Hannah’s Blog

This recollection is prompted by recent attempts to compare the invasion of Iraq to FDR taking America into World War II against Germany following the bombing of Hawaii by Japan. No less a luminary than legal pundit Stuart Taylor seems convinced that a rag-tag band of Saudi dissidents commandeering a couple of jets is somehow the equivalent of Japanese military forces allied with the Germans to put the squeeze on the northern hemisphere and somehow justifies the American assault on an Axis of Evil that sprang full-blown out of Bush Two’s brain.
Somebody seems to be working over-time to make historical connections that really have no basis in fact. But, what’s being overlooked entirely is that the moral basis for America being at war has entirely changed between then and now.

My mother was a willfull, stubborn and narcissistic woman who had little to no empathy for anyone else unless she perceived them as useful to her purposes—purposes which were often impulsive and not well thought out. However, whenever her belongings (a category that included helpful people) were involved, her persistence in looking after them could not be surpassed. Moreover, while my mother often complained that her mother was in the habit of acquiring friends whose social station was lower than her own, so her own superior qualities would stand out, the real purpose of this complaint was to contrast her own preference for cultivating “friends” and “clients” from a higher social strata, for the purpose of demonstrating that a “poor working girl” could achieve just as much, if not more, by her own efforts. (I’m assuming some competitive and materialistic gene in her DNA which, for whatever reason, seems not to have been passed on to me).

Though not edifying in themselves, the characteristics I’ve mentioned need to be noted if one is to understand what propelled my mother, soon after her return, via a tortuous night-long ride in a cattle car, to a bomb-leveled Munich from Austria (where we had spent the last years of the war), and, having deposited her four year old daughter with her mother, to set off on yet another journey—this time to Aachen (a city near the Dutch/Belgian border) in an effort to locate her in-laws and see if they had any news of a husband, who’d gone missing from his military post. Why, having heard through the grape vine that the rail lines had been cleared and the tracks had been repaired to move freight from south to north, this lone woman took herself to a railhead and hopped on board an empty train.

While there was no passenger service as yet and permits to travel from place to place were hard to get, it seems that mixed in among the freight cars and transports there were some rail carriages for passengers. I conclude that from the fact that my mother found a compartment for herself and was discovered there by an American soldier–a soldier who somehow managed to communicate that her situation was dangerous and that, for this reason, he was going to lock her in the compartment and release her whenever the train arrived in the area where she wanted to get off to find her relatives. And so it came to pass. After a long night of starts and stops (just as the usual two-hour trip from Austria had taken the whole night from dusk to daylight, this transit was much slower than the pre-war norm), the American soldier returned and let her out, safe and unharmed. Then, after having located her father in-law and determined the house to be intact, she made the return journey on her own, leaving the elderly man behind.

Compare that experience with what’s happening in Iraq where American troops, as well as American contract forces, are routinely reported as having executed whole families in their beds and Iraqis keep being killed by other Iraqis for giving aid to the enemy forces (American troops) or even just reporting the news. Is that because the Iraqis are somehow less civilized and less easily pacified, or is it because the moral cause of the American military is no longer the same as it was in World War II?

I think it’s the latter. I think that the reason Iraqis are being shot as collaborators while my father, after he returned from a prisoner of war camp, was employed by the Americans on one of their bases and started contributing to getting the country back on its feet, was because the American effort wasn’t merely just; it was informed by the moral authority of our system of government, as outlined in the Constitution–a moral authority, as Senator Chris Dodd has been reminding us, that was demonstrated at the very top by the judicial processes followed at Nuremberg. The perpetrators of the most horrific crimes while the Nazi regime was in power weren’t dispatched in a revenge operation; they were accused, tried and judged according to the law. In other words, the agents of the American government conducted themselves according to the principles we believed in, rather than the standards to which the criminals had descended.

The prosecutors at Nuremberg very likely had little time to give much thought to the potential reverberation of their demeanor and decisions throughout the military ranks, and even the American people back in the states, but, as Chris Dodd refers to it–the force of our example, rather than the example of our force carried the day and propelled the American nation into a leadership position for the remainder of the century. And now that’s all been lost. The world is shocked by the spectacle of “suspected terrorists” (individuals who, for some reason, have the power to terrorize without actually doing anything untoward) being locked in box cars and shot, if not slowly starved to death in make-shift prisons, based on the spurious rationalization that, all of a sudden, Americans are hated for their freedoms–freedoms which, it seems, they can’t even give up quick enough. What’s happened?

Although George Santanya taught, “Those who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them,” I’m not sure that forgetting or remembering is the significant part. More likely, the reason we make the same mistakes over and over is because pride leads men to conclude from other’s mistakes that they can do better. And, as I’ve noted before, the better of bad is not good; it’s worse. So, we should not be surprised, for example, that the subjugation of Iraq has gone on longer (from the First Gulf War to the present=17 years) than the German effort to dominate its neighbors in Europe. After all, the rather independent minded European Union that has evolved isn’t entirely consistent with the free-wheeling, free-market nominal democracies the American industrial class seems to have hoped for.

Besides, the principle of equality which demands that individuals be judged on the basis of their actions, rather than their social ties and connections, hasn’t been all that satisfying here at home either. If some people aren’t better and more privileged than others, what’s there to strive for?

That’s an attitude the woman on the train was prepared to understand. For, you see, she, too, was convinced that the American soldier, who guaranteed her safe passage, was simply responding to her assertion of her right to do what she wanted, go where she wanted and when she wanted to go, because, after all, she was a lady on a mission; not a common refugee. You see, it was because she insisted on her rights that she got special treatment. And if others didn’t, it was because they weren’t sufficiently demanding. It’s the attitude by which our ruling elite seem to be propelled. Their success is evidence of their virtue. And, that everyone’s rights are secured by the consent of the community to our transit, is conveniently overlooked in the effort to avoid any sense of obligation. On the other hand, the rest of us find ourselves increasingly restricted by these self-same people who would argue that our freedoms have to be earned with the coin of obedience to their whimsical inclinations.

How else are they to establish their superior status?

It’s almost as if being treated fairly feeds a sense of superiority in some people, which then translates into a reason for considering other people as inferior to themselves. Not only does “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” not produce the desired result (reciprocally supportive behavior), but “doing unto others as you were done to” turns out not to be an accurate predictor of behavior either. So, maybe the proponents of the selfish gene are right; there’s just no way that the selfish gene can be satisfied. But, if not, then those of us who don’t have it, had better do our best to keep it in check.