Tag Archives: conflict
I'm descended from James
Posted by jrbenjamin in War
Advice, conflict, Fighting, Patriotism, Sebastian Junger, Soldiers, Tribe, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, War
"Like a lot of boys I played war when I was young, and like a lot of men I retained an intense and abiding curiosity about it. And like a lot of people, my family was deeply affected by war and probably wouldn't have existed without it. One of my mother's ancestors emigrated from Germany in order to fight in the American Revolution and was given a land grant in Ohio in return. His last name was Grimm; he was related to the great folklorists who recorded German fairy tales. One of Grimm's descendants married into another frontier family, the Carrolls, who were almost wiped out by Indians during a raid on their remote Pennsylvania homestead in 1781. The Carroll wife managed to hide in a cornfield with her four-year-old son, James, while the Indians killed her two teenage sons and her dog. The husband was off in town that day. I'm descended from James.
My father was half Jewish and grew up in Europe. He was thirteen when his family fled the Spanish Civil War and settled in Paris, and seventeen when they left Paris ahead of the German army and emigrated to the United States. He tried to sign up for military service but was turned down due to asthma, so he eventually helped the war effort by working on jet engines in Paterson, New Jersey. Later he got a degree in fluid mechanics and worked on submarine design. When I turned eighteen I received my selective service card in the mail, in case the United States needed to draft me, and I declared that I wasn't going to sign it. The Vietnam War had just ended and every adult I knew had been against it. I had no problem, personally, with fighting a war; I just didn't trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary.
My father's reaction surprised me. Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France. 'You don't owe your country nothing,' I remember him telling me. 'You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.'
The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn't so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he'd made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I'd benefited from my entire life."
Pulled from Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. I'm descended from James.
That sentence, its ordering in the paragraph and use of the informal contraction where a self-serious "I am" would be tempting, is a reason Junger is a great writer.
Image: AARP
A collection of my posts on Junger
How the Brits see their legacy in WW2
The 20th century's major work of philosophy was written in the trenches
What Would Lawrence of Arabia Do about the Middle East?
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Arabia, army, conflict, Fighting, foreign policy, Interventionism, Lawrence of Arabia, middle east, peace, T. E. Lawrence, Twenty Seven Rules, War, warfare
"Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is."
Rule #15 in T. E. Lawrence's "Twenty Seven Rules" which summarized for the British army his approach to Arab warfare. It was published in 1917.
Credit to TheDish.
What Could've Been among Jews and Arabs
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Arabia, Arabs, Chaim Weizmann, conflict, Felix Frankfurter, Hamas, history, Homeland, Iraq, Israel, Israel-Palestine, Jews, letter, middle east, Middle East History, Palestine, peace, Prince Feisal Husseini, Syria, Zionism, Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference
Paris, March 3, 1919.
DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER:
I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.
We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper.
We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.
The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other…
I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.
(Sgd.) Feisal. 3rd MARCH, 1919.
A letter sent from Feisal Husseini (above, center), then King of Syria and later Iraq, to United States Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (pictured below).
What's the point of reading history if you'll just forget it later?
The last gentleman on the Titanic
The Hungarian photographer who stormed Omaha Beach
"Does It Matter?" by Siegfried Sassoon
Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, War
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Afghanistan war, Barack Obama, combat, conflict, Department of Veterans Affairs, Does It Matter?, Iraq War, Memorial Day, Poem, poetry, scandal, Siegfried Sassoon, veterans, Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration, War, War Poetry
Does it matter? — losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter? — losing your sight?
There's such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter? — those dreams from the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won't say that you're mad;
For they'll know you've fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
"Does It Matter?" by Siegfried Sassoon.
As we near Memorial Day, the subject is war. And on this Memorial Day, in the United States, the subject is how we treat veterans who have made it home.
In November of last year, I wrote a post in which I argued,
As of last week, the Department of Veterans Affairs has stopped releasing the number of non-fatal casualties of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The International Business Times suspects this is an attempt to conceal a "grim milestone": the one millionth American serviceman or woman who has returned home maimed or wounded…
Yet what we should see in the homecoming of these impossibly brave people is obscured by the context in which we see them return. So often, an apparently emblematic veteran is shown coming home at the halftime of an NFL game, his teary-eyed family rushing across the field for a hug as reverent claps and raucous chants of "USA!" reverberate through the stadium. In this contrived ceremony, many Americans believe they have seen the typical homecoming: a healthy soldier in uniform, his adorable and adoring wife, proud children, and the appreciative cheers of a grateful nation. Yet far more veterans will come home to trouble — physical, interpersonal and financial trouble — which is often the direct consequence of their deployments. But at the football game, you clap, you cry, and you absolve yourself of responsibility to that overjoyed family on the field.
I received several comments and a handful of emails in response, prompting me to offer a more direct clarification:
We send soldiers on a string of protracted deployments, from which they eventually return to a VA that is thoroughly backlogged and utterly inefficient. And underlying these operational disgraces is a strategic program that entrenches them (and us) in conflicts that are completely open-ended. There is no victory without objectives, and our objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan are, and have been for a long time, either muddled or unattainable…
It's ignoble to charge men and women like [my brother-in-law] with quixotic missions — missions which we as a people neither seriously engage with nor sacrifice for, except in meaningless, vicarious gestures… What counts is, first, adopting sound policy so American power is used justifiably and effectively in the world; and second, making sure we have the proper care and support waiting for those brave men and women when they return home.
At this point, I'm on the verge of hysterics about the Veterans Affairs Health Care scandal. I think President Obama should be too. The opening words at his press conference yesterday should not have been "… people will be held accountable." They should have been, "Not one more veteran dies because this sort of negligence. Not one more veteran loses care because of it. Not one more veteran will wait an extra minute, in any waiting room, in any state, at any time of day, because of it… otherwise, heads will roll."
More war poetry:
"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke
"Gone, Gone Again" by Edward Thomas
"On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam" by Hayden Carruth
Dexter Filkins Tells a Tragic, Symbolic Anecdote about the Fate of Iraq
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conflict, Dexter Filkins, Dora, Gazaliya, Insurgents, Iraq War, Journalism, Saddam Hussein, Sadiya, Shia, Sunni, The Forever War, The New York Times, War, Yusra al-Hakeem
"In places like Dora, Gazaliya and Sadiya, the insurgents had taken to killing the garbagemen. It seemed strange at first that they would do that, kill a man who collected the trash. Then they started killing the bakers. In those places, naturally enough, the garbage piled up in the streets, heaps of it, mountains of it, and there wasn't any bread. Then they started killing the teachers, and the teachers stopped going to the schools. And the children stopped going, of course. So: no bread and no schools and mountains of trash. Ingenious, I guess, if you wanted to stop the functioning of a neighborhood.
Not long after, I talked about these things with Yusra al-Hakeem, one of the Iraqi interpreters I worked with. Yusra was one of my best Iraqi friends. She was bright, funny and loud, one of those Iraqis who had taken immediately to the new freedoms. And yet in the past year life had changed dramatically for Yusra, and Yusra had changed herself. A Shiite and a liberal, Yusra had begun wearing a long black abaya, which she loathed but which was necessary, she believed, to protect her from the militias in her neighborhood. Yusra usually tore it from her head the second she walked inside the Times compound. 'Stupid thing,' she'd say, hurling it onto the couch.
And now Yusra had decided to leave the country. At first she joked in her usual way. 'After 1,400 years, the Shiites have had their chance, and look at the mess they made. The Shiites, they cannot govern Iraq—bring back the Sunnis!' And then a laugh. Yusra didn't mean it—she loathed Saddam. But the danger was different now, debilitating in a way it had not been during the years of Saddam.
'I am so tired,' Yusra said. 'In Saddam's time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because'—she picked up her abaya—'I don't wear my stupid hejab.'
She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra's way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter's notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.
'This was Saddam,' she said. 'He is here. Big. During Saddam's time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard.'
She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.
'The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi,' she said. 'From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.' She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.
'We Iraqis,' she said. 'We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom.'
And so she would leave Iraq. For Jordan, for Syria—and then, if she was lucky, for America."
From The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.
Andrew Bacevich cites the theological concept of original sin to answer a political question about future warfare
My all time favorite debate: Christopher Hitchens versus George Galloway on the Iraq War
I wrote a post about how the incentives of the U.S. political system, and structure of our military, perpetuate endless wars
'Your Leaders Are Crazy': The Leaflet We Dropped on Nazi Germany
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Adolf Hitler, Aviation, Belgrade, Bombings, conflict, Coventry, Detroit, Ford, German-occupied Europe, Hermann Goering, history, Leaflet, London, Luftwaffe, Marshall Plan, Nazi Germany, Nazis, Nazism, peace, Plymouth, Rotterdam, Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur Harris, Third Reich, War, Warsaw, Wehrmacht, Willow Run, World War Two
In the Spring of 1942, printing presses around Britain began pumping out 20 tons worth of a leaflet that would later be dropped from the skies over German-occupied Europe. This pamphlet, which was written and signed by the Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur Harris, is a riveting historical fragment that displays the Brits' stiff and gritty dignity as well as their ironclad confidence, a few months after Pearl Harbor, in the forthcoming support from their ally across the Atlantic. This document, which cannot be found in full anywhere else on the internet, is reproduced below exactly as the Wehrmacht would have read it.
"We in Britain know quite enough about air raids. For ten months your Luftwaffe bombed us. First you bombed us by day. When we made this impossible, they came by night. Then you had a big fleet of bombers. Your airmen fought well. They bombed London for ninety-two nights running. They made heavy raids on Coventry, Plymouth, Liverpool, and other British cities. They did a lot of damage. Forty-three thousand British men, women and children lost their lives; Many of our most cherished historical buildings were destroyed.
You thought, and Goering promised you, that you would be safe from bombs. And indeed, during all that time we could only send over a small number of aircraft in return. But now it is just the other way. Now you send only a few aircraft against us. And we are bombing Germany heavily.
Why are we doing so? It is not revenge — though we do not forget Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam, London, Plymouth and Coventry. We are bombing Germany, city by city, and even more terribly, in order to make it impossible for you to go on with the war. That is our object. We shall pursue it remorselessly. City by city; Liibeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen; Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg — and the list will grow longer and longer. Let the Nazis drag you down to disaster with them if you will. That is for you to decide.
It is true that your defenses inflict losses on our bombers. Your leaders try to comfort you by telling you that our losses are so heavy that we shall not be able to go on bombing you very much longer. Whoever believes that will be bitterly disappointed.
America has only just entered the fight in Europe. The squadrons, forerunners of a whole air fleet, have arrived in England from the United States of America. Do you realize what it will mean to you when they bomb Germany also? In one American factory alone, the new Ford plant at Willow Run, Detroit, they are already turning out one four-engined bomber able to carry four tons of bombs to any part of the Reich every two hours. There are scores of other such factories in the United States of America. You cannot bomb those factories. Your submarines cannot even try to prevent those Atlantic bombers from getting here; for they fly across the Atlantic.
Soon we shall be coming every night and every day, rain, blow or snow — we and the Americans. I have just spent eight months in America, so I know exactly what is coming. We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end, if you make it necessary for us to do so. You cannot stop it, and you know it.
You have no chance. You could not defeat us in 1940, when we were almost unarmed and stood alone. Your leaders were crazy to attack Russia as well as America (but then your leaders are crazy; the whole world thinks so except Italy).
How can you hope to win now that we are getting even stronger, having both Russia and America as allies, while you are getting more and more exhausted?
Remember this: no matter how far your armies march they can never get to England. They could not get here when we were unarmed. Whatever their victories, you will still have to settle the air war with us and America. You can never win that. But we are doing so already now.
One final thing: it is up to you to end the war and the bombing. You can overthrow the Nazis and make peace. It is not true that we plan a peace of revenge. That is a German propaganda lie. But we shall certainly make it impossible for any German Government to start a total war again. And is not that as necessary in your own interests as in ours?"
The leaflet penned by Sir Arthur Harris and dropped over Nazi Europe in the late Spring of 1942.
More war:
"If": A quick anecdote about how Sparta stood up to Philip of Macedon
A.N. Wilson points out the central paradox at the heart of World War II
Journalist Sebastian Junger reflects on what the War in Afghanistan taught him about human nature
Below: Dresden, capital of German Saxony, Spring 1945.
Original Sin and Future War
Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Speeches, War
Afghanistan war, Andrew Bacevich, army, battle, Breach of Trust, casualties, Chris Hedges, conflict, Dexter Filkins, Gore Vidal, Government, Iraq War, Journalism, Los Angeles Times, Memorial Day, Military, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, politics, War
Questioner: I have a bumper stick on my car that says, "War is not the answer"… But of course the question is, if war is not the answer, what is the answer?
Andrew Bacevich: I'm actually a conservative. Look… let me cut to the chase: as a Catholic, I believe in original sin. I think that we are, in our nature, fundamentally flawed. And that peace, probably, is beyond our capacity to achieve. Therefore, to my mind, a more modest goal is more realistic: to minimize the occurrence of war, except in those circumstances when the highest values are at risk and there is no alternative but to resort to violence in order to defend those ideals. And even then, always, always, always to be cognizant of the fact that war occurs in the realm of chance, and that the consequences that will stem from war will defy your imagination.
So, therefore, one needs to be extraordinarily cautious, careful, and wary. And… especially since the end of the Cold War, we as a people — and in particular our political leaders in Washington — have entirely lost sight of these historical realities. They're far too casual about going to war; they're oblivious to the adverse consequences. They work on the most optimistic assumptions — that it's going to be easy, that it's going to be cheap, that once you achieve some goal you set for yourself, all other problems will vanish.
And so, from a conservative's perspective, I say, "No, there's no reason to think along those terms." And therefore, we should be cautious, and again minimize rather than expect to eliminate armed conflict.
West Point graduate, Vietnam War veteran, and Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, speaking during the Q&A portion of a recent panel on how the wounded come back from war. Below, watch a short clip of Bacevich testifying before Congress in 2009.
In 2010, Bacevich wrote a morally flawless piece in the Los Angeles Times that was published on Memorial Day, three years to the month of his son's death while serving in Afghanistan. Bacevich summoned Americans to regard that day not as a holiday heralding the start of summer, but as a moment in which we solemnly memorialize fellow citizens who have come home draped in American flags. Let the article's penultimate paragraph detonate in your mind:
How exactly did we get ourselves in such a fix, engaged in never-ending wars that we cannot win and cannot afford? Is the ineptitude of our generals the problem? Or is it the folly of our elected rulers? Or could it perhaps be our own lazy inattention? Rather than contemplating the reality of what American wars, past or present, have wrought, we choose to look away, preferring the beach, the ballgame and the prospect of another summer.
This issue of how our society processes its role in armed conflict, and armed conflict's role in world affairs, is becoming something of a preoccupation of mine. Now that a half dozen of my friends have seen deployments and my brother-in-law has been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, I have come to see their valor as fundamentally travestied by the quixotic missions for which they bravely sacrificed. More embarrassing, however, is the craven egotism of a society which has sacrificed nothing for the cause, leaving the immediate burden to a mercenary army and the bill to generations who were not alive when the war began.
As someone born the year the Cold War ended, I've now lived half my life as a citizen of "a country at war," and I can remember skimming (when I was thirteen) Gore Vidal's 2002 anti-imperial polemic Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. I loathed almost every page of Vidal's cynical, careless screed, but I loved the title. It was so prescient, though the war's peace would materialize most conspicuously in the minds of a civilian populace of which I am a part.
In the next week, I am going to publish a short reflection on Sebastian Junger's tour de force WAR. In the meantime, I recommend watching Bacevich on how the wounded come home as well as reading his searing book Breach of Trust. If you are looking for more journalistic takes on our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, check out Dexter Filkin's The Forever War or Chris Hedges's War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.
'We Don't March': Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck on the Evils of Militarism
Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Political Philosophy, War
Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, America and Americans, Bertrand Russell, conflict, democracy, England Your England, Eugene Debs, Fascism, Genus Americanus, George Orwell, Government, John Steinbeck, March, Marching, Military, nonfiction, Pacifism, Patriotism, peace, politics, protest, Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism, Spectacle, Walter Isaacson, War, Why I Write
"When troops would come by, accompanied by fifes and drums, kids would pour into the streets to join the parade and march in lockstep. But not Einstein. Watching such a display once, he began to cry. 'When I grow up, I don't want to be one of those poor people,' he told his parents. As Einstein later explained, 'When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.'"
Albert Einstein, as described in chapter 2 ("Childhood, 1879-1896") of Walter Isaacson's biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.
"One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is 'Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me', like the bully who makes faces at his victim.
Why is the goose-step not used in England? In the British army… the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard."
George Orwell, reflecting in a segment from his essay "England Your England," which is published in his collection of essays Why I Write.
"It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don't have to. Every holiday draws millions marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march… but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers.
Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed…"
John Steinbeck, writing in his essay "Genus Americanus," which can be found in his last published book, America and Americans.
If you have additional references or ideas relating to this topic, please send them my way or post them in the comments section.
During the First World War, prominent public figures in all three of these men's home countries were jailed for not marching in lock-step into the conflict. Because she opposed the war and had become one of the figureheads of the German socialist movement, Rosa Luxemburg spent most of the war in prison and was eventually murdered by German soldiers in 1919. In England, Bertrand Russell was thrown into Brixton Prison for six months for "passive resistance to military or naval service." And in the United States, the famous union leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene Debs was charged with ten counts of sedition for making an anti-draft speech on June 16th, 1918. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and was disenfranchised for life.
If you'd like to read more from Steinbeck, check out another selection from America and Americans, in which he points out a curious paradox at the heart of how Americans appraise their presidents: "The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else…"
Or, see more from Isaacson's biography of A.E., including a page describing Einstein's obsession with identifying the causality behind the laws of nature. "When I am judging a theory… I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way?"
The Greatest Debate of All Time: Hitchens Versus Galloway on Iraq
Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Original, Politics, Speeches, War
Afghanistan war, Amy Goodman, Baruch College, British Parliament, Buckley-Vidal, Charles James Fox, Chomsky-Foucault, Christopher Hitchens, conflict, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Einstein-Bohr, foreign policy, Foreign Policy Debate, Galloway Versus Hitchens, Galloway-Hitchens, George Galloway, George W. Bush, Hitch-22, Huxley-Wilberforce, International Affairs, Invasion of Iraq, Iraq War, John Ashcroft, Lincoln-Douglas, Michael Faraday, Miliband–Poulantzas, Military, Nation-Building, Occupation, Parliament, Pat Robertson, Rhetoric, The Greatest Debate Ever, The Greatest Debate of All Time, The Iraq Invasion Debate, The Iraq Occupation, War
It's often tricky to identify "the best" of a certain category. But with debates, ironically enough, the question is, at least to my mind, settled. There are a lot of nominees for second place: Buckley-Vidal, Chomsky-Foucault, and Miliband–Poulantzas (Here I'm talking about debates for which we have a substantive record, so Lincoln-Douglas, Huxley-Wilberforce, and Einstein-Bohr don't count). But the greatest recorded debate of all time is Hitchens-Galloway. No Question.
It is simply the most caustic, articulate, and galvanizing verbal clash that has ever been captured on film. If you do yourself the favor of watching it, within a minute you will have found a side — and you will be enthralled. Once, after a long, desultory day of swimming last Spring, two politically-minded friends and I decided to put Hitchens-Galloway on in the background as we poured some drinks and planned out our evening. Within 5 minutes, we were glued to the screen; within 10, we had forgotten about the night's plans and were rehearsing arguments about the Iraq War; within 20, we had taken sides in a 2-on-1 verbal fray that eventually ended — I'm amused and embarrassed to admit — with several not-so-light shoves being thrown.
I happened to be fighting solo in that scuffle. Because I did, do now, and have always categorically opposed the invasion of Iraq. In this debate, I take the side of Mr. Galloway. My two friends, loyal as ever to the Hitch, were flanking me from the right.
This does not alter the fact that I despise almost everything I've subsequently read about Mr. Galloway, and believe that Hitchens is dead right in many of his cutting ad hominems against the Respect MP. Nevertheless, the gravity and intensity with which Galloway gives voice to the concerns of the anti-war Left is unmatched really by anyone I have ever seen. Like an acid reacting to its catalyst, the venom that bubbles out of Galloway is clearly a response to what he identifies as the "malevolence and incompetence" of the "neo-con gang" which occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the time. Fanning this brushfire of wild contempt were the looming effects of Hurricane Katrina, and the naturally conjoined questions which arose from it: Why are we hemorrhaging resources over there? Don't we need that cash and manpower here?
Galloway makes this explicit several times in the exchange, but it runs like an underlying seam through several of his rejoinders. Some of these are, in addition to very clever, scathing and overflowing with (righteous?) animosity: "What you are witnessing is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug"; "Never wrestle with a chimney sweep… there's no way you can come out clean"; "People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood"; etc. But while these are below the belt, I don't think they are — to borrow a line from Hitchens in the debate — beneath contempt. For one, Hitchens invites them (see the last two minutes of his opening remarks); and second, Hitchens can handle them. Galloway and Hitchens were two of the biggest alpha-males on the planet, and Galloway was not going to relent on his alpha-maleness. He couldn't bring a knife to what was so clearly going to be a gun fight.
I can remember watching this debate when it aired on DemocracyNow the week of September 9th, 2005. I can also remember how much the Iraq question was beginning to fill the sky in the Fall of 2005 — that moment when some of us could foresee the now nearly unavoidable truth that our invasion was an enormous blunder and our occupation a Sisyphean waste. As a freshman at my conservative Southern Baptist high school, I was among the only students who felt this way about Iraq, and I can remember not only how strongly I was beginning to oppose the invasion, but also how much I despised the assumed self-righteousness of those who repeatedly excused the Bush administration's rank deceptions and bravado.
It would be several years until I would read James Fenton's "Prison Island", a poem he wrote during his visit to Cambodia as the U.S. began bombing there in 1970. One particular stanza rings most acutely in my mind when I recall the bad early news out of Iraq and that 15-year-old kid who didn't exactly know how to express why he didn't like the war.
My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?
I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your minds
As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,
Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.
Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.
Ironically enough, I would for the first time stumble upon these words in the second-to-last page of Christopher Hitchens's memoir, Hitch-22. The fact that Hitchens could write them without embarrassment or irony stands as verification of Michael Faraday's immortal rejoinder. "There is nothing quite as frightening as a man who knows he is right."
Watch "The Grapple in the Big Apple", the greatest debate of all time (Playback begins as the debate heats up, so rewind to the start to watch all of Hitchens's opening):
Some of my comments on the so-called "Debate of the Decade": George Galloway versus Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq War.
For the record: I don't endorse all of Galloway's remarks, nor do I oppose all of Hitchens's. I admire this debate first for the rhetorical skill and knowledge it exacted from the interlocutors, and second because it brings to light many nuanced issues surrounding the Iraq invasion and occupation — issues which we should still grapple with today.
The Odyssey Home
battle, Chris Hedges, classics, conflict, epic poetry, Greek, home, Homer, Iraq War, literature, Military, New York Times, Odysseus, poetry, PTSD, Speak Memory, Stanley Lombardo, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Trojan War, Vladimir Nabokov, War, Western Civilization, Writing
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy's sacred heights.
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.
Of all these things
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
By now, all the others who had fought at Troy—
At least those who had survived the war and the sea—
Were safely back home. Only Odysseus
Still longed to return to his home and his wife.
Book I, Lines 1-18 of Homer's Odyssey (Stanley Lombardo's translation).
These lines were composed in the 8th century BCE. Other than the Iliad, the work which these words set off is the oldest extant work of Western literature.
As a reminder to those who've forgotten their 10th grade English curriculum, the Iliad is the story of the final few weeks of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the decade-long tale of its hero, Odysseus, as he returns home to his wife and son in Ithaca, where he is king. Odysseus is noted for his brilliance, perseverance, and cunning; he devised the Trojan horse, the winning ruse which, after ten years of warfare, led the Greeks to "plunder Troy's sacred heights".
The larger narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey is an immortal one, vibrating with harsh and immediate lessons for our own age. Philosophically, it relates the pitfalls of pride, the capriciousness of fate, the pulls of romantic love, and the truth of Oscar Wilde's great dictum to be careful what you wish for — you may get it. On a practical level, however, it tells of war's horrors and pities, its moments for heroism and glory, and the fact that, oftentimes, the settling of the dust marks only half the battle, because it's the return home that often proves most perilous. It was true in the day of Patroclus, and true in the age of PTSD. As Chris Hedges noted, in his New York Times review of the Lombardo translation, "every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading the Odyssey."
Some brief notes about SPEAK MEMORY:
The opening words are essential. Homer's poems would not have been codified on tablets or parchment; instead they were orated to an audience and set to some form of rhythmic music, such as the slow beat of a griot's drum. For this reason, it's important to try to hear his words spoken, either by yourself or by a performer such as Stanley Lombardo, who penned the above translation and reads them in the video below.
"Speak Memory" is also crucial because although we don't know whether Homer was an actual person, folklore tells us that he was real and that he was also blind. So the "memory" part was something he would have only been able to express through his tongue. What's more, like Shakespeare, he may never have existed; like Milton, he may never have actually seen the works over which we now pore.
Third, "Speak Memory" is notable because it is also the title of Vladimir Nabokov's memoir. In a strong field, one of the most compelling titles I know of for an autobiography.
Watch Lombardo perform this portion of the Odyssey, as well as an extended discussion about the work, here:
Alexander the Great, Ancient Greece, Ancient History, battle, conflict, De Garrulitate, Military, military history, Philip II of Macedonia, Plutarch, Sparta, War, wit
"Philip II of Macedon was the father of Alexander the Great. His son would one day conquer the known world, but Philip was, in his own right, a brilliant military leader who set about conquering each of the city-states of ancient Greece. Well, almost all.
Sparta, on the southernmost tip of the land Philip sought to control, was a military powerhouse — a strict martial culture known for its brutal prowess. In 346 B.C, Philip sent a message to intimidate the Spartans. 'You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people and raze your city.' The term 'Laconic wit,' comes from the Spartan region Laconia. The Spartans employed it to great effect with their one word response to Philip: 'If.'
Philip never attempted to conquer Sparta."
A modern translation from Plutarch's De Garrulitate ("On Talkativeness"). Find it in his Collected Essays.
The photograph is of a fragment of a statuette of Philip II of Macedon.