I know I said I was going off to write my great work. It's in the works, and everyone should hope I finish it. In the mean time, I thought I would provide some insight into the world scene for the younger generation that reads here. I'm just old enough to provide a few laughs and some modest reflections about the state of affairs in the world.
As I've already mentioned, I'm reading American Epoch, A History of the United States Since the 1890's, Arthur S. Link and William B. Catton, a Second Edition, 1966 (a third printing beginning in 1963 of a revision of the 1955 original edition), Library of Congress catalog # 63-12398, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. And while it is too close to my own vintage for it to be overwhelmingly enlightening for me, it provides here some interesting background perspective upon those who are my age and a bit older, and as we were educated.
Now, that may seem a convoluted way to gain an understanding of history, or to take a perspective upon the world, but, that's the way I do it. I know who I am, so I work backward from there. If you didn't fully comprehend the immediately previous paragraph, it's worth another read, if just to find out what path my mind takes as I consider what I read.
I try only to read the news, a few current short essays, and as many well-dated book-length texts as I have time for. I've previously explained why in detail. When it gets to the point where everything you read is same-old, same-old for you too, you might consider my approach and start searching out well dated texts. This methods applies in every field of study, and, personal yields can be greatly enhanced, especially in the sciences where younger enthusiasts might not consider the search worthwhile.
Before getting into the first quote I'm going to pull out of American Epoch let me give you a little background about what it is like to have been born shortly after the Second World War, just about a decade before this book was originally published. This is also about the same time the current lever-pullers in Washington D.C. were born. I've no doubt some of them read this book. It is a persuasive historic tome raved about in academic circles and assigned reading in numerous college history and political science courses of that era.
The 1950s was an era when as we grew up we played cowboys and Indians, but we also played Army, and, we fought the Japs and the Germans. For male youth of the era there was tremendous pride in the whipping our collective fathers gave the Germans and the Japs. Everyone who grew up then greatly admired the bizarre German and Japanese military paraphernalia it seemed every someone's father brought home as war souvenirs. We played war with spiked German helmets pilfered from German mansions or bought off the street in Germany, as well as with the typical Second World War German helmet everyone has seen in the movies, or on bikers who sometimes wore them in the sixties. We also played army with Japanese swords liberated during the occupation of Japan, if we could get away with it. We also played with mock wooden M-1 rifles that were originally used to train the GIs and somehow made their way into a lot of American homes and into the hands of young boys in the 1950's. Davy Crockett was big, as was Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and Soupy Sales. Our youth wholly pre-dated Star Trek. We didn't have computers, or even pocket calculators. But we all had B-B Guns. Color TV was a late part of our youth, and most of us didn't have one. We're all easily ten to twenty years older than Homer Simpson is portrayed.
From American Epoch, Chapter 9 The American Democracy at War subsection 80, Public Opinion and the War
[...]
To convert this hostile opinion [toward the declaration of war - trade unionism and its isolationist sentiment] and educate all citizens to an understanding of American objectives, [WWI], Wilson created the Committee on Public Information with George Creel, a progressive journalist from Denver, as head. One of Creel's first official acts was the establishment of a voluntary press censorship that worked remarkably well. He next turned to the more difficult task of making Americans war-conscious; before the war had ended he had mobilized 150,000 lecturers, writers, artists, actors, and scholars in perhaps the most gigantic propaganda campaign in American history [circa 1917].
As a consequence an official line was sold to the American people. One side of the propaganda glorified American participation in terms of an idealistic crusade to advance the cause of freedom and democracy throughout the world - a concept that the President reiterated in 1917 and 1918. The other side portrayed the German menace in the most lurid colors, in terms of the Hun attempting to despoil Europe and extend his dominion to the Western Hemisphere. Although the Creel Committee rejected the cruder atrocity stories, it appropriated and spread many of the official Allied atrocity charges.
The Creel Committee's efforts to make Americans war- and security-conscious came at a time when they were already distraught by rumors of disloyalty, espionage, and sabotage. The results of Creel's propaganda, and even more of the agitation of irresponsible volunteer organizations like the National Security League and the National Protective Association, was to stimulate such an outbreak of war madness as the country had never before witnessed. There were numerous spy scares, and large organizations of patriots sprang up to catch enemy agents and traitors.
Most of the hysteria was turned against German Americans, all things German, and anti-war radicals and progressives. Each state had a committee of public safety, with branches in every county and city; and in many areas these committees were not much better than vigilante groups. It was they who conducted reigns of terror against German Americans, especially in Montana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. La Follette, as the leader of the progressives who voted against the war resolution, was burned in effigy in Madison, expelled from the Madison Club, and publicly censured by most of the faculty of his beloved University of Wisconsin. The climax came when the Minnesota Public Safety Committee demanded his expulsion from the Senate.
As one historian has shrewdly observed, the majority of Americans in their hatred of things German lost not only their tolerance but their sense of humor as well. Statues of heroes like Von Steuben and Frederick the Great were taken from their pedestals. Many states forbade teaching of German or church services conducted in German. Sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage," and, German measles, "liberty measles." The crowning blow came when Cincinnati ruled pretzels off free lunch counters in saloons.
Now, while and before only briefly noting the all too obvious similarities described in this section about the First World War, to what has transpired over our own recent history, the immediately preceding four-plus years of the Bush Administration, let me give you some background.
There are two quintessential images of the First World War, images that shock-date and authenticate the antiquity of WWI for those who would've read this book when it was hot, and the authoritative statement of this history as it was written in 1955. The first is a picture of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, King of Prussia, in his spiked helmet; and the second is of a military horse wearing a gas mask accompanied by WWI soldiers in similarly donned attire. This was an antique war. And in fact all of this is much older than even antique, as "Kaiser," like "Tsar," is merely a variant of Caesar. So, keep all that in mind for our present analysis.
From subsection 81 Civil Liberties During Wartime
All governments try to protect themselves against enemies from within as well as from without during extreme crises. To Wilson and other administration leaders it was an absurd situation when the federal government could force men to fight and give their lives for their country and yet could not punish persons who attempted to obstruct the war effort or gave aid and comfort to the enemy without violating the law of treason. The President's answer to opponents to the war was the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917 [and the Sedition Act of May 16, 1918]. It provided imprisonment up to twenty years and/or a fine up to #10,000 for persons who willfully made false reports to help the enemy, incited rebellion among the armed forces, or attempted to obstruct recruiting or the operation of the draft. An equivalent of censorship appeared in a section empowering the Postmaster General to deny the use of the mails to any matter which, in his opinion, advocated treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to the laws of the United States.
[The U.S.] Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson of Texas had been a staunch supporter of Wilson's policies, but he was neither tolerant nor discriminating in judgement, and he used his vast new power to establish a capricious censorship. For example, he banned the American Socialist from the mails soon after the passage of the Espionage Act. Two other leading Socialist publications, The Masses and Victor Berger's daily Milwaukee Leader, fell under the Texan's ban in August and October 1917. In addition, he suppressed all anti-British and pro-Irish publications and banned an issue of the single-tax organ, The Public, for suggesting that more revenue should be raised by taxes.
In effect the Espionage Act became a tool to stamp out dissent and radical, but never conservative, criticism. As one authority observed, "It became criminal to advocate heavier taxation instead of bond issues, to state that conscription was unconstitutional though the Supreme Court had not yet held it valid, to say that the sinking of merchant ships was legal, to urge that a referendum should have preceded our declaration of war, [or,] to say that war was contrary to the teachings of Christ. Men have been punished for criticizing the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A." A movie producer, Robert Goldstein, was sentenced for ten years for displaying a movie about the American Revolution that allegedly incited hostility against an associate of the United States. The most famous case involved Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the Socialist party. Debs expressed frank revulsion at the war in a speech before a Socialist convention in Canton, Ohio, on June 16, 1918. He was speedily brought to trial and sentenced to a term of ten years in federal prison.
In all fairness it should be said the administration was not responsible for the excesses of this legal witch hunt. They were the outcome largely of the hysteria and maelstrom of hatred that converted district attorneys, judges, and juries into persecutors of a dissenting minority. [...]
[...]
All told, 2168 persons were prosecuted and 1,055 were convicted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, sixty-five for threats against the President, and only ten for actual sabotage. But this reckoning gives little indication of the extent to which suppression of dissent was carried out by organized groups who lynched, whipped, tarred and feathered, or otherwise wreaked vengeance on labor radicals, German Americans, or any persons suspected of disloyalty. As Wilson had predicted in April 1917, many Americans forgot mercy and tolerance and compassion. In retrospect, the war hysteria seems the most fearful price that the America paid for participation in the First World War.
The author-historian lessons of Link and Catton here are a good ones, but they are lessons intended for those born two or three generations ago, and, it is not the lesson we are here to learn today. You must always keep in mind, I write philosophy. I am no mere political commentator caught up in the passions of some inane and even lame political belief or disbelief as our understanding of the political is usually expressed.
In 2007 almost a century later it is a difficult task to get into the head and mindset of Woodrow Wilson, the academic turned politician.
It is easy for me being of the vintage of those pulling the levers in office today to know what it is that our mutual contemporaries felt as American Epoch was read in the 50's, 60's and the early 70's. By the 70's it was becoming outdated by events unhinging the collective social consciousness relating to the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
As we then read Link and Catton, we were appalled that in the name of doing something good, such things could happen as are described by what I have just quoted from American Epoch. The irony, and it is a stomach-destroying irony, is that some nearly a century later would take from this vivid history provided by American Epoch and turn it into a play-book for conjuring up an invasion of the Middle East to further their bizarre ideas of an American empire extending into the 21st Century by the brute military force of invasion and threats of nuclear annihilation of either us or our "enemies".
None of this is new however. Bob Dylan wrote a song alluding to it in 1965, right when American Epoch would have been at the peak of its historical perception-persuasive height.
The final stanza from "Highway 61 Revisited"
Now the roving gambler he was very bored, Trying to create a next world war. He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor. He said, "I never engaged in this kind of thing before. But yes, I think it can be very easily done. We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun, And have it on highway 61."
So, as everyone can see here, none of this is new. To get anything new out of the lessons we are learning today, we must take a step back, and consider what it is that makes up our own perception of the world.
Each of us can only make of the world what transpires and masquerades as the world but can only exist exclusively in our minds. During the First World War, technology being what it was, President Wilson and his own band of war-hawks were concerned about what was delivered through the U.S. Mail. Times have certainly changed since then, or they have for our mental input opportunities, and the amount of time one has to consider, filter and measure all the mental input. The world's population has much more than quadrupled. The technological dangers of war have increased beyond any numeric measure. But, we still have by-in-large the same mindset President Wilson had when the Kaiser wore a helmet with a spike coming out of the top of it for his public profile picture, and when men went off to war with their horses wearing gas masks for some questionably noble cause.
Today however, due to the vastly changed world around us, the world we can only know about by what is in our minds, no gamblers, however bored, and no number of First World War soldiers with their gas-masked horses can defend against the tyranny imposed upon us by the current hazards of war or, by the machinations of war propagandists keen to co-opt every propaganda opportunity. The stakes have been risen too high, and the potential deadliness of every foe has been amply observed, noted and played out, in Korea, in Vietnam, and now and again in Iraq.
And while the U.S. could declare war upon and defeat the entire world in this last world war, there would be no one left to benefit from the imperial folly of these Caesars.
The problem is with what is in these people's heads. Above is an example of the education they received. It is antique. This is how they perceive the world at its base. However, we also must consider how they have all been isolated in their jobs in government for decades. Their real education has ceased. They have become fogged-in by what Washington think tanks and lobbyist have fed into their thick skulls where their world exists. What's more, they have become isolated by their own perception of themselves. They think they know more than anyone else. They have legions of staff that answer their mail and filter through it selecting for their consumption only that which reinforces their idea of the world in their own heads. They commune with God.
Their only joy in the world is that of feeling power, which is an illusion. None of us has any power except to make things worse. It is simply a very difficult undertaking to make things better. It isn't just perseverance and hard work that's required to make things better. It takes a real understanding of the world, and, from my experience success here has more to do with luck than it has to do with hard work.
99% of the effort required to make for a better world is cerebral. And, it is best attempted in time spent in denying what one believes because of their own antique education.
This is how difficult it is to make for a better world. I'm almost sixty. I can reduce all of my life's efforts to make a better world into one success, and, that one success into a single sentence:
The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.
And, I defy anyone to do better during their own lifetime. I would gladly welcome it. And, I'm taking on all comers to show their stuff, because those about whom I am saying they have Antique Educations, Minds and Wars are not just those in Washington D.C. They are everyone one of us.
My final quote here from American Epoch will put the last nail in the coffin. From Chapter 11, Demobilization and the Triumph of Normalcy 1918-1920
ALL POSTWAR PERIODS in American history have been times when partisanship runs at fever pitch and passions generated by the war [and more recently the war against these wars too] drive people to acts of violence. So it was during the years following the Armistice, as war hysteria found victims in "Reds," foreigners, Jews, Negroes, and Catholics. As if to further confuse the domestic scene, labor unrest during 1919 and 1920 was at its highest peak since the 1890's. [...]
If there is one thing my more than a year with wrestling with the implications of the moral imperative has taught me, it is that we steal from and destroy the prospects for the future in so many ways.
If the war ends tomorrow, and even if Bush and Cheney are arrested for 9-11 tomorrow, a tentative future would then begin with all the other problems we have been ignoring while 9-11 and the war obsessed us all.
But, as the Chinese proverb states, even a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And, to that we can add, no journey of any great distance is accomplished without having to take a few steps backward.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
--------------------------------------------------------
