sister.” Nonviolent felons should be addressed as "sir" or "ma'am."

 

Elected representatives should be on a similar social plane as felons. If you don’t agree with me, you’re a coward, a fool, a slave, and you’re destroying our democracy.

 

Why do our elected representatives need titles? What does it do for them? Is it necessary to remind them that they have power, or responsibility? No, that’s a silly argument, obviously they have power and responsibility. They know that. What they don’t know is that the power and responsibility is totally, completely contingent on their service to citizens. They forget this in the way that they speak to us, in the way that they live, in the influence they wield. They forget this, living in a democratic society, by insisting (institutionally, officially, or personally) that they be addressed by some form of title. That they believe honor or respect is their due as a Senator or Cabinet Member.

 

Absurd, untrue, obscene.

 

People in the military understand that they serve the country—they swear oaths to the same. They address civilians as “sir” and “ma’am” in part because doing so preserves the essential hierarchy of violence in America—citizens are above soldiers, politically and socially, and should be. In turn, soldiers are given some tangible benefits, while (in most practical terms) being treated like dogs, made to wear silly uniforms, and subjected to the real prospect of a quick death. We can do the same for elected and appointed representatives, but as the consequences are so much greater for the politicians who can do things like declare war or authorize military intervention, those politicians should be treated with accordingly less respect than soldiers.

 

I say “soldiers” because the proliferation of titles for different types of soldiers—“marines,” “sailors,” airmen” “SEALs” and soforth is more of this servile and appalling, totally inappropriate impulse to set apart and above. If you’re in the military, you’re a soldier. People who believe otherwise are willing idiots at best, and dangerous radicals at best, attempting to subvert and destroy democracy. Stop using any word other than "soldier," immediately.

 

Furthermore, as much as Americans secretly despise soldiers—they do, unarguably, despise them, passionately and secretly, as all great passions are secret passions—soldiers are still offered a measure of public respect. Soldiers offer to die, which is pretty generous of them, considering, so they get monuments and speeches. Politicians never offer to die for their country, although we'd all be better off if most of them did—not offer, die, I mean—so we should give none of the tongue-in-cheek, superficial and almost entirely bogus support we say we give to "the troops" to politicians.

 

“Shitheel” or “Shit-for-brains” would be a good title for people serving in Congress. “Hey Shit-for-brains Cotton. You really have Shit-for-brains.” Whether you agree with Tom Cotton’s politics or not (I don’t, but that’s beside the point), you see the benefit. He remembers that in spite of his representing a constituency, it’s everyone’s duty to tell him what a total, complete, utter disgrace he is for being in politics. If you don’t like my example of Tom Cotton, don’t worry, it applies equally to Tammy Duckworth, someone for whom I have a great deal of respect, whose politics are 100% diametrically opposed to Cotton’s. Basically, pick someone in Congress today—anyone. It works.

 

Now, I don’t want to peg the title to a specific phrase—“Shit-for-brains” is insulting now, but give it a couple years and people would be trying to make it into a mark of honor or distinction. Really, people in Congress should just be called whatever you call a drunken, stupid, lying, criminal sack of decrepitude. Today it’s “shit-for-brains,” but tomorrow it could be something totally different.

 

The president would have a worse title, because the president has more power than any single congressperson. When addressing Congress, however, the president would obviously say “brothers” or “comrades” or “collectively, my equal.”

 

People who work for Congressmen and Congresswomen, as well as those working for a president’s cabinet or the President should not be addressed under any circumstances. They should be ignored, and if anyone hears them speaking, they should be kicked and called a dog, and otherwise belittled. If any of these people acquire prominence simply by working with or for a powerful person—Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin comes to mind as an excellent example of this, as do all of Trump's children and Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanual—they can be kicked on sight. What happens later in their career does not matter, so that Rahm Emmanual’s becoming Mayor of Chicago does not mean he's suddenly immune to being kicked, or having voting-age citizens scream “you shit, you fucking worthless piece of shit, I own you” while kicking him, so close to Emmanual that spit flies off their mouth and onto his face—no, that just means now he’s Mayor of Chicago, but also these earlier bad things are still happening to him.

 

Caveat: as a politician you can't hit back or say anything while being kicked or screamed at except "I'm sorry, you're right citizen, I'm sorry." And it better fucking sound sincere.

 

Some Bullshit Counterarguments, Easily Dismissed

 

Here are some counterarguments against my wise scheme. Firstly, there could be concern that people elected or appointed to leadership positions would get depressed by getting called bad names or kicked, and do a worse job—especially without any positive reinforcement. I would point out that in the military, especially during training, I and every other soldier in training were subjected to every horrible name one can imagine and worse, and made to know both that we had no right to expect anything, but also that what we were doing was very important. What I saw in training and at the unit level, on a tactical level, was that the very best people did not care about what they were called, and worked very hard to earn the respect of their peers. Only when you got away from that small, personal level, only when you left “the tribe” did things begin to break down, did rank and tabs or awards become more important than actions. In any case, I did not see verbal abuse as dissuading good people from working hard—in fact, it seemed like a stimulant.

 

Another counterargument could be that using vile language to describe American leadership would encourage citizens to do actual violence to them, or to murder them. This is an excellent point, but not, I think, a counterargument. On the contrary, I believe that if a clever human like Hillary Clinton had been called “Shit-for-brains” or “garbage-taint-scumheart” or whatever else people wanted instead of “Madam Secretary,” it could have helped guide her political evolution in a more productive directin than the trashcan of history, where she and her philosophy have ended up. Ditto Donald Trump, obviously.

 

In other words, the violence of words would signal in plain language to officials that, in fact, they were, at all times, very close to their end, and that, like the character of Nick the Greek in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, they’d have to work very, very hard to avoid that actual (rather than threatened) end.

 

Another criticism could be that this practice or habit would lead to an increase in violence in society overall, and a desire to use harmful language in general. I don’t think this is a valid criticism, because people tend not to enjoy using violence under any circumstances—violence is profoundly unsettling. People who love hierarchy want us to believe that the alternative to hierarchy is violence, but of course that assertion is as hypothetical as the assertion that communism is practical. The requirement to describe elected leadership and their political representatives as “Shit-for-brains” or “Shit-soul” or “Stupid-Fascist-Fuckup-Fucker” would not suddenly result in many people cursing in public all the time. Rather, it would serve as a kind of caution to everyone living in the society: but for the grace of god and hubris, there go I. Furthermore, human decency would protect those elected leaders who truly worked for the people from the worst outrages. Politicians would see that working for the good rather than for each other or themselves would result in ameliorated negative interactions. Rather than curse at them  in public or in private, citizens would just try to ignore interacting with them in general, so as not to hurt their feelings or stop the good work they were doing. This would only happen with the best of them, though. The sign of a great leader would be that people only grudgingly (rather than enthusiastically) made remarks that in other circumstances would be slanderous about their person and personal lives. Good leaders would be allowed to do their good work.

 

A final counterargument would be that this situation would dissuade people from getting into politics. I disagree—I think it would dissuade all but the most sturdy people from getting into politics, people who do not depend on titles and honorifics to describe their authority as do our cousins in Europe or Asia or Africa.  If you don’t mind getting called every horrible, insulting phrase under the sun—if you don’t mind hearing your mother and father and sister and brother and wife and children abused in the most horrifying, borderline criminal, graphic detail imaginable, politics shouldn’t be for you. If you want someone to address you as “Ambassador such-and-such” or “Secretary so-and-so” or “Mr./Mrs. President,” there are many other countries in the world that will accommodate this type of (to my American thinking) nauseating pander: this should not be how we do things in America. Bowing and scraping and elevating the most servile and precious, the most proud among us to positions of leadership—it is below us, individually and collectively.

 

Let's choose instead to call our elected leadership and their political appointees what they are: shit-for-brains, asshole-grease. Down with hierarchy, up with democracy!

The day after the election felt all too familiar. It felt like 9/11. Then, as now, that day only promised a long road ahead. The years that followed, I dreaded a war I felt duty bound to fight. I was only twelve on 9/11, but I came from a family a Vietnamese refugees, for whom war and resistance is as much a part of the fabric of our lives as family reunions and weddings. We have always fought for whichever country we called home, Vietnam under the French, both the communist north and American-backed south, and now the United States. My brother and I both fought in Afghanistan, and my family shed no tears when we deployed because for us it was inevitable—we fight.

Before all of that, on 9/11, amidst the anguish and strife, I somehow had the presence of mind to think:

Welcome to the rest of the world, America.

I thought the same thing the day Trump claimed victory. Yugoslavia came to mind that morning. My friend Sara, a Croatian-American writer, likened a Trump presidency to the election of Slobodan Milošević. The hate-speech and ultra-nationalism of the Trump Campaign were the same starting points for ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Yugoslav wars. To many, Yugoslavia was once a paragon of multi-culturalism, but we witnessed a model society descend into conflict distinguished by crimes against humanity. In Love Thy Neighbor, Peter Maas writes that before the Bosnian War started, Yugoslavs thought the brazen inhumanity that occurred would be impossible. They satirized and lampooned the idea of a civil war on national TV. All it took were a few—a small, cursed, hateful few—to throw a once great nation into turmoil.

My wife and I spent the whole day texting, asking, what are we going to do? She told me that she wasn’t going to be one of those Jews that waited in Berlin until the day they put her onto a train; she wasn’t going to just wait and see. Some part of me wondered if we were being irrational, these epigenetic memories of pogroms and falling napalm—surely these nightmares would never come to fruition? We have middle class jobs, a rent-stabilized apartment, we vote in local elections—surely it would never come to violence? I asked myself if everything I worked towards—my art, my family, my dreams—would be cut short by another conflict. The soldier in me yearned for the comfort my M4 carbine gave me in Afghanistan, but I didn’t fight for an America ruled by the rifle rather than the ballot.

I was told by white men in my life to be patient, wait for the smoke to clear because it cannot be as bad as everyone thinks. One man told me that the campaign’s bigotry might subside, that it was only a tactic to get into power. He said that the adult thing to do now was to build bridges, as if my anger at the election’s result was childish—now wasn’t the time to take up arms. I remember thinking that no one would come for him for being the wrong skin color, for saying the wrong thing.

I knew then that resistance was my only option. I struggled with that decision. I wondered if I was just contributing to a deeper division in a country that seemed split nearly straight down the middle. Right wrong or indifferent, we elected Trump president—by action or inaction, we are all responsible. Yet it can’t be just about healing, because the people that brought Trump to power seem to have little interest in bridging the divide given the uptick in hate-speech.

My wife and I took to the streets Wednesday, the ninth of November alongside thousands. We flooded Union Square. A city in despair called out, voices echoing through glass and concrete canyons. Those voices became one. Though we disrupted the organized chaos of Manhattan rush hour, bystanders cheered us from their city buses, honked their horns in solidarity, even joined us. Rain fell, but we were warm. When the night was over, I felt purged of despair. I am wary of emotionally cathartic experiences, because poverty, illness, and war have taught me that catharsis can be a cheap illusion, but I thought I felt something genuine.

That Saturday, I marched again. There were thousands more demonstrators on Fifth Avenue, where veterans had paraded with their flags and patriotic banners just the day before. There was something subdued about the demonstration, contained—police barriers formed a fence between us and pedestrians shopping at upscale retailers or couples leaving from brunch. The mass of protestors stretched for dozens of city blocks—it was hard to see where the huddled bodies began and ended, but there were times when the slogans and chanting stopped, falling into a cowed silence. It had only been a few days, and I worried that the collective passion that compelled us to gather had somehow subsided.

The closer we came to Trump’s tower, the closer the police hemmed us in. A block away, the demonstrators were penned in on all sides by barricades. I speculated on how many of the men and women the NYPD would be called on to enforce the systemic cleansing of the country proposed by Trump and his cohort. How many would relish it? Would I count them among the enemy soon?

It’s just a job, most of the officers said when I asked them why they joined the force.

The black officers laughed when we started chanting, Fuck Giuliani.

I told one sergeant from the Seven-Seven out of Prospect Heights that I was sorry they had to spend their Saturday out here.

“At least it gets us out of Brooklyn,” he said.

When we reached the police blockade below that glaring, obsidian edifice, Trump supporters—young men in their twenties perhaps—heckled the crowd. These men—or boys—were not the white working-class poor, those rust-belt disenfranchised that the new media looked to scapegoat after the election. They were patricians, dressed in expensive oxford shirts and high-end outdoor jackets. I can’t remember what they said; I just remember their smug self-assuredness. While the others around me tried to ignore them, I yelled back. I wore a hat that read Operation Enduring Freedom Veteran, with a Combat Action Badge embroidered at the center.

“Motherfucker,” I said, “why don’t you go down to the recruiting station and put your money where your mouth is.”

While his friends backed down, one of them leaned over the barricade and shouted louder. I didn’t hear what he said over the sound of my own voice responding in kind. As we marched past I slung insult after insult until they were out of sight. I used my status as a veteran to humiliate him, and some part of me is ashamed, because I forgot that I didn’t just fight for my idea of what America should be, but his as well.

By that point, my friends were tired and hungry. Everyone’s enthusiasm had dissipated. As we wriggled out of the pen, street vendors hawked cheap light-up toys out of granny carts and high-school kids took selfies, while an activist festooned with leftist pins and patches performed for a news anchor on the other side of the corral.

Free of the crowd, I watched the spectacle from the perspective of the cameras and passers-by. I remembered that they protested in Yugoslavia too, but tens of thousands had to die before Milošević was brought to justice. Almost everyone hoped for a peaceful resolution—everyone but the ultranationalists who laid their genocidal plans. In Love Thy Neighbor, Maas captured the laments of Bosnians caught unprepared for the violence that would beset them for nearly three years. As I watched the crowd disperse, I wondered if I too would be caught underprepared—outgunned, outmanned, starving. I wondered how many of these women and men around me would be willing to take up arms. Perhaps my greatest asset as a veteran was my capacity for violence, my ability to fight and kill, but the idea dismayed me.

When my train crossed the Manhattan Bridge, my wife texted me.

Traffic is totally fucked on bway/ in the 20s

Good job 🙂

Social media, the news, my friends—they all noticed the stand against hate. The whole country watched—continues to watch those that struggle for equality. I understood then that as a veteran, I am not an asset because of my capacity for destruction. We veterans seeking to fulfill our country’s promise of liberty and justice for all are assets because of our capacity to organize. Going forward, we must exercise and teach our acumen for strategic decision-making, our ability to marshal resources, our ability to lead. If America is to resist the threat of mass deportation, hate crimes, and free-speech suppression, it will need its veterans.

Perhaps the day will come when we must defend our communities against violence, but violence is a tool of last resort. We would do well to remember that organizations like the Black Panther Party, Young Lords, and the American Indian Movement were populated and led by veterans who sought to build community, contrary to the popular narrative that they were terror organizations. Veterans are already standing up to Trump’s vision for America. Organizations like Common Defense are speaking out against misogyny and homophobia, and Veterans for Peace are standing in solidarity with Muslim Americans in their #vetsvshate social-media campaign.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Professor and Albert Einstein Institution founder Gene Sharp outlined 198 methods of non-violent action to resist the threat of hate looming before us. For now, mass protests are important to show the country how many of us oppose racism, sexism, and homophobia, but there is more work to be done. What stands out about these methods is that in aggregate they amount to the formation of an alternative society. Nonviolent methods can be performed by any of us, from members of the government to workers and consumers. Sharp’s protégé Jamilia Raqib gave a TED talk on using these nonviolent methods to disrupt and ultimately dismantle tyrannical regimes like Daesh, but they could easily be applied to a Trump autocracy. She says, “The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete.” Our country needs us again, whether infantry, mechanics, or logisticians—our skills can build that alternative society together.

There is already so much hate in our country, and those of us who fought know that war is not a vicious cycle, but a downward spiral. The challenge before us is not to respond to hate with violence, but to foster a society that values community above enmity. My friend, Ali Dineen, a musician and activist, told me that we should not seek to call our adversaries out; rather we should call them in. I might have asked that Trump supporter to talk instead of berate him. I might have simply asked him what his name was, undoing bigotry is a long process that starts with a conversation. In the coming years I fear that resistance may come to mean armed conflict, and though my soldier’s heart sometimes yearns to fight again, I don’t want to fight my own countrymen. Violence can only deepen the deep divide in America, but making violence obsolete, having a vision for the future that includes our enemies, that kind of resistance can bridge the divide in our country. I spent four years in the Army practicing the art of war; now in revolt, I have the chance to build rather than destroy.

Photo Credit: Ken Shin

Correction: A previous version of this essay stated that Gene Sharp was a professor at NYU.

Shortly after Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Booker Prize was awarded to fellow American Paul Beatty for his novel The Sellout. It seems Americans are having a moment in the world of literary prestige, maybe to counterbalance the current political nadir. Dylan was the first American to win the Nobel in 23 years, and Beatty is the first American ever to win the Booker Prize, the pre-eminent prize in Anglophone letters. Originally the Booker Prize had been limited to British writers, then eventually to English language writers from the larger British commonwealth, now to any writer in English. I have read a few handfuls of the past winners and candidates, and I can say that Paul Beatty’s win is well-deserved and ranks among the best of them.

The Sellout is a satire on race in America. It is not only one of the funniest and most intelligent books I have read about race in America (a relatively limited number for me), but one of the funniest and most intelligent books I have read, period. The novel is told by a Black urban farmer with the surname Me in a fictional South-Central Los Angeles slum called Dickens. This impoverished locality, “the murder capital of the world”, was an embarrassment to L.A. and the U.S.A. and was disincorporated by the authorities. One of the central plans of Me is to reconstitute and delineate his hometown of Dickens. He also begins to slyly reinstitute segregation, first on his girlfriend’s bus, then in shops, the library, and the school. After this gambit, crime plummeted and student test results skyrocketed.

The main character was raised and home-schooled only by his father, a prominent psychologist and intellectual who made his son’s life into one long racial sociological experiment. The farm they inhabit takes on Garden of Eden-like qualities, with an impossibly wide-range of exotic fruits that are well-known around town, and delicious enough to make rival gang members put away their Glocks to lick up watermelon juice. One of the members of the local donut shop intellectual club is a Black media impresario named Foy Cheshire, who steals Me’s father’s best ideas to get rich, and calls the main character “the Sellout” for most of the book.

The funniest and most controversial character by far is an aged television actor named Hominy Jenkins, who played a minor role in the old Little Rascals TV series of the 1920-40s. Hominy rejoices at all signs of overt racism, and happily enlists himself as the Sellout’s lazy and unwanted slave. The eventual discovery of this relationship and the resegregation scheme puts the main character behind bars, and eventually in front of the Supreme Court.

There are numerous mentions of real-life African-Americans, often unnamed for legal reasons, throughout the novel, including Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Dave Chappelle. The novel makes use of the author’s detailed knowledge of Los Angeles, as well as Black pop culture, intellectual culture, language, film and TV, and literature. The plot is very engaging from the first page to the last, as well as being chock-full of new ideas in almost every paragraph. The author never seems to run out of interesting and funny new formulations about race and life in America. It is a very difficult book written with frankness and irreverence, not worried about upsetting any sacred cow or offending overly sensitive readers. It appears at a time when just such blunt discussions of race are needed.

One instance of how biting the book can often be is this passage about all of the miserable cities of the world that rejected Dickens as a potential sister city. The last of these is the Lost City of White Male Privilege:

“The Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolano’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars.”

In the final anecdote in the novel the main character tells about a long-ago visit to a local comedy club featuring open mic night for black comedians. Halfway through, a white couple walks in and begins joining in the laughter. The comedian confronts the white couple and asks them to leave. “This is our thing,” he says. The main character then expresses regret that he did not stand up for the couple’s right to be there. It’s a serious end to a powerful, nuanced, and funny book. As all satire, it punches up at an entrenched system of power–racism and bigotry, in this case. Most of the blows landed. In "post-racial" America, though, it will take a lot more people punching to topple the system in question. And a lot more people reading and writing and engaging in open dialogue with each other, and defending each other’s rights to live and laugh freely.

Since 1989-1991 when every country in the USSR or the Warsaw Pact (save Russia) jumped ship at the earliest opportunity, reasonable people have asked the question: why does the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) still exist? This essay represents an attempt to understand basic criticisms that exist across the Western and non-Western political spectrum—to take them at face value, and examine them in good faith. The author of this essay believes in the necessity of NATO–its goodness, in fact–so it is an attempt to see things from another perspective.

 

Speaking with people on the right and left who argue against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one encounters two different critical methodologies that arrive at the same conclusion. This is how Americans who support former candidate for US President Bernie Sanders or current presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein could find common ground with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, Republican candidate Donald Trump (and former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates). It’s also how Americans can find common ground with Russian nationalists, Chinese nationalists, and far-right groups across Europe.

 

Jumping into a comparision between the two groups' methodologies requires some minor simplification. I don't think this veers into oversimplification, but then, as I view both arguments against NATO as insufficient, that shouldn't be surprising. The motives of the left and the right are very different. As such, their criticisms have different moral weight, and require different types of justification to make sense. The left and right are not "the same" for reaching similar conclusions about why one should not support a European Cold War alliance, but their conclusions do happen to agree. That's important.

 

Conservative NATO skeptics tend to bring two types of criticism against the organization. The first draws on skepticism over globalization and alliance, and is not unlike the “States Rights” argument one often encounters among this type of thinker. These people view NATO membership as a concession of US sovereignty and agency. Taking part in a mutual defense pact means the US having to defend other countries in ways that run contrary to its own interests. The US loses more than it gains from a military alliance with Europe. The second describes the problem in financial terms: the US cannot afford to spend the money it does on NATO, that money would be better spent almost anywhere else. This second source of concern is similar to the first in that it assumes that the US is somehow being cheated by participating in the alliance—out of sovereignty, agency, or money.

NATO skeptics on the American left are less concerned about advancing “US” interests, and more interested in expanding a world where people can live free from war. To this type of thinking, the US is itself a source of much or the dominant piece of aggression in the world, and as NATO is subservient to US influence, it should be diminished. The hypothesis here is that a smaller or non-existent NATO would inevitably lead to a more peaceful world. People tend to live harmoniously with one another, much moreso than nations, and reducing any nation-state agency is to the good. This type of thinking also leads people to advocate for the reduction or outright destruction of all nuclear weapons. From this point of view—the humanist or humanitarian—the stronger and larger NATO is, the more likely war becomes.

 

Leftist criticism of NATO spending resembles conservative criticisms, with both claiming that the money spent on defense could go elsewhere. Whereas conservatives tend to prefer that money spent on alliance flow instead to grow US military capability, liberals or progressives would prefer that money to be invested in education, infrastructure, and science, both domestically and overseas. This leftist tends to believe that lack of education or transportation leads to misunderstanding and violence, and that were everyone to have the same basis of understanding and knowledge, wars could be prevented.

 

Another possible anti-NATO stance comes from countries hostile to Europe. Countries that would prosper from NATO's wane (China, Russia, etc.), which correctly assess that a militarily unified Europe checks their own territorial or economic ambitions, are natural enemies of NATO. These countries view any alliance of which they are not a part as something to be diminished or destroyed. In a few cases, like that of Serbia, whose territorial ambition NATO buried in the 1990s, hostility could also represent lingering resentment toward having suffered military defeat. It is worth pointing out that people who refer to Serbia as "Yugoslavia" are, as a rule, almost always anti-NATO along these lines.

 

The final perspective hostile to NATO comes from within the US military establishment. This criticism tends toward the conservative: defense industry spending is a zero-sum game. A country only accumulates so much capital, and conservatives believe that investing in alliance or partnership wastes that capital. While the motivation in this case is financial, the criticism manifests itself as political: these skeptics focus on the possibility of fighting war at the tactical level, independent of strategic considerations, or the diplomatic minutia of whether Russia was somehow tricked or deceived by NATO’s expansion. In all cases, the argument by people like Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-48) ends up being reduced support for NATO. This amounts to tacit or explicit acceptance of non-Western agendas.

 

Across the spectrum, people who have criticisms of NATO should not be viewed as necessarily hostile to American, European, or Western interests. While that is certainly the case in a few circumstances, for the most part, criticisms of NATO end up being reflections of the West’s failure to translate its prosperity into a model that is sustainable in the rest of the world. As few places outside the US and Europe have experienced lasting prosperity under Western models, it’s difficult for the West to dismiss criticisms out of hand.

 

In the US and in Europe, hostility toward NATO should be viewed as a failure on the part of NATO to communicate its purpose effectively. If NATO and the US were able to describe how and why, specifically, Europeans and North American participants benefit from the security arrangement, it seems unlikely that any morally and logically humanistic citizens of Western countries would see meaningful opposition to NATO, save on the absolute fringe. On the fringe left, people wish to weaken the US and Europe following the hypothesis that strengthening all non-European countries would lead to an increase in global justice. On the fringe right, people wish for there to be absolute US or European power, and see alliances between the two as contrary to the interests of each.

 

If you believe that peace and prosperity for all humans require a weaker Europe and USA, you see NATO as a problem. If, on the other hand, you believe the USA or Europe should be absolutely powerful, NATO appears wasteful at best, and a threat to your sovereignty at worst. I think you're wrong–but I understand your position.

Philosophy used to be the king of science. Hard to imagine now, but it’s true. Over the last few centuries, however, the divide between science and philosophy has grown larger and more irreconcilable, even while science overwhelmingly surpassed philosophy in importance. Philosophy has become a specialized field for unanswerable metaphysical and ethical questions, while science, the new king of human knowledge, searches for and finds answers. That is the conventional wisdom, anyway. Philosophy, more than a specific field of academia, is something more akin to a way of thinking, questioning the world, and exploring possibilities. In reality, all cutting edge scientific research depends on philosophy. Most theoretical scientists worth their microscopes would readily admit that posing questions, hypotheses, and thought experiments (otherwise known as philosophizing) are the foundation for conducting research. In philosophy, unlike in science or in daily life, questions are the answer, the journey, the raison d’être. As Will Durant wrote in The Story of Philosophy: “Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.” 

Despite the opinions of some scientists, there are some questions that concern both philosophy and science, and there are certainly some questions that will likely never be solved even by futuristic science. These two issues are at the heart of two recent books I will review: Why Does the World Exist: An Existential Detective Story (2012) by Jim Holt, and What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge (2016) by Marcus du Sautoy. I strongly recommend both books for philosophically or scientifically inclined readers interested in life’s biggest questions and mysteries.

A single question provides the impetus for the first book, whose title says it all: Why does the World Exist? Actually, the title does not say it all–the question should be framed: “why does the universe exist?” This is a question which most likely goes back to the dawn of mankind, to our most primitive myths and religions, and which certainly interested our earliest philosophers. As Holt goes on to show in great detail, it is also a question that has interested virtually every philosopher who ever lived (and not only philosophers but poets, preachers, politicians, and plumbers). There is something so basic, and fundamental, and unanswerable about the question, that anyone with a brain cannot help but give it some serious thought at some point in their life (and in many cases, over the course of their life). Holt points to the 17th century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Liebniz as the first one to really formulate and attempt to answer the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” 

Spoiler alert: Holt does not conclusively answer the title question, but by the end of the book this lacuna is almost beside the point. It remains an unanswered and (most likely) an unanswerable question. Holt nevertheless travels around universities and cafes in Europe and America to interview ten of the most brilliant minds across various fields that all have a stake in the question. Over half of Holt’s interlocutors are theoretical or cosmological physicists: Andrei Linde, David Deutsch, Alex Vilenkin, Steven Weinberg, Roger Penrose, and John Leslie; the remaining four are two philosophers, Adolph Grünbaum and Derek Parfit, the theologian Richard Swinburne, and the novelist John Updike. Each interview gives new insight from a completely different perspective and set of assumptions. Holt, a philosopher himself, finally does attempt to formulate his own theoretical flowchart that explains how the universe could have come to existence out of nothing. The result is somewhat technical, metaphysical, and probably not terribly convincing, as the author himself might admit, but still food for a good day’s thought.

Why Does the World Exist? is far from a dry recitation of theories and ideas, but rather a lively personal and even emotional journey which invites the reader to think for himself. We travel from place to place with the author, who writes in witty and readable prose. Along the way he fluently provides the commentary on the relevant existential views of virtual every major philosopher in the western tradition, along with abundant references to literature, art, and music. The book is so jam-packed with captivating information that I almost wanted to reread it immediately after finishing–the best praise I can give to a book, especially the philosophical non-fiction variety.

What We Cannot Know is another book which doubles as both a big-picture explanation of science and philosophy and a personal quest for the limits of human knowledge. Marcus du Sautoy is a mathematician whose title at Oxford University is Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, a chair he took over from Richard Dawkins. If du Sautoy’s goal is to help the public at large to begin to understand the arcane questions that underpin the latest scientific developments, his book is highly praiseworthy but not completely satisfying. In this book, he sets out the task of exploring the limits of human knowledge in seven specific areas he calls ‘Edges.’ He explains: “They represent the horizon beyond which we cannot see. My journey to the Edges of knowledge to articulate the known unknowns will pass through the known knowns that demonstrate how we have travelled beyond what we previously thought were the limits of knowledge.” Thus, he is interested not just in what we still do not know at the present, but what kinds of questions might be fundamentally unknowable to human science. 

The seven Edges of knowledge du Sautoy discusses are the following: Chaos Theory, the indivisibility of subatomic particles, quantum mechanics, the limits of the universe, the nature of time, black holes, and what came before the Big Bang, the problem of human consciousness, and the troubling mathematical paradoxes surrounding infinity. Typically du Sautoy devotes two chapters to each Edge, with one being a summary of the relevant scientific history leading up to the present, the the second being an exploration of the possibilities for expanding our current knowledge. 

One on hand it’s hard to find fault with such an ambitious and erudite book that just about does everything it set out to do. If I have any qualms at all they are more than likely due to my own significant limitations rather than the author’s. I found it hard to keep track of exactly the main point of each chapter, each of the ‘edges’ that were being discussed at a time. Du Sautoy never gives a concise introduction or conclusion of each area that reinforces what the particular question under discussion was. Because of this, as well as the overly long technical sections, it was hard to maintain narrative focus. Added to the fact that I am much less capable of engaging in scientific and mathematical concepts than in history and philosophy, there were chapters which I found myself struggling to get through–say, the minute consistency of leptons, muons, and quarks and how they are measured. Obviously there were parts that I was more interested in than others, especially the more philosophical parts discussing the limits and origins of the universe (naturally, following Holt’s book), and the debate of human consciousness and free will. Du Sautoy presents a massive, almost overwhelming, amount of information, and looking back, I find that there are very few specific things I remember learning from the book, rather than several general viewpoints I absorbed. If I had the time and patience to reread it, I would doubtlessly glean more than the first reading.

For those who are analytical minded and interested in the cutting edge developments of science and math, What We Cannot Know is a great book to get you started or broaden your base of knowledge. For others who prefer a more speculative, and focused journey into the philosophical history of the investigation of existence, Why Does the World Exist? is probably the best overall summary you will find on the subject.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

David's review of Mark Thompson's The White War and the particular stupidity of the Italian front in World War One.

With the murders of unarmed black men by police happening over and over and over, with no apparent consequences, it's time to revisit Matt's Letter to America from one year ago, which specifically addresses the murder of young boy Tamir Rice, but is sadly still relevant.

Editor’s Recommendations

American Politics

Whatever your views on Barack Obama, it is hard to argue that he has been one of our most dignified, thoughtful, and well-read presidents. This interview with the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin shows why.

Yet another metaphor for the Donald Trump rolling fiasco: it's like a low-brow piece of punk rock-inspired performance art.

World Politics

Professor Timothy Snyder writes about the long-dead Russian fascist ideologue who provides Vladimir Putin's favorite bedtime reading, and how this relates to the undermining of democracy around the world as Putin's main aim. This involves Trump, obviously.

Alex Tabbarok in The Atlantic makes the strong case for the moral failure of the current system of closed international borders.

War and Art

According to Bryan Doerries, the founder of Theatre of War, Greek tragedies "Don't mean anything. They do something." Is he right? Should returning veterans privilege the emotional over the intellectual?

Free Speech

David Bromwich with an illuminating, original and exhaustive take on the problem of innocence and censorship (a topic often discussed at WBT).

During this ongoing centenary of the First World War, interest in “The War to End All Wars” has returned, especially in the form of articles and essays. In the English-speaking world, this is almost always focused on the Western Front and the battles featuring Britain or the USA (I contributed to this phenomenon with my essay discussing Robert Graves, Goodbye to Christmas Truces). The contributions of nations on other fronts are largely forgotten in this context. How many people even know which side Romania or Bulgaria fought on, or where Galicia is? The Italian Front is also largely unknown in the Anglosphere, except perhaps to note that it is the setting for Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. After reading Mark Thompson’s The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (Basic Books, 2010), I learned a great deal about this important historical chapter, and strongly recommend this book to all readers of history.

I have lived in Italy for 10 years, during which time my passion for history and mountains has served me well. I have hiked up dozens of alpine peaks still crisscrossed with trenches, tunnels, and artillery positions. The World War I front is ubiquitous in northeast Italy, stretching over 400 miles across the Dolomites and Julian Alps from Lake Garda to the Isonzo River in Slovenia. When I was in the U.S. Army I participated in a battalion staff ride to the Asiago plateau north of Vicenza to study the battlefield. As an artillery officer myself I was responsible for researching and giving a presentation to the group about the nature of indirect fire during the war. There are many enormous, Fascist-era war memorials and charnel-houses along the front holding the mortal remains of tens of thousands or more of fallen soldiers. I have visited these monumental tombs at Asiago, Pasubio, Monte Grappa, and Caporetto several times each, and it is always a sobering experience. Every town in Italy displays a plaque in the public square with the names of those native sons who died in the wars, a dozen or less in the case of the smallest villages. Unlike America, which has not seen war on its own soil since the 1865, the memories of the two world wars live on in a much more profound way in Italy and all the countries of Europe. In Italy’s case, the ostensible “victory” of the First World War make it the source of a continuing myth of heroism. Here’s the truth: Italy’s participation and conduct in that war was a total disaster that led directly to its two decades of Fascist rule, and subsequent defeat in the next world war.

Bad Tactics

One notable recent exception to the general lack of English-language recognition of the Italian front is this fantastic journalism by Brian Mockenhaupt in Smithsonian Magazine. In this article the author mainly discusses the extreme winter hardships of the high mountain fighting in the Dolomites and the feats of engineering by both the Italians and Austrians. Despite repeated offensives, almost all by the Italian side, the front throughout the war stayed remarkably stable in something resembling an even more inept version of the trench warfare of the Western Front. The two main sectors were the high mountainous border between the Trentino and Veneto, especially around the Asiago plateau down to Monte Grappa, and the line of the Isonzo (now Soča) River which nearly aligns with the current border of Italy and Slovenia and is characterized by a plateau called the Carso. The first sector is rightly famous for the unprecedented extremes I mentioned before. Indeed, Mark Thompson says in The White War: “The mountain units had to endure fantastically severe conditions. War had never been fought at such heights before, up to 3,500 metres. Fighting in the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and more recently in Kashmir occurred at even greater altitudes, but the soldiers’ experience on the Alpine front remains unmatched.” As for the feats of engineering, this was probably the single strong point of the Italian war effort from 1915-1918, and one has left traces all over the mountains today from the 52 tunnels carved up into Mt. Pasubio, to the cable cars, vie ferrate, trenches, and explosive mining under enemy positions. Otherwise, both sectors of the front still suffered from the same massive errors of strategic and tactical planning and execution that doomed both belligerent sides to such a brutal and dismal struggle.

For anyone who has never been in close proximity to artillery shells landing or machine-guns firing, it is hard to imagine the destruction these modern weapons can cause on unsuspecting or unprepared human beings. Imagine men moving up exposed and difficult terrain into unbreachable barbed wire entanglements, then you will have an idea of the fundamental tactical problem of World War One that led to the stalemate of trench warfare. On the Isonzo Front, the Italians fought 12 large battles along the exact same lines over the course of over two years, involving over a couple million soldiers, a million casualties, and absolutely no change of tactics to face the artillery, machine-guns, and barbed wire. The Austro-Hungarians defended this front extremely well for over two years, very undermanned and under-equipped, giving up very little territory, and inflicting more casualties on their enemy than they received most of the time. In The White War, Thompson writes: “The Italians kept coming, wave after wave, across open ground in close-order formation, shoulder to shoulder, against field guns and machine guns. To one Austrian artillery officer, ‘it looked like an attempt at mass suicide’. Those who reached the deserted Austrian line met flame-throwers, tear gas, and machine-gun and rifle fire emanating from hollows and outcrops on the crumpled Carso. When dusk fell, their only significant gain was a hilltop, wrested from the Polish infantry of the 16th Division.”

The 12th Battle of the Isonzo of October 1917, often called the Battle of Caporetto, was the first and only offensive by the Austrians on this front during the war. It was also a massive and unexpected defeat for the Italians that took back a part of the territory ceded to Italy in 1866 and nearly succeeded in forcing Italy to sue for a separate peace treaty. Superior German forces participated and led the way in this victory, including a vanguard company led by a young Lieutenant Erwin Rommel whose initiative caught much larger Italian forces unawares and helped break the poorly defended Italian lines west of the Isonzo. Thompson writes: “Caporetto was the outcome when innovative tactics were expertly used against an army that was, in doctrine and organization, one of the most hidebound in Europe. The Twelfth Battle was a Blitzkrieg before the concept existed.”

The disaster of Caporetto for the Italians led to the long overdue replacement of the inept Supreme Commander Luigi Cadorna, and the consolidation of Italian forces along a much more compact and well-defended line of the Piave River north of Venice. This allowed the Italians to bide their time and build up forces for one last offensive against the by-then completely exhausted and hopeless Austrians. This last battle, with the auspicious name of Vittorio Veneto, supposedly washed away forever the stain of Caporetto and the Isonzo (which seem to have been traumatically erased from Italian memory immediately after the war).

Even for someone who spent two years in combat and is well-versed in military history, the stupidity and callousness of the Italian generals is enraging. Sending millions of courageous young men into uphill attacks without effective artillery backup, aerial support, intelligence, or even wire-cutters for the barbed wire is a way to earn the absolute contempt of your own soldiers, as well as the enemy, as well as posterity. Thompson described the front in this way: “Italian losses were increased by sheer carelessness, born of inexperience and also ideology. Many officers disdained to organize their defenses properly because they thought the Austrians did not deserve the compliment. Only tragic experience would expunge this prejudice.”

And again here: “The troops were unprepared, in every sense, for the conditions they faced. Lacking weapons, ordered to attack barbed wire, struck down by typhoid and cholera, poorly clothed and fed, sleeping on wet hay or mud, the men began to realize that they were ‘going to be massacred, not to fight’. Hardly Garibaldian warriors, rather cannon fodder in a new kind of war.”

On the living conditions at the front that never improved in nearly three years: “Sweat, dust, mud, rain and sun turned the men’s woolen uniforms into something like parchment. Their boots often had cardboard uppers and wooden soles. Lacking better remedies, the men rubbed tallow into their cracked feet. Helmets were in very short supply. The wooden water bottles were unhygienic. The tents – when they had them – leaked. The wire-cutters were almost useless, and unusable under fire: ‘mere garden secateurs’, as a Sardinian officer wrote disgustedly in his diary. Ration parties were often delayed by enemy fire. The only hot meal was in the morning, and so poor that soldiers often rejected most of it. The pervasive stench could, anyway, make eating impossible. The effects of such poor nutrition were evident after three or four days in the trenches, and some units sent out raiding parties for food and clothing in trenches that the enemy had abandoned. The soldiers slept on straw pallets, but there were not enough to go around. Even in the rear, before proper hutments were built, the men lived in tents that quickly became waterlogged and filthy. Abysmal medical care led to ‘a good number of avoidable deaths due to inhuman treatment’. Wounded men were routinely ‘shipped on 20 or 30 km ambulance runs on vile roads and then kept waiting for hours outside hospital’.”

Worse Leadership

How did things get so miserable for the Italian side? The answer is an utter lack of political and military leadership. The only person of leadership during this war who comes out well in reading The White War is General Armando Diaz, who replaced Luigi Cadorna after Caporetto and injected basic competence and caution into the war. I cannot recall in any historical period a supreme commander who combined such unchallenged authority and staying power with such complete incompetence. In any other situation, a leader such as Cadorna would have been quickly killed, replaced, or forced into surrender. The less said about this character, who somehow still has streets named after him in Italy, the better.

I’ll leave him with two succinct descriptions from Thompson’s book: “Worst of all, Cadorna had discovered a knack for abandoning offensives when Boroević [the very capable Croatian general of the Austrian Isonzo forces] had committed his last reserves. The steely exterior concealed a vacillating spirit.”

“Cadorna’s and Capello’s [another inept general] actions in the Eleventh Battle were so careless and self-destructive that historians have struggled to account for them. In truth, the two men acted fully in character. Cadorna’s battle plans always tended to incoherence, his command often slackened fatally in the course of offensives.”

The other, more complex side of the leadership vacuum was political. Cadorna was only able to consolidate such unchallenged power for so long because he answered only to the monarch, still a position of great power in Italy at that time. The monarch was a figure known as Vittorio Emmanuele III, the grandson of the first king of unified Italy, and a weak-willed and morally suspect character. This king nevertheless enjoyed a long reign from 1900, when his father Umberto was assassinated, to 1946, when he finally abdicated in a quixotic bid to save the institution of the monarchy for his son and for Italy. Fortunately, Italy voted in a referendum to abolish the monarchy and establish a republic, and finally vindicating the true fathers of Italy, Garibaldi and Mazzini. Victor Emanuel was so short (4’11”) that he could not wear a real sword, and so his nickname was “Little Sabre”. Italy engaged in at least five foolish wars during his reign, and he was instrumental in allowing Mussolini’s Fascist regime to violently take control of the government and hold it for 22 years.

Before Mussolini, there was the fascinating and nauseating character of Gabriele D’Annunzio, a Decadent poet, for a long time the most famous person in Italy, and a bloodthirsty proto-Fascist. Thompson spends an early chapter explaining the importance of D’Annunzio in making the blustery rhetorical case for Italy’s involvement in a war most Italians did not care about. The poet at least backed up his words with actions, as he was given an army commission and entered himself into many battles on his own authority, seemingly getting a rise out of the abundant bloodshed falling for Italy’s sake. This disturbing character does not come out well in Thompson’s account, and rightfully so, I think.

The last aspect of failed political leadership that needs mentioning is the shameful way Italy’s representatives behaved both before and after the war. The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister before and during most of the war, Salandra and Sonnino respectively, ensured that neither its allies nor its enemies respected Italy’s shameful conduct. Italy was actually a member of a secret defensive alliance with Germany and Austria before the war. Italy did not support its allies at the outbreak of war because Austria’s declaration of war against Serbia was not defensive in nature. The Italians stood on the sidelines for almost the first year of the war, playing both sides to get a better deal for its aggressive territorial claims. Everything about the beginning of World War One was tragically absurd, but Italy ended up being the most unnecessarily and nakedly opportunistic of all the belligerents. It wanted Austria to give up large parts of its territory in Trentino, South Tyrol, and Friuli (including Trieste) in return for Italy’s honoring its alliance. When Austria (who was still Italy’s historical nemesis despite this dubious alliance) balked, Italy obtained a secret deal with the England and France called the Treaty of London that guaranteed it would get all the territory it wanted after the war. In the end, Italy’s disastrous human cost of participation in this war can be placed fully in the hands of just three people, according to Thompson–Salandra, Sonnino, and D’Annunzio.

Pointless Sacrifice

Italy’s total number killed was 689,000, the total number of wounded was nearly 1,000,000, and prisoners and missing in action was also 600,000. A huge majority of them occurred on the 55-mile Isonzo front, and Italy, almost uniquely in this war, was only fighting one enemy. The total casualties of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were over three times higher than Italy’s, but that includes the much larger front against Russia as well as Serbia and Romania. For further comparison, Italy suffered more casualties during 3 1/2 years along its only front than both sides of the entire U.S. Civil War, which was the bloodiest in American history.

Again and again, the numbers of men slaughtered in each and every battle was much higher than it should have been given even modest improvements of tactics or basic respect for human life by the officers. At one hilltop near Gorizia, whose importance was only symbolic, Thompson writes: “The conquest of San Michele had cost at least 110,000 Italian casualties over 14 months, including 19,000 dead, on a sector only eight kilometers long.” At one outcropping defended by the Austrians in the Dolomites, wave after wave of Italians were sent into machine-gun fire and “more than 6000 Italians had died on Col di Lana for precisely nothing.” After one of the endless offensives on the Isonzo, Thompson writes of Cadorna: “As for his actual gains on the Carso, they amounted to several villages and a couple kilometers of limestone, won at a cost of 80,000 casualties.” In another nameless struggle: “Five regiments were launched against the lone Habsburg battalion on Hill 383. Outnumbered by 15 to 1, the Austrians still inflicted 50% casualties on the attackers before succumbing.” All of this bloodshed was obviously mind and soul-numbing, not only to the millions of soldiers who were called up, but also for the entire nation, most of whom did not want or care about this war and did not even know why it was being fought.

After the war, Italian politicians once again played disgraceful diplomacy to the abhorrence of allies and enemies alike. Prime Minister Orlando and Foreign Minister Sonnino made absurd claims to places like Rijeka, the Dalmatian coast, Albania, and even Turkey, in order to justify their sacrifice, apparently forgetting that every other country “sacrificed” at least as much, and that Italy’s position on the “winning” side of the war still did not exactly give it the moral high ground. As Thompson writes: “Orlando’s and Sonnino’s zero-sum strategy in Paris dealt a fatal wound to Italy’s liberal system, already battered by the serial assaults of wartime. By stoking the appetite for unattainable demands, they encouraged Italians to despise their victory unless it led to the annexation of a small port on the other side of the Adriatic, with no historic connection to the motherland. Fiume [Rijeka in Croatian] became the first neuralgic point created by the Paris conference. Like the Sudetenland for Hitler’s Germany and Transylvania for Hungary, it was a symbol of burning injustice. A sense of jeopardized identity and wounded pride fused with a toponym to produce an explosive compound.”

D’Annunzio’s thirst for violence and aggressive nationalism was not quenched at the end of the war, and he laid the blueprint for the next several decades of fascist dictators by seizing the port of Rijeka with a small militia and declaring it an independent Italian Regency. After he declared war on Italy itself the Italian navy placed a well-aimed shell in D’Annunzio’s palace, which led to the poet’s quick surrender and flight from the city. Furthermore, the combination of a destructive war and the economic hardships it imposed laid the foundation for future political upheaval. “This enduring sense of bitterness, betrayal, and loss was an essential ingredient in the rise of Mussolini and his Blackshirts.” Thompson further comments: “For many veterans, Mussolini’s myth gave a positive meaning to terrible experience. This is the story of how the Italians began to lose the peace when their laurels were still green.”

An outside observer such as Hemingway, barely 19 years old and on the front for only one month, was able to see the war as “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery.” Somewhat incredibly, from my experience and what I’ve read, the general opinion about the First World War in Italy is either of forgetfulness or buying into the heroic myth-making of the Fascist regime that wrote the history books in Italy for over a generation. Even if that regime is mostly discredited now (pictures of Il Duce still adorn the mantelpieces of at least a few rustic houses around the peninsula–I have even seen it with my own eyes twice!), the history involved before and during the world wars is too tragic to be accepted. The heroism of the Alpini, rugged mountain soldiers, lingers in the national consciousness more than anything else. Thompson comments that, for all the destruction, World War One was Italy’s “first true collective national experience”, one whose exorbitant cost only led its victims to embrace it even further. It may be that every symbolic “birth of a nation” always only truly comes about through a horrific spasm of violence.

I think this is where the history of one front of one particular war becomes something more universal in the human experience. War is the worst thing humans do. Based on our biological and social development, it is also one of the most complex and psychologically conflicted. The lessons of history always point to the folly of war, but that has rarely stopped opportunistic politicians and greedy businessmen from precipitating the next one, even against the wishes of the majority. In Italy, as Thompson meditates: “The Risorgimento [the national unification movement led by Garibaldi and Mazzini] was libertarian, patriotic, democratic, enlightened, and still unfinished, forever wrestling with its antithetical twin: authoritarian, manipulative, nationalistic, conspiratorial, and aggressive. From 1915-1944, the anti-Risorgimento had the upper hand. Perhaps the two still contend for mastery of Italy’s dark heart.” I would venture to say that in all countries at all times, these two antithetical notions always vie for control of political power, using emotional calls to arms, for the purpose of either the enlightened betterment of all, or the greedy enrichment of a few. We must always heed these two irreconcilable ideas, and always come out on the side that seeks to end whatever war we are in, and oppose the next war.

On 9/11–Punk, Protest, and Witness: WBT Editors Choose Their Jams

There was a chance, in 1991, for the US to take a responsible role in leading the world into the 21st century. Rather than do this, we worked instead to profit from former enemies’ weakness. In doing so, in prioritizing our own interests over those of others, we lost an unusual opportunity to build a peaceful world based on trust and collaboration. Ten years later, with America atop an increasingly conspicuous global pyramid scheme, we breathed a collective sigh of relief when we were granted a reprieve from judgment. Rather than face the consequences of our behavior, we doubled down—and, on 9/11/2001, decided to assign blame outside our national borders.

On this, the fifteenth anniversary of our collective moral cowardice, a national giving in to neurotic fear of cultural or individual weakness unbecoming of exponentially the most powerful nation on earth, we recommend listening to the following songs and albums. On your way to work, during lunch, returning home from a profitable (or unprofitable) day at the grind.

Don’t worry, an admission of guilt isn’t weakness—it’s evidence of strength. Like your 2nd grade teacher said, correctly, and many adults seem to have forgotten.

Adrian Bonenberger's Selections

Before 9/11–We saw it coming: Bad Religion Recipe for Hate (1993)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12kcpP-8jfM?list=PLtKArKK2vi6Rd82-YBdcupKRlT4MlRCn1]

After 9/11: Green Day American Idiot (2004)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee_uujKuJMI]

Matthew Hefti's Selections

The last solid album release before a generation of teens all lost our innocence still takes me right back to that summer before 9/11, those few carefree months between high school and college. They changed the album and song name after 9/11, but it seems almost prescient: Jimmy Eat World Bleed American (2001)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag8yc8yx2LU]

Whether it be the wars, our apathy towards our nation's poor, or our xenophobia toward refugees, Rise Against is post-9/11 protest punk that comes closest to perfection. Rise Against Appeal to Reason (2008)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DboMAghWcA]

Drew Pham's Selections:

After 9/11, Sage Francis lamented the bigotry of our newfound nationalism, and presaged the longest war in American history: Makeshift Patriot (2002)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtNMly0aDUk]

Himanshu Kumar Suri, otherwise known as Heems, was a student at Stuyvesant High School on 9/11. In Patriot Act (2015), he recounts that day, and the racially charged days that followed. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecc5CIACMVY?list=PLQnM-KKIn3betzuTxjc9j6z8uhiA7WO1a]

Mike Carson's Selections:

James McMurty's 2005 "We Can't Make it Here" pretty much sums up the anger of much of middle America over the last fifteen years and does much to explain our current election. 

 

And, though this might be cheating, I always think of David Bowie's 1997 "I'm Afraid of Americans" and Warren Zevon's 1978 "Lawyers, Guns and Money" this time of year.

 

https://youtu.be/u7APmRkatEU

 

https://youtu.be/lP5Xv7QqXiM

Recent news articles about coal pollution in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and protests against new pipelines in North Dakota by the Standing Rock Sioux caught my eye. I’m an ardent environmentalist, but I’ve never been to and know little about the Mountain West area of the United States. The name of this particular river jumped out at me, however, because I had just been reading about the 1876 Lakota Sioux War and its famous Battle of Little Bighorn, which took place along a stream parallel to the larger Powder River where much of the theatre of war was centered. I thought about how a minor link between past and present symbolized the entire history of the American Indians’ relationship with the United States.

I have always been interested in the story of the American Indians. When I was in the first grade in elementary school, we spent one week preparing a project on American Indians; everyday I had to fight with one other equally keen classmate over who got first rights to the ‘I’ volume of the class encyclopedia set. There was a long article on Indians in this volume with many great pictures and maps showing the locations of all the tribes, and their inexorable migration westward. A couple years later, in 1992, “The Last of the Mohicans” was the first R-rated film I saw in the cinema; I have seen it a couple dozen times since and it remains one of my all-time favorite films. There has always been something powerful in my consciousness, even before I understood it, that the country in which I was born and raised was once populated with a totally different group of people who were gone now–mostly gone, anyway. For a big, year-long historical research project in 7th grade in middle school, I chose the Trail of Tears–the forced death march of the Cherokee tribe from Georgia to Oklahoma to allow for gold-mining on their land. Long before I was politically aware, the innate feeling of tragic injustice moved me, and has continued to inform my historical and political readings to the present day.

My first year of college I took a class on early American history, during which I learned much more about the Pequot War and King Philip’s War. These two wars, beginning in 1634 and 1675 respectively, pitted for the first time New England colonists against local Indian tribes. They were brutal and both sides engaged in what would now be called ‘war crimes’, but by a narrow margin the Pequot and Wampanoag tribes were defeated, dispossessed of their land, enslaved, and driven into extinction (in a case of damnatio memoriae it was even forbidden to mention the name Pequot after the first war). The continual westward push of the European immigrants from the eastern seaboard gave rise to the same theme recurring again and again: frontiers with the Europeans and Indians were established, usually with an official peace treaty between the parties; the growing European population fueled the need for land; encroachment on Indian lands by Europeans started new conflict; Indians were defeated by Europeans, often with the help of rival Indian tribes, and often with extreme cruelty and duplicity. This pattern played out hundreds of times in the 280 years or so from the first English colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts to the “official” closing of the western frontier in 1890 (if we extend this history back to Columbus’ enslavement of the Arawak Indians on his first voyage in 1492 then it becomes almost exactly 400 years; in this essay I will focus only on the American Indians of the United States and not the entire American continent, though the history follows a similar pattern everywhere).

The contours of this long history are only ever taught in American history classes as a broad and tame overview, eliding most of the relevant details, and thus not providing scope for the scale of the tragedy of the American Indians’ plight. Only through independent reading and study, Howard Zinn’s unconventional history book The People’s History of the United States or Dee Brown’s engrossing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to name two famous examples, can one come to learn the heartbreaking tale of the American Indian.

Last Fight of the Fierce and Feathered

The last major war in these centuries of conflict between European Americans and American Indians was the 1876 Lakota Sioux campaign, called the Great Sioux War. This is one of the most famous events of all the Indian wars due to the abundance of contemporary sources (though no one bothered to interview or report anything from the Indian perspective until decades later, long after hostilities between Indians and white men were a thing of the past), as well as the well-known protagonists on each side. This war featured the most famous Indian fighter in American history, George Armstrong Custer, and two of the most famous Indian warriors of all time, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

Custer was one of those 19th century American originals who made his name by fighting, first in the Civil War and then against the plains Indians. His total defeat by the Indians at Little Bighorn (known as the Battle of the Greasy Grass to the Sioux) is still the worst loss in American military history in which an entire unit was destroyed in such a short time. The 210 cavalry troops in Custer’s personal detachment of the 7th Cavalry were killed to the last man against a type of foe (Indians) who had never won a war against American forces in over 200 years of near continual, if low-level, conflict. This battle is described in a fascinating, thorough, and even-handed way in Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2010 The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which I would highly recommend (as well as his other books In The Heart of the Sea and Why Read Moby-Dick?).

Crazy Horse was a warrior leader of the Oglala Sioux tribe, one of five confederated groups that made up the Lakota, or western plains Sioux Indians. Sitting Bull was a chief and holy man of the Hunkpapa, another one of the five tribes. Both of these men shared the characteristics of noble defenders of their people against an unprincipled and perfidious enemy. Crazy Horse, considered strange and incomprehensible even to his own people, was never defeated in battle in hundreds of engagements against the U.S. cavalry and rival tribes. Despite this, even he had to surrender to the U.S. government in order to save his people from starving. In the end he was stabbed in the back by one of these people, and with his death the spirit of resistance of the Indians died. He was never photographed and his final resting place is still secret. One of the best biographies I have read is Mari Sandoz’s Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas, which tells his story entirely from the Indian perspective with a compassionate and poetic touch. There has been an ongoing project in the Black Hills for the last 70 years to carve a sculpture of this great warrior, which will be the largest sculpture in the world when completed. It was originally blessed by one of the leaders of the tribe, but most Indians today feel the monument is a desecration of a sacred mountain in the hills they consider their rightful home.

The original cause of the Great Sioux War was that Custer led a large cavalry march into the Black Hills to cut open a path, which violated terms of the peace treaty between the Sioux and the U.S. government which stated that the Black Hills were property of the Sioux and would never be entered by white men. This path became frequented by gold diggers who had discovered a rich source of mineral wealth. As happened again and again, when Indian land was found to be valuable, treaties were summarily ripped up and war of conquest, displacement, and destruction was visited upon the Indians, who never understood why the white man’s word was not his bond. Offers of millions of dollars to buy the Black Hills were rejected over and over by the Sioux tribes, which led to the government taking the land by force. Today, moral resistance against the theft continues since no Indian has ever taken the money offered by the government for the Black Hills (now sitting in a trust worth $1.3 billion), which have since been extensively mined for over 130 years with the total gold and metal extraction unknown, but probably coming to at least hundreds of billions of dollars. As recently as 2015 Congress passed a defense bill authorizing Native lands in Arizona to be sold without permission to foreign companies for copper mining. To recap, the U.S. government and many private companies have made an enormous amount of money from a small piece of land that was stolen from Indians, who never took any money in return and today survive on unwanted land that they are not allowed to own in abject poverty.

The Economic and Environmental Effects of the Indian Genocide

I am fully aware that genocide is a strong word, the strongest one used by historians in fact. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. I am also quite familiar with the entire centuries-long history of Indian wars and the many individual tragic episodes that comprise it, and I have no misgivings about using the word genocide. Starting from the Pequot War and King Philip’s War to the Trail of Tears to the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, 1868 Washita Massacre (one of Custer’s proudest “victories”), and the final, painful Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, the classification of genocide is appropriate. Look up the harrowing details and I’m sure you will agree.

Estimating historical population figures is always tricky, but the typical average estimate for Indian population in the Americas in 1492 (the watershed year) is around 50 million, with high estimates of 100 million; up to 20 million or so has been estimated for the population of the area of the present-day United States. For comparison’s sake, the likely population of Europe in 1492 was probably around 60 million (and for even further comparison, the Roman Empire at its height in the second century CE was around 50 million). This goes to show the general truth that population figures have held steady or grown very slowly for most of human civilization, with the explosion to nearly 8 billion humans building up only for the last two centuries. The current American Indian population in the United States today, on the other hand, is less than 3 million. This number, which has actually grown rapidly in the last couple decades after staying very low for most of the 20th century, shows how there is just a fraction left of the people that used to inhabit the entire continent, while the total non-Indian population of the United States itself has exploded from 0 to 320 million since the 1600s (it goes without saying that disease played the largest part in decimating the Indians, but for those survivors it was an endless campaign of total destruction waged by the white men that drove the Indians nearly to extinction; it is always worth revisiting Jared Diamond’s outstanding Guns, Germs, and Steel demonstrating how Europeans came to wield such power over the rest of the world’s inhabitants).

The surviving Indian tribes remain dispersed almost completely in arid, resource-less lands of the American West, land unwanted by any white man for good reasons. Not only that, the arrangements by which they were herded onto reservations and which govern Indian relations today state that it is illegal for the Indians to actually own their own land, which makes them the only people in the country who are denied property rights, in a land which was all stolen from them in the first place. The irony is stunning and tragic. The biggest issue that raises awareness of the Indians’ plight today is not land or even history, however, but sports teams and school mascots. Most Indians today are not very concerned or offended by the Washington football team using the name Redskins, or by the hundreds of high schools and colleges using Indian names and mascots. They are too busy living in squalor, in third-world conditions in the richest country on Earth, and with little hope to even own their own property or improve their situation.

Like all indigenous peoples of the world, especially those of the western hemisphere, American Indians are the best and wisest advocates for environmental protections and the most dedicated fighters against exploitation of natural resources. According to Noam Chomsky, indigenous peoples of the world are the only hope for human survival. From the First Nations of Canada to the Zapotecs in Oaxaca and Mayans in Chiapas to the recently murdered rights activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras to the Amazonian tribes in Brazil and the Guaraní of Bolivia, indigenous peoples are leading the protests against deforestation, new pipelines, new dams, and other wanton destruction that is part of an exploitative capitalist system that does not account for environmental or human costs. As I have already mentioned, the Black Hills sacred to the Sioux are now deforested for timber and dotted with thousands of mines that blight the landscape. The Powder River basin of Montana and Wyoming, scene of the Great Sioux War, now produces 40% of the United States’ coal in super-intensive mining that renders the land into a real-world version of Mordor. The millions of American bison that once roamed the plains were massacred by the white man until there were only a few hundred left, all so that the plains Indians could not survive by their traditional nomadic hunting lifestyle. In 2016, members of the small remaining Standing Rock Sioux tribe are still protesting against new pipelines of dirty tar sands oil and a fracking-derived natural gas pipeline that would cross their land without their permission (or the land they inhabit but cannot own, which is considered public land by the government). If Crazy Horse were alive today he would be one of the leaders demanding political and property rights and environmental protections for his people. The current situation is the result of hundreds of years of principled American Indian resistance to genocide. Perhaps it is time for the rest of us to heed the wisdom and courage of the American Indians, and all indigenous people, and to treat animals as brothers and the land as if it is sacred, and not just an endless resource to be consumed and destroyed.

 

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Adrian writes about how deep war memories go in today's Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine

Another one by Adrian discussing the legacy of the British retreat at Dunkirk and its possible modern corollary–Brexit

Editor’s Recommendations

American Politics

Charles R. Pruitt writes on how politics is gutting the equalizing institutions that at one point made the American Dream seem more than a myth: public Ivies

Big brother watches Baltimore and Big Business reaps the bounty, reported in Bloomberg

World Politics

Piece by Anne Applebaum in New Republic that bears revisiting on Ukraine

Wired peers inside the clandestine world of Soviet cartography

A deeper look into Russia's well-oiled propaganda machine

Military

SEAL Team six and a man left for dead

History

The story of the East India Company, the original corporate raiders and a private empire unto itself

Sports and Politics

Old but good during run-up to NFL season and a propos patriotism and the Colin Kaepernik pseudo-scandal

Yuppies

A viral video of yuppie privilege becomes a Chicago neighborhood walking tour

World War Two never ended. It sounds like the plot of a dystopian science fiction novel, right? Either the bad guys won, or the good guys didn’t win, and either way, history as we know it isn’t right. You can hear the Hollywood producer saying “great premise, kid, get a star to sign on and we’ll run it on Netflix for a couple seasons, see if it sticks.” Or some kind of click-magnet bait-and-switch b.s., like “well, technically Germany only signed a ceasefire…”

 

This essay is about an astonishing thing that I discovered while traveling in Eastern Europe, where much of the worst killing took place during the World War Two. What I discovered was this: for some people—mostly in Ukraine—WWII is still going on. It never ended.

 

This first occurred to me as a possibility while traveling with NATO forces in Poland for Foreign Policy. There was an intense moment when the Poles observed German armored vehicles, tanks, and bridging assets crossing the Vistula River. A shadow crossed the faces of Polish Generals and civilians, I saw it happen: it started off as shock, then anger, then, over time, a kind of understanding. The Germans were back, yes, but as partners and allies. In other words—until that intellectual confrontation with the German military in their present-time, World War Two had not ended for the Poles.

 

About a month later, while interviewing a couple from Luhansk Oblast, the Ukrainian couple mentioned their 91-year-old grandmother. The elderly woman, a supporter of Ukraine, continued living Luhansk after the separatists took over because (like many from her generation in Ukraine’s east) she was simply too frail and poor to pick up and move. Fuzzy on the math, I asked them what she’d seen in her lifetime. Their answer? Holodomor, the Nazi Occupation, the Holocaust, the undeclared war with Poland, the Soviet recapture and plunder of Ukraine, the destruction of Ukraine’s anti-Soviet rebellion by 1954. This was the first thirty years of one human’s life.

 

Later, conducting analysis on the heavily industrialized east of Ukraine, along the contact line (where millions are at risk of shelling or attacks), I saw many elderly civilians confined to their homes, I became curious. How many people would have known about World War Two from their childhood? I used 1934 as a starting point, because (excluding Holodomor) WWII began for Ukraine in 1941, and I can remember being 7-8 years old pretty clearly. Being 10-15 is even clearer in my mind’s eye. Well, according to numbers from 2014, there should be between 900,000 and 1.2 million Ukrainian citizens alive today who (judging from the things my grandfathers remembered after they slipped into senility) remember WWII. All of them understand that their country is at war. Tens of thousands of them live in the area directly threatened by hostilities.

 

Memory is a powerful tool. What, whether, and how a thing is remembered determines a lot about whether it stays active in the present. A woman broke my heart in college, and it took me years to get over it. That event was my present. People suffering from PTSD relive the trauma of the stressful event over and over—without medication, often, for the rest of their lives. Which explains why people who are traumatized are at greater risk for alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

 

So we have a population that grew up suffering under Stalin, the actual (not metaphorical) Hitler, and then Stalin again, which is currently being re-traumatized by Putin’s Russia. This brings us to the reason that World War Two never stopped.

 

World War Two never stopped because it was a war fought over whether repressive anti-englihtenment totalitarianism would rule Europe and the world, or whether humanism and western values (even those espoused haphazardly as in republican oligarchies like the United States) would hold sway. And while we have said that we won WWII and the Nazis lost, or that the Soviet Union won WWII and the Nazis lost, the truth is, the intellectual and ideological conflict at the heart of WWII never disappeared. On the one hand, it didn’t disappear because the Soviet Union was basically a more enthusiastic and popular if less well organized version of Nazi Germany (especially after 1945, when ethno-linguistic nationalism drove Russian ethnic cleansing)—and the USSR lasted well into the 20^th century. So all the places that we neglected to liberate from the Soviet Union were basically places where WWII didn’t have a chance to end, at least until the USSR’s collapse. Because of active wars today, to some of those places (like Ukraine), we might as well have never fought WWII in the first place.

 

After all, even though we’ve moved on and successfully contained our understanding of World War Two

The Old Woman of World War Two – still traumatized after all these years

to kitsch movies or good-timey-grandpa television series, there are people in every country who still aver that nationalism and race are ethically valid (even necessary) ways of organizing people, that constant war against cultural nor national enemies should inspire praise or enthusiasm rather than anger or condemnation. These people exist in America, and in Russia, in Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. In Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, and Pakistan, and China and India. In Japan, of all places (proving that even nuclear weapons are not as powerful as human endurance).

 

We tell ourselves that World War Two ended because we have bad ways of understanding conflict—we speak in legal terms. A declaration of war means that the budget is spent certain ways, and that other types of medals become permissible for killing human beings. War is a state of being, where one lives in more or less constant anxiety that one’s life will be taken, or that one will be hurt so badly that one will wish for death. War is rape, and murder, and looting, and lies—war is everything that’s horrible about humans, brought out from the darkness and celebrated. War is also a legal state of relations between nation-states that become committed to each other’s destruction—between ideas, and ideology.

 

But World War Two didn’t end. Not in victory for us, nor in defeat for the Nazis, who somehow spread their way of thinking into other countries around the world, their vile attitudes toward religious and ethnic minorities, their appalling lack of humanity and contempt for post-enlightenment human rights. WWII did not end in victory for the Soviet Union, either, because the Soviet Union ended up incorporating the most meaningful platforms of Nazi Germany (ethnic nationalism based around Russia, rather than Germany, and victimizing minorities like Jewish people). For the UK’s part, it lost its empire trying to stand for the things that might prove that it really had won WWII, or at least been on the winning side. Emancipating its former colonies was a decent gesture, but ultimately irrelevant, as Brexit has demonstrated—eighty years after the conclusion of WWII, it’s likely that today’s England would have allied with Hitler’s Germany, or at least managed to stay neutral. From an economic, ideological, and geopolitical position, the only country to come out conspicuously ahead after WWII was the United States of America.

World War Two lives on in the memories of those who survived the Holocaust, in places like the USA, France, Russia, and Israel. It continues in the daily shelling endured by eighty-five-year-old women who live too close to the artificial border of the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, and who are still drawing water from the wells of their grandparents. The ideas that compelled Europe to tear itself to shreds twice in three decades are still alive and well. The job begun of clearing darkness from Europe, the night of pre-enlightenment thinking, has yet to be completed.

Whatever one might think about the United Kingdom’s recent behavior toward Europe—its antagonism toward the European Union, willingness to undermine international markets, and everlasting search for the best possible deal—you can’t say it didn’t help beat the Nazis. Regardless of their unwillingness to participate in the collective European post-war experiment, you can’t say the UK didn’t help rescue Europe from the night of Nazi totalitarianism. That the UK didn’t stand for European values in Europe’s darkest hour.

An upcoming movie, “Dunkirk,” might change that. “Dunkirk,” which appears to be a movie about the fear of death, seeks to reevaluate the UK’s role in WWII, as well as its role in European affairs. In the current context. It’s possible that “Dunkirk” will cause audiences to question whether the UK is capable of long-term alliance or partnership when its interests aren’t at stake.

Most WWII movies confirm what people already know about WWII—who was good, who was bad, and why it was important to fight. The ideological stakes were unusually clear during WWII and it makes for a great dramatic setting. Few WWII movies communicate any urgent questions about life (a phenomenon called kitsch by some on this site). Instead, WWII becomes a superficial and emotionally vapid garden of thematic consistency, a circus freak-show of predictable actions and reactions. See! Conspicuous bad guys (the Nazis). Marvel! At clear-cut good guys (as told here, the British, the Americans). Cry! For hapless allies in need of rescue (the French and the poor Jewish folk in the Holocaust). Laugh! At dopey enemies who are easily dispatched (the Italians and, paradoxically, the Germans). At the end of the exhibit, a happy ending.

Whenever an established filmmaker decides to tackle an unheroic corner of the war, they take a big risk. Awkward stories don’t fit with audience sensibilities, especially when it comes to WWII. Two of the best WWII movies—The Thin Red Line directed by Terrence Malick, and Cross of Iron directed by Sam Peckinpah—represented big gambles, which impacted both directors in the short term. These movies take unusually honest looks at war, without glamorizing it. Both movies encountered skeptical or hostile critics and audiences when they were released.

Now, the Christopher Nolan who directed Batman has undertaken to tell the story of the British Expeditionary Force’s (BEF) retreat from France. From the West’s perspective, this was one of the most significant actions of the war, and basically guaranteed a Nazi victory when the outcome of the struggle was still very much in doubt. Rather than stay and fight as they had in WWI, pinning down the German flank and giving the French Army time to regroup while landing reinforcements further down the coast, the BEF fled, and essentially doomed the French and continental Europe to four years of Nazi occupation, as well as the Holocaust. Adding insult to injury, barely a month later the Royal Navy bushwacked and sank great portions of the French fleet in North Africa without provocation or warning.

THE HISTORICAL EVENT OF DUNKIRK IS EMBARRASSING

To say that Dunkirk was an embarrassment would be an understatement. By any honest measure of evaluation, Dunkirk was a catastrophe. In other areas, the British fought doggedly to protect their Imperial interests, dedicating extraordinary resources to defend Egypt, Africa, and India. Where France was concerned, though, Great Britain was just as happy to watch its economic and colonial rival burn.

This is not to suggest that there was a British conspiracy to lose France—they committed significant soldiers to keeping the Germans out, and were legitimately hoping to avoid strategic defeat in Europe. This is only to point out that where Britain dedicated itself to fighting Nazi Germany, it did not lose (Egypt, England, India)—and places it saw as expendable (France, Norway, Greece) or where racism was involved (anywhere facing the Japanese), it did. The battle of Dunkirk is filled with incidents of apathy and inattention, missed opportunities, inaction, and half-hearted effort. The only time British officers dedicated their unmitigated attention during Dunkirk was when it came to loading their boats as quickly as possible to return to Great Britain. Had they applied a quarter of the energy expended in leaving France to staying there, it’s entirely possible that World War II could have turned out differently. The French might have had time to rally, as they had in WWI. The Italians might have thought twice about entering the war on the side of Hitler (unknown to many, Mussolini did not actually commit to the Axis cause as a belligerent until 10 June, after the British flight from France).

Many, many things could have turned out differently—had the British not decided (after a week of skirmishing) that it wasn’t worth defending France. Granted, this is counterfactual history (which in clumsy hands can be worse than useless), but Hitler did not cancel the invasion of Great Britain because of the British Army—they had left most of their equipment in Normandy and were viewed as already defeated. It was cancelled because the Luftwaffe and the Kreigsmarine were unable to secure a crossing of the English Channel. Had the BEF been defeated (worst case scenario), the Nazis could not have invaded the UK.

Of course, that’s not how the narrative goes. The way most people read history is that the British barely avoided total destruction at the hands of the Germans—that the German victory was inevitable, so they had to run away. In this context, the retreat was not a disaster, but some kind of miraculous victory. Viewed in its appropriate context, however, the Battle of Dunkirk reads as the version of Monty Python’s Holy Grail where Brave Sir Robin was the only one who survived to tell his version of the encounter with the confused three-headed ogre.

But everyone knows that our grandfathers weren’t pussies. Unlike the current generation of me-first baby-boomer handout-for-free wantniks, our grandfathers were honorable and hard as nails. The ultimate proof of this, beyond teary stories of sandwiches earned by chopping wood, is how they comported themselves in WWII. Our grandfathers, you see—British and American—beat the Nazis. It was the least morally ambiguous war we’d ever seen, and the hardest war, and they were lucky to get to fight in it, and every vet since—from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan—understands that we owe an unpayable debt to those great, titanic figures looming over our shoulders. And the retreat from Dunkirk is part of that exciting, dramatic story.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN DOES WELL WITH MORAL COMPLEXITY

Christopher Nolan’s success as the director of the Batman trilogy should not be understated. The Dark Knight is worth watching and rewatching, filled with interesting and well-presented individual and philosophical clashes. And while Batman: The Dark Knight Rises veers into parody, it is still far superior to most of the other superhero offerings of today—it is not superficial in places where the Spider Man franchise has always bowed to temptation, it is not wanton or spuriously violent where Marvel’s Iron Man and Avengers franchises embrace violence as a justifiable means to an end. Nolan may or may not be consciously aware the Hegelian dialectic, inevitable conflict between ideas, and the ways in which competing ideologies twin and intersect and depend on each other for definitional integrity but he espouses those themes with admirable consistency.  If you’re going to make a serious movie about serious heroes, Nolan’s the person to do it. His Batman villains were tasteful and appropriate as these things go (Raz-Al-Gul, The Joker, Two-Face, Bane). The heroes were complex and accessible. This is likely true in part because Nolan’s world is a human world, not supernatural—episodes have logical (if unexpected) explanations. The enemy is not a silly robot or a magic alien—the enemy is us, an exaggerated, intentionally distorted vision of our potential for causing harm to each other, for making mischief on a grand scale.

Hence Nolan’s unique suitability to direct a great WWII movie. The way we read about it in the history books, WWII is basically a superhero fairy tale, starring knowable humans in the heroic roles, and engagingly inscrutable humans as the villains. Our grandfathers don’t (or didn’t if, like mine, they’re dead) talk about what they did, except when they get drunk, and then the stories are a mixture of horrifying and pathetic, comical. In graphic novels and movies, though, as I mentioned earlier, WWII is a morality tale—the good, handsome officer. The loyal sergeant. The conflicted soldier. The bad officer. And—of course—the strong and untrustworthy SS guy to be defeated at any cost. Even—especially—if it means turning into the SS guy. That’s the lesson we learn from WWII movies. Weakness is bad. Killing is necessary. Necessary is good. An elliptical but pleasant logic that generates the same satisfaction in English and in Russian.

There’s another level to Dunkirk, and it’s worth mentioning, because stories go deep when one pulls back the curtains of history. All the significant British and German leadership had direct experience with World War I, and were responding in various ways to that war. The Germans and British leading the fight in and around Dunkirk all recalled what had happened the last time their armies had thrust and parried in a total blind as to what was going on. Both sides had come of age during the age of trench warfare. Both craved certainty, needed to understand their lines—the destruction of which on both sides (deliberate on the part of the German blitzkrieg, unintentional on the part of the Allies) had resulted in an unseen opportunities and great anxiety. In that chaotic tempest, the British and Germans lost their nerve at the same time, in different ways. When the French line collapsed and the German armor started rolling south, flanks exposed, the British leadership continued to decide against an unequivocal and powerful counterattack (which might have defeated Nazi Germany or at least given the beleaguered French a chance to catch their breath) until flight by sea was the only option left. And the Germans chose to allow the Luftwaffe an attempt to destroy the British (not the last time a military would hopefully but unwisely and unsuccessfully entrust operational victory to its Air Force). Both militaries were led by veterans of World War I. Neither were willing to risk everything against one another. Into this decisional vacuum, the British High Command chose flight.

It was possible to accurately and correctly review Fury from its original two-and-a-half minute preview, but Dunkirk’s preview lasts one minute and seven seconds and involves precious little to evaluate save Nolan’s deft use of sound and physical gestures to convey dread. It doesn’t look bad. In another director’s hands, I’d worry that the movie would retread tired tropes like Allied heroism (rather than cowardice) in the face of inevitable Nazi victory and thousands of Nazis killed while stalwart British defenders did their duty. I’d be waiting for that inevitable exemplar, a brave NCO expiring on his dead crew’s hot machine gun having single-handedly saved the British Empire. Knowing Nolan’s accomplishments, I’m hopeful that he’s going to pull a Peckinpah or Malick instead. Contrary to popular belief, humans don’t need unrealistic and ahistorical monuments to psychotic excess—no, humans seem constantly in want of reminding that actions have consequences. The consequences of Dunkirk were simple: France was destroyed, and the Jews annihilated.

EMPIRES ALWAYS FALL

Then, within fifteen years, Great Britain’s empire collapsed anyway. And no matter how much the current British would like to deny it—their history, the world’s history—abandoning one’s allies leads to horror, death, and bloodshed. The USA (mostly) the USSR (some) and China (a little) stepped into the vacuum created when colonialism collapsed, while those nations freed from Great Britain attempted to make their way in the world despite having been intentionally and systematically hobbled. Many of those countries—hundreds of millions of people—suffered through savage, bloody wars of independence, accustomed as they were to the implicit and direct threat of violence behind British rule. One British retreat occasioned its most spectacular retreat of all—that which left the United Kingdom a sliver of its former self, and its citizens pining for independence from Europe.

Whatever direction we learn Nolan decided to take Dunkirk—kitschy, hackneyed morality tale or counterintuitive evaluation of a desperate and rather despicable (again, talking about the UK here) Empire on decline, it deserves a well-educated evaluation. The UK—or Great Britain—or England—whatever it’s called—has a long history of interfering with European affairs to its advantage when that interference is unnecessary, counterproductive, or self-interested (Hundred Years War, WWI), then taking off when it’s needed most (Dunkirk, Brexit). This movie is an excellent reminder of that pattern, at a time when we’re watching it unfold again in real time.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

In case you missed it the first time, check out Drew Pham's fascinating essay Every Soldier a Thread.

Mike Carson wrote about why the nation's capital does not need another war memorial.

Editor’s Recommendations

Fiction

Matt Gallagher has a new short story out in Playboy this month.

Politics

Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson propose a President's Historical Council, which is actually a fantastic idea, as long as Niall Ferguson is not one of the historians.

What is wrong with people who use their children as a mouthpiece for politic opinions? Sam Kriss tells us here.

From Occupy Wall Street to Bernie Sanders, there has been a growing public recognition of the defects of our brand of late American capitalism. But what could replace it? One little part of the answer may be local cooperatives, whose success in Italy is a great model of bottom-up economic solutions. (One of the editors of this website is a member of this Italian coop and can attest to how well it works).

Film

Most reviews of new superhero film Suicide Squad are negative, but they missed the main point: its all about families and divorce.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

David James discussed Plato's Republic and how it relates to Donald Trump–namely, what kind of leader and democracy do we really want?

Adrian Bonenberger writes live from Ukraine, where an expected Russian Orthodox Church "March for Peace" might turn out to be something straight out of the Russian dictator's playbook.

Editor’s Recommendations

Trump and Foreign Relations

Speaking of Putin, distinguished historian and expert in Eastern Europe, Timothy Snyder, has written a fascinating, and scary, article about how Putin is an ideal model for Trump.

Franklin Foer at Slate: "Vladimir Putin has a plan for destroying the West, and it looks a lot like Trump." Lots of research and detail here.

The same author earlier this year profiled Trump's new campaign manager, a certain Paul Manafort. The man has apparently worked for two dozen dictators in a long career which is almost unbelievably devoid of humanity or morality of any kind.

Trump as the Republican Party's Frankenstein's Monster

Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann detail in great depth how the Republican Party laid the groundwork for a no-nothing populist demagogue by waging war on government itself for three decades.

Trump, The Sociopath

Trump's ghostwriter regrets his part in painting a myth shrouding a deeply troubled man.

Trump's Character

There is not enough time in the day to list all the ways Trump is a flawed candidate, but this article does a great job summarizing how much he has faked out the Republican Party for his own egotistical ends.

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone with a laugh-out-loud, over-the-top annihilation of everything Trump is and represents. 

Trump Satire

Remember that Christmas classic cartoon, How the Grinch Stole Christmas? It taken't take much changes by College Humor to rework the orange Trump monster into something scarier than the Grinch.

The office of American President is too much power and work for a single person. Donald Trump does not want to do any work but wants to be a figure-head. This ingenious article shows how we can kill two birds with one stone by reforming the American political system. All hail, King Trump!

Plato’s most famous work and the foundational text of political philosophy is the Republic. Written in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and other real-life Athenians, the book opens with a discussion about the nature of justice and then proceeds into Plato’s ideas about what an ideal state and its leader would look like. I will argue how these ideas are still relevant nowadays, especially regarding the disturbing state of American politics in which the American people are considering electing for the first time an openly authoritarian leader who is blatantly unqualified for the job. 

Plato, an aristocrat, held a deep antipathy for democracy; he had lived through the defeat of Athens at the hand of Sparta as well as the condemnation of his mentor, Socrates. He blamed democracy for these twin catastrophes. His own ideal state would actually bear strong resemblance to Sparta–a totalitarian state in which a small elite trained for success in battle, the majority were disenfranchised slaves who did all the labor, and all cultural activities were forbidden. Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy summarized Plato’s Republic as follows:

“When we ask: what will Plato's Republic achieve? The answer is rather humdrum. It will achieve success in wars against roughly equal populations, and it will secure a livelihood for a certain small number of people. It will almost certainly produce no art or science, because of its rigidity; in this respect, as in others, it will be like Sparta. In spite of all the fine talk, skill in war and enough to eat is all that will be achieved. Plato had lived through famine and defeat in Athens; perhaps, subconsciously, he thought the avoidance of these evils the best that statesmanship could accomplish.”

Russell goes on in his criticism, answering the question of how and why Plato could have achieved such greatness despite having, frankly, mostly terrible ideas:

“Plato possessed the art to dress up illiberal suggestions in such a way that they deceived future ages, which admired the Republic without ever becoming aware of what was involved in its proposals. It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him. This is the common fate of great men. My object is the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.”

Plato's Non-Ideal Republic in Practice

Indeed, the millennia of admiration for Plato’s Republic came to a sudden end when Russell’s History and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies were published in the same year–1945. No coincidence that both were written during the Second World War at the height of the destruction wrought by demented dictators and dangerous ideas. Popper’s was perhaps the first, and still most important work, that separates Plato from the humanistic and democratic ideas of Socrates, and shows rather that Plato’s ideal state was a totalitarian one. The overriding theme of the book, which follows the thread of totalitarianism from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, is how all these philosophers relied on historicism, a false theory in which history unfolds according the universal laws, to enable dangerous ideas to follow. He accused all of these thinkers of being partially culpable in leading Europe towards the crisis of leadership and war contemporaneous with the book’s publishing. Popper argues instead for a strong defense of the open society, which protects liberal values and institutes reforms without violence. One relevant issue Popper also discusses is the Paradox of Intolerance, which says that for an Open Society to flourish, we must not be tolerant of intolerance (which include the type of hate speech, bigotry, and violent rhetoric that is becoming normalized in Donald Trump's Republican Party). 

The most famous parable from the Republic is that of The Cave, whose premise about Plato’s theory of ideas most undergraduates would be familiar. Much more useful, in my opinion, however, is the parable of the Ship of State. Imagine the state as a ship, whose captain is a skilled stargazing navigator. The citizens are sailors, who may have many various skills but are not qualified to pilot the ship, especially through rough weather. The sailors mock the captain and try to replace him, but ultimately he is the only one with the ability to lead them. In Plato’s view, the captain in a state should be a philosopher-king, wise and trained at birth for his position as total ruler. One sees that democracy and Plato do not mix well–for him, the people were a mob who could not rule themselves.

Let’s bring these analogies into present day America.

As far as I can tell, America is the longest running large democracy in history, though a number of smaller polities, such as Iceland or the old Iroquois Confederation, to name two, are certainly older. For a huge and diverse nation of over 300 million people that has the world’s largest economy and strongest military, the fact that it has survived 240 years and a bloody civil war without ever deviating from a democratic and peaceful transition of power is quite amazing. Unprecedented actually. It was taken for granted when the Founding Fathers drew up the Constitution that Athenian-style democracy could only ever end in manipulation of the mob, or demos, by a demagogue or tyrant. They drew up a system of checks and balances between branches of government in which no person could amass enough power to take over the government, and through which change would necessarily be slow and conservative. This has often frustrated the ability to pass needed reforms, but has also the greater benefit of preserving the system peacefully. 

Past American Presidents

Never in American history, discounting the obvious case of the Civil War, has the original political system drawn up in the Constitution come under threat of being radically altered. Likewise, there has never been a single person in American history who has had the power, or even sought the power, to completely control government in anything even resembling a dictatorship. Out of all the 44 presidents (Grover Cleveland served non-consecutive terms and is counted twice), historians typically agree on Andrew Johnson as the worst. It was certainly Abraham Lincoln’s biggest mistake to name him his Vice President for short-sighted and unnecessary electoral reasons before his reelection, and Johnson’s horrible term had awful ramifications for the next century regarding the reconstruction of the South. Even so, it is hard to find any American president who was unqualified to hold the office, in the traditional sense of having the ability and experience to operate an executive organization with delegated tasks and many moving parts. This has nothing to do with ideology, or even effectiveness, but of basic qualifications for the job before taking office. Several highly successful generals had either mostly good, mixed, or awful administrations (Eisenhower, Jackson, and Grant, for example), but their qualifications were never questioned despite their success or lack thereof. Herbert Hoover is generally considered an awful president mostly due to the Great Depression beginning on his watch, but he was highly successful in his private career and as the head of the U.S. Food Administration during WWI and Secretary of Commerce under two presidents before being elected, and was thus very qualified. Even George W. Bush, whom historians will most likely rank closer to Andrew Johnson than Franklin Roosevelt, governed the second largest state before becoming president. Most presidents have been highly educated and experienced men (obviously all men to date) with military backgrounds and terms as senators, congressmen, or governors. Men who understood something about the world and also how government works at various levels. The most successful presidents have also had temperaments suited for the rigorous stressfulness of this unique position as well as the ability to listen to advisors and learn from mistakes. To have a combination of many of these rare skills is what is wanted in a president, as well as a certain degree of other abstract qualities like intellectual curiosity, integrity, and empathy. 

The Ideal Leader in a Democracy

Basically, I would argue that we want the same thing today as Plato wanted, even if we have different ways of going about it. Even if they will not be philosopher-kings, our leaders should be the best among us, and chosen by an informed electorate. They should be highly skilled at steering the large and unwieldy ship of state even in the rough waters of domestic and international politics. Plato, a member of the hereditary aristocracy and an anti-democrat, thought that these leaders should be bred from birth for the role, with the rest of the people having no say in the matter. There is another meaning of aristocracy, which is merely “rule by the best”, not involving genetics or inheritance but pure merit through earned experience, training, and natural character, and selected for by the majority of citizens. In our democracy, even with the two major political parties nominating candidates for the office of president, there has long been a de facto sorting out of the best qualified candidates. Once again, this has nothing to do with ideology but of basic minimum ability to function in a very complex role. Despite differences in ideas by the parties and the electorate, there has always been a tacit understanding that the winner will uphold the duties of his office and continue to serve in the government for the people.

The Disqualification of Donald Trump

Thus, we have never before in American history been in the position we are currently in–namely, to have a major party candidate for president who is clearly and without any doubt unqualified and unsuited for the office that he seeks. The Republican Party, once a bastion of principled conservatism, respect for law, and personal responsibility, has become so radical and reactionary over the last three decades or so that it has nominated a person who would certainly be the most disastrous, irresponsible, and unqualified president in history, and the closest we have yet come to a dictator, however petty. Trump’s open disregard for the rule of law, free press, and clear lack of basic knowledge of the world and the government he would operate is a disqualification for president. His other temperamental flaws, his proudly open bigotry (the likes of which has not been seen in a major candidate since there was legal slavery), his shocking, world historical level of narcissism and mendacity (unprecedented even for a would-be politician), and other shallow but toxic policy ideas are almost beside the point–any one of these attributes should easily have disqualified Trump from coming anywhere near being an realistic candidate for president, but the ultimate fact that he has none of the necessary tools to meet the minimum standards for piloting the ship of state is the single most important fact. He is not trained or experienced in anything like running the executive branch of the richest and strongest military power on Earth. He has shown no ability to succeed in anything other than making his own name universally known, however he goes about that. He is not a stargazer who can pilot America through bad storms, nor is he someone who should have instant control over soldiers’ lives and nuclear weapons.

The Republican Party, for the first time in American history, has failed in the basic task of nominating a human who is at a basic level of qualification for the office of president. There is no need to get any more into the details of how and why this happened--this article gives a brief summary of how the Republican Party began moving rightward three decades ago and cynically cultivating deep distrust of government itself for its own electoral gain, and this is the result. The most important thing is that Trump be defeated at all costs, and that a strong warning is cried out that never again will We the American people tolerate such a denigration of our hallowed tradition for maintaining a functioning democracy, whatever differences of policy and ideology. I disagree with Plato's sentiment that democracy is a bad thing. It is not a perfect system; it is merely less bad than every other possible system. Its strength, and also its only flaw, is that it ultimately depends on an electorate that votes in the best interests of the peaceful and prosperous survival of the state, and not on a single tyrant who manipulates the mob with promises to solve all problems on his own. Let’s hope that we can continue for at least another 240 years without such a threat and an affront to our great country.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Drew Pham's essay Each Soldier a Thread meditates on the Orlando massacre and how violence effects soldiers long after coming home.

David James reviewed two more recent science books that attempt to answer some of the biggest questions of life, just like the title of Paul Gauguin's masterpiece: Where Do We Come From? Who are We? Where are We Going?

 

Editor’s Recommendations

Military

General Petraeus is too busy to talk to Nick Turse. Turse wonders: How do generals who lose wars get so busy?

For some reason, War on the Rocks is becoming the publication without peer for delivering skeptical reports on NATO’s efficacy, as well as why people won’t participate in it. The latest installment in their series how to bias people against NATO

Politics and American History

John Quincy Adams was the only person to return to Congress after being President. This article shows how his knowledge of history and deeply held sense of morality made him into an effective leader and someone today's politicians could learn something from.

Bush Jr. has been hesitant to leave his beloved ranch and show his face in public life since his term ended. He insists, however, that history will judge him differently. One recent biography shows why that is probably not the case.

Politics and French History

"The Other Paris" by George Packer. French Muslims struggle to place themselves in a society that seems to reserve liberty, equality, and brotherhood only for it's White, native-born citizens. Packer asks the question, are Paris' suburbs incubators for terrorism?

Just because you are a scam artist like Trump, doesn’t mean you have to advocate inhumanity like Trump. Roger Pearson at Lapham’s Quarterly reveals that the iconoclast and champion of liberty Voltaire would flourish on Wall Street today.

Literary Parody

A Zambian woman writes about her frightening gap year in Cornwall.

 

One of the most illustrious living scientists, E.O. Wilson, is still active and writing great books well into his ninth decade. In this article I will review two of his most recent works, The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) and The Meaning of Human Existence (2014).

Wilson, a biologist considered to be the world’s foremost expert on ants and sociobiology, is a gifted writer who explains difficult concepts for non-expert readers. My interests have always lain mostly within the humanities–history, literature, and philosophy above all–but reading these two books has opened my eyes in a couple ways. Firstly, that biology strongly determines many of the things often considered as separate and non-overlapping fields of study–history, politics, and the arts, for example. Secondly, that the fields of science and the humanities really would be best served by combining their forces and engaging in joint dialogue and research. I will attempt to explain these in greater detail.

The Social Conquest of Earth is the story of how the most successful and dominant organisms in Earth’s history are the ones that developed eusociality–namely, the social insects of termites, bees, wasps, and especially ants on one hand, and human beings on the other. Eusociality is the term for the systematic cooperation between a large number of organisms in a given species for the benefit of the group over the benefit of individuals. Out of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary history and the rise and fall of as many different species, this trait of social cooperation has only arisen 20 times as far as experts can tell (mostly species of the aforementioned insects, along with two varieties of shrimp, and two species of naked mole rats that are the only other eusocial mammals besides humans). Wilson spends the rest of the book explaining why it was so rare, why human beings in particular are so unique, and how this relates to the rest of the world’s history.

“The origin of eusociality has been rare in the history of life because group selection must be exceptionally powerful to relax the grip of individual selection. Only then can it modify the conservative effect of individual selection and introduce highly cooperative behavior into the physiology and behavior of the group members.” This is the key point of why social cooperation is so rare, leading to what Wilson calls the iron rule of genetic social evolution: “It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.” This is true for all the relevant species, but especially for humans as we will see.

So how did such a trait evolve in the first place? Wilson lists three reasons: “One solid principle drawn from this analysis of the hymenopterans [the ants], and other insects as well, is that all of the species that have attained eusociality, as I have stressed, live in fortified nest sites. A second principle, less well established but probably nonetheless universal, is that the protection is against enemies, namely predators, parasites, and competitors. A final principle is that, all other things being equal, even a little society does better than a solitary individual belonging to closely related species both in longevity and in extracting resources from the area around a fixed nest of any kind.” 

A significant part of the book deals with detailed descriptions of ant (and termite and bee) colonies and how they developed socially, which is Wilson’s particular specialty (at one point he mentions nonchalantly how he discovered and named 442 new species of ant). More interesting is how he compares and contrasts these social insects with humans, and describes the evolutionary process by which humans became a uniquely transcendent species. (For another interesting take on what happens when the planet’s two most successful species go head to head, see the classic short story “Leiningen Versus the Ants”, which I remember reading in high school English class).

Wilson describes the development of Homo sapiens as a maze, ultimately random, with each subsequent mutation bringing us closer to our modern form and capabilities. The first necessary adaptation was existence on the land so that fire could be harnessed (this is why highly intelligent dolphins and whales will never develop civilizations). The second necessary adaptation was large body size which allowed for bigger brains and advanced reasoning and culture (this excludes all eusocial insects). The third necessary adaption was the use of grasping hands with soft spatulate fingers that could hold and manipulate objects (this eliminates all large land animals besides the apes). The next necessary step was a dietary shift to a large amount of meat, a much more efficient source of protein that led to both larger brains and more social communities (this also excluded all other apes who are either vegetarian or, like chimpanzees, get only a small fraction of their calories from meat [additional note: I have often written of my vegetarianism and how good it is for people, animals, and the environment; I do not see any disconnect, however, between our ancestors’ adoption of meat into their diet for extra caloric and social development in a very limited world, and our current need to cut down grossly or eliminate meat consumption from our diets for the good of ourselves and life on our planet]). “About a million years ago the controlled use of fire followed, a unique homonid achievement.” This was likely because early human ancestors found cooked meat from animals burned in forest fires, and began to bring the fire with them. “Cooking became a universal human trait. With the sharing of cooked meals came a universal means of social bonding…along with fireside campsites came division of labor.” This maze seems very logical and easy to trace in hindsight, and from here it is relatively easy to trace the rest of human social development.

Wilson comes to some similar conclusions as another biologist Yuval Noah Harari, whose Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind I reviewed here. For instance, he says “The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck–good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever.” He spends a lot of time describing how human culture developed to favor group cooperation over individual interests, and how this has affected our history, culture, and even psychology. “An unavoidable and perpetual war exists between honor, virtue, and duty, the products of group selection, on one side, and selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, the products of individual selection, on the other side.” In fact, he comments at length on the tribal instincts of our species which lead to the worst part of our nature, yet has been ingrained in our cultural development over thousands of generations of evolution. “The elementary drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership easily translates at a higher level into tribalism. People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion…Once a group has been split off and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation.” What a history of human war and social conflict this sociobiological fact entails.

A portion of the book is spent on laying out the case for the theory of group selection versus the theory of kin selection, which had been the most popular one for four decades. The latter, discussed by Charles Darwin, formally theorized in 1964 by W.D. Hamilton, and popularized by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 The Selfish Gene, states that kinship is the dominant criteria for genetic reproduction. Wilson references a new mathematical model and a variety of examples to show why group selection is actually the more likely reality. Altruism, for example, never fit well in the kin selection model, but it is the basis for Wilson’s theory. Dawkins, a renowned polemicist, did not take lightly to the dismissal of his preferred theory, and it led to quite the biological war of words in the press (here is a summary). I am not equipped to weigh in on what is still a controversial issue in evolutionary biology, but Wilson makes his case very convincingly.

Another fascinating aspect of the book that warrants mentioning is its discussion of how human cultural development differs from other animals. Somewhat surprisingly, Wilson says that we did not invent culture. Our common ancestor with chimpanzees did millions of years ago. “Most researchers agree that the concept of culture should be applied to animals and humans alike, in order to stress its continuity from one to the other and notwithstanding the immensely greater complexity of human behavior.” Accordingly, he mentions how dolphins and whales have culture, shown by their imitative social interactions. He reminds us again, though, why such intelligent creatures did not progress as far as humans in social evolution: “Unlike primates, they have no nests or campsites. They have flippers for forelimbs. And in their watery realm, controlled fire is forever denied.” Culture is especially dependent on long-term memory, a trait which humans possess far above all other animals. Our enlarged brains have made us into storytellers and planners, able to imagine past and future scenarios, invent fictions (a point also highlighted in Harari’s book Sapiens), and delay immediate desires in favor of delayed pleasures. 

The Social Conquest of Earth explores a number of other engaging topics, but in the name of brevity I will conclude my synopsis here (in this New York Times “The Stone” article, Wilson also gives a nice summary of his ideas). I think one of the most important points of the book is the connection between biological development and what we usually think of as humanistic studies. I, for one, will be rethinking much of what I thought I knew about political and ethical philosophy. If we simply trust facts coming from scientific research, we will not need to construct theoretical hypotheses about how human societies developed and invented laws–those of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau, for example. Likewise with thorny questions of morality–if we consider that we are social animals who evolved successfully to work together, but that we still maintain the older individualistic impulses that go against the group, it helps to understand why humans behave the way the do. Perhaps Nietzsche was right, but not in the way he intended. We need not use the terms good and evil to characterize human actions–we can assess them as altruistic or selfish. Wilson comments: “Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin, while group selection is responsible for the greater part of virtue. Together they have created the conflict between the poorer and the better angels of our nature.”

The Meaning of Human Existence is a slimmer volume with a more multidisciplinary approach, but no less ambitious than its predecessor as the title implies. In it, Wilson rehashes some of the same information as before, such as another extended case for group selection theory over kin selection (prompted no doubt by the controversy it stirred up two years earlier). For the most part, though, Wilson attempts to give a brief but comprehensive version of human history and development, and how we can advance as a species by uniting scientific and humanistic studies, and overall being better stewards of our immense, godlike power over the planet. 

Here are some interesting quotes in my opinion that give some flavor of what the book is about:

“The function of anthropocentricity—fascination about ourselves—is the sharpening of social intelligence, a skill in which human beings are the geniuses among all Earth’s species. It arose dramatically in concert with the evolution of the cerebral cortex during the origin of Homo sapiens from the African australopith prehumans. Gossip, celebrity worship, biographies, novels, war stories, and sports are the stuff of modern culture because a state of intense, even obsessive concentration on others has always enhanced survival of individuals and groups. We are devoted to stories because that is how the mind works—a never-ending wandering through past scenarios and through alternative scenarios of the future.”

“What we call human nature is the whole of our emotions and the preparedness in learning over which those emotions preside. Some writers have tried to deconstruct human nature into nonexistence. But it is real, tangible, and a process that exists in the structures of the brain. Decades of research have discovered that human nature is not the genes that prescribe the emotions and learning preparedness. It is not the cultural universals, which are its ultimate product. Human nature is the ensemble of hereditary regularities in mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to others and thus connect genes to culture in the brain of every person.”

“It is tribalism, not the moral tenets and humanitarian thought of pure religion, that makes good people do bad things.”

Both books are highly recommended reading for anyone interested in life’s big questions, which should be everyone. In The Social Conquest of Earth, Wilson opened with a discussion of Paul Gauguin’s masterpiece, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”, and what led the painter to create such a work. Gauguin lived an interesting life, giving up everything in a quest for truth and beauty (as portrayed in William Somerset Maugham’s great roman à clef, The Moon and Sixpence). The painting reveals the questions which are still central to religion, philosophy, and science; these questions may perhaps never be solved, but Wilson overall gives as good a try as anyone at some likely answers. He ends on a positive, if quixotic, note that if humanity can harness its power for good, we can conquer our gods and demons: “So, now I will confess my own blind faith. Earth, by the twenty-second century, can be turned, if we so wish, into a permanent paradise for human beings, or at least the strong beginnings of one. We will do a lot more damage to ourselves and the rest of life along the way, but out of an ethic of simple decency to one another, the unrelenting application of reason, and acceptance of what we truly are, our dreams will finally come home to stay.”

The violence that reached our shores left me at a loss—every attempt to conceptualize these tragedies failed to capture the emotions moving me. I tried to make sense of San Bernardino and Orlando by writing, but after a dozen drafts I realized that failure is at the heart of my shock and sorrow. We bore witness as attacks ravaged Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey. I watched each attack unfold, felt each death defeat me. We fought for Afghanistan, for America, but it was for nothing.

My friends that served in Iraq echoed similar sentiments in the spring of 2014 when Daesh captured swathes of Iraq and Syria. They watched everything they struggled for fall apart. It was a cruel turn to watch ISIS flags fluttering from American Humvees. We were warriors in the world’s most powerful military, but most of us were helpless to act. More than six thousand of our brothers and sisters died, more than fifty thousand wounded—what will their legacy be?

Like many of my brothers and sisters that served in Iraq and Afghanistan, I poured my heart and soul into this war. I knew we were fighting an uphill battle when I joined, but I thought if we fought for the Afghan people, maybe the terrorism they faced wouldn’t come home with me. I failed. I remember reading a Washington Post article about my area of operations—the Jalrez Valley in Wardak Province—mere months after we returned home in the fall of 2011. When we arrived, two girls’ schools thrived just outside our outpost, our Afghan counterparts enjoyed good relations with the locals, and many local villagers helped us fight the Taliban shadow government. One girls’ school is ruined now, the other beset by drive-bys and bombings. The article said Jalrez was named “the Valley of Death.” My Afghan comrades—with whom I broke bread and bled alongside—despair that the population threw their lot in with the Taliban. The valley is theirs now, how long until they seize the province? The nation?

The day after Orlando was warm and sunny—the summer felt garish and irreverent against my frustration. I tried to explain to a civilian colleague what I felt, and she asked me how I could feel responsible for the attack. She said it seemed so removed from my deployment in 2010. Many of us were brought up in the military schooled in counterinsurgency, which taught us that what the “strategic corporal” did on the ground impacted the whole war. Indeed, leaders on the local level like Colonel H.R. McMaster influenced national policy. I learned that war is not just red and blue symbols on a map, but a complex and entangled system that includes every one of us. Each raid, each dollar, each soldier a thread in a web. It connects a rifle to a villager, a villager to a valley, a valley to a nation—each strand leading to another variable, another effect. What implications did losing Jalrez have on the war? I can’t pretend to know what Omar Mateen thought of the war on his family’s country, but if it was mine I would be full of rage and sorrow. I can’t say where those feelings would take me, and maybe that’s why I can’t make Omar into the enemy no matter how hard I try. Every attempt to understand his decisions dropped me into a void. I told my colleague that I couldn’t draw a line from Jalrez to a mass murder, only that I felt responsible.

In a society so divorced from the implications of war and foreign policy, veterans not only bear the physical and emotional costs of war, but shoulder the moral responsibility as well. Only during the Global War on Terror has the term “moral injury” entered into the lexicon of mental health and trauma. One need only look to the International NGO Safety Organization or Team Rubicon to see veterans’ commitment to duty and social responsibility. If one thing can be said of veterans it is our need to act, but there’s something else driving us. In the words of Chris Hedges, war is a force that gives us meaning. Danger makes life simple—survival supplants wardrobe choices and cocktail selections. There is a singularity of purpose and a definition of clarity I have found nowhere else. It joins us irrevocably. Sebastian Junger’s new book Tribe examines the bonds that come from collective hardship in wartime—one woman in the book, Nidzara Ahmetasevic, was evacuated from Bosnia only to make a harrowing return trip back to Sarajevo because it was too hard to keep going while her family suffered. “We were the happiest,” she told Junger. “And we laughed more.”

Like her, I miss much of my war. My brother, an active duty Infantry Sergeant and OEF vet, says he wishes he was back in Afghanistan. He holds out hope for another deployment, another opportunity to get back into the fight. The thought terrifies me, I don’t know what I would do if I lost my little brother. At the same time, another part of me wishes I could go back with him. War gave me camaraderie and meaning, but it was an addiction. Karl Marlantes called combat the crack cocaine of adrenaline highs, with crack cocaine consequences.

I look at the attacks at home and abroad, and I wonder if the source of my despair isn’t the tragedy of each event, but a yearning for combat. We said we were in Afghanistan to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, but when fighting season came I savored the fighting. It came to eclipse the desire to build infrastructure, capacity, and governance in Afghanistan. It even eclipsed the beauty of the little girls that welcomed us into their schools. I lost Jalrez because I was too intoxicated by the smell of gunpowder and the power of calling Apache gunships to raze the valley. I kept the Afghans I was supposed to serve at rifle’s length out of fear, alienating them. When I came home I tried to pay penance for my blood lust by working for veterans non-profits and by working with refugees to the U.S. I thought if I could save enough lives, make a big enough difference, then I could eventually make up for leaving Jalrez in chaos. For a while I told myself I was doing good work, making a difference. Then a car would backfire or the neighbors would set off a string of firecrackers—I would break into a sweat, my glands taking me out of reality and back into the fight. After that the pathways addicted to adrenaline reactivated like reopened wounds, a bitter reminder of internal war between my compassion and savagery.

After Orlando, it feels as if there may be no way of erasing my guilt because we brought home the dualism we took to war. In many ways, the contradiction of duty and conscience against violence and war reflects the contradictions in our national narrative. When we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, we said it was to liberate the oppressed. At first that held true: many Afghans and Iraqis welcomed us, welcomed the opportunity we appeared to herald—though our collective desire for revenge colored the decision to engage in both wars. The product is the despair of a failed enterprise of our own making. We say that all men are created equal, but black Americans are still murdered with impunity. We call for an end to violence in Iraq and Syria, but our only action is to drop bombs. We brought other things home—our police forces mutated into paramilitary organizations, our xenophobia morphed into something that politicians actively encourage to win elections with. Perhaps this will be the legacy of the war on terror that so many of us veterans and countless more civilians suffered for.

My good friend and confidant Kristen is a fellow vet, a Florida native, and identifies as part of the LGBTQ community. In the days following Orlando, she said,

“I fought for them. For the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. And it’s come to this.” Her tears fell.

I projected all my guilt, all my failure onto those words. In my head, I listed people I left behind in Afghanistan, the people that have to live with my mistakes. My guilt was immobilizing me into inaction, another failure. Kristen said something else.

“Why aren’t we celebrating the resilience of gay communities? Why aren’t we celebrating the lives of the people of color killed in this hate crime?”

I despair because I am complicit. We all are, yet despair and failure alone cannot define us. We must take ownership of our wars and their effects to face the future. We saw the consequences of war because we answered the call. For us, duty doesn’t end when we take off the uniform. We must share our experiences lest we leave the nation deaf and blind. Tomorrow, we build. Leading voices like Phil Klay, call on veterans to make art for the urgent cause of cultivating a more responsible body politic. Our definition of community must shift from the brotherhood of warriors to include voters, fighters, and victims of these conflicts. Then, we avenge the victims of these hate crimes, these terror attacks.

 Then, when we fight it won’t be for nothing.

“If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”

    Attributed (probably falsely) to Jonas Salk

The good news is that most of the world has finally accepted that global warming is happening and is going to wreak havoc on our climate over the next 100 (or 100,000) years, and that something needs to be done collectively by world governments and industries to stop the worst of the changes from occurring. The bad news is that much of the climate change is already programmed in and will lead to large-scale disaster, and that the global human response, while increasingly encouraging, is still not nearly enough to make a dent in Mother Nature’s coming retribution. In this review, I will discuss two recent books that in different ways discuss how Homo sapiens have come to dominate the earth and its climate, and what this means for the future of our species and the planet. They are Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014) by Yuval Noah Harari, and Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? (2013) by Alan Weisman.

In the first book, Sapiens, Harari offers some novel takes on how and why modern humans became and remain the kings of the terrestrial castle. Human beings have been around in some form for about 2.5 million years, and even 70,000 years ago anatomically modern humans were insignificant animals. “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. Their impact on the world was very small, less than that of jellyfish, woodpeckers, or bumblebees…Today, however, humans control this planet. How did we reach from there to here? What was our secret of success, that turned us from insignificant apes minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of the world?” 

Harari spends the first chapter outlining a brief but lively summary of the biological evolution of the many various human species that we used to share the planet with. The key features, all with pros and cons, are our unusually big brains, our upright gait, and our social skills. He describes the consequences of our sudden leap to the top of the food chain 400,000 years ago: “Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.”

In this over 400-page book, Harari, a professor of biology in Jerusalem, continues to pour a wealth of information and theory on the readers without ever losing their interest. In the third chapter, he speculates that interbreeding between various human species was rare, and that Homo sapiens basically wiped out other species, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, whenever they came into contact, most likely due to intolerance. “In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect, or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species?” Whatever the cause, the result is that Sapiens are left as the only survivors of the genus Homo, and a rare animal without any close relatives. Interestingly, Harari speculates how history might have happened differently had we had to coexist with other humansspecies. “How, for example, would religious faiths have unfolded? Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve, would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur’an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species? Would Neanderthals have been able to serve in the Roman legions, or in the sprawling bureaucracy of imperial China? Would the American Declaration of Independence hold as a self-evident truth that all members of the genus Homo are created equal? Would Karl Marx have urged workers of all species to unite?”

The reason Homo sapiens conquered the world, Harari claims, is above all its unique language. Around 70,000 years ago our ancestors left Africa for a second time and began to colonize the entire planet, a long march which only finished when the first humans reached New Zealand around 800 years ago. After leaving Africa, these Homo sapiens encountered and probably exterminated Neanderthals (and many other large animals), while at the same time developing a remarkable amount of new technologies over the next 400 centuries: boats, oil lamps, bows and arrows, needles, as well as art and the first evidence of religion, commerce, and social classes. This Cognitive Revolution allowed for humans to think and communicate in new and sophisticated ways due to language use. The causes of this mental explosion are unclear, but Harari claims that it was most likely a genetic mutation that came from pure chance. (Compare the biologist E.O. Wilson here: “The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck—good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever.”) As for language itself, he says that while many animals, including our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, use types of communication mostly for signaling danger or food, human language developed mostly as a way of gossiping. Besides this, he says that a further development of the Cognitive Revolution is the human ability to think and talk about things that do not exist–entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched, or smelled. “This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.” The consequences of this fact were obviously enormous and dominate the rest of the book.

Harari continues to discuss how language ability allowed our ancestors to form larger social groups. “Even if a particularly fertile valley could feed 500 archaic Sapiens, there was no way that so many strangers could live together…Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.” However, large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths, or fictions, which bind the group in ways that gossip cannot. This large-scale cooperation, derived from human language and imaginative thinking, is what led to the crucial cooperation of large numbers of people that gradually formed cities, empires, and conquered the planet. The consequences of this development lead us to the present-day and into the future. “As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees, and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations, and corporations.”

The next main point in the book is the transition from the long-standing tradition of foraging bands of hunter-gatherers to mostly stable villages of farmers. This happened with the Agricultural Revolution of 12,000 years ago, and led to larger and more sophisticated societies. Harari spends a lot of time discussing the diversity of the ancient (and a few modern) forager bands and how dramatically their way of life differed from the agricultural one. Comparing the two groups, he claims interestingly that “The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history.” He speculates that average human brain size has actually decreased since the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, since survival no longer requires the superb memory and mental abilities from everyone as in the foraging groups. Furthermore, foragers had physical endurance and dexterity that few humans achieve today. He presents us with a plethora of evidence which leads to his most interesting claim in the book, in my opinion: that ancient foraging humans had a happier and healthier life than the subsequent agriculturally dependent ones. The diet was wholesome and varied, the working week was relatively short and free time was much greater, and infectious diseases were rare. Meanwhile, most agricultural societies until quite recently have had to endure constant uncertainty over their crops, little variety of food, much more work, and more unhygienic conditions. This is not a new argument–Jared Diamond wrote an essay with the same conclusions in a controversial 1987 essay “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”–but it is still surprising and counter-intuitive. How could ancient humans have possibly had better or happier lives than most of their post-Agricultural Revolution descendants? The idea is not so surprising if we consider Rousseau’s idea of the Noble Savage, long thought to be erroneous, or examples such as the paradisal Polynesian tribe described by Herman Melville in Typee, or the many noble societies of American Indians like the Iroquois or the Lakota Sioux.

Harari continues with several chapters detailing the relationship between humans and animals, which has become more and more unequal in favor of the humans since the Cognitive Revolution. Basically, wherever modern humans have lived, extinction of large animals and plants has followed soon thereafter. The First Wave Extinction accompanied the spread of foragers, the Second Wave Extinction, more due to slash and burn agriculture and habitat loss than hunting, accompanied the farmers, and we are currently in the midst of the Third Wave Extinction, caused by our own all-consuming industrial activity. Giving perspective on this tragic history, Harari comments: “Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.” This is especially important because “if we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.” Besides the outright destruction of wild animal species by humans is the subjugation of domestic animals to the point of tragic absurdity: “It’s hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Their evolutionary ‘success’ is meaningless. A wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks…The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures.” Later, Harari comments on the current state of industrial farming, in which hundreds of billions of animals are raised in horrific conditions for a short time to be slaughtered for human consumption, calling it “a regime of industrial exploitation whose cruelty has no precedent in the annals of planet Earth…and might well be the greatest crime in history.”

Moving closer and closer to the present, Harari presents us with a long series of historical examples about how human societies have changed and gradually unified, leading to the last of the three revolutions that drive the human narrative–the Scientific Revolution. Around 1500, science led to new knowledge which created new technology and fundamentally changed humans’ relationship to their environment and each other. Harari presents a huge number of case studies in politics, industry, exploration, religion, economics, artistic culture, and science that offer his personal interpretations and opinions on all of these areas. The book overall is abundantly full of intriguing information and details about the long rise of Homo sapiens and what it means for our present and future existence. 

For me, by far the most fascinating chapters are the early ones discussing how Sapiens arose biologically from among many other primate and human species, leading to the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. This is the heart of the book taking us from the beginning of the world until around 12,000 years ago, and therefore the most theoretical, mysterious, and little-known even to people like me who have studied ancient history. As soon as Harari brings the narrative forward into the territory of recorded history, that is, since the first major Mesopotamian civilizations until the present, the book begins to become slightly more and more weighed down by the entropy of the overwhelming number of things discussed and the author’s increasingly over-arching and tendentious claims on all areas of human history and life. That is not to say that the book stops being interesting or that I even disagree with his ideas, but that the best part comes from Harari’s specialized knowledge of biology and the story of early human development. For a large part of the second half of the book, he is clearly less well-versed in the details of modern history and arts, or less concerned with scientific rigor and more with his own opinions. He plays fast and loose with his examples of economics (the 400-year development of capitalism, for example), wars, or historical events and how they relate to his big-picture history of the species. There are few (if any) authors who could successfully pull off such an ambitious and wide-ranging history of our entire species in proper detail from origin to the present, and if Harari falls short on the more recent history of humans that is nothing to scoff at. The philosopher Galen Strawson reviewed the book critically calling it a swashbuckling account, and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, men with whom I otherwise have little in common, have both included it on their own lists of favorite books (probably more for the final chapters speculating on the future of our species, i.e. artificial intelligence and other things that I have not discussed here, for my own reasons). Overall, Sapiens is a highly worthy book for anyone interested in human life, and it presents so much engaging information in a readable way that this should be recommended reading for any student of the sciences and humanities.

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In the second book, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, Alan Weisman spends no time discussing the history of the human race except insofar as it relates to the increasing population growth of our species. I am a big fan of Weisman’s previous book, The World Without Us, a long think-piece with a series of interesting case studies about what would happen to different ecosystems if humans suddenly disappeared. Countdown is the sequel, in which for over 500 pages Weisman follows the same pattern with a series of case studies of overpopulation in various countries and possible solutions that have been tried over the last century, and the consequences if we continue on this exponential trajectory. 

The format of Countdown is to dive straight into the many local problems arising from an overpopulated world and beat us over the head, chapter after chapter, with the scope of the problem, without ever explicitly connecting the dots between all of the information. We are led to draw our own conclusions, but there is really only one proper inference to make after reading a few chapters of the book: human population growth is out of control and we need to do something about it before we destroy most of the planet’s other inhabitants and resources. 

Such a book obviously does not skirt around controversy but confronts it head-on. Thus, the first chapter brings us straight to Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Israel-Palestine conflict.  “Arafat’s biology bomb” was the way locals referenced the demographic split of the divided territory. Palestinians have many more children than Israelis and so put more pressure on an already intractable political situation. Weisman discusses the recent history of walls, intifadas, agriculture, religion, and many other things relevant to the conflict, but the simple thesis comes down to the fact that too many humans are trying to live in a small area without enough resources, which is called carrying capacity, an updated version of the old Malthusian argument. This will become a repetitive theme throughout the book as Weisman visits at least 20 countries and interviews hundreds of scientists, politicians, families, and scholars. The book is basically extended reportage based around the author’s own travels and interviews, and he gives few of his own overt opinions in favor of presenting us an overwhelming number of data that leads to the incontrovertible fact that there are too many humans.

Weisman constantly grapples with the question of how many people Earth can reasonably support versus how many people there will be due to the weight of current demographic trends. We are already well over 7 billion, and most estimates say that we will reach 10 billion by 2050, and could peak as high as 15 billion by the end of the century. Paul and Anne Ehrlich, famous for their 1968 book The Population Bomb, have calculated the ideal human population to be 1.5 billion. The Ehrlichs and their younger colleague named Gretchen Daily are the most recurring characters in the book, and it is clear that their decades of work on the population problem has made an great impact on the author. 

The book is fairly bleak, but I cannot imagine it being any other way given the scope of the problem it treats with. Just a few of the many topics covered at a brisk pace are China’s one-child policy, forced sterilizations, different kinds of contraception available in different countries, religious opposition to contraception, agricultural innovation and genetic modification, AIDS, and gorillas. Ultimately, after discussing every kind of recent example of population control on every continent in great detail, Weisman offers no specific solutions, but presents us with a choice: “I don’t want to cull anyone alive today. I wish every human now on the planet a long, healthy life. But either we take control ourselves, and humanely bring our numbers down by recruiting fewer new members of the human race to take our places, or nature is going to hand out a pile of pink slips.”

Countdown is similar to Harari’s Sapiens in its enormous wealth of information across many fields (its impressive bibliography attests to its rigorous research), and its generally negative tone about the rise of humans and our ability to deal with the world we have created. Sometimes the truth hurts, and if it’s necessary for us to realize that we are collectively responsible for the extinction of our closest living relatives and countless other species we cohabited the planet with, and that our ever-growing numbers and unsustainable lifestyles are dooming even our own existence, then these two books should be required reading for every politician, business leader, teacher, and student. We are a problem-solving species and the undisputed rulers of the earth, but the countdown has indeed begun for Homo sapiens and there is no resetting the clock.

Since the last time we conducted a wrapup, the following has occurred: NATO finished the largest joint exercises in over a decade, England voted to leave the EU, personal hero to all WBTers (and creative non-fiction pioneer) Michael Herr passed away, and Bernie Sanders pledged to vote for Hillary Clinton, which some had feared would not be the case. For your reading edification:

Michael Carson's essay about Michael Herr, published first in 2014: https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com/2014/02/michael-herrs-teenage-wasteland/

Adrian Bonenberger's final dispatch from Dragoon Ride and Anaconda, the US military's slice of the joint NATO exercises–sadly pro-EU and pro-NATO (given England's decision to exit the agreement): http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/21/dragoon-ride-6-what-eastern-europeans-say-as-they-watch-the-u-s-and-german-militaries-head-toward-russia/

Brexit: a tragic split that undermines decades of progress in erasing the national rivalries between European powers, nearly culminating in the end of the world during World War II (which was concluded with the detonation of atomic weapons). Persepective from The Economist, a magazine that has spent years vilifying the EU and deriding the Euro as a viable currancy and now, now that it's really happened, seems to be feeling slightly differently about things http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701265-how-minimise-damage-britains-senseless-self-inflicted-blow-tragic-split

Is a simple majority a high enough bar for important decisions in democracies, such as the Brexit vote? This article argues not, especially considering that low voter turnout means that only a third or so of voters generally decide things for the whole country. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/brexit-democratic-failure-for-uk-by-kenneth-rogoff-2016-06

 

As if the Brexit vote wasn't bad enough for political reasons, it also empowers the type of "leader" who think protecting the environment and addressing climate change is a waste of time. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2016/jun/24/uks-out-vote-is-a-red-alert-for-the-environment

 

Is the Brexit victory a good sign for Trump? Probably not. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/06/embattled_whiteness_gave_us_brexit_it_won_t_give_us_president_trump.html

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argued that every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. There is truth to this. Some soldiers do go to war expecting an exciting adventure. Some don’t expect to be killed or even think about their chances of being killed. Some don’t dwell on the fact that they have guns and will have to shoot the enemy. But most do. Most are rational actors with the same evidence we all have at our disposal: namely, war involves violence. So why are they so often surprised when the war they go to turns out to be, well, violent?

Though concerned with what happens to soldiers after war, the question of imagined experience versus actual experience haunts Laurent Bécue-Renard’s powerful documentary Of Men and War. Following several veterans at the Pathway Home, a California facility established to help traumatized veterans find meaning in trauma, Bécue-Renard reveals that the men fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan did not find the experience worse than expected, not exactly—they found it more humiliating than expected. 

According to the documented counseling sessions, many of the veterans at the Pathway Home participated in firefights, staunched the bleeding of ruptured bodies, and helped collect dead bodies. That they did these things should surprise no one. I would be hard-pressed to imagine anybody who did not know these things happen when you bring rifles and bombs to a place with a bunch of rifles and bombs. And, not surprisingly, the Pathway veterans tell very few of these traditional wartime stories. Only a few seem particularly upset by the fact that they had to kill an enemy, or lost a battle buddy or even their own combat injuries. This is not to say that these things did not upset them, only that they do not explain why they are at Pathway Home.

The veterans do, though, tell a whole lot of accident stories. One tells the story of how he kicked in a door and broke the neck of a little boy who was about to open the door. One tells about getting a lifelong disability because he jumped from a helicopter five or six feet to the ground and landed wrong. One tells about watching a tanker pull a gun out of the turret and how the tanker blew his own head off.  Another tells about leaning into a fridge to get his best friend a Monster energy drink and pulling his M-4 trigger and killing his best friend. 

After the release of American Sniper, Americans had a national conversation about PTSD (or what passes for a national conversation in America). In the movie version, American Sniper Chris Kyle’s decision to kill a child and save American soldiers haunts him. But most soldiers would not be haunted by this. This is a straightforward exchange, a decision that involved conscious volition and a commitment to save fellow soldiers. It is the same logic with which we drone bomb and carpet bomb and drop nuclear bombs on cities—horrible, morally suspect, but (for many) a necessary utilitarian sacrifice that comes with war. Moments like this do not haunt the soldiers at the Pathway Home. In the Pathway Home version, the sniper would have tried shooting the boy and shot an American soldier or shot the wrong boy or failed to make the shot and all the soldiers died. That’s what haunts. Accidents haunt.

Kicking in a door and breaking a child’s neck cannot be rationalized. The soldier who did this in Of Men and War—an obviously decent and empathetic man—tries to blame it on bad Iraqi parenting. He tries to blame the boy. He tries to blame it on himself. But it can’t be explained. It can’t be reduced to any schema. It is just stupid and horrible and unfair. The boy is dead and you didn’t mean to kill him. That’s it.  It is a stupid accident. It is humiliating. It sucks. It is impossible to lend meaning to such a moment and such a story because embarrassments like that don’t deserve meaning—they resist explication not through their horror but their arbitrary horror.

In “The Chaff,” a short story by Brian Van Reet, the narrator describes how what troubles veterans is seldom what most would consider traumatic. Instead, the narrator finds himself overwhelmed in civilian life by a trivial moment, an action and event not especially traumatic. The narrator of Matthew Hefti’s novel, A Hard and Heavy Thing, obsesses for years over a practical joke involving a pebble—“the stupid, galling, rebarbative, pestilent, abrasive carking rock”—rather than the actual violence the pebble supposedly caused. The opening line of Phil Klay’s National Book Award winning Redeployment, “We shot dogs,” has similar implications. Soldiers go to war to kill humans. Soldiers (and civilians) do not expect to kill dogs. Soldiers remember the dead dogs, not the person of whatever age or gender they had to kill to save friends or because some Captain told them to (the ending of Klay’s story suggests the multiple moral ironies inherent in such logic). 

From different angles, Van Reet, Hefti, Klay and Bécue-Renard approach the idiosyncratic nature of PTSD—not its horror, not its thousand-yard stare, how war was so much worse than expected, but its very ridiculousness, the awkward and absurd and pathetically embarrassing nature of war. There is nothing dignified about the denizens of Pathway Home. These veterans do not stare into the abyss. They do not see any heart of darkness. They have no access to some existential truth. They have not returned sadder and wiser men. They are simply lost men stuck on what might not have been, how something as silly as forgetting to un-chamber a round or buckle a seatbelt killed their best friend.

Young men and women do not join the military thinking that it will all be a walk in the park and that war’s violence won’t affect them. They are not imbeciles. What soldiers do miss is that the violence they will face is often desperately pedestrian, something that could have happened to them back home, which has no meaning other than the fact that it happened. Wrestling with sheer happenstance is not an easy thing to do for civilians. It is even harder to do with several thousand years of war mythology and sentimentalizing telling you that an accident has a larger meaning when it clearly does not. By immersing us in the experience of the men at Pathway Home, Bécue-Renard’s provocative documentary wrestles with this disconnect. Let us hope the people who send these young men and women to war start wrestling with it too.

Across the United States and most of the developed world, there is a growing awareness of the problems caused by overconsumption of meat, and an attendant growth in vegetarians and vegans. One of the many campaigns to help spread awareness and moderate our diets is Meatless Monday. This program, endorsed by many public and private organizations, encourages people to forego meat at least one day a week in favor of plant-based alternatives. The Department of Defense, one of the largest and resource-heavy organizations in the world, is considering adopting the practice in military dining facilities. 

Jodi Ernst, a first-term senator from Iowa and retired lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, has recently introduced legislation into the United States Senate to actually block the Department of Defense from implementing “meatless Mondays” in military chow halls. She claims that daily meat consumption is necessary to satisfy nutritional needs. This is so facile and disingenuous that only a caveman could defend it. If you actually read the official Dietary Guidelines for Americans, it is suggested to eat less meat and eggs. But for legislators like Ernst, facts and logic cannot get in the way of their gut instinct.

If we dig deeper, it turns out that Iowa is actually the nation’s largest pork- and egg-producing state, and the agribusiness industry contributed at least $200,000 to Ernst’s 2014 Senate campaign. That is a good return investment for an industry whose 2014 sales were $186 billion. Because this isn’t about nutritional needs, obviously–it is about cold, hard cash. Like everything in America. Everyone knows that meat is not necessary for proper nutrition. It has actually been clearly linked to cancer, and the enormous consumption of meat in America has helped create not a healthy and balanced population, but one with an uncontrollable obesity epidemic.

I was in the US Army for four and a half years and spent two years deployed to Afghanistan. In this time of my life I was still a typical American meat-eater. I ate meat nearly everyday while deployed, and I can attest that the quality of the food was low, and it was in no way necessary to offer meat everyday even to highly active soldiers. In retrospect, I wish there had been more variety of food offered in the chow hall like meatless Mondays that would have given me different options and helped me lower my meat intake earlier.

I became vegetarian and then vegan after leaving the army, and I have not eaten any meat or animal products in over four years. I am light and healthy and energetic, and I practice rock-climbing several times a week with better physical performance than I ever felt during many years of army training with a heavily carnivorous diet. Senator Ernst is either ignorant or willfully lying on this issue. Neither is a good look for an elected politician.

Furthermore, Ernst, like all of her Republican colleagues, loves to completely dismiss either that climate change is happening or that it is caused by humans, saying things like “I’m not a scientist.” On every other issue, they are experts, however. On abortion, they are medical experts; on gay marriage, they have a direct line to God; on guns, they are all enthusiastic hunters and potential freedom fighters. It’s all hypocrisy. Everyone who studies the issue knows that not only is climate change the most urgent crisis humans have faced since the last ice age, but that intense industrial meat production is one of the largest single causes of pollution and climate change (I’ve written about climate change here). Factory farms, like the ones that are concentrated in midwestern states like Iowa, are enormously inefficient and harmful to the environment. And that is to say nothing about the ethical question of raising billions of sentient, emotional creatures to live short brutal lives in cramped metal cages, pumped full of steroids and antibiotics before being slaughtered. It has been said, with no irony or exaggeration, that modern factory farms are humanity’s biggest crime.

Senator Ernst was elected on a platform of freedom and her military experience. She deployed to Kuwait as a combat tour. She has also falsely claimed that National Guard duty is the reason she missed over half of the votes in the Iowa State Senate. She thinks these things make her an expert on military matters, and that all military personnel and veterans will support her no matter her policies. As a veteran myself with two years of deployment on a remote outpost in Afghanistan, I can say that most veterans see through self-serving and corrupt politicians quite easily. That is why Bernie Sanders’ top contributors are active duty military members. This is also important because Ernst is one of the people who will be considered for the Republican Vice President nomination because she is a woman and a veteran. Too bad she is also a corrupt fraud like most of her party’s standard-bearers.

The Republican Party, which has long made “freedom” its watchword, does not seem to understand what it actually means. It often tends to conveniently ignore freedom for people that disagree with them. It does not take a political philosopher to realize that freedom does not count if it only means restricting other people’s freedom. The Republican Party, which claims to want “smaller government” while insisting that government should be able to regulate and block the most personal individual choices in people’s lives, has struck again with an absurd logic-bending proposal about people’s most personal individual choices.

Eating is one of the most personal things we do. Just like religion, sexual preference, whether to have a child or not. In all these cases, the supposed party of individual freedom wants to restrict freedom. In the spirit of 1984, the Republicans would operate a Ministry of Freedom that insures everyone eats what they told to eat and prays how they are told to pray. It is hypocrisy, unmasked, not even trying to be masked, in fact. Like many Americans, I’m tired of it and want to change the system. One important way is to follow political campaigns, be active, and vote. Arguably even more important is to vote with your wallet with the products you buy, and get involved and stay involved in local or personal issues that you are passionate about. That is why I do not take it lightly when I see a hypocrite try to spread lies about meat consumption in order to help prop up a hundred billion dollar industry, or spreading lies that it is necessary to eat meat to be healthy when it is clearly the opposite. Veganism is an idea whose time has come as more and more people are learning that it is better for their health and for the planet (and for the animals). Fortunately, people have more freedom to do as they please than people like Senator Ernst realize.

My Sunday morning began with a Wall Street Journal article about Scrabble. The story, which featured scrappy young Nigerian players, underdog victories, and applications driving the most rigorous systematic analysis of the game to date, decided that the future of Scrabble lay in defensive play. It was one of the saddest, most depressing articles I’ve encountered this week—and utterly in keeping with social trends toward cynicism and narrow self-interest.

We haven’t always played Scrabble in our house, but it’s always been around. I grew up poor—the kind of poor where you eat meat twice a week, and beans are a good source of protein, and you get invisible Christmas presents, and your black and white television craps out when you’re five years old and you don’t get a replacement until you’re ten—a 12-inch screen. No cable, just antennae, which would pick up signals better in certain areas than in others.

I grew up “poor” rather than “in poverty.” My parents were both well educated artists. Our (small) apartment was filled with books and wooden blocks and board games like Scrabble. And poetry (my mother was a poet) and music (my father was a classical guitarist). Furthermore, during the day, my surroundings were safe and engaging—we lived in a rural area, on the Connecticut shore. There are crucial differences between being poor and living in poverty, and one of the most important is the sense of limitation or despair that attends impoverished conditions—I did not see my world as being bounded or limited by possibility.

Still, the lack of toys, television, and infinite disposable physical energy meant that our family tended to play board and card games or listen to music as a means of recreation. And so as soon as my sister and I were old enough, we played Scrabble with our parents.

Our first games weren’t great—low-scoring contests normally won by my father or mother, who'd routinely net over 200 points. Nothing impressive. We rarely exceeded 450 points total. Breaking 100 was considered good for me or my sister. We didn’t know how to play, didn’t know the words, the techniques, the strategies. Too, the game began to grow unpleasantly competitive when I and then my sister reached High School—we became invested in winning, to the detriment of the game itself.

When I hit college, though, Scrabble came into its own as the family game par excellence. This was due to an observation made by a girlfriend at the time. Following a victory of mine, she pointed out that because the group had failed to break 500 points, collectively we had all lost. At first I thought this was motivated by spite. Later, though, she directed my attention to the inside of the box, upon which the rules were printed. Sure enough, the language on the box stated quite clearly that 500 points was the score four average, amateur Scrabble players should reasonably be expected to achieve.

This changed the game for me, and for my family and friends. The implication was clear: playing Scrabble, which I’d always viewed as a winner-take all, zero-sum game, had a team component. If one player scored 496 points and the other three each managed (somehow) to score 1, and that one player won, but the combined total for the game was 499, then collectively, the group had failed to measure up to the “average” for a game of four players: 500. This meant that according to the game’s own logic, while one should be aiming for the best score possible, one should also be looking to ensure everyone else was maximizing their scores, up to a certain point. In other words: Scrabble is a game about competition within a framework of cooperation. The essence of Scrabble is not doing everything one can to defeat one’s opponents, but rather to defeat them within a matrix of collaboration. It would not be an exaggeration to point out that this lesson, which I first understood playing Scrabble as a young man, has been salutary for other areas of my life. Winning a friendly post-prandial competition or losing in a broader winning effort became equally enjoyable pursuits.

Our scores quickly reflected this. From struggling to break 500, my family routinely scored in the 600-750 point range. The winner was the person who played the best words in the best places—but that distinction applied more or less equally to myself, my parents, and my sister. We learned more words through competition, and were able to push the boundaries of the game, while blossoming within its framework. Risking more in the context of succeeding at the game was elevating our individual and collective game to new heights—we weren’t risking less in an effort to dominate, or to win. By cooperating, all of our scores were increasing. All of us were winning. One might view that as sportsmanship.

I’m glad that Nigerian iconoclasts have demonstrated that they can defeat their former colonial occupiers in an equal contest of wits. That seems important on its own, a useful lesson for all who might erroneously believe in an essential cultural or social hierarchy. As an American, I’m not a huge fan of Great Britain—not in the past, not in the present—and usually happy to watch them lose to the people they exploited for so long, under almost any circumstances. I will say this: Scrabble is best as a pedagogical tool encouraging friendship and mutually-supportive growth, not as a means of recreating intellectual trench warfare. I hope these Nigerian Scrabble players continue to win—but also that this victory does not come at the expense of Scrabble’s best and finest attributes: its capacity to encourage a conception of the common good.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Drew Pham writes about the burn pit registry, Afganistan and cancer. Make sure to give it a read if you didn’t get a chance already.

WBT Friends

Nate Bethea does not care whether veterans support Trump only that Trump supports veterans.

Editor’s Recommendations

Military

Glossing a young Ernst Jünger, Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes argues that some people love war. Jünger also loved bugs too, like a lot. Not sure what that means for Marlantes’ argument.

Economic Zeitgeist

The good news is that experts are finally admitting that neoliberalism actually exists as an ideology, and that it is most likely dying. The bad news is that we don't know if the system that replaces it will be better or worse.

The living wage, or universal basic income: a fantastic idea that is finally being implemented in some European countries, some local jurisdictions in the US, and one major charity organization. Let's hope that the obvious success these experiments have will help the UBI to catch on everywhere else.

Literature

Why do people not read Henry Miller anymore? Have we become prudes?

It started with a cough none of us could get rid of. Sure I smoked. Lots of us smoked but the non-smokers had it too, even the fitness nuts that worked out all day. We all had that cough. Whatever refuse we had, we burned in a shallow pit at the center of our outpost. We burned expended radio batteries, the non-rechargeable lithium ion kind, dirty mattresses, and food waste. Anything that might benefit the enemy, we burned. Anything we didn’t want, we burned.

I didn’t think much of it over there until my wife said that my cough worried her. Running was always hard, but it was harder when I came home. Before we deployed, I thought that the men who fell out were weak. It pissed me off when other platoons passed us during runs because we had to slow down or circle back to pick up a straggler. When we came back from Afghanistan, the number of men who couldn’t keep up increased. Some of them used to be PT studs.

Our unit’s physician assistant wrote about as many prescriptions for sleeping pills and anti-depressants as asthma inhalers and sleep apnea machines. We made fun of the contraptions. Darth Vader masks for the mouth-breathers, the booger eaters, the sham-masters—we thought they wouldn’t mind since they were sure to receive high disability ratings from the Army and VA. I coughed and hacked all the way through post-deployment leave, into winter holiday leave. I cut back on smoking but it continued. I had to take one of my wife’s inhalers because running in the cold weather burned my lungs hard and closed up my throat the same way a bad allergic reaction might. Fuck it, I thought. I still maxed out my PT test. I thought I was just fine—cough or no cough.

Other things seemed more immediate. The men in my platoon all left the Army, or left Fort Polk for other units. The anti-depressants the Army prescribed made me erratic and impotent, straining my marriage. I went off my meds and drank as much as I could get away with. That year at Mardis Gras in New Orleans I watched the parades while sipping from a box of wine with a straw in it. I spent too much money, to the point that I had to ask my mother for extra cash so I could go out and party. I cheated on my wife. I got an article fifteen for mishandling property. I tried to kill myself.

Despite everything my wife stayed with me and kept me together. Despite the suicide attempt, the article fifteen, the adultery, and the alcohol, I left the Army with my rank and an honorable discharge.

There isn’t one singular reason that drove me towards self-destruction; like the war I fought the true answers are complex and messy. I will say that one component of my condition was the guilt I felt over the violence Afghan civilians endured because of the fighting I willingly participated in. I failed in Afghanistan. Trash wasn’t the only thing we burned while we were there.

After a string of failed interviews and a souring experience working with veterans non-profits, I found out that there was a resettlement agency where I could help refugees, many of them Afghan. Maybe this would be atonement, at least in some part. I took a position as a casework volunteer as soon as I could.

I languished for three seasons without a paying fulltime job. From our apartment in Brooklyn every morning I climbed the steps to the elevated subway track at Myrtle Ave. It was nice in the warm months, but as time passed and the bills stacked up, my breathing became labored, and my heart pounded in my ears. The colder it got, the harder it was—but I chalked this up to bad nutrition, lack of exercise and the stress of watching our savings account shrivel and wither.    

The volunteer work at the resettlement agency was hard and thankless, but it was one of the few good things I did, even if it was as simple as advocating for a client at the food stamps office or processing paperwork. Sometimes the refugee families even thrived, although most didn’t—the odds were always stacked against them. They were like my parents in many ways, just trying to get by so my generation had a chance to prosper.

I told my parent’s story to clients every time they seemed to lose hope or when the obstacles seemed insurmountable. Eventually they became engineers, and owned a house in the suburbs, I said. I left out being house poor, the domestic violence, and abandonment. It didn’t fit the American Dream. An Afghan family with two girls comes to mind—everyone in the office wished they would one day have everything they wanted from life. It was hard enough for the family to adjust to American life and make ends meet without the childhood blood-cancer that afflicted one of the girls. She had a smile that made my heart bleed, but she didn’t have a single hair on her head, and fatigue from her treatment protocol meant she was conscious for precious few hours during the day. I remember the resettlement supervisor had to find an affordable apartment close to a cancer treatment center—apartments near NYU or Memorial Sloan Kettering were an impossibility. Can you imagine refugees in Murray Hill or the Upper East Side? So they settled in the Bronx near Montefiore, but far from everything else. I remember holding that little girl in my arms carrying her up and down the steps to their fourth floor walkup. I sang Boats and Birds by Gregory and the Hawk to her.

 If you'll be my star

I'll be your sky

You can hide underneath me and come out at night

When I turn jet black

And you show off your light

I live to let you shine

I live to let you shine

When I held her, face on my shoulder for a pillow, her arms limp at her sides, I knew that I was responsible for her illness. Maybe I didn’t drop any depleted uranium bombs, or institute the practice of burn pits, but I didn’t do anything to stop it. I was only a teenager on 9/11, but I wanted revenge. As an adult, I didn’t vote responsibly, or stage any substantive protest—I wore my convictions as a fashion accessory. If I couldn’t atone for those things that I was only indirectly responsible for, how would I ever atone for the things that I did? I remember that day well because after I carried her down the steps to the bus stop, I needed to sit down and rest. I caught a flu that wouldn’t go away, and if I so much as walked at a brisk pace, my heart beat in my ears again. That family left New York City for better prospects in a state with better jobs and lower rent.

A few weeks later my flu persisted, and I developed a painful abscess. Every passing day stairs were harder to climb, my breath harder to catch. By then, I knew no amount of cough syrup or acetaminophen could shake the fevers, so I went to the VA hospital’s ER, hoping they would give me some medicine and send me on my way. I expected to spend a few hours there, I knew how slow hospitals could be, but the doctors had to call a hematologist to get a second opinion on my labs. Even the nurse commented that my blood looked so thin she didn’t need a microscope to know that I was anemic. I panicked. I was supposed to be in good health. Anemia seemed serious. When the doctor finally came back, he said he was almost positive that it was cancer. Those labored steps, that unending flu, my heart beating in my ears—it was leukemia, a cancer of the blood that begins in the bone marrow.

My wife and I lived from moment to moment during those months, living on a shoestring. We applied for disability and Medicaid to make ends meet. I was ashamed; I never thought I would need Medicaid. Some days our budget was so tight and the chemo was so difficult that I wished I died in Afghanistan.

Our friends were there at first for us at first, but by the end most stayed away. I don’t blame them—it’s hard to be giving all the time. After I reached remission, friends I hadn’t seen in a long time would say, look at all your hair, or you look so healthy, but it felt like they were saying I’m glad it’s over, let’s not talk about it. I don’t blame them, but like a fellow survivor said to me, cancer is like a criminal record that follows you around for the rest of your life.

A friend of a friend had leukemia too—he didn’t go to war, he never smoked, never smelled a burn pit his whole life. Just bad luck I guess. After chemo and a failed bone marrow transplant, his doctors attempted a new radical procedure using a modified HIV virus that taught his immune system to kill the cancer cells in his body. From all accounts it was a difficult battle. The procedure took a heavy toll, but once it was done he was cured. Although the doctors said there wasn’t a single cancer cell left in his body, he died anyway. Pneumonia. After destroying his defective lymphoblasts, his immune system was too exhausted to fight off a simple infection. It happened so fast. I only knew this man through stories my friends told about him, and the one email I sent his way offering him my moral support. I knew that he was an artist. I knew that he loved his son. That is all I will ever know of him, that friend of a friend. How many people disappear like him? How many become unremembered names, night, and fog?

I don’t know what happened to that Afghan girl I sang to, I only know that our war trash didn’t disappear when we burned it. We sowed the air with poison. Afghanistan and Iraq’s capacity to treat victims of American burn pits dwindles with each day the war continues, especially as the security situation deteriorates. Only in 2013 did the VA recognize burn pit related illnesses, more than a decade after the war started. At least my name will be recorded in the Burn Pit Registry. It is a pyramid of human maladies—a dozen different cancers, Chrohn’s disease, COPD, hypertension, hepatitis, chronic bronchitis, infertility, lupus, the list marches on. Who will list the names of that little Afghan girl, and everyone like her, still dying?

 

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Two articles for Memorial Day: The first is in memory of some good soldiers who died in Mosul (and an extended attack on Christopher Hitchens). The second is an eloquent argument for reason over passion in dangerous times (with an extended discussion of the writings of Tiziano Terzani).

Editor’s Recommendations

Memorial Day

Benjamin Fountain goes off on chickenhawks and channels his inner-Bitter Bierce in this Memorial Day fusillade.

Turkey

Erdogan is drunk on power. If interested, check out WBT’s take on the problem of Erdogan and free speech.

Retribution and Remorse

“Richard Weisman, a sociologist at York University in Toronto, says that in his research of different legal systems, he frequently encountered the view that “remorse is weakness.” Expecting a defendant to show remorse, he says, amounts to “a ritual of humiliation.”

The NY Review of Books looks at how our judges have failed us. 

"Thus, a gap seems to exist between what we as victims want and what third parties decide for us. When we have been slighted, we tend to our own needs rather than pursuing punishment, but when we make decisions on behalf of someone else, we prefer an eye-for-an-eye strategy. This finding calls into question our reliance on the putative impartiality of juries and judges."

"Restorative justice can be a noble goal, but it does not speak to…anguish, which could not be assuaged by public apologies or rectified by community service. Nor can this approach take the place of punishment for most criminals. In fact, restorative-justice programs actually increase the power of the state by adding yet more layers to an already crowded and overworked judicial bureaucracy, subjecting those in trouble with the law to extraordinary levels of social control."

Sentencing without Remorse

Technology

Coders are increasingly becoming like dog trainers, and less like gods, as programs become smarter. Unrelated news, Adrian began hyperventilating and sweating about 1/3 of the way through this article.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Adrian on Paraguay, the racial utopia that wasn't and America's bloodiest war.

Editor’s Recommendations

Politics

Trump is not a Fascist. He is the first American version of the quintessential Latin-American caudillo.

An interview about American exceptionalism with the always interesting Andrew Bacevich.

Military

Band of Brothers? Sex crimes and cover-up in the 101 Airborne.

The Afghan who saved Marcus Luttrell has been left high and dry by the "Lone Survivor," and now claims things went down differently than in the book.

A new book from Sebastian Junger. We have let veterans down, he argues, because we hate ourselves. 

Modernity 

Two very different articles about different sides of the world detailing a similar sad movement toward extremism and violence.

Fiction

A nice essay on the superb Annie Dillard and returning to the books we love. 

 

The title, which I selected myself, is a trick. Most citizens of the United States of America know their war history. There's even a popular television brand dedicated to educating US citizens about war, and their country's role in it. So while it may surprise some to learn that the greatest loss of life during a single battle occurred in World War I rather than the Civil War or World War II, it is not as though people are unaware of those three wars, or the basic context: North versus South, Allies versus Germany, Allies versus Nazi Germany.

 

But “American” refers to the Americas, as a whole. And there’s one war of which few outside South America have heard. A war that occurred during the modern era, and was unlike anything seen during recorded, post-enlightenment history, before or since. While the scope and scale differs from that of the first and second World Wars, the loss of life and culture is comparable in relative terms–even, perhaps, exceeds that inflicted on Germany at the end of that conflict.

 

This war shares something else in common with World War II–a type of dictator that one sees only occasionally in the world. A visionary tyrant, a leader inspired by some overarching idea that compels everyone around him (or her) to attempt a drastic overhaul of society along moral, ethical, or scientific lines.

 

The Paraguayan War (or “The War of the Triple Alliance”) pitted Paraguay (substantially larger then than it is today) against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. It was a battle of ideologies—on one side, a group of countries (the Triple Alliance) made up of what we would now call repressive authoriatrian regimes. On the other, Paraguay, which was run by an absolutist dictator. Something that all the participants had in common was that all had recently declared their independence from Spain or Portugal as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars, and were coming into their own as nation-states.

 

Paraguay had a population of 525,000 at the war's outset. The combined population of the Triple Alliance was around 11,000,000. Paraguay was the aggressor, attacking Uruguay, Brazil, and then Argentina in succession until all three nations were united. The war lasted from 1864-1870, and by its end, Paraguay was completely defeated. 70% of the male population of Paraguay died, including its dictator. Paraguay lost large swaths of its territory to Brazil and Argentina, and its population decreased by over half. It took decades for the small country to recover.

 

This type of destruction is rare in modern warfare—a harrowing of one’s enemies so deep that it creates generational disruption. It seems that quite apart from Paraguay’s role of aggressor in the war, a source of hatred for Paraguay and unwillingness on the part of the Triple Alliance to negotiate with them was the nature of Paraguay’s dictatorship, and its history. The Triple Alliance all had similar forms of government—authoritarian aristocracy-based systems, recently liberated from a similarly aristocratic Europe, run primarily by European elites drawn from the country that had originally colonized them (Spain in Argentina's case, Portugal in the case of Brazil). They all condoned slavery to varying degrees.

Paraguay was different–almost unique in world history. In the wake of its independence from Spain during the Napoleonic wars, Paraguay was ruled by a heavily centralized government that obeyed the despotic but charismatic progressive leader Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. De Francia closed Paraguay's borders and instituted a radical set of social and political reforms, ruling until his death in 1840. Following that, his successor and acolyte (a nephew) Carlos Antonio Lopez ruled from 1842 until he died in 1862. While slavery was not abolished until after the fall of the dictatorship in 1870, it operated somewhat differently than in neighboring countries, in that after 1842, children of slaves were automatically emancipated upon reaching the age of 25.

 

De Francia and his successor, Carlos Antonion Lopez, took long views of Paraguay's development. Under their harsh direction, Paraguay industrialized, fielded a series of schools that catapulted it to the highest level of education in South America at the time, achieved independence in terms of food production, organized their military along European (Prussian) lines, and created the country's first constitution. They also attempted to create in Paraguay a—wait for it—real racial utopia based on enlightenment (Rousseau, specifically) principles, wherein whites could not marry one another, but were compelled to marry darker-skinned people. Paraguay was run by nepotistic despots, but was less nation-state than an aspiration toward just and equal society. Its leadership seemed legitimately to desire a distinct, enlightened culture wherein elitism occurred only through a honest competition. When de Francia died, for example, he'd doubled Paraguay's wealth–furthermore, it was discovered that he had neglected to collect his full salary, several years' worth of which he returned to swell Paraguay's coffers. The nepotistic aspect of the Paraguayan state seemed more a product of access to education and ideological committment than any egotistical desire on the part of de Francia to perpetuate his blood in leadership roles.

 

When the dictator’s nephew’s son (Francisco Solano Lopez) took over in 1862, he opened the borders and began a serious attempt to organize the smaller South American nations into an alliance that would be capable of resisting larger neighbors like Argentina and Brazil. Lopez also fell in love with the bad-ass Irish wife of a French officer–this heroine subsequently moved to Paraguay and bore multiple children. The first country Lopez sought to influence was Paraguay’s neighbor Uruguay—this country had (at the time) a government friendly to Paraguay's, and enthusiastic about creating a bulwark against South America’s traditional powerhouses. Uruguay also controlled access to the Atlantic Ocean, key to expanding trade.

 

Brazil had other ideas. They succeeded in replacing Uruguay’s pro-Paraguay government with a pro-Brazil government, backed by a Brazilian invasion, and Lopez decided the time was right to push back. Despite its small population and relative lack of equipment, Paraguay's militarized society was able to mobilize large portions of its population quickly, and Lopez took the upper hand against its much larger but less-well organized northern neighbor and its Uruguayan puppet. Following a setback against Brazil's superior navy in 1865, and a rebuke from Argentina, Paraguay expanded the war to include its southern neighbor. After this year, the war became a series of catastrophes for Paraguay, punctuated by the occasional defensive victory.

 

For more details on Paraguay’s earliest days of development as an independent nation (which itself offers several fascinating historical lessons and much intellectual food for thought), I recommend the Wikipedia articles that form the backbone of my own research, here, here, and here. Suffice it to say, Paraguay’s racial and social utopian dream (or nightmare) was destroyed by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay working in concert whose superior equipment and population told in the long run. Lopez led a guerilla war but was killed in 1870 in the jungle, his family's dream in ruins. Still, as with many such widespread and creatively ambitious social experiments, the legacy of Paraguay’s innovations live on. Paraguay has one of the most homogenous populations in South America—in part a product of that early intermingling of Europeans with black, native, and mixed-race populations—and an unusually long life expectancy (especially given their poverty), along with relatively broad education and literacy rates.

 

I'm not sure what lesson to draw from the Triple War. On the one hand, I'd like to think that real dialogue between different ideologies and nations should be possible. On the other hand, that "dialogue" always seems to find its purest expression through warfare. And one cannot discount that it's always the purest, most radical believers in progress (the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Lopezs) that seem to initiate these struggles.

 

We live in a day and age when people casually employ terms like "fascist," "communist," and "dictator," (as I have to a certain extent in this essay), and extrapolate a great deal from those words' associations. Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia lived a frugal life that he seemed unattached to, so much so that his substantial inheritence went to enriching Paraguay. Nevertheless, his nephew's son was a belligerent war-hawk who brought ruin to his neighbors, and, ultimately, to Paraguay itself. I wonder–countries, societies like that of  newly-independent, 19th century Paraguay don't attempt to mask their intentions–they telegraph them to the outside world. The tyrant, the dictator, boldly and proudly tells all who will listen: "this is how society should be–this is how *all* society should be." Are there any nations today that can honestly claim to resemble tiny Paraguay, dreaming of dominion?

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Adrian argues that you shouldn't stop talking to people just because they like Trump.

WBT Friends

Adrian's 2nd piece about enduring Ranger School for Task and Purpose.

Editor’s Recommendations

Military

The Afghan who saved Marcus Luttrell has been left high and dry by the "Lone Survivor," and now claims things went down differently than in the book–this is long but must-read.

Suicides linked to SEAL training.

Humanities

Why is philosophy important in schools? These two articles demonstrate why we need more than STEM education from K-12 and beyond.

http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/is-this-on-the-exam-the-pressing-need-for-philosophy-in-schools-1.2627951

http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/teaching-students-philosophy-will-improve-their-academic-performance-shows-study

Revisiting an old controversy with Irving Howe's 1991 essay on The Value of the Canon, and what constitutes aesthetic value in the arts.

Politics

President Obama has belatedly come down in support of an idea that will make our elections, and our democracy, stronger and more open: Election Day as a Federal Holiday.

Slate's Rebecca Onion discovered Reiff 

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Carson reviews David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting—find out why it might be worthwhile to think about the merits of forgetting.

WBT Friends

Peter Molin at Time Now reviews Matt Hefti's A Hard and Heavy Thing.

Editor’s Recommendations

Advocacy

Pennsylvania courts and a Philadelphia jury did something bold and rare, and if others would follow suit, maybe our police forces would be less corrupt. 

All Art is Propaganda 

Why be an artist and write short stories no one reads when you can write short stories that shape how an entire country thinks? An essay at the Times wonders at how the gutting of news agencies has made us susceptible to not only Trump but pretty much anything. This response at the Post calls BS on the piece's literary and journalistic tropes and says there's nothing interesting or new to see here.   

Fascinating interview with Adonis, the celebrated Syrian poet, about the Syrian Civil War, Daesh, East vs. West, and the Holocaust.

Robots 

An AI “robo-investor” that takes annoying human meddling (and ethics!) out the stock market – surely a profitable advance to humankind (published March 31, discovered and read this week) 

Politics

Trump has become the Republican nominee, short some kind of convention fuckery, or him striking a cynical deal with party leadership—and Don Cheney says he’s got the Trump-man’s back (Donald, don’t go hunting with him!). 

A great look at how the Democratic Party could really fail against Trump.

 

In At The Mind’s Limits, a series of essays reflecting on his time spent in the Nazi concentration camps, Jean Améry predicted that in one hundred years the murder of millions, carried out by “a highly civilized people,” will be lumped with countless other 20^th century horrors and submerged in a general “Century of Barbarism.” Victims like Améry “will appear as the truly incorrigible, irreconcilable ones, as the anti-historical reactionaries in the exact sense of the word.” And history will be, perversely, the prime agent of this (and his) erasure.

Améry was not wrong. As David Rieff points out in his illuminating study, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, by 2045 the last survivors of Nazi atrocities will be dead. Whatever moral or intellectual satisfaction Améry might have obtained from remembrance of his atrocity will pass on to people who were not victims, people who, no matter how well-intentioned, manipulate Améry’s memories and experiences to their own social, political and cultural ends (like me, right now). “The verb to remember,” Rieff argues, “simply cannot be conjugated in the plural except when in reference to those who lived through what they communicate.”

Despite this, the collective memory industry is booming. From Washington DC to Saudi Arabia groups of concerned citizens and respectable thinkers recreate the past in their own image, projecting grievances and “the memory of wounds” into the future out of a mistaken belief in memory’s ability to prevent future crimes (take, for example, the ongoing 1916 Irish centenary or Russia’s 70^th Victory Day anniversary military chest-thumping). Relying heavily on “highly questionable notions of collective consciousness,” Rieff contends, these groups have turned memory into a “moral and social imperative,” an imperative that has become one of the “more unassailable pieties of our age.” Rieff finds this notion justifiably—and demonstrably—absurd.

And yet, even if he is right, very few would find it anything less than irresponsible to contemplate the obvious, if terrifying, alternative—forgetting. Rieff just does that. Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting covers a remarkable amount of ground in less than 150 pages—from Australia’s Anzac Day ceremonies and First World War Gallipoli campaign to W.B. Yeats and Ireland’s Troubles to the 9/11 Memorial and Al Qaeda—while glossing an even more remarkable number of scholars and poets for evidence of the ways in which memory is used and abused. Is it time, he wonders, that we dispense with Santayana’s famous adage about remembering the past for Nietzsche’s “active forgetting”?

Important to this counterintuitive argument is Rieff’s notion of progress. Very much like the English philosopher John Gray—who appears often in In Praise of Forgetting—Rieff does not really believe in progress, at least not in the traditional sense. Where many governments today consciously and unconsciously assume teleological and Whiggish constructions of the historical record—that we are the culmination of history rather than its contingent byproduct—Rieff’s understanding of history is less palatable perhaps but infinitely more pragmatic and productive. In this version, when progress is made, it comes through ugly compromise, what John Gray describes as a “modus vivendi among civilizations,” necessary in a world where particular cultural values are, unfortunately, incommensurable. 

According to Rieff, nothing impedes this type of progress more than paeans to collective memories that cannot logically exist, and which idealize a perfect rationality that humans clearly do not possess. Rieff adroitly interrogates the overreaching claims of historians like Avishai Marglit who call for some kind “of shared moral memory for humankind” to combat the “biased silences” in the historical record. Rieff compares such thinking to that of those who in the human rights communities “insist that there can be no lasting peace without justice.” Not true. History, Rieff asserts, “is replete with outcomes that provided the first while denying the second.” To Rieff, the memory community could stand to grow up a little in this respect— giving up on utopian dreams of perfectly remembered pasts for the rough and tumble politics of strategic forgetting.

But the target of Rieff’s argument is less professional historians like Marglit, who often qualify their arguments, acknowledging the dangers of memory obsessions (e.g.., Confederate memorials or Bin Laden’s “crusader armies”), and more the memory industry, whose uncritical interpretations have turned experiences like Améry’s into self-validating tourist kitsch and perpetuated violence in places like Ireland for seventy years. Rieff’s book takes for granted what academics have long been wary of acknowledging—that the majority of human beings have little use for the subtleties of critical history. What they do have use for is the banalities of historical platitudes and the mysticisms of collective memory. Cases in point: Joan of Arc’s current incarnation as the enemy of immigrants in France, Mel Gibson as Scotland’s national hero and any promise to make “America Great Again.”

Memory for memory’s sake should not be laughed at (at least not always). Rieff witnessed firsthand in the Balkans how each side used often-valid historical grievances to justify the continuation of violence. My own time working with Iraqis from 2006 to 2007 in Mosul taught me something similar. And in an U.S. election cycle dominated by grievance, it is perhaps time we start taking forgetting seriously, and not simply its consequences but also its inevitability and practicability. The alternative, the continued privileging of memory, of starry-eyed assumptions about the redemptive possibilities and inherent morality of remembrance, carries with it its own dangers, dangers we would be foolish to dismiss as third-world barbarisms.

Of course, such talk of forgetting will have its critics. Anyone who has studied race in America well knows how silence and amnesia can perpetuate violence too. And movies like the sublime Son of Saul prove that there are ways to remember the Shoah and other atrocities that don’t descend into kitsch. Yet, after watching Son of Saul on my computer, advertisements proliferated in my web browser. They all asked the same thing: that this Passover, I think about investing in Israel Bonds. This surprised me. After reading Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting, it shouldn’t have. Memory is not sacred. It is not above the present. It is not above the politics of the now. Whatever your thoughts on forgetting, it would be criminal to exchange one self-satisfied piety for another—to forget that the victims of history can be and often are persecuted by those who consider themselves the most competent and thorough of historians. 

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Many people enjoyed watching a video of ISIS fighters getting blown up this last week. If this enthusiastic vouyerism made you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, you might be interested in this essay which wonders at the definition of barbaric. 

Editor’s Recommendations

Advocacy 

Want to know how your police can avoid lawsuits and avoid admissions of guilt in the wake of an unlawful shooting of a young black man? It would appear your city just needs to fork over $6 million, the current going rate. 

Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan dies at 94. In an age where Ted Cruz is often mistaken for the voice of U.S. religion, take the time to reflect on a poet and a priest who saw things differently.

Masculinity 

Behind every good man is a better woman: An unsigned feature essay written by Harper Lee on the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas recently surfaced in a publication written for FBI professionals. Truman Capote would later use her material in his book IN COLD BLOOD, only later to say Harper Lee was a mere research assistant. 

It's now apparently okay for U.S. presidential canditates to make fun of a woman for being a woman. That means it's time to dust off  Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies. 

Race

“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves”—people often forget that what James Baldwin had to say about white people was just as important if not more important than what he had to say about black people. 

An intuitive and depressing series of revelations about company diversity initiatives and how they don’t work well.

Politics

Can whomever wrote this deeply misguided piece be fired twice? 

Do you know who Trump's new campaign manager is? If not, don't worry, half the world's would-be dictators have only good things to say about him. 

The Ultimate Nature of Reality

A very difficult read about reality that will require you to channel your inner Berkeley.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

David James weighs in on the German government's decision to prosecute comedian Jan Böhmermann and tells us why it's perfectly okay to mock a dictator.

WBT Friends

Matthew Komatsu reviews Brian Castner's new book, All the Ways to Kill and Die. My favorite line: "If there is risk inherent to the structure of All the Ways We Kill and Die, it is that its polygamous marriage of imagination, memoir, and reportage runs the risk of throwing off a genre-monogamous reader." Based off of the rest of the review, this is a risk I'm willing to take.

Adrian Bonenberger writes for Forbes on Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko and Putin's latest mistake. 

Editor’s Recommendations

Advocacy

Congratulations to The Marshall Project, for their recent Pulitzer Prize. If you are at all interested in racial and criminal justice, subscribing to their daily Opening Statement newsletter is a necessity. 

Politics 

An article decrying how smug and condescending liberals have become, and if we're honest in our introspection, the editors at WBT can't claim innocence of the same vice at times. 

Bill Moyers discusses the problem of stone-age brains trying to figure out democracy (and perhaps proves the point of the above Vox link—you decide). 

The New York Times on how Clinton could win the nomination and lose the election. 

Masculinity 

Remember the God-awful Tucker Max? Well, supposedly he's moved on from humiliating women and now wants to raise a family. Read Amber A'Lee Frost at the Baffler to find out whether "Dick-Lit" has truly changed its ways.

A former professor of Adrian's writes about class fragility in America, and the comment section is BRUTAL.

Birthdays

Friday was Shakespeare's birthday. Read our favorite Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Greenblatt, on why Shakespeare's "cakes and ale" were always subversive and how Shakespeare's plays have become an unlikely weapon against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Fiction

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer wins the Pulitzer Prize! Check out WBT's take on the The Sympathizer's literary and historical importance (with respect to war literature) and then buy the book. 

Prince

Prince passed away. In his honor, grab some pancakes and check out Prince's favorite Dave Chapelle skit. 

The German government, a coalition of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats, has decided to allow prosecution of one of its citizens, a comedian named Jan Böhmermann who read a poem which mocked Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey. This is because there is a law in Germany’s penal code that forbids insulting foreign leaders. The decision was made by Merkel despite protests from her coalition partners. Thomas Oppermann, the leader of the Social Democrats, said: “Prosecution of satire due to lèse-majesté does not fit with modern democracy.” Even Merkel admitted that the law should be changed and that Parliament will do so in the next session. It should be obvious that there are some important issues at stake in this case.

I have previously written about Freedom of Speech here (about the Espionage Act and government secrecy) and here (about Charlie Hebdo and terrorism). I am not an absolutist when it comes to Freedom of Speech; I think that it is not permitted when speech comprises credible threat of violence against a person. Insults and mockery, on the other hand, however offensive they may be, are fair game. Giving offense is not a crime, nor is bad taste; they are both protected by freedom of speech.

I like to think of freedom of speech as the first among equals within the “First Amendment suite” of universal human rights that are the backbone of any free society: Freedom of Speech, Religion, the Press, Free Assembly, and Free Petition of Grievances. Without these most basic protections, no society can be considered free. When these rights are impinged upon, a society becomes less free.

My concern in this case is not for Germany. There is no doubt that Germany is a free, but imperfect, society (there has never existed a perfect society). The fact that the left-wing and right-wing opposition in Germany are in agreement with the Social Democrats that prosecution of Mr. Böhmermann is the wrong decision shows that Germany is not turning into an authoritarian state. Merkel herself clearly said she would try to eliminate the ridiculous law that allows for such prosecution. The problem is not with Germany. The problem is with Turkey.

Turkish President Erdogan has ruled his country for the last 14 years–the first 11 as Prime Minister and the last three as President. For the first few years he was widely praised as a reformer and modernizer who could bridge East and West. Turkey was in discussions with the European Union about potential membership from around 2004-2009. This candidacy stalled ostensibly due to a series of major problems with human rights that were far below EU standards: there was reported to be a lack of freedoms of expression, thought, conscience, religion, assembly, and press; there is also a lack of impartial judiciary, children’s and women’s rights, and trade union’s rights. This does not count to lingering problems of the oppressed Kurdish population, the Cyprus question, and the ongoing official denial of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Since the EU integration process was suspended, there has been a clear move in Turkey even further away from these reforms and more towards authoritarianism.

I have previously written about the legacy of Kemal Atatürk here. While I am highly skeptical of any consolidation of power into the hands of a single person–a dictator or autocrat–there have been historical cases in which the situation called for such a person in order to make otherwise impossible reforms. Atatürk is one such case of the rare benevolent dictator. Other historical examples can be counted on just one or two hands, and the assumption should always be that these necessary dictators give up power as soon as possible (for example, when Garibaldi conquered the Kingdom of Naples in 1860 and began implementing constitutional reforms, before voluntarily and peacefully giving the territory to the newly united Kingdom of Italy six months later). One of the lessons of history is clearly that all power corrupts (another theme I have discussed here). If we look critically at the career of Tayyip Erdogan, we can easily follow the path he has led towards authoritarianism, with no apparent sign of his giving up any power during his lifetime. He has moved away from his early reforms towards crushing all opposition and making laws according to his own personal diktat. 

The tragedy of Turkey is that it has the potential to be a great country with a free society. It has no need of a dictator. It is similar to Russia in both these regards. But power corrupts. And when certain men (because it’s always men) hold power for too long, they begin to see conspiracies and threats around every corner, and they tighten their control of state institutions and limit any lingering freedoms already existing in the country. These men are always afraid of armed uprisings or military coups d’état, but what is just as dangerous in their minds is mockery. When a dictator consolidates his power, writers, comedians, artists, poets, and intellectuals of all stripes are immediately placed under surveillance, exiled, imprisoned, or shot. This is because dictators cannot stand the idea of anyone openly making fun of them, even if it’s a joke about their facial hair. Only the dictator sees a real potential threat from a joke by a poor comedian about the dear leader’s whiskers. In this case, Erdogan has followed the dictator’s operating manual to the letter.

It has long been troubling that a law exists in Turkey that forbids criticism of any kind against Kemal Atatürk. The existence of such a law is itself an affront to freedom of speech and historical inquiry. I respect the achievements of Atatürk, but no leader, living or dead, is free from criticism from his subjects or posterity. The danger of such a law has been made manifest in new laws clamping down on criticism against Erdogan, and the complete disregard for freedom of speech and the press that now seems to plague Turkey. Erdogan has ruthlessly pursued prosecution of anyone expressing any criticism of him, such as a Turkish doctor who posted an (admittedly uncanny) comparison between his President and Lord of the Rings villain Gollum.

Erdogan is now taking his game one step further by exploiting a little-known German law to pursue a case against a German comedian who mocked him on German television. This comes at a key time in which European governments are relying on Turkey to stop the influx of refugees through Turkey into Europe so as to appease the growing right-wing xenophobic parties gaining steam around the continent (and the world). Erdogan, always a wily operator, will take advantage of this deal to demand that European governments import his version of press controls in return for cooperation on refugees. 

America is by no means a perfect society, but at least it has probably the strongest tradition of freedom of speech and of the press in the world (even if the limits are constantly being tested). In how many other countries in the world can you imagine a comedian not only mocking a sitting president to his face for 20 minutes on live television, but even living to tell about it. That is what happened with Stephen Colbert and President Bush in 2006, and happens everyday of the year with other comedians, writers, or just normal citizens on social media. As I have explained, jokes and speech are allowed to be offensive or in bad taste. My freedom of speech allows me to publicly disagree with what someone said, but not to silence them. The only exception is violence or threat of violence. When America talks about exporting freedom, this is what is meant. It takes a combination of strong leadership and a willing populace to gain such freedoms in the first place. It is unfortunate that the former is lacking in Turkey today, though we can hope that the latter still has a vote in the matter.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

David James reviews Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and Adrian Bonenberger argues memorizing policy does not magically make you a good leader.

Editor’s Recommendations

Advocacy

538 comes in with the numbers to show that government transparency does more than hold public officials accountable. The release of the Laquan McDonald video finally inspired the citizens of Chicago to get rid of one of America's worst prosecutors, but it also seems to have decreased gun violence in the short term. WBT's Matt Hefti wrote about our shared guilt for Laquan McDonald's death last year.

Aviva Stahl's "Why Young Sex Criminals Get Locked Up Forever" explains the bizarre and ineffective world of civil commitments for sex offenders.

Politics 

With Bernie Sanders and Britain's Jeremy Corbyn leading a growing socialist zeitgeist (or at least a massive reappraisal of the social contract), George Monbiot at The Guardian has written a lengthy and informative article on the history and pervasive worldwide influence of Neoliberalism, quite possibly the source of all our current problems.

A piece at Slate, possibly influenced by David's recent piece on Alexander Hamilton, discussing how the popularity of the Hamilton musical might affect changes to the proposal of putting a woman on the $10 bill. For some reason, the proposal is only to put a woman on the back, and it's not clear why Andrew Jackson is still occupying our money.

Excerpt in Foreign Policy from a book by David Rieff examining American culture. This chapter discusses kitsch in the Holocaust Museum. Amazing.

Technology 

The most famous and controversial Utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer, discusses the ethical problems presented by Artificial Intelligence.

Fiction

Fascinating article in The Paris Review by a man who has actually created an online version of Borges' Library of Babel, and a discussion of the many interesting consequences which still spring from this king of short stories.

(Originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian)

The recent Paris Climate Conference has been called the last best chance for the leaders of the world, nations and multinational corporations, to agree upon a framework that can somewhat mitigate and limit the compounding effects of climate change. Some have commented that a best-case scenario for such an agreement would still not prevent a future of unbearable heat and widespread famine, drought, war, and mass migrations; a total failure to reach a feasible agreement, like the previous iteration in Copenhagen in 2009, would mean much, much worse: no less than the end of human civilization as we know it and the extinction of huge numbers of plant and animal species, possibly including homo sapiens. Roy Scranton, in his new book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, cleaves to the latter option as the most likely scenario, and this slim volume is dense with big history, scientific nitty-gritty, and philosophical reflections.

Scranton opens the book by invoking his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, driving and patrolling through Baghdad and pondering the collapse of a once-bustling ancient city into chaos and violence. Back home in the States and safe once again, he witnessed the similar breakdown of order and imposition of martial law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Scranton connects these localized disaster zones of social breakdown with the future fate of the planet and the human race when climate change accelerates and worsens. He cites a litany of military planners, economists, and scientists to draw his indisputable and alarming conclusion: “Global warming is not the latest version of a hoary fable of annihilation. It is not hysteria. It is a fact. And we have likely already passed the point where we could have done anything about it.” Sobering words.

Over the next four chapters, we are treated to a God’s eye view, in the style of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis, of geological eras, the rise of homo sapiens, the evolution of energy and industry, the seemingly intractable conundrum of the greenhouse gas effect, the near impossibility that the nations and leaders of the world will come to a working solution that will fix things, and the universality of violence in our primate species. Scranton presents well-researched and argued points on an impressive range of topics with a concise and continually compelling sense of conviction.

The fifth and final chapter, entitled “A New Enlightenment”, is the most original, interesting, challenging, and vexing part of the book. Scranton opens with an epigram from the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature on earth which was rediscovered by chance only 150 years ago. The epic tells of the adventures of the powerful king Gilgamesh and his wild companion, Enkidu, as they unite their opposing forces against the gods themselves, forcing the gods to strike down Enkidu. Gilgamesh becomes distraught over the death of his friend and wanders the earth seeking a way to conquer death. Frustrated in the end, Gilgamesh curses the futility of existence. His experience lives on, though, and offers, as Scranton says, “a lesson in the importance of sustaining and recuperating cultural heritage in the wake of climate change.” It also represents “not only the fragility of our deep cultural heritage, but its persistence.” For the author, the specter of climate change is such a monumental problem that we have no hope of solving it; rather, we should focus on maintaining and deepening our humanism and protecting our rich cultural legacy in order that we will both have a softer descent into the envisioned post-apocalyptic future, and that this rich heritage painstakingly accrued over millenia may be rediscovered one day by our survivors in order to rebuild a new civilization. Our study of philosophy, the ancient classics, and Shakespeare, as rewarding as it may be, creates something of a non sequitur when used as a transition to the idea that our unfortunate inheritors will be fighting for resources and survival in a post-apocalyptic world where life will revert to that pre-state existence invoked by Hobbes: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a far-reaching, erudite, and cultured book with a bleak view of humanity and its future. The author draws upon a wide variety of philosophical ideas to make his point, from Heraclitus (“Life, whether for a mosquito, a person, or a civilization, is a constant process of becoming…Life is a flow.”), to Hegel (“The human being is this Night, this empty nothingness which contains everything in its simplicity.”), to Heidegger (“We fall into the world caught between two necessities, compelled to live, born to die, and reconciling them has forever been one of our most challenging puzzles.”). More than any schools of thought, though, it seems like the author subscribes on some level to the Stoicism of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius when he says “Learning to die means learning to let go of the ego, the idea of the self, the future, certainty, attachment, the pursuit of pleasure, permanence, and stability. Learning to let go of salvation. Learning to let go of hope. Learning to let go of death.” This echoes once again the oft-repeated quote by Montaigne that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” In both the title of this book and the many references to “learning to die”, I think we could easily substitute the phrase “philosophizing” without losing any significance; for Scranton envisions a dying world in which we will all need to become philosophers if we are to hold onto our humanity.

Fear of death is universal among humans and many of the higher mammals. It likely spawned our myths as well as our art. It is only the philosophers who do not avoid it or fear it, but look it clearly in the face. This is true of Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, the Zen Masters, the Bodhisattvas, Hume, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, and many others who have spent their lives contemplating death not as a morbid fascination but as a means to improving and perfecting their own lives. If it is difficult for most people to attain such peacefulness of mind even after a lifetime of meditation, it is even more unfathomable to find any comfort in the inconvenient truth that the Earth will be rendered uninhabitable in a few million years, and that the cold death of the universe will follow in its wake a few billion years later. The cycle of life and death does not occur on an individual level, or even that of an entire species; it includes planets, stars, and the universe itself. Numerous other books, films, and stories, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, discuss this tragic reality in one way or another; Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, Asimov’s “The Last Question”, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Lars Trier’s Melancholia, Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, and the Samurai manual Hagakure, which Scranton read in Iraq as a way of dealing with the pervasive and daily dance of death.

Everything in the book springs from the idea that global warming is a problem too big for humans to deal with based on the total lack of realistic and practical alternatives we have to stop it. On this point, I fully understand the enormity of the problem, the almost complete lack of political and corporate will to change our entire world economic system and sacrifice short-term profit, and the bleakness of the future we therefore guarantee for ourselves; but I do not, and cannot, fully endorse the complete resignation of the search and struggle for solutions that the author advocates. On the merits, I have no issue with any of his conclusions except for his certainty of failure in the face of global warming. I am by no means hopeful about the state of the climate and the geopolitical effects that my children will witness, but I think that is exactly why pervading pessimism must give way to de rigueur active optimism for the sake of our survival. The current Paris Climate Conference will be not the last best chance, but the first great step to further increase momentum towards a global solution to the extremely daunting but not impossible crisis we face. If that means a change away from neoliberal capitalism towards a more sustainable future, as Scranton alludes to, so be it.

Overall, the book is exceedingly ambitious and almost too wide-ranging for its own good, and it feels like the solution offered by the author in the face of a crisis he goes to great lengths to explain renders the conclusion relatively feeble and unconvincing. It is not really a work of philosophy as much as a cri de coeur over the indispensability of philosophy and the humanities as a way of securing “the fate of humanity itself.” I do believe, along with the author, that a deep sense of compassion and humanism are necessary to continued civilization, but so is collective action. My grasp of philosophy helps me cope with the thought of my and the world’s eventual annihilation, but my appreciation of human craft, art, technology, and collective potential to solve problems tells me that we will not go gently into that good night.

Wrath /ræθ/ noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Adrian Bonenberger reviews Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots. 

WBT Friends:

AWP '16 has come and gone, with no less than eleven events focused on war writing. Peter Molin at Time Now (and moderator of two of these events) put together a list beforehand. See what you missed.

Editor’s Recommendations

Criticism

Old but intriguing story by Edward Said about his invitation to discuss Israel and Palestine with Sartre, Beauvoir, and Foucault. It did not go as he expected.

“The bogus populism of the commodity—its warm-hearted refusal to rank, exclude, and discriminate—is based on a blank indifference to absolutely everyone.” A spirted critque of a society without criticism from everyone's favorite Christian Marxist, Terry Eagleton.

Journalism

The largest and most consequential leak of private information ever—a peak behind the curtain of the ultra-wealthy who rule our world, and an eloquent counterargument to people who say the wealthy are effective at self-regulation. 

Is a Cashless Society an Observed Society? 

Military

Longform reporting by Sam Laird on veterans growing medical marijuana to help their fellow vets.  

An ex-Ranger multiple combat tour vet takes a long look at military recruiting in schools, and doesn't like what he sees.

Is Marine Maj. Mark Thompson guilty of sexual assault or not? The Washington Post talks to the man himself. 

Advocacy

95-year-old attorney Elaine Fischel explains why she helped defend Japanese war criminals in court after World War Two: “We sent our lawyers there to defend the enemy and I don’t think any other country would do that. To me, it was an example of the United States at its best.” 

Fiction

A short story by Margaret Atwood, “Death by Landscape" 

What purpose does our economy serve—why do we seek greater profit? What does profit do for an individual, an institution, or a civilization? Does capitalism work in the way we imagine—and if not, what should we do about it?

On its surface—literally, on the cover—Martin Ford’s 2015 book Rise of the Robots would appear to be an unambitious, objective socio-economic look at one relatively small niche of the economy: that portion which has been automated by machines we call “robots.” From the very first page, however, it becomes clear that Ford’s ambitions extend well beyond describing life as it is today, or even simply extrapolating the likely consequence of developing better Artificial Intelligence and robotics. Rise of the Robots is far more important than its publishers and reviewers give it credit (and they give it quite a good deal of well-earned credit): it claims that the economy as we know it is going to be the engine by which humans develop themselves out of jobs, which, according to the logic of capitalism, means humans will soon have no purpose or use. In other words, if true, Rise of the Robots is also the most accessible, well-researched, and exhaustively documented argument against market-driven capitalism the world has ever seen.

Humanity’s greatest crimes have come about through misbegotten attempts at progress. Racial, economic or religious Utopias like Mormonism, the USA, Israel and other more extreme examples like China, Soviet Russia, ISIS and Nazi Germany inevitably require that some suffer or die so that others can prosper. Furthermore, human-driven climate change, the exhaustion of underground water sources and the poisoning of Earth’s environment all occurred so that people might drive reliable automobiles, avoid starvation, eat healthily, keep the hot part hot and the cold part cold and live without fear in places that see excessive temperature or hostile climates.

Ford claims the following: the automation of our economy is one such well-meaning catastrophe, and it is already more or less inevitable. He observes that whereas the means never existed before to make human labor obsolete, we are fast approaching a time when that is possible—and that the time it will take to make it possible is decreasing (we’re making more progress, faster, than ever before). Technological innovation will, at last, make almost all forms of human labor obsolete. His evidence for this is compelling—that, in the last 15 years, most of the traditional manufacturing and industrial jobs once held by humans have been replaced by robots. Not just in America, either—overseas as well, in those places that manufacturing and industrial jobs fled during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. In other words, basic manufacturing isn’t coming back to America, it’s no longer an option for humans. Ford then goes on to provide convincing and compelling evidence that this change is already underway in other fields, including (among many others) that of journalism, the medium in which you’re probably reading this right now.

So, reading Rise of the Robots, one is quickly convinced that Ford is correct, and our obsolescence as a species is inevitable. The robots are coming for most jobs—and, at some point, your own, whether you’re a bureaucrat, a lawyer, a lab technician, a writer, in retail, a pilot, a soldier, a farmer, a banker, an investor, or a manager, to name some of the possible jobs humans can now hold but won’t in the future. In fact, all but the most skillful, capable humans will find themselves locked out of the job market, leaving room only for the most capable or those who happen to be sufficiently wealthy or happen to be entrepreneurs when the job market closes, permanently.

He offers some possible and sensible paths ahead for legislators and intellectuals, but all face many deep cultural and economic challenges from those who stand to profit from automation. The strongest businesses today, the engines of America’s economy, would hardly approve of “a living wage” for all American citizens, let alone global citizens. Universal health care is panned as absurd—the notion that anyone could gather sufficient political willpower in the USA to lay the framework for our inevitable and near post-human labor market is risible.

Paradoxically, the very moment at which it will be too late to predict or control our dependence on robot labor will also be the moment at which it will also become irreversible. And when one considers humanity’s spotty track record with empathy toward the sick, poor, weak or vulnerable (humans, in this future scenario), it seems unlikely that those devices designed by the most profit-minded among us will have motivation or inclination to preserve the lives that made them possible. 

Wrath /ræθ/

noun

            1
:  strong vengeful anger or indignation
 (chiefly used for humorous or rhetorical effect)

            2
:  retributory punishment for an offense or a crime: divine chastisement
        

On WBT

Michael Carson on Hamlet and History

WBT Friends:

One of our own editors, Matthew Hefti, wrote a novel called A Hard and Heavy Thing, which is structured as a fictional suicide letter. If you haven't read it yet, you're missing out. 

Novelist, MFA Professor, and sometimes blues musician Garry Craig Powell with a very fascinating broad survey of how famous writers have incorporated philosophy into their fiction, and a comparison of American and British writers.

Editor’s Recommendations

Criticism

On Literary Hub this last week, Dustin Illingsworth wrote a risky essay about actual suicide letters as a literary genre to be analyzed, studied, and even enjoyed. Is he bold and ultimately correct? Or does the essay go too far in its voyeurism and exploitation of writers who suffered from depression or mental illness? 

An excellent review of what appears to be another great book on the burgeoning zeitgeist field of the intersection between capitalism, human extinction, and the Anthropocene, with mentions of similar books by Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Roy Scranton, and the obligatory Gilgamesh reference. 

Politics

What if the presidential primary were a history exam? 

Mohamed Amin Chaib is a Belgian, and he also happens to come from a moderate Muslim family. Growing up, his older brother was always there for him and “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Now, if Mohamed wants to see his older brother, his only chance is to watch horrifying propaganda videos of his older brother brutally murdering innocent people for ISIS or praising the recent terrorist attacks in Belgium. Mohamed can’t bring himself to watch the videos, but he can bring himself to publicly denounce a member of his own family and the radical beliefs his brother has embraced. 

Advocacy

Just last week, the United States 5th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a last-minute stay of execution to John Battaglia, whose attorney had abandoned him on competency claims. The federal court of appeals ruled that all the Texas courts were wrong in denying Battaglia relief, and that he is entitled to new counsel and a hearing to evaluate what the federal court called “colorable claims of incompetency.” With its ruling coming after Battaglia had exhausted appeals in Texas and all petitions for pardon or clemency, Battaglia’s eleventh-hour reprieve demonstrates we’re still all-too-ready to execute the mentally ill without providing them adequate representation. 

The ACLU is currently suing the Louisiana Public Defender’s Office for failing to provide adequate representation to indigent defendants, and the Louisiana Public Defender’s Office is welcoming and assisting with the lawsuit brought against them. As Louisiana continues to abdicate its responsibility to protect its citizens’ Sixth Amendment rights under the Constitution, they continue to try to execute those same citizens. The whole system is in a crisis. Since 2000, 54 new inmates have been sentenced to death row, but 58 inmates have had their cases overturned. When more people have been freed from death row because of wrongful convictions or sentences than have been put on, it’s time to acknowledge our obsession with death results in anything but justice. 

Fiction

R.I.P. Jim Harrison, a unique American storyteller. Here's a great interview with him in the Paris Review.

Baseball

With Opening Day (yes THE Opening Day) arriving this week (FINALLY!), The Isthmus out of Madison, WI profiled Commissioner Emeritus Bud Selig, who has returned to his home state of to teach some lucky students at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship campus. 

"But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions." 

This Week on WBT:

Adrian Bonenberger on Bernie Bros and American Privilege:

https://www.wrath-bearingtree.com/2016/03/our-american-privilege/

WBT Friends:

Carson on Trump and neocons at Salon: http://www.salon.com/2016/03/12/trump_would_be_as_bad_as_bush_a_commander_in_chief_who_respects_the_military_does_not_order_soldiers_to_commit_war_crimes/

Editor’s Recommendations

Cultural Criticism

Trump is Loki: http://thebaffler.com/blog/donald-trump-trickster-god

We are Patrick Bateman: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/theater/in-hindsight-an-american-psycho-looks-a-lot-like-us.html

Advocacy

Life in solitary with a homicidal cellmate: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-consequences-of-solitary-with-a-cellmate?ref=hp-1-122#.o7ZedJ5Kq

On Georgia's new felony driving law: https://theintercept.com/2016/03/23/georgias-felony-driving-law-targets-blacks-latinos-undocumented-immigrants/

Politics

Why the kids aren't all right with Clinton: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-young-people-are-right-about-hillary-clinton-20160325

Fiction

John McCain is a communist sympathizer: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opinion/john-mccain-salute-to-a-communist.html

Supposedly a good war story is a fascist-killing war story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/writers-and-war_b_9547584.html

 

It has come to my attention that there exists an award-winning Broadway musical based on the life of Alexander Hamilton. Additionally, I recall an announcement a few months ago by the Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, that a woman will be chosen to appear on our paper currency for the first time ever in 2020, replacing or “sharing” the $10 bill’s Alexander Hamilton. There has been a long-running campaign by activists to force the Treasury Department to consider featuring a woman on paper currency. America is one of the only developed countries that has never featured a single banknote adorned with a woman’s face. One of the campaigning groups, Women on 20s, recently had an open election on which woman should be honored, with the winner being the ex-slave heroine Harriet Tubman. I fully endorse this selection, and one of my other top choices would have been another ex-slave Sojourner Truth, a formidable speaker and advocate for freedom and universal rights. These choices highlight both the rich and checkered history of America and its diversity more than any of the current ex-President standard-bearers. 

Big-Picture History of Early America

From the beginning there were two very large opposing stake-holders in the new nation, which was only formed out of compromise between the two: northern industrialists and merchants, and southern agrarian slaveowners. This otherwise irreconcilable opposition was infamously ignored in the U.S. Constitution, all but guaranteeing that the issue would eventually be settled by force of arms, as was the case nearly a century later with the Civil War. After the initial presidency of Washington, who was basically neutral and above party politics, and the brief tenure of John Adams, the southern states held sway for the next several decades. For over 40 years from the presidencies of Jefferson to Jackson, the interests of the slaveholders were protected in the name of (ironically) individual freedom and state sovereignty. America itself was largely built and enriched with free labor on the backs of slaves. Like all systems of violent exploitation, this was one that could obviously not be sustained forever, and the cracks began to show in the 1840s, growing wider and wider until the southern states finally declared war out of economic and political desperation.

But who should we choose to replace on our currency?

After Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, Alexander Hamilton was probably the most important founding father of the United States, and the only one to not serve as president. He was also the only one who was fully a self-made man, being born illegitimately in the West Indies to a Scottish trader and a French mother, and rising in the ranks to Washington’s aide-de-camp due to his political and journalistic talent alone. He was by far the most important contributor to the Federalist Papers, the series of essays that had profound influence in pushing America towards ratifying the stronger federalist constitution it still abides by today. He was the architect of the capitalist economic system that America maintains today, just as Jefferson was the architect of a much-changed democratic system. Both systems have pros and cons and are not mutually exclusive, though they have been politically opposed since the early days of the republic. Jefferson’s system of democratic individualism was good for the agrarian southern states and the rapidly expanding western states. The name has always been somewhat a misnomer, as the franchise was initially reserved to wealthy white landowners, and only gradually to all white men, to the emancipated male slaves (in theory if not in practice), and, in 1920, to women. That political operatives are still trying to suppress and buy votes in any way possible in 2016 shows an inherent weakness of democracy itself and the limitations of the high-minded Jeffersonian project.

Hamilton, as the leader of the Federalist party, was an enemy of Jefferson, and his political project did not long survive his 1804 death by duel (killed by Aaron Burr after being instrumental in blocking Burr from becoming U.S. President in 1800 and New York governor in 1804). His economic system, as we will see, was placed on much firmer ground and lives on today in our banking and capitalist wealth. Hamilton’s system allowed for corruption and concentration of wealth, which came to fruition quickly, and especially in the years of the industrial robber barons, almost as great as any ever seen. The financial centers of the east coast allowed the capitalists to effectively control the entire country economically, even if the southern “democrats” long held political power. The wealth and population of the North powered it to a win the war of attrition over the Southern slave states. At this point, the economic and democratic systems of Hamilton and Jefferson converged, combining both their positive and negative attributes. The democratic franchise was expanded, but the economic might of the industrial north also gained more political power, which it has arguably held, with ups and downs, to the present day.

Alexander Hamilton was the Architect of America’s Economic Might

This lead it to become the wealthiest nation in the world by 1880 and continuing to the present day, with no short-term end of this reign in sight. At the same time, the overall wealth of this America was only grudgingly granted, after countless worker uprisings and hard-fought union activism, to its middle and  lower classes. The out-of-control inequality finally caught up to the capitalist classes with the Great Depression, which swept in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and a 50-year window of rising middle-class prosperity. Even this was achieved in spite of the continuing undemocratic discrimination against Blacks, which had never seen the economic or political freedom promised by the Emancipation Proclamation and the defeat of the Confederacy. 

One of the biggest changes in the public discourse in the last few years has been the widespread realization, distilled in the Occupy Wall Street movement, of the unacceptable state of income inequality. America’s economic system has reverted back towards the corruption and concentration of wealth planned by Hamilton, and championed ever since by the J.P. Morgans and John Rockefellers of yesteryear to the unaccountable Wall Street banks and multinational industries of today. Thomas Jefferson was a deeply flawed human who was nevertheless America’s most cultured and intellectual president ever, and the visionary of its flawed and imperfect democracy. Alexander Hamilton was also a deeply flawed human who was one of the most influential forces in establishing America’s powerful, unprecedented, and very imperfect economic system. 

On the other hand, Jackson is easily the most dubious of all the current monetary placeholders on moral grounds. Even if Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and all the other southern president were actual slaveowners, Andrew Jackson was certainly one of the most violent and racist of all our presidents. He was a well-known warrior and killer of Native Americans in countless wars, was a notable slave-trader, and is single-handedly responsible for some of the most horrific episodes in American history against the Natives. 

Both Jefferson and Hamilton represent the good and bad potential of America itself and its uneasy relationship with democracy and money. In this latest political campaign season of populism and rising economic inequality, the best we can hope for is for the best aspects of both systems to be more fully realized with the consent of the citizens. Maintaining a functioning democracy that prioritizes justice and fairness is not easy, but is still very possible in an imperfect but hopeful America. Jackson represents the worst of these tendencies combined.

Conclusion

That should be sufficient grounds to select Andrew Jackson as the first paper currency representative to be demoted to living just in history books rather than in our daily monetary transactions. The symbolism of replacing him with a woman would be stronger than with any other, not to mention the fact that choosing the $20 bill itself gives a greater place to the cause of sexual equality. It is not only a more valuable bill than the $10 but also in much greater circulation. If we also consider the relevant fact that Jackson detested and fought vigorously against the very idea of a National Bank and national currency, while Hamilton was the strongest earlier proponent of both, it makes more sense to keep Hamilton at least for a time and get rid of Jackson immediately. 

America is also one of the few western countries that honor politicians and presidents above all on its currency and public facilities; you will therefore find a noticeable dearth of cultural, literary, intellectual, scientific, or philosophical names in these places. Why not Mark Twain, Herman Melville, or Walt Whitman; or Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, or Louisa May Alcott; or Ralph Emerson, John Dewey, or William James; or Rachel Carson, Rosa Parks, or Phillis Wheatley; or Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, or Duke Ellington? Any of these and a host of others are all more interesting and culturally relevant than the handful of tired, flawed ex-presidents. I do support Harriet Tubman, in any case, as a great choice to adorn the $20 bill.

Military hyperbole is at the heart of Serial’s second season. Sarah Koenig has gambled that she can take a simple premise—man walks off a base in Afghanistan, is captured by the Taliban—and make it representative. Of the war, of the world, of human nature. The season has discussed how Army private Bowe Bergdahl came to leave his post in Afghanistan, was captured by the Haqqani network (a savage affiliate of the Taliban), and the military’s efforts to rescue him. Its focus was procedural as well as institutional, describing the military’s bizarre, byzantine, and unrecognizably convoluted legal and social skeleton. The season’s sixth episode, “5 O’Clock Shadow,” extended that focus to the military’s extreme linguistic habits.

 

It’s difficult to imagine a world without metaphor or hyperbole. Try it—try visualizing a day wherein everything everyone said to you and everything you said to someone else, was understood as a verifiable truth claim. Conducted properly, the exercise results in confusion, absurdity, and a bewildering breakdown of communication. While metaphor and hyperbole aren’t necessary for communication, we rely on these linguistic devices to describe thoughts or emotions that involve some discomfort, and as most people’s lives involve discomfort—in work, in love, or in one’s fragile ambitions—metaphor, analogy, and hyperbole become a kind of language within a language.

 

This is doubly true in the military. When one considers the context, it’s not surprising—the military, and especially the Army (or Marine) infantry consists of a more or less constant indoctrination into the ideas that (1) a soldier is part of a collective, with limited value as an individual and (2) one should expect to get hurt very badly or die, and that so long as this occurs within a military-sanctioned action against one’s enemies, that injury or death is desirable. Citizens of countries that have Western humanism and individualism at their cultural heart will find these thoughts incomprehensible at best—and those citizens who become soldiers of their humanist nation’s militaries therefore take this linguistic tendency to speak in metaphor and hyperbole to dramatic extremes.

 

In “Five O’Clock Shadow,” Koenig made much of Bergdahl’s disillusionment when a prominent and high-ranking sergeant in his unit claimed that soldiers had joined the military to “rape, kill, pillage, and burn,” a claim that was not immediately disputed by others present. Apparently, Bergdahl took the sergeant’s statement at face value, and statements like it. This became evidence to Bergdahl that his unit’s leadership was unscrupulous.

 

Most people with military experience—and especially experience in the combat arms, where euphemism and hyperbole are most necessary for psychical well being—understand that the military is filled with hyperbole. The easiest example of this (described by Army veteran Nate Bethea for Task & Purpose’s Serial Podcast) is a popular way of saying that one is angry with a peer or subordinate: “I’m going to cut off his head and shit down his neck.” The correlation between American soldiers or officers promising this horrible and primitive manner of execution and actual executions carried out? A perfect 0.

 

Establishing that people don’t mean everything they say, in or outside the military, is one important component to see how Koenig understands Bergdahl. Another point is that the military itself is filled with double standards that could be (and in the case of Bergdahl, were) interpreted as hypocrisy. Hence Bergdahl’s conclusion that the official fixation on unit uniform standards (or standards in general) was arbitrary and unreasonable—a fixation with which every soldier in post-9/11 combat has had to struggle. The same sergeant was quoted in “Five O’Clock Shadow” as viewing unshaven soldiers in the same light as the Vietnam-era unit that committed the My Lai massacre. To Bergdahl, this was another confusing example of hyperbolic rhetoric, but to the sergeant, the statement was intended to be taken at face value.

 

Bergdahl concluded that the military’s priorities were honorable and decent, and that it was his unit’s leadership that was intentionally or foolishly misinterpreting rules, regulations, and intentions in Afghanistan. Bergdahl concluded this because he apparently had difficulty interpreting metaphor and hyperbole, and was unable to reconcile the difference between ideal and real. This quintessentially human struggle, in Bergdahl’s case, appears to have been insurmountable.

 

The seventh and eighth episodes of Serial elaborate on Bergdahl’s literal-mindedness, and assign it a definition that fits it into the spectrum of mental illness: schizotypal personality disorder, a form of schizophrenia. In other words, Bergdahl’s behaved like a crazy person because… he was a crazy person.

 

I have argued elsewhere that Bergdahl should never have been in the military to begin with, and that due to his uniquely unsuitable temperament, those officers responsible for adjudicating Bergdahl’s case should view his crime with mercy and compassion. These episodes make it very clear that Bergdahl was never fit to serve in the Army infantry—from a social standpoint, as well as from a literary and linguistic one.

Many Americans have been noticing, with more frequency, the inconvenient truth that our democratic system, by design, is actually not very democratic. The design was planned originally by the Founding Fathers who created the country–many of them owned actual slaves, and neither they nor women nor men below a certain economic class were allowed to participate. Even then, the Electoral College was thought up as a further check by the elites against any occasional rabble-rouser elected by the people but not approved by the elites. That the people have three times voted for a president (1876, 1888, and 2000) yet witnessed the losing candidate inaugurated shows that the system has worked as designed. Among the other quirks that hinder true democracy (such as gerrymandering, voting restrictions, limited voting dates, the existence of the Senate, and others that I have previously discussed in my post Republican Reactionaries and the Road to Fascism), the entrenched system of the two-party primary elections needs amended. I will propose one simple incremental change to somewhat ameliorate the representation of our country: get rid of the nauseating quadrennial ritual of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

Possible Solutions    

There are many solutions to reforming the primary system, which in itself would be just one small step towards a more democratic system as a whole. Many of these ideas have been proposed and discussed for a long time, but never adopted. They include the national primary (hold every state’s primary election on the same day), the Delaware plan (hold four groups of primary dates starting with the smallest states and ending with the largest), and many variations of a random rotating primary state order. I ask myself why New Hampshire (which awards only 20 “delegates” for Republicans and 24 for Democrats) has about 1000 times more power in selecting candidates than the most populous state of California (which awards 172 Republican delegates, and 546 for Democrats). Why does California, for example, not hold its primary until June when the candidate has almost always already been chosen by much smaller states? California has almost 40 million people, or 12% of the entire nation, and it is obviously very diverse (only 40% white). For that matter, why do Texas, New York, and Florida (27, 20, and 20 million people respectively) not all hold earlier primaries, perhaps together on the same day as California, to allow a much wider and more diverse set of people choose candidates?

It bears mentioning one more time that political parties were in no way prescribed by the Constitution and were famously warned against by George Washington; yet there has been a de facto rule of the two-party system since Washington retired back to his slave plantation at Mt. Vernon. I have not done any thorough research on how political parties have chosen their candidates, but I think it is safe to say that it has always been as fraught with corruption as it is today (compare Thoreau’s 1849 “Civil Disobedience”, in which he discusses how unrepresentative candidates are chosen by elites and how he is stuck paying taxes for slavery and war against Mexico, neither of which he supported). As for the current system, things are still apparently mostly decided upon by party elites in proverbial smoke-filled rooms, with the voters expected to do nothing more than conform and foot the bill.

The Iowa Caucus    

Let’s move on to Iowa. American elections go on much too long (they’re virtually eternal at this point) and cost much too much (we could literally feed and educate the starving people of the world for years with the cost of a single American election). Much of the early time and money is dedicated to the strange spectacle of the non-binding caucus of Iowa voters. It is a caucus, not an election, because you have to arrive and participate in the nominating process for hours instead of simply casting a quick ballot. It is non-binding because delegates are allowed to change the candidate they support before the party’s convention. 

I will grant that it is very difficult to create and maintain a perfect political system, and if we agree that democracy is the best, or least worst, system, then the participatory caucus system of elections may not be in itself a bad thing. Regardless, it does not work for federal elections in a country of 320 million people. Iowa is a state of three million people (less than 1 percent of the nation), and its population is 92% white and much more rural than most of the country. In other words, it barely resembles America as a whole (which is only 63% white and mostly urban). Every four years, would-be candidates spend months and months (years in the case of a Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton), building up party infrastructure in Iowa and pandering to its local power brokers. Issues like ethanol subsidies, which enrich Iowa’s farmers, become centrally important. 

After all this electioneering, one might think the actual results would be of public interest. The Republican Party, in a rare case of common sense, declares a winner based on actual votes. I can easily see that 186,847 people participated in the Republican Iowa caucus and that the winner received just over 51,000 votes. The Democratic Party, on the other, still has not released the vote count over one week later, and it’s unsure whether they ever will. I have no idea how many people voted in the Democratic caucus and how many actual votes each candidate got. All we know is that Clinton received 700.47 “state delegate equivalents”, and Sanders received 696.92. I have no idea how these numbers were arrived at, nor how one can split a delegate. Furthermore, the Democratic Party awards something called “superdelegates”, of which it is estimated that Clinton received six and Sanders zero. What are they and why are they estimated? It seems that this party did not think the whole election was controlled and undemocratic enough, so these superdelegates are a combination of party officials and elected office holders who get to have a bigger vote than a normal person. It’s like when the dad’s vote counts for two in the family council, because the idea that the kids had a real vote was just a farce. That seems to be what the Democratic Party thinks about its voters.

The New Hampshire Primary

Let’s now discuss New Hampshire, the first actual primary election in the nation. New Hampshire is somehow even smaller and less representative than Iowa. Its population is a mere 1.3 million (less than half of one percent of the nation, and less than the population of every borough of New York City except Staten Island), of which 94% is white, and it is also more rural than much of the country. The voters of New Hampshire are famously libertarian-leaning and standoffish in giving their support to the revolving door of candidates that barge into every little diner in the state every four years. The media and candidate attention given to the New Hampshire primary is as much as every other primary in the nation combined. Why does such a small, homogeneous state continue with such outsized influence?

Voter Activism, Apathy, and Moderation

I did a perfunctory search about the origins of this current primary system, and it seems that it has been in place since 1968, when protests at the Democratic Convention caused the party elites to exert more control. You know, because why would people be protesting instead of accepting the candidate chosen by the elite to maintain the status quo?

There is plenty of blame to go around for the enduring corruption and general weaknesses of American-style democracy: the corporate media, the always-reactionary Supreme Court, high party functionaries, the entire “power elite” as C. Wright Mills called it. The most blame goes to the individual citizen voter, however. As imperfect as it is, our system still allows us to create from scratch a new government every four years. All it takes is moderate interest in actual issues that will affect our daily lives to enable such an outcome–a scenario I realize is straight out of science fiction.

Another benefit of widening the primary net will also make would-be candidates work slightly harder to appeal to a wider electorate, thus, in theory, even slightly moderating the tone of our political discourse. How does it help American democratic representation if the candidates to lead the country are always chosen by a very small, older, mostly white, mostly rural set of voters? There are many ways to reform our democracy, but demoting Iowa and New Hampshire’s primary place is one step in the right direction.

Regardless of what the official results might say, Bernie Sanders won the night in Iowa. The margin reported by most media outlets shows Hillary Clinton at 49.8% and Sanders at 49.6%, but there have been enough reports of shenanigans, voter fraud, and missing results from various precincts to call into question the value of the caucus process in showing the people’s choice for the Democratic nominee. What is abundantly clear, however, is that Bernie Sanders is no fringe candidate. The showing by the Sanders campaign in Iowa could be exactly what Bernie Sanders needs to shake and bake right past Hillary Clinton in the race to be the Democratic Party’s nominee.

So without further ado, here are the top three reasons why Bernie Sanders was the real winner in the Iowa Caucus.

Bernie Sanders Has All the Momentum

Clinton gained nothing of value, and Sanders won the surprise of pundits and coverage from the mainstream media machine. Bernie Sanders was expected to lose, but his campaign is energized and Clinton’s campaign is scared. She may have won by 0.02% according to most mainstream reports, but Hillary Clinton won a Pyrrhic victory, and it’s one she will not easily recover from.

Sanders and Clinton virtually tied, and Iowa’s delegates are not awarded on a winner-take-all basis, so the tie goes to the candidate who exceeded expectations, clearly Sanders. At the Democratic National Convention, Sanders and Clinton will receive the same number of delegates from the state of Iowa, so Sanders has lost nothing. Clinton, on the other hand, has lost the air of invincibility that carried her months ago.

Bernie Sanders will now move into New Hampshire as an even stronger favorite. Sanders is out of the gate garnering nearly 50% of the vote in Iowa when just months ago Sanders was in single digits in the polls. A tie in Iowa and a win in New Hampshire just may give Sanders the momentum he needs to gain the backing of more establishment Democrats.

Bernie Sanders Showed the Nation that Hillary Clinton Can Lose

Ruth Marcus asked the perfect question when trying to decide who won the tie: “Which campaign was celebrating Monday night, and which was trying to figure out what went wrong?” Hillary Clinton has long been the presumptive nominee, and the mainstream media has viewed Bernie Sanders as nothing more than a modern-day Ross Perot. Far from being an outlier to shake up the political conversation, Bernie Sanders demonstrated his mass appeal and ability to contend.

At best, the media made it seem like Bernie Sanders was simply pulling Hillary Clinton further left, but he had no chance to actually win the nomination. In Iowa last night, Bernie Sanders showed the world that Hillary Clinton can be beaten. Considering many have shied away from Bernie Sanders because they view him as unelectable, the clear fallibility Clinton exhibited in her “win” will do nothing but give reluctant Sanders supporters the push they need to really feel the Bern.

Bernie Sanders Established Himself as the Voice of the Future

In a bit of an ironic turn, the old white man gained the most votes from the younger and more progressive generation. Among the Democratic voter age groups, Sanders pulled the following overwhelming numbers:

• Under 25: Sanders won 86% of the vote.
• 25-39: Sanders won 81% of the vote.
• 31-39: Sanders won 65% of the vote.

Just as the younger voters carried Barack Obama in crushing Hillary Clinton’s presidential dreams, there is no reason younger voters won’t do the same for Bernie Sanders. John Cassidy summed it up perfectly in The New Yorker: “When you are so heavily reliant on support from older voters, it is tricky to project yourself as the voice of the future.”

The thing is, Sanders wants voters to have the power—as they should. As such, he’s demonstrated integrity no one in our younger generation has ever seen from a politician, refusing to take money from PACs and big businesses. His reward has manifested itself in broken fundraising records that show no sign of slowing. His fundraising has come from individual donors, which means far more voters are personally invested in Bernie Sanders than in any other candidate. Win or lose, it shows that there is hope yet for our system of democracy.

Matt Shuham wrote in The Indypendent, “In a post-Citizens United era…the Sanders camp is placing a bet that rarely pays off in American politics: that absent mega-donors, PACs or the support of a party establishment, the machinery of public opinion can run on conviction alone.” Even with a technical loss in Iowa, Sanders won the Iowa caucus. In a democratic-republic in which the voting public shows up en masse and ensures the system runs on conviction alone and not on the whims of mega-donors and media moguls, everyone wins.

This essay is a short response to the great recent analysis on Socialism in America by my colleague on this website, Adrian Bonenberger. I was looking for ways I could critique his points but it is hard on the merits, I guess because we share more political opinions than I might had thought. Here are a few of my comments that variously qualify as minor quibbles, or just my own comments expounding on what he has written.

We agree that Bernie Sanders is the best candidate for President, and without ennumerating all the specific reasons why, it is enough to realize that he offers the best policies on basically every pressing issue as well as the most consistently honest and incorruptible character–a rare mix in politicians today or at any time. As a proudly self-identified Democratic Socialist, we can place him in the company of such men as Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela (not to mention other Very Intelligent People such as Pablo Picasso, Bertrand Russell, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Helen Keller, Marie Curie, Jean-Paul Sartre, Noam Chomsky, Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon, and many others–much better overall company than J.P. Morgan or Donald Trump, in my opinion). We also agree that Socialism has long been a highly pejorative word in America, especially since the first Red Scare in 1918, rising in popularity during the Great Depression, and being finally blacklisted and virtually outlawed for good during the Red Scare after WWII for the next six decades. The time has finally come when Socialism is no longer a dirty word, but is increasingly becoming accepted as a positive and possibly essential solution to many of America’s biggest problems.

On Education, I agree that it is more important that education is universally available than who supplies it. I am not against private school, and I actually work at one. I believe, though, that public school should not only be available but free for everyone. In an America where even education and our great university system has been corporatized and privatized, this is an important point. Schools and universities produce our future citizen-voters, our innovative ideas, and our culture. Contra your point, I do not know of any philosophers who have seriously claimed that ignorance is better than knowledge. Ignorance very truly does lead to either dictatorship or, something only slightly less malign, a system of plutocratic control by a tiny fraction of the richest citizens. The great John Dewey, perhaps the most influential American philosopher in the fields of education and democracy, argued that that a working democracy could not exist without an educated populace.

On Regulation, I think you hit the nail on the head. One of the biggest complaints, and weaknesses, of Libertarians is that Government restricts freedom with too many burdensome regulations. Obviously no government is perfect or without corruption, but as you say, the regulations in large part exist because the status quo ante gave us things like child labor, poisoned food (see Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle), poisoned air (compare pictures of 1970’s L.A. to 2016 Beijing), poisoned water (look up Cuyahoga River fire), wage slavery, even real slavery. Socialism fought for and delivered solutions to some of these problems (and some other more minor ones like weekends and public holidays), but many more remain.

On Taxation, I would just like to add that while our tax dollars are often misspent, they also buy things like highways, trains, space exploration, the Internet, a working postal system, a strong military that has kept foreign countries from our soil for 200 years, national parks, and many other things I can’t think of off the top of my head. The thing I’ve never been able to understand is that most people who can afford to pay taxes to support their society do everything they can to avoid paying taxes to help their society. This is due to pure greed and selfishness. It is well-known that the top tax rate during America’s most prosperous decades ever was above 90%, and the economy and the middle-class grew together. As the top tax rate declined to a low point of 28% (with an effective rate much lower for the rich, a large part of whose wealth is not taxable), the middle-class has shrunk and the economy has become unstable. There are different conclusions to be drawn about tax data, which can always be skewed in any direction you want it to go really. The point is that taxes are necessary to guarantee a working society for everyone, so if you accidentally pay a tiny fraction of someone else’s school tuition or hospital bill by mistake then you have to live with that gross unfairness. If you don’t like it, move to a tax-free country like Somalia and see if you like it better. I do not think that raising taxes on the rich is a panacea, but it is a great first step.

On the Free Handouts and Lazy Freeloaders point, I would like to add that this is probably the most pernicious and also most difficult to dispel myth, and the one that keeps many misinformed people voting against their economic interests. It is in the interest of the rich to appeal to people’s innate prejudice or racism in order to pit the middle class against the poor instead of themselves. We all know the myth of the lazy black people, which has caused ignorant white people to blame supposed “welfare queens” and policies such as affirmative action for all their problems. If it weren’t black people, it would be immigrants. There is always someone else to blame rather than the real culprits, even while working-class whites, now deprived of union protections that made the country more prosperous now are increasingly depending on welfare. The fact is that the biggest freeloaders and welfare queens in America for the last 40 years have been Oil companies like Exxon and Shell, Arms producers like Raytheon, Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, multinational corporations like Walmart, Chemical and Agricultural giants like Dow and Monsanto, Airline producers like Boeing, and many other fabulously profitable and destructive companies that enrich shareholders while robbing the people and denuding the planet.

On Socialism as Totalitarianism, I would just like to add a small point about the nature of socialism. It helps to imagine it not as a monolithic idea, but, like Capitalism, a gradable ideology that can become as moderate or as extreme as it is allowed by the political situation. To those who say that it is an unworkable and naive system, it already works well in many countries around the world, including the United States. “Socialist” Norway, for example spends 20% of government revenue on social projects while in the USA its 18%. For the total economy, somewhere around 35% is socialized in the USA while its somewhere around 45% in “Socialist” France. I can tell you, by the way, that life in Norway and France is good, as it is in “Socialist” Italy where I live. Not perfect, but good. Socialism in America today is so appealing especially because we have drifted so far into unregulated and predatory capitalism that socialism becomes a moderate ideology which can bring “balance to the force”, as it were. Life is not “good” for a huge growing number of working poor in America who are being exploited by a capitalist system which cares nothing for them, and where income inequality has grown so extremely out of control that literally the richest 62 individuals in America are worth as much as the bottom 50% (that’s 160 million people, by the way). Socialism in the Soviet Union or China was really not socialism at all, but an extreme totalitarian oligarchy that simply continued the ancient traditions of despotism in those countries after overturning the old regime. Left to its own largely deregulated devices, Capitalism in America and the world has evolved into an extreme neoliberal oligarchy that aspires for even more power and money than the planet’s resources can supply. Like a deadly virus, it must be stopped before killing the host. Whether that happens with relatively mild socializing reforms and limits, or with a more traumatic revolutionary overthrow of the current system, modern capitalism will be brought down. I hope it is something closer to the former, only because the latter brings with it a much higher probability of violence, anarchy, and a worse system than before.

Americans have become jaded by injustice. Wealthy and elitist citizens like Robert Durst and John du Pont bully, rape, and kill their way through life like Godzillas, law enforcement seemingly powerless to stop or even slow them. Meanwhile, poverty-stricken communities are treated like hostile territory, and then get to watch as their citizens are routinely treated worse than we treated Afghan Taliban sympathizers on combat patrols. It goes beyond simple racism, too—the recent hit series Making a Murderer features an impoverished white man systematically framed and—frankly—fucked over by both the local law enforcement community and its criminal justice system. And the success of podcast Serial’s first season owed as much to its producers’ skill as to a boundless cultural appetite for true crime stories where the criminal is the justice system. Enter the case of Bowe Bergdahl.

In late December, 2015, the Army announced that Bowe Bergdahl would face charges of desertion and “misbehavior in the face of the enemy” during a Court-Martial. The stakes are high—Bergdahl faces Dishonorable Discharge (loss of money and benefits) and a lot of prison time. Is hanging Bergdahl up by his toes the right move? While I believe he’s guilty, and think he’s a snake who deserved the misery he endured when he chose to walk off-post in 2009, I don’t believe the Uniformed Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) should destroy Bergdahl. Actually, although every time he speaks on Serial I hope the Court-Martial panel finds him guilty and maxes his punishment, upon reflection, and considering the broader situation with how justice works in the military and society, I conclude that the court should go easy on Bergdahl. Justice and mercy are rarely the same. There’s precedent for military mercy, though, and in an unusual place for an institution dedicated to enforcing strict standards for its leaders: General Officers.

What happened in March of 2015 is the most prominent example of this phenomenon that I can remember. General (retired) David Petraeus was offered a plea-deal to avoid prison time for allowing his biographer unfettered and unauthorized access to classified material (in espionage terms, a potential “honey pot” scheme). Whether one respects Petraeus, the work he did in the military and afterward as Director of the CIA, it’s difficult to see how his crime could warrant such light punishment, especially given the sentence delivered to Chelsea Manning. Petraeus received what was, by all accounts, a slap on the wrist. This type of approach is normal when it comes to higher ranking officers found guilty of misconduct.

Views on Bergdahl and his legal predicament metastasized in 2014, mostly for political reasons. For conservatives, the trading of five Taliban was tantamount to Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler. To Progressives, getting Bergdahl back was an act of mercy. Then, members of Bergdahl’s unit (veterans and active duty) broke their silence, condemning him as a traitor and deserter, and the discussion focused on the deaths and injuries Bergdahl’s act caused. Obama walked away from what he thought had been a political triumph with egg on his face, while an angry lynch mob clamored for the firing squad or the hangman.

A couple years ago my old Brigade Commander in the 173^rd, then-Colonel James H. Johnson, III, lost a rank and was forced to retire (keeping all of his benefits) after furnishing his Iraqi lover’s father with tens of thousands of dollars of contracts, engaging in bigamy, and some other hanky-panky that would actually be hilarious if it hadn’t happened in real life.

Because the argument over what should or shouldn’t happen to Bergdahl has become intensely politicized if you’re a non-vet, and personal if you’re a veteran of Afghanistan (and the closer you get in time and in space to the corner of Paktika Province, where Bergdahl deserted, the more personal and emotional it becomes), it might seem like this is one of those scenarios where there is no answer – perfectly suited for adjudication by justice. But there is an answer, and a solution. Here’s how this needs to go down.

To begin with – it was good to get Bergdahl back. Regardless of his actions, he’s an American soldier, and the military doesn’t (and shouldn’t) let its members languish in prison – Afghan, Iranian, Mexican, wherever. Trading five or five hundred Taliban to get Bergdahl back was worth it. By the numbers, we’ve been absolutely destroying the Taliban since 2001 – I can confirm that this is what I saw on both of my deployments to Afghanistan, 2007-08 to Paktika Province, and 2010-11 to Kunduz Province, Taliban getting bombed, shelled, mortared, and machinegunned when they stupidly came close enough to one of our forts, blundered into one of our ambushes, or blunderingly ambushed us when we had jets, artillery, or helicopters close by (as good commanders almost always did).

I sympathize with people who expressed fear that the 5 released Taliban would join up with ISIS or the Taliban or some other rag-tag group of fighters that could not withstand a single day against the concentrated power of America’s military. The Taliban and ISIS seem scary, and do horrible things in places that are far away. To those conservatives who live in constant terror that one of these anally fed five early-2001 former Taliban commanders, hungry for vengeance, will track them down and wage jihad on their patio: don’t worry! Those Taliban are way more scared of you than you are of them. They’re horrible shots. And if we ever want to kill them, we can. The trade to get Bergdahl back is not more reason to hate the soldier, even if it seems we could have got him back for less.

It was good for us to retrieve Bergdahl. But the military has placed itself in a bind. If Bergdahl doesn’t receive serious punishment, some say, his trial risks turning UCMJ into farce.

As painful as it will be for veterans to hear, especially those personally invested in his adjudication, he should be allowed to separate with benefits, owing to the unusual and special nature of his case, and the fact that he’s quite clearly out of his mind and always has been. The most important jury—the jury that really matters (members of the military community) already knows that Bergdahl’s a deserter, a coward, and a man with no honor. That is already a fact, based on the facts as reported in venues like The New York Times as well as Bergdahl’s own testimony on Serial’s second season (although subsequent episodes reveal that Sarah Koenig believes that Bergdahl’s attempts to escape from the Taliban are exculpatory and mean that he was heroic rather than cowardly, this well-intentioned but ultimately hypothetical argument is not compelling). Bergdahl admits (to an opportunistic Hollywood producer) during Serial’s first episode that part of his motivation in leaving OP Mest was to indulge a narcissistic fantasy with himself as a cinematic protagonist on par with Jason Bourne. Bergdahl wasn’t a posturing intellectual who (as it turned out) created far more problems than he resolved—he was crazy. And the military never should have let him wear a uniform.

Bergdahl should keep his benefits, lose his rank (he is not a sergeant, and his appearing as such dishonors all non-commissioned officers), and face a fine and reprimand, as did Brigadier General Jeff Sinclair (who admitted to having mistreated a subordinate with whom he claimed he was having a consensual sexual relationship). This will be bad for Bergdahl, but good for the military. After all, he’s immediately recognizable to almost everyone in the military-veteran community—every time he were to enter a VA clinic or hospital, he’d face a stony silence and turned backs. He is a pariah. The best thing that the military can do is make that most powerful of gestures—conditional mercy. Something must be done, nobody who’s served would argue that he should be released from his choice scot-free, this is an absurd and childish claim. But what? Given the way the military handles high-ranking officer misbehavior, what should be done with Bergdahl isn’t much.

The military of today uses rules that were designed for a draft military, where desertion was (and remains – see Afghanistan’s military’s problems with desertion) a major issue. For America’s volunteer military, composed of (mostly) healthy young men and women, the problem with many young soldiers is keeping them engaged while they’re not in dangerous areas. Restraining action is very different from compelling it – and the stories that infantrymen tell themselves and each other are how to get the Medal of Honor, not how to shirk or avoid the mad minute. I don’t know about Iraq, I was never there, but in Afghanistan, it was all about getting out and after the enemy as much as possible. Our military should not feel threatened by desertion – the idea of honorable service among soldiers is sufficient to compel good behavior. In other words, people serve because they want to, not because they’re afraid of punishment, as they were in the past. Unless, of course, those soldiers are unhinged, as Bergdahl clearly was (and is).

Apart from the military not needing to enforce this archaic rule about desertion and misbehavior (although it seems prudent to keep the rules on the books) because soldiers and veterans will enforce it anyway as a matter of course, the best reason not to punish Bergdahl severely is the one I’ve been making throughout, which is that the military rarely does so in a meaningful way when it comes to its officer leadership. A great deal has been made of how Bergdahl may have been responsible for the deaths of those searching for him, and for endangering the mission in Afghanistan. So let’s take the case of the Air Force Major General Carey, in charge of 450 ground nuclear missiles, or about 100 times what it would take to kick World War III off in style. What happened when (I could not make this up if I wanted to) he started drinking heavily, fraternized with two “suspicious women,” and ended up on a three-day bender while on an official trip to Moscow in 2012? What happened to the guy who was casual around the apocalypse?

He was removed from his position, reprimanded, and moved to other positions of responsibility. No loss of rank, no fine. Just—a little hangover.

If we want to be real about justice in the military, in America, it’s time to stop jumping at every opportunity to squash people whose lives are already miserable, and can only be made marginally worse. It’s time to treat ourselves more seriously, and use the rules equally—not to pretend that money or power or influence can keep us from that ultimate justice, which is death in a casual and uncaring universe. Bergdahl has already suffered enough, and will suffer more without the military lifting a finger. He’s a marked man, now—he will never be able to live a life free of fear that one of his comrades won’t track him down and beat him, or worse. Moreover, a brotherhood of which he desperately wanted to be a part has forever turned its back on him. Why rub salt in the wound? Give him an OTH discharge, treat him for the wounds he incurred in Taliban captivity, tighten up recruiting standards, and be done with it. That’s essentially what’s already been done with so many General Officers. Time to show a little mercy to the common man, even if the common man happens to be a one-of-a-kind nut-job like Bowe Bergdahl.

In a literary culture full of “McPoems” and hand-wringing over the homogenization of literature because of a supposed surplus of MFA programs, Bryan Hurt breaks the mold. He’s as educated as any creative writer out there, having studied under such luminaries as T.C. Boyle and Aimee Bender in the University of Southern California’s PhD program in Creative Writing. He has also done his fair share of instructing in the MFA world.

Despite—or perhaps because of—Hurt’s background in formal creative writing programs, his stories are utterly unique. The stories in Everyone Wants to be Ambassador to France hold all the quirk and hopeful humanity of George Saunders’s best work while somehow capturing the inner sadness of works by Raymond Carver, who is no stranger to young MFA students learning the form. Except in Bryan Hurt’s narrative in which a sad and lonely man puts all his belongings on the lawn priced to sell, no one dances on that lawn for the man; instead they beat him up. Even in light of the comparisons and allusions, Hurt’s stories are uniquely his own. I’m certainly not the only one who thinks so, as Hurt’s collection was awarded the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.

Hurt refuses to shy away from impactful and relevant issues, but he does it with humor, aplomb, and no small amount of grace. Take the story “Contract.” The story’s form takes that of an actual legal contract with all its enumerated points and subpoints. The protagonist is a CEO condemned to sacrifice everyone he loves—as in, actual blood sacrifice—to appease the shareholders who make his job possible. Bryan Hurt simultaneously creates a contract with the reader through deft metafictional analyses (e.g., “9.4… [T]he story has made certain promises to its readers…10.10…There was only ever one way this story was going to end…”) and eviscerates the upward-mobility-at-all-costs mindset of corporate America, all while making astute readers laugh out loud at word-play and absurdities that—coming from Hurt—don’t seem so much absurd as they seem like an insightful look at what makes us all tick.

Bryan Hurt masters the art of subtext in both form and content. In the opening story, Hurt packs an entire analysis of ages-old patriarchal influence in love and marriage into fewer than four pages. “The Beast of Marriage” affirms what Jack Kerouac wrote approximately sixty years ago: “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together…” But in Hurt’s collection, it’s not just boys and girls in America. It’s boys and girls on their honeymoon in France. It’s also a lonely boy missing a girl from his basement, where he builds his own dwarf star and mini-universe and becomes something of a god in his own right. It’s also a lonely astronaut missing his father while he walks on the moon. It’s also illicit lovers riding in a car that drives itself.

Both hilarious and heartbreaking, Bryan

Hurt’s stories ask the big questions. In “Panic Attack,” Hurt’s narrator muses, “What’s going to be okay? Are we going to make more money? Be less stuck? Be less tired?” But with the entire collection, Hurt implicitly asks bigger questions like, will everything get better? Are we doomed? Hurt won’t explicitly tell you the answer to those questions, but his narrator does tell us what kind of story he wants, which—as a gift to us—is exactly the kind of story that Bryan Hurt writes: “I want a story that answers yes to all of these questions. A story that’s definitely not a real story because it tells me that things will get better.”

And in an age like this—with fear and terror dominating the media—who even wants real stories anymore? Or put another way, who doesn’t want stories that tell us things will get better? Plus, as Bryan Hurt writes with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, “Berets are cute…French is cute. There’s nothing more American than being cute.”

 

Matthew J. Hefti holds a BA in English, an MFA in Creative Writing, and he is currently pursuing his JD at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He is a military veteran, having served two combat tours in Iraq and two combat tours in Afghanistan as an explosive ordnance disposal technician. Among other publications, his words have been seen in Pennsylvania English; War, Literature and the Arts; Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Chad Harbach’s MFA v. NYC. His debut novel, A Hard and Heavy Thing (Tyrus / F+W) is now available where books are sold.

By Adrian Bonenberger 

I wrote a long essay about Lindsay Graham’s candidacy a few months ago, when Craig Whitlock broke the story about Graham’s sleazy and disingenuous military service (I choose my words very carefully—no enlisted man or officer who’s had to struggle for promotion can view Graham’s career and retirement with anything other than disgust). I revised it about a month ago, updating it to reflect his ongoing unsuccessful candidacy, and his apparent lack of interest in taking responsibility for a matter any honorable man would have sought to resolve before it became an issue. My hope was to bring attention to the fact that Graham himself still draws pay as a retired Air Force Colonel, which is outrageous, and also as further evidence that neither the military nor Congress can be trusted to police themselves when it comes to the obvious conflict of interest inherent to having appointed officers of the executive branch, legally beholden to the office of the President, serving as representatives of the citizen electorate.

Boring, boring shit. So boring I’m annoyed I had to summarize it in a paragraph. And I don’t blame you for being annoyed with me at having made you read it. Long story short—dictatorship, venality, corruption, blah blah blah. Fuck it.

Instead of slamming you with 2,500 words about how our democracy is basically doomed, let’s talk about the new Star Wars instead. I recently watched Episode VII—The Force Awakens and feel compelled to discuss it in candid terms, for your edification. There will be no spoilers in this discussion of the movie. I’ve listened to the experts discuss SWTFA, I’ve read the positive reviews. It’s time to deliver a counterbalance to the predictable parade of pander coming out of the usual corners.

Background on me, and how I interact with this movie franchise: I’m a longtime fan of Star Wars, an easy get. I saw Star Wars when it first aired on network television, and Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in theaters. I had a few of the toys growing up as a kid. Never read the books, nor did I read many comic books beyond the few that somehow ended up in Branford’s public library. I have never worn a character costume for any reason. I’m aware of the role-playing game but never played it. My friends and I played the video games during the high school years, and then later in college.

I didn’t hate Attack of the Clones. I like movies, and the Star Wars franchise is clearly capable of delivering great movies (Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back) as well as others that are… less great (Return of the Jedi), mediocre, or bad. Albert Burneko wrote about this phenomenon more gracefully than I could have, as usual, for Deadspin.

Outside Star Wars, I like satire and noir and comedy. Hitchcock, and Herzog. I loved The Thin Red Line and Dr. Strangelove and Paths of Glory. Starship Troopers was a great satire of what it would be like to live in a fascist society. I’m not a goddamned hater! I’m not!

I didn’t love The Force Awakens.

More context, since no matter what I say now, forever, people will point me out as the white man who stood up and said “it was a good mediocre movie.” Not a prudent place, tactically, to be, in other words, in a movie with a powerful female lead and strong minority supporting characters. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being bad and 10 being great, here’s my take on all other Star Wars movies:

I Phantom Menace: 4/10

II Attack of the Clones: 4/10

III Revenge of the Sith: 5/10

IV Star Wars: 10/10

V Empire Strikes Back: 9/10 [many would invert the SW/ESB rating here]

VI Return of the Jedi: 8/10

Overall, I’d give The Force Awakens 6/10, putting it a lot closer to Revenge of the Sith than Return of the Jedi. It was entertaining, it gave me chills and brought tears to my eyes with the music, sound effects, and deft introduction of major plot points I’d seen in my childhood. The story wasn’t bad! But it wasn’t great, which is what I was hoping for. It could have been great, too. You can see it trying to be great, almost making it, and being dragged down by—I don’t know what. Marketing? Disney? Interference? Politics?

Here are the three major problems I had with The Force Awakens. Every intelligent human with whom I’ve spoken, Democrats and Republicans both (so I feel like I’m on solid footing), old fans and new, all agreed with me on the following basic points:

ONE

The world that was built so deftly, so economically in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back (and so clumsily in the prequels) is confusing in The Force Awakens. Consider the first five minutes of Star Wars for a moment—a movie that is itself a master class in storytelling. The audience learns that (1) there’s an Empire and a Rebellion—the political order of the world is comprehensible [side note—I learned what a “rebellion” was as a child from the movie, when my parents explained the dynamic to me]—and (2) who the good and bad guys are, what they look like, how they behave. When Darth Vader and Storm Troopers capture and storm a tiny ship, killing its soldiers and capturing its cargo, a princess, everything (sounds, visuals, music, action) balances harmoniously for the audience. Whether or not one is interested in the larger story, it is impossible to deny that the essential conflict has been established, definitively and authoritatively. Having established so much, so clearly, the filmmaker is able to efficiently build the world out further in a myriad of ways. Stormtroopers in Mos Eisley represent a threat, which Obi Wan, described as a wizard, neutralizes using some kind of magic called “The Force.” Han Solo, a mercenary, is seen as reliable in part because he doesn’t care for the Empire. This basic world building moment in the beginning of Star Wars is obeyed, reinforced, and becomes a touchstone of sorts, to the point where even in a later movie, understanding where a character stands vis-a-vis the Empire says things about that character—like with Han’s assessment that Lando Calrissian has “no love for the Empire,” which sets, Calrissian up as an essentially good character.

In The Force Awakens, there are (ulp) three groups. The Resistance seems like the inheritor (both in terms of weaponry, ideology, and personnel) of The Rebellion, and good characters affiliate themselves with it. The First Order seems like the heir (both in terms of weaponry, ideology, and personnel types) to The Empire’s legacy, and evil characters affiliate themselves with it, including the movie’s primary antagonists. Now—though it’s rarely seen and little explained, apparently the third part of the galactic order at this point is—The Republic! Not “The Old Republic,” which was the government of the prequels, but something that seems to be allied with The Resistance, rather than The First Order—neither powerful enough to keep The First Order in check, nor so weak that they can be easily defeated at the outset. In any case, The Republic plays a passive role in the film, are described rather than seen, for the most part, and its presence raises more questions than it answers.

 

So at the end of the first film, here’s what I know: Resistance good, like Rebellion. First Order bad, like Empire. Republic—no idea. Don’t know where they are, what they look like, what they do. And this brings up serious questions that interrupt one’s easy enjoyment of the film. We know First Order doesn’t like Republic, and Resistance seems to like Republic, but why is the Resistance not part of the Republic? Who are they resisting? What are the basic relationships like in the film?  In episodes IV-VI, everything was clear: Rebellion versus Empire, Light side of the force versus Dark side, and people torn between those two ideologies. In episode VII, I really could not tell you what motivates people to make choices based on their “side.” Which leads up to the second great flaw with this movie:

TWO

Lack of character driven plot. A movie that gets this right succeeds, and those that have trouble establishing or following character motivations fail. The character with the strongest and most clear motivation in The Force Awakens is Kylo Ren, one of the primary antagonists. If you don’t think this is a problem, you should. Without giving anything away in the movie, I’m going to rate each of the primary characters in terms of character unity and plausibility of action, also on a scale of 1-10, 1 being laughably absurd, 10 being perfectly reasonable:

Han: 9/10. A great performance worthy of the character and its actor.

Leia: 7/10. Not as much for General Leia to do as one might have hoped. Despite feminism raves about the film, the old and diminished star of the first series proves that especially in Hollywood, nothing is as powerless, ultimately, as a woman ravaged by time.

Kylo Ren: 10/10. Some people disputed this characterization of the first movie’s antagonist, but the character was logical and compelling, and acted in ways that one would not expect. Given the weight placed on the actor’s role and the character’s significance in the movie and series, it is impossible to imagine a better character here.

Captain Phasma: 4/10. An absurd character, totally unnecessary. There were opportunities for Phasma to kick ass in a couple scenes that would have increased the Stormtrooper Captain’s menace—instead, Phasma was the punchline of pointless jokes. Wearer of the silver suit, deliverer of vacuous lines. Why?

Chewie: Was never really a fan of Chewie but he does his thing in this movie, only, as with other elements of this movie, in a slightly imperfect fashion

Finn: 5/10. Extremely mediocre, almost perfectly mediocre character. If I had to get rid of one character, it would be Finn. I tried to imagine the movie without Finn, and it immediately improved. A big part of this is the character’s inexplicably contradictory compulsions. Just a flat, superficial character whose decisions at every point are surprising, because he’s never adequately fleshed out.

Rey: 9/10. Pretty much carries the movie. Only thing that prevents her from rising to full on 10/10 Luke Skywalker status is her lack of effort—at no point does one doubt that she will prevail, she cruises through her challenges, which makes for a somewhat boring and anticlimactic finish. Also, her motivations are obscure and aestheticized in a way that Ren’s are not. I don’t know why a whiney Luke trying to get off Tatooine in Star Wars works where confident, capable Rey does not–but it’s just not the same. I suspect that an unwillingness to test the female character, to risk “demeaning” or “diminishing” her and her capabilities were to blame for the difference here.

Poe: 8/10. There was not enough Poe in this movie, and those places where Poe occurred, he wasn’t used to full effect. I believe this is because Poe and Finn could or should have been the same character—Poe is just the part of Finn that can fly X-Wings well. Together they’d be a far more interesting character, although their being separate characters raises the possibility of something truly revolutionary: Star Wars’ first openly gay protagonists.

Side note—the actors all did great work in the movie (or at least I thought so). Finn wasn’t poorly acted—on the contrary you can see John Boyega working like crazy to give the character life—nevertheless, one can only do so much with a mediocre draw.

THREE

Rushed plot. There are four or five parts in the movie I remember where one scene jumps to another without any idea of why it’s happening or how it’s connected to the action—places that, in Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back are explained by the characters behaving logically given what the audience knows about them, or according to plot points that have been seeded beforehand. A great example of this is how Obi Wan’s ghost speaks to Luke throughout the end of Star Wars—“use the force, Luke!”—then (the precedent has been established) manifests himself to Luke at the beginning of Empire Strikes Back  and instructs Luke to seek master Yoda in the Degobah system. Luke then says Degobah and Yoda five or six times before he actually flies there. When Luke departs and arrives, the audience isn’t thinking “where’s Luke headed off to, now?” or “Degobah—where’d that star system come from? And who’s this weird alien?” At various points during The Force Awakens, I found myself thinking “why are we here now, rather than somewhere else? And what’s up with f***ing Finn, what he’s doing makes no sense, again.” Those places where the plot flagged in the original trilogy was often carried by the characters’ powerful motivations, or the overall context of the universe (the first two gripes)—in VII, those places the plot drags or becomes confused, there’s not much to rescue it from itself. It’s nowhere near as bad as in the interminable Phantom Menace, but neither is The Force Awakens as clean and tight as its predecessors.

 

A final issue this trilogy will face is less definite, and much harder to describe. Apart from the legacy of the previous films and the weight of expectations from the comic books, television shows, video game, card traders and literary worlds that sprang up to satisfy peoples’ curiosity, these films have to contend with the powerfully positive nostalgic legacy of the original trilogy. Things are already shaping up to be interconnected and contextually subtle in ways that are suitable for contemporary society, but fundamentally disappointing as light entertainment. In the original series, a young man confronts his father, and is able to transcend the bad choices his father made, while wrestling to adhere to a strict moral code. Audiences are both more sophisticated and less rational today than they were in the 1970s and early 80s (a consequence in part of decreasingly consistent cultural mores, for better and for worse, but in the context of this movie, for worse), and there have been a glut of ambitious movies that foundered on their own desire to create complicated and clever, knowingly self-referential stories that satisfy everyone.

This movie is most laudable in part precisely because it goes so far out of its way to create a new mythology for the current social climate. After all, the original trilogy is basically a story for white European men. Women have long bemoaned the lack of fully realized female characters who can respond to (rather than mindlessly fulfill) gender expectations, and have found a hero in Rey. Some have claimed that the original trilogy is explicitly racist in its handling of both Lando Calrissian and Darth Vader, and African Americans will likely be pleased with the inclusion of a heroic black character who owns his black-ness (and, possibly, in future films, his homosexuality) (Finn). Hispanic fans may feel burned by the relative lack of Poe, who is, as mentioned earlier, a character with great potential, sadly underused. Others saw earlier movies’ treatment of native societies like the Ewoks and Gungans as exploitative and condescending at best, and racist at worst—there is almost nothing to be seen of earlier episodes’ willingness to rely on racist or prejudicial tropes to be seen in The Force Awakens. The only overt examples of discrimination in The Force Awakens were (1) the aforementioned reluctance to give old women consequential roles outside ceremonial leadership functions and (2) the usual terrified insistence on binary cisgender roles in sex—homosexuality is unseen (unless Finn and Poe end up shacking up in later movies, which would be a good step in the right direction—clearly the two have a powerful and inexplicable immediate intimacy, seen in their few scenes together, and Finn’s character is such a cipher in terms of motivations that it’s not at all implausible to imagine him developing in that direction).

Overall, the movie did a much better job at living up to the promise of the original trilogy than the prequels. The prequels were so bad without serious rationalization or bizarre if entertaining conspiracy theories that it’s a minor miracle the franchise survived, and that Hollywood was willing to gamble on further movies. I am hopeful about Star Wars’ long term prospects, based on this first, long-awaited sequel to the original trilogy. I’m also hopeful that Disney is confident enough in both its brand and the power of the original trilogy to allow real challenge to the characters, and enable them to grow. The series is overdue for a big winner, and Rey certainly seems strong enough to carry a powerful storyline.