This commentary, Common Sense with Paul Jacob, usually deals with man’s inhumanity to man — man’s insanity to man, oftentimes. But on this Christmas Eve, let’s for just a moment focus squarely on some beautiful days of sanity and humanity that somewhat magically broke out of the ugliness of “total war” back eleven decades ago: World War I, “The Great War.”
Let’s remember the good times.
The Christmas Truce
History Channel
A Sign Of Friendship In The Midst Of War I THE CHRISTMAS TRUCE 1914
The Great War
Christmas Truce of World War I
Joyeux Noel / 2005 film (video, 13:35)
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. Merry Christmas!
As Donald Trump appeared to be winning last night, the number of Twitterers who proclaimed a hankering or a design to kill themselves rose dramatically. Michael Malice and others found humor in it, but it’s a super-saddening development, if you ask me.
These Kamala Harris voters are not really going to kill themselves. It is just something to say on Twitter.
I really hope I’m not wrong about this.
I’ll leave to others the counsel of life. That is the job of friends and family and emergency hotline dispatchers. My counsel is different: talking about suicide because your candidate lost is undemocratic. If the authoritarian pronouncements of both major candidates alarmed you about the danger of anti-democratic trend, this fad should raise the alarm several decibels.
The whole point of democracy is to allow a transition of power sans bloodshed. And that requires both contenders and supporters not to shed each other’s blood … or their own. When they fail.
It’s a requirement. Not to over-react.
The losers have to accept the loss, and the winners have to refrain from using the state to punish the losers further.
It’s sort of that simple.
Resignation is key, as scientist Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1) indicated: “Going to bed, reasonably resigned to Trump win at this point as it seemed to me from a distance for some time. He may be a nut, a liar, and a crook, but the bright side is a likely boost free speech and due process at unis and bump in tech sector, if we survive the rest.”
We will survive. If Trump wins the Electoral Vote (I’m going to bed, too, before a final determination), or if Harris does.
At the same time, I don’t want U.S. Marines landing on the beaches of Venezuela or Nicaragua or parachuting into Madrid or Kowloon … or for our military to endlessly occupy turf in Afghanistan and Syria.
There are limits even to superpower status. We cannot re-make the world in our image. By force. Everywhere at all times.
Except to some degree, by example. And regime change wars have not set a very good example.
The Iraq War destabilized the Middle East and handed Iran a major strategic victory. Leading from behind to help NATO overthrow the government of Libya has produced more chaos for northern Africa and Europe. Efforts at regime change in Syria have only worsened the suffering of millions of people.
U.S. troops remain in Iraq. After 17 years, we still have soldiers dying in Afghanistan. We can never leave. At least, not without any “gains” evaporating in a hurry.
And the president who finally ends military involvement in these “endless war” will get endless grief for abandoning allies* and ceding ground to Russia or some other bad actor. That’s what happened after 28 soldiers were pulled out of Syria.
Being a superpower isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Beacon of freedom seems a better gig.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* This is not an argument for being a bad ally ourselves. For starters, I think we ought to welcome Kurdish refugees who wish to immigrate to the U.S.
That’s what Democratic presidential aspirant and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg reminded last night’s debate audience. “All day today, I’ve been thinking about September 12th, the way it felt when for a moment we came together as a country.”
The terrorist attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon, and the attempt foiled by brave citizens who were killed in the crash of their airliner in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, did indeed result in a wonderful bond of unity throughout our country.
Having lost more than 3,000 citizens, we came together.
“Imagine,” instructs Buttigieg, “if we had been able to sustain that unity.”
Before we all sing along with John Lennon, though, consider: (1) It is not so easy for government to re-create the sort of public horror, fear, grief, etc., necessary to ensure maximum national unity, and (2) please don’t try.
The purpose of government is not to produce a pressure-cooker society where we forever exist on a wartime footing.
Do you miss the good old days of World War II? Totalitarianism threatened much of the globe; 70 million people died in the war. But it unified our country, which defeated Nazism, fascism, and a murderous empire.
We must memorialize the victory, not repeat it … just for unity’s sake.
Yet the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocosio-Cortez (D‑NY) states that “the House of Representatives recognizes that a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal is a historic opportunity.…”
Opportunity?
Our motto should be ‘Liberty’ — not ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’
At long last, John Bolton’s 17 month tenure in the Trump Administration isover.
I won’t pretend not to be pleased. Yet I also do not pretend this national security advisor was always and completely on the wrong side. He has consistently claimed to have an ulterior motive for his favored never-ending war footing: “Individual liberty is the whole purpose of political life, and I thought it was threatened then” — when he was a teenager and exposed to the ideas of Barry Goldwater — “and I think it’s threatened now.”
Unfortunately, he rejected the lesson that our Founders knew all too well: constant war-making doesn’t yield freedom. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” James Madison wrote, it is war that “comprises and develops the germ of every other.” Madison’s list of reasons for war’s dangers include
Debts and taxes;
Rule of the many by the few;
Discretionary executive power;
Special favors greed economy;
Propaganda; etc.
Nevertheless, folks like John Bolton continue to think that we can be free while our military micromanages the “resolution” of every conflict across the globe.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who often comes off like a war skeptic, continues to side with the interventionists.
“We’re going to keep a presence” in Afghanistan, Trump said the other day. “We’re reducing that presence very substantially. We’re not fighting a war over there. We’re just policemen.”
“Why were you the lone voice out there going after the neo-cons, going after the people who took us into these wars?” Chris Mathews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, asked presidential candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D‑Hawaii) after Wednesday night’s debate.
Pro-peace candidates do well with voters, but still most politicians and the mediaremain hawkish. The only time “the mainstream media fawned” over President Trump was after airstrikes against Syria.
“I deployed to Iraq in 2005 during the height of that war,” she told Mathews. “I served in a medical unit where every single day I saw that terribly high human cost.”
Contrasted with former Vice-President Joe Biden, who voted for the Iraq War as senator, Gabbard pledged not to “bend to the whims of the military-industrial complex or the foreign policy establishment.”
“Today the Taliban claimed responsibility for killing two American service members in Afghanistan,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had posed during the debate. Noting that “leaders as disparate as President Obama and President Trump” have wanted “to end US involvement,” Maddow inquired of Rep. Tim Ryan (D‑Ohio), how he might get us out?
Instead, he argued: “We must be engaged in this.” That led Gabbard to cut in, calling Ryan’s answer “unacceptable.”
“We have to bring our troops home from Afghanistan,” she declared. “We are no better off in Afghanistan today than we were when this war began [nearly 18 years ago].”
Offered the opportunity, not one of the other eight candidates on the stage addressed the country’s longest war.
This is a problem, since, as I’ve repeatedly posited in this space, there is no plan to defeat the Taliban, only to negotiate power-sharing with them.
